Everyone is banning Social Media | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand Podcast 🍋

Episode Title: Everyone is banning Social Media
Date: June 24, 2026
Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc, DougDoug
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the recent global trend of banning or restricting social media for children and teenagers, focusing on policy moves in the UK and Australia, implementation challenges, cultural impacts, parental perspectives, privacy and freedom concerns, and the responses of both tech companies and world governments. The hosts also explore related topics including the evolution of work-from-home, credit card “premium” traps, the state of the streaming and gaming industries, and global AI regulation.

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Main Theme

Is Banning Social Media for Minors Effective, Possible, or Even Ethical?
Examining State, National, and Global Policy Responses to the Harms of Social Media and Technology on Kids.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. British & Australian Social Media Bans – What’s Actually Happening?

• UK Bans Social Media for Under-16s: A sweeping ban, including platforms such as YouTube, set to take effect in 2027 ([03:23]).
  • Keir Starmer’s last act as Prime Minister—portrayed humorously as a "legacy move".
  • Aiden: “It’s a point in a larger trend…not the first country, but one of the more extreme bans so far.” [03:23]
• Australia’s Implementation ([04:03]):
  • Ban modeled after China’s approach to video game restrictions.
  • Most teens continue to circumvent restrictions using VPNs and evading age verification.
  • Doug: “Most people…have continued to use it. They use VPNs, they fake the age verification system, they keep going.” [04:04]
  • Kids get creative: using tricks like drawing facial hair on faces for AI verification ([05:09]).
  • Growth of niche, less-regulated platforms—unintended side-effect, possibly increasing risk for children ([05:56]).
  • Parental approval remains high due to belief in “helping the next generation" even if present teens remain unaffected ([05:56], [06:36]).

2. Parental and Societal Impacts

• Parental Sentiment
  • High approval for bans, especially for future generations; frustration for those with teens already using social media ([06:41]).
  • Emotional cost for children being “the only one” without access to social circles ([07:14]).
  • Aiden: “The reason that I was so frustrated at my parents…is because you’re preventing me from participating in this social culture…everything that would allow me to feel included at school.” [07:14]
  • Parents hope policy relief will repair parent-child relationships, but it’s not working for current users ([08:30]).
• Social & Educational Outcomes
  • Strong evidence for the harms: lower school outcomes, more bullying, more teen depression ([09:18]).
  • Ofcom UK Study:
    • 33% of 5-7 year-olds have social media accounts
    • 90% of 12-15 year-olds are on social media
    • 84% of 8-17 year-olds have been bullied online
    • Self-reporting of digital literacy far outpaces actual ability ([09:18] - [09:55]).

3. Designer Drugs: Infinite Scroll, Platform Design, & Alternatives

• Debating the Root of the Problem:
  • Could we restrict or ban addictive features like “infinite scroll” instead of whole platforms? ([10:21])
  • Daily time-limited access (“Daily Scroll” concept) ([11:15]).
  • Recognized challenges: platforms’ ability to quickly adapt and circumvent such restrictions ([11:43]).
  • Doug: “It would be very, very difficult to win that war.” [11:43]
• China’s Approach as a Comparison
  • Enforcement widely ignored or circumvented by youth; “it became a meme” ([12:27]).
  • “Productive” vs “slop” content myth dispelled by their own research ([13:07]).
• Rise of Parental Pushback Across Contexts
  • Not just “phones” but screen time in schools; push to return to pen and paper ([13:58]).
  • Digital learning contracts post-COVID have led to device overuse and backslide in education quality ([14:30]).
  • Examples of misuse: students playing games on school-issued devices ([15:09]).

4. America’s Patchwork Approach

• 19 states attempting different forms of bans or restrictions, with mixed success and legal challenges ([17:36]).
  • Age verification routines often easily sidestepped.
  • States like Utah impose curfew-based access; Colorado and Minnesota use mental health “warning labels” ([18:30]).
  • US legal system and First Amendment present unique barriers to enforcement ([19:30]).
  • Doug: "California and New York are trying to...go for the addictive feeds of minors, but that's being legally challenged." [19:50]
• Government Tactics
  • Some states (Florida) suing social media giants for noncompliance, seeking monetary damages and strict enforcement ([20:45], [22:34]).
  • Tactic mirrors China’s model of holding companies responsible to avoid direct government moderation ([21:33]).

5. Civil Liberties, Privacy & Surveillance

• Freedom vs. Protection:
  • British voting age paradox: 16-year-olds can vote but can’t use YouTube ([25:44]).
  • Concerns about requiring invasive age verification—AI tracking of users’ behavior and faces ([26:55]).
  • Slippery slope to broader surveillance and ID requirements ([27:55]).
  • Brandon: “If you’re a 13-year-old, are you going to have government ID?...the only way to do it seemingly is to get more authoritarian. It's a little worrying.” [27:55]
• Steel-manning Both Sides:
  • Need to avoid another 20-year lag like with tobacco or gambling ([26:36]).
  • Equally real risk of government overreach and misuse of power ([26:55]).

6. Social Media, Childhood, and Cultural Change

• Long-term Risks for Everyone:
  • Social media’s negative effects persist past 18 ([28:47]).
  • Should exposure be “dripped” (gradual introduction) and tied to positive behaviors like reading ([29:01])?
  • Book-for-time Swap: If you read Moby Dick, you get two hours on social media ([29:24]).
• Personal Anecdotes:
  • All hosts share stories of how their childhood social and tech experiences shaped them ([07:14], [16:36]).
  • Trend of “screen detox” and efforts to revive non-digital skills or hobbies ([30:57]).

7. Quick Hits – Tech, Streaming, Gaming, and Credit Cards

• AI & Music Lawsuits ([35:41]):
  • Indie musicians sue YouTube/Google for training music AI on their uploads.
  • Google's response: the license you grant by uploading gives them the legal right to use content ([37:30]).
  • Broader AI copyright debate: platforms are training models on all accessible data.
  • Doug: “...there’s just no way that these companies…the full speed race, aren’t uploading every possible thing they can get their hand on.” [38:54]
• Steam Machine Pricing ([41:06]):
  • Valve’s new PC-console hybrid is very expensive due to rising component costs, especially RAM driven by AI demand.
  • Implications for the future of console vs. PC gaming ([44:55]).
• Work From Home, Office Politics, and Social Health ([51:18]):
  • Pros: convenience, flexibility, less commute, autonomy.
  • Cons: isolation, fewer connections, less mentorship, challenging career development for new workers ([52:59]).
  • Doug: “The people that want more people in the office have a tendency to be self centered and entitled. They have higher opinions of themselves as leaders and they covet power and status.” [57:06] (as satire/quoting a study)
• Premium Credit Card “Trap” ([63:02]):
  • Premium cards’ perks often come with increasing fees and push users toward costlier spending.
  • Most people overestimate the value they get (“hope springs eternal”).
  • Opting out is a rational choice for many; “mental battle” not worth it to everyone ([71:20]).
• Stock of the Week: Netflix ([72:25]):
  • Netflix’s decade-long invincibility wobbles for the first time as subscriber growth slows and price hikes are rejected.
  • Possible indicator of economic downturn or consumer fatigue ([74:03]).
• Global AI & G7 Debate ([77:09]):
  • Recent moves in the US to halt the release of powerful AI models (Anthropic Claude/Fable) have global repercussions.
  • Concerns by other world leaders over “kill switch” risk for AI as essential infrastructure ([80:38]).
  • Emergence of “trusted partner” model—a parallel to nuclear arms distribution ([80:38]).
  • Legendary quote: Brandon: "Suddenly AI...has...reached the state of nuclear weapon level geopolitical importance." [80:38]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Circumventing Social Media Bans
  • Doug: “Bunch of kids off of Instagram and put them on 4chan. You haven’t saved them.” [05:56]
• On Parental Approval
  • Doug: “It seems like if you were already using social media, this has done very little to dissuade you. But it has seemingly done something for kids that were turning 10 or 11 or after the ban.” [05:56]
• On Infinite Scroll
  • Doug: “Eventually the world will catch up to what I said a year ago on this podcast. But until then, I will just smugly smile because I know the Infinite scroll is the future that we’re...we’re going to get to.” [11:01]
• On Civil Liberties Risks
  • Brandon: “If you are forced to be identified and tracked by the government at all times, like, the actual implementation...is extraordinarily hard.” [27:55]
• On Work From Home and Office Culture
  • Doug: “The people that want more people in the office have a tendency to be self centered and entitled. They have higher opinions of themselves as leaders and they covet power and status.” [57:06] (Quoting a New York Times study)
• On Credit Card “Traps”
  • Aiden: “Now so many people have these cards that we can...we’re in the extraction point—for the average person, this is working against you and not for you.” [71:20]
• On AI as a Global Security Issue
  • Brandon: “AI...has, at least from the political perspective, reached the state of nuclear weapon level geopolitical importance. And that is fucking crazy.” [80:38]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Topic/Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Main Topic Intro: Global Social Media Bans | 02:32 | | UK Ban Details & Starmer’s Move | 02:55 - 03:23| | Australia’s Test Case / Niche App Risks | 04:03 - 05:56| | Parental Reactions & Longer-term Hopes | 05:56 - 07:13| | Social Exclusion Childhood Story | 07:14 - 08:30| | Evidence of Harms (UK Ofcom Study) | 09:18 - 09:55| | Infinite Scroll, Platform Design | 10:21 - 11:43| | China’s Example & Parental Pushback in Schools | 12:27 - 13:58| | US Patchwork of Laws/Legal Challenges | 17:36 - 20:45| | Privacy, Verification & Freedom Concerns | 26:55 - 28:17| | Banning vs. Dripping Exposure / Book-for-Time Swap | 28:57 - 29:43| | Credit Cards: The Premium Trap | 63:02 - 72:25| | Gaming Industry – Steam Machine | 41:06 - 48:12| | Stock of the Week: Netflix Falters | 72:25 - 75:52| | AI Regulation, G7 & “Kill Switch” Diplomacy | 77:09 - 85:36|

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Language, Tone, and Style

The hosts maintain a light-hearted, witty, and highly conversational style, peppered with satire, banter, and personal anecdotes even when dissecting policy, economics, or serious social questions. Quotations and exchanges often alternate between sincere concern and intentionally exaggerated takes for comedic effect.

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Audience Takeaway

For listeners who missed the episode: You’ll come away with a comprehensive view of the world’s attempts to restrict social media among young people—what works, what doesn’t, and all the complex tradeoffs around privacy, freedom, and the ability to parent in the digital age. The episode weaves these discussions with candid reflections on the technology industry’s power, the psychology of business models (from credit cards to streaming services), and the shifting sands of policy and regulation in a hyperconnected era.

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Quick Recap / Actionable Nuggets

• Bans are here, but tech-savvy kids are miles ahead.
• Parental sentiment is pro-ban, but real-world effects are slow, uneven, and possibly shifting problems elsewhere.
• Addictive features (like infinite scroll) may be more addressable than “platforms” per se—but are hard to regulate.
• Efforts to enforce age bans often end up requiring invasive surveillance or government overreach.
• Many US states are piecemeal in their approach; federal efforts flounder on legal and cultural shoals.
• Parents, teachers, and governments are all reacting to a growing sense that “screens everywhere” has gone too far.
• Financial products (credit cards, streaming, tech) are extracting more value from users over time—caveat emptor.
• The fate of leading AI tools increasingly resembles the geopolitics of arms control—cooperation, competition, and security fears abound.

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Final Message from the Hosts:
“We can’t wait anymore. People are so angry. Parents are so angry. Kids are seeing a decline. They’re having to do something. So the solutions won’t be that good at first, I think, but hopefully someone can figure out something that makes progress.”—Doug [32:56]

Transcript

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Brandon]

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[Aiden]

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[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And he, like, accidentally bought a house.

[Doug]

I missed the appointment, so by default, I own the mansion.

[Brandon]

It's like the Twitter deal.

[Aiden]

And then. And then I show up to come over to his new house for the first time.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And he's mad at me and says that I have to. Him and Ari both say that I have to move in to split the mortgage with them because he missed all the appointments that would have told. Told him the house is too big.

[Brandon]

The house is too big.

[Doug]

That's your dream. And yet the tone of your voice and the way you told this to me over discord is that I'm at fault for an action that didn't happen.

[Aiden]

You're being an asshole.

[Brandon]

I'm going to be honest, this sounds like you in China. I don't know if we talked about this on the podcast. All of us were trying to use the Chinese apps, but it's impossible because you have a phone number constantly. Things are popping up all the time. Every app does their own thing, and Brandon was the only one who was able to order or use the apps because he has the power to just, like, click through Things at this unbelievable rate with a level of confidence that is baffling. And I can imagine this same sort

[Doug]

of thing happening because I signed away all my rights to Xi Jinping for a thousand years.

[Aiden]

I clicked every button and apparently that same willpower allowed you to accidentally buy

[Doug]

my mansion in Beijing.

[Brandon]

That we found. And this leads into our main topic today. Should adult children be able to use social media?

[Doug]

Yes, adults children or adult man children. Social media. That's the ban on the menu today because Britain has joined a number of countries from around the world in completely banning social media for children under 16.

[Aiden]

And that is the only piece of news from Britain this week.

[Doug]

Well, it's funny because, right. I mean, you're, you're joking, but because they don't follow Britain politics. Right. After announcing this, Keir Starmer then stepped down the Prime Minister of the uk. It was his last act, basically out the door. He's like, no social media for kids under 16. And I'm out.

[Brandon]

It's like. It's like Kobe's final game. He scores 70.

[Doug]

Yeah. Keir Starmer's truly the Bam Adebayo of. Of records.

[Aiden]

No one said that before this.

[Doug]

Yeah. LS we break. We break ground. We say things no one else will say. So. So, I mean, that's the big story. We can go into the details of it, but it does. It's a point in a larger trend. There's. This is not the first country to do this. It's one of many and it is one of the more extreme bands so far. So this is one of the first ones to include YouTube. YouTube and yeah, other platforms are completely banned in this Britain under 16 thing. It doesn't go into effect until 2027, so there will be a last gasp. But it does follow a Australia ban from six months ago that was supposed to be the test case. Australia, We've talked about this earlier show

[Brandon]

start about it happening.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah. Talking and having. So it's been six months. Here's the follow up. Much like the ban on video games in China, we talked about most people who are already using social media, teens or otherwise, have continued to use it. They use VPNs, they fake the age verification system, they keep going.

[Brandon]

However, are you telling me that when they say what is your birthday? They don't put in the right number instead of scrolling to the bottom? And there are thousands upon thousands of

[Aiden]

credit to give them credit. They have to go a little further than that to circumvent these bans. But the initial implementation of the Australian One was not super effective. Like the first week it's rolling out and I was watching this news piece where they're interviewing a bunch of kids between the age of, I think like 11 and 15 and just asking them how this is going. You know, did this, did you get kicked off these apps? For some people, their accounts didn't even get flagged initially. So they just kept using the apps

[Doug]

like normal, you look old for a sentence.

[Aiden]

And then for others, they did lose access. But there's things like verifying your face as an indicator of how old you are. But there's reports of like, kids finding ways to like draw facial hair on themselves in order to surpass the age filter. Or in Australia, the week that this ban was implemented, the number one apps on the Australian app store were all ways of circumventing the ban. Or more niche social media sites that, that didn't get caught in the band in the first place. Which was a concern in itself because if you're ostracizing children to platforms that are more niche, less familiar, less regulated, you're potentially putting them, yeah, you take an even worse spot than before.

[Doug]

Bunch of kids off of Instagram and put them on 4chan. You're not like, you've saved them, you haven't saved them. But here's the thing. The Australia ban six months on is, is unanimously popular with parents. Get like a 9 out of 10, 90% approval score within a YouGov poll. People are feeling like it's the right direction. And here's what I'll say. It seems like if you were already using social media, this has done very little to dissuade you. But it has seemingly done something for kids that were turning 10 or 11 or after the ban. Like they, they are less likely to start. It is less likely to get. So the way they're defending it now is saying that it's a longer term play to almost save the next generation.

[Brandon]

Right. We have a lost generation.

[Doug]

Yeah, These guys are, these kids are corrupted by Instagram.

[Aiden]

I think the New York Times was doing a breakdown on this of like, of parent sentiment basically. And it was talking about the frustrations of how this isn't as relieving for parents of children in this primary age group right now. Like, not that they're unhappy with the ban, but that the ban isn't, you know, getting their kids to turn on a dime and like basically stop smoking. But the hope is that like, okay, my kid who's eight isn't going to. This is gonna be the difference in Them getting hooked or not.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And I think there was a feeling among parents in the article about how they still feel like they're the villain. It made me think about growing up where my parents were really strict with this stuff, like whether it be social media, even like account like using the Internet in general, playing video games. And I often felt as like one of the kids at school, the main, the main reason it sucked so bad was watching all of my friends at school or the other kids talk about things that I didn't get to do. Like they're talking about, oh, the coolest thing that just happened on like Call of Duty this weekend. And like I couldn't play like an M rated video game. And, and like I will add you and like let's talk on Facebook or MySpace. I wasn't allowed to have those accounts and that was the reason that I was like so frustrated at my parents at that age because it's like you're preventing me from participating in this social culture of, you know, everything that would allow me to feel included at school. And then my parents, there's this whole dynamic between me and my parents, like arguing and going back and forth about like, and they become the enemy and, and it's basically a bunch of parents hoping they don't have to feel like that anymore. No parent wants to constantly be in

[Doug]

this fight with their kid. Yeah.

[Aiden]

And the hope is like six months in, hopefully this helps fix that dynamic or relationship between me and my 13 year old because I don't wanna take away the thing that makes them feel included at school. But it's just not working.

[Doug]

No, it hasn't been done in that regard. Yeah, a lot of examples of parents saying if they follow the rule closely and their kid doesn't have it, the kid will say, well my friends have Snapchat and they're still using it and I don't have isolated. So yeah, it hasn't done a ton for kids already hooked on it to be honest. That's the, that's the breakdown. But it seems like a really intractable problem and UK has said we're not going to wait because the truth is the reason this is all pushed across, we should talk about the downsides as well. But the reason it's pushed across because there's, there's a lot of strong evidence that it reduces school outcomes, increases bullying, reduces, increases teen depression. All the things that are, that have been, we know about for social media.

[Brandon]

Dude, I, I looked. So there's a study by Ofcom in the UK which is Obviously relevant to this new band coming out. And not only are 33% of 5 to 7 year olds have their own social media account in 2022, and then by age 12 to 15, 90% of them have it. But 84% of kids aged 8 through 17 said they've been bullied online. And then the majority of 12 to 17 year olds are confident that they can tell what is real and fake online, but only 11% of them correctly could identify what was relevant. So you have a bunch of confidence. Extremely online from 2022, by the way. So it's a couple years ago.

[Doug]

But how many of those bullied would you say? 8 to 12 year old?

[Brandon]

No, those. That's 8 to 17. So basically anybody online has been bullied.

[Doug]

Do you think that's. How much is that slime? Do you think if we got rid of slime, they would be reducing that number dramatically?

[Brandon]

Dramatically. That's what they talk about. There's a small percentage of society that just.

[Doug]

He's constantly.

[Aiden]

If you control for slime's Twitter account, it's actually way.

[Brandon]

There's a. The UK is backwards. You need to target individuals.

[Doug]

So wait, okay, not, I mean, that's a joke, but the uk. So people that are pushing back against this, most of them do not dispute that there's clearly a problem. Like clearly the numbers on teen depression and educational outcomes are all in a downward slide in a bad direction. But what they say is, what if instead of trying to do this blanket ban on all platforms or picking platforms, what if we banned the parts of the apps that are addictive, basically, the Infinite Scroll. If we attacked Infinite scroll, then you could allow people to have TikTok or YouTube or Twitter or whatever.

[Aiden]

But what if they could all like, they only had a set time during the day to all scroll at the same time.

[Doug]

Eventually the world will catch up to what I said a year ago on this podcast. But until then I will just smugly smile because I know the Infinite scroll is the future that we're. We're going to get to. We have to do everything wrong.

[Brandon]

Infinite scroll, which is a strange name to pick, is the idea that everybody. Daily Scroll.

[Doug]

I'm sorry.

[Brandon]

Oh, yeah, Daily scroll. One hour a day, everybody can use it.

[Aiden]

So, Beast, is there any. Yeah. What is the progress there? Because I do, when I think about something getting banned like YouTube, I feel like there's a kind of an argument for, oh, I wouldn't mind a younger person being able to Browse things on YouTube if you like, gut shorts from the feed Change how it feeds you content.

[Doug]

So is the progress is zero. I mean, the platforms won't go for it. And even if you were to make that ban, I think they could run circles around you. I mean, like YouTube, you tell them they can't do Infinite scroll, they. They will do 999,000. You know, they'll find they're just so good at that. It would be very, very difficult to win that war. I think so, yeah. I don't know. You know, a government that has even more ability to control its corporations and citizens is example. China, and China's on this list as a country that has tried social media bans and Internet regulation. And we were there, man. And the truth is, they have had very little success actually banning video games or social media for young people. They're all scrolling on it. And so it just.

[Brandon]

It became a meme that I asked every single person that we met if they know kids who are playing video games, and they're all like, yes, kids still play video games. Even though it's supposed to be like one hour a week.

[Aiden]

Or when we talked to actual kids, we just asked them, like, do you and your friends, like, how does this work with the. How you circumvent this? And he's like, yeah.

[Doug]

They almost laughed at it. Like, the idea that we even thought it was real is. Is. It was funny.

[Aiden]

I think the other thing that came up a lot is that that story or idea that was going around for a while that young people in China are getting fed, like, more productive things on their version of TikTok, like, educational content, and everybody there was like, dude, no, it's brain rotted as hell.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's as brain rotted.

[Aiden]

Same thing.

[Brandon]

AI tumbles.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

There's like, a lot of AI like Trump, and both of us, like, we're

[Brandon]

doing the predator meme shake of, like, AI slop about American politics. Both countries are deeply united.

[Aiden]

You know, I think something that couples pretty well with this is a larger pushback by parents that I've been seeing in the US at the least, to screen time in schools in general. Like, parents being unhappy with the integration of things like tablets or computers into how kids are educated. I think there's been, especially since COVID because of digital learning, like, came to prominence in such a way through that time period. A bunch of school districts around the country signed these massive contracts with tech ed companies.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

To integrate, like, technology into our education process across our district to modernize the way we educate our kids. And it. The amount of screen time that was climbing in schools post Covid was going up and up and up until like 23 to 2024 school year. And now in certain areas of the country that's falling because parents have been pushing back against it so much. And there's a reaction of parents seeing the decline in like their kids cognition or a rise in something like their anxiety. And they're tying the devices that they see their kids required to use at school to those outcomes. And I thought it was pretty crazy. In this one article I was reading, it was parents just sharing an anecdotal story about how their kid has to bring like a Chromebook home. And it's. They play. The kid just keeps playing Balatro on the Chromebook. And then. And then after that this same father, the same father and other parents said they have discovered playing on devices five nights at Epstein's in which players try to escape Geoffrey Epstein's island. And I.

[Brandon]

Wait, sorry, that was part of the coursework.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah, that was like civics. They put that straight in seventh grade requirement.

[Doug]

You got to five nights at Epstein.

[Aiden]

But I think that's actually a story I want to dig into more. Another time is like the scale at which these like tech ed contracts were like being sold throughout this time period. But I think there is a collective reaction from parents now, whether it be like because of phones, social media or this integration of screens into learning where people are like, I want papers and pen back. I don't want like AI involved. I don't want this level of cheating. I want my kid to actually be able to focus and learn something. So there's like a tide shift in how all of this stuff is rolling out.

[Doug]

Totally. Everything that I've seen with regards to reducing phones and screens at school has been successful. I know like Sweden actually did it. Some Nordics countries did it.

[Aiden]

Nordic fun fact.

[Doug]

Nordic fun fact of the week. Some countries in the northeast did it. America, like it's just so far from what I've seen. I haven't seen evidence that it hasn't worked because people. It just makes sense. It just makes logical sense that you would pay attention less, you would cheat more. I would do that as a kid. In fact, I remember the one class where we had a computer all the times was typing class and nobody did any. You just played games. That's the whole time?

[Brandon]

Yeah, it was awesome.

[Doug]

It was sick. I really enjoyed it. But like if it was every class I would do that every time. So yeah, I don't know. That seems pretty likely.

[Brandon]

Yeah, you and I Dodged the. The worst of it, basically the worst of it. Like we, you know, when we were entering high school, it was like MySpace was starting to take off. And then as we were exiting high school, Facebook was starting to take off. But wasn't really like algorithmic content. It was like your friend's feed, you know. And so we just didn't experience that and we turned out great. Horrible.

[Doug]

You have to go even further back to find anyone.

[Aiden]

And I was left scarred and disheveled.

[Doug]

Yeah, you turned out terrible. Your parents banned you. You're like, what happens when you raise someone in the woods on Mario Kart Wii? But I remember even you had ti84 with block dude on it.

[Brandon]

Yeah, we took what we could get.

[Doug]

Anything I could get, Everybody will take

[Brandon]

everything they can get.

[Doug]

So if you gave me five nights at Epstein's, I'm not paying attention at all.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Even right now when my computer's not working.

[Doug]

You're playing five nights at Epstein right now.

[Aiden]

Pull up five nights at Epstein's.

[Doug]

Well, what's going on in America? Because in Florida, yeah, we, we had our own.

[Brandon]

So I didn't realize this until looking into this. So, you know, UK and Australia have, have done this. UK just did this big nationwide ban. We America kind of have been implement bans. There are 19 states that are in the process or attempting to do bans of different kinds, but they're all like patchwork and different and having different legal troubles. So what is already the case is that the big social media companies, at least in America, I don't, I imagine it's different for countries. It's supposed to be 13 plus. Like you're supposed to be banned from social media below that. But then of course, like anybody can go get one. And again, on the UK thing that I looked at, like 60% of 8 to 11 year olds have their own social media account. It's like the majority of 8 year olds have it anyways. And so there's all these different laws. Here's some notable examples that I thought were interesting. Colorado and Minnesota, they're requiring a warning label that pops up about the impact of mental health. Like it's cigarettes.

[Doug]

So useless.

[Aiden]

It's like, dude, what is that? Dude, I had this problem solved. I was thinking about this and they've

[Brandon]

said it's worked and miserable.

[Doug]

How has that worked?

[Aiden]

It's like, it's like how in California how anything that could potentially cause cancer has to be labeled. And I walked into a restaurant yesterday where at the bar they had labeled that like spirits and Wine can, like, potentially cause cancer. And I was like, who is that fucking?

[Doug]

They put it on everything. So nothing means.

[Aiden]

Exactly, exactly. And I imagine this would be the same thing. But they're claiming it works.

[Brandon]

No, they're not claiming it works. No, no, no. I'm sorry. Like, what I'm trying to paint the picture of is the US Is in this chaotic state of many people trying many different things.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

This is what Colorado, Minnesota have tried. Utah is like, you have to have your parents consent to sign in, and you need their explicit permission to use social media from 10:30pm to 6:30am so there's like, time gating in some states. Interesting.

[Aiden]

It's getting dangerously close.

[Doug]

Interesting.

[Brandon]

Arkansas and Ohio tried to ban it, but it was blocked. So a bunch of these have been blocked by judges because the First Amendment is like the big counter to this because, you know, many people feel like people under the age of 18 do have rights. And then California and New York crazy pass lawless viewers.

[Doug]

Then they're. They're all right.

[Brandon]

California and New York are trying to, like, to go for the addictive feeds of minors, but then that's being legally challenged. I mean, there's some interesting questions here about the, you know, the rights of people, because that's essentially the big counterargument. But then in Florida. So Florida passed a law in 2024 that if you're under 14, you can't have an account. Fifteen to 16 requires parental permission. So like, on the stricter side, kind of. And then the social media accounts, like, companies have to delete the account. So they get $50,000 per violation. So there's like a big monetary punishment. And there were some legal challenges eventually. It started in February of this year. So Now Florida sued TikTok's ass and saying, you guys are allowing underage access. You guys are misrepresenting the amount of violence or sexual content you can be exposed to. And then, Perry, if you pull this up again, the law states 13 and under is banned. TikTok on their page says 13 plus. Like, come on in. And so Florida is like, no, you can't do that. We have a law that says you're not allowed.

[Doug]

Okay, but we had a law that legally banned TikTok in America. We all said, eh, yeah, if TikTok has learned not to care about our laws, I guess I don't blame them.

[Brandon]

Yeah. So what's interesting is Florida seems to be like, aggressively going after social media companies in a way that other states kind of aren't. They're also they sued Snapchat in 2025 and said it. They're legally opening accounts and whatnot. So they're going for, like, a lot of monetary damages and trying to put serious pressure on the social media companies. And I think that's like a pretty interesting turn if states start to actually throw a lot of losses.

[Doug]

Funny because Florida's in such a budget deficit. It just sounds like they're trying to shake down TikTok for some cash.

[Aiden]

And that's kind of was. Was China's approach when we were talking to people there. Right. Like.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Like

[Aiden]

the law around expression on social media apps is kind of. It's intentionally vague so that speech can be moderated in a way to the government's choosing there. Right. But they put all the pressure on the companies to enforce it rather than themselves and basically say the companies will face really high consequences if you do not, like, service the law appropriately. And then that incentivized the crackdown on the company's end and where, like, they don't want to let anything slip through because of how dire the consequences are, you know, whether it be monetary or, like, you know, somebody being arrested or removed from their position. I'm not saying that strategy should be adopted. That was just the way they went about it. It's like, okay, we're not going to, like, create this massive government employment program to like, moderate these companies and then submit the request to social media companies. It's like, no, you, the company are responsible for dealing with this. And it's like, if you don't deal with it in a way that we deem adequate, then you will face the problem.

[Doug]

Yeah, we'll find you.

[Brandon]

Which follows up to, like, kind of what's happening alongside these laws? What is America really good at, if nothing else?

[Aiden]

Freedom.

[Doug]

Freedom. I was going to say that.

[Brandon]

Freedom to. We've read lots of books about this freedom.

[Aiden]

Hey. Freedom to buy a house that you never toured.

[Brandon]

That's true.

[Doug]

You have the freedom to do that.

[Brandon]

Freedom to. If.

[Doug]

Freedom to force your friend to split it with you.

[Aiden]

Freedom to force your friend to split it with you. Freedom to shoot guns.

[Doug]

Guns. Shoot guns pretty well.

[Aiden]

Sorry. Did it. I feel like you had an answer.

[Doug]

Could we shoot the social media in some way?

[Brandon]

What if we fi. Because I heard they have the media in the cloud. What if we fire our guns into

[Doug]

the air and we shoot. Click.

[Brandon]

Do we shoot TikTok down?

[Doug]

TikTok's cloud could not survive, right?

[Brandon]

No.

[Doug]

This actually is a pretty good.

[Brandon]

They're being. They're being sued to Shit right now.

[Doug]

So suing them? Yes, that's one of our things.

[Brandon]

They're suing them with a gun. So no, the TikTok is being sued right now not only by Florida but by 14 state attorney generals simultaneously. There's a bipartisan coalition that is saying they're misleading the public about the safety of their platform and harming young people's mental health. It changes per state but like Massachusetts is like you're a public nuisance. New York is saying you're false advertising. And so apparently there's a thousand similar lawsuits pending. And this is in follow up to if you guys remember earlier this year, last year there was a big meta lawsuit where this woman who is 20 won a lawsuit for millions of dollars that said meta, you harmed my mental health. And so there is this big trend where people states are starting to do these massive quantities of lawsuits against the social media companies saying you have harmed me. On top of these bans, they seem like they're kind of little fucked.

[Doug]

This is exactly what happened with vape companies. What was the big vape company when it was first and the vape juul. This is what happened to Jewel. Yeah, jewel, like literally 38 states or whatever parents and all of them got angry enough that there was lawsuits across the country and it just kind of imploded their ability to sell and do the way they, they done before. And I mean they dumped their, their stock to Marlboro or something.

[Brandon]

But yeah, but yeah, I just don't get how a company like TikTok is going to survive, which is already tenuous in terms of what it's, what weird state it's in when you have a precedent with a couple different lawsuits now that any person who's like a late teenager or early twenties can sue them and say you distress me and win millions of dollars.

[Doug]

How are you going to survive long term play?

[Brandon]

Oh my God. Maybe they're extraordinarily popular.

[Doug]

It is worth saying it's still the biggest social media and it's dominant and people use it. I think I saw among teens it's like five to seven hours a day is the, you know, it's like some, some astronomical number. I think it's all social media, not just TikTok but it's the biggest one of the of them. But still it's like these are, you know, the thing they're fighting against is pretty entrenched and I want to, you know, if we're, we're, we're nearing the end of the subject. I want to steel Man, a little bit. There is a strong counter argument that's worth bringing up, which is that, you know, for example, in the uk, for this next election, they have changed the law so that 16 is now the voting age. So you can vote at 16, but you can't use.

[Brandon]

What was it?

[Doug]

I was 18 before.

[Brandon]

Okay. Oh, they lowered it. Wow.

[Doug]

They lowered their voting age for the next election. And there is an idea of like, can you really tell someone they're. They're old enough to choose the direction of the country, but they can't watch YouTube? There's like a freedom aspect of it. There's also an aspect of like, if you do we trust the government to be the one to control these platforms. These are areas where we could get opinions out outside of the mainstream system and find other people that there's the idea of, like, could this be. Once they have the verification systems, could they be turned even more restrictive later on? If there was, you know.

[Aiden]

Well, the UK was already under fire for this.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Aiden]

They, outside of kids, they were looking to broadly apply ID verification for social media accounts for everybody. And they were facing a lot of criticism.

[Doug]

So it's like a totally fair point. And that makes it a really tough thing to have a solid podcast take trademark on.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

In that I just, I wish people on that side would at least agree. Agree that, man, social media clearly is doing damage. We can't wait another 20 years to find out that it's fucking kids up. And then people on the other side have to realize that, like, you know, the government doesn't always have 100% best freedom of speech, interest and heart, and they could abuse this power if given it.

[Brandon]

There's another argument going on, which is that, so if you are a social media, okay, we institute these bans, let's say that's yours. Let's say we say under 18, no social media, we're cutting it out. Like, let's do it. How do you actually stop kids from doing this? Well, the only way to do it with is to use like AI tracking, basically. And that's what's going on. Right. Like, so YouTube now has the whole thing where they track your behavior and then use that to algorithmically determine whether you're young and then force age verification. And Roblox is doing a similar thing, which, if you remember that candidate for Los Angeles mayor was complaining about the age verification thing. Like TikTok has a new thing where they like analyze your face like you were saying. And so if you, you have tens of millions of people or Hundreds of millions of people on your platform and you are trying to determine if it's a person who's 13 pretending to be 17. The only way to do that is to get really invasive or require id, Right. Which maybe you don't have. Also, if you're a 13 year old, are you going to have government ID and all sorts of things like can you speak freely about the government or whatnot. If you are forced to be identified and tracked by the government at all times, like, the actual implementation of how do you stop kids from using these apps? Is extraordinarily hard. And the only way to do it seemingly is to get more authoritarian. It's a little worrying.

[Doug]

Well, that's why I really like the idea of even though it's impossible, it's also impossible. But the idea of like attacking part of the platform, the Daily scroll, but attacking Infinite scroll, attacking the parts of the platform that are so addictive, I know they'll just find a new way, which is the hard part of me thinking this through. But man, attacking that would actually be effective because also we all agree on the show that the problems of social media don't actually stop when someone, their brain doesn't hit 18 and go, okay, I can handle this. It's poisoning our brain, Poisoning everybody's brain.

[Brandon]

Oh, it's horrible.

[Doug]

It's ruining society in some ways.

[Brandon]

Yes.

[Doug]

And so like if you just don't give them any antibodies when they're a kid and they're like, they'll figure it out when they're 18 and they're just, they're gonna get brain rotted anyway.

[Brandon]

She's saying we drip it to them, they start at one minute a day until they've proven they can handle it.

[Doug]

I think you should get a minute per your age.

[Brandon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Doug]

But there's the oldest among us will get the most social media, which is good.

[Brandon]

But if you're showing signs of brain rot, we like break glass and there's a book there and you have to read it.

[Doug]

We hand you the giving treat.

[Brandon]

That's a slow ass book. No, it's like Catcher in the Rye. It's one nobody even likes.

[Doug]

Dude, that was so funny. When I was in elementary school, they had all the books in the school library color coded with a little dot on them and you get points for the each book you read. If it was a bigger book, you got more points. What if the book would unlock amount of time you get on social media? So if you read Moby Dick, you get two hours.

[Brandon]

That's what my parents did.

[Doug]

Did they really?

[Brandon]

Yeah, we had to like, do chores and like read books and maybe. Maybe you too, and like do homework and then that would get. Oh, now you get 30 minutes of video game time. Like.

[Doug]

Oh, interesting.

[Brandon]

Yeah, this sucked.

[Aiden]

Didn't do that. It was just blanket. No.

[Brandon]

On weekdays my kids were just mainlining Cartoon Network and I was reading books like a coward.

[Doug]

But your kids.

[Brandon]

What?

[Doug]

Your kids. You have secret kids.

[Brandon]

No, no, no. Like my friends. Like my friends.

[Doug]

Sorry, you said my kids. My kids.

[Brandon]

My kids are watching Cartoon Network. My fellow kids.

[Aiden]

I can't. I. I can't imagine the. I'd actually like to hear people's suggestions, if you have one, for the comments. Sound off. But it feels like the two solutions are. What you've just outlined is this more like stricter enforcement of IDs, like database of users and, you know, which trends in this, like, more authoritarian direction or an ability for a government figure or institution to enforce rules on the companies in a way that is much more broad and reactive than is currently allowed through like a more liberal justice system or legal system.

[Doug]

You're saying the core problem.

[Aiden]

I mean liberal in like the academic. I understand academic sense.

[Doug]

I've told Carlson Story. Later we'll talk about it.

[Aiden]

Oh, I know what sorry is my dog.

[Doug]

Yeah, we'll talk about your dog in a second.

[Aiden]

No, but do you see what I mean? It's like, it feels like the solution. It's like these two prongs of solutions trend in a more authoritarian direction. But the stakes, the stakes of the underlying issue feel very high. So I don't really know how to feel.

[Doug]

So I will say, like, if there was a world where kids were allowed to drink as much as they want and then we started banning it, you would say you could say this is a more authoritarian direction. But at the end of the day, some level of authoritarianism for some rules makes sense.

[Brandon]

Like people should not agree sports gambling to not be widely accessible.

[Doug]

There's things that should be banned. So I'm not like a total, total, like laissez faire, no rules for anyone.

[Aiden]

I think I'm more in the camp of like, in. On both fronts. When you have a problem that is digital, the layers of friction to adapt and change and mold the thing around the rules that have been made is always very quick and easy relative to a physical thing. So that is my worry is like, I'm 100% of the belief that, okay, the UK government could draw up a strict set of laws that require social media companies to Modify their platforms in a way that is less addictive. But like you said, I think with the pace at which these institutions can adapt and the age of the people in charge.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

They can only re. It's like Instagram finds a new workaround that is compliant with the law, and then you're back just years later.

[Doug]

They finally adapted that.

[Aiden]

Yeah, but if I. But in my miracle in the hypothetical world, no consequences. I've made you the fucking social media czar in the country. And you can just. The Daily scroll and you decree the Daily scroll and anything that, like just based on vibes that breaks the Daily scroll, you just get to say no to. You could just react on a whim and. But that has all these consequences because what if you're a really bad guy and you.

[Doug]

And you actually sounds really good. I think I. Like we were headset. And I think I should handle all social media. But let's move on to a different story, because I think we can't. I wouldn't hear your opinion. If you guys have a. If you guys have solved this problem, let us know and we'll pass it on the decision maker. Next time Pete Buttigieg is here. We'll pass it along. But it is. It is. I guess what I'll say to sum this whole story up is that many, many countries from. From the UK to the. To the EU as a whole, South American countries, Asian countries, and America, they're all saying, we can't wait anymore. People are so angry. Parents are so angry. Kids are seeing decline. They're having to do something. So the solutions won't be that good at first, I think, but hopefully someone can figure out something that makes progress.

[Brandon]

And I'll say it. I would like to not also be banned from Twitter. So if they find a way to do that.

[Doug]

You would like to be banned.

[Brandon]

I would like them to ban me from Twitter. That'd be fun. I've eliminated all the others, and then that still hooks me back.

[Aiden]

When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account. Like if a tween won the lottery.

[Doug]

I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bonds, but, bro,

[Aiden]

I bought a house and it's sick, bro.

[Doug]

I'm thinking the floor is gonna be all trampoline, bro.

[Aiden]

With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound.

[Doug]

They're just being babies.

[Aiden]

But switching to Geico saved me hundreds. So my bank account is safe.

[Brandon]

It feels good. To say some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico

[Doug]

Here's a

[Brandon]

finding that should stop every tech leader cold.

[Doug]

Organizations most confident in their AI deployments have more than twice the security incident rate of those that aren't 72% versus 33%. That's from Teleport's 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey of more than 200 infrastructure security leaders. Teleport establishes a unified identity layer for humans, machines and agents that is cryptographically backed that enables agents to be controlled and contained with the same rigor that you apply to other actors in your infrastructure. Because in the new era of AI, the problem isn't agents, it's the privileges we're giving them. Download the free [e-mail] Vox

[Aiden]

I see

[Doug]

you Avatar Fire and Ash is now streaming on Disney plus.

[Brandon]

It's the film critics are calling the best avatar yet. A true epic and completely jaw dropping.

[Aiden]

This is the only pure thing in this world.

[Brandon]

Return to Pandora on Disney plus.

[Doug]

It will be an event for the

[Brandon]

whole family and watch the Oscar winning phenomenon at home.

[Aiden]

This is sick.

[Brandon]

Avatar Fire and Ash now streaming on Disney.

[Doug]

Rated PG13.

[Brandon]

Speaking of YouTube, interesting. I mean this is a quick one and then we'll move on.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Brandon]

YouTube was sued a couple months ago and it was by a group of indie musicians who sued them trying to do a class action lawsuit saying hey, you're new AI music model Lyria 3 has been was made by copying all of our music. So this is kind of the broader, you know, story of what is happening with AI music right now where most of the companies like Suno or Udio, which are the really big ones, are making AI music and their models were trained off of all the music they could find on the Internet and their argument is fair use. We are, you know, we are transforming it and we don't think that we've broken any laws here. This is a big, big, big ongoing discussion which can pot massively change the direction of AI development. But right now these types of questions are still unanswered. With Google it's a little bit different because Google, they were sued by these musicians and said hey you copied our music just like the other guys. But Google responded, this is June 10th like two weeks ago and responded to this lawsuit and said first off, even accepting their untested allegations as fact, the complaint cannot stand. Basically the lawyer opens and says first off, you can't even prove if we trained it off of your music or not. But they won't say whether they did. Even accepting your Untested allegations as a fact. The complaint cannot stand because plaintiffs granted YouTube and Google a broad license to use the uploaded content. And they're right. In the YouTube terms of service, when you upload something, quote, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non exclusive, royalty free, sub licensable and transferable license to use that content, including to reproduce, distribute, prepared derivative works, display and perform it. So every time any of us upload something to YouTube, we are giving them the right to use it to train AI models.

[Doug]

It's crazy because I read the full DMCA every single time I click through those things and I just must have missed that part.

[Brandon]

Would that have stopped you? I suspect not. So this is interesting in that this is a kind of different story than the typical musician sue AI company who responds with fair use. Google's like, look, we have the rights. And then the counterargument by the musicians is basically, I mean, I can find the quote here. Google doesn't just have access to our music, it operated the infrastructure through which much of that music reaches the world. Google owns YouTube, one of the most important platforms for music discovery, distribution and monetization. And it runs content id, which is how they manage rights. And so they're basically their counter argument is because you guys are a massive distributor of music, we sort of have to upload. We can't really opt out if we want to have success, but that then allows you to do this sub thing with them. So this is an interesting case that again is part of a broader trend with the AI music lawsuits. And this one is totally different. So, you know, who knows? I think Google has a stronger case here. The other AI music players maybe less so.

[Doug]

Yeah, I mean, Pseudo's got doesn't even have this because you definitely didn't sign anything. They just stole music. They just stole music and, and uploaded it. And I assume if you really could get into the nuts and bolts of this, Google did too. I'm sure there's plenty of songs that aren't on YouTube that they threw into their model.

[Brandon]

That's what's so funny is they're saying like, even if you could prove what you're saying, like, we don't know. Look, they have not said what they trained this music model off of everything

[Doug]

that I've seen from, you know, like for example, Meta Mark Zuckerberg, they rented a building off of their office campus and had everyone bring in books to scan and then upload that they didn't own. And they just counted it as like, like it's off site. But, and that was proven. There's many of us, like, there's just no way that these companies, which are on a full speed race, aren't uploading every possible thing they can get their hand on to increase training data.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

There's been no punishment for it so far on any real level. And so they're just doing it. I, I, yeah. This reminds me of when Disney. There was a person that they, they ordered a restaurant for their, a meal at a restaurant for their wife at a Disney park. And they said, is this gluten free or something? I don't remember exactly what it was. It's some dietary shellfish.

[Aiden]

Shellfish.

[Doug]

And they're like, no, it doesn't. Okay. And then she ate it. It did have shellfish. She died. And he goes, I'm suing you. This is crazy. You lied to me. And, and they go, you have a Disney plus account. And there's a part of that EULA you signed eight years ago that says you can never sue us and you have to go into forced arbitration. And so there's that level of like, dude.

[Aiden]

And he wasn't even, I think the account had been like inactive for years. He hadn't even watched Disney plus.

[Brandon]

Dude, I'm playing Baldur's Gate. It sounds like you're like signing a deal. The devil permanent contract. And then in return you get shellfish. I have a question for you, Aiden. What I've realized through this is that YouTube has the right to train an AI model off of all of our podcasts and they could make Lemonade Stand AI and just replace us. And would you watch it?

[Aiden]

Would I watch Lemonade Stand AI?

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Oh, yeah, Absolutely.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

I mean, we could cut costs here. We could save the gas of us driving in Los Angeles traffic.

[Aiden]

They'll just never be able to replace the yard. The server would catch on fire. It would just.

[Doug]

You think they can't generate slime saying a fart joke. YouTube.

[Aiden]

YouTube's podcast. AI would never be able to make a joke about how, like, we do.

[Doug]

Yeah, well, I don't, I don't even

[Aiden]

know if we can keep that in this episode.

[Doug]

Oh, yeah. Probably have to believe that. Probably have to bleep that. Can I talk about gaming back?

[Brandon]

Gaming is back. What's up?

[Doug]

Listen, every once in a while on the show, we have a story that proves to us that gaming is back. And this one, honestly is the opposite of that. But I want to talk about it the two, two parts of this story. Number one is that yesterday, I believe Valve finally announced the price of their much anticipated Steam Machine, the console killer that's bringing the PC to your living room is astronomically high. It's like thank God.

[Aiden]

I was worried the plebes would be able to afford it. Thank God. I'm an itching Aiden head to toe

[Doug]

in Gucci and Moncler so fucking happy that the regular folk cannot afford the Steam machine.

[Aiden]

I woke up, I checked my news feed like I do every morning to see if there's an update on the Steam machine. And I take my diamond grill out and I say thank. Oh, I was hoping for two thanks game.

[Doug]

Still a little cheap, but thanks game. No, it's astronomical. How much is expensive? It's 1049 I believe, with no controller.

[Aiden]

That's the cheapest model with no control.

[Doug]

Cheapest model with no controller for everything.

[Brandon]

And you need a controller to play.

[Doug]

You do need a controller to play. So basically all you don't, you can plug in a keyboard, we just touch

[Aiden]

in whatever you want.

[Doug]

I'm sorry, you're right. But the Steam Machine with, with controller. I don't know what the exact all in cost for like a regular use case is, but it's like 12, $1300, something like that. And people are finding it to be extraordinarily expensive and certainly disappointing for what they expected. And Valve's response is that this is what it costs us to make. We're not even making a profit on the console, which is probably true given that the cost of RAM has gone astronomical due to AI. So this is seen as a response to like, hey, that's what it is what it is. AI is buying all the chips, this is what we could get. But it does seem like it undercuts the momentum that Valve had of like we're gonna just start taking over the living room like that. I feel like this is gonna be slow to be adopted.

[Aiden]

Yeah, I, so I have a few, few thoughts on this. I watched a cool review of the product by Dave Tudi already and he points out that if you try, like people are balking at the price, which I think is totally understandable. But if you try to build a comparable PC at the moment, like just on your own, the parts come out to a very similar price.

[Doug]

Yeah, they're not profiting on this, I think, or a very, very little if they are.

[Aiden]

The big thing that they're saying they won't do is a lot of console sales traditionally have been loss leaders. The idea that we'll sell this actually not at a profit, we'll sell it literally At a loss. Like the first Xbox sold that way. And we will make that back through either your subscription to our online service or through the games that we're selling and publishing for the console. And Valve is refusing to subsidize the console and sell it at a loss, like a lot of companies do choose to do. I think the thing that does genuinely suck for them from. I've been keeping up weirdly close on the release timeline of this since their announcement. You know how, like the Chrome app on your phone, like, just feeds you recommended news articles. I clicked like three about the Steam machine when it launched and then it feeds me a new update every day.

[Doug]

This little Steam Machine freak loves everything about it.

[Aiden]

And he's like.

[Doug]

And then I want to know the specs. He wants to know the.

[Brandon]

There's an infinite scroll about Steam Machine price.

[Doug]

That's the world we live in, dude. The infinite scroll's gotten so deep, it's

[Aiden]

even hitting Google Chrome.

[Doug]

It's hidden everywhere.

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

is up, PlayStation is up, phones are going up in price next year. Like, the RAM cost has increased tech across the board.

[Aiden]

You can basically. And the biggest fault of this arguably is that it only has a gigabyte of RAM in it. Like, that is a decision that they made. And one of the. If you track the price increase with the Steam deck and assume that they had to make a similar adjustment in the price of this, you can see that the original intended price of this product was around like 750 to $800. But they had to push it up to this. They couldn't even push this down to 999, like below, you know, below 1,000,

[Brandon]

which is much cheaper.

[Aiden]

But they obviously made a decision internally to like it CR the thousand mark. And I was talking to this in our just a friend group chat and I was like, dude, this has to be the worst time ever to choose to launch a video game console.

[Doug]

Yeah, it just looks bad because you're

[Aiden]

just gonna get eaten alive.

[Brandon]

Regardless of the reasons, I'm revealing myself as a fake gamer. Why, even in the world where this is more affordable, why is this, why would this be disruptive or impactful? The machine? Because I thought the whole pitch is like because it is just a PC. Why is this substantially different than somebody buying a pre built PC that you can do?

[Doug]

I think the idea, it takes me to the second story, but second story, it's a good answer to your question. So Sony recently, over the past few years has wanted to make more money off their big console exclusives like God of War and Spider Man. And so they said, well we're in a war with Xbox, we can't release it there. Nintendo is a whole different platform, different specs, can't release it there. What if we release them on PC? And so they quietly have been releasing a lot of their major titles on PC. Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider Man, God of War and they all made a ton of money. They did a longer term study of these users and they realized, oh, here's the problem. They once they realize they can just wait and get our best titles on PC, they all of them, their purchase intent on a PlayStation has dropped to nothing. They just, they realized that the best thing to do is kind of just to own a PC. PC can get almost, it gets every Xbox game, it gets almost every game but Nintendo games. And so PC gaming has quietly, despite the being, you know, backseat to consoles for most of like when we were growing up, has become the dominant form of gaming. It's, you get the most value for

[Aiden]

your buck and if you're crazy little guy, you'd be playing Nintendo games on it too.

[Doug]

Don't tell him, don't tell them. I wouldn't do it.

[Aiden]

Couldn't catch me doing it.

[Doug]

So PC gaming has really just taken off. And Steam has become the dominant platform store for buying video games. And it has all the latest new indie games and the games you play with your friends and all the games that don't release on consoles or release much later on consoles. And so Steam has realized the last battle is like most, there's some group of gamers who only play on their couch in front of the tv. They don't actually have a gaming PC. It's overwhelming. It's too hard to set up. The idea of it is too daunting. If they can crack that code and they can put a Steam machine that's very one click and press and play in your living room, it kind of could blow the console makers out of the water. It could be the last bastion. So that was the idea is like Steam could have total dominion over gaming with this final push.

[Aiden]

And nothing will crack the living room quite like a thousand and fifty dollars price tag.

[Doug]

But this price tag usually put a damper on it. So, yeah, those are. Those are two stories. It's like just a weird time in gaming. I will say PC gaming is clearly looking pretty good. Xbox is in a total tailspin. They're doing layoffs. They're closing down studios. They're moving all exclusives to PC and Sony. Nintendo are kind of walling up their gardens again. Oh, so the Sony story, the end result of it is that Sony has said they're pulling back from PC releases of their. Of their exclusives. The next God of Wars and stuff are not gonna go on PC. They're gonna literally be console only. You have to buy a console because they realize that they're kind of like selling themselves out long term.

[Aiden]

Yeah, I feel like if that's the lesson to learn from Nintendo more than anything.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Aiden]

Like, that is the real brand power of Nintendo. It's like, you. You want to play fucking Mario Mario, bitch? You want to play Mario Mario, you

[Doug]

better buy a damn game. You better got console or switch switch 12.

[Aiden]

Anyway, I'm on the wait list, so

[Doug]

you're on the wait.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Obviously you're gonna buy 12 of them because you like to work from home. Okay. And if you're working from home, what exactly is the vibe?

[Aiden]

What's the vibe at working from home? I wanted.

[Brandon]

Nobody even noticed, especially now that we've called it out. Expl.

[Aiden]

I wanted to ask you guys a question because I saw an intriguing opinion article about work from home now that it has been more established and we're years past Covid. And this was making the argument that everybody enjoys remote work for the most part. You poll people. It's like 80% of people. People say they prefer remote work. It's better for them for a multitude of reasons. Like, you don't have to commute anymore. You can do, like, little chores throughout your day. You can be at home with your kids. You can. There's so many reasons why work from home is super, super appealing. But this. The person who wrote this article was going through a couple different studies and basically making the argument that this era of work from home is increasingly isolating people and causing them to be more depressed, have fewer connections with people, and have these slower, you know, downward effects on you after years and years of doing remote work. And the reason I thought this was interesting, this is more of like an open question to you guys, is do you agree with that idea or takeaway? Because in the comments of this article, as you can expect, people are like New York Times shills trying to get us to go back to work like the establishment just is doing whatever they can to convince us to go back. Basically like a bunch of people arguing that the New York Times is like a part of the cabal that is forcing people to work in office again. And, and while I can see why people would want to push back against this, because I, I literally started working for Ludwig. One of my primary two reasons was because my old job was asking me to go back into office.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

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

[Narrator/Advertiser]

People.

[Doug]

It's funny that you mentioned the New York Times as being accused of being the deepest shill on this because my counterpoint comes from the New York Times to this article. This is an opinion guest essay that you're showing. Can you show mine as well? This is also an opinion guest essay. This is one that just came out yesterday that I read. It was called the Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office Every Day of the Week. And it's a six year study that interviewed thousands of employees and bosses on work from home. And what it found was the one trait that is consistent across all managers that wanted the most work in office time is ego. As in they really enjoyed the feeling of being the boss in person.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

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

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Was the ones who really enjoyed the feeling of like, I don't know, lording over meetings and walking around the cubicles. And those people were the most of like we have to get back in the office right away. And so I think there's some truth to that. However, I've talked to some people in my audience about this, younger people. And I do think there's a point of like if you've already established yourself and you're good at what you do. Work from home is pretty convenient. But if you're new, there is a weird thing of like joining an office and being work from home immediately. You don't get to know anybody. You don't get really any mentorship. You don't learn a lot of skills. You're often more isolated. And I do think if I'd started my career work from home, I would be less excited about it. So I don't know, I think there's probably like most things, some stupid ass nuance. I don't know. Doug, what are you saying?

[Aiden]

Dumbass. Fucking stupid nuance.

[Doug]

Stupid ass, stupid ass.

[Brandon]

I have no hot take. There's so clearly like it depends on the environment and the pros and cons. I think what you just said is an important one, which is, I mean, like, I remember my first programming job. Like with every single programming team, you have the guy who knows everything and he's the only reason the team even functions and he comes in to fix everything. And like going to that guy and being able to just walk over and ask for help and like communicate what's going on, it was an enormously important part of that job. And that would have been miserable without that. And I wouldn't have developed and become the amazing programmer that I immediately quit and stopped doing forever. And then like hybrid roles, it's like those, even if it's two days a week in person, those are really important to connect with people. And then there's just the sense of. I think generally creativity is better when you have people in person than online. Although again, obviously that totally depends on the environment. I find that doing solo brainstorming or I can walk around in my own environment is extremely important. But also it should be in person, right? I think both these. So to me, like the dream would be hybrid roles. But it obviously, so obviously depends on the team and the company and the situation. And if you have to commute an hour and a half each way, then that's gonna add such misery to your life.

[Aiden]

I feel like. So the, the real negatives of working in the office in my mind are the commute, the required structure of a, of a company, the feeling that you have to force or pretend to do work for like a full eight hour period, when oftentimes you don't need to be working for that whole time and

[Doug]

then been in a company where your seat is in front of your manager and they can see your computer. Have you ever been in that situation?

[Brandon]

Yes, I sat next to my manager.

[Doug]

It's so horrendous. It's so horrendous because.

[Brandon]

Oh, dude, I was also. Not only that, I was next to it. This is what esl apparently I was not only next to my boss. Also I was like right in front of the main conference meeting room, which all day long had parts of teams for the entire company with glass walls. And then I'm on the other side of it and they can look at my monitor.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Because sometimes you just. Your brain's fried. You a scroll Reddit for a second or just like get your. But you can't do it. And so you're like constantly having Excel sheets open or it's. It was the. I'm so glad my seat moved in my early days of twitch because I could not. It was like stressing me out to pretend all the times I've had.

[Aiden]

This one time. Yeah, I've had this one time. But it was next to my boss, Ken Hotbed Chen, if you know this guy. So as you can imagine, I looked over at his monitor and he was on Reddit most of the time.

[Doug]

Yeah. And your current boss, Ludwig, I don't think would be too.

[Aiden]

Yeah, he's not really breathing down my neck in the same way, but. And then I think the last piece of it is when you really need to zone in and focus to get a certain amount of stuff done. I think being in an open office can like take. Take away from that sometimes. But I think if you remove the. If you remove the commute and like the hard structure part, most people I feel like would want to come in. And the reason I say this is because I've actually made a big push at mogul in like the last year and a half for people to start coming in more. Cause something. And there's no hard policy about this, but there's something that I have noticed.

[Doug]

The people that want more people in the office have a tendency to be self centered and entitled. They have higher opinions of themselves as leaders and they covet power and status. You were saying you've been searching for coo?

[Brandon]

Yeah. How are you running?

[Aiden]

If I can make an argument for a different reason, as the more they

[Doug]

coveted power and status, the more they favored return to office mandates.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Brandon]

And so do you walk around and you kind of look at what they're working on.

[Doug]

Yeah. And you kind of like check in.

[Aiden]

Don't do that. No mandate.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Just to be clear, none of that. I said, I said I'm just reading the. Encourage people to come in more. No one's been laid Off.

[Brandon]

If you want to be a team player, come on in. But there's no mandate.

[Doug]

Yeah. Wait. Jeff just got fired. I wouldn't hate to. Hate to meet him.

[Aiden]

Like, hey, no one got fired. No one got. Sorry. No one got fired for that reason.

[Brandon]

Hey, guys. Just had to shut down off brand. But I think it'd be cool if you come into the office, but no

[Doug]

pressure around with a $3 million chain.

[Aiden]

Okay. Something I have noticed as the guy who manages everybody at the company who is essentially hr, is that the people who come in the least feel the most isolated in their role and have the most negative opinions about how other people in the company feel about them. That's what I have noticed.

[Doug]

Oh, interesting.

[Aiden]

So I think there's a lot of like, you know, when you're texting somebody, there's an ambiguity in like the tone or how they mean it. And if we meet person to person, I see your face, I see your body language. Like, we have a much clearer path of communication. Like right now you can, you can tell that I. Yeah, exactly.

[Doug]

He's flipping me off under the table,

[Brandon]

emanating off my skin.

[Aiden]

And I think people coming in, people coming into our office develops a, like, stronger morale and camaraderie. Camaraderie and comfort around everybody. That makes people just.

[Doug]

You're saying it's like a fan of the company. You're saying your office is like a fan.

[Aiden]

Oh, my God.

[Doug]

I want to make fun of you.

[Aiden]

This is a company where people. Auto plays deadlock for six hours a day. That's. That's my fucking point. If you could. It's like if people just get done what they need to get done and they can come. I agree with you. They can come in.

[Doug]

I'm just making fun of you.

[Aiden]

They can fuck around. We can watch the NBA finals together. We can. People play video games together.

[Doug]

Indeed. List next to this that you're trying to.

[Aiden]

I'm not hiring anybody. I'm. I'm making a case that like, I think, I think people enjoy. This is not a company where, like, nobody does work. Like this past week before this Minecraft event we did, you know, a handful of people are throwing together like 12 hour days together in the office in order to get this event prepped and done on time and then. But in the week after where there's like maybe a couple months before the next project, you know, the next day they can be in there and like, let's have fun and play. Like, we'll like do a couple meetings that we have to get done today and then we'll like play counter strike together for a couple hours. I'm not saying this is gonna happen at fucking Amazon on, but I'm saying that in this environment where a bunch of people have like relatively short commutes, don't have any like hard rules, me breathing down their neck and like demand that they're in like a spreadsheet all day, people are really happy to come in and like separate home life from work life. And I'm not saying that's a standard that's like sustainable at every mega corporation, but like, it's the reason that I gave up on working literally from home all the time because it made me sad. For the reasons that in this article, years before I read this article, I was like, I realized working at home alone all the time without talking to anybody ever, just fucking makes me sad. And it's fun to be around other people and like be able to turn your co worker and like, hey, can we like do that thing? And like, I, I think to agree

[Doug]

with you, I want to just say we, we for this show often do episode planning meetings like on Thursdays and we'll do them on a Discord call. And the energy of that call versus when we got in this room and all brainstormed on a whiteboard is a million times. Night and day, we're on Discord. We're all kind of half distracted. We're like, some people are silent, you ideas, we get it done, but it's not. When we get in person, there's a much more of an energy where we're riffing off each other. We invented great concepts like the Nordic fun fact. Three hours brainstorming. We got that. Okay. Things happen. So I, I totally agree that there's a difference and I just think it's, you know, it's often nuanced and person by person. Person. You were gonna show something.

[Brandon]

Oh, no, I mean, that was just for you, Brandon.

[Aiden]

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[Brandon]

Whatever your thing, it could be anything.

[Doug]

Canva helps you make that thing a thing.

[Brandon]

Canva is a simple online tool thing.

[Doug]

It's a way to design with our

[Brandon]

magic AI tool things you can social

[Doug]

media your things, generate images or videos

[Brandon]

of your thing, make decks or presentations to show your thing.

[Doug]

Whatever needs to be done for your thing. Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

[Aiden]

This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.

[Doug]

That is fire.

[Aiden]

Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer.

[Brandon]

Okay, I like this one too.

[Aiden]

I'm not good with it. Okay, try, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

[Doug]

I agree with you on this, but one thing.

[Brandon]

Yeah, let's. Let's swap this. Go ahead.

[Doug]

One thing I don't agree with you on that. I've kept my rage boiling about. No, obviously. I almost thought about not bringing this up again because it's only negative for me. I'm not gonna change the dynamic that 85% of Americans have a credit card and are very attached to to it.

[Brandon]

Don't worry. I have another way to bring this up and talk shit about you on Patreon.

[Doug]

Okay, perfect. However, an article I read recently in Business Insider that I wanted to share with you guys and we could pull it up on screen. It's called the Premium Credit Card Trap. And I wanted to bring this up as a launching pad because I think it articulated some things that I was far too stupid to get across when I was explaining why I am a little bit wary of these premium credit cards. And it's a longer article. I'll give you the key highlights. It basically noted that over recent years, the yearly fees of these so called vaunted credit cards like Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire Rewards and keeps going up. And it went up from like 695 to 785. One of them is 820. They're rising and rising and people at the margins are starting to notice that maybe this doesn't make as much financial sense as they thought. And there's evidence in this article. If you have a premium credit credit card, they are being much more deliberate about which companies they give you special bonuses and rewards for. And they're making partnerships with these companies. And the idea is to kind of subtly push you into shopping that direction over another direction. And what they found was if they do something like, hey, you get 10% off a delta Airlines flight, but only if you shop business class. What they're finding is consumers are spending a lot more. For every 1%, they increase the rewards. The Monthly points, they get back people's spending increases 32%. And so people are spending quite a bit more on these things. And so, yeah, like for example, you probably would have gotten the economy flight, but because there's a 10% discount in business, you're almost losing money if you don't get it. It's a psychological trip, it'd be a bad deal. So you have to buy it. And that's happening with like some deluxe gym memberships and you know, all sorts of things. People are just spending money they wouldn't normally spend. And you're in a bit of a. What this article kind of breaks down is that you are in a bit of a psychological war where if you do everything right and you're super on, on, on top of it, there is benefits to this. You obviously can get, you can extract more than you put in, but you're in a bit of a battle at all times where they are trying to influence, trick, subtly nudge you to spend more or in different ways than you otherwise would have. And I think there's a freedom from that in some way where if you just opt out, you are not playing that game.

[Brandon]

Well, I just want to clarify here. You're saying opt out of platinum credit cards, right? That have these very high.

[Doug]

These are all the fees ones and luxury ones.

[Brandon]

Right. And I just want you to know that that is not every credit card. You can get a just normal ass credit card.

[Doug]

No, I totally understand. But you, yes, you can get a normalized credit card. You're right, you can do that. But even that. So the psychological aspect is that when you buy something with normal cash, there is a cost in your brain and a upside in your brain that you, you put together. But what they say in this article is that when you have a credit card, the cost is removed.

[Brandon]

With platinum credit card.

[Doug]

No, any credit card.

[Brandon]

Any credit card, the cost is removed

[Doug]

because you're not seeing the money go out of your account and you get a second dopamine bonus of like, I'm gonna get some points back. So you get double the dopamine bonuses and you get none of the costs. So you still spend more than you otherwise would.

[Brandon]

Wait, so hold on, I just wanted.

[Aiden]

So what's bad?

[Brandon]

So, yeah, so as long as you extract more like you were saying, you get double dopamine for every purchase instead of worrying about the money side.

[Aiden]

All I'm hearing is double dubbeding.

[Brandon]

No downside.

[Doug]

It's a tasty cookie. They described it in this article as like smelling a delicious cookie. And it makes you want to eat cookies. Okay.

[Brandon]

So wavy.

[Aiden]

Okay, I would. I'll defend you for a second. I. I have one of these, like premium credit cards. I have the Chase Sapphire Reserve, not an ad. And here I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't get it. Basically the re. The first time I heard about this card years ago was when the annual fee was like $300 or $350. And this was a card that came with an instant $300 travel credit. So as long as you were someone who paid to travel at all during the year, the card basically immediately paid itself off, like accounting for nothing else. And then a few years later, I want to say like four or five years later, the fee got up to $500. Still the $300 travel credit. Still a bunch of these other perks. Realistically, if you're spending any, like, if you're a middle income person spending any decent amount of money on this card, it's probably, and you go on like one trip in a year, it's going to pay for itself. However, like a year ago they raised the fee to $800 and they also reduced a lot. That 300 travel credit is still there alone. But a lot of the other benefits changed. And the way it works is you only get like a ton of the benefits if you spend it on this premium list of like hotels and restaurants that they've like curated, curated deals with with. And if you weren't already a consumer at these really high end hotels or really high end restaurants, then you're just getting encouraged into spending more money in order to see the benefit of that at all. And me and my girlfriend have the same credit card, but she has a much more like normal salary. She makes like $70,000 a year. So for her, this card and the $800 fee just flat out did not make sense anymore. And I think the way it works is like, there's kind of a, kind of a confusion and like how you can get out of your credit card. Like canceling your credit card reduces your like, credit points because you're getting rid of a portion of your credit history sometimes. But she ended up downgrading to like the base Chase card that has like no, no fees and like, no big things attached to it. So she's not getting any of the upside. But she doesn't have to pay this fee anymore. And this was her final, like, I'm not doing this anymore. It's just too much. This doesn't make sense. And the only reason it even Financially makes sense for me as somebody who still refuses to book. These are like hotels and restaurants that are like thousands and thousands of dollars per night. It's just ridiculous. Like, I'm not gonna do that. But if you spend like a certain amount on your credit card in a year, you, you hit like a, another airline credit or something that like works for me. But the reality is they've like crept. They've had this slow creep in the fees and like push you towards like more expensive and niche things. And this is happening with the competitors too, where they just, they're basically just making deals with companies to extract more and more money out of you. And that is totally a part of this process. Especially at these like high value end ones that have gotten pushed to a wider and wider consumer base.

[Doug]

Yeah. And they, you know, kudos to your girlfriend for choosing to downgrade because they say in this article that, that there is a huge psychological aspect of loss aversion where people associate some level of status or lifestyle to. Once they join these groups or have these cards and the idea that you have to downgrade is actually damaging to people. They feel bad about it. They feel like they don't.

[Aiden]

I think they give you these tiny ideas of lifestyle perks. Like they'll give you access to like nice airport lounges. They have like the fucking Centurion or like the Chase lounges that are really nice. But then we talked about this. There's a story on the Primo the other week. They don't have any room because it's not special to have these credit cards. Everybody fucking has them. So there's always like all of the perks or. Sorry, a ton of the perks can't even be enjoyed because too many people have this thing in the first place. You're not a part of some exclusive social club.

[Doug]

Here's a quote here. People may be overly optimistic about many of the benefits they'll use, how many of the benefits they'll use when signing up to a card. And once they realize they failed, they keep it anyway because it feels like a sunk cost and hope springs eternal. They'll utilize it better later. So, you know, they take advantage of that anyway. I don't know. I actually don't care. I want to be, I want to be clear. I don't actually care. I do whatever you want. Many people in the discord have proven that they are mathematically making out on these. I do literally live your life. I don't care. I think I just want to bring this up because this article is interesting to me. And I think it. It. I just like the idea of avoiding any mental battle with a big bank ever. I just don't want to do it. I don't want to deal with it. I will get tricked, I'll get beaten, and so I opt out. And I think there's other people that agree with that.

[Aiden]

And for the grinders that are really showing the value of it, grinders are like, fuck it, you're doing it. Most people are not doing that. And I think as much as I've made fun of you about this, I think the reality is like, so many things, like an Uber that was so cheap at first and then caught on broadly enough so now the prices can be raised. Like, this is something where the deal was so good at the beginning. That's how they attracted the initial user base of people. And now so many people have these cards that we can. We're in the extraction point for the average person. This is working against you and not for you. And that's just the reality. That's the only reason it gets to exist. That's the reason credit cards get to exist, period. So I think to be in denial of that and it's like. And for me personally, I'm like, I make fun of you because I think the reality is you're in an economic tier where you'd just be taking advantage of. But I think the. The entire basis of these systems only exists on that. There's a bunch of people losing and the bank makes a ton of money. That's just the reality.

[Doug]

That brings you to a story. It's not on our list, but I'm talking about. Anyway, I'll just do a quick story pivot, which is that I don't know if you guys know, but for the past few years, only one streaming service has been profitable, and that's Netflix. Everybody else has been losing money. Netflix stock over the past six and a half months, this is stock of the week, I guess, has basically halved because consumers are finally. It was seen as like, Disney is a luxury. HBO is a luxury. Netflix is a utility. I have my electricity bill. I have my water bill. I have my Netflix bill. Netflix, for many families is just like, you just pay it. They keep raising prices. You just pay it. They have begun to cut their Netflix bill. Netflix people have started to cut back. That's not like a massive drop in subscribers, but I wish I had the numbers exactly top of my head. But the idea is that they have. There's been some. Some shaky trends in recent Netflix data of longtime Netflix subscribers finally cutting their, their bill and finding other ways to watch TV or movies. And that is interesting because they have sort of. They were in their attraction phase for a while now where they have been raising prices relentlessly and people are just going along with it because they had the biggest library and they were the most all arounder streamer services for families. And. And so, yeah, just an interesting little update I wanted to give. That's the stock of the week.

[Brandon]

Netflix is 40% over a year is wild for the big streamer. Yeah, that's crazy.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's a pretty shocking downgrade, especially in a time where the market overall is way up. Like most companies, even money losing companies are doing quite well. And so for Netflix to be hit so hard by the market is like, it's a sign of like, wow, people are, are stretched a little bit on. On.

[Brandon]

Do you feel like this is one of those situations where the stock market or the stock, let's say, is just divorced from the fundamentals of the business because presumably Netflix is still a profitable good business. It's just not the oh my God, this is the future of media.

[Doug]

Yeah, probably type of dominance. Again, I hate to make stock movement.

[Brandon]

Scribers are not halved. I'm trying to get some numbers right here, but yeah, I mean, it's what, it's gone down a lot. I don't even know if it's gone down. It's just not going as much.

[Doug]

Yeah. I think it just grows slow. I think the point is that the stock market, the price it had before was baking it a up into the right graph of growth. That was like beautiful. And now that graph looks like it's flattening or going down. When that's.

[Aiden]

Do you think this is. And I'm no meme.

[Brandon]

Wait, real quick. Yeah, real quick. Just like so from Variety, like they went 2024, they had 300 million subscribers. End of 2025, they had 325. So it's kind of wild that they are still. They are getting millions of subscribers every year.

[Aiden]

Wow.

[Brandon]

And their stock is plummeting.

[Doug]

Yeah. Although I will say some of those are downgrading from the, the profitable tier to the ad supported tier to the.

[Brandon]

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

[Doug]

So it is like, it's a change in the makeup, but yeah, I agree, it's. It could be a research indicator. People are finally cutting this bill. But I don't know, I don't know what it means. All I know is that Netflix, I've, you know, I've Talked about streaming industry for years and years and years and Netflix has always been the rock solid one. They've always been like everyone else, shit in the bed. They figure it out. This has finally happened. And what's interesting is like, like this is happening basically six months after they walked away from the Paramount deal, I'm sorry, buying Warner Bros. Discovery. And the idea was we were going to spend $100 billion to buy Warner Brothers and HBO and the market was shaky about it. We walked away, our stock went up and then went straight. Everyone's like, ah, nevermind. So I don't know, this is interesting,

[Aiden]

Aiden, what you were saying, the recession indicator thing. But do you think. Do either of you use Netflix a lot?

[Brandon]

I cancel.

[Aiden]

Oh, you're.

[Brandon]

What are you pointing at him? What's going on here?

[Doug]

Cops will get me. I freak.

[Aiden]

What I was avoiding saying.

[Doug]

He was avoiding saying it. I'm as lazy as I sound from the credit card section. It's not like I would normally set this up. My wife is. My wife saw that we were paying for HBO and Netflix and she's like, no, cancel that. She set up some kind of media

[Aiden]

service and she wants me to move in. To split your mortgage?

[Doug]

Well, yeah, because we have to save the money, so we'll all split the bills on that. And so yeah, it was.

[Brandon]

Was that media server, was that over the last six months,

[Doug]

that's what crushed Netflix's thought I was paying for 100,000 subscriptions.

[Aiden]

To me, the other answer could be, and it's hard to imagine that it would all happen at once. Like this is. Is the catalog just declining in value so much that people are finally reaching a breaking point and cutting off their subscription? But I'd leave that to the Netflix heads in the chat too.

[Doug]

All I know from Netflix heads is they fucking hate that Netflix makes shows they like and then cancels them after two seasons. Every single time.

[Aiden]

Shout out to Sensei Banger.

[Doug]

We got off traffic. I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about the G7 countries unrelated. And I hope to God there's no stories about AI related to them, but maybe there is.

[Brandon]

Do I have a crazy turn of events for you.

[Aiden]

All right.

[Doug]

This is a guy with cereal.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

This is in large part in follow up to the anthropic story where their new model fable slash mythos was shut down. So I think we mostly just talked about this on Patreon, but this is a big deal. So a week and a half ago, Anthropic, they released their new model fable. This is the big crazy high, you know, like, oh my God, this is going to change cybersecurity for everybody. And they had restrictions on it, but then the United States government, the Commerce Department said, you need to shut this down. There's security flaws. Fast forward a week and a half and it's still not back up. I think there's many people who thought, oh, this is gonna be. I mean, Anthropic's quote was like, this is a misunderstanding because this would be crazy to establish a world where America, the government, can, on a whim, press a button basically and say, you have to shut down access to this thing. And so at G7, the summit with all these world leaders, some interesting things happened. And this is interesting things in like world leaders are talking and maybe things will happen. So this is more of a high level, like Vibes. However, interesting vibes. First off, people like French President Macron and the PM of India Modi voiced concerns to the US folks that they're basically saying, hey, we are concerned that if you just cut off access to the top American models at any given time, if you just turn switch on and off, why would we want to start developing our infrastructure or military or encouraging startups or businesses to be using any of this stuff? If we hook this up into our power grid or our military or how we run the country, let alone like a new startup in India is like built a cool commerce website and they're using AI to help power things. And then suddenly Trump's like, nah, don't want it this week. This is an enormous, very fair. This is an enormous concern from a world power. And you know, right now AI usage is really starting to kick off. The past six months in particular, I don't have quantifiable data for that. But certainly Vibes, in terms of how much people are talking about cloud code and then from the American AI perspective, right, We've talked a billion times about how the AI companies are essentially driving the economy of America right now and all of our growth. Well, how is a company like OpenAI or anthropic going to continue driving unbelievable growth by saying AI is going to run everything if they can't even go to a company or a country and say you're definitely gonna be able to use our product, right? If they're like, it's the equivalent of like selling washing machines, but the washing machines just might get turned off by Trump randomly, with no warning, no explanation and no recourse.

[Doug]

And they're always being sued right now by consumers, many of them who Paid for the extreme tier of model to try Fable, and it's now been a week and they haven't been able to use it. I wanted to use it, I can't use it. It's just not there. And in their announcement, they're like, we'll have more information within a day. Within like 24 hours. Yeah, there's been no. There's been no update.

[Brandon]

They assumed this would be quickly resolved. Like, this is crazy. And so another part of this meeting was they proposed a trust, quote, trusted partners program where certain other countries would get sort of exclusive access to the top models from Anthropic and OpenAI. In terms, it's like a sort of like, trade network that bypasses the restrictions. But if you think about what that they're talking about it like it's a military weapon.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Aiden]

Like a.

[Brandon]

We, as France, we want to have a deal that we get access to the early models before they're released publicly. And so I think what's been happening over the past few weeks is a strong indicator that suddenly AI, whether it is deserved or not, has, at least from the political perspective, reached the state of nuclear weapon level geopolitical importance. And that is fucking crazy. Particularly given that there's no clarity on really why this is happening or when it's going to be resolved or what's going on.

[Aiden]

So I think it ignites or reinforces fears around tech that's not AI being shut down by the US as well. Like, we've seen these changes within the European Union of them moving away from certain types of US Software in order to maintain sovereignty around how they, like, keep their data or. Yeah, things like that. And then. Or if you take something like WhatsApp, if the US government can command, like, Meta to shut WhatsApp down. Well, India is WhatsApp's biggest market to a point that, like, the new. I think the new lead at WhatsApp is like an Indian, someone who has a ton of history in, like, Indian tech. And like, you could just shut off that entire service for a country because the American government made that decision. Yeah. As a reminder, it's also this.

[Brandon]

WhatsApp is like abuse for business transactions. This isn't just like a texting app like these. These companies and these products, like, underlie the ecosystem of countries now.

[Aiden]

No, I feel like you go. You go to a ton of foreign countries and the main thing they list is the company's WhatsApp in order to, like, contact them. Yeah, I feel like these conversations around AI enforce all of that for the other things that are lower stakes around it too.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Aiden]

It's like a reminder of like, how reliant we are. Like, if I'm another country, how reliant we are on so many forms of American technology.

[Brandon]

Right, right. It's. It would be extraordinarily concerning if you're another country. Right. And it seems like this stuff. And again, this is all predicated on the idea that AI is as powerful and dangerous as. And that's part of the irony here is like, we as the public really don't know whether fable is that powerful because they haven't let us test it. Right. So, like, this may or may not

[Doug]

be as dangerous from the NSA or whatever, where they were like Claude Mythos hacked our servers in not weeks, but days or what. Yeah, they said something, but I have no idea. I really have no idea the accuracy where that came from. How.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brandon]

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

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I thought what you said about it being treated like a nuclear weapon was very, very apt. There's this article called A Signal of where Power Sits. And I'm just gonna show you the picture from it, but it's the idea. I don't know if you can pull this up, Perry. It's just this. When you look at this meeting at the G7 and it's like, World leader, world leader. AI CEO, world leader. AI CEO, World leader, leader. It's just kind of a wild time where they're just all sitting there discussing these monumental changes and they're treated with the power of nation states almost. If you're like Sam Altman or you're Dario Amadai, it's just kind of a crazy thing and it's such an important or seemingly important technology and and change for military and for economics that they're being treated with this level of.

[Aiden]

There was.

[Doug]

It's just wild to me me.

[Aiden]

There's a different recent story about Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan disabling access to Claude for their bankers in Hong Kong because of the combined scrutiny of the American government being concerned about non citizen access to these platforms. But also China's concern of American AI being used within Hong Kong and yeah is. I don't know, it's starting to crop up in all these minor ways.

[Brandon]

The world where a new AI model is announced and OpenAI says hey we came out with something that's really powerful. This is introducing a whole new class of military capabilities, cybersecurity capabilities, software capabilities, things that could really make a difference. And we're just giving it to classified world leaders for six months. I don't love the vibe of that. You know it feels extraordinarily less democratized and more and more leaning towards government just kind of having this extraordinary power.

[Doug]

Extraordinary power.

[Brandon]

It's apparently people think I'm in favor of like government mass surveillance or something. I saw a comment about that. So that was my alt. That was your alt.

[Aiden]

I want to shout out. Okay, I actually do want to shout out a guy in the comments of that video because when we were talking about about the which video last one. This is a two episodes ago where we're talking about the how surveillance. How mass surveillance within Russia was starting to be used against the government. And Doug's like going through a ton of different aspects of like the pros and cons of like the consequences of this technology being used by like authoritarian governments and like how it could be misused. Da da da. Very I would argue a very interesting exploration of the topic. And then sounds nuanced. Some initial gross. Some initial commenters were like Doug or all three of us were pro no government surveillance. And there was one commenter who clearly was. He was pissed off that he was reading this from all the other people and he wrote like an essay where he timestamped all of the stuff and he was like I have no idea how you guys are coming to this conclusion. Here's like X X and X point where Doug like pre addresses what you're saying. You guys are idiots. Like it's I, I, I and I wanted to shout out that one guy who, who took the time to write that up because I was going insane.

[Doug]

That's Aiden's all I'm gonna. It's not my all Heroic commentator who wrote it out.

[Brandon]

Which is crazy because that guy's wrong. I am super for mass surveillance.

[Doug]

Yeah, you've always been saying that.

[Brandon]

I was very embarrassing to read camera

[Doug]

in every home, bro.

[Brandon]

Read in between the lines here. I brought up flock. That means idle support. Mass surveillance. Funny stuff. I want stock of the week.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Week.

[Doug]

Dog of the week.

[Brandon]

Okay? So clearly coming out of G7AI. And again, I want for no avoidance of doubt. AI is as good as all the hype. And it is super powerful and important.

[Doug]

It's like a nuclear weapon. But good.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brandon]

And no avoidance of doubt, no nuance. All good.

[Doug]

And I agree with you 100%. Except for one.

[Brandon]

And certainly that would mean. Oh yeah, yeah. Except for gro.

[Aiden]

And.

[Brandon]

And certainly that means that stock go up forever if AI.

[Doug]

Well, that's what I'm talking about, Grok. So what?

[Brandon]

Cereal meme. Spit out milk.

[Doug]

That's the best transition I've ever gotta give you a handshake for that one.

[Aiden]

He's a professional.

[Doug]

Look, I wanted to do a song of the week on the most important song of the last week. Everyone was talking about it. We covered it. SpaceX IPO'd made a gazillion dollars, went up 30% in like two days. Elon Musk, first trillionaire and then like trillion and a half. And the company was worth more than Microsoft at one point. Point. Which is insane after three days. And now if we check in today. No, briefly. No, it has fallen below where it started.

[Brandon]

No, but he's still a trillionaire.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

I believe he's still a trainer.

[Aiden]

Briefly. So it bounced back up from where it started.

[Brandon]

It's right about.

[Doug]

It's right about where it started. Basically it's right about where it started. So all of the post IPO gains have wiped out. Again. This is like normal swings of a brand new company. I'm not going to talk about this more than once. I just want to say because of the hype for this particular company and because of the WallStreetBets enthusiasm, I love this Derek Zua interface you've got going on a lot. And I mean a lot. I mean a record breaking number of people. Oh wow. Actually, anybody. It's down a tiny bit from where it started. A record breaking number of people in human history bought short term call options on this stock stock in the few days after its launch. Which basically is a very short term bet. You don't actually own any stock. It's a bet that it will go up in a short period of time and if it doesn't, you lose a lot of money. And it was, it broke the record that was on Meta stock from years ago by like 20x. It's the most ever done. So a lot of people, specifically Wall street betters, Korean stock gamblers, Taiwanese stock gamblers, all of them are currently underwater and begging and praying this stock goes up quickly, has to go up soon. And a lot or a lot of people have lost a lot of money in this, which is why I bring this up additionally, because you'd expect this stock, if it was going to pop, to pop now because over the next six months a lot more supply is going to get dumped on the market. As everyone who's an employee or a banker or Elon Musk himself, the lockup period ends and they can now dump their share. They can't do that yet. They can't sell. There's 4% of the company available for sale. Soon it's going to be 10, 20, 30% company available on market. So the idea is that this is a spooky sign. If you are like a. I just like many people on this online who are like, I just sold my house to put it all into SpaceX. I just, I just like put my entire 401k into SpaceX and everything SpaceX. I'm believing this is. You don't want this to be happening so early. You'd like this to be popping for a lot longer before anything like this happened.

[Brandon]

Do you think that when John capitalism invented money, this is what he was thinking about? Like a rocket company goes in IPOs and they put 4% up for sale. And then various gamblers around the world, like Korean mobsters are putting their life savings on a short term call option about whether it goes up not related to the actual product.

[Doug]

I think he would smile and get misty eyed at how far Elon Musk has pushed his little game.

[Aiden]

Yeah, Mr. Cap would say, by golly,

[Doug]

the market, by golly, the market's done it again. No, I do think this is a subversion of every possible thing you'd like.

[Brandon]

Free markets for cat planted seeds for trees he would never sit under the shade of.

[Doug]

Yeah, I think it's a little cartoonish, but at the very least I guess I'm Shaden Freud happy that people on Reddit who are like you're fucking, you're going to say dumb and poor for not buying into this or who's.

[Brandon]

Is that like Wall street bets?

[Doug]

Yeah, like a wall. Not, not even most of Wall street bets, like this is a bad idea. And then some are like, nuh, this is a genius idea. And so far it has not paid off for anyone who's bought in post ipo. Obviously, if you're a banker, it's still great.

[Aiden]

If you worked at SpaceX, I'm sure you're happy.

[Doug]

You're incredibly happy. They're all millionaires. There's jobs popping up for people who are just wealth managers, for newly rich space experts people.

[Aiden]

They're like, if you are a wealth manager in Hawthorne, California, you are missing a gold rush right now.

[Doug]

And that makes some people want to die. And so what would they.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

What would they do?

[Aiden]

Aiden? I think with the amount of time we have left, we leave that one on the table. And I figured I'd pivot to a

[Brandon]

smaller why don't you assist in this episode Dying.

[Aiden]

There's a story on assisted dying in Quebec I did want to talk about, but I think it'd be a little

[Doug]

longer Patreon bonus left.

[Aiden]

The thing I want to bring up was actually from last week's episode I wanted to chat briefly about. Thank you for the people who weighed in and like, gave feedback on the episode. I know it didn't, like, perform as well as a normal episode does, but to try something new and see a lot of people enjoy it was pretty cool. There was one piece of feedback and keep in mind, I have no vested interest in Applied Intuition as a company beyond my. I like seeing my friend employee. I'm happy for him. And there was a lot of criticism of the company I saw that I think came from this place of when we talk about AI companies on the show, they're often in a place where they're not making money and they're reliant on selling a narrative about what their product is going to be in the future and perhaps going to IPO and hopefully flesh out a bit, find a source of funding or reward the employees who have worked at these places for a long time through the IPO that they're doing, and that primarily by selling not only the technology, but the narrative of what that technology is going to be. And I think people are used to that framing when talking about AI companies. And I could see through a lot of the criticism and some short conversations I had with people in the wake of that episode that they thought the same thing about applied into it. Like, this is a company that's gambling on some idea of the future. And to an extent it is. But I think what people didn't understand and what I don't think we said in the Episode is this is a profitable company. This is a profitable business and has been for years. It is successfully selling the technology they're describing in the show now. They don't need to like, there's not this, like we're hoping this pans out and like starts making revenue for a us. It's like they've been doing it and this was just showing off what they have been working on. And I realized when I gave that context to some people who were being really critical of the business because they didn't know that it actually changed their opinion pretty substantially because I think they're so used to the idea of like AI Grifter company trying to like sell us something that doesn't work. And I thought it was worth clarifying or putting that information out there. Understanding that's not where like everybody's criticism was grounded. But I had enough positive conversations, people about that outside of the show that I thought it was worth bringing up. Cool. Yeah. But if you guys have suggestions for how we can brush up that format or what we could explore or go check out in the future, I want to go see more stuff. So open to hearing your guys', your guys's feedback and how to deal with

[Brandon]

social media bans and ideally take all the nuance of that discussion about credit cards and distill it into an insult about Brandon.

[Aiden]

About Brandon and take it to his 20s twitch chat like you could.

[Doug]

Yeah, don't just keep it in the comments. I want you to follow me around the rest of my life with credit card related discussion. That would be my ideal outcome of this episode.

[Brandon]

One of the big things about social media, you got to get off the digital world, get into the physical world, ideally into your mansion.

[Aiden]

If you're at Atrioc Chatter and it's like you're, you're dying for something to say this week, it's like you could talk about how he maybe didn't wake up for his match.

[Doug]

You talk about that.

[Aiden]

You could talk about that or you could talk about how he doesn't use credit card.

[Doug]

These are two.

[Aiden]

Did you. I have a quick question. Did you get messages to call him that morning? Did you call him too?

[Brandon]

No.

[Aiden]

Me and Ludwig were both getting messages from Atriok fans to call him to get him to show up.

[Doug]

And that's our show, folks. Thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate you. By the way, Aiden, sponsored By applied intuition 100% has been showing it for

[Brandon]

money and I'm sponsored by Mass surveillance

[Doug]

and love Tucker Carlson. Thank you so much for watching.

[Brandon]

Goodbye brother.

[Doug]

Goodbye.

[Aiden]

He's leaving the GOP behind.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

We all do it. You have a night for yourself, but don't like the sound of the silence, so you turn on the TV just for the ambiance. It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone. And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone, but when you switch to geico, you've got claims reps available around the clock, so whenever you need, you'll have people around to help. And let's turn on the washing machine just for good measure. Isn't that soothing?

[Brandon]

It feels good to have support. It feels good to Geico. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Colombia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your [e-mail] to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.