We Solved the Strait! | Ep. 058 Lemonade Stand 🍋

19:53Aiden:And Lebanon's super... You called it out. That's the problem. Lebanon's defined right now.

19:59Atrioc:The problem? Lebanon, run by Hezbollah, who's an Iranian ally. That actually wasn't the problem I was thinking of. They're going to close the canal.

20:07Aiden:They're going to put a toll booth on the canal. I was thinking of a different problem in Lebanon right now. There is really no place you can put a canal. Except, gentlemen, there is one obvious solution.

20:19Atrioc:You go north through Iran to the Caspian Sea, right? We get boots on the ground. We start digging. It'll go right next to Tehran. Okay. And we get to the end. What is the single problem with that? the single problem the single problem the single problem is that the Caspian Sea is not a sea it's a big lake it's a big lake so that our boats are stuck in the Caspian Sea imagine figuring that out when you finally get there we spend trillions boots on the ground in Iran build a canal oh fuck guys the government likes to do weekly sprints you just kind of focus on the next leg of the canal this boat hits the oh shit but okay even if you actually did this and you got the canal you got all our boats into the Caspian Sea there is actually a way to get to the rest of the cities right if you look there on the map through the caspian sea once you're in the caspian sea we just need one more canal you go east okay you go across kazakhstan across china across all of mongolia across china again across russia and then you're at the sea of japan your boats are scot free right because straight right when we're there okay now we can go up through the bering sea we can go through the northwest passage down past greenland and we go to new york city that's but gentlemen awesome what's the last remaining problem i've greenland could close the straight which is why we do need to take greenland donald

21:40Aiden:trump was right he 5d chess i was i'm thinking about this because at first i was like if one country yeah i could influence a straight based on their geography surely a canal through multiple countries presents the more the same problem at a larger scale okay i was thinking about that but I hadn't considered that once you go through so many countries, you actually create such a confusion that maybe no one knows how to enforce it or take advantage of it.

22:11Atrioc:And then I want to say, checkmate, Ron. So one thing here is ideally we could actually go down to Panama and create another canal alongside the first one, Panama Canal. Just to double it up. It's like adding another lane to traffic. It just makes it better. Just one more canal.

22:26Aiden:You know what the solution is? This is like if we revived Magellan and asked him what the solution was. What do you think the fastest way is to get oil out of here? This is the type of shoe we can do as a society if every country worked together. Yes. You know what I'm saying? We can build an even bigger canal.

22:44Atrioc:We can build bigger canals that go every which way. Let's do a one-time wealth tax and we'll fund it.

22:53That's a brilliant idea, Doug. I think you've brought a unique insight. He's cracked the code. He might have cracked the code. Why aren't they doing it? Okay. Anyway, we're on.

23:02Aiden:Why don't we hop on over to maybe a smaller, lighter story? I wanted to hear about this DOJ case against the NFL. Wait, well, let's do Hungary. You want to talk about Hungary now? Are you trying to put a little light in there? I'm trying to add a little spice before we get to that. We could talk about Hungary. I mean, I'd do it. It's pretty quick. Why don't we combine them both in one story? All right. You're just trying to get my stuff out of the way. Just fucking throw a truck out. Get it. You take nothing at the end. Yeah. Yeah. DOJ. So listen, you're, you're an NFL viewer a little bit. I am.

23:33Okay. I'm not really, but the complaint from NFL viewers and senators who get complaints from their constituents about the NFL is that it has become more and more dispersed across different streaming platforms to the point where if you wanted to watch every single game of the NFL in the last season, it would cost you$1 ,000, which is higher than even the cable era. So it's like astronomically expensive and people are getting upset about it. So the DOJ, despite not really doing much antitrust enforcement in this first year of Trump's term, has come out with a new lawsuit against the NFL, or I guess it's beginning the process of investigation in the NFL.

24:12And the idea is back in like the seventies when the NFL was just getting off the ground, they were given an exemption to a collective bargaining thing. The idea is that every NFL team should negotiate TV rights on their own. That's the idea. They're competing against each other and keeps the prices down, yada, yada. But NFL was given an exemption that allowed them to all negotiate together and be a collective issue for all NFL to negotiate as one TV rights package. And that made them a lot of money and it's been quite successful. But that only applied to traditional cable TV. It does not apply to streaming.

24:44And so they've been operating like it does but now there's this question mark of like hey is what you're doing really allowed is it a monopoly thing um it's weird you're gouging people i feel like it's it's easy to

24:57Aiden:watch right it's all in one place you just well you just go to stream you go to stream east you go to stream east and it's all there so i don't know what they're what they've been talking about

25:07Atrioc:youtube it's like this last season you know i paid for youtube tv plus fox whatever it was and it's like a cool$110 a month or something like that. It's crazy expensive. And you can watch most of them, but it is wildly obscenely expensive. To get all this, if you want to get everything. Right, right. If you want to get like your local, anything outside your local network. For the NBA, it's been miserable. Like when you see LeBron James on the sideline watching the game on stream East, you know that there's a problem. He's a billionaire. He's watching that happen. Yeah. Wow.

25:36Aiden:It's just convenience, right? Like I experience it more with the NBA as well, where I bought, I think, like YouTube TV and the NBA like league pass this year. And I couldn't watch the Lakers game. And between these two things, I was paying, the first time I've ever paid for sports my entire life. And I was paying$190 a month between these two platforms. And I couldn't watch the fucking Lakers game. And I was like, what's happening? What is it? And I gave up. I canceled both. I'm like, I know what I'm doing from here on out. I did that same story. So why in this specific case, why i i still don't quite understand they're just they're breaking it sounds like with negotiating deals with streaming platforms they were following the decorum or precedent of the law as it applied to cable packages yeah up until recently but then they started breaking the law to make to broker more deals with more streaming platforms if you are trying to find the exact true legalese reason for this you're going to be lost because the truth of the matter is it is mostly pressure from senators who are getting a lot of anger from constituents who have just found this to be horrible this experience is horrible there's not it's really kind of a gray area uh technically you know in my mind it's not that crazy for the nfl which kind of operates as one org to have their own negotiation for tv rights but the way it is broken basically what the doj seems to want is not to like dramatically upend the rules they're just like make it cheaper like they're kind of like trying to put pressure on yeah i guess because i'm not understanding like

27:08Atrioc:the nfl it's a company right it's an entity right so how do you tell it that it has to break up into multiple it that just seems the way it was prior to this this uh ruling in the 70s was like each individual team technically owns their own rights for for their games they're just preventing the teams from bundling together okay so they've been collectively bundling and negotiating as one entity which technically is a monopoly and allows them to you know kind of gouge consumers if they competed they would probably drive the prices down teams would try to have a cheaper package and the other team to get more fans or whatever.

27:39That's the idea. But they can't, they don't have to do that. And they possibly should have to do that with streaming. But really DOJ is like, just people are mad, figure it out. It's kind of what it seems like the vibe is. Not that they're like deeply concerned about the letter of the law and antitrust.

27:53Atrioc:I think it's one of those things where it determines presidential popularity, like gas. It's like if gas prices go up, the population's unhappy. If football goes up, population is unhappy. Like you just can't do that. But you're probably right. I think it's just like politicians would be like, Like, hey, look, football needs to be... This is going to spark more change than housing, I think.

28:11Aiden:I think you're right, dude. Yeah, I'm so torn because my initial reaction is people are fucking calling in about this. This of all the things. But I do think it does matter. Like, it's a consumer thing that the bulk of people enjoy in some facet or another. It's a problem that is so common in the American sports watching experience. Like everybody talks about this and how much of a pain in the ass it is. And I think it's just like the most, one of the most common forms of entertainment. So naturally it's going to bubble up to the top and be like an issue that's pressing enough for some people to bring up.

28:50Aiden:And it's like, this is something that I want, I think government is, exists to address. I don't think it's high on the priority list of all the things that we have to fix. I think this is number one. But I don't want to just like turn my cheek and be like, this is stupid. Because I do think it's a tangible thing that makes people like happy or sad in a weird way that has real cascading consequences for people. I'm with you. I think people are, especially in crazy times, kind of turn towards escapism a little bit. I've turned towards basketball more this past year as like a complete outlet away from the news and I've really enjoyed it until Luka got injured and then I was like a saddle on both sides.

29:35And I really think for some people the NFL is like that and it sucks that it's like gotten exponentially. The prices are exponentially more expensive.

29:44Aiden:Atriok, the morning of, he's reading our NBA. He's like sees the Luka headline. He's like, fuck it. I was distracting myself with the Ron Moore update.

29:52Atrioc:So now Iran war is your... I hope we bomb the fucking straight. That's you, dude. You're getting mad. Close the fucking straight, bro. I need something to feel.

30:01Aiden:I think that's the real reaction pipeline that I kind of see. It's like when we were talking about on the last bonus episode about the layers of financial or social discomfort that kind of mount on top of each other. And with something like this, like if you're sitting at home and inflation is forcing the price, the prices of everything in your life is going up it's harder to meet your like mortgage payment maybe you just got laid off you finally get to the weekend you want to watch your local team's baseball game and you open the youtube tv app that you you can like you're putting all of your free money into that costs 90 a month and you can like barely keep this on as you canceled your other subscriptions and then you can't watch the game without adding a 20 peacock add-on and it did And then you phone your representative because you're fucking pissed and your life sucks and you can't watch the fucking stupid game.

30:58Aiden:Like, I see that legitimate path of this being a form of entertainment or escapism that people want in their lives. And it's immensely frustrating to access. And it just builds off of everything else that is shitty right now. Yeah. I do think, from my reading, is like they haven't really figured out what they want yet. The DOJ. it's more of like just the anger and it's putting the pressure on opening the door be like figure it out we'll see yeah i don't know what'll happen from this but uh you know yeah interesting that's the update on that little thing support for lemonade stand comes from samsara i'm gonna be honest i'm looking at this ad script and and i'm realizing that every company we work with uses me as the example of of of to make fun of in the ad read that's what i'm here they say that i could could have made a mistake while driving maybe or allegedly made a mistake while driving which i would never do i'm a perfect driver and everybody knows that and i wouldn't need but and even though i'm perfect i might want a dash cam that could protect me from from you know accidents or accusations of things i didn't do you would want a dash cam that captures real-time video that proves that your drivers are not at fault because i've been hearing a lot of rumors

32:14Atrioc:that you keep driving your big rig truck into a Panda Express because they're out of Orange Chicken. Right. And you honk the horn the whole time.

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33:10Atrioc:You can talk directly to it. It talks back to you. So what I did is I had this idea for a project and for like two hours, I walked around outside enjoying nature, talking to Claude, going back and forth and making sure there was like, you know, poking holes in my ideas. Some of the time it actually had some good feedback, but it was back and forth. And at the end of the conversation summarized everything we had said into a clear document with bullet points that I could then use to reference in the future. And it is like a measurable improvement in my life because instead of sitting at that computer for two hours doing all this, I got to walk outside with my cats.

33:41Atrioc:It was great.

33:42Aiden:That's awesome. It's weird because you could just talk to yourself and not remember any of it. That's what I do. That's what I do. And if we look between the two of us, between me and Doug, it's like one of us walks away with great projects that he puts together and displays to his fans. And one of us is Ludwig's friend. So it's like who comes out on top of that interaction?

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34:20Aiden:I'm realizing Doug is also Ludwig's friend. He's got you beat on every... I'm really not winning on any front right now. I need to revisit this.

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35:48Aiden:Well, we could turn the page and go to Hungary because they just had an election for a new prime minister, a new party into power. And I'll keep it real. Viktor Orban, the former prime minister, or the current prime minister until June. He's cool. He's a chiller. he's like a chili survivor i wouldn't i think hungarians wouldn't call him a chiller oh because it's a different that's the word in their language that's the yeah i mean they would call him something else in their language i'll give you that in hungarian uh and uh he's been in power for 16 years and before i talk about this i have researched this for about five hours so there will undoubtedly be things that i don't explain fully or that i don't understand uh but i'll try to break down why this is a really significant election and why you may have been reading a bunch of headlines about it.

36:43Aiden:So Peter Major won the election over Orban, who has been in power for 16 years. There has been an enormous positive response, especially in a city like Budapest, finally Orban being pushed out of power. And why is this such a big deal? Why does this election matter so much uh orbon for one was incredibly corrupt like it is it is well understood that this guy put friends and family members into huge positions of power so he's a chiller positions to make extraordinary amounts of money a common example sandler does it and he's the coolest actor of all time victor orbon does it he's the corrupt leader ruining okay lebron plays with his sons.

37:34Aiden:Like, come on here. Orban was doing a little more than getting his friends on Grown Ups 2. Like, for example, a famous friend of his was Lawrence Mazaros. A friend of his that after he came into power in 2010 became extraordinary wealthy in a short time after the election. In just five years, he doubled his wealth year over year. Saw, I believe, a thousand percent return on his wealth in a time period that Mark Zuckerberg and Musk's only went up by 600%, becoming a multi-billionaire. You should have good investors in your circle. And this is a guy who was... I don't understand. This was a guy who was not wealthy prior to his friend getting into power.

38:16Aiden:And then he suddenly became connected to construction, banking...

38:21Atrioc:Which you hate the American dream. He saw his friend succeed and had a grussel do it himself. Yeah, he was inspired. He was inspired. If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt,

38:30Aiden:we could say he was very inspired. but there's been other examples of the corruption uh other things with orbon uh and people connected to orbon uh diverting public funds to you know foundations family estates uh misusing european union funds that have been sent to the country also another huge scandal that i i was reading mostly before we started the episode today was the cover-up of a sexual abuse scandal in a Hungarian public school where the director of the school had been abusing young boys for, I think, over a decade. And many, many children victims to this person. And the deputy director to the person that was committing the abuse helped cover up these crimes as well.

39:17Aiden:And both of these people got sentenced to prison. The abuser, incredibly, only sentenced to eight years in prison, which absolutely blows my mind with this. I mean, the scale at which this person was abusing children in this school, basically another person in the political establishment under Orban, President Novak issues pardons to people involved in this sexual abuse scandal. And in Hungary, you don't have to issue pardons publicly. They don't have to be public information. And then it was leaked to the press like a year later that this had happened. And this case spreads like wildfire that Orban like knew about this, that these pardons was issued to these people that helped cover the sexual abuse in the school.

40:01Aiden:And it was a huge, uh, one of the huge things that inspired the rise of the opposition in the buildup to this election. Like one of the massive scandals that had hit Orban among all this other, uh, corruption that has existed for years. Uh, And then the other thing he's done is just ramped up control of state media. So Orban and his allies in Hungarian business or in Hungarian politics have helped acquire media outlets over his time in power so that he has more and more control over public messaging in the country. And this has been especially effective in the rural areas of the country that have less access to TV channels than the more urban cities have.

40:52Aiden:And I'll kind of clarify why this really is important, this control over the rural areas, in a little bit. And then the last big, big thing that people criticize him on, or not last thing, but one more big issue, is his cozying up to Russia. So he's generally pushed Hungary away from unity with the European Union and closer ties to Russia and Putin. One of the benefits to this has been cheap Russian fuel that they began heavily relying on. And this is making a deal with Russia, buying their oil at really low prices. and for a while the benefit or the trade-off that citizens saw it was like oh we have really cheap energy in the country but after the ukraine war comes into play uh energy prices spike and even though they're still they still have a deal to get russian energy at a lower price they still uh made it more expensive and rose with like the global surge in energy costs right they built in a margin that they didn't need to that specifically paid off Orban's government.

42:08Aiden:Like they benefited from a huge spread on the Russian gas through that period of time. You gotta get a taste. You gotta get your cut. You gotta get your cut. While refusing to receive energy from any other parts of the world and in like any significant capacity. And they have also connected friends and like oligarchs in Hungary to Russian related business projects. So for example, like Russia was going to build or a Russian contractor was going to build two nuclear power plants in Hungary. And he sets up friends or people in Hungary to specifically benefit financially from these deals with like Russian companies at the expense of them not being the best decisions for the average Hungarian person.

42:52Aiden:The way this is playing out for like normal Hungarian people through this period of time, is consequences like in the 2020s skyrocketing inflation like way more than the rest of Europe. They aren't on the euro, by the way, even though they're in the EU. They have their own currency. Wait, can I talk about that just a little bit? That's the one area I do know about. Yeah. So Victor Orban, his economic policies have been pretty widely regarded as a disaster. He came in, he took basically personal control of the central bank and had these policies of like, some of them even sound good. like low flat income tax across everybody or, uh, um, pro natalist policies where you can get money for having kids.

43:33He did, uh, you know, he had price controls on utility, so they couldn't get too expensive. He put a lot of key state industries in his friend's hands, all these things. All right. And, and for a while it seemed like they were working and it, cause they had relatively low unemployment and relative stability. And so everyone was like, okay. And he won some elections off that. Like he kept going. Oh, you know, he had control of the media too. And then, um, the underpinning of that started to become obvious, which is that he had seized control of central bank and was just printing money nonstop to fund all of his ideas.

44:06And, uh, the pro natalist policies didn't work. The birth rate kept falling. Uh, in fact, they have fewer people now than they did in 2011 when he first got in there. And, um, the inflation rate largely comes from their central bank just running the printer nonstop. And so now they are experiencing what they had, they had 57 % price rise since 2020, double the EU average inflation peaked above 25 % in 2023, the highest in the EU. And you know, pretty much all that comes back to the fact that their central bank, every time he has an idea, prints the money for it. And it just devalues their currency, which is separate from the Euro.

44:41So yeah, I would say that's a huge core of like why, regardless of his media control he's starting to see or has now seen yeah huge people like

44:50Aiden:turning away from him there's real economic consequences for people in the country like the thing so i i i hate to say it but i have a friend i was gonna ask what's your friend in that you know the the specific the specific complaints and this seems to line up with the data is like the skyrocketing price of like housing in hungary that's come along with this the general feeling of falling behind compared to a lot of other parts of Europe and all declining funding or effective funding in areas like healthcare. He said there's been a really dramatic shift in the quality of healthcare and hospitals in the country because of the economic problems that there's been.

45:33Aiden:And I think one thing that's the really wild thing is that during this time that Orvon's been in power, one of the things he did was change the voting structure in the country. So with a two-thirds majority that he was able to get a long time ago, you're able to make changes to the Constitution. And with the constitutional changes that he made, he kind of gerrymandered and reconstructed the value of votes in the country so that the countryside functionally has a lot more weight in elections than the urban areas do. And that's where a lot of his support was, right? Like people in Budapest that are more liberal are very against him and kind of always have happened.

46:21Aiden:But this combines with things like his control of state media where it was more influential over these more rural, more disconnected areas of the country. And as long as he could maintain influence and power over these rural areas, he could continue to have these crushing results in the following elections that happened after the first time he got elected. And that's been one of the ways he was able to maintain power this whole time. So Peter Major is kind of used this against him in this election, which is wild. He heavily campaigned in these rural areas, going to over 700 cities and villages in two years, meeting people in person and running this seemingly very grassroots campaign.

47:05Aiden:And this guy is from Orban's party in orbit prior to this and kind of broke out of it to run this opposition campaign. and by convincing enough people in these rural areas, he secured this giant majority in parliament under this win. So he actually only won 54 % of the vote, but his party or coalition, I don't know the exact situation, but he has 69 % of the seats in the Hungarian parliament now because of that win.

47:40Atrioc:because the rural votes ultimately have more sway yeah because of the way that those votes

47:45Aiden:translate into parliamentary seats which is because of what orban did while he was in power to secure his position has been like effectively used against him flipped the other way uh and the payoff here is now that he has this two-thirds plus majority people are hoping that major like uses this power to undo a lot of the damage that Orban has created in the 16 year period. Like you can create the constitutional changes to counteract a lot of what has been built up in the country before because Orban still has like friends, like stacked courts, people in positions of power that want to act in his general interest or might impede what the opposition wants to accomplish, right?

48:32Aiden:But in theory, Meijer now has the power in parliament to override a lot of what Orban has built up to stop the opposition moving in the other direction. And from talking to my friend, specifically, one of the huge hopes of people, particularly in Budapest, it sounds like, is that Orban and the people around him will be held to account as soon as this transition in power happen yeah uh and well you know we'll see if that actually plays out yeah some of the feedback i saw was that you know i wanted to ask you about this i don't know about this this peter guy i don't i don't know about him but my understanding is he's he's not so politically dissimilar no from orvon he's not like a massive but i think what people are excited about is his anti-corruption effort like that's the main thing so he's been pushing on that specifically yeah Yes, very much.

49:26Aiden:Like, their politics have been described as center-right, which is, like, where a lot of the country aligns with. And these people don't diverge a lot, like, ideologically.

49:40Atrioc:It really comes down to this counteraction of corruption.

49:45Aiden:And people are just sick of Orban specifically and kind of what he is. I mean, if all the wealth of your country is being funneled to a few friends of the league, like obviously that's like that's the number one issue almost a few high performers he has a great roster of friends he's chosen well and i think we like we live in a country where i i think like corruption exists in the united states i think corruption exists in in every country around the world in some facet right the way hungarians especially sweden yeah the way let's get back let's see where this canal is being dug yeah the way hungarians and the talk around this election The way they talk about corruption is that it's like it is insanely clear and insanely explicit the amount of money he has taken away from the public to benefit him and his friends around him.

50:35Aiden:The last kind of layer to this, and I would say the relevance to the audience maybe, is like how could this affect you is the way Hungary fits into the EU. So the thing that I had heard about Hungary a lot is they're kind of the black sheep that upsets a lot of the European Union votes. And that's because when it comes to issues of like foreign policy or sanctions or I think tax taxation. There's like a few categories of things. They need unanimous support from EU member states when they vote on things, which is crazy because there's 27 member states. You can't get 27 people to agree on anything.

51:16Aiden:I know. It kind of seems insane. So everybody's voting pepperoni and Hungary's like... And Hungary's like... It's more like I don't like pepperoni and I want... Russia, what do you want? I want that. You want vodka on the pizza.

51:35Atrioc:That's crazy that all 27 have to...

51:39Aiden:So Hungary has blocked and delayed aid packages to Ukraine. they have recently there's been leaked phone calls of them, their foreign minister calling the Russian foreign minister during closed EU meetings and leaking the discussions of the European Union closed meetings this just came out like this year and then direct conversations between Orban and Putin as well so that's been another thing that like rocked things before this election is the degree to which the Orban administration is like subservient to Russia and they've been able to hold EU funds hostage before. Like even if they misuse EU funds and the EU freezes them because of their breaking the rules, they're able to leverage the fact that they hold this veto power as a way to like unfreeze those funds and convince the EU to like still give them the money.

52:34Aiden:And they've also been part of an effort to slow down or stop the european union sanctions on russia over time so i i think for the broader eu populace for anything that hungary is holding up or the information that they are leaking to russia the hope is that this stops now that this new person is in charge yeah the polish pm said russians go home right after this election was over he was like a big he was jumping in like he basically said orban was a russian puppet go home from hungary basically

53:07Atrioc:it's interesting we read the book kaput which was about german politics over the last you know a couple decades and then one of the whole sections was about how germany has for a long time been super cozy with russia and obviously a lot of oil intermingling and then the you know german politicians basically being in denial up until the ukraine war and then ukraine war happens and that's complete and utter like we've accepted the truth this is not a tenable relationship and then somebody blows up the Nord pipeline and it's like, you know, even physically there's no connection, right? And it's interesting that Hungary seems to have taken another couple of years to be like, ah, no, we are done.

53:44Atrioc:We're done with this country. Maybe it's not heavy. Maybe the new guy does the same thing.

53:47Aiden:So that's kind of the fear is like, there isn't a full understanding of what this guy will do yet. I think there's one, there's a lot of the Orban apparatus that's still in place that needs to be dismantled by the new guy and his parliamentary majority uh there isn't necessarily this like on the issue of ukraine it hungary doesn't necessarily lean heavily in support of ukraine in general just like as a populist so it doesn't necessarily mean that the eu votes will just 180 all of a sudden uh and there's things like uh lgbtq rights that have taken a like a big backslide under uh orban that politically like from the ideology of this position that dominates the country just because we're anti-corruption doesn't mean those things are necessarily going to change uh there's a bunch of scrutiny around those things but this new guy takes power in june that's my little like overview of what's going on and like why this is important uh i think like much like some other things like even you know the president of venezuela changing albeit because of outside intervention uh earlier in the year i think a lot of these things need way more time to play out to see how it'll actually work but for average hungarians like talking to my friend reading interviews of hungarian citizens in budapest the as soon as this person is ousted there's a lot of hope of what the future could be uh and we'll see what it's like yeah i think there's like there's two uh u.s angles to this that i wanted to bring up you know one of them is like there's a lot of parallels obviously to trump situation right now which is like he's like a right-wing populist similar to Orban who's facing pushback from even his own base not necessarily on his politics so much but largely on uh corruption inflation economic stagnation promises not being met things like like the promises they hate it's like the promises are unmet yeah and so I think there is a parallel I mean it does you know it makes me want to push people even more in America to be like look they voted in Hungary they voted in Hungary and got the result they wanted, you could probably vote here and make progress in the same level.

55:59And the second thing I want to say is that a big part of this was J.D. Vance. Not a huge part of it, a minor part of this. But J.D. Vance was sent by the Trump administration to help shore up Orban's support and do a big speech. Why? He should have sent it to another guy. Why would they do that?

56:15Aiden:He should have sent J.D. Vance to the other guy. He should have. Because apparently, based on polling, that knocked four percentage points off Orban's polling. That's what, see? Yeah, which is crazy. And I do think, you said why, and I legitimately think, this is my conspiracy theory again, that J.D. Vance is being given doomed missions because they no longer see him as successor to Trump. I legitimately think he is being placed over and over again. I'm not a fan of J.D. Vance, but he's constantly sent on impossible losing missions where he looks like a total fool. and I think, you know, there's this theory because New York Times had this big piece come out about the internal struggles about the Iran war, whether or not to go and the piece really paints J.D.

57:00Vance as the lone heroic voice being like, we should not go into this war, it's a bad idea, it's gonna be a quagmire and the theory is that J.D. Vance is the guy, he's the source and so now like, there's like a rift in the administration where they're just sending, they're like, and if you look at the polymarket results, fucking Rubio is skyrocketing and Vance is on the downswing. I don't know if they've passed yet, but like of who will be the next candidate in, in 28. And I think there's a real sense that JD Vance has lost the mandate of Trump heaven. He is no longer the successor apparent, uh, for the conservative MAGA movement, whatever, whatever it's going to be in 28.

57:37Atrioc:I mean, it can just be used. He has JD Vance go and campaign for Newsom so that Trump can win.

57:44Aiden:what if he says the touch of death right yeah like he's a poison pill yeah they just send him in the wrong direction you have to use this asset strategically i mean they sent him to be the lead and basically only negotiator in islamabad to deal with iran like in an impossible negotiation where they want entirely different things of course he comes out being like we couldn't do anything and then he goes to orban that's you're not going to win that election he just everything he's being sent to do and at the same time they're like protecting rubia rubia only shows them public Look for the few small wins.

58:14He's there for Venezuela, but not for Iran. He's there. You know what I'm saying? He doesn't talk about ice. It's weird. It's like, it just feels like there's, there's something moving behind the scenes to put Vance's like this goofy cartoon.

58:26Atrioc:There's a slow conversion. I'm looking at the polymarket presidential Republican nominee for 2028 and there's a slow convergence. It looks like it's not, you know, the past month. It's sort of stabilized. Okay. Yeah. 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.

58:52Aiden: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.

59:09Atrioc: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.

59:45Atrioc:Hi, I'm Brene Brown.

59:47Aiden:And I'm Adam Grant.

59:48Atrioc: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.

1:00:11Aiden:Hey, so we're not paying taxes this year, right?

1:00:14Atrioc:Until the Pentagon passes one damn audit, we shouldn't pay any more taxes.

1:00:21Aiden:People don't want to pay taxes anymore because they don't trust the way the government is spending and tracking our money. Americans are fed up with paying taxes. And I know, I know, but hear me out. Americans are extra fed up with paying taxes lately, according to some Gallup polling and some posting. But are we being short-sighted? I think that it's important to have a government. I think that humans tried anarchy for quite a long time, and it didn't work so well. A lot of people got hit over the head with rocks. We didn't have a whole lot of economic development. Almost everyone agrees that the United States should have a military to protect it from foreign invasion, that we should have law enforcement, firefighting, schools, etc.

1:01:05Aiden:Anti-taxers and where this could all be heading on Today Explained, dropping every weekday afternoon. Okay, so you mentioned Polymarket. Yeah. And I know you had two itsy-bitsy stories about Polymarket you wanted to talk about.

1:01:18Atrioc:Two itsy-bitsy stories. All right, look, these aren't critically important, all right? One is I was sent this GitHub, and I think it's great. If you scroll down a little bit, H-Rock, this is called Nothing Ever Happens. Do you have lots of disposable income that you don't know what to do with? Well, what this bot does is that it automatically goes to all of the non-political bets, or excuse me, non-sports bets on Polymarket and just says no. This is the nothing ever happens Polymarket bot. So you can just have this thing running with your money and you are betting that nothing happens. The ceasefire doesn't happen.

1:01:51Atrioc:Taylor Swift does not get married. JD Vance does not win. It's just everything. You can just be a total pessimist and put all your money on it now. Actually kind of hype. And this is what Pauli Marco was meant for. Second one, if you go to the California governor election winner. So quick little primer on California governor election. So another politics story going on here. But there's this huge swing all of a sudden in the California governor. The Steyrverse. The Steyrverse is happening. So there is a surprising amount of drama with the California governor race. It's very strange. So I'll do the same thing that you did.

1:02:27Atrioc:And here is why you as a non-Californian might give a shit about this. One, California is gigantic, right? As a reminder, it's like the size and GDP of big European states. The fourth biggest economy. It is the fourth biggest. California is a behemoth. We have 40 million people. It is bigger than Canada in basically every respect, except size.

1:02:45Aiden:I think the population is near the same and it has a bigger economy, doesn't it? Yeah. No, it's like US, China, Germany, California. I'm not kidding. It's Japan.

1:02:57Atrioc:Canada's bigger, but we're a grower. Anyways. It's cold up there. Yeah. Not only is it a big, big ass state on top of that, a lot of the policy that comes out of California ends up actually influencing a lot of, you know, uh, national policy and sometimes even global policy. If for example, California passes a strict aggressive AI regulation on all the tech companies that are creating AI in California, that is essentially going to be a nationwide regulation because the companies are all developing it here. They're going to stick to those regulations and they're going to have to kind of use that nationwide.

1:03:31Atrioc:So this is a pretty consequential election. California is also just broadly seen to be sort of on a downturn recently, or at least that's the perception. So what's particularly interesting about this is in 2010 in California, this is a very democratic state, right? But in 2010, we passed a bill. And that bill says that in order to reduce bipartisanship and make it so that it's not just Republicans versus Democrats every time, make the field a little more open, that what we do is we have the primary stage. It was about to happen in June where anybody from any party can run and everybody votes on it.

1:04:03Atrioc:And then the top two candidates from the primaries move on to the general election, but only the top two. And it doesn't matter what party they're from. Okay. Okay. So all of the candidates are running in the governor race in about two months. We're going to do the vote top to move on. And those to or who you vote on. Now, this sounds cool in paper because instead of just Democrat versus Republican, you only appeal to your base. You have to kind of appeal to everybody, right? You're trying to get to be one of those top two. But it could be two Democrats and it could be two Republicans. So what's the world where it's two Republicans running for governor of California in extremely blue state?

1:04:39Atrioc:Well, what would need to happen is that you have two very strong Republican candidates who are splitting the Republican vote. And you would need to have a lot of Democratic candidates who are splitting the Democratic vote across many different people. And this is exactly what has been happening for months. In the election, you have two Republican candidates who are the clear frontrunners splitting the vote almost exactly evening. Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. Chad Bianco, you can Google him. He looks like the type of guy that in a James Cameron movie would run the machines. Yeah, he's in like the mech suit.

1:05:17He would wear the guy in the mech.

1:05:20Atrioc:And coincidentally, he is arguing that we need to boot up fossil fuel production in California. pull him up pull him up wait pull him up uh another one the other guy is steve hilton this is a uh god dude i holy fuck you can tell this is the type of guy who like you've always been a problem soldier jake sully when a guy comes into the room and says they're attacking again he says all right it like puts out his cigar that he was smoking while benching right so chad bianco you got he is he's a sheriff his whole thing is anti-crime anti-fraud and we're gonna we're gonna restart a bunch of energy production meanwhile you got steve hilton former fox news show host very anti-crime anti-fraud pro energy pretty much the same fucking campaign they're not that distinct and so that's you know sort of working to their advantage they are sniping at each other and actually trump endorsed steve hilton um but they can't they can't get a he's never been a fox news host he didn't endorse for higher office yeah yeah and you know he did like a weekly like sunday show he's not like a mainstay on fox news but he's no tugger he's no he's no tugger but these guys are actually these two republicans are actually so split that the california gop is not endorsing either one of them because they can't get above 60 of the vote so it's like exactly split okay even after trump's thing so this this perfect horrible storm is brewing perfectly you have these two guys and then on the democratic side you have a bunch of candidates that are all polling in like the single or double digits and no clear front runner that is kind of changing uh just now so you guys might have heard about eric swalwell yeah and he did he's been accused of sexual assault by a number of women so up until last week you had eric swalwell katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Matt Mahon, Xavier Becerra, Betty Yee, Tony Thurmond, Antonio Villarigosa.

1:07:25Atrioc:I'm probably saying that wrong. You had at least eight candidates who were all genuinely viable splitting it up. And this is, of course, going into this two-month thing where you might have the disaster. None of them are agreeing to drop out. All of them are sticking in it and fighting it out. So a couple interesting updates very recently. Eric Swalwell was arguably the lead, although polls all make it different up until a couple days ago he's accused of uh sexual assault by there's a cnn report there's a san francisco chronicle report he has since dropped out of the race and it appears that people are now moving towards swalwa uh excuse me towards tom stayer so a couple other you know key players here that are probably really in the running katie porter is like a long time california legislative but she's kind of fucked because there are these videos that came out of her screaming at staffers like while she's making a youtube short talking and then saying things like get the fuck out of my shot she got ellen get out of my shot she actually did actually did so there's two videos that basically are the most stereotypical karen videos ever where she's blowing up on somebody and it's just like what dude this is a horrible look bad

1:08:33Aiden:look it is funny because i feel like my my view of katie porter is almost entirely shaped by clips and she was like a she would get clipped in her like senate hearing videos where she would like bring out a chart yeah and like own somebody in a hearing and everybody would be electric in the comments yeah and then and then more recently the clips have been going in the opposite direction where it's like her screaming at a staffer we're getting really upset with somebody interviewing

1:09:02Atrioc:her it's those two yeah those two clips came out and everybody's like oh she seems like kind of a bitch and that literally nukes her campaign. It's kind of like

1:09:12Aiden:those clips with Clavicula right now where he's walking out of interviews. She's going to be California governor in a few years. Kitty Porter's kind of like Clavicula.

1:09:20Atrioc:Hey, Drog, you can pull this up. You have it, that'd be great. Here's one of them. The reporter one is actually worse because she blows up at this reporter who's asking very reasonable questions. I remember watching this one and thinking it wasn't great.

1:09:32Aiden:It was a while ago. So I'm on the oversight committee, you might know. And that is where we did a study recently this fall in September and what it showed is electrify our transportation sector

1:09:46Atrioc:that we're going to lose more than half a million Californians dying prematurely to air pollution and other problems and the state could lose out of my fucking shop.

1:09:58Aiden:I have to tell you that that's actually to be correct. It's not that it's electric vehicles. It's that if we don't need a commitment to comparison, I'm not worried. okay it does okay you also were in my shop before that stay out of my shop okay it's so that's it it is it's so funny because i actually think in ellen that like an ellen accusation is a perfect yeah a perfect uh comparison it's like yeah it's pretty wild

1:10:29Atrioc:it's like these two videos and that has that kicked her out from being like maybe the front rudder to like even with everybody else you have tom stayer who's this billionaire activist who's much more progressive than the other folks uh but he's self-funded because he's this billionaire he's put a hundred million of his own money and kind of using the the you know saying like oh i can't be corrupted because i have so much money type of thing didn't trump say that yep yep i don't know much about this guy i need to look more about this i'm sorry but yeah i've been looking a little more into him then matt mahan is the mayor of san jose he's really coming in as like this is the pro tech guy not even pro tech but the tech people all like him and are endorsing him so even though he's been a very successful mayor of san jose but you know he's coming in being like here's the like technocratic solutions i'm gonna do i've succeeded in san jose i'll succeed uh statewide but then a lot of people there's just so much anti-tech wait how long has he been mayor of san jose uh i don't know the timeline we can look it up right now well just because i hated living in san jose so i want to know i mean not his fault really yeah i mean like maybe maybe it's 2023

1:11:30Aiden:so actually now i wouldn't know mayor of san jose hmm mayor of mayor of hell mayor of hell is running for governor of california saying it's getting cheaper to live in hell but this guy was mayor after i was there so i have no idea if he's yeah he's doing

1:11:46Atrioc:well he's kind of like that angle and then there's there's this there's four other candidates who are convenient like there's a weird thing there where they're all the non-white candidates and then usc tried to host a debate where they used their own criteria to decide which candidates should be there at the debate and their criteria said that based on you know the current polling and the fundraising and everything that it would be the six white people and not the four not white people even though technically it was based on you know not it was just their number or whatever and that caused so much frustration that usc had to cancel the debate so now there's also this strange thing but in this weird fucking drama going on with the california governor race for the first time in months there is now a clear leader who is tom stare and he's a pretty interesting candidate we you know we don't need to go into to his policies and what not come on the damn show bro uh yeah so so you could see polymarket is again this is what people are betting but with polling sites as of a couple days ago he's like he's pulling at like 13 and other people are 11 polling would indicate that it is still an absolute crapshoot between what is still now seven it's down from eight seven leading candidates so i think what polymarket is reading into based on the better is like who's going to be top two who's the democrat in the top two that's the yeah that's who's going to win as long as one of these seven democrats can get more than the two Republicans, then disaster is averted.

1:13:13Atrioc:And it's this weird thing happening, and this is all going to resolve in June, in like two months. Interesting.

1:13:19Aiden:So with Tom, he, I don't know if you guys remember this, he ran for president in the Democratic primary a while back. I remember he, what did he say? One of our many beloved. It was like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren were having a fight on stage, and then Tom Starrett comes in the middle, and he's like, hey, I don't want to bother, but Bernie, I'm a big fan. and like he's like I remember that it's the only clip I remember from Tom Steyer so I think we might we might have an in here because actually one of my closest friends like worked on his presidential campaign that year and then was his PA for years after let's get him on the show so I think you got a friend in Tom Steyer yeah I mean I'm one degree of separation away yeah so maybe we I'd be curious to learn more about what his actual platform is I think anecdotally, he's the only one that I've seen campaign ads of on TV.

1:14:12Aiden:I'm not keeping a close eye on things, but like just like on, I don't know, like a Lakers game will be on and like, you'll see Tom Steyer's ad. They're not on piracy.

1:14:22Atrioc:That's weird. You're missing out. You gotta get these Tom Steyer ads. You're missing the Tom ads. No, he's got some really, so, you know, tech people have said if Tom Steyer is elected, it will ruin California. So that's the kind of like, he's pretty progressive. He has things. It's a lot of like energy focus. He's been doing that for a long time. But a couple of really notable ones. One, a lot about increasing taxes. So a lot about affordability. All the candidates are talking about affordability nonstop. And then he wants to push for single-payer health care. Like change California, get rid of private insurance, and have it be a single, which would be extraordinarily hard to do legislatively.

1:14:56Atrioc:But if he pulls it off, that's crazy. If he pulls it off in California, it's a cool model for the rest of the country. It'd be interesting to try. Yeah, absolutely. So this thing is weirdly dramatic and interesting and weird. and we're going to see what happens. And the absence of this guy, Swalwell, who just got pulled out, who was like pulling in a lot of the traditional left Democrats is suddenly that's being dispersed and we're trying to figure out where it lands.

1:15:21Aiden:Yeah, he resigned from the House of Representatives. He also resigned from Congress.

1:15:26Atrioc:Yeah. There was a second person. I'm sorry I'm blanking on their name. The Texas guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two congressmen were accused of sexual harassment harassment multiple people um trying to get their name i had it in my notes uh gonzalez tony gonzalez out of texas uh he had a sexual relationship with his staffer who killed themselves after the after the text messages leaked or whatever the staffer did the staffer killed themselves dude that's awful and then this person like i guess ignored it ignored it and pretended it didn't happen and tried to downplay it and then it kept being up and now they're resigning uh insane so one democrat republican same day they both resigned same day both over sexual misconduct yeah uh

1:16:11Aiden:anyway i i uh i appreciate you reminded me that about the importance of the primary in california specifically because in my head i was like oh yeah i'll vote in november but the deadline is much closer.

1:16:24Atrioc:Yeah. You know what's also crazy? California, super democratic. It's not that democratic. Trump lost by 20 points to Kamala Harris. That means 60 % of people voted for Kamala and 40 % of people voted for Donald Trump in California. Yeah, bro, and they're all in

1:16:39Aiden:Huntington Beach.

1:16:41Atrioc:I think there's a perception. California being a democratic stronghold is only relatively recent like it like there's reagan's like base for and then uh you know right wing schwarzenegger was the fucking governor of california for a long time i mean it's not can i give two personal updates i said these things publicly so i'm gonna give updates on it publicly first one rice crackers gentlemen dude the drama i want to know what's going on even more drama we went to china as we talked about and we went to a food trade show in chong do where we were pulled into a sort of business cracker dalliance with someone named Susanna, who's a very powerful person in her company.

1:17:24Atrioc:I publicly committed on the podcast that we would figure out how much actual take home revenue I get from a Patreon episode, me personally, and I would spend all of it on rice crackers and we would put them here in the studio and eat them. Unfortunately, I have an update from Susanna, which is that she has left the company. She told me the same day that she met us, she found a severe and irretrievable, irreparable problem in the manufacturing. She much later told me that they are not poisoned and I am safe to have eaten them. But there's a major problem with delivery. And now I asked, wait, can I still buy them?

1:17:57Atrioc:She said, well, I work independently and I'm sourcing from many different crackers. And if you really like that flavor, I can find another factory to create that flavor for you. So just keep working with me. And I was like, I'm a little confused by this. Can I buy from the company that you used to work for? Can you just buy through them? And she said, I do not recommend it. If you trust me, they were good though. It's like, I kind of want those ones. They were tasty. And you did say they were powerful and great. They were powerful times. Anyway, if you trust me, follow. I texted her at what was like four in the morning in China.

1:18:29Atrioc:And she immediately sent back like 40 texts. Anyway, if you trust me, follow my recommendation because I am food experts. if you insist on your love for the rice cracker, meet a Wong Z ahead. I respect your choice because you are my friend who I truly treat with my heart. And so, and then she followed up with an apology two minutes later saying that she was too flustered and then reiterated everything. Look, the point, the point is the truth is here. I no longer have a contact at me to Wong Z, the rice cracker company. I now have a contact with a woman who is saying she is going to do research to find me similar rice crackers.

1:18:59Atrioc:I don't know what to do. Right.

1:19:02Aiden:And it's, you got to go deeper. I don't want to be the conspiratorial type of guy. But it feels sudden, doesn't it? It feels sudden. And it's weird. You think it's political? It's weird. I'm saying that maybe the Communist Party is cutting her out of the... I didn't bring the party into this. You think she should pick personally?

1:19:28Atrioc:Okay, quote. The moment I found out the truth, I knew I had to be honest with you immediately, even if it was sudden and confusing. I just, this woman is so powerful. I love it. So I'm probably going to try to buy a bunch of rice crackers. You have to just take a recommendation. Just take a recommendation and go. I'm going to be buying like however many pallets of rice crackers that I haven't tried. And this is even more insane. Okay, the other update, just on Chachipiti specifically, and actually I think we have an Anthropoc ad. The timing is coincidental, by the way. But on a previous episode a couple ago, I said I was going to try to stop using Chachipiti as much as possible.

1:20:01Atrioc:I am trying to do that. I stopped the$200 subscription, but I have found that unfortunately, at least right now, ChatGPT is the one that can actually do Japanese talking. I don't know if you guys have experienced that at all. Sure. So I am currently on the lowest paid tier that I can on ChatGPT specifically for that. And I've been using other models for everything else.

1:20:18Aiden:To keep the translation stuff.

1:20:20Atrioc:It's just for translation. They have, so there's like a voice to voice API that they have. And so it sounds relatively similar to Japanese, whereas the other LLMs currently that I'm aware of are just people saying it's it's like a text-to-speech terrible translation that sounds nothing yeah i really haven't tried the voice models on other ones i don't use chat bd more i did quit it but uh it was a good voice model yeah i just switched to typing more which i just say uh you know i made a big point saying hey i'm gonna not use this product i am using it basically as little as i can except for specifically the one about japanese or very specific stream features that i need because their models do certain creative things in certain settings but in every other context i am moving away from chat gbt and we've turned down a sponsor on this channel i've turned down two personal sponsors now that my agent presented to me so minor update there in case you see chat gbt on my phone that's the thinking yeah i what is the

1:21:12Aiden:genuinely what is the 200 subscription do with something like that like what is gbt yeah like when you're because i know most of the other llms have like higher paid tiers like that too what is that usually offering you because i have like the lowest level pro subscription on these super simple

1:21:26Atrioc:higher usage and new features so the reason i was paying for the 200 one is because you would get access to early features yeah so they would be like we just released deep deep research go try this out here we just uh that that pulse thing that they did you know open ai just like throws out a lot of different things and so you got to have access to that it's crazy because

1:21:44Aiden:200 it's like it's giving you so much there yeah and 200 can't let you watch a lakers game in los angeles 200 okay there's a story on that i mean uh not lakers game on on the 200 here, which is that there's been people reporting across all the major AI that they're starting to see like, what is the word for it? Outages? Outages. Yeah. Like service denigrations. Like some, I forget the exact company, but they did a test, like a real deep dive test and noticed that the AI at the same tier on the same price was thinking less than it did two months ago. It was the output of tokens or whatever text was less than it used to be.

1:22:27And it seems like a lot of the AI companies are running into server and constraint limits. They're trying to give you less per dollar to try and make up the... Because everything, even the$200 tier, loses money. That's what they found. Every single one, people are using it more than it costs them. The people that buy$200 tier often use$1 ,000 plus worth of tokens.

1:22:53Atrioc:I was the profitable one. I was probably using$10 a month out of the$200. So I was one of the few people giving them actual profit. But most of the people who are buying these super high tiers are the ones who are running agents like five hours a day. And so those people are genuinely hitting. And that's, you know, as Claude code and Claude work and all these tools continue to expand, I don't know if you guys have heard this as well. This is anecdotal, but I am hearing more and more people in my life who are not like deep in the AI sauce saying things like, oh yeah, the last few months I started to incorporate Claude code for this or this.

1:23:28Atrioc:People who aren't doing hardcore coding, like other types of work, and are like, it is genuinely incredible. So it seems as though it is starting to hit more of like a public zeitgeist. And at the same time, Cloud Code uses a shitload of AI processing and tokens. It's no longer this, you know, auto-complete finish a sentence for you. It's doing, it's like harnessing an absolute shit ton of things all simultaneously, which we learned about because Cloud Code leaked as well, which is a whole separate thing. It's craziness with AI right now. It's real wild. They really genuinely need more data centers.

1:24:02Atrioc:Does that mean we should build more data centers? Maybe, maybe not.

1:24:05Aiden:They need more data centers because more people are using the product than ever issuing more requests.

1:24:10Atrioc:They are genuinely hitting the limits of compute. And to be fair, that's compute that they have access to. Maybe if we repurpose compute from, you know, if we take it from Roblox, maybe we can power AI. And that's why, you know, I think OpenAI shut down Sora and other things. They're just trying to put all their compute towards the few areas, like the business areas. But that's the point, which is like, you know, I think I should give a bit of a mea culpa here or something, which is like there was this theory maybe two years back. Oh, sorry, Mike, that a lot of this data center build out was financially wasteful and probably still is to be honest.

1:24:46But the truth is that demand is certainly there for every token they can build. Like they are, they are, they haven't built enough to be honest. In terms of user demand. Okay. People really want every single token that the data centers can generate and the demand for it is only seeming to ramp up so like the companies that you know there's a bit of a i told you some moment from open ai right now uh you know in a lot of ways they're not having that but in this area they're like hey we went all in on building as much compute as we possibly can because we knew this was coming and anthropic was a little slower they were like you know a little more measured we're not going to go crazy on the spending and it's seeming like you just want as much as possible that's that's what it's seeming like i'm just i'm just admitting it with what the finances are looking like which is like people are using every amount that they are being given it's not like a lot of idle gpu time you know things are they're running into the limits of every data center they're building no

1:25:42Aiden:maybe i'm sorry my brain might just be cooked yeah you're saying they need to build more data centers to fulfill the demand that exists but i believe he's saying we should regardless of what

1:25:54Atrioc:local communities want. And I assumed he meant that.

1:25:57Aiden:I assumed he meant that no matter the externalities. And whenever I talk about data centers on the show, keep in mind that I'm saying it with that. I don't care about negative externalities. You and I wake up every morning, we pour out 10 gallons of water into the street. I wake up and I look at a list of externalities

1:26:15Atrioc:and say, those are stupid.

1:26:16Aiden:The passive noise that the facilities make that harm people's brains and well-being or the pollution or the use of water. I don't care. Yep. I don't care. I'm asking you. Yes. Why don't you, you just said that the argument was that they don't want to fulfill the demand because it's not worth the money, but they need to fulfill the demand. I'm confused at what you're saying. What I'm saying is the argument about a year and a half to two years ago was like, hey, you are spending trillions of dollars to build all this compute data center out. Yes. And it's like, if any of that goes idle, it is the biggest, most ruinous financial decision of all time.

1:26:51It's absolutely insane to do this. It costs so much money. but the reality, and this could still be the case because they might be able to sell it profitably. Okay, that's the case. But it's now obvious that they will have the demand. People will want to use every ounce of compute that a data center, every data center you build is going to be used.

1:27:08Aiden:But is the argument that, even though from what we were talking about before, even though that all of the available, like computing power of what you could build would be used, that isn't necessarily profitable still. Right. Correct. The question mark is still that because right now, everything is being, it's like early days of Uber or early days of Netflix. Everything is being sold at such a markdown that it seems awesome. It's like MoviePass. MoviePass is not a great business, but everyone used it. Everybody, if you use MoviePass, it's like awesome. MoviePass is great. So we don't know yet the economics of whether or not this hashes out.

1:27:43But at the current price, the demand is astronomical. People all over. That's not the point of what I'm saying. Get out of my shot. Get out of my fucking shot. Get out of my shot. I'm sorry.

1:27:58Aiden:Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. I'll acknowledge it. I apologize to you, the audience. I interrupted you to make a dumb movie pass joke. No, no, no. Why don't you keep going? I'm sorry. All right. And anyway, so I'm saying about AI data centers. Get out of my shot. No, you missed the part now. About the data centers. Okay, well, you were in my shot before that. You were in my shot before that. and our next guest, Ellen DeGeneres, is going to talk to us about her comeback to Grace and how she's one of the greatest TV hosts of all time. Anyway, that's the AI little bit of a news story.

1:28:34Atrioc:And one last spicy little tiny tidbit about AI real fast. It's drama time. Sam Altman, everybody hates him now. Everybody hates Sam Altman. CEO of OpenAI because there was a post, oh my God, I think it was New Yorker, right? New Yorker. Who basically did like a year and a half long report. Okay, yeah, sorry. You said it was a post. I just want to say, this is a really, really well done. No, from the New York Post. Or is it New Yorker? It's the New Yorker. So they did like this super long tweet. No, it was not.

1:29:01Aiden:He's triggering me.

1:29:02Atrioc:It's so funny to like dilute

1:29:05Aiden:Ronan Farrow's career. And like, he made a fucking, I don't know, he made a fucking tweet. I don't know. Did a really, really masterful series of long form interviews with almost everybody Stan Maltman has worked with throughout his entire life and constructed a long form, well-crafted through line of dishonesty. Basically of like from every venture he's been on, he has left people in his wake who thinks he acts dishonestly. Like he will lie, he will say one thing in public and one thing in private. He will promise that he's really focused on AI safety and on being nonprofit and then slowly but surely dismantle those productions behind the scenes to make it into a for-profit venture and to care less about AI safety.

1:29:47And it was interesting because this article comes out and there is a really groundswell of Sam Altman anger. And then, unfortunately, someone takes it too far and throws a Molotov cocktail or something at his house. The cocktail was – that was after the article came out?

1:30:05Atrioc:Yeah, it was after the article comes out. And then I believe a couple days later, Sam Altman posts a tweet saying, last night I was taking care of my son and somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at our house. and so it's weird i have a weird thought about it because i do think that there's a there's a very real criticism you could levy at sam altman for all these things in this article and that in general i think the way he's acted especially around the non-profit to profit status of open ai this is a real thing from the article that i thought was like it becomes very clear that he is being dishonest about his intentions.

1:30:43I mean, he told me none of that's true. It's all good. But obviously people shouldn't throw Molotov cocktails at people with family. You know what I mean?

1:30:50Aiden:Well, what do you think? Because I watched Rucker Bregman's video about kind of the same topic, right? I didn't see this.

1:30:59Atrioc:It's on my watch list. I haven't seen it yet. What's the takeaway?

1:31:01Aiden:And I think the... I would say one of the major takeaways from that video, and I take it this article from what you're saying as well, is during that period where the board removed him as the CEO, and there was that giant pushback, which we actually talked about, I think, on this show after it happened. Maybe. I did a big Eclipse. Wasn't it months after? I remember talking about it, but it might have been long after it actually happened. It would have been long after. They put the old Twitch CEO in charge for one day. It was a while. But anyway, he basically says that the board, in the light of all of this information, was clearly right to do that at the time.

1:31:49Aiden:And I wanted to know if you, both of you, as having more insight into this, because I haven't read the New Yorker article. Do you agree with that sentiment? so i'll tell you when i covered it at the time i was more charitable towards sam altman's side because largely all the employees were on his side because if he went there was a real sense that open ai might dissolve into everyone leaving different ships and then they would all lose the value of their stock and they were all very very scared about that and so they all kind of rallied

1:32:25Atrioc:behind sam that was i think there's also a charitable interpretation that they were proud of what they're doing like at that time there was much less negativity around all this stuff the i chat gpt was considered this like technological like incredible achievement if you were there at that time at the forefront of ai research creating a product that however many 10 million 100 people 100 million people try out in a month or whatever it is this unbelievable groundbreaking product and you're there at the forefront of research on ai i feel like that's also be a reasonable uh incentive for somebody to say like i want to make sure this ship keeps going sure i think that's fair but i mean you know like the core engineer behind that ilius is keeper is the is the guy pushing and saying that sam allman is lying and needs to be removed so it's not like i wouldn't say it's like i'm sure i'm sure money plays a part of it i think there was a lot more pride about open eye at that point i mean this is two three years ago right this is way before i think broadly society started to be like whoa hold on what's going on we yeah i i think that

1:33:23Aiden:was my outlook like i remember being i i just trust the employees to like oh if they are all getting behind this sentiment then they must understand something about the value of this person that i don't so keeping this guy there is probably the right call but that was all i understood you know but after this article i mean it just makes it clear that the people who are closest to him, which is the senior level employees, were the ones who wanted him out. And the lower level employees who basically had stock vested and thought he was a leader, things were working. Broadly, it was working. They were a successful AI leader.

1:34:01It was like, don't rock the boat. Let's keep this going. So it's a weird disconnect. I can't say that I have a concrete answer, but I do think it doesn't paint a flattering picture of Simo. And I will say, even tech side, I really like Ben Thompson's trajectory, has been way more critical of OpenAI's choices lately, as they seem to be just flipping. They recently announced a huge pivot towards the corporate side of AI way more because they've seen Anthropik succeeding in that area. And it's a weird choice because they were the leader in – they were like the Google of AI. They were like the consumer-facing one that was doing really well.

1:34:36Now they're kind of deprioritizing that, trying to go another direction. They've had all these different other pivots. They had the adult chatbot, which got canceled. They got Sora, which got canceled. They had ads, which they brought in like meta tech people to do. And it's been largely keyword-based and pretty bad. They just haven't seemed to land on a direction yet, and it's questionable. So we'll see.

1:34:55Aiden:Did you rehearse all of this after we got the Anthropics sponsorship? You know who's done a great job? No, I genuinely believe this. I believe this well. I think OpenAI is making some missteps, business-wise. Timing-wise, it seems expensive. If I wore out a giant Anthropics shirt or a chain, I'm wearing increasingly gold jewelry. I don't know what you're talking about. But I already mentioned, you know, since we had the fucking ad in the episode, I'll say, what I see people talking about most is like, quad code is giving me rate limits. That is the thing I see a lot on social media is like, hey, I'm using it, and they used to give me more tokens, and now it's giving me less.

1:35:35So they're all running into fucking issues.

1:35:39Atrioc:It's worth saying for people who are not following the infrastructure behind this stuff, that as the tools are getting more advanced, a big reason why it seems, why the perception is that these tools are getting more advanced and people are going more and more, wow, holy shit, this is actually really useful for this job or this job and not just coding. And then within coding, many people going, holy shit, is because there's more stuff happening. Each time you ask it a question, there is more calculation being done. So it seems that broadly, we're getting to a point where it's less about jamming giant, giant, giant quantities of data into the thing on these$10 billion training runs and more about building a product scaffold on top of that.

1:36:19Atrioc:But the product scaffold is going to be using more and more tokens to operate basic things. So I don't know for certain. I don't know why people are hitting limits. I think it's a mix. I know that Anthropic has been also changing limits and whatnot, but these things are happening simultaneously where they're making their products more expensive to use. And so that's simultaneously running into then consumers who want to come in and use it more, obviously. And it's a weird challenge right now. Yeah, and one of the big fears that you're seeing is like, did we just get a taste of something that is genuinely useful on some level to consumers, and it's going to end up being in the hands only of businesses?

1:36:54Atrioc:Thanks for that on some level. I appreciate that. Yeah, people, I mean, I listen. I think I have, you know, we've got greater financial resources than most. But let's say I'm at my normal job. Back when I was at NVIDIA, I make a good salary. I would probably be using this the same way I am now to learn things. It's a great learning tool. Yeah. Like if, for example, like an NVIDIA for you, you would say, Claude, write an email to my boss that everything's still looking good and then play League of Legends for me for eight hours. Exactly. Actually, the trick to that was I would book a long meeting and then I would play TFT.

1:37:27So you're using it for that reason. And if they charge what it cost them to use right now, a lot less people would be using it. Now, I think they can get those costs down, but like that, you know, it's a real situation where it might end up being mostly in the, like people tried it. They're like, oh, this is kind of useful for my job. And then it finds out that it's priced out and you have to have a corporate account.

1:37:47Atrioc:But then we can cut it with ethanol to make it cheaper. There we go. There we go.

1:37:51Aiden:I think it's funny because we have like, I think like vouchers to use Claude for free because of the sponsorship that we got. But I lost where the vouchers got sent to us. So I've just been paying. Yeah, I tried the voucher, but it said you already have the tiers. So I couldn't. So you couldn't even use it? Yeah, I've just been paying out of pocket. It's a pain. Okay, well, that is the end of this week's episode of Lemonade Sand. If you want to join us for an extra hour on the Patreon, you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade sand. I have a juicy topic for you guys on the Patreon episode that I saved.

1:38:26Aiden:Juicy Aiden topic. A little juicer topic about Waymo and a video that came out and autonomous driving. Don't fall for it, guys. Clickbaiting you. Oops. He's trying to take your money. And he's going to do it shirtless. But if you do it, don't. Don't fall for this. I'll be shirtless. Stand up to this. And if you were to subscribe on Patreon, don't do it on iOS. They charge you more. We don't get that money. Don't do it on your fucking iOS device. You want to do it on desktop or an Android. Every Patreon episode is free in a Waymo in the backseat. You can watch it as long as you want there. Guys, thanks for watching.

1:39:01See you next week. Bye. Thanks, everybody. Bye.