Why YouTubers are Quitting | Ep. 043 Lemonade Stand 🍋

20:48Aiden:So how does the situations of other people that work on your channels contribute to you making these sorts of decisions? It's been a big part of it this year. It wasn't so much before. But I think with this year, it's not even solely about their jobs. It's about that we, at the beginning of the year, all made a commitment to hit every day. We made this thing. And so they're all in on it. They're like crunching to make videos happen. This is big A, right?

21:18Atrioc:How many people are involved with Big A specifically? I mean, there's two editors and me is like the main team, but there's like people that help with research. There's people that, there's other editors that jump in when we need a crunch. So it's like probably five, six people that are around. But all these people like early on committed to this idea. And sometimes they've had to make sacrifices to do it. And so when it's time for my turn to make a sacrifice, I feel like shit that day and don't want to do it. I feel like I can't be, I can't be the one to break this street. I'm not going to be the one.

21:45Atrioc:We were finding ways to cram in content in Japan. Yeah. When we're theoretically on big, just give people, we would literally be in the trash taste studio doing a podcast, and then we would wrap up and trash taste guys are about to record their own podcast. And you were like, C-Dog, can I borrow your computer to record a clip? And you, while we are all hanging out with the trash taste guys, catching up, we're having fun. 10 feet away in the corner, Brandon is recording clips. It was funny because you were,

22:14Aiden:you were reading through the research material before making the clip in the corner of the room just silently scrolling right after like two hours of work and we went out drinking

22:28Atrioc:until like 2 a.m and then you're you're wasted and you're like connor can i go to your can i go to your apartment tomorrow at six and record clips and he was like well i'm leaving for a flight you'd have to come at 6 a.m and you were like that's fine so you're like dude i showed up so my not homo just felt like absolute shit he let me in the door he's like all right i'm leaving go record and i was like all right and then i fell on his couch and fell asleep for three hours and then woke up and recorded uh yeah yeah but that's because you know same thing because i know that adish is the big example but like i know that he has stayed up fucking late sometimes to make sure we hit the midnight deadline and he's done work on it and so it's like you got a break before me like i'm not gonna be the one that stops the streak at the end we're getting near the end here it's getting very annoying like i'm you know i'm running out of stuff that i want to say this year i want to break and you're a podcaster you got takes come on but i use them on this show too we've talked about this like a big problem for me is like i think you mentioned it where you said you know when you have downtime like i better read something so i have that is what my life feels like right now where i feel like i'm constantly trying to consume things so I have things to talk about yes and that's fine and that's it I like to I did this because I like to do that anyway but it it is hitting because of the podcast plus big a yeah there's only so many damn things that I'm gonna have a strong opinion on that I want to talk about and I'm hitting the limit and it's like like the engine stalling out right there near the end of the year and I just want to take a fucking break and read a book for fun and read it you know what I'm saying

23:59Aiden:I think you summarized it really well in your video, which was this idea of because you're the guy, you're making the video, you're in charge of everything. Every free moment could be another moment that you're working to make the thing better because you could put a little more time into it. You could put a little more thought into it. It could be, and so -

24:26Atrioc:There's never a list of things you check and now the thing is creatively perfect. It's only ever an infinite thing you could do better. Yeah, I want to talk about this. Like I think some people, listen, these jobs are, especially with the level of success we hit, are really good and they're awesome. Unbelievably fortunate. It's lucky and fortunate, right? Yeah. But I do think it's worth this discussion because we're in a world where if you polled, especially young people on what their number one job would be it is this job that is right now every polar study is like it's become the it's past astronaut and fireman i'm like whatever and so i think it's worth a candid discussion of what the downs like what are the down what are the the perils and stresses of it i think that's why this is a worthwhile discussion to have even if you are sitting there and you're like my job fucking sucks this is what are you talking about don't complain i i can understand that i've had you know i worked jobs that i you know at the end of it.

25:20I really hated my job at Twitch and I, there's parts of my time at NVIDIA that I was like extremely stressed and didn't like it either. But I, I don't go, oh, now I have this job and it's so easy. There is some parts of this job that fucking suck. And I think it's worth talking about. And I think it's, it's easy to pretend like they don't exist and be like, we're so lucky. And I'm glad that we're having this discussion because there are parts that, um, I'll be totally

25:45Aiden:honest i think like there's a very big difference from being a youtuber to being like a a podcaster like a this is way easier dude this is totally way easier and and making the yard compared to being somebody like doug making that style of youtube video is significantly easier doing the yard itself is very easy it's i want and then it is it is it is incredibly easy speak for yourself so i did a lot of research a lot of prep yeah uh and i i think that's i i think maybe that's the asterisk is like i i don't know if people know what they're asking for when they say they want to chase that but i think that goes a lot of ways right like i had this dream when i was a teenager my goal was to work in esports.

26:36Aiden:I wanted to make video game events. I thought that would be the coolest thing ever. I went to MLG Anaheim 2013. I saw 20 ,000 people packed in a room watching League of Legends and StarCraft. And I was like, dude, holy shit, this is fucking amazing. This is what I want to do. And then every decision in my life was towards the goal of working in esports from there. And then eventually I got there, like very, very early to be honest. And I got into the world of what running esports events was actually like and i was like damn this is not that this shit sucks it sucks so much

27:10Atrioc:everybody who gets into it i've personally had calls with a number of people or like friends were like hey can you talk to my brother like he wants to get into esports can you talk to this friend and i'm like look man just so you know run it sucks once you're in there it is if you are listening to this podcast all four of us have been part of it it sucks balls dude and it's a whole industry that runs on people that love video games so much that they can grind them down. They hate it. That's just an endless turn of people that love competition and love video games. And they just fucking mash them.

27:42Yeah.

27:43Aiden:One feeling that I really resolved from that trip through e-sports, like getting to this point of like, Oh, I have the job I told myself I always wanted. And now I'm not enjoying it anymore. I realized that chasing like aspirations or rose tinted versions of careers is so much less fruitful than making changes in your life that are about like quality of life. You like it's way better. Imagine so many jobs like boil down to like tech or spreadsheets that you're using on a computer. Right. And the end output a lot of the time is very disconnected. like in the case of esports the your love of gaming is very disconnected from the spreadsheet and emails that you're just filling out years and i was like oh i could just be doing this for something else or some other type of company work less hours and then game at home exactly exactly that that allows me to improve other parts of my life outside of work i should start making decisions based on that and i feel like that was like a life-changing revelation that that helped me move in like a better direction.

28:49Atrioc:I disagree. I've, my mental health has been not prioritized in any way, shape or form the last seven or eight years. Yeah. I wouldn't train this for anything. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I think the experience is worth it. Uh, first off, I only got to the position where now I can, in theory, you know, again, retire for people who don't know, I'm still going to make videos on a second channel. I'm going to stream when I feel like it, it's just going to be much, much looser. But like, even if I had to fully quit now, like I would do it again. I'm so, I want to have accomplished things and contributed to industries and creative projects that I'm passionate about.

29:20Atrioc:And that to me is worth it. It just, it's just, it can't be forever. And I think that's maybe what the average person doesn't realize. It feels like almost every YouTuber is burning the rope at both ends. And you are like rapidly moving towards this ability to just not emotionally be able to do it anymore. But I'm the, maybe because I'm a workaholic of the mindset of like, I would fucking do it again. I, you know, I liked working in e-sports. It was miserable and so hard and not good for me in many ways and i'm really proud to have done those things and gotten through it and yeah have the experience to look back and know i did it and i learned what i did and don't like i don't know i i would rather try than be safe i agree with that part i i don't

30:02Aiden:think i regret the experiences i think it's important to still chase those things and like

30:08Atrioc:learn from them okay this ties to a question then that i wanted to ask both you guys because one of the things I'm excited about with AI is that I think it's going to offer many, many more people the ability to be entrepreneurs, start a business, do whatever, because I think AI tools are going to pull away at many of the friction of starting a business or whatnot. And we can get into that later with our later conversation. But not only because of that, also because of everything else we've talked about with the economy changing, it feels like everything is moving towards gig work and people being their own business owner.

30:39Atrioc:And while that's really cool in a lot of ways, I am concerned increasingly that that's going to put every person on earth into this position where you just need to work endlessly because you don't have an employer you don't have some degree of safety you don't have a consistent thing you can show up you are trying to grind and make your way and establish something all day every day forever and I really would not wish that on all of the populace. I think I enjoy that for periods of time, but I'm concerned about the average person who's forced into gig work or forced into self-employment needing to be in this grind without a decision.

31:19Aiden:I think that I feel like it's kind of a false offering because it gives you so much autonomy to do the work, ignoring all of the other downsides of it. You feel a sense of guilt for your own failure or like economic position that I do not think is fair to the circumstances of that job or why you were forced to take that job. And that's, it's kind of this false, this false promise because you're not really a business owner. You're not, you don't have any of the upside. You have none of the upside except maybe kind of the scheduling part of what it would mean to own a business, right? So the reward is not there.

32:04Aiden:Yeah, the trade-off of actually owning the business is sure, you deal with all the things that you're talking about, which I do think is true. I think the cost of like leadership, if you're doing it correctly, is that you do have to always be on and you're responsible for other people and you owe an amount of time and effort that if you were in a more standard position, you wouldn't have to put in. but you don't even get the, and then you get the ownership of the thing and presumably the financial reward and the flexibility in being your own boss that comes out of that, right? But as soon as you're a gig worker, you actually have none of the upside, the actual upside and the reason to put that time in, but you only serve to be like exploited with the false promise of what it means to be your own business.

32:53Aiden:You know, it sounds like you just read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Aiden.

32:58Atrioc:Yeah, I agree. The proletariat really should have the means of production. Oh, this little thing?

33:04Aiden:If you want to check out the book club episode,

33:06Atrioc:we just ran this. Yes. We are hours off of Aiden finishing the Communist Manifesto, by the way. Adrian, what do you think? Yeah, people... I've actually said this on stream, which is that when people complain about YouTube or consecration, it is because, like you said, they can't turn their brain off. You can't check out at the end of the day. There's always something you could be doing. And that is essentially what every entrepreneurial job is. And in fact, I think I've said this. I think consecration is probably the easiest version of that because you have a very defined set of rules that the platform handles for you.

33:42I have to just do this thing. But it still fills up all your time and your mental thought. But if you're running a business, you might have to do

33:51permits from the city, your HR and payroll, all this extra stuff that's much more annoying, that's like more managed with YouTube. But so I do think making everyone into having to deal with that as their regular course of doing business is a, it's almost dystopian. I mean, it's crazy. It's not, that's not a normal outcome. I don't think the average person wants it.

34:11Atrioc:They don't want it. They would like to find, even my own employees, dude. I learned this from working with people. There's some people that would really like like a high percentage based pay and they want to just grind. They want to hustle and put a ton. Some people would like a structure. They want stability. They want a set amount. They want time and effort and hours that are set to what they want to give to this. And they want to not think about it outside of that. That's just some people's preferences. And so the major takeaway is if you're someone who's like, oh, man, I'm watching Kai Sinat or something.

34:44That's something I want to do. And you're not a person that would like to do that stuff outside. You're not going to enjoy it. You're going to hate the job. It's not going to be fun for you. that is the i think the takeaway you can take you know even it was funny we were at your house warming i don't want to i'm not even gonna say the name someone who works for one of those type streamers one of those big uh irl young live streaming bill and from the outside it looks like that person is uh you know winging it like i have a fun there's a camera on but that the the person on their team was like yeah after you know nine hours of live streaming then we have like a two-hour review call and we're like planning that like and that person's leading the call like that and this is a young person like this person's grinding they're grinding to get that level you're saying

35:29Atrioc:there's like an IRL streamer for nine hours very very famous afterwards okay yes

35:33Aiden:I mentioned this yeah I did yeah

35:36Atrioc:on mixed signal yeah yeah yeah she

35:39Aiden:left my house at 9 p.m. for the meeting yeah it's like on a Saturday what's the Friday it was a Friday night she left she left at 9 p.m. after working all day to go do another meeting because that's just when it has to happen. Yeah, because they just finished a stream. That's crazy. And then, oh man, I would say something because I, what were you talking about? Don't cut this out. No, I had something so perfect. Leave this in the podcast. Oh, and this is the brain rot that comes from streaming.

36:06Atrioc:Talk. It's been five seconds of nothing. This is awkward. The audience is leaving. It's two out of ten. Yeah, two out of ten. Three out of ten. Four out of ten.

36:16Aiden:I think I wanted to move on to after a year of doing this show, if you guys have any big shifts in what you think or believe about the world, because this is, I think, just the speed at which I formed opinions this year and changed opinions was probably the fastest because there was an intentionality to reading and consuming stuff all the time. So we had stuff to talk about on this show and a little bit outside of it. So I wanted you guys to speak to that.

36:47Atrioc:I went from not like disagreeing with Nick Fuentes to disagreeing with him like about hating women. Because you think he doesn't go far enough you're always like yeah but that's the old you think he's a rhino yeah

37:03Aiden:calling Nick Fuentes a rhino is so funny

37:06Atrioc:I more the joke was that I didn't know what Nick Fuentes thought and now that I've looked at what he thinks I strongly disagree with it but yeah that too what about you that's it that's the only change that's really no no i got i got a bunch but i don't want to i don't want to you know ted talk this what's yours oh what are some of yours we can go around the torn hmm there was one that i talked to you about uh after we recorded one day recently and it's about the idea i don't want to do a huge ai thanks you have plenty ai things to say too yeah i'm sure but i you know there's one belief that strengthened one that weakened at the beginning of the year i would have told you that i think ai is like a financial bubble and it's going to pop whatever that view over the year has strengthened however on the flip side i have become like just middling to 100 concrete that it is going to change the world very very profoundly and that it is an extremely extremely impactful like i mentioned this to you in the way there's people in my community who when i talk about ai being a financial bubble are like yeah and then it's going to blow up and then it's going to be gone and i just i have to be so so direct that that's not going to happen like it is once you see even one thing and i've seen a couple now that it can do fantastically that it's just a hundred x improvement over previous things once you see that once you realize it's like oh this is this is like when i first saw the internet this is like a big thing this is going to give an example yeah what are the ones that like stuck the big example that i've talked about recently is that i i used to sit next to the finance department at twitch and i would play melee with these guys every day we would talk and They would complain about their job and things they're working on.

38:43And I saw an example of a finance professional using AI to take a massive amount of data, financial data, and, uh, and, and organize it for new regulations that were coming out. So like, it would ask him the right questions and things you need to change. And I have seen someone do that for like when GDPR, which is a financial thing from Europe rolled out and everyone had to do it. I talk with them every day as they're working on it. This is such a painful process for them. that takes weeks and complaining. And it has a lot of human error too, honestly. They mess up on it. And I saw this thing step-by-step go through it and the financial professional checking it.

39:19It was crazy. I mean, that is such a 100, you know, maybe a thousand X leap over how simple it was. That would have taken a team of people a long time. This is like, you know, that's like if you were someone who's a coal miner and saw the first steam engine. Like it's a big deal.

39:34Atrioc:That is a big deal. Or somebody delivering letters physically via horse and then the internet appears or Morse code or something. And I, I, there's many things I hate about it, which is like what I think it's doing to education. I think it's amazing for education, but it's being used horribly. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of complex thoughts on it. But I, once I see a few, and I see more of these examples as time goes on and it's like, nobody who's done it that way is going to go back. They're just not gonna, they'll, they'll refine this system. They'll add extra people to check it if there has problems, but they're not going to go back to the old way.

40:08It just will not happen. And I probably wouldn't have said this at the end of last year. And now I will 100 % say it, that there's just, yeah, that's a big thing I've changed.

40:20Atrioc:And you like crypto now too, right?

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42:18Atrioc:It feels good to have support. It feels good to Geico.

42:22Aiden:Well, what's, okay, one thing, maybe one thing that you changed on, and it can't, but what's one thing that you feel like you have enhanced conviction for? And it can't be crypto. Well, that was the first part of that was that I am, I feel very strong.

42:38Atrioc:Well, another thing you changed on is you are very critical of Lena Kahn now. Well, we pressed her in that interview. According to the New York Times. We pressed her. According to the New York Times, major change from Adriac. Per Adriac, even. Yeah, Gavin, did you see Gavin Newsom year in review podcast and he was like here's all the people we debated this year first of all i don't think we debated and he's like a lot of them were controversial we had uh charlie kirk we had steve bannon we had a tree that was his big three he interviewed like fucking 50 people this year oh my god that was so awesome that was uh that was wild but uh when i've solidified on i don't know most things honestly i feel like i've solidified on that's that's the hard part The hard part is the things that you change.

43:27All right, is there anything about you? What's something you changed or solidified on?

43:33Aiden:Change is, I think I came to terms with this idea of broader trends or forces dictating long-term outcomes in ways that the solutions that we talk about don't actually change. I think the main time this came up was when we were talking about how national debts affect countries and using Greece as this example, this historical example. and this idea of how different policies and political ideologies had occupied the greek establishment throughout that time period in the 1900s and how while short-term outcomes for people did change based on those policies like quality of life might have improved for uh for people based on like a social welfare policy that got introduced or something like that right at the end of the day nobody addressed the undercurrent of how the government was funding itself.

44:33Aiden:And they spiraled into a scenario where eventually they had to come to terms with that. And I think that my brain has just been opened up to the idea that a lot of solutions feel so simple, especially when you're younger. And when I was younger of like, why don't we just do this? Why can't we just do this? this thing will fix this thing and it doesn't work that way a lot of the time like there is some undercurrent of more complex issues that are very difficult to address that you need to deconstruct somehow and that needs to be addressed as well and taking that framework to a bunch of different things that we look at in society i feel like that was like an eye-opening moment for me in the earlier part of the year.

45:23So you did trim for the first time.

45:27Aiden:And to some people, I feel like I'm saying something that's super obvious, right? Like, of course, that's the case. But I think you want, I think an optimistic view and maybe a naive one is looking at things in very simple terms and being like, why don't we just pass this little policy and it'll fix this issue? But there's, I think, wrapping my head around issues this year and realizing like how many stakeholders and decision makers and and and and how like one positive outcome for somebody else like so easily affects somebody else in a negative way the the idea that the people in power can just make really simple decisions and make everything better is not really true i can't like crank the dial on their desk yeah inflation yeah and and i think a lot of people do feel that way and i i used to

46:17Atrioc:feel that way too do you have you ever had the experience where because like there's so many companies that are run so fucking bad like video game companies like ea is awful right yeah and then you go work at ea in my case and you're like oh it's a miracle that anything functions at all or you know you go work most things right most human groups it's like held together by fucking duct tape and string and like i think it's a young i think uh idealistic view of like Why don't they just do the things that'll fix the problems? And then when you work in enough companies, you're like, oh, this is barely.

46:50Yeah, everyone is like a plane being rebuilt in good light. Yeah. I have this example. People have mentioned this a bit. I use an example. When I first started at Twitch, you know, I'm a young guy. I'm like 21. I'm like, this is fucking awesome. This is the website I watch every day. This is going to change the world. And I get there, and my first job is handling the front page of Twitch, what streams are showing. And they're like, yeah, so this whole thing is run out of a Google calendar. They hooked up the fucking code to the back end of Google Calendar. And then you open it up and it's a Google Calendar with 100 ,000 entries covering every square inch of space.

47:20And you have to write a Google Calendar entry in a certain syntax that it can pull from the book. So I have to write like Lyric, 4 p.m. to 4.15 p.m., 6.17 priorities, 6.7. I'm brain rotted. Yeah. And that's how it works. It still works like that today from what I heard from people inside. That's crazy. This is like a cut for a billion dollars. the website runs on a fucking google calendar back end uh yeah and then everyone's kind of making things up like so many people that are supposed experts a lot of them just got lucky in something and then they they extrapolate that there's so many other fields like i remember i shouldn't say the name but there was a guy who had done something really big at riot and he really succeeded but largely it's because he hit right at the right time the legends took off and right it was big yeah but i was like this guy's a fucking legend and i uh uh he was starting up a new startup and i almost left nvidia for it and he was selling on a phone call he's like selling me he's like this is and i just like was believing this guy's this guy's got it all figured out he sees the future how everything's gonna go and then i ended up not doing it like a very last second decision and of course it was a disaster but the way he's in his reality distortion field But I've seen that with a lot of people where they just, it's a lot of confidence over, I don't know, that's something I've learned over my life.

48:41I think there is an unfortunate juxtaposition of you have to be confident enough to push ideas forward to make anything incredible or interesting or

48:56Aiden:successful. but if you're cognizant of this idea that you just don't know everything and you can't be wrong and there's always more information and there's always more consequences, it like - You freeze. You freeze. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I feel more frozen this year than I ever have before. I'm very aware. I feel like I'm very aware of the fact that I'm just fucking wrong about a bunch of shit. Right. I am. And I'm going to be changing and updating the way I feel about things for the rest of my life because I want to try to understand things better. You know what you can do is you can just check the comments.

49:32They're always right. Yeah, that is true. If you're like, I don't know when I think about something, they'll tell you. You synthesize all the comments, that's the truth. You gotta read them all.

49:41Aiden:Me copy pasting all of our comments into an AI chatbot. Turn this into a guy. It kills itself. The AI truly is dead. No, no, no. That's what the big A comments would do. The big A comments are not bad, bro. They just, one person called you fucking bald or something. Hate that guy. Hate that guy. You can't get over it, dude. And fearing that that sense of being frozen is going to impede me from making some sort of progress in my life. Yeah. No, that makes sense. You're always talking about how you need fat stacks. Why don't you grift? Just start grifting, dude. Just grift confidently. It's so, it would be so awesome.

50:17Aiden:It'd be so awesome to grift. It'd be so easy. What about you, Doug? What do you change your mind on this year?

50:24Atrioc:I got a couple things, but it's interesting transition point that you said, which is the feeling of feeling less confident. I super feel that like I feel less qualified to say anything on this show, which I think we've talked about over time. It's like so I've thought about my my own political opinion transition. And I forget if I've mentioned this to you guys off the pod, but I would say that 2024 kind of radicalized me a little bit, not necessarily to the right, but against Democrats specifically. And I did go into the beginning of this year, really, really disliking Democrats, which is, I think the source of some of those critical comments,

51:00Aiden:everybody,

51:02Atrioc:by the polling, everybody. Yeah.

51:05Aiden:It wasn't, yeah, that's not a completely out there thing to happen.

51:07Atrioc:So here's, here's the difference. It's me being Democrats are fucking terrible and maybe the Republicans will do better. Like those, those standard is so low. So I, again, and I don't vote for Trump, but I, the, the, The context for this is that I have for a decade now been following closely leaders in tech. I have been looking at their interviews and their thinking. I was listening in 2016 and 17 to Tim Ferriss, who interviewed Mark Andreessen and all these different tech folks, CEO of Dropbox, CEO of Instagram, Ben Horowitz, read Ben Horowitz, read Peter Thiel, zero to one, read all these things about how to make a business and how to think about technology and entrepreneurship, which I think are all incredibly inspiring.

51:48Atrioc:Mark Andreessen is a wild, weird dude, but is really fascinating the way he thinks about the world. So for whatever it is, eight years was following this. And then I started listening to the All In podcast like three years ago, which my friend recommended to me. And that is what really kicked off my interest in business and technology. Because those guys, four VCs who are like ultra rich, but they're talking about these things with a level of knowledge of business that you just didn't hear anywhere else. And they just kind of didn't give a fuck either. They were like, we're so hot and rich. We're going to say what we feel like.

52:21Atrioc:And for the first several years of that show, I don't know. David Sachs is your guy. That's your poster over the bed. Look, smoking hot. I don't know. It's hot and rich. If the word rich is big enough, the word hot feeds in. Okay. It's trickled down economics. That's what it's all about. And so I started to listen to those guys constantly. And roughly, it was mostly focused on business and tech. And I found it phenomenally interesting. And that really spurred my interest in following this and wanting to understand AI and understand what's going on with the business world. And they occasionally touched on politics.

53:01Atrioc:And of that group, there was distinctly somebody who's on the left, Jafson Calacanis, somebody who's distinctly on the right, David Sachs. And then two guys who are distinctly moderate, which is Trichmoth, Polly Hopatia, and David Freeberg. And then 2024 happened. all these people in tech, all of them shifted way to the right. And I'm sure all of you see this. Sam Altman says openly he's going to donate a million dollars to Trump. Like a year or two prior, these same companies are talking, are all democratic and talking about how they think Trump's an absolute disaster and they would never vote for him.

53:32Atrioc:Right. It was like, lock him up. Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen do a podcast saying how the Kamala Harris administration is going to be so unbelievably hostile to AI that they have to, at a moral obligation to humanity, endorse Donald Trump because it is so clear how disastrous their policies are. And to be clear, I actually agree with the sentiment that supposedly Kamala's team that they talked to in person was bad. It sounded like they wanted to use AI to crack down on free speech and stuff. So taking that out of its word, pretty scary. Every tech person starts shifting sharply to the right over 2024.

54:11Atrioc:The All In podcast, my weekly source of like news and information about how to think of the world basically became a political show. By the mid of 2024, they were running fundraisers for Donald Trump. And once the election happened, they are visiting the white house regularly, doing interviews from the white house regularly. And David Sachs is now a key member of the Trump administration who is personally dictating AI policy. And so for me, I wouldn't say my heroes, but the people who largely influenced how I thought about the world and developed my business sense and my acumen and my worldview, and specifically how I went to for news and tech updates, all started telling me every day on Twitter, on podcasts all over the place, Biden is going to destroy the economy, destroy technology, ruin the future that we have in mind, and Trump is the only hope.

54:59Atrioc:And while I like to believe that that did not influence me, I definitely went into this year being like, I'm, I don't want to say glad Trump won, but like if these guys are right, this could be good. And that way. And that was sincerely where I was at the beginning of this year. And then it's been quite interesting to see as I've learned all of this stuff and just seen the Trump administration be a complete fucking disaster. And then most of those, and most of those same tech people are no longer vocally supporting Trump, right? They're kind of like, they all just kind of are now, you know, Elon Musk, right.

55:32Atrioc:Who's endlessly talking about how it's like humanity is at stake is fucking hates Trump now and calls him a pedophile publicly. Right. And it's like, it was very interesting to come into this year at the beginning of this year thinking like, I kind of understand how incredibly destructive the democratic policies are. And while I would still consider myself a left-leaning person, I'm not afraid to voice some of those criticism on this show. And then I, I did kind of, and people got upset kind of in, you know, a myriad of ways, but less about comments and more just as we've, for the first time in my life, I learned things that aren't Twitter and a podcast and we actually dove into stuff every week.

56:12Atrioc:And I spent five hours every week, really understanding the fundamentals. I think my view has shifted substantially away from this is what tech people are telling me to think, or this is what the politicians are telling me to think to just, I feel like I, I'm still uninformed. Like you said, I still don't know stuff. I have less confidence than ever to say things, even though it's ironic because I do know a lot more. But now I feel like I'm kind of in my own individual source of knowledge and I can view things with a degree of, I don't know, actual knowledge and not just being fear-mongered by a bunch of people online.

56:43Have you seen that graph? It's like the, is it Dunning-Kruger? What's the graph?

56:46Atrioc:Yeah, the Dunning-Kruger. Yeah, it's like when you have no knowledge, you feel super confident, but the more you learn, the less confident you get because it's like, it's so complicated. Dude, it's worrying to me how confident I came into this year that actually end of the sentence it is worrying to me because in retrospect you know why i was so confident it's because i listened to all in every week and i read a lot of twitter confident yeah they were so confident that's that's what led me to believe i was actually qualified to talk about politics on this show as much as i joked about and like genuinely with with 100 sincerity i now believe i am not qualified i believe that these things are so deep and complex and i still love trying to understand things but i i don't listen to that podcast anymore i don't go on twitter almost at all i read lots of articles and try to deeply understand the systems behind these things and then make conclusions and that has i just feel much more like thoughtful and uh it was very interesting to see every hero do this weird right you know massive right pivot for me internally to be like i'm not voting for trump i'm not on board with you guys but but me the truth's probably somewhere in the middle and then to feel like everybody's a fucking idiot is kind of where I'm at now.

57:58Dude, I had, I mean, not probably the same way, but definitely with some finance professionals I read who were like telling me openly that, that Trump was going to be the guy that he was going to fix the national debt that he was like, I would read these things or listen to their podcast and I'd be like, I really respect this guy who was talking to him. He said some smart things in the past. And so I'm going to keep my mind open. I don't think I was as,

58:19Atrioc:but yeah i should say that's my trump got elected and i was like i'm gonna keep my mind open because while i disagree with so many things about it on the economy specifically on on the the handling of technology and on the debt those are the two things that in theory everybody was saying this is why we just saved the nation and those two things have utterly disaster like completely disastrous right and so the the part of me i was not elated in any way that trump won but I was like, well, I've been told by dozens of people I respect for a year that there's these incredible outcomes that are going to happen.

58:54Atrioc:Those didn't fucking happen. Like not at all. Yeah, people lie. I mean, they just lie all the... I mean, I don't even know if they're lying. They're like...

59:07Aiden:No, that's something I think about a lot, is whether or not... You know, people are so quick to saying like, he lied, or they're lying to you. But I think a lot of the time, certain people have absolute conviction for what they're saying. And lying, at least to me, lying means you're intentionally... You know that it's... You knowingly are not telling the truth. It's like a lie by exaggeration lie by confidence. It's a lie. It's a lie of like, you don't know. And you know, you don't know, but you're projecting a sense of confidence that make everyone else feel like, you know.

59:42Atrioc:It's a little weird. I mean, I really like I'm really not going to trust like random. I don't know. I have so much. I have so much more more of a sense of like, I am not going to form a strong opinion unless I've really taken time. and otherwise, you know, I'm going to talk about this with my friends. I don't know if you guys feel the same, but.

59:59Aiden:Absolutely. I think this is the every, this is an experience that a bunch of people go through and are going through. I think that to me is kind of the intention of the show. It's like, we're three guys who don't know everything. The fun of the show is us figuring stuff out and learning about things that we think are interesting and then talking to each other about them. and we're not you know we're not experts and that's that's most people's experience as they navigate these things and they navigate life but are you like me where you went into the year being like i do kind of know some stuff i'm kind of smart i i i had i had like 50 confidence and now it's at like five i think i think i feel less that way i think i maybe if i were to use your percentage analogy i felt maybe like i felt like i had like 25 and now i'm down to like 15 or 10 damn really yeah i i do feel like we gotta build up your confidence we need to build up your

1:00:59Atrioc:confidence no no no no no i think it's the yard they've been chipping you down we can get let's start next year at 100 let's start you at 100 next year your kindness raid yeah don't even joke

1:01:08Aiden:don't even you say don't make a sick joke like that like you mean it because we're not gonna do that you know.

1:01:17We both call in sick that morning. It's Aiden by himself. First show of the year. We don't even show up. What else have we changed our minds? I'm sure there's a lot, but I'm struggling to think of like a broad, big point. Okay, I'll throw a couple out there.

1:01:32Atrioc:We don't need to hear my thoughts on it. I'm curious if you guys have changed at all. One, again, this is, you know, I would say that I felt quite knowledgeable about tech going into this year, and I now feel more knowledgeable, but about other fields. but some some of the other fields i feel like i've learned one i now strongly feel that we should raise tax rates a lot it's it's not just reading price of peace or or talking to lena con or whatever it's a lot of things that just over and over feel like they reinforce that the importance in unironically the fucking communist manifesto here a little bit um dude who knew it's got some stuff in there i i wouldn't go that for it's not good what no i think i think

1:02:09Aiden:look I don't I'm not I don't agree with this but there was like a there was a couple things in here was like I guess that makes sense like and then there was a couple things is like I feel like you're trying to you all save it for the book club but this guy's built it feels like there's a bit of a mental framework that they're like the whole world needs to fit into this framework and at anyway we'll save for the book club

1:02:32Atrioc:I don't listen okay I think you guys were already on board for higher taxes I think I started the year being like I see the argument for that, but all the people in my life, all the tech people are saying it's bad, you're saying you shouldn't tax, and now I'm solidly in like, I think we need higher taxes. Curious if that changed for you guys. I'm way more upset at boomers. I think boomers are like a wildly... You have radicalized on boomers. I've radicalized on boomers a lot. I saw you, and there's an old guy in the parking lot, and you were kind of like... You had made him flinch, bro. Well, I made him flinch, and I was like, wait, wait, how old are you?

1:03:01Atrioc:And he's like, I'm only 57. I'm like, okay, you just made the cut off. You're clean. Gen X. Old Gen X. Be careful. I think I tried to go in with an open mind on the Republican administration. I think they've been a complete fucking failure. And then there's a bunch on AI that, you know, there's been more bad and more good, but that's a bigger one. Did anything? Oh, monopolies and acquisitions too. Same thing. I feel like we would really benefit from a fuck load more regulation against all the acquisitions and monopolies. I've gotten increasingly concerned about that. I'm curious. I think both of you and most of our audience already felt in that camp, but I think I now I'm in your camp not because I was reading a bunch of Twitter or watched a stream or a video essay about it.

1:03:40Atrioc:It's because of books and dozens of hours of research where I'm like, yeah, this is genuinely what I think is valuable. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it's almost like the opposite. Those are things that I have those are like core to me that I said for a while, but like the things I've picked up from this show and honestly from you are more of being you know, not every idea that you've brought from that world that you were in is we should discard. There's some interesting things from that that I have. I started reading more of the free press. I started reading... But like... Who's the fucking guy?

1:04:18I need more information. Who's the guy? Ben Horowitz. I'm sorry, Ben Horowitz. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. How did I not pick up on the clues there? Those are the... I snapped at you. You didn't say it. So I don't know. I think I've picked up that. I get the more pro AI stance of just its possibilities. Those are the things I picked up that I didn't have going into the year. You mentioned price of peace. Price of peace is a big thing for me as part of the show. That one opened me up to ideas on government spending that I was like really militant against that I see the benefit of. I, but I still like a fucking.

1:04:57Aiden:It's so, it's so funny that that might be, that might be my number one recommendation out of the year that book yeah is that one i thought

1:05:04Atrioc:it was beast yeah i thought it was really impressive yeah i think that's it's for for

1:05:10Aiden:what people to read or like what i could if i could give one action item for people out of the podcast i'm like dude just read this book and i think it'll give you at the very least it'll give

1:05:19Atrioc:you a lot to think about i feel that about abundance i felt way more about abundance yeah

1:05:23Aiden:i mean i like i liked abundance a lot too i've dude i think abundance has become a curse on my

1:05:29Atrioc:life though i i'm having dreams about that we did a live show with ezra klein and derrick thompson they came on stage and everybody started booing like i'm not a joke honestly i'm dreaming about them hating us for our association with ezra klein i can't i can't i i listened to your crash

1:05:46Aiden:out the other day my my abundance crash out is i hate how the public discourse around the book has turned me into a defender of the book because i did like a bunch of it but then i have a bunch of criticisms of the book that I read, of the book that I read. Well, hold on, let's talk about my imagination

1:06:04Atrioc:of what the book is.

1:06:05Aiden:And the problem is I'm fist fighting these ghosts of what people think the book is about. And it's like, if you're talking about the movement or the corporate money behind it or whatever, like the co-opted movement around it. But I'm like, if you read this paragraph in the book, there's nothing controversial about it. It's the halal Mamdani thing where he's like, guys the permit system is fucked up and everybody has to pay for this exploited system what if we fix that so people don't have to pay a giant fee for a permit that should be 50 that's that's what the book's about that's what i and i feel like it i feel dumb because i feel like i'm constantly on the back foot of defending this book and these authors that i'm not even that big of a fan like i'm not a particularly big fan of ezra klein but i'm like defending against this thing that i'm like you the book just didn't say that yeah yeah once you've read the book it's kind of it's kind of tough to pile on when you're like it's not that controversial like the things in the book would be most people if you split them out would be agree with them i think i think the word abundance has become insane though i hate i because people use it in so many fucking ways eon musk is talking about abundance every fucking week and he's like entirely different vision than what ezra klein has than what other people have than what some corporate uh fucking lawyer on the democrat dnc says they just say the word abundance and it's like this paper over of doesn't mean anything.

1:07:23I think this fucking comedy is my best because there's abundance in it at one point.

1:07:27Aiden:I think my new thing, my new thing is anytime I want to talk about like a point from abundance, I'm just going to say it's from Breakneck instead because it's almost the same fucking book. Just say it's from fucking Bernie Sanders. Honestly, go for it. It doesn't, anyway, I've got that crash out 50 times. Yeah, it doesn't matter to me. Support for this show comes from SoFi. Let's face it, College is expensive, and how you pay for it really matters. That's where SoFi comes in. SoFi helps you refinance at rates as low as 4.24 % APR, potentially saving big by lowering your monthly payment. You can even customize variable rates to meet your financial goals, all with no penalties or fees required.

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1:09:48Atrioc:The one takeaway from abundance that really felt different to me, again, coming from two straight years of every tech person I had followed saying how the government is a total fucking disaster. And if Biden and Kamala are able to remain control, then the government is going to have even more of a stranglehold and it's too inefficient and business can't operate and run. And I think there is some truth to that. but the you know and then abundance points out a number of examples which is like we tried to make a wind farm in wisconsin or whatever it is it's been 17 years and nothing's been built here's the train in california we've tried to build it's been what 18 17 years and nothing's been built the regulation and all this stuff like you got a tiny track yeah you can't ride it but you have a tiny bit of track and and that was like the kind of standard like yeah government sucks at doing things but what i think abundance did very well is then or breakneck or breakneck they show the government can do things it's like there's a different problem there right it's funny because

1:10:45Aiden:both books use china as an example of like look china they're building shit look how they build

1:10:50Atrioc:yeah and i think what what shifted for me was i i had been presented the argument in either a very black or white way the government should do more or the government is too inefficient and we too over-regulatory and we should strip it down as much as possible. Get Elon Musk in there and tear it all down. But I think what abundance does well is say, look, we've actually stopped the government from being effective through these different tools and regulations and lawsuits. So there's opportunity there. And then there's a long history of the government being really effective at making projects that had a huge difference or importantly to me, invention where the government funded the fundamental research, which is what companies then used to market and bring these things to a wider audience.

1:11:34Atrioc:So the, I, I think there's a fantasy from the tech folks that still exists right now, which is you should let private industry do it all. And I think it's a very appealing thing for entrepreneurs and people who get tired with government excess, but, and it's what, that's

1:11:50Aiden:also what people who hate abundance, but haven't read it say the book says, yes. And it's like half

1:11:55Atrioc:of the book right the second half of the book is how effective the government has been historically and how that's actually being stripped away now because of rfk jr pulling research from all this stuff and so i thought that was very interesting of it being a really compelling case that even in the case of like pushing the bounds you like the government is incredibly valuable and should play a part and you shouldn't view the government as the smaller the better with no exceptions yeah

1:12:21Aiden:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a great takeaway from the year. I think that it speaks to the point of there just being nuanced to these big black and white ideas that I think are often carrying.

1:12:33Atrioc:There's nuance to Nick Fuentes' ideas.

1:12:35Aiden:No, no, no. Can't be a joke. Maybe laugh, but we can't even. It's so funny because he's like one guy where it's like, I think it's just so. He's dropped the nuance. He's dropped the nuance and he really is. He has dropped the nuance. He's just saying the worst thing. It's so funny. It's so funny. Cause it's like, you can, he's the most concrete example of you can open it up. You open up the stream, you hear the worst thing you've ever heard in your entire life. And he's just saying it.

1:13:12I mean, that works for him though. That's the, I don't know. That attention at all costs. We shouldn't get into Nick Fuentes.

1:13:20Aiden:No, I don't need to rehash. That's how it is. Why are you shitty?

1:13:24Atrioc:We went on a deep dive on a Patreon episode. Did you? We went deep into Nick Fuentes. Was that after the Piers Morgan thing or no? No, it was before. The Piers Morgan thing was wild.

1:13:33Aiden:Anyway, I wanted to... This is a big idea. I wanted to know if you guys had any thoughts. This is one thought I came around to this year of, I think, you know, a young Seattleite college student such as myself, you know, has come up in the ideas of like, you know, the evils of capitalism, if you will. Obviously, that lacks a bit of insight. Hold on, hold on.

1:14:00Atrioc:Hold this book while you're saying that.

1:14:01Aiden:Hold on, hold on. So, and I just want to, so I think with that kind of background, you come into things with a certain mental framework or certain like ideas that just are sit in the back of your mind that shape how you perceive things. And this year, we talked a lot about wealth inequality and how that's like a really driving force in what is making things shitty for everybody right now. and I came to the realization this year I think you're sold as maybe a younger left-leaning person or outright like socialists or if you call yourself a communist that capitalism is like this driving force behind wealth inequality in society and it is inevitable that capitalism forces us towards this outcome and I think this year because of a little more historical concepts we dove into and uh this idea of money is this money is kind of like a representation or an exercise of power right money accomplish allows you to like accomplish something that's yeah yeah dude okay and i i i started to think about how power like inequality of power congregates in a bunch of different places and scenarios.

1:15:28Atrioc:Pass the mushrooms, by the way.

1:15:30Aiden:I'm serious. No, no, I'm giving you a shot. I'm serious. And how like wealth inequality through the lens that we view it now with money is not the only way that wealth inequality exists. It exists within like power structures in society. And even if we eliminated, like if you eliminate money, if you eliminate capitalism, this idea of wealth inequality still forms and exists. And what you're actually trying to do with whatever system of governance that you have or the way you're trying to like lead society is combat what wealth inequality within that society. You're trying to, it doesn't have to be, it could be through like social inequality, like maybe through an autocratic government that doesn't actually need money to like enforce a lot of their power and decisions because of the way they've congregated it.

1:16:19Aiden:You're trying to protect against the consolidation of power, not the consolidation of money. and money is just a vehicle for power in society now. And I thought, I feel embarrassed. I feel embarrassed. I think it's great. But this is one thing I came around to this year is like capitalism is not this exclusive scenario where wealth inequality develops. It exists in any structure or society in a bunch of different ways and letting it consolidate in so few people's hands is bad for everybody else in the longterm. I think that lens, I didn't come to the realization to. No, I mean, that's 100 % true, right?

1:16:58I mean, of course, there was wealth inequality prior to capitalism. Feudalism had wealth inequality. Yeah. If you go back to villages, there was the big man structure where one guy would hoard all the resources and be the chief or whatever. If you go to Soviet Russia, they had an inner circle that had way greater access to wealth and privilege than, yeah, there's no, I don't think there's any society, actually, outside of very, very small groups. that doesn't eventually have some, like, you know, that's the great leveler of theory, which is they all trend towards, because people figure out the meta of whatever it is.

1:17:28They figure out the meta of whatever the game is you've created, whether it's capitalism or anything, and then they start optimizing for their resource acquisition, and then eventually it breaks because somebody, they get too much. They inequality becomes a problem.

1:17:38Aiden:Yeah, you break the, whatever the game is that you exist within, you start breaking down that, and somebody starts consolidating within that.

1:17:48Atrioc:Brendan, I'm curious, did your views on, because you've, you know, talked about this and I think probably been the most knowledgeable about the three of us about this particular the way it manifests has your opinion on what should be done about wealth inequality changed at all this year I mean we went and interviewed your fucking hero Lena Khan who I would say I mean I don't I couldn't speak to myself at the end of last year but I feel so so strongly that it is the stuff we started to do around 1980 which shifted the flow of tax money from rich to poor, from working to rich. Now, instead of going from the rich and the tax money flowed towards subsidies and helping for working class people, it has flipped.

1:18:31And that plus government overspending, those two things I think are the core root of the problem that everything else stacks on top of. And so I, yeah, I guess what I would say is something that ties up what you're saying is that I strongly believe there is no solution at all that doesn't require constant human vigilance. There is none. There is no set of rules we're going to create that won't get gamed by humans trying to maximize their gain in the system. And so the only way you can do this is to have human beings that fucking care. And for example, there's no way you could write the law that is going to be better than a reasonable human being judge who is acting in good faith, being like, this is the right call here.

1:19:17That is going to be the better outcome in every situation because you can't stop things from getting games. So yeah, I think the thing I want most in the world is high progressive taxes. I want high taxes. I want a system that does not distribute it mostly to wealthy boomers. I want to distribute it to people that need it the most, kind of like post-World War II New Deal America. That's like the thing I'm – and a strong antitrust system. I think that's the number one thing. I think – you can go to capitalism, communism, all that. I think there's so many downsides to both systems. But the thing I like about, the one thing I think is the upside of capitalism, the only good part is that very clearly when two entities compete, it drives down costs and drives up innovation for regular people.

1:20:01That is the only good thing. So if we have a system, which I think we have right now, which is the downsides of capitalism, and we don't even get the upsides, we have an ossified monopoly-based, then there is no point to it. You're not getting any of the good part. You only get it in very few areas, which is like I've mentioned them, which is like YouTube. For a YouTube viewer, you get a million different options that are all competing for your time and you get a lot of great options. On Steam, you get a ton of different games competing for your dollar. They're driving down prices. You're getting a ton of innovative new games.

1:20:28People like that. People like a competitive environment. TVs, you get a bunch of people trying to compete for your dollar in TVs. TV prices are getting cheaper. You're getting bigger and thinner. Those things are great, but you do not get that in healthcare. You're not getting that. In a lot of areas, you're getting very limited options. You don't get that in fucking youth hockey when you have to go and it's bought up by private equity and they fucking make you film to pay your, like that shit is not, and the only way to stop that is not some massive, I mean, I personally don't think it's like, we need to have the government seize every private asset and then regulate it.

1:20:57What I think we need to do is have a strong antitrust system, which we've had in this country, which is informed and knowledgeable and has experts and takes a huge amount of, it has like the weight of the government behind it. It's not like an afterthought where they don't care about it. It's like a very important mission that everyone understands and they're going to break up monopolies. They're going to make sure no matter what industry it is, if there is a few players, if they're coordinating to raise prices, you are going to get broken up. You're going to get massive fines. We're going to break up your...

1:21:26And if you just do that as your regular course of business all the time, you will end up with a fucking, I think, a really, really healthy competitive economy where someone being rich can be easily out-competed by someone who's poor. And I think that is awesome. I think that is almost unbeatable. I think if a country does that and another country doesn't, even if this country has better stability regulation, they're going to fall behind. I think it's so productive. It's so incredible, the amount of innovation will get off that. So yeah, that's my dream. That's what I want. And I think I've felt that generally, but maybe over the year, I've gotten more concrete on the actual asks.

1:22:03Atrioc:Yeah, I think it's very well said. You've also convinced me that, again, like increased taxes and the issues that are coming around, increased monopolization, are, are basically new to me. But the more we've done research, the more I feel like, no, this really makes sense. As much as again, the tech people in my life are all saying how great it is that this company is becoming as big as possible. That seems to be the entire metric for success. The all in guys literally will bring on any, but you know, they bring on Travis, uh, Kalnick, whatever the former two, the Uber.

1:22:37Aiden:For some reason, I thought you were going to say Travis Scott.

1:22:39Atrioc:And I was like, oh, Travis, yeah, three different Travis's that they brought in. And and unfortunately, it was this boring Uber CEO. And yeah, you know, to him, they're like, yeah, you were phenomenally successful at Uber. And then you look at what he did. And it was a I mean, he was technically successful for all these unethical things that he was doing. That was just brutal that he was forced out of the board. And it was a disgrace. And but the one single metric that determined that this is a person who is valuable and worth talking to is money. He made a shitload of money and the company became extraordinarily valuable.

1:23:15Atrioc:Acquisitions are good. Mergers are good. This is all good. And I've and I've just really fallen away from that.

1:23:21Aiden:Well, we're rounding out our year. Why don't we talk a little? We'll do one little current news section to send off the year.

1:23:29Atrioc:You know, my views have changed. Epstein.

1:23:31Aiden:Not not even. Turns out he's a bad guy. I can't. admittedly i came in in 2025 thinking that it was going to be epstein's year i've been following jeff on twitter for a decade the new york financier and a great friend that's what i heard and and a lot has been revealed yeah a lot has been actually not enough that's the real fucking story of today is that we got drip fed a thousand new uh epstein documents but they're like 98 % redacted people are doing like big shows on the uh house floor whatever they're holding up They wasted a lot of fucking ink for this. It's just pages and pages of pure black.

1:24:10Think about how expensive that is. I know, it's low-key. Where's our government budget going? To be printed out.

1:24:15Atrioc:To the printed redactions. I thought the whole point of the vote and all of this stuff around it was to not have it be redacted. Is that not? No, that's not the case. Wow.

1:24:26Aiden:And Doug, you're such an idiot. You're dumb for thinking that. So next year, you're going to realize how stupid that is. I know, I know.

1:24:31Atrioc:I can already sense the Dunning-Kruger effect happening. I was so confident about they had an emergency redaction section and they had a whole team of people moved in to fucking redact these files to get them ready for this release they dropped only a portion of them and even this portion is heavily redacted and the people in these files that are released it's very obviously who Trump would want to put it's like Michael Jackson, Oprah Bill Clinton I don't know what Oprah was doing probably but uh yeah it's like there's clearly more to the story and it's not done and i think this is like another attempt to be like well there you got it all right shut up piggies but you you know and and uh i guess i'm thankful that it doesn't seem to be the response from anyone even you know i was on our conservative this morning um reading their response to this and it was all like where's the rest like unredacted nobody nobody is going to see 80 fucking pages in a row of pure black and be like hmm that's good i got what i did i'm seeing what else solved so yeah it's not a major news item it's it's just the beginning i think of people getting honestly i think it makes him more angry i don't know we'll see do you think it loses his cell phone of from to do it's just it's all insane to to not fucking release the files it's funny because

1:25:51Aiden:in the worst case scenario right presumably it'd be a bigger cell phone If he's in the files in a super compromising way, then the biggest cell phone was doing that, and that is now going to haunt you no matter what. But I do think he's handled it. I mean, that and the fucking economy, man. The affordability speech, I don't know if you guys saw it. He's like woken up to the fact that it's a big deal, and so he's doing affordability speeches, starting rallies and manners. Is he doing more? Because my understanding was he did the one rally so far. It didn't really go well. We did a rally. Then he did this big national address.

1:26:26Yeah. I think he's got more planned. I know Vance has been on tour doing affordability around the country. And it's just, I don't think it's hitting. I think, yeah, I think it's bad. But people are leaning into the word right now too.

1:26:39Aiden:Yeah. The Democrats really want. Everyone's saying affordability. I think the articles I'm seeing. So there was one article this morning that I wanted to talk about one sec, which was uh how democrats used one word to turn the tide against trump and it's about affordability and i was having like shock waves because of that era where democrats were like we started calling them weird and now we're and now we're winning and i was like i think we can't i don't want to get too excited no i don't think it's democrats brilliant messaging i don't think It's just trying to get a fucking disaster. Trump is bad and people are feeling it.

1:27:19I don't think you could run almost anyone against what he's running right now. I literally think it's so, to independence and to people who aren't diehard it's so unpopular. It's just unpopular. It's not what anyone thought it was going to be. It's not the fucking promised land. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, there's some candidates are doing it. Obviously, Donnie ran a great campaign and ran on affordability, but I just think in general, it's not like some brilliant messaging. I actually, I hate this because both Democrat and Republican strategists talk about politics like it's all about if you say the right word.

1:27:54It's just about, it's like a puzzle that if you unlock this thing in the right order, and it's never about like changing the conditions of people's lives. It is always about if I just, if I massage this in the right way, that will unlock the voters that I need. And I think that's so fucking cynical and so fucking annoying. And a lot of these articles are about that. And Republican strategists are saying that we need to focus on affordability. We need to use the right messaging for Trump. It's like whether the fuck Trump, Trump can keep talking like a buffoon as long as it worked for him when they thought it was good.

1:28:26It's not his messaging. It's not how he says it. He can say whatever the fuck he wants. If people feel like their lives are actually getting better and costs are going down, they're going to love him. He can talk shit on Rob Reiner as he's dead as much as he wants. If the prices are going down and I swear to God, people will laugh at it. He's basically like, that's funny. but now because it's not working they're like that's too far you've crossed the line and i think that's honestly what it is so i i hate the idea that it's messaging that it's like the right yeah and i just haven't picked the right new york times is that angle a lot of like

1:28:56Aiden:it's a tactic uh you wanted to touch on one thing i it was a game studio had recently announced that they're incorporating ai into the game that they're developing to yeah we'll hit this quick so

1:29:08Atrioc:there are two beloved game developers who both have come under fire asterisk from terminally online twitter people because they revealed that they use ai at some part of their development process so the first are the people who made claire expedition 33 claire obscure expedition 33 and the second is lorian studios who made baldur's gate 3 so these are like two of the most critically acclaimed and beloved games from like let's say mid-sized studios both of which won game of the year, the last couple of years. Um, and in interviews, uh, the, I believe studio head of, uh, of Baldur's Gate three of that studio, which is Sven Vinkie.

1:29:49Atrioc:He has said, Oh yeah, we use some AI for our development. We use machine learning for, in his quote, tasks that nobody wants to do. They talk about how, like if it's motion capture cleanup or editing voiceover, that's already been recorded or something very specific. Um, that was quotes from him. And then he also mentioned how their concept artists use it to sort of compile different reference images. And this received an enormous amount of flack. Um, he had to then respond on Twitter and I mean, you can pull this up Perry, but holy, there's so much pushback. Holy fuck guys. We're not pushing hard for or replacing concept artists with AI.

1:30:27Atrioc:We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we're hiring more. The art they create is original and I'm very proud of it. I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of generative AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn't say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that and they are indeed world-class artists. He goes on to talk about how they use it to explore references in early ideation stages and then he ends with a line I like which is we hired creatives for their talent not for their ability to do what a machine suggests but they can experiment with these tools to make their lives easier.

1:31:00Atrioc:So this has become a sort of discussion on the, let's at least like Twitter sphere of, for folks who are really concerned about AI and particularly generative AI and whether it's going to replace human work or devalue human creative work, is any amount of this allowed? The vibe I'm getting is that most people feel that this stuff is fine. Even though these are beloved studios, they're like, look, these are tools that are accentuating the human creative process. a concept artist would have gone and spent hours and hours and hours compiling images and pulling them as references for the original art that they then create this helps speed up that process or again some like technical cleanups of whatever in theory that's like to me that's like the great stuff that ai will be used for it's human beings being able to do their creative visions faster but it's received this a lot of feedback and concern from folks basically saying all the companies you like are actually using AI and they are going to eventually replace artists.

1:31:57Atrioc:And it's an interesting discussion because this is happening. I've seen a number of folks in the game dev industry reply to this and say, you people are completely naive if you don't think every industry is using AI to speed up small tasks like this. Everyone is doing this. And there's this sort of realization that is spreading to the discontent of many people of, should there be this purity of a form like game development or any kind of art where no amount of machine learning or AI tools are allowed at all.

1:32:26Aiden:I think the label just comes with so much baggage right now. And so many negative realities that are interlocking with this one word that can mean and impact a lot of things. So people are taking the worst idea of what this could mean and then applying it to this out of fear that the other bad things that they see happening associated with AI are happening here as well. It's weird because it's like I understand where the fear comes from, but I also have this frustration. It's funny because I didn't see... I saw less... You know what I saw? So when a game like from EA announces something like this, it's universally, it's easy to hate, but because Larian is so loved and because X-233 is so beloved, it was more people being like, well...

1:33:16There's nuance to this. I saw most AI haters being like, well, the way they use it is different. It's funny. The truth is, I work with a game developer and he's pitching me on new ideas and all the fucking slides he used were as a mock-up with AI. Of course, he's not going to, he's making these 10 different ideas, quick mock-ups so he can pitch them.

1:33:41It's going to be used. I don't know if it's, especially something behind the scenes and it's 90 % cheaper or 90 % faster or 90%. It's just that, that is, you know, it's like, there's, um, I don't know if you've ever seen these, a really like, uh, white pilling thing you can do on this is to go back and read ads that were in the newspaper about the first wave of cars. And it's like people being like, your fucking horse is so much better than cars. it's like they're you know uh and and they would use names they'd be like old bessie never let you down old yeah there's like a real ad it's like a famous and uh it's just a similar thing in this i i'm not talking about um agi if that happens that's a whole different conversation when that's like that's a fundamental change of society if that happens but as like a thing this is right now right now what ai is basically just a tool that can do some things faster, some things worse.

1:34:39Some things good, some things bad. And there's just no, there's no way to put a tool back in the box in the way. It's just not. It's just because, because what you create then, if you try to like really make a label like if you, if you made a rule tomorrow where this has to be a humans only label, then all you're really creating, at least in our current system is an arbitrage opportunity for you to pay someone to human wash it. that's also going to happen. Because if, if there's a premium, you can charge on a game that is human only, then I'll make the game with some AI and then I'll pay a human to run it through that.

1:35:14So it looks like it's a human game and I can make it for 10 times cheaper than you. And I'm selling it as a human game. That is the incentive you're creating. There is no, that will happen no matter what. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just, sometimes you have to tell people like, this is, this is the world. This is what's going to happen. So you have to wake up and be ready for it. And this tool is too good at some things to ignore. That is, and people are going to use it. And if you shame it, then they will find a way to hide it. But it's because it is 90 % faster or 200 % faster.

1:35:44That's the case. And I would like us to work to build a world where humans see the rewards and benefits of this. But to pretend like it's not there or to finger wag at it and hope it goes away is a huge waste of everyone's time. It's a colossal fuck up on the paths we could take. What are you? I thought you're...

1:36:00Aiden:This is my conviction that I carried into this year that I think I carried the whole way through it. Okay, what is it?

1:36:06Atrioc:You're only going to play human games?

1:36:08Aiden:That I'll only play human games. Human games. By humans. By humans for you. This episode's brought to you by human games. By human games. Is that I think the goal of AI and automation should be, the main goal is to supplement human living and stability. So like the underlying thing that this should service is because AI has to contend with the reality that you're talking about, where it will inevitably be used by a bunch of people, at least as we continue to develop it. I want AI or automation in general that is maybe contributed to by AI to supply the social welfare that is necessary to keep people stable and happy at a time where they will be losing their jobs.

1:37:01Aiden:Like we talked about with, you know, it's not inherently bad to want to automate the backbreaking work of being in a warehouse 12 hours a day. Yeah. But the issue with a bunch of people losing those jobs is that their reality, having lost that job, is also very bad. And we should be automating a future where everybody has access to like their base needs. And then I think a lot of people will take less issue with things like this, because it's the threat of that instability that I think overhangs all of this thing. What this guy is doing when he tweets is he's exasperated because he's basically saying.

1:37:43I'm a concept artist. This is my life and career. What we're seeing is a train coming at my industry and I have no plan. Nobody has any plan for what I'm going to do for my livelihood. And so I'm streaming out and I'm trying to build a move. I totally get it. Yeah. But yeah, I just, yeah, I agree. 100%. And that's, but I think it comes back to what we've been saying about higher tag. the benefits of this automation are going to accrue in fewer and fewer hands and we have to find a way to take some money out of that hands to take it back

1:38:16Aiden:there's two things there's two things in that that I'm going to hard agree with and if you want to check that out you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand our second tier we have a book club every month this month it happens to be the Communist Manifesto but we've read a bunch of different books

1:38:33Atrioc:basically we're saying if you're kind of in the elite class of the Patreon then you can participate then you have access to knowledge the revolution read the communist manifesto with us come seize the knowledge by subscribing to our Patreon this has been a great year thank you so much it's been awesome anything we want to say about this year of the podcast

1:38:58Aiden:I would like to say I appreciate This podcast has reached an audience that is much larger than I ever thought it would be. When we talked about starting this show, it's been a privilege to get to work with both of you. And I'm really glad that not only did I pitch you the idea of doing this, but you spoke up and said you wanted to be a part of it. I think this has been a really fun, good fit. It makes me so happy to meet so many fans of the show throughout the year too. Yeah, I want to say, I thus far, we've been doing the show for about a year. Every eight months, 10 months. I have not met a lemonade stand in real life who wasn't really awesome to talk to.

1:39:39And so you could be that person. I want you to come up and be a total asshole to me so you can break the streak. That's what I would like. I would like to meet the first asshole lemonade stand. No, I love this show. It has exposed me to a lot of interesting books and ideas. Breakneck and Pies of Peace are two things I really, really fucking enjoyed reading this year. They drastically changed my worldview on things. and I love these discussions. I just like doing, I like you guys. I like, this is a fun thing for me to do and I'm glad it's part of my life and I'm hopefully, I think both you and I are going through this.

1:40:10I'm trying to reorient our lives so we can have more time to really breathe with this and not feel like it's crushing us. But also you too, you have six jobs or whatever. You're doing a lot. So yeah, just looking back, I'm glad we did it and hopefully you guys can stick with us as we figure out more of how we're gonna make it work. But it's fun and cool.

1:40:28Atrioc:Yeah. I got nothing to add. it's been it's great i'm very excited to keep doing this i'm excited for 2026 i feel more like comfortable in my own skin with this type of show than than ever before so it's it's great i'm excited if i can sorry just a reminder we are going to china next year that's a big thing we're planning in tentatively march we are working on it but that that was a patreon goal that we hit and so we are going to go there and film content there and hopefully according to somebody we spoke with recently maybe be real journalists for the first time real journalists yeah mixed signals called

1:41:00Aiden:this you're doing some real journalism and i was like and i was like i promise you i'm not i can't wait to ask you should be cut or uncut uh but yeah i think this uh i think this new year is going to be very exciting for the show because of projects like that other guests that we have lined up uh and excited to share it with you guys and if i could give you one thing into the new year It's, you know, just kind of in the vein of this episode, be open to changing your mind and updating how you feel about things. Don't listen to us and take that as the only way to look at things. I think what you were saying, this has been my like bridge to learning and exploring a lot of things that I wouldn't have otherwise.

1:41:46Aiden:It's forcing me to engage with a bunch of ideas that I'm really happy I am. And I hope that's something that people take away in the coming year. It's like when you hear something you're excited about or interesting, or you want to respond or you feel antagonized by on this show, go read some more about it. Go learn some more about it. I think that's a really good energy for your entire life, to be honest. And I'm trying to take a little bit of that with me into 2026. So we'll see you there.

1:42:12Atrioc:Thank you, guys.