Are English Speaking Countries Unhappier? | Ep. 060 Lemonade Stand 🍋

15:42Aiden:Phones are something that everyone has. Not everyone is consuming American news media. Yeah. A hundred percent. What I'm saying is in the same way that like somebody in China isn't watching Fox, like American Fox news. Okay. Like when you consume stuff on your phone, your social media feed isn't this neutral worldwide news feed that you consume. I think we're using social media different. I'm saying social media as the concept of people spending a lot of time on their phone, getting news from their phone, which is broadly sad for the world. People are generally more atomized. They're more isolated.

16:16Their friendships are down. Like that is what I'm saying social media. I'm not saying social media as in our pundits on social media are being read all over the world. Yeah. So I think it's more of a world. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think social media is uniquely causing sadness here. I think it is if it's a sad thing, it's mostly around the world, right?

16:35Atrioc:I think I largely agree with that. It's hard to know because everybody's experience of social media is so different now. You know, it is so fragmented. I would be hesitant to speak for everybody and be like, nah, it's not that sad. But if I, you know, we're going through China. People are doom scrolling. Here's what I definitely agree with. The entire world is on social media. They're all doom scrolling. 100%. Okay.

16:54Aiden:I'll table this. I think it ties in with the housing one we'll get to later.

16:59Atrioc:Okay. Yeah. And in fact, Let's let's move on with this extremely helpful chart, which is inflation and housing. Let's tie these together. So obviously massive, massive increase in the price of basically everything over the past several years. Some of the stats from this article that I thought were particularly shocking general consumer prices increased between 2007 and 2020 for a 13 year period. They increased 25 % and then they increased by 25 % again, just between 2020 and 2025. Housing from 2004 to 2020 increased by 50%. So 50 % increase in our houses over 16 years. And then there was another 50 % increase from 2020 to 2025.

17:42Atrioc:So we, in the last five years, particularly in America, have experienced a tripling of the rate at which prices go up. And so that seems like a pretty shut and dry case. What do you think? while on inflation, I would kind of push back. I'm intentionally oversimplifying that, but go ahead. The world had inflation. Like everyone has had it. And in fact, during COVID, America was a little bit less impacted.

18:09Aiden:So this is what I had looked at. The inflation of the Anglosphere. UK leads the charge when we're looking at these five countries that people generally consider a part of it. Even if you're looking at the past 10 years, when you compare it to the rest of like the OECD, it's most of the countries are below average among that group of countries on inflation. And the UK is like touching average or like right around average. Now it's worth saying the UK is the unhappiest of all the English speaking countries. They're the most upset. So there's something to that. But I wanted to bring up housing because I think that's different.

18:47Housing is uniquely bad. I think - Okay, so let's separate that. If we're going to unbury the lead here, this would be my fucking guess. If you could pull this up this, this chart kind of says it all like the red is housing prices in Anglophone countries. The blue is like comparable European countries and like for audio listeners,

19:04Atrioc:it's way more expensive. It's just skyrocketing in New Zealand, Canada, UK. And we're talking what like over a hundred percent more on average versus Western Europe, more than a hundred percent. this is a crazy increase for English speaking countries specifically. So yeah, the anglosphere as an average is way up western so yeah exactly so that seems to track a little bit more than um inflation broadly than inflation broadly like again this is young mental adult health uh is far lower in uh in anglosphere than western europe so yeah i think economically they're both like the idea that france and germany and the uk are all getting vastly different levels of inflation does not seem to hold up.

19:51No. But they do have a higher housing price. They're just building less housing. I was looking into this. Some part of it seems to be, some part of it is zoning laws and all things we've talked about, but there is some part of it, which is there's a preference, like revealed preferences of people in Anglospheres for less interest in apartments to own. They have less interest in owning apartments. I don't know if it's historical preference or like they used to be so wealthy that they could have the space for everything and now they don't anymore. I mean, I do think a lot of unhappiness boils down to expectations.

20:25And a lot of people in these countries had very good times in recent living memory that are now tantalizingly out of reach. They're all, you can look at the boomers and they can remember it and they had it and you don't have it. And I think that's a bigger part of it.

20:40Atrioc:So any complaints with inflation being, it's a little sad. All right, inflation clearly a worldwide problem. Yeah, very angry about it. But if our goal here is to try to identify this quadrant, what is specifically affecting the English-speaking world so much, housing is... I think it's bottom right, bro. Yeah. Probably one of the absolute biggest. And I think... Go ahead.

21:02Aiden:This was like the number one thing we had looked at before this. I think there's a funny... I mean, it's not funny in the consequences of it. Experiment you could do when you look up most, like, housing affordability compared to median income. and you pull up the list of countries that are on that, like what are the least affordable places in the world? Hong Kong always leads the charts. That's like the number one city. But then after Hong Kong, it's like all, it's London, all American cities, the big Australian cities, the big Canadian cities. It's, they fill the list. Auckland's up there. And what I wanted to tie this into is I think this feeds into social media because even if social media becomes the vehicle for this to spiral even further than it would.

21:51Aiden:So if housing affordability in the US or Australia is the worst in these biggest cities, right? Obviously those larger populations are going to go on social media, talk about these problems or maybe just be more negative online because it's rooted in this underlying idea that you can't afford a home. Yeah. And then that cascades into all of the consumers of English speaking content. So even if I happen to live in a place that's maybe smaller and more affordable in one of these countries, I'm getting fed the update or narrative about how shit things are. And I think housing to me, when we've talked about this in the past is the root, but it's the way social media amplifies that within English.

22:39Aiden:social media. It's like kerosene on a fire. I mean, it makes total sense. I agree. So why don't we tie this to

22:46Atrioc:another theory, which is much more, let's say soft and hard to quantify. It's not about pricing or news. It's just about human expectations. I posted in our discord, our lovely patreon discord and asked in all capital letters. Are you depressed? Tell us about it and then got some great answers. So I want to thank everybody for posting in and I would say it's hard to kind of rank obviously what people were saying, but of the several dozen depression, right?

23:10Aiden:So now we're going to rank our discord members by their mental health. We have a different chart. We have their faces. We printed them out and we're going to put on how sad Chad versus total loser and are

23:21Atrioc:they in the world versus English? So something from Rosa Westerners are not uniquely depressed. They're just uniquely ambitious and increasingly that ambition is at odds with reality. We see the ladder being pulled up before we get a chance to climb it and it's infuriating and discouraging. This isn't as much of an issue in countries that never cared very much for the latter to begin with. From India Lime, I think one of the most dominant cultural narratives within the US and within our sense of self as the entire nation is this idea that if you work hard, you get to a position where life gets better and essentially feeling that that is not happening anymore.

23:52Atrioc:Even one, there was two posts from folks who were basically like, I feel like my life is pretty good. I have a girlfriend and a job and things are going well, but I feel like I have a duty to try to make the world outside of my own life better and I have to know what's going on outside of my life to do that and so it's making me depressed i want to jump in on this if you pull this up this really jabs what you're saying so is it is it just our expectations are too high this is a chart on the faith in the idea that hard work is rewarded with success young adults in the anglosphere are losing faith in that idea they are not seeing that and i do think that ties in with what you said and i do think that is something that is deeply demoralizing especially if you thought that that was the case previously because we talked about this in a previous episode, but I, there's this book confidence map.

24:37It's about agency. People feeling they have no agency makes you way more to may more aimless. I think you have no ability to turn the ship and you're just adrift is like,

24:46Atrioc:is how much of this do you think comes from the fact that our parents are, are, you know, the generation right before us across most of the Anglosphere, right? Had it extraordinarily good. No, I think that's a huge part of it. It's like, is, is that comparison point rather than the kind of broader concept of we as Americans or Englishmen or whatever, like we believe we should have these incredible things. It's like we just saw what our parents got. You think like it's really specifically grounded. I think very specifically, it's like if you think you're going to have worse opportunities than your parents, you are likely going to get very pissed.

25:22You're going to get depressed or nihilistic or angry because there's country like, for example, I mean, we talk about some of this that we saw in China. What's interesting to me is that if you if you if you disentangled everything and put the stats on a chart, China right now, GDP per capita, even adjusted for person power, adjusted for person power is lower. Like on a pure numbers basis, there's less. There's less had.

25:47Atrioc:Yeah, they have less money, so they should be less happy. I'm not necessarily what I'm saying, but like it's the direction of travel. Do you know what I'm saying?

25:54Aiden:All aspects in China are worse than in the United States. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. is like if you were to just plot that and you didn't have the lines before it, you could make like obviously option A. But I think what's so obvious is that if you're heading in the right direction, there's a general sense of like, this is working, this is positive. Whereas if you're even slightly tilting in the wrong direction, it feels catastrophic. It feels the world is ending.

26:22Atrioc:Is there a world where Trump kind of initiates a great reset so that our expectations can only to go up from here. Maybe. And we sort of take a five-year hit right now, and then we're back at that top right quadrant. Then we're back with the rest of the world being unhappy.

26:38Aiden:It's funny you say that. That's unironically some people. So I have heard that argument in life, the idea that Trump, like in the destruction that comes around him with the status quo and also the falling in quality of life for people in the US, it has to hit this bottom to kind of reset and then build out of again, not as a pro to Trump, but like whatever comes in the wake of him. Yeah. And also I would say, even if he's not doing it for America, there's like measurable evidence that he's probably doing it for some parts of Europe who were, were like speed running down the Trump route until they saw what happened with Trump and America and are now like, well, it's not, I mean, let's not get so nihilistic and angry.

27:22This is legitimately happening. There's like some some wild populist parties in in Europe that are losing support because of because Trump threatened to invade Greenland and all that stuff.

27:33Atrioc:Even arguably the Canadian election, right? Yeah, his involvement, you know, like him coming to power just like changed everything. We have Trump in here somewhere, right? Do you want to talk about him? Yeah, because what's interesting is like this sounds silly, but if you don't speak English, you hear less Trump. Yeah, and he is like a destabilizing force that does make it even for other angles for your countries, hard to have a, uh, coherent worldview or vision of the world. I mean, I know as an American, it does feel for me, uh, my head is more spinny when he says shit, like we're going to end a civilization tonight.

28:11It's like, like it makes you feel like, uh, bad about the country. You know, you feel like disconnected from disconnected from the ideal that you want to like push towards it. Right. I don't think any country hits their ideals by the way, but I think the idea that you're trying to go towards it is nice, but making an effort and it feels like he's not even, there's not even an attempt. There's not even a lip service to the ideals and it's, it's disorienting. Well, so counter,

28:36Atrioc:I would assume that folks in other countries would be, if you are in Canada or the UK, that you would be seeing the sort of other world type of happiness because Trump is not your president. So is it just literally you understand English and you can understand understand Donald Trump is yeah. I don't think this is the case, but I'm just, it's an interesting, unique aspect of, uh, of English speaking countries. That that's one thing that would be, it's definitely English more in my experience.

29:04Aiden:He usually shores up pride in the other countries. You know, there, they use it as a reference point of, well, at least we don't, at least we don't have him right now. That's the more frequent thing I hear.

29:17Atrioc:And I just want it for the record. day truck said to put Trump as only kind of sad. Well, he's got the swagger.

29:26Have you seen him dance to YMCA? It can't be that bad. That's some happiness out in the world.

29:30Aiden:I actually want to ask an open question to the audience because I think we have a unique audience for this. People in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand who listen to this show are a genre of person who are more tapped in to U.S. politics than the average person from those countries would be. And because the U.S. dominates English media and English social media, I think people from those countries are like weirdly in tune with U.S. politics, right? Yeah. Do you feel like Trump being in power here makes you sad? Genuinely. Yeah, even if it's not a shame, right? If you're in Australia, I can't imagine you don't feel some type of like destabilization.

30:20Like it's a signal of the world that was more stable than your parents knew is fraying. The old order is dying. You know, all that stuff. I feel like that is generally part of the fog of the future that makes you unstable, even if you're not in America directly feeling Trump. And the idea that like, okay, this country ostensibly was our ally and now they're tariffing. all that stuff is like probably throws you out in the off kilter in a little bit too. I don't know. I think he's part of it, but I would agree that it's not the uniquely English speaking thing. Let us know. So we stay involved.

30:54Atrioc:So we've got basically the idea of our own kind of culture and expectations being a key part, which let's just quickly. How important you guys feel that is like the expectations that English speaking countries have set for themselves the last generations and not just Americans, right? Do we feel I feel like that's as impactful as the fact that our homes are way more expensive. I would say not as much, but it's in there.

31:18Aiden:I think they're tied. They're tied together. I do think there's, there's a lot of truth here. That kind of comparison is the thief of joy. We have this aversion to loss. It hurts to lose things and fail much more than it. Yeah. And to be on the trajectory up, you know, and this is tied to housing uniquely in these places where it's like, this is the baseline way to live life and like find success is being stable enough to move out and buy a home. I feel like that's the commonality between these things. And it's too expensive to have. I don't feel like it is unique in that I think young French people and young Japanese people and are struggling with this right now too.

32:05Aiden:Like that feeling's not, not unique. Struggling with the housing thing or with the sense that things are declining? The sense that things are declining. Like that is a shared feeling across a bunch of places. So if that is the case, what makes it unique in this specific situation? This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate seat. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs.

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33:22Where is Daredevil?

33:24Atrioc:I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I've been liberated. I'm going to take this city back. in an all new season now streaming only on disney plus they're hunting us it's time we started

33:41Aiden:hunting them i can work with them this should be tons of fun marvel television's daredevil born again now streaming only on disney plus well here's a question is one of the theories is that

33:56Atrioc:we in the anglosphere are measuring our happiness differently so that's a common argument we are more aware of mental health. We have, you know, we talk about it more. It's become, you know, anxiety, ADHD, these diagnoses have gone way, way, way, way up over the past couple of decades. And the argument could be that maybe we aren't actually unhappier compared to the rest of the world, but we have just become much more aware of our poor mental state, whereas another country might hide it. There was an interesting slate article. So Rosa and the discord linked this. So a slate article talked about how Finland, they're one of the happiest countries, right?

34:28Atrioc:But then if you ask them, they're like, no, we're not. So there's a quote. Nobody is more skeptical than the fins about the notion that we are the world's happiest people. To be fair, this is hardly the only global ranking we've topped recently. When a cabinet member of the Finnish government was introduced at an international conference as quote, the representative of the happiest country in the world, he responded. If that's true, I'd hate to see the other nations. So, but isn't that just a comment on the human condition? I feel like they are. I hear that Finns say that I've heard the saying that all the unhappy Finns kill themselves so it makes the stats better I've heard this but I

35:06Aiden:I think people take the word happiness too literally. Yeah like they're not walking around smiling they're just generally more content with like they're less what's the word I'm thinking of I don't think because the report isn't about like which country of people is the most euphoric and walking around but that's what the title kind of makes it sound like. It's just a measurement of a bunch of factors that provide stability and confidence. General life satisfaction. And like people in Finland have, you know, measurably lower levels of corruption. They're generally less likely to go into disastrous debt for health.

35:44You know, like all this thing. There's like a lot of things that would derail a life that are less common there. And so I don't, I mean, their weather sucks. I'm not, I feel like it's, I feel like it's reasonable to think that they are top ranked in happiness.

35:57Atrioc:We have the four or five that should cancel out. That's what I've been saying, but nobody believes me. You're joking, dude. They can't even imagine that there. What do you guys think about the job market? How influential is this compared to the rest of the world broadly? And we can, we can kind of tie AI in here. I think AI is often contributing to the feeling that there's going to be less jobs, but they're sort of intertwined. Yeah, it's interesting. I I mean, listen, if you take inflation and housing and jobs and all that together, it's my core. My core belief is that that is the key thing. But I do think that the job market is pretty bad all over.

36:34In fact, it could be worse in other countries. So I wouldn't necessarily say that's the Anglosphere thing.

36:40Aiden:I actually talked to friends in Australia and Sweden about this recently, about their struggles, this 20 to 30 range, especially getting new jobs. What's it like to apply to things right now? Layoffs happening. And without looking at data directly, I haven't seen anything that says unemployment is dramatically higher in these five countries, right? Or that it's dramatically more difficult outside of them to get jobs. It could even be worse than other.

37:13Atrioc:Youth unemployment in China. It's brutal in China. And people told us that in China kind of lackadaisically, like in Chongqing, when we were talking with our tour guide, she's like, Oh yeah, it's like 30%. It's insanely hard to get a job right now. This is just casually like, Oh my God, for reference hours that youth is what 10 right now, something like that.

37:29Aiden:So I feel like the only point we've hit so far that actually has a differentiation of these specific countries is housing price. When we put everything in really sad, I don't know if we,

37:42Atrioc:well here, let's, let's quickly chalk this. 2020 is when this all started. Yeah, 2020 is when atrium started streaming regularly. Well, that's not, but that is available to the entire world. Well, actually how much it's really more English speaking.

37:58You're saying the reason the anglosphere is unhappy is because I am streaming. Yeah. Well,

38:05Atrioc:it ties directly into the news. It ties directly into expectations. You keep telling people they should have a home. Okay. It's kind of interlocked with everything. You keep telling your audience they should have jobs. Counterpoints. I have been streaming so much less, and yet happiness has only gone down. That was only this year, though. We don't have data for that yet. The World Happiness Report was through 2025. I keep taking breaks, and people get more unhappy, so that can't be possibly.

38:31Aiden:When the Bureau of Atriarch Streaming does their revisions at the end of the day. We do a lot of numbers revisions.

38:37Atrioc:All right, look, I think we're starting to wrap it up. A core one. Do you think these people just need Jesus? Maybe it's religion, Aidan. Religion. You're a God-fearing heathen, right? No. God-fearing heathen. And you're miserable. Heathen. Why don't you go to Christ or any of the other ones?

38:53Aiden:Are you, if I were to give, statistically, I think Scandinavian countries are some of the least religious out of like the OECD, I think. And they're at the top of the happiness report. So I think, I don't think that's the case at all.

39:08Atrioc:Yeah. Yeah, so even in the Derek Thompson article, the number of people who are non-religious has been increasing substantially for like 50 years. It used to in this man look at the exact numbers in the 70s. It was like five percent and then it like 28. Yeah, pull this up. So the number of declined, right? The number of people who are non-religious has been declining fairly precipitously for 50 years and no, no, no. people have been getting more atheist until covid now they're getting more religious right right yeah yeah so yeah um so it does not appear to have any impact whatsoever unless religion is making them sad you could flip it that's what it is so it's the people who have become religious in the past five years but the people who've gotten religious last five years are so unhappy with their new have you read the news in the bible it is depressing bible is low-key depressing I think this is kind of I'm not putting Jesus is kind of sad.

40:08Well, this is religion. This is the picture for religion. And yeah, I don't think it's the big. I don't think it's a big cause of this. It has been at times in history, but not now. Trust. What about trust? Which we represented by

40:23Atrioc:the spy in Team Fortress 2. The spy in Team Fortress 2 stabbing the engineer. It feels like we're all being stabbed in the back by spies. Trust. Social trust. high trust versus low trust society. It does feel like that's, I don't know if it's the cause, but it feels like a symptom. But people are increasingly feel low trust in some of these Anglosphere countries. Yeah, so it's a number,

40:49Aiden:I hate to echo it, but it's another thing that doesn't really come out in the numbers when you look at how they measure against other countries. So there's a number of ways you can look at this. There isn't a fixed way to measure trust in a society. Two of the things I looked at were the world value survey. They do a question of, you know, what do you trust your neighbors in your country or your, sorry, do you trust strangers in your country? The average stranger. And just taking people's general evaluation of that. And the countries that are on the high end, you could probably guess. It might be a little Denmark.

41:27Aiden:Might be a little Finland. And they rank really high. I think Denmark is like 73 % trust the average stranger in their own country. And the Anglosphere countries are lower on this list. And there has been a decline in the US over the past few decades. But there's actually been an increase in Britain, which was interesting to me. And pretty stable in Canada, Australia, New Zealand. No significant change. and with plenty of other OECD countries like below and above these places. So I couldn't find anything significant there. There's another measurement that you can look at where what is the likelihood that somebody will find a wallet and like try to return it to its owner?

42:17Aiden:And this didn't really prove anything either. There was an interesting gap between the US, like trust in the US for strangers was really low, but the amount of people in the U S that would try to return the wallet is actually really high. And there's kind of an interesting disparity there of, Oh, well, how does this functional, like, how does this outlook on stranger strangers functionally interact with an actual task? Uh, but again, like no conclusion, no reason to like isolate these five places in terms of how that trust manifests, at least in the, these two tests. One thing I want to say is, uh, for me, if you were to break trust into trust in your other citizens and then trust in institutions, which is hard to categorize, but I do feel, at least anecdotally, it feels like there's a massive decline in trust in institutions.

43:11Like specifically, like, you know, I'm someone who would like defend our three branches of government and checks and balances. But like in modern day, it's harder and harder because they're so gridlocked and there's so little progress. So it like, it declines your ability to like, believe in that value and espouse for it and have trust in that it's going to do its job. That if we were to like all follow the rules and you know what I'm saying? I just think that is gotta be some part of it.

43:38Aiden:I don't know if that's worldwide or, or, uh, I wonder if those, this is another example of something that social media just really exacerbates. Right. And I think it just makes the problem seem even worse. Or if you're hearing something about the U.S. all the time on social media, then it's echoed through the whole silo of English social media. Then that makes you evaluate and feel worse about maybe your own government and its dysfunction. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if, you know, because these countries all have very similar political systems. You know, there's differences, but I mean, they have largely two major parties.

44:18I'm wondering if the gridlock from that is causing problems. I'm wondering if - For Americans specifically. But you'd have to identify the gridlock is unique, right?

44:26Aiden:Yeah. I'm not saying that there isn't enough similarities here for a pattern to exist, but who's to, you know, is -

44:33Atrioc:I mean, France's government is notoriously deadlocked, right? Yeah. We've talked about that on the show. Yeah.

44:39Aiden:So again, I think it's something that just fails the test of like is do these places stand out as truly unique among all these factors

44:47Atrioc:yeah seems like we lost a lot of trust that's also outlined by Derek by the economics economist pearlsman also show that trust is basically just plummeted for Americans in the last six years but it just doesn't seem English speaking specific okay you know what is English speaking what's the one thing that like unites particularly America but but honestly, most of YouTube, most of YouTube. I guess Madden Grand Theft Auto six keeps being delayed. I was pretty close. I would argue the world cares less about the delay than we do. And this is that is a big thing actually worse than housing and topped only by a truck streaming more me and Grand Theft Auto are probably the biggest causes of unhappiness.

45:35If they just released the damn game,

45:38Atrioc:if we keep failing to meet expectations, Yeah, and who's the one English speaking president that has had more impact for the entire angle sphere than anyone else. Gerald Gerald fucking Ford, also English speaking. This man. I don't know if you guys saw check this hunk of a man out. This is him playing football. I'm sorry. Is your podcast? This isn't for you. This is only for a truck. He used to be hot, and he's not, and that's why we're sad. Gerald Ford is a piece of ass, and I mean that the nicest way possible. How is that relevant, dog? To whether or not... I get it, actually. When you think about it.

46:17Atrioc:Let's wrap up this conversation. What are your guys' conclusions? So a lot of reasons to be sad in the world. I don't think there's any argument around that. Tapes over here. But I really do agree. It feels like there's a couple things that seem to stand out that are specific to us. The housing, I would argue, being the biggest, And then our news being so negative relative also seems extraordinarily problematic.

46:44Aiden:I think broad unhappiness is usually rooted in some material reality, like in some way. So what's the only factor we're able to look at on this board in this 40 minutes of podcast time? It seems to be housing prices. That's what stands out the most to me. I can't really find a clear reason for any of the others that would make the Anglosphere particularly unique. You're pointing to me. Well, there's one more thing. What is unique about English-speaking countries versus the rest of the world? We speak English. We speak English. Is it possibly that the English language is so stupid that that is the problem?

47:28I before E, except that there's C, except in the word weird and the word science. Well, the word red and read are spelled the same, but pronounced differently and mean different things. Like what if the fucking language is so annoying to deal with that? It's causing all this pain.

47:43Aiden:You ever heard how they count in French? It's fucked up. It's fucked. And you think you, and you're worried about that.

47:55Atrioc:I have a theory. Yeah. What's your theory? We're so bad at talking. we can't figure out how to get a house built, get a like we keep being like oh set up a pillar there and someone else is like pilar. I do like the idea of the housing crisis. I think the housing crisis is rooted in our comms just being put on bad comms. Why? Why the fuck is only of English speaking countries not building housing or bad at making housing affordable? Why is this unique to English speakers? I mean I think the data is there like if it's much worse. That's such a clear indicator of happiness, but why are we uniquely?

48:31Atrioc:It's not like it's just America. We have to go deeper into that, but I do want to say that I just read this piece that was like, there's a proven preference to not owning an apartment. If you want to own, they want to own a house in Anglosphere countries. And it may be rooted in the fact that historically they were able to do that. And so it's like, you feel like you're stepping down. Like people that were doing well or had a nice middle-class job could afford a house. Now I have to get an apartment. That's the downgrade. I'm pissed about that. I want a single family home.

49:02Aiden:Did they explore any other reasons for that being the case? Like if you look at America, there's really high demand for SUVs that doesn't exist in other places. Yeah. Uh, or even something like wedding rings, you know, but the origin of these things are often corporate marketing campaigns that were meant to circumvent some sort of regulation or popularize selling the thing. Like, is there something here that is similar, you think? They did not give an explanation, but I do think, yeah, I think it's a status thing. I think human beings are very status-obsessed creatures. And I think there's an idea that it's a downgrade, that in some way that you are less than you should.

49:49It's expectations versus reality, which I think is the core of all this.

49:52Aiden:I guess what I'm asking is, could you take a guess as to why those expectations are so ingrained or set? Especially outside of the US. I feel like I could make a really good guess why those expectations are set in the US. I mean, I would say even in Anglosphere countries is because they were able to do it until, you know, you go back to 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, they were able to do it. And now it's harder. And so, but you still want the same marker of success. You want the, what your parents had. I guess that would be my biggest guess. Additionally, I assume it's just harder to build in general. I think there's zoning laws that are unique to these legal systems that have all made, or whatever.

50:33I think the political gridlock, those things have combined to make it toxic. But I think there's a, I don't know. There's an idea that like, hey, I really want them to build a bunch of apartments so that other people can have them. So it brings down the price of homes so I can have a home. I think there's a part of that in English for countries. You want someone else to do it, but you want the same status symbol that your parents had.

50:56Atrioc:So expectations, affordability, being blasted with negative news. Let's get away from this. Talk about all the horrible shit that's been happening this week. Aiden, you want to talk about what's going on in Gulf states? That shit's awful.

51:11Aiden:Whoa. And by the way,

51:13Atrioc:if you're living in New Zealand, America, you need to know about this. Okay.

51:19Aiden:You need to be tapped. You need to be tapped.

51:22Atrioc:You need to monitor the situation. I want you to crack open a monster. Do you think that people in New Zealand learning about UAE leaving OPEC is really making them unhappy? I think they got to get their monitor right here, two inches from their face, and they got to crack a monster, and you need to monitor the situation. Prepare to get sad. I think if you could learn about this in a house, a big house, you'd be fine. Let's get fucking depressed, guys. Let's get into it. this isn't even a sad story or did we talk about uae i mean i yeah i don't know if i would call

51:53Aiden:this sad so i don't know if you guys are familiar but this is not a sad what is sad about it we are we depressed for opec not having another member am i a guy guy who's sitting in front of a graph that scale is kind of sad to really sad it can only be on this chart

52:09Atrioc:well you made the chart i'm not putting opec on here or like and do you feel like opec is particularly saddening to English speakers. How would they say it's like a friend's D &D group lost a member, not if OPEC lost a country? Who cares?

52:24Aiden:So, I don't know if you guys are caught up on this, but there's been this whole like US-Israel-Iran war going on.

52:31Atrioc:I try to not listen to the news. It makes me sad. Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

52:36Aiden:And kind of in the fallout of this war, the UAE announced today that it is leaving OPEC. And if you are not familiar, OPEC is a bunch of different countries, many of which are in the Middle East, but several from Africa, I think some from South America as well, that are a public cartel of oil producing nations that cooperate on pricing and output of oil in order to influence the global price of oil. And they have done this, I think since the 60s, OPEC was formed in the 60s. It's been 60 years. I don't know if it's. And the UAE is one of the largest producers in OPEC. It is the third largest producer behind Saudi Arabia and not super far behind Iraq, which is second.

53:28Aiden:And they have talked for many years about potentially leaving OPEC. the trade-off being that once you leave, you can produce as much as you want. And that has potential financial benefits. You have a certain ability to navigate geopolitical situations like the one we're in right now that you wouldn't otherwise have. And you don't have to adhere to the ruling of the cartel and let other nations decide how much oil you're going to produce anymore. And the outcome that I think not a lot of people fully understand is the cartel and its ability to influence the global price absorbs price shocks that would happen.

54:17Aiden:So huge swings in supply or demand that would cause the price of oil to spike for short periods or really drop for periods. OPEC, because they control so much of the supply as a block, can choose to control their output collectively in a way that heavily influences the public price of oil, that lets them all make a stable amount of money at all times. And the UAE has a big chip at that table because they produce so much compared to the other countries. And they're leaving at a time when the US has also dramatically increased its production, which has decreased the power that OPEC has over the market at large.

55:03Aiden:So that's why this is consequential. I'm curious if you wanted to weigh in, had any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, it's just... So OPEC, they all team up and they all say, we're going to make less oil so we can all have a higher price and be rich. And everybody in OPEC is incentivized to cheat. They all want everyone else to cut their thing and then they cheat and put a little bit more. And they all have been doing this. Algeria cheated in 2002, 2006. Saudi Arabia cheated in 2002. Qatar cheated for fucking 10 years. Saudi Arabia, they've all, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, they've all cheated. They've all at different times needed the money more than other people.

55:42And so they say, we're only gonna produce this much and then they produce more. And UAE is kind of just over it. They're just kind of over it and they would rather just produce and sell as much oil as they can, especially because right now when oil prices are over$100 a barrel, there is so much money to be made. If you just sell as much as you make, you can fund your, you can do everything. And if you're voluntarily holding back, it's kind of frustrating, especially if you think other members of the cartel are cheating. So I think UAE is just like, fuck it, I'm going to get mine. I think it's a symbol, first of all, of kind of what the U.S.

56:16has done to all sorts of institutions, but everyone's kind of going into this, what Carney called multipolar world. Everyone's kind of looking out for themselves, figuring it out and pulling back from these institutions that have sort of made cooperation. I don't think OPEC is a particularly good thing. I understand they could absorb price shocks, but essentially at the end of the day, it's a cartel that makes all of our gas more expensive.

56:39Aiden:It does feel like it's a part of that greater trend. I think the pressure that this puts on now is because they're one of the largest producers. Like other countries have left OPEC prior to this. I think Qatar left in like 2020. A couple countries had left before that. But the difference between the UAE and those places is that the UAE's output per day is way higher. And they actually do have a little more influence from their output than, it's just not as big of a deal when those countries left. And now Saudi Arabia is in this spot as the biggest producer, kind of the de facto head of OPEC by the amount they output.

57:18Aiden:They have less control than they ever have because of the UAE leaving. And then it forces Saudi Arabia to be like the remaining enforcer and cut their oil production by larger margins in order to try and still have that influence over the price that they once had. It puts a lot of pressure on Saudi Arabia that didn't exist before. And I guess I'm not really privy to the nuance of this relationship changing over the last few years, but the UAE and Saudi Arabia are clashing a little more politically in recent years than they did in the past. Differing takes on how they develop relationships with Israel, for instance.

58:04Aiden:And the UAE is, yeah, cutting and running. it.

58:07Atrioc:Is it fair to say that the weakening of that cartel in the absence of the sort of like global shock where they can sort of help monitor the price is going to be better for the consumer. Like if I go to the local bodega to buy a barrel of crude, is it going to be cheaper now because UAE is not adhering to these prices?

58:27Aiden:When we take our gas station break between the main episode and the primo and we get our barrel. You get your peaches. You get the sweet peaches. You get some almonds. I get the barrel. And what I appreciate you you share the crew. No matter how expensive it gets and you can never tell me I don't share the crew.

58:50Atrioc:Sometimes it's that dirty Venezuelan world, you know.

58:53Aiden:I get that unrefined sour crude. Rude. I put it on my Skittles. Dipping your Skittles in sour Venezuela. Rude. Is a beast. Is fucking sick. The question you asked had a very important line, which is like all else being equal or whatever. Yeah, definitely. If this was just the only thing that happened, oil prices would go down. Everyone's flooding the market with more. I mean, your example with Saudi Arabia, I 100 % agree, but like Saudi Arabia is under some financial pressure right now. They, they, they, it's like hard for them to cut their oil output. I know it's tough. They got it. They got to finish the line.

59:33Aiden:They got to finish the line. They got to sponsor another. They got to get a golf league going and yeah. Wait, what is the financial pressure being the restriction of moving of the oil through the straight? I'm guessing. No, I'm thinking in general, the cost overruns of all the things they've been spending on to cut. So actually the line in a way, the line in a way like they, all that stuff is very expensive and it was while they were pumping a lot of oil. If they have to cut the oil, it's going to be harder.

59:59Atrioc:Yeah. So although they're probably doing the best because they have that pipeline, they're probably doing better than anyone. But yeah, so I don't know. Overall, I think it's a decent thing. I think OPEC was not in a lot of people's benefits as a consumer. And I think this is a big pressure to them. They were 40 % of the world's oil market before losing UAE. Now they're going to be less. And UAE pumping as much as they can is like everyone else is incentivized to be like, well, I don't want to be left behind. Yeah.

1:00:25Aiden:Did we talk about Iraq's pipeline that they have on the last episode? We talked about a canal. I mentioned the canal, if that's what you're thinking. Oh, and also worth mentioning that another member of OPEC, Iran, is firing missiles at the UAE. So it also makes the UAE, OPEC, hard to... Probably a small factor. Probably not that big of a deal. Iran is in OPEC?

1:00:52Atrioc:Yeah, yeah, that is funny. That's so funny. They're attacking everybody.

1:00:55Aiden:Yeah, Iran's number of Iran's number four. Yeah. Wow. So now excuse me number three now.

1:01:06Aiden:Moving up the spot.

1:01:07Atrioc:Honestly, if you're if you're a product manager working at Iran and your job, your KPI, that's the most tech brother you've ever said. And your KPI for this sprint is to get Iran to Number one on the list, you start bombing number one, two, and three.

1:01:24Aiden:Elizabeth Holmes. When I'm a part of the fucking religious theocracy of Iran, and I'm doing agile. And I'm at the scrum. I'm in the morning scrum. I come to Monday scrum. It's like, we build a few more drones.

1:01:42Now we're going to get UAE out.

1:01:44Aiden:We're going to clear the Jira ticket. We bombed UAE's pipes. I thought we talked about this on the show for some reason, but Iraq, I didn't know this has actually a giant, uh, high capacity pipeline as well to get oil to their opposite coast. Isn't it to Russia or America or not to Russia? I'm wrong. No, they get to like the Baltic sea or something, right? I'm fucking, I gotta hold on. Give me, give me one. I don't want to say one fucking second, dude. Uh, yeah, I'm trying to remember where it goes out, but there's like, uh, They have restrictions on basically they have a high capacity line to get oil out of the country, which they've historically been unable to use very effectively because.

1:02:33Goes through Israel and they and they have beef.

1:02:38Aiden:They have beef with the Kurds. Yeah. Uh, so the Kurds threaten the pipeline in order to leverage in their relationship with the Iraqi government. Yeah. Uh, because of the issues there that I know so much about, but I won't tell you right now. It's funny because this is the area of the map that we were making a joke like would be impossible to build. Yeah. Yeah. But there's a pipeline. There's actually a pipeline. And they, I forget what the number was, but there actually is an incredible amount of capacity in this pipeline. And they have, in the wake of this crisis, because the strait is closed, they have negotiated something with the Kurds in order to start using this pipeline actively again.

1:03:21Oh, I mean, like, this is the best time. If you have a pipeline, you're the GOAT. If you're a pipeline exporter in the Middle East who gets around Hormuz, you're just a money printer. You've literally developed a license to print money. Why didn't we do that? Why didn't we, as Lemonade Stand, build a pipeline in the Middle East?

1:03:37Atrioc:Or you mean America, which we've also done.

1:03:39Aiden:on. I'm dead ass man lemonade stand, but I was to be fair.

1:03:45Atrioc:We do have pipes coming out of the back wall that as far as I'm aware, that's the sour crude right there.

1:03:51Aiden:That's where we store it.

1:03:52Atrioc:We release. We finally released lemonade merch. See that. See that tap. Don't push that tab. You need to fill your vehicle. Your SUV needs topping off. All right. Yeah, I mean, that was an interesting piece of news for sure. Sad, sad stuff.

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1:05:31Atrioc:Trading at Schwab is now powered by Ameritrade, giving you even more specialized support than ever before. like access to the trade desk, our team of passionate traders ready to tackle anything from the most complex trading questions to a simple strategy gut check. Need assistance? No problem. Get 24-7 professional answers and live help and access support by phone, email, and in-platform chat. That's how Schwab is here for you to help you trade brilliantly. Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Let's move on to OpenAI and Microsoft. Now, there's been a funny little relationship going on with some some spikes in their relationship this past week.

1:06:11Atrioc:I say relationship. What I'm going to try to do is frame all of this as though it's a romantic relationship to help it be more understood. Okay, real real brief history. Open AI been around for a while, obviously, and in 2019 to 2023, basically open AI and Microsoft were in a monogamous relationship. Okay, Microsoft is the biggest investor. They had exclusivity on IP specifically with the API IP, but broadly they are the ones who get to sort of run most of open AI products. What true love? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But there was a funny thing that we talked about a while ago, which is that if open AI achieves AGI, then they get to like break the contract, which is a very strange, funny thing because AGI does not have an actual definable thing.

1:06:53Atrioc:So this has been going on for quite a while. And then as we talked about last year, opening AI finally, after a lot of consternation was able to transition to a for profit. So they split into two. They have the open AI, but now they have a public benefit corporation underneath it where the nonprofit has a 26 % share and Microsoft has a 27 % share. So they had a child. Okay. Open AI is the nonprofit and Mike. Yeah, and they birth the child and they both have equal ownership in the child, but also the remaining 47 % is hold held by employees who are the family friends. This all tracks. This is all tracking like just a relationship.

1:07:31Atrioc:So we chatted about this. You know, this is again last October where there was a big question of like what was going to happen. Clearly open AI is angling to IPO angling to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And in their original contract with Microsoft, they had basically kind of shackled themselves and said, we're only going to use Microsoft's services. We're guaranteed to buy this much. There's even revenue share where open AI just has to just straight up send. It's estimated 20 % of their revenue straight to Microsoft on top of paying them for all the compute that they need to use. Oh, wow.

1:08:01Yeah, so this

1:08:03Atrioc:happened in October and this was the story of like opening. I has finally become for profit asterisk. They're, you know, the for profit company is like this child that they have. So in the month since then, things have gotten a little funky and open. I is starting to sleep around a little bit, but first Microsoft had a little dalliance. I would say this is not cheating. It was emotional cheating. Okay, so what Microsoft did in November is they partner with anthropic you go to the next one anthropic happily announced hey we're on a strategic partnership together microsoft has agreed to buy uh excuse me we're agreeing to buy 30 billion dollars in azure compute which is microsoft's cloud services and in return we microsoft we're going to start running their models so the relationship with opening ai that's still their main squeeze but microsoft talking a lot with anthropic it's getting a little spicy

1:08:52Aiden:Can I quickly ask is Azure like Microsoft's competitor to something like AWS?

1:08:58Atrioc:Yes. Yeah. So you hear about Google Cloud or Azure or AWS. This is all companies that basically are selling servers that can do stuff. Yeah. So Microsoft is trying to position themselves instead of saying, hey, we offer open AI products. They're trying to say we offer open AI products, but also don't tell my partner, but we can also slip you some anthropic too. So they're starting to put more and more models on here. so then february 27th happens this is quite recent now open ai uh announces a massive new round of fundraising with amazon so as a reminder they signed this whole deal and when they went for profit that microsoft still had exclusivity right microsoft is still the one that gets their ip they have this great balance back and forth and opening i just comes out and it's like we've partnered with amazon we're really happy with this they're investing 50 billion dollars but there's some weird things.

1:09:50Atrioc:They say AWS from Amazon is going to be the exclusive provider for this new joint product. We're going to make this new runtime environment called OpenAI Frontier, but they're explicitly not supposed to do that in the contract when they wrote the marriage contract. Yeah, when they wrote that, when they signed the prenup, they specifically said that they're not like everything from OpenAI still has to run on Microsoft. If it's an API, Hi, Amazon announces very happily. We're investing$50 billion in open AI, but it's actually$15 billion followed by quotes, another 35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met.

1:10:28Atrioc:What does that mean? Who knows? What is opening? I doing with Amazon. What are their hands actually going on each other? I don't know. So this appeared, this is, you know, two months ago appeared to directly conflict with this big, you know, deal that had taken years for them to sort out with Microsoft. So that same day, if you go to the next one, Perry, Microsoft comes out and has to basically say no. And they say our IP relationship continues unchanged. We have exclusive license and access to the property. Azure is still the exclusive cloud provider. We're supposed to have exclusive providing for stateless APIs.

1:11:05Atrioc:And any anything that comes from a collaboration with a third party, including Amazon, has to be hosted on our stuff. And so Microsoft is kind of going, wait, what the fuck is going on? We had this deal in March. The FT runs report and says Microsoft is considering suing open AI. We know our contract, a source told the FT. We will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and open AI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them. So they open AI sort of appeared to just be flaunting the contract that they had signed with Microsoft, which by the way, as a reminder, they couldn't have even gone for profit unless Microsoft gave the okay.

1:11:46Atrioc:That's how important Microsoft is in open AI's business. So now as of one day ago, they, if you go to the next one, Microsoft and open AI come out and they say, we revised our contract again. So now they're saying, look in quotes, open AI products will ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities open ai can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider that i don't know what that means that's all they said there's no additional context they're saying it has to ship first on azure unless microsoft doesn't want to does that is that for a certain amount of time i don't know but in it it's now non-exclusive microsoft has officially given up other people they they're officially in an open relationship which is kind of wild because again Microsoft is like the biggest contributor to open AI for a long period of time.

1:12:40Atrioc:And a key part of that was that they would have exclusive IP access to open AI. And they're finally giving that up. The other thing that they're giving up is Microsoft no longer has to pay any rev share to open AI, but open AI has to pay rev share back. So the way of to, you know, kind of summarize all this open AI has convinced Microsoft to be non-exclusive. This is after years of them basically trying to finagle around the details of their contract. Microsoft seemingly is like saving money on this. They still have a lot of equity, but they're partnering with other people. OpenAI is partnering with other people.

1:13:16Atrioc:And what was this key central partnership across all of, you know, AI is sort of falling apart probably in, in a wake in anticipation of open AI IPOing soon. And so if you feel like that's a little convoluted and confusing, if you go to the next one Perry. There's this lovely graph by Bloomberg that really shows all of it. Scroll down until you'll see it. You'll know it when you see it. Keep going that. So this graph really kind of drives home.

1:13:42Aiden:Audio listeners, this graph doesn't look like anything. It's incredibly confusing.

1:13:48Atrioc:There's about 20 circles with lines interweaving between all of them, essentially showing how incredibly incestuous all of these companies are with each other and how many deals and relationships there are. And there was this degree of sort of like key exclusivity partnership between two of these giants and now with that gone everybody's going to be sleeping around with everybody yeah what's wrong with starting the polycule it's a polycule it's definitely a an ai fuck fest going on here what i will say is you know and nvidia is hidden open ai is hidden yeah they're the they're getting around no everybody no loads refused is the open AI party.

1:14:28100%.

1:14:33It's a lot of arrows going on. They're the center. They got money promised to everybody and they take money from everybody. I got two headlines here, Perry, if you pull them up. Amazon, in addition to, at the same time, they're investing in open AI, put$25 billion in Anthropic and Google, which has their own platform, Gemini, is also putting 40 billion in adorabic and money in open AI. And there just seems to be a sense among every one of these big tech companies that they just don't want to lose. Like they just, like we're going to do our thing as hard as we can, but we better to God better not be out of the loop if someone's ahead of us or like, they just, AI is such an existential threat for their future that they have to have billions of dollars into every one of the competitors to make sure that it's...

1:15:22Aiden:Just to clarify, This is basically just these companies hedging. They see this as so critical that they have to invest in competitors because they literally have no choice. That's what it feels like. Part of it is also, a lot of it is circular. So like if Google puts 40 billion in Anthropic, they're saying there's a condition that you have to use our cloud or whatever for that. And so their cloud gets a boost and Anthropic gets a boost and everyone's, you know, it's the circular circle jerk thing. but it does feel like part of it is that like, I don't care if they're my direct competitor, just make sure that we're a part of anything that's winning.

1:16:01Atrioc:Yeah. Another way to put it is so Sadia Nadella talked about this with war cash like six months ago. And basically the crux of his strategy is we want to be a hyperscaler. We want to have massive data centers that can run anybody's model. So we want to invest in basically everybody so that no matter which model wins, which out no matter which person manages to spend the whatever 30 billion dollars to create the AGI. We have the system right there ready to go that's ready to use it. So that's why most of these deals include things like open AI has to buy like the contract says open AI has to buy 250 billion dollars of Azure Azure usage, which is crazy.

1:16:40Atrioc:That's that's an insane amount of money. So a lot of these investments are like you just need to make sure you're running it on our servers so that no matter who wins like the model of you know, the model has no matter what AI you build, it has to run on computers. And so if Google or Amazon or Microsoft are all setting themselves up to have to be the cloud provider, they kind of don't care who wins to some degree. Yeah. And all those promises from no loads, refuse open AI do not run up well against this headline, which just came out, which is from their CFO, where they have missed both revenue and user targets.

1:17:18and I think were recently just passed in business revenue by Anthropic. So these are all things that are kind of spooky for the dark center of this web because again, they've just made so many promises on money and they had estimated to hit a billion users. They have not hit it. They estimated to hit a certain amount of revenue targets to be on track to pay those things back. They have not hit it. the ads platform has so far not produced the returns they expected. Obviously, Sora didn't produce the returns expected. And all the money in AI right now is coming from business clients who are spinning through the nose.

1:17:56And a lot of that is going to quads. So yeah, it's a weird thing. I will say this woman, the CFO of OpenAI is apparently getting like left out of meetings by Sam Altman. He's like icing her out because she keeps talking about this stuff and not like going with the flow. He apparently wants to just vibe his way to, you know,

1:18:16Aiden:vibe his way to the IPO, to the IPO. Cause the IPO is where they all cash out.

1:18:21Atrioc:I don't mean to talk ill of Sam Altman, who by all accounts is impeccable. By all accounts. But it is, it's like even just this Microsoft story is wild. You spend years getting your biggest partner to agree to like let you become a for-profit company to change a bunch of the deal that you guys had. And then a couple months later, you go basically explicitly violate that with Amazon and get them to, you know, they're basically just continuing to kind of push Microsoft a little bit farther out, which maybe they're fine with, but it, dude, it does not seem like a loyal partner. And it's going to be fine.

1:19:02Aiden:I just want to like see some other people, and Microsoft's like, okay, well, you can't bring him home and then sam altman started bringing him home

1:19:13Atrioc:and like and sam altman's like and by the way i love you and i want to be with you unless i have like the greatest orgasm of all time artificial general orgasm and that would change things

1:19:25Aiden:that would say but i do love you and yeah and you know that you thank you for the money by the way thank you so much for the money a little bit more i just need a little more i just need a little bit more because I got a date with Amazon tonight. Like I want to look good. Yeah, I don't know. I know I like Amazon.

1:19:44Yeah, it's weird. I agree. Doesn't seem like a good partner. It seems like he I mean, you could chart even even I mean, I'm no supporter of you on, but you go every step of the way and he like he'll use them for what is useful at the time and then the second he wants something more can be benefited more. He just cuts the partnership loose and yeah, it's

1:20:04Atrioc:it's honestly it's it's one black mark on a flawless record. On a flawless record. This guy's had an impeccable life and career.

1:20:10Aiden:I know we haven't talked about this at all, but OpenAI seems to have a lot of financial obligations. So many, bro. So many. I just, like you said in that article, it's like that was one$250 billion obligation. And that's one of the things. His deal-making spree last year put OpenAI on the hook for 600 billion in future spending commitments and for this context q3 of last year it might

1:20:41Atrioc:have been q4 i apologize but they lost 11 billion dollars so they just give you a sense of what they're doing in a given three month period they are losing 11 billion dollars but like that'll turn around it's just have you seen the new chat gb did you see the pictures they're really i heard it's good actually i was going to ask you about it i don't know if you know anything more about the new chat GPT. I heard it's good. It's just that there's a limit. You can't promise 600 billion dollars and then make no money like something. I mean, America's done it for a long time, so maybe it's not impossible, but for a company that doesn't work, it doesn't.

1:21:14I don't know. It's so wild.

1:21:16Atrioc:I'll quickly give the counter argument. We've talked about this, I believe, on a patron episode like six months ago as part of these announcements that open I has been doing. They announced that they have 900 million weekly active users on chat gbt that is a bafflingly large amount of people even if it's not hitting a billion like they promised even if it's not going to generate whatever six hundred billion dollars in the next year that is an insanely huge amount of users that currently uh the vast vast majority of which are not paying i believe it's six percent are paying they actually talked about this in their recent uh announcement but the point is they have what eight hundred billion people a billion they've entered eight hundred billion people.

1:21:59Atrioc:They have eight hundred million people for whom they are using open AIs products and not paying. Okay, so here it is. So nine hundred, nine hundred million weekly active users, fifty million are paying subscribers. That is eight hundred and fifty million people using their products, costing them money and not making them anything. And then if you compare that to the tech giants where we have often said, hey, Google spending crazy money, but they are profitable. They make a lot of money. meta spending a crazy amount of money on ai but they are profitable the reason both of those are profitable is because of ads they have a really sophisticated ad network and in theory if open ai can start monetizing the literal fucking almost billion people they have using their apps that could be an absolutely momentous revenue stream so it's not like there's no formula for how to get there there being like a reasonable company i don't know if it's there like 650 billion dollars constantly, but it's just, it's worth acknowledging the amount of users they have on chat.

1:22:57Atrioc:GBT is absolutely insane. And there's almost no monetization, which is kind of wild. Yeah. They just have to, it's just harder to crack than they thought. Like, like, like social media is harder to crack than they thought. Yeah. They just, they keep jumping into these things. They need like a social, like a vertical scrolling app with videos. Go back into it. Yeah. Sore three. They need to do sore two. Yeah. I don't know. I have just been underwhelmed by their ad products and financially it's been nothing so far. So I don't know. I don't see them. When you say their ad product, what do you mean by that?

1:23:32They have keyword ads in free open AI right now. Okay. And it just has not.

1:23:38Aiden:I thought for some reason, the way you're saying it, I'm like, does the separate ads from the, I thought they're just, they're putting ads. No, they're just putting ads. Okay, yeah. But they're not like integrated in a way that's, going to get a bunch of marketing dollars. Yeah. So I don't know. I, I, I, it just feels again. The thing is, it's not one of those things where it's like your deadbeat son who's in the garage, like learning guitar. And it's like, he'll figure it out. Give him time. Like they don't have a lot of time. All these promises are soon. The deadbeat son is 38. Yeah. And he's got a lot of credit card debt.

1:24:14Aiden:The deadbeat. Yeah. It's like, okay, he needs to figure it out. He's a crazy polycule. He's in. He owes a lot of money. And he's fucking everybody. He's bringing them all over. He's no loves refuse. He brings them home. He's 38. He doesn't make any fucking money. It's a problem now. It's a, they got to figure it out. So Darren, this can't be your plan.

1:24:37Well, we could talk about the boring Trump news about another assassination attempt. Third one, yawn. We're over it. We've seen it. You can talk about how there's a widespread conspiracy theory. which I think is a sign of the times more than any truth to them. I think it's just like people are, people are. But I think what's more interesting, more interesting Trump story is that starting now, the U.S. is issuing passports that have Donald Trump's face on them. So I really think this will finally crack what we've been missing. When I go overseas, the problem when I say I'm American is they're like, well are you an american who supports the all change rump and in like can show him off and

1:25:19Atrioc:hold on is this optional or this is going on my passport i believe this is the new passport i guess it doesn't say well we can find out it just says we'll begin i guess i don't know how many options you have on this right now for uh for non-americans it's a fucking eagle it's awesome at least my my old one from five years ago american passports last 10 years meaning those bearing trump's image would expire years after the president's second term ends in twenty twenty nine, which is why we need a third term. First of all. Yeah, is what I've been saying.

1:25:49Aiden:The number probably the number one reason for probably the number one reason. I gotta say it's a good looking photo. So there's something to that. I have to renew mine. So I'm just dude, I can't wait for aiden his trump passport. It's going to be safe. Flip that open. All right. It's gonna be hard for you to pretend you're Canadian when you're overseas when you when you have this bad boy. It's a really time to start using the Canadian one.

1:26:17Atrioc:I have time to bust it out. Questions to wrap this up. One for each of you. Spicy one. It track. I saw you stream this morning talking about the White House shooting saying that people wanting the ballroom is a conspiracy. Seems like we need a fucking ballroom. A truck. How do you answer that? Secondly, Aiden is every smasher good big question bro who plays ultimate player me who plays brawler

1:26:45Aiden:I play the one for the game. What?

1:26:49Atrioc:Why exactly do you think that the shooter plays smash ultimate and not your favorite game smash melee? I play the one for the game. Give yourself funny. Just say to here is I can't look. I hold on. Hold on. I want to actually. Yeah, you joked about this on your stream. Yeah, And you said Aiden probably has a friend who's friends with this guy. Oh, you want how many people I have never been more confident that I am like one

1:27:16Aiden:degree of separation away from a person.

1:27:18Atrioc:Wait,

1:27:19Aiden:so is I are sorry. What's wonder? I know somebody who knows them a hundred percent.

1:27:23Atrioc:A hundred percent. Yeah. So can you reach out? This already happened with Luigi Mangione. Boy, you know, a Luigi Mangione. No, I like one degree of what was it? A Luigi main.

1:27:35Aiden:and are two degrees, two degrees. It's not a little bit you, but I was I was thinking about this because Luigi Mangiotti also played competitive smash. We really yeah and oh my God wait wait wait wait and I was looking game cube or that just shocked me and I was like I was thinking about it. I was like there they training them there is that the sign program is

1:27:58Atrioc:competitive smash tournaments bring them into so it's going to be a next It's going to be next, bro. Oh, don't piss me off. I'm sorry. Tucker Carlson is good.

1:28:12Aiden:The next Patreon clip you post some big A. I'm telling you, I might not make it through. I might not stay stable. If I see you play one game of Ultimate, I'm fleeing the country, bro. Thank God you're on Melee. Oh, my God. I'm on r slash atriac, which is the worst subreddit of all time. Say it on Patreon. Say it on Patreon. we're going to discuss it uh which by the way if you want to wait an extra hour of content every week we have a patreon bonus episode sometimes we put 10 minute clips of it on big a but it's actually a full hour and there's 50 more minutes of sometimes your friend puts it on big a and we're going to get into that right now on the patreon thanks guys for watching this week hopefully it made you a little bit happier to counterbalance our anglosphere's decline bye everybody thanks for watching bye