Lemonade Stand - Everyone is banning Social Media | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

On this week's show... Aiden goes to the office, Atrioc picks a stock, and DougDoug reads the EULA. 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: 068 Recorded on: June 23rd, 2026 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Audio Listeners can hear us: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yz44z9z3t8VQu4WRmsrs6 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lemonade-stand/id1799868725 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d7e1f54-49a3-4082-81e8-f70bfe1ace63/lemonade-stand iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-lemonade-stand-269417962/ 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 Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 1:40 UK Social Media Bans 11:05 China Bans 21:38 TikTok is getting sued a lot 24:26 What does regulation look like? 32:52 YouTube is getting sued by Musicians 46:15 Remote Work Positives and Negatives 58:45 Premium Credit Cards are getting worse 1:08:20 Consumers are starting to cut Netflix 1:13:05 Mythos ban causing worry abroad 1:23:30 Stock of the Week 1:28:10 Quick follow up on last week 1:31:17 Outro New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I had a dream this weekend, and Doug, I want you to tell me if this is believable. Okay. In the dream, Atrioc accidentally bought a mansion. Okay. because he he missed all of the appointments to see the house in person. Yeah. And he like accidentally bought a house that was too big. I missed the appointment.

So by default, I own the mansion. It's like the Twitter deal. And then I show up to come over to his new house for the first time. Yeah. And he's mad at me and says that I have to, him and Ari Bulls say that I have to move in to split the mortgage with them because he missed all the appointments that would have told him the house was too

This is your dream and you have the tone of your voice and the way you told this to me over Discord is that I'm at fault for an action that didn't happen. You're being an asshole. I'm going to be honest. This sounds like you. In China, I don't know if we talked about this on the podcast. This is ridiculous. All of us were trying to use the Chinese apps, but it's impossible because you have a phone number constantly things are popping up all the time. Every app does their own thing.

And Brandon was the only one who was able to order or use the apps because he has the power to just like click through things at this unbelievable rate with a level of confidence that is baffling. And I can imagine this same sort of thing happening. That's because I signed away all my rights to Xu Jinping for a thousand years. I clicked every button. And apparently that same willpower allowed you to accidentally buy a home. My mansion in Beijing. And this leads into our main topic today.

Should adult children be able to use social media? Yes. Adults children are adult man children. Social media. That's the ban on the menu today because Britain has joined a number of countries from around the world in completely banning social media. for children under 16.

And that is the only piece of news from Britain this week. Well, it's funny because right, I mean, you're joking, but because they don't follow Britain politics, right after announcing this, Kirstarmer, then step down. The prime minister of the UK,

it was his last act basically out the door. He's like, no social media for Kizner 16, and I'm out. It's like Kobe's final game. He scores 70. Yeah, Kier Starmer's truly the bam out of bio of records.

No one said that before this. Yeah, LS, we break ground. We say things no one else will say. So, I mean, that's the big story. We can go into the details of it, but it does, it's a point in a larger trend. This is not the first country to do this. It's one of many.

And it is one of the more extreme bands so far. So this is one of the first ones to include YouTube. YouTube and other platforms are completely banned in this Britain under 16 thing. It doesn't go into effect until 2027. So there will be a last gasp. But it does follow a Australia ban from six months ago that was supposed to be the test case. We talked about Australia about Australia ban on the show.

I'm sorry about it happening. Yeah. Yeah, talking about it happening. So it's been six months. Here's the follow up. Much like the ban on video games in China we talked about. Most people who were already using social media, teens or otherwise, have continued to use it. They use VPNs.

They, uh, the age verification system, they keep going. However... Are you telling me that when they say, what is your birthday? Yeah. They don't put in the right number instead of scrolling to the bottom and there are thousands upon thousands of 100 and eight-olds. To give them credit, they have to go a little further than that to circumvent these bands. But the initial implementation of the Australian one was not super effective. Like the first week it's rolling out. And I was watching this news. piece where they're interviewing a bunch of kids between the age of, I think, like, 11 and 15,

and just asking them how this is going, you know, did this, did you get kicked off these apps? For some people, their accounts didn't even get flagged initially. So they just kept using the apps like normal. You look old for a sense. And then for others, they did lose access, but there's things like verifying your face as an indicator of how old you are. But there's reports of like kids finding ways to like draw facial hair on themselves in order to surpass the age filter or in Australia the week that this ban was implemented the number one apps on the Australian app store were all ways of circumventing the van or more niche social media sites that didn't get caught in the band in the first place which was a concern in itself because

if you're ostracizing children to platforms that are more niche. less familiar, less regulated, uh, you're, you're potentially putting them in an even worse spot than before. A bunch of kids off of Instagram, put them on 4chan. You're not, you're like, you've saved them. You haven't saved them.

But here's the thing. The Australia ban, six months on, is unanimously popular with parents. It got like a nine out of 10, 90% approval score within a you gov poll. People are feeling like it's the right direction. And here's what I'll say. It seems like if you were already using social media, this has done very little to dissuade you. But it has seemingly done something for kids that were turning 10 or 11 or after the ban.

Like they are less likely to start. It is less likely to get. So the way they're defending it now is saying that it's a longer term play to almost save the next generation. Right. We have a lost generation. Yeah, these guys are, these kids are corrupted by Instagram. I think the New York Times was doing a breakdown on this of like apparent sentiment basically. And it was talking about the frustration.

of how this isn't as relieving for parents of children in this primary age group right now. Like, not that they're unhappy with the ban, but that the ban isn't, you know, getting their kids to turn on a dime and like basically stop smoking. But the hope is that like, okay, my kid who's eight isn't going to, this is going to be the difference in them getting hooked or not. Yeah.

And I think there was a feeling among parents in the article about how they still feel like they're the villain. It made me think about growing up where my parents were really strict with this stuff, whether it be social media, even like a count, like using the internet in general, playing video games.

And I often felt as like one of the kids at school, the main reason it sucked so bad was watching all of my friends at school or the other kids talk about things that I didn't get to do. Like they're talking about oh, the coolest thing that just happened on like Call of Duty this weekend

and like I couldn't play like an M rated video game and like I will add you and like let's talk on Facebook or MySpace. I wasn't allowed to have those accounts and that was the reason that I was like so frustrated at my parents at that age because it's like you're preventing me from participating in this social culture

of you know everything that would allow me to feel included at school and then my parents there's this whole dynamic between me and my parents like arguing and going back and forth about like, uh, and they become the enemy. And it's basically a bunch of parents like hoping they don't have to feel like that anymore.

Like nobody, no parent wants to constantly be in this fight. Yeah. But, and, uh, the hope is like six months in. Hopefully this like helps fix that dynamic or relationship between me and my 13 year old because I don't want to take away the thing that makes them feel,

you know, included at school. Uh, but it's just not working in that regard. Yeah, a lot of examples of parents saying, uh, you know,

If they follow the rule closely and their kid doesn't have it, the kid will say, well, my friends have Snapchat and they're still using it, and I don't have it, and I'm isolated. So, yeah, it hasn't done a ton for kids already hooked on it, to be honest. That's the, that's the breakdown. But it seems like a really intractable problem. And UK has said, we're not going to wait. Because the truth is the reason this is all pushed across.

We should talk about the downsides as well. But the reasons pushed across is because there's a lot of strong evidence that it reduces school outcomes, increases bullying, increases teen depression, all the things that have been, we know about. for social media. Dude, I, I look at this. There's a study by Ofcom in the UK, which is obviously relevant to this new band coming out. And not only are 33% of five to seven year olds have their own social media account in 2022. And then by age 12 to 15, 90% of them have it. But 84% of kids aged 8 through 17 said they've been bullied online. And then the majority of 12 to 17

year olds are confident that they can tell what is real and fake online, but only 11% of them correctly could identify what was relevant. So you know, much of extremely online. This is from 2022, by the way. So it's a couple of years ago. But how many of those bullied, what did you say, eight to 12 year old? No, those, it's eight to 17. So basically anybody online has been bullied.

Do you think that's how much is that slime? Do you think if we got rid of slime, they would be reduced that number by 12. 40%? It's what they talk about. It's a small percentage of society. even. He's constantly. If you control

for Slime's Twitter account it's actually way... The UK is backwards. You need to target individuals. So wait, okay. Not, I mean, that's a joke, but the UK, so people that are pushing back against this,

most of them do not dispute that there's clearly a problem. Like, clearly the numbers on teen depression and educational outcomes are all in a downward slide in a bad direction. But what they say is,

what if, instead of trying to do this blanket ban on all platforms, or picking platforms, what if we banned the parts of the apps that are addictive? Basically, the Infinite Scroll. If we attacked Infinite Scroll, then you could allow people to have TikTok or YouTube or Twitter or whatever.

What if they could all, like they only had a set time during the day to all scroll at the same time? Eventually the world will catch up to what I said a year ago on this podcast. But until then, I will just smugly smile because I know the Infinite Scroll is the future that we're going to get to. We have to do everything wrong before we do it.

Everything wrong before we should recap. The infinite scroll, which is a strange name to pick, is the idea that everybody can use. I'm sorry. Oh yeah, daily scroll is one hour a day, everybody can use it. It would be so beast. Is there any, yeah, what is the progress there? Because I do, when I think about something getting banned like YouTube,

I feel like there's a kind of an argument for, oh, I wouldn't mind a younger person being able to browse things on YouTube if you like gut shorts from the feed, change how it like feeds you content. Like so is there. The progress is zero. I mean the platforms won't go for it. And even if you were to make that ban, I think they could run circles around you.

I mean like YouTube, you tell them they can't do Infinite Scroll. They will do 999,000s. You know, they'll find, they're just so good at that. It would be very, very difficult to win that war, I think. So yeah, I don't know. You know, a government that has even more ability to control its corporate. and citizens is example China.

And China's on this list as a country that has tried social media bans and internet regulation. And we were there, man. And the truth is they have had very little success actually banning video games or social media for young people. They're all scrolling on it. And so it just... It became a meme that I asked every single person that we met if they know kids who are playing video games. They're all like, yes. The kids still play video games, even though it's supposed to be like one hour a week.

Or when we talked to actual kids, if you just ask them like, do you and your friends like, how does this work with the, how you circumvent this? And he's like, yeah, everybody's place. They almost laughed at it. Like the idea that we even thought it was real is, is, uh, it was funny. So the other thing that came up a lot is that, uh, that story or idea that was going around for a while that young people in China are getting fed like more productive things on their version of TikTok, like educational content.

And everybody there was like, dude, no, it's brain rotten as hell. It's the same thing. AI Trump. Yeah, there's like a lot of AI, like Trump and. Both of us, like, we're doing the predator meme shake of like AI slop about American politics. Both countries are deeply united. You know, I think something that couples pretty well with this is a larger pushback by parents that I've been seen in the U.S. at the least to screen time in schools in general.

like parents being unhappy with the integration of things like tablets or computers into how kids are educated. I think there's a, especially since COVID because of digital learning, like came to prominence in such a way through that time period. A bunch of school districts around the country signed these massive contracts with tech ed companies. Yeah. To integrate like technology into our education process across our district to, modernize the way we educate our kids. And the amount of screen time that was climbing in schools post-COVID was going up and up and up until like 23 to 24 school year. And now in certain areas of the country, that's falling because parents have been pushing back against it so much.

And there's a reaction of parents seeing the decline in like their kids' cognition or rise in something like their anxiety and they're tying the devices that they see. their kids required to use at school to those outcomes. And I thought it was pretty crazy in this one article I was reading. It was a parents just sharing an anecdotal story about how their

kid has to bring like a Chromebook home. And it's they play, the kid just keeps playing Bellotro on the Chrome book. And then after that the same father and other parents said they have discovered playing on devices five nights at

Epstein's in which players tried to escape Jeffrey Epstein's Island. And I... And wait, sorry, that was part of the coursework? Yeah. Yeah, that was like... Civics. They put that straight in.

Seventh grade requirement. You got a... Five nights at Epstein. But I think that's actually a story I want to dig into more another time is like the scale at which these like tech ed contracts were like being sold throughout this time period.

But I think there is a collective reaction from parents now, whether it be like because of phone, media or this integration of screens into learning where people are like, I want papers and pen back. I don't want like AI involved. I don't want this level of cheating. I want my kid to actually be able to focus and learn something. So there's like a tide shift in how all of this stuff is rolling out. No, totally. Everything that I've seen with regards to reducing phones and screens at school has been successful. I know like Sweden actually did it. Some Nordic countries

did it. Nordic Fundback. The North Fund Back of the Week. Some countries in the Northeast did it, America. It's just so far from what I've seen, I haven't seen evidence that it hasn't worked. Because people, it just makes sense. It just makes logical sense that you would pay attention less, you would cheat more.

I would do that as a kid. In fact, I remember the one class where we had a computer all the times was typing class and nobody did any, you just played games. That's the whole thing. Yeah, it was awesome. It was sick. I really enjoyed it.

But like if it was every class, I would do that every time. So yeah, I don't know. That seems pretty likely. Yeah, you and I dodged the... The worst of it. Basically the worst of it. Like, we, you know, when we were entering high school, it was like MySpace was starting to take off.

And then as we were exiting high school, Facebook was starting to take off. But there wasn't really like algorithmic content. It was like your friend's feed, you know? And so we just didn't experience that. We turned out great. But I mean, you have to go even further back to find anyone. Yeah.

And I was left scarred and disheveled. Yeah, you're not terrible. You're not your parents band you. You're like what happens when you raise someone in the woods on Mario Car Wii. But I remember even, you had TI-84 with a block dude on it. Yeah, we took what we could get. Everybody will take everything they can get. So if you gave me five nights at Epstein's, you know, I'm not paying attention at all.

Yeah. Even right now when my computer's not working. You're playing five nights and Etsy. That's what I'm right now. Perry pulled up five nights at Epstein's. What's going to do? on in America because in Florida, I believe we, we had our own attack on it. So I didn't realize this until looking into this. So, you know, UK and Australia have, have done this. UK just did this

big nationwide band. We, America, kind of, have been implementing these bands. There are 19 states that are in the process or attempting to do bands of different kinds, but they're all like patchwork and different and having different legal troubles. So what is already the case is that the big social media companies, at least in America, I don't, I imagine it's different. for countries. It's supposed to be 13 plus. Like you're supposed to be banned from social media below that. But then of course, like anybody can go get one. And again, on the UK thing that I looked at, like 60% of 8 to 11 year olds have

their own social media account. It's like the majority of 8 year olds have have it anyways. And so there's all these different laws. Here's some notable examples that I thought were interesting. Colorado and Minnesota, they're requiring a warning label that pops up about the impact of mental health. Like it's so useless. It's like, dude.

What does that do to? I had this... I was thinking about this... And they've said it's worked and missus killed. How's that worked? It's like a... It's like how in California, how anything that could potentially cause cancer has to be labeled.

And I walked into a restaurant yesterday where at the bar, they had labeled that like spirits and wine can like potentially cause cancer. And I was like, who is that fucking form? They put it on everything so that nothing means anything anymore. Exactly, exactly. And I imagine this would be the same thing.

they're claiming it works? No, they're not claiming it works. Oh, my back. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Like, what I'm trying to paint the picture of is the U.S. is in this chaotic state of many people trying many different things. Yeah. So this is what Colorado and Minnesota have to have your parents' consent to sign in.

And you need their explicit permission to use social media from 10.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. So there's like time gating in some states. Interesting. It's getting dangerously close. Yeah. Interesting. Arkansas and Ohio tried to ban it. but it was, so a bunch of these have been blocked by judges because the First Amendment is like the big counter to this because, you know, many people feel like people under the age of 18 do have rights. And then California and New York. That's crazy. Uh, pass laws.

Then they're all right. California and New York are trying to like to go for the addictive feeds of minors, but then that's being legally challenged. I mean, there's some interesting questions here about the, you know, the rights of people because that's essentially the big counter argument. But then in Florida. So Florida, Florida passed. a law in 2024 that if you're under 14 you can't have an account 15 to 16 requires parental permission so like on the stricter side kind of um and then the social media accounts like companies have to delete the account so they get 50,000 dollars per violation so there's like a big monetary punishment and there was some legal challenges eventually it started in February of this year so now Florida sued TikTok's ass and saying you guys are allowing underage access you guys are misrepresenting the amount of violence or sexual content you can be exposed to to and then Perry if you pull this up again the law states 13 and under is banned

TikTok on their page says 13 plus like come on in and so Florida is like no you can't do that we have a law that says you're not okay but we had a law that legally banned TikTok in America we all said eh yeah if TikTok has learned not to care about our laws I guess I don't blame yeah yeah so what's interesting is um Florida seems to be like aggressively going after social media companies in a way way that other states kind of aren't. They're also, they sued Snapchat in 2025 and said it, they're legally opening accounts and whatnot. So they're going for like a lot of monetary damages and trying to put serious pressure on the social media companies. And I think that's like a pretty

interesting turn if states start to actually throw a lot of lawsuits. It's funny because Florida isn't such a budget deficit. It just sounds like they're trying to shake down TikTok for some cash. And that's kind of was, was China's approach when we were talking to people there, right? Like the, the law around expression on social media apps is kind of, it's intentionally vague so that speech can be moderated in a way to the government's choosing there, right? But they put all the pressure on the companies to enforce it rather than themselves and basically say the companies will face really high consequences if you do not like service the law appropriately. And then that incentivized the crackdown on the company's end.

And we're like, they don't want to let anything slip through because of how dire the consequences are. You know, whether it be monetary or like, you know, somebody being arrested or removed from their position, I'm not saying that strategy should be adopted. That was just the way they went about it. It's like, okay, we're not going to like create this massive government employment program to like moderate these companies and then submit the request to social media companies.

It's like, no, you, the company, are responsible for dealing with this. this and it's like if you don't deal with it in a way that we deem adequate, then you will face the house. Yeah, we'll find you. What's, which follows up to like kind of what's happening alongside these laws. What is America really good at if nothing else? Freedom. Freedom. I was going to say that. Freedom to, we've read lots of books about this. Freedom, hey, freedom to buy a house that you never toured. Yes, that's true. You have the freedom to do that. Freedom to if as long as the friend shows up to split it with you. Freedom to force your friend to split it with you.

Freedom to... I shoot guns. Guns. Shoot guns pretty well. Sorry. I feel like you had an answer. Could we shoot the social media in some way? What if we fight?

Because I heard they have the media in the cloud. What if we fire our guns into the air? We all fire our guns up at the same time. Do we shoot TikTok down? TikTok's cloud could not survive. Right. No, I... This actually is a pretty good...

They're being sued to shit right now. Oh, suing them. Yeah, that's one of our... Yeah, that's one of our things. They're suing them with a gun. So, no. I have a funny, yeah, okay. The TikTok is being sued right now, not only by Florida, but by 14 state attorney

general simultaneously. There's a bipartisan coalition that is saying they're misleading the public about the safety of their platform and harming young people's mental health. It changes per state, but like Massachusetts is like, you're a public nuisance. New York is saying you're false advertising. And so apparently there's a thousand similar lawsuits pending. And this is a follow up to, if you guys remember earlier this year, Last year, there was a big meta lawsuit where this woman who was 20 won a lawsuit for millions of dollars that said, meta, you harmed my mental health.

And so there is this big trend where people, states are starting to do these massive quantities of lawsuits against the social media company saying, you have harmed me on top of these bands. They seem like they're kind of little fucked. This is exactly what happened with vape companies. What was the big vape company when it was first? And the babe... A jewel? Jewel. This is what happened to Jewel.

Yeah. Jules, like literally 38 states or whatever, parents and all of them got angry enough that there was lawsuits across the country. And it just kind of imploded their ability to sell and do the way they, they done before. And I mean, they dumped their stock to Marlboro or something. Yeah. But, yeah. I just don't get how a company like TikTok is going to survive, which is already tenuous in terms of what it's, what weird state it's in. When you have a precedent with a couple different lawsuits now that any person who's like a late teenage,

or early 20s can sue them and say, you distress me and win millions of dollars. How are you going to survive? That's like a tough long-term play. Oh, my God. I mean, they are extraordinarily popular. It is worth saying it's still the biggest social media and it's dominant and people use it.

I think I saw among teens, it's like five to seven hours a day is the, you know, it's like some astronomical number. I think it's all social media, not just TikTok, but it's the biggest one of them. But still, it's like these are, you know, the thing they're fighting against is pretty entrenched. And I wonder, you know, if we're, we're nearing the end of the subject, I want to steal man a little bit.

There is a strong counter argument that's worth bringing up, which is that, you know, for example, in the UK, for this next election, they have changed the law so that 16 is now the voting age. So you can't use. What was it? It was 18 before. Okay. Oh, they lowered it. Wow. They lowered their voting age for the next election.

And there is an idea of like, can you really tell someone they're old enough to choose the direction of the country, but they can't watch YouTube? there's like a freedom aspect of it. There's also an aspect of like, do we trust the government to be the one to control these platforms? These are areas where we could get opinions out outside of the mainstream system and find other people that...

There's the idea of like, could this be, once they have the verification systems, could they be turned even more restrictive later on if there was, yeah. Well, the UK was already under fire for this, right? Outside of kids, they were looking to broadly apply ID verification for social media accounts for everybody.

Yeah. And they were facing a lot of criticism. So it's like a totally fair point. And that makes it a really tough thing to have a solid podcast take trademark on. Yeah. In that, I just, I wish people on that side would at least agree that, man, social media clearly is doing David. We can't wait under 20 years to find out that it's fucking kids up. And then people on the other side have to realize that like, you know, the government doesn't always have 100% best freedom of speech, interest in heart.

And they could abuse this power if given. There's another argument going on, which is that, so if you are a social media, okay, we institute these bands. That's yours. Let's say, we say under 18, no social media, we're cutting it out. Like, let's do it. How do you actually stop kids from doing this? Well, the only way to do it with is to use like AI tracking, basically. And that's what's going on, right?

Like, so YouTube now has the whole thing where they track your behavior and then use that to algorithmically determine whether you're young and then force age verification. and Roblox is doing a similar thing, which if you remember that candidate for Los Angeles mayor was complaining about the age verification thing. Like, TikTok has a new thing where they like analyze your face like you were saying. And so if you have, you know, tens of millions of people or hundreds of millions of people

on your platform and you are trying to determine if it's a person who's 13 pretending to be 17, the only way to do that is to get really invasive or require ID, right? which maybe you don't have. Also, if you're a 13-year-old, are you going to have government ID? And, you know, all sorts of things.

Like, can you speak freely about the government or whatnot? If you were forced to be identified and tracked by the government at all times, like the actual implementation of how do you stop kids from using these apps is extraordinarily hard. And the only way to do it seemingly is to get more authoritarian. It's a little worrying. Like that's why I really like the idea of, but even though it's impossible, it's also impossible. But the idea of like a tag. The daily scroll.

The daily scroll, but attacking infinite scroll, attacking the parts of the platform that are so addictive. I know they'll just find a new way, which is the hard part of me thinking this through. But man, attacking that would actually be effective because also we all agree on the show that the problems of social media don't actually stop with someone.

Their brain doesn't hit 18 and go, okay, I can handle this. It's poisoning our brain. It's poisoning everybody's brain. Oh, yeah. It's horrible. It's ruining society in some way. Yes. And so like if you just don't give them any antibodies

when they're a kid and they'll figure it out when they're 18. They're just, they're going to get brain rotted anyway. I do you're saying we drip it to them. They start at one minute a day until they've proven they can handle it. I think you should get one minute per your age. Yeah. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. But there's like, the oldest among us will get the most social media, which is good. But if you're showing signs of brain rot, we like break glass and there's a book there and you have to read it. We hand you the giving treat. That's a slow ass book.

No, it's like catcher in the rye. It's one nobody. even likes. Dude, that would be so funny. When I was in elementary school, they had all the books in the school library color coded with a little dot on them. And you get points for each book you read. If it was a bigger book, you got more points. What if the book would unlock them out of time you get on social media? So if you read Moby Dick, you get two hours. That's what my parents did. Did they really? Yeah, we had to like do chores and like read books and maybe you too and like do homework. And then that would get, oh, now you get 30 minutes of video game time. Like, oh, interesting. Yeah. It sucked.

Didn't do that. Didn't help you. Blanket No on weekdays. My kids were just mainlining Cartoon Network and I was reading books like a coward. Wait, your kids?

What? Your kids? You have to see your kids? No, no, like my friends. Like my friends. I mean,

I said my kids. You said my kids. My kids are watching Cartoon Network. My fellow kids. I can't, I can't imagine the, I'd actually like to hear people's suggestions if you have one in

for the comments, sound off. But it feels like the two, solutions are what you've just outlined. Is this more like stricter enforcement of IDs, like database of users, and, you know, which trends in this like more authoritarian direction? Or an ability for a government figure institution to enforce rules on the companies in a way

that is much more broad and reactive than is currently allowed through like a more liberal, uh, justice system. You're saying it's the lips. You're saying the core problem here. I mean liberal in like the, like the academic, I understand. Academic sense. I'm a tour carlson story later we'd talk about it.

Oh, I know what. Sorry. Is my dog? Yeah, we're talking about my dog in a second. No, but I, do you see what I mean? It's like, it feels like the solution. It's like these two prongs of solutions trend in a more authoritarian direction,

but the stakes, uh, the stakes of the underlying issue feel very high. but I don't really know how to feel so. I will say, like, if there was a world where kids were allowed to drink as much as they want and then we started banning it, you would say, you could say, this is a more authoritarian direction. But at the end of the day, some level of authoritarianism for some rules make sense. Like, people should not. I mean, I agree.

I agree. I would like sports gambling to not be widely accessible. There's things that should be banned. So I'm not like a total, like, laissez-faire, no rules for anyone. I think I'm more in the camp of like on both fronts, when you have a problem that is digital, the layers of friction to adapt and change and mold the thing around the rules that have been made is always very quick and easy relative to a physical thing. So that is my worry. I'm 100% of the belief that, okay, the UK government could draw up a strict set of laws that require social media

companies to modify their platforms in a way that is less addictive. But like you said, I think with the pace at which these institutions can adapt and the age of the people in charge, they can only read, it's like Instagram finds a new workaround that is compliant with the law and then you're back to one. And eight years later they finally adapted that. But if I,

but in my miracle, in the hypothetical world, no consequences, I've made you the fucking social media czar in the country and you can just- The Daily Scroll! And you decree the Daily Scroll. and anything that, like, just based on vibes

that breaks the Daily Scroll, you just get to say no to. You could just react on a whim. But that has all these consequences because what if you're a really bad guy? Wow. And you... That actually sounds really good.

I think we were heads at and I think I should handle all social media. But let's move on a different story because I think we can't... I would hear your... We'll hear your opinions. If you guys have a... If you guys have solved this problem,

let us know and we'll pass it on the decision making. Next time Pete Buttigieg is here, we'll pass it along. But it is, it is... I guess what I'll say to send the social social story up is that many, many countries from the UK to the EU as a whole, South American countries, Asian countries, and America, they're all saying we can't wait anymore. People are so angry,

parents are so angry, kids are seeing decline. They're having to do something. So the solutions won't be that good at first, I think, but hopefully someone can figure out something that makes progress. And I'll say it. I would like to not also be banned from Twitter. So if they find a way to do that, let me know. You would like to be banned? I would like them to ban me from Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be fun. I've eliminated all the others, and then that still hooks me. He keeps getting you back. Here's a finding that should stop every tech leader cold.

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Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Speaking of YouTube, interesting, I mean, so this is a quick one and then we'll move on. YouTube was sued a couple months ago, and it was by a group of indie musicians who sued them trying to do a class action lawsuit saying, hey, your new AI. music model, Lyria 3, has been, was made by copying all of our music. So this is kind of the broader, you know, story of what is happening with AI music right now where most of the companies, like Suno or Udio, which are the really big ones, are making AI music and their models were trained off of all the music they could find on the internet. And their argument is fair use. We are,

you know, we are transforming it and, uh, and we don't think that we've broken any laws here. This is a big, big, big, ongoing discussion, which can potentially massively change the direction of AI development. But right now, these types of questions are still unanswered. With Google, it's a little bit different because Google,

they were sued by these musicians and said, hey, you copied our music, just like the other guys. But Google responded, this is June 10th, like two weeks ago, and responded to this lawsuit and said, first off, even accepting their untested allegations as fact,

the complaint cannot stand. Basically, the lawyer opens and says, first off, you can't even prove if we trained it off of your music or not. But they won't say whether they did. Even accepting your untested allegations is fact the complaint cannot stand because plaintiffs granted YouTube and Google a broad license to use the uploaded content. And they're right in the YouTube terms of service when you upload something, quote, you grant to YouTube a worldwide non-exclusive royalty-free sub-licensable and transferable license to use that content, including to reproduce, distribute, prepared derivative works, display, and perform. So every time any of us upload something to YouTube, we are giving them the right to use it to train AI models. That's crazy because I read the full DMCA every single time I click through those things.

And I just must have missed that part. Would that have stopped you? I suspect not. So this is interesting in that this is a kind of different story than the typical musicians sue AI company who responds with fair use. Google's like, look, we have the rights. And then the counter argument by the musicians is basically, I mean, I can find the quote here. Google doesn't just have access to our music. It operated the infrastructure through which much of that music reaches the world.

Google owns YouTube one of the most important platforms for music discovery, distribution, and monetization. And it runs content ID, which is how they manage rights. And so they're basically their counter argument is because you guys are a massive distributor of music, we sort of have to upload, we can't really opt out if we want to have success. but that then allows you to do this sub thing with them. So this is an interesting case that again is part of a broader trend with the AI music

lawsuits and this one is totally different. So who knows? I think Google has a stronger case here. The other AI music players may be less so. I mean, Suno's got doesn't even have this because you definitely didn't sign anything. They just stole music. They just stole music and uploaded it. And I assume

if you really could get to the nuts and bolts of this, Google did too. I'm sure there's plenty of songs that aren't on YouTube but they threw into their models. That's what's so funny. Is they're saying like, even if you could prove what you're saying, like we don't know.

They, I look, they have not said what they trained to this music model off of. Everything that I've seen from, you know, like, for example,

meta, Mark Zuckerberg, they rented a building off of their office campus and had everyone bring in books to scan and then upload that they didn't own. And they just counted it as like,

it's offsite. But, and that was proven. There's just no way that these, the ad companies, which are on a full-speed race, aren't uploading every possible thing

they can get their hand on to increase training data. There's been no punishment for it so far on any real level, and so they're just doing it. I, uh, yeah. This reminds me of when, um, Disney,

there was a person that, uh, they, they ordered a restaurant for their, a meal at a restaurant for their wife at a Disney park. And they said, is this gluten-free or something? I don't remember exactly what it was.

Some, some dietary fish. It was shellfish. And they're like, No, it doesn't. Okay. And then she ate it. It did have shellfish. She died. And he goes, I'm suing you. This is crazy. You lied to me. And they go, you have a Disney Plus account. And there's a part of that ULA you signed eight years ago that says you can never sue us and you have to go into force arbitration. And so there's that level of like. Dude, and he wasn't even, I think the account had been like inactive for years. So he hadn't even watched Disney Plus. Dude, I'm playing Baldersgate. It sounds like you're like signing a deal with a devil. Like you can make this like permanent contract for and then in return you get shellfish.

I have a question for you, Aiden. What I've realized through this is that YouTube has the right to train an AI model off of all of our podcasts. And they could make Lemonade Stand AI and just replace us. And would you watch it? Would I watch Lemonade Stand AI? Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, we could cut costs here. We could save the gas. of us driving in in Los Angeles traffic. They'll just never be able to replace the yard. The server would catch on fire. You think it can't generate slime saying a fart joke? YouTube's podcast AI would never be able to make a joke about how like we do.

I don't even know if we can keep that in this episode. Yeah, probably have to bleep that. Probably have to bleep that. Can I talk about gaming back? Gaming is back. What's up? Listen, every once in a while on the show, we have a story that proves to us that gaming is back.

And this one honestly is the opposite of that, but I want to talk about it. Oh, okay. Two parts of this story. Number one is that yesterday, I believe, Valve finally announced the price of their much anticipated steam machine. The console killer.

It's bringing the PC to your living room. And it is astronomically high. It's like... Thank God. I was a... worried the plebs would be able to afford it. Thank God. I'm an itching.

Aiden head to toe in Gucci and Montclair so fucking happy that the regular folk can not afford the steam machine. I woke up. I checked my news feed like I do every morning to see if there's an update on the steam machine. I take my diamond grill out and I say thank all.

I was hoping for 2000. Thanks, game. Still a little cheap, but thanks game. No, it's astronomically expensive. How much is it? I believe with no controller. That's the cheapest model with no controller. The cheapest model with no controller. For everything you need a controller to play.

You do need a controller to play. So basically all in. You don't. You can plug in the keyboard. You just touch the box. You can plug in whatever you want. Oh, okay. I'm sorry, you're right.

But the steam machine with controller, I don't know what the exact all in costs for like a regular use case is. But it's like $12, $1,300 or something like that. Yeah. And people are finding it to be extraordinarily expensive and certainly disappointing for what they expected. And Valve's response is, is that this is what it costs us to make.

We're not even making a profit on the console, which is probably true, given that the cost of RAM has gone astronomical due to AI. So this is seen as a response to like, hey, that's what it is what it is. AI is buying all the chips. This is what we could get.

But it does seem like it undercuts the momentum that Valve had of like, we're going to just start taking over the living room. Like that, I feel like this is not going to be slow to be adopted. Yeah, so I have a few thoughts on this. I watched a cool review of the product by Dave Toadie.

already. And he points out that if you try, like people are balking at the price, which I think is totally understandable. But if you try to build a comparable PC at the moment, like just on your own, the parts come out to a very similar price. Yeah, they're not profiting on this, I think, or are very little if they are. The big thing that they're saying they won't do is a lot of console sales traditionally have been loss leaders. The idea that we'll sell this, actually not at a profit will sell it literally at a loss, like the first Xbox sold that way. And we will make that back

through either your subscription to our online service, through the games that we're selling and publishing for the console, and Valve is refusing to subsidize the console and sell it at a loss, like a lot of companies do choose to do. I think the thing that does genuinely suck for them, from, I've been keeping up weirdly close

on the release timeline of this since their announcement. You know how like the Chrome app on your phone just feeds you recommended news articles? I clicked like three about the steam machine when it launched and then it feeds me a new update every day. This little steam machine freak loves everything about it. Yeah, and he's like, and then I keep like...

He wants to know the specs. He wants to know the... There's an infinite scroll about steam machine price updates. That's the world we live in here. The infinite scrolls gotten so deep. It's even hidden Google Chrome But they did delay the announcement, the price,

and I think everything about this because of the problems they were running to in the cost of the parts. And this is not just being felt by them right now. You can see this in the price increases across consoles in general. They raise the price on the Steam deck. So, and if you look at...

Xbox is up, PlayStation is up, phones are going up in price next year, like the RAM cost has increased tech across the board. You can basically, and the biggest fault of this arguably is that it only has a gigabytes of RAM in it. Like that is a decision that they made. And one of the, if you track the price increase with the Steam deck and assume that they had to make

a similar adjustment in the price of this, you can see that the original attended price of this product was around like $750 to $800. But they had to push it. it up to this. They couldn't even push this down to $999, like below you know, below a thousand. Which is much cheaper.

Yeah, but they obviously made a decision internally to like, it crosses the thousand mark. And I was talking to this in our, just a friend group chat. And I was like, dude, this has to be the worst time ever to choose to launch a video game console. Yeah, it just looks back. Because you're just going to get eaten alive

regardless of the reasons. I'm revealing myself as a fake gamer. Why even in the world where this is more affordable. Why is this, why would this be disruptive or impactful? The machine, because I thought the whole pitch is like, because it is just a PC, why is this substantially different than somebody buying a pre-built PC that you can do? I think the idea, always it takes me to the second story, but actually I'll do it. I was a second story. It's a good answer to your question. Okay. So Sony recently, over the past few years, has wanted to make more money off their big console

exclusives like God of War and Spider-Man. And so they said, well, we're in a war with Xbox. We can't release it there. Nintendo is a whole different platform, different specs, can't release it there. What if we release them on PC? And so they quietly have been releasing a lot of their major titles on PC. Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, God of War. And they all made a ton of money. They did a longer-term study of these users, and they realized, uh-oh, here's the problem. They, once they realize they can just wait and get our best titles on PC, they all of them, their purchase intent on a PlayStation has dropped to nothing. They just, they realized, that the best thing to do is kind of just to own a PC.

PC can get almost, it gets every Xbox game, it gets almost every game but Nintendo games. And so PC gaming has quietly, despite being, you know, backseat to consoles for most of like when we were growing up, has become the dominant form of gaming. You get the most value for your buck. And if you're a crazy little guy,

you'd be playing Nintendo games on it too. Don't tell them. Don't tell them. Nintendo was still killing. Couldn't catch me doing it. So PC gaming is really just taking off. And Steam has become the dominant platform store for buying video games.

And it has all the latest new indie games and the games you play with your friends and all the games that don't release on consoles or release much later on consoles. And so Steam has realized that the last battle is like most, there's some group of gamers who only play on their couch in front of the TV. They don't actually have a gaming PC.

It's overwhelming. It's too hard to set up. The idea of it's too daunting. If they can crack that code and they can put a steam machine that's very one-click and press and play, in your living room, it kind of could blow the console makers out of the water.

It could be the last bastion. So that was the idea. It's like Steam could have total dominion over gaming with this final push. And nothing will crack the living room quite like a $1,050. But this price deck really put a damper on it.

So yeah, those are two stories. It's like just a weird time in gaming. I will say PC gaming is clearly looking pretty good. Xbox isn't a total tailspin. They're doing layoffs. They're closing down studios. they're moving all exclusives to PC and Sony Nintendo are kind of

walling up their gardens again. Also, the Sony story the end result of it is that Sony has said they're pulling back from PC releases of their exclusives. The next god of wars and stuff are not going to go on PC. They're going to literally be console only, you have to buy a console because they realize that they're kind of like selling themselves out long term.

Yeah, I feel like if that's the lesson to learn from Nintendo more than anything, right? Like that is the real brand power of Nintendo. It's like, you want to play Mario? You don't play Mario bitch? Do you want my Mario? Mario? You better buy a damn game.

You better got a console or a switch. Switch 12. Anyway, I'm in the wait list. You're on the wait. Obviously, you're going to buy 12 of them because you like to work from home. Okay? And if you're working from home,

what exactly is the vibe? What's the vibe at working from home? Yeah, that's good. I wanted to... Nobody even noticed, especially now that we've called it out explicitly. I wanted to ask you guys a question because I saw a...

an intriguing opinion article about work from home now that it has been more established and we're years past COVID. And this was making the argument that everybody enjoys remote work for the most part. You poll people, it's like 80% of people say they prefer remote work. It's better for them for a multitude of reasons. Like you don't have to commute anymore. You can do like little chores throughout your day. You can be at home with your kids. You can, there's so many reasons why work from home is super, super appealing.

But this, the person who wrote this article was going through a couple different studies and basically making the argument that this era of work from home is increasingly isolating people and causing them to be more depressed, have fewer connections with people, and have these slower

you know, downward effects on you after years and years of doing remote work. And the reason I thought this was interesting, this was more of like an open question to you guys, is do you agree with that idea or takeaway? Because in the comments of this article, as you can expect, people are like New York Times shills

trying to get us to go back to work. Like the establishment, just is doing whatever they can to convince us to go back. Basically, like, a bunch of people arguing that the New York Times is like a part of the cabal that is forcing people to work in office again. And while I can see why people would want to push back against this, because I literally started working for Ludwig, one of my primary two reasons was because my old job was asking me to go back into office.

And I was like, I absolutely do. not want to do that. And, uh, however, now the way I work is like I go into an office every day. A very non-traditional office at that though. And I wanted to just get your guys's thoughts on this. Like do you think, how do you think like work from home effects of you guys as like with your careers? What you think this is like for normal people, where you sit on the topic in general, kind of looking for everybody, everybody's opinions listening to this too. Uh, because I can kind of see multiple sides of this issue, just looking at myself,

not even thinking about other people. It's funny that you mentioned the New York Times as being accused of being the deepest show on this, because my counterpoint comes from the New York Times to this article. This is an opinion guest essay that you're showing. Can you show a mine as well?

This is also an opinion guest essay. This is one that just came out yesterday that I read. It was called The Secret Reason Bosses want everyone back in the office every day of the week. And it's a six-year study that interviewed

thousands of employees and bosses on work from home. And what it found was the one trait that is consistent across all managers that wanted the most work in office time is ego, as in they really enjoyed the feeling of being the boss in person.

That was the most consistent trait that led to someone wanting to bring everyone as much as possible. So, and that in my own experience, having done a few years of work from home and work in the office from Nvidia, where this debate would happen a lot, that tracks with the managers who wanted it the most

versus the ones the least. Yeah. Was the ones who really enjoyed the feeling of like, I don't know, lording over meetings and walking around the cubicles and those people were the most of like, we have to get back in the office right away. And so I think there's some truth to that.

However, I've talked to some people in my audience about this, younger people. I do think there's a point of like, if you've already established yourself and you're good at what you do, work from home is pretty convenient. but if you're new, there is a weird thing of like joining an office and being work from home immediately. You don't get to know anybody.

You don't get really any mentorship. You don't learn a lot of skills. You're often more isolated. And I do think if I'd started my career work from home, I would be less excited about it. So I don't know. I think there's probably like most things, some stupid-ass nuance. I don't know, Doug, what are you saying? Dumb-ass fucking stupid-nose.

Stupid-ass, stupid-ass. I have no hot take. There's so clearly, like, it depends on the environment and the pros and cons. I think what you just said is an important one, which is, I mean, like, I remember my first programming job, like with every single programming team. You have the guy who knows everything and he's the only reason the team even functions and he comes in to fix everything. And like going to that guy and being able to just walk over and ask for help and like

communicate what's going on, it was an enormously important part of that job. And that would have been miserable without that. And I wouldn't have developed and become the amazing program. that I immediately quit and stop doing forever. And then, you know, and then like hybrid roles, it's like those, even if it's two days a week in person, like those are really important to connect with people. And there's just a sense of, I think, I think generally creativity is better when you have people in person than online.

Although, again, obviously that totally depends on the environment. I find that doing solo brainstorming or I can walk around in my own environment is extremely important. But also it should be in person, right? I think both these. So to me, like the dream would be hybrid roles. but it obviously, so obviously, depends on the team and the company

and the situation and if you have to commute an hour and a half each way, then that's kind of had such misery to your life. I feel like, so the real negatives of working in the office in my mind are the commute, the required structure

of a company, the feeling that you have to force or pretend to do work for like a full eight hour period when oftentimes you don't need to be working for that whole time. And then... You've been in a company where your seat is in front of your manager

and they can see your computer. You've been in that situation? Yes, I sat next to my manager. It's so horrendous. It's so horrendous because... Oh, dude, I was also... Not only that I was next to it, this is an ESL with Perry.

I was not only next to my boss. Also, I was like right in front of the main conference meeting room, which all day long had parts of teams for the entire company with glass walls. I'm on the other side of it. They can look at my monitor.

Yeah, because sometimes you just, your brain's fried, you scroll Reddit for a second or just like get your, but you can't do it. And so you're like constantly having Excel sheets open or fit. It's, it was though,

I'm so glad my seat moved in my early days at Twitch because I could not. It was like stressing me out to pretend all the times. I've had this one time. Yeah. I've had this one time, but it was next to my boss, Ken Hotbed Chen.

Oh, he's just, if you know this guy, it's not. So as you can imagine, I looked over at his monitor and he was on, write it most of the time.

Yeah, and your current boss Ludwig, I don't think would be too. Yeah, he's not really breathing down my bag in the same way. But I, and then I think the last piece of it is when you really need to zone in and focus to get a certain amount of stuff done. I think being in an open office can like take away from that sometimes. But I think if you remove the, uh,

if you remove the commute and like the hard structure part, most people, I feel like would want to, come in. And the reason I say this is because I've actually made a big push at Mogul in like the last year and a half for people to start coming in more. Because something, and there's no hard policy about this. But there's something that I have noticed. The people that want more people in the office have a tendency to be self-centered and entitled. They have higher opinions of themselves as leaders and they covet power and status. You were saying you've been so COO. Yeah. So if I can make an

argument for a different reason as the more they coveted power. in status, the more they favored return to office mandates. Okay. And so do you walk around and you kind of look at what they're working on? Yeah, and you kind of like check in. And don't do that.

No mandate. Yeah. Just to be clear, none of that. I said, I said, I encourage people to come in more. No one's been laid off.

If you want to be a team player, come on in. But there's no mandate. Yeah. Boy, Jeff just got fired. I wouldn't hate to me. I'd hate them like him. No, we got fired.

Sorry, no one got fired for that reason. It would hate. What hates. Hey, guys, just had to shut down off brand. I think it'd be cool if you come into the office, but no pressure. And walking around with a $3 million chain.

Okay, something I have noticed as the guy who manages everybody at the company, who is essentially HR, is that the people who come in the least feel the most isolated in their role and have the most negative opinions about how other people in the company feel about them. That's what I have noticed. Oh, interesting. So I think there's a lot of like, you know, when you're texting somebody, there's an ambiguity in like the tone or how they mean it. And if we meet person to person, I see your like face. I see your body language. Like we have a much clearer path of communication. Like right now you can, you can tell that. Yeah, exactly. He's flipping me off under the table. You feel like heat emanating on the skin. And I think people coming in, people coming into our office develops a like stronger morale and camaraderie and camaraderie and camaraderie and,

comfort around everybody that makes people just happier to be at the company. You're saying it's like a family. You're saying your office is like a fucking god. Oh my fucking God. I just a team. I want to be insane. I want to make funny you. I want to be funny. This is a company where people auto plays deadlock for six hours a day. It's that's my fucking point. If you could, it's like if people just get done what they need to get done and they can come in. I agree with you. They can come in. I'm just making fun of you. They can fuck around. We can watch the NBA finals together. We can people can like video games. There's no Indeed list next to this that you're trying to get a self-re job. I'm not hiring anyway.

I'm making a case that like I think people enjoy. This is not a company where like nobody does work. Like this past week before this Minecraft event we did, you know, a handful of people are throwing together like 12 hour days together in the office in order to get this event prepped and done on time. And then, but in the week after where there's like maybe a couple months before the next project, you know, the next day they can be in there. And like, let's have fun and play like, well,

will like do a couple meetings that we have to get done today and then we'll like play Counterstrike together for a couple hours. I'm not saying this is going to happen at fucking Amazon. But I'm saying that in this environment where a bunch of people have like relatively short commutes and don't have any like hard rule, me breathing down their neck and like demand that they're in like a spreadsheet all day, people are really happy to come in and like separate home life from work life.

And I'm not saying that's a standard that's like sustainable at every mega corporation. But like, it's the reason that I gave up on working literally from home all the time because it made me sad for the reasons that in this article, years before I read this article, I was like, I realized working at home alone all the time without talking to anybody ever just fucking makes me sad. And it's fun to be around other people and like be able to turn to your coworker and like, hey, can we like do that thing? And like I think to agree with you. I want to say, we for this show often do episode planning meetings like on Thursdays. and we'll do them on a Discord call. And the energy of that call versus when we got in this room

and all brainstormed on a whiteboard is a million times night and day. We're on Discord, we're all kind of half distracted. We're like, some people are silent, you're those are new ideas. We get it done, but it's not, when we get in person, there's a much more of an energy

we're riffing off each other. We invented great concepts like the Nordic fun fact of the room. We spent three hours brainstorming, we got that. Okay, things happen. So I totally agree that there's a difference and I just think it's, you know,

it's often nuanced in person by person. You were going to show something? Oh, no, I mean, that was just for you, Brandon. I'm sorry. I agree with you on this. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, let's swap this.

Go ahead. But one thing I don't agree with you on that I've kept my rage boiling about, no, obviously, I almost thought about not bringing this up again because it's only negative for me. I'm not going to change the dynamic that 85% of Americans have a credit card and are very attached to it. Don't worry. I have another way to bring this up and talk shit about you on Patreon.

Okay, perfect. Um, however, an article I read recently in Business Insider that I wanted to share with you guys, and we could pull it up on screen. It's called the premium credit card trap. And I wanted to bring this up as a launching pad because I think it articulated some things that I was far too stupid to get across when I was explaining, um, why I, I am a little bit wary of these premium credit cards. And, uh, this is a longer article.

I'll give you the key highlights. It basically noted that over recent, years, the yearly fees of these so-called vaunted credit cards like Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire rewards and keeps going up. And it went up from like $6.95 to $7.85,000, one of them's $820. They're rising and rising and people at the margins are starting to notice that maybe this doesn't make as much financial sense as they thought. And there's evidence in this article. If you have a premium credit credit card, they are being much more deliberate about which companies they give you special bonuses and rewards for. And they're making partnerships with these companies. And the idea is to

subtly push you into shopping that direction over another direction. And what they found was, if they do something like, hey, you get 10% off a Delta Airlines flight, but only if you shop business class. What they're finding is consumers are spending a lot more. For every 1% they increase the rewards, the monthly points they get back. People's spending increases 32%. And so people are spending quite a bit more on these things. And so, yeah, like, for example, you probably would have gotten the economy flight. But because there's a 10% discount on business, it's like, you're almost losing money if you don't get it. It's a psychological trade. It'd be a bad deal. So you have to buy it. And that's happening with like some deluxe gym memberships and, you know,

all sorts of things. People are just spending money they wouldn't normally spend. And you're in a bit of a, what this article kind of breaks down is that you are in a bit of a psychological war, where if you do everything right and you're super on, on top of it, there is benefits to this. You obviously can get, you can extract more than you put in. But you're in a bit of a battle at all times where they are trying to influence, trick, subtly nudge you to spend more or in different ways than you otherwise would have. And I think there's a freedom from that in some way where if you just opt out, you are not playing that game.

Well, I just want to clarify here. You're saying opt out of platinum credit cards, right, to have these very high fees. These are all the fees ones and the luxury ones. Right. And I just want you to know that that is not every credit card. You can get a just normal-ass credit card. No, I totally understand.

But you, yes, you can get a normal-ass credit card. You're right. You can do that. But even that, so the psychological aspect is that when you buy something with normal cash, there is a cost in your brain and a upside in your brain that you put together. But what they say in this article is that when you have a credit card,

the cost is removed. With platinum credit card. No, any credit card. Any credit card. The cost is removed because you're not seeing the money by your account. And you get a second dopamine bonus

of like, I'm gonna get some points back. So you get double the dopamine bonuses and you get none of the costs. So you still spend more than you otherwise would. dopamine. So, hold on, I just want to. So what's bad to back? So, yeah.

So as long as you, extract more like you were saying, you get double dopamine for every purchase instead of worrying about the money side. All I'm here to double-dobody It's a tasty cookie. They described it in this article as like smelling a delicious cookie and it makes you want to eat cookies. Okay, so yeah.

Wavy, okay. I would, I'll defend you for a second. I have one of these like premium credit cards. I have the Chase Sapphire Reserve, not an ad. And here I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't get it basically. The first time I heard about this card years ago was when the annual fee was like $300 or $350. And this was a card that came with an instant $300 travel credit.

So as long as you were someone who paid to travel at all during the year, the card basically immediately paid itself off. Like accounting for nothing else. And then a few years later, I want to say like four or five years later, the fee got up to $500. Still the $300 travel credit, still a bunch of these other perks. realistically if you're spending any like if you're a middle income person

spending any decent amount of money on this card it's probably and you go on like one trip in a year it's going to pay for itself however like a year ago they raised the fee to $800 and they also reduced a lot that 300 travel credit is still there alone but a lot of the other benefits

changed and the way it works is you only get like a ton of the benefits if you spend it on this premium list of like hotels and restaurants that they've like curated deals with. And if you weren't already a consumer at these really high-end hotels or really high-end restaurants, then you're just getting encouraged into spending more money in order to see the benefit of that at all. And me and my girlfriend have the same

credit card, but she has a much more like normal salary. She makes like $70,000 a year. So for her, this card and the $800 fee just flat out did not make sense anymore. And I think the way it works is like there's kind of a confusion and like how you can get out of your credit card, like canceling your credit card

reduces your like credit points because you're getting rid of a portion of your credit history sometimes. But she ended up downgrading to like the base chase card that has like no no fees and like no big things attached to it. So she's not getting any of the upside, but she doesn't have to pay this fee anymore.

And this was her final, like, I'm not doing this anymore. It's just too much. This doesn't make sense. And the only reason it even financially makes sense for me, as somebody who still refuses to book, these are like hotels and restaurants that are like thousands and thousands of dollars per night. It's just ridiculous. Like, I'm not going to do that.

But if you spend like a certain amount on your credit card in a year, you hit like another airline credit or something that, like, works for me. But the reality, is they've like crept, they've, they've had this slow creep in the fees and like push you towards like more expensive and niche things. And this is happening with the competitors too, where they just, they're basically just making deals with companies to extract more and more money out of you. And that is totally a part of this process, especially at these like high value end ones that have gotten pushed to a wider and wider consumer base. Yeah. And they, you know, kudos to your girlfriend for

choosing to downgrade because they say in this article that there is a huge psychological aspect of loss aversion where people associate some level of status or lifestyle to once they join these groups or have these cards and the the idea that you have to downgrade is actually damaging to people they feel bad about it they feel like they it's like they don't I think they give you these tiny ideas of lifestyle perks like they'll give you access to like nice airport lounges they have like the fucking centurion or like the chase lounges that are really nice. But then we talked about this. There's a story on the pre-no the other week. They don't have

any room because it's not special to have these credit cards. Everybody fucking has them. So there's always like all of the perks, sorry, a ton of the perks can't even be enjoyed because too many people have this thing in the first place. You're not a part of some exclusive social call. People may be overly optimistic

about many of the benefits they'll use, how many of the benefits they'll use when signing up to a card. And once they realize they failed, they keep it anyway because it feels like a sunk cost. And hope springs eternal, they'll utilize it better. later. So, you know, they take advantage to that. Anyway, I don't know. I actually don't care. I want to be clear. I don't actually care.

I do whatever you want. Many people in the Discord have proven that they are mathematically making out on these. I do literally leave your life. I don't care. I think... I just want to bring it up because this article is interesting to me and I think it, uh, I just like the idea of avoiding any mental battle with a big bank ever. I just don't want

to do it. I don't want to deal with it. I will get tricked. I'll get beaten. And so I opt out and I think there's other people that agree with that. And, uh, for the grinders. that are really improving the value of it. Like, fuck it. You're doing it. Most people are not doing that. And I think as much as I've made fun of you about this,

I think the reality is, like so many things, like an Uber that was so cheap at first and then caught on broadly enough, so now the prices can be raised. This is something where the deal was so good at the beginning. That's how they attracted the initial user base of people. And now so many people have these cards that we can, we're in the extraction point.

For the average person, this is working against you and not for you. And that's just the reality. That's the only reason it gets to exist. That's the reason credit cards get to exist, period. So I think to be in denial of that, and it's like, and for me personally, I'm like, I make fun of you

because I think the reality is you're in an economic tier where you just be taking advantage of this. But I think the entire basis of these systems only exists on that there's a bunch of people losing and the bank makes a ton of money. That's just the reality. Now, Berger's your favorite story. It's not on our list, but I'm going to talk about anyway.

I'll just do a quick story pivot, which is that, I don't know if you guys know, but for the past few years, only one streaming service has been profitable, and that's Netflix. Everybody else has been losing money. Netflix stock over the past six and a half months, this is stock of the week, I guess,

has basically halved because consumers are finally, it was seen as like Disney Plus is a luxury, HBO is a luxury. Netflix is a utility. I have my electricity bill. I have my water bill. I have my Netflix bill.

Netflix for many families is just like, you just pay it. They keep raising prices, you just pay it. They have begun to cut their Netflix bill. Netflix people have started to cut back. It's not like a massive drop of subscribers, but I wish I had the numbers exactly on top of my head. But the idea is that there's been some shaky trends

in recent Netflix data of longtime Netflix subscribers finally cutting their. their bill and finding other ways to watch TV or movies. And that is interesting because they have sort of, they were in their extraction phase for a while now where they have been raising prices relentlessly and people are just going along with it

because they had the biggest library and they were the most all-arounder streamer servers for families. And so, yeah, just an interesting little update I wanted to give that's the stock of the week. Netflix is 40% over a year is wild. Yeah. For the big streamer.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it's a pretty shocking downgrade, especially in a time where the market overall is way up. Like most companies, even money losing companies, are doing quite well. And so for Netflix to be hit so hard by the market is like, it's a sign of like, wow, people are stretched a little bit on, on, uh, do you feel like this is one of those situations where the stock market or the stock, let's say, is just divorced from the fundamentals of the business? Because

presumably Netflix is still a profitable good business. It's just not the, oh my God, this is the future of media. Yeah, probably. I get, I, I hate to make any permission on a Shriver stock movement. Survivors are not halved. I'm trying to get some numbers right here. But yeah, I mean, it's, what, it's gone down. I don't even know if it's gone down. It's just not going as much.

Yeah, I think it just grows slow. I think the point is that the stock market, the price I had before was baking in a up into the right graph of growth that was like beautiful. And now that graph looks like it's flattening or going down. And when that's, do you think this is, and I know me? A recession? Yeah, real quick.

Just like, so from variety, like, they went 2024, they had 300 million subscribers. End of 2025, they had 325. So it's kind of wild that they are still they are getting millions of subscribers every year. Wow. And their stock is plummeting. Yeah.

Although I will say some of those are downgrading from the profitable tier to the ad-supported tier to the, they're like, yeah, that makes sense, yeah. So it is like, it's a change in the makeup. But yeah, yeah, I agree. It's, uh, it could be a recession indicator that people are finally cutting this bill.

But I don't know. I don't know what it means. All I know is that Netflix, I've talked about streaming industry for years and years and years and Netflix has always been the rock solid one They always been like everyone else shit in the bed They figure it out This has finally happened

And what's interesting is like This is happening basically six months After they walked away from the Paramount deal I'm sorry buying Warner Bros Discovery And the idea was we were going to spend $100 billion to buy Warner Brothers and HBO And the market was shaky about it We walked away

our stock went up and then everyone was like, ah, never mind. So, I don't know. That's interesting. Aidan, what you were saying? Or I'm the recession indicator thing, but do you think, do either of you use Netflix a lot?

I cancel. Oh, you're, what are you pointing to him? What's going on here? The cops will get me. I'm a pirate freak. What? I was avoiding saying it.

I'm as lazy as I sound from the credit card section. It's not like I would normally send it up. My wife is, my wife saw that we were paying for HBO and Netflix and she's like, no, I'll cancel that. She set up some kind of media server. And she wants me to move in to split your mortgage. Well, yeah, because we have to save the money.

So we'll all split the bills on that. And so yeah, I don't... Was that media server? Was that over the last six months? That's what crushed Netflix's thought. I was paying for a hundred thousand subscriptions. To me, the other answer could be. And it's hard to imagine that it would all

happen at once like this is the catalog just declining in value so much that people are finally reaching a breaking point and cutting off their subscription. But I'd leave that to the Netflix heads in the chat to engage. All I know from Netflix heads is they fucking hate that Netflix

makes shows they like and then cancel them after two seasons every single time. Shout out to Sense 8. Fucking bang your show. That's all I know from Netflix heads. We got off traffic. I wanted to talk about I want to talk about the G7 countries unrelated. And I hope to God there's no stories about AI related to them, but maybe there is.

Boy, do I have a crazy turn of events for you? All right, this is a guy with cereal. Yeah. This is in large part in a follow up to the Anthropic story where their new model fable slash mythos is shut down. So I think we mostly just talked about this on Patreon. But this is a big deal. So week and a half ago, Anthropic, they released their new model fable. big crazy high, you know, like, oh my God, this is going to change cyber security forever.

And they had restrictions on it. But then the United States government, the Commerce Department said, you need to shut this down. There's security flaws. Fast forward a week and a half. And it's still not back up. I think there's many people who thought, oh, this is going to be, I mean, Anthropics quote was like, this is a misunderstanding. Because this is, this would be crazy to establish a world where America, the government can on a whim, press a button, basically, and say, you have to shut.

down access to this thing. And so at G7, the summit with all these world leaders, some interesting things happened. And this is interesting things in like world leaders are talking and maybe things will happen. So this is more of a high level like vibes. However, interesting vibes. First off, people like French President Macron and the PM of India Modai voiced concerns to the U.S. folks that they're basically saying, hey, we are concerned that if you just cut off access to the top American models at any given time, if you're,

just turn switch on and off. Why would we want to start developing our infrastructure or military or encouraging startups or businesses to be using any of this stuff? If we hook, we hook this up into our power grid or our military or how we run the country, let alone like a new startup in India is like built a cool commerce website and they're using AI to help power things. And then suddenly Trump's like, nah, don't want it this week. Yeah. This is an enormous, this is an enormous concern from a world power. And, and then, suddenly, Trump's like, nah, don't want it this week. This is an enormous concern from a world power. And, you know, right now, AI usage is really starting to kick off the past six months in particular. I don't have quantifiable data for that, but certainly vibes in

terms of how much people are talking about Claude Code. And then from the American AI perspective, right, we've talked a billion times about how the AI companies are essentially driving the economy of America right now and all of our growth. Well, how is a company like Open AI or Anthropic and continue driving unbelievable growth by saying AI is going to run everything? If they can't even go to a company or a country and say, you're definitely going to be able to use our product, right? If they're like, it's the equivalent of like selling washing machines, but the washing machines just might get turned off by Trump randomly with no warning, no explanation, and no recourse. And they're always being sued right now by consumers, many of whom paid for the extreme

tier of model to try Fable. And it's now been a week and they haven't been able to use it. I wanted to use it. I can't use it. It's just not there. And in their announcement, they're like, we'll have more information within a day within like 24 hours. Yeah. There's been no. There's been no. There's been no update. They assumed this would be quickly resolved of like, this is crazy. And so another part of this meeting was they proposed a trust,

quote, trusted partners program where certain other countries would get sort of exclusive access to the top models from Anthropic and Open AI in terms, it's like a sort of like trade network that bypasses the restrictions. But if you think about what that means,

they're talking about it like it's a military weapon. Like we as France, we want to have a deal that we get access to the early models before they're released publicly. And so I think what's been happening over the past few weeks is a strong indicator that suddenly AI, whether it is deserved or not, has at least from the political perspective,

reached the state of nuclear weapon-level geopolitical importance. And that is fucking crazy, particularly given that there's no clarity on really why this is happening or when it's going to be resolved or what's going on. So... I think it ignites or reinforces fears around tech that's not AI being shut down by the U.S. as well. Like, we've seen these changes within the European Union

of them moving away from certain types of U.S. software in order to maintain sovereignty around how they, like, keep their data or things like that. And then, or if you take something like WhatsApp, if the U.S. government can command, like, meta, to shut WhatsApp down, Well, India is WhatsApp's biggest market to a point that like the new, I think the new lead at WhatsApp is like an Indian, uh, someone who has a ton of history in like Indian tech. And like you could just shut off that entire service for a country because the American government made that decision. I feel like all of this. WhatsApp is like abuse for business transactions. This isn't just like a texting app. Like these, these companies and these products like underlie the ecosystem of countries now. I feel like you go to a ton of foreign countries and the main thing they list is the company's WhatsApp in order to like contact them.

Yeah. I feel like these conversations around AI enforce all of that for the other things that are lower stakes around it too. Right. It's like a reminder of like how reliant we are. Like if I'm another country, how reliant we are on so many forms of American technology. Right. Right. It's it would be extraordinarily concerning if you're another country, right? And it seems like this stuff.

And again, this is all predicated on the. that AI is as powerful and dangerous as, and that's part of the irony here is like, we as the public really don't know whether Fable is that powerful because they haven't fucking let us test it, right? So like, this may or may not be as dangerous. From the NSA or whatever, where they were like, quad mythos hacked our servers in not weeks but days. Yeah. They said something, but I have no idea, I have really have no idea the accuracy, where that came from. Yeah. Yeah. There's a number of different, I mean, I've tried to keep up where I can. There's a number of,

of different companies who get access who are like, it helped us in this ways or this way. So like you have Firefox coming out and saying, oh my God, it's helped us with so many bugs. This is unbelievable the rate at which we're able to do things. But it identified things, but didn't have a good solution. And then there's other companies that say it said that it identified eight things, but in practice, it was only one semi important one. This was an open source software. I want to say it's like curl, something like that. There was a low level, uh, low level programming video about that. But anyways, it's, it's just a really bizarre. This feels like a huge inception point for like how AI is going to be distributed globally. Yeah, yeah. You, I mean, I thought what you said

about it being treated like a nuclear weapon was very, very apt. There's this article called a signal of where power sits. And I'm just going to show you a picture from it. But it's the idea, I don't know if you can pull this up, Perry. It's just this, when you look at this meeting at the G7, and it's like world leader, world leader, AI CEO, world leader, world leader, AI CEO, world leader. It's just kind of a wild time where they're just all sitting there discussing these monumental changes and they're treated with the power of nation states almost. If you're like Sam Altman or you're Dario Amadai, it's just kind of a crazy thing. And it's such an important or seemingly important technology and change for military and for economics

that they're being treated with this level of discussion. It's just wild to me. There's a different recent story about, uh, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan disabling access to Claude for their bankers in Hong Kong because of the combined scrutiny of the American government being concerned about non-citizen access to these platforms, but also China's concern of American AI being used within Hong Kong. And yeah, it's starting to crop up in like all these minor ways. the world where a new AI models announced and Open AI says, hey, we came out with something

that's like really powerful. This is introducing a whole new class of like military capabilities, cybersecurity capabilities, software capabilities, things that could really make a difference. And we're just giving it to classified world leaders for six months. I don't love the vibe of that, you know? It's, it feels extraordinarily less democratized and more and more leaning towards government just kind of having this extraordinary power. Extraordinary power. It's, uh,

apparently people think I'm in favor of, um, like government mass surveillance or something. I saw a comment about that. So, that was my old. Oh, that was your old.

I want to shout out, okay, I actually do want to shout out a guy in the comments of that video because when we were talking about the, which video, last one? This is a two episodes ago.

Yeah. We're talking about the, how surveillance, how mass surveillance within Russia was starting to be used against the government. And Doug's like going through a ton of different aspects of like the pros and cons of like the consequences of this technology

being used by like authoritarian governments and like how it could be misused. I would argue a very interesting exploration of the topic. And then some initial some initial commenters were like Doug or all three of us were pro-government surveillance. And there was one commenter who clearly was He was pissed off that he was reading this from all the other people.

And he wrote like an essay where he timestamped all of the stuff. And he was like, I have no idea how you guys are coming to this conclusion. Here's like X, X and X point where Doug like pre addresses what you're saying. You guys are idiots. Like it's I, I, and I wanted to shout out that one guy who took the time to write that up. Because I was going insane. That's Aiden's all. I'm going to.

It's not my old. Not my doing. This heroic commentator who run. Which is crazy because that guy's wrong. I am super for mass surveillance. Yeah, you've always been saying that. I was very embarrassing to read. You said a camera at every home.

Bro, read in between the lines here. I brought up flock. That means I will support mass surveillance. Funny. Funny stuff. I want stock of the week. Stock of the week. Okay, so clearly coming out of G7, AI,

and again, I want it for no avoidance of doubt. AI is as good as all the hype, and it is super powerful and importance. Like a nuclear weapon, but good. Yeah, yeah. And no avoidance of doubt, no nuance, all good. And I agree with you 100% except for one. And certainly that would mean, oh, yeah, except for GROC.

And certainly that means that stock go up forever if AI. Well, that's why I'm talking about GROC. So what serial meme spit out milk? That's the best transition of ever. Can I give me a handshake for that one? He's a professional. Look, I wanted to do a song of the week on the most important song of the last week. Everyone was talking about it.

We covered it. SpaceX IPO made a gazillion dollars. Went up 30% in like two days. Elon Musk first trillionaire and then like trillion and a half. And the company was worth more than Microsoft at one point, which is insane after three days. And now, if we check in today, briefly,

it has fallen below where it started. No! But he's still a trillionaire, right? I believe he's still a trillionaire. Briefly. So it bounced back up from where it started? It's right over it started. Basically, it's right about where it started.

So all of the post IPO gains have wiped out. Again, this is like normal swings of a brand new company. I'm not going to talk about this more than once. I just want to say because of the hype for this particular company and because of the Wall Street Bet's enthusiasm, I love this Derek Zouander face you've got going on, a lot. And I mean a lot.

I mean, a record breaking number of people. Oh, wow, actually, anybody gets down a tiny bit from where it started. A record breaking number of people in here. human history bought short-term call options on this stock in the few days after its launch, which basically is a very short-term bet. You don't actually own any stock. It's a bet that it will go up in a short period of time. And if it doesn't, you lose a lot of money.

And it broke the record that was on meta-stock from years ago by like 20x. It's the most ever done. So a lot of people, specifically Wall Street betters, Korean stock gamblers, Taiwanese stock gamblers, all of them are currently underwater and begging and praying this stock goes up quickly. It has to go up soon and a lot or a lot of people will have lost a lot of money in this, which is why I bring this up.

Additionally, because you'd expect this stock if it was going to pop to pop now because over the next six months, a lot more supply is going to get dumped on the market. As everyone who's an employee or a banker or Elon Musk himself, the lockup period ends and they can now dump their share. They can't do that yet.

They can't sell. There's 4% of the company available for sale. soon as it's going to be 10, 20, 30% of a company available on market. So the idea is that this is a spooky sign. If you are like a, I just, like many people on this online who are like, I just sold my house to put it all into SpaceX. I just like put my entire 401K into SpaceX. And everything in SpaceX, I'm believing.

You don't want this to be happening so early. You'd like this to be popping for a lot longer before anything like this happens. Do you think that when John Capitalism invented money, this is what he was thinking about, like a rocket. company goes and IPOs and they put 4% up for sale and then various gamblers around the world like Korean

mobsters are putting their life savings on a short term call option about whether it goes up not related to the actual product. I think he would smile and get misty-eyed at how far Elon Musk has pushed his little game.

Mr. Cap would say, by golly the market. By golly, the market's done it again. No, I do think this is a subversion of every possible thing you'd like free markets for. Cat planted seeds for trees. He would never sit under the shade of. Yeah, I think it's a little cartoonish, but at the very least, I guess I'm

Shaden Freud happy that people on Reddit who are like, you're fucking, you're gonna say dumb and poor for not buying into this. Who's, is it like Wall Street bets? Yeah, like a Wall, not even, most of Wall Street's best, like this is a bad idea. And then some are like, nah, this is a genius.

idea. And so far it has not paid off for anyone who's bought in post-IPO. Obviously, if you're a banker, it's still great. If you worked at SpaceX, I'm sure you're happy. You're incredibly happy. They're all millionaires. There's jobs popping up for people who are just wealth managers for newly rich SpaceX people. They're like, if you are a wealth manager in Hawthorne, California, you are missing a gold rush right now. And that makes sense. And that makes Some people want to die. And so what would they, what would they do? I think with the amount of time we have left, we leave that one on the table.

I figured to pivot to a smaller thing. Why don't you assist in this episode dying? There's a story on assisted dying in Quebec. I did want to talk about, but I think it'd be a little longer time that we had left. The thing I wanted to bring up was actually from last week's episode. I wanted to chat briefly about thank you for the people who weighed in and gave feedback on the episode. I know it didn't like perform as well as a normal episode does, but to try something new and see a lot of people enjoy it was pretty cool. There was one piece of feedback and keep in mind, I have no vested interest in applied intuition as a company beyond my, I like seeing my friend employed.

I'm happy for him. And there was a lot of criticism of the company I saw that I think came from this place. of when we talk about AI companies on the show, they're often in a place where they're not making money and they're reliant on selling a narrative about what their product is going to be in the future. And perhaps going to IPO and hopefully find a source of funding or like reward the employees who have worked at these places

for a long time through the IPO that they're doing. And that primarily by selling not only the technology but the narrative of what that technology is going to be. And I think people are used to that framing when talking about AI companies. And I could see through a lot of the criticism and some short conversations I had with people in the wake of that episode that they thought the same thing about applied intuition. Like this is a company that's gambling on some idea of the future. And to an extent it is.

But I think what people didn't understand and what I don't think we said in the episode is this is a profitable company. This is a profitable business and has been for years. It is successfully selling the technology they're describing in the show now. They don't need to like, there's not this like, we're hoping this pans out and like starts making revenue for us. It's like they've been doing it. And this was just showing off what they have been working on.

And I realized when I gave that context to some people who were being really critical of the business because they didn't know that, it actually changed their opinion pretty substantially. Because I think they're so used to the idea of like AI grifter. company trying to like sell us something that doesn't work. And I thought it was worth clarifying or putting that information out there. I understanding that's not where like everybody's criticism was grounded. But I had enough positive conversations people about that outside of the show that I thought it was worth bringing up. Sure. Cool. Yeah. But if you guys have suggestions for how we can

brush up that format or what we could explore or go check out in the future, I want to go see more stuff. so open to hearing your guys's feedback and how to deal with social media bands. And ideally take all the nuance of that discussion about credit cards and distill it into an insult about Brandon. And take it to his Twitch chat. Yeah, don't just keep it in the comments.

I want you to follow me around the rest of my life with credit card related discussion. That would be my ideal outcome of this episode. One of the big things about social media. You've got to get off the digital world, get into the physical world, ideally into your management. If you're at Atriok chatter, and it's like you're dying for something to say this week,

it's like you could talk about how he maybe didn't wake up for his match. You could talk about that. You could talk about that. Or you can talk about how he doesn't use credit card. These are two great options. I have a quick question. Did you get messages to call him that morning? Did you call him too?

No. Me and Ludwig, we're both getting messages from Atriac fans to call him to get him to show us. And that's our show, folks. Thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate you. By the way, Aiden, sponsored by Applied Intuition 100% has been showing it for money. And I'm sponsored by mass surveillance. And loves Tucker Carlson.

Thank you so much for watching. Bye, brother. Goodbye. He's leaving the GOP behind.