Lemonade Stand - Applying to Jobs in 2025 | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

On this week's show... Atrioc investigates some numbers, Aiden asks about jobs, and DougDoug invests for the memes. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 023 Recorded on: August 4th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I stole your paper. You stole my paper and now you're pretending like you're... You know what you've stolen this morning? What am I stolen? Our time. Our time. It's unbelievable. So I want you guys to know that...

As warning, we haven't done ads yet, but Aiden's about to do a fucking 20-minute Apple ad. Open. Here it comes. Open on Atriox computer right now is a PowerPoint presentation that I am not kidding, has taken him the last 25 minutes to get open on his laptop. That is not an exaggeration.

25 minutes to pull it up on your laptop. Steve Jobs is schlong down your, the ghost of Steve Jobs. The ghost of his shlong? Yes. Down your gullet, dude. It's insane. Some of us want to break free from the same. from the ecosystem that you...

I think some of us want to record the podcast. Give my paperback. You don't even know how to read it. Doug was saying you're probably swiping it. Like it's cocoa melon. Okay? Why won't the thing change?

I can't turn the volume up. I can't hear it. That was 20 minutes for him, dude. He's looking for the volume button on the side. I'm next to two geriatric box. Hey, what did you read? What was interesting? In the paper, in the morning paper today.

In the morning paper, I... Okay. read something this weekend, Chatchibati told me this. You know, this, every single paper, four trees are taken down to produce one news paper. You did this. You did this. You Chad GPT.

And the ChatchipT query killed 15 more. There was 20 total trees were killed for this conversation. Just figuring out which trees were killed. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny because this first article on the FT weekend printout that you have, U.S.

Job Slowdown, Backs, Rake Cut, call is actually what I want to talk about this one of our main topics. Jobs. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Hold on. Dildos. You want to open with Dildos? Let's open with Dildos. This is where the people are here for. Okay. Okay. Okay. Perry, you pull this up. Well, hold on. Let's check out the retention rate on this episode after this. All right. We're going to see a massive dip after this. Okay. There have been two during the WNBA games the past week. Sadly, this is not funny. Nobody laugh. People have been throwing Dildos. Do not laugh. Do not laugh.

People have been throwing dildos onto the WNBA courts during basketball games. And you can now bet on the color of the next dildo that will be thrown onto a WNBA court. I was laughing I had a different joke in my head. It wasn't related. So there's this whole gamble going on. You can bet real money on whether it'll be a pink dildo, a purple dildo, a blue dildo. And then there was this great tweet that I saw called Infinite Money Glitch, which is you buy a WNBA ticket, 30 bucks. You buy a blue dildo for $15.

You max bet blue dildo at $5,000. You throw the blue dildo onto the court. You've made $69,000. So what is going to do this? Yeah, I don't really know would stop somebody from doing that. And I think this is a great kickoff of just the creativity around the job market right now

and what's it looking like, Aidan. I think this is a kickoff, this intro, and this has shown that we're all unemployable. So we have to talk to other people about what the job market is actually like. If you can't do, you teach. We're here teaching. Okay, I have one more thing to say about these dildas before we move on to the actual job discussion,

which is that I need to crash. out on this, but it should be a longer subject on, not people throwing the dollars or whatever, on this whole, um, movement to get mad at, I don't watch the WNBA. I don't care about the WNBA. I don't watch it. But what they're asking for is just the same percentage of revenue that players get in other leagues. It's not, it's a smaller amount of revenue.

I understand that. But they want the percentage of revenue. And people keep throwing in this stupid Hollywood accounting bullshit. that they're not making money. The revenue has 10xed in two years. There's enough money, but they keep spending it on things for the owners or marketing or private jets,

and then they say, oh, there's no money left for the players. But the players should get a percentage of revenue before the expenses come out, which is what they do in every other league. It's not going to be as much. Of course, it's not as watch as much. But the fact that they've gotten, like most sports fans to agree

with this cartel-like behavior towards the employees of the league is crazy. It's crazy. It's so stupid. I don't care about them. I'm a passionate defender of the WAA. It's just very obvious

and they just want the same percentage. I mean, I haven't mathed it out, but this conversation has existed about the WMBA or women's sports for a long time. Yeah. And maybe, maybe, like, five years ago, maybe there's an argument there. I don't know.

But now we, the WMBA is gigantic. So many people watch and go to the games. Like, it is exploded. popularity, the viewership, the viewership is like comparable to normal NBA games now, which is wild. And for some games. And I think that is wild to begin with. And people are still like, yeah, rookie contracts, 70K a year.

Caitlin Clark's rookie contract is 70K a year. She makes less money than Nick Yingling does. Well, that's for the contract. That's deserved. Nick Yingling's a hard. It puts as hard on those fucking field. A lot of value. No, you guys have heard of Hollywood accounting, right?

where like you might be an actor and you're like, I want a percentage of the profits of a movie. And then somehow Spider-Man too never made me money, even though it's, you know, Lord of the Rings never made any money. That's what they're doing with this. They just keep saying, so what you do is you get a percent of revenue. You get a percent of what the thing actually makes

before they take out expenses. And that's what they do in every other league. That's what the NBA players. 50 percent of revenue. And it goes to the players and the rest and they can decide what they do with the rest. The league can decide what do with the rest. But here, they're like, we'll give you a percent of the profits.

Oops, there's no profits. Oops. And then everybody, repeats this same line like it's the fucking, like, ah, there's no profits. Like, of course you can't get paid. It's ridiculous. It's making hundreds of millions of dollars.

There's enough to pay the players. I just want to crash out on that because I think people are emotionally attached to these people not getting paid. No matter how good the attendance gets or no matter how much money it makes. They just really enjoy it. And I want to tell you it's fucking stupid. What does this have to do with dildos? Well, this is sorry, the WMBA. That's why they're throwing dildos.

Is that why they're throwing dildos? I didn't know why they're throwing dildos. That's why they're throwing dildos. The player started wearing like, pay us what you owe us. And then everyone started throwing dildos on the court. Like it's- That's so annoying. You could have, again, let me villain chair this. Could have been coincidental.

Could have been too just, Dildo-lo-lo-lo-loving guys. I don't watch the true. Or I presume guys who threw dildos and like they could just be, maybe they do this in every sports game. I don't know. They could just be normal shitty guys. Right, right.

They don't have to be normal, shitty. That is totally fair. That is totally fair. The action is inherently misogynistic. Okay. Let's be clear. So it's inherently misogyn.

Maybe they throw Dildos on the bra when he's praying. It might not be politically or economically motivated. Ah, it's simply to be shitty. It's simply to be shitty. Imagine catching the guy and they're like, why do you, it's like, is this in response to the, to the pay issues that have been going on? And it's just like some dude, he's like, no, I just fucking thought it'd be

money. I think it should be funny. I just hate women, but they should get paid. I just don't like women's sports. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of when I think it was the U.S. women's soccer team was fighting for higher pay a few years ago.

And they were getting interviewed about it on John Stewart or something like that. And all of the classic counter arguments of equalizing pay to the men's team are getting pushed back on. People are like, the women's team's not as good or women's soccer isn't as competitive. But for the women's men's, or the women's U.S. team specifically, compared to the men's U.S. team specifically, The women's team is incredibly successful, right? Like we win most of the international tournaments, or we make it to the finals of most of the international tournaments, bring in a ton of revenue.

And compared to our men's team, they're very similar in terms of the impact and money that they bring in, but they're paid drastically less. So I think all these questions or ideas of people who come in and they're like, well, it's like, it just doesn't make any sense or it's not as competitive or they don't bring in as much money. it's the no they're not being unreasonable they're asking for just a pay that reflects the value i just really super clear i don't think katelyn clark should get paid what lebron gets paid what i'm saying is like

the NBA brings in 20 billion 10 billion goes to the players that's the contract they have 50% that's what if the wbba brings in 200 million 100 million goes to the players you just make that a line item that goes there first otherwise they'll never get paid Caitlin Clark is like mind-going to me because it's like you enter the league, you're a national phenomena, you instantly, whoever signs you, right? You make your, you make up your salary in a easy, a day in Jersey sales, ticket sales, like your impact on the whole league and because of the rookie contract rules, you're at 70K a year. That's, I understand.

She's making tens of millions from endorsements and deals and all of that stuff. It's not like she's not finding a way to get compensated. but the fact that the league itself, I found out last week that the highest paid salary in the entire NBA right now is like $256,000, which is, you know,

maybe reflective of what the league was 10 years ago. But I don't know. All I know is that they're just getting, just do it the same way. Just do it the same way. That's all I'm saying, just do it the same percentage way and then you can do whatever you want.

They can get paid $10. What if the guys were doing dildos in protest? Maybe. That's true. Maybe these guys are heroes. Have we considered that they're... They just really need to workshop the intention. It's like, guys, guys, love the energy.

Let's, why do we... Throw something else. Change it up. Well-intentioned, dumb, misogynistic guys who want to support women, but do it in an under, like, in a backhanded way. No, I mean, they bought a ticket. They bought a ticket.

They're not getting paid, so I'll throw... I'll interrupt the game. I'll throw like a dodo. They're like Colin Kaepernick, kneeled for the anthem. We will throw dildos for the players. Right. Willing, that's the situation. Did it, is, um, jobs?

Okay. Before, before, we got, we got, we got, we got way off topic. We were talking for like 15 minutes. I have one topic that I do want to touch on before we get into the experience of applying for a job right now, the jobs report that just came out in the U.S. I wanted to ask you, Atrioc, about, we were discussing off the pod. Yeah. How a report had come out. Yeah.

For the first time in a while. or for the first time all year. The June budget was a surplus. It was reported back. And there were some early reports of tariff revenues starting to come in and creating this surplus for the first time. So I wanted to ask you, can you lay that out?

Can you explain it a little more? Because I have not found this. Perry, we're going to need to pull something up and age probably have to cut it down. Can you pull, I mean, I like this image first. Welcome to the Golden Age. Thanks to the leadership of POTUS, the U.S. is generated over 100,

$150 billion in tariff revenue in the past six month. Look that fist. Strong. Anybody? What? Oh, high fives? Yeah. Well, yeah.

Gold age, maybe. And I've paid some of them. That's half of that's mogul shirts. All right. So this is the bipartisan deficit tracker. Now, I'm going to, maybe this is confusing, but I'll go through it. See that purple line right there, the pinkish purple one right in the middle 255? That is our current deficit for this year.

Okay. That's how much we've spent by each month. Okay. So around this time last year, we had spent $1.2 trillion more than we made in 2024. That's what we were in June. Now we're at 1.3. I just want to be super clear. But you look, so when this line goes up, when a month where it goes up, that's a bad month.

That's a month where we spent more than we took. When it goes down, which it happens sometimes in all these different years, that's a surplus month. What they've been doing, Scott Bessent, Trump, all these right-wing, talking heads, have been going around and saying, this is our first June budget surplus in 20 years. It's just June. There's been surpluses in April, in July, in February, in, every now and then you'll have a surplus month.

It's pretty standard, but the overall year is bad. But because there was a payment that fell on a weekend in May that ended up going to June, we had our first, sorry, paid in May instead of June. So the government made its payments a little early. So we had a really bad May. As you can see, the May spikes up to, and we had a surplus in June. And so it just landed on a weird month.

And so now we have a surplus in June for some reason. And they're saying like, wow, things are drastically different. I promise you, first of all, we have spent more this year than the bad year of 2024. And by the end of the year, this number will still be much higher. It'll be worse than every other year maybe than 2020 and 2021. Can you explain?

I'm still confused. Why doesn't the graph go down for that month then? Because the spending... For which month? For June, right? It did. You see it between May and June. Am I looking at the wrong time?

It goes down very slightly, and that is what they're calling the first June budget surplus in 20 years. But they're like soft saying June, and they're making it seem like we got our first surplus in 20 years. Like we've turned something around. There's nothing different.

We are still spending way more than we make, and by the end of the year, we'll have spent like one and a half to two trillion dollars more than we brought in. And this is all because of, of revenue that was meant to be paid out in May that fell into June. No, it was paid early.

It paid at the end of May instead of the beginning of June. Okay. So we got the payment out of the way, which is why you can see, like between April and May on this graph, on the purple one, huge spike. That was a,

it was a bad month. We added a lot to the deficit. But now we had a slightly easier June, so we cleared. The tariff revenue helped a little bit, but it's very small in comparison. Okay, so why, if I was die hard for Besson, the boys? Yeah.

Why couldn't this be indicative of it continuing to go down after this? Could this not be the start of a trend? Maybe. You know what? By the end of the year, if this purple line is plunged and we're just swimming in tariff revenue, that's fine. But just you can even scroll down. I think they actually address this directly.

And in fact, they say, yeah, the federal government ran a monthly surplus of $26 billion in June. However, this is because a government payments typically do June 1st shifted to May this year. accounting for this timing ship, we actually ran a monthly deficit of $71 billion. Okay? Just to be clear. And then it says we're going to have

probably a worse one in July. So looking ahead, barring any major conditions, changes in economic conditions, the government will likely run a larger deficit in July. So the idea that this is some large trend is, I think, untrue. And I think it's just this weird little statistical blip

that is being turned to a story that we've turned something around. The fact is, under Biden and under Trump, we spend way, way more than we make. And in fact, the big, beautiful bill has only made it worse. So outside of the red and the black line there, which is our worst years ever, 21 and 20, this is like, this is the worst year.

And this year's terrible. We're at some of the worst America's ever been in terms of spending more than we make. And to pretend like we're not is a joke. So I just wanted to address that. I've talked about this on my own stream, but I'm glad you brought up this question. It's, yeah, it's, it's,

actually makes me really disappointed in Scott Besson because I'm a Scott Bessent, I wouldn't say fan, but I like, I respect him and I read him before he got a, even got this job. And he's really, he knows what he's doing. When he goes up there and says the June, you know, he slips it in. He knows what he's doing. And it's, it, this is not a surplus.

Okay, two, two questions slash follow. Okay. One, it looks like that because of the drop to June. Yeah. That were actually comparable to the previous two years. You look at where the dot is on June. That's right. So the, it sounds like, I, what I heard.

heard you saying is like we are, it's worse than previous years. To me, it seems like if you look at where the dot is on June, we are comparable to 2023 and 24 right now. But from what they're saying in the report, the expectation is that it'll bounce back. It'll bounce back aggressively above the other... But the way I would read this so far, I mean, it jumped up aggressively last year in July. I mean, for people

who are listening online, basically we're looking at how much money we've spent this year, how much, you know, how much deficit we're in this year versus previous years. Yeah. As I can tell, this is like exactly the, at least It's very similar. It's very similar in line with 23 and 24. That's correct. Yeah.

But, you know, as I said, but also as Trump said, or Scott Besson said, these Biden deficits are unsustainable. They're horrendous. Right, right. They are as bad as the previous. And they're as bad. They've approved nothing. Yeah.

I guess it is kind of a weird thing where Biden's last two years were some of the more ridiculous spending that has ever happened. Yeah. So the idea that if we're meeting that as the bar, that it's not even remotely. Yeah. Those were terrible. were rallied against rightly by Scott Besson. They would have a trillion dollar deficits every hundred days.

And it's like we're in the same zone. And by the end of the year, you know, my expectation is that the 25 number is going to be higher than 23 and 24 just based on the big beautiful bill and the tax cuts. So we'll see. I don't know. But I just, it's certainly not better. And you're implying that it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have another question. So, so this tweet by the White House, this was I think last week, they tweet so much. I tried to find this tweet again today. There's like 300 tweets I had to go through. My God. And so they basically said, this year, we've gotten 150 billion of tariff revenue. So this is the first half of the year. We're halfway through, right?

A little more, 150 billion. In theory, that means we will be making $300 billion by the end of the year in tariff revenue. That wasn't there before, you know, asteris, asteris. As a reminder, the way I like to think about this, it just simplifies things. Every year, the U.S. government spends $2 trillion more than we make. If we can get that down to zero, then at least we aren't losing more money every year. That is the goal, right? So $150 billion already, and then $300, let's say if you double it by the end of the year, that's a decent chunk, right?

That's not bad in terms of working down the deficit. And what I was thinking about is, while they certainly haven't explained it like this, as we've talked about, tariffs are basically tax on American consumers. This isn't money that, like, is appearing out of thin air. This $150 billion is, like, Americans have paid this. And what I was wondering is like, was it their intention that with the big beautiful bill, they cut taxes a lot, which loses revenue for the United States, but they're basically just introducing a different type of tax with tariffs. And so even though they're portraying it as like, look, you have all freedom for money and we're shutting down unfair trade deals. Really what they're doing is saying, will lower your income tax, will increase your tariff tax. Does that feel like it makes sense? Do you think that's what Besson is maybe doing here? That was part of the rationalization. When we discussed the big beautiful bill, they did say, they were insisting that even though this is creating such a massive deficit on paper, the revenue is to be made up by the tariff changes that were made. But it doesn't. They also, but they keep framing it as like tariffs are great for the Americans and low taxes are great for

the Americans. I think probably internally they were like, look, tariffs are not going to be good for the average American. The tax could be good, maybe these offset. And so I'm wondering if there's like a little more thought to it than maybe we thought. Yeah, maybe. But the problem is that the tariff is a tax on people that buy and consume regular cheap goods. Right. So it's like the average person is paying these taxes and the tax cuts are primarily on wealthier people. So we've replaced, you know, taxes on corporations and the rich with a tax on you

buying toys from China and buying, you know, steal from other countries and buying, you know, it's just, it's the worse. Well, whatever. I mean, listen, all this would be fine, you know, if our numbers two trillion, and we're raising some tariff revenue. My expectation is that this is going to cause problems in the job markets. We're going to raise less money.

We're going to have fewer people employed and GDP growth and jobs numbers. And we were talking about that. Problems in the job market. The job market, yes. Problems in the job market. Okay, something interesting happened recently. On August 1st, a report was released

by the Department of Labor and under the commissioner, Erica McIntaffer. McIntyre for? I don't know. That's their last name. And this jobs report noted that through July, there was only an additional 73,000 jobs created. And it also notably reduced the number of jobs that they had initially reported from the previous two months.

So they had previously said that in May there was 144,000 jobs that had been created. And in June, 147,000 jobs created. And those were reduced to 19,000. and 14,000, respectively. Very good. Which is a massive, massive drop. Also, can you guys,

because I didn't look into this much specifically, is the idea that the government estimates the amount of jobs that are created, they're like, this is what we think is happening, and then a month later,

they look at what actually happened and what does the revision mean? Like, what's the process here for how it changes that much? I mean, the short version is that as more time passes, more data becomes available to accurately estimate these things.

So they retroactively go back and say, we were wrong, here's the real number. And, and, These corrections are pretty normal. Like this happens frequently. This going back into the past to correct data

based on new information that we get happens all the time. Okay. What was particularly shocking about this was the scale of the revision. So the amount that this got reduced by. And I think just looking at the numbers, this feels pretty scary, right? Can you pop slide four actually?

Because it describes visually what you were just saying. Well, slide four, I drew what the numbers were when they first announced. So you can see there was 144,000 new jobs revised down to 19, 147 down to 14. And when these numbers were announced, these were celebrated. These were like, you know, good, good numbers.

Jobs were in the right direction. We have hundreds of thousands of new jobs pouring into America. And now the revision is such that 250,000 less jobs than they thought, these were pretty terrible months. In fact, you can see the worst months in recent history, like terrible job growth. And the theory as to why there's been such a sharp falloff from my understanding. Because she's a lot.

liberal cuck. She, yes. That, well, that's coming in at number one. That was the watch mojo number one. Yeah. And then another thing that, uh, that I had seen was shorter, the staff that is available to capture and calculate the data across the board at departments like this or in other parts of the government that produce relevant data to calculate these numbers have,

are increasingly short staffed. There's been a lot of staff cuts over the years because of the doge cuts that had happened earlier on. So there's fewer federal employees like managing and interacting with data that informs this type of reporting. And then also, there is a huge difference in the expected amount of seasonal labor that was supposed to come in. So during the summer months, there's a huge amount of expected summer work or seasonal work. And this excludes farm work, it mentioned. But that boost in seasonal employment is not happening at all. And it's way, way lower than expected. And it does get into the details of what, you know, sectors are loosely losing

positions and what sectors are increasing their hiring still. The only place that's seeing in big leaps in hiring is in healthcare sectors. Healthcare sectors are really desperate and stretched for people right now. And I think specifically, like elderly care of, or taking care of the old people old and sick and the jobs are only to get rid of, to take care of the boomers with money. Yeah, the jobs revised down is like, construction is down, manufacturing's down, retail's down.

Like every job that would be considered to do well in a good economy is all being revised down. And the only thing up is healthcare and then some government like teacher jobs. Like those are the only things that are growing. And so, All private sectors are down.

Private sector employment is down. It's a bad report. And, well, this is the crazy thing. In the wake of this report and the adjustments of these numbers, Ms. Mick and Tarfur, or I apologies. Ms. Woke, you just call her what her name is. It's a tough name to say. Ms. Woke apparently was fudging the numbers

and Trump has just fired her. This is, to me, insane. I feel like this is the type of thing that, and I know this sits within a sea of actions, and I know this isn't the first red flag or something along the way. I just think it is so insane to read a headline like this about the American president. It speaks so much to the situation that I think we have arrived in where the president of the country gets a labor report that he doesn't like that indicates that he's doing a bad job and then he just fires her and then says she made up all the numbers while he also pressures the chairman of the federal reserve to lower

interest rates to stimulate the economy so it's like to me it's like which one is it are we do we have a record-breaking economy that is doing things it's never done before like you say all the time well then why do we need to lower the interest rates why are you doing everything you can to asked Jerome Powell from power. No, I think you made a really good point there. I just want to explain it if you're more casual on interest rates and your eyes glaze over or whatever. You know, Trump has been really hammering

Jerome Powell to lower interest rates. And when you do that, it's a sign that, you know, like if you raise them, that means inflation is the biggest problem. And if you lower them, that means employment's the biggest problem. Like, that's the general. So the only reason you'd lower them is if you thought, oh, man, the economy, the jobs market's getting really bad. So this report is a blessing.

to everything Trump has been saying. Like he could appoint this and said, look, we need to lower interest rates. Jobs are terrible. But instead, he is calling it fake news. In fact, jobs are great. We have tons of jobs, but also we need to desperately lower interest rates.

It just doesn't, it doesn't have any logical through line. Now, I think you have a thing you want to show from Ray Dalio. So I want to present a counterpoint with the normal caveat of like, look, of Bridgewater Capital. So he's considered one of the most legendary investors of all time. Somebody who, at least Atroc and I respect a lot, we're going to be reading this book. On the Patreon, where we have a book club every month, and there's been some great episodes recently.

You can go check it out, blah, blah, blah. However, so he mentioned something and he comes out. This is a trusted, like, bipartisan guy who says, I probably would have fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, too. That's because it's a process for making estimates is obviously obsolete and error prone, and there's no good plan in the works for fixing it. Goes on to talk more. And then he, at the end, he says, like, look, if the motivation from Trump firing this person is political, like he just doesn't like what they're producing, then that is obviously not okay. So he acknowledges that. And let's be honest, probably that was most of Trump's, you know, motivation, right? But looking at that graph

earlier, the estimates originally were, let's say, 150,000 jobs created. And then retroactively, they go, we were wrong. It was 15,000. To me, as an uninformed person, seems like they did a shitty job. If you are that far off, if you as the head of the Bureau of labor statistics are what, like 10 times off in your estimates and the country is going off of that and then a month later, you're like, hey, sorry, I messed up. That's not messing up a little bit. That's like deeply and fundamentally being wrong to a degree that's like, you don't seem competent. I say that as an outside party who doesn't know the actual process, but that's what Ray Dahlia is expressing here as well of like, look, the private markets understand the actual

numbers to a more accurate degree. Why is the Bureau of Labor statistics not doing that either? of what Trump is doing and why, this doesn't seem like it's being done competently. I'm curious what you guys. So first, full disclosure, this is an argument that I need to spend more time digging into because I don't understand statistics well enough to give it. But reading through other people's responses to this argument,

because I do think that this argument is really, a lot of people do feel this way. It's like if the revisions are this wild and if they feel this inaccurate, if the process is this bad, then how could they be doing a good job to begin with? Has this approach completely fallen out of favor? From people, from attempting to read people

who have a stronger grasp of statistics than me, they're saying that those people have a flawed understanding of how these reports are put together. And I think there is something, there's something underlying here that I'm unable to explain to you about the process. by which these reports are put together

that is missing or difficult to do and not just because these people are bad at their job. I think that is something really important. And also, like I said at the beginning, these revisions happen all the time and they have happened for years. So the fact that you're stepping up at now, at this time, because of this, in response to this specific issue,

whereas you have years and years prior to this to make something like... Years and years of them doing a bad job, it would be the counterargument. Yeah, because you're, Because you could, in my opinion, it's like, you could have made this decision three months ago, four months ago, if you were upset at the process by how which it was done. And Trump has also offered no explanation as to the technicalities of why he's removing this person. There's the obvious thing here, which is Trump has a storied history of firing people who don't do things the way he wants them, right? So like, come on, that's obviously what happened here.

But there is this argument of like, why is it this inaccurate? Yeah, I want to jump in. Okay. So there's a couple things. I can totally agree. I've talked about this well before Trump came into office, that the BLS has been consistently wrong and consistently revising down.

And I want to challenge one thing you said. You said that they often, you know, it's very standard to revise later. That's true. BLS has been around for decades, right? But for the longest time, they would have a pretty even amount of revising up and revising down.

They might undershoot it. They might overshoot it. Recently, as in the past few years, it has been a consistent pattern of starting out too high and then later quietly revising down, which is a pattern that is... Woke.

I don't know if it's... I don't know what it is, but they're clearly overstating the health of the economy. Now, I don't mean that's... I don't think it's... I fully disagree with the thing that it's like political or plan or they're like sneakily changing the numbers.

I think my understanding is that there's two parts to it. Number one, survey data has fallen off a cliff. People no longer respond to the surveys they use to help get an accurate... data of the environment. So second thing, they've been job cut. They've been slowly but surely squeezing the number of people. So they have fewer people getting fewer accurate data from response surveys.

That has made them less and less likely to be accurate. The second thing is they use this thing called the birth death adjustment. So they'll get the survey data and they'll make some, this thing called the birth death adjustment. It's not about births and deaths of humans. It's about birth and deaths of companies. So basically they'll say like, oh, well, we know that there was a registration of 10,000 new companies. On average, a new company will hire seven people. So we're going to say there

was, you know, 70,000 new jobs. That's the idea. The birth of a new company leads to this much average new jobs. Well, it turns out post, let's say COVID, but even before that, in the smartphone era, the birth of a new company is primarily a single person Uber driver, a only fans creator, a, that is where the majority of new company registrations are. And so they're still adding seven or six new jobs to the economy. So I was going to ask I understood this and isn't that why the

overestimation is the consistent part? We're more likely to be overestimating because this is the guess. But they have not adjusted this obvious flaw in their data for now years. So again we just all know why Trump did this.

He hasn't even hidden it at all. He just calls her woke news fake. It's so blatant. It's not like, he's like, you know what? I think statistically there could be some, this is the model. He very clearly has, actually there's clips about probably not going to have it here,

but in previous months when the jobs numbers are good, he lauds it, he praises it. I think maybe if I were to use, let's completely leave this example, right? It's imagine, imagine we're in, we're in China, like a year ago. Yeah.

And we have a problem with rising youth unemployment. It's starting to skyrocket. There's a bunch of, just young university grads who have nowhere to go, they have no jobs to get, this part of the economy and the job market is really struggling. And we keep publishing the increasing data from internally within the government, right?

And that goes out to, anybody in the world can look at that data and see the rising youth unemployment in China. And then the Chinese government decides we're not going to make that or publish that report anymore. And then I, as a third party, Ray Wong

say I come in and I report it's like well they weren't that great at reporting the youth unemployment statistics all along like it probably is good that they stop making the report and they can revise it. It's like maybe that's true

but the timing is crazy. You have chosen specifically to do it now when even by your own standard, the problem has existed for a long time. So even if you were to take that argument, 100%. And I want to call it one's positive thing because Trump has directly lied on something he keeps saying about this, which he said, this very partisan hack right before the election

was putting great jobs numbers out for Biden. And then right after the election, revised them down 800,000, the biggest revision ever. And it's so clearly, and he changed the month by one. And it's so annoying because they did do that major revision. before the election, one month before, instead of one month after. And so it actually was really damaging to Biden.

I remember it because I made a video out of the time. It was like right before the election, they said actually there was way fewer jobs than thought. And it really hurt Biden. But he's saying it like they did it. Listen, I do think they've been consistently wrong and maybe you could change it. But it just, there's no doubt in anyone's mind.

We're all like playing along like WWE or something. Like we know why he did this. He's like Thanos with the reality stone. You know, he's like, they turn down the numbers. All the Gen Zee viewers perked up. Yeah. Oh. You know, he's like reality is whatever I want to make it.

It's so cool. He just tweets. Okay, his Twitter is his reality stone. And he just does whatever he wants. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking wild. So I want to, I want to, you know, I'm sure you have more to say, but I want to kick off.

We're going to talk about people's actual experience in the job market. You have actual interview with people. Yeah. But I want to show something. So slide eight is the, on. employment rate, which has now ticked up to a local high of 4.2%. However, if you hit the next slide, it's actually, so the orange line is the unemployment rate, it's actually relatively low.

Like, look how, you know, 4.1, 4.2 is in the long scheme of the past, you know, a couple decades. Okay, so for audio listeners and myself. So right now, unemployment rate is 4%. Right. Is that correct? 4.2. It's a little out of date.

But actually, like, one of the lowest of the last 30 years. Like, looks pretty good. Now one thing you'll notice on that orange line is that when the unemployment rate starts to tick up, it usually doesn't stop until your inner recess. You can see the examples in the past. So that would be 2001 over there, spikes in 2001, goes up in 2008, spikes in 2008,

goes up in COVID, huge spike. So there's rarely a situation you can see on this entire graph where it goes up and then goes down. When it starts rising, it's called a Psalm rule. Basically says if over three months you're seeing rising unemployment, it's a good trigger of a recession.

And again, Claudia, Claudia Somm has disputed around this, because this is post-COVID and things are weird. So I want to say, this white line is surveys of jobgoers on how likely, how hard it is for them to find and keep a job over the next six months.

Basically what they're saying. You'll notice for all of 30 years of history, this white line and this orange line have stayed pretty lockstep. They've stayed, like surveygoers have been pretty good at saying when things are good or bad. Based on the actual unemployment data.

Yes. Yeah. you can, there's a strong connection between what they're saying and what we're seeing on the actual data. Around COVID, around 2018, 2019, and beyond, there's been this massive divergence, this big gap. And what my, again, this is the work of like Mike Green. I don't want to take credit for it. But the theory is that this gap is because of things like the gig economy, like Uber, like, like, only fans, like all this stuff that has made people no longer file for unemployment even when they've lost their job because it's not worth the hassle and they can get more

money quicker by just plugging into the gig economy but their jobs are so lost because this survey is about like real jobs and so based on this graph if the orange line was tracking the white line like it had done historically we would be closer to like a six seven eight percent unemployment we were much higher and that is the economy that people are feeling but that is not what the data is showing so if you go to the next line i just want to the last slide last thing i'll say Again, I'm not a statistician. This is off of work of people smarter than me, but I've done my best to really understand it.

This black line on this one is, all this data comes from the few states where you're not allowed to drive Uber under 25. So it gives us a really rare insight into what happens when you get unemployed and you can't drive Uber. Like you're 24-year-old, you get unemployed. So you'll notice previously, the black line,

this is people who can't drive Uber, 16 to 100, has always been unemployed. under the orange line, okay? It's always been less. Just now, it is higher. So people who are 16 to 24 in few states where this happens, they are having a worse unemployment rate than people who can drive Uber.

This is like a weird statistical anomaly that is showing that like in the few areas we can see the difference, Uber is making a massive difference. People that can do it, are not filing for unemployment and so the data is being skewed. So I just want to bring this up just to show that I think a huge part of this is the gig economy. And I've, I've surveyed my own viewers. And many of them that are recently employed said it's such a, it's such

a massive hassle to go through all the paperwork to file for really meager unemployment benefits. And also, you can't claim them while you're driving Uber. So you have to choose one of the other. Yeah. And it's much easier. So I, all is to say that I think my theory is that the labor market is already sounds bad. It is worse than that. It is worse than what we are getting at. But I think we're going to hear from actual people. Maybe, Aidan, maybe you have like,

can you give us your contact? Because you brought this topic up. Like, this is your, yeah. I mean, the main thing that's been sitting with me is I feel like anecdotally, I've been seeing this unfold over the past two years. Just in group chats of personal friends or people I know where they share experiences

of what it's like to apply for jobs or finding a job. most of these people in their early 20s to early 30s and what that experience is like right now. And I reached out to our Discord, which you can join if you check out patreon.com slash 11-A-San. But

getting a surveyed a bunch of people through there and then also asking a bunch of personal friends what their experiences are actually like right now and across a bunch of different industries. So one, starting in tech, which I think has notably suffered in the last couple years,

an example, like a friend who is an engineer, somebody who was looking for a job for nine months and just managed to recently get one. In that time, putting together 500 plus applications. Jesus. Managing mostly to get a few interviews through either recruiting opportunities that didn't translate into anything or a friend of a friend who actually results in the application seeing more than just submitting it, right? And then just talk to a friend who's a U.X researcher. she was out of work for a year and a half, searching for jobs that whole time,

and she finally landed a gig recently. But before she got this full-time gig, she was applying to a position at this competitor to Kendall, she was saying, and she landed the interview. She was one of five people to get interviewed. There were 500 people who applied to that position, that one part-time position at this company.

And she, from her perspective, if she'd been looking for work for so long that I kind of need to take anything, all apply to this part-time job instead of a full-time one. I'm insanely overqualified. I have like six years of experience in this field. I worked at a successful tech company before this, and let me see if I get this job. She doesn't get that gig, even though she's incredibly overqualified.

The person who gets it out of the five is a person with 10 years of experience in their field and had worked at Kindle before this. for a part-time position. And she's, you know, she's managed to land on her feet now, but another friend who is, he does, like, analytics work. So he initially wanted to do, like, sports analytics, get into something like the NFL or, you know, a traditional sport environment, right?

He had an internship with a company that was in this space for a while. ends in July of last year. And he was hoping to leverage that either into a position in the industry in general or at the same company, but neither happened. And he widens what he's applying for over time. Different like general corporate analysis positions or corporate analytics positions.

Yeah, take anything. And we'll take anything. He sent over 600 applications in the 11th month period and he just got a job last month. And then for people in like somebody who does like biology or works comes from like the field of biology worked in research is at some sort of like biotech company now I think he had applied to about 50 jobs before getting one he said but only got it because of a referral from a professor that he had worked with before

and a big issue in this industry this year is that all the cancellation of like federal funding and grants that came with the cuts of the beginning of the year affects the whole world of academia and research. And he said, because that part of the industry is so tied into the private industry, it's had effects on their ability to hire in that world as well. And he also noted that with all the changes

to visas in immigration this year, that a lot of student visas and H-1B visas that fill out a lot of this work are not getting renewed. So a lot of these international people that work in these jobs or at these companies aren't getting hired back anymore.

He also noted that, as of this year, international workers aren't eligible to receive grants for funding in any of these science fields that he works in, specific to biology said. And I asked him, I was like, say I'm a, you know, say I'm a Trump supporter. And I'm like, you know, these visas aren't getting renewed. These, the grants aren't getting given to foreigners anymore. This is a renewed opportunity for Americans in academia, like American citizens, these jobs are available to Americans now. And he was like, the issue with that is they weren't getting walled out before. This is, this is not an area where Americans weren't getting hired because these opportunities weren't available. Like, these people

were coming in because it fills the gap of an area where we couldn't get enough Americans into these positions to begin with. And he noted that, like, the institution he works for, he said, Also, I'm not trying to flex, but for context, the institution and labs I have been at have all been at the top of the field. My last lab was working right next to a lab that just won the Nobel Prize. So the fact that even we are struggling is pretty crazy. I can only imagine what it's like at smaller institutions. And he said that in the context of his, in his business, China and Europe are investing so heavily in his field of work that as we like shut down opportunities and money into his field, it strengthens the industries in those areas

because it's where people turn to for opportunity. And then the last person I wanted to talk to worked in the film and TV industry. So he was a post-production guy on reality TV shows for a long time. He worked part-time or contract. America's strongest industry. Love Island.

Love Island, UK show. Oh, really? They're taking our fucking jobs. Driver's still running. He was talking about in 2017 or 2017 to 2020, worked contract. This industry is growing. He's developing a lot of connections.

He's getting a lot of work. Lends a full-time position at one of the companies that he's a relationship with and works there from 2020 until 2023. During this time period, they are doing really well. He said he's getting paid amazingly well. He loves his job. And that was boom years for TV shows.

Boom years. All the streamers were competing and. Exactly. Yeah. It was just like an amazing time to be, that industry, right? And then he said since then, because this COVID entertainment bubble has kind of popped, like all these large companies in the space are consolidating and making more and more cuts, the reactions or the, some of the reactions around the union negotiations that were happening,

all of these things that are happening at the same time result in the industry. And then the last thing was a lot of the industry leaving Los Angeles, like not wanting to work in LA anymore and finding cheaper places to do cheaper work outside of here. And he hasn't had any work in this industry for like two years now. And he said it's like the worst time in his life. He's really, and he's really struggling because he's dealing with the fact that he invested all this time in his career, all of this experience, all of this, you know, his education to work in this specific field.

And it feels like it doesn't translate very well anymore. He doesn't have somewhere to turn to. In the meantime, he's done some editing work. for like Twitch streamers and YouTubers where he can find it, contract things that aren't very consistent. And then he ended up getting like, but as time passed, he opened the doors

to anything. He said he had just done a test and applied to become like a 911 operator. He, where is it? He applied to be a debate coach at a high school to work worker comp claims, like insurance claims.

Yeah, just take a bunch of sales jobs. Like we'll take anything. And it's currently, works at Dodger Stadium and part-time at Spirit Halloween. And that's what he's doing right now. And he's gone from, you know, super successful career where he was making enough money for both him and his wife to, like, live comfortably to the situation he's in now where both of them are struggling and they are just trying to figure out how to make ends meet. And he's, and he's 30. Well, I heard from Trump is the greatest economy ever and things are bob and so I don't understand

how to square that circle. But it's, it's, the last thing I wanted to touch on is like we, we said one field is experiencing like a lot of people hiring right now, right? It's in medicine. It's in taking care of the elderly. And one person in the discord stuck out to me specifically. And they said they're 38 years old. Basically, the job market is in a weird spot because they're constantly poaching people from different positions or different healthcare groups or different hospitals to fill positions. But the game like never ends right now because people keep leaving ship or they keep leaving ship or they keep. pulling people from different. That doesn't sound so bad for the workers. Like if they're getting poached left and right, they're getting good pay bumps. He expands a bit. He said recently left my first job post-training,

which was a fully outpatient, no nights, no weekends job because it was owned by a private equity company. And the day-to-day experience was awful, as was the compensation relative to the market rate. It was very easy to find a new job, but not easy to find one where you don't have to compromise

on several things you don't like because now every job has, downsides in the industry. So to get better pay and better management run by doctors and not MBAs, the trade-off is working call shifts at night or weekends again. Most of us in medicine feel like the system is holding on by a thread and will collapse in just a matter, and it is just a matter of when, not if. And then he goes on to explain why the field isn't as appealing as it used to be. But just, you know, this is all anecdotal. And I understand that, right? But even talking to other friends that work in healthcare,

they all feel really similarly. That the system is very stretched, the amount of time and shifts that they have to put in, there aren't enough people to fill positions. And I think when you work in a context of healthcare, where the difference in you, choosing to stay a few extra hours

and help people out or take on a long shift is dealing with another person's health or livelihood, there's a lot of mental pressure on you to do a good job. That's what I hear from people. It's not as hard as being a streamer, but I understand. I get, like, in general what you're saying. But I really appreciate everybody writing in here is like across all of these fields,

like whether, you know, regardless of what they are, the common, huge, huge common themes I saw were spending tons of time, sending in a ridiculous amount of applications, most of which don't even get a response, or if you do land an interview, not getting a response after that. No one contacting you after your interview. Can I ask, did anyone bring up like ghost jobs? That's what I hear about so much.

Is that like, was that part of the, I didn't read these? I didn't, I didn't read. I think from my understanding of ghost jobs, I think part of the issue is like, if you're applying to them, it's not actually clear if it was a ghost job ever. Right, you never know. You never find out.

There's a lot of people finding, a lot of people saying they, I've spent a ton of time applying to jobs and a really common message they got back was this position was just filled. So that could be that, right? Ghost job, meaning a company posts, a listing that they have no intention

of actually hiring? Yes, just to seem like they're still growing to seem like to appear good. And apparently like, the numbers are impossible to verify because no one's going to tell you what's a ghost job. But the stats I've seen are like,

it could be as high as like 70% in some industries where you're, 70% of what you're seeing as jobs available are not real. They're just, every company has at least a few ghost jobs to pretend like they're not in a death spiral. With all of these people,

especially in these industries that I think have experienced a ton of downsizing like techs. Like you've dumped all of these people out of the workforce and have a limited amount of positions to apply to that are still available. It's like each one of these incoming,

like if you're on the recruiting side, you're getting hundreds of applications right now to sort through and figuring out how to manage that. Did they even mention chat GPT? Because I know that's been a big fucking crazy thing in jobs right now. Some people were mentioning the, uh,

the, the, the discomfort of the way that they were declined or received messages after their either application or interview. So they said a few people noted that the way they got a message or the, I think the specific example I can remember was one person said that they got a message back from a normal, they got a call from an actual human being and that said they were confirmed for the interview. but then got an automated message, like a day later,

that said that their position was declined. And that is something that gets automated by people using chatGBT to sort through applications. The other thing people said, I mean, this has always been the case. I can't imagine a time in history where, you know, recommendations don't make you go a little further. But what I gathered from reading through a bunch of people's responses is that recommendations or have gone from like something you need sometimes to something

you need basically all the time. Like it is the number one difference maker. Brian, Brian from Riot and Blizzard. Yeah. He's a recruiter and I talk to him. And basically my understanding is that nowadays, if you put out a job application, you're going to get 500 plus chat GPT written resume.

and cover letters for that job. And it's impossible to, to just differentiate outside of like incredible background that like, you can't fake. But like for most people, you can't even tell from the, it's all Chad GBT, right? So, and so they're using AI to sort these and it's AI going in and AI coming out. And it's so the only way is a recommendation. Like you said, like that's like their only unique thing is to find a human being that will say vouch for you because the numbers are static.

They're impossible for a human being to go through for everything. It was interesting. Sorry, go ahead. It makes me feel like often people talk about how the main point of college is just a network. Like, that's the real value of it. And I think I pushed back against that when I was in college. I was like, no, I'm learning out of program. I'm learning this concrete skill and that skill is going to get me a job.

And it feels like across all industries now, including computer science, looking at the responses from people in the Discord, it's like, no, having computer science degree is not that helpful anymore. But then the people who are like, oh, I got a job in the CS industry, almost every, at least every single person I saw is like, well, I had a friend at work there. Right. Yeah, yeah. So even the industries that it felt like you could really like build this portfolio that just get to this rock solid foot in, that doesn't work anymore. And it's so weird to say, but I would, my sense is that if you're trying to get into computer science, it is more important to make connections with people than to learn how to program.

That would be my advice right. Which is a very weird thing. Yeah. And I guess just to quickly add on to that. So I would screen resumes at EA when I worked there 10 years ago. Even then, when there was many fewer applicants, if you get, for example, you do a job posting, you're like, we need an entry-level computer scientist to help us with this particular role while we're managing data. And so I would be, for our team, I would be one of the people who'd screen through resumes. And I can tell you on the human experience side, if you get, and I don't know if you guys have gone through applications.

If you get a hundred resumes, they start to all blend together. Yes. Like it is so unbelievably hard. Not only do they blend together, unless you are going to spend an hour on every single person, which would then take you a month to go through, which is not feasible, you have to kind of just go through and just try to look for a couple things that stand out notably. And then if you were told by a friend, somebody you trust, oh, this person I know is applying, he's really good.

That's top of the stack right away. You set it to the side. You're looking for maybe two or three others because it's just not feasible at all. And I imagine that, but times 10. and if it was 5,000 applications, it's like the only possible way to, you know, chat Chb-T is evening what everything looks like. Yeah, it seems like just incredibly brutal.

This person want Romans in the Discord spoke directly to what it's like on the recruiting side. He was describing his own personal opportunity perspective of applying, but then he said on the flip side, I've been part of hiring and the reverse experience is equally as insane. Applications now reaching triple digits with HR being extremely strict with guard,

rails to the point where I'm pretty sure it's on a win. Can you imagine that? Someone who isn't even in the field has to sort out and bring the best candidates to you, but they don't know exactly what they are reading. High quality talent is extremely hard to come by. I get random messages on LinkedIn asking me to recommend them. And when asking where I met them, they literally said we haven't, but it's hard to find a job, mostly people who are on visas. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you guys, because we've been around. in a different environment. And I want, just for me,

sorry, I keep leaning back. I know, it's so obvious. You know, I feel like I'm being gaslit constantly because the vibe is so clearly different. Something, it can't be, like we were around in, in like the 2014-50, in the era when, I'm not saying it was easy, the job wasn't just handed to you.

It was if you were in computer science. You were handed jobs. as you left Berkeley. Like that's why everybody like got those coding boot camps and everything because the, the path to getting a job was was so. Heck, tech was desperate for talent.

Yeah. That is that is completely reversed. And maybe this is tech bias. I understand because I'm in that area. And that's, yeah. And that's people I talk, a lot of friends I have in that area.

But it's so obvious that the people now are not, um, I don't know, working less hard or whatever. It's just different. Like it was easier. It was easier before. And now it is harder. And you can't tell me that like the unemployment rate is the same.

or that the economy's booming. It just clearly isn't. Everybody has a story like this. This is not, you know, it's like a day or two in the next point. I mean, we got like hundreds of responses. But everybody. You talk to anybody in your life who is like actively searching for a job and you can,

it's just miserable now in a way that it was not. I'm not saying it was always easy and I'm not saying if you got a job before that you just lucked into it. But it's harder now. It just is. And so it's, it is frustrating to be told. from any source that it's not. There was a wild,

there's a person who works like pretty high up in, or used to work pretty high up in marketing related to e-sports. What's her name? And address, and list of greatest fears? And they,

and I received a message from a coworker the other day about them because they're, you know, they're relatively older. And I do think there's a difference here that I noticed in the age,

of responses when people were getting back to me is like people who are older and more experience are having an easier time finding jobs when they search. They're still a different, which makes sense, a difference between overall unemployment and youth unemployment, like easily, easy to understand that, right? But even for this person who is that established resume in e-sports and marketing like they had at two very big companies, they have been out of work for, I think a year, and I think made a LinkedIn post about, you know, just to the public of why they would be valuable to your company, please hire me.

Just an open-ended post. And I'm looking at somebody that I'm familiar with, I know has more than a decade of experience in high-level marketing roles, not senior marketing roles, not entry-level. And this guy has been looking for a job for apparently over a year. That's crazy to see for me.

And especially when it's a figure that you recognize and you look up to as a younger guy who's finding a job in Eastport. Yeah. I just, yeah, I think the vibe kind of speaks itself. It seems atrocious. It seems atrocious. And that's before the data reflects it.

Do you know what I'm saying? Like that? Yeah. That is, it feels like the part, and I know I'm a club, a bit of a dumer, but it feels like the part in like the big short before they update the mark to market on everything. And like everyone knows it's best.

bad, but no one admit, like it just, it's possible that we're getting a biased survey here. And we're not hitting the right people. But it just feels like from everybody in my life, even my friends back home in Arizona. Like it just consistent vibe is that it's atrocious. It's terrible. But the data has not, is barely budged. It's barely moving up. And I just feel like what's going to happen when we admit it, when we admit that it actually is not.

I mean, even if you're looking, you know, even if you're somebody who is looking at anecdotes, right? this was not something that anecdotally my friends were struggling with five years ago. And they were younger and looking, and they were working in, I would argue, they were working in like esports and tech. And nobody was talking about that at the time. And then outside of e-sports and tech,

I feel like it's anybody who was working in a white, maybe a white-collar field, I feel like is the same experience across the board. Like I think the number one thing you want to vent to your friends about are very, maybe personal struggles with things that feel unfair with something like job applications,

with struggling to find a job because it's so important in your life and you need to share it with your friends and the people around you. So to see that this, at this scale, witnessing it all the time, especially over the last year, versus what I think my friends were talking about

five years ago or eight years ago, go, it's absolutely different. So I want to talk about this because that's the one thing I'm worried about is that we're biased towards the fields that we know and have. Of course. Of course. And basically, there are a few, we talked about the industries that are hiring and that's mostly healthcare and it's like government jobs.

But the companies that are still reporting profits that are still like doing well are on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Like the biggest tech companies are still blowing the back out of earning. I couldn't find a more sexual way to say it, but it is sexual. It is orgasmic. In fact, look at a, sorry, I'm skipping slides ahead. Go to slide 20. He's coming when he made it to this photo.

If you go to the slide right after that, it shows Meta's recent earnings report. They're having a great time. But what is so shocking, what is so a historic is that Microsoft and Meta are, again, ball-bustingly good earnings. Yeah. And then they're laying people off. Like they are doing better than ever. They're crushing.

Their main business is doing well. They're throwing a ton of money in AI. If you are an AI researcher, you're doing better than ever in history. You're making absurd money. But the average employee, they're still like they left 9,000 people. Microsoft did another 8,000.

Like, damn. So these are the companies. If you go to slide 19, it really shows it. Are the layoffs coinciding with these, like it's still happening in the last month? Yes, yes. Wow.

Microsoft saw you in Adela, CEO of Microsoft. I got a post internal that was like why we have to change. It's like we want to discuss. We just had to let go of so, all the normal jargon of like incredible, our friends and our family and our co-workers. We had to like go of 9,000 people.

Probably many of you are confused and frustrated because we also have had our most profitable quarter of all time. And it's just, it's just from there. It's like we need to repivit for the future. It's just nonsense. There's no follow up. I'm so glad you read that because it was, it was, to me,

it's one thing to be like, So sorry. We had to lay off 9,000 people. Yeah. It would be like, we had to lay off 9,000 people. We know you're hurting and I want to address it.

Doesn't address it at all. Oh my God, dude, he mixed two things. He mixed announcing how fucking great the company is doing and the layoffs into the same post. And to me,

I could be wrong, but to other people, it was clearly written by copilot. He was like using his own. I mean, maybe wrong. Maybe it was heartfelt. I'm not sure.

But it just felt, it had the AI vibe. And I, you know, he has an AI vibe to him. That's possible true. I'm fully admit. that.

What is the, because the profits don't exist just because of the layoffs, right? Like it's not one to one. No, no, they're doing great and then laying people off. Yes. So why, what actually is the logic you think? Like, what is it genuinely like we're bloated and have a bunch of talent that doesn't align with what we want to do in the future? I'm not trying to excuse these companies by, but there's like, they made the decision,

right? So there must be a thought. You could say. Yeah. I mean, so here's the, here's some of the lines of thinking. One is the businesses are changing dramatically. All these big tech companies are trying to reorient towards AI. If you've built out these giant structures in your company, for example, Microsoft shut

down a bunch of their game studios. I think that's stupid. I don't think they should have bought those studios in the first place if they were just going to go shut them down. But the thinking is we, if you believe Sotia Nadella's thinking, which is our company needs to be fundamentally reoriented around AI, well, that means letting go of parts of the company that aren't about that. Like, these are, these are just making traditional games.

That's not his focus. Microsoft explicitly is trying to do AI games, which I know most people are, including myself, not a big fan of it all. But so if the thinking is we need to reorient in this way, there is a real cost to having giant chunks of a company that aren't oriented, like, towards your main mission. As much as people like to believe, like, oh, just let him keep going. You have a lot of money. It's not good, generally, for a business, just have giant swathes of things that are just

doing totally independent things that are not. not related to your core mission. So under the premise of our core mission as AI, we need to rebuild everything around that. You drop parts of your company that don't feel like they align. Same with the groups within your company that don't feel like they can be reoriented in this way. And then part of it is just cycling in the idea of like if you like, so it's important to remind everybody in the context of this incredibly frustrating, brutal job environment that part of what is going on is that in 2021, which will actually talk about a little bit with Figma, there was this absolutely massive explosion and bubble within tech. Microsoft, like, doubled, I think. I mean, we're talking

like 100,000 new employees, just, I think Microsoft, I don't know, maybe you can look it up, but we're talking about tens and tens and tens of thousands of people that suddenly in a year pop up in every tech company. It was obviously at the time a massive bubble. And now there's this huge contraction. And the problem is many, many people across the world and society went, ah, these areas are expanding. I'm going to push myself into those areas. I'm going to learn how to code. I'm going to learn how to code at UC Berkeley, right? Like, again, when I went there, I was an anomaly by being a computer science student. Now the majority of students are computer science students.

At least that's what I'm told. So this massive shift happened in society to go, okay, we are going to invest into these companies. The bubble is now kind of gone. Simultaneously, they're trying to reorient towards AI. And so now all of them are going, we need to contract massively. Part of the benefit of contracting and laying people off is then you can bring in like fresh people who really orient. Which I think is, again, I do not think this is ethical. I think it's a shitty thing to do.

but there is logic to it. If you believe that this is a critical thing for your company to survive, like future, surviving, thriving is to reorient in this way. What I'm saying is I don't care about the other, like if you go back to that slide, I'm sorry, Perry, the 19 slide,

I don't care about the ethics of it. They can do what they want with their business. It sucks. CEOs are always going to write fucking terrible things when they lay off people. Yeah. The point is that these are the few companies, if you go to slide 19,

these are these top 10 companies in the S&P, the big tech companies, these are the few companies doing well. And if they're not net hiring, do you know what is it? What does it say if the best performing companies in the economy are still the ones doing? Yeah. If they're the ones doing layoffs, then like what the hell or what is everyone else going to do? And again, they are hiring people for AI, but it's like they're firing 25 people making

$100,000 and hiring one guy making $250 million. So here's where I'll give a bit of context. I've mentioned a couple times now that I've gotten a little more pessimistic about AI over this six months, this last six months. And in part is things like this, because in theory, AI should be creating new jobs. And we've talked about the first episode, we talked about how in the short term when a brand new disruptive technology comes into society, like the internet, it's going to destroy more jobs than it creates, but eventually it will create more jobs.

But the way CEOs in tech companies are explicitly talking, like Toby from Spotify, is we aren't hiring anybody until we prove it can't be done with AI. Like they are making a cultural, intentional shift towards get rid of anybody who can't support AI focus and don't hire anybody unless we absolutely provably cannot do it with AI. And these are the companies doing well. These are the companies with earning. Right. And so we're, and they're the ones growing because of AI and because of the hype around AI. And so these are the companies that should in theory be spearheading the growth that comes from this new technology. Instead

there as a point, as a cultural point saying we are going to try to thin down as much as we possibly can. And there's just nowhere, you know, you lose a job at these places after investing all this time in your education and career. Right. I mean, in a similar capacity to my friend that had been working in post-production and TV for so long. Yeah. And now they're in a situation where it's like all this time I spent up into this point doesn't, like, where do I go with it?

Right. Yeah. Which is sucks. It's fucking sad. I still, I still think there's an incredible amount of good that can come out of AI. And I'm increasingly getting pessimistic that it's, that companies are really not making an effort to bring those benefits to the average person right now. And I think that's quite sad.

I think the average person is benefiting. Can you go to slide one? There's one person who's actually making out quite well in this economy. And this is the average person. This is the average person. This is the average person. A good person's hero. Elon Musk today was awarded after a long battle $30 billion because they want him to energize and focus.

Most dumbass CEOs try to do good first and then get the pay package. But if you read the bottom of this, following lackluster results last month, Elon Musk renewed his threat to leave Tesla. So what Ewan does is he does a bad job first, then he threatens to leave. That's so sick. And then he gets an even higher payout. This actually has to be one of the most insane CEO company dynamics of all time. There's no way, because in any other situation, this is just not how it even could work.

Am I wrong? I mean, it's like if Shohay Otani in baseball. Yeah. He is, I think, widely considered the greatest of all time now or up there. And then let's say he has an absolute dog shit season this year. And then the Dodgers are like, look, we're going to pay you even more to stick around because we think you'll bring it back next year and you'll become the goat again. That is the thinking here, right? Because like, inarguably, Tesla and Elon through SpaceX and Tesla has created trillions of dollars of market share.

So as an investor, he is your wet dream when he's functioning properly. Am I not, am I insane for thinking that when you're that wealthy and you're, you're, that you're, you have that much of the stock already, $30 billion doesn't move the needle on your work ethic. I don't get it. $30 billion should move the needle on anyone's work ethic. No, no, no. But do you see what I'm saying?

It's like, at that stage and at that scale, it's nonsense numbers. You're already in practice as functionally rich as you will ever be. I think it's a fair point. What is another? Are you asking me, do I think Elon is something going to walk in? No, but that's what I'm saying is like from the boards, From the board's perspective, do you really think that this pay package is going to change anything significant about this guy's output?

Okay, he went into Doge for a while. If my cat is distracted and rowdy and running around, I will give him a treat to calm back down and stay focused. You give your cat $30 billion. I have a $30 billion treat. Look, the scale is a little bit bigger here, but it's the same concept. The Elon cat was wandering around. There was a bird outside called Doge that he kept looking at and he got really excited about it. and we just, Tesla needs to just get him focused back on the company he runs.

If we followed this analogy, I do not think there's much stopping the cat from going back outside at any time. It's so funny because he's figured out a way to get paid a ton when Tesla's doing well and get paid even more when it's doing badly. He has found an ultimate. To be fair, though, I feed my cat treats regardless.

He's doing, he's... I just want to put this number in a scale real quick because I think it'll help understand. So $30 billion, we obviously know it's a lot of money, but Tesla's a big company. Tesla's entire profit for 2024 was $7 billion. So this is like, and that was one of their bigger year. I mean, like they've ramped up since post-COVID. So it is like, I think, added up their entire profit ever.

All the problems this company has ever made is his pay package now this year. It's just like the company has only existed to give him money. It's just wild to me. It is wild the system he's created. Now, I think he's played it pretty smartly, and I want to give a little more detail here. One thing he's noticed, as all tech CEOs have, if you say the word AI, stock goes up.

Tesla has notably been kind of absent from AI because Elon Musk has focused all his AI attention on GROC and XAI. He's put all of his time into that. And he's basically saying, I'm going to leave Tesla and focus on that stuff. But if you keep me around, I'm probably going to merge the two.

I'm going to find a way to get the word AI into Tesla's earnings reports more often. And that will probably boost shares enough is the thinking to make up for this 30 billion loss. So there's a rationale to it. It's not the most insane thing, but it's kind of just disgusting. It's just disgusting.

I can't believe I can't buy a B.YD. It's insane. It's insane that I can't buy. I don't know you're a traitor. I don't know you're a fucking traitor. That's interesting. All right. Speaking of merging companies,

you guys want to talk about Figma? Let's do it. All right. We've been going a while. and I want to talk about Figma, a company that IPOed last week, and why it is relevant and why you should maybe care, and more importantly, why it relates to the conversation we have with Lena Con. And this is basically a follow-up I want to do to express... Oh, my queen?

Your queen. Criticism is not the right word, but I spoke to a venture capitalist who runs a successful venture capitalist fund, as well as a CEO of a pretty successful VC-backed company. Disclaimer on the second, technically I'm investor in that company because he's one of my best friends. but I invested the minimum amount possible just so that I would get access to the investor emails and now I reply and I'm like, I don't care. Every time.

So I have to be mailed like these formal documents and stuff because I'm technically an investor at the minimum amount and then I can just walk around and like say, you need to do more for me. I'm one of your investors. So it's great. You can put investor in your bio. This is how I felt when the T,

from the stock competition, the metals company, they sent out a recent like, you know, you're an owner of the company. come to our meeting. And I was like, yeah, I am. Sort of him, an influencer, an innovator for TMC. So technically, disclaimer, I have invested $5,000 in the company of the person who I own. And I stand to gain $1,000 or something, maybe if it blows off.

I'm going to be real, that's so much less than I thought it would be. I asked for the minimum amount, the actual minimum amount. And that was apparently as low as it could go. So technically, I am biased towards this company, technically in this guy also, but more so he's one of my best friends. Okay, so Figma, why do we give a shit? Figma, if you haven't heard of it, design collaboration company. They started like about 10 years ago. It's think of Google Docs, but for design. So a bunch of people can get together and work on a document collaboratively. Quick history of Figma. They kind of release their product in 2016. They start, they get people into like free tiers, really rapidly start to expand. By 2022, they're just crushing it. Four million users. There's the primary design tool for 77% of product designers.

88% gross margin, they're crushing it. Adobe comes in. September 2022, they announced they have agreed with Figma to buy them for $20 billion, just like double their private valuation 50 times their annual revenue. So Adobe's argument is supposedly like, this doesn't compete with us. We don't compete with Figma. They had a product called Adobe XD, which was directly competing with Figma, but that product was failing. And they're basically like, look, this is in the same broad design space,

but Adobe makes the products where you, you know, you build, like, you flesh out the design visuals and whatnot. Figma is people collaborating on the, you know, conceptual designs. Well, you definitely wouldn't be competing if you bought. Exactly. That's for damn sure. So I think to me, and probably to most people, and the reaction was once this announced, like, come on, that's fucking bullshit. What do you, Adobe?

First off, everybody hates Adobe. It feels like they have a monopoly and they use that to abuse their customers and that we all have a worse experience. We like early cancellation fees. Me and Aden, for example. Yeah. That's one of Adobe's coolest things. Adobe. If I cancel early,

I should pay you more money. That's for damn sure. It's my fault. It's my fault. I fucked up Adobe. I'm not holding up my end of the deal. And you should punish me. And I feel guilty about it.

Like I need a payment to cleanse my soul. I was throwing up thinking about breaking up with Adobe. Millennials don't keep their word anymore. We have no honor. Our ancestors were honorable. Okay. The greatest generation, they went to World War II and they were honorable.

I feel like a fucking quitter when I canceled my vote. Photoshop, dude. I couldn't afford it, and I felt like I let fucking the CEO of Adobe down. So the government's come out. Not only the U.S. government, the FTC, led by Lena Con at the time. So this is, again, late 2022, but also the European Union Commission and also the UK Commission all say, we think this is monopolistic. We are going to investigate this. So the deal falls through by like a year later, something around that end of 2023. Adobe and Figma say, we're going to walk away from the deal. We're not going to try to merge. This is not going to be able to be done in a regulatory way. So Figma, over the next two years, two and a half, they keep raising investor funding. They keep just absolutely crushing it. And if you pull us up, Perry, they IPOed last week. They sold their shares at $33 a share. We can, I guess, briefly talk about how an IPO works.

But basically they're like, hey, we think it's going to be about $33 is what it's worth. By the end of the day they launch, it's up to $115 over triple. So this thing just fucking explodes, okay? Figma is one of the most successful IPOs, one of the most successful companies, is a huge success story. And so coming out of this, Lena Kahn does a victory lap.

She goes on Twitter and says, a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses, rather than being bought up by existing giants can generate enormous value. It's a win for the employees, the investors, innovation, and the public. So she is looking at this,

and we're going to talk about really the broader ecosystem of what's going on. She's looking at this and saying, our goal to really drive scrutiny to mergers and acquisitions, to draw a lot more resistance to big tech companies, buying smaller ones. This is an example of how now we have a big competitor to Adobe in the form of Figma.

This is a fantastic thing. But the Silicon Valley world had a lot of choice worth for her. And so, for example, Paul Graham, who founded Wycombinator, a, let's say, startup incubator, start a thrifti. Sometimes you keep rolling the dice, Sometimes when you keep rolling the dice, things work out. Sometimes not.

But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop. You have Jason from the All In podcast who's kind of an idiot, so I'll skip him. No offense. He's a little more emotionally charged here. Oh, he's the guy who said bread lines when he heard about the grocery store. Dude, this is a who's who, a really great blunt rotation. I got to be honest. I mean, Paul Graham has good stuff.

Nikita Beer is more of a memeer. Then brings up the fact. Nikita Beer has made his entire fortune selling the same company over and over to big tech. he makes a company that's about teenagers sending each other compliments. He made it Gass App and TBAH and IRL. It's the same company three times and he sold it to Discord.

He sold it to Facebook. He sold it to, I think Amazon was with everyone. Of course he is against anything that slows down merchant acquisitions. He's figured out an ultimate scheme on money making scheme. I respect the guy. He's got a great hustle.

But he did it three times. And the fact that he's like... Wait, what was his product that he said? He made it a app with three different names where teenagers could anonymously send each other compliments. One of them was called TBH, one was called IRL. It's like, you could be like, Aden, you could open it up and be like,

someone called you hot today at school. You don't know who, but it feels good. And I think you can pay a little money to unlock it or something. And that app, apparently, it works. And it gets at least those bursts of users. And then he sells it to a bigger tech company. And then he makes the same app again with a different name. And then he sells it to a tech company.

He's figured out an ultimate scheme. And I think he's smart and I respect him for that. I changed my mind on Lena. But the idea that he's going to admit that like any regulatory oversight over startups is a good idea. Of course not. It directly impacts his bottom line. Yeah. Trying to stop great American successes. A few more responses. Somebody pointed out the classic survivorship bias where it's basically the point is yes, Figma did well, yes went on to succeed and be bigger than they. So now they're worth like $60 billion. Yeah. Adobe was trying to buy them for $20 billion. So like the amount of let's say market value that is created massive on top of monopolistic concerns. But this is a, you know, a frequent criticism from various people. I saw some other interesting ones where, you know, people are basically criticizing. You said letting the startups grow independently when in actuality,

what you did, Lena, is you prevented them from having the option of having an exit. And there's plenty of counter examples too. A lot of people, oh, I got logged out of X, maybe, nope, we're good. Somebody's saying, I would have, I worked for a startup that would have gone bankrupt and gone to zero and the entire staff would have been laid off if we weren't bot. And then a person follows up and be like, so you were forced to compete. Imagine that. Folks being like, hey, here's a, here's an email for Mark Zuckerberg in 2012 saying one reason people underestimate the importance of Google is we can just buy any competitive startups, but we can't buy Google yet. So some blatant like anti-competitive stuff for Mark Zuckerberg in the past who does

not have a good history of this. Right. And so there's a whole kind of debate going on with Lena doing a sort of victory lap and that being a reason for them to talk about it. I don't think that most of the tweets that people are saying in response to Lena are particularly well-voiced or anything like that. So I wanted to hear for more people. So again, spoke of the VC and a startup CEO who's been, both of these have been like working with startups tech for the last 10 years. So here are some actual thoughtful counter arguments. So Lena Kahn came in as the FTC share. And what she did over the course for four years is massively expanded the scope of what types of things she would go after. She did create, uh, she released this guideline list from the FTC merger

guidelines basically saying these are the rules that we are going to consider when we decide whether or not we're going to resist and push back against your ability to merge or buy a company. Now, as I read through these in prep for the Lena Con interview, they're pretty broad, but it's fine. But then what happened is that the actual cases that she took on were, I think, in many ways, cases that people would never consider to be anti-monopolistic. So one example that was brought up was Facebook meta tried to buy a small VR fitness app. They didn't make VR fitness apps. They didn't make apps at all for VR stuff. They owned a VR platform. And Lena pushed against that and said, well, you shouldn't be able to

buy things downstream of you if you're a platform owner. You shouldn't be able to do vertical purchases rather than just horizontal. There was two pharmaceutical companies that made different, these aren't giant pharma companies. They're two companies that make different drugs that have no overlap and they wanted to merge because they thought they could be more successful in marketing each other stuff. And Lena pushed to block that. And that eventually got stopped because her argument was, well, you guys would be able to bundle together your medicines and thus be able to kind of abuse that in the market for higher pricing. Anybody, any company could do that whenever. There was no evidence. Eventually that, she lost that case as well

because there was no evidence they were going to do that in the first place. They did eventually give a stipulation to her and say, okay, we promise we won't bundle for price things. So there was a bit of a victory for her there. But the issue, and I agree with this, having looked through this in what I believe is an impartial way, is that while she came in and really broadened and said, we are going to be way more aggressive about stopping big tech

and big companies from just buying out stuff and creating these monopolies, the cases that she took on and the FTC took on, felt so broad, so nebulous, so unclear about why this particular merger is an issue versus the stuff that clearly falls in line with what people would think traditionally, created a level of uncertainty that slowed M&A down entirely. I brought this up when we talked to Lena Con. And her response was, well, look, 97% of these mergers still went through, right? It's not like we're blocking all of them. It's like some small percentage that we're going to investigate. But the counter argument and what people saw in Silicon Valley was, if you make the entire merger market feel uncertain, if you set the tone of we might go after anything, then people are not even going to attempt to do that. So yes, 97% of the deals that came in were passed by you, but the argument is way more, way fewer deals got to you in the first place because people were so uncertain about what was happening. They didn't want to even attempt

stuff like this. And the mergers and acquisitions that could have actually been really helpful or spurred innovation or whatever, which we'll get to, those couldn't even happen in the first place. The other piece that I didn't, I wasn't really aware of is that Lena did this stuff while the IPO window closed. And this is why Figma is relevant. So IPOs are where you take a company public, right? But it's risky to do that. You are kind of putting a lot of the, the fate of your company out into the public. You have all this regulatory scrutiny. You then have all these obligations. And if you put your company out public and then the stock drops, that could tank the entire thing, right? So you really want to be certain that taking a company public will

have actual success in the market. People will actually invest into your company. But the problem that we mentioned earlier is in 2021 was a massive bubble. So there's some crazy numbers. Like there's all these SPAC companies that did a much of crazy stuff. Dozens of tech companies were IPOing in 2021. There's record VC funding. But then 22, 2022, 23, the bubble pops. Things swing way back. And so interest rates also rise up way during this period. So instead of having a zero interest rate policy, which we had forever, now people can make safe money by investing in, you know, safe assets. They don't know. need to go for like high growth tech stocks, right? And the companies that had IPOed in 2021,

they start crashing. So this big bubble in 2021 where it's like, yeah, everybody go public, everybody get all this hot, zesty action, that starts just popping massively. The companies that got a part of that, a piece of the action, they're failing now retroactively badly. They averaged 30% below offering price on average. It's not just they drop. They drop below what they initially were. The valuations in the private sector are being slashed. general economic volatility with, for example, the Russia-Ukraine war causing enormous energy shocks. And an analyst said, no- What is the point? What is the takeaway? What is the takeaway? Yeah, yeah. So- She couldn't have anticipated that. No, no, no, no, she couldn't. The takeaway is nobody's going to take their company public with this massive uncertainty. That's not on her. It is not on her. But the reality is 80% less deals in 2022 than 2021. 95% less money generated. There's a,

massive basically what they refer to it as the shutting of the window, where you were able to take companies public before and now it is much harder to do so because the willingness of the public to invest in these companies has disintegrated massively. So this coincided in this 2022-23 era at the same time that Lena Con starts doing this very broad and what was considered to be nebulous scrutiny of emerges and acquisitions. And so people across the VC tech startup space, people who are creating all these companies and saying, look, we're building the these companies we're investing, we're trying to make something of value. We've now lost both of our exits. We can't go public and we can't get people to potentially buy us or do acquisitions

because both of those have been shut down simultaneously. So that's in part what drives the frustration that you see on Twitter from people who are like, we had two options and both doors closed to us. The entire industry is suffering as a result. The VC manager that I talked to, um, talked about how flip out. No, no, I know. Let me chargeing the crash. I'm about flip out. Yeah. No, let me, let me, me like get the core arguments in place and then I'm sure you have plenty of counter arguments. So, you know, the argument is basically, and we need to talk about as well whether the VC market is even good, right? Because I'm sure there's, there's plenty of people who feel like, this isn't a good thing in the first place, which I then had a bunch of follow-up conversations

with them with. But their argument is like, look, this is in general for the country good, to have innovation that's spurred by VC investing, by private capital, funding people to make new things, to build new things for our country, for innovation, for everything. And right now with this kind of dual threat, we are being threatened in the entire system is being threatened. What is great about Figma is this is the first time in a while where there's been a big successful tech IPO, where this is now saying, okay, we might have that door opening again. The other door is also kind of opening because Trump came in and Lena Kahn had to resign and all that. So I think there's a couple of things we can go on and we don't have a ton of time left, but, you know, is this system even

good in the first place. What is the value of startup founders being able to have a choice? And various other things on like, is this really the core cause? This is the winiest group of people in the entire world. Okay. This is crazy. Okay. You already crashed out on Twitter.

I'm going to crash out on Twitter. You want to pull up that tweet? This is crazy. Okay. You know why the Figma IPO was successful? It's because it's a company that makes money. It's a profitable, successful company. If you make one of those, you will find a way to make money.

They have been surviving in a bubble era for a few years. where you could do almost fucking anything and spend all your time posting VC advice on Twitter and throwing money in random directions at stupid and profitable businesses. And when that dries up even slightly for a moment with a FTC that only lasted a few years and is already gone and they can't stop whining about it even years after she's out of power. It's fucking crazy. This is a publicly elected official who was appointed for a reason to enforce laws we have on the books. She's not appointed.

And Biden was publicly elected. She was appointed. his right to appoint the FTC, which exists, to write laws that are on the books written by Congress about mergers. We are enforcing already existing laws. The fact they've been rubber stamp for so long does not mean they can never be enforced.

And the fact they're enforced even slightly and most of them didn't even go through has been such a pain point for a portion of society that has benefited so much already. It's fucking crazy. It's crazy. And all they had to do, as Figma has proven,

the entire time, is just make a profitable business. That you can put on the public any time. In 2021, they dumped so many disgusting spas. It was a scammy bubble. Yeah, none of those companies made any money. And when that dried up, they tried to foist it on the tech companies. We have a lot of money to throw around. Maybe they can convince them to buy them.

When they couldn't do that, they started whining. Just whining, whining, whining, whining. If you make a good company with a good property people buy, you will make money that has never changed. That has always been the core of business. And the idea that so many people are chiming in and chirping about this figma thing. Can you please put my tweet because I'm going to. I got into this Twitter thing you brought.

I usually don't even fucking tweet. The fact that anyone could look at this figma situation and be like, wow, well, Lennox shouldn't even be taught. This worked exactly as intended. If Lena Kahn had not intervened, or I guess, antitrust in general, this company would have been bought by Adobe for $20 billion. We would be in an environment where we have fewer competition.

We have one company Adobe. Everyone has to pay whatever fee they charge. They can market up. They have no competitor from Figma. The Figma founders would have made less money. The Figma employees would have made less money. Figma customers would be unhappy. They fucking hate Adobe.

The only person that is lost is Adobe. This is a great outcome. We now have two competitors instead of one. The people, everybody made more money except for Adobe execs. Customers, when surveyed, hate Adobe and are really happy to have this alternative. Yeah. So this guy said, you know, Lena Kahn would did her victory lap. And he goes, Lina Kahn cuts the right hand off of a job.

genius pianist who nevertheless perseveres and produces a one-handed masterpiece for which the end she then takes credit. It's fucking insane. That is not what happened. And the idea that the masterpiece would have been them getting bought by Adobe for under their market value so that they can consolidate and raise prices is the ultimate outcome or an equal outcome to what we got is crazy. She intervened and we got a better outcome, which is what happens with antitrust in general. We want more competitors because as consumers, we want the ability to fucking walk. if somebody's abusing us and overcharging us, we want the ability to walk somewhere else.

This whole, winy attitude towards it is ignoring that reality, which is that the basic consumer needs choice to have any say, to have any. So I'm sorry, I'm not questioning at you. I'm crashing out of some of these colleagues, but it's just, it's frustrating to me that this is, if this was like an example where Figma exploded,

then at least you could be like, well, look at this, Lena. This is an example where it worked perfectly. It worked exactly what everyone would want, and they are still nonstop chirping about a woman who is not even in power anymore. I find it to be disgusting. I find it to be, and again, all of these people chirping, they're all millionaires. They're all tech millionaires. So it, I don't know.

I'm sorry. I said what I said. Okay. This is good. Okay. So let's keep going. This is exactly the type of, I mean, to less intensity. Yeah.

The questions that I wanted to ask people who are in the industry and basically ask, why. This seems like a great outcome. Seems like exactly what you want. Why on earth is this the thing VCs are going in and being like, how dare you lean a con? Like this is the stupidest possible thing to go in and try to criticize her. Okay. I think there's a couple fundamental things. And I really want to emphasize this because I think a lot of our audience is on board with you where they're like, companies are bad.

I hate Adobe. Listen, Vigna's a good company. However, they made billions more dollars. There are absolutely people in our comments and on the internet. The idea of a company succeeding or getting bigger, if Adobe had become more bigger, you know, bigger, they would have been of seven. I got a gym because they were mad that I was happy

that Figma's employees made billions money. Some people were mad that Figma did well. Like, anyone did well. Okay, I understand that exists, but I just want to be clear that that shouldn't detract from the point I'm making because that's not my point. So here, it was what I would consider

to be one of the core counter arguments of this. It's about choice because the, yes, Figma is now worth more. This is a better outcome. Adobe lost. But Figma wanted this. Figma worked for whatever it was nine years, the people there worked at this company to build something of value, and they wanted to merge with Adobe. They were not forced into it. There was nothing there. So I think the question is, do you agree that startup founders, somebody who pours their blood, sweat, and tears into a thing that they've created, and you could talk about a big tech company, or you could talk about the guy who runs a Baskin Robbins and then sells the franchise to somebody else

after they've run it for 10 years, and it's been successful. It's worth reminding that it is super fucking hard to make a company. It is not easy to make something of value. I think it's easy to look at this ecosystem and go, everybody's just jerking each other off, making things. But 90% of tech companies go out of business. If you talk to people in Silicon Valley, the majority of their startups will die and fail.

90% within five years. 75% of the companies that VC's back never make them back money. So most people going into this are spending money and losing it. It is not like you just make us anything you want and you get paid out for it. You have to actually create something of value. On top of that, the giant tech companies are not going around buying everything. The Magnificent Seven, it's hard to know how many deals they exactly did. There's like 200 public deals out of 150,000 that have happened over the past 50 years.

These are estimates because they don't, they don't disclose every single deal that they do. But the narrative of like, big tech just buys up all the companies we need to stop them is objectively wrong. They are doing a tiny, tiny, less than 1% of all the acquisitions are happening by big tech. Amazon does hardly any. Microsoft does more, and they do like maybe 150 over the past five years. It is simply not true that out of over 100,000 acquisitions, most people who make companies and sell them are not doing it to Microsoft and Facebook. They are doing it to small buyers and other small companies that merge together.

So I think it's worth acknowledging that. It's not like there's this cabal that completely dominates the space, even though obviously I agree they have outside influence, and so did the VC and CEO who I talked to. And so the question is, in that context, if you're a founder who busts your ass and you make something that is valuable enough to get to that 10% where you've put in years of time

where you and your employees and your team have made something that is considered valuable and another company comes along that's bigger and says, we want to buy you, that you should have the choice to do that, that if you have said, I've built this thing, being forced to sit in the ownership seat forever, if I make a company, right now, I haven't made a company

of the last seven years. And if somebody offered to buy it and I was like, you know what, I'm done. Maybe it's because I want the money. Maybe it's because I think I could grow more by being bought by a bigger company. Maybe it's because I think, like, the employees want this,

whatever the reasoning is, I think that it is legitimate that me as somebody who's built a business should have the choice about what to do with it. And what was happening in these situations as Lena Con came in and said, you are not going to have the choice.

Now, again, I am strongly voicing the opinions that I've heard. I would consider myself kind of in the middle here because I deeply believe that there are monopolistic tendencies going on. I don't think that acquisitions are some beautiful, incredible thing all the time. But there is, I think, a real argument to say, like, is it correct for a government to come in? Tell a person who's built a thing on their own that they can't go and sell it. They have to. I think that's the simple, the simple answer is that they have to. So you have to draw the line somewhere. And we agree on that. And the criticism against Lena Con and what their FDC was doing is that there wasn't a clear line.

And I can sympathize with this because even me as a neutral party who likes Lena Con a lot and who fucking hates monopolies and I don't like the big tech companies consolidating everything. Even reading through her cases, I was like, dude, I would have no idea what she would scrutinize. And that is the problem that Silicon Valley has. It's not that she pushed back against the obviously bullshit ones like Adobe and Figma. It's the fact that people felt, whether it was legitimate or not, that they had no idea and thus it wasn't clear at all. Something that my startup friend said, like, if she had just really clearly defined

this new type of merger, we're going to criticize and we're going to scrutinize deeply, people would have grumbled and accepted it. The problem is nobody felt the guidelines were clear. And there are guidelines here that I've read and I think these are pretty clear, but the actual cases that they brought, I agree with the Silicon Valley perspective

of it felt unclear. That's the issue. He was not suing a Baskin-Robbins trying to sell. and there's nothing in this that says you can't sell. What they're telling a few powerful agents is that they can't buy. Is it a difference? The founder can sell.

If someone wants to buy it, fine. But if it's to Adobe, then there's a problem. If you're Figma, you could have sold to someone else. But you can't sell to Adobe because they have the dominant market share in that market. If I make a competitor to Ticketmaster and it's fucking good and doesn't charge people absurd fees, people like it and Ticketmaster offers to buy me,

it would be right of her to look at, whether this is leading to consolidated market. So those cases are obvious. What about the non-obvious cases that I mentioned? I think we keep coming back to Adobe Figma and being like... I think the problem is that the argument of like ambiguity and uncertainty here can go on forever. It's like we have let it stretch in the opposite direction for so long with so little oversight that any concession back in the opposite direction is going to be viewed by these people as a negative.

I do not think the idea that people were just looking for... for stricter guidelines around mergers and acquisitions is truthful. I do not think, because if we could simulate the world where this is dramatically more clear, I do not think that these people are on the timeline saying like, ah, she's actually chill. Like there's a, there's a zero percent chance. No, no, no, they will be upset either way, for sure. And I want to be clear here, there is absolutely abuse in the system that I think the average person, if they sat down were honest and they're not a scam artist who is, you know, doing crypto offerings

or doing SPACs that turn out to be scams. Most people would go, yeah, it's being abused by big tech. There's a power law that's happening. This is not fair. If the pendulum swung way away from antitrust, it needs to swing back. And I think most rational people, most thoughtful people that realize the long-term health of the ecosystem, you can't have monopolies. You cannot have people buying direct competitors.

That's obviously fucking stupid. The pendulum needed to swing way back. And the criticism, I think there's a lot of just douchebags who are doing what you're saying, which is like, how dare you take a lot of it? way our party that we're having. But this is the pendulum swinging back a little. It's just a tiny bit. It's a little. That's the problem. Perry from production here. We're going to skip ahead a little bit. We've actually cut like a big chunk. Aiden and I were going back and forth. We realized we're kind of repeating ourselves. I want to just briefly summarize a few things and then

and then just pose a question, which was posed to me, which again, I'm trying to kind of relay at least another perspective. Again, the pendulum needed to swing back. There's a lot of douchebags who are like, you, Lena Con is ruining my life. And I think nobody, at least in my world is sympathetic to those people who are scamming folks. The question is for the average person who's trying to run a business who needs investment capital upfront to make it work, many reasonable businesses can't just generate profit from day one. I think that is a reasonable thing to try to promote and protect and that there were some reasonable concerns with the way the FTC felt so broad that what the types of companies and investment opportunities that would

have been there before started to close in part because of what she did. In part, both things can be true. I also think what is relevant is just to ask how do you incentivize innovation, just on a high level? And do we think that you better incentivize innovation by flooding the markets with a bunch of money and allowing a bunch of people to kind of grift and make money when they really don't deserve it, which we've seen a whole lot over the past few years? But also you get people who do actually pour blood, sweat, into tears to make something valuable and are able to do that because they generate capital. I'm biased because many of my close friends have done this,

and they aren't the douchebags who make shitty unprofitable companies, or if they are unprofitable, there's a real thought behind why, and I believe that innovation is good. Or do you kind of swing to the other side and say, look, yes, innovation is good, but you can't have that at the expense of having giant companies coming in and buying everybody up. And you have to push back against that because innovation will be lost if they continue to do this long term.

And I totally see both sides. I generally would lean more on Lena-Con's side. I generally am sympathetic to this. There's been so much abuse that obviously, the shit needs to change. But I feel like there is a valid side of this, which is like there's real value of a lot of investor money flowing through and making it easier for somebody to innovate and create something valuable. As a reminder, our lives are a lot better than they were 200 years ago when the average life expectancy was 35 and everybody worked in farming. There's a lot more to do,

but I think that innovation and developing our society is incredibly important. And I want our society to get better. And so in that high level, how do you encourage innovation? How much should the government come in and make those decisions and say, look, we're not giving you that choice because it can be immoral. And maybe that is what you need to do. But I at least just want to voice the other side. Yeah. I mean, I think the closing thoughts I have is like on the front of innovation, I think there's a lot of unexplored things of funding and pushing innovation that, or I shouldn't say unexplored because I think when you dig into mechanisms of innovation and funding that have existed within America through the past 80, 90 years, there's a lot of things of what allowed

the government to encourage innovation or fund innovation that we have cut or taken away over time that spurred a lot of the greatest technological innovations of the 20th century. that are no longer something we're pushing forward. And I think it's important to keep innovation in mind when you make these decisions. The mechanisms of innovation still have to exist somehow. How do you motivate people to make things? And I think you're right in keeping that in mind.

I think my core push back to the argument is like I think when people describe their, when people describe the reasons why they were unable to do something or unable to make the company they wanted to make, they look to reasons that they look to blame things that take away the easiest way out or the simplest way out, and because it affects them individually and personally. And it's very natural to present those concerns as the most pressing concerns. But when you, I think having that be the pervasive argument of,

this situation when there was an era of like easy money and funding beforehand. I think people are more likely to be upset and point to somebody like Lena rather than pointing to the money that allowed you to live the life you did for the past 10, 15 years and exist within that space just no longer is there. But there's an argument here to be had about, you know, lay it all out. What are the companies that didn't form or didn't exist because of things like this and like what were the actual conditions of them. And I want to see more of those things because we talked mostly about the victories

and the clear-cut things that she did, right? And there's so many more cases and so many more things that that entire department and agency got to work on. But I think it's important to like substantiate that side of the argument when something feels more explicitly clear

as the explanation for the... I can talk about this forever. Let's add no 30 minutes to the podcast. Let's keep going. We're going to have a Patreon. I can talk more about it. Listen, I think I made my thoughts, Clara. I just want to say, I mean, I, we are all good friends and we are doing, I think,

a good discussion. I really enjoy this discussion. People that listen aren't always understanding of that and they're not able to set way in. Let's put it, I'll put it simply. Nothing would make me more fucking annoyed to read a bunch of YouTube comments that like shit on Doug or shit on any of us. Okay, you can't shit on the people on Twitter though, because there's a bunch of

docebags who are probably to let them. You should have your opinion. I just, yeah, I, I, I think people just come in with this idea of like the any back and forth discussion is going to be something that is seen as like negative. It's like, I don't know. I want to, I want to be able to have this discussion to like go back and forth about like all of the ideas that are a part of this. And that's what makes it fun and exciting to do.

This is how I would talk to you guys off pot. I'm passionate. Yeah. We're all passionate. Yeah. So I just keep that in mind if you're going to chime in. It's fine to have your own opinion and it's fine to disagree with anything here. but just like, I don't do it

somewhat respectfully be candid. Do you think there's gonna be a comment? It's like, I can't believe Doug is supporting these capitalist doucheback and they follow up and they're like, sorry, I just got the end up so. It's actually chill, sorry. They like already have written the comment.

You guys made fun of the carrots and the asterisks. Oh, are we doing charis and asteris? Those were great. The carrots and the asteris to end the comment. Anyway, thank you. One discussion. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you so much

if you contributed to the Discord as well because that is so helpful to hear people's perspective with what's going on in the world, and I think just adds a lot of just color and nuance to what is super challenging. It's fucking hard right now. Yeah.

Thank you for every, thank you to everybody. What's more positive note? We, there's something positive. Oh, I have a single line. A single line.

Oh, never mind then. What? I have nothing. No, the world's dead. No, dude,

it's too. We got on something funny. I have an extremely tall story we'll end on. I don't even remember the fucking country. Bring up slide 11 real quick, just really quick. Very end.

Slide 11. So you know how some countries have really bad inflation. so they have, instead of $1,000, they have $1,000, and then $10,000. Oh, yeah, Zimbabwe had like the $40,000. They have $4 trillion bills. Well, Iran has figured out a way around that.

They're going to print a $10,000, but they're just going to call it a $10. Oh, go. They're just going to slash three zeros from every bill, but they will numerically be $10,000, $50,000, $100,000. That is a brilliant new innovation. That's the lemonade stand of countries. Like, they solved it.

Is it bad? Is it bad if I, I think this is, this is kind of a good solution. It's not. It actually has been tried in Turkey, Romania, and Zambia, and it does nothing. In fact, there's a quote on line 12. You bring a slide 12, just real quick, we'll end on a funny thing. Analyst believe that unless accompanied by actual inflation control and financial reforms,

this cosmetic move will fail to alleviate any of the countries' economic problems. Which is exactly what has happened in three other countries that tried it. It's just a funny way to make your bills less embarrassingly. Why would it change anything? But that's what's happening. Funny stuff. Thanks for watching Lemonade. We appreciate you.

See you next week. I can't wait.