Everyone is banning Social Media | Lemonade Stand 🍋

19:04Atrioc:No, they're not claiming it works. Oh, my bad. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Like, what I'm trying to paint the picture of is the U.S. is in this chaotic state of many people trying many different things. Yeah. This is what Colorado, Minnesota have tried. Utah is like, you have to have your parents' consent to sign in, and you need their explicit permission to use social media from 10.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. So there's like time gating in some states. Interesting.

19:27Aiden:It's getting dangerously close.

19:29Atrioc:Time gated, interesting. interesting arkansas and ohio tried to ban it but it was so a bunch of these have been blocked by judges because the first amendment is like the big counter to this because um you know many people feel like people under the age of 18 do have rights and then california and new york that's crazy uh past laws viewers then they're they're all right california and new york are trying to like to go for the addictive feeds of minors but then that's being legally challenged i mean there's some interesting questions here about the you know the rights of people because that's essentially the big counter argument but then in florida so florida passed a law in 2024 that if you're under 14 you can't have an account 15 to 16 requires parental permission so like on the stricter side kind of um and then the social media accounts like companies have to delete the account so they get 50 000 per violation so there's like a big monetary punishment and there was some legal challenges eventually it started in february of this year so now florida sued tiktok's ass and saying you guys are allowing underage access you guys are misrepresenting the amount of violence or sexual content you can be exposed to and then perry if you pull this up again the law states 13 and under is banned tiktok on their page says 13 plus like come on in and so florida is like no you can't do that we have a law that says you're not okay but we had a law that legally banned tiktok in america we all said eh yeah if tiktok has learned not to care about our laws, I guess I don't blame them.

20:55Yeah, yeah.

20:56Atrioc:So what's interesting is Florida seems to be like aggressively going after social media companies in a way that other states kind of aren't. They sued Snapchat in 2025 and said they're legally opening accounts and whatnot. So they're going for like a lot of monetary damages and trying to put serious pressure on the social media companies. And I think that's like a pretty interesting turn if states start to actually throw a lot of lawsuits. It's funny because Florida isn't such a budget deficit and it just sounds like they're trying to shake down TikTok for some cash.

21:27Aiden:And that's kind of what's China's approach when we were talking to people there, right? Like the law around expression on social media apps is kind of, it's intentionally vague so that speech can be moderated in a way to the government's choosing there, right? But they put all the pressure on the companies to enforce it rather than themselves and basically say the companies will face really high consequences if you do not like service the law appropriately. And then that incentivized the crackdown on the company's end and where like they don't want to let anything slip through because of how dire the consequences are.

22:08Aiden:You know, whether it be monetary or like, you know, somebody being arrested or removed from their position. I'm not saying that strategy should be adopted. That was just the way they went about it. It's like, okay, we're not going to like create this massive government an employment program to like moderate these companies and then submit the request to social media companies. It's like, no, you, the company are responsible for dealing with this. And it's like, if you don't deal with it in a way that we deem adequate, then you will face. Yeah. We'll find it. What's the,

22:36Atrioc:which follows up to like kind of what's happening alongside these laws. What is America really good at? If nothing else,

22:43Aiden:freedom,

22:44Atrioc:freedom. I was going to say that freedom to we've read lots of books about this

22:49Aiden:freedom. Hey, freedom to buy a house that you never toured.

22:52Atrioc:Yes, that's true. You have the freedom to do that. Freedom to

22:56Aiden:force your friend to split it with you. Freedom to force your friend to split it with you. Freedom to shoot guns. Guns. Sorry, I feel like you had an answer.

23:07Atrioc:Could we shoot the social media in some way? What if we fight, because I heard they have the media in the cloud. What if we fire our guns into the air? We all fire our guns up at the same time. Do we shoot TikTok down? TikTok's cloud could not survive. Right. no i actually is a pretty good they're being they're being sued to shit right now so suing them yes that's one of our things they're suing them with a gun so i have a funny yeah okay the tiktok is being sued right now not only by florida but by 14 state attorney generals simultaneously there's a bipartisan coalition that is saying they're misleading the public about the safety of their platform and harming young people's mental health it changes per state but like massachusetts is like you're a public nuisance new york is saying you're false advertising and so apparently there's a thousand similar lawsuits pending and this is a follow-up to if you guys remember earlier uh this year last year there was a big meta lawsuit where this woman who was 20 won a lawsuit for millions of dollars that said meta you harmed my mental health and so there is this big trend where people states are starting to do these massive quantities of lawsuits against the social media company saying you have harmed me on top of these bans they seem like they're kind of a little fucked.

24:19This is exactly what happened with vape companies. What was the big vape company when it was first? And the vape everybody... Jewel? Jewel. This is what happened to Jewel. Jewel, like literally 38 states or whatever, parents in all of them got angry enough that there was lawsuits across the country and it just kind of imploded their ability to sell and do the way they'd done before. I mean, they dumped their stock to Marlboro or something. Yeah.

24:45Atrioc:I just don't get how a company like TikTok is going to survive, which is already tenuous in terms of what weird state it's in, when you have a precedent with a couple different lawsuits now that any person who's like a late teenager or early 20s can sue them and say, you distressed me and win millions of dollars. How are you going to survive? That's like a tough long-term play. Oh my God. It is worth saying it's still the biggest social media and it's dominant and people use it. I think Like I saw among teens, it's like five to seven hours a day is the, you know, it's like some, some astronomical number.

25:21I think it's all social media, not just like that, but it's the biggest one of the, of them. But still it's like, these are, you know, the thing they're fighting against is pretty entrenched. And I wonder, you know, if we're, we're, we're nearing the end of the subject, I want to steel man a little bit. There is a strong counter argument that's worth bringing up, which is that, you know, for example, in the UK for this next election, they have changed the law so that 16 is now the voting age so you can vote at 16 but you can't use what was it it was 18 before okay oh they lowered it wow they lowered their voting age for the next election and there is an idea of like can you really tell someone they're they're old enough to choose the direction of the country but they can't watch youtube there's like a freedom aspect of it there's also an aspect of like if you do we trust the government to be the one to control these platforms these are areas where we could get uh opinions out outside of the mainstream system and find other people that there's the idea of like um could this be once they have the verification systems could they be turned even more restrictive later on if there was yeah well the uk was already

26:18Aiden:under fire for this right they outside of kids they were looking to broadly apply id verification for social media accounts for everybody yeah and they were facing a lot of criticism so it's like a totally fair point and that makes it a really tough thing to have a solid podcast take trademark are gone. Yeah. In that, I just, I wish people on that side would at least agree that man, social media clearly is doing David. We can't wait another 20 years to find out that it's fucking kids up. And then people on the other side have to realize that like, you know, the government doesn't always have 100 % best freedom of speech, interest in heart, and they could abuse this power if given it.

26:55Atrioc:There's another argument going on, which is that, so if you are a social media, okay, we institute these bans. Let's say that's yours. Let's say we say under 18, no social media. We're cutting it out. Like, let's do it. How do you actually stop kids from doing this? Well, the only way to do it with is to use like AI tracking basically. And that's what's going on, right? Like, so YouTube now has the whole thing where they track your behavior and then use that to algorithmically determine whether you're young and then force age verification. And Roblox is doing a similar thing, which if you remember that candidate for Los Los Angeles mayor was complaining about the age verification thing.

27:33Atrioc:Like tick tock has a new thing where they like analyze your face, like you were saying. And so if you have, you know, tens of millions of people or hundreds of millions of people on your platform, and you were trying to determine if it's a person who's 13 pretending to be 17, the only way to do that is to get really invasive or require ID, right? Which maybe you don't have. Also, if you're a 13 year old, are you going to have government ID? and you know all sorts of things like can you speak freely about the government or whatnot if you are forced to be identified and tracked by the government at all times uh like the actual implementation of how do you stop kids from using these apps is extraordinarily hard and the only way to do it seemingly is to get more authoritarian it's a little worrying like well that's why i really like the idea of but even though it's impossible it's also impossible but the idea of like attacking the daily scroll but attacking infinite scroll attacking the parts of the platform that are so addictive i know they'll just find a new way which is the hard part of me thinking this through but man attacking that would actually be effective because also we all agree on the show that the problems of social media don't actually stop with someone their brain doesn't hit 18 and go okay i can handle this it's poisoning our brain it's poisoning everybody's Oh, it's horrible.

28:48It's ruining society in some way. Yes. And so like, if you just don't give them any antibodies when they're a kid, they'll figure it out when they're 18. And they're just, they're going to get brain rotted anyway.

28:57Atrioc:I do saying we drip it to them. They start at one minute a day until they've proven they can handle it. I think you should get a minute per your age. Yeah. Yeah. But there's like the oldest among us will get the most social media, which is good. But if you're showing signs of brain rot, we like break glass and there's a book there and you have to read it. We hand you the giving tree. that's a slow ass book no it's like catcher in the rye it's one nobody even likes dude that would be so funny when i was uh in elementary school they had all the books in the school library color coded with a little dot on them and you get points for the each book you read if it was a bigger book you got more points what if the book would unlock amount of time you get on social media so if you read moby dick you get two hours that's what my parents did did they Really?

29:43Atrioc:Yeah. We had to like do chores and like read books and maybe, maybe you too. And like do homework. And then that would get, Oh, now you get 30 minutes of video game time. Like, Oh, interesting. Yeah. It sucked.

29:53Aiden:Didn't do that. Didn't help you. Blanket. No, on weekdays,

29:56Atrioc:my kids were just mainlining cartoon network. And I was reading books like a coward, but your kids, what your kids, you have to see your kids. No, no, no. Like my friends, like my friends. Sorry. My kids. My kids are watching cartoon network. My fellow kids. I can't,

30:14Aiden:I can't imagine that I'd actually like to hear people's suggestions. If you have one in for the comments sound off, but it feels like the two solutions are what you've just outlined. Is this more like stricter enforcement of IDs, like database of users and no, which trends in this like more authoritarian direction or a, an ability for a government figure or institution to enforce rules on the companies in a way that is much more broad and reactive than is currently allowed through like a more liberal uh justice system you're saying it's the legal system you're saying the core problem i mean liberal in like the dirty lives like the academic i understand academic sense it's a carlson story later we'll about it oh i know what sorry is my dog yeah we're talking about your dog in a second no but i do you see what i mean it's like it feels like the solution it's like these two prongs of solutions trend in a more authoritarian direction but the stakes uh the stakes of the underlying issue feel very high so i don't really know how to feel so i will say like if there was a world where kids were allowed to drink as much as they want and then we started banning it you would say you could say this is a more authoritarian direction but at the end of the day some level of authoritarianism for some rules makes sense like people should not like i mean i agree gambling to not be widely accessible i there's things that should be banned so i'm not like a total like laissez-faire no rules for anyone i think i'm more in the camp of like in on both fronts when you have a problem that is digital the layers of friction to adapt and change and mold the thing around the rules that have been made is always very quick and easy relative to a physical thing so that is my worry is like i'm a hundred percent of the belief that okay the uk government could draw up a strict set of laws that require social media companies to modify their platforms in a way that is less addictive but like you said i think with the pace at which these institutions can adapt and the age of the people in charge yeah they can only read it's like instagram finds a new workaround that is compliant with the law and then you're back to years later they finally adapted that yeah but if i but in my miracle in the hypothetical world no consequences i've made you the fucking social media czar in the country and you can just daily scroll and you decree the daily scroll and anything that like just based on vibes that breaks the daily scroll you just get to say no to yeah you could just react on a whim and but that has all these consequences because what if you're a really bad guy wow and you and you sounds really good i think i like where we were heads at i think i should handle all social media but let's move on a different story because i think we can't i would hear your opinions if you guys have a if you guys have solved this problem let us know and we'll pass it on the decision maker next time pete buddhich is here we'll pass it along but it is it is i guess what i'll say to sum this whole story up is that many many countries from from the UK to the EU as a whole, South American countries, Asian countries, and America, they're all saying we can't wait anymore.

33:25People are so angry. Parents are so angry. Kids are seeing decline. They're having to do something. So the solutions won't be that good at first, I think, but hopefully someone can figure out something that makes progress.

33:35Atrioc:And I'll say it. I would like to not also be banned from Twitter. So if they find a way to do that, let me know. You would like to be banned? I would like them to ban me from Twitter. Yeah, that'd be fun. I've eliminated all the others and then that still hooks me. He keeps getting you back. We all do it.

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35:35Atrioc:Speaking of YouTube, interesting. I mean, this is a quick one and then we'll move on. Okay. YouTube was sued a couple months ago and it was by a group of indie musicians who sued them trying to do a class action lawsuit saying, Hey, your new AI music model, Lyria 3, was made by copying all of our music. So this is kind of the broader, you know, story of what is happening with AI music right now, where most of the companies like Suno or Udeo, which are the really big ones are making AI music and their models were trained off of all the music they could find on the internet. And their argument is fair use.

36:12Atrioc:We are, you know, we are transforming it and, and we don't think that we've broken any laws here. This is a big, big, big ongoing discussion, which can potentially massively change the direction of AI development. But right now, these types of questions are still unanswered. With Google, it's a little bit different because Google, they were sued by these musicians and said, hey, you copied our music just like the other guys. But Google responded. This is June 10th, like two weeks ago. And it responded to this lawsuit and said, first off, even accepting their untested allegations as fact, the complaint cannot stand.

36:48Atrioc:Basically, the lawyer opens and says, first off, you can't even prove if we trained it off of your music or not. but they won't say whether they did uh even accepting your untested allegations is fact the complaint cannot stand because plaintiffs granted youtube and google a broad license to use the uploaded content and they're right in the youtube terms of service when you upload something quote you grant to youtube a worldwide non-exclusive royalty-free sub-licensable and transferable license to use that content including to reproduce distribute prepared derivative works display and perform it so every time any of us upload something to youtube we are giving them the right to use it to train AI models.

37:23It's crazy because I read the full DMCA every single time I click through those things and I just must have missed that part.

37:29Atrioc:Would that have stopped you? I suspect not. So this is interesting in that this is a kind of different story than the typical musician Sue AI company who responds with fair use. Google's like, look, we have the rights. And then the counter argument by the musicians is basically, I mean, I can find the quote here. um google doesn't just have access to our music it operated the infrastructure through which much of that music reaches the world google owns youtube one of the most important platforms for music discovery distribution and monetization and it runs content id which is how they manage rights and so they're basically their counter counter argument is because you guys are a massive distributor of music we sort of have to upload out we can't really opt out if we want to have success, but that then allows you to do this, uh, sub thing with them.

38:17Atrioc:So this is an interesting case that again, is part of a broader trend with the AI music lawsuits. And this one is totally different. So, you know, who knows? I think Google has a stronger case here. The other AI music players may be less. So, um, Sudo's got, doesn't even have this because you definitely didn't sign anything. They just stole music. They just stole music and uploaded it. And I assume if you really could get into the nuts and bolts of this, Google did too. I'm sure there's plenty of songs that aren't on YouTube that they threw into their models. That's what's so funny is they're saying like, even if you could prove what you're saying, like we don't know.

38:50Atrioc:I look, they have not said what they trained to this music model off of. Everything that I've seen from, you know, like for example, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, they rented a building off of their office campus and had everyone bring in books to scan and then upload that they didn't own. And they just counted it as like, it's off-site. And that was proven. There's just no way that these AI companies, which are on a full-speed race, aren't uploading every possible thing they can get their hand on to increase training data. There's been no punishment for it so far on any real level, and so they're just doing it.

39:24This reminds me of when Disney, there was a person that they ordered a restaurant for their meal at a restaurant for their wife at a Disney park, and they said, is this gluten-free or something. I don't remember exactly what it was. It was a shellfish. And they're like, no, it doesn't. Okay. And then she ate it. It did have shellfish. She died. And he goes, I'm suing you. This is crazy. You lied to me. And they go, you have a Disney Plus account and there's a part of that ULA you signed eight years ago that says you can never sue us and you have to go into forced arbitration. And so there's that level of like...

40:00Aiden:Dude, and he wasn't even... I think the account had been like inactive for years. He hadn't even watched Disney Plus.

40:06Atrioc:Dude, I'm playing Baldur's Gate and it sounds like you're signing a deal with the devil permanent contract and then in return you get shellfish I have a question for you Aiden what I've realized through this is that YouTube has the right to train an AI model off of all of our podcasts and they could make Lemonade Stand AI and just replace us and would you watch it?

40:29Aiden:Would I watch Lemonade Stand AI? Oh yeah absolutely We could cut costs here we could save the gas of us driving in in Los Angeles traffic. They'll just never be able to replace the yard. The server would catch on fire. It would just... You think it can't generate slime saying a fart joke and then you going... YouTube's podcast AI would never be able to make a joke about how like we do. I don't even know if we can keep that in this episode. Yeah, probably have to bleep that. Probably have to bleep that. uh can i talk about gaming being back gaming is back what's up listen every once in a while on the show we have a story that proves to us that gaming is back and this one honestly is the opposite of that but i want to talk about it anyway uh the two two parts of this story number one is that yesterday i believe valve finally announced the price of their much anticipated steam machine the console killer it's bringing the pc to your living room and it is astronomically high it's like thank god i was worried the plebs would be able to afford it thank god i'm addition in head to toe in gucci and montclair so fucking happy that the regular folk can not afford the steam machine i woke up i checked my news feed like i do every morning to see if there's an update on the steam machine.

41:52Aiden:I take my diamond grill out. I say, and I say, they are. I was hoping for 2000. Thanks game. Still a little cheap, but thanks game. No, it's astronomically expensive. It's 1049. I believe with no controller. That's the cheapest model with no controller. The cheapest model with no controller for everything. Do you need a controller to play? You do need a controller to play. So basically all you don't, you can plug in the keyboard. We just touch the box. Whatever you want. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. but the steam machine with controller, I don't know what the exact all-in cost for like a regular use case is, but it's like$1 ,200,$1 ,300 or something like that.

42:28And people are finding it to be extraordinarily expensive and certainly disappointing for what they expected. And Valve's response is that this is what it costs us to make. We're not even making a profit on the console, which is probably true given that the cost of RAM has gone astronomical due to AI. So this is seen as a response to like, hey, that's what, it is what it is. AI is buying all the chips. This is what we could get. but it does seem like it undercuts the momentum that valve had of like, we're going to just start taking over the living room like that. I feel like this is going to be slow to be adopted.

42:58Yeah.

42:59Aiden:So I have a few, few thoughts on this. I watched a cool review of the product by Dave 2d already. And he points out that if you try, like people are balking at the price, which I think is totally understandable. But if you try to build a comparable, a PC at the moment, like just on your own, the parts come out to a very similar price yeah they're not profiting on this i think or very little if they are the big thing that they're saying they won't do is a lot of console sales traditionally have been loss leaders the idea that we'll sell this actually not at a profit we'll sell it literally at a loss uh like the first xbox sold that way yeah and uh we will make that back through either your subscription to our online service through the games that we're selling and publishing for the console and valve is refusing to subsidize the console and sell it at a loss like a lot of companies do choose to do i think the thing that does genuinely suck for them from i've been keeping up weirdly close on the on the release timeline of this uh since their announcement you know how like the chrome app on your phone like just feeds you recommended news articles yeah i clicked like three about the steam machine when it launched and then it feeds me a new update every day this little steam machine yeah three clubs everything about it and he's

44:19Atrioc:like and then he wants to know the specs he wants to know the there's an infinite scroll about steam machine price that's the world we live in here the infinite scroll's gotten so deep yeah it's even

44:30Aiden:google chrome it's hidden everything but they they did delay the announcement the price and i i i think everything about this because of the problems they were running to in the cost of the parts and this is not just being felt by them right now you can see this in the price increases across consoles in general they raise the price on the steam deck uh so and if you look at this up phones are going up in price next year like the the the ram cost has increased tech across the board you can basically and the biggest fault of this arguably is that it only has a gigabyte of RAM in it. Like that is a decision that they made.

45:13Aiden:And one of the, if you track the price increase with the Steam Deck and assume that they had to make a similar adjustment in the price of this, you can see that the original attended price of this product was around like$750 to$800. But they had to push it up to this. They couldn't even push this down to$999. Like below, you know, below$1 ,000.

45:34Atrioc:Which is much cheaper. Yeah.

45:36Aiden:Mentally. Yeah, but they, they obviously made a decision internally to like it crosses the thousand mark and i was talking to this in our just a friend group chat and i was like dude this has to be the worst time ever to choose to launch a video game console yeah it just looks bad because you're just gonna get eaten alive

45:52Atrioc:regardless of the reasons i'm revealing myself as a fake gamer why even in the world where this is more affordable why is this why would this be disruptive or impactful the machine because i thought the whole pitch is like because it is just a pc why is this substantially different than somebody buying a pre-built pc that you can do i think the idea it takes me to the second story but actually i'll do a second story it's a good answer to your question okay so sony recently over the past few years has um wanted to make more money off their big console exclusives like god of war and spider-man and so they said well we're in a war with xbox we can't release it there nintendo is a whole different platform different specs can't release it there what if we release them on PC.

46:33And so they quietly have been releasing a lot of their major titles on PC, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, God of War. And they all made a ton of money. They did a longer term study of these users and they realized, uh-oh, here's the problem. Once they realized they can just wait and get our best titles on PC, all of them, their purchase intent on a PlayStation has dropped to nothing. They realized that the best thing to do is kind of just to own a PC. PC can get almost, it gets every Xbox game, it gets almost every game but Nintendo games. And so PC gaming has quietly, despite being backseat to consoles for most of when we were growing up, has become the dominant form of gaming.

47:12You get the most value for your buck. If you're a crazy little guy, you'd be

47:17Aiden:playing Nintendo games on it too. Don't tell them. Don't tell them. I wouldn't do it. Nintendo would still kill it. Couldn't catch me doing it. So PC gaming has really just taken off and Steam has become the dominant it uh platform store for buying video games and it has all the latest new indie games and the games you play with your friends and all the games that don't release on consoles or release much later on consoles and so steam has realized the last battle is like most there's some group of gamers who only play on their couch in front of the tv they don't actually have a gaming pc it's it's overwhelming it's too hard to set up the idea of it's too daunting if they can crack that code and they can put a steam machine that's very one click and press and play in your living room it kind of could blow the console makers out of the water it could be the last bastion so that was the idea is like steam could have total dominion over gaming with this final push and nothing will crack the living room quite like a thousand fifty dollars but this price tag has really put a damper on it yeah so yeah those without me those are two stories it's like just a weird time in gaming i will say pc gaming is clearly looking pretty good uh xbox is in a total tailspin they're doing in layoffs, they're closing down studios, they're moving all exclusives to PC, and Sony and Nintendo are kind of walling up their gardens again.

48:32Oh, so the Sony story, the end result of it, is that Sony has said they're pulling back from PC releases of their exclusives. The next God of Wars and stuff are not going to go on PC. They're going to literally be console only, you have to buy a console, because they realize that they're kind of like selling themselves out long term.

48:46Aiden:Yeah, I feel like that's the lesson to learn from Nintendo more than anything, right? Like, that is the real brand power of Nintendo. It's like, you want to play Mario?

48:55Atrioc:We'll play Mario, bitch. You want to play Mario? Mario? You better buy a damn game. You better got a console or Switch 12. Anyway, I'm on the wait list. You're on the wait list. Obviously, you're going to buy 12 of them because you like to work from home. Okay? And if you're working from home, what exactly is the vibe?

49:13Aiden:What's the vibe at working from home?

49:17Atrioc:Nobody even noticed. Especially now that we've called it out explicitly.

49:21Aiden:I wanted to ask you guys a question because I saw a, an intriguing opinion article about work from home. Now that it has been more established and we're years past COVID. And this was making the argument that everybody enjoys remote work for the most part. You poll people. It's like 80 % of people say they prefer remote work. It's better for them for a multitude of reasons. Like you don't have to commute anymore. You can do like little chores throughout your day. You can be at home with your kids. You can, there's so many reasons why work from home is super, super appealing. But this, uh, the, the person who wrote this article, uh, was going through a couple different studies and basically making the argument that, uh, this era of work from home is increasingly isolating people and causing them to be more depressed, have fewer connections with people and have these slower, you know, downward effects on you after years and years of doing remote work.

50:31Aiden:And the reason I thought this was interesting, this is more of like an open question to you guys, is do you agree with that idea or takeaway? Because in the comments of this article, as you can expect, people are like New York Times shills trying to get us to go back to work. Like the establishment just is doing whatever they can to convince us to go back. Basically, like a bunch of people arguing that the New York Times is like a part of the cabal that is forcing people to work in office again. And while I can see why people would want to push back against this, because I literally started working for Ludwig.

51:16Aiden:One of my primary two reasons was because my old job was asking me to go back into office. And I was like, I absolutely do not want to do that. And however, now the way I work is like, I go into an office every day. a very non-traditional office at that though and i wanted to just get your guys's thoughts on this like do you think how do you think like work from home affects you guys as like with your careers what you think this is like for normal people where you sit on the topic in general kind of looking for everybody everybody's opinions listening to this too uh because i can kind of see multiple sides of this issue just looking at myself not even thinking about other people it's funny that you mentioned the new york times as being uh accused of being the deepest show on this because my counterpoint comes from the new york times to this article this is an opinion guest essay that you're showing can you show mine as well this is also an opinion guest essay uh this is one that just came out yesterday that i read it was called the secret reason bosses want everyone back in the office every day of the week and it's a six-year study that interviewed um thousands of employees and bosses on work from home.

52:26And what it found was the one trait that is consistent across all managers that wanted the most work in office time is ego, as in they really enjoyed the feeling of being the boss in person. That was the most consistent trait that led to someone wanting to bring everyone as much as possible. And that, in my own experience, having done a few years of work from home and work in the office from NVIDIA where we had this debate would happen a lot that tracks with the managers who wanted it the most versus the ones the least was the ones who really enjoyed the feeling of like I don't know lording over meetings and walking around the cubicles and those people were the most of like we have to get back in the office right away and so I think there's some truth to that however I've talked to some people in my audience about this younger people I do think there's a point of like if you've already established yourself and you're good at what you do, work from home is pretty convenient.

53:22But if you're new, there is a weird thing of like joining an office and being work from home immediately. You don't get to know anybody. You don't get really any mentorship. You don't learn a lot of skills. You're often more isolated. And I, I do think if I'd started my career work from home, I would be less, uh, excited about it. So I don't know, man. I think there's probably like most things, some stupid ass nuance. I don't know, Doug, what do you say? Dumb ass fucking stupid nuance. Stupid ass, stupid ass.

53:52Atrioc:I have no hot take. There's so clearly like, it depends on the environment and the pros and cons. I think what you just said is an important one, which is, I mean, like, I remember my first programming job, like with every single programming team, you have the guy who knows everything and he's the only reason the team even functions and he comes in to fix everything. And like going to that guy and being able to just walk over and ask for help and like communicate what's going on, It was an enormously important part of that job. And that would have been miserable without that. And I wouldn't have developed and become the amazing programmer that I immediately quit and stopped doing forever.

54:24Atrioc:And then, you know, and then like hybrid roles, it's like those, even if it's two days a week in person, like those are really important to connect with people. And there's just the sense of, I think, I think generally creativity is better when you have people in person than online. Although again, obviously that totally depends on the environment. I find that doing solo brainstorming or I can walk around in my own environment is extremely important, but also it should be in person, right? I think both these, so to me, like the dream would be hybrid roles, but it obviously, so obviously depends on the team and the company and the situation.

54:56Atrioc:And if you have to commute an hour and a half each way, then that's going to add such misery to your life.

55:02Aiden:i feel like so the the real negatives of working in the office in my mind are the commute the required structure of a of a company the feeling that you have to force or pretend to do work for like a full eight hour period when oftentimes you don't need to be working for that whole time and then i've been in a company where your seat is in front of your manager and they can see your computer you've been in that situation yes i sat next to my manager it's so horrendous it's so

55:33Atrioc:horrendous because oh dude i i was also not only that i was next to this is what esl perry i was not only next to my boss also i was like right in front of the main conference meeting room which all day long had parts of teams for the entire company with glass walls and then i'm on the other side of it they can look at my monitor yeah because sometimes you just your brain's fried you scroll reddit for a second or just like get your but you can't do it and so you're like constantly having excel sheets open or fit it's it was though I'm so glad my seat moved in my early days of Twitch because I could not it was like stressing me out to

56:08Aiden:pretend all the times I've had this one time yeah I've had this one time but it was next to my boss Ken Hotbed Chen oh he's so as you can imagine I looked over at his monitor and he was on reddit most of the time yeah and your current boss Ludwig I don't that would be true he's not really breathing down my neck in the same way but i and then i think the last piece of it is when you really need to zone in and focus to get a certain amount of stuff done i think being in an open office can like take away from that sometimes but i think if you remove the uh if you remove the commute and like the hard structure part most people i feel like would want to come in.

56:52Aiden:And the reason I say this is because I've actually made a big push at Mogul in like the last year and a half for people to start coming in more. And there's no hard policy about this. But there's something that I have noticed. The people that want more people in the office have a tendency to be self-centered and entitled. They have higher opinions of themselves as leaders, and they covet power and status. You were saying you've been searching for... If I can make an argument for a different reason. The more they coveted power and status the more they favored return to office mandates okay and so do you

57:25Atrioc:walk around and you kind of look at what they're working on yeah and you kind of like check in

57:28Aiden:don't do that no mandate yeah just to be clear none of that interesting i said i said i'm just

57:33Atrioc:reading people to come in more and no one's been laid off if you want to be a team player come on but there's no mandate yeah wait jeff just got fired i wouldn't hate to hate me i'm like no sorry no we got fired for that reason hey guys just had to shut down off brand but i think it'd be cool if you come into the office but no pressure around with a three million dollar chain

57:55Aiden:okay something i have noticed as the guy who manages everybody at the company who is essentially hr is that the people who come in the least feel the most isolated in their role and have the most negative opinions about how other people in the company feel about them that's that's what i have noticed. Oh, interesting. Um, so I, I think there's a lot of like, you know, when you're texting somebody, there's an ambiguity in like the tone or how they mean it. And if we meet person to person, I see your like face, I see your body language. Like we have a much clearer path of communication. Like right now you can, you can tell that.

58:34Yeah, exactly. He's flipping me off under the table.

58:39Aiden:I think people coming in, people coming into our office develops a like stronger morale and camaraderie and camaraderie and comfort around everybody that makes people just say it's like a family you're saying your office is like oh my fucking god oh my fucking god i want to be insane i want to make fun of you this is a company where people auto plays deadlock for six hours a day it's that's that's my fucking point if you could it's like if people just get done what they need to get done and they can come i agree with you they can come in i'm making fun of you they can fuck around we can watch the nba finals together we can people can play video games together there's no uh indeed list next to this that you're trying to sell i'm not hiring anybody i'm i'm making a case that like i think people enjoy this is not a company where like nobody does work like this past week before this minecraft event we did you know a handful of people are throwing together like 12 hour days together in the office in order to get this event prepped and done on time.

59:40Aiden:And then, but in the week after where there's like maybe a couple months before the next project, you know, the next day they can be in there and like, let's have fun and play. Like we'll, we'll like do a couple of meetings that we have to get done today. And then we'll like play counter-strike together for a couple hours. I'm not saying this is going to happen at fucking Amazon, but I'm saying that in this environment where a bunch of people have like relatively short commutes and don't have any like hard rule me breathing down their neck and like demand that they're in like a spreadsheet all day people are really happy to come in and like separate home life from work life and i'm not saying that's a standard that's like sustainable at every mega corporation but like it's the reason that i i gave up on working literally from home all the time because it made me sad for the reasons that in this article years before i read this article i was like i realized working at home alone all the time without talking to anybody ever just fucking makes me sad and it's fun to be around other people and like be able to turn to your co-worker and like hey can we like do that thing and like i think to agree with you i want to just say we we for this show often do episode planning meetings like on thursdays and we'll do them on a discord call and the energy of that call versus when we got in this room and all brainstormed on a whiteboard is a million times night and day we're on discord we're all kind of half distracted we're like some people are silent you're doing ideas we get it done but But it's not, when we get in person, there's a much more of an energy.

1:01:05We're riffing off each other. We invented great concepts like the Nordic fun fact. We spent three hours brainstorming. We got that. Okay, things happen. So I totally agree that there's a difference. And I just think it's, you know, it's often nuanced in person by person. You were going to show something?

1:01:19Atrioc:Oh, no. I mean, that was just for you, Brandon. Sorry. So good. So good. So good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now.

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1:02:20Atrioc:When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. I agree with you on this. Yeah, let's swap this. Go ahead. But one thing I don't agree with you on that I've kept my rage boiling about. No, obviously I almost thought about not bringing this up again because it's only negative for me.

1:03:05I'm not going to change the dynamic that 85 % of Americans have a credit card and are very attached to it. Don't worry. I have another way to bring this up and talk shit about you on Patreon. Okay, perfect. However, an article I read recently in Business Insider that I wanted to share with you guys. Maybe we can pull it up on screen. It's called the premium credit card trap. And I wanted to bring this up as a launching pad because I think it articulated some things that I was far too stupid to get across when I was explaining why I am a little bit wary of these premium credit cards. And it's a longer article.

1:03:40I'll give you the key highlights. It basically noted that over recent years, the yearly fees of these so-called vaunted credit cards like Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire Rewards and keeps going up. And it went up from like 695 to 785, one of them's 820. They're rising and rising and people at the margins are starting to notice that maybe this doesn't make as much financial sense as they thought. And there's evidence in this article, if you have a premium credit card card, they are being much more deliberate about which companies they give you special bonuses and rewards for. and they're making partnerships with these companies.

1:04:19And the idea is to kind of subtly push you into shopping that direction over another direction. And what they found was if they do something like, hey, you get 10 % off a Delta Airlines flight, but only if you shop business class. What they're finding is consumers are spending a lot more. For every 1%, they increase the rewards, the monthly points they get back. People's spending increases 32%. And so people are spending quite a bit more on these things. And so, for example, you probably would have gotten the economy flight, but because there's a 10 % discount on business, you're almost losing money if you don't get it.

1:04:57It's a psychological trick. It'd be a bad deal. So you have to buy it. And that's happening with some deluxe gym memberships and all sorts of things. People are just spending money they wouldn't normally spend. And you're in a bit of a, what this article kind of breaks down is that you are in a bit of a psychological war where if you do everything right and you're super on top of it, there is benefits to this. You obviously can extract more than you put in, but you're in a bit of a battle at all times where they are trying to influence, trick, subtly nudge you to spend more or in different ways than you otherwise would have.

1:05:33And I think there's a freedom from that in some way where if you just opt out, you are not playing that game.

1:05:40Atrioc:Well, I just want to clarify here. You're saying opt out of platinum credit cards, right? That have these very high fees. These are all the fees ones and luxury ones. Right. And I just want you to know that that is not every credit card. You can get a just normal ass credit card. No, I totally understand. But you, yes, you can get a normal credit card. You're right. You can do that. But even that, so the psychological aspect is that when you buy something with normal cash, there is a cost in your brain and a upside in your brain that you put together. but what they say in this article is that when you have a credit card, the cost is removed with platinum credit card no, any credit card the cost is removed because you're not seeing the money by your account and you get a second dopamine bonus of like, I'm going to get some points back so you get double the dopamine bonuses and you get none of the costs so you still spend more than you otherwise would

1:06:28Aiden:dopamine so, hold on so what's bad about it

1:06:35Atrioc:so as long as you extract more like you were saying you get double dopamine for every purchase instead of worrying

1:06:41Aiden:about the money side that's right all i'm here in a double double it's a tasty cookie they described it in this article as like smelling a delicious cookie and it makes you want to eat cookies okay so baby okay i would i'll defend you yeah for a second i i have one of these like premium credit cards i have the chase sapphire reserve not an ad and here i'm going to tell you why you shouldn't get it basically the re the first time i heard about this card years ago was when when the annual fee was like 300 or 350 and this was a card that came with an instant 300 travel credit so as long as you were someone who paid to travel at all during the year the card basically immediately paid itself off like accounting for nothing else and then a few years later i want to say like four or five years later, the fee got up to$500.

1:07:32Aiden:Still the$300 travel credit, still a bunch of these other perks. Realistically, if you're spending any, like if you're a middle income person spending any decent amount of money on this card, it's probably, and you go on like one trip in a year, it's going to pay for itself. However, like a year ago, they raised the fee to$800. And they also reduced a lot, that 300 travel credit is still there alone, but a lot of the other benefits changed. And the way it works is you only get like a ton of the benefits if you spend it on this premium list of like hotels and restaurants that they've like curated deals with.

1:08:12Aiden:And if you weren't already a consumer at these really high end hotels or really high end restaurants, then you're just getting encouraged into spending more money in order to see the benefit of that at all. And me and my girlfriend have the same credit card, but she has a much more like normal salary. She makes like$70 ,000 a year. So, uh, for her, this card and the$800 fee, uh, just flat out did not make sense anymore. And I think the way it works is like, there's kind of a, kind of a confusion and like how you can get out of your credit card, like canceling your credit card reduces your like credit points because you're getting rid of a portion of your credit history sometimes.

1:08:53Aiden:Uh, but she ended up downgrading to like the base chase card that has like no, uh, no fees and like no big things attached to it. Uh, so she's not getting any of the upside, but she doesn't have to pay this fee anymore. And this was her final, like, I'm not doing this anymore. It's just too much. This doesn't make sense. And the only reason it even financially makes sense for me as somebody who still refuses to book, these are like hotels restaurants that are like thousands and thousands of dollars per night it's just ridiculous like i'm not gonna do that um but if you spend like a certain amount on your credit card in a year you you hit like a another airline credit or something that like works for me but the reality is they've like crept they've they've had this slow creep in the fees and like push you towards like more expensive and niche things and this is happening with the competitors too where they just they're they're basically just making deals with companies to extract more and more money out of you.

1:09:50Aiden:And that is totally a part of this process, especially at these like high value end ones that have gotten pushed to a wider and wider consumer base. Yeah. And they, you know, kudos to your girlfriend for choosing to downgrade because they say in this article that there is a huge psychological aspect of loss aversion where people associate some level of status or lifestyle to once they join these groups or have these cards and the the idea that you have to downgrade is actually uh damaging to people they feel bad about it they feel like they it's like they don't i think they give you these tiny ideas of lifestyle perks like they'll give you access to like nice airport lounges they have like the fucking centurion or like the chase lounges that are really nice but then we talked about this there's a story on the primo the other week they don't have any room because every it's not special to have these credit cards everybody fucking has them so there's always like all of the perks or sorry a ton of the perks can't even be enjoyed because too many people have this thing in the first place you're not a part of some exclusive social here people may be overly optimistic about many of the benefits they'll use how many of the benefits they'll use when signing up to a card and once they realize they failed they keep it anyway because it feels like a sunk cost and hope springs eternal they'll utilize it better later so you know they take advantage of that anyway i don't know i actually don't care i want to be i want to be clear i don't actually care.

1:11:07You do whatever you want. Many people in the Discord have proven that they are mathematically making out on these. Literally live your life. I don't care. I just want to bring this up because this article is interesting to me. And I think it... I just like the idea of avoiding any mental battle with a big bank. Ever. I just don't want to do it. I don't want to deal with it. I will get tricked. I'll get beaten. And so I opt out. And I think there's other people that agree with that.

1:11:30Aiden:For the grinders that are really proving the value of it. Like, fuck it. You're doing it. Most people are not doing that and i think as much as i've made fun of you about this i think the reality is like like so many things like like an uber that was so cheap at first and then caught on broadly enough so now the prices can be raised like this is something where the deal was so good at the beginning that's how they attracted the initial user base of people and now so many people have these cards that we can we're in the extraction point for the average person this is working against you and not for you and that's just the reality that's the only reason it gets to exist that's the reason credit cards get to exist period yeah so i i think to be in denial of that and it's like i and for me personally i'm like i make fun of you because i think the reality is you're in an economic tier where you just be taking advantage of this but i i think the the entire basis of these systems only exists on that there's a bunch of people losing and the bank makes a ton of money that's just the reality the emergency reference story it's not on our list but i'm gonna talk about Anyway, I'll just do a quick story pivot, which is that I don't know if you guys know, but for the past few years, only one streaming service has been profitable, and that's Netflix.

1:12:45Everybody else has been losing money. Netflix stock over the past six and a half months, this was stock of the week, I guess, has basically halved because consumers are finally, it was seen as like Disney Plus is a luxury. HBO is a luxury. Netflix is a utility. I have my electricity bill. I have my water bill. I have my Netflix bill. Netflix for many families is just like, you just pay it. They keep raising prices, you just pay it. They have begun to cut their Netflix bill. Netflix people have started to cut back. That's not like a massive drop in subscribers, but I wish I had the numbers exactly on top of my head.

1:13:20But the idea is that they have, there's been some shaky trends in recent Netflix data of longtime Netflix subscribers finally cutting their bill and finding other ways to watch TV or movies. And that is interesting because they have sort of, they were in their extraction phase for a while now where they have been raising prices relentlessly and people are just going along with it because they had the biggest library and they were the most all-arounder streamer services for families and and so uh yeah just an interesting little update i wanted to give that's the stock of the week Netflix is 40 over a year is wild yeah for the big streamer yeah that's crazy yeah it's a pretty shocking downgrade especially in a time where the market overall is way up like most companies even money losing companies are doing quite well.

1:14:03And so for Netflix to be hit so hard by the market is like, it's a sign of like, wow, people are, are stretched a little bit on, on, uh, do you feel like this is one of those

1:14:13Atrioc:situations where the stock market or the stock, let's say is just divorced from the fundamentals of the business because presumably Netflix is still a profitable, good business. It's just not the, Oh my God, this is the future of media. Yeah, probably. I get, I, I hate to make any the subscribers are not halved. I'm trying to get some numbers right here, but yeah, I mean, it's what it's gone down. I don't even know if it's gone down. It's just not going as much. Yeah. I think it just grows slow. I think the point is that the stock market, the price it had before was baking in a up into the right graph of growth.

1:14:45That was like beautiful. And now that graph looks like it's flattening or, or going down. And when that's,

1:14:50Aiden:do you think this is, and I know me. Yeah.

1:14:54Atrioc:Real quick. Just like, so from variety, like they went 2024 they had 300 million subscribers end of 2025 they had 325 so it's kind of wild that they are still they are getting millions of subscribers every year wow and their stock is plummeting yeah although i will say some of those are downgrading from the profitable tier to the ad supported tier to the yeah that makes sense yeah so it is like uh it's a change in the makeup but yeah yeah i agree it's uh it could be a recession indicator people are finally cutting this bill. But I don't know. I don't know what it means. All I know is that Netflix, I've talked about the trimming industry for years and years and years, and Netflix has always been the rock solid one.

1:15:31They've always been like, everyone else shit in the bed, they figure it out. This has finally happened. And what's interesting is like, this is happening basically six months after they walked away from the Paramount deal. I'm sorry, buying Warner Brothers Discovery. And the idea was, we were going to spend$100 billion to buy Warner Brothers and HBO, and the market was shaky about it. We walked away. Our stock went up. And then it went straight. Everyone's like, ah, never mind. So I don't know. It was interesting. Aiden, what you were saying?

1:16:02Aiden:The recession indicator thing. But do you think, do either of you use Netflix a lot?

1:16:08Atrioc:I cancel. Oh, you're. What are you pointing at him? What's going on here?

1:16:12Aiden:The cops will get me.

1:16:13Atrioc:I'm a pirate freak. What? I was avoiding saying it. He was avoiding saying it. I'm as lazy as I sound from the credit card section. It's not like I would normally set this up. My wife saw that we were paying for HBO and Netflix, and she's like, no, cancel that. She set up some kind of media server. And she wants me to move in to split your mortgage. Well, yeah, because we have to save the money. So we'll all split the bills on that. Was that media server, was that over the last six months? That's what crushed Netflix is thought. I was paying for 100 ,000 subscriptions. subscriptions.

1:16:48Aiden:To me, the other answer could be, and it's hard to imagine that it would all happen at once like this, is the catalog just declining in value so much that people are finally reaching a breaking point and cutting off their subscription. But I'd leave that to the Netflix heads in the chat. All I know from Netflix heads is they fucking hate that Netflix makes shows they like and then cancels them after two seasons every single time. Shout out to Sense8. fucking bangers we got off traffic I wanted to talk about I want to talk about the G7 countries unrelated and I hope to God there's no stories about AI related to them but maybe there is

1:17:29Atrioc:boy do I have a crazy turn of events for you alright this is a guy with cereal yeah this is in large part in follow up to the Anthropic story where their new model fable slash mythos was shut down. So I think we mostly just talked about this on Patreon, but this is a big deal. So week and a half ago, Anthropic, they released their new model fable. This is the big, crazy high sec, you know, like, Oh my God, this is going to change cybersecurity forever. And they had restrictions on it, but then the United States government, the commerce department said, you need to shut this down. There's security flaws.

1:18:06Atrioc:Fast forward a week and a half, and it's still not back up. I think there's many people who thought, Oh, this is going to be, I mean, Anthropic's quote was like, this is a misunderstanding. Because this would be crazy to establish a world where America, the government, can on a whim press a button basically and say you have to shut down access to this thing. And so at G7, the summit with all these world leaders, some interesting things happened. And this is interesting things in like world leaders are talking and maybe things will happen. So this is more of a high level like vibes. However, interesting vibes.

1:18:39Atrioc:First off, people like French President Macron and the PM of India, Modi, voiced concerns to the U.S. folks that they're basically saying, hey, we are concerned that if you just cut off access to the top American models at any given time, if you just turn switch on and off, why would we want to start developing our infrastructure or military or encouraging startups or businesses to be using any of this stuff? If we hook this up into our power grid or our military or how we run the country, let alone like a new startup in India is like built a cool commerce website and they're using AI to help power things.

1:19:16Atrioc:And then suddenly Trump's like, nah, don't want it this week. This is an enormous. It's a very fair. This is an enormous concern from a world power. And, you know, right now, AI usage is really starting to kick off the past six months in particular. I don't have quantifiable data for that, but certainly vibes in terms of how much people are talking about cloud code. And then from the American AI perspective, right? We've talked a billion times about how the AI companies are essentially driving the economy of America right now and all of our growth. Well, how is a company like OpenAI or Anthropic going to continue driving unbelievable growth by saying AI is going to run everything if they can't even go to a company or a country and say, you're definitely going to be able to use our product, right?

1:19:56Atrioc:If they're like, it's the equivalent of like selling washing machines, but the washing machines just might get turned off by trump randomly with no warning no explanation and no recourse and they're always being sued right now by consumers many of them who paid for the extreme tier of model to try fable and it's now been a week and they haven't been able to use it i wanted to use it i can't use it it's it's just not there and in their announcement they're like we'll have more information within a day within like 24 hours yeah there's been no there's been no assumed this would be quickly resolved like this is crazy and so another part of this meeting was they proposed a trust quote trusted partners program where certain other countries would get sort of exclusive access to the top models from anthropic and open ai in terms it's like a sort of like trade network that bypasses the restrictions but if you if you think about what that they're talking about it like it's a military weapon like crazy like we as france we want to have a deal that we get access to the early models before they're released publicly and so i think what's been happening over the past few weeks is a strong indicator that suddenly ai whether it is deserved or not has at least from the political perspective reached the state of nuclear weapon level geopolitical importance and that is fucking crazy particularly given that there's no clarity on really why this is happening or when it's going to be resolved or what's going on so i think it

1:21:17Aiden:ignites or reinforces fears around tech that's not ai being shut down by the u.s as well like we've seen these changes within the the european union of them moving away from certain types of u.s software for in in order to maintain sovereignty around how they like keep their data or yeah things like that and then or if you take something like whatsapp if the u.s government can command like meta to shut whatsapp down well india is whatsapp's biggest market to a point that like the new i think the new lead at whatsapp is like an indian uh someone who has a ton of history in like indian tech and like you could just shut off that entire service for a country because the american government made that decision yeah i feel like all of this whatsapp is like abuse for

1:22:08Atrioc:business transactions this isn't just like a texting app like these these companies and these products like underlie the ecosystem of countries now no i feel like you go you go to a ton of

1:22:19Aiden:foreign countries and the main thing they list is the company's whatsapp in order to like contact them yeah uh i i feel like these conversations around ai enforce all of that for the other things that are lower stakes around it too right it's like a reminder of like how reliant we are like if i'm another country how reliant we are on so many forms of american technology right

1:22:39Atrioc:right it's it would be extraordinarily concerning if you're another country right and it seems like this stuff and again this is all predicated on the idea that ai is as powerful and dangerous as and that's part of the irony here is like we as the public really don't know whether fable is that powerful because they haven't fucking let us test it right so like this may or may not be as dangerous from the nsa or whatever they were like claude mythos hacked our servers in not weeks but days or what they said something but i have no idea i really have no idea the accuracy where that came from how yeah yeah there's a number of different i mean i've tried to keep up where i can there's a number of different companies who get access who are like it helped us in this ways or this way so like you have firefox coming out and saying oh my god it's helped us with so many bugs this is unbelievable the rate at which we're able to do things but it identified things but didn't have a good solution and then there's other companies that say it said that i it identified eight things, but in practice it was only one semi important one.

1:23:40Atrioc:This was an open source software. I want to say it's like curl or something like that. There was a low level programming video about that, but anyways it's just a really bizarre, this feels like a huge inception point for like how AI is going to be distributed globally. Yeah, I mean I thought what you said about it being treated like a nuclear weapon was very, very apt. There's this article called A Signal of Where Power Sits, and I'm just going to show you a picture from it, but it's the idea, I don't know if you can pull this up, Perry. It's just this, when you look at this meeting at the G7 and it's like world leader, world leader, AI CEO, world leader, AI CEO, world leader, it's just kind of a wild time where they're just all sitting there discussing these monumental changes and they're treated with the power of nation states almost.

1:24:24If you're like Sam Altman or you're Dario Amidai, it's just kind of a crazy thing. And it's such an important or seemingly important technology and and change for military and for economics that they're being treated with this level of, there was, there was, it's just wild to me.

1:24:41Aiden:There's a different recent story about, uh, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan disabling access to Claude for their bankers in Hong Kong because of the combined scrutiny of the American government being concerned about non-citizen access to these platforms, but also China's concern of American AI being used within Hong Kong. And yeah, I don't know. It's starting to crop up in like all these minor ways.

1:25:13Atrioc:The world where a new AI model is announced and OpenAI says, hey, we came out with something that's like really powerful. This is introducing a whole new class of like military capabilities, cybersecurity capabilities, software capabilities, things that could really make a difference. and we're just giving it to classified world leaders for six months. I don't love the vibe of that. It feels extraordinarily less democratized and more and more leaning towards government just kind of having this extraordinary power. Extraordinary power. Apparently people think I'm in favor of government mass surveillance or something.

1:25:54Atrioc:I saw a comment about that. That was my alt. That was your alt.

1:25:57Aiden:I want to shout out, okay, I actually do want to shout out a guy in the comments of that video, because when we were talking about the... Which video? Last one? This is two episodes ago, where we're talking about how mass surveillance within Russia was starting to be used against the government. And Doug's going through a ton of different aspects of the pros and cons of the consequences of this technology being used by authoritarian governments and how it could be misused. I would argue a very interesting exploration of the topic. and then some initial some initial commenters were like Doug or all three of us were pro-government surveillance and there was one commenter who clearly was he was pissed off that he was reading this from all the other people and he wrote like an essay where he time stamped all of the stuff and he was like I have no idea how you guys are coming to this conclusion here's like x x and x point where Doug like pre-addresses is what you're saying.

1:26:55Aiden:You guys are idiots. Like, I shout out that one guy who took the time to write that up because I was going insane. That's Aiden's alt. I'm going to...

1:27:06Atrioc:This heroic commentator who wrote it out. It was crazy because that guy's wrong. I am super for mass surveillance. Yeah, you've always been saying that. I was very embarrassing to read. You set a camera at every home. Bro, read in between the lines here. I brought up flock. That means I will support mass surveillance. uh funny funny stuff i want stock of the week stock of the week okay so clearly coming out of g7 ai and again i want it for no avoidance of doubt ai is as good as all the hype and it is super powerful and important it's like a nuclear weapon but good no yeah yeah and no avoidance of doubt no nuance all good and i agree with you 100 except for one and certainly that would mean except for Grok and certainly that means that stock go up forever if AI well that's why I'm talking about Grok what serial meme spit out milk that's the best transition I've ever made in my entire life can I give you a handshake for that one look I wanted to do a saga of the week on the most important saga of the last week everyone was talking about it we covered it SpaceX IPO'd made a gazillion dollars went up 30 % in like two days Elon Musk first trillionaire and then like trillion and a half and the company was worth more than Microsoft at one point, which is insane after three days.

1:28:21And now, if we check in today, briefly, it has fallen below where it started. No! But he's still a trillionaire, right? I believe he's still a trillionaire.

1:28:33Aiden:Briefly. So it bounced back up from where it started? It's right about where it started. Basically, it's right about where it started. So all of the post-IPO gains have wiped out. Again, this is like normal swings of a brand new company. I'm not going to talk about this more than once. I just want to say, because of the hype for this particular company, and because of the Wall Street bets enthusiasm, I love this Derek Zoo interface you've got going on, a lot, and I mean a lot, I mean a record-breaking number of people. Oh, wow, actually, anybody's down a tiny bit from where it started. A record-breaking number of people in human history bought short-term call options on this stock in the few days after its launch, which basically is a very short-term bet.

1:29:15You don't actually own any stock. It's a bet that it will go up in a short period of time. And if it doesn't, you lose a lot of money. And it broke the record that was on MetaStock from years ago by like 20X. It's the most ever done. So a lot of people, specifically Wall Street bettors, Korean stock gamblers, Taiwanese stock gamblers, all of them are currently underwater and begging and praying the stock goes up quickly. It has to go up soon and a lot, or a lot of people will have lost a lot of money in this, which is why I bring this up. Additionally, because you'd expect this stock, if it was going to pop, to pop now, because over the next six months, a lot more supply is going to get dumped on the market.

1:29:55As everyone who's an employee or a banker or Elon Musk himself, the lockup period ends and they can now dump their share. They can't do that yet. They can't sell. There's 4 % of the company available for sale. So it's going to be 10, 20, 30 % of the company available on market. So the idea is that this is a spooky sign. If you are like a, I just like many people on this online who are like, I just sold my house to put it all into SpaceX. I just, I just like put my entire 401k into SpaceX and everything in SpaceX. I'm believing this is, you don't want this to be happening so early. You'd like this to be popping for a lot longer before anything like this happens.

1:30:31Atrioc:Do you think that when John capitalism invented money, this is what he was thinking about? like a rocket company goes and IPOs and they put 4 % up for sale and then various gamblers around the world like Korean mobsters are putting their life savings on a short term call option about whether it goes up not related to the actual product I think he would smile and get misty eyed at how far Elon Musk has pushed his little game Mr.

1:31:00Aiden:Kaplan say by golly the market the market's done it again no I do think this is a subversion of every possible thing you'd like free markets for cat planted seeds for trees he would never sit under the shade of

1:31:16yeah I think it's a little cartoonish but at the very least I guess I'm shading Freud happy that people on Reddit who are like you're fucking you're gonna stay dumb and poor for not buying into this or who's as I like Wall Street bets yeah like a well not not even most of all she's been like this is a bad idea and then some of them are like no this is a genius idea and so far it has not paid off for anyone who's bought in post-ipo obviously if

1:31:41Aiden:you're a banker it's still great if you worked at spacex i'm sure you're you're incredibly happy they're all millionaires uh there's jobs popping up for people who are just wealth managers for newly rich spacex people they're like if you are a wealth manager in hawthorne california you are missing a gold rush right now and that makes some people want to die and so what would they do Aiden? I think with the amount of time we have left we leave that one on the table and I think I'm going to pivot to a smaller thing

1:32:14Atrioc:Why don't you assist in this episode dying?

1:32:18Aiden:There's a story on assisted dying in Quebec I did want to talk about but I think it'd be a little longer The Patreon bonus The thing I wanted to bring up was actually from last week's episode I wanted to chat briefly about, uh, thank you for the people who weighed in and like gave feedback on the episode. I know it didn't like perform as well as a normal episode does, uh, does, but to try something new and see a lot of people enjoy it, uh, was, was pretty cool. There was one piece of feedback and keep in mind, I have no vested interest in applied intuition as a company beyond my, I like seeing my friend employed.

1:32:53Aiden:I'm happy for him. Uh, and there was a lot of criticism of the company I saw that I think came from this place of when we talk about AI companies on the show, they're often in a place where they're not making money and they're reliant on selling a narrative about what their product is going to be in the future. And perhaps going to IPO and hopefully, uh, find out a bit, you know, find a source of funding or like reward the employees who have worked at these places for a long time through the IPO that they're doing. And that primarily by selling not only the technology, but the narrative of what that technology is going to be.

1:33:34Aiden:And I think people are used to that framing when talking about AI companies. And I could see through a lot of the criticism and some short conversations I had with people in the wake of that episode that they thought the same thing about applied intuition. Like this is a company that's gambling on some idea of the future to, and to an extent it is, but I think what people didn't understand and what I don't think we said in the episode is this is a profitable company. This is a profitable business and has been for years. It is successfully selling the technology they're describing in the show. Now they don't need to like, there's, there's not this, like, we're hoping this pans out and like starts making revenue for us.

1:34:16Aiden:It's like, they've been doing it. And this was just showing off what they have been working on and i realized when i gave that context to some people who were being really critical of the business because they didn't know that it actually changed their opinion pretty substantially because i think they're so used to the idea of like ai grifter company trying to like sell us something that doesn't work and i thought it was worth clarifying or putting that information out there understanding that's not where like everybody's criticism was grounded uh but i had enough positive conversations people about that outside of the show that i thought it was worth bringing up sure cool yeah but if you guys have suggestions for how we can brush up that format or what we could explore or go check out in the future i want to go see more stuff uh so open to hearing your guys's uh your guys's feedback and how to deal with social media

1:35:08Atrioc:bans and ideally take all the nuance of that discussion about credit cards and distill it into an insult about Brandon. And take it to his Twitch chat. Don't just keep it in the comments. I want you to follow me around the rest of my life with credit card related discussion. That would be my ideal outcome of this episode. One of the big things about social media, you gotta get off the digital world, get into the physical world, ideally into your mansion.

1:35:33Aiden:If you're an Atriarch chatter and you're dying for something to say this week, you could talk about how he maybe didn't wake up for his match. You can talk about that. You can talk about that. Or you can talk about how he doesn't use credit cards. These are two great options. I have a quick question. Did you get messages to call him that morning? Did you call him too? No. Me and Ludwig were both getting messages from Atriok fans to call him to get him to show up. And that's our show, folks. Thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate you. By the way, Aiden, sponsored by Applied Intuition, 100 % has been showing it for money.

1:36:07And I'm sponsored by Mass Surveillance. And loves Tucker Carlson. Thank you so much for watching.

1:36:12Atrioc:Bye, brother. Goodbye.

1:36:13Aiden:He's leaving the GOP behind. When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account. Like if Fatween won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But, bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With a helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe.

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