Who Has The Cards? | Ep. 063 Lemonade Stand 🍋

16:28We're telling our defense contractors, you're going to start building faster. you know guy makes I have a big problem with it I'm the king I have sold more Boeings than any human being on earth they gave me award salesman of the year I said what about salesman of the in the history of Boeing I've sold more Boeing planes than any man in history by far probably over a thousand

16:51Atrioc:so the president and I should actually just a quick you know follow up of America not of Boeing has been going around the world, like selling Boeing planes as these weird diplomatic things. China doesn't, it's not like he's selling them to Chinese companies. He sells them to China, the government who then distributes it to their private companies. And so it's just very strange. I'm like, why? I, you know, maybe you know more. There's certainly the, like it's big and it's flashy. You get to say America first. It's, you know, Boeing giant company creates a lot of jobs. also trump has millions of dollars in boeing stock that is being actively traded like literally right now whoa everybody i watched a good coffee zoo last night where they he lined up some trump tweets with his stock purchase which just got disclosed and like he has a tweet where he's literally saying the ticker of palantir and how great of a company is right as he bought it and it dipped a little bit it's like he's trying to i mean he really just but what's funny is the amount he gained from that is he's a billionaire.

17:53He is a billionaire now. He's, he's kind of faked in the past. He is a billionaire. He made, I don't know, 350 grand. Like the fact that he cares enough to tweet, to make that is he's really a hustler for every on the Boeing thing though. I'll get steel man it slightly because other presidents have done something similar. And the idea I think is that the two industries, aircraft and autos are just strategically important because they can be repurposed in times of war. You don't want to let those decline or fail. All the auto companies during World War II were repurposed into tanks and everything.

18:29Same with airplanes. So you kind of want them to be thriving and if Boeing gets big orders, then you have this leading... America is one of the leaders, although Boeing has kind of slipped and allowed Airbus, I think, in Europe. Yeah, Airbus.

18:40Atrioc:And actually, the interesting thing here as well, so... I'm blanking on the name, Comac, I think? Yeah, the Chinese one? Yeah, Comac, yeah. So COMAC is China's competitor. They started 2008 and they only started delivering planes that were in commercial service in 2023. So last year they sold or delivered like to be able to use 16 total planes versus 1 ,500, 14 to 1 ,500 that were done globally. So they're tiny right now, but that was founded by China with the explicit goal to stop the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing. So I wouldn't be surprised as well because China obviously continues to grow. if part of the thing here is make sure Boeing gets a big foothold on China and Comac can't like grow into, you know, into that space.

19:25Atrioc:Yeah. It's tough though, because the, you know, I looked at the chart, I wish I had it in front of me. I'm sorry. I don't, but it's basically Boeing sales to China by year. So before any of this Trump stuff, it's like 800 planes a year, like tons. Then the first Trump meeting happens. And I think they got a deal for, you said 700, 500, 300, 300. So it was like, cause that's when the trade war started and they did, they stopped buying butling altogether and then it goes down to 300 and that deal isn't even fully because of the crash and all is because of covid so like they just don't even fully finish that deal like it says 300 was the headline number but they didn't even do that and then ever since then it's been a trickle down to like 100 or nothing this deals back to 200 but we're like we're like getting these deals that are small fractions of what it was before this trade war started right so and less than the 500 that they wanted i mean i think it's it's it's a failure right and it's It goes back to, again, like there's just, there's not as much dominance that America has, you know.

20:19Aiden:That's what I felt like looking at this is like you have three very specific industries, not to say that these aren't wins for people in these areas, like for farmers to be able to sell soybeans to China is very important for them, right? But it feels like Trump comes into a conversation like this, gets to walk away and be like, guys we have this we made this amazing huge deal for Boeing planes it's very showboaty as see we have this complex trade relationship that's like very one-sided and I'm getting wins for us right but in the grander context of the trade deficit that he talks about all the time and also the giant piece of leverage they have over us through that trade relationship it it feels more like showmanship of like, look how I fight for you guys when it doesn't really have like a grander effect on that relationship.

21:12I think, uh, I think that's the, that was the kind of the takeaway. Now that this, there was a very contentious meeting. Honestly, I was generally decently impressed with how both sides said the right diplomatic things. And like, uh, even G could have been more like, um, if he wanted to, he could have like humiliated Trump on this day or been were like, you know, but he didn't. They were like, there was a genuine attempt to connect at least. But if you look at you pull this up real quick, just like the cards Trump has, it feels like he has played his cards in all the previous meetings and is kind of running out like the tariffs got struck down.

21:49Sorry, go back to that image. Yeah. What game are they playing? This is a poker with no middle. Okay, I want to just read no middle.

21:57Aiden:Trump has two cards, but she has five. That's a tough game. What you don't know about this is if you win with two seven at most casinos, they pay you out a little bonus. So he's going all in. It's like he's playing for the bonus.

22:11Atrioc:So in this game, though, do we know that a two and a seven hand is bad? We do. We do know that. It is bad. It's always bad. I think the idea is that he's used tariffs. He used them as much as he possibly could. They got struck down and also China kind of punch back with the rare earth thing and now that he can't do that again uh you know we can't cut off we cut off high tech was the last thing we have which is chips we can't really cut off planes or soybean or beat like what what else are we gonna what's the lever not yeah i mean i don't know i think i think china doesn't want to escalate and have another trade war it's not they had to be fair really bad numbers just come out for retail sales industrial growth like they're in a bit of a slump here yeah league of legends okay we it's made we stop we stop we stop sending it to them it tencent owns it tencent does own it we own right games is in america right so you put up like a shield it's actually yeah tencent does own i think 50 what

23:12Aiden:is it 50 percent yeah i mean majority for sure and i think the u.s government owns the other 50 There's something at play there. They must. They must. We've got to have something left. Because it feels like a CIA psyop to ruin minds. I do think the CIA is involved in League of Legends and the Chinese government, and they're both trying to ruin our youth. And it's working. And that's a fact. It's working. It's ruining our youth. In slime, Anthony Bruno.

23:37Atrioc:Most popular video games in China. Honor of Kings. Shit, that's not ours. PUBG Mobile, that's not ours. That's by Tencent. Genshin Impact. Do we own that? No. Dungeon and Fighter Origins, League of Legends, Dota 2, Crossfire. If you flashback a few years, we had Avengers Endgame, which is really popular in China. If we could cut off... What if we cut off the end of the MCU so they never saw how it ends? That would have been a bargaining chip. And then we could have said, we'll give you the end. We'll give you the end of Avengers. If you buy some more Boeing planes. Or some soybeans. Each Boeing that you buy will be filled with DVD copies of Avengers Endgame.

24:15so you can distribute it to the popular so yeah i don't know that's the thing but i think the main topic uh at least on china's side 100 the main thing i want to talk about the most was taiwan i think you look into a little bit between drinks yeah i mean she's she's spokesman i mean actually

24:30Aiden:i had to add it with binoculars i worked hard i worked hard during the day okay and i kind of a work hard play hard kind of and i played hard in the evening i appreciate that me and the Politburo? A couple of them. I won't brag and say it was all of them. But Xi's spokesman put out during the meetings going on, the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy. And this is, by the US's side, like, own account.

25:09Aiden:This is the number one issue in all previous meetings with China. Taiwan as an issue on the whole is always the thing that comes up the most, usually the thing that's talked about the most. And I wanted to pull up, there's a long interview with Trump that Fox did in China. And then that one that I mentioned by Rubio, where they both kind of answer questions around the topic and they're trying to play this dance of uh nothing has changed but maybe we will act and maybe we'll sell them weapons but also maybe we won't right and and and finding a way to say that while saying nothing every country in the world has their own little song and dance on taiwan of finding a way to like say it in the right way and i i sent you a youtube link it just comes in at the correct time stamp so i want to watch like a minute of this interview with Trump.

26:04Atrioc:Did the people of Taiwan feel more or less secure after your meetings with President Xi?

26:12Aiden:Neutral. Has the policy changed at all? No, nothing's changed. No, nothing's changed. I will say this. I'm not looking to have somebody go independent and, you know, we're supposed to travel 9 ,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down. But you're waiting on approving billions of dollars of weapons for Taiwan. That's right. Is that moving forward? Well, I haven't approved it yet. We're going to see what happens. What are you looking for? I may do it. I may not do it. Yeah, what's your hinge point? Well, I'm not going to say that, but I may do it.

26:46Aiden:I may not do it. But we're not looking to have wars. And if you kept it the way it is, I think China is going to be okay with that. But we're not looking to have somebody say, let's go independent because the United States is backing

26:58Atrioc:us you know so president she probably liked that you haven't approved the weapons to taiwan

27:03Aiden:um i would say like is maybe too strong a word because he thinks i could do it with just the signing of my signature unlike biden who couldn't sign us

27:16Aiden:it is really funny because through this whole interview it's amazing we do go to the biden el classico so much in this interview It does happen every time. Biden couldn't do it. I did it. He couldn't sign it. He couldn't have signed it. It's not relevant. But I think both him and Rubio are hammering the idea that like nothing has changed post this conversation. Like nothing about the relationship between us and China and Taiwan has changed. But as you can imagine - I want to push back on that. Can I jump in? Or like not on you, but on them. Yeah. Okay, I just want to say, because I think from Rubio's point of view, nothing has changed.

27:56I think Rubio was really good in this event of maintaining message discipline. He said that China will always try to push you or get concessions, and you always say, our stance is unchanged. That way, you're not even answering. You're not giving a thing. But Trump can't do that. And so even in that interview right there, certain things he said, like we don't want to go 3 ,000 miles to fight a war. He's saying things like, it's closer to them. We're not going to. And what it is doing is if Taiwan, who believes America is their ally and has some backing, is now scared. And they're thinking we might get, they might get the Ukraine treatment, where you pretend to be an ally for a long time.

28:31Then when times are tough, you don't get out. And also, even the idea that Trump would renege on an already signed weapons deal because of what happened in this meeting is opening the door to China being way more, like, seeing an opportunity with Trump. that they can, because back to cards, turns out this is kind of the last huge card that Trump has that China wants something, which is that if Trump backs off visibly from Taiwan, stops selling them weapons, that's very much in China's interest. They very much want that. And they're willing to trade stuff for that. Yeah. And Trump loves a deal, loves a trade.

29:07Aiden:There's a couple other things in this because in the vein of what you're saying, the president of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, I think, uh he saw this yeah and you know sees what trump says during and after the meetings and he's like whoa whoa whoa yeah hold up you guys you guys already agreed to this this is a security commitment based on laws that we both share uh and taiwan will not be sacrificed or traded and will not give up its free way of life under under pressure uh insisting that like this this agreement has to go through. Uh, and he admitted like a quote said they were very concerned about the contents of the meeting that were, that was had while also saying that Taiwan's not going to do anything to like provoke or start a conflict seemingly in reply to the idea that, uh, Trump is saying like, nobody go and say anything about independence now.

30:02Like, you know, they're not

30:04Aiden:trying to start anything. Uh, and then I think this also comes in cause a huge chunk of this interview, Trump goes back and starts complaining that Taiwan hasn't made hard enough of a commitment to chip development in the United States. And basically saying like a huge part of what they need to do better for everybody. You need to start developing chips in the U S and not in just your country. And it was a mistake of previous presidents to allow quote Taiwan to steal chip developing technology uh and and and have it be so centered in their country and like how and it's part of the reason why intel has fallen so far behind uh this is you know i i think it's funny because if you're a taiwanese and you hear that the obvious trump is not that subtle the obvious implication is get this chip stuff out of taiwan so that we can sacrifice this pawn exactly it's not once that tech is out i have no reason to care and so like i don't know it's very frustrating as someone who values America, like the way he's treated all of our allies, Europe and it's very frustrating to me, but Taiwan is one of them.

31:12And it's like, that's what I was, I was thinking,

31:14Aiden:if you're listening to this, you have to be so mad because the guy is basically demanding that you give up the last significant piece of leverage you really have over keeping the protection as is. And it's already so ambiguous to begin with. Yeah. And you know, I mean, this was a strategic a plan from Taiwan. I was reading something recently about the, because the people who still run the chip industry are like in their seventies now, they're pretty old and they've like in their generation, they went from way, way, way behind Intel, nothing. And they poured government money and time and influence into this to make that their linchpin.

31:52This is the golden jewel of Taiwan. We can make the best chips in the world. And now they're kind of reaping the rewards. Taiwan GDP growth is just broke like a record or something like literally because all of the money and all the tech companies in the world is flowing in to taiwan right now because of the ai boom they are one of the biggest beneficiaries and uh yeah i don't know i don't know what it was but it was for a developed economy it was one of the biggest jdp prints

32:13Aiden:in a long time to 13 yeah oh my god 13 is crazy you know like china does five america's like two right now it's like 13 for a big developed economy it's a big year for them you know like they they've got that. Alex Honnold climbs Taipei 101 and Mark Rober commentated it. Not sure why that happened. That's the big three. So like they are riding high, but this Trump thing might have gotten rid of the dumps. Taiwan stole Mark Rober from us.

32:38Atrioc:That is a red line. We want to create Mark Rober here in America.

32:43Aiden:If the next Glitter Bomb video is in Taipei, I'll take up arms. And I won't sell them arms. Anyway, I mean, those were like kind of the main things. I don't know if you guys have any minor stories. I thought I will say like overall, it could have gone way worse. It could have been way more contentious. Last thing I'll say, there's a book called Thucydides Trap that I really liked by Graham Allison. And it's about how it looked at all the times in history when there was a established dominant power and then a rising power, based off Athens and Sparta. And like, I don't know the percentage, but like 91 % of the time, over 60 examples, there was a conflict, there was a fight.

33:22And the only times that what didn't was like, America and UK. And there's a couple examples. And Xi Jinping specifically referenced this book in conversation. He specifically said it to Trump. And we have to avoid the cities trap. And I thought that was interesting. I don't think Trump has read it. I'm not sure it's part of this, but I think the idea that like, hey, a conflict between America and China that gets hot would be so bad for everybody. Let's keep this in mind and let's avoid it. And this meeting seemed generally in that direction. So it's not a horrible idea. I think Trump is kind of bumbling.

33:58Atrioc:Aiden got drinks with Thucydides, I think. I think you were a big part of...

34:03Aiden:I kept things cool this year. You heard Trump? He said he wants China to stay cool, Taiwan to stay cool. Yeah. I was... You're chill. I was keeping it together.

34:14Atrioc:Meeting to wear sunglasses does not imply you kept it together, by the way. I was keeping it cool, Doug.

34:19Aiden:And I wanted to end this because we talked, you brought this point up a while ago, the common formula of the headline, China has done this thing, but at what cost? Oh yeah. At what cost? And I thought it was funny as I was going through stuff to read about the summit, there's a Wall Street Journal article that is literally titled, Xi Jinping is now the world leader he wanted to be, but it has come at a cost. Did they say what the cost is? Nope. I haven't opened it. Okay. I just literally took the headline and I'll fully admit that.

34:53Atrioc:That's the kind of hard hitting. Yeah, that's the hard hitting. I didn't read that one.

34:58Aiden:When you're 15 long, I have to cop to when I didn't read the article. I saw the headline and I just thought it was funny. No, it is funny. And that is it. It's funny because they should at least find a synonym. They always do the same headline. But there's a challenge, you know, just mix it up. It's always that one cost. Yeah, I'm sure there are costs. There's always some challenge.

35:16Atrioc:To be a Marvel villain, which is like, you know, mostly one-sided, but there's one interesting thing that makes them slightly sympathetic. They always want that.

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36:53Aiden:Talked a little about planes, but what about the airlines? What have they been up to? And there was a recent thing that came up. It was in April. JetBlue is potentially being sued in a class action lawsuit for predatory pricing practices. So you may remember we talked a while ago to Lena Kahn about the threat of companies utilizing private information. I mean, we took her to the fire, dude.

37:23Atrioc:Okay, when we raked Lena Kahn over the coals, and she didn't even want to be there.

37:29Aiden:She hated that interview because of how hard she was. She cried at the end of that interview. A lot of people don't know that. Surprise the New York Times didn't put that. but she brought up about the potential pricing practices of companies using private data as an example say they know like an airline knows that you're going to a funeral and they increase the price of a ticket because they have that information to take advantage this idea yeah incredibly dystopian so in april a guy tweets at jet blue uh a 230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy. I'm just trying to make it to a funeral.

38:12Aiden:JetBlue on Twitter responds, their customer service rep responds and says, clearing your cash and cookies or booking with an incognito like what might work. Incognito window might work. We're sorry for your loss. Seemingly a public acknowledgement that they do indeed participate in this pricing practice, which immediately there is an uproar about like the customer service tweet itself goes a little viral on twitter through that period of time i think i actually saw it when this happened uh and uh a few days later not necessarily the person that made that tweet but a person files a class action lawsuit that is yet to be approved or cleared by a judge uh that jet blue is taking these sort of tactics.

38:59Aiden:And I think if you're, you know, tapped into the idea of this existing, like you may, if you watch that Lena Khan interview, for instance, you're like prepped for this to be a problem. But JetBlue has like outright denied that they do this as well as other airlines. And JetBlue is just saying, guys, like the customer service rep, like just didn't know what they're talking about. And we don't collect this type of information. This is just how ticket prices work like when other seats get booked like ticket prices can change within short periods of time based on availability availability of a flight and to be fair as i looked into this there is no significant data or like pattern available at least for now that they actually have done this like there isn't uh it there's plenty of other like standard reasons why fares do go up within that period of time.

39:54Aiden:There's no like pattern of this behavior and the lawsuit hasn't been approved. Look, it is fully possible that they're not actually doing this specific behavior. Yeah, I'm not saying airlines are good guys. It's just that I saw, there was like that more perfect union video where they were talking about how companies like Instacart specifically said they don't do algorithmic pricing. And so they did an experiment where they actually got hundreds of phones, hundreds of drivers. Yeah. And they were different prices on the groceries. And so like, they're, I mean, they, they, they can lie. Of course.

40:27Like until there's like an experiment or, or an idea that like, they have to really do the calculus. Is this going to be investigated by the government? Are we going to get a fine bigger than what we gain? If they're not going to do that, then the smartest move is to lie and then do some form of it. So I don't know. I'm not saying it as an avenue. I am saying that like, we need to start thinking of a plan if it does happen where you can fake to be my alive grandma. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I'm going to her funeral, I can, like, send you an email or something or, like, publicly buy you a gift on Amazon so the cookie tracks it.

40:58I'm ready anytime.

40:59Atrioc:You activate me. Yeah, you just keep writing into the description. She's really not that fun to hang out with. Yeah. I barely even want to go. Debating whether this is going to be fun at all. Just kind of seeing. Seeing the price plummet. Just kind of seeing. It shows$200 and you're like, actually, I think I'm staying home that weekend. The price checks down. $1 ,80,$1 ,70.

41:18Aiden:Yeah, I think I'm fully with the idea that airlines may be doing this or will attempt to do it down the line. From like right now, there isn't this specific paper trail of like this being true in this moment. I'll give you an example. I just want to say because like when I worked in marketing in NVIDIA, we would have to do social media ad buys on like Meta. Yeah. Facebook. And there is a shocking amount you can tell about a person without tracking the things you think they're tracking. Like just, uh, just by, um, you know, the, the famous example is like, they can often know you're pregnant before without tracking that, you know what I'm saying?

42:05Aiden:Wasn't this a thing that this was with, with target, right? Target had put together like a package of recommended items about to their customer that they assumed were pregnant from other things they had bought and they didn't even know yet. And then they sued Target for that, I think. I'm not sure if they won. But yeah, I mean, the idea is like just by the information that you already do give, they can correctly and legally say, oh, we don't track this, this, and this. But because those things correlate so well with all the data points they have, they can find truths about you. So this isn't one-to-one, but it did make me think of, you know how people talk about how their phones listen and record them all the time?

42:49Aiden:And like, oh, I was just talking about this type of dog food. And then like my phone fed me an ad for it like an hour later. And the reality of that is mostly that no, your phone doesn't listen to you. They don't do that. They don't really do that. There's an asterisk on that. But what they do do is collect so much of your browsing data that they can predict the type of ad to that degree of certainty anyway without listening to you. You're not a unique snowflake. There are people who have 98 % of the same details as you and they saw the same Instagram post or heard the same news story or whatever that made them search the same thing.

43:32And so it's like they know what you're going to do almost based on the people just like you. there's so many people doing the same thing so yeah i think uh that's what most of like the oh it's listening to me is from is some guy saw the same that's why whenever i'm like driving on the

43:45Atrioc:freeway sometimes i'll just like screech off to the side just to throw them off like i want to be unpredictable and unknowable the handler for doug at meta is like fuck where'd he go he's

43:54Aiden:breaking containment i i wanted to test i this is not you know this is not an infallible experiment

44:00Atrioc:by a thousand colanders every weekend i want instagram to have no fucking idea what i'm up to it's fucking up everyone else's recommendations because they also buy like a mug and it's like you want to call under right? This is like when I sold my best selling book, Doug, a Doug, Doug story, and then people kept buying it. We tried to, we tried to buy it alongside lube. So it would show up as recommended on Amazon. And then one guy bought it alongside house of leaves. So it's like recommended alongside house of leaves all the time.

44:34Aiden:the the the last thing i wanted to try because i'm supposed to fly jet blue later this year i'm like for a funeral for for a funeral for a wedding you're going for a funeral you have to be there for that wedding for a wedding jet blue that i have to go to if i don't go to this wedding my girlfriend will be very upset with me jet blue unless it's your don't make it expensive so i say i can't go jet blue rubbing his hands upping the hitting the up button on the price uh no i'm just kidding. It should be a should be a fun when I got an airline story. Oh, no, I just wanted to say I tried I tried like three different three different browsers, three different devices like on it and I logged into Google.

45:14Aiden:Am I not logged into Google checking the the same prices of two sets of jet blue flights I have later in the year to see if like maybe they're fucking me. It's all the same price across everything.

45:23Atrioc:This is just like a social media intern who just doesn't understand how the browser work, which kicked off this huge class action.

45:30Aiden:I don't think it was that I think it could like it or was there other pieces could be this could be the actual revelation of JetBlue doing this. We don't know yet, right? It could be that too it could be an employee that had heard about this type of pricing tactic thinks they're too low on the chain to actually know but thinks JetBlue does this and recommends to that person that they do this in order to fix the problem or they're just throwing it out there because they don't know how any of this works. There's a bunch of different possibilities but yeah, you got another airline story and this one's a little bit fun all right uh although i guess maybe not we'll see you know how people have been uh finding different quirky fun ways to insider trade using the new uh poly market and calci uh prediction markets they've become such a hot topic uh well a guy did one that was so crazy that i have to give him props even though i don't like that trend uh there is a bet every single day on what the temperature will be in like france for example in different countries.

46:27And this guy found out that the way that is measured is by a sensor at the airport. And so he, in this video, so you can pull this up, took a hairdryer, heated up the sensor, and then took the outside long shot bet that it would be really hot that day, even though it wouldn't, and made 34 ,000 pounds or 34 ,000 euro.

46:55Atrioc:Is that is that illegal? Are there laws? I say you can't go heat up the temperature sensor. I don't know. I don't know this point of human history. Why would you go use a hairdryer on the temperature sensor? Why would they have preactively? There's no rule against it.

47:16Aiden:You know, when I was I was riding the Amtrak for the first time in a long time, and they have these really long extended announcements about what you can and cannot do in the cars and they get really specific so you start to wonder it's like oh people just did that at some point and no and now in the future there's going to be a new sign up on the fence that says no blowing hair dryers or other items into to affect temperature readings i mean their solution to this problem by the way was just to move it to a different airport so i'm quite sure someone's going to try it again okay i have a I haven't thought about this because the, the real version of me, the like 90 % of my version of me is like, this is a scourge on our society.

48:02Aiden:This needs to be policed at the very least. Like you can't, you cannot allow these things. But then the other 10 % of me is like, dude, if you're the fucking moron betting on this shit, just I've fucking applause to that guy for just, for just doing it. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, I think about that for a lot of things. There's so many things where I used to be like, guys, we don't have to stop this. And now I'm like, bro, if you're falling for this still, if you're still buying, like if you're in 2026, still being like, well, this NFT is a good idea. Yeah, which is that mentality, that mentality for regulation is just untenable.

48:36Aiden:Like you can't have that mentality and have like a society. But I do, part of me still does feel that way. Because it feels like how, you know, if you regulate, if you're stupid enough to still fall for some of these things, you can't regulate it enough. There's not enough rules that'll save you. The insider trading is so prevalent on these platforms that big stock trading firms like Jane Street and all these, you know, the big hedge funds are now scraping Polymarket to find consistent winners and then front running their bets on much bigger. Like, because they're making pennies compared to what you can make on the stock market if you knew some truths about the Iran war or missile.

49:15Atrioc:So they're analyzing Polymarket to find people who clearly have insider knowledge. And then they're going, what's the bigger bet we can make off this? Wow. Oh, that's so awful and fascinating. I know. It's really fascinating. It's a wild place, the world we live in. Speaking of which, a lot of this wildness happened after COVID. And that was a really fun time for us as students. Yeah, keep going. And so now I'm hoping, I've always been hoping, when's the next pandemic coming around? Okay. And you've been following up. Yes. Okay. God. All right. right. So yeah, 2020. There's this pretty funny prank on the world and so you might have heard you had that bat right?

49:54You ate that bat or that

49:55Atrioc:pangolin is a pain. Yeah, pangolin. You were on your other China trip. You

50:00Aiden:were my other China. You were smoking a little weed in a lab. If I remember in a lab, no, a lot of people think it was in a lab, but I just went to the market about the page about a pain. I just bought a pangolin and then I cooked it, but not well enough. You didn't bring a lot of time in China. China last decade, actually. A lot of people don't know that. You're the Forrest Gump of China, bro. Shit has happened around you. And then I flew straight to Italy.

50:24Atrioc:And then Tom Hanks' house. I think you met up with Tom Hanks. And it kicked everything off. Okay. Now, fingers crossed because this one, this new fun version of a new virus came from South America. Tell me you have not gone there recently.

50:38Aiden:No, no, just China.

50:41Atrioc:You were talking about your Venezuelan friends recently, haven't been visiting. No, it's

50:44Aiden:phone calls. Okay, okay. Phone calls.

50:46Atrioc:All right, so hantavirus, you might have heard of it. This is a, I guess, like very small outbreak that is happening of a rare disease, and I think it's kind of bringing up some of the same types of fears about pandemic stuff because we're all fresh off of a horrific pandemic. So this is a disease that comes from rodents, does not normally affect humans, but some rare strains can. Basically, it's like you get the flu symptoms that are bad, and then it can affect your lungs or kidneys and kill you. It can be pretty rough. There's no treatment vaccine. mean the kind of scary part is it's one to six weeks incubation period, meaning by the time you get it versus showing symptoms, it's one to six weeks, which is a long time, which means you might have it and be contagious without knowing it, but we don't know how it spreads.

51:35Atrioc:So you might, if you've heard about this before this point, it's because this outbreak happened on a cruise ship like very recently. Northern lion super cruise. Yes, this is over the past like to cancel it like two weeks, couple of weeks and it spread on this cruise ship, but we don't know how because normally these things spread by basically rat or rodent droppings. So if you're like you're like snorting lines of rat urine like that could get you hantavirus. You're probably not going to get it if you aren't like directly exposed to like rodent droppings and you're inhaling them in small spaces.

52:06Atrioc:So this is like the one strain. It's called the Andy strain that can spread between people of hantaviruses and so this we've known about this for a while this isn't like out of nowhere this particular thing that is spreading on this cruise ship um so but it's it's infrequent enough and it's small enough and it hasn't really been a big deal before that we don't know how it's transmitted well rat droppings are cool now so everyone's been like oh people have been that's like what the kids are doing if you go the tick tock's on it bro like i took nyquil you know in high school to try to get to try to hallucinate kids now they're doing rat you're calling it chucky cheesing bro they go you go you have yourself a night bro you were doing it with jensen wong in china bro don't act like

52:48Aiden:but it was pure it was pure it was the good stuff it was pure you think jensen's getting bad shit

52:57Atrioc:every story we've talked about today you were actually involved with any reason it's so funny

53:02Aiden:if we interview jensen wong like a year from now we cut to this clip

53:08Atrioc:So the allegations true New York Times, they grilled him about his rat dropping usage.

53:14Aiden:No, Jensen to like hundreds of thousands of people. Listen, it's crazy.

53:19Atrioc:Perry, if you pull this up, here's a little article from or image. Excuse me from Bloomberg showing the map. So basically this leaves from South America. The idea is probably a couple people got onto this cruise ship, which only had 150 people small, but got onto this ship. They probably spread it to some degree. it's spread. So while this all might sound scary, you might heard of Hantavirus and all this stuff. It's not like a huge deal to be honest. So here's, here's what we do know. Three people have died in total. It's kind of bad. If you get it, there's been 13 total cases. And at this point, the cruise ship is like done.

53:49Atrioc:People have disseminated, but they're under the under watch basically, because it's in a couple of different countries now, but people are quarantining and whatnot. World Health Organization and CDC says the risk is super low. European health officials are saying This isn't showing like it's going to mutate or anything. It's not, which is what would make it more contagious, right? That's the thing with COVID. It keeps mutating to become a new thing that spreads. But that does not appear to be happening here. According to the European CDC, they've already sequenced the genome. And I think really the, fortunately, the result of this, you might've heard about this and been a little freaked out.

54:24Atrioc:Like I was until this morning. It's like, basically seems fine. The two things to be concerned about. One is just, there is a long incubation period. So there's a world where this suddenly starts spreading, but it seems to just not be nearly as scary.

54:37Aiden:Is there not a confirmation of like to what amount of that incubation period you're contagious at all?

54:43Atrioc:We don't even know how it transmits. We know very little about it. So that is the part that you might be afraid of, but of the information that is now rapidly developing, like the CDC said this was an emergency or took emergency actions immediately, but they're saying it's contained. They're saying it's fine. And if you, if you really need comp like comfort, check a look, take a look at this poly market poll, which a hantavirus pandemic in 2026, only 6 % chance. So I really see no concern at all. I think the main story here, honestly, is that people are freaked out because of COVID and distrust of government.

55:19Atrioc:So that even though the CDC and the who are both like, this is good, we've got it under control. We're just going to keep it careful. Like we don't have a CDC director permanent one anymore. And we haven't for a long time. People generally are distrusting the government. So I think this is less of a real serious concern for a pandemic right now. All the signs point to this will be contained, even though it sounded kind of scary. I think it's just tough because like last, I mean, I agree with you. From what I saw, it doesn't seem to be the COVID level, but people said this shit. Like I remember all the shit.

55:51I remember Elon Musk saying no new cases by April. I remember seeing all this stuff downplaying it, or it's contained to overseas. There's only a few cases in America. It was like, it just became bigger, and every step of the way, people were downplaying until Tom Hanks got it, and then it was like this big deal.

56:07Aiden:I'm just calling a homie. I've got a friend. You got a friend? Doctor. Studies infectious disease. Oh, he plays melee, though. No. Oh, I thought he had a melee. No, no, no, no. He's just a doctor. That's what I talked to him for vaccines, right?

56:20Atrioc:You connected me with him for vaccines, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we talked. Same guy.

56:24Aiden:yeah about vaccines uh and he he we had an interesting conversation not about hantavirus but about something similar a long time ago where he was talking about this uh there's a really high percentage chance that if you do get it you die and the uh question in medicine of how effective is it actually for a virus to have uh a really high percentage chance of killing you because of the virus kills like 40 50 percent of the people it infects it lowers the chances of it spreading or that's the argument is that it's it's not actually good for the viruses like life

57:01Atrioc:in the long run viruses i mean maybe i'm speaking out of my butthole here but they don't want to kill the host at all because then they die right and the reason you have viruses killing us in the first place is because they come from animals you know what i'm saying they're not supposed to be some of them do it for the greatest joy yeah yeah yeah but i haven't and they're depressed they've been on social media. I haven't had a conversation about how hot the other viruses are. The gins are viruses are the bottom of the social standing and like the, and they want to move up in the world and killing is how they do that.

57:33Aiden:I think knowledge on this topic is something that I maybe have the least to contribute. I think I want to, I actually want to call a call him about this. Cause I haven't had a chance to speak with him about it and get, get his, I was to do a costume episode where we dress up as doctors. We just we give we give our takes. Yeah, we give our takes on medicine. Well, last week's episode was pretty scientific. So I think we got we have a process. Yeah,

57:58Atrioc:I look, you're right. Like this, this could get bigger. It is a thing that is still technically scary right now. And I think primarily because we're all like a little scarred from this recent thing. But public health officials, including the CDC of Europe and of America are both saying we are monitoring this closely, but this does not appear to have the same kind of like particularly scary property. So it is obviously possible, but I think the main question here is like in the, in that horrible nightmare scenario where it happens, would people go back to playing among us or swap to peak, which is the better game.

58:31Yeah. I mean, if this happens, if you tell me that, yeah, you're seeing the case pick up, I'm investing in friends, lap games. I'm putting so much money. I'm taking my entire net worth. And I'm dumping it on that because two is coming out real quick.

58:46Aiden:Yeah. I'm going to shovelware that shit out, dude. I'm going to reskin it. Okay, this is more an open question because I literally don't remember. I get your brief pushback of like people were downplaying the seriousness of COVID. Yeah. But I don't feel like, am I crazy? I don't feel like health institutions downplayed it. I feel like figures and people who had like more vested interests or obvious lack of knowledge. But it was like, maybe I'm crazy. This is years ago. I literally do not remember. I'm trying to remember. And I smoked so much weed. No, I don't. I'm not sure. I remember, like, I remember news, basically.

59:24I remember news telling me that it was contained and not a big deal,

59:27Atrioc:but I'm not sure if they were quoting. Remember, like, our best source of news were podcasts, and they would just, like, have random doctors on who would be like, this is what we're seeing here. It'd be invalidated in, like, three days. It was just, yeah, it was crazy. This thing's been going on for, like, a month and a half, by the way. So this isn't, like, the last week's becoming a panic. It's basically a thing you might have heard about. Seemingly right now, everybody's in quarantine and we're, you know, knock on wood. Okay. I feel like Grock will tell me whether it's a big deal. That's a good point.

59:54Aiden:Wait, what else? Oh, there's an Ebola outbreak too. Jeez Louise. Oh yeah, I was thinking about getting that ready for the event. Thinking about getting Ebola? Well, trying it out. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a world traveler. You're a traveler and you've always been jealous of those that had Ebola because it was like something you never got to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm like. often said that was uh who wrote that that story about the the fig tree plat right what nobody knows what you're having a stroke is it olivia is it olivia sylvia plath sylvia sylvia i don't know big sylvia plath my bad it's sylvia plath i don't know why is sylvia plath the story of the The story of the fig tree where you look at like it's this tree and it has all your lives at the end of every fig is a different version of your life.

1:00:49Aiden:And the one with Ebola, it's like I want to experience that too. Didn't Sylvia Plath? Shit, let's keep all that in. Stick her head in an oven or something? Shout out to Sylvia. What you got?

1:01:07Aiden:What you got? What you got going on in there? I want to stew in this for a bit. I really love to hear more of your thoughts on poets. I want out. I don't think we should move on until we've heard everything you got to say about Sylvia Plath. Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, comedian and best-selling author Chelsea Handler gives her tips on independence and aging gracefully. I would argue that 50, now that I am 50 and I understand life more than I did when I was 30 or 40 is that you get so much more wisdom and you get so much more experience that you actually feel like you're beginning again.

1:01:47Aiden:Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.

1:01:55Atrioc:I'm Midge First, two-time NWCLE champion, championship MVP, and forward for the U.S. Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs.

1:02:16Aiden:In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness.

1:02:26Atrioc:So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02:43Atrioc:I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Ed Elson. And we're bringing the Profit Markets Tour to Chicago. That's right. The city with big shoulders, I think. Chi-town. Is that what they call it? The city with big shoulders? Anyways, I call Chicago the old navy of cities. I think it's 80 % of New York for 50 % of the price. I went there with my son. You probably don't love that.

1:03:04Atrioc:I went there with my son and I had the best weekend. We went to this amazing steakhouse. We went to a batting cage. We did a bike tour. we had the best time. What can they expect from us in Chicago at? We'll have predictions. We'll have hot takes. We'll have some of Scott's signature rants live and in person. And you will have the chance to ask a question as well. Come to the Vic on Monday, June 1st. You can get your tickets at ProfGMarketsTour.com. That's ProfGMarketsTour.com. I actually have a story that I think Mr. AI may find interesting. Okay, let's pull this up. I thought this was rather funny.

1:03:45I don't know if you've heard.

1:03:46Atrioc:There's a little thump at the bottom of the table just now.

1:03:53Okay, I want to pull this up. This is a social experiment that I found to be quite funny and kind of, I don't know, a twisted mirror up to society. The Joker and Chuck were talking twisted.

1:04:09Aiden:Some people want to watch the world burn. Yeah. This guy had an idea. What if I take an actual Monet painting that is not well known and tell everyone it's AI? How will they react? And so we uploaded this. I generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe it in as much detail as possible. What makes this inferior to a real Monet painting? That is a catnip prompt for people who are really, really anti-AI. Oh, he marks it as made with AI on Twitter? Yeah, he marked it as made with AI. anyway this is real and the rage bait was was well done so i i have some examples here uh and again knowing it's a real monet reading some of these it's monet ish yes and certainly pretty but at the risk of sounding pretentious it would imo not hold up next to the real thing the first time i saw monet's paintings up close it was astonishing the brush strokes here aren't as precise they're all just all negging yeah there's a certain harshness no soft blending of colors it's all borked nonsense with no sense of place no frame just colors there's no focal point uh you know just it's garbage brush strokes don't feel monet you know people going on and on and on i will say there are some real fucking art chads out there who actually know their shit and they were like wait a minute this this is a real i mean this is this detail from an actual late Monet, you can tell the brushstrokes are super similar.

1:05:38And since the, you know, there's a couple people that had like, I'm still getting it. Let's see. Disagree with people saying it lacks depth. There's a clear plan with the lily pads. Paint texture looks believable as a physical object. It's not a top tier Monet, but it's very credible Monet, which is probably true. There's some people that have the knowledge to figure it out, but I think this just goes back to the idea that, you know, I think we all have said many of the problems with generative AI, but the one argument that's always annoyed me is the one about like the hands or you know the there's too many teeth all the ideas are like of course they're going to fix that in two seconds and I think this puts a lens up to that of people just trying to downplay something basically fictionally just making up things of why it's so shit once they know it's AI it's more of a feeling than it is like the actual measurable impact of it.

1:06:29I mean we're pretty

1:06:30Atrioc:much there right where you can't tell the difference. This is another indication of that, but like in a weird reverse thing. Obviously, plenty of photos and videos and what's not. You can still tell, but man, it's so fucking hard. It's insane. I heard an AI, this is going to sound crazy, but I heard an AI Drake song, and I also listened to all three of his new Drake albums, and the AI song was probably better. You listened to all three? Yeah, it was on stream. We were kind of roasting it. All three? We were kind of roasting it, and I was like, damn, this album's kind of boring, and then I heard a song.

1:07:01I didn't knows it's I heard I was like that was gonna get in turn out the beam so I don't know it's a weird time I do think once you know it's AI I I have a similar feeling to some of these people where once I know I just lose interest it's not as interesting or fun to enjoy yeah but but the idea that you can measurably see the difference seems to be declining day by day I mean yeah I don't know yeah I mean

1:07:21Aiden:this is more I think this is a classic exercise and just tricking people who have conviction about things they hate but don't actually know anything do you know what i mean exactly this is like when you can do this where you're like doesn't it suck that biden did this and then the person's like yeah fucking hate biden and then you're like yeah trump did that gotcha like i it's like an exercise in it an exercise in like owning people that i think is like of course this was gonna happen did you need to do it that's how that's a little bit of how i feel about it is i don't I, yeah, I don't know. I guess I would like people to have, because if you stick to this line of argument, you're going to get more frustrated and angry as the quality gets better.

1:08:12But if you have a more principled war, you're like, Hey, I don't like generative AI on his purpose, on a service. At least then you can, you know what I'm saying? I don't think this, this,

1:08:20Aiden:this exercise he doing, he's doing doesn't really like, I don't think this shifts the needle on people having more principled arguments about it. I think this is for him to feel good. Maybe. And for us to laugh.

1:08:32Atrioc:Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I agree. This feels like a funny roast. But then actually here, some good resources I found that I think are about if you want to understand maybe some of the downsides of AI art beyond just, oh, it looks bad or it's going to take jobs. Brandon Sanderson, who writes the Cosmere series books, he has a video called, if you just search Brandon Sanderson, an AI art bad. It'll probably come up. It was like a couple months ago. And basically his argument is the creative process requires you to go through things and it is not about the destination. And if you just kind of get to the destination, then, um, you're ultimately like not really creating anything at all.

1:09:12Um, and then as well as what I think that the, what you're saying, the principled

1:09:17Aiden:outlook of, Oh, I'm not interested in this AI piece of art, not because it doesn't have some facet of being interesting, but because it wasn't made by a human, which kind of just excludes what the point of art is. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah. I think if more people are on that line of thought, there's more progress being made than everyone kind of coping every time a new one comes out. Yeah, I agree with that.

1:09:45Atrioc:I find that to be like, it just turns me off. If you, listening, you want to feel like you have more of a meaty argument for why you don't want AI art to exist, even if it ends up being as good as Monet or whatever the standard ends up being. We Are Art by Brandon Sanderson is a keynote he gave recently. And then a video I really liked was Suno AI Music and the Bad Future by Adam Neely. Very long video about AI music, whereas Brandon Sanderson's is more about AI art broadly. But I think both of them talk a lot about how I think with generative art and music, there's much more of a sense of it like harming the actual creative process rather than being a tool to assist your creative process.

1:10:24Atrioc:Like it's fundamentally ruining what you are doing as a creative person, which I think is different from a lot of other fields where like, if it speeds up doctors discovering the medicine, I think that feels different than the argument around AI and creativity where there isn't an answer. And the point is for you to express yourself and that is being lost. So I think there's great arguments enjoy the process in those situations. Well, I wouldn't say that. I mean, well, making music, let me rephrase that yes and no making shit is hard as you know and i think it's you know everybody who's made stuff realizes like oh a lot of this is brutal and frustrating and hard and difficult um and that's that's why i think it's so appealing to have a tool like this that could be like i'm struggling with the baseline of my music i'm just gonna have it write all that and the lyrics and whatever or i'm gonna have it write the outline of my book or or do the the background imagery for my game or whatever it is so i think it's i think the temptation to lose those like those pieces of frustration is what is where it's really, it's a tough one.

1:11:21It's a balancing act. For example, the one you just said about background in game where it like it, you do a pattern and it just fills in all the rest. So you can say, yeah, no, it's like, it's tough. Cause that, that could help an indie game studio, have a game look at a higher quality than it was able to do before. I could, it could,

1:11:38Atrioc:yeah, there's things you could do, but it, you know, the example I just felt was the, there was a new story about the number one song on iTunes being from an AI generated artist. and I listened to it and I hated it. I hated it. I just hated it. I thought it was really, really bad and it made me upset. And, but I liked that AI Drake song. So it's not like it's about the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it just made me realize that like, there's nothing stopping. You know, I think what I hated more than that was that they made a ton of money off it. I was like, I didn't care when it wasn't someone making money.

1:12:05When I was like, this guy's, there's no human artists lower on this list. I think it made me, it made me more viscerally upset.

1:12:11Aiden:Do you think AI Drake wins the beef? I could do much worse.

1:12:18Atrioc:You did a follow-up AI Drake versus AI Kendrick Beef. You see... They could keep the beef going forever if they just keep generating AI songs. Because AI Drake isn't a pedophile.

1:12:30Aiden:That's true. That goes a long way.

1:12:32Atrioc:That's what your prompt is. Okay. You have another story? Yeah. The trial of the century. Oh, yeah. Update. Elon lost. Many are calling it the trial of the century. especially us because it's mostly us on this show actually. I don't think anybody's called trial of the century. A lot of notable media per line. They can stand. Okay. So we talked about it two weeks ago. We did. We did get a result. Elon lost. So I think you step back. The fundamental question was not just like which one of these guys has bigger dicks. It was more of like, okay, there's three real questions. Was there a breach of charitable trust?

1:13:12Atrioc:Like, did OpenAI violate agreement to use Elon Musk donations for charitable purposes? And did he like co-opt, did they co-opt that into their own profitable, you know, enriching themselves? And that's really the crux of it, is what they were trying to argue. OpenAI's counter-arguments. The biggest one, which I didn't even realize until I was looking into it this last week, is about statute of limitations. So if someone harms you, you have a limited amount of time to sue them. And after that point, you cannot sue them anymore. That's what the statute of limitations is. So in the case of something like this, it's three years.

1:13:46Atrioc:And Elon Musk filed this lawsuit claiming that OpenAI took all his money and did all this perverse stuff to enrich themselves in August 5th, 2024. So the only way that his claim is legally valid is if he's saying, I was harmed at or after August 5th, 2021. He had three years. and open a eyes main point is like like what ended up being the main argument is we think you were harmed well before that we did arm it but it was a long time tech crunch has some really good outlines of there's there's a bunch of different points that they argued and that musk argued but that is absolutely the crux of it so the jury unanimously decided this is what two days ago that elon's suit fails because he filed it too late all of this all this shit happened in like 2018 and 20 and even judge yvonne gonzalez rogers who we complimented said quote there was a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's findings which is why i was prepared to dismiss this on the spot which is crazy but if you look at it elon knew about the for-profit changes uh in 2019 they announced like the shift to cap for a profit by then and like we talked about there's all these internal emails of him saying we should swap to for profit and i should be in control of it and so the idea that like he just now realized that he's been harmed right as he's about the public right as he's about public ipo right as about open ai is about the public i after open ai has ballooned to one of the most you know valuable companies in the world and so he tweeted his response to this here it is perry if you pull it up regarding the open ai case the judge and jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case just on a calendar technicality there's no question to anyone following the case in detail that altman and brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity the only question is when they did it and then he says he's going to appeal to the ninth circuit and uh it looks extremely unlikable or uh unlikely that he'll be able to appeal this i mean it's so clear that he waited and you can argue whether or not that lets opening off the hook but like in terms of the legal process, like it's way past, it is way past statute.

1:16:02Atrioc:Yeah. It's like a weird, it's a weird conclusion to this. It is a weird conclusion. Like not, it's not that satisfying. You're like, well, you waited too long. It's funny because they both, I mean, you know, on some level, Elon got a dub in that he was able to smear Sam Altman and Greg publicly, which he kind of, you know, like, but they both come off looking, not so great. I mean, it was not a win for either side, really, other than OpenAI doesn't have to go and like open source their thing and ruin their IPO. Yeah. But yeah, there's like their argument. So Elon's was he, he said that his skepticism of the co-founders grew over time until fall of 2022, when he finally decided that they had betrayed him.

1:16:49And it's an insane thing to say when they went for profit, like years prior, and he's already

1:16:54Atrioc:has many tweets showing that he was aware of it and then he finally decided that he they did in fact betray him when he when he learned about microsoft's plans for a 10 billion dollar investment in 2023 which again microsoft had invested a billion seven five years before that uh and then open ai's attorneys are like you saw the term sheet for the fundraising round in 2028 which quote musk received and his advisors reviewed but musk said he didn't read it in detail so it's like dude you had everything here and then you just waited yeah sometimes you read a read a headline

1:17:28Aiden:you make a joke about it sometimes you don't read the the information that's because you're busy bro maybe you're just fucking busy bro you got shit to do other than sue what a weird what a weird trial it's so funny because it's yeah it just feels so like we did that episode about it and it was like wow what's gonna happen i wonder how it's gonna turn out and this is the most

1:17:51Atrioc:oh yeah it's like by far the least interesting part of it is that this happened like nine years ago that's not what he's funny is that you know my reading the jury deliberated for like no time at all it was like a instant bro they for how much for how much money they both spent on lawyers yes for for like this to be obvious but how much spectacle for them to they fucking took greg brockman's private diary public yet to sit up there and read passages from his diary the entire The entire premise of the thing was so bad that the judge almost threw it out initially and was like, whatever, we'll let it go to trial when everybody knew like, dude, you waited way too long for this.

1:18:31Atrioc:They're reading their private text messages. That was so funny. It seems like you know what? Yeah, maybe he just did this to fuck with open AI. I imagine some lawyer was like, dude, this this was in twenty eighteen. This is not going to work. Yeah, and then he's just one of his many, many, The highly paid one has brought that up at least once. Yeah. But he didn't read it in detail. No, he didn't read it in detail. Slip by. Interesting. Okay. We just had a, you know, we should just tell the audience here. We had a brainstorm recently. We got a big whiteboard. We filled it up with ideas. And one of the things we really wanted to do on the show is add some segments.

1:19:03And so if you have ideas for segments that we can do, send them in. But one of the ones we had is Aiden's friend of the week. Aiden knows a guy. Yeah, Aiden knows a guy.

1:19:15Atrioc:Of his vast and unknowable network that extends to every world leader, by the way. You have a network on every continent and every city on this globe. We want to know an update from one of them. We need to pick one of your friends and we want to hear about their private life. Who are they dating? Did they graduate from school? Do they like their major?

1:19:33Aiden:They graduated. I think it sounds like they liked their major. Got an applicable career. Did ask.

1:19:39Atrioc:Okay, by the way, so we pitched a segment to each other. Aiden knows a guy. We have no idea who Aiden talked to or what this is about. I can't wait to find out. Surprise every week. Not every week, but whenever we do it. Because I do know a guy.

1:19:50Aiden:And who do I know this week? You may have seen in the news that Cisco laid off 4 ,000 employees. I did see it. I'm not clapping at that. Dude, that's really strange. That's really strange because we were going to do a segment called Stock of the Week that I was doing. Yeah. I had it ready. It's Cisco. Well, Stock of the Week. It's Cisco. I'm not kidding. that's like those two ideas together so you got laid off so he didn't get laid off actually okay uh so he he put in a group chat with our friends it's like uh layoffs are coming tomorrow wondering what's gonna happen like am i on the chopping block uh layoffs come through he makes it uh but i wanted to ask him you know what is that actually like on the inside of one of these giant companies because you often see these headlines about big companies laying off thousands of people.

1:20:44Aiden:You know, I want to know what the vibes are like, how that works internally. Really? Can you guess? Bad, but it turns out, okay, surprisingly.

1:20:53Atrioc:Wait, have either you guys been at a company for layoffs before? I have, but it was a small, you know, it was an 80-person company. No, honestly, no. Not Twitch or Invent in no layoffs. Yeah, never, never. Stans has a great story. there was huge mass layoffs at a company he was at and they lined up to turn into their keyboards and like they're like they had to like return their stuff their badge and gun yeah like their badge and gun and one of the guys this is stuck in my head for over 10 years now one of the guys takes it does like a like a meal and goes like an amazon warrior returning his bow that's so good and that has been stuck in my head ever since i don't know so anyway i'm sure the vibes are fun so less of that in this one admittedly looks like they have 83 ish thousand so this is like five percent of their workforce five percent of the work they're cutting yeah

1:21:42Aiden:and my friend uh he's been working there for just about 10 years and uh i was like you know just how do you like working there he says it's a good you know for his position he uh the pay is really competitive good he has a lot of freedom he doesn't have to go into the office in his position he works pretty regular hours they have a great vacation plan he's and the perks are good okay he's like this is generally i actually really like this job and i do like the company uh and i was like okay 4 000 people though uh you said that in our group chat in advance you knew the amount how does that work and he's like well the company has to uh make it when you lay off people at this scale it they have to like let uh the public know in some capacity ahead of time i think either to deal with like government regulations or to deal with like the number is going to leak out because of the scale of layoffs anyway but they don't know who is going to be laid off specifically but he also said that this happens at cisco one to two times per year this isn't strange uh this is a pretty normal thing for his entire time that he's worked there.

1:22:51Aiden:Uh, and I was like, okay, well, what about the size? Like 4 ,000 people, 5%. And he was like, this is on the higher end, but it's still not abnormal. Basically the company goes through, uh, some sort of restructure every year where they like, uh, are looking at the future, feel like they need to like restructure or reorganize. Oftentimes the company will have like merged or like acquired some sort of smaller company and we need to make changes in order to accommodate that people get let go in that process uh and so so none of this was like shocking to him and he said uh he said like maybe it's just like you know maybe this is crazy but like this is all just normal to me uh and even the like i asked him like even the anxiety of like well what about you losing your job like if you hadn't made it through.

1:23:41Aiden:And he was like, well, kind of like, I do feel nervous. You don't really know until the day comes, but the reality is like for people that get laid off at our company, it's not that bad of a deal. He's like, you get six months of severance, uh, and they have a program internally, uh, where they help like connect you with a new position at a different company or like help you find a new job basically and he said i don't know the specifics of how it works but the internal report is that there's a 75 success rate of that program and also you usually something that was interesting is something that coincides with these layoffs is oftentimes company will have seen record profits for the quarter but they're still laying off thousands of people and cisco did in this case they laid off all these people announced their earnings record profits stock shoots up And I was like, is there any acknowledgement of that juxtaposition in internal messaging?

1:24:38Aiden:Does anyone above you, whether it be a manager, whether it be an executive? And they announced it in the same blog post. They said earnings crossed. That's what Microsoft did.

1:24:47Atrioc:That's what they all do.

1:24:49Aiden:And I think from a third party perspective, right? Those things clearly clash with each other. Like, how could you lay off all these people while your company is having more success than ever? And he was like, he kind of laughed a bit. He was like, okay, well, a lot of the time when you get, like, usually when you get laid off, or if you've been an employee here, you have stock, like a significant amount of stock as an employee. And so everybody that keeps their job is happy because the stock that they hold goes up. And if you get laid off, your stock goes into, the stock that you had as an employee goes into, like, this escalated vest program.

1:25:27Aiden:so anything that you held that hasn't vested has a chance to like speed up and vest still so you get like an extra bump to your pay package on the way out and he's like as a result people who get laid off are like not that upset have a nice cushion yeah and uh it and i think that was his outlook on the whole thing is like there's some bump here in that if you're one of the people remaining there can be like a discomfort in like getting moved around or like reorg to new teams uh but overall like the headline seems really heavy-handed but this is like a really normal thing at their company and the people who are laid off are treated relatively well and i was kind of shocked by his like nonchalant answers to the whole thing yeah keep in mind this is a guy who didn't lose his job at the end of the day.

1:26:22Aiden:Yeah. I think the call would be different had he lost his job. A hundred percent.

1:26:26Atrioc:A hundred percent. And maybe next week's Aiden knows a guy. Talk to one of your recently laid off friends. Yeah.

1:26:31Aiden:Yeah. To balance it out. I think because the thing that we didn't get to and the thing that I think he didn't really reconcile with is like getting laid off in different periods of time has really different consequences, right? Like he's talking about how good the severance or the pay package is, which can be true. Yeah. But the likelihood of you getting repositioned to a new job now versus like 10 years ago feels drastically different. So the story I'm thinking of is I have a friend who got laid off from Meta and was paid remarkably well there and has not been able to find a position in the same pay package despite having a glowing resume.

1:27:06And it's because the market is just a lot harder for stuff like that. There's less demand. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, that is the problem more than the severance. I think these big tech companies all pay pretty good severance. They're not. They're not. Yeah. Yeah.

1:27:17Atrioc:I would love to hear from somebody who can say it in real words and not corporate speak, like why you have to do this. Is it literally just pumping stock price? Because this has happened repeatedly with big tech companies.

1:27:30Aiden:They have a specific answer for this layoff. Basically, Cisco provides a bunch of infrastructure for AI companies like networking. Okay. And because of the amount of traffic that AI companies demand, they are, and the new type of things that they have to like train employees for and the new type of technologies that they want the company to invest into. They're like, it's super profitable to support AI companies right now. Right. We need more people with that technical expertise. We're laying off a bunch of old, like older, not literally older employees. We're laying off employees that don't have that expertise and rehiring people that do.

1:28:13Aiden:And that was one more thing he touched on was like every time there's layoffs, they rehire people. And it's not just to fill the exact same positions. It's like there's usually some internal strategy shift of we need this huge chunk of new people. And we don't really need these people in their positions anymore. And we're like cycling them out. that's that's the argument that they've made publicly and also apparently the internal messaging yeah Aiden knows a guy and that's a knows a guy and that's a knows a guy and next week we'll talk about a Wong Hooning it's just so funny you tie that up because yeah that is I'm not kidding the best performing like not not penny stock but large stock in the past month is Cisco really

1:29:00Atrioc:And that's our stock of the week. Yeah, 33 % up. Easy. Wait, how much of that is from, like, after this layoff announcement? No, well, they announced REC Revere at the same time as they did the layoff, so it wasn't really the layoff. It was more of that. I mean, obviously, all the AI companies are just dumping money into Cisco to build data centers and stuff. So that's why they're making a ton of money.

1:29:16Aiden:Yeah. But it just feels like a terrible time to be laying people off, but, yeah. Can I give you guys a quick thing? Yeah. A follow-up to last week. I need to be shamed because I made a joke about Iceland and why it's not important. Okay. and how they don't have a standing military because they're not important. They're in the Arctic. Nobody cares. That's not true. That's not true. It hasn't been true for a long time. Okay. But ever since World War II in the Soviet Union, they apparently, as they became a more strategic... This should be a segment. Bullshit Nordic fact from Aiden.

1:29:54Atrioc:No, no, no. The segment is Aiden corrects previous Nordic bullshit facts. Nordic boiling facts. This is important. And then every week we'll get some update on fucking a Nordic country or like that area.

1:30:05Aiden:Yeah. I just wanted to correct the record and say that I'm wrong. Okay. They're strategically important now. They've arguably been strategically important since the end of World War II.

1:30:15Atrioc:Wait, nobody ever said they weren't strategically important. Hmm. Did we say that? What are we correcting? Is the fact that they're going on the military? I made a joke about why

1:30:22Aiden:they don't have a standing military last week that is based on an incorrect premise. Is this just some comment you got? And I'm to break the record. Is this one guy? Is this one guy?

1:30:31Atrioc:You're getting one guy. I'm not kidding. I get one guy all the time. I get it.

1:30:35Aiden:This was like tens of people. Okay. Tens. No, no, no.

1:30:39Atrioc:Let me just make sure.

1:30:40Aiden:What's the population of the country? 380 ,000. And it's part of the reason they don't have a standing military. I knew that part. 380 ,000. About as many sheep as about... Those people are probably the entire military. About one sheep to every person in that country. Yep. Did you know in Iceland they walk backwards on Sundays? shut up. Shut up.

1:31:00Atrioc:How many people? Let me know in the comments if that's correct.

1:31:05Aiden:I'm just saying, I'm just saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. We're the only country without a standing military.

1:31:11Atrioc:Employees a highly specialized unarmed staff of roughly 250 people. I'm sorry, man. Is that a standing military to you? Iceland does not maintain its own armed forces. It is an active member of NATO. Wait, so what are we correcting? What? The reason? What? What? Wait, I thought you're saying that they do have a military. They don't have a military. You got corrected in the comments. They're like, they do have a military. Okay, you guys aren't listening.

1:31:36Aiden:You guys aren't listening to me. You guys got so caught up in making fun of me that I have a fact about a Nordic country that you didn't even listen. A fact? You have one fact?

1:31:47Atrioc:Wait, the fact was that they're unimportant. Is that the fact? No. What is the fact? What is the fact about ISIS military?

1:31:55Aiden:Last week, I said, I made a joke. that they don't have a standing military which is the true part yeah because okay they are not like like they are not important they're too far out of the way geographically and i'm here to and i'm here to clear it up because tens of people were clamoring for the correct answer tens of people are in the army first off secondly what is the reason 300 000 listeners and you two coming don't know anything about the iceland and it's better to correct them is it not which so why

1:32:27Atrioc:admit that we're wrong. Do they not have the army? That's the correct. No, they don't have the army. Then we agree

1:32:33Aiden:that it's not because it's not because they're not important.

1:32:43Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Never be scared to correct yourself. We'll see you next week. If you want a full extra bonus hour, we roast a about this.

1:32:55Aiden:If you want more Nordic facts. We have a Patreon. I'm going back to lemonade stand. It's primarily Nordic facts at this point. It's all Nordic facts on the Patreon. But you're going to turn that on the Patreon. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next week. Goodbye. Bye, everybody. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

1:33:23Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.