Returned, The Trade Wars Have | Ep. 019 Lemonade Stand 🍋

16:45But because it's politically unpopular on their side, they can't do it and nothing's getting done. It's becoming this problem where now I think Trump is pivoting to a different country to find the number one deal because Japan, they can't seem to close it.

16:57Aiden:Japan was meant to be the number one deal. Yeah, that was the idea from minute one. And they were really willing to... Could we backtrack a little bit to the one deal that did get made with the UK? I knew that deal got made, but in terms of fanfare or its position in the news, I feel like I heard relatively little about it and also the contents of it. My understanding is that deal wasn't very comprehensive and it was something quickly put together. So why isn't his one win something that we're more locked into or you're presenting as something more important? I think the UK deal, my understanding, is that it's really just a restatement of the way things already were.

17:37It doesn't change much dramatically. It isn't like a huge win for American producers or that the UK is going to significantly buy more goods than they weren't before. Listen, the reason I brought up that Japan goofy tweet of that guy exaggerating is because some countries, and including the previous PM of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who had his own faults but really knew how to deal with Trump, is they've understood the showmanship. Like Qatar promised Trump 20x their GDP in investments. It's not real. They promised him multi-trillion. But they did a big show. They had people with swords come out. They did a parade.

18:14They gave him a plane. Yeah, they did the things that work, and they got the deal they wanted. And it's just funny that the playbook to winning these trade deals is actually pretty obvious now. And people that aren't doing it are now – it's just causing problems for Japan's car industry because they can't get a deal done here. They do sell a lot of cars in America. And it's just funny. They're being so hung up on this rice thing.

18:38Aiden:Can we dig deep for a second? Let's use our lemonade stand powers to dig here. And is there, if I'm a part of his administration or other people that are responsible for making these deals or setting the tariff amount, people like Scott Bessent, what is the argument, the pro argument for why these things are going well? Like, what is the excuse for not having anything done in 90 days? Why have we actually been productive this whole time? If I want to be the strongest steel man, do you guys know of anything to dig in the opposite direction? Yeah, 100%. What they would say is that - Basically, sorry.

19:15Aiden:What I'm asking is, is there anything to talk about here other than outright failure? Because the presentation of it feels like that. And I'm wondering, it's like it feels like there must be something they could say if I had Scott Besson next to you. What I would say, yeah, I could totally steal my ass. From their side, what they would say is the onus is on everybody else. Like they don't care if a deal doesn't get made. What they're saying is like, if you want to sell your goods here in America, then better figure out how to play by our book. We don't care if there's no deal. We will just tariff you.

19:50We'll just write up a tariff and that's fine by us. That's the idea. However, what I'm questioning is that because of the delays the first time, it seems like they actually do care about what the impact it'll have on stock markets and bond markets. if we actually have the tariffs. I think they would rather have a nice deal and sign it and be done. But they have to pretend to be in a position of total strength. We don't care.

20:13Aiden:And that's a position we can pretend to be in because as a market, we have so much buying power and we're not so much an exporter where we're relying all these countries to buy our things. We're at a deficit in the first place. We're a gigantic market that presumably these people need. Yeah, I think they all need it individually. The hard part is whether they start to collectively cut us out. Collectively, if they all collaborate, it's like, how much do you need us? How much do you need the American market if you can literally sell to everywhere else? That's the big question. And so I don't know, but I do want to say this.

20:46So China is the only country that has had above 10 % tariffs. They've had like the 40 % or whatever from the end. I know. And you bring up that article, the one with the graph where you scroll down. So what actually has been happening is, I think we predicted this on the show, straight up, is like they're just shipping through other countries, which is like 100 % what you'd expect to happen because the demand for the Chinese goods is still there and China still has the only place to make them.

21:14Aiden:So let me give you a little window into this. Okay. As someone who has experience working on a business that has sourced things from China, you know, I might have friends who operate businesses of similar scales that are making similar decisions around this problem who are also just doing this. They're just doing this. It just goes to a different country and gets something added or repackaged and then it comes to the US. That's all that happens. This is the most predictable outcome. And I think we said it from minute one. And if you scroll down to the graph, so like the second these tariffs started coming into play, a huge spike in Vietnam and Indonesia imports happened because that's where they're just going to Vietnam or South Korea or Indonesia.

21:58Something's being slightly tweaked and it's being reclassified so the tariffs don't apply. So what this becomes is, the lesson of this is like, hey, either we spend gazillions more to try and constantly whack them on and put all this down, or we tariff every country on the world at once, questionable if that'll work, or we got to find a way to make a deal that both sides agree. Like the idea that these tariffs will just work with no workarounds, no black market, I think is a little silly. That's where I'm at. So that's where we find ourselves on this trade war with this update. I don't know if you have any further questions.

22:36I think it's pretty fascinating how, sorry, microphone discipline. I'm going to import a second microphone. You have two on either side of your face. What if we put one of those three podiums? You're just in a voice acting booth.

22:52Atrioc:We're here like yelling through it.

22:54Aiden:I think maybe let's, I think this cleanly connects into something we wanted to briefly touch on, which we were saving for later, but I think is the big, beautiful bill passing. And I'll let you take on the lead with this mostly. Sure. But the way I see this connecting is the pro argument for this bill passing. And if you're listening to this right now, we've talked about the bill an endless amount. And we've always been pro every aspect of it. And we've been a pro the entire time. And so like, please don't try to dissuade us from that position. It is that in the bill, the deficit spending is being offset by things like the revenue from the tariffs, which are not accounted for in the accounting of this bill.

23:39Aiden:Like the tariffs are a source of revenue to the country. And that is something that we haven't seen all the benefit of yet. That's supposed to come in and be something that helps with the financial math of this bill. Right. And my skepticism to that, when I heard it, was this, seeing the degree to which people will go to dodge these tariffs to begin with. Whether it be a small business or a big business, everybody is looking for a way to circumvent it. And I think just leading into that, I think there's a bit more teeth to that argument as well that I thought was interesting to cover that you might want to touch on or get into.

24:19Atrioc:Yeah, we can hit it up. I mean, I think, what's what's so the bill we've talked about a bunch of times it did pass completely i uh i you know this time i was like surely politicians will do what they say they're going to do and not vote for it and that didn't happen so that's been a fun while at some point i'll stop my naive child like whimsy will be stamped into the ground but there was a lot of politicians who were like i will absolutely not vote for this they've changed my critical things and that you know they just do it's just wild for me to someone to get on like five different news networks and speak directly me to camera and be like this bill's a disaster and unless it's changed i the recency bias i feel

24:56Aiden:like i can't i i can't even believe i convinced myself a little bit i think it's just the audacity to run the media circuit yeah and then not even like a quiet like quote of like yeah i don't know if i really agree with this or like i don't know if this is in the right direction and then you vote for it it's like wildly doing the media circuit to like rile up your constituents against it and then being like yes i guess though dude this ron johnson was a was a senator and like i played his clip maybe on here and also on my stream and i was like this guy's spitting this guy and he was like really going out there and then i check and he voted for it's like it's just crazy unchanged the bill did not change he just voted that to me is wild they might be like lizards

25:37Atrioc:in a human skin i just don't i genuinely like what's going on here like what do you what do you think you're the is the point of your life if just like what you say has no bearing in any of actions like what what drives a person like that i don't understand uh maybe like really nice dinners paid for by comcast probably man i i am just baffled well some of it's fear right so my understanding is that yeah you know uh trump definitely has the power to get a republican primary so you'd lose your job like if he really gets the true social machine working on you he can make you out to be but then you defect to the america party yeah which elon musk's new third party yeah what i wanted to briefly touch on here is just the argument for why it could be good because i streamed on fourth of july last week and there are you know a few comments of people being like it's a sad day to celebrate america we are our country's going towards ruin and i think there's a legitimate argument towards that for me not only is there the kind of moral ethical side of cutting a bunch of medicaid which is just not cool the the main concern that we've talked about a bunch is just the debt going up by trillions and trillions of dollars yeah and And as we've discussed, that it could send us like towards ruin as a country.

26:48Atrioc:So that is terrifying.

26:49Aiden:You can dislike this bill from so many different angles. Yeah, there's a lot of options to work with.

26:53Atrioc:You can pick so many different things. A lot of angles.

26:55Aiden:As the reason why this sucks.

26:57Atrioc:Yeah. So the debt and the deficit, that is the really concerning part to me amongst many. And so I was listening to an argument basically, again, from the, let's say, Scott Besson, treasury secretary, of what is the goal here? Like, why are they doing this? So part of it is, like you said, tariffs. So when they talk about the amount of deficit, that doesn't include tariffs. But even numbers on that could be wrong. And obviously, please double check me if you're. But okay, Vietnam, I believe, is about$120 billion in trade, like trade with the United States. So even if we did a 20 % tariff on them, that is like$20 billion.

27:30Atrioc:That's not that much money. So even if we, you know, get, let's say,$100 billion in tariffs every year, a couple hundred billion, that is helpful.

27:38Aiden:Like, I didn't know you were doing that well. $20 billion, not that much. Not that much.

27:42Atrioc:That YouTube. That's because you got five channels. His second channel goes crazy, dude. You haven't seen the revenue on that second channel? Them, like the Vietnam tariff money is like having a VOD channel. It's not going to resuscitate the US government. Come on. It's a slight stream of income. Right. It's not. Yeah. Right. And so between that. You wouldn't understand because he doesn't upload on YouTube. He's a marketer. Exactly. Now, China, that's our Twitch primes. Okay. Like we can really squeeze them. Yeah. So, you know, arguably there's going to be some tariff money, but, you know, there's so much flux of tariffs.

28:11Atrioc:We don't really know. The more compelling argument that I heard is, why is it acceptable to put us$5 trillion in debt by cutting everybody's taxes? And again, it is everybody. It's not just rich people. But, you know, if you cut everybody's taxes, way less money for the government. That's what sends us more into debt. What is the possible value of that? Well, the pitch is we want to get GDP growth up. And one way to deal with a debt is to pay it back, which is stupid. Cringe. Or we outgrow it because if the idea is in 10, 20, 30 years, our GDP is so incredibly massive, our economy is just fucking cruising that our dollars worth more and the 36 trillion that we owe right now is comparatively not that hard for us to pay back.

28:51Atrioc:So if we just stop the debt from getting worse and we grow a lot as a country, we can outgrow the debt being problematic. And there's no... No, I mean, this statement, if we just stop the debt from getting worse, discussing a bill that makes the debt significantly worse. Yes. Like, I don't... Yes. So... That's my first... It's good.

29:11Aiden:Well, can I synthesize? And from my understanding is the tax cuts and the bill in general are going to incentivize so much economic growth that it outpaces the debt that this bill adds.

29:25Atrioc:Yes. So that's the hope. The hope is because we are putting so much money into people's pockets that it will stimulate an amount of growth. And hopefully with AI and automation, all the other stuff going on, we will actually outpace this. It would also require us to stop making the debt bigger. but theoretically if we stop making the debt bigger every year and we just keep it at 36 trillion dollars just a little bit of money just a small amount then that we could outgrow so a crucial part of the equation is missing which is to stop making it bigger every year we've ever tried this cool idea where we cut taxes for wealthy people so that it'll sort of fall what's the word for that like it'll get down and then the growth will i wonder if we maybe trickle trickle cereal I don't know I don't know I don't think it's ever been tried before that's why I'm so excited about it yes because it's so brand new so yeah I'm also skeptical to be clear but this is I just want to point out for people are like this bill is a complete and total disaster what the fuck are people in the right thinking this is at least the argument probably for a majority of politicians it's just like hey short term let's get more money to people that's most likely what's going on but that is at least the pitch is I think it's fair.

30:40Atrioc:More money into people's pockets. Let's grow more. To steel man it. But I just. I disagree. I understand. I'm with you. And I think it's fair to do that. But I just want to say like, it's funny because so much of the tax cuts are just continuations of the tax cuts that exist right now. Like they're supposed to expire. Right. So the idea that keeping the, like we're not getting the growth right now, but we're somewhere to keep this going. And then the growth's going to 10X, like trillions of dollars to do the same tax as we currently have is going to give us the growth that we're not getting currently is stupid.

31:12I'm sorry. I think the Occam's razor here is that they want to throw money to the people that support them. The idea that it's this brilliant 9D chess plan that is going to grow us out of our debt is a nice thing to say as you blow out the debt. But it feels like you're not treating the problem seriously, but you keep telling me that like, this is, don't worry, this is the way.

31:36Aiden:Okay, so this is the other argument I've heard from a couple people, and I think this has been copy-pasted across a couple things that Trump has done. But this idea that through, in a similar way to Trump started talking about, even before he was running for president, he was talking about China and our relationship with China, what getting rid of our manufacturing means. Like, if you look at old footage of him, he's been talking about China for a long, long time. And that's energy he carried into his first campaign. And now our relationship with China, or our trade relationship at least, is something that is top of mind in politics, right?

32:15Aiden:It's something that gets brought up all the time. And I think you could credit him for its place in popular politics talk. Like regular people bringing that up as a talking point, right? And I'm not necessarily - Mission accomplished. So I think the argument that I've heard with this is that through this bill getting passed and through other things that his campaign has been about this time or his presidency has been about this time, the conversation of the national debt has reached a point that is inseparable from the public conversation of politics. it has set us on a trajectory where we have no choice but to confront and address it really aggressively and i'm not saying i agree with this argument i would rather this have not passed but this is the other argument i have heard is like the benefit of this whether he intends it or not is that now we have a problem that is so dramatic that we have no choice but to address it that

33:19Atrioc:person is a baka that's that's an insane all right sorry dad

33:27Aiden:to his credit he's not the only person i just feel like trump is playing he's the first person to find an easy mode for dark souls i he plays politics on such an the amount you can bend over backwards to well he's not fixing the problem but he's bringing awareness to it so that eventually i don't think no no no i think the discrepancy between that is the people i have talked to one of them happens to be my dad, but there are other people that have brought this up, is not people who are like Trump the genius who is making sure that we confront this down the line. They're like, through his recklessness, at least the country will be forced to address this very important issue that they have refused to let enter the public sphere up until this point.

34:09Atrioc:Right now, we're like sick with the flu or something, but not enough to go to the hospital. And then Trump is coming in with a bucket of flu virus and injecting it into the body to incentivize us to go to the hospital. I like it. I'm just saying, and are these same people, are these same people being like, God bless Hunter Biden through his recklessness. He's bringing awareness to cocaine abuse and that is going to finally make America conflict. It's just absurd. It's just absurd line of thought, bro. It's like, it's such a desperate play. No, it's also funny because it implies that it's like a one-time fix that we're putting off.

34:45Atrioc:No, it's only there because we're moving towards the cliff. Like you don't have to move towards the cliff. It's not like we've got it. It's like spring cleaning. You've got to do it at some point. We don't have to have a$40 trillion deficit.

34:58Aiden:Yeah, you're taking a spring cleaning approach to an episode of hoarders, but but here's what I'll say to give credit. One thing I've never said Trump is bad at. He is actually one of the goats of this is he can read the room. I guess, on what real things that people are actually, you can find a kernel of truth that people are actually upset or angry about. He's good at reading his base. Yeah. He's very, very good at reading his base. Yeah, he can understand. But like, I think, for example, 30 years of jobs disappearing to China is something that like Americans were broadly, a big swath of Americans were broadly upset about.

35:42And he can harness that. I just never like his, his solutions never seem to make sense. They never seem to be coherent. But he can definitely read the room. I'm like, these are problems that everyone's kind of sweeping under the rug. No one's discussing. I'm going to make a big deal about it. But that doesn't mean you get automatic credit for fixing. You have to fix it. That's a fine thing for a pundit. But it's not a fine thing for a president. A president has to have a policy that fixes it. No. No. You're wrong.

36:10Atrioc:You know what? Another interesting element of this that I haven't heard anybody talk about. So Medicaid. There's all these Medicaid cuts. That's one of the most criticized part of this bill. And I've seen a lot of people criticize and basically say, you are going to be taking away health care from a ton of your constituents. How does anybody on the right justify this? Well, part of the reason they do is because basically all the people who are going to be cut from Medicaid, this would be under the expansion program of Medicaid. So quick recap. In 2012, Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, and that expanded Medicaid.

36:44Atrioc:and basically states could opt in and say, hey, we're going to expand Medicaid so it covers more people with higher income and it can include people who are able-bodied and don't have dependents. So if you were able-bodied and didn't have dependents before the Obamacare Act, you could not get Medicaid. It was expanded under the Affordable Care Act in 2012. But not every state took it. It was literally Obama said, okay, the federal government, any state who wants it will now cover like millions more people. all us will pay 100 % of it at first. 90 % later, we'll pay all the costs for this, and you can expand your Medicaid dramatically, and we just way more people in your state get coverage.

37:22Atrioc:40 out of 50 states did that, but 10 didn't, including Florida and Texas. So there are 10 states right now who don't have the expanded Medicaid. It is instead incredibly small and restricted compared to these other states. So if you're wondering why there seems to be certain groups of the country that are adamantly, let's say even kind of like this moral, crusade, it seems like to say Medicaid shouldn't be given to people can't work to their credit. They haven't been taking the federal dollars for this for over a decade, even though they could have. And from what I read, there's people saying like, you know, this doesn't make sense.

37:54Atrioc:It's not financially responsible and people who are, you know, it takes away the dignity of work or whatever. So, you know, lines like that. So this is a weird thing to say.

38:04Aiden:It does take away the dignity of work. I've been saying that. Yeah, I'm saying that's all your employees. hold up there was that the union word i heard hey there champ you're a mogul we don't talk like that why'd you quiet on out yeah so it's an interesting thing if you're wondering why a bunch of states are

38:25Atrioc:are so on board with removing medicaid it's because from their perspective they haven't benefited from this for 13 years they've adamantly been opposed to it and now they're basically trying to say everybody should be closer to what we're doing. We've been the only financially responsible ones this whole time. It's like 20 % of the country never expanded it. It's a lot of people. That's really interesting. I did not know that. It is interesting. If you're a Texan and you're a poor Texan on Medicaid, I wouldn't agree with this, but you could be like, everybody else should have the same standards as me.

38:56Atrioc:And it makes more sense why people in these states would be receptive to this.

38:59Aiden:Do you know how that was decided at the time? Was that state votes or constituent votes deciding whether or not they would accept it? Or was it just a governor or their state? I'm not sure. I believe state legislator.

39:09Atrioc:Maybe you can look up, Perry, of how states decided to join Medicaid expansion. But yeah, it's been happening over the last 10 years. But that was a major part of the pitch of the Affordable Care Act is we as the federal government are going to cover the cost to massively expand Medicaid. And 10 of the states just didn't, which is crazy for them to just refuse the money, frankly. Uh, yeah. So they had to, it looks like pass law. So it would have been state legislation. So in 10 of these States, they were just like, Nope, we don't want it. You don't want your Obamacare money. You know, like, uh, I got mine type voting.

39:48Like if you're in Texas and you're, you don't want other States to have stuff you don't have. Like just simply, right. So like interesting, it's an easy thing to vote to cut. Yeah. Cause it doesn't benefit

39:59Atrioc:you at all? Is it someone else getting the fact that they voted for 12 years to never take the money either is strange. Like that is, is strange to me that I'm sure it's possible some strings or something, or like it comes out of the state budget in some way eventually on a lot. Like

40:12Aiden:you said it was eventually it becomes a 10 % cost to the state. You said the federal government would cover a hundred percent of it initially and then 90%.

40:19Atrioc:But still, like if the federal government went to you and was like, Hey, we're as a federal government, we will pay for 90 % of Medicaid, if you expand it to like 5 million new people, almost every single group, anybody on earth would be like, yeah, sure, I'll take that. And they just didn't.

40:34Aiden:I mean, this strikes me as something, this is without me looking into this at all, right? But I think about the fervor around Obamacare at the time, right?

40:42Atrioc:Right, you can tell it was political. It's like, we don't want, we hate Obamacare, therefore we won't even be a part of this movement.

40:48Aiden:It's like the, have you ever looked at the polling of, you pull reception to Obamacare versus reception to the Affordable Care Act versus reception to the line items of the Affordable Care Act. And each one is just an insane jump in percentage of people who are like, yeah, this is good. And Obamacare, you know, polled pretty low at the time. And then you just give the actual name of the bill and the people are like, yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Much better than Obama, shit. And then you show them what it actually does and they're like, this is great, dude. So it's just how politics works, I guess.

41:26Yeah.

41:27Atrioc:In Texas, they're probably like, do you want Obama coming into your house and treating your grandmother with free care?

41:34Aiden:That's unironically what the rhetoric was at the time. If you go back and watch pundits talk about Obamacare at the time, it's crazy. It is that.

41:41Atrioc:And they were right. And they were right. I want my country back. All right. And mission accomplished.

41:47Aiden:So why don't we, I want us to slide over, because I think you had an interesting story about social media that you wanted to dig into.

41:55Atrioc:Yeah, let's just dish, dudes. Let's just get into it. All right, so article kick this off. Perry, if you could pull this up. So do you guys remember this crazy thing? I don't know if you've, like this happened a while ago, and it's wild. Threads. Remember threads on Instagram and how that existed briefly? I remember. Remember that? Remember how everybody was like, yeah, we're going to go here instead of Twitter because I'm pretty sure, Yeah, that launched after Elon bought it. Remember, everybody's like, we're going to threads. And then nobody ever talked about it ever again. Remember that?

42:24Aiden:I remember everybody getting their handles and then never do anything after that.

42:28Atrioc:Yeah, just like Google Plus, just like Blue Sky, just like Mastodon. Yeah, so this is one of those things. And then it kind of died off by the wayside, except it didn't. It has gotten really big. So there's this graph that came out about the daily active users on. This is mobile, which is an important distinction on Twitter, threads, and Blue Sky. Twitter has like about 150 million people who tune in every day on their phones. Now, Threads is almost at 150 million. Like, it is almost there. In terms of the impact that these apps are having, Threads is nearly as big, at least when it comes to mobile devices.

42:59Atrioc:On PC, there's basically no presence by Threads. Blue Sky, there are like a million. Blue Sky is not having a good time. Shout out to Blue Sky. So, this is an interesting opportunity to talk about kind of what is the landscape, because I looked across it, of like, what is even going, like, I assume you guys have a similar take as me, which is that I have not heard a single mention of threads once in the past two years. My take is that people are opening Instagram, a very popular app, and misclicking the threads button a hundred million times. I legitimately do not believe that it is close to the daily active users of Twitter.

43:32Aiden:Wait, is it not its own app? You access it directly through Instagram? It's connected to Instagram now. You have the same handle. You have a cross. Dude, if you think about the number of people. people wait, he's threads a separate app or not. Yes, but you in Instagram is now a threads button that can like they can click over to it. You still have to open out of the like billion people using Instagram. It's just a bunch of them. Have misclicking that is my honest.

43:57Atrioc:So so this is what I want to talk about. This is what I was thinking. So you know, again, threads users going way up. If you look at this chart right here, it's just been growing like crazy. The monthly active users is like double that. It's like 300 million people a month. They're opening up threads. So I was looking into it. How in the fuck is this app getting insanely huge 300 million people a month looking at it every day, 150 million. None of us hear about it ever. It's not in the cultural zeitgeist in any way. And the answer is not the entire world is America. So it turns out social media users in 2025.

44:29Atrioc:There's like a billion social media users in China, India, almost five, I should say almost 460 million. Now the United States, we got a lot. We got 240 million social media users, but then Brazil with 144 million. One of the countries that I feel like we never talk about is Indonesia. It's one of the biggest countries in the world. I never hear anybody talk about Indonesia ever. They have 140 million people on social media, Mexico, 90 million, Philippines, 90 million, Vietnam, 70 million, Pakistan, 70 million. These are massive, massive numbers. And so looking into where is Facebook as a specific example, getting all of their people well so found this this breakdown it's mostly from asia and south america uh there we go out of the uh so facebook is still absolutely gigantic by the way it is almost three billion monthly active users like it just like you know yeah two fifths of the world's population is still on facebook which even though again for gen z and millennial americans like nobody goes on facebook anymore right and so looking at this of of those three billion india has 400 million active Facebook users, Indonesia, a hundred million, Brazil, a hundred million, Mexico.

45:36Atrioc:So 400 million is more than the entire population of the United States. Yes. All using just using Facebook from one country. So I think what is interesting to kind of, you know, step out and remember here is that America relative to the entire population of the world, we are tiny. And even though we don't really use Facebook anymore and we don't use threads meta as a company across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads is really, really, really successful at capturing broad audiences across the world, particularly ones that are rapidly developing like Southeast Asia, South America. You know, Brazil has a massive social media presence in all this.

46:14Atrioc:So I thought this was really interesting that Threads is actually doing fantastically well for them, just not really in a way that we care about, which is an interesting just like way to think about social media you know i mean that is interesting that something i will say though is um my understanding is the value per user because these these these platforms run on ad oh you think they're less valuable i don't think less value as people but i think there's an ad dollar thing where it's like one user in the united states is worth like i don't remember the exact numbers from marketing days, but it's like 20 plus dollars per person in terms of amount they can sell ads for it.

46:56Yeah. And it's like eight cents if it's from a new, they don't buy enough on ads. Yeah. So from a profitability, I mean, I guess number of users and impact, I guess is valuable. And this is very interesting, but like from a health of the business, it's just a lot easier to get a hundred million people from somewhere where you can't sell any ads than it is to get somewhere where it's like, there's a high, that's my, that'll be my one counter, but that makes sense to me. I mean, I, I, I guess you do not think of it that way. Yeah.

47:23Atrioc:It's, it's just like fascinating. And I think it's, it's again, like what you're talking, there's two, there's two angles. One is you objectively make way, way, way more money when you have an American audience or European or European, whatever rich countries, right. That's you just objectively can squeeze us for a lot more of our precious, precious goo.

47:41Aiden:I mean, even compared to Europe, right. Isn't the, the, the ad rates in the U S yeah. He was like the by far highest. We just consume like crazy. We love ads and we buy.

47:51Atrioc:And we have a lot of money. We're rich people who want to buy stuff. And that's our vibe. Dumb TikTok ads.

47:59Aiden:Well, a question I have for you guys. Are you residual Facebook users? Do you guys engage or check it at all now? Like Facebook the site, and then if not Facebook, wondering if you guys touch Messenger at all anymore.

48:14Atrioc:It got me, like I kept using it for Messenger specifically for about five years after college, and now I am locked out of my account. I don't even have my password anymore. And I tried to reset it, and it wouldn't let me. And I was like, eh, I don't care. I just truly don't care. Yeah, I'm a Messenger user. Because there's that period in time where Facebook was big enough, and you have some friends that you just talk through that, and it just sticks.

48:34Aiden:So that's what I was going to say, is the U.S. having a number that's even as high as 200 million is pretty shocking to me. but I think about the way that I use Facebook, which is basically I check Messenger once a week. And I think that's a lot of people. Like you just have a residual use for Facebook that you continue to engage with occasionally. Or things like Marketplace, like Facebook Marketplace has become crazy popular. Things that let you hang on to the site in a way that is very different from the way that you were probably using it 10 years ago. So that was the first thing that I thought of when I saw this.

49:12Aiden:Another interesting thing is I think for young people especially, the way you get into social media or end up picking a platform or signing up for is social pressure around you or social trends around you, right? A way to engage with the friends you have at school, whether it be college or high school or something you might use for work, right? And the trend of one site being big at a certain time hits different languages and countries at different times, right? So even if Facebook has maybe a lot of the same issues that it did 10 years ago, and it's not a very good or very fun site to use, or people have phased out of it in American life, different countries are experiencing the wave of Facebook just being popular at different times.

50:01Aiden:So I'm really curious, like if you give another 20 years after this, what are the ways that all the people in all these other countries are still interacting with that site? The other thing I was thinking about with this was the segmented nature of language or culture on social media. And this is why China has always been so fascinating to me, even growing up, was that their internet wasn't even on the same sites that I used. And I was kind of excited by that. It felt so secretive and cool. but with stuff like this, like Japan or Japanese gaming scenes, like I came up playing competitive Mario Kart and the Japanese scene is a huge part of that.

50:42Aiden:But the world scene on the whole communicated to each other pretty much in English. Even if you were French, even if you were German, the community was a linked thing that communicated in English as the medium of exchange, right? And then Japan was pretty separate because they only spoke Japanese and they didn't mind playing with just their own community in a lot of ways. And they had their own forums, their own websites. And then eventually with Twitter, they had their own kind of sections of Twitter, right? Like people, like there's a whole world of Japanese Twitter to interact with that you can find if you follow enough Japanese people and speak Japanese.

51:20Aiden:But if you have a normal English-centered algorithm, right? You're never interacting with that. And the same goes for like Portuguese. Like Brazil has its own memes and own things, right? That are totally separate from the way that the English internet has developed. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned China and their entirely separate apps and the Great Firewall and everything. I saw someone said something recently that was funny to me, which is that like, you know, you mentioned there's like a billion internet users there, right?

51:47Atrioc:What was there? No, no, no, 1.1 billion social media users. Social media, yeah, exactly. That's not even internet. That's people who are on these apps, which is crazy. You just have an absurd, absurd number of people online.

51:57Aiden:It's got to be because of WeChat though too. I put an asterisk on that. It's like everything is on WeChat and you need WeChat to like live basically. But even if it's 800, it's a lot of people online and they are all completely isolated from the rest of the world, really through their apps. Like they don't use the same apps. They don't use anything. And it's funny that the way someone phrased it It was like, we think of it as they are being blocked from us. But in a way, we're almost being saved from a deluge of 100 million Chinese people overrunning every. They would outnumber almost every other country on every platform that we like.

52:35It would be.

52:37Aiden:Yeah, the English audience would be secondary. Yeah, right now the Americans or Western is the central. Like you said. I get what you mean. Your Maru-Karu Wee community was through English. The examples that I would give, if you go to Twitch, if you go to YouTube, even when you account for all these languages in different types of videos, right? The biggest creators on all of these platforms are still English-speaking creators in general. There's like a few exceptions depending on how you measure it. Like, for example, on Twitch, Ebay, super big figure, right? Yeah, massive. Very, I mean, you have access to, there's more first people with Spanish as their first language than English.

53:15Aiden:Yeah. Like, that's an enormous audience across so many countries. But on the whole, the largest consistent figures across all these platforms are English speakers. If you go look into the data, like you can go take a look. That doesn't mean it's always the case in every like subcategory and thing you measure. But on YouTube, it's Mr. Beast, right? And then on Twitch, it's Kai. Well, like the idea would be if the firewall was down, it would be Chinese. The number one, based on the number of people. And you can go do this. something I do think is interesting about Chinese websites is that they block people from going to websites that they don't approve of.

53:49Aiden:But most of these Chinese platforms are things that you can access as an American. So that's the thing I would do growing up is I found out like, what are the big Chinese, like YouTube-esque and like streaming sites? I would go like browse YY and DouYu and like see what the fuck do they stream? Yeah, there was a phase for a bit where Everyone was going on Xiao Hong Shu, which is like their Instagram Pinterest hybrid. It was like a trend. Everyone was going there, right? And then like I remember I made a QQ account growing up because that's how you could make a Chinese League of Legends account.

54:20Aiden:And then I used a fake Chinese passport number to make my Chinese League account and then played 300. We're trying to go to China, not get banned from it. I played 300 ping Chinese League. And that's why they let me in and not you. And a young Xi Jinping hated your fucking support. You were terrible.

54:36Atrioc:They're going to look at your KD ratio and we are banned if it's not toxic. We're looking at your toxic chat messages. You were raging at your team. If they see you inting a single time. Woman, bullshit upon you. What's... Oh, he's been practicing. One more thing before on social media. So China, TikTok, let's bring this together. You know, it's supposed to be banned. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a follow-up here, which is very interesting. If you want to say anything, but keep delaying it. Big news is that I think by the end of August, The international version of the app is supposed to be banned.

55:11And TikTok is launching a new US-only version of TikTok called M2 or something. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have the details? Yeah.

55:20Atrioc:So yeah, slightly different than that. So TikTok is supposed to be banned. There's a law that we talked about this last week. Law that it's supposed to be banned. Trump's just stalling it just because of pure vibes. Supposedly, there might be a buyer. The reason a buyer is really unlikely for TikTok is because the core app is developed in China. So there's a, you know, it's owned by a Chinese company. They, the idea that they are going to like give up the algorithm to tick tock this wildly successful thing. Never. They won't want to do it. I'm not only is that just a stupid business decision, it also, there's a degree of like national pride that China has created this international phenomenon.

55:53Atrioc:That's extremely rare and uncommon. And it would be a big hit to the idea of China wanting to export culture. And it's like giving up La Boo Boo dolls. You just couldn't, you know what I'm saying? And so this is, you know, most people would agree untenable. There is like no way that, uh, and actually here, I have this article here as well. I can pull up on the, um, there's like no way that the Chinese company is going to be willing to sell the algorithm, which again is developed by Chinese engineers, uh, by ByteDance in China. So TikTok is technically a separate company than Da Yin or Dou Yin, which is the Chinese version, but it's still Chinese engineers, right?

56:28Atrioc:And that's the challenge. So this new one they're going to do is called M2. And the idea is it's going to be an app and a company that is entirely made within the U.S. And that way they can tell the U.S. regulators, hey, this has nothing to do with China. So it means moving the tech stack from China to an American company. And from a technical perspective, probably it means forking the code in some way. But it's not clear what this means. Because again, ByteDance does not want to give up the code that allowed them to make TikTok. They don't want to give that away. And so the whole weirdness around selling TikTok is there's no way they'll sell the core thing that makes TikTok run.

57:02Atrioc:At most, they would sell basically the name, the name TikTok and a bunch of data, which is not valuable. And so there's this inherent disconnect between the idea of selling TikTok and what ByteDance might actually do. This is their attempt to get around it, seemingly. And so the specific dates, they're going to launch this on September 5th. And then they're going to shut down TikTok on March 26th. So their idea is we will force everybody on TikTok to migrate to an app, which is legitimately centralized and developed in the United States. And then it'll be a kind of separate thing. And if that pans out, then maybe they don't need to be banned.

57:34So interesting, though, because that's like us soft creating our own great firewall. Do you know what I'm saying? The idea that it has to be a U.S.-based app that is for other U.S. users only.

57:45Atrioc:Well, I think so. We don't have a lot of details about it. The idea would be the algorithm and what powers it and the data are all US based, but it would still be able to interact with international people. Right. But I assume someone in, you know, France is down, is keeping the same version of TikTok and you are on him too. So unless that they cross share videos. Yes, they would. They would. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea is like you still, cause you know, if, if we get, I think TikTok is aware that if the United States gets removed from the TikTok ecosystem, it all fails, right? Like we are too much of a cultural center, right?

58:17Atrioc:You can't just pull away the US and not have everybody else flood. If I'm not dancing on there, it's not going to last. Right, right. That's what draws the people in. Doing some of this is like how the app stays afloat. If my 20 ,000 viewer TikTok clips of my stream don't keep going up, the site will crumble. We don't have squeaks on there. Yeah. But what makes TikTok work culturally is the international spread, right? So you need to keep that fabric going. The challenge is that you need to have the algorithm of the app not developed by China. So the idea here is that Americans will use an app that can still connect with the international version of TikTok, but it would be two different recommendations algorithms.

58:55Atrioc:One is developed by United States. One is developed by ByteDance. So you would never really know if you're going to have a different experience. Yeah, yeah. It would be this very strange thing. So there's a lot of unknown about this because we don't know exactly what they're doing. But this is what they're, you know, these are the reports coming out. It's like we're going to make this version that technically is developed by America. and then there's this weird fracturing while maybe still keeping it all together.

59:16Aiden:Do you think it'll have any impact on the number of people who are actively using the app? I feel like it will be negligible at best because the platforms that are sort of competing with TikTok that have worse algorithms, like I think even functionally from, it's clear to me that YouTube Shorts has a worse algorithm than TikTok does, like the way it just serves me content, right? But I still click the Shorts. like I'm still I still have the monkey in my brain yeah our brains so I feel like you downgrade the algorithm but I don't feel like it's going to change the way people use it which was the only benefit that I saw from banning it but yeah probably beside I mean I I don't know if I necessarily believe in like the security concerns in this specific case but yeah I don't know I think habits will change too much but I also don't know that this is even you know this this could be like stalling.

1:00:09Right. We don't know if this is, I think both sides are just stalling in this. It just feels like everyone wants to kind of like deep things. March, 2026, we'll get rid of it. But by March, 2026, they'll be like, all right, we need six.

1:00:21Aiden:This is going to be like real ID, bro. This is going to be like real ID at the airport. The tick tock ban is actually going to come to fruition in 2032. And they're like, all right,

1:00:32Atrioc:we gotta do it. For not Americans for the last five years, every time you go to the airport, That's a sign that says you have to get a new updated ID or you can't fly coming in March of this year and then every single year, every single signs. They're just like, look, we'll give you a little bit more time and this has been going on for what seven years. It has to be at least six years. I think I saw the first signs for a real ID at the airport.

1:00:55Aiden:I think it's in 2018. I still lived in Washington when I saw them for the first time. That's everything. We just keep extending. We just

1:01:05Atrioc:you just bail yeah do you spell i mean the thing is what they would do is they release this so in the reason i think it's interesting is because they're saying september 5th that's soon that's in two months so in two months they release dick talk and inside the current app there's a button that says you must migrate to dick talk by next march and you press a button and you download the new app and it's exactly the same in almost every single way they might pull it off that'd be like a kind of that'd be a kind of funny way to get around the whole thing yeah well it doesn't get around the law that is supposed to ban it which is still that they're well i so well wasn't

1:01:38Aiden:that it was never a ban right it wasn't the whole idea this was the goal of the law was it not to get it under it was to give this to an american controlled company or under american control this is what the goal of the law was this is an app developed in america correct but it's still owned by byte dance which is still a chinese company the whole point of the law specifies that like you have to get the Chinese ownership out of the app that is controlled. Hey, hold on. Run this back. Sorry, I actually skipped over this part then. The Chinese company still owns this as like a subsidiary, but it's just the data is being stored in the US and that's adequate?

1:02:13Atrioc:All right. Currently with TikTok, Bydance owns it and develops it. TikTok is a Chinese company. However, they store, at least for the US, their data in the United States. So that's their argument is like, the Chinese don't have control over it. The data is all in the U S that is how it currently works. However, the United States Congress and lawmakers said that's not enough. There's a whole bunch of evidence that shows Chinese engineers and software developers still have access to the data. The Chinese communist party is still pretty clearly able to tell ByteDance what to do. So clearly there is influence.

1:02:45Atrioc:The core code running the app is Chinese, even though the data is stored here. The idea with this is they will move that actual development code to the United States. So the whole thing is here and then they might be able to get around it and say yes we have chinese overlords who are technically in control the company but the engineers are no longer in china are you a

1:03:04Aiden:chinese tech company that's been forced to move your tech stack to the united states well you can sign up for nord vpn and you can also watch vietnam you can also watch some like crazy shows on netflix that's gonna be that's our first let's only take sponsors whenever we start taking

1:03:26Atrioc:sponsors that are just catered to tiktok getting around american censors okay speaking of china let's do a sponsor where we can get money out of china for money yeah okay because that's your

1:03:40Aiden:final topic i want to hear this was a cool so this isn't really like it's not uh breaking news or recent news in the sense that this has been going on for a while, but it's something that still exists now. And this interesting world of Chinese capital flight and money laundering, how it ties into the drug trade around the world, but specifically in the United States as well. And I started looking into this, I think almost two years ago when some stories were breaking out about it. I remember watching - By looking into this, he means starting to do drugs. Yeah, when I was buying the drugs. I started talking to the Chinese mafia.

1:04:19Aiden:I met a guy in San Diego, and he was speaking Chinese. And I was like, that's crazy. I just noticed my plug kept getting more and more Chinese as I was buying throughout the years. No, but there's some really cool reading you can do about this. There's some good videos out by both the FT and Vice. Coach Rock, I think, had a good one. The Vice one is particularly interesting if you want to go watch it after this, because they actually go undercover and meet some of these Chinese brokers that I'll tell you about. And it's really, really interesting. But basically, so if you are a rich person in China, you might want a way to get your money out of the country.

1:04:59Aiden:Well, why is that the case at a basic level? They have really strict capital control. So if you're a Chinese citizen, you can only move 50K USD worth of currency per year per person out of the country. So whether that, and if you want to make larger investments in say foreign companies of any kind or buy things like real estate or make really large purchases for like a foreign good, you would need to get that approved somehow. So when you couple that with general restrictions or issues in China around, maybe you're just not confident or in your assets in China for the foreseeable future, and you just want a way to get the money out of the country.

1:05:43Aiden:How can you get it out? Well, you could use something called an underground bank that functions on the basis of these things called mirror transfers. And the basic idea of a mirror transfer is that on one end, I deposit money with like an illicit bank or group. Like I give you a bunch of - So you're a rich Chinese guy. I'm a rich Chinese guy. You have a hundred trillion yuan. Mm-hmm. A hundred trillion. Well, you have a lot. I'm rolling. Five hundred billion yuan. Okay. That is serious. That's what? Like six dollars? That's still a lot. That's a lot. That's still a lot. Okay. Okay. And so you go to him, and what are you doing?

1:06:19Aiden:He's the bank. I'm going to Doug. He's actually, Doug is also Chinese in this scenario. Okay. And I give Doug, I give Doug a bunch of my Chinese yuan, R &B, and on the other end, I have a contact in the United States that I'm comfortable holding assets for me. My little, my, my homie over there, my little guy over there. And, uh, the Chinese, uh, like organized crime has a representative in the United States that gives you the person I trust the equivalent amount in USD minus like a commission. Right. So what we've done is there's no record of this transaction. There was no actual international transfer of money.

1:06:58Aiden:And so it's just done through this crime syndicate that basically has the cash to do it and has signed off the transaction on their end. And the issue with this is that it's really hard to track, right? But this is a way that Chinese people buy money outside of China in order to get foreign money or foreign assets, right?

1:07:20Atrioc:You know, you always hear about particularly Chinese nationals, but just international people buying housing in North America. You know, like in Canada, that's a complaint that's often said by people. It's like, you know, foreign people are coming in and buying all the houses and that's why we can't afford any. How are Chinese nationals able to buy so many homes if they can only spend 50K a year?

1:07:39Aiden:I actually had this question too and I have two loose answers to this and if anybody can weigh in, I'd appreciate it as well. But from my understanding, there's actually restrictions on the Chinese end that came into place in 2016 and 2017 that actually makes it harder for Chinese citizens to do this. So that's one thing that limits it And then I also know in places like Australia and Canada, they've instated laws at local levels that also makes it harder for foreign citizens to just buy up real estate and hold it. So those are two things that have changed in like the last eight years that do affect this.

1:08:10Atrioc:But how would they even buy a house in the first place if they can only spend 50K?

1:08:14Aiden:So now, one of the ways you could do it is through a system like this. Or perhaps you just have a family member abroad that you could do it through, right? But this whole process represents a way that you can move money around in order to make purchases like that. Gotcha. I do want to stress that prior, like 2016 and prior, there wasn't as strict controls from the Chinese end on what you could be spending your money on. So there's some laws that have changed from China's perspective that also have made it more of a reason to do this at all. So the way that this ties in is into the drug trade. A massive, you know, Mexican drug cartels make massive amounts of money selling drugs in the United States and around the world.

1:08:59Aiden:And they need a way to launder the money that they bring in. Right. So this created an interesting opportunity. And I want to walk you guys through the process.

1:09:08Atrioc:So can I be the cartel?

1:09:09Aiden:You can be the cartel. Yeah, absolutely. So you could be the cartel in Mexico. And your name is Doug. Okay, cool. And you send a fentanyl shipment to our friend over here. I'm the fentanyl. in New York. I don't even have to act on this one. And Atriok Atriok operates a drug gang in New York that distributes and sells the fentanyl, right? I thought we were doing something fictional here. And this is fictionalized events. So the drug gang, Atriok, sells the fentanyl in New York. So they earn a million dollars in cash that now needs to be laundered. And they tell the cartel back home that, hey, we have a million dollars.

1:09:51Aiden:We've successfully done this. And now you approach a Chinese triad member in Mexico. That's your broker for this amount of money. And he's like, you're like, I need to get my money now. That guy hits up his Chinese contact in New York. And he's like, there's a million dollars for you to go pick up. And then they communicate. And then the guy in New York goes and picks up the money, tells the Chinese contact in Mexico. And let's say that's me. I'm a Chinese broker in Mexico. I pay you out the million dollar USD equivalent in pesos. And I just give that to the cartel, right? You've been paid out and made whole for this whole transaction.

1:10:27Aiden:And the reason this is so good for you is this is way quicker and way safer than trying to smuggle cash across the border, which would take much longer periods of time, get seized. There's all these associated risks with that, right?

1:10:42Atrioc:But instead, all I did was my team in New York handed a million dollars to a Chinese guy, and then we received a million dollars in pesos in Mexico.

1:10:49Aiden:And apparently this, yes.

1:10:50Atrioc:They're like Chinese Zelle.

1:10:53Aiden:Kind of. For drug dealers. What's mind-blowing about this is this regularly happens, the turnaround time for you as the drug dealer, regularly happens within a 24-hour period. It is extremely fast. So compared to the weeks or months that it might have used to take you back in your early drug dealing days. Yeah. And then, so the way this continues is like the Chinese contacts have picked up the million dollars, right? And the Chinese broker in America now put up the U.S. dollars for sale to any Chinese citizens that might want those U.S. dollars, right? And then Chinese citizens who want to purchase that U.S.

1:11:31Aiden:dollars to get their RMB out of the country, they meet with a agent of the triad like a Chinese person in China and then make a legal money transfer of RMB to their bank just within China and now that representative of the triad in China you know texts the guy in the U.S. and confirms that the transaction has been made and then the U.S. guy pays out the million or you know whatever amount in USD that they wanted to their friend in New York. And now your trusted contact, like if I'm a rich Chinese person, I just have a homie in New York or wherever in the US. It doesn't matter in this scenario.

1:12:10Aiden:And my friend now has the money in his hands and I've successfully acquired the USD that I want. Yeah, what's fascinating about this is like, it's so, so much more difficult to track under all normal like FBI money tracing methods because the USD has never left New York. The RMB has never left China. The pesos have never left Mexico. It's just circling in each one, but everyone gets what they want. And so drug trafficking is like a very natural fit with this because there's a ton of cash that needs to be laundered, right? But it isn't just the Mexican to U.S. drug trade that is taking advantage of this.

1:12:45Aiden:There's organized crime around the world that needs money to be laundered. And so anywhere in the world where there's pockets of Chinese diaspora that have popped up for whatever reason, like in Africa because of the infrastructure projects that have been built or like Chinese mining companies that are working in Africa. There's little, there's like groups of Chinese people that now live in that place that can operate potentially as like, uh, as part of this, part of this money laundering trade. Right. Or a huge thing, crazy stat that I saw was how, uh, remittance remittance is when, uh, a foreign, like a foreign national is sending money back home to, family, right?

1:13:27Aiden:Legal remittance from Italy has fallen off to like near zero in the past decade and a half because they've all gone to the black market because of the system now. And there's, so there's, there's all of this like illegal, you know, black market trade that exists all over the world that wherever a Chinese broker can provide, can provide this service, because there's a need from Chinese citizens to get their money out of the country, they can provide a really quick and clean service, basically. I mean, my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think we've rushed to some more things, is that over the past 10, 15 years, Chinese triads have taken over the global money laundering industry completely.

1:14:09Almost everywhere. It is complete. It used to be a million different ways from a million different people. It is now almost all global money laundering is done through Chinese triads because the demand from regular non-crime affiliated citizens in China to get money out of China is so big that it can support everything else. Everything else can run off of that need.

1:14:29Aiden:Yeah, and it's going up. And I asked myself, like, why the specific rise in this happening now, right? And it was the capital restrictions, like I said, but also other things in China that have been happening that pressure people economically to do this. Like if you want to invest in foreign assets, you don't want to, the Chinese stock market just hasn't been, it sucks. It's flat for 30 years. So if you just want to put a bunch of your money in assets that exist outside of China in order to safely keep it, you want to get your money out. Chinese real estate struggled a bunch in recent years because of the giant bubble that started, that did pop, started to pop.

1:15:12Aiden:You don't want to hold Chinese real estate anymore. You put your money, get your money out of the country. and then general confidence in whether or not the government is going to impede or seize the assets that you own, right? Because they have a history of doing that. Or a really basic reason, sometimes you just want to buy something super sick that isn't sold in China and costs a lot of money. Some people just want to use a service like this for the sake of doing that.

1:15:37Atrioc:If you don't mind me spoiling it, at the bottom of your notes, I see in all caps CSGO skins.

1:15:43Aiden:Okay, this was a thought that I hadn't fully completed.

1:15:45Atrioc:It's just, that's all it says with two question marks. CS2 skins. Oh, excuse me, CS2 skins.

1:15:50Aiden:Well, this reminded me a little bit of the way that like the Chinese CS skin market interacts with the rest of the market. Because there's a giant trading site called Buff, Buff163, that is Chinese only and is really difficult to get money into and out of as a foreigner. And you need to go through like all these steps to do it. And China is the largest section of the skin market for CS. And I was noticing like weird parallels between like what I was watching and reading and the way that the skin market works in Counter-Strike. But I hadn't completed the thought, which is why it was a weird note at the bottom.

1:16:27Well, I had a half-completed thought then. It's the same thing. Apparently, this is also a limit of misinformation, but I was reading this recently, is happening in the early stages with the LaBubu dolls. The demand is real from Western countries. We think it's really cool. There's like celebrities wearing them. They want to buy them. They have huge value. but they're made in China.

1:16:44Atrioc:Hold on, before we talk about Lububa dolls, let's start with like some objective facts. They are ugly as sin. Thank you. Rihanna doesn't think so because she wore one around her waist. No, I think let's just start with the facts. No rational person thinks these look good. I'm sorry, but Riri thinks they're cool and so other people think they're cool and you can gamble on them and open blind box. So that's really fun. I'm going to steel man it. I hate them. Ooh, good steel man. steel manning is just saying my own opinion. Anyway, they're popular and they're worth quite a bit, especially some of the rarer ones.

1:17:22And so recently this did happen. I get it. I don't know if it's part of this larger thing, but they've begun to become seized at Chinese customs, leaving the country because they're made in China. And so people are getting access to them much cheaper than they would get them overseas. And then they are smuggling lots of them out of the country, than selling them for a huge inflated profit to get money out of the country. It's like a way of not carrying cash out, but carrying the boo-boo dolls worth. That's so much money. So it's just funny because I do think in a similar way to how I'm kind of like making fun of Trump for trying to whack-a-mole tariffs.

1:17:59Like there's no way to... The similar thing is happening with Chinese capital controls where the demand is so great. There's so many porous holes opening up. People find a way. People find a way. You can't clamp it down. If they don't, you know, if you're like you said this, but if you're rich in China, you put your money in the stock market, it goes nowhere. You put your money in real estate, it goes nowhere. You have to get the money out of China, even if you're not like afraid of it getting seized. You just have to find a way to get it to grow or you're shrinking. So you want to put it in Vancouver real estate because that's mooning.

1:18:26You want to put it in Nvidia stock. You want to put it in, you have to get it out. And so they will find a way, whether it's through drug dealers, whether it's through the booboo dolls, whether it's through CSGO skins, they're going to find a way.

1:18:36Aiden:Yeah, I think it's almost assuredly happening with CS skins to some degree. Because through the larger skins, they're ridiculously expensive at the high end. The one we didn't mention that is the elephant in the room is crypto. Crypto is a huge vehicle for this. And so it's happening all over. It's gold. People are finding a million different ways. But it... Well, okay. Let me steel man that. NFTs look really cool. That guy who hates Labood, loves monkey JPEG Twitter profiles. Yes, sir. Let's just start with the objective facts, sir. Okay. I'm sorry. I don't like these steel man. Okay, wait. I want to ask you guys something, though, because I...

1:19:14Aiden:Does any question pop in your head when I give you this scenario? Think about the whole process we had outlined with the drug trade in, like, Mexican cartels, like, they're selling drugs in the United States. They sell it for USD. Yeah.

1:19:28Atrioc:When does money actually change countries?

1:19:31Aiden:It never does. That's the whole appeal of the system.

1:19:34Atrioc:But, like, at no point, at no point ever.

1:19:37Aiden:No, and that's what protects these transactions. But I think you're getting at the question that I had. Because if you think about how this works, right? The drugs are sold for USD and the brokers are paying you out in pesos. Recursor. Is that what you're getting into? No. I mean, they're selling fentanyl. That's the drug. In the analogy, is Aatrox still on fentanyl? I've always been this whole time. I couldn't do this pod with you guys if I wasn't on a little fentanyl. He's not on fentanyl this time. Right. It's not important in the analogy. There's no analogy, actually. I'm just explaining something.

1:20:06I thought you were trying to get at the point that like, well, the pesos have to come from somewhere, right? Exactly.

1:20:12Aiden:Exactly. I was wondering the exact same thing. When I was thinking about this, I was like, where do the brokers get the pesos? Because if you follow this system, as it's been laid out to me, right, you have a finite supply of pesos to pay out the cartel. Right. Where do the pesos come from? So this was one of the, there's a whole, we got to close the loop here. This was wild to me. The Chinese crime organizations import, they use the yuan that they get in China and then use it to buy cheap Chinese goods that they then transport and import to Mexico and then sell at stores and markets that the triad still owns in Mexico.

1:20:55Aiden:And they only sell them for cash. And they run massive market businesses of like shoes, clothes, masks, anything you can think of that could be produced in China. And the trade relationship, if you look at the amount of goods that have come into Mexico from China in like the past decade, has spiked dramatically. And that's how they get the pesos. There's a whole like closed loop to this where they continue to bring in Chinese goods back into Mexico, sell them locally there, get the pesos in cash to use for these payments. That makes total sense. I did hear, the way I heard it, And that makes, I 100 % believe you.

1:21:32I think it's probably makes more sense than what I'm about to say. That's the amount of pesos you need to be staggering, right? So you have to do all that. But the way I heard it was, you know, to close the loop, the real thing they need, they can get pesos for is from the drug cartels that are making fentanyl in Mexico to export to the United States need fentanyl precursor. They need like the raw chemicals and materials to make fentanyl. And they buy that from China with pesos. So they trade the pesos, but never leaving the country. So I think you're probably right here,

1:22:03Aiden:because when I was looking at the, I think it was the Vice report where they're going through the stores that the brokers are showing them that they own. I was like, this seems crazy to me. Like, how could you be pushing enough volume of these goods in order to make up the gap of like how large these payments are expected to be? Right. So it's probably just both things, right? It's like, you need every avenue you can get to bring in as much pesos as possible in order to operate the business, the illegal business at the scale that you need to operate it at. Because in the, uh, in the interview where they're using the body cameras and stuff, they're talking about like the, the reporter is pretending to be a fake, you know, fake Chinese party interested in laundering a bunch of money.

1:22:51Aiden:Right. And the people they're talking to are like bragging about how much money they can launder or pay out at a time through the system that they have. And they're like, well, 200 million would be like way too much. Like we can't do that all at once. It would like take a long time, but like 10 to 20 million, no problem. You give me a day sets up. Like I can move that for you instantly. And I was blown away by that. I was. It's so funny to think that like something as seemingly irrelevant as like China changing their capital controls could cripple the drug industry temporarily in mech you know what i'm saying like every one of these pieces including just rich chinese people that don't care about drugs at all that want to get their money out has to exist for this all to work otherwise yeah yeah do you do you think that there is a group a

1:23:37Atrioc:whole section of people in the united states who lost their job as drug dealers and money launderers and are now upset at the chinese for taking their jobs we need a drug dealer

1:23:47Aiden:You know what's funny? The money launderer part, genuinely, yeah. Because that's what has been replaced here. Presumably in this whole scenario that we outlined, it's like the local gangs and like whether it be like in the European example, they were talking about the Italian mob. And in New York's case, it could be a local drug gang. Like, you know, we haven't lost those jobs yet. Thank God. But the money laundering is the thing that's been replaced. Every individual gang across the world is kind of like a McDonald's franchise where they get the drugs from someone else and they do the money laundering.

1:24:22They just operate their local flavor of crime, of violence, but they're not making the drug and they're not handling the money laundering. Everyone else, it's all, that's really funny.

1:24:35Aiden:It's funny that it has become so financialized. American who can only view things through lens of McDonald's. Oh, you're saying it's like burger. It's like burger. It's like when Burger Friends are. I see. Yeah. That makes total sense. I think this story is, you know, I recognize that this whole process, you know, has pretty dire consequences at corners of it. But holistically, I found it incredibly fascinating. Wait, we're coming up on time. You had a correction you wanted to make. Yeah, I did want to make a correction from last week. A quick thing. Can you do that correction, Saul? where you say, I'm a little baby.

1:25:14I'm sorry for being wrong. I'm not very good at my job and I don't do my research. I didn't do this song, by the way, when I lied about cancer two weeks ago.

1:25:25Aiden:Last week, I talked about birthright citizenship and a few people were correcting me and rightfully so. So I want to clarify one thing first is that I'm not against birthright citizenship. I don't know how that came across. Not here from the comments. Nope, not against birthright citizenship. But one thing I was wrong about, I meant to clarify or what I meant to say was unrestricted birthright citizenship is not common in a global context. However, there are way more countries than the US and Canada that have it. And those include like Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Jamaica, Chile, Ecuador.

1:26:01Aiden:So a bunch of countries do have it like way more than even I thought, but still a minority of countries. And then a bunch of people pointed out that like, uh, birthright citizenship is way, way more than that. And it's like, yeah, but that's restricted birthright citizenship that has a bunch of like rules and addendums to it, which is not what I was talking about. Uh, so I just want to make that correction because I was wrong, uh, about the number of countries that have it. And just keep that in mind. That is why next week we're replacing him with Gavin Newsom, who doesn't get so many things wrong.

1:26:33Atrioc:He doesn't lie about birthright citizenship. He does his research before the show. So he checks his sources. Speaking of checking sources, you want to hear something funny? So I was looking into all the social media stuff, right? And I was looking at numbers for threads. And I was cross-checking a bunch of things just to make sure the numbers were actually right. And one of the websites I was using to primarily talk about threads, not this one, but another one, was basically, it was talking about how threads has grown. And so, again, the whole point of the story was like, wow, threads is gigantic.

1:27:00Atrioc:And we just kind of don't realize it. They have 150 million people that are using this like every month or whatever. And what's crazy as a stat is of that 150 million, 50 % are from Armenia. That's not true, right? Armenia has 3 million people.

1:27:16Aiden:And so according to this website,

1:27:20Atrioc:very confidently is just stating, yep, and we know looking at the data that Armenians are about half of them, half of the 150 million people. So each, so either threads is growing, kind of spread around the world or every single Armenian person has multiple, has 30 threads accounts that they are personally running, which is just like, it's a cool cultural place to be. You really get to feel like you're my account for work,

1:27:42Aiden:my account for friends, my account for my second wife for every hour of the day. I don't know.

1:27:52Atrioc:So I,

1:27:53Aiden:as I say it in a oddly British accent,

1:27:56Atrioc:I don't know what I learned from this is that it is very hard to get accurate numbers on social media and it's, it's mostly estimates. So this happened to me when I worked in marketing all the time. You did so much of this stuff is fluff or empty or you'd have to give these pitches on like the growth of platforms to your executive. And it would just be you're just like you're just budgeted. You just there's no there's no numbers. They don't publish it. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Apparently, it's all Armenia. Dude, this is a symptom, though. I've been talking to my shirt about this. No matter what your position is, if you Google hard enough, there'll be a website that confidently agrees with you with a stat that doesn't make sense.

1:28:31there's and people you know like you have to have some kind of trusted sword it has to be some kind of barrier because otherwise there will be a website i i promise you i agree that you're

1:28:42Atrioc:someone's gonna find a dude of the eight or nine half of them linked to each other as the source it's just like dude what it's like bot farms for me yeah it was bot farms that are referencing each other all with different numbers like what what is even going on here i feel like to add a little bit of noise to the day just right just just so there's their website's a little bit different. That's fucking crazy. The internet, I want my country back. Internet used to be a good, honest source of news that I can trust.

1:29:06Aiden:Yeah. I mean, it used to be better. It used to be better for sure. Forum days. You have a little signature? Did you ever do that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I used to make them for money. A little anime banner. Forum signature? I was on the Yu-Gi-Oh! card maker for you. No, I would make you one that says, like, Yu-Gi-Oh! lover. Yeah, yes, sir. Put like Yu-Gi-Oh! and add a little Photoshop sheen to it. I used to crank those out. That was easy money. Yeah, you're making him in Gimp because you couldn't get Photoshop. I'd cry. Pirate. Oh,

1:29:33Atrioc:shit. Never mind. Well, I think that about wraps it up. We do have about 45 more seconds. So what I would like to pitch is a track just counts down from 45, 30, 29, 28. I can't do that. Thank you. You're watching limited. Thanks. You're fine. See you next week.