Lemonade Stand - We are moving to Japan | Ep 004 - Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

This week Aiden reports back his findings on Japan's housing market, Atrioc tells us which movies are woke, and DougDoug explains why we can't trust anonymous people on the internet anymore.Recorded on: March 27th, 2025Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZggAudio Listeners can hear us:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yz44z9z3t8VQu4WRmsrs6Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lemonade-stand/id1799868725Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d7e1f54-49a3-4082-81e8-f70bfe1ace63/lemonade-standiHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-lemonade-stand-269417962/Follow usTikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecastInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCastThe C-suiteAiden - https://x.com/aidencalvinAtrioc - https://x.com/AtriocDougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFoodEdited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedisheditsSegments00:00 Normal Podcast Prep00:24 Aiden is back from Japan!03:53 Japan's Housing Market12:33 How does Tokyo seem "affordable"?20:38 DougDoug the builder26:10 A home would be nice30:35 Why woke is killing movies44:03 China doesn't need Hollywood49:30 The landscape has shifted57:39 Death of the Monoculture1:02:08 AI Version Fatigue1:07:54 ChatGPT is now bad at math1:11:03 Scammers are replaceable1:15:07 Can we moderate this?1:21:35 DougDoug in the villain seat1:26:18 A final noteNew takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday.#lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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About. How long? I got, I mean, I landed like three hours ago. And then by the time, oh, beautiful LAX, by the time I walked to the Uber parking lot, got into the Uber and then got here, it was about 15 minutes ago. All right. Well, I did just get back from Japan. Yep. And I thought it would be nice to pick, you know, a nice exciting topic related to Japan.

And one thing that was going through my head a lot while I was there because we actually went out into the countryside. And I've never done that before. I've been, or at least not in like mainland Japan. I've been to Hokkaido and I've done a little road trip like while it's snowing. And I've been to Tokyo. But I've never been into like the countryside that you kind of see. Do you consider yourself an honorary Nihong.

No, I'm basically Japanese. We were calling Nick Engling, the chopped huss. entire time if you know what that means. In Japanese, the whole time we were there, we'll move on from that. Anyway, I think a big thing that, a big headline that I have seen in

our media in recent years is about how you can get free houses in Japan. Anyone can buy one, literally one or zero dollar homes. And the catch being that these homes are often very broken down, old, abandoned, But it did make me want to look a little more into, like, why housing in Japan is so relatively cheap at a time when, like, everywhere in the world, right?

Like, developed countries, big cities, prices of real estate are generally going up. Like, people are getting priced out of living places. And that's not, like, an American thing necessarily. No, like Canada, Australia, UK. It's all over the world. Yes. So the first thing I took a look at was And as you've explained to me in the past

Is Japan had this gigantic asset bubble that like largely included real estate When they were when their economy was exploding They went through this huge Inflationary period of assets in the country And then I think it was in like 99 9192 was like that when it like really really crashed He peaked in 89 so But can I say a fund step. Yeah. In 89 at the peak of the bubble, the land around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was

worth more than all the real estate in California. Like you could own California for less than they did the one of the biggest real estate bubbles in human history. It was crazy. Wow. We stayed at a hotel right next to the Imperial Palace and have you considered that it's really nice? Yeah. This is you trading for California with Ronald Reagan. And if you're into Stockton, it's not that nice. It's just not as good as the Imperial Palace. And one little video I watched as an example is even on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is like a major, major city, right? The most populous city in the world by like metro area population.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, there are large like, you know, 1,500 square foot family homes that might cost like $70,000. And compared to, you know, what we would be paying in L.A. That's crazy. That's freepiece. L.A. is a million, I believe. Right. I believe the median price for a home in L.A. is like $1.1. Yeah, I think it passed the middle.

Median? Yeah. Oh my God. That's what I heard too. I think. That's actually, I don't know any more than a million now. But I know because it was a comparison. It was actually from the book, Abundance by Ezra Klein, which we'll probably talk about next week. But talking about how the price of a home in America is just obscenely overpriced, at least in most of the blue cities right now. The metro areas. Right. The metro areas. Yeah.

So there's a bunch of factors. And I'll kind of layer this into two. main things that I saw. So for rural Japan, where you could get these abandoned houses, right, there is a decline in population. Like, as time has passed a really concentrated movement of people from rural areas of Japan into cities, just like a lot of the developed world is going through in general, right? Like, that's a general population movement that happens. But Japan, it happened earlier and more aggressively. And that, on top of that, really low birth rate. Really low births.

And one of the lowest in the world. On top of this, Japan also isn't really changing its mind about immigration. At least not at a rate that matters. Like, they're not welcoming in or making big efforts to get large amounts of foreigners in the country to sort of supplement the population, right? So I, real quick on that, so I looked into a little bit on their immigration changes. My understanding is it used to basically be zero. Like nobody comes in, this is Japan only.

And then the past few years, they've opened it up a lot. But are you saying that a lot is just relative? A lot is relative. It's not increasing in any meaningful way. And I asked a friend while we were there who's lived there for a long time, like, what is young people's perspective on letting more immigrants in to like help deal with these problems? And this applies to a lot of issues, not just like immigration, housing or like whatever economic problems Japan is dealing with. He said young people and people in Japan. in general are just very, very apathetic about politics. It isn't something you publicly engage in

in general. And I think it's part of a general cultural way of like how people socialize. It'd be very weird for you to talk to strangers about your honest opinions about things in the first place. But then decoupling from that, I think politics is like particularly sensitive. And there isn't a culture of being attentive and involved in politics in the way that it dominates discussion in America in particular. But maybe the West in a larger sense. And so basically in the rural areas, they're dealing with this problem. Their supply is like increasing just by proxy of it not being used anymore. Right. And because there's no demand and nobody is moving to these rural areas, it basically just boils down to that.

And because of that, you have these really low home prices, like even a nice thing on the outside. Like, I think the misleading part of the free house is that those ones aren't nice. It's like they aren't well kept. You would have to put a lot of work into it. There are stories of Americans because foreigners can buy property and land in Japan freely. There's like no restrictions on that. Foreigners can buy those properties. And there are stories of, for instance, Americans going and getting one of these free homes.

but the amount of work that you have to put into it to make it like livable and nice. But I heard you can't buy it unless you move there. You can't, I couldn't like make an investment. I think for the free ones, my loose understanding is for that specific program that gives out the free ones you do. But if we were buying, if we wanted to buy that

$70,000 apartment or the 50, like a $30,000 apartment. Yeah. We would be able to buy that. Right. It doesn't come with like a permanent residence. You buy the property, but it's not like you can then just roll in Japan and you live there now.

Yeah. So you still have to go through the arduous process of getting approved for a visa and then permanent residency, which is usually 10 years of living there. My friend who immigrated there was talking about how if he got kicked out, he wouldn't lose the asset of the home he owns or the land. I see. So you go there for six months. So all I have to do is keep going there every six months and add to my housing portfolio. I don't even know. In a few years on the black rock.

In general, in general, I think, like I said, I think the rules might be different for those like free or like near. free homes. But if you were just buying like a home, a nice big home that was like pretty expensive in Tokyo, like you could just buy that and not live there. Right. You guys want to buy like a $1 home in the countryside and do an episode there? It's just the one time studio

that would be so sick. For the podcast. Just it just our Japan studio. No, but we're always thinking so big. Yeah. I'm a small town and they're like we're dying and we're running out of people. And then we have three new immigrants that are coming and help turn things around and we show up for one day. They see us dunking our faces in ice water and then we leave.

Toss the bottle on the ground and then fly out. I would hate us. That's like Logan Paul round too for sure. I saw a few things that just related to the countryside stuff. I thought are interesting because I was just looking into this a little bit. Apparently, 647 of Japan's towns and villages have been designated as depopulated areas. 60% of Japan, of the land area, is now depopulated areas where it's like there are not enough people there and they're basically losing support. And then as part of that, so all these people just over the past like 20 years that's been this, or I mean decades, but it's increased, I guess, even more in the last 20 years, that all these people are moving for the countryside to the city, right? And so then the railroads in the countries are having to close stations. So J.R. Hokkaido closed 18 stations. This was last year, I believe, 2024.

or it would be due to low passenger demand. J.R. West is hurting. That's why America was smart to do no trains. No trains. We got it. We figured it out. We figured it out. We knew there'd be a crisis. That way when we started having babies. We're usually planning for that.

We're just thinking we're long-term thinkers. And then this really kind of mind-fucked me. A shift from trains to buses doesn't work because some 40% of the vehicular bridges in Japan are reaching age 50, and the local governments don't have the budget repair them so they're just forced to ban their use. And so countryside are also becoming less accessible as the bridges are no longer becoming

usable. And then there isn't the people or the budget to repair them. So the countryside, it's like this spiral. So yeah, you can go get one of these, you know, $10,000 houses, but it might be hours away by car from a train station, you know? I'm a bit of a Japan expert. Why don't they simply use the mecks or the, the mech suits that they've got? Oh, is that not, well, in the budget?

or was well, Britannia is still winning the war and so most of them are in combat right now. It's tough. Once Japan is in peace time,

the next soldiers will return home and they will build the bridges. You know, what's interesting is not just Japan. So I looked at this too. Italy is going through pretty much bar for bar

the same thing. They're a little more open immigration but like you can get a $0. $1 house in Italy in the countryside where anything outside of the city it's like they have an aging population with not enough young people.

People are leaving the small towns. If you go live there, they'll basically give your house for free. So I was going to bring up that trend as well because my friend showed me this in Sweden, rural areas in Sweden. It's the same thing. You get a pretty nice, large home in like a rural part of Sweden for maybe like $30,000 to $50,000 in like pretty good condition, lovely location, and same mechanisms behind it, basically. Just like everybody needs to move or wants to move to the city. So like for an average person, it's not a good deal. still because you're so isolated and the town is dying.

Well, I'm wondering when someone's going to flip and people are going to move as flocks. Like, if you had eight of your friends and all your, their families or what, you all decide you were just going to take over the small town. You can get insane real estate. This is the L.A. influencer problem that we talk about about. Actually, this is a good example. About how a bunch of people in L.A. that do YouTube here. I would actually describe. I hate Los Angeles for the record.

Nine out of 10 people that I have talked about. I probably talked to 30 or 40 content creators in L.A. about this have said, oh, I hate L.A. I'm only here because everybody else is here. Exactly. But all of us say that, and nobody leaves. But everybody has to move at once. Not me. Because it's the value of being in the same place. You don't like it.

There's a few people who like it. L.A. Strong. Nine out of ten dentists, you're the dentist saying that the toothpaste doesn't work. Yeah, you don't need toothpaste. You don't need toothpaste. Rup banana peels on your teeth. I use this. Yeah.

And I use a mouth tape. And my teeth are pearly. But I do think it's really interesting that this is like so apparent in other countries as well because that gets talked about less. Japan is the country that has the headline so often. I think because it's the problem is so much more aggressive and it's been building for longer. Yeah. And then the other part of this that I wanted to talk about was, okay, well, rural areas, right? We're talking about in Japan people moving to cities like Tokyo for instance.

But Tokyo is really interesting too because compared to other cities in the world with like I would say equal standing and development if you look at a city like London or New York or Clancyville, you would see that Tokyo is relatively affordable compared to those places which is really, really interesting.

Like why is this major city not going through the same real estate struggle that all those other big cities are? And because obviously in Tokyo like in Japan the rural areas population is declining, but Tokyo, the population is still going up. And the big thing behind this is

their zoning and building laws. They have a way different approach to how housing is allowed to be built at a different culture of expectations around how you judge or value the homes next to you.

So they were starting to go through a similar cost of living crisis in the 60s as they were developing and they put in a place a new zoning law at that time that, like in America, there's, uh, for zoning laws, we have like hundreds of different types of zones and like way and different rules to, to move around. Okay. Move around within.

But, uh, Tokyo only has 12 different types of zones that properties can be. And in like 10 of those 12, housing is allowed to be built in all of them. So it means that if it's zoned for like retail, if it's zoned for, uh, something else, you can still build housing in that area alongside it. And that's created like an industry and a supply of housing that is always outpacing actual households. Yeah, I saw a graph that was like, it showed New York and then it layered over it,

what buildings that are there now wouldn't be allowed to be built under current zoning laws. Yeah. It was 40% of North that exists right now wouldn't be allowed to be built today. This was really shocking to me. The way it's been zoned. You can only build high-scale luxury apart.

you can only build like the highest end stuff. You can't build. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was really surprising because to me, in an American context, right? New York is pretty dense. There's a lot of, there is a lot of like apartment style housing there that doesn't exist in like a lot of other cities.

But even a place like New York has really street zoning laws. Yeah, that's like the best of the American one. Right. And basically those zones have like reached their capacity. And then, okay, well, you might think let's vote to change the zoning laws. let's change these things in order to get more housing built. And this is also something that was really interesting to me, because in America, right, we vote for these things at the local level.

And that's where kind of like the idea of NIMBYism comes in. Like, not in my backyard, basically. If I own property in a place, I don't, in order to maintain the growth of the value of the property that I already own, I'm going to vote against new housing initiatives in my area, maybe under the guise of like keeping the culture of the neighborhood or something, right? And so housing initiatives are consistently struck down. But in Japan, that housing, that the zoning laws are just set at the national level. They just decide. That's interesting.

So people in neighborhoods don't have the same input or control over who gets to build in there. That's super interesting. And the result also, like for one more example of this, is in America, oftentimes there will be rules about the standardization of like how a house is built in a new development. So there's reasons why like groups of homes like have to match up with each other or have similar designs or require similar like lawn care or something like that

might be through your HOA, it might be like a city ordinance. But in Japan there's no culture of that. There's no like rules on how you can build your apartment or home next to the home next to you. It doesn't have like there there's no worry about the design of your home devaluing the design of the property

next to yours. Which is also, this goes in tandem with one last interesting piece that plays into this, is there is a strong culture of breaking down homes and rebuilding when you buy. So moving into somebody's home that was already owned and lived in is like weirdly not cool in Japan. And it's way more common to get the home, break it down, and then build a new home there for himself. I saw a number for this. That's crazy. In 2013, guess the number, okay, of all home purchases in Japan,

how many of them are purchasing somebody pre-built home, right, versus a, you get a brand-new one? Wait, pre-built versus brand new? As in, you buy a used home that, like, in America, right? And move in-in-to-in-frey, you go, like, the vast majority of the time, it's a house that's built and it's for sale, and now you buy that house and you go to that house, right? I would say 75% are pre-built. Only 15% of all house purchases in Japan were of existing houses. The rest, they create new homes.

That's crazy. 85% of people and they buy a home are making a new home there. They either destroy the old one or they just get a new one built and do that. And even the one guy I know in Japan who is getting, who's making, he's making a home. Like he's building it from scratch. He bought the plot. And that's just crazy because like the vast majority. in Europe, United States, whatever.

Like, homes are meant to be this appreciating asset forever. And in Japan, it's like this temporary thing that is not meant to appreciate. I didn't know that until I looked into this. Like, the common practice of, like, breaking those things down. I think there's also a part of this where the homes and the land that they're built on are actually owned separately. Yeah.

So it is most common. Like, if I were a homeowner in Japan, most homeowners in Japan, like, if you own an actual, like, home and not, an apartment, own the land the home is built on. That is like the most common situation. But technically those things are disconnected. So you might lease the land itself, own the home that's built on it, and pay like a rental fee to the land owner, which is something that happens. And yeah, so I think. Wait, what if I own a home on a land that I'm leasing, then someone else buys

the land from underneath means, I don't want you to have a home here anymore. And then, yeah, they, they just don't. No, they can't. Okay. So I, I, I don't think they can. You're saying if the landowner... Like, you're going to have a house. Yes. I'm going to want to hurt you. So I'm going to buy the land underneath your home and then tell you to get kick rocks.

Yeah, it's called freehold versus leasehold. So leasehold is you own the building, but you rent the land. Yeah. And freehold is you buy both. And so there's situations where you buy the property, the home on the land, but you don't own the land. And if that lease, but you usually get the lease for like decades. But if the lease ends, and after 30 years of living there and this, house, they don't want to renew the lease with you. You then have to leave and they can destroy the

home, which is usually what happens. Because again, it sounds like they are just constantly taking down buildings and rebuilding. And I think this part of this, part of this, like, culture of like rebuilding and building in general is a huge part of like why supply has managed to be so bountiful in a place like this and like why they're not dealing with the same housing crisis. Yeah, it's tough. They have other economic crises in, in general. that are oncoming, right? But in comparison to, like, if you looked at a city like Sydney or Vancouver or New York,

it's way, way different. And you'd expect Tokyo to be in a similar position to those places. Right. Yeah, I mean, the best example I saw in a country not necessarily going through the exact same demographic crisis, which Japan is. So it's hard to disentangle them because their population is shrinking every year. So it's like houses are going to get cheaper regardless.

But in, like, Austin, America, they changed the zoning laws. to build more and rents have been dropping dramatically. It's like down 22%. Yeah, Austin is like the success story in the United States right now. Like, oh, if you build a lot of housing, even while the city population has been skyrocketing over the past five years, houses go, housing prices go down.

Yeah. You just have to let people build stuff. That's why I'm very pro-build stuff. Just build, build more houses. Yeah. Doug Doug will build your house if you want one. Look, I feel like I'm just dropping these random facts about Japan. I learned, and I'm going to drop one more.

So I guess that, supposedly part of the thinking between why Japan has this culture of just destroying houses and rebuilding them is because it was the post-war era. A ton of Japan was destroyed, right? So what they needed was a ton of prefabricated housing that wasn't meant to last forever.

It was just get housing up. But then that created this culture and this system where you have all of this industry that's built around homes that aren't meant to last 100 years like ours are, but they're just meant to be there for 20, 30 years. You just have a place to live, but then after 30 years, the whole thing is brought down.

And so that consists. So the value of the home and the land are separate, right? And so if you buy a home and land together in Japan, the home is meant to go to zero value over 30 years. It is like a car. It is a depreciating asset. The home you buy is just like a car and it is going to zero over time. Or if not zero, like $10,000 in the country, right? And that's why it's a totally different mindset than what we have, which is like homes go up in value.

It's an investment. In Japan, they're like, no, that's my old shitty car that's 30 years. old, why would some foreigner want to come into the country and buy it? Like, what are you doing? Go build a new home. It's like, that's the culture. Well, so there is an asterisk. When I was there talking to a few people about this, the asterisk on pricing that I noticed is for the average person, right? Like, if you were just a, you know, working class person who lives in an apartment, renting is, is more affordable. And that's, and that's cool. But if you're a person who is looking to buy a plot of land and to build a home on it.

Yes. In a place like Tokyo, the combined cost of those two things is super expensive. Very expensive and comparable to a place like Los Angeles. So it's sort of like, it's a little misleading to say that housing, like house ownership is that much cheaper because if you wanted to go the full distance in a place like Tokyo that has that demand. If you want the housing experience that we think of in the West, that is different. Last factoid and then I'll stop dropping back.

Okay, okay. No, these are good. The average building in large, expensive urban areas of Japan, the actual building is only about 10% of the cost of the whole thing. So, like, 90% of what you're buying is the land, not the building on top of it. Yeah. So, again, if you're like, oh, rent's really cheap, it's like, well, if you want to also buy the plot of land, you're paying like nine times as much all the sudden in the most extreme

cases. But it's crazy. It's a totally different system. I like the concept of it because, again, like the idea that you have a whole system built around getting a lot of homes up quickly and you can just get things made that somebody can at a very low entry point get into a plot of land and have a cheap home built and then longer term they can look for actually getting the land and having this appreciating asset. That feels great. We bundle them together in the West and then you have to go all in on this

plot plus house and it doesn't make sense and then objectively we're failing at it but maybe it's just zoning. I don't know. The outlook on the it's interesting to see the spectrum of outlook on housing because it seems like in this situation, your house is not, your house is basically not an asset. It's not something you're investing in. It's just something you live in. And then further down the line,

maybe a little more in the middle would be like the American way of looking at things where it's like your house is an investment, but you diversify and you put a lot of money into like stocks and bonds and stuff like that. And then there's like on the other end, I feel like China where it's like do or die, buy property at all costs.

Yeah, it was like always on. Until the crash. Yeah. Do you know about this? There's some giant percentage of Americans where almost their entire investment is in their home. Like, they don't actually put stocks. So this is why, this is the reason, you know,

America and Canada and Australia and all these countries, it's an impossible problem or a thorny problem to fix is because for so many years now, people have been told this is how you almost save for retirement. This is what you're saving for. You put your money in this 30-year mortgage and you're paying on it. And then when you retire, it's worth a lot more and you can sell it and have a lot.

If you were to turn homes into depreciating assets overnight, which I think is kind of what you have to do to get to a real society, it cripples like a generation of people, two generations of people. There's young Canadians who have taken out the biggest loans imaginable to buy a house in their area. And like if that goes down and down,

they're fought, they're crippled. With something like the local zoning stuff, like why would you be a NIMBY? It's like, you know, a lot of people, the idea behind NIMBYism is like, in principle, you agree with the idea of more affordable housing, but it's not in my backyard because it's against your own individual interest to vote for it, at least in the short term.

Yeah. I think you could make a long, long term argument that you're also voting against your own interest, but that's, I mean, that's a long-term discussion. I mean, I like the idea of taking it out of people's, I think people, you know, people talk shit about new people all the time and I get it. But it's hard to make someone vote against their own personal pocketbook, right? Yeah, you need to change like the structure. Yeah, I like the way you said about Japan where it's just a federal thing.

It's like everyone's doing it. It's not just your little areas that you're going to fall behind. Yeah. Everyone's going to have a devaluation in some way to make it more affordable for, so everyone doesn't get angry. I mean, I feel like, I seriously feel like, I say this a lot, but I feel like half of global radicalization is due to an inability of young people to afford a home or receive any path to affording a home.

I think if everyone could afford a home, it would change so much of people's anger. Incredibly, there are so many problems that stem from a culture where housing is meant to be your main investment. Because it's like we said, it incentivizes everything for you to prevent housing to be built. Once you bought into the system, every incentive pushes you towards less housing being built. And it screws over everybody who isn't already in the system. And it's like, so now we're dealing with that. And I'm pessimistic about how we change this. And that's why I hear the Japan on the national level deciding zoning.

And that just sounds like a fantasy to me of like, God, if you could just force all these people to just build and just, or not even force them to build, to let developers build. Like San Francisco does everything they can to stop developers who desperately want to make housing from doing it. Because they come in and just stop every single thing at every point of the way. And if you just open the market and let people build things, housing. would go down, but every homeowner in San Francisco benefits from the fact that the prices go up every year, right? And it's just, I don't know how we solve it. It is actually in the book that just came out, which we'll probably talk about the next couple weeks, that this is very explicitly what they're talking about as one of the main issues right now that is causing particularly

blue states to lose people to red states in the United States because it is just not affordable. It's cost of living, cost of housing. Right. And red states are on average building a lot more. and Texas and Florida are particularly doing that, they are gaining the most people, their housing prices are the most affordable. It's like something has to give. Like people can't do this forever. I don't know, man.

It's tough because I think once you try to, if you tried to pass some sort of like national legislation about it, right, depending on who's making the effort to pass it, the messaging is kind of similar to the version of getting rid of cars that I didn't actually say a couple weeks ago. from the comments you did. I heard from the comments you did. But that's the, I think in America, like, as soon as you overstep the boundary of something

that affects property rights, people are going to light up about it. The messaging about it will never be delivered in, like, a positive, like, this is what the country or community needs. It will always be an infraction on, like, rights. It goes against the American culture of freedom and government get out of our, like, why would the, the federal government's going to come in and tell my town that we have to build more and can't zone the way we want to. And then on top of that, part,

it's exacerbated by the fact that who votes the most. Old people, right? The older you get, the more you involve you are in local politics, the more power you have in your local politics. And those are the people who are bought into the homing system and do not want everybody else to come in

and allow a bunch of apartment buildings to spread all over the place. So also the people who have the most voting power are the most incentivized. And young people aren't going to coalesce around this enough to do it. I mean, maybe they will. Maybe they're awesome. They might. I mean, people are getting more and more restless about it.

It's like, it's one of the biggest problems. Yes. Maybe it hits a breaking point. And I, I would love it too. We all move to Japan countryside. Or we all go to anything? That's where we move all the L.A. streamers. Like, look, we found a shack in Hokkaido.

And the bridge just broke down. But like, we can jump the ditch like in did to Canada. We could rebuild the ditch. That'd be a fun stream. We're rebuilding infrastructure live stream. Yeah, just to sign this time. Popping off, I thought this is funny because Nick Yingling came as our, like, producer for this trip. And he said, as we were walking around Tokyo, it'd be so nice if we just had big ass buildings like that that were just housing.

Why don't we have that? I saw him getting radicalized on trains. It was so funny. We were on the flight back home and he was like, why do I have to get in this fucking chungus Uber? This doesn't make any sense. L.AX will radicalize a lot of people. LAC is a little different. Housing L.A.X are the two.

Pass if you fly from Tokyo. Yeah. You take a train to Tokyo's airport. Fly to L.A.X. You get out into L.A.X and take an Uber to your one million dollar home. Take a bus to your barking lot to take your parking lot. Then you go to a million dollar home that you don't own, but you rent for 5K a month. It's like, God damn, man. Oh, housing annoys me so much. So, yeah, I thought that was just something interesting to sign the trip off on.

But I want to hear about why woke is killing movies, Brandon. Thank God. Because you've been going, you've been rattling on, about how movies in games are woke. Okay, let's just simplify for the audience. They don't have to watch the whole thing. Is Japan woke or not? It's my presentation. We're going to go into it.

Oh, we're talking about, I basically go through everything in the world and say woke or not. Okay, okay, okay, good. Finally, a podcast doing that. Yeah, I would just look at the podcasts that are most successful in us, and they talk about woke a lot. I thought I would really throw our hat in the ring. unfortunate that if we were following the model of success, that probably would be the way. I want to talk about the movie industries.

We live in Los Angeles. It's pretty important to the economy here. And I wanted to learn more about it. As you may or may not know, a movie just came out called Snow White. Boow, whoa. Wait, hold on. Are we booing or cheering for this?

You got to let me know. Snow White was the first movie they made, right? Wasn't that Disney's first feature length? I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Before they went 36. Before it. Well, it turns out now that it's woke, it's gone broke.

Is this good or should be cheering or booing? Whatever, whatever your heart says. 43 million opening weekend. It's very low for a $270 million budget. Week opening, worrisome for Disney. And the natural response that I'm seeing on the internet is that Snow White has gone woke. Snow White has gone woke. And that is why this movie is flopping.

And that is the main thing to blame. And of course, I believe that instantly. because it aligns with my entire worldview. So I'm locked in, but I thought I would look into it more. And as I looked into it, I discovered really that we were at a real precipice, a real interesting time in the movie business, especially here in Los Angeles, especially here in America. That is, it's changing rapidly under our feet.

I want to talk about it more. So Snow White, while doing terribly across the board, box office-wise, actually outperformed in red states. So possibly... Possibly it's not 100% entirely on the woke backlash. And it could be more having to do with the fact that movies. So it's not woke enough? For the blue states?

It's not woke enough. Oh, damn. Or maybe, Doug, it's possible that the lackluster performance of Snow White and Mickey 17 and Dogman and Captain America are not entirely on a woke not woke spectrum. Maybe that's affecting some people's ticket sales. You guys are shaking your heads. I don't understand. Maybe I got to convince you more. You keep saying something makes it no sense.

This is a podcast. It's possible that the entire industry is going through some bigger problems. The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start. Not just Snow White, but every movie released this year is off to a pretty bad start. And we're way down from last year, which was already a bad year. It's like 50% ticket sales in March

are down from last year and last year was a bad. These are, I assume, mostly, like, theater box office, right? This is theater box office. Okay. It's not like, yeah. Which I don't know if you'll get to this, but I assume streaming and competition is probably, okay. We'll talk about streaming.

But it's about the movie industry. Because there's still like movie. Like movie theater industry in a way, right? Movie theater and like Hollywood studio productions. Right, right. And the whole system. They're just, it's falling apart. They're selling less than ever.

So is the problem supply or demand? That's kind of what I'll go through today. Is it that there's not enough good movies or is it that people aren't wanting to watch movies? Or is it some combination of both? Let's go through this real good. I'm sure there's no nuance to this. In the comments will let us know there's no nuance. Do these box office flops, including Mickey 17 here,

which turns out was not woke, but still flopped. They spell the end of Hollywood. And first thing people say is COVID. People will say, well, it's a reaction to COVID. Ever since COVID, people aren't going to movies as much. It's a COVID thing. I looked at that, too. It turns out like every other out-of-home entertainment thing,

like, for example, Broadway, sports, concerts. In the top right, we have people going to a live D&D show. These are up. They've recovered from COVID, and they are now up in sales. They've trended back upwards. Movie theaters are the only one

of like out-of-home experiential type things that are still declining. So there's something unique happening in this industry. I want to take it back to 2024. I'll go back to last year. We're going to look at last year's box office and just get an idea. First of all, the supply issue.

Have we considered that D&D might not be woke? Possible. None of those were woke. Only movies are woke. D&D has famously purred. Whoa. Yeah, there's no... I know, D&D, all those circles,

famously right-wing. Well, the dark elves... Well, let's get the dark D&D all-white right-wing... Finally. Finally a show for... Yeah, for the non-woke D&D crowd. Anyway, 2024,

we're going to start at the 13th best performing movie of the year. And I want you to see as I go through, as I count up, if you notice anything about these movies. So this is Beetleju's, Beetlejuice, the sequel to an 80s classic. they did pretty well.

This is Gladiator 2. It's the sequel to a 2000 classic that did pretty well. This is Venom the Last Dance. It is a third part of a trilogy of Venom movies that are part of a larger spider verse that Sony owns.

That's part of a larger Marvel verse. Okay? This is Sonic 3. This is Kung Fu Panda 4. This is Godzilla Kong, the new empire. The fifth in the monster verse, but the 39th,

Godzilla movie. This is Dune 2. It's pretty cool. All right. Hold on. Whoa. For the record, this one ripped. This one kind of ripped. Still a sequel, okay? But kind of ripped.

Mufasa the Lion King. A CGI remake of an animated movie. It's a prequel. Very necessary. Is it a prequel to the animated one or the live action? It's a prequel. I mean, they call it live action, but it's all computers. Are these?

It's a show. Woke has just destroyed so many studios. Is that the pattern? Is that the pattern I'm seeing? I mean, look how woke this Bufas a lion is. You film real tigers. Yeah, they're real lions. The original Lion King.

I'm beginning to notice the trend here. Are you noticing the pattern? Despicable Me Four. Oh, my. And then, and then we have Wicked. Well, that's part of the Wicked verse. Wicked is of all these 13 movies I've shown, I guess, an original property, but it's based on a Broadway play.

which is based on the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. It's based on the most, one of the most popular movies of all time. This is not an original property. But it is the first movie I could even call remotely not a sequel of what I've shown so far. Super. Which is crazy.

We're fighting to say that. This is what we're trying to fighting to say. Yeah. Okay. We have Moana 2, Disney back to the well, Deadpool and Wolverine. Remember Logan? Do you guys see Logan?

Yeah. Really emotional, powerful ending. for the Wolverine. Maybe want more Wolverine. And then they said, let's bring him back. Yeah. Let's bring him back because there's more money to be made. Logan is so good.

It was such an amazing movie. It's the Dune part two of movies. And it's back. And then we have the number one movie of the year Inside Out 2 where they added more emotions to tell more of a story. And this did really well,

one of the biggest anime movies all the time. I don't know if you saw a pattern from all of the top 13 highest grossing films in the world last year, but I think customers are seeing a pattern. I think they're starting to feel a little bit of fatigue from constant sequels and reimaginings of the exact same stories. And I went back to make sure I wasn't crazy here.

And this is 1999, one of my favorite movie years growing up. This is, again, the top 13. I picked the ones that aren't sequels, and you'll notice it's a majority of them. You got the Sixth Sense, you got The Matrix, you got Big Daddy, you got Green Mile. It's a big mix. They're not all CGI. They're not all, you know, family action comedies. They're like a broad mix.

There's a couple, Julia Roberts. She's overrepresented 99, but there's a horror movie, there's a comedy movie, there's Stuart Little, there's a big mix. And even for the Zoomer, because I know Aden is 12 years old, I went to 2006, and it's the same kind of thing. 2006, movies you grew up with, there's a lot of new IP here. The start of the click averse. Today, today, if click hits the top 10, there would be a click two, click three, click verse, you know what I'm saying? We're in a different era. So things have dramatically changed,

and studios have gotten more and more safe. If we were to, I mean, if we were to just look at the movies on this screen right now, we were joking about Click 2, right? Yeah. But these are like original properties that came out at this time. And then a lot of these did get a bunch of sequels. Like over the hedge, cars, Happy Feet, All got series.

You're right. Yeah. And those are movies that have come out in the 2010s and ons in the era where this like trend, I feel like kind of started. The Departed didn't get a sequel, so that's kind of weird. Did you watch The Departed? Not a lot of room for a sequel.

It's a bit of a Logan situation. We couldn't have, oh, you know what think we could get Deadpool and departing? I would love a departed verse. Okay. So anyway, you can see. There's like one character letter.

You can see that Disney, but not only Disney, all these major studios have begun playing it safe. Investors are noticing, consumers are noticing. People are afraid, first of all, in a declining sales environment to lose their job. So they only want to greenlight movies that they know will be a success. And now we're getting to like fourth, fifth, sixth movie.

Like the part of the Caribbean series is this long dead and they're stomping on its grave because they're trying to recapture the magic of like a 2003 first time seeing Johnny Depp. Yeah, what's up? Teacher, I have a question. Okay. How much do you think, which is maybe what you'll get into, of that the fact that last year, the top 13 movies were all sequels, which is insane. Do you feel like that maybe it's that people do really like sequels? Not that they're getting tired of it, right? Is it like, those were the ones that were the most successful 13 movies? So maybe it's like this is what audiences actually want. Is there any argument to that? There's a huge argument to that in that it is working, but less and less effectively. It's like a drug.

It's falling down the drain. That's exactly what I was thinking of, right? It's like the repetition of the formula is slowly, like think about sequels in the 2010 sort of era and how year after year after year box office record getting broken, right? And now we're kind of hitting the fatigue where it's enough to get some people going, but we're petering off.

The broad industry is struggling. Because this is like the majority of movies coming out, I feel like less original films have the chance to be the next big hit or franchise or something like that. I mean, they simply aren't getting made in the first place. Outside of streaming services. In terms of box office, they are not putting them in theaters because they're too risky. So we know that there was a supply problem. People are at least in somewhat getting fatigued with the same thing over and over.

But there's also, as you're going to bring up, a demand problem. You can just see a long amount of people, a large amount of people talking about how their consumption habits have changed around movies. which is that streaming services and the ease of being at home have changed their ability and COVID in some ways changed their buying habits of like actually going to a theater.

It thought it was a temporary phase. It's not and they're spending more and more time watching things at home where it's cheaper or easier or they have more control. And some people are sad about that. Movie going is not what it used to be and it's leading to a shrinking pie

that is being filled only with sequels and safe properties. There's also one other aspect of the demand that I want to bring up, which is that maybe older people are leaning more into their home, but they're still watching a lot of movies. However, among younger people,

especially younger than us, they're choosing our content. They're watching lemonade stand instead of going to the movie. Or they're watching I Show Speed. Or they're watching, I mean, that's the two. Never mind. Never mind. Let's, okay, Dispicable Me Five. Push it out. I don't care.

Moana 10. Keep it coming. Whatever keeps us watching. So they're choosing creator content over premium TV and movies. YouTube is one of the biggest threats to the movie industry because even if they're not as high budget or as well thought out, it's exactly your niche. Whatever you as a person wants, someone's going to make a 30 minute, 20 minute video exactly that for you for you for free. And it's really crowding out the ability of Hollywood to make what they used to do able to make. 56% of Gen Z and 43% of millennials find social media content and then includes

YouTube. More relevant traditional TV or movies. And they feel a stronger personal social media creators than TV personalities, which we monetize. So the last thing I want to say, that's the demand side. We talk about supply side. The last thing I want to say that's really interesting about Hollywood

and the movie industry right now is Xi Jinping. He's a great actor. He's going to be shaking things up. Wait. Is he woke or not? Oh, he's the woke as they get. Nobody's woke as well as in classic

Xi Jinping. Because you're talking about chat, JPM later, I use the new filter they added to make him studio Ghibli. Oh, my God. Dude, this kind of rips. Wow.

I like like him more. He's friendly. Dude, this is. I would let him lead me. Anyway, so, uh, Xi Jinping. So the 14th movie last year. I saw the 13, right?

The one right below that was this movie in China called Yolo. And it's an entirely original movie about a woman who's down on her luck, who takes up boxing and it's a comedy. This was a hit in China. And it was big enough to not, not get, maybe on everyone's radar, but 14th in the world last year. And one of the biggest non-sequel, non-original property movie.

This year, they decided to go into sequels. And they released this movie called New Ja Too. This movie has broken every record you can think of entirely inside the Chinese domestic box office. It is a massive, massive, massive cultural hit. This is, if I can play the video, let's see. this is a group of factory workers being given the day off work to all shuttle bus to the theater print out thousands of tickets and watch New Jod too it is a cultural phenomenon there

that has now broken 2.1 billion in the box office which 1 billion that's like almost that's almost avatar like end game level Chinese theaters don't need Hollywood anymore for this first time this year, we are seeing a movie hit global top heights of box office and it did no sales in America, like a few million maybe, nothing. And it did 1.8 billion in China. So it's, again, so far in 2025, New Jat 2 has outgrossed every other movie in the world combined in every market. It's, it is a, it is a wake up call that is like not fully appreciated by people in Hollywood yet where no one saw this coming after last year. I feel like the wake-up

call is a bunch of Hollywood executives are going to be like, ah, we should make sequels for China. That's going to be the takeaway. It's like when, dude, I don't know. They all get in the fucking situation room. It's 10 guys at a board meeting and they're like, I think we just need another Transformer sequel. Right. Right.

I mean, Transformers is a great example because they literally set half that movie in Shanghai. No, they crush in China. To do it in China. They're just cater to Chinese audiences, yeah. Yeah. Are they just going to leave? Like at some point, the American studio executives are going to be like, why are we, why would we crank out shitty sequels here?

If we can just literally shift the studio to be a Chinese studio for Chinese audiences and our crappy strategy will work there. I'm hoping they take some positive lessons from this, but you're absolutely right. They probably won't. And like we are entering into a real, like, it could be a spiral, a bad spiral for the American movie industry that they're not ready for.

So again, it cracked the global box office top five. it beat Star Wars Force Awakens and is closing in on Avatar and Titanic and Avengers Endgame, which is like the big three of all time. It could theoretically pass Titanic. It probably won't beat Endgame and the first Avatar,

but it's like it is up there in a way that nobody had in their bingo card for China coming out of this year. So people are trying to ask what it means. It's $2 billion box office from. What does this mean? Is this going to be replicated again? Again, it's a unique moment in time.

It's probably not going to be every Chinese movie comes out like this, but it's a sign that they're going to like start standing on their own two feet for making movies. And, uh, sorry, what? I was going to say this does not teach us the lesson I was hoping it would about sequels. I was really hoping the moral of the story would be slightly different. Yeah, I thought the yolo would be a good example, but no, I mean, they did a sequel and it went crazy.

But their movie industry is thriving in a way that like America in the 90s and 2000s, they have more original properties. Well, they don't have the same sequel fatigue that we might, right? They're going to get it later. Yeah, they'll eventually come around. And so our only hope as America is for Jack Black to put on his big boy pants

and make this movie work. Because this is our last... I looked at the upcoming slate of releases for this year. If America wants to keep its streak of having a number one movie every year, which I think it's had for a long time, it's Minecraft movie or bust. That's where we're at.

So I want to open the discussion I want to talk to you guys, but it's just such an interesting time for Hollywood. So let me put this down. Man, if we win with the Minecraft movie, that's like winning World War II with nukes. Like, you don't feel good about it. Like, this is us dropping our western nuke. You know what I mean? And like, we will win.

Truman explaining why he had to drop the Minecraft. We're going to win, right? I understand it was tacky. I understand it was classless. I'm sorry if this is insensitive, but Minecraft IP, that's Rochima. Jack Black, that's Nagasaki. You're using your two biggest entertainment bomb. We're dropping both.

And it'll be an ethical dilemma for years to come. The scene with the creeper farming. Was that okay? Was that okay? Blasphemy. It was an ethical use of Jack Black and the Minecraft movie? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't think so. I would rather, I think, loose than deploy this onto society. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm dumb. But I kind of expect this movie to underperform for what it's expected. I think New Jot 2 might take it this year. I mean, it's crushing. I don't think we have an avatar level movie. And also similar to nuclear proliferation,

once we use Jack Black here, the other countries will realize, China will realize they can hire him. They'll get their own Jack Black arsenal. I don't know. There's a bunch of ways to take this discussion. One thing I had thought of is like, isn't it interesting that two of the highest grossing films

of all time are Titanic and Avatar? One? Avatar one. Yeah. Like, I think it's really... And Titanic 1. And Titanic 1. Titanic 2 was crazy, though.

It was just a two-hour shot of the ocean. Titanic 2 deserved more. But I do think it's interesting that, like, as far as original stories go, those are both pretty high up there. Like, there is a version of success you can find for those films, if not, you know, if not difficult. So I think the studio somewhat know that, but my understanding from reading this is like there's real culture. of fear now because in an industry where the pie is growing, everyone feels like they can take risks. Whenever it starts to shrink even a little bit, everyone clamps down on their job and their

territory and their property and what they have. And they do not want to lose it. They don't want to be the guy fired or the guy that makes the big flop. Even though it's happening that. They're getting flop after flop after flop. They're trying to be as safe as possible. So the other big thing that changed here, I go back to this interview with Matt Damon a lot, where he explains how the film industry has just fundamentally changed primarily because of streaming. And it's not in the way that like, oh, streaming detracts from, like, less

people want to go to the movie theater necessarily. It's changed the revenue structure of how movies make money. The old way is that if you made a film and it went to theaters and maybe it performed fine or it underperformed, you usually made it up on the back end

with DVD sales. DVD sales were a huge part of how movies made money for a long, long time. Mid-budget film could be. Yeah, and he was saying a big part of like why so many movies from like his era of coming up in acting, like if you take like Goodwill Hunting, I think he uses as an example. He's like, the reason that movie could get made is you didn't need it to be a box office smash to make it. It doesn't need to be an amazing blockbuster hit to pay itself off. And that

revenue has disappeared. You need it to succeed in the theater. Because after that, it doubt and then the theater has also great, the theater experience has been restricted and encroached upon by streaming and the demand for movies to reach streaming quicker because they used to run in theaters for way longer as well, right?

So it's this compounding effect and I thought that was really, really interesting is like the way, like you just make less money when you make movies. So the, it needs to be like a cultural hit in order to make it worth it. Like a Barbenheimer type. Yeah.

That's your way to do it. Do you know why them going? to streaming services after the theater run rather than going to DVDs make so much less money. Is it the streaming services just don't pay as much or people don't watch them as much given the other options they have? Like,

you know, is it... I think it's just the rights the rights that the services are willing to pay for are less than the total revenue that you would get from all of the DVD sales to people. Or the DVD or the DVD rental. That's just less. Streaming services do not need to pay as much.

Yeah. And I'm sure part of it is just there is way, way, way more supply of stuff to watch. So, gaming services do not need to offer as much money. They don't need yours to a movie. In the kids example, right, your movie is competing with way, way more accessible media. Right. And yeah, that was like the first thing. And then the other thing that had come to mind was the cost of making movies has risen a lot.

So I was watching recently this like podcast clip of Adam Scott and Robbins. Bob Lowe talking about how they would have made, or if it could have been made, Parks and Rec, which was a big part of how they broke out as actors through the popularity of that show. And they were talking about how creating movies specifically in California and L.A. has kind of died off because of the costs associated with making movies here. And a lot of production costs have ballooned in ways that limit the types of products that can be made. So it's not just about the revenue, it's also about the upfront cost. And there's this like big fight of like where you can even make productions now.

Like a lot of other countries or other cities offer like tax credits for you to come there and make stuff. Like Toronto's half the shows are made there. Yeah. And Rob Lowe makes a point of like how he was working on a new project. And the main place that offered to give him the tax credits necessary to make the show was in Europe, I believe. And he just said, I can't, I can't do that. I cannot move my life to Europe for the duration of what it takes to move the show. And then the show just died.

So I think there's another part of this where the cost being so limiting in either California specifically or maybe the U.S. in like a broad sense. I know like a lot of production has moved to places like Atlanta, for instance. Like they did, I think they did like all of the Avengers in Atlanta because of the like facilities and like tax credits and stuff they got there. Right. But that's kind of the two, like two industry changes that have come through watching those that I learned about was like, okay, costs going up, limited opportunities of where you can affordably film things, and then a limit and cap on the revenue you can actually make. Do you guys watch movies and theaters anymore?

Like, is that a regular part of your... Okay. No. You actually reminded me, I'm getting excited because this is the other point I wanted to make. I go to the theater all the time. I actually watch movies all the time. And I think an unfortunate thing, reading like those Reddit clips or like Reddit comments about how movie, the movie going experience is different now. I do agree in a broad sense because the number, like you showed the list.

Like there's definitely a change in the quality of movies and the types of movies that are getting released now. But original stories and good movies still get released all the time. I go to AMC with like my AMC Stubbs Pass that I have. You're a stubbeds, pass guy. Yeah, because my girlfriend got me into it. And we just go see movies all the time. We just watch new stuff. And there is good new movies that just come from a,

I feel like a more limited subset of studios now. Like it feels like A24 is like one of the only studios that like stamps original properties out. We just saw like earlier, was this earlier this year or last year? We saw, I haven't seen that yet. It's fire. But we saw a conclave in theaters. thought Conclave was amazing. I have a question.

Did you see Snow White? Fuck, no. It's too woke. Too woke for me and my girlfriend. I think, but movies like that, I don't see because of, and I didn't see, I say this as a made fun of, bullied, like, Marvel head.

I didn't go see that new Captain American movie because I'm just fatigued. They don't feel like they mean anything anymore. I always hated the like live action format Disney movies. Because it's like, grow up. Make something new. Telling Disney,

telling a child of Disneyland, it can grow up. Princesses aren't real. It's not, no. But that's the thing, they don't make those movies for the kids, right?

It's like, they are for kids in some ways. No, they do in some ways, but why do they have to revert back to old properties? It's because in the same way that Disney,

like the average age of the, like, Disneyland goer now is like way higher than it used to be, right? It's a different market that they're trying to like get money

Brahman appeal to. I think the main point I'm trying to make is this, as much as I want to sympathize with the movie going culture has changed commenter, it's like, I go to movies all the time, watch good movies and enjoy them, and just not a lot of people go to them. And it's like you can still go see

original good movies. I want to latch on that though, because I was thinking about the same thing. I was like, there are good movies. There's a movie called Black Bagg just came out. It looks awesome. I want to see it. It's not going to do very well. I think, and this is like the bigger discussion is like, it's almost like the decline of the monoculture because half of the fun of watching a movie like that is knowing someone else watched it and you can talk about it.

But if you go alone, it's still enjoyable, but it feels very, I don't know, isolated or disconnected in a way that like some of those top movies from 2006 or 99 that I showed you, that was almost a fun cultural event where I would go see Talladega nights or Click or whatever. And you could talk about it with all your friends. I think there's a loss of that that makes it less valuable. We talked about this last week.

If you have a culture that brought, or two weeks ago or three weeks ago, a culture that is broadly becoming less social, right? Which we've seen and we've talked about. If that is broadly the direction we're going and people are consuming media more often on their own, the movie theater experience is not that great by yourself. It's fine.

If you are consuming media on your own, why would you not do it from the comfort of your home? True, right? So it's the pattern for society already is we are becoming more isolated with how we consume things and how we socialize. Like, it makes more sense to do that at home. The movie theater experience is like, I don't think I've ever gone to a movie

by myself. It's almost like a taboo to do that. Even more so than like eating at a restaurant by yourself, right? And that probably hasn't gone away. And so you just have less people like you who still are social, right? And like, are you still going to movies? No. Right. I'm not. And we've talked about this. Of the three of us, you're the one. still trying to maintain social.

You're trying to keep the outside going. Right. Probably most people are like you where they're like, oh, is in a, because movies are great. Movie theaters are fun. I agree. Not that people want to go.

If I were arguing against myself, I think there's two ends to this. There's the point that you're making. There's like the after you've seen it, cultural participation aspect of it. Because obviously like Barbenheimer, Avengers, like some things break through and they still do great.

And they do amazing. Yeah, it's very feaster family. So it's like proof that that that still can breakthrough in the current time. And then on the other end of it, I feel like I'm taking a very like pull yourself up by your own bootstraps approach to movie watching, which I acknowledge that a big part, it's like, well, the average person isn't fighting through that many layers of friction to go see an original movie that they may or may not like. Like I, I recognize that. And I think part of a part of like changing the culture in the movie industry is like, well, maybe two down.

decades ago, you went to the theater or you might think about going to the theater and the movies you happen to be available when you finally decide to go are a wider array of original stuff. Like, we, 20 years ago, we're deciding to go see a movie and it might just be the departed, right? But you're now. You're not allowed to see the departed. I'm allowed to see the departed. I would see it. I want to see it. Small, small side thing. Tell me more about this wonderful. Society 20 years ago. I went to, I'll never forget this. I was on a date. It was a bad date movie, by the way. I was 16. I was turning 17 in a week and I was going out with a girl who was a year

older than me. And we went to go see the wolf of Wall Street and we were buying our tickets and I went up to the guy second and he had just seen like my date by the ticket before me. And I'm like, please, please let me buy this ticket. And then he just said, you're good, homie. I'll never forget that guy. But yeah, I think 20 years ago you might just go see, like you want to go see a movie, you might see The Departed

because that happens to be playing. But now the range of movies available for you to see is like more likely to be sequel, remake, whatever. If you're going to be the savior of the industry, you need to see Minecraft movie at least three times on open.

No, don't say no. You're standing up for this. This is our last hope. America could lose our streak. America can lose our streak. We're like 30 years of being. You have to watch it on loop. We're busy.

I'll have you know I've walked in L.A. and walked next to Jack Black, and I feel like that's like me going to the movie. That's enough. You hate L.A. And you're a name dropper. You should be proud of me in this scene. I can do both.

I'm going to be honest. Same thing. Downtown L.A. He was hanging out. He was doing vlogging back in the day. Oh, it was pretty great. Oh, Jablinski. Yeah.

So I think that means you gotta take the hit. You, A.R. have to go watch the Minecraft movie until Jack Black talks to me. All right. Yeah. Well,

now we decided who pays the price as to who has to go see the Minecraft movie three times. I would like to get to Doug's last topic because we have, I believe, an AI breakthrough

that is on chat GPT's end that is rather good at creative processes. Guys, we're going to replace all the movies with AI. Dude, no more movie.

people. Finally, that's the problem. I'm supposed to take the comments. Oh, right, so your villain seat. I think we should replace all movies with AI. There we go. No, think of the artists. The death of art.

Okay. In your weekly ranting about AI stuff, thought this was pretty interesting. So there is a new GPT model that was released by OpenAI two weeks ago. ChatGPT 4.5. I want to get your initial thoughts on the release, Aiden.

Okay, so I started using chat GPT. Was it 4.5? I just downloaded the app like a week ago. So I just downloaded it. Are you paying the 200 of a month subscription plan? No. I'm using free.

So you aren't even trying 4.5. Oh, so I'm not even got, I don't even get it. Loser! So I've been pretty satisfied with the basic experience, be honest with you. You didn't even get a studio Ghibli Xi Jinping.

Well, I tried to support Xi Jinping by downloading deep seek first. And then, so I gave it my best shot. Okay. To directly give my free data on my phone that it purges and wires into Xi Jinping's mind directly, I did that. And then I got frustrated that it doesn't work on desktop very well. So I switched to chat with GPT.

And I just assumed I would be using the latest and greatest, but apparently not. Yeah. So I think your reaction is a great reaction. A great, it's emblematic of most people's reaction to GPT 4.5 coming out, the big hot new model, which is what? That happened? because there's new models coming out like literally once a week. This big new one came out

and then I saw a thing it was like, well actually Baidu just released a new model called Ernie 4.5 and that's only 1% of the price. I'm like, who the fuck? Who's Ernie? Like who are any of these companies?

This happens every week. There's new models. And what you might have heard about potentially, correct if I'm wrong, is the jump from chat 3.5, chat TBT 3.5 to 4. You never hear about that? Yeah, yeah.

I felt like that was like big public. when like news about a new chat GPD or like new AI platform really broke through mainstream. Unironically, kind of like the movie fatigue thing, right, where now there's just nonstop sequels to model. And early on, each new jump forward,

each new release felt like a big deal, right? And so the jump from GPT 3.5 to 4 was big. And everybody's like, oh my God, chat GPD is so much smarter. And so for the first time since four, like in the last couple years, they released chat GBT 4.5, this is maybe two weeks ago now.

in theory should have the same, you know, massive global impact, just kind of floats away and almost nobody really cares. There's actually a lot of criticism of it. By opening I's own metrics, it is actually worse at math and coding in a lot of ways than their previous models. So you might be like, okay, this is just not, the leaps, the gains we're getting are not nearly as big anymore. I mean, they're not even big. They're worse. Right. Right. That's not a leap. Yeah. Yeah. It's a stumble. The leaps aren't, yeah. And so at the same time, there's other people who are saying, wait a minute, this new model is insanely creative. Probably a lot of people have tried ChatGBT, or something equivalent, and thought, okay, this thing can like try to be creative, but it sounds like a weird, like kind of robot person imitating a creative person, and it's not good. Same with like AI art and stuff like that. You know, it looks, it just feels kind of off, right? Yeah. This is not AI art necessarily, but this thing really is able to write. And so, like, tried this out on stream and I did a whole stream of just messing around with GBT 4.5 and this thing is amazing. I had it. I gave it the trolley problem of like would you kill Hitler to save five other

people and had this really interesting nuance discussion about it really tortured it. It was quite funny. We wrote a smut book. Did it kill Hitler to save five people? It seems like a really easy choice. It said no. It said no because you shouldn't killing people isn't ethical even with that. And then I said, Okay, but what if aliens come to Earth and they say, unless you kill Hitler and harvest his organs to save five people, all of humanity dies. And then it said, okay, well, that's like too much. And the way it's talking is like a person. It's weird. Like, it feels like you're talking to a human now. And it's like, whoa. Okay. In that case, brother, you'd have to, I would go for it. The human race. Okay. Okay. Okay, brother. Don't call me. Oh, don't call me brother. And so I was like, dude, bro. And so we start. Only Deepsee can call me brother. Yeah,

Dave C would call me brother me and G call me Comrade DMC and they would call

you comrade yeah and then as soon as you ask bro about Tiananmen Square it loses the friendship whoa

I thought we were having a good conversation no idea deep sea deep see we were chopping it up you thought we were

chill I thought but deep seek's woke unfortunately and so I had it write like a smut book

about a dragon giving oral sex to a nuke to save the world eventually like we had this long conversation

about the ethics of Hitler and whatever else. Yesterday I did a Dungeons and Dragon Stream where I had the new GPT model act as three different characters wildly creative and awesome. So this thing I've tried using it for more like creative writing and idea generation. I still feel like I am the creative leader

when I use it but it is an incredible assistant way better than before. I have a question for because you're not the only person talking about it being better in this regard. Right. Right. This is an understood thing. So I was wondering as far as like something like math and coding seems like something measurable to me. Right.

So when people talk increased performance with something like this, how is that being evaluated? Is it just vibes basically because it's creative? So this is where I'm getting to with this. It's, you know, every week I could be like, guys, there's a new model and that's fine. But I think the more interesting thing is that this is the first model that's released that is objectively worse in some ways and way better in others. And in this case, it's way better in other category that is, like you said, completely subjective. How do you score it on being a creative writer or writing good poems or having empathy?

One of the big things that they've emphasized with this one, and this is what they've said. They're like, look, this model is not trying to be the breakthrough programmer. What is trying to do is have better user intent. And actually, there's a great tweet about this, if you can pull this up, Perry. And it shows that this thing more than in the past when it felt like you were talking to this strange kind of robot creature. Now, yeah, here it is. Okay, so behind us, here's a tweet. You say, pick a number from 1 to 50.

Chatsby T says 37. You say, I will shove 37 bishops up your ass. He says, sounds ambitious. I hope they're the small chess ones. And then you say 37 bishops shoved later. Let's play again. Pick a number from 1 to 50. And then Chachapit says, oh no, all right, four.

Let's make it easier this time. This sounds like a guy that you're like joking around with, right? It's able to pick up on the specific way that you're talking and joking. so much better than before. And this is obviously a goofy-ass tweet, but there's many examples of this. And for me, I was, I was astounded by how interesting and creative it is.

So you did this, like if you tried to have a similar sort of conversation with the previous version, it wouldn't be like this. As an AI language model, I can't talk about sexualized things, right? The instant you try to bring up something, sexual won't do it.

If you try to get it to be a more creative person, it's either going to be this total caricature of whatever, you know, whatever stereotype that you've given it, like be a frat bro, it can do that to the most extreme, exaggerated tropey version. Now there's really nuanced,

more creativity, more variety. It's really impressive. And so, you know, again, the point of this and why I think it's compelling is not that this is the newest model because, again, literally every week, there are new models, and there's a lot of measurable things

that they can do. This one's better at programming. They have all these tests, all these benchmarks, which is its own sort of weird rabbit hole because now a lot of the people making AI models are just trying to score high

on these like tests. They're like building for the test. Yeah, you're like building for a test. It's called overfitting. And the idea is you basically just keep training the model to get better and better and better at passing these programming tests. And that's not really what the average person needs or wants in their everyday life. You do not give a shit if the new Chachviti can pass a programming test really well.

No, in fact, this would probably benefit me. Right. Because my primary use case of this is practicing language. So having basically normal conversations for something in the target language that I'm trying to practice. So this seems like it would be super beneficial. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say this is really cool.

And I have been using 4.5, and it is awesome for some things. I'm seeing all these different vectors get good enough at the same time to do some really horrendous things, which is like, I don't know if you've tried the new, I forget the name of it, but there's a new voice model that sounds insane. It's like Willow or something.

I've heard about it, but I haven't tried it. I tried it on stream. Because again, these things are every week. There's a new one. Yeah, it's a new one and it talks with the pauses and the like of a human. Like in a way that I haven't seen before. It's like, like, what's like, what's up, bro? And it like stops and he's like, like, it's like laughs at the right performance and then breathe.

And it just sounds like a fucking human in a way that scared me. And so like if you could pair that, but it also, the things it says were kind of stupid. Like it wasn't a smart thinker. Right. But you pair with that voice model with this writer. Yes. And then you put it on a phone with my grandma. She is getting fish 24th.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, I, I, I think. People are going to actually need safe words. Finally, I can scam at scale. Yes. Yeah, it's like scamming at scale. Like it's,

and it's putting poor call center scammers out of work. That's my real. Think of all the call centers that will be out of business. I'm worried sick. Or think of the jobs that this will create for scammers. These are the jobs that I've been talking about. Finally. For every grandma in America, 100 scammers.

You know the whole new industry. The whole learn to code thing. Learn to scam. Yeah, you won't need to code with how good these models are getting. You just tell it who you want to scam and how to do it. You have to tell how to do it. Our Saratoga morning routine, like 7.30.

Scams. Fish 100 grandmas out of there as well. This is so interesting. Something I reflect on a lot is the first time I ever heard of OpenAI, I was sitting in an arena in Seattle at the International. and I saw the Open AI crew sit down and set up a computer on the stage

and they were like, this is our new AI, and then it beat Dendi in 1V1 Dota. And that was in 20, I think that was in 2017, and now it's this. Yeah, much more advanced. It does a lot more than beat Dendi and Dota now. Yeah. I think, yeah, that is the main, I mean, my main worry is like the scale at which

this is like deployed to like hurt people. even thinking of like scams necessarily. Just just the, I think the thing that always pops into my head first is misinformation. It's like your ability to just make, you know, some official looking video with a real politician sound. Dude.

And like make claims. I have a specific example of where this is bothering the shit out of me. And I want to bring it up. So I talk about a lot of like, I don't know, contentious topics on stream. I cover current events or news. which means you're going to get comments that are pushing back on your whatever. And I've always dealt with those and it's fine.

And you have a conversation. Sometimes you learn something from them and they learn from something to you. But I'm seeing it more and more every month where the comments are clearly AI generated. And their response to my response is like they put my response into chat GPT and asked it to write a response to what I'm saying. So it's not literally a bot. It's a human being engaging in the argument with you. But using your. I can do its work of arguing.

Like you're a college professor. Yes. It's like, it frustrates the shit out of me because I'm not even hearing your thoughts. And it's like, I don't mind you. I use it to learn. I'm getting all these weird mixed feelings because I really do. I think I was doing it today, but Doug is open my eyes. There's so many good ways to use it. But I am getting frustrated with the ways it's being.

I mean, I think if we were to compare it, if we were to compare it to something, I think the discussion we had last week about education and phone. in schools. Like, think about the ability to have this in your pocket has so many benefits. There are so many good things about having this tool connected to the internet. It allows you to do so many things with your work and your life and connect with people, but it also has had horrendous consequences for things like kids in an education environment. And I think this will be the same thing.

I think where I really stumble right now. is when I think about, is how to like moderate or control it because I don't, I don't have answers that are like popping into my head, right? It's like if you're talking about regulating, like if you're talking about like environmental regulation or something, right, you could point to like a policy idea like carbon credits and then you could talk about the merit of that idea. I don't even know what the first policy idea is with this. So here's a thought, a theory. I believe in this and other people do is actually, I'll say the theory first. It is the idea that we are going to move away from a world where you can trust anonymous data, right?

So right now you can go on YouTube and you read comments and unless it's clearly a porn bot, it's a human. Except now it's not. Or an Amazon review. Or an Amazon review or a Yelp review. Or those, a video of a politician saying something. Up until two years ago, that meant it was real, right? video meant it really happened, right? A quote could be misattributed to somebody,

but a video of them saying it, that's real. That is obviously falling apart, right? So all of the system that we have had of how information spreads, which is that you can receive a piece of media and irrespective of who gave it to you, you can trust it. That is, I think, by the end of this year, done, absolutely done. You cannot, if some guy sends you, your friend, sends you an email and says, here's what Donald Trump just said.

Like, you cannot trust it. This is the excuse he makes to ignore my text. I text him all the time and he's like, I can't tell you. verified. Nobody can verify. It could be anybody. I just want to hang out. I just want to get lunch with you and you're like, where's your blue check mark? Where's your blue checkmark? This is the theory that I have and I've seen other people advocate for, which is the idea that

every person basically needs to be verified. As in on a social media platform, on YouTube or whatever, you have to actually develop an identity that is verified that is that establishes you are this human who expresses this particular point of view. there are actually companies now who are trying to push this of like world ID everybody's going to so these companies are going to try to monetize oh the global new art yeah which right no no nothing that'll happen about that if you give one company the ability to determine who's real that sounds spooky to me this is no joke this is what my on the way to lax to leave for this Tokyo trip my Uber driver was talking about this but in like a you know with a bit of a Jewish flavor and I was just in the

I was like, I don't think it'll be like that. Like, I don't think they do that. It's like, how many minutes of where are we? But I think, I think that is, I think that's a step in the right direction. I think that's a cool idea. I'm not saying step in the right direction. I think it is the only world that we move towards it. Again, it's happening.

I, I fully endorse everything about Elon Musk, to be clear. You always say that. And one, and I have been saying that. You have been saying that. And that's why you heard it so much stock of his copy. So one thing, and I know people don't want to hear that Twitter does some things well, but one thing, one, I don't think they're doing this well. But the concept, I think, is the right idea, which is Elon basically pushing and saying,

people need to be verified. Do they all need to pay them $8? No, I don't think so. But the idea that, like, hey, you just can't trust random anonymous commenters anymore. You can't trust random videos that people are sharing. You need to have people who you receive information from have a verification of this is a human. And even if there are a human who uses Chachabit, over time, that would be established as this person's reputation and identity. But you have to, we have to establish some way of indicating this is an actual human being.

I don't necessarily think that's the worst thing in the world. I don't know that giving people the ability to an honestly anonymously spread misinformation, that has existed forever. And we're just giving them more powerful tools. And eventually we're saying, no, we're not allowing anonymous people to spread info. caveat to that, of course, this, like, what about whistleblowers? What about all these other things, right? This becomes very complex. At a basic level, this has to happen to some degree.

You're, you're, okay, so you're one, yeah, there's so many layers to this, dude. It's extremely complex. We'll solve it. We're going to solve it. We've got what? Perpetuation of misinformation of misinformation is not just like, you know, anonymous and bought accounts either. It's like, you know, it can be very public notable figures. Like, if you took somebody like Alex John's,

for instance, right? That is a, like, everybody knows it's him. I know he's right about everything. Right. Tread lightly. Sorry, it's a bad example. Bad example. Let me look for a different guy. You have to actually see a quote or video come from Alex Jones verified account

rather than from anybody else who said, look at what he just said, right? I want him to tell me the frogs are gay. If someone else tells me, I'm not going to trust it. That doesn't it sound trustworthy to all to me? No, it sounds crazy. But if he says that I feel like he's not worth. Now there's a little bit of trust you. There's a bit of journalism to it.

No, but that's, but that's not. that's part of the reason is like I, a lot of the issue is like not, but maybe the misinformation issue in that regard is, is kind of the same as it already is. It's like people with like platforms and like you know who they are can just as easily like spread things like that. To be clear, there's plenty of evidence that Russia, for example, does hire a bunch of people to just so discourse or anger in our social media. And where are those jobs going to go? Right. And that would hang for them to lose their jobs. Right. Right. I, ironically, a lot of of scammers are going to lose jobs because AI is going to do it for them.

Scam at scale. I do think the other part of this is the verification idea. I had this idea passing in my head the other week and it was because I was thinking about how on Waybo you need to have a Chinese social security number or like whatever the equivalent is. When you use Chinese social media, part of the like Chinese government's ability to like moderate and control the internet. We are not paid for by the CCP.

No, no, hold on. This is an anti-CCR. I'm doing pro-Ghi-Chimpin movie stuff and you're doing pro-webo. This is an anti-argue thing, right? I think there is. Dougson is talk about how Taiwan is part of the second one.

Well, because it is. You know what, maybe we've got too far this episode. We've got too far this episode. We're doing. We're like a fine. Anti-woke pro-Shing-Ping. There we go. Yeah, okay.

Bring that up here. So, yeah, that's my. Guys. So big dog. That's my big dog. Big dog in the back. The part of the ability to moderate and control the internet in China is that all these social media accounts, even like game accounts and things, have to be tied to your, like,

an actual Chinese ID, right? Like you have to be identifiable, at least to the government, uh, through your social media profile. And that in a way is actual human verification online. Like part of me does want that in the sense that when I talk to you in person, I know it's you. And maybe we'll lose that at some point too. Pretty soon.

Yeah, pretty soon. Yeah. It's the scary part. But the idea that I could be talking to you on Discord and there, I would also like to know it's you in the same way. But the government in stating that system also starts to get scary and uncomfortable. And it's definitely by all the layers, right? There's like all these like weaving layers of this of like there's pros and cons to like every

possible way to like moderate and move forward. Can I sit in the villain chair for a sec? Oh yeah. yeah. Go crazy. Okay. You know what solves that? This is not a joke.

Crypto. Oh. That's, that's, that is, that is the point of crypto. Take away the chair. And burn it.

Just to be clear, right? Oh, no. As my fellow lovers of everything Elon and crypto do, that is, that is, look, this is too big of a discussion

to get you right now. But I will quickly, it's a sickly, say the point of crypto technology is not for Hawk to a coin. It is to have decent. You bite your tongue. Yeah. Sorry, sorry. Speaking for myself, you know, I don't, I don't own crypto. I think basically all crypto stuff going on right now is scammy and shitty. But the idea of it, the technology of it, is about decentralized ownership of things. And so if you had a verification system that was grounded in a what's the bit, lot, lot, blockchain, blockchain. Right? The idea is like Bitcoin, you can't

have a government come in, take your ID. Grab the fucking block. Yeah, yeah. I do see what you're saying. Right. So China system is what you're saying. It's this verification and it's extremely dystopian because the government can disappear you in a second and that's terrifying.

And that's why the lemonade stand will be taking donations via Manaro from now on. Yes. XRP, Sala, whatever. Everyone's in the crypto reserve. I think, yeah, we're closing it on like the end of the show. So that's an interesting. This is a longer discussion. I think that's why these.

This wasn't even my discussion. I know. This was the intro into my actual topic, but this is good. Oh, I'm sorry to derail. No, no, no, it's good. I don't know. Let's send it. Well, we'll save it for another time.

Look, a little teaser for next episode or whatever of lemonade stand. Actually, good, because I have, I have something I want to research and bring back for this that I think supports the point. Yeah, the teaser is the point of the hyper-creative writer model that came out of AI is not just, ha-ha, we can make, you know, funny jokes on Twitter or whatnot. Or a ha-ha, we can scam people. That's not really that funny, actually. it's not about that. It's the idea that we are moving towards a world where AI models are very specialized towards specific groups, right? So this model is objectively worse for programmers, but it is incredible for me, right? And that's happening more and more. And there's all these

interesting examples of it's not just going to be for writers, there's going to be a medical industry one. And not even just a medical industry one. It's for specific, let's say, you know, pathology for cancer patients type things, right? So these are going to become very, very specialized rather than this like God AI that we currently are trying to create. Right. So that's in the future. But all of this relates, the fact that this one is so insanely good at creative writing basically means that our worst fears are true. We are now officially at the state of like we are not going to be able to tell online if you're a human or not.

But please don't use Chad GBT to leave your comments like you did on the last episode. You had something you wanted to say about our gambit to get them all to comment by using the hashtags and dots. Oh, I noticed a theme of the worst. bad faith comments always lacked the asterisk or the hashtags and I was like they were so much easier to write off because I was like you did it you literally didn't listen to what we talked about but I do feel like there's this poor soul that that tuned in and scroll down as you do in the middle of a show to check the comments yeah and it's like is this all bought it? Oh yeah it looked like well ironically that proved that they're not bought it because chat

Chb-T would not have included those yeah this is also fighting against bots we're making our own system. Like, if you want to drop a message with just three little asterisk on the end of it to like know that you watch the end of the show, I would appreciate it. And as a final note, I think in the future episodes we're going to carve out a little more time to like make sure

we follow up on comments and stories from previous episodes, but I thought this was a nice note to end on. Thank God he's stepping up. Robert Kennedy Jr., pushing to remove the phones from schools like we asked for. Yes. Because they give you, the radio waves give you cancer. Wait, I'm

Sorry, what? Why? Why again? Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter? No. And that's what it does it have to do with mental health or dopamine injection? No. For another pro-CCP wireless phones are giving you cancer episode next week. You're telling me. You're telling me, A-Rox phone is giving me cancer right now.

Get that out of here. If you have the banana on your face, it'll help me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let me do this. Thanks so much for watching, everybody. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Oh, hoes. You're going to do that.

You have to stop doing that. You have to stop eating the skin. Great play, right. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.