It's Still Shutdown | Ep. 032 Lemonade Stand 🍋

The government is dead.

Opening on the blank is dead.

That can't be our recurring theme.

No,

it's too risky.

It's too risky.

We have a limited stand curse.

We have a problem with a curse.

Aiden, my goal today, actually, is to flip that curse into a blessing.

Okay.

I figure we always try to talk about good news and then bad news happens.

If we talk about the government shutdown extensively today, the law of irony will flip it so that it's ended tomorrow and didn't mean anything.

I actually feel like we talk about bad things all the time, Brandon.

I don't know if that's an accurate assessment of the Lemonade Stand curse.

What I'm saying is, I think the curse is trying to make our show seem wrong in some way.

So, if we're like, this is the biggest story, the government shutdown, then by tomorrow, it'll be usually what happens.

We talk about breaking news and then minutes after we post, it majorly changes.

So, it's possible the government shutdown gets worse, but most likely it will get better within a few minutes.

You just said, you said the wrong thing.

Now it's going to flash forward.

Now,

I'm kidding all his.

He explained the plan too much.

And now the great war.

Now sit.

And now the Etsy witches are going to curl their monkey paw.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in day seven of a government shutdown, which is poised to become perhaps the longest one on record.

I have no basis for that statement.

Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, so just so you're aware, the longest one, 34 days.

34 days.

Okay, so 34 days.

Right now it's been seven.

Yep.

That's the info you went off of.

My info I'm going off of is that.

We're closing in.

Everyone in seven is seeming very intractable on making any progress.

Something I'll give to you.

We've been in a the shutdown is now longer today than it was yesterday.

And if that keeps up,

it'll never end.

Right.

Right.

No, I saw a quote today.

Republican Senator Jim Justice called it Groundhog Day.

As in they're showing up every single day and they're saying the same things on both sides, making no progress and going nowhere.

So I don't know how that breaks, especially because both sides seem incentivized with their base to make a stand here to fight.

So,

I'm just saying we're in day seven.

I don't see a clear path.

Maybe there is a clear path that Doug's going to explain to me how we get out of it.

I think Jim Justice, he needs to, it'll keep repeating until he figures out how to get AOC to fall in love with him.

That's what we need.

We need a Romeo and Juliet type of situation across the aisle.

That would actually be awesome.

And then, as they both kill themselves, like we all come together in mourning, finally, it's kind of like a 9-11 situation that reunites the country.

Yeah.

Still, love is so beautiful.

Right.

We're all shedding tears.

But I think when this happens, and you know, even in my memory, right, this has happened a handful of times now.

Although the last, the, the most recent one hasn't been since 2018.

It was 18, 19?

That was the longest one.

And there were three in 2018, which maybe is why it feels like it's happened so often.

I think the big questions that jump to mind is, what does this actually mean when the government shuts down?

And why is it happening?

I'm glad you asked, Aiden, because I brought my best government attire from home.

Why is your government attire like a bono outfit?

This is all I had.

I couldn't find sunglasses, and I look more like a gay Colombian drug dealer than a government employee.

But this is the best I got.

And a shirt t-shirt with me on it.

Yeah, this t-shirt says trader with Aiden's face.

That is a beautiful shirt.

I will give no additional context.

Now, when the government

folks when the government shuts down uh by definition you don't have enough money to fund everything right that's like the whole point is congress hasn't decided how much money the government has to fund the government so as part of the executive branch there's 15 departments which you've probably heard of before like the department of state the department of treasury so there's 15 of them and you basically have to decide that the whole area needs to decide what gets shut down and what doesn't.

And so we are going to simulate that exact same scenario in an oversimplified form with these five $1 bills.

Gentlemen, you are now the president and the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.

One for you, four for me.

When the shutdown happens, you, the OMB, you need to decide the rules and the agencies decide the details.

The president is going to say, yes, I approve of all this, but technically, it's not the president that decides.

And so what I wanted to find out is you, the average person listening at home, does it matter?

Like, who cares?

Is the Department of Interior shuts down?

Does that do anything?

So, I've brought 15 departments for you gentlemen to consider.

Okay.

For each one of these departments, you have five total dollars.

It costs a dollar to keep the department running.

Otherwise, the rest of them are going to shut down.

Okay.

This is just like what they're actually having to decide right now.

Why do we have government budget problems where every department costs $1?

Yeah.

Disney again.

Slightly oversimplified analogy here.

Let's start with the Department of Education.

Again, you can fund five out of these 15 total departments.

Would you guys spend a buck on the Department of Education?

Hold off on that.

We have homeschooling now.

Yeah.

Also, and I've been studying ever since our conspiracy episode.

I don't know if you noticed.

There's an all-seeing eye on this dollar, and that explains how they've been controlling us through education.

Wow.

So we don't need this.

This is what we don't need at all.

I think people should listen to me

and listen to YouTubers.

And that's going to get us in a good spot.

So I think this one I would definitely not fund.

So you know what?

I actually would, I think the average person is not going to suffer too much from this.

Unlike the name, the Department of Education doesn't manage schools or anything.

It's not like a school is going to get shut down they they don't do that they're managing overall high-level policy and grants and things like that the main thing they do that would affect people student loans they have to approve student loans but even the student loans themselves it's not like that shuts down it's just new ones being approved so in this let's say hypothetical month that you guys are deciding to not fund the department of education you've got nobody's getting new loans but honestly Not that bad.

Okay.

Yeah, I heard that

you still have to pay your student loans, but there's no one you can call at

that.

right if you're trying to be like there are some very funny things about the department being shut down for example a uh a little side tangent a group of unions representing federal employees has sued the trump administration because they don't want to be laid off by the trump administration yeah however the unions are stuck in a cycle because the justice department would handle those lawsuits and the justice department was deemed non-essential and isn't handling them so they just can't sue the government right now that's so sick

wait one quick question so the as far as like consequences or impacts go, we're talking in the context of like immediate effects, like for the expected, you know, maybe 7, 20, 30 day period that this could be, because traditionally shutdowns aren't very long.

Like I said, the longest, right?

Yeah.

The longest has been that 34-day one.

And that's the longest by like 13 days.

Yeah.

So we're describing like the immediate fallout or effects of this.

Right.

We're saying like to you, the average person at home, if the government ends up shutting down for 15 days, like for me, you know, I wouldn't really care.

Normally it doesn't seem like it affects me.

That's what we're trying to decide right now.

What do you guys need to do to make sure the average person doesn't have their life ruined by this?

Okay, we cut the Department of Education.

We cut the Department of Education.

All right, easy.

We cut out of treasury.

What do you think?

Is that worth a buck?

I think so.

Now,

why do you think that?

I just feel like if we lose the treasury, we're going to lose the value of this very dollar that I'm spending on other things.

And that's a great point because the Department of Treasury is the one who pays for literally everything and collects all the money and balances the debt.

So we would immediately...

So you are paying for it.

Let's just say, okay.

No, no, no.

We have a lot of money.

Fund department.

Congratulations.

We have rising rates of homes.

You're at Treasury at home.

Okay, yeah.

All right, I'll take that dollar.

Congratulations.

We are keeping one of our government departments alive.

It's the Department of Treasury.

That means we can continue to collect money, including taxes.

That means we can spend money on literally everything.

It's not very helpful to shut down the Department of Treasury while keeping other departments open because then you can't pay any person anyway.

Also, the entire global market is underpinned by our bonds and debt servicing, and that all falls apart.

So that is pretty definitively the most important thing.

I take it this is one of the ones that's deemed essential in real life.

Yes.

In real life, this is one that has by far the lowest number of people who are laid off or furloughed, meaning they don't have to show up to work.

All right, this one.

I don't know what the fuck this does.

Department of Housing?

What do you guys think?

Department of Housing.

Who cares?

Is any average person affected if the department never heard anyone complain about housing in this?

No one's complaining.

We actually solved it this last week.

I don't know.

If anybody read the news in the last week, you saw the headlines about how housing's been solved.

So that's a bit of a relief.

I will say, though,

Aiden, if everybody is constantly complaining about housing, then how good could this department be?

That's true.

How much could they be doing currently?

I don't think we fund it.

Maybe.

Okay, this would be my thing here:

I don't think we're known for the scale

of our public housing services.

And

so it feels like a market that

it feels like an agency that wouldn't be providing the most compared to the other agencies, of which we have a lot to get through.

We only have $4.

We only have $4

more.

So

I feel pressured to say no to this one, admittedly.

Okay.

All right.

We are not not funding for the next two weeks the Department of Housing.

I can't even go back.

And that means that 10 million Americans no longer have rental assistance and will most likely go homeless.

Because this covers things like Section 8 housing.

There's about 5 million families, 10 million total Americans, 70% of whom are seniors, children, or disabled, who will now suddenly not have rent assistance and will probably be evicted.

Hey, if the government shuts down only two or three weeks, maybe they aren't evicted by then, huh?

Sure, it's looking remarkably prescient.

Can I take it back?

You cannot know.

We've ripped every rent that's been furloughed and fired.

But hey, you know, maybe the other departments are going to help more people, right?

It's only 10 million.

Okay, Department of Agriculture.

What do you guys think?

Does that sound important?

I mean, it.

You know what?

I do think food is a big deal, but my guess is the Department of Agriculture is mostly based around giving huge subsidies to large factory farms.

Yeah.

And I feel like the, for the time period that the shutdown is likely to exist in, your subsidy not being paid within this, let's say, four-week period doesn't seem

that pressing.

Like it feels like we should be able to get through a net 30 invoice here.

I think so.

So I'm going to say no.

No.

All right.

We are dropping Department of Agriculture.

And for the most part, your intuition was right.

It's a lot of like high-level regulation around farming, around food production.

The problem is twofold.

First off, you've got food safety and inspection.

So no food will have any quality checks of any kind going forward.

But fingers crossed, no food crisis.

The other thing is, ooh, there are 20 million kids who won't get lunch anymore at schools.

Also, 40 in 2024, there were 40 million people on SNAP, which is the food vouchers, like food program.

That's under the Department of Agriculture for some reason.

Snap is under the Department of Agriculture, so is kids' lunches.

I don't know why that's the case, case but uh 40 people 40 million people no longer have uh snap assistance to eat food you're gonna have a lot a lot a lot of the country now a little worried no worries because

okay he is running to the other side of the room he has what is found his

oh you finding extra money

because a little thing called tariff revenue just came in and in real life trump is proposing to use tariff revenue to fund snap in the meantime.

Okay, all right.

And probably to give bailouts to farmers.

So we're going to use this five dollar.

Hey, buy yourself something nice.

Okay, this is the only time you get to use tariffs because

it's like farmers getting subsidies and stuff like that is a big part of it.

But okay, fair.

We'll say tariff revenue is unexpected and you guys get to fund the snap program, which, by the way, what has tariff revenue been so far?

Because I know what SNAP costs in 2024.

It's probably over SNAP, right?

800 billion, billion, something like that.

Okay.

Snap's actually a trillion last year.

We spent a trillion dollars on Snap?

This is a report from the Department of Agriculture last year.

Trillion bucks.

Don't buy yourself something that matters.

Yeah.

So tariffs are great.

That would be all of the tariff money to get 80% of people to have food.

Nah, I don't cover it.

Because he's promising so much of this.

He's promising like

tariff revenue is supposed to cover everything.

It covers everything.

It is magical.

It can't even cover Snap.

He's like, we're going to give everybody in America a $2,000 check on tariff revenue.

Tariff revenue is gone.

That's off the table.

He still got four bucks, though.

Okay.

We're all right.

Department of Defense, now known as the Department of War, it is the military.

What do you think?

Now, this is one of the things where we are oversimplifying the analogy.

This is more expensive than the other ones, but let's assume it costs the same amount.

Would you fund it?

Or could you just say, hey, everybody, let's chill for two to four weeks.

You guys got this.

Here's what I'm thinking.

The obvious answer is we don't fund this one because in a month we're not going to need it.

All right.

Yeah.

However,

I feel like this one has 10x the employees of every other one.

And if they are furloughed and not paid, it is so many people unpaid.

So at the very least, I ripped this dollar in half.

I mean, I don't know.

This is a tough one for me because I know we have all of these

bases and we have all these employees and military bases.

And even hospitals.

I think Veterans Affairs is a different department.

Veterans Affairs is a different department.

Ooh, that helps.

That helps.

So maybe we...

You're not throwing veterans under the bus by doing this.

I think it's the few.

You're throwing future veterans under the bus.

It's only a few weeks.

How bad could it get?

How bad could it get?

You're not funding the department more.

Are you serious?

Okay, we do not have a military.

No military bases, no readiness whatsoever if there's any kind of attack on the United States.

This is a fingers-crossed kind of moment.

Nuclear deterrence, that's gone now.

China might go for Taiwan.

Russia might go for Ukraine.

But if we could hold out for three or four weeks, come on.

It's a four-week window.

Four weeks.

And you were right, by the way.

There's about three million people employed by the military.

I think the main exaggeration of this segment also is that in actuality, all of these things can be partially funded.

or like we're just saying yes, no, flatly.

Right.

And we're getting rid of the entire thing.

We're taking it or leaving it.

Yeah, and we have $4.

And we only have, and we have $4, which does fund it fully in this exercise.

But that is, there's an amount of people you can

put on leave.

You know, it might be 20% for one department on leave, unpaid leave.

It might be 80% for another department.

That's my understanding.

Yeah, I think in the real world, it's a sliding scale of how much they get cut.

And I think you're going to show it to us at the end.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I sure did remember to get that graph ready.

He sounds confident.

Which, Adrian, we'll take a look at that graph.

We have it.

We'll take a look at that.

yes this is simplifying things at the same time this is a simplified version of an actual thing that they have to go through which is to decide what are we shutting down during this period i mean these are real decisions they have to make even if it's not quite you know this high level okay well we don't have a military right now what else could we potentially cut what do you think about Department of Justice?

Okay.

You want to pay this?

Well, like the anecdote you already provided, I think I'm kind of in the camp of you would, am I crazy?

You would not fund the DOJ?

i don't want to fund the doj you don't want to fund the doj that's what i've decided where's your you have no sense of justice none

i think it should just be my call i think yeah okay we'll run it through aiden yeah actually it's fine we're gonna talk about what happens if we cut the doj right so if you cut the doj it's you know it's the laws where that aren't being enforced anymore but here's the thing most laws statistically they're enforced at the local level at the state level right so the federal government they take on like tens of thousands of cases a year but that's kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of cases that are taken in the justice system across the whole thing.

And we're also not talking about the judges.

That's part of the judicial branch.

So this is the United States government being able to sue or take cases against people or companies that are doing illegal things.

Now, the issue here is that kind of by definition, a federal crime,

something the government will broadly go and put this case up for is somebody who crosses state lines.

As in, it's a big deal.

These aren't little tiny things.

This might be a massive drug trafficking ring.

This might be massive cyber criminal or financial fraud.

This is going to be potentially something incredibly huge.

It might be anti-monopoly stuff, as we talked about with Linacon.

So is the world going to catch on fire if the Department of Justice mostly gets shut down?

No.

You just have to hope that there aren't any major, major, major high-impact cases that are going to be kind of screwed because they're out of commission for a month.

I mean, I feel like the DOJ, the last big case I heard them going after was like

Ty Lopez, the Lamborghini guy, because he bought Radio Shack and did a Ponzi scheme with it.

It's like, all right, I mean, that guy's not good.

I'm glad they're getting him, but

I can wait four weeks to get him.

I think that's legitimate, although I'm sure people at the FBI who actually know the type of horrible shit that's happening all the time would be like, you guys are insane.

This is an insane thing.

People at every one of these agencies are going to be mad about every because, of course, it's over.

Okay, all right.

That being said, Department of the Interior.

Come on.

You want to randomly?

You guys give a shit about this?

Come on.

He's trying to to bait us.

You want to just randomly gamble on this one?

This is going to be super important.

You can tell by his mother.

You don't give a shit about this.

Look at this.

There's a bison on it.

We don't have a bison on that.

Bison are dead.

You're going to be a dollar.

Department of the Interior.

Congratulations.

Your national parks will continue to be staffed.

And that's about it.

So that is by far the least impactful one.

I got a level with you.

We're doing a terrible job.

What do we keep so far?

We only have the treasury.

Good news on this.

Good news is they also coordinate things like permitting for the federal land, like if farmers want to graze on it or mining rights.

So

that they don't do it themselves, they issue permits.

Yeah.

When you go to Yellowstone, you think of us.

Okay.

When you enjoy that beautiful day.

When you're taking vacation, you think of old H.

Rocky Run.

All right.

This one is a wash.

Nobody cares about the Department of Health.

Fuck it.

This is Health and Human Services led by Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

I cut it.

You cut health?

Okay.

Well, how much,

yeah,

with each of these, I'm thinking about how much like boots on the ground, day-to-day effect does it have?

Like, if we lose this for 28 days, how problematic is that?

Just so you're aware, Medicare and Medicaid are under this.

Gonna be some anger.

Tell you what, we cut this.

They have to make it.

Here's the question that I wanted to answer.

Yeah.

Medicare and Medicaid are managed by the Department of Health.

Yeah.

But if the Department of Health Health goes away, does everybody stop getting health?

Are they the ones doing the health?

I will answer that question shortly.

You must guess.

Are they doing the health?

I know.

We're dropping the Department of Health and Human Security.

This is actually, I think, a smart decision.

I mean, smart in the context of an emergency, obviously.

Because...

Yes, they oversee Medicare and Medicaid, but what many people are not aware, the government isn't personally managing people's health plans.

They're not personally,

they're not hiring the doctors that take care of people.

They're overseeing and approving the private companies that will be paid by the government to do this work.

So over the course of a month, the people on Medicare and Medicaid, most likely, they'll be able to continue getting health, continue to get services, continue to get insurance.

They just can't resolve any problems and there can't be like major updates.

Also, hopefully there's no pandemic because that is the CDC.

We're doing a lot of fingers.

Fingers crossed, Chad.

If you don't get a pandemic, it's a huge four-way gamble right now, I will say, in this world.

I like, oh, see, you kept saying getting health.

And I was like, yeah, just getting your health.

Just get health.

I was more thinking like from a doctor or a pharmacy, but yeah.

All right, what do you guys think about the Department of Homeland Security?

If we cut the military, I'll definitely cut Homeland Security.

Yeah, I mean, this is like the baby brother to the Department of War.

This is going to stop China's invasion of Taiwan.

We're already gambling.

That's my read on it.

I'm prepared to be very wrong.

The only thing here is a couple.

So, Department of Homeland Security, it's what the name suggests.

It was made after 9-11.

It's for internal threats, not external threats.

And so that includes border protection and ICE.

That's gone.

Border protection is gone.

TSA screening for the airports.

That's gone now.

Past your line.

And that is, that is, well, actually, the opposite.

That is currently happening in airports right now.

This is a real one.

FEMA,

the agency that deals with disaster response.

So if there's another hurricane or something horrific,

cybersecurity infrastructure.

Oh, and one other one: U.S.

Secret Service.

So our politicians are going to get

much

more

agile.

Agile.

They're going to be very a little skittish.

You know, like a rabbit.

We'll do a lot of Zoom calls for us.

We'll do more Zoom calls.

We'll do Zoom town halls.

Well, unfortunately, you also lose cybersecurity infrastructure.

So we'll have some hacked Zoom town halls.

Department of Homeland Security is dropped.

Okay, what about Department of Transportation?

People got to get around, Aiden.

They got it.

They got it.

They got it.

This is actually, people don't know this.

They have a direct internet line to control anybody's car at any given time.

So imagine that goes away.

Yeah.

You're dropping this?

No, I think I'll pay for this.

You pay for transportation?

You're getting the Department of Transportation.

Well, you have one more dollar.

You do what you want with it.

Fine, fine.

You take it.

You take it.

There's like six more.

Okay, you do

Department of Transportation.

This is a good decision because this is air traffic controllers.

If you don't have this, nobody can fly.

That being said, the rest of what the DOT does is not really a day-to-day thing.

It's like overseeing the broad railroad system, the broad, you know,

like airport system and whatnot.

So but I assume the operations, like with a lot of these things, I think a common theme here is oversight of these things at a national level, but the local level, say the LA Metro, would continue operating because it's its own organization.

They would throw funding.

The highways.

They oversee the broad planning of highways.

They don't manage the highways.

So the average person for the DOT like getting shut down, they're not going to care.

The only thing they will care over the course of a month is airplanes crashing.

But we do need our air traffic control.

That's right.

What we're saying, though, in the real world, air traffic controllers are not getting paid, but are still working.

Well, you could.

But they'll get back pay.

That's right.

Yeah.

They're not getting furloughed as in, you know, I mean, correct.

Yeah.

But even furloughed employees get paid.

Right.

Right.

So anyway, yeah, it's it's bad.

This is happening right now.

And again, like to what we mentioned earlier, certain parts, large chunks of the Department of Transportation are just told to not come into work right now.

Air traffic controllers, they're like, please come in.

You're not paid for the time you're furloughed, though.

I thought.

That's what I thought about it.

That's what I thought, but there's a law in 2019 that says they actually do get back pay for all the time they were.

Yeah, I mean, let's double check.

I didn't have time to deep dive into it.

This is a good thing to check on because this is a twist in my understanding as well, was that

there's a bunch of people during a shutdown from all of these agencies at differing percentages depending on the agency that get essentially laid off for that set period of time.

They don't work and they don't get paid.

And then there's a portion of people who continue to work to operate or do their job at the agency.

I thought those people are also not getting paid, but then they get the back pay for their work

that when they come back.

I thought the people that do not work through that time period do not get back pay.

That's what I thought too.

And there was a law passed in 2019 that furloughed people who aren't working will get back pay.

So I believe that your law is correct.

However, there is a White House memo going around suggesting that not all government shutdown workers will receive back pay.

Donald Trump was asked about it and he suggested that not all furlough workers will get, it depends.

Okay.

He said.

So we don't, we don't know what that means.

Yeah.

Historically.

Yeah.

And that's my understanding as well.

Historically, before 2019, if you were furloughed, the idea is, look, we're just not paying you, but please come back to work in the future.

Now, furlough also means we're going to back pay you, which is basically not furlough.

So it's a little confusing to me, but the Trump administration is trying to push back against that in order to save money, to lay off people, et cetera, et cetera.

It's interesting because in 2019, the law you're talking about, it was signed by Trump.

Yeah.

That said all furloughed employees shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.

So they'll get their backpay, which is interesting.

There might have been different political motivations at the time because the shutdowns in 2018 were.

That was because the Democrats didn't want to, they didn't want the

spending bill at the time to fund the border wall.

There was a big dispute over it.

That was the December, like the into 2019 shutdown.

Here's a direct quote.

Trump, when asked at the White House on Tuesday afternoon about back pay for those workers, said, I would say it depends on who we're talking about.

For the most part, we're going to take care of our people.

So that's a big question mark.

It's got to, in that scenario, it's got to suck to be one of the guys who has to keep working.

That's what I was going to say.

Because you could have just gotten a bigger picture.

They just make everybody go into work, dude.

If you're going to pay them back anyways.

Yeah, it's wild if they're going to get paid back that they don't work.

That's just the worst of both worlds.

I know what I'm saying.

We don't get the services.

And then

we're not going to get any money.

I would actually prefer if I'm paying the taxes for it.

If you're going to get paid either way, like, please do the thing.

Please give people snap money.

This seems so obviously wrong that there must be something we're on misunderstanding.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, there must be something we're missing here.

That was my thought.

And I learned about that like two hours ago.

And I was like, I don't have time.

I got to, I'm knocking out these other things.

So, you know, look, we can explore it more later.

But

yeah, there's people who are currently not working by the normal standard set in 2019 should also be paid back once the actual budget is passed by Congress that says who is getting what amount of money.

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, on this specific example of transportation, I'm sorry, of transportation.

I was flying this weekend and I was thinking about in the air.

I was like, man, the air traffic controllers that are working right now are not getting paid.

I mean, they'll get back pay.

Right.

Right.

Assuming that they're not going to be able to do it.

But it's a wild thing that somebody who's determining whether your plane crashes isn't being paid.

And then Burbank had to shut down.

This is, you know, near us in LA, was not able to operate.

And a bunch of planes were delayed because they were understaffed.

Yeah.

So, like, they're, you know, even with the situation of like, ah, we'll pay you in the future, like, not everybody's going to show up.

Like, it's just, so this is all happening in real time.

Also, they are going to be permanently laid off.

So, again, another quote is: asked Tuesday how many permanent jobs in the chopping block.

Trump said he'll be able to say in four or five days, if this keeps going on, it'll be substantial and a lot of those jobs will never come back.

Yeah.

So, you know, like again, I have, I have a friend I was hanging out this weekend who is furloughed from his job in the government.

I don't want to say where, but,

and he, it's a very stressful time.

Like they're, they're trying to figure out what's going on.

They have like work that they, it's like larger project work that is sort of still going on, but they're being told not to work and they don't know what type of back pay or what they'll be receiving.

It's weird.

It's a weird spot to be in.

It's confusing.

It's funny to hear from a person in that situation that it's basically as ambiguous as it is.

Yeah, for us.

Yes.

They're like getting weird emails from their managers and just trying to figure out what to do, but it's all day to day.

They don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's a weird spot to be in.

All right, let's wrap this up and do a really rapid fire.

And then we'll talk about like $2.

Because then we'll talk about the political maneuvering of all of this, right?

This is just what happens with the government shutdown.

It's like, what are the different parties arguing for?

So let's rapid fire.

Commerce.

Department of Commerce.

Do you fund it?

I'm taking it.

Aiden has all the money.

You're taking it?

I'm taking the Department of Commerce.

Okay.

That is okay.

What?

You've got, no, nothing.

You've got $1 left.

Congratulations.

No problem.

What?

You get to keep doing weather forecasts.

The Department of Commerce?

It does the weather and patents and trademarks.

So that will not stop during the next month.

Congratulations.

Defunding the Department of Commerce and then pirating a bunch of Nintendo games.

What are you going to do about it?

There's other things.

Like they produce all the national statistics.

So

a lot of commerce is based around the information that comes out of the Department of Commerce, but I would argue one of the less impactful.

Wait, is the BLS ladder up into commerce?

Do you know that?

Or labor systems?

I was going to write that down.

I forget.

I'm fairly certain, but that might be labor.

I think it's labor.

Okay.

Well, that's defunded now, I know, because they're not releasing the jobs report.

Yeah, that is for sure defunded.

Okay, Department of Energy.

You've got $1 and another four?

Four.

We have to get...

See, now it's chunked.

Show us, do it.

Let's do a, give us a spread.

No.

Cut energy.

Okay, cut energy.

Cut energy.

So this is fine.

Because we don't need it.

The thing is, again, they're not maintaining the energy themselves.

It's overall grid stability.

However, they literally do make and maintain nuclear warheads.

So those are out of commission.

We're already not doing war, Doug.

No, that is a good call.

Okay, Department of Labor.

Department of Labor.

No, we're cutting that.

We don't need those fake statistics that they kept picking up.

True, true.

Big one here, OSHA is going to be gone.

There's going to be no workplace standards or regulations whatsoever.

So it's not going to be.

Oh, shut up about it.

How about that?

A fingers crossed situation.

Oh, no.

No, now no one will fine me for having the 2024 work poster up in the office.

I don't know if you said

it.

Mogo moves his office.

They worked him to the bone and they don't have safety rails.

Shut up.

Stop saying that publicly on the show, dude.

Okay.

I'm going to say the last two, okay?

You got to pick which one you fund.

And we ran out of printer anyway.

It's just Department of State.

The Department of State or the Department of Veterans Affairs.

You've got $1.

What do you choose to fund?

All on you, Aiden.

I have to wait.

The Department of State.

Department of State?

I think I'm going to fund the Department of Veterans Affairs because my understanding is they employ a ton of people.

And this is health care for a considerable amount.

of individuals.

That is a great choice.

Not only do 400,000 employees work at the Department of Veteran Affairs, which is the next next biggest after the actual military, they literally do manage the health care of the veterans.

So unlike the Department of Health and Human Services, which pays a bunch of private people to do all the health care.

Department of Veteran Affairs literally is taking care of 9 million veterans.

So that all falls apart immediately.

So good call there.

That's one that's extremely untenable to cut.

Department of State, this means that the entire rest of the world can't interface with the United States whatsoever.

We have no more diplomats.

We have no more embassies.

You can't get a visa into the country.

You can't get a passport.

But good news, we don't have a military anyway based on your guys's budget.

So it's not like we could do anything anyways.

The Department of State is gone.

So, ladies and gentlemen, that leaves you with a pretty

lineup.

We've got the interior, we got transportation, treasury, veterans affairs, and oh boy, oh boy, the Department of Commerce.

And I also funded Snap with Tariffs.

This is a pretty dangerous thing.

This is not bad.

We're at a hell of a government right there.

Not a lot of safety, but a lot of

ability to fly to fucking fuckers.

And they don't know if we have nukes or not

i want to i want to touch on something i think we should show the graphic on screen uh you know for audio listeners this is tough to summarize because it's a lot of departments and a lot of numbers but uh i i the actual number of employees uh or federal employees through each of these agencies the number that are expected to be furloughed and then uh the i think just the percentage that's the percentage of the employees that are kept on to continue operating.

That was cut.

And

my initial question when we were talking about prepping this episode was

when you choose to keep funding a bunch of portions of these agencies, how is that actually

paid for?

Is it just

the government is shut down until a new budget resolution is passed, and then all of that back pay for the employees during the previous time period needs to be supplied anyway?

So you're essentially agreeing, you're making a decision that no matter what the budget is going forward, all of the people that

are continuing to be asked to work are going to be paid somehow in the future once we have agreed on a budget resolution.

Is that how it works?

I mean,

that's what I thought, but what we find out today is that based on that 2019 law, everyone's getting paid.

Yeah, which doesn't, it feels like that doesn't make any sense.

It's actually, it kind of shakes up my whole understanding of how shutdowns work in that we are not saving any money in this shutdown.

We're not saving any money, but we're not doing anything.

Yeah, we're just doing less.

The people of the United States are just getting less services as two parties.

And quick for audio listeners, let's just kind of go through.

So, treasury, so we did this exercise.

It's oversimplified, but in the real world, this is what's happening.

There's all these departments.

And to call out some of them, the treasury, they are furloughing almost no people.

So the treasury, they're just continuing to fund.

Veterans Affairs, continuing to fund.

They really wanted Homeland Security.

That one stayed around, apparently.

Same with justice.

But then on the other side, they almost fully cut education, almost fully cut Environmental Protection Agency, which is sort of different than this.

Commerce is out.

Labor is out.

Housing and urban development is out.

So kind of on a high level, you guys roughly matched along with what the government is doing, which is saying, look, of all these departments we have to manage, like we're going to mostly leave this ones intact and these are just going to be left to the wayside.

While having to pay them back in the future anyway.

That's so wild to me.

Yeah, I don't know how it's going to play out.

I mean, so yeah.

Can you imagine being because the education, the Department of Education is one of the ones where most of the people are being furloughed, right?

Yeah.

So in this scenario where the back

is owed, imagine being one of the 10%

of people at the Department of Education who has to keep working.

I don't want the vacation.

You're doing extra work, no extra pay, and everyone that got the vacation is getting paid.

Maybe.

Well, why don't we use this as a transition point to talk about what both sides of the aisle are doing on this and like what they're leveraging.

Yeah, it's a good question because one of the things that trump has been saying the idea is that you know you furlough people they aren't showing up to work because you don't know whether the government congress hasn't decided how much money we're going to spend over the next year that is fundamentally what's going on so we're not going to spend the money yet until we know that the money has been by law allocated so the furloughing is happening to say some people we just have they need to show up to work we're requiring it other people we're going to pay you back later.

And what Trump is doing as part of this is saying, I'm going to have to lay off off a bunch of people.

But that seems like something he wants.

Like this is basically an excuse.

It's like a threat to help push these negotiations.

You feel like it's more of a threat?

My sense is that because that's not necessary, like he doesn't have to do that because they aren't being paid right now, regardless of the furlough thing.

It's not costing the money right now.

It would just be like, this is a chance to shrink the government is my take on it.

Maybe.

I mean, it sounds like they are being paid.

There's like 4005.

I mean, this makes sense to what I heard.

There's like $400 to $500 million a day of back pay accruing.

Right.

That is like owed.

But it's what you just said, specifically the layoffs.

Like he keeps talking about, I'm going to have to start laying off a bunch of people.

And that would be a substantial departure from what normally happens in a shutdown.

So there's like this whole political game unfolding around this right now.

So earlier in the year, there was a similar opportunity for the Democrats in Congress to not pass a budget resolution in order with the opportunity to shut down the government by doing so.

Right.

And they, a lot of the Democrats at the time wanted to do that to slow the

Trump administration and the Republicans in power.

But there was disagreements as to whether or not this was the right timing to do so.

Because if you don't, because this was early on in the year, if you don't allow Trump's admin to sort of unfold, then they have an easy blame during a shutdown of, see, we can't even take any action because the Democrat and the Democrats are more likely to become the center of blame for that.

But now we're far enough in the year where so much of what Trump has done is polling so poorly with the Republican support behind him.

The Democrats now feel like it's their opportunity to take a stand.

And I think there's this view of the party being very wishy-washy and having no backbone.

And this is their opportunity to do something substantial and fight back.

And it's one of the few pieces of leverage that the Democrats actually have, which is not passing this.

And they have three stipulations as to why they're saying they're withholding their

approval of

the budget stopgap that they've built on.

So the three things are one, they want

ACA, or sorry, they want Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year to be

extended or made permanent.

At the end of this year,

there's a bunch of Affordable Care Act subsidies that were approved a long time ago that allow people to enter the market when they're purchasing health care for themselves through the Affordable Care Act.

And this is not Medicare or Medicaid.

And it's the way that a ton of people, about 22 million people, access affordable health insurance in the country right now.

And

through the expiration of these subsidies, people's premiums are expected to jump a ton with an average of 114% 114% increase, hugely dependent on your level of income.

So, if you're lower income and you're buying subsidized ACA healthcare, you're looking at maybe you're jumping from literally paying nothing to something like $35 to $65 a month, which is still a big increase if you're not making a lot of money.

But if you're middle income, like say you're making like $65,000 a year, right?

And you purchase your healthcare through the ACA,

you're looking at a huge huge increase in your premiums over the course of the year, maybe a 10 to 20K increase in healthcare premiums to maintain the same plan that you are on now.

And the Democrats are saying, we cannot allow these subsidies to expire.

You need to continue to fund them and make them permanent.

That's the first, the first stipulation.

You looked like you wanted to hop in.

No.

I have a quick thing.

It's these subsidies were not that long ago.

They were enacted in 2021 during COVID.

And so during that point, Biden and Democrats had Congress and everything, and they said, we need to expand basically the support we're giving to people through the ACA because COVID is causing all these issues.

And then they extended it through 2025.

It was initially just supposed to be two years.

So it was meant to be temporary.

Then the next year, they extended it to 2025 and said, we still need lots of support for people.

So it's supposed to end now.

In theory, that was started as a COVID era, like help people during this pandemic.

And now Democrats are saying this should just be permanent.

And that's the context.

And then for the second stipulation, they want to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that came in the big beautiful bill,

which we've already talked about on the show before.

But Medicaid saw a bunch of cuts through making it more difficult to be eligible or prove your eligibility and saving money that way.

And the Democrats want this reversed.

And then the third thing is a commitment from the White House or the executive branch to no longer make unilateral decisions on pulling funding from agencies

that

was approved by Congress in the past.

That's Trump's favorite thing.

It's one of the favorite things right now, right?

But their thing with this is

there's a general idea that this level of oversight or changing of funding to agencies made,

like say years ago, funding to these agencies decided in a budget bill is decided by Congress.

Now, during this administration, the executive branch has made a lot of executive orders or decisions to defund or freeze funding for things related to these agencies.

And Congress has a problem with this, even some Republicans, because it's like, these are decisions that we debated and voted on and passed.

And now you are unilaterally making decisions about how that funding should be allowed to continue when we already did this the correct way through Congress before.

Also, if you continue to do this, any new agreement we come to about budgets means essentially nothing if you can just hand wave anything off as the executive and make a unilateral decision about changing it in the future.

So there needs to be some sort of change or commitment for that that will no longer be the case.

And these are the three things that Democrats are seeking right now.

Do you know why, while that sounds like a good idea, why is that part of the budget?

I think it's not necessarily a part of the budget.

This is the only piece of leverage.

This is the first substantial piece of leverage that Democrats have right now that they can use to push Republicans around.

Interesting.

It is a political move.

I think there is sort of a public-facing argument from Democrats that I've seen that this is very focused on healthcare and they've picked healthcare to stand their ground on because they feel like it's the one issue they really can win on against Republicans right now.

But

overall, they're looking for any opportunity for a political win in a climate that has basically the most disgust or dislike of Democrats, even though, you know, even if Trump's approval ratings are low, the Democratic Party's approval ratings are ridiculously low.

I think they're even lower than Trump's.

And from a Republican perspective, the pushback here or what they're looking for.

First,

the the big thing that they're holding in contention is like, if you do this, we're going to lay a bunch of people off.

A bunch of people are going to lose their jobs permanently.

And that's the stick they can wave in return and like really blame Democrats because they're making an effort to blame the shutdown on Democrats right now.

Yeah.

Quick, funny thing about that.

Trump has already announced that the officials in charge of layoffs have been deemed essential.

They still got their jobs.

They're going to need you.

They're showing up to work.

Well, how can you lay the people off if the guy's laying the people off jobs?

You need to fund the layoff guys.

You got to fund the layoffs.

You need to fund the layoff, guys.

And then

there's even an argument here that Republicans are quietly happy for the shutdown occurring because they want

better ground to stand on for these layoffs to happen anyway.

Trump from the executive position wants to cut more federal jobs in general, but doesn't feel like he has the public confidence or goodwill to like continue making these cuts.

But this is a situation that may allow them to do it basically without the same pushback that they would get otherwise.

But I think that's up for contention because a lot of Republicans are flat out saying that it's bad that the government is shut down and we didn't want this.

And they were fighting back against the Democrats to have it up and running again.

And then the last point,

or one more point I saw about this, were the Republicans are pointing out that when they were in the minority under Biden, they never said no to one of these stopgap bills, stopgap funding bills, during the previous Democratic administration.

They're like, even when we hated Biden, we weren't doing what you're doing right now.

And this

feels unprecedented, or we didn't do this to you guys,

at least in this exact type of budgeting situation.

And if you look back, like the most recent shutdown before this was in 2018.

And the Democratic argument on the other side is these times and the decisions that this executive is making are so unprecedented that this action is absolutely necessary to take at this time.

And I think if you go further back, you can also make the argument that Republicans have caused different shutdowns in different scenarios.

So there's an argument to be made there as well.

And then the very last thing was another item of, well,

these healthcare programs were funding, were being abused by illegal immigrants, which is sort of the headline version of the Republican argument of why these programs are like wasteful or shouldn't have been, uh,

shouldn't have existed in these facets in the first place.

I've spent some time looking this up.

This is complicated, but the headline is very misleading.

I, it, it is, there's a very, very long-winded explanation:

there's there's the way money is like given out to states and then used, people who are like illegal or like undocumented could be using programs, but

the vast majority and what they're really saying is most people who are here through some, through some legal protection, like say you're here through like asylum or some other case that protects your legal status in the country, even though you're not like, maybe maybe you're not on like a visa or a green card or something like that.

You have some legal status in the country.

This administration's aggressive policies and views towards those types of people that are often getting deported or no longer have that protection, those were the people who had access to these programs in the past.

Because if you're flat out like illegal, quote unquote, or just undocumented, then you weren't supposed to have access to any of these programs in the first place that are the healthcare programs in question.

But they are available to people who had legal or protected status through different programs that the Trump administration no longer respects.

So this is a very large distortion of the abuse of these systems that Republicans are claiming exists.

That's what I could find.

I can't, you know,

I read something much more long-winded.

than that and I'd encourage you to read more about it.

But to me, this headline is a very dishonest read of the way these programs are uh the being used and we've uh i think to end this uh

these

these programs saved money like the medicaid cuts saved money primarily by making it difficult for eligible people to access the program uh they were like you're just making it hard for people that would get on who have a legal right to be on it, and you're just making it giving more friction to those people having having access to it so that's that's the political game that's unfolding

yeah

you know uh i think what's interesting here is not so much the specific programs they're fighting about but that they both no longer feel that there is any incentive to cooperate

uh

I think they both have a political, I mean, if they're, they're both already polling, Congress as a whole is polling so poorly, both parties, and they can't even go much lower.

This is one argument that I saw.

It's like they can't even go much lower.

And

Democrats have no power outside of this.

They don't have anything in the House or the Senate or the judiciary or the presidency.

They have nothing.

So this is kind of their last lever.

And so for them,

I think the party split 50-50 on whether or not they should negotiate, but like it's way, that's a way higher percent than it's ever been.

And

they risk so much by looking weak than they would by not negotiating here.

I mean, I think they're trying to negotiate in some way, but and then the Republican side, there's no advantage for them to give in either.

They can get some things they may want about cutting.

And

also, it gives them kind of a scapegoat, which is as the government is being more, the polling of the government is going down.

People are getting more and more upset.

This gives you a sort of a little bit of an out.

You can be like, hey, like, we're trying to do stuff.

This is like slowing us down.

This is getting off our mission that was going to go great.

So I just don't see either side having a real incentive to switch, which makes me think, you know, knock on wood, this could change by tomorrow, but it seems like this is going to be a longer shutdown than we've seen normally, longer than the average one.

I don't know if it'll make it to 30 days.

I don't, maybe not, but I don't see what the breaking point is because people are upset, but they're not any more or less upset at the other party or this party than they were before.

People are just generally rising in anger.

I don't know.

That's the vibe.

I get it.

I wonder if you have a different thought on it or if there's...

I think so.

I mean, one of the big things.

again, you know, Democrats are using this as what you said is basically like the final lever.

Like they're not in control of Congress at all.

They don't have Supreme Court.

They don't have the presidency.

And they're just being like outmaneuvered constantly.

And then the big, beautiful bill, which you talked about earlier this year, they did a reconciliation bill, which basically allowed that to be passed without 60% of the Senate.

So they got in these like massive cuts.

And so the Republicans have just done what they wanted, asterisk, for this whole time.

And it feels to me like if the Democratic Party doesn't hold here and they give in, they're like, all right, fine, you can cut all the Medicaid.

We're not going to stand up for this.

Like, they're real fucked.

Like, that's, that's the last bastion of like, we have some kind of influence.

And given that their polling and everything is so low already, it feels like they are not going to give in here because it's going to be like somewhat existential to their party.

I think there's a very, very pervasive idea, and I would say fairly so, that the Democrats are basically a bunch of soy cucks with no backbone.

Like,

to say it politely.

And I think the party has come around and recognized the fact that people view them in this sort of like sad, you never fight back and do anything sort of way.

And they need to do something substantial in order to come across.

And this is their gamble, right?

It might not pay off.

I don't know if people come out of this 30 days from now applauding the Democratic Party.

Maybe, you know, maybe they will, maybe they won't.

But I think they're part of the reason why the approval rating is so low is, well, Republicans, they don't like the Democrats, obviously.

But I feel like most Democrats or most left-leaning people in general do not like the Democrats.

Have you seen the Chuck Schumer quote during this thing about the letter?

Have you seen this?

No.

It's like him talking to the news and they're asking him about the shutdown.

And he goes like, yeah, so I sent Trump a strongly worded letter.

And then he realizes what he's saying.

sounds so fucking ineffectual.

So in the middle of his sentence, he's like, well, I mean, not a letter.

I demand it.

You can see him recognize the talking points.

You can see that people who, for their entire career in politics, their 70-year career in politics have been this very kind of sterile, like both sides are now trying to be a Trump-esque figure and just failing badly.

Chuck Schumer trying to be like, hello, fellow kids.

It's so bad.

Yeah, I think it just says they got to do something.

My outlook is similar to yours.

I came into this, this one kind of feeling, oh, this might be the longest one we ever have.

And we did this whole exercise of, you know, which ones would we save?

And, you know, within the realm of let's keep this four weeks or under within the expectation of past shutdowns.

But I think this one feels like it can go longer.

And then the pain I imagine that is felt when you extend this to maybe more than a month, two months, three months, I don't know how long it could be.

Just having this many people who are on federal payroll not having access to a paycheck for that long, people will be upset.

They will demand attention to this in some facet that people have to be held accountable to to some degree.

If you start fucking with enough people's paychecks

in that you just take them away, there's no,

that's when people will be the most upset.

So that's what I read.

I read that around the 30-day mark specifically is when it becomes a real big fucking deal because that's when paychecks would normally, that's when your monthly paycheck would normally arrive.

And when that doesn't get there, shit starts becoming unable to get paid.

So there was an interesting thing that happened during the last one because it was the first one that surpassed 30 days.

A theory or a feeling that one of the reasons they finally had to cave and make a decision was the air traffic controllers.

Because although they were supposed to be coming into work, and I think this has already happened at Burbank Airport, people just started taking their sick leave.

And they're like, I'm not going into work.

Like

for anybody who doesn't know, air traffic controller is a famously stressful job.

You work extremely hard.

Extremely stressful job.

And people, and if you're not getting paid for such a long period of time, people just start calling in their sick days or not showing up and saying, basically, you know, you see a spike in sick days all of a sudden.

They're soft quitting.

And

enough air traffic controllers choosing not to show up during the last shutdown was like one of the last big things that happened before they finally caved and like made a decision together to get the budget through.

And I think, yeah, again, because air traffic controllers have mortgages to pay too.

Like if their patient doesn't arrive, their life starts to get

spiraling unwind.

So that's where I think this gets, I mean, listen, I think both sides are getting

more negative polling from this.

Against, it is not positive from any American, I think, on the ineffectiveness of government, but it's going to come down to who feels like they're getting the worst PR deal that is going to have to cave.

I did have this thought when I was going over it of,

I think I agree with the Democrats taking this stand and making this decision.

Like from a political strategy perspective, I do think it is better for them to do this than nothing.

But then I thought about how, dude, if I'm not a person who like reads the news and listens to the news every day, and I'm not in tune like with what's going on to some degree.

And also I'm in the privileged position of having like a financial position that isn't affected by this at all.

Like if I was just a normal person who wasn't tapped in, then I would be, I would not be applauding the Democrats here either.

I would just be like, the government shut down, fucking figure it out.

Like I would just be.

I think this is what most people are saying in joke, even if they have a side.

I think, you know, I understand the fight for the ACA subsidies.

I get it.

And I think this is a fine spot to take a stand.

I get the strategy, but I overall feel like,

fuck, I feel like I'm going to get so frustrated.

Cause like,

well, I think the fear of the, this is a big thing.

The ACA subsidies are probably the most substantial thing that people could see change in their daily financial life, right?

So if I'm one of these people that sees a giant increase in my premiums for my healthcare, right?

These subsidies don't expire until later this year still.

You have yet to feel the effect of those expirations happening.

So you, from a democratic strategy perspective, you're like gambling on these people's understanding that their healthcare premiums would have gone up in the future, but never actually did.

You need to like, you need, that needs to be so valuable to people.

And some people, that's what I mean by tattering though, right?

Like if you're not paying attention, if you're just not paying attention to this at all and you just pay your healthcare every month and the subsidy is part of what keeps it low, but you don't give a shit about politics.

And it never actually goes up because this whole situation plays out.

What part of it makes you reward the Democrats for that?

No, but if you don't give a shit about politics, you probably haven't even felt the effects of this yet.

You probably, the shutdown hasn't trickled into your life.

No, but that's what I mean is like just statically, your opinion of the Democrats is pretty low.

And because none of this is affecting you yet, including the subsidies going away, if it all ends and the subsidies continue, nothing about your opinion of the Democrats has really changed if you're that person.

Do you see what I'm saying?

So let me rephrase that.

They need to wait for those people to feel the pain and the Democrats come in to rescue them and reinstate their benefits.

But if that doesn't, if there's never a period where it's actually lost, everybody will keep living their lives and go, why the fuck was it shut down?

Exactly.

Exactly.

There's a world where the stronger strategy for Democrats is actually wait till the end of the year.

People lose their health care coverage or subsidies.

And then Democrats are like, we are arguing to, and you could actually do that because you can do a continuing resolution which means the government is funded at previous levels for let's say three months you get through the year and then you'd be like then the democrats can go hey all of you people on these subsidies if you don't help us and we don't get this through you are screwed you will feel it right now and i don't know if that's you know ethically the correct choice or even strategically the correct choice it was just one thing i saw is like this feels like a hole where the value you say you're bringing here, most people might not even recognize.

Yeah, the average person is not going to

people with 22 million that are on this are aware of this.

I think Marjorie Taylor Greene even is flipping.

She's flipping her vote.

She's flipping to be on the Democratic side for this because of these subs.

She has two kids, she says, that are on this health insurance that are going to have their premiums triple.

And she like, you know, she's like deep.

I think people are aware of this.

I don't think it's completely unknowledgeable.

And I also think if you're someone who doesn't pay attention to any of this and not affected by healthcare,

once this catches up with you, once some kind of government, you can't go to to a national park or the lines of the airport are too long or whatever this catches up to you.

You generally overall are going to,

I mean, if you listen to the messaging, you'll be like, maybe I blame the Democrats, maybe I'm the Republicans.

But at the end of the day, you also go, I am tired of the chaos.

You end up blaming the administration overall just because I don't care whose fault it is.

Like it's, you have the power and we're not.

Yeah.

Which is a larger, I think this is a, I think they're being hurt just as much.

Highly edited anecdote here, but a cut of like street interviewer in the city asking people who they blamed on the shutdown.

I don't know what city it is.

That shapes the opinion, of course.

But I do think there's a general opinion here of people know that the Republicans have control of everything on paper.

You're the guy in the office.

You have the Supreme Court and you have control in Congress and the government shut down.

Fucking figure it out, Republicans.

Like, I do think there's a feeling of that for sure.

And so

that's what I'm saying.

I think this is still politically

somewhat strong for the, like, I think they both can play it.

And that's why it's, that's why I think it's so long.

I bet you guys $5

that it ends when the Republicans agree to the Medicare things, but with a bunch of stipulations that describe how illegal immigrants absolutely cannot qualify, even though that has no real impact because that's not what's going on, but that allows them to claim

we have solved the problem and we made sure the Democrats wouldn't give it to a legal image.

That's a great prediction.

That is like, because they've that's the Republicans get some kind of W, which is funny because, to be clear, Democrats would be getting the entire W, but Republicans would get the visual W.

Like, you know, all those illegal immigrants who were on healthcare, they're gone now.

And it's like, yeah, they are.

They are.

Yeah, sure.

That's a lot of money to bet.

That's last month's test for anything.

Quick, quick, final thing.

Number of days before the shutdown ends.

Go prediction.

Ooh, this is good.

Fun fact: when we recorded a second test episode, Doug and Atriac both thought the Ukraine war would be over by now.

No, not just by now, by March.

By fucking February.

I thought day one.

He promised me.

I don't get it.

He did say day one.

He promised me day one.

Why doesn't he furlough Putin?

I'm saying 33 days.

Unironically, I think 33 days.

That's my guess.

Price is right rules, 34.

Okay, I think Trump's going to make a big deal about how it's not the longest shutdown ever, and he's going to say we need to end it before that.

It's all optics.

I'll go now.

See, I kind of want to go in that pocket too, but now I'll go high.

I'll be the high guy.

I bet it'll be a historic 45 days.

Damn.

I got a nice window here.

Close without going over.

I think I have the best window, to be clear.

I was going to go like 31, but then you said 33.

Speaking of illegal immigrants,

don't look at me.

Brader.

Yeah, wait, wait, wait.

We were talking about H1Bs.

There's another big bigger guy.

Oh,

bag.

They're not H-1B visas.

No, I don't.

That was an obvious softball to you.

No, that was a really good softball, and I'm just, I'm just, I'm tired.

Well, also, it doesn't make sense.

They're not illegal.

There are nothing illegal about it.

I wanted to talk about H-1B visas, which is something that people might know changed recently.

I've been wanting to talk about this for a while.

I've heard that illegal aliens are getting H-1Bs.

They're signing up for them in droves.

That's what I've heard.

And this actually makes them legal.

This is a way that illegal.

No, no, that's the illegal H-1B visas.

That's what it's all about here.

I heard Mogul Move's been firing hardworking American workers.

You keep talking about what we do at Mogul Move.

And replacing

H-1Bs.

Because it's like I tell you these things in confidence, and then you come on the podcast.

I need content.

So I like to tell your secrets to the world.

Right.

Can you bleep out what you said earlier?

Just some of the words randomly.

Okay, for people who don't know what H-1Bs are,

these are visas for quote specialty occupations, basically jobs that require a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific specialty.

Like your degree has to be attached to what you do.

Easy example, you get a job as a software engineer at a big tech company and you have a bachelor's in computer science.

And this is the type of visa that you would need to move and work in the U.S.

from another country.

And, you know, other common jobs that might use this, it could be an accountant, it could be a doctor.

Unlike, it wouldn't be somebody who is like a cab driver or like cleaning staff or someone like that.

There is a big change.

Trump recently announced that they raised the application fee for this visa from a peak of $5,000 to $100,000.

100 racks, baby.

Insane.

Yeah, big deal.

I mean, there's a a lot of turmoil around H-1Bs.

People, I think, rightly in some cases, have felt that they are being undercut on their wages by H-1B workers.

And then H-1B workers have often felt the system keeps them tied to a single employer, trapped in that job, and unable to negotiate for better wages.

So it's like a weird double bad situation.

Yeah.

The way this works is you

enter basically a lottery for the chance of actually applying for the H-1B.

And there is a limit on how many of these visas can be issued per year.

I think it's like 65,000 a year to people with bachelor's degrees, and then another 20,000-ish set aside for master's degrees and higher specifically.

And

the

main, wait one second.

What's crazy is there's a lot of gaming of that system.

I don't know if you know.

I looked into H1Bs a while back.

Like, so let's say Google, you want to hire a software engineer from, I don't know, India or something.

I'm visiting China.

So what you'll do is you will, first of all, submit as many possible entries in the lottery as you can.

So even if you, you know, submit more than you need so that when whatever you get, you can apply.

But then also you will hire like a staffing firm that is also basically their main job is to constantly submit thousands of entries into this lottery.

Yes.

And then once they get their share of like 50 or 60 or whatever, then you can hire through that staffing firm.

So it's like, it's like a numbers game and a money game where the biggest companies can overwhelmingly use loopholes to get as much of the lottery H-1Bs as they can.

And historically, the intention behind this is to take some specialty area in America that's underserved by America's labor market and get people to fill those roles.

And that's, that's the good intention behind it is like, oh, we don't have enough people that specialize in this type of work.

please let's get them here so that our companies can grow and uh and get talent that they need to be successful h1b is like underpin most software big tech companies like there are

so many h1b visas and often the smartest people in the given room are h1b visa holders so the change to 100k aside up until now the the the issues with these that i see is if you're on this visa right you can only work for the company or the job that sponsored your application.

So if I get a job at Google with my H-1B, I can't just freely go seek a job elsewhere.

I also need Google or whoever my employer is to sponsor my green card, which is my permanent residency in the United States, if I want to seek that out

after a few years of living here.

I think it's five.

And your H-1B is good for three years, but you need to keep that job with that company.

The issue is that you as the employee, you don't have a lot of flexibility to go freely like negotiate and seek out

other offers, right?

And relative to the field of jobs you could be getting elsewhere in the US, you might be underpaid because the friction to you go to freely go seek other work is so high.

And the company also doesn't have a ton of incentive to sponsor your green card because as soon as you're issued the green card or permanent residency, you can leave freely and not worry about them being the holder of your H-1B anymore.

So that's on the worker side, one of the prospective issues of these visas to begin with.

And then on the other side, while the intention is to fill

underserved markets within the U.S.

labor market,

as these jobs or markets like kind of ebb and flow in certain spaces, right?

So in a sector like tech right now, tech in the last few years has been downsizing.

We're out of the period where people are hiring a ridiculous amount of people into tech workplaces, right?

So there's an incentive to lay off like higher cost or like higher salary local American like salaries at the expense of maintaining or continuing to hire H-1Bs at lower salaries.

And in general, from what I could see,

There is a historic, H-1Bs have historically been used like correctly.

They seem appropriately used and have like

studied, not out-competed like local labor markets in the U.S.

I think I would disagree.

I did some research on it and I found a lot.

I mean, I guess I get on the stats.

Maybe I don't know how much stat, but I saw a lot of examples of, especially like in accounting.

Disney fired their entire accounting department, replaced it with H-1Bs.

I've seen multiple big companies.

lay off a lot of people to replace it.

And the only point is the lower labor cost.

It's not like.

The loose idea that I got here is that this system has been potentially increasingly abused as time has passed.

Yeah.

As the meta gets figured out.

Yeah.

And especially as,

so if we were to use tech as an example, right?

When tech started exploding in the U.S., the number of available positions or like the talent demanded greatly exceeded the amount of people in the U.S.

that were even educated to do those jobs, right?

But then we have this whole reaction internally to pushing software engineering, computer science degrees, coding boot camps.

There's a whole industrial like reaction within the US to educate and push people towards this exploding field, right?

But then over time, the explosion in that field like levels out or maybe even turns in the opposite direction.

And now all of a sudden you do have.

all this American labor that is educated and able to do those jobs, but can still be

laid off at the expense of hiring those H-1B employees, right?

Yeah.

So it depends at like what stage and like the cycle or like what level your business is at or how many of these like lottery spots you're able to get or game.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'll villain charity.

I don't hate immigrants actually.

So I think they

I just

about to say I was gonna say I'm strongly pro-immigration.

I just think the H-1B system specifically is like rife with abuse.

It is just a way to have undue leverage over a worker from a different region who you can then pay less than the local going rate in America.

No, I think

the core problem with this is that everybody loses, basically, right?

Like, if you, I think, no, the companies benefit, to be clear.

Companies are a benefit.

No, the companies are extremely

talented people for the benefits.

You get talented people for less money and they can't leave and they have no negotiating leverage.

It's great for if you're Microsoft, this is great.

Yeah, I think a good change to this would be if H1B, if H-1B holders could basically freely seek other employment or freely seek other related employment while they were.

Yeah, there's like two things, right?

There's the 0-1 visa, which is like a super talented person who's really good at their job.

They can get an 0-1 visa, which has more flexibility.

That's the streamer visa.

And

that's what some of the, that's what Lincoln has.

Yeah.

And that's become more and more

chosen as the route to go.

People have gotten way better.

There's like systems now where you can fill out the right thing and figure it out.

And where will you get an O1 visa?

That's been happening for top-tier tech talent who don't want to be locked into the H-1B system.

So that's happening.

And I think an expansion of that and a better funding of that and a better understanding of that to get more people.

If people are really talented and want to come to America, you should, it should be our number one priority to get them to be a worker.

So I agree with that.

And the second thing is this idea, somewhat on its face, makes sense, which is the idea that, like, if there's a hundred thousand fee, then you're only going to get truly talented people for your H-1B.

You're not going to get someone who you can just underpay.

You're not going to get an accountant who can pay 45K instead of 60K from

a different country.

That's That's the plan.

That's the idea.

I get the idea in theory.

However, in practice, this law has a carve-out, which is the White House can waive your application fee at any time.

So in practice, what it means is everyone has to go through Trump.

Every big company now has to go through Trump to get their H-1Bs at a discounted rate, not to pay 100K per.

And, you know, what happened when this rolled out was they said it was 100K retroactively.

So every company was freaking the fuck out.

And

they were saying to all their H-1B employees, do not fly in.

Like stay over there.

We'll figure this out.

Don't.

So there's a lot of chaos and panic.

And then Caroline Levitt came out and said, no, no, no.

We didn't mean retroactive.

We meant like starting now for the future, which was a backpedal.

And now, but they're saying with a carve out through the White House.

So that, that, like, like most things that this administration does, even if there's a kernel of something that they're attacking, the execution is either grifty or or chaotic.

And in this case, both.

So there's the chaos and then into the part part where it's like requires you to go through him.

Well, it seems like the big pain points I can see from this is, with that being said, right?

If you're Amazon or Google, you're one of these companies that was kind of seen kissing the ring in the buildup to the election anyway, you might have the relationships with the White House to go forward and negotiate that fee down for your company, right?

But places that'll be hit in different ways,

like a huge source of healthcare labor is H-1Bs, like for nurses or doctors.

And this is areas where we're like famously understaffed, where we're still hiring in a job market that's terrible, right?

The one sector of the economy that's still hiring and looking for people.

And if you work at like a smaller healthcare institution, like a smaller local hospital or a smaller network within healthcare, you might not have the leverage or the connections to negotiate those application fees down or even talk about those those application fees being lower.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's the problem: it's a two-tier system where those with connections and those that kiss the ring and those that have something to offer, the White House, can get better deals on labor now, which is again

crazy.

I want to add one more crazy thing that I didn't know.

I didn't hear at all about this until I read more.

And

so, about 70% of H-1Bs issued are to people from India.

And when this announcement was made, there was no significant change in the American stock market, but there was a big shift in the Indian stock market in reacts in reaction to this message, which was wild.

And I think because so many people

like Indian diaspora that are in the US, like if you get one of these jobs, right, and you have this visa, it's you you know, part of the reason why you are getting this job is even relative to the American market, if your salary is low, right?

It's probably much higher than what you were earning back home.

And you send money back home to your family and that helps, you know, stimulate local economy or local business in like wherever your family lives in India, inadvertently, you know, being attached to like Indian, Indian companies.

And there was a reaction in the Indian stock market.

to this change being announced.

And I thought that was, that was really wild.

There's huge companies that have made a business.

I forget the names, but these IT companies where their whole thing is

and yeah, I know that it's an H-1B.

It's so perverse onto how this whole idea is supposed to be, which is they're basically just, they apply for as many H-1Bs as possible.

They just try to get as many as they can.

It's almost entirely Indian workers.

And then they are then just offload that to major tech companies for a fee.

It's, it's a fucking racket.

It's terrible.

So, you know, again, I'm super, super pro,

you know, positive, skilled, fair immigration, but I do agree to H1.

I mean, you know, and the big counter argument is what you already addressed, which is like, we need super talented people to keep winning as a country.

That's like the, that's the foundation of America, right?

Is getting the best and brightest people to come to America and build it.

And then particularly with all the fervor around robotics, AI, et cetera.

It's like...

AI is shockingly high leverage if you're a really brilliant person, right?

If you're like one of the smartest people, it's like that person can have such an outsized impact.

So you want them here really bad 74 india 11 china and then one percent canada so it's i know crazy isn't it crazy it's just basically india and then a little bit china yeah yeah um

yeah and again i the percentage of these visas every these h1 visas every year that go to the largest tech companies plus two gigantic indian staffing firms is like I want to say it's like 80%.

It's like I saw the stat and it was, it was, it was shocking.

Oh, you can see here.

Amazon, Tata Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, Cognizant, JB Morgan, Walmart, and Deloitte.

And like these combined are like all of the H1Bs.

They're pulling almost all of them.

And then Tata Consultancy gets a massive number of the H-1Bs and then they sell subsidiary like accounting services to like all these different companies in America that can then just sell, lay off their entire accounting departments.

So it's just.

The way it's being used is like systematically just undercutting wage pressure in America.

yeah, there's no benefit,

except for the companies.

Can I talk about, I want to, one kind of tangential immigration thing

related to this is, you know, so a bunch of people obviously do get green cards eventually, right?

Like

eventually, not, not everybody does, but,

and once you have your green card, you could apply for citizenship.

But when you have your green card, there's a, there's a quota system on how many people from different countries can become citizens off of their green card.

And these quotas don't scale with rates of immigration or population of countries.

So obviously, like if you're from Denmark, like you'll be on your green card, I think it's five years or maybe you need five years to get your green card.

And then I think you can apply for your citizenship like right after that or something.

But if you're from Denmark, We don't have enough Danish immigrants coming to the U.S.

to get anywhere near the quota.

So you can just apply and then become a citizen.

It's relatively quick as far as U.S.

immigration stuff goes, right?

But as you can imagine, based on this number,

dude, people are on their green card from India for like 15 to 20 years right now

because of where they are in the queue within that ladder.

That's a very long line.

Because we don't scale or change it at all, which seems absolutely ridiculous to me.

No, it just feels like a really broken, underfunded, corrupt system that has so many like abuses and loopholes for the biggest corporations and not benefiting

average Americans on immigration.

Life is hard for the immigrants coming in.

I mean, maybe they're making more money than they would make, but they're, they're in

a disadvantageous position at every step.

They're like, yeah.

I think you just have so little negotiating power once you're at that company that employs you, right?

You can, you're,

you know, you're put in a spot where you probably feel obligated to work longer hours,

do more to keep your job.

If you get fired, you lose where you live.

Yeah, I mean, I have friends out in H-1B.

And what I would say is,

dude, one of the pure proofs that this is not being used in the way it's intended is that part of the law is that everyone who hires somebody for an H-1B is required to have made a job posting.

and tried to find, they can't find,

they have to prove they could not find a qualified American candidate for the role.

That's like part of the law on H-1B.

And so the way they get around this is so obviously fraudulent.

Like they have so many ways of like, they'll only post it in the newspaper.

Yeah.

Like they'll, and you have to require to mail in a letter with your resume.

Like it's like the ways they get around like contest law.

Like there's so many ways they do that so they can make sure that like no one can actually apply except for the candidate they want to underpay.

This is another thing with like time passing and the system being abused more.

Yeah.

It's like early on, a lot of these

like catch-alls, the way you're supposed to prove that you couldn't have hired an American in this person's place.

Yeah, it's like these things started off more honest and effective at the beginning of this program.

Yeah.

But as time passes, it becomes more and more distorted.

I feel like that about so many things in government in general.

It's like, it's like a video game meta.

It just gets people figure out how to, how, whatever the law gets made, it's like a countdown until somebody figures out to abuse it.

And that's why you need wise leadership that updates.

And then fucking Trump dropped a balance patch, except there's microtransactions that go to the old version.

Dude, true it's pay to win it's pay to win it's pay to win

and it's and there's already a lottery system involved so it's like you're already trying you're already off the taxes

you're trying to get a five-star accountant

fucking info sys gets approval to keep doing this without the hundred thousand i mean

yeah it's crazy well yeah i mean do you have a do you guys have any more thoughts i think i said what i said yeah i i stand by it i don't have anything else uh

i wanted to move move on to, do you want to talk about?

We have two AI topics we can end on.

AMD, open AI thing that just happened that you wanted to talk about, or generative AI news that has also come out recently.

I would love to hear what Doug says because I'm going to form a clip on the other thing anyway tonight.

Oh, there you go.

All right.

So you linked me an article by the FT that I read, which is about the AI music companies working on licensing with some of the big music publishers.

And this was very light on technical details, which I found concerning, but it was very much like the music companies are saying, okay, during the internet era with Napster and LimeWire, all this pirating, it was this huge thing.

The amount of share the music industry had in totality like dropped like 60, 70% as a result.

Like they just got cratered.

Right.

They got wiped out by the internet, never fully recovered.

And so they're like, we understand that AI is a similar existential threat.

We got to get ahead of it.

So we are talking with licensing deals.

And the thing I saw, one of the quotes is like, we want it to be something like Spotify, where every time an AI song is played, if it utilizes our music, then we would get a cut.

I mean, that makes sense, right?

It's or similar to sampling music, right?

If you use a sample.

And the AI companies, at least in that article, didn't comment on it in any way.

They're just apparently in communications.

So for this specifically, it's interesting because

generative AI in general, it's not.

Some people seem to think it's like you're sampling music.

If you make an AI song, it's not like it picks five songs and combines them together.

It has been trained off of millions or in the case of images, billions of pieces of data that it slowly trains on.

And so when you ask it, go make me a cool EDM song, it's not going and saying, I'm going to get Justice's song and sample it.

And I'm going to get Skrillax's song and sample it.

It's similar to if you said, hey, The Weekend, the artist, you just released a new album.

Everybody you've ever taken inspiration from and any music you've ever listened to in your life, you need to give them a cut of the money because that technically influenced how you made your new thing.

It's like, how on earth would you enforce that?

So it is interesting that the AI and audio industries are talking about this because to me, this doesn't feel tenable at all.

And at the other side, I definitely want us to move to a world where if you're, if you create content and that is used by an AI company to train their model, who then goes and makes things, I think you should be compensated for that.

And that's the world we seem to be moving towards with like the New York Times licensing, Reddit licensing, various other companies are saying, hey, AI AI companies, you can use our stuff if you pay us.

But at the same time, the idea that the music industry is like, yeah, we should get a little credit every time somebody makes a song.

It's like, that doesn't, that doesn't make sense because on the technical level, that's not how it's working.

A model is being trained off of millions and millions and millions of songs, which turn into a math equation that can sort of reverse engineer what a song is.

True, but I mean, it is being trained off of the songs they own, right?

Those songs are being ripped without permission and being trained on them.

You know, it's interesting.

I mean, it's a complex thing.

And this, this article made me think like,

music industry, you don't understand how AI works.

They didn't understand the internet either.

They're probably going to get screwed on this.

And they're confidently saying, we're not going to be left behind on this one.

We know it's a big deal.

And it's like, you don't sound like

one of the quotes is literally like, if a song is played that uses our music, we should get credit.

That's literally every song.

Again, to train an AI model, you train it on all of the music that slowly tweaks a formula.

That would mean every single song in existence that it's been trained off of is used every time, technically.

yeah so this doesn't make sense i do agree it's a weird intractable problem that applies to all of generative ai and i don't see an easy solution to it and we're seeing this problem on a bigger scale with we talked about the the ai slot fee yeah where sora launched and they had an opt out copyright law program which basically said if you don't want us to steal your stuff and make rick and morty or whatever then you come and opt out but we're going to do it otherwise which is not how copyright law works can you do that with crime like you can rob a bank but they have to let you know Yeah.

All the banks in the area have to opt out for me robbing them.

Dude, you're covered.

So they did that for one day, literally one day, until they got 10 billion legal calls.

I mean, I think the WWE was the one that led the most because they were getting their stuff pirated or whatever.

Yeah.

And so Sam Altman backtracked.

And now everyone on the Sora Reddit or whatever is complaining because they're getting so many more.

We can't make this because you're trying to make, anyway.

So that's happening.

But, you know, I mean, I get what you're saying, Doug, in that it's training on everything.

But I've I've been scrolling sore to test it out.

Like, they're creating South Park episodes.

They have the voices and the drawings.

And then I heard, like, it was outputting the actual unchanged Stranger Things soundtrack.

Like, as it was.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, there's clearly some.

Yeah, no, I can do.

And that's what makes this so complex and weird.

It's like, so let's say that you want to say, if your AI uses our copyrighted content explicitly, like it, and when I say use, it would recreate it.

But let's say it recreates SpongeBob or the Stranger Things soundtrack.

In that case, if it's clearly recognizable, let's say your company has to try to identify it in some way, we get credit.

And maybe you do that.

But then the question is, again, if I say make a song that is inspired by The Weekend,

it's not going to be the actual sample.

I think that's a much aggregate.

And then again, this is how real human creatives work.

I'm inspired by people all the time.

I don't have to give them my YouTube revenue because I was inspired by a cool Hitman video you did or something, which is a real case.

oh, it's a real case, you're gonna have to pay me.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, jokes on you didn't work very well, right?

People didn't think it was that funny

for me.

So it's, it's so, it's so challenging.

So that, that would be an easy one where you say, hey, if you, if the AI recreates a, a recognizable piece of copyrighted content, you have to pay.

That's easy.

The much harder version is where it's SpongeMan instead of SpongeBob, and it looks similar, and it's a clearly inspired show.

And at that point,

what is the difference between inspiration and ripoff?

That's so hard to define.

I think this is going to be such a, such a battle in the next few years.

Like, this is their, everyone is gearing up.

And like you said, I think what I've read too is they all they have fresh pain from the internet.

They remember how they got screwed.

Right.

And so they're throwing every dollar, like all the movie industries.

Yeah.

They're, they're lawyering up.

And then the AI companies have even more money, a substantially amount more money.

They have billions.

So it's like, yeah, they just make money up here by just saying the word AI.

They're just saying the word AI.

And so that's infinite money.

Well, and and so they're both just about to go crazy.

I mean, I don't know how it's going to play out.

I'm definitely going to keep trying to follow it pretty closely.

And currently, I see no

good solution.

The most obvious thing is going to be the AI companies pay a license to be able to train their models off of the library.

And that is already happening with a number of companies.

But there's, you know, as we've talked about it before in the past, there's huge lawsuits right now that are going to be determining this about whether a company can say, I shouldn't have to pay you in the first place because it is transformative.

Well, also, because right now, all the AI models, the really good ones that everyone's using, are through a few, you know, mostly big, mostly American companies that they can still negotiate with.

But once the tech gets more, everyone can run shit locally on a

deep seek-like, you know,

China can and will make a model that does this exact same thing and you will not be able to sell it.

And you can run it locally and then make as much copyright as you want and then put it on TikTok.

Like, it doesn't, it's going to be such a problem.

I don't really understand how to.

I don't.

Yeah.

It's a wave coming for all these companies and i don't understand how to it kind of feels like there's no winning

the like it for for those companies it's it's this is sam altman's blog by the way it's it's it's very funny it's worth a read it is him after one day of sora oh recognizing how

uh this is not working how he planned

It's first him saying, hey, rights holders, we're not going to do that opt-out thing.

I was mostly a goof, and we're going to have a thing where we can share the revenue with you.

We're going to figure that out.

We're working on it.

So that's him realizing like there's legal pressure coming immediately.

The second thing is him saying like, hey, we really do have to make money on this though.

People are making way more of these than we thought.

And most of them are not getting as many views as we thought, which is very funny because it's very expensive to make.

Like the GPU time to make a video.

And we thought about this when we were talking about it.

Also funny because he's said this exact same thing several times.

Yeah, like on every

product launch, which leads me to believe that, and other people as well, that this is not an accident, that it wasn't like, oh, God, no, no, copyrighted content.

It's a very deliberate strategy to put it out there get it a ton of attention so everybody's like holy shit what's going on and then you get to pull it back go i'm sorry

i'm sorry

but i do think i mean i don't know if they expected how much of the traffic would come from people just yoinking this stuff off sora and putting it somewhere else where they can't monetize like how does open ai make the money well it's it's off of compute time they that is their current plan so it's the creation of it yeah but you know i was saying this on stream but you know have you ever been to like meme generator.com or whatever, where you can like, that is not a profit.

That's a small business.

It's a very small business.

If they become the GPU meme generator, is that really enough to pay for the

trillion dollars they need for the rest?

Not that much, but you know, counterpoint, Adobe, right?

Adobe is a set of tools to be able to make things.

And if this is a different tool where you can go and say, this is the type of video I want to create, you don't have to pay 50 bucks a month for Adobe.

Maybe.

I mean, you're just gambling on enough people paying for the tool because

the social media is the vehicle to advertise the tool, basically.

It's like if I keep seeing, if I, it's the same thing with like the

Ghibli, the Ghibli profile pictures.

Yeah.

It's like those things spread everywhere and everybody's like, how do I make mine?

Then they go seek out

Adobe.

They're not trying to be YouTube.

And that's a really important distinction.

They're trying to say, hey, do you want to make things like this?

Come to our website and pay us.

I'm just saying Adobe's money comes almost entirely through big, long-form corporate contracts like the most people regular people pirate it they or they find some way of using it like it's not you and me paying for photoshop is not how they make their money they make their money because they signed a deal with microsoft or whatever for a big corporate contract you actually sound like me you sound like me explaining to my parents when i was 15 why it was okay that i stole photoshop

and it was coming for me but adobe knows you steal it and they want you to use it so that when you grow up and get a job in the industry you you require your corporation to buy this license so maybe this will work maybe enough corporate people need to use AI to make SpongeBob.

Like, I don't know.

I just, I just.

How is a company going to function if you can't, by the way, some of the best ones, Mario'd in a cop chase going down the street?

A lot of cop chases.

A lot of cops.

Every person's been arrested.

Every person, dude, Michael Jackson stealing my fried chicken.

Incredible.

I mean, there are amazing videos out of this.

There's a really good one of Sam Altman breaking into Studio Ghibli's headquarters, grabbing all the papers off of Miyazaki's desk and running away while he's chased by Miyazaki.

That was Chef's challenge.

There's a huge trend around Sam Altman, the creator of crimes committing crimes, which is so funny.

So funny.

Internet's undefeated.

Guys, that's our stand.

I do look forward to seeing how this plays out.

I agree with you that it's going to be an epic legal battle for generations.

I don't know how it's going to play out.

I want to see Nintendo get involved so bad.

They're the SWAT team.

Yeah.

When a certain line gets crossed, Sam Altman's going to be in the crosshairs of Mario's Delta Force.

He's been on the opposite side of the nintendo one so many times that i just want to see it play out i want to see it play out the other way because i've seen mario smoking weed and i've seen all this stuff

here's the thing this is all it's all good and it's gonna be really interesting fun little battle until deep seek launches deep seek video yeah and then all hell breaks loose because there's no

laptop to enforce it at all i'm safe

i'm safe

why are you safe with the that's because it's gonna come pre-installed never mind i'm actually more compromised

And that's why this shirt wraps up our episode.

Aiden is a traitor.

From me, Brendan, and the trader.

Thanks for watching, Lemonade Stand.

We'll see you next week.

Bye-bye.

Bye, guys.