The Biggest Merger Ever | Ep. 050 Lemonade Stand 🍋

19:49Like Tesla has already put$2 billion into Grok.

19:52Aiden:I feel like it's like a sci-fi book. It's like it's a sci-fi plot to like fuse all these, to have all these companies and then fuse them all together. Hey, he's not talking about Mars. You said, um, you haven't given up on Mars. He didn't give up on it, I guess. But 14 years ago, Elon Musk said, I'll put a man on Mars in 10 years. Obviously, his timelines are always a little off. But then recently, he said the new plan is for SpaceX to build a self-growing city on the moon within 10 years. And we'll do that before Mars. So Mars is at least 10 years from now.

20:22Atrioc:So he did say on this podcast I watched, within the next 10 years, they're going to invent a time machine to send somebody back to Mars 14 years ago so that this timeline was correct. well that's good how many beers have you had at that point wait a second now we're it was funny sorry i listened to maybe 20 minutes 20 30 minutes of this podcast and they kept just probing him for like what is the plan here like how is xai going to become profitable and just like i'm not going to spill the secrets i would need two or three more beers and i didn't click to the end of the hour and a half to see did he just so i watched probably the same 20 minutes i got this the scene i got was like dorkish kept asking especially about the the data centers because broadcast knows his shit and he kept poking him like he's a podcaster he's qualified he's qualified he's a podcaster it's the most noble profession there is but he kept asking him like okay what like how's this like apparently my understanding i'm not an engineer my understanding is the amount of solar panels you need on these things generate even like the equivalent of a one gigawatt data center is like absurd like at the current tech it's like absurd the size is incredible the radiation like breaks the gpus up there much easier like the the amount to cost replace is absurd like i the it just seems astronomical literally and figuratively to do in any realistic timeline and so i'm it feels more to me like hey this is a cool hype thing to say before the ipo yeah oh wait uh barry can you pull this up in spacex so again like in spacex's announcement that they're buying xai slash also twitter um they you know it's it's this it's saying we are doing this so that we can get data centers into space and that's the only way to scale them to the degree of which you know and there's this one line here the only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource intensive effort efforts to a location with vast power and space i mean space is called space for a reason laughing emoji there is a laughing emoji in the pr so i'm pretty sure Grok wrote this, right?

22:22Atrioc:Like ironically.

22:24Aiden:That's far. Can't tell me that's not. That's far. We can't drop a fucking little emoji. Yeah, you got it. They should have done laughing, crying emoji, skull emoji. Yeah, just to be a little more with the times. It seems a little dated, a little millennial.

22:38Atrioc:Alright, so a couple rapid fire questions to you guys about aerospace industry. I did a small amount of research on this as well as chatted with my aerospace friend. So I think it's easy. Certainly I have fallen prey to this to think that spacex is like the only space company making rockets and shooting things into space yeah but there's actually others there's like rocket lab is a public company that does this uh it's firefly astra there's aiden space yeah in space is like a big one you've been working on that one yeah in space you're like launching shit keeps going outside you just like throws a basketball as high as you can how far did you get are you getting close well we've gotten probably about 15 feet in the air and wait no don't give us raw numbers say the percentage improvement every year oh yeah oh that's a huge leap a quarter quarter over quarter

23:24Aiden:we're growing 15 15 in the last year improvement for sure in terms of the height and then also huge celebrity investors like ludwig augren oh he doesn't know that he's an investor right but you've been pulling some of the but i've been pulling money out of the account yeah because there's precedent for that a couple million here a couple million there okay okay so there's a lot

23:49Atrioc:of rocket companies rapid fire question why the fuck does the average person care about things going to space anyways well i don't know i thought the i thought starlink is pretty cool like that's cool right do you mean like a grand philosophical sense either either grand philosophical or more importantly if you are a person who works at you know a normal job and you don't give a fuck that SpaceX launches however many rockets a year. What are some reasons that you as an average person might care about aerospace industry? I think there's

24:20Aiden:I think there's still a raw fascination with like space and exploration and like furthering human discovery. Boring! That I think is there. Boring! I think I still have that in my heart. I was like fascinated by space when I was a kid. I wanted to be an astronomer. Putting me to sleep right now. I'm gonna kill myself one day. I'll tell you why we go to space I'll tell you why we go to space because I'm a greedy little gold goblin and apparently these meteors and these asteroids they have a ton of gold in them so that's the other reason you can grab on there and you can suck it all out I do think there's probably a longer term argument of if you can make space travel cheap enough you can collect or gather a lot of resources from off the earth without a lot of the negative externalities of doing it on earth.

25:13Aiden:You have like potentially unlimited access to like resources and energy that earth no longer needs to provide you if the space travel is cheap enough while absolving humans of the downsides of like resource extraction. Would you guys live on Elon Musk's moon city? Would you move there? I'd visit. Privileged.

25:34Atrioc:I would buy - I'd visit, I'd swing by. I'd buy an apartment and it's metaverse.

25:41Aiden:Why would you use that as the example, Doug? But I feel like those are the two, like there's the philosophical kind of like human discovery. And then I think there's a scientific like reason alongside that. There's valuable human discoveries that come with like the pushing of human understanding that is required for space travel. And then there's a more like practical, like resource and energy reason on the other side.

26:10Atrioc:Yeah. So like what you said, you know, NASA has pages about this, but you know, a lot of the advancements and technologies that benefit life on earth come from space technology advancements. So like solar panels, water purification systems, dietary formulas, material science innovations. These are all from NASA, as in NASA has talked about how their work has advanced these things. This is stuff that benefits the average human. On top of that, weather forecasting. that's from satellites in space gps that's from satellites in space as you mentioned starlink communications is you know up until now we mostly communicate with our cell phones and internet on a bunch of ground fiber you know around earth i mean i mean could i give a cool example of starlink

26:47Aiden:like a very practical thing when we filmed tip to tip last year which was ludwig and michael reeves traveling through japan their crew behind them in the rv used starlink for a ton of that trip in order to send like proxy files back and forth that they were editing with to upload like final versions of videos. It was super useful and was one of the reasons that a project like that is maybe not straight up possible, but at least way more practical to do than it otherwise would have been. Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the things that really warmed me to Starlink recently was reading a lot about what was happening in Iran.

27:27We don't have to go too deep into it now, but Um, the, the, the government there has total control over the internet. They shut it down during these protests and the crackdown and people were like using Starlink as the only method of getting it out. And some of the agents of the government were going door to door, checking the rooftops and breaking Starlink satellites to try like, but that was the only method. And so like, it is a way of democratizing internet access through, you know, it's like there's something to that for sure.

27:56Atrioc:Yeah. And there's also, there's a lot of businesses that you might not be aware of that are based around satellite imagery, which to be fair, a lot of this is used by governments for defense manufacturing. Let's be real. Yeah. But, but they're real actual good use cases. For example, the Brazilian government uses satellite imaging to see what's going on in the rainforest and can see like, okay, a narcotics operation is clearing forest land to build an airstrip and to like build out narcotics factories.

28:22Aiden:Or I've seen it for, in the context of like Amazon rainforest logging in like, it's like illegal logging practices in the, in the Amazon, they can see areas or patches that have like been burned in like really remote areas. So you can identify where, you know, where to find like these poachers or loggers that aren't supposed to be there. Yeah.

28:41Atrioc:So there's, there's, you know, you, you actually care, I think as a, as an average person, this might reasonably affect your life in some way, but I think the big one to hone in on that we just talked about is Starlink because that's communications. And let's look at Verizon's market cap. It is$200 billion, right? Like just one of the telecoms companies in America has a$200 billion market cap. So if you imagine that Starlink and SpaceX who own Starlink can expand that to the point that they are eating giant chunks of the telecoms industry, you're starting to see, okay, a lot of that$1 trillion valuation that SpaceX has, like maybe you can justify it if that just keeps growing and growing and growing.

29:20Yeah, I guess this is a thing that's unique to this time, but especially to Elon's companies, where just so much of the valuation always comes from saying things like that, but it's never from like, what are they doing now? The money is never there now. The robots are not being sold. The autonomous vehicles are yet to have any real driverless rides. It's like, I get it. I do get it. I understand it, but they, more than anyone else get the biggest amount of like gap yeah no what i just said is a story

29:50Atrioc:about what might happen it's a good sounding story that when you go like look here are all the things that make this story might be true because of all these things right and then he's a guy who you know provably now because it's been so many years has told again some stories he has has eventually gotten there but so many of the stories are homer

30:13like simpson though because like you know the the guy on mars the the uh the drill the boring drill uh highways there's like a lot of things that just got promised and now we've had enough time to be like those didn't happen so why are we giving you so much credence on these stories where you're promising the same that's my only that's my i mean there's actually other things there's again you know as a spacex investor not me but if you were one um one of the big things they're flagging is like hey grok is currently being sued by like 12 countries france a bunch of your because of all the weird like things it was doing with putting people in bikinis and well france can't sue them if they're in space no laws in international waters so now all these lawsuits and like bad PR and like everything that is political, it's tied with Twitter and X.

31:06And it's now all lumped into SpaceX, which is just, you know, it's like it turned something kind of clean and cool about rockets into something very messy. That's the, all right. So, okay.

31:16Atrioc:Queen click, queen, queen, quick rocket things. So, okay. While a lot of this is a story, it is true that SpaceX is by far the most dominant rocket company right now. So how many launches do you think happened in 2025 from Blue Origin? It's the Amazon. It's the Jeff Bezos company. We hear all about it. How many rockets do you think they launched? I feel like they launched that one with Katy Perry, and it was such a PR disaster. They haven't done that. Wrong. Two. No way.

31:46Aiden:Really? It's only two? Also, I was going double digits. I thought it was 100.

31:51Atrioc:That's suborbital. They don't even go into orbit. So it's like a six-minute funny no-gravity thing. Dude, that first one was such a everyone that was on that thing got like roasted for weeks.

32:04Aiden:Wait, they've done it. Sorry, they've done two launches in 2025 or two all time.

32:10Atrioc:2025. Okay, I don't think it's not.

32:12Aiden:It doesn't really make it.

32:14Atrioc:I don't think 2024 and earlier increases the numbers that much, but I don't have those off the top of my head. I understand Katy Perry got so roasted for that. She had to start dating Justin Trudeau. That's how far she fell back to earth, which is not a good follow up. Yeah, it's kind of like famously bad PR. Like SpaceX buying Twitter. It doesn't absolve the problem. Okay, Lockheed Martin. They have a space gun. How many launches do you think they had in 2025? Oh, I'm going to give them eight. Okay, close. Six. So Rocket Lab. This is a public company that launches rockets. They're a legit ass public company.

32:50Atrioc:I believe their market cap is 36 billion dollars. How many launches did they do? 2025 bro give me 850 holy shit no whoa my god jesus christ okay five no rocket rockets are hard guys they're really hard rocket lab the public company that you can go and buy this from 21 and 2025 spacex 165 launches wow they are way above everybody else in terms of launches okay number of satellites that they personally manage and operate out in space planet uh labs is a public company they have like 150 to 200 doing this satellite imaging amazon leo their amazon starlink competitor they have about 200 again they're amazon leo is explicitly trying to like get in on that starlink competition right yeah spacex again amazon is 200 spacex has 9600 like this is orders an order of magnitude higher right um but fucking 50 times more uh and then reusable rockets spacex is the only one commercially doing reusable rockets so they save something like

33:54Aiden:40 to 50 percent of their launch cost they're the only one doing reusable rockets yes so everybody

34:00Atrioc:has prototypes like china's lab does rocket lab does isro does blue origins are reusable but again they're not going into into orbit right now so it's like less impressive spacex is the only one commercially doing it and each rocket can get up to like 20 times usage can i say okay so let me

34:17Aiden:let me break away i i'm not here to tell you that this company is fully deserving of a trillion dollar IPO. But even without the, the, the Starlink part, the promising thing of this company to me has always been space travel in will inevitably become part of humans future in some capacity, right? Like the, the desire to go back and forth between space and the earth more frequently, not from like a human tourism perspective. I don't really think that'll be, you want to go to the moon 10 minutes ago. You said you're going to swing by. Yeah. I'll be one of the guys. of course no but i i less that and more there will be like more practical resource driven reasons to go back and forth between space like satellites like but as an example you're you're so far ahead of the curve and an industry that is seemingly so critical to the future yeah i feel like there's so much potential there that's the value that i've always seen in spacex so you know xai or not okay i it's not that i disagree i do think spacex is his best company but i'll say like here's an analog right the things you're saying about how far ahead they are are things you could have said about tesla in 2018 or 19 right and if you flash forward till now like for you know i got a story here next year xiaomi releases a 70 000 reusable rocket it alongside the su7 we now have a rocket that can go yeah chinese manufacturing i'm sure and and energy costs are going to allow them to compete heavily and i think they were maybe a few years behind okay but then also like tesla since that 2020 period where 2021 where it kind of peaked has flatline i get like the growth of the cars and all things you said they're gonna be dominant in electric vehicles they're so far ahead yeah in fact everybody else caught up they're flatlining their european sales for this year down 88 percent norway down 67 percent netherlands down 57 percent in the uk down 40 percent in france this is all from like this january versus last year okay they're in three consecutive years of decline in europe so like that's in europe in china they're worse so like they're doing okay in america they're losing other places so the idea that like spacex is going to maintain this i think they are i mean i undisputably he's innovated in samaria or his companies have innovated in samaria like they've had a spacex absolutely has like definitively yeah but the idea that he has been really good about that next step where you like uh first of all maintain the lead and then turn it into a profitable business that can he it hasn't been there and so like i feel like in fact other people are going to step in take the tech that maybe he's led on xiaomi and yeah i'm not kidding it might be xiaomi the phone company now car company soon to be rocket company that's the way it all works in china uh i guess yeah okay hold on i'm taking the under is what i'm saying but I don't disagree with most of you.

37:12Just real quick, because it's important.

37:15Atrioc:Yeah, I hate this, dude. Refreshing and escape. There we go. So I heard that, so anyway, fact-checking whether SpakeSex is profitable. They have said they're$8 billion in profit last year ahead of the IPO. So at least at times, they are profitable. $8 billion in profit on$15 to$16 billion in revenue, and that's from Reuters. 100%. So they're not - So they are profitable. So they are profitable. So that's like an important correction. Yeah. Yeah. Does that justify buying the thing that's going to lose them a billion dollars a month? Maybe not, but - But yeah, I just want to say, this profit again is, we're in comparison to Amazon at a hundred billion, Google at a hundred billion.

37:54This is like -

37:54Aiden:So this actually leads to a question I want to ask you both, is I think revisiting this in this moment, I've seen the profitability of a company like Google or a company like Amazon, seeing the list of like the wealthiest people alive right now. Yeah. At least like private individuals. and then looking at where Tesla's at, where SpaceX might be, where XAI is. And isn't it kind of ridiculous that he's that rich? Like, does any of this, it seems so unfoundedly disproportionate from how other companies are valued and how other people's like net worths are represented. like how can this guy who's at best in charge of one company that loses a lot of money one company that makes seven billion dollars a year one company that makes seven billion dollars a year uh worth 800 billion dollars i think he first of all he owns a larger portion of it than most other ceos i understand that right but it's the idea that after everything we know and understand it's like people that invest like broadly people that invest in these companies understand a lot of the things that we understand about elon musk yeah and these companies as well so how is his net worth even like allowed to be i think he's the greatest storyteller but i you've talked about story i think he's just been incredible people get people and the market gets excited about the future he paints and whether or not that materializes doesn't see doesn't seem to matter so far i mean look at the

39:29Atrioc:three of us i get hyped up about shit all the time and just say it on this show like no i mean even

39:34Aiden:that's one out of three people even in this episode right i'm sitting here who i'm not a fan of this guy but i'm like fucking fucking put the gpus in space that sounds fucking awesome like i i get that part but it seems crazy that this story that the narrative aspect is enough to like take i know my god and it's not just i know my company only makes seven billion dollars man but trust me it's worth way more than this other company that makes 130 million dollars a year Yeah. But I think the all the market has become more focused on storytelling. He's just the guy that's the it's so extreme that it like it's frustrating when you want to have any sort of valuation makes sense.

40:14But yeah.

40:16Atrioc:For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat.

40:29Aiden:I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building.

40:46Atrioc:But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far, it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon. And welcome to America Actually.

41:22Atrioc:Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. I do want to say, okay, on this subject, we talked about, you talked about GPUs in space. I want to do a quick gaming story. If you guys, Mike, we do a quick gaming story.

41:55And then I'll...

41:55Aiden:Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm begging for gaming. Because we haven't put some gaming on this podcast. I'm gaming for begging to be back. I want to do a gaming story. So GPUs, NVIDIA, just canceled their GPU lineup through 2027, possibly beyond. They're just not making gaming GPUs.

42:15Atrioc:Gaming's dead? Or like they're not making new ones. And it's because of this. Gaming is canceled. Gaming can't be dead. Because of how expensive memory has because everyone is buying AI chips for this, for space. And then Aiden is buying them and just throwing them into the air. Let's get this in. So Jensen just came out and was like, yeah, we're just not doing a new, like the old chips are where we're going to stop. You just buy those for the foreseeable future. And it's like kind of interesting. I have a question. So graphics are frozen is what I'm saying, right? Starting right now, graphics are frozen until the AI thing clears up or new stuff comes in.

42:48Atrioc:Do you feel that you were the head of marketing and gaming, right, at NVIDIA? Do you feel like you leaving made Jensen say, what's even the point? I feel like I wish I was there now because knowing this, you are getting paid to do no work. Oh, you think they don't let you off. You think they're like, Hey, just keep your corner office. This happened for me during, there was like a crypto wave in 21 and all the cards got bought up by crypto miners. And they were like, Hey, just take the summer off. Don't market because we can't sell any. And, uh, people are mad. they can't like it's all it was all sold out from everywhere it was that was it like just don't just don't like cut down the marketing so i just sat there and like down the marketing just work less so that's what they're doing right now i'm sure the marketing seems just chilling anyway i want to say okay two more gaming stories because if graphics are frozen now there has been this big push from a bunch of different laid-off triple-a developers to make essentially overwatch clones this happened recently with a game called high guard that i don't know if you guys heard about it just came out it was like it's not overwatch but it's it's like a hero shooter 5v5 thing you better not be talking shit about high you're a high guard guy no i wanted to ask you about it because all of these these x blizzard these x riot x they all have made similar type of hero shooters and they are all flopping the big one was concord for 100 million at sony but now high guard they just laid everybody off like two weeks in they had 100 000 people at launch day everyone stopped playing and they all got laid off and then this is not necessarily a hero shooter but like two days ago i saw a thing from riot games where they have been teasing this fighting game to xko for like eight years and it finally launched and everyone is laid off in two weeks like it's like so what i'm not even like this is just a thing of like what is going on in gaming what do you guys think is happening that triple is triple ages dead outside of like fortnite and all these companies are doing these big high profile flops and nobody seems to be able to

44:50Aiden:adapt to what gaming is now maybe you have a better window into this than i do because i i've been feeling a similar question i've been wanting to talk about high guard specifically because of how low the numbers have been and how i had heard about this yeah but with 2x ko something that surprised me was i feel like they were willing to let this game simmer for so long but you let the build-up time was incredible. The fact that they could announce that this game existed, work on it for so long, keep everybody employed through that time period, then launch it, have kind of a weird timeline of marketing and beta releases that I actually think made the launch really confusing.

45:33Aiden:They soft launched it like 12 times. Yeah, that's why I never knew when the game was actually out. So by the time that the game is actually out, it's like, hasn't this been out? There's no hype anymore. That was my outside perspective. And that's ignoring that like maybe the genre is like tough to access and other stuff but you you you were willing to go through all of these layers of friction to get to the release and then you only have the game out for a short period of time longer than two weeks in 2x chaos right it's been like i think it's been like six but it was quick not maybe it is maybe since the official release i'm not sure since the official release it'd be good to clarify but i'm all i'm saying is why are you willing to wait that long for the game to exist but not enough time to see if you can turn things around after it comes out and uh if you have any insight there or to the broader question that he

46:23Atrioc:asked i'm very curious i i so like i don't have like insider knowledge on this like you know technically i was a game developer in the most like technically sense so you know but you're a streamer you're pl i mean you have a chat you know i'm saying like this is here's what i'll say on that note yeah uh the one the developers of high guard one of them got kind of mocked for this but he basically blamed gaming culture now including streamers for the reason his game didn't just died on release he said uh people made fun of our videos on social media the comment section were flooded with memes calling us concord 2 uh we got negative reviews from users who didn't even play it and that's why we didn't and it's not like i don't think those things are true but i feel like that's an insane cope that doesn't that doesn't jive with how i see games that succeed like the game arc raiders is crushing so you know what i'm saying is it just a good game thing versus a bad game thing i would i would say an anecdotal thing and then a maybe business side anecdotally i have not played many triple a games the last several years i've just become less interested in them and have had less time for games and so i don't want to take on a game that's going to be 50 hours but last weekend i tried death stranding 2 okay hadn't played the first one but i was like oh this could be really cool and to be honest i was pretty disappointed it's a seems like a cool game there's it's not like it's bad or anything but i just thought it would be more i thought it'd be more different than what i understood the first one to be and it seems like it's that but with a new coat of paint and my whenever i try a triple a game obviously it's extremely subjective but for me it doesn't feel like that much stuff is different than five years ago or 10 years ago the graphics are nicer but i don't care very much those are frozen now so those are frozen anyway like that's not a driving factor i want like like compelling gameplay that gets to the deal quickly i tried pikmin 4 recently as well and after 45 straight minutes of characters talking and no gameplay i was like i don't fucking care i want to just play a game like i don't give a shit and so he doesn't get it he doesn't get how all of ours like so deeply attached to these anecdotally i think that indie games have done a better job of being innovative and being creative and compelling and i think that like you see that in the market peak absolutely fucking crushed and actually i talked to one of the peak developers at the streamer awards and he was talking about how he was part of the team that made another crab's treasure they had worked i forget how many years but it was like three or seven years on this game right and they finally put it out it's like dark souls-esque kind of game and it did okay and then they spent three months on peak and it becomes one of the biggest games of all time and he was like i feel so confused about this because like i the thing i barely put any time into is one of the biggest gaming sensations of all time and it's a nice i think example of how much creativity matters more than just like production value i knew him in

49:08Aiden:college did you really we played melee together oh right i forgot he mentioned that yeah that's crazy it was it was so surreal to see him there because it was like this weird thing of like i haven't seen you in so long why are you here and then and then it's like you mean peak it's like we used to we used to play melee at the u-dub smash club nice boy that's another funny coincidence is he was like, we were talking,

49:28Atrioc:I was like, oh yeah, my brother makes indie games. He's like, oh, what games? I'm like, oh, you made the Stanley Parable. And he's like, your brother's Davey? Like, he's had all these conversations. He's like, really helped me out. And so this dude has like a weird personal connection to our lives. It's cool in that. All you're saying, like, so at the same time as like this game, around the same time that this game is blowing up and everyone's getting fired.

49:47Aiden:Yeah. Mugenics, I don't know if you guys heard about this game, but it's a new cat indie roguelike. It's selling like a million copies instantly. Like, creative stuff is breaking through at a greater level than ever before. Indie people with three-person studios are making absurd money, but like the AAA stuff that takes eight years to make and is like behind on what consumers are wanting at the moment is like, it's getting destroyed. I feel like the value proposition or like the risk is just so much different than it used to be. I imagine there's a world now where indie devs have actually a more reasonable path to making and getting their games out there in a shorter period of time with relatively less cost than a AAA studio could, which were the primary vehicles for developing and publishing games maybe 10, 20 years ago.

50:32Aiden:So like this old business model of how AAA studios address, like address the market doesn't really make as much sense anymore. It's just tougher competition. And then also the, or sorry, the risk reward of taking that approach to publishing a game like doesn't make as much sense. The other thing I think is huge that I think about a lot is online gaming when we were kids wasn't that prevalent yet, right? So this idea of this big continuous live service experience was very new and people were creating games that were like the first to market in that area. But now, after all of the time that has passed, giant live service titles are established.

51:21Aiden:So when your new game comes out, when your fucking overwatch 45 clone comes out it isn't it doesn't just have to be good by its own merits it has to prove its value within a genre of things that already are like stable and have a lot of value you're competing with like overwatch that already exists you're competing with valor you're competing with counter-strike league of legends these games that have established player bases and followings that people will go back to for literally in some cases like cds CS has been around for decades. League is coming up on 20 years. These games are things that people continuously come back to.

51:59Aiden:And your game needs to out-compete and provide something that those games don't already. Peel you away from that. And this was actually my problem with playing platform fighters that weren't Melee. Because I had played Melee for so long, and Melee is so good in my eyes, that anything that would come out that was vying for my attention in that space like that old game icons that eventually got published in a different form or even when rivals 2 came out and i think rivals 2 is a really fun game genuinely and i do i do not have financial ties by the way i'm not

52:36Atrioc:financially tied to that company so you're just financially tied to the guy who owns the company

52:41Aiden:okay fair enough fair enough there maybe there's a conflict of interest there but genuinely when I've played Rivals 2 for the first time I was like this is the first platform fighter I have played besides melee that I'm significantly enjoying but I never got into it because it's like I could just keep playing you already have the friends and the tournaments and the everything at the scene yeah I agree and I think in every game that's getting dropped especially with these lofty expectations of being a continuous live servants like log on and play a bunch thing that isn't like this a story game that can like crack through and like have value for a short period of time and maybe you put a sequel down the road like these community or multiplayer experiences they you you are just you're putting it out there and hoping it beats out all of these titans that didn't exist i heard this from a game developer frame which is like they're like death stars you call them which is basically fortnight legal edge like some these i can't even believe i forgot fortnight there's these massive live service games that have billions of dollars pointing in they have new content all the time they have established legacies yeah and because they make so much money everyone wants a slice of that pie everyone's like if i could just crack through which to be fair a game like arc raiders did it's a live service game that is like doing really well yeah it's making money if you crack through you are you are hitting a cash geyser the oil comes out of the ground and you're you're set but it's so difficult because you're competing against the best of the best with infinite resources and time And so I agree.

54:10I think too many AAA studios swung at the king and missed basically.

54:15Atrioc:You know, it also reminds me of when I, and maybe you guys experienced this too. When I worked in e-sports production, I worked at a company called ESL and it did, we did, I was working on like medium sized gaming tournaments. Right. And I remember I did a show called Trinity series, which was a Hearthstone tournament. And I was, we were up allotted because it was very creative and people like, Whoa, this feels so different and unique compared to the average tournament. And I reflected on how much time I actually spent focusing on the creative side of the tournament. It was maybe 10 % of the time, 90 % was about coordinating all the production assets and the team and the logistics and getting the ideas into place.

54:49Atrioc:When you have that much production scale and size, the vast majority of time is just spent like just getting the ideas even remotely implemented. Right. And then I went to YouTube and I was utterly refreshed by how the inertia between I have a creative idea and it is out there in the world is a hundredth of the amount of space. I just imagine that for AAA of like, if you're the Assassin's Creed developers and you're like, I want to do something like crazy and experimental and different that you might have one chance to do that for the entire next game, right? That's all you can afford. That's all your team can do versus an indie developer who can like just crank that out every week.

55:26Yeah. And it might look as polished, but if it's fun, it'll just take off nowadays.

55:29Aiden:I used to like working in one of the working in esports was the frustration of the dynamic of how ad funding or heavy marketing was the the lifeblood of esports for so long right so you had to like kind of pander to and create tournaments in a style that the advertiser especially if it was a white label project looked for and what i mean a white label for people who don't know it means like when your production company or your company doesn't uh you're not at the front end of the presentation of the product anymore so like if chipotle would approach us and be like run a call of duty tournament nobody knows that it's my studio making the tournament they just contract us chipotle is the brand on top of it uh and chipotle would have all these restrictions about how they want the tournament of the format to be and i was like this is definitely going to be bad Like this isn't what the players want.

56:28Aiden:This isn't really what the viewers want. But it's what the money wants. But it's what the money wants. And you would have to do that. And I think I got frustrated with that part of esports. And I was like, you know, this thing I dreamed and working of for so long, I don't want to fucking do this anymore. I'll go be Ludwig's boy. I'll be Ludwig's boy instead. Or I wanted to go work at a company like Riot where at least you were the first part. You were doing stuff internally or first party. and my favorite esports project i've ever worked on was this melee league i did in socal in 2024 and it was because i had full freedom to do and structure things in whatever way i wanted and i think in that space i'm a true expert and like that is jenny if i could pick one thing that i'm an expert at in the world it's rocket ships and this and rocket rocket ships getting things in getting gpus into space and i toss them really high it's crazy you've been breaking quite a few but like you're getting there for sure you're getting there it's expensive but the freedom to design that competitive that scene and that uh that league in the capacity that i wanted to was the most fun i've ever had with an esports event and it's because and i imagine indie developers feel that i just heard i don't want to i don't want to leak too much but i heard from someone who worked at a agency that got the high guard contract to help them get like streamers and stuff basically their words were that they did start with an l and end with an oden they were like hey we tried to tell them like some of this stuff is not going to work and the money didn't want to hear it and so like and then you flash forward two weeks and everyone's laid off like it's like it's that it's that quick nowadays like if you don't if you aren't hitting the culture or the creativity it's like people just don't play it and then all of a sudden I don't know, it's crazy.

58:19Anyway guys, I want to move on to a talk because we're on time here when there's like 10 of everything's a hit. I want to talk very briefly. It's a real tone switch. You ready for this? Yeah. The government shutting down again. I feel like the government has too much production value.

58:33Aiden:I liked when we talked about games. I love talking about games. uh all right let's get one sentence review and then we're going to talk about the new diablo 2 expansion okay fine we'll do one sentence on it basically department of homeland security is the only part of government shutting down no i'm sorry the whatever it ladders up into actually is dhs dhs is shutting down they couldn't get funded as of saturday morning 1 a.m it's over there's no money that being said because of the unique quirk of the big beautiful bill everything in the DHS except for ice is unfunded but ice is still funded so even though this is all about ice like that all the anger is about ice the reason they're freezing it is about ice ice is still funny because they have 70 billion in cash from the from the big bill everything else which includes like the border patrol yeah i think virtual might be fun as well but like

59:28But like TSA, right? TSA, yeah, exactly. That's the big one people want to know. There's a couple more of them, but these are just the general idea. Yeah, TSA, yeah, I guess the main one we're going to realize is TSA. That's the Transportation Security Administration. Yeah, I guess that's the main thing you're going to see in terms of feed. So that's being unfunded. So some people are going to work knowing they'll get paid, back pay, where this gets figured out. But again, we're back to it again where it's like the whole funding thing. i will say the main things come down to if you pull this up there's 10 demands this is what they need for the vote which is basically no masks require id

1:00:04Atrioc:protects from locations from who who's demanding this is the man from the democrats okay who voted against this only one i think it was fetterman flip sides voted with republicans i think summer i think massey or someone might have voted on the democrat side the point is they don't have a filibuster majority to get the bill through until they agree on this so they are debating now but my understanding is because the there's like a recess they're not able to vote for 10 days at least 10 days of the shutdown now again we'll cover this more because a bigger deal in terms of uh the shutdown expanding but my understanding is like it's like it's just a a political flashpoint right now around but you know we mean these these demands seem extremely reasonable yeah they seem like the basic first step yeah it's like this is not ice agents should not be wearing masks they should not they have to verbalize who they are and their id and they need to display their agency name and not just be like mysterious people showing up in vans like this seems super obvious there's like a you know it's a bit of a ripping on democrats kind of meme but it was like um republicans we want to kidnap people and put them in unmarked vans democrats mark the vans

1:01:20that shit cracked me up it does it does yeah so i think this is a basic first step and i'm surprised but i can i understand yeah you want to jump in well okay one i've a please clarify for me

1:01:31Aiden:yeah the i don't is the idea that they're using the weight of the shutdown as it pertains to a

1:01:46Aiden:that remains funded currently no matter what. They have no other lever to get at ICE than this. This is what ICE ladders up into. Just the fact that ICE is already funded is not their problem. They just have to do it this way. So this is the best thing they can do to get changes to ICE. Look, I hate it. It just feels like, you ever seen that Chuck Schumer parody video where Trump goes too far again and then the guy is dressed up like Chuck Schumer and he's like, that's not very nice. they shouldn't there's a strongly worded letter kind of yeah and and i think i i was listening to a daily episode about this and the correspondent was talking about the democrats strategy with this with this shutdown and how they view the previous shutdown as internally democrats view the previous one as a success because i know i know and i was like i don't understand didn't they cave at the last second there's the whole and they view it as a success as a success because it was a flash point for raising awareness about democrats better support for health care than republicans it probably did do that but that's and i and i was like yeah it maybe it did that but it didn't they didn't get any changes i was like what are we fucking talking about dude and this i i look this is this is obviously my bias leaking through but it's the same reason i asked pete at the end of the last episode and i think one of the things you were trying to hammer home with gavin newsom when you were doing that interview yeah was like no you don't understand like you you can't just i get that you're positioned to win the next election but you can't just win it yeah so you You have to make substantial changes in the way that allowed these problems to exist in the first place.

1:03:38I will say, okay, I'll steal straw. What's the good one? I'll steal man this one. I'll cover some straw on the steal man. I like the idea. So you punch it and you think it's a straw man, but it's hard to steal.

1:03:51Aiden:Let's do a lemonade stand episode where we only straw man.

1:03:57I'll steal man. And then I, you know, I feel the vibe of this and I agree with the vibe of this on general, but I feel like people are expecting in this moment right now, a miracle from a party that has nothing. They don't have the house. They don't have the Senate. They don't, unless you expect them to grab an AK 47 and assault the Capitol. I don't expect that. Like, do you know what I'm saying? Like the reasonable thing they can do is like try to make demands on things they have leverage on, which is this. And I think for a temporary stopgap before they can win elections and make real changes, these changes seem like a good like baseline all americans should agree

1:04:33Aiden:why the masks right let me say well i agree i agree in the sense that i yeah sure but i i feel like i'm a maybe i'm a maybe i'm a fucking moron dude i i i but but it's like we're we're going for another shutdown strat when when a month ago you walked oh yeah no that's how i that's how i I felt like you described it. And, you know, if they walk on this one, right? You know what I'm saying? Like, then, yeah, I agree with that in general, but I think I'm just more... We need to go back to gaming. I'm getting too riled up. I need to talk about High Guard. You know what I've been doing is every week, I've been checking the High Guard concurrence.

1:05:18Aiden:I'm just saying, I'm not voting... We're going back to High Guard. I'm not voting for the DHS funding bill until they fund high guard with it. Until they keep dedicated servers up for high guard. No more masks on the developers. Developers got to be unmasked. I think, okay. I actually do have a bit. I mean, I got other things you want to do. I got, I got fucking topic cards. Go to another thing. All right. Here's one. This is for Doug.

1:05:47Atrioc:You watch Superbowl, Doug? I did watch the Superbowl. I tried to pay as little attention as possible because the game sucked and the ad sucked. Hey, it was in my peripheral at all times.

1:05:57Aiden:If you love kicking, it was a great game. No. You're one of those guys? Huh? It was a real masterclass in defense. It was a masterclass in defense.

1:06:03Atrioc:Shut the fuck up. In kicking. No, it's a masterclass in defense if both teams are defending really well. It's boring. The whole thing is boring. It was not a good game. And I agree the ads were bad, but one bright point of the ads was we had a little bit of an AI war. Ooh. We got a little bit of a drama. There's a little bit of a, you know, and so this is a little bit dated as we say this, but it's going to go into something else, which is that Gemini, OpenAI, AI.com, who else? Meta, bunch of, there was some weird AI slop ads. Like, did you see that vodka ad where there was just literally -

1:06:38Aiden:Yes, it was a lot of AI-generated content. Was the vodka one actually AI-generated? Yeah, AI-generated. Because we were watching it in the office and we were like, was this just AI? Yeah, it was like an AI-generated slop ad. It looked terrible.

1:06:51Atrioc:Oh, my God. The personal cleaning robotics one seemed to be all AI. That was just nonsense. So there was some weird slop in there, but the big thing was these big companies that are, again, all spending hundreds of billions of dollars are kind of like muscling in each other's territory and trying to stink their claim as what makes their brand different. And the big thing, the big argument was between Anthropic and OpenAI, where Anthropic is like, hey we don't do ads that's our whole thing they did these they did these ads i don't know if you saw them where they had like the guy yeah pretend to be an ai and he's like hey yeah they had four

1:07:27Aiden:i don't know if they all rolled at the super bowl but i had seen this on twitter the week before yeah they released four different cuts of this ad that basically have the same premise yeah and this rolled at the super bowl so here's the here's the funny thing my understanding because i read a lot of ad breakdowns after the Super Bowl because I do it for my show. And it turns out, market research showed that most, like the average like 46-year-old guy watching this while drinking a beer thought this was genuine. So like if you're watching this kind of half, you're just like, this is kind of weird.

1:08:00Like they thought they were presenting this as a good thing. And so it's like this, as far as I could tell, this did not backfire. like a little bit of backfire like they the main takeaway from the ad is like ai is kind of creepy

1:08:15Atrioc:weird it's like they're also they were trying to they were attacking open ai chat gpt adding ads yeah right that was like their main attack yeah and you know which is a legitimate thing and we've talked about that in the past but then also i i guess you said they just started but ads aren't in it yet so it's also to the average person who's not extremely online twitter they are in it right look i saw maybe i'm crazy but like if they if they are they started like a couple days ago i don't they started after the super bowl right i i i saw um so it's like it's an attack on chat gbt about hey these guys are doing ads and we're not which is very you know a very valid line of attack but it's bizarre when the average chat gbt user is like i don't get it i don't have ads in my thing yet but i guess they're just getting ahead of it uh because ads are supposed to launch soon I believe.

1:09:04Dude,

1:09:04Atrioc:Sam Altman, so head of opening I said, he did a gigantic reply to this, didn't he? The good part of the Anthropics ad. They are funny and I laughed, but I wonder why Anthropica would go for something so clearly dishonest. I guess it's on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. He did like a tone policing kind of thing. He also tried to make them out like the big bad rich guys. You see that? yeah, Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad that they do that, and we're doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions.

1:09:44Aiden:Hey, only one of those companies went to the international and won to be on Dandy and Dota. Oh, you're talking about... And it's open AI. It's... He's gonna try to bring it back to gaming every time now. No matter what. How can I connect this back to games? And that's why this is about High Guard. That's why the war in Iran is kind of like Mario

1:10:02Atrioc:64 in 2026 this podcast is going back to its roots and we're bringing gaming back it's about gaming it's about business about gerald ford a lot of people asking for gerald ford in the last comments by the way a lot of very few people cared about p2 buddha judge and if this episode

1:10:16Aiden:gets to 10 000 likes we will bring gerald ford on the podcast dude can you imagine we did an ai gerald ford discussion our worst rated episode at the ableist is what they look like but this is what the open ai ads look like they're not so they actually launched okay okay um they're not as intrusive on frame one as you'd expect, I guess. It's like they have a line and they separate it at the bottom. So they'll give you your answer and then it'll be like, here's something related to your answer. It's not necessarily like, hey, bud, you've been feeling sad lately? You know, give you a pick-me-up is like nerds or whatever.

1:10:53Xanax. Xanax. For me, it's always candy. If I'm depressed, I want candy. it's a little dystopian i'm realizing i haven't seen this to be honest here's what i'm gonna say okay let's get crazy with it i want to get crazy with this i've been waiting to do this don't show my screen yet i'm pulling up uh i'm gonna convince aiden you're an ai guy lately i've been feeling like that shit is moving so fast in the world of ai that i have to get i still think it's a financial bubble but the tech is like getting crazy in some areas and i'm gonna convince aiden and this whole podcast is gonna be ruined dude okay i'm gonna show you wait were you not convinced by his to-do checklist app that's yeah again it's weird i've always known it could do something simple like the checklist app and that's why for me it wasn't like oh this is crazy breakthrough but it's like damn it's pretty good like i just type it in and does it but here this this is your goat rutger bregman dude oh rut rut mean right this guy you're talking about you read all his books i bought you his book for christmas another one yeah i like rutger this guy i mean his example but he has a different post where he's like hey why is there some people completely sticking their head in the ground on this i he's he's not an ai guy by any stretch of the definition he's a total like i mean how would you describe it what would you what do you think his philosophy is i don't

1:12:20Aiden:like a humanist. He's very, I feel like he's very positive about humanity and how we can use our innate goodness towards making all of our lives better. Yeah, he's like anti-fascism, anti-big business, all that stuff. But this guy's like, hey, I needed to do a teleprompter app and I was going to buy a hundred dollar one, but I vibe coded it in two prompts. It worked better. Like he, I mean, he has a longer thread on this. He has a blog. But, and I wonder if I could. It's weird he didn't text me about this.

1:12:52again he's talking about u.s wealth concentration all this i'm just saying i'm seeing more people who actually try it be like damn some of this shit's crazy and i think i don't know if you had any examples from seed dance but i saw oh there's this new chinese video ai it's crazy like some it's obviously not it's still slop i understand that it is still at its core i watch it it's like always the same fucking upgraded version of sora i'm gonna be vulnerable it's like rick and morty fucking dancing in a you know what i'm saying it's always slop yeah this this just as an example

1:13:24Atrioc:as a prompt of this is ai generated video of brad pitt and tom cruise fighting arguing about epstein you killed jeffrey epstein you animal he was a good man he knew too much about our russia operations he had to die and now you die too so this is this is from byte dance which is the company that makes slash made tiktok yeah they've

1:13:53Aiden:been training on your tiktoks i got a couple things about it dump in one because i had seen a bunch of these videos are going around now right and i think the reason that this is sort of catching on a little is i would say that these videos look better than previous iterations of ai video software that i have seen or at least most of them right and i think by the nature of of product, it means it's going to improve over time. And I think on Twitter, you do see a similar range of reactions to these things of this is stupid. It looks bad. This is so obviously AI, whatever. But I do want to point out that I think in the past week, and I don't mean Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting.

1:14:34Aiden:I mean, little videos that have taken me as someone who I think as someone who grew up on the internet has a relatively does a relatively good job of like parsing whether or not something is you know real or fake in uh is this a scam is this not a scam like this is the first week with ai videos where i have seen a couple things that have been presented to me and

1:14:58Atrioc:i'm like oh i thought oh it's like twitter or something yeah just on twitter friends okay just

1:15:03Aiden:people uploading things on twitter that have been like fed to me through through my algorithm right and I and it took me way like it took me longer to figure it out and realize that like oh this is definitely like haha it's so funny to make fun of the AI videos this is just gonna go this is gonna get worse yeah there was that viral rabbits in the trampoline thing where a lot of people were like confirmed it was real and it was AI and that was like that was one of the big moments for people here here's an example Rucker retweeted this this is Josh Dawes I'm 48 and I've worked as a software engineer for 30 years I've grown numb to the Silicon Valley hype machine my default posture is meh we'll see what i've seen and experienced firsthand in the past two months is not hype ignored at your peril now again i do think that a lot of this is a little bit too far on the oh my god side but i gotta be real here the advances are getting faster and they are real and the more i dig into it the more i see real concrete examples of certain areas like like the big one the one that kicked off the episode we talked about last week or two weeks ago was um anthropic putting in a thing that allowed a legal add-on right and and like i've seen i was had a blog that kind of broke down how it's impacting the legal field and it's just like the way i think about it it's i think of my entry-level jobs i think of things i did when i started at twitch like i managed the email newsletter and i managed the front page and i know for an absolute fact that everything i did in those jobs for again probably a year and a half to two years as I got started in the industry can be done in one prompt now.

1:16:36Everything, the entire email I created, everything. And so that is something different like that. And then you see the Microsoft guys and they're like, every white collar job is getting automated in 12 to 18 months. And again, I'm naturally skeptical. As you know, from this podcast, I'm naturally skeptical of all this stuff. That being said, I'm not stupid. I do test these things and try them out there is that's breaking a line it's like it's getting more yeah yeah i think the idea like

1:17:04Aiden:even with what i'm saying right i'm not here to say that that like ai video is this flawless thing or something it's the fact that i i'm hitting this point for the first time in a few years where i had a passing thought of i wasn't sure and then being scared of that feeling and realizing that this trend will only increase. I will be more, I have to be even more conscious than I ever was of the idea that this video is just entirely fake. And then I saw another thread that really convinced me. It was a filmmaker, I think, talking about. He was like, listen, the scene where it's me and Doug in a room doing dialogue, they're not gonna replace that.

1:17:44But this scene that opens it, where it's like a helicopter shot of London that goes into a window and then starts the scene, we can make that in two seconds now. And if that's good enough to be not able to tell, that just, you just - Saved hundreds of thousands. You saved$100 ,000. And so, and again, this is as bad as it'll ever get. See, dance too out of nowhere. So I'm just getting more real to the idea that this is not just an issue, but like a really big issue. Like a really, really urgent issue that I think even if, again, I'm actually more of a skeptic on AGI, but on like, I guess what I'm realizing is how most jobs don't need AGI.

1:18:27Most jobs are like pattern matching basic shit. Most white collar jobs are like, see a couple things, think about one choice on that and then do an action.

1:18:38Atrioc:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's do a little role reversal. Okay. And let me make a pitch to you guys about why this stuff is overhyped. Oh, interesting. Wait, I want to mention. This is such a different episode. One quick thing about C-Dance. I'm getting so high.

1:18:53Aiden:I'm withholding it. I did want to mention C-Dance. I think it was today. Disney and Paramount both sent ByteDance a cease and desist. 100%. Like already. And they seem very upset. One of the quotes from one of the partners with Disney's law firm said, ByteDance's virtual smash and grab of Disney's IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable. yeah so i mean because i'm all of these examples are like i'm watching mario and luigi like fist fight yeah yeah yeah so so i of course there's going to be this reaction but it's happening

1:19:27Atrioc:very quickly and i just want to confirm when you saw that you that you were unsure whether

1:19:31Aiden:it was real or not i did think that was the one where i was like i'm pretty sure this is real mario did fight luigi yeah well it's like this is this it's like they both love princess peach so yeah okay all right well i'm very excited for this episode because i i guess i'm being the fucking AI holy shit guy and you're going to downplay. Yeah, okay.

1:19:50Atrioc:So two weeks ago, we talked about AI via coding. I think that there were valid criticisms that we focused too much on hype as well as a lot of the people I quoted were basically people in AI who are highly invested in AI succeeding. And I think that is a fair criticism. I want to remind everybody, none of us are experts. So I'm trying my best to learn. But this week, I made an effort to go and specifically research and present some other sides, including things we didn't get to that two weeks ago so in terms of just like raw numbers we just talked about it bunch of new models releasing this was like 10 days ago anthropic released opus 4.6 which is like the even better coding model of what we had been talking about and then 28 minutes later open ai drops gpt 5.3 codex so they're like literally trying to snipe each other within like an hour of dropping the hot new thing so this keeps going um and i reached out to some ai or excuse me, software people who are not like, you know, tied to the AI space.

1:20:47Atrioc:So from what I've been hearing for four or five people that I spoke with in some situations, this stuff truly is like mega advanced in terms of the coding specifically. A lot of people do feel like there's a major shift in the past few months and you see it like this guy right here who just vibe coded a thing and is going, holy shit, this is different from what I can I read his line real quick before we go on because I didn't, this is what I was looking for. And it's like this coming from this guy, Knowing what we know about Rucker, it's like a really crazy thing for him to say. That's what kind of woke me up and made me.

1:21:16So he said, I'm increasingly annoyed by how many journalists, academics, and large parts of the left, which he is on, get everything wrong about AI. So many smug dismissals from people who clearly don't use it much or don't know how. I have multiple what the fuck moments every week now. For example, and then he talked about the teleprompter thing. For context, I've never written a line of code in my life, but I was able to give Claude two rambling prompts. Two minutes later, it works better than the fancy$100 software with patented VoiceTrack technology. Most surreal tech experience I've ever had.

1:21:42And it's all moving so much faster than I expected. AGI is not even a clear concept to me, but I do know what's available now is just fucking impressive and it'll only get better. It's totally unserious to keep dismissing the greatest technological revolution of our time. Sticking your fingers in your ears, it must be BS because they have these hands out of red marks or red noise. It's not helping anyone.

1:21:58Atrioc:Wait, wait, hold on. Say that sentence again. That was crazy. That was a single word. I know that we complained about you talking. The text is on the screen and you guys can read. That one was crazy. You know what you can do is vibe code a text reading app. Do it again. Do it again. Read the last one. I'm not, do it again. Last paragraph again. I don't want to. We have audio listeners. It's totally unserious to keep dismissing the greatest technological revolution of our time. Sticking your fingers in your ears. It must be BS because it comes out of Silicon Valley and these Huns haven't read Marx or Adorno.

1:22:27It's not helping anyone. Love it. Again, coming from Rucker Bregman means something because he's a guy who's principled. He's very principled. He doesn't just say such as to say that he has no financial stake in this. Yeah, but that made me.

1:22:37Aiden:For context, there's two famous clips with this guy. outside of his writing as an author. There's an old clip where he's at Davos, I think at the World Economic Forum, where he calls out everybody on stage. And he's like, I feel like I'm having a surreal experience where nobody here talks about taxes and the importance of taxes. We all fly here on our private jets and nobody wants, I feel like I'm in a fire conference and nobody wants to talk about water. That's his famous quote. And then there's another cut interview from Fox News when Tucker Carlson was still there, where because of that clip, Tucker Carlson's interviewing him and he's asking him, it's like, it's so impressive that you stood up to like the elites and the upper class and like called them out all out on that stage.

1:23:13Aiden:And then Rutgers like, yeah, and like, but you're like one of them. Like you do the same thing. And then Tucker starts cussing them out and they cut it from broadcast. So it's that guy. I was gonna say right after he makes this point about AI, he's like retweeting, you should quit GPT, cancel your chat GPT. Like he's not a booster by any method, any measure of the imagination. Like he's not boosting this in any way. I think he's just being honest. and I have been feeling increasingly more like this, especially in the past three months as I've like tested the stuff and seen things like CDance. It's just like, it's getting better faster.

1:23:48That's the thing, it's getting better faster.

1:23:49Atrioc:So I'm speaking largely about software here, but the reason software matters if you aren't a coder is because if software gets insanely good, that allows people who are making the models that touch whatever industry you work in to go faster. That's always been kind of, it's called like closing the loop is what they talk about. Whereas you start to have AIs writing code that's training AIs and you just start to speed that up. And so in theory, it just is going to get better faster. Um, and so I spoke with somebody who is a CEO of like a midsize startup and I was like, is this hype? And he was like, it's not hype.

1:24:20Atrioc:This is crazy. I mailed this. I did this huge new feature that touched all the different aspects of our app, our CMS, our data pipeline, our managing data pipeline, uh, actually presenting everything to the customer service, doing all this analysis, all of it on the way to work at my commute. And on the other side, talk to software engineers who are like, no, this is not good. So my friend who I mentioned last time, who nine months ago said AI coding agents are like a, uh, you know, like a junior software engineer who doesn't learn. He said it has gotten a lot better. He's using it a lot more and he's coding less than ever.

1:24:55Atrioc:Again, this is a guy who is not invested in AI in any way is very skeptical and he's the smartest programmer I've ever worked with. Um, but he says it misses critical things. So you cannot fully trust this. He spends tons of time fixing the little things that it misses. So his quote is it gets 90 % of the way, but that 10 % is missing. And that means you end up spending far more time getting that little bit to work that while, yeah, it seems like it's really helping you. If it's not fully getting there for many industries, that's not useful for a doctor. That might not be useful for a lawyer. That might not be useful, even maybe for a film developer or a producer or whatever.

1:25:30Atrioc:If that helicopter shop just can't get the right creative vision he wants, that might not be useful. He also said it's a security nightmare. Like it is just terrible at passing various things around, at managing proprietary data. There's huge vulnerabilities.

1:25:45Aiden:This is the number one complaint I see when people talk about building apps at scale for like large commercial use.

1:25:51Atrioc:Right. so i i think having looked into this more pretty much anybody at my level and even a small company this has this has leveled up in the last few months where you're like this can potentially do everything but anything that touches security and then it's anything that's a giant code base so like some of our youtube commenters were saying okay i work at a giant sass company i work at this company with a huge database and they're saying it can't do it cannot handle this so there's very much still a limit at which this stuff is just not effective but in this you know they're like these i think growing tears at which people are like whoa this stuff is 100 and that's one of the parts i'm still convinced in the financial bubble because i was seeing examples of people being like holy shit everyone will be able to code their own monday.com or treller or whatever and then those things are gonna die right that's the idea and maybe those those are like the easiest ones maybe but i guess salesforce but here's the thing is if you're at if every individual company is going to try to make their own and spend all their time debugging that right getting that ready and getting the security to be okay, the amount of time and money they spend on that, they could have just spent 80 bucks for the seat, for buying the license.

1:26:57And it turns out that like, it's probably not going to be nearly as efficient to duplicate the work across everybody to make their own. Right. You know what I'm saying? So I fully see the skepticism. I'm just more impressed with the tech than I was before. And I do think it's going to change some things.

1:27:10Atrioc:So here I think is another, it gets a little higher level, but what are some downsides of people continuing to use these tools in the ways that we're talking about. The first is a concept called de-skilling. So we've essentially alluded to this, but the idea is that if you offload your critical thinking to an AI, your skills actually degrade. So I found a paper, AI induced de-skilling in medicine, and there's a whole bunch of evidence that doctors who use AI to do decision-making in a medical environment actively lose the ability to make those same tasks without AI. Quote, automation gradually erodes human expertise critical processes become increasingly vulnerable as reliance on ai becomes entrenched and the necessary skills to operate without it are forgotten there's another study that did uh looked at doctors who do colonoscopies in poland tested three months of them just like digging in there for answers without ai and then used ai assistance for three months the detection rate the robots are taking such a beautiful job from humans i want optimus to get up in there yeah 100 i don't i want to this is a humans of love digging through the human polish anuses for a long time for millennia and now it's gone that's a huge part of our economy i take all the jobs think of the polish so okay the the doctors doing this after three months of ai usage their ability to detect this without ai dropped six percent They just became measurably, concretely, substantially worse at their job without AI after they'd used it for a period.

1:28:45Atrioc:Last time we talked about Anthropic doing this study with programmers who used a new, who used like a, learned a new Python library using AI. And the ones who used AI didn't learn it as well. Couldn't refer back to what they had learned. Like the understanding was worse. So this is really concerning in a world where we have AIs that are increasingly like, oh, I can do everything for you. 80 % of your code is just tell me what to do, but you're actively losing the critical thinking skills. So there's another, uh, from modern software engineering, a YouTube video where they did a study about the maintenance of code.

1:29:18Atrioc:And the idea is look, writing code is the getting the first draft done is, uh, a small portion of the overall work it takes to do software. The maintenance of it after you've made it is in his estimate three to five times more than the lifetime, uh, over the lifetime of the software. Some quotes I liked it's largely naive nonsense to imagine you can develop software once and then never revisit it. Um, yet most AI studies stop at did the AI software developer finish faster? And they just kind of brag about the speed and quality of what's written and don't think at all about, is this even useful in the longterm?

1:29:54Atrioc:And again, with all of this stuff, you can start to imagine how this applies to any industry, right? Not just programming. So they did a cool study. Phase one, they had a whole bunch of programmers add features to an app, some with AI, some without. Phase two, a second group of programmers came in and tried to improve the code from phase one, but they didn't know whether it was AI written or not. So the question is, is like, is it harder to maintain AI software? And the results, he was like, I'm actually surprised it didn't appear to make a huge difference. Pushes back on this narrative. You would think the AI code is total dog shit, but it was not.

1:30:26Atrioc:It was fine. But what it did reveal is that the smart engineers using AI had better code. It was like better quality. And the less experienced engineers, the worst one who used AI had worse quality code. And his quote, if you're already doing the wrong things, AI will help you to dig a deeper hole faster. Tools amplify capability. They don't replace it. So it brings up this idea. If you're someone who never learns critical thinking skills they never spend those two years being an entry-level person to figure out what looks good or what's bad they just offload their thinking to the ai or even if you start with somebody who has the expertise and then they de-skill and actually devolve because they're having the ai do most of the work you are now going to have a world where people who don't have good critical thinking skills and a background are producing more shit than they did before we have that world right now that is the world we are in that's what i feel like uh yes yeah it's

1:31:20Aiden:It's pulling the ladder up on critical thinking. I feel like, but also like kicking people down. That's the thing. I think it's been easy.

1:31:28Atrioc:Like we've talked many times about how, Hey, this is going to destroy entry level jobs because a senior engineer can just review what an AI does. And this is, I've talked about this with doctors doing the same thing, but we're like, wow, will people learn to be a senior person? But this is also revealing that the senior people are getting dumber by using AI. So in both angles, we're like suffering. and then there's just going to be this massive slop that is being pushed out as everybody becomes dumber but is better at producing slop we're getting really efficient at being dumb slop generators prime prime said this he reviewed the two most recent models and he's like the people who weren't producing good code are just producing bad code faster at a gargantuan rate yeah and then one final thing i'll say there's this excellent youtube video called a can ai pass freshman cs So this is graduate TA at Cornell.

1:32:18Atrioc:I guess we can put links to these YouTube videos in the description, but graduate TA at Cornell last semester did a study where he basically had the three of the best coding models, Gemini, Claude, and ChachiBT, just follow his computer science class that he helps teach to see, is it actually like PhD level coding? Because Sam Altman keeps saying they're now like PhD level coders. So the synopsis of this hour and a half video, these AIs ace a whole bunch of really hard things and screw up things that no student would ever get wrong and no human would ever get wrong. And the final grades were Gemini and Claude both got a C plus in this class.

1:32:56Atrioc:Chad GPT got a B plus. All three of those models, which are the newest models that are mega hyped, that are told like we're told constantly these are PhD level smartness. Look at all these graphs. Every single one scored below the median student grade. These are supposedly PhD level CS coding capabilities and they're doing worse than a freshman computer science student. And so he ends with a quote that I really like. He talks about how there's all these mistakes. And then he says, but the complete void of creativity that permeates everything that AI touches makes the output so much less than anything we got from the real people we got taking the course.

1:33:35Atrioc:If you put the bland, broken output from the LLMs alongside the magic the students worked, it really isn't even a comparison. So can an AI pass a first semester CS class? Sure, it can technically, but looking at our students, I'm still feeling okay. And I think I was very optimistic. And he showed examples of how students really added like unique creative angles to all the assignments and were able to thoughtfully solve things. And instead, these models are like can sort of kind of do that. And I was like, okay, maybe we got some hope for entry level people. Wow. And all of this, and we can now jump to it, but all of this is not what the stock market is thinking.

1:34:11Atrioc:the stock whether or not these ais are are actually game changers the stock market is acting like it is so to tie back to business last two weeks software software starts are just getting absolutely annihilated panicking first it's not even software stocks like everything that could possibly be disrupted by ai is getting haircut 10 15 20 it's like it was software it was legal it now it's like commercial real estate stuff like a lot of things a lot of things are all getting haircuts. Uh, I think the takeaway that I've had from, from looking into this more is these things are really good at certain tasks and certain, let's say silos of what you're doing, but there's a degree of critical thinking and creativity that is necessary.

1:34:52Atrioc:And in certain cases, just like security and logistics for this to really be valuable in most industries. Right. But on paper, it can replace these people. And that's what the market is doing. And that is where again, I'm really concerned about entry-level stuff. Steve Eisman, best friend of the pod, he did his weekly market recap last Friday and he was like, OpenAI just approved an insurance provider AI app. Investors took that news as a potential existential threat to insurance brokers, many of which went down 10%. He explains that those insurance brokers provide complex services to commercial insurers, whereas the OpenAI app is for personal insurance in like a casual format.

1:35:31Atrioc:But in this environment, investors shoot first and ask questions later if they ever ask questions at all. Same thing with an AI tax powered tool that knocked out a bunch of stocks. Anthropic release the productivity tool for lawyers and LegalZoom dropped 20%, which is like I use LegalZoom. Like they've been nice. And that doesn't get to layoffs, which we can chat about. Yeah, you pull this up. It's the way you were describing is how I've seen it. this is not the, I'm drawing the chart, but it's like the way I always describe is that if this is like a skill chart with different skills, AI goes off the chart on like one part of the task.

1:36:07Yeah. Like insanely, insanely efficient, insanely good. And then it's like really weak at the other part. So it's not well-rounded in that, but some part of the task, it just destroys. Yeah. Which causes people to get scared. Yeah, again, I don't know where I land on hype versus reality. I'm just in a process of flux, but I do know that it's getting better faster. I do know that. And I do know that the old idea of it is just a next token generator parrot getting back to you is not really true anymore because they added, I found this out from that book that we read and I took more time into it, but because they forced it to do chain of thought reasoning where it has to say how it's thinking at all times and then they graded that and then reinforcement learning on that.

1:36:52it now has these processes that applies to everything. And so it's actually capable of getting to solutions that are not just remixed of, yeah. And so that, you know what I'm saying? That is, again, I just know because I've worked in the corporate world, most jobs are not that mentally taxing. Most jobs, three hours a day, people are on Reddit or checking their email and they have a couple of key decisions in the day. A lot of things is pattern matching. A lot of things is like, oh, I got this file. I need to put this in Excel in this way. Send this person to this email, respond to this. It's like, if you can figure that out, that basic thing out, you could do that job.

1:37:26Okay. It's not, I don't know.

1:37:27Atrioc:It's crazy. Permit me to rant one final segment and then we'll, we'll wrap. Yeah, we should wrap. But exactly what you said, right? I think that it's clear that there are critical things missing that which humans are necessary. Even my, my friend who runs the startup is like, look, these things are not creative. The only reason it's valuable is because human beings are making smart decisions around what it should do. but the market is ignoring that and going we can just knock out all of these jobs and replace them so josh tyranji did a he's a journalist attack and he did an interview with derrick thompson he has a quote that i like this from this last week he says when i spoke to a bunch of ceos they said look i actually like my workforce i actually think that this meaning ai would take time and we could perfect it wall street has no patience for that they're expecting me to show financial results now um and then the way they show financial results the fastest is by cutting jobs and replacing those with automation even if it's not perfect he talks about how mckinsey there's another company he's like looked at a lot mckinsey's business model is to hire a bunch of college graduates who've never run a company and then charge another client five million dollars to have these college graduates make powerpoints do make a bunch of powerpoints and they charge some$5 million.

1:38:40Atrioc:So, um, beast business model. It's a crazy, it's honestly a crazy business, but they do all of this stuff, right? They do have a staff of people and to their credit, McKinsey generally hires like wicked smart people out of very high end schools. They do maintain their prestige and, uh, and they spend months creating the analysis and whatever else, even if the analysis at the end is like, yeah, lay off tons of people. So if you think about AI though, AI could just take the data set of all the analysis they've done and then just shit something out to a client, right? McKinsey could very easily make an AI that replicates what their team of human beings does and just does like an okay, you know, pretty close, let's say 90 % version of it, but kind of misses some core things.

1:39:21Atrioc:And even if McKinsey is like, we don't want to do it. We want to maintain our prestige. Well, another company is going to come along and say, hey, we're going to get you the report in one week and it's going to cost$1 million instead of$5 million. And he talks about McKinsey is all of a sudden McKinsey has this massive competitive pressure and they will fall in line because they're not going to lose business over this so what i'm really concerned about now is not only are companies being driven by wall street short-term profits which means lay people off and replace them with ai which is not ready to do the critical thinking and misses certain things but on top of that we're going to have this shitty race to the bottom where they're forcing more ai usage and more layoffs when it's not ready because everybody is going to be doing it and i find this to be pretty uh concerning yeah it's just Spooky in the short term, especially.

1:40:05I do think white-collar layoffs are accelerating, and I think this is a bigger part of it than I anticipated.

1:40:13Atrioc:Dude, like Dario Amidai, biased, works for Anthropic, has a long essay he did about two weeks ago and just lists. So they're making Claude, and he's like, I really think this is going to destroy jobs at a much faster rate than anybody else. I don't know. Maybe he is incentivized to do that. I'm not sure why he would, I guess. But the point is he is actively, he's one of the few AI people. I want to be clear. He's incentivized because his company sells the business clients and they want them to come make a deal with him. Yes. Okay. No, no, no, that's fair. That's fair. He, to his credit, I think he's going out there repeatedly and saying, we are coming in for a catastrophe with our economy.

1:40:53Atrioc:We are about to destroy giant swaths of entry-level jobs, or at the very least, I think there's an argument again, that they're not going to do it effectively. but that wall street and corporations will do that because that's the short term beneficial thing. And that is really fucking scary. And, uh, I, that's why I brought up with Pete last week. Cause I was like, I think this is going to be like the biggest thing in two years. This feels like a fucking catastrophe that is incoming dude. Well,

1:41:21Aiden:if you want to hear us talk about the disastrous revised job numbers, you can join us on the second. And then we're talking about gaming. You can join us on the Patreon at patreon.com slash LemonadeStand. We do an extra hour of the show every week. But that's it for this week's episode. You can check out the Patreon. What are you wearing? All right. Can you pull up the website? Listen, there's one person that embodies the spirit of this pod and us telling the truth at all times. Right. And that is the late, great Bernie Madoff. I don't know if he's dead, actually. Did he die? He did, right? I think he died in prison, yeah.

1:41:53Let's get him and Gerald Ford on the pod.

1:41:55Aiden:Okay, here's the deal. We're selling this sweater with Bernie Madoff on it. I came up with this design. You've been pushing this sweater for like five years. Yeah, if you've followed me closely for some reason or Josh Man, the Melee player, you may have seen this sweater and it's because I made it a very long time ago, but I didn't have a personal brand to sell it under that really made sense. And we finally decided to put it on sale. I was like, what if we actually sold this now? So if you want to cop a Bernie Madoff, never stop hustling sweater. Yeah, it's Bernie Madoff, the greatest Ponzi schemer in world history.

1:42:35And it says never stop hustling. And if that's the kind of brand you want to rent yourself, which I certainly do, here's Bernie right here.

1:42:41Atrioc:That's a smile that can't lie, dude. I would trust that man. He wouldn't lie to you. I would trust that man. He wouldn't lie. By the way, do we get money from this? Or are you just using our website for this? It wasn't clear. That's a great question, actually.

1:42:53Aiden:This money will go somewhere. I don't look we could I really just wanted to get this one out there this sweater's a Ponzi scheme how appropriate guys thanks for watching check out the patreon check out this website what is it lemonade stand dot shop lemonade stand dot lemonade stand dot shop check that out thanks to Bernie Madoff for his long time support of our podcast yeah that's Bernie see you guys next week thanks everybody bye