There’s One Week Left… | Ep. 086 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Support for the show comes from InGen. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. InGen is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, InGen customers save more than $300 million on travel. With zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join InGen every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at InGen.com slash Vox. As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice, that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays. The decor, the gifts, the shopping lists. Put more in. Importantly, the holiday treats. Cheesecakes, cookies. Is there anything better? And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option. Philadelphia, the original cream cheese. Made with fresh milk and real cream. This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good. Find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com. Welcome back to Lemonade Stand, everybody. Back from New York. Yeah. Just in time for what feels like the entire world to have elections. So we do want to give you guys a little announcement. Next week are the U.S. midterm elections, and we'll be doing our episode one day later than normal. That's right. Don't freak out. Don't panic. Yeah. We haven't been silenced by the deep state. We haven't been shut down by. We haven't been shut down by the Jared Kushner's slush fund. Trump has not taken his debt. Maybe he has. Not yet. Well, when we get to the Jared Kushner section of this episode. Yeah, we're going to find out. There's a lot of lemonade stated there. But yes. Next week, one day late. The episode is going to come out on Thursday. But a lot of people may have seen, I think today, as we're recording this, Israel's elections are happening right now. Brazil's elections just happened. There was a snap election called in Serbia that you just made a video about. Yeah. And then even next week, I think it's our midterm elections and New Zealand's elections. So it's an insane. And the world is watching both of them with bated breath. It's like. It's an equal consequence, I would say. Well, you know, if you've been looking at New Zealand politics, they've been talking about taking over Greenland, too. It's been getting swept under the rug. Yeah, it's been getting hidden. But they have some dangerous ideas down there. And they're getting away with a lot. Can I say that? Mm-hmm. But I wanted to start with the. The Brazilian election and Lula winning, which, if you're paying attention, I think really no one expected. But you, you have more to say about it. Listen, I think there's a lot of elections to talk about. There's a lot to talk about with elections this week. And I did that video on Serbia. But the Brazilian one is almost, if anything, as shocking or maybe more so. This is a pretty historic win from Lula. A little bit of context. First of all, the context on the betting markets. This is probably the most wrong I've ever seen. The betting market. They had him at like 80, 85% to lose. And then it all flipped the last second. And nobody in Brazilian history has lost the first round and gone on to win. Or they haven't done it in like 80 years. It's like a very, very long time. And so quick context. There's been this big, you know, in South America, the red is left and blue is right. Just to catch up for you. Thank you. They flip it. Actually, everywhere but America. I think they flip it. And there's been this big rightward. Surge in Latin America over the past few years. Like many, many countries have had right wing populist parties take power and win elections. And the thought was, this is going to happen in Brazil. There's this guy I follow who writes a lot about South America. His name is Brian Winter. And he said the big debate on the Brazilian election was whether Lula would lose because incumbents are losing everywhere. Or whether he would lose because Republicans are winning everywhere. And they said neither happened. It's like this shame, insane thing. So what's weird is in this election. In this election, you know, they had the first round of voting that also does the Congress. It does like all the legislature. The right wing party won a ton of seats. Like they have the majority now. They have legislative victory. But then it goes to this second round with the two runoff candidates for the presidency. Yeah. And Bolsonaro, the other candidate, he was ahead in that initial election. Yeah, he was ahead. And so it just seemed like a slam dunk that he was going to put it in. But between that gap. Yeah. Between that first and the second vote, they had like a really, really insane digital game. The thing that I've been able to take away from reading about it is like Lula's team got really, really active on social media. He, I think, won a debate. They had a debate. And he like did a really good job in it. He had a lot of catchy moments that went viral. And those two things were enough to switch, you know, a few million votes from people that were undecided. So, yeah, it was a shocking result. I mean, none of this. It kind of makes you realize that none of this stuff is real. None of this stuff is set in stone. Like, literally, as big as like title events are, you can go as focused as you want. People can change their mind down to the last minute. Did you see? So I was wondering, I did hear about this like digital push, this like reinvigoration of his base from the initial loss, these sort of things. Yeah. But also that within the time between when the runoff was declared and when this election happened, the left wing party in power, managed to pass a new work reform bill that like reduced the work week from 44 hours to 40 hours, reduced the work week from six days to five days. Yeah, they did. I'll talk about that because the problem is with that is that they they passed a pretty comprehensive like spending and again, hour reducing bill that costs a lot of money and it is funded with debt. So, yeah, I mean, listen, this is weird because the other. Party, if you don't know, Brazil's elections, they had a coup, like an attempted coup, like January 6th. And the president that lost the last election, Jair Bolsonaro, is in jail. He's in jail for that coup. He's like house arrest now. Oh, he's not in jail. OK, they got him out. It's funny because that was one of the lines, I think, in the debate where Lula was like, you know, he said prisoners vote for you or something. He's like, yeah, 100 percent of prisoners should vote for me like your father. So, so, OK, he's house arrest, but his son is the one that was running. Yeah, Flavio Bolsonaro. And so he lost. And that is kind of crumbling the whole plan they had around Jair's crimes being waived and him getting out and yada, yada, yada. And so it's all kind of falling apart. And as of like right now, there's like breaking updates. His passport got canceled and he's fled the country. My understanding is I saw an update from like 30 minutes ago. He's gotten a. U.S. passport and he doctored flight logs to make a flight fake flight to Argentina, but he's going to the United States. You know, he has allies in like the Trump administration. So apparently he also has an Italian passport as well. So like he can move to Europe if he wants to. But this was the Bolsonaro family had strong ties to the U.S. to the Trump administration and are, I guess, like gave them a heads up, gave the Trump administration a heads up. And then like we're coming to the States, I think out of fear, primarily out of fear of like retribution for the other side winning, because presumably his dad is going to be or himself is going to be held to account for crimes committed. No, already he's been charged with like corruption and money laundering and yada, yada, yada. So pretty insane turn of events in Brazil. I do think I think he was also expecting Flavio here that after the election was lost. Yeah. He attempted to contest it, not with a coup, but he said, like, there was extra polling hours and we need a recount, yada, yada, yada. And he expected to have more support from Trump. And Trump said, well, this could have been rigged. But, you know, you kind of just like I'm busy with my own thing. I got my own show on my own plate. And so once that happened, the fight went out of him instantly. And his plan became to flee the country. It is funny because Trump is just the worst ally. He really is. He's so flaky. Like, he's just. Whatever he's wrapped up in at any given time. He's like, yeah, we're boys, right? Like, what about. Yeah. I do think going for a second, a second coup would be insane. A second coup would have been. I think there's it does get compared to January 6th a lot. But I think the previous Bolsonaro encouraged coup, there was a case that somebody within Bolsonaro's team had like got caught making up. A plot to have Lula assassinated. Oh, Jesus. And there isn't proof that like Bolsonaro approved of that or knew about it. Right. But it was someone in like his immediate camp who was talking about having Lula killed. And then among the coup, like the attempted coup itself and like and then him getting tried for it. OK, so if you're a Lula fan, big excitement. And obviously this does create a more diverse political South America. People were worried there would be this pure right. were shipped over the whole continent. That being said. because of this spending package because of brazil's economy in general which is you know they have a like an eight percent deficit which is even bigger than france which is even bigger than what we got here in america you know it's a pretty big deficit uh there was an immediate reaction to him winning like their stock market dropped i i don't even have the exact number it was it was like it was a massive drop instantly their currency took a big hit like there was a lot of uh financial bets that lula would not win uh and that flavio would win like possibly rein in spending i don't believe that either there's a lot of you know there's a long history across all countries of people saying there's a problem with debt i'm gonna rein in spending when i get and then they get in power and they never they spend more trump is example of that i have a pro argument for lula here tell me and with the spending yeah is so their debt to gdp ratio which is often the like general signaler of how safe a country's debt burden is it's not like a foolproof metric or something like that they're at about 83 percent right now which by how people worry about this metric people are very wary once that number climbs above a hundred yeah and it starts to impact their ability to raise further debt in the global bond market uh well they're only at 83 they've got some wiggle room yeah and by the time they surpass a hundred lula will be dead probably yeah i mean i think the fear is that there's like no this is a problem everywhere right now there's just no plan or path we're gonna just run it until the the cliff goes off but yes anyway uh yeah big big win for lula and uh and an equally interesting win over in serbia these two things happened like back to back and they were like uh pretty insane so i did a video on the serbia thing i don't know if you yeah i had questions because i i this is a rare circumstance where i haven't watched your big a episode and i hope i'm not rehashing too much for those who may have watched that already but i wanted to present this as we talked about serbia on the show a while back and what led up to like the rise in student protests there and the rise in and then uh for those of you interested i actually did an interview with a student protester on our patreon like i interviewed him for like an hour and a half his name was constantine is constantine he's not he's fine he's fine he's celebrating actually he's probably in a good mood uh and it was really uh if you want to check that out you know go check out the patreon but i'm what confused me a little bit when i was reading about this uh and i only read about it today was this was a snap election and the students formed like a new political party that won the election that has ousted it's so sick so yeah can you can you just help me understand that very brief because i did do the big a video but it really is so awesome and i'm like trying to tell everybody about it because i think it like inspires me uh so uh vuchich who's run the country for 14 years and has gotten increasingly more authoritarian and more tied in with putin uh about two years ago there was a massive train station collapse uh that began these protests and people looked into the class and they said it just got renovated why did this happen and it seems to be that uh there was a lot of cronyism a lot of contracts being given out and they would take all the money they would spend the bare minimum on the reconstruction and keep it all for themselves people were very upset about this and six people 16 people died and instead of just having this one-time protest it became like you know every day at the same time of the collapse they would have this candlelight vigil and then they started to get bigger and then every year on the the memory of it they would have these massive protests in the street and they organized and they noticed that the reason that vuchich uh was so hard to unseat is that he had such control of the media and anytime an opposition party came up he would like 24 7 slander their leader and like really like run him through the mud and so they thought what if we made a movement that has no figurehead no no like one leader and the reason he was even running for election is because there's a constitutional limit in serbia that you can't have more than two five year terms he was that he started in 2017 we're coming up the end of it so he said i'm going to resign right before my term limit and i'm going to run for prime minister instead of president and i'm going to move some of the powers from presidency to the prime minister it's kind of cheeky yeah it's called the putin shuffle putin has actually done this like i think multiple times back and forth to maintain power forever so he's doing it and uh the odds are again all the betting markets he was supposed to win and they made this thing called the student list where they created these small locally organized groups across serbia not just in the capital and they would vote for people they thought were just basically not corrupt their big thing was like we don't care where you are politically we don't care where you are with the geopolitics of serbia because there's russian influence chinese influence american influence we want to end corruption in serbia and that was a very unifying thought and so just pick people you think are like true uh serbian patriots not corrupt and they picked like doctors cardiologists athletes former basketball players like just people they thought represented the country and they had 250 of them for every seat and uh there was no leader though yeah and then they went door to door because they didn't have the media so they went door to door and they knocked on everyone's door and they said serbia or mafia was their slogan was the idea is like this country's become a crime ring let's yeah and it was just so successful like it was just the power of organization and uh consistent door knocking and like creating this movement and they were non-violent but consistent protest and it overwhelmed them at the polls i mean like he won beyond the landslide he had to concede almost immediately 30 minutes after the election and he said yeah i mean we're it wasn't close like i think they got way more seats one of the articles i read called it like the the effect of the hungarian spring because the story in hungary was like really similar you know primarily uh an anti-corruption story about getting orban out of power this person who increasingly corrupt authoritarian cozy cozying up to russia like for financial gain and distancing their country from potential ties into the european union very similar situations and then uh they in in hungary uh major major fuck you guys it's a hard i i struggle everybody attack him for it but he had a similar approach he had a similar approach where the media was a part of the media had such a clamp on the communication to rural districts in hungary that had an outsized weight in the voting so his approach was to literally door-to-door campaign in all these rural towns and communicate with people directly it's like really cool and i they they turn the tide and hungary has been in on a really good trajectory since the uh earlier success in the year from that election and hopefully something plays out similar here in serbia and i think it's kind of interesting at a time when like western europe is uh we're watching western europe fall towards these further right potent like fascist parties uh because people are stick is sick of the establishment that's currently in charge right and this is kind of happening in the opposite way where in these eastern european countries you have this like more authoritarian maybe more right-wing guy but people are turning the tide there too people are fed up with whatever is creating the current circumstances and i did think about this with with lula and the problems of like spending in brazil and the that broader problem for so many countries around the world i've been thinking of that about that presentation i did on greece a while ago this general idea that not that people can't benefit in the short term you could lula's policies will have a positive effect i bet for a lot of like working class people in brazil in in the short term and i think that's a good thing right sure uh but if the institutions that you have are kind of like rotted and spending is out of control and you keep accumulating debt regardless of who is in power whether it be the left-wing party or the right-wing party in the long run the the chickens come home to roost you know like that's and and that's what that presentation on greece was like all about is like it they had a flip-flop between like really right-wing parties and socialist parties throughout those decades yeah but they never dealt with the underlying institutional problems of how spending worked in the country and eventually it destroyed their economy yeah and i can't help but feel like as i watch across the globe a bunch of places flip-flop over and over and over again not not without reason to do so people are rightfully upset about the way things are working uh i there there needs to be like a more concrete fix of the underlying things that are oh i totally agree i feel like there's this undercurrent this fucking tectonic plate of debt problems that is everywhere and it's the one thing people are having a real hard time addressing so they flip-flop on the other things that being said you know i'm not yeah i'm not going to tell you that a 40-hour work week in brazil is bad i think that's a win i think that's a good thing and there's yeah you know progress is incremental and fits and starts and i do think like uh like what happened in serbia like it's not a guarantee the country is now suddenly on a perfect path no but it's like they were on a perfect path and they were on a perfect path and they were on a perfect path and they were on a path that was clearly not working where it was like very corrupt and so it's like these are this is progress it's like the way the world works it's like this sign curve up so i i don't know i'm i'm hopeful for it uh it has echoes we've talked about on this show of like um you know the gen z protests in nepal and all over uh asia and like it's like i'm not saying anyone's figured it out yet but it's kind of uh hopeful a bit to see this happen again and again as people are like are fed up with the way things are and and are making some progress on it. - I think especially as an American, seeing other places working young people who don't have the institutional power come out on top is super i think this is one of the coolest ones because they not only did they do it the way they did it which was like pretty much essentially non-violent through the ballot box but organized is they they uh made a you call it they codified their how they did it they like literally made a guidebook and they want other people to learn from it they like which is like awesome they literally built this plan they showed how they did it they did it in public they had these rules and steps to follow and it's like that sounds insane that's i don't know they really kind of blew my mind so i think it's cool uh but speaking of serbia and and how a big part of this was their fight against corruption across political lines i want to talk a bit about the american midterms because we're doing a full episode next week after the results i'm sure it'll be exciting uh or terrifying who knows but we're a week out and there's like a lot of stuff starting to trickle in so i'll first want that some of the early voting stuff i don't know if you know this i'm the world's biggest trump fan so i'm devastated to see these early results you do talk i constantly am like trying to pump for him i hope he wins i voted for him four times sometimes you voted for him four times yeah i did twice in 2020 because i thought he needed help against the cheater joe biden yeah yeah well i he cheated once so i was like surely we get one you get one you get one back yeah uh no okay so so i don't want to like early call anything but at this point in previous midterms republican turnout even for mail-in or early voting was much higher you know in a lot of places like even even florida which probably still gonna go red uh but places like texas places like kansas places like ohio places like i mean i'm looking at everything and i'm seeing a consistent turnout um problem like they're they are just not having the enthusiasm gap and they had like a real surge of the beginning and it's falling off so quickly and so it just seems like the energy is not there and then you like feel the vibe in the country and it just feels like people are fucking exhausted just fed up like he does not have a lot of core support anymore and then you see the videos i wish i could pull one up i don't know if we have one of like paxton rallies and they are i mean they are staggering the chairs three wide to try and make the crowd shot kind of like and they're only and it's all the oldest people it's like there's not a single young person in there and you really feel the energy gap and so i you know i am a little hopeful for how this uh midterm is shaping up and i'm looking at the other elections and one thing i thought was interesting part of it is they've been polling people and obviously the story even for trump's win was that people have been fed up with cost of living that was a big problem in the in biden years and it's a big problem now and people are angry and angry because like but what's interesting is a new issue has hit 71 salience among independents and it's even higher among uh it's getting higher among republicans and it's really high among democrats and it's corruption corruption has like entered the top two or top three it used to be like cost of living massive and then just a huge fall off and then it would be things like i don't know immigration or whatever like it was like such a bigger uh issue but now corruption has become one of the bigger things people are really reporting over and over that they feel like uh it's becoming something that really angers them and i think it's where it's like you hear about trump getting a billion dollars in crypto profit you see things like the pay-for-play pardons and you notice that your gas is six dollars that you know it's like it all ties in where you just feel a little more angry you just know that someone out there is is grifting they're getting rich while you are finding yourself struggling and so uh i i thought that would be interesting tie-in to what you kind of looked at with jared kushner my story you think clean there's nothing wrong with jared kushner having a little bit of boy swag in 2018 can a white boy have a little swag we've we've we've outlawed boy swag in this country stop saying boy swag it's really off-putting okay i'll admit it i'll admit it i i cracked i cracked open the fair article that was it's an excerpt of a new book by matthew cole about jared kushner kushner okay and uh i expected an article full of boys uh but basically what's going on with kush dog in this excerpt in this excerpt it talks about how uh a dutch intelligence service hacked kushner's phone in like 2018 right off the bat i heard this high level part of it is fucking crazy because like we're at the point where ostensibly allied countries are so suspicious of this weird corruption and like obvious double dealing that they're like having to investigate the phones of representatives yeah well i think what what's crazy is for for me when i open this as uh this is first term stuff this is not even now uh kushner is making friends with muhammad bin zayed and uh muhammad bin salman of saudi arabia muhammad bin zayed is the uh like crown prince or king of the okay and he they discover that he has these two bank accounts one based in the uae and then one they find out is based in israel and after some initial discussions basically the uae and saudi arabia are looking to like provide some sort of like slush fund of money to strengthen relations with the trump administration at the time okay this idea that okay we're setting this up to be like a bank account and then we're like we're going to have to decide a portion of our like government budget to make deals with the united states but that doesn't end up getting agreed upon but what they do agree upon is giving two billion dollars between the two of them to jared kushner well why wouldn't you do you know i'm saying like he's got as you say boy swag and two billion dollars will let him like really stretch his wings they see swagged up boy and they were like what if we gave him to be and uh giving this to someone directly like very close to the trump administration you know and someone's hot you know someone's got a hot hand and you want to bet behind you want to like yeah join in he was he was frying at the table so they give him like 750 million dollars in this uae based bank and they don't want anything right because that would be corrupt they don't want to like it's just it's a gift well the kush defense is coming this 750 million in the uae bank account is from banks in azerbaijan and the reason this raises red flags is apparently because azerbaijan has this financial history of being a country to like launder money through because they have privacy laws around their banks there where they don't have to disclose like anything about transactions or holders or whatever okay so the transfer of 750 million dollars comes from like a random account in azerbaijan and gets deposited in this uae account and they don't have to disclose anything about transactions or holders or whatever that kushner is a signatory on not an owner a signatory so keep in mind you're gonna cancel a guy for being a signatory i can't be a signatory on a foreign bank account with 750 million dollars on it we come back in woke 1.0 i guess what comes for anybody and then to top this off and this was technically not discovered by the dutch agency if i recall uh israel also uh the israeli central bank an account to kushner as well that the remainder of the money got deposited in and the reason for that being is the israeli central bank also does not have to disclose any information about that account okay but the journalist apparently has information yeah i saw that yeah that's a big point of this which is that they so many actual banks have to follow these certain regulatory laws or have to disclose things yes but central banks which are the banks of a government are above that they have a certain like immunity yes and so when this goes through the israeli central bank that's a that's not a normal thing it's kind of it's kind of crazy too so like the uae account wasn't the uae account was visible and because that dutch agency had hacked his phone what they could do is they couldn't access it themselves but every time he unlocked his phone and was using it they could see his screen while he was using it okay so they could see him so they're fucking pocket they're pocket watching which is cringe that is cringe i've always said the dutch are cringe i've been saying it a lot no you've never said it wow they get exposed for pocket watching is that the weird story that the dutch got exposed for pocket watching yeah that's kind of i feel like that's that's cushy's defense too uh so this the and the thing with the money in the israeli account in the israeli central bank account is that uh moving that money out of it has also been uh challenging because moving it to any foreign account is something that could get flagged as well right sure and reportedly they've like taken money out of the account into like cyprus bank accounts which also have like a lower level of oversight it's all these methods to like not have to disclose what this money is or what it is for right and what you have to do the precedent for anybody that is like a family member of the president uh president or works for the president like if you're in office the idea is you have to disclose any uh foreign accounts assets that you own and you're not going to be able to disclose your own or are a signatory on right but this was never disclosed and now that this is hitting like Vanity Fair, and this book is about to come out, Jared Kushner's lawyer is coming out and issuing statements. They want Vanity Fair to take this story down, and they're also outright denying this across the board. Basically, every party involved, which is Kushner himself, like every American party involved, Kushner himself is denying it. He had a representative to Israel who was supposedly communicating with Netanyahu and the Israelis to ask for his money to be moved out of the account. Those people are denying they had any knowledge of it. So the whole way down, there is no admission so far. So he's saying the Dutch just made it up. I'm not even kidding. Yes. They faked the phone screen. They are saying that the journalist who has published this piece has basically manufactured the whole story, and that he has not provided any proof of these accounts existing, of his sources, of the Dutch having done this intelligence work at all. Right. Which is. If I'm being honest with you, a little hard to believe. Well, you know what they say, where there's smoke, there's fire. And when it comes to Jared Kushner and having like weird slush funds in the Middle East, this doesn't. It doesn't track with his behavior or his history or his attitude or his flight logs or his. It doesn't. It doesn't add up. I can't think of any. It just. Because this is a first term thing, right? And I get it. It's like if we. And if we had a history of maybe his second term of working for the government being any way similar. Similar to this, I would believe it. Yeah. But my dog Kush just has a little. Has a little boy swag. Got a little boy swag. And he can't be stopped. Yeah. So I. But shit like this, bro. This is why I think people. I mean, again, if you ask Americans, it's hard for them to pinpoint an individual story. I don't think people follow. There's been so much stuff. So many. You get like waterboarded with it. But I do think that there's this like consciousness. Because I said this on stream. I think Trump. Trump has this ability to move past any individual story. An incredible political ability of like no single thing can stick in the news or take him down. But I think there's been so much that like it no longer is a story. It's like this general sense of corruption that is. It's just rising among all. In all people's brains. They don't have to even have one example. They just know they're getting screwed. They know on some level there's deals and grift and graft happening. Grift and graft. Grift and graft. Those are my two henchmen. I mean, I just like. Dude, I'm reading this article and we didn't. We did the corruption episode where we highlighted like five different stories about, you know, Trump family corruption during the second term. Yeah. And I keep thinking about how the news cycle talked about Hunter Biden's laptop for like four years. And. It's still my number one issue in this election. It is. And it's big. And don't get me wrong. That has not fallen far down my list. I get you. People listening right now. Yeah. But for this, I'm like. Dude, this is $2 billion and the only defense is either it didn't happen at all or if you do believe it happened, then you have to believe that all of the reasons that this $2 billion is hidden from public view is like. All of those reasons are totally chill. And even though you are legally required to disclose something like this and didn't do it. Oops. Support for the show comes from Enjin. Running a small business. Means every dollar has to work hard. Enjin is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country. Built specifically for businesses like yours. And in 2025, Enjin customers save more than $300 million on travel. More than a thousand businesses join Enjin every year. And every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at Enjin.com slash box. Life can be messy and complicated, especially during the holidays. One thing that isn't? Switching to the Simplicity Plan from Verizon. It's one plan, one price. Just $30 a line per month for you or the whole family. Make the simple choice this season. Switch to Verizon and shop their best holiday deals today. More than a thousand businesses join Enjin every month. We can move on to another. I am curious. You looked at early voting results. And I'm curious if you looked at polling for a little thing called Prop 40 in California. I did not. What are you seeing? Can you explain what it is? For those who don't know, Prop 40 is the wealth tax initiative in California that's about to be voted upon. People are voting on it right now through early voting. Basically how it works is this is a one-time wealth tax on California taxpayers with more than $1 billion in assets. The idea is that of the money raised, 90% of it will be applied to healthcare in California. And 10% for food assistance and education related programs. And there's also a stipulation that none of the money raised can be subtracted for funding already provided for these things. So it can't like replace money we already set aside in the tax base for that spending. And leading up, there's been polling about whether or not this is going to pass or not. And I will say, as somebody who lives here and gets mail regarding the elections, this is the number one thing I'm getting shit about. A lot of ads about it. Holy shit. A lot of mailers. So many ads. Clearly there's some money invested in this not passing. And I have to say, when people, I've realized in the last year, and maybe I'm realizing this super late, is like when you look at political ads and you listen to a thing that tells you to vote no on Prop X in your state, you gotta wonder which side has the money to pay for that ad. Sure, yeah. If one side is for the public good and one side has the money to say, no, then whose interest is this really being pushed for? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's true for this one. I do think for some of them, there's like, sometimes this happens, you get both sides just dumping money. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to tell. Yeah. And some of the way these things are, I went through my ballot recently and I was like, damn, it takes some time to really go through that thing and like understand what is being said and what I believe. It's not easy. I do think there's a lot given to ones. But in this case, there's a huge money. There's a huge money gap on the spending. Yeah, I think when the disparity, the disparity is more obvious here. And we have a great episode coming out in a few weeks where we interview a tax expert that I don't want to spoil. But basically make, she makes the argument for some type of tax on wealth. The idea is the people, it's not about like wealthy people paying more than normal people even. It's that when you look at the wealthiest people, you look at people's effective tax rates, they choose to take the majority of their compensation in the growth in their assets in some form. They're not taking out a normal salary or contractor fee like me or you. And they, by doing so, they're able to pay effectively, you know, below a couple percent in tax on their income. Yeah. Whereas at the very least, we would be wanting them to pay like the 30, 40 percent that we pay. As normal people, which they do not do. And taxing wealth is a way of doing that. But they have a bunch of arguments against this arguments that we've talked about on the show, too. And I think the smaller arguments that are being made are like, oh, this is like setting a precedent to like tax your retirement accounts as normal people. The law is written to like to be amended. And this tax will be expanded to normal people in the future. Yeah. This tax. This tax is experimental and risky. And then the last big, big argument that's been made a lot is that this is going to drive high earners out of the state. It's going to force people or companies to leave, which will reduce California's tax base in the future. And I think those are arguments that I'd like to come back to. But I think what's interesting is when you read down the California ballot information or when you look at these ads right now, the faces of who is. You say no to this are teachers and firefighters and health care workers, these organizations that they've managed to get backing from. But when you look at who is spending money to back these ads, you can see that it's anything but normal people funding the proposals. These are the regular bros. These are the boys. Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders, is the number one contributor so far with his one hundred and two. million dollars of free speech contributed. Yeah, his dog Eric Schmidt is there. And Other notable figures, I looked down the list. Lindsey Snyder, the owner of In-N-Out Burger, putting a five mil in there. I love In-N-Out Burger. And here's the part that I didn't know before looking into this story, because I've been following Prop 40 pretty closely, but I didn't understand this part. And when I was filling out my ballot recently, I saw Prop 41 and Prop 42. And I also realized that these people are advocating for spending for you to say no on Prop 40, which is no to this wealth tax, but they are also advocating for you to say yes on Prop 41 and Prop 42. What these things do, and I'll just quote the graph above me, Prop 41 bars taxes that evade the state's voter-approved spending limits, and Prop 42 prohibits new state taxes on personal assets and most retroactive taxes. So the idea here is they have laid a trap, because one of the other people that does not support Prop 40 is the governor of California right now, host of this show, Gavin Newsom. Our co-host. Our co-host, who's been so flaky lately. Have you noticed that? He doesn't even come to the episode pre-prep. He doesn't do, he skips our weekly. He skips our weekly, and he's barely on the show. I say, I say. I'm gonna call him out, bro. This is crazy. Gavin, you can do the call from sack, bro. You don't gotta come down. Gavin, call in, bro. But Gavin Newsom pushed forward, in an effort to try and have this Prop 40 removed, and not have it be on the ballot at all, because he's been pretty vocal against this. And whether or not you wanna give Gavin Newsom credit or not, his outlook is that this cannot be implemented at a state level. It needs to be some sort of national-level proposal, which I think you can make a case for, but I would make a firm argument that this is a step in the right direction in the short term. Yeah, I think that's fair. We talked with Ray Madoff, and I am somewhat sympathetic to the belief, I do think, like, I just get, I feel icky about, I just know they're very good. Wealth is very good at evading and moving state to state, and I kinda want things to be national. But, like, this is a one-time tax. It is a good test. It's a good, yeah. I think even Ray Madoff had problems with the idea of doing the exact method of this. Yeah, she had a more, like, complex approach to taxing wealth that we'll go over in that episode. But, in general, like, I think this is up in the right direction. And, obviously, just in your gut feeling, you gotta know, when this many people are lined up against it, and it's like, you know why. And I agree. The idea of, like, hey, there's a vote on Prop 40, and it's hard enough for human beings to keep up with all these fucking props and what they stand on. And then you've added two more, like, trap props to undermine the first prop, and you're just hoping that one of these hits, because people don't follow it super closely, and then you're safe from, it's like, it's not democracy. That's fucked up. It's, like, not a normal way to handle it. This is the part that tilted me, bro. It is a trap. This is, this is psychotic. It's not only do we not even get the right to just vote on this wealth tax, yes or no, without an incredible amount of money being invested into the yes side. It's that they have laid out the two other propositions that are meant to, if any one of these things gets through, it makes the wealth tax difficult or impossible. You gotta hit the bingo, dude. It's gotta be a slob machine. You go, cherry, cherry, cherry. Exactly. And I was reading the proposals, like, on my ballot, and I think, like, I have to go through my ballot, and I have to read all these things, like, a couple times to make sure I know how I'm voting. And if anyone who's just, like, crunched for time or is choosing to do it the day of or, like, doesn't really understand the way these things interact with each other, which is a totally normal thing, it's hard to read these things and just immediately get how they all interact with each other. It feels so unfair that this is, like, the opposition to this thing. Yeah, I agree. The way they're handling this is horrendous. And as a guy who's made a billion dollars selling Enron hats, I firmly am willing to pay my fair share here in California on this wealth tax. I'm just gonna say, that's a brave of me to say. It's interesting you say that because Jensen, on the leaving argument. Oh, my goat, Jensen Wong, my old boss? Jensen Wong, the old goat, has said something similar. Basically, he's down to pay the tax if it passes. He doesn't mind. He's like, he basically said, I'm rich enough, I'll pay the fucking tax. I have a leather jacket. I have 14 leather jackets that all cost more than your guys' salary. And then, the other big story around this was Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck! So early on, when this was getting proposed, he threatened to leave the state. He was one of the people that said, I am up and moving my residency to another country. People have left the state because it's a retroactive tax. There's, like, a date that if you leave before it, you don't get hit by the tax. Yeah, so Sergey and Larry, Sergey Brin, Larry Page are two of the people that have done that. Yeah, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, the guy of Kalanick from Uber, Don Hankey, you know, just like the goats. Just like the goats. Peter Thiel's here, yeah. I think there's a couple arguments against this idea in general. One is, you, these people are, I would say, unfortunately, not as impactful to the budget of the state. of states as the argument makes it seem. Because of the way they already hide and structure their wealth within the current situation and the way, like, we look at taxes through the lens of I get income, I pay taxes on that, right? But these people aren't doing that. They are already paying effective tax rates, even living in states like California that are on the, below, like, a couple percent. And they're, this idea, that these people moving as individuals is gonna be this massive hole in our budget is not as true as people think it is. These people are not currently paying, like, 30, 40 percent of their income or something. They don't have a lot of income on paper to begin with. The other argument is that companies are going to leave the state. But companies are much more embedded in the ecosystem of California than people credit. I think it's a lot harder to move the headquarters and all the employees and all of, like, the process knowledge that exists within the state to another place. And Meta has essentially conceded that. Because Mark Zuckerberg has come to a deal with the board of Meta that he is going to be able to sell enough of his shares to get through this wealth tax without forfeiting any of his control over the company. So we've talked about, you've brought this up on the show before. Basically, the way Mark's stake-in-stake book thing is that the way Mark's stake-in-stake book will be on, they should merge stake and Facebook so you can gamble on your friends and family. Oh, beautiful. That would be fucking awesome. Dude, I'm farming my grandmother. Will she say something weird at Thanksgiving? Yeah, it's awesome. You can make some real cash. But the, basically, because of the way they allocated votes to Mark's shares early on, he has, he has a smaller amount of shares, but an outsized power of voting within the company. He has like a 61, 61% of the voting power. Yeah, every share that Zuckerberg owns has 20x voting power. He has never had anything but full control of the company, even though, percentage-wise, he owns, I don't know, a relatively small percent of Facebook. Like, you know, if everyone, but if every other shareholder, they could get, you know, whatever, 88%, 89% of the company, they cannot outvote him. He literally, he literally has the last word on everything, which is why he is able to run it into the wall on like the metaverse and, you know, whatever. Well, he can throw money at anything because no one can outvote him. But Zuck came to a deal with the meta board that allows him to retain the voting power while he sells through a portion of his stock to accommodate paying this wealth tax if it is to pass, which was a big deal. And it means that he is staying a resident in California and also meta is clearly staying in California. And I think this, this is seen as a win for the crowd that is arguing like not that many people are going to leave. Companies aren't going to leave. This is not going to have this threatened impact that a lot of people have made the argument for. Now, like you noted, other people have left already. Like there, there has been. Here's what I'll say. I like, because again, I'm on the side of taxing wealth, so I want to do it. And the reason I want it to be nationwide is because even if in this case, meta wins, the example I'm thinking of is like Hollywood here in LA where the tax benefits that are offered in places like Atlanta or Vancouver have just, it doesn't happen instantly. Like when those, those advantages were created, it's not like every movie moved out of Hollywood. Exactly. It's like over time, these companies just are, they drift towards their best tax advantage. And so I am an advocate of like standardizing the barriers and also working with ally countries and trying to standardize wealth. Like you want to make it so they have no place to hide because they will find that place. They may not do it immediately because there's a lot of ties they have to these places and there's, it's sticky, you know, but eventually they do. And so I don't like the idea of waiting, you know, and yeah, that's it. But it's a good, it's a good thing. No, I totally agree with you. The long-term solution needs to be something enforced at like a national or international level. And something that sucks about this right now, especially not knowing the results, is the amount of things impeding this It's passing. me feel like the likelihood of getting this done at a national level is just so fucking low. Oh yeah, fucking difficult. Yeah. That's another reason why this could be good is maybe not even as like this is the solution but if you could get it through in California and it's not apocalyptic and there's some money for the state it's like here's the signal, let's figure it out for the rest of the nation. That's not a crazy idea, it's like a gateway. If you are in California and you want this to pass, if you want the wealth tax to pass effectively, you need to vote yes on Prop 40 and no on Prop 41 and no on Prop 42. And maybe on Prop 47 you have to spin around Prop 49 and you have to write your name backwards. And then you do have to do like a crazy long jump over Prop 50. It's fucking insane. Okay, I want to slide over to, you had some little info about the ratings agencies. Oh yeah, this is not a massive actually, this probably is a massive story but certainly it hasn't come to light yet. I just want to bring it up because I saw a couple pieces and they get me my ears perked and a little spooked. You know that scene in the big short where they literally have their ratings agencies portrayed by a blind woman who's like refuses to see what's right in front of her face and it's like this metaphor. And the idea that happened in 08 was that all these companies were packaging dog-shaped mortgages up and they'd go to the rating agencies and they'd get a triple-A rating. And they were not triple-A, but the ratings agencies were worried that if they didn't say triple-A that they would take their business elsewhere. That was the idea. Well, there is a general sense that that is happening in like every single thing the rating agencies can rate right now. And the big example is it's like the quality of insurance. So the idea is like if you build a house in I don't know, Florida or any place that you would need insurance, people are going to smaller and smaller like almost boutique rating agencies to get things stamped on insurance policies that don't actually cover if things were to go wrong. But people need to have insurance. Basically like there is a lot of money that is supposedly there if there was a hurricane or there was a disaster or there was a fire in all these places. And the truth is that it's like not triple-A. It's rated as covered, it's rated as good, but the idea is that it's not. And what's interesting is when the government was trying to even just begin the process of investigating, like, hey, let's just look into this. There was this massive pushback from the collective rating agencies and they kind of backed down. The government kind of backed down and said, you know, we don't even need the data. Like you guys are self-reporting and things like it's good. That's the story from today. And it's interesting because I'm seeing a similar story play out in a number of different areas, not just in insurance. Like, for example, you know, we've talked about bond yields a bunch. It's basically the idea of what it costs your country to borrow money. France has had their bond yields go really high. It's much more expensive than to borrow money. And they're in a tier with other countries that are rated like B or triple B or below. But they're still rated like AA3. And there was this idea that Moody's was going to downgrade them and they just didn't. They just didn't do it. And I think there's this idea like they're they are the only one that's triple A3. It's up in this area. It's like this quadrant. They don't belong. They're the only one with that level of that level of. Yeah. So like any reasonable person can see that they're borrowing like they're not triple A3. Everyone in the market knows they're not triple A3. But Moody's just saying we don't see it. And so this is happening all over. And I tied a third thing in. We talked about the guy that owns the Dodgers, Mark Walter. Yeah. And they looked into all the rating agencies he used for all these weird packages he was putting together. And he found like he found this this insurer agency called Egan Jones, which is extremely tiny. It's a credit agency that like has no clients. And they were just churning out thousands of credit ratings with a team of like five or six people and just rating everything the way he wanted and collecting all these fees. And I don't know, man, but you're hearing about this happening in like packaged up auto loans. And you're hearing this packaged up in insurance. You're just packaged up at the country level. And it just feels like the rating agencies are all whores like all over. I don't know that any of them can be trusted and they are all fucking taking money to say whatever the fuck people want. And, you know, that's a problem. If anything were to go wrong, if something were to go wrong, then the truth starts to come out of like whether this is worth fucking triple A or whether it's actually less quality. I was I was going to make a joke about us opening. Up a company to issue ratings. We should do it. But then and then you said five employees and I was like, wait, this feels it's not that much of a joke. Like you can. Yeah, it's five analysts and there's more employees. The idea is like it's a small ass team. So anyway, yeah, they tried to investigate and there was a huge pushback and now they're saying, you know, it's fine. We're we don't need to fully look into this. So again, I don't know. The idea is it's so opaque. You don't know, but it's like the Jared Kushner thing where it's like, I don't trust these people and there's smoke here. So maybe there's a fire. I would love to have more transparency rather than less, but I feel like this is the corruption app. Yeah, I think it's the corruption app. There's and I think people are sick of it, bro at every level. I just feel like they're getting grifted in some way. And by the way, sign up for the picture where the real information is. Okay, we keep the best stuff on our fucking Patreon support for today's episode comes from Delta official airline of the National Women's Soccer League traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities. It fosters understanding expands horizons. It connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta with up to 5500 daily Delta and Delta connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents. Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug Delta is here to help you get there. Visit Delta dot com for more info. Delta wherever the journey takes you running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. All-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odo dot com slash Vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Vox. Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars. Vet bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on Trustpilot. Get a free quote in minutes at FetchPet.com slash save. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Ideally, we want people to be held to account. Pay the price for their actions. And I there was an interesting story. So New Mexico is suing or a judge has issued a ruling and a penalty to Meta Facebook for 25. You saw Social Reckoning, your favorite movie, and you said, I want to be in the squeak wheel. I want to be in the trilogy. I'm going to be I'm going to be I'm working with Aaron. You want to work with Aaron. You want to be back for part three. You want it to be the Aiden story where you break down the corruption at at Meta. And I said, Aaron, fucking you don't need Fincher, bro. That it was a masterpiece. I loved it. I loved it. Get me involved. Came out and said openly. You said like, I've worked with a lot of great directors and I've really absorbed their knowledge. But recently, my movies, the ones that I direct myself haven't been hitting. And he's like, maybe I just don't have talent. That's what he said. And he's like, maybe there's a part of directing that is talent. And I don't have that. Like, that's kind of sad. I don't feel bad for me. He's very rich, but I feel bad. And now I'm crying for Aaron Sorkin. But it is funny that he openly said that because he's had like a couple of flops now. So they they issued this. And at first, I thought this had something to do with the earlier story in the year about like child sex, sex exploitation on like Instagram. Women like girl and women, mental health on the platforms, like a bunch of lawsuits to do with damage to users that Facebook had ignored. Like every state was suing Facebook. Yeah. And New Mexico, one of the more notable ones for the amount of money that they had won. But this doesn't actually have to do with that at all. It has to do with Cambridge Analytica, which I was like, that's crazy. That's like 10 years ago now. And I realized like for those who don't remember Cambridge. Doesn't it feel kind of quaint now? It was like such a big deal. I know. - I know, and now Cambridge Analytica happens like every weak like like and we just have to be like yeah that's kind of how it is like uh but but what was happening back then is cambridge analytica was like this small small ish firm based in the uk that was collecting data off of facebook via third-party apps and they were creating these voter profiles of people and facebook was allowing that data to be taken and used in ways that was against their terms of service but also against the law and by building these voter profiles uh cambridge analytica allowed uh political ads to be targeted towards people in a fashion that had not really been done before and it's notably had an effect on the 2016 presidential election in the u.s and i think ted cruz's senate uh campaign at the time and it resulted in ted cruz and donald trump winning like it played a notable part in it yeah you and uh they also had accusations of similarly fueling the brexit vote but i think that's like less substantiated than the other two things so cambridge analytica happened a while back and new mexico because of these breaches in law around that that facebook had committed they sued them in like 2021 i'm not really sure why there was such a wait time but that's when they decided to do it and uh this ruling resulted in a 25 billion dollar firebreak that meta is going to appeal they are going to drag this out as long as possible of course and uh i think this is also part of a broader pool of states that we're trying to do a similar thing but a lot of states have chosen to like settle over time um it's so funny because that is a gargantuan amount of money certainly for a fine but if you look at what meta has been doing zuckerberg is signing checks 10 times bigger than that for a data center every week he's i know he's i know he is like they're spending like fucking crazy if you just if new mexico just told him it was for a data center he'd probably sign it and just submit the invoice as like data center funding fee he wouldn't even notice it would be a rounding error on what he spends it's just so i know they have a ridiculous amount of cash i mean this is a company that is worth uh trillions of dollars at this point and uh but for what it's worth like the meta's uh council said uh the ruling and the attorney general's approach to this enforcement makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of new mexico at its core this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online and uh that is their defense of and and they are publicly saying they think they can like win in appeals uh but i i thought this 25 billion was crazy for two reasons the reason you just said and also that it is one of the largest if they were to pay it it would be one of the largest penalties paid by a company in the u.s ever oh yeah it's massive like i think the only things i could find that were bigger were the collective spending of the bp oil spill like the fallout of that uh but you have to you have to add up all of the things they paid across multiple uh things and then tobacco at the end of the 90s yeah uh which was like 200 billion between like four companies and uh 20 so 25 billion is historically relevant but what annoys me is is the context of uh this like for meta it is getting to a point where even that isn't that much which is crazy to say and i really think it's important when people look at these penalties and we talk about like corporations being held to account like the fines need to be impactful and have to match the severity of the infractions because the way these companies uh deal with these issues is that they're not going to be able to do anything about it and they're not is by dragging it out paying as little as possible and they they rarely face any real consequences it's rare that a large fine like this actually hits and i wanted to give this example of uh in finland they have uh income income based speeding tickets oh yeah so i think it's stupid that there's this general idea in like corporate penalties that you can kind of fuck up and do a and just kind of buy your way out of it you like you drag it out you whittle it down and then you eventually make a payment and maybe you pay a few hundred million or maybe you pay a billion but it's like it's kind of the cost of doing business yeah in the same way that admittedly like if i'm pulled over for speeding like a speeding ticket to me is like not that impactful to some compared to you know you say that you say that all the time you say that to the cop yeah i spit it in his face i'm like you know this doesn't even matter here this doesn't even matter you saw but , yeah i sell mogul merch i don't fucking care about speeding is what you tell them it's kind of stupid that something like speeding tickets or infractions or parking tickets are are are just flat rates that like have basically no impact to a person that can just like afford to take the speeding ticket but are really meaningful to someone who has like way less money and in finland they have income-based speeding tickets it's a percentage-based infraction and as these companies get larger and larger like if your company's worth trillions of dollars you should be paying for a speeding ticket and you're not paying for a speeding ticket you're not paying fines that are proportionate to your company's like scale so that these things actually matter and that following laws actually means something yeah i will say i mean i'm not fucking caping for meta here but i want to give a different side my understanding is that you know with legal precedent if you lose to new mexico for 25 billion you you have 49 other states that are chomping at the bit to like like you could lose a lot more like if you add it all up you could lose a lot more money you could lose a lot of money you could lose a lot of money yeah that is fair so outside of this specific case when it goes back to those ones from before those state rulings against like uh exploitation on instagram and stuff like that that was the big fear with that one on their end is like this fine is not that big but if like these handful of people can get this level of damages from us yeah and that opens it up to a user base of hundreds of millions of people yeah what does that mean on the globe it's like yeah their their potential legal liability is is a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of money and it's a lot of enormous and probably dwarfs the size of the company so uh i wouldn't say they're off the hooks and this is i mean if this goes through yeah that is an enormous amount it's maybe not in their their immediate spend but it would be a good precedent yeah i mean it's one of the largest ever so to to give some credit there certainly they would feel it because you don't get anything for it they don't get to get a piece of a data center they get nothing 25 billion dollars is gone and that does reflect poorly on their fucking earnings their stock goes down their stock comp goes down and they'll feel it well um i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do that i have a company that you just chilled for better and i know you love them so much and it was a firm defense i don't even like saying you stand but you stand behind them so so heavily but i i'm the number one defender of a trillion dollar company oh it's a small little fun story but i wanted to ask you about it you as a big apple shill a shilligan air for apple you have the phone and the watch the headphones the fucking butt plug you have everything dude yeah you're jealous i get you the butt plug works with the watch so you don't understand it's the ecosystem so anyway you of course uh they they put the little slop in the trough for you of the brand new foldable phone oh big idea foldable from apple or 10 years late okay and you're like i gotta buy it day one i don't care the price i send me three so i have a backup yeah i bought three uh there's been a bit of a story about they're calling it crack gate okay and the idea is after not that many folds i wonder if i can have the exact amount of folds 17 000 it's like over 17 000 folds it's fine it's fine i wouldn't even open mine that much i probably wouldn't even open it and it's like people are seeing it break a little bit easier we're aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iphone duo units a small number dude and if they experience issues they can contact apple care which also costs money um i don't know what you're thinking about this but it costs two thousand dollars it's a pretty expensive ass phone and there is reports of reliability problems did you see did you see the samsung ad no samsung like openly called them out they made an ad that showed like the first foldable they made which is like 10 years ago yeah they show like the new ones and the advantages and the thing and they show an apple like an apple slice trying to fold itself and it cracks they like they openly call them out and they were like we've got history in there i don't know oh they're trying to be cute they're trying to be cute with it don't come for my corporation yeah i'm gonna stay with my corporation the cool thing about my iphone duo is that when i i message people it's blue instead of green so i do like that that's good with my watch yeah yeah yeah it was fun i think it was antho he was like telling me because he saw an android he's like ew yeah he's like you know there's an app you can get that turns your bubbles from fucking blue to green or whatever i was like bro i'm 35 like at this point i've made peace with that i'm not no one's fucking you're not getting bullied at school for green bubbles school for green bubbles but he's i'm bullying you yeah i think you should feel ashamed i just i feel like i'm okay with it i okay i have seen this i feel like it is here my genuine take i i like getting to talk about this phone because it's so rare to have a tech story on the show that isn't ai really it's like yes yes give me give me give me give me and i the reason i was excited about this is i wanted to buy a foldable phone like i was thinking of switching to android like a year and a half ago and i was like oh it'd be cool to get a photo ball a foldable i do like these a lot and then we went to china we saw all these sick foldables a bazillion of them yeah and i a couple of the ones in china like oh i just can't import these because they won't work on u.s networks and i had seen the rumors about the apple foldable and i was like okay why don't i wait and see what it's like so i've been excited about okay i've been following them okay i've been excited i know and then it comes out and the reviews that i watch of the phone are pretty good the main criticisms i see is like it doesn't have face id uh it's a little heavy and you know those things kind of suck but generally the product is is good but then these articles start to hit after like a week of like all of the bad stories of people that have one that like doesn't work after a week uh and i'm actually thinking about refunding mine because mine is a pre-order and it doesn't even come until january okay and i was like damn you're gonna have to wait until january and then you're gonna have to wait until january and then you're gonna have to wait until january and then you're gonna have to wait until january and if it if like the risk is that high and like apple care is such a fucking joke because you pay out i never get it because you pay out your ass every month so that you can pay less when your phone breaks it's like it doesn't it's not even actual like insurance it's like it's like u.s health care insurance it's like i pay hundreds of dollars i pay all this money a month so i can just pay you more money when i go and it's like it feels like bullshit i don't want to engage with that i hate that's awesome and uh apple i will still do a sponsorship with you um but i can you show this can you show my screen oh my god because i do think you know i was uh i was not on board with the duo so i don't know maybe this changes your mind if you're feeling some kind of you should keep your now you can see what you can do okay so i did see this video and i was like imagine i've got the ft on the right the new year times on the left i'm reading both articles at the same time and then i and then i flick over i flick over to reuters and then the guardian i'm doing this i'm doing an article yeah you could do quad stream and just have information yeah straight to your brain just wired in there yeah so you don't think that would be productive uh no i think this is great i think when i think of what i want out of a phone i want more and more screen space and time so i could spend more time looking at it you you can't even joke because you fucking love your phone oh no you fucking love your phone dude oh dude i don't i don't you love scrolling x i do i do it has everything it does it and to your credit is everything the everything app um i i so i'm anyway the short my short very short reaction is i think i might actually refund my pre-order because uh of all the bad stories i promise you viewers you will see him with the phone on this episode like in the future i will say my phone has a hole in it right now oh sheesh just you know kind of beast yeah it's got a little voice yeah he has a little voice back i i wanted to bring this up with you okay um i've been thinking about this a lot the past few months and i've generally been going through this uh uh the way i use social media changed i was like this was this is probably like a year plus ago maybe what is it i stopped making tweets okay i deleted all my tweets yeah i don't make any posts i don't post on any i don't post anything except like the shows that i'm on sure and uh part of that was i don't want to be a part of this like online machine and i stopped watching shorts at the beginning of the year and i've grown like increasingly resentful of kind of the mechanics of the internet oh yeah and like the way that it makes me feel and the way that it wastes my time and uh i i kind of wanted to pose a question to you and the audience because i've been thinking about that so much uh literally past past year right now okay like can i really reconcile these feelings about that and still publish these shows like we cut things down we make clips we make shorts we we uh we're making podcast content like is my resentment of like short form content especially like instagram real style shit tweets instagram posts social media culture like can i really hold that belief and be a guy who like issues and makes the slop do you know what i mean i sort of know what you mean i mean i'm not you know is my like maybe i'm fucking biased but i don't i don't think this is the sludge do you know i don't think this is like the greatest thing you could do with your time you could get a crack open a book and do four hours but for me a long form podcast and then what a promotional clip of that is not like that's not what's radicalizing people or disengaging them or killing literacy or i don't know i i i see what you're saying in in a grander scheme and like a uh what's the book that the rucker brugman book in like that moral ambition yeah in a moral ambition type way but i i don't know i don't feel an incredible amount of guilt for making this show i don't think that's like the part of yeah i guess i'm not saying you should feel guilty i'm more questioning like is is what i'm making like even over the last hour right um you know there's things i'm emotional about it's not necessarily like all informational is the show is the yard is lemonade stand are these products really so different that i can continue making them and like justify these other beliefs and kind of like disgust at like how the internet is kind of being warped and like what it is becoming i think i don't know for you i mean it's a personal choice i think that's a fair thing to say the way i think about it personally with like with like because i as a youtuber who uploads a lot right yeah i have to be at the mercy of the way the almighty algorithm works the thing i have me and my team and we're a business and the editor have to get paid and we have to figure out how to work with the algorithm and i do sometimes feel icky about it like we have to like you have to have a hook early in the video and you have to like package it in a way that's like uh eye catching but not you know you have to have a hook early in the video and you have to like i don't know it can't be like too on the nose people just already think they know what it is and they'll click it and the things you have to do and i don't love that aspect of it but in my mind it's like i think of it as this is such a huge tidal wave that is so much bigger than me and what i'm trying to do is surf that wave but offer something i'm trying to do something better the idea is like i have to use i have to play the game as it is but try to whenever i elevate if i can that that is my idea i i'm not saying i fucking hate it every time but that's what i'm trying to do because i just don't i have this like um this feeling that if you avoid it all together it's almost like you it's like opting out of voting or something it feels like you're just like you're throwing away your ability to have any voice or influence that's yeah because it's such a big thing it's happening whether we do it or not and i i want to like recognize the reality but advocate to push it like i think you on this show expressing your distaste and disgust with social media is more positive and impactful and getting people who haven't maybe fully formed their ideas than just doing nothing saying nothing and being off you know i'm saying that's what i think but i'm not sure where your head is on that i just that's that's how i i feel it yeah i mean i i i'll say this as a consumer of your content like a huge reason why i wanted to do the show was watching your stuff seeing the value in the things that you're doing and seeing the value in the things that you're doing and seeing the value in the things that you're doing and seeing the value in the things that you're doing and seeing i think we get to have fun and and do something like this together and i guess i want that to be true because it validates like my worldview and validates like what i do and i've been wrestling with is it truly that different and i appreciate your answer i'm curious what the audience thinks like if there really is a separation and like how you see consuming this podcast versus the other things that consume your time online i think i i'd like to have this idea of like my values being in order and like thinking through things yeah uh okay i did want to call out midterm elections if you're in the u.s which is like 50 percent of our viewers you're gonna be hopefully voting next week uh or you could be voting right now if you already have your ballot in your hands or you have early voting or something like that uh i want to remind you all it's really important really really important time to go out and vote and i will i you know for me personally if you care what i think i think you should vote uh on like if you're in michigan i think you should vote for abdul al sayed if you're in texas i think you should vote for talarico as your senator i if you're in california i think you should vote yes on prop 40 and no one prop 41 and prop 42 uh you know those are my my big wrecks i think if you're in other places around the country i think it is a prime time to vote against trump and the republican party i will say it on the show because i have a platform i that's the message that i want to get across right now yeah i listen man i've been i've been fucking preaching this i just i i think if you look at what happened in serbia and you look what's happening around the world your vote matters i think people try to convince you that it doesn't matter it doesn't do anything but it does it genuinely does and the - People spend so much money to make money. mitigate your ability to vote and for your ability to vote against these things like like how much money is being spent to say no on something like prop 40 i i really if if people are not spending billions of dollars so that because it doesn't matter yeah it does matter yeah i agree a hundred percent it matters a lot it can change things i know that you know it can be very easy to fall into a deep cynicism on it where you just feel like nothing ever changes and there's big wins this year too like even in the u.s like hawaii uh drafted that legislation against like citizens united there there is a chance to like make progress and i think there are some real candidates out there right now uh that can make a difference and i this election even though it's a midterm election you know traditionally things things have lower turnout do not forget to vote go out and fucking do it it's important uh and we will be covering the election next week yeah so next week we'll be live one day late because we'll have the result of the elections and we will cover them all down here we didn't want to do it the day before and like speculate and then by the time you watch it it's already happened and so we're gonna do it the day after uh pretty pretty uh hopeful and excited please get out there and vote uh you know we have this community discord let us know what you send us a fucking picture of your voted sticker i'll respond to any questions i'm here to like i want to encourage it and celebrate it we've gotten some people to sign up over on the stream and and we want people to do it here and i think that's it for our episode but if you want an extra bonus hour you can go to the patreon slash lemonade stand and uh check out our extra bonus hour every week and join our long-running stock game where i think oh sorry the october results are going to be closing there's one week left in october to participate we're going to be going over the results next week uh we also have another book club we read like michael lewis's latest book that's going to be coming out soon uh but we'll be back with doug no no we won't be with you it'll just be me it'll be you and me still doug's gonna be gone forever it's just gonna be me and you that's on vacation by the way in case you guys are wondering he's on he's on a vacation and normally what we do is we surprise him on his vacation and get him sick and ruin it yeah we have some record podcasts every trip to japan he's done in the last two years we've managed to go and get him sick and we still might maybe next week the midterms are so hot we fly out to japan and we're coughing and we get him sick but realistically he gets a few weeks of break and then we're back with the full episodes after that thank you guys for watching and we'll see you next week for an exciting episode support for the show comes from engine running a small business means every dollar has to work hard but if your team is still booking travel the old way it's costing you more than you think engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country built specifically for businesses like yours book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes earn up to ten percent back on hotels and in twenty twenty-five engine customers will be able to get back to work even if they don't have the money they need to get back to work and you'll be able to get back to work even if they don't have the money they need to get back to work even if they don't have the money they need to get back to work even if they don't have the money they need to get back to work customers save more than three hundred million dollars on travel with zero booking fees no contracts and no bs more than a thousand businesses join engine every month join them and get five hundred dollars when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash box running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project one app for accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other that's where auto comes in an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing all in one powerful platform no messy integrations no bouncing between tabs and best of all no spreadsheets stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system try for free today at odoo.com slash box that's odoo.com slash box prize picks packs are here rip digital packs and get real basketball football and pokemon cards sell cards instantly for cash or ship them home prize picks packs gives everyone the opportunity to pull the one of one cooper flag rookie card worth eight million dollars and a pikachu illustrator card worth 2.8 million dollars and packs as low as just one dollar download prize picks and use code spotify to get 25 instantly and bonus packs when you buy your first five dollar pack prize picks run your game 18 plus eligible areas terms apply collect responsibly