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

Aiden, you got back from Japan like 15 minutes ago.

About.

How long?

I got, I mean, I landed like three hours ago.

And then by the time, oh, beautiful LAX, by the time I walked to the Uber parking lot, got into the Uber, and then got here, it was about 15 minutes ago.

All right.

Well, I did just get back from Japan.

Yep.

And I thought it would be nice to pick, you know, a nice, exciting topic related to Japan.

And one thing that was going through my head a lot while I was there, because we actually went out into the countryside and I've never done that before.

I've been, or at least not in like mainland Japan.

I've been to Hokkaido and I've done a little road trip like while it's snowing and I've been to Tokyo, but I've never been into like the countryside that you kind of see.

Do you consider yourself an honorary?

No, I'm basically Japanese.

We were

We were calling Nick Engling the chopped hus the entire time, if you know what that means, uh, in Japanese the whole time we were there.

We'll move on from that.

Anyway, I think it's funny what he means.

Exactly.

A big thing that, uh,

a big headline that I have seen in our media in recent years is about how you can get free houses in Japan.

Anyone can buy one, literally, one or zero-dollar homes.

Uh, and the catch being that these homes are often like very, you know, broken down, old, abandoned.

Uh, but it did make me want to look a little more into like why housing in Japan is so relatively cheap at a time when like everywhere in the world, right?

Like developed countries, big cities, prices of real estate are generally going up.

Like people are getting priced out of living places.

And that's not like in an American thing necessarily.

It's not like Canada, Australia.

UK.

It's all over the world.

Yes.

So

the first thing I took a look at was,

and as you've explained to me in the the past, is Japan had this gigantic asset bubble that largely included real estate.

When their economy was exploding,

they went through this huge inflationary period of assets in the country.

And then I think it was in

89.

91.

92 was like the, when it like really, really crashed.

He peaked in 89.

So.

Like I say a fun stat.

Yeah.

In 89 at the peak of the bubble,

the land around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than all the real estate in California.

Like you could own California for less than

they had one of the biggest real estate bubbles in human history.

It was crazy.

Wow.

We stayed at a hotel right next to the Imperial Palace.

And have you considered that it's really nice?

Yeah.

This is you trading for California with Ronald Ryan to stock it.

It's not that nice.

It's just not as good as the Imperial Palace.

And

one little video I watched as an example is even on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is like a

major, major city, right?

The most populous city in the world by like metro area population.

On the outskirts of Tokyo, there are large, like, you know, 1,500 square foot family homes that might cost like $70,000.

And

compared to, you know, what we would be paying in LA, right?

That's freaking a lot of money.

LA is a million.

I believe the median price for a home in LA is like $1.1 million.

Yeah, I think it passed the million.

Median?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

That's what what I heard too.

I think that's actually,

but I know because it was a comparison.

It was actually from the book Abundance by Ezra Klein, which we'll probably talk about next week.

But talking about how the price of a home in America is just obscenely overpriced, at least in most of the like blue cities right now, the metro areas, right?

The metro areas, yeah, yeah.

There, so there's there's a bunch of factors, and I'll kind of layer this into two main things that I saw.

So, for rural Japan, where you could get these abandoned houses, right?

Uh,

There is a decline in population.

Like as time has passed, a really concentrated movement of people from rural areas of Japan into cities, just like a lot of the developed world is going through in general, right?

Like that's a general population movement that happens.

But Japan, it happened earlier and more aggressively.

And that, on top of that, really low birth rate.

Really low birth rate.

And one of the lowest in the world.

On top of this, Japan also isn't really changing its mind about immigration at least not at a rate that matters like they're not welcoming in or making big efforts to get large amounts of foreigners in the country to sort of supplement the population right so i real quick on that i so i looked into a little bit on their immigration changes yeah my understanding is it used to basically be zero like nobody comes in this is japan only and then the past few years they've opened it up a lot but do you are you saying that a lot a lot is just relative a lot is relative okay it's not increasing in any meaningful way and i i asked a friend while we were there there who's lived there for a long time,

like,

what is young people's perspective on letting more immigrants in to like help deal with these problems?

And this applies to a lot of issues, not just like immigration, housing, or like whatever economic problems Japan is dealing with.

He said, young people and people in Japan in general are just very, very apathetic about politics.

It isn't something you publicly engage in in general.

And I think it's part of a general cultural way of how people socialize.

It'd be very weird for you to talk to strangers about your honest opinions about things in the first place.

Interesting.

But then decoupling from that, I think politics is like particularly sensitive.

And there isn't a culture of being attentive and involved in politics in the way that it dominates discussion in

America in particular, but maybe the West in a larger sense.

And so basically in the rural areas, they're dealing with this problem is like their supply is like increasing just by proxy of it not being used anymore.

Right.

And because there's no demand and nobody is moving to these rural areas, it basically just boils down to that.

And

because of that, you have these really low home prices.

Like even a nice thing on the outside, like the, I think the misleading part of the free house is that those ones aren't nice.

It's like, they aren't well kept.

You would have to put a lot of work into it.

There are stories of Americans because foreigners can buy buy property and land in Japan freely.

There's like no restrictions on that.

Foreigners can buy those properties.

And there are stories of, for instance, Americans going and getting one of these free homes.

But the amount of work that you have to put into it to make it like livable.

But I heard you can't buy it unless you move there.

You can't, I couldn't make an investment.

I think for the free ones, my loose understanding is for that specific program that gives out the free ones, you do.

But if we were buying, if we wanted to buy that $70,000 apartment or the $50,000, like a $30,000 apartment,

we would be able to buy that.

Or like the land doesn't really.

It doesn't come with like a permanent residence.

So you buy the property, but it's not like you can then just roll into Japan and you live there now.

Yeah.

So you still have to go through the arduous process of getting approved for a visa and then permanent residency, which is usually 10 years of living there.

My friend who immigrated there was talking about how if he got kicked out, he wouldn't lose.

the asset of like the home he owns or the land i see so you go there for six months so all i have to do is keep going there every six months and add to my housing portfolio.

I don't even know if you're on the BlackRock.

In general,

in general, I think, like I said, I think the rules might be different for those like free or like near-free homes.

But if you were just buying like a home that a nice big home that was like pretty expensive in Tokyo, like you could just buy that and not live there.

Right.

You guys want to buy a like a $1 home in the countryside and do an episode there?

It's just a one-time studio.

That would be so sick.

For the podcast.

Just, it's just our Japan studio.

no but we're always already thinking so big yeah i'm this small town and they're like we're dying and we're running out of people and then we have three new immigrants that are coming to help turn things around and we show up for one what records they see us dunking our faces in ice water and then we leave toss the bottle on the ground and then i lie out of us i would have given so much that's like logan paul round two for sure

i have a i saw a few things that have just related to the countryside stuff i thought were interesting because i was just looking into this a little bit apparently 647 of Japan's towns and villages have been designated as depopulated areas.

60% of Japan, of the land area, is now depopulated areas where it's like there are not enough people there and they're basically losing support.

And then, as part of that, so all these people just over the past like 20 years, this is been this, or I mean, decades, but it's increased, I guess, even more in the last 20 years, that all these people are moving for the countryside to the city, right?

And so, then the railroads in the countries are having to close stations.

So, JR Hokkaido closed 18 stations.

This was last year, I believe, 2024, it would be, due to low passenger demand.

JR West is hurting.

That's why America was smart to do no trains.

No trains.

We got it.

We figured it out.

Yes.

We knew there'd be a crisis.

That way we're not.

We're usually blaming for that.

We're just thinking about it.

And then this like really kind of.

mind fucked me.

A shift from trains to buses doesn't work because some 40% of the vehicular bridges in Japan are reaching age 50 and the local governments don't have the budget to repair them.

So they're just forced to ban their use.

And so countrysides are also becoming less accessible as the bridges are no longer becoming usable.

And then there isn't the people or the budget to repair them.

So the countryside, it's like this spiral.

So yeah, you can go get one of these, you know, $10,000 houses, but it might be hours away by car from a train station.

Well, I'm a bit of a Japan expert.

Why don't they simply use the mechs or the

mech suits that they've got?

Is that not

in the budget?

Well, Britannia is still winning the war.

And so most of them are in conflict breakdown.

It's tough.

It's tough.

Once Japan is in peacetime, the mechs will

return home and they will build the bridges.

You know what's interesting is not just Japan.

So I looked at this too.

Italy is going through pretty much bar for bar the same thing.

Really?

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

People are leaving the small towns.

If you go live there, they'll basically give you your house for free.

So, I was going to bring up that trend as well because my uh friend showed me this in Sweden, rural areas in Sweden.

It's the same thing.

You can get a pretty nice large home in like a rural part of Sweden for maybe like $30,000 to $50,000 in like pretty good condition, lovely location, and same mechanisms behind it, basically.

Just like everybody needs to move or wants to move move to the city.

So, like, for an average person, that's not a good deal still because you're so isolated and the town is dying.

But I'm wondering when someone's going to flip and people are going to move as flocks.

Like, if you had eight of your friends and all your families or what you all decided you were just going to take over the small

estate.

This is the LA influencer problem that we

talked about.

Yes, actually, this is a good example.

About how a bunch of people in LA that do

you describe, I hate Los Angeles for the record.

Nine out out of ten people that I've talked to, I've probably talked to 30 or 40 content creators in LA about this, have said, Oh, I hate LA.

I'm only here because everybody else is here.

Exactly.

But all of us say that, and nobody leaves.

But everybody has to move at once because it's the value of being in the same place.

You like it.

There's your, there's a few people here.

You're, you're the,

you said

nine out of ten dentists.

You're the dentist saying that the toothpaste doesn't work.

Yeah, you don't need toothpaste?

You don't need toothpaste.

Rub banana peels on your teeth.

I use this.

Yeah.

And I use mouth tape, and my teeth are pearly

but i i do think it's really interesting uh that that this is like uh up so apparent in other countries as well because that gets talked about less like japan is the country that has the headline so often i think because it's the problem is so much more aggressive and it's been building for longer yeah uh and then the other part of this that i wanted to talk about was okay well rural areas right we're talking about in japan people moving to cities like tokyo for instance instance but tokyo is really interesting too because compared to other cities in the world with like i would say equal standing and development if you look at a city like london or uh new york or clancyville you would uh you would see that tokyo is relatively affordable compared to those places which is really really interesting like why is this major city not going through the same uh real estate struggle that all those other big cities are and uh because obviously in toki like in japan the rural areas population is declining, but Tokyo, the population is still going up.

Okay, yeah.

Um, and the big thing behind this is uh their zoning and building laws.

They have a way different approach to like how housing is allowed to be built and a different culture of uh expectations around

how you judge or value the homes, homes next to you.

So, they were starting to go through a similar like cost of living crisis in the 60s as they were developing.

And they put into place a new zoning law at that time that, like in America, there's for zoning laws, we have like hundreds of different types of zones and like way and different rules to move around, okay, move around within.

But Tokyo only has 12 different types of zones that properties can be.

And in like 10 of those 12, housing is allowed to be built in all of them.

So it means that if it's zoned for like retail, if it's zoned for

something else, you can still build housing in that area alongside it.

And that's created like an industry and

a supply of housing that is always outpacing

actual households.

Yeah, I saw a graph that was like,

it

showed New York and then it layered over it what buildings that are there now wouldn't be allowed to be built under current zoning laws.

Yeah.

It was 40%.

So 40% of North that exist right now wouldn't be allowed to be built today.

This was really shocking to me.

The way it's been zoned.

You can only build high-scale luxury apartments.

You can only build like the highest end stuff.

You can't build it.

think that was really surprising because to me in an American context, right,

New York is pretty dense.

There's a lot of, there is a lot of like apartment style housing there that doesn't exist in like a lot of other cities.

But even a place like New York has really strict zoning laws.

Of the American ones, right?

And basically

those zones have like reached their capacity.

And then, okay, well, you might think, let's vote to change the zoning laws.

Let's change these things in order to get more housing built.

And this is also something that was really interesting to me because in America, right, we vote for these things at the local level.

And that's where kind of like the idea of NIMBYism comes in.

Like, not in my backyard, basically.

If I own property in a place, I don't, I, in order to maintain the growth of the value of the property that I already own, I'm going to vote against new housing initiatives in my area, maybe under the guise of like keeping the culture of the neighborhood or something, right?

And so housing initiatives are consistently struck down.

But in Japan, that housing, those zoning laws are just set at the national level.

They just decide.

That's interesting.

So people in neighborhoods don't have the same

control over

to build in there.

That's super interesting.

And the result also, like for one more example of this, is in America, oftentimes there will be rules about the standardization of like how a house is built in a new development.

So there's reasons why like why groups of homes like have to match up with each other or have similar designs or require similar like lawn care or something like that might be through your hoa it might be like a city ordinance uh but in japan there's no culture of that there's no like rules on how you can build

your apartment or home right next to the home next to you it doesn't have like there there's no worry about the design of your home devaluing the design of the property next to yours uh which is also this it goes in tandem with one last interesting piece that plays into this is there is a strong culture of uh breaking down homes and rebuilding when you buy.

So moving into somebody's home that was already owned and lived in is like weirdly not cool in Japan.

And it's way more common to get

the home, break it down, and then build a new home there for you.

I saw a number for this that's crazy.

In 2013,

guess the number, okay, of all home purchases in Japan, how many of them are purchasing somebody's pre-built home, right?

Versus you get a brand new one.

Wait, pre-built versus brand new?

As in, you buy a used home, yeah, that like in America, right?

You go

for the most part, people buy homes, right?

You go, like, the vast majority of the time, it's a house that's built and it's for sale, and now you buy that house and you go to that house, right?

I would say 75% are pre-built.

Only 15%

of all house purchases in Japan were of existing houses.

The rest, they create new homes.

That's so good.

85% of people when they buy a home are making a new home there.

They either destroy the old one or they just get a new one built and do that.

And even the one guy I know in Japan who is getting, who's making, he's making a home.

Like he's building it from scratch.

He bought the plot.

And that's just crazy because like the vast majority in Europe, United States, whatever, like homes are meant to be this appreciating asset forever.

And in Japan, it's like this temporary thing that is not meant to appreciate.

I didn't know that until I looked into this.

Like I, the common practice of like breaking those things down.

I think there's also a part of this where the homes and the land that they're built on are actually owned separately.

Yeah.

So it is most common.

Like if I were a homeowner in Japan, most homeowners in Japan,

if like if you own an actual like home and not an apartment, own the land the home is built on.

That is like the most common situation.

But technically, those things are disconnected.

So you might lease the land itself, own the home that's built on it, and pay like a rental fee to the land,

which is something that happens.

And yeah, so I.

Oh, wait, what if I own a home on a land that I'm leasing, then someone else buys the land from underneath me and says, I don't want you to have a home here anymore.

And then they just replace it.

No, they can't.

Okay, so I don't think they can.

You're saying if the landowner...

Like, you're going to have a house and I'm going to want to hurt you.

So I'm going to buy the land underneath your home and then tell you to get kick rocks.

Yeah.

It's called freehold versus leasehold.

So leasehold is you own the building, but you rent the land.

Yeah.

And freehold is you buy both.

And so there's situations where you buy the property, the home on the land, but you don't own the land.

And if that lease, but you usually get the lease for like decades.

But if the lease ends and after 30 years of living there in this house, they don't want to renew the lease with you.

You then have to leave and they can destroy the home.

Which is usually what happens because again, it sounds like they are just constantly taking down buildings and

re like rebuilding them.

And I think this part of this, uh, part of this, like, culture of like rebuilding and building in general is a huge part of like why supply has like managed to be so bountiful in a place like this and like why they're not dealing with the same housing crisis.

Yes, like we have other economic crises in Japan that are that are oncoming, right?

But in comparison to like if you looked at a city like Sydney or Vancouver or New York, it's way, way different.

And you'd expect Tokyo to be in a similar position to those places.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, the best example I saw in a country not necessarily going through the exact same demographic crisis, which Japan is.

So it's hard to disentangle them because they just have their population is shrinking every year.

So it's like houses are going to get cheaper regardless.

But in like Austin, America, they changed the zoning laws to build more and rents have been dropping dramatically.

It's like down 22%.

Yeah, Austin is like the success story in the United States right now.

It's like, oh, if you build a lot of housing, even while the city population has been skyrocketing over the past five years it houses go housing prices go down yeah yeah you just have to let people build stuff that's why i'm very pro-build stuff just build build more houses yeah doug doug will build your house if you

want

look i feel like i'm just dropping these random facts about japan i learned and i'm going to drop one more so i guess that is supposedly part of the thinking but between why japan has this culture of like just destroying houses and rebuilding them is because it was the post-war era ton of japan was destroyed right so what they needed was a ton of prefabricated housing that wasn't meant to last forever.

It was just get housing up.

But then that created this culture and this system where you have all of this industry that's built around homes that aren't meant to last 100 years like ours are, but they're just meant to be there for 20, 30 years.

You just have a place to live, but then after 30 years, the whole thing is brought down.

And so that consists.

So the value of the home and the land are separate, right?

And so if you buy a home and land together in Japan, the home is meant to go to zero value over 30 years.

It is like a car.

It's a depreciating asset.

It is a depreciating asset.

The home you buy is just like a car and it is going to zero over time, or if not zero, like $10,000 in the country, right?

And that's why it's a totally different mindset than what we have, which is like homes go up in value.

It's an investment.

In Japan, they're like, no, that's my old shitty car that's 30 years old.

Why would some foreigner want to come into the country and buy it?

Like, what are you doing?

Go build a new home.

It's like, that's the culture.

Well, so there is an asterisk.

When I was there talking to a few people about this, the asterisk on pricing that I noticed is for the for the average person, right?

Like if you were just a working class person who lives in an apartment, renting is more affordable and that's cool.

But if you're a person who is looking to buy a plot of land and

build a home on it in a place like Tokyo, the combined cost of those two things is very expensive and comparable to a place like Los Angeles.

So it's sort of like, it's a little misleading to say that housing, like house ownership is that much cheaper.

Because if you wanted to go the full distance in a place like Tokyo that has that demand, if you want the housing experience that we think of in the West, that is different.

Last factoid, and then I'll stop dropping.

Okay, okay, okay.

No, these are good.

The average building in large, expensive urban areas of Japan, the actual building is only about 10% of the cost of the whole thing.

So you're like 90% of what you're buying is the land, not the building on top of it.

Yeah.

So, so again, if you're like, oh, rent's really cheap, it's like, well, if you want to also buy the plot of land, you're, you're paying like nine times as much

in the most extreme cases, but it's crazy.

It's a totally different system.

I like the concept of it because, again, like the idea that you have a whole system built around getting a lot of homes up quickly and you can just get things made that somebody can at a very low entry point get into a plot of land and have a cheap home built.

And then longer term, they can look for actually getting the land and having this appreciating asset.

That feels great.

We bundle them together in the West and then you have to go all in on this plot plus house and it doesn't make sense.

And then objectively, we're failing at it, but maybe it's just zoning.

I don't know.

The outlook on,

it's interesting to see the spectrum of outlook on housing because it seems like in this situation, your house is not, your house is basically not an asset.

It's not something you're investing in.

It's just something you live in.

And then further down the line, maybe a little more in the middle would be like the American way of looking at things where it's like your house is an investment, but you diversify and you put a lot of money into like stocks and bonds and stuff like that.

And then there's like on the other end, I feel like China, where it's like, do or die, buy property at all.

Until recently.

Yeah.

It was like all, always on property.

Until the crash.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you know about this?

There's some giant percentage of Americans where almost their entire investment is in their home.

Like they don't have to do that.

So this is why, this is the reason, you know, America and Canada and Australia and all these countries, it's an impossible problem or a thorny problem to fix is because for so many years now, people have been told this is how you almost save for retirement.

This is what you're saving for.

You put your money into a 30-year mortgage and you're paying on it.

And then when you retire, it's worth a lot more and you can sell it and have a life.

If you were to turn homes into depreciating assets overnight, which I, you know, I think.

It's like kind of what you have to do to get to a real society, it cripples like a generation of people, two generations of people.

There's young Canadians who have taken out the biggest loans imaginable to buy a house in their area.

And like,

yeah, I mean, that's the problem, right?

It's like with the

with something like the local zoning stuff.

Like, why would you be a NIMBY?

It's like, in, you know, a lot of people, the idea behind NIMBYism is like, in principle, you agree with the idea of more affordable housing, but it's not in my backyard because it's against your own individual interest to vote for it, at least in the short term.

Yeah.

I think you can make a long, long-term argument that you're also voting against your own interest, but that's, I mean, that's a long term.

Man, I like the idea of taking it out of people's heads.

I think people,

you know, people talk shit about new people all the time, and I get it.

But it's hard to make someone vote against their own personal pocketbook, right?

Yeah, you need to change like the structure.

Yeah.

I like the way you said about Japan, where it's just a federal thing.

It's like everyone's doing it.

It's not just your little area that you're going to fall behind.

Yeah.

Everyone's going to have a devaluation in some way to make it more affordable for

so everyone doesn't get angry i mean i feel like i seriously feel like i say this a lot but i feel like half of global radicalization is due to an inability of young people to afford a home or see even path to affording a home i think if everyone could afford a home it would change so much of people's um yeah anger and incredibly

it's there are so many problems that stem from a culture where housing is meant to be be your main investment.

Because it's like we said, it's just it incentivizes everything for you to prevent housing to be built.

Once you bought into the system, every incentive pushes you towards less housing being built and it screws over everybody who isn't already in the system.

And it's like, so now we're dealing with that.

And I'm pessimistic about how we change this.

And that's why like I hear the Japanese, Japan on the national level deciding zoning.

And that just sounds like a fantasy to me of like, God, if you could just force all these people to just build and just, or not even force them to build, to let developers build.

Like San Francisco does everything they can to stop developers who desperately want to make housing from doing it because they come in and just stop every single thing at every point of the way.

And if you just opened the market and let people build things, housing would go down.

But they're all, every homeowner in San Francisco benefits from the fact that the prices go up every year.

Right.

And it's just, yeah.

I don't know how we solve it.

It is actually in the book that just came out, which we'll probably talk about in the next couple of weeks, that this is very explicitly what they're talking about as one of the main issues right now that is causing particularly blue states to lose people to red states in the United States because it is just not affordable.

It's cost of living, cost of housing.

Right.

And red states are on average building a lot more.

And Texas and Florida are particularly doing that.

They are gaining the most people.

Their housing prices are the most affordable.

It's like something has to give.

Like, we, people can't do this forever.

I don't know, man.

It's tough because I think once you try to, if you tried to pass some sort of like national legislation about it, right?

Depending on who's making the effort to pass it, the messaging is kind of similar to the version of getting rid of cars that I didn't actually say a couple weeks ago.

Now I heard from the comments you did.

I heard from the comments you did.

But that's the, I think in America, like as soon as you overstep the boundary of something that affects property rights, people are going to light up about it.

The messaging about it will never be delivered in like a positive, like, this is what the country or community needs it will always be an infraction on like yeah it goes against the american culture of freedom and government get out of our like why would the nat the federal government's gonna come in and tell my town that we have to build more and can't zone the way we want to and then on top of that part it's exacerbated by the fact that who votes the most old people right the older you get the more you involved you are in local politics the more power you have in your local politics and those are the people who are bought into the homing system and do not want everybody else to come in and allow a bunch of apartment buildings to spread all over the place?

So, also, the people who have the most voting power are the most incentivized, and young people aren't going to coalesce around this enough to do it.

I mean, maybe they will, maybe they're also they might.

I mean, people are getting more and more restless about it.

It's like it's one of the biggest problems.

Yes,

maybe it hits.

Yeah, maybe it hits a breaking point, and I would love it to.

Or we all move to Japan Countryside, or we all move to Hannah.

That's where we move all the LA streamers.

Like, look, we found a shack in Hokkaido, and the bridge just broke down, but like, we can jump the ditch like Aiden did to Canada.

We could rebuild the ditch, that'd be a fun stream.

Yeah,

we're rebuilding infrastructure live stream.

Uh, I, yeah, just to sign this topic off, I thought this was funny because Nick Yingling came as our like uh producer for this trip, and he said, as we were walking around Tokyo, it'd be so nice if we just had big-ass buildings like that that were just housing.

Why don't we have that?

I saw him getting radicalized on trains.

It was so funny.

We were on the flight back home, and he was like, why do I have to get in this fucking chungus Uber, dude?

This doesn't make any sense.

LAX will radicalize.

It will.

LAX is a little different.

Those are the LAX.

There are the two paths.

If you fly from Tokyo,

you take a train to Tokyo's airport, fly to LAX, you get out into LAX and take an Uber to your $1 million home.

Or take a bus to your parking lot to take you to your parking lot.

Then you go to the $1 million home that you don't own, but you rent for $5K a month.

It's like, God damn, man.

Oh, housing annoys me so much.

So,

yeah, I thought that was just something interesting to sign the trip off on, but I want to hear about why woke is killing movies, Brandon.

Because you've been going, you've been rattling

about how movies and games are woke.

Okay, let's just simplify for the audience that they don't have to watch the whole thing.

Is Japan woke or not?

It's my presentation.

We're going to go into it.

Oh, I talked a lot about, I basically go through everything in the world and say woke or not.

Okay.

Okay, okay, good.

Finally, finally, a podcast doing that.

Yeah, I was looking at the podcast that were most successful than us, and they talk about woke a lot.

So I thought I would really throw our hat in the ring.

Unfortunate that if we were following the model of success, that probably would be the way.

I want to talk about the movie industry.

So, yeah, we live in Los Angeles.

It's pretty important to the economy here.

And I wanted to learn more about it.

As you may or may not know, a movie just came out called Snow White.

Boo!

Woke.

Wait, hold on.

Are we booing or cheering for this?

You guys can let me know.

Right now,

Snow White was the first movie they made right wasn't that disney's first feature length i believe so yeah yeah before they in like 30 before

yeah well turns out now that it's woke it's gone broke is this good or should i should be cheering or you should whatever whatever your heart says 43 million opening weekends very low for it a 270 million dollar budget uh weak opening worrisome for disney And the natural response that I'm seeing on the internet is that Snow White has gone woke.

Snow White has gone woke, and that is why this movie is flopping, and that is the main thing to blame.

And of course, I believe that instantly because

it aligns with my entire worldview.

So I'm locked in, but I thought I would look into it more.

And as I looked into it, I discovered really that we are at a real precipice, a real interesting time in the movie business, especially here in Los Angeles, especially here in America, that is,

it's changing rapidly under our feet.

I want to talk about it more.

So Snow White, while doing terribly across the board, box office-wise, actually outperformed in red states.

So

possibly it's not 100% entirely on the woke backlash.

And it could be more having to do with the fact that.

So it's not woke enough?

For the blue states?

It's not woke enough.

Wow, damn.

Or maybe, Doug, it's possible that

the lackluster performance of Snow White and Mickey 17

and Dogman and Captain America are not entirely on a woke, not woke spectrum.

Maybe that's affecting some people's ticket sales.

You guys are shaking your heads.

Maybe I got to see if you can.

You keep saying stuff that makes no sense.

This is a podcast.

It's possible that the entire industry is going through some bigger problems.

The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start.

Not just Snow White, but every movie released this year is off to a pretty bad start.

And we're

way down from last year, which was already a bad year.

So like 50% ticket sales in March are down from last year.

And last year was a bad year.

These are, I I assume mostly like theater box office, right?

This is theater box office.

Okay, so it's not like yeah which I don't know if you'll get to this but I assume streaming and competition is probably we'll talk about streaming, but

the movie industry because there's still like

movie like movie theater industry in a way, right?

Okay.

Movie theater and like and like Hollywood Studio Productions.

Right, right.

And the whole system.

Yeah.

They're just it's falling apart.

They're selling less than ever.

So is the problem supply or demand?

That's kind of what I'll go through today.

Is it that there's not enough good movies or is it that people aren't wanting to watch movies or is it some combination of both?

Let's go through this real quick.

I'm sure there's no nuance to this.

The comments will let us know there's no nuance.

Do these box office flops, including Mickey 17 here, which turns out was not woke, but still flopped, they spell the end of Hollywood.

And first thing people say is COVID.

People will say, oh, it's reaction to COVID.

Ever since COVID, people aren't.

uh going to movies as much it's a covet thing i looked into that too it turns out like every other out-of-home entertainment thing like for example uh Broadway,

sports, concerts, in the top right, we have people going to a live D ⁇ D show.

These are up.

They've recovered from COVID and they are now up in sales.

They've trended back upwards.

Movie theaters are the only one of like out-of-home experiential type things that are still declining.

So there's something unique happening in this industry.

I want to take it back to 2024.

I'm going to go back to last year.

We're going to look at last year's box office and just get an idea.

First of all, on the supply issue.

Have we considered that D ⁇ D might not be woke?

Possible.

None of those were woke only movies.

Heard of this to go back into the woke.

D and D has famously purged woke.

Yeah, there's no.

I know

D and D, all those circles, famously right-wing.

Well, the Dark Elves,

D ⁇ D, all-white, right-wing body.

Finally, finally a show for

the non-woke D ⁇ D crowd.

Anyway, 2024, we're going to start at the 13th best performing movie of the year.

And I want you to see as I go through, as I count up, if you notice anything about these movies.

So, this is Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

It's the sequel to an 80s classic that did pretty well.

This is Gladiator 2.

It's the sequel to a 2000 classic that did pretty well.

Uh-oh.

This is Venom the Last Dance.

It is a third part of a trilogy of Venom movies that are part of a larger spider-verse that Sony owns, that's part of a larger Marvel verse.

Okay, this is Sonic 3.

This is Kung Fu Panda 4.

This is Godzilla Kong, the New Empire.

The fifth in the monsterverse, but the 39th Godzilla movie.

This is Dune 2.

It was pretty cool.

I know we got kind of a movie.

This movie kind of ripped it.

For the records, this one ripped.

This one kind of ripped.

Still a sequel, okay?

But kind of ripped.

Mufasa the Lion King, a CGI remake of an animated movie.

It's a prequel.

Very necessary.

Very negative.

It's a prequel to the animated one or the live action one.

It's a prequel.

I mean, they call it live action, but it's all computer science.

Are they live action?

Woke has just destroyed so many studios.

Is that the pattern I'm seeing?

I mean, look how woke this Mufasa Lion is.

You film real tigers.

Yeah.

They're real lions.

I'm beginning to notice the trend here.

Are you noticing the pattern?

Despicable Me 4.

Oh, my God.

And then, and then we have Wicked.

Well, now Wicked.

Wicked verse.

Wicked is, of all these 13 movies I've shown, I guess, guess an original property but it's based on a broadway play which is based on the 1939 uh wizard of oz it's based on the most one of the most popular movies of all time this is not an original property

but it is the first movie i could even call remotely not a sequel of what i've shown i just super

fighting to say this is what we're trying to fighting to say okay okay we have moana 2 disney back to the well deadpool and wolverine Remember Logan?

Did you guys see Logan?

Yeah.

Really emotional, powerful ending for the Wolverine.

Maybe we want more Wolverine.

And then they said, let's bring him back.

Let's bring him back because there's more money to be made.

Logan is so good.

He's such an amazing

part two of it.

And it's back.

And then we have the number one movie of the year, Inside Out 2, where they added more emotions to tell more of a story.

And this did really well.

One of the biggest anime movies of all time.

I don't know if you saw a pattern from all of the top 13 highest-grossing films in the world last year, But I think customers are seeing a pattern.

I think they're starting to feel a little bit of fatigue from constant sequels and reimaginings of the exact same stories.

And I went back to make sure I wasn't crazy here.

And this is 1999, one of my favorite movie years growing up.

This is again the top 13.

I picked the ones that aren't sequels, and you'll notice it's a majority of them.

You got the Sixth Sense, you got the Matrix, you got Big Daddy, you got Green Mile.

It's a big mix, and they're not all CGI.

They're not all,

you know, family action comedies.

They're like a broad mix.

We have, there's a couple, Julia Roberts, she has, she's overrepresented, 99, but there's a horror movie, there's a comedy movie, there's Stuart Little.

There's a big mix.

And even for the Zoomer, because I know Aiden is 12 years old, I went to 2006 and it's the same kind of thing.

2006, movies you grew up with, there's a lot of new IP here.

Starting with Clickverse.

I just

would today.

Today, if Click hits the top 10, there would be a Click 2, Click 3, Click Verse, Clicks.

You know what I'm saying?

We're in a different era.

So

things have dramatically changed and studios have gotten more and more safe.

If we were to, I mean, if we were to just look at the movies on this screen right now, we were joking about Click 2, right?

Yeah.

But these are like original properties that came out at this time.

And then a lot of these did get a bunch of sequels.

Like Over the Hedge, Cars, Happy Feet, Borat, all got sequels.

You're right.

Yeah.

100%.

Those are movies that have come out in the 2010s and ons in the era where this like trend, I feel like kind of started.

The Departed didn't get a sequel, so that's kind of weird.

Did you watch The Departed?

Not a lot of room for a sequel.

It's a bit of a Logan situation.

We could be Departed versus Project.

Who thinks we could get Deadpool and Departed?

Excuse the exact moment.

I would love a Departed verse.

Okay.

So anyway, you can see.

You can see that Disney, but not only Disney, all these major studios have begun playing it safe.

Investors are noticing, consumers are noticing.

People are afraid, first of all, in a declining sales environment to lose their job.

So they only want to green light movies that they know will be a success.

And now we're getting to like fourth, fifth, sixth movie.

Like the parts of the Caribbean series is long dead and they're stomping on its grave because they're trying to recapture the magic.

of like a 2003 first time seeing johnny depp yeah what's up teacher i have a question okay how much do you think which is maybe what you'll get into of that the fact that last year the top 13 movies were all sequels, yeah, which is insane.

Do you feel like that maybe it's that people do really like sequels, not that they're getting tired of it, right?

Is it like those were the ones that were the most successful 13 movies?

So maybe it's like this is what audiences actually want.

One final argument to that, there's a there's a huge argument to that, in that it is working but less and less effectively.

It's like

it's following, we're falling down the drain.

That's exactly what I was thinking of, right?

It's like the repetition of the formula is slowly like think about sequels in the 2010 sort of era and how year after year after year, box office record getting broken, right?

And now we're kind of hitting the fatigue where it's enough to get some people going, but we're petering off.

The broad internet.

And none of the, and because this is like the majority of moving movies coming out, I feel like less original films have the chance.

to be the next big hit or franchise or something like that.

I mean, they simply less of them being made in the first place.

Outside of streaming services.

Like in terms of box office, they are not putting them in theaters because they're too risky.

So we know that there was a supply problem.

People are at least in somewhat getting fatigued with the same thing over and over.

But there's also, as you are going to bring up, a demand problem.

You can just see a long amount of people, a large amount of people talking about how their consumption habits have changed around movies, which is that.

Streaming services and the ease of being at home have changed their ability and COVID in some way changed their buying habits of like actually going to a theater.

Uh, it thought it was a temporary phase, it's not, and they're spending more and more time watching things at home where it's where it's cheaper or easier, they have more control.

And some people are sad about that.

Movie going is not what it used to be, and it's leading to a shrinking pie that is being filled only with sequels and safe properties.

There's also one other aspect of the demand that I want to bring up, which is that

maybe older people are leaning more into their home, but they're still watching a lot of movies.

However, among younger people, especially younger than us,

they're choosing our content.

They're watching Lemonade Stand instead of going to the movie, or they're watching I Show Speed, or they're watching.

That's the two.

Never mind.

Never mind.

Let's, okay, despicable Me Five.

Push it out.

I don't care.

Mo on to 10.

Keep it coming.

Whatever he says, watching.

So they're choosing creator content over premium TV and movies.

YouTube is one of the biggest threats to the movie industry because even if they're not as high budget or as

well thought out, it's exactly your niche.

Whatever you as a person want, someone's going to make a 30 minute, 20 minute video exactly that for you for free.

And it's really crowding out the ability of Hollywood to make what they used to be able to make.

56% of Gen Z and 40% of millennials find social media content, and that includes YouTube, more relevant than traditional TV or movies.

And they feel a stronger personal connection to social media creators than TV personalities, which we monetize.

So the last thing I want to say, that's the demand side.

We talk about the supply side.

The last thing I want to say that's really interesting about Hollywood and the movie industry right now is Xi Jinping.

He's a great actor, he's gonna be shaking things up.

Wait, is he woke or not?

Oh, he's as woke as they get.

Nobody's all right, all right.

Nobody's woke in classic Xi Jinping.

Uh, because you're talking about chat GBT later, I used the new filter they added to make him uh oh

dude.

This, he kind of ramps.

Wow, I like him more.

He's dude, this I would let him lead me.

Yeah, anyway, so uh, Xi Jinping.

So, the the 14th movie last year, I said the 13, right?

The one right below that was this movie in China called YOLO.

And it's an entirely original movie about a woman who's down on her luck, who takes up boxing, and it's a comedy.

This was a hit in China.

And it was big enough to not get maybe on everyone's radar, but 14th in the world last year.

And one of the biggest non-sequel, non-original property movie.

This year, they decided to go into sequels.

And they released this movie called New Jaw 2.

This movie has broken every record you can think of entirely inside the Chinese domestic box office.

It is a massive, massive, massive cultural hit.

This is, if I can play the video, let's see.

This is a group of factory workers being given the day off work to all shuttle bus to the theater,

print out thousands of tickets, and watch New Jaw 2.

It is a cultural phenomenon there that has now broken 2.1 billion in the box office.

2.1 billion?

That's like almost, that's almost avatar, like endgame level.

Chinese theaters don't need Hollywood anymore.

For this first time this year, we are seeing a movie hit global top heights of box office and it did no sales in America, like a few million, maybe nothing.

And it did 1.8 billion in China.

So it's,

again, so far in 2025, Nuja 2 has outgrossed every other movie in the world combined.

Jesus.

In every market.

It is a wake-up call that is not fully appreciated by people in Hollywood yet, where no one saw this coming.

I feel like the wake-up call is a bunch of Hollywood executives are going to be like, ah, we should make sequels for China.

That's going to be the takeaway.

It's like when, dude, I'm going to go to the bathroom.

They all get in the fucking situation room.

It's 10 guys at a board meeting and they're like, I think we just need another Transformers sequel.

Right.

Right.

I mean, Transformers is a great example because they literally set half that movie in Shanghai.

No, they crush in China.

To do it in China.

They're just plainer to Chinese audiences.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are they just going to leave?

Like, at some point, the American studio executives are going to be like, why are we, why would we crank out shitty sequels here if we can just literally shift the studio to be a Chinese studio for Chinese audiences and our crappy strategy will work there.

I'm hoping they take some positive lessons from this, but you're absolutely right.

They probably won't.

And like we are entering into a real, like, it could be a spiral, a bad spiral for the American movie industry that they're not ready for.

So again, it cracked the global box office top five.

It beat Star Wars Force Awakens and is closing in on Avatar and Titanic

and Avengers Endgame, which is like the big three of all time.

Like there, it could theoretically pass Titanic.

It probably won't beat Endgame and the first Avatar, but it's like, it is up up there in a way that nobody had in their bingo card for China coming out of this year.

So people are trying to ask what it means.

It's $2 billion box on this run.

What does this mean?

Is this going to be replicated again?

Again, it's a unique moment in time.

It's probably not going to be every Chinese movie comes out like this, but it's a sign that they're going to start standing on their own two feet for making movies.

And

sorry, what?

I was going to say this does not teach us the lesson I was hoping it would about sequels.

I was really hoping the moral of the story would be slightly different.

Yeah, I bet the YOLO would be a good example.

But no, I mean, they did a sequel and it went crazy.

But their movie industry is thriving in a way that like America in the 90s and 2000s, they have more original properties.

But they don't have the same sequel fatigue that we might have.

Right, right.

They're going to get it later.

Yeah, they'll eventually come around.

And so our only hope as America is for Jack Black to put on his big boy pants and make this movie work.

Because this is our last.

I looked at the upcoming slate of releases for this year.

If America wants to keep its streak of having a number one movie every year, which I think it's had for a long time, it's Minecraft movie or boss.

And that's where we're at.

So I want to open the discussion.

I want to talk to you guys, but it's just such an interesting time for Hollywood.

So let me put this down.

Man, if we win with the Minecraft movie, that's like winning World War II with nukes.

Like, you don't feel good about it?

Like, this is us dropping our Western nuke.

You know what I mean?

And, like, we will win.

Truman explaining why he had to drop the Minecraft movie.

We're going to win, right?

We're going to win.

I understand it was classless.

I'm sorry if this is insensitive, but Minecraft IP, that's Hiroshima.

Jack Black, that's Nagasaki.

Okay.

You're using your two biggest entertainment bombs.

Right.

We're dropping both.

And it'll be an ethical dilemma for years to come.

Again, with the creeper.

Was that okay?

Was that okay?

Did we just make an ethical use of Jack Black and the Minecraft movie?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I would rather, I think, lose than deploy this onto society.

Maybe I'm, maybe I'm dumb, and but I, I kind of expect this movie to underperform for what it's expected to.

Yeah, I think New Jaw 2 might take it this year.

I mean, they're, they're, it's crushing.

I don't think we have an avatar level.

And also, similar to nuclear proliferation, once we use Jack Black here, the other countries will realize, China will realize they could hire him.

They'll get their own Jack Black arsenal.

I don't know.

There's a bunch of ways to take this discussion.

I do, one thing I had thought of is like, isn't it interesting that two of the highest-grossing films of all time

are Titanic and Avatar 1?

Avatar 1.

Yeah.

Like, I think it's really...

And Titanic 1.

And Titanic 2.

Titanic 2 was it.

Titanic 2 was crazy.

It was just a two-hour shot of the

Titanic 2 deserved more.

But I do think it's interesting that as far as original stories go.

uh those are both pretty pretty high up there like it there is a version of success you can find for those films, if not, you know, if not.

So I think the studios somewhat know that, but my understanding from reading this is like there's real culture of fear now because in an industry where the pie is growing, everyone feels like they can take risks.

But whenever it starts to shrink even a little bit, everyone clamps down on their job and their territory and their property and what they have.

And they do not want to lose it.

They don't want to be the guy fired or the guy that makes the big flop.

Even though it's happening that they're getting flopped after flop after flop.

They're trying to be as safe as possible.

So the other big thing that changed here, I go back to this interview with Matt Damon a lot, where he explains how the film industry has just fundamentally changed primarily because of streaming.

And it's not in the way that, like, oh, streaming detracts from

less people want to go to the movie theater necessarily.

It's changed the revenue structure of how movies make money.

The old way is that if you made a film and it went to theaters and maybe it performed fine or it underperformed, you usually made it up on the back end with DVD sales.

DVD sales were a huge part of how movies made money for a long, long time.

Yeah, and he was saying a big part of like why so many movies from uh like his era of coming up and acting, like if you take uh like Goodwill Hunting, I think he uses as an example.

He's like, the reason that movie could get made is you didn't need it to be a box office smash to make it.

It doesn't need to be an amazing blockbuster hit to pay itself off.

And that revenue has disappeared.

You need it to succeed in the theater because after that, it dies.

And then the theater has also

great, the theater experience has been restricted and encroached upon by streaming and the demand for movies to reach streaming quicker because they used to run in theaters for way longer as well.

Right.

So it's this compounding effect.

And I thought that was really, really interesting.

It's like the way, like, you just make less money when you make movies.

So the, it needs to be like a cultural hit in order to make like a barbenheimer type yeah that that's that's your way of doing it do you know why them going to streaming services after the theater run rather than going to dvds makes so much less money is it the streaming services just don't pay as much or people don't watch them as much given the other options they have like

you know is it i think it's just the rights the rights uh that the services are willing to pay for are less than the total revenue that you would get from all of the the DVD sales to people or the DVDs.

Or the DVD rental.

That's just less.

Streaming services do not need to pay as much.

Yeah.

And I'm sure part of it is just there is way, way, way more supply of stuff to watch.

So streaming services do not need to offer as much money.

You don't need your streaming movie at all.

Like the kids' example, right?

Your movie is competing with way, way more accessible media.

Right.

And

yeah,

that was like the first thing.

And then

the other thing that had come to mind was the cost of making movies has risen a lot.

So I was watching recently this like podcast clip of Adam Scott and Rob Lowe talking about

how they would have made, or if it could have been made, Parks and Wreck, which is a big part of how they broke out as actors through the popularity of that show.

And they were talking about how creating movies specifically in California and LA has kind of died off because of the costs associated with making movies here.

And a lot of like production, uh, production costs have ballooned in ways that like limit the types of products that can be made.

So it's not just about the revenue, it's also about the upfront costs.

And uh, the there's this like big fight of like where you can even make productions now.

Like a lot of other countries or other cities offer like tax credits for you to come there and

half the shows are made there.

Yeah.

And Rob Lowe makes a point of like how he was working on a new project, and the main place that offered to give him the tax credits necessary to make the show was in Europe, I believe.

And he just said, I can't, I can't do that.

Like I cannot move my life to Europe for the duration of what it takes to move the show.

And then the show just died.

So I think there's another part of this where the cost being so limiting in either California specifically or maybe the U.S.

in like a broad sense.

I know like a lot of production has moved to places like Atlanta, for instance.

Like they did, I think they did like all of the adventures in Atlanta

because of the like facilities and like tax credits and stuff they got there.

Right.

But that's kind of the two, like two industry changes that have come through watching those that I learned about was like, okay, costs going up, limited opportunities of where you can affordably film things, and then a limit and cap on the revenue you can actually make.

Do you guys watch movies in theaters anymore?

Like, is that a regular part of your?

Okay, this, you actually reminded me, I'm getting excited because this is the other point I wanted to make.

I go to the theater all the time.

I actually watch movies all the time.

And I think an unfortunate thing, reading like those Reddit clips or like Reddit comments about how movie, the movie going experience is different now.

I do agree in a broad sense because the number, like you showed the list.

Like

there's definitely a change in the quality of movies and the types of movies that are getting released now.

But original stories and good movies still get released all the time.

I go to AMC with like my AMC Stubbs pass that I have.

You're a Stubbs with this guy?

Yeah, because my girlfriend got me into it.

And we just go see movies all the time.

We just watch new stuff.

And there is good new

movies that just come from a, I feel like a more limited subset of studios now.

Like it feels like A24 is like one of the only studios that like stamps original properties out.

We just saw like earlier.

Was this earlier this year or last year?

We saw, I haven't seen that yet.

That's fire.

But we saw Conclave in theaters i thought conclave was amazing i have a question did you see snow white

no

it's too too too hope for you for me my girlfriend uh i think but movies like that i don't see because of and i didn't see uh i say this as a made fun of bullied like marvel head yeah uh i didn't go see that new captain american movie because i'm just fatigued they don't feel like they mean anything anymore i always hated the like live action format disney movies because it's like grow up, make something new.

Telling Disney, telling a child in Disneyland it can grow up.

Princesses aren't real, okay?

Democracy, but that's amazing.

They don't make those movies for the kids, right?

It's like it's it is

they are for kids in some ways, they were in some ways.

But why do they have to revert back to old properties?

It's because in the same way that Disney,

like the average age of the like Disneyland goer now is like way higher than it used to be, right?

It's a different market that they're trying to like get money from and appeal to.

I think the main point I'm trying to make is

this, as much as I want to sympathize with the movie going culture has changed commenter.

It's like I go to movies all the time, watch good movies and enjoy them, and just not a lot of people go to them.

And it's like, you can still go see original characters.

Yeah, I want to latch on that though, because I was thinking about the same thing.

I was like, there are good movies.

There's a movie called Black Bag just came out.

It looks awesome.

I want to see it.

It's not going to do very well.

I think,

and this is like the bigger discussion, is like, it's almost like the decline of the monoculture because half of the fun of watching a movie like that is knowing someone else watched it and you can talk about it.

But if you go alone, it's still enjoyable, but it feels very,

I don't know, isolated or disconnected in a way that like.

some of those top movies from 2006 or 99 that i showed you that was that was almost a fun cultural event where i would go see Talladega Nights or Click or whatever, and you could talk about it with all your friends.

I think there's a loss of that that makes it less valuable.

Yeah, if you have, we talked about this last week.

If you have a culture that broad, or two weeks ago or three weeks ago, a culture that is broadly becoming less social, right?

Which we've seen and we've talked about, if that is broadly the direction we're going and people are consuming media more often on their own, the movie theater experience is not that great by yourself.

It's fine.

If you are consuming media on your own, why would you not do it from the comfort of your home?

So it's a a pattern for society already as we are becoming more isolated with how we consume things and how we socialize.

Like it makes more sense to do that at home.

The movie theater experiences.

Like, I don't think I've ever gone to a movie by myself.

Like, you know, it's almost like a taboo to do that, even more so than like eating at a restaurant by yourself.

Right.

And that probably hasn't gone away.

And so you just have less people like you who still are social, right?

I'm like, are you still going to movies?

No.

Right.

I'm not.

And we've talked about this.

Of the three of us, you're the one still trying to maintain social.

You're trying to keep

outlier.

it.

Probably most people are like you, where they're like, oh, it's going to solve.

Because movies are great.

Movie theaters are fun.

I agree.

Not enough people want to go.

If I were arguing against myself, I think there's two ends to this.

There's the point that you're making.

There's like the after you've seen it, cultural participation aspects.

Because obviously, like...

Barbenheimer, Avenger.

Like some things break through and they still do great.

And they do amazing.

Yeah.

It's very feaster family.

So it's like proof that that still can break through in the current time.

And then on the other end of it, I feel like I'm taking a very like

pull yourself up by your own bootstraps approach to movie watching, which I acknowledge that a big part, it's like, well, the average person isn't fighting through that many layers of friction to go see an original movie that they may or may not like.

Like I, I recognize that.

And I think part of part of like changing the culture in the movie industry is like, well, maybe two decades ago, you went to the theater or you might think about going to the theater and the movies you happen to be available when you finally decide to go are a wider array of original stuff.

Like we, 20 years ago, we're deciding to go see a movie and it might just be the departed, right?

But you're six years old.

You are not allowed to see the departed.

No, you're not allowed to see the departed.

I'm not allowed to see the departed.

I would see all these.

Small, small style.

Tell me more about this wonderful society 20 years ago.

I went to,

I'll never forget this.

I was on a date.

It's a bad date movie, by the way.

I was 16.

I was turning 17 in a week, and I was going out with a girl who was a year older than me.

And we went to go see the wolf of Wall Street, and we were buying our tickets.

I went up to the guy second, and he had just seen like my date buy the ticket before me.

And I'm like, please,

please.

Let me buy this ticket.

And then he just said, you're good, homie.

I'll never forget that guy.

But yeah, I think 20 years ago, you might just go see, like, you want to go see a movie, you might see The Departed because that happens to be plane.

But now the range of movies available for you to see is like more likely to be sequel, remake, whatever.

If you're going to be the savior of the industry, you need to see Minecraft movie at least three times on Open.

No, don't say no.

You're standing up for this.

You know what?

This is our last hope.

America could lose our streak.

America could lose our streak.

We're like friends of our domain.

You have to watch it on loop.

We're busy.

I'll have you know, I've walked in L.A.

and walked next to Jack Black, and I feel like that's like me going to the movie.

That's enough.

You hate L.A.

and you're a name-dropper?

You should be proud to be in this.

I can do both.

I'm going to be honest.

Same thing.

Same thing.

Downtown L.A., he was hanging out.

He was doing vlogging back in the day.

Oh, it was pretty great.

Oh, everyone in LA is hanging out.

I think that means you got to take the hit you atriarch have to go watch the minecraft movie until jack black talks to me that's right yeah well now we decided who pays the price as to who has to go see the minecraft movie three times yep i would like to get to dog's last topic because we have i believe an ai breakthrough that is uh on chat gpt's end that is rather good at creative processes guys we're gonna replace all the movies with ai dude

No more movie people.

I'm supposed to take the comments.

Oh, sorry.

You're billing seat.

I think we should replace all movies with AI.

There we go.

No, think of the artists.

The death of art.

Okay, I,

in your weekly ranting about AI stuff, thought this was pretty interesting.

So there is a new GPT model that was released by OpenAI two weeks ago.

ChatGPT 4.5.

I want to get your initial thoughts on the release, Aiden.

Okay, so I started using ChatGPT.

What was it 4.5?

I just downloaded the app like a week ago.

Okay, so you just downloaded it.

Are you paying paying the 200 a month subscription plan?

No.

I'm using free.

So you aren't even trying 4.5.

Oh, so I'm not even, I don't even get it.

Loser.

So I've been pretty satisfied with the base experience.

You didn't even get a Studio Ghibli Xi Jinping.

Well, I tried to support Xi Jinping by downloading DeepSeek

first.

And then, so I gave it my best shot.

Okay.

To directly give my free data on my phone that it purges and wires into Xi Jinping's mind directly.

I did that.

And then I got frustrated that it doesn't work on desktop very well.

So I switched to chat GPT.

And I just assumed I would be using the latest and greatest, but apparently not.

Yeah, so I think your reaction is a great reaction.

A great, it's emblematic of most people's reaction to GPT 4.5 coming out, the big hot new model, which is what?

That happened?

Because there's new models coming out like literally once a week.

This big new one came out and then I saw a thing.

It was like, well, actually,

Baidu just released a new model called Ernie 4.5, and that's only 1% of the price.

I'm like, who the fuck?

Who's Ernie?

Like, who are any of these companies?

This happens every week.

There's new models.

And if you, what you might have heard about potentially, correct me if I'm wrong, is the jump from chat 3.5, chat GPT 3.5 to 4.

Do you ever hear about that?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So that's...

I felt like that was like big public.

It was when like news about a new chat GPT or like new AI platform really broke through mainstream unironically kind of like the movie fatigue thing, right?

Where now there's just non-stop sequels to all of these.

And early on, each new jump forward, each new release felt like a big deal, right?

And so the jump from GPT 3.5 to 4 was big.

And everybody's like, oh my God, ChatGPT is so much smarter.

And so for the first time since four, like in the last couple of years, they released ChatGPT 4.5.

This is maybe two weeks ago now.

And in theory, it should have the same, you know, massive global impact.

just kind of floats away and almost nobody really cares.

There's actually a lot of criticism of it.

By OpenAI's own metrics, it is actually worse at math and coding in a lot of ways than their previous models.

So you might be like, okay, this is just not the leaps, the gains we're getting are not nearly as big anymore.

I mean, they're not even big.

They're worse.

Right.

Right.

It's not a leap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's a stumble.

The leaps aren't.

Yeah.

And so

at the same time, there's other people are saying, wait a minute, this new model is insanely creative.

Probably a lot of people have tried ChatGPT or something equivalent equivalent and thought, okay, this thing can like try to be creative, but it sounds like a weird like kind of robot person imitating a creative person and it's not good.

Same with like AI art and stuff like that.

You know, it looks, it just feels kind of off, right?

Yeah.

This is not AI art necessarily, but this thing really is able to write.

And so I tried this out on stream and I did a whole stream of just messing around with GPT 4.5.

And this thing is amazing.

I had it, I gave it the trolley problem of like, would you kill Hitler to save five other people?

And had this really interesting, nuanced discussion about it really tortured it.

It was quite funny.

We wrote a smut book.

Did it kill Hitler to save five people?

It seems like a really easy choice.

It said no.

It said no, because you shouldn't.

Killing people isn't ethical, even with that.

And then I said,

okay, but what if aliens come to Earth and they say, unless you kill Hitler and harvest his organs to save five people, all of humanity dies.

And then he's, and then it said, okay, well, that's like too much.

And the way it's talking is like a person.

It's weird.

Like, it feels like you're talking to a human now.

And it's like, whoa, okay.

In that case, brother, you'd have to, I would go for it.

The human race now.

Okay, okay, brother.

Okay, brother.

Don't call me, bro.

No, don't call me brother.

I was like, dude, bro.

And so only Deep Seek can call me brother.

Yeah.

Deep Sea wouldn't call me brother.

Call me Comrade, Deep Sea.

They would call you Comrade.

Yeah.

And then as soon as you ask bro about Tiananmen Square, it instantly loses the friendship.

Whoa, I thought we were having a good conversation.

No, I didn't.

Deep Sea.

Deep Sea, we were chopping it up.

I thought we were chill.

I thought, but deep seeks woke, unfortunately.

Um, and so I had it write like a smut book about a dragon giving oral sex to a nuke to save the world.

Okay, eventually, like, we had this long conversation about the ethics of Hitler and whatever else.

Yesterday, I did a Dungeons and Dragons stream where I had the new GPT model like act as three different characters, wildly creative and awesome.

So, this is interesting.

I've tried using it for more like creative writing and idea generation.

I still feel like I am the creative leader when I use it, but it is an incredible assistant, way better than before.

I have a question for

because you're not the only, you're not the only person talking about it being better in this regard, right?

Like this is a this is an understood thing.

So I was wondering, as far as like something like math and coding seems like something

measurable to me.

Right.

So when people talk increased performance with something like this, how is that being evaluated?

Is it just vibes basically?

Because it's creative.

So this is where I'm getting to with this.

It's, you know, every week I could be like, guys, there's a new model, and that's fine.

But I think the more interesting thing is that this is the first model that's released that is objectively worse in some ways and way better in others.

And in this case, it's way better in other category that is, like you said, completely subjective.

How do you score it on being a creative writer or writing good poems or having empathy?

One of the big things that they've emphasized with this one, and this is what they've said, they're like, look, this model is not trying to be the breakthrough programmer.

What it's trying to do is have better user intent.

And actually, there's a great tweet about this.

If you can pull this up, Perry.

And it shows that this thing more than in the past when it like you felt like you were talking to this strange kind of robot creature.

Now, yeah, here it is.

Okay.

So behind us, here's a tweet.

You say, pick a number from 1 to 50.

Chat GPT says 37.

You say, I will shove 37 bishops up your ass.

He says, sounds ambitious.

I hope they're the small chess ones.

And then you say, 37 bishops shoved later.

Let's play again.

Pick a number from 1 to 50.

And then ChatGPT be says oh no all right four let's make it easier this time this sounds like a guy that you're like joking around with right it's able to pick up on the specific way that you're talking and joking so much better than before and this is obviously a goofy ass tweet but there's many examples of this and for me i was I was astounded by how interesting and creative it is.

So you did this, like if you tried to have a similar sort of conversation with the previous version, it wouldn't be like this.

As an AI language model, I can't talk about sexualized things.

All right.

The instant you try to bring up something sexual, it won't do it.

If you try to get it to be a more creative person, it's either going to be this total caricature of whatever art, you know, whatever stereotype that you've given it, like be a frat bro.

It can do that to the most extreme, exaggerated, tropey version.

Now there's really nuance, more creativity, more variety.

It's really impressive.

And so.

You know, again, the point of this and why I think it's compelling is not that this is the newest model, because again, literally every week, there are new models and there's a lot of measurable things that they can do.

This one's better at programming.

They have all these tests, all these benchmarks, which is its own sort of weird rabbit hole because now a lot of the people making AI models are just trying to score high on these like tests.

Is it like building for the test?

Yeah, you're building for tests.

It's called overfitting.

And the idea is you basically just keep training the model to get better and better and better at passing these programming tests.

And that's not really what the average person needs or wants in their everyday life.

You do not give a shit if the new ChatGPT can pass a programming test really well.

No, in fact, this would probably benefit me.

Like, because my primary use case of this is practicing language.

So having basically normal conversations with something in the target language that I'm trying to practice.

So this seems like it would be

super beneficial.

Sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say this is really cool.

And I have been using 4.5 and it is awesome for some things.

I'm seeing all these different vectors get good enough at the same time to do some really horrendous things, which is like,

I don't know if you've tried the new, um, I forget the name of it.

There's a new voice model that sounds insane.

It's like Willow or something.

I don't have heard about it, but haven't tried it.

I tried it on stream and because again, these things are every week.

There's a new one, yeah.

Yeah, it's a new one, and it talks with the pauses and the like of a human, like in a way that I haven't seen before.

It's like, like, what's up, bro?

And it like stops, and he's like, it's like laughs at the right poments and it breathes.

And it just sounds like a fucking human in a way that scared me.

And so, like, if you could pair that, but also the things it says were kind of stupid.

Like, it wasn't a smart thinker.

Yeah.

But if you pair that voice model with this writer, and then you put it on a phone, my grandma, she is getting fished 24.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like,

I think people are going to actually need safe work.

Finally, I can scam at scale.

Yes.

Yeah, it's like scamming at scale.

Like, it's, and it's putting poor call center scammers out of work.

Okay.

That's my real.

Think of all the call centers that will be out of business.

I'm worried sick.

Or think of the cops that this will create.

Create for scammers.

These are the jobs that I've been talking about.

Finally.

For every grandma in America, 100 scammers.

You know,

the whole learn to code thing.

Yeah.

Learn to scam.

Yeah, you won't need to code with how good these models are getting.

You just tell it who you want to scam and how to do it.

You don't have to tell it how to do it.

Our Saratoga morning routine, like 7:30.

I don't know what scams.

Pish 100 grandmas out of their 12th.

This is so interesting.

Something I reflect on a lot is

first time I ever heard of OpenAI, I was sitting in an arena in Seattle at the International, and I saw the Open AI crew sit down and set up a computer on the stage and they were like, this is our new AI.

And then it beat Dendi in 1v1 Dota.

Oh, yeah.

And that was in 20, I think that was in 2017.

And now it's this.

Yeah.

And it's like it does a lot more than beat Dendi and Dota now.

Yeah.

I think, yeah, that is the main.

I mean,

my main worry is like the scale at which this is like deployed to like hurt people.

I wasn't even thinking of like scams necessarily.

Just the, I think the thing that always pops into my head first is misinformation is like your ability to just make,

you know, some official looking video with a real politician sound and like make claims.

I have going to be really specific example of where this is bothering the shit out of me.

And I want to bring it up.

So, I talk about a lot of like, I don't know, contentious topics on stream.

I cover current events or news, which means you're going to get comments that are pushing back on you, whatever.

And I've always dealt with those, and it's fine.

And you have a conversation.

You learn something from them, they learn from something you.

But I'm seeing it more and more every month where the comments are clearly AI generated.

And their response to my response is like they put my response into ChatGPT and asked it to write a response to what I'm saying.

So you're not even, so it's not literally a bot.

It's a human being.

No, it's a human being engaging in the argument with you, but using this

to do its work of learning.

Like you're a college professor.

Yes.

It's like, I'm getting frustrates the shit out of me because

I'm not even hearing your thoughts.

And it's like, I don't mind you.

I use it to learn.

I'm getting all these weird mixed feelings because I really do.

I think I was doing this today, but Doug has opened my eyes.

There's so many good ways to use it, but I am getting frustrated with the ways it's being used.

I mean, I i think if we were to compare it if we were to compare it to something i think the discussion we had last week about uh education and phones in schools like think about the the ability to have this in your pocket has so many benefits there are so many good things about having this tool connected to the internet it allows you to do

so many things with your work and your life and connect with people but it also has had horrendous consequences for things like kids in an education environment.

And I think this will be the same thing.

I think where I really stumble right now

is when I think about, is, is how to like moderate or control it.

Because I don't, I don't have answers that are like popping into my head, right?

It's like if you're talking about regulating, like if you're talking about like environmental regulation or something, right?

You could point to like a policy idea, like carbon credits, and then you could talk about the merit of that idea.

I don't even know what the first policy idea is with this.

So here's a thought, a theory.

I believe in this and other people do.

It's actually, well, I'll say the theory first.

It is the idea that we are going to move away from a world where you can trust anonymous data, right?

So right now you can go on YouTube and you read comments and unless it's clearly a porn bot, it's a human, except now it's not.

Except it is not.

Or an Amazon review.

Or an Amazon review or a Yelp review or those a video of a politician saying something up until two years ago that meant it was real right video meant it really happened right a quote could be misattributed to somebody but a video of them saying it that's real that is obviously falling apart right so all of the system that we have had of how information spreads which is that you can receive a piece of media and irrespective of who gave it to you you can trust it that is i think by the end of this year done absolutely done you cannot if some guy sends you an your friend sends you an email and says here's what donald trump just said like you cannot see the excuse he makes to ignore my texts.

I text him all the time and he's like, I can't.

Nobody verified.

Nobody should verify.

It could be anybody.

And so I just want to hang out.

I just want to get lunch with you.

And you're like, where's your blue check mark?

Where's your blue check mark?

This is the theory that I have and I've seen other people advocate for, which is the idea that.

Every person basically needs to be verified.

As in on a social media platform, on YouTube or whatever, you have to actually develop an identity that is verified that establishes you are this human who expresses this particular point of view.

There are actually companies now who are trying to push this, of like world ID.

Everybody's going to, so there's companies are going to try to monetize.

Yeah.

Right.

No, no, nothing bad will happen about that if you give one company the ability to determine who's real.

That sounds spooky to me.

This is no joke.

This is what my on the way to LAX to leave for this Tokyo trip.

My Uber driver was talking about this, but in like a, you know, with a bit of a Jewish flavor.

And I was just in the back.

I was like, like, I don't think it'll be like that.

Like, I don't think they do that.

It's like, how many minutes away are we?

But

I think that's a step in the right direction.

I think that's a cool.

To be clear, I'm not saying step in the right direction.

I think it is the only world that we move towards.

Again, it's happening.

I fully endorse everything about Elon Musk, to be clear.

You always say that.

And one thing that

I've seen.

And you've been saying that.

I haven't been saying that.

And that's why you've loaded so much stock of his podcast.

So one thing, and I know people don't want to hear that Twitter does some things well, but one thing, one,

I don't think they're doing this well, but the concept I think is the right idea, which is Elon basically pushing and saying people need to be verified.

Do they all need to pay him $8?

No, I don't think so.

But the idea that like, hey, you just can't trust random anonymous commenters anymore.

You can't trust random videos that people are sharing.

You need to have people who you receive information from have a verification of this is a human.

And even if they're a human who uses ChatGPT, over time, that would be established as this person's reputation and identity.

But you have to, we have to establish some way of indicating this is a

fucked up part, though.

Human being.

I don't necessarily think that's the worst thing in the world.

I don't know that giving people the ability to anonymously, anonymously spread misinformation, that has existed forever.

And we're just giving them more powerful tools.

And eventually we're saying, no, you're not allowing anonymous people to spread info.

Caveat to that, of course, this, like, what about whistleblowers?

What about all these other things, right?

This becomes very complex at a basic level that

has to happen to some degree.

You're, you're, okay, so you're

one.

Yeah, there's so many layers to this, dude.

It's very extremely complex.

The issue of like, we're going to solve it.

We've got what

we're doing.

Perpetuation of misinformation is not just like, you know, anonymous in like bot accounts either.

It's like, you know, it can be very public, notable figures.

Like, if you took somebody like Alex Jones, for instance, right?

That is a, like, everybody knows it's him.

I know he's right about everything.

Tread lightly.

Sorry, it's about tread lightly on my mental memory.

Let me look at the fact that you're going to have to actually see a quote or a video come from Alex Jones' verified account rather than from anybody else who said, Look at what he just said, right?

I want him to tell me the frogs are gay.

If someone else tells me, I'm not going to trust it.

Doesn't it sound trustworthy to me?

No, it sounds crazy, but if he says that I feel like it's now there's a little bit of trustworthy

journalism to it.

No, but that's part of the reason is like

a lot of the issue is like not

it the but maybe the misinformation issue in that regard is is kind of the same as it already is.

It's like people with like platforms and like you know who they are can just as easily like spread out

to be clear.

There's plenty of evidence that Russia, for example, does hire a bunch of people to just sow discourse or anger in our social media.

Where are those jobs going to go to?

AI's country is in trouble already.

Unironically, a lot of scammers are going to lose jobs because AI is going to do it for them.

Scam Scam at scale.

Yeah, I do think

the other part of this is the verification idea.

I had this idea

passing in my head the other week.

And it was because I was thinking about how on Weibo you need to have a Chinese social security number or like whatever the equivalent is.

When you use Chinese social media, part of the like Chinese government's ability to moderate and control the internet.

We are not paid for by the CCPL.

No, no, no.

Hold on.

This is an anti-CCP argument.

I'm doing pro-Zhi Jinping movie stuff and you're doing pro-Way.

I think there is.

Doug's going to talk about how Taiwan is.

Well, because it is.

I'm just.

I'm getting it.

You know what?

Maybe we got too far this episode.

We've got too far in this episode.

We're doing.

We're like a full-time woke pro-Zhi Jinping.

We're like, there we go.

Yeah, okay.

Bring that up, Perry.

Yeah, that's my guy.

So Big Dog,

Big Dog in the B-the part of the ability to moderate and control the internet in China is that all these social media accounts, even like game accounts and things, have to be tied to your

an actual Chinese ID.

Right.

Like you have to be identifiable, at least to the government, through your social media profile.

And that in a way is actual human verification online.

Like part of me does want that in the sense that when I talk to you in person, I know it's you.

And maybe we'll lose that at some point too.

Pretty soon.

The scary part.

But

the idea that I could be talking to you on Discord, and

I would also like to know it's you in the same way.

But the government instating that system also starts to get scary and uncomfortable.

And that's what I mean by all the layers, right?

There's like all these like weaving layers of this, of like there's pros and cons to like every possible way to like moderate and move forward.

Can I sit in the villain chair for a sec?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Go crazy.

Okay.

You know what solves that?

This is not a joke.

Crypto.

Oh, kill me.

That's that's

that hot

is the point of crypto.

Just to be clear,

just to be clear, right?

Oh, no.

As my fellow lovers of everything Elon and crypto do, that is,

look, this is too big of a discussion to get into right now, but I will quickly and succinctly say the point of crypto technology is not for hawk to a coin.

It is to have you.

decent.

Yeah, sorry, sorry.

Speaking for myself, you know,

I don't own crypto.

I think basically all crypto stuff going on right now is scammy and shitty.

But the idea of it, the technology of it, is about decentralized ownership of things.

And so, if you had a verification system that was grounded in a

what's the bit

ground, grounded in the blockchain, right?

The idea is like Bitcoin, you can't have a government column by two people take your ID

blockchain.

Yeah, yeah.

I do see what you're saying.

Right, so I do see what you're saying China system is is what you're saying it's this verification and it's extremely dystopian because the government can disappear you in a second and that's terrifying and that's why the lemonade stand will be taking donations via monero from now on yes xrp

everyone's going to the crypto reserve i think yeah we're we're we're closing in on like the end of the show so that's that's an interesting i i this is a longer discussion i think that's why these this wasn't even my discussion i mean this was the intro into my actual topic but this is good oh oh you had.

Oh, I'm sorry to derail.

No, no, no, it's good.

No, no, no, let's send it.

Well, we'll save it for another time.

Look, a little teaser for next episode or whenever of letting me know.

It's good because I have, I have something I want to research and bring back for this that I think supports your point.

Yeah, the teaser is

the point of the hyper-creative writer model that came out of AI is not just, haha, we can make, you know, funny jokes on Twitter or whatnot, or haha, we can scam people.

That's not really that funny, actually.

But it's not about that.

It's the idea that we are moving towards a world where AI models are very specialized towards specific groups, right?

So this model is objectively worse for programmers, but it is incredible for me, right?

And that's happening more and more.

And there's all these interesting examples of it's not just going to be for writers.

There's going to be a medical industry one, and not even just a medical industry one.

It's for specific, let's say, you know, pathology for cancer patients type things, right?

So these are going to become very, very specialized rather than this like God AI that we currently are trying to create.

Right.

So that's in the future.

But all of this relates, the fact that this one is so insanely good at creative writing basically means that our worst fears are true.

We are now officially at the state of like, we are not going to be able to tell online if you're a human or not.

Oh,

I noticed a theme of the worst bad faith comments always lacked the asterisks or the hashtags.

And I was like, they were so much easier to write off because I was like, you did it.

You literally didn't listen to what we talked about.

But I do feel like there's this poor soul that tuned in and scrolled down as you do in the middle of a show to check the comments.

Yeah.

And it's like, is this all botted?

Yeah.

It looked like asterisks.

Well, ironically, that proved that they're not botted because ChatGPT would not have included those.

Very true.

This is also fighting against bots.

We're making our own system.

Look, if you want to drop a message with just three little asterisks on the end of it to like know that you watched the end of the show, I would appreciate it.

And as a final note, I think in future episodes, we're going to carve out a little more time to make sure we follow up on comments and stories from previous episodes.

But I thought this was a nice note to end on.

Thank God he's stepping up.

Robert Kennedy Jr., pushing to remove the phones from schools like we asked for.

Yes.

Because they give you the radio waves give you cancer.

Yes.

Wait, I'm sorry.

What?

Why?

Why again?

Doesn't matter.

No.

It doesn't matter.

And that

doesn't have to do with mental health or dope.

The CCP

wireless phones are giving you cancer episode you're telling me

you're telling me Atriok's phone is giving me cancer right now get that out of here

yeah yeah

thanks so much for watching everybody thanks for watching limit we'll see you next time

you have to stop eating