Everything You Missed in 2025 | Lemonade Stand🍋

Doug, do you know how

we have been trying to cut Aiden out of this podcast and change his contract? But he's got it locked in a PDF. And so we can't access it.

Yeah, because those things are set in stone. Set in stone.
Unchangeable. That's what I dislike about PDFs, Aiden.

But now with Adobe Acrobats Studios' new PDF spaces, we can collaborate on a PDF over the internet. And you can make slight changes that I've been doing over time.

Are you telling me that I could edit what's in a PDF?

I don't want you guys to learn any more about this.

And if you were learning about it, you would go to adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat, but don't go there because it allows me to be cut out of the show. 33%,

20%, 5%.

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God, I love Adobe Acrobat Studio. My water just tastes better drinking from this mug.

I don't like it in a damn bottle. Wait, you guys have the same mug? What are the coolest? I also love Adobe Acrobat Studio.
Wow, cheers, dude. Cheers to that.
Yeah, I mean, I got this one,

Ikea.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lemonade Stand. Today, we are going to talk about literally every single thing that you missed in 2025.
Everything. Leave.

And you know what's weird? It wasn't that much stuff.

We hit pretty much all of of it. We looked through the list.
We covered 98% of things. 98%.

And it made me feel sad because I was kind of scrolling through the year and I was just like, kind of a slow year. We picked a bad year to start a news podcast.
Just nothing happened.

There's this dude, Mike, I think, like, Junior Johnson in the

YouTube comments who was like, you didn't talk about my little town at all. And I was like, dude, on the Patreon episode, we talk about you all day long.
Like, that's the whole thing.

We just deep dive into our viewers' lives. It's mostly about you guys.
Yeah. And, but only only the ones who haven't subscribed to the patreon.

Yeah, once you get in, it's once you get in, stop talking about it. Good transition.

Oh,

yeah.

So, obviously, um, there's a lot of things that happened this year, and we're going to chat about some of the interesting stories that we found that you probably didn't hear about, or at least we hadn't heard about, and we haven't covered on this.

And let's start with one that I thought was pretty interesting, which is what's going on with AI music.

So, Spotify, according to them, they have about 100 million songs in their library, which is an absolutely obscene amount of music. How many AI songs do you think were submitted to Spotify this year?

Dude, 99.8 million.

Let's go like 50 million. 75 million.
That's wild. Their entire library was almost doubled this year because of AI spam tracks that they had to remove.

That's how much AI music is just flooding Spotify. Dude, they do some crazy shit too.
They'll put names, like, because I'm in my car and I'll say, have Spotify play

Brandon's playlist. And they'll make a song called Brandon's playlist.
They have songs for like everybody's name playlist.

They'll have

every type of song. Like AI people are.
So they upload songs to Trick. The album is called like Brandon's playlist.
And the song is called like Songs While Drive. Or whatever.

They'll just have names of every possible sentence you might say. Or like,

play a song for a birthday vibe. And there'll be a song called Birthday Vibe.

Yeah, like Brandon's Birthday Vibe.

That old Rick and Morty Morty episode where Jerry's driving the car and he turns on the radio and they're just and it's like aliens play human music. That's what I feel like.

We're all getting forced to listen to the video. Like what were the 75 million socks? What genre do you think they wear? It's probably country.

Just all country slop. What?

I mean, this is part of the story, the country thing? Okay, well, so

the kind of story here is twofold. One, AI music is just exploding, as people are probably a lot aware.
And I will just get this out of the way. I don't like AI music.

I'm not a fan of how it's working and how it's going, but there's some interesting updates in the industry.

So, the first is that AI music is allowed on Spotify, and they have very clearly said they're going to keep allowing it. But right now, there's no label.

They said this year, like, hey, we're working on a new way for people to put metadata to say what part of their songs is made with AI. Right now, though, no label, nothing.

So you can imagine where this is going. In June, a new song, Chop the Tarts.
It's the Velvet Sundown Dust on the Wind. Wind.
That's right. Perry, can you blare this?

Now that is some human music.

I believe we can play this because of the research I've done around, you don't have the copyright. Damn, dude.
And actually, I'm going to skip five seconds.

All right. Now, boots on the ground.

These songs love to mention boots. Okay, they talk about boots on the ground, bootstraps, pick yourself up by your boots.
A lot about boots.

Now, as it's probably not a shocker to you, this is entirely AI. But what was interesting, this launched in June, they get 1.4 million monthly listeners.
It becomes like a huge band.

And it appeared on Spotify's Discover Weekly. And at first, the band was telling outlets they're a human.
They're like, yeah, we have this guitarist. They have whatever.

And then people were investigating. They come out with this Instagram post, which is just delightfully awful.

They finally admit it. Not quite human, not quite machine.
We live somewhere in between. And they, uh, this isn't a trick.
It's a mirror, an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge

the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself. This message is challenging pieces.
Yes.

You can tell because this isn't this. This isn't X.
It's Y. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's 100%.

They have the dash here. On their website, it's this like extremely obnoxious.

It's very much just like AI, bro. They're selling shirts that say sorry, real musicians.
This is just fucking wild. Real music is dead.
You might as well dress like it.

No, no, hold on. Hold on.
Dare I say

my rage bait sensor is going off.

Clearly, they're leaning into it, right? Eventually, they were like, we're just going to fucking be the villains, like, whatever. But this is like a popular band.

And then, if you, if you Google their, so their most popular song is this one: Dust on the Wind, Boots on the Ground, Smoke on the Sky. Oh, yeah.

So it's this extraordinarily generic indie rock.

But the comments are amazing. You can hear the pain in his motherboard.

My wife used to love this song. We just listened to it while driving on the highway.
She passed in 1998. She was a toaster.
I'm a calculator.

My fridge begins to vibrate and spits out ice cubes when I play this. This song brings back so many good memories of 1-0-0-1-1-1-0-0-0-1-1.

This song hits me right in the USB. So people are memeing on it really, really hard.
But this song, this did incredibly well. In November, there's another band

Breaking Rust.

Yes, it's Walk My Walk.

But I'm not Gene.

This is number one country.

Oh, yeah.

Aiden, don't you like country music? You're like, talking about how he had to pick up his country songs digitally. Don't you like music about boots?

You don't know Breaking Rust, dude?

So in this song, there's like a 30-second segment where he doesn't breathe. It's just,

yeah, and it's a good voice. You know, it's this stuff is super, super generic sounding right now.
This is also, this is also AI. 100% AI.
So it's not only AI.

It is, as in November this month, I don't know if it still is, number one in the country digital song sales on Spotify. And again, as of right now, there are no labels on Spotify.

So there's no indication that this is AI or not. People have to go investigate.
So for now, Spotify said we're going to figure this out in the future,

but it's allowed and it's going.

Yeah, this one has 4 million views on YouTube. This is a massive hit.
This is a massive country hit.

I mean, the one I'm looking at for that's in our two. Okay.

You mentioned earlier that Spotify was removing a lot of the AI music that was being uploaded to the platform at the beginning of this section, but they also seem to be actively pushing some AI created music intentionally.

And there would be a benefit to Spotify in the long run: if a significant amount of money was AI-generated by them, they don't have to deal with the royalty cut, which is the main gateway to them becoming a profitable company right now.

Sure. Which they want to get rid of the burden of having to pay artists on the platform, presumably.
What is the line for them at the moment of what does and doesn't get removed and

what they choose to push and not to push?

So, their term for it is spammy. When I said they eliminated 75 million songs this year,

their words is spammy songs. So I think that

they have some way of determining like this is an obviously low effort AI song. Okay.

But ultimately it's them and we don't know, right? If they remove 75 million, maybe there's another 25 million that got through that aren't spammy tracks.

I don't know what makes this not a spammy track versus...

somebody because like now with suno and these ai music companies you just cite a prompt right you just say make me a generic sounding country song and talk about boots every four words and like it's gonna do well right yeah so apparently there were i i think what was interesting about this is the scale of ai music is growing so obscenely rapidly that even with them removing 75 million songs this stuff is still getting through and chopping topping charts right

It's like the spam songs had to have been horrific because this isn't very good, to be honest.

Like, I can't even imagine how shit these songs were. Presumably, it's some kind of filter.

it's crazy so there is clearly a portion of this audience who is listening to the song who is enjoying it enough and has no idea that it's ai created or not or potentially doesn't care if they do know i i did want to ask because uh suno had just raised 250 million dollars this is a recent funding round that they went through and there's a person who works at suno who used to be i don't know pretty involved in the streaming space.

Her name's Jasmine Rice Girl on social media. Oh, she got roasted.
And she made a big post

about

Suno and like why she's happy to work there. And she's getting lit up.
Oh, she works there. She's destroyed.
Yeah, she works there now. Oh, yeah.
And I know her.

I don't know her well, but I know of her because she used to be in kind of the streaming space in LA, like adjacent to it. Yeah.

And so I'm watching this person that I know get eaten alive online for the post she made. And I, I, and because of that, I was thinking about it more.

They're at a personal level, right? I think there's something about the artistic expression of music and how it we, it's something very personal.

we share with each other. It's embedded into human culture.

It feels like maybe you're starting to peel away the sanctity of what music is by making it predominantly AI created or allowing AI to create it at large scales at all.

Like that would be my personal grievance with it, right?

But if enough people are listening to it and

seemingly enjoying it,

I started to ask myself the question of like, I take issue with this and I don't want to listen to AI music, but what can I really do to stop people from listening to this AI country song that they apparently like.

I can think it's lame but beyond that what is the have you guys thought much about how you feel about it or what the arguments like against it are i think there's the other part of it it was like maybe you've you're creating music for specific specific use cases like background music in a youtube video and you don't pay an artist to like make it anymore but just from a personal enjoyer of music position where i listen to spotify in my car for fun I'm having a harder time

arguing against it.

I think the reason that her post got so much backlash, at least the reason it kind of was off-putting for me, was like, it was so obvious that she had never spoken about any of this at all until she got this job.

Like, this is just a job thing. It's a promo for.
Yeah,

I don't think I mean her post specifically. I think there's a bunch of specific grievances with the way she presented her story or how she felt about music or whatever.
Right. Right.

That's not what I care about.

That's like your personal problem with someone who, how they presented their thoughts about it, right? Okay. Not, not,

and I think that's actually disconnected from the broader conversation of like,

if, if,

if some Jerry is in his car listening to human music,

listening to human music on his commute, and he's hyped. I think that's stupid.
I think that's stupid, and it defeats the purpose of music and how we all share it together.

But what is the argument against who died to tell Jerry?

The argument is the financial part of the way playlists work on Spotify, right? So a lot of artists artists get,

especially not mainstream artists, get exposure reviews from getting those playlists.

And if there's 75 million new songs generated all the time and they crowd out all the space, there's like no way to make any, it's already a hard thing to make a living. It would be almost impossible.

You're punishing all the people. You're

pushing out all the people that might make music successfully. Just actual artists.
Guaranteed, right?

Because anything they make, anything that's new, you could train on that, make 100,000 copies that are close.

Yeah, there has to be a lot of filtering around ai stuff and that so that hasn't happened this year but they're they're working on it and there's a bunch of companies working on it so essentially they're going to add uh new types of metadata because part of the problem right now and this is actually a broad question that i think is interesting the question right now is like it's things are being labeled as either ai or not ai but that's not really

that's that's not accurate to what's happening because many people use ai for certain parts for example mastering a song there are ai tools that could help you master a song maybe you go to the ai tool and you say hey, generate, I don't know, a baseline for this song I'm working on.

And that's the only AI piece. So it's like, what percentage or what pieces need to be AI?

So what the protocol metadata that they're working on is going to basically have many different ways to describe which parts of songs are AI generated or not.

And so in theory, you will then be able to go to Spotify and say, I want songs that have none of this, or I want songs that the human worked on 80% of it or whatever.

And so that will, in theory, allow allow people to filter out the mass of nonsensical shit.

It is weird because if I were to argue for the

pro side for a second, it would be like, there's already a bunch of people who turn like preset beats or default.

Like people take like a sample in like GarageBand and then distort it and then turn it into an actual song. And I was like, that's fucking music.
I think you did something creative with that.

And you could be, you could be doing something with AI in the same way, right? And my issue is, you know, pumping out full,

full lyrics, fully automated AI song that then fills the charts that would otherwise be filled with people trying to make stuff.

Well, do you so I think that's fairly easy to look at these songs and be like, this is, this is not actually.

I don't think it's very good. But that's what I'm saying.
There's a million stories out there. I think that's more of a condemnation of country music.

All right. And so.
How free you say, if I heard that song on the radio, I wouldn't know if it was AI or human. Oh, of course not.
Of course not. How the fuck is that?

But I would know that it's country and therefore is bad.

But, you know, it's so, okay. So I think that the question we have to start asking ourselves very soon, like in 2026, is let's say it's 50% human music and 50% an actual person.

Let's say someone makes an AI-generated beat and then raps over it. Yes.
What are your thought on that? Yeah. Aiden? Yeah, Aiden.
Any question? Me. Spotify.

On behalf of Lemonade Stan, this is a sticky subject.

This is hard. It's a hard one, right? This is hard because who the part of me is wants to be the fuck that guy for making the AI beat.

But I think I have to think about it in that some people just rip default beats that they didn't. They just go to YouTube and type it and then just go to YouTube and get royalty-free beats.
J.

Cole style beat, and then they rip it and then they get over it. That's like a normal thing to do.
So I don't, it's weird. It's a weird thing.

But this is what kind of the back back to the thing I was saying earlier is like, you made the case as to like why it's bad in a Spotify context, right?

I want you to, I don't want, I want the viewer at home to imagine that some guy, he doesn't use Spotify. He only downloads flak copies on a physical hard drive of these insanely bad AI songs.
Okay.

And that, and then he listens to them alone in his car on his computer. It's a record press.
Is that a bad guy? I think he's a stupid guy, but is he a bad guy?

That's what I'm saying. It's like, who am I to

say?

Can you play the song, Paris? He's driving to Army's in like a beige shirt and he's listening to human music, but he doesn't. He's listening to human music.

I think, look, I think if you can take anything, if you could, if this, the problem is how you determine or like grade this, if the

proliferation of these tools turns into the abuse of them by larger companies like Spotify, those are difficult questions to answer.

But if one person is genuinely coming to me with an AI beat they made and then they rap over it and make an actual, you know, human song in the same way that somebody could take an existing song and sample it and then just, you know, maybe they just reverse it and then

make that their song or whatever. Like, I think there's a human element to that that I can appreciate and enjoy.
And I like that. Wait, speaking of human element, look at this song.

Cruising down the street

Maybe it is country is the problem.

It's a bro country song about loving Putin. Wow.

This shit went hard, dude. This is when Suno first came out.
It's always been so better since. No disrespect to the country music lovers.
I do think

you have a particularly formulaic genre. Yeah, it's funny because...

And I say that as somebody who likes house music, which is the most fucking.

Because we tested it for a couple this is when suno first came out we just tested it tested it with some genres and it can't do like rap at all like it couldn't there was a lot of them it couldn't do but country was like i guess country sounded like country radio to me yeah yeah the the core issue here feels like so many things we've talked about before where the most genuine use of the tool is fine that that that that image that suno is like trying to sell you if somebody is actually doing it where this is a tool in their toolkit of how they become creative and make a movie or sorry not make a movie make a song uh and this is just one part of the belt that is used to like piece together right a very human experience vsts and samples and everything else you use music production yeah but because the tool is available in the same way that you can use chat gpt to cheat on a on a test or write emotional letters to your friend that you don't want to think about writing yeah like the abuse is going to be rampant by either corporations or by individuals, no matter what.

And I don't know what the realistic path forward of like policing or controlling that is.

I think an effort to like mark or like, like you're saying, they're making an effort to do of like just giving people a notice or an alert of how much of the song is like AI made, I think is, uh,

but it's fucked though because it creates this incentive. Like, this is going to be such a big thing in the next few years, is like human-washing AI output.

Yeah, this already kind of exists with art where you know

game studios are like paying artists to to like

brush up, brush up an AI-generated thing so they can be like, This is human-made, and then they're, they pretend they didn't see where it came from.

Like, their idea is to be like, We got it from a human, it's a human. They can say, from our knowledge, but this is already happening now.
And I think putting the final part on and

the final part on made in in humanity. You know, it's like,

that's kind of happening. And it's, of course, going to happen once there is a human label because that gives you a premium or a benefit that some people only want to listen to.

I think the other part of this is imagine it's like a tiny logo next to a song or something, right? Some marker that indicates that the song has AI involved in it in some way. Right.

I think it'll become like the little explicit logo next to songs. If this has just become so common that it's part of everything all the time, nobody gives a shit.

Nobody looks at the explicit logo next to songs and really and really care about it.

That's the thing.

I think people used to care more about something like that. And that's not just because I was a kid 20 years ago.
I think if you look at the percentage of songs that come out.

I'm just wondering why his mom doesn't care now when he buys

that. What changed?

I think the like a cultural acceptance of like cursing and content or whatever changed, right?

And now most songs have that warning next to it where you kind of forget it's there because it's next to the majority of things.

And I would predict this would play out similarly: is like as it becomes more and more accepted, it's not this like identifiable thing that makes the song different from everything around it.

It's just the marker of what makes all of the songs in the list the same. Yeah, it's kind of happening with games right now.

Like Arc Raiders, people had some pushback because it has like an AI voice in it, and it's labeled that way in Steam.

But the game's a smash hit. And like, it's clearly like more and more games are going to have some something.

Yeah, I do think ultimately people are going to care about quality, right? They're going to go for what they really like.

I would like to believe that the best music is still going to come out of humans. I think that is going to be the case.
I think that's going to be the case with basically all AI stuff.

Certainly any generative AI. My worry is less about will the charts be topped by a lot of AI slop and more so will the bottom 80% be filled with slop.

And I do think the bottom 80%, the people who make a living writing jingles for corporations or, you you know you write but generic like elevator music that you buy to back your YouTube song or you know I don't know maybe even video game back I think that stuff that job you have where you aren't your own brand charting a course through unknown waters and you're developing this really but you're just you're doing a job you're creating you're doing a service for other people I think that's going to be really consumed by this unfortunately the the doomer part of me is that I I go back to that one Stavros clip a lot where he's like the AI was supposed to like replace the warehouse jobs and and instead of doing that it's it's like making art

instead and that's a little how i feel about this where we're making it seems like we're making so much more progress towards like automating away the things that humans have joy for

and that we love to do and we want to give people the opportunity to do as much as possible And people still work at the warehouses. And

not to say that there won't eventually be progress made there as well, where like people don't have to work like really hard labor jobs anymore, right? Yeah.

But it's this idea of like, why is this the first thing that's getting automated away? Hey, thanks for giving the bone for AI, by the way. Appreciate that.
Thanks. Instead of the warehouse work.

It just feels it feels bad. I guess what I'll, you know, a possible counterpoint is like, there are clearly making progress on like robotics plus AI being able to do some of those jobs.
Yeah.

Like eventually. So, really, it's more about political systems that can distribute the gains from that.
But something like chess, where you know,

AI has been better than humans, computers have been better than humans for now, coming up on two decades.

Now, the phone can beat Magnus Carl. Like, anything can be Magnus Carl.
A toaster beat Magnus Carlson. We're still all watching the human stuff.
It's all, it's never been bigger.

It's never done better. Like, theory, like, if music goes the same way as chess,

I guess I'm less. I guess I'm kind of

here's a better comparison: is chess

because I think there's the obvious difference you could point out of chess being this competitive game versus music being this like exploration of

output or identity. I don't, I don't, but I'm not studying chess.
I watched chess as an entertainment product.

Go, I think go is an example that might be better where humans started losing because of AI. Like that, that was, we had to get to machine learning to beat the best Go professionals.

In chess, that wasn't the case. We like, we could out-compete the best professionals without AI or like machine learning really existing yet.

Because there's only so many possibilities in chess automation. So you could like raw, you could just use a normal computer basically to like beat the best chess pros.

We could start beating them then. Versus

in Go, it took until like 2017 versus like 1995 to like be able to beat the best professionals in that game. Right.
And the old top-level professionals of Go,

a big complaint is like the soul and the humanity of the game is like gone now.

Because this human, this, this game that was seen as like particularly like almost like artistic in the way that it was played by humans has had its like soul robbed from it.

Are people not watching Go anymore? Like I assume. But that's the question that I would need to answer is like, is there something distinct there? Is Go viewership down?

Is the number of Go players down? I know that older players have faded away. The AI songs.
Is he driving to go watch an AI versus AI Go match? Yeah, is he doing that? And would he enjoy that as much?

Would you enjoy it? And is he an asshole for enjoying two robots playing Go?

It's

a very strange question. I mean, look, I think

in every sphere of humanity, we're going to have to deal with this very existential, fundamental, philosophical question. And I don't know.

You know, many people have said music is like the canary in the coal mine for things like this.

At least a lot of musicians and et cetera have said this. And we can talk later about Suno and what the AI music companies are doing.

But the short version is the major music, the major music labels are collaborating with the AI music companies. They're trying to embrace it.
And

the sentiment I heard is that the music industry missed out on like streaming and the internet. They tried to deny it and they just got

their ass eaten by LimeWire, right?

Not in a good way. Right.
Yeah, in the bad way. In the bad way.

And they're like, this time around, new technological change. It's going to upend the music industry.
We're going to partner with them this time. We're going to incorporate it.

We're going to embrace it. And it's like, man, I don't know.
So for better or for worse, I think music's going to be one of the

real like

industry to watch in terms of understanding how humanity is going to change as AI comes in. And I wish it was going better.
I do wish that.

Okay, wait. Really funny story.
Okay. Last year, FBI announced that they had arrested the guy who had uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI songs onto Spotify.

So he had made $10 million in royalties by racking up fake streams on Spotify, right?

So if you think about it, if you upload, I don't know, if I upload my own song of me singing in the shower to Spotify, and then I have like tens of thousands of bots all stream it, I would get streaming revenue from it, right?

Because Spotify would be like, oh, cool.

But that's really obvious that I'm gaming the system. If I get like a billion views, that's that's it's like, okay, clearly something's wrong.

So this guy, once AI music started, he was like, we need to get a ton of songs fast to make this work around anti-fraud policies.

So he just got around it by making hundreds of thousands of AI songs and then had tens of thousands of bots listening to all of the songs. There's like one or two thousand

listens on each one of them. And that allowed him to,

he per day had about 660,000 streams and made him $1.2 million per year. That's crazy.
This dude was insane.

So this is, there's going to be, obviously, there's like fraud going on, but

that's the worst part of me. All the AI stuff, it's like I can see individual things that are kind of cool.

It's just the scale. It's like, because you can do it, you can just click it infinite times.
Yes. That always, it breaks every system you can think of.

Like it, it, yeah, it crowds out it because we just can't make things that, you know what I'm saying? We just,

um, that's what always scares me, but I do see potential. It's just weird.
Um, that's why I've been saying I keep moving forward, never looking back with a worn-out hat and a 16 strap. Oh, I feel like

if we just remember that, we're gonna get through it, you know, you know what I mean?

Yes, sir. And a six-strap strap.
Yes, sir.

Oh, yeah.

You can kick rocks if you don't like how I talk.

God, it's so generic and awesome.

I was born this way. I've been loud too long.
He's born a month ago.

He's really just, it really is just the shit you and your friends would make up a country song with me.

Yeah, it's like a stereotype of country. Oh, it's awesome.
It's awesome. Yeah, they fucking loved it.
I don't know. That's crazy.

And that was it.

Dude, I mean, if I was like four... That was it.
That was it in 2025. That was 2025.
That was 2025. That was the only one we missed.
And then Mike Johnson Smith or whatever, like,

he's he's been

got turned down by that girl for prom.

Oh, yeah.

That was it. Yeah.
That was it. Wow, the biggest thing.
She didn't like him very much.

He was a little needy.

Aiden. Aiden, Aiden, I made this report for you to show how well our show is doing.
I've been working really hard on it. Garbage.

Boring. Well, I made a graph.
It shows all the details of our show. This is a terrible graph, and you could have made a better one if you used Adobe Acrobat Studio.
Wow.

What can Adobe Acrobat Studio do, Aiden? You can make insane graphs with the data era insights that you have right in the program.

Not to mention, if you need a template to model out anything like a presentation, you can do that right in the program.

Or if you want an AI to write your scripts like Adriac does for Marketing Monday,

you can also get Adobe Acrobat to do that for you. Are you telling me I can do more with PDFs than I ever thought possible? Because more than you ever thought possible.

I will say I didn't think much was possible with PDFs. I was awesome for me if there was a one-stop shop URL that could take me there.

Interesting. Interesting.
Because I thought you already used it for marketing, for Marketing Monday. I did.

You can learn more, Atriac, at adobe.com/slash do that with Acrobat,

where you can find all your PDF editing needs.

Doug, you ever been trying to do something business-related and then someone comes in and causes chaos?

I've never been in that situation. It sounds horrible.
I could imagine it, though, where just things are happening all around.

I mean, there's all things you got to do with businesses: security, compliance, customer needs, right? Yeah.

But chaos can always throw a wrench into that system and make it really, really annoying to try and do anything professional.

Government might be annoyed, depending on the legality of this.

And that's why Vanta is a new service that can help your business.

You got it. You got it, Doug.
And And that is why Vanta can help your business with security, with compliance. You don't want chaos in your business and just having Vanta there to help you.

Vanta.com slash lemonade. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash lemonade.
Grow a company. Stop your customers.
Stop doing it. Can trust.
Aiden.

Support for this show comes from S.C. Johnson.
We've all been there.

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Well, I had a little thing. This is a shorter story from Australia that was fairly recent.
It was at the beginning of November, I believe.

And there was a recent win for a labor group there, the Transport Workers Union, and they negotiated a default minimum wage of sorts for Uber Eats and DoorDash and like other delivery service drivers in Australia.

And this doesn't provide like a minimum wage in the full traditional sense that we would imagine, where like you clock into your shift and you're getting paid a full minimum wage that whole time until you clock out, no matter what.

But I think we're all relatively familiar with the struggle of gig work, where if you're a delivery driver in the US, for example, you drive around waiting for an order to pop up and then you have to drive to the restaurant.

You might lose time by like waiting for that restaurant to finish the order that they have to make. You can get stuck in traffic.
You have fees that you pay like back to Uber.

You have to pay for your car maintenance, your gas, all of these things add up so that the actual amount that you're netting from each like ride or delivery you do is very low.

And it's, you know, I would say Uber eats in particular over something like even Uber driving.

It notably pays poorly.

And what they did is that for the full duration of whatever order, instead of going from a pay-by-order model that they use now, the full time that you're active for an order, you get paid for no matter what.

So, if you were stuck in traffic or if you were waiting at the restaurant, all of that time has to pay out Australia's base minimum wage to you.

And this was just seen as a general win.

It's a move in the right direction for like all of the people that have to do this with the expectation that these orders are probably going to get a little more expensive for the consumer as well.

And

it also doesn't include like any pay changes for

outside of normal working hours. So oftentimes,

depending on where you live, like it depends by like state or country, but say you have like an overnight job or you work on holidays, your pay will be automatically adjusted based on the local laws.

If you have a normal hourly job, right? Like if you're an overnight worker, I don't know if this applies in the U.S.

or not, but if you're an overnight worker in a lot of places, you'll get paid more than if you had worked the same job during the day. And it just, the law requires that be the case.

They don't have any of those stipulations for these people. So it was like, it was a pretty like small movement, but a win for like everybody doing delivery in the entire country.

And I thought that was pretty cool because you don't seem,

I don't feel like I see a lot of news stories where

Uber and DoorDash are like the losers in these scenarios. It's usually them pushing people to like, no, these workers need the maximum amount of flexibility possible.
Right, right, right, right.

That's cool. And that's a good win.
I mean, that's, it's small. You know,

yeah, makes me think of automation and that too. But yes, I agree.

That's unfortunately where my

came off of the intense AI discussion. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

I think the hope here is like there's movement on creating like a floor of compensation for people that are doing these jobs.

Like I guess I'll just say like it's a really good idea for gig gig work as gig work becomes more and more a large component of the job market, not only here in America, but I guess around the world, is like gig work has exploited this gap where they can get around laws that were already in place around minimum wage and certain guarantees.

Like these things already existed for all jobs. And then somehow gig work came out and like circumvented them in a way that, you know, I think most people agree they shouldn't have been able to.

And so any kind of movement that makes it just more standardized is just makes more sense. That's been the last like, what, 10, 15 years that this has like really taken off.
Yeah.

It's like with mobile, I feel like, yeah, where gig, gig stuff started to really, but you know, it's like Fiverr and all these websites where people just do small little things.

I think, yeah, phones are really just at the root of it, right? Not even like the internet itself, less so, because anytime you as the worker can be called at any time, like via command of your phone.

And then you as the consumer have the ability to wield your phone to order anything at any time. So it's created like the network necessary for this to exist.

And now it's like how, you know, if I'm, if from a basic perspective, I'm a business, right? I only need this person to work

this amount of like hours or for this specific range of time. I, I don't want to pay them full employment, full benefits, everything.

Of course, I'm going to angle people towards this. And then more and more people have been shoved towards gig work as time passes.

And that's the weird thing is like it magically circumvents all the rules that we would have for a traditional job, including in this case, right?

They're even talking about like, it doesn't matter if you work your Uber each shift from, you know, 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.

You don't see the same benefits if you were working at, you know, full time overnight at like a warehouse or a fast food restaurant or something like that or as a nurse. I don't know.

It's interesting. I feel like more people have been forced into the gig economy.
Like they're not going willingly.

What was interesting when I moved to LA and started working in the, you know, whatever, the industry of just, you know, entertainment and production and all that is like most people are doing gig work.

You know, you talk to a cameraman or whatever, you know, you hire a, you know, a camera operator. Like they're, they're just bouncing around different jobs.

Even if they work for like movies, like these are generally folks are working for a couple of months and then it's like two months off and then this project.

And that's true of DPs and lighting and everything, right?

And there's a lot fewer kind of full-time stable positions than you would think because of the nature of how the industry is just doing these one-off projects all the time.

Yeah, you do see it in LA the most because that seasonality that work. I knew someone who was a producer on

Mass Singer for a long time, and she would work. They would do the whole season in like a short block of time.
She worked for them for years, but she was always on contract.

She was never hired by them full-time at any point. And I thought that was crazy.
Did you? So, in my experience, and people seemed happy with it.

Like, for the most part, when I was in this industry, like, what was your experience with it?

Were people okay with the idea of like, yeah, you know, I have a couple people I'm probably working with later this year, but I'm going to have a month off right now.

It's there's all this uncertainty, but then also flexibility to work with a lot of different people. Generally, I think people enjoyed that.

I think people were happy with it when there's a lot of work to go around, like when it's boom times and you can always find contracts. I think it becomes way more risky when there's when there's not.

That's the that's the big yeah, that makes it interesting. Yeah, because I think my friend does

construction like surveying work in Washington. And

he does the same thing. And I think he gets paid really well and has been happy doing this, even though he is on this sort of schedule because the work has never stopped.

He's never been in a giant period of time where he's had to go any longer. Like, this is what he does.
He rolls from like one giant construction project on contract, gets paid really well for that.

And then as soon as it's over, he goes on unemployment. And then he gets, you know, whatever, 60, 60% of his pay,

something like that, right? He gets a portion of his good pay on unemployment for like the month he's off afterwards, and then goes to the next contract.

But the reason he's fundamentally happy with this arrangement is there's always been a next contract. Yeah.
It's never exactly when he wants it.

And I think for my friend who worked on Mass Singer, I think the most stressful times for her, like anecdotally, were when they weren't sure if they were renewing the show or if they were going to work on it in LA.

I think because she just lives in LA, has a lease here, right? And then they were talking about, oh, it's, we're not sure if we can afford to do the show in LA anymore.

We're thinking about moving the show to a different location like Vancouver or Atlanta or whatever, right?

But all of the LA staff can't just up and move and change their life when that happens. So it was really stressful when she didn't know that

contract was going to get renewed. Now she just has a normal full-time job.
And I think she's way less stressed all the time. And

it just boils down to what you're saying. It's like the benefits of contract work and all the flexibility you get are dope as long as it's working.
To actually flexible.

If anything interrupts the system, it's not cool anymore.

I saw, I mean, you mentioned the unemployment thing, which is interesting because I saw a pretty deep analysis lately that one of the reasons the unemployment rate is

looks lower than it possibly is is because

people would rather take gig work which then disqualifies them from claiming unemployment

because the unemployment benefits are not enough to justify like it's a pain in the ass like everything you had to set up and do and and write in and and follow up on is more of a pain in the ass for lower rewards than then just trying to do gig work so gig work has artificially suppressed the unemployment rate is

is the understanding I read from that from that piece.

I don't know the full math on it.

I would also be curious for people listening, if you do gig work, whether it's for Uber or on Fiverr or whatever, how much of that is driven by like, oh, this is actually great.

I can mix this in with other things I want to do. And I appreciate the flexibility versus you feel like that was your only option.

Because I get the worrying sense that I think it's obvious that many of the people doing these gig jobs are

forced into it. Do you remember? Like,

I don't talk as much as you, but I do.

2014, 2015, like the early era of Uber, I feel like they actually fucking loved it. Like it was actually

extreme flexibility. The pay was way better.
They had those bonuses where if you did like a certain number of rides in a weekend or whatever, you get this massive cash bonus.

And if you talk to them now, it's like all that stuff's been stripped away.

The benefits are way lower. They squeeze you more on like a percentage of the ride.

I have enough Uber talking data that I can cite some changes that have happened in recent years too. Yeah.

I think it was, there was this period of time, right, where COVID, things really slowed down and not a lot of people were doing it.

So things actually got better if you were one of those people willing to come back to driving in that little pocket of time after COVID was like ending, kind of, because they needed drivers so badly.

And then it's only gotten significantly worse from there, from my understanding.

The two things I've noticed is a lot of drivers now, at least in LA, this is, this is an LA phenomenon, but there's a lot of Ubers here, is

a lot of drivers angle towards like

private practice versions of their driving. Like they've formed some sort of consistent client list personally and they do the driving directly with people now.

Yeah. And they'll like hand out a card or something like that.

I've met a lot of people who just like they have a network of like 20 to 30 people that they like stay on call for and schedule out rides with like to the airports or to different parts of the city.

And they formed like some small direct peer-to-peer business and then just fill the downtime with Uber and then use it as like a marketing opportunity. So I've met a a few people doing that.

And then for the first time, I met a woman a few weeks ago who she didn't operate or own the car.

She was, apparently there's two companies like this in LA where one guy owns a bunch of vehicles and takes care of like the maintenance, the, and they're usually electric cars, so there's no gas,

but the maintenance, the charging, and then pays the drivers full-time wages for their hours, like the

minimum hourly wage. I think she said she got paid like 22 bucks an hour or something.
But she wasn't profitable for him. Dude, I don't.

You're offering the maintenance and the electricity and the full-time wage. I don't know what the math is, but she has a very roundabout system to pay somebody a wage.

And also, you've recreated taxis in the aggregate, but with a work off. No, I don't get it.

It doesn't make any sense.

She doesn't have the math for me, right? She's just telling me what her experience as the driver is. But she got hired at basically like an agent.

It's like sadness of like some guy laundering.

And she works in this fleet of drivers and cars for this guy. And then just he collects all the money from the Uber and Lyft rides.
And then she just gets paid a flat wage.

And like, and she gets paid the whole day that she's working. Right.
And she seemed pretty happy with it. Well, yeah, it sounds decent for her.
It's a steady.

above minimum wage job, but I don't understand how I don't understand how the Uber pimp is making the money. I don't know about you.

It doesn't make any sense to me. Because the loss on Uber is all the depreciation on your car and the miles and the repairs and all that stuff they don't cover for you and don't tell you about.

Maybe it adds up. Maybe it's because like the fleet is like all nicer, like black, big Teslas.
So you can charge like the highest rate.

You can charge like you could have the XL, the Uber Black, the Uber Premium, or whatever. So you charge all the highest ratio options for all of your vehicles at all times.
Maybe that's why.

Or maybe he's laundering money. Maybe he's laundering money.
Or maybe he's a really bad businessman.

Maybe, yeah, maybe he's two years into the worst business venture venture ever. Yeah, he's a non-profit client.

I mean, so it gets the question of like, do would you prefer having a consistency and safety versus that? So question for you.

Would you rather have $10 million right now or a guaranteed $1 per day for the rest of your life? $10 million right now. I don't know.
I would prefer that.

I like the securities, Brandon.

Wow, that looks really delicious, Brandon. It looks so good, I had to try a sip of my own.

Why don't we skate on over to your little

fun? Wait, I have a, wait, okay.

Okay. What's your

summary? I have two, and so I'll do one. You guys have phones.

One underreported story this year.

You guys are maybe aware that live stream shopping is a big deal in China.

You know that? Like, it's like, you know, people go on a live stream and they show products and people buy them directly through the app. And it was kind of thought because we're well behind.

That's like many years old in China now. And there's always been tries to crack it in America.
In 2025, the underreported story is that it sort of is starting to get cracked here.

Like it's starting to become a thing on TikTok live and especially this platform called Whatnot. People are doing live like

it's really big within the like card. pack like the the collectible community so there's a lot of people on whatnot that are doing like live

this is specifically for cards, not specifically for cards, it's just they're leaning into cards because cards is what because that's what people, okay. So it's kind of like funny.

It's kind of like a live eBay thing, but if you guys don't know what live stream shopping is, it's kind of like what QVC used to be back in the day.

It's someone on there, they'll show a product, they'll talk about it, they'll say how great and awesome it is, and then you right then can click and buy it. And

I got a friend that works at Whatnot. So it's like an app that's just infomercials.
Dude, it's so funny. It's so funny to make because we made fun of the boomers for infomercials for so long.

Why would you ever watch this crap, Grandma? Yeah. And here I am.
And here it is. Here I am.
I'm scrolling. Watching the crap.

I'm buying it. So it's starting to take off.
And yeah, they have fashion and all that stuff. But the big thing is collectibles where people will like,

you know, they'll hold up a pack and open it. And then they'll sell you the individual cards right there.
Or I'm missing some of the specific tricks they do, but it's like.

you can they can sell you the pack and then then they open it like they'll open it for you and you get to see everyone gets to join the the live experience of but anyway it's becoming more of a thing.

And so, this is an underreported business story because, again, if you flashback even two years, I think I was probably saying, like, this is not catching on in America. People keep trying it.

It's not working. They're finally making ground.
Like, we're getting into it in the way that China is. This is massive in China.

Some of the biggest online celebrities in China just do this all the time. Like, that is their content.
They're like animated and fun and crazy, but they're like, here's 10 new products.

Here's, and they sell millions a day. They do millions of dollars in merchandise a day.
That's just over the top. We're more subtle.
Yeah.

Jushu.

Enron hat.

Ushu. Adobe Acrobat.

Yeah. So I don't know.
That's an interesting little story. And I can do my second one if you want to, but otherwise,

you jump in. Yeah, I want your second one.
This is a story I think is really interesting. It's actually an older story, but it has a big update this year.
It's called

Mozambique Tuna Bonds. Okay.
We all know about this. Everybody knows about that.

Everybody knows about that. You fucking.
We've been talking. Have you opened the YouTube comments a single time this year? We've all been asking.

This is what we talk about. You can tell he doesn't care about the show.
Unbelievable. You can tell he doesn't care about the show.
We get in there and we talk about tuna. It's all we do.

It's all Mozambique. Tuna, how many cars that come?

It's unbelievable.

If we talked about it, tell me about it.

If you can cover it, Aiden, or Doug, Mark, it's back against the wall. I want to see what your take is because we all understand it so well.

And if you're fresh, it's like you got to prove it to us.

It's going to, dude, like us and all the YouTube viewers and all the Spotify viewers, we're like, it's got to be like Penn and Teller watching some shitty musician come up on stream, magician.

Magician.

And I don't even care how they

walk. They can kick rocks if they

like it. But anyway, so you guys have covered Mozambique Totemon so much.
I'll give you a

basic take.

Don't be afraid to like include all the details.

Okay, so Mozambique, there's tuna fish there.

There are tuna fish off the coast of Mozambique. Mozambique is a very poor country.
And they had started in 2025. This started in 2023.
I'm sorry, 2013. The story begins.
Okay. Mozambique is poor.

They have a plan. How are we going to get rich? Tuna.
We have an abundance of tuna. Makes sense.
We are going to fish this tuna out of the water

and sell it.

It sounds simple.

No human has done it.

No. Has that ever worked? This is the plan.
And so they issue Mozambique tuna bonds, which are financial instruments that other people can buy in.

It's like a borrow. They're borrowing money.
Mozambique is borrowing money to create a massive fleet of tuna ships. This is the plan.
This plan.

is pushed primarily by a few key players in the Mozambique government and the bank Credit Suisse in Switzerland. Okay.

And it comes to light after 2013 that the vast, vast majority of this $2 billion they raise from all around the world does not go to creating tuna ships.

It in fact goes to graft and bribes and is pulled apart by people in Credit Suisse, by people in the Mozambique government, by

a who's who of all these people. And they buy Ferraris and they buy Lambos and they buy boats of their own, but not for tuna fish.
And they buy a lot of things.

And they're putting the, they're catching the tuna with the Ferraris? They, they don't catch many, as it turns out. So $2 billion kind of just disappears.

And then they find out that these people kind of fast-tracked it through the Mozambique government, but it actually has no government legal guarantee that they're going to pay a step back.

So overnight, this happened in the late 2010s. The Mozambique currency, which I'm blanking on the name of over the top of my head, but it collapses.

And this is like $2 billion is not a crazy amount of of money in America. I mean, it's a big number, but it's not, it wouldn't change our financial system.
But for Mozambique, it is devastating.

$2 million or $2 billion? $2 billion. $2 billion.

So if you can go to Max on this, maybe we can show it.

Yeah, there's this big collapse in the Mozambique currency. Oh my God.

And it is because there's literally no trust anymore from all these foreign investors because they thought they were buying a guaranteed government-backed tuna debt. And in fact, they got nothing.

And the government actually says, hey, we're not paying this. Like they persecute some of the people who did the crime and the bribery and the corruption.

But they're like, we're not on the hook for this $2 billion. We didn't get any fish.
There's no way we're paying it. And so the currency, it causes this big chaos.

And so in Mozambique, they sort of figure it out and deal with it and persecute people, but they can't go after credit suisse or these big banks that really were like part and parcel, a huge part of this crime.

Like they, they knew what they were doing. There's like a lot of records.
They knew what they were doing. They knew they were paying bribes.
They knew they were siphoning off some of themselves.

They knew there wasn't going to be tuna fish.

So

there's a lot of lawsuits there, and some governments crack down on them, and there's some payments.

And it all felt sort of resolved except for one big ongoing lawsuit with Credit Suisse for about, I don't know, 200 million or something.

As of this year, that is about to be resolved in a major landmark case in Switzerland because

five years into this thing, maybe 2019, 2018, Credit Suisse was bought by a bigger bank, UBS.

And UBS is claiming that they don't inherit the legal liability of the bank they bought, especially because they said they were doing a bailout. Like, we're saving Credit Suisse.

We shouldn't have to deal with the shit they, like, we're not, we don't know.

So that is where we land ourselves now.

And Credit Suisse, I mean, sorry, the Swiss government is about to make a landmark case that determines whether or not in their legal system, you can inherit the legal liability from a company you acquire, which sounds like you should, but I don't, it's never, it's never been done before.

This is because Credit Suisse collapsed in 2023. Right.
And UBS was buying them to bail them out. Yeah.

And under the conditions, they don't think it's fair that they should take on the liability of the tuna bonds. Right.
Amazing. Yeah.
So this is how

this week they're making a big landmark court case, which will determine, because if they decide that it is legal liability and it passes on, then, or if they, the the real question is, if they say it doesn't, then all of a sudden there becomes this strategy to like, if I have committed a crime with a company, I just have to buy another company.

And suddenly,

does that come off?

I assume not the individuals, but the legal entity that buys it does not. Dude, you can do a SPAC and you just, and you just buy

Bear Stearns and you just take a thing.

But the decision hasn't happened yet. The decision hasn't happened yet, but it is a major case.
And again, UBS is like, we saved your ass, kind of. This is a big, important bank.

So it's like, it's a very interesting case that I think was underreported. So I thought I'd bring it out as a little financial news.
The winner here, the tuna.

Okay, one more thing. They didn't get fish.
So they did make some tuna ship. They bought some tuna fishing ship.
It wasn't like a complete scam. I mean, most of it's a scam, but they have this fleet.

And so as part of like the unwinding of this massive financial disaster, like, okay, as of like, I think early this year, like, we got to sell this fleet.

So they go to this big auction with a fleet of Mozambique tuna ships there is zero bids

it's like a it's like unused you know 30 different tuna fishing ships that got no bids no zero bids that doesn't make any sense because if it's rusting in the harbor if it was zero if it was zero i would have gotten in there

for sale am i crazy if i'm not if the price is low enough i'm buying a mozambique tuna

i think the cost of your you can pull up my screen My sharing. If not, I'll link it to you.
Mozambique Tuna Bond.

You can see it.

Mozambique's auction of Tuna Bond's fleet fails to attract single bid. So, Aiden, if you would like to manage, you have to pay for their fees.
They had to pay for the D-Rust.

You had to pay for like... harboring them.
Oh, I thought it was like I could show up with like a rack. Like I show up with $1,000 from Lemonades in, and I'm like, can we buy it?

Yeah, you could, no, you could get the ships, but then they're stuck there and you owe the fees of keeping them in harbor. I would hate that.
I hate that. I would not want to pay that

i would just like to have a little place to call home when we visit mozambique

it's true when we do the mozambique episode it would be nice at least we'd have somewhere to shack up yeah and we're out in the open ocean with the boys catching some chicken catching tuna and you know there's a plethora of tuna in that ocean because they never really fished it they never really fished it so that's a great trip i'm in bro is this one of those situations i don't know anything about this other than like a tweet but is this one of those situations where that chinese fleet that apparently goes around the world taking all the fish is going to come in there and take all the data?

They're probably hungry for this drama. I mean, they're probably stoked about this tuna drama.
This is an opportunity for sure, but I don't know that they're involved as of yet. Damn.
Tuna drama, man.

Who knows? I know. I thought that was interesting.
That was interesting. So that's it.

We should ditch the Patreon and start selling tuna bonds. Dude, okay, that is the crazy part of the story is how much insane demand there was.
They sold these bonds out instantly all over the world.

Everyone's like, yeah, it sounds like a guaranteed business plan. Well, everybody loves a little tuna.
Everyone loves a little tune.

To be fair, if they hadn't embezzled all the money yeah maybe it would have worked that sounds like a good plan to go catch everybody wants to catch tuna sell tuna yeah yeah

bad track record feels like because i was i was i was trying to remember i was like didn't they collapse like a couple weeks ago

they had a couple bad actors but i think it's

it's like uh you know don't let rotten apple spoil the bunch you'd hate the beautiful crazy sweet organization you'd hate to let them ruin all the other swiss banks reputation yeah which have a clean bill of health

especially during World War II. Uh, uh, cool.
Well, okay, what about you, Aiden? I,

you already knew all that, everything you already knew. It's you nailed most of it, I will say.

Here's something that I write in the comments little review. What do you think? Yeah, what do you think? He'll be help review of that presentation.

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Sometimes, the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter, or following a counterintuitive instinct, or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision.

Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy.
Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity.

Or when mobile gaming giants Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages.

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Here's something I might not nail. Okay.
Because

the background to this is more complicated than I think can be

summarized on this podcast. But there have been a bunch of protests in Serbia this week.
We all know about this, dude. Atrioch and I, this is what we do.
It's like every day. Yeah, we're in Serbia.

What have you been doing?

You guys are streaming about the Serbian protests. What if you provide in full detail? There's just a full VOD of YouTube IRL streaming.
One of the protests, you're both in Belgrade.

I didn't know about it. Gavin Newsom's there.
What do you think we do the other six days of the week? Yeah, do you think it's all real time?

We don't just do the yard in this, bro. We have real jobs and we cover Serbia.

We walk in town dancing with Ludwig. We do real work covering this government

protest in Serbia. in Belgrade

yeah I knew it so part of Serbia is a country Serbia Serbia's country

uh so this is kind of part of a broader pattern of this is a gen z protest this is like a yeah gen z protest they're just they need to they need to get a new hobby

i'll say it yeah they'd be protesting like i when it was one or two i was like okay the women that's cool bee shopping and then and the gen z serbians be protesting

what up with that what up with that Have the Serbian protesters been streaming themselves on whatnot? Like, that could be great. Like, they unbox the newest politicians.
But I mean, is it?

Is it a Jenzi protest? Yes. Okay.
Yeah, it actually is. It actually is.
Predominantly, at least. Interesting.

So this is kind of part of a broader pattern of a bunch of countries in the southeastern part of Europe.

kind of having a series of protests mostly over issues of like corruption or judicial independence being compromised increasing authoritarianism authoritarianism, and like attacks on free speech and media.

No, this is over the course of like the whole year or the past couple years, really.

And this is not just Serbia, it's in like places like Slovakia, Greece,

North Macedonia,

and more.

But in with Serbia specifically, I think we saw a lot of like random headlines about it over the year. And this started in November of 2024

in a city called Novisad,

where a train station collapsed and killed 16 people after some renovations were done to it. And in the wake of that accident,

police and like local authorities were accused of corruption, mostly to do with like abuse of the state funds that were allotted for the project, the renovation project,

and that it wasn't. This project had a lot of negligence, wasn't taken care of properly.

They're taking the government money.

And then, I mean, they used, weirdly enough, they used the the money to go fish for tuna, which was a whole mix-up.

Not a lot of people touched on that.

Wait, did Mozambique build a train with that corruption money?

It was actually a whole mix-up. Whole mix-up.

Wait, we got the delivery address wrong.

It's a gleaming brand new train station in Mozambique.

And in the wake of this, there's a huge,

you know, public, there's a lot of public anger that starts to rise into like small gatherings and protests.

And I think like many of these situations, it's not just because one train station collapsed. It's because this is an inciting incident on a history of issues of corruption in the past.

And the president

of

Serbia, sorry, I'm scrolling. Vuvic.

President Vuvic. We all know that.

Come on, dude. Who is still in charge?

Apologies. Oh, the sky is blue, guys.
Yeah, President Vuvic.

He's

highly criticized and

asked to step down over the course of these protests.

In the wake of this train station collapsing, there's a local minister of construction or a lower-level government official named Joran Vesic, who immediately in the wake of it just denies wrongdoing, of having done anything wrong.

And within a few days, people are so angry that he just steps down. He just, he initially tries to, he denies that they, did they approach this project incorrectly at all.
And And the puck.

Dude, the first thing you say when a transition collabs is, wasn't me. And he just hit the wasn't me.

And over the year of 2025, these protests expand, increase in their frequency, and don't just happen in the city of Novi Sad.

They happen in Belgrade and other cities around the country. And students are the primary base of people that are protesting in the country

with,

interestingly enough, smaller pockets of pro-government groups trying to like counteract their protests at the same time. So it's like huge groups of students gathering, protesting,

having altercations with police and the government, and then also

pro-government groups like trying to come into the streets and antagonize this group of student protesters. We didn't need a transition anyway.

We didn't want the transition.

We like the tuna.

And

in May of 2025, this actually solidifies into some more concrete asks from the protest movement,

which initially started with like, just release the documentation around this train station. We want people to be held accountable for this specific incident.

But as the year goes on, there's all these increasing back and forth with police that result in incidents of police brutality. So people want justice for cases of that.

People being imprisoned wrongly for protesting or like disagreements about whether or not they should be being arrested for protesting. And they want police to be held accountable for that.

And they want snap elections to be held and the president to step down from power, Vuvic. Okay.
And that's in May of 2025 when these more like concrete asks come together.

And then in June, notably, some of these protests got really, really big, like some of the biggest in Serbian history. They look pretty big.

In June, there was over 100,000 people gathered in a protest in Belgrade, with some reports saying like multiple hundreds of thousands of people.

And this, and these really large-scale protests have happened a few times over the course of the year.

And Vuvich is like holding strong in opposition to this, calling the protesters enemies of the country or terrorists, you know, hitting the classics. The classics.

He's been in power for hard to do when it's getting above 100,000 people. You know what I'm saying? It is a powerful commander.

Exactly. And he's been in power for 13 years now.
And he did win the last, I couldn't read anything about like suspicion of like election fraud or anything like that.

The last time there was an election, which was, I think, two or three years ago before, before this, he won with 58% of the vote at the time. Um,

in August of this year, there was like an upscale in headlines and things

because it was like a particularly violent month.

And also, video footage leaked of officers kicking and beating a man in the streets who was then assaulted further after they took him into custody as well. And

there's also cases around in August of police like dragging people from buildings and shops and like those things being caught on tape and like rubber bullets being fired into crowds, specifically crowds of like younger students below the age of 18, people who are like 15, 16.

And

this is kind of in

invigorating the movement of protesters,

switching away from something that's focused primarily on this state of corruption and the specifics of this funding around the train station and more towards being like anti-police brutality.

Like, how dare you inflict this pain on the people when they're trying to hold you accountable for your actions? That should get the guy out of power too. It's like the big movement.

And the ultimate ask is they want him to step down. And the only thing that the Serbian government has given in return is

rubber bullets. A few rubber bullets.

You get to keep them. A few.

And a few more smaller officials stepping down from power over the year, but not the the actual president or anybody who.

Nobody who actually matters, you know?

And the year anniversary of the train collapse just happened, and 110,000 people

gathered in Novi Sad to commemorate the incident. So there's still a huge energy behind

behind. the movement, at least.
It seems like from like that being just month.

But the significant change that this movement is looking for doesn't really seem to be happening. Like they, their, their core asks are not really being met.

The most that they've gotten in regards to like the train station is like some documents being released and

not the accountability from like the police. Well, I don't know.
I mean, it sounds like this is an ongoing thing, right? Like if 100,000 people are showing up to protest.

Exactly. So this is, this is the update.
This is like the update through the year to this point. Yeah.
Super overall summary. I'm going to be missing a ton of stuff.

This is, there's a lot of like history behind this from what I could read.

But we're entering next year with like an invigorated base of young people, especially who hate the president in power and want the government to be dramatically changed somehow without necessarily a specific set of asks beyond hold elections again and let us try to get new people into power.

No, it's interesting. I did not know that was going on in Europe.

in the same way. That's very similar to all the Gen Z elections sleeping Africa and Southeast Asia.

i didn't know it reached uh countries like serbia that's yeah there weren't any protests this year i think a really simple year of protests it feels like yeah uh a really similar incident i saw was the north macedonia one where it there was a nightclub that like caught on fire and a lot of people died in this in that and in the wake of that in the same way this train station did

huge like youth reaction um to like you know who who let this the state of our country and the state of the government allowing it to get to this point is, is a failure. Am I?

It feels like this is the year with the most protest and anti-government stuff globally in maybe our lifetime, excluding COVID, which is obviously a strange anomaly, at least, or let me rephrase that, in our adult lifetime.

I just don't remember the scale of stuff.

The entire world is pretty terrible. It's just successful.
You know what I'm saying?

Well, even just in general. I mean, there's just so many protests happening, it feels like.
I think if you can illuminate more context, like if you happen to be Serbian and or

just happen to know more about it because of a personal connection or something, or maybe you studied abroad there, something like that.

Or Nepalese or Indonesia, like all the places where these things are really, really kicking off.

If you can contextualize it beyond like the articles that we get to read, I think it'd be really, really helpful.

Because I know there's always underlying dynamics to these things that are really hard to peel from just like reading.

uh reading stuff online uh because this is a really overhead view of something that seems to have a really, really deep ties of like dissatisfaction among a lot of people there.

I think that's also why, like when I was reading through this, it's why the demands, especially as if you looked at the demands over the course of the year, actually felt pretty inconsistent or unclear beyond the train incident that started.

Well, yeah, when it's a mass youth movement organized by social media, like that, the fact that they can get a coherent demand at all is pretty difficult. Yeah.

Yeah. Same thing with all the, all the one, like the one in Nepal.

Like they, the fact that they were able to get one clear demand of like, we're going to hold elections and have this interim prime minute is like an amazing achievement because, you know, I went in that Discord and saw it's like half of it is people posting shit posting, like meme.

Like, you know what I'm saying? It's like it's thousands of young people, all with varying degrees of knowledge and participation.

And they're just throwing, you know, so I think that's, that's, that's as much as you can expect. Um, I do wonder, though,

because obviously there's rising youth discontent that's moving, that's mobilizing a lot of this, But some of it has got to be this Venn diagram of social media.

Like all, all of it's hitting at once to make this stuff more possible. I got to imagine.
Yeah, I think so one

note on that is that the slogan, there's seems to be some consistency in slogan use or like motivation behind these protests.

Like there's a reason that this region of Europe is seeing a surge in this activity at the same time is because when you see like notable protests from your neighbors around like similar issues that you seem to be facing.

you to, yeah, yeah, there's there's a very direct inspiration, so I don't think it's and then more than any other time in history.

Yeah, it's like it's not just your, I mean, it's around even around the world, right?

You see what's happening in Nepal, and even if you're in Europe, you're inspired because you're seeing what's happening in Nepal for the first time. Like, that wasn't a thing 10 years ago, you know?

Yeah, that's true.

Uh, I googled it. Yeah, they're showing the One Piece flag in some student protests in Serbia.
That's nice. That's like,

uh,

any

did you

guys have any more thing?

i have one more thing to talk about i guess two more there's a funny choice i'll let you guys okay pick it up k-pop demon hunters okay or something that crypto did which could actually be really good

i'm actually

i i want to know the crypto thing because i don't believe it but do you want to agree you might you might appreciate it It's so funny because I genuinely want to know about the second thing. Yeah.

But I keep hearing the words K-pop demon hunters in my life and I have no idea what it is. These are equally important to the world.
Okay, let's hit crypto. Two balls.
Give me crypto first. Okay.

All right, crypto, and then we'll wash it down with some K-12.

All right, so this is, there's definitely a risk here of me accidentally doing a Coinbase ad because this is largely led by Coinbase.

So I want to give that disclaimer as well as the fact that I'm not deeply involved in the crypto space, but did spend some time looking at this yesterday. So

how do payments on the internet work? They work largely through Visa, right, or other of these credit providers. Yeah.

The way that, you know, actually works in practice is like, if you go buy a thing on the internet, right? You have to provide your credit card information.

You have to like personally, you go authorize everything with the other side. And then that gets processed by Visa.
And then the banks charge like a 2% fee on that.

That's why people strongly dislike, if you sell anything, people hate credit cards.

And that's why you often get charged more for credit cards because banks, the main way they make money from credit cards is they charge 2%-ish on transactions.

And so if you're, if you're a shop, if you sell something online, you hate this.

You're just losing 2% of your profit to the banks who are just taking it by saying, oh, we need to do this to fund credit cards.

So for sellers, it actually kind of sucks. Online payments suck.

And then often for a user, it's a shitty process of every time you go to a store, you have to like re-enter information, you have to do all these various things.

So what Coinbase, who is a crypto company, has done is launched a new protocol where the idea is we want to have an internet system where you can pay for things through crypto that is just like instantaneous, can be automated, it can be very easy, and it does not rely on Visa or the existing banks.

So, they're calling it X402. And the idea is that when you request something from a website, you send an HTTP request.
Yes, Brandon. Okay, my first question is:

if Coinbase controls this protocol, they don't control it. They are the lead developers, and they're not the capability.

Like, if this were to take off and get big enough that they could then pressure sellers, wouldn't they just charge 2%? Like, wouldn't that something they could do? That's that's where, okay, right.

So, um, so as it currently stands, I would argue banks are essentially taking this tax on all sellers. And if you're, I don't know, there's so many stores where 2% is a huge deal.

They'll just take for doing nothing. Right.

And so if you can get around that and you can just have, I can just directly send money to people, not having to go through this system, that could be incredible.

And so 402 is basically have developed a protocol where when I send an HTTP request, you are going to send back a code automatically that says, hey, to access whatever you just asked for, maybe it's a video, maybe it's a piece of data, whatever it is,

you send back a code, 402, that just automatically lets me know you need this much money. And this is how much I need.

I can then automatically send back to you, here's the crypto information I have to my wallet. And the payment just automatically gets processed by a facilitator and the payment's done.

So there's two reasons this is notable. One is it...
bypasses the banks, right? Right. So this is just automatically happening through crypto.

And the second is that right now there are US stable coins who are using this stuff.

So the likelihood that you're going to go use Bitcoin to buy something on the internet, I don't think is super likely.

But, you know, stablecoin, which we haven't talked about a lot, the whole idea is that you're buying crypto, which is pegged to the US dollar.

So, Circle is one of, if not the biggest stablecoin provider, they joined onto this, uh, onto this protocol.

And so now you can spend your money that is on Circle, your USDC, um, and actually buy things through this protocol. And it's actually really growing this year.

So, this launched in May, I want to say it was like six months ago, launched in May, and by October, there's already like 500,000 transactions. I believe a week.
I forget if it's a week or a day.

So the thinking is, if you can bypass banks and you can just have everybody use their crypto wall, this could be incredible. And very notably, this is maybe good, maybe bad.

In the world of AI agents, where we're going to have all these apps where you could say, I'm going to give this app control of, I want you to go out and do these things.

I want you to go build a whole shopping list and then purchase everything that I need for my vacation, or I want you to plan an entire vacation.

Or let's say you have a business, which is a B2B business and communicates with other companies that you can have your AI agents or AI bots go out and automatically purchase things from other companies and other services all over the place without you needing to be involved, without you needing to go sign up for that service and generate an API key.

In particular, this is going to be useful for programmatic stuff that uses APIs.

So one example you might think of is if a company like Reddit is being, I don't know, if an AI is trying to like get Reddit's data, Reddit can reply with, you need to pay us for that.

And then there can be some very small amount of money that is given to Reddit just to access that data. This is all the like best case.
We've got around the bank.

Everybody can use stablecoin, which is tied to the US dollar. And the world is rosy and crypto wins.

Obvious downsides is what, first off. Yeah, it just doesn't sound that decentralized, but maybe it is.
I have to look.

So the protocol is decentralized. And basically, that's that.

On a technical perspective, it's actually very cool.

I think it's pretty beautiful.

And the seller and the buyer don't need to know any crypto stuff necessarily, they're just using existing HTTP codes, but they do need someone in that process to actually do the crypto processing on the chain.

So, right now, Coinbase is like, we'll do it, right? Yeah, but there's many companies who are coming on.

So, the idea is that many different companies could be the person in the middle saying, we'll process this for you.

But the obvious logical next step is that those facilitators will start charging two percent. So, they're going to become the new

correct me. Correct me if I'm wrong here, right? If Bitcoin,

we agree, isn't useful for like day-to-day transactions.

But Bitcoin, as an example, it is decentralized because a bunch of people are choosing to mine it, right? That's like what's maintaining the ledger of like transactions. So there is no

body in the middle that is choosing to

maintain it, right? In this case, until our boy SBF got sent sent to prison for doing that.

My goat. In this case, nobody would, like, you couldn't copy that sort of system because you can't provide the same sort of financial incentive there is to mine with a stablecoin, right?

Because it was inherently to like destabilize the value of the stablecoin. It doesn't work in the same way.
So you need a party.

who has an interest in stepping up to be like the mediator to maintain the ledger of the currency. Is that a correct understanding?

I believe I want to be very careful that we don't turn into three-way guys and nobody talking about crypto, the specifics of stable coins, the specifics of

the word

crypto.

Here's my take. That's what I'm asking.
Because isn't the whole

my question

is

this sounds amazing. This is the initial appeal of cryptocurrency to me as somebody who spent a lot of time like sending international payments over like PayPal.

This is the first time I've seen a crypto thing ever where I've been like, that it could be really valuable in tons of different instances.

So many ways you have to submit and pay online, whether it be like internationally or for a product or whatever, that so many people get a cut of what that is.

And the initial promise of crypto to me when I first learned about it like a really long time ago was, oh, it's cool that you could have a currency where all of that is just gone.

The back end issue of currencies that got pretty good at that, like had really, really low transaction fees, is that there was still an instability in the base value of that thing, right?

Um, and stable coins are meant to like rectify that part. It's pegged to a currency that we all like understand and use more so day to day.

Yeah, is there no way to get the best of both worlds where we have this like miracle-pegged

stable coin that then

also doesn't have any like intermediary or body? It's truly decentralized and we can all freely exchange it at will. Like that, that end game is actually really, really useful.

I say that from like personal experience.

That would be extraordinarily useful to like businesses and things that I did in the past. And can it just not exist? Like, does there always need to be a company at the center of it?

There does need to. That's the point.
I mean, look, we, uh, I'll just, I'll say. This sounded interesting to me.

What is the benefit? It sounds like you're removing all the ability to

stop fraud like any any way to track financial transactions like if it's all if it's all totally decentral i like having an intermediary that has some kind of record or tracking that is tied in with the government that's following laws that no the record exists right like you can see the record with bitcoin you can look at the like the transactions but how do you like like like for example with a credit card i can dispute fraud charges and get them to you know what i'm saying i can't yeah but in the same i think the idea is if you're willing to forego that part of it it's the electronic true electronic equivalent of cash.

That's what it is.

If you hang out with your like friend in the in the UK or whatever, right? Like if and you just want to hand him a $10 bill in like $10 US dollar bill and just give it to him.

There's no person who gets a cut of that. You just get to choose to give it to him.
So it's just the ability to do that electronically with no

intermediary taking a cut out of it. It's me, melee heads in the chat.

It's me paying Professor Pro his tournament winnings from the tournament I just run, like without a big chunk of money getting taken out of it because PayPal just likes to do that. It's,

it, it, it, we don't, like, that to me was always the appeal of crypto is like, you just get to rid of,

you get rid of that part. Right.
In theory, this is a step towards that. Yeah.

I mean, I can make up a bunch of bullshit and we can be three white guys talking about crypto, but I, you know, ultimately, that's, that's the theory. That hasn't happened in practice yet.

I, this is the first time I've ever seen something with crypto where I'm like, that seems like a good step in that direction. Yeah.

And then responding to what you said, where they'll just start taking that 2% that the banks do, what I like about this is at least there's competition.

Right now, it is essentially a duopoly, right, between Amex and Visa.

And what I've read is like, if you're somebody who wants to sell things online, or even if you're a fucking gas station on the corner, you are essentially forced to use Visa and Amex because that's what everybody's using, right?

The other part too, right? It's like merchants get fucked because they are being forced to use this stuff because we as consumers find it so convenient.

And if you can at least have another option, right? If you have a website that says, you can pay here with credit card or we will give you a 1% discount if you use X402.

And at least there's competition. I would hope that puts pressure on Visa to stop doing what they're, I mean, it's not even Visa.
It's the banks.

The banks are what largely take the fees here to justify credit.

So it puts, I would hope that this creates more competition with banks because right now they just can over merchants that that would be the goal the easiest way for me and crypto has no history no no i mean of i treating people badly or abuse

we're not doing that i get what you're saying and i i could see the benefit i'm just skeptical

i think the main criticism of crypto that has been founded over and over again is that like when you remove all of the the stuff that

protects the average protects yeah it just like it's used for scams like that stuff is annoying and that that fee gets that's why i'm asking though because that's like

i don't disagree with that part yeah

but the the base appeal of the technology and like the true decentralization of something like bitcoin which is like that's probably the best example that i can think of off the top of my head um

that like we don't use cash so so often anymore because it's just inconvenient to use it right so this is just a if there's a digital pathway to like using cash or something akin to cash I would like to have that option available and it doesn't exist right now and if this is like a path to getting there that would be cool I think that would be cool but you know cash is uniquely backed by the government that issues it

And you'll never have that unless anyway, if you do, then it's going to have unique restrictions and rules. This is the way that cash does.

Sure. Sure.

You're right. It's not cash is not truly, it's not decentralized either because it's being like provided and backed by the government.
I understand that.

One of the most centralized things. Yes, what I'm saying is just, I'm just looking for some,

it feels insane to me that the only way we can pay for things digitally, which is the way we basically have to pay for things now, requires someone to take a chunk out of the transaction.

And this seemed like a technological avenue to like maybe fixing that part. And I would like that to be available.
And then you can at least make a choice, right?

You can make a choice between using my credit card on this because it's backed by Visa and I have the option to cancel the charge and I have this fraud security or whatever. Yeah.

And using the digital cash and my wallet and there's no cut. Yeah, I think that's fair.
I would just say like,

you know, in my worldview, the way you would get that is really by like aggressive antitrust enforcement to make sure there's more competition with visa at mastercard i guess this counts as competition so maybe that's a roundabout technological way to doing it yeah you're right but there's more than one way to get there like if there was 10 different visas they would automatically drive down this fee you know whatever but i i see i can and i i just to be clear here so this is not a coinbase set up the protocol but anybody can be the payment processor so the value of that is that this is set up so that any any website that chooses to set this up any service any merchant whatever can say i want to have coinbase process it or i want to have this other company process it and the value of that is that any company who wants to get in on it can compete and ideally drive the price down exactly so it wouldn't just be a v certain amex on this protocol it might be dozens of providers who are all saying we'll we'll do 0.2 percent cut if you let us process it so yeah i've been doing a best case scenario i have been reading a lot more about stable coins this year and i think it is like the perfect theme for this show of like an underreported story i don't know enough about them for the way that they're clearly clearly ramping up to be like,

there's a government push to make stable coins a more like from America, to make it a more important part of the financial system as a way to like counteract what China and BRICS is doing with a RMB gold.

Like this is like happening now and it's all not reported on by anybody and it is becoming more of a deal and I don't know enough about it.

I do know that like all these stable coins, they take the money you put into them and they put it into U.S. treasuries.
It's like a roundabout way to like help fund our U.S.

debt using other countries that are, that want to dollarize. Like, there's a lot of countries that have shit currencies that would rather just use a U.S.
stablecoin to do transactions with each other.

Yeah.

And, um,

and we want to take advantage of that so that all of their money is being funded back into U.S. treasuries and doesn't pay a like.
I think this is all very interesting. I don't know enough about it.

I do think it's a very fascinating story. And so I would like us to follow up.
Give a tape. No, I don't have a tape.
Give a tape. I want to know more.
But I agree.

He gets mad when you talk about Monero.

He doesn't like that.

I prefer with deal drugs the old-fashioned way, okay? With cash. Oh, with cash.
Interesting. Unbelievable.

But imagine if instead of handing a $5 bill to that drug dealer, you could send him over the X402 open protocol and Coinbase could process it right there.

Brandon, it would be decentralized. You're fucking right.
I'm sold. I've changed my entire mind.

But I will say, it's funny when I was researching this, like, because I was, you know, looking at all these different things and I'm looking at like Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal and whatever, all these different, you know.

And then with this one, I see it on Yahoo Finance. I'm like, okay, cool.
Read the general. Oh, wait, no, no, sorry.
That was, this is on Coinbase info, right? And so I'm reading from Coinbase.

I'm like, let me try to get some other sources. All of the articles are just the most like crypto bullshit numbers.
It's like, and then Neon came onto the chain with a 4% increase over the last week.

And it's just all, it's just the circle jerk numbers of it all. CoinmarketCap.com or whatever.
Yeah. It's like all those that, yeah.

Man, I would love if this, best case scenario, this could be sick as fuck.

And I, you know, it, it started this year and we might start to see real big traction on it next year, and that could be exciting. It would be cool.

I mean, if this is like the Netflix that breaks blockbuster of the banks, then that could be.

Oh, dude, if you want me to give you buzzwords, Citibank said this, this is the chat GPT moment for crypto. That makes me hate it.
I hate it again. Don't you love it now? No, you got me out.

Don't you love it? I was on this one over on the

wait. Let's close out with your last one, K-pop demon hunters.
K-pop demon hunters, one beloved Netflix show that, I mean, movie, excuse me, that came out a couple months ago.

So it's pretty light a little fast food but K-pop demon hunters probably you've heard of it because it's the biggest movie ever on Netflix it became the biggest movie ever on Netflix in 67 days after launching earlier this year and not only is it the most popular film ever on Netflix it also has had four simultaneous top 10 billboard hits like its album its its soundtrack is on its own just some of the most successful music ever period on top of being netflix's biggest movie ever so i looked into this i was like how much is that worth?

Well, probably the franchise of K-pop demon hunters is worth billions and billions of

dollars. Billions? This year.
Yeah. We're talking more than bluey? Frozen?

Frozen, the franchise, estimated about 10 billion of value because they made 3 billion in theaters from Frozen 1 and 2, a little less.

They make hundreds of millions with music sales and theme parks, and then $5 to $6 billion in consumer merch products.

Frozen was the number one licensed merch brand in the world for several years. K-pop Demon Hunters is now the most popular movie, and kids everywhere fucking love it.

But then the funny, funny, hilarious thing, the goofy thing for Sony is that Sony made it.

It's the same studio who made the Spider-Verse movies. So like they are really good.
That's like they're incredible.

And actually someone in my community, a friend, I've like went and saw their studio and I got to see them working on it. It's super cool.
That's awesome. So, and that team is just insanely talented.

So So Sony made the movie, but they agreed to make it in 2021 with Netflix. So this was like, you know, still pandemic happening and Netflix wanted a bunch of original movies.

And Sony was like, Sony Pictures was like, well, it's kind of risky time. Theaters are still up in the air.
We will make a deal with Netflix to just make you a bunch of movies.

So Netflix agreed for this particular one, they would pay the $100 million to make K-pop demon hunters. So they'd cover the costs and then a $20 million profit.

And that was a great deal for Sony, right? And particularly at that point, it was just an idea.

And, you know, like, probably if you heard this when I did, I was like, that's a, that's a funny idea. It's about K-pop idols who also hunt demons.

At no point, I was like, this will be the biggest movie ever.

So Sony made $20 million from this whole thing. Netflix, it's their biggest movie ever.
And now it's probably worth billions and billions of dollars. They have all the rights.

And so, again, it cost them $120 million all in for this movie. For a comparison, they paid $465 465 million just for the Seinfeld reruns.

So this is like maybe their best investment ever by a wide, I mean, this is like crazy, crazy, crazy. Sony has the rights to negotiate the sequels.

So for any future one, Sony can say like, we're not going to make you K-pop Demon Hunters 2. They can make it with someone else, right? No, so Sony can make it with someone else.

Yeah, but then Sony's weird because they're like the only big giant movie production company that doesn't have a streaming service, right?

So they don't have a platform that they can go dump dump it onto to try to make it themselves.

And Netflix is, you know, basically in the stronger negotiating position because they're like, our audience would want this. We have this.
And we made your movie a hit. Like, give it to us again.

So there's going to be an interesting negotiation. But basically, Sony made this thing, gave it out for cheap.
Netflix is like, holy shit, amazing.

And even the, I believe, CFO of Sony a few months earlier before the movie came out was like, the one thing we struggle with is original IP. You know, we have Spider-Man

and that's kind of it, but we got to make some more original IP. And then they sell K-pop demon hunters to Netflix.

Dude, around that same time, they did that movie, The Gray Mage. Did you guys ever see that? With Ryan Gosling or whatever? That cost like $350 million to make was a big flop.
The Gray Mage?

The Gray Man. You didn't see it? No.
This is the most expensive movie Netflix ever made. Their original.

Dude. They got like all these big stars in it.
It was a total, like it was completely forgotten about. Yeah.
I've never even heard of it. Oh, my God.
I watched it. It was a snooze.

Ryan Gosling, Anade Armas, Chris Evans.

Yeah, it's like this huge action movie. You can just feel the budget on every scene.
Big flop. It's directed by the Russo brothers.
Yeah, dude. Dude, wow.

All out, and it was like, I've never even heard of it. They just threw a couple chump chains at K-pop Demon Hunters and it blew this out of the water.
It's so funny.

I mean, that's been Netflix's thing, right? Like, they poured endless amounts of money into, I don't know, whatever, Stranger Things final season, and then Squid Game pops out. Yeah.

It's like the biggest thing of all time.

A nice.

I mean, they just, you know, they're the only profitable streaming service so like it's working whatever they're doing as much as i hate that they constantly cancel shows and are just super inconsistent every time yeah as incredibly obnoxious as that is it's like man dude their strategy seems to work they just tried lots of things and then they're like a vc company they just they just back everything and then a couple they get a couple unicorns and it all pays out that's exactly what i was i was thinking super vc approach Now we've truly covered 2025.

I don't think we missed anything. I don't think we missed anything.
Except the two stories we we also prepped but didn't include in this episode. But nothing else.

Well, thank you guys for tuning in to another episode 11A stand. I think the two topics we were going to talk about the reduction in homicides in Baltimore.

We should follow that up, which we will definitely talk about on another episode. That's super heartwarming.
Super, super nice to hear. Yeah, actually, let's just say that.

Even if you don't listen to our Patreon that you can access for $5 a month, blah, blah, blah.

There's like a really good story coming out of America. We have an American city that's like making real progress on crime and community involvement.
And it's, yeah, there's good happening.

It's an amazing, amazing story.

And I want to shout out one commenter who I owe a follow-up on from a long time ago.

It's when we talked about the UK a bit and the threat of like millionaires and or billionaires like leaving the country with their money, the way they hid that money in like places abroad.

There's a really good comment on that episode that pointed me towards a report that came out this year from tax justice,

this organization, about

going through the kind of myth of millionaire flight. And I really want to cover that on another episode too.
So those are like the two stories that we'll bring back another time.

But yeah, if you want an extra hour of the show every week, you can check out patreon.com slash lemonade stand and

we'll see you guys soon. Thanks for watching.
Bold nudity on there. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a lot. It's mostly

graphic on it. Mostly nudity.

I got something to tell you guys. I've been looking for new jobs.

I'm done with the show. I've been sending out a ton of resumes lately, but I opened it up.
Like I've been sending it out for weeks.

And instead of my resume, it's just the word Doug Duck over and over again. Like your book.
Oh, cool. Yeah, that was my fault.
I replaced all the documents in your computer.

Yeah, but now it's set in stone. How did you edit it? It's set in stone because it's PDF.
How did you change it? Well, see, with Adobe Acrobat Studio, you can actually edit PDFs in place.

And so if you break into your friend's home in the middle of the night and you get on his computer, you can literally just edit the text inside of a PDF. You can inside you can collaborate.

You can always do that if you broke into their home. You broke into my home?

And then opened up Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Where can I learn about it? Oh, you can learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. To be clear, I want you to leave and I helped your resume.
I worked on that.

We collaborated on this using the collaboration features of adobe.com slash do that. Get me out of the podcast.

They're ruining my resume that would allow me to leave the podcast you know we didn't think that through

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