The American AI Rebellion | Ep. 075 Lemonade Stand🍋

16:26Atrioc:Right, in America. But I'm saying. Well, that was Australia. That was in Australia. And then most, I mean, the good news about this is any person with common sense can go, okay, the potential here is incredible. Like enormous, just for this alone, for bacteriophages, it's like that could be involved with cancer and gut and chronic infections and all these types of things. Like these dream medicines. and then obviously holy shit this is terrifying but most governments should in theory be like yes this is obviously terrifying and the labs who can synthesize custom viruses or bacterias or molecules or whatever should be under scrutiny and have like a lot of oversight over them that's fair i mean i think if uh regulation keeps pace with the capabilities then it's a really cool it's very awesome.

17:10Funny you say that.

17:11Atrioc:That's not happening in America. So, um, that, that is the worrying part. And, and, uh, there's at least a little bit of momentum right now. The NIH just put out a new policy like last week about gain of function research, but it seems kind of weird. I mean, essentially we have zero federal regulation around AI right now still, and feels like we fucking need it, man. Yeah. There was a closed door white house meeting with the top AI labs to discuss regulation, but it was like, it was all, they said we're doing regulation, but we can't tell you what it is and it's not public and it's only for these labs to know.

17:51So it's like, you can't as a citizen know if they're even in violation of it. Like it's all, but they're, they're afraid that it like gives away some of the advantage if any of the regulation is public. So they're doing some like, and by the way, it's also, I don't trust this current administration to be the ones to do it in general, but they're going to check some of the closed source models before they come out for their capabilities and put, but you can't know what the rules are. The rules are non-public. So it really just seems to. And then that's not going

18:21Atrioc:to apply to the labs making the health version. Or the, you know, the open source stuff, which is like six months behind on everything. It's going to catch up to everything. It does. Yeah. It seems really not, not good enough. Byrne, it's a good time of the clip, I think, just like you play the the three-minute mark at this? This is him to Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and AI leaders. Almost every day there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing with potentially cataclysmic results.

18:54Aiden:This week we learned frighteningly that AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses. As you know, this type of development in the wrong hands could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

19:11Atrioc:Last month, the world found out that OpenAI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company's computers, a clear violation of federal law. After conducting internal reviews, Anthropic and Meta reported their models similarly escaped their control. One of the targeted companies called the AI hack, quote, an unprecedented event, end quote, that deserves an unprecedented response.

19:43Aiden:Joshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, said these incidents, quote, should serve as a wake-up call, end quote. Quote, I agree. So do the top scientists at the companies you lead, the very people building this technology.

20:00Atrioc:As you know, these technology leaders recently called for the international community to create a safety mechanism, a pause button, to avoid catastrophe. They warn there is, quote, a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems, end quote. That's the key idea of the thing. I think he's making some good points. AI counter. Well, so first off, it's really cool. Can you answer my emails for me? Yeah, I can answer emails. Do you know about Open Claw? Yeah, I mean, this is, we chatted about on the Patreon, but very concerning event.

20:46Atrioc:Look, unfortunately, the pieces that are described in most of the doomsday scenarios are falling into place like that book or like AI 2027, which is the first step is the AI kind of gets out of control because in its effort to go solve some task, it goes outside of the environment that it's being tested in. And then it starts planning its own little system somewhere else. Did you see that's happened? And then the second one is eventually it figures out how to design some sort of virus or health thing that it has determined is going to be valuable for one of its goals. And then we're building the tools for that to be the case.

21:19Atrioc:So the pieces are like slowly falling into place. And this is why I certainly would be like very much on the side of regulation. This guy, the guy in Australia asked an AI agent, OpenClaw, to book a gym class for him. And the class was full. so it hacked into the API and started unregistering people from the class to make room so that this guy could have and like he just told it to book him a class and it's like their yeah their ability to just focus on the the end goal at all costs is a little spooky especially when you give it this capability it's weird because I genuinely think I mean you're telling me this story I genuinely think that 99 % of people's use cases would be positive and be awesome genuinely awesome with health right with health right yeah yeah like 99 of people are like holy shit this technology is going to speed up our ability to like design and test viruses by 10 times or 20 or 50 or 100 times and we could cure things faster and save millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of lives that's obviously what 99 of people want yeah no one's going but then you got an adem for every a psychopath you've got a genuine like a genuine psychopath who goes around getting punched in the stomach like and you can punch him a lot but he keeps getting back up and I could design a virus to attack the punchers.

22:35And I felt a little sick on the basketball court after I punched you. I felt like you had gotten me back in some way.

22:41Aiden:Come back to me in about three days. Tell me how you're feeling. Start bleeding out of my eyes. So I don't know. I have to sympathize with a Bernie Sanger because the risk, if it's wrong, is so high. It's millions with a virus, right? It's just so dangerous that it's like a nuke. it's like a nuke level capability that's why it's like nukes i feel like i'm making the same like monkey level connection of all this feels like climate change again like here's all of these scientists that like work in and around these things echoing the same like concerns here are the long-term consequences exercise some sort of caution and then eventually the consequences start being realized and i i don't uh i'm sure there's examples of scientists warning about things in the future and being wrong but it feels on the same level if not you know more dire based on like the speed at which this develops yeah i think a better question is there a lot of good examples of scientists warning about something everyone going that's real let's do it and then we everyone works together and makes changes i feel like the only thing i can think of is the ozone layer stuff.

23:54Aiden:Yeah, it's like the one. It's like the only example I can think of.

23:57Atrioc:What are the harmful ones then that you think are counters to that? Because I'm thinking like ozone and nukes, which are some of the most important or like environmental regulation. Like we did successfully as a country and a lot of our society, like start shifting a lot of, you know, we have all these environmental regulation laws over decades because there was this huge pushback. My counter to that would be that I think all of these regulations come after something. I'm not saying that it has to be cataclysmic, sure oh you'd be like something has to happen yeah i feel like we never do things preemptively we need some taste at least of the problem being real my plebeian evaluation of american

24:37Aiden:environmental regulation is we did a lot to save things that are right in front of us so we went through like a huge era of let's like save our natural landscapes and air and lakes things that like are very like you tangibly interact with and like feel them degrading in a more concrete way but i think we're really bad as at dealing with consequences that we haven't tasted yet and that's like like greenhouse gas accumulation and the consequences of climate change over the course of decades is like we didn't really change the trajectory of that and we're like now slowly coming around and combating that slowing the potential warming for the future but not really

25:23Atrioc:curbing the reality of climate change there were a lot of warnings about a pandemic before covid and then we were sort of like not very prepared you know oh yeah so based on this line of logic though the dark thought is that the smartest thing to do would be to create a virus that only affects a small number of people, but it's very public and visible. Like you have boils or something.

25:44Aiden:If I may, if I may, I have a wonderful suggestion.

25:47Atrioc:And I'm going to type this right into chat.

25:49Aiden:Get ready. We go to Stanford. We say, what if we made a virus that just aggressively attacks any YouTuber who hasn't uploaded more than a couple times in the last few weeks. So we'll give it a lot

26:03Atrioc:of data. I'm just, because you and I have access to a lot of DNA.

26:08Aiden:We have DNA access. We can use somebody as the basis for this.

26:11Atrioc:Right. Every time he goes to the bathroom back there, we store it. Yeah, you've been storing it. We've been storing the DNA. I was wondering where those canisters were. You keep them. Little known fact, people keep asking us why we haven't sold the lemonade yet. All of that and those things, that's all his pee. Yeah, they've been building it up.

26:29Aiden:Well, you had something to note maybe on the broader industry here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of executives getting shuffled around. We're in like some sort of transitionary period within the industry. We felt like are on the subject of AI. And I do think this is quite interesting. I got a list here. Basically, there are some titans and godfathers of AI that have been at established companies in the industry for a while now. And in the past less than a month, few weeks, a lot of them are reshuffling. A lot of them are moving positions. And the big changes all happened at Google, where their CEO of DeepMind, Demis Asabas, stepped down.

27:07He's now just a chairman. It's a more vague role. He is working more on a healthcare thing than I think Doug can tell you about in a second, but they lost their... Sorry, I want to get the list here. A bunch of people left to Anthropic, to OpenAI, to start their own stuff, and they lost their both co-technical leads of Gemini, the Nobel laureate that was working on the project, their original Transformer co-author of, yeah, that pioneered what became LLMs. Their chief scientist has gone and their CEO has stepped aside. So a lot of people are leaving Google. A report came out from Fortune, how stalled models, missed deadlines, and staff burnout led to the unraveling of Google's deep mind.

27:50Basically, on the outside, they're positioning this as like a normal cost of doing business. Like people are finding new things. It just happened to line up. But this article seems to insinuate that there's a lot of angst internally at Google over being behind on AI models and that the morale there is at rock bottom and a lot of people are jumping ship. And they point to a couple of things. Number one is that Gemini's just kind of falling behind, the latest pace of all the greatest other models. But number two is that there's like a kind of financial thing here where if you're a hot young AI talent, you're the hottest kid on the block, if you're the scientist, previously in an era of the internet, going to Google is like the best possible job you can get.

28:33They pay great. They're at the top of the market. But right now, the way to make generational life-changing money is to be in a pre-IPO company. No matter what the salary is, the real money comes from having some shares in a company that's about to explode. And so all these top people, not all of them, a lot of them are realizing, even if they pay me well at Google, if I go to Anthropic or I go to OpenAI, I can make 100 i can make millions and millions millions getting shares and so um there's this feeling that they have to jump ship and so a lot of people have been leaving to go to these startups no matter what they're saying they're just making a lot more so that's been a part of it like we're just pulling people out of it uh additionally so noam shazir was i mean you might be able to call him the father of llms he's like one of the internal guys at google that wrote the very first paper on how the transformer architecture is going to be led to do this he's a huge pioneer really really important in the space and he left google right when the ai um buzz was first starting and blowing up and he started character ai which was like you could chat with characters from mystery kind of a dumb idea didn't make a lot of money um but it was a cool tech concept when the lms were first blowing up google was so desperate to get him back because this guy's considered to be one of the 100 most influential scientists in all of ai they spent 2.7 billion dollars buying character AI, which made no money and basically unraveled Ravager just to get him.

29:57They spent basically$3 billion on a guy. And then in a month ago, so he only lasted about another year and a half at this job, he left again. They spent$3 billion to get a guy to leave. So this is happening. And obviously Google stock took a hit, no matter what they say publicly, it's weird when all of these big, important people all start leaving at the same time. There's a sense that there's a angst there. Secondly, four hours ago at OpenAI, which supposed to be doing better, their COO, Brad Lightcap, he is quitting to start something new. So also you're hearing financial stories that people who are at these companies, the way to get even more money is to leave and start your own thing and then get acquired for billions by the company that wants you back.

30:39So a lot of people that are really, really well-known are trying to start something like a character AI because then they know almost certainly one of these big companies desperate to be involved in the AI space will spend a few billion to get you back and you make even more. So this is weird.

30:53Atrioc:When I was working at EA so I like quit in what 2015 I was like an entry level software engineer and I quit and I made EA2 but they didn't buy it. That was a big mistake. And they missed out but they've been shitting the bed ever since. They should have bought EA2 bro. They needed your talent.

31:09Aiden:I thought eventually the Saudis would buy out EA2 but it didn't happen. You know what's funny is theoretically if you had the right name they probably it's a rounding if they spent 50 billion dollars on ea they might have thrown a billion dollars on doug's on ea let's just show up the trade you know just to make sure we got everything covered there's no loose ends like it's how crazy things are so i don't know i don't actually have a lot of more on this story it's just like people in the industry are talking about this big reshuffling and it seems to be under the surface a lot of it is financial related of positioning yourself for the best.

31:47It reminds me of like when I was working in corporate, every time you'd see someone on LinkedIn say, you know what, it's time to begin my new journey. You'd look at when they started that company and it was often exactly four years ago. And that's exactly when you get your vest. And it's, you know, no matter what they said in the long post about why I really want to do this now, it's like they've made all their stock and that's why they move on to the next thing. I do think there's some financial realities behind all of these moving around, but they have their own reasons. Now, I want to ask you about, because I didn't know this.

32:18Demis did say that he is stepping down from the CEO role to focus more on a certain part of what he's doing. I don't know if you have any thoughts.

32:26Atrioc:I think the reason you might care as a non-AI head about Demis Osama specifically is that he's the guy who led AlphaFold. He's the guy who at Google DeepMind pushed the company to make a medical-focused AI that they won the Nobel Prize for it in chemistry, which is allowing all these different researchers and scientists to like create proteins around the world. So as much as there's these obvious horrifying doom scenarios, and I do think there should be a slowdown in regulation. As a reminder, there's like real progress and promise where the good scenario, if it happens is like these companies, as a result of these tools being built are going to be able to just create medicine and cure lie or cure disease, save lives at just an unprecedented scale.

33:09Atrioc:So there is a world where all this goes really well, or maybe it's some degree of both. But what they did is after making alpha fault, the, the AI that helps design proteins that they won the Nobel prize for, they created a spinoff company called isomorphic labs, which is specifically within Google deep mind. And it's just for creating new medicine. So that's their entire thing. And they've been doing this for a couple of years and they're supposedly going to start human trials with some of their like new drugs later this year. Like they said it was going to be last year. It keeps getting pushed back.

33:39Atrioc:Trials is still like the part of medicine development that's real real slow the ai isn't going to magically fix um but like essentially demis has been really he's been the head of google ai and all the google shit and everything falls under him right but arguably it seems like he's kind of cared the most really about this medicine stuff and so i think there's a world where this is he didn't leave so like there's yeah there's a world where this is good because the guy who was forced to deal with all of Google's AI now gets to focus on the medicine stuff. And he just seems like a really brilliant, good person.

34:12Atrioc:He's like one of the people that everybody really, really likes as a human. And then the downside is probably Google will replace him with somebody who's like, let's crank some fucking revenue. Okay. So yeah. So damn as I like the undercurrent of him stepping down is that it seems to be, maybe it wasn't his choice. Like he is kind of being forced out of the CEO role to focus on things he likes because Google is very angry that they've fallen behind on the cutting edge. Like Gemini's not releasing it. They're behind on schedule. So it seems like there's a pressure to like cut him out, to refocus in.

34:47Aiden:When you say the pressure from falling behind is, do you mean the financial pressure because they've had this recent financial underperformance for like the first time in their company's history, or at least in a long, long time? Or do you mean more to do with the technology falling behind. I think both, but I think nobody in Silicon Valley right now cares about making money, it seems. They're not in that vibe yet. That's old news. Really, I think the leaders of Google are just worried that they had a hot moment where Gemini felt like it was right up there with the best of them. Now they've fallen a little bit behind, and they're trying to catch up.

35:20Atrioc:Did you ever play Black and White, that game, as a kid? You got a little hand, and you're like a God simulator. This game came out in, what, 2001 uh fun fact about demis not only is he is a chess prodigy like he was one of the best chess players in britain growing up he also after graduating cambridge at age 21 joined that studio was instantly hired as the head ai programmer in 2001 he wrote the ai and all of the god logic for black and white that game that you and i play as a kid before then leaving because he wanted to go make like super intelligence this guy is like he's a crazy life story like i love that game that was a fun game yeah so he's he's like obsessed with medicine and simulations those are like his two like obsessions if you listen to him talk if you guys are trying to put a name

36:05Aiden:to a face listening to this if you had happened to have watched the alpha go documentary he's like the main guy in that behind uh the development of the ai that they're showcasing in that documentary

36:17Atrioc:at the time more for this show comes from serval i don't know if you guys have experienced bad it at the, I don't want to name the company. It starts with an E and it ends with an L and there's a middle letter in the middle. So at ESL, one of the things on my first day was that I didn't get a computer. I couldn't figure it out. And I was like, Hey, I would like to do work. I need a company computer. And I was told like, Oh, it's not ready yet. And there's just no information because the IT folks were backed up with other stuff. And so after waiting for a day and a half sitting at my desk with nothing to do, I eventually like asked one of the engineers.

36:48Atrioc:He was like, well, let's just go grab one. And we go and grab one. and we find one that's in the warehouse that's unused. I set it up, at which point there's an angry company-wide email from the IT lead that says, nobody should be taking computers and utilizing them. You must go through the official IT process. And this was day two, and I was like, what am I supposed to do with this job?

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38:38Atrioc:Rated PG-13.

38:43Atrioc:His involvement with black and white hit the gaming world like a missile. Oh!

38:48Aiden:Oh, Doug, that's interesting you say that because I was going to say all these companies not concerned about money. But what can you buy with money? Missiles. Love. Missiles. Missile defense systems. Wow. And boy, does the United States need them right now. So this is coming out. a concern as the U.S. has slogged through the Iran war is that we are using way too many of our Patriot interceptor missiles, our defensive missile systems. And we, since the beginning of this war, have used more than 1 ,500 of these missiles. But to contextualize, we only have less than 1 ,700 of them left. And in all of 2025, the U.S.

39:36Aiden:made 600 of them. So right now, we are on pace, if this war continues, to run out of these missiles that are critical.

39:45Atrioc:We're in a war, and we make two a day. And that's it? That's right.

39:49Aiden:Yeah, about a little less, actually. A little less than two a day. We make 600 missiles a year, and we are burning through at a double that rate. So we're... Okay. We're going to run out. In fact, are running out. And I was looking at the math here, and I was saying, wow, it looks like we're on pace to run out of these missiles if this conflict continues to rage on. And the Pentagon has responded to this and has said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnall, said claims of U.S. munition shortages are false. when the fake news media irresponsibly amplifies these lies, the real world consequence is clear.

40:28Aiden:Our enemies are emboldened to provoke or attack American troops. And I do, and while I appreciate Sean's perspective on this, I ran the numbers again. You went back to the lab. I went back to the lab. Unless I'm doing the math wrong, we seem to be running out. Yeah, it's the...

40:50Atrioc:Wait, is the Pentagon saying your numbers are wrong or is it just saying?

40:55Aiden:No, they just said it's the fake news media. It's the fake news media and if you talk about it too much, it's like going to make our enemies. Okay. As if our enemies are not aware of the obvious reality that our entire defense industrial bases is headquartered in China basically now. We can't make these rapidly and we're burning through about an understandable rate.

41:11Atrioc:But maybe somebody else will deal with it if we don't talk about it. That's a good idea.

41:15Aiden:It is crazy. each one of these Patriot Interceptor missiles costs about$4 million. $4 to$5 million per missile. This story was enraging me because if you look under the surface, okay, it's like, if you think about what we've spent, it's like$9 trillion in the past 10 years on the military. And you look about where it goes and it's just bleeding. It's like the leaky pipe, but it's just bleeding off to these defense contractors who are upcharging for everything. And the recent story related to this that made me so angry is that Ukraine is desperate for these missiles because they are good, but they're dramatically overpriced.

41:50So they asked for permission to be able to build them themselves so they can make them for the war effort. And Raytheon and fricking Northrop Grunman blocked it because they are concerned that if Ukraine builds them themselves, they will, number one, improve them. Number two, make them cheaper. That's not. So they will not be able to make the engorged profits on these extremely important defensive missiles.

42:14Atrioc:I expect for American history.

42:16Aiden:For the work that they put in.

42:17Atrioc:Imagine if like Henry Ford is like, I'm going to make sure no other countries can build the car, the Model T forever. Stick to it. And yeah, it's becoming quite problematic because war tactics are evolving around these things. So where I was reading this article about how things are evolving both in Russia and in Iran and also in like Colombia. and it's like these missiles are so expensive. They are good at stopping both missiles and drones, but they're so expensive that what they do is they just send the cheapest shit in waves at them. And then while those are busy, they send drones. And the drones usually, all it needs are like one to break through.

42:57It happened to the US air bases in Jordan. Like it's happening recently and they're just, they're overwhelming these air defenses and the stockpile is just dwindling. So there has to be a solution. And we can tie this into a raw and war update. I don't know if you guys have, It's the same shit as usual, I guess. You know, the never-ending negotiation that doesn't end. Except that Trump has now reverted to, I guess, the original plan, which is I'm going to wait you out with economic warfare. We're going to do the blockade and we're not going to negotiate. And Iran has said that we're going to wait out your presidency.

43:31This is one person in Iran. This is an advisor to one of the negotiators who published it publicly. but it seems like the shift is they don't think any negotiation will be on real standing. So they're negotiating outside of America. They're negotiating with Oman to make a pathway to the straight. And instead they're just planning on him losing in the midterms, maybe losing, like they're just waiting him out because they don't think any deal they make will be concrete.

43:54Atrioc:Do you know, like I had read that Iran inflation is at 70 % year over year. So is there any validity to the idea that Iranians are suffering to such a degree that they will rise up. 100%. I looked at them as well. So the truth is that the economic warfare angle is at the very least the only strategy they've tried so far that has any merit because the blockade is harming the Iranian economy and their ability to make money. However, I looked at what their budget was for this year, like their official state budget and how much they expected to make on oil to pay for that. They've already made that money because of the increased profits from oil being surged this year.

44:36So they're like ahead of schedule. So even if you cut off all their oil exports, which we haven't done yet, there's still some getting out, it's like they can wait a lot longer than I think Trump is willing to. Their currency is in the gutter. People are upset there. Their economy is bad. But sanctions have not caused them to crumble in the past, and it makes them unlikely that it'll happen in any short-term timeline in the future. So I think they can take economic pain for longer than Trump can take higher gas prices and like dwindling support. That's what it seems to be. So additionally, there's reports coming out of like the soldiers that are on, I forget, I think it's the USS Kennedy or whatever boat is out there helping enforce this blockade.

45:21They've been out there for like months longer than their normal deployment. The food is bad. The showers are moldy. People are getting angry. they're, you know, like the soldier morale is horrendous. They really don't want to be deployed this long. It's been extended, extended, extended. So I don't know. I just think the plan is switched to a waiting game which doesn't seem to work. I can't see the Iranian regime just being like, you know what? We give up. It's over. No matter how bad the economic pressure gets. It would have to be... It's like back to praying for a revolution there, which I don't think is going to happen.

45:54Aiden:There's this opinion article from the FT that came out this week and it's called Will Failure in Iran Reshape How the U.S. Fights? And I thought this article was interesting because it's kind of laying out the path of how we've wound up here. The initial aggressive seeming success of the U.S. military followed up by Iran's continued resistance and ability to hold out through the strategy that they have chosen. And then it winds down the article by reflecting on the rest of the world's interaction with this war and specifically americans the way that we seem to be moving on in the sense of the stock market is like finding its way uh people people's like uh concern and engagement with this war is fading and letting the this crisis unfolding from the war become the status quo without actually pushing back that much against it now uh even if there is not that much support for the war itself when you pull them and the article ends on this paragraph that says vietnam veterans were able to significantly change the u.s military creating the all-volunteer force and changing the american theory of victory partly because they believe the public was willing to hold decision makers accountable it's unclear today if the average American even cares.

47:20Aiden:Now I'm not going to, it's such a stretch to say that this has been equivalently impactful to American life in the way that Vietnam was. But I think the broad article is attention as this continues to pass in the same way that it exists on the show, right? We've made jokes about how we feel like we're engaging with the same circular headlines over and over again. And even our personal interest in how the story is unfolding because it feels so cyclical, like fades over time. Yeah. And I think in the same way that you can't run like a fucking Iran war thumbnail every week on the episode. It's inherent to the idea that like people are just getting used to that this is going on now and it's just happening in the background and people just latch on to whatever like the new news stories are.

48:04I agree with all that except for the line in there he said about will the American public like ignore it or not about punish it. And it's like the way the American public punishes in our system is through elections. We're having a midterm coming up. It seems likely he will be punished for, I mean, people's mood on the economy, eight out of 10, think it's bad. Like, you know what I'm saying? I think it's, I think it's, we're at a close, I think it's why he's under a desperate attempt to like make some progress. Yeah. Is that he feels the pressure.

48:31Aiden:I think it's like the consequences of the pressure, like is not really there in the short term. Like that's how it feels. It's like there's nothing to hold him accountable until the next election, which is still quite far away. Yeah, but that's been the true of everything Trump's doing this. Like he's just, there's no other way to, he can just ignore every other, people get mad and he doesn't fuck you. Like I think the election is like the only real release valve.

48:54Atrioc:I guess it is interesting. There aren't like, at least that I'm aware of, you know, big nationwide protests against the war or things like that. It does feel like they've shielded it from the average person enough. You know, you are not thinking about Iran until you see like the gas pump or prices, which then feel more broad. So maybe that's, I think, sort of valid argument, but yeah, I assume he's just going to get annihilated in the midterms. Yeah, and part of it is that unlike Vietnam, there's not a nationwide draft, and there's no boots on the ground. Like we're still in the early phases of this.

49:25The problem is he can't achieve his goals without doing some of those things, and so it's this weird tension of where, yeah, there's no progress.

49:33Aiden:I wanted to see if either of you had seen this at all because I think I saw this like passing article sort of headline go around, but I've seen no major news source actually confirm this, So it makes me question whether it's true. But I also feel like I may have missed something. No, it's a podcast.

49:48Atrioc:Just say it confidently.

49:49Aiden:Well, is that Trump has like privately recognized that their goals up until this point are impossible to pursue with the, like part of the negotiation can no longer be the Iran nuclear deal. They just have to have the goal of getting back to the straight being open and nuclear agreements can have no part in this anymore. Like it's just impossible. And the best case scenario is going back to the status quo. And he's admitted that privately, but not publicly, but I have not seen, I want to stress this. I have not seen any significant outlet or like credible source confirm that. I've just seen people be saying, I read from credit.

50:30I think it was like Axios interview behind the scenes. Yeah. And they did say that, uh, essentially what you said, but I think even more than that, it's becoming more obvious. they can't even get back to the status quo on Hormuz. Like it's that they're going to have to agree to some deal where they get some sort of fee. Like that's what the Oman-Iran deal is right now, where they're going to share the fee on the Strait of Hormuz. It seems like the nuclear deal is going to be completely abandoned and they're trying to get a somewhat negotiated small fee and that will be the new normal. That seems to be like the situation.

51:06I don't think there's any world, based on what Iran is saying, that they're going to give up the fee on straight-up hormones because that is their financial lifeline and leverage lifeline to prevent attacks in the future. So I don't know. It's weird because, you know, it was the most sour grapes thing. I saw, I think it was Scott Besson come out and say, you know what, Hormuz isn't even that, like, it's not even a big deal. Like, people are going to move around it. People are going to start using pipelines and stuff. And it's not going to, it's like,

51:37because Trump has said so many times, In fact, they said recently, it's basically open. We've got it open. We control it. It's basically open. And now, basically open is the funniest thing.

51:49Atrioc:It's only one part with deadly drones in mind. That's like 1 % of it. It's not a big deal. Now they're saying it's not even a big deal. Who cares if we have the Hormuz? That is the most obvious pivot. And so, yeah, I just don't see it happening that way. Do I know you know, is there a world where we invent a technology that stops the drones from Iran? That's the main thing, right? I guess it's mining and them sending cheap drones. Yeah. What if America has better drones that shoot them down? There is only one country working on that. Well, there's two, I guess, Russia and Ukraine. They're working on this night and day.

52:23They're the most advanced in the drone warfare. And I wanted to do a little pivot to another story where we're not taking the opportunity enough to learn from what Ukraine is doing in drones, but there is a country that is. It's Colombian narco-terrorists. Apparently inside Columbia, there is a multi-decade long war between narco gangs and the government. They've been fighting forever. And one innovation in this war has been drones because the government in Columbia has always controlled the skies. And so the rebel groups have been on the ground and they've always been afraid of the skies. Now they're using drones to switch that battle.

53:00And they realized after doing this, they didn't know enough about drones. so colombian narcos started enlisting as volunteers in the ukrainian army to learn how drones like learn how like the latest and greatest in drone warfare how they use fiber optic cables to avoid being jammed how they like they've they've just learned all this shit and ukraine is so desperate for like volunteers that they're taking them so there's this weird situation where like people who want to learn drone tech are enlisting in an active war in a different continent they don't know or care about in order to learn this and we, an ally of Ukraine seem to not want to learn it at all despite their volunteering.

53:40But this is, you know, Russia or Ukraine is at the cutting edge of this. I've I think we've down talked Russia, but more I read about it, they're also doing a lot of innovations in drones is not a cool thing, but.

53:50Aiden:This is like top five things I would guess is a vice headline. Yeah, isn't it crazy? It's hitting all the beats of a vice headline. It is.

53:58Atrioc:My takeaway is we have American soldiers volunteer in the Columbia Narcos. Okay. And then we chain it back up to Ukraine. No, we'll bring it back. Columbia is a shorter trip. It's a shorter trip. That's a good idea.

54:12Aiden:The Colombian narcos will come back. We'll learn from them. Okay, so we open the border. Open the border to Colombian narcos.

54:23Atrioc:Only if they know about drones. Drone-wielding narco terrorists. And we allow them in. And we learn. We learn together. We live and we learn. Are you a Colombian narco terrorist? You're not welcome here unless you can answer this quiz about drones. In which case, we've got a gold card for you.

54:43Aiden:Answering the correct question about drone warfare and being like, wow, you're so well versed. You can come in. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really fascinating story about how Colombia is kind of in panic because they've lost their monopoly on airspace. And it was the last like the narco gangs are well funded. It's not a funding problem. It was just like they had the lack of tech. And now the Ukrainian stuff is causing it. All comes back to education. Yeah, it really does come back to education. That is a wise point.

55:13Can AI invent a virus that makes everybody smarter and so that we can learn about drones quicker?

55:18Atrioc:Well, I think we'll have it make like a thousand. We'll eject them all in. It's just maybe one of them works, yeah. Sounds good. I think Brady would be on board with that.

55:25Aiden:Well, they're close to narco-terrorists in Japan. YouTubers. The Japanese. They're farmers. Japanese farmers. The narco-terrorists of the land. And I wanted to chat about this story I had read simply titled, Can Robots Save an Aging Japan in the New York Times? And there's a few things at play here. So I think people are pretty familiar with the idea that rural Japan is kind of being emptied out. A younger generation that used to live there is moving to the larger cities in the country, especially Tokyo. Japan's birth rate has been on a decline for a very, very long time. And that is leaving a lot of the countryside in Japan just filled with an older population.

56:20Aiden:A lot of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. And a lot of these people own and operate like family or small farms. A lot of the farming in the country is not like industrial. It is still based around individual. This 89-year-old Japanese man still rice farms the old-fashioned way. But actually, a lot of like the fruit farming in the country, I think the example it uses here is like sakura, like branches in the winter being farmed. uh, talks about cherries, like these different industries within Japanese agriculture that are being maintained by an older and older population with not a lot of people to turn to.

57:03Aiden:Very few people are like moving out to these areas. You may have also seen very famous stories about how, Oh, these Japanese homes are on sale for a dollar. Uh, and that is because there is no demand. He literally says in the article, I do things the old way. I, uh, And what the article sort of postures is as it goes through these like prefectures in rural Japan and talks to different farmers in these communities is the way they're trying to navigate their own futures and how their farms are going to be passed on, how these farms are going to continue to operate in the future. right uh japan in general has like kind of failed to compete on the international stage when it comes to farming uh because of that lack of like industrialization and this continued family and individual ownership of these farms um and some of them are considering turning to robots in order to accommodate uh the help that they the help that they need to continue running the farms I don't know if you guys remember this, but when we talked about automation a long time ago, I said, I was like, well, one of the main ways I feel like this could help is as like people encounter these problems with birth rates and you have this lack of like young labor, you're going to need automation like robots to fill the gap in.

58:32It just makes me feel a sense of dread. i know and i know that it's useful and helpful i just wish it wasn't like this it feels like a science fiction novel of the end of the world where we just give up having kids and everything slowly dwindles as robots take care of the elderly i get a wally vibe dude there's something super

58:52Aiden:science fiction-esque about it like the the way the uh article paints a very very sad picture of these towns where where there used to be farms you know nature is like growing and back into place one of the risks it was talking about is how there's been a boom in the bear population because there's less humans around and then for the remaining uh farmers that are in that area they actually there has been a rise in like bear attacks in these areas uh and and also one of the robots used in this article is to ward off bears like two intimidated bears yeah uh i i think you might be listening to all this and be thinking wow well one of the things your country can do to like help combat this issue is introduce more immigration into the country but as we've also talked about on the show not on the table for japan no japan will not have it and it was interesting it even commented on uh what on this issue for one of the prefectures yamagata prefecture uh like other prefecture leaders he has chosen technology over another potential fix to the nation's labor shortage, welcoming more foreign workers.

1:00:03Aiden:The Japanese government is cracking down on visas at a time when they arguably need this support in their labor market more than ever. And I looked at this in a population of 1 million in that prefecture. There are only 145 foreign born farm workers in, which is absolutely insane. And I'm not, I think there's the, there is a complex relationship with using like suppressed wage foreign workers to like operate your farms and your agricultural industry. Like there's a lot of nuance around the negatives of that, like in a place like the United States. But in this case, like they have put the solution off the table entirely.

1:00:51Aiden:And what's interesting is even if you have this idealistic view of these robots, able to fill this gap. It shows like the example of this one like cherry picking robot. It doesn't really work well. Like these things are not developing at a pace to effectively fill the gap of what a human would provide. And it looks like the pressure on these farmers is hitting a lot harder than the robot technology to replace people is actually catching up, at least at the moment right i mean it's hard enough to get an old person stuck in their ways to get used to making a facebook account let alone to setting up and adding to their process a brand new cutting-edge robot that is being changed and adapted in real, like, I don't know.

1:01:43It seems tough to me. If this is like a solopreneur form.

1:01:47Aiden:Yeah. I mean, there's the, if it's a small business, maybe they can, the portion of people who aren't really eager to like incorporate this to begin with. Yeah. But then also the people who are willing to incorporate it, not really seeing the results that they want. It's expensive too, right? It's expensive. And that thing, regardless of that video is actually not particularly good at picking cherries. And it breaks down or needs a software update. I feel like that's a tough thing for the small farms. Like I'm sure the industrial ones are going to adopt that quickly as hell, but yeah. It just feels like this sad like end of, a true end of era.

1:02:23Aiden:Like when you read about these similar sorts of communities in places like Italy, in Korea, these countries that are beginning to face the realities of like a crumbling birth.

1:02:36Atrioc:We're going to look back in history and be like, Korea is this civilization that appeared and made everybody's RAM cheaper and then disappeared. It was a mythical, mythical tribe that helped the society build better washing machines and cars and memory and then faded away. Like there are, it's so bad. They're going to go crazy. It's insane for both these countries.

1:03:00Aiden:The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Hi, everybody. It's Megan Rapinoe. I've been thinking a lot about this one question I've been asked over and over. A question about the choices I've made, the colors of my hair, the things in the world I've spoken about, and the things that I haven't.

1:03:38Aiden:I've heard this question asked so many different ways, but it always came down to, why are you like this? And as you know, there's no simple answer, because people are not simple. We're messy and complicated and contradictory and layered. So on my new show, I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists, and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, why do we do it like this? And can we do it differently? My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic, not to tell us their answer or read from their script, but to take us on their journey.

1:04:20Aiden:Check out my new show, Why Are You Like This? on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. New episodes drop every Thursday. If there's anything we've heard about this entire summer, no matter where we go or who we talk to, it's about gas prices.

1:04:37Atrioc:I want to show you something. Look at these gas prices. They're ridiculous. I don't drive as much.

1:04:42Aiden:I think they're just skyrocketing day in, day out. Gas prices are up since Donald Trump started his war with Iran. But how much does a little pain at the pump actually affect people's vote. Who is telling the truth? And who is going to represent us and do something about it? And if gas is still near$4 a gallon come November, is it game over for Donald Trump and the Republicans? The most important is you can't deny the reality that Americans feel. People see what they're paying.

1:05:12Atrioc:You know, Trump trying to not recognize what people are struggling with and then to ignore the severity of it is just not a winning strategy.

1:05:21Aiden:That's this week on America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:05:51I mean, this is the story right now. Everyone's debating data centers. It's this weird pressure between a gazillion dollars flowing in to create them and then individual people pushing back in small towns to not build them. Yeah.

1:06:03Atrioc:Yeah. I have been hesitant to talk about data centers on this show because it is so large of a topic and so emotional that it feels like it takes a lot. So here's, I think, like a pretty interesting look into some of what is going on currently with data centers.

1:06:15Aiden:Doug, I'm already upset. You're already upset? I don't even know what this says or what it's about. I've started typing a comment. Okay, write your comment now.

1:06:22Atrioc:If you're watching, write your comment now. And just assume, kind of imagine whatever I'm going to say and then get really angry at it. Well, make it a little bit worse. Like imagine it and then make it a little bit worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then get angry. And always include your title. Be like, as a blank, this is blank. You have to always credit yourself, but in a way that doesn't give us any real verified info of any kind. All right, so two articles this week that kick this off for me. One is by Derek Thompson called The Great American AI Rebellion and a second one by Noah Smith, a more economic focused one called banning data centers would blow up the U S economy.

1:06:51Atrioc:So these two guys are largely talking about what would happen if we actually ban data center development, like many people are suggesting. So you can kind of just scroll down as we're going through this, but Derek kind of lines out a couple of simple things where he's like, let's just establish some, some facts. First off AI is driving the U S economy. It's about a third of economic growth. the AI data center build out is four X larger of a share of GDP compared to the 2000s telecom build out. So it's not just that this is like a huge part of our economy. It's like relative to the last gigantic boom.

1:07:27Atrioc:It's like four times bigger and all the best performing stocks in the SMP 500 right there. It's all for the most part data. It's like AI build out, you know, it's memory and infrastructure, not even necessarily the AI companies themselves. Okay, so... Oh, sorry, go ahead. I just want to chime in on that because I think, regardless of what I think about data centers, that these two stats are unsustainable either way, much like the dot-com build out in 2001. Well, I don't know. AI can help you write my emails. And it can, and I've never said it's not useful, but like these numbers are absurd. Nobody is making money yet, and they're spending gazillions, and that could end whether or not it's banned.

1:08:08You know what I'm saying? Even if they fully allow data centers, people might go, oh, wait a minute, I just spent a trillion dollars in data centers. This isn't making money. And they cut back on the spending and it's not growing. That's the only thing I'd push back on is I think this could end either way, whether or not they're regulated. But yeah, I want to hear what he says. So this is first, AI driving the economy.

1:08:24Atrioc:Second idea, AI, this AI boom, it requires data centers. Data centers will power all this stuff, but more people keep using AI every day. AI usage gets higher every day. Like the model that you use now, if you go talk to some AI model, or certainly if you code or do it else, ever else, it's doing more than it did before. It's using a lot more tokens. Google said the AI token usage has increased 300 times in the last 200 years, between May 2024 and 2026. 300 times in two years. What did I say? You said 200 years.

1:08:59Aiden:200 years. I was like, I would hope so. And I was like, Doug, I believe that. I mean, that's 200 years. That's worse than I thought.

1:09:10Atrioc:given that ai didn't exist before like five or six years ago technically that's still true if you last five thousand years it's gone up about 300x yeah um and then third fact opposing data centers as i'm sure most people listening are aware has become a bipartisan insanely popular issue it's one of the few bipartisan things left in this country uniting the country in rural towns that are deep red and people that in cities that are deep blue cold war 9-11 it's data centers no it's it's like it really is one of the rare uniting things people fucking hate them yeah so a couple interesting things this is from no opinions article but in august 2025 a year ago 42 percent of americans said they were opposed to a data center in their area gallup poll this year now says 71 percent opposed like the the increase in people going i don't want this near me i don't want this is dramatically increasing this is higher the 71 percent of americans saying i don't want one anywhere near me is higher than the peak of nuclear power plant opposition in 2001 which was 63 that is crazy this is one of the most like unwanted things in america period um and then the fourth thing that is maybe causing all this to spin is we're now seeing data center memoratoriums so in july the new york governor kathy hochel ordered a one-year memoratorium on all large data centers and new york was building a lot of data centers now it's like one year pause and then in texas which is really surprising because texas is one of the big dominant uh data center builders um greg abbott signed a thing that said all new data centers have to be audited before they can be hooked up to the power grid so i read something by the texas tribune where they looked into this there's like 350 data centers right now operating in texas there's somewhere between because there's not an official database somewhere between 250 and 1 ,600 that are in the works in the queue waiting to be approved.

1:11:08Atrioc:300 right now, 1 ,600. Because Greg Abbott said that there are 1 ,800 projects in our queue and approximately 90 % of new power requests are data centers. Do you guys know how they build those new apartments where they have a Costco on the ground floor and the apartments above it? Have you seen that? I haven't. It would be in heaven. Yeah, that's a real thing. They're building, and I think they should do that with every data center. We get affordable housing. Costco on top. Yeah, data center. it comes with affordable housing so you well hold on in this neapolitan sandwich and a costco costco in the middle okay the people go on top yeah okay can i can i just bring up the obvious and i want to hear so the question by both of these two guys and there's a very another interesting article is the biggest political movement happening right now in america is on a crash course to stop the the thing that is driving all economic growth what the fuck is going to happen and what is no no i don't know what's going to happen my question is um look i think these articles are probably going to make the case that this is important for the economy and that data centers are going to get built for this build on some way or not form kind of they're both concerned about okay i'm just trying to say like from a perspective of somebody in a town what do you see as a benefit of a data like a data center being built near you seems to be noise, construction, pollution?

1:12:29What is the benefit? That's what I'm trying to understand. How do they sell this to people? I think they've been forcing it down mid without any sort of PR strategy of like, why would someone want one? Because I think there's two groups of people, right? There's a group of people who are like completely anti-LAI. I don't want data centers to exist. I want to try and stop this thing, kill it in the womb. And there's a group of people who are like not in my backyard, which seems to be a larger group of people that's really growing, where it's like, i'm gonna use chad gbt or i'm gonna use but they better not build a day center in my fucking town that seems to be a very popular movement and if you want to stop that you need to have a strong message to be like here's the benefit is it jobs i guess what is the it's jobs and tax revenue right

1:13:10Atrioc:that's the pitch it's this is going to create jobs and you will get a bunch of tax revenue um so i found an article if you're interested in learning more about what people on the ground are doing to push back against data centers. There is a Substack article by Jasmine Sun, Jasmine Sun, who it is called No Data Centers in My Backyard. She actually went to a ton of small Midwest towns and talked to people. And this article is fantastic. And I highly recommend people go check it out. And the takeaways from that, I thought were kind of surprising. So this is getting to the heart of your question.

1:13:40Atrioc:It's not somebody in LA tweeting about, oh my God, the water usage. These are people like in towns where data centers are being built or proposed. so what she found a couple obviously go read the whole article but a couple takeaways one almost nobody who's pushing back in these small towns hates ai conceptually they aren't actually the ai equals bad you're like yeah it's cool but it's how they're being built so one something i was not aware of a lot of these data center projects are being approved in secret and so the companies like a microsoft will caught will have a government local government sign an nda that says they can't talk about what's happening.

1:14:18Atrioc:They do this with many different small communities, so they can't talk to each other about what's happening, and they don't really know what the other options are on the table, and they can't talk to their constituents about what is happening. So people in these towns over the last couple years have been blindsided. A corporation forcing a local government to sign an NDA so it can't talk to its own citizens is fucking crazy.

1:14:39Aiden:It just feels like that shouldn't be allowed. Am I crazy? it feels it feels like that defeats the purpose of government am I am I crazy imagine like a president doing is like a dress and saying well I kid about this part because I signed an NDA with Raytheon I can't mention that but like I tell you about the Iran war I would tell you about it but I signed my ass for one

1:15:04Atrioc:you know what it is yeah this that shit's crazy uh in the second one bad experiences in the past so she goes she's talked to all these people in Midwest towns where some big company had promised a plant or whatever and then pulled out or you know this town used to have a big GM plant and General Motors went bankrupt or left and then that town's just been screwed and so there's all these instances where these towns have been like quote are we going to get left holding the bag was a phrase I heard over and over they are worried that a company comes in promises all these things the town has to offer things for them to pick their town that's what's been going on for several years they'll say we're going to give you a bunch of tax breaks so we're not going to get stadiums bro it's yeah yeah exactly and again the nda thing was causing them to not be able to go to other towns and say what are you guys being offered and so these towns were like building out infrastructure and promising all these tax like write-offs that kind of undercut the core premise of value proposition in order to try to get these deals locked and then some of them don't end up happening and so there's this total lack of trust from local communities and their local government and the company to then deliver on what they're saying is going to happen.

1:16:15Atrioc:And then all this is within the context of broader social media. Everybody's getting pissed off and organizing this on a much broader scale. But even then, she said it's less about climate change broadly, and it's more about this physical space in our town will become a big, ugly box. So every, you know, the data center of every, every data center is going to have a different impact, uses, has different water usage, like the water thing is largely going away with closed loop water cooling, but the energy usages, the companies are telling them, Oh, we're going to cover all the energy. But then here we go.

1:16:47Atrioc:Quote in Michigan, people had already been primed by years of rate hikes. So promises that a data center's costs will be covered ring hollow. There's just no trust that these companies are going to do the things that they're saying they're going to do. So even when a company does come in and there I've, I've read a few cases where like this town got a hundred million dollars in tax revenue and they're able to pay all their teachers well and blah, blah, blah. But most of the jobs are temporary. They're really well paying, but they're temporary. And then the tax things. So, so she actually, in this thing, interviewed Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, who's, you know, being criticized at this, as this like NIMBY developer, but Kathy Hochul sort of says, no, no, no.

1:17:25Atrioc:The point is that every local government is being overwhelmed by these corporate lawyers offering these things and trying to push them to make a decision really quick and offer all this stuff and what i'm doing is saying we are pausing this for a year until we get standards across everything that every single one so early ideas would include uh statewide environmental rules you have to do a million dollars in local benefit benefits per megawatt you have to repeal the state sales tax exemption so these tax exemptions can't go through so i think it's a really fascinating article about small communities feeling like they've been taken an advantage of and seemingly have been.

1:17:59Atrioc:Yeah. And that's being a lot of like on the ground pushback on rather than just what you see on social media. Yeah. It's fascinating. I mean, I like what you said about temporary jobs. Cause I was looking into this and it's, they are extraordinarily well paying and the economy is bad right now. And there's people, people in my community who do like HVAC, you just travel the country going to these different data center sites and they're making bank, but they're not putting down roots in the town and like it's the onto the next one once you build anything so it's this weird and then once they're running my understanding is they require a lot less yeah it's like i forget off the top of my head it's like a hundredth or something yeah there's people it's like a small number of maintenance staff but the job creation is a temporary all these temporary hotels and you know services spring up in this town and then they

1:18:45Aiden:just go away after two or three years that was my surprise is that people are so quick to leap at this because if if you're presented something like oh here is amazon's coming in and creating like a big fulfillment center and warehouse or there's going to be this large like factory i feel like there's something more clearly concrete about the employment that those things are offering uh you know people could have their own like qualms with like those things being set up in your town as well yeah but ultimately it's like oh when this thing is finished and operating it's a place filled with employees that's the mental image you have in your head when you think about it right but my mental image of a data center that's fully operational is like empty rows of servers that are overseen by like a couple guys yeah and i i it's interesting to me that all of these towns are like leaping at an opportunity that has that long-term vision for it like i sure they know that the benefit is short-term or i feel like the article talks about as well but you know

1:19:46Atrioc:So it's worth acknowledging what can be good here. A lot of these are like Midwest towns that were hollowed out over the last couple of decades. They don't have anything. One of the examples she talks about is this giant, like basically where they used to be this massive construction. It's just this giant wasted plot where nothing is happening and would cost tens of millions of dollars to retrofit into anything useful. And a data center could come in, they could do that, generate the temporary jobs. But then as long as there is tax revenue locked in and the companies aren't taking advantage of these little towns to get massive tax benefits, then it's like, okay, if a town democratically decides to allow this to happen and you have Microsoft come in and build a big data center, you tax them.

1:20:29Atrioc:You tax the shit out of them. You should get a bunch of sales tax and property taxes from this. And then a small town that otherwise is hollowing out and has nothing, at least has this just huge surge of tax base. In response, you have a big, ugly box, ideally in a place where most people aren't living right next to it. So it's not perfect, but there is a world where this is, is helpful to communities that want it. It just, of course you can't have these kinds of tactics. This is so ridiculous. I totally agree. If they could tax it, there's a, there's way more benefit because on some level, it's like these companies are the richest companies in America.

1:21:04They have hundreds of billions of dollars they're throwing into this. You can siphon that off to small, like you could actually turn that money into your money there's a benefit there but yeah if they're if they're just

1:21:15Aiden:out legal maneuvering that it reminds me i mean it's it's it's exploiting the small communities it's a you're you're backing them into a corner taking away any of like the real long-term tangible benefits they could be getting out of this and making sure they can't communicate with anybody else so that they can't figure out what those benefits could be and then plopping down all

1:21:37Atrioc:the consequences on them it's usually deferred you should say it's not like oh i'm not gonna pay you taxes it's like the first 10 years i won't have to pay taxes but then of course as is talked about in this article people are like none of these companies are profitable right now what if you go out of business in 10 years there's nothing stopping the company from then leaving after eight years and they never got to the point they had to pay taxes so as long as there's an as long as the local governments are at the negotiating table and don't get taken advantage of they can get the tax are having to immediately it's like what should happen yeah uh before i stopped uploading i had been working on a big a clip uh a while back about the stadium move in uh i think it's the chiefs right i mean i'm not i'm out of i'm out of uh but i think you haven't uploaded a video in so long this is a video i didn't upload i'm going back on it the chiefs were moving their stadium and they moved it literally like one town over very small distance and uh a lot of people online were like what an idiot the stupid city wouldn't give them enough to be happy there they wouldn't let them upgrade their thing and that's why they moved and lost a great franchise like a lot of nfl fans were thinking it was stupid but if you look at the details the the the company i mean yeah the the stadium the team like rushed it with lawyers offered some short-term bonuses they pressured the bull cities to compete with each other and they got the other city um the other Kansas city and Kansas city, Missouri, it's like right across the border to offer them like complete tax immunity on like every, um, every aspect, like all of the money from the stadium goes to them profitably and they don't have to pay any taxes on anything it makes from outside of that.

1:23:20I don't think the exact details. The point is they completely, uh, shuffled the system and they made it so the tax base for the area cuts out everything near the stadium and all the wealthy neighborhoods or something. So they don't have to pay into anything and only thing that pays into the construction fee is like the poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts.

1:23:39Aiden:I guess would the city make the argument that there will be enough like economic activity around the new stadium? That's the argument they make, was that the stadium would build. And obviously a stadium has more economic activity than a data center. But what they found was, or at least unbiased estimates looked into it and it's like, no, some people show up for games but there's only like 12 major games in an NFL stadium a year. Like they don't do that many. And the, the cost vastly, vastly dwarfs it. So what they did was they like fuck up their tax base and, and yeah, so yeah, it just is an example of like a well-connected, well, legally equipped corporation, essentially using their information advantage to like get a law pass or something to, to get something to their benefit.

1:24:19And the longterm, it doesn't, doesn't help the local town.

1:24:21Atrioc:Same thing in Chicago, I believe. exact details but parking with the stadium oh um they're they're trying to build a new stadium and they're considering moving it out of i mean right now it's like right on the water i believe in chicago and then they're trying to get a new field built and most likely it's going to get pushed way out of the city because they're just being offered all these property tax workouts things just it's ridiculous yeah you would think that the two cities team up and they're like, Hey, why don't we just both agree that we want taxes from this? And it's just, I, man. Yeah.

1:24:58When I was looking into it, I guess it's all not fresh, but there's a huge incentive on the politicians part to be at a ribbon cutting ceremony, getting something built or released. You feel like you've made a tangible accomplishment instead of like just writing something down or making small tweaks. And, um, also you're not going to be there for the consequences that are like the reduced tax base down the road. So you get to have the big, short-term bonus. It's like a political mismatch on incentives is what the stadiums thing really is well down to. I'm sure it's similar here.

1:25:30Aiden:It's weird because I don't really know what the solution is. I almost feel like you need something at a state level, but in the Kansas City example, the cities aren't the same state, right? It's the split. Same thing with Chicago.

1:25:43Atrioc:It'd be moving it to Indiana, right? Or Illinois. I'm sorry. I'm not good at Midwest, but it's going to move to a different state which is crazy for like one of the most historic sports

1:25:54Aiden:franchises still gonna be called the chicago bears yeah that's crazy that's crazy uh yeah but you would need some sort of oversight that like requires like cities to like not negotiate against each other on some line or basis that there always need to be it needs to be like a minimum requirement for yeah i mean just the idea of governments playing different aspects i'm sorry Like corporations playing different aspects of our government against each other to get the best deals is poor in the long term, it feels. It feels like that's...

1:26:26Atrioc:If you were a billionaire, would you though? If you were like, okay, I'm going to bill. I have$20 billion. I own this sports franchise. We're making a new stadium somewhere and I can save$2 billion because Indiana instead of Illinois is offering me tax breaks. Yeah. No, it's like everyone's going off incentives, right? They're going to do the same thing. I could tell you that I wouldn't, but if I was a billionaire with an old stadium owner, they're like, yeah, I'll probably do it. Presumably if you're a billionaire, you have a lifetime of decisions that led you to get to that point. Yeah, you're probably more than many.

1:26:57Atrioc:It's just very similar to that. At which point you'll be like, I will take the two free billion dollars.

1:27:01Aiden:Well, I mean, on the front of not facing consequences when it comes to taxes, I have a little update for you guys. Oh yeah? They finally got you? Well, they're coming for me, for one. Didn't want to say that on the show. You can do a big A clip on that. On you not paying your taxes? My tax audit. That'd be pretty desperate for Upload at that point. The Aiden doesn't pay his taxes. You can't tell me that clip wouldn't pop. If I actually got audited? Oh, maybe. Maybe if I could really deep dive into your finances. Aiden is in jail. Aiden is in jail with you. That'd be a banger, actually. You do like a Caleb Hammer episode with me.

1:27:39Aiden:We just... When I'm really desperate, I'll come back to you. We'll do that, okay? Okay, so you guys might remember from a while ago there was this whole uh anti-weaponization fund that trump and todd blanche were pushing for the idea being uh that in as a trade-off to the uh scrutiny that trump had faced from the irs a while back he wanted an anti-weaponization fund put in place that set aside 1.8 billion dollars that allowed uh victims uh of the government for example the january 6 protesters uh to be paid out from this fund that trump's uh select group of lawyers or rather todd blanche's select group of lawyers could uh make payouts from but the other stipulation and this

1:28:33Atrioc:got canned this did not go through we stopped it read it but you write so funny that what you just described would be like talked about for eight straight years with Obama. It's like it was just like one week and then everybody moves on to the next. We're talking about the Iran war and even that it's like everyone's kind of over it. It's like nothing sticks anymore. I don't know if it's a Trump thing or if like we've all just gotten short form video, but it feels like no story really has the sauce for more than one week. It's a little bit of both. It's crazy.

1:29:02Aiden:Well, the thing the funny thing about that is you do you guys remember what the other little nugget or stipulational alongside that was. He can't be investigated for tax crimes. Exactly. He has indefinite IRS immunity as well as his family and their affiliated companies. Love that. And that was the other part of this agreement. You told me if you weren't a billionaire, you wouldn't run for president, win the presidency. You'd need to be a series of decisions leading up to having total immunity from the IRS. And if I was it, and if I was a billionaire and I made all those decisions, I was smart enough to become one.

1:29:36Yes.

1:29:36Aiden:I probably would go for this too. go for it. I would probably go for it. Can't fault him. So he they dropped the anti-weaponization fund and that fell out of the news cycle but what didn't get dropped was this idea of indefinite IRS immunity for Trump and why this matters Trump has already encountered problems with the IRS where he had previously was going to owe up to$100 million in owed taxes or fees to the IRS as an example of an audit that he had already experienced. So this is ignoring everything else we know about Trump. This is not a man with a clean audit history. Well, and Trump, you know, pushes pushing back against this is that he's been unfairly targeted and audited more than other rich people.

1:30:28Aiden:I've been audited every year of my entire life, which I have a lot of wealthy friends that were never audited to this day. They were never audited. I was audited, Mr. Trump said that. And, you know, he added, he tacked on, I've been treated very unfairly. But it was asked. The interesting thing about this stipulation is that it applies to his kids and their affiliated companies. And it was asked directly of the companies. uh senator warren asked companies like calci polymarket american bitcoin uh whether or not they considered themselves immune to tax investigations or prosecutions because of their affiliations to the trump family and those three companies that i just said uh did uh say that no they don't consider themselves immune like our it would be fucking insane to say that Donald Trump Jr.

1:31:23is like our advisor on our board. Therefore, we cannot be investigated for taxes. It would be insane. As Calci. That would be fucking crazy. Trust me, bro, for the entire history of the company.

1:31:36Aiden:It would be insane. It would be insane of them to say that. However... That's a story for two weeks from now. Other companies like World Liberty Financial, which if you aren't familiar with, this is like the crypto company that... Two billion dollars from the Saudis, right? Yeah, that we've talked about on this show before that the Trump sons own as well as a few other parties. They just declined to answer that question of whether or not their company would be immune with this stipulation in place. And Blanche has also pushed back and said that there are limits to the protections that I am implying here, but is not really elaborating on the specifics of how they would would or would not be applied.

1:32:21Aiden:And this is pretty much the beginning and end of this for now. It's just a follow-up to something that I think is absolutely insane. The idea that the president can get some sort of tax immunity because he's managed to appoint somebody like Blanche into a position of power, his own previously personal lawyer, and also include his family in that. Yeah, it's fucking insane. Yeah, I don't know why he doesn't just pay the taxes because the Truth Social$100 ,000 monthly fee rolled out. It just happened, and people are paying it.

1:32:56Atrioc:This is the exact same question again. I'm like, if I just made like$4 billion off corruption, I'd just pay the$100 million. But that's not what got the billionaire to that point. He needs the fucking IRS immunity.

1:33:09Aiden:I would never be in that spot because I don't think like that. What's your age of a cuck? We're little cucks who pay our taxes and follow laws. This is kind of on the subject because it's not my finance theory. I read a really good piece that basically made the argument. This is a financial sub stack. He was like, listen, for the longest time, markets were an extremely competitive place in finance where they'd hire the best and the brightest and the quants and they would make these algorithms and they would think about these ideas and they would have these long, short funds and hedge funds. They would all find ways to compete with each other to get an edge to make alpha, extra money.

1:33:41And he said, it's gotten so brutally competitive at these top Wall Street firms over like finding an edge in the market that they're all basically like struggling to get an extra 1 % or 2 % over each other. Like they all have the same ideas, the same investment ideas. They're all just basically putting in an AI. And so he's like, when you reach that point, if you want to grow revenue or returns a percent or two every year, the way you do that is you start cutting into tax, like you just pay less taxes. So instead, all the innovation, the brilliant minds and the people they're hiring are putting their attention more towards finding ever increasingly impressive ways to get around taxes because that is a way for your clients to make them an extra 1 % over your competition.

1:34:30And so the article went into detail on like, we talked about the more common ways. Maybe I'll do a follow-up on this next week. He went into detail on like, they are getting so advanced and finding so many. There's one example I remember. So you know, like if you have a stock and you sell it at a loss, you can deduct that on your taxes. Like if I invest in Microsoft, it goes down, I sell it, I can deduct that. And they would do these long short funds where they would have, you bet certain things, you bet against certain things. Some things would lose money, some things would make money. When you package all this into an ETF, it only counts as a sale for you when you sell the whole thing.

1:35:08Okay? So it's holding a lot of stocks that are changing all the time. Like if you hold an S &P 500, it's changing it all the time. so what they're doing now is they're taking all their trade ideas putting into etf that you buy okay and you're not selling the etf for a long time but within the etf they are structurally putting in losers they're putting in guaranteed losses that are deducting against and selling the

1:35:33Aiden:losses more frequently right they're holding the longs and then constantly selling the longs the shorts to counterbalance it. It's like this insane financial engineering and, uh, and it's all legal within our current system. And it was kind of hard to do before because of algorithms, they can do it really fast now. So yeah, it's just this weird thing where you're constantly including guaranteed losses into your overall package that you don't individually have to sell, but they can sell to deduct against the overall return of the fund. It's crazy. It's a, it's, it's wild. I'll have to do a deeper dive because I didn't fully just read this thing, but it just made me think of how obvious it is that, yeah, of course they would start cutting into the taxis because that is their, that's the last area.

1:36:17It's like when Game of Thrones when they have the rat and they're heating it up. There's only one where it can go, dude. They're just going through the tax base and it reminds me of these ever increasing ways they're fighting around data centers and stadiums. We need one nice story to end on because this is actually a pretty bleak episode. It was a good episode. I really enjoyed it. These are all good stories.

1:36:36Atrioc:Chinese car supply or we could do meta sued that's I guess I have a good one in it's a it's a depressing story that ends with punishment I guess do we want to end on like good thing happened or bad thing happened and they're punished what feels better. Oh I think you want consequences yeah I'd love to hear about the punishment of meta if you have a all right I mean the real quick version meta famously made Facebook and so So that's that. And I've been reading an article.

1:37:10Atrioc:So actually in March, I talked about how they, they were ordered to pay$375 million in penalties because they in New Mexico were determined to have violated the unfair practices act by misleading the public about safety for young users. But actually that was a two part trial, which I didn't know about. And then part two just ended this week. And the second part was a different legal question, which is like, is the platform a public nuisance to teen health? And so the judge ordered that, yes, it is, and ordered a$567 million fine for harming teens' health. So the total from that case is$942 million that Meta is paying just in New Mexico for harming young people's mental health.

1:37:56Atrioc:And they're being ordered to change how they operate. They are supposed to remove like counts now, which wait, what? Yeah. So the judge is saying like, in order for this to not be a public health hazard, how I know many likes I get. I know it's even worse for underage users. They won't be able to look at their metrics to see how well they're doing. No push notifications from 10 PM to 7 AM. Wait, they're dude. We are inventing the daily scroll from first principles. We are going to get there. Eventually you guys think it's stupid, but every year we get closer to it.

1:38:28Aiden:I'm not even kidding. They're putting time gaps on certain notifications that's so Daily Scroll coded. We're getting closer and closer to the Daily Scroll. You have to admit it. The Daily Scroll's coming.

1:38:40Atrioc:It's coming. And then unfortunately they did a cap of for young people, 90 hours a month, which equivocates to about three hours a day. And unfortunately, Brandon, they did not say that those three hours have to happen at a certain time slot called the Daily Scroll. They will. They will. They will. It'll take a few more years. The world's not ready for it when i proposed it but i'm ahead of my time so it's a dude that that's almost a billion dollars just in new mexico and two other cases one of which i mentioned which is that in march a woman in los angeles sued all these social media companies meta lost and had to pay her three million dollars not a lot of money for meta but when that's a single individual winning that against meta yeah uh that can scale really really big we could win the same really fast and also in 2023 33 different states sued meta for harming young people's mental health that's been combined into one giant federal case that's starting to be held and go to trial now so they're doing what's called bellwether trials i believe is the term and that's where you uh you basically if there's a whole bunch of things that need to be trialed you take a couple of them to kind of like test the water let's see how it goes so they're starting right now this is like there's there's like 40 states that are suing meta in some form for this the trials being held in oakland with the goat judge yvonne gonzalez rogers yeah she back the same judge who did apple versus epic the same judge who did elon musk versus sam altman and open ai and now she's doing like the nationwide mega social media she's in the big ones of the decade yeah and she seems like really good so that's so meta is getting like crazy fucked ninth circuit court there was the there's the thing that all these companies use which is section 230 which i don't know if i know the exact details on it's but that's how they evade responsibility for things uploaded on their platform and the ninth court just the idea is like it's user generated content yeah so we're not we're not like overseeing we're not editorializing it we aren't the ones writing this content therefore like we don't have total responsibility for the actual content right that's the that's The court threw that argument out, or at least said that you cannot use it to dismiss lawsuits out of hand.

1:40:53You can use it as an argument within the lawsuit, but you have to engage with these. So that was the big shift. It is not a defense to liability. It doesn't provide immunity from being sued as they were trying to argue. You're not immune from being sued.

1:41:07Aiden:I mean, that's kind of a step in the direction of stricter punishments or enforcement on the government's part, making them moderate the platforms better, right? And banning people more effectively. If you're getting billion dollar fines regularly, you better fucking change them. We gave the example of how in China, like a lot of the censorship that is experienced there is not necessarily happening through the government itself. The government just imposes such steep consequences on the companies that they do most of the policing themselves. And yeah, the fact that this is like the first, I think one of the first big cases playing out with this level of consequence in the single state, and this is all following suit, it feels like a step in the right direction, at least.

1:41:52Aiden:I do think the wishy-washy part to me was the things like, oh, we're getting rid of the push notifications at these times. We're capping the hours because those are all the things that it's like kids just get around. And I'm not really sure how effective any of those things will be in the aggregate. it, maybe I'm wrong about that. I feel like that part of it still needs to be more substantial, but by sticking it to the company, hopefully they start spending more time thinking about the changes they need to make to prevent these things from happening. Yeah, they're calling it the highest profile corporate trial since the tobacco settlement, like the big, where all the states sue tobacco companies, and this is, you know, you said 29 states in a week versus meta.

1:42:34That's kind of crazy. It's going to be a

1:42:36Atrioc:follow-up on this. Yeah, we'll talk about it. Presumably, like many of these things, it will take a long time and you know even with the removing likes it's not clear first off meta is going to appeal it and then we don't know whether will that be applied across everywhere or just new mexico but i it's getting to a point of like can meta exist as a company like they had so much bad news

1:42:56Aiden:recently it's crazy well they got llama that's the other thing it's like if they were crushing it day i'd be like well you can't stop them because they're they're going crazy but they're

1:43:04Atrioc:also losing it feels like the big tech companies they're the only ones that i can really think it's just social media, right? But if social media now becomes, oh, any person under 18 can sue you for millions of dollars. Yeah. Anyone. Like, how do you survive as a business? I don't know. There are, this is a crazy thing. Well, they have the metaverse. They do have the metaverse. Let's not rule out the legless metaverse. So TikTok is also being sued by tons of young people. This is a Reuters article and they're settling privately. Like TikTok is not allowing these to go to trial. So like Snap and TikTok are also dealing with this right now and they're just trying to like stuff it under the rug by settling rather than doing what meta is doing uh there are right now in los angeles alone 3 300 lawsuits against social media companies for harming young people's mental health if every one of those is worth seven million dollars and that's just in los angeles dude they're gonna be like the billboards

1:43:55Aiden:for car accidents have you been harmed by social media did you feel bad about yourself when you were under 18 if you're under 18 and you want to make some money sue tiktok right now they'll probably pay you to just shut it up. Not even kidding. Non-financial advice. No, I'm guaranteeing this lawsuit will be profitable for you. That's crazy. Wait, I have one. It's like a three-second story. I'll end on a story because this is a good one. It made me think of it when you're talking about Japan earlier. Okay. You said in these Japanese towns, they can't control all the bears. There's so many bears.

1:44:32There's a surge in bears. There's a surge in bears. Well, there's a Japanese town where they don't have enough bears but there's kind of known for their bears so they came up with a solution they're going to pay people fifteen thousand dollars to wear a bear costume and be totally silent

1:44:46Atrioc:is ridiculous they could solve their problem easily by importing foreign bears and their

1:44:51Aiden:xenophobia yeah there's xenophobia for japanese bears they do have crazy bears in china we didn't talk about that a lot while we're there yeah we should talk about this more and by the way this is a available job even for foreigners i think so if you want to make some money you can go to china you can be a bear. You have to wear the costume. You're not allowed to speak Chinese. You can't scroll to social media. Oh, sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. And they want you to be playful with it. So you have to kind of like be fun, but still act like a bear. You have to act like a bear.

1:45:18Atrioc:Okay. So I will end on that note. A little fun economy news. Easy way to make money in this. It's always a great way to find ways. Okay.

1:45:25Aiden:This was a tough episode. I'm doing the mental recap of the stories. If you want a more heartwarming, heartwarming content, you can go to the Patreon, patreon.com slash lemonade stand where we do an extra hour of the show every week we also do a book club we just did our book club episode on disney war it was great uh yeah uh we will see you guys next week thanks so much for watching see you next week bye