Good News! (and some not so great news) | Lemonade Stand 🍋

I think we need a little more energy on this show.

I was looking up what is the main reason, the most common reason that people are low energy, and it's dehydration.

And so

I got us a tub of certified horse electrolytes that we're all going to take a big sip of right now before we start our good news episode.

Is this?

Yeah.

All right.

So one scoop of this is for a horse that's in like a hot, humid horse.

It's electrolytes.

It's certified for

me.

Can I drink?

Can I actually drink this?

No, that's really good.

It's electrolytes.

It's really dangerous.

It's electrolytes.

Doug, I

wouldn't.

We need horse mentality in this podcast if we're going to win.

When horses hunt in packs, the other horses are ready to jump in if one falls.

That's the attitude.

It's predatory.

They don't hunt in packs.

It's clumping very intensely.

Do they hunt in packs?

No, they don't hunt in packs.

I think I believe in it.

I'm going for...

Clumping.

Always, guys.

Why don't we all take a sip of our horse?

Oh, God.

It's not.

Oh, my God.

It's really just, it looks like moon sand.

It does look like moon sand.

Bro, every week, Doug's like, don't worry, I got a cold open.

This is very bad.

It tastes like I'm drinking like ocean water.

Dude, that is.

This is your morning routine?

Every morning.

Oh, this is nasty.

You're deeply sick.

Guys, what are we talking about today?

Good news.

So much good news.

It's a good news episode.

Good news episode.

The most well-timed good news episode in history.

It couldn't have been better.

I'm so glad we announced it ahead of time on the previous Patreon recording and spent all week prepping on it because it's just the week was full of good news.

There was nothing else but good news.

So when we planned this, we knew.

Dude, you got to stop drinking that horse afterwards.

I've tasted it.

You should not be tasting it.

Don't keep drinking that.

I put four scoops in it.

It's really bad.

If you collapse mid-episode, I know exactly why.

Or if I have the best performance ever, we'll know.

We'll know.

Podcast like a god.

Right, right.

And they're like, every week we have to fucking keep.

Like immediately within a week, Joe Rogan is fucking pounding them.

Horse electrolytes.

That's what spreading throughout the day.

A whole jar of horse electrolytes.

That's what Lee Kuan Yu drank every day.

That makes sense.

During his prime.

I'm having the dose if I'm a heavy horse in a hot, humid environment, plus one extra.

Because you could actually damage your...

This is not a normal note.

God.

This is so gross.

That's me having liver failure is bad news.

This is good news week.

It's also funny you said we need to be more hydrated when I drink all of my water and yours every week.

That's true.

I'm hydrated enough.

You're the guy.

You've got a loss.

I've got plenty.

I'd argue you're too hydrated.

Yeah, if anything, I don't need horse electrolytes.

Look.

Okay.

Obviously,

this is coming in at a weird time.

We did say we were going to do a good news episode this week, and we prepped that.

And

something

happened over the weekend.

There have been some large protests and demonstrations in Los Angeles

over ICE immigration raids.

And we don't want to leave that untouched, especially since we live here.

For me personally, it's like right in the area of where I actually live.

And

we just wanted to cover that at least a little bit.

It's still something that's unfolding.

I think there's going to be more protests this weekend.

And I think there's a larger topic of the way immigration is being approached in this country that we also want to spend some time talking about.

I think that's going to be our conversation, a longer conversation on the Patreon today, and something we're going to talk about in the future.

But since this is happening in

our neighborhood, we just wanted to touch on the details of what's actually going on because I feel like I see a pretty big discrepancy between, you know, what's happening in my area versus what is getting chatted about online.

So, if you somehow do not know, over over the weekend,

there was a protest in downtown LA, specifically around this place called the federal building, in reaction to some ICE immigration raids that had happened, I think, just a couple nights before.

And the

ICE had come in with other federal officers, it sounded like, and arrested more than 40 people and then had brought them from different areas of downtown LA and then had brought them to holding in the federal building because the federal building has like a jail or a prison.

Yeah.

It's like it's crazy because when you drive through downtown LA, there's kind of this one big building you'll go by sometimes and you're like, why does that look like a prison?

And then eventually I realized it just is.

So

in reaction to that, these protests break out.

It's happening in this area that is near Little Tokyo, which is like our Japan town.

And

I guess the main thing that I wanted to talk about, and

because

I have gotten as many texts as I did when the fires were happening from friends, from family asking me, most of which don't even know I actually live in the area.

They just know I live in LA.

And I think the rhetoric around this protest right now is that LA is being like burned to the ground.

And I cannot express enough that it's just not what's happening.

This protest and what has been happening is confined to basically a series of like four blocks around this building.

And while there have been periods of time over the past few days where that area has gotten pretty crazy, if you didn't read the news and you didn't like live and walk through that area, you wouldn't know this is going on, to be totally honest with you.

And I think my frustration has been seeing

the way people talk about the protests online, particularly Trump and the opportunity he's used to like become so inflammatory with it, not only sending like the Marines and National Guard in as a reaction to it, but continuously pushing this narrative that LA would have been burnt to the ground.

He will not remove trips, troops until it is safe there.

And I drove, I drive through that area.

It's fine.

Two blocks away people are in a cafe.

Like, it's

exactly, exactly.

And I feel feel like the, the, the main thing I wanted to compare this to was the fires earlier this year.

Because the fires, shit actually was hitting the fan.

It was fucking crazy.

There were downed power lines.

The sky was red.

There were multiple fires in the city that you could see from all over.

Like, I remember.

We all had friends who evacuated or lost property.

I lost power.

A lot of people were affected.

Soot over everything, like all through the middle of the city.

Literally entire neighborhoods burnt down.

A co-worker, like a good friend of mine, and his wife lost their home.

And if you stood on the north side of LA through those fires, you could actually, if you turn to your left, you could see the Palisades fire.

If you turned, like, if you were just standing up, you could see the fire that was in Griffith or near the Hollywood sign.

And then if you look to your right, you saw the giant Eaton fire near Pasadena.

It was surreal how crazy it was.

And I feel like the news cycle in response to this protest is

just blowing it way way out of proportion and that's not to belittle i i i want to be really specific in that i don't want to belittle the reasons people are there because i think that fight is like very very just and we'll we'll talk about uh the reasons why people are there more uh but for the actual i think people have this perspective that our city is crumbling and it's just nowhere near that

yeah amen man i i think the amount of misinformation i've seen on this thing online is is insane it's it i so i went to the protest i was there in person and i remember i was under the shohei otani mural in little tokyo which is where they had one of the lines set up and people were talking about how shohei otani had said they should lock the protesters up because i looked it up and there's a viral tweet with a hundred thousand likes where he says that it's from talking basebell not a real play it's it's made it's completely made up And then Ted Cruz is tweeting videos from 2020 saying, wow, LA doesn't look very safe.

It's not, I mean, there's just, and it's all going mega viral.

And the retractions or the follow-ups are getting like one 100th of the.

So, yeah, I mean, I went there.

I walked around, you know, right on the line in the, in the, in downtown or at the corner of like second and San Pedro in Little Tokyo.

There's like, I don't know, there's graffiti and there's people yelling at the line or honking.

Yeah.

But it's like a, it's four, it's like four blocks.

And then it's, it's nothing else.

So I just want to say it is exaggerated.

And then I want to zoom out a bit and then we can, you know,

get to the good news.

There's a lot of good news.

My take here is like,

if you flash back one week ago, what was the news cycle?

It was Republican infighting over the big, beautiful bill.

It was

Elon Musk calling Donald Trump a pedophile.

It was bad economic data coming out about like, you know, people aren't hiring.

Housing sales are way down.

Like, what's going on?

And that news cycle was all over the cable news, which we know Trump is watching every night in the White House.

And so to reset the news cycle conveniently, now there's an easy target, which is the most hated state, California, the most hated city in California, LA, unpopular Merrickaran base.

And he's picking a fight with that, making the whole news cycle about this off of like, you know, four image.

And people shouldn't burn Waymos.

I hundred percent agree.

But like, that is the one image.

And again, all those Waymos were on one street in one spot.

At one, at one time on one day.

I think it, I also, I don't think, I don't think it's cool to burn Waymos.

I don't think it's doing anything to do that, at least personally.

But it's frustrating seeing that zoned in on

the rioters and protesters are causing incredible amounts of violence when

that to me is the kind of the only thing that's happened.

There are a couple other like minor infractions, but when you're talking about a protest that goes on for days over the course of the weekend,

no one, people are just protesting, blocking the highway for a bit.

To me, that is so disconnected from the rhetoric that is being

spewed about it.

Did you guys, because you guys both were there for periods, did you see any of that destructive?

Because you're saying it was contained in the four blocks.

Do you feel like those four blocks, it is as destructive within those four blocks as being portrayed, or is even within that area, it's not at all?

I went back the next.

I just, I've seen the same picture of the guy waving the American, the Mexican flag on the car like a hundred times.

And it's just like that, seemingly.

That is the one picture that's being used to to like inflame and uh

justify again that picture plus the word insurrectionist is what is being used to amplify like the possible invocation of the insurrection act an insurrection is like a a revolution like you are trying to overthrow the government that is not anywhere close to what's happening on the ground if you walk around and so it is it's frustrating to hear this and it feels like like uh or welling it like a doubles me because i know that's not what I'm seeing walking around.

And again, it's like if you were only allowed to upload a YouTube video, if all of the comments were not stupid, if nobody could post a stupid comment.

That's what it feels like in that, like, if you can't have a protest because somebody is going to do something stupid in it, then you can't have a protest.

How could you ever protest?

There's going to be somebody that takes it too far or stupid.

But 99.9%, I'm being serious.

I talked to people, I walked around, are just upset at the way ICE is acting, which is like a reasonable and American thing to do.

You can, you can have that position.

I think if you guys want a clearer perspective on what's actually happening on the ground, a ton of people have live streamed the protests while they were there.

So there's VODs to like go back and watch.

Or if the protests continue this weekend, go on Twitch and watch people actually there experiencing it.

Because I think it gives you a way better perspective on

the time

that it takes for anything significant to happen,

if it happens at all, and gives you a good perspective on how almost like literally 99% of people there are there because they want to stand up and gather for a cause.

They want to use the most basic part of the First Amendment, I feel like.

So, I just wanted to stress that as you follow this story, because I think it's going to keep developing and the protests are going to keep happening.

Just remember that it's a little different in person and

do your best to get

a clear picture of what's actually going on.

I think if you guys are happy, I kind of want to move into the episode we prepped before all of this was kind of happening.

We started prepping good news stories because so many topics on the show have been particularly downtrodden in Doomer lately.

And don't worry.

I'm sure we'll get back to that.

Yeah, we'll have plenty.

Yeah.

We're like that meme of like the priest trying to pray and there's the woman next to him like yeah we're trying right we're trying to look at good news this week but yes it's hard uh yeah so i i clearly you guys don't know that meme i do i do i do

the meme but also i don't think here's the here's the shocker i don't think it's that hard i think our human brains are drawn to uh

danger or negativity or something.

And I think there has been a lot.

Yeah, there's danger of this drink rather than the upside.

But honestly, when

prepping for this week, you know, there's a lot of good stuff going on.

It's just balanced out.

It's just hard to make a...

So I think, I don't know who wants to start, but I think we all brought like some cool stuff.

I mean, me and Doug both locked into one topic.

So

this is just nice and fucking simple and great.

If you pull this up, Perry, in 2024, 92% of new power capacity across the world was renewables, which is incredible.

So as much as, you know, the climate feels like, I think, an intractable, gigantic thing, we really are as a world moving towards renewables so this chart from enber energy.org shows where the new uh energy that is being created the clean energy is coming from so solar and wind right now they're a kind of smaller percentage but solar and wind are growing rapidly basically and that's that's i think one of the broader stories that will i would really like to dive into at some point is how much potential is in solar specifically um it for a myriad of reasons one of the main ones being like you can make it in a factory and then you just ship it out somewhere and put it all over the world whereas it's a little more difficult with let's say a nuclear power plant or, you know, wind turbines or whatnot, where you have to build it in the field.

China is

installing more renewable power than all other countries combined in 2024.

So even China, who is like one of the dirtiest countries in terms of carbon emissions, is like really aggressively developing renewable energy and is basically the ones that

make all this stuff out.

That's my understanding of China: they're building nuclear, they're building wind, they're building solar,

and they're coal.

They're doing everything.

They're literally just like, we want all of the energy.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think it's estimated that their peak, their peak emissions are going to be hit either this year or next year right now.

This idea that they're building so much renewable infrastructure that they're going to be curbing the total amount of carbon emissions they release.

And so India is on a pretty good,

pretty good track as well.

Like they're making...

Well, especially cool because

the more it's used, the more it drives the cost down, which makes it easier for other countries to get in on it.

It's cool.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

So, like, with solar, for example, the manufacturing costs are just plummeting.

So, over time, it becomes easier and easier to, for example, you know, you could power, I don't know the exact numbers on it, but a huge percentage of, let's say, America, if you took a giant chunk of New Mexico, right, and you filled miles and miles and miles with solar panels.

And so, these types of things of having massive, massive quantities of renewable energy that is not harming the climate, like this is possible, like not only in our lifetimes, like potentially in the next decade or two.

So, it's really encouraging how much cheaper and more accessible this stuff is becoming, and how many countries that traditionally have been pretty dirty are aggressively moving in this direction.

As someone who lived in Arizona, that place during summer is God's mistake, and human beings should not live there.

So, I think everyone should have to leave in the summer, and we just blanket it with solar panels, the whole thing, and then power the country for the year.

Arizona just becomes a solar center.

Yeah, just it just

last week.

We talked about Australia taking one for the team.

We put it in the Australian out there.

All-power every Australian out there.

Australia is our battery.

Who else has got good news?

Oh, wait, you want to follow up on this on this?

Yeah, so what I think is particularly crazy about this is the rate at which this has been improving.

I think climate, I think we were so used to, especially growing up, climate change being news being so bad for so long.

The idea that we're actually making pretty rapid advancement in the direction of improving it is

one, one crazy to me.

Like 40% of electricity in the world being made from clean sources now is absolutely surreal.

And then at the scale of growth we're at, because I think it was 30% in 2023, I want to say, like we're, we're improving so rapidly.

A lot of individual countries becoming closer to that like 70% or 80% mark instead.

I think there was a stretch of time where

There was a six-month stretch last year of, I think it was Uruguay.

It's Uruguay or Paraguay.

Forgive me.

I think it's Uruguay.

Where their entire serious

burning your poster.

They did all that work and you gave it stolen.

I know.

Unbelievable.

They spent like six months at 100% renewable for like their entire grid.

I thought that was insane.

If it's Uruguay, that's using the Chinese power plant that's like breaking, I think.

Is it?

I might be getting the country strong, but anyway, yeah, go ahead.

We might be mixing up, or it could be the same one.

But besides, outside of that progress, like what the future looks like, right?

So if you look at the scale of emissions in the world,

you know, there's the emissions related to creating electricity, and that's why this is such a big deal.

But there are other raw emissions for things like heating, for example.

So burning something to run a heater to heat a home.

That's a ton of emissions in the world.

Or burning fuel to run a combustion engine so transport works.

These are the other large sources of carbon emissions in the world.

So at first glance, you might be like, well, we're whittling down electricity and like making that more and more renewable, but we still have these huge outstanding things, right?

Cool thing about those is more and more technology is developing in those areas that is moving those things into into the pool of electricity.

More and more things are being electrical powered, and that is where we're focusing like all of our renewable effort, if that makes sense.

Yeah, totally.

The last thing I wanted to wrap this up with was if you look at where we were estimated to be by the year 2100, have you guys ever heard of how we estimate the damage of climate change through the degrees Celsius, like average warming around the world?

Sure.

Oh, if we experience two degrees of warming or three degrees of warming, this is a way to gauge the consequences of climate change because every tenth of a degree or every degree that we increase by, the consequences of climate change become more and more grave, basically.

You know, affecting things like food supply, dramatic weather events.

And with the trajectory we were on in like 2000, we were expecting to have four degrees of warming by the end of the century, which would be disastrous.

Like cataclysmic.

Doesn't sound so bad on a cold day.

And

but now we've managed to, with where we're at right now, we've managed to bring that down to an expected like 2.7 to 3.5 degrees of warming, which admittedly still isn't great in terms of its consequence.

But that's if we continued from where we're at right now, like the rate or the amount of renewables that we have at the moment.

And then all these predictions just like draw straight lines, right?

They find out what, but then everything in real life happens exponentially.

Yeah.

Once the incentives align, suddenly you go from very little solar to a lot of solar.

Like once the price point exists that it becomes the best option, suddenly it just explodes.

Like that's the way things just seem to work in real in the real world.

And that's how it's happening now, right?

Like this is like things like solar drastically increasing in such a short period of time.

And then we'll see the benefit from that as this technology continues to improve, the projections of the warming over the course of the next 80 years are going to continue to get way, way better.

And

I don't know.

That's pretty fucking sick.

It's nice to read a story that was so definitively like, yes, we're making human progress.

Yeah.

This is incredibly good for the future of Earth.

This is so inspiring that we are successfully moving in this direction.

I love it.

Yeah.

It's funny because I want to do a good news story that's so much smaller scale and not important.

No, tell us about it, dude.

No, what do you think was that?

You guys are talking about how incredibly good this is.

By the way,

after yours, I'm going to talk about how we're saving babies with science.

I feel bad.

I don't feel like it's not.

No, so what's the most important thing?

What is it?

No, the babies can wait.

What do you got to get off your chest?

Do you guys know how a credit card works?

Can you explain?

Like, what happens when you...

Well, it's like, for example, you could use it to pay for the treatment that would save a baby's life, I assume.

Is there other things you use it for?

So you would get the treatment now and then pay for it later, right?

Does that make sense?

Buy now.

You could buy it now and pay for it later.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, it turns out buy now, pay later is exactly like a credit card.

And so in Australia, they finally said, hey, we're going to regulate it like a credit card.

which means buy now pay later in australia at least for now but this could spread wider is being fully regulated like a credit card because that's what it is which means um

you know there's credit score impacts if you don't pay, which is bad, but also that they have to actually do credit checks for ending it out.

So they can't just give people loans that they can't afford to trap them in a predatory cycle.

Like, it's progress because what Wall Street likes to do is every few months they reinvent the concept of debt with a new name and then avoid all the regulations for the last way they called it debt.

Such a good idea.

And

buy not pay later is finally catching up to that reality.

And people are like, wait, this is no different and needs to be regulated the same way.

So that's a good thing.

I wonder if, yeah, I wonder if they're first movers on this because After Pay is an Australian company, right?

So their

hold or their, their impact.

I feel like that has to be one of the reasons you're first to act.

It's like this company exists within your borders and it being popular there first.

And it's popular.

I think like 40% of Gen Z on Australia are like using BNPL or whatever.

It's like, it's a big number.

And I think they're realizing that this is just shady day.

It's just like,

and a lot of people are either unable to make the payments because they were not given a credit check when they signed up for it, or

there's no consequence.

So people are just loading up with it and then deleting the app, not paying, right?

Yeah.

Which is going to cause systemic financial problems.

So Australia is at least like getting ahead of it.

I think over here, maybe we'll just let it run until it causes a big problem.

But in Australia, at least they're getting ahead of it.

And I think this could be a good marker.

I think this is a good story.

That's what I'm saying.

It's not a big deal.

It's not changing the world, but it's cool that somebody's proactive about

financial problems.

Did they make any notes on

how, how does this work if I'm already signed up for the app?

Are they going to have to retroactively credit check everybody?

That's a good question.

I don't know the answer to that.

I assume yes, because the regulation is not like you get a freebie, you're going to get grandfather.

You don't get grand.

Everybody gets grandfathered in.

I assume your account must now be credit checked to see if they can afford to give you the limit that they've been giving you.

Which is, it's just, I don't know.

Buy not pay later has been a funny topic for me forever because the name is so funny and stupid.

It's just, it's just

how do they get away with it not being treated as a credit card?

It's so baffling to me to just use a funny name.

Like, what's to start to stop them from Australia being like, hey, we have a new thing that's called like

ZoopZoop Pay in two weeks.

And then they're like, hey, that's not Buy Now Pay Later.

That's our two-week zooper system.

Like, what is, I don't understand if it was that simple to make an unregulated debt market.

It's, it's so bizarre.

Zoopy Zoop sounds awesome, by the way.

Right.

I would and have been using that law on Zoop Soup.

It feels like if

those flying cars that they're making for the LA Olympics,

if those just didn't have to be subject to any regulation laws.

Hey, it's not a plane.

It's not a plane.

You know what it is?

It is the airbud scene where they look at the rulebook.

There's nothing that says a dog can't play basketball.

It's implied.

It's implied, dude.

Like, we don't need to have a specific rule for this name of the thing you're doing.

It's all under the umbrella.

Yeah.

So I'm just going to be asshole kicking Airbud out, though.

Is there a rule that says you can't give credit loans to dogs?

Because that's maybe our loophole.

Oh, my God.

If we lend them to the dogs, then the owners can take custody of

millennial pet spending is like the most lucrative.

And they're just, it's on the rise.

Kim.

Well, this is kind of a, this is a good news.

I guess I'll just stop it there and not say why it's bad news.

We could jump in on the industry and give pet loans to dogs.

And then, then we have the airbud defense.

It literally does not say in the Australian.

Perry, can you check?

Can you scan the entire new Australian law and see if they do mention that this applies to dogs or not?

It's Airbud in his later years, and he's giving predatory loans to other dogs.

Airbud stood off, but he's in Wall Street.

He's in JP Morgan.

JP Morgan chased the ball.

Oh, damn, dude.

You got the Michael Burry binder in that one scene at the beginning, a big short.

He's just sitting at the table with four bankers.

Like, no, you can give me the loan.

It's fine.

This is pictures of cute dogs.

Mailmen, mail trucks.

Please, flip the pages for me.

I don't have phones.

You guys want to talk about saving babies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so this is a few weeks old.

But there is this gene editing technique called CRISPR that came to prominence in 2012.

Very cool revolutionary biology thing where basically we figured out, we learned from a bacteria how you can basically snip a part of a DNA strand.

So it's a big deal because we didn't have a way to like micro-edit DNA before this, but we just found this bacteria that's been doing it and then like basically figured out how to copy them.

So you pair this protein with an MRA or not MRNA, a g RNA, and you pair these together and it goes to a specific spot of a human's DNA and then it snips the DNA and then you can recover it in some way.

So that has been conceptually really amazing over the past like decade or so, but hasn't really been used on people yet.

It's still mostly in trial stages of like, in theory, we can change people's genetics to do various things, but we don't, this is very difficult in practice.

So then a few weeks ago, there was a baby who was born with CPS1, which is a, this basically extremely serious genetic disorder.

Okay.

Untreated, you've got like a week and you die.

Jesus.

And treated like aggressively, like the baby's living in the hospital for months or years, they're maybe going to survive with severe neurological damage.

So this is like an incredibly severe

disease that is caused by a genetic mutation, like one gene that is basically wrong.

It's like hundreds of people get this a year.

It's not, it's not massive, but this baby was born with it, I think about nine months ago.

And immediately upon being born, they recognized that it's this horrible genetic disease.

And this team set out to try to solve it using CRISPR.

And so instead of the normal like decade to develop something custom, they did this over six months.

And these doctors said, like, such speed to producing clinic-grade CRISPR for a genetic disease has no precedent in our field, not even close.

These steps traditionally take the better part of a decade, if not longer.

But they managed to essentially

map the exact genome of this baby to map exactly what their DNA sequence looks like, find using computer modeling the exact spot that was mutated in the genetic sequence, design a molecule through gRNA that can find that specific spot and then cut it and cause the body to basically replace it with healthy stuff.

And it worked.

So they saved this baby's life a few weeks ago in May.

This is the first time ever that CRISPR has been personalized and used on an actual baby.

So they were able to like modify this thing, a genetic treatment for a specific person.

And they're saying now that it's done, future treatments could be a lot cheaper by an order of magnitude at least is what one of the doctors said.

So CRISPR is a, is maybe you've heard of it if you've followed biology at all.

Incredible potential to this thing.

Like, for example, in theory, we can cure Huntington's disease, which kills like 250,000 people.

I don't know if that's a year or in general who have it, but that's fatal.

That's a single gene mutation.

We could like cut and cure that.

Alzheimer's risks, you could find the genes that increase the risk for Alzheimer's, edit those, which I think many, you know, tens of millions of people every year who are dealing with that.

Curing HIV.

HIV is crazy because it gets into your DNA.

Like it embeds itself into your dna and we could in theory have crisper that goes in and like snips it and then even the designing the changing people's genes before they're born is where it gets kind of crazy sci-fi and there's a famous example of this in 2018 where this scientist in china just went uh solo and just edited embryos i don't know if you guys heard about this that's scary to me no no no no this is still good news so he

he talked to patients he like found some people like couples who like one parent had hiv and the other didn't so the baby's at risk for hiv

and then he edited embryos and then implanted them into the women and uh one of the women had twins and he went to jail for three years because the entire scientific community was like what the fuck man i remember this yes it's like yeah deeply unethical

so but the wild thing is

it could work you know and so uh while there's many ethical questions right now um and crisper isn't perfectly precise there's various things You know, one of the things to remember is that you have a copy of your DNA in every cell.

So it's not like you go and change one cell.

You sort of have to get the changes to propagate through the whole body.

So there's challenges with that and making sure it hits the right thing.

But in theory, in our lifetime, probably accelerated by what just happened with this kid, we could have designer babies where you that's not what I'm good news.

This is good news.

Where, and these are all

you Trojan horses.

No, no, no.

It's time for another watch.

It's time for, would you mod your baby?

No.

Okay.

No, no, no.

You wouldn't, you wouldn't slide your doctor at 50 to give him green eyes.

This is possible.

Okay.

This is hypothetical.

This is theorized to be possible.

You, you mod your baby, you snip, you snip a few genes, and they only need five hours of sleep every night.

Pirate Software, another content creator, is I've talked to him about this.

He only genetically needs four to five hours of sleep.

His body functions perfectly fine.

Now he's talked to doctors about it.

that's why he streams like 20 hours a day.

He just

streams 20 hours a day.

He's one of the actual people.

Yes.

Okay.

No, no, no.

So paraphrasing.

People will be like, yeah, I only need six or like five hours.

Yeah, they're like, right,

they're exhausted.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But they just do it.

But there, there is like, there is a.

Yeah, I just drink two monsters every day and I'm good.

Yeah, no, no, no.

You're tweeting.

So he genuinely operates as well as everybody else.

Maybe even better.

The dude's crazy in terms of like how much he works and how much he does.

Four or five hours of sleep.

Would you do that?

Would you give that to your kid?

No, I would would be annoyed.

I don't get any sleep because my kid's up all the time.

That's actually a good point.

I'll modify to give them 18 hours of sleep and then I do it.

Okay, all right.

Wait, follow up because this is, I think, relevant for you.

This is, again, this is legitimately possible potentially in our lifetimes, potentially in the next decade or two.

You edit the genes so they never go bald.

First of all,

this is a powerful gene, and

I don't think you can.

I think it's deep in.

It's impossible to find all the boxes.

CRISPR this out.

That kid's going bald.

Dude, you know what it it makes me think of is like, some rich parent is going to make their kid LeBron James.

Absolutely.

And he's going to show up to my kid's youth basketball camp, and he's going to be seven foot four at 14 years old.

Okay.

So let me get into that.

So here, the next two are, these are real serious things that I think are a little more

genuinely, as a parent, consider this.

Okay.

If you were told that you can enhance their brain power, there are genes related to memory and learning to where your kid could have a stronger capacity for learning things, for mental processing, for memory.

Would you, let's say the risks are mostly gone.

Obviously, this is some high-risk thing, probably not, but would you give your kid that opportunity, let's say 20 years from now?

So I'll give you my answer.

It is similar to me to like...

taxes where

I don't want it to be each person's individual moral choice to whether or not they pay more or whether they use the best methods they have to pay less taxes.

I just want it to be enforced that if we all collectively decide as a society that this is kind of weird, that we just don't allow it.

I don't want to have to be in the hospital and have to check the box of whether or not I decide if my kid is going to be

competitive.

A preposterous scenario here because there's a bit of a there's a bit of a doomer scenario.

We're getting off the rails.

Oh, it's the good, it's the good news episode.

But

if you say, say it's just about brainpower, say we're only talking about that.

It's to increase your cognitive ability and how much you remember.

This is the only thing we're talking about for the moment.

If you regulate that in your country

and then other countries choose not to regulate that.

People are flying to China to have a...

I wasn't even thinking about that.

I was just thinking about how if

there's another massive nation of people where this becomes irregular and they just outclass your group of people people in every way because they allow this, but your country bans it.

Yeah, it's dude.

This is fucked.

Right.

If you, if you like right now, you know, you're like, I'm struggling in the world and my parents,

they could have.

It's the good news app, dog.

It's like a circumcision, you know?

It's like

my parents cursed me with this foreskin, and I wish they had picked differently.

Okay, last one.

You could, this is, again, this is possible in our lifetimes, make them taller, more handsome, change skin and eye color, change facial symmetry like a character creator in Skyrim.

Would you handcraft your child to be an Adonis or do you let them be an ugly piece of shit like natural?

Oh, God, it's so funny.

If imagine the scenario where everybody's doing this, but you just let your kid be ugly.

That's the thing.

It'd be kind of base.

That's the fucked-up thing.

If everyone looks the same and you're like, eh, fucked up.

No, you obviously.

Would you do like a statement?

I think this is exactly

a state.

It's like Regines.

This is the exact line that people talk about.

This is the end game of what people talk about with the risks of this stuff, which is like the genetic, the changing cosmetic, genetic things.

And I hadn't really thought about the cognition thing as much, but

you just fundamentally.

This is just eugenics.

Like, this is this strays into

too far into eugenics, and you can't do this.

I think you lose too much of humanity.

Like that's the simple way of putting it.

I don't know that I realize that me relaying that platitude on Lemonade Stand of the Podcast doesn't solve the problem down the line.

I don't, I don't know how we'll deal with this one.

Let me, I'll, I'll reground it in something that is just genuinely positive.

I think the immediate use for this type of stuff that we're going to see soon is identifying genetic defects in babies and just simply eliminating a lot of preventable disease and challenges.

So that's, that's going to be the first step before you start modifying eye color or anything like that.

That stuff's a little more down

the road.

But in our lifetimes, I think there's a real challenge.

I mean, like, if I have a, if I have a child, which I don't know if I will yet, but and I was told, hey, we can go in and stop them from having sickle cell anemia, like that's, that's a big fucking deal.

And I absolutely would do that.

And this is going to be something soon that we're going to at least have the option for.

And it's, there's weird ethical choices, but I, I, man, to prevent horrific disease, I, I, is, is exciting to me.

I I would never want to give up on the opportunity to deal with stuff like that.

I think condemning children to a short lifetime of suffering and not pursuing it when you know you could is terrible.

I, I, the regulation around it will just need to be so strict and standardized.

And I think it'll be so important for there to be some sort of globally unified approach on the issue.

Yeah.

Because it's, it's one of those things where once it gets out of the bag somewhere, it's

people, people are going to want it.

In the same vein, the tax example was good.

This idea that when you let it come down to individual choice and morals, there are inevitably a subset of people that will make the decision to do it.

And that lets

all these other people do it behind them because their logic is: I'm just trying to keep up.

I'm just trying to be fair.

And then,

yeah, there's just, there is such long-term, horrific consequences from the technology.

But in the short term, I think in the direction, like, why are we starting with something like this, right?

It's because this is what people primarily want to use the technology for.

And I think that's important.

Yeah.

There's incredible, just straight up medical potential.

And fortunately, that's what's going to come first before we have to debate the big ethical questions.

Like my final question, which is, let's say you're in the hospital, you just delivered your baby and you realize Ludwig's son is next to you in the bassinet and the lab technician comes over and nudges you and like, hey, you want to edit him a little bit?

Do you edit Ludwig's child to make him bald?

No need to.

Bro, he's turning 30.

You're going to see it.

Oh, no.

You're going to see it.

That's wishful thinking.

It's hiding in there.

That's wishful thinking.

That's not wishful thinking.

It's holding strong, bro.

I can't even joke.

You don't just increase the slider on your kid's height, decrease Ludwig's kids' height just a little bit.

You don't?

You're a good friend?

I wouldn't consider it, by the way.

I wouldn't even consider

regulate it really closely unless it's for pranks on influencers.

Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah, I think if it's just a prank, then I think it's a prank.

You can do it.

That's a comfortable

influencer.

We all agree.

I mean, it's worth making fun of them.

It's fine.

Yeah, I think it's all right.

I mean, listen, you save some babies' lives.

We'll save many more babies' lives and alleviate an enormous amount of saving a baby live is cool.

An enormous amount of human

will be reduced.

Although I could villain share it.

uh i got i got a health related one i got a medical one again i'm coming in with small scale all right i just want like nice little wins small wins okay a team in japan has just um

announced a breakthrough on the development of synthetic blood which is uh all blood types at once can be stored for much longer and

can help alleviate the lack of blood at many, many, many hospitals around the world.

There's a, we're systemically under-donated the amount of blood we need, especially in certain blood types.

And so they made this breakthrough where, again, I don't have the right word for it,

hemoglobin vesicles.

They take, right?

All they do is they take old expired donated blood that's over three weeks old and they add like this, I don't know, lipid coating to the blood that allows it to take oxygen like a regular red blood cell.

And it makes it apply to all blood types and has no viruses.

So it's like just safe safe and clean and good.

Now,

announcements like this happen all the time.

And sometimes people are like, well, nothing ever happens of it.

Like you hear about it and then nothing happens.

And the reason I thought this one was interesting is because if I had said this in 2022, it would be like that.

But they actually tried it in 22, 100 milliliters of blood in a bunch of patients to test if there was any negative effects.

And it's now been three years and there was no negative effects.

So now they're progressing to the next trial where they're doing a much larger, like it's like 400 or 500 milliliters and seeing it again.

But if that holds like it did for the last one, then really we're just there.

And they have the ability to create on demand large amounts of synthetic blood that could save a lot of lives, especially in places that have not a lot of donating infrastructure.

Like rich countries have a lot of donating infrastructure, but a lot of poor countries don't.

So I think that's like generally pretty cool.

Like everything I could read about it was pretty cool.

But you can feel villains.

Yeah, I think the major consequence here is that anime and manga will no longer have a reason for their characters to communicate their blood type.

And I feel like that'll make that'll just destroy a bit of the

culture and the content there.

Have you ever noticed that?

Is that a thing in Japan?

Yeah, some Asian countries,

they have like a personality type associated with your blood type.

It's like a meme or horoscope.

You know, like you have like, yeah, horoscope or like right brain, left brain, or blood type became a thing.

And it's like, oh, you're, you're this type of person.

You're that type of person.

Yeah.

I don't know.

So I guess you could be like the synthetic type of person who's like cool with everybody.

You're just,

I'm synthetic.

You're chilling.

I just mean, I just, I'm fit in with you.

I'm a viber.

I'm a viber.

I'm kind of a low blood tier kind of guy, to be honest.

Sometimes I get up in the morning.

I just think, ooh, this is bad blood.

That's because you drink horse electrolytes every morning.

The electrolytes haven't currently seeped into the blood yet, but I'm thinking I start mixing it with the synthetic juice that the

slurp juice that the Japanese are making.

Do you

know?

So

I don't know much about blood types, but one thing I kind of know is that if you have

O, is it O negative or your blood type is O, then you're the type that can donate to everybody.

Uh, and anybody can use your blood.

So are they like recreating that, or is this its own

new thing?

That's the value of this, is that you don't have those restrictions.

So the synthetic blood would work with everybody, basically.

Yeah, it works with everybody.

Yeah.

So, and because that's, that's one of the biggest challenges with donating blood.

So, like, my mom is O negative, and then as a result, people pander and

like hunger for her blood.

And so she donates blood a lot.

Hunger for blood, like vampire, getting like election texts, but about your blood all the time.

Wait, can I FR?

I ask, uh, what?

Can I guess your guys's blood type based on this Japanese?

Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So,

Doug, you are

confident, self-centered, and unstable.

You really had me in the first half.

You're typo.

I don't actually know, but you do too.

I don't know either.

You don't know your blood type, man.

You know why I don't?

It's because I went to Nepal when I was 18 for a while.

And they were like, you can't donate blood for a long time, man.

Like, seriously.

Do you have demon's blood?

So they were just like, you're, yeah, you have low-tier blood.

But on top of them just disliking it.

It's a learner blood.

Like, it's an

item in World of Warcraft.

It's gray colored.

It's not even purple.

I just have sludge.

Yeah.

They told me I actually just have sludge in my it's just mud.

What are you guys talking about?

No, no, no, no.

So if, so, I mean, at least at the time, I was told, like, because there are potential diseases that are prevalent in Nepal, and this is like 10, 15 years ago, that you genuinely can't donate blood for a long time.

So I've not had a reason to explore whether I'm donatable or not because I was exposed to whatever was there.

Well, I had Aiden as type A here, but I just don't know.

If you guys ever find out, let me know.

We'll know what this personality test is.

Well, it sounds like this is, we've just run the test, and I am typo, actually.

Sounds like we actually know.

Uh,

yeah, I guess we do.

This is so funny.

I got a little business win.

You got a business win?

Or at least something interesting I thought

was the Switch 2 just came out.

Okay.

And the Switch, the previous console, the Switch 1 sold about 155 million units, which I think it is either the best.

best-selling.

Big good news.

Nintendo made some money.

Let's go.

Big Nintendo.

They're either the best-selling.

I think the Switch has surpassed the PS2 as the best-selling console of all time, if I'm not mistaken.

It may not have quite come to that threshold.

I didn't know this part.

The Switch 1 had made $100 billion in revenue with a B for Nintendo over the course of its

over the course of its life up until now, which was surreal to me.

But the Switch 2 is, as of

this recent release, Nintendo's best and fastest-selling console ever.

3.5 million units in four days.

And the next closest that I could find looking at their sales data for the previous consoles was the Wii when it came out.

And that managed to sell 3.2 million in about a month.

This is faster than the Wii?

So this is faster than any other console or handheld they've released.

Okay.

That can I

it.

Can you pull up the chart you had earlier, Perry, of the sales?

I think that's interesting of

the just scale of it if you pull this up.

So, I mean, just for people to get a sense, the PS2, which probably a number of people in our audience never saw or experienced, is crazy.

It's unbelievable how much

it's sold.

Like, just an absolute behemoth.

And so the fact that Nintendo Switch even got close is like pretty.

insane.

I mean, you can see the other consoles here.

It's just like, it's like nothing.

The Wii was one of the most popular ones ever.

It's 100 million.

PS2 was 160 million.

It's crazy.

Being a GameCube kid in the PS2 era, dude, you were isolated.

GameCube isn't even on this.

You have to scroll down for a minute.

It's so sad.

Everyone had a PS.

Everyone's talking about the new PS2 game.

Halo.

Yeah, or Halo.

Yeah, Xbox or PS2.

And it was like, yeah,

I've got some...

I got Smash Bros.

So that was it, man.

Did you guys get one?

Okay, well, I want to villain share this for a second.

Okay.

I was going to villain share every good news story today, but I realized that would be bad.

So I'm just not talking about that.

That's funny.

So I'll just villain share this one.

All right.

Gamers complained loudly and vociferously about the Switch 2's price increase, which I think largely was due to tariff negativity.

But they were saying, we're not going to, we will make our stand here.

All right.

We're not buying this higher price.

Obviously, I knew that was going to be bullshit because gamers never hold their word on that.

They always go for a FOMO.

But it's crazy that a console that is now more expensive and has literally one game can blow everything else that it's already previously done out of the water.

It's like Nintendo does not have to try at all and they can just move units on these things.

That's crazy to me.

It's like, what, what is the,

you used to have to have like three big launch titles and like really push for it.

Now it's like, jag up the price, no game, deal with it.

And everyone's like, yes, please, Matt, please, sir.

When I went to go pick mine up at, I think I got mine from Walmart and mine had been dropped off there.

And I watched a bunch of people come in while I was waiting, trying to buy one because they were sold out for the ones that were just regularly in stock.

And the mixture of people that are walking in, like the age,

like a lot of, a lot of...

older people to be honest that i do not think are the people in the youtube live stream announcement chat complaining and putting like the sleep sleeper emoji when the game comes on or like the the price gets listed.

I think there's just a huge disconnect between the angry gamers online and who is actually buying the product.

I agree.

Yeah,

I just think it's funny that

I don't think this is a good launch, all things considered.

I think the console's cool, but there's nothing, unless you're a real Mario Kart guy.

Yeah, I mean, I know you hate Mario and Nintendo, but I do actually have to agree that it's, I don't see much of a a reason to go buy it.

But essentially, Nintendo launched Mario Kart World, and everybody is paying $800 for it.

That is basically what happens.

Like, they've sold 3.2 million copies of Mario Kart World that happened to cost $700 or whatever it is.

I also don't understand the craze.

Like, I'm excited to eventually get one.

Yeah, I'll get one eventually.

Yeah, it's cool.

It's cool, but I'm also baffled by.

I'm just surprised there's this level of like FOMO of like, I got to get it day one to like play Mario Kart.

Some of these people are.

going to be fucking stupid.

You did it.

But you're a Mario Kart guy.

Like, I get it for you because you still play Mario Kart Wii 20 years later.

You're like a, you're a Mario Kart guy.

But like, for me, I like Nintendo.

I like the Switch.

I play Mario.

I play Zelda.

Well, I got to fucking wait in line at Best Buy so I can buy Mario Kart World, play it on my couch for 20 minutes.

Like, all right, I'm just not bored.

Well,

it's crazy.

I thought something that was interesting, and I was just watching this

Bloomberg piece on

how their strategy has evolved.

And I thought about it: how Nintendo has always taken a different approach to the other companies, where instead of iterating on the previous version of the console, they try to create something novel and new.

They basically take a big risk and don't follow the success of the previous console at all, right?

And they've kind of followed this wave of one console that does really well and then hitting a console that doesn't do very well.

The biggest example is Wii to Wii U.

Nobody knew what was happening.

Terrible name.

You know, Wii sold over 100 million units.

The Wii U sold like 13 million, which is crazy.

Yeah.

Crazy, crazy.

Massive flop.

And this is the first time that they've taken the previous console and just created an upgraded version, but as a new console entirely.

And it's interesting that they're not, they learned their lesson, I guess, and they're not taking a risk, which is also sad in a way.

But when the Switch had come, I remember when the the switch came out, I had a fleeting thought of how could you really improve or iterate on this concept?

Because it's replacing all of your handheld devices and it's replacing your home console.

So, what direction can this really move in from here otherwise?

And I kind of like that they just upgraded the version.

Maybe I'm a Nintendo soy.

Everybody likes it.

I think, I mean, the magical thing is they had a successful console for once.

Like, they won.

They won a generation.

And so they're like, let's just do that again.

Yeah.

Like, I think, you know, the Wii was successful, but they...

They won that generation.

They dominated.

My understanding is they sold a lot of consoles, but most people had a really, really low attach rate.

So people bought it for Wii Sports.

And so that people didn't actually buy games.

They didn't sell that many games.

I think they crushed that era, though, because they had the DS too.

And

the DS is the best-selling video game device ever.

Yes.

Besides like, DS was a massive hit.

And I think the Switch is kind of like a spiritual successor in a way of like a console mixed with a DS.

Anyway, I just think like it wasn't, I think every rational gamer was like, Nintendo, please don't do a Switch U.

Please don't do something weird or wacky.

We like the Switch.

It's still, it was selling well up till the Switch 2.

I mean, Switch has been incredibly successful.

Just do it again.

It's still selling well because the packaging is confusing and people are accidentally buying Switch ones.

Props to them for just...

Making the name scheme simple too.

Just putting a two on the end of it.

God forbid you go the Xbox route.

Oh my God.

The Xbox 920 XL.

I don't even know what it is.

I literally could not tell you what the Xbox model is called right now.

Did you see the handheld Xbox they just announced?

No.

It's like the Asus ROG Ally Series X Friendship Edition.

It's fucking

ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

I don't know who's in charge.

What demon is in charge at Microsoft of naming is just cackling in his fucking iron throne.

That's crazy.

But it's crazy.

It even went back to Xbox One, right?

Or am I hallucinating that and mixing that with Battlefield and Halo and everything else?

It was Xbox versus PS2, and they did pretty well.

And they were worried about Xbox 2 versus PS3.

They're like, ah, our number's one lower.

So we have to just fucking throw it out the window.

They should have just taken, I don't know.

I mean, Xbox One worked is the problem.

That was like their best generation.

Or 360 work.

I'm sorry, 360.

Yeah, 360 worked.

360 is where it works.

And 360 was basic and cool.

Yeah.

There is an understanding that Xbox 360 was.

How do you you follow 360?

720.

720.

What, 1080?

Yeah, that's what NVIDIA does.

Mystery.

While you work there.

No.

While you work there.

NVIDIA has a clear naming scheme.

20 series, 30 series, 40 series, 50 series.

You're dumb as bricks.

Sold pretty well.

Yeah.

Sold pretty well.

Got a bonus that year.

I want to quickly, if you pull this up, Perry, with our funny little stock game we've been doing.

First off, we're currently up $7,000, which is crazy money for three of us.

Continue to be first place with Atriok, actually last of the three of us.

Wow.

Great little handshake there for us.

But one of the things I thought was interesting, on top of, you know, if you go to dougdug.com/slash stocks, you can check out these numbers.

Everybody kind of has like their winning company.

And Ludwig's is Nintendo.

Nintendo's up 36% since January.

And I think what's interesting, it's not like the stock market has that much, you know, importance to Nintendo as a company, but we, Ludwig invested in Nintendo when they had already announced the Switch 2.

Everybody knew the Switch 2 was coming out.

And somehow, and what is kind of confusing to me is how much the perception of Nintendo's value as a company has increased since then, even though nothing has really changed.

In fact, all they've announced is kind of like, yeah, we're going to have a Mario Kart game.

And they didn't really launch anything else.

And somehow their company is just perceived to be doing so well.

beyond the expectations of a couple months ago.

And that is interesting and confusing to me.

So somehow they're just crushing it.

I think it was because they started cracking down on Smash tournaments.

That's what it was.

A couple tens of billions of value increase once they started cracking down.

You can't want

a garage tournament with a custom stage.

Yep.

Now that the tournaments don't have UCF at it, I'm confident I can put another million in.

I mean, my understanding is that, you know, the market is forward-looking and it's trying to predict the good and the bad outcomes.

And as it got closer to reality of the launch, they were worried that like, oh, if they have a high price, people people might not buy it.

People are buying it, selling super well.

It's going to do a few million units.

Well, it did above expectations.

But this, it was up this much like a month ago before.

No, yeah, as you get closer to the reality became more and more apparent that how much people were.

People were excited for it.

The launch window was open.

They're going to dominate this into the holiday season.

It's all working out in the way Nintendo wanted to.

They've got my hands tied, dude, because I was getting excited about the Switch 2 after I got it.

And I was talking to friends.

And I was like, like, Yeah, like I have Breath of the Wild on it, I can play like from my old console, and I can pay $10 for the upgraded Switch 2 version, and it runs at 120 FPS now, and it's really smooth, and the picture quality looks really good.

And then Nick looked at me and he's like, Isn't it crazy you're excited about that?

That's how low of a bar they're setting.

And I was like, Yeah, it's a year

low, bro.

And they just tapped it in.

I don't know.

There was a funny conversation.

We work with Kelby,

who is our sales guy at Mogul Moves.

And one afternoon, we had like an hour-long conversation about what the value to Red Bull is, what amount of money would Red Bull pay Nintendo to have Mario hold a Red Bull camera?

Like in ads.

Like, how much do you think that's worth, Kelby?

Do the math for me.

And

then he's posturing different scenarios.

He's like, well, can there be a Mario flavor too?

And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Replace the wing cap in every Mario game with a Red Bull.

And he chugs it, gets actual wings, and then

that's good.

I'm gonna be honest, that's that's that's the marketer right there.

That's gonna move you.

I mean, they're so carried by their IP, right?

That's the one thing they really, really have over everybody else.

Is like you have, I think, Mario.

This may have changed because I remember looking at this like probably like eight years ago.

But uh,

Mario was

the most recognizable figure in media, like when polled globally or something.

So if you took a bunch of company IP, basically, if you took figures like Pac-Man and Mickey Mouse and all of these different things, Mario was recognized by like 94%

of people.

They could look at a picture of Mario around the world and say, that's Mario.

A Japanese created Italian plumber that fights a monkey named Donkey became.

Yes, sir.

the world's one and also yeah that's Nintendo's core thing is like even in the dark times because every every six years they're in dark times they have Mario Zelda Pokemon they just have a few franchises that are so good and they have such great developers for those games that even if nobody else is making games for their consoles they can weather the winter and then they can they can bounce back when they hit the red stride i mean uh Pokemon is the single biggest media franchise ever.

Yes.

Of all, you know, so that's, yeah, they got, they got something wrong.

It's crazy that kids today are as enamored with Pokemon as I was when I was seven years old.

I was hearing that recently.

That's crazy.

I always remember.

It's also crazy, real quick, that like our friends today are as enamored with Pokemon as they were when they were seven

and have not grown up.

I'm sorry, that was mean.

I don't like Pokemon.

I never liked it.

I don't get it.

No, I want to understand you.

You're a Digimon guy.

I want to like it.

I do.

And I can't.

And my cold, dark soul just can't accept the beauty of Tiger.

No, I get it, Doug.

I get it, Doug.

You engage consciously with the media in front of you.

You know, you understand.

It's too easy.

I don't understand.

CRISPR a pidgin to become a Pidgey.

Yes.

I want to say.

Did he, were you there when he said this?

When he confessed that when he was a child?

He thought Pidgey was real.

He thought Pidgey, like, like, of course, Pidgey and Weedle are real.

And he will when CRISPR gets involved.

Yeah.

These are going to be real things.

Pikachu is going gonna be my friend as i dreamed when i was a child if you loan me your dog for a few years i'll turn him into pikachu can't take or your baby whichever just give me some kind of living creature that's important that risk with you specifically but i'll find him let me go off the grid like that guy in china for a little bit let me go wild dude uh i have another story oh yeah okay i just because before you would take my baby i was just thinking more about all the cool i'm just thinking about all the sliders i would be changing but yeah go ahead uh i have another good good news story this is a this is a kind of a weird one well it's just good news, but it's almost obvious.

But there was a, I'll explain it.

There was a big cancer conference in Europe.

Specifically.

You said cancel culture?

Cancer conference.

Actually, it was in Chicago.

I'm sorry.

In Chicago recently, they had a cancer research conference where a bunch of doctors came out and somebody came up with a well-done.

peer-reviewed long-term longitudinal study about

um

exercise as a treatment for cancer.

Basically as in comparison to, it's for colon cancer specifically, and it was in comparison to chemotherapy.

Okay, they just compared it.

And, you know, what often doctors will do is they will say, you know, remember it exercise, or they'll give you like, this one was like, we're going to try treatment where you are assigned a personal trainer.

You have to specifically do this number of things four or five days a week.

They tried it.

It was shockingly, remarkably proven effective.

And it got a standing ovation from all these cancer researchers who are showing that, like, consistently taking care of your health, going on walks, doing high-intensity exercise or whatever, is like one of the body's proven best ways to actively fight disease.

This case specifically for colon cancer.

And by the way, what they mentioned in this is like, there's no reason you can't now do both.

Because they should, they like, I think it had a 5% increase in survival when they did the chemo, and it was like seven or eight with the intense exercise.

You can combine them both and have, you know, again, the examples they use is like one in 12 people who would have died will now survive.

I'm sorry, I'm getting a phone call from my cancer research buddy.

Getting cancer.

Actually, the study,

the study's blown wide open.

It's just not true.

So,

this is comparing people who are exercising with the assigned practice.

So, there's three groups.

One of them is like chemotherapy,

just the standard thing.

And then one of them was like, they gave them the normal thing they told them, which is like, take care of your health, do exercise.

And then one of them was like, they took it seriously.

And they had government, and I would say they had the hospital funds applied to you get a personal trainer and you're going to have a regimen.

And what it's basically saying is that people that did that, it really was remarkable, the impact, in a way that got all these cancer researchers.

standing up.

Are the people those people also doing chemo though?

Or are they doing just the

comparison between chemo and the exercise?

And the exercise people have had a higher result the chemo was effective but only you know it's a small percent it's

like late stage colon cancer like five percent more survive from the anyway i'm not saying it's the the world's most positive news or anything but it's just interesting and i think um

there's a positivity to it that i think a lot of the doctors were seeing which is like hey if we can get this proven to the point where it unlocks funds or unlocks you know health insurance funds or whatever this could be a big deal because anyone can do it there's not danger to it there's no there's no downside to the exercise it's a pure upside and if it has the effects that it does which is higher than chemo and you can combo it with chemo i mean you can get a lot more people living and they're healthier and and it can help just unlock a larger trend of like this is important and has great positive knock-on effects

It reminds me of when we talked about medical, the medical episode, you know, one of the takeaways is an enormous amount of the health problems that we have in America are chronic health problems that are largely from people not taking care of themselves, right?

And that's, and that's the truth.

And it's in ways that they can that are just hard, eating healthy, exercising, not smoking, et cetera, et cetera.

And so the more of this evidence that comes out, I mean, something my mom would drill into me over and over growing up is like how critical this stuff is and how hard it is for doctors to get people to stick with this stuff and do it.

So the more evidence there is, it's like the, it sounds kind of silly and obvious, but the amount of benefits for cancer with everything is just so ridiculously high.

Jack line in here, I want to bring this up: it says knowledge alone is likely to be insufficient to allow most people to make meaningful and sustained change.

So, this evidence, this proof where they can start treating exercise like a drug, where a prescription is filled out, a trainer allotted, and the schedule adhered to, can make a massive, it's like, it's like it is like if this was an announcement of a new drug, the

level of positive effect it had would be a massive breakthrough.

Like, holy shit, we had been something crazy.

But it doesn't even cost money.

Someone can't patent it.

They can't own it.

All you have to do is just put someone on a schedule and make sure they stick to it, and they're going to have much better health outcomes.

That's cool.

I mean, it's much better than a world where this stuff doesn't work, where you just have no control.

You need some kind of crazy new drug.

If you don't get it, you're dead.

Doing it like a prescription.

I've never heard that concept.

That is really interesting.

So I thought it was cool.

I thought it was good.

It's very hard to get people to

having doctors.

I spoke with, they're basically like, yeah, you can tell patients to do stuff, and then most of the time they come back.

You know, it's like I go to the dentist every six months and he's like, Hey, you using that retainer at night?

And I'm like, Nah, next time, though.

And that's that's what it's like, you know.

And for, you know, in my case, it's not that big of a deal if I don't wear the retainer, but it is a really big deal if you're not, you know, exercising, particularly if you have these diseases.

So

it reminds me of a tweet that was like,

Those people who tell you to exercise and sleep more to deal with your depression are so annoying because that shit works.

and uh and i i think it the coupled you know stuff like that or i i've been told the number one way to defend against uh developing like dementia or alzheimer's later in life is just exercise like that is the number one documented thing you can do to prevent it later in your life uh it's crazy how broadly applicable it is and it feels like such a given

but it's just something that is really yeah

really hard to instill in people.

I'm trying to be better about it right now.

I'm in a phase of life this year where I'm trying to be more disciplined and just make sure I do something like every day.

And it helps.

Just like, just, you know, anecdotally, lower anxiety, better appetite, better sleep.

Things just automatically improve in your life.

It gives you this way better baseline.

So to know that it could have as far-reaching benefits as something like this is awesome.

It's three extremely simple things.

It is diet, sleep, and horse electrolytes.

I am wired.

I don't know if you guys notice.

I've been like stepping underneath the table.

Part two of this article is: cancer is 99% cured when you just

mainly horse transfer these

electrolytes.

Yeah.

I wonder what mine tastes.

No, it's a singular sip.

What is your problem?

Mine looks like a brick.

It looks like a walk.

You just ruined the high fest.

Zamboni.

No!

It's 20 minutes later.

Woo!

Thanks, buddy.

Let's go, dude.

I am pumped and ready to pawn.

Let's go.

You really just drank the rest of it off of the table.

We all cleaned it up, and he sat there jugging the entire rest of the.

No, let me finish this.

Well,

we do have a

couple more good news, Topics, to add this off on.

I found a cool one

from today,

which was the World Bank ends its ban on funding nuclear power projects.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wait, this is like a bigger story.

This is happening all over the world.

There has been movement, broad-based movement in Europe, in America, in Asia to like

re-examine nuclear and get projects moving.

And as someone who's a big supporter of it and think it's like incredibly high power,

low emissions, zero emissions, like just an incredible way towards energy security and freedom.

And it's awesome.

It's cool to see countries of the world recognize that and move towards it in a broad-based way.

Yeah, I was surprised by the amount of news I've seen around this this year.

And even in the past month, I feel like a lot of stuff has been moving in the same direction.

I have a question for you.

Say I'm listening to this and I'm like, A-track, you never think about the nuclear waste and where they're going to put the nuclear waste.

Yeah, I would love to talk.

I wish we'd do a whole episode on it.

We should do a nuclear episode.

I would like to do a nuclear episode.

Just broadly, the amount of nuclear waste is really small.

Okay.

All of it in the world would fit in like a football field up stack three times.

So it's like, just understand that.

And so many of the innovations in nuclear recently are able to reuse that nuclear waste.

So

I can go way deeper on this and I can do a whole pride.

Just generally, it's not like I'm not aware of nuclear waste when I'm pro-nuclear.

I'm like, that doesn't exist.

I am not thinking that everyone's turning into Spider-Man or whatever.

I believe that there is simple, cost-effective solutions for this and that it does not

make this incredible energy source not a good idea.

That's that's my opinion.

That's where I stand on nuclear.

Yeah.

And there's two cool things that are semi-related to that.

One is PBR is a new type of nuclear reactor, which uses, I forget, I believe it's uranium.

It's blue ribbon?

Yeah, it's PBR.

You drink that and you get a nuclear energy to go out and have fun.

Dude, and then we capture that energy.

We go to a club, we give everybody PBRs, and the increased energy in the club is put them on a hamster wheel by a turbine is captured, and we use that to power the brewery that makes the new paps, and it's actually an infinite energy generator.

Yeah, because you get good times, and you get good energy.

Yeah, do you actually, Perry?

Do you look about PBR actually stands for?

But I think it's pebble-based reactor, I want to say.

It's

some of the core things, it's uranium.

spheres instead of these rods.

There's hydrogen that cools it down instead of water.

But one of the key features is that, yeah, pebble bed reactors.

One of the key features is that it doesn't melt down.

One of the problems with nuclear, you know, the big scary things is like Fukushima, Chernobyl, right?

Like if the if the nuclear power plant melts down, then that's where the radioactive material starts shooting out into the world and get hit in the chest with a bunch of protons or neutrons or whatever.

But with PBRs, the idea is that if power shuts down, if there's a disaster, it will immediately start cooling down.

It doesn't heat up past the point that it starts actually like destroying the facility and breaking things.

So this was tested in China recently.

And although there's some some skepticism about it, sounds like there's real promise there.

And then the other is small modular reactors, which instead of making one giant nuclear power plant, you make it essentially in this like template form that's smaller.

And that has a bunch of merit.

There's a lot of research about that.

Well, I'm sure we can dive into it at kind of like a solar panel on your roof, Vibe.

Like you'd get your own nuclear power plant.

Oh.

Just to stick it on my roof.

More like a town would get a

yeah, I don't think it's for individual homes.

Yeah, it's not for individual homes.

I'm actually running 400 switch twos to play

creative progress.

Because I will say, in that case, the nuclear waste is a concern.

I do not want that on your wristwatch.

That is an issue.

But small modular reactors, the idea is like right now with nuclear, it's really hard to build them because you've got to commit whatever, $30 billion to make some giant power plant from scratch.

But if you turn it into a template that can be quickly made and also scaled up or down depending on the size of a city, that's really valuable.

So actually, this reminds me that Britain just hired Rolls-Royce.

I wish I didn't know they make power, but they're basically they want a bid to start developing nuclear small modular reactors.

Nuclear, small module reactors.

That's hype.

Yeah.

And a bunch of companies are, I mean, some companies, like I think Meta, is just buying a nuclear power plant full stop outright.

Oh, because they want

it for data centers.

They want to power a data center.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's just a lot of progress and innovation happening in nuclear right now.

Rolls-Royce nuclear.

How's a Gucci?

What's Gucci nuclear doing?

Why don't all the fashion brands of Europe get into nuclear energy?

Dude, that would be so funny if

LVMH just pivoted into nuclear energy.

Dude, that's a good thing.

They ditched all of the clothing behind.

And then, what's it?

Bernard Arnaud?

Yeah.

I think.

And he just becomes a nuclear.

Nuclear.

What's the brand that's way overpriced and stupid?

All of the LVMH brands.

Most of them.

No, like.

The Vuitton.

No, the biggest, stupidest one that starts with a B, I think.

Balenciaga.

Like, imagine a Balenciaga nuclear power plant.

It's just like, it makes no sense.

That I wouldn't, I would not trust them to deal with the waste because they would put the waste in like, in like ripped jeans.

They just like shoot radioactive material.

Just dog name it off cool.

You mentioned Fukushima.

I mean, even Japan, which after Fukushima, which is one of the, I think, the most recent large nuclear disaster,

they put a law that was like...

stopping the lifespan of their nuclear reactors.

They just repealed that law.

They just realized as they got closer to the timeline, it's like it is such a big part of their energy mix.

It's so helpful.

helpful, it's so efficient that it was

a panic mode that they did, and they got rid of it.

So that got it's just happening even in countries where it's been affected.

Um,

because you can't argue with the numbers on it, it's cool.

You know, what else is great news about that?

Countries that have a tendency to do not super cool human rights things, okay, like Russia, uh, that's you know, it's largely what powers them.

Like, Russia has, you know, so much of their economy is based around selling gas to Europe.

You know, it's like the more that every country around around the world can become self-sustainable via solar or nuclear and energy stops being this like resource you have to like fight over.

It's like it enables countries to not be dependent and enable other

despots, whatever you want to call it.

So I think there's some real, there's so much good stuff coming out of renewables as an increase and nuclear and all this.

Yeah, I mean, there's follow-ups to that because...

No, no, no.

There's no nuance to what I just said.

No, I'll just say it because I have a follow-up to the follow-up.

The follow-up people both say is like, well, a lot of uranium comes from Russia Russia because they have the spots.

But it's worth noting, follow-up to that, is that uranium is actually extremely widely available.

It's actually very naturally occurring.

It's just nobody's bothered to build up all the processing in mines because there's not been huge demand.

And as demand increases, there's going to be a lot more

creation of that.

Yeah.

Worth noting.

Anyway, it's, oh, is that your last one?

You got any more?

I got one more.

Okay.

Okay, sure, minutes.

Yeah.

Cool one.

Senator Hawley.

Let's see if this iPad still functions after.

Oh, okay.

Well, I guess I lost the main one, but Senator Josh Hawley, who is pretty far right, proposed a bill just this week basically proposing a $15

federal minimum wage hike for America.

So right now, minimum wage is $7.25, right?

Not $7.50.

Oh, yeah, there we go.

And so

this is proposed.

And I think the reason that this is relevant, this isn't passed yet, but this is something that a lot of senators, you know, Bernie Sanders notably has been pushing for something like this for a long time of increasing the federal minimum wage.

Basically, the minimum wage by the federal government has not increased in decades, even though the cost of living has increased dramatically.

And I hadn't really strongly looked into this much before, but

the counter argument against minimum wage that, for example, people generally on the right, the conservatives will say, is that if you increase the minimum wage, that's going to be past the point that a lot of especially small businesses can sustain and manage.

And that will force them to lay people off.

They won't be able to hire as many people because they have to pay them more.

And therefore, you're going to lose a huge number of jobs.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a $15 minimum wage could eliminate anywhere from 2.7 million jobs all the way to zero.

Wow.

Yeah.

Which is really helpful.

Yeah.

But it would lift 900,000 people out of poverty.

So Basically, critics are saying like, you can't just force companies to pay at a certain rate.

This is not a good idea.

The free market should take care of it.

That's That's like the core argument, particularly given that the cost of living in San Francisco is vastly different than a small town in Missouri.

Right.

And so to federally force this, it doesn't make a lot of sense rather than states doing it.

And so some of the

cool things I saw, there's a different couple studies over the years that looked at the actual change of employment when states or areas of the country increase their minimum wage.

So there was a pretty influential one from 1992, which is they looked at New Jersey increase increase their minimum wage from 425 to 505, checked like 400 fast food restaurants, and there was no reduced employment at all.

And then there was another one, this one from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which, you know, slightly biased towards increasing minimum wage, but still did this study that from reading through it for a little bit, it seems really grounded.

And basically they studied how two states, California and New York, doubled their minimum wage, how we went up to like $15 over the course of about a decade.

And so they looked at all these interesting pieces about this.

And what I thought was particularly interesting that they conclude.

So when you increase the minimum wage, in this case for these two states, and they increased it to $15,

they looked at what actually happens to that increase cost that the business...

has to expend.

They found that it doesn't actually reduce employment.

There is no disemployment that resulted in these areas and they compared all these different ones.

But what ends up happening is those costs get split about 50% goes to customers.

So the businesses raise their prices.

So about half those increased costs goes to customers.

And the other half goes to just less money, just less revenue.

And the point, the conclusion of this was all of these different, in this case, fast food restaurants, all of these different fast food restaurants, none of them fired people.

They just ate half of the cost.

and they passed half the cost on to customers.

And what that implies is that it is not a perfect free market, is that these companies clearly can afford to pay their people more and just take a hit on their profit.

And the argument of minimum wage shouldn't be increased because the market will find perfect equilibrium.

In case after case, it's been shown, no,

these companies can do this.

They actually can take this hit.

Of course, there's more complexity to it.

Maybe some small, you know, mom-and-pop shop business can't do this in some town or whatnot.

But I thought the studies around this were particularly interesting.

And then the fact that this is gaining traction on the Republican side of the aisle, and given that Republicans are really trying to get a more of a foothold in, let's say, working class people and really resonate with them, I think there's real potential that this actually makes some waves, which would be really cool.

You want to go first?

No, you go first.

All right.

Well, I'll say it's this guy, Josh Hawley, has been someone I've had an eye on for a while because he is really polarizing to me.

Okay.

I know nothing about him.

No, no, no, no.

I'm just saying, like, sometimes he'll say it, like, the coolest thing I've ever heard.

And then sometimes he'll say, like, we need to have the Bible be the only thing taught in school.

You know, he is a true, like, yeah, it's that guy.

It's this guy.

It's that guy.

Okay.

And, you know, it's just funny.

He is part of this new wing of Republicans that are like weirdly aligned on a lot of pro-worker stuff, like with Bernie Sanders or he was pro-Lena Kahn.

He was one of the few Republicans that wasn't like Trump.

So

he's interesting.

And sometimes he'll say something about workers that I think is really cool.

And I agree, raising the minimum wage makes total sense.

We have a lot, a lot.

I mean, I wrote a book called Goliath that's about just the amount of monopoly capture we have on so many different markets in America, even things like cheerleading.

Like, you wouldn't think about that, but if you have a daughter who's in cheerlead or son in cheerleading, like it all goes through like one company.

So you have to pay these absurd things for all the equipment.

And that company has an exclusive contract with like every school.

It's like, we just have so many things that are monopolized.

And so

the idea that it's reaching natural equilibrium on wages is not true because people don't have a lot of options in a lot of fields.

So anyway, I think he's just an interesting character.

And I guess I'm happy in general that people on both sides of the aisle are starting to like handshake over the fact that like he mentions in this article, we need stronger unions.

We need more minimum wage protections.

I think he would also agree that like we need to have protections from wage theft.

People get

their wages stolen all the time or like it takes a long time to get them or there's delays.

All this stuff is beneficial.

So even if I am not handshaking on most things he says, like I agree on this.

Well, here's Aiden to villain chair raising the minimum wage.

Why we shouldn't do it.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't actually think we shouldn't shouldn't raise it, but I do think there's something to be said about the utopian version of what the minimum wage is meant to accomplish.

So I think it's Denmark doesn't have one.

They just don't have a minimum wage.

And

the reason this is the case is because of their really high

percentage of union participation.

So the issue, part of the issue with minimum wage on the other side of things is that when you set it at a flat amount, it never scales at a rate that matches the productivity of labor in the economy.

So as soon as you set the minimum wage, it immediately starts getting outpaced by whatever forces are pushing

what,

let's say, the correct market wage should be above that, whether it be just inflation or other things in the economy.

So

your minimum wage is aging.

And that's why the 725 is so crazy, right?

We've gone 20 years where our dollar is worth significantly less than it used to be, but people can still be getting paid the same amount of money.

And I thought something was interesting there: like the report we had up, I think it had the word monopsony in the title, which we had covered on the book club episode that we did.

This idea that

the market is,

most markets are

not necessarily monopolies, but share strong characteristics of monopolies because of how few players exist within the space.

And because that's the case, labor is not able to effectively negotiate what the actual value of their work is.

Examples being that if you live in a small town in the year 1900 and all that town does is mine coal and that's the only job, well, you don't have a lot of leverage to negotiate your salary.

And

the way to counteract this or to have a greater impact on valuing your work is negotiating as a group or negotiating as a union.

So, in a place like Denmark, which doesn't, as far as I understand, really have a minimum wage, because like 95% of workers are in the country are in a union, and the unions are constantly negotiating wages up in tandem with the other things that are in effect in the economy.

Now, do I think that's a comprehensive, easily sloganable policy to push forward in the United States?

No.

No, I don't think that change is going to come before, and I'd rather fight for something basic like, can we at least get it to 15 boys?

That makes sense.

I think there's something to be said about this not being an effective long-term solution to what, you know, what it's attempting to fix.

Yeah.

And

I'm glad you pointed out the things that you did where we can see that there is a negligible impact on employment, like people say.

But I'm hoping that the long-term solution in the US one day could be something more.

Yeah, because it's a backstop.

Like, this is, this is, this should not be the driving factor of how people are paid, is what the federal government is.

I mean, most states are not, right?

Because there is just most states have a higher wage.

We talked about this a bit.

Most states have a higher minimum wage to begin with.

And then the percentage of workers that are paid at the minimum wage is fairly low.

I think it's like below 10% or something.

And I think for

what it's worth,

that doesn't mean this won't help a lot of people.

I think we're about to see like going from 725 to 15 is such a dramatic jump that there's a ton of people in the middle there that are going to be boosted up along the way um

yeah i hope this goes through yeah we'll see some data probably won't but at least it's the right it's the right direction and then i i think what's valuable here is like in the Congress, right?

We're so split and so like 50-50 that you only need a few people from the other side to get things to happen.

So I think that's where it's really compelling that you're getting Republican support for this as well.

Yeah, I just like seeing movement on some pro-worker stuff and anti-monopoly stuff.

Yeah, that was a lot of good news.

That was some good news.

Yeah, actually, yeah, that feels nice.

It's like, yeah, the world isn't all terrible.

Yeah.

We did fit in some bad news in our good news.

Yeah, we managed to fit in some bad news.

A couple things started to be a lot of fun.

Would it really be lemonade stand without a little bit of bad news?

A little bit of bad news.

It's the spice of life.

Whether it be CRISPR eugenics or the number of people that'll get arrested at the protest this weekend, you can be sure that you'll get your dose of bad news every week.

Thank God we solved it.

I'd be a little depressed.

Yeah, I'd be worried if we didn't solve it.

But if you want to join us for our extra hour we do every week, it comes out on Mondays.

You can go to patreon.com/slash lemonade stand.

I think this week we're going to talk a little bit more about the circumstances behind the protests and the immigration as that story continues to develop.

We also do a ton of extra shows on the secondary of the Patreon.

We've been doing our book club, which was super fun,

and our watch-along, our extra show where we respond to comments.

So if you're interested in any of that, we're also getting very near our subscriber goal of 10,000, where we are planning a trip to China.

Meet Xi Jinping, hash this whole thing out because this trade deal stuff's been going on.

10K subs to hash it out with China.

Hash it out.

We'll get the rare earth minerals.

We'll bring them back.

I'm bringing a lot of suitcases.

And I'm smuggling in NVIDIA chips.

They were rested by the end of it.

Let's be real.

And

I feel obligated to communicate.

Don't drink horse electrolytes.

Wow.

That was a bit.

He's looking pretty.

That's so energetic.

Look at how flush my skin is.

He might be a little pale.

He's very sickly.

Adverse health consequences if you drink.

Oh, one more thing.

You know, on the Discord, which you can join if you join the Patreon, there was like an insane amount more good news.

We didn't actually think, we brought our own stories and we didn't get to get to the

oh no, a lot of these were from Discord.

So, thank you.

Thank you, everybody, who's submitted

stories from Discord.

Yeah, we've been getting a lot of great feedback every week from that.

So, thank you from their region, from their country for our sending in good news, and it is from all over the world.

And it was very fascinating to read through.

So, if you want to join in on that,

it's all positive rather than our situation, which is half positive.

Uh, check that out on the Discord.

Yeah, all right, we'll see you guys next week.

Thanks next week, baby.

Bye.