Lemonade Stand - We Fled the Country | Ep. 037 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

On this week's show... Atrioc talks shutdown, Aiden finds an infinite money glitch, and DougDoug may have found the world's biggest gambler. 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: 037 Recorded on: November 11th, 2025 (in Japan) Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 3:45 Shutdown Watch 18:28 Traveling as Americans 21:17 SoftBank 32:47 The Vision Fund 2015 45:53 $500 Billion Investment - Stargate 1:01:30 Yen Carry Trade 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

For a month now, we've talked about the government shutdown. It has been the top piece of news. Everybody wants to hear more. The episodes have been doing super well because of it. So we went to the heart of the source, Japan. To get boots on the ground coverage of what exactly is going on with the U.S. government shutdown. We fled the country. Breaking news here from Japan.

Live from Tokyo. I saw the 30-day mark and I was like, we got to get boots on the ground. We got to get boots on the ground. Here you go to the trash taste. We need as many anime figurines behind us as possible. Chuck Schumer, what do you think about those lovely girls behind A. Triok? Busty women behind me.

It is funny. Right as we're leaving, which was yesterday from America, they're shutting down planes, the shutdown's ending, and then right when we land, they're like, maybe it's over. That is the update. I know Aiden, you've read about this. We read about it on the flight, but since the 12 hours we were flying, six or seven Democrats? Eight, baby.

Eight, a full list. A full list of eight Democrats have broken ranks, flipped sides. They're saying our population is fleeing to Japan. They saw us leaving this. That's the last straw. I should clarify if you're wondering why we're here in Japan for this episode. Sure.

Do it. Anyway, go ahead. So what happened with the government shut down? Well, quick, okay, a quick, genuine context to why we're why we're here. Doug, a while back, decided he was,

well, you had a vacation planned from, like, the beginning of the year. Yeah, yeah. And we were like,

okay, well, Doug is leaving for three weeks. Why not go to Japan and shoot an episode? Why not make Doug work on his vacation? Why don't we follow him wherever he goes and force him

to work? So we're doing three episodes here. It was basically like, Doug is like, yeah, I'm finally going to take this great trip off. It's been a really hard year. Three weeks.

It's been a tough year. And we were like, Doug, what if we came with you and we shot a bunch of episodes on your vacation? Like three in a week. Yeah. Well, okay, I know I feel better about it now because one of our best performing episodes is the one where I'm not in it last week. And so what's interesting, I realized you and I did a solo episode when you were gone. One of the worst performing by far. Okay.

And then with me gone, one of the best performing. So we have one more test to do, which is Aiden and I is a duo. You guys do a duo. And that one is two million. Yeah. I think the theme, though, of that episode doing well and the past couple is that we just put the garment shut down in the title.

You guys did the same? It was the same time. That was a flash forward. It was artistic. It was artistic. And I can't wait to use it again. And I can't wait to use it again. And I can't wait to use it again.

Us on the White House lawn again, but looking at the finished White House ballroom. We're in Japan right now. How do we even justify that thumbnail? Makes no sense. It is funny to be in Japan to use that. in three in Japan, so how many we do that? The actual reason we're recording a normal episode in Japan is we had to get here early enough in the week, but then the guest episode that

will be coming out next week, we couldn't record early enough to hit the time frame for this week. So we're doing a normal episode, and we do have some stories related to Japanese business or Japanese politics that we wanted to talk about in this episode as well, because we thought it would be a little more on theme. But we're going to start off talking about the shutdown, how it looks like it's wrapping up finally, and just finish out this normal episode on the Trash Tayset. Yeah, so eight Democrats flipped,

but let's just talk about this, because I think this is unexpected, at least from my POV. The way the wins were shifting after those big elections that all went them, not just New York, but the other two. and the general sense of discontent it seemed a Republican side. It felt like, and the polling, and Trump's falling polling, it felt like the both sides were holding out and it seemed like it was working more for the Democrats. And then you see this, where eight of them switch sides flip and are voting to get the 60

votes needed to end the shutdown, which is happening basically as we speak. So it hasn't actually ended the shutdown yet. They're still going through some pretty crazy shutdowns at airports. I think 40 of the biggest. airports in America just cut flights by 10%. Some like 3,000 flights in the past day have been canceled, but they're on track to end it. So I guess, yeah, and I don't know if you know about that. Yeah.

So like you said, it's not actually over yet. The eight that switched over, so in the Senate, they finally reached the 60 vote majority that they needed to pass the spending bill that had been proposed. And the eight Democrats that flipped were Catherine Cortez of Gets of Gets. Nevada, who actually hadn't flipped. She was the one Democrat who had been always voting for the bill the entire time. And then Dick Durbin from, Senator Durbin from Illinois, Senator Federman, Pennsylvania, Senator Hassan, New Hampshire, and then also Shaheen from New Hampshire, Senator Kane from Virginia, King from Maine, and Rosen from Nevada. And what all of these people

have in common, from my understanding, is that all of them aren't up for re-election for a while or straight up retiring after their current term is over. So they don't really have to deal with the short-term consequences of being the person that stands out on this. It's one of the points of criticism that is coming for them. And then this still needs to go through the House, which has been called back into session because they have been on a recess for, I think, over a month. Yeah. And they all are trying to come back by Wednesday to complete the vote from the House perspective to move everything forward. And the big, big issue is that the budget that is being proposed in this vote does not come

with any of the concessions that the Democrats were holding out for. The main thing being the Affordable Care Act subsidies are expected to expire at the end of the year this year, and they wanted those to be made permanent. And they even, Chuck Schumer, had even offered a more limited version of this where can you give tax credits that essentially extend these subsidies for another year. And the Republicans still said no to that offer as well. And then we've also talked on past episodes that the Democrats were seeking two other major things as well with no movement on those either, which was the reverse of the Medicaid cuts in the big beautiful bill and a stipulation about Trump or the executive branch

no longer making big unilateral decisions over the budget anymore. So they didn't get concessions on any of those things. And the current deal funds the government through January and also has a provision that would reverse the layoffs of federal workers that did happen during the shutdown. So that's something. And also ensures the retroactive pay for everyone that had been furloughed through that time. So we had been going back and forth about Trump saying that maybe we're not going to pay these people that were furloughed this time. But it seems to be a guarantee that everybody will receive their back pay. It's all even more pointless. It's like, hey, let's just ensure really there was no point to any of this. Yeah, it kind of rewinds the clock to October when

this shutdown started. It just says none of that happened. Everyone gets back pay. Everyone gets unfurloughed. We refunds snap. A couple of permanent things that would have happened. the layoffs, or, you know, I'm glad people aren't being laid off, but like,

what was the point? That's, what was the point of any of this? This was the war I had inside me was, my initial reaction is, what,

then what the fuck was it all for? And then the other reaction of, do I get to say that from a position of not being a person who was worried about not receiving my food stamps this month?

Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like this was pointless and my first reaction is I wanted them to stick this out and get the concessions that they wanted. Like I would rather have seen that. I can see that argument. But I also am not a person that is not, for the most part, not seeing the consequences of what this shutdown continuing means.

But at the same time, you could argue the Republicans should have just caved. That's what I'm saying. If you're going to go into this battle, you have to know that that's going to happen. You know that going in. You know that that's what a shutdown means. And you are making the argument that the political wins will favor you. you're going to hold strong and they have to cave before you do. It's weird to do it.

And then the second of the actual consequences have it would be like, wait, I didn't. I thought you'd came instantly. And then I'm in the UK. It doesn't make any political sense. I saw a quote. This is from Dan Pfeiffer, who's, who was the comms director under Obama. He said, nobody can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrats. That's what it feels like.

I don't understand because it was by all metrics that I could see. And again, you know, it was working. It was like generally. It was, people were laying blame in all directions. People were generally mad with the government. Yeah. But the chaos of the situation was falling more on the person in power. And it was hitting Trump more.

And I, even Trump internally, there was those leaked conversations he was having with Republicans where he was saying, this is killing us. We have to either get rid of the filibuster or we have to do something else. Like, if we just let this go, like this is Trump saying. Trump was recognizing this was a disaster. No, I guess that's the one thing. And I don't want to, I don't even think this is as calculated as someone might say. I think this is like eight people who, for whatever reason,

caved or flipped. So it's eight Democrats, two of which are retiring next year, and six aren't up for re-election until at least 2028. Right. So it's like eight people who aren't going to deal with the consequences of it. And as far as I know, people have been laying a lot of blame on Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. And I don't fucking like those guys at all.

But they voted against this. And they have been trying to get people to vote against it. Yeah, there's been calls, I think, is it Roe, Shanna? Yeah. Roe-Conna. He was the first guy to voice. like the first Democrat to voice his opinion publicly about Chuck, you didn't reel everybody in and do your job as the leader of the party right now. It's time for you to step down and let it be somebody else.

Oh, really? Yeah. I like Roe. He's good. I'm a fan of his. From Tangle, which is a newsletter I like, one of the things he said is basically Chuck Schumer voting against this bill, as you just said. It's not even really them resisting. It's like he says, oh, I'm opposed to this.

We shouldn't be giving in. but from Isaac Saul, this wouldn't happen without his approval and it wouldn't be happening without his approval behind closed doors. Most Senate Democrats are on board with reopening the government, which is why they came out of a caucus meeting

with this plan. So the thinking is the Democrats are saying, okay, we're going to kind of put the blame on these eight people. We'll be like the centrist. Find the right ones that can't get... Right, right. The centrists are the reason,

but us Democrats, we fought for you. But what's almost certainly going on behind the scenes is Chuck Schumer and the leaders are going, okay, this is the plan. We are going to cave in a way where we can say we didn't cave. Right. We're resisting.

We voted against it, which is, you know, maybe the more cynical version, and that's the more political, you know, interpretation of what's going on. I mean, it's tough to know. But even if, even if you take him at his word and Chuck Schumer is against this, it is, it's pretty damning that he can't keep the party in life. Either way. He's not a good leader of the party if they can't have a unified vision. And they can't work as the Democrats to get a cohesive goal across.

It's very split. So, yeah, it's a bad look. I mean, you said Rocana, or Roshana, but there was like three people last night that were making that call for him to step down. This morning, it's like nine. Like, it's, the number is going up

of people like loudly clamoring, because this is pretty unpopular among Democrats, especially given how pointless the last month now seems. I think, yeah, the whole, I don't think you gain any political points by caving. It's like you walked into the wall of what you should have expected to happen the whole time.

this is what was going to happen. And then your party gave up when it hit the point that we all expected it to get to. And now it's not like you have nothing to stand on. I don't think this is a big... Yeah, again, the concessions are all just rolling it back to how it started. Now, you didn't get anything new. I got, I don't look at these polls here. The shutdown has been a sobering experience from any Republicans because Trump has seen his polling numbers drop and the economy weakened since the thing.

began on October 1st. You know, 45% approved of his performance when it started. Now it's down eight points from the end of it. Disapproval up. Like it's, the idea that this was like not, I don't know,

it's just crazy to give in in those circumstances. It really does feel. Maybe the frustrating thing was the amount of time it took to get to a stage where people felt like it was working. Like, this is the longest shutdown ever, right?

we're looking at the earliest that it'll end is the 43 day mark, like when it will actually be over over. Yeah. And because the longest one up until this stage was 34 days, maybe you as the, any politician involved in this, but from a democratic strategy point of view, you think that it's going to end, you're going to start negotiating and start figuring out a solution before that 30-day mark really comes into play. Right.

And you, but it took you until almost the 40 day mark to see any shift in the opposing sides position. And by that point, there's so much pain being felt by your constituents that you decide to just give up. I'm trying to rationalize it. It's fair. I think one more thing that's worth mentioning is like from Trump's POV, it did not seem even though he, again, these are like the leaked conversations, even though he understood that it was hurting him and the Republicans, you see the Republicans are getting killed. it didn't seem like he was ever going to concede on the ACA subsidies and instead was going to try and repeal the filibuster. And so there's like a world where it's like, okay,

if we keep this going, the likely outcome is that the filibuster's gone and they just start ramming through whatever they want. That's, and so instead we can just get snap funded, get everything rolled back and take the win in the, you know, I guess there's something to it, but it seems hard to defend,

given what happened leading up to it. Like, if you were going to do this, just don't do it at all. Just don't shut down and we have less chaos. I don't know. It feels weird. Yeah, they walk out of this the losers for sure. That's what it feels like. Well, hold on.

They have a vote about whether to maybe extend the ACA subsidies in a month. Yeah, that was the concession. Is that? The concession, not that they're going to get the subsidies, which is supposedly the whole reason they're doing the shutdown. It's that they've got to vote. vote on it. A vote before the end of December. That was the big thing they got. Do you think they're going to pass it?

That's so funny. The Republicans do pass it. Dude, I'll see, yeah. Democrats, that's like the most big brain strategy play. That being said, probably the Republicans aren't going to magically change their mind in the next one month for some reason. That's a stupid idea to get a vote. Like, this

has been a vote on that. Maybe they'll turn it around. Maybe they'll say yes. I don't know. So on the upside, America not being shut down, if this happens, makes the rest of the world a little less scared about buying our IOUs, our bones. Yes. Thank God. And, you know, gold prizes are not skyrocketing as much because it's total chaos. Yes.

Those are the couple of the markets up a little bit because people are like not worried that it's going to spiral into chaos. I mean, Bessent was saying, you know, every day the shutdown continued past 30 days is like, people were posting, I saw really, it's like a haunting screenshot of the pay stubs of air traffic controllers and other people where it's like worked this week, 38 hours or whatever, how many hours pay zero. It's like you're getting your paystub and it literally says zero dollars on it. And these people, it's, you know, it's a lot of people. It's like it's hundreds of thousands of people that cannot make payments that month.

And that spirals. That is like snowballing negative effects. So ending that as soon as possible, I mean, you know, there's it. The political is, like, so stupid, but like, it makes sense. If you flew in the past couple weeks, like, all the airports are, you know, more kind of crowded, hectic behind, not running. And then when I went through TSA, I talked to TSA people and I was like, hey, this seems like a nightmare right now. Are you being paid?

And they're like, nope, we got a big fat zero. And I was just like, thank you for working. Thank you for showing up and allowing me to like, you know, I didn't, I didn't say, thanks for allowing me to go on vacation because I felt like it would have looked like a doucheback. But I was like, you know, and there's people who really need. to fly for their income and their livelihood and their family and whatever else. And it's just like, thank God people are showing up

and just working. Like for free. With no guarantee, they're going to get paid for the last 40 days. Guy, I dropped the link. I don't know if you can pull it up. I read this article as you know, like as we were getting to the plane. I mean, at LAX, two jets almost collided. They had to do evasive maneuvers because the air traffic control.

It's like, yeah, we read that. We were talking about this because it happened. I read it the day before we left. And I was just like, Like, oh, that's... That's comforting. I didn't want to read that right before I was leaving.

There's some dude over... It sounds like GTA5 online. They left on the runway at the same time aimed at each other. Oh, and the pilot's only answer was, sorry. Oh, you know what I did? Okay, so when I was looking at this,

I think it was through a CNN report, and they had said that, well, we reached out to the FAA, FAA for comment, but didn't receive anything because the staff that replies to the emails is shut down. So we had to contact the facility in Milan that had the information for the Italian aircraft and get the information from there instead. That's good.

We're outsourcing. You know what I'm saying? You can get it cheaper in Italy. You know, okay, just a note on how America looks kind of stupid to the rest of the world. Yesterday, I was sitting in a room with maybe 20 naked Japanese men surrounding me. Of course. As one does. This is back in America

This is like I was in a sauna Okay And in this particular sauna Onsen that I was in I went and sat in the center of the room And they have a TV in it That you can watch

And I had the news And it was me A white American dude Surrounded by like 15 Japanese guys Watching Scott Besson Our Secretary of Treasury Explain why we need tariffs on Japan And I just felt very awkward

Sitting there in the middle Being like ooh Ooh This has got to be rough You looking around at all the Japanese and it's, I'm from Germany.

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. When I was getting my shave this morning, I was talking to the Japanese guy and I was trying to ask him his political opinions.

And he was, what do you mean? You think that's bad? It's strange. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Well, we had a good rapport. We were talking. And I was like, you know,

I was telling him what we do in this podcast. I just didn't know. You're like, oh, quenicia, politics. What do you think? No. We got in.

it and I was like, but it's funny because he was open about everything about his upbringing, about what he's doing? Yeah, okay. And then when I was asking him about like, what do you think about Takahichi? What do you think about Trump? He's like, he was trying to get my,

he wanted to know what I thought first. He was very trying to get it. And I could tell he didn't like Trump but didn't want to, because he couldn't, he thought maybe I liked it. So I couldn't get it out more out of him, but he was like, yeah, well, interesting. He's really,

This is so the opposite of When my girlfriend and I were in Sweden on vacation in August We went to a restaurant one morning And the server comes over to talk to us And he found out we're from L.A And he's like, I've never been I've never gone to the U.S. He's like, I just wouldn't want to go

I just don't think I'd like it And we're like, yeah, yeah like I did, you know, that's totally fair. He's like, it just doesn't seem like a nice place. And I was like, yeah, yeah. He's like, it's just not for me. I'm like, okay, man, okay. Like, he couldn't, he couldn't get it.

It was like, the complete opposite. I'll get him to love L.A., bro. I'm sick of this L.A. slander. But, I mean, shut down aside, by the time we're back, it sounds like it's going to be over. And we won't get to use that lovely thumbnail anymore. but I wanted to hear about softbank from you. A company and the man who runs it that I am loosely familiar with through his investment in WeWork,

and I wanted you to kind of give us some background and story on that. Yeah. Okay. This is, this guy's crazy. All right. It is really interesting. If you pull up Masayoshi-San. So you might have heard a soft bank.

Second largest company in Japan. Second largest company in Japan. It's a massive, massive company. What's the biggest? Toyota. Okay, that tracks. That tracks. They're close.

So SoftBank is run by this guy Masayoshi-San. So he's this incredibly successful Japanese businessman. So you might have heard of SoftBank for two different notable stories. One is they were the big backers of WeWork, which is an extraordinarily large, failed company. And this guy basically just put billions of dollars after this company that was a terrible business. And the second is recently he's leading Stargate, which is the $500 billion AI infrastructure project. So there was another piece of news this week about how they're partnering pairing with open AI and they're going to be launching all this AI stuff in Japan. And I was like, what exactly is going on with soft bag?

And this guy is wild. So Masayoshi-San, Japanese business guy. He actually went to Cal, my alma mater. While he was there, he spent, according to him, five minutes a day trying to invent new inventions. And he invented the first electronic dictionary for languages and sold it for a million and a half dollars. So while he was doing that at Cal, I tried to drink a whole case. of beer in one day. They're both pretty influential.

For those of you listening at home, just five minutes a day you can change your life. It's literally what he said. He was like, I decided to prove my friends wrong. So essentially, he comes back to Japan and he decides he wants to get into technology. And so he starts building a company called SoftBank. They just essentially bank software services or programs that they then sell to the Japanese companies. So that's the meaning behind the name.

So in the kind of 80s, he's growing this business. it's becoming bigger and bigger. But he starts to invest. He loves investing. And so he, for example, invest into Yahoo when Yahoo is really, really early and young. And that grows up into a whole bunch of money, yes? Is that why Yahoo is so big in Japan? Partially, yeah.

Wow. Yeah. So he sort of, his company invested a bunch of money into Yahoo when they were early. And part of his investing strategy as part of SoftBank as this company grew was he would go to another, let's say, American company and say, I want to partner with you, I want to invest a ton of money. And we will help you establish yourself in Japan. Like, we'll operationally run your business in Japan while also just being a big part of your business, right? So this guy, Masayoshi, he starts to get real into investing.

He's investing in tons of different companies. So even though he started as, you know, they're distributing software and they're doing other types of publications and whatnot, he starts to really get a knack for going to different internet companies, giving them $20 million, giving them $10 million or whatever. And soon, his company is not just that software bank anymore. It's also this big portfolio of investments into tech companies. And by the sort of end of the dot-com boom around 2000, he actually briefly becomes richer than Bill Gates. He's making $10 billion a day in net worth for three straight days. And so all these investments into internet stocks, like he's one of the people who, when you

hear about that bubble, was one of the big beneficiaries. And then, boom, the bubble pops. He loses 99% of his company's value. And he's famous for a while. this guy, Masayoshi Son, for being the person who lost the most money of any human on earth. He lost $70 billion. Unfortunately, he did lose his trophy to Elon Musk later on. But for a long time, this is a guy who made all these crazy bets, throw all this money into these big internet companies.

All of it crashes and burns. He almost loses everything, goes totally. He loses $70 billion of value, and he manages to scrape through the bubble. And that's how he first became really infamous. Can you pull us up and go to Max? I just wanted to show what Doug's talking about here. If you click on Max, on the left is the stock of SoftBank during the Doccom bubble.

Oh, my God. Briefly, yes, briefly his stock was worth $30 per share. It looks like one of those bottom of the ocean floor diagrams where you see the Mariana's trench. Yeah. So it drops intensely precipitously. It's like 99% drop. Yeah.

Yeah. And so what many people would do in the situation is tone it back. would say, oh my God, I made a ton of big bets, and that was really risky. And Masayoshi son, he is the guy in the meme who just won't quit. He's not going to quit gambling because he's about to make it big. And to his credit, he's really, I think pretty smart around, because I listened to a couple interviews with him, really smart around tech and saying what's like a future-facing tech. So coming into 2000, his company's in shambles, and he starts to sort of barely recover. And what he acknowledges is that mobile is going to be the next big thing. So over the next six years, he

starts to basically convince banks to help him buy up telecom companies. So he starts with actually Yahoo, who had some infrastructure in Japan and buys them. And that starts their kind of network. And then they buy Japan Telecom, which allows them to expand the network further. And then in 2006, they buy Vodafone, who has like, you know, an actual like phone mobile infrastructure and licensing with the government. And so through these acquisitions and expanding it over and over, over the course of like the 2000s, he basically changes what was a software distribution company into just a massive telecoms company. Think Verizon in the U.S. It is SoftBank is now one of the big three telecom companies in Japan. They are just a massive and they run and operate all of their

stuff. So turns the company around and correctly identifies that mobile is going to be a big thing. He goes to Apple and convinces Steve Jobs to let them be the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in 2008. So a lot of kind of this forward-facing stuff. So his company starts to build back up. And now they are a telecoms company. And as he's doing that, he starts betting again. All right? So he's getting all this money and now he's just throwing it around. So he bets in companies like this little one called Alibaba with Jack Ma and gives them $20 million. So over the course of the 2000s, he's kind of like retooling his business, bringing it back up, turns into this successful telecom company while also using that money and putting a lot of bets. And some of those

bets go really, really, really well. For example, that little $20 million in Alibaba soon becomes worth, I think about $70 billion. Yeah, earn them about $72 billion. 20 million. No way. The $72 billion. That's just what they earned. Apparently it was worth more. So that's over the course of like 16 years. But that is considered to be one of the all-time best investments ever. Another pretty prescient one he does is in 2016, he buys Arm, ARM, for $32 billion. Yeah, I know that. And that one, so Arm, they design essentially chips for mobile devices. So in 2016, like, yes, Arm is successful, but they're essentially a, you know, a small company

in Britain. He goes in and buys the whole thing for $32 billion and goes, I think this company is going to basically dominate chip manufacturing and chip design. We want to be in on it early, buys the thing they eventually IPO later. they are currently still one of the most successful companies. And again, right? It's like he kind of called how important chips are going to become. But I want to do a small correction.

I think it was a, I think it said a 70 billion. It was more like $8 billion. But it's still a 425 times increase one of the greatest events of all time. I don't know what you're seeing. Maybe, maybe, um, that was according to him. I'm seeing SoftBank put 20 million at Alibaba when is a startup and then booked a gain of 8.5 billion, 425. But when?

Because it was, it's worth. Oh, you're right. I mean, it does, okay, when Oli Bala went public, this investment turned into $60 billion. Maybe they didn't sell it all. I'm they sold it some. This is worth, I mean, that's, that's, that's, yeah, soft banks gain, you know, Wall Street Journal, 72 billion. Okay. Wow. That is a staggering increase. Yeah. 20 million to 70 billion is staggering. 20. So it was only a measly $8 billion by Atriarch's reporting, but 72, now that's a good investment. Okay, I see. They sold $8 billion. Right. There was a point at which they sold. Yeah. So it's not their total shares are worth $70 billion. Yeah. And actually at some points it was worth more. So it's not it's not that they like cashed in $72 billion in one go. It's more that over time it has become worth that much. And that's bankrolled a lot of their company. You know, there's a similar story to Yahoo. Yahoo. I mean, probably all tie it in. Yeah. Yahoo at one point owned a good chunk of Alibaba. Not a not a massive chunk. But they put in, I don't know, 30. million. And when Yahoo basically lost the war to Google and was like declining, the value that they owned of Alibaba was worth more than the entire rest of the company combined. Yahoo was basically a holding company for Alibaba stock. Which is funny because then SoftBank is in part holding it.

So like, so this Alibaba investment he makes becomes one of the most successful ever. Buying Arm, it turned out to be incredibly brilliant and is still a big part. SoftBank, him still owns most of Arm. which is now, again, one of, you know, in the AI craze, like Arm is wildly influential. So this dude, even though he became the most, the biggest loser of all time in the early 2000s, he turns around a giant telecom company and then does all these investments, some of which become the most successful ever. And so even after this failure over the course of the, let's say, 16 years from 2000 to 2006,

2016, turns around his whole company and makes these major investments and starts to be considered one of the investing goats. Many people are like, holy shit, this guy can identify a future-facing technology and company. He identified Alibaba early. This is one of the people who knows what he's doing when it comes to investing. It's like Masayoshi, Roaring Kitty. Those are two, two of them investing Mount Rushmore. And so he splits the company up into two, right? As he starts to over time become a little less interested in running a telecom company and you can tell he just wants to bet big. He's all about big, big bets. And so he really concretely splits us into two.

So you might hear soft bank in two different contexts. One is soft bank group, which is this broader investment company at this point. And then soft bank corporation is a subsidiary within that that runs the telecom. So if you are walking around Japan, you might literally see like a soft bank store. And that's referring to you can go buy a mobile device and buy, you know, a plan for mobile. but then SoftBank broadly refers to Masayoshi-San, this guy who is leading all these investments, which not only includes the telecom, it includes all of arm, it includes other big companies that they've invested into, and it includes the Vision Fund.

Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, the Vision Fund in 2016, he decides, I'm not betting big enough, even though he bets way, way, way too big all the time, all the time. So he decides to raise a 100 billion. dollar fund. That sounds like these numbers get so big. The biggest, the next biggest fund ever raised for venture capital was nine and a half billion dollars. So it'd be 10 times that. The, the next biggest private equity fund ever raised was about $24 billion by Black Rock. And for context, in 2017, every U.S. venture capitalist, this is 2017, there's still tons of hype around tech,

right? I was going to say, venture capital is a fucking huge in the U.S. in 2017, yes. Across 8,000 companies in total, all U.S. Venture Capitalists invested about $84 billion in 2017. Masayoshi Son is like, I'm going to personally get $100 billion and we personally are going to distribute that into tech companies. His quote is that it is conceived primarily to make investments around the thesis of singularity, a belief that artificial intelligence will surpass the intelligence of humankind and replace and redefine a significant number of jobs. So he in 2016, is like, I think AI is going to advance. It's going to take over.

It's going to become the big thing. And I want to raise $100 billion, which is like the size of a country in order to invest into it massively. So where do you get $100 billion from? Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the answer. I was looking, I accidentally looked at Doug know, Doug's notes. So I was like, that tracks.

Yeah. So there's a story. He goes, he gets on a plane. He gets on a plane and he's going to meet with investors for this plan. And they had originally $30 billion as their goal that they were going to raise. And on the flight over, he's reviewing the slides. And apparently he reaches over to the slide deck, deletes the three and replaces it with a 10. And he says, life is too short to do anything small.

So just on the plane, he's like, $30 billion? No, no, no, no. $100 billion. So that's the kind of guy he is. We're just on a flight. He's like, no, no, no. let's go way, way, way, way bigger. Like so unnecessarily large for no reason.

He goes to Saudi Arabia and he meets with MBS, the Crown Princess Soberts. And he's like, there's a great YouTuber coming up right now. His name is Mr. Beast. Yeah, yeah. You're going to want to build a theme park. You're going to want the theme park. So it goes to, and again, I want to actually, some quick numbers. Etriot, can you throw out some numbers?

So we're talking about $100 billion fund. It's easy to think, oh, that's a lot of money. but like, how do you ground that against a real business? I'm talking about AirPods. Air pods. 100 billion would put you at the size of Nintendo. Oh, my God. Nintendo's a $100 billion company.

So that is the eighth largest company in Japan is what that would be. And it's just for like venture capital. Just for venture capital. Yeah, I think McDonald's globally makes like $17 billion a year, something like that. I mean, these are massive, massive companies. So he goes, he meets with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and tells him, I'm going to give you a gift of a trillion dollars. And the guy says, what?

And he says, you just have to give me a hundred billion. And then I'll turn it into a trillion dollars. And so he says that in 45 minutes, he convinces the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to give him $45 billion. So they successfully raise about $100 billion. This is true. And this is he said, you did this on a talk show? Yeah. He said he walked in and he said, yeah, he started by getting his eyes and why with a, I'm going to give you a trillion.

dollars. MBS, a trillion. That's like, that'll cover 10% of the line. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, the line is unlocked. We have a way to fund the line. So you're starting to get a sense of this guy, Masayoshi, and how he's just like the biggest gambler of all time. And he just says he just makes it unnecessarily huge for no reason. He's the guy at the roulette table that bets on red, it hits red, goes double down. It hits red, double down. It's red, double down. It's like to walk away. So he goes to Saudi Arabia in 45 minutes convinces them to give him $45 billion.

Again, as context, the biggest fund ever raised, which is like by Black Rock, was like $25 billion. So just from Saudi Arabia, he with as SoftBank agrees to put in $28 billion. Abu Dhabi gets them to agree to invest $15 billion. And the remaining $5 billion is from normal companies like Apple who give a billion. So I just want to, I just want to again reiterate this. normal tech world is like you go and you raise you know a couple hundred million dollars from different companies he raises a hundred billion dollars almost entirely from two middle eastern countries and his own company and that's where the fund comes from this is vision fund

2017 it's just such an incomprehensible amount of money like i'm i'm doing well you know i have i have i have everything raised a few billion from aiden i have everything you know you know And it's just, it's so, such an unfathomable amount of money. Apple, the biggest company in the world, I believe at the time in 2017, but regardless, massive. They only agreed to put in a billion and that was huge for them. Yeah. Only a billion.

Only a billion. Getting to say only a billion. Saudi Arabia cashly drops 45 billion. I mean, Saudi Arabia has like a trillion dollars almost that they can throw around. But still, this is just, this is insane. And so they come back and they basically say, all right, we have $100 billion. Now we need to spend it. Okay.

And for Congress. In context, four of the biggest tech IPOs ever, Spotify, Lyft, Uber, and Slack, massive companies. And their entire kind of like funding, they raised $24 billion combined. So the idea that you need $100 billion, it's not just an insane amount of money. It's like, how do you even spend that? That's an average of over the... Well, that's where the story gets... That's where...

Right, exactly. The number I saw from this site is because they said it was going to be a five-year investment, they had to invest on average $55 million per day that they had to be. So they just go fucking crazy. So they basically send people out all over the world who were just throwing money at everybody. And there's articles about this. And for example, Bloomberg where they're saying, look, up until this point, venture capital was like you go and you make these small little speculative investments.

You say to a company, we're going to help you grow a little bit. And these guys come in and just say, look, smallest deal is $100 million. All right. We want billions, though. They're trying to go into a category and instead of finding a young company, they find one that's currently the leader and they're like, we're just going to drop so much money into your pocket that you don't have to be profitable for a long period of time. We just want you to grow an insane amount, dominate the entire market, we'll figure it out later. So this drives valuations way up. It makes it way harder for normal venture capital.

SoftBank, according to a partner at a major Silicon Valley firm, is a big stack bully, which is a poker term referring to a player with a pile of chips so huge that competitive. are afraid to get in the game. I mean, it's so funny. The idea of being like a massive venture capital firm and having all this money available to you and be like, I'm getting stacked out. Yeah. Because this dude walks in from Japan

and billions of dollars to everybody. Because I think this is making it seem like this is the most genius play. You know, like the guy shows, Ludwig plays poker with us. Yeah. He shows up. He has infinite money. He doesn't care if you loses. It doesn't mean, you just puns his money.

And that, hold on. I wish that were the case. The last time he made out like a bandit, which feels it even worse because he doesn't meet it. He had a lot of, yeah, employees that he basically robbed. Yeah, me. So does Masayoshi Sons poker play work?

No. No, it doesn't. So this crazy. I mean, it has work. You talk about the good time. I don't know. We'll talk about both. Yeah, yeah.

But this vision fund, this $100 billion dollar vision fund. So this vision fund. And they actually raise a set. In 2019 Vision Fund, too, they raised another like $56 billion. That time, the Middle Eastern countries are like, no, we don't want to be a part of this because at this point, it's not. So as of June 2025, this is according, this is from SoftBank's own reports. They have, they have currently hold investments in over 400 companies. They have spent since 2017, since this exception, about $164 billion. That is a ton of money. And they have some huge

successes early on. Coupang, I'm not exactly sure how to say it, basically Korean Amazon delivery. They bought a 35% stake for $3 billion. They end up with $33 billion gained in 2021. So huge gain. 33 billion, crazy amount of money. DoorDash, they bought a whole bunch of stock. They bought $680 million, ended up profiting $11 billion during the IPO in 2020. They actually, with Nvidia, they bought 5% of the company in 2018. And then in 2019, they sold it for $3 billion, or they made $3 billion. If they had held on to their 5% stake in Nvidia right now, it would be worth $230 billion. Oh my God.

That would have single-handedly made them one of the most successful companies of all time. That bet that they made, they sold early, and it's referred to as the fish that got away. However, there were some extremely notable failures. So, we work, we don't have time to get into the whole story of we work, but essentially was this giant scam by the CEO who was going around just dumping money everywhere. And when that guy got together with Masayoshi-San, who was like, you know, You want to spend money? You want to grow by burning billions of dollars?

It was like a match made in heaven. The two just start burning more and more and more money. They try to IPO. It fails. So instead of letting it fail, SoftBank puts in another $10 billion. And like, surely $10 billion will prevent it from failing.

But eventually, if a company really fucking sucks at the fundamentals and just burns cash, that doesn't work. You can't just throw money at the problem. Like, Mossio Chishon had to pay the CEO a billion dollars to leave. Yeah.

which is the most crazy fuck. The guy was so bad, but he had so much entrenched control that they had to give a billion dollars to leave. Yeah, it's such a sick idea to turn. They basically turned a leasing office space into a tech company, like pitched it as a tech company. And it's just leasing. And it's just leasing office space.

With a CEO who was kind of just scamming, who's the investors in the company. And then, yeah, and then literally asked for a billion dollars to leave. So they soft bank in total spent and long, $16 billion, and this is part of that vision fund. Chinese Uber, Dedi, they invested $11 billion, which for a period was successful, and then China cracked down on tech companies, and that became a failure.

Katera is a U.S. construction tech company. They invested $2 billion. Whole company goes bankrupt. So the short version of this vision fund, it came in as like, this is the biggest fund of all time by far, and they're just throwing money every round. First two years, they're just throwing the money everywhere, but they have some like major, major high profile losses. They have a couple big high profile wins, but for the most part, in the last, let's say, seven years, it's been huge, huge failures. Like, this is considered,

like, one of the biggest, highest profile failures ever. And they basically admitted, like, we've really messed up here. We invested in some really, really stupid things at a scale that was just unbelievable. The fast few years finally starting to become profitable. So SoftBank, as of March of this year, posted their first profit in four years. Good for them. The company? Yeah. SoftBank the company. So this year, finally, they're doing well. And actually, according to the report in this June, their overall vision fund is now worth $170 billion, which means over the last, whatever it is, eight years now, they have actually profited in total $5 billion. So even though, yeah, so even though at varying points over the last eight years, they made some of the dumbest investments ever and lost big, like more money on these investments than any other company ever. because Masayoshi Son just wants to fucking throw it all on red over and over and over. Technically now, largely thanks to AI stocks, they are in the green by $5 billion. I think that's through Vision Fund too, though.

My understanding is that Vision Fund 1, they got the $100 billion, mostly from the Middle East, and they punted about 33 of it by the end of it. Like, it's down to 70, which is why they didn't want to invest in Michigan 1 too. Sometimes you get crazy and you punt 33B. So now it's back. And this is according to their thing. So in Vision Fund 1, they have actually... They provided?

Yeah, yeah. So, and that's kind of the thing, right? Like, over time, this thing has, is doing well enough, right? At this point, it is no longer this massive failure, but it took years and years of it being a massive failure. It is crazy to look at, like, a $5.7 billion profit on the fund and be like, they did all right. Like, that being...

That is really good. I mean, what is the percentage return, though, on a hundred... No, that's what I mean, contextually, with the amounts of money that are being thrown around the amount of money raised. It feels like such a, it doesn't feel that big, but it is success. It is success. Yeah. And all it took was destroying a lot of markets and creating some bubbles and disrupting everything and inflating valuations. Partially why I first like started looking into him is because in the all-in podcast, which is, let's say, a tech business podcast, earlier this year, I was listening to it. And they were like, Masayoshi-San, this year, they're posting incredible

profits. Like SoftBank Group is doing super well this year. Yeah. I think he's the goat. He's the goat investor. Like he, he, he, he went through all those hard times in the 2017, 18, 19, and now he's proven he was right the whole time. And I'm like, no, he is fucking not, dude. Like, he's, like, so he just has these huge wins and these huge losses, and that's his whole thing. He is like this insane gambling, dude. So what does this all lead up to? Well, there's two notable things that have happened recently. The first this year is that he, is leading Stargate. We talked about it very briefly, but Stargate basically in January, comes out with President Trump and says, we soft bank, we're going to raise $500 billion.

And we're raising this so that we can invest into U.S. infrastructure for AI. We're going to start with $100 billion. We're going to raise $500 billion over four years. Again, sense of scale. Every video game made approximately $185 billion in 2024. They're trying to raise $500 billion to make a bunch of power plants. So this is partnered with OpenAI, Nvidia and Oracle and Microsoft are helping with the tech. But basically, SoftBank came in. Masa Yoshi Sonan and said, Trump, America, I will find $500 billion for you guys. He said during the announcement, Mr. President, last month I came and I promised that we will invest $100 billion. And you told me, oh, Masa, go for $200 billion. So I came back with $500

billion. So this guy told Trump, he was like, we'll find $100 billion, which again, would be absolutely obscenely large for AI infrastructure. Trump's like, come on, go for $200. Comes back with $500. That's so insane. But he hasn't raised the $500 yet. No.

According to Elon, whose tweet said, um, SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority. So according to Elon, you know, who, who knows, he's really annoyed at this whole thing. They've raised $10 billion of the $500 billion. Then Open AI CEO Sam Altman replies and says, wrong, as you surely know, we're building the data centers right now. And so, funny story and illustrative of this guy that he's now 68, I believe. He says he wants to still head soft bank forever. He's still in control of all the reins.

And at this point, he's coming into America and saying, $500 billion. We're going to raise all this money for AI. The other thing that happened this week, which is interesting, Open AI and SoftBank announced that they're partnering in Japan. So as we mentioned earlier, one of the things SoftBank has been good at is they go to tech companies and say, we're going to help you, we're going to invest a ton of money into you, we're going to own you or a large part of your company. But we'll also help you operationally run in Japan. Like we know how to run companies in Japan. We know how to integrate where this massive telecom company. So this week, they announced the crystal intelligence is they're going to be offering artificial intelligence together to companies in Japan, Open AI and SoftBank. They're creating this together. And so the idea is, you know, they're going to use OpenAIs, current Chatsby, T, and tech and all of that, but they're going to really market it for a Japanese audience and marketplace specifically. They're going to really try to get integrated into Japanese businesses. And they announced a huge customer already.

that's buying this, which is SoftBank. So SoftBank, the investment vehicle and Open AI are partnering to create this new business to sell AI to Japanese companies. And the first, and the first customer is SoftBank, the Telecom company. And so it's just another one of these funny little AI circles where the first and only customer of the AI is themselves. And so they're just a nice little circle of AI flowing around in between these companies. So they are essentially.

To recap this whole thing, soft banks led by this, I would argue, crazy gambler, Masayoshi Son, who's had the biggest wins and the biggest losses ever. Right now, he is leading this obscenely, completely unrealistically large project for AI infrastructure, what maybe will work, who knows what's going to go on there? And at the same time, he's working with AI companies to try to essentially spread AI adoption in as much of Japan as he possibly can, because they've put most of their investments recently into AI companies. it'd be crazy because the start of this guy's story is basically having an explosion in his success because of the dot-com bubble.

Yeah. So it's an AI bubble. It'd be really funny to see his like the thing pump up the other side and then the bubble, like say this is a bubble and it pops again, right? Then he just goes through the exact same cycle. Yeah, that's a thing. Like right now they're doing super well and right now you have people like the All In podcast saying, he's the goat because right now it's up. And what's funny is like part of these bubbles is like he

helps create them because if you go to every company and offer them billions of dollars, like that creates a bubble, right? It's like, well, he's using, yeah, yeah, it's if you have this amount of money in a space like venture capital, right, and you start throwing around huge amounts of money, you force other people to follow suit to stay competitive with you, I imagine. Yeah, this is what happened in e-sports for the, you know, the e-sports fan. which is that all these companies came in and started blowing tons of money onto e-sports going, oh, this is going to be really big. Everybody's salaries went up.

Everybody's expenses went up. The whole thing became unsustainable because everybody was trying to spend as much money as the really big guys who were spending unsustainable insane amounts of money. It's so funny that you contextualize it that way because that's the exact same thing I did. Is League of Legends salaries is how I contextualize and stuff like this? They're just chasing something that could never put. pan out, but everybody was forced to raise their salaries because the players at the top that had the most money were just throwing around so much. It's not that it could never pan out, though. I think that's different. I don't know if this could pan out. The league salaries were not going to pan out.

Yeah, 100%. And we like, we work was not going to pan out. Like that's the thing. Because he, again, he has made some brilliant investments and predictions. And like buying arm was was really, really smart. And that has been a massive leverage point for his company at this point. But also just does, yeah, his whole thing is being like a big stack. One of the, one of the stories is that in 2015, SoFi, who does online lending, wanted to raise a few hundred million dollars. And so this is like, you know, they're growing a lot as a company. And there's like, okay, we want to raise some capital, but not a lot. We don't want to give up too much control of our company. And Masayoshi's son meets with the Sofi founder and says, I'm going to invest a billion dollars into this ecosystem. It can be with you.

And if not, it's going to your competitors. And so the Sofi guy was like, like, okay, we'll take it. Like, if he, if the guy comes to you and says, I want to invest a billion dollars and you're like, I don't really want that much money. He's like, well, if you don't, I will put that into your competitor. It's like you're forced to take and spend that much money. It's crazy. Imagine someone came to us.

It was like, I'm going to invest a billion dollars in. It's either the yard or you. We will put a billion dollars into the yard unless you take this. Wait a second. Our sets are looking at the White House, bro. We're going to have gold. though. And then what's funny is like, how in the fuck would we monetize that? How would we make a billion dollars? I think that, yeah, that's a weird intimidating scenario where you're not actually confident your business can take

advantage of that amount of money and pay it back. It doesn't always make sense. It's, and again, sometimes it does and some of these have worked out well. Like, again, they have been able to dominate giant markets, but this company is just crazy. It's just this giant gambling firm led by this guy Masayoshi who's led the whole thing for, you know, for decades. And it's just, it's wild that he just is, the scale keeps going up. He's just going bigger every single year. Yeah, I think that was the thing that stuck with me was this is already such a leap to get to the stage where these funds had a hundred billion dollars to throw around. And now he's saying that he's going to somehow raise 500. Right. And it's like, we could just, we could chill out. I mean, I, you know, I think there's a lot of risk in this, specifically the fact that now this, this, this, this, this. This pump, this time around, he's got more debt than ever. SoftBank has raised so much debt this year to keep this going. So, you know, when you're doing it off funds from what your company makes, it's a lot different than when you're borrowing.

And if it doesn't work out when you borrow, then there's like this real doom loop of having to pay back the debt on. Is that public information, like how much they're borrowing? Yeah, it is. They, let's see, I think it sets. They're over $100 billion. I don't know, in debt. They're on a soft bank continues jumbo debt spree this year.

They just raised another $17.1.5 billion in debt. I'm trying to get their total amount. That's 100 something. But, you know, that's one of the risks. I mean, he seems to be, he seems to be, you know, you see the theme here. Like he's early to the internet. He throws a gazillion dollars at it, tries to catch. Yeah.

He's early to mobile. It throws a gazillion dollars out of it. He's early to AI. There's a gazillion dollars at it. I mean, if you hit the right things, it works, right? It's just, it's just, it's just risky. I do, you know, he's such a gambler. He's the, he's like maybe the biggest gambler of all time.

He might be. Like, this guy might be the biggest gambler in human history. He keeps hitting red, and we're on a generational run right now. Ooh. Well, he's in black sometimes, but yeah, because he triples down, like it always ends up going back. He's Martin Gale betting. That's exactly what he is. He's martingale betting with everything.

increasing amounts that are more relevant to the economy. But in 2021, I was more of a, I mean, he's clearly bounced back with the AI stuff. But in 2022, I mean, after 21, because he was the guy, we guys remember 21 when it was like everything was getting funded. Startups were crazy. It was the we work era. He was the guy of that era making all that happen. Like he invested in mobile pizza delivery.

That was a huge flop. He invested in wire car, which is the biggest fraud in German history, like the giant. He just, he wasn't checking anything. That was the true. they were just signing checks. They didn't care, and it was like a volume game, which is kind of what venture capital is. Like they always just write a lot of little checks,

but his checks were just 100 times bigger. They were just bigger checks. They're just way bigger. Very big checks. So it's interesting. I don't know. I think he adds risk to the system, but I also think he's doing the,

he's got his gambling. I think I would, like, up until researching this, I would have felt like, yeah, you know, giant kind of gambler, and on net, he seems to make money, and it's doing well. and he keeps raising money, and even though it just takes some absolutely massive failures, I think the part that really got me is reading more about how it affected the ecosystem, which is just that it's, and look, I think there are businesses that it can be a really good

thing to grow for a long time unprofitably and then you eventually figure out how to monetize. And the two big ones for me, or actually the biggest, is YouTube, right? YouTube for, I don't know, what, a decade, two decades, a decade and a half was unprofitable for incredibly long time, but I think it's a phenomenal business. I think it's an incredible asset for humanity. I know not everybody agrees with that. But to have this open, accessible business that anybody can go put things online for free that's immediately accessible the entire rest of the world,

the amount of education and business that has grown around it, obviously we have all our entire careers and almost all of our friends. I mean, literally like 100 million people benefit from YouTube in some way in terms of the economy. It's massive. But the infrastructure of that is so obscenely complex. that you're just not going to be profitable for a while. So I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to just say, like, this system makes no sense. But looking at what he was doing specifically, there's a difference between, like, allowing a company to run unprofitably for a while where you have this clear goal of how we're growing in this way.

We're trying to make it as sustainable as possible. And then we will slowly monetize it versus just throw money at it forever. Like, it's so. I ironically think sports is the best way to contextualize this. sports where there is no limit on spending. People have a criticism of how money erodes the integrity of the game and the even playing field of competition. People talk about that in baseball. People talk about that in like the Premier League, these leagues where you can just spend as much as you want, as you want, put clubs in a bad position. It puts the top clubs that have the money

to spend or they, they in quotes, have the money to spend in bad spots. It puts the clubs that don't have the money to spend in bad spots. And it makes for a less compelling competitive environment, unlike, you know, something like the NFL where they've done a lot of work to even the playing field between the teams, which is a much better competitive system, right? And this is, I think that is a good analogy for this guy has chosen to take an obscene amount of money and his acceptance of an obscene amount of risk and it's starting to distort the game that all of these things exist in, which is, I think you can take this theme that we're talking about right now and you can apply it across a bunch of different industries of how, uh, maybe like

inequality of spending or inequality of wealth, corrods the, the game that is, is being played. that's that's kind of the way I look at it well funny funny stuff I think I think if you're thinking if you're thinking you know Doug why did you call him Masayoshi son the entire time is it just because you're in Japan right now no I just learned this before this his name or or is is S-O-N like is that's his full name that we've just been saying the whole time and I didn't I didn't know that I didn't I didn't know that up until when us doing this

segment on this episode. He's got, he's got a lot of names because he's, uh, he like had, he's, he's, he's,

he's, he's, anyway, but yeah, Masayoshi son is how, is how, is how he's usually referred to. I just think this is,

look, we've got a couple, like, ongoing stories that kind of weave over the, over the, you know, the months of us doing this podcast. For me now, I'm really curious about Stargate,

which is him coming in, being like, we're, this is the most money ever raised in human history. We're doing it. We're going to be the ones that raised the money. And right now he's betting crazy big on AI. Like he's one of the pieces. So as we talk about the AI bubble, Masayoshi-San and SoftBank and arguably the United States as a

result of Stargate, it's, we're going to see how this gamble plays out. I'm, I'm curious to see if he lands on red, you know? Yeah. See how it plays. What a guy. What's with, it's sorry, one last note. Why he's 68? Why does everybody have to be 65 to 80 who's doing crazy shit. Why does everybody? No, it's like every time you hear about somebody like this, we've talked about this. They're all in the same band of generation. And not only that.

They have the money. I know, but not only that, he just said he wants to run the company for 10 more years. Like, why? Dude, like, let somebody else do it. I just, I don't really, I hope when I'm 68, I'm not like this eager to like keep gambling even bigger and run the world for 10 more years. It's crazy because he could, you know, if he stays in reasonable health, if you think about a Rupert murder.

or a, what can I not think of Berkshire Hathaway? Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, these people that ran their businesses until 90s until they're not in their 90s, right? He could be that guy too. You could go for another 25 years. 30 more years of the big gambler dude. Yes.

Well, I mean, you know, theoretically, if this AI thing doesn't work out in the short term, that line goes, same as dot com, and he has to do it all over it. And he has to do it all over it. And that's why he needs 30 more years. He needs 30 more years to run it back again, one last time. And that's the real trilogy of this story. It's when we're doing Lemonade Stand 30 years from now, we're going to have another Masseyoshi's own episode.

I can't wait to see what the next gamble is. What else we got? Okay, I wanted to talk about, do you want to jump into something? No. I wanted to talk about the yen carry trade, if you guys are familiar with that. And something interesting,

because I think in the last few years, the couple stories that we may have heard or even talked about on the show this year have to do with the yen has declined in value. The Bank of Japan is printing a lot of money in order to suppress the interest rates on their debt, little bits and pieces that we've talked about, right? Within this is something I think is really interesting called the yen carry trade, which is maybe a free money printer, depending on how you look at it. that has existed.

I mean, it's existed for a long time in some form of another because it comes from the fact that it's really cheap to borrow money in Japan historically. They've kept their interest rates basically at zero for decades. You know, when we look at American interest rates, we went through a long period of near 0% interest rates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, right? Like a decade of really cheap borrowing in the U.S.

but if you look at the chart and line up U.S. interest rates with Japanese interest rates, you'll see that Japan's has been near zero for way, way, way longer, like I think more than 40 or 50 years. And it's just started to shift a little more recently. So because of this, you could take, you could borrow money in Japan and then take that money and then invest it in something that you expect to be higher yield in a different, type of currency, right? And this, like, East sports.

Like, you could be, you could be making a huge esports or we work investments with this money. But honestly, actually, if you were timing it correctly. So,

but the, this came to a head more recently in like 2024, 2023 time period because the, the U.S. interest rates were starting to climb to combat inflation, right?

And generally, what's the, safest asset that people think they can invest in. We work. We work. Sorry, besides we work. Silly me. Besides we work.

U.S. treasuries. Historically, the most reliable safest investment that you could put your money in. And we went through a period where the interest rates on our six months treasuries were like four and a half to five percent. It was like historically high, right? Even just personally, right? I think all of us put some amount of savings.

those treasuries for that time period because it was like, I can put in an amount of money and get 5% back in a period of six months with no consequence. Of course I'll do that. A bunch of normal people did that at the time with their savings. And because of that spread between the 5% you could get with that and the 0% that you could borrow money at in Japan, the yen carry trade is this idea of I could borrow as much money as I want from the Bank of Japan, take that yen, convert it into U.S.D and then buy something really safe and reliable like U.S. treasuries

and then just get the spread on those two interest rates as profit. And then also, because we've went through this historic time period of the yen declining in value, when you pay back the debt, you owe effectively less money than you did before, right?

If the yen is declining relative to the U.S. dollar, it means that when you take the U.S. dollars that you made from the treasury when it pays out, the same amount, paying back the same amount of yen is less than when you bought it, because the yen's been declining this whole time. So this trade was seen historic volume through the past couple years because the yen was on this terrible trajectory, and you had this spike in U.S. interest rates. So I can take basically free money from Japan, convert it into U.S.D, take advantage of,

the most reliable safest payout asset that's at historic interest rate highs and then just keep paying it back over and over and over again. And massive... Real quick, are there, was this not available in other countries? Because a lot of countries had zero interest rates, right? So is there a reason why Japan was like the go-to to go borrow money? Or is it, is it like part of this fact, I assume one, just because it's a very developed country, but then two, because the yen kept going down in value is the idea? So I think, yeah, it's two things. So historically, this trade has existed for a long time because the interest rates have been near zero for a long time. The yen, and I think the institutions that you could borrow from, are seen as more stable or

reliable than a lot of other countries around the world that you might be able to interface with, right? The yen is like this very developed, sorry, Japan is this very developed economy that has strong financial institutions. They're like a reliable country that I could go seek this money out from. I'm not expecting anything to go wrong. The yen even through the yen through a period like the 2008 financial crisis

is seen as a relatively stable store of value relative to the US dollar. So because of that reliability, this trade has existed for a long time. But I think the scale at which it's being used is a little, it's rockier over these, decades because the yen was more stable and it wasn't like crashing all the time, right? And you did

have to take that money and put it into riskier investments to see the return. So normally, like if we were looking at the 2010s, right, the U.S. interest rates were near zero. So if I was trying to do the yen carry trade, I would take a bunch of yen that I've borrowed and now have all of this money to invest. But I would have to pick something riskier. Like maybe I put it into, I've invested into some type of American stock or some Turkish company with Lira's. And I have to gamble on the return of that investment. And that is more risky than just buying a U.S. Treasury. But the volume of this trade expanded so much within 2023 to 2024 because you had this incredibly unique time period where the interest rate in Japan was still zero. And,

for reasons related to that and others, the value of the yen is consistently declining relative to the dollar, which is making the trade even more profitable. And then you have a historically high return from the safest asset you can buy, which is U.S. treasuries. So it's as free profit or free money as you could possibly get. No, is there a, is this building or something? Is there a, no, I think this is this a No, I think this is just like fascinating because I think this kind of sits in the shadows of, you know, most people don't know this, but this was something that a bunch of large financial institutions or companies were able to take advantage of for a really long period of time, like a couple, essentially a couple years where if you had the means and the connections to, you know, borrow money at this scale, you could take advantage of the free money printer. And when this started to change is, This year, we finally saw kind of a spike or a stabilization in like the yen crashing and then also our interest rates declining. So the trade is like now it's no longer as valuable as it was through like the past couple years.

It's not that you can't do it anymore, but this special like insane crossroads of circumstances that were allowing people to take billions of dollars in Japanese yen and then get like literally a free 5% on that amount of money for like a year and a half. two years. That was something a bunch of institutions took advantage of at the same time. Yeah, I'll just say, like, you know, I think broader context, if you're not thinking about interest rates, it's just that the Japanese government has a lot of debt, like a lot, the most in the world of any developed country. They have a ton and ton of debt. So they have to artificially keep the interest rates, which is what you pay someone to borrow money. You have to keep it low. Because if those rise up, then the amount they're spending on interest for the government is more than their military, than their schooling, that everything is.

combined. If they had interest rates like us, they would not be able to afford a government. They have to artificially keep it low. Because borrowing in Japan is artificially kept low, this carry trade has existed for a while. And again, it got to his extreme example. But people can just borrow money here and spend it on anything because it's this great deal that happens to coincide with this established first world, big country, big banks, everything. There's no risk. There's a lot of risk. So I would say the yen carry trade is much, you know, I think the example you're talking about is like when it hit the absolute extreme because it's safe versus safe.

When it gathered the most notoriety because of how it's like this is the most egregious, the abuse of it became. But it is underpinning a lot of risk assets worldwide because this big infinite place to borrow money has allowed people to go and put it into tech stocks or whatever. I mean, it's just people have found this to be a good spot to get money and then somewhere else is where to spend it, which by the way is self-reinforcingly kind of bad for Japan because what you're doing is taking money out of Japan and putting it into U.S. dollar or something else. So they have to, it is kind of a doom loop on their part that they eventually have to get out of. It's what causes the yen to get weaker because people are selling yen to buy something else. So they have slowly but surely this year have been trying to raise interest rates back up in Japan.

Well, they have to balance that because if it gets too high, the government, can't fund itself. And if it stays too low, people are constantly fleeing the country with money. So it is interesting. The yen character is an interesting underpinning to what's going on.

And you'll see on days when it kind of reverses or when the yen does well and people are spooked about their, you see massive movements because it causes things to be more brittle, more... Yeah, it's funny because on the subject of bubbles in the previous topic, right?

This is the part of it I didn't really understand until recently about If you just see this upward, if you see a trend of upward movement in the yen for a period of time, you can see a reaction in things like the stock market. In America, yeah. Because so much money from this method has been used to pump up various stocks or industries. And I didn't know the weight that this had.

And I don't even, I don't have numbers to contextualize that, honestly. I, it's, but I think it's, because it's not super clear, like how much money has been raised in total and used as investment. Like, through this. I can you pull up a yen to USD on like Google just and then go max again? I think it's a good thing to like, if you go max on this one, and it just shows you, you know, just how, how weak the currency really has become. Like it's, it, this is in part because of this. I mean, we've talked about it, but this is why in the past, few years. There's been such a flood of tourism in Japan. I talked with the, the barbara I was talking about, you know, he was telling me, um, he said, not, he said, you're one of the good ones.

No way. I'm sure. No way. You basically are one of the good ones. But, you know, he's talking about how there's foreigners all coming and they're doing social media and it's a problem here in Japan. But I think that's the idea, there's this anti-foreigner backlash in Japan because, it's not any individual's fault, but it's people are, coming over vacation more and more because the deal is so good. The deal is incredible. You get your money goes farther. And it's, and it's because of these central bank decisions by Japan, which have made the currency slowly but surely get weaker. And so it's causing all these later political effects that we'll talk to the expert, you know, on a future episode. Yeah.

But it's, it is it. It's all connected. It all plays out. I guess let's tease it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. We are going to be talking with somebody who lives here and is like a really involved with the business and political side of Japan. And so... Yeah, Jeffrey Hall. Jeffrey Hall. And really excited about that. So next week should be the episode where we're really going to like dive into a lot of

this with an expert. So who really lives here and is seeing it all. Yeah, yeah. He works. He has been a guest on BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, all these media outlets to help explain kind of the political and economic developments in Japan. in and he was someone we've gotten connected with recently and is kind of our main guest for for this week.

So I'm actually, we're doing the same thing, which is like, help us understand what's going on in Japan. Because he's like, person who lives here who's just like deeply involved with it. So the uncary trade reminds me of like, whenever I learn more about Wall Street,

I'm always like, they just live in this funny fantasy world. Oh yeah. Where you don't have to like, it's not real, you know, like there's people who, I mean,

there's presumably thousands of people who their main job has been buying money, borrowing money from Japan and then buying U.S. treasuries and then holding it and making billions and billions of dollars. They haven't created anything. No. Nothing was added to the world. They're just sitting there and then they buy one currency and then they hold it in another and then they make billions of dollars.

And it's just, I often think about if you had all the people dedicating all of their mental energy and talent and intellect to that, what if they like made, what if they made things what if you built things what if you did anything of it so I don't know if you'll remember

this there's a Dutch writer or an author named Rutger Breggman and I brought him up as a potential guest a few months ago because he has these famous segments that have gone viral a couple times and you know he has some books that have

come out and I think his most recent book is about exactly what you're saying basically that we financially, in society right now, we financially reward this type of path. We spend a lot of time and investment and money in like crafting careers that then make money in these ways instead of rewarding them for pursuing the biggest problems and like public policy or things that would help the everyday person. And I think this is a very good question. I don't have an easy answer to that.

Well, I do. I don't an easy answer, but I want to say, like, so the reason that that thing exists is because somebody somewhere politically wants a free lunch. And it's, in this case, the Japanese government, but in our case, sometimes it's, we want, they want to juice the economy for their own political benefit. They want to have debt, but not pay normal interest rates for their own benefit. And because of that, it creates these distortions that incentivize people to do the these otherwise useless jobs.

These shouldn't really exist. They don't provide benefit to society, but it is a counter effect of somebody trying to get something free. Someone's trying to get a political, and so like, that's why I think we've talked so much on the show about, you know, governments having to run

some kind of fucking balanced budget. Like you have to collect taxes and spend those taxes and not try to do above me on that because it creates distortions. Our kids will deal with it. That's what they've been saying for years. The important thing is that Masayoshi's song gets 10 more years to gamble.

And then the kids will deal with it. Dude, they'll be fine. Yeah, maybe they will, but they don't seem fine. They feel like they're not fine. My kids are fine. They're fine. Everything's going to be fine. All I know is I want Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Trump, Joe Biden and Masayoshi for 10 more years at least.

And then, dude, the next generation will deal with it. The next generation should be five years younger. That's it. Yeah. You know, Zohm. You know, someone's finally out of the game. Of all those people you just missed, mentioned, as of today,

Warren Buffett announced he is, quote, going silent. He's no longer writing his shareholder letter that he does every year. He's no longer doing public speaking. I don't know what age. He's like 90 fucking something. But Warren Buffett is essentially out of the game. He has passed on the reins.

He's fine. He was never making policy. He's just investing in stuff. I don't probably, born Buffett. I'm just saying he's out of the game. He's just. He's 95. 95.

A little too soon to be out of the game. I've had this thought too is with maybe it's a little more understandable with like a Zuckerberg who's like still relatively young. And maybe this is the reason that I'm not the guy at the helm of any of these companies. But I just can't imagine the world

where I'm 80 fucking years old and I have 50 plus billion dollars and I want to keep doing that job. you could just go enjoy life. I think that... Okay, right, you're telling me that if you were Masayoshi-San and you would bet $20 million and you got $70 billion, one of the biggest returns on investment ever,

you're not going to chase that high for the rest of your life. You're telling me you're going to go like wake up in the morning and have a coffee and look at nature with your beautiful wife? No, you're going to think about like, what if I put $100 billion and I get $18 trillion? I think it's the rush. And I think that people like, you know, if you're Trump or really, you like being...

I have an answer to this. I have an answer. Because you're talking to the guy, you're talking to the guy who, when he sits down at the blackjack table, he sets a little goal of, what if I hit, like, if I get to turn this $100 into $500,

I'll walk so I can buy my Nintendo Switch. And then I do that. But then because I do that, I'll never be the guy who has a billion in the first place. Like maybe you just never reach that mark if you're kind of a normal...

Yeah, you have to be a psycho. So I feel this way about YouTubers and content creators. Like whenever people are like, why are YouTubers and content creators so weird? It's like, you wouldn't be in this position if you weren't kind of fucked up. Like all of us...

No, no, I think this, I wouldn't... I don't mean this in an insulting way. This is exactly, okay, when we met Mr. Beast and we went to his facility. Why would you do this? If you weren't fucked up, yeah. We had Mr. Beast on the yard a few years ago, and I realized that he, dude,

he is obsessed. He is a man who is, whatever. you think of him, he is truly obsessed with making YouTube videos. It is what drives his every movement from every day, and it was extremely apparent to me in the short period of time I met with him. I don't think he was putting on. I think I saw everything going on at the facility, like the staff, what, how he even lives, like, like the, the room at the warehouse that he would like sleep in overnight if he needed to, shit like that. And I'm like, you're, you're,

Oh, kind of a weird guy. You're a weird guy, but you wouldn't be in this position unless you were a version of that guy. Like, I do, so maybe this is a stupid question in the sense that any, it's like when we were talking about people that seek power in general.

Like, no, the guy who's probably the best person functionally for being the president or the best senator, is likely never going to run. Because he's just not, That doesn't match up. And I think this is kind of a cliche conclusion to come to, but I do have an increasing feeling of it being real. When I have this like, I'm a normal person.

If I was in their shoes, I just wouldn't do the job anymore. And seeing these guys obsessively run it down until their 80s or 90s or running it up, running it up. And they're just, their brains just seek something differently than mine. does. Gotta be a hell of a high, dude. It must be. It must be.

No desire to be Masayoshi-Sahn, but goddamn, I can't even imagine. This is like the threat, the Faker winning worlds again, and there's like this just nail-biter team fight that he comes, that T-1 comes out of, and Faker, like, smiles

and laughs to himself at the end of the team fight, and the top comment was like, man, he just lives with this shit. And then somebody else was like, I think it's the only way he can feel anything anymore. Like, dude, Vaker needs to go to game five of the world championship to, like, feel something. Yeah, I'll be honest, from my POB, it looked like he was a Tuesday for him.

He looked like he clocked in. He didn't even care. But that's the problem. It's like, the high's not so good anymore. And it's like, what do I do besides? Maybe SSR point. You can't get any higher. At least with gambling.

He's running it out. Yeah, I know. You can just keep putting more money in as a gambler, dude. You know, Trump can go for term three, I guess, or whatever the fuck he's going to go for it. Okay, well, I think we're pretty much out of time here. We have two more episodes we're recording in Japan, a special one with two YouTubers that I think we don't want to spoil yet because it's not going to come out for a while.

We're going to release it at the end of the year around Christmas. And then this upcoming one with Jeffrey Hall, a university professor in Japan, also a special guest on a bunch of news and media networks as an expert as to what's going on in politics and economics in Japan that I'm really excited we're going to get to put out. next week. We should do a little anime talk to hit the set right at the end here. What do you guys think about Luffy and, uh, I don't know. Thoughts on, thoughts on Luffy, Doug?

I think he's Segoi. Well said. You can't. Well, said. That's an episode. We have to pay penance or something. We can't use the studio and then also, I'll say a genuine opinion. I heard they don't even talk about anime on trash chase anymore. That's what real fans told me. The streets are saying it's not even animated. Oh, they're saying it's true. Okay. Connor's upstairs. I didn't even realize

Connor came in. Streets are saying, Connor. All right. We'll see you guys next to us. Bye, everybody.