Applying to Jobs in 2025 | Lemonade Stand 🍋

It's just so stupid.

You stole that for you stole my paper.

I stole your paper.

You stole my paper.

Now you're pretending like you're.

You know what you've stolen this morning?

What have I stolen?

Our time.

Our time.

It's unbelievable.

So I want you guys to know that.

Guys, warning.

We haven't done ads yet, but Aiden's about to do a fucking 20-minute Apple ad.

Open.

Here it comes.

Open on Atriarch's computer right now is a PowerPoint presentation that I am not kidding has taken him the last 25 minutes to to get open on his laptop.

That is not an exaggeration.

25 minutes.

I don't know how it up on your laptop.

Steve Jobs's schlong down your ghost of his body.

The ghost of his schlong?

Yes.

Down your gullet, dude.

It's insane.

Some of us want to break free from the system, from the ecosystem that you're.

I think some of us want to record the podcast.

You don't even know how to read it.

Doug was saying you're probably swiping it.

Like

it's cocoa melon.

Okay.

Why will the thing change?

I can't turn the volume up.

I can't hear it.

That was 20 minutes for him, dude.

He was looking for the volume button.

I'm next to two geriatric bucks.

Hey, what did you read?

What was interesting in the paper?

In the morning paper today.

In the morning paper.

Do you know?

Okay, I read something this weekend.

Chat GPT told me this.

Do you know this, every single page, four trees are taken down to produce one newspaper?

And

you did this.

You chat GPT?

And the ChatGPT query killed 15 more trees.

There's 20 total trees were killed for this conversation.

Figuring out which trees were killed.

Yeah.

No, that's good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's funny because this first article on the FT weekend printout that you have, U.S.

jobs slowdown backs rate cut call is actually what I want to talk about.

Yeah, one of our main topics.

Jobs.

Wait, wait, wait, hold on.

Hold on.

Dildos.

You want to open with dildos?

Let's open with dildos.

This is what the people are here for.

Okay, okay, Perry.

Can you pull this up?

Well, hold hold on.

Let's check out the retention rate on this episode after this launches.

All right.

We're going to see a massive dip.

We're going to see a massive dip after this.

Okay.

There have been two during the WNBA games of the past week.

Sadly, this is not funny.

Nobody laugh.

People have been throwing dildos.

Do not laugh.

People have been throwing dildos onto the WNBA courts during basketball games.

And you can now bet on the color of the next dildo that will be thrown onto a WNBA court.

I was laughing.

I had a different joke in my head.

It wasn't related.

So there's this whole gamble going on.

You can bet real money on whether it will be a pink dildo, a purple dildo, a blue dildo.

And then there was this great tweet that I saw called Infinite Money Glitch, which is you buy a WNBA ticket, 30 bucks.

You buy a blue dildo for $15.

You max bet blue dildo at $5,000.

You throw the blue dildo onto the court and you've made $69,000.

Someone is going to do this.

Yeah, I don't really know what would stop somebody from doing this.

And I think this is a great kickoff of just...

The creativity around the job market right now and what's it looking like, Aiden.

I think this is a kickoff.

This intro and this has shown that we're all unemployable, so we have to talk to other people about what the job market is actually.

What do you teach?

Where are you teaching?

Okay, I have one thing to say about these dildos before we move on to the actual job discussion, which is that

I need to crash out on this, but it should be a longer subject on not people throwing the dildos, whatever, on this whole

movement to get mad at.

I don't watch the WNBA.

I don't care about the WNBA.

I don't watch it.

But what they're asking for is just the same percentage of revenue that players get in other leagues.

It's not, it's a smaller amount of revenue.

I understand that, but they want the percent of the revenue.

And people keep throwing in this stupid Hollywood accounting bullshit that they're not making money.

The revenue has 10x in two years.

There's enough money, but they keep spending it on

things for the owners or marketing or private jets.

And then they say, oh, there's no money left for the players.

But the players should get a percentage of revenue before the expenses come out, which is what they do in every other league.

It's not going to be as much, of course, it's not as watched as much.

But the fact that they've gotten like most sports fans to agree with this cartel-like behavior towards the employees of the league is crazy.

It's crazy.

It's so stupid.

I don't care about them.

I'm not, I'm a passionate defender of the WNBA.

It's just very obvious that they just want this same percentage.

I mean, I haven't mathed it out, but this conversation has existed about the WNBA or women's sports for a long time.

Yeah.

And And maybe,

maybe, like five years ago,

maybe there's an argument there.

I don't know, but

now

the WNBA is gigantic.

So many people watch and go to the games.

Like it has exploded in popularity.

The viewership, the viewership is like comparable to normal NBA games now, which is wild.

And for some games.

And I think that is wild to begin with.

And people are still like, yeah, rookie contracts, 70K a year.

Caitlin Clark's rookie contract is 70K a year.

She makes less money than Nick Yingling does.

Well, that's deserved.

For the contract.

That's deserved.

Nick Yingling's a hard.

He was as hard on this fucking field.

A lot of value.

Now, you guys have heard of Hollywood accounting, right?

Where like you might be an actor and you're like, I want a percentage of the profits of a movie.

And then somehow Spider-Man 2 never made any money, even though it's, you know, Lord of the Rings never made any money.

That's what they're doing with this.

They just keep saying, so what you do is you get a percent of revenue.

You get a percent of what the thing actually makes before they take out expenses.

And that's what they do in every other league.

That's what the NBA players get.

50% of revenue.

And it goes to the players.

And the rest, and they can decide what they do with the rest.

The league can decide what they do with the rest.

But here, they're like, we'll give you a percent of the profits.

Oops, there's no profits.

And then everybody repeats this same line.

Like it's the fucking, like,

ha, ha ha ha ha, there's no profits.

Like, of course you can't get paid.

It's ridiculous.

It's making hundreds of millions of dollars.

There's enough to pay the players.

I just want to crash out on that because I think people are emotionally attached to these people not getting paid, no matter how good the attendance gets or no matter how much money it makes.

They just really enjoy it.

And I want to tell you, it's fucking stupid.

What does this have to do with dildos?

Well, this is all the WNBA.

That's why they're throwing dildos.

Is that what I throw dildos?

I didn't know why they're throwing dildos.

That's why they're throwing dildos.

The players started wearing, like, pay us what you owe us.

And then everyone started throwing dildos on the court.

That's so annoying.

You could have.

Let me villain share this.

Could have been coincidental.

Could have been two just dildos.

Could have been dildo-loving guys.

I don't know.

Two guys, or I presume guys who threw dildos and they could just be...

Maybe they do this in every sports game.

I don't know.

They can just be normal, shitty guys.

They don't have to be normal, shitty.

Misogynistic guys.

That is totally noggy.

No, I think the action is inherently misogynistic.

Okay, let's be clear.

It's inherently misogynistic.

Maybe they throw dildos on the brawl, but he's not.

It might not be politically or economically motivated.

Ah, it's simply to be shitty.

Simply to be shitty.

Imagine catching the guy, and they're like, why do you, is this in response to to the pay issues that have been going on?

And it's just like some dude is like, no, I just fucking

paid more, actually.

I just hate women, but they should get paid.

I just don't like women's sports.

Yeah.

It reminds me of when I think it was the U.S.

women's soccer team was fighting for higher pay a few years ago.

And they were getting interviewed about it on Jon Stewart or something like that.

And

all of the classic counter-arguments of equalizing pay to the men's team team are getting pushed back on.

Like, people are like, the women's team is not as good, or women's soccer isn't as competitive.

But for the women's men's or the women's U.S.

team specifically, compared to the men's U.S.

team specifically, the women's team is incredibly successful, right?

Like, we win most of the international tournaments, or we make it to the finals of most of the international tournaments, bring in a ton of revenue.

And compared to our men's team, they're very similar in terms of the impact and money that they bring in, but they're paid drastically less.

So I think all these questions are ideas of people who come in and they're like, well, it's like, it just doesn't make any sense, or it's not as competitive, or they don't bring in as much money.

No, they're not being unreasonable.

They're asking for just a pay that reflects the value.

I just want to be super clear.

I don't think Caitlin Clark should get paid what LeBron gets paid.

What I'm saying is like the NBA brings in 20 billion, 10 billion goes to the players.

That's the contract they have.

Just 50%.

That's what it is.

If the WNBA brings in in 200 million, 100 million goes to the players.

You just make that a line item that goes there first.

Otherwise, they'll never get paid.

Caitlin Clark is like mind-blowing to me because it's like you enter the league, you're a national phenomenon, you instantly, whoever signs you, right?

You make your, you make up your salary in a, easy, a day in Jersey sales.

Take a sales or jersey sales ticket sales, like your, your impact on the whole league.

And because of the rookie contract rules, you're at 70K a year.

I understand.

She's making tens of millions from endorsements and deals and all of that stuff.

It's not like she's not finding a way to get compensated, but the fact that the league itself,

I found out last week that the highest paid salary in the W, the entire W NBA right now is like $256,000, which is,

you know, maybe reflect a lot of the time.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't even know what's $10,000.

But I don't know.

All I know is that they're just getting.

Just do it the same way.

Just do it to give them the same revenue.

That's what I'm saying.

Just do it the same percentage way, and then you can do whatever you want.

They can get paid $10.

What if the guys were throwing dildos in protest?

Maybe.

Maybe these guys are heroes.

And we considered that they

just really need to workshop the intentions, right?

It's like, guys,

guys, love the energy.

Let's, why don't we throw something else?

Change it.

They're well-intentioned, dumb, misogynistic guys who want to support women, but do it in

a backhanded way.

No, I mean, they bought a ticket.

They bought a ticket.

They were not getting paid.

So I'll throw, I'll interrupt the game.

I'll throw throw like a dildos.

They're like Colin Kaepernick, Neil for the anthem.

We will throw dildos for the players.

I'm willing.

That's the situation.

Did it is

jobs?

Okay, I'm sorry.

Yeah, before

we got way off time.

We've been talking for like 15 minutes about the way off time.

I have one topic that I do want to touch on before we get into the experience of applying for a job right now.

The jobs report that just came out in the U.S.

I wanted to ask you, Atriok, about

we were discussing off the pod

how a report had come out that for the first time in a while or for the first time all year, the June budget was a surplus.

It was reported back.

And there were some early reports of tariff revenue starting to come in and creating this surplus for the first time.

So I wanted to ask you, can you lay that out?

Can you explain it a little more?

Because I have not

easy to pull something up and Adrian's probably going to cut it down.

Can you pull up?

I mean, I like this image first.

Welcome to the golden age.

Thanks to the leadership of POTUS, the U.S.

has generated over $150 billion in tariff revenue in the past six months.

Look at that fist.

Strong.

Anybody?

What?

Oh, high fives?

Yeah.

Golden age, baby.

And I've paid some of them.

That's about half of that's mogul shirts.

All right.

So this is the bipartisan deficit tracker.

Now, I'm going to.

Maybe this is confusing, but I'll go through it.

See that purple line right there?

The pinkish purple one right in the middle of 255?

That is our current deficit for this year.

Okay.

That's how much we've spent by each month.

Okay.

So

around this time last year,

we had spent $1.2 trillion more than we made in 2024.

That's what we were in June.

Now we're at 1.3.

I just want to be super clear.

But you look.

So when this line goes up, when a month where it goes up, that's a bad month.

That's a month where we spent more than we took.

When it goes down, which it happens sometimes in all these different years,

that's a surplus month.

What they've been doing, Scott Bessett, Trump, all these right-wing talking heads have been going around and saying, this is our first June budget surplus in 20 years.

It's just June.

There's been surpluses in April, in July, in February.

Every now and then you'll have a surplus month.

It's pretty standard, but the overall year is bad.

But because there was a payment that fell on a weekend in May that ended up going to June, we had our first,

sorry, paid in May instead of June.

So the government made its payments a little early.

So we had a really bad May.

As you can see, the May spikes up to, and we had a surplus in June.

And so it just, it landed on a weird month.

And so now we have a surplus in June for some reason.

And they're saying, like, wow, things are drastically different.

I promise you, first of all, we have spent more this year than the bad year of 2024.

And by the end of the year, this number will still be much higher.

It'll be worse than every other year, maybe than 2020 and 2021.

Can you explain?

I'm still confused.

Why doesn't the graph go down for that month then?

Because the spending.

For which month?

For June, right?

It did.

You see?

See it between May and June.

Am I looking at the wrong?

You're looking at that one.

It goes down very slightly.

And that is what they're calling the first June budget surplus in 20 years.

But they're like soft saying June, and they're making it seem like we got our first surplus in 20 years.

Like we've turned something around.

There's nothing different.

We are still spending way more than we make.

And by the end of the year, we will have spent like one and a half to $2 trillion dollars more than we brought in.

And this is all because of revenue that was meant to be paid out in May that fell into June.

No, it was paid early.

It was paid at the end of May instead of the beginning of June.

Okay.

So we got the payment out of the way, which is why you can see like between April and May on this graph, on the purple one, huge spike.

That was a, it was a bad month.

We added a lot to the deficit, but now we had a slightly easier June.

So we cleared.

The tariff revenue helped a little bit, but it's very small in comparison.

Okay, so why if

I was die-hard hard for, for Bessett and the boys,

why couldn't this be indicative of it continuing to go down after this?

Could this not be the start of a trend?

I mean, maybe.

You know what?

By the end of the year, if this purple line is plunged and we're just swimming in tariff revenue, that's fine.

But just you can even scroll down.

I think they actually address this directly.

And in fact, they say

Yeah, the federal government ran a monthly surplus of 26 billion in June.

However, this is because a government payments typically due june 1st shifted to may this year accounting for this timing shift we actually ran a monthly deficit of 71 billion okay just to be clear and then it says we're going to have a probably a worse one in july so

uh looking ahead barring any major conditions changes necron conditions the government will likely run a larger deficit in july So the idea that this is some large trend is, I think, untrue.

And I think it's just this weird little statistical blip that is being turned to a story that we've turned something around.

The fact is, under Biden and under Trump, we spend way, way more than we make.

And in fact, the big beef bill has only made it worse.

So

outside of the red and the black line there, which is our worst years ever, 21 and 20, this is like, this is the worst year.

This year is terrible.

We're at some of the worst America's ever been in terms of spending more than we make.

And to pretend like we're not is a joke.

So I just wanted to address that.

I've talked about this on my own stream, but I'm glad you brought up this question.

It's,

yeah, it's, it actually makes me really disappointed in Scott Bessette because I'm a Scott Bessant, I wouldn't say fan, but I like, I respect him and I read him before he got it, really got this job.

And he's really, he knows what he's doing.

When he goes up there and says the June, you know, he slips it in.

He knows what he's doing.

And it's, this is not a surplus.

Okay.

Two, two questions slash follows.

One, it looks like that because of the drop to June, that we're actually comparable to the previous two years.

If you look at where the dot is on June.

That's right.

So the, it sounds like

what I heard you saying is like we are, it's worse than previous years.

To me, it seems like if you look at where the dot is on June, we are comparable to 2023 and 2024 right now.

But from what they're saying in the report, the expectation is that

even the following month, it's going to bounce back aggressively above the other.

The way I would read this so far, I mean, it jumped up aggressively last year in July.

I mean, for people who are listening online, basically we're looking at how much money we've spent this year, how much, you know, how much deficit we're in this year versus previous years.

As far as I can tell, this is like exactly at least very similar.

It's very similar in line with 23 and 24.

That's correct.

But, you know, as I said, but also as Trump said or Scott Besson said, these Biden deficits are unsustainable.

They're horrendous.

Right.

They are as bad as the

proved nothing.

Yeah, I guess it is kind of a weird thing where Biden's last two years were some of the more ridiculous spending that has ever happened.

So the idea that if we're meeting that as the bar, that doesn't mean it's not even remotely good.

Yeah, those were terrible and they were were rallied against rightly by Scott Besson.

And, you know, they would have

a trillion dollar deficits every hundred days.

And it's like, we're in the same zone.

And by the end of the year, you know, my expectation is that the, the 25 number is going to be higher than 23 and 24, just based on the Big Beautiful bill and the tax cuts.

So we'll see.

I don't know.

But I just, it's certainly not better.

And

they're implying that it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have another question.

So, so

this tweet by the White House, this was, I think, last week.

They tweet so much.

I tried to find this tweet again today.

And there's like 300 tweets I had to go through.

My God.

And so they basically said, this year, we've gotten $150 billion of tariff revenue.

So this is the first half of the year.

We're halfway through, right?

A little more, $150 billion.

In theory, that means we will be making $300 billion by the end of the year in tariff revenue that wasn't there before, you know, Asterisk Asterisk.

As a reminder, the way I like to think about this, it just simplifies things.

Every year, the U.S.

government spends $2 trillion more than we make.

If we can get that down to zero, then at least we aren't losing more money every year.

That is the goal, right?

So $150 billion already and then 300, let's say if you double it by the end of the year, that's a decent chunk, right?

That's that's not bad in terms of working down the deficit.

And what I was thinking about is while they certainly haven't explained it like this, as we've talked about, tariffs are basically a tax on American consumers.

This isn't money that like is appearing out of thin air.

This $150 billion is

like Americans have paid this.

And what I was wondering is like, was it their intention that with the Big Beautiful bill, they cut taxes a lot, which loses revenue for the United States, but they're basically just introducing a different type of tax with tariffs.

And so even though they're portraying it as like, look, you have all freedom for money and we're shutting down unfair trade deals, really what they're doing is saying, we'll lower your income tax, we'll increase your tariff tax.

Does that feel like it makes sense?

Do you think that's what Besant is maybe doing here?

That was part of the rationalization when

we discussed.

discussed the big beautiful bill.

They did say, they were insisting that even though this is creating such a massive deficit on paper, the revenue is to be made up by the tariff changes that were made.

But it doesn't they also, but they keep framing it as like tariffs are great for the Americans and low taxes are great for the Americans.

And I think probably internally they were like, look, tariffs are not going to be good for the average American.

The taxes be good, maybe these offset.

And so I'm wondering if there's like a little more thought to it than maybe we thought.

Yeah, maybe, but the problem is that the tariff is a tax on people that buy and consume regular cheap goods.

So it's like like the average person is paying these taxes and the tax cuts are primarily on wealthier people.

So we've replaced taxes on corporations and the rich with a tax on you buying toys from China and buying

steel from other countries and buying, it's just

worse.

But whatever.

I mean, listen, all this would be fine.

You know, if our number's 2 trillion.

and we're raising some tariff revenue.

My expectation is that this is going to cause problems in the job markets.

We're going to raise less money.

We're going to have fewer people employed and GDP growth and jobs numbers.

And we were talking about that.

Problems in the job market.

Yes.

Problems in the job market.

Okay, something interesting happened recently.

On August 1st, a report was released by the Department of Labor

under the commissioner Erica McIntafar.

McIntarfer?

I don't know.

And this jobs report noted that through July, there was only an additional 73,000 jobs created.

And it also notably reduced the number of jobs that they had initially reported from the previous two months.

So they had previously said that in May there was 144,000 jobs that had been created and in June, 147,000 jobs created.

And those were reduced to 19,000 and 14,000 respectively.

Very clear.

Which is a massive

drop.

Also, can you guys, because I didn't look into this much specifically, is the idea that the government estimates the amount of jobs that are created and they're like, this is what we think is happening.

And then a month later, they look at what actually happened and they, what does the revision mean?

Like, what's the process here for how it changes that much?

I mean, the short version is that as more time passes, more data becomes available to accurately estimate these things.

So they retroactively go back and say, we were wrong.

Here's the real number.

And these corrections are pretty normal.

Like, this happens frequently.

This going back into the past to correct data based on new information that we get happens all the time.

What was particularly shocking about this was the scale of the revision.

So the amount that this got reduced by.

And I think just looking at the numbers, this feels pretty scary, right?

Can you pull up slide four actually?

Because it describes visually what you were just saying.

So slide four, I drew what the numbers were when they first announced.

So you can see there was 144,000 new jobs.

revised down to 19, 147 down to 14.

And when these numbers were announced, these were celebrated.

These were like, you know, good, good numbers, jobs are in the right direction.

We have, we have hundreds of thousands of new jobs pouring into America.

And now the revision is such that 250,000 less jobs than they thought.

These were pretty terrible months.

In fact, you can see the worst months in recent history, like

terrible job growth.

And the theory as to why there's been such a sharp falloff, from my understanding, because she's a liberal cuck.

Yes.

She, yes.

Well, that's coming in at number one.

That was the watch mojo number one.

Yeah.

And then

another thing that

I had seen was shorter,

the staff that is available to capture and calculate the data across the board at departments like this or in other parts of the government that produce relevant data to calculate these numbers

are increasingly short-staffed.

There's been a lot of staff cuts over the years because of the Doge cuts that had happened earlier on.

So there's fewer federal employees like managing and interacting with data that informs this type of reporting.

And then also,

there is a huge difference in the expected amount of seasonal labor that was supposed to come in.

So during the summer months, there's a huge amount of expected summer work or seasonal work.

And this excludes farm work, it mentioned.

But that boost in seasonal employment is not happening at all.

And it's way, way lower than expected.

And it does get into the details of what sectors are loosely losing positions and what sectors are increasing their hiring still?

The only place that's seeing big leaps in hiring is in healthcare sectors.

Healthcare sectors are really desperate and stretched for people right now.

And I think specifically

like elderly care or

taking care of the city.

They are old and sick, and the jobs are only to get rid of, to take care of the boomers with money.

Yeah, the jobs revised down is like

construction is down, manufacturing is down,

retail's down, like every job that would be considered

to do well in a good economy is all being revised down.

And the only thing up is healthcare and then some government like teacher jobs.

Like those are the only things that are growing.

And so

all private sectors are down.

Private sector employment is down.

It's a bad report.

And

well,

this is the crazy thing.

In the wake of this report and the adjustments of these numbers,

Ms.

Mick and Tarfar, or I apologize.

Ms.

Woke, dude.

Just call her whatever.

It's a tough name to say.

Ms.

Woke

apparently was fudging the numbers and Trump has just fired her.

This is, to me, insane.

I feel like this is the type of thing that, and I know this sits within a sea of actions, and I know this isn't the first red flag or something along the way.

I just think it is so insane to read a headline like this about the American president.

It speaks so much to the situation that I think we have arrived in, where the president of the country gets a labor report that he doesn't like that indicates that he's doing a bad job.

And then he just fires her and then says she made up all the numbers, while he also pressures the chairman of the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy.

So it's like, to me, it's like, which one is it?

Are we, do we have a record-breaking economy that is doing things it's never done before, like you say all the time?

Well, then why do we need to lower the interest rates?

Why are we doing everything you can to oust?

Jerome Powell from power.

No, I think you made a really good point there.

I just want to explain if you're, if you're more casual on interest rates and your eyes glaze over or whatever, you know, Trump has been really hammering Jerome Powell to lower interest rates.

And when you do that, it's a sign that the, you know, like if you raise them, that means inflation is the biggest problem.

And if you lower them, that means employment is the biggest problem.

Like that's, that's the general.

So the only reason you'd lower them is if you thought, oh man, the economy, the jobs market's getting really bad.

So this report is a blessing to everything Trump has been saying.

Like he could have pointed us and said, look, we need to lower interest rates.

Jobs are terrible.

But instead, he is calling it fake news.

In fact, jobs are great.

We have tons of jobs, but also we need to desperately lower interest rates.

It just doesn't, it doesn't have any logical through line.

Now, I think you have a thing you want to show from Ray Dalio.

So I want to, I want to present a counterpoint with the normal caveat of like, look, I don't deeply know or believe this stuff, but Ray Dalio, who is the CEO, believe CEO.

Well, anyway, head of Bridgewater Capital.

So he's considered one of the most legendary investors of all time, somebody who at least Atriok and I respect a lot.

We're going to be reading his book on the Patreon where we have a book club every month.

And there's been some great episodes recently.

You can go check it out, blah, blah, blah.

However, so he mentioned something and he comes out.

This is a trusted, like bipartisan guy who says, I probably would have fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics too.

That's because its process for making estimates is obviously obsolete and error-prone, and there's no good plan in the works for fixing it.

Goes on to talk more.

And then at the end, he says, Look, if the motivation from Trump firing this person is political, like he just doesn't like what they're producing, then that is obviously not okay.

So he acknowledges that.

And let's be honest, probably that was most of Trump's motivation, right?

But looking at that graph earlier, the estimates originally were, let's say 150,000 jobs created.

And then retroactively they go, we were wrong.

It was 15,000.

To me, as an uninformed person, seems like they did a shitty job.

If you are that far off, if you as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics are what, like 10 times off in your estimates and the country is going off of that, and then a month later, you're like, hey, sorry, I messed up.

That's not messing up a little bit.

That's like deeply and fundamentally being wrong to a degree that's like, you don't seem competent.

I say that as an outside party who doesn't know the actual process, but that's what Ray Dalio is expressing here as well of like, look, the private markets understand the actual numbers to a more accurate degree.

Why is the Bureau of Labor Statistics not doing that either?

Regardless of what Trump is doing and why this doesn't seem like it's being done competently.

I'm curious what you guys think.

So first, full disclosure, this is an argument that I need to spend more time digging into because I don't understand statistics well enough to give it.

But reading through other people's responses to this argument, because I do think that this argument is really, a lot of people do feel this way.

It's like, if the revisions are this wild and

if they feel this inaccurate, if the process is this bad, then how could they be doing a good job to begin with?

Has this completely, has this approach completely fallen out of favor?

From people, from attempting to read people who have a stronger grasp of statistics than me, they're saying that those people have a flawed understanding of how these reports are put together.

And I think there is something, there's something underlying here that I'm unable to explain to you about the process by which these reports are put together

that is missing or difficult to do, and not just because these people are bad at their job.

I think that is something really important.

And also, like I said at the beginning, these revisions happen all the time and they have happened for years.

So the fact that you're stepping up at now at this time because of this

in response to this specific issue, whereas, like, you have years and years prior to this to make something like years and years of them doing a bad job, it would be the counter-argument.

Yeah, because you could, in my opinion, it's like you could have made this decision three months ago, four months ago, if you were upset at the process by how which it was done.

And Trump has also offered no explanation as to the technicalities of why he's removing this.

Obvious thing here, which is Trump has a storied history of firing people who don't do things the way he wants them, right?

So, like, come on that's obviously what happened here but there is this argument of like why is it this inaccurate yeah i want to jump in okay so uh there's a couple things i can i can totally agree i've talked about this before well before trump came into office that the bls has been consistently wrong and consistently revising down And I want to challenge one thing you said.

You said that they often, you know, it's very standard to revise later.

Yeah.

That's true.

The BLS has been around for decades, right?

But for the longest time, they've had a pretty even amount of revising up and revising down.

They might undershoot it, they might overshoot it.

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

woke.

I don't know if it's, I don't know what it is, but it's, it's, they're clearly overstating the health of the economy.

Now, I don't mean that's, I don't think it's, uh, I fully disagree with the thing that it's like political or planner.

They're like sneakily changing the numbers.

I think my

is that there's two parts to it.

Number one, survey data has fallen off a cliff.

People no longer respond to the surveys they use to help get an accurate data of the environment.

So second thing, they've been job cut.

They've been slowly but surely squeezing the number of people.

So they have fewer people getting fewer accurate data from response surveys.

That has made them less and less likely to be accurate.

The second thing is they use this thing called the birth-death adjustment.

So they'll get the survey data and they'll make some, this, this, this thing called the birth-death adjustment.

And

it's not about births and deaths of humans, it's about births and deaths of companies.

So basically, they'll say, like, oh, well, we know that there was a registration of 10,000 new companies.

On average, a new company will hire seven people.

So we're going to say there was, you know, 70,000 new jobs.

That's the idea.

The birth of a new company leads to this much average new jobs.

Well, it turns out post,

let's say COVID, but even before that, in the smartphone era, the birth of a new company is primarily a single person uber driver a only fans creator a uh that is where the majority of new company registrations are and so they're still adding seven or six new jobs to the economy so i was gonna ask be that i understood this and isn't that why the overestimation is is the consistent part we're more likely to be overestimating because this is the guess yeah they have but they have not adjusted this obvious flaw in their data for now years so again i

we just all know why Trump did this.

He hasn't even hidden it at all.

He just calls her woke news fake.

It's not like he's like, you know what?

I think statistically there could be some.

This is the model.

He very clearly has, actually, there's clips of it, but I got to have it here.

But in previous months, when the jobs numbers are good, he lauds it.

He praises it.

I think maybe if I were to use, let's completely leave this example, right?

It's imagine, imagine

we're in China like a year ago.

Yeah.

And

we have a problem with rising youth unemployment.

It's starting to skyrocket.

There's a bunch of just young university grads who have nowhere to go.

They have no jobs to get.

This part of the economy and the job market is really struggling.

And we keep publishing the increasing data from internally within the government, right?

And that goes out to anybody in the world can look at that data and see the rising youth unemployment in China.

And then the Chinese government decides we're not going to make that or publish that report anymore.

And then I, as a third party,

Ray

Wong

say, I come in and I report, it's like, well,

they weren't that great at reporting the youth unemployment statistics all along.

Like, it probably is good that they stopped making the report and then revise it.

It's like, maybe that's true, but

the timing is crazy.

You have chosen specifically to do it now when, even by your own standard, the problem has existed for a long time.

So, even if you were to take that argument, 100%.

And I want to call it one specific thing because Trump has directly lied on something he keeps saying about this, which he said, this very partisan hack right before the election was putting great jobs numbers out for Biden.

And then right after the election, revised them down 800,000, the biggest revision ever.

And it's so clearly, and he changed the month by one.

And it's so annoying because they did do that major revision down before the election, one month before instead of one month after.

And so, so it actually was really damaging to Biden.

I remember it because I made a video about it at the time.

It was like right before the election, they said, actually, there was way fewer jobs than thought.

And it really hurt Biden, but he is saying it like they did it.

Listen, I do think they've been consistently wrong.

And maybe you could change it, but it just.

There is no doubt in anyone's mind.

We're all like playing along like WWE or something.

Like, we know why he did this.

He's like thanos with the reality stone you know he's like they turn down the numbers all the gen z viewers perked up yeah

oh you know he's like reality is whatever i want to make it it's so cool he just tweets okay his twitter is his reality stone and he just he just does whatever he wants yeah wow yeah it's fucking wild so i i want to um

I want to, you know, I'm sure you have more to say, but I want to kick off.

We're going to talk about people's actual experience in the job market.

You have actual interviews with people.

Yeah.

But I want to show something.

So, slide eight is the unemployment rate, which has now ticked up to a local high of 4.2%.

However, if you hit the next slide,

it's actually, so the orange line is the unemployment rate.

It's actually relatively low.

Like, look how

4.1, 4.2 is in the long scheme of the past couple decades.

Okay, so for audio listeners and myself, right now, unemployment rate is 4%, right?

Is that 4.2?

It's like 4.2 is a little out of date, but actually one of the lowest of the last 30 years.

Right.

Looks pretty good.

The one thing you'll notice on that orange line is that when the unemployment rate starts to tick up, it usually doesn't stop until you're in a recession.

You can see the examples in the past.

So that would be 2001 over there, spiked in 2001, goes up in 2008, spikes in 2008, goes up in COVID, huge spike.

So there's rarely a situation you can see on this entire graph where it goes up and then goes down.

When it starts rising, it's called the Somme rule.

It basically says if over three months you're seeing rising unemployment, it's a good trigger of a recession.

And again, Claudius Somme has disputed it around this because this is post-COVID and things are weird.

So I want to say, this white line is surveys of jobgoers on how likely, how hard it is for them to find and keep a job over the next six months, which is basically what they're saying.

You'll notice for all of 30 years of history, this white line and this orange line have stayed pretty lockstep.

They've stayed like survey goers have been pretty good at saying when things are good or bad.

Based on the actual unemployment data.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like Like you can, there's a good, there's a strong connection between what they're saying and what we're seeing on the actual data.

Around COVID, around 2018, 2019, and beyond, there's been this massive divergence, this big gap.

And

what my, again, this is the work of like Mike Green.

I don't want to take credit for it, but the theory is that this gap is because of things like the gig economy, like Uber, like

OnlyFans, like all this stuff that has made people no longer file for unemployment, even when they've lost their job, because it's not worth the hassle and they can get more money quicker by just plugging into the gig economy, but their jobs are still lost because this survey is about like real jobs.

And so based on this graph, if the orange line was tracking the white line like it had done historically, we would be closer to like a six, seven, eight percent unemployment.

We would be much higher.

And that is the economy that people are feeling, but that is not what the data is showing.

So if you go to the next line, I just want to, the next slide, last thing I'll say, again, I'm not a statistician.

This is off of work of people smarter than me, but I've done my best to really understand it.

This black line on this one is

all this data comes from the few states where you're not allowed to drive Uber under 25.

So it gives us a really rare insight into what happens when you get unemployed and you can't drive Uber.

Like say you're 24-year-old, you get unemployed.

So you'll notice previously the black line, this is people who can't drive Uber, 160, 16,

has always been under the orange line.

Okay, it's always been less pre just now it is higher so uh people who are 16 to 24 in few states where this happens they are having a worse unemployment rate than people who can drive that drive uber this is like a weird statistical anomaly that is showing that like in in the few areas we can see the difference uber is making a massive difference people are that can do it are not filing for unemployment and so the data is being skewed so i just want to bring this up uh just to show that I think a huge part of this is the gig economy.

And I've surveyed my own viewers and many of them that are recently employed said it's such a massive hassle to go through all the paperwork to file for really meager unemployment benefits that they might, and also you can't claim them while you're driving Uber.

So you have to choose one or the other.

And it's much easier.

So

all this to say that I think my theory is that the labor market is already sounds bad.

It is worse than that.

It is worse than what we we are getting at but I think we're gonna hear from actual people maybe Aiden if you have like yeah can you give us your contact because you brought this topic up like this is your yeah I mean the main thing that's been sitting with me is I feel like anecdotally I've been seeing this unfold over the past two years just in group chats uh of personal friends or people I know where they share experiences of what it's like to apply for jobs or finding a job most of these people in their early 20s to early 30s and what that experience is like right now And I reached out to our Discord, which you can join if you check out patreon.com/slash.

But getting a surveying a bunch of people through there, and then also asking a bunch of personal friends what their experiences are actually like right now and

across a bunch of different industries.

So, one

starting in tech, which I think has notably suffered in the last couple of years,

an example, like a friend who is an engineer, somebody who was looking for a job for nine months and just just managed to recently get one.

In that time, putting together 500 plus applications,

managing mostly to get a few interviews through either recruiting opportunities that didn't translate into anything or a friend of a friend who actually results in the application seeing more than just submitting it, right?

And then just talked to a friend who's a UX researcher.

She was out of work for a year and a half searching for jobs that whole time.

And she finally landed a gig recently.

But before she got this full-time gig, she was applying to a position at this competitor to Kindle, she was saying.

And she landed the interview.

She was one of five people to get interviewed.

There were 500 people who applied to that position, that one part-time position at this company.

And she, from her perspective, she'd been looking for work for so long that I kind of need to take anything.

I'll apply to this part-time job instead of a full-time one.

I'm insanely overqualified.

I have like six years of experience in this field.

I worked at a successful tech company before this.

And let me see if I get this job.

She doesn't get that gig, even though she's incredibly overqualified.

The person who gets it out of the five is a person with 10 years of experience in their field and had worked at Kindle before this for a part-time position.

And she's, you know, she's managed to land on her feet now.

But

another friend who is,

he does like analytics work.

So he initially wanted to do like sports analytics, get into something like the NFL or,

you know, you know, a traditional sport environment, right?

He

had

an internship with a company that was in this space for a while.

It ends in July of last year.

And he was hoping to leverage that into either into a position in the industry in general or at the same company, but neither happen.

And he widens what he's applying for over time, different like general corporate analysis positions or corporate analytics positions.

Yeah, take anything.

And we'll take anything.

He sent over 600 applications in the 11th month period.

And he just got a job last month.

And then

for people in

like somebody who does like biology or works, comes from like the field of biology, worked in research, is at some sort of like biotech company now, I think.

He had applied to about 50 jobs before getting one, he said, but only got it because of a referral from a professor that he had worked with before.

And a big issue in this industry this year is that all the cancellation of like federal funding and grants that came with the cuts at the beginning of the year affects the whole world of academia and research.

And he said, because that part of the industry is so tied into the private industry, it's had effects on their ability to hire in that world as well.

And he also noted that with all the changes to visas and immigration this year, that a lot of like student visas and H-1B visas that fill out a lot of this work are not getting renewed.

So a lot of these international people that work in these jobs or at these companies aren't getting hired back anymore.

He also noted that as of this year, international workers aren't eligible to receive grants for funding in any of these science fields that he works in, specific to biology, he said.

And

I asked him, I was like,

say I'm a Trump supporter.

And I'm like, these visas aren't getting renewed.

These oper, the grants aren't getting given to foreigners anymore.

This is a renewed opportunity for Americans in academia, like American citizens, these jobs are available to Americans now.

And he was like, the issue with that is they weren't getting walled out before.

This is not an area where Americans weren't getting hired because these opportunities weren't available.

Like these people were coming in because it fills the gap of an area where we couldn't get enough Americans into these positions to begin with.

And he noted that like the institution he works for,

he said, also, I'm not trying to flex, but for context, the institution and labs I have been at have all been at the top of the field.

My last lab was working right next to a lab that just won the Nobel Prize.

So the fact that even we are struggling is pretty crazy.

I can only imagine what it's like at smaller institutions.

And he said that in the context of his

in his business, China and Europe are investing so heavily in his field of work that as we like shut down opportunities and money into his field, it strengthens the industries in those areas because it's where people turn to for opportunity.

And then

the last person I want to talk to worked in the film and TV industry.

So he was a post-production guy on

reality TV shows for a long time.

He worked part-time or America's strongest industry.

Love Island and Love Island UK show.

Oh, really?

They're taking our fucking jobs.

Driver's still running.

He was talking about in 2017 or 2017 to 2020, worked contract.

This industry is growing.

He's developing a lot of connections.

He's getting a lot of work, lands a full-time position at one of the companies that he's a relationship with and works there from 2020 until 2023.

During this time period, they are doing really well.

He said he's getting paid amazingly well.

He loves his job.

And it was boom years for TV shows.

All the streamers were competing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It was just like an amazing time to be in that industry, right?

And then he said, since then, because this COVID entertainment bubble has kind of popped, like all these large companies in the space are consolidating and making more and more cuts.

The reactions or some of the

reactions around the union negotiations that were happening, all of these things that are happening at the same time result in the industry.

And then the last thing was a lot of the industry leaving Los Angeles, like not wanting to work in LA anymore and finding cheaper places to do cheaper work outside of here.

And he hasn't

had any work in this industry for like two years now.

And he said it's like the worst time in his life.

He's really, and he's really struggling because he's dealing with with the fact that he invested all this time in his career, all of this experience,

all of this,

you know, his education to work in this specific field.

And it feels like it doesn't translate very well anymore.

He doesn't have somewhere to turn to.

In the meantime, he's done some editing work for like Twitch streamers and YouTubers where he can find it.

contract things that aren't very consistent.

And then he ended up getting like, but as time passed, he opened the doors to anything.

He said he had just done a test and applied to become like a 911 operator.

He,

where is it?

He applied to be a debate coach at a high school to work worker comp claims,

like insurance claims, applied to a bunch of sales jobs.

Like, we'll take anything.

And is currently works at Dodger Stadium and part-time at Spirit Halloween.

And that's what he's doing right now.

And he's gone from, you know, super successful career where he was making enough money for both him and his wife to live comfortably to the situation he's in now where both of them are struggling and they're just trying to figure out how to make ends meet.

And he's and he's 30.

Well, I heard from Trump, it's the greatest economy ever and things are popping.

So I don't understand how to square that circle.

But it's the last thing I wanted to touch on is like we said one field is experiencing like a lot of people hiring right now, right?

It's in medicine, it's in taking care of the elderly.

And one person in the Discord stuck out to me specifically and

they said they're 38 years old.

Basically, the job market is in a weird spot because they're constantly poaching people from different positions or different healthcare groups or different hospitals to fill positions.

But the game like never ends right now because people keep leaving ship or they keep leaving, pulling people from different positions.

What does it sound so bad for the workers?

Like if they're getting poached left and right, they're getting good blood bumps.

He expands a bit.

He said, recently left my first job.

uh post-training which was a fully outpatient no nights no weekends job because it was owned by a private equity company.

And the day-to-day experience was awful, as was the compensation relative to the market rate.

It was very easy to find a new job, but not easy to find one where you don't have to compromise on several things you don't like

because now every job has its downsides in the industry.

So, to get better pay and better management run by doctors and not MBAs, the trade-off is working call shifts at night or weekends again.

Most of us in medicine feel like the system is holding on by a thread and will collapse in just a matter, and it is just a matter of when, not if.

And

then he goes on to explain why the field isn't as appealing as it used to be.

But just, you know, this is all anecdotal, and I understand that, right?

But even talking to other friends that work in healthcare, they all feel really similarly, that the system is very stretched.

The amount of like time and shifts that they have to put in, there aren't enough people to fill positions.

And I think when you work in a context of healthcare, where the difference in you, you know, choosing to stay a few extra hours and help people out or take on a long shift is dealing with another person's health or livelihood, there's a lot of mental pressure on you to do a good job.

That's what I hear from people.

It's not as hard as being a streamer, but I understand.

I get in general what you're saying.

But I really appreciate everybody writing in here is like across all of these fields, like whether, you know, regardless of what they are, the common, huge, huge, common themes I saw were

spending tons of time, sending in a ridiculous amount of applications, most of which don't even get a response.

Or if you do land an interview, not getting a response after that.

No one contacting you after your interview.

Can I ask you, did anyone bring up like ghost jobs?

That's what I hear about so much is that like,

was that part of, I didn't read the interview?

I didn't read, I think.

From my understanding of ghost jobs, I think part of the issue is like, if you're applying to them, it's not actually clear if it was a ghost job ever.

Right, you never know.

Right, you never get a response.

There's a lot of people finding a lot of people saying they've spent a ton of time applying to jobs, and a really common message they got back was this position was just filled, so that could be that, right?

Ghost job, meaning a company posts a listing that they have no intention of actually hiring, yes, just to seem like they're still growing, just seem like to appear good.

And apparently, like

the numbers are impossible to verify because no one's going to tell you it's a ghost job, but the stats I've seen are like it could be as high as like 70% in some industries where you're 70% of what you're seeing as jobs available are not real.

They're just

every company has at least a few ghost jobs to pretend like they're, they're not in a death spiral.

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

It's like each one of these incoming, like if you're on the recruiting side, you're getting hundreds of applications right now to sort through and figuring out how to manage that.

Did anyone mention ChatGPT?

Because I know that's been a big fucking crazy thing in jobs right now.

Some people were mentioning

the

discomfort of the way that they were declined or received messages after their either application or interview.

So they said a few people noted that the way they got a message or the, I think the specific example I can remember was one person said that they got a message back from a normal,

they got a call from an actual human being and that said they were confirmed for the interview, but then got an automated message like a day later that said that their position was declined.

And that is something

that gets automated by people using ChatGPT to like sort through applications.

The other thing people said, I mean, this has always been the case.

I can't imagine a time in history where, you know, recommendations don't make you go a little further.

But the, what I gathered from reading through a bunch of people's responses is that recommendations or

are have gone from like

something you need sometimes to something you need basically all the time.

Yeah, my friend.

What is the number one difference maker?

Brian, Brian from

Riot and Blizzard.

Yeah.

He's a recruiter and I talked to him.

And basically, my understanding is that nowadays, if you put out a job application, you're going to get 500 plus chat GPT written

resumes and cover letters for that job.

And it's impossible to

differentiate outside of like incredible background that like you can't fake.

But like for most people, you can't even tell from the, it's all chat GPT, right?

So and so they're using AI to sort these and it's AI going in and AI coming out.

And it's so the only way is a recommendation.

Like you said, like it's, that's like their only unique thing is to find a human being that will say, vouch for you, because

the numbers are staggering.

They're impossible for a human being to go through for everything.

It was interesting.

Sorry, go ahead.

It makes me feel like often people talk about the main point of college is just to network.

Like that's the real value of it.

And I think I pushed back against that when I was in college because like, no, I'm learning how to program.

I'm learning this concrete skill and that skill is going to get me a job.

And it feels like across all industries now, including computer science, looking at the responses from people in the Discord, it's like, no, having a computer science degree is not that helpful anymore.

But then the people who are like, oh, I got a job in the CS industry, almost every, at least every single person I saw is like, well, I had a friend who worked there.

So even the industries that it felt like you could really like build this portfolio that just gets you this rock solid foot in that doesn't work anymore.

And it's so weird to say, but I would.

My sense is that if you're trying to get into computer science, it is more important to make connections with people than to learn how to program.

That would be my advice.

That's crazy, right?

Which is a very weird thing.

Yeah.

And I guess just to quickly add on to that, so I would screen resumes at EA when I worked there 10 years ago.

Even then, when there was many fewer applicants, if you get, for example, you do a job posting, you're like, we need an entry-level computer scientist to help us with this particular role while we're managing data.

And so I would be for our team, I would be one of the people who would screen through resumes.

And I can tell you on the human experience side, if you get, and I don't know if you guys have gone through applications as well, if you get a hundred resumes, they start to all blend together.

Yes.

Like it is so unbelievably hard.

Not only do they blend together, unless you are going to spend an hour on every single person, which would then take you a month to go through, which is not feasible, you have to kind of just go through and just try to look for a couple things that stand out notably.

And then if you were told by a friend, somebody you trust, oh, this person I know is applying, he's really good, that's top of the stack right away.

You set it to the side, you're looking for maybe two or three others because it's just not feasible at all.

And I imagine that, but times 10 and if it was 5 000 applications it's like the only possible way to you know chat gpt is evening what everything looks like yeah it's seems like just incredibly brutal this person want ramens in the discord spoke directly to what it's like on the recruiting side of uh he was describing his own personal opportunity with perspective of applying but then he said on the flip side i've been part of hiring and the reverse experience is equally as insane applications now reaching triple digits with hr being extremely strict with guardrails to the point where I'm pretty sure it's on a whim.

Can you imagine that?

Someone who isn't even in the field has to sort out and bring the best candidates to you, but they don't know exactly what they are reading.

High-quality talent is extremely hard to come by.

I get random messages on LinkedIn asking me to recommend them.

And when asking where I met them, they literally said we haven't, but it's hard to find a job.

Mostly people who are on visas.

Yeah, so I wanted to ask you guys because

we've been around in a different environment.

And I want, just for me, sorry, I keep fleeting back.

I know.

It's so obvious.

You know, I feel like I'm being gaslit constantly because the vibe is so clearly different.

Something, it can't be

like we were around in like the 2014, 15, in the era when I'm not saying it was easy.

The job wasn't just handed to you.

It was if you were in computer science.

You You were handed jobs as you left Berkeley.

And that's why everybody got those coding boot camps and everything, because the path to getting a job was so

tech was desperate for talent.

And that is completely reversed.

And maybe this is tech bias.

I understand because I'm in that area and

that's the people I talk, a lot of friends I have in that area.

But it's so obvious that the people now are not,

I don't know, working less hard or whatever.

It's just different.

Like it was easier.

It was easier before and now it is harder.

And you can't tell me that like, the unemployment rate is the same or that

the economy is booming.

It's just, it clearly isn't.

Everybody has a story like this.

This is not, you know, this is like

a day or two.

And then, I mean, we got like hundreds of responses.

But everybody, you talk to anybody in your life who was like actively searching for a job, and you can, it's just miserable now in a way that it was not.

I'm not saying it was always easy, and I'm not saying if you got a job before that you just lucked into it, but um, it's harder now, it just is.

I, I, I, and so

it's, it is frustrating to be told from any source that it's not.

There was a wilderness.

There's a there's a person who works like pretty high up in

or used to work pretty high up in marketing related to esports.

What's her name?

And address and list of greatest fears.

And they, I, I, and I received a message from a coworker the other day about them

because they're, you know, they're relatively older.

And I do think there's a difference here that I noticed in the age of responses when people were getting back to me is like people who are older and more experienced are having an easier time finding jobs when they search.

There's still

a difference, which makes sense, a difference between overall unemployment and youth unemployment.

Like easily, easy to understand that, right?

But even for this person who is that established resume in esports and marketing, like they had at two very big companies, They have been out of work for, I think, a year, and I think made a LinkedIn post about, you know, just to the public of why they would be valuable to your company.

Please hire me.

Just an open-ended post.

And I'm looking at somebody that I'm familiar with.

I know has more than a decade of experience in high-level marketing roles, not senior marketing roles, not entry-level.

And this guy has been looking for a job for apparently over a year that's crazy to see for me and especially as when it's a figure that you recognize and you look up to as a younger guy who's finding a job in esports yeah

uh

i just yeah i think the vibe the vibe kind of

atrocious it seems atrocious and uh

and and that's before the data reflects it do you know what i'm saying like that yeah that is it feels like the part and i know i'm a conflict of doomer but it feels like the part in like the big short before they update the mark to market on everything.

And like, everyone knows it's bad, but no one admits, like, it, it just,

it's possible that we're getting a biased survey here and we're not hitting the right people, but it just feels like from everybody in my life, even my friends back home in Arizona, like it just consistent vibe is that it's atrocious, it's terrible, but the data has not is barely budged, it's barely moving up.

And I just feel like what's going to happen when, when we admit it, when we admit that it actually is not.

I mean, even if you're looking, you know, even if you're somebody who is looking at anecdotes right

this was not something that anecdotally my friends were struggling with five years ago and they were younger and looking and they were working in i i would argue

you know they were working in like esports and tech like and and nobody was talking nobody was talking about that at the time and then outside of esports and tech i feel like it's uh anybody who was working in a white maybe maybe a white collar field, I feel like is the same experience across the board.

Like, I think the number one thing you want to vent to your friends about are very, maybe personal struggles with things that feel unfair with something like job applications, with struggling to find a job, because it's so important in your life and

you need to share it with your friends and the people around you.

So to see that this at this scale, witnessing it all the time, especially over the last year versus what I think my friends were talking about five years ago or eight years ago, it's absolutely different.

So, I want to talk about this because that's the one thing I'm worried about is that we're biased towards the fields that we know and have friends.

Of course, of course.

And

basically,

there are a few.

We talked about the industries that are hiring, and that's mostly healthcare and it's like government jobs.

But the companies that are still reporting profits that are still like doing well are on Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Like, the biggest tech companies are still

blowing the back out of earnings towards.

I couldn't find a more sexual way to say it, but it is sexual.

It is orgasmic.

In fact, look at, sorry, I'm skipping slides.

Go to slide 20.

He's coming when he made it to this photo.

If you go to the slide right after that, it shows Meta's recent earnings report.

They're having a great time.

But what is so shocking, what is so ahistoric is that Microsoft and Meta are, again, ball-bustingly good earnings.

Yeah.

And then they're laying people off.

Like they are doing better than ever.

They're crushing.

Their main business is doing well.

They're throwing a ton of money in AI.

If you are an AI researcher, you're doing better than ever in history.

You're making absurd money.

But the average employee, they're still like, they left 9,000 people.

Microsoft did another 8,000.

Damn.

So

these are the few companies.

If you go to slide 19, it really shows it.

Are the layoffs coinciding with these?

Like it's still happening in the last month?

Yes.

Yes.

Microsoft, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put out a post internal that was like, why we have to change.

It's like, we want to discuss.

We just had to let go of so many, all the normal jargon of like incredible, our friends and our family and our co-workers.

We had to let go of 9,000 people.

Probably many of you are confused and frustrated because we also have hit our most profitable quarter of all time.

And it's just, it's just from there.

It's like, we need to re-pivot for the future.

It's just nonsense.

There's no.

I'm so glad you read that because it was, it was,

to me, it's one thing to be like, so sorry, we had to lay off 9,000 people.

It's the other to be like, we had to lay off 9,000 people.

We know you're hurting, and I want to address it.

Doesn't address it at all.

Oh, my God, dude.

He mixed two things.

He mixed announcing how fucking great the company is doing and the layoffs into the same post.

And to me, I could be wrong, but to other people, it was clearly written by Copilot.

He was like using his own.

I mean, maybe wrong.

Maybe, maybe it was hard felt.

I'm not sure, but it just felt, it had the AI vibe.

And I, you know, he was like, it has an AI vibe to it.

It's possible true.

i'll fully admit that

what is the

because the profits don't are exist just because of the layoffs right like it's not one to one no no they're they're doing great and then laying people off that's not yeah so why

what what actually is the the logic you think like what is it is it genuinely like we're we're bloated and have a bunch of talent that doesn't align with what we want to do in the future i'm not trying to excuse these companies by all means but there's like they made the decision right so there must be a thought.

You could say yeah, I mean, so here's the here's some of the lines of thinking.

One is the businesses are changing dramatically.

All these big tech companies are trying to reorient towards AI.

If you've built out these giant structures in your company, for example, Microsoft shut down a bunch of their game studios.

I think that's stupid.

I don't think they should have bought those studios in the first place if they were just going to go shut them down.

But the thinking is we, if you believe Satya Nadella's thinking, which is our company needs to be fundamentally reoriented around AI, well, that means letting go of parts of the company that aren't about that.

Like these are just making traditional games.

That's not his focus.

Microsoft explicitly is trying to do AI games, which I know most people are, including myself, not a big fan of at all.

But so if the thinking is we need to reorient in this way, there is a real cost to having giant chunks of a company that aren't oriented like towards your main mission.

As much as people like to believe, like, oh, just let them keep going.

You have a lot of money.

It's not.

good generally for a business just to have giant swaths of things that are just doing totally independent things that are not related to your core mission.

So under the premise of our core mission is AI, we need to rebuild everything around that.

You drop parts of your company that don't feel like they align.

Same with the groups within your company that don't feel like they can be reoriented in this way.

And then part of it is just cycling in the idea of like, if you let, so it's important to remind everybody in the context of this.

incredibly frustrating, brutal job environment, that part of what is going on is that in 2021, which we'll actually talk about a little bit with Figma, there was this absolutely massive explosion and bubble within tech.

Microsoft like doubled, I think.

I mean, we're talking like 100,000 new employees, just, I think Microsoft, I don't know, maybe you can look it up, but we're talking about tens and tens and tens of thousands of people that suddenly in a year pop up in every tech company.

It was obviously at the time a massive bubble.

And now there's this huge contraction.

And the problem is many, many people across the world and society went, ah, these areas are expanding.

I'm going to push myself into those areas.

I'm going to learn how to code.

I'm going to deal with it.

I'm going to learn how to code at UC Berkeley, right?

Like, again, when I went there, I was an anomaly by being a computer science student.

Now, the majority of students are computer science students, at least that's what I'm told.

So, this massive shift happened in society to go, okay, we are going to invest into these companies.

The bubble is now kind of gone.

Simultaneously, they're trying to reorient towards AI.

And so, now all of them are going, we need to contract massively.

Part of the benefit of contracting and laying people off is then you can bring in like fresh people who really orient, which I think is, again, I do not think this is ethical.

I think this is a shitty thing to do, but there is

logic to it.

If you believe that this is a critical thing for your company's survive, like future surviving, thriving, is to reorient in this way.

What I'm saying is, I don't care about the ethics.

Like, if you go back to that slide, I'm sorry, Perry, the 19 slide, I don't care about the ethics of it.

They can do what they want with their business.

It sucks.

CEOs are always going to write fucking terrible things when they lay off people.

The point is that these are the few companies, if you go to slide 19, these are the top 10 companies in the SP, the big tech companies.

These are the few companies doing well.

And if they're not net hiring, do you know what I'm saying?

What does it say if the best performing companies in the economy are still the ones doing yeah if they're the ones doing layoffs then like what the hell what what is everyone else gonna do and again they are hiring people for ai but it's like they're firing 25 people making a hundred thousand and hiring one guy making 250 million so here's where i'll i'll give a bit of context i've mentioned a couple times now that i've gone a little more pessimistic about ai over this six months this last six months and in part is things like this because in theory ai should be creating new jobs and we've talked about the first episode we talked about how in the short term, when a brand new disruptive technology comes into society, like the internet, it's going to destroy more jobs than it creates, but eventually it will create more jobs.

But the way CEOs in tech companies are explicitly talking, like Toby from Spotify, is we aren't hiring anybody until we prove it can't be done with AI.

Like they are making a cultural, intentional shift towards get rid of anybody who can't support AI focus and don't hire anybody unless we absolutely provably cannot do it with AI.

And these are are the companies doing well.

These are the companies that are earning right.

And so we're so it's and they're the ones growing because of AI and because of the hype around AI.

And so these are the companies that should, in theory, be spearheading the growth that comes from this new technology.

Instead, they're as a point, as a cultural point, saying we are going to try to thin down as much as we possibly can.

And there's just nowhere, you know, you lose a job at these places after investing all this time in your education and career.

Right.

I mean, in a similar capacity to my friend that had been working in post-production and TV for so long.

And now they're in a situation where it's like, all this time I spent up until this point doesn't, like, where do I go with it?

Right.

Yeah, which is sucks.

It's fucking sad.

I still think there's an incredible amount of good that can come out of AI.

And I'm increasingly getting pessimistic that it's

that companies are really not making an effort to bring those benefits to the average person right now.

And I think that's quite sad.

I think the average person is benefiting.

Can you go to slide one?

There's one person who's actually making out quite well in this situation.

And this is the average person.

This is the average person.

This is the average person.

This is the average person's uh hero elon musk today was awarded after a long battle 30 billion dollars because they want him to energize and focus most dumbass ceos try to do good first and then get the pay package but if you read the bottom of this following lackluster results last month elon musk renewed his threat to leave tesla so what elon does is he does a bad job first and then threatens to leave

and then he gets an even higher payout

this actually has to be one of the most insane CEO company dynamics of all time.

There's no way, because in any other situation, this is just not how it even could work.

Am I wrong?

I mean,

it's like if Shohei Otani in baseball,

he is, I think, widely considered the greatest of all time now or up there.

And then let's say he has an absolute dog shit season this year.

And then the Dodgers are like, look, we're going to pay you even more to stick around because we think you'll bring it back next year and you'll become the GOAT again.

That is the thinking here, right?

Because like, inarguably, Tesla and Elon, through SpaceX and Tesla, has created trillions of dollars of market share.

So as an investor, he is your wet dream when he's functioning properly.

Am I not, am I insane for thinking that when you're that wealthy and you have that much of the stock already,

30 billion doesn't move the needle on your work ethic.

I don't care.

30 billion should move the needle on anyone's work ethic.

No, no, no.

But do you see what I'm saying?

It's like

at that stage and at that scale,

it's nonsense numbers.

You're already in practice as functionally rich as you will ever be.

I think that's a fair point.

What is another thing?

You're asking me, do I think Elon is suddenly going to walk in?

No, but that's what I'm saying.

From the board's perspective, do you really think that this pay package is going to change anything significant about this guy's output?

Okay, he went into Doge for a while.

If my cat is distracted and rowdy and running around, I will give him a treat to calm back down and stay focused.

You give your cat $30 billion.

I give him a $30 billion treat.

Look, the scale is a little bit bigger here, but it's the same concept.

The Elon cat was wandering around and there was a bird outside called Doge that he kept looking at and he got really excited about it.

And we just, Tesla needs to just get him focused back on

the company he runs.

If he followed this analogy, I do not think there's much stopping the cat from going back outside at any time.

yeah it's so funny because he's figured out a way to get paid a ton when it when tesla's doing well and get paid even more when it's doing badly he has found an ultimate to be fair though i feed my cat treats regardless

he's doing he's i just want to put this number in a scale real quick because i think it'll help you understand so 30 billion dollars we obviously know that's a lot of money but tesla's a big company tesla's entire profit for 2024 was 7 billion.

So this is like, and that was one of their bigger year.

I mean, like, they've ramped up since post-COVID.

So it is like, I think added up their entire profit ever.

All the profit this company has ever made is his pay package now, this year.

It's just like the company has only existed to give him money.

It's just wild to me.

It is wild the system he's created.

Now, I think he's played it pretty smartly, and I want to give a little more detail here.

One thing he's noticed, as all tech CEOs have, if you say the word AI, stock goes up.

Tesla has notably been kind of absent from AI because Elon Musk has focused all his AI attention on Grok and XAI.

He's put all of his time into that.

And he's basically saying, I'm going to leave Tesla and focus on that stuff.

But if you keep me around, I'm probably going to merge the two.

I'm going to find a way to get the word AI into Tesla's earnings reports more often.

And that will probably boost shares enough, is what they're thinking, to make up for this 30 billion loss.

So there's a rationale to it.

It's not the most insane thing, but it's kind of just disgusting.

It's just just disgusting.

I can't believe I can't buy a BYD.

It's insane.

It's insane that I can't.

I don't know you're a trader.

I don't know you're a fucking trader.

That's interesting.

All right.

Speaking of merging companies, you guys want to talk about Figma?

Let's do it.

All right.

We've been going a while, and I want to talk about Figma, a company that IPO'd last week, and why it is relevant and why you should maybe care.

And more importantly, why it relates to the conversation we have with Lina Khan.

And this is basically a follow-up I want to do to express.

Oh, my queen?

Your queen.

Criticism is not the right word, but I spoke to a venture capitalist who runs a successful venture capitalist fund, as well as a CEO of a pretty successful VC-backed company.

Disclaimer on the second, technically I'm investor in that company because he's one of my best friends, but I invested the minimum amount possible just so that I would get access to the investor emails.

And now I reply and I'm like, I don't care

every time.

So

I have to be mailed like these formal documents and stuff because I'm technically an investor at the minimum amount.

And then I can just walk around and like say, you need to do more for me.

I'm only an investor.

So it's great.

You can put investors in your bio.

This is how I felt

from the stock competition, the metals company, they sent out a recent like, you know, you're an owner of the company.

Come to our meeting.

And I was like, yeah, I am.

You sort of am a an influencer, an innovator for TMC.

So technically, disclaimer, I have invested $5,000 in the company of the person who I own.

And I stand to gain $1,000 or something, maybe if it bought.

I'm going to be real, that's so much less than I thought it would be.

I asked for the minimum amount, the actual minimum amount, and that was apparently as low as it could go.

So technically, I am biased towards this company.

Technically, this guy also, but more so he's one of my best friends.

Okay, so Figma.

Why do we give a shit?

Figma, if you haven't heard of it, design collaboration company.

They started like about 10 years ago.

Think of Google Docs, but for design.

So a bunch of people can get together and work on a document collaboratively.

Quick history of Figma.

They kind of released their product in 2016.

They get people in with like free tiers, really rapidly start to expand.

By 2022, they are just crushing it.

4 million users.

It's the primary design tool for 77% of product designers, 88% gross margin.

They're crushing it.

Adobe comes in.

September 2022, they announced they have agreed with Figma to buy them for $20 billion, just like double their private valuation, 50 times their annual revenue.

So Adobe's argument is supposedly like, this doesn't compete with us.

We don't compete with Figma.

They had a product called Adobe XD, which was directly competing with Figma, but that product was failing.

And they're basically like, look, this is in the same broad design space, but Adobe makes the products where you, you know, you build, like you flesh out the design visuals and whatnot.

Figma is people collaborating on the, you know, conceptual design.

Well, you definitely wouldn't be competing if you bought.

Exactly.

For damn sure.

So I think to me, and probably to most people, and the reaction was once it's announced, like, come on, that's fucking bullshit.

What do you do?

Adobe, first off, everybody hates Adobe.

It feels like they have a monopoly and they use that to abuse their customers and that we all have a worse experience.

We like early cancellation fees.

Me and Aiden, for example.

Yeah.

That's one of Adobe's coolest things.

Adobe.

If I cancel early, I should pay you more money.

That's for damn sure.

It's my fault.

I fucked up Adobe.

I'm not holding up my end of the deal.

And you should punch me.

And I feel guilty about it.

Like, I need a payment to cleanse my soul.

I'm just throwing up, thinking about breaking up with Adobe.

Millennials don't keep their word anymore.

We have no honor.

Our ancestors were honorable, okay?

The greatest generation.

They went to World War II and they were honorable.

I feel like a fucking quitter when I canceled my Photoshop, dude.

I couldn't afford it.

And I feel like I let fucking the CEO of Adobe down.

Fucking let him down.

So the government's come out, not only the U.S.

government, the FTC, led by Lena Kahn at the time.

So this is, again, late 2022, but also the European Union Commission and also the UK Commission all say, we think this is monopolistic.

We are going going to investigate this.

So the deal falls through by like a year later, something around that end of 2023.

Adobe and Figma say, we're going to walk away from the deal.

We're not going to try to merge.

This is not going to be able to be done in a regulatory way.

So Figma over the next two years, two and a half, they keep raising investor funding.

They keep just absolutely crushing it.

And if you pull this up, Perry, they IPO'd last week.

They sold their shares at $33 a share.

We can, I guess, briefly talk about how an IPO works, but basically they're like, hey, we think it's going to be about $33 is what it's worth.

By the end of the day, they launch, it's up to $115, over triple.

So this thing just fucking explodes, okay?

Figma is one of the most successful IPOs, one of the most successful companies.

It's a huge success story.

And so coming out of this, Lena Kahn does a victory lap.

She goes on Twitter and says, a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses, rather than being bought up by existing giants, can generate enormous value.

It's a win for the employees, the investors, innovation, and the the public.

So she is looking at this, and we're going to talk about really the broader ecosystem, what's going on.

She's looking at this and saying, our

goal to really drive scrutiny to mergers and acquisitions, to draw a lot more resistance to big tech companies buying smaller ones.

This is an example of how now we have a big competitor to Adobe in the form of Figma.

This is a fantastic thing.

But the Silicon Valley world had a lot of choice words for her.

And so, for example, Paul Graham, who founded Y Commonator, a, let's say startup incubator.

Startups are risky.

Sometimes you keep rolling the dice.

Sometimes, when you keep rolling the dice, things work out.

Sometimes not.

But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop.

You have Jason from the All-In podcast who's kind of an idiot, so I'll skip him.

No offense.

He's just

a little more emotionally.

Oh, he's the guy who said breadlines when he heard about the grocery store.

Dude, this is a who's who of a really great blunt rotation.

I gotta be honest.

I mean, Paul Graham has good stuff.

Nikita Beer is more of a memer than brings up.

Nikita Beer has made his entire fortune selling the same company over and over to big tech.

He makes a company that's about teenagers sending each other compliments.

He made a GasApp and TBH and IRL.

It's the same company three times.

And he sold it to Discord.

He sold it to Facebook.

He sold it to, I think, Amazon was with everyone.

Of course, he is against

anything that slows down mergers and acquisitions.

He's figured out an ultimate...

scheme a money-making scheme.

I respect the guy.

He's got a great hustle, but he did it three times.

And the fact that he's like...

Wait, what?

What was his product that he made an app with three different names where teenagers could anonymously send each other compliments?

One of them was called TBH.

One was called IRL.

It's like, you could be like, Aiden, you could open it up and be like, someone called you hot today at school.

You don't know who, but it feels good.

And I think you can pay a little money to unlock it or something.

And that app, apparently, it works and it gets at least a burst of users.

And then he sells it to a bigger tech company.

And then he makes the same app again with a different name.

And then he sells it to a tech company.

He's figured out an ultimate scheme.

And I think he's smart and I respect him for that.

I changed my mind on Lena.

But the idea that he's going to admit that like any regulatory oversight over startups is a good idea, of course not.

It directly impacts his bottom line.

Yep.

Trying to stop great American successes.

A few more responses.

Somebody pointed out the classic survivorship bias, where it's basically the point is, yes, Figma did well.

Yes, went on to succeed and be bigger than they.

So now they're worth like $60 billion.

Adobe was trying to buy them for 20 billion.

So like the amount of, let's say, market value that is created, massive on top of monopolistic concerns.

But this is a, you know, a frequent criticism from various people.

I saw some other interesting ones where, you know, people are basically criticizing.

You said letting the startups grow independently when in actuality, what you did, Lina, is you prevented them from having the option of having an exit.

And there's plenty of counterexamples too.

A lot of people, oh, I got logged out of X, maybe.

Nope, we're good.

Somebody's saying, I would have, I worked for a startup that would have gone bankrupt and gone to zero and the entire staff would have been laid off off if we weren't bought.

And then a person follows up and be like, so they're, so you were forced to compete.

Imagine that.

Folks being like, hey, here's a, here's an email from Mark Zuckerberg in 2012 saying, one reason people underestimate the importance of Google is we can just buy any competitive startups, but we can't buy Google yet.

So some blatant like anti-competitive stuff from Mark Zuckerberg in the past who does not have a good history of this, right?

And so there is a whole kind of debate going on with Lena doing a sort of victory lap and that being a reason for them to talk about it.

I don't think that most of the tweets that people are saying in response to Lena are particularly well-voiced or anything like that.

So I wanted to hear from more people.

So again, spoke with a VC and a startup CEO who's been, both of these have been like working with startups tech for the last 10 years.

So here are some actual thoughtful counter arguments.

Lena Khan came in as the FTC chair.

And what she did over the course of her four years is massively expanded the scope of what types of things she would go after.

She did create, she released this guideline list from the FTC, merger guidelines, basically saying, these are the rules that we are going to consider when we decide whether or not we're going to resist and push back against your ability to merge or buy a company.

Now, as I read through these in prep for the Lena Khan interview, they're pretty broad, but it's fine.

But then what happened is that the actual cases that she took on were, I think in many ways, cases that people would never consider to be anti-mona or monopolistic.

So one example that was brought up was Facebook Meta tried to buy a small VR fitness app.

They didn't make VR fitness apps.

They didn't make apps at all for VR stuff.

They owned a VR platform and Lena pushed against that and said, well,

you shouldn't be able to buy things downstream of you if you're a platform owner.

You shouldn't be able to do vertical purchases rather than just horizontal.

There was two pharmaceutical companies that made different, these aren't giant pharma companies.

They're two companies that make different drugs that have no overlap and they wanted to merge because they thought they could be more successful in marketing each other's stuff.

And Lena pushed to block that.

And that eventually got stopped because her argument was, well, you guys would be able to bundle together your medicines and thus be able to kind of abuse that in the market for higher pricing.

Anybody, any company could do that whenever.

There was no evidence.

Eventually that she lost that case as well because there was no evidence they were going to do that in the first place.

They did eventually give a stipulation to her and say, okay, we promise we won't won't bundle for price things.

So there was a bit of a victory for her there.

But the issue, and I agree with this, having looked through this in what I believe is an impartial way, is that while she came in and really broadened and said, we are going to be way more aggressive about stopping big tech and big companies from just buying out stuff and creating these monopolies, the cases that she took on and the FTC took on felt so broad, so nebulous, so unclear about why this particular merger is an issue versus the stuff that clearly falls in line with what people would think traditionally, created a level of uncertainty that slowed MA down entirely.

I brought this up when we talked to Lena Kahn, and her response was: well, look, 97% of these mergers still went through, right?

It's not like we're blocking all of them.

It's like some small percentage that we're going to investigate.

But the counterargument and what people saw in Silicon Valley was if you make the entire merger market feel uncertain, if you set the tone of we might go after anything, then people are not even going to attempt to do that.

So yes, 97% of the deals that came in were passed by you, but the argument is way more, way fewer deals got to you in the first place because people were so uncertain about what was happening.

They didn't want to even attempt stuff like this.

And the mergers and acquisitions that could have actually been really helpful or spurred innovation or whatever, which we'll get to, those couldn't even happen in the first place.

The other piece that I didn't, I wasn't really aware of is that Lina did this stuff while the IPO window closed.

And this is why Figma is relevant.

So IPOs are where you take a company public, right?

But it's risky to do that.

You are kind of putting a lot of the fate of your company out into the public.

You have all this regulatory scrutiny.

You then have all these obligations.

And if you put your company out public and then the stock drops, that could tank the entire thing, right?

So you really want to be certain that taking a company public will have actual success in the market.

People will actually invest into your company.

But the problem that we mentioned earlier is in 2021 was a massive bubble.

So there's some crazy numbers.

Like there's all these SPAC companies that did a bunch of crazy stuff.

Dozens of tech companies were IPOing in 2021.

There's record VC funding.

But then 2022, 2023, the bubble pops.

Things swing way back.

And so.

Interest rates also rise up way during this period.

So instead of having a zero interest rate policy, which we had forever, now people can make safe money by investing in safe assets.

They don't need to go for like high growth tech stocks, right?

And the companies that had IPO'd in 2021, they start crashing.

So, this big bubble in 2021, where it's like, yeah, everybody go public.

Everybody get all this hot, zesty action.

That starts just popping massively.

The companies that got a part of that, a piece of the action, they're failing now retroactively badly.

They averaged 30% below offering price on average.

It's not just they dropped, they dropped below what they initially were.

The valuations in the private sector are being slashed.

General economic volatility, with, for example, the Russia-Ukraine war causing enormous energy shocks.

And an analyst said, Wait, what is the point?

What is the takeaway?

Yeah, yeah.

She couldn't have anticipated that.

No, no, no, no, she couldn't.

The takeaway is nobody's going to take their company public with this massive uncertainty.

That's not on her.

It is not on her.

But the reality is 80% less deals in 2022 than 2021.

95% less money generated.

There's a massive, basically what they refer to it as the shutting of the window, where you were able to take companies public before, and now it is much harder to do so because the willingness of the public to invest in these companies has disintegrated massively.

So this coincided in this 2022, 2023 era at the same time that LenaCon starts doing this very broad and what was considered to be nebulous scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions.

And so people across the VC, tech, startup space, people who are creating all these companies and saying, look, we're building these companies, we're investing, we're trying to make something of value, we've now lost both of our exits.

We can't go public and we can't get people to potentially buy us or do acquisitions because both of those have been shut down simultaneously.

So that's in part what drives the frustration that you see on Twitter from people who are like, we had two options and both doors closed to us.

The entire industry is suffering as a result.

The VC manager that I talked to talked about how

let me get the core arguments in place and then I'm sure you have plenty of counter arguments.

So

the argument is basically, and we need to talk about as well whether the VC market is even good, right?

Because I'm sure there's plenty of people who feel like this isn't a good thing in the first place, which I then had a bunch of follow-up conversations with them with.

But their argument is: look, this is in general for the country good to have innovation that's spurred by VC investing, by private capital, funding people to make new things, to build new things for our country, for innovation, for everything.

And right now, with this kind of dual threat, we are being threatened and the entire system is being threatened.

What is great about Figma is this is the first time in a while where there's been a big successful tech IPO where this is now saying, okay, we might have that door opening again.

The other door is also kind of opening because Trump came in and Lena Khan had to resign and all that.

So

I think there's a couple of things we can go on and we don't have a ton of time left, but you know, is this system even good in the first place?

What is the value of startup founders being able to have a choice?

And various other things on like, is this really the core cause?

This is the whiniest group of people people in the entire world okay this is crazy

okay you already crashed out on twitter i'm gonna i crashed out on twitter you're gonna pull up that tweet this is crazy okay you know why the figma ipo was successful is because it's a company that makes money is a profitable successful company if you make one of those you will find a way to make money they have been surviving in a bubble era for a few years where you could do almost fucking anything and spend all your time posting VC advice on Twitter and throwing money in random directions at stupid, unprofitable businesses.

And when that dries up even slightly for a moment with a FTC that only lasted a few years and is already gone and they can't stop whining about it even years after she's out of power.

It's fucking crazy.

This is a publicly elected official who was appointed for a reason to enforce laws we have on the books.

I'm sorry.

Biden was elected.

He was appointed.

He has his right to appoint the FTC, which exists, to write laws that are on the books written by Congress about mergers.

We are enforcing already existing laws.

The fact they've been rubber stamped for so long does not mean they can never be enforced.

And the fact they were enforced even slightly, and most of them didn't even go through has been such a pain point for a portion of society that has benefited so much already.

It's fucking crazy.

It's crazy.

And all they had to do, as Figma has proven the entire time, is just make a profitable business.

That you can put on the public anytime.

In 2021, they dumped so many disgusting SPACs on the bus.

It was a scammy bubble.

Yeah.

There was none of those companies made any money.

And when that dried up, they tried to foist it on the tech companies who have a lot of money to throw around.

Maybe they can convince them to buy them.

When they couldn't do that, they started whining, just whining, whining, whining.

If you make a good company with a good product, people buy, you will make money that has never changed.

That has always been the core of business.

And the idea that so many people are chiming in and chirping about this Figma thing.

Can you please follow my tweet?

Because I'm going to.

I mean, I got into this Twitter thing that you brought.

I usually don't even fucking tweet.

The fact that anyone could look at this Figma situation and be like, wow, well, Linux shouldn't even be taught.

This worked exactly as intended.

If Lena Khan had not intervened, or I guess antitrust in general, this company would have been bought by Adobe for 20 billion.

We would be in an environment where we have fewer competition.

We have one company, Adobe.

Everyone has to pay whatever fee they charge.

They can mark it up.

They have no competitor from Figma.

The Figma founders would have made less money.

The Figma employees would have made less money.

Figma customers would be unhappy.

They fucking hate Adobe.

The only person that is lost is Adobe.

This is a great outcome.

We now have two competitors instead of one.

The people, everybody made more money except for Adobe execs.

Customers, when surveyed, hate Adobe and are really happy to have this alternative.

Yeah, so this guy said, you know, Lena Khan did her victory lap and he goes, Lena Khan cuts the right hand off of a genius pianist who nevertheless perseveres and produces a one-handed masterpiece for which she then takes credit.

It's fucking insane.

That is not what happened.

And the idea that the masterpiece would have been them getting bought by Adobe for under their market value so that they can consolidate and raise prices is the ultimate outcome or an equal outcome to what we got is crazy.

She intervened and we got a better outcome, which is what happens with antitrust in general.

We want more competitors because as consumers, we want the ability to fucking walk.

If somebody's abusing us and overcharging us, we want the ability to walk somewhere else.

This whole...

whiny attitude towards it is ignoring that reality, which is that the basic consumer needs choice to have any say, to have any.

So I'm sorry, I'm not crushing on you.

I'm crushing on some of these colleagues, but it's just, it's frustrating to me that this is, if this was like an example where Figma exploded, then at least you could be like, well, look at this, Lena.

This is an example where it worked perfectly.

It worked exactly what everyone would want.

And they are still non-stop chirping about a woman who is not even in power anymore.

I find it to be disgusting.

I find it to be, and again, all of these people chirping, they're all millionaires.

They're all tech millionaires.

So it,

I don't know.

I'm sorry.

I said I was going to say, okay.

This is good.

Okay.

This is good.

So let's keep going.

This is exactly the type of, I mean, to less intensity, the questions that I wanted to ask people who are in the industry and basically ask, why?

This seems like a great outcome.

Seems like exactly what you want.

Why on earth is this the thing VCs are going in and being like, how dare you, Lena Khan?

Like, this is the stupidest possible thing to go in and try to criticize her.

Okay.

I think there's a couple fundamental things.

And I really want to to emphasize this because I think a lot of our audience is on board with you where they're like, I know, I know.

Companies are bad.

I hate Adobe.

Listen, no, Figma's a good company.

However, they made billions more dollars.

There are money.

There are absolutely people in our comments and on the internet who the idea of a company succeeding or getting bigger, if Adobe had become more bigger, they would have been upset.

I got a gym because they were mad that I was happy that Figma's employees made billions of money.

Some people were mad that Figma did well.

Anyone did well.

Okay, I understand that exists, but I just want to be clear that that shouldn't detract from the point I'm making because that's not my point.

So here it was what I would consider to be one of the core counter arguments of this.

It's about choice because,

yes, Figma is now worth more.

This is a better outcome.

Adobe lost.

But Figma wanted this.

Figma worked for whatever it was, nine years.

The people there worked at this company to build something of value and they wanted to merge with Adobe.

They were not forced into it.

There was nothing there.

So I think the question is, do you agree that startup founders, somebody who pours their blood, sweat, and tears into a thing that they've created?

And you could talk about a big tech company or you could talk about the guy who runs a basket Robbins and then sells the franchise to somebody else after they've run it for 10 years and it's been successful.

It's worth reminding that it is super fucking hard to make a company.

It is not easy to make something of value.

I think it's easy to look at this ecosystem and go, everybody's just jerking each other off, making things, but 90% of tech companies go out of business.

If you talk to people in Silicon Valley, the majority of their startups will die and fail.

90% within five years.

75% of the companies that VCs back never make them back money.

So most people going into this are spending money and losing it.

It is not like you just make anything you want and you get paid out for it.

You have to actually create something of value.

On top of that, the giant tech companies are not going around buying everything.

The Magnificent Seven, it's hard to know how many deals they exactly did.

There's like 200 public deals out of 150,000 that have happened over the past 50 years.

These are estimates because they don't disclose every single deal that they do.

But the narrative of like big tech just buys up all the companies, we need to stop them is objectively wrong.

They are doing a tiny, tiny, less than 1% of all the acquisitions are happening by big tech.

Amazon does hardly any.

Microsoft does more and they do like maybe 150 over the past five years.

It is simply not true that out of over 100,000 acquisitions, most people who make companies and sell them are not doing it to Microsoft and Facebook.

They are doing it to small buyers and other small companies that merge together.

So I think it's worth acknowledging that.

It's not like there's this cabal that completely dominates the space, even though obviously I agree they have outside influence.

And so did the VC and CEO who I talked to.

And so the question is, in that context, if you're a founder who busts your ass and you make something that is valuable enough to get to that 10% where you've put in years of time, where you and your employees and your team have made something that is considered valuable and another company comes along that's bigger and says, we want to buy you, that you should have the choice to do that.

That if you have said, I've built this thing, being forced to sit in the ownership seat forever, if I make a company right now, I have made a company over the last seven years.

And if somebody offered to buy it and I was like, you know what?

I'm done.

Maybe it's because I want the money.

Maybe it's because I think I could grow more by being bought by a bigger company.

Maybe it's because I think like the employees want this, whatever the reasoning is, I think that it is legitimate that me as somebody who's built the business should have the choice about what to do with it.

And what was happening in these situations is Lena Kahn came in and said, you are not going to have the choice.

Now, again,

I am strongly voicing the opinions that I've heard.

I would consider myself kind of in the middle here because I deeply believe that there are monopolistic tendencies going on.

I don't think that acquisitions are some beautiful, incredible thing all the time.

But there is, I think, a real argument to say, like, is it correct for a government to come in, tell a

person who's built a thing on their own that they can't go and sell it?

They have to.

I think that's the simple

simple answer is that they have to.

So you have to draw the line somewhere.

And we agree on that.

And the criticism against Lena Khan and what their FDC was doing is that there wasn't a clear line.

And I can sympathize with this because even me as a neutral party who likes Lena Khan a lot and who fucking hates monopolies and I don't like the big tech companies consolidating everything, even reading through her cases, I was like, dude, I would have no idea what she would scrutinize.

And that is the problem that Silicon Valley has.

It's not that she pushed back against the obviously bullshit ones like Adobe and Figma.

It's the fact that people felt, whether it was legitimate or not, that they had no idea and thus it wasn't clear at all.

Something that my startup friend said, like, if she had just really clearly defined this new type of merger, we're going to criticize and we're going to scrutinize deeply.

people would have grumbled and accepted it.

The problem is nobody felt the guidelines were clear.

And there are guidelines here that I've read and I think these are pretty clear, but the actual cases that they brought, I agree with the Silicon Valley perspective of it felt unclear.

That's the issue.

She was not suing a Baskin Robbins trying to sell.

And there's nothing in this that says you can't sell.

What they're telling a few powerful agents is that they can't buy is a difference.

The founder can sell.

If someone wants to buy it, fine.

But if it's to Adobe, then there's a problem.

If you're Figma, you could have sold to someone else, but you can't sell to Adobe because they have the dominant market share in that market.

If I make a competitor to Ticketmaster and it's fucking good and doesn't charge people absurd fees, fees, people like it, and Ticketmaster offers to buy me, it would be right of her to look at whether this is leading to consolidated marketing.

So, those cases are obvious.

What about the non-obvious cases that I mentioned?

I think we keep coming back to Adobe Sigma and being like, I think the problem is that the argument of like ambiguity and uncertainty here can go on forever.

It's like we have let it stretch in the opposite direction for so long with so little oversight that any concession back in the opposite direction is going to be viewed by these people as negative.

I do not think the idea that people were just looking for stricter guidelines around mergers and acquisitions is truthful.

I do not think, because if we could simulate, if we could simulate the world where this is dramatically more clear, I do not think that these people are on the timeline saying like, ah, she's actually chill.

Like

there's a 0% chance.

No, no, no.

They will be upset either way for sure.

And I want to be clear here.

There is absolutely abuse in the system that I think the average person, if they sat down were honest and they're not a scam artist who is, you know, doing crypto offerings or doing SPACs that turn out to be scams, most people would go, yeah, it's being abused by big tech.

There's a power law that's happening.

This is not fair.

If the pendulum swung way away from antitrust, it needs to swing back.

And I think most rational people, most thoughtful people that realize the long-term health of the ecosystem, you can't have monopolies.

You cannot have people buying direct competitors.

That's obviously fucking stupid.

The pendulum needed to swing way back.

And the criticism, I think there's a lot of just douchebags who are doing what you're saying, which is like, how dare you take away our party that we're having.

But this is the pendulum swinging back a little.

It's a tiny bit.

That's the problem.

Perry for improduction here.

We're going to skip ahead a little bit.

We've actually cut like a big chunk.

Aid and I were going back and forth.

We were realizing we're kind of repeating ourselves.

I want to just.

briefly summarize a few things and then and then just pose a question which was posed to me which again i'm trying to kind of relay at least another perspective again the pendulum needed to swing back there's a lot of of douchebags who are like, you, Lena Khan is ruining my life.

And I think nobody, at least in my world, is sympathetic to those people who are scamming folks.

The question is for the average person who's trying to run a business who needs investment capital up front to make it work.

Many reasonable businesses can't just generate profit from day one.

I think that is a reasonable thing to try to promote and protect.

And that there were some reasonable concerns with the way the FTC felt so broad that what the types of companies and investment opportunities that would have been there before started to close in part because of what she did.

In part, both things can be true.

I also think what is relevant is just to ask, how do you incentivize innovation just on a high level?

And do we think that you better incentivize innovation by flooding the markets with a bunch of money and allowing a bunch of people to kind of grift and make money when they really don't deserve it, which we've seen a whole lot over the past few years, but also you get people who do actually pour blood, sweat, and to tears to make something valuable and are able to do that because they generate capital.

I'm biased because many of my close friends have done this and they aren't the douchebags who make shitty unprofitable companies.

Or if they are unprofitable, there's a real thought behind why.

And I believe that innovation is good.

Or do you kind of swing to the other side and say, look, yes, innovation is good, but you can't have that at the expense of having giant companies coming in and buying everybody up.

And you have to push back against that because innovation will be lost if they continue to do this long term.

And I totally see both sides.

I generally would lean more on Linacon's side.

I generally am sympathetic to this.

There's been so much abuse that obviously this shit needs to change.

But I feel like there is a valid side of this, which is like, there's real value of a lot of investor money flowing through and making it easier for somebody to innovate and create something valuable.

As a reminder, our lives are a lot better than they were 200 years ago when the average life

expectancy was 35 and everybody worked in farming.

There's a lot more to do, but I think that innovation

and developing our society is incredibly important.

And I want our society to get better.

And so in that high level, how do you encourage innovation?

How much should the government come in and make those decisions and say, look, we're not giving you that choice because it can be immoral.

And maybe that is what you need to do.

But I at least just want to voice the other side.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think the closing thoughts I have is like, on the front of innovation, I think there's a lot of unexplored things of funding and pushing innovation that, or I shouldn't say unexplored, because I think when you dig into mechanisms of innovation and funding that have existed within America through the past 80, 90 years, there's a lot of things of what allowed the government to encourage innovation or fund innovation that we have cut or taken away over time that spurred a lot of the greatest technological innovations of the 20th century that are no longer something we're pushing forward.

And I think it's important to keep innovation in mind when you make these decisions.

The mechanisms of innovation still have to exist somehow.

How do you motivate people to make things?

And I think you're right in keeping that in mind.

I think my core like pushback to the to the argument is like,

I think when

people

describe their

When people describe the reasons why they were unable to do something or unable to make the company they wanted to make, they look to reasons

that they look to blame things that take away the easiest way out or the simplest way out, and because it affects them individually and personally.

And it's very natural to present those concerns as the most pressing concerns.

But when you

I think

having that be the pervasive argument of

this situation when there was an era of like easy money and funding beforehand.

I think people are more likely to be upset and point to somebody like Lena rather than pointing to the money that allowed you to live the life you did for the past 10, 15 years and exist within that space just no longer is there.

But there's an argument here to be had about, you know, lay it all out.

What are the companies that didn't form or didn't exist because of things like this?

And like, what were the actual conditions of them?

And I want to see more of those things because we talked mostly about the victories and the clear-cut things that she did, right?

And there's so many more cases and so many more things that that entire department and agency got to work on.

Um, but I think it's important to like substantiate that side of the argument when something feels more explicitly clear as the explanation for the

forever.

Let's add another 30 minutes to the podcast.

Let's keep going.

Uh, we're gonna have a patron, we can talk more about it.

Listen, I think I made my thoughts clear.

I just want to say, uh, I mean, I

we are all good friends and we are doing, I think, a good discussion.

I really enjoy this discussion.

People that listen aren't always understanding of that, and they're not able to.

I'll put it simply.

Nothing would make me more fucking annoyed to read a bunch of YouTube comments that like shit on Doug or shit on any of us.

Okay, you can't shit on the people on Twitter, though, because there's a bunch of douchebags who are.

I just, yeah, I don't know.

But I think people just come in with this idea of like the any back and forth discussion is going to be something that is seen as like negative.

It's like, I don't know.

And I want to, I want to be able to have this discussion to like go back and forth about like all of the ideas that are a part of this.

And that's what makes it fun and exciting to do.

This is how I would talk to you guys off pot.

I'm passionate.

We're all passionate.

Yeah.

So just keep that in mind if you're going to chime in.

It's fine to have your own opinion and it's fine to disagree with anything here, but just like, I don't know, do it somewhat respectfully if you can.

Do you think there's going to be a comment that's like, I can't believe Doug is supporting these capitalist douchebags?

And they follow up and they're like, sorry, I just got the end episode.

It's actually chill.

Sorry, like they already have written the comment and they gotta follow.

In front of the carrots and the asterisks,

oh, are we doing carrots and asterisks?

Those are great.

The carrots and the asterisks to end the comment.

Anyway, thank you for the discussion.

Really enjoyed it.

Yeah, thank you so much if you contribute to the Discord as well.

Because

that is so helpful to hear people's perspective of what's going on in the world.

And I think just adds a lot of just color and nuance to what is super challenging.

It's fucking hard right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for every thank you to everyone.

What's going on?

Positive note.

Everything positive.

Oh, I have a single line.

A single line.

Never mind then.

What?

Two lines.

No, the world's dead.

No, dude.

It's too.

We're going to end on something funny.

I have an extremely tall story.

We'll end on.

I don't even remember the fucking country.

Bring up slide 11, real quick.

Just really quick.

Very end.

Slide 11.

So, you know how some countries have really bad inflation?

So they have, instead of $1 bills, they have $1,000 bills and then $10,000.

Oh, yeah.

Zimbabwe had like the $40 trillion.

Yeah, $40 trillion bills.

Well, Iran has figured out a way around that.

They're going to print a 10,000 bill, but they're just going to call it a 10.

They're just going to slash three zeros from every bill, but they will numerically be 10,000, 50,000, 100,000.

That is a brilliant new innovation.

That's eliminates the end of countries.

Like, they solved it.

Is it bad?

Is it bad if I think

this is kind of a good solution?

It's not.

It actually has been tried in Turkey, Romania, and Zambia, and it does nothing.

This is what they do.

In fact, there's a quote on line 12.

You bring me slide 12, just real quick.

We'll end on a funny thing.

Analysts believe that, unless accompanied by actual inflation control and financial reforms, this cosmetic move will fail to alleviate any of the country's economic problems.

They have no shit, which is exactly what has happened in three other countries that tried it.

It's just a funny way to make your bills less embarrassing.

Why would it change anything?

But that's what's happening.

So, funny stuff.

The trash eliminates that.

We have to go.

See you next week.