What's After Superheroes? | Ep. 025 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Fellas, our show is doing well, but every week I look at other shows like Joe Rogan or The Daily or The Yard, who gets more viewers than us.

And I think our option left for growth is to pay a wizard to cast spells on our viewers.

Because on Fiverr, if you search for spellcasters, there's like hundreds of people who are like professional wizards and witches who you can pay to cast spells on people.

And so I found one of the top ones, like hundreds of really good reviews.

And I said, I host a podcast called Lemonade Stance with my two friends, Aiden and Atriok.

We have a rivalry with another podcast called The Yard that Aiden also hosts.

I wish for our podcast to take viewers from the yard and bring them here to Lemonade Stand.

I do like that.

Oh, could you wish Payne checked it on the yard?

Ladies and gentlemen, the spell has been cast.

Is this from the person on the yard?

This is from the person.

I believe they're in Pakistan, and this is something they've been casting.

They said they would do it every night for three days.

And I basically said, Look, I just need one viewer to come from the yard, and it's it's a success but then i realized aiden a lot of people on youtube used to watch our show and then they left and so what we really need is an extreme obsession love spell for stubborn cases and i said many of our viewers stop watching the show over the last six months i'd like our viewers to fall back in love with our show to keep watching our show forever even though they're being very stubborn about it and this worked she gave me a full report it was genuinely very thoughtful She's in Nigeria?

While not every individual will return for optimal resorts, I encourage you and your co-hosts to continue fostering the authenticity authenticity and enthusiasm that define Lemonade Stand.

Wait, no, there can't be work on our end.

No, no, no, no, no.

This is what you're talking about.

We could have to change anything.

This spell thrives alongside genuine effort.

This will harmonize with the spell's work.

Pretty clear she's talking about you, Aiden.

And that's when I realized something.

Okay.

What's really going on is our viewers are leaving our show and going to the yard because they think you're putting in more effort.

So I found Brianna Mary and I did an ultimate spell.

This is somebody who's in India?

I asked for the the ultimate wish, and two days later, she got back to me and said, I am pleased to inform you, I have cast a powerful custom mind-influencing spell to make Aiden 10% less funny on the next 10 episodes of The Yard.

Our show is safe.

Yard might not notice.

This is just a, think about it.

I'm basically, see, if you, if we're, you know, Lemonade State is paying for these spells.

Yeah.

I'm paying a third of this bill to steal viewers from the show that I'm already on.

Yeah.

So, funny.

It's probably a net wash for you.

Yeah.

It's actually, we're just transferring.

You're, you're contributing just as much to the world as long as you're 10% funnier on this show.

If this worked, we could have stolen from Joe Rogan.

We could have stolen.

But you stole from Adrian.

We stole it from a show that I already am on.

We're like sharing a studio.

I did not prep for today's episode, by the way.

I think this is all we need to do.

That would have helped too, though.

I can't believe that.

When you were okay, at the beginning of this episode, when you were scrolling through this, as you were explaining, I was like, one, unbelievable how long you continued scrolling.

Yeah, that there's this many options.

And then you said the word hundreds of reviews.

And then I looked, and some of the, that one has over a thousand reviews.

Yeah.

Wait.

From $45 plus fees,

that person has made at least $45,000

I will spell extremely.

I mean, I did pay a $20 add-on for her to recast the spell on her.

You paid for an add-on every night to steal viewers from a show I'm already on.

Wait, this is actually a real money-making opportunity.

Maybe we should be doing this instead of it.

What if we just cast custom spells?

50 bucks or pop, hundreds of them.

All right, if you're on the lemonade saying Patreon, we're going to need you to unsubscribe and join our Fiverr magic

spell casting.

I'm going to help help our country for a second.

Bring down Xi Jinping.

Bring down.

Dude, I'm way ahead of you.

Guys, I didn't say it yet.

I spent 50 bucks on a telepathy spell to convince Xi Jinping to join the podcast.

Well, that would be good.

I mean, that would just be a nicer outcome for him.

The problem is that I just, the wish is for him to consider it, not to come on.

I see.

So at some point, Xi Jinping is going to be like, oh, maybe I should go on that podcast.

To be honest,

dollar for dollar, the chance of that working is just worth it.

I had a genuine thought the other day about Xi Jinping, and this is going to sound weird.

This is a serious thought that I had.

Does Zhijin Ping ever have days where he just doesn't

sorry?

He doesn't want to do it?

Do you guys like, does Zhijin Ping ever wake up some days and just be like, I want to watch a movie?

I want to

just chill.

No.

The vibe I get from him is that he's really grinding, but you can't possibly not have days because I felt lazy that day.

It was like a Sunday.

I was like, I don't want to do anything.

Maybe I'm falling.

Maybe I'm falling for the propaganda, but I'm like, no.

I think he has that iron in him.

You know what I'm saying?

I just picked Xi Jinping with the socks on, feet up on the couch, puts on the Chinese translation of the departed, which is what I watched on Sunday.

You watch the Chinese translation

of the departed.

And just doesn't do anything.

I wonder if that's the case.

Well, look, Xi Jinping is a bit of a superhero to the Chinese government.

Your transitions are incredible.

I would like to

understand what's going on in the world of superheroes.

We're also going to talk about craziness going on in credit cards, Aiden's trip to Sweden, what he's learned about various European lifestyles and things.

Oh, yeah.

And then maybe a little bit of Intel and the weirdness going on with the U.S.

government at the end.

Yeah, I think that covers it.

All right, I want to talk about superheroes.

This is a business story that we haven't covered in a minute.

And I think it's relevant to our viewers' lives because many of them fall right into the range where superhero movies have been a major part of the culture in their lives.

I don't know if we can pull this up.

Can you, can I?

This is, I mean, I feel invested in this.

I'm a big superhero movie fan.

I grew up like reading comic books.

I love,

you know, most superhero movies

in general, or at least like

these big franchises.

Like, I'm mostly a Marvel fan.

I didn't really, like, grow up with DC or anything.

Sure.

I was like really invested in these big franchises and movies and everything.

And I have a lot of opinions on why this has all ended up where it has now.

And I still enjoy these movies to an extent.

I think my favorite movie ever is a superhero movie.

Oh, yeah, name three superheroes.

My favorite movie ever is The Dark Knight.

And I think

it's a social network.

I guess it is.

Yeah,

it's like one of the least superhero superhero movies.

So I'll give you that.

But in general, very big fan.

So I'm excited to hear that.

I'm excited to hear your opinions then.

Let me just give you the business context here and we'll go into it.

So little backstory.

Superhero movies through the 70s, 80s, and even 90s are mostly

slop.

They're just, they're just, there's not, they're few and far between.

They have a few kind, like Superman franchise was kind of a hit, but mostly they're campy.

They don't get critical acclaim, and they do decently at the box office, but nothing special.

They're just done few and far between on the biggest franchises.

There's the Batman, the Jack Nicholson is the villain.

And then around 97.

They start to, they ramp up with the Batman series because this one was pretty successful.

And then around 97, they get the George Clooney Batman and Robin.

So we get this really, really campy, really terrible, low-reviewed movie with you know, big stars like Arnold playing

Mr.

Free.

And every line in this movie is an ice plunge.

The ice man cometh.

Please show some mercy.

Mercy?

I'm afraid that my condition has left me cold.

Do you please of mercy?

He does a million more.

He does like, what killed the dinosaur?

The ice age.

You can pause.

You can pause.

Truly terrible.

A true critical flop doesn't make very much money.

And Hollywood kind of decides if we have all, if we have George Clooney and Earl Schwarzenegger at the prime of their careers and we can't make it work, superhero movies are dumb.

What could be stupid?

Nothing could have fixed that.

And so in,

you know the next two years there's no superhero movies at all i think there's only one and we'll talk about it for a second there's blade now blade is very under discussed i don't even know it's a marvel property but blade is actually the only thing that keeps the the ember alive let's go because blade is a tiny marvel franchise from their new little fledgling marvel unit and it makes a a nice return on his budget nothing crazy when during covid when i moved in with ludwig slime and nick we would watch movies a lot and we had a week where we watched the Blade trilogy, one movie

each night.

And then we watched all of the John Wick movies back to back to back.

Okay.

And the Blade movies kind of ripped.

Do they?

The first Blade movie is kind of sick.

So if you haven't seen the first Blade movie, Doug, I just got one quote here.

Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate up hell.

Damn.

Damn.

Pretty badass.

Yeah, and I'm in.

And it does not amazing.

Nobody's writing about it, but it did good.

It made its money back, plus, more people were happy.

And because of that, their other fledgling project doesn't get canceled.

And that project

is X-Men.

Okay, we enter the 2000s.

That is the year 2000.

This movie is a surprising hit.

Even though it's kind of campy, even though it's got superheroes, even though it's got powers, audiences respond well.

It gets pretty good reviews.

People are excited about it.

They want more.

And it does pretty well at the box office.

And then right after that, we get the one that really kicks it off.

Toby Maguire Spider-Man.

Yes, sir.

Cinema.

Yes, sir.

And I think a lot of people have a very fond memory of this movie and the trilogy of movies that it spawned.

It just hit at the right time.

And this was a smash success.

I believe this is the number one movie overall of 2002.

It beats like Harry Potter movies.

It beats Star Wars.

It beats a lot of big franchises.

And so Hollywood suddenly waits, see, it realizes that there's a lot of money to be made here.

And so in the 2000s, we get the beginning of of what will become the superhero dominance.

So, we get all these movies you can see here, and they start taking off.

Not all of them are good.

It's hits and misses, but they make a decent amount of money, and people are clearly interested.

There's a hunger for it.

So, in the 2000s, we got in total 31 superhero movies and three shows.

These are sort of as a basically a boomer of the internet now.

These are the ones that I remember and that I like.

Okay.

And then at the end of the 2000s, I don't have a picture for this year.

Maybe we'll add this in post.

We get Aiden's Favorite movie.

We get The Dark Knight at 2009.

And we get in the exact same year, like one month before or after, we get Iron Man.

And these two combined give superheroes everything it was finally missing.

It gives it critical acclaim, cultural acclaim, and it also gives it the beginning of what would become the Marvel web of franchises, everything interconnected.

It gives you, you watch one, you have to watch the next one, you have to watch the other ones.

So those two combine, and superheroes get heroin, they get cocaine, they get shot off into the stratosphere.

So, over the next decade, this is the 2010s, this is where most Zoomers got into it.

We go from an average of three movies a year and almost no shows per year to four and a half movies a year and a lot of shows.

We get a ton more Marvel.

This is Avengers kicks off this decade and it goes all the way through the decade.

And then at the end of the decade, we get Avengers Endgame.

2019.

And this is what you might say is the culmination of this decade that everyone attached to.

This movie does absolutely insane numbers.

I believe it's the second highest grossing movie of all time.

Doesn't quite beat avatar.

It's crazy that Avatar still won, to be honest.

And that's not even counting inflation.

It's insane.

But it's seen all over the world.

It's this huge cultural touchstone.

And then we get COVID.

Okay.

And then we get into the 2020s.

This is our decade now.

Now, I've annualized these numbers.

This is not the actual total number.

This is as if you basically have to double it because it's only been five years.

But we're getting an annualized number of six movies a year and, you know,

four TV shows a year.

Way more than we're getting before, but it's after endgame and everyone's kind of possibly moved.

I want to talk about it.

So this is where we're in now, where we're getting more superhero stuff than ever, but the critical acclaim is down.

The box office is down.

And we're getting movies like this.

So Madam Webb comes out recently, flop.

Eternals comes out, gigantic budget, like 400 million dollar budget flop craven the hunter from sony flop uh thunderbolt even highly reviewed ones though are now starting to do underperformed we got fantastic four just came out uh this is gonna use listen this is a well-reviewed movie lost a hundred million dollars fantastic four

uh fairly well reviewed probably gonna lose i think a lot less maybe maybe 20 to 50.

but and now starting right now today there are no superhero movies for the next six months, which has not happened since 2011.

We haven't had a gap like like this.

Hollywood's like tried and tried and tried for the past, basically since the 2020s started, and they've been diminishing returns.

And now it's finally like

they're soft giving up.

And this will be the first year since 2011 without an MCU film in the domestic top five.

That's crazy.

Which has like not happened.

And so the last chance for Marvel, I'm just going to wrap this up.

We can talk about it.

They have one last shot on goal.

They have Avengers Doomsday coming Christmas next year.

They spent an absolutely gargantuan amount of money to get Robert Downey Jr.

said he was done.

His character died.

Tony Stark died.

He said, I'm done with Marvel.

They said, what if we gave you $200 million?

The most any actor has ever been paid for a movie ever.

Second highest is Keanu Reeves because he took like percentage points on the Matrix trilogy and got like, you know, no one's close.

So RDJ is going to get $200 million.

He came back.

He's going to play Doctor Doom.

This is their last chance.

If this fails, it seems completely over for Marvel.

This is like everything's trying to build to this and uh this is where we talk about it this is when we talk about it what's next so i i want to also posit a question let's talk about this all give your thoughts but i want to ask if superheroes are over hollywood is not going to suddenly become creative what is next and i think the answer if you look at the stats is video games okay

Mario Bros did a Billy.

Minecraft Movie did a Billy.

Sonic 3 did way more than Eternals at one third of the cost.

This is what it seems like we're leaning into.

So is it a superhero into video game era?

Do superheroes still have juice?

I leave the question to you guys.

I want to know what you think, but that's my little catch-up presentation.

Aiden, you look dumbfounded, but you're a superhero guy.

Give me, give me your context going in this.

What do you think?

Yeah.

Well, maybe it just hit at the right time growing up, right?

But my understanding is with Marvel specifically, they were a company in a rough spot.

And they were in a position where they were actually licensing out their properties, their stronger properties, like Spider-Man.

That's what Sony owns the license to that character.

They made the movies.

And then Iron Man was their big

gamble or big step forward of taking a property that wasn't very popular, a superhero that wasn't very popular, and let's see if we can build our own movie, like reform this character, and then they end up building a broader franchise out of it, right?

Yeah.

And I think, although there are other superheroes movies, like there's all these DC movies like Justice League and Wonder, you know, Wonder Woman, these,

like Man of Steel, that sort of era of DC universe movies.

I think the main thing we all think about in the past 15 years is the Marvel movies and the universe they built out with Avengers, right?

Yeah.

And

I do think

there's this idea of there being like too much or too much saturation of these movies, but the reality is it's that they're bad.

I think that is the main, that is the main thing.

We basically got a decade of Marvel movies that were, on the whole,

pretty good.

Like most of those movies were pretty okay.

And even if there were bad ones, they were formed into this pretty cohesive story that came together in a really interesting way that we hadn't seen

in any other media franchise, not through movies before, right?

You got to like watch most of these movies over the better part of a decade in a plot that basically made sense.

And all of these characters come together for the first time in a fashion that you had never, you just had never seen before.

And the payoff was good.

And then after that payoff, right, you need to follow it up with something substantial.

Like give me a reason to continue watching, right?

And I think except for the Spider-Man movies, which are incredibly successful.

Like I said, any Spider-Man movie that comes out goes crazy.

That's the only big hit, by the way, so far of the 2020s, I think, is Spider-Man, No Way Homes.

He's like the exception to the rule.

I feel like Spider-Man is like Marvel's exception to the rule right now.

But for all the other movies,

there's no story to jump back into because Endgame cleaned everything up.

And now you have to build up a new thing for me to be interested in.

It can't just ride off the hype of superheroes anymore.

It's more important for the movies to be good now because there have been so many.

And I think there was this era right after Endgame came out where they were all stinkers.

Like they just suck, dude.

Like, there is no, they're not going in any interesting direction.

The dialogue sucks.

The writing in general sucks.

They didn't really feel like they were building in a cohesive, interesting direction.

The main villain that they were setting up and had cast ended up being a domestic abuser, and then they had to navigate firing him.

Like, there was all these things that made it shitty and uninteresting.

And now, after years of that, right, in an era where you're pumping out more movies than you ever have, and they're also being, they also are bad movies more often than they were before, you've tainted the reputation of superhero movies on the whole.

And this is also not helped by the other side of the coin, which I would call DC, basically fucking it up every movie they put out, too.

So, DC movies on the whole have been telling me you didn't love Black Adam.

DC movies have been terrible for such a long time.

The only good DC superhero movie I can think of

is Robert Pattinson Batman.

That's the only good one that's come out in recent years.

And so now we've gotten to a point where I think these studios understood this broader criticism and this broader fatigue that is being felt.

And they finally started making some kind of good ones or some kind of okay ones, right?

Like the Superman movie that just came out or the Fantastic Four movies, apparently pretty decent.

I haven't even seen that one yet.

That's what I'm going to say, though.

So your point that bad movies movies should be correlated with box office results is true.

This is this applies right here.

Like a movie that gets a worse score generally does worse in performance.

It's a bit of a boy who cried wolf scenario where they've they went through maybe three, four years of pumping out dog shit, and now they've finally managed to start making some decent ones again, but the fatigue had already set in, right?

I am not excited to go see the next Marvel movie, even if it's supposedly really good, because you've broken up the reason for me being engaged and following the story that existed in the previous decade.

It was like, I'll go see the next episode of the TV show, basically, because I'm engaging in this broader cultural event that's going on, right?

Or it's a character that is so well liked and so well established that it like supersedes like what Doug said at the very beginning of this episode, right?

The Dark Knight.

That's not even really a superhero movie because it's kind of not.

Like I get that it has Batman in it and I understand that surface level, it is a superhero movie, but that movie rips because it's like, it's like a gangster film.

And it's like, and Batman's like one of the least important parts of that movie.

And it's just kind of awesome.

In the same way that the new Batman movie is more of a, you know, detective thriller, like, like the movie Seven.

And those are the characters or the types of movies that break the mold a bit more.

I guess what I'm saying is for the generic super movie that we, a superhero movie that we had for so long, there is no reason to step up to the plate and go see it anymore.

It is,

they have to fight their way out of, I'll save this for a plane ride one day category.

Right.

And that's how I feel about it right now.

And

I do think the doomsday movie, Robert Downey Jr., the branding, they haven't done a big Avengers movie in a while.

I think that makes me excited still.

Like that gets me in the door.

But if I were to compare this to my love for another franchise, I love Star Wars.

Wars.

I was going to say that.

Yeah, I feel the same way.

I love Star Wars, and I feel...

So for me, though, yeah, I guess it's both oversaturation and decrining quality.

It's the bull.

Once they lose you, they lose you.

I don't trust it anymore.

If every, that's the thing.

If they were always, it wouldn't matter.

The saturation wouldn't matter that much if they were all bangers.

If they were reinventing.

That's what I was going to ask.

Do you feel like if after Endgame, these were really good movies, would the fatigue have continued because it had just been a decade straight of this, anyways?

No, I don't think the fatigue would have continued if they were good because they were, you could continue to reinvent, reinvent the genre and do things.

It's like you aren't locked into a formula because it's a superhero movie.

You can do anything with it with these people.

The movies can be creative and interesting.

But what if there's four of them instead of just one?

Yeah, it's like, is there too much of a good thing?

Is there a point where, you know, could it be four or five or six a year?

No, even if they're all

four heroes in one movie, like the fantastic four.

That is also part of the issue.

I would say that it's

too much of a good thing is

only the case here because, one, it's not that good of a thing to begin with.

And the movies all follow very standard formulas of uninteresting plots or characters that all it's like the movie or the new movie, like whether it be, you know, Shang-Chi or

Doctor Strange, they don't feel that different in their like plot or their writing than the movies that came out 10 years ago.

And they're just mid.

They're mid to bad over and over and over again.

But I think we're trapped in this world of superhero movie means the plot and the characters need to all be thought about and structured in a very particular way.

Whereas when you look at a movie like the new Batman movie or the Dark Knight, an older older Batman movie, right?

You can take a character like that and take them out of this like weird traditional world of what superhero movies are kind of trapped into, right?

Like do something interesting.

They're not trapped.

You can just, people respond well to like interesting things.

Now they've dug the hole.

So it's harder to get out of it, right?

Yeah.

But they didn't have to dig the hole to begin with, I think.

I think they just, they pumped it out on the slop line and maybe it worked.

So I want to, this is not like a culture war thing, but I don't think Captain Marvel is considered one of the greatest

Marvel movies.

But that movie before Endgame made like a billion.

I mean, that movie did really, really, really well.

The average tier movies before Endgame were doing pretty well.

The slop was doing, I mean, they were overall quality better.

But the movies are slop.

No one was saying Captain Marvel was a five-star movie.

It was just, it was riding the hype of Marvel being popular, right?

Yeah.

And you dug the hole along the way of like, you cannot continue to feed mid-slop and have it make a billion dollars.

Eventually, it will stop.

So you need to be creative enough and willing enough to like change things and do interesting things and make better fucking movies.

Otherwise, eventually you get to the point we're at now.

I think if they were continuously like reinventing the formula or creating some new giant compelling story, people wouldn't be fatigued by superheroes inherently.

I think properties like Spider-Man and Batman kind of prove that.

Okay, what is what I'll say?

Superman is doing pretty well this year.

Yeah.

It's well-reviewed.

I think it's the first superhero movie in a while to break 7.5 on IMDb league, which is pretty good.

Yeah.

It is still going to underperform the Batman.

Yes.

It's still going to underperform Man of Steel, the last Superman movie, which is actually lower rated.

It's doing fine.

You know, it's going to make its money back, but it's not a smash hit.

And then Fantastic Four, fairly well reviewed, going to not do that well.

So you're saying that's like if they keep up this good pace, they can get it back.

Yeah, I think if you keep pushing, like keep being creative and keep pushing things in a new direction and strengthening your position, eventually people will warm up to the idea that these movies are good and interesting again.

Like, I, I, uh, if I were like Spider-Man, like, why is Spider-Man so popular beyond the recognition of the IP, right?

I think the newer movies are basically like pretty good teen comedies that a superhero happens to be in.

Like, they're fun and interesting to watch in a way that the other superhero movies aren't.

Yeah.

And, like,

and Superman, I think there is something to be said about, like, the inherent popularity of the IP through history.

And, like, sure, like,

a new superhero that you've never heard of could only ever be so successful compared to something like Batman or Spider-Man.

But in general, I think they just need to nail enough movies in a row, like,

and then people will be back on board.

And they haven't made, and they've done a really bad job at making good movies for us.

Who could have predicted that Craven the Hunter would flop?

I don't understand.

When you said that, I was like, this is not real.

You've AI generated a picture and a title.

I've never heard this in my life.

Imagine signing the document at Sony to give $100 million to make a Craven the Hunter movie and think, yeah, this is a good idea.

This is a good use of my funds.

The guy who signed that makes so much more money than we do now.

That's just crazy.

Every one of the executives who's been signing these off makes so much more money than us.

Oh, yeah.

They're all crushing.

Oh, damn.

They're crushing, right?

But they are.

Why are we talking about that?

They are panicking.

They are like they, they've tried it and it keeps working less and less.

I think that they're suffering.

They're suffering from all of the mistakes of each other in that people do categorize superhero movies together in their head, right?

And all of the bad movies, regardless of who they come for and like how, and because of how many bad movies have come out for so long, people

will

be inherently fatigued for a long time.

Distrustful.

And now there has to be a way that

you break that mold.

But in the same way that we've gone through decades of superhero movies being reinvented, right?

It's going to, it'll just happen again.

How do you explain Sonic fans?

They buy every game.

That's different.

That's different.

The Sonic fans just beat off Sonic.

That's a different...

That's a different mechanic that I can't account for.

I want to give a slight Counterpoint.

And here's what I think.

Sure.

Is it possible?

I agree with you that a good movie will probably make more money than a bad movie.

And if they make a bunch of good movies, people will trust them.

And I think that's true.

But I think the era where you could mix in good movies with mid-movies and get by is kind of over because it seems like culturally superhero movies are going to the back burner.

Like it's just,

it's like how rock music was bigger in the 70s and 80s, and then we switched to hip hop, whatever.

It's like yeah i think there is a cultural shift away from superhero movies as younger generations just turn away like it just or people i think there's probably something to be said here about giant ip that becomes successful makes an incredible amount of money or or a formula that makes a bunch of money and then giant company rides the trend until and and beats the dead horse until they can no longer print the same amount of money on it and then they have to move on to something else because they can't successfully reinvent it yeah like that's probably happening here in the same way that it like it's happening with star it happened with star wars like the movies were so bad yeah that they're not going to make movies for a long time like they're they're not going to try it again but eventually they'll be able to come around and and do another attempt yeah

yeah yeah and and to be fair like i'll i'll see a mainline star wars movie they got me from my childhood like i'll still see it but man they i will go see it i will go see it play all the shows you guys are in in a toxic relationship.

I just want you to know that.

That's how I feel.

Yeah.

You're being abused.

But don't you think it does?

It does change.

I don't know.

It'll be different this time.

I swear.

We will bring back

it.

It is different.

I think the big thing that's changed with something like Star Wars or something I can think of, like Game of Thrones, where you

so

publicly do a bad job with your franchise that you actually stain people's ability to continue engaging it with it without thinking about how bad it was before.

There's something to be said about franchises going in that direction.

And

it's not that I won't go see the next like mainline Star Wars movie.

I probably will, but I don't know if I'll see it opening weekend.

I don't know if I'll be as excited.

I stopped watching all the like shows.

I stopped engaging in all the side content around it because I just, when I thought about Star Wars, I was like, they took something I loved and

they got rid of all like the extended universe shit that I liked and replaced it with absolute dog shit.

And now I don't feel excited about Star Wars anymore.

And with this, it's the same thing.

It's like endgame is over.

They closed the storyline.

So what do I move on to next?

I don't really care about going to see these new superhero movies because there's nothing to participate in.

But now I, you know, I'm not locked into video game movies as the next step, but there is probably some sort of next formulaic franchise sort of thing that you could just walk into.

What if

Hollywood executives tune up, turn the sound up?

Okay.

What if I'm putting myself in their

paid $300 million to lemon and stand?

Yeah, just to come back again and again until he's 98 years old.

If this works in doomsday, that's what they're going to do.

Yeah,

the first lesson was superheroes are popular, and the second lesson was Robert Downey Jr.

Jr.

is popular.

I mean, what I would say if I was a studio executive is get Congress to fully ban TikTok.

We need to preserve the American shitty movie studios and protect them from these awful mics that are taking their attention.

I think it's TikTok, right?

You're giving them better stuff.

Unlike the high-quality, nutritious food that we gave them in the 2010s, now children are eating slop on the internet.

Is there anything that you guys can think of besides what is the next gigantic movie?

Is it really video games?

I hadn't thought about it until you brought it up right now.

No, I think it is.

There's a bunch of, I don't have the list in front of me, but there's a whole bunch of video game movies that have been greenlit.

Like Zelda, like every big IP you can think of, Hollywood is ravenously like, oh, this is where the money is.

You know what?

When you're saying that right now, I'm like, that's not going to work.

It's failed forever.

And then I realized it's the exact same pattern.

2010s, they tried to make all these video game movies, like Doom.

Remember that?

Yes, and like Hitman and all these things.

And they've all flopped super bad.

And then these three, Sonic, Minecraft, and Mario Bros, are probably the equivalent of Iron Man and Dark Knight.

I agree.

That the studios are going, ah, cool.

We're locked in for the next 10 years.

Fucking send it.

Oh, God.

I think we're going to get Zelda.

We're going to get a fucking Pac-Man movie.

We're gonna remember the Prince of Persia movie?

Did you guys see that?

Oh, yeah, that was terrible.

That was terrible.

Like, Need for Speed, and everything.

Yeah, isn't there like a

Forza movie, or am I just thinking in Need for Speed?

There was a movie where a kid plays Gran Turismo.

Gran Turismo.

That's what happened.

That's another one.

The Gran Turismo movie.

Ads everywhere.

I think all three of these franchises have had a movie, none of which succeeded.

Dude, when they make a Madden movie,

they actually make a Madden movie like every year.

Oh, dude, the spell's working.

That was really funny.

You know,

they're going to make like a billion-dollar Halo movie.

You know, there's going to be a

TV show.

Yeah, they couldn't get it to work, but I think, well,

off the basket, it's Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr.

is

Master Chief.

It's Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr.

for the next one to say about

So even Spider-Man, which is the biggest hit of the 2020s for superhero movies, the only one that I think break a billion.

Maybe there was one other, but that's that's the big one.

That movie was all

it was Toby McGuire, it was Andrew Garfield.

It was like, obviously, Spider movies are doing well.

Yeah.

But the best ones are nostalgia bait for a better time.

You know what I'm saying?

Is it going to be all just like, remember this, remember that?

Like, as they.

I just watched.

I I just watched the new Captain America movie on the flight.

I haven't seen it, so I'll think because that's an example of like and truly, truly one of the worst movies I've seen in the past five years.

I'm not kidding.

It was so bad, there was so little redeeming about it.

And I understand that there will be a general fatigue no matter what if you pump out a bunch of the same or similar product, even if they happen to be really good individually.

But this was,

it was remarkably bad.

And it's like, this is what you can't be mad that your formula isn't succeeding when you're pumping out that level of dog shit.

It was insane how bad it was.

I, and so that's, that's what I'm thinking about: is like, dude, if it's just,

I, I understand it's probably hard to make a giant good blockbuster movie, but it's not, they're not sending their best.

But, but if they had the original Captain America come back and pat him on the shoulder and they teamed up, would you smile and go, this is my childhood?

I love this.

And I

no,

I wouldn't let Chris Evans get away with that.

If you went into a McDonald's and you ordered the food and you took a bite and it's terrible, but then Ronald McDonald walked out and patted you on the shoulder and said, remember how good it used to be?

But that wouldn't do anything for you?

I don't think that would do that.

That's kind of what they're doing right now, but they raised the price.

Right.

All right.

Well, I mean, I don't know.

I don't know if we have any more thoughts.

Or, you know, Doug, is there anything else you want to say about that?

I mean, are you a superhero movie guy?

Are you like a

movie guy?

So I've been fully out for a while.

I do have a

closing thing.

Could we go to the box office list?

I want to see the current year's box office list that we that was one of the slides, wasn't it?

You wanted, what do you mean?

Didn't you have like the like last year's box office top 10 or something on there?

Uh, yes, I did.

This one or like this year?

Okay, okay.

I have a thought.

This is, this is semi-related.

See the movie, How to Train Your Dragon.

Yep.

Right there, right?

Yep, Yep, yep, yep.

There, what do you and Lelo and Stitch?

Okay, one thing that I'm surprised hasn't run out of gas yet in the world of film is this insane live-action re-release of old films.

And maybe it's just the nostalgia thing you're talking about, where people are just so attached to these movies from their childhood that they can't, they can't stop their idiot brains from going and seeing.

Will Smith's biggest movie is Aladdin, the live-action remake.

Will Smith is, you know, he's a, he was a top box office guy for 10 years, and his biggest movie is the live-action Disney remake of Aladdin.

It's crazy.

People love those fucking movies.

I know.

I think my actual, like, maybe top three hot takes is that if you are excited to go see one of those movies, you, I don't think you should be allowed to watch the movie.

I think you need to go back to school or

maybe

I don't know.

They need something in their brains checked.

Okay, you're picturing like a 27-year-old who's like that's who it is.

That's a lot of who it is.

Some of it's kids, but a lot of it is

Disney adults.

People who grew up with it are now parents and they're bringing their kids because they want them to enjoy the same, a slightly worse version, actually, of what they grew up with.

This is the worst part of me.

The worst part of me hates that they are successful.

The fact that Lilo and Stitch remake made $420 million

is disgusting to me, and I can't quite phrase why to you.

That's funny.

You think How to Train Your Dragon should have gotten more?

Yeah, because that's your childhood.

You like that more.

I mean, that movie does.

I'd honestly say that movie is better than Leelo Stage, but that's it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Have you seen both of those?

Yeah.

You are the person you're talking about, Aiden.

What?

Neither of us have seen it.

And you're complaining about these.

Wait, oh, oh, wait, you mean the remakes?

Oh, no, no, no.

I've only seen the original.

Oh, okay, okay.

We've all seen the original.

Yeah,

I haven't seen the remakes.

The only thing I'm actually surprised about here, and the note I wanted to end it on, was the amount of these movies that has come out and the length of time they have come out for, I'm surprised they're still doing so well.

Like, maybe they haven't been coming out as much and as often as I feel that they have, but in a conversation where we're talking about fatigue and like over-releasing a certain formulaic type of product, the fact that these are at the head of the the box office so often is mind-blowing to me.

And

I wonder why.

Maybe it's just because they're like exact recreations of something that were so successful in the past.

I think you're taking proven smash, smash, smash hits and remaking them.

It's like, and there's enough time that's passed.

If they remade Lilo and Stitch again in five years, I don't know if

there's a line somewhere.

Anyways, let us know your thoughts.

If you are more of a movie connoisseur, we'd love to know why you turned away, why you're still interested.

Again,

one more thing I want to say, because I looked at the box office data, the opening week for the new Superman or the new Fantastic Four or Thunderbolts was actually fantastic.

They still have this diehard group that is more excited than ever when the movies are actually good, but the drop-off is massive.

You've lost the general public.

You've lost the general public.

You haven't really lost the diehards or just, there's less of them.

But the general public no longer gives a shit about the larger Marvel Web or even, you know, Superman or like there, there's the drop-off has been much, much bigger, and that was noticeable.

I guess it's all the people on the peripheral that feel the fatigue the heaviest, right?

Yeah, because I think about people like my girlfriend, who are like so checked out of this genre, even when it was hype, but she still saw Avengers Endgame.

Yeah, you know, like Avengers Endgame was just like, I, you know,

you just got, you just went, you're out of touch.

And I think there is a giant group on like the outer edges, which was, you know, the bulk of people who were just deciding to go to these that feel the fatigue the most and are also the least likely to engage in whether or not the movie is good or not.

So,

yeah, interesting.

I wanted to talk about a little.

So I just got back from a trip.

I went on vacation.

Where'd you go?

I want to set this up.

And speaking of your girlfriend, listen, Dub.

Okay.

This is our last, this is our last chance.

He went to Sweden with his girlfriend.

Yeah.

And this was like like the trip to introduce her to Sweden and see if she would like it enough that they could move there together.

Yeah, yeah.

And so every night I have been paying witches and praying that she would not enjoy it so that our baby boy Aiden would not be able to go to Sweden.

And then I message him when he's there.

He sends me pictures of parks and strollers and greenfields and grass.

And she goes, she loves it.

I love it.

And I was like, well, we lost him.

That was our, this is our last hope to keep Aiden in the great country of America on the beautiful.

I sent him pictures of the 405 to try and keep him here.

You did, dude.

He did send me a photo of the just back-to-back traffic on the 405.

And it's like, I know you miss us to show him the beauty of America.

I reminded him we have a great president, Donald J.

Trump.

And I just, it didn't seem to convince you.

So I don't know what else can get through.

I mean, have you ever thought about the

fact that there is

audio listeners?

It looks like racism is frowned upon harshly.

Doug is googling the cons of living in Sweden.

The cons of living in Sweden is that racism is frowned upon.

I'm just going off the list, man.

Oh, police are useless except with regard to prosecuting crimes.

Oh, wait, that's

like parking fines.

Tell us about Sweden.

How to go in.

Okay,

I'm not here to tell you about my trip specifically, but there was something I

really, really really interesting I learned while I was there and the like Atriac said the intention of this trip was I was bringing my girlfriend there for the first time uh to introduce her to Stockholm surrounding like towns and my friends there to give her a better idea of you know are you ready to move here because that's my plan currently is uh I'm gonna move there in like a year and a half and

uh

The through the week we spend, we hang out with a bunch of different people.

We know like virtual, Anna Kramling, uh,

some other personal friends of mine.

Wait, by the way, I did use the picture of the yard with virtual in it for the witches.

So he might be

less funny.

Just Anna touching his shoulder.

She's like, what's wrong?

I don't know.

You seem

funny anymore.

Dave, you seem about 10% worse funny.

But, and

so I'm lucky enough to like know and have a lot of friends there already.

And that's part of the reason why I want to move.

And, but while we're there, we're asking them all these different questions about, you know, the specifics of, you know, what do you like?

What don't you like?

What are the good and bad things about living in Sweden?

And I think when you're raised in America, you have this general idea that even if you reflect on like quality of life in Europe positively, you have this idea that they have way higher taxes.

And so you have way less money.

But the trade-off is you get a bunch of benefits in society, right?

You pay the taxes and you get a healthcare and a welfare system and all these lovely things from it.

But when I was talking to a good friend of mine who just got an entry-level software engineering position at a bank there, and we were talking about his salary and what his expenses are, I was aligned, I was starting to do a bit of of mental math in my head, and I was like, wait a second.

And

have you ever had this thought?

Is like, you know,

European people you work with, they always seem to be on vacation, they always seem to be out of the office.

And I kind of wondered, you know, if people in Europe have way lower like incomes or like way less disposable income because of all the tax they pay, you know, how do they go on all these nice trips all the time?

How do they, all, how do they get to go out and do all these lovely things on their vacation or like, you know, do things like that?

yeah, I had this passing thought in my head, and I went through and I mapped out what salaries would be like in Sweden versus Los Angeles and a bunch of other American cities when you consider all of the committed, like required to live expenses that you have in the U.S.

to see what your actual like after-tax and required expenses, okay, like money you have left is.

So, where I started was, I just took my friend's salary who has this job.

And so he makes

he makes about 62,000, 61,000 US a year right now, which is on the higher end in Sweden.

And

here, I'll pull up, I'm going to pull up this trigger.

So the way I went about this is the expenses that I considered like required to live are your health insurance, your

car insurance, your rent/slash mortgage, your utilities, your groceries,

internet, phone,

gas, public transportation.

Do you want to send me the link?

I'll put it up on screen.

Sure.

So the expense, these are the considered expenses that I considered like required for a living, right?

And I just compared it to living in Los Angeles.

And so after tax, if you look at this salary of $61,300 and look at it after tax in Stockholm, it's about $47,200.

And then the same thing in Los Angeles, after tax, it's about $49,400.

And then you go through.

Sorry, Adrik is adding in an expense you missed, which is a cyber truck.

You're going to need to cost $120,000.

That's a requirement.

Did you have that required for

that?

That's going to make it negative.

Do you know in Sweden, the government just gives you a cyber truck?

It's free there.

The way I estimated these was basically making the required expenses about as minimal as possible.

Like considering lower end studio apartment, base utilities, not anything above what you need, like lowest end health insurance plan that you could get reasonably.

And that's how I generally estimated these expenses.

And if you consider all these things,

when you look at this same salary in these same two places, your after-tax and after-expenses income in Sweden, in Stockholm, is $27,600, which is much higher than the $14,300 that you're left over with in Los Angeles on the same salary.

And I found this immediately frustrating because it feels counterintuitive to this narrative that I've been fed my whole life.

But I wanted to have an honest approach to this whole conversation.

Because, of course, the same job would have a higher salary in Los Angeles.

Thank you.

Thank you, Brandon.

I just want to bring that up because you're not mentioning it, the salary will be higher.

And if you look at this position, if you entry-level software engineer in Los Angeles at a bank, he's looking at probably $90,000 a year starting starting point, maybe $95,000.

And if you run the same thing, consider all the same expenses, because base required expenses are going to be the same in this situation, no matter what.

He's left with a higher amount, $5,000 higher in disposable income than the person in Stockholm.

If it was 50 cents more, it'd be worth it.

With 33.

With $33,800 about, right?

So a $5,000 difference.

Okay, fair enough.

You do have a higher take-home income on this similar job in between these two places.

Right.

But then,

so I have my thoughts on that to begin with.

Okay.

But I decided I wanted to take a look at, well, what happens when you just look at median income in these places or per capita income?

It depends on what you're looking for.

You can use a bunch of different numbers for these things.

I tried to be as neutral as possible in what I chose.

And I have a bunch of different options here.

But when you look at median income in or median personal income in Stockholm, it's about $43,000 US dollars for the year.

And if we go through the same math that I laid out, or that

you're left over with about $18,000

of disposable income for the year, right?

Considering all the same expenses.

And then if you treat

this, this number is a little high, I think, but we could say the median Los Angeles income is

72.

I think

there's some discrepancies here, but let's take a higher median income number that I came up with, which was 72.

And you're left over with not much more than the $18,000.

You have $21,000 left over after all those expenses, right?

And then if you take a lower median income measurement in Los Angeles, which is like $60,000, you're left over with a much lower amount.

And then if you look at median or like per capita income in Houston, in Nashville, where it's $45,000 and $47,000, the number you're left over with compared to the median income in Stockholm is $14,600 you're left over with or $12,700 you're left over with.

And all of the expenses for those cities, I tried to estimate specifically to those cities, to be clear.

I wasn't like rolling over the Los Angeles numbers to each one of those.

My broader point that I want to make here.

is that I found this incredibly sad and frustrating because the quality, the quality of life for what you get, even if in the best case scenario where you have the same job and you're making a little more money, like say $5,000 more dollars over the course of the year, in this example with the software engineering,

is that you live in a place where you have higher rates of crime, including higher rates of violent crime, significantly more.

Sweden,

among Europe, one of the higher rates of gun crime in all of Europe, still considerably lower than what goes on in the United States.

You have lower societal trusts, more expensive education, poor public spaces and like

things like parks, bad public transportation, no sick days, no parental leave, of which you get 400 days combined between you and your spouse that you get to use over the first four years of your child.

You get paid, paid sick days, paid sick days if your kids are sick.

You can take a week off from work and then pass that, if you get like a doctor's note that your your kid is still sick, you get to stay home paid for by the government.

25 days of mandated vacation per year minimum paid for.

You get to live in a walkable city.

You have stronger public welfare.

You have public health care.

You have a lower life expectancy in the U.S.

You have worse child care, higher child mortality,

higher costs of the health care itself with worse outcomes, better food and nutritional standards, and a higher quality of public education for your kids.

You have all of those things.

And maybe,

maybe in some of the situations I laid out, sometimes you make less money.

Sometimes.

And if you take and if you take just median income, if you take the general median income from both places, you actually have more disposable income in Stockholm.

And you get all of those things.

And

I will be honest,

as I dug into this,

I felt kind of betrayed because to me, growing up, there was always this idea that like you only got all of these benefits with

the with the fact that you paid more in tax and that you had more income for yourself.

But for the average person, that doesn't even hold true.

In most cases, in the U.S., the average person on an average salary or an average paying job ends up with less money than you do in a place like Sweden.

And then, even on the high end, if you're someone who is striving to become a billionaire, there are more billionaires per capita in Sweden.

Over double that of in the U.S.

I think it's almost three billionaires per million in Sweden.

And in the U.S., it's one.

So if you really cared about becoming a billionaire, you have a better shot in Sweden.

And I think it is.

To spend a whole week there walking around in a city that is significantly cleaner at all of these immaculate parks, finding out that I get paid leave from the company that I would own in that country by the government when I want to take paternal leave.

I always thought that the paternal leave didn't make any sense for me because, oh, if I set up my company, I'm just going to, I thought it was a legal requirement for the company to have to pay for my paternal leave.

That's what I thought.

It's not that.

The government pays for your paternal leave.

So even though I own my company, the government will send me money to take my paternal leave.

Based on your salary?

Based on the salary that I pay myself.

I assume that the corporate tax rate is higher, though, right?

For that company?

The corporate tax rate?

Swedish.

So, theoretically, could I start a company right before I'm about to have a kid and pay myself a salary of $900,000 a year,

have the kid, the government pays that salary while I'm on paternal leave.

I desire you want to move to Sweden.

You sneaky motherfucker.

So, interestingly enough, corporate tax rate in Sweden is actually slightly lower than in the US.

20.6%.

This is the other thing.

As I'm talking to my friends there, hold on.

They lowered it this year.

Yeah, it used to be 32%.

They did a big, big, big, beautiful bill.

Yeah, too.

But even when they had theirs higher, right?

It was 32% until this year.

It was lower than our previous rate of 50%.

Of 35%.

So

that part aside, Sweden, extraordinarily business-friendly.

If you set up a business there, there's all of these

things that encourage you to do so over surrounding countries.

It's a big part of the reason why so many of the large companies in not only the Nordics, but Europe are set in Sweden or Stockholm specifically because of all the benefits that they have for business owners there.

And a lot of the people that I talked to there who are business owners were explaining to me the ways that you

basically pay yourself and handle your taxes in Sweden as best as possible.

And I was like, this situation is better for me, I think, than it is for, than it is in California.

And I was surprised by that because I'm a high-income earner.

So all of these things and like stereotypes perpetuated about what you sacrifice by moving to a country like that, which is one of the first questions people ask me is, well, aren't you going to pay a bunch more in taxes?

Isn't that going to suck?

And I was already on board because I was like, no, I'm buying into a society that takes better care of me, my family, and all of the people around me.

But then financially, I actually am not.

I'm basically in the same place I am in California, if not better.

And for my kids, probably better, like if they're just going to pursue normal careers.

And I'm not going to say there's no trade-off.

I do think there's unique career opportunities in the United States that I don't think exist there sometimes.

But I think for the average person, this whole like debacle and rabbit hole of me going

going into this was it felt, I felt very betrayed, betrayed.

It made me angry that this is the case.

Give Ace Oak and I a second to defend America.

What do we got?

I was going to say freedom.

Freedom was a big one, but I think he's got a good counter to that.

Money.

We have more money.

No, he mentioned

that one.

We were going to talk about trucks.

They barely have any trucks in Sweden.

You barely have trucks at all.

They didn't even include car payment in Sweden for this because they don't have a car.

I guess.

Because you don't need a car.

Hold on.

Are you assuming no car for people in Sweden?

Yeah, in Stockholm because you don't need a car.

Gotcha.

Okay.

And I think on aver, and to be fair, like, I think there are cities, of course, there are cities in the U.S.

Like, no, if you lived in New York or even when I lived in Seattle in college, right?

Like, I didn't need a car, but I think in general in American life and in a city like L.A., a car is a required expense.

It's not, you do not have the same degree of choice over owning a vehicle in a place like Los Angeles as you do in a place like Stockholm.

Okay, so help me understand something.

Everything you're saying makes sense, but when you compared a software engineer in Sweden versus a software engineer here and said they would make more here because salaries are higher, the take home was $5,000 higher.

Yes.

So my understanding from this is like, if you are a high earner you do take more in the end from being in america so i get what you're saying like about this system supporting people who who make let's say the median or less in america and that makes sense i think what you just said of like you felt like you were told you're gonna have to pay so much you are a high income earner so won't you be paying substantially more in sweden so

yes with an asterisk okay i

From my understanding, if you're a business owner specifically, and that's how I would be applying for my visa, visa, I might be in a unique position where I might be paying similar or less tax than I do now because of the way that you distribute profits from your business and the way business profit is taxed there versus a normal salary.

But I just treated this as salary to salary.

Does that make sense?

Salary to salary, you would get more take home in America, right?

That's

up until

like if you're a very high income earner, right?

Yes, yes so like i have an example i think i the average oh i wrote it down like if you it sounds like there is yeah so there's a there's a reason why they might be like no i should stay in america so if i made so as an example right uh i i totally so that's our that's our defense rich people win i totally concede that i totally can see well rich people who are paid salaries but don't own companies yes yes point for america so like the example that i did i don't have it on the sheet which was uh if you made say you've made a salary of four hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, your take home in

Sweden with on that salary, in Stockholm specifically, is about 236,000 US a year.

That's what your take-home would be.

And then in California, your take-home would be $269,000 a year.

So about a $30, $33,000 difference.

Pretty significant, honestly.

But I think when you have that, the two main points I want to make here is that even though that difference exists, right, you have

you have all of these things and benefits that you sacrifice for not only yourself, but your kids, your family, and your community around you.

You like, is it worth that salary difference to, you know, walk through the streets of a place that is, you know, you know,

has a ton of people who are homeless everywhere and like don't have homes and like you don't have and don't have access to health care and your kids have to go to an expensive private school instead of a public school and like all of those like is it worth all of that trade-off or should you just be buying into a collective benefit for society around you like i i would argue that the trade-off there to begin with is is bad but the thing i wanted to stress is that for the median income earner for the average person with the average job you walk away with more money in sweden still

and that's crazy Because those people are giving up nothing.

They actually have more money than the American does.

And then you also get all these benefits.

And I think that runs very counterintuitive to everything we're told about these systems and what Europe has over the U.S.

and these common like U.S.

versus Europe arguments.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally.

I think that's fair.

Like, if I were to give you an example for my girl, like for my girlfriend who

makes a very normal salary in comparison for her job,

she would make

slightly more money there.

She would make slightly more and then have access.

And then if we had a child, she would have

200 days paid of maternity leave.

She would miss American Idol, though,

among other things.

No, I think it's...

She wants to stay her entire life in a country that's never won the World Series.

The shame, the embarrassment.

Unbelievable.

We didn't even win the last baseball international tournament either.

We won the World Series.

It called the world series jesus christ and i no i was no that i'm talking about the baseball world cup i know and we're talking about the world series the world the world series that's where the world plays

dude when the grateful dead does a world tour you think they go to sweden no probably they go to britain and they go to america and they go to canada

i yeah i mean this ties into some stuff we talked about on the show before the the idea that um well i guess you're you're sort of countering the idea you're saying they're not even paying that much more in tax but the idea of like the equinox effect where people are happy to pay a little more if they notice the difference.

If you make less than, because of the way Sweden's tax system works,

if you make less than 70K US a year, which there, because they have lower salaries on average, most people do, you pay less tax than you do in California.

Yeah, I mean, the big thing I've heard from people who have come from Sweden to here is if they're high owners, they want the higher salary.

That's the the thing.

That's, that would be the big counter argument.

It's just there is a higher take home at the highest level.

Yeah.

And people who really can earn the most.

I think, yeah, to be clear, it's not like there's zero reasons to come to the U.S.

I think that's, that's an important part that I, I totally concede.

Is like, there are

situations from what I can see, the most like the most

the main things you would take advantage of is if you have a job in a field that pays you a really high salary in a specialized industry that is like more prominent in the U.S.

So things I can think about is software engineering, right?

There's not a version of being like a senior software engineer at Amazon where you're paid 500K a year in Sweden.

It doesn't exist.

I know a bunch of software engineers there and their salaries are way, way lower, even at big companies, right?

I think that the tax situation for people who own businesses, I'm finding out in Sweden is actually extraordinarily friendly.

I'm actually surprised by that.

There was some Norwegians I was hanging out with, and they were saying one of the main reasons that so many big companies exist in Sweden and not many big companies exist in Norway is because of the differences in policies around business taxes and wealth taxes between those two countries.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Which I hadn't really thought about, right?

Because from my perspective, it's just like those two countries are basically right next to each other.

They're on all the charts together.

They're, they're very, very similar, but they're describing the difference in like

the

opening of business between the two.

And then the last thing I'll say is that,

you know, Sweden population, 10 million.

That's the Los Angeles metro area.

That's it's actually less.

Yeah, greater Houston.

That's New York.

I mean, you know, it's just a bigger country with,

you know, in that 50 different states, all have their own rules and regulations and laws and states taxes.

And it's just difficult on a 300 million person scale.

But not that we're not

to get reactionary.

But I'm going to to get reactionary.

I am.

Does it not make you

does it not make you a little mad?

Like, it's crazy to me.

It is crazy.

The level of benefits and quality of life there is astounding to me.

Like, and this is stuff that I learned on this trip, even though I've been looking forward to moving there and have been there many times before this.

And I.

The day-to-day enjoyment, the number of like families I saw everywhere, the number of like like the parks and social benefits and all these things my friends just openly talked about and were like, Yeah, this is just what we get.

And this is what it is.

And no, and then I came back to LA at LAX and fucking walked to LA exit, got an $100 Uber to get home.

Uh,

and then walked through like a street of

street of trash and you leave your home.

Like, like LeBron James gave you a nod through the train.

As I walk past like a field of like people that live in the street that should have like homes or apartments and like not not have to live on the street like it doesn't make any fucking sense dude as my parents pay like you know tens of thousands of dollars to send my little brother to college and it's just it is a fucked system it is embarrassing that it is this way in this country i think truly i i it made me it

i don't know the because i i feel like if you make the fact that you have less money when you make forty five thousand dollars a year in Houston

than $43,000 a year in Stockholm is like, I don't know, that's crazy to me.

If you consider these expenses, right?

I'm sure you could, you can like fuck with my numbers and I tried to be honest and like pick as many like low-end averages and everything.

I didn't want to like cheese it.

But I mean, the fact that you're right.

You have a huge gas payment and a huge car insurance payment.

And I assume a car payment.

You didn't even.

I didn't even list a car payment.

I'm just assuming this person owns their car in full.

Just like they have a used car that they know in full, they're not making a car payment, which most, there's a bunch of things you could include in this that most regular Americans are paying on top of this stuff.

But I wanted to make sure it's like, no, only list the things that you need to, to, that are basically required for a living, which is like utilities, rent.

You basically need to have a car and

you have to pay gas to move the car

and then and shit like that.

Yeah.

I mean, I agree.

I just don't know what to add.

It's like, yeah, I, in part, I, I think this, it just underscores the core fundamental cultural divide, which is one of saying we are going to prioritize the ability to focus on your own individual success, even at the expense of the broader collective.

And that seems to be the American ethos, for better or for worse.

I'm in the same boat.

Like, I don't, I don't want that.

Like, I hate

Los Angeles.

Yeah, it's, it's incredibly depressing.

But I think to not, to not retread anything, I think that's actually a really good idea to end on because I agree with you.

To me, that's the value proposition you think of as an American and that you think of when you compare yourself to the people.

Deeply rooted in the American dream, the thing that we reinforce over and over.

And so many of our like parents and grandparents were able to, yeah.

And to a degree, I think if that value proposition were true, then you could fairly make that choice.

But through this exercise, what the

thing that angered me the most was that the value proposition that you described is not really true.

You don't really get more money.

You don't really get more freedom.

I'm saying for rich people, right?

No, yeah.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, but the American dream is bought into by like a collective society that has endorsed it, right?

I would say it's a collective American idea.

Yes, but it's the idea of like, yeah, you're worse off if you're poor, but if you can make money through the opportunities that America provides, you will benefit more than if you did that somewhere else, right?

That is, that is the pitch, right?

And so obviously the majority of people are left behind in that system, which I suspect none of the three of us are stoked about.

But I mean,

that's how you preserve it, right?

Is then you have all the people who are successful saying this is good we should encourage this type of thinking right yeah yeah

it makes sense in a way it's you know not what i would prefer obviously but takeaway of this is that you know they're getting taxed roughly the same they're after tax for the same salaries roughly similar which means the tax dollars are just being misallocated right they have enough tax money if they have more tax money you mean america has more tax money like they could spend that on similar things.

They're spending it on other things.

How much we talked about a lot.

yeah that's a really good point how much does sweden spend on the military every year we spend a trillion dollars

you know it's things like that that i wonder if like doug and doug i'm glad you asked it's lower it is wow okay imagine it was trillion two

it was all going orange yeah i mean we've talked about budget and how we spend money and i don't think we spend money very well yeah it's like it's misallocated so um

a huge part of it is that yeah again percentage gdp 1.47 that's pretty low so um yeah and they just joined NATO too.

So I wonder if it's going to

be.

They're all committed to five.

So that'll, you know, we'll see.

But yeah, I think we would like to see, but we've talked about it a million times on the shows, but public transport is like a thing that allows people to spend less on cars and that and have more take-home pay.

And that is something we could spend our tax dollars on with the money we have now, but it's allocated elsewhere.

It's on other things that is

that we need people to make hard choices to move those things over here or raise tags if you want to, but one of the two.

All right, stop teasing us.

So did you like it?

Yeah, I couldn't get his real feeling in Sweden.

You couldn't get a read on this.

He could not get a read.

He was being so mystic about.

I'm not getting so weird colors for a flag.

It was like

the old stars and stripes.

The old stars and strikes.

That's hard to beat, bro.

If you don't mind me saying this, we got 50 on them.

If you don't mind me saying this, for the entire time we've been talking about doing this podcast, which is over a year now that we've been like kind of planning and discussing it, you've been saying you're about a year and a half out from moving to Sweden.

Is it still a year and a half?

Can you be a year and a half?

No, I think I said two years when we started, right?

I think it was a year and a half.

Okay, well, I think now it's down to like a year and four months, three months.

Okay, I will, I get to be like unleashed from LA.

I'm now like gonna, I'm pulling the trigger once you leave, basically.

Yeah, you're gonna free me from LA.

Japan.

Japan.

And Adrian is gonna

forever love the 405.

405.

Just that's good, though.

It keeps us grounded.

It keeps us grounded.

You know, you don't want to be fine.

Like, you'll be stuck on the ground

out on the asphalt you'll miss it you guys will miss it you'll be begging me to come back

i turn on the tube in japan wait a minute no world series

what am i to do yeah uh

well actually let's let's let's let's move on uh all right no actually hey this is this is this sort of relates uh which is an interesting conversation about whether the united states government should be involved in private companies so that was pretty interesting before that i'm going to really quickly follow up from last week i i feel like i had a little egg on my face chat gpt5 kind of sucks i was telling brandon how we got to talk about all the goods of chat gpt i've been hearing universally negative things and my experience has gotten markedly worse over the last week yeah it got worse

can i can i interject yeah but how does it just get worse if it's the same version well they do update it they're constantly updating it and changing it so it's not the same

It's the equivalent of...

What if ChatGPT but worse?

Sam Altman after the blunt, dude?

If you upgrade from Windows 11 to Windows 12, like you're on a new big set, but it's, you know, you're going to keep it.

No, okay, that makes sense.

My understanding is also

they are

hitting their energy limit.

Like they, as more users are flowing into ChatGPT-5, they have to keep making the service worse to keep the speed and quality.

Like my, that is my, that is what Sam Alt was trying to like hint at was like, they have so much demand and they can't get they can't get enough energy online for data centers online for this new thing.

So they're they're it's actually getting worse in real time as more users are added, which is like the opposite of what you want.

You know, like a social network gets better, the more people that add it.

Like this gets worse the more people that anyway, sorry.

No, I mean, there's, yeah, there's a bunch of issues.

A programming content creator friend of mine, Theo, like made a post where he's like, I need to apologize.

When I was trying ChatGPT before it launched, it was incredible.

And what is out now is worse.

And I feel like I misled everybody.

And like, I sort of feel the same last week on a very small scale.

Like, I'm like crashing out at it multiple times a day now because how annoying it is to talk to when practicing a language.

Like, oh, yeah.

Every day I'll be like, stop prefacing your questions with eight sentences.

Just tell me what this is in Japanese.

And it'll be like, absolutely.

Yeah.

I hear your frustration.

Let me just talk quicker and get straight to the point.

Let's get right into this.

No more dealing with this.

Let's just go.

And I'll be like, shut the fuck up.

You're doing it again.

And I'm like, that's like an I think you should leave sketch.

Jude.

I'm going crazy.

Anyway, like, like, we are like we know on this show ai is perfect and there's no downsides but this is one rare instance where there was some frustration okay um so last week interesting story where intel the giant company that makes uh you know cpu chips um they have been struggling a lot over the past few years that is maybe maybe a topic we can get into if we have time but there's another interesting thing that is happening in this whole as intel one of the american like tech giants who is in theory should be part of the future of AI and computing and all this stuff because they make some of our best chips.

They're American.

That's fantastic.

They're doing bad.

Like they're doing actually quite bad.

So we can talk about that as well.

But one of the things that is happening as people are trying to figure out how to help Intel is the U.S.

government, Trump, is like floating the idea of the United States government investing into Intel and holding private stock.

They are going to, in particular, Intel said they wanted to open up this giant factory in Ohio to manufacture chips.

That doesn't seem to be happening.

And they're like, we're not going to have money.

We got to push this back to the 2030s.

Trump obviously really pushing for more more jobs, investment in the U.S.

So their idea is like, okay, if we as the United States invest into it, you guys would then be able to get this thing going.

We get jobs.

We get all this stuff.

And so I was curious about this.

I was like, I don't know of any instance where the U.S.

government has like bought stock in a company and just like invested in it.

So I looked into it.

There are cases over the entire history of the country where the U.S.

government comes in, but almost always it's either you're failing as a company.

We want to help because this is going to be economically devastating.

You're going to lose a lot of jobs.

Here's a gigantic loan.

Hopefully you pay us back.

That's one.

That's happened a bunch of times.

It's like the banks, right?

Yes.

But actually, even then, with the 2008 financial crisis, that was the other example where they actually do buy a big stake.

So they bought, for example, 34% stake in Citigroup during the financial crisis.

So they actually...

owned part of the companies, but then within a few years, the banks recovered and paid the government back.

Or GM and Chrysler, like our car companies, went to bankruptcy.

U.S.

Treasury bought 60% of them of GM, 10% of Chrysler.

And then by 2013, four years later, they had bounced back.

The U.S.

sold all the shares.

So it's kind of these like temporary things where the U.S.

government comes in, uses money to help like prop up a company, get them back on their feet.

They succeed.

It's a great success story.

The U.S.

government is totally out.

And

this would potentially be the first case where the U.S.

government wants to just invest into a healthy company.

Intel is not doing well, but they aren't dying.

You know, they're still very valuable.

They're not going into bankruptcy.

And the idea is like the United States would just hold pieces of it and have influence on it that is very unusual and i would say pretty un-american i mean that's like the hallmark of of the chinese government right in that book we read is all about how the chinese government basically oversees all companies like you have to have a chinese communist party member in your you have to have like these you know monitors in your companies so i'm just curious open question what do you guys think about this it's weird that they didn't start with game stop

yeah a strategic investment in game stop what did they also a company that's doing really well very healthy

buy more of it right now.

I mean, there's a strategic thing here, right?

Which is like, so

the foundries that make chips are extremely important.

And right now, all the good latest and greatest ones are in Taiwan.

And the second latest and greatest ones are in Korea.

Samsung's got the other foundry.

And then the third best, which used to be the best for a long time, is Intel in America.

Now they barely even make their own chips.

They outsource it to TSMC.

But the idea is eventually either get TSMC into America to build factories there because we're all under the assumption that eventually China will want to take Taiwan and they have to plan for that future where it's not

where we can make chips outside of Taiwan

or Intel gets on its own feet and that was like the plan during the Biden years where they like they simultaneously enticed TSMC to come to Arizona and also gave a bunch of money to Intel to make foundries and one of these will work out and we'll get chips in America and they've the TSM thing is kind of soft working out and the Intel thing is not working out at all it's like a total flight the company is is just floundering.

It's just getting worse and worse all the time.

Yeah.

So, you know, I can see a strategic reason for putting money in.

It does feel weird to have the government take a permanent stake in a company with no plan.

That doesn't, first of all, it just gives them a weird leg up on their computer.

Is it just the difference between this option and going a subsidy route that you have more?

You have more direct say in the direction that the company can move in?

A bunch of things.

It would be a partially state-owned company in perpetuity, right?

And that's very different than how the United States has been involved with any company.

They don't, they aren't a shareholder who like owns part of the company and can influence the direction through that.

That's what I mean.

Do they own it?

They're just being like on the, on the board, or they have voting chairs or something.

Now they get to directly impact the direction of.

Correct.

Yeah.

So, I mean, they would be, they would have influence of the company.

I mean, they would just be a buyer, like anybody who

buys stock in the company.

I think one angle to this that I thought was interesting is looking at some of these patterns in the past where the U.S.

has provided a giant loan to one of these companies that then comes out on the back end and succeeds.

If the United States had held that, they helped, you know, they like came in, they injected money into this company, helped them recover.

In theory, if they had just held the stock.

we as a country would have made a ton of money over the decades as that company continued to grow and benefit from that.

And that's what a normal investor would do, right?

They're like, I'm going to invest in this company.

And then if they do really well in the long term, we get to have returns.

And some of these things,

there were actually billions, like tens of billions of dollars coming back to the United States that they made.

But in most cases, it's like it kind of averages out to being even.

I want to say I fundamentally have a problem with that because if you're a competitor to Intel, they have this inherent advantage of they have the government's ear.

They have, they are investing, you know, it's just a weird thumb on the scale that is weird.

I want to say this is part of like a dartboard of ideas that Trump has been throwing around Intel.

First, he tried to get the CEO fired.

He tried to make him quit or whatever.

He said he was a Chinese spy, the CEO of Intel, and he had to be resigned immediately.

Folks, to be fair to Trump, he's Malaysian and Trump probably doesn't know.

He doesn't know the difference.

So first of all, it was like when the TikTok CEO gets interviewed and he's like, are you, you work with the Chinese, you're Chinese?

And he's like, I'm Singapore.

And then he has to say it like three times.

So he first he did that.

And then he said he's a great guy, and he took it all back.

And then he said, we're going to get TSMC.

We're going to force them to buy 49% of Intel.

And that'll make them move their stuff to America.

And then they kind of scrapped that idea.

Well, TSMC was like, no, we do not want to go buy another company.

We're doing really well.

We're running our own.

Intel sucks.

I don't know why I keep bringing them up.

But like if McDonald's was like,

Trump came in and was like, you got to buy Burger King.

Like Intel's like, no, we'd rather make more than McDonald's.

What are you talking about?

We don't want this.

Yeah.

And again, a big part of it, and that's why I'm concerned with this idea for many reasons, obviously the Comptoshian thing, but also like,

throwing good money after bad is the story of the last 10 years of Intel.

A lot of people and different governments and Democrats and Republicans have found ways to try and give Intel more opportunity and money than they probably should have earned, and they have squandered it.

They've just, they've done really poorly.

So the idea that another massive government fund to them is going to turn things around, I'm skeptical.

I think Intel is a mismanaged company with rot at the core that, you know, it's going to be, they're going to need to go through the hard times.

You don't think Lip Bhutan is going to turn it around?

I don't think so.

You don't like Lip Buh Tan?

He's like the third CEO in four years.

No, Lip Buh Tan is badass.

I talk about Lip Bhutan.

They're going through a few.

They're going through that fast.

They've gone through a lot.

They've gone through a bunch.

Yeah.

I think my, yeah, I think my issue would be

less with them buying the stock itself and being involved, because I think there could be some sort of approach that's interesting there.

It's more to do with the chasing a company that has historically underperformed.

Like in an American context, how much does

you buying stock in this company actually

able to change the trajectory of it?

Can you really correct the management issues at the center of it?

It doesn't seem like it from the outside, from a basic investor's perspective, doesn't seem like a great investment.

I can see the

general ideas behind it of like why the government would want to do this in a general sense, but the specific company they're choosing to do it with feels like the it's it feels like the 2008 financial crisis of like, well, you guys fucked up really bad, but you're important, so we'll save you.

And it's like, that sucks.

That's a shitty way to have a company operate.

It's like they just have this permanent parachute that we as taxpayers pay for, to be clear.

Yeah.

So I'm uncomfortable with it, but I do see the need to have chip making somewhere in America.

Though I think the TSMC stuff is kind of working.

The Arizona plants, as far as I know, have been doing better.

They had a hard time finding Americans apparently willing to work as hard as the Taiwanese

chip guys with the insane on-call hours and everything.

But

they are producing good yields, and it's like it is doing it.

Is the Americans had the gall to ask for two sick days, Aiden?

Imagine the Swedes, okay?

Swedes would show up for 10 minutes, they would go to their park and have their child all day.

I want to be clear, TSMC would hate the Swedes.

I actually have a question for you guys because I think there's an interesting thing here that I've thought about sometimes.

Is

in the wake of 2008, a point that gets brought up a lot is that

the banks got bailed out with taxpayer money.

And that is something that angers the average person.

But when you look at what actually happened,

I'm not a villain chair, dare I say.

Am I a hitter for the banks right now?

Who knows?

Is that we got paid back.

All the money that was spent on bailing out the banks was returned to the government within the church counter to this.

So I want to hear your thoughts on that.

I'm chomping at the bank because I've actually answered this before and

I think I've heard this talking point.

Yes, the money they gave directly to the banks got paid back.

Yes.

But it's like if you are a Pokemon card investor,

and you have

gambled massively on Charizards, you bought a whole ton of Charizards and then Charizards tank.

If I give you money, invest in your company, and then simultaneously at the same time, print a bunch of money out of thin air to buy mortgage-backed Charizard-backed securities and get the price of Charizards back up, then your business is suddenly healthy again and I get my money back.

But that's not,

you know,

that's not, we didn't really get our money, but we got the money back from this specific part.

What's wrong with Charizard?

But we lost the money we spent propping up the housing.

That was money was just thrown away.

Yeah.

So,

you know, yes, we saved these companies.

They were still at great cost.

There was still a huge increase of the money supply.

It still had these terrible knock-on effects.

So I just think.

This is a a good answer because my own pushback to this argument is that

you're still bailing out a system that was abused and kind of incentivizing people pushing the boundaries of reality

behavior.

But there's a way more nuanced version of that.

And then the second part of it is, as you said, there's this, you know, there's moral hazard, which is the term that like.

If you are on Wall Street and you're a thinking, smart, sharp individual and you recognize, oh, if I'm this size and I make this error, I will get this bailout.

And you have to factor that in the future.

And so the moral hazard is I should take more risk in the future because I will have this higher percentage chance of getting a bailout.

This is a smart thing to do.

And so once they factor that in, they take, you know, we just get an increasing risk because we've proven that they will step in at a certain point.

And when you don't have that risk, you have to play safer.

Now you don't.

It's just, it's just the meta is evolving.

And I think it's bad.

I think it's bad to send that message.

And if you don't bail them out earlier, say even before 2008 but 2008 if you start there you take the pain then then people grow up with it you know the tree grows straight everyone they learn the limits but if you keep trying to kick it down the road the problem gets bigger and bigger and the bailout required if it happened now is like 10 times bigger it's just it's astronomical yeah we just print more money

We're not the first government in history to think about that.

And like sometimes problems arise.

What is it?

That's all I'll say.

Zimbabwe printed money and they ended up fine.

They did end up fine.

You're right.

Because you could always knock off that last three zeros.

We actually did solve it in that one episode.

I was like, you just

white out a couple zeros on each of the money.

Everything's good again.

I mean, it goes back to Rome.

Even Rome, Rome, they couldn't print money in the same way, but they would just reduce the gold value.

They would just put less gold in each coin.

And like, you couldn't notice it, but it problem solved.

People are finding ways.

What's the term for how they're like filling chip bags a little less?

Everything Shitification or whatever.

You shouldifying the currency.

Yeah.

So I just, you know, we're on that path.

We'll talk about it in that book club if they talk about it a lot in the Ray Dalio book.

We have a few minutes left.

I don't know if there's any breaking news updates I wanted to talk to you guys about.

I don't know if you guys saw.

Do you guys remember the

last time Zelensky and Trump and Vance all met in the White House?

And it was, you didn't say thank you.

And they had the big blow up and the big fight.

Yeah, they had a follow-up meeting yesterday, and I want to say

the bar was in the floor, obviously, probably one of the worst meetings ever had, but

it was better.

It was better.

I was saying this,

I hate to give anyone any credit here.

Zelensky showed up in a suit.

He said, thank you.

Fitch, how'd it look?

He said, thank you 19 times.

We counted it.

He opened by saying thank you like 14 times in a row.

I'm not joking.

He's like, I just want to start by saying thank you for this wonderful room.

And

it was almost comical.

It was calm.

Like clearly he had just been coached and he was like, I'm going to say exactly what I need to get what I want.

I'm not going to.

Vance didn't say one word.

He didn't interrupt.

He didn't, like, it was a much better meeting.

And the reporters, which I got to say, the reporters in those meetings are trying to derail it.

They're trying to ask the most incendiary question to get Trump to exit crazy.

Trump, for the first half of the meeting, the best I've ever seen him and being like, this is off topic.

Let's, I've never seen him do that in his life.

But then he cracked, of course,

and he started ranting about Joe Biden and Obama and how he saved crime in DC.

And

it is funny when

when Joe Biden gets brought up as a talking point, but he was the previous administration.

He was the previous president.

You know, I think it can be relevant at times.

But when it's, I think it's really funny when he sticks it to Obama because it's like, it was just so long ago.

It was just so long ago.

I mean, he, you know, came out of his, that was his first presidency, right?

Out of Obama.

That makes sense, you know.

I saw a stat the other day that like 7%

of

British people consider themselves as having a rival.

Like

the nemesis.

The nemesis.

And then 17% said, there's like most say they don't have one.

And one says 7% say the nemesis.

And then somebody's like, 17% say they used to have a nemesis.

We and they slayed that, right?

It's like, what's going on there?

How did you how did you solve that?

I do feel like there's a still a little bit of that nemesisness going on here.

Oh, also, dude, Zelensky opened not only by saying thank you a million times, he also

handed Trump a letter from his wife saying thank you to Trump's wife, which is like

kind of a brilliant diplomatic move, honestly.

It's like a really no, he did a couple of things.

And he clearly was ready for Trump's style this time around.

He called America and your country so big.

He could say how big it was.

Like, he kept talking about big.

He said,

can't say that to Sweden.

You know, we need your help for this thing so we can buy the best military stuff in America.

Like, your stuff is so good.

Yes.

And you can see Trump's eyes light up.

Like, he's like, wait, this guy's.

So I, you know, it's crazy that the meta is evolving around Trump.

So many leaders are figuring out that, like, if you just say he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and he's great and big.

Like a QuickTime event.

Yeah.

And he's like a QTE.

Yeah, I don't know.

By the way, QTE is crazy because that's like the same amount of syllables.

Don't fucking.

No, it's one more.

Go back to Sweden at this point.

Go back to Sweden.

Okay, you've already lost your American value.

You're ignoring our traditional American values of calling things big.

Yeah.

And shorting them.

Wait, I should be the one who's tilted here.

I heard I weighed in on the Ukraine war and negotiations last week.

Definitely agree with that.

And that's our show, guys.

Thanks for watching.

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