The New Ferrari is Ugly and the Pope is Pissed (Unrelated) | Ep. 64 Lemonade Stand 🍋

18:00Atrioc:And then, like I said, having measures for equity that go beyond just economic growth, which I think, you know, probably all three of us feel somewhat passionate about changing.

18:10Aiden:I mean, Benedict, which he was more of a GDP guy. It's just simple, you know, just rock solid. GDP go up. It was one of his big quotes was that God like a, when GDP go up, uh do i i kind of want to ask viewers because you know in my own life i've seen the like transformation of my catholic family and the way their faith has developed uh a lot of people in my own life who have like fallen away from the church and anecdotally feeling like this person has lost a little of the the punch that it would have had like even 50 you know 50 years ago definitely The importance of the Pope to like the average person and the, the, the way they can, the Catholic church can impact the world is like dramatically different from it used to be.

18:57Aiden:Right. I'm kind of wondering for people listening, does this guy still have a huge impact in either your own view on things or in your family's views, maybe your older relatives, like how lauded is the Pope's word in, in your own lives? I'm just curious, like people's insight. from an American POV, this is just facts, I'm generalizing, but it's facts. The majority of Christians are more likely to vote Republican. And Trump has been in a feud with the Pope, and it hasn't impacted their opinion of him too much. I can't imagine the Pope's got the sauce he used to have. I feel like the president having beef with the Pope would have been an electorally damning thing for your base 50 years ago.

19:39That would have been insane.

19:40Atrioc:Yeah, that is wild now that you say that. And now it's like nothing. It's like, yeah.

19:44Aiden:And it's, yeah, it's just Tuesday. Are the majority of Christians in the US even Catholic though? I'm not sure. I actually don't know. I feel like the answer is no, but I don't know. But you just feel like the aura of the Pope would have made a bigger deal in that. I don't know. To me, it's kind of surprising.

20:00Atrioc:I think it's really cool to have someone like this give a really thoughtful, arguably, I think a little too long of a take. Again, it's 200 pages and the middle third is the one about AI. Have quad trim it down next time, your holiness. uh was there any parts on ai weapons because i was i was um i had a section that i had for the china uh trump meeting recently about this and just i read more about it and it really is like something that's that's super uh kind of spooky in that it kind of upends a lot of power structures if somebody powerful had the ability to control a lot of ai weapons autonomous control drones or whatever it like upends the the consent of the governed that you need in a lot of cases like it really if it gets more advanced it really does call into question a lot of things that have been true for all of history which is you kind of need this pyramid of humans to all agree and even if you're fucking people at the bottom the people at the next level but if you have so many of those drones you once you're in you're kind of locked into power in a way i don't this this seems to

21:06Aiden:be one of the few things that you know states in conflict agree up on right now right isn't like Like China, US, I think Russia, all agree on provisions around automation of weapons. And maybe I'm mistaken about Russia, but I definitely had read during the US-Chinese summit that one of the main things that is agreed upon is not to allow AI to just have control over weaponry, especially nuclear weapon. This is not 100 % informed change. Over decisions to kill, sorry. No, I agree. I know they said that, and I know that there's like general consensus that's a bad thing. And I think currently nobody's doing it as far as I know, but everyone is training.

21:50Everyone has tests of it. They're all, no one's done it. No one's, everyone has a human on the kill button, but it's just so. But you gotta have it in the pocket. You guys, like everyone's getting it in the pocket. That's what's kind of spooky to me.

22:03Atrioc:I think the spookiest part is that it's not on you then kind of, you know? Like you can offload the blame If you're the general or the head of a state where you're like, our AI went rogue and did drop the bomb on X, Y, or Z. And it's, it's not our fault. But it's also like the thing, like I'm thinking about more than a scary part for me is internal, which is like, if you were a despotic leader and previously you told like, you know, uh, if you told citizens to fire on other citizens, oftentimes they wouldn't do it. A certain level of, you know, if you're a worse enough leader, like a famous example is when the Soviet union fell in 91, there was tanks out front of uh boris yeltsin at the time and they didn't fire on him and he walked out and he stood in the tank and like made him stand down and it was a big moment of like shifting power but like if it's autonomous and you just tell it what to do that's not it's not going to stand down that's not so i don't know that that's a weird thing for me i just don't know if that upends the whole revolutions in history i don't know but the pope explicitly says that and he's it's it is funny to read something the pope read and it's very specific about ai weapons like you have to be able to retrace and reconstruct decision making processes which makes sense you know as in you need to be able to look back and understand how decision was made he says you should not be able to delegate lethal force to automated processes and you have to establish a shared framework at the international level to curb the technological arms race he's he's not like anti tech in this.

23:31Atrioc:He's very much like, here's the ways we need to be responsible and shift how we measure these things. Even though he uses the quote like disarm as the word, which is interesting. He also got Ebola on stage. Wait, no, no, sorry. Cut that out too. Don't cut that. That was a brilliant fucking segue, bro. This guy still got it. Quick look up.

23:55Aiden:It looks like there's about twice as many Protestants as there are Catholics in the U.S. Oh, damn. Really? Yeah. But to quickly move on, let's pivot. Let's talk about Ebola. Something like... The Pope to Ebola. What do you guys... These are the three least related topics that we have ever discussed. This is why we couldn't title it. It's Ferrari, the Pope, and Ebola. It's a fucking wild week. It's a wild week. Okay, what do you guys know about Ebola? Genuinely. Blood disease. Yeah, the blood's

24:25Atrioc:involved. Blood disease, 50 % kill rate. What do I know about Ebola? I know it's a deadly disease. That's all I know. You know what I honestly know when you say Ebola is so embarrassing? When you say Ebola, the first thing I think of is the movie Osmosis Jones from 2001 with like Chris Rock. It's like an animated cartoon. There's a virus in there and he goes, Ebola's child's play compared to me. That's the first thing I think of. I'm kind of caught up on the That's awesome, dude. There we go. If you put influenza and COVID and Ebola on a CSGO team, Ebola's top fragging every time. Is it the worst?

25:05Atrioc:They're operating.

25:07Aiden:Ebola has a high fatality rate, especially this strain. It's one of the highest in the, is it like top? So Ebola, a virus, there's an outbreak of currently in the Congo, the eastern part of the Congo. and the main way that Ebola is transmitted is through bodily fluids, things like blood, vomit, and diarrhea, and it causes you, like you get things like diarrhea, you're bleeding. You're expelling fluids. You're expelling a bunch of fluid as you die from this, and part of this dehydration and fluid expelling you go through puts the people around you at risk because the fluids that people get into contact with is the way people get it.

25:49Aiden:So like people providing medical care to people with Ebola are very at risk to contract it as well. And right now, this outbreak in the eastern part of the Congo is getting really big. As of last week, 900 people had already died. This is a disease with like a 40 % fatality rate. And this specific strain of Ebola right now doesn't have any major treatment or vaccine available for it yet. So this is a new strain of Ebola? I don't think it's new, but it's rare. and researching. And this spread, they are like months behind on containing it because there is no apparatus or effective apparatus in the eastern part of the Congo to be able to contain something like this.

26:35Aiden:If you guys don't know, the eastern part of the country, and the Congo is massive. It's like six times the size of California. The whole eastern part of the country is in disarray. It's very segmented. The government that exists in the capital doesn't really have control over this area. There's a lot of like warlords and taking control of like smaller areas of the country that are at conflict with one another. There's not a lot of infrastructure that like allows supplies or like the military that exists in the country to even be able to come to potentially stabilize that part of the country. This is, and it's been really effectively ungoverned or it's like in a lot of ways yes and it's been that way for uh i think around like a decade and the congo has a very you know volatile history going way way back right this plays into how this disease is like able to be combated right you're not able to like leverage the resources that a more developed country might be able to i think it's hard to imagine when you live in like a you know a place like the u.s or a place like france like the government can't just like deploy and like start developing tests for the disease and like deploying medical workers.

27:44Aiden:It's really challenging this part of part of the country to be able to like test and contain an epidemic, a pandemic breaking out like this. And already like an international aid group had set up like a medical tents to like help out the hospital in the main area where this is breaking out. It's called the Bonilla. And there's like 700 to 900 ,000 people in this, this city of Bonilla. People burnt down these medical tents in order to get a body back from these tents. So another issue with how disconnected and fragmented communication is about the disease is that people have a lot of like fear about the medical people that do come in.

28:26Aiden:There's a lot of like conspiracy theories that are spread. And a really common thing is like when people die, you want to go through like burial ceremonies and deal with the dead in like whatever respectful or appropriate way. right but if you take a body that has died from ebola the fluid is still containing the disease so if you go through these like normal practices that you would you're very likely to contract the disease and people out of fear of the medical staff that are available in there to help them like burned down these tents in order to recover a body and like bury it in the proper way So the limited amount of staff that does exist there is having a really difficult time, like communicating with people and helping contain the disease in whatever capacity they even could.

29:17Aiden:It's a really, really difficult situation. And like part of the reason why like a lot of Ebola pandemics have like spread in this specific area. Yeah. I mean, like they banned funeral wakes and gatherings more than 50 people. and yeah, there's a huge amount of pushback from young people in the community when they try to come in and help. Yeah, so that's wild. So yeah, I mean, I can see it from your point of view of like, if you're somebody who wants to help, not only are you at a higher risk of getting a disease, but you're at a risk of being attacked or having your place of work being burned down.

29:52Like it's, yeah, that's crazy. That is a difficult.

29:55Aiden:And right now it, you know, it looks like this is just gonna continue growing and spreading in this area of the country. And it was interesting. I'd read another article too about the reaction in the capital city of Kinshasa. And that's way further away because the country is so large, right? And day-to-day life there hasn't really like changed much or been held up at all. On one hand, a reaction of like, well, the country doesn't have that much infrastructure for the disease to actually like travel to that area of the country yet. There's like that argument. But there's the other part of it where the government doesn't really have the apparatus or the means to like deal with an outbreak like this either.

30:36Aiden:So like life, people can't just like go home and chill and stop working. You know, people need, you know, need an income. They need to continue working and like living life. And they're willing to gamble the chance of this outbreak, like spreading to a larger city because they can't really afford forward to be more conservative about it. It's kind of a tragic story and it a lot of context around like how a disease like spreads in a place like this.

31:03Atrioc:Yeah, I think that's always when I hear about Ebola, that's one of the things where I feel like, okay, well, hopefully it can't get too bad because you have to like be in contact with bodily fluids. But with these kind of conditions, yeah, that gets a lot harder to avoid. It does seem like it'd be very, it's hard to imagine something like this becoming a sort of global pandemic just because, you know, ultimately it's not traveling through the air. At least the strain knock on wood. Jesus.

31:30Aiden:Yeah. I don't know how like viable that is. Like to what degree it could like mutate and do something like that. I couldn't speak to that.

31:35Atrioc:Being in this area with these conditions, it's like, yeah, that's so rough.

31:39Aiden:Yeah. I think like travel to the country, like Uganda has closed like travel off with the Congo already. A lot of other countries around the world are like limiting people who have been to the Congo from entering. So there's like - Yeah, the US set up a quarantine facility in Kenya for any Americans exposed. And then I think there's like the DRC team has to isolate before being able to compete in the World Cup. Yeah. They're like making them go to a 21-day bubble, which is kind of, you know, there's some controversy there. But yeah, I kind of want to keep an eye on the story and see, you know, how the situation escalates.

32:17Aiden:It definitely sounds like it will continue to, uh but i i thought it was pretty wild to see that story of like the tents being burned down it's like yeah i will say insane respect to the dog i mean the way you described it that that just sounds like the most thankless difficult uh incredible job to be doing that that that's that's really impressive uh and i mean and i mean if we just move on over to korea dude this is like topic whiplash this week i hate that no no no hold on you have to find a

32:51Atrioc:diegetic way to connect yeah connect to samsung and you need to do it with taste we did it flawlessly for our topics dog's transition was one of the best you you you did put up a goat

33:02Aiden:transition and it's and it's like just lie just make something up they won't quote it out of context the doctors in the congo shouldn't strike much like much like the people working yes i'm union buster aided dream with me oh you want to become a streamer you might be working for two guys who commentate super smash brothers melee and they got a little show they do called the reeds and they've entrusted you to do their merch well what do you do you can use shopify to sell that merch you got no idea what to do it doesn't matter shopify makes it so easy your name's ludwig augren you have to sell those clothes somehow this really happened he used shopify the reeds scar and tov entrusted him to sell the reeds merch and he built a store all by himself even though he knew nothing about it and had been and had been fired from every job before that yeah it's funny that of that group he was the smart one on setting things up and he just found a way to use shopify the true star managed to use some of their uh easy to market easy to use marketing tools yeah wait where's he fired this worked there's a happy story he he got fired from his jobs before that and then he successfully okay thanks to shopify thanks to shopify did this

34:26Atrioc:job for the reeds i would argue it's entirely shopify because i have a bunch of reeds merch Wow. It's time to turn those what ifs into cha-ching with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash lemonade. Go to Shopify.com slash lemonade. That's Shopify.com slash lemonade. Pregnant athletes are not fragile. Yeah, that's right. I said pregnant athletes. I am Robin Atchison, VPN head instructor at Peloton, and I PR'd my deadlift the week before my son was born. I was also a, quote, geriatric type 1 diabetes pregnancy, and so I know there can be a lot of fear and uncertainty about what is healthy movement when you're pregnant.

35:10That is why I got trained in pre - and postnatal fitness, and this week on my podcast, Project Swagger, I am sharing some key guidelines and the story of how I stayed active during my pregnancies. Listen now at Project Swagger.

35:27Buy Now, Pay Later is everywhere. And honestly, we need to talk about it. 60 % of Coachella goers put their tickets on Buy Now Pay Later this year. You can even pay off your DoorDash order in installments now, like your sushi. So this week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm breaking down exactly how these companies are making money off of you, why missing one payment can flip your interest rate from zero to nearly 36 % overnight, and the uncomfortable truth about what it really means when you need to split a$200 purchase into four payments. Plus, I'm answering your questions, including what to do if you're already in over your head.

36:01Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. This is a relatively big story in that we've covered this a bit on the show, maybe some on Big A, but the big winners of the AI boom recently have shifted from the hyperscaler companies to the picks and shovels companies. Not just NVIDIA, but all the memory companies. They've been making literally gargantuan amounts of cash. Samsung and TSMC in Taiwan. Taiwan just passed India to be the world's fourth biggest stock market or whatever, entirely off of one stock. India has like, I'm not getting a thousand more stocks over a certain market cap, but one stock TSMC has brought Taiwan up.

36:45And Samsung in Korea has had a similar boom where a few memory companies in Korea, which dominates the memory industry, have made so many sackfuls of cash that it's changing things. And the Samsung workers who have been working around the clock to fulfill this demand for memory are rightfully wondering where their piece of the pie is. Because the profits of Samsung have gotten so gargantuan and yet their pay hasn't changed. So there's been this brewing strike. And they have a lot of leverage right now because the demand is so high that if Samsung slows down or shows down factories for even a moment, the amount of loss they're taking per day is more than like yearly revenues in previous years.

37:24Can I give you just a sense of how much this has grown?

37:26Atrioc:So this is from Bloomberg. Samsung is on track to become one of the world's most profitable firms this year with its semiconductor arm posting a 48 fold jump in profit for the March quarter. Wait, 48 for the 48 times the amount of profit. And so the workers want to cut to that. So here's a number that is stuck in my head. I don't even need to pull it up. Samsung could pay every single employee at Samsung a$400 ,000 bonus. Everyone from the top down to the janitors, a$400 ,000 bonus, and still have their most profitable quarter ever.

38:06So obviously, like, it's the right moment for a strike, and all the workers with their highest amount of leverage and the ownership having the most amount of money to give are brewing for a strike. However, because there is such a desperate desire to avoid the strike, not only by Samsung, but even by the Korean government, who really wants to keep this tax revenue and this boon going of Korean memory, the negotiations have been fierce. But the latest update I saw, which I think is like six hours ago or something today, is that they have held off on the strike. They have a tentative agreement. They're going to get some kind of bonus.

38:38I don't have the hard numbers. Maybe we can even find it. But that's the idea. So it's a very interesting story of a worker. I think this is probably, and I guess we don't know, but historically, memory cycles like this are cyclical, which means there's a moment where supply is low and demand is high and you get a ton of money and then they build up the factories and then the price goes way back down and the moment's gone. So this is kind of your moment as the workers to really get a piece of the pie. You don't want to wait it out or the moment's not going to be there. So, yeah. One hour ago.

39:11Atrioc:Yeah. they reached a deal. Okay. So the union, the labor union voted in favor. And they will be getting an average bonus of about$340 ,000 per chip worker. And I believe there's about her chip worker per worker. And Samsung is also from Bloomberg. Samsung employs about 78 ,000 people in a semiconductor division. Dude, 340 K bonus per person. I don't know if it's going to be to every single person, because you don't know exactly. But certainly it's going to be tens of thousands who are now getting...

39:47Aiden:Wait, 340k per... Is that for real?

39:51Atrioc:Yeah. No, and not only is it for real, because this started last year with SK Hynix. I don't know how to say their name. That's it. Hynix and Micron and... Yeah, so they... Another South Korea company that's making the memory, right? So basically SK Hynix and Samsung are the two that are just gangbusters profit right now. So infrastructure-wise, you need GPU chips, which crunch the numbers for AI, but you need memory chips in order to feed information to and from those GPU chips. So they have to be done together. Like what NVIDIA does requires both, uh, both the GPU chips to be made and memory.

40:27Atrioc:And so SK Hynix is the other one that's going crazy. 2025, they made a deal with their labor union to give 10 % of operating profit to employees. That meant an$80 ,000 bonus for each one in 2025. And they're expecting $900 ,000 per person in 2027. Dude! Holy shit! It is insane. Holy shit! Yeah, and then another quote from them, it's all from Bloomberg, even Hyundai's Hyundai Motor. Wait, that's not a 10 % profit share? This is USD! This is USD! United Dolls, yes, this is dollars. Wait, I hadn't heard that one. 900k per person? So that's what they're expecting, so, you know, it's assuming profits keep going, but this is for, that would be 2027.

41:06Atrioc:Yeah, but that's only 10 % profit share, that's crazy! 10 % of operating profit goes to employees would be 900 ,000 per person. Am I crazy?

41:14Aiden:Per person. This is, I mean, this is awesome.

41:17Atrioc:Yeah. Right. I feel like this is awesome.

41:19Aiden:I will village here. Now,

41:23Atrioc:I don't say this because I don't think it's awesome. I think it's great. It's in fact, it's a trend. And so another thing is even Hyundai Motors union has begun talking about similar rhetoric saying the company should set aside 30 % of net profit as a bonus pool. The idea of companies setting aside net profits out as bonus pool for employees, I think is fantastic. The only counter argument, which I didn't deeply dive into, but this is again from a Bloomberg article that was going through this. This is one of those articles, you know, when CNN is like, this topic is very divisive. And, you know, truck lover 49 on Twitter said this.

41:58Atrioc:So they're quoting people are saying, yeah, netizens. But anyway, the supposed counter argument is that Korean, like everyday people are saying that should go to everyday people. That should go to government programs. It shouldn't just mint like 75 ,000 millionaires and only go to those people who happen to be employed at Samsung and nobody else gets a slice. I mean, I can definitely see the argument.

42:21Aiden:If you looked at this from like a national, almost like a national resource value. And if you look at Samsung's position contextually within Korea, I could see that argument. Like how Norway nationalized its oil and then has this sovereign wealth fund that is basically this like backstop for, and there's like 300 ,000 USD for like every citizen of Norway or something like that. You could view Samsung in that context maybe. uh i mean there already is you know there's there's a there's a big wealth gap in korea and samsung employees are certainly some of the better paid higher-end people so it's like the the better off doing even better like way better have you heard the thing about i mean this is like this is like all people who are already doing too well but how in people who work in tech in like the bay area there's like a real uh massive wealth divide about to exist we'll talk about later with spacex ipo but all the big ipos are about to happen and like just randomly based on whether or not you worked at another tech company or anthropic you're going to become a life-changing 40 million dollar like you have a ton of fucking money or you have 400k and it's like you're doing pretty well but that's and it's like this weird massive wealth gap is going to appear this year um between tech workers i don't it's like an interesting concept i think given that we have so little wealth redistribution.

43:47Like this is like a pretty cool way to start rather than like trying to get your steak too buttery. It's something, it's something, it's something.

43:54Aiden:But I get that too. It's like, you know, some people, they coin flip NVIDIA and other people wind up at Mogul Moose. Oh no, big tragedy. And we both worked. No, big tragedy. I did think of that in my own life because I remember I basically coin flipped between Blizzard and NVIDIA. It was so close for me and my life would be so different. And everybody, my wife, my parents, my friends, they all said, blizzard, blizzard, blizzard. And I was so close to not doing it. And it was, I don't know, it's just crazy. But that's luck. Yeah, I don't know, that's crazy. Yeah, I mean, interesting story. I think it's kind of cool.

44:27Definitely, I don't know, I'm kind of a pro-union guy. I think it's kind of cool. Especially non-public unions, where it's a private company. I think it's really smart, like it works. And they clearly got a benefit out of it. If they did nothing or waited, this moment's going to pass and they would get nothing and now they've got and still they're having most profitable quarter ever so the company's still winning

44:46Atrioc:company samsung is in 2026 actually you can pull this up period estimated to become one of the most top five the second most profitable company in the world only second to saudi arambo that's fucking which is again i think the count the argument would be like this is a level of wealth that potentially is worth almost nationalizing right and if you did like back napkin math 220 billion in profit it's i'm not saying the government should go seize all that but like if they did and then you split that amongst the 50 million south koreans that's like four thousand dollars a person i you know so that you can you could argue you should this should be a giant dividend and maybe there's worker bonuses and whatever else or like the pope loves free market invisible hand you let it ride well i mean even if they change nothing assuming i mean there's a lot of corporate tax loopholes that would you fix but if they were fixed and you had a normal corporate tax rate them having this quarter is already a massive boon.

45:39Yeah, not a money. The government would have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A ton of things. True, true, true. You know, so it's yeah. This company's taken off like a rocket. Wait, I'll segue. Oh, fuck. You got it there, man. You nailed it. That was crushing. No, no, no, no. Do yours. Do yours. I don't have one. No, no, do yours. Free ball. No, no, no, do it. You know who shouldn't strike SpaceX employees because they have the greatest leader of all time, Elon Musk. And that's why I want to hear more about the space that landed just like the recent

46:05Atrioc:starship. Did it go bad? I actually, I actually didn't check. I don't know. I didn't hear that. All right. So SpaceX, we've talked about them IPOing. They have actually done the filing with the SEC. So they filed a document. And as part of that, you know, the process of an IPO, you got to file with SEC and be like, we're planning on doing this next up. They're going to go try to like shop it around to various people. But this SEC is like them, you know, legally disclosing their financials and the various state of the company and all of this. So read through a good chunk of this thing as well. And what they're trying to do, if you pull this up, Perry, is they are trying to, it's sort of supposedly launch at a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation.

46:40Atrioc:If you look at the top most valuable companies of all time, Nvidia currently 5.2 trillion, Apple is 4.5. And so 1.75 puts them around Saudi Aramco, Tesla, and Meta. It'd actually be more than Meta. The top 10 company worldwide as it lists. As it lists. So you might be wondering, how would it possibly justify it? So I'm going to give you a couple fun takeaways from their, from their, their IPO. So here's the form. First off, this is not usual. And I had to go like double check to be like, am I crazy? Or is this not usual? It opens with like 15 pages of rockets. It's just pictures about space. None of these have any captions.

47:20Atrioc:There's no point to any of it. It's awesome.

47:22Aiden:They're getting me.

47:24Atrioc:It's not normal. By the way, audio listeners,

47:26Aiden:I'm looking at some cool pictures.

47:29Atrioc:It reads the first like 20 pages of it reads like, a book for children about why nasa is cool like it's awesome um okay so then you know over this very very very long document some of the interesting things they make a big case about how there's three divisions essentially that they're targeting or marketing and saying look this is what we got first off is the space rockets business we launch rockets look at these pictures they don't make a ton of money we'll get to that in a second second is communications and that's what they're calling their satellite network particularly starlink which is very profitable which we'll get to in a second and then third is ai so as a reminder they tacked on xai recently and what we sort of realized as you look at the financials of this uh if you pull this up perry our best friend of the podcast uh professor g scroll down a little bit to the bar graph uh yeah our good friend prof g so if you look at this graph for people who are listening um this is the revenue and loss for each of those three divisions that I just said.

48:31Atrioc:You can see that connectivity, which again, Starlink, is by far the most profitable thing they have. They're making$11 billion and only losing$4 billion, like$7 billion in profit. No, that's$4 billion is the profit. Oh, sorry, sorry. $11 billion revenue,$4 billion profit. Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. So$4 billion profit space, they're losing money, but they have$4 billion in revenue, and the reason is they're spending like$3 billion a year on R &D, so that sort of makes sense and then you have ai which is this like tumor tacked on to what would be a great company which is losing them six billion dollars and it is a tumor like this didn't exist as part of the company it was a rocket company and then elon wanted to save grok and xai and so he made spacex buy it and now they have this money losing tumor yeah attached to spacex well hold on so this

49:19Aiden:loss we're looking at the 6.4 billion dollar loss right now does that is that after you include the Twitter blue subscriptions.

49:27Atrioc:Surprisingly, yes, they talk. He talks about Twitter in this and it's it's like someone like it's like someone is drunk and it's from a different presentation. They'll just be random paragraphs about like we have so many users on X and then it goes back and then it goes back to rockets and there's no explanation for why that's relevant. This doesn't make any sense.

49:46Aiden:X has everything. It's the everything including rockets.

49:52Atrioc:uh yeah so so in this in this file a huge part of it is basically trying to justify why they will be able to use ai as basically the key pillar of their business i noticed you already found the really funny graph so we'll come to that in a sec um but essentially there's a ton of argument where they say look we have the biggest we've already launched this massive satellite network true you know we already have the business infrastructure to get things into space that's true saying we have solved most of the technical hurdles in order to do something like get data centers into space and we believe that we will be able to create far more of the computing that is needed for the future of AI by putting into space and we are going to be at the center of that.

50:35Atrioc:Notably there is that I could see no information about like for example cooling which is one of the giant technical hurdles behind data centers in space but it is a huge amount of this pitch is based on the idea that the future of the world is going to be AI. The future of that AI will be run in space and we are uniquely positioned to do it. And now how do you justify, which is, sorry, how do you justify the valuation? A track has the chart. Go ahead and pull this up. This is a, this is a total addressable market chart. You know, the Tam is used in a lot of pitches where, um, yeah, you guys, maybe you've seen it back in e-sports pages.

51:13We will say like, sports is a$8 billion a year industry. And if we get even 1 % of that, we're doing, it's a classic like a huckster way of pitching things and their total addressable market. Again, these numbers are made up. They're not based on anything reality. And they include businesses they currently don't operate in. Many of these, they don't currently make any money in or do any of this.

51:37Atrioc:And this is like the pitch of like the reason we're going to be worth this much is because this is all the business we're going to get. Yeah. Yeah. And so they end up with a number of 28.5 trillion, which is essentially equivalent to the US GDP. It's not only the US GDP. The entire B2B business right now is like about a trillion dollars generously. They're saying they're going to have 20 times that.

52:04Aiden:I'd put together - Didn't just enterprise applications. I had to put together a business plan for my Swedish immigration application. it looks a lot like this. The total different market for Three White Guys podcast is billions of dollars. It's trillions, man. The amount of money we're bringing to Sweden is going to be crazy. It's going to be life-changing. It's going to be astronomical. Yeah, again, many of these businesses, they currently don't operate in and don't make any money in. So the idea that they can just make these, I mean, he's always been good at that of throwing out big numbers, but this is one of the most egregious ever.

52:36And it's worth saying, I just want to say, of those top 10 companies you showed, meta, Amazon. SpaceX by far is the lowest revenue and profit. It does not belong in that group by any measure. Even Tesla. Tesla makes more money in revenue and profit. Maybe not profit anymore, actually. I'm not sure, but in revenue for sure than SpaceX. So it really is like a dwarf among giants in that group that is just stretching more than ever the future promises versus what it has now of any company that would be in that big group.

53:07Aiden:We talk about price to earnings and that ratio a lot on the show and how Tesla is the standout in that top group of companies as having a really high price to earnings ratio, right? Yeah. Like a way, like this stock seems to be significantly overvalued based on this one metric compared to these other stocks. And you're saying SpaceX's would be even crazier. So Tesla is the egregious one of the group with about a hundred. They don't have the number for SpaceX. It's not a public company, but the estimates are between 200 and 300. So it would be by far the most like baking in this future promise of any companies that are made that big.

53:42Atrioc:Yeah. Um, there's an aspect of the IPO that I want to talk about that if you're going to cover it all, I don't know that much, but I'll say it if you don't. So it's like, uh, it's about the float. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Okay. So the idea is that, um, you know, the amount of shares that you put up to the public is like the amount that they can buy and sell and trade. And if you put a smaller amount, because it's more scarce, there's automatic demand from people that are interested in SpaceX, from Elon Glazers, from companies that want to get involved, from passive investors and 401ks that have to buy it.

54:12And if you put up just a small amount, the demand of that will cause them to short super high. And it makes all the rest of them on paper worth that same amount. So he's only listing like the smallest amount any company's ever IPO'd for. It's like 5%. It's like, I don't know the number, but it could be a liar. It could be 10%. but it's like a very, very small percent of the company's being actually publicly listed. But because all that demand is going to flow in, it's going to make the price pop and make it seem like all of the billions of shares that he owns are all worth this amount. I mean, it's like a real, it's a real testing of like the rules that shouldn't run that way.

54:46Aiden:Do you know who Max Fosh is? Yeah. Yeah. It's the Max Fosh video. He became the richest man in the world for one day because he had one share. It's that. He is that. Yeah. Yeah, and so it's surprising that, it feels surprising that given all of that context, you can just do that. So that's the thing. So all of this stuff he's doing, including this fast listing, which is getting it to list quicker than other companies normally would and be picked up by retirement accounts quicker than it normally would be allowed to, all these rules got changed for Elon and these new IPOs this year of Anthropic because they all kind of threatened to go elsewhere.

55:25Yeah. Like the NASDAQ really wants SpaceX to listen to NASDAQ. And if he's there, like if you don't do these rule changes, I'll go list on the New York stock exchange or somewhere else. There's not really a lot of options, but he's doing it anyway. And so they caved. So the NASDAQ caved and gave them these rule changes that are like really incentivizing retirement accounts to buy them before they've been proven and to do a small float.

55:46Atrioc:And what is like the difference? Like for me as a layman, I don't, I couldn't tell you the difference between the New York stock exchange versus NASDAQ versus what, like I, All I know is that they make money off of who's listed on them. Like it's to their benefit. So I don't know why it's a difference for like you as a layman. I mean, they list different stocks. NASDAQ is more tech stocks, but it's not like there's a... But they're changing the properties of how things are listed in order to incentivize like retirement accounts, you're saying? So yeah, a lot of people's retirement accounts track the indexes.

56:15You might have like a 401k that buys the S &P 500. Right, right. And it buys all those stars or it buys the NASDAQ. That's a big popular one. And so normally you would have to wait a year after being listed or something before it's like proven its earnings in a way to start buying it. But now it does it instantly. So everyone's retirement accounts, like very quickly after this company gets listed, are going to start automatically buying shares. And they buy shares based on market cap weighting, so the size of the company. And so he's like artificially boosting the size of his company and getting more passive bid.

56:47Like all this is causing people to be quite upset, I think.

56:48Aiden:Is he leveraging the exclusivity of the listing to do that? Because you can be listed on both of these things at the same time. Yes. But I assume he's saying like, if you do this, we'll only go with you. I am not an expert on how you could list on multiple ones. But my understanding is that you pick one, it's listed there, and the size of it helps the NASDAQ or whatever in its growth and money making and et cetera. So I'm not 100 % an expert on that. but I do know that these leveraged the two against each other to get these rule, which would not like a smaller company would never get this deal, but SpaceX is the biggest IPO ever.

57:25And they're like, I can kind of like throw their dick around.

57:27Aiden:Yeah.

57:28Atrioc:There's one interesting piece about the shares. So one aspect of this IPO that people are noting is that it's extremely unfriendly to shareholders, because in theory, if you buy shares into a company, you should be able to vote on how the company works. Like that's the, it's the entire idea. Elon currently has 42 % of SpaceX, but he has class B shares, which get 10 votes per share compared to a normal peasant class A share, which is one vote per share. So he, after this IPO, will have 85 % of voting power. No one else will have more than 5%. So the voting will just be for show. He can vote whatever board he wants.

58:08Atrioc:He can vote whatever compensation he wants. So when you buy into this company, if you buy any of the shares you are basically saying this is elon's literal ship and whatever he wants to do will happen and i'm hoping it earns me money you have no input it's crazy he's pushed the limits of people's willingness to believe him to be a little bit greedy that the price will definitely go up no matter what i mean he's really pushed it and i gotta say this is the zuckerberg playbook he was the first one to do this because the ipo for facebook was what was hugely demanded back in the day. He got these dual class shares that have given him total control over Facebook for all these years, even though he doesn't own the majority of it anymore.

58:47He's sold up enough. He has 10X voting. And Elon is following his footsteps. This used to not be a thing because shareholders, obviously, if they're buying the stock, want to have the vote. But everyone is just all in it. They just want the price to go up. They don't care about... I don't know. It's gotten weird. I wonder what the result will be. It's an interesting... It's a very interesting IPO.

59:08Atrioc:Yeah. I think the weirdest part is like, so even, okay, Prof G Media, our best friend, said, quote, Starlink is genuinely excellent. 3.3 billion in revenue in a single quarter, 1.2 billion in operating income, a 36 % margin year-over-year, no serious competitor. If that was the whole company, it would be one of the great businesses of our era. They have, the rocket launching is, I think, amazing. We've talked about it a bunch on the show. I've glazed it. Starlink is unbelievably successful and now they're jamming the AI side onto it and making the entire IPO about the AI side of it and it's re and then mix you mix that with like the weird Elon things of like super low float and he has all the voting shares it's like very very strange

59:53Aiden:it's crazy like uh have you flown United recently they their Wi-Fi on a bunch of their planes now is just Starlink Wi-Fi yes and it's so good it's actually it's just really that's what really fast Wi-Fi on the plane. And I'm like, imagine all the contracts you could potentially have with all these airlines. You have something that people literally can't compete with right now. And I feel like it's one product that as much as I fucking hate Elon Musk, Starlink is fucking awesome. It's fucking sick. What's the rockets and the catch? But it's not as cool as Grok. I think we'd all agree on that. Yeah, I love that, love that.

1:00:34Oh, I thought you were transitioning to a Grok story. Oh, I wish I had a Grog story. Do we have a difference? Here, I can transition.

1:00:41Atrioc:Okay, get us from SpaceX IPO to... Keep closing the damn... Cuba. Get us to Cuba. What?

1:00:54Aiden:For basically two decades, the experience of using the internet hasn't changed, which is to say when you want to do something, you go to Google, you type some words, you hit enter, and then you click on some links. But now Google in particular is really eager to change that. This week on The Vergecast, we're talking about all of the news from I.O., Google's big developer conference, including the ways in which it is going to change search completely and forever. All that, plus what a Google book actually is, on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

1:01:30Next time SpaceX launches a rocket, I hope it does not crash in Cuba because they've been through enough. Aiden, tell me more about what's going on. Well, no, hold on.

1:01:38Atrioc:If a SpaceX rocket crashes and there's a horrible oil spill, that could be really helpful. They could use the oil.

1:01:46Aiden:Cuba, it's rough right now. I don't know if you guys know this, but they've basically run out of oil. So for people in Cuba right now, what does that functionally look like? Their power grid is offline most of the day. I heard it's like 22 hours. Yeah, they have one to two powers a day right now for the average citizen. And the way this works is people have to cook with things like charcoal and wood in their homes. And the power only comes on at night. So people have to wake up whenever the power has to turn on. They get up maybe like 11 p.m. Lights suddenly turn on. everybody gets up to do their laundry, charge their phones, try and cook the next day's meals all at the same time.

1:02:36Aiden:And then also because there's such a limited amount of oil, like people's ability to get to work. I can't drive to get to work or like a bus isn't available. So people are walking hours to get to their job or unable to work because the job they work requires power to function at all. Energy is the economy. Without it, it's, I mean, everything. Uh, and a lot of people just do not have enough to eat, don't have any money. And I think that, you know, the context that leads up to this situation, at least very, at least recently is, uh, the U S earlier this year cut off Venezuelan oil to Cuba, which was the majority of the oil that they relied on to run the country.

1:03:17Aiden:And then outside of that, I think it was like a little over 60 % of their oil was coming from Venezuela. but they were also getting a lot of oil from Mexico and then a little oil from Russia, Algeria. And something that was kind of interesting to me is something Marco Rubio said about this recently, where he basically - He's very invested. Marco Rubio, like this is his passion project is what's going on in Cuba. Marco Rubio's parents, grandparents are Cuban, right?

1:03:48Atrioc:He's Cuban-American. He's Cuban-American.

1:03:49Aiden:And this is a huge, huge voting block in the US is Cuban Americans, right? And they are particularly passionate about this issue. And like Marco Rubio is like a part, kind of representing that crowd in the US, right? He said that like, because the Cuban economy is in free fall and they don't have any money, that's the reason that they can't get any oil right now. So stay with me a second. Yeah, I'm with you. Something that was interesting to me was, oh, how were they getting all the oil before? had this vague idea that Venezuela was sending them oil basically as aid. But what Cuba was often offering these other countries was their human resources.

1:04:35Aiden:So Cuba has a lot of doctors, for example, right? And they don't have enough money to buy oil. But what they were doing before was like offering their doctors as like, we can help your country and send staff and human resources in exchange for the oil that you give us. It wasn't just purely out of like aid or donation. Cuba was offering what it had to offer and then paying for a limited amount of it in the capacity that they could. In Mexico's case, they were like circumventing the restrictions that have been in place around Cuba but by the U.S. for a longer time by creating like a shell company basically that allowed them to like do transactions with the Cuban government and send them oil.

1:05:21Aiden:And this is the apparatus that gave them enough oil to function until this year. But then the U.S. really cracked down on it, not only cutting off the Venezuelan supply, but pressuring Mexico to cut off their supply as well.

1:05:34Atrioc:Push it. Venezuela's oil has been sanctioned by the U.S. for a while, right? but it was still allowed to flow to Cuba?

1:05:42Aiden:I don't think, like, there was no blockade enforcing that. So they're sending oil, like Venezuela, not cooperating with the U.S. sanctions around how that oil is, like, being distributed around the world. And the U.S. at the time, not, like, militarily enforcing a blockade to limit. Post-Maduro kidnapping is, like, U.S. has much more sway over Venezuela's sending of the oil.

1:06:06Atrioc:Exactly, exactly. And presumably we were not, we being the United States government was not cool with it, but was not stopping it.

1:06:13Aiden:Doing anything to like enforce it. Got it. And, but now Cuba has nobody left. And the oil, only oil they've gotten in the last couple months was the US allowed a donation of Russian oil, which was like 700 ,000 barrels, which was basically lasted, I think lasted Cuba like another two weeks or three weeks. but now they're in a situation where they literally, they have basically nothing left. And the average person in the country is suffering the consequences of the blockades enforcement. And I think something kind of confusing to me is, you know, what is the US's goal here? Because the US hasn't actually been that explicit about what they want, because there's a reason that we're putting all this pressure on Cuba, right?

1:07:05Aiden:One thing we've done more recently, I think it was like a few days ago, the CIA director went to Cuba and basically gave them like -

1:07:14Atrioc:Oh, that sounds good. It's a good start. Yeah.

1:07:17Aiden:And he's like, he's a great guy. His name's Greg. Plays ball on the weekends. He actually comes to our pickup game. Don't even say that. CIA men playing ball with the -

1:07:31Atrioc:Every week he's in a different outfit. We never know who he is. We never know who he is. He always shows up for pickup.

1:07:37Aiden:Got a good three, though. Yeah. Sounds inauspicious, Aiden. I think there's kind of this vague idea right now with the action that we took against Venezuela earlier in the year. We're in this renewed Monroe Doctrine era of the US where we want heightened control over our hemisphere. We want heavy influence over all of the Americas in a way that we haven't pushed for. That's what I heard. Yeah, that was a doctrine behind this. But yeah. I mean, maybe you're answering this question, but what is the specific goal with Cuba? And I don't - So the most concrete ask right now, there's this vague idea of like, we want regime change.

1:08:13Aiden:We want a more economic influence there. We want a government that like follows US demands. We want a complete change in the institutions of who's in power there, right? But we haven't, we don't have those explicit demands necessarily. But what the CIDA director did say, we want at the very least to remove foreign military bases in Cuba that are like intercepting U.S. communications. So there are Chinese and Russian military presences in Cuba that like because of the proximity to the U.S. Right. Like to spy on the U.S. And we want to get rid of that. And that's like our first like real concrete demand.

1:08:58Aiden:Uh, the only other thing that I've, I'd seen is we indicted Raul Castro. I saw that. Who's like 94. He's literally in his 90s. He's like on death door. Yeah. It seemed like really soon.

1:09:09Atrioc:I mean, if we don't do this, he might run for the U.S. Senate. He's too young, Doug. And I think there's too much of a spring chicken.

1:09:15Aiden:There's this vague idea that's similar to the indictment of Maduro. This is like a threat that we're going to come in and remove this guy from power. but we send in black hop choppers to kidnap a 95 year old man. I'm going to lose it. Yeah. So this is the criticism is that if Raul is like removed, it doesn't change anything. He's like, he's a symbolic figure is my understanding.

1:09:37Atrioc:Name the last time that removing or killing a leader didn't help the situation.

1:09:42Aiden:The last time. Other than the last two that happened this year. We should do next week. By the way, we're going to, I'm pre announcing. So you'll do it. Talk to your Venezuelan friends. I want to see an update on Venezuela because that was one of those situations where it's like, yeah, I think Maduro was a fucking bad guy, a bad leader, but has anything changed? It's just Delsey Rodriguez doing, has anything actually changed on the ground? And maybe it has, but it feels like nothing changed. Yeah, I haven't caught up with them since the week after that happened. So I should definitely check back in.

1:10:13Aiden:And in Cuba, unfortunately, I don't know anyone. No guy. Aiden doesn't know all the guys. but I think the sad reality of what's happening right now is the country for the average person, it's like they have no power to live a functioning, I would say dignified life in the words of the Pope. It's a reset to this donut. If you don't have energy on a society, everything infrastructure is built around energy, it's a complete collapse. It's a huge, huge regression. People die, hospitals can't open. And I think there's this theme of similar to Iran in Venezuela, maybe less so with Venezuela, is there's all this like these pressures and actions from the Trump administration, but not necessarily a clear plan or goals that are being explicitly laid out.

1:11:06Aiden:There's just this vague idea of we're taking action because I was surprised when I was looking into this to see the lack of like cohesive demands or messaging around like what this is supposed to what this is supposed to get out of the Cuban government.

1:11:23Atrioc:Surely the person who said we are now going to militarily enforce that no oil goes from Venezuela to Cuba and they'll have 60 percent less oil. certainly i would hope so there was some follow-up or did they like were they like oh sorry it's 12 it's lunch let's break like is there any follow-up to that what i mean that's what you're saying right like we have not we we cut off the oil to cuba they're now suffering and there's no follow-up

1:11:46Aiden:on like what we're trying to accomplish there's there's an idea yeah there's an idea of like we're trying to negotiate with cuba about something that's what i mean and to remove the government from power to get a new one in, but the progress there is not, the plan and the progress there is just not very explicit from what I'm reading. In the back part of my brain, has Trump said like 52nd state or something about Cuba? Is he Trump-Cuba state? I don't think so. I guess not. That's crazy. He says about fucking Greenland, Canada, but not Cuba, which is on the door. I don't know. We have also said like if you, if they begin negotiations with us, Like there is a hundred million dollars available in aid or something like that.

1:12:29Aiden:Okay. But I'm on March 18th. Trump says he can do whatever he wants with Cuba floats idea of taking the Island. He believes he'll, he'll have quote the honor of taking Cuba. But what does that look like? What is the point?

1:12:41Atrioc:I don't understand. The expansionist tendencies of this guy, it seems to be like he wants to change the map and have it be his legacy. I swear to God, it feels. Yeah.

1:12:48Aiden:The most concrete, the most concrete demand I've seen since the blockade is this, uh, is the CIA director going there and then, uh, you know, asking for military presence to be removed from there. That's like the, uh, but we'll see, you know, we'll see how it turns out. I'm not, you know, my heart definitely goes out to people who are like normal people who are caught in the crossfire of like great, like, I don't know, powers. This is a perfect transition. Please continue your heartfelt, uh, thing because I want to talk about the stock of the week. Yeah. Yeah, what is the stock of the week? A track?

1:13:21Why did we set up this order from Cuba? The problem is you and I have goofy business stories and AIDS all depressing shit in the world.

1:13:30Aiden:We're trying to fit Ebola in between. They're calling it the most incoherent podcast episode of all time. My next one is Google glasses. I can't go from Cuba. I can't just stock of the weekend. That's a really sad story.

1:13:44Atrioc:You know, now that we're going is the stock like a really important company that would help the average person feel better about the life no no in fact it's not it's like a wrong for this uh here uh bring up this really me me showing that the struggling

1:14:02Aiden:mother cooking with charcoal in her home the stock of the week yeah yeah what is it atrion tell me what it is human family if you need some financial advice here's the stock of the week that can really turn it around for you. We need a little sound effect. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Stock of the week.

1:14:21Atrioc:Stock. It's just a little graphic I made that feels kind of in poor taste now. It feels too crass and financialized. But this is the Stock of the Week segment, which we just started, where I'm going to go over an interesting stock change from the past week and maybe talk about some of the context or story of it. Does the company here have power more than two hours a day? They have a lot of power. They have a lot of power. A lot of political power. And in fact, a storied history with our own podcast. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the stock of the week is Intuit TurboTax.

1:14:56So brace yourself, because ever since we canceled our partnership with Intuit TurboTax, turns out their stock has had, in the past week, they were the largest falling large cap stock in the world. They fell 27%. There you have it, folks. that's the lemonade stand difference uh and if you zoom out it's 30 percent the past week i'm doing a stock of the week so this is the largest fall in the last week we have any major stock but if you zoom out six months they lost half the value of the company oh my god and if you zoom out a year they lost 60 percent intuit turbo ducks has been an absolute free fall if you zoom out all-time max you can sort of see us on this chart but ever since mid of 2025 they have been completely collapsing.

1:15:43And right around in the middle there, you can see, is when we canceled our partnership. So there's a big thing.

1:15:51Aiden:And that's why you need to sign up now at TurboTax.com slash lemonade. So why? Why is this company an absolute freefall? I mean, this amount that they fell in this very short period of time is equivalent to Starbucks and Chipotle both going to zero in a six-month period. Pretty big fault. So TurboTax is a company that is basically four separate companies in a trench coat. It is Intuit TurboTax, which you know, which is the public tax filing company. It's QuickBooks, which is for small businesses. It's Credit Karma, which is like checking your credit score. And it's MailChimp, which is like the company I used at Twitch to make email newsletters for marketing.

1:16:31Aiden:MailChimp, I did not know. Yeah. Yeah. I once famously misread the MailChimp prompt and sent out a letter to 7 million people that just said SDFG.

1:16:40Atrioc:And let's just say that was stock of the week. And that guy got hired at NVIDIA after that. After that. They didn't even fire me. But the crown jewel of the company is actually not TurboTax. It's QuickBooks, where the vast majority of the profit of this company comes from, selling to small businesses with their tax solutions. They have a 70%. It's a duopoly between H &R Block and QuickBooks. Basically, every small business in America uses one of these two, outside of a few exceptions. And they make us their money from that. So that has been disrupted lately by AI. This is perplexities, computer for taxes.

1:17:15A lot of AI companies are swooping in and trying to find ways to guide you through the tax process the way TurboTax does, but for way, way cheaper. And none of them are quite good enough yet, but the threat is in the air that they're gonna be taking a large part of this chunky market share and doing it. The second part of this stock dropping so much is that they're the first company in the past year to do a mass layoff and say, it's not because of AI publicly. They made the big mistake of cutting signatures of the workforce, thousands of people, and saying nothing to do with AI. And the market, instead of rewarding that, punished it because it just seems like, oh shit, your company's in a bad spot.

1:17:53The reason they did that is because they are very wary of even saying the word AI because AI is such a threat to their business that they want to pretend like it's not a big deal and nothing to do with it. And then the final reason that they're having this collapse in this past week is they just announced earnings. So we've talked about this. There was a new government feature called Direct File in 2024, which allowed low-income users to just file their taxes directly through the government and not have to use any secondary thing like TurboTax. And through a little bit of lobbying in 2025 with the Trump administration, TurboTax was able to get that gone.

1:18:31So this year, you could not use direct file. It was removed by the government.

1:18:35Aiden:You're telling me that happened and we signed a deal with them after that? Look, it's a joke. It's a joke. If you want the actual explanation, you go to go read a fucking public Patreon post. You want the actual explanation? I'm goofing off. He's a bit of a goofer. So here's the thing. So in mid 2025, when this lobbying went through, the stock market was like, oh, well, they're going to make bank. Like they've clearly eliminated their biggest competitor. They're going to grow a lot. This is awesome. But it turns out when they released earnings this year, despite the fact there was no direct file, all low-income users used TurboTax less.

1:19:17There was a lot of pressure among price-sensitive DIY filers, and they ended up just finding others. So I don't know what they used, but they didn't use TurboTax. They didn't have the growth among low-income users.

1:19:26Atrioc:Yeah, the direct file was shut down, but that was like the government program. but they still, there are free, there is a number of companies that do it for free. So I think people just use those. Yeah. Having maybe gotten used to direct file in the previous years, they didn't come back to TurboTax the way they thought they would. Yeah. And so all of that combined to make a, you know, a pretty weak earnings report. And the company just keeps going to going to free fall. So that is a stock of the week. I hope that context helps you understand what's going on with them too. I thought that was kind of just an interesting story of why this company's not only part of the software is getting eaten by AI story, but also like the lobbying didn't work.

1:20:04So it's kind of just an interesting, interesting little update on that's the stock of the week. No, I forget if you already mentioned this, but I'll let you finish the jingle that we,

1:20:13Atrioc:everybody knows and loves he's doing background. He's doing it the same every time. Is, is there, is there like revenue way down or is it just, no, it was actually a pretty decent quarter. Like they, they beat on revenue and they beat on profit, but it was these little things buried into it. One, we're having big layoffs to our low income thing. didn't grow the way they thought it would. And then three, please don't talk about AI. Please don't talk about AI. Please don't talk about AI. Okay, so they're getting beat off because of AI's threats, not necessarily because their business is currently collapsing.

1:20:42It's not collapsing. It's just the growth has really slowed. It's really stalled. Got it. Okay. I mean, most of their profit came from we fired a bunch of people and we don't have to pay them anymore. Gotcha. And that hasn't gone through our business yet.

1:20:53Aiden:I think also maybe another thing that brought them down is on QuickBooks, they recently added that tips feature, which just sent me to the fucking mood and anger. I opened a hundred thousand dollar invoice that unironically had a tip section at the bottom, 10 through 20%. Do you know what happens when you click 20 % on a hundred thousand dollar invoice? You can probably do that math. Wait, when you say tips, do you mean tipping on advice?

1:21:21Atrioc:You mean tipping on an invoice? Yes. Yes.

1:21:24Aiden:I opened, I'm not going to, I opened a hundred thousand dollar invoice because that's like the maximum that'll let you pay it at like a time when you open a QuickBooks invoice. And it had a tip, tip percent at the bottom. Like a supplier? Like I'm at the fucking coffee shop. And I, well, did they do a good job? The factory owner spinning the iPad around on his hundred thousand dollars. Yeah. So let me just send you that extra 15K. That's crazy. He does my latte crazy. Yeah. But I do think the biggest part of their fall off comes from the PR nightmare they feast with the Reddit posts against them on the lemonade stand.

1:22:04Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Atriox subreddits, and I think that crushed their brand.

1:22:08Aiden:And I stand, and God, God, I stand with them. I stand with them on the subreddit. But the only thing more annoying. Wait, with Intuit or the people? Or you're still deciding? Ooh, Doug, remember when we said we were going to do surface? the only thing more annoying than me forcing stocks in this conversation would be Aiden forcing the Nordic countries into this conversation and I know you've got a brand new segment it's a new segment ladies and gentlemen oh is that the Nordic fun fact of the week I can't wait we made this a segment largely to stop you from doing it in real life I want to contain this to the podcast You'd be like, no, no, no.

1:22:50Save that for the segment. You want to make all of them suffer with you. Yeah, I would rather you guys suffer than him ad hoc in my real life telling me, oh, did you hear about this shit in fucking Norway? Oh, did you hear about how Sweden's got here?

1:23:01Atrioc:Okay, everything else. They made school buses that go two directions. I don't give a shit, Aiden. And you're going to tell me only on the podcast now. Brendan and I, we don't know what this is. It's just called Nordic Fun Fact. Go ahead. Why is the Nordic Fun Fact? No, no, no, no.

1:23:15Aiden:know well what do you think if you could imagine what sweden's national pastime is what do you think it is it's fucking standing in the dark at 4 p.m that's top 10 another guest free health care i don't know on bread in some way combining those two also top 10 free health care not even top 20 not even close it's it's it's packing your lips with a little bit of zen actually i think i except it's not. I saw this. It's it's snus. I read this in the paper, like the physical paper. So if you don't, if you don't know this in Sweden, everybody is packed up, baby. They got to, they got a horseshoe of these in their mouth.

1:23:58Aiden:Anecdotally, one of my, one of my favorite stories is I know more than one person who sleeps with two of these. That's fucking crazy. In Sweden. Yes. And, and if you're an American, you're probably aware of the general trend of products like Zinn catching on, especially in the last few years. They've become incredibly popular, but they have been a part of, I would say Swedish culture for much longer than that. They've had like little tobacco pouches that you like, that you put in your mouth, like little pillows and they've switched to something like more synthetic in recent years that is, but like per capita use of these things is way higher in Sweden than most of So that's news.

1:24:40Aiden:And that's it right there. Yeah. And so I read, I saw this lovely article on the FT titled French nicotine pouch ban is an attack on the Swedish way of life. Minister says this is actually an anti-Swedan story. I'm glad you brought it. France, France put into place a really strict ban on these pouches. You can no longer buy them in France. but not only that, you can't have them in your possession at all. So normally how it would work with laws among countries in the EU is even if you have like a localized ban on something like this, it wouldn't necessarily be considered contraband or illegal to have that product within the EU in other countries with asterisks on that.

1:25:29Aiden:And Sweden is apparently -

1:25:31Atrioc:You buy this in Sweden, you bring it to France.

1:25:32Aiden:Yeah, yeah, that would be fine. Okay. And Sweden is really upset by this ban because it goes way further. It bans these products in a way that would set you up for a massive fine and potentially prison time if you had like a pack of these pouches that you traveled with into France. How that will actually be enforced, you know, we'll see. But people, politicians within Sweden are claiming this is a huge attack on Swedish culture. In Sweden, we have had a relationship with Snow since the 1600s. And it would be the equivalent of banning something like French wine. Yeah. And I don't really know how to forget.

1:26:11It's as if we would prohibit French baguettes in Sweden.

1:26:15Atrioc:Or private healthcare in America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sweden's part of our way of life. Right. That's our culture. That's what George fought for. Yes. Yes.

1:26:24Aiden:It's not really clear if there's going to be any reaction on France's part, if there's going to be any addendums to this law or like reversal of it or caveats. but uh sweden arguing that it has direct consequences for the free movement of persons uh because eu citizens risk sanctions while traveling through france for just do you think it's the massive exporting of snooze from sweden it's a huge economic thing and they don't want friends that's fucking dumb atriak it's about the cultural what's wrong with being packed up with your boys in france speaking of that wait show the graph scroll down this is how popular snooze in Sweden, the right graph is the youth.

1:27:05Aiden:Yeah. And you can see ever since they launched the nicotine pouches, it has just been exponential hockey stick up. Absolutely exploded. So the boys are packing the zins or what's new zins.

1:27:17Atrioc:Aiden, I don't mean to speak ill of our brand new segment, Nordic Fun Fact. However, this feels more like a France fun fact. This feels about what France is doing. Also, so my understanding as a dumb American. French love smoking. Why are they so anti-Zin? Okay, that's actually a really good point. That's a great question. Why is France banning snooze when everyone there smokes a pack of gas? I think they're trying to protect the cigarette industry because Zin is threatening the French way of life. Wait, maybe you're fucking right. That's honestly a good point. I never thought about they smoke so much in France and they're worried about fucking snooze.

1:27:48Aiden:I have no idea what tobacco or like nicotine consumption stats look like in France. If I could take a stab at it. I bet it's literal, yeah. Go for it. If I could take a stab at it Before you look something up, here's my desk. Because even on this chart in Sweden, right? You can see that tobacco or like smoking and nicotine pouches were declining in use up until like 2016, right? Yeah. And tobacco use in general continues to fall off. While tobacco consumption rates are different in various countries, a lot of like smoking in the US has fallen off of a cliff. It's been seen as this giant success in public health, right?

1:28:30Aiden:Which I believe that. But the uptick in pouch use and vape use, like I think the argument here is that if you wanted to protect the public health of France, maybe smoking is already on the decline and you're not too worried about it. So you just want to stop this new trend in its tracks before it can really take off.

1:28:55Atrioc:that's what the ai overview at google.com is also suggesting all right smoking's already declining over time so this is a broad attempt to tackle nicotine but maybe it's by big cigarette and they're they're just uh they put on a mustache i wonder what the people undercurrent the financial undercurrent of this is but i just got to say like on a broad level you'd think it feels a little uh presumptive of sweden to tell france what they can and can't ban for health reasons like if it's if they were like saying sweden can't do it that's one thing but it's like in france you should be able to regulate what you want well okay to give this argument

1:29:34Aiden:some credit i think i think this is a silly story with this specific subject matter i think the idea of you getting mad at another country banning snus in a vacuum is is ridiculous yeah i think it's ridiculous that some of my friends sleep with two of these too by the way i but but i think the underlying idea here is there is some infraction on the agreement that we are all partaking in as a part of the european union we all have agreed to these rules and stipulations about how commerce is done between our countries so why are you making an exception uh and and breaking our agreement that's that's the context that they're arguing how it'll hold up I don't know.

1:30:18You should follow it up with another Nordic fun fact of the week. That was actually kind of interesting.

1:30:21Aiden:Next week, we'll be back with my other Nordic fun fact of the week. It turns out Iceland's thinking about joining the European Union. Oh, boy.

1:30:27Atrioc:That doesn't sound as fun. Let's go another snooze update.

1:30:30Aiden:Yeah. Maybe mostly snooze facts of the week. Snooze facts of the week. Well, I want to hear an update from Doug because already on this show, we actually did a little history lesson on Google Glasses when they got initially announced. Wait, let me, let me, let me, let me hit this one, because I think there's a good thing. The next topic, which we'll probably close the show on, is about smart glasses. And Doug has something to say about that. And before he does that -

1:30:54Atrioc:He has something to say. Okay, no, no, no, no. Before he does that, I want to say that when we were prepping this episode, just an hour ago - Right. You walked into the bathroom, said, Meta, take a photo, then took a photo of your pee, then brought it out and showed it to me, and it was bright neon yellow. So you need to drink more water, but I'm excited to hear more about why you were doing this meta play dubstep i don't want to listen to this you've also been doing this off camera you were playing classical music earlier or whatever i couldn't hear anything you guys are saying drone this out no turn on dubstep oh my god okay thanks to the new meta updates you can't glasses whatever you can listen to look new google glasses we talked about a while go.

1:31:39Atrioc:All right. In our failed products, right? That was like an example of one of the like Google Glass. Yeah. Like one of the least successful. So, you know, long period of time where Google was trying to do this. One of the interesting things that came out of Google IO last week, which is their big yearly tech conference, is that they said they are definitively launching new glasses. Now, these are a little different. Perry, I gave you a link and you can pull them up here. But basically, they said we're doing two things and they're going to be both coming in 2026. The first is audio glasses that are going to speak into your ear.

1:32:11Atrioc:It is called instead of Google Glass, intelligent eyewear. They are partnering with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. You can see some looks here if you are watching on YouTube. Looks good. And these are going to be very, very similar. You said looks good. I like these ones. They seem fine, right? I mean, I'm not a big, yeah, I don't like the style. That one's kind of interesting, not for me, but like it's like a, it looks like it's fashion glasses. I think, you know, the fact that they're partnering with like legit glasses brands. So two categories, first category audio only, which is going to be very similar to what Meta's glasses are currently doing.

1:32:50Atrioc:And that just means there's a speaker in your ear. It has a camera and it's going to connect to Gemini, which is their AI model. And it's going to connect to your phone and you can and be like, oh, I had something to my calendar right now. Oh, like take a picture of this, blah, blah, blah. So they're launching this, and then they are also going to launch a second version, which is partnering with Xreal. And you can see actually from CNET a video here in the background. Now, the reason I wanted to show this particular video is because gaming is fucking back, gentlemen. All right, if you play this.

1:33:19This is Infinite Climber again.

1:33:21Atrioc:No, it's not Infinite Scaler, which by the way is a big deal and you have to admit. Secondly, check this shit out.

1:33:26Aiden:You could connect with a Steam Deck, and you could connect your phone or a laptop, daisy chain it in. I played games on a Steam Deck and then brought up a YouTube browser, the little processor puck, and played tutorial videos alongside Hollow Knight.

1:33:42Atrioc:Okay, and let me explain what's going on here. This second category of glasses, and this is where the more interesting piece of this little mini story is, is going to be a version where there's actually a screen in the glasses. So we are finally going to have, you are wearing glasses and you get like a heads up display that shows you here is a google map you can see it and as you're walking it adjusts right here are images here are videos here whatever and this cnet video shows him he is playing silksong the the output from his steam deck is playing silksong being sent into a video live in his glasses as well as another window which is a youtube tutorial of the same game all inside of reality that he is looking at through the glasses.

1:34:23Atrioc:It is to put this differently. Basically, Apple Vision Pro, but in glasses is never going to talk to each other in person ever again. It's a little sad. Like I will be playing Silksong during Nordic faculty during this.

1:34:39Atrioc:This shit's got a crazy to be honest. It's got too far. No, you're so right. And you're so right. You just turn up the

1:34:50Atrioc:so you know, this is going to launch. The audio one is going to launch in the fall. The glasses one supposedly is going to be launching later this year. They're partnering with X real for that one. The reason I think this is sort of interesting meta. These glasses that actually bought a year ago, year and a half ago, and it's like, yeah, this would be cool to try new glasses. I've used these one time, including two times, one of which is setting it up, and the second is taking a picture of my pee and showing it to you. But to To give you a sense of like how well these are doing, as we know, Apple Vision Pro kind of fizzled out.

1:35:22Atrioc:A lot of the VR stuff kind of fizzled out. But Meta Glasses in 2024, when they launched these Ray-Ban things, 1 million sales. 2025, they sold 7 million of these things. 76 % of the smart glasses market is owned by Meta, according to IDC. So later this year, Meta is going to do Meta Connect in 2026. Supposedly, they're going to maybe add a display screen so they can try to compete with what Google's doing. Maybe more AR features, maybe additional sensors. That version with the Silksong thing, you're going to have to have a little device in your pocket, little puck. Maybe they do something like that or a wristband.

1:35:57Atrioc:Google kind of has advantages on integrations, but this is pretty cool in that these have been actually going like huge. These are getting insanely popular, I think a lot more so than I realized. And as these become mainstream, the instant you get an actual working HUD in these things, it might really explode with what people want to do while simultaneously being very dystopian i you know it's like i want to have a nuanced take on it because i tried the i bought a pair as well i thought it was a cool idea i wanted to try it out and played dubstep i yeah dubstep while i'm talking i think the music part is actually kind of awesome like no one around you can hear it it looks pretty cool though i think the worst part is right here bro i think it's a vibe killer to have a camera in your glasses once anyone else in the room notices it you feel like such a weirdo it's not a cool it i think it breaks the social contract to have a camera in your classes i honestly think that's the worst part you're not you're obviously listening to that but i just think it's a problem better turn it up and i i think a version that had no camera but the music and maybe the hud is kind of interesting like i think it's kind of it could be cool on like a flight or whatever but i just think the camera breaks something it's weird Women love when you approach them with these songs.

1:37:10For starters. You're just so on base. Because someone did it recently at an event I was at, and you're talking to them, and you realize, oh, wait, this is weird. Like, you could be recording this right now. It's just a weird... Because I open every combo with a slur, so I was just like, it's me. It's like, you're recording. And I don't want people to cancel for that.

1:37:28Aiden:I think you're right. I think, camera aside, the general skepticism of this product strikes me as similar to the six fingers ai argument it's like sure maybe it doesn't work that well right now but it's gonna get to a point where it works amazing it works pretty well the music part works great it's yeah no one can hear it around it and you can it looks it's awesome i think there is a cynicism for the product that I see broadly outside of that, outside of the camera that I, I, I feel that way about, uh, for the camera. I feel like it's like, dude, it's kind of like phones where I think people just get whittled down.

1:38:09Aiden:I think that's my unfortunate take on it is I do feel like we obviously feel uncomfortable about that, but as soon as like enough people have these on all the time, you just suddenly have to accept it, which is fucking annoying. But I think the reality of it is is if it just becomes popular enough it'll be fine you're probably right people will get whittled down that's a that's a rough thing to hear but you're probably right but when i first use it i don't know at least so far people have held a line and by the way people kind of said that about like i don't know apple vision pro and stuff and that in public is horrible but that's

1:38:46Atrioc:different right so it's it doesn't it i mean that's that's the whole thing with why this is interesting is it's the first form factor on your face that feels comfortable ask a question do you i don't know if you know the answer to this if you used a version of this with uh a screen in there and i'm like talking to you is it very obvious that you're watching something on a screen so i don't know i mean these aren't out right yeah this is it's not public yet so i see in your glasses like the reflection of you like i can't watch youtube videos or whatever yeah i don't know because that that's a big impact it's like i want to be able to watch like a Counter-Strike videos while driving, and I don't want the cop to be able to know.

1:39:24Atrioc:Yeah, officer. Yeah, I guess I was going too fast. Is that donk highlights? Riddle me this. Is it that much? Technically, it's better than if the phone's like near my lap and I look down occasionally. You could always say technically it's better than something for anything. There we go. I'm whittling you down. That's not an argument.

1:39:42Aiden:Meta, show me Doug's pee.

1:39:48Anyway, folks, that's the That's the wide world of our story. Check this out. Before Doug breaks an ATAR rule and shows. It's super weird. We have to take a picture of that. We're going to catch you next week. If you want an extra hour of us debating this, you can find us on the Patreon. That's another great, a limited stand in the books. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye. See you next week. Bye. Fade out now before I see Doug's pee.