Lemonade Stand - This Has Been a Weird Week | Lemonade Stand🍋

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

On this week's show... Aiden makes a call, Doug says the word "tax", and Atrioc brings the Nordic Fun Fact of the week? 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: 069 Recorded on: June 30, 2026 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 1:37 Earthquakes in Venezuela 4:12 Since Maduro was removed 8:35 Venezuela's Oil 12:18 Venezuela's Debt Reveal 15:36 Venezuela's Stability 21:32 Crimea State of Emergency 29:56 NYC Passes Mamdani's Pied-a-terre Tax 39:48 Gavin Newsom and the Wealth Tax 53:40 The Saudi's Own What?! 1:01:20 The Nordic Fun Fact 1:04:17 Military Insider Trading 1:14:52 Birthright Citizenship Decision New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Here's something most wellness influencers won't tell you.

over supplements, powders, cold plunges, wearables, and hacks, that's going to undermine your goals. I call it majoring in the minors, and it is one of the five mistakes I see people make most on their wellness journeys. I'm Rapid-Ageon, VPN head instructor at Peloton, and this week on my podcast Project Swagger, I'm sharing all of those mistakes and what I want to see you do instead. Follow Project Starger Now, wherever you get your podcasts. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Lemonade Stand. I was thinking about how to promote the show You know how I've been doing web development this year? I like learning it.

So I put together a little website that I thought would be cool for yours, check out, or new ones. And then I was thinking about like, how can I promote this? Right. How do I get a lot of people to click it? Yeah. And I realize it's a custom T-shirt with a QR code printed on it. So anybody during the whole episode can check it out and look.

No, I think that's awesome. Can I ask one question? Yeah. By definition, if they see this QR code, they're already watching our show. I mean, they could show No, no, like clips or something, like a TikTok. Okay, okay. Oh, oh no.

Wait, don't click it. Please don't click it. I don't click it. And so we're thinking of selling this as Don't click, no. Merch. No, we haven't talked about that. We certainly have.

Anyways, we've got a great show for you today. We're talking about Venezuela. We're talking about Russia. We're talking about, excuse me, Crimea and Russia. We're talking about a whole bunch of other stories. They won't scan. I want you to know. Is it what I think it is?

It'll go to exactly what you think of it is. I just been learning web development this year. Guy who's been... I've been trying to promote the show. Do you think I can wear this? No. Are we getting trouble? I don't think you can wear this.

What's the first fucking topic? Put your Chinese athletic jacket back on. Yeah, put your jacket back on. And Aidas blur that QR code. Our poor editor. All right. We're getting started. With

what are we going to start with? Transition us. With the devastating The devastating earthquakes that have Venezuela. I didn't know that was going to be the intro.

I tossed you an LU character. I gave you a perfect throw. Yeah, he's set you up and then you're throwing it in like that. Have some class. Have some tact. For those of you who might not know,

there were two enormous earthquakes that hit, uh, in Venezuela near Krakas, primarily in this area, uh, called Lwira. And, uh, I think if you don't know how like the Richter scale works, you know how like, it, the power of earthquakes increases exponentially. So, uh, like a 6.0 earthquake, and the difference between that and a 5 is much smaller than the difference in power between a 6 and a 7 and so on. Uh, and two, uh, and two, 7.2 and a 7.5 magnitude earthquake hit that area. And so far, uh, 1,700 people are confirmed dead, over 5,000 injured, over, uh, 16,000 displaced,

with tons of, uh, new bodies and people, like live people being discovered all the time, being discovered every day. And that's part of the reason why the statistics are, are moving, uh, and changing so quickly is because the rescue effort has been, ongoing and so many people have are currently lost. And I naturally reached out to my friends that we spoke to earlier in the year on this show because I wanted to make sure like, hey, are you okay? Is your family okay? What's going on? And just to get their perspective on, you know, make sure they're okay, but also get their perspective on the whole year up until this point. And thankfully, everybody is okay and alive.

My one friend, unfortunately, his family is homeless now, so their building didn't completely collapse, but the building is so structurally damaged that everybody in the building had to move out of it. And he sent his family basically his entire savings up until his point. He works in the Dominican Republic,

and that's what's supporting them right now. for the other two, it sounds like they, their families are uninjured, safe, still have homes, but a crazy, crazy natural disaster. And I asked, you know, up until this point, how have things been going this year, like in the wake of Maduro being removed? is a lot of them had a relatively positive outlook at the time hoping for, you know, change and things be getting better. And one of them, this friend, he said things this year, unfortunately, have not improved. And they have arguably gotten worse. And even prior to the earthquake, water and electricity has been less stable than it was in the previous year, often only

having power for like five hours a day. Healthcare, wages, still bad. The only positives that he can really think of is that some notably corrupt individuals within government have been put into prison and political prisoners from the Maduro times have been freed.

Like over 600 political prisoners have been freed. And this was actually a really early note from different friends. So one of the three friends I did not have a long conversation with him. I only know that he's okay through a mutual friend of ours. And that was one of his first positives that he gave me earlier in the year was that soon after Maduro was removed,

they were freeing political prisoners after that time. It was interesting to me, this friend who said that things have been worse, did say this at the end of the conversation. He said, I still have faith in true. Trump and his plans to bring about real positive change for Venezuela, which I thought was very surprising, given everything he said before that. As far as the other friend, kind of a shorter perspective, the one whose family is homeless right now, but he thinks he is feeling uncomfortable with how things have been playing out so far. He, especially as the, I would say, the person who

literally left Venezuela for like a better life, was very hopeful at the time for better change. He's the one in the Dominican Republic. He's the one in the Dominican Republic. He said, with Maduro, he thinks the disaster and the management around it would have been worse. However, or life in general through this year would have continued to be worse. However, he has been disappointed by the overall U.S. support and response throughout

the year. And it trumps his hope for like U.S. initiated change in the region are not living up to his expectations. He said when he's time, he's going to send me like a longer write-up of what he thinks. But this is just, you know,

two people's perspective in the midst of this disaster. And... I mean, from a zoomed-out perspective, the U.S. hasn't done anything in Venezuela, outside of oil-related stuff. Am I crazy? Which I'll get to.

Oil companies are happy. But yes, that is a different group of people. We mentioned this when it first happened. was like they replaced Maduro with his second in command. Right. Nothing outside of that has really changed. They doesn't step in on the government side. They haven't stepped in on the...

Yeah. I mean, one thing I saw is that they're more open to international aid, supposedly, than Maduro was. But, you know, whether, like, the details of how that plays out are, like, unclear. Yeah, portions of sanctions have been lifted that allow, like, even in the instance of this earthquake, like, financial aid to be provided in a way that it wouldn't have been able to before. But keep in mind, these are also sanctions that were...

put into place by the U.S. to begin with. Right. The primary changes that I had read outside of this do have to do with oil, a huge shift in oil production within the country between the previous year and now, and that oil being allowed to be bought and sold to the United States as well as other allied nations. And without that oil and its profits necessarily being distributed in a business. a new way to like help citizens. You know, it's still ultimately being controlled by this, uh, you know, corrupt institutions. So I want to hear what you, you have to say about that.

Yeah. So if you remember in January when Maduro was kidnapped in our funny prank that we pulled, um, that the oil companies for decades had basically been kicked out of Venezuela, like the private American companies. And they had their assets seized. And so there was a kind of infamous quote by the Exxon Mobile CEO, Darren Woods, all around great guy who said Venezuela is quote, uninvestable during a meeting at the White House. Quote, we had our assets, we had our assets seized there twice. You can imagine to reenter a third time would require some pretty significant changes. Conoco Phillips, which is the other big one, uh, is owed 12 billion dollars in compensation was like agreed upon and they just haven't been paid. So in January, it was like,

Hey, this might not become the cornucopia of American, like, drilling again. But they're actually doing well, like from their perspective, things have been going great. Oil like barrels per day has been going up every month. I read an article this morning. It said it's now approaching. By March, it was approaching one million barrels a day. And by June, it's 1.2 million barrels per day, which I was like, is that a lot? None of them said.

And then it turns out it was about 900,000 barrels per day in 2025. So it's not like some insane increase. It is higher. But as a reminder, in the 1990s, Venezuela was producing 3.5 million barrels per day. So this is still incredibly low. But Chevron, who's the one private oil provider who had managed to stay in Venezuela, is producing more oil than ever. They're saying they want to increase investment. They're like Venezuela, you do still owe us $1.5 billion.

But if you pay that off, we're going to invest even more. There's a lot of conversations between the oil companies and the government of Venezuela, where they're trying to get these contracts in place for securities. but oil companies are stoked. And then another thing that's interesting, America has been buying more and more oil since this has happened. China has bought none. They just cut it off completely.

It has been zero since that point. But then India is filling that gap. And weirdly because of the Iranian war, the interest in Venezuela oil has gone way up. So the Iran war has helped like re-kickstart Venezuela oil, get up the amount that they're producing per day, I get the amount of interest from companies up. And so in that weird way, they're benefiting.

How are the rest of the people doing? Did you see anything about, I know for ExxonMobil and, is it, the Conoco, Canoco Philips? Yeah, I don't know to say it, but. They, they are holding back that investment until they at least get a guarantee of like reparations for the money they feel owed when they were initially kicked out or something like that. They don't feel like there's enough, like, stability there.

Yeah. So essentially they are negotiating with the government of Venezuela. And the Venezuelan government is supposedly being extremely excited about this and working a lot with them. You say, hey, you're going to get guarantees that, you know, when a new government comes around, we can't just seize all your stuff. There has to be some guarantee there. Guarantee for the amount of stuff we owed you because of what we took in the past for socialization or, excuse me, nationalization of the oil industry. So it's ongoing. But basically the one provider who's been there, the whole.

time Chevron is going gangbusters and everybody else. Yeah, I heard Chevron's been cleaning up. The way I saw a phrase was like, because they stuck around. Yeah. They got first dibs on everything. This was their whole gamble. Yeah. They until things magically become stable, like stable from their POV.

Yeah. Stable, stable again. And we'll reap the benefit of being the only company that stayed entrenched. But I heard all the profits from all this oil are like going to a bank in New York and they have U.S. control over a big part of it or like, I don't know, I don't know specifics on this. But my understanding is it's not all the oil they've shipped already. This is mostly like just getting oil they currently had stored in Venezuela.

They were just selling it. And that money is not yet returned to the government. That's my understanding. But, you know, you talk about owing. I can go a bit into the debt because I think it's kind of an interesting angle on the story. Right. So Chevron, all these companies, they're all saying they're owed money. Turns out a lot of people who are owed money by Venezuela.

So in the time since. Chavez stepped down and Maduro took over. The GDP of Venezuela has basically been cut by like two thirds. Like the country is, you know, completely fallen. And in that time, they were cut off from major Western capital markets where you'd like borrow money, you know, mostly by U.S. sanctions. And so they've been borrowing from a lot, you know, like almost like the loan sharks of the finance world, the global finance world.

They've been borrowed from all over. and they've been very, very opaque, hidden about how much they owe, who they owe it to, they're not publishing this stuff with the IMF or what it. And so now that they're like reentering the global system, they had to do a big reveal of, you know, they're like, they're trying to do a restructuring basically. They have so much debt to so many people. They're like, hey, we need to put it all together, collate it, write some of it off, figure out how much we can actually pay and like get our debt in order.

and the people expect there to be like 140, 160 billion or something. Anyway, it's closer to like 300, 260 to 300. And that's, it's double their GDP. So 200% of GDP, massive, massive amount of debt. They revealed that they had a lot more debt than they haven't said. Now, obviously, when it's that big, you can't really pay it. Like, they're kind of just saying, hey, world, this is how much we owe. We need to figure something out.

And they're going on the creditors and it's like, either you can get nothing or we can, like, take a haircut and, like, get you, 40 cents in the dollar. Is it not change at all given that they have all this oil? Because again, in theory, the concept is if you bring in all these private oil producers back, the overall output of oil in Venezuela increases back to what it was decades ago, right? And then it's this absolutely money printer. Is that not? I think that's part of it. I think that's why people would be willing to give them some kind of leeway. Okay. And like they want to get involved. But the idea is like right now, the payments anytime in the future cannot be made. I think you're also in a position where you might be forced to make concessions on the ownership of that oil, even if the production is upticking.

So like, you're not going to be able to take all the revenue. Yeah, the private company, like getting the majority of the revenue in a way that doesn't allow you to like rebuild things at home or or support people in the way that you would hope to. Because that's what's happening like right now, right? We see this uptick and oil production, but then don't have this change for like the average person there that they're hoping for. although it's, you know, it's only been six months. And obviously, you know, I don't know there's a good time for it, but a truly awful time for this earthquake to go happen because they are trying, they're beginning a month-long process

to convince the world that to give them a break on the debt and to like set them up for the future, which based on the Venezuelan finance guy that was explaining this, who I learned it from, is actually a really hopeful moment. Like once this is figured out if they can get this deal restructured and they have manageable debt payments, then they're opened up to take on new investment money a lot easier. Now they're back in the capital markets, people can invest in the country.

And it's supposed to be a wave of growth could follow that. Do you know Blackwater, the like military contractors? Private military contractors? Yeah. I think they're most famous for like this old case during the Iraq War where they had like private military contractors and people who work for them like killed Iraqi civilians in the square, but they were actually like tried and went to prison in the U.S. And that was kind of the most infamous thing about the company. And the guy who ran Blackwater, Eric Prince, did this crazy, it's a really weird interview with the FT from like a week and a half

ago. Okay. Very interesting read because this guy's kind of psychotic. Like even in the interview, he's like, he like, if you share, at the end of the interview, he's like, if you share this information about my children I just told you, I'll find you and kill you. I mean, we've told that to every guest of our shows. Me, shaking people who just his hand on the way out. If you, if you spill this detail about Ludwig Ogre. And this guy, at the end, one of the last questions he's asked in the interview is because what he does now is like consulting and military contract work like all over the

globe. He's like, he's kind of like a movie villain, if I'm being real. And he's like, would you, what do you think of the situation in Venezuela? What would you do? Like, what do you think about investment there now in this like post-Mudoro era? And he is like, I still think from like all my connections and what I know, the region is still very unstable. I wouldn't encourage investment there for X and X reason. And this is from a guy that does all this like global work.

Keep in mind, I would argue his answer also implies that you need to hire his military contracting expertise to be safe. No, but it probably, I mean, it seems to be quite unstable. Like, I was reading about the earthquake, and it's just, there's some implicit, you know, right after the Maduro thing, Trump was tweeting like, we run Venezuela. We own Venezuela. And, but it seems like that only extends to getting the, only the good parts. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Because right now there's no, there's a, I mean, there's a lot of pressure on Delcy Rodriguez who's running it. A lot of discontent is what I was reading because of the mismanagement of this earthquake rescue. And it's like some part of it's on her, but some far it's on where there's got to be some aid or help if you're, if you're going to implicitly. I mean, if I'm being real, like the most like cynical, the most cynical evaluation, which is what I felt like I had at the beginning of the year was you, like, what is the US want out of this? You want like a new version of the government that's just more cooperative or like subservient to you, which is like

you know, there wasn't this big institutional change. It's this new woman in charge who, like, works with you. And then you want access to Venezuelan oil. And you're getting that slowly. Yeah. And you have those two things now. You don't necessarily need anything else to change. Yeah, it still seems kind of short-sighted, though, right?

Because you got to imagine that the more, you know, disaster and poverty-stricken the region is, the more likely it is that there will be things that upset your ability to build a prosperous. What sort of cascading consequences could there possibly be? It feels like... I feel like you're just making shit up. You know, if you think about like post-World War II

when America did the Marshall Plan and they're like, they had to invest to rebuild everything in order to, they could buy American consumer good. Like that's... Didn't we just send Chevron in to Germany? If you read draft on the Marshall Plan, if it's like just...

than is Chevron. Chevron and Eric Prince. And it's weird because Eric Prince, it was like a prophecy. Eric Prince wasn't even born yet. It was a prophecy about Eric Prince. Yeah, I don't know.

It does not seem like, well, I don't know. I guess if I'm, if I'm being less cynical, it does seem like much slower than you'd like, but there is some positive green shoots. Like there is more money flowing in a Venezuela.

Their primary export oil is growing in output. it. If this debt is restructured, it does open up a lot of investment in other non-oil things in Venezuela. Yeah, well, like one of the big things going on over the last couple decades is as they nationalized the private oil companies, they lost the expertise and the people to manage their own state systems. And so the overall production drops. So in theory, private investment is coming in and then they're also building up their national side and then they're able to produce a lot of money through that. They also said the longer term plan. is for Delsey Rodriguez to step down and they hold actual open, free and fair elections.

The problem is they're just, they said that and there's been no follow-up. When is that happening? There's been no follow-up, and it's like, we'll get the elections going. We'll get the election going. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll go. Because, yeah, she just shouldn't be a long-term leader of the country.

That she's part of the regime. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I am interested in getting a longer response from two of my friends just to get their opinion of what the experience is like right now. But I really, really hope in the short term that people like Knox family can find some stability in a place to live. Because I asked him about the short term hopes of places getting rebuilt. And he was just like, I don't think institutions are really in place right now to get things rebuilt.

Yeah, money and stability, political, like all that stuff is required to begin the process of so hopeful. You know, another place in a state of emergency is just a transition a little bit because across the globe. Crimea is in an official state of emergency. the, the, here, can you pull this map? Just to give a little background or history. Okay, here's a map of Crimea. It's at the southern part of Ukraine. In 2014, Russia seized it, okay?

They've been occupying it ever since. This is before the Russia-Ukraine war of 22. And it's obviously very strategically important to Putin and Russia, the access to the Black Sea, as Aiden Elklin mentioned. So, so, so. I'm looking at this. The black C's all over the thing. You know, Aiden has a good point here, Brandon.

Have you seen kind of what's around it? Yeah, it's the black Cs. Wait, do you think Putin knows how much the Black Cs are? I think if you saw that, if you're an audio listener and you're wondering what's around Crimea on the map, I'm saying, it's the Black Sea everywhere. No, he's pinpointed it.

A subtle detail of Crimea is that it has access to the Black Sea. And that actually turned out to be really important. So it's been a huge, huge, I don't know, area of fighting in the Ukraine-Russia war. And recently, you know, we talked about a few episodes back, Ukraine's been striking back with incredibly effective drone warfare. And they have been hitting Crimea like crazy.

And first, it was like you'd start to see gas lines at gas stations. Then Crimea cut off all non-military gas access. So you cannot buy gasoline in Crimea unless you are part of the military. And then they declared an official state of emergency. The whole place is like under full military lockdown. That was like today, right? Yeah, it's like, was I read an article like two days ago that said,

like a quote from someone in Crimea is like, it's bad, but it's not urgent, we're gonna be okay. And then literally 24 hours. And the drone strikes from Ukraine are like literally as we speak over the past 48 hours, like ramping up insanely. They're hitting all throughout Russia, all these fuel depots lines.

They're hitting trucks so he can't, transport thing. Like, there's just fuel shortages all cascading across the country, but especially in Crimea. And so it is, I don't know, it's, it's a definitely very successful tactic so far about Ukraine. I don't know what it means in the broader picture, but that is what's happening. It's, uh, I thought I saw something, uh, pretty wild about how because Moscow is under threat, and there's such this limited, there's such a limited supply of, uh, anti-air weaponry within Russia. They are consolidating what they have for air defenses in Moscow.

They are moving that stuff towards that area of the country in order to better protect it. But that leaves areas like Crimea vulnerable in a way they haven't been in the past, which allows these attacks to happen. Yeah, I mean, Moscow had this three-ring air defenses and it's supposed to be impenetrable. And now that it's been breached recently,

It's like shattered this sense of, you know, I mean, if you take a look at Russia's economy, it's like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and nothing. The cities have so much more of the wealth and everything and the upper class of society are all in those cities. And so them feeling, oil is the rest, those two in oil is like the economy. And the people in those cities feeling under threat is dramatically decreasing the support for the war. Now again, these polls are obviously biased because they're done, you know, I'm reading here, but they're done door to door and being openly critical is a, is a dangerous thing to do

in Russia. But it's dropped from like 99% to 69%, which is like a pretty big swing of support in a war where you can't really publicly. You're like, hey, I'm with Putin's militocracy. What do you think about Putin? And like, if I'm willing to one third of the time, it's like, it's actually kind of a big deal. And so, anyway, they're saying Crimea is becoming Putin's trap. It's too symbolic to and now it's too exposed to use the one state for access to the Black Sea. So yeah, it's, again, we don't know. It's all under fog of war, but I have to say, just me personally, reading a lot about this recently, the Ukraine vibe shift has been crazy. They've just been so successful on a number of fronts in such a short period of time. And every day, I feel like

you're getting more news of some crazy strike that you thought was impossible happening. There's a really good video piece that came out, I think like five days ago from the Keeve Independent. And it is a video breaking down how the drone operators and drone attacks work right now.

It's like an inside look. And it's crazy because it's like this, this 24-year-old kid with a headset and a controller. And he goes into the, like, the VR shot of the drone. the little like DJI Madvik looking drone has a bomb attached to it and he flies it around in a first person perspective and on the video you can literally watch him fly the drone they fly it through trees with like the fiber optic like connections they use so they can navigate through like really dense forests and then he spots a Russian troops in the trees and then flies the drone and the bomb physically into them. and then the feed cuts when the bomb explodes.

And it's insane to watch. It is, and that has been like the past, you know, years of warfare. That's like how it works. And I think to have this like strong visual of what is actually going on, it's like this kid sitting at a desk hitting his vape and then flying the next drone into a Russian troop. Like a Russian person. Like it is surreal to watch.

And honestly, if you're, If you feel like you can, because to be totally honest with you, you're watching someone die. And it's, and it's awful. And if, uh, but I think if you want a real look at what this is like, I recommend going to watch it. Also. Yeah, this guy. Oh, God. Have you heard, we talked about the show, the, the gamification aspect they've added to it?

Yeah. So you brought this up and I thought it was crazy. But it's funny because in the wake of you saying that on the show, I saw two more reports, including this video that came out within the following week about how the system works and about how you're rewarded for the number of like targets that you successfully damage people or like enemy troops that you kill, your unit has access to better resources

or drones depending on how well you're performing. And like when you look at the, it looks like a kid playing a video game. No, it's insane. It's so gamified. It really is shocking. And the fact that it's effective is even crazier.

I don't know, it's... It's very much feels like start of World War I when the French showed up with like colorful cavalry to a machine gun fight, you know? And that's what's happening now. And I... And like a science fiction novel.

It feels in both ways like... Yeah. Warfare advantages in the past and then also just something's so weirdly black mirror. It's crazy. I mean, as far as the tide's turning, you had mentioned this change in the

like Russian advance and they say they're talking about that in this video they say like normally during this time of year they would have a lot more targets because Russia would be making an effort to advance at this time but compared to last year there's way fewer

there's way fewer advancements and I think I feel the same way like the fog of war. Like war reporting always feels like a little like vague and difficult to understand. You don't want to like jump to conclusions and just like hope that the side that you kind of want to win is winning. Yeah, I want Ukraine to win, but it's biased, right? But it does feel like something significant is changing.

And I really, really recommend if you feel like you can watch it to go watch that piece. Okay, let's get off of war. We've covered that one before. It's, I mean, there'll be more happening next week, but let's talk about the war on wealth. Yeah. Yeah, everything's a war today, but like one of the more lighthearted wars. Yeah. So, so this is from New York City.

Zoran put on VR goggles and flew a drone into Kathy Hocel's. Yes. To deliver a congratulatory letter saying, hey, we passed the piece. We passed the tax. It's crazy. I miss this. Yeah. Yeah, he's gone all this new tech.

So we already mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but Zoran passed a, I don't know how to say it, Peter Terry tax. And so the idea is that Holmes, you know that's not. I was like, you said it right before we started. Yeah, you said it right correctly. When you guys didn't respond, I was like,

oh, if they don't say anything, I'm going to get angry comments. If they don't acknowledge that at all, people are going to be furious. Okay, so this past, this past in May, the idea is that it is taxing second homes in New York City, like a home where somebody doesn't, live there at least the majority of the year, right? And so this was, you know, touted as, hey,

I'm passing one of my things to tax the rich. Generally, people are kind of excited about it. Some numbers, if you have a home that's over $5 million, then you're going to have an additional property tax of like 0.8 to 1.3%. For condos, it's a lot lower. It's only like a million dollars, and then the percentage is higher. Turns out the valuation is kind of weird here. Homes are valued based on how much they sell for, like how much comparable homes sell for. Condos by the Department of Finance are valued as if they are rental buildings, like how much value you would rent would generate. And so Ken Griffin, the big hedge fund manager, has a $238 million penthouse that's worth $15.5 million. So that's where there's like a little bit of strangeness.

Tomfoolery. Well, it's not Tomfoolery. The idea is like we value condos lower, so the tax on that is going to be a lot higher. So the tax on condos is going to be like 5%. Tax on Holmes is going to be like 0.8. Oh, they made the tax higher. Yeah, yeah. It's mostly just if you hear different percentages. It's just a weird way to evaluate. It is strange. So they're actually going to update it in 2028, I believe, the first year. But that explains the disparity in the percent of the tax. Yeah, that you might hear. But in the end, Pierre Debis, a lawyer figures the charge could basically double the property taxes on a $5 million apartment. So this tax is really adding a substantial amount of revenue. And so this Bloomberg article tied

Momdani's new Pita tax leaves wealthy with few loopholes. I thought it was a fun little lighthearted story. Okay. Because quote, the scramble for workarounds began almost immediately. People who would be impacted by this policy are going to try to avoid this tax at any cost and they're usually very good at doing so. And while there's a few legitimate exceptions, there's no obvious strategy to circumvent the new charge and you have to either use it or not. So here's a couple of things that rich people are trying to get out of paying this tax. First off, they're like, what if my family lives there? Well, it doesn't, it has to be your direct family, like your kids or your spouse or your parents or your grandparents.

Can't be your cousins. And then they have to live there full time. So you can't just be like, yo, nephew, Jerry, show up, party in my apartment a little bit. That doesn't work. And so they, you know, if this is Ken Griffin's apartment, he has to have his family members living there full time confirmed. Other people are like, what if I sell it to an LLC and then a company owns it and not me? and they're basically like, look, New York City is going to look out for that. They're going to look and see who the actual beneficiary of the LLC is and the penalties are very high if you're trying to hide or skirt this.

They're like, okay, what if we rent it to somebody, you know, for a dollar. I rent it to like my maid or something. Again, it kind of works, but the tenants have to live there full time. If they like bail out of the lease midway through, it doesn't work. So they probably need a 12-month guaranteed lease. And again, a person has to live there. So you can't just be like, yo, my friend, you're renting this for me for a buck. They're going to be really strict about it.

One example, broker Michelle Griffith helped the owner of a $9 million house in Tribeca list of the property for $40,000 a month. So people are being forced to put these extraordinarily high rental prices in order, which in a way is like if that's what happens, that's fine because now that house, instead of being the, you know, this super wealthy person, empty second home for a empty second home. Like, you know, they're, you know, if they try to go through this loophole, in quotes, they're just being a landlord

that is selling, you know, they're actually renting out their thing. So in the end, the more likely outcome, attorneys say, is a simple reckoning. Either a primary resident lives in the property or it'll be taxed. Yeah, and an owner of a $20 million $1,000 Manhattan Pitae, who primarily lives in Greenwich, Connecticut,

told Finch he's likely going to sell his NYC apartment if he can't find a way around his estimated $210,000 second home search. charge. So we'll F in the chat for extremely rich people. Why do you need a second home in New York? That's my question. What happened to this country? You can't have a fucking second home anymore? You can't have a, yeah. Am I crazy? Am I crazy? I should be able to have a second home. I think one, they need to carve out. They need to carve out. If my, if it's like, for you or for just rich people?

I think, I think for it's just for me, that's fine, for starters. And then I think it makes sense if the second home is like on a lake where your family took you to when you grew up. That should be like, that should probably be in there, right? You get a carve out for that. Yeah. It's one of those carves. Rhode Island and Montana are doing the same thing, Pitae taxes. And one of the reasons, Rhode Islands is called the Taylor Swift law, like casually because she has like some giant mansion in an island on Rhode Island. And people are basically like this, look, this fucking sucks. Oh, okay, I understand now. You could have your primary residence in an entirely different state. and your secondary ones in New York

and that's taxed. Yes. Okay, I thought it was you have two homes in New York City. No, no, no, no. How could you possibly need to? Okay, if it's not your private residence. So, I mean, that's...

Oh, so if you have a second somewhere else. Oh, yeah, yeah, you know what? Give rid of all the taxes. So, yeah, I should just super clarify. This whole tax, the entire premise, what a Pitae is, is saying this is a second home that you do not live in as your primary residence. I got you.

And it is basically saying if you are going to purchase living space in our city and you aren't going to live there, you need to pay extra taxes to have that, which I think is totally reasonable, perfectly, personally. And what I thought was really interesting in this Bloomberg article is that part of the reason that this is palatable, right? Like getting taxes raised, like property taxes, most people do not go for that. That is a horribly, politically, untenable most of the time. But if you're passing a Pita tax, by definition, you're taxing people who don't vote in your city. Yeah, they're not going to. Isn't that awesome? So it's actually way easier to pass this.

And then as much as rich people are awesome, like this really feels like, dude, if you're buying a second home, like you're so rich that you're buying a second home. You can't, you don't like rent a nice studio or something when you happen to be. You have to have an entire home in another city.

Dude, pay more taxes. Like you're so rich. Isn't it funny? Like, you can't even use the, well, I'm going to leave the city argument. You know what I mean? You don't live there. Yeah.

You already don't live there. Yeah. I guess my interesting thing now would be if they can't find the loopholes and they just fucking dump them on the market, does the tax just not raise any money, though? Is my, is my question? Yeah, you know, the worst case scenario

is that all the people holding these homes say having the second home in New York isn't worth it anymore and they dump it on the market and they don't sell. But presumably if a big supply of new homes comes in and the prices drop, like already prices are dropping. That's good. That's a good outcome regardless.

I'm just, I remember when I first talked about this, it was a good chunk of the new budget is the amount of money they were going to raise from this tax. It's like 600 million, right? It's not that much. I mean, I wouldn't say a good chunk of them, but it was one of the biggest new tax increases. Yeah, yeah.

And so other than just the one-time thing from Hokel. Yeah. And there's also a weird thing like now, now they're even trying to do it. drop their prices. So there was a condo owner that dropped their list price from 5.8 million down to 4.7 because they're literally just trying to sell underneath this $5 million threshold. But then even because of that, the problem from their perspective is they can say, oh yeah, this isn't worth enough to be covered under this tax. You can buy it as a second home.

But if the value goes up again, as soon as the value hits $5 million, they're paying it again. So it seems good. I mean, it's just nice to see that, you know, a tax on wealthy is actually being paid seemingly and kind of cathartic. Yeah. The thing I'm about this story is that all of the obvious workarounds were tried and failed. That's like a nice. Usually you think, oh, there's this new law. They immediately think of a way around it and everyone just moves around the business.

And there's a world where they did figure it out and they've been very good at convincing journalists that they have not figured it out. And they paid Bloomberg to say, oh, we're totally confused. We're fuddled, dude. I wonder how this applies to, like, corporate ownership over buildings. Like, if you're a company that owns, say, like, 10 or 20 apartments in New York, how that applies to you? Yeah, like a we work or something. And I'm a bunch of buildings.

How does that? Yeah. I'm not saying you have the answer right now. Yeah, I'm just curious. I believe it's only for homes. This is not a corporate. Or, like, yeah, I guess you're less likely to, like, oh, if you're a corporate landlord, you're less likely to be owning a ton of $5 million plus properties

because your approaches to rent things out to. Okay, well, on the East Coast, we figured out how to tax the world. But on the West Coast, there's a war brewing. But on the West Coast. On the West Coast, there was Ken, and then on the East Coast there was Azin, and they were kind of on a collision course. Such a deep cut.

Dan, there's been 10 people who are pumping their fist right now. Sorry. It's a game on myself. Yeah, myself. And I do think Gavin Newsom is kind of like the Azizam. or the can, I guess, of this situation. And he has put on a VR headset and is driving a drone directly. No, metaphorically, he is proposing a federal billionaire wealth tax.

So I'll keep this super brief. This is just another wealth tax update going on. Over this last year in California, people have put forth a proposal to have a one-time billionaire wealth tax. This would be a 5% tax on all network. over a billion dollars in California. So this is very unusual because, you know, the reason billionaires don't pay much taxes is because it's all on their assets, which they don't sell, so it's not marked as income. And there's, you know, many nuances to this that we can obviously get into. There's like 200 people in California who this would even apply to, who have over a billion

dollars. And this is unique in that it would basically force them to sell their assets to produce the money for this tax, which is a huge departure from really any tax that. that we have in America. This is gonna generate, in theory, if it happens anywhere from tens of billions to hundreds of billions, although that depends a lot based on, again, like what are the mechanics of billionaires even being forced to sell assets,

which is part of the criticism of it. And it's basically gonna go all to healthcare. 90% to healthcare, which is particularly relevant for California because of federal Medicaid cuts and it's 10% to education and food. So this debate has been going on for a while. If you read the all-in podcast guys on Twitter, have been frothing over the mouth at this for many months.

This is a nuclear bomb. This is a nuclear bomb. So obviously, billionaires are not stoked about this. People in favor are, you know, many different groups, folks who want progressive taxation. Bernie Sanders has explicitly supported this. It's got to be a tough time for all in. You know, you got wealth taxes.

You got the Sharia second home tax. It's rough all around for these guys. Yeah. The world's crumbling. And David Sachs isn't allowed to work in the White House anymore. You only get like 100 days if you're a voluntary, government advisor or whatever. So it's not even...

How really? They checked that? Yeah. I can't imagine anyone but it cared. He could go on a mustache. Okay, this is the California proposal. So this has been the California proposal. It is officially going to go on the ballot.

So this is happening and this is potentially a really, really big thing. Gavin Newsom, who I've heard rumors he's going to run for president next. And people suspect that he is trying to navigate this in a way where he can position himself kind of in the middle so that he can get through this. So not super surprisingly, he has been vocally opposing this billionaire wealth tax in California. And he has a really, really easy excuse, which is if we only implement this in California, the billionaires will just leave. This is already happening. Billionaires are leaving. There's like five of them who've left. Could I give a couple genuine arguments against the, I mean, this is from what I've

read, basically, the arguments against the implementation of the California tax. I mean, let's just broaden it out because they're basically the same thing. So, This last Friday, Gavin Newsom broke a little bit for being like, you know, down the line Democrat and said in a substack called it's time for a national billionaires tax and a new social compact. He basically argued, I want to implement a national billionaire tax, not just a California one. The California one is people are just going to flee the state. And it's not helping our teachers enough. It's only helping Medicare. That's not fair.

And basically suggested I want to increase tax rates. trickle-down economics has been an explicit failure. We need higher corporate stock, we need higher corporate taxes and suggested building a national public equity fund with AI and automation. So this is not him, he's not suddenly, you know, AOC here, but he is, I think, changed his tune a little bit to say, hey, I want to substantially change the wealth code or the tax code and push for higher taxes, push them on AI and whatever else. And I think one of the other arguments against the California one is that it's one time.

And by not being something that's implemented continuously, you're mitigating a large point of the reason in doing it at all. And some alternative suggestions were like, a more consistent tax that, like, every time a billionaire leverages their assets as collateral for loans, you're basically pricing out the value of that asset,

and then you have to pay tax against that to try and close that loophole that is a- In the California one? No, no, no. That's like a counter-argument against the California one. It's like, this is one time, is implemented poorly, there's better ways of doing this. And on top of the idea that like people will just-

There's a lot of organizations that are like progressive organizations that are against the California one. And I think the more interesting question is kind of, is there substantial movement to do something like this at a national level? I think he's in a weird spot, right? Because for the largely, like, progressive audience that is very critical of him, they don't, the reaction to his substack was not good.

They were like, Gavin, you're just trying to, like, shift your perspective or position yourself for your presidential run. Like, you're just going to walk this back, like, you've walked back other things. I saw a lot of that criticism from, like, the further election. audience. Sure. And then the right-wing audience that hates Gavin Newsom already isn't one-eight, they hate the wealth tax to begin with, and they just hate Gavin Newsom. I, like, it's interesting because I do think that a national wealth tax is a huge solution to the problem of a state implemented one. Like, I think this is a good move personally with, you know, with a bunch of

stipulations about the details. But he's trying to, like, win back a crap. that already hates him so much. That's what so interesting about this. It's like it's partially about the tax system and it's partially about Gavin Newsom trying to get his foot into camps. Yeah. You hung out with him. I think just for fun and then it happened to be recorded.

I mean, disregarding who wrote it, right? Because I think there's a certain aspect of like, this guy really wants to be president. So he's doing. But the core principle of like, hey, if you put this in California only, and it's a one-time tax, they will flee it.

I think it's true. I believe that. I mean, Jeff Bezos fled the Seattle one and went to Florida. Like, they're all, they do do this. A national tax sounds better to me. Whether he's the guy to follow through on that, it's entirely different question. But I think the core purpose of the substack is true.

So I don't want to be like hating on it for that. As written, I agree with it. I agree with the idea that we should have a national one. I agree with the idea that using all of the money on Medicaid is in my mind one of the worst ways to use it in general. I think the majority of our budget going to elder people health care is poor. I disagree with it as a point of principle. Yeah, it sucks because I feel like

the base principle of this is tax the wealthy more close loopholes that allow them to continue to dodge paying taxes. I want that. Yeah. And it is so difficult to get progress that effectively taxes the wealthy that I feel like I'm like, I'll fucking take anything. I can't. Just give me a little bit.

But for all the reasons we've explored on this show, the California one sucks for like X, X and X reason. I want like an effective, better version of this implemented at the national level. But will I ever get that? Is it worth, do I have to like fight another X years to even have a hope of something like that moving into place? Do I just have to take the cookie of the California one in the meantime?

It feels shitty that this is the choice. Well, well, well, Aiden, a little tiny, I don't know if he's saying, Representative Dan Goldman introduced a new act to Congress in December 2025 called the Robin Hood Act. Okay, so here's a problem, right? Taxing billionaires sounds good, but as you said, a criticism of like a one-time five percent tax. again, billionaires do not just have cash sitting around. That means they need to sell a ton of assets.

And that causes a cascade of problems for them. And potentially their own wealth like just plummets downwards as you start trying to sell massive quantities of it. Also a long-term effect. Like I don't, even if I don't give a shit about current billionaires, I do think this would have a cooling effect on people starting companies in California,

which I do think is good for this day. I think they would start it in Austin. So let's just say even the chance of becoming a billionaire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but just nationally. Let's say the idea. If it was nationally, okay, different. But so, okay, so there's got like some, I, Bernie, for example, is very explicitly in support of the California one. And the California one is you just have to like liquidate 5% of your assets basically and sell them. But as we talked about on a Patreon, if you start selling your stocks at a massive quantity, the stock value plummets because you were introducing a massive amount of supply into the market. It is hard to actually realize as like money when you were at that scale would be the argument. On the other side, you know, how.

How do billionaires get away with not paying taxes? Well, they lent, they get loans, right, using their assets as collateral. And then they basically just borrow repeatedly. That doesn't count as income. It's a loan. It's not technically income. And they just do that forever using their unrealized assets to get out loans, which gives them cash.

And then they die and they just give it to their, you know, heirs or whatever. And it doesn't get taxed. Yeah. So the new Robin Hood Act is basically tackling the loans specifically. So it's proposing a 20% excise tax on loans that are backed by capital assets for people who make over $400,000 a year. So I really like this one, right? I feel like this is really smart, which is saying, hey, if you are a billionaire or somebody

who's just, you know, egregiously wealthy and you try to use, you don't sell anything you have, you know, appreciated over time, you can't go use that as collateral to just get a ton of cash from a bank or whoever without paying taxes because essentially you are making that money at this point. So this bill seems really great, and I'm really excited for it to be shut down by corporate interests. No, it would be a cool idea. I think my last thing I wanted to say about this was I think the one-time part is one of the biggest weaknesses of it. And it comes back to something we talked about on the Patreon like over a year ago.

And I think the principle of why a wealth tax is important is not just because you're trying to raise tax revenue, but you're trying to like, curtail the amount of wealth that is able to consolidate at a tier where it like damages the rest of society. So if you take a one time wealth tax of 5%, and even if there's no way of dodging it and all these people pay it, they're at a tier of wealth where the money they have remaining just continues to build up and fuel a lot of the same problems that already exist now. It's like like very important that these laws in the long term like curtail the long term consolidation of wealth in a way that fixes the ways it damages the rest of society. And the fact that this is one time makes it like borderline, borderline useless for that long term goal. It is great for like

short, maybe it's great for short term tax revenue purposes or maybe it's like a proof of concept for what can be passed later down the line that's more effective. But that to me is like one of the biggest weaknesses is like you can, the max effectiveness of this if it is implemented correctly and nobody dodges it does nothing to fix that longer problem which is the like virus eating away

and so many aspects of society. Massive wealth inequality. They have to do something. I agree. We have to do something. There needs, something needs to be done. You have an idea of you just take the stock. You know, like if you have 10 million shares

and you have to get tax 10%. Yeah. And, you know, you're like, I can't sell a million shares. It'll fuck up to everything. Yeah. The government just takes the shares and puts them in a fucking wealth fund.

That's it. I mean, that seems interesting. Like the idea of like everything that can be sold or can't be sold, it just gets tokenized or whatever, or it gets like, and they just get that percentage and they can sell it in their own time

like over a long period of time. Yeah. And potentially same thing with inheritance, right? Which is I'm dumping $100 million dollars of assets onto my kid. And hey, that kid has to actually just give portion to the government, something like that.

I do think the argument of like, I can't possibly get an accurate value on this to tax it is a little foolish because we do that with property tax. That's how property taxes work. And so they should be able to work on other forms of wealth. They do it when they value it to get the fucking loans.

Yeah. They do it when it works for them. Yeah. You can't do it when we need to tax it? Yeah. It just feels like a pretty weak argument when you look under the hood. Anyway, to the billionaires in our audience, let us know your perspective.

Most of you guys are billionaires. So it's like I... It is a bit of a billionaires club around here. And some of those billionaires are Saudi. And that's why we introduced a brand new segment called the Saudis own what? The Saudi's own what? What do they own, Aiden? Well, this week on the Saudi's own what?

Yeah, it's the first time. I have an amazing. I have an amazing story. We could also call this gaming is back. Is it related to the Nordics at all? It's not related to the Nordic. Audience, skip ahead five minutes. Don't worry, audience.

I got you covered. We'll get to that. I thought, because Evo, the largest fighting game tournament in the world was this past weekend in Vegas. And there is a special game that is at Evo. And it is called Fatal Fury. Are either of you familiar with this game? So there is a famous, at least within the fighting game community,

a game developer, S&K, that made the Kings of Fighters series for a long time, an established old fighting game series that began fading out. Didn't manage to stay relevant in the way that a series like Street Fighter would. And as this developer was failing

and the Saudi government was stepping into a lot of investments around e-sports, they decided to buy out that studio and gave them a bunch of funding to make a new. new fighting game, which became the Fatal Fury.

What's interesting about Fatal Fury is that it is a competitive game, a fighting game, that they could immediately integrate into the broader Saudi-owned e-sports environment. And if you haven't been keeping up with this, Saudi-owned or Saudi-backed companies have become the owners of

large portions of the e-sports industry. This is companies like ESL, face it, which you and our producer actually used to work at. They're companies like the holding company that owns Evo itself now, the tournament, is Saudi-owned. And the E-Sports World Cup is this gigantic event across a bunch of different games with huge prize pools for participating teams,

participating developers, as sort of the e-sports arm of the broader, you could say Saudi sports washing initiative that they'd taken across a bunch of different things things like golf, things like F1 finding ways to integrate culturally

into the world in ways they hadn't before. And the Nordic update of the week is... Now I'll get to that. So, this game, Fatal Fury, immediately commands a premium space in in esports.

It's integrated into the ESports World Cup with those. million dollar prize pool and this game has I checked this morning this game has like half of the concurrent players that rivals of Ather 2 has which is like 500 like 400 to 500 concurrence on at any given time and of those limited pool of people playing like a huge portion of the active player base are like really high level professional fighting game players that were good at other games who solely play this game, not because it's good, because of the extraordinary amount of prize money that is available through all the tournaments for Fatal Fury. Most prominently,

the Eastports World Cup, which is that million dollar prize pool. So these old fighting game players like Goichi or Go 1 or like NY, Chris G, these recognizable names from like fighting game history, if you're a fighting game guy by chance, these people have moved on in the late stages of their career. And the FGC is like famously broke. They you're, it is a compared to like the PC gaming scenes like it comes from an era of of just having having less money. Going to garages, going to garages, going to laundromats and playing at the arcade. That is kind of the vibe that permeates the FGC. And as a result, a lot of the money in fighting games previously has been small, especially compared to other larger e-sports. And now this is the game and the, and the

opportunity to cash in, even though this game has like no real player base. And I just thought this was so interesting. This game has been around for, I think it's been over a year. And they also have weird inserts. So because of the Saudi Football League, Cristiano Ronaldo is a playable character in this fighting game. And then also, also a, I forget his name. They're one of the characters in this game is a real-life Swedish DJ who is just who just happens to be friends

with like one of the Saudi crown princes and he they put him in the game. Just beat the shit out of Krishna Ronaldo. I think what's also crazy is his character, he doesn't look like Ronaldo in the game. You know, to be fair, like LeBron's

in Fortnite. It's not that crazy. LeBron being in Fortnite, Fortnight's one of those popular games in the world. Yeah, so Fatal Fear is how far behind. 400 players, you said, on a given day. Bernie has every IP known to man. It's different.

It's not the same as having Christiana randomly in this game. If they have nobody else and just Renalda. It's like if you put messy and get to work, it's like it's just weird. That's coming.

That's the only feature of the sequel. So I thought in this like broader time of Saudi sports washing. This is my grand larger theory is that Saudi Arabia is a teenage boy wasting a bunch of money. They have infinite oil wealth and they are dumping it on e-sports World Cups that make no money and sports washing that makes no money and golf

that makes no money and the line that makes no money and they're just dumping money on Zubi and it's not working. There's no way this has any return. This is not like, oh my God, this is improving the standing of Saudi Arabia and they just bought a developer to make a game that made no money and they're making a World Cup that's going to lose a million in prize pool.

What if the professional players because they're primarily playing other games, right? And they're just going like part time to this, this one to try to make a whole bunch of money. We should have some sort of pita tax on their winnings. You can't be a second game player. Right. Have a fucking primary residence.

You need to be a primary main game. Yeah. I don't. Sorry, I can't play street fighter anymore. I've been paying too much tax on my fatal fury winners. Has it even, has it ever worked where someone comes in with infinite money and says, I will make a game successful? I don't think so.

I mean, other than like, a million story. Like Jason Schreier has written a million stories about how that. doesn't work. Yeah. Especially with e-sports. Like, if you're going to dump your money, dump it on new features for the game or something. But the idea of like,

we're going to make the tournament so big. Eastports is a famously good place to spend money. You take that back. You know, there's all the guys waiting like, I don't want to play this game because it only has a million prize. But if it's a million and a half,

me and my friends are jumping on Fatal Fury. Yeah, all it does is pull like these top very capable players in already. It just pulls the mercenaries for five minutes. And then they take your money and they leave. I thought this was just, crazy because like almost no, so few people know this game exists and it's just, it has a slot at like this huge e-sports tournament now, massive prize pool. And like, uh, like at that one tournament, I think Goichi won, uh, 300 grand for first place. It's like more money than he's

ever won from anything ever. It's like multi-d, I think he's played funny game for like 20 years. Okay, well, your new segment was not the Nordic fun fact and it turns out that people have been demanding the Nordic fun fact. I saw, that two weeks in a row you hadn't filled our Nordic Fun Fact. So I decided I would do it. Okay, I'll take the mantle upon myself. Thank you.

Because at the end of the day, our show is just a vehicle for delivering Nordic Fun Facts. Can I speak for the audience here? Thank you. Thank you, Brandon Ewing. I know. I just realized that like everything else

is kind of a rapper on our core purpose. And you're ignoring it. It's crazy you built this up and then you just abandoned it for Saudi Arabia. So I included something about Sweden in that if you think about it. Hey, do you think there's some dark money flying around here? Suddenly he's talking about Saudi Arabia.

Exactly. I do think there's some dark money. I'm glad you bought that up. So I have a Nordic fun fact that's related to the World Cup. The first one is that Sweden lost right now, right as we were speaking, they lost three out of France.

Which is just funny. It was 1-0 when we started the episode. I was like, don't worry. Don't worry. Don't come back. But I saw a funnier Nordic fun fact. And that is, have you guys seen the Viking Row

that is taken the social media world by storm where all the Norwegian fans do a, collective row. And it's been, there it is. And it's, you know, it's charmed people and it's pretty cool. But there is one group of people who are not charmed by this.

And it turns out it's other Nordics. The Scandinavian neighbors are irked by this. Okay. By the celebration. And there are many Swedes quoted in this saying it's just a bit much

and they keep overdoing it. I've been saying that. And I'm just, wondering why the fuck Sweden is such a party pooper on this seemingly fun celebration. I don't want to know. To get bottom out of this. I stand with them. Whatever there.

And to the Sweden migration agency, whatever you think is what I think. For the Swedes, their neighbor's celebration is more of a nuisance than a novelty. With some finding the rowing simulation too reminiscent of the thunder clap made famous by Iceland fans. They think they stole it from Iceland. They can't just have a fun. Can't a country celebrate hundreds of years of plundering and slaughtering their neighbors? Jesus. Can't they do it anymore?

That's that one friend who's too well. Dude, there's no way that they looked at Twitter or something and they found a couple angry commenters. There's no way. I always say that because it's Reuters. I was like that they're not like. Reuters posted? Yeah, that's the only thing that's why I bought this. I saw who published this and it's like, wait.

It's not like just a clickbait on MSN or whatever. And then people on the Swedish squad were denigrating it, which is just crazy to do in the middle of the tournament. It paid off by the Saudis. Yeah, I think that's a part of it. So the Nordic fun fact is that right now, only the NOR part is fun. And the rest of it just have facts. Next topic immediately.

Well, I've got a good vibe story for you guys. If you could picture an ideal sponsor for this show, a company we would love to work with. Who just refuses to contact us. Oh, I don't know. Where are you going with this? Like a company that would let you bet on like anything. Oh, yeah.

Please. Please prediction markets. We did, right? Remember we even offered multiple? Yeah, we already declined it. I don't know if it's by them. Only because the offer wasn't big enough. We're writing for the big cash.

I said, polymarket, you think I'll compromise my values for that? Up. One more zero, buddy. I do, I do want to say this is one of the things that makes me the most pessimistic right now. For those of you watching the World Cup, at least in the U.S., you may be seeing this Rick Rubin ad where it's filmed all nice, and he's asking like profound questions flashing across the screen, and it's a fucking, I can't even remember if it's polymarket or calchie, because it makes me seet so much.

There's a fucking Timothy Shalemay one, too. There's back-to-back different prediction market ads as you're watching the World Cup everywhere. And one of the worst things about prediction markets as it's being discovered is the betting on military events over the course of this year. And 60 Minutes just did an interesting piece where they go and speak to a few different companies that analyze polymarket data. And they saw the rate at which U.S. military actions have been bet on against the odds and the rates of success by certain. users. And one person actually in the U.S. who was a soldier, I can't remember what his position was, but he's being prosecuted for insider trading on a... That's crazy because you probably just watch his lemonade stand and gets up to the minute information on war through the fog

of war and knows exactly what to bet on. That's not... We see things that nobody sees. We have the foresight. And so I don't think it's insider trading. But one company's evaluation stood out to me. they were, they saw that a specific group of people that was making bets across a bunch of U.S. military actions made $2.5 million with a 98% success rate across different, across betting on different U.S. military actions primarily in the Iran War. And another person saw that any long-shot bet, things that had less than 35% chance of success, had a very high rate of success from specific users, like with like a 60 plus percent win rate across a group of users

on long-shot U.S. military bets. The point being that the scale at which insider trading on war is making people money is kind of this new facet of war existing at all. As prediction markets get bigger, basically any information that you have that someone else doesn't have

becomes profitable. And so the incentives start to make everybody an insider or become, like somebody in every group becomes insider trader on anything that you can trade on,

which is like a crazy that hits militaries, corporations, earnings before they come out its entire trading. Everything you can insider trade on is now like, there's a direct monetized line that isn't enforced.

Like very few crackdowns, very few. The big one that I saw is kind of a pivot, but it just is reality TV shows. They're filmed in advance. And every single one has now been spoiled. Like if you went to episode one of Survivor and said who will win, already, they knew who won. Oh my God. Wow. Because it had already been filmed.

And they can't crack down on the hundreds of people that worked in the show. They just can't, they can all sign NDAs. But. And so it's also wild because like, Most of those shows are, I mean, not scripted entirely, but, you know, heavily influenced by production anyway. So it's not even, it's not like you're watching like a completely organic match between people. You know, like the journey of, it's like you're betting on what the writers are going to write. And then the right, God, what a disaster.

But they know. The writers were what's betting on it. Right, or anybody working on the show, obviously. I saw something crazy about the military bets is if you move past the general discomfort of insider trading, the, uh, dystopian idea of making bets on like war decisions to begin with and making money this way. The way these data companies in the 60 Minutes piece are like evaluating anonymous accounts to see who's likely insider trading in order to predict the outcome of events, they're like, we're doing this as independent data analytics companies. But people like say you were in a war

with Iran, it's the US and Iran. Both sides can be doing the same. thing within their military to analyze the upcoming decisions of the opposing side. Find someone you think is an insider trader and then track their bets and then use that to know. It compromises military operations and then like puts the additional lives at risk because people can analyze the decisions you're going to make because of the people breaking from planning to insider trade. I thought that aspect, this is insane.

No, there was people, there was a guy inside Google who was insider trading on every you know, they had so many bets on who will be the most search person of the year or whatever. And then people were able to use some of his bets to figure out how Google's earnings would do because he was clearly a Google Insider.

Like, yeah, it's just weird knock on effects. I do. The one thing that is kind of funny to me is like the general premise of prediction markets, which is like you're using the power of the public guessing to

predict the most accurate outcome, excuse me, accurate outcome in a way. No, it kind of works on that. In a way, you're getting closer because you have all the insider traders participating. Like from the outside, if I have somebody who doesn't have an account on there, it's like, there is some

value to me of the insider traders moving it towards more accurate. It's just that everybody using it is playing a rigged game where you will lose money almost certainly unless you have insider trading knowledge. Yeah, there's no incentive to use. It's just, it's farming dumb people. to take their money. But you should ban everybody except insider traders.

Almost. That's what I was kidding. Right. You have to prove that you work on the show before you're allowed to bet. Yeah, then you can bet. Then we'll know it's accurate. Honestly, that could bring back competitiveness

to reality TV because then you have a whole group that's trying to get a different outcome and they're fighting for it until the very last episode. Dude, I saw someone, one of those super, super prediction markets tech pulled people on Twitter who was like, we should get rid of Uber E's, and instead make a prediction market

where you say, food won't arrive at my doorstep. And then someone could take the counter on that and then deliver you a burrito. And that's how they get paid. There's no... Every human interaction can be refrained as a polymarket bet.

It's just so disgusting. It's just so disgusting. Have you seen that interview? It's there. I think it's polymarket. The owner or like the founder is being asked about why Donald Trump Jr.

is on the board. Yeah, I saw that. Donald Trump Jr., on the board right now. Of CalChee. And then the interviewer is like, so why is he on the board? And it was like, well, we have a lot of advisors. And then she's like,

yeah, but that's the president's son. That's a pretty special guy. And he's like, again, we have a lot. It's like, and they all provide insight. And she's like, but this is special insight. What insight does he provide? What does he do? And he's like, you know, it's, yeah, he won't answer. I think this is one of the proliferation of these things

is one of the things that I think just makes me the most upset right now. Maybe it's not the most important issue in the world. Like I understand that. But when I see these ads on TV, it just genuinely disgust me. I think the funniest part to me is that everything we're talking about, like military, Google, reality TV,

and the ads with all this stuff is just a rounding arm on what it really is, though, is sports betting. Like all of the money of it is sports betting. Everything about it is just a sports betting website, and they've added all this extra stuff, which is weird and has problems. But the core of the business is a fancier draft games. It's just wild.

Like, they've made all these externalities terrible just to also shoehorn in gambling. Well, I have a small story that I just want to throw in because I think it's really funny, and I just heard about it today. Do you guys know that the winner of a recent, I think $38 million power ball is the store circle K.

And I'll explain why. And I just thought this is so funny. You mean the people who sell the lottery tickets? They sold the lottery ticket and they won it. And it's because a woman came up to buy lottery tickets. She said, I want $80 with the lottery tickets. Then when they printed out the tickets, she said, I only have $65.

So she only bought, so we'll have to keep some of them back here. They kept them behind the counter and they fell to the floor or whatever. later the cashier looked at the ones on the floor like this won. And so she told her manager, then her manager clocked out, put on a different outfit, came in and bought the ticket from her behind the counter exchanging it. Then he tried to cash it and then it was immediately found out as you're an employee, if you're okay, you legally can't buy a ticket. And it went into this limbo.

The person who did the original $80 bet said, okay, well, it's mine, right? That's my ticket. I should win. And they said, no, you didn't pay for it. And so it went up in the air and they're like, well, I guess it belongs to Circle K because they take a loss when they printed it and didn't give it to anybody. Heartwarming. A win for Circle K. And so it seems like Circle K may actually win the fucking lottery.

It's like Willie Wonka won the Chalka Factory Tour. I thought it was so crazy. That can't be the rule. They must just do it again. You can't give it to Circle fucking K. That's so funny. But that's seemingly the way it's going. No, there's ongoing lawsuit.

Can we bet on it on Paul, you're going? Yeah, all right. So I just do that story in. That's funny. All right. You want to get serious? Yeah, get serious for a second. It's good.

It's a good thing. Get serious. Okay, as of what, this morning, right? The Supreme Court announced that they have ruled against Donald Trump and reinforced the idea that birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. So this is pretty big. This is one of the things that Trump did literally within hours of inauguration. And he wrote... Day one. Day one. And he wrote an executive order that

basically says that your parents have to be a lawful permanent resident of the United States in order to get citizenship. So if you are, you know, an undocumented immigrant, if you are here on a temporary visa, like a tourist or student, or even H-1B, someone who is like living here for years, you would no longer get automatic citizenship for your kids. So quick backup historical context of why this amendment exists before the Civil War, the Supreme Court and the Dred Scott decision had actually legally said that black Americans can't be citizens. And so then after the Civil War, Congress passed the 14 Amendment and it said, anybody born in the United States, all persons born or naturalized in the United States,

and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside. So, you know, right after Civil War, we very definitively defined in large part in response to that court ruling to say, if you're born here, you are a citizen. And then this was reinforced in 1898.

There was a ruling the Wong Kim Ark case where basically two Chinese immigrants, their kids were born here, and in that case affirmed, it doesn't matter that you guys are immigrants, your children, because they're born here, are citizens. The only exceptions are going to be if invading militaries give birth on in America, their kids don't get to be American citizens. I think that's fair.

Foreign ambassadors, right? If you're like a diplomat from Sweden or whatever, and you have kids here, that doesn't count. You're representing Sweden. And Native Americans, for some reason, just to kick them while they're down, I guess. I don't know why that was the case. They carved that out? They said, Native American? Yes, that's part of the 1898. It's those three groups. I wonder what the explanation. Yeah. I didn't, I did not dive into that deeply because that's, that's the type of thing that takes a lot of it. I imagine there's a lot of nuance there, but, um, yes. So this has been established for a long time, right?

Every American person learned about this in school, like a lot. And so then it was a little bit of a surprise to hear that Trump was pushing for the idea of repealing this because it's, it very explicitly states. Any person's born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens. And so the sort of anti-immigration more right-wing, right-wing crowd, the argument is somebody who is here illegally is not actually subject to the jurisdiction of America. And therefore, they should not qualify. And really what they're upset about is the idea that there is, you know, someone from, let's say, Mexico crosses the border illegally and they give birth here. And it incentivizes people to try to come here and just basically give birth. and they're sort of getting around the normal citizenship process.

So Trump did this executive order right when he came into office. The Supreme Court, it went all the way to the Supreme Court, and today they ruled 6.3 that is still withheld. It doesn't matter if you are undocumented. If you are born in America, no matter what, except again for a couple carve-outs, you are a citizen. So that's cool. I actually, what I was a little, I was wondering,

like how many people are born in this, How many immigrants? How much is it even happening? So per Bloomberg, which they didn't quote a source. And so I went, and it's from the Center of Immigration Studies. There were 250,000 kids born to undocumented immigrants and temporary visas in 2023, which was nearly 7% of all U.S. births. Oh, wow.

Which is crazy. And that's a lot. And then looked at it a little more. This is from the Center of Immigration Studies who are like a right-wing think tank. And I'm like, okay, all right, maybe a little disclaimer here. but those are the best numbers that people seem to be quoting. That's also during Biden's years

where there was like a lot of border. There's a big surge of immigration. Yeah, 2020 and 2223 were like the biggest ever. It was like $2 million a year, something like that. So to make the argument, they're kind of quoting the worst, you know, the most immigration. They're quoting that year with a seemingly pretty biased think tank.

And so who knows, you know, ironically now that Trump has made the border very intense, arguably this is not even nearly as relevant. But anyway, so as you can imagine, Democrats, moderate, most people are happy that this is the outcome. And they're saying, yes, this is great. So what did Donnie T say? He said Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, which is too bad for our country. But we can easily make it up in Congress through legislation with the support of the president.

No long and unwieldy constitutional amendment is necessary. This is not really true, kind of, but actually we'll get to it. He also followed up and said, I would like to congratulate President Xi and the great country of China. on the massive birthright citizenship win. Implying that President Xi Jinping is benefiting from Chinese immigrants having kids here and getting citizenship, I think, which is not where the majority of people come from. I don't know how to read this.

Is he trying to say that China has a different policy? I literally looked up and I was like, did China just also pass an immigration bill? He definitely did not. No, no, he's referring to our ruling. Okay. I'm glad you guys were confused in the same ways. that I was. Yeah. So I think he's making this about China, which it really is not. But one thing

that I thought was interesting is that Brett Kavanaugh, one of the Supreme Court justices, he ruled in favor of birthright citizenship that it should be guaranteed for all people. But it's like written directly in the Constitution. It's like it's like not ambiguous. Yes. It's just it's just that the, you know, subject to the jurisdiction is is a little vague. Okay. And then the second, you could argue. And then the. the second argument is that is clearly not the intention of the law. The intention, this is the argument, right? I'm not saying. The, it was clearly intended to ensure that black Americans post slavery or anybody post slavery was like had guaranteed rights. And the idea that somebody could

jump over the border for two days, give birth and then leave and their, you know, child is guaranteed citizenship is probably not what the, you know, constitution was meant to represent. And as a reminder, the vast majority of the world does not have birthright citizenship. I would not expect to be, if I go to Japan and have a kid while I'm on a tourist visa, I wouldn't expect my child to be Japanese.

I'm going to preempt the last time we said that on the show, a bunch of people got in the comments and were like, so many countries have birthright citizenship. If you look at it, the number of countries that have birthright citizenship in the same capacity that the US has is very low.

Like the larger, there's a bunch of more countries with like birthright citizenship, but with like some more clauses on like how it works and things like that. Yeah. I'm just preemptively. Fair. Trying to beat those comments out. So, you know, I think it's probably fairly obvious that the majority of the pushback for this is people just upset about non-white immigration, right? Like that's like that's obviously I think the main draw here. But I think there's a valid argument of like most countries in the world don't have this where somebody, I mean, even like one of our World Cup stars, right? His Nigerian parents while living in England came to visit America and they were going to

fly home to England, but his mother was too pregnant, gave birth here and he's an American citizen and is now playing for America. Well, now he's getting hurt, which is why I'd argue this is best. Yeah. Because we need it. It's a benefit. That guy stored two goals against paranoia. And you could argue it's a little bit of.

bit silly that his Nigerian parents who lived in London who came here for a vacation and tried to go home but couldn't because she was too pregnant and they gave birth here and then immediately went home to England and he never grew up here or spent any time here is an American citizen. You could argue that's a little wonky. Do I care? No, I think it's like, it's like, it's like, it feels American. I don't know. If you're really good at soccer. If you're really good at soccer. If you're really good at sports, yeah. I think probably for all of us, it's like, one, this is not a massively influential thing. And two, it's like, it's like, it's part of the spirit of America. You know, it's like, I like the idea that, you know, we're kind of pro-immigration, even if there's like some weird edge cases.

The most strict counter-argument would be you are encouraging a sort of like birth tourism or, for example, you encourage the cartel to basically black market traffic people and say, hey, when you're in late stage pregnancy, we're going to sneak her across the U.S. border. You're going to give birth in the borders and your kid's going to get American citizenship. But it's extremely dangerous for all involved. And you're incentivizing this kind of perverse market. that would be the strongest counter, I think. That's fair. Yeah, I think that the argument is, I don't know.

I think the scale, you'd have to like show, am I wrong? Like I feel like I'd have to be shown like more large scale abuse of the system. Maybe that's already been showcased and I'm like ignoring it. I think from my perspective of somebody

who was naturalized and does not have birthright citizenship, I like My thing with the ruling was always It feels so clear cut in the way that it's written But if we went through the arduous process Of amending that To fit some sort of modern version

Of what the country broadly agrees on Like two thirds of the country agrees on And we want to change it Then go through that process I guess The weird battle to fight It's stupid. I don't know.

It just feels... I feel like the narrative of it at this time feels primarily abused or on the back of this anti-immigrant narrative that exists broadly rather than the actual

foundational issues that it presents. Like somebody could be building the case in the way that you've described, right? Like that is the argument that I'm reading online too and I think that maybe it needs to be articulated to me better. Like it could be fair, but then you have to go through the process of like changing the Constitution in order to...

All right, real quick aside, because you audience or you guys might hear about this. Brett Kavanaugh, who's one of the people who voted to support this decision, said that the problem he has with it is actually not the 14th Amendment. There's the 14th Amendment and then there's a statute by Congress that was started in to oversimplify a bit 1940 that basically repeats. the 14th Amendment and gives additional information that says things like, okay, what if you don't know who your parents are? What if you're born in a U.S. territory, blah, blah, blah. So there's actually two kind of things we have regarding this. We have the constitutional amendment itself, and then you have this statute. And Brett Kavanaugh's argument is the statute, which is just something Congress can pass. If Congress goes and updates that, that can have a carve-out

for somebody who does, you know, birth tourism as they are calling it, and that could work. But that would still have to go back to the Supreme Court. So... But then he would change his position in that case, if that legislation...

I mean, he's implying that. Who knows if the other five justices who voted in favor of shutting down the executive order. So if you hear Trump or Brett Kavanaugh or other people talk about how this can now go to Congress without a constitutional amendment,

that is the idea. But it seems to not hold a lot of weight. And then again, even if you, even if Congress changes it, it has to go get approved by the Supreme Court again. Five out of the dying justices said clearly today that they are going to be in support of birthright citizenship. So most likely, this is done. It's closed book. I think it's interesting to see, not that this hasn't happened a couple times already. I think the general narrative that the court is like ruling heavily in Trump's favor because of the way it's like politically stacked right now is true.

but how a lot of these decisions, more prominent ones, are not going in the way that he's hoping, like to see a conservative, a wholly conservative court ultimately decide against this in a way that he's publicly unhappy with is really interesting.

Yeah, on the tariffs too. There's a couple big things where he's been hit. But I will say under the radar today, there was, you know, Kavanaugh sided with him pretty strongly on a thing that I didn't get reported very much, which is that spending limits on campaign pains.

Yeah. A, uh, a, uh, a law that has existed since Watergate completely got removed today. Yeah. Yeah. All political parties can now spend unlimited amounts on any candidate.

And, uh, it's like a, it's like a bonus on top of Citizens United in 2010, which is a law that I think has been pretty negative on America. And so this is a follow up that has just happened. And I feel like it's, it's kind of went under the radar. It's the tail end of J.D.

Vance coming out on stage and saying, that Watergate would be a 12-hour story today, and now the laws they pass after there are getting undermined. And I do think... There's another big ruling, too, that I don't know if we have the time to fully explain, but the right for the executive to fire heads of agencies

or at will, but with a carve-out for the Fed, the Fed still is fully independent and cannot be fired. by the executive or fired without cause. But I want to come, I think this stuff is worth coming back to at a time when we've have more time to talk about it because I think there's

some been, there have been some really big Supreme Court decisions very recently that are worth covering more and over the course of the entire year. I think Perry actually had a really good suggestion for an episode where we can come back and do that. But I think this is the end of this episode.

Thank you for joining us for another week of Lemonade Stand and if you'd like to join us for an extra hour of the show on patreon.com slash lemonade stand feel free to pop over there We're trying something new this week We're doing a bit of a game show this week

So if you want to check that out Or the other bonus episodes we do You hop on over there Let's go go North Young Man for 200 I hate this category Go North Young Man for 200 Founded in 1943 this Swedish company is.

You're kidding me. He's got a faster fiber wire. He's like those companies that built it one frame closer. Founded in 1943, the Swedish company has grown to become the largest furniture company in the world.

What is it does? What is IKEA? What is it? Lengo. This is crazy. All right, Doug, you get bored again. Okay, let's go all aboard for 600. All aboard for 600.

Initially used to jumpstart 600 million in funding for the Bright Lines Florida Project. I clicked it. I clicked it. I clicked it. All right. Initially used to jumpstart 600 million in funding for Bright Lines Florida Project. This is what is the name of the tax-exempt

investment vehicle. I actually don't remember this exactly. What is public debt bond? That is incorrect. What a fuck. I'm buzzing! I'm buzzing! I'm literally buzzing.

What are... What are private? activity bonds. That is correct. I'm not going to say public activity bonds. I was not. Loser. And I. Loser. And let's go. I would love to see gaming is back for 200. Gaming is back for 200.

With long blue twin braids, this league of budget character is. Yay! Who is jinx? Oh my gosh. That is correct. With a long blue twin braids, this League of Ledger's character carries an arsenal of weapons including a rocket launcher. It is jinx. Nice looking game really fast. play League of Legends.

Pick the next one. Pick the next one.