The Nobel War Prize | Ep. 046 Lemonade Stand 🍋

13:14Aiden:Nothing, Doug. Drop behind you 100%.

13:17Atrioc:You made a typo.

13:19Aiden:Get the Swedes out of there! So,

13:21Atrioc:there's a couple, as you can imagine, the response to this has been pretty universally negative. On the free press, any left-leaning of any kind person or institution has been like, what the fuck is this? This is absolutely insane. Including right-leaning publications as well like the free press posted a pretty pretty negative article on this and that free press is very right-leaning for context but i think it's interesting that a right-leaning uh you know article came out about this they were like despite all the recent foreign policy wins of of trump this one isn't hitting the mark okay um there's a great one here chase passive income on twitter said now it's going to cost 10 more to buy greenland since it's a product of denmark not a Great move.

14:05Atrioc:And even Mr. Senator Kennedy, says a Republican senator, had some choice words for this.

14:12Aiden:To invade Greenland and attack its sovereignty, a fellow NATO country would be weapons grade stupid. Yeah, he's not... President Trump is not weapons grade stupid. Well, let's not rule anything out. That's all I'm going to say on Greenland, but there will be more to happen with respect to Greenland. This is a big shift in the vibes.

14:43Atrioc:This is coinciding with potentially the Supreme Court overruling tariffs coming soon. We'll chat about comes at the back of Davos, which is happening, you know, world leaders meeting. And Trump is like Trump did this like right before meeting with all of the leaders. everybody's kind of criticizing this and going what is about to happen and is this going to blow up NATO the North American alliance that is held true for 80 years yeah World War II on yeah um so there's a lot to go off of here I got a couple points we can start on the tariffs and the legality but anything jump out to you guys first yeah I mean first of all you mentioned Republicans so this has been of all of Trump's actions, maybe the most unpopular Republicans in that, uh, there was a thing from the guardian that a number of senior Republican congressmen and senators approached Trump and said, if you actually go through with this, as in military boots on the ground in Greenland, it will be the end of your presidency.

15:43It will be impeachment. It'll be, so it's like, it's a, there's a hard line from them on that though. He hasn't softened in his talking about it at all since this discussion even all the um there's financial angle where stocks and bonds are both sold off today uh in response to this this action there's a lot of angles i mean one more angle is that you kind of made a joke of like mr president i'm behind you 100 you just type it on sweden but like that is the language i'm seeing from a lot of people which is uh uh right here here's here's uh um i forget his first name tillis but uh thank you oh thank

16:22Aiden:you and to be clear i'm not critical of the president i'm critical of the bad advice he's getting on greenland okay well let's you know it's this idea of like i'm not critical of trump trump's perfect he's doing everything right but someone's giving him bad advice on greenland and it's just like i don't know that that's the case i it feels like this is his i feel bad for trump

16:40Atrioc:He's helpless in the face of this bad advice. What's a guy to do? What is a guy to do? And we were talking about this last week, but I mean, maybe you have an angle on this. I'd love to see this map here. Yeah, so We'll See Journal came out with an article I thought was really good called Why Greenland Matters to U.S. Defense in Seven Maps. And essentially, if you look at normal, what is the Monter projection? I forget the name of it. Mercator, right? Mercator projection. The way we normally look at maps, like has everything kind of distorted. But if you actually look at a globe at the top, Greenland is basically right in between North America and Russia, right?

17:17Atrioc:And so this map in particular, which, you know, you can see if you're on the YouTube side, basically from Washington, D.C. to like, you know, a hundred different spots on Russia, it's going to go essentially over Greenland. So in the case that missiles are firing either from the U.S. to Russia or from Russia to the U.S., and these are intercontinental, Greenland is right there. From a strategic standpoint, it makes sense that if you were the U S you would really, really want this. Even the case with China, one of the routes that they would theoretically send missiles is over Russia and then to America over basically the top of the globe.

17:51Atrioc:So this map I think does help clarify things. It's not random. I was confused about this last week of like why the importance of Greenland. It's because on a traditional map that we look at, it doesn't seem that important. It doesn't seem, it doesn't seem like it's in between anything really.

18:04Aiden:Everything's so much closer than you realize like this this region is so so important militarily and because of trade and

18:11Atrioc:yeah another crazy thing on this so we've talked about and many people are making the argument of the U.S. already has military bases on Greenland yeah and we have permission to make military bases on Greenland yeah why do we need to own it so what's interesting is we historically there's been 25 different stations or bases on Greenland that America has had over the years but that's down to just one right now there's only one base so objectively the u.s has way less presence than we've had at any previous point it's something like because we had dismantled a lot of these

18:41Aiden:bases or operations in the wake of the soviet union falling i believe yeah uh yeah basically

18:47Atrioc:during the cold war it peaked yeah so exactly what you said today we have 150 troops there down from 15 000 so there is a massive scaling down and then if you're in this world where like we are in a direct potential conflict with russia and china makes sense that you would want to have a lot of presence there. And yes, you, you know, I, I think we could trust Denmark slash Greenland to let us build a bunch of bases, but you know, if you're playing psycho risk, then maybe you feel like, no, we should just own it. I mean, like, you know, given the option, you would prefer that as the U S is it worth blowing up the whole Alliance?

19:17Atrioc:Probably not. I would say it's particularly funny to blow up the Alliance. I mean, I think definitely not. Right. That's what I'm saying. Hold on. It is definitely not a good idea. Right. The idea that you need to blow up your alliance so that you can protect yourself and NATO from Russia makes no sense. If you lose the allies you're supporting.

19:36Aiden:Lemon of optimism. You don't need an alliance if you own it all. But you only own Greenland. But we start with Greenland. You're saying full on world empire. Yeah, the global American empire where it's officially all in buffs. Of course. Of course. That's not optimistic to me. And if you're watching this show for the first time right now, I believe that fully. And it's clear through my view expressed across all the episodes of the show is that I desire that as an individual. You've always been a pro-American guy. Yep, and I've been pro-American. I really want to own it. Yeah. That's why you're fleeing to Sweden is so you can be advanced.

20:17Aiden:I'm the tender. I'm the tender. I'm a little suction cup that they're sending to Sweden. So it becomes America one day. You're going to scout around and send back information. no i mean look it just doesn't make a damn bit of sense i don't know and i'm not even this is not just me this is like i read a lot i read a guy oh i wish i had his his name in front of me geopolitical strategy guy a guy who has made his entire career of like he did a bunch of articles during biden of saying like republicans are being i'm gonna at least tell you what he's thinking like no matter how crazy you think biden is being on this or this or this this is what this is what the strategy is he did the same for trump up until this is the first time the title of his piece on this was like, I really don't know what this one is.

20:56Like, it really doesn't make, like, there's no good reason, especially when you could scale up everything you're doing in Greenland. I mean, if they hit the limit, then maybe you start talking. If you scale up to 25 ,000 troops again, you're building bases and you're mining minerals. And then Denmark goes, no, then okay, you may be, but you're not even, you're nowhere near that. And Denmark was being super open about anything we wanted to do and it is just causing such economic uh and geopolitical pain immediately for no real reason and nobody wanted this there was a funny tweet that i saw that was like um uh europe i don't know if european leaders understand how much the average american desires greenland which is like they don't before this thing from trump there was zero polling that anyone cared or wanted this it was not torturing me it's been i can't even pay

21:46Atrioc:attention to the clippers game i have to distract myself with sports bets to go over the misery of

21:51Aiden:it's like a i don't know it just feels like if we have alaska on the one side then on the other side it should be ours too that but i think that's what he's thinking and i know that sounds crazy but then you read these letters and it's like i think he just wants the map to look cool and

22:07Atrioc:He clearly just wants to have the legacy of he got a giant piece of land. Yeah, that's the Trump thing. That's clearly what's going on. But that's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. All right. So what is the EU doing? The EU is not fucking okay with this. And they are basically now debating, like, what are we going to do to retaliate? So there's a thing that they have called the Protection Against Coercion. I forget the exact name of the anti-coercion instrument. There is a tool that basically the EU has that they passed a few years ago in 2023 that says that they can it's actually kind of funny. They have to come up with all these commissions.

22:42Atrioc:It's very bureaucratic. But essentially, if they decide that they're being coerced into something that they don't want to do, they can take a wide variety of financial actions, let's say. And that could include things like selling off United States assets. so the the eu owns a lot of the u.s stock market and of our treasuries the u actually invests a lot and there's some good quotes um by folks who are like yeah the problem with the u.s is like they depend on other people to fund everything like as a reminder we're in debt and we spend more than we make every year we need other people to give us money and so they're considering some pretty extreme options.

23:23Atrioc:So some interesting facts about this. The EU holds about 40 % of foreign US treasuries. So if they stop buying our treasuries, we can't raise money as easily. And then we have to pay more for that money, which would be a big deal. That being said, that sounds bad. And then I looked it up. Foreign treasuries are only 25 % of all treasuries. 75 % are held domestically. So to put that different, of all US treasuries, the EU holds about 10 % of them. But still, that's a lot. The EU holds trillions of dollars of US stocks and bonds and could sell them. But the majority are held outside of the government.

23:56Atrioc:They're private. So the EU could like force this big sell off to hurt the American economy, the American stock market. But it's going to be a lot of pain for you. But in theory, you know, that's something that Trump is like extremely sensitive to, right, is markets. And so they could put these these huge pressures on him. And there's some crazy quotes. The Dutch bank AG chief current chief global currency strategist is talking about in quotes, the weaponization of capital from the bank's global head of currency research. In an environment where the geopolitical stability of the Western alliance is being disrupted existentially, it's not clear why Europeans would be willing to play this part.

24:36Atrioc:Macron from France is requesting that they activate this anti-coercion instrument and take extreme steps where we're basically going to like start a massive trade war between the EU and the United States. They're calling on no longer approving the trade deal that was approved that was supposed to happen in June. That's what I wanted to say. Yeah, that was like a big victory for Trump last year where he's like, we got this awesome trade deal. They're going to like potentially vote to not do that. The counter, though, is Germany, where German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Germany is really dependent on exports.

25:07Atrioc:So he said France is affected by the American tariffs to a different extent than we are. so it's understandable that he wanted to in quotes react a little more harshly than we do nevertheless we are trying and succeeding and adopting a common position basically is like is the eu willing to massively hurt themselves economically in order to try to punish trump well the thing is they're both hurt that is the problem that's why this seems so beneficial to like russia and china the fact that we are ripping apart this close transatlantic alliance for no real gain on either side is foolish. And it's driving, you know, not necessarily Germany because they don't have a lot to sell to China and China's selling a lot to them.

25:54But other EU countries are now opening up to China. And, you know, there's the big story this week of Canada. Canada opening up to China. Carney made a deal with Xi to allow China electric vehicles. they had a hundred percent tariff on chinese evs in canada because america asked them to and they got rid of it for at least the first 50 000 vehicles or whatever um and that's you know i'm saying and and he said a carney carney has been like out there saying basically the old global order is dead i can't uh work for a world that i want to be i have to work for the world that is right now and i have to diversify our trade so that america doesn't have a hundred percent uh pressure on i think that we're completely reliant on them so there he's making deals uh with south america they're making deals with europe and they're making deals with china and all other countries are doing similar things they're just trying to i'm i'm less worried about this short term selling off our debt or selling off stocks um than i am every country just de-risking just finding different routes for everything so they're not as reliant because that is the one they're eroding the superpower that you talked about last week you said one of

27:09Aiden:the superpowers is this the the position of the u.s dollar is like the global reserve currency and the financial the place of like financial importance that we have as a country and all of these things add up as huge chips away at that superpower like the u.s is losing one of the three things that keeps it as like the dominant player and uh you know in a in a broad sense maybe you could argue that oh you don't think it's like ethical for the u.s to have that power in the first place and that may be may be the case but right now it's like the u.s dis intentionally dismantling yeah it's just like you want the leader of your country to play their cards well right it's just like that whether or not they should have those cards that's enough for the rest of the world to figure out but the america should not be dismantling their own things that benefit their citizens.

28:00It doesn't make any sense. It's just... Anyway, can you pull this picture up? You mentioned Macron.

28:04Atrioc:He's just been sitting on your computer. Because Macron had to wear these glasses the entire time at Dallas. It's very funny. What? This is the president of France. And apparently he had an eye condition or something. So every speech you're talking about, he's been giving, he's had to do it indoors with these glasses. With these aviators? Wow. It looks great. He has not been seen without these the entire last feed is. And it is very funny. It's kind of tight. So maybe that's why he's winning over versus Mertz in this EU battle over how to be, how to respond to Mr. Trump. Yeah, dude, it is why it makes me think of when the tariffs were first starting a year ago and you pointed out if you wanted to, for example, get the whole world to collaborate and coordinate on doing tariffs on China that are very targeted in order to make sure that there's like security and that Chinese exports are not destroying all of these different industries around the world, but that would make sense, but you would need world coordination to do it.

28:55Atrioc:Is it right? And so we've discussed that a lot and literally as a result of trump like bullying everybody everybody is now moving to make direct relationships with china and to decouple from the u.s and like we're this is such a good example the fact that this deal was just signed between canada and china and they're now saying we've we weren't taking your electric cars we're now taking them i mean that's like

29:16Aiden:uh-oh we're just uh-oh what look at this in my hand the lemon optimism he's crawled his way back of the conversation. He says that Aemon Gaiman doesn't need to get a visa for the China trip anymore. Yeah. Yeah, they're doing like, oh, you're awesome. Yeah, you're right. Whoa. They're doing visa-free Canada. Visa-free for... So if you think of it, that's pretty sick. Everything's coming up, Aiden. It's coming up, Aiden. It's like, if he just takes Sweden off the list, then I haven't stopped with it. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. listening to this podcast smart move being financially savvy smart move another smart move having state farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor state farm is there prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state

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31:34Atrioc:Available at participating locations only. Okay, so I looked at the press release from Canada, okay? So big one is they're reducing the tariffs on the cars, right? They go from instead of 100 % tariffs down to 6 % tariffs, right? But there's a couple other things that China agreed to start like buying more from Canada. And as a Canadian, I want to hear your thoughts. First off, China is lowering tariffs on Canadian canola seed oils.

32:00Aiden:Oh, that's big. That's big. My grandfather makes that. My grandfather makes that.

32:04Atrioc:Apparently$4 billion seed market. Kind of a beast trade. Canada gives them seed oils and they get cool EVs. Yeah, that's tight. No, no, no, no. It gets better. Canada is now expecting, so China's going to drop these discrimination tariffs on lobsters.

32:23Aiden:Big for Nova Scotia. This is straight up front card. Big win for Nova Scotia.

32:27Atrioc:Apparently, lobsters are so big in the Canadian economy that he chose that specific. Hold on. Lobsters and crabs. And can you guess the third one? These are three things that are listed as important exports that China is going to take in more of.

32:41Aiden:I mean, I feel...

32:43Atrioc:It's the big three. The big three. Surely it's timber or oil. It's the big three. Lobsters, crabs. That's right. And peas. And peas? Peas. Lobster, crabs, and peas. So big, big day for the pea farmers. Wow, that's crazy. Peas. Wait, can I say something? So Carney, I've been listening to him talk about this a lot. I've listened to all his speeches over at Davos and about this. He started in French. And I do think that Carney is the smartest Western leader right now. I think he's by, I think he's by far the smartest. Much like all of his country.

33:16Aiden:No, that's not. The most intelligent, average highest intelligence across the spectrum. I think he truly understands. The best flag. I think in fact, most Canadians are dumb as hell. And they got very lucky with him. I think he actually gets it in a way that other leaders are only going to take a while to catch up on. And one thing that he is like screaming, basically, in the nicest way he can, is that he sees the G7, which is the big Western economies, their debt-fueled, bubbly, speculative economies that they've had for a while that have kind of run the world are coming to an end. He basically says that like this, the era of printing currency, G7 dominance is coming to an end.

34:03It's just happening. And I am adapting to a new world where we need to use the resource, the hard resources we have, not the financial ones. So Canada is very wealthy in resources. They have peas, they have lobster, and they have oil and they have timber. And they are going to export these things while they have value in order to improve the tech of the country. that like he's figuring out that like the the old ways of just printing money to keep like a real estate based economy of it's not going to work it's coming to an end it's going to pop it's in trouble and he is basically saying that we're going to use our resources at the values they are to get uh and the smart thing he's doing by the way with the evs he's doing what china did when they were starting to get rich is uh if chinese ev companies want to sell in china right now they can just ship them for the first 40k cars but then they have to come in and make a joint vehicle a joint um i forget the word a tandem bicycle a joint venture so a chinese company like neo or like byd has to set up a joint company in canada with a canadian company that has 51 and then they have to teach them how to build the evs and like that's what china did to start moving up the ladder and carney's forcing them to do it here it's like it's it's trickling back down out of China to Canada.

35:23I mean, it's a smart play. He's a smart, he's thinking forward and everyone else is driving headfirst to the cliff. Um, and I don't know if you have that. You want to talk about bonds? Cause it really ties into this.

35:33Aiden:Like this is like, well, the, the main story I'd seen was from earlier this morning, uh, which was that the Denmark pension fund, uh, which holds a hundred million dollars in us treasuries is starting to sell their position. They are saying it's not directly related to the ongoing rift between the US and Europe, but that it actually has to do with the instability and lack of faith in the US's finances. Like they are publicly saying this is because of poor financial management by America. And we are reacting to that. But it is coming at the same time as all of this Greenland action unfolding. And it's hard to imagine that that is not also playing a part in the choice of this action.

36:26Aiden:But Denmark is just one country, and$100 million in bonds is a significant amount of money, but maybe not as much in a global context. But I think the fear from my memory is Canada had weaponized this in a conversation with Trump earlier last year when the rhetoric about Canada for 51st state had really heated up. And Carney had said they were gonna sell the bonds or alluded to the idea that they were gonna sell all of their US treasury bonds. And this is, at the time for Canada, their successful way, seemingly, of like toning that down or getting Trump to like chill out. So this is the financial lever that these countries can react with.

37:13Aiden:It's like, does selling our bonds get you to move the needle or change your take on this at all. Yeah. So I want to talk about this. So can you pull up this graph? We're probably aware of this. Maybe people watching are also aware of this, but right now in the amount of money the government spends every year, about 15 % of that goes to interest on our debt. We have 30 trillion, 30 something trillion, 37 trillion. I don't know the number, a lot of debt.

37:35Atrioc:Yeah. And it's at an average interest rate of 3.3 % because some of it's long-term. Some of it we got at lower rates for 20 years. Some of it We got it last year for whatever, but it's average of 3.3%. And so we do 14 % of our, our deficit is on interest. And so when people stop buying us debt, the borrowing cost goes up right now. I think it's like for a 10 year, it's like four and a half percent for 4.2 or whatever. It's a little, yeah, 4.2. And we have a lot of debt that, so imagine like if I'm broke as shit and I want to, I have very little income and I borrow a hundred K from you and I'm going to pay$50 a month in interest.

38:13And at the end of the year, I have to give you the a hundred K back. Okay. So I can afford the$3 payments. So I pay it every month end of the year. I don't have the money to give you the a hundred K cause I spent it. I bought a Ferrari and I bought a gun and I bought whatever. So I have to borrow another a hundred K to pay you back. And then I just do it again. I pay$50 to that guy. That is what we do with all of our debt. We never pay it off. We always roll it over. We just, at the end of the year, we roll it over. And what the interest rate is when we roll it over matters a lot. We have a lot of debt that's about to come due.

38:44They're about to roll over. And our borrowing costs are going like this. They're going vertical with all this geopolitical tension because people don't want to loan us money at 4 % or 4.5%. It's going to 4.6, 4.7. Every percent that goes up is another 300 billion here. 300 billion is equivalent to the department of education department of homeland security and

39:05Atrioc:department of state combined and airpods combined can't forget about airpods so right now it's at 3.3 percent of our interest if that went to four percent that means we can no longer something we don't you know increase change anything we can't afford department of education department of homeland security department of state if it goes to double we can't afford a military like that's That's the size of the military. Like, this is the real impact of rising interest rates. This is like, you know, it sounds like it doesn't mean anything. But what it means is the amount of our budget every year going to interest gets so astronomical.

39:38It crowds at everything else. This is what's happening in Japan's interest rates. Their borrowing costs are going parabolic. And they're deeply worried. Like, how do you afford a government? How do you pay for things if your borrowing costs have gotten so extreme?

39:50Aiden:Thank God for tariffs. The big marker that people look for is these interest rates climbing to or past 5 % just as a marker of significant growth. And the 30-year treasury rate for the U.S. treasury is 4.93 % right now, has climbed to 4.93%. That's insane. And the 10-year is also going up. I think it's interesting. This is also happening at the same time as a bunch of European bonds also climbing for the same period of time. And also, even recently, after a year of it surging or longer, gold is spiking in value again. So Big A stays winning, lemon of optimism. I mean, I'm not stoked because now it's too high.

40:40Now it's scary for the world. But this is what Carney's saying. this is what carney's theory is is that it doesn't matter whether you're the european country or you're america or you're japan this this g7 debt-based thing is it's not working the borrowing costs are going to get so high we can't afford anything the currency is going to have to get printed to pay it off it's going to be monopoly money right it's a hard assets thing so he's focusing on oil and timber and fucking lobster and peas yeah and uh essentials the essentials You can live on that stuff.

41:13Atrioc:And we can build a house out of Wall Street crypto game, but you can build a house out of crab. Out of peas. Crab shells are durable. Crab shells and pea shells. And yeah, that's what it seems like. So I don't know. This Greenland thing is so smart, man. It's so smart. Fellas, can I throw an open-ended feeling out there? Yeah, what? this I think I've been trying to understand why this week's news has racked me so much I've stated either maybe on the patreon I forget but that I still don't feel like we've crossed a threshold at which Trump's action and what happening is sort of like a turning point that you can't go back from this week I think the vibe for me has always been like I don't like what's going on with ice I don't like what's going on with tariffs I don't like what's going on with LGBT rights.

42:04Atrioc:I don't like all these things he's doing, but he's going to leave in a couple of years and presumably we will go back to normal. And if we can like ride it out, which is nice and easy for me to say.

42:12Aiden:You have a semblance of, you still have an idea that the system will correct itself. Correct itself. Right.

42:19Atrioc:And we've talked about this, that unless elections fundamentally are compromised, that it will correct itself. I mean, we did elect this guy. We did elect him democratically to, and now he's doing crazy shit and it should correct itself. but this is the, something about this, I don't know why, it just feels like this, this has shattered things in a fundamental way. Like you can't trust this global system that has existed for 80 years if this can happen from the US. There's no going back. Like I, I really feel pretty depressed about this unfortunately and I do feel like, okay, it's broken. It doesn't matter.

42:56Atrioc:This is the week for me where it's like it doesn't matter if he's gone in three years.

43:00Aiden:Is it, So I think the interesting part of this is like this, this is the thing that makes you feel that way. But it's because like your, your idea is that trust that other countries have in us is so irreparably damaged that you cannot go back to the old way of doing things after this, regardless of who's in charge, because people are making such concrete steps. to make their country or their economy independent from the U.S. in ways that it wasn't before, that they're not looking to backtrack like two or three years from now. Is that like a fair evaluation?

43:45Atrioc:Yeah, I think so. It's probably a mix of that, which is the sort of rational side of like, well, these policies and treatments, these treaties just aren't going to be valid anymore. And I think the other half is just an emotional set. I'm coming off of Prozac. so it's but uh unironically maybe that's been softening things uh and i think the other side is just an emotional one of just for some reason this this just went over of like trump just bully like openly explicitly bullied our allies we'll get to the board of peace thing in a sec which is like it's just kicking eu while they're down it's just but i i don't know it's like okay the world is truly going to be totally different than what we thought it would be.

44:29Yeah. The way I heard it described that I thought was funny. I mean, this is not as funny really, but was, um, you know, if you're thinking about it rationally from someone in Europe, like a leader in Europe, even if you think Trump will be gone and someone will come in, that's more easy to deal with. You know, the idea that, uh, every four years based on 32 ,000 swing voters in wisconsin whatever on my mic uh you know how how 30 000 swing voters wisconsin feel about trans kids playing volleyball or something you get to decide whether or not you are going to be in a trade war with your ally or you're going to be threatening to be your like that that's not a reliable enough you know we we switch pretty wildly here in america pretty quickly we have two parties and they're you know i'm saying so they just have to de-risk

45:18Aiden:no i i've i've had this feeling of oh him like this direction that the country is moving in even if it completely reverses two years from now you're not you're not somebody like carney or macron and looking at that and being like well you know may as well get fully back in the u.s basket they swap the guy like because it could just swing back the other way so so violently uh and you've seen what you've been punished so hard for being too reliant

45:51Atrioc:we're trusting you know it's it's i think maybe the shift for me is like it is irreparably changing the world at least for the foreseeable future into a every man for himself kind of vibe and that's just really fundamentally scary right then the pretense that that we could trust each other and work through it is is evaporating and that's it's it's not just like oh the u.s trade relations are bad it's like every country is gonna have to do what canada is doing and say we are not trusting anybody we're focusing on our own interests and that's just fucking sad man what a sad state for the world for human beings my little

46:29Aiden:lemon of optimism has a has just a little bit of pessimism to put into this conversation I've my worry from like a 20 year 30 year perspective has uh you know price of peace that book we read explains this pretty well but it's a generally well understood idea that the at large benefit of this like world order post-world war ii is that countries are so economically intertwined and dependent on each other that it's this built-in defense mechanism against people going to war. It doesn't mean no wars happened in the last hundred years, but it has been a relative time of peace of superpowers battling it out with each other, right?

47:19Aiden:There hasn't been any gigantic global power-to-power conflict since World War II. I'd say Ukraine, Russia kind of broke that. That's a big enough, that's the biggest. I mean, that's when this all started to break down anyway. Yeah, so that's like a signal of like something, a larger shift happening, I would say, right? Yeah. And I feel like the, as you continue to like isolate allies and people economically, you're eroding what's left of the safeguard, preventing countries from fighting each other. Like you're getting rid of this like underlying economic safety net that, you know, wasn't, you know, has its pros and cons in so many different ways because it's a global system and da, da, da, da.

48:09Aiden:But ultimately was something that was protecting like us going to all out war with other countries in the capacity that we were doing for hundreds of years before that. And now we're getting rid of it. And also a bunch of people have nuclear weapons and are like for the first time ever rearming nuclear nuclearly uh it just it feels scary yeah i'm not i'm not like awake at night worrying about that part but it reminds it's a reminder of like it wasn't the the period of peace that we had gone through before this it wasn't always like that in human history it wasn't like that for most the most of human like post-agricultural history was not like that.

48:53Aiden:And now we're like getting rid of the main thing that was preventing it from being like that. Right. And this period of peace has coincided with the invention of nuclear weapons. So we haven't had, we haven't been in a world where nuclear weapons exist and there's no global safeguards. It doesn't ever happen. So we're all going to find out and we're going to find out together. Oh, cool. Yeah. I mean, this is another Carney quote. He said, he's talking about the system we currently had or had. It helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security. And then he said, this bargain with America no longer works.

49:33Let me be direct. We're in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Great powers have started to use economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs is leveraged. So like, this is just, everyone has to change. And it's, it is wild that it's happening on the back of a guy who I saw in Home Alone 2 as a kid and is now obsessed with the Nobel Peace Prize. It's crazy. It's crazy.

49:56Atrioc:To be fair to Trump, in a world where all the alliances are rupturing because of what you did to acquire Greenland, having Greenland is strategically valuable. If you create that world, yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. A lot of foresight.

50:10Aiden:If all of it becomes America, then aren't you?

50:14Atrioc:I was actually going, you know, I see his plan. Okay, you guys want to hear about the Board of Peace, okay? This stuff with Greenland started, and I was like, this is depressing. And then I started reading about the Board of Peace. The Board of Peace was proposed. We need peace. We do need peace. Yeah, yeah, it's got the word in there. I'm more worried. They're debating on the name. It might be Board of War. The Board of Peace. I'm excited for this. We talked about this in the wake of the treaty piece of sorts in Palestine and Israel, right? Where this 20-point document was pitched by the U.S.

50:48Atrioc:and it was agreed to. And, you know, credit was due. Hostages were returned. And Israel has continued to bomb and kill people. And it's not exactly.

50:56Aiden:Oh, really? I didn't read any of that after.

51:02Atrioc:So it's been a very tenuous piece that involves some killing and some war from one side. But in theory, the U.S. resolution has gotten a whole lot of countries on board, and the Board of Peace for Gaza is like the name of the group that they're putting together. We talked about this because Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the U.K., Tony Blair. is the head of the Board of Peace for Gaza. He's going to help oversee this, and they're going to have a bunch of technocrats. I don't know why they use that word for this. Technocrats come in and run the rebuilding of Gaza, right? Okay. That's the premise.

51:35Atrioc:so there's been some updates that is the board of peace for gaza but trump is actually instituting a broader coalition called the board of peace broadly the board of peace for gaza is inside of it kind of like the un the way it'll work is if you join you join for three years and then you're part of this coalition of country leaders that decide what kind of things are going to happen or sound suspiciously like the un which donald trump does not really like he uh announced Bloomberg found the, basically the prompt or the premise of it that's being pitched to countries, which is that you can join for three years or if you pay a billion dollars you're a permanent member.

52:11Atrioc:A little exclusive club. Cool. And even the board of peace got paid a win,

52:16Aiden:bro. Fuck, dude, you know what this reminds me of? It's like selling Overwatch League slots for$20 million. It's like, just come and join. It's exactly like that. Microtransactions are getting into everything. You know? Come join my new league. You have to pay for different flags. I don't like the whole one. This is going to be a great new league.

52:34Atrioc:It's going to last forever. So that's silly, right? It's like, ah, billion dollar club, right? And that's probably the headline you've heard. But looking a little more into the actual draft that's been pitched to countries, how does this board of peace function? Well, Trump is the chairman of the board. Decisions by these countries around the world on geopolitical issues, such as the rebuilding of Gaza, obviously majority vote. But every single vote is subject to the chairman's approval. Donald Trump. Trump will have the power to remove a member that can only be vetoed by two thirds majority of the member state.

53:09Atrioc:So he personally, as the chairman can kick people out and also decide who gets invited.

53:13Aiden:Just to be clear, even if I paid the billion,

53:16Atrioc:it's not clear. As you can imagine, this is a Trumpism type thing where it's like an unclear document, but these are the, this is what it's stated so far is that, um, so meetings, they're going to happen when the chairman decides the agenda is approved by the chairman. So we're not going to talk about stuff unless the chairman wants to talk about this stuff. We're not going to meet unless the chairman wants to meet. And here's the piece that really made me go, holy fucking shit. The chairman who basically controls this new UN board is the only one who gets to decide who the next chairman is. And so this, I realized, is the play by Trump to stay in power after he's kicked out of office, right?

53:54Atrioc:And again, it gets back to that feeling of like, ah, at least this will correct in three years. but he if this works and he can get country leaders all together after he's president will be chairman of the board of this institution that has all of these different countries deciding world affairs with permanent control over everything including who's next and of course you can imagine he's put in jared kushner and various other people and like leadership oh the goats the goat team jared always the all-star squad so it always finds a way man he's gonna and run Paramount Pictures. He's a busy guy, Jared.

54:27And some crypto thing. And then, yeah, my understanding, board of peace, you pay Trump a billion dollars. Right. You get on board. You don't get any input in the decisions. You do. It's just he can veto it. He can veto it. Trump has solo veto power over everything. He's chairman of the board for life, not just the life of the presidency.

54:47Atrioc:Yeah. So even if he were... It's him establishing his own global thing that is separate from the U.S. government forever. And he has sole control over all the money in the Board of Peace. Yeah, when you donate a billion dollars, it's going to go, in quotes, mostly to the... Sorry, the money raised will be used, yeah, directly to accomplish the Board of Peace mandate to rebuild Gaza. There's a quote, mostly. Just to put this all back in a loop here, the big impetus for this we have to take Greenland and break all our alliances thing was Greenland, you can't protect it from our enemies, Russia and China.

55:23Right. And the first person, I think, he invited to the Board of Peace. Is Vladimir Putin.

55:31Atrioc:There are some funny people invited to the board of peace. You got the European countries. The ones who, just to be clear, just were threatened with tariffs to take Greenland. Inviting them to board of peace. You got Israel, who's the first one who came, Benjamin Netanyahu came out and said, the details haven't been coordinated with us. And is like apparently very upset because Qatar and Turkey are invited as well. And is like, this is supposed to be about like us running Gaza. and instead he's making this board around the world. Macron from France promptly declined. So credit to him came out and I was like, we're absolutely not fucking being a part of this.

56:05Atrioc:Trump responds with, well, no one wants him because he's going to be out of office very soon. I'll put a 200 % tariffs on his wines and champagnes and he'll join. Fucking baffling. And then others imply like Carney said he's interested in principle, but then behind the scenes, they're like, we will not pay a dime for this, which is kind of - a billion dollars to join your board of peace. We got Argentina's Malay. We got Belarus's autocratic leader, Lukashenko. So that's cool. Russia was invited. Lukashenko is invited? Yep, to the board of peace. Dude, if the board of peace is like Lukashenko, Trump, and Bernie.

56:40It would be so funny.

56:42Aiden:That'd be, hold on. Hold on. Stay with me. That's a little beast.

56:48Atrioc:If it's just the three of them, that's super funny. here. Okay. We've talked about the big two, right? Which is Belarus and Russia. Who's the big three that you really want the board of peace? China. China's invited. They said they might be interested. Okay. Oh, and he wants to start by Thursday. He announced this like a day ago. By Thursday. He wants to start by Thursday. He wants to start a billion dollars by Thursday.

57:12Aiden:It's so baffling, man. Just send it. Just send it. You just send it. Cash app. Enmo. I'll take whatever you need. I'll take digital you want. I'll take CS kids. They can pay for it with their tariff revenue. I feel like it's so funny to imagine. Can you imagine hopping on the kind of like MAGA train 2016? You feel a little disenfranchised. I can understand how you'd be there. You're all on the drain the swamp rhetoric. You're like, get rid of the deep state. Get rid of the globalists. and in 2026, you're reading about the board of peace. The leadership where Trump gets to be chair into infinity over this global organization with full veto power that all the other countries buy into.

58:04It just feels like I'm wondering what you could say.

58:10Aiden:I'm wondering what you could say. And I know it doesn't matter. I know it doesn't matter. I don't have, I can't find him in front of me, but there were a lot of examples obviously pulled up of people in the 2016 era saying things like, um, Trump invading Greenland or taking, or taking Greenland seriously were obviously like, it's not, it's an example of alarmism is, you know, and like now that shit's real. So, uh, I don't know. It's, it's, uh, it is, it's funny in a cosmic sense, but obviously very depressing.

58:48Atrioc:I mean, there's a, uh, when you have about tariffs, which is like kind of a good, good spin on this. Sure. What's the tariffs angle? So all of this, all the chaos, I should say all a huge amount of the chaos that Trump has instigated comes from tariffs, right? He's thrown tariffs on everybody, even with this board of peace thing, fucking threatening France by putting 200 % tariffs on their champagnes, right? That has been the club that he has been wheeling and, uh, beating everyone off over the last year. Right. so are tariffs legal what like what is the precedent for this well the precedent is the international emergency economic powers act which i'll just pronounce instead of ieepa i'll just say epa epa gives the president economic tools during a national emergency and so what's the history of this like what why is he allowed to do this is he allowed to do this uh they started this in 27 in 1917 as the u.s entered world war one and then by the 1930s congress updated it so the power could be used during peacetime and this basically was the uh the act that was used during the cold war so the presidents could put economic pressure on other countries it's gonna be like sanctions or you know international restrictions or seizing assets or whatever it is right all the fun stuff yeah so this is basically this is the act that has allowed presidents over the last like 100 years now to put economic pressure on various things but they have to say they have to declare a national emergency to do it in 1977 they they update it from the trading with the enemy act to the epa require a little more transparency you have to formally extend it every year and uh they also congress was like we can end the national emergency all right the president can declare one but we can now vote to do it except after the supreme court ruled on it it has to go

1:00:36Aiden:to the president for signing he can veto it so congress can say you know the ending yes so

1:00:41Atrioc:president can declare a national emergency congress can vote to end the national emergency and the president can veto it and say no i still want the national emergency that it can then be counter vetoed like any normal law with two-thirds vote in house and senate is a perfect system

1:01:03Atrioc:so a little let's do a little game since 20 in 2025 since this uh the most recent version of this kicked off in basically the 70s right 1977 presidents have declared how many national emergencies do you think we've had this is we're talking like 50 years oh quite a few for sure i mean like national emergencies right i know but presidents kind of go willy-nilly with it you know if they need yeah yeah if you need some 12 30 77 national emergency i'm not even close all right so obviously most of them like are done now right there are actually some of them that are still going so of the 77 total national emergencies that the president has created uh presidents over the 50 years how many do you think are still happening like we are still in a state of they never said they were over they never said they were over we are technically still in the state of emergency.

1:01:54Venezuelan drug boats, man. What happened? Yeah. 52.

1:02:00Atrioc:46. 46. We are in 46 right now. National emergencies. One of them is when Iran took the US embassy staff in 1979. That emergency has been going for 46 years. And it still scares me. They're waiting.

1:02:15Aiden:They're waiting for a good enough movie about it to end the emergency. You're like Argo? Ben Affleck's take, maybe 7 out of 10, 8 out of 10. No, Argo is good. That's your worst take of the show. They need a 10 out of 10 movie.

1:02:29Atrioc:Argo's fine. Perry, if you can pull this up, there's a Wikipedia page that you can go to. List of national emergencies in the United States. It is very, very long. And you can go scroll down and just look at all the emergencies, which are highlighted in green of which ones are current. So this act. Just pick one. What do we got? Well, we got some Obama ones blocking certain persons. in Nicaragua? That was a good one.

1:02:51Aiden:So many of them are current.

1:02:53Atrioc:Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. So, as you can imagine, Trump did a lot of them, but the ones that are really notable is February 1st of last year. That's when he did three executive orders, and this is basically saying there's a national emergency with drugs on the northern border, on the southern border, and from China. And that's when he, like, first did those big tariffs and started things off of them. These are all for the tariffs, right? Yes. So, there's been other ones, to be clear. Like, you know he's there's just broadly a cartel emergency right now and there's an energy emergency apparently right but how does the the cartel emergency or even the trade deficit emergency apply to i'm going to put tariffs on francis wines to get that is exactly the question so when we talked about liberation day last year you can see that is here it is on april 2nd 2025 you can go look at the order and it states he basically is like we have had these trade relationships that have become increasingly unfair it is a national economic importance it is actually an emergency that we need to use tariffs in order to uh reciprocate and fix the trade deficits so this has been the premise he has used this act that's been around for like 100 years now in its most recent form 50 and he's to keeps declaring national emergencies however no president has ever even though all the presidents have done a bunch of national emergencies, none of them have ever used it to create tariffs like this.

1:04:16Atrioc:So this is new. So there was a lawsuit by a bunch of small companies that basically sued the president and said, we don't think you have the legal right to do this. And the lower courts of the United States ruled that it is unconstitutional. And they said, it basically argued the word tariff is not even in this national emergencies act. This is not something that's supposed to like be the case. Trump's arguing like, oh, it definitely is. And so this got bumped up to the Supreme Court and this started, they took the case in September and they started arguments in November. So just to recap this, the Supreme Court right now is ruling and determining whether the tariffs that Trump has been using to do all of the stuff we're talking about.

1:04:57Atrioc:If they rule that illegal, all of this breaks. Not only did they listen to arguments on the 6th of November, so like two months ago, apparently they were very skeptical. like a lot of questions were from most of the judges indicating that they didn't seem to think that this was very legit so right now they are in recess and they have a four-week recess where they are going to like finalize their deliberation in that time period since everybody realized that justices might not vote uh in trump's favor there's been like a thousand lawsuits that have hit the united states now that all these companies that have been paying tariffs over the last year think it might all be unwound.

1:05:35Atrioc:They're all suing to get ahead of this, basically jumping on the bandwagon so that they can get back all this money they've paid. And if this is ruled unconstitutional, if this is ruled that it's not allowed, the US government will have to refund all of the tariff money to everybody that's paid it. I think I'll get mug money back. I have a very strong counterpoint. Okay. Can you pull up my screen?

1:06:04I need audio. I understood how to deal with him, and I'm the tariff king, and the tariff king has done a great job, and I hope we win the Supreme Court case because if we don't... I'm the tariff king, and the tariff king has done a great job. So the good news on all this is that the tariff king... He's the tariff king. I'm the tariff king, and the tariff king... A little third-person reference to yourself as the tariff king. Of course. and he has done a great job according to the tariff and he's the tariff king said it so he

1:06:35Atrioc:wouldn't be wrong you tell me the tariff king and the chairman of the peace board are both lying and the fifa peace prize winner and the nobel peace prize uh receiver receiver recipient owns the medal recipient of the nobel peace prize fact donald trump that's a fact never tell me i'm president so he's got five things to his name and he's calling himself the tariff king and you're just yapping about laws. I know I'm yapping. Uh, Trump did say that if the Supreme court strikes it down, they'll find other ways to implement tariffs such as section two, three, two of the trade expansion act, which does, it was done by Congress.

1:07:11Atrioc:And it does let the president put tariffs on specific goods in the matter of national security. So I would argue that this Supreme court case is going to be one of the most important things to happen in the Trump presidency. Most of the chaos he's done has been, or at least externally, right? Not talking about ice and everything else most of the chaos he's done internationally has been through tariffs it's all been predicated on this particular national emergencies act the next date that the supreme court might make a decision is february 20th so in exactly a month and that might just cause all of this to crash to a halt he can try these other avenues to get tariffs but they're a lot harder to do you have to have this like process where the commerce department goes through and and does the studies to prove that this specific thing is a matter of national security so he probably cannot just threaten it on wine randomly to to macron so that's the hopeful thing i i deeply hope that countries do not join the board of peace i deeply hope that the supreme court rules down on tariffs you know there's an argument for tariffs that you could that you could make and i think the way they're being used is so obviously awesome incredibly destructive and harmful Ah, that guy's not mid-red weird.

1:08:21Yeah, I agree. I did want to say about tariffs that all of the deals, you know, we did the 90 deals in 90 days and then they became more than that in more days. every one of the deals that we have signed thus far, including the EU deal, were precluded on the fact that Donald Trump could make these tariffs. That was the idea. If the tariffs are unconstitutional and they're struck down, every single deal, every progress they've made on any of those deals is all unwound immediately. The Europe deal is already being thrown out of the window because of the new tariff. Once you make a deal, the idea is that's the deal.

1:09:02We're going to set a certain tariff level on Europe, and we signed a deal. And then you can't later say, I'm going to add this new deal about Greenland.

1:09:09Aiden:Because you won't give me what I want. Yeah, that's not how that works. People can't learn and evolve. That's funny. I feel bad sometimes for the people in Trump's administration who have to kind of like rationalize what he's saying. And I don't remember, it was someone in the State Department or something. They were like, let's think of this Greenland tariff deal as, let's talk about it separately from the European tariff deal that we already had. Don't try to merge them. because you're immediately said, we're throwing out the old deal. And I just think it's funny when you try to pretend like they're not one of the same.

1:09:40Aiden:You have to like somehow thread the needle in front of the press and be like, no, no, this is why it makes sense. This is a separate, yeah.

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1:10:34Atrioc:You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto-renews at$12.99 a month. Terms apply. It's crunch time at work, and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit RedBull.com slash GettingItDone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to-do to done.

1:11:08Atrioc:And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited. Terms apply. Visit the website for more information. You know what? Can I throw some good news out there? I would love that. Let's start with the fact that I beat Silksong in one life. That is good news. Thanks for watching Lemonade Sand, everybody.

1:11:28um i would like to show you a really cool map thanks for watching lemonade stand everybody no no no play catch with my dad yeah as of right now 2026 january california is drought free for the first time in decade now i guess this doesn't matter if you're not in california But it's a big deal. There are no drought symptoms in California, and our reservoirs have filled up. So it's kind of like a big, it's kind of a cool moment. I don't know. You guys are very happy about it.

1:12:07Atrioc:I'll take some credit for this. I go pee in my neighbor's backyard instead of using the toilet. Yeah, I saw you pee in the reservoir, actually. We got a recycle water in the reservoir. You were drinking it and then peeing in it. This came from the Discord. I thought it was a pretty nice piece of news. Haven't showered in a month. just given that if you flashback literally one year we were in fires we were in a dangerous wildfire drought situation and now one year later uh it's a better spot i mean even i i think

1:12:34Aiden:anecdotally if you live in southern california the last few years i've been here there's a noticeable change in how much rain we've gotten in the winter we'll like experience these like torrential downpours for huge stretches of time in the winter. And then a kind of fun thing, you know, that has its own set of consequences, but I would go hiking when I first moved down here and, you know, go around California, a little like dustier, less like trees or greenery. Like when you go out and hiking, especially compared to a place like Washington, where I moved down from. uh and then the last few years when i go out hiking like all of these trails and places are just filled with like green plant life that did not used to be there at least not in that same like quantity and it was it's a pretty uh stark shift just in like the six years that i've lived here that you could go out last year we had wildfires last year he passed one well we we

1:13:35Atrioc:let the palisades burn down to save up water for the drought i see yeah it's strategic karen base did that that's not wildfire risk as close to zero as it ever gets 14 of the 17 reservoirs are at 70 percent of more capacity that's a good sign uh weather wise though i heard that um i don't know if you guys heard about this it's like a massive cold front about to hit texas the southeast uh atlanta like there's like a like apparently the the cold front of the century or something something really bad climate's changing fuck dude you're telling me fuck dude i do know this is the third hottest year in history 2025 and the one before it was the second hottest and the one before that was the first hottest so we're in the top three in the last but that's trending down.

1:14:28I have three.

1:14:29Aiden:It's trending down. Are we fixing climate change? Have they run the numbers on this? Since lemonade stand started, the world is less hot than it was the year before. Think about that. Ozone is almost bad too. Think about that.

1:14:41Atrioc:But actual real thing, like ozone over Antarctica, I believe, right, is like almost healed. Like we're going to fully regenerate the ozone layer. We're actually, we are doing some good things. There's a couple wins in the basket. Let's find out who else is doing some good things because as we near the end of this episode, I want to talk about a game that we played one year ago DougDoug.com slash stocks exactly one year ago today we made some picks on which stocks we thought would do good in the first year of Trump's presidency after 252 trading days we have a winner Ludwig nope sorry he's dead last

1:15:25Aiden:Sorry, you read the chart the other way.

1:15:27Atrioc:Let's just read out some of these numbers. I want to give the context here. Maybe you can give it. Let's say you are a badass trader on Wall Street. Your job is to make trades. You buy and sell assets. Maybe you do it for a pension fund. Maybe you do it for some small wealth management company, right? What would be a good return if you were successful on Wall Street? So I looked this up because I'm working on a video for this. And I looked up how hedge funds performed this year because they have to be public with their percent return. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of them with different various, and some of them did beat even Aiden's number here.

1:16:00But there were many, many hedge funds that did 18 % that were crowing from the rooftops about their record incredible performance. Because the general idea is if you beat the S &P 500 index, which is what you're benchmarked against, which is 13.34%, you had an incredible year on Wall Street. if you are doing a 20 % return in this past year, you very likely got a large bonus. You got to cash out on your yacht. This is not an exaggeration. This is literally how they're paid. And so even this is like a damning indictment of wall street. If Ludwig had been on wall street, he would be considered a top trader.

1:16:41Atrioc:And that sets us up for Ludwig making on his 10 stocks, 25 % return. He made a profit of$2 ,500. Dug Dug in fourth place with a 34 % profit. Stands with 37. Atriok with 42. And Aiden with a 56 % increase over one year. This would be a generational run if he was doing this on Wall Street. We, in total, the five of us, have raised$19 ,534 for charity, which Aiden will be deciding. This is truly obscene. And I want to remind everybody that includes the 800 odd dollars that Ludwig lost on Trump coin. It's great.

1:17:23Aiden:It's great. I want to give you some examples. Some of these legendary D.E. Shaw's Oculus Funds were wealthiest people putting in the smartest minds. They get the richest people. I mean, sorry, they get the brightest minds from MIT and they put them only to work on trading stocks. D.E. Shaw's Oculus Fund did 28 % this last year. They barely edged out Ludwig. We read Ray Dalio's book Bridgewater. or his fund, their Pure Alpha Fund, which is their best performing fund, did 34%. The highest in 50 years they've ever had. 34%. Impressive. Impressive for a young. I would put them just under Doug Doug.

1:17:59Atrioc:Just under me, who, to be clear, my highest performing stock is Occugen Inc. Occugen was determined because I asked my Doug AI on the stream, what is a good stock? He said that Ocugen is a great pick because it's up like 40 % right now. That's not true. It didn't, it was just lying. And I put it, my, all my money in, or a thousand into Ocugen. They were almost delisted over the summer because they dropped so low, but then they've had a spike upward from a start of 70 cents per stock to$1.67. And that returned 135%. ludwig beat the vast majority of incredibly successful hedge funds investing into united united healthcare trump coin and oxidative petroleum all of which right off the back of luigi mangi he just picked micron which actually was the single best performing stock i believe in the S &P 500.

1:19:03Okay. Not in the competition. Not fucking penny stocks that scrape this deep sea ocean.

1:19:09Aiden:Oh, I'm sorry that my intelligence reaches outside of the S &P. we talk about his win here. If you could pull up this quote, there's an iconic investing quote that I think really applies to what happened in this game. This is an absurd result. The fact that we all five made, you know, stupid on-stream things and beat all major hedge funds and the S &P is a sign of insane times that almost everything is trending up. And what does that say? What does the quote say? You can't read. That's why you can't even read. What does it say? Read it out loud for me. Everyone is a genius in a bull market. Ah, Aiden McCaig, a genius.

1:19:52Aiden:That's what it says. That's what the word says. Yep. That's what it says, everyone. And your portfolio is largely successful

1:19:59Atrioc:successful off the back of TMC, the metals company, Inc. Can you walk us through what you found so compelling about TMC? Doug, it takes a keen mind to see the value in TMC as early as that day. It's returned 350%, by the way. I'm going to think of this every time I watch like a CNBC interview with a Wall Street trader or like a hedge fund guy. They're like, I was up 40 % last year. Yeah, it's really about investing in the markets. And it's probably just that they're fucking hitting. They just hit something.

1:20:29Aiden:Doug, it's about finding your own way, trusting your gut, not just doing what the crowd tells you to. When all the naysayers came in, how did you keep going, Aiden? Interesting, interesting. And it was tough because a lot of people did naysay. When we were drafting the stocks, what did Stan say? He said, I've never even heard of that. It trucks in metal. We don't even use that anymore. I didn't say we don't use metal. and I and if you're lucky like me and you have just a curiosity for the world

1:21:04Aiden:then you too can be delivered a 10-minute NBC video about an upstart industry in the year 2022 and then you can loosely hang on to that idea until your friend invites you to the stock competition and then spots you the money because you're doing home renovations which is exactly what happened a great a fun fact about this competition yeah i don't own the stocks doug does yeah because i didn't have enough cash when we did the stream so he spotted me and then a month later when i did have the money doug was like well it doesn't really make sense to like change it over we may as well just keep it this way and then you could like pay me back later if you lose and uh but you were up so and my grit your tenacity and you did it is i i literally my i came into this competition so unbelievably underprepared i just picked nine companies i could think of top of my head uh that hadn't been chosen throughout the competition and then i think as like my ninth or tenth pick i was like i need one thing that makes my portfolio stand out like i literally need to come up with one individual idea and i was like oh that whole thing we had talked about this industry in the first test episode of lemonade stand that we filmed like i did a little section on it we did because there's this interesting world of like uh the metals company is a is a company that is trying to pull up these like nodules from the ocean floor that have like rare earth metals in them as a new way to like don't act like you know what they do um and and the reason it really interested me was not because of this like new object this is the genuine part it's not because of the like oh this is a new way to like find this resource and it's like environmentally questionable and it was the like government apparatus that was uh policing it because because this mining type of mining didn't exist it's overseen by this UN office in like the Caribbean that is understaffed and was like never meant to moderate this task.

1:23:23Aiden:And it's over these sections of the ocean floor that are owned by like small Pacific Island nations that, you know, are trying to find a way to like economically move up. So they're partnering with companies like this and there's a bunch of corruption involved. and it was just and you said just get me in and i was like and i was learning about all of this over the course of a couple years because the story was ongoing like the story of the metals company and the other companies that are involved in this work is very up and down based on these like regulations and things and i came into the competition to raise money for charity and i was like i remember this company it's an energy adjacent company i bet things are going to change quickly like regarding the regulations around this with trump in charge that was like just my guess and yeah i mean the big thing was just china china put the squeeze on rare earth minerals and all the rare earth companies skyrocketed and this was uh this was the one and this was one of them this was the one at like ten dollars this year and what it was crazy is like the 159 i bought it at when we did this competition was already high like it had gone from like 20 or 50 cents like all the up to that dollar mark and then over the course of this year it went crazy and it hit 10 so i made a cool uh cool four wait i'm pretty sure on that stock alone you made more than like stands i made 3500 on that one stock so which is uh pretty crazy uh stands had one of the best performing stocks the whole thing with oklo as the year of nuclear although that's still companies get to make any money yeah that was dude my nuclear pick was my second best pick the chemical corp nuclear stuff did really well my best stock was a company that uh sells a not a cure for psoriasis just a really expensive treatment you have to keep buying it's not to be enormously profitable

1:25:17Atrioc:and was that because a certain congresswoman no that was tempest yeah that was the one before Oh, okay. Atriox's third best performing stock is just the gold trust. You just bought gold. Yeah, I just bought gold. Damn, do DraftKings did not perform for you at all? No, and I found out that the idea of, let's say, sports betting is going to be bigger this year turned out to be quite true. If I had bought in Robinhood, which turned out to be the big winner of sports betting this year because of prediction markets. Prediction markets. If I bought in Robinhood to DraftKings, Robinhood was about as big as TMC.

1:25:48Robinhood was actually, I think, the number two or number one performing stock in the S &P this year. That's crazy. Which is pretty insane. Robinhood had a 250 or something like that percent return. So bit of a mistake to go with DraftKings. I picked Goldman Sachs. I thought there'd be a lot of mergers. There was, but Albertsons and Kroger did not merge. So me and Ludwig both lost on that.

1:26:10Atrioc:Speak of yourself. Ludwig made 82 bucks. He made 82 bucks. I'm sorry. I just can't. We've literally looked around his room and picked things that he saw. And beat the hedge funds. Yeah. because he saw all of his MAGA gear, which is why he went for Trump coin.

1:26:23Aiden:$19 ,500 for charity. Nothing to sniff at. I get to pick the charity it goes to. Already picked it. What is it? And it is a small group that donates money to small new business owners in Sweden. From abroad. It's just small startups that are moving their operations to Sweden to help them get a Lego. Wow. Yeah. that's really noble of you it's great that sounds really heroic because they need to get their feet on the ground and it's like yeah wow that's pretty noble we do have some bad news though which is that there was a punishment assigned to the loser where they had to run a 5k

1:27:08Atrioc:wait hold on do you have a charity I haven't picked it yet I guess we'll update on that

1:27:13Aiden:I'm open actually genuinely if anyone has suggestions for charities they think are particularly good. I think my first idea was just like, you know, finding maybe like some mutual aid organization or, but I'm really open to any ideas. The punishment though, I did want to get to this because Ludwig is the person who lost. And if for those who don't remember, because I think many people forgot the agreed upon punishment was whoever finishes last has to fly to New York, go to Wall Street, wear a suit and a briefcase and film themselves running a 5K in New York. That is what the loser has to do. And when I brought this up to Ludwig a month and a half ago, he had of course forgotten this and just said he quote, wasn't going to do it.

1:28:03Aiden:Which is not fair. And I need you. I'm begging you if you happen to be a Ludwig viewer and you're here who you watch his Twitch stream, you watch his YouTube videos, you cannot let him forget that he committed to this punishment. You got to put the pressure on. Because there's no, there's no, if we let this slip by, then what teeth do we have as Americans? As Americans. Our country is falling apart. This is like the last thing we had, the institution of this stock game. Yes, it's all we have left.

1:28:30Atrioc:And Ludwig needs to do this. Fellas, I got to admit something. Okay. I already told you about this. I looked at my Robin Hood numbers, a lot less money than they're supposed to be on my returns. A lot of people. So my second highest performing stock is Palantir. Yeah. And upon review of my portfolio, I invested in Palatin.

1:28:53Aiden:Dude, I forgot about this. I forgot.

1:28:57Atrioc:That is a different company. So I actually didn't make$1 ,350. What I did was lose 70 % of my portfolio and I lost 700. if you go off of those numbers where instead of palantir i went for paladin palatin excuse me i am actually in last place now here's my counter argument okay i bet ludwig didn't even buy trump coin okay no i don't think he bought i think the competition is on the stocks and we have to reconcile the money the 19 500 that has to come up right i will just pay the difference out of my own pocket to make sure that so i think the competition is based off of what we said it's That's not what you bought.

1:29:36Atrioc:And I just feel like we can all agree that Ludwig still lost, even though technically a hundred percent, I mean, I'll just fully admit it here. So there's 10 stocks here. I put all of the money into gold and I just figured I would pay the difference. You didn't know. Did I? Okay. I just figured I would pay the difference.

1:29:55Aiden:We are. Look, I mean, the 19 ,500 will be donated regardless.

1:29:59Atrioc:That is going to happen. And now I have to, actually I don't have, God damn it. I just realized the one person in this group who will be easy to harass for the money is you. And I already have your money. Aiden. Yeah. Getting a truck to fill out a form takes like a week. He's not going to send me$6 ,000. I'll send the cash.

1:30:17Aiden:I'm so responsible. Doug never even had to get, he just used his own money for me. That's how communicative I am. I think this was, this was fun though. It was really fun. I liked this. Yeah. I mean, it's fun this year. It's so funny because in a bad year, it would be so not fun right we had a dip in april we all went negative and then we came back

1:30:37Atrioc:through sheer force of will yeah that was our skill yeah uh let's end i we're basically we're basically done i want to end on one pretty important ai update that i think is interesting and we'll expand on it even more in our patreon episode if you want to hear more about that but i'm gonna hit real quick which is there's some updates on open ai chat gbt recently announced they're adding ads into the chat gpt product um so if you pull this up mr perry this was uh four days ago open ai in the coming weeks we plan to start testing ads in chat gpt free and go tiers um and so looking into the numbers of this a little bit the chat gpt they have said as of a few months ago that they have 700 million uh weekly users of those 35 million pay a subscription so 95 percent of chat gbt users are not paying for anything and that is obviously going to be a huge hit what's interesting about this is you know sam altman uh the ceo he he said oh we're going to test out ads and and what's going to uh let's see where's the thing we're starting to test this out here are principles it'll never affect the answers it gives you we'll keep your conversations private because he knows this is going to get an absolutely enormous amount of criticism and people have been quoting this particular clip from him if you pull it up which is i kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model

1:32:01Aiden:um i would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody on the world in the world like access to great services but if we can find something that doesn't do that i'd prefer that and they could not find something i was gonna say one year three months ago i don't i don't It is a last resort. Like I actually want to take this in good faith. It's like all of what he said in that clip could just be true, right? Like they are struggling. You have a massive product that is incredibly expensive. Most people who use it, use it for free. You need to monetize it somehow to like have the hope of having your company continue to operate in the future.

1:32:39Aiden:We've talked extensively about their financial obligations they have into the future, right? the huge bet this company is making on it becoming profitable eventually like everybody wants like are everybody involved in the project california's got a lot of water now uh i i just feel like that could be true and they're realized their back is against the wall financially and they have to introduce ads to the product i feel like that's just i think it is true i think that's just the admission from that clip yeah is that they are back against the wall and they need fucking money as we as we've been saying on the show like when they did Sora when they did um uh like you know other features they've had they've done like what deep research yeah but they had other things that

1:33:27Atrioc:were like um with all the images yeah yeah they've had a couple of features come out every now and then and it's like each one is clearly a play to try and make some money to try and find to monetize in some way. And each one has been obviously not up to the task of the gap that they owe and what they have. And so it's, this is the last thing. This is the last arrow in the quiver. We're going to put ads on all these millions of free users. And if that makes us enough money, then maybe we're good. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Like what they're doing as a business, does that make sense?

1:34:00They have, they've promised trillions. They don't have trillions. How do they get there? They have to figure that out now. There's no more time. The data centers are breaking ground. They can't afford them.

1:34:09Atrioc:Yeah. Some numbers that are interesting. So in the third quarter last year, so this is over three months, according to Microsoft, who's largely funding OpenAI, OpenAI lost$11.5 billion. That's quite a bit of money to lose. So the counter is that...

1:34:24Aiden:Dude, that's 11 spots on the board of peace.

1:34:28Atrioc:Yeah, Sam, could have stacked the board of peace with his homies. He could have stacked the board of peace. Microsoft is wasting their money on this OpenAI nonsense. If you assume, so again, 5%, about 35 million people are paying for a weekly subscription. That includes the$20 a month or the$200. So let's assume$25 on average from those 35 million people. That means they're making$875 million a month. That doesn't even include the business deals or the API side where people can use it directly, which are additional. So we could be super generous and say they're making a billion dollars a month.

1:35:00Atrioc:But that means, you know, again, they lost$11.5 billion in a quarter, even though they're making, let's say,$3 billion in revenue. And looking into those, my initial response to seeing these ads was like, OpenAI is fucking cooked. They said this is a last resort. They clearly are in their death throes because why else would you do this? And then started thinking about it. Google and Meta, who are wildly, wildly successful companies, are largely successful off the back of advertising revenue. Third quarter, the same quarter, last year, Google made$74 billion and MetaMate$50 billion off of advertising.

1:35:36Atrioc:So two of the most profitable companies in the world are making money because they serve ads to people. ChatGPT is one of the biggest products in the world and has 665 million people, arguably more depending on the most recent numbers, who would be down to watch ads possibly, probably. And so it could be an absolute money fountain for OpenAI. This could, I don't know, a little skeptical, but become absolutely wildly successful.

1:36:07Aiden:Can you poll? Isn't there polling data on people's overall view on Instagram ads and it's like positive or something? I remember reading this a long time ago. I'm just pulling this out of my ass. But I remember reading something about people actually having a net positive opinion about Instagram ads because of the degree of personalization. So people actually like on the whole like them. And it's like, if you're dealing with the amount of data that you have, I mean, this is like, this is also one of the fears of what these AI like chat bots were going to turn. They know a lot about it. It's like, they know so much about you and it's going to be repurposed to like sell you products.

1:36:52Aiden:You know, it's not lost on me that I have an Adobe Acrobat studio mug on the table right now. I understand, but it's, I just think like it, it feels like you cannot have a product that is this large for free and not monetize it somehow. You have to do this. Yeah. Or because everybody's not going to pay 20 bucks a month. Like I pay the 20 bucks a month plan or whatever, but not everybody's going to do that. Yeah. But the counter argument is that, you know, a service like YouTube took a long time to make money. Right. and they were able to do that because Google could float it. If OpenAI is desperate now, as we're in year like two, three of this AI build out and they're throwing ads in and Google doesn't have to do that with Gemini for fucking forever.

1:37:47I mean, for as long as they want. Like they have money. Then it -

1:37:52Aiden:Isn't it also, but they have no reason for the free, they have no reason not to. Am I crazy? like other like in the short term like out compete or offer an alternative version but even in like a five-year timeline i feel like there's no way gemini doesn't have ads on it for the free users especially when you consider the portion of their business that is ads already it's like why is that not the natural progression of where that goes well i agree that in in whatever medium term that eventually the free versions of this will have ads because they don't make any money you You can't piss away the money forever.

1:38:30Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a charity service, right? Yeah. They run a data center that costs billions to make. They're going to ask it a question. They're going to turn all those fucking things online. Yeah, it's going to cost money. But in the race period, the companies that can afford to not do it are going to have a huge advantage. And OpenAI is not one of those companies. They're burning through cash. So I don't know. I guess I'm more negative on it and on OpenAI in general. I just feel like I don't see... You know, there's a lot of things. Like, yeah, he had a similar quote about AI slot videos in Sora before they ended up doing it.

1:39:04Like, all the principles they have just seem to happen right up until they need the money. Then they put out, like, a blog post. Like, well, this is, we're going to do it creatively and smart. Then they plow right through. Then it doesn't really seem to work. Ads is the last resort. And I'm sure this will make some money. I'm not doubting that. But is it going to make the billions they need? Is it going to pay for the 1.5 trillion in commitments?

1:39:24Aiden:I think that's the actual question, right? is this step as their supposed last resort. Like I'm taking, I'm choosing to take what he said at face value, which implies that they haven't walked back anything. It's he explained the situation that they would need to do this. And now they're choosing to do it. The question is, is this enough to sustain the company's business going into the future?

1:39:48Atrioc:Yeah.

1:39:49Aiden:And I, you know, I have no idea. I guess it's like a wait and see, right?

1:39:54Atrioc:Yeah. they're they're really opening eye is very interesting to watch not only because chat gpt is in the cultural zeitgeist but also because they've been fairly consistently the ones who push out a thing first the ones who pushed out you know mainstream image generation first there you know that really became popular and took on sora 2 is like the ai video generator that the average normie who doesn't follow ai knows they know what sora is they're like oh funniest there's compilations of funniest Sora videos on, on YouTube. Um, either the first ones that did deep research, they're the first ones that did a personalization to you where it like memorizes things about you and can reference them.

1:40:33Atrioc:And this is also where they're putting in the first step. Oh, medical stuff. They're the first ones to like say, yeah, we're just going to, we're going to give medical advice and embrace that, which is still feels crazy to me. So they seem to consistently be the ones who put themselves out there first with a new feature and deal with the ramifications. yeah, it's like they are kind of the litmus test for the rest of the industry. I think how this goes is going to inform what Meta and Microsoft and Google and all these other places do. So I don't know. We'll see. It's strange. It's funny. Also, Sam Altman specifically mentioned the ads I like are on Instagram where I found stuff I otherwise never would have.

1:41:12Atrioc:So it's funny you called out Instagram. Yeah.

1:41:15Aiden:I mean, even anecdotally in my own life, people have like a pretty positive they talk pretty positively about instagram ads specifically and if there's this like weird thing where it's like everybody hates advertisements until they like melt into the the content you consume in a way that makes you want to buy the thing apparently this is a big issue on like tiktok right now is you know how you're supposed to disclose that things are advertisements, but a ton of people on Tik TOK are get ad deals for like certain products. And they just like, you know, maybe I get a certain type of, uh, like makeup and I'm an influencer on Tik TOK.

1:42:01Aiden:And I just like use the marked bottle of the thing and, you know, put it on my face clearly in the video as I go about my normal day. And I talk about the normal stuff that I talk about on my Tik TOK. Right. But I'm getting paid to use that. And I'm actually not disclosing it but i just use it all the time no one discloses anymore yeah and it's like no one is like policing or regulating that and it's like and no one but simultaneously nobody's complaining about it and then they just maybe go and buy the thing uh i think instagram ads are like more obviously marked but they're closer to that camp where it's like i actually kind of wanted to see that product that is like so suited to my niche interest um and i wonder if it's like people will cave on this over time because it will surface things that people want so badly because of the information it has about you.

1:42:46Aiden:I have no idea. We will see. But thank you for joining us on another week of Lemonade Stand. If you want to check out the extra episode we put out every week, you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand. Do an extra hour of the show every week. We also do a book club. I've been pushing. I'm about to push out the first fully recorded interview that I didn't mess up for the year. I interviewed a Serbian protester and talked to him for over an hour. He showed me some really interesting footage, gave me some interesting insight into what's going on over there. I'm going to be putting that on the second tier of our Patreon throughout the year, similar stuff like that.

1:43:25Aiden:Yeah.

1:43:26Atrioc:And related to ads, we are going to make a video talking in more depth about how we're thinking about sponsors and ads that we mentioned last week. If you would like more information about what goes on behind the scenes with this type of stuff, we will post about that.

1:43:38Aiden:yeah also to clarify that one won't be that'll be public that won't be like paywalled or anything yeah we might upload it on patreon but it will be something anybody can view you don't have to pay to watch that yes okay cool thanks for watching guys see you next week bye it's tax season and at lifelock we know you're tired of numbers but here's a big one you need to hear billions that's the amount of money and refunds the irs has flagged for possible identity fraud now here's another big number, 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed.

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