Gen Z Can't Get Laid | Ep 011 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Yo, welcome back to Lemonade Stand, everybody.

Perry, could you pull this up on the big screen behind us?

Got a little something to kick this off.

It's coming to my attention.

So, what are we talking about?

Some of you were upset with the way I handled myself hairline-wise on the previous episode.

And in fact, it seemed to dominate the conversation.

Now, we talked about this on Patreon, but I just want to rest assured

that the Toby Maguire emo hair look will not be happening again to save this pod because it will doom us.

Is that why?

It was like a little lower metric episode for us.

And I can only be linked to one thing.

It's on you.

Opened the video.

It was vomited.

And clicked out.

A lot of people gave me that feedback.

I just want you to know that my barber.

literally had a death in the family.

And that's why I picked him up that day.

I showed up and there was a sign saying death in the family.

And so I was like, I cannot stress enough, I offered you my hat.

Dude, I didn't want your greasy yard hat.

Greasy.

So

dirty, greasy yard hat.

And so, yeah, I refused it.

And I got a haircut and I feel fine.

If you are still uncomfortable, I also brought a hat.

So I'm going to, you guys.

Let us know in the comments.

Do you want to delete that thing?

Can you please close that tab?

Yeah.

Wait, cross it like accidentally.

Oh, you want me to actually close it?

Yeah, let's get rid of that.

There's like 10 of us.

Can you close this out?

It's a little distracting.

Atrial, can you go ahead?

Okay.

Atriac, we're trying to start the show.

I understand.

Not everybody has a task here.

Okay, there we go.

Blank slate.

What are we talking about today, guys?

Oh, my God.

Well, honestly, we're going to be talking about why Gen Z is so fucking lame.

Yeah.

Just atrociously lame.

By the metrics, they're just not

out there.

And I'm going to be the villain's chair today.

I think they're self-hating.

Self-hating Gen Z, and I'm clutching down because I got hit by my hairline.

So we all have problems.

This isn't even so much of a topic.

He just keeps DMing us and being like, I haven't gotten laid in months.

And we're like, dude, do you need to let it out?

I'm just, you know, longer.

You're calling me lame.

Do you think I should talk to my girlfriend about it?

Dude, she's scared.

Relationship problems are for your bros and their podcast.

Yeah.

And not for talking about with your girlfriend.

You have to monetize it.

You have to publicize it.

But that aside, and maybe a few other small things, like a little Lena Khan announcement.

I got a tiny small one, kick us off.

Yeah.

Did you guys see that HBO Max changed its name?

Or I'm sorry.

Wait, Max changed its name back to HBO Max.

Back to HBO Max today.

Wow.

It was HBO Max, then it was Max, then it was Max with a different logo.

Then it was Max with a different logo.

And as of today, it's back to HBO.

Steve, that's not even the full history.

You're forgetting about before that it was HBO Go.

And then before that, HBO was just a subscription package that you paid for in addition to your cable.

Yeah.

Right.

I had HBO Go.

I used to use my dad's friend's family's direct TV login to get into their HBO Go account to watch Game of Thrones at iSchool.

That's bad.

And then I just kept that password and account saved on my computer until they got rid of HBO Go.

Because you could use that up until like a few years ago.

I feel like most people have at least one account they don't pay for.

I feel like that is most people.

They are

100%.

But they're cracking down, apparently.

I hit on my friend.

I was like, hey, I need your Disney Plus password again.

He's like, they're cracking down on IPs now.

No, I heard.

I heard.

We can't even steal and loot the streaming services' content anymore.

The business side of it was Netflix finally crossed the fucking Rubicon.

They finally said, hey, we're cracking down on password sharing after being cool with it for so long.

Everyone's like, oh.

This is it.

It's the last straw.

I'm canceling Netflix.

You've pissed me off.

And then nobody canceled Netflix.

And then the subscriptions went way up.

And so everybody learned that that's the way to do it.

So now everybody's cracking.

Everyone's copying with Netflix.

Disney's doing it.

HBO is doing it.

Everyone's cracking down on password sharing.

We just talked.

We were hanging out with a friend.

Perhaps I won't name him, the Brimson Cler,

who said that they pirate everything because they're sick of all the streaming services.

So they just went back to pirating and they use a home Plex server to stream everything now.

You can use Plex and your own video files and then use that to stream to your phone, your computer, like even when you're away.

And he just built this out.

It's apparently pretty easy to do.

I was reading about it myself and I was like, oh, this is, I mean,

it would allegedly be awesome to do that.

When I'm trying to do something like pretty simple on my computer and then somebody messages me and you're like, why don't you just install your own Linux box with these different server tools and use these client interfaces to do like a hundred different things and that way you can run the server yourself instead of needing to pay a company four dollars a month to do the whatever minecraft server i would like at some point i'm normally my money my time is worth anti-tech i'm normally i'm not anti-tech i'm normally like i don't want to make the hard painful thing but the crimson blur is also lazy like that and i'm he figured it out so it can't be that yeah okay all right him doing that means it can't be that hard I think the part of what you're saying, and I know you're embellishing, but I think people are getting pushed to the edge where it's like, okay, to watch watch all the things I want to watch or do all the things I want to do, I need to pay, instead of like a couple seven dollar subscriptions, I'm paying four different $20, $25 subscriptions.

The thing you describe does not sound like some easy alternative to paying.

No, it's definitely more steps, right?

There's always a layer of friction there that I think the average person would never fight through.

But I think it's one of those things where it's not as hard to set up as you think it is.

And then once you do it, you've fought through all the friction that you need.

Pretty much.

Based on my audience, people are pirates like crazy.

I remember when I was younger, there was a huge wave of piracy around music.

I would pirate everything I ever listened to.

Yeah.

And then it kind of dropped off as Spotify became consumer friendly and, you know, all that stuff became.

And I feel like right now, the way that subscription services are, all these young people are pirating everything.

They talk about pirating every single show.

I can't think of something that don't pirate.

I think music might be one of the main ones, right?

Because you don't have to.

I think they don't pirate music.

I didn't do pirates.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Music is one of the things you don't have to pirate because the streaming services basically have everything available, right?

But I feel like as soon as you tread into

TV, it went in this direction.

I feel like sports is the most obvious one.

I'm finally encountering this as like I've become an active NBA fan in the last few years, like gone from passively following the league to actually wanting to watch a lot of the games.

And it is a miserable experience to watch sports games.

You, I, I, I pirated for so long or like watched, you know, the streams online of games.

That also is inconvenient in its own way.

And then I've been trying a YouTube TV, like free trial subscription to watch the NBA playoffs.

It works pretty well.

But then you have.

like blackout laws and stuff.

And I'm like, I can't even watch the teams that I want to watch the most.

And then this also, once I start paying it for it, like full price is like 80 bucks a month just so you can watch sports.

And then you have all these addendums on like which actual games premiere on which channels and stuff.

It's just, as soon as you like create so much inconvenience, people start looking for

crack the code of

you can watch an NBA game and restream it with your own commentary with chat on the side.

If they can crack that or they can monetize it and they get the money from it,

they're going to make billion, untold billions.

If you could have like an ex-player pull up the feed, be able to stream it, and then the money from that is commercialized and goes back to the NBA, it's going to make so much fucking money.

If you could just make it easy, because everyone young now watches the highlights or the Stream East, you know, illegal stream.

But people can't figure out how to monetize it.

That's like the big thing.

But they haven't even tried.

They only do it in the old, cramped, you know, package way.

Because they're still cashing out on the old cramped package way.

One thing I was thinking about, though, you know, like the NBA complaints about, it's been complaining about its ratings a lot and how this is going down.

I think to me, the most obvious thing is it is, you have a ton of young fans who aren't going to pay for basically a cable package to follow the sport.

Right.

I wonder if you add up, like, I wonder if the ratings or like the fan engagement is actually going down for watching full games

if you include all the free pirated viewership.

Yeah, I wish there was a way to know that.

That's a really fair point.

Because I do think there's an argument of like, oh, maybe ratings are going down no matter what because people just passively engage through like highlights and stats rather than watching actual games.

But I wonder if you include the data of the illegal streaming, if there was a way to do do that,

if the ratings are actually going down at all.

Like you have to

watch official, like in a way they would count my view, the NBA at all this season, but I've watched almost every fucking game through Streamies, Piracy, or YouTube.

So like I'm not getting counted, and I assume some people like me.

So yeah, that's probably a fair point.

I wonder if the cultural relevance is still there or increasing, but it's not being tracked.

That's why I feel like the NBA specifically is more culturally relevant than ever.

Like there's more fans and like it seems to be a growing sport, especially globally.

Like basketball is becoming bigger and bigger.

So it's hard for me to believe that the ratings of the league are also going down at the same time.

Like genuinely.

Maybe we should call NBA Max.

That's for the schools.

And then, but eventually

NBA.

It's just Max.

It would just be Max.

Similar to HBO.

NBA isn't really the brand name.

Nobody cares about that.

But they love the word Max.

We actually, no, no, no.

What if it was NBA Go, but you used your cable subscription to log in still?

You know what's fucked up about it is somebody got paid a lot of money to be the consultant that said, you know, we have to change this name or this logo or this, you know, millions of dollars of a company that's in debt.

Warner Bros.

Discovery is like going to some fuckhead to be like, yeah, this is the idea.

We need to be HBO.

It's not some fuckhead.

It's a college student who started looking into this a few months ago.

But they went to an ID leak.

Yeah.

So

shows them to go back and just crazy.

You have no respect for consultants.

It's disgusting.

It's disgusting.

Oh, my God.

You wouldn't believe the things on and off the pod that he says about consultant.

I will take this stand.

Every episode, he starts by sacrificing a consultant in the bathroom.

It's covered in blood.

And I say no.

I stand for consultants and the good one that is.

And there's no between.

As our Patreon subscription revenue grows, we will hire a more expensive consultant to sacrifice every episode.

Right now, it's just Deloitte.

We're just going to give Maine Capital to McKinsey.

I mean, I can dream.

We've set some lofty goals.

Unironically, let's hire a consultant and see what they tell us to do with the podcast.

That'd be so funny.

Dude, they'd say to like fire Brandon out of TPI.

Now you're going to want to cut with a headache.

You're going to want to cut some costs.

Let's do a consultant episode.

We do everything they say, and it's all based on a consultant.

And like, it's probably like really fast topics.

We're constantly changing.

There's like ads everywhere.

This would be awesome, dude.

This is what you can then they do.

I want a black bar over my

or big arrows being like, hey, click here, click, comment on it.

I had one close friend of mine worked at Deloitte for a long time.

He was putting up a record wow hours at that job.

Oh, just clocking in on wow.

Yeah, just playing an incredible amount of wow.

Anyone who finds a way in the cracks of the white collar office system to do nothing and play video games all day and get paid.

It's a bravo.

I respect you.

I like that villain share.

Yeah.

I don't like that.

And you know why?

Because I've been on the receiving end where I needed people to actually get their shit done and they didn't.

Here's an example of a company you might have heard of.

The fuckers at Twitch didn't do any work ever.

Okay.

Back me up.

Have you ever worked with Twitch?

I'm backing up.

This is unfortunate.

I'm working up Blur.

I have worked with Blur.

I didn't work with Blizzard.

Talk to me about how you're playing League of Legends all day at Twitch.

No, I played Smash Bros.

Melee.

Oh, yeah.

I had French and people at Twitch.

And this is also the case at Blizzard.

So when I worked at ESL, we worked with Twitch and Blizzard.

All the shit, all the responsibility of making a show happen fell on me.

And then they would be like, oh, sorry, can't reply today.

We have a big raid going on.

It's Thursday at 2 p.m.

It's called culture.

The French, it's called culture.

It didn't work at all in their office.

They refused to work.

They're like, hey, sorry, we've already hit 25 hours of work.

It's the French.

Well, also, the French were even worse.

They played video games all day.

Kanam on your side.

Okay.

Because

I love French people.

However, it is very frustrating to to work with French people when there's dead points.

And let me be clear, the French office was telling us what we needed to do and then would clock out for the next four days

and mask off, say, Europeans in general.

And office culture are costly.

Because they have a higher quality of life.

Because they get so many fucking holidays.

I had a German colleague who has like a bank holiday every two days.

Every two days, there's like a quote bank holiday and they took all of August off.

Fuckers with this better quality of life.

it's just you know like honestly I'm stuck under this fucking you know boot heel of America so you better fucking work along with me if you're getting if we're in the same company if my if you're if we're if I'm in NVIDIA America you're in NVIDIA Europe fucking send me the files

because otherwise I have to do it same deadline so I'm just doing it and you're on

I suffered a lot because if people are playing video games or European or both

and I

feel like I'm with all due respect but holy shit did that make my life worse many times?

I feel like if you push past Americans, you get to like Taiwan, where

TSMC is apparently complaining about like the quality or devotion of the American employees.

Oh, for sure.

Then they're the like super hardcore opposite end of way too much.

Everybody just has a different

Chinese video one.

They were looking for waiting on me and I was waiting for you

for sure.

For sure.

It's the chain of like who's going to work more out of it.

It is fun.

It is funny.

It's going to circle down economics from the French to the Americans to the Chinese, just waiting for the upper row to do work.

Waiting for a short file to be sent.

I do.

I mean, the European thing is funny because it's true.

Like, you'll just, you'll hit people up that you work with and then you'll get the out of office for this like two-week stretch, but that'll happen like four times in a year.

Yeah.

I'm, I'm a little, okay, and I say this as someone who's been famously plays video games at his office.

Sure.

It's fine.

I'm actually a little with Doug, only because in a broader sense, if you're the person who abuses that all the time and you develop no skills in the time that you've worked there, which is,

I think so many white collar jobs, you have plenty of time to fuck off.

The idea that you have to be at your desk working seven, eight, eight,

to eight hours a day straight

is just, to me, like

lunacy.

Like no one, no one, even if a culture maintain, a company culture keeps this idea of like you sitting in your desk for eight to 10 hours and you can't leave.

Very rarely is the person actually working.

actually.

You're actually working.

Pretty much never.

You don't get eight hours of good mental work a day.

So I'm not a person who thinks that is essential, but I do as the person who

I have hired a lot of people, not just at my job now, but I've been a part of the hiring process at companies before this too.

Hiring people that say they have a bunch of experience on paper, that also are capable of speaking well in the interview,

and then turns out they actually have no ability to do any of the work because I'm like, yeah, fuck off and play TFT, Nick Yingling, for four hours every day.

I'm like, that you are avoiding naming anyone's work until now, and it's fucked Nick Yingling.

I'm specifically naming Nick Engling because he's an incredible worker.

He's genuinely, he's genuinely amazing at his job, but he does on the days where he doesn't have a lot to do, he comes in and plays some video games, and then he does like the maybe the two hours or the hour of work that he has to do, and then maybe another day he'll work like eight hours or nine hours, right?

It depends on what he needs to get done.

I think the problem is some people will find this job at a giant corporation.

They'll work.

And I'm not faulting you for scamming Deloitte.

I don't care about that part.

I care about when you come to me and ask for a job and then you, and then you, and then I hire you.

And then I, you know, selfishly am on the receiving end of your

lack of skills.

That would be my selfish defense of what

I'm different.

I'm different.

Because I'm a boss who says, yes, fuck.

I don't care if you play video games at work, just as long as your work gets done.

That's pretty sick.

I think that's fair.

I will say it is worth noting.

This is the asterisk for the audience, that I go to their office quite a bit.

Every single time I've come in past 2 p.m., you're playing Martio Car Wing.

Every time.

And you're yelling at whoever you're playing against.

You're mad at me.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, they deserve it.

That's part of it.

So consider that for once.

But, yeah, I'm a true, I live and die

values.

So I think that makes sense.

And so you're saying, let's put this together.

You like to play video games at work.

You don't focus as much as previous generations, and you're Gen Z, right?

It's almost as though there's some sort of generational pattern here of people who are working, engaging differently.

Talk like crazy.

Dude, let's talk about Gen Z because this actually relates to it quite well.

Yeah, I do want to.

Okay.

So a couple weeks ago, I just stumbled upon an article about Gen Z Z specifically having lower rates of participation in romantic relationships.

And that was kind of the catalyst for getting into this topic.

But I think we, even on the episode, I think it was

the first episode we did where we talked about Gen Z being more lonely than other generations.

And I think

I have looked into things, you know, why is Generation Z seeing all these trends of different things in their life going a very different direction than it was for millennials and Gen X, all these people before them.

Specifically, this is while researching what is affecting Gen Z primarily, I was surprised across all of these countries, the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, all of them have lower rates of alcohol consumption.

They're drinking less than previous generations.

They are having less sex than previous generations.

They have lower rates of participation in dating in general, or like fewer romantic relationships.

They're sick.

And then this frequency, so even if you are getting older, like for example, maybe there's a delay in, like Gen Z people are on average having sex for the first time later in their life.

But even once they've had sex later in their life, they have it less frequently than millennials did or the previous generation did at the same ages.

Yeah, it's worth worth mentioning for this because I read the article you sent that all of this stuff is about previous generations at the same age.

They measured for that.

They accounted for how much sex boomers are having right now.

Yeah, exactly.

It's funny because it's also that.

It's actually also that.

But when I was reading through the stats, because I was careful with the wording, because that was Gen Z is having less sex than boomers right now.

They're like seven-year-olds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

What?

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, I thought it was a good idea.

So it's also that.

That was the thing.

It's like, depending on the studies you're reading, they are delivering a different version of the information.

So I saw that and I was like, well, you know, maybe it makes sense.

You're in your like 40s, your 50s.

You either are in your like marriage with a consistent partner, you're more confident in yourself.

Like there's, there's a bunch of reasons I could see why maybe you're having sex more than somebody who's like 18.

But

it's, it's law, when you just hold these things across the same age groups, like when you look at the stats of these previous generations

when they were 18 or when they were 25 uh these things hold true the other thing that is also declining in all these places is cigarette smoking um however this is the one i want to put an asterisk on is uh this is heavily offset by the growth of vaping in most of these countries

yeah so nicotine use is actually not declining very much at all but cigarette smoking is falling

a lot is that a plus i think that's a like i think that's a small dub right

It's not a big, but it's slightly better.

Zin's less harmful than cigarettes.

You're getting way more nicotine, though.

Is that

doesn't it like hurt your lungs less?

Yeah, it hurts your lungs specifically less.

I'm not going to go out here and explore the consequences.

Oh, sorry, you're not a doctor.

The other thing I wanted to mention, too, is that

cigarettes are bad.

When is AI going to solve cigarette smoke?

The mark of

marks of adulthood, that we might say, like getting a part-time job or learning how to drive.

It depends a little on the country here, but overall, in all of the countries I'd mentioned, these are also happening at later times in life.

So the main thing we wanted to zone in on here is specifically the

lower rates of sex and participation in relationships.

And one thing that was pretty shocking to me is uh

probably the first thought I had was how much of a falloff is it really?

When did this trend actually start?

You know, were millennials dealing with this in comparison to Gen X or Gen X in comparison to.

So if we looked at participation in relationships in the US,

it looks like in their teen years, about 78% of baby boomers

had a relationship at some point during their teen years.

When they were teens, okay.

But and then Generation X, 76%.

So

basically the same thing, right?

But then millennials, it drops to 66%.

And then Gen Z, it drops to 54%,

which is crazy.

And

that fall off is so aggressive.

But one thing I think is interesting about this, because we're going to delve into, I think, why we think these things are happening and just general opinions and perspectives of also people in the Discord that we talk to about this is.

I think the first immediate answer that a lot of people want to go to is phones and technology and the isolation that comes from that.

But millennials saying 66%

makes me think about this a bit differently.

It feels like a trend, especially because it's across so many different countries as well, that makes me think this trend, like if you just removed phones from this picture altogether, my feeling is that this percentage would still be lower.

Maybe not as much.

Maybe there's a lot of factors at play here, but I do feel like because there was already a slight downward trend starting, that phones and the internet aren't the only thing at play affecting this.

And I wanted to open up this to you guys is

why, why do you think this is happening?

I think it's crazy that across all of these countries,

these are places across Europe, North America, Asia, it's the trends are all the same.

So why?

Yeah, I mean, one thing I want to say is, so Gen Z is a pretty broad range of experiences.

Like the youngest Gen Z is 13 right now, and the oldest is 28.

So the older Gen Z's are basically millennials.

Like you're basically, they have very similar cultural markers growing up.

And then the youngest Gen Z's are basically Gen Alpha.

They say skibbity raise and they play fucking Roblox.

So it's like it's a huge, huge gap.

Like a 28-year-old and a 13-year-old have almost nothing in common.

It reminds me of it.

No, I hang out with a lot of them.

We get along.

When I was, you know, like early 20s or whatever, and all these same conversations happened about millennials.

And I would look it up.

Some New York Times writer would be like, millennials love experiences.

They're very experienced ripping.

And I was like, there's like a hundred million of us.

What the fuck are you talking about?

It's so broad.

This is a chai.

Me to my best friend were different people.

Don't lump me together with 90 million people.

It's obviously experience.

This is extremely overgeneralized.

So that's what I want to say.

I think, I mean, I think there's a lot going on here.

I think phones is one part of it.

It's affecting everyone of all ages.

And maybe Gen Z.

We should clear, like, all like 80 million Gen Z are sigmas, to be clear.

That is true.

That is true.

Generally disputed.

Yeah, yeah.

But for everything else, there's nuance, right?

Dude, the jawlines of this generation could cut down.

But one thing I noticed when reading a lot of those comments, too, from our viewers, talked about this, is like, man, one through line over and over is COVID, where I feel like that hit Gen Z like a certain age of Gen Z, especially like a baseball bat to the head, dude.

I think that that racked up some damage socially and

cultural markers get just delayed, like dating and getting a

license and all these things got majorly delayed.

And I think those were happening anyway.

And I'm sure the trends are longer term.

But man, did COVID like accelerate it and throw things for a loop?

And maybe speaks to the aggression of the falloff rather than not being the sole factor.

Let me throw out some quotes from our Discord.

So these are folks who I pinged about, I sent, you know, pinged like 3,000 people last night in the Discord.

Sorry about that, but got a lot of good feedback.

So from Erwin, since COVID, talking about socializing and how they felt like socializing was pretty normal up until COVID.

Since COVID, this has completely degraded.

I lost contact with most of my university friends because of it.

From what I heard of younger people still in university during and since COVID, it has not gotten back to normal in terms of social aspects I experienced.

From Fummy, the biggest part of the problem, in my opinion, is mental health.

COVID had a huge impact on it and messed everything up

as a domino effect.

And then other people basically saying COVID like pushed everything back.

So what might be happening is it's just just taking four years longer for Gen Z to have the same experiences.

So, one quote I thought was interesting from B2 Brawler was: 30 is the new 20.

Everyone's going to be piping in like five years when all the Gen Z and baby millennials start getting to 30 since the runway to adulthood has expanded.

Hey, I do.

You're almost there.

Yeah.

You're almost there.

You need to start piping for some time.

For me, I look at myself.

I wonder what it'll be like.

As my dad described the 20s.

And then there's other sentiments of like it being pushed back.

So I think that's really interesting.

And even, you know, again, it's like Gen Z is not like some wildly different experience, right?

Like, we're all really all in the same camp here, um, uh, unless you're that old, but uh,

younger than you,

but uh, you know, it does seem interesting of like all of us, I think, have experienced the fact that our parents were like, oh, yeah, we were like married and having kids by age like 24.

Dude, and none of us do.

I mean, not none, but like, you know, for our generation, that's it's been pushed back so far.

So, I do wonder to what degree, like, gen millennials and Gen Z specifically were just having our adult phases pushed back.

And then COVID accentuated that.

Dude, I think that's my grandma called me for my birthday recently.

Very sweet.

And I asked her, I was like, hey, grandma, what were you doing when you turned 34?

She's like, yeah, I was on my third kid.

I was like, wild, man.

And she was like, talking about

10th job.

I was like, yeah, I

played Hitman on stream.

You know, it's wild.

I mean, I do feel like these, these cultural markers keep getting pushed back.

Some part of of it has got to be economic, too, right?

Not just fun.

It's got to be like people are having a tougher time.

You know, if you have no clear path to buy a house or whatever, then everything seems stretched out.

Like that, that used to be something you could do on your first job

at 20, 21.

You could put a down payment on a house, right?

Yeah, but okay, I do think that's part of it, but that...

That feels like something interlocked with relationships or maybe

the delay in starting stuff like driving driving or working, but like, why would sex be affected by that?

It doesn't feel like a good explanation for that.

Counterpoint, some of these comments reference the idea that

people are feeling, they're not hitting it yet because they're young.

Maybe some of them are still in school, but they are feeling this upcoming

cliff of economic pressure that they have to be fucking ready.

And so they're grinding more or they're like more likely to, or they're checking out more.

One of the two, but like they're, they're thinking about that in a way where a care a more carefree let's fuck kind of guy you know what i'm saying might be a different spot i want to propose a counter and i want to start by asking how did you guys meet your significant others uh i i met through mutual friends okay yeah college so in person yeah yeah i do you agree and i feel this way that most people's long-lasting best relationships are usually met in person It's usually through friend networks, people, and not necessarily like you see them at a bar, right?

But it's like through

connections you have rather than dating apps or online.

And I'm not saying definitively that's the case.

Like my current relationship started online, right?

So it's not, it's obviously, but, but I think broadly that is the trend I've seen that's more likely to be successful.

Getting,

I think no, I want to say yes so badly.

I feel like that's my inner bias.

That is my personal experience.

But when I think about all the people in my life that have asked about how they've met their partners, especially how they meet new people, if they've like started dating within the last few years,

the amount of people that say, Hinge, man, it is so many people.

And I feel like online is

maybe the, it's definitely the majority.

It's by far the majority.

I was trying to pull up a graph.

I mean, statistically, it definitely is the majority.

Maybe the question

you're asking is like, does that equal

something long-term or sustainable?

Two of the big themes I saw.

One is people, and everybody pretty much agrees with this, dating apps suck, right?

So, you know, a couple people, Durank mentioned that Gen Z just doesn't seem to want to meet as many people organically in person.

Tommy

or 1344 said about dating apps, I get a good amount of matches, but I never follow up with any of them because it all feels like lust with no real interest behind it.

Clarina Storm said, I have two close friends who are both looking for a relationship on dating apps.

What can only be described as abysmal results?

It's affecting their mental health drastically.

They laugh it off, but they're hurting badly, even people who who know what's going on.

So it feels, and that's like a recurring thing over and over.

Everybody talks pretty negatively about dating apps.

So I think that everybody's being funneled towards that, right?

And I've experienced that myself.

I mean, you guys have been out of the dating pool for a while, but that's certainly my experience.

Like, that's the way to go.

Even more so if you're somebody who has hobbies and interests that are primarily online or you're not in a dance class or whatever, right?

Like I don't go to bars casually.

So what I heard about dating apps, though, is the idea that, you know, human beings are not well adjusted to an abundance of choice, which is it makes us very, very difficult to commit.

Once, if you think, like if you're in a relationship that you met through online and it's not something goes wrong or something's not perfect, you're much more likely to jettison that.

And because you have a million other options, you can always swipe again.

It's it is poison for your brain, man.

I, I, I, I was on dating apps pretty consistently from age 19 to 20

uh

24 I want to say because I'm 28 yeah I'm 28 right now never got laid once that's crazy

five years

it's because I look for you know look for just you're only there for lust conversations because you open with Mario Kart Wii what's your favorite map yeah do you like funky kong as much as I do I

but I spent so much time on dating apps, you know, figuring out kind of the game of it.

It was how I met most of the people I dated through that time period of my life.

And I've realized towards the last couple of years, especially where I took like longer breaks away from it.

I wanted to focus more on meeting people in person.

The way it had made me see other people, see myself.

I noticed all these terrible things about the way I interacted with people.

I didn't.

I don't think I was able to show

what I think is valuable about myself in a social context.

So, because you're, especially as a guy, I think you're dealing with rejection more than

acknowledgement, right?

So, you're you that kind of eats away at your self-esteem over time, especially as like maybe uh you get ghosted, but also in return, it creates this culture of you ghosting or not following up on people as well, because it's so easy to quote, like upgrade and go continue to swipe.

Um, financially, I think these apps kind of prey upon those insecurities too, and like turn little bits

into ways to monetize like read receipts

looking at who's liked you first all these little layers of monetization on the main on the main apps climb was telling me that he was saying you know they you can pay for seeing who read your messages you can pay for a super like that makes it go at the top of someone's feed you can pay 500 bucks a month for like the ultimate package on tinder which which is like dude You know, that's just telling a lonely person, you know, what they want to hear to extract the maximum possible wealth from from them all the while i think you're developing a very vapid view of the people you're looking at on the app like you it didn't i didn't like the way i was starting to view or value the people i was speaking to or scrolling through and then as soon as you meet in person the whole dynamic changes i think what often sucks completely different about the experience is is

talking to people before on the app was so drastically different from what they were like in person.

And I think I personally,

this is, this is just my personal experience.

I never, and I, you know, I'm bracing for the joke about how I've never had sex before,

but I've never, I've never used the apps to actually hook up with people.

Virginia

was a virgin.

We want a virgin.

I always use them to date and meet people.

And then people I ended up dating, I did end up having sex with, actually.

No, but if I...

Whoa, big guy over here wants to talk about his sex all the time.

But if I've been through his podcast, David, if I've ever hooked up we're not it's not a bro-coded show and you tate okay we want to have a serious conversation about dating without you bragging about your sexual especially you don't have to list every single person you've been saying yeah so all these dudes

jonathan i was going crazy

it's the big three uh uh so i but i i've always

this is just my way of looking at it I've hooked up with people hooking up with people like in a more casual setting has always happened for me in person because that dynamic is like way more comfortable and back and forth and you have a way better read on the other person than over the app where like things are so ambiguous and you're guessing and you feel more insecure you're trying to imagine what they think and you depending on your insecurities i think you take it in more negative directions than like things actually mean and stuff comes across in like the wrong way that so much about in-person communication just conveys automatically if that if that makes sense no it makes a ton of sense so then you know, based on what you're saying and based on this graph here, I don't know if Perry pulled up.

You know, this is how couples meet.

This is heterosexual couples data, but I think it applies the same to homosexual as well.

Look at the spike in the 2010s.

Phones or online in general has to have some, like the way

your experiences line up with this data en masse means a lot of people are more

uncertain who they're talking to, how they feel.

They're more

uncomfortable, like more, more risk-averse, more, you know, I think this is a real

crazy period.

It's a rapid work.

Work was the second highest way that people met

historically, you know, for decades.

And, you know, only below through friends.

And if you think about that and the shift that we have towards like gig culture, towards remote work, towards all these things that make work less likely to be a driving factor of like how you're meeting people in your same kind of space.

It's like this, it makes sense, right?

Everybody would be driven towards dating apps.

Dude, it's just wild seeing every other method plummet to essentially zero as online takes one, not you know, a total market share.

I think there's a bad combination of things here that is like the cultural, there's a cultural shift that pushes a lot of activity in life towards the internet and phones in general, not just dating, right?

And then COVID also juiced that.

And then COVID also making that even worse.

But dating is one of those things that gets basically siphoned in that direction but the experience of dating online is pretty shitty so those things interlock with each other it's like you

you feel like this is the place you have to go and do it it feels more difficult maybe to reach outside of those boundaries to go and date just out in public like i think a question that hits people now is like what do i even do like i don't go we have this idea through media i think at least in american culture of like i will go to a bar and meet somebody it's like well people don't really want to do that.

Or,

and, and now it feels like, okay, it has to be done on the phone, but the phone makes so many things about dating so shitty.

And, and now, because the experience is only there, and that experience is so bad, then you wind up just not doing it at all.

I think something that also sucks about this is as something I've thought about is

people who are, I think, particularly men

who do the seeking culturally, like you, it is very rare that you would have a woman approach you as a guy, even if they're interested.

And so, from the male perspective, you have to do the initiating a lot of the time, the like hitting somebody on hitting on somebody, flirting, et cetera.

You have to lead that interaction, at least in a public setting.

But I think what's also kind of happened is you, as the guy, are, if you're a conscious guy of like being like polite or like non-intrusive, I think

you are more likely to be insecure about what you say to that person.

And then that makes you more tentative of doing it.

And then that means the remaining people, the remaining guys who are willing to say anything at all, are the guys who don't have any self-awareness and say the worst things, which makes the in-person dating experience even shittier for women.

Right.

It feeds into itself.

Because then women are like, oh, well, I shouldn't respond to somebody's coming out to me.

They're usually douchebags, which means less guys who aren't douchebags will do that, which means it's more higher percentage just douchebags doing that.

You know, it's like it defeats on itself.

Because there's a, I think there's a

straight female perspective of dating apps as well, right?

Where their experience is very different than the men, where they get a ton of matches.

Right.

They, uh, and those matches are, I would say, very low quality on average.

The things that they're willing to say to you,

overtly sexual, aggressive,

maybe needlessly mean.

Like, it's very hard on their end to like seep, like scroll through all the garbage they get and find something that's actually worthwhile, especially because it's still through this like internet interface.

And then you have two people on both ends who are getting increasingly

just checked out of the whole system.

Super unhappy with the whole project.

Exactly.

And ghosting each other.

And yeah, I mean, one of the things you said, I want to bring up, because there's a through line in comments there about a real fear of appearing

creepy or off-putting or cringe or cringe.

cringe the word that's used cringe they just don't want to you know they're they've seen so many bad examples get publicized or yeah and then they don't want to be part of that that is not that is not their goal so they it's kind of avoided you just you check out the whole thing i think check out is the good word where it's like i don't see how to win this game so i won't play yeah one crazy thing i only heard about recently um is these are we dating the same guy groups have you guys heard about this so it's it started i guess in 2022 in new york city and now there's 200 of these groups that are largely on facebook And it's basically women, only women can join.

And then they post screenshots of dating app profiles of men and are like, anybody know anything about this person?

So it's like expanding the idea of your friend network that you normally in the past be like, oh, I'm talking to this guy.

Do you know anything about him?

Except now it's 100,000 people all giving comments.

And I first saw this in like a Reddit, a post of a Reddit thread of a woman saying that her brother had been posted on it.

And basically it was just this super mean, just like hypothesizing about how this guy seemed like he would be a creep and would abuse women.

It was just this like total just bullshit about this guy.

But then at the same time, there's a lot of people who I think justifiably are like, oh yeah, I was saved from having this horrible experience with this guy because three other people said it.

But if you just, again, you add that to like socially aware guys and it's just, it adds this sense of like anything you do might be magnified by a literal hundred thousand at this point.

And there's so much attention.

That's not necessarily bad, right?

There's obviously

there's multiple elements to take this.

I actually, there was two comments in Discord that were really surprising to me for that reason, which is one from Lewin: the internet has removed social consequence for bad behavior and lets people kind of just get away with it without proper shame.

And then, and that was like a lot of people were reiterating that.

And then from Hasbro.

Is that true, Wave?

I highlight that.

The internet has removed consequence for bad behavior.

On the whole, yes.

But

I think if you're a public figure,

or not even a public figure, in the example that you just gave, it has the potential to scrutinize you even more at magnitudes

more.

And it feels like the guy.

So, this surprised me because I'm somebody who's been on the opposite end where I've been

maybe too conscious about really not wanting to come off badly.

And that has been a challenge for me.

And I've had to like overcome that and be like, I'm just going to ask this person out and try to do it respectfully and say, fuck it.

That's why I was surprised to see this, these comments.

There's another one.

I think they're not being en masse social consequence for being a creep feeds into a lot of toxic masculinity loops that they get.

So

what I wonder if it's almost like, again, like dating apps kind of pushing people to the extremes where you have people who are douchi are now able to go influence many, many, many people because they don't have the social qualms about being respectful.

Or, you know, they're just saying, fuck it, we ball, I guess.

I think it's a little, I think it's, it's like global warming.

Okay.

I'm excited to hear this.

And it's like, it on the whole, it's getting warmer, but then the winners when they happen are fucking crazy.

That's, that's, that is the best way to synthesize it, I think.

Is is you, on the whole, the internet allows you to get away with so much more and live with so much social, uh, so much less social consequence on average.

Yes, but if you have certain individuals get like mega amplified, this is in the news, this is in the Facebook group, everybody's talking about your high school.

This is a big thread that everybody's gossiping about in the high school because it was shared on Facebook to everybody, right?

Like, and I think the thing you're talking about about people being pushed towards misogynistic places, I think there's there's two things happening there where one, you, because either through a lack of consequence, you can engage in that space and push further and further into its ideology, or I think there are probably pretty real base reasons from experiences on things like dating apps that sort of make you jaded over time.

Like if there's, if you're a guy and your experience on dating apps is shitty and you don't, maybe you're not the most like socially confident and you don't know how to like navigate the system very well and you're dealing with the fact that you're being rejected all the time.

And then you hear about this group that might be sharing and talking about your thing to tens of thousands of people in your city.

And you're being rejected at a scale that you could never be rejected at in person.

I think that's, it's, it's, it makes the, the negative feeling is compounded so heavily.

So now you go and seek out or feel comfort in this community of people that tells you these awful things about women.

And then I feel like that's why a lot of women's perspective on dating is, is the reverse, right?

It's sort of this men are trash, fuck men, fuck all men, like they're fucking terrible sort of messaging.

Right.

Is that is based in very real

experiences.

If you're like, if eight out of your 10 Tinder matches that you just got in the last two minutes are asking to fuck you tonight and you can't talk to them about anything real, that isn't a very good experience.

And that naturally fuels your negative perception of men in the process.

And I think it's funny because this is ignoring like, I don't know, do you have a lot of friends who use Grinder?

No.

Do you?

A little bit, but not many.

Grindr has its

own subset of insane social issues that exist within that app.

And it's like on paper, maybe it sounds like a lot of fun.

Like you want to hook up with people.

It gives you easy access.

It gives you their location.

You can get kind of straight to the point.

Like most of my friends who use Grindr talk about how like they don't even know the person's name a lot of the time.

And it, and that's just kind of the way it is.

But this leaves its own trail of negative consequences too, of people talking about how shitty and shitty the guys are they talk to, about how they don't want to know anything about each other.

They just feel used.

They only they just launch into like sexually aggressive photos and it pressures you to kind of engage in that behavior.

There's a lot of like

body shaming and like race preference stuff that is like very forward on that app that isn't

because of the how outwardly focused on hookups it is.

So it's it's it's interesting.

It's like, even if we leave the dynamic of like straight people on dating apps, right?

And we talk about gay men on Grindr specifically, which isn't necessarily for dating.

It's hooking up.

It has the internet and the app have exacerbated consequences for people there too.

Yeah.

You know what could solve this?

AI.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I do not think AI will help.

Actually, it's not helping at all.

Yeah, I don't know.

Straight up, it's not.

It's not.

Straight up,

it is a weird release valve for people who are.

Right.

It funnels the frustrations, all this stuff into like, here's an outlet that you can just pour.

Yeah, just people, people are like searching for real connection and they're talking to these AI chatbots in a way that is providing them things that humans are not able to.

What I'm hoping, now that we're on it, okay, briefly, I think there's a world where AI, there are AI like dating services that could, I'm not saying be some, holy grail, I don't think they would, but at least be better than, let's say, Tinder.

So, and as much as I want to push back, Doug, you're on the right track, at least as far as the dating app CEOs are concerned.

I learned about this this, literally this week, is that a lot of the

CEOs of these companies, whether it be Grindr, the group that owns, I think, Tinder and Hinge, Bumble, they're talking about AI as this tool that is going to supersede swiping, and that you will have this like

basically tool or like buddy to engage in that like serves you better suited matches

rather than you spending time swiping on people.

He's giving you advice as to like how to talk to people.

This is something that they want to push towards.

Here's my concern.

Let's say, so I go on Bumble, right?

And now instead of swiping, I give it a whole bunch of information about me.

I talk to it for a while so it can develop like an understanding of how I talk.

And then my Doug Doug Bumble bot goes out and finds like, let's the Aiden bot, right?

And this is literally a Black Mirror episode.

And the Aiden bot's absolutely.

And so the two of them start talking.

And unlike us having to have this whole fucking rig and roll where we're like meeting, you know, we're like saying pleasantries and trying to have a conversation, they can do all that.

But then the problem is they would fall in love and you and I are still alone.

And it's, so I think the dating apps are just going to become

AI dating.

I would say it's because a rig and roll is a little bit more.

It was going to be a cool like, like, like drop, like a reality TV show.

You get to tune in and watch it and see it.

And then you get to tune in and be like, is my AI getting laid?

But it probably won't.

it'll probably get not laid at the same rate that you get laid

yeah it's getting ghosted you just feel even worse you're like even my ai can't

scale by millions of bots at once i was thinking i was thinking about this you i you made i thought you were just joking but then i remembered there this literally is a black mirror episode

actually is an episode where they create a clone of you and they put it in a room and then all the little clones of them talk to find who's in love and then it tells you you have your match and then they die and i i just yeah that is one avenue that I think I would never, I could never support.

I think to me,

the baseline human experience of like why you exist, I think it's, it's the reason why when you spend time with like friends and people you know well and just in the presence of other people, you just feel better.

It's it's like a chemical reaction in your brain.

Your brain is happy.

You think you're all sharing a banana.

Yeah, you get your humanist like demands.

And I think navigating the social plight of dating in person and learning how to talk to people is like, it's like the innate human experience that you can't compromise.

I think that's like,

if we're automating that part of life, it's like, it's over.

What am I fucking doing?

What's the point?

That's the one thing robots shouldn't be.

You mentioned a phrase that I want to bring up because I read a really good article with the same title.

And you said.

They're getting rejected more often than anyone went to pre, like just by sheer numbers, you're getting more rejections, which each one of them chips down at your self-confidence and makes you more.

So, there was an article called The Most Rejected Generation Ever, and it was about Gen Z in the aggregate.

Again, not everyone's experience, but about not just dating, but like in general, they're getting rejected from more things at scale.

Like, the ability you can apply to more jobs than ever before, but more of them reject you.

You can apply to more colleges than ever before, but more of them reject you.

And you can find more dating options than ever before, but more of them reject you.

So, you're constantly being told in some way or another that, like, no, no, no, no, no.

And I think that causes people to check out.

And I think,

not everyone and not all the time, but I, yeah, here, there is the article right there, the most ridiculous generation ever.

And it just goes through all these interviews with Gen Z who are like, man, you know, I applied to 300 colleges and, you know, 295 of them gave me a no.

And it's like, maybe getting accepted into five would have been, it is fine, but the previous generation might have applied to 20 or 18 or five.

You know what I'm saying?

Like they're just, they're just doing more things.

Like a typical Zoomer on the apps may be getting rejected by more prospective partners in a week than a boomer has in their entire adult life.

And that's like a real number.

And so

I think that to me is the most plausible explanation for the behavior.

It's a very logical response to getting overly rejected is to is to either change your strategy to something wild, which is like the Andrew Tate or whatever, or to just opt out.

And I think we're seeing so much more of those two behaviors because of this very reasonable getting rejected at scale.

It's depressing.

I'm going to be honest, man, it's sad.

Yeah.

I mean, I would also advocate more towards, you know, when we looked at that graph earlier about where people found their partners, and then suddenly the past two decades, there's this precipitous drop downwards.

You know, the different, all those places were in person and now everybody's meeting online.

And I feel like we should, as a society, try to push back to somehow in-person experiences and increasing that.

But then COVID, general social anxiety, all these experiences that people talked about is then pushing people to stay online more, not meet in person.

And so we have this like double,

it's attacking for both sides and it's so rough.

All these things compound.

I think that's the, that's the main thing is you

like like in this culture of rejection and people getting upset by that and then they act in new ways that they, you know, I think puts off other people and that feeds like the ghosting thing.

I think ghosting has become normal because so many people do it.

So it makes you comfortable with doing it or it makes you want to lash out and do the same thing.

You want to leverage that same thing that made someone else did to you and made you feel uncomfortable.

The one thing I want to bring this back to is this idea that, like, the phones and internet don't have so much to do with the trend or aren't the root cause.

Because we can kind of look back and see that there was a general downward trend starting way before these things were mainstream.

You can see, I think, millennials had more access to technology than

the previous.

Yeah.

And I do, I absolutely think that that is a unifying thing that has an effect and is a reason why it's happening in so many places.

However, I wanted to think about things that precede this that might also be influencing this.

So one thing, I think like this is just the industrialization sort of era, the 1900s.

I think a lot about society has fundamentally changed.

The way we view life and the things we chase, the way we want our careers to develop, the type of like homes, the scale of entertainment we have access to, not just on your phone, but in general, the scale at which entertainment, like video games, like movies,

all of those things exist in a capacity that they did not in the past.

Thinking about growing up in maybe,

I'm not going to hit the years exactly right, but if you're in the 1500s or the 1100s and you were an an average person, what was the book you had in your, you didn't have books.

You had like the, you had your Bible and that was kind of

because books were so expensive and difficult to go right.

Generations have fucked up, Aiden.

The way, the way

my country back,

the things,

I wanted to address this.

I wanted to address this.

Because if we took that argument seriously, I think there is a cohort, especially in America, that say like we are leaving God and Christianity behind, and that's the reason that these things are falling apart.

Dude, a phones for Bible

activism program where you take a kid's Bible and give you a Bible.

Just swap it in.

Like the Australian guns program.

The gun buyback, but it's your phones on the back.

We give you a Bible.

It's so good.

I think

it's happening across so many different countries of so many different languages and cultures.

It is so clearly not an absence of Christian religion.

Put Jesus.

That's in Fortnite.

Dude, he would pop.

You can't tell me it wouldn't sell.

I mean, okay, so I kind of disagree.

Only because of your own data, right?

You had boomers and you had Jed X at very high participation rates for all of these things.

Yeah, but thinking about the years, right?

You're looking at boomers.

You're looking at post-World War II into the decades following when...

They're industrialized.

I think post-World War II, like lifestyle and post-World War II,

like industrialization is sort of what I'm talking about.

I think one one other thing that I thought about was

the

push for individuality, a culture of individual success, and specifically women working, like 50% of the population becoming expected to not just be stay-at-home moms anymore and have a family.

It's like, no, you're going to pursue work and have a life in the same capacity that men do, basically.

Now every person in society is expected to chase kind of the same dreams.

And you now have like two competing ambitions that would be the like foundation of every straight relationship.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

so I think that those things precede technology and I think are like the beginning of these trends shaping up.

And then they happen to like encounter that culture of individual success feels like a baseline for these things starting.

But then we happen to make a bunch of things along the way that made the trends increase by way more drastic margins that enhance all the factors that are at play.

That's fair.

Perry, can you pull up that graph again about the online?

I just want to I want to give a thought that I think fits into what you're saying, which is that.

Do you think God is dead?

I think God is dead.

That's my idea, by the way.

I invented that fucking Nietzsche.

No, okay.

I mean, as you're bringing it up, I'll just say, like,

I...

It's not even that it is online.

It's that it's different.

I guess what I'm saying is that the world is different.

different and i think of someone like if you think about how fast that is cosmically to go from basically nothing to basically everything it's like no one older than you your parents your older siblings they cannot give you advice you are in a new realm with new activities new standards new everything and no one can tell you how to navigate it and i think things like this have happened throughout history and other rapid technological changes and I feel like in a way humans are figuring it out and we are finding ways to adapt to this and we are kind of like, but like the people caught in the middle where we don't know what the hell is going on are the ones getting screwed.

Can you give me an example of how you think we're figuring it out?

Because I think I disagree with that part.

I don't think we're figuring, it's like, sure, we're alive and like society is functioning at like a base level,

but I don't think this transition is being handled very well.

I don't think the average person is like.

I think that's fair.

I guess maybe, maybe I'm hoping they'll figure it out.

I feel like maybe it's a good metric we could use of have we figured it out is: does your country have babies at replacement population level?

Because if your country is literally dying because people aren't having children, that feels like an indication that something is failing.

I see the direction you're going in.

I think

if some passion is going to disappear in two generations, because nobody just wants to have babies for a myriad of reasons, largely economics, structurally, all that types of stuff.

Do you think if they get everybody free super likes on Tinder in Korea, it would solve the

whoa.

We could turn it around.

We could turn it around.

No, I don't know.

That won't work because they, Christianity is actually still pretty lit in South Korea.

They're really

God is not dead there.

So that couldn't be that.

Like a youth bastard with a backwards cap.

I actually, I mean, I don't feel strongly about this, but I think that's a reasonable metric of like something is clearly wrong broadly in society if you can't.

I mean, that's not to say everybody needs to have two babies, but like

fundamentally there's an issue, right?

And like if your society is at replacement levels, that's like, okay, people feel like they have a future to the point that they can meet significant others and raise a family.

And if you don't have that, something is fundamentally wrong.

Sure.

Am I?

How does that land?

I think I can actually agree with you in a general sense.

I couldn't tell because maybe we just brought it up in the context of this graph where you're talking about the scale of online dating.

I do not think what you're talking about is rooted in online dating.

No, no, no, no.

Because that's what you're talking about of this broader trend of like, yeah, as for example, women are all pressured to go have a career, right?

That's one of the

things that we're finding things that are causing people to have less children.

And it's just, it's an interesting metric to look at of like, okay, all this stuff's going on.

There's all these cultural changes.

Talking about the idea of have we fixed it or addressed any of these issues in a major way.

I think one way is to look at are people having families?

That just feels like a very fundamental result of a society feeling healthy for people.

So I want to say, you know, because this brings me to a transition too, I want to talk about in these articles you mentioned, it wasn't just romantic relationships.

There's also

friendships.

I mean, people are reporting more time alone.

They're reporting less close friends.

People say they have fewer close friends than ever.

Like this is this generation has fewer close friends than anyone did at their age.

And they are, you know, spending more time online.

And so it brings me to this article, Perry, if you could bring up the one I have about Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg recently had a quote where he said, no, it's in the Discord, where he said, the average American has the appetite for 10 to 15 friendships, but they only have three.

And we're going to fill that gap.

And he's talking about AI-generated chatbot friends.

I'm fine with Zuckerberg to fill my gap.

Get in there, Mark.

That would be better.

And so my gap is right now.

Right now, they are actually paying people $50 an hour to sample your smile and small talk to train AI chatbots.

Get in there, Mark.

Get in there.

That's some black beard shit.

There's so much

in my life.

Get in.

That's wild.

That is wild.

Maybe he just wants it personally because he's kind of a robot himself.

Maybe he just wants your.

Well, no, he wears a chain now, so he's cool.

That is true.

I heard he was cool.

Yeah, he turned your

oversized team.

He went surfing and the t-shirt that he designed himself.

But maybe he'll just just pay 50 bucks an hour for you to talk to him.

Yeah, to back up what you were saying, a lot of the comments as I asked about this whole topic in Discord were about socializing.

People feel like it's more difficult.

People aren't doing it anymore.

A few that I thought were pretty interesting.

Davious V, who said, most of my friends are attractive and funny, creative, so they shouldn't have any trouble if they put themselves out there, but they're just too anxious to do so.

They don't get out enough to meet people organically.

So

again, this thing of people staying at home, hobbies are isolating, talk online.

Yeah.

Because that can mean the problem is not with dating at all.

It's like a byproduct of socializing.

That's why I was trying to draw it back to like meeting in person.

Cause it's not like necessarily about dating, but it just seems like a lot of fundamental human interactions stem from that.

Fewer third places, fewer.

Yeah.

And then the internet plus COVID supercharging it has just made everybody more online and more isolated.

They're more dank, though.

So many people mentioned the third places thing when we talked about the loneliness stuff on the first episode.

Yeah.

And I actually want to push back a bit.

I actually agree in a broad sense that I want more third places.

I think it's important for people to have a space between, you know, home and working in city.

Like cities should be built with those things in mind.

Costco.

Be able to walk, be able to bump into people.

You can meet and fuck someone at Costco over a hot dog.

Easy.

With a hot dog.

That'd be romantic.

It would be romantic.

Me cute.

But

based off of the trends in all of the countries we just outlined, I don't really feel like that's at the root of it.

I think that's like an edge.

That's like an edge enhancer to all of this.

Because Because if you're going to look me in the eye and tell me that

like the biggest country.

I'm going to tell you if the cost of living has gotten way more expensive.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, this is good.

And the housing's more expensive than the people.

Okay, tell me.

You guys know that.

US?

Yes.

Canada.

Yes.

U.K.

Yes.

France.

Yes.

Germany.

Yes.

Sweden.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

South Korea.

Yes.

Japan.

Yes.

New Zealand.

Japan, maybe not.

Japan's okay.

Japan's okay.

New Zealand, Australia.

Japan compensates for the housing.

Everybody put Japanese.

I see where you're working.

The pushback obviously is like, no, all these places are more expensive or like going to third places is more expensive.

But all of these places still have huge populations.

Most of the big cities in these places have been growing.

Most of these

stuff to do.

Most of these countries have way more like walkable and interactive city environments than the U.S.

and Canada do.

I do not think like the idea that money is preventing you from walking five minutes down the street in paris to go to the park in your neighborhood and meet up with people they'll grind harder than you all right they're trying to make some bread all i'm saying is i do not think third places is the thing adding like huge percents of the lunch

bowling alley every corner in paris they will start and i promise you that i promise you that i think i agree with your sign i hear what you're saying i think that's i think it's a fair pushback I mean, you know, I think what we're circling here is like, there's a lot of factors, right?

There's a lot of factors.

And I say that as somebody who wants to move to a different country because of the city layout and quality of life.

Like I think it's important.

Don't get me wrong.

I do not think it is like a root cause.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was another sentiment that a number of people expressed, which is basically like, you can also put yourself out there and you have to do that.

And like as that's, that was my experience.

I had to start putting myself out there and being more assertive and more confident.

That's hard to do.

And then this gets back to anxiety and isolation, preventing people from feeling like they can go do this.

Cause like you can find things to do.

Like you can do that in basically everywhere if you're in a city there's stuff to do if you're not in a city i grew up in a you could or not like just a boring suburb it's like you can find stuff to do like buy them a patreon sub to this podcast you guys put in two cute

listen together and i want to say something important all right just to again push back from pelmas in the discord personally i pipe at an insane frequency so i'll opt out of this conversation so hey stand people are doing it people are fucking

limited stand viewers especially

if you listen to this you want to get involved in the conversation on on discord you can join, sign for the Patreon, the $5 tier, gets you an extra episode every week, and you get access to the Discord.

You can get piping advice from just to shill it.

Well, no, no, you don't get piping advice, but you get piping updates.

So you can come in here and you can put a little fire emoji if Pelvis got laid up.

You can watch closely enough.

You'll make

Pelmos get laid in the last hour, and it's just a green or a red.

It's kind of like a wordle.

I have, okay, I have two theories I want to posit at the end of this conversation.

One less significant than the other, but you mentioned it briefly.

Is that,

and so I didn't think of this until someone in the Discord brought this up, is that your accessibility to your parents being good people for advice as they apply to life.

This applies to applying for jobs.

It applies to what is the value of school, how you should talk to people, how you should date.

All of these dynamics have changed so much that your parents or figures in your life that you're able to ask for advice are not able to provide very good advice.

That's what I get as the classical example of just go in and hand in your resume.

It just, it does not work anymore.

It doesn't work anymore.

It's close.

Like, it's so different.

Yeah.

And I think that is a small point that I think is worth mentioning where like the rat, the pace of the change has taken role models' ability to really push people in the right direction where it's fractured it.

The last thing that I've thought about is

what you just said.

You said at a certain point, you decided to like put yourself out there.

Right.

And I think that the pace at which you learn things about yourself, you learn things about yourself from like failing, from discomfort, from putting yourself out there, from interacting with other people, like this

fear of rejection, this anxiety that exists.

I think even without phones and the internet, because

entertainment is so

much more broadly accessible, You can take any moment you're uncomfortable, especially now, but even if you go back, this scales as time passes.

You can take any moment that you're uncomfortable and consume some sort of entertainment that satiates you.

You can hit the baba, if you will.

And because you're able to do that in any moment where you feel comfortable, you uncomfortable or you might push yourself in a direction out of basically boredom, you get to sit back and do something passive that occupies you.

So all of these little moments in your life where you would choose to venture out a little further and push yourself a little more happen with wider and wider gaps between them.

And it gets harder and harder to learn things.

And the longer the gaps are too, the more your anxiety builds within those periods of time.

And it makes it harder and harder to finally convince yourself to put yourself out there and learn the things that I think maybe your parents or their parents were learning at way younger ages.

I think that's the wisest thing you said in this podcast.

Yeah.

That's very well said.

I like the way you said that.

I think that's important for people to hear.

Yeah.

Like your life unlocks when you start pushing yourself in uncomfortable ways.

Like the only reason, at least for me, I have this content creator job and I can do any of the things that I can do now or have my relationship or have anything is because I became more willing to put myself in hard, uncomfortable situations.

Everybody you know who's successful is like that.

It's like, yeah.

Well, I mean, there's just people that have rich parents, but I'll share it.

Okay, yeah, but even those people, from my understanding, I don't know, a ton of like, you know, Nepo kids, but they don't seem that satisfied either.

It's like, at some point, you gotta, you gotta put yourself out there and try things and fail and grow.

And that's how you do anything that's worthwhile.

And that's I mean, I like your YouTuber example because, like, you know, a lot of people would say, I can't make X video or whatever, but then you go back to the first, like, your first video, anyone's first video, they're terrible, dude.

Right.

They're fucking terrible.

Everybody goes through years and years and years of failure.

And you, you succeed when you learn to push through that consistently and like hone in on who you are.

And you can't do that by just waiting around.

Like, life doesn't just present you with the solution to everything.

And that's like the one thing that it's exactly what you said.

It's like, I don't think people who are frustrated with the situation right now, which is very justified, should also be under the illusion that life used to be easy and everybody would just hand you everything.

And maybe the boomers made us like feel that way because they talk about it that way.

You go down the street and you give them a firm handshake and you get a job.

I mean, to knock your local dance to the barn dance at the county fair and you find your wife.

You know, it sounds like it was.

If there was ever a generation in human history that had more handed to them, it is boomers in like the U.S.

and maybe the UK.

Yeah, that's it.

I think it's because they conflate.

I think there is a quality of older people that and a piece of that advice that does absolutely hold true.

But what happens is they conflate it often with the financial ease of their life, with their

willingness to like go out and do things and work when a lot of the financial aspects of that generation's success are way broader trends that just do not exist now.

But I think the general base advice of like try things, put yourself out there, fail, learn from it.

Don't be afraid to meet people.

Challenge, like, challenge your fears.

That sort of fucking bullshit you grow up with is actually good advice.

The only things in my life that I'm super proud of and are super meaningful, well, except my like family, all came from being willing to put myself out there.

You tried a lot of families, right?

You like, you were,

yeah, they were the last one.

You were willing to fail, and you said, this guy sucks.

Yeah.

Honestly, I, I mean, if you do all that, you too could be a podcaster.

I wanted to, yeah, I didn't want to go down that route.

There's a lot of options.

I just wanted to say it as an example.

Wrapping up this whole thing before, I think we should talk about a couple other things in this episode.

But I wanted to wrap this up because you brought up a really, really cool topic that I know me and Brandon definitely want to talk about with you.

Is we should talk about the birth rate stuff and how that's trending down across the world.

I think it's a super interesting discussion.

It is related to a lot of what we're talking about now, but it's kind of its own like monster and problem.

And it's very, very interesting.

So I just wanted to like pin that for the people who are listening because I wanted to dive into that so much more, but it's kind of its own like 45 hour long discussion at least.

We'll solve that next week.

Yeah, we should bring that back up.

I think what's most interesting is, you know, as, well, I'll just broad level, let me go ahead, is as governments are realizing how bad this is, how like desperate situation is, like South Korea, for example.

Right.

They're all trying unique and different things.

And it's really fun.

It's to be clear, it's too late for them.

We don't need to be around the bush.

It's up.

I think if they airdrop in Elon Musk and

the, who's the Timberwolves player?

Edwards.

Edwards?

They're going to turn that baby into.

Just a couple of viral dudes.

Viral men.

The two most fertile men.

But like, you know, 40 different countries are all trying these new desperate tactics to get birth rates up, and most of them are not working.

So I think going through some of those will be a fun feature pod.

Yeah.

Let me really quick, before you go, just say thank you to everybody who gave a bunch of notes and opinions on this in the Discord.

I'm going to plug it one more time if you're interested in this.

This is super great.

I'm going to try to

figure out a better way to ask for this type of stuff in the future, but I would love to keep getting people's perspectives on these topics as we go through them.

This was super interesting.

So, I really appreciate all the feedback from everybody.

If you guys enjoy the show, we do an extra hour-long episode every week that you can get with the Discord access, patreon.com/slash EliminateSan.

And we've got even more stuff, a couple other bonus shows as well.

If you want to check it out, we just watched the big short and did a react to that.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's been really good.

This is great.

The Discord is like

fantastic.

It is crazy how awesome it is.

So thank you.

Everybody's a hairline, I guess, in there.

I don't know.

It's a really great conversation and Atriox hair.

And it's those two things.

I'm talking about my hair.

One thing, cool thing I wanted to bring up in small news is in a LinaCon victory.

Well,

she's not in the position anymore.

She's the head of the movement.

She started the movement she started the movement she's the head of the she was the head of the ftc yeah and uh one of the changes they made was that ticketmaster and ticketing sites can't hide the prices or hide their fees in the prices they list anymore the price has to be listed fully including the platform's fee in checkout and that apparently just launched two days ago on May 12th.

So now when you go to Ticketmaster or other equivalent sort of sites,

you now open up a ticket and see the full price like plane tickets.

because they can't do that with plane tickets, right?

Have you ever noticed when you're shopping for flights, it includes the taxes and the full, the full fees

in the list price.

So now Ticketmaster, an evil, evil company, is no longer allowed to lie to you.

I'm sure they will continue to get away with some other things, but I thought this was a cool small win, especially in the wake of her not even being in the position anymore.

It's nice to see something like this go into effect.

She had a couple really awesome things like this.

One of them was one click to cancel, which came into effect where, you know, if you have a gym that is trying to make it hard for you to cancel, because that's their business model is to lock you in.

You can now, you're mandated by law to have one button that you can click to cancel.

That's incredible.

Dude, you know what's fucking crazy?

During COVID, I had a gym membership and it was the only gym membership I've ever had in my life

because I started lifting during

right before COVID and where like me, Ludwig, Slime would all go to the gym together, right?

And I'm paying, I think like 45 bucks a month, I think.

And then COVID comes into effect.

It, you know, we get past the first few months.

It's kind of clear that this isn't just going to blow over.

So I looked to cancel my gym membership and I just couldn't do it because

they didn't have a way online.

When I called, nobody was available.

And then the information online, it didn't give me any method to cancel like over mail or on the website.

So, and it's COVID.

So I just kept paying the subscription for another year and I just couldn't cancel it.

I was like, this is unbelievable.

I can't believe you're allowed to do this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, you know, Lena Kong was a true believer in, you know, if you're going to have a market, the only way it works is if both sides have full information.

She talked about this a lot.

You know, you need to be able to tell exactly what you're getting and what you're buying and that you're not being tricked.

And it makes things run more smoothly because they, you know, you're not going to pay that list price and they have to lower their price.

So it's awesome.

One click cancel.

This, the things you did with, I mean, this isn't hold up in the courts, unfortunately, but non-competes where, you know, that's not going to hold up.

That didn't?

Didn't hold up, unfortunately.

We'll maybe get there eventually, but the idea that, you know, a corporation could,

people like Jimmy Johns was putting sandwich artists in non-competes.

And they, when they got fired, they couldn't go to another, they couldn't go to Subway.

They couldn't go, which is fucking insane, right?

But all it does is drive down wages because you're desperate.

You can't go anywhere else.

You know,

I didn't tell you guys this.

I put a little addendum in Doug's contract.

If he ever quits the show, he can't keep doing his YouTube channel.

Yes, dude.

Lena tried to stop it.

Shake my hand.

I thought you were going to say.

Shake my hand.

I thought you were going to say about him on the yard.

You can't go on the yard if he quits our show.

Oh, God.

It's called legal expertise, baby.

Sorry, Lena.

Dude, a larger story here is that I'm going to give some credit here to the Trump administration.

I usually don't do that.

I'm pretty negative.

I was under the impression that the new

change of the FTC to be more pro-consumer, to start and break up monopolies, to have some impacts on that side would be gone.

I thought they would be completely wiped out.

Most of that stuff is continuing, if not being more aggressive against big tech specifically.

Like the cases against Google to try and possibly spin off Chrome, the cases against Meta to possibly spin off Instagram have, if anything, there's kerosene thrown on it.

Like there's more effort.

So I'm shocked about that.

That has been a big surprise for me for my predictions like in January.

And I just wanted to shout that out.

Like whatever has changes the FDAC has caused more long-lasting permanent change to that organization's ability to actually do something for the American consumer, which has been completely like, used to be a rubber stamp for whatever the fucking corporations wanted.

Which is cool.

I'm going to tie that to the other thing the Trump admin did this week.

Yeah, so another credit to them is

the pretty pro-consumer executive order.

Trump on Monday, so two days ago from the day of that we're recording this, signed in an executive order basically saying that pharmaceutical manufacturers, the drug companies, are no longer going to be allowed to sell their drug prices any higher than the lowest pricing they sell to any other developed country, which is crazy because right now, the way the drug industry largely works is that drug companies make these drugs and then sell them to Americans at like 10 times the price of the rest of the world because the rest of the world doesn't agree to buy them for that price.

But we have this whole fucked up healthcare system where it's like everything's crazy expensive and there are these rebates.

It's this whole mess.

So he signed an executive order saying that the health secretary, which is RFK Jr., has a 30-day deadline to tell drug makers that they have to lower prescription drug costs.

Yeah, if you pull this up, Perry.

And so what they're saying is, hey, all the drug manufacturers who right now, because we have a free market healthcare system, are going to have to lower it and charge the same prices that they do in other countries, which again might literally be a 10th of the price.

Like if you go to the UK, the UK pays, you know, a fraction of what we pay in the US because our system just every, just kind of cycles this massive, massive expenditure.

And then we or companies all pay for it.

It's a disaster.

That being said, uh, not clear if this is going to hold up.

But anyway, this is, it's very like, it's, so it's, you don't really have the, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, the health secretary does not have the power to go to a bunch of drug makers and like impose fees or anything.

There's not a law that allows him to do this.

So Trump is like trying to will this thing into existence.

But in theory, a lot of people would support it.

Maybe it becomes becomes a bipartisan thing in Congress.

All the people, I was looking into who supports and opposes this, all the people who support it.

It's like Bernie Sanders, AARP, like all the people who deal with health insurance and like trying to get seniors medicine, the people who have been burned by having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for medicine in the U.S.

for some goddamn fucking reason.

And then, and then I looked into all of the like supporters and it's like this pharmaceutical company, this drug carrier

consortium, this air, yeah, sorry, everybody who's opposed to it.

So it's exactly what we'd think.

Everybody is on board with this except for the drug companies.

And the single argument is it'll reduce innovation.

And it's like, man, I'm all,

but it doesn't.

It is cool.

I think this is one of those things where I saw the clip this morning of him.

He delivers, you know, his Trump way of speaking about like, I have this friend.

He's a lovely guy.

He's got a shot.

He's a sad guy.

He gets a zip and he

spends.

He called me and he told me it's $1,200 $1,200 in New York and it's only $88 in London.

And I said, that's awful.

And then, but, you know, he's building up to something that's really.

good and reasonable something that actually yeah all people would want this zero prescription drug cost and my dad my dad was the person who sent me the clip and he weirdly it wasn't a link he downloaded it and sent me like the file and then also also it had chinese subtitles so i mean your dad's on fucking waybo getting his news updates on yeah and i was like dad where are you watching this

uh I thought that but this was one of those things where it's like I kind of will believe it when I see it but if it happens this is this would be fantastic

the odds that this goes through let me jump into that because I want to talk about this is like okay two things number one you mentioned uh free market I think I just want to push back and I want to say our healthcare system is nothing like a free market it is completely It's immersed with middlemen and rules and regulations.

Well, by free market, I mean the drug manufacturers can set whatever prices they want.

And there isn't a government agency basically enforcing some degree of pricing even in the case like the UK you basically have a single health care provider so if a drug company from the US goes to like Ozempic for example goes to Nova Nortis they go to the UK and they say we want to sell you Ozempic for a thousand dollars like we do to the Americans yeah Britain says no fuck off and they keep saying no fuck off up until Novo agrees to sell it for like a hundred dollars yeah that's we don't have that in America there's all these different players that is a free market though that is like them saying we'll walk if you don't like if you go to the store and you and they want to sell you a car for a million dollars and you say no till you lower the price.

But in America, the insurance companies, the pharmacy, like they all have the option to not buy these things.

They just don't have enough negotiating power.

It is a market power.

Well, okay, here's the thing.

In America, the, the, you know, like Medicare, Medicaid, the government is not allowed to negotiate.

Legally, the pharmaceutical lobby has originated.

So that is, yes, that is.

They cannot use their market power.

Like, let me give you an example of shut up.

Shut up.

Don't come from my free markets.

Example is like, this is not a great example, but I'm off the top of my head.

Like Walmart.

Right.

If they go to Tide and want them to lower the price of the detergent, they do this all the time.

They say, hey, listen, we're not going to let you be on our shelves once you lower the price.

So Tide, knowing that they have access to all these consumers, does their best to lower the price.

Yeah, you're not going to be able to do that.

Medicaid specifically can't.

So that fucks it up.

So I think that's fine.

But I want to say also, I am not of the opinion that pure free market works for healthcare because, you know, if I go to buy a Honda Civic and I don't like it and they give me a bad price, I can buy a Toyota and it's fine.

But if I go to buy insulin and I I don't like it and

I die.

The ability to die, you cannot walk.

The ability to walk is like the core essence of a good market.

And like you can't do that with healthcare.

You will die.

So I understand.

He has so many stupid examples.

What I want to say here is this

thing that Trump is talking about, this matching U.S.

healthcare prices to like the Europe and other countries is what Bernie Sanders has been pushing for for a long time.

Like this is a core platform of his original run for president.

And RFK mentioned it in this speech.

He mentioned like this is a part of

Bernie Sanders ran on these exact ideas, but they never got him through.

So

and Bernie's response to this, which I think was profound, which is like, hey, this has been tried before.

Trump himself signed a similar deal in term one and the courts always block it.

And so it becomes this thing where you get this headline and you're like, hey, this is great.

But the only real way to do it is to push comprehensive legislation through Congress, which they never do.

So it's like becomes this executive order where you, where it's almost like setting up to have the courts block it so so you can then denigrate judges.

Like that's to me, it feels more like, hey, I can do this thing that everyone agrees is great.

It will get blocked by the courts because we're not doing it the normal, right way.

And then I can go, why the fuck are judges allowed to do this?

Let's, let's get rid of judges, which is like a real,

like a weird, bad lineup.

Like, I, you know what I'm saying?

I don't like the way that's headed.

Um, it's like setting up for an easy win against the judicial system, which is not so.

Yeah, I completely get what you're saying.

For people who have kind of not followed this deeply, largely what Trump has done in his admin in his administration so far is dropped tons of executive orders, which to be clear are less, they have less legal authority than Congress, who's the one who's supposed to be writing laws.

So it's like he can write these laws.

It's not supposed to be a law, but he can write these like orders of what happens, right?

But if Congress comes in and overwrites it or the

judicial system overwrites it, it's gone.

So this executive order that he signs is only relevant up until the legal system confirms, yes, this is legit.

Right.

Or Congress comes in and like reinforces it with with a real law.

So, this is a

vibe.

He's shooting a vibe out into the world.

And if anybody, if a, if a federal judge comes in and like tries to stop it, it will go.

And I just want to be clear.

He has written this exact vibe at the end of his last term.

And it got blocked.

It was different.

It was only for Medicare.

Okay.

But, yeah, I mean, it was, it was the idea of matching drug prices to them.

And that got blocked.

And this is more expansive and will likely get blocked.

So like, if you're a president who has a problem with the judiciary, one thing you can do is say, I think everyone should get free candy, executive order.

And then when the judge goes, that's, you can't have that authority.

You can't do that.

Then suddenly you go, wow, the judges want to block your free candy.

And it's a problem.

So like, I think Bernie's response to this was measure, which is like, hey, I agree with the theory of this, but the way you are doing it is, it seems like a different goal.

Yeah.

And that's my pushback.

It's like, I agree with this idea.

Yeah.

So I'm on the same page.

I think what I'm hoping for with this, I think it's very unlikely this, this stays.

There's no, you know, obviously the pharma industry is like one of the heaviest lobbying, right?

So they're going to do everything they can to stop this.

In theory, though, people are so pissed off at the pharma industry.

And this headline is big enough that this would then incentivize Congress to act, right?

If you can wrap it, because like I didn't even know that he did anything like this in the last Trump election because that Trump or the Trump administration, because the first Trump term was so obscenely chaotic, he signed that in like 2019 or 2020.

So this is around January 6th, right?

Like that got completely overshadowed by everything else.

That was big.

Yeah.

And I think this, this has more of this shape

to get like bipartisan people across the board to be like, yes, this should be happening.

At the very least, Medicare and Medicaid should be able to negotiate prices because that shit is crazy.

100 million%.

I read that that's changing soon, but I didn't read more into why because that's baffling.

And I just want to, I mean, you could jump in here a second, but I just want to say, like...

You touched on it, but it really is like one of the deepest rots at the heart of our system is that we have an extraordinary number of well-paid pharma lobbyists, at least one per senator, one per congressman, one per legislator, that are just full-time job is to like funnel money into these people to make sure they don't make any progress on making healthcare better.

100% hate that.

And I think this is against their interests, but I do want to say like the day this executive order came out or was announced, the headline, their stock prices dropped because they're like, okay, this is bad.

And they have immediately bounced back and people have realized it's not going to get through.

So

an idea that has no chance of succeeding or isn't made with the, it's made for a headline and not for real things is almost just as bad.

Like I want a real change.

I don't want brownie points.

I don't want someone.

Do you feel like,

do you feel like, so let's say he puts,

so I agree this is largely performative.

It is extremely unlikely this lands, but this is going to be talked about enough.

I mean, we are talking about it as an example.

that in theory, the conversation is now increasing around this topic and we could move towards Congress enacting something like this sooner.

And if him making what is, you know, let's say this like vapid gesture, but if it results in people becoming angrier and more passionate and pushing Congress to do this earlier than they would have otherwise

in 30 days when this is supposed to have happened, we're supposed to have dropped all their prices.

Because right now, like insulin in America, $100 in Canada, $12.

Right.

Okay.

In 30 days, they have to equalize.

They have to figure that out.

According to the state, fucking freight is.

So when they don't do that in 30 days, Are people going to get mad at Congress and say, hey, get this bill passed?

Or are they going to get mad at the judiciary for blocking his law?

And that is where I'm, I'm worried.

If it's all setting up to get you mad at the judges, then I think that's kind of fucked because this is an executive order that has beyond his authority.

But if you get mad at Congress and we can go, hey, shut the fuck up, bipartisan, pass this, get

pills lower price, then I'm all for it.

I would love, I think, again, the spirit of this is one of the best things Trump has done.

I totally agree with it.

It's insane that we spend four, five, 10x for the same drug.

across a border.

Like Canada is right there.

It's the same, they're same company.

Canada is just like, no, we're not not gonna pay that much and then in america all the all the parties are just like yeah this is great because everybody benefits from it except patients dude the cable companies do the same thing with every small town in america where they lobby to make sure they can't have negotiating power over who lays cable wire who it's crazy we all pay more because no one's allowed to literally negotiate on a group of people um i agree it's free anyway you're free market

free i think uh you're gonna jump down sorry cut you off no your your point about the lobbying was the main thing i wanted to get to uh but i wanted to come back to what you said about r d being the defense because i think there is a very good point to be made here that this is often and trump brought this up as in uh what he thinks that the prices that the americans are paying are basically subsidizing r d that the other countries don't have to pay for because they pay such lower prices right

however something that i learned uh last year was that R D is a bit of a myth in how drug companies actually choose to use the money that that they have.

And it is much safer for you rather than developing some sort of new life-saving treatment, like spending a ton of money in order to cure some incurable disease or pursue something really niche and expensive, especially as medicine gets better over time, right?

The things that are left are harder and harder to crack.

We spent a lot of time talking about that in the last episode.

The problem with RD is a lot of the money just goes towards iterating on existing drugs so that you can renew licenses or patents on technology that basically already exists, mark it up and resell it to people as an upgraded or a new version of the medication they're taking.

And that is like 90% of RD spending.

I saw

more about that.

I'm not trying to defend pharma companies here, but like

it does take a lot to develop drugs.

No, no, absolutely.

Think about it.

Even from a purely economic perspective, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And this is actually something that was in

Abundance.

Kill him.

It talked about how people in the last few decades, there's decreasing motivation to spend money and take risks on new drug or scientific development because the return is way less certain.

And it is way better for you to...

innovations.

What was Lena, Lena Khan's example with we could use something similar to those

why cannot I think it was

inhalers, where they made the tiny, the inhalers were about to become like public domain, and then they adjusted, they changed the plastic part of the cap on the inhalers so that they could renew the patent and continue charging a higher price.

They just made it worse.

Like it has a little strap on there or whatever.

When you take the cap off, so it stays on, but now it's annoying and people are annoying.

That was the only thing they added to maintain the.

So most of drug R D in the U.S., R D expense, is going into making iterative versions of drugs that already exist so they can renew their ownership over that thing and maintain the monopoly over that drug.

And I think that is the problem is when this defense comes up, including when Trump mentions it during that speech

in his Trump fashion where he kind of explains it, but doesn't identify it.

It's very weird.

But

all I'm saying is that people rarely talk about that part.

It's just like, well, it's getting put into discovering new cures for things, but that isn't really the case.

And the the financial incentives aren't necessarily there for it to be the case.

That completely makes sense.

I agree with that.

I just, I just want to, I'm just always cautious when people's takeaway is like, fuck all these companies.

They're pieces of shit.

It's like, no, actually, it's really important that companies develop new drugs, right?

Like, this is.

And I just want to make sure that we're also acknowledging that there is good to pharmaceutical companies making money.

Should they be making this much money?

No, I don't think so.

Should they be doing what they're doing, like you just described, and doing iterative drugs and then using that as an excuse to profit like crazy?

No, that's obviously bullshit.

And that that shouldn't happen.

But there needs to be, we do need some kind of financial ability for drugs to be developed.

And that's all.

And just, and even another angle of this is maybe what needs to change, the vast majority of the price of developing a new drug is actually trials.

It is getting it through

FTC.

Oh my God, I'm playing.

FDA.

FDA, yeah.

So getting it through FDA.

So that's where the majority of the cost of developing a drug comes from.

And I've heard from multiple scientists.

I don't know enough about this to comment on it, but it's a sentiment I've seen multiple times from biologists of the process to get new drugs approved is actually too arduous and cumbersome and expensive.

And there might be a way to, obviously, not remove all clinical studies, but maybe streamline it in some way or make it more efficient or something.

I have certain rules for different types of drugs so you can incentivize a company to develop a new drug without them them needing to make some obscene amount of profit on the back end.

Yeah.

That's all.

There's obviously like everything, there's nuance.

And

the system that we have is abysmal.

It's terrible.

It's abysmal.

I'll just say I looked in the numbers because I had a similar thought, but I wanted to get the stats.

And they're pretty damning for the pharma companies in that the majority of the profit they make goes more to over half goes to marketing versus R D.

And,

you know, the bonuses they're paying out to executives.

Right.

It's insane.

It's just not enough going to RD that you'd expect this argument to work.

And I will say, I keep using the insulin example because it's the one I can remember easily, but there's other drugs.

But like insulin in Canada sells for $12 a vial and it costs them $2 to $4 to make.

It also costs $2 to $4 to make and they sell it for $104 in America.

That extra, I mean, a $12 profit, a $12 to $4 is $8 profit.

That's a huge profit margin already in Canada.

They're making enough to be a justifiable working business if that was the same everywhere.

So the idea that it has to be 1,000% or 2,000% is absurd.

Like it wouldn't exist in any market where they hadn't captured the government and are using it as a particularly

when the profit.

The profit comes from somebody.

The person paying the increased prices is patients in America.

I mean, often it's out of own tax dollars.

So again, a huge, we have a massive budget deficit problem.

A huge part of that goes to Medicare and Medicaid, which are just paying absurd, above-list prices for all these drugs.

I mean, yeah, the American taxpayer is a global pay pay.

It is

crazy when you think about the expenditure per capita ratio of our healthcare spending compared to other countries.

For low quality quality,

we don't live as long.

We're sicker.

sicker we're angry we're more depressed like it's not working we're paying more it is i mean bring the bible back

and

we let god back into this country and into japan and into

i want god ejected into my body by novo nortis

one thing uh this is the i i got him i'm sorry yeah ai might help

no no no so i was getting in on that so so really just very briefly what we talked about last episode if you watched the whole thing towards the end we talked about the major breakthroughs in drug discovery because of the tools that people are developing.

One of the things that makes me hopeful is that we can push back on pharma companies by basically saying, look, we are also developing tools to make drug creation 100 times cheaper or 1,000 times cheaper and faster.

And if you do that, then this excuse of we need to make $20 billion to make the next drug, that falls away.

And so I'm hopeful that that will start to actually change.

Yeah, I mean, me too.

I think the core, for me, the core rod of it is lobbying or the ability ability to just money and politics, Citizens United.

Because, you know, it's so funny that even big mega corps like Google with Fiber or Amazon trying to do healthcare, they couldn't break in.

Like they, they were so blocked by the regulatory middleman net that they couldn't even get into compete.

And they have all the money.

And it, it,

no one can actually offer a better service at lower price than these guys because they have completely monopolized the government to make sure that they have the fattest margins.

That's big short.

That's why you don't talk about my margins.

Nice and fat.

Sure.

So yeah, I mean, that is, to me, it's one of the more radicalizing things.

Like when you read about American healthcare, there's just nothing good about it.

And it's not somebody getting, you know, a worse product at a worse price.

They're just dying.

Like people are dying.

Families are dying every day.

It's horrendous.

We have such a shit.

healthcare system for such a rich country.

You might even push back someone.

You might take action.

There's ways that are positive.

There's a lot.

A lot of the best medical talent ends up coming to the U.S.

because of these kind of gross problems.

I do agree that the richest people are...

There are some diamonds in the rough, but broadly, it's pretty shit.

If you're talking about like

quality of care, if you have unlimited money,

excellent.

It is.

We have a good system.

Cedar and I will

rich people.

It's solid.

It's very good.

But obviously, that is not the best.

I see what you're saying.

If I

redeeming point, it's like there is a need for a private, like private people to have the motivation to seek outcomes in healthcare.

There is a motivate, a reason to have that.

I think,

you know, us, I think to me, the COVID vaccines are actually a good example of that.

It's like, sure, private companies.

Bill Gates had a private motivation to put a microchip in it.

But even though that's not a great example, because basically the governments started it by saying, we'll pay you a shitload of money.

We guarantee this much business, right?

No, but that's what I mean is like there's a, there's a utility of those private companies in that situation.

And I think they're,

yeah, anyway.

Yeah.

I just want to at least at least vocalize the nuance because I think it's so easy to be like, fuck the whole system.

And it's like, no, no, no, hold on.

There's a lot going on here.

There are things we need to preserve, even if we radically change things, right?

You might have a good perspective on this with how many of your family are working.

Right.

And everybody in my family are doctors.

So to say like all the healthcare is worse everything it's like no this is not true you have like really really smart talented people in the medical industry but you have perverse incentives so for example if you go to if you go to medical school and then you come out of it three hundred thousand dollars in debt yeah and the option is do you want to go be a primary care physician where you have to like arguably had it harder is the wrong way to put it but it's an extremely stressful high volume job where you're cranking through patients you don't get to like really follow up with people in a meaningful way because you're just trying to get through as many as possible and you get paid less a lot less than if you go become a a specialist and open your own clinic, right?

You become a dermatologist or a surgeon or whatever else.

It causes us to have a lack of health care providers in primary care, which is some of the most important.

If you were talking about preventative medicine or whatever else, and then

people, like in many cases, the best people, if you're getting surgery, you know, cancer treatment.

A lot of people come to America for the best cancer treatment.

And somebody listening is in their derm residency right now and they're nodding their head.

Like, yeah.

Fuck yeah.

Yeah, that's how it is.

Yeah, I'm helping skin.

I've never talked to a doctor or a healthcare professional who has ever said anything positive about the insurance companies.

Ever.

Drug manufacturers and insurance companies are pretty universally reviled.

They seem just total shit.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean, we.

We actually covered a lot of ground this time.

I like this.

We're trying to, for those of you who are still here, you know, we're trying to hit a new balance.

I think the last couple of weeks of like hit one main topic a little harder, squeeze in a few extra things that we think are really interesting for the week and keeping Atriok's hair under that hat.

Under that hat.

I have a question to close this out.

Get your guys' thoughts.

Earlier, we talked about how Gen Z is having less sex than any other generation.

Okay.

Including like right now, boomers.

currently are having more sex than Gen Z.

So question.

Do you think Bernie Sanders has more sex than Aiden?

Easily.

Easily.

Dude, he puts it.

Bro, Bernie Sanders.

Lamps pipes.

Is he the guy on our Discord?

No.

Is Bernie Sanders doing that?

There's a video of Bernie Farming Sanders.

He's draining free throws.

Bernie Sanders is doing rallies.

Bernie Sanders gets drained every night, dude.

He's doing rallies and he's doing rails at the after party.

I'll tell you that.

He's doing rails.

Yeah, actually, in his mid-80s, that might be the way he's keeping things going.

He's stupid and Pepa.

Wait, and I have one more thing I want to sign us off with because I feel obligated.

I can't let this topic die on the show because the updates are still continuing.

Okay.

There's no longer 145% tariff on China.

Oh, right, right.

We've

that's the title thumbnails.

Terrorists.

The tariffs are so weird.

We've got to wait until the very end.

30 seconds.

We've paused it.

Yes.

For 90 days.

I mean, we could do that next time.

I could talk about it again.

30%

and business is back, baby.

Business is back.

Mead March.

We're bringing it into the port.

Who knows what's possible?

And I do want to be clear.

That's 30%.

Wait, okay.

Last thing if we're keeping a story alive, and we should end.

Is Waymo, Tesla, self-driving?

Baidu is doing Chinese self-driving, similar to Waymo.

They are rolling out in Europe.

They're trying to win the Europe market.

There's a big war going over who's going to get, they're doing it in Switzerland and they're doing it in Italy, I believe.

They're just rolling it out.

So the war is heating up, dude.

It's about to happen over this self-driving global EV race between China and the U.S.

I hope a lot of people don't die.

Obviously, but man, this is going to be juicy.

This is

going to be so much war.

No, no, I'm just saying, like, I started to say this is going to be so juicy and then realized I was talking about like the Kardashians or something.

Like, there are people who might die, but like, it's going to be

just

a shit.

There will be controversies and shit with Tesla in like a month.

It's going to be crazy.

It's going to be

worth watching.

And we're going to do it right here on Limited Stand.

Thank you guys for watching.

Thanks, everybody.