The War Is Back | Ep.072 Lemonade Stand 🍋

21:03It's a pretty binary thing, right? It could be weak, but if they can do it, or they can't do it. And if they can do it, you haven't really changed anything. Yeah, they're not using the stuff that they weren't using.

21:14Atrioc:And they are, anyway. And additionally, the thing that I found frustrating, as because this is asking for a lot more money on top of, we covered this in the show, but this is a$1 trillion military budget already that they've been given for this, this year. And on top of that, they're asking now for, as part of this help the Iran war extra funding package, included in this is$800 million for the National Guard and Patrol DC, a billion dollars for the Army Patrol Southern border, 900 million for boat strikes in the Caribbean, which is not, it's like, why is it part of the Iran war funding update?

21:51Many people asked this. Many senators asked this. And he said, we have to keep the momentum going. That's not an answer. Wait, hold on. Is there currently momentum in the Caribbean? I don't know.

22:01Aiden:The strikes on boats coming from Venezuela. I thought the Venezuela thing was done. I thought Marco Rubio was basically running the place. It's$900 million to be saved. It's$900 million to be saved. $900 million. $18 billion for munitions. $1.7 billion for recruiting more people. I did not set the GoFundMe. That's what I'm saying. The GoFundMe's got to be way bigger to help this out. And so that's where we're at with Iran. Well, that's the update. It's just, it is looking like, and I've said this word before, a quagmire. I'm getting real fucking Iraq and Afghanistan vibes, dude. I don't understand.

22:37How do you get out of this? What is the way out? What is the plan? I mean, what's weird to me is this feels worse

22:46Atrioc:than Iraq and Afghanistan, because in those cases, like, you know, America goes in and devastates these countries and then also devastates our own money, treasury, everything. Like, we waste all this stuff. And then the same thing is happening here, but then, like, the entire world is suffering from, like, oil shortages. Like, it feels worse. I mean, maybe it's just because we're in the moment and it's easy to be like, this is a disaster, obviously, but the ramifications of this, if this continues, like, if the result is there's a permanent toll on the Strait of Hormuz, that seems worse in many ways yeah it's it's frustrating i was genuinely hopeful for that one month ago um end of the war the the thing i thought it was a stupid idea but they're getting out of it iran's gonna have some advantage that that you've basically given them but like it's over shit's gonna flow and the world economy can breathe a sigh of relief but it's not happening and it doesn't look they can do it it's almost impossible to go back to the negotiating table now after last time it just doesn't make any sense unless some material reality changes for one of the two parties uh maybe maybe a midterm fear from trump's side or maybe some deeper economic crisis on the iran side if they can't ship oil maybe but like realistically they're both pretty entrenched and everyone the whole world has to suffer now for that i mean it's i don't know it seems bad kushner's gonna find a way don't you worry oh kush old cushion whitkoff they might they might figure it out so i can't tell you whether or not it's going to happen but that is the update on the iran war um support for this show comes from shopify i've been thinking of starting a new business okay some uh some alternative medicine techniques i've been learning about you've been really on this lately i've been on this there's a lot of different practices from a lot of different parts of the world that a lot of people don't know about i would like to write books to sell merch about this i have no idea where to do it i don't think your business is a good idea but But, and the but is important, I do think you could run that business quite well on Shopify.

24:48I don't think something's wrong with your head. I've got a cure for you. See, I don't want your cure. I don't trust his cure.

24:53Aiden:Yeah, I don't trust his cure. I don't want you to sell it. I want you to pick a normal product. You made mugs. The Doug Doug Mug Mug. The mugs, the mugs. Everybody liked that one. Yes. And you could sell that on Shopify. So if you have a normal product, you could use Shopify to run your small business. I don't want you to do that. If your business is better than Doug's, a great place to run it would be Shopify, which allows you to make your idea into a real business and sell things online. So go make it, Doug. No, don't. Thank you. I will.

25:23Atrioc:With Shopify, nothing stands between me and my idea in a real business. So I'm going to go make it one. Cha-ching! You can start free at Shopify.com slash lemonade. That's Shopify.com slash lemonade.

25:36Aiden:Just the mugs. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan,$15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending. Zero tears. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy.

26:07C terms.

26:08Aiden:There's a civil war happening in the Democratic Party.

26:11Atrioc:And if there's one place that that's playing out most clearly, it's in Michigan. A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that

26:18Aiden:could determine control of Congress in November.

26:21Atrioc:Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded E-word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability

26:34Aiden:concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking, where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum? Then in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle. The problem though, is that that model hasn't really accurately predicted our politics for a very long time. If Michiganders wanted moderate, why would they have elected Donald Trump twice? Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is making the progressive case for America first, and he's trying to settle the Democrats ideological battle in the process. This is about the many versus the money. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually.

27:08Aiden:Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. But you had a carry on story because the war doesn't stop in just the Middle East. We also have a deep. We have a more a more entrenched neighbor to the north. I would argue a more pressing war to this nation. A greater threat. because it's right there yeah and literally hanging looming and a notoriously like warlike people the canadians who are some sort of militaristic hat yeah exactly and they look down and they they just they're always ready for and carney's getting a little out of pocket have you noticed that i mean he's making threats has he he's buying he buys mark carney The leader of Canada has been making threats.

27:58Aiden:They're buying Swedish fighter jets, Swedish fighter jets, and they said they're going to use them against the U.S. I don't think that's the last part. I got that. I got that from a different Max Fisher video. Swedish fighter jets. What the frick's going on, Canada? IKEA instructions. Okay, so there's some exciting news in trade relationships between the United States and Canada, and Trump announced a new round of 50 % tariffs on many Canadian goods. These things like wine, hockey sticks, cement, dairy products, plywood, paper, furniture. Albeit these goods only comprise like less than 10 % of the total goods that are being traded between the U.S.

28:44Aiden:and Canada. But you might hear that and be wondering, didn't the Supreme Court just rule that Trump can't unilaterally set tariffs? I vaguely recall that, yes. How is this possible? Which was my first question. And apparently Trump has taken it upon himself to use a niche section of the Tariff Act of 1930 that says if it is in retaliation to countries that are discriminating against US commerce uniquely compared to other countries, Canada, then you can put those tariffs into place. So what Canada did that was very different from the rest of the world, Canada, when Trump had put the initial rounds of tariffs in over the course of last year, earlier part of this year, they and China were two of the only countries to distinctly push back and apply tariffs of their own, at least in a prominent way.

29:49Aiden:And because Carney or the Canadian government chose to do this, Trump is trying to punish Canada for doing so. Like, you stepped to me, I can now use the provision in this law to apply these new tariffs against you where I otherwise cannot right now. And there's all these issues of, like, the previously applied tariffs to a bunch of different countries getting refunded and the controversy around that. And this has not been, like, tested in court. The assumption is that there will be legal challenges internally in the U.S. of whether or not he can apply tariffs in this way. But obviously, Canadians not pumped about this to begin with.

30:36Aiden:But I think it is a lot of people noting that since this court ruling against him and his ability to put out tariffs, he's still finding ways to work around the rules and apply these as - Yeah, it seems like such bullshit, bro. It seems like you could just find the 1847 Act Against Chewing Gum. Be like, well, someone chewed gum in Canada.

30:54Atrioc:Dude, when the Founding Fathers made that law in 1930, they knew that we would have a beef with Canada where they would, unprompted, throw tariffs on us.

31:02Aiden:Well, 1930, that wasn't long after the War of 1812. Yeah. So there was a lot of... There's still beef. There was still some simmering resentment. Something's sitting there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

31:12Atrioc:Okay, I will say that when we talked about the ruling from the Supreme Court that he can't do the tariffs, That's just that he can't do it on executive orders. But even then, there are other ways to make tariffs. It was never like, oh, tariffs are done. It's supposed to be a power of Congress. Isn't that the... Yes.

31:29Aiden:The idea that he cannot make the unilateral decision to apply a tariff, and he is still choosing to do so through the provision in this act.

31:36Atrioc:I'm blanking on the name, but there's another way that you can. It's basically the one where he can just at will throw this out and just say, this is law now. Now he has to go through these commerce processes to get it approved, and it has to be more narrow. So this is what would the expected outcome of the Supreme Court ruling, which is that he would go find the like five or 10 or whatever things where you can apply tariffs. It's just more restrictive. I mean, so it's you know, it's better. Right. But obviously, this is still kind of kind of dumb.

32:02Aiden:There's a couple things I think are kind of insane about this. uh one this is happening at a time when the previous trade agreement that he had with canada and mexico uh is is coming to an end i believe like that there there's a the time frame for that trade agreement was coming up and this applying these tariffs is a part of like changing that agreement uh what's interesting to me is like that agreement was set by him like it was what was meant to replace NAFTA, which is what we had gone by since the end of the 90s NAFTA came into play. And he's basically overriding an agreement that he oversaw and saying, like, the old me was dumb.

32:48Aiden:Here's these new... That's called progress. That's called learning from your past mistakes. Maybe learning from his mistakes. Yeah. Maybe learning from his mistakes. You can't be stuck in one persona for your whole life. Learning from Canada's mistakes, really. So when this whole 51st state rhetoric, like the tariffs are getting applied to Canada last year was going on. You guys might remember the backlash from Canadians. There's been a huge dip in Canadian tourism to the United States, for one. They stopped buying our alcohol. And then, yeah, a bunch of provinces banned the import of U.S. alcohol.

33:19Aiden:They put quotas on American-made cars and also banned the import of certain types of dairy products, like cheese in certain areas or tariff cheese. and these were all of the responses that Trump was mad about. Like, you can't do this to us. We're going to hit you back even harder. What I think is wild is in this New York Times article I was reading, it mentioned that in 2022, 83 % of Canadians saw the U.S. as a good partner, just like in a general sense. What do you think that number is now? I'm hoping it's higher. I'm hoping they respect his firm but fair attitude. We hosted that house party for the World Cup.

34:04Atrioc:We're bros now.

34:05Aiden:Yeah. So it's actually 89%. They went up. They said firm but fair. No, it's 35%. It's falling to 35 % in basically a three and a half year timeline. That's so insane. I know. It is absolutely insane. Well, wait. Listen to this clip. This is going to show you that he's got the right rhetoric to get Canada back on our side. Can you realize? The Canada terrorist. What are those in response to the wildfires? We hear this?

34:34Atrioc:That's separate. We're looking at that separate.

34:36Aiden:And what is your anything Canada? It's only responsive the way they've treated our farmers and our people. Canada's been very, very tough on us over the years. For many years. And no other president's done anything about it. I love Canada. I love the people of Canada. many friends that live in Canada, but their leadership from Trudeau to the current leadership, I mean, in all fairness to them, they need us to survive.

35:02Atrioc:Without us, there's no way they can survive. But they've been very... I think when you say that, you're basically asking people to say, fuck you. You know what I'm saying? It's like you're... Human rational response is to be like, fuck you. They will do whatever we can to not be dependent on you in any way.

35:23Aiden:It's the encouragement of our new president.

35:30Like if China, if Xi Jinping went on the air and said, America needs us to survive. The instinctual response is like, well, fuck you. We're going to try and do whatever we can to not use Chinese goods or whatever. I would lay down and submit. It's just a human thing. I don't know why. It's like the most obvious response to this type of rhetoric.

35:52Aiden:My litmus test for this is my grandfather. He is traditionally conservative by Canadian standards. He's an Alberta oil man. He's like, get the energy going. He doesn't like the granola British Columbia people. He is a true Calgarian, if I may. and he used to be like I don't like Trump but I get where he's coming from like type of deal dude he hates Trump and he kind of hates the US now he's full boycotting he won't come to visit anymore he refuses and he's not the only one that has this sort of mentality and this is coming from I think these are the things that contribute to Carney being pretty popular right now.

36:43Aiden:Carney is like, I think he has like the highest approval rating of any centrist leader in the world right now. And I think it's because, it's functionally because of this. Like, not to say that there's no like policies being turned around in Canada or if there's nothing like substantial to like maybe point out. But I think ultimately he stands as this figure opposed to Trump in a way that people, regardless of their political affiliation in Canada, seem to stand behind. It's because he exists, Carney gets to be the guy who is combating him. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me, this is kind of a weird tangent, but it reminds me of Iran in a way where if you flashback to before he got involved, like the Iranian regime was remarkably unpopular.

37:29There was like mass, mass protests. There was economic collapse. You know, like they were - They did like mass slaughter of the people in January. And now their popularity is up. They're entrenched in power. They have a new source of funding. His involvement is only emboldening and helping the opposition of him because he's such an unlikable and short-term focused guy. The deal-making is so bad. I didn't read the art of the deal. Maybe I'm missing the next step of this process, but it's not working. There's a lot of game left to be played.

38:02Atrioc:We've got two and a half more years. It's getting me thinking. I like the idea.

38:07Aiden:If not four more after that. The whole first term, the gap in between, the first year and a half, it's all been laning phase. It's a really long laning phase. And we're entering. We got this late. We are going for the 60-minute baron to win.

38:31Atrioc:Dude, yeah, you get beat up early game. But, okay, you know, real quick, open-ended question that I'm starting to think about a little bit. You know, I, at this point, I don't think he's been a very good president. And I would also... And I'm... I'm thinking of changing my vote next time. I've voted for him three times now, but I swear to God... I was a three-time. I was a three-time. In 28, when he runs again, I might not give him my fourth. Might not. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm starting to wonder, sincerely, like at this... so much of Trump has been like, God, this is insane, but it'll end at some point.

39:08Atrioc:And the assumption that most other people around the world would understand, this is insane, most Americans aren't like this, we'll move on. Sorry, I'm burping a lot. I wonder why. I can't imagine why. And I'm starting to wonder. It's so funny to say most Americans aren't like this. You're shrunk your seventh. And as a hot-blooded, God-fearing American, I am starting to wonder, is in two and a half years, let's say we elect a normal person, Yeah. And it's never even know. Right. And it's not this like I mean, just truly baffling level of global chaos and just destruction of our entire reputation.

39:42Atrioc:Will people forgive us? Are we locked in this forever? And I mean this partially selfishly that like when I go abroad somewhere, I can right now be like, no, Trump sucks. Right. And there's enough anger towards Trump in America that people probably recognize that a lot of Americans don't like this. But at some point, at some point, are people just like, no, that fucking sucks so bad. America just kind of blows for the next decade or two or three.

40:07Aiden:I think the reactions from like that. I go back to that Carney speech he made at the economic forum, like how long ago, where he talks about, oh, this is a sign that we need to enter a new era where we as this block of like middle powers in the world are no longer reliant on. on the United States. And even if we get a better person into power, I think it has raised all these alarm bells about what dependence on the U.S. means and the idea that in the future, even if the next two presidents are perfectly good, perfectly competent in an international sense, you've exposed all these vulnerabilities in the relationship for the next time a figure similar to him gets elected.

41:00Aiden:And there's an electorate in the U.S. that can elect a guy like this. So if I'm concerned about all of the flaws that have been pointed out to me by him exposing them over the past years of our relationship, then I probably want to shore those things up either way. I have a hard time seeing things going back to this like traditional US led world order after him because he's just exposed so many of the problems with it. You know, regardless of how you feel about America's dominance on the global stage. I think that's just like the reality. Yeah, fair point.

41:42Atrioc:It's like in a neighborhood, like if everybody left their front door unlocked because you've never had a problem and then your neighbor just turns into a psycho for a year, breaks in every day. Yeah. And he's like, I'm sorry. I'm like back on, I'm on a medication again. It's all like, you're probably going to keep locking your door. Even if the guy moves out, you're probably going to keep locking your door now. Yeah.

42:00Aiden:It just probably shakes what you worry about for the future. And that's not to say like nothing could be rebuilt, but. Yeah. I mean, I think it'll take time and you have to do things right. I think on like an individual level though. I mean, I think the people that you'd want to interact with are not going to judge you as a human being based on the leader of your...

42:21Atrioc:That's what I'm worried about is like it's getting so insane that it might be like that.

42:25Aiden:Are you talking about more that than what I'm talking about? No, I mean, it was open-ended.

42:30Atrioc:I both mean on the broad level, but also the individual level. Like, are American individuals now going to be assumed to be okay with this or complicit in this?

42:40Aiden:I think that part will blow over faster because I think a lot of the rhetoric that I feel like I interact with now is almost like pity. Do you know what I mean? Like there's a sense of anger, frustration a lot of the time, for sure. But it's like rarely, it's not directed at me as an individual as much. It's more to do like, it fucking sucks. Like what's going on with you? Are you okay? I feel like it's more in that direction. And as soon as like a new, more competent leader and things are trending in a better direction, that happens. I feel like people will quickly recognize that. But I don't think that'll be realized in more consequential geopolitical decisions.

43:29Yeah, TBD. I mean, we don't know where this goes. I do think, yeah, how this thing plays out is such a big question mark. Iran. Iran, yeah. I think it's such a big question mark for how... Because this... If I'm being real for just a second, like... You know, Russia and China are both helping Iran, and the Ukraine war is still going. It just feels like this is all getting so big. And it would be great if it was trending towards less conflict and not more, because as it gets bigger, it becomes more and more, like, real global shifts in blocks that are, like, cut apart.

44:08Aiden:This is, okay, so that thing I mentioned about China cutting its demand for oil in half earlier, right? one of the explanations for why they did this because them choosing to do this alleviated a lot of pain in the rest of the world wasn't necessarily just a decision that was beneficial to themselves sure and uh the argument for like why they would do this is if they can show their resilience through a long period where oil is scarce uh it shows to the rest of the world that they're more capable of navigating the conflict with taiwan because in the event that they were to invade taiwan one of the first places that is expected to be blockaded by the u.s is the Strait of Malacca.

45:00Aiden:And because so much oil is trafficked through there. And if they can show that blocking that straight doesn't actually mean that much, it's like this giant flex that when eventually we do invade Taiwan or whatever happens, you guys do not have this lever over us anymore. And I feel like it's this increasing sense of like people are becoming more or not people countries are becoming more fearful and isolationist and getting ready for some greater conflict that's what it feels like that's what it feels like it feels like you're you're just you're it's like you hear the storm cloud the birds are flying by it's like it feels like the the shit's coming that's honestly what it feels like the more you you see all these pieces moving but we don't know anyway uh well speaking of china yeah speaking of china Actually, this is a really interesting story.

45:58I'd love to ask you about this.

45:59Atrioc:Yeah, so we want to talk about a pretty bombshell new Chinese AI model release. And before we do that, I really need to go to the bathroom. So I'm going to...

46:08Aiden:Dude, he has so many cans. That's so crazy. Dude, is he actually... He's on seven cans. Audio listeners, I am looking at a Diet Coke graveyard that Doug has just built during this podcast. it's so funny bro he just has like the horse electrolytes he just finds he'll do things to his body for the good of podcasting and he doesn't have to can I say that I'm wearing my like goofy little it would be way funnier if we made him do it I'll wear like my goofy little outfit from like the yard episode of the day be like hot I'm wearing it on lemonade stand now he comes in and harms himself you had the opportunity to change you just like dressing like that Like this?

46:57Yeah, you just think you're a little fancy laugh. You think I'm a cute little schoolboy? You're like the little Canada Update schoolboy. Should I do something bad? I'm surrounded. I'm surrounded, dude. I have the schoolboy and the fucking guy chugging Diet Cokes. Oh, no. Sorry. What's going on with Kimmy?

47:19Aiden:Are you going to paddle me? Cut the show. The whole show. This is who you chose to do the show with, by the way.

47:29Aiden:Kimmy! What's going on with Kimmy?

47:31Atrioc:Because I would love to hear it. Four years ago, chat GBT releases. No, hold on.

47:42Aiden:I don't know if we're cutting this. So much of this episode is Doug coping with the amount of diet coke he's ingested. And it's so obviously destroying his body. it's destroying the bees or yeah now there isn't i walk into it every time i walk into it every time

48:07Atrioc:ladies and gentlemen america has dominated the ai race so far and i would say that the american economy nay the world economy has depended on it now a bombshell happened exactly in january 2025 because that is when DeepSeek R1 debuted. This is a Chinese company that released an open source model that was extraordinarily good. Not quite as good as the very best American ones, but basically they're dirt cheap. You can run it on your own system. It was a bombshell moment. The NVIDIA stock value dropped$600 billion in a single day. Everybody starts asking the question, do we need way less compute than we thought?

48:47Atrioc:Do the American companies actually have an advantage? now a little lesser known thing is that on that exact same day by coincidence a different chinese ai lab called moonshot released their own model kimmy 1.5 that they thought would be a cool new thing and they just got swept under the rug by deep seek and like all of their users left for deep seek they got ruined and so they've been cooking ever since it's been a year and a half they launch various updates over time revenue starts to go up they're doing well and then on July 16th, Kimmy K3 released. K3 is a reasoning model as well as having the harness.

49:24Atrioc:It's just as capable as models like Claude Code or Codex, the ones that people have been very excited about, except it is about a third of the price.

49:34Aiden:Do you think Kimmy, you know, the reason, Kimmy could reason that this is not a good thing

49:43Atrioc:to do to your body? Cheers to that, Ian. don't open okay so perry you can pull up kimmy.com and why don't you search is it healthy to have nine sodas in 45 minutes yeah that's what the chinese models say about this what the chinese models have to say um according to our dear leader xi jinping if you're if you're american kimmy tells you that it's fine so if you go to uh first question do you have bs if you go to a page like llm stats.com there's a lot of sort of comparisons between these two really the the the most important thing to take away is this new model, Kimmy 3, is better than every single model except the very high-end Claude and OpenAI models.

50:22Atrioc:And even then, it beats them in certain categories. It is a third of the price and basically as good. They're just very, very, very close and way cheaper. Yes. Which is very spooky. Yes. For American models. Yes. There are some genuine innovations that they've done. We can get to that if you all are interested in terms of what technically they are doing. But let's talk about what the fallout of this has been. Okay? So first off, Moonshot, again, is one of maybe like eight Chinese AI labs that are competitive. Other ones include like Alibaba and DeepSea, ZAI. But this immediately makes Moonshot like the hottest kid on the block, right?

50:56Atrioc:Both in China and globally with AI. Daily sales go up. Most popular kid on the block? Isn't that a phrase?

51:05Aiden:No, it's the hottest kid. I don't think it's the hottest kid on the block. The hottest thing on the... Whatever. Whatever the phrase is. Kimmy is the hottest kid. I don't know. You're being weird about it. You're right. Sorry, schoolboy. You're being weird. Okay. All right.

51:17Atrioc:Aiden's classmate, Kimmy, is considered the most popular at the school dance right now. Popular at the dance. Okay. Sorry. Popular. Daily sales immediately go up 6x. They got so popular they had to stop people from signing up. I saw that. That's how popular their business is. So the Chinese companies and broadly Chinese investors are elated because the estimate for many people, including the top AI labs, was like, oh, we're six to 12 months ahead of China, like our AI labs are. And now that's maybe three months, maybe less. It's hard to know. The investor Kai-Fu Lee said, quote, open AI and Anthropic will be the iPhone.

51:53Atrioc:The Chinese models will be the Android. So that means the American clothes models will make the most money, but the Chinese models will get more market share. So that was really interesting. China is elated about this. America is freaking fuck out. So first off, big sell-off of tech stocks the same thing happened with deep seek released right everybody's suddenly going wait a minute uh is pouring all of our money into this industry going to work if china can release a model that undermines a lot of what we're doing there's also been a lot of movement now within the trump administration because so much of this whole thing is underpinned by beating china so a couple things bloomberg reported that sam altman is visiting with the trump administration next week and they're going to try to like propose a sort of safety review board Trump's saying, oh, maybe we'll do an independent like reviewer who makes sure that the leading models get out.

52:43Atrioc:Because all of a sudden the idea of what happened a month ago where the White House stops Anthropic or OpenAI from leasing their top models is now maybe a national security threat of like, oh, we're following behind China if we stop you. So they're simultaneously trying to stop regulation or do things like banning it. So per Axios, quote, the Trump administration is showing signs it could ban cutting edge Chinese models, a momentous move that could lock in dominance by open AI and anthropic. Behind the scenes, apparently the Commerce Department, NSA and various White House people have all been talking behind the scenes about banning or putting restrictions on Chinese models.

53:20Atrioc:The previous AI advisors, including David Sachs, kind of pushed back against that. but those guys are out and they've been trying to cycle in new people for to kind of like be the chief ai advisor policy so they're now strongly considering maybe we just stop it all together and then scott besant uh secretary treasury is talking about ip theft and saying suggesting the idea that well maybe the only reason china is able to make these models because they're just copying ours the idea being that you train an ai that is trained off of whatever claude says or whatever OpenAI says. But he said, quote, this administration supports open source models.

53:58Atrioc:What we do not support is IP theft. If we see that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we will have the ability to sanction them. There is nothing more

54:08Aiden:ironic than complaining about IP theft in this context.

54:13Atrioc:Yeah. I can give a counter to that, but yeah, it's certainly ironic. One quote he said, companies that are using Chinese models should have to disclose that to their customers. Quote, you can't use counterfeit goods so this is a this is a big it's a big deal it feels like every couple months a new chinese model comes out that everybody's like holy shit and then it and then it swings over to american company has new thing that everybody's freaking out and it's been doing this cycle for at least a year but the gap's getting closer right the uh the timeline the between the great new thing and then the i would say i would say that the so if it's like a sine wave and it keeps swinging between america's on top and then china's on top or let's say open source is going to be the dominant thing.

54:55Atrioc:The speed at which it is swinging between those is speeding up, right? Because model releases are coming out faster on both the open source side and the closed source side. So it's like it's the swing is happening every week or two.

55:09Aiden:Do you guys know how funding for these Chinese AI companies works? Like is this, are there Chinese VCs that are putting money into this? is just the ownership of the company that is self-funding it? Is it subsidies? Is it investment from the government? How do these companies... I think it's all of the above. There's different groups doing it. Alibaba is the Amazon of China. They have a ton of money. They're throwing tons of money into AI. Not as much as a meta or a... And then there's the... DeepSeek was the spinoff arm of a Chinese hedge fund. It's a side project they did that ended up being big.

55:48So it's different groups spending different amounts.

55:51Atrioc:But yeah, and it's similar thing where they go make companies and then they get a certain valuation and they're raising money through VCs and all this. So it's, you know, it's more restrictive of a market than our VC one, but it's still roughly the same. So like this company Moonshot, they have an interesting background. The creator is 33. uh he is like a child math prodigy in china but came here studied at carnegie melon then worked at meta and google's ai labs and then instead of staying went home to found his own company and so there's also people complaining about how hard it is for like immigrants to stay in america now because we were like losing people who are going home and making massive competitors like this um so he you know he went to china and basically started it with 300 people from like a top university um and he appears to be this like kind of genius guy and they they became unicorn status like worth a billion within like a month or something like that i forget the exact timeline but it's it's similar when you read about their market as to ours just with more the government

56:55Aiden:can step in and do whatever it's interesting there's kind of a tie in there with when we went to china and hearing people's opinions about uh desire to move abroad and foreign education Like people now, when they go, if they go study in a foreign country, there used to be more of a desire for people to stay in those countries to continue their career. But as quality of life in China has improved, especially over the last 20 years, the number of people that if they do choose to study abroad, the question of that decision is already a little more different than it used to be in the past. If they do choose to go study abroad, they're more likely to come back and go work in China because of the opportunity and the quality of life in China that they feel they have there now versus what it was like in the past.

57:46Atrioc:Yeah. Yep. And we kept talking to people who said they have no desire to visit America, which is just kind of like, it was just not what we expected. You know, like people are just like, no, I never want to leave China. Yeah.

57:58Aiden:And to hear them talk about how that like did not used to be that way. Yeah. The, so, okay. One question I did have about this, if the accusations of like IP theft are accurate, right? And these models are built mostly off of the success and like technical innovation of the American companies that are willing to spend more of the money to sort of lead the charge. Say we get to this point where the American companies are largely no longer willing to make the investment or put in the time because of the financial situation that they are in. Does that mean that the Chinese industry loses a lot of its ability to progress or innovate?

58:44Aiden:Or not really? Like their products are able to continue on their own. Is there any insight into that?

58:53Atrioc:That is the debate is basically how much is the Chinese success of companies like DeepSeek or Kimmy from them copying American companies or not. And that's open ended. So some people, you know, like Trump, the Trump admin is suggesting is like they're just stealing our IP. They're just distilling our models. But then there's people. So I was reading about, you know, the tech that Kimmy made for this, for example, how they compress context so that you can have longer form sessions, work sessions. and that is just genuine innovation that they've made. There's also kind of a thing where arguably copying the output of another model is becoming less and less valuable.

59:30Atrioc:Like three years ago, these models really were like autocomplete. That's not really what's happening anymore. There's many layers on top of this and a lot of the product when you talk about an AI, even now when you go to ChatBT and ask it something, it's like agents spinning off of agents and then you have like these harnesses that are spinning off different skills and utilizing things like browser search. there's a lot you're now building both the fundamental ai at the bottom and you're building the stuff on top of it that coordinates everything what that means is it's harder to copy all of that you when you go talk to claude you don't get to see everything that's going on under the hood because they've been building this up over time so the pushback against the irony around stealing definitely these ais are fundamentally based off stolen data but for you know a year two years now most of the developers of AI have been moving beyond get more stolen data, and now it is much more how do we coordinate the fundamental models that are there.

1:00:24So you could argue that there's real innovation happening

1:00:28Atrioc:on how you choose to utilize these things, and that is probably harder to copy. But that's the debate. Are they copying or not? I don't think that's the debate only because at the end of the day, the consumer doesn't care. Here's a quote. Let me rephrase that. It is an academic debate that the user does not care about. Yeah. They don't give a shit. He doesn't give a shit. At the end of the day, they want the best thing for the lowest cost. Here's a, you can pull this up. This is a, I just found this out of context, but this is what Ford is doing right now. They're flying four to five Chinese EVs to Detroit like a year and they're distilling them.

1:01:02You know what I'm saying? They're breaking them down. That's just what a competitor is going to do to try and catch up. I have zero doubt that everything they could try to take from a copy of Claude, they're doing to try and make their models better. And if they lead in something, people in America are going to try to do the same thing. That's what businesses are going to do, whether they say it or not, whether they hide it or not. And so it all just feels very academic. It feels like silly because at the end of the day, there's countries outside of America and China, and they're going to pick the model that they can get the best thing for the lowest cost.

1:01:34That's the more real thing, which is that this is just existentially scary for these two incredibly well-funded but not profitable companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, that have been dumping trillions of dollars and need to be able to make a return. And if you make all the innovations in the world and then businesses use a cheaper alternative, you're fucked. And so I think that's where the pressure is coming from. I think they are lobbying, essentially, the government to start doing things like review and pressure on shutting down Chinese models. And they need to make it so that there's only a few options because if there's not these options, they are fucked.

1:02:13I think Claude is genuine innovation. It's a really cool thing. I've used it for cool things. But my God, at that cost, a lot of businesses are going to be looking elsewhere. They're just way more expensive. So yeah, I don't know. I think that's the question here. And I don't know that... Here's what I don't know. It's like how much can you even control this with regulation? The user doesn't know what model you used if you have like a wrapper on top of it. I'm a business, and if I could use Kimmy, who would even stop me? How would they even know? Are they tracking traffic?

1:02:48Aiden:Yeah, I feel like there's the fundamental question of digital regulation. Anything that's digital is so challenging.

1:02:57Atrioc:Real quick, if you're talking about large companies, like you at home running this, no. Tiny mom and pop shop, no. But if, for example, Microsoft or Google, who are the hyperscalers who host these models, start offering it on sale, that's where the majority of usage is going to come from. And they'd be too scared to go over. Right, because then the government would obviously know if Microsoft is selling to customers the ability to use Kimi K3. So you wouldn't be able to stop everybody, but you could stop the big players. The government does have real leverage here that I agree. I don't think it's good for the market for them to do that.

1:03:33Atrioc:But given what the admin has done so far, I would not be surprised at all if we hear about sanctions on Chinese models soon, literally just to protect the American companies. The thing is, like, that's what I'm saying is because the world market isn't just these two countries, even if China says no American models or America says no Chinese models, like right now it's happening with EVs. Every other country in the world is choosing, right? They're choosing where to buy EVs, and they're going to choose as they make their businesses, where do I get digital intelligence? And if they can get it so much cheaper, it almost doesn't matter.

1:04:07Even if you were able to regulate it in America, you'd have to regulate it across Europe and South America. That's the bigger question they're not ready for. All this regulation stuff feels like you're delaying the inevitable that comes when you're not competitive on cost or quality.

1:04:24Aiden:As time passes, America's power through the relative size of its consumer market is just going to continue to decline. It's just not as big as the rest of the world combined. What if, okay, I have a question. What if we taught Kimi... Sorry, just locked eyes with his tenth Coke. What if we taught Kimmy to trade stocks?

1:04:50Atrioc:What model would you use if you were trading stocks? Hey, hey, segue. This is a very short story, and I don't even know how much. You segued that in the most serious way. I thought you were enjoying a really personal anecdote.

1:05:00Aiden:And my grandmother died. I don't know whether you'd use Kimmy or ChadGBT or Claude for this, but it turns out a lot of Wall Street head funds are beginning to use AI when trading stocks. They're using AI to summarize instantly news data and transfer that into actionable things to do with stocks. So basically, like, if an article came out that said Google's CEO was hit by a bus, then maybe they would go, this is probably a sell signal. I think that's a buy. Whatever it is. I don't know. But the idea is, like, it's analyzing news.

1:05:39a unique quirk of that is starting to be discovered. So this is a paper that just came out from the University of Liechtenstein about adversarial news and lost profits manipulating headlines. Here's the key idea of it. Let's say we have Lemonade Stand Incorporated, okay? And there's news coming out that Aiden did something terrible. Whoa. Lemonade Stand Incorporated fires Aiden because blah, blah, blah. Whatever. That's the title. You can't find me. That's in my contract. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's the title. And so they want, so the AI is supposed to ingest that and then turn it into actionable data.

1:06:18But here's the thing. Technically, you could write lemonade stand using, how do you say this? Cyrillic or acrylic letters? How do you say this? Cyrillic. Cyrillic letter. You could use Cyrillic letters, the Unicode where you go like alt, one, two, three, four, and it makes a zero that looks exactly the same as an O.

1:06:33Atrioc:Yeah. and the ai can't read that instead of saying lemonade stand or in this case alphabet it sees like dot dot dot star star hhb it sees it doesn't see the word and so it ignores it as a as a functional trading pattern and so news articles are being written to dodge ai scraping where bad news is written with random characters changed to be Cyrillic, and good news is written in full English. And so when they parse it, the only thing that comes out is good news. It's good. It's a natural evolution. Wait, wait.

1:07:13Aiden:I'm so confused. What motivation would the authors of these articles have to do that? Are they getting paid on the back end to do things that benefit these companies? Because everything gets scraped, you could also publish this yourself as like a blog or whatever. If you have any sort of – Sure. Like a company that's been doing something similar to this I think is – maybe it's Coinbase. Coinbase has been publishing on their main website a blog every single day talking about how great – I don't know. It's writing it in a way that he picked up for AI search results about how Coinbase is the best place to trade crypto stocks.

1:07:51And then when you Google that, you basically get something trained on that that gives you the top thing. Go check out Coinbase. So that's the idea. This is just people evolving to the adaptation of AI.

1:08:01Atrioc:So this is like a company. If they need to post something that's negative and they don't want it to show up in search results. Yes. Like a press release. Okay. So they obfuscate bad news in a way that, wow, AI scraping won't catch it. AI scraping won't catch it. And it's instant because this stuff gets published and it's instantly the newswire picks it up and people are trying to trade on it. And so they're trying to like change the trading such that like here you can see like with different letters highlighting like Google shares rally after earnings beat and the company faces severe losses and layoffs.

1:08:34The red part could be removed from the scraping. And it's just an interesting adaptation to this world. I don't know what will happen next, but I thought it was a funny paper to show what's going on with AI trading. That's really the stock update on this one. I don't have a deeper thought, but I could transition to another stock story. Wait, wait, hold on.

1:08:55Atrioc:Well, unless it's the truth social because it's super relevant. No. What's going on with truth social? Oh, dude. Okay. This is genuinely one of the most corrupt things. Oh, we covered this on Patreon, but let's talk about it. Okay, real quick then. Truth social, which is Trump's Twitter of choice. he posts incredibly consequential tweets such as saying it's liberation day in america before announcing all the tweets and his tweets on truth so his truths massively affect the market right and now truth social the company is going to sell to wall street firms faster access to the truth social posts which means if you're a wall street firm that uses these posts to trade you can pay extra so that you get to see what trump is posting about in the economy and in the world news before anybody else a 100 000 fee to get trump's truths milliseconds earlier which can matter i at first i was like that doesn't sound helpful and apparently since so much trading is algorithmic now like that is the difference yeah no they have to pay it basically what i was reading it's like they they would be at a huge disadvantage to not to given how impactful his tweets have been in the past year and a half and so it's like the only way for true social to make money because nobody uses the website other than Trump.

1:10:12The only thing of value to have is the president announces shit on there that's globally impactful. For a couple more years. He's gonna die soon.

1:10:23Atrioc:Could we have Trump insider trade on Polymarket to fund the war so we don't have to raise taxes? That's an interesting idea. I wish we'd been doing that because there's been a lot of insider trading and I don't know where it's been going. And if we could put that towards the war effort, We might be able to get this thing funded. Yeah, yeah. I'll keep going on a quick stock story. Tesla, big stock we've talked about many times. Elon Musk, our worst-for-trillionaire, no longer a trillionaire. Tesla is having its earnings soon, and it's pretty important, impactful earnings for Tesla. People have been asking, shareholders of Tesla have been wondering, hey, what the hell is going on?

1:10:58You're focusing on SpaceX. Remember us? Remember your first love? Like, we got shares. Let's keep going. And they have this thing. It's open investor questions. And you vote based on the number of shares you have to put a question into Elon's queue at the earnings. Now, I don't know how many averages getting through, but it's not that many. So the top questions matter a lot because if you get down the list, it's not going to get to you. And right before this earnings, which is about to happen, two softball questions appeared at the top with massive amounts of shares, more than like everyone else combined, putting them in.

1:11:35So it's either him or someone close to him put too easy to answer questions at the top. Now, the next, all the questions after that from actual shareholders are like, Tesla has missed short-term guidance on RoboTaxi three earnings, three earnings reports in a row. From 50 % coverage of USA by end of 2025 to most recently seven new cities in the first half of 26. What is keeping Tesla back from accomplishing these short-term goals they've set for themselves? Like that was one of the most, that's probably the most upvoted from regular investors, but it is now being shoved down the list by two out of nowhere, last minute, one shareholder softball questions to reward long-term Tesla retail shareholders for their loyalty.

1:12:11Can you commit to achieving at least half the goals outlined in 2025 compensation plan before considering any offers to acquire or merge Tesla? They are all, all the questions are the same theme, which is like, where's robot taxis? Where's Optimus robots? And please don't merge Tesla with SpaceX. I tell you fucking Karen's dude. let him just do his job for a little bit you don't have to ask him every single year single earnings they do they're on his ass bro nobody's more on his ass than tesla shareholders when you

1:12:43Aiden:have a boss who's breathing down your neck yeah nobody enjoys that that's true it's harder to work yeah yeah how how is he supposed to get work done if people are pestering him and i do think the world collectively should give you on a break for once yeah he's been on you know when your boss

1:12:57Atrioc:shows up at the office once every three months and asks if you've done any work. Fucking let up. And he asks a question of whether any of your promises are even close to being fulfilled. Disgusting. Disgusting. But I don't suppose it matters to him too much. He can kind of softball this one because SpaceX is a larger majority of his wealth by a lot. And I've heard that there's a new chair that Trump is sitting on in Washington, D.C.

1:13:25Aiden:The Fed chair. Oh, what's going on? Well, Kevin Warsh, this is a short, short story, but it was an interesting little bit of background about him that I did not know. He's rich as fuck, that's what I know. About what the expectation is for this new era of the Federal Reserve in the country, which sets interest rates that have a large influence on the rest of the American economy. So apparently a big thing with Kevin Warsh is his insistence that Fed communication changes from how it's been for a long time. So every quarter, the Fed chair will do this update on what the new Fed interest rate is going to be going forward.

1:14:14Aiden:Another overbearing boss. Another. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You hate to have him. Yeah, I do live reacts to those. Jerome Powell comes out. He says the same shit every time, but he's got a fun little suit on. I'm Jay Powell. That's a great Jay Powell impression. I'm Jay Powell. He's like a cartoonish kind of thing. He does his catchphrase. He does a little dance. He bounces around. Yeah, it's a hoot. Kevin Warsh seems to be, he's not really a dancey guy. He's not into that. As it turns out. But there has been this sort of precedent set at the Fed. that they signal and sort of leak intentions ahead of these rate announcements.

1:14:58Aiden:And to get markets to come to expect a certain result to be announced at that quarterly announcement. Yeah. And what this has done, in Kevin Walsh's eyes, is created sort of a mirror economy where the value of things like stocks does not accurately reflect the value of those companies. It's just a general reflection of the market's confidence in what the Fed is going to set the rate at. That is his feeling. So by the Fed setting the rate and signaling that they're going to set the rate or move the rate in a certain direction, the market is following that announcement more than they're following the underlying value of the assets themselves and he has seen this as a problem for a long long time uh he used to work at the fed while bed burn ben bernanke was the chair and during the 2008 financial crisis there was the fed was kind of uh leading the charge by putting interest rates to zero in an effort to rejuvenate the economy again.

1:16:10Aiden:But after things got kind of going, by the time we hit like 2011 and things are like picking back up, Kevin Warsh, and not the only person with this opinion, is like, okay, well now that we've gotten through this crisis, the Fed should no longer be taking this like proactive role in like directing how the market should be. It should stay tight-lipped, not reveal any information about what we're going to do, and let markets resolve themselves without the expectation of the rate going up or down in a particular way. And the market should be a more true reflection of the actual value of these assets.

1:16:52Aiden:And this is his kind of MO going forward, is we're no longer going to leave these little breadcrumb trails of where the rate is going to move to. the market uh should not be a mirror quote of the federal reserve's uh expectations and rate uh it should be more of an independent thing that the fed obviously still has influence over for through how that rate is set it's not like this relationship is completely disjointed or something he just thinks this there needs to be a new era of fed communication that has not been followed since the 2008 recession. And as someone who has known about this, you know, new, you know, this changing of the guard for a while, it was just interesting to read, like, his personal perspective on, you know, what needs to change at the institution.

1:17:41Aiden:Yeah, I would like to hear your thoughts. All I want to say about Kevin Warsh is that from my POV, of someone who's, like, a little bit more of, like, I don't know, almost a fiscal conservative, like, let's stop doing crazy money printing, let's uh not have the market totally rely on the swings like what he's saying so far has been really good to be honest he came in and we thought oh this guy's gonna do everything trump wants he's gonna be he's not gonna care about inflation and his first meeting he came out and he was the most harsh anyone has been on inflation in one of those meetings since i've started watching he went out he said it's it's our job our first and foremost responsibility to break the back of inflation and we're going to do it.

1:18:21And he's like way more hawkish as they would call it than everyone expected because Donald Trump wants a dove. He wants somebody who's going to cut interest rates and worry about inflation later and get the economy juiced. So all of his words have been that. But the reason we had a market signaling like that and the reason things are going is because when times get tough, there is an enormous amount of pressure, not just from Trump, but from everyone, from all businesses, from everyone to fucking bend the rules, to print the money to lower interest rates to keep things going. And there's a lot of history of central bankers, not just in America, but all over the world of like, they talk tough until they get punched in the mouth.

1:18:59And we haven't had like any sort of real stock market downturn. We haven't had any real sort of like, I mean, the oil thing in Iran hasn't really happened yet. Like once that happens, it remains to be seen whether Kevin Warsh will be as tough as he has sounded. That's the first test if he passes that test and he's like there's this guy paul volcker back in the 80s who had people like burning shit on his front lawn he had hate from everybody but he raised rates and he broke the back of inflation in the late 70s late 70s and he's considered a hero in central banking and he kind of saved the u.s dollars from now to our lives like until now and he probably is not that guy we're gonna see maybe he wants to be maybe he will be but realistically it's like when we get any type of real downturn, he's probably going to succumb to the pressure and start the printing and lowering interest rate that everyone always does.

1:19:49So that's what I'll say about Kevin Warsh. It's like his words have been great so far, but the whole reason he's in office is because Trump picked him for a reason. And so it's like, which way is he going to go? We don't know. And I remain to be seen. That's what I'd take away on Warsh. But I was impressed by his speech.

1:20:06Atrioc:Yeah, that's well put. That's helpful. Can I give just a funny little story? A little funny one. Yeah, send it. You guys know that. Well, it's not even that funny.

1:20:17Aiden:I hope the story doesn't besmirch a fine Swedish company. It besmirches a fine Swedish company and your favorite tech company, Apple. So it's going to be a tough one for you. So let's not do this one. You guys know how RAM prices are through the damn roof. Everything's got to raise prices. Consoles are going up. MacBooks are now going up. Phones are going up. and Apple has realized that these prices raising could cause people to stop buying their phones as much or buying the latest model. And so they're like, okay, how do we get them to buy it? We needed them to be able to rent it from us, basically.

1:20:51But they realized, wait a minute, if we get millions of people renting a brand new iPhone from us, we're taking on a lot of risk because they might not be able to make those payments. But who is one company in the world that does not give a shit about renting people to people with bad credit? It's Swedish company Klarna. and so Klarna and Apple are teaming up. Klarna is taking on all of the risk. Apple's getting paid full price by Klarna and Klarna's just hoping they're going to make their payments. They can rent now all the latest and greatest for much less a month. And one key factor of this is that you do not get access to AppleCare.

1:21:26Now, can you explain exactly what that is? It's a big deal in all these articles, but I don't understand. What is AppleCare and why would they not allow your access to this when you do this?

1:21:33Aiden:AppleCare is like a subscription you can pay for your Apple product that you own. So when you break it, or maybe even when you lose it, you get subsidized options to repair or replace the parts. At least that's how I've always... No, that makes sense in that they're worried about the credit worthiness of the people doing this, and maybe they're going to try to scam it or some way, like break it or try to get a refund. I don't know, whatever. Oh, so you wouldn't get access... If you do this, you cannot get AppleCare. It's one thing they keep essentially saying, and I just want to know why that is, but you can't get insurance.

1:22:13I guess that makes sense

1:22:14Aiden:because if you buy the phone basically entirely on credit with Klarna, and then you get AppleCare at the same price that it's usually at, which is relatively cheap per month, and then you just break the phone. They stand to lose a lot of money in that situation. Right, yeah. I think that's their fear. And so, yeah, this is just, I mean, it's kind of like sneakily brilliant on Apple's side because they are going to juice more demand for their phones and still get paid 100 % fully by Klarna. It's just a massive risk from Klarna, who is subsidizing every single person who wants a$25 a month brand new iPhone or something crazy.

1:22:59Aiden:Surely Klarna is just running it down mid. Do you know what I mean?

1:23:06Aiden:I can't recall if you actually talked about this on the show. Didn't you talk to somebody who worked there? Yeah, yeah, I did. And it wasn't great news internally. And then everything about the business model in the long run doesn't really seem to make sense. No, no, no. It's a 60-minute game.

1:23:23Atrioc:Yeah, much like Trump, they're playing a long game. Klarna's an AD carry. Start talking about them like they're an early game pick.

1:23:30Aiden:So I feel like somebody at Klarna is just like, ah, fuck it. That's the vibe I got from the employee who worked there who basically told me that they are running it down mid on the credit worthiness of people. They have these cohorts of people that don't have the money to buy the things they're buying, but they can make the payment for now. And Klarna's like, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We're going to become a big successful company and we'll deal with that. And so this is just more of that. I don't know. I thought it was an interesting story. But that's my last main one for today.

1:24:02I don't know who's got. I got a story. Give me a story. The story better not be about your Beezoar.

1:24:08Atrioc:People are eating Taco Bell with shit in their pants. Over to you, Aiden, about Snap enrollment.

1:24:17Aiden:I'm supposed to end this on Snap enrollment? You're on your tech. Do you actually know any more about this? I don't at all. Unironically, I watched a 20-minute Fox News video about it. Okay. What did you take away? because I don't know anything about it. I just know people are eating Taco Bell and shitting. That's all I know. People are eating Taco Bell and they're shitting their pants. That's what you told me already. Over to you, Aiden, for snap enrollment. Is there anything more that I should know? Should I be afraid of non-Taco Bell? He's being so clear with you. What about non-Taco Bell food?

1:24:44Am I afraid of lettuce? Am I going to shit my pants? If you eat Taco Bell, you might shit your pants.

1:24:52Atrioc:Over to Aiden for snap enrollment. Trying to get important information from someone who's sipping their 19th Diet Coke is actually quite frustrating. Hey, great news, by the way. Yeah. Bezoar free. Dude, it's not good to drink this night. No, we actually looked it up on Kimmy K3. It's not Kimmy. This is the ninth one. I am Bezoar free. This is the prescribed amount of daily, daily, by the way, soda that you're supposed to drink if you have a Bezoar. This much. Do you think that Diet Coke paid doctors? The funny part is in the article, they're like, honestly, we don't really know how it works. It's like some combination of the acidity or something.

1:25:28Atrioc:So they're just fucking telling people with piece of words. It's like Malboro being like, smoke 10 packs a day. It's a shame. It's a shame. They gave him three liters of Coke. Yeah. And they didn't even, apparently it's for Cokes. There's got to be a medicine with the active ingredient that is required to drink that much sweeter. That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense at all. Call Sam. Oh, you have a doctor? Maybe it's the... Ass part of me. that's not we're calling our infectious disease expert

1:26:00Aiden:hey hey are you do you have like a couple minutes yeah I got a couple minutes so you're on lemonade stand right now oh good lord and Doug Doug has Doug read a story about how a woman had a bezoar in her stomach and she had to I love bezoars

1:26:21Atrioc:Okay, Sam, and without any additional context, what would you prescribe somebody who had a Bezoar?

1:26:28Aiden:Two to eight liters of Coke. Yes! Yes! S-A-P. Yeah! Okay, hold on. Yeah! Infectious disease expert. Hold on. Cheers to that. I'm going for 10. Okay, what if, what if Doug... What if they didn't have a Bezoar? What if they didn't have a Bezoar and they just drank the same amount of Coke anyway? way i mean it might like erode through your fucking stomach the whole reason that you're drinking that much coke is there's like phosphoric acid in it that breaks down like the hair that you swallowed so i don't know if that's a great call if you're just ripping that but preemptively

1:27:09Atrioc:you want to be safe it's preemptive bees or prevention doug doug says it's preemptive bs or prevention is that i i you know what i don't i i i could run the study i don't know if anyone's done that okay yet but that's it that's a good for science was this i have a memory of you

1:27:27Aiden:telling me that coke is prescribed for was it for a bs or for something else we had a patient at the va who had a large bs war and the gi doctors told us to go get like two to six liters of coke two to

1:27:44Atrioc:Six liters? I'm way under.

1:27:46Aiden:Drink up! The cheap government only had RC Cola, and we actually looked into it, and it doesn't have the phosphoric acid. It's only Coke! Imagine drinking three liters of RC Cola, and it's like, oh, sorry, I didn't... When I met a student, the nurses just pulled like 20 bucks and had me run to a gas station and go buy Coke. Wow. That's beast. least okay wow yep yeah that's okay so i will doug has drank 10 cans of coke in about in about 80 minutes if i'm being honest with you you're gonna be so sad dude you'll never have hair block up your esophagus i'm the healthiest man on this podcast your doctor did not help us your doctor thanks sam you're a smart man you're a smart man emboldened him hundreds of thousands of dollars

1:28:41Atrioc:in med school debt in order to tell me that on this podcast. Over to Aiden for snap enrollment. That was the worst Aiden knows a guy ever. Fine. We're going to do snap enrollment. But it has to be a Nordic fun fact somehow. No, we have to end on a Nordic fun fact. Do you have a Nordic fun fact?

1:28:55Aiden:Nordic fun fact? We have two minutes. Okay. Make it about Nordic. Here, I actually do have a really short Nordic fun fact. Let's go. Perfect. Okay. Okay. So I was curious. I was looking into, you know, all the Nordic countries have their own currency, even the two that are a part of the European Union. They all have their own... Croner. Croner. Wow. You got it. You got it. You fucking say it right, dude. It's so easy to please.

1:29:21Atrioc:Yeah, that wasn't much, man. His eyes lit up like the voice of a lie, bro. I just said Croner in a funny voice.

1:29:28Aiden:I think you've beaten me into submission, right? Because anytime Sweden is brought up, you sort of... I'm so negative. You're so negative. I give you a little Croner. Any engagement. I'm like a kid looking for just anything from his dad. I was doing some very basic research, and it turns out Denmark, their currency is pegged to the euro. And they have, through this program called ERM2, which is what you go through when you're in the buildup to proving to the European Union that you can be on the euro. That we have a, like our currency is good enough and stable enough and our financial institutions are set that to take on the euro in the future.

1:30:18Aiden:We're going to peg our currency to the euro and keep it within a certain percentage range of the euro's value. And so we can, you know, get on the euro in about two years time. Oh, they're planning to be on the euro. No, that's the interesting thing. So they went through this process to do that, but then just never left it. So they keep their currency, unlike the other Nordic countries, Denmark keeps their currency pegged to the euro within a two and a quarter percent range, which you can go all the way to like 15%. There's like a lot of wiggle room from the European Union to like pass this test.

1:30:51Aiden:But Denmark keeps it like really, really tight. and I guess the reason that they stuck to this is they get the benefit of having a currency that's like matched up with the euro which like helps inner European trade with their country but if the shit were to ever like hit the fan they aren't in the same position where like a Germany would be obligated to like bail out a country that's on the euro that's like struggling within the European Union or they could, like worst case scenario, the euro collapses and they could just make the decision to get rid of the peg and cut and run. Seems like they have best of both worlds.

1:31:33Yeah, it does feel like they kind of cheated the system a bit.

1:31:35Aiden:Yeah, the trade-off is that they don't get any votes on policy that directly impacts the euro. So the trade-off is like, we don't have a say in policy decisions that influence the euro, but we get this flexibility on the other end. Yeah, but if you're as small as Denmark, Mark, it's like, what kind of say would you get versus a big gorilla like Germany anyway? I don't know. I don't know. So it's like you're kind of like. Germany's the hottest kid on the block. They're the hottest kid on the block. They're dressed up just like Aiden is. And if you're the hottest kid on the block, you can join us on Patreon.com slash Lemonade Stan, where we do an extra hour of the show every week.

1:32:16Aiden:Come on on there. Hot kids only. We got 11 ,000 hot kids signed up to the Patreon. Give me a Coke, dude. I feel like I have a mental bezoar after this episode. I need to clear up. I really was hoping Sam would be more against you. The doctor supported him. I'm switching to his side. He's science approved. That's the healthiest episode we've ever done. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. Don't drink that many Cokes. It's just so bad. I'll go to the bathroom.