Atrioc

It's a depreciating asset.

Because you've been going, you've been rattling off about how...

D&D has famously purged woke. Yeah, there's no... I know. D&D, all those circles, famously right-wing. Well, the Dark Elves purged all the woke characters.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We're dropping both. And it'll be an ethical dilemma for years to come. The scene with the creeper farting. Was that okay?

Maybe I'm dumb, but I kind of expect this movie to underperform for what it's expected to do.

Can I say it? Titanic 2 deserved more.

Right.

I'm allowed to see The Departed. I would see it. I want to see it. Small, small side thing.

I went to, I'll never forget this. I was on a date. It was a bad date movie, by the way.

I'll never forget that guy.

It's a stumble.

Whoa, I thought we were having a good conversation. Deep Seek, we were chopping it up.

Think of all the call centers that will be out of business.

This is no joke. This is what my, on the way to LAX to leave for this Tokyo trip, my Uber driver was talking about this, but in like a, you know, with a bit of a Jewish flavor. And I was just in the back. I was like, I don't think it'll be like that. Like, I don't think they do that. It's like, how many minutes of where are we?

And I always say that. And you've been saying that. I have been saying that.

That would be so sick.

Just our Japan studio.

Let me look for a different guy.

Yeah.

You know what? Maybe we got too far in this episode. We've got too far in this episode. We're like, there we go. Yeah.

Just to be clear, just to be clear, right?

I mean, I landed like three hours ago.

Yeah, I feel like that's a little extreme. I think the less extreme version of the argument that you're saying, I actually think that makes sense. I think the argument of making school more specialized and allowing kids to focus on particular areas that they're best suited for or they're most likely to succeed in is an approach that not only...

Some schools are able to take in the U.S., but if you look at education systems in other countries, they often let kids do that, like in the later high school years especially, right? I think that is very disconnected from the consequences of kids having phones.

there's two paths right there's one of just saying that schooling needs an overhaul in general which has been true for a while which is like a lot of kids get left in the cracks a lot of kids aren't set for this rote memorization learning it's not physical enough for young boys I've heard like they don't get enough outside time especially that's why like

There's like aspects of schooling that could be- But if we were having this argument about education in 2007 before iPhones existed, that argument would be the same. It's the same. It was the same thing back then.

But also there's the dopamine addiction, which is like, it seems different.

And I'll say as somebody who, so I didn't know this. I got an ADHD diagnosis like a year ago and I'm not about to blame like all of the bad things in my life on ADHD to preface.

Publicly, you can do it privately, but not-

But when I talked to my parents, I didn't know that they knew I had ADHD as a kid. Did you not see that video?

It was obvious.

Yeah, it was cinema. Oh, so good. I mean, the win-win would be if Elon goes to Mars.

What the fuck happened to the safe space? And talking to them, I think about when I was a kid and I wasn't allowed to watch TV on weekdays. I wasn't allowed to play video games on weekdays. I could read, basically. And I, that constant, like part of having ADHD, I think is your constant seek for stimulation basically. And it is hard to focus on things.

And for me as a kid, that ended up getting like captured in books and comic books. Like that was, I just read constantly. I would take a book everywhere with me as a child so I could read every moment of every day. Or I would listen to audio books on tape and things like that.

And I think about what would have happened if I had like a phone instead and just free reign on the internet, which I didn't really have until like mid teenage years. And I think it would have been really, really bad for me. I would have turned out way, way differently because my effort and focus and like success would have been like completely diverted from like how I grew up.

Obviously that's extremely anecdotal. This is like a very personal experience to me, right? But I do think on the whole, access to like this all the time, like when you give, like I think a really good video on the effects of weed came out. because a bunch of like weed research has dropped in the last couple of years, like post legalization.

And a lot of the consequences of weed can now be looked at in like the long run. And there is, turns out there is really, really bad cognitive effects from like constant or like even small use of like weed, particularly for children. Not so much for adults. I'm not here to say stop smoking weed or something.

A buddy cop film where we have to learn to get along? And you have 100K in your pocket.

This seat is the villain.

I'm saying the idea that having this device with you all the time that is constantly pushing and stimulating your brain and giving that to someone who's young and developing especially The idea that it has no consequence at all is ridiculous for one. It would be crazy to have an opinion that it has no impact at all.

Honestly, if they're under 18, maybe. I don't know if I'd be taking it away. Yeah, I would...

Because I won the March Madness bracket.

And they have data on this. So I'm not remembering the study exactly, but they've done studies on schools that have effectively, again, a lot of schools try it, but not effectively, but effectively banned phones.

Telling your kids, I showed up, Mars, only 100K in my pocket. Turns out you couldn't buy anything with it.

Sorry, can I play a quick game of Fruit Ninja? Because I'm getting bored.

I even talked about this. I talked about a similar thing recently on, we do a little advice show for the yard, like Patreon. And on, we were talking about vices. And I think a huge thing for me was how compulsively, literally addicted I was to Twitter for years.

compulsive motion of opening the app, scrolling without thinking, close it, literally open it like a second later, doing that all the time. And I think that's what kids have access to. And this story from this woman online, right? That's not a study, but I have heard this story so much from so many people who teach. That phones have destroyed the classroom.

And if we were to go back to what I think is a valid argument, actually, which is what Doug was bringing up at the beginning, I think that is, again, totally true. Ways to transform and shape education to make people be as successful as possible and escape the psychic prison, if you will. I think that's totally valid. It's just separate from fun time.

And I built this future for us.

I can lead into your things real quick. In that article, you don't have to bring it up, I'll just say it. It ends by saying because this all started around 2012, it's very obviously not an evolution. We're not getting physically dumber. Our brains are not cognitively dumber. So it is having to do with like the way we're learning, the way our environment we're in, the way they access the phones.

And it means it's changeable, which means, you know, the hopeful thing of it is like, we can change it. Our policy or whatever we do can make it more likely. So you have this idea here from becoming an alpha assistant. Is this Andrew Tate's school? Is this the solution? Wait, is this Andrew Tate's Forbes sponsored school?

I do have a few topics I want to list for the audience before we get into them. I don't want to hear it. Stop. Pause.

You don't even want to. No, before you tell me these topics. What? This is a nice thing that I'm doing. I need to do a nice thing for you. Okay? Oh. I need to do a nice thing for you. And that nice thing is that we need to talk. about safe spaces. I think... Actually, yeah, I think Perry has this thing.

Learn how to not be a beta. Crush a brew.

Yeah, you don't know a shit about weed, Aiden. Look at Lulu here, 10 years old. She shows up every day. She hits the bong.

She's a fucking alpha, and you don't get that. You're right. She's an alpha.

I think we need to talk about how you need to use an iPad. Okay. You need to figure out how to use iPads.

So I want to say, I just want to say, I have used this. I mean, I was doing it before. You go to alpha school? No, I don't go. I'm actually not an alpha. You went to alpha school? I'm actually in beta school. What year did you graduate, bro? I'm in beta school. It's different.

Dude. But you sort of put me onto this and I've been doing it more and it works. It legitimately, I'll put in an article that I want to talk about on stream. I'll have it summarize the whole thing, but not summarize it. I'll have it quiz me. So I'll like read the article and then I'll put it into the thing. And I'm like, hey, just check my knowledge.

This is the hostility. You're bringing that over from the other podcast. Now, if you guys don't know at home, Aiden is also part of another podcast called The Yard. Okay, I'm happy to say their name. And they bully him a lot. And I didn't notice this, but they pointed this out. I don't know if you could pull up the tweet from, let's watch this. Let's watch this real quick.

And if you do the voice mode, like I have a conversation about the article. And if I'm like, this is my takeaway. They're like, well, actually, you know, it'll like correct me. Or like, it's like a really smart person I'm talking to that knows what I'm trying to learn and just gives me feedback. I mean, I can actually see what you're talking about. I've tried it firsthand and it does work.

And that way, when I go live and someone asks me that question, I've had this, like I'm prepared for it in a way that I couldn't have done just by myself reading. Like it does, there is... Potential there, 100%.

It's that feedback.

Right, right.

Exactly their skill level and works up from there. Have you, Doug, have you seen The Wire?

Dude. I don't know if you know, Aiden can't go 15 minutes in real life without bringing up The Wire. He forces it into every conversation.

And we've made it two whole episodes, I thought, without this problem, and now it's back.

It's a great show. Okay. But you might remember, you've seen The Wire. Have you not? Yeah, I've seen The Wire. You know, the beginning. I've seen it through your description of every line. The famous scene, the famous scene at the beginning of season four, when Snoop is buying the nail gun in the store.

And the whole thing is that like Snoop, you know, had, had Snoop grown up in maybe a better environment is actually a very intelligent person who knows what they need, knows how to ask questions and has like a very in-depth conversation of like how I specifically need this type of tool that would be best suited to hide the bodies in vacant buildings.

Yeah, they're buying a thing to hide dead bodies.

And this is a silly example of... I do think catering knowledge and learning to specific situations that best fit the kids so that they best understand them is totally the way to go. Even just... having individual time is so important. Like I remember when I was a younger kid in like fifth grade, and I think there was a brief period of time where I went to a private school.

And in that school, there was like a subset of people within the class that they pulled out of class to like work on basically like the next grade's worth of material because we already knew the existing material.

This is where they show up.

I use Google Translate to talk to my Uber driver. I know, I know.

So but, you know, at public schools, those opportunities were like few and far between, at least at U.S. public schools. Right. And like I said, when you look at public education in a lot of other countries, they start to take these more like refined approaches to different students so that they're working on something that they are more invested in. I think that's, this is kind of awesome.

Like if you were, if you're doing this through, I don't know, in a classroom that is like deployed by the teacher or the school, rather than like on the, at the kids, like phones at an individual level, I think that's, this is really cool.

Okay, freeze frame right there. He says, I use Google Translate to talk to my Uber driver and then pauses like a dog that's about to be beaten. They make fun of him so much for just talking to Uber drivers on that podcast. They make fun of me for talking to people.

Cause I think at least as, if you took this all out of the world of like technology and you just go back far enough in time, I think again, these were the same conversations about education that people are having like 10, 20, 30 years ago about how to help students succeed.

And this is like a tool that allows that to happen. I want to talk a little about the negative sides of AI though. And it's not this in education. And I've been hearing this all over. There's a good article about it, but also I've talked to my, I had my chat like come up in some stories. And the level of cheating, especially in college level courses right now with chat GPT is rampant. Yes, it is.

It is. Yeah, it is viral.

And maybe that means the whole system is just, it doesn't work in this, in this area, but like the structure of it is still there and it's teetering. It's not, teachers are frustrated. They're, they're grading like 80% chat GPT papers. They know the student did put no time into. And yeah, The students are also reporting that like, okay, so let's say you're a student and you want to try hard.

Well, you're worried that if you don't use AI to cheat, you're going to fall behind this kid that does. And your grade's worse. If you're in college, you're literally suffering because of the curve. Right. Yeah, there's a curve. And then also like you hear the stories of like people graduating. It's a tough time now to find if you get bad grades, you're worried you're going to graduate and not be.

So you're like almost incentivized hard to cheat because the thing can write better than you on a lot of things. Right. So now it's like, This race to the bottom where everyone is cheating at all times. It's getting exponential. And now they're going into job interviews and they're cheating in those. They're having the AI auto-listen to the job question and then just read it.

I mean, it's breaking the whole system. It's breaking every way of measuring human ability and talent and that structure that existed before. And I don't have the answer, but that is a downside of AI that's coming really quickly. Well, I think this is a longer-term strong positive

Okay.

Period. So I was just like, instinctively, I was like, yep, let it hit. And then you guys just didn't say anything.

I don't give a shit.

Yeah. I think this actually comes back to the first episode when we were talking about AI in a way, but this is hitting education, I would say, sooner or more heavily than the way it's hitting the job market. It's like a freight train. Yeah. It's the same issue when we were talking about how, well, what is the consequences of like AI on the future of the way we work? Right.

Look at his face. He's afraid. You don't have to be afraid here is what I'm trying to tell you.

And the big consequence is like, well, AI is going to replace all these jobs. But if those people can't move to new jobs because AI is also capable of replacing those jobs, then there's this catastrophic effect on the way like society is, it's structured right now.

And, but it's how this is the same situation. It's like new tool is not like complimentary to the way education is currently structured or, Or has been done for decades. I mean, for a long time. But the deconstruction is happening already. So I think the answer, like when I think about how, what I fucking learned in business school is basically- You went to business school? Yeah. Oh, dope.

I went to business school and I studied finance and I studied marketing. And I, nothing, almost nothing of what I learned is applicable or helpful in my life. In business school, really? Except for, and all of the experience that I gained by being in university was I leveraged a lot of university resources to like start, to start a business and run e-sports events.

This is a safe space. You can tell me the topics.

Yeah. Doing actual things is the only way to learn.

By like running that company. And I don't like regret going to college for those reasons. Like I did learn a lot through those ways. And there were exceptions in my classes where I learned about stuff that I thought was really interesting. Yeah. But overall, like I didn't take that much away from it. And this like tailored education experience.

Now it's more expensive. I mean, for kids nowadays, it makes no sense. For the average young person going to college right now, it's like the price has only gone up. The quality is going down. Everyone's cheating. Like the quality of your degree means less because there's so many false positives people are cheating through. Like it's this really tough time to be figuring out What the fuck to do?

I mean, I don't envy people who are younger. People are like 18 right now. It's like insane. I'm really learning more about it by talking to some of them. And it's like, I don't, I feel like in 10 years, maybe we figured some of this out and they're having this, but I feel like this, this window is so bad. This window sucks.

Yeah. Parents like telling them, don't just do this or what, you know, like parents that don't understand how much it's changed. I don't know. It's just interesting.

I think this specific use case is really, is really cool. Like I, to me, if, if this is like, I think about the language learning example you gave, uh, like you have been learning Japanese. That's how Ludwig's been studying Japanese. And in the time that he said he's been using chat GPT, it is from my outside perspective as somebody who knows like a little Japanese, uh,

like very little from studying it in college is, Oh wow. He's improved a lot in the period of time that he's been using that instead. And I think there, I think there is really cool use cases of it because as somebody who's the, you know, from that first episode, the AI scrutiner, if you will, here to scrutinize. And like, I do think that the cheating epidemic right now is, is terrible.

Like the situation is literally devolving before us. I, I'm really excited about something like this.

Have you heard the Steve Jobs quote? This is a long time ago. It's like him talking about the future. And he's like, Alexander the Great learned everything he knew from Aristotle. Aristotle was like his private tutor. And he's like, one day we'll be able to put all of Aristotle's teachings into a computer and create a digital Aristotle that can be anyone's tutor.

And I thought that was really, I mean, first of all, it's incredible foresight for 84 when he said it or whatever, but there is something to that of a kid having the compounding knowledge of the world privately for whatever you're interested in, if it's Japanese or whatever. I mean, that is cool. I do see that being a positive thing once it can get figured out, once society adapts to it in a way.

It's just, I mean, if you're 18 or you're like, you had high school and COVID and now you're dealing with cheating in college, you're just getting fucked.

I'm trying to reach for like what might be, like what are more negatives or like what is the potential argument to this use case specifically? And, Maybe if I was a teacher, I would be seeing this and be, one, maybe a little insecure about my job and be like, is this the process of me getting replaced? What place do I have in this system now?

Does a teacher turn from a person that stands in front of a classroom and teaches a group of 30, 40 kids into somebody that's basically like an AI manager? Maybe an emotional support.

Is that what you're thinking? Because you know what I'm thinking? I think after our episode last week where you defended Elon Musk, he reached out and hired you as an ad man to promote his various... And he's like, don't worry, whatever is submitted, he will win the contest.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I will say it's, it's, I think it's really important for there to still be like guidance and structure from, from the school. And that, because, uh, when I was in high school, I had this class I was a part of that was, uh, you could get into instead of English. And it was called, this is at a public school too. It was called rise. I forget what it stood for.

And also the fallout of Mark Rober's suspiciously timed video. It feels like he listened to our app and then kind of just pumped that out.

But the idea was you had the autonomy within that class to kind of decide whatever you wanted to work on. And the dramatically, I would say good examples of how that time was used was one girl that graduated a few years before me, worked really hard, opened like a coffee business using the time that she was in that class. And then she got into like an Ivy League school.

And there was other examples of people in that class becoming really successful. I think I struggled a bit more in that environment. Like, even though I was a really successful student at that age, I fucked off. Like I spent like half of that. I spent half of that year, first year down, like finding YouTube music and learning how to like,

I basically spent a bunch of time learning how to pirate music at school. Cause I couldn't do it. Um, that's alpha right there. Uh, it's not to say that that like program didn't have any use, but I feel like that's like, that was supposed to be this opportunity for me to grow and succeed in a direction that I, uh, that I couldn't in a normal class.

And I think that opportunity is really important, but I could have used a little more guidance, a little more structure, a little more guidance, especially for some kids.

That makes sense.

This show?

I think he stole your content.

It's time for Doug Doug to call out Mark Rober. Yeah, you need to do it. First of all, we need an enemy for this podcast. All good podcasts have enemies.

And some drama that's been going on in the wake of that. And then also in this era of protectionism in the U.S., I wanted to bring up a little law called the Jones Act, which is really interesting just to help demonstrate some of the costs of enacting

Let's see. Mark Rober, why don't you post your Robin Hood account?

you know, even good intentions behind protectionist legislation, talking about something that isn't tariffs for once in the context of protectionism, too. And also, we want to do some follow-ups on comments and people's feedback from the last couple episodes for you to squeeze that in, too.

So that was a little bit of my thought was you as a YouTuber making this video might not have been paid by the other company, might not necessarily want Tesla to be the party to fail, but if both cars just handle both situations equally fine and you don't put any effort into it past that, you've made a pretty boring YouTube video. Right.

And I think from an entertainer's perspective, I can understand why he might have made these decisions if the criticisms are accurate. Right. And I, it's, it kind of starts to walk this line of like, how much duty do you as like an entertainer, but also like a science YouTuber that I think commands a lot of respect within the space. Yes. Yes.

I'm going to do my best to defend Mark Rober here, but I do agree that I think the most damning criticism to me is that you should have used full self-driving.

That's by far the biggest.

And I have a Volkswagen that came out a few years ago, and I have this system that keeps me in the lanes and stops me from hitting cars. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't expect it to succeed in this situation.

So I think that's... So here's the core thing is like... First of all, what his results line up with is essentially equivalent to what you said in your breakdown of LiDAR versus cameras and their different capabilities and different strengths. Yes. Including fog and bright lights.

And so it is reasonable that if this test were to rerun again, even with FSD, this could still be a problem with LiDAR versus cameras. Like it needs to be tested again.

Yeah. And then the only other thing I want to mention is a lot of people are pointing out, like if you see right here, see the rainbow road goes on? Yeah. He turns it on late for sure, but it's on. turns off.

And that is because people are postulating, and this is, I read a good article on this, is that Teslas have been shown in multiple instances to automatically turn off before an accident to change the, to muddy the waters around whether autopilot was engaged during accidents. Dude, it's like when Disney takes the bodies out of the park before they're declared dead.

I have no idea. So I'll be the voice of the people on this one trying to learn about the Jones Act from you. I haven't heard about this.

Oh, that's good.

I don't know if they, this is rumored.

That has been shown. There was a Tesla that drove into a... It was a white truck, and they thought it was the Horizon, or it was a blue truck, they thought it was Horizon. They drove into it, and the person died. But they said autopilot was off at the time. You're laughing a lot at this guy's death, by the way.

No, if I was a truck driver, I would not paint my truck to look like a Horizon, like some fucking lunatic. It's a bad idea, I agree. I wouldn't bait people into killing themselves in my truck. It's probably not the smartest trucker move, but this guy dies. And every time this happens, they kind of muddy the waters.

Like autopilot wasn't engaged at the moment of crash, but it was engaged, you know, seconds before. And it like, if it's too late to break and it's, but it's still context of collision, it does turn off. And they say it's for the reason of like, let's give back to the humans. They have last chance, but it feels very muddy, the water. So it's, Well, I agree with you. I really do.

But I think you wanted to intro, right? Your topic was the first one. I do.

I was kind of disappointed because, like, I feel like Mark Rober had a real chance to, like, have an open and shut slam dunk on LIDAR. And instead, because of these errors, it, like, it muddies the water. So no one can.

But I also think, like, this points out, this footage is pointing out what a lot of court cases have already shown, which is, like, this is a real thing that Tesla was getting investigated before, before Doge wiped out a lot of the investigative areas that were looking into this. That's just coincidence. That's just coincidence. Oh! Allegations. So I don't know. I'm ambivalent on it.

I want to call you stupid. And I want to call you stupid. And I want to call Perry stupid. And I want to call myself stupid.

I wish they would do... I mean, he's getting so much pushback. Maybe he will do a follow-up or do some kind of more strenuous test. It's interesting. Yeah, it's super interesting. I would love to know more detail, but...

And it's like a Waymo that's getting pulled over by a cop. A cop on foot in his full uniform is like, stop. The Waymo stops. And then like a little driverless pizza delivery bot is like rolling by. The guy gets distracted. And then the Waymo just fucking peel us out of there. And it's like, how do you, he doesn't know what to do. He's like an old cop.

It was a safe space for like maybe 15 seconds, by the way. All right.

He has no idea how to deal with all these robots around him just moving on their own. The world's getting so crazy. Things are changing so fast, though. It's interesting. That's so funny. Anyway, what do you think will happen? I don't know what Mark Rober does next. I don't even know if he's upset about it. The video's doing great.

I feel like Mark Rober criticism, the problem is that even if the pushback is really big, it's kind of like when Mr. Beast gets flack, you're pretty insulated. Like at the core of it, even if a million people are shitting on you, you drop the next video to like 10 million plus people that have no idea this drama even exists. Right.

And that's, that's like Mr. Beast is like, that's not a great thing. That's not, no, I don't think it's, there's a lack of accountability in that. Yeah. But Mr. Beast has kind of like run to that level, right? Where it's like, even if the internet, there's a huge pocket of the internet that's up his head at him. It's like a hundred million people still watch the next like yacht video.

Right, right, right. Because they just don't even know that this is a controversy in the first place.

I don't need to do that. Okay. We've got it.

In 2025? This year, yeah. This year.

I have a better than that.

And one more thing I want to say, because you put me on all this, is that you made the story that Tesla decided early on that LiDAR was too expensive.

And when they made that decision.

Sure. Like cameras just focusing on that. Right, right.

A Financial Times article. asking, have humans passed peak brain power? That's sort of the opening topic here I want to talk about is, well, let me ask you a sincere question first, and I'm going to ask Aiden first, because I have a specific example. Do you think you're smarter or dumber than you were when you made this video in 2012? Do you think you're smarter? Be honest.

But when they said that, my understanding is that LIDAR was like as expensive as up to $15,000 of additional shit you got to put on the car.

And now at the time of Luminar and all this, the cost is going down to like 500 to a grand. Like it's dropped dramatically.

Wait.

And so in the future, you can imagine it getting insanely, you know, if that continues, we get it down to- Even if it was at that price, like if that's the price that it takes to add on to a system to be that safe, then- Well, think of the shareholders.

He's making a good point. Wait, as a business major, I'm actually switching right back to Doug. Yeah, on my side. But it feels like a needless cost cut when it's getting this cheap. I think the LIDAR stands are...

Like even if LIDAR costs... That's Doug as my AI tutor trying to make it like... Yeah, yeah.

This is good. Maybe I didn't understand this and then I wanted to stick LIDAR on like my Honda Civic and I didn't... No, it drives itself now. I just paid the 500. It just works.

One more thing, anti-LIDAR thing I want to say. This is my most pro-Elon argument yet, is I read that... One downside of LIDAR is that if everybody has LIDAR, they interfere with each other. So if every car in the road was using LIDAR, the amount of laser, I mean, that sounds so boomer. I don't know. The amount of lasers out there might interrupt the data collection or cause a problem.

Again, I don't know if this is true, but my understanding is that LIDAR could be conflicting if there was like everyone doing it all the time. Again, we'd have to look more into this, but that could be a problem down the road where we go, oh, LIDAR is great. And then there's causes its own issues.

But then all the cars are crashing all the time.

Kind of cool, though, like Fast and the Furious.

Which was created after World War I to help preserve shipping lanes in the United States.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. I like it. I like us not getting into this so we can have something that me and you know.

Yeah, like a little secret. Referencing around it. Like, oh, the Jones Act.

Oh, the Jones Act. Classic Jones Act.

Teach me.

Your AI tutor is loading his Jones Act. Well, I thought this would be interesting to talk about because I've heard about this law coming up in a bunch of videos explaining shipping logistics in like different parts of the US. So I watched a video about like, oh, how Hawaii handles their like shipping between islands or from the mainland.

I do like that it says win a free trip to Mars, but then after that, best bracket wins 100K. So do you get both, or does it imply that if you put together the best... Are you going to show up to Mars with no money?

And then a video about basically the decline of Puerto Rico and how the Jones Act affects Puerto Rico. And then I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And I think at a time when like a, you know, a terrorist especially, but I would say protectionism in general is a big talking point of, you know, the Trump administration, fans of Trump.

When you made this video, are you smarter or dumber?

Like the idea that we're isolating as Americans and becoming better independently and we don't need to rely on this like global economic system anymore. Things like that. Um, so the Jones act is, it started in 1920 was put in place in 1920 in the wake of world war one.

The Jones act is a law that requires any like water based shipping. So even on a river to be done by a ship that was built in the U S owned by a U S company and crude only by Americans.

On the whole, I'm smarter, but it's closer than I'd like to admit.

USA.

Very pro-USA law. And the idea was in the wake of World War I. Sorry, any ship that's delivering to America.

What do you mean?

Any ship that is delivering goods between American ports.

Okay. Yeah. I was like, cause China wouldn't send a ship here with, okay. Sorry. Any American, American to America.

So, so the, the way, the way this law, an example of how this law affects things now is say there's a Chinese shipping company, right?

And they have a boat that they built in Korea. Okay. And that boat picks some stuff up in long beach and it is not allowed to pick up stuff in long beach and then bring it to Seattle.

That's illegal. Nowhere else in America. Nowhere else in America. Can they make a round trip to Cuba and stop there and then...

Okay, so that's sort of the theory here is that beginning in 2012, adults and teenagers have reported marked declines in their ability on math and reading scores and their general ability to concentrate. Difficulty thinking or concentrating, difficulty trouble learning new things. Around 2012 is when it starts to decline. And it's been measurably rising or declining in this case ever since.

Okay, so that's the weird thing is, yes, technically, if they interrupt the trip by going somewhere else first, they can then go to America. Do they just do that probably all the time? No, but they don't because there's not a ton of use cases where that is super effective. There's a similar law that applies to passenger boats, and they do do that.

That's why all the ferries that go from Washington to Alaska stop in Vancouver.

They have to.

Because they're not on Jones Act compliant ships. That's so funny. So basically the idea was if we put this protectionist law into place, the U.S. will always have a thriving maritime shipping industry that is not only good for America on the whole, but is good for military and security reasons. So when we get into a big naval war, we have like a shipping fleet to deploy. Okay.

But what they didn't plan for is that- There were no downsides. And there were no downsides in that- End of the episode. Arriving American shipping industry. The problem we've arrived at is they didn't expect global shipping to like blow up as much as it did in the future after the fact. And the- I love his cute little notebook.

They make fun of him on the yard so much.

For the notebook?

Yeah, because they've never seen him like this. So they watch this show and they're like, he's got his little notebook. Usually he's talking about piss and shit and farting.

That's all they do. But ships started getting built in other places outside of the U.S. because it was way more cost effective to do that.

Can I say a stat? Yeah. 55% of all ship building globally is done in China.

Yeah. And dude, get this, as of 2018, and this was the trajectory was still going up, 91% of ship building happens in China, Korea, and in Japan. So the entire like shipyard industry, like ship manufacturing industry in the U.S., it just doesn't exist anymore. All of these companies went out of business and they don't have enough Jones Act compliant clients to like keep a business open.

There's not enough demand for that. So it was funny because when I was reading through this, there was like the paper that I was reading was from 2020. And it was talking about how few shipyards are left in the U.S. that even make these types of ships anymore. And it was like, and one of the few remaining ones is about to close. It's called like the Philly, the Philly shipyard.

So I looked up the shipyard, the name of that shipyard. Now the Hanwha Philly shipyard.

Don't talk shit about Philly, the Eagles or Hanwha shipping.

So isn't it... It was really funny to like, oh, that happened. It got bought out. And the consequences of this, in short, are that we have a really limited supply of compliant boats that are even able to fulfill this purpose anymore. They're more expensive to use. So...

For any goods that like Hawaii has to get, for example, or coastal states in general, the price of goods shipped on those things is like really, really expensive because there's only a couple companies that even do this type of shipping. So there's a way lower supply. They're way less efficient and they charge way more because they basically have monopolies on the industry.

no competition and uh this this grand like shipyard industry that was meant to produce like having this giant fleet and all these uh these companies like protected actually has crumbled and fallen fallen apart and the people that suffer the most are like a really explicit example is the hurricane maria hit puerto rico and like devastated puerto rico a couple years ago right

And they were turning around ships for the Jones Act?

Yeah. And that was a big thing. They couldn't get emergency supplies because the Jones Act affects those ships. And they were requesting to lift the law for a period. And Trump eventually caved and lifted it for a week. But he said, basically, the companies that benefit from this really don't want us to do this. That's like... And during Hurricane Katrina, they did the same thing.

Science, reading, math, numeracy, literacy.

What is a little surprising to me is up until 2012, you're saying that it was still trending upwards on the whole or it was like stagnant and then it dropped. Like, do you know?

It's like this law is so harmful that during disasters, they literally temporarily remove it. Right.

Otherwise, a few companies will surcharge.

But even like day-to-day, like things like fuel supplies are either way more expensive or less accessible. Mm-hmm. Or these places turn to maybe foreign countries instead because they can offer those goods at a way lower price. So you're losing like the economic benefit from that.

And then also anything that you would ship over water that might be cheaper normally gets pushed into like other transportation industries in the U.S. that are like further burdened. Like the supply of shipping space in the U.S. brought to you by like things like trucks, trains, et cetera, is stretched thinner because the boats aren't really an option.

So I see two options. One is we as a podcast advocate for the repeal of the Jones Act, which would be pretty cool of us. We do like a really powerful. Or two, we start an American-owned shipping company. Take advantage of this monopoly situation.

This is big.

Think about our plan. Why didn't they make a podcast? If the both companies had just opened to Patreon and asked people to work for them.

They could have made some real money.

The reason that I was thinking about this a lot and why I thought it was interesting is because while the benefactors of this would be the remaining people that get to work on a ship in the US and keep your job. Because

I don't have the data. I mean, it looks like 2006, 2012 was pretty flat.

Honestly, if foreign companies were competing, the remaining shipping jobs that exist here, albeit very few, wouldn't exist at all because they'd be getting out-competed by who actually staff ships now, which is like Filipino and like Indian workers who are much cheaper to pay.

And the boats cost way less to make.

Yeah.

But I would say the 2000 that we peaked, but like it's been rising, flattened out, and now it is declining as of 2012. And, you know, that's, I think, do you have any thoughts? Like, Doug, what's your first thought?

Yeah, we have to. And the new, an example of like an industry that existed, basically existed way smaller scale back then is like natural gas. They get moved around on big tanker boats. American tanker boats do not exist. There are none. It literally doesn't exist.

So a place like Puerto Rico that might be able to get like natural gas, which we produce, I don't know if you know this, we've been drilling.

I do know this.

We've been drilling.

We're kind of a natural gas goats. A lot of W's for America.

You can send American gas to Puerto Rico at like a really cheap rate, but because this law exists, that you can't do that. Uh, and then they, so they, a lot of that excess gas would get sold to like other countries and then Puerto Rico's buy their gas from other countries.

Um, there's so much of that happening. There's so much of like, we put, uh, like a restriction on buying Russian oil or something. And then Russian oil just goes to India and then goes from India. Like if you're a restriction, they just go to India and then sell it to Europe. The circumvention of tariffs is so interesting.

Like Vietnam is like thriving because it is not China, but you can just put something from China to Vietnam, slap a sticker on it. And it's like, there's all this ways of getting around tariffs and protectionism and, uh,

Okay, so, okay, with all this being said, I think we can agree this rule's not working, but I personally think that America having some sort of shipbuilding industry is valuable, especially in a world where, you know, they're at tensions with China. Having all of it there is kind of spooky in that world. So do you have any thoughts of, like, what you would do to...

Could you solve this problem for everyone?

Yeah, if I could just solve this quickly right now, this huge geopolitical issue. Well, that's the thing, right? This law actually has nothing to do, it didn't protect that at all. It didn't protect it, it didn't work. And so we're in a worse spot.

Yeah, this makes no sense.

Compared to even back then. I don't really have the answer. Why do I listen to this show?

If we're not going to solve the shipbuilding crisis in America, then why are they tuning in, Aiden?

The only thing I can think of is... Put it on the Patreon.

You would have to... The solution is right on the Patreon. If you're watching, the solution is on the Patreon. You have to do the tier three. We'll tell one person on our boat.

And we'll whisper it to them.

as we send them off into open water uh i i think i i would love to hear a better approach or answer the only thing i can think of is stuff similar like the chips act right like you have to subsidize and like basically invest and spend a bunch of money to make making a ship in the u.s cheap enough to make it competitive that's the only thing you can do and then from what i know Yeah.

Taxing these three states to give the money to small, dying shipping companies. Right. It is ridiculously expensive. Which are price gouging. Yeah. When you put it that way, it's kind of amazing.

There's a funny story about Hawaiian farmers choosing to air in cows to the mainland instead of using boats because of this law.

It's like There's a bunch of scrutiny of the quality of work conditions on boats and the low wages you get to pay these people from the Philippines and India that often staff these boats. It's not like the other side is filled with filled with good. It's just that there's a bunch of people in the U.S., particularly in those places, that suffer because of this decision.

And the only people that benefit are the people who have the monopolies on the remaining shipping left and the people who have jobs at those shipping companies. And at the individual level, I'm sure they would like to keep their jobs. It's kind of, um, we didn't talk about this on an episode, but we did talk about this together.

Was the, like the efficiency of ports in the U S versus like the efficiency.

That was our first conversations. We were like thinking about this, doing this podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a, you know, there was a big, it was when we were at the dinner, like where we were talking about like what we wanted the show to be. And I thought that conversation is very similar. It's like, obviously people want to keep their jobs and do not want to suffer in the wake of a decision that would like repeal this law, right? But how many people are suffering on the other end

Because this law exists. And the aggregate other side, for sure.

Regardless of that, I think this Jones Act is not doing what it was intended to do, which is protect American shipbuilding. I'm actually pro. You're trying to get it over with? It's the villain seat. Drop in the comments. You always are talking shit on my man, G. He's the GOAT.

Yeah, you're with Xi Jinping.

He's a sleeper agent from China here to destroy our shipbuilding industry with this fake propaganda about the ships.

But yeah, I just thought one thing it was making me think of as a final note, and I would love to hear if people in the audience have more thoughts about this too, is this something that had, I think, obviously good intentions were fell apart because of like other factors outside of the law that it could not control. And then the complete purpose of the law was like totally diverted. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I, I do wonder if there's, you know, when you look at protectionist legislation in the future, what are the, like the little loopholes and potential consequences of, of, of that? So I don't know.

It was interesting. Yeah. Doug, you had some drama. You had two dramas.

Let me hear this drama. Okay. I don't know what this topic is.

This is juicy. This is juicy. Guys, buckle in. HR software as a service. Right. Like Adobe subscription? No, like they help with payroll. Like, yeah, it's like you get payroll.

Wait, he's actually got me hooked.

Okay, all right.

Okay.

And pouring a Pepsi in the trash.

That's brutal.

Now they're just full on making these insane things. This is the Kendrick versus Drake of payroll services. Except they're both guys wearing a Patagonia vest.

So he can link it, right?

50 times funnier than it's HR software as a service.

That's fucking awesome. Shouldn't have made fun of Gusto before this. They're doing fine. They've got Hitman. They're doing fine.

Well, I wanted to dig in. Is there more information here about the context of why this is happening or how this is measured? What is the rest of the article?

The deal's spied. Probably to cover up a different thing.

Is he on the lam? Is he running? If you're a deal and you hire a spy, this guy is the goat. This guy really didn't crack under pressure. I know.

I was thinking it was like, surely your job at the HR company is not worth all this. It just can't be. Right.

There's no nationalism or security at stake or something.

Are you going to be broke? I would hate to be broke. No, he puts it on Mars.

Get us the info. Fucking crazy. Do you think the Yardle will figure out who our spy is in their Discord? What? Nothing. I just hope they don't murder and kill our spy because if they figured it out, it would be like a huge...

Nobody has an exact answer on why. But they posit some couple things. One is that people are reading less than average. So the decline of reading is pretty dramatic. Again, right around 2010, 2012. And I want to say, 2010 is the year that... Is the year that smartphones took over 50% of the population. So if it went over... Once you say phone's bad, everyone loses their mind.

Okay. Is it realized?

Do you guys, I figured it might be nice to close out on a couple, like, you know, we wanted to follow up on a couple topics from the previous videos. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, it'd be great.

Just a quick check of the comments. And I think it's worth saying that I think all of us have spent a lot of times reading some of these great comments people put in the last two episodes. Yeah. Yeah. We've been responding and sitting in there and it's been great. I think we super appreciate it.

That was like the number one thing we were looking for for this show is like well thought out, interesting perspectives and thoughts. People will have it on this one, I'm sure. That's cool.

I think from the first episode, because we even touched on it again in this one, was the people dealing with the consequences of going through the education system during COVID. And a lot of people... I think that was probably the thing we got the most personal responses and anecdotes about it. And I would say the pervasive sentiment was basically negative. People talking about their experience.

And a lot of people saying things like this... The conversation on socializing post-COVID really resonated with me because I was a junior in high school in 2020 and can definitely attest that it altered my abilities and desires to socialize.

I was already really introverted and instead of trying to fight against the isolation, I basically took advantage of it as a way to get used to not needing peers around me. I know now that this was probably a mistake and I'm paying the price of my social life for it.

Now that I'm in college, I don't know anyone who also went through the hyper isolationist route as I did, but I'm sure they're out there. And from reading the comments, I think that that experience was very, very similar between people.

A lot of people kind of maybe not even necessarily having the worst time during COVID, but then coming out of it and then trying to get back to normal and then realizing that everything is,

It's the most there's ever been. But I really appreciate it because we got a lot of personal stories that I read through related to that topic. And a lot of stories really similar to that one.

The one thing I wanted to follow up about from the last episode was when we were talking about self-driving cars and the potential of robo-taxis and also the idealistic structure of cities with trains and things like that, a few people came out and said that we're just a bunch of city guys and we don't get it.

And our public transport utopia and the fact that we like trains, all I think we're generally in favor of like, oh, trains are nice to have in cities and a good way to get around. Seem to think that we don't think cars should exist in rural America. And that was actually a surprising amount of comments.

I wanted to clarify something because I thought it was a good demonstration of what I call good faith versus bad faith arguments. And

It's a really simple example of like, I think people jump to the conclusion that because I want like more trains and less cars in cities.

Have you heard that? No. If you say I like pancakes, someone on Twitter will say we fucking have against waffles.

Exactly. What do you think about waffles? Exactly. This is what bad faith is, is when you are listening to us explain a topic or like talk about something and we miss an aspect of the conversation. Like something doesn't get touched on and you assume that because it wasn't touched on that we disagree with it, that we inherently have the opposition opinion to you.

Well, just to clarify, I do want to take your car away. If you live in a rural part of America, I would like you to ride a horse, because that's my image of a cool rural area. You should have horses in rural America.

That is like the obvious conclusion they're leaning towards.

And there's a reason.

There was also obviously a lot of people. The comments weren't as frequent as I thought, but the people we were making fun of that were going to be like, Doug's such a Tesla shill. There was a couple people like that. And it was always like a flag of like, you didn't make it to the part of the episode.

Are you the phone's good guy? Yes. I'm the phone's bad guy. He thinks phones are good for kids in the comments. No, I want to be phone's bad. So phones, and generally it says like our ability to, it's not like reading is getting specifically worse or massively worse. It's that our ability to process information, like take in information, process it and make,

I said this on my stream and I said this in the comments. I responded to some people that said this. When you're taking the position of like, trying to find some defense of what Tesla's doing. It's the harder one for the audience that we're gonna attract and have. It's harder to do. It's very easy to be the guy that's like, hey, Tesla sucks.

And it makes for a much better podcast to have people having differing opinions.

I actually thought a good litmus test for this is if you've made it this far in the episode... and you have a comment you want to make, put two asterisks just at the end of your comment, whatever it is, and it's just a sign that you heard this part of the episode.

I just want to see. You're trying to do the deal thing.

You're trying to honeypot the comment. No, no, no. I just want to see. I just want to see. This one time, I won't ask for it again, but that conversation came up a lot. And I thought I'd clarify is like, I think, I don't know if I've ever met anybody in my entire life that has said, let's get rid of all the cars in like rural America and suburbia. Like legitimately has that opinion.

No, I don't know either.

And I was like, so why would that be ours? And the idealistic form of these things, I think, is like, okay, well, you have a really good public transportation system that lets people basically choose to have a car or not if they really want one. Because I think the way cities are structured now, like in LA, you basically have no choice.

In practice, it's not literally a tax, but it is a tax on every person. Because you have no choice, you have to pay for your car, pay for your maintenance, pay for your insurance. And those are expenses that I guess freedom... I don't know, the freedom of choice is giving you. It's not really a choice at all. And the idea is providing city infrastructure that frees up people from that decision.

And on that note, I'd like you to leave your angriest comment you can. Put three hashtags before it.

You're weak. If you're a three hashtagger, first dibs on the Jones Act boats. You just get the spot. Come out.

That's pretty much it.

He will eat the entire thing.

No, but you've been saying off camera that it's going to be you. I also bit the styrofoam one. I'll split it with you.

It's almost like when your brain turns on and has to work a little bit, we've sort of pushed past that. And they point to a lot of things. One of them they say is not even that it's phones, but it's infinite scrolling on media.

Yes.

To where it kind of like, anytime you get in discomfort, you just move on to the next thing. Your brain does not get comfortable sitting in in the discomfort of thought.

Again, yeah, go for it. Yeah. Could I posit my, I'll give my- What's Aiden's theory on intelligence?

Because this is something that I've thought a lot about self-reflecting. I feel dumber in some ways than I used to be when I was younger. Actually.

And the biggest thing that I noticed was as I've gotten older, my ability to speak in the way I want and instantly come to the words and ways I want to describe things and explain things has gotten less sharp over time, particularly in, I would say, the last five to six years. I feel like I was actually better at finding the words to explain things and speak to people when I was younger.

He's been weirdly quiet about Mars. Have you noticed in the past few years? Because he kind of... You know the whole thing with him blowing past Tesla deadlines? He used to be blowing past the Mars deadline. And we'd be like, we're going to Mars this year. We're going to Mars this year.

And I think that tracks really directly in my mind with the amount that I read. Because I barely have read up until this year. So maybe before this year, I had not read a whole book in maybe five or six years. And my habit of reading like every day obsessively has been gone since basically the beginning or middle of high school.

And I think reading, uh, in general, or maybe if you, if you intently listen to audio books, I think there's, there is some, uh, scientific support for, uh, listening to audio books actually is very similar to reading. I think the problem is, are you actually paying attention to what you're listening to in the same way that you have to pay attention when reading? Right.

Like I've seen Ludwig listen to audio book and it's not,

His eyes are glazed over. You can just phase out while something happens to be on, right? But if you are intently listening to audiobooks, I think it might be the same. And I think that is the number one thing I could point to in my own life is when I was reading every day, I think I had a way better vocabulary and quickness in the way that I was able to access and explain things.

But that aside, my other part of this that I think absolutely has to do with this is it is related to phones, and phones are, like, the way this problem is dispersed in my mind. But the constant, like... activation you have access to all the time by scrolling things like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or just the internet in general. Or for me, it's YouTube.

He did say something. And we've left it behind. I think today. He said Mars in... 20 years, maybe 30. I'm only kidding.

I listen to a ton of YouTube and podcasts and how I have to listen to those things almost all the time. I always am putting something on. And I think when you're pushing your brain like and you are constantly giving it... It's constantly in a state of stimulation. I think things that stand out are fewer and far between, and things become harder to retain and memorize.

A lot of the way that you memorize or hang on to things is strong emotional responses to those things. So if you... Say I did something wrong. Like I did, I betrayed you in some capacity. And there's two versions of this playing out. The version where you don't realize anything happened and we never talk about it.

Is he admitting to something?

And I've hidden it from you for years and you don't really know about it. That version, every day your life is worse.

But there's some big lesson. There might be something that I have to learn from that or take away from that that I might not take away because there's no big emotional moment that forces me to confront it. But if you got mad at me and we got into an argument, like a real argument, which we've never really done before. We will. It would be very distinct and fresh in your mind.

That's something that heavily influences memory is like the emotional, maybe the emotional state. I'm sure there are better ways to describe this, but basically the state of being that you're in when you're consuming the information.

That's four years ago.

But if you're in like a constant baseline state of information being spit at you all the time, and there's nothing to differentiate it from every other moment of your day, it's really hard to actually remember and retain it. And I've been talking about this a lot with some other friends because I think my memory has gotten worse.

Finally, a realistic timeline. I was talking, we have this Discord now that we started the show, and I think I put in that chat, I was like, as much as an Elon hater as I am, part of me gets excited every time he drops the Mars deadline. Oh, dude, I mean, the Mars would be sick.

And I was like, I don't think I have like early onset dementia or something like that. I hope. I think it's just a consequence of the way that I am constantly constantly engaging in messages, consuming media. Like, it's a consequence of my phone, my job, all these things. Do you feel this way, Doug?

Is this something that you've experienced? Or what's your experience with this over the past, let's say, since 2012 to now?

By the way, wait, one Emmett Shearer thing. I used to work with this guy. He would be in meetings where executives are presenting him important things they've worked a whole month on, and he's on his phone playing Hearthstone. This is a fact I will stand. So for him to call out, He was breaking out of the psychic prison. Yeah. All right, Tom, I'm sorry.

Yeah, the Twizy. With no shame. Dude, it's like basically a golf cart. It's so funny. This is it. Oh, wow. Yeah, no, that's cool. But we, yeah, I just, uh, I was looking at the same thing. Like what would it cost to like import one of these cars that we don't have? But, uh, yeah, but.

I drive my Twizy to work. I make a souffle. I spend 14 hours making souffles.

I rolled my arm.

I'm a greedy brother. You're trying to bring our souffle to McCafe. Yeah.

You got to. That's where the money is. You get the combo of McCafe and souffle. I don't want to drive a Twizy anymore.

Okay.

It wasn't that bad. It's not that bad.

Why did you say that so casually?

super related to this.

This is not running over dogs. This is radar on a street.

It's doing, okay, it's doing both of these things?

Doug is doing what he normally does, which is drawing.

This used to be ours.

And the roads are built for this.

And he's two steps ahead.

This is a strong, I'm beginning to see the direction that this is moving in.

Or other things all together. Or other things. Yeah.

Just doesn't slow down.

Have you seen the clip of him walking off the stage and leaving his kid behind?

Kill me.

And there it is.

No, that's what I'm saying.

Everybody needs to be reminded about the prisoner's dilemma, I think. I will be driving a tank in 2035. That's what it's going to take. That's going to be awesome.

You can't beat it. You weave in between. You're Renault Twizy making contact with an F-150 exploding.

It's not what happened. This is a good exercise in correcting the narrative because I would like, like I said, my parents lost me in the grocery store.

We'd have to rename it to Gulf of Australia. We just renamed it. I wouldn't want to go through that whole process.

You're the train guy.

He looks like he could be the train guy. Yeah, you're not building it. He's got the hair of a train guy.

Just a good guess. Half the dogs die to the trains. I've kind of been running some numbers. Well, the cameras on the trains are really grainy, so people don't feel very bad about it.

Just really inconvenient, all things considered. But welcome back to the second episode of Lemonade Stand. That was our callback. Welcome.

Yes. It's the guy with the diamond slide.

It's, It's so funny. It's like adding another lane doesn't solve traffic. But theoretically, if you have like 50 lanes, it does solve traffic. Yeah, of course. That'd be sick. Nobody ever talks about that.

50 lanes.

You sold me.

Where do we land? The end of this whole debate is that we should add more lanes. More lanes. More lanes. More lanes. More horses. We've done it. We said we'd solve it by the end of the episode. Oh, we're going to number eight for sure this week.

Just a backpack all around.

It looks like a video game, and that removal of the human element is real. And I do want to be clear. This is not running over dogs.

I love that that whole episode led up to that.

I do like the idea of this like CCP secret service equivalent like scoping the place for bugs and it's just sorting through fake lemon and lime canned sodas.

That's crazy.

Bicycle path? No, no, no, no.

The sports watching continues.

Grandchildren can sell them to the Saudis. Look at it. Look at the butterfly knife. It spins, it's blue. It's pretty blue.

That's your best? That's the way. You do a better one. No, that's not. You're on a road trip.

All right.

100%.

You're really concerned? That's a segment. We can do the death of regional accents.

It's a company expense. It's just good business.

Absolutely. Look, I get that AI is going to be disruptive, but I think it's way more disruptive. Can I ask a question about your dad? Because you bring up your dad a lot when we're talking about anything serious. You're like, I talked to my dad about it. Yeah, yeah. Your dad is Canadian?

The arrogance of thinking we're up for a podcast-y on our first episode.

Yeah, I'm going to show your home and address and your dad and where he lives. You can draw on it.

I commute from Toronto. I got a $2.5 million shack in Toronto.

That's for religious reasons. But anyway, you know, Canada's real estate market, if you don't know, is like one of the worst in the world. Basically every major city, the prices have gotten astronomical. They had no 2008, 2009 housing bubble. Like they had it, but they didn't pop it the way we had it here. So it just kept growing.

And it's continued to grow. And at this point, like, any Canadian you talk to talks about how they'll just never own a home. Essentially at their wages.

Such an easy role. I'm Atrioc. I do a lot of this stuff already normally. But then these two guys had really... I like talking to them about all this stuff. And so we sort of had this idea of doing a podcast. And I think it's going to be pretty fun.

Yeah.

Just being in America.

I've got a Canadian friend, and I have been making 51st State jokes, obvious jokes, right, for a little while now. And then recently, he's like, hey, I don't think it's funny anymore. He told me just privately. He's like, I know you don't mean it, but I don't like it anymore. Because it's seeming more and more serious politically.

It seems like Trump said it as a joke at first, and now he keeps saying like... He keeps calling it Governor Trudeau. He keeps saying like... You know, and so they're like, they just don't want to have their sovereignty threatened so regularly by the neighbors themselves with all the nukes. Canada has no nukes, by the way. So I wanted to bring this up too. I got two things I wanted to bring up.

One is that this is the craziest outcome that I ever could have expected. Recently, like a few days ago, a Canadian politician went to the UK and they're trying to get a deal where the UK's nuclear umbrella applies to Canada. I have a... Oh, my God.

So, they're going to, like, UK and France to make a world where, theoretically, the UK would be threatening the United States with nuclear war if the United States invaded Canada. Wow. Like, how crazy...

And I just didn't expect Canada specifically to get involved in this. I didn't expect this to become a Canadian. Were you double gunsing us? I'm picking a side. Oh yeah. Okay.

Well, no wonder things are getting worse here. There's so many damn Canadians. Yeah. If they would just stay in their own state,

So that's great. I want to bring that up. That brings us up politically. So, you know, you flash backwards one year, everyone in Canada is so doomer. It's just like it's over, right? People are depressed. Housing prices too high. Jobs too low. They're mad at Trudeau. They're mad at Trudeau because he did such a good job.

And, you know, there's fuck Trudeau signs everywhere. And it's become a foregone conclusion that him and his party were going to lose. That's the idea. And then this 51st state thing starts happening. And it's the most shocking poll. I mean, the conservative government is still leading and I think will still win. but it's become like way closer.

But I'm really excited. I'm excited about it because I think before we even talked about this, we were just talking. I was just messaging you constantly about AI stuff and asking about like your thoughts on tech, because you're really deep into it. Hey, we've been talking about politics, and it's like, oh, this could be fun.

He's not running again. So he's getting someone else. I think he's getting Mark Carney, but yeah,

You know, it reminds me of, you know, George Bush was a divisive president with pretty low polling numbers by the end, but after 9-11, it was like 98%. It was like the country was united.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So right now the polling is like really rallying behind it. Cause it feels like from the Canadians, you know, from my side, I still think of it as like, it's a little mean spirited, but it still feels like a joke as an American. I don't, I can't imagine we have tanks rolling in Toronto from the Canadian side. It sounds like they're, they're like really pissed off.

Like really rallying behind this idea of like, stop calling us a state, you know? And I would love to get more of your thoughts.

It doesn't make any sense.

I mean, I've never seen a bad time historically where Europe wants to spend a whole fuck ton of money on military. I think that historically is always a good thing.

And I think Trump's really cooking something here. Germany just had this thing called a debt break where they can't spend more than their budget. They're breaking it. It's been a long debate. They're finally easing that break to spend 500, 800 billion euros on military. They're going to start doing this militarization of Europe. And I think that's base. That's awesome. It's going to be great.

The more the merrier. This has never gone wrong before. It's never gone wrong, dude. I think when Germany militarizes, the world smiles. That's the old saying, right?

I'm not a big student of history. I just sort of go off the vibes.

Yeah, that one's an interesting one, though. It's even more complicated because I feel like the people of Greenland keep saying they don't want to be Danish or American. They kind of want their own thing eventually. Right now, they're still Danish-ish.

Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. That one's tough. I don't know.

Yeah.

I saw a good video on it. They talked about how, you know, because some of the ice caps are melting, the real estate up there is becoming more incredibly valuable. It's going to open like shipping open shipping lanes and there's a ton of rare earth metals. So I feel like there's is some sort of global gold rush and I don't fully understand. I don't know where I stand.

I really haven't made up my mind on where I stand on it, but I do think it's complicated given that there's like three distinct parties that all kind of want ownership.

What are you talking about? You have a massive platform and you do text them all the time.

Introducing the AI small dick segment. Yeah, there will be that. He's got nine pages on that right here. Yeah. It's going to be fun. It's going to be good. It's going to be a good time. I think, and you guys probably agree, so I'm going to speak for you. Okay. All right. I'm going to do that a lot. Hearing someone talk about something they're really passionate about is really fun. It's just fun.

i agree that he's accelerating the motion a lot but that that is the motion like we we can't afford this just straight up we it doesn't it can't continue in its current i guess has to change that's funny because i mean my thoughts is uh i think that's super interesting and i like your pov but you guys talked about it like this was generous or whatever and in my mind it was like and i'm i'm

I'm like a patriot, dude.

It's self-serving, yeah, yeah. It's self-serving, and I don't think that unwinding it is to our benefit. I think you're right that as these economies, you know, China is now a bigger trade partner with most of the globe than America is.

Like, the fact that they're not stepping up to this doesn't make much, you know, Brazil is a much bigger economy than all these countries are bigger economies, and they want a bigger say, and I think it's going to shift because of that. But I think America trying to unwind it is kind of crazy because it's all helped us. It's all been to our benefit for so long.

Like the system, NATO, the United Nations. Like we say that Europe is spending too much on, or not enough on military because we're spending too much. But it's given us so much power over European decisions. Specifically like if we're like, hey, we want to build our EV industry outside of China. Let's tariff Chinese EVs. Europe just goes along with it. They just do the same thing. Right.

Absolutely no meddling. Yeah.

Famously zero.

You guys have all the unique interests. We're going to bring our own topics and you're going to hear about things from someone.

I'm going to talk about how why Aiden is a massive flake and the damage that causes to people around him. And this is a real joking. This is actually here. So we're going to get into that later. It's called cancellation culture, not cancel culture, cancellation culture. And Aiden's at the forefront.

He fought. It might be one thing soon. That's the big question I have. That's the big question I have. I want to know your dad's thoughts on Canada 51st State. Where is he? Because that's changing everything in Canada right now. Everyone's freaking out over it. You know better than me.

I don't have that take, but I can respect it, right? I can totally see it and make sense. You know, maybe a loss here is offset by a greater gain in the world. If you're all humans, benefit the rising tide. I get that. I actually have no problem with that. The thing that makes me mad is...

Americans that don't realize that the reason that a guy managing a Buc-ee's in Texas makes more than a European doctor is because of these systems of power that have America at the core. They think they can vote to dismantle this stuff. I think they're just born better.

They're gonna feel the punishment from this stuff unraveling as they are more and more not protected from equal competition with the global. I don't think it's fair. I agree it's not fair. But I'm saying as an American who wants a certain thing, it's crazy to not understand the consequences of dismantling this stuff that's all to your benefit.

The CIA was the Ohtani of government agencies. Fire bar. That is fire. They just kept knocking on the bars.

I can tell you that it doesn't matter. We don't have to worry about any of that because AI is going to come in and it's going to replace all of this.

We don't have to worry about the global order because all of our jobs are going to be taken by AI, as Doug's about to explain.

To the future. Hot diggity damn. No other podcast has this, folks. Is this still the cold open?

I, it's funny because I watched a movie from 93 yesterday. And one of the main plot points is this woman trying to get a job as a typist. And like, you just, there's a whole office of people just typing up things. Other people, it's crazy.

I feel like the average user wants to hear more about Aiden's canceling.

Hmm. Did you guys know I used to solder the chips themselves when I worked at Nvidia? They would send me the parts and I would go in my garage. Because we didn't have computers then.

Yeah, it was actually an American-made operation. And I wasn't very fast with them. That's why there were shortages.

Okay, dude.

We have podcasters now.

My dad has worked in the military for 30 years, and then he quit, and he works at a military contractor now. He doesn't really like him. He's ready to leave. He's always had this dream of being a travel agent, and I don't know how to break to him. I've told him softly in many ways, like, oh, that's cool, but it doesn't really exist anymore.

I don't pay them though. You know, it's like, for me, it's always like exposure, exposure, right? An exposure-based economy sounds good.

What if Trump tweets out everyone we owe debt to for exposure? They call it even.

I'm going to make you a star.

I want to talk about this. I'm interested in it right now. I want to talk to you. I want to hear your thoughts.

We need to add a medallion to become a content creator and then that'll fix the problem for the future.

Take on the authority, yeah.

By the time this airs, they could be gone.

I mean, it's probably like Uber, right? It's like Uber and... I'm assuming? I mean, that's crazy.

I wish Twitch would hire some of these people for their mobile app because it sucks so much.

We created some jobs out of Twitch.

I got a lot to say. I want to talk about it. This is very interesting. First thing I want to say is I think it's cool to have a techno-optimist who can articulate your points on this podcast because I think... The vibe I get from my audience, especially when I'm talking to them, and they're younger people in America, most of them, is doomerism, right? They're very doomer. Yes.

And I don't know necessarily where I stand. I'm going to bring up some points they might make, right, when I talk to you. But I think it's cool that you have this idea because I don't like the idea that everyone is constantly doomer in general. I just think it's self-serving. So self-defeating. Yeah, it's a bad snowball.

And there's a really big load on our collective human mind.

We can't get rid of my point though. I want to, I want to jump in. Cause okay. I agree. Like, I am not a Luddite by any... I don't follow Ludwig, nor... I'm not a Ludwig fan. I'm not a Ludwig fan. Actually, just say fuck Ludwig. Let me start by saying that.

Let me just... If it was any other technology, my instant response is exactly what you said. I know that if you invent the tractor, some guy loses his job, but the farm gets bigger, we get more... Whatever. I know, always historically...

I think people are maybe not correctly and nobody really knows, but are intuiting that AI is a little bit different, that it feels different because it feels like the first time where maybe you just don't need a human at all. Maybe it's like, it's not that we're making this thing convenient so the human can do a higher order task. It's like the human has now truly been lapped.

And I'm not saying AI is there yet. And I'm not, I don't know exactly where I stand on this, but I think it's like, this one's different, is what I'm trying to say. And I want your question on that, because this one feels to me different than- I have thoughts.

And then with AI- Can it be company Aiden and company Atrioc?

Can I just say, it's very cute that you have notes because whenever I do this stuff live and I don't know what I'm talking about, I just make it up. But you're referencing.

I sell it to a private equity firm and I'm on Bermuda Beach.

Interesting. That's when Donald Trump said, Aiden's great.

I just want to drill down on the question, though, because I fully agree that if it's like artist versus artist plus AI, that second one's more productive.

I get it. But I don't know what happens when there's the leap of why have the human part of it at all. I guess I don't understand that a human can't be completely lapped to the point where they are cut out. Maybe you have one human as an overseer or manager, but I don't see... I see the transitional period. That's what's happening right now. Writers with AI can research stuff really quickly.

It's great. They're improved. Sure. But I don't see what happens when I don't need to hire a writer. Because I hire people for videos and stuff. And if they use AI, they can get stuff done. I don't see what happens when they... Because AI just feels to me different. That's what I'm saying. It just feels... it feels to me like it's better at all of the human things.

So I don't, it's like almost inconvenient to have a human.

This is still cold open.

I want to make a counterpoint to my own point and just argue against myself is that people said this about chess when computers got better than humans at chess. Completely better. There's no human on earth that can be even like a calculator, like a phone at chess. It gets better. Yeah. Chess has never been bigger. People, you know, at the end of the day still want to watch humans play.

They still enjoy the art and sport of it. And the entire industry of chess has never made more money nor been bigger than decades after computers lapped humans. So I don't think it's unreasonable to say that could happen for a lot of things where AI is completely better than all of us, but we still want to do human thing. We want to watch a human made play or a movie or whatever. I get that.

But for the totality of industry, so many things are just profit driven and they will pick the best option. And I'm worried that if humans are not involved in that. I even agree with you that it could be a good thing, but we have to restructure society. We just, our system, I don't think will work in that situation. That's, that's.

You're just making the saddest possible story, but I agree.

Yeah, I mean, you guys brought up two points that are very interesting, which is you talked about saving lives from cars being able to self-drive, for example. Right. And you mentioned jobs, and it's like 37 of 50 states, the number one job is truck driving. The number one job. And the second self-driving trucks are good, all those jobs disappear instantly.

Well, again, like I said, I'm glad you're talking about it because I do think there's many, many, many people, especially those that will watch the show, that don't see that side of it at all. They don't even have both sides of the argument. They have one side of the argument and they're really deep into it.

Yeah, I mean, so timeline everyone's not doing. He's like, he asked for tariffs, right? And then there's 30 days. It starts out, and then immediately before it happens, Canada says we're going to have... more guards on the border and a fentanyl czar. And then Mexico said the same thing.

And it's easier to say, well, we're in good, comfortable positions. But I think it's fair. I think it's interesting. And I... I want to talk to you more because I want to share that optimism because I don't like the idea that this technology is so different that I should just be sad. You know what I'm saying? I have used AI for research. It's been helpful.

I think I'm close to where you're at, but I still have... because I can just see the pain that it's going to cause, like guaranteed going to cause some people.

But I'll tell you, he's getting more pain than anyone. And that's me when I invite Aiden to something and he flakes on me. This is what I've been really staying up at night over a truck.

Absolutely. Look, I get that AI is going to be disruptive, but I think it's way more disruptive to have an event like a fun dinner or something. And then Aiden cancels on you last minute. And Business Insider did a very interesting article.

Wait a second. Please write fuck Aiden. This thing on the rise of cancellation culture, which is basically they interviewed some people, they did some studies, and it looks into the idea that people now more than ever have been flaking. It's a post-COVID thing.

People have been more than ever resorting to, you know that good feeling you get when there's an event you don't want to go to and then last second you cancel on it? Well, people have called that, you know, self-care or whatever. This study goes into the idea that, hey, it's actually kind of negative long-term for your mental health, for our ability to form friendships, for our loneliness.

Like, there's a loneliness epidemic. It shows average time spent alone is like at an all-time. We had the COVID peak, and then it dropped a little bit, and it's going right back up. Like, people are... compared to the decade before COVID, astronomically lonely. They're astronomically more alone, more time at home, more time ordering in, more time.

And I wanted to get a sense from a serial canceler like Aiden. It's actually a joke. I actually want to get your thoughts because you are somebody who I think is the exact opposite of this. You make a point to do all this stuff and you do a lot of social events.

yeah so i wanted to get your sense of whether you thought that was a benefit to you or why you do it because i think there's a lot of people who fall into this mindset that i talk about here which is like um it can feel so scary or anxiety inducing or whatever to just leave your house sometimes it's so comfortable we have built really palaces to ourselves lately and um why it's worth it to leave.

I want you to sort of make the pitch because you're the one I think who does it the most. I think we hang out at our house a lot. I go out, but like I... Have you tried out video games? Yeah, video games are awesome. And I don't know. And I like my reading. I like watching stuff. So I want to hear from your POV why you're so against this, why this is not your attitude at all.

It like, it's supposed to be canceled on for sure. Everyone knows that.

So the big two they have in the article are... this busyness culture, this idea of like people feel busier than ever. They feel like they have to climb the economic ladder more. They feel like there's, you know, we're in a spot where jobs are harder to get. Everyone's trying to be a little bit performative busy and also is busier. And so the idea that the first thing you can cut is

I'm with friends. You can cut, you cut the superfluous stuff that you can always.

And in one way it might be the most meaningful part.

So there's that. And then there is more anxiety. So, so again, people just self-report dramatically more anxiety and They think their friends... Since COVID, you're saying, right?

So people will report thinking their friends want to hang out with them less than they do. If you ask the friends, they would say 80% to 85% or whatever. The people would say 40% to 40%. People are generally more in their own heads. They think they're less important to social events they go to. They think they don't need to be there.

And they also think that if you have a friendship with somebody, if I cancel on you, my general thought would be like, we're friends. It doesn't matter. And it probably doesn't. But what this article goes into is like, it sort of does, like it does add up over time. All these lost encounters are like deposits in a friendship bank that aren't earning interest.

You're just not, you're not paying into that bank. And over time, your savings at retirement are a lot.

I'm so glad I wasn't a student at the time. I just feel like for kids, it feels like it was a life changer.

I think if you got two years of Zoom school in junior, senior college, or high school, you should get your money. It's not fair. You didn't get anything or even close to what I think you deserve or what you earned.

This thing talks about striking up conversations with strangers and how it says, you know, if you're thinking about, hey, I want to say something to that stranger, you get nervous and don't want to do it. They're going to think I'm annoying. But if someone does it to you, generally, you're like, oh, this is kind of cool. It's like fun. Exactly. It's a mismatch reward system.

I did that at a coffee shop this week. You do it all the time. You actually do it too much. You are the annoying one. No, no, no, no, no, no. There's not an Uber driver who's not tired of this guy in Los Angeles.

Most people hate when Uber drivers talk. Uber drivers hate when you talk.

It's like a 30 year low or something.

It's so funny if you talk about COVID with anyone who's not a consecrated, they're always universally negative. But then consecrators have to do that thing where they're like, Oh, yes. This is bad. All of their numbers, like 10x.

Talk to Ludwig about COVID. He made millions. It worked out so well for him.

It's a fentanyl damage panel. It's all the Sackler family. Three different opinions.

And we got a lot of pop-ups.

I think harder. And I also want to give one more note because we don't talk about this because, because of being content creators, I guess, but it's also more expensive. Like, I heard this from a lot of... I talk to people about it. I talked to my old friend, Jay Witts, who is... He used to go to a lot of basketball games. He told me, like, you got a family now. It's just really expensive.

Like, it's just... Everything's... Like, the prices have gone way up. It's hard for him to get out. And I think when you talk to a lot of young people, especially, it's like, every restaurant's expensive. You know, a lot of things that normally would be a good third place have become monetized and more expensive. And so they're running out of spots.

Now, I don't think that... I think that's still a little bit of a cop-out in that you can always find something cheap to do. You can always... I think a lot of things we do- I think it's that- Drop off the battle bus. But that's part of it.

Play Mario Kart Wii.

It's not a den of socialization.

You said it well, I would love to hear some people's responses, especially because we plan to do follow-ups on some of the,

Comments in future episodes.

It's all about cream pies.

They're paying the most, right? Guys, this was really fun. I really liked this first episode. I had a good time. Want to do some handshakes?

Great stuff.

Here's the deal. Zoom out. Tariffs are problematic, right? This is like a weird thing.

But like for Canadians, it seems like the bigger issue is that all of these tariffs seem to be in service of turning the country into the 51st state. He keeps talking about that and like in a less and less joking way.

So I'm really interested because I don't talk to a lot of Canadians because they're gross and they disgust me, but I would love to hear, like, do you have a Canadian POV on like what that means?

We're going to talk about this later.

ditch and we're going to make Canada pay for it. It's well known Canadians can't climb.

With a bag full of fentanyl, which I do occasionally.

They're just driving over the border for Costco.

That would put the dealers out of business.

If you think the cartels can offer remotely comparable experience to a Costco... The consumer will choose the Costco every time. It's just a better experience.

The guy with 19 disguises on his 30th.

Hey, what are Slime's thoughts on the Ukraine war? I'd love to hear.

As I was hoping. Yeah. I want to,

I made a video game with a Canadian developer. And so we got paid. We got our pay balance theme. And he's like, I need to pay you now because every day it sits here, you're losing money as the Canadian dollar devalues. It is so bad. It was like losing big percentages of what we got paid.

Aiden pulls us aside at the beginning. He's like, hey, we can't be eligible for podcast awards.

I just think this is really funny because like two weeks ago we said people's attention spans are getting too short and we have to like bring real rigor. I'm literally texting on my phone right now. As we're talking in the show and you want to add a one minute lightning round topic to the Cut. Cut to me.

Let me just go on this real quick.

So Donald Trump would like you in response to that.

to build a factory in America. I know. Or for the demand to create a factory in America. I'd love that. That is what he would like so that you would do this. And I can... How much could it cost, Michael?

But I want to steel man this argument, okay? The idea is that all our manufacturing has gone to these different places. We want to bring it back. If we make it too expensive to buy from there, eventually someone will build here. It's the idea.

Now, we've talked about the Jones Act and how that stuff can end up backfiring and American consumers end up paying more for like a less quality product where they build up. But not even that. So if you are a person with a bunch of money and you're thinking, okay, well, I guess I'll build this factory. What you have to think about is in longer term cycles, more than a couple of years.

So you're like, okay, if I'm going to build this, then in four years or whatever, these tariffs better still be around because if they go away or they change, then I'm left with this unprofitable American factory that I spent all my money on. And then everyone's back to buying stuff from China for cheaper. Yeah.

So the tariffs have to be truly ironclad and rock solid and long-term and built with that in mind. Now, what we've seen so far is so chaotic and so scatterbrained and so up and down. And so it makes it impossible for any businessman to realistically get the funding, the agreement, the board approval to be like, all right, well, I'm going to take the risk and I'm going to build this in America.

That's even if this would work. Now, there's other many, many

And this is applied to every good, not just merchandise, every good from nearly every country at the exact same time and with no prior even leak of what the numbers would be. Again, I've been watching this very closely up to this day. As of last night, the market was in panic because they don't know what he's going to announce.

He comes out and all of these numbers hit at once and the market was up today and then this got announced and it tanked. I mean, just fucking plummeted. You guys are doing terrible in the stock market competition. Yeah, we are. And you're doing fine? I'm doing okay, but I'm down. Everyone's down from this. This type of unreliability is one of the worst. I don't agree with tariffs in general.

I think there's a long history. Again, if you go back to the 1920s, into the great 1930s and the Great Depression, they had the Smoot-Hawley tariff act at the exact same time. where they thought it would bring prosperity. It didn't. It also didn't last very long because people hated it so much they had to get rid of it, which is exactly what people who are looking at this are thinking.

I'm not going to make big plans around these tariffs because they're going to be so unpopular, they're going to get rolled back.

And so it's just causing chaos. So in the meantime, it only causes damage. It causes higher price in the short term. And this is the second thing I want to say. I know you're going to bring up something, but I want to show one more thing. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you know this, but Japan, China, and South Korea historically are not friends. Yeah. Usually they don't get along.

Japan and China have so many problems. There's like huge anti-Japan sentiment in China.

Like us in Cuba, I feel like. The fact that they are teaming up in response to these tariffs should be the biggest alarm bell siren. We have tariffed every, like if we had a strategic plan to just target China to get some manufacturing back and we got all our allies in on it and we like work together, I could see, I'm not a big tariff fan, but I could totally see it.

But when you go, you try to attack everybody 500 V1, you just, they become friends with each other and not you. It's very isolating. I mean, I don't know how, I just want to say is like, if you're out there and you hate the woke or whatever, it is not woke to dislike this. It's okay to dislike this.

Like, even if you're the most, I have people that I read in my feed who are the most hardcore, like Republican businessmen. They fucking hate this. Everybody that I can read who cares about the US economy is like against this. So I'm trying to understand that like, I don't see the benefit. I would love to have a better understanding of the benefit.

Maybe you want to argue it or tell me what you've heard.

Yes. It's Elon Musk putting $45 billion on himself saying this company is worth what he bought.

Low key, I think it's smart.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. What I want to say is I think the timeline was a little bit skewed on that in that these tariffs were gone before World War II. Okay. You talked about how manufacturing helped us.

Right. And our manufacturing peak is after World War II. So the tariffs were gone before World War II. Interesting. We have a manufacturing boom during the end of the Great Depression into World War II. And our peak is right afterwards when everyone else is dead. Not dead, but actually some of them are dead.

Europe's blowing up and we're building. People, World War II people. What I would say is that our manufacturing peak is when we are the leader in making the best stuff. When we are competitive. When you add up all these roadblocks and tariffs, what you're really doing is you're taxing your own citizens to provide a jobs program for this specific industry.

And you're doing it briefly because it's only as long as people will stomach these tariffs, which means it's very risky for someone to make that investment choice because they know it's so... People don't like paying more for shit. It's a hidden tax. So usually they'll get... I mean, like the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which is the last tariffs we had in America. They were so deeply unpopular.

They extended the Great Depression. They made everything more expensive. They got rolled back.

They're called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. It's a tariff act. And it was in the 1934. And at the beginning of the Great Depression, they were like, all right, we're going to solve this problem that, you know, everything's getting bad. We're going to do a bunch of tariffs and it's going to protect all our industry and keep our jobs. It did the opposite effect. It extended it. It made it worse.

People couldn't afford anything. The people started laying people off. The Depression got worse and extended. So after about three, four years, they abandoned the tariff act. It got scrapped. And that's when we actually began this whole resurgence boom into World War II. Part of that is government spending on World War II.

I wanted to say something about Saudi princes! Dang it!

So the idea that the only way we can be competitive is if we block our competition is, to me, scary. It says that we have given up the fact that we could even be competitive. And what happened instead... Now, this is a problem for hollowing out the middle class. We have to figure this out. But it's not like America stopped making everything. It's that we moved up the value chain.

We started making... High-tech stuff. We made Boeing planes. We made high engineering stuff. We stopped making toasters. We stopped making t-shirts. We stopped making... Those things got exported to different countries. Because I don't think one country can make everything in the world. I think you want to be at the high end of the value chain. You want to make the best and highest in stuff.

And generally, the most profitable countries in the world. Like, I'm thinking of like... Why do I always, what is Holland? What is Dutch? Netherlands. Yeah. The Netherlands, you know, they have ASML. They make the most high-end lithography machines. It's a big part of their economy. They're not making t-shirts and toasters there. They have a growing economy. They make the highest end stuff.

Usually the wealthier countries move up that chain. So the idea that we're going to hurt all our trade partners, we're going to tax our own citizens so we can bring back the toaster jobs and the t-shirt jobs at the expense, that scares me. And again, I think alliances matter. I think trade partners matter.

Also, we have, before this, had relatively low tariffs, but we didn't have the lowest tariffs. And the countries at the highest part of, like if you had a chart of like lowest tariffs to highest tariffs, the ones with the highest are like the countries that have terrible economies. It's like Bangladesh.

It's like they're at the bottom of the ladder and they're trying to protect their small little industries as best they can, but they're not competitive in anything. So for me, this feels similar to the Jones Act where like it's a misguided attempt to protect American shipbuilding that ends up with Americans paying more for shipping. We're not, and you're not even getting good ships.

It's not like we're working. I don't think it works. That's why I am anti-tariff most generally and especially a non-targeted A blanket one just feels like we're trying to get everything everywhere all at once to be built in America while pissing off everybody and having no friends that want to make, that's why I'm against it. I just, that's my counter to Howard Lennick is basically briefly.

But I could see some targeted, you know, I'm not inflexible, but that's my counter.

The woke liberals are trying to bring down your Liberation Day. Today is Liberation Day and I will not have my way.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, it's like if they rolled out a Terminator in the stores, people would be like, I don't want to buy that. But if it made your selfies a little cuter. They would buy it all in over 50. Like, this is the proof. If you just make it... This is all it takes.

Did he pay us for this 30-minute merch ad for a moment? That's true. You're going through each individual product and talking about how great those are.

Smoking the pack watch on Houston.

Are you playing a clip?

What if they got it wrong and they're spending the money on more homelessness? Oh, right.

If you stay in this... We'll give you money.

In a minute, I want to say one thing. We talked about this like a week ago, the movies thing. I looked at the data all the way back to 1912. America has had the number one movie every single year of human history of cinema until now, until this year.

We did it for electricity in the,

I don't have high speed internet in downtown Los Angeles.

2020 doesn't really count because there wasn't any money in it and we didn't have any theaters open. But outside of that, that's crazy.

No other country has done it. No other country could possibly do this.

Is this the one that's built on Nordstrom parking lot or whatever?

Yeah, I think one of the examples he had was like there was money for public housing, I believe in LA, for like affordable built housing. And they had, I don't know, 80 to 100 million. And they flash forward a few years. Half of it is built. The rest of it's not even built. And it cost... I think 700,000 per unit. And these are really small affordable houses.

They could have bought a full size house in, it's almost a full housing price. Like it was way too expensive and slow. So even though they had the plan to build some kind of socialized housing, it was over budget, over time, and too expensive per unit to even be justifiable.

Yes.

I did it.

I mean, I agree with all this.

I just want to say, I think it's easy in a lot of issues to blame the people as quote unquote evil or like they're morally wrong. And I think we just have a system of really horrendous incentives. And I don't blame someone in an environment where in a world, in a country where

you know, money and financial security is so important, so different for your quality of life, to wanting their house to go up in value. Yeah, of course. And so, you know, and it's hard. I mean, I do blame the politicians, guys.

It's hard to blame the politician when the only people that show up to their town council meetings are... 200, 300 people who all tell them, don't build this.

I think, this is going to sound crazy, we're solving it right now. I'm being a little hyperbolic, but I think his book, I think talking about this, I think us explaining it, he makes this case. He was on a podcast talking about this. If enough people sort of

see this and reward a politician with more attention or support for standing up to the people in the room and saying, hey, listen, there's 200 of you in here and I understand you're my constituents and I understand you want to stop the building for whatever reason you say, but there's also 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 more people who will benefit from this being built and they're my constituents too.

They might move to this city and the housing price might go down. Millions of people might be benefited. So I have to think about all that, and I have to... If people are rewarded for that, people understand that, and voters reward that, then they have an incentive to do that. Right now, nobody cares or notices or even understands this problem.

So I think explaining the problem, I think, I mean, what you're doing makes a lot of sense, and I think people who have not heard of this will understand. I actually think, maybe it's naive, but I think it actually does help if enough people... If you can...

articulate a problem really easily and digestibly, I think you've done a good thing because people can understand, explain to their friends, word of mouth spreads, and then there is an incentive. Then you get a win as a politician when you talk about this and you stand up for this and you build it.

So that's funny that he thought that. But I read these documents and it was like he thought that after the police showed up, he ran into a bathroom, flushed the toilet, wiped his phone. And then came outside and they said, you're going to go to jail. And he's like, I'll take my chances and ran away.

So I, you know, it's like after that, it's cool to come clean.

Thank you. Thank you.

Dude, it's crazy that their plan was to like send him to Dubai though. That's crazy. I mean, Lindsay Lohan did that.

So did esports.

About many other things that we'll talk about today in Liberation Day, as well as what we're not being liberated from is expensive housing, which I think Doug is going to get into.

You know what, you've actually convinced me in this one minute segment.

Everyone who shoots a regulation goes away. So you brought this up. I want to bring this up because I... Well, I agree with everything you said, to be honest. I think we talked about this before even this book came out, because we saw that think piece by Ezra, blah, blah, blah. I agree. I think there's many rules that have not done what they're intended.

The age-old apocryphal story is like in the British Raj, India. they made a rule to ban cobras. And they said, if you bring us a cobra skull, because they want to kill all the cobras, if you bring us a cobra skull, we'll pay you some money. We're going to kill all the cobras. People started breeding the cobras because there was money in it.

Like, rules are doing the opposite of what they were intended to, even if they have good intentions or they're against them. I just want to say, I... I think there's a tendency to hear this speech and be like, well, I'm pretty interested in Doge. And I just want to say that I have been so deeply disappointed with Doge on every level.

And I have, at this point, no hope or goodwill towards it when I look what's actually happened and what cuts have actually... And so much... the chaos it's induced, and the actual cuts that have been made. Now, this purple line here is our current budget deficit so far this year. It is bigger than it was in 21, in 2020, in... Wait, isn't 2020... 2020 is the dark blue one?

It's the one that spikes up there in the half of the year.

But so far in this year, so you see the purple one on the top, we're in February. We are above all the previous years. We are currently spending more than any year of Biden or Trump. Trump won. But I don't understand. We canceled the $7 million contract. It was not even around in the air. We are spending more money. And this is before the new $5 trillion tax cut comes in.

So this deficit is going to balloon. It is going to balloon. Those tax cuts are continuing tax cuts. That won't include it more, right? No. The continuing tax cuts are already baked into the pie. That's already assumed to be okay. More tax cuts. We are... This is announced today. I mean, this is like three hours ago. I don't even know.

But there's a $5 trillion new bill from the House that is a $5 trillion tax cut over the next 10 years that is going to balloon this deficit. And it will make up for 10x of whatever Doge has even possibly cut. We are nowhere close to getting... Even to like, you know, five years ago level of budget, which is already bad. We are not on track to financial prudence at all under Doge or not.

And so I just... I am personally sick and tired of people who I thought I agreed with. Like there's sometimes a concern to be like, I agree with balanced budgets. I agree with getting control of the national debt. And then when they get into the power, they don't do any of that.

So I'm sick of, again, people on the left over-regulating, but I'm also sick of people saying they want to get this stuff in order and doing nothing substantial or any real cuts. I guess I'm frustrated with politicians. This whole Doge thing is one of the most unique opportunities.

I still don't really believe in the long-term value of the stock. If a stock is $100 and drops 90% and then rises 90%, it's now at $19. So it's up a couple percent, but it's down. Oh, it's down overall.

Dude, I'm glad you're answering this because this is going to cripple our show.

Over the hedge.

So, yeah. So, during the campaign last year, he said that November 20th, whatever the election day was, November 4th, that's Liberation Day. And then we got there and it came and went. And then he said, Liberation Day will be January 20th, my first day in office. And that came in.

Well, there was a comment on there that also I didn't know about. The Departed is actually a remake of a Chinese movie.

A Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs. But I think we recognize that for a citizen in America, seeing The Departed feels like a fresh new experience. And seeing Kung Fu Panda 4- It's absolutely different than a direct sequel.

And we read your comments, and I would love to hear, if you have a thoughtful idea on something that was said here, I would love for you to write it. If you can approach it in like a... Put three hashtags.

No, no, no, no.

Our comments are like bots, dude. No, it's not like bots.

I think people are opening it and looking at our comments and look like they're all from bots because they have

But this is the real day. He said, April 2nd, that is Liberation Day. That is the day we let out our truly sweeping tariff package across all the enemies who have been, quote, I don't know if I have the quote here, but... Is he going to say nice things? It was like... I'm going to say this. It was like taking advantage, pillaging, and raping us. Did he use that word? He used that word directly.

I want you to know you're not required to install the Japanese keyboard to leave a comment on video. If you want me to read it, sure. I'll read it anyway.

I'm not putting that in his mouth. That was the direct quote.

He had this. I want to show this image that I'm bringing up here. Sorry. This is him pulling up on stage a list of all the countries who will now be receiving new reciprocal tariffs. Basically, they looked at whatever they counted as a tariff being used against us. And there's a lot of nebulous discussion here.

But he said, we're going to give you tariffs back essentially equal to what you've given us. That's the idea. And we're going to counter back tariffs. We're going to make sure the trade is fair. Some of it's based on them just having a trade advantage. Like we're buying more of their stuff than they buy of us. So it's like not fair. We need to balance it.

So you said like we have to worry about, I think the average American farmer is deeply worried about Svald and Jan Mayen taking advantage of us. I think they've been pillaging us. The herd in McDonald Islands have been, yeah.

I mean, Norway's on here differently. That's confusing. This is some kind of separate entity. This must be something different. Tuvalu's been fucking us over. And I'm sick of it.

It's just the paid money for the dot TV ad.

What do we, what do we, maybe less. So we need to tariff them. Norfolk Island's getting a 58, no, I'm sorry, 29% tariff. This is, so it's extreme, right? So it's, it's, it's across the board. I mean, this list is massive and it's, I want to bring something in.

And then I think, Aiden, you're also going to talk about how you wanted to adopt a South Korean child.

It's like things that could be counted as tariffs. So it's not like them specifically having a hard tariff on us. It's like a mix of, like, let's say, for example, if they have only a tariff on... picking a random good, like rice. If they have a tariff on one good, it's being broadly blended across the whole thing and we're doing a blanket tariff on their whole country.

Or if they have a tariff, or if they have a thing where it's certain things can't ship there. Any type of thing is being calculated as a number and it's being blended and saying, we're just going to blanket that out.

It's not exactly the corn number. It's like they're estimating what they think the overall number would be based on the things they get tariffed. They're making a blended number and they're saying we're fighting back. That's the idea. Okay. Okay. This is on top. The reciprocal tariffs are on top of the tariffs he's already done.

We're back to the Lemonade Stand. We're back again.

So like China, for example, already has, I don't know the exact number, 25%, something like that. Tariff to US to China. He's added an additional 25 to fight this reciprocal tariff.

Right now, it's like in the middle of the day.

54. The tariff on China is now at the 54%.

You actually pick only the sweatshops, right?