Economic D-Day Is Here | EP. 077 Lemonade Stand 🍋

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Treasury Secretary Scott, in this video, this is this morning, a few hours ago, went out and said he is declaring an economic D-Day is coming for Iran. And I thought that was an interesting phrase because just last week, you did a presentation on how we basically tried every possible economic sanction for 40 years. Yes. And in fact, the conclusion of that was, well, if you've been doing this for 47 years, what option is left? And the option is China, basically, because they're the one that is really financially underpinning Iran's ability to do anything right. So when you talk about economic D-Day or, you know, other people have been calling it economic 9-11, he said he wants to economically holocaust them. He's gone deep. You have to imagine that what he means by this is a dramatic escalation with China. I have to be so real because of the general news about the administration all the time. Did he act? Which ones did he actually say? Just D-Day. Just D-Day? But it is called, there's the new thing that came out today because I did read, Scott Besant wrote a piece in the FT, I don't know if he can show it, called An Economic D-Day is Coming from Iran. He wrote this last night and he published it in the FT under his own name, basically laying out why they're doing this, what's going on. Then he followed with a speech today. Now the speech today he announced, this is called Operation Economic Outcast. The idea is, similar to what you discussed last week, is they're going to pull every possible lever to make Iran and Tehran an economic outcast from everyone in the world. No one will trade with them. And as you mentioned, if you look at the numbers, 90% of what they trade is going to China. And he doesn't mention China's name in this. And doesn't even, isn't even willing to say their name. And China has said they're not going to stop trading with Iran. So I don't know what exactly this means, but he did, I mean, this is, I wish I had a direct quote from the video, but he's like forcefully saying, we are going to cut you off from the US dollar system if you trade with Iran. And if you're not talking about China, you're not talking about basically anyone with that. So I don't know. It's like a, it's like a big line in the sand to draw today. I don't know exactly how it's going to play, play out if they're just talking tough. Wait, or are we going to try and that's what I understand. So we've had sanctions forever. And then he made a big deal last week about how there's going to be, there's going to be a big announcement and then he calls it economic D-Day, but they're not, there's nothing concrete. It's just like, we're going to be doing additional sanctions on everybody if you don't apply. And then a quote from him, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? So it's like a threat, but we're not going to do it. And he's not saying which countries and he's not saying the specifics. It's just like, we're really angry. Yeah. That's not D-Day. D-Day actually did stuff. People already know we're angry. D-Day was not us giving a strongly worded letter to Hitler. Okay. It was not, it wasn't us writing in the FT. Hey, hey, you better stop it Hitler. Big things would be coming. Hitler off the US dollar system. That would have, we could have saved some lives on D-Day if we just took them off the dollar. The dollar system. Well, let's not under the value, the strength of strongly worded letters. Aren't they already cut off from the US dollar system? What am I misunderstanding? Their lifeline is Russia and China and this doesn't even name them directly. I don't, I don't know what it means, but it seems like it's a big deal for them. It's an important economic D-Day that they're doing. Those who tether themselves to Tehran are foreclosing any path to prosperity. So we said these other countries, your confidence will collapse. Any nation that serves as a financial artery of a withering regime should expect to share in its isolation. Now, when you think about that, share in its isolation means they are not isolated. They are together in a trading partnership, which is what Russia and China currently are with Iran. To become a sanctuary for terror is to become in the eyes of the United States, a global pariah. The problem is, I think the problem with all of this stuff that he's been doing lately with the treasury market and with the yen is that just in the eyes of the United States, it's not no longer enough. They don't have enough economic clout to force every single person to trade with who they want and when they want. And the main person you need to like heal in this scenario or the main country is the country with all the economic leverage. Yeah, Xi Jinping would have to be on board with this. And I don't, he didn't mention his name in the speech, so I'm not sure it's a complete alliance. I do say it was a funny quote I heard from the former US ambassador to Iran who helped negotiate the Obama nuclear deal. He said, when asked about what new sanctions we could really realistically roll out, he's like, so we've tried the low-hanging fruit, we tried the mid-hanging fruit, we tried the high-hanging fruit, we tried the tree. I don't think there's anything left in the tank. So he seems pretty puzzled as to what, outside of like open economic war with China, which by the way, we've kind of already done in the trade tariff wars of last year, and they sort of hit their limit and they had the leverage on the rare earth and they cut it off. So again, I don't, it's a lot of tough, and it is, I guess a bigger deal than usual, but I can't, I can't realize what's going to be different about it. You did say, you talked about digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Yep. So with China, the key things they buy Iran's oil, which is like their lifeline, right? But they do use like crypto for tons of different things. So trying to basically cut anybody who's doing any sort of organized crypto purchases or trading with Iran. I mean, probably this will put real pressure. There's probably some levers, there's left China, but just not the big one. Yeah. And so to steal, man, I did, I talked to my contact in Iran and he did mention the Rial is hit an unprecedented, like 2 million to one us dollar. Oh my God. And he's like at the worst of back when he's actually fled the country now, but back when he was there, he was like, it was 500,000, which is one fourth of what it is now. That was the worst of when he was there. It's now 2 million. He said, if basically nobody is using the currency at all, they are all shit. Shifting to gold or dollars or crypto, or just like holding their assets in anything else, because holding it in Rial is like asking to have it devalued to nothing. People that are paid wages in Rial are like at, you know, it's like, why more levels of cry? It's like a bad, like the economy of Iran is in a horrible spot. And additionally, the, do you have any insight into public life from talking to that person? Like I understand that they fled, but as wars go on, life goes on in places. Like in Tehran, you can still go to a restaurant and buy food. Yeah. Are you not making that transaction in the local currency anymore? I think they're using other currencies. Yeah. That's the impression that I'm getting is they've found other ways. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it could be R and B. It could be dollars. It could be crypto. It could be gold, but they're not like carrying their savings in Rial because that is not a reliable source. Uh, that being said, the Iranian president two days ago, three days ago did say something that signaled a, a willing that, that there is some effect to this because again, also data has come out that oil out of Hormuz from Iran has completely stopped. The blockade is seemingly having an effect. Now they've already banked a lot of extra money because of all the oil they exported earlier. That was at higher prices, but they're not making it now. And that is a problem. Iranian president said it's time to end the war with the U S from a quote, a position of strength. But saying that does necessarily indicate that there is a future where you're not a position of strength. Like the, the idea is like we are in our maximum amount of leverage. Now people are beginning to build routes outside of Hormuz. They're building pipelines and our economy is not like getting better. And so it's, it would be good to negotiate with some, you know, the problem is it's very hard. I think this will be our next story. We're talking about Canada. It's very hard to make a deal with Trump that is reliable, no matter who's got the position of strength or what you agree upon. It's hard to make a deal that he's going to stick to. So we can transition over to that, but there, there is some idea that it's working. I don't think it's working quick enough for Trump's timeline, which is the, the midterms and what he wants to do, but it does seem to have some effect on their economy in that they might actually want to negotiate. But I don't know if these additional sanctions are going to add too much to that. And I don't, again, the impacts are also being felt in America, which is higher prices for things, fertilizer, gas, et cetera. So yeah, I don't know. That's yeah. Why don't we skate on over to just a, a great situation with our Northern neighbor and my home country. Yeah. We have a Canadian. authentic Canadian on the podcast. Never say we're not a diverse podcast. Now over to our international reporter, Aiden McCabe. If you want an immigrant's perspective. Let's get an authentic Canadian perspective from Aiden. What is going on on the ground? So I think you have already talked about this on Big A to an extent. And I watched the press conference where Mark Carney speaks to the Canadian public about what has gone on in trade negotiations with the United States from the Canadian perspective. And basically announces that after heavy negotiation, we have arrived at a point where the U.S. has seemingly forfeited the old terms and the progress that was made, comes in with new terms all of a sudden that Canada is very uncomfortable with. And Carney, instead of trying to continue to the negotiations, pulls Canada's negotiations back and says, we're just matching the tariffs dollar for dollar. We are no longer going through this process anymore. Am I missing anything there? No, no, no. I think the one thing I'd say is, so we're under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, the USMCA or whatever. This was signed in 2020 by a certain president named Donald J. Trump, who said at the time, this is the greatest, fairest deal we've ever signed. And now in 2026, he's saying this deal is bad, unfair, not a good deal, and that Canada is abusing it, and that we need to change. We need to change the terms of the deal. So they've gone from a 16-year renewal to a yearly renegotiation. And while they were doing this renegotiation, like you said, they tried to add some terms last night. I think the term that was really a sticking point, I mean, I could steal that. I didn't do this in my big eclipse. I want to kind of do it now and just say, this is what is happening, is that the USMCA is like as close as you can get to a free trade thing between North America, America, Canada, Mexico. America has a priority, which they are worried, that if they are going to put tariffs, tariffs on Chinese cars or whatever, that Canada could end up being a backdoor for Chinese manufacturing. So if we have a deal with you and then you have a deal with China, China can just use Canada as a way to get into our free trade system that we didn't want them to be in. And Canada had just negotiated that new deal with China that allows EVs at least in for a set period of time earlier this year in like February. And Canada is allowed, there's a sovereign nation that can make their own deals. But America was trying to get them to base, they didn't say which country, but the obvious, the obvious answer is that they are trying to get them to have no deals with China. And that was not part of this negotiation until the last minute, they kind of threw it in. And Carney said, no, that's where you're like, you're basically pushing our sovereignty. And so, yeah, I would just say that's like the setup. The problem is, is I want to, I actually would love to hear what your family said or what we were talking about in, in what Canadian perspectives. Yeah, I think the two, so I have a broad overview. This is before this happened. Keep in mind, this is more like during the negotiation, but I went to see a bunch of my family recently in British Columbia. And I asked a huge spread of my relatives, just what they think about Carney and what is going on right now. And the general sentiment from all of them, even though they do have different political backgrounds and opinions, not all of them even voted for his party. They said they like the way that he's standing up to Trump. And then the worst criticism I heard was he has yet to vote for Trump. He has yet to deliver on a lot of the things he's promising because he just hasn't been in office that long. Right. But generally seems to be taking a position of strength for Canada and has a strong economic intelligent background that they all really like. Keep in mind, this is just my family. Sure. So Doug had actually a handful of questions to ask my family members. And I texted it to a few of them. What were you like as a kid? Yeah. Were you always this scrawny? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did they underfeed you intentionally? Well, he's like a scarecrow. Why does he feel like he's like a weird, like one of those two men? Keep him outside in the yard. So I asked that. I asked that. And then also about the politics stuff. Okay, I got you. All right. Yeah. I don't really want to talk about this. And the two responses I have so far, this is from my grandfather who's approaching 80 years old, is about to retire soon, and has worked in Canada and the US for quite a long time now. And from, and Doug's questions going into this were, does all of this rhetoric between Canada and the US, these ongoing issues, does it feel more like background noise? Or does it feel like something that is having a concrete effect on your life? Or something that is really demanding your attention? And the second question was, has this resulted in any tangible change in their behavior, consumption habits, what they're choosing to buy? Right, right, right. From my grandfather's perspective, he finds the, the Trump changing his mind part to be particularly frustrating and chaotic. He said, I think I can survive some of the tariffs myself, but it's the day-to-day uncertainty. It seems Trump changes his mind on a daily basis with very little thought or rationale. I just find that really frustrating. And for, from him, he says he doesn't buy a lot of things in general. He's a pretty frugal guy, but he spent his entire life trying to buy Canadian made goods as best he can. He doesn't feel like he is personally changing his consumption habits very much. - Okay. - He is more sensitive to it now, but is pretty much just doing the same thing he always did. I know from my other grandfather, he is outright boycott, will not visit the U.S. under any circumstances, even to visit like my immediate family that does live in the U.S. - Oh. - Won't buy American products, hates Trump. That, and he's a conservative guy. He's a Canadian that prior to all of this, was going like, "I get where Trump's coming from." - No, that's wild. That is a, yeah. - And then from my aunt, she is an interesting perspective, I think, because she's well-educated. She works in government. She's worked in government for like 30 years. And she's very tapped into Canadian politics because of her work, her news consumption. And she's very tapped into American politics, consumes a ton of American news. And her, she had a much more lengthy response. And she said in her circle, this is super top-of-mind in basically every aspect. Whether it be in personal consumption or just view of how it impacts things economically. She said these tariffs have like a tangible effect on Canadian jobs, prosperity. She sees the way that affects people already. And then for her and her friends, like personal spending habits, they go out of their way to not buy American products. - Right. - She gave an answer. She gave an anecdote about how her and her friend were at the grocery store and they were buying produce. And they like tried one of the grapes, I think. And she was like, this is a really, that's what, maybe they were at a farmer's market or something, you know? And she said, oh, I hope these aren't, oh, I guess it wouldn't be a farmer's market if they're, - Sure. - They're buying American grapes. - She's stealing grapes. - They're stealing grapes. - So. - Your aunt is a criminal. You've admitted it on a podcast. - And I feel like tariffs on that type of person is appropriate. - I feel like we're double the tariffs. - Let me reread the quote. Last, she said, last night I was with my friend Joanna and we stopped in the grocery store and she picked up some really, really nice grapes. - Oh, so now Joanna's going to jail. - And then. - Now you throw Joanna under the bus. - And then asked aloud. And then she asked aloud, don't tell me that these are American. And then they were, and she just put them back down. - Oh my God. - And she also reckoned. - I'm reading them. - And then she also said she recognizes - Economic war, that's what this is. That's a direct quote from Cardi Bala. This is an economic war. - Yeah. - She's grilling an American hamburger in the grocery aisle. It's like, this is better not be American. - She said that she even recognizes that the grapes are from California, which from a political stance is, you know, governor of California is Gavin Newsom. She feels that this is a guy that is standing up to Trump from an American political perspective. - Yeah, sure, certainly not up the line. She's like, we got to hold the line. And even if it, and I think there is some recognition from everybody, especially when, you know, you have family members that are American, that this isn't the whole US, this isn't about US citizens. It's very focused on frustration with one particular guy who seems to be going back and forth on the decision. He's, this isn't, he makes all the time. - I kind of have an encounter, a couple of weeks ago, I think during the Beezor episode, I posited the question. Do you feel like America's reputation is permanently ruined? - Yeah. - And there were actually a lot of great responses in the YouTube comments, like really thoughtful responses. And a lot of them from, you know, countries like Canada or Australia or European countries were basically like, maybe it was different in the past, but this is, it's not just what Trump is doing because I rationally know a ton of Americans hate Trump. It's the fact that half of the country is capable and willing to elect somebody like this. - This is exactly, so my aunt, the direct quote, "We signed a deal many decades ago. "We trusted the U.S. and we integrated our trade, "ideally to the benefit of both. "The fact that this is happening is such a massive betrayal "that it has fractured trust with Canadians "for, I bet, a generation." Dude, we are so pissed at Trump, at my aunt said, dude. And also so shocked that 50% of the population didn't see through this guy. - Yeah, that's a great point. No, I wanna, I wanna, my thought on it, because I was trying, My clip on it was a little more like, this is fucking terrible, whatever. I was trying to steel man it. And I was thinking, and the problem I keep running into is like, even if, because we've talked on this show about how the economic shock of China's growing manufacturing is causing some problems in a lot of countries because they're just really fucking good at it. And if they continue on this path, everyone is going to be economically dependent on them for manufacturing. It's offshoring everything to them. And there's things you could do. And it's like, if that was a priority, there is a way to give and take with a friendly ally to maybe like, we want this. You have to, we have to give something to you. Like there's a way to make this a win-win on a multi-decade long Northern border sharing ally. The fact that he turns every negotiation into a extremely contentious head-to-head bullying match, I think is counterproductive. Even if we had insane strength, even if we were fully able to bully Canada, we don't seem to be able to do it. It is, uh, I it's, it's like, a human thing. Like if you were to do that to somebody in your life, they would resent you very quickly. It's just not, you'd ruin all your friends. You would ruin all your friendships so quickly. And it's like, it's insane that we as a country, but especially as a fucking negotiator and a president are running this strategy down mid over and over until nobody can trust anything you sign, say, shake hands on, agree on or deal. And, uh, I think that's the problem here. Cause I don't think there's a world where it's impossible that you could even get Canada to agree to change their EV tariffs when China or whatever, but you have to be willing to, you can't just take, take, take, take, demand, demand, demand, threaten, threaten, threaten, bully, bully, bully. It doesn't work. It's a, he wants to be in a perpetual Mexican standoff guns pointed at everybody else, everybody pointing guns at him, but they're not allowed to have guns or they doesn't like if they use guns back, it's like, no, if they agree to stop the stand down, he wants another one. He'll then pull the guns back out. He wants it to be gone. He takes out a second gun. He's like, no, I've got you where I want you. It's I think to actually connect the first, the, the first two stories here, I think what's really funny is in, in the Iran scenario, he has this excuse, which I don't think is a good one, given all the context that we've gone through on the show, that the Iran nuclear deal was made by the Obama administration was made by another guy. And that deal wasn't effective. Ignore the merits of that argument and just take it at face value. I'm going to handle this differently. I'm a new guy, but with Canada, he made the last deal. It's so no matter what, it doesn't matter if it was the president before, it doesn't matter if it was him, him, when it happened, he can, he's willing to throw everything out at any time. Yeah. I wish I had. Yeah. Okay. I just got the direct quote. I'm sorry. In 2020 USMCA is the largest, most significant modern and balanced trade agreement in history. And it's the best agreement the United States has ever made. So to say that, and then to undo it, not, but six years later, five years later, really, uh, is people can't trust that. Of course. And you just undermine your ability to do it at all going forward. Even honestly, even if new administrations come in, I think that's the frustrating part is the idea that he could totally, I mean, the Republican party could lose the next election. We could have an all democratic, like Senate house of representatives. No, it could be Mark Carney's clone wins in America and they handshake and they love each other and they kiss, but it doesn't really matter who's in charge next because there's this underlying idea of no matter what the result, things can just flip to another insane guy within four years. Yeah. And that is the memory that will live on for at least a few more terms. I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. I think you'd have to build a trust is a lot harder to build back than it is to lose. And I think like, you just can't make a 20 year deal with it. You have to, you'd have to make a four year deal max. And then like renegotiate, you know, it's just, that's a, I think that is going to have consequences for a while to come. And it's like, it's a depressing, I mean, it's like, do you ever think about how we've talked about this? The idea of like the, uh, the benevolent dictator, it's like the benefit of, you know, tons of trade-offs. I hope they're very obvious, but when you have one guy, in charge for a really long time, you can have, you can make a bunch of, you can make a bunch of progress. I think Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore is like a good example. And then even in China's case, right. You have, uh, for all of their problems that we've discussed at length, you have one consistent figure that's in charge and like pursuing a policy agenda for a long period of time that can result in good things for that place. You could also have an insane guy at the head. Is this your Putin for America pitch? Is this, I would classify him in insane guys. No, I, I, I see what you're sharing, but it's funny because it still depends on the person because you know, if you gave Trump 20 years in power of complete control, he would still change his mind on his own deal. It would still go. You know what I'm saying? You have to be stable. It's like any human relationship, whether it's the government, whether it's a person, whether it's an autocrat, whether it's their guys, they have to, they have to commit to things they say they're going to do. He loves D-Day. He loves D-Day. He just wants D-Day. He just wants D-Day to happen. It's like, he just, If we had unlimited terms of Trump, like say we've had Trump for the last 25 years, we're still flip-flopping trade deals. No, I mean, and that's what's happening in Iran too, is that they, they are finding, even when we get to the negotiation table, things change or the second, the second, the balance of power is in his favor. He's like, well, the old deal, I don't know. It's like Darth Vader. I've altered the deal. That's the problem. And so everyone is rationally doing the rational thing, which is find whatever leverage we have and grow that out as much as possible so that I have some counterpunch. Otherwise, you're going to keep bullying me. That is like just what you have to do. And it's a, I don't know. It's a frustrating experience. You know what never changes? What never changes? Answer cells. Don't they famously, isn't that the problem? Is it they're constantly mutating and changing? No, I'm, hold on. I'm reading something. That's like the worst answer cells. Turns out. They change all the time that all the time. It's actually, it's actually part of what makes it really hard to address. Yeah, it's a, so it's basically been unaddressable until Doug is about to tell us that it's been a hundred percent cured right now until now. That's right. Uh, okay. Major cancer breakthrough. Now, probably all of y'all have heard stories where somebody I've done this on this show, right? Where you're like big scientific breakthrough. Seems like this could have huge implications for cancer and you're like, Whoa, that sounds cool. And then two years go by and you've never heard about it again, and this goes, this happens every one, two, three years. And eventually when you're a grizzled old, like man in your fifties, you start to be like, okay, is he looking at, I don't know that I necessarily trust the next story here about some scientists eliminated tumors in mice or whatever. So Perry, I sent you an article, but you can honestly, you can pull this up anywhere. This is a huge story this past week, Moderna. We love them. They injected us all with microchips. Okay. Um, I'm a Moderna taker. Yep. This, I can talk to Bill Gates. It's awesome. You're going to give us me advice. Yeah. Constantly during this show, we communicate to each other, the jokes, the whole show is written by Atrioc and then we're fed the light. So if you have anything, if you're angry about anything we are done, it's actually, I don't like Atrioc script for that Doug joke. Uh, okay. But this, you know, this is not one of those stories. This is an actual. We made a thing that is going to help cancer for real now. So, uh, Moderna Reese, a huge announcement last week. Let me just back up and quickly. You remember RNA vaccines, that cool new thing that we, I mean, not invented, but you know, became that we invented. That was a big thing about us. So obviously that really kicked off during COVID era. And that was how we made the COVID vaccines. And this is a really interesting and valuable new way to be able to make vaccines the general differences instead of a normal vaccine. Where you inject a weakened version of a virus, for example, with RNA, you're, you're sending messengers, which will tell the cells to make something. So the idea is we can design in a lab. We want your cells to make a certain type of thing, inject that the cells make it, and then your body learns that's a bad thing. I'm going to look out for it. So it's very flexible and fast and has all these advantages over traditional vaccines. So given that, um, as you pointed out, actually that was wrong. Cancer cells do change. They change a lot. This is first time here. And that's kind of trust because Aiden has a strong background in medical science. That's true. Well in podcasting, which is downstream of, which is upstream of all upstream of all knowledge. Yes. It's cool. Once you click the first upload button, YouTube has you glance into the orb of knowledge. And from that point forward, you cannot be wrong. Yeah. So as we are creating this new type of vaccine that we, you can basically design in a lab. We are going to tell your body to make, it opens up this idea of, could you make a personalized cancer vaccine? Part of the challenge with cancers again is like they change all the time and it's your own body cells changing. How are you going to get your body to figure out exactly what the cancer cells look like? And they're changing all the time anyway. So in 2017, Moderna started developing a personalized cancer vaccine for melanoma, which is skin cancer. So here's the process that they came up with. You take a sample of somebody's cancer cells, the actual tumor. Okay. You use their program, which will analyze via machine learning, will analyze all the different cells, including health cells. cells and there's like thousands of different ways mutations might show up or different proteins that can show on the surface of a cell and they design up to hopefully 34 of these basically markers of what a cancer cell looks like in this person's body rather than a healthy cell okay so they are they are analyzing your specific dna and the way the dna is showing up and creating cancer okay they then in their lab design and manufacture an rna vaccine that is custom to you it is specific to your specific cancer cells okay and then they create that they inject it the immune system says okay i'm going to build this thing that you told me how to build it builds it or i should say the cells build it the immune system goes what are these things what the fuck's going on here it identifies them go okay i know to look out for these in the future and then it goes on to the rest of the body realizes it's present in the cancer cells make the cancer and kills it so you are creating you're basically using machine learning to understand some specific traits of tumors from your specific body you tell the body to make that very specific thing and now the body is trained against your specific cancer this is a sort of like conceptual dream that people have had for a long time now in 2023 they've been working on this since 2017 in 2023 they started phase 3 trials phase 3 is basically the final test for medicine this is the really big one you get 1100 people different countries different hospitals blind studies it's the extremely thorough if this passes this is a legit drug that we can sell to people and last week on wednesday they announced they had passed phase 3 trials they passed i thought they had i thought this was they started it no wait that's huge last week and this is again this is not hypothetical it's not promising research last week a major pharmaceutical company cleared the trials to prove that they have a cancer that dramatically reduces the death and recurrence of melanoma that's insane that's for all of these patients that's a custom made rna for that individual person nothing like that has happened before and actually gotten through phase 3 trials so this is fucking awesome there's one and a half million americans just in america living with melanoma every year 110 000 new people are diagnosed this is from the cancer um organizations i forget the names uh 8 500 people die a year in a year and the idea now is like this is going to help them in this particular case it's melanoma post-surgery but they're looking at approximately a 50 reduction in cancer recurrence or death so it's not 100 gone but 50 reduction a couple asterisks here that i can get to later but that's basically what we're looking at all this stuff about lives saved and and people helped what about moderna's stock price that's what we're talking about question nobody gives a shit except for the stock dude perry can you pull up the moderna stock market so the graph is actually it's insane so last wednesday moderna announced this and this had been kind of cooking for a while but again phase three passing is a big deal and they announced this and the stock went from 62 and close to the day at 170 increase it doubled it over doubled wait a day that's crazy at its peak it had over tripled this is an smp 500 company crazy swing for that went up over two and a half x in a single day um so i mean you guys can guess why well what that says though is that company's entire value of all their drugs is to the market worth less than this drug passing stage three trials that are the potential of what this can mean there you go it's the potential investors are reading the that this company could be at the treatment for all cancers yes yes wow so a quote from barclays analysts said they expect that this particular therapy that just got passed could generate annual sales of about three billion dollars for melanoma by 2035 that's good that's but that's not like earth shattering numbers right there uh but again the real signal here is this is the first time a custom rna cancer vaccine has succeeded a phase three trial right and phase three trials like the vast it's like 66 fail in phase three at least and that's the first time a custom rna cancer vaccine has succeeded a phase three trial um so the underlying concept of we as humanity can design customized cures for people is now proven so that's where what this really represents the next day the stock plunges 25 i mean still from a high and so i was curious why well moderna is actually like not doing well other than this yeah moderna this last quarter posted a net loss of 782 million on revenues of 145 million they have not had a hit since the covid vaccine they kind of like you know yeah it was a hit though that one hit crazy so they're kind of a one-hit wonder they were doing this awesome ep right in 2020 that summer their music just fucking took me places i was amazing i listen to all three albums i actually just did one of the you did all three different albums i got the deluxe oh i meant i got three shots of moderna oh yeah no no that's listening the same album three times so okay so what's next the fda still needs to approve this but again you know this is should all go well and phase three trials like is at a a level of uh let's say scrutiny where it should go through so we should actually people should be able to get this as a treatment in like a year or two uh moderna is obviously going to try this for other cancers melanoma is so here's here's some of the disclaimers like this isn't you know cancer is cured melanoma is one of the easier ones for this to work on it's not a cancer it's a cancer it's a cancer it's a cancer it's why they started with this one and the idea is like it mutates a lot so it's easier for you know their algorithm to analyze it because you have a lot of different potential targets because it's such a high mutating one um so they're basically going to start going for cancers that also are high mutation and slowly work towards the harder ones but moderna is already trying this the mid-stage trials for bladder kidney pancreatic stomach cancers there's large trials ongoing right now for certain lung cancers uh and then there's like sam burrell the ceo of a medical research charity life arc said this study will help build confidence that uh more tailored approaches to treatments for rare conditions that are driven by unique genetic mutations meaning it's not even just cancer it's anything that's genetically related this is proving like holy shit there's some real potential here and there's a lot of other companies that are trying this for example bio and tech is working on colon and pancreatic cancer custom vaccines so a lot of people are are doing this there's trials underway and there's a lot of other companies that are trying this for example bio and tech is working this is this giant signal to everybody of like holy shit this can work this is awesome this is awesome yeah this is a fucking cool story it's gonna be so sick because like when the ai powered drones that are getting discovered in ukraine right now come for us we'll all be cancer cancer it is one of those things run us down like dogs in the street i will not tip top shape nothing will slow me down i won't have a cough i'm gonna be i'm gonna be on like the the nth version of glp once my body is gonna be in peak condition for the drone burnt to a crisp around you we are gonna be so old and so unhappy are you tired of hearing about business tech and finance from the bros we are the tiger sisters a top business podcast with the vox media podcast network tiger sisters releases every monday and we decode money power and love and who doesn't love all those things we are the internet's wall street and silicon valley big sisters tune in every monday for late night sister talk meets boardroom strategy check out tiger sisters on youtube spotify or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to the tiger fam i'm bridget reed and i'm james walsh the alexander brothers moved in a world of multi-million dollar homes exclusive parties and powerful people behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault in our reporting for new york magazine we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories now that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docuseries the wolves of real estate the alexander brothers you'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped stream all three episodes now only on peacock okay speaking speaking of robot drones and cancer research i want to know what's at the forefront of robotics okay in china because i've been seeing clips yeah yeah so i pulled some clips we had uh fummy our uh researcher bring some clips uh you've probably seen some of these the world robot the world humanoid robot games has kicked off in beijing you've probably seen some of these clips of them running uh usain bolt style they beat uh usain bolt's record in the sprint the thing that's different this year is that all the robots are required to have no remote operation you can't plug them in it has to all run autonomously on its own when you tell what to do and so uh they you know there's there's two conferences here there's the robot games which is like basically an olympics where they do high jump and running and everything else and there's a conference which is a slightly different name it's like the robot world robot conference and it's having the same time and time again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and that is more of like almost a business to business people showing off real industrial capacity of the robots with things they can do. It's less public. This is sort of China's like show off to the world, see the capabilities. Sports are a great way to see year to year progress happening. And what, what they're noticing this year is that there's been a pretty big leap. They're breaking a lot of records. They couldn't break before they're going autonomous longer than they could before they're doing physical actions. I mean, I don't know if I have the clip here. Yeah. That's the actual conference. Okay. If you, uh, audio listeners were looking at a robot cowboy riding a robot horse. Yeah. And now a robot playing ping pong pretty well. That's the perfect one. Same thing if you switch over to here. This is a 135 shot robot rally in tennis. Humans hitting the robots. So it's like unpredictable. And, uh, again, it's moving around on its own. It's adapting to what it sees. It's all autonomous. No, no remote. And so its ability to do mechanical tasks that were previously, it would break down a lot quicker. Has dramatically increased. Now they're still not there. Um, this isn't people at the conference were saying there isn't yet what they would call the chat GPT moment for robots as in a perfectly, uh, economic use case that makes sense. And it crushes that, but it's, everyone is noticing that it's just a lot closer. Like you can do a lot more things into like all these robots. Again, there's many companies competing that are all going to independently. And from the Chinese side, now we've seen this economically from what they did in EVs. Well, people are saying at this conference is they have adopted a very similar playbook, which is there are state subsidies overall. Like if you hit this goal, you can make a lot of money, but there are lots of competing companies. A lot of people are in a full industrial race to make the best robot. And so many of them are trying to out innovate each other, certain tasks. There's a really frenzied competition between these companies, all of which are starting to go IPO at the same time. So I don't know if I mentioned this show, but in general, the Chinese stock market has been flat for like 30 years. Like they just don't, despite the economy growing, their stock market has been a bad place to put money this summer. They've had the biggest IPOs, you know, basically ever in China, or at least in their markets, history and their markets history, you know, like, and a lot of them are robotics, some unitary launch and did like a 600% pop day one, bigger than SpaceX, not a bigger company, but a bigger pump. And so it's like a lot of interest and passion into this as a new growing industry in China. And it is, you know, you can see the advancements in this field at the same time as the advances in AI, they haven't yet truly merged, but when they merge, it's a spooky thing and possibly a, I mean, it just changes the world in a dramatic way. If used in a good way, it could mean like a massive increase in, you know, the ability to output things from factories or whatever, but it's like, it just changes what is possible. And none of this is like right around the corner. It's not one year away. According to all the interviews from the thing, but people are just noticing that the advances starting to compound, like this guy's figuring this out, this guy's figuring this out. They're adding it together. We're just guys doing this thing. And it's becoming a really dense evolution. Wait, is that, am I correct? And looking at this Shanghai composite index has increased like 80% in the last year and a half, something like that. Three, three years, three years, even still like, No, it's been a huge surge. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So can I, Yeah. Can I be a hater for a second? Yeah. You can steal man it. Hey, uh, one thing I find funny about this and it, especially after going to applied intuition, I'm look, I'm a simple man. Yeah. I see a video of a robot playing tennis and moving around. I still think that's cool. Part of it, part of me still thinks that things that's cool, but I remember a point of discussion we had at a point where I was like, at applied intuition, which is they had this back area that we weren't allowed to see that had robots that they were working on different form factors of robots. And one of the ones is in the background of the interview we do in that episode. And it is a human form factor robot. And I think because we're human beings and because of media, there is this strong desired form factor of, can we make a robot humanoid that does things like we do, but see, like looking at that running competition is kind of funny because you can make a faster row. I think they have already made faster robots than that by just not doing a human form. Put it on a wheel and it would, and the idea that we need to chase this like perfected human form factor robot, maybe it's because people think that that will be easier to accept. Yeah. Yeah. Or integrate from like a commercial perspective. Maybe that's the argument. But to me, I've always thought it's a little dumb. It's like in a world of like biological evolution of all these different like plants and animals that do all these insane things. The idea that this is the form factor you should be chasing for your perfect robot that does a bunch of stuff or even having like the robot humanoid games, you could be making and chasing other things. And I'm sure, and there are, I've been to a company where I've been chasing robots. Yeah. Where they're working on other stuff like that. I'm sure it's happening in the background already. It already happens with drones. It already happens. But I think the obsession with the human form factor robot always feels a little silly to me. Well, let me make a straw robot man. Okay. The value of a humanoid robot is not inherently in the shape of humans being better than the shape of like Ultron or whatever, but it's that we as humanity have built our society around the human shape. So if you want a robot to help with people around the house or whatever, human houses are meant for humans. So most of the tasks are optimized for that rather than a big death machine that can move really fast. That's, that's the argument in my head. It's like, I will say, does it need to run faster than you seen bolt? No, but if you want, like if you, you know, you want it to do laundry and use the laundry machine and get under the sink to pick up things and put things up in shelves. Like, you know, it's all built for humans right now. Yeah. But imagine like even dream with me for a second. It's a, it's a robot that does all your chores at home. Okay, it's commercially affordable, okay? It has four arms instead of two. You know, it's surely that one's a little better at the job part of that is it's off putting. I think, I think what you said about it being like a form factor that we can anthropomorphize people call chat GPT. Like they say nice things to it. You're not saying like, I think that might be it too. I, but in my head I'm like, I think I rather, maybe I want a little spider robot at home. If your arms move as fast as Usain Bolt, really fast. Aiden. Actually, that was, this is, this is all he can dream. You don't need to upgrade this. I, you know, people made fun of me for teasing the fact that I didn't love project hail Mary, but I thought, thought, thought something cool about that movie is so many times in media. The presentation of aliens is like so humanoid and because it's natural to express the guy in a costume, but in that movie they take an, they like, no, like this life form in a far off galaxy that we like meet up with. It has no reason to be similar to us in really any way, but it still thinks and talks like a Redditor. That's universal. You're being humanoid. I don't like this. And would I want a little robots? If the robot spider does the dishes really fast, I think I prefer it. Oh, I don't know. I think it'd still be creepier if it's like my friend robot human and he's like, Hey, and then the robot spider is like, you're the marketing guy. This makes sense. But it's, I'll just say that the reason this is all humanoid in this Olympics thing is entirely marketing. This is like a show to the world of how good China has gotten at robotics. And I think the one big question was that I want to post to you guys is like, if you pull this chart up. So the, the, the issue is that all of the parts that are going into these advanced robotics are almost entirely made in East Asia and mostly in China, especially the magnet nets, precision bearing, the power electronics, the encoder, all this stuff is majority made in China. Or if you include South Korea and Japan, we almost have none of it in America. Tesla, I've maligned them plenty, but there are only like robotics company, even close to the scale and size needed at the level that's going on in China. And they're ahead. It seems to me that they're quite ahead. And so it does feel like one of the big questions is if this is, it could be, it could be farther away than people think it'd be closer than people think. But if this is like a next industrial revolution where you start merging AI and physical robotics and this is happening, not here, it's happening. Like it's clearly not happening here. It's happening in China. And that's a big question. Like people have to start thinking about that, waking up to that and kind of figuring out what, because nobody wants to be in the country that where the next industrial revolution doesn't happen as the history show. That's a really bad. I mean, even looking at this graph, right? Where Japan is represented in a pretty big portion of these different categories, right? In that, when I was going over that article of like Japanese robots replacing farm workers, uh, from a couple episodes ago, it, one of the points it made is that the Japanese robotics industry is falling behind relative to China and South Korea. And even though they do have that industry and it's been around for a long time, they aren't even necessarily keeping up in innovation. Uh, so there seems like there's a fewer and fewer players that are capable of developing these things at a point that can align with. I mean, it's what we read in breakneck where it's like this scale of so many competitors at same time as what, because we had like Boston dynamics, who was like one of the early leaders in robotics. And they had those videos that went viral eight years ago, but they're not keeping pace. There's not enough. or competition or other people compared to what's going on with all these companies so it's just a i think it's going to become a really big story once robotics has a chat gpt moment where it's like oh this robot can run autonomously in a factory for three weeks without doing anything and it's like a big deal and once that happens it's like wait a minute this is a huge huge efficiency advantage i don't know we'll see my it's been cleaning my clothes for three straight weeks your clothes are thread i've been trying to stop it it only knows how to clean it shoves you away with two of its arms the other two keep cleaning cleaning i wait one final quick anecdote which is just a funny part of this yeah the cultural difference between us and china right now when we went to china and we went into the mall to go look at their insane cars i while you were waiting around to check out the new xiaomi su7 i went downstairs and because there was a humanoid robotics stall in the mall and i got to like they showed off the robot dogs that were doing dances they didn't have the humanoids there because they were like oh we're doing a big show today this is in malls in malls they have multiple companies doing humanoid robotics and showing them to people right there dude when the guy doug i walked downstairs because doug was there i saw the end of it and then and then when the guy made the dog like run at us from the other side of the room i was like oh my god so maybe this is different no you see yeah you just see it moving at you fast it's like wow that so maybe i don't want that maybe i don't want it feels creepier it feels great it does feel creepier it's good i want to be dominated by humanoid looking things okay i want to i want to i want to be killed by a human robot i've always said that all right how do we transition this to new zealand housing um china geographically okay it would take the humanoid robot i believe if i do the calculations here 31 minutes to run from china to new zealand yep i think that's accurate doug and what would they find housing wise in new zealand when they got there and they would find a wealth of townhomes the chinese robots would have plenty of townhomes to move into the chinese robots are going to need a place to live what country has some space and they can move to auckland okay so i think uh yeah me and h rock have been auckland together we did a little new zealand tour we gambled uh we did gamble i went up a thousand new zealand dollars in the middle of the day to it is a sad thing to do which a casino in the middle of the day it was basically empty dude we played blackjack with a viewer yeah we sat down and gambled and then the only other person in the casino was like are you a it was crazy it was i love the yacht it was crazy and then we all won and we were like hugging each other like it was yeah anyway sorry it was great it was great uh i i think as someone who loosely follows new zealand a lot of the economic news you hear about the country right now is pretty negative like rising cost of real estate uh unaffordable rents brain drain of their young educated population to either australian universities or the australian workforce an aging population of australian older australians moving there and buying property and uh they're not really being a lot of opportunity for like working class new zealanders right now as their real estate market has shot up over the course of like the last few decades and priced a lot of people out uh but this was a good story that kind of told a little you know a little news in the opposite direction okay uh so in 2000 i think it was 2016 it might have been a bit earlier than that new zealand uh or auckland specifically new zealand's biggest city changed their zoning laws so they rezoned 75 of the land uh and this was two years ago and they were like oh my god we're going to have to do this uh and they were like oh my god we're going to have to do this uh and they were like oh my god we're going to have to do this uh and this was to allow more dense housing to be built they had a lot of it zoned for like single family homes and uh if you look at the reform uh prior or if you look prior to the reform yeah uh 96 percent of the land was zoned for low density housing and after the reform uh 45 percent of it went to medium low 23 went to medium seven percent went to high the basic idea that we need to build more buildings up and we are willing to relinquish the idea of large houses in exchange for smaller properties because of the demand of people who need to live here and there is a limited amount of land in auckland to even develop in the first place and what was pretty cool is the results have kind of come in after a decade of this policy being around the housing stock there are now about 620 000 available uh sorry 620 000 total units of housing a hundred thousand more than over a decade ago before the reforms and median house prices have fallen about a quarter in that same time more than the overall drop for the nation in the same time period and rental prices since 2016 rose 26 percent more in the rest of the north island of the country than in auckland itself uh basically they just built a ton of town home uh townhouses uh turning lots that would normally be one house into like four or five units of housing and it's funny because if you look at auckland on this chart in the same article it's not a particularly dense city still like they could be building a lot more like towers and apartment buildings and build further up this is not a particularly uh even aggressive policy but this change has moved the needle in some direction and i'm sure that there are young new zealanders listening to this right now that are saying i'm still economic things are still expensive new zealand is not free of problems and this is also off of the back of a giant increase in property costs over uh the past few decades that still needs to be like rectified and like reckoned with but it is cool to see the impact of how a policy change on building did have a tangible effect on mitigating the cost of housing in the area and uh that's pretty much it no it's awesome i mean listen auckland is not going to solve the economy of australia no individual city is going to solve youth unemployment everything for the whole country the fact that they built even for new zealand like it's like austin austin did a similar thing right and they're not like it's still hard to be uh trying to find a job when you're a person in austin but the point is that their their rent prices aren't rising the same level as other cities in the state like it's just cool it's as cool to see that it worked uh it's shocking that building more housing building houses yeah it makes the prices go down it really blows my mind i think they tried capping the price on but not building anymore i think if you are from new zealand especially if you're a young person right now if you're in your 20s early 30s would love to hear about what your economic experience is in the country if this change is really that noticeable by you because ultimately rent still rose in auckland it's not like rent went down overall since since 10 years ago uh so i'm curious if this like seeming win or this very relative win feels like a win in your actual life uh but it was interesting to read about at the very least that's cool that's really cool that's awesome i'm glad i'm glad it's uh i mean this is just a lesson that i hope that all the world leaders in our audience take it's like this is one of the easiest wins is that rezoning has been like successful in almost every city it's been tried it's like it's one of the most things in politics are trade-offs i mean this one has a trade-off in that housing prices for boomers might go down but like this is it's harder to get a single family home yeah i mean like i'll give a counter like a friend i guess i don't know if he'd want to share it but like a friend of mine who lives in texas of ours uh bought a home and the value has gone down by like 50k over the last couple years and that's got to feel fucking horrible and that's because austin has built so much house that it is a buyer's market and you cannot you know your housing value does not just like go up in perpetuity more that's not how it works and rents are down it's great better than ever to be a renter in austin it's more affordable to pay rent and live in a place in austin than it has been in a long time and also owning a home is less valuable because it feels like the niche i like the trade-off and that friend said i like that this is happening it just sucks to see my investment get fucked exactly i think that's the niche pool of people that i have some sympathy for that i think unfortunately needs that is the trade-off that we need to make is the the people who have like managed they to save enough money to all in it on a house that's pretty expensive are getting screwed and then they don't have a lot of savings or assets and like anything else because they they saved everything to just get over the hump of being able to afford a house and now somehow like this happens with friends who are like relatively successful in la and they they save for years to finally get a house they have two incomes they put all in yeah yeah and and that's all they got and and it dips for them i think that is the but there's no other way like there has to be something has to give eventually in order for the problem to be solved yeah 100 god i hope we have mass surveillance on all those new new zealand homeowners thank god doug because there's a new flock camera on every corner of auckland i made that up wait is this about there's flock in auckland i have no idea oh flockland they're calling it flockland uh uh is this flock camera story flock camera what's new about flocking we talked about it last week we talked about flock cameras yeah it was like uh two or three weeks ago so little flock camera update this is becoming an increasingly contentious issue and we talked about how a couple of weeks ago, various American cities are starting to say no to the flock cameras that their police departments and HOAs and schools and all these communities are installing. People are starting to really get some pushback. Yeah. I saw a story of a guy who took down a flock camera. Is this part of your thing in Ohio? Yeah. He took out a flock camera in Ohio and then a grand jury refused to indict him. Wow. Like he was caught doing it and they just didn't indict him. It's a sign of the times. Like, I mean, that's, that's a wild thing because he, they had a hundred percent evidence that he. I don't think they did have evidence because the flock camera couldn't track him out there. There was no more video. Anyway, I started to get off. That's the trick about crime now. Uh, okay. So, so this is a minor story update and I'm going to give you some different perspectives that I thought were interesting flock. This is about 10 days ago now announced some changes and the response to this enormous increasing backlash. And they basically said, we're going to change our privacy and accountability and security. Uh, there's a blog post about it. You can check out here. Some of the takeaways instead of storing license plate data for 30 days, they're only going to store it for seven. So we're like, we were voluntarily kind of clamping this down with the asterisks that it can be extended via evidence mode, which is an exceptional case where police are like, we need this data for longer periods of time for this case. We're going to filter the shared data. So if you're sharing your data with another city or department, which has been one of the big criticisms of like this city just ends up sharing all their information with the federal government. That isn't on by default, you have to pick specific categories that can be shared. So a more ability to filter and they're going to audit automatically for abuse of their systems. There's a Washington post report that dozens of cops have now been arrested because they've been personally abusing the flock systems. There was a cop who used flock to, I believe over 700 times track where his ex-wife was. So now if abuse is detected by flock, they will automatically lock out those individuals from the system. So that's a big one. So I think that's a big one. So I think the police force from using flock, you now have to have a case code to search. And in the end, you know, they kind of hype themselves up and more like, look in July, we detected over 1000 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. So it is their attempt to kind of do PR couple of interesting responses. ACLU has been a very critical of flock. They said the devil's in the details. These are conceptually good, but ultimately this feels like PR move. We wanted 48 hours of data retention going down to seven is not enough. This evidence mode, in quote, it's just like, they'll just be able to store data forever. If they want the search filtering thing, they flock keeps saying, we're going to get better about preventing other groups from having the data. They've said that a lot. So maybe this time is different, but probably not. Um, a lot of left lean leaning commentators are obviously like pretty, uh, not convinced by this, a quote from AG Dellinger in Gizmodo. As for the actual communities affected by flock, you'd be pretty hard pressed to believe that a person ready to tear down a flock camera is going to have their mind changed by shortening the recommended data retention window from 30 days to seven. Yeah, that is, that's like the heart and soul of it, right? It's like, I don't think anyone has ever been convinced by one of these corporate blog posts. I've never seen one of these come out and it's been like, Oh, you know what? Yeah. Well, let me give you another perspective. Cause I do think let's, let's talk about this recent community, uh, hearing. Let me make sure you can hear it. Perry, I volume up. Let me know if you're good. Okay. This is a public safety committing in San Diego a few days ago. The emperor is a fan of flock and we must continue utilizing flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium, because we all know that the flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers. They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums. And we need this. I need this so I can stock my ex-girlfriend. So, okay. So if Vader is steel bandit, I think he's got a good point. Different cases. Look, even the conservative commentators in some of the articles that I saw are, they're concerned. I think there's not that many people who are just stoked. Oh my God. Stoked for flock. I feel like if you're in a, in a traditional, like don't tread on me. Yeah. Like if you're a tea party guy who actually is insane, you'd hate it. Yeah. If you're a anti-vaccine Facebook mom, it's psychotic. There's a kid on your playground with cameras. Here's a quote from conservative Mike Fox. This pro surveillance narrative relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of government in a constitutional Republic and ignores the reality that institutional power is inevitably abused. It's kind of wild that would be at all supportive of this when this seemingly goes so against what has traditionally been the balance of real tough on crime. And then it's privacy. And that's the, that's the fucking balance. But yeah, it just doesn't seem like there's like, this is like a pretty popular movement. Now this anti-flock thing is like nationwide, uh, people that like people that are in government that aren't listening are getting rolled over by their constituents or yelling at them in, uh, in public forums. Like it's becoming a big thing. Like they just have to, to respond. The voters are seemingly against this overall. I was going to say, is this my weak echo chamber mind, but I feel like flock sits in a very similar category as data centers where the pushback against it seems to be more bipartisan than you'd expect with a lot of issues right now. Yeah. I mean, there's look, let's also be clear. There's definitely normal people. There are definitely plenty of people. It's hard to quantify who just like the idea of police can solve more crime. Right. I think, I think probably us three and most of our audience are not wild about what flock is doing, but that exists. I talked to somebody who's in the Midwest kind of boomer era vibe a week or two ago. And they were like, yeah, you know, the people against it just don't want crime to be taken care of, but like, it's obviously good. And we're trying to get installed in this other city. And like somebody who's like kind of, you know, involved with their local community. So these people exist or like, that's fine with me. We want less crime, but certainly the tide is going against it. I mean, people fucking hate flock as much as they hate the Lakers. Fuck you. First of all, it's tough. I don't even know if I want to defend the Lakers anymore. It's such a crazy time for me. Walk us through it, Aiden. Cause I'm, it's pissing me off. I have, I have an interesting question for you guys. I think, what do you think the most valuable sports franchise in the world is? The Lakers. Sacramento Kings. Ooh, they're on the list. If you go down far enough from the list, uh, they, I think I have been just asking people this question for fun the last few weeks actually. And I think it's interesting to hear what people's responses are. A lot of people will say a really well-known basketball team like the Lakers. A lot of people will try to read, read the global context of sports and they'll be like, well, it's probably a soccer team. And then it's probably Real Madrid or like Barcelona or something like that. And, uh, it is the, uh, Dallas Cowboys. At an estimated 15 and a half billion dollars at the top of the national football league, a primarily American sport. Uh, and do you have a general idea as to why, uh, NFL teams are worth so much TV rights? Yeah, it's the TV rights. And those TV rights are exploding over time. So recently the NFL and the NBA both made gigantic new 11 year deals, uh, way larger than their previous ones. I think the NBA tripled their previous, the NBA is like 77 billion dollars worth more than curing cancer. Dude, wait a minute. Yeah, that's crazy. It's, it's the football, it's national football league. Moderna was 50 billion after doubling. That's crazy. And then the NFL is 110 billion for 11 years. And these deals just, uh, gotten negotiated, I think a couple of years ago now. And these broadcasts, are getting insanely large because it's the last thing really carrying network television at the same time as you have all these streaming platforms trying to cement their place in the market, right? There's only like for most people, the way they consume TV now is they expect to watch it at any given convenience and with minimal ads or the ability to fast forward through things. And the traditional network TV experience doesn't really offer that anymore. But what's the one thing that we all still watch live, tolerate the ads through it's sports. So these, uh, forces have kind of become juggernauts for the leagues. They're able to demand so much from these networks. And in turn, because of the rev share deal and the way that like league revenue works, this gets distributed to the rest of the league, the rest of the owners, the rest of the players and things like the NFL and the NBA. So recently the Lakers announced the sale of their team for the highest recorded sale of a sports franchise ever, which is 12 and a half billion dollars, which is also crazy because the Lakers, uh, just sold, uh, I think a little over a year ago for around 10 billion. Uh, the fact that somebody, uh, almost flipped it like a house is kind of funny, uh, because normally once you get a seat at the table within a very limited pool of owners, you stick around for a while. The guy who was the owner of the lakers prior to this also the owner of the dodgers is apparently in a bit of financial trouble right now and he is being investigated by the doj and the sec and is allegedly trying was trying to sell the lakers quickly in order to get a bunch of money in order to help with that case and this reporting if you want to hear the longer story is by pablo torre the same guy who did all of the investigative reporting on the kawaii leonard stuff so i really encourage you to look more into it or follow his stuff in general if you're curious about it uh but the reason why this deal is so crazy it is uh led by uh not jared kushner i was about to say bob josh josh kushner yeah yeah it's this deal was led by josh kushner uh jerry kushner's younger brother and bob eiger the former two-time but behind uh josh kushner is his private equity fund thrive uh thrive he is a main fund called thrive capital yeah and this is his offshoot fund called thrive eternal which recently sent out a message to their investors to explain a new investment thesis uh that they at least have had for like the past year or so and the idea is in an age of uncertainty around investment in the age of ai when so many things can be changed and replaced with this technology that we don't fully understand yet how do we evaluate the future what's something that we expect to be untouched by ai no matter what that seems like a promising industry that continuously pumps new money out of it because of all of these other circumstances that are collided it's sports it's the ultimate right like authentic human experience right and uh they made this uh acquisition of the nba teams and as we can see like within a year they turned around a two billion dollar profit on the sale of this team right and that is crazy in itself but it presents this idea something that uh pablo was talking about that i think is really interesting is private equity has only been able to get uh chunks of teams for the past few years like the the chain it starting in 2019 was when private equity was able to have any stake in any of these major sports teams and uh the rules were changing the nba i think in 2019 and then the nfl in 20 no sorry it was the mlb in 2019 what what would change that allowed private equity to not be able to do that before restrictions from the leagues themselves okay so they chose to have a i think in the past you have this like it's so funny to talk about owners in in this way but god damn it teams used to be more affordable they used to be cheaper no it's because they got more expensive yeah the guy you the guy in your town who was rich enough could could buy it in a sense yeah i mean sports teams were like a billionaire luxury boy it's like a yacht or something it was like a and when they were at a one billion dollar to five billion dollar valuation or whatever then it was like a thing they could afford but now because they are getting so valuable and so expensive that a regular working class billionaire can no longer buy one on its own could we rezone to make more of them to make more teams or more billionaires borth i don't know look into that get chachapiti on that uh yeah so so now that they're so expensive the only entities that have enough money to be throwing around billions to buy it's like private equity and and paul bagger pays your bank well paul bagger's a small part of this deal i mean he's like the face of it but it's like yeah pushner's money thrive capital and there's there's uh also limitations on uh in these leagues of how much sovereign wealth funds were able to buy like norway's sovereign wealth fund couldn't buy out a sports team a long time ago but now these caps have been changed so the leagues are making changes that more and more of these like institutional scale investors can get into sports and have a share and there's already a concern from sports fans so i think a lot of people are familiar with the idea that private equity has been ruining youth sports in the u.s as uh private equity firms like take ownership over like like hockey stadiums and hockey clubs and like single areas they're able to control so many facets of youth sports in a certain region that they can up the fees for everything even charging things like the like restricting your ability to record your kids game with your phone and then charging for the streaming service which i thought was ridiculous until i talked to my uncle who my cousins all play hockey in alberta and he was saying he pays the 50 a month fee for all of the game feeds and like he he doesn't mind because it's like it's got a nice overlay and like he wasn't gonna record it but if he did but he said technically he's not supposed to record the games which which is crazy and now sports fans as they're beginning to interact with this i think the mob is like the first layer that was really getting hit by this because in 2019 when they lifted the restriction uh a private equity group got a huge chunk of the red socks and a private equity group that's interested in maximizing the team for profit and not this traditional chase of like i'm an owner i'm a rich owner who owns the sports team and i want to win yeah that is very different than a private equity firm that's in the sport to make money those goals aren't necessarily aligned well they're actually directly opposite if you really look into it because in a sports league they split the tv revenue 30 ways or whatever and so theoretically whether your team is doing good or bad as long as the league is doing well you get a big cut so the maximized thing to do is to pay your salaries as low as you can yeah the salary for lose every game but get all the money on that's like the smartest thing to do billionaires don't usually do that because they want to win they want to be like the champion guy holding up the trophy so it's like yeah it's i mean the long-term fear is you have so many of these players you you have a market where realistically the only parties who can afford teams anymore are giant groups that are primarily interested in milking the funds out of something that is for a lot of cities like part of civic life it's not you know going to the baseball game or supporting your team it's like a generational thing and the idea that now a group who's trying to aggressively price tickets and monetize food in every way they're you're at what point do you like push away the fans that give the team value and well it feels like supporting thrive capital could be like a cool thing i do with my son dude it'd be so funny dude getting that you know what we should do thrive capital jerseys but with like donchus's name on the back and go to a game i just feel like that'd be a good father-son bonding moment to both like help shareholder equity and thrive capital like that's what i want him to grow up idolizing he's great thing yeah but i i the other thing i thought was really interesting about this is it sports has always been a platform for like statements and politics like you know very simple images of uh like protest at the olympics or something like that right there's a there's this soft power in sports it's why like qatar a place like qatar really wants the world cup right it puts your name on this grander stage and it's so interesting like even in even outside of this private equity stuff you look at the way like premier league teams are being brought up by like the a royal from the uae or or qatar or the way saudi arabia has like increased their spending in sports and over to have in order to have this like global presence in it it's all of this global money is like surging and spiking this industry that you know is very human yeah and it's kind of the last like bastion of human authenticity and it kind of makes you wonder when it's all gonna break like how how much longer can all this money keep getting put into it so people are saying that like if there ever is a down round in like what these t because these tv deals every time they do like you said it's so much bigger and if they ever like are flat to down in the next negotiation if no one's offering to pay you ever more billions for your tv rights it like collapses all the growth models baked into these like sports team like because they don't run them right now for a profit they run them kind of dead even and they just sell the team for a higher valuation later because everything's growing so it's weird uh well i think depending on the league you're in you could be making a lot of money right like if you have an nfl team if you have an nfl team because of the way the nfl is structured you are probably making money you probably have a profitable team from my understanding i think it's different in leagues where you don't have salary caps i think it gets like really fucky in i think it's different in leagues where you don't have salary caps i think it gets like really like the premier league where you they they do have rules now but you have people come in spend all this money the top end teams are losing money i think like real madrid barcelona manchester unite manchester city these are all orgs that i think are technically losing money correct me if i'm wrong on that but they're because they're pushing the salary caps for like uh players higher and higher so i think there is an aspect of like egos and owners too it's like you get a small piece in a very exclusive pie and your team winning is kind of the only thing money can't buy yeah if you're that rich if you're that rich uh yeah i will say there's one more angle this story which i think is interesting and i sort of think it's interesting because i think it's can't explain it so i'm gonna just toss it up there like yeah uh it's that mark walter the owner that sold the lakers is he's in financial trouble as you mentioned but that financial trouble in that investigation he's under seems to be like the tip of a very large iceberg that expands broader outside of sports he made his money through this uh hedge fund and it's like he has tied it in with insurance companies that he bought and he is taking this is what he's alleged of doing is the illegal crime taking insurance premiums and using them to gamble on things with the idea that he could pay it back later with the he's gambling on buying sports teams it's like it's like sam beckman free taking customer deposits and so but if you look into it it looks like this may be the case that a ton of private equity and hedge funds over the past few decades have been like slowly but surely buying insurance companies and looting them to fund their operations and it seems to be they also seem to know that if this all goes belly up the insurance companies have to get bailed out because they are the insurance the life insurance or whatever health insurance for lots of citizens so it's like this could like he's the guy getting caught but as he starts to unwind all of his sports empires to pay i mean it's crazy now it may all end investigation because like you said josh kushner bought it and josh kushner is into the kushner family who's assigned to trump and there's a history of like hey you do scratch my back i scratch yours maybe he gets a pardon maybe that all goes away it's weird they sold him in just a few days yes apparently the deal was in less than three days yeah which is like insane to like open and close that but also it seems like josh kushner and bob eiger wanted to buy the new las vegas team that's gonna start but then the bidding price got so high they're like why don't we just buy an established team like the lakers they reached out and it worked out but i just want to show you this clip real quick because as a you know i don't know i don't like kushner but i'm so glad we have a true authentic lakers fan and bob eiger to run the team um for the listener a little bit of background uh bob is a is a clippers fan and he was sitting courtside uh for nearly every home game during my four years in la and so you and i have spoken on a number of occasions but i know you're very close friends with um one of our our recent guests chris paul who was just on the podcast but i'm so happy to have you on the podcast but there was a there was a lot made of your relationship with him and your relationship with with adam silver it goes back a couple decades in sort of making the the bubble possible the nba bubble happened this past season can you just speak a little bit about your relationship with chris and your involvement in in helping the the bubble happen sure um i am a a clippers fan having moved from new york to los angeles back in 2000 and being a big nba you gotta respect that you gotta respect that guy who's buying a team just for the money is like i don't even like them i don't even i fucking hate them it's not in my dna to be a lakers fan this is you going to the job interview for that valorant their valorant position and you saying that you don't even like shooters i did which you did do that i was in the last two for the role wow and we had lunch together and i was like i'll be honest with you i don't even like shooters and then they they they passed and then at least bob auger you know got the gig true fucking bob at it again to be fair adriac did not flash 12 billion dollars yeah i think they would have kind of funded a couple more uh two xkos talk about that on the patreon uh anyway it's a it's a clusterfuck and i do think when pablo tory's reporting come out more comes out it's going to be like a bigger thing than just the lakers even though this is already a pretty big deal of private equity and equity in sports uh yeah i think it's just a really fascinating really fascinating business i'm like i'm so into uh the the money behind it all right now you greedy bob eiger pig yeah what can i say just want the cash do one more story let's hear about what another fun subject like data centers oh okay well okay we're close up to the end of the show and we did a subject last week on data centers and the political backlash i kind of wanted to just follow up because like you mentioned with flock cameras first of all a lot of reporting is coming out on what people's uh polls and attitudes are towards data centers but it is becoming one of the few truly bipartisan issues in america and governors and um state representatives who previously had been pro data center and advocated how you know it's like we're bringing jobs to our state are all abandoning ship just simply out of voter pressure it is becoming like a 80 20 uh lineup and what's interesting is i talk a lot of data here from some good articles is that uh there's a broader backlash against the tech industry as a whole and ai as a whole but if you go to individual products like even for example chad gbt people have a generally positive view i mean if you talk about google amazon or microsoft people are more than 50 positive uh if you talk about like apple and chad gbt it's closer to whatever but the only ones that are even somewhat negative are grok and anthropic and most of the people are the purple bar which is they don't even know what it is they're not mainstream appeal but like if you ask you about their individual use of the products it's okay but data centers have become a flashpoint for i think a broader uh anger with i think part of it is like some of the marketing that ai firms have done to what it means to the average person i think they've pushed the message that this will take your job this will it's about to change everything and that is causing people to be i don't know upset or afraid across party lines and what's interesting is so i have a and by the way this is sort of not unique to america but most in america than anywhere else so this grabbed out that was really interesting about the rise of ai and the rise of ai in daily life and it's a proxy for like data center support the u.s is the most concerned or more concerned than excited of any country in the world or at least of all the major ones pulled out that this is happening more uniquely here people are more feeling upset about the consequences or or like angry about it it's it's just strange and if you look at it the only remaining like even solid or or like undecided data center group are maga republicans but like republicans who are not maga who are still like the tiger carson republicans or like they are anti-data center the left is anti-data center the you know liberals are anti-data center it's like this one group was like trump said he liked him a while back and i haven't changed my thoughts they're still locked in so it's just a foot they just haven't moved their polling but it is it is like if you look at this like um like harris voters for example it's a 13 point swing it's just swinging drastically since january in the last few months it has become way more contentious people asked why so this is a pretty big study on people's responses on why the largest concern seems to be environmental which i listen based on the data i've seen is like the least impactful part of a data center that i've seen credible concerns over noise like if you're close enough to a data center the powering of it is causing noise am i crazy am i wrong no i looked at the fact that you still have discord notifications pop up with the text on your laptop that you use for this job but sorry i'm sorry i turned off your name because i had to see someone's username that's it's not just turn off notifications on your windows who has notifications on windows we're doing a show this is like data centers it wouldn't be pushing all these notifications or no data centers you need a fucking calendar can i say that can i interrupt this segment to say it's not even related you should disable it you're gonna put that calendar where do you think the calendars are located this is a protest he's on the 80 20 fucking data centers i am you and i use a calendar it's stored in some data center somewhere i'm gonna tell you uh kathy hokal of new york that's greg abbott of texas they have both pivoted from being pro data center to anti because of political pressure because of how much in america this is becoming an issue and i i it's a thorny question because i don't have the answer but like uh given that i think some level of progress in this has to be like they just have to be built in some way it should be a way that's you know not environmentally damaging it's not close to someone so there's noise damage but we can't have the country be the one that's falling behind in everything because of this i i just think it's a weird situation where i think they've done such a horrible job of articulating what the benefit is like if there are benefits they are diffused and the negatives are localized so what is the i don't know i'm just wondering how we can solve this issue as a would happen with robotics or anything you know what i'm saying yeah it might i feel like the simple solution because it kind of is telling that people's opinion on ai isn't necessarily aligned with this like people's use of it rather yeah their real preferences of usage so different so the fact that that is the case and the fact that environmental concerns are the highest right it seems like if you address people's concerns with like quality of life noise pollution environmental concerns like if you can show tangible ways that these don't like mitigate the damage that's done around them i feel like you could change a lot of people's minds uh for the for like the layman who cares more about that than some like broader anti-ai principle yeah i guess and and that's easier said than done i'm sure yeah but that that feels like the simple i don't think it's irrational for people to feel this way if they don't see the benefit but i just i'm wondering how they saw it because it's down it's like something i think should be solved it should be a win-win situation where we are still building new things i think what i'm saying is that when we we talked about this a while ago where like do the majority of people see the like benefit or impact that ai is having on their life and we're making the argument that for a lot of young people in the country especially who are maybe more tapped into the consequences they don't really see those benefits yet and the trade-offs don't seem worth it but when you look at like a broad spectrum of people when you think about they and you look at their view of ai and their own use of it they already see the positive applications they like being able to ask chat gpt a question it spits it back and they don't think about it much more than that i think that's different than data centers though no but that's what i mean because they have that positive effect of ai like in their life already if you just address these base constraints of like well a data center me near you means these consequences then the the problem feels like it's it's solved even if that's like a difficult problem to solve do you know what i mean or do you feel like that or are you saying the image of data centers is so tainted that even if the noise concerns the environmental concerns all these things are addressed that people will no longer go back the other way i think there happens to be actually an interesting uh bloomberg article called why chinese citizens are far more optimistic about ai than americans actually don't think it's really environmental like the ai hate was really rising before the environmental aspects became a real solid reason to hate it but people are just propping up the environment as like the sense the sense i get is that people i mean obviously there are real environmental concerns i'm not downplaying that but i think that that is the that's that fill that fills the slot for a reason to be angry at this in general and that is based on the reporting by jasmine son that we talked about last week where she went and talked to people in small towns and they're like we like chachapiti like we're fine with it it's we're not opposed to ai conceptually it's we don't trust these tech companies and in this bloomberg article it was like the past decades defining tech stories in the u.s were mostly damaging social media harming teenagers the carbon cost of always on delivery the collapse of trust after edward snowden so this article makes the argument that china i mean it's crazy china people excited about ai in china is 84 in the 80 percent more than double the population and they're saying in china the proliferation of technology has been carefully moderated by the government and is everybody has seen in their lifetimes this huge improvement in the quality of their lives and then in america it's like we were at the top of the food chain relatively in terms of development right two three decades ago and people largely feel anxious and worried and distrusting of tech broadly so the sense i get and i'm sure it's different per person from multiple reports does seem to be that it is like america doesn't really trust these companies the environmental concerns are the reason to make that into a concrete policy change i think to back that up uh there's a study that showed people are more supportive of having a coal plant built next to them than a data center which environmentally makes there's just no fucking way so it does feel like environment has become the catch-all for a general anger towards what these represent rather than is it a clean coal plant yes and it's i mean look i can speak to this personally as i started to get uh angry comments about the ai content i was making like the beginning of last year the criticism and it's kind of you know tapered off now as i've kind of changed what i've done but initially it was just we don't like ai we don't like what it's doing and it largely is about like generative ai it feels like it's stealing people's work it's going to take replace jobs but now the first argument when you see when people say i just don't like what it's like that you're using ai is the environmental concern like it's switched to that um and i and again it gives me this feeling of like that's just the most prominent reason to hate it but ultimately people are scared and feeling frustrated with the whole industry having this much power and growth and then please i'm sure people in the comments like this is obviously extremely nuanced let us know if you have other feelings on this but you know what i'd love to do is go to some towns and ask people it'd be so interesting to like interview because i think ultimately i feel like my perspective is so fueled by just people in our age range like between basically between the age of like early 20s and like mid 30s and also that inherently is a group of people that's more online and i'd love to hear people's like just more average people's explanations of how they feel about this topic i have a hard time imagining what would i do have a would turn this around in the u.s it feels like it rides on a larger wave that is difficult to challenge you know what it honestly so as a certified ai hype bro yeah the thing that you can always fall back on we talked about this yesterday you can always fall back on medicine right you can always fall back on like well it's going to cure cancer and with that moderna thing that i mentioned earlier when i first saw the story i was like there was there was like some like tweets or something that were like you see and a.i is doing it thanks to a.i we're starting to cure cancer we're going to be able to make customized drugs and so that was one of the things i researched for this story i was like was a.i a part of this and like no they started this in 2017 it's just straight up not it is machine learning which is different and moderna has a partnership with chachi bt but the idea that a.i is curing cancer right now is not true like it's not and so they're leaning into like it's like clearly there's been a wake-up call among a.i companies that like hey the chickens are going to go and they're going to be able to do what we've been saying and like the impunity with which we've been acting is going to cause us serious financial harm in the ability to get this like there's like 165 billion of data centers that have already been paid for that haven't opened they've been like they've stopped construction because so like they you know and so they're saying a lot of like they're going back to the cancer thing because they're going back and it's just like dude it's like you can't claim credit for this moderna one i guess if you are talking about machine learning broadly you can i guess but this is well before you can't claim credit for this modern one i guess if you are talking about machine learning broadly you can i guess but this is well before you can i guess but this is well before you can i guess but this is well before you can i guess but this is well before you can i guess but this is well before you can i guess if you are talking about machine learning broadly you can i guess. they have to solve that problem if they want to build them that's just you can't expect someone to leap at the chance to help you out co-opting the yimby movement for data centers yes rezone for data centers build them in my backyard and we are gonna walk the walk here which is why we're happy to announce that big yellow thing back there that's a data center now it's powerful and it fuels all of the ai we use at lemonade it fuels all of the scripts that have been telepathically through our cancer vaccine. send to each of us i will say i did look it up because someone in my chat was like would you ever live next to a data center i looked it up there's dozens of data centers in los angeles and there's one within six miles of us now and where i live as well so where do you live again i don't you tell my exact address shut up you prompted it someone's gonna read your lips if you enjoyed this episode and you hate me you're in luck you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand to watch the bonus episode this week because i won't be on it if you if you if you are a person who just slogs through lemonade stand and says i hate every time aiden fucking speaks subscribe to the patreon now for the best episode ever dude you won't hear the nordics mentioned once you won't hear our stonia mentioned once it would be funny if we do the nordic fun fact episode and it's just you and me and we're like everything is wildly wrong it's makeup it's all negative uh i heard in sweden they don't even throw their trash they just throw it right on the ground you will see you will see these two on the bonus episode this week and me on next week's main episode thank you for watching thanks guys bye wait real quick just a reminder the cancer did not the vaccine did not cure the cancer i forget wait did i emphasize that properly what did the vaccine cure did i say the vaccine i've already written my comment you said it didn't cure it you said it didn't cure it and you said it provided actually you've got about 50 50 with an asterisk okay i actually forgot i actually do want to throw this into the end there's an important correction i wanted to make about last week's episode i actually thought somebody made a thread And this is not, it's an important correction. Do it. This is good for YouTube retention. I think in my explanation of the Sudan civil war, we, I remarked that, uh, way back when the SAF violence in the Western part of the country was a historical reason for the, uh, violence that the RSF is causing now. I think it is important for me to say that was incorrect. There was an older group called, uh, the Janjaweed that preceded the RSF became the RSF as it is now that committed those atrocities back then. The SAF did support them. The important thing is like, I think in the episode, we're kind of guessing as to the reason for like the retribution and the terrible violence that is unfolding now. And maybe it's because of like retaliation against this group that did something back then. That's not the case. Um, I think the point of that segment was for you to pick a group and say, this is the problem. This is the response of that. I agree with that. I just think it's an important correction to make. Okay. If we're all getting dirty laundry out, I feel bad about the time that I said I was presenting my story to an old bald guy in a skinny bird. And I think you don't look skinny anymore. You put on a lot of weight and it's noticeable. I would not call you that. That was important to correct the story. And, and, and we'll, thank you guys for watching. Thank you. See you next week, everybody. Bye. I want to correct that. That's when I said we're leaving the show. Yeah, I want to make that correction. We have more corrections to make. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye everybody. Bye.