Applying to Jobs in 2025 | Lemonade Stand 🍋

17:12Atrioc:Okay, two questions slash follows. One, it looks like that because of the drop to June that we're actually comparable to the previous two years. If you look at where the dot is on June. That's right. So what I heard you saying is like it's worse than previous years. To me, it seems like if you look at where the dot is on June, we are comparable to 2023 and 2024 right now.

17:34Aiden:But from what they're saying in the report, the expectation is that given the following month, it's going to bounce back aggressively above the other.

17:41Atrioc:The way I would read this so far, I mean, it jumped up aggressively last year in July. I mean, for people who are listening online, basically we're looking at how much money we've spent this year, how much deficit we're in this year versus previous years. As far as I can tell, this is like exactly, at least very similar. It's very similar in line with 23 and 24. That's correct. Yeah. But, you know, as I said, but also as Trump said, or Scott Besson said, these Biden deficits are unsustainable. They're horrendous. Right, right. They are as bad as the previous one. And they're as bad. They've approved nothing.

18:12Aiden:Yeah, I guess it is kind of a weird thing where Biden's last two years were some of the more ridiculous spending that has ever happened. Yeah. So the idea that if we're meeting that as the bar, that it's not even remotely good. Yeah, those were terrible. And they were rallied against rightly by Scott Besson. And, you know, they would have a trillion dollar deficits every hundred days. And it's like we're in the same zone. And by the end of the year, you know, my expectation is that the 25 number is going to be higher than 23 and 24, just based on the big, beautiful bill and the tax cuts. So we'll see.

18:44I don't know. But I just, it's certainly not better. And you're implying that it is.

18:49Atrioc:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have another question. So this tweet by the White House, this was, I think, last week. They tweet so much. I tried to find this tweet again today. There was like 300 tweets I had to go through. My God. and so they basically said we've this year we've gotten 150 billion of tariff revenue so this is the first half of the year we're halfway through right a little more 150 billion in theory that means we will be making 300 billion by the end of the year in tariff revenue that wasn't there before you know asterisk asterisk as a reminder the way i like to think about this just simplifies things every year the u.s government spends two trillion dollars more than we make if we can get that down to zero then at least we aren't losing more money every year that is the goal, right?

19:30Atrioc:So 150 billion already, and then 300, let's say if you double it by the end of the year, that's a decent chunk, right? That's not bad in terms of working down the deficit. And what I was thinking about is, while they certainly haven't explained it like this, as we've talked about, tariffs are basically a tax on American consumers. This isn't money that is appearing out of thin air. This 150 billion is, like Americans have paid this. And what I was wondering is, like, was it their intention that with the big, beautiful bill, they cut taxes a lot, which loses revenue for the United States, but they're basically just introducing a different type of tax with tariffs.

20:04Atrioc:And so even though they're portraying it as like, look, you have all freedom for money and we're shutting down unfair trade deals, really what they're doing is saying, we'll lower your income tax, we'll increase your tariff tax. Does that feel like it makes sense? Do you think that's what Besant is maybe doing here?

20:17Aiden:That was part of the rationalization when we discussed the big, beautiful bill. they did say they were insisting that even though this is creating such a massive deficit on paper the revenue is to be made up by the tariff yeah but you know but it doesn't they also but they

20:35Atrioc:keep framing it as like tariffs are great for the americans and low taxes are great for the americans i think probably internally they were like look tariffs are not going to be good for the average american the tax could be good maybe these offset and so i'm wondering if there's like a little more thought to it than maybe we thought yeah maybe but the problem is that the tariff is a tax on people that buy and consume regular cheap goods. So it's like the average person is paying these taxes and the tax cuts are primarily on wealthier people. So we've replaced taxes on corporations and the rich with a tax on you buying toys from China and buying steel from other countries and buying...

21:12It's just... It's worse. Well, whatever. I mean, let's listen. All this would be fine if our number is 2 trillion and we're raising some tariff revenue. My expectation is that this is going to cause problems in the job markets. We're going to raise less money. We're going to have fewer people employed in GDP growth and jobs numbers. And we're going to talk about that. Problems in the job market.

21:37Aiden:Problems in the job market. Something interesting happened recently. On August 1st, a report was released by the Department of Labor under the commissioner Erica McIntarfer. I don't know what's her last name. And this jobs report noted that through July, there was only an additional 73 ,000 jobs created. And it also notably reduced the number of jobs that they had initially reported from the previous two months. So they had previously said that in May, there was 144 ,000 jobs that had been created. And in June, 147 ,000 jobs created. and those were reduced to 19 ,000 and 14 ,000 respectively, which is a massive drop.

22:25Atrioc:Also, can you guys, because I didn't look into this much specifically, is the idea that the government estimates the amount of jobs that are created and they're like, this is what we think is happening and then a month later, they look at what actually happened and what does the revision mean? What's the process here for how it changes that much?

22:39Aiden:I mean, the short version is that as more time passes, more data becomes available to accurately estimate these things.

22:45Atrioc:So they retroactively go back and say, We were wrong. Here's the real number.

22:49Aiden:And these corrections are pretty normal. Like this happens frequently. This going back into the past to correct data based on new information that we get happens all the time. What was particularly shocking about this was the scale of the revision. So the amount that this got reduced by. And I think just looking at the numbers, this feels pretty scary, right? Can you pull up slide four actually? Because it describes visually what you were just saying. Well, slide four, I drew what the numbers were when they first announced. So you can see there was 144 ,000 new jobs revised down to 19, 147 down to 14.

23:22And when these numbers were announced, these were celebrated. These were like, you know, good numbers. Jobs are in the right direction. We have hundreds of thousands of new jobs pouring into America. And now the revision is such that 250 ,000 less jobs than they thought. These were pretty terrible months. In fact, you can see the worst months in recent history, like terrible job growth.

23:43Aiden:And the theory as to why there's been such a sharp fall off from my understanding.

23:48Atrioc:Because she's a liberal cuck. Yes. She, yes.

23:52Aiden:Well, that's coming in at number one. Okay. That was the watch mojo number one. Yeah. And then another thing that I had seen was shorter, the staff that is available to capture and calculate the data across the board at departments like this or in other parts of the government that produce relevant data to calculate these numbers are increasingly short-staffed. There's been a lot of staff cuts over the years because of the doge cuts that had happened earlier on. So there's fewer federal employees managing and interacting with data that informs this type of reporting. And then also, there is a huge difference in the expected amount of seasonal labor that was supposed to come in.

24:34Aiden:So during the summer months, there's a huge amount of expected summer work or seasonal work, and this excludes farm work, it mentioned. But that boost in seasonal employment is not happening at all. And it's way, way lower than expected. And it does get into the details of what sectors are loosely losing positions and what sectors are increasing their hiring still. The only place that's seeing big leaps in hiring is in healthcare sectors. Healthcare sectors are really desperate and stretched for people right now. And I think specifically like elderly care or taking care of the old people. And the jobs are only to get rid of, to take care of the boomers with money.

25:23Yeah. The jobs revised down is like construction is down, manufacturing's down, uh retails down like every job that would be considered um to do well in a good economy is all being revised down and the only thing up is health care and then some government like like teacher jobs like those are the only things that are growing and so uh all private sectors are down private sector employment is down it's a bad report and in well this is the this is the

25:54Aiden:crazy thing in the wake of this report and the adjustments of these numbers uh miss uh mcintarfer or i apologies it's a tough name to say miss miss woke uh apparently was fudging the numbers and trump has just fired her uh this is to me insane you i i feel like this is the type of thing that, and I know this sits within a sea of actions, and I know this isn't the first red flag or something along the way. I just think it is so insane to read a headline like this about the American president. It speaks so much to the situation that I think we have arrived in, where the president of the country gets a labor report that he doesn't like that indicates that he's doing a bad job, and then he just fires her and then says she made up all the numbers.

26:51Aiden:while he also pressures the chairman of the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. So it's like, to me, it's like, which one is it? Do we have a record-breaking economy that is doing things it's never done before, like you say all the time? Well, then why do we need to lower the interest rates? Why are you doing everything you can to ask Jerome Powell from power? No, I think you made a really good point there. I just want to explain if you're more casual on interest rates and your eyes glaze over or whatever. You know, Trump has been really hammering Jerome Powell to lower interest rates.

27:25And when you do that, it's a sign that, you know, like if you raise them, that means inflation is the biggest problem. And if you lower them, that means employment is the biggest problem. Like that's the general, so the only reason you'd lower them is if you thought, oh man, the economy, the jobs market's getting really bad. So this report is a blessing to everything Trump has been saying. Like he could have pointed us and said, look, we need to lower interest rates. Jobs are terrible. but instead he is calling it fake news. In fact, jobs are great. We have tons of jobs, but also we need to desperately lower interest rates.

27:55It just doesn't, it doesn't have any logical through line. Now, I think you have a thing you want to show from Ray. Yeah. So I want to,

28:03Atrioc:I want to present a counterpoint with the normal caveat of like, look, I don't deeply know or believe this stuff, but Ray Dalio, who is the CEO, I believe CEO, well, anyway, head of Bridgewater Capital. So he's considered one of the most legendary investors of all time. Somebody who at least a truck and I respect, lot we're gonna be reading this book on the patreon where we have a book club every month and there's been some great episodes recently you can go check it out blah blah blah however um so he mentioned something and he comes out this is a trusted like bipartisan guy who says i probably would have fired the head of the bureau of labor statistics too that's because it's a process for making estimates is obviously obsolete and error prone and there's no good plan in the works for fixing it goes on to talk more and then he at the end he says like look if the motivation from trump firing this person is political, like he just doesn't like what they're producing, then that is obviously not okay.

28:49Atrioc:So he acknowledges that. And let's be honest, probably that was most of Trump's, uh, you know, motivation, right? But looking at that graph earlier, the estimates originally were, let's say 150 ,000 jobs created. And then retroactively they go, we were wrong. It was 15 ,000 to me as an uninformed person seems like they did a shitty job. If you are that far off. If you as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics are what, like 10 times off in your estimates and the country is going off of that. And then a month later, you're like, hey, sorry, I messed up. That's not messing up a little bit. That's like deeply and fundamentally being wrong to a degree.

29:25Atrioc:That's like, you don't seem competent. I say that as an outside party who doesn't know the actual process, but that's what Ray Dalio is expressing here as well of like, look, the private markets understand the actual numbers to a more accurate degree. Why is the Bureau of Labor statistics not doing that either regardless of what trump is doing and why this doesn't seem like it's being done competently i'm curious what you guys think so first full disclosure this is an

29:49Aiden:argument that i need to spend more time digging into because i don't understand statistics well enough to to give it but reading through other people's responses to this argument because i do think that this argument is really a lot of people do feel this way it's like if the revisions are this wild and if they feel this inaccurate, if the process is this bad, then how could they be doing a good job to begin with? Has this approach completely fallen out of favor? From attempting to read people who have a stronger grasp of statistics than me, they're saying that those people have a flawed understanding of how these reports are put together.

30:32Aiden:And I think there is something underlying here that I'm unable to explain to you about the process by which these reports are put together that is missing or difficult to do and not just because these people are bad at their job. I think that is something really important. And also, like I said at the beginning, these revisions happen all the time and they have happened for years. So the fact that you're stepping up at now, at this time, because of this, in response to this specific issue, whereas you have years and years prior to this to make something like this.

31:05Atrioc:Years and years of them doing a bad job. it would be the counter argument.

31:08Aiden:Yeah, because you could, in my opinion, it's like, you could have made this decision three months ago, four months ago, if you were upset at the process by how which it was done. And Trump has also offered no explanation as to the technicalities of why he's removing this person.

31:20Atrioc:There's the obvious thing here, which is Trump has a storied history of firing people who don't do things the way he wants them, right? So like, come on, that's obviously what happened here. But there is this argument of like, why is it this inaccurate? Yeah, I want to jump in. Okay, so there's a couple things. I can totally agree. I've talked about this well before Trump came into office, that the BLS has been consistently wrong and consistently revising down. And I want to challenge one thing you said. You said they often, you know, it's very standard to revise later. Yeah. That's true. The BLS has been around for decades, right?

31:52But for the longest time, they would have had a pretty even amount of revising up and revising down. They might undershoot it. They might overshoot it. Recently, as in the past few years, it has been a consistent pattern of starting out too high and then later quietly revising down, which is a pattern that is woke. I don't know if it's, I don't know what it is, but it's, it's, they're clearly overstating the health of the economy. Now, I don't mean that's, I don't think it's a, I fully disagree with the thing that it's like political or planner. They're like sneakily changing the numbers. I think my understanding is that there's two parts to it.

32:28Number one, survey data has fallen off a cliff. People no longer respond to the surveys they use to help get an accurate data of the environment. So second thing, they've been job cut. They've been slowly but surely squeezing the number of people. So they have fewer people getting fewer accurate data from response surveys. That has made them less and less likely to be accurate. The second thing is they use this thing called the birth-death adjustment. So they'll get the survey data and they'll make this thing called the birth-death adjustment. It's not about births and deaths of humans. It's about births and deaths of companies.

33:03So basically they'll say like, oh, well, we know that there was a registration of 10 ,000 new companies. On average, a new company will hire seven people. So we're going to say there was 70 ,000 new jobs. That's the idea. The birth of a new company leads to this much average new jobs. Well, it turns out post, let's say COVID, but even before that, in the smartphone era, the birth of a new company is primarily a single person Uber driver, a OnlyFans creator, that is where the majority of new company registrations are. And so they're still adding seven or six new jobs to the economy.

33:38Aiden:So I was going to ask, I understood this. And isn't that why the overestimation is the consistent part? We're more likely to be overestimating because this is the guess. Yes, but they have not adjusted this obvious flaw in their data for now years. So again, we just all know why Trump did this. He hasn't even hidden it at all. He just calls her woke news fake. It's not like, he's like, you know what? I think statistically there could be some updates to the model. He very clearly has, actually there's clips of it. We're not going to have it here. But in previous months when the jobs numbers are good, he lauds it.

34:16He praises it.

34:17Aiden:I think maybe if I were to use, let's completely leave this example, right? It's imagine we're in China like a year ago. Yeah. And we have a problem with rising youth unemployment. It's starting to skyrocket. There's a bunch of just young university grads who have nowhere to go. They have no jobs to get. This part of the economy and the job market is really struggling. And we keep publishing the increasing data from internally within the government, right? and that goes out to, anybody in the world can look at that data and see the rising youth unemployment in China. And then the Chinese government decides we're not going to make that or publish that report anymore.

34:56Aiden:And then I, as a third party,

35:03Aiden:Ray Wong, say, I come in and I report. It's like, well, they weren't that great at reporting the youth unemployment statistics all along, like, it probably is good that they stop making the report and they can revise it. It's like, maybe that's true. But, the timing is crazy. You have chosen specifically to do it now when, even by your own standard, the problem has existed for a long time. So even if you were to take that argument. 100%. And I want to call it one specific thing because Trump has directly lied on something he keeps saying about this, which he said, this very partisan hack right before the election was putting great jobs numbers out for Biden.

35:46And then right after the election, revised them down 800 ,000, the biggest revision ever. And it's so clearly, and he changed the month by one. And it's so annoying because they did do that major revision down before the election, one month before instead of one month after. And so it actually was really damaging to Biden. I remember it because I made a video out of the time. It was like right before the election, they said, actually, there was way fewer jobs than thought. And it really hurt Biden. but he is saying it like they did it. Oh, listen, I do think they've been consistently wrong and maybe you could change it, but it just, there's no doubt in anyone's mind.

36:22We're all like playing along like WWE or something. Like we know why he did this. He's like Thanos with the reality stone, you know,

36:29Atrioc:he's like, they turned down the numbers. All the Gen Z viewers perked up. Yeah. Oh, you know, he's like reality is whatever I want to make it. It's so cool. He just tweets. Okay. His Twitter is his reality stone. And he just, He just does whatever he wants. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's fucking wild. So I want to, I want to, you know, I'm sure you have more to say, but I want to kick off. We're going to talk about people's actual experience in the job market. Yeah, absolutely. You have actual interviews with people. Yeah. But I want to show something. So slide eight is the unemployment rate, which has now ticked up to a local high of 4.2%.

37:02However, if you hit the next slide, it's actually, so the orange line is the unemployment rate. It's actually relatively low. Like, look how, you know, 4.1, 4.2 is in the long scheme of the past, you know, couple decades.

37:15Atrioc:Okay. So for audio listeners and myself. So right now, unemployment rate is 4%, right? Is that correct? 4.2. 4.2. It's a little out of date, but. Actually, like, one of the lowest of the last 30 years. Right. Like, it looks pretty good. Now, one thing you'll notice on that orange line is that when the unemployment rate starts to tick up, it usually doesn't stop until you're in a recession. Like, you can see the examples in the past. So that would be 2001 over there. Spikes in 2001. goes up in 2008, spikes in 2008, goes up in COVID, huge spike. So there's rarely a situation you can see on this entire graph where it goes up and then goes down.

37:47When it starts rising, it's called the SOM rule. It basically says if over three months you're seeing rising unemployment, it's a good trigger of a recession. And again, Claudia SOM has disputed it around this because this is post COVID and things are weird. So I wanna say this white line is surveys of job goers on how hard it is for them to find and keep a job over the next six months. That's what they're saying. You'll notice for all of 30 years of history, this white line and this orange line have stayed pretty lockstep. They've stayed like survey goers have been pretty good at saying when things are good or bad.

38:23Atrioc:Based on the actual unemployment data. Yes. Yeah. There's a strong connection between what they're saying and what we're seeing on the actual data. Around COVID, around 2018, 2019 and beyond, there's been this massive divergence, this big gap. And what my, again, this is the work of like Mike Green. I don't want to take credit for it. But the theory is that this gap is because of things like the gig economy, like Uber, like OnlyFans, like all this stuff that has made people no longer file for unemployment, even when they've lost their job, because it's not worth the hassle and they can get more money quicker by just plugging into the gig economy.

39:02But their jobs are so lost because this survey is about like real jobs. And so based on this graph, if the orange line was tracking the white line, like it had done historically, we would be closer to like a six, seven, 8 % unemployment. We were much higher. And that is the economy that people are feeling, but that is not what the data is showing. So if you go to the next line, I just want to, the next slide, last thing I'll say, again, I'm not a statistician. This is off of work of people smarter than me, but I've done my best to really understand it. This black line on this one is, all this data comes from the few states where you're not allowed to drive Uber under 25.

39:41So it gives us a really rare insight into what happens when you get unemployed and you can't drive Uber. Like say you're a 24 year old and you get unemployed. So you'll notice previously, the black line, this is people who can't drive Uber, has always been under the orange line. okay it's always been less just now it is higher so uh people who are 16 to 24 in few states where this happens they are having a worse unemployment rate than people who can drive the drive uber this is like a weird statistical anomaly that is showing that like in in the few areas we can see the difference uber is making a massive difference people are that can do it are not filing for unemployment.

40:22And so the data is being skewed. So I just want to bring this up just to show that I think a huge part of this is the gig economy. And I've surveyed my own viewers and many of them that are recently employed said it's such a massive hassle to go through all the paperwork to file for really meager unemployment benefits. And also you can't claim them while you're driving Uber. So you have to choose one or the other and it's much easier. So all this to say that I think my theory is that the labor market is already sounds bad it is worse than that it is worse than what we are getting at but i think we're going to hear from actual people maybe aiden if you have like yeah can you give us your contact because you brought this topic up like this is

41:03Aiden:your yeah i mean the main thing that's been sitting with me is i feel like anecdotally i've been seeing this unfold over the past two years just in group chats uh of personal friends or people I know where they share experiences of what it's like to apply for jobs or finding a job. Most of these people in their early 20s to early 30s and what that experience is like right now. And I reached out to our Discord, which you can join if you check out patreon.com. But getting a surveying a bunch of people through there and then also asking a bunch of personal friends what their experiences are actually like right now and across a bunch of different industries.

41:43Aiden:So one, starting in tech, which I think has notably suffered in the last couple years, an example, like a friend who is an engineer, somebody who was looking for a job for nine months and just managed to recently get one. in that time, putting together 500 plus applications. Jesus. Managing mostly to get a few interviews through either recruiting opportunities that didn't translate into anything or a friend of a friend who actually results in the application seeing more than just submitting it, right? And then just talk to a friend who's a UX researcher. She was out of work for a year and a half searching for jobs that whole time.

42:26Aiden:and she finally landed a gig recently. But before she got this full-time gig, she was applying to a position at this competitor to Kindle, she was saying, and she landed the interview. She was one of five people to get interviewed. There were 500 people who applied to that position, that one part-time position at this company. And she, from her perspective, she'd been looking for work for so long that I kind of need to take anything. all apply to this part-time job instead of a full-time one. I'm insanely overqualified. I have like six years of experience in this field. I worked at a successful tech company before this.

43:06Aiden:And let me see if I get this job. She doesn't get that gig, even though she's incredibly overqualified. The person who gets it out of the five is a person with 10 years of experience in their field and had worked at Kindle before this for a part-time position. And she's, you know, she's managed to land on her feet now. But another friend who is, he does like analytics work. So he initially wanted to do like sports analytics, get into something like the NFL or, you know, a traditional sport environment, right? He had an internship with a company that was in this space for a while. It ends in July of last year.

43:52Aiden:And he was hoping to leverage that either into a position in the industry in general or at the same company, but neither happened. And he widens what he's applying for over time, different like general corporate analysis positions or corporate analytics positions. Yeah, take anything. And will take anything. He sent over 600 applications in the 11th month period, and he just got a job last month. and then for people in like somebody who does like biology or works comes from like the field of biology worked in research is at some sort of like biotech company now I think he had applied to about 50 jobs before getting one he said but only got it because of a referral from a professor that he had worked with before and a big issue in this industry this year is that all the cancellation of like federal funding and grants that came with the cuts at the beginning of the year affects the whole world of academia and research.

44:51Aiden:And he said, because that part of the industry is so tied into the private industry, it's had effects on their ability to hire in that world as well. And he also noted that with all the changes to visas and immigration this year, that a lot of like student visas and H-1B visas that fill out a lot of this work are not getting renewed. So a lot of these international people that work in these jobs or at these companies aren't getting hired back anymore. He also noted that as of this year, international workers aren't eligible to receive grants for funding in any of these science fields that he works in, specific to biology.

45:31Aiden:And I asked him, I was like, say I'm a Trump supporter. And I'm like, you know these visas aren't getting renewed uh these opera the grants aren't getting given to foreigners anymore this is a renewed opportunity for americans in academia like american citizens these jobs are available to americans now and he was like the issue with that is they weren't getting walled out before this is this is not an area where americans weren't getting hired because these opportunities weren't available uh like these people were coming in because it's fills the gap of an area where we couldn't get enough Americans into these positions to begin with.

46:11Aiden:And he noted that like the institution he works for, he said, also, I'm not trying to flex, but for context, the institution and labs I've been at have all been at the top of the field. My last lab was working right next to a lab that just won the Nobel Prize. So the fact that even we are struggling is pretty crazy. I can only imagine what it's like at smaller institutions. And he said that in the context of his, in his business, China and Europe are investing so heavily in his field of work that as we like shut down opportunities and money into his field, it strengthens the industries in those areas because it's where people turn to for opportunity.

46:49Aiden:um and then uh the last person i wanted to talk to worked in the film and tv industry so he was a post-production guy on a reality on reality tv shows for a long time he worked part-time or america's strongest industry love island and love island uk show oh really uh they're taking our fucking jobs uh he we're still running he was talking about in 2017 or 2017 to 2020 worked contract. This industry is growing. He's developing a lot of connections. He's getting a lot of work, lands a full-time position at one of the companies that he's a relationship with, and works there from 2020 until 2023. During this time period, they are doing really well.

47:33Aiden:He said he's getting paid amazingly well. He loves his job. That was boom years for TV shows. All the streamers were competing. Exactly. Yeah. It was just like an amazing time to be in that industry, right? And then he said since then, because this COVID entertainment bubble has kind of popped, like all these large companies in the space are consolidating and making more and more cuts. The reactions or some of the reactions around the union negotiations that were happening, all of these things that are happening at the same time result in the industry. And then the last thing was a lot of the industry leaving Los Angeles, like not wanting to work in LA anymore and finding cheaper places to do cheaper work outside of here.

48:15Aiden:And he hasn't had any work in this industry for like two years now. And he said it's like the worst time in his life. He's really, and he's really struggling because he's dealing with the fact that he invested all this time in his career, all of this experience, all of this, you know, his education to work in this specific field. And it feels like it doesn't translate very well anymore. He doesn't have somewhere to turn to. In the meantime, he's done some editing work for like Twitch streamers and YouTubers where he can find it, contract things that aren't very consistent. And then he ended up getting like, but as time passed, he opened the doors to anything.

48:53Aiden:He said he had just done a test and applied to become like a 911 operator.

49:01He, where is it?

49:03Aiden:He applied to be a debate coach at a high school to work worker comp claims, like insurance claims. applied to a bunch of sales jobs. Like we'll take anything. And he currently works at Dodger Stadium and part-time at Spirit Halloween. And that's what he's doing right now. And he's gone from, you know, super successful career where he was making enough money for both him and his wife to like live comfortably to the situation he's in now where both of them are struggling and they're just trying to figure out how to make ends meet. And he's 30. Well, I heard from Trump it's the greatest economy ever.

49:39and things are bobbing. So I don't understand how to square that circle.

49:42Aiden:But it's the last thing I wanted to touch on is like we said one field is experiencing like a lot of people hiring right now, right? It's in medicine, it's in taking care of the elderly. And one person in the Discord stuck out to me specifically and they said they're 38 years old. Basically the job market is in a weird spot because they're constantly poaching people from different positions or different healthcare groups or different hospitals to fill positions. but the game like never ends right now because people keep leaving ship or they keep pulling people from different departments. Well, it doesn't sound so bad for the workers.

50:14Like if they're getting poached left and right, they're getting good pay bumps.

50:18Aiden:He expands a bit. He said, recently left my first job post-training, which was a fully outpatient, no nights, no weekends job because it was owned by a private equity company. And the day-to-day experience was awful as was the compensation relative to the market rate. It was very easy to find a new job but not easy to find one where you don't have to compromise on several things you don't like because now every job has its downsides in the industry. So to get better pay and better management run by doctors and not MBAs, the trade-off is working call shifts at night or weekends again. Most of us in medicine feel like the system is holding on by a thread and will collapse in just a matter of when, not if.

51:01Aiden:And then he goes on to explain why the field isn't as appealing as it used to be. But just, you know, this is all anecdotal. And I understand that, right? But even talking to other friends that work in healthcare, they all feel really similarly. That the system is very stretched. The amount of like time and shifts that they have to put in, there aren't enough people to fill positions. And I think when you work in a context of healthcare, where the difference in you, you know, choosing to stay a few extra hours and help people out or take on a long shift is dealing with another person's health or livelihood.

51:34Aiden:there's a lot of mental pressure on you to do a good job that's what i hear from from people it's not as hard as being a streamer but i understand i get like in general what you're saying but i really appreciate everybody writing in here is like across all of these fields like whether you know regardless of what they are the common huge huge common themes i saw were uh spending tons of time sending in a ridiculous amount of applications most of which don't even get a response or if you do land an interview not getting a response after that no one contacting you after your interview can i ask did anyone bring up like ghost jobs that's what i hear about so much is that like was it was that part of i didn't read i didn't i didn't read i think from my understanding of ghost jobs i think part of the issue is like it's if you're applying to them it's not actually clear if it was a ghost job ever right you never know where you never get a response i see there's a lot of people finding a lot of people saying they have spent a ton of time applying to jobs and a really common message they got back was this position was just filled so that could be that

52:37Atrioc:right um ghost job meaning a company posts a listing that they have no intention of actually yes just to seem like they're still growing just seemed like to appear good and apparently like like the numbers are impossible to verify because no one's going to tell you what's a ghost job but the stats i've seen are like it could be as high as like 70 in some industries where you're 70 % of what you're seeing as jobs available are not real. They're just, every company has at least a few ghost jobs to pretend like they're not in a death spiral.

53:06Aiden:With all of these people, especially in these industries that I think have experienced a ton of downsizing, like techs, like you've dumped all of these people out of the workforce and have a limited amount of positions to apply to that are still available. It's like each one of these incoming, like if you're on the recruiting side, You're getting hundreds of applications right now to sort through and figuring out how to manage that. Did they ever mention ChatGPT? Because I know that's been a big fucking crazy thing in jobs right now. Some people were mentioning the discomfort of the way that they were declined or received messages after their either application or interview.

53:49Aiden:So they said, a few people noted that the way they got a message or the, I think that the specific example I can remember was one person said that they got a message back from a normal, they got a call from an actual human being and that said they were confirmed for the interview, but then got an automated message like a day later that said that their position was declined. And that is something that gets automated by people using chat gpt to like sort through applications um the the other thing people said i mean this has always been the case i can't imagine a time in history where you don't recommendations don't make you go a little further but the what i gathered from reading through a bunch of people's responses is that recommendations or are have gone from like something you need sometimes to something you need basically all the time.

54:47Aiden:It is the number one difference maker. Brian from Riot and Blizzard, he's a recruiter and I talked to him. And basically my understanding is that nowadays if you put out a job application, you're going to get 500 plus chat GPT written resumes and cover letters for that job. And it's impossible to differentiate outside of like incredible background that like you can't fake. But like for most people, you can't even tell from the – it's all ChadGBT, right? And so they're using AI to sort these and it's AI going in and AI coming out. So the only way is a recommendation. Like you said, that's like their only unique thing is to find a human being that will say vouch for you because the numbers are staggering.

55:36They're impossible for a human being to go through for everything.

55:38Aiden:It was interesting.

55:39Atrioc:Sorry, go ahead. It makes me feel like often people talk about the main point of college is just to network. That's the real value of it. And I think I pushed back against that when I was in college. I was like, no, I'm learning how to program. I'm learning this concrete skill, and that skill is going to get me a job. And it feels like across all industries now, including computer science, looking at the responses from people in the Discord, it's like, no, having a computer science degree is not that helpful anymore. but then the people who are like oh i got a job in the cs industry almost every at least every single person i saw is like well i had a friend who worked there right yeah so even the industries that it felt like you could really like build this portfolio that just gets you this rock solid foot in that doesn't work anymore and it's so weird to say but i would my sense uh is that if you're trying to get into computer science it is more important to make connections with people than to learn how to program that would be my advice crazy right which is a very weird thing yeah and I guess just to quickly add on to that, I, so I would screen, uh, resumes at EA when I worked there 10 years ago, even then when there was many fewer applicants, if you get, for example, you do a job posting, you're like, we need a, a entry level computer scientist to help us with this particular role while we're managing data.

56:46Atrioc:And so I would be for our team, I would be one of the people who would screen through resumes. And I can tell you on the human experience side, if you get, and I don't know if you guys have gone through applications, you get a hundred resumes, they start to all blend together. Yes. Like it is so unbelievably hard. Not only do they blend together, unless you are going to spend an hour on every single person, which would then take you a month to go through, which is not feasible. You have to kind of just go through and just try to look for a couple things that stand out notably. And then if you were told by a friend, somebody you trust, Oh, this person I know is applying.

57:19Atrioc:He's really good. That's top of the stack right away. You set it to the side. You're looking for maybe two or three others because it's just not feasible at all. And I imagine that, but times 10. And if it was 5 ,000 applications, it's like the only possible way to, you know, ChatGPT is evening what everything looks like. Yeah, it seems like just incredibly brutal.

57:37Aiden:This person, want ramens in the Discord, spoke directly to what it's like on the recruiting side. He was describing his own personal opportunity perspective of applying, but then he said, on the flip side, I've been part of hiring and the reverse experience is equally as insane. applications now reaching triple digits with HR being extremely strict with guardrails to the point where I'm pretty sure it's on a whim. Can you imagine that? Someone who isn't even in the field has to sort out and bring the best candidates to you, but they don't know exactly what they are reading. High quality talent is extremely hard to come by.

58:11Aiden:I get random messages on LinkedIn asking me to recommend them. And when asking where I met them, they literally said we haven't, but it's hard to find a job mostly mostly people who are on visas um yeah so i wanted to ask you guys because because uh we've been around in a different environment and i want just for me sorry i keep leaning back i know uh it's so obvious you know i feel like i'm being gaslit constantly because the vibe is so clearly different something it can't be um like we were around in in like the 2014, 15, in the era when, I'm not saying it was easy. The job wasn't just handed to you.

58:53Atrioc:It was if you were in computer science. You were handed jobs as you left Berkeley. That's why everybody got those coding boot camps and everything, because the path to getting a job was so... Tech was desperate for talent, and that is completely reversed. And maybe this is tech bias, I understand, because I'm in that area, and that's the people I talk to, a lot of friends I have in that area, But it's so obvious that the people now are not, I don't know, working less hard or whatever. It's just different. Like it was easier. It was easier before and now it is harder. And you can't tell me that like the unemployment rate is the same or that the economy is booming.

59:31It's just – it clearly isn't. Everybody has a story like this. This is not – this is like a day or two in the news court.

59:37Aiden:No, I mean we got like hundreds of responses. But everybody. You talk to anybody in your life who is like actively searching for a job and you can – it's just miserable now. in a way that it was not. I'm not saying it was always easy and I'm not saying if you got a job before that you just lucked into it, but it's harder now. It just is. And so it is frustrating to be told from any source that it's not. There was a wild... There's a person who works pretty high up in, or used to work pretty high up in marketing related to esports. What's her name? And address? And list of greatest fears? And I received a message from a coworker the other day about them.

1:00:23Aiden:Because they're relatively older. And I do think there's a difference here that I noticed in the age of responses when people were getting back to me is like people who are older and more experienced are having an easier time finding jobs when they search. There's still a different, which makes sense, a difference between overall unemployment and youth unemployment. Like easily, easy to understand that, right? But even for this person who is that established resume in esports and marketing like they had at two very big companies, they have been out of work for, I think, a year and I think made a LinkedIn post about, you know, just to the public of why they would be valuable to your company.

1:01:08Aiden:Please hire me. Just an open ended post. And I'm looking at somebody that I'm familiar with, I know has more than a decade of experience in high-level marketing roles. Not senior marketing roles, not entry-level. And this guy has been looking for a job for apparently over a year. That's crazy to see for me. And especially when it's a figure that you recognize and you look up to as a younger guy who is finding a job in esports. Yeah. I just, yeah, I think the vibe kind of - It seems atrocious. And that's before the data reflects it. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that? Yeah. That is, it feels like the part, and I know I'm a bit of a doomer, but it feels like the part in like the big short before they update the mark to market on everything.

1:01:58And like, everyone knows it's bad, but no one admits, like it just, it's possible that we're getting a biased survey here and we're not hitting the right people, but it just feels like from everybody in my life, Even my friends back home in Arizona, like, just consistent vibe is that it's atrocious. It's terrible, but the data has not, is barely budged. It's barely moving up. And I just feel like what's going to happen when we admit it? When we admit that it actually is not.

1:02:23Aiden:I mean, even if you're looking, you know, even if you're somebody who is looking at anecdotes, right? This was not something that anecdotally my friends were struggling with five years ago. and they were younger and looking and they were working in, I would argue, they were working in like esports and tech. And nobody was talking about that at the time. And then outside of esports and tech, I feel like it's anybody who was working in maybe a white-collar field, I feel like is the same experience across the board. I think the number one thing you want to vent to your friends about are very maybe personal struggles with things that feel unfair with something like job applications, with struggling to find a job because it's so important in your life and you need to share it with your friends and the people around you.

1:03:18Aiden:So to see that at this scale, witnessing it all the time, especially over the last year versus what I think my friends were talking about five years ago or eight years ago, it's absolutely different. So I want to talk about this because that's the one thing I'm worried about that we're biased towards the fields that we know and have. Of course, of course. And basically, there are a few, we talked about the industries that are hiring and that's mostly healthcare and it's like government jobs. But the companies that are still reporting profits that are still like doing well are on Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

1:03:51Like the biggest tech companies are still blowing the back out of earnings. I couldn't find a more sexual way to say it, but it is sexual. It is orgasmic. In fact, look at a, sorry, I'm skipping slides. I go to slide 20. He's coming when he took this photo. If you go to the slide right after that, it shows Meta's recent earnings report. They're having a great time. But what is so shocking, what is so ahistoric, is that Microsoft and Meta are, again, ball-bustingly good earnings. And then they're laying people off. Like they are doing better than ever. They're crushing. Their main business is doing well.

1:04:34They're throwing a ton of money in AI. If you are an AI researcher, you're doing better than ever in history. You're making absurd money. But the average employee, they left 9 ,000 people. Microsoft did another 8 ,000. Damn. These are the few companies. If you go to slide 19, it really shows it.

1:04:50Aiden:Are the layoffs coinciding with these? It's still happening in the last month or the last two months. Wow.

1:04:55Atrioc:Microsoft saw you in Adela, CEO of Microsoft, put out a post internal that was like, why we have to change. It's like we want to discuss. We just had to let go of all the normal jargon of like incredible. Our friends and our family and our coworkers, we had to let go of 9 ,000 people. Probably many of you are confused and frustrated because we also have had our most profitable quarter of all time. And it's just from there. It's like we need to re-pivot for the future. It's just nonsense. There's no follow-up. I'm so glad you read that because it was, to me. It's one thing to be like, so sorry we had to lay off 9 ,000 people.

1:05:29Atrioc:It's another thing to be like, we had to lay off 9 ,000 people. we know you're hurting and I want to address it. Doesn't address it at all. Oh my God, dude. He mixed two things. He mixed announcing how fucking great the company is doing and the layoffs into the same post. And to me, I could be wrong, but to other people, it was clearly written by copilot. He was like using his own. I mean, maybe wrong. Maybe it was heartfelt. I'm not sure, but it just felt, it had the AI vibe. And I, you know, he has an AI vibe to him. It's possible. True. I'll fully admit that.

1:05:58Aiden:It was just like, Because the profits don't exist just because of the layoffs, right? Like it's not one to one. No, no. They're doing great and then laying people off. Yes. Yeah. So what actually is the logic, you think? Like is it genuinely like we're bloated and have a bunch of talent that doesn't align with what we want to do in the future? I'm not trying to excuse these companies by any means. But they made the decision, right? So there must be a thought process. You could say. Yeah.

1:06:28Atrioc:I mean, so here's the, here's some of the lines of thinking. One is the businesses are changing dramatically. All these big tech companies are trying to reorient towards AI. If you've built out these giant structures in your company, for example, Microsoft shut down a bunch of their game studios. I think that's stupid. I don't think they should have bought those studios in the first place if they were just going to go shut them down. But the thinking is we, if you believe Satya Nadella's thinking, which is our company needs to be fundamentally reoriented around AI. well that means letting go of parts of the company that uh aren't about that like these are these are just making traditional games that's not his focus microsoft explicitly is trying to do ai games which i know most people are including myself not a big fan of it all but so if the thinking is we need to reorient in this way there is a real cost to having giant chunks of a company that aren't oriented like towards your main mission as much as people like to believe like oh just let them keep going you have a lot of money it's not good generally for a business just have giant swaths of things that are just doing totally independent things that are not related to your core mission.

1:07:27Atrioc:So under the premise of our core mission is AI. We need to rebuild everything around that. You drop parts of your company that don't feel like they align. Same with the groups within your company that don't feel like they can be reoriented in this way. And then part of it is just cycling in the idea of like, if you like, so it's important to remind everybody of in the context of this incredibly frustrating, brutal job environment, that part of what is going on is that in 2021, which we'll actually talk about a little bit with Figma, there was this absolutely massive explosion and bubble within tech.

1:07:57Atrioc:Microsoft like doubled, I think. I mean, we're talking like 100 ,000 new employees. Just, I think, Microsoft, I don't know, maybe you can look it up. But we're talking about tens and tens and tens of thousands of people that suddenly in a year pop up in every tech company. It was obviously at the time a massive bubble. And now there's this huge contraction. And the problem is many, many people across the world and society went, ah, these areas are expanding. I'm going to push myself into those, those areas. I'm going to learn how to code. I'm going to learn how to code at UC Berkeley. Right? Like again, when I went there, I was an anomaly by being a computer science student.

1:08:28Atrioc:Now the majority of students are computer science students. At least that's what I'm told. Uh, so this massive shift happened in society to go, okay, we are going to invest into these companies. The bubble is now kind of gone simultaneously. They're trying to reorient towards AI. And so now all of them are going, we need to contract massively. Part of the benefit of contracting and laying people off is then you can bring in like fresh people who really orient, which I think is, again, I do not think this is ethical. I think it's a shitty thing to do, but there is logic to it. If you believe that this is a critical thing for your company to survive, like future surviving, thriving is to reorient in this way.

1:09:04Atrioc:What I'm saying is I don't care about the other, like if you go back to that slide, I'm sorry, Perry, the 19 slide, I don't care about the ethics of it. They can do what they want with their business. It sucks. CEOs are always going to write fucking terrible things when they lay off people. Yeah. The point is that these are the few companies, if you go to slide 19, these are the, these top 10 companies in the S &P, the big tech companies, these are the few companies doing well. And if they're not net hiring, do you know what I'm saying?

1:09:26Aiden:What does it say if the best performing companies in the economy are still the ones doing? Yeah. If they're the ones doing layoffs, then like what the hell or what is everyone else going to do? And again, they are hiring people for AI, but it's like they're firing 25 people making a hundred thousand and hiring one guy making 250 million.

1:09:42Atrioc:So here's where I'll give a bit of context. I've mentioned a couple of times now that I've gotten a little more pessimistic about AI over this six months, this last six months. And in part is things like this, because in theory, AI should be creating new jobs. And we've talked about the first episode, we talked about how in the short term, when a brand new disruptive technology comes into society like the internet, it's going to destroy more jobs than it creates, but eventually it will create more jobs. But the way CEOs in tech companies are explicitly talking like Toby from Spotify is we aren't hiring anybody until we prove it can't be done with AI.

1:10:15Atrioc:Like they are making a cultural intentional shift towards get rid of anybody who can't support AI focus and don't hire anybody unless we absolutely provably cannot do it with AI. And these are the companies doing well. These are the companies with earnings growth. And they're the ones growing because of AI and because of the hype around AI. And so these are the companies that should in theory be spearheading the growth that comes from this new technology. Instead, they're as a point, as a cultural point saying, we are going to try to thin down as much as we possibly can.

1:10:44Aiden:And there's just nowhere, you know, you lose a job at these places after investing all this time in your education and career. Right. I mean, in a similar capacity to my friend that had been working in post-production and TV for so long. Yeah. And now they're in a situation where it's like all this time I spent up until this point doesn't, like, where do I go with it?

1:11:02Atrioc:Right. Yeah. Which is, sucks. It's fucking sad. I still, I still think there's an incredible amount of good that can come out of AI and I'm increasingly getting pessimistic that it's, that companies are really not making an effort to bring those benefits to the average person right now. And I think that's quite sad. I think the average person is benefiting. Can you go to slide one? There's one person who's actually making out quite well in this economy. And this is the average person. This is the average person. This is the average person, okay. The average person's hero. Elon Musk today was awarded after a long battle, $30 billion because they want him to energize and focus.

1:11:37Most dumbass CEOs try to do good first and then get the pay package. But if you read the bottom of this, following lackluster results last month, Elon Musk renewed his threat to leave Tesla. So what Elon does is he does a bad job first and then he threatens to leave. And then he gets an even higher payout.

1:11:54Aiden:This actually has to be one of the most insane CEO company dynamics of all time. There's no way because in any other situation, this is just not how it even could work. Am I wrong?

1:12:06Atrioc:I mean it's it's like it's like if Shohei Otani in baseball yeah he is I think widely considered the greatest of all time now or up there and then let's say he has an absolute dog shit season this year and then the Dodgers are like look we're gonna pay you even more to stick around because we think you'll bring it back next year and you'll become the goat again yeah that is the thinking here right because like inarguably Tesla and Elon through SpaceX and Tesla has created trillions of dollars of market share. So as an investor, he is your wet dream when he's functioning properly.

1:12:40Aiden:Am I not, am I insane for thinking that when you're that wealthy and you have that much of the stock already, 30 billion doesn't move the needle on your work ethic. I don't get it. Surely. 30 billion should move the needle on anyone's work ethic. No, no, no. But do you see what I'm saying? It's like, it's all at that stage and at that scale. It's nonsense numbers. You're already in practice as functionally rich as you will ever be. I think that's a fair point. What is another? Are you asking me, do I think Elon is suddenly going to walk in? No, but that's what I'm saying. From the board's perspective, do you really think that this pay package is going to change anything significant about this guy's output?

1:13:24Atrioc:Okay, he went into doge for a while. If my cat is distracted and rowdy and running around, I will give him a treat to calm back down. and stay focused. You give your cat$30 billion. I give them$30 billion. Look, the scale is a little bit bigger here, but it's the same concept. The Elon cat was wandering around. There was a bird outside called Doge that he kept looking at, and he got really excited about it. And we just, Tesla needs to just get him focused back on the company he runs.

1:13:49Aiden:If we followed this analogy, I do not think there's much stopping the cat from going back outside at any time. And getting more treats. Yeah, it's so funny because he's figured out a way to get paid a ton when Tesla's doing well, and get paid even more when it's doing badly. He has found an ultimate -

1:14:04Atrioc:To be fair though, I feed my cat treats regardless. He's doing - I just want to put this number in a scale real quick because I think it'll help you understand. So$30 billion, we obviously know it's a lot of money, but Tesla's a big company. Tesla's entire profit for 2024 was$7 billion. So this is like, and that was one of their bigger year. I mean, they've ramped up since post-COVID. So it is like, I think added up their entire profit ever. All the profits company has ever made is his pay package now, this year. It's just like the company has only existed to give him money. There's not, it's just wild to me.

1:14:44It is wild, the system he's created. Now, I think he's played it pretty smartly and I wanna give a little more detail here. One thing he's noticed, as all tech CEOs have, if you say the word AI, stock goes up. Tesla has notably been kind of absent from AI because Elon Musk has focused all his AI attention on Grok and XAI. He's put all of his time into that. And he's basically saying, I'm going to leave Tesla and focus on that stuff. But if you keep me around, I'm probably going to merge the two. I'm going to find a way to get the word AI into Tesla's earnings reports more often. And that will probably boost shares enough, is the thinking, to make up for this$30 billion loss.

1:15:21So there's a rationale to it. It's not the most insane thing, but it's kind of just disgusting. It's just disgusting.

1:15:27Aiden:I can't believe I can't buy a BYD. It's insane. It's insane that I can't buy a car. I don't know you're a trader. I don't know you're a fucking trader. That's interesting.

1:15:36Atrioc:All right, speaking of merging companies, you guys want to talk about Figma? Let's do it. All right, we've been going a while and I want to talk about Figma, a company that IPO'd last week and why it is relevant and why you should maybe care and more importantly, why it relates to the conversation we have with Lena Khan. And this is basically a follow-up I want to do to express. Oh, my queen? Your queen. Criticism is not the right word, but I spoke to a venture capitalist who runs a successful venture capitalist fund, as well as a CEO of a pretty successful VC backed company. Disclaimer on the second, technically I'm an investor in that company because he's one of my best friends, but I invested the minimum amount possible just so that I would get access to the investor emails.

1:16:17Atrioc:And now I reply and I'm like, I don't care. So I have to be mailed these formal documents and stuff because I'm technically an investor at the minimum amount and then I can just walk around and say, you need to do more for me. I'm one of your investors. So it's great. You can put investor in your bio. This is how I felt when

1:16:34Aiden:from the stock competition, the metals company, they sent out a recent like, you're an owner of the company. Come to our meeting. And I was like, yeah, I am. I sort of am an influencer, an innovator for TMC.

1:16:48Atrioc:So technically, disclaimer, I have invested$5 ,000 in the company of the person who's who I own. And I, I stand to gain a thousand dollars or something. Maybe if it, I'm going to be real.

1:16:58Aiden:That's so much less than I thought it would be.

1:17:00Atrioc:I asked for the minimum amount, the actual minimum amount. And that was apparently as low as it could go. So technically I am biased towards this company. Technically. And this guy also, but more so is one of my best friends. Okay. So Figma, why do we give a shit? Figma, if you haven't heard of it, design collaboration company, they started like about 10 years ago. It's think of Google docs, but for design. So a bunch of people can get together and work on a document, it collaboratively. Quick history of Figma. They kind of released their product in 2016. They get people into free tiers, really rapidly start to expand.

1:17:32Atrioc:By 2022, they're just crushing it. 4 million users. It's the primary design tool for 77 % of product designers, 88 % gross margin. They're crushing it. Adobe comes in. September 2022, they announced they have agreed with Figma to buy them for$20 billion, just like double their private valuation, 50 times their annual revenue. So Adobe's argument is supposedly like, this doesn't compete with us. We don't compete with Figma. They had a product called Adobe XD, which was directly competing with Figma, but that product was failing. And they're basically like, look, this is in the same broad design space, but Adobe makes the products where you build, like you flesh out the design visuals and whatnot.

1:18:14Atrioc:Figma is people collaborating on the conceptual design.

1:18:18Aiden:Well, you definitely wouldn't be competing if you bought. Exactly.

1:18:21Atrioc:That's for damn sure. So I think to me, and probably to most people, and the reaction was once this announced, like, come on, that's fucking bullshit. What do you, Adobe? First off, everybody hates Adobe. It feels like they have a monopoly, and they use that to abuse their customers, and that we all have a worse experience. We like early cancellation fees. Me and Aiden, for example. Yeah. That's one of Adobe's coolest things. Adobe. If I cancel early, I should pay you more money. That's for damn sure. It's my fault. I fucked up, Adobe.

1:18:48Aiden:I'm not holding up my end of the deal. And you should punish me. And I feel guilty about it. Like, I need a payment to cleanse my soul. I was throwing up thinking about breaking up with Adobe.

1:18:58Atrioc:Millennials don't keep their word anymore. We have no honor. Our ancestors were honorable, okay? The greatest generation. They went to World War II and they were honorable. I feel like a fucking quitter when I canceled my Photoshop, dude. I couldn't afford it. And I feel like I let fucking the CEO of Adobe down. Fucking let him down. So the government's come out. not only the US government, the FTC led by Lena Khan at the time. So this is again, late 2022, but also the European union commission and also the UK commission all say, we think this is monopolistic. We are going to investigate this.

1:19:27Atrioc:So the deal falls through by like a year later, something around that end of 2023, Adobe and Figma say, we're going to walk away from the deal. We're not going to try to merge. This is not going to be able to be done in a regulatory way. So Figma over the next two years, two and a half, they keep raising investor funding. They keep just absolutely crushing it. And if you pull this up, Perry, they IPO'd last week. They sold their shares at$33 a share. We can, I guess, briefly talk about how an IPO works. But basically, they're like, hey, we think it's going to be about$33 is what it's worth. By the end of the day they launch, it's up to$115 over triple.

1:20:02Atrioc:So this thing just fucking explodes. Okay. Figma is one of the most successful IPOs. One of the most successful companies is a huge success story. And so coming out of this, Lena Khan does a victory lap. She goes on Twitter and says, a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses rather than being bought up by existing giants can generate enormous value. It's a win for the employees, the investors, innovation, and the public. So she is looking at this and we're going to talk about really the broader ecosystem of what's going on. She's looking at this and saying, our goal to really drive scrutiny to mergers and acquisitions, to draw a lot more resistance to big tech companies, buying smaller ones.

1:20:42Atrioc:This is an example of how now we have a big competitor to Adobe in the form of Figma. This is a fantastic thing. But the Silicon Valley world had a lot of choice words for her. And so, for example, Paul Graham, who founded Y Combinator, a, let's say, startup incubator, started through Risky. Sometimes you keep rolling the dice. Sometimes when you keep rolling the dice, things work out. Sometimes not. But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop. You have Jason from the All In Podcast who's kind of an idiot, so I'll skip him. No offense. He's a little more emotionally charged here.

1:21:15Aiden:Wait, he was the... Oh, he's the guy who said bread lines when he heard about the grocery store. Dude, this is a who's who of a really great blunt rotation, I gotta be honest with you.

1:21:22Atrioc:I mean, Paul Graham has good stuff. Nikita Beer is more of a memer than brings up the fact... Nikita Beer has made his entire fortune selling the same company over and over to Big Tech. He makes a company that's about teenagers sending each other compliments. He made it GasApp and TBH and IRL. It's the same company three times. And he sold it to Discord. He sold it to Facebook. He sold it to, I think, Amazon was a third one. He, of course, he is against anything that slows down merger and acquisitions. He's figured out an ultimate scheme, a money-making scheme. I respect the guy. He's got a great hustle.

1:21:53But he did it three times. And the fact that he's like... Wait, what? What was his product that he sold? He made an app with three different names where teenagers could anonymously send each other compliments. One of them was called TBH. One was called IRL. It's like, you could be like, Aiden, you could open it up and be like, someone called you hot today at school. You don't know who, but it feels good. And I think you can pay a little money to unlock it or something. And that app, apparently, it works. And it gets at least those bursts of users. And then he sells it to a bigger tech company.

1:22:19And then he makes the same app again with a different name. And then he sells it to a tech company. He's figured out an ultimate scheme. And I think he's smart. And I respect him for that.

1:22:28Aiden:I changed my mind on Lena. But the idea that he's going to admit that like any regulatory oversight over startups is a good idea. Of course not. It directly impacts his bottom line.

1:22:40Atrioc:Yep. Trying to stop great American successes. A few more responses. Somebody pointed out the classic survivorship bias where it's basically the point is, yes, Figma did well. Yes, went on to succeed and be bigger than they, so now they're worth like$60 billion. Yeah. Adobe was trying to buy them for$20 billion. So like the amount of, let's say, market value that has created massive on top of monopolistic concerns. But this is a, you know, a frequent criticism from various people. I saw some other interesting ones where, you know, people are basically criticizing. You said letting the startups grow independently when in actuality, what you did, Lena, is you prevented them from having the option of having an exit.

1:23:16Atrioc:And there's plenty of counter examples to a lot of people. Oh, I got logged out of X. Maybe. Nope, we're good. Somebody saying I would have I worked for a startup that would have gone bankrupt and gone to zero and the entire staff would have been laid off if we weren't bought. And then a person follows up and be like, so they're so you were forced to compete. imagine that uh folks being like hey here's a here's an email from mark zuckerberg in 2012 saying one reason people underestimate the importance of google is we can just buy any competitive startups but we can't buy google yet so some blatant like anti-competitive stuff from mark zuckerberg in the past who does not have a good history of this right um and so there's a whole kind of debate going on with lena doing a sort of victory lap and that being a reason for them to talk about it.

1:23:59Atrioc:I don't think that most of the tweets that people are saying in response to Lena are particularly well-voiced or anything like that. So I wanted to hear from more people. So again, spoke of the VC and a startup CEO who's been, both of these have been like working with startups tech for the last 10 years. So here are some actual thoughtful counter arguments. So Lena Khan came in as the FTC chair and what she did over the course of four years is massively expanded the scope of what types of things she would go after. She did create, she released this guideline list from the FTC merger guidelines, basically saying, these are the rules that we are going to consider when we decide whether or not we're going to resist and push back against your ability to merge or buy a company.

1:24:45Atrioc:Now, as I read through these in prep for the Lena Khan interview, they're pretty broad, but it's fine. But then what happened is that the actual cases that she took on were, I think in many ways, cases that people would never consider to be anti-monopolistic. So one example that was brought up was Facebook Meta tried to buy a small VR fitness app. They didn't make VR fitness apps. They didn't make apps at all for VR stuff. They owned a VR platform and Lena pushed against that and said, well, you shouldn't be able to buy things downstream of you if you're a platform owner. You shouldn't be able to do vertical purchases rather than just horizontal.

1:25:21Atrioc:There was two pharmaceutical companies that made different, these aren't giant pharma companies. They're two companies that make different drugs that have no overlap. And they wanted to merge because they thought they could be more successful in marketing each other's stuff. And Lena pushed to block that. And that eventually got stopped because her argument was, well, you guys would be able to bundle together your medicines and thus be able to kind of abuse that in the market for higher pricing. Anybody, any company could do that whenever there was no evidence eventually that she lost that case as well.

1:25:50Atrioc:Cause there was no evidence they were going to do that in the first place. They did eventually give a stipulation to her and say, okay, we promise we won't bundle for price things. So there was a bit of a victory for her there. But the issue, and I agree with this, having looked through this in what I believe is an impartial way, is that while she came in and really broadened and said, we are going to be way more aggressive about stopping big tech and big companies from just buying out stuff and creating these monopolies, the cases that she took on and the FTC took on felt so broad, so nebulous, so unclear about why this particular merger is an issue versus the stuff that clearly falls in line with what people would think traditionally, created a level of uncertainty that slowed M &A down entirely.

1:26:33Atrioc:I brought this up when we talked to Lena Kahn, and her response was, well, look, 97 % of these mergers still went through, right? It's not like we're blocking all of them. It's like some small percentage that we're going to investigate. But the counter argument and what people saw in Silicon Valley was if you make the entire merger market feel uncertain, if you set the tone of we might go after anything, then people are not even going to attempt to do that. So yes, 97 % of the deals that came in were passed by you. But the argument is way more, way fewer deals got to you in the first place because people were so uncertain about what was happening.

1:27:11Atrioc:They didn't want to even attempt stuff like this. And the mergers and acquisitions that could have actually been really helpful or spurred innovation or whatever, which we'll get to, those couldn't even happen in the first place. The other piece that I didn't, I wasn't really aware of is that Lena did this stuff while the IPO window closed. And this is why Figma is relevant. So IPOs are where you take a company public, right? But it's risky to do that. You are kind of putting a lot of the fate of your company out into the public. You have all this regulatory scrutiny. You then have all these obligations.

1:27:38Atrioc:And if you put your company out public and then the stock drops, that could tank the entire thing, right? So you really want to be certain that taking a company public will have actual success in the market. People will actually invest into your company. But the problem that we mentioned earlier is in 2021 was a massive bubble. So there's some crazy numbers. Like there's all these SPAC companies that did a bunch of crazy stuff. Dozens of tech companies were IPO-ing in 2021. There's record VC funding. But then 2022, 2023, the bubble pops, things swing way back. And so interest rates also rise up way during this period.

1:28:12Atrioc:So instead of having a zero interest rate policy, which we had forever, now people can make safe money by investing in, you know, safe assets. They don't need to go for like high growth tech stocks, right? And the companies that had IPO'd in 2021, they start crashing. So this big bubble in 2021, where it's like, yeah, everybody go public, everybody get all this hot, zesty action that starts just popping massively. The companies that got a part of that, a piece of the action, they're failing now retroactively badly. They averaged 30 % below offering price on average. It's not just they dropped.

1:28:44Atrioc:They dropped below what they initially were. The valuations in the private sector are being slashed. General economic volatility with, for example, the Russia-Ukraine war causing enormous energy shocks. And an analyst said - Wait, what is the point? What is the takeaway? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She couldn't have anticipated that. No, no, no, no, she couldn't. The takeaway is nobody's going to take their company public with this massive uncertainty. That's not on her. It is not on her. But the reality is 80 % less deals in 2022 than 2021. 95 % less money generated. There's a massive, basically what they refer to it as the shutting of the window, where you were able to take companies public before, and now it is much harder to do so because the willingness of the public to invest in these companies has disintegrated massively.

1:29:32Atrioc:So this coincided in this 2022-23 era at the same time that Lina Khan starts doing this very broad and what was considered to be nebulous scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions. And so people across the VC tech startup space, people who are creating all these companies and saying, look, we're building these companies, we're investing, we're trying to make something of value. We've now lost both of our exits. We can't go public and we can't get people to potentially buy us or do acquisitions because both of those have been shut down simultaneously. So that's in part what drives the frustration that you see on Twitter from people who are like, we had two options and both doors closed to us.

1:30:09Atrioc:The entire industry is suffering as a result. The VC manager that I talked to talked about how - Flip out. No, no, I know. Let me charge you in the crash. I'm about to flip out. He's trying to crash. No, let me get the core arguments in place and then I'm sure you have plenty of counter arguments. So the argument is basically, and we need to talk about as well whether the VC market is even good, right? Because I'm sure there's plenty of people who feel like this isn't a good thing in the first place, which I then had a bunch of follow-up conversations with them with. but their argument is like look this is in general for the for the country good to have innovation that's spurred by VC investing by private capital funding people to make new things to build new things for our country for innovation for everything and right now with this kind of dual threat we are being threatened and the entire system is being threatened what is great about Figma is this is the first time in a while where there's been a big successful tech IPO where this is now saying okay we might have that door opening again the other door is also kind of opening because trump came in and lena khan had to resign and all that so um i think there's a couple of things we can go on and we don't have a ton of time left but you know is this system even good in the first place uh what is the value of startup founders being able to have a choice and various other things on like is this really the core cause this is the whiniest group of people in the entire world okay this is crap okay you already crashed out on twitter i'm gonna i I crashed it on Twitter.

1:31:33You want to pull up that tweet? This is crazy, okay? You know why the Figma IPO was successful? It's because it's a company that makes money. It's a profitable, successful company. If you make one of those, you will find a way to make money. They have been surviving in a bubble era for a few years where you could do almost fucking anything and spend all your time posting VC advice on Twitter and throwing money in random directions at stupid, unprofitable businesses. And when that dries up even slightly for a moment with an FTC that only lasted a few years and is already gone, and they can't stop whining about it even years after she's out of power.

1:32:05It's fucking crazy. This is a publicly elected official who was appointed for a reason to enforce laws we have on the books. She's not appointed. I'm sorry. Biden was publicly elected. She was appointed. He has his right to appoint the FTC, which exists, to write laws that are on the books written by Congress about mergers. We are enforcing already existing laws. The fact they've been rubber stamped for so long does not mean they can never be enforced. And the fact they're enforced even slightly and most of them didn't even go through has been such a pain point for a portion of society that has benefited so much already.

1:32:37It's fucking crazy. It's crazy. And all they had to do, as Figma has proven the entire time, is just make a profitable business. That you can put on the public anytime. In 2021, they dumped so many disgusting SPACs on the public.

1:32:52Atrioc:It was a scammy bubble. Yeah. None of those companies made any money. And when that dried up, they tried to foist it on the tech companies who have a lot of money to throw around. Maybe they can convince them to buy them. When they couldn't do that, they started whining, just whining, whining, whining. If you make a good company with a good profitable buy, you will make money that has never changed, that has always been the core of business. And the idea that so many people are chiming in and chirping about this Figma thing. Can you please pull up my tweet? Because I'm going to – Yeah. I got into this Twitter thing you brought.

1:33:18I usually don't even fucking tweet. The fact that anyone could look at this Figma situation and be like, wow, well, Linux shouldn't even be taught. This worked exactly as intended. did. If Lena Khan had not intervened or, I guess, antitrust in general, this company would have been bought by Adobe for 20 billion. We would be in an environment where we have fewer competition. We have one company, Adobe. Everyone has to pay whatever fee they charge. They can mark it up. They have no competitor from Figma. The Figma founders would have made less money. The Figma employees would have made less money.

1:33:51Figma customers would be unhappy. They fucking hate Adobe. The only person that is lost is Adobe. This is a great outcome. We now have two competitors instead of one. The people, everybody made more money except for Adobe execs. Customers, when surveyed, hate Adobe and are really happy to have this alternative. Yeah. So this guy said, you know, Lena Khan did her victory lap and he goes, Lena Khan cuts the right hand off of a genius pianist who nevertheless perseveres and produces a one-handed masterpiece for which she then takes credit. It's fucking insane. That is not what happened. And the idea that the masterpiece would have been them getting bought by Adobe for under their market value so that they can consolidate and raise prices is the ultimate outcome or an equal outcome to what we got is crazy.

1:34:34She intervened and we got a better outcome, which is what happens with antitrust in general. We want more competitors because as consumers, we want the ability to fucking walk. If somebody's abusing us and overcharging us, we want the ability to walk somewhere else. this whole uh whiny attitude towards it is ignoring that reality which is that the basic consumer needs choice to have any say to have any yeah so i i'm sorry i'm not crushing on you i'm crushing on some of these companies but it's just it's frustrating to me that this is if this was like an example where figma exploded then at least you could be like well look at this lena this is an example where it worked perfectly it worked exactly what everyone would want and they are still nonstop chirping about a woman who is not even in power anymore.

1:35:20I find it to be disgusting. I find it to be, and again, all of these people chirping, they're all millionaires. They're all tech millionaires. So I don't know. I'm sorry. I said what I said.

1:35:30Atrioc:Okay. This is good. This is good. So let's keep going. This is exactly the type of, I mean, to less intensity, the questions that I wanted to ask people who are in the industry and basically ask why this seems like a great outcome seems like exactly what you want why on earth is this the thing vcs are going in and being like how dare you lean a con like this is the stupidest possible thing to go in and try to criticize her okay i think there's a couple fundamental things and i really want to emphasize this because i think a lot of our audience is on board with you where they're like i know companies are bad i hate adobe listen no i know good company however they made billions more dollars there are Absolutely people in our comments and on the internet, the idea of a company succeeding or getting bigger, if Adobe had become more bigger, you know, bigger, they would have been upset.

1:36:15I got a gem because they were mad that I was happy that Figma's employees made billions money. Some people were mad that Figma did well. Like anyone did well. Right, right. Okay. I understand that exists, but I just want to be clear that that shouldn't detract from the point I'm making because that's not my point.

1:36:31Atrioc:So here is what I would consider to be one of the core counter arguments of this. It's about choice. Because yes, Figma is now worth more. This is a better outcome Adobe lost. But Figma wanted this. Figma worked for whatever it was, nine years. The people there worked at this company to build something of value and they wanted to merge with Adobe. They were not forced into it. There was nothing there. So I think the question is, do you agree that startup founders, somebody who pours their blood, sweat and tears into a thing that they've created and you could talk about a big tech company or you could talk about the guy who runs a Baskin Robbins and then sells the franchise to somebody else after they've run it for 10 years and it's been successful.

1:37:09Atrioc:It's worth reminding that it is super fucking hard to make a company. It is not easy to make something of value. I think it's easy to look at this ecosystem and go, everybody's just jerking each other off, making things. But 90 % of tech companies go out of business. If you talk to people in Silicon Valley, the majority of their startups will die and fail. 90 % within five years. 75 % of the companies that VCs back never make them back money. So most people going into this are spending money and losing it. It is not like you just make anything you want and you get paid out for it. You have to actually create something of value.

1:37:42Atrioc:On top of that, the giant tech companies are not going around buying everything. The Magnificent Seven, it's hard to know how many deals they exactly did. There's like 200 public deals out of 150 ,000 that have happened over the past 50 years. These are estimates because they don't disclose every single deal that they do. But the narrative of like, big tech just buys up all the companies we need to stop them is objectively wrong. They are doing a tiny, tiny, less than 1 % of all the acquisitions are happening by big tech. Amazon does hardly any. Microsoft does more, and they do like maybe 150 over the past five years.

1:38:15Atrioc:It is simply not true that out of over 100 ,000 acquisitions, most people who make companies and sell them are not doing it to Microsoft and Facebook. They are doing it to small buyers and other small companies that merge together. So I think it's worth acknowledging that. It's not like there's this cabal that completely dominates the space, even though obviously I agree they have outside influence and so did the VC and CEO who I talked to. And so the question is, in that context, if you're a founder who busts your ass and you make something that is valuable enough to get to that 10 % where you've put in years of time where you and your employees and your team have made something that is considered valuable and another company comes along that's bigger and says, we want to buy you, that you should have the choice to do that.

1:38:56Atrioc:That if you have said, I've built this thing, being forced to sit in the ownership seat forever. if I make a company right now, I haven't made a company over the last seven years. And if somebody offered to buy it and I was like, you know what? I'm done. Maybe it's because I want the money. Maybe it's because I think I could grow more by being bought by a bigger company. Maybe it's because I think like the employees want this, whatever the reasoning is. I think that it is legitimate that me as somebody who's built a business should have the choice about what to do with it. And what was happening in these situations is Lena Khan came in and said, you are not going to have the choice.

1:39:29Atrioc:Now, again, I am strongly voicing the opinions that I've heard. I would consider myself kind of in the middle here because I deeply believe that there are monopolistic tendencies going on. I don't think that acquisitions are some beautiful, incredible thing all the time. But there is, I think, a real argument to say, like, is it correct for a government to come in, tell a person who's built a thing on their own that they can't go and sell it? They have to. I think that's the simple answer is that they have to. So you have to draw the line somewhere. And we agree on that. And the criticism against Lena Khan and what their FTC was doing is that there wasn't a clear line.

1:40:07Atrioc:And I can sympathize with this because even me as a neutral party who, who likes Lena Khan a lot and who fucking hates monopolies. And I don't like the big tech companies consolidating everything. Even reading through her cases. I was like, dude, I would have no idea what she would scrutinize. And that is the problem that Silicon Valley has. It's not that she pushed back against the obviously bullshit ones like Adobe and Figma. It's the fact that people felt, whether it was legitimate or not, that they had no idea. And thus, it wasn't clear at all. Something that my startup friend said, like, if she had just really clearly defined this new type of merger, we're going to criticize and we're going to scrutinize deeply, people would have grumbled and accepted it.

1:40:46Atrioc:The problem is nobody felt the guidelines were clear. And there are guidelines here that I've read, and I think these are pretty clear. but the actual cases that they brought, I agree with the Silicon Valley perspective of it felt unclear. That's the issue. He was not suing a Baskin-Robbins trying to sell. And there's nothing in this that says you can't sell. What they're telling a few powerful agents is that they can't buy. There's a difference. A founder can sell. If someone wants to buy it, fine. But if it's to Adobe, then there's a problem. If you're Figma, you could have sold to someone else.

1:41:18But you can't sell to Adobe because they have the dominant market share in that market. If I make a competitor to Ticketmaster and it's fucking good and doesn't charge people absurd fees, people like it, and Ticketmaster offers to buy me, it would be right of her to look at whether this is leading to consolidated market power.

1:41:33Atrioc:Those cases are obvious. What about the non-obvious cases that I mentioned? I think we keep coming back to Adobe Figma and being like -

1:41:38Aiden:I think the problem is that the argument of ambiguity and uncertainty here can go on forever. It's like we have let it stretch in the opposite direction for so long with so little oversight that any concession back in the opposite direction is going to be viewed by these people as negative. I do not think the idea that people were just looking for stricter guidelines around mergers and acquisitions is truthful. I do not think because if we could simulate the world where this is dramatically more clear, I do not think that these people are on the timeline saying like, ah, she's actually chill. Like there's a, there's a 0 % chance.

1:42:19Atrioc:No, no, no. They will be upset either way for sure. And I want to be clear here. There is absolutely abuse in the system that I think the average person, if they sat down, we're honest and they're not a scam artist who is, you know, doing crypto offerings or doing SPACs that turn out to be scams. Most people would go, yeah, it's being abused by big tech. There's a power law that's happening. This is not fair. This, if the pendulum swung way away from antitrust, it needs to swing back. And I think most rational people, most thoughtful people that realize the long-term health of the ecosystem, you can't have monopolies.

1:42:50Atrioc:You cannot have people buying direct competitors. That's obviously fucking stupid. The pendulum needed to swing way back. And the criticism, I think there's a lot of just douchebags who are doing what you're saying, which is like, how dare you take away our party that we're having?

1:43:03Aiden:But this is the pendulum swinging back a little.

1:43:05Atrioc:It's just a tiny bit. It's a little.

1:43:07Aiden:That's the problem. Perry from Production here. We're going to skip ahead a little bit.

1:43:10Atrioc:We've actually cut like a big chunk. Aidan and I were going back and forth. We realized we're kind of repeating ourselves. I want to just briefly summarize a few things and then just pose a question, which was posed to me, which again, I'm trying to kind of relay at least another perspective. Again, the pendulum needed to swing back. There's a lot of douchebags who are like, you Lena Khan is ruining my life. And I think nobody, at least in my world, is sympathetic to those people who are scamming folks. The question is for the average person who's trying to run a business, who needs investment capital upfront to make it work.

1:43:39Atrioc:Many reasonable businesses can't just generate profit from day one. I think that is a reasonable thing to try to promote and protect and that there were some reasonable concerns with the way the FTC felt so broad that what the types of companies and investment opportunities that would have been there before started to close in part because of what she did. In part, both things can be true. I also think what is relevant is just to ask, how do you incentivize innovation just on a high level? and do we think that you better incentivize innovation by flooding the markets with a bunch of money and allowing a bunch of people to kind of grift and make money when they really don't deserve it, which we've seen a whole lot of the past few years, but also you get people who do actually pour blood, sweat, and tears to make something valuable and are able to do that because they generate capital.

1:44:25Atrioc:I'm biased because many of my close friends have done this and they aren't the douchebags who make shitty, unprofitable companies, or if they are unprofitable, there's a real thought behind why and I believe that innovation is good? Or do you kind of swing to the other side and say, look, yes, innovation is good, but you can't have that at the expense of having giant companies coming in and buying everybody up. And you have to push back against that because innovation will be lost if they continue to do this long-term. And I totally see both sides. I generally would lean more on Lena Khan's side.

1:44:53Atrioc:I generally am sympathetic to this. There's been so much abuse that obviously this shit needs to change. But I feel like there is a valid side of this, which is like there's real value of a lot of investor money flowing through and making it easier for somebody to innovate and create something valuable. As a reminder, our lives are a lot better than they were 200 years ago when the average life expectancy was 35 and everybody worked in farming. There's a lot more to do, but I think that innovation and developing our society is incredibly important and I want our society to get better. And so in that high level, how do you encourage innovation?

1:45:26Atrioc:How much should the government come in and make those decisions and say, look, we're not giving you that choice because it can be immoral. And maybe that is what you need to do. But I at least just want to voice the other side. Yeah.

1:45:38Aiden:I mean, I think, I think the, the closing thoughts I have is like on the front of innovation, I think there's a lot of unexplored things of funding and pushing innovation that, or I shouldn't say unexplored Because I think when you dig into mechanisms of innovation and funding that have existed within America through the past 80, 90 years, there's a lot of things of what allowed the government to encourage innovation or fund innovation that we have cut or taken away over time that spurred a lot of the greatest technological innovations of the 20th century. that are no longer something we're pushing forward.

1:46:24Aiden:And I think it's important to keep innovation in mind when you make these decisions. The mechanisms of innovation still have to exist somehow. How do you motivate people to make things? And I think you're right in keeping that in mind. I think my core pushback to the argument is I think when people describe their... when people describe the reasons why they were unable to do something or unable to make the company they wanted to make, they look to reasons that, they look to blame things that take away the easiest way out or the simplest way out and because it affects them individually and personally.

1:47:07Aiden:And it's very natural to present those concerns as the most pressing concerns. But when you, I think having that be the pervasive argument of this situation when there was an era of like easy money and funding beforehand. I think people are more likely to be upset and point to somebody like Lena rather than pointing to the money that allowed you to live the life you did for the past 10, 15 years and exist within that space just no longer is there. But there's an argument here to be had about, you know, lay it all out. What are the companies that didn't form or didn't exist because of things like this?

1:47:47Aiden:and like what were the actual conditions of them. And I want to see more of those things because we talked mostly about the victories and the clear cut things that she did, right? And there's so many more cases and so many more things that that entire department and agency got to work on. But I think it's important to like substantiate that side of the argument when something feels more explicitly clear as the explanation for the fall through. I can talk about this forever.

1:48:13Atrioc:Let's add another 30 minutes to the podcast.

1:48:15Aiden:Let's keep going. we're gonna have a Patreon we can talk more about it listen I think I made my thoughts clear I just wanna say I mean I we are all good friends and we are doing I think a good discussion I really enjoy this discussion people that listen aren't always understanding of that and they're not able to segue in let's put it I'll put it simply nothing would make me more fucking annoyed to read a bunch of YouTube comments that like shit on Doug or shit on any of us okay

1:48:44Atrioc:You can't shit on the people on Twitter though. Cause there's a bunch of douchebags who are. Yeah, of course. You can shit on those. And you can have your opinion.

1:48:49Aiden:I just, yeah. But I think people just come in with this idea of like the, any back and forth discussion is going to be something that is seen as like negative. It's like, I don't know. And I want to, I want to be able to have this discussion to like go back and forth about like all of the ideas that are a part of this. And that's what makes it fun and exciting to do.

1:49:07Atrioc:This is how I would talk to you guys off pod. I'm passionate. Yeah. We're all passionate. Yeah. So I just keep that in mind. If you're going to chime in, It's fine to have your own opinion and it's fine to disagree with anything here, but just like, I don't know, do it somewhat respectfully if you can. Do you think there's going to be a comment that's like, I can't believe Doug is supporting these capitalist douchebags and they follow up and they're like, sorry, I just got the end up, so it's actually chill. Sorry. They like already have written the comment. You guys made fun of the carrots and the asterisks.

1:49:33Atrioc:Oh, do you already have carrots and asterisks?

1:49:35Aiden:The carrots and the asterisks to end the comment? Anyway. Fun discussion, really enjoyed it.

1:49:40Atrioc:Yeah, thank you so much if you contributed to the Discord as well, because That is so helpful to hear people's perspectives of what's going on in the world. And I think just adds a lot of just color and nuance to what is super challenging. It's fucking hard right now. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

1:49:55Aiden:Thank you to everybody. What's more positive note?

1:49:57Atrioc:There's something positive. Oh, I have a single line. A single line. Never mind then. What? Two lines. No, the world's dead. No, dude. It's too. We got to end on something funny. I have an extremely tall story we're going to end on. I don't even remember the fucking country. Bring up slide 11 real quick. Just really quick. Very end. Slide 11. So you know how some countries have really bad inflation? So they have, instead of$1 bills, they have$1 ,000 bills and then$10 ,000 bills.

1:50:19Aiden:Oh yeah, Zimbabwe had like the$40 trillion bill. They have$40 trillion bills. Well, Iran has figured out a way around that. They're going to print a 10 ,000 bill, but they're just going to call it a 10. Oh, there you go. They're just going to slash three zeros from every bill, but they will numerically be 10 ,000, 50 ,000, 100 ,000. That is a brilliant new innovation.

1:50:41Atrioc:That's the lemonade stand of countries. They solved it.

1:50:43Aiden:Is it bad if I think this is kind of a good solution? It's not. It actually has been tried in Turkey, Romania, and Zambia, and it does nothing. In fact, there's a quote on line 12. You bring up slide 12. Just real quick, we'll end on a funny thing. Analysts believe that unless accompanied by actual inflation control and financial reforms, this cosmetic move will fail to alleviate any of the country's economic problems, which is exactly what has happened in three other countries that tried it. It's just a funny way to make your bills less embarrassing. Why would it change anything? But that's what's happening.

1:51:18Funny stuff. The Trash Eliminates. We appreciate you. See you next week. I can't wait.