Are We Getting Dumber? | Ep 003 - Lemonade Stand 🍋

Did you know that if you go to x.com, the everything app, and you submit the winning college basketball bracket for March Madness, you could win a trip to Mars.

This is a real thing that's on Twitter.

And so what I'm thinking is because we have a big audience now, if every one of our viewers, we all submit a different bracket, but we put Atriarch's name, then one of us will win and then Elon will kidnap him and then be Mars and we'll finally be rid of you.

Is that what you're thinking?

Do you see what I'm thinking?

I'll be after our episode last week where you defended Elon Musk.

He reached out and hired hired you as an adman to promote his videos.

He's like, don't worry, whatever is submitted, he will win the contest.

I do like that it says, it says, win a free trip to Mars, but then after that, best bracket wins 100K.

Kind of, is it, so do you get both, or does it imply that if you put together the best

are you going to show up to Mars with no money?

You're going to be broke?

I would hate to be broke.

No, he puts it on Mars.

Yeah, you have to get there.

Freddy Player One.

That's where he leaves his inheritance on Mars, and then the rest of humanity humanity has to go get it.

He's been weirdly quiet about Mars.

Have you noticed in the past few years?

Because he kind of, you know, the whole thing with him blowing past Tesla deadlines?

Used to be blowing past the Mars deadline.

Yeah.

And we'd be like, we're going to Mars this year.

We're going to Mars this year.

He did say something.

And we've left him.

I think today.

He said Mars in.

20 years, maybe 30.

I'm not really kidding.

He said it was like five years.

No, that's it.

Four years ago.

Like four years ago.

Finally, a realistic timeline.

I was talking.

We have this Discord now that we started the show.

And I think I put in that chat, I was like, as much as an Elon hater as I am, part of me gets excited every time he drops the Mars deadline.

Oh, dude.

I mean, the Mars would be sick to see.

I want that to happen in my life, though.

It would be sick to go.

You like, no matter how much you hate Elon, like, you've got to admit that when the starship caught with the two chopsticks and the spaceship landed

cinema, right?

Cinema.

It's so good.

I mean, the win-win would be if Elon goes to Mars.

Didn't I have my dream and he's farther away from me.

Elon and Atriarch and Mars together.

You two chopping it up.

A buddy cops film where we have to learn to get along.

And you have 100K in your pocket.

Because I won the March Madness bracket.

Telling your kids I showed up, Mars, only 100K in my pocket.

Turns out you couldn't buy anything with it.

And I built this future for us.

I do have a few topics I want to list for the audience before we get to it.

I don't want to hear it.

I don't want to hear it.

Stop.

You don't even want to.

No, before you you tell me these topics, what?

This is a nice thing that I'm doing.

I need to do a nice thing for you.

Okay.

Oh.

I need to do a nice thing for you.

And that nice thing is that we need to talk

about

safe spaces.

I think.

Actually, I think Perry has to say that.

I think we need to talk about how you need to use an iPad.

Okay.

You need to figure out how to do it.

There's the hostility.

You're bringing that over from the other podcast.

Now, if you guys don't know at home, Aiden is also part of another podcast called The Yard.

Okay.

I'm happy to say their name.

And they bully him a lot.

And I didn't notice this, but they pointed this out.

I don't know if you could pull up the tweet from.

Let's watch this.

Let's watch this real quick.

This is what they show.

I use Google Translate to talk to my Uber driver.

I know.

I know.

Okay.

Freeze frame right there.

He says, I use Google Translate to talk to my Uber driver and then pauses like a dog that's about to be beaten.

Because they make fun of him so much for just talking to Uber drivers on that podcast.

They make fun of me for talking to people.

So I was just like, instinctively, I was like, yep, hit, let it hit.

And then you guys just didn't say anything.

Look at his face.

He's afraid.

You don't have to be afraid here, is what I'm trying to tell you.

Is this a safe space?

This is a safe space.

You can tell me the topics.

And now I can tell you the topics.

I'm going to know.

I'm excited to tell you the topics.

Well, everyone.

This week we're talking about how, is everyone getting stupider?

Yeah, you would talk about that, you bitch.

Oh, dude.

Dumbass.

I was just talking about safe spaces.

So I'd like this to be one of those.

That was the first two episodes.

I was really settling into my safe space.

And also the fallout of Mark Rober's suspiciously timed video.

Oh, yeah.

It feels like he listened to our app and then kind of just pumped that out.

He stole your content.

Yeah, yeah.

And some drama that's been going on in the wake of that.

And then also

in this era of protectionism in the U.S., I wanted to bring up a little law called the Jones Act, which is really interesting, just to help demonstrate some of the costs of enacting, you know, even good intentions behind protectionist legislation, talking about something that isn't tariffs for once in the, in the context of protectionism too.

And also, we want to do some follow-ups on comments and people's feedback from the last couple episodes.

Squeeze that in too.

Yeah, it sounds awesome.

About the Jones Act, it's really funny because you guys were talking before the pod started about how, like, isn't it crazy how things like that are so effective and then some people don't even know what it's about?

And I was like,

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

So, I'll be the voice of the people on this one trying to learn about the John Zag from you.

I haven't heard about this, but uh, I think you wanted to intro, right?

Your topic was I do.

I want to call you stupid, and I want to call you stupid, and I want to call Perry stupid, and I want to call myself stupid.

It was a safe space for like maybe 15 years, by the way.

All right, so before you do that, why don't you spend 30 minutes pulling up a tweet to call us stupid?

To do that, okay, we've got it.

Can you find a tweet that calls us stupid in under an hour?

Better than that, okay.

A Financial Times article

asking, Have humans passed peak brain power?

That's sort of the opening topic here.

I want to talk about is, well, let me ask you a sincere question first.

And I'm going to ask Aiden first because I have a specific example.

Do you think you're smarter or dumber than you were when you made this video in 2012?

Master Calvin45 here.

Do you think you're smarter?

Be honest

than when you made this video.

Are you smarter or dumber?

I know it's a little mark, but I'm really happy.

On the whole, I'm smarter.

But it's closer than I'd like to admit.

Okay.

So that's sort of the theory here is that beginning in 2012, adults and teenagers have reported marked declines in their ability on math and reading scores and their general ability to concentrate.

Difficulty thinking or concentrating, difficulty, trouble learning new things.

Around 2012 is when it peaked, is when it like starts to decline.

And it's been measurably rising or declining in this case ever since.

Wait, so up until...

Science, reading, maths, numeracy, literacy.

What is a little surprising to me me is up until 2012, you're saying that it was still trending upwards on the whole, or it was like stagnant and then it dropped.

Like, do you know?

I don't have the data.

I mean, it looks like 2006, 2012 is pretty flat.

Yeah.

But I would say the 2000s that we peaked, but like it's been rising, flattened out, and now it is declining as of 2012.

And, you know, that's, I think,

I don't know.

I mean, do you have any thought?

Like, Doug, what's your first thought?

When, when, when I first thought, I think you and I graduated around 2012.

We hit the seat, baby.

That's fucking

truly representative of the cognitive decline

um i mean i have thought so i like i talked to a teacher friend of mine about like kids and what's been going on i i think we as we talk about it probably need to separate covid um my friend who's a high school teacher was saying right now the last the way he phrased it the last wave of kids who are really messed up by covid are finally like starting to leave the school system they got rid of them yeah but like but like they are so messed up and the way he phrased it was like these are kids who justifiably have no sense of authority when it comes to like schooling or teaching or parents or anything because there was this two-year period where they were just at home and could do whatever they wanted.

And he said, as a teacher, there was no way to discipline anybody or stop them from just playing Minecraft all day long.

Right.

And so the structures that we were told as a kid of, you have to listen to your parents and go to school and do these things just completely collapsed.

And so he said they're like kind of getting used to it again.

And like people, you know, the younger kids who were younger during COVID covet are now sort of like back into like the way or education yeah right of the rhythm of how we have traditionally done things um so it sounds like that has really messed things up and then i for me there's a broader question of like is it a good thing that our school system is dramatically changing because my sense from this article is less that people are dumber and more that people are not doing well on our traditional way of grading intelligence.

Well, I wanted to dig in.

What is the,

is there more information here about like the context of why this is happening or how this is measured?

Like what is the rest of the argument?

Nobody has an exact answer on why, but they posit some couple things.

One is that people are reading less than ever.

So the decline of reading is pretty dramatic.

Again, right around 2010, 2012.

And I want to say 2010 is

the year that smartphones took over 50% of the population.

Once you say phone's bad, everyone loses their mind.

That is like the obvious conclusion they're leaning towards.

You think phones are good?

You get to be the villain.

This episode is good.

I'm just a guy.

Yes.

He thinks phones are good for kids in the comments.

No, I like phones bad.

So phones, and generally it says like our ability to, it's not like reading is getting specifically worse or masters are worse.

It's that our ability to process information, like take in information, process it.

It's almost like when your brain turns on and has to work a little bit, we've sort of pushed past that.

And they point to a lot of things.

um one of them they say is not even that it's phones but it's infinite scrolling on media yes to where it kind of like anytime you get in discomfort you just move on to the next thing your brain does not get comfortable sitting in in the discomfort of thought and again yeah go for it yeah positive my i i i'll give what's aiden's theory on intelligence

theory on this because this is something that i've thought a lot about self-reflect self-reflecting.

I feel dumber in some ways than I used to be when I was younger, actually.

And the biggest thing that I noticed was as I've gotten older, my ability to speak in the way I want and instantly come to the words and ways I want to describe things and explain things has gotten less sharp over time, particularly in, I would say, the last like five to six years.

I feel like I was actually better at finding the words to explain things and speak to people.

when I was younger.

And I think that tracks really directly in my mind with the amount that I read.

Uh, because I barely have read up until this year, so maybe before this year, uh, I had not read a whole book in maybe five or six years.

And my habit of reading like every day obsessively has been gone since basically the beginning or middle of high school.

And I think reading

in general, or maybe if you, if you intently listen to audiobooks, I think there's, there is some scientific

support for listening to audiobooks actually is very similar to reading.

I think the problem is, are you actually paying attention to what you're listening to in the same way that you have to pay attention when reading?

Right.

Like, I've seen Ludwig listen to an audiobook and it's not.

Yeah.

His eyes are glazed over.

You can just phase out while something happens to be on, right?

But if you are intently listening to audiobooks, I think

it might be the same.

And I think that is the number one thing I could point to in my own life is when I was reading every day, I think I had a way better vocabulary and quickness in the way that I was able to like access and explain things.

But that aside, my other part of this that I think absolutely has to do with this is it is related to phones and phones are like the way this problem is dispersed in my mind.

But the constant like activation you can you have access to all the time by scrolling things like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, anything, or just the internet in general.

Or for me, it's it's YouTube.

Like I listen to a ton of YouTube and podcasts and how I have to listen to those things almost all the time.

I always am putting something on.

And I think when you're pushing your brain like

constantly and you are constantly giving it,

it's constantly in a state of stimulation.

I think things that stand out are fewer and far between.

And things become harder to retain and memorize.

Like a lot of the way that you memorize or like hang on to things is strong emotional like responses to those things.

So if you,

if say I did something wrong, like I, I did, I, I betrayed you in some capacity.

And, uh, and there's two versions of this playing out.

Uh, the version where you don't realize anything happened and we never talk about it.

And I've hidden hidden it from you for years and you don't really know about it.

That version of you.

Every day your life is worse.

And I'm watching you.

I'm watching you suffer.

And you have no idea it was me.

It was me this whole time.

But there's some big lesson.

Like there might be something that I have to like learn from that or take away from that that I might not take away because there's no big emotional moment that forces me to confront it.

But if you, uh, if you got mad at me and we got into an argument, like a real argument, which we've never really done before.

We will.

It would be very distinct and fresh in your mind.

Like that's something that heavily influences memory is like the emotional, maybe the emotional state.

I'm sure there are better ways to describe this, but basically the state of being that you're in when you're

consuming the information.

But if you're in like a constant baseline state of information being spit at you all the time, and there's nothing to differentiate it

from every other moment of your day.

It's really hard to actually remember and retain it.

And I've been talking about this a lot with some other friends because I think my memory is, has gotten worse.

And I was like, I don't think I have like early onset dementia or something like that.

I hope.

I think it's just a consequence of the way that I am constantly engaging in messages, consuming media.

Like it's a consequence of my feelings.

Do you feel this way, Doug?

Is this something that you've experienced?

Or what's your experience with this over the past, let's say since 2012 to now?

Postphones, post.

I'm too weird of a person, I think, to have a baseline that I can compare against.

I think this is a relevant enough time to bring up this tweet I saw.

Okay.

So, this is a teacher who talked about the current state of education and based essentially saying what you are saying, Aiden, so we can start it.

That's the old COVID.

I think you guys don't know what's going on in education right now.

That's fine.

Like, how could you know unless you were working in it?

But I think that

you need to know.

So, here is exactly what it's like right now working in public education.

First of all, all, the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever.

They live on their phones and they're just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they're in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school,

they behave like addicts.

They're super emotional, like the smallest thing sets them off.

And when you are standing in front of them trying to teach,

They're vacant.

They have no ability to tune in if your communication isn't packaged in short little clips or if it doesn't have like bright flashing lights.

That's actually the way harder part for me than just the outright behaviors is just being up at the front talking to a group of kids who have their eyes open.

They're looking at me, but they're not there.

Yeah, and that's the core of it, right?

Which is

pretty damning and sounds horrible.

It's also wild.

And then the response, which I think is interesting.

So I saw this response from Emmett Scheer, the old CEO of Twitch, and he said, I'm not sure if this is true, but weirdly, if it is, which is just awesome opener.

By the way, wait, one image here thing.

I used to work with this guy.

He would be in meetings where executives are presenting him important things they've worked the whole month on, and he's on his phone playing Hearthstone.

This is a fact.

I will stand.

So for him to call out,

he was breaking out of the psychic prison.

Psychic.

All right, Tom, I'm sorry.

Yeah, so in response to this, this teacher explaining how difficult education is right now, he says, I'm not sure if this is true, but weirdly, if it is, it kind of gives me hope.

Blur out the judgment and details, and it sounds like a generation staging a jailbreak from psychic prison.

So there is an argument that I don't necessarily agree with that the way our schools and the way our everything has been structured education-wise is very much about turning the average citizen into a cog, into a broad cog that can fit into any machine.

And I think arguably that is not a good system for majority of people, particularly in our modern society, and that maybe it is a world where we want to have more specialized tools of

AI education or tutors or whatever that aren't just like, we're going to jam you into this box, check all the boxes over the course of high school.

Emmett's take is a bit, I don't know, psychic prison feels like a bit money.

Yeah, I feel like that's a little extreme.

I think the maybe the like less extreme version of the argument that you're saying, that makes, I actually think that makes sense.

I think the argument of like making school more specialized and allowing kids to like focus on particular areas that are they're best best suited for or they're most likely to succeed in is an approach that uh not only like some schools uh are able to take in the us but like if you ask uh if you look at education systems in other countries they often let kids uh do that like in the later high school years especially right i think that is a very disconnected from the consequences of kids having phones there's two paths right there's one of just saying that uh schooling needs their overhaul in general which has been true for a while which which is like a lot of kids are left in the cracks.

A lot of kids aren't set for this rote memorization learning.

It's not physical enough for young boys.

I've heard like they don't get enough outside time, especially.

That's why, like, there's like aspects of schooling that could be.

But if we were having this argument about education in 2007 before iPhones existed, that argument would be the same.

It's the same.

It was the same thing back then.

But also, there's the dopamine addiction, which is like it seems different.

And I'll say, as somebody who, so I didn't know this.

I got an ADHD diagnosis like a year ago.

And I'm not about to blame like all of the bad things of my life on ADHD, to preface.

Publicly.

You do it privately, but not.

But when I talked to, but when I talked to my parents, I didn't know that they knew I had ADHD as a kid.

And they.

Did you not see that video?

It was obvious.

I'm pretty sure everyone.

What the fuck happened to the safe space?

All right, sorry.

And talking to them, like my,

like, I think about the,

when I was a kid and I didn't, I wasn't allowed to like watch TV on weekdays.

I wasn't allowed to play video games on weekdays.

I could only, I could, I could read basically.

And I, that constant, like part of having ADHD, I think, is your constant seek for stimulation, basically.

And it is hard to focus on things.

And for me as a kid, that, that ended up getting like captured in books and comic books.

Like that was, I just read constantly.

I would take a book everywhere with me as a child so I could read every moment of every day, or I would listen to audiobooks on tape and things like that.

And it's, I think there is, I think about what would have happened if I had like a phone instead and just free reign on the internet, which I didn't really have until like mid-teenage years.

And

I think it would have been really, really bad for me.

I would have turned out way, way differently because my effort and focus and like success would have been like completely diverted from like how I grew up.

Obviously, that's extremely anecdotal.

This is like a very personal experience to me, right?

But I do think on the whole, access to like this all the time, like when you give,

like I think a really good video on the effects of weed came out.

because a bunch of like weed research has dropped in the last couple of years, like post-legalization.

And a lot of the consequences of

weed can now be looked at in like the long run.

And

there is, turns out there is really, really bad cognitive effects from like constant or like even small use of like weed, particularly for children.

Like it, not not so much for adults.

I'm not here to like edgy, like say like stop smoking weed or something.

But I think the seat is the villain.

Yeah, that's the villain.

The idea, I'm saying the idea that having this device with you all the time that is constantly like pushing and stimulating your brain and giving that to someone who's like young and developing, especially, the idea that it has no consequence at all is ridiculous for one.

Like it's, it would be crazy to have an opinion that it has no idea.

You want to take away people's phones and their weed.

Yeah, no phones, no weed Aiden.

Honestly, if they're under 18,

maybe.

I don't know if I can take it.

I don't know if I'd be taking it away.

Yeah,

I wouldn't have learned anything in high school.

I already had a hard enough time paying attention with like

people watching Fortnite and like having a GameCube at home, let alone fucking Fortnite on my phone and clips it.

Like I would be destroyed.

I completely agree.

100%.

And they have data on this.

So I'm not remembering the study exactly, but they've done studies on schools that have effectively, again, a lot of schools try it, but not effectively, but effectively banned phones.

And it helped.

And when they do, it helped.

Scores go up.

I just want to point out for the audio listeners.

I got a call from a phone.

Brandon just got a call in the middle of that sentence and had to put his phone down on his lap go ahead sorry can i play a quick game of fruit ninja because i'm getting bored yeah

i'm getting fucking in the middle of the sentence reached out for his phone and looked down away from us i i even talked about this uh i talked about a similar thing recently on we do a little advice show uh for the yard like patreon and on we were talking about vices and i think a huge thing for me was how compulsively literally addicted i was to Twitter for years.

Compulsive motion of opening the app, scrolling, close it, without thinking, close it, literally open it like a second later, doing that all the time.

And I think that's, that's what kids have access to.

And this story from this woman online, right?

It's that's that's not a study, but there this, I have heard this story so much from so many people who teach that phones have like destroyed the classroom.

And if we were to go back to what I think is a valid argument, actually, which is what Doug was bringing up at the beginning,

I think that is, again, totally true.

Like ways to transform and shape education to make people be as successful as possible and

escape the psychic prison, if you will.

I got

totally valid.

It's

separate from the psychological.

Okay, so I can lead into your things real quick.

I want to say something.

So in that article, you don't have to bring it up.

I'll just say it ends by saying, because this all started around 2012, it's very obviously not an evolutionary.

We're not getting physically dumber.

Our brains are not cognitively dumber.

So it is having to do with like the way we're learning, the way our environment we're in, the way they access the phones.

And it means it's changeable, which means, you know, the hopeful thing of it is like, we can change it.

Our policy or whatever we do can make it more likely.

So you have this idea here from becoming an alpha.

Right, right.

Andrew Tate's school.

So is this the solution?

Wait, is this Andrew Tate's Forbes?

Assalamu alaikum forbid.

These are Alpha Tate's three three commitments.

Okay, all right.

Tech Bros.

I'm sorry you had to wait a whole 25 minutes to talk about AI, but we're back into AI, dude.

All right.

Let's talk about how AI is going to make everything better.

And there's literally no downside, right?

I can't think of any.

Okay, so I think there is an important premise to start with, which is that one-on-one tutoring of a student is shown to be vastly more effective.

And there's been a lot of studies by this.

I found one about from the University of Chicago.

But the difference between having a teacher in front of a group of people who is giving the same lecture and the same broad lesson to everybody versus a one-on-one tutor is a massive difference.

And we all know this, right?

That's why rich people pay for tutors for their kids and then it always makes them do way better in school, right?

So if we agree with that premise, which has been around and known for decades and decades and decades,

if we could transform our education system to be more like a one-on-one tutor experience, that could have incredible benefits for kids.

So there are now studies going on with basically people using AI LLMs to have an AI tutor, essentially.

So this is in early stages.

These are going to get way better, but even there's some studies in Nigeria and Ghana.

One of them is crazy.

In Nigeria, they had students in a six-week program for one hour a day after school.

They talked to this LLM chat bot to help them learn English.

And they tested that at the end.

The six weeks was equivalent to two years of typical learning.

That is how big of a difference having a tailored experience was.

They did math in Ghana.

Kids Kids were given an hour of this AI math tutor on WhatsApp.

And over eight months of doing this, one hour a day, it was an extra year of learning.

Like these are crazy gains when you can tailor education to a specific person.

So Alpha School, I only found out about this recently.

It's the school in the U.S.

There's like nine campuses, something like that.

And there's some like prominent tech people who's like kids are in these things.

Their premise for their school is there are two hours a day of actually

two hours a day of not being, don't be a beta.

You gotta not be a beta.

Yeah, where you just crush a brew.

You sling dick.

You smoke that marijuana.

They know what alpha.

Yeah, you don't know a shit about weed aiders.

They smoke fucking marijuana.

No, my dad.

I got Lulu here,

she shows up every day.

She hits the bong.

She fucking goes.

She's a fucking alpha.

You're right.

She's an alpha.

So, so this school, their premise is you have two hours a day, that's it, of really tailored learning.

Their teachers are no longer considered teachers.

They are guides.

And their goal is to be these one-on-one mentors with each student, which are offering support and guidance and motivation for the student to work with this AI tutor to have really tailored education to them.

And the testimonies from kids are like, like this one.

I don't have to stick to just second grade.

I can learn in third and fourth grade content too, right?

Like kids can go at their own rate for all these different topics.

And then the rest of the day, they spend doing all of these, whatever activities they're interested in.

So they could like try to run their own business or they do some sort of outdoor activity or pottery or whatever they feel like, whatever's going to make them the biggest alpha.

So this is interesting.

I only learned about this recently, but apparently the results of this are insane.

Like the, the scoring that these kids are doing is vastly higher on average than a traditionally educated kid in the Texas region.

And it's wild to think that like two hours and I imagine myself in school and like how much of schooling was me just forcing myself through this slog.

And if it was tailored to me, like now I learn at like 100 times the rate I used to because I tailor everything to my interests and largely use AI to help me do that.

And I'm very optimistic about us potentially transforming education that is separate from phones, which I don't think kids should have in school.

So I want to say, I just want to say, I have used this.

I mean, I was doing it at Alpha School.

No, I don't go.

I'm actually not.

You went to Alpha School?

I'm actually in a school.

Where did you think you graduated, bro?

I'm in beta school.

It's different.

I sadly talked about that.

What is it like once you broke out of the matrix?

Dude.

But you sort of put me onto this and I've been doing doing it more and it works it legitimately i'll put in an article that i want to talk about on stream i'll have it summarize the whole thing but not summarize it i'll have it um quiz me so i'll like read the article and then i'll put it into the thing and i'm like hey just check my knowledge and you can do the voice mode like i have a conversation about the article and if i'm like this is my takeaway they're like well actually you know it'll like correct me or like it's like it's like a really smart person i'm talking to that knows what i'm trying to learn and just gives me feed.

I mean, I can actually see what you're talking about.

I've tried it firsthand and it does work.

And that way when I I go live and someone asks me that question, I've had this, like I'm prepared for it in a way that I couldn't have done just by myself reading.

Like it does, there is potential there.

The rate at which I learned, I've learned history, programming, a new language, like learning Japanese are all easily 10 times the rate at which I used to learn things 10 years ago using AI.

It is feedback.

It is wild.

And it's not just feedback.

It's that it's custom tailored to you, right?

Imagine a teacher who's explaining the article to you, but there's 30 people who all have their own questions and you get lost in.

And what I'm lost on, I get an immediate answer.

Right, right.

And you can tailor it to you.

I mean, imagine again, kids who are like, like my teacher friend was saying, like, kids don't seem to be as motivated nowadays.

And what I would hope is that AI tools or whatever modern education tools we use, whether it's AI or not, can be tailored so this kid who's terrible at focusing on math can it can be rephrased in some sort of game that's related to Fortnite or their favorite characters or a weird like movie thing in a way that actually gets their attention right at a level that matches their specific type of skill level right and rare

Have you, Doug?

Have you seen The Wire?

Yes.

Dude.

Okay, I don't know if you know.

Aiden can't go 15 minutes in real life without bringing up the wire.

He forces it into every conversation.

It's because it's a great show.

We've made it two whole episodes, I thought, without this problem, and now it's been a while.

It's a great show.

Okay.

But you might remember, you've seen The Wire.

Have you not?

Yeah, I've seen The Wire.

You know, the beginning of the season.

I've seen it through your description of every line.

The famous scene.

The famous scene at the beginning of season four when Snoop is buying the nail gun in the store.

And the whole thing is that, like, Snoop, you know, had

Snoop grown up in maybe a better environment, is actually a very intelligent person who knows what they need, knows how to ask questions, and has like a very in-depth conversation of like how I specifically need this type of tool that would be best suited to hide the bodies in vacant buildings.

Yeah, they're buying a thing to hide dead bodies, bro.

And

this is a silly example of,

I do think, like, catering, catering like knowledge and learning to specific situations that best fit like the kid so that they best understand them is totally the way to go.

Even like just having individual time is so important.

Like, I remember

when I was a younger kid in like fifth grade, and I think there was a brief period of time where I went to a private school.

And in that school, there was like a subset of people within the class that they pulled out of class to like work on basically like the next grade's worth of material because we already knew the existing material.

We were nerds.

So, but at you know, at public schools, those opportunities were like few and far between, at least at U.S.

public schools, right?

And like I said, when you look at public education in a lot of other countries, they start to take these more like

refined approaches to different students so that they're working on something that they are more invested in.

I think that's this is kind of awesome.

Like, if you were, if you're doing this through,

I don't know, in a classroom that is like deployed by the teacher or the school rather than like on the at the kids' like phones at an individual level, right?

I think that's this is really cool.

Cause I think at least as if you took this all out of the world of like technology and you just go back far enough in time, I think again, these were the same conversations about education that people are having like 10, 20, 30 years ago about how to help students succeed.

And this is like a a tool that allows that to happen.

I want to talk a little bit about the negative sides of AI, though, and it's not this in education.

And I've been hearing this all over.

There's a good article about it, but also I've talked to my, I had my chat like come up and give some stories.

And the level of cheating, especially in college-level courses right now with Chat GPT is rampant.

Yes.

It is, it is, yeah, it is viral.

I mean, you're saying they're breaking out of the psychic prison.

And maybe that means the whole system is just, it doesn't work in this, in this era.

But like the structure of it is still there and it's teetering.

it's not teachers are frustrated they're they're grading like 80

chat gpt papers they know the student did put no time into and the students are also reporting that like okay so let's say you're a student and you want to try hard well you're worried that if you don't use ai to cheat you're gonna fall behind this kid that does if you're your grades worse if you're in college you're literally suffering because of the curve right yeah there's a curve and then also like you hear the stories of like people graduating it's a tough time now to find if you get bad grades you're worried you're gonna graduate and not be.

So you're like almost incentivized hard to cheat because the thing can write better than you on a lot of things.

So now it's like this race to the bottom where everyone is cheating at all time.

It's getting exponential.

And now they're going into job interviews and they're cheating in those.

Like they're, they're having the AI auto listen to the job question and then just reading the, I mean, it's getting, it's getting, it's breaking the whole system.

It's breaking like every way of measuring human ability and talent and that structure that existed before.

And I don't have the answer, but like that is a downside of AI that's coming really quickly.

Yes.

Well, I think this is a longer term, strong, positive.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's my idea.

I'm not going to pretend like, no, AI is straight up destroying our current education system, like straight up.

And I think there's a world where we can go, okay, long term, this like things like this alpha school could be really positive.

I

have an education from one of the best computer science schools in the country and a computer science degree from it.

And I think that education quality was pretty bad overall.

And I am not heartbroken if the fairly shitty way of having us learn and test our learning knowledge, which had almost no correspondence to who went on to actually be successful and make an impact in the world, I'm not that heartbroken if that system fails.

I'm not that heartbroken if Dr.

If Professor Brian Harvey can't fucking grade our scheme projects as well anymore.

I don't get Harvey getting shaded 15 years, 12 years later.

Yeah.

Well, no, he's got this famous, he's got this famous video about not cheating.

And he's right.

Morally, like, obviously, morally, I'm not, I'm not supportive of cheating or anything, but, but it's, it, the current structure is fucked for sure.

And I think what I hope and think is and will happen is that we can, we can push it towards these really tailored experiences.

But it's not, I don't like the, the, the, the paradigm of like, all the kids go to high school and then they take the SAT and that number is how smart you are.

It's like that shit is going to end.

Yeah.

That's going to end.

It's going to be you are specialized in certain things and you can pursue those things with a lot of like individual focus.

Yeah.

I think this actually comes back to the first episode when we were talking about AI in a way, because, but this is hitting education, I would say, sooner or more heavily than the way it's hitting the job market.

It's like a freight train.

Like, it's the same issue.

When we were talking about how, well, what is the consequences of like AI on the future of the way we work?

Right.

And the big consequence is like, well, AI is going to replace all these jobs.

But if those people can't move to new jobs because AI is also capable of replacing those jobs, then there's this catastrophic effect on the way like society is structured right now.

And, but it's having, this is the same situation.

It's like new tool is not like complementary to the way education is currently structured.

Or has been done for decades.

I mean, for a long time.

But the deconstruction is happening already.

So I think the answer, like when I think about how what I fucking learned in business school is basically you went to business school?

Yeah.

Oh, dope.

I went to business school and I studied finance and I studied marketing.

And

I, nothing, almost nothing of what I learned is applicable or helpful in my life

except for,

and all of the experience that I gained by being in university was I leveraged a lot of university resources to like start to start a business and run esports events.

Yeah, doing actual things is the only way to learn.

By like running that company.

And I don't like regret going to college for those reasons.

Like I did learn a lot through those ways.

And there were exceptions in my classes where I learned about stuff that i thought was really interesting uh

but overall like i i didn't take that much away from it and this like tailored an education experience more expensive yeah i mean for kids nowadays it makes no sense for the average young person going to college right now it's like the price has only gone up yeah the quality is going down everyone's cheating like the the quality of your degree means less because there's so many false positives people are cheating through it's like people don't even like it's it's it's this really tough time to be figuring out what the fuck to do.

I mean, I don't envy people who are younger, people who are like 18 right now.

It's like insane.

I'm really learning more about it by talking to some of them.

And it's like,

I don't, I feel like in 10 years, maybe we've figured some of this out and they're having good, but I feel like this, this window is so bad.

This window sucks.

Yeah, I, again, don't want to downplay that.

Yeah, this window sucks.

Parents, like telling them, don't just do this or what, you know, like parents that don't understand how much it's changed.

I don't know.

It's just interesting.

I think this specific use case is really, is really cool.

Like, I, to me, if if this is like I think about the language learning example you gave

like you have been learning Japanese.

That's how Ludwig's been studying Japanese.

And in the time that he said he's been using ChatGPT, it is from my outside perspective as somebody who knows like a little Japanese, like very little from studying it in college is, oh, wow, he's improved a lot in the period of time that he's been using that instead.

And I think there,

I think there is really cool use use cases of it.

Because as somebody who's the, you know, from that first episode, the AI scrutiner, if you will,

here to scrutinize.

And like, I, I do think the cheat, the cheating epidemic right now is, is terrible.

Like the situation is literally devolving before us.

I, uh, I, I'm really excited about something like this.

Have you heard the Steve Jobs quote?

This is a long time ago.

It's like him talking about the future.

And he's like, uh, Alexander the Great learned everything he knew from Aristotle.

Aristotle was like his private tutor.

And he's like, one day we'll be able to put all of Aristotle's teachings into a computer and create a digital Aristotle that can be anyone's tutor.

And I thought that was really, I mean, first of all, it's incredible foresight for 84 when he said it or whatever.

But like, there is something to that of a kid having the compounding knowledge of the world privately for whatever, like,

whatever you're interested in.

If it's Japanese or whatever, I think that's, I mean, that is cool.

I do see that being a positive thing once it can get figured out, once society adapts to it in a way.

But

that's what I said in the first episode.

New technology, it's destructive at first, and then you start getting the gains.

And we are currently in the destruction phase, and it's going to be hard and scary and terrible.

And I,

again, to repeat myself, I am not saying the terrible stuff isn't happening or won't happen, but I just want and hope that people can also acknowledge how much good there is down the road.

And then hopefully we try to maximize that, minimize downside.

That's, yeah, but it's fucked right now for sure.

It's just, I mean, if you're 18 or you're like,

high school and COVID, and now you're dealing with cheating and cost.

It's bad.

You're just getting fought.

I'm trying to reach for like what might be like, what are more negatives or like, what is the potential argument to this use case specifically?

And if I would, maybe if I was a teacher, I would be seeing this and be one, maybe a little insecure about my job and be like, am I, is this the process of me like getting replaced?

What place do I have in this system now?

Do that, you know, does AI, does a teacher turn from a person that stands in front of a classroom and teaches like a group of 30, 40 kids into somebody that's basically like an AI manager and

emotional support or someone who can handle it?

The description I have is pretty decent.

So it's at alpha school, teachers shift from traditional roles like grading and writing lesson plans to supporting students' emotional and motivational needs and teaching life skills.

Just like, yeah, I mean, that's a, you know, very optimistic description, but in theory, like, yeah.

And those are, those are the most impactful teachers that I had.

It's not the ones who wrote really good lesson plans.

It's one that

really tailored to me.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I will say it's, it's, I think it's really important for there to still be like guidance and structure from the school.

And that, because when I was in high school, I had this class I was a part of that was, uh, you could get into instead of English.

And it was called, this is at a public school too.

It's called Rise.

I forget what it stood for, but the idea was you had the autonomy within that class to kind of decide whatever you wanted to work on.

And the dramatically, I would say, good examples of how that time was used was one

girl that graduated a few years before me, worked really hard, opened like a coffee business using the time that she was in that class.

And then she got into like an Ivy League school.

And there were other examples of people in that class becoming really successful.

I think I struggled a bit more in that environment.

Like even though I was a really successful

time at that age,

I fucked off.

Like I spent like half of that.

I spent half of that year, first year, down, like, finding YouTube music and learning how to, like,

I basically spent a bunch of time learning how to pirate music at school because I couldn't do it at the configuring.

That's alpha right there.

It's not to say that that, like, program didn't have any use, but I feel like that's like, that was supposed to be this opportunity for me to grow and succeed in a direction that I, uh, that I couldn't in a normal class.

And I think that opportunity is really important, but I could have used a little more guidance.

Yeah, a little more structure, a little more guidance, especially for some kids.

That makes sense.

Anyone else could use structure and guidance?

This show?

This show.

Let's move on

to drama.

Guys, it's been drama, drama, drama.

Almost 43 minutes.

I'm sorry, tech bros.

We are now moving on to Tesla.

Signed by Tesla.

It's time for Doug Doug to call out Mark Robert.

Yeah, you need to do it.

First of all, we need an enemy for this podcast.

Yeah.

All good podcasts have enemies.

Okay.

This is

interesting timing because last week uh we talked a whole lot about tesla versus waymo which is basically the difference between cameras in a car versus cameras and lidar in a car lidar being lasers that shoots around and it can like see what's going on irrespective of whether there's light in the camera or there's fog or whatever else so what two days later i think mark rober giant science youtuber if you don't know uh very family friendly makes this video where he compares tesla to another company luminar who makes LiDAR.

So basically he just does a bunch of tests of this exact thing of a car with timing's crazy.

Yeah, timing's crazy.

Of a car that just does cameras versus a car that has this LiDAR system built in.

And so he puts out this video and somewhat predictably, the Tesla fails several of these things and the LiDAR system succeeds at all of them.

For example, if there's like super bright lights in the car, I forget exactly which ones Tesla failed.

It failed like half, but like super bright lights or rain that is falling from a bunch of hoses that completely obscures the vision, right?

And then the last one is he went through a fake cartoon painted wall.

So he's like, and if you, if you're looking at the video, you can see it.

He drives through a wall that is painted to look like the background.

This is not something that happens in real life, but the point of this is like there is a physical object on the road and the laser LIDAR system absolutely can detect it, but the cameras can't because the cameras, it just looks like the road is continuing, right?

So he did this test and it's very fun and dramatic.

I thought it was interesting the response to some of this.

So this was one of the most prominent criticisms I saw.

I don't know who Sawyer Merritt is, although in his bio it says investor of Tesla.

So I think he's slightly biased.

Sure.

But there's, you know, the timing of this was so interesting.

And he posts this video.

Mark Rober posts this video.

And then on Monday, Tesla's stock drops.

And Luminar's stock, who makes the LiDAR that he showed off, increased.

25%.

Oh my 10 million view videos.

It's a big...

By two days later, it peaked at a 50% increase.

so let's see mark rober why didn't you post your uh robin hood account yeah

so so mark rober said he followed up and he had due to criticism he was like we did not receive money from luminar um but luminar stock goes way up what luminar does they don't make cars but they make the lidar system that they're trying to sell to cars so they're trying to make like a standalone lidar system so um

This guy, Sorry Merritt, comes in and is voicing some of the big criticisms against this video, Mark Rober does.

The first up is that he doesn't actually use Tesla's full self-driving technology.

He uses autopilot.

So autopilot is like every Tesla car basically has this, and it's like a highway driver assist.

It just like keeps you in the lanes and whatnot.

And it is supposed to break and stop you from hitting things, but it's not full self-driving.

There is, as of the last like five years, there is full self-driving SFD that Teslas have, and that's the new thing that is meant to be self-driving.

So right out the bat, it's kind of strange.

He just straight up didn't use Tesla's advanced system at all.

He used the old one from five years ago that is not meant for things like this.

There's also inconsistencies in the video.

So he like posts this clip on YouTube due to criticism of him driving through the wall with the Tesla.

The Tesla just smashes through it.

But he activates the autopilot mode like three seconds before going to the wall.

Like really late.

And that impacts it.

Whereas with the LiDAR car, they activate it way down the runway and there's like tons of time for the car to realize there's a wall there.

Not only that, he posts this raw footage and says like, this is the raw footage.

That's how you know I didn't fake this.

But then in the video, there's a different clip where he activates the autopilot earlier in the runway at a different time.

So basically they did multiple takes and then spliced them together in the YouTube video, which is just kind of strange and weird.

And there's other things people, you know, being.

Like, why was there a child that you ran over afterwards?

It was, and obviously the answer to that is it's dramatic and fun.

I was going to say, number five was dumb to include because it's like, it's just kind of funny to hear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's for for the youtube video he's a good youtuber yeah so it's i mean okay i really i think the point is like he i think mark rober is an extremely talented guy and i don't think this was well-intentioned but it is i think objectively misleading the video is titled Can you trick a self-driving car or can you fool a self-driving car?

And then does not use Tesla's full self-driving capabilities.

And then basically stacks the odds against it and doesn't give a whole lot of clarity around like, hey, we're doing a bunch of tests and we are giving Tesla as many disadvantages as possible.

Disclaimer again: I don't love Tesla and Elon Musk, goddamn, but I am at least voicing some criticism.

And so, you know, this, I would, I would go so far as to say most of the people criticizing this are clearly angry Tesla investors who want to believe the Kool-Aid.

Uh, you know, I'm not convinced this is some big scandal or whatever, but it was kind of weird and interesting how much of a market impact this video for Mark Rober had, as well as the fact that objectively

he gave a lot of disadvantages to Tesla.

It's a little weird.

So that that was a little bit of my thought:

you, as a YouTuber making this video, might not have been paid by the other company, might not necessarily want Tesla to be the party to fail.

But if both cars just handle both situations equally fine and you don't put any effort into it past that, you've made a pretty boring YouTube video.

Right.

And I think from an entertainer's perspective, I can understand why he might have made these decisions if the criticisms are accurate.

Right.

And I, it's, it kind of starts to walk this line of like, how much duty do you, as like an entertainer, but also like a science YouTuber that I think commands a lot of respect within the space.

Yes.

Uh, he's a NASA engineer or was a NASA engineer.

Like, I'm going to do my best to defend Mark Rober here, but I, I don't, I do agree that I think the, the most damning criticism to me is that you should have used full self-driving.

Right, right.

That's by far the biggest.

He literally used the outdated system that is not meant to be self-driving and made that his comparison in a video called Can You Fool Self-Driving Cars?

The latest and greatest.

And I have, like, I have a Volkswagen that came out a few years ago, and I have this system like that keeps me in the lanes and stops me from hitting cars.

You know what I mean?

Like, but I wouldn't expect it to succeed in this situation.

So I think that's, yeah.

So here's the core thing is like, first of all, what his results line up with is essentially equivalent to what you said in your breakdown of LiDAR versus cameras and their different capabilities and different strengths, including fog and bright lights.

Yes.

And so it is reasonable that if this test were to rerun again, even with FSD, this could still be a problem with LiDAR versus cameras.

Like it needs to be tested again.

Most likely.

The results would be the same.

Yeah.

But the fact that he disadvantaged this hurts his punch.

Unecessarily.

It's just like, why did you do that?

Like now there is so much criticism because genuinely it's not fair.

Yeah.

And then the only other thing I want to mention is a lot of people are pointing out, like, if you see right here, see it, see the rainbow road goes on.

Yeah.

It's, he turns it on late for sure, but it's on,

turns off.

And that is because people are postulating, and this is, I read a good article on this, is that Teslas have been shown in multiple instances to automatically turn off before an accident to change the, to throw, to muddy the waters around whether autopilot was engaged during accidents.

Dude, it's like when Disney takes the bodies out of the park before they're declared dead.

Oh, that's good.

I don't know if they, this is rumored.

This is rumored.

If you pause this footage,

when Mark Robert drives through the wall, it's just Mark Rober driving.

Yeah.

Tesla's autopilot's off.

So fucking check that.

That's what I'm saying.

I know.

That works.

He's always been shown.

There was a Tesla that drove into a...

It was a white truck and it thought it was the horizon or it was a blue truck.

It thought it was horizon.

It drove into it and the person died.

But they said autopilot was off at the time.

You're laughing a lot at this guy's death by the way.

No, if I was a truck driver, I would not paint my truck to look like a horizon, like some fucking lunatic.

It's a bad idea.

I would bait people into killing themselves in my truck.

It's probably not the smartest trucker move, but this guy dies.

And every time this happens, they kind of muddy the water.

Like, autopilot wasn't engaged at the moment of crash, but it was engaged, you know, seconds before.

And it like, if it's too late to break, and it's, but it still contexts a collision, it does turn off.

And they say it's for the reason of like, let's give back to the humans.

They have last chance, but it feels very muddied the water.

So while I agree with you, I really do.

I was kind of disappointed because like I feel like Mark Rober had a real chance to like have an open and shut slam dunk on LiDAR.

And instead, because of these errors, it like it muddies the water.

So no one can.

But I

also think like this points out, this footage.

is pointing out what a lot of court cases have already shown, which is like, this is a real thing that Tesla was getting investigated before before Doge wiped out a lot of the investigative

areas that were looking into this.

So I'm like, that's just coincidence.

That's just coincidence.

Oh,

allegations.

So I don't know.

I'm ambivalent on it.

I wish they would do it.

I mean, he's getting so much pushback.

Maybe he will do a follow-up or do some kind of like more strenuous test.

It's interesting.

Yeah, super interesting.

I would love to know more detailed, but.

There's a whole other topic which I would need, I don't know enough about, which is the legal side of full self-driving, which is if a full self-driving, a Waymo hits and kills a person, who is at fault?

Like, who get, what happens?

Like, do we just put the car in jail?

Or is it the engineers?

Or is it like, what happens, man?

So that's, that's a whole crazy video recommended after your talk last week.

I guess I was just looking more into it.

And it's like a Waymo that's getting pulled over by a cop, a cop on foot, a cop on foot in his full uniform.

He's like, stop.

The Waymo stops.

And then like a little driverless pizza delivery bot is like rolling by.

And the guy gets distracted.

And then the Waymo just fucking P-Is out of there.

It's like, how do you what?

He doesn't know what to do.

He's like an old cop.

He has no idea how to deal with all these robots around him just moving on their own.

It's just the world's getting so crazy.

Things are changing so fast.

Like,

it's uh,

it's interesting.

That's so funny.

Anyway, I, what do you think will happen?

I don't, I don't, I don't know what Mark Rober does next.

I don't even know if he's

upset about it.

The video's doing great.

I feel like Mark Rober criticism, the problem is that even if the pushback is really big, it's kind of like when Mr.

Beast gets flack, it's you're you're pretty insulated.

Like at the core of it, even if a million people are shitting on you,

you drop the next video to like 10 million plus people that have no idea this drama even exists.

Right.

And that's that's like Mr.

Beast is like kind of

no, I don't think it's there's a lack of accountability in that, but Mr.

Beast is kind of like run to that level, right?

Where it's like, even if the internet, there's a huge pocket of the internet that's up aside of him, it's like 100 million people still watch the next like yacht video, right?

Right, whatever, because they just don't even know that this is a controversy in the first place.

And this is, I mean, all things considered, this is pretty niche.

This is not a huge deal, but it isn't interesting as this conversation goes on with cars and whether we should have LiDAR in them or if Tesla can pull off this thing.

And Tesla is saying right now that they're going to launch cyber cabs in June of this year.

Like, that's in three months.

2025?

This year, yeah.

This year.

So, So supposedly in three months in Texas, they're going to be launching cars that don't have a driver in them, which is, from what we are aware of, way too soon.

And so

this is an ongoing discussion.

I think it's going to happen and be very relevant over the next couple of years.

What exactly are our standards as Americans or humans who are near cars to like how good it has to be?

You know, it's like, it's going to be so interesting.

And one more thing I want to say, because

you put me on all this, is that, you know, you made the story that Tesla decided early on that LiDAR was too expensive.

Yes.

And when they made that decision, and again, too expensive and also technically not the best solution.

Sure.

Like cameras just focusing on that.

Right, right.

It's both, which is important to recognize.

But yes.

But when they said that, my understanding is that LiDAR was like as expensive as up to $15,000 of additional shit you had to put on the car.

Yes.

And now at the time of Luminar and all this stuff, the cost is going down to like 500 to a grand.

Like it's dropped dramatically.

Is it that cheap?

Yes.

It's gotten way cheap.

It used to be tens tens of thousands, and now it's hundreds, is the estimates.

Wait.

And so, in the future, you can imagine it getting insanely, you know, if that continues, we get it down to.

Even if it was at that price, like if that's the price that it takes to add on to a system to be that safe, then think of the show.

How is that?

Alex, he's making a good point.

Wait, as a business manager, I'm actually switching right back to Deck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, my side.

But

it feels like a needless cost

cut when it's getting this cheap.

I think the LiDAR

stands are

stands are starting to make waves.

I don't know.

It feels,

it's worth reiterating because I think a lot of people miss this point is that it's not just cost.

It is the bigger argument is that having your engineering team focused on just a vision approach is going to allow you to do it more effectively than to spread them out across a bunch of tech that has to coordinate.

That is incredibly hard to do.

So it's not like you just stick LiDAR and you got plus one stats in your car.

Like it becomes much more complex.

So I just want to

I want to reiterate that.

Like even if LiDAR costs.

Doug is my AI tutor trying to make it like

this is good.

Maybe I didn't understand this and then I'm I wanted to stick LiDAR on like my Honda Civic and I can drive.

No, it drives itself now.

I just paid the 500.

I literally

as far as I can tell if LiDAR cost $1, Elon would not put them in Tesla's because he thinks the better approach to actually achieving full self-driving is to have a simpler vision-based approach that you just get that way.

Again, he says it's a software problem, not a hardware problem.

That's it.

That's the thinking.

That's the thinking.

One more thing, anti-LiDAR, I think I want to say, this is my most pro-Elon argument yet, is I read that

one downside of LiDAR is that if everybody has LiDAR, they interfere with each other.

So if every car in the row is using LiDAR,

the amount of laser, I mean, that sounds so boomer, I don't know.

The amount of lasers out there might interrupt the data collection or cause problems.

Again, I I don't know if this is true, but my understanding is that LiDAR could be conflicting if there was like everyone doing it at all times.

Again, we'd have to look more into this, but that could be a problem down the road where we go, oh, LiDAR is great.

And then there's, it causes its own issues.

But then all the cars are crashing all the time.

That'd be kind of cool, though.

Like, Fast in the Future.

Do you think we could ship all of the LiDAR lasers?

Using a fleet from the Jones Act?

Oh, my God.

Which was created after World War I

to help preserve shipping lanes in the United States.

Oh, I didn't know we were dealing with a professional.

But the thing about the Jones Act, Doug, we wouldn't.

We choose not to do it.

What is the coincidence?

I don't know what you guys are talking about.

I like us not getting into this so we can have something that me and you know, but you don't have to do it.

Yeah, like a little secret.

Yeah.

Referencing around it.

Like, oh, the Jones Act and Jones.

Oh, the Jones Act.

Classic Jones Act.

You put on earbuffs.

I don't think you deserve this.

Teach me about the Jones Act, AI tutor.

Teach me.

Your AI tutor is is loading his Jones Act.

Well, I thought this would be interesting to talk about because I've heard about this law coming up in a bunch of videos

explaining shipping logistics in like different parts of the U.S.

So I watched a video about like, oh, how Hawaii handles their

shipping between islands or from the mainland.

And then a video about

basically the decline of Puerto Rico and how the Jones Act affects Puerto Rico.

And then I was like, oh, this is really interesting.

And I think at a time when, like, you know, tariffs, especially, but I would say protectionism in general is a big talking point of,

you know, the Trump administration, fans of Trump, like the idea that we're isolating as Americans and becoming better independently and we don't need to rely on this like global economic system anymore, things like that.

So the Jones Act is,

it started in 1920, was put in place in 1920 in the wake of World War I.

Okay.

The Jones Act is a law that requires any water-based shipping, so even on a river, to be done by a ship that was built in the U.S., owned by a U.S.

company, and crewed only by Americans.

USA.

U.

Very, very pro-USA law.

And the idea was in the wake of World War I.

Sorry, any ship that's delivering to America.

Or wait, what do you mean?

Any ship, so any ship that is delivering goods between American ports.

Okay, yeah, I was like, because China wouldn't send a ship here with, okay, so any American, America to America.

So, so the, the way, the way this law, an example of how this law affects things now is say there's a Chinese shipping company, right?

Yeah.

And they have a boat that they built in Korea.

Okay.

And that boat picks some stuff up in Long Beach and it is not allowed to pick up stuff in Long Beach and then bring it to Seattle.

That's illegal.

Nowhere else in America they nowhere else in America.

Can they make a round trip to Cuba and stop there?

And then.

Okay, so that's the weird thing: is yes, technically, if they interrupt the trip by going somewhere else first, they can then.

Because

there's not a ton of like use cases where that is super effective.

There's a similar law that applies to passenger boats, and they do do that.

So that's why all the ferries that go from like Washington to Alaska stop in Vancouver.

All of them.

They have to.

So they have to like ping-pong between countries.

Because

they're not on Jones Act compliant ships.

That's so funny.

So basically, the idea was: if we put this protectionist law into place, the U.S.

will always have a thriving maritime shipping industry that is not only good for America on the whole, but is good for military and security reasons.

So when we get into a big naval war, we have like

a shipping fleet to deploy.

Okay.

But what they didn't plan for is...

And there were no downsides.

And there were no downsides.

And that

was our thriving American shipping industry.

The problem we've arrived at is they didn't expect global shipping to blow up

as much as it did in the future after the fact.

And

the...

I love his cute little notebook.

They make fun of him on the yard sold for him.

Yeah, because they never seen him like this.

So they watch this show and and they're like, he's got his little thumb.

Usually he's talking about piss and shit and farming.

Look at the yards and James is like a mystery science theater.

They're just watching our show, making fun of Aiden the whole time.

That's all they do.

But ships started getting built in other places outside of the U.S.

because it was way more cost-effective to do that.

Yeah, I mean, are you?

Can I say stat?

Yeah.

55%

of all shipbuilding globally is done in China.

Yeah.

And dude,

get this?

As of 2018, and this was the trajectory was still going up.

91% of shipbuilding happens in China, Korea, and Japan.

So the entire

shipyard industry, like ship manufacturing industry in the U.S., it just doesn't exist anymore.

All of these companies went out of business and they don't have enough Jones Act compliant clients to like keep a business open.

There's not enough demand for that.

So it was funny because when I was reading through this, there was like the paper that I was reading was from 2020, and it was talking about how few shipyards are left in the U.S.

that even make these types of ships anymore.

And it was like, and one of the few remaining ones is about to close.

It's called like the Philly, the Philly shipyard.

So I looked up this shipyard, the name of that shipyard now, the Hanwha

Philly shipyard.

A true American institution.

In 2024, it had been.

I didn't talk shit about Philly, the Eagles, or Hanwha shipping.

It had been bought.

It had been bought by a South Korean company.

Yeah.

A South Korean company.

So isn't it?

That's, that's, it was really funny to like, oh,

that happened.

It got bought out.

And the consequences of this, in short, are that we have a really limited supply of compliant boats that are even able to fulfill this purpose anymore.

They're more expensive to use.

So for any goods that like Hawaii has to get, get, for example, or coastal states in general, the price of goods shipped on those things is like really, really expensive because there's only a couple companies that even do this type of shipping.

So, there's way lower supply.

These are, they're way less efficient, and they charge way more because they basically have monopolies on the other side.

There's no competition.

And this, this grand like shipyard industry that this was meant to produce, like having this giant fleet and all these

companies like protected, actually has crumbled and fallen apart.

And the people that suffer the most are like a really explicit example is the Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and like devastated Puerto Rico a couple of years ago, right?

And they were turning around ships for the Jones Act.

And yeah.

And that was a big thing is like they couldn't get emergency supplies.

because the Jones Act affects those

ships.

And they had to, they were requesting to like lift the law for a period.

And Trump eventually caved and lifted it for a week.

But he said, basically, the companies that benefit from this really don't want us to do this.

And during Hurricane Katrina, they did the same thing.

It's like this law is so harmful that during disasters, they literally temporarily remove it.

But even like day-to-day, things like fuel, supplies are either way more expensive or less accessible.

Or these places turn to maybe foreign countries instead because they can offer those goods at a way lower price.

So you're losing like the economic benefit from that.

And then also anything that you would ship over water that might be cheaper normally gets pushed into like other transportation industries in the U.S.

that are like further burdened.

Like the supply of shipping space in the U.S.

brought to you by like things like trucks, trains, et cetera, is stretched thinner because the boats aren't really an option.

So I see two options.

One is we as a podcast advocate for the repeal of the Jones Act, which would be pretty cool of us.

We do like a really powerful.

Or two, we start an American-owned shipping company.

Take advantage of this monopoly situation.

That's what our Patreon tier is.

You get to ride on our boat.

You get to be the crew on the boat.

As long as you're an American citizen.

Because you're American.

You have to pretend to be.

They pay us to work on the boat.

So we can undercut the current monopoly.

This is big.

Boat companies.

Think about this.

Like, think about this.

Think about our plan.

Right.

Because I

make a podcast?

If the bill companies had just opened to Patreon and asked people to work for them, they could have made some real money.

Uh, but I, the reason, the reason that I was thinking about this a lot and why I thought it was interesting is because while the benefactors of this would be the remaining people that get work on ships in the U.S.

Work on a ship in the U.S.

and keep your job.

Because honestly, if foreign companies were competing, the remaining shipping jobs that exist here, albeit very few, wouldn't exist at all because they'd they'd be getting out-competed by who actually staffs ships now, which is like Filipino and like Indian workers who are much cheaper to pay.

Right.

And the boats cost way less.

And the boats cost way less to have.

They're going to have to be for a third of the price or something to make a boat in China or Korea.

For better quality.

Yes.

It's like we just, we just have options.

Oh, it's behind on

expensive boats that you then have to use to move something from Puerto Rico to Florida.

Yeah, that's we have to.

And the new, and an example of like an industry that existed, basically existed way smaller scale back then is like natural gas.

They get moved around on big tanker boats.

American tanker boats do not exist.

There are none.

It literally doesn't exist.

So a place like Puerto Rico that might be able to get like natural gas, which we produce, I don't know if you know this.

We've been drilling.

I do know this.

We've been drilling.

We're kind of a natural gas goat.

A lot of W's for America.

You can send American gas to Puerto Rico at like a really cheap rate, but because this law exists, that you can't do that.

And then they, so they, a lot of that excess gas would get sold to like other countries, and then Puerto Rico is buying their gas from other countries.

Dude, there's so much of that happening.

There's so much of like, we put

like a restriction on buying Russian oil or something.

And then Russian oil just goes to India and then goes from India to, you know, like if Europe restricts it, they just go to India and then sell it to Europe.

The circumvention of tariffs is so interesting.

Or like Vietnam is like thriving because it is not not china but you can just put something from china to vietnam slap a sticker on it and like there's all these ways of getting around tariffs and protectionism and uh it's okay so okay with all this being said i think we can agree this rule is not working but i personally think that america having some sort of shipbuilding industry is valuable especially in a world where you know they're at tensions with China.

Having all of it there is kind of spooky in that world.

So do you have any thoughts of like what you would do to

to do

you solve this problem for everyone?

So yeah, if I could just solve this quickly right now, this like huge geopolitical issue.

Well, that's the thing, right?

It's like this law actually has nothing to do.

It didn't protect that at all.

It didn't protect it.

It didn't work.

And

so we're in a worse spot.

Yeah, this makes no sense compared to anything even back then.

I don't really have the answer.

Like you'd have to like get you.

Why do I listen to the show?

If we're not going to solve the shipbuilding crisis in America, then why are they tuning in, Aiden?

The only thing I can think of is

the solution is right on the Patreon.

The solution is on the Patreon.

You have to do the tier three.

We'll tell one person on our boat.

One lucky tier three subscriber who works on the boat.

And we'll whisper it to them as we send them off into open water.

I think.

I would love to hear a better approach or answer.

The only thing I can think of is stuff similar to like the CHIPS Act, right?

Like you have to subsidize and like basically invest and spend a bunch of money to make making a ship in the U.S.

cheap enough to make it competitive.

That's the only thing you could do.

From what I know.

Yeah.

And my understanding is arguably it's like, so this is what we're doing instead of the government subsidizing a shipping industry is we force Americans to pay more to get their stuff shipped.

And particularly like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska just have to pay way more for all their shit because

it has to to be shipped on these boats that are old and expensive and there's not very many of them.

And so the biggest advocates to repealing the Jones Act are Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, anybody who doesn't live in the contiguous United States because you just have to pay way more.

So arguably instead of our government subsidizing our shipping fleet, it's Puerto Ricans like subsidizing our shipping fleet and just paying

these three states to give the money to small dying shipping.

Right.

Like it is ridiculous.

Which are like price gouging.

and yeah you put it that way it's kind of amazing like we have Hawaii as like a very important state that everybody loves and then we're just like yeah but we're gonna make it super expensive for you guys to get anything it's like it's wild uh I I yeah I would lean more towards just straight up government subsidies because it just I just don't think it makes sense and I know free markets have downside but like in this case i would rather yeah it's like our our shipyards have to compete and we have a smaller amount that are actually good rather than what we have which is a bunch of expensive slow shitty fleets, and then everybody's paying more for stuff.

I just don't see how this better.

There's a funny story about Hawaiian farmers choosing to air in cows to the mainland instead of using boats because of this law.

That's what the farm

brothers.

Three cows

first class.

That's what the Wright brothers were imagining.

They're like, finally, Hawaiians can get their cows easily to California.

Yeah,

it's not like it's all roses on the other side of this.

It's like, okay, well, what happens when you let like full competition take place?

It's like, you know, there's a bunch of scrutiny of the quality of work conditions on boats and the low wages you get to pay these people from the Philippines and India that often staff these boats.

Like, it's not like the other side is like filled with filled with good.

It's just that there's a bunch of people in the U.S.,

particularly in those places, that suffer because because of this decision.

And the only people that benefit are the people who have the monopolies on the remaining shipping left and like the people who have jobs at those shipping companies.

And at the individual level, I'm sure they would like to keep their jobs.

It's kind of,

why did we, we didn't talk about this on an episode, but we did talk about this together was the, like the efficiency of ports in the U.S.

versus like the efficiency.

Oh, either way.

Those were our first conversations where we were like thinking about this doing this podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a,

you know, there was a big, it was when we were at the dinner, like where we were talking about like what we wanted the show to be.

And I thought that conversation is very similar.

It's like, obviously people want to keep their jobs and do not want to suffer in the wake of a decision that would like like repeal this law.

Right.

But how many people are suffering on the other end because this law is the other side for sure.

I think it's like

I don't know the number.

I believe it's like either 100,000, between 100,000 and like a couple hundred thousand people are employed by the Jones Act shipping stuff.

So it's like you lose that.

And that's not insignificant yeah that's a lot of people but but then you know again the the other side of the coin is there are millions and millions and millions of people in the united states and various areas who are paying way more basically so that those people have jobs and it's like is that dude the other the other thing that i would be more stoked about repealing the jones act if Trump was not burning all of the bridges with Japan and Korea, who are the only ones who could make our ships if we go to war with China.

You know, it's like, I generally am all about free market, but then when you also burn the bridges to the rest of the market, then it's like you have to be able to make it yourself.

You can't do both.

And that's, that's one thing I've read about a little bit, which is a bigger conversation.

But like, if we go to war, as far as my understanding, like America is completely porked right now.

Like, we can't build ships.

We can't build most of our stuff.

All the raw materials comes from other countries.

So like, we just would not be able to build things.

And then I don't know if that helps or hurts that if we repeal the Jones Act and then there's more competition.

I don't know, man.

It's it's a little

regardless.

Well, hopefully, there's no war with China, right?

But regardless of that, I think this Jones Act is not doing what it was intended to do, which is protect American shipbuilding.

I'm actually pro.

You think we should just get over it?

You try to get it over with?

It's the villains.

I'll get it.

I'll get it.

Drop it.

Xi Jinping.

You always are talking shit on my man Xi.

He's in.

He's the gun.

No, we're bugs.

Have you seen my Discord profile picture right now?

Do you see this?

Yeah, you're with profile on the white Xi Jinping.

Somebody like Drew me hanging up with Xi Jinping with the yard and Chinese flag waving below us and

F-35s flying above us.

I know what's happening.

He's a sleeper agent from China here to destroy our shipbuilding industry with this fake propaganda American ships.

The law is so bad.

So bad.

It's so bad.

Chinese

so sick.

I open up my next notepad.

It's all mandarin.

Comes in with your little white book trying to spread your your lies to the youth.

But yeah, I just thought it's it one thing it was making me think of as a final note, and I would love to hear if people in the audience have like more thoughts about this too, is this something that had, I think, obviously good intentions

fell apart because of like other factors outside of the law that it could not control.

And then the complete purpose of the law was like totally diverted.

So I do wonder if there's, you know, when you look at protectionist legislation in the future, what are the like the little loopholes and potential consequences of

that?

So, I don't know.

It was interesting.

Doug, you had some drama.

You had two drama.

We can end this on some juicy ass drama.

Let's let me hear this drama.

Okay, because I don't know what this topic is.

I have got juicy drama in the world

of HR SaaS companies.

This is not juicy drama.

This is juicy.

This is juicy.

Guys, fucking our software as a service.

Right.

Like,

like Kobi subscription?

No, like, they help with payroll.

Like, yeah, it's like you get payroll.

He's actually got me hugged.

Okay, all right.

Aiden's.

He's actually got me hung on your ears.

Briars, I have to browse that shit.

Aiden's going to know about all the HR drama, and you're not.

I'm wondering.

What did Gusto do this time?

Oh, okay.

All right.

This, this is all, I swear, this is all real.

I'm not exaggerating.

Okay, there's a bunch of HR companies.

You got Workday, right?

Everybody loves Workday.

i mean they all hate it but hate it any any major company has some sort of hr software it helps with like employees and contracting and and payroll and and all this other stuff right all this like not very fun uh stuff but it's a huge business okay so two of the uh newer players are rippling and deal deal spelled d e e or sorry d e e l so deal so these two they're actually they're both grown really rapidly they kind of specialize a little bit in one thing versus the other but for the most part it's like here's all the hr tools you need for your business.

They're evaluated most recently, this is like two years ago, at 12 billion and 13 billion.

They're like neck and neck.

Okay.

And they're like ultra competitive.

Okay.

Okay.

And so you might think, yeah, who cares?

That's not very interesting.

They start beefing.

Okay.

They start to like pretty aggressively pursue each other's customers, right?

Because they go for businesses, you know, and so they're like, they go Nike is, I think, with Deal.

So Ripling goes is like, hey, we're, we should come over to Ripling.

We have a better business, all this stuff.

And so at some point recently, Deal, and I have it up here.

Oh, I'll accept all all the cookies.

Deal, the one of the two services, they post something called Deal versus Rippling.

This is on their website?

This is on their website.

And there's

a lot of people.

This is kind of wrong.

Right, right.

We went to Coke's website and it was just Coke versus Pepsi.

Them pouring a Pepsi in the trash or something.

Yeah, that'd be guys.

Trust me, this is the least dramatic it gets.

So this is the start.

Deal, the HR company posed deal versus Rippling.

And they're like, we have all these entities, integrations, payment methods.

Get started.

Here's the companies.

Deal is rated higher than Rippling in 74% of the shared markets.

It's just this straight up.

Hey, here's a comparison.

This is so funny.

It's like the comparing product graph.

It's the comparing of like their two subscriptions, except it's their company checking every box and Ripling failing over and over and over.

It's like automate IT operations.

X.

No, they can't.

It looks like a Mark Rober video, though, right?

Yeah, right, right.

Set up this.

All right.

So

Deal throws out a punch, right?

And so Ripling strikes back.

How do you think Ripling would reply?

You might think they'll make their own page.

No, no, no.

What Ripling did is they introduce a snake game.

And so they make an actual game of snake where you move around and you have to get little items, right?

And they say, don't buy snake oil.

Deal claims to be a one-stop solution for your global payroll needs, but their customers pay the price.

Play this game to find out the difference.

And then as you play this snake game,

I don't know if I can play it on this iPad here, but it shows a claim.

Oh, I can't.

It shows a claim from deal.

And then when you go and you get it, it shows you the actual thing that they said.

Deals marketing claim.

Pay anyone anywhere in minutes.

Reality could take days to run global payroll.

That's brutal beefing.

As you play the snake game, each one unlocks a letter for the word mislead.

At one point, somebody from Ripling posts a screenshot.

One of the executives from Deal played the game and sent in feedback, which is suck a dick with a big dick

ASCII art.

So they start, they're now full on beefing.

They were always competitors on the market.

Now they're just full on making these insane things.

This is the Kendrick versus Drake of like payroll services.

Both payroll services.

Except they're, but yeah, they're both guys wearing a Patagonia vest.

Yeah.

So it's getting pretty intense, right?

And you're like, all right, this is funny.

And then on Monday, two days ago, the CEO of Ripling releases a tweet and he says, Today, Ripling sued Deal.

What?

Our Our lawsuit alleges that Deal cultivated a spy at Ripling and orchestrated a long-running trade theft secret or trade secret theft.

Okay, so let me break down what exactly goes on in this very detailed lawsuit where they break down what happened.

They, it turns out, at Ripling, use Slack and they have logs for everything somebody does on Slack, including which channels they search for and look at.

And they find out that there's a, they think, a spy and a new employee who keeps searching in in Slack for deal stuff.

So he joins Ripling and he just starts searching in every single channel for anything related to deal and any customers that deal has and searching for like customers that Ripling is trying to get from deal so he could leave

and they can stop.

And so they're like, we think we have a spy.

This employee, it has nothing to do with his job, but he keeps looking into what deal is doing.

Okay, so

they're like, we want to see if this guy is actually a spy.

And so

they honeypot him him and they make a fake Slack channel, uh, called D.

It's like D Defectors, yeah, D Defectors.

They make a new Slack channel that didn't exist and they send a letter to Deal's chairman, CFO, and general counsel that says, Hey, guys, just so you know, Deal, us at Rippling, we have a new Slack channel where we talk about all the stuff we have on you.

And if you ever mess with us again, we're going to release all of it.

Literally, just to honeypot, make this up right within four hours.

the alleged spy is now searching for this new channel, which was made specifically for this.

So the honeypot works.

This guy who is maybe a spy immediately starts searching for this new channel that has not existed a day before and is all made up.

Okay,

it gets better.

They go to the High Court of Ireland and they get a court order that they're going to go take his phone.

They show up to his desk with a court examiner, like a court-appointed person who's legally authorized to detain this guy.

And he runs into the bathroom and locks the door

and tries to flush the phone down the toilet.

Dude,

so the guy is banging on the door saying, You are violating court orders.

You have to come out right now.

He refuses to respond.

After a while, he finally comes out.

And you can see here the quote: He says, If you take another step, you're violating court order again.

And he says, I'm willing to take that risk.

And then he flees the premises.

Crazy.

So the spy got away

and he took his phone with him.

So they didn't get the phone.

They even, in the lawsuit, they're like, we looked through our plumbing system and did not find a phone.

So they went and looked for it.

Okay.

So

this is insane.

I told you, the most dramatic thing.

And the response from Deal is.

He's crazy.

Right.

This is HR companies.

And so Deal's response so far, this is two days ago, said weeks after, okay, so they tried to go back on the the offensive and this is basically the end but

weeks after ripling is accused of violating sanctions laws in russia and seeding falsehoods about deal ripling is trying to shift the narrative away we deny all legal wrongdoing and legal wrongdoing and so they're like oh yeah rippling well you guys are selling to the russians and and then it follows up in one of the articles however deal itself has also been accused of violating sanctions against russia according to a lawsuit filed in florida earlier this year so both of them are accused of violating sanctions in russia which they're using to distract from the spy, which has been stealing trade secrets from Ripling.

It is insane.

It is 50 times funnier than it's HR software as a service.

It's the

most boring

industry with the most scandalous shit going on.

Oh, maybe that's fucking awesome.

Shouldn't have made fun of Gusto before this.

They've been doing fine.

They've got Hitman.

They've been doing fun.

Who do you think blew up Nord Stream?

Good deal, bro.

bro.

The deal sparked.

Probably to put the, to cover up a different thing.

I can't wait to follow up.

What's the, is the spy?

Am I going to get arrested?

Is he going to lamb?

Like,

if you're a deal and you hire a spy, this guy is the goat.

This guy really didn't crack under pressure.

I know.

He tried to flush his toilet and then ran away and said, I'm willing to go to jail with this.

Wild.

Yeah, I was thinking was like, surely your job at the HR company is not worth all this.

It just can't be.

Right.

Like you're not going to be able to do it.

How much is deal paying him?

Like you're not fighting for like the security of your countrymen.

There's no...

There's real life spies who've cracked these.

Exactly.

There's no like a nationalism

or security at stake or something.

It's for payroll.

Men used to go to war.

Now they fight for HR companies, right?

We need something to galvanize our youth because they're just going to do this instead.

They're going to scroll on their phones and they're going to go be a spy for deal.

The funniest thing about this to me is that they sent this letter, this honeypot letter, to deals.

It's it, it's the honeypot is brilliant.

That's a smart honeypot's insane.

It's they sent this to only the top people at deal.

So,

one of the top people

that a 12 billion dollar HR company is personally orchestrating a spy in their competitor and telling them, Hey, we just got info about the D Defectors channel.

Go check that out.

Get us the info.

Do you think the yard or figure out who our spy is in their discord

what no nothing i just i hope they don't murder and kill our spy because they're figuring it out it would be like a huge

okay

is it realized i'm gonna get a we're gonna you and i are gonna get a letter

the yard has found some incriminating evidence against lemonade stands

How did you find this story?

Yeah, where'd you hear about this?

This is Twitter.

Man, this is where they ask where the hot stuff happened.

And that's why I see everything app, man.

Yeah.

You can go to Mars from watching basketball.

You can really learn about locks.

It's covering all the bases right now.

Do you guys, I figured it might be nice to close out on a couple, like, you know, we wanted to follow up on a couple topics from the previous videos.

Just to

check out the comments.

And I think it's worth saying that I think all of us have spent a lot of times reading.

uh some of these great comments people put in the last two episodes yeah yeah uh we've been responding and singing in there and uh it's been great i think we super appreciate it.

That was like the number one thing we were looking for for this show: like well-thought-out, interesting perspectives and thoughts.

People have it on this one, I'm sure.

That's cool.

I think from the first episode, because we even touched on it again in this one, was the you know, people dealing with the consequences of going through the education system during COVID.

And a lot of people, I think that was probably the thing we got the most personal like responses and anecdotes about it.

And I would say the pervasive sentiment was

basically negative.

People talking about their experience and

a lot of people saying things like this.

The conversation on socializing post-COVID really resonated with me because it was a junior in high school in 2020 and can definitely attest that it altered my abilities and desires to socialize.

I was already really introverted.

And instead of trying to fight against the isolation, I basically took advantage of it as a way to get used to not needing peers around me.

I know now that this was probably a mistake and I'm paying the price in my social life for it now that I'm in college.

I don't know anyone who also went through the hyper isolationist route as I did, but I'm sure they're out there.

And from reading the comments, I think that that experience was very, very similar between people.

A lot of people kind of maybe not even necessarily having the worst time during COVID, but then coming out of it and then trying to get back to normal and then realizing that everything is ironically the isolationists, there might be the most amount of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's

the most there's ever been.

And uh, but I really appreciate it because we got a lot of like personal stories that I read through related to that topic and a lot of stories really similar to that one.

The one thing I wanted to follow up about from the last episode was

on when we were talking about, you know, self-driving cars and the potential of like robo-taxis and also the idealistic structure of cities with trains and things like that.

A few people came out.

and said that we're just a bunch of city guys and we and we don't get it.

And our public transport utopia and the fact that we like trains, all I think were generally in favor of like, oh, trains are nice to have in cities and a good way to get around.

Seem to think that we don't think cars should exist in rural America.

And that was actually a surprising amount of comments.

I wanted to clarify something because I thought it was a good demonstration of what I call good faith versus bad faith arguments.

And

I didn't know where you were going.

Okay.

I'm buckling in.

I think it's a really simple example of like, I think people jump to the conclusion that because I want like more trains and less cars in cities.

Have you heard that?

No.

When you say I like pancakes, someone on Twitter will say, We fucking have against waffles.

Exactly.

What do you mean about waffles?

Exactly.

This is what bad faith is: is when you are listening to us explain a topic or like talk about something and we miss an aspect of the conversation, like something doesn't get touched on.

And you assume that because it wasn't touched on, that we disagree with it, that we inherently have the opposition opinion to you.

Well, just to clarify, I do want to take your car away.

If you live in a rural part of America, I would like you to ride a horse because that's my image of like a cool rural ride.

And that's it.

You should have horses in rural America.

That's mine.

So I, yeah, and I think you should, like, if I get something wrong, give us the benefit of the doubt.

Assume I'm right.

Just assume that you have it wrong.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's

just some basic common decency.

Just believe dubs.

Just believe.

He's got a microphone.

Believe all ducks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If there's a microphone.

Yeah, I have more subscribers than you.

And there's a reason.

That's why

there's a reason.

Right, right.

That's true.

Okay.

There was also, obviously, a lot of people.

The comments weren't as frequent as I thought, but the people we were making fun of that were going to be like, Doug's such a Tesla chill.

Like, there was a couple people like that.

And that was a few people.

It was always like a flag of like, you didn't make it to the part in the episode.

One, you tuned out at the beginning of the episode.

Dude.

But two, two, you just ignored the part, the bombshell you saved where you're like, and I sold all my Tesla stock today because I don't believe this.

I said this on my stream, and I said this in the comments.

I responded to some of the people that said this.

When you're taking the position of like trying to find some defense of what Tesla's doing, it's the harder one for the audience that we're going to attract and have.

It's harder to do.

It's very easy to be the guy that's like, hey, Tesla sucks.

You know, everyone's like, yeah.

Yeah, it is actually easier to condemn the guy who did the Nazis.

Yeah.

It actually is easier.

And we don't even know what it it was.

Yeah.

That's true.

That's true.

And it makes for a much better podcast to have people having differing opinions.

And you know what?

My heart goes out to all the people in chat who I like have.

I think we should strive to have a couple like uninformed

loud people.

You know, that's that brings life to the comment section.

I actually thought a good litmus test for this is if you've made it this far in the episode, when you and you have a comment you want to make, put two asterisks just at the end of your comment whatever it is and it's just a sign that you heard this part of the episode

i just want to

do the deal thing i just want to see

i just want to see i just want to see this one time i won't ask for it again but that conversation came up a lot and i i thought i'd i'd clarify is like i think i don't know if i've ever met anybody in my entire life that has said let's get a rid of all the cars in like rural america and suburbia like legitimately has that opinion no i don't know either uh and i was like so why would that be ours?

And, you know, the idealistic form of these things, I think, is like, okay, well, you have a really good public transportation system that lets people basically choose to have a car or not if they really want.

Right.

Because I think the way cities are structured now, like in LA,

in LA, you basically have no choice.

In practice, like it's not literally a tax, but it is a tax on every person because you have no choice.

You have to pay for your car, pay for your maintenance, pay for your insurance.

And those are expenses that I guess freedom, I don't know, the freedom of choice is giving you.

Like it's not really a choice at all.

And the idea is like providing city infrastructure that frees up people from that people from that from that decision.

And on that note, I'd like you to leave your angriest comment you can

as we wrap up episode three of three hashtags before it.

If it's if you got this far in the video.

Secret three hashtag.

People who just clicked out and made their comment right after I said that.

If you're a a three hashtagger, you can go reply to the two asteriskers and you can be like,

You aren't committed at all.

You're a weird.

If you're a three hashtagger, first dibs on the Jones Act boats, you just get the spot.

Come out.

All right.

Oh, was that the last one?

I think so.

That's right.

So to close it out, I did actually bring Atriac a lemon this time.

He will eat the entire thing.

We're going to eat this this whole time.

That's why I've been telling my stream that you're going to eat it nobody.

You've been saying off camera that it's going to be you.

I also bit the styrofoam one.

I'll split it with you.

All right.

Thanks so much for watching.

It was a great episode.

See you next time.

Oh,

oh,

it's just.

Oh, no.

Oh, they just can't be pleasant.

I don't want to craft.

Okay, actually.

I'm not hungry.

That's gross, Doug.

Are your eyes watering?

Good episode.

Good episode, boys.