Lemonade Stand - Will The Peace Last? | Lemonade Stand 🍋
Episode Date: October 15, 2025On this week's show... Aiden answers a question, DougDoug talks of peace, and Atrioc brought some rocks. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord a...ccess, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 033 Recorded on: October 14th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Announcement 4:28 Shutdown Watch 9:26 The Nobel Peace Prize 18:30 Gaza Ceasefire 35:04 US Israel Recently 47:21 Rare Earth Minerals 1:03:13 China and US Relations 1:13:04 Something Lighthearted 1:27:44 Outro New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Ladies and gentlemen, we're starting this episode with the number one story.
Is the government still shut down?
Yes.
Doodoo do, do, do, do, do, do, all right.
It is still shut down, Doug.
14 days, folks.
Two weeks, we're headed towards, I don't remember what our bet was, but we're getting,
we're halfway.
Do you remember what each of our numbers were?
I picked 45.
33 days.
I think it's going to be 33 days.
And I was like with 34 or something.
I tried to one up you.
Yeah, you tried to one up.
That's, I think you're, I think you're, you guys are really in the pocket there.
Yeah, there's, government's not looking great.
We're going to be giving a little update on that.
We're going to be talking about the Nobel Prize.
We're going to talk about the updates with Israel, Palestine,
and the ceasefire there and the progression of that,
as well as rare earth minerals and tariffs with China
and all sorts of other fun things.
And maybe, if we've got time, erotica.
Yes, ideally some erotica.
From Chad Cheapteeat.
Before we get to the erotica,
we have a little announcement that you may have already seen.
We are officially partnered with Vox Media as of last week.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and this is sick.
This does mean there will be ads on the show.
But to give you guys context for what specifically that means,
as a typical podcast, we're going to start to do brand integrations.
That'll kind of ramp up over the next three months.
As part of that to sort of compensate,
we're going to be phasing out the ads that are built into the YouTube videos.
So if you're on YouTube, that way you aren't getting served a bunch of YouTube ads.
Instead, it'll be like us delivering the ads,
and we are going to try to make them entertaining and fun.
And honestly, Vox is like a great partner.
that we're really excited about.
This was our number one choice of people to work with.
And it's not just people serving us ads to make money.
It's like this is a group that has a ton of connections with other creators,
with like interesting news and journalists development stuff.
They want to support us with our trip to China that we're going to do and other things like that.
There's events that they run that we're going to be able to be a part of,
a ton of support they're offering, other stuff as well.
But we are like, this wasn't the most lucrative option we had.
It's the option we were most excited about.
So I'm genuinely stoked that this happened.
To give you guys some context, we always knew that ads were going to be a part of the main show eventually,
but we took our time picking a partner that we really liked and had a lot of confidence in.
And that's why it took so long to get to this point to begin with.
And yeah, if you want to hear maybe a longer winded explanation behind the changes that are happening right now with the types of ads that'll be on the show,
the way they're going to be rolled out, the way this interacts with like the Patreon, other questions.
you might have.
Very understandable.
We released a little like 15 minute video on the Patreon that anybody can watch.
You can,
you don't need to be a member.
You can just load the page and watch it.
And it's basically like a 15 minute frequently asked questions on everything that
people have been asking and related to this.
So go check that out.
If you,
if you have more questions about this.
Is this you?
Yeah.
You recorded a 15 minute direct-to-camp video.
Yeah, I just learned about this.
Because everybody was 10 minutes ago.
Well, everybody had so many of the same questions.
I was like,
I'll just answer them.
And we're not going to spend 20 minutes
on the podcast episode talking about it.
Well, apparently we are now
because you have to explain yourself.
There's a mystery episode
that went up without us.
You're just upset because we want to talk to Gavin Newsome.
You have to jam in some Q&A.
So I need some time for myself.
I need some time because I'm getting slowly
pushed off of the show for Gavin time.
Gavin, wait, not yet.
I honestly think this is great.
It's like the best partner I could have asked for.
I think there's a lot of great stuff
is going to come out of this.
So thank you all for supporting the show.
Otherwise, it wouldn't happen.
And like a lot of guests, like Steve Isman, for example,
as somebody who we were able to connect with through these conversations.
Like there's going to be a lot of cool opportunity through this partnership.
So we are stoked.
Yeah.
I have to say it's pretty surreal coming from like the more gaming and Twitch space to even get the opportunity to work with a company like this.
And, uh, yeah.
So supporting the show up into this point is,
dude,
I was sending them for examples of ads I've done.
And I sent one where I went into my, like,
friends room naked and tried to sell them factor.
We'll see,
guys.
This deal might not last because they've seen now Aiden's
yard ads and your ads.
And they're getting cold feet already.
I sent the team at Fox.
I send them the factor adderee we did at the yard
where slime is Hannibal Lecter and I'm Jody Foster.
And I'm like, yeah, we want to do it like this.
So anyway.
So shut down watch.
Shut down watch.
Two weeks in.
Is there any updates
you guys have heard about?
I mean,
it sounds like it's still
will they,
won't they?
I mean, the big action,
I don't know about this ending or not.
I have not heard anything on that front,
but the Republicans,
Trump specifically,
have started to follow through
with their threats of laying off
huge portions of the federal workforce
in retaliation of the shutdown.
And if you could
maybe quickly Google the department's affected
because they're not coming of mine right now.
But this was the threat
on the table from that side of the aisle.
Like if you move forward with this,
we're going to,
we're going to cruise through
and cut more agencies
and federal jobs.
And my understanding is
there is an efficiency
in this process now
because of the amount
they already did it earlier in the year.
With Doge?
Yeah, when we were hearing
about the Doge cuts, right?
There was this big air of confusion
around how these are going to be executed.
You know, what is legal to do
and what is not legal to do?
but now, because they went through that process
early in the year,
getting rid of federal employees is a little,
unfortunately perhaps,
they're a little more familiar with the process now.
And this action is a little easier to take.
Yeah, the White House is saying
it's going to ride out the shutdown
by continuing layoffs,
but troops and law enforcement will pay.
That doesn't make sense, whatever.
It doesn't make sense.
It's not like you're saving money right now
because you're not paying anybody anyways.
It doesn't, that doesn't make sense.
You're not riding.
out the shutdown by doing this. I will say it has gotten
more confusing to me over time. How, how,
and I was reading some of the comments on our last one,
those people were like, yeah, it is just a mismatch of things.
There's a bunch of rules that don't fit together
that have been pushed together and it just happens.
Yeah, we should just clarify based on the last episode
that yes, it is the case
that everybody who is furloughed right now,
the government employees who aren't working,
are going to be paid.
They're supposed to be. Yes, yes.
Barring some sort of breach of protocol,
which that wouldn't happen under Trump.
like they're you know they're supposed to be paid so we're not saving any money we're
we're just not running the government which is just a crazy solution that we've come to
Trump did say on true social quote we have identified funds to pay military troops I assume it's
just the tariff basket I don't know what he's he's found an extra source of funds and eight
like in the couch have you noticed he finds tariff revenue like it's in the it's in the
cracks of your car yeah it's like a rich kid finds money
Digging in between the backseat of your Jetta
and finding $10 billion in tariff revenue
that is just laying around.
Found $8 billion of unobligated
research development, testing, and evaluation funds
that will be used to pay the military.
All right, I guess.
Well, look, last week we talked about
the critical functions of the government
that would really hurt people day to day.
That stuff is still running.
You know, airplanes are still running.
There's been delays, but I know a bunch of people
have still been flying.
Nobody's died.
So it's functioning, right?
And none of the really painful stuff
has happened. But like we talked about, the one month mark is when the pain really ramps up.
And that's why I think all of us are of the belief that this is going to last 30 days.
Like no, there seems to be no traction whatsoever in the last week, which means probably it's
going to the 30 day mark. And then tensions really rise as people don't get paychecks and they can't
afford rent. Yeah. Again, everything I see, there's, there's been absolutely zero progress on any
target of negotiation. Nobody's given an inch. It's just not moving. I do have somebody in,
in my community, who is an air traffic controller. It confirmed it for me.
who talked about what it's like going on there.
And you mentioned, I think, during the shutdown,
maybe in the Reagan era or something, where...
The shutdown in 2018, the last shutdown in 2018,
which was the longest one, still is the longest one.
Right, that around the 30-day mark,
whatever, they started taking more sick days
and, like, trying to find ways and...
He said they're doing that now.
Like, it's already ramping up a bit
where people are taking more leave, more time off,
more, you know, things are a little bit understaffed,
people are...
because they're not getting paid.
So I assume that will ramp up heavily,
like you said, around 30-day mark.
At which point, people will have to do something
because they got to fly still.
And air traffic controllers are already famously understaffed.
Can we replace air traffic controllers with Chad GPT?
Doug, tell me.
Like, I'm going to open it up right now.
Like, if you put a screenshot of a radar thing,
can he just tell Chad JPD what to say?
Perry, if you could pull this up, it's looking like,
uh, you know.
You know I have no body and cannot operate physical machines.
But I think a lot of chatty is just about convincing it.
It's all work on this in the background.
Yeah, yeah.
Cammer it out.
You can't remember that out.
No, no.
You are an air traffic controller.
All right.
Okay, perfect.
I think we're going to hear more about this in the next week.
Oh, it said, understood I can simulate air traffic controller.
It's actually we're good.
I just had to tell it.
It was qualified.
Like driving, air traffic control is mostly about confidence.
Yes.
people do say that.
Let's use the Nobel Peace Prize
as a kickoff point
for some interesting discussion.
Donald Trump has famously this year
been campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize,
which to be clear is not a thing you campaign for.
But he has been talking about it a whole lot.
So the Nobel, you know, Academy Foundation, there we go,
has been around for about 100 years,
five different categories.
Peace is the one that isn't quite as like science grounded.
But the Nobel Peace Prize includes such legends
as Nelson Mandela,
helping to end apart hide in South Africa.
Mother Teresa, who was now a Catholic saint,
founded the missionaries of charity
and did all this work with the poor in Calcutta
in India. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. civil rights movement,
Mikhail Gorbachev, who I didn't actually know
before looking into this.
Wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah, in 1990, before the Soviet Union collapsed
for his reforms that he did, like Glass Knotts and Parastroika
to ease tensions and help reduce threat of conflict.
And then, somewhat a little controversial,
Barack Obama in 2009.
So this was really...
For piloting the drone, extra...
Yeah.
Except for being the air traffic controller.
We're doing a sick 360 no scope with the drone.
Yeah, it was like...
It was because, like, he was just so good at it.
He did it in the most peaceful way possible.
He had an Xbox controller in one hand
and a place he control on the other hand.
I will say this, even when I was younger,
I was like, this doesn't feel like it makes a lot of sense.
Wasn't it like his first...
Yes.
It was super early and he presided over...
a lot of wars.
Yeah.
Which doesn't feel super compatible
with the Nobel Peace Prize.
I don't know.
Foreign policy wasn't even a thing he was working on
because it was like during the height of the recession.
Yeah.
It was like, it was a weird thing to get that early
without doing very much of anything.
So he, nine months into his presidency,
won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Donald Trump was trying to do the same thing here.
So there is a precedent.
And like you guys said,
so the Nobel Foundation, their words were like,
only very rarely has a person to the same degree
as Obama captured the world's attention
and given its people hope for a better future.
But both in the actual war, like if you
pull this up, and the way people
talked about it, and even what Obama then said,
which is that he was like, literally
in his acceptance speech, he's like,
I am at the beginning and not the end of
my labors. I haven't done very much.
Like, so...
I do like the idea of like him getting
the award and him being like, this doesn't even
makes sense.
No, literally, okay. Quote.
And yet I would,
be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated
and then listed other people like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. and said like,
I'm not in that camp yet. And so he was like, this is not something I deserve. And so what did he
actually do? He, uh, as he became a president, he went to Cairo in Egypt and was like talking about
restoring relations with Muslim countries with the West because, you know, that is sort of fractured
over the Middle East wars.
He set in plan a motion to withdraw the U.S. troops from Iraq.
Technically, Bush did that, but he also then reaffirmed it.
You can't give it to Bush for Iraq.
You can't start a war and then make a plan to get out of it
and then get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, he also, just be clear, he's done it again.
He then sent them back in for ISIS.
Called for nuclear disarmament, you know,
broadly set the tone for global peace and cooperation.
Oh, and then also sent 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, yeah.
But the only thing I can really credit him with that would is years later the Iran nuclear deal.
He, he, that was his.
I'm reading this right now, and it seems very much about like the vibe.
Like it's like, it's vibes.
It's vibes.
He advocated dialogue.
He helped, you know.
Look, no disrespect to the campaign, but it's like he put hope on a poster and then he got the Nobel Peace
Yeah, strength in international diplomacy and cooperate,
but yet nothing actually physically happened.
Yeah.
So this one was a little weird.
And because of this and because of how much Trump has,
let's say,
pushed himself into all these different situations
that have been going on,
I think there's a real legitimate shot that Trump would win it.
And instead, as of last Friday, he did not win.
Instead, the winner is Maria Carina Machado
from Venezuela.
Quick primer.
Venezuela is currently being led by a dictator.
Oh my god, I'm blanking on the name.
Maduro.
Maduro, right.
And Maduro has not exactly been doing fair democratic elections.
They've been hiding the results.
And so Machado is basically one of the leaders of the resistance who is trying to push for
actual democracy.
She is like in hiding.
Her life is threatened.
But she hasn't left the country because she's there fighting like really, really impressive
woman.
Somewhat interestingly, Marco Rubio nominated her in 2024 for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah.
So you can nominate people.
And so before he became, you know, part of it.
of Trump's team. Rubio even was like, called her like the iron lady of Venezuela as badass.
And so I actually, so I did some research and I found the actual top secret document that
the Nobel laureate foundation made to analyze Donald Trump's candidacy for Nobel Peace Prize,
right? Some research. So they did, they just did a classic pros and cons here. All right. So pros,
Venezuela democracy. Trump has been very pro democracy in Venezuela. And he's been talking about
Maduro and his abuses. And they even put out a bounty on Maduro to try to like get him
arrested. So the, the actual winner, uh, this woman, Machado, she called him out and said
Trump deserves part of the honor of this. Like she personally thanked from, he is the best thing
you could get, right? The closest, the best best thing to getting it is having it. And so he loved
that. Now the cons of the Venezuela things. He keeps blowing up boats without any evidence. So I was going
to bring this up. Right. Yeah. And so they're saying it's drug boats, but they haven't said any evidence.
And so he keeps blown up.
Okay, but that's like a small thing.
There's a couple boats.
Israel-Iran ceasefire.
Remember in June there was a war between Israel and Iran?
It's called the 12-day war now because it ended thanks to Donald Trump and the U.S.
mediating an end to it, unironically.
The problem is that he did also bomb Iran first.
It's a give and take with the Nobel Peace Prize.
People do say that about it.
Yeah, it's not about always peace.
The name is misleading.
The name is misleading.
The name is misleading.
It's a misnomer.
It's very vibes-based.
You have to have some peace in there.
There's a lot of peace at the nuclear facilities after the bombs went off.
Right, after.
Well, you bond them to keep the peace.
Yeah.
I mean, technically, yes.
Yeah.
Ukraine, Russia.
He's made a big deal about how much he's going to solve the Ukraine-Russia talk.
And he's been talking a lot to Putin.
Unfortunately, the war is still going.
But Pakistan India ceasefire.
Remember this?
A couple months ago, Pakistani group basically killed, did this horrific
terrorist attack in Indian Kashmir,
or killed 26 people, India starts responding
with missile attacks. These are two gigantic
world powers who are about to go to war
and Trump actually gets
in there and negotiates a ceasefire.
He apparently, according to his own words,
threatened a 200% tariff on the
countries unless they would go to the table and
negotiate. Which is a sick way to do
peace, which is that you threaten them with tariffs
on your country unless they behave.
And that's actually like a pretty
sick achievement, except then India
came out and said it wasn't Trump.
they just talk directly with the military leaders.
Yeah.
I did, I did see that too.
Wow.
To be clear, I mean, this is an interesting one.
You know, he claims full credit for ending it.
India says he had absolutely nothing to do with itself.
And then Pakistan, who kind of wants to drive a wedge between India and America is like nominating him.
Right, right, right.
The Pakistani leader was like, Trump was great.
He was instrumental.
He was awesome.
He's like, he threatened us so hard.
And then we get to Gaza Sea's fight.
We're going to be talking about this in a lot more detail in a second, but this is a huge development
where the U.S. has mediated this 20-point peace plan.
Hostages were exchanged a huge, huge development, which is incredible and honestly amazing,
and I think this does deserve some flowers.
Obvious downside here, too early to tell.
It's like we're a couple days in, and so we're going to talk more about this, as well as the
fact that arguably a lot of all of what's been happening has been funded and supported by the United
States up until now.
And so as they looked at this, apparently it was dead.
even, but then the final thing that pushed them into the not awarding it to Donald Trump
camp, he has pissed off the entire world with tariffs and threatening them constantly,
pulling out of NATO and generally being extremely aggressive across the entire world.
When did he do that?
It's just that one thing.
Almost clutched at the end.
And I do unironically think he has done more than Barack Obama did in his first nine months.
Sure.
His vibes are atrocious.
And so clearly that is a bad thing when it comes to winning the.
Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah.
Trump decimating the vibes.
That's why I would say Obama had like basically an empty pros column and an empty cons
column so you could go off vibes.
If you have this many cons, it's hard to be like this is the guy.
Though I do want to say the guys of ceasefire, we're going to talk about it.
He, you know, Trump had a speech about Machado's win where he's like, hey, they should have
given it to me, but, you know, she's pretty good.
And then he says, you know, they gave it for what they did in 24.
So who knows, Nick?
Like he's like talking about.
Right, right.
He could theoretically, if this ceasefire were.
to hold for a year, not only could he win it, he might deserve it. Like, given this is the one he's been,
of the seven wars I looked into him, there's really, it's very circumstantial on the seven. This is the one
where he has the most actual impact, which is the Gaza ceasefire. So I'm interested in hearing more about
it from, from your research, Aidan, but. Yeah. Let's, let's get into it. So this is a huge
development and the Gaza Israel situation. Yeah, I mean, it's a ceasefire deal that is the potential end to
this war, right? And I wanted to recap a little bit of the past month and a little bit in the
past year. So, you know, the war has been going on since October 7th of a couple years ago.
In that time, Israel has killed 68,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians. And over this time,
many of people have called for a stop to this violence, right, over the course of this two years.
and a lot of people or organizations like Human Rights Watch Amnesty International have called it a genocide.
And then most recently, a UN commission of inquiry in September of this year released the first definitive statement from the UN calling it a genocide as well.
And I would say at a personal level, the vibes in the past six months to a year, just reading news and like seeing people's broader opinions about this,
I think as this has dragged on,
there's been a pretty distinct turn
in terms of the collective view
of Israel having gone too far.
It feels different than it was like a year ago
or a year and a half ago
when you look at like the percentage of people
who are saying that.
And I think this pressure and this context
of more and more countries
and people feeling that way
is sort of building up to the moment
in the past month and a half
that we're in now.
So the big development,
that have led to this ceasefire specifically.
On September 9th, Israel launches a strike in Qatar, targeting some Hamas leadership that
they are currently negotiating with.
There's an ongoing like just...
Hey, worked in Iran.
There's an ongoing negotiation between Hamas and Israel to sort of figure things out for the future,
right?
And as they're negotiating with them, they attack them in Qatar.
The same representation.
Again, you know, I think what you said before about the opinion shifting is important
as context for this because Israel has become more and more isolated geopolitically.
Yes.
On its one major ally of the United States.
And the United States is ally with Qatar.
So this strike is like, you know, I don't remember the exact thing, but Trump himself,
who's been a pretty pro-Israel guy and still is, was like pretty furious publicly about
this attack in Qatar because it crossed a line of, you know, we're the only ones on your side
you just crossed the barrier.
Absolutely.
It's crossing a significant line.
And, and...
It's like if we went to Vox's headquarters
and threw bricks through the windows.
Well, I did it right yesterday,
but only just to keep them on their chair.
Just to keep them on their chair.
And then you call for peace.
And I asked them to raise our ad rate.
And then in reaction to this,
or I imagine it was getting organized
or spoken about prior to this as well,
a block of Arab countries,
including places like Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, the UAE,
and Qatar.
present a peace plan to the U.S. in New York
ahead of the UN General Assembly
that happened in September.
And the U.S. is like, all right, this looks good.
This is our chance to create a ceasefire
or potentially end the war.
Let's bring this to the Israelis in New York.
And they go through all of these negotiations
and they come out with this like 20-point plan
that Israel agrees to that admittedly, at first,
the Arab countries aren't happy with.
But after these negotiations play out, one more thing happens, which is there's a public
photo shoot with Netanyahu in the White House where Trump gets him to phone Qatar in front of
the media and apologize for the strike.
Really?
In this sort of, the pictures are pretty crazy, honestly.
He's kind of like sulking.
Yeah.
Netanyahu doesn't look happy in the photo.
And Natanyahu looks like a yelled at child, to be honest.
I mean, can I say one thing about the U.S.?
because you mentioned the UN.
I think that was a pretty key moment.
Absolutely.
That UN meeting,
because that was like a public display
of how isolated they had become
when Netanyahu got up there to speak
and talk about...
Yeah, there's two things happening in tandem
at the UN Assembly, right?
When Netanyahu goes up to speak,
almost all of the room steps,
just walks out of the building, right?
Symbolically, like, we will not tolerate Israel any longer.
And then the other big thing that happened
was France, Canada, the UK,
Australia, Belgium, and a few other countries
recognize Palestinian statehood
for the first time publicly, which is
this gigantic
public recognition of
hey, we,
Israel becoming increasingly isolated
on the world stage, right?
These are major economies. It's like almost all the major
economies of the world were.
Yeah. And
at this point, right,
Israel really has only
the U.S. as a significant
player on its side, albeit the U.S. is the
party with the most sway and influence over which direction like Israel goes on these things.
And with this deal that they had negotiated with Israel at the time, they, they agree to this 20-point ceasefire, which is seen broadly as something that favors Israel more than the Ghazans and Hamas.
Here, if you pull up this, I hadn't seen this before.
This is, it's like a parent scolding a child.
They like gave Netanyahu fucking corded phone
and make him read a script.
In front of the public.
In front of the cameras.
That's insane.
It was crazy.
Man.
So there's a note here in that there's kind of a theory
that Israel agreed to this 20 point plan
because they didn't think Hamas would agree
to a lot of the details of it.
Like the idea that there's aspects of this
that Israel wasn't super happy
or Netanyahu isn't super happy with.
but it was so, from their perspective, so unlikely Hamas would agree to the stipulations around disarmament and no longer governing the Gaza Strip.
Point 13, they cannot, Hamas cannot have any role in the governance of Gaza in any form and they have to shut down all military and like they need to agree to this for the ceasefire to hold.
But Hamas follows up and does agree.
So this, this begins to take shape in a reaction to both sides agreeing to this and Trump, you know, announcing that this is.
officially agreed upon,
Hamas releases,
this was as of Sunday this week,
Hamas releases the 20 remaining
live hostages that they have to the Israelis.
And then there's a prisoner exchange that also happened
earlier this week of about 2,000
Palestinians prisoners and detainees being released
back to Gaza.
And then the other beginning stipulations of this
are aid is allowed to like flow freely in and out of Gaza again.
there's going to be increased
economic support to
Gaza to help them rebuild
Hamas has an opportunity
like Hamas officials have an opportunity
to decide whether or not they're going to like stay
or leave and be
like set up residents
in like other countries
Gazans also like
Gazans broadly are like free to return
to their like cities and towns where they used to live in
you're seeing like a lot of pictures right now right
people walking long long distances
back to their homes that are now
destroyed from what happened.
And,
Kai, two other ones I thought were interesting in this 20 point plan.
One is no one will be forced to leave Gaza,
which sounds obvious,
but months ago Trump had been floating this idea of
like moving Gazans to a different country or something.
And so that is like baked into this peace plan that like that is not happening.
And then point 16 is that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.
So it's a very explicit like they have to leave.
Yeah.
And I want to, so I want to come
back to that specific point and also a few other of these.
The two other things that has happened like over the course of the weekend is Trump flew
to Israel, makes a speech, and then Trump goes to Egypt for this like Gaza Peace Summit
where they're with a bunch of other countries from around the world,
showing their approval for this agreement, announcing what the future is going to be like
and how this plan is going to play out.
But I think one important thing is that Trump, in the,
build up to this or around these things has said that he's saying the war is over. But Netanyahu
has not said that at any point. And also at this Egypt summit, Israel wasn't there. Israel didn't go.
And neither was, you know, Hamas or like any form of like Palestinian representation from what I saw.
So it's weird to have this like giant summit around this deal, but not have either party present and just have.
and just have it be all the other countries
that help negotiate said deal.
So where does this leave things right now, right?
There is absolutely an immediate sense of relief
from whether or not you're like Palestinian or Israeli
for maybe different reasons.
There are a relief of just the violence being over, right?
For Gazans to like no longer be under attack in this war
and for presumably this genocide to be over,
you can like return, you can safely.
return home. I mean, aid is now allowed to flow in. Eight can flow in. There's some relief there
no matter what. But now we're at the rest of this where the beginning stages of this plan are being
put into place and Israel is like falling back their lines of occupation on the Ghazan territory,
but the territory is still currently occupied. And this 20 point plan has a bunch of stipulations of
the follow through both on Israel's end and Hamas' end that need to be like continued to be
followed through with. And Netanyahu's lack of recognition of the war being over sort of
indicates that, you know, Israel might just start this up again. Because there have been previous
ceasefire agreements where Israel, like, agreed to a ceasefire for a period of time. And this just
launched, you know, launch a missile and then continued it. Now, I want to say, if you, the geopolitical
situation is such that it would be tougher for them to break it than they have in the past. Exactly.
Because the reason they negotiated to begin with is because they're so isolated. They're defended
on the United States.
And I'd say,
finally stop backing them
or at least push them
into doing something.
Yeah.
And now they don't have the hostages
as a,
I don't use the word excuse,
but like as a,
as a cause.
They can't be like,
we have to go save our citizens.
If there's no more hostages under,
they can't begin rebombing Gaza
and try to,
it just further isolates them.
And it would be a violation
of what is a publicly recognized
pretty good,
not a pretty,
a positive peace deal.
There's also weird,
I mean,
maybe just weird from my perspective
of reading it, stipulations in the plan.
So point nine is Gaza will be governed
under the temporary transitional governance
of a technocratic, apolitical,
Palestinian committee responsible for delivering
the day-to-day running of public services
and municipalities for the people in Gaza.
And then one of the people that it says
who's going to assist with this is Tony Blair,
the former prime minister of the UK.
And I think there's just,
what I have been reading,
because there's so many different ideas and opinions and sources.
And even the way this was agreed to feels like,
uh,
like,
uh,
feels like there,
there may not be a follow through or a full agreement with all the aspects of this plan.
It,
it's very,
it feels like there's a lot of details that,
uh,
won't be committed to.
If there's one thing the Palestinian region has needed,
it's more British influence.
We need to bring that back.
Okay.
Everything was so good.
They drew the borders well.
They set this all up well.
We need to bring Tony Blair back in.
Well, actually, Tony,
we might not be aware
is Tony Blair is,
he's knighted.
He's a sir.
So we actually need to do a new
the crusade.
He's like,
I'm going to run that.
I'm going to fix this situation
just like I fixed the NHS.
We're going to send him,
Sir Patrick Stewart,
Sir Elton John.
We're going to send a new crusade over.
As many British people as we can.
Peaceful knights.
To solve the Middle East.
I do want to say,
you know,
you talk about the,
tenuousness of this deal. It's only been a few days. Yeah. Or a day four or five or something like this,
really early. And Israel is already threatening to re-block aid because they did not get the bodies
of the deceased hostages. Which they're supposed to get from- They are supposed to get. And I guess
they've been trickling out. They got four additional deceased ones today, but they haven't got them all.
So they're threatening to cut the aid. So it's on a razor's edge of like, but that's, that is a
and I feel like the primary thing
maintaining this
is just the U.S.
pressure and influence.
The fact that they have finally
caved to like a small degree
and pressured
for this deal to be the case
that's like the biggest thing
that makes this different
from anything in the past
but it's still a question
of whether or not
it will hold together.
Like the,
you know,
just because the 20 point plan
says the occupation
is supposed to end
doesn't mean that it's going to end.
And then one thing I was thinking about
is even if it did, right?
None of this has anything to do with the West Bank.
The West Bank's not mentioned at all.
The settlements in the West Bank aren't mentioned at all.
Like, there's a whole other section of this issue
that even if everything in this agreement
was fulfilled perfectly, right?
Yeah.
It's not like Israel, Palestine, as a, you know,
as the issue is like solved, right?
Palestinian liberation.
The worst.
Yeah.
It's, it's, uh, so,
it all feels so precarious.
That was what I walked away with.
It feels confusing, precarious,
and I'm happy that the violence is over in the short term,
but is this something that is followed through with.
So that's what I want to say is like,
obviously I've been a bit of a critic of Donald Trump.
For a lot of episodes and a lot of big and clips.
But if this held, let's say, through a full year of next year,
it would only be because,
yeah, he has to keep his attention on this thing.
Oh, it would require Donald Trump to actually continually think about this, put pressure on it.
If he turns his attention and gaze somewhere else and stops carrying, this will fall for it.
So if he did it, I would actually say that is more than what Obama did it could be earned.
Like, I wouldn't mind him getting the Peace Prize for that.
This is going to take significant focus.
Imagine Tony Blair gets the Nobel Peace Prize next year.
That's fucking crazy.
So what you're saying, I think a critique I've seen pop up a lot.
is Trump has this way of doing business.
Is he announces a change that he sees himself as involved in.
And to his credit, he is involved here, right?
And then he makes it very grandiose.
He's like, the war is over.
It's one of the great moments in civilization.
He said he ended 3,000 years of war in the Middle East.
Yeah.
He's like, but he has a history of doing one, he said that.
of doing something or saying something like that
and then kind of moving on
and going to the next issue or the next toy
without, and leaving the follow through
and the details to others, right?
Yeah.
And I think with a situation like this,
that seems like an approach
that isn't going to be sustainable.
That's my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, we don't know.
I agree with you.
It seems tenuous.
It seems like there's a lot of things
that could break it.
Any small action.
even by an individual actor could
domino effect, could escalate.
I mean, anything could cause someone to feel like
they don't need to do their up into the bargain
and then escalate and then goes back and like it.
Okay, so I have a question that falls up on this.
I feel you guys follow this more deeply than I do.
So I would like to think I somewhat represent
the average person who is,
I think it's safe to say the average person
also doesn't like what Israel's been doing
and is not happy about what Israel's been doing
and thinks this is a shitty situation
and that Israel shouldn't be supported
with the way they've handled this.
Why is the USA the only ones still left supporting them?
Do you guys understand?
Like every other, because it's like you said,
it was in the past couple months,
it went from other countries being like,
we really don't want this to like full on Palestinian statehood.
This is a genocide.
I mean, it's a major ramp up.
And this is like France and Germany, right?
And like, what is happening in the U.S.
that we are so steadfast with this?
I don't get it.
Hi.
So my girlfriend also asked me this question.
and I'm a 20-year-old podcaster,
I'll give it my best shot.
And before I answer this, please,
just relax.
Just relax.
I'm just, just relax.
My understanding is that Israel has spent a long, long time
like crafting support within America
and the American government,
and they are trying,
like they need like one big party
to exist as they are now,
like in the safe or like stable fashion that they are.
And then in the U.S.'s interest,
this is a country in the Middle East
that's like a relatively unstable region
for U.S. relations
and has other threats like Iran.
So it's important to have a deeply tied U.S. ally
in the region in order to like combat that potential threat.
Right.
That's my very loose understanding.
is there's a mutually beneficial arrangement here
and like deep historical political ties
between the two countries now
that are hard to just snap a road
because you can see, I would say,
especially this year and past two years,
a huge disparity in the level of like political support for Israel
in like the political establishment
versus the support for Israel
from the average citizen right now, right?
That's what's deviating like around the world.
Yeah, I want to give this,
Same caveat, but older podcaster, but same thing.
But I want to talk about it.
So my understanding is that, you ever seen that old clip of Joe Biden from like literally
40 years ago where he's like early term senator?
And he's like, if Israel did not exist in the Middle East, America would have to invent
in Israel for its interest.
Like, you see that quote?
General idea is that it's like an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East.
And because of the conflict there, because we did a previous episode where I kind of showed
the trade routes that go through the Middle East.
and the abundance of oil is that America needed a strategic military intelligence ally.
The same way that Russia got really deeply in bed with Syria
and the same way that China is getting close ties with Iran.
You just need, as one of the big bros,
you need a little bro in that region to make sure that your interests are protected.
And that's how it worked.
But then the tail began to wag the dog over the past decades,
as Israel used focused political pressure
and, you know, they have political lobbies in America.
Right.
To sort of, instead of becoming the thing of America's interest,
America became sort of subservient to Israel's interest.
And they flipped it, which has been kind of going on
until really this Qatar bombing.
This Qatar bombing is like the first time I've seen a big shift
where it felt like even in the Trump administration,
they were set, even like Tar Carlson was like, this is not like,
Netanyahu was playing us like a fool.
And so they flipped on that front.
is my understanding.
From a pure geopolitical statement,
I feel like that is what's been having
was Israel was kind of flipping their relationship
to their benefit.
And then now after Qatar, Trump kind of...
Yeah, it's like the left politically,
I mean, not even the establishment.
The left outside of the political establishment
has been obviously extremely vocally critical.
And then it feels like recently,
even politicians who are elected
are starting to be like, eh, not a fan of this.
You know, just such a massive departure.
The actions, the actions they've taken,
and also the level of media
that you have to display them, right?
There's so many cascading little things
that have shaped opinion outside of,
in a way that could never exist before.
I think also one interesting point I saw come up
is Netanyahu was meeting with,
I think it was like a Christian religious group in the US,
and he was talking about how they could maintain support from Americans.
And he was talking about like,
moderating TikTok or moderating American platforms,
like censorship on America media platforms
to help shape people's view of Israel.
And I think when you're a Tucker Carlson, right?
You hear that and I, you know, not a Tucker Carlson fan.
Well, but he, don't say wow.
You listen to do it a lot.
Don't say what.
But even like Tucker is somebody that hears that
and is like foreign government influence
my free speech and media consumption.
Yeah.
For their benefit.
For their benefit,
I don't fuck with that.
So I think this past two years is this,
Israel has taken a bunch of actions and said a bunch of things where people are like
revisiting the like cultural or like historical idea of their country's support for them.
And they're like, wait a second.
I don't like this.
Yeah.
And that's,
and so they're kind of paying the price for their own actions here outside of the,
you know, the moral implications.
Yeah, you know, on a moral front, too,
it's like, you know, October 7th is a horrible attack,
but I don't know how many people died,
2,500 or something, I don't actually do remember.
It was like, it's like a little over 1,000, I think.
But so if you're immediate retaliation,
whatever, for defense, okay, you get that.
But if it's two years later
and you've killed or starved 68,000 people,
it becomes more and more,
like displaced a million,
it just becomes more and more apparent,
very obvious to the rest of the world,
that this is not an act of defense.
It is not, you know what I'm saying?
It's so clearly beyond that.
And so, and I think they were willing to put up with that until it became so isolating economically.
I think now that like, I think a lot of deals were getting cut off with major European Union countries and things that made them very dependent on America.
And then America flipped.
And once Trump flipped, that's it.
They have nobody left to, yeah, it won't work.
A friend mentioned, like, there's little things that add up over time too.
Like, you know, Netanyahu flying on his point.
he doesn't get to, he has to do
like a weird route that takes longer
to get to the UN now.
Or like I'm an Israeli citizen and like
when I travel abroad I have to lie about where I'm
from because everybody hates me.
Oh true. And I'm,
I think
little frictions that are
the result of this conflict existing
add up over time.
The inconveniences
have to be addressed at some point
because they affect
you know, Israel has to,
Israel has to reconcile with like all of the reactions of the world around them and how that affects like not just their government, but their citizens.
I like the idea of Netanyahu stopping a genocide because he wants no layovers.
It's just I can't.
I can't.
That's funny. I didn't mention it.
Two of the most prominent people who nominated Trump had said he should have won the peace prize, Netanyahu and Putin.
Wait, Putin?
Putin said he deserved it for his work in Gaza.
Wait, no way.
About Trump?
Donald Trump deserves a Nobel peace price.
That can't be true.
I don't believe it.
Says Donald Trump.
I mean,
let's fact check.
Putin praises Trump's peace efforts
as really doing a lot
to resolve global crises.
Putin,
maybe he said it after he didn't win
and said, well.
Sorry,
yeah, yeah, sorry.
He did not officially nominate.
But both Netanyahu and Putin
both expressed support
for him being an advocate for peace.
That's your advocacy group.
Which is awesome, right?
Like you're, both of them are doing war together.
Yeah, they're active.
Well, active.
Like the two people causing the most war and destruction.
Yeah.
Outside of Sudan, I guess.
That's even like the thing is like, I get what you're saying or not with you.
I get the idea that you communicated, which is that America needs some sort of like base of some kind of safety that in this giant region where there are antagonistic countries like Iran.
But then if the base you've set up pisses everybody off all the time, that's not actually helpful.
Like that makes everything.
worse, man. I think that's what they figured out. I think, I mean, Trump was probably the last,
took him, you know, he got there the last possible second, but I think that is what it's again,
it's like the bombing I ran before doing the peace deal type of thing. It's like, you know, at some
point proactively doing all this violence. One thought I want to close this out on is if you
are interested in hearing more about this, like, I encourage you to read more, I encourage you to
look out more than like just listening to the show. I thought reading through the full 20 point
plan was particularly helpful.
So if you have some time, just look it up, like just Google it, full 20 point plan.
And I think it's very illuminating of what like the goals are at least.
And it gives you a framework of how successful this is as it plays out.
Yeah, I want to add on two things.
So you can just on Wikipedia, it's just Gaza Peace Plan is the thing and that it has the 20 points listed there.
It's a pretty quick read.
This is not, you know, tons of pages.
Yeah.
And then the second is an article that I think is phenomenal.
And this is, if you're somebody like me who has tried to follow this conflict, but feels like, holy shit, there's so much going on.
It is so hard to parse what's going on, what's exaggerated.
Isaac Saul is the lead of a publication called Tangle, where he like puts out daily newsletters.
I think it's phenomenal.
It was turned, I was turned on to it by a friend.
So he made an article called, I think I'm leaving Zionism or Zionism is leaving me.
So he's an American Jew that then went to Israel as birthright.
and spent, I think, like a decade living in Israel
and is now back here,
longtime staunch supporter of Israel.
And then he basically talks about his reckoning
and frustration with this over time
and how he has now basically views this
as a legitimate genocide
and goes into detailed explanations
of why you could classify it as that.
This is by far the best thing I've read
and it's very much like tries to understand both sides.
So if you want to hear more from somebody
who's really participated in both sides of this,
excellent article.
Highly recommend.
One thing I really do want to learn more about,
and I didn't have time to read more about it,
was the internal political situation of Israel.
My understanding is that Netanyahu is like part of a farther right group within Israel,
who also was being investigated, you know,
that he was able to declare like emergency powers for this conflict
that allowed him to extend his term as leader of Israel
and avoid persecution for things that he had done before the past.
So I don't fully understand that line.
I don't understand the other factions within Israel
who are trying to do different things
and what they, are their chances of winning or,
I don't know that.
I tried to follow that actually a bit more
because I think my understanding on that
was really foggy as well.
What I found out is he is struggling
a bit politically within Israel.
Like he isn't well liked by a lot of people,
but it's not for,
it's because of those corruption reasons
rather than...
Rather than the genocide.
Rather than the genocide.
Like nobody's like, most people in Israel are not like,
he's committing these like human rights atrocities
and this is why I don't like him.
They like him for different reasons.
And there is, I mean, I don't have it pulled up right now.
I was going through some like public polling in Israel
and how they view like the war
and how they view Palestinians in general
or like how Palestinians are being treated in the war.
And it's pretty heavy handed in one direction of like,
they think it's fine that it's this way.
not literally everybody, of course.
But I think with stuff like this,
you can read, read, read.
You know, there's more and more to learn about it.
Just one thing I want to learn more about.
Well, interesting.
You know what else is a war?
The trade war.
Let's go to a lighter war.
That doesn't involve a lot of guns.
But, you know, who knows where I'm going to leave.
The thing is, it could get some guns involved eventually.
That's why I'm wearing my goats.
That's just, it can't be our lemonade.
Stan Kerr.
By the way, if we eliminate Stan Curse World War III-Aided,
you bite your fucking tongue.
I'm wearing this as a message of peace to Xi Jinping, all right?
I'm wearing my Xi shirt to bring the American Xi Jinping.
Inside of you, there are three Gis.
Yes.
Yes, there are.
And the trade war is escalated.
And I want you to give an update on, you know,
a real line has been, I would say, crossed in the trade war recently that is leading
to massive movements.
on both sides.
So I brought this special top secret container
of rare earth metals that I shipped in from China,
which is the only place where,
no, you can't look at it.
I can't look at it.
I can't look at it.
I'll show you there.
We all know that there's been a trade war
between the United States and China,
pretty much kicked off by the United States.
They were the ones that first put on the tariffs
and have been trying to reshore manufacturing from China.
And they've also been doing restrictions
on AI chips and data center chips
and, you know, top, top level technology stuff
to prevent it from getting the Chinese hands.
Okay?
So that was the impetus,
but it's been sort of at a standstill.
They've had negotiations, but nothing has really changed.
Recently, China, like a few days ago,
China announced what is a massive, massive escalation in this war,
which is a restriction of rare earth metals
to everyone else in the world.
You know, I'm going to get to it.
So this is a rare earth bombshell.
Now, if you don't know, a little context,
China accounts for half of,
the global rare earth mining and 90% plus of processing, which means essentially in, in effect,
if you make anything that use rare earth metals, you will be working with China. It will be going
through. Yeah. I have a question. Yeah. They're called rare earth minerals. Are they rare?
We're going to get to that. Thank you for setting that up, but you do it in three slides.
Okay, all right. All right. Yeah. Set me up again later. Okay. Ask it again. The United States,
for example, we have one rare earth mine in California, Mountain Valley. Um, and,
no rare earth processing.
So this is how the United States
get rare metals from its own California.
They mined it out of the ground.
They get big lumps of dirt and rock
and they ship it to China
who then processes it and then ships it back.
That is how we do it.
And that's how most countries do it.
Yeah, sure.
They're called rare earth minerals.
No.
Is it actually rare?
Okay, look at this graph.
You can see very easily
that China is dominant
in global output of rare earth minerals,
United States.
And this is after refining, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So this is 70% of the actual
usable stuff.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
So there are a number of rare earth minerals.
Actually 12 that China have put import or export restrictions on.
But I want to talk specifically about these seven.
They have absolute leverage, absolute dominance over these minerals.
We basically cannot build things that use them.
So this right here, Doug, is samarium.
Okay.
Do you know what samarium is used for?
That's right.
Nuclear reactors, electronics.
magnets, okay?
This is gadolinium.
You can't eat them.
Okay.
Did you just lick it?
This is used for data storage.
Again, nuclear reactors, MRI high frequency contrast agents.
And of course, defense, like sonar and sensors.
This is terbium.
It's used for fuel cells.
LED lights, smartphones, TV screens.
Again, requires China.
This is dysprosium.
And they have 99% market share in this.
Disprosium used for electric vehicles for wind turbines.
For again, nuclear reactors, EV transition.
It's critical for an EV transition for any country.
And you cannot do it without dysprosium and you can't do that without China.
So they put one of these in my car.
That's right.
They stick it in there.
And it turns on.
It's like the reactor in back to the future.
This is lututium.
I don't even know.
Lute etium.
Letium.
Medical imaging, catalyst, high electronics.
Etrium.
LEDs, superconductors, medical, ceramics.
I can see why this one is worth a lot.
This is a cool looking mineral.
And of course, finally, we have the one
everyone's trying to get into Scandium.
Okay?
This is for creating light aircraft,
like light high-tech aircraft.
It's used for, again, fuel cells,
3D printing, a lot of high-tech stuff.
Okay? Strategic takeaway, yeah.
You want to raise your hand?
Is they're called rare earth minerals.
But I don't understand why so many people
are trying to get into Scandia,
but not the others.
That's a great question.
First of all,
all of these rocks are not what I said they were.
Just rocks from around the town.
Oh, dude.
Wait,
what's the one I licked?
I'm sick of YouTube.
Can I say,
can I derail for a second?
I'm sick of you too
making long-winded presentations
where you rug pulled.
Little bait and switches.
Yeah,
this is just a box full of rocks that I found.
Just fully believed him.
Yeah, no, I did.
I did, yeah.
However, however.
Come to think about,
I don't know how you would have gotten
all of this in three days.
is actually very difficult. You can only get them in like school level sizes because China
will not export them to you via Amazon. To prove my point about how China won't export this,
here's a box of rare earth minerals. Yeah, but all the things I said were correct. So obviously,
this has thrown Western companies and basically anyone who's not in China into chaos.
This is what a rare earth mine looks like. And these are the elements. Okay. So again, these are
actual elements that are fundamental to the earth around us. China has restricted the world from
using these elements without their permission and then recently added five more. So now there are
12 elements that essentially China has declared sovereignty over, which means, I want to explain,
I read through the Mothcom announcement. If you want to make anything that uses these and has even
0.01% from a Chinese source, which they pretty much all do, you must send an Apple
to the Chinese government, get it approved.
You cannot resell what you make to another country
without proven China.
They're not just selling you the rare earth.
They are selling you the right to use it in anything
and anything you make with it, you cannot sell to someone else.
They have declared total authority over these minerals
they have 90% control over.
They've like trademarked rocks.
Yeah.
So it's a pretty big line in this stand.
Like it's got people freaking out.
Now, where did they learn how to do this specific plan and ideas?
Let me show you an example.
So this is ultraviolet technology developed in San Diego.
And it happens to be used at ASML in the Netherlands to make their gigantic lithography
machines that are used to make gyps.
Because they use this tiny part from San Diego in this massive machine, America has
said you cannot export to anyone else in the world because you have a point, you know,
you have a 1% American product in it.
And so we will ban you from selling it to any of these countries in red and we will
make you get approval for any other countries in blue.
All right in yellow, I'm sorry.
This is the exact model that China is now rolling out for their dominance of rare earth.
It is between America and high-end tech and China and rare earths, and they are both
restricting how anyone else in the country and in the world acts based on their original
input.
So ask me a question.
Ask me the question.
Doug.
Rare earth mineral name is it?
Great question, Doug.
That's a really wise question.
So rare earths are a bit of a misdomer.
They're not that rare.
In fact, every single day, you will see a new announcement from some country saying,
oh, we discovered millions of tons of rare earth minerals.
Kazakhstan found 20 million tons.
Even China just found another.
20 million tons.
I looked like barely any.
They're really heavy.
They're really heavy.
Sweden, you might talk about this, Aden, said they found the largest deposit of rare earth metals in Europe.
And then right after that, Norway said, no, oh, we found the largest deposit of rare earth metals.
earth metals. And I was thinking, are these the same deposit? You guys are right next to each other.
But no, they are a 15 day walk apart. Okay, there's Aden right there saying, wow.
Wow. Um, so every country does it. Uh, Wyoming has said they just found a massive,
everyone does it all the time. And the comments in all these videos are like, oh, well,
get fucked China. Now we have our own. But the truth of the matter is they've never been rare.
They exist in huge quantities all over the world. The hard part is refining them. Okay.
And countries that do manufacturing like Germany are really.
realizing how risky it is because they use this stuff all the time and now have to go apply to China
for everything. And if it has any defense impact, China automatically denies on principle. That's what they said.
So yeah. And the initial concern with why a lot of these countries didn't want to refine them in the
first place or develop the supply chain to do so was environmental, right? Yeah, it's two part. One part is
environmental. This stuff is pretty rough on the environment. You have to get massive quantities of
essentially dirt. And then you filter them.
through with like very dangerous chemicals that often seep into groundwater. And then that brings
out the tiny trace amounts of the rare earth metals that you then refine enough to have enough to
use. So it's like it's really raping the environment. I don't know the better where it's like bad.
It's like really bad. Like every area that does this has problems with like rivers getting
tons of toxic chemicals in them. The land looks completely ravaged. But like this is how you get
rare earth minerals. And you just need to find a mind that is far enough from.
human activity to do it because it is required for literally all the latest tech and defense stuff.
That's how it works now.
Okay?
And so most people just offshore, they're refining to China.
They just like they don't look at it, but they get the dirt and they send it there.
And it's now become concerned not only to Germany, but all of Europe.
Europe's entire manufacturing base is dependent on this and China can cut it off at will.
Now, I want to say that China is not currently threatening to just cut it off.
They're basically saying, you apply to us.
We're going to approve pretty much everything.
If it has anything to do with defense,
we're going to say no on principle.
If it has anything to do with high-tech AI stuff,
we're going to say no if you're touching America.
That's sort of what they've said.
And it's put, you know, everyone at high-ler.
That guy looks like he's going to go burn down the Navi's tree.
It looks like he's about to pop a blood vessel.
I can't get some scandium.
He looked upset that there's any trees left near the rare earth minerals.
So in response to this high-tech threat,
But you know, we talked about this before.
America closing its grip on high-end AI chips has caused, you know, things to slip to their fingers,
as in China is now full speed ahead trying to get outside of a building their AI checks.
This is exactly what's happening in reverse with China.
They have chosen this moment to draw the line and make their stand, but they are sewing the seeds of their own undoing
because everyone is working full speed now because they know the risk.
So France, which has huge nuclear power capabilities, and,
deposit of rare earth is investing a ton
in making their own rare earth.
Refining plants.
Australia has seen that,
you know, their president,
Albanese,
Prime Minister, came out and said,
like, this is our greatest opportunity.
We're going to do a trillion-dollar deal with America.
We have a ton of rare earths.
We have the ability to work on it.
This could be a huge growth industry for Australia.
That would probably be huge for Australia too
because their mining sector is so gigantic
and it's sort of a drag in the sense that
it's,
they are so reliant on that sector for like economic growth.
So if you could develop the supply chain a little more and add on to that,
long run for Australia, that probably has to be so.
Exactly.
So the big thing, it goes back to the book, we read Breakneck, is that this stuff is hard
and it requires a lot of expertise.
All that expertise is located in China, you can't just one-off throw money at it.
You really have to build up this process knowledge of doing it a lot for a long time.
And if you try to just half-heartedly do it or throw a factory here and there,
not only will you not be good at it, but you will be uncompetitive competitive.
to China who can do it at a bigger scale and cheaper.
And in the past,
every time someone's tried to set up a competing rare earth production facility,
China just lowers the prices,
undercuts them,
makes them not economical,
and they go out of business.
So they've been,
it's been a multi,
almost a decade long plan
to set up this total control of rare earths
that they are now like putting into play
as a way to like punch back in the trade war,
which,
you know,
they have it right to do because they're being attacked and they're trying to like,
but it's what's happening.
So real quick,
do you know,
it sounds like because so much of the world sends their rare earth minerals to China for refinement,
that in theory, a country like Australia could set up a just ton of refinement plants,
for example, in the desert,
because they have so much open space, right?
So in theory, countries that are willing to, I don't know, designate a lot of land that doesn't need to be like that environmentally maintained,
it could in theory get very successful.
In theory, of course, like there's anything unique about China that makes them able to do this,
but they have just done it so consistently for so long and I'm such a domic.
that it's hard to break in.
But that's why this move is big,
because before this move,
everyone that tried to do it was like,
guys, this is important.
China has too much dumb as we need to do it.
Everyone's like, yeah, okay.
But then when push came to shove
and it wasn't profitable,
they were like,
well, you lose.
Yeah, yeah.
But now it's like seen as a strategic threat.
So governments are willing to prop up companies
that aren't yet profitable
to make sure that the rare earth supply chain
works outside of China.
It probably helps that all of these countries
are interested in doing
this around the same time as well, right?
A wave of them doing it at once rather than one country trying to break in on its own.
Yes, it's kind of becoming public.
Everyone is now realizing at once what a threat this is, what risk is.
Because they cannot have their own fighter jet program.
They can't have their own high, you know, there's a lot of high end EV program.
They can't do that anymore without China's approval and they can cut it up in any moment.
And to be clear, also semiconductors, which power AI, which is powering our entire stock market
and economy.
100%.
Like, it's everything.
It's the same thing that like China and Russia and,
a lot of those red countries are realizing about semi-connectors,
which is that American cut off at any moment.
Okay?
And so they have to get out of that thumb.
So what does this mean?
It means, number one, that stupid fucking Aden is going to win our stock competition,
for sure.
I was about to tell you guys,
I don't know if you've checked the metals company.
That shit has broken $10.
I bought this at one.
Yeah.
948% gain this year.
And it's because,
companies like the metals company.
And I'm not talking to me to just your,
like literally 150 different companies
that are in the rare earth space
are all skyrocketing.
Because everyone around the world
in the past five days
has realized all at once,
we need our own rare earth minerals
and money is flowing from governments into this.
Atriac actually took this presentation
from my personal hard drive
from nine months ago.
You planned this.
Why did you invest in TMC?
He saw a vice documentary.
Dead ass.
I watched.
I went,
I,
wait,
is this one about
undersea mining?
Yeah,
yeah,
God damn it.
Yeah,
it's not even
the right reason
for investing.
I went back and found
the video of the one I watched.
It's like a 10-minute
like MSNBC piece
about the company or something
and it just really stuck with me
because I saw follow-up articles
and then when we did the draft
I was like,
I can only think of one company
that I've actually researched
and then I just picked it.
And because in my head it was like energy
electric cars
minerals, surely that'll go up.
And then, and you just backed me up.
And it fucking did.
All right.
This has become the most important thing in the world this year for almost every developed
economy.
And so it's happening.
So in response, you know, we talked about the follow up where Trump, you can take
that off the screen.
Trump is doing 100% tariffs on China because of this escalation.
And now he's counter escalating.
And he walked it back a bit after the market reacted poorly.
And there's going to be a meeting in South Korea between Xi and Trump,
in a few weeks where they hopefully talk this down from the ledge because it's now getting insane.
But I wonder what you guys think because I actually think China may have played their hand too early on this one.
It feels like they had this dominance and they might still have it for years to come.
They will have it for years to come.
But this is because they're even walking it back.
China's like, hey, guys, we're going to approve almost everything.
Like the first thing they said really was tough.
And now they're like, don't worry.
Unless your American defense will be fine.
But everyone is not reacting with panic.
I know we have this show.
Yeah.
But it feels awkward as the guy who played Counterstrike for five hours last night
to step up to the plate and be like,
China played their hand to it.
You know,
it's hard for me.
It's hard for me to say.
I think that's fair.
But you have read,
you read the book,
Breakneck,
and you seem to come to a conclusion
that America's attempt to restrict China's AI stuff
is kind of backfiring.
Is that where you're at or no?
I think, yeah, it backfires no matter what, right?
It doesn't matter when they make this play.
Maybe there's a more critical moment.
You could argue where the short term benefits you
in some sort of higher stakes conflict.
Like say we were actually at war or something, right?
And then you play these cards
because the stakes are so high.
Maybe there's a more opportune moment.
But regardless of when you do it
across all of these issues.
As soon as you make a move like this
that is heard so widely,
everybody is going to react
and start developing the tools
to like combat the leverage
that they have over you.
It doesn't matter when it's leverage.
Well, that's what I'm saying is you...
The longer you wait,
the more your dominance entrenches
and the more you can have that leverage
unsaid.
You know, use it when you actually
actually need it. I think to pull it out so. I would ask is how much more entrenched do they
do they need to be? Like if you gave them five more years, 10 more years, I don't really know
the answer that question. But it seems like from what you were walking through, their strategic
position is as powerful as it basically could be. I think that's a fair point. I mean,
they think so. As in like this is not an ad hoc plan. This didn't just come together.
They have been planning for this. In fact, there's one mineral, one element, helium.
that America had a dominance on.
America was like the primary exporter of helium.
And China needed a lot of helium.
And before, I think years ago,
they were thinking about pulling this trigger in 2020,
and they realized that America could counterstop helium,
you know, and they planned for this.
They said, we're gonna completely get
off dependence of American helium over the next few years.
And they did. And now there is no, you know.
And they could have birthday parties all they want.
Yeah, exactly.
Xi Jinping wanted to have this huge balloon birthday party
and he was worried that Trump could cut him off.
but now he can't.
I have a question about the helium.
Forgive me.
Yeah, I might not know this one.
Isn't helium really common?
Why is it so...
Isn't helium the next most common one?
Or I don't...
There's like a limited amount.
I don't know if the time...
I don't know.
I have this a limited amount of helium.
The sun be making helium.
But I know that sounds silly.
It's like maybe we just can't get it.
Maybe we just can't get it.
I don't know enough about this topic.
I don't know how we could, like, collect
I used fake locks.
I don't understand how elements truly work on a fundamental level.
I just know that they're naturally occurring and China says they own 12.
Yeah.
There's a finite amount of helium on Earth.
It's not a thing.
You just have an infinite amount of.
Shouldn't we just go to the sun and get it?
I'll scoop it up.
Shouldn't we just be scooping it up at this sun?
I'm asking Chad GBT.
Sometimes.
Sometimes on the show, sometimes on the show, I have more.
Sometimes on the show I have to let my inner child run wild
and ask the questions like, shouldn't we just go to the sun?
Sometimes you have to explain Israel, Palestine,
we can scoop up the only from the sun.
I think this just a position is important
because it means if you're listening to the show,
it's like you should go,
you shouldn't just be listening to this show.
Nah, you're good.
Because in my head, it's like helium,
the sun be making that.
A lot of it.
I'm going to push back.
What are you suggesting specifically
that we go to the sun?
Okay.
The sun doesn't deliver.
it here. The sun disperses it.
Stop saying the sun be making it.
Just that last time you should say that. That's true
though. That's true. You know that's how it works
right. The sun is a hundred and
50 million kilometers away.
Yeah, but it's gonna make it
to us, surely. And then you can scoop
it up.
I feel like the sunny scene where he's
like about stars. I don't know about stars
to dispute it. Like I don't know.
I know for, look, if I know anything,
I know for a fact that the sun
be making it.
You're no.
part is correct.
Korean from the sun has not reach earth in usable form.
That can't be true.
That can't be lying.
That's,
I can't trust it.
Come on.
Okay.
So any,
anything else you wanted to wrap this up?
I want to say this is just beginning.
It feels like this is like this is gotten everybody both in China and in the rest of the
world on high alert as to this trade war being,
you know,
it feels like it goes like a,
it's like a heartbeat or something trending down.
It gets a little better, and then something happens,
and it gets worse.
The tensions are clearly deteriorating between these two countries.
If I were to reach back into the Israel-Palestine section, we just did, right?
I was talking about how all of these things that you do add up into these little layers of friction
that compound on each other over time for citizens of your country, right?
Or maybe for your government's ability to take action.
And I think here, right, the beginning of this trade war, as it continues to play out,
as these things pass over time,
they affect our lives individually
in like little inconvenient ways
that add up and add up and add up over time
that put pressure on presumably the American government
to make a decision of whether or not
they can continue to hold strong
or if they need to cave in order to make the political base happy, right?
And this is the same thing.
I don't, I need enough time to play out and see what,
How is this going to affect me in my day-to-day life?
Because it surely will with enough time passing.
Well, the immediate thing is the tariffs.
So, again, the way it immediately affects people is that Trump, in response to this, said,
100% tariffs on everything from China starting November 1st.
And like for normal people, you might have ordered 12,000 mugs.
Right, right.
And the average per, again, speaking as like the kind of every man on the podcast,
I have $100,000 in mugs arriving in a few weeks.
and I might be fucked because what am I going to do when they're like,
hey, come get your mugs at the border and give it.
Anyway, I, so this is, this is problematic.
And then you might have already said this when I was researching whether we can go to the sun.
Is, so there's this Apex summit.
So Trump and Zier meeting on October 31st, it's in two weeks.
So in theory, this is saber rattling from both sides where they will then go meet in person in
South Korea at this yearly summit, and then they will both go, oh, we've come to an agreement.
Because they've already done that, like five times this year, right? They keep doing this up and down
heartbeat, like you said. So in theory, this all goes away. And it was just a whole bunch of dick swinging,
but it's concerning. That's the last part. I have a big question for you. So maybe you go ahead.
Okay. I'll say is that, you know, I was re, I was researching for this last night. And I ended up
on a real rabbit hole on what Taiwan has been saying about all this, which is very interesting.
Because they're kind of caught between the two. Again, they make chips. They can't export because
America says so, and they import rare earth that China says you can't make things with it.
They go to America.
Like, they're really caught between two worlds.
And Taiwan is extremely afraid that at this meeting, there is going to be a deal.
We kind of talked about it before.
There's going to be a deal where Taiwan uses a bargaining chip to get rid of this rare earth.
Like America is going to withdraw support from Taiwan, you know, maybe not publicly,
but like ease back from any protection as a way to get out of this rarer thing.
and de-escalation and tariffs
and a normalization.
That is like on Taiwanese news.
They are talking about this pretty regularly.
It is something that is like worried.
And that's an interesting angle going into this
because it feels like China's ultimate goal
is not dominance and rarest.
It is to reunify China and Taiwan.
And they're willing to throw some things around
to get that.
And so I don't know.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I don't know if that was your question or what.
You almost exactly my question.
We had touched on the idea of the U.S.
China positioning themselves to actually get along and kind of not deal with these disputes
anymore, where does that stand?
But I think this is the exact answer.
And again, I don't know.
This is just what's speculated in Taiwan.
Of course, they're going to say that in Taiwan.
It's like very refreshing relevant to them.
But there's some credibility to it, especially given recent actions.
So again, like a Taiwanese leader wasn't able to land in America recently.
Like, yeah, like they were going to have a meeting and they blocked and they said,
just keep going, just as a weight of simmering tensions.
with China, and then obviously Trump blocked the sale of some arms to Taiwan that were supposed
to be sold. So it's like, clearly something's being discussed, and this could be a part of it.
What else is going on?
Well, I figure we could pivot to something light. Okay. I could give you my-
like Sudan, bro. I could give you my 10-minute explainer on the Sudan Civil War.
Dude, this episode's been so dark. Okay, hold on. Is that, good? That or AI erotica, okay,
which is, that's lighthearted. You could write, and, you know, you could write, and, you, you,
You could have Chad JVT write erotica about the Sudan war.
I won't do that.
Doug,
I'll tell you things I won't do and it won't be that.
I think,
you know what,
actually,
I think this deserves maybe a little more air time in the future.
I've been following up and I,
maybe just to preview,
I had a really good call with someone who's been living in Sudan,
still lives in Sudan for 20 years.
And we had talked about the war on Patreon.
And I just did like preliminary research,
reading articles of what's going on,
and then talk to him for an hour.
Very enlightening.
I think it's a massive conflict
that a lot of people either forget about
or flat out don't know about.
I've stressed this every time I brought up.
It's not a...
These wars are not a competition,
but this scale at which the Sudan civil war
is unfolding at,
and the number of people who have died
either a famine or directly from the war
is just at a scale that I was so far beyond me.
So I'm putting together some things on my end
to bring it up on the show,
explain it as best I can,
and talking to people who actually live there.
So I want to a little preview for the future.
Why do we talk about something light?
A little AI erotica.
Yeah, so in equally important news.
sex is fun. Sex is fun.
Is this going to be, is this like Sora erotica?
Kind of, I mean, this isn't so, like, the actual story itself is, is interesting, but not incredibly impactful.
If you pull us up, Perry.
So Sam Allman, head of Open AI, said, Chad, TBT is going to soon allow erotica for adult users.
So the main point of this is not really about being able to write cool porn.
it's more that there is a general question about how restrictive these AI models should be.
And as most people are aware, especially recently, Chachabit and Sora, the hot new video model, right,
are both incredibly restrictive as they currently stand.
When Chachabit 5 came out, one of the big criticisms is it stopped feeling like a kind of personal type of friend
and became a much more like clinical objective person.
And they've talked about how that was essentially to avoid the challenges they were having,
like people being told to commit suicide by character AI or, you know, these other things
where people become really deeply, emotionally dependent on this thing to an unhealthy degree. So
they essentially, there's a pendulum that is swinging where they release a product and it's
either way too overly restrictive or not restrictive enough. Case in point last week,
they released Sora or two weeks ago, they released Sora. Tons of copyrighted content out
the gate. And then they swung it way back and everybody's pissed off because it barely makes
anything without getting upset at you.
I can't make my full SpongeBob episodes anymore.
Yeah.
People are actually saying that.
That's what on the Sorrow Reddit.
They're like,
I made, last week I made SpongeBob.
It was fucking great.
Now I can't.
Fucking Sam,
I'll let you tell yourself.
I hate you.
That's unironically what is being said.
Okay.
And this is a response to that.
Yeah.
So he is basically acknowledging
in the last few months,
we have been too much on the side
of censorship over control.
It's not going to help you.
It's not going to personalize.
We are aware of this.
We're swinging it back.
And we're going to pair that
with more verification of
age. So if you verify that you're an adult, we're going to allow you to make sexual content,
which if it's not abundantly clear already, this is going to be an absolutely enormous use case
for chat chit and for all these AI companies, right? There's going to be so much AI porn and
AI erotica and all this stuff, right? And so far nobody's really known how to navigate it,
but what they're suggesting is, okay, if we allow adults to verify that they are adults, then it's okay.
We're also going to be stricter around trying to find kids and try to gate how the AIs will
actually act with them and not make them this sort of like,
you imagine that tweet though?
It's like I found this tweet to be so insane because,
uh,
we,
we talked about maybe a week or two ago.
We pulled up the SORA blog and we showed like their,
their mission statement and how we're going to be,
we're going to be safe and our number one priority is creativity and not.
And,
you know,
I made the case on that episode was that like,
on,
that sounds good until there's a profit mode.
whatever. There's something else that you need to do. And this post basically just says, like,
we made it very restrictive to be sure we were careful with mental health issues. We realized
it's made this less useful or enjoyable people without no mental health problems. But given the
serious issue, we wanted to make it get this right. And now that we've been, basically
now we've solved the mental health problem, but they haven't. They're just going to bring it
back because people are mostly upset. It's not, the idea that they've mitigated it or have new
tools is crazy. It's just going to be, they've just realized that the competition is heating up.
GROC, you know, Elon Musk is tweeting about AI erotica all day every day.
Yeah, yeah.
And GROC is coming, you know, for part of their lunch, and they just want to head that off.
So I don't know.
I can see the other side of this.
I mean, so these models are being updated all the time.
Having safeguards in place to make sure, to be able to pick up on the idea of, okay,
somebody is now talking about suicide in a way that clearly relates to them, you can train
the models to learn how to identify this stuff better.
So they've been fine-tuning this and doing this work.
you can update models substantially after the core foundation is in place.
So if you take him at his word, they have behind the scenes, they started really restrictive,
and they've tested internally and shown, okay, we feel confident that this is actually not going to do weird things to mentally vulnerable people.
I don't think it needs to be as cynical as what you're saying.
Are you confident that it's not going to do that to mentally vulnerable people?
I think it'll be better than it was and it'll still be bad.
And it's going to be an ongoing pendulum forever because everything is.
That's what the internet is.
That's what video games.
That's what everything is.
I sort of agree with that part of it,
where I think all of the internet and all of technology is sort of preying on the vulnerability.
Everybody is going to find a way to abuse the new thing.
You have to make adjustments.
Sometimes you overcompensate for the abuse and then people find out how to abuse that new thing.
I mean, this is how, you know, hacking and this is how everything works, right?
With scams, it's like it's this never-ending battle between things like banks and hackers.
or your fucking, you know, aim bots in CSGO
and Valve trying to push back against aimbots.
And so it's always changing behind the seeds.
You just don't see it.
I'm not saying you're wrong,
but I absolutely could see a world
where they just are improving it.
I don't know.
I mean, I just, I have a hard time not seeing this.
You know, it feels like there's a new announcement every week.
And if you read it through the lens of,
we are going to do whatever is most profitable for us
to get the money we need to pay for all the things we've promised,
then it makes sense.
but everything else it feels very...
But this isn't necessarily...
I mean...
Do you think it's...
I would ask,
do you think this is praying
on anybody's vulnerability
in like a really a new way?
I would argue,
if we're talking about the use of it
for sexual content,
then is that any different
than the way people are treating this
as like their boyfriend or girlfriend,
like they're emotional
or like romantic confidant already?
These are lumped together.
It's going to do both of those things,
what they're really saying is here
is we have,
we have sterile
sterilized the chat GBT.
We have made it bland and lack of personality
and extremely restrictive on what it is willing to do.
We are going to pull back on that in a variety of ways
and that's going to include it.
You can be more parisocial with it.
It's going to include sexual stuff.
The sexual stuff, that's probably for money.
Like, I'll concede on that.
I want you to make a J-O-I.
Yeah.
I read this far more as we are allowing this
to become a personalized thing
that feels like a friend again
and take on the weird mental health challenges
around that rather than we're trying to lock in on porn.
And here's another way, just real quick, of what you said of like, they're trying to make
money.
Like, yes, but also that is, that's hand in hand with make a better product.
Like this is, what they're describing as a product that I, as a normal person, will enjoy
more.
I'm fucking sick of current Chad GBT.
It's not fun to use anymore and feels overly restrictive.
So if from their perspective of how do we make a better product, this will do that.
It's just whether they are actually mitigating the mental health or saying they are.
Yeah. I just feel like this is them waving a white flag on even trying to stop that.
This is them realizing that like the cost of customer satisfaction is not worth them trying to protect people from the most dangerous aspects of what this can do.
They're saying fuck it.
But like they should never try. Like they should just be overly restrictive forever.
I'm reading this as them saying we're making another attempt to allow it to do these things and we think it'll be better this time.
I feel like they should keep trying.
Well, are they?
What I'm saying is like this post would be written exactly the same if they were giving up on that fight and just go all that is.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
We just don't know.
I got you.
We don't know.
But I just,
I have a hard time trusting him because I don't think he's earned it.
I don't know.
I don't think the actions of Open AI have been anything deeper than trying to maximize their own.
The power in the AI ecosystem has been profit,
which it's fine through for a company, but they keep putting out these posts where it's like,
aiming for a higher.
Yeah, it's very aspirational.
But I don't think it's what they're doing.
I hear you and I
and I can very much understand that perspective.
I think part of why I lean the other direction is because I have watched as this company
over the past three years has made my life better every couple months as these models have
improved and just continue to do bafflingly impressive things.
Like last week, I used their new coding model codex to program.
this chess app where I had every chess piece controlled by an actual Twitch chatter. So it's 32
individual people on the board yelling at each other telling me what to do. It was fucking
awesome. And one of the more complex apps I've done and almost it was like 90% vibe coded.
And it did it phenomenally well. And it couldn't have done that six months ago. So I'm like
seeing these progressions of wow, this is really or the way it helps me like practice a new
language or something. Yeah. I mean, I use it too. But those those features are, we're fully
capable within the
you might call safe version.
It not acting like a friend I found to be,
like I was kind of annoyed when it was a very sycophantic.
You know, you're so fucking great.
Bringing that back feels like a cave to people that really wanted that thing.
And I don't know.
I found it to be useful for, like,
if it's something that's on Wikipedia,
chatty is incredible to talk.
You can talk to Wikipedia.
It's fucking awesome.
But the idea that it needs to be.
be your boyfriend and girlfriend and giving you erotica sounds like dangerous.
And it's something they don't care anymore because they're on a full speed mission
because they've made now $1.3 trillion in promises for money they don't yet have.
And they need money.
That is true.
I definitely, definitely acknowledge that that is a, yeah, absolutely factor.
I would like to believe it's both.
I would like to believe they want money and they're genuinely making it better.
There's going to be a lot of, there's going to be a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction writers
that are out of a fucking job.
Think about that.
Think about that?
What happens when you don't need a real human being
to write about how Sonic fucks tails?
How is the industry going to absorb these seven people?
You watch out in the next jobs report.
You'll see it.
You'll see it.
You'll be sorry.
The worst part of since the government shut down,
it's just to be one big category of erotica.
We won't know if it's Sonic and Tails fucking.
We won't know it's Halo Master Cheats.
fucking Mario.
I want details.
Not while it's shut down.
There's a team
and they're all furloughed right now.
Oh, our government
was strategic
SMUT initiative.
I mean,
interesting story.
Yeah,
we'll see how it plays out.
I would actually be curious.
This is a comment farming.
I really sincerely am curious.
For people in the audience,
what your take on this is.
Presumably a lot of you
engage with AI tools in some way.
I'm more talking about chat,
Chibee, right? The ones you're using with on a daily basis for helpful things, not, you know,
meta-AI jamming random shit in your feed, right? If you are a chat-tube-user, do you find the
at least option for it to be more personalized, to be more human to, and potentially erotica
doing, you know, going all to that, to that height? Does that sound appealing to you? Is that
something that you want? Or do you feel like this, I'm fine with this not even being an
option for the sake of safety? I would be curious, like what people's use cases. Do you guys know
the story of VHS and Beta Max?
We heard that?
Yeah.
Do you grow up with VHS tapes you watch?
So VHS was a standard and there was a better standard called Betamax that was headed by Sony,
which at the time was like with the biggest tech company in the world, it was the most powerful
tech companies in the world and well beloved by the American people.
And people thought Betamax is going to win.
There was a better technology.
It was better for movies.
It ran better.
And the story goes that VHS won because these early Betamax players and VH players were
very expensive and VHS had porn.
So the early adopters were people that were like,
I'm going to spend a lot of money to get a VHS player
so I can watch porn.
And BetamX was banning porn.
And that allowed VHS to become the standard early
and then eventually take off,
even it was the worst format.
And that apparently repeated with HD DVD and Blu-ray,
where Blu-ray, Sony learned their lesson,
made sure porn was allowed,
and Blu-ray players were bought.
So I think there's an idea on the Elon Musk side
that I am GROC, I am behind Open AI,
and I'm going to lean all in on erotica
because that will give me early adopters
that make GROC better than tech.
And this is Sam Altman trying to head that off by saying, oh, we're going to have porn, too.
Don't worry about that.
And there's a bit of like a business case there.
And I wonder if there's, you know, I feel like there's a connection to Elon Musk here
on Sam Olman's side where this is so clearly a response to what he has been constantly
hammering home.
And now we're in like this weird porn race because they don't want to be the guy that doesn't
have porn in this.
I don't know.
That's a good point.
That's a good point.
In a weird way, gooning is holding up the entire SEP.
And wow, that's time, isn't it?
It's our time with a great wacky world.
Oh, thank you.
A lot of crazy stuff.
Thank you for joining us on Lemonade Stand.
If you want to check out that frequently asked questions
about our Vox Media partnership
and the ads in the future, you can check that out
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You can watch that for free.
If you want any of the extra content we do,
we do extra shows every week.
You can go to patreon.com slash Lemonade Stand.
we're planning our trip to China
for earlier next year.
We hit the 10,000 patrons.
We're going to China.
We have a pretty cool guest.
I'll keep it a secret now lined up.
Thanks to people a box.
And we also are doing,
can we talk about Japan or no?
Oh, yeah, I'm down.
Yeah, we're going to Japan.
Doug's going to Japan on vacation
and we were like, let's ruin Doug's vacation.
Let's follow him and make it work.
Let's make it work while he's there.
Guys, I need some time here.
Oh, we'll go with you.
We'll go.
We'll go.
That's the thing, Doug.
You don't have to worry.
We'll break the podcast to you.
But we're gonna have a few guest episodes
in Japan, where we're gonna get to talk
about the political and economic situation
unfolding in Japan right now,
which I think are gonna be really good.
So you have a lot, I'd say you have a lot
to look forward to you right now.
We're pretty excited about the coming in weeks.
And we're gonna do a Patreon episode this week
where I jam an entire lemon in my asshole.
Yes.
And then we're going to the sun.
Wait, wait.
The new lemon party.
Fact check from last week,
because I do want,
it's in the comments.
But I was off by a factor of 10.
It is not one trillion dollars.
on SNAP a year. It is
a hundred billion. And I
what I realize is I got that wrong. I was pretty
embarrassed by that because
I saw a number by Chatsubit and Google Gemini's thing.
And I was like, I don't want to trust these numbers. Let me go to the actual
source. I went to the actual source. I found the government website,
looked it up, saw the document. I was like, cool.
I know this with 100% confidence. And I fucking got it wrong.
And I did the math because it was 100,000
millions. And then I multiple, anyway.
So a hundred billion a year on Snap
tariffs at the same time is closer to $200 billion.
So the points remain, but do want to correct that number because that was pretty off.
I also, I totally forgot about this.
I also had a correction from last week.
I had said that there was a quota on like green card transitions to citizens and that whole
block that people experience off their H-1Bs.
It's not you're stuck on your green card.
It's actually worse than that.
You're stuck on your H-1B.
There's a limited amount of green cards that can be given out to each nationality per year.
So you can be stuck on your H-1B for decades, potentially, if you're Indian.
So I just wanted to correct that really quickly.
There's a small thing.
I saw pop up.
But the important thing is even though we got it wrong about those things, our broad point
was still correct.
And that's all that matters.
And that's all that matters.
And in fact, the small details, they don't matter at all.
I mean, the sun do be making helium, I think.
Right, right.
And now that I think about it, never correct me again.
Small details getting to the sun.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks for watching.
Oh, thanks for everybody.
