Big Tech's Game of Thrones | Ep. 021 Lemonade Stand 🍋

19:02Atrioc:Maybe he is an absolute genius, but he's your age. Do we talk about scaling? He's my age? He's 28. What are you doing with your life?

19:11Aiden:I'm doing well. What were you doing five years ago? I'm making Cowboy Bebop merch. What were you doing five years ago? He was founding Windsor. It's the jacket that Spike wears in the show. Oh, that is cool. Red puffer jacket. You know, I'd pay a billion dollars. Cat Whippy Ball, give you a billion and a half. Tell you what that did in revenue. Huh? Not a billion. But you know what? It's making some money back. It's making some money back.

19:38Atrioc:You have a profitable business. None of this is profitable yet. Yeah, none of this is profitable yet. Not even close. So to wrap up this little mini story about cognition. So this is, you know, a week or two ago, Google comes in and basically says, all right, we're just like scooping out the top talent. They take it and leave like some sort of weird predatory animal. And then cognition, or sorry, not cognition, windsurf, the people, you guys, the other 225 people are like, what the fuck is going on? You just lost all your leadership. You lost the main tools you use to make the product. Everybody's in what the fuck mode.

20:05Atrioc:three days later, Cognition, who's another startup that also makes AI coding tools that also was apparently in the running, comes in and offers you guys, reportedly, 300 million and buys you guys out and says, don't worry, we're going to make sure all the employees get a cut. You guys will fold into our thing called Devin. We're going to combine them together and we're going to be this great new company. And they make a big deal about how they're going to make the employees, right? But they're a smaller company. They don't have two and a half billion to drop people, right? So you guys are, you know, maybe you get a...

20:34a nice Subaru. Yeah, maybe you get a million, something like that.

20:37Aiden:Yeah, get that hybrid Crosstrek. Guess I'll watch Burning Man in VR.

20:43Atrioc:You could rent a nice hotel at Four Seasons. You can't buy a place. So this is crazy. And this is a trend called reverse aqua hire where a company comes in and just buys the top talent. And this is becoming more common. So there's a couple big thematic things going on. One is this funny drama between all the companies. And there's a few threads going off of this that get really, really weird, which is why Google is doing this, as well as what Microsoft is doing. But it's also, you know, it's relevant to the Lena Kahn conversation because part of why companies are doing this, like Google, is because you go through all this regulatory scrutiny if you come in and try to buy the whole company or buy any piece of the company.

21:21Atrioc:And you get to avoid a lot of that, in theory, if you just buy the talent. If you just come in, and what Google said is, oh, we're just licensing the company. We're just licensing your tech, and we're taking some of your talent. In practice, what they did is, they came in, ruined the ability for them to compete, took all the leadership and bailed, right? It's like, it's pretty, yeah.

21:38Aiden:I have a question about the licensing.

21:39Atrioc:Yes.

21:39Aiden:So, because my initial reaction to this is your trade-off, as opposed to going through the regulatory process to buy out the company, is that you have to recreate a lot of the software or proprietary work of the company that you would have bought out. Like, there's a benefit to actually buying the company because the software and the tools and everything that was made by the employees of that company and is owned by that company, you just have it. But if we do it this way where we've hired staff, we need to get that staff to recreate their past work, which takes more time and potentially more resources.

22:17Aiden:Where does the licensing part of the work come into this conversation? You're saying that they're licensing some of the software or the work that they were doing previously?

22:25Atrioc:Yeah, so what Google is saying is we are going to use some of the pieces of tech that you guys have built, you two collectively over the course of the last few years. We're going to use some of that. But what everybody's pretty clear on is they don't actually give a shit about that because it's exactly what you said. That's not very useful to Google as a company. So like what they really would want is if they cared is to recreate the product themselves or buy the whole thing. So the only explanation that makes sense is what they want is the talent. What they consider is worth two and a half billion dollars is to buy the founders of that company that you guys have been and the very top researchers and developers.

22:59Atrioc:And there's such an insane premium on AI talent right now. It is considered so much more valuable to get the guy who's been working in AI for four to five years and built something successful versus the, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of people who are in the industry now over the past year or two that they're willing to pay that much money. The bet right now for all these companies is get the smartest people and they'll figure it out. It's not buy an existing product. So the license is like, it doesn't really matter as far as anybody can tell.

23:29Aiden:This is like a, I feel like this is like the Miami Heat ruining basketball. You know, they're just making super teams now. We've changed everything. And we talked about this with Meta.

23:39Atrioc:Meta also did that as like the Dodgers or the Yankees, right? They just go in and they're just trying to buy everybody out of all the major companies. Like it's just this weird. It has to work. That's for sure. Like we're at the part where they're buying everybody. Everyone goes, damn, this team looks great.

23:53Aiden:I mean, I think if we, yes, there's two sort of courses here, right? There's the broader situation of whether or not these companies are going to be successful by using these strategies, right? Whether by investing a bunch of money into this industry to begin with or by spending exorbitant amounts of money on hiring new talent. And that has to pan out eventually. And it's interesting to hear that questions are starting to be asked as like, when will we see the return on this level of investment? Right. At an individual level, if I'm one of the guys that founded one of these hot, new, supple AI companies, I'm happy.

24:33Aiden:And they want your body. You're stoked as a founder. They want my body and I'm getting paid a lot of money for it. And I'm certain, like the highest amount of employees have ever been paid in the human race. You don't even have to share it with your employees now. extraordinary salaries that from an individual perspective, it's like, oh, I'm being rewarded for all my time and effort and knowledge of this industry, right? On the other end of the individual scenario that you were asking about, yes, I do think it sucks to be an employee at one of these startups who presumably had some amount of equity because that's how a lot of startup compensation is handled.

25:11Atrioc:That's the pitch of like, come work at this startup, help us build it over the years, and you will get payout if we get bought or we go public.

25:17Aiden:Yeah.

25:18Atrioc:And this new form is preventing that.

25:19Aiden:And I think that was something that people overlooked in the Lena Khan episode. I did see some people pushed back to the posturing of that question to begin with, which was, you know, this environment of positioning yourself to be bought out in order to make money off of your company doesn't seem like something that's healthy. And I kind of agree, but people do forget that startups are loaded with lower level employees that take on often lower salaries than they might be getting elsewhere, especially, I mean, at least in the 2010s for sure. And in exchange for equity at companies that they thought had high long-term upside, and then when the buyout happened or the IPO happened, they could walk and make a bunch of money from their early position at a startup.

26:10Aiden:I think that is part of getting a job at a startup in that era. It's like, I might make$20 ,000 less a year, or$30 ,000 less a year, but I get equity in a company that might pop. And I'm basically, I'm kind of gambling in that way. I just disagree with the whole premise, bro. No, I'm not saying, hold on. That's the next part, right? I'm not saying that this is a healthy business environment. I'm saying that it still sucks to be the guy who when, I remember when I made this decision for myself, right? When I went to go work at the tech startup I had, I could take the option of scaling my salary to like a max of like 55K with between 40 and 55K with an exchange of equity for that amount, right?

26:55And I, thinking that this company

26:57Aiden:would never make it in the long term, in the very long term, took the max amount of salary I could. That was the risk assessment I took, right? But maybe at a different type of company or a different type of person with a different risk assessment, you max out the equity option that's available to you. That's why it's called risk. It could have a downside. we're spinning our wheels over 200 employees at a Silicon Valley startup. I'm not spinning my wheels about it. They're not, they're not like, I'm not spinning my wheels about it. I think that doesn't change the fact that this shouldn't be the way it works to begin with.

27:32Aiden:But if I'm the guy who had that planned and I happen to land at a startup where I'm making, you know, maybe a hundred thousand dollars a year as a software engineer, instead of the one 50 I might've been making at a bigger company. and I also happened to land at a company that explodes in value, is extremely successful and then also I get left with my dick in my hand because a bigger company decided to cheat the system a little bit. That sucks. Someone else bought you. They got bought for 300 million from someone else. Google was never going to, I mean, this company, the people that didn't get bought, it's like 200 salespeople.

28:08They didn't want them anyway. They were never going to buy them. They only wanted the guy at the top. If they were forced to buy the whole company, then I guess they would have done that. But this is always going to be for the people at the top.

28:19Aiden:Yeah. And these salespeople have just been hired. It's like they built a product and grew up. They hired a bunch of salespeople. They didn't need them. I'm not losing any sleep. Those guys didn't get a massive payout, life-changing money. Who said I was losing sleep? Okay. I agree with what you're saying.

28:33Atrioc:They don't deserve any compensation. They got compensation. They got paid money and they're getting a buyout from$300 million. They're fine. It's like this is, I don't even think this is like an antitrust thing. I think they literally just wanted those people. This is their dream solution.

28:48Aiden:Yeah, I think there's a strong argument that it might not have had to do with antitrust at all. I do think that could be the case as well. But I think I'm just, I'm laying it out. It's like for that guy, because your question was, I'm that guy in this scenario. Yeah. Yeah, that sucks. I'm sad. Yeah, it sucks. But he's like, why are you shedding tears?

29:11Atrioc:that person who's been working at this company for three years could have had other 20 million dollars for right now. And now they're only making$200 ,000 a year in San Francisco. How dare you? I mean, that's poverty wage. You know, now that you put it like that, this guy can barely make ends meet. No, I mean, I, I semi get it. And I do think that like, um, you know, it is just weird. He's mad twitching and giving him a lot of stuff. I was mad. I'd be on this guy's side. No, actually, it was good. Actually, I'll be honest with you. From my POV, did I really deserve what? I got like a Ferrari worth of money, okay?

29:53And I didn't do shit. You know what I'm saying? People around me got fucking absurd amounts of money because that was a big buyout. There was a small number of employees. But I just showed up and I tweeted some things. I changed the front page. You should have made$20 million from Google. This is unacceptable.

30:10Atrioc:Anybody who makes an AI company or works at an AI company should make$20 million. Always. From Google. And Google better pay it. And Lena Kahn needs to fix this. Lena Kahn needs to pay it. And I want$20 million, Lena. I want it. Okay. But what about the larger question here of like, your honest opinion, because you're more tech. Yeah. Yeah. Like, these guys can't be worth it, bro. I can't imagine. Like, maybe somebody somewhere is going to come up with something. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills that, like, this is really awesome for the few people that are benefiting. Right. But it just feels like the last gasp of multi-trillion dollar companies that are sniping over the last few percentage inches of AI dominance.

30:59And they haven't figured out how to turn it into anything probably yet. So, that's where I'm at, where I'm like, this can't be worth it.

31:05Atrioc:This can't be worth it. I think that it will probably not be worth it. I think we've talked about this before. The mindset of the tech companies is AI is going to be so fundamental to how their products operate, to how people interact with technology and the world, that even if you just wanted to keep your current market share, AI is going to be critical to do that. If you are Google and you have search, I would describe ChatGPT as being a vastly better search engine than Google. It is for people who have started at this point just using ChatGPT to ask questions on the internet, vastly better.

31:38Atrioc:I mean, such a better experience. So you can obviously extrapolate that to say, if you're Google, you're sitting here, you have one of the most successful and largest essentially monopolies on the internet and search ever that powers this unbelievably giant company. And then this new technology has the ability to basically undermine your entire system. That is an existential threat. I get to the fair point. If you are meta and you have social media and another company comes in, for example, let's say TikTok expands into a much more sophisticated AI-driven social media platform and just sort of eats Instagram and Facebook's lunch.

32:09Atrioc:That is an entire massive company, one of the biggest in the world, who is existentially threatened by this. You can apply that to every single tech company. It sounds like you wanted to say something, but this is the core thinking, is this stuff has the ability to threaten all of this.

32:22Aiden:There's a more simple argument here for this specific company, just the way you laid out the pricing model of Winsurf, right? Sure. I looked at that, and my immediate thought was Google Workspace. Uh, so for those who don't know, Google offers a platform where you, uh, sign up and pay like monthly fees as a company and then monthly fees per users to support things like company email addresses and company tools and Google drive storage and stuff like that. Right. Uh, a bunch of companies pay for that service already. So this type of tech rolls really easily into, if you develop an equivalent or competing package to what Windsurf has at Google, you get to roll it really conveniently into something that already has a massive user base or a massive customer base.

33:13Aiden:You offer a bunch more services that are really valuable, already used by a bunch of programmers that are willing to pay a relatively high price for that service that you get to add into the pricing for a huge thing you already offer. That feels like a very straightforward product proposition to me. rather than this nebulous idea of AI changing the future. It's you're just developing really good tools to roll into a massive program you already offer at Google that does bring in tons of revenue.

33:41Atrioc:There's two simple ways you could approach it. One is if you're an AI company, you think AI is going to bring in trillions of dollars with how much it's going to revolutionize the world, in which case spending 10 billion right now to snap up a bunch of people, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, that's worth it. But even if you don't believe that, I think that even if you just believe you need to protect your own castle. Like just what you currently have is under threat. Even in that case, if you are worth whatever Microsoft or Meta or Apple is worth, it could be worth it to go buy the top people. If nothing else, just to stop them from going to Google to potentially take away that from you.

34:14Atrioc:So it can be a purely defensive thing as well, even if you don't, even if Mark Zuckerberg secretly doesn't believe the hype about AI.

34:22Aiden:The disconnect I would say is that I don't think Wall Street hedge funds are investing massive amounts into Google because of Google Workspace getting better. Like, I don't think that's... I'm not even sure they're going to make a product with those guys. I mean, it sounds like they just want the talent. Everything I read about it, like, they have no concrete plan to recreate Winsurf.

34:42Atrioc:Not only are they not going to do that, they're going to integrate them into DeepMind to work on their existing Gemini stuff. Yeah, they're just working on it. Well, fuck me, fuck me. Fuck me. No, no, no. That's why, good thing, I'm not on the board at Google. No, you're right. What you're saying is right. That's what a business should do, but I don't think they're...

34:56Aiden:That's what I would do. I'd be like, so we'll make the tool and we'll embed it into our current product. That's what I would say. You guys are in the board meeting. I can't do ours in the board meeting. I would feel uncertain about the stock I'm holding if you're giving that speech. You're saying the same thing. I think your point is good. I actually fully agree with that. I actually have heard some of that on some of these earnings calls where they basically say like, this is so existential. Yes. We can't answer your question about profits just yet, but this is so important that we can't.

35:26Atrioc:probably many, many, many investors are getting duped because if you think about it from the defensive standpoint of, we just need, you know, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, we just need to make sure that some company doesn't come in and destroy our social media empire. Then maybe you're just spending the billions and billions of dollars on defense. And that doesn't make wall street like you more. So you have to keep saying, Oh yeah, we're going to make so much money. And like, it's quite possible they do. There's a lot of theories about how this will become massively profitable in X, Y, and Z, but at the very least you have to do it defensively.

35:56Atrioc:So do I think the stock should be skyrocketing every time people invest in AI? No. Do I think the companies have a good reason to put this much into AI talent? Yeah. Yeah, I do. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but like when it comes to software and particularly research like this, getting the smartest people matters a lot. I would rather have one Ilya Suitskaver, who's like one of the godfathers of this stuff and a total genius. I would rather have one of him than a thousand of me and I'm like a decently smart guy with tech, but I don't even care how many I would rather have one of him than a million of me.

36:28Atrioc:You can't just throw people at these problems, right? It's just like in the same way you would rather have one Einstein rather than a million dumb people. Like having more dumb people at the problem doesn't help, right? If you were trying to make the atomic bomb, would you rather have Oppenheimer or like one million dumb frat dudes? How many dumb frat guys would it take to have built the atomic bomb? It's infinite. It would never heaven that's the point that would be a better movie that would have been a better movie to watch a million frat dudes just bro we could condense the atoms with this cake stand brad where did you put the uranium so there's a real there's a real premium on like the smartest guy if you're the guy who comes up with the next tech that is what causes your company to make the ai tools that suddenly accelerate by everybody else you get to agi all this stuff you become the biggest company in the world the most influential that's worth it by far i get it I just will say this.

37:22Atrioc:And I deserve$20 million. What they're saying is indistinguishable from a gigantic grift and tell the truth until it happens. Right. We don't know. So it's, it's, it's a Schrodinger's fucking until something happens. I'll just say it's not. And someone will say it is, and we won't know because it's just up in the air, but it feels so bubbly. It feels so like at some point, you guys are, you're always talking about the vibes, man. you talk about the vibes but you're fucking them up yeah no i'm not i think there's a few more years before somebody wall street goes stop saying ai is going to do all this stuff has it made you money but right now we're years off that right now you can just keep saying it's just oh bro it's gonna make so much money you won't even believe how much money it's gonna keep going for a while longer we're like we're not even at the good stuff yet i mean the good stuff's already happened for invading about they're they're yeah they're everyone everyone has to buy from them that's crazy okay yeah we gotta move on yeah it's been too long okay we'll swing back at the end there's a funny drama between microsoft and open ai which i didn't realize about so we'll swing back that little oreo sandwich you can get to the cream in the middle we'll get back to the cookie at the end all right give us give me some cream atrioc i don't want to do any cream metaphors talking about jeffrey epstein hey give me the cream on jeffrey epstein i just want to give you guys a Minor update.

38:47You know, it's been discussed ad nauseum all over the place. I think it's really important. So, minor discussion. This Epstein thing is not going away for Donald Trump so far. Unlike most other political scandals that he's bulletproofly navigated through, it seems like this is sticking a little bit louder and longer than other things. There's a real demand from people in his own base to release these files. Don't make a pun. Do not make a pun. What was your pun? Oh, okay.

39:14Atrioc:Never mind. I don't even know what the pun was. This is serious. We shouldn't joke about it. You shouldn't be smiling and laughing right now. You could joke about it. It is cosmically funny that this is all going on. Your words. For me, I think Jeffrey Epstein isn't that funny. I don't think it's that funny what he did. I'm not saying what he did was funny, Doug. Oh, you think him killing himself was funny? Well, we don't know if that happened. All right. Aiden has different theories. He might have done it. Is Schrodinger's suicide? Anyway, what I'm saying is of all the issues he's been polled on, this is by far his worst polling issue in the history of both terms of Donald Trump.

39:57Damn. Negative 44 disapproval to approval, like 44 % more disapproved than approved. People are deeply upset about it. He is now in a lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox. That's a breaking of his, that's a fracturing of an empire that helped to make him. and we're just seeing this weird unwind. And as there's a demand for a vote on it, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Republican, closed down the House so they couldn't vote. Like today, this happened today. There was going to be a vote to release the files and they just sent everybody home so they can't do it. So we're in the middle of a pretty big demand and many of the Republican House reps were on social media demanding what the fuck's going on.

40:37We want to be able to... I think they're maybe appealing to their base or whatever, but this is happening. So this is all happening live, and I think until there's some more news on it, people are going to keep asking. I don't think it's going to be like, ah, fuck it, move on. That's my theory. Possibly it is, because we all have brain rotted.

40:54Aiden:There's a couple things I think are really funny about this, which I understand at large, not a funny situation overall. all. But I do think it's really interesting that if you look back, Trump never himself made this a core tenant of his campaign or platform. There's one interview where he said like, yeah, I would release the files. And then he goes on to clarify, but I would be careful about how I would release them. And like, you wouldn't want a lot of phony stuff in there. And that's, that's like one of the only times he himself talks about this. but everybody around him that campaigned with him, it became this large issue within his base.

41:41Aiden:And now it's biting him in the ass. Okay. You're right. This is funny. It's actually pretty funny. It's just, it's not something that Trump himself was like, he wasn't campaigning on. Yes, I will get into office and I will release the files and we need to hold people accountable. He's always been like, you don't know. You just don't know. But all of the people around him really latched onto this issue, especially during his last campaign. And all of the media pundits that lean more right or very far right really have captured this issue for a long time. So I think it almost accidentally became a rallying cry for the people in his base.

42:27Aiden:And I think that's very interesting that he never wanted this, but it is coming to haunt him now. And at least from the way I see it. And then the other thing that I kind of wanted to posture a question to people listening right now. I do think there is a theme here that we've gone over this year of the big, beautiful bill and the deficit spending sort of fracturing this tech right support he had that was more intent about moderating the deficit or the debt. Right. And then we come along to the issue of how he handles Iran. On the tech right thing, Elon Musk is the one that kicked off this whole, Donald Trump will not release the Epstein files because he's in them.

43:14That was part of that fracturing.

43:16Aiden:So he puts that out there, right? And then we come to the issue of Iran, the possibility of getting involved in another foreign war. Not getting involved in another foreign war is another core tenant of his campaign and his political constituency. So we start to see more fracturing of support from that issue, right? And then this Epstein issue really rises up and seems to be another place where there's a huge break among a lot of people who support him on, well, why won't you release this? I don't understand why you are obfuscating or you just refuse to release these files, right? So there's a media narrative right now that the base on the right is fracturing.

44:08Aiden:But the media and the way people like to talk about these things, especially if you're generally opposed to that position, I think people like to latch on to any clue or hint that the other side is weakening. People like the idea of the tides turning and themselves starting to win. And oftentimes reports of, let's call it the leopards ate my face arguments are not really representative or true of how the opposing side actually is feeling or fracturing. And I wanted to know from people who maybe have more conservative family members or friends, or if you're a more conservative person listening to this podcast, do you feel like these issues are actually fracturing the Republican or let's say more MAGA base on that side?

45:00Aiden:because I want to have a more realistic understanding rather than me looking at the media that's fed to me of do you think this is actually, these three back-to-back issues, especially the Epstein thing, are they actually swaying people's opinions on this stuff?

45:15Atrioc:There's a good tweet that is related to what you're saying. If you pull this up, Perry, which is someone tweeted, well, I'd like to see old Donnie Trump wriggle his way out of this jam. Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily. Ah, well, nevertheless, I'd like to see, and then it just loops. And we've seen this a billion times. And I do often wonder because people are, it's exactly what you're saying. People are so excited for the downfall. And this is, there's whole, there's whole reddits about just people jerking off of like Trump Gret or something that it's called, you know, of this idea.

45:44Atrioc:And I also agree. It's hard to get a real on the ground thing, but certainly from my perspective as well, having not followed what he did within nearly as much depth in the 2016 term, it feels like his base is upset. Back in 2015, it was like everybody else besides the hardcore MAGA are pissed off. but they're still really loyal. And this is like, they seem really unhappy. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I've seen this iconic tweet and that's sort of what I'm saying is before this, this is my default response. He seems to get through a lot of, yeah, this feels different. We could be wrong. It's a fully fair point.

46:17That's why I want to know. I feel like this question to my stream and I got some Republican people reaching out. They basically said, you know, the diehard of the diehard have not changed. They're 90%. They're locked in, but there's people that used to have the flags and the hats that now don't they still support them but it's more quietly people are you know it's just like this open enthusiasm is clearly waning uh the huge surge he had among young people is evaporating like that the the i think i have a link for you perry but gen z specifically has completely flipped and all polling on trump like you'd see right here it's massively it's a purple line there um negative 40 approval young people it was even at the start of his term like they have buyer's remorse here they thought they were getting something different than what they're getting I do feel like you know you can always say who cares about polling nothing happens is everything the same I don't think he has the same level of enthusiasm and support that he started the term with I think that's actually a pretty fair thing and I think it's more negative now than it was then I think people have not loved the way he's governed the way they thought they would when they voted in the election.

47:24That's my honest feel. I don't even think it's a biased take. I think that's where people are landing. It's really going to hurt him for his third election. We should talk about that next week. But yeah, who's going to 28 when this matters? It could happen in the midterms. This could matter. We don't need to talk about it too much more. But this Epstein thing, my guess is that, I don't know, I can never underestimate people's ability to be like, ah, what's next? Move on to the next thing. But I think this has some sticking power. People will keep asking about it.

47:54Aiden:People get really, really fired up about pedophiles for some reason.

48:03Aiden:Why can't people just chill out? That's basically what he's saying, by the way. Well, I actually broke this down to somebody this week. I was trying to explain why I think this is such an important thing beyond the subject matter being so heavy and something that... it's not really, it's not a political issue to say that people don't like pedophiles. Like that's, wow, we're still managing to be bipartisan on that one. But I was trying to describe why this has so much momentum from this political angle or base. And I think it's because if you dig, if you work back, like why is this issue that feels very disconnected from what Trump has actually said about it.

48:51Aiden:So important to this crowd of people. And it tracks all the way back like before the 2016 election where stuff like Pizza Gate was like a year leading up to the election, right? Kind of like Pizza Gate time period, Hillary's leaked emails time period. There's a lot of momentum. Pokemon Go to the polls. There's a lot of momentum for, I would say, conspiracy theories circulating around Democrats being involved in rings of pedophilia. And then Epstein kind of enters this public conversation on the internet that to a degree that I had not seen before. He was arrested in the 2000s. It's kind of been known that Epstein was a bad guy, right?

49:45Aiden:But in the mid 2010s and leading up to the election, the Epstein stuff starts to get kind of tied into reporting leading up to the election and tied into other things that are more conspiratorial, I would say, like Pizzagate. And if you were checking 4chan at the time, if I'm being honest, this was, it started, QAnon and this idea of the deep state and like pedophilia and all of this stuff is building a lot of momentum. It always existed online before this. Like there's the, you know, the Alex Jones crowd, the idea that politicians like meet up in the woods and sacrifice people and all of that.

50:25Aiden:Like all of the, all of this like existed in like little threads and ideas, but hadn't reached this like place in popular culture, I would say, especially not in mainstream media. But if you're like a diehard right-wing MAGA sort of guy and you've been on the internet, this type of issue has been so pressing for you for like over a decade. And now you're in a position where Epstein himself has been arrested. There seems to be a conspiracy around him being murdered. He's directly linked to all these powerful people. It's like the most concrete version of any conspiracy theory you've been perpetuating or engaging with for more than 10 years.

51:08Aiden:and your guy is finally in office and he has all the power in the world with all of the people around him who are completely unchecked compared to the people that were around him in his first administration who often said no and wouldn't let him do things. And you have the files in hand and it's like you've been frothing for this moment, right? And now he won't do it. And you've been promised by all of these people around him for so long. so i can imagine if you are in that position it's incredibly frustrating like it seems insane that you're not getting the information that you've kind of sought after for 10 maybe more years this is like 9-11 for 9-11 conspiracy theorists yeah it it this kind of yeah like i'm it's it actually kind of is it you like you're telling a joke but it's it's as if the 9-11 conspiracy theory had like a gut, it's like we address, if we arrested George Bush for 9-11, like, and the files were not being shown and George Bush killed himself in jail.

52:15Like, I don't know.

52:16Aiden:Like, it is kind of like that. And I was trying to just lay out all of that context for some, for why I think this is so important to so many people who have been in this space for a long time. Because I just remember reading and seeing that stuff happen at the time. There's an undercurrent that led to this stuff becoming so mainstream to begin with. I mean, that explains why it's important to them, but this feels like a bipartisan important issue. This feels like people broadly are mad about this, and it's kind of uniting people asking questions. This is one of the few issues that seemingly has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, except for when these votes to release it come out.

53:03People talk about it the same. Yeah.

53:04Aiden:So I don't know. I mean, it's like the real test will be like the bill, right? It's not a budget bill. It's about leaking the information about the pedophile who's dead now and all the people he trafficked. So we'll see who holds to their word or not.

53:22Atrioc:What I keep coming back to, which is so weird, because normally Trump is really good at rallying his base around stuff. You mentioned this. Yeah. The goat of reading the room. And this is the one time that I've seen him just totally miss the mark. Cause the, the super easy way to do this is cause they released information. They released footage of his jail cell. And they're like, see, nobody went in. They're like, we looked through all the things, all the documents. There's nothing in there, incriminating anybody. There's no list, right? They said all these things and they did the supposedly, you know, they did all this research and then they released it, but they just said, and there isn't a list and there's no conspiracy.

53:56Atrioc:Sorry. Um, and what, and that came out from Pam Bondi and cash Patel and all them. and what they should have done been like, there isn't a list. This is probably goes even deeper than we thought. But right now, we don't have anything, right? That would have kept everybody happy. He sort of did that. I mean, he said, he's still implying there's like a list, but it was written by Obama and no, but like cash and Pam are like, there was never a list. Like get over it. Yeah. Right. And he's saying like, guys, why are people still obsessed with this? All he had to do was frame this as like, we've been foiled again by the deep state and we're going to get them next time.

54:29Atrioc:and just rally people around even more and make the fact that there's no list or they're not willing to release it part of the story. It's so baffling to me that they didn't do that.

54:37Aiden:It'd be funny to see, because part of me does think that would have worked better, but the idea of blaming the deep state when you hold every conceivable position of power in government is...

54:49Atrioc:But all the people who want this to be the big juicy conspiracy, like the core people we're talking about, that this seems to upset them in a way that nothing else Trump has done. Like, they just needed another, you know, worm to go after. They just needed to chase another car. But he was like, guys, the car isn't real. Stop chasing the car. That was his mistake. He was like, the car is actually way down there. The Democrats, like, used whiteout on the pages, and we can't see what was underneath. Like, that's all they had to do. He just had to pretend like it goes deeper.

55:15Aiden:They didn't. Well, I think that's kind of what he, like, half-assed. Yeah, he sort of did that. He tried to do that.

55:21Atrioc:He was like, why is everybody still obsessed about it? They are dumb for doing this.

55:25Aiden:Yeah, but then he tried to course correct and then say it. It was written by the Democrats. Written by the radical Obama.

55:30Atrioc:I guess I didn't see the prescription.

55:32Aiden:I'll go on the record. I bet you, look, if there's a book and names in it and those pictures of the binders with blacked out names on it, I bet you there's some Democrats on there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It didn't release under Biden either. Charge the Democrats. I'll say it here first. Charge the Democrats. Release the list, huh? Yeah. Look how brave I'm being. anyway I don't want to get too bogged down in any more of this because I think this is one of the I'm sure if you're listening to this you've heard a lot about this already but I did want to explore that idea of how real is the division within the party right now.

56:15Aiden:If you have any anecdotes to share about that. Yeah for any people

56:18Atrioc:in the audience if you have stories or your perspectives, particularly if you are either in that camp or know people who are in that camp who felt super loyal and were willing to see past all the other perceived, let's say, shortcomings of the Trump administration so far, but this is uniquely problematic. I'd be very curious to hear it. Yeah. I got a topic. I want to jump in with a topic. It's a topic that could threaten the very fabric of this podcast. You know one of our core pillars in this podcast is Lee Kuan Yew. Another one is trains. Lee Kuan Yew trains. Actually, two killer pillars so far.

56:55This pillar is about trains. We just have the two pillars. Do we have a third pillar? No, I think we're just a straight line. We need to come up with another pillar.

57:04Aiden:At least a triangle. Lee Kuan Yew and trains podcast. In one of our early episodes, we talked about Brightline, a privately owned train in Florida. You guys are clapping. I have an update. Do you guys remember how you pitched me? They had these government bonds. Not government bonds. You could buy the debt.

57:26Atrioc:Public activity bonds. Yeah. And the government said they were tax-free, but they weren't guaranteeing them. It was just, you're buying their debt. It's tax-free, but it's their debt. If they don't pay it, whatever. They didn't pay it. Can you scroll down, Perry? I'll understand. This is what they're trading at, these bonds. I don't understand. Trains are good. Go down. Down, down, down, down. Trains are like AI. They go up in value. That's what I thought. Right there. That's the day ago or whatever. That is when they announced they were not going to be paying the interest on the bonds that they promised to pay, which usually is a sign of like insolvency.

58:01You're not having the money. It's a bad sign. The value of the bonds plummeted instantly overnight. Everyone that bought in thinking it was kind of like soft backstopped by the government because it's as it's public activity is now experiencing in real. Hold on.

58:15Atrioc:That person be very stupid because that's not what they are. It's not what they are, but they're sort of thinking, oh, it's got the endorsement. It's got the, it's a. Kind of, except that's not what it is. Well, yeah. They just thought it was less risky than it is. And the risk is now coming apparent because, and this is the other bad news I want to deliver. Writership is 53 % below estimates and revenue is 67 % down from estimates. People just aren't riding this train enough. So I don't, and part of it could be marketing. It could be, it's a new thing. Americans don't understand trains.

58:45Aiden:It could be marketing. It could be price too. I did look at the feedback to when we talked about this last time. Yeah. And there were people who lived in the area who talked about Brightline overestimating the impact or overestimating the ridership they had. And they were citing the expense of using the train. I think that's super fair. So I looked into it. The people that do ride it regularly, which is not as high as they thought, love it. It is hitting a mark for a certain group of people, but that group of people isn't as big as they thought it was. So they're trying some things. I'm not saying it's over.

59:19They have enough cash to last them through 2027. And they're partnering with JetBlue. They're partnering with Disney. They're making these things happen. It's possible they can get ridership up. But as of right now, based on projections, they are going to lose quite a bit of money. and the bondholders are freaking out and trying to unload these bonds to anyone who will buy them, but they're becoming junk. People are talking with lawyers who are trying to find a way because now they're concerned they're not going to get their money back. They loaned his debt to this company.

59:48Aiden:Well, when I was looking at public activity bonds when we were prepping for that episode, we talked about this. They were kind of weird because they aren't guaranteed except sometimes. So maybe there could be a gap in knowledge to where people didn't understand or underestimated the risk of what they were buying, the idea that maybe they wouldn't get paid back that interest. But I think on other projects through the country, there has been scenarios where even though they're public activity bonds, the government still stepped in to foot the bill after the fact. So maybe they were hoping for some sort of bailout that they're not getting.

1:00:26Everyone's always hoping for that in this country, but I hope that doesn't happen.

1:00:29Atrioc:I think you guys are assuming these investors are stupider than they are. They probably realized exactly what this is, which is that it's an investment with some risk attached. Yeah, and then the risk. And the risk came through, and it's not good. They're not doing well. I think it's as simple as that, not that they didn't understand what was going on or thought the government would back it up. Yeah, you're probably right. A public activity bond is just where the government helps bonds not have to pay taxes on the revenue. So if you go in on this particular investment and it works out, you'll make some more money on the back end because you don't have to pay taxes.

1:00:59Atrioc:I guess I'm not understanding who this investor would be that is so dumb. They like walked by the train and was like, whoa, you want money? They're hoping, which is a fair assumption, that the government, which has been touting this train, Brightline, it's awesome. It's fucking great for Florida. We're building this. This is a huge success of our state. Don't want it to fail, which means they will step in and back. I think that is a fair point.

1:01:25Aiden:Maybe they're accounting for that in the risk, right? the idea that even if this company fails to pay back the interest, maybe the government will choose in this niche scenario to still step in and bail out the interest payments.

1:01:37Atrioc:That's a fair point because it is so key to Florida presenting itself as this modern hub. But assuming they're smart, like you're saying,

1:01:46Aiden:that's a part of the risk calculation and the risk came to fruition regardless. It's not over. I don't want to make it seem like this train is dead. It's going to keep running and they're working on things to grow it. It's just that they made big projections that would allow them to pay the money back they borrowed. And those projections are not happening. So there's going to be problems. And this could throw off the construction of the Las Vegas one. It's just that the saga for trains in America continues to be hard. It's basically what I'm, I know. My perspective on this changed a bit when we talked about the Vegas to LA one.

1:02:23Aiden:because I wonder from people who have used this or been around it, locations of the stations, taking into account, ignoring the price, how useful is something is this actually when you exist in city infrastructure that is so car-centric to begin with or so difficult to create rail lines into cities? My issue with the LA one, when we talked about it last time, is my heart sank when i found out that it's actually in rancho cucamonga and not los angeles if you're gonna drive an hour to get there i can't i can't really express to you how far rancho is away it's not feasible i may as well drive to las vegas borderline uh and i i certainly it is price competitive for me to fly out of like lax or burbank then take that then drive all the way to that station and then fly, which sucks because I want there to be trains.

1:03:23Aiden:I want them to be more useful. My maybe fear with a project like this is similar to the LA one is even if the train is getting built, how practical and accessible is that station? Uh, even for me, like when I think about using the Metro, there's, there's a reasonable case for me to be using the Metro versus my car for a lot of the places that I have to go in Los Angeles, but it doesn't, it unfortunately adds a ton of time to traveling because none of the stations are actually close to where I need to go. There's no station actually close to my house or very close to my house. There's no station actually close to my work.

1:04:04Aiden:They're all a little more inconvenient than they ideally would be, right? Versus when you're in bigger cities that are better planned, that have better station layouts where you're no more, what feels like you're never more than like a five to like 10 minute walk away from a station. But that isn't to say I'm like giving up hope on trains forever. I want there to be more trains. It just sucks to hear that. No, I'm not giving up at all. I just think we had a bit of optimism on it and it's seeming more like to be able to do this without government will be impossible. They just, you have to have somebody, eminent domain.

1:04:43It has to be a little closer. If it's this inconvenient and out of the way, maybe in Florida it'll change if they can find the prices down or whatever. I'm not going to rule it out, but it's not working the way I thought.

1:04:52Atrioc:There's a little bit of hope because they haven't expanded to the Disneyland area yet. If they do that, it's not... That could be huge. Right. In theory, it's a major, major, major reason people would want to use the train. Presumably, they already had that in their metrics and projections of like, oh yeah, once we do that, it's going to be even bigger. This looks bad. I'm going to be honest. This looks real bad. I was unfortunate when I read it. I had hoped for a better outcome. We'll see. I have one more small business story, and that is just how glorious it must be to work for a defense contractor company.

1:05:23Because I was listening to the earnings call of Lockheed Martin. They announced an 80 % profit drop. Huge, huge decline. Really bad day for them. But then people asked why, what's going on. And they said it's classified.

1:05:37Specifically, we had a$950 million charge as a result of difficulties in a classified aeronautics program. And then they can't say more. And then suddenly, so that's like, they wiped out all of their profits. They're actually net negative on cash flow this quarter. We don't know why. We don't know what happened. But they just, so obviously it took a hit to their stock. But yeah, they're just like, yeah, we have no money. There's no money this quarter. And that's fine because classification over something like that

1:06:06Aiden:supersedes your legal rights to disclose. It's just very funny. They could just say it's classified. We should start classifying our own opinions

1:06:16Atrioc:just to make sure we don't get flack. It's classified. It's classified. My get out of jail for your card. Yeah, sorry. What are you talking about? It's classified. Military secret. I know it was a bit of an asshole, but there's an explanation. I can't tell you. I can't tell. I can't share it with you. Okay. Who else has trains?

1:06:36Aiden:France. What? France sure does. Is anything happening in France? Yeah, I'm trying to leave.

1:06:42Atrioc:Literally anything, Aiden.

1:06:43Aiden:Something's happening. Is there? Something's happening. So I'm trying to leave. Smoking. What are they protesting about today? Well, it's funny you ask, Doug, because they're kind of back at it. No. There is always something. So France recently, their prime minister, not their president, their prime minister of the same party as Macron, from my understanding, uh beiru beiru uh released their epsc files their french files the french teen files yep that would be that would put a light of fire under our ass you know what i'm saying little uh free market everybody else released their own epsc files we'd be pretty jealous we'd have to catch up he released their budget proposal because i give you contacts in this guy do you know by room uh no he he was brought okay they had a huge fight over who was going to be uh this this uh prime minister role yeah because because macron can can suggest somebody but they have to vote to appoint him and they went through all these rounds of people and finally they picked like the most safe middle of the road like this guy is gonna just deal with the budget because we we got bills to pay shit's going wrong nobody can agree on anybody we're We're going to go with Bayrou.

1:08:04He's the middle of the road guy. He's a compromise we can all agree on. He's going to deal with the budget. I don't know your story, but I just know him going in.

1:08:11Aiden:Well, this is his attempt to solve the budget problems in France because France is running a massive deficit, basically. Who isn't? A little bit, but they're among the highest in the EU right now. uh i think the second sorry the second highest or the highest and uh they have a debt to gdp ratio which if you're confused on why that's important we have a great episode on uh national debts and like why they're a problem i suggest you go listen to that episode like a little bit of background on this but uh they have a jet debt to gdp ratio of 110 and climbing so not the highest in the eu right now.

1:08:55Aiden:I believe it is lower than Italy's and Greece's, but the difference with theirs is that it's on a trajectory upwards right now, whereas Italy and Greece's is coming down. So they're in a tough situation where their budget is being mismanaged, right? And with the backdrop of they have a commitment and expectation that they're going to be increasing their military spending to 5 % of GDP. All of the EU has to hit this benchmark by 2035. And currently, their military spending is only 2 % of their GDP, which - What's ours? Ours is like 15%, right? 20, something crazy?

1:09:41Atrioc:No.

1:09:42Aiden:Is that too high? No.

1:09:44Atrioc:I'm going off of the budgetary stuff, but anyway. Yeah, it's -

1:09:48Aiden:I mean, ours is higher, higher, but I can't remember what it is. It's like 8%. Yeah, it's not crazy though. There's no way. It is crazy, by the way. It is fucking crazy. Because we got fat GDP. We have a big country and 8 % of our GDP for military is fucking crazy. You see my tanks? You could go to 4%, still have the biggest military in the world, and we could afford like a million things. So they're having a similar problem to us where their bond yields are going up. The amount of interest that France is having to pay to get people to buy its debt is increasing seen. And for the first time, a big marker here is that if you look at the 10-year bond yield in France, it has surpassed Italy.

1:10:30Aiden:And Italy is like the forsaken EU child in many ways of their debt is unreliable, like don't buy Italy's debt, in a similar way that people look at Greece. Yeah, from like an easy perspective, it's just your bond yield is a way of the market deciding how risky it is to lend to you. Yeah. So when the market is saying France is higher than Italy, it's saying France is riskier to loan money to than Italy. Exactly. Which is crazy. I mean, that's not normal in European politics or history. So that's, and this is on top of France's commitment to decarbonization and getting more access to energy. So they have all of these fronts, right?

1:11:06Aiden:Like rising, rising rates on their debt, demands, new demands for spending on defense and trying to bring their country into the future when it comes to carbon-free energy, which they're doing a relatively good job of.

1:11:17Atrioc:Yeah, it's like 2 % of their GDP right now is military. They have to go up to 5%. That's a lot. Yeah, that's a huge jump. That's a huge jump. When you're already overspending, you already don't have the money. That's massive.

1:11:27Aiden:That's the issue, right? So you're in a place where you need to figure out your budget somehow, right? Do we raise taxes? Do we cut spending? We probably have to do both, and that's kind of what I want to get to at the end of this. So Beirut had proposed a new budget I think it was Tuesday of last week, and the reception was extremely negative. So I looked into what he was actually asking for. So the first thing is that people and headlines caught on too heavy is that they wanted to cut two public holidays in France. They wanted to get rid of Easter Monday and then a holiday that celebrates the victory in World War II on May 8th.

1:12:13Aiden:these cutting public holidays generate more economic activity and headlines across France grabbed onto these two things. And it's a huge part of the public pushback to this. Anytime there's an infraction in France on holidays or anything to do with pensions or anything in France, right? There's major, major pushback. France famous for protesting any intrusion on the, I would say leisure or workers' rights, right? Which is good in many ways. one to protest. Yeah, it's super easy. It's a holiday. No one wants to have a holiday taken away. Yeah. And then the other thing that they were asking for were spending cuts and a spending freeze.

1:12:52Aiden:So he was asking for what they called a blank year for 2026. Basically, the way it works in France is every year, pensions and welfare scale with inflation, basically, or scale with costs, right? So every year, they're a little more than they were the previous year. His request was that all 2026 spending on these things remain the exact same as it was in 2025. Let's just maintain our spending at the exact same level for one year. And that will save us. I think they estimated like 7 billion euros or something. Sorry, rather than increasing it some amount rather than increasing it by an amount that would cost them 7 billion more dollars.

1:13:33Aiden:And they have a really, you know, they have a really hefty, uh, welfare welfare system, but also a notably expensive healthcare system, even among European countries, French people spend a disproportionate amount of money on healthcare because there's a lot of services and, uh, offered to French people or, or a level of medical service that is offered to in France that I think is not comparable elsewhere. Things like, uh, nurses being paid for to be available for newborns when you have a child, for example. So that was his request to like freeze those spending except for anything that has to do with debt servicing.

1:14:13Aiden:So like naturally you're going to be having to pay more interest on your debt over time as you take more out. So that doesn't count. And then the military spending that they're going to have to do. So they can increase the military spending within these provisions he had laid out because they still need to meet those commitments. And then the last thing, I thought these were tax increases at first, but they're not, which is kind of the interesting same part here. So they wanted to close a bunch of tax write-offs that either are deemed low utility or disproportionately benefit wealthy people and businesses.

1:14:46Aiden:They want to make sure that wealthy people and businesses don't abuse the tax system or abuse as many tax breaks, and they pay more in taxes by fixing those things. And then also, uh, they wanted to, uh, create, create a, excuse me. This is called a solidarity contribution. I had to look this up. My understanding is that it's not the same as like changing the tax structure, but you're demanding people pay extra for a specific reason or from a specific system. So an example I could give is maybe you demand that wealthy people have to pay more into Social Security. They have to pay more beyond the tax system into Social Security that they see no benefit from.

1:15:35Aiden:You're not paying more into your own Social Security benefit that pays you out later. You're basically, quote, donating money into Social Security. And the point of this is to just create equity among society. Like take money from the wealthiest people to and apply it to a very specific purpose. And he is proposing that they do have a solidarity contribution of some kind from the wealthiest people in France in order to help deal with the budget concerns. Is it voluntary or what I don't understand? No, it's not voluntary. This is the wording is really weird. And perhaps that's why some people are upset is because rather than like saying you're advocating for this concrete change in taxes on the wealthy, you're wording it in a more ambiguous way.

1:16:18Aiden:But maybe I'm -

1:16:19Atrioc:You're pointing a gun at them and saying, don't you want to give to the poor people? It sounds like.

1:16:23Aiden:Kind of.

1:16:24Atrioc:Out of the goodness of your heart, right?

1:16:27Aiden:That's what it kind of sounded like. I don't think that is. I think I'm misunderstanding how solidarity contributions work. I think you can effectively think of them as, the way I was reading it, is you can effectively think of them as an additional tax. And in this case, an additional tax on wealthy people. but it's an additional tax with a very specific purpose to be applied to a specific sector or fund. I mean, the way I read it, I don't know as much about this particular story, but the overview I heard of this budget was like, they're very, very concrete on the things they would cut. Yeah.

1:17:02But they're very vague and nebulous on the taxes they will raise. Yes.

1:17:06Aiden:Yes, absolutely. Okay. So, and all of these things, right, receive major pushback right away. Like, losing my public holidays, like spending cuts on services we need. The interesting thing is this is being universally pushed back on by both ends of the political spectrum in France, right? Of course, no voter wants it. Nobody wants to, like Le Pen, famously on the right in France, is shitting on this. The left-wing parties in France are shitting on this. Nobody is happy with these changes. Nobody wants them, right? And I think the question that I kind of wanted to ask, because I think if you're nitpicky and you go through the details of this, I would say my major criticism is, okay, you're being really concrete about the spending cuts, but you're not being concrete about the revenue part of it.

1:18:01Aiden:You're not laying out a plan for like how taxes are going to be raised or changed on the wealthiest people, even though you have a semblance of an idea of getting wealthy people to pay more. However, I don't think that's why the average person gets upset. I don't like when you look at the headlines for the pushback on this, it mostly has to do with the public holidays, right? It's like the most simple, eye-catching thing. And the question I wanted to ask you guys, because we're at a similar, even higher debt to GDP ratio as we head towards this financial crisis. I think compared to how we've been dealing with our budget issues, this feels a little more grounded in its approach, where it at least is laying out something or acknowledges that wealthy people need to pay more.

1:18:51Aiden:But no one wants tax increase. like no one wants to hear about tax increases applied to them. No one wants to hear about like spending cuts or freezes. There comes a point in your budget where you probably need to do both things. How do you get people on board with that? Because in France right now, it doesn't matter what end of the political spectrum you're on. They all disagree with the proposed changes here, right? And they're on seemingly like a financial crash course. And it feels so difficult. Seeing this situation versus America's has made me much less confident about any ability to turn the ship around when it comes to this financial issue because nobody wants to contend with the short-term reality of the policy proposals that are necessary when your debt to GDP is this crazy.

1:19:44Yeah, this is the political problem of being at the end of this massive debt cycle. We've kicked the can for so long that whatever solution will be painful. It'll be unpopular. However, you know, somebody's going to have to bear the cost of this many decades of debt binge profligacy. When you tell regular people who are not even thriving that they have to bear the cost by cutting their holidays, it's just not, that's untenable. I don't expect them to be receptive by any means. You're not saying that at all. I'm just saying that feels like a path that's not going to hold. and I think the only way you can do this is because even though they have a lot of money and a lot of power, they have fewer votes because they have fewer raw number of people.

1:20:27The only way is to have some of the burden of this knuckling up, toughening, whatever metaphor you want to use has to fall heavily and concretely on those who have the most. Like it just has to.

1:20:39Aiden:Yeah, the only solution I could think of here was if I can be a New Deal shill for a second is the GDP, a debt to GDP ratio during World War II and into the beginning, you know, the early years of FDR's term was extraordinary. And what was the path that we took at the time? Well, we levied a ton of taxes on the wealthiest people in the country and eventually, and you know, that's not the only thing that's happening around that time period, but I think it was a key part of turning economic things around in a positive direction where we could basically create enough economic growth and create a bunch of revenue from taxes and reel in the fiscal damage.

1:21:26Yeah, people talk about austerity a lot. And the one thing I don't like when they talk about it is like, austerity is so fucking terrible, you shouldn't be cutting things. And I actually agree with that. I think for most people, you can't be cutting their health services. This stuff is too harsh on people that need this stuff the most. However, people often on that side will go, we should just keep borrowing. You can't do that either. You have to find a way to balance the budget without cutting the stuff that's most important to people at the bottom of the income of society. I guess that's the question I'm sort of asking

1:22:00Aiden:is how, in this specific circumstance with France, I don't know what the answer is, but how possible is it when you're being pulled in all these directions is like, okay, we have all these demands for defense and military spending because of the situation we're in with NATO and Russia. And I, but I also need to keep all of my incredible like social services and my incredible medical system and my public holidays and my, like all of my provisions for, you know, good work-life balance in France. And I also need to reel in the budget somehow. Is there, I'm more talking about the math. Is there literally enough wealth in France to be taxed to pay for all of that?

1:22:45Aiden:And the answer, I hope, is yes. I would like that to be the answer. But I wonder if you reach a point of your debt is so big that that doesn't get to be the answer anymore. And I don't know what stage that is at.

1:23:01Atrioc:So let's use the USA as an example. I think that something that people use as a kind of like cure-all panacea when talking about this stuff is make the rich pay their fair share. And nowadays, the term is billionaires rather than millionaires. Going off of chat, GBT, I don't know if these numbers are totally accurate, but there's about 800 billionaires in the U.S., combined wealth of$5.7 trillion. So let's say about$6 trillion held by the billionaires. even if you took all of their money, not increase their taxes from whatever it is, 33 % to 50, right? You just took all of their money. That would fund the country.

1:23:39Like, that would help our deficit for, like, less than three years.

1:23:42Atrioc:That might sound good, but that's a one-time thing that doesn't fix the fundamental spending issues. There's, you know, various questions about whether that's even possible in the first place. That's if you took all their money. If you doubled their taxes right now, most of the money from billionaires and super wealthy people is from assets that are being held. They don't have$7 trillion,$6 trillion sitting around in cash. The vast, vast, vast majority of that is stocks. So I got a couple points on that. Yeah, yeah. No, I would love a clarification on this because I agree that rich people should pay more money.

1:24:14Atrioc:It feels very silly that we just cut taxes for a bunch of wealthy people. At the same time, the idea that you can be like, look, the way we solve the deficit is to tax the wealthy. That is massively oversimplifying and the math doesn't add up. We are$36 trillion in debt. We go two more trillion every year or more. At least we go two trillion. Could I synthesize?

1:24:33Aiden:The math is not even remotely adding up. Could I synthesize my question quickly? Sure. I think taxing the wealthy, we've talked about it before, is probably one of the most important things you need to do, right? Beyond, it's an important part in raising revenue to begin with. But we've talked about how beyond raising revenue, it's an important part of keeping your economic game in your country a healthy thing to participate in, right? My question is, at what point, kind of what you're posturing here, is like, there is certainly a point of debt because we've pushed it so far where just raising those taxes is not enough anymore.

1:25:11Aiden:And in the US, an example we've talked about is like, okay, well, if you pivoted to a universal healthcare system where you can negotiate as a single buyer, You could reduce your healthcare spending a lot without losing anything in terms of quality or availability, right? That's something we've talked about that's important in the US. In France's case, I don't know France well enough to be like, what are the areas that you could cut spending in a similar way? Because eventually I feel like the debt is big enough that you need to do both, right? You are probably gonna have to do both, fully understood.

1:25:47But two things I wanna say to your point. I would love to hear your thoughts. You mentioned billionaires specifically.

1:25:54Atrioc:Yeah, yeah. What I don't think was mentioned was corporate taxes, which is where there's a much bigger amount of wealth that can be, and they used to be higher. They've been lowered over decades, right? So corporate taxes, that's a huge, huge amount of money. And you're not trying to pay off the 30-year-old. That's nearly impossible. The amount of money that we're talking about for the debt to actually pay it off, impossible. What we're trying to do is just get to a balanced budget. We just have to stop it from growing. And so to do that, you just simply cannot be continuing to ask regular people to see a quality of life decrease.

1:26:26They're just already at their edge. Yes. We can't be, it just does not, it's not politically possible. There's gonna be so much anger. Just taking away people's holidays is like almost a comical end of that game where it's like they're shaving off a few billion by getting away holidays to try and balance the budget. It's absurd. Like, so that's my point. It's like it's the highest in people and corporate taxes. Yeah. And then I guess, yes, of course, some spending cuts, especially efficiency ones are the ones that's best where you can get the same quality of service, but you're spending less on middlemen.

1:26:59That makes total sense. But at the end of the day, it's going to be unpopular because we've had it too good for too long. There's been too much debt field and there will be pain. I totally get that. Yeah. But who bears that pain is going to be the big question of our next 10, 15 years.

1:27:15Atrioc:So you feel, and this is a genuine question, you feel that at least, so to put this really simply, we spend$2 trillion more in every given year in the U.S. than we make. If we can get that down, we can pretend whether we don't owe an additional$36 trillion, I guess. So if we can find$2 trillion, but it has to be every year, you feel like at least a huge percentage of that could be covered. I don't think taxing billionaires covers that much of it. You would have to do capital, like unearned capital gains tax.

1:27:40Aiden:I could give you a little math.

1:27:42Atrioc:Because I haven't looked at the corporate tax and how much of that draws.

1:27:44Aiden:Yeah, so I did look at that when we went through the, I fucking forget what episode. But I looked at this because we cut the corporate tax rate in the United States in 2017, right? And I wanted to see the difference in that revenue. And from what I just looked at, I think if we had kept the corporate tax, assuming that corporate profits remain the same through the same period, if the tax rate had remained the same, then we'd be making, uh i think it was 200 billion more 200 to 300 billion more a year in revenue if if the corporate tax rate in america had just stayed the same instead of getting cut in 2017 yeah yeah um that's uh in the current year we would be making 200 or 300 billion more in like 2024 2025 so i i you know that's not that's not an insignificant amount of money maybe you could push the corporate tax rate even higher.

1:28:39Aiden:Yeah, that's what I want.

1:28:40Atrioc:Even that, it's like, so, okay, let's, so again, I agree. I'm just, I'm trying to point, what I'm trying to do is push back against what I often hear, which is like, well, we just need to tax the rich more. I agree, but I don't, the math doesn't make sense to me. That would save us $200 billion a year, right? Again, we need to get to $2 trillion, so that's 10 % of the way there. If we have 800 billionaires, let's say we go to every billionaire and say, you need to put up $250 million a year. Let's say we can make that tenable. That's$200 billion, right? So that's another 200 billion. We've asked billionaires for this crazy amount of money.

1:29:10Atrioc:I mean, not crazy, a large amount of money that they aren't paying right now. We've made 400 billion. We're 20 % of the way there. We're a fifth of the way. Where the fuck do we make the rest of it? And that's my concern. And obviously, we have to cut spending in some, but I would love our military to go down. I would love our healthcare to go down. I just don't see where we get all the money. Two trillion is so much money.

1:29:31Aiden:I'm even thinking

1:29:32Atrioc:about this. I would love for it to be rich people. I'm sure there's somebody who's going to comment,

1:29:36Aiden:Outside of the, I'm thinking about this issue outside of the US is my basic question for somebody who has a more, you know, mathed out answer of this is what is the threshold you get to where you have no choice but to start cutting spending on things that people like, that average people like? What is the threshold where you have to start doing that no matter what? Well, you can't do it politically. And that's very vague. And you can't do it politically. I understand all of these things, right? I get that. I think I'm just wondering what... There is a point where you have rode the gravy train for so long that you need to make hard choices.

1:30:20Aiden:And I'm wondering where that is. And I'd rather start with things like wealth taxes or land value taxes or fucking estate taxes, higher income taxes on the wealthy, raise the corporate taxes. all of these things that I think are essential to having a better functioning society at a base level, I want to start with all those things because we haven't done that yet. We've been going in the opposite direction for a really long time, and that's the part that needs to be reverted 100%. But, yeah, I'm asking the question of the math. And I understand that we don't have the exact numbers or the answers yet.

1:30:55Aiden:I'm more curious. No, I mean, I think the realistic outcome, this is what I hear from people who talk about the same thing, is that we won't figure it out and we're going to run full speed into the wall. And what that means is the cost of borrowing will get so astronomical that you just can't pay. That people will – because as your debt gets so big, people charge more and more. You have to pay more and more yield to get someone to loan you money. And that's going to get out of control and then we're going to have to print money to buy our own debt. This is like the end game of Japan. Japan is going through this right now.

1:31:24I mean Japan is in a bit of a – Japan just had an election where their far-eyed party, the make Japan great again type thing. Yeah, they won. They're sweeping. And the LDP lost a majority for the first time in the history of Japan, really, forever. And people were angry there because they're at the endgame. They have 200 % debt to GDP. Yeah. They're printing money. They're getting inflation, but wages aren't keeping up. People are getting angry. And you've got to get political upheaval. If you can't solve the debt problem, if you can't balance the budget, you eventually get it. You can delay it for a long time, and we have, but you will eventually get political problems.

1:32:00so yeah I don't know I mean the UK sort of had it with they had a budget that was so bad no one loaned them money and Liz Trust got kicked out of office in 30 days or whatever that's crazy that's still crazy so I don't know it's happening it's happening all over this is a question not just in France but everywhere but I totally agree with your question I don't know how it's solved but I do know that starting with public holidays or starting with things that are impactful to regular people is a no-go. Yeah, it feels silly. People won't, it's not even silly. It won't work. There's going to be so much pushback that you can't get it done.

1:32:36It's just that era of like, we're going to do a little bit of a cost cut. Everyone's got to tighten their belts. It's just not going to work anymore. There's just too much money concentrated in too few hands. Even if they won't fully pay for it, that's where you have to start. You just agree with that. People won't take it is my honest assessment. I think people will are at the end of the rope on it. That's my, that's my theory, but we'll see.

1:32:56Atrioc:I think that maybe if you start with that and you're like, look, corporations and the super wealthy are paying a lot more. And now we have to start going to other areas. It's at least a step that then makes broader society go, okay, maybe we can collectively shoulder this thing. We've been kicking down the road forever, but yeah, I agree. You can't start with holidays. It's such a bad start, man.

1:33:18Aiden:Can I posture one other thing that I think save some money before we end? And I've been meaning, I swear to God, I'm still going to do this, this topic soon. because I've been meaning to do some interviews about it. But I've talked about Estonia's digital bureaucracy before. That's our third pillar, dude. The third pillar is even mentioning Estonia. The reason I thought about this this week is I've been dealing with a bunch of paperwork related to my businesses and taxes lately and just how annoying and complex getting through a lot of it is. It's just annoying. And you have to submit the same information about yourself, the same information about your business.

1:33:58Aiden:You know, in the case of the company that we own for this podcast, I'm getting, you know, I think I've asked you guys for like similar information, like two or three times, because I just need it over and over again for like different agencies or different groups of people or whatever, right? It is a painfully arduous process in so many ways. And from my understanding, Estonia created this incredible model of cutting out a lot of the paperwork and process that people need to do just business or do things in their life, like their personal taxes or handle something like their marriage or any interaction that involves paperwork and the government, which is all of them, they have managed to consolidate into a really clean process.

1:34:42Aiden:And imagine a world where you have like a single profile of your information that's accessible across all of these different government, like institutions and websites google login but it fills out your form exactly like and that is something that saves so much money and time for so many people like that to me when like the vague notion of doge that is like what the what could be pursued is like that's what efficiency actually means to me is greasing the wheels of like how all of these systems work because i interact with them all the time and uh you know, not just if you're a business owner, but just if you exist in society, you have to interface with paperwork and submissions all the time, whether it be for your driver's license, ID, voter registration, whatever, right?

1:35:34Aiden:All of these systems could be made more efficient and consolidated and digitized and save so much time and money. And I feel like that, and Estonia, that's a huge part of how they started running massive surpluses. Obviously, smaller country. I fucking get it. you commenter who's making a comment right now. I get that. I was going to say it. I fucking, I was going to say it. I understand that. Obviously, I understand that. I'm just saying that that was a huge course that they took to make things better there and to save themselves a lot of money. I think taking a very conscious and concrete approach to something like that, when we're talking about things like this could be really good.

1:36:12Aiden:Anyway, I'm done. Yeah. I mean, I, I think it reminds me of some of the Lena con stuff where it's like, Hey, maybe this won't solve everything. Maybe one click to cancel is not going to fix our corporate monopolies. But people just want to see a nice step in the right direction might be nice. Something that's unequivocally good, makes people's interaction with government better, saves us money, just go for it. We're going to lose. It gets momentum going. People are like, oh, okay, I believe that I have some trust in the system that it's getting better and it's going to work. And they buy in a little bit instead of constantly trying to find their way out of it.

1:36:44For sure.

1:36:46Atrioc:I want to end with two quick little things. Okay. First off, somewhat serious, I want to make an apology. A few months, two ago maybe now, we talked about – I just posted a video about the emotional challenges I have had with some things going on in my life. And then we talked on the Patreon, and I talked about a quote-unquote hate thread, a person who had criticized me and my opinions in the wake of that. And I think I had sort of exaggerated what this person had said, and I called them psychotic and this other stuff. And I recently learned that somehow that had gotten back to this person and that obviously some people found who this was and found the thread and all that.

1:37:20Atrioc:And looking back, that sucks. Like just straight up, that sucks that I did that. I think as much as I was not in a good headspace at that time, I'm a public figure. And I don't really think about the fact that if I'm talking about these things to hundreds of thousands of people and calling somebody psychotic, that fucking actually sucks and is really irresponsible of me. So as I learned about this recently, I did genuinely feel remorse about it. So to that person, if you happen to see this, genuinely sorry, I hope you did not get any harassment over that. I it's also just broadly I wanted to say it because I think I'm learning how to be responsible as a public figure and this is one of those things of like okay there is a real consequence to just like talking shit about a public person and I super do not want to contribute to that type of culture of public figures you know roasting people online and everything that comes with that so um.

1:38:08Aiden:Why you need to be nicer to Jeffrey Epstein.

1:38:10Atrioc:That's right. I don't know if that's the takeaway. And that's the takeaway. So I wanted, because I talked shit publicly, I wanted to publicly say, that really genuinely sucks. And I kind of felt like an asshole when I realized what I did. So I do apologize for that. Follow up, slightly more upbeat, went to open sauce this last weekend, last minute. And you went to open sauce and we saw so many amazing people. I just got to, I mean, I didn't even announce how I was going. I just like saw all these people who were so nice and so enthusiastic. And many people said how much they enjoyed this show and appreciated what we're doing.

1:38:40Atrioc:And it was incredibly heartwarming. And I just appreciated that a lot. and it is really nice to be like grounded and talk to an actual human being and be like, oh, people are real. There's like, I don't just have to be in the internet world all the time. It's like a real thing. So that meant a lot and I appreciate it.

1:38:55Aiden:It was so cool. I think, you know, I imagine because the crossover was something like Lemonade Stance, or sorry, with OpenSauce and the type of content and the content creators that are there and the things that are presented. But I have never met this many Lemonade Stance fans. Lemonade Stance. Lemonade Stance. That's good. in one place. And it was so nice meeting so many of you. Truly, I had a wonderful time saying hi to everybody. It was so, so cool. And it made me feel like we're making something really special.

1:39:25Atrioc:I don't think people give a shit about my YouTube anymore. There was like two people out of a hundred who brought it up. Nobody ever does like, I love lemonade stands. Like, thanks. And then by the 99th person, I was like, I do YouTube also. You should check it out sometime. Thanks so much, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you.