Julian Dorey Podcast - #440 - “Psychopaths in Power!” - HEATED Debate on Peter Thiel, Lutnick & Scariest AI Outcome | Pomp

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) SHOPIFY: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/julian 2) MARS MEN: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Anthony Pompliano is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, venture capitalist, YouTuber, writer & investor. POMP'S LINKS: - TWITTER: https://x.com/apompliano?s=21&t=5fXT2gjxOw5SVv4h7J1URA - INSTAGRAM: ​​https://www.instagram.com/pompglobal/?hl=en - YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@AnthonyPompliano - SUBSTACK: https://pomp.substack.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00- AI, Inflation & Palantir 10:44 - Inflation Crisis Explained 22:45 - AI Jobs & Birth Rates 33:22 - AI Replacing Jobs 43:17 - Trump, Mamdani & AI 55:32 - Palantir & AI Investing 1:08:19 - Facial Recognition & Surveillance 1:17:58 - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel & AI 1:32:26 - Peter Thiel & Javier Milei 1:42:34 - Middle Class Collapse 1:54:00 - AI Regulation 2:02:32 - Peter Thiel & Bitcoin 2:11:44 - Epstein Files & Brian Johnson 2:25:42 - Epstein Cover-Up & Howard Lutnick 2:35:21 - Corruption, Power & Politics 2:45:21 - Jeff Bezos & Parenting 2:53:15 - AI Data Centers 3:05:31 - AI Energy Crisis 3:15:40 - Data Centers Debate 3:24:24 - Humanoid Robots & AI 3:32:01 - Pomp's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 440 - Anthony Pompliano Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I am one of Mocenui. On July 10th. Maui, you aboard my boat and restore the heart of Tefiti. And here we go. The journey begins. See her light up the night in the sea. She calls me... The ocean chose you.

Let's go save the world. I got your back, chosen one. Disney's Moana. Boots Nick. His name is Hay-Hey. His name is Yum. When he goes in my tum-tum. In theaters July 10th.

I have to assume there is something darker there because then he's also one of the most powerful people in the world standing right next to the president. Even in places where the commerce secretary, it's like, is that the guy you should be standing next? I feel like that's where the secretary state should be instead. Like he seems to be everywhere. And like it just, there is something so insidious. But go back for a second, right? So, and this just may be a different way that we kind of approach these things. I mean, I'm the president of the Howard Lutnikate K club, to be clear. if we're being there. You should invite him.

I don't know if he would come, but you should invite him to see if he would come. All right, Anthony Popliano. Are you here as a Palantir agent on behalf of Kevin O'Leary or what's the story? Well, Palantir and Kevin O'Leary are two completely different things. Not in my book. Same thing to me.

Mr. Wonderful is looking like Mr. Teal these days. I don't know. All right. Well, what's the big issue you got with AI? So AI as a whole, I don't have an issue with technology progressing. Okay. In the past, in the, but the big but is this is the first time where technology could have the potential to outthink us if very, very irresponsible, say, power hungry people living in places like Argentina and getting off the edge right now are allowed to be put in charge of whatever it becomes. And that I do have concern about. So I want to make sure that if we're building technology, technology works for the people. And I also want to look out for all the people coming into the job market now who are very worried about living in a world where suddenly technology is doing things that they're not even able to enter the workforce or have a purpose in life.

I think these are really important topics, but I think it's important to talk about to see if we can find a great way forward. So hopefully you're going to help with that today. Well, I think that most of what you've been told is wrong. And I can say that as someone who nine months ago, 12 months ago, I believed a lot of those things in terms of AI was going to replace jobs, data centers, may not be great things, all this stuff. And so I've been spending a lot of time going through it.

And so maybe you can- In the data centers? Interesting enough, you know, people have known me for a lot of the crypto stuff. And that's actually how I got started in crypto was mining. And my father had been in the data center business. And so understood a lot of those things. But I didn't really understand maybe the implications of this. So let's maybe kind of break down different things.

The first thing is jobs. If you said to me 12 months ago, is AI going to destroy jobs? I'd have been like, hell yeah. I was, you know, if there was a- a march down, a street in New York City that was like AI's taking jobs, I'd been at the front of it. And I talked a lot about this because my thought process was it was going to be very deflationary. If people aren't getting jobs, right, that means there's not a lot of growth going on. It's not a lot of growth.

Then there's deflation that's bad for asset prices. But it's also means that prices should be coming down because companies aren't spending money. So that was my kind of worldview. Now, there are two things that I've seen that have changed my mind. The first thing is right now, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24, which is the people, coming out of college, right? The thought process was they are not going to be able to get a job because AI, it's not going to replace the absolute world expert yet. It's not that smart. It can replace, however, the entry-level employee. So think of, for example, maybe in marketing,

use a non-technical role. If you're just starting out in your career and you're doing marketing, what do you get asked to do at your job? Not the most important things, right? Kind of the lower level stuff, hey, go create this, you know, campaign, maybe write up a memo, do this thing, do that. Do a social post. Social post. And AI is really good at doing kind of the entry-level job stuff. So the thought process was actually it's not that the entire job force gets, you know, affected equally. It's that people who are just starting their career. That's bad because what do you need?

If you're just starting your career, you need to gain experience. It's how you become valuable later in your career. But if you don't get that opportunity, you don't have any money saved up, right? You just probably have student debt because you just went to college. Right. And you now aren't afforded the opportunity to get any sort of experience. So what is the data point that has convinced me that. maybe that's not actually happening. The unemployment rate of 20 to 24-year-olds in America

went from 9%. Now it sits somewhere around 5, 5.5%. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Over what time period? Over the last like three years. Now, there's a couple of different factors. You have to remember, AI doesn't operate just in a silo, right? There's also kind of the macro environment that occurs. So what's happened during that time period? Well, if you remember, what happened was about three, four years ago, 2022. What was happening in 2022?

The Federal Reserve was raising interest rates at the fastest pace in history. Because of the war and all that? Well, 2020 and 2021, we basically went through a complete rejiggering of the U.S. economy. Right. COVID happened. And when COVID happened, I always say two things happened.

One, the population lost their mind. And then politicians, government, anyone with any sort of power, they lost their mind as well. And the reason why I think 2020 and 2021 was so, you know, abrasive. There was so much controversy, so much battle between the people and those in power is that basically you had half the population that was cheering on the government as they took away constitutional rights, as they forced, you know, vaccines, as they did all these things. But then the other half of the population is like, wait a second, this is crazy. Why do you trust these people? These people are not

have your best interest at heart. What you were on that half. I was definitely on that half. You know, I'm very proud to say that I've got unvaccinated blood maybe is the best way to put it. Now, With that said, if you go and you take a look at what was going on from a government perspective, they never dealt with this before. So if you're in the government's position, it's really hard if you think that COVID is this big, you know, kind of boogie monster to say, we're going to sit back and do nothing. Let the market work it out. So again, if you kind of look at everyone involved in the situation, most people were acting from their rational perspective trying to do what they thought was the right thing. Now, there's one thing that we know is if you give people in power, more power, they're going to abuse it. Right. And so I was very much like, this is crazy. We should not be shutting down these cities. We should not be doing this stuff. We should not treat the population all as the same person. So a 75 year old person is not the same thing as a 25 year old person when it comes to health related things, etc. But what did the government do? Trump and Biden both printed a ton of money. Yeah. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates all the way down to zero percent. So the best way to think about this if you know nothing about finance is they essentially manipulated the market to engineer.

year growth. They call it stimulus for a reason. Would you characterize that for people out there as like a hidden tax basically? Well, inflation in general is a hidden tax. I think it's one of the most destructive things that happens in the U.S. economy. But what they basically did is they took this thing that was already destructive and they supercharged it. Yes. And so if you go back to 2020 and 2020, I put a lot of content on the internet, right? I am yelling and screaming at the top of my lungs saying you cannot print $5 trillion, $8 trillion, $9 trillion, and not get inflation. Now, Now, what happened, which I think confused a lot of folks, is that they printed the money in 2020. The inflation didn't actually show up until 2022.

Why is that? Well, they announced, okay, we're going to do a stimulus package of, you know, make up a number. I don't know, $2 trillion. $2 trillion tomorrow doesn't go into the market. What they do is they create all these different programs that people can get access to the money. So now they have to go and say, okay, well, here's the rules of how you can get it. So the PPP loan program or these various things. then people have to say, oh, wait a minute, the government's handing out money.

How do I get some of that money? And they run around and they try to figure out how do they apply for it or get the handout or whatever. And so as you work through the economy, it takes time to actually take the money from an idea, which essentially was let's stimulate the economy to actually being in the hands of people in the economy. And so what you saw was 2020, they start printing money. 2021, they print even more money.

And as they're doing this and they're announcing both fiscal and monetary programs, individual investors are like, oh boy, here comes this tsunami of money. Well, guess what happens? There is going to be a case-shaped impact. The people holding assets are about to get real rich because all of that money is more money chasing the same number of assets. The asset prices go up. The people who don't own assets, who 50% of the country just is saving, they're about to get smashed. Yep.

And that's what happened is they got hit with 9 plus percent inflation according to the official numbers. And so that meant that if you had a dollar, if you look at the number, say if you had a dollar in 2020, today it can buy about 70 cents worth of goods. You've lost 30% of the value of the U.S. dollar in six years. And you said a phrase there. You said the official number. You suspect it's worse. Well, the U.S. government is really bad at counting. If you go and you look, don't tell that to feed eggs at.

They're bad at counting in a lot of ways. But there's a government organization called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is basically in charge of measuring lots of economic data points. You have to remember, we're talking about the government. We are not talking about the latest cutting-edge technology. So what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does is a couple of examples. They send people physically into grocery stores, and they say to them, here's a tablet. I want you to go find the Campbell soup that is light salt, and I want you to manually input

the price of that Campbell's soup into this tablet. it. If I sent you, very good looking, smart, intelligent person who would want to do a good job into the grocery store. And I give you a list of 50 items to accurately input the prices. How many do you think you'd get right? I mean, I think I'd get 50, but like this is the shit we should use AI for. All right. So that's the first thing. So that's the first thing is you've got this kind of manual data input. Another thing that they do is there's something called homeowners equivalent rent. So homeowners equivalent rent is they call you on the phone. Let's say you own a home. And they say, hey, Julian, how much you think you could rent your house for? If you ask somebody who owns a home how much they think they can rent their home for, they got no clue. They have no clue. So guess what? They think they're rich. They probably overstated by 20, 30, 40, 50 percent.

They're guessing. Yeah. The problem is if you actually look, we have real data points. You can just go on Zillow, Redfin, Street Easy, whatever. What are the homes that have rented in the last 30 days in America or in a city and just look at that data? what are the prices on the grocery store when you go and you look online? So there's a mismatch of modern technology and their data collection. But the more interesting thing is then they have messed with the methodology.

So if you go back to the 80s, the way that inflation was calculated is they basically said, okay, you have a dozen eggs. We're just going to look every month. What is the price of those dozen eggs? We're going to do that for all of these different consumer products in America, and that's the inflation rate. Today what they do is they have a basket. And they basically say, you as an individual, what is it likely that you're buying?

You know, maybe you buy some eggs, maybe buy some meat. Maybe you have a gallon of gas once a week. You know, these different components of how you interact. And then they say, but if a price goes up too much, eggs, you're just going to stop buying eggs. You're going to substitute those eggs with some other product at the grocery store. Yeah. Maybe. But there's a lot of people who just keep buying the eggs and they get online and they complain about it.

Or they complain to their neighbor, but they're still buying the eggs. They're expensive. man. Eggs are fucking me every week. Here's the craziest part is there's two components to the eggs. The first is that if you look at the price of eggs, they went up a lot, they've come down, but they're still very expensive, which I think is actually a great data

point as to there's people who are saying I don't care what the inflation rate is. You can tell me till you're blue in the face, inflation's high, low, whatever this number is. I'd say growth rate. All I know is that when I go go to the grocery store, the bill's too high. When I go the gas pump, the bill's too high. I don't care what the year-over-year growth

all I know is it's too expensive. Very different. The second thing is that corporate America cashed in. And corporate America is cashed in in a very weird way. If you go and you look at eggs today, what is the most expensive eggs at the store? There are eggs that are like, we are organic, range-free, you know, whatever crazy cockamamie thing.

And I have a group chat with a couple of friends of my wife and I, the couples. And, you know, it's a generalization, but it's true. All of the women are going, and they're buying the eggs that are the seemingly most healthy eggs. They're also the most expensive. I go the grocery store and I see the $15 eggs versus the $9 eggs. I'm saying, look.

And that one doesn't have glyphus. I don't care if it was inside of a cage or not. I don't care if they were eating grass or not. Just give me the eggs. And so I get the $9 eggs, right? But then you start to look online and you start to realize there's been all these controversies as like, are the eggs actually range free? A lot of them.

Whatever. Yeah. So you not only get the inflation that's in the economy, get the thing. So go back for a second as to the AI stuff. Starting a business new isn't just hard. It can also be terrifying. I know the feeling. So much work goes into it and it can be hard to make the leap of faith. When I started my podcast, I wasn't even sure what I was doing. I was in my parents' house figuring it all out. Of course, I had the thoughts of what if no one ever listens to this? What if I make a fool of myself? What if I'm sitting here two years from now and I'm nowhere? But you got to get rid of those intrusive thoughts and just keep moving.

And for many of you out there looking to start a business or already in business right now, having a partner like Shopify on your side to help is huge. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From household names like Jim Shark and Magic Spoon to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. And they also help you get the word out like you have a full marketing team behind you.

You can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best yet, Shopify, is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond did i mention that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world it's why shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet so it's time to turn those what-ifs into with shopify today sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shopify.com slash julian that link is in my description below

massive run-up in inflation, guess what happened? Companies came under pressure. Of course. So if inflation is flying, that means that everyone is showing up and they're saying, hey, it's unlivable because I can't afford to live in this city, buy these things, whatever, if you don't raise my wages. Right. So then companies are like, oh my God, if inflation's at 9%, if I don't raise the wages of my workers by more than 9%, that means that actually my workers are worse off this year than they were last year. Which is crazy. Can I stop you for one sec just for a question, for clarification, for everyone out there

who's not a financial expert like you, you know, there's a common thought where people say shouldn't the government basically have a ledger of every time throughout its history that they've ordered more U.S. dollars printed and what the number was. And obviously we know the government tends to lose a lot of data, as you correctly pointed out. But if they had something that was a semblance of this, Why would it not be so simple to figure out inflation by saying, okay, in 1971, we had X number of dollars in circulation. And now in 2006, we have X plus, you know, $11 trillion in circulation.

What's the percentage difference? Why is it not that simple? Well, there are people, and I'd actually put myself in the camp of, if you look at inflation, Milton Freeman's famous economist, he has this thought that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. The only place that inflation can get created is in Washington, D.C. If they print money, it creates inflation. If they don't print money, there's not inflation, right, to the degree that we're talking about. So the reason why that's important is if you actually look at how many dollars are in circulation, I believe that that is a much closer representation of what real inflation is than their manipulated methodology,

data collection, et cetera, of what they're reporting. So the CPI number is a government number, right? If you go around the world and you look at governments that are reporting data when it gets bad, all of a sudden the data looks a little bit better than what people are feeling. Now, what I will say is under Trump, under Biden, and now against Trump, under Trump again, one of the things I find most interesting is that there is a separation of the way people think about this. There are some people, and I would put myself in the camp previously of tell me what the numbers are. People have no clue what's actually going on.

Just tell me the data and I'll look at the data, oh, people are doing better than they, they think they are. Oh, the stock market is doing well. Oh, inflation is not at 9% anymore. Now it's at 2.5% whatever. But there's another camp. If you go talk to people and they say, I don't care what the number says. I'm telling you, I can't get ahead. I'm telling you it's too expensive. I have shifted pretty aggressively into the camp of the data doesn't matter. What people feel is actually the thing that matters. Because guess what? They change their consumer behavior patterns. They change the way they vote. They change. the receptivity to socialism or any of these ideas based on how they feel. Yes. They don't care what the government number is. They don't care what the alternative data says. All they know is either they're killing it or they're not.

And can you blame them? I mean, that's human nature, right? Part of what makes this really hard, I think, for politicians and especially economists to wrap their head around is the feelings of the American people towards inflation is just as responsible to social media as it is to what the grocery people. bill is. Because if you go in, the grocery bills higher, you don't like that. But guess what you also don't like? You don't like getting on Instagram and seeing that your three friends who live down the street, they're killing it. They're going on vacation. They got a Bugatti outside. Right.

That's what they show you. Yeah. Of course. By the way, it doesn't matter that they rented it or that, you know, they're actually up to their ears and credit card debt or whatever. All you know is how the hell is it that somebody who is within reach of me in terms of living standard wages, is, et cetera, they're killing it and I can't figure out how to pay for child care. Right. And so that big difference is ultimately where I think people get very unhappy, right? What is unhappiness? It is ultimately the difference between expectations and reality.

And so if you expect that everyone is killing it and you're not, you see your ledger. And you say, I don't understand how everyone else is doing this and I can't keep up. And that's where you get this unhappiness. And that's really what I think a lot of politicians are trying to kind of prey on is the unhappiness. that a big part of the population has. And we're going to come back to that loop. Pomp was on about the 9% wage increase for employees, but I want to stay on this point because it's really important.

I think arguably, but to me, I think it's kind of common sense. Perhaps the worst effect of inflationary policy is what it's doing to, you know, biological nature of humans in this country. And what I mean by that is people are now faced with a financial decision as to whether or not they can start a family. that is literally anti-evolutionary, like to where it is so expensive to have a child, which, you know, I think is like the most important thing you end up doing in life. I know you'll certainly speak for that yourself as a father now. It's like, damn, that's a real conversation happening. That's disastrous if we don't get a lid on that and, you know, find some sort of suitable solution for the average American over the next decade, no? I'll give you three data points that I think are important people to understand. The first is if you use, you to meet someone and have a relationship, get married, have a kid. What is one of the areas that you would meet people the most frequently? Talk to our parents, our grandparents, whatever.

Where did everyone meet each other? The office or the bar? At work or after work? Well, guess what happened over the last decade? If you're a guy, you better not talk to anyone who was at your office. There's a lot of social pressure all of a sudden. And it comes from both sides. men are scared to talk to women, right? But also, women, rightfully so, realize, wait a minute, the creepy dude in the cubicle next to me who used to say all this stuff, and I couldn't bring up the fact that he's being creepy,

I can now say something. And so you get all of these social forces that come together. And so you have a situation where one of the areas where people would meet the most often is basically taken off the table. So that's one kind of social consequence of the last decade. I'm not saying that it's good or bad. I'm just saying it's a fact that we see that.

It's a pendulum swing. It's like you don't want the bad things that would come with that, right? You want to fix that. But in fixing that, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And yeah, we went. Shitting where you eat, whether it's at the office or places you go all the time, is like a genuine fear of mine. And I speak for a lot of the people out there right now who will agree completely what you said. That is a real problem.

I met my wife. She was a reporter at Fortune magazine. We met for a coffee one day. completely platonic, business-oriented, etc. When we met, it became very obvious during that conversation. This was going to go one or two pass. I was attracted to her. I think she was attracted to me, right?

Or we could just sit and continue to have a platonic business relationship. I suggested, hey, why don't we go to dinner tonight? Oh, that night? Oh, yeah, listen. I never thought I was going to get married. But the second I met this girl, I was like, listen, if I'm into this, Let's go to dinner night, right? All right.

I see you. So, we went on three dates in two days. Two days. Yeah, and then I just started calling her my girlfriend. Three dates and two days. That's pretty good. Coffee, dinner, hang out the next night, right? Like, let's go.

All right. Did you have a bed then? Or was that like when you were still sleeping on the apartment? Yeah, I was, you know, just moving around, moving and shaking. But here's the problem. Three or four years after that, I don't think I would have done that. Really? 2016, very different environment than 2018, 2019.

Right? So again, like my personal experience, I can't speak for everyone, but like for my personal experience, I don't know. Maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. You got in right under the gun.

Before the game started, right? I was playing the old game. So that's first. The second thing is, what is one of the number one reasons why people do not have more than two kids? They have to get a new car. The number of seats in the car.

You can't put three kids in a normal car with a car seats usually. So if you go over Reddit, Facebook groups, all the stuff, there's tons of moms and dads talking about. If I want to have a third, I have two kids already. If I want to have a third kid, I'm going to have to get a new car. Cars are expensive. Right. So again, there's a cost component to it that is not directly just child care, you know, food. The car becomes a huge component of it.

So that's another thing that's become pretty interesting. The third one, again, personal experience. My wife and I are very fortunate, right? We've had a lot of things go right in our life. We live in New York City. She ordered diapers two weeks ago. She ordered two boxes of diapers. Now, I don't know what box was, right, but she ordered them off Amazon.

$150. How many diapers are in each box? Even if this is a supersized box of diapers, I said, those diapers better last a year. $150. $150 bucks for two boxes of diapers off of Amazon. Now again, the kid shits three times a day. Well, you don't have any kids yet. Sometimes more than that.

You can go through eight, ten diapers a day, right? So you look at this and you say to yourself, wait a second here. Even if you are buying regular diapers, it is expensive. And that doesn't even get to then how many families have two incomes and have to pay for child care? Right. And so you get to this whole situation where if child care, I saw a stat recently that the, I think the average child care in America now is $30,000. $30,000. Imagine what they are charging at a preschool or for somebody to come over, all this stuff, right?

Well, if that's $30,000, how much money do you have to make it your job post tax to be able to cover the child care? So again, let's just say that the average rate is, I don't know, let's say somebody pays 30% taxes. okay, if I make 60 grand, 20 of it ballpark is going to taxes. That means there's only 40 left for that income of which 30 is going to child care. The person who's going to work making $60,000 only has $10,000 once they pay taxes in child care. Right. It's unsustainable. And so you come back to, okay, if you're a young person and you have the dream of doing really, I think, three things.

you want a job that can create financial stability for you currently, but at some point of family. The second thing you want is you have some desire to work on things that are meaningful to you. They're rewarding, right? So whether that is a hobby, your professional work, whatever. And then the third thing is,

I think a lot of people, they have some sort of lifestyle that they want to engage in. Some people, their dream is to live in New York City. They want to live. They love the idea of being in a dense urban area where they can walk down the street and get a bagel and do all the stuff.

I got a lot of friends. That sounds like a second coming of hell to them. Right. They want to live on a farm. They don't want anyone near them, right? They don't want to talk to people, all the stuff. Everyone's got a different viewpoint as to what they want to be able to do. So as part of that, now it comes down to we have a country that is split between some people

want to rent. Some people want to own. So one of the big, in my opinion, one of the big maybe misunderstandings is that everyone wants to own a home. I don't actually think a lot of people want to own a home, right? There are a lot of people who want to own a home. But there's a growing percentage of people who they value mobility. They value the ability to work remotely.

They value the ability to pick up and go somewhere for a month, all these different components. And so we're trying to take a one-size-fits-all lifestyle and overlay it onto 330 million Americans who all want different things. But the one thing that I do know everyone wants is people don't want to not be able to pay their bills. Right. People don't want to feel the financial pain. And so it comes back to if you're 22 years. years old and you're coming out of school and you hear AI's destroying jobs, you're freaking out. Yeah.

Now, what we're actually seeing, though, is that the companies that are AI exposed. So some companies aren't touching AI. They don't care about AI. Like who? If you're a family-owned manufacturing business, so you deal with hardware, physical goods, et cetera, you're probably got people pitching you on use AI to be better in finance. Yeah. I've been doing this.

My family's been doing this for 70 years. I'm the third generation, take your AI and shove it up your ass, right? Steve's over here like, go fuck you show. And by the way, we're doing just fine, right? Yeah. What about like Fortune 500 companies, though, or any like... They're adopting it very rapidly. But here's the thing, is that AI exposed companies, the latest data, is showing that they

are actually hiring more people and they're actually increasing wages faster. Now, as I've dug into this data... How recent is that data? Last six months or so. Okay. Because one of the areas where people thought that there was going to be an absolute wipeout was software engineers. So AI can now code. So why do we need the software engineers?

And people were laughing because they were like, remember when they were yelling at the journalist and everyone else like learned to code? Right? Oh, you guys want to cry because you're losing your job? Like, why don't you just learn to code? And now you're fucked. And now the joke was like, oh, the software engineers like learn to code. Well, no, you're screwed, right? Yeah. What actually happened was there was a huge sell off or drop in the number of software engineers.

But now it has started to rapidly go the other direction. Because the cost of tokenization with AI is insane, right? What happens with AI, and this is, again, going back to, I've changed my mind on this. And a huge reason was I saw it in our own businesses. So at first, maybe 18 months ago, everyone said, mandate from heaven. Every company I knew, every CEO started to tell their team, use AI, use AI. What do people start using AI? Well, guess what, every single person became way more productive.

Now, I actually think that there are two sides to AI. I think AI sucks at some stuff. Somebody gave me a report yesterday to make a fairly big decision on the next 12 months or so head count at a company. I started looking at the report. I started saying the numbers are wrong.

Is this Claude? The math is wrong in this, right? And I basically was looking at this person and I was like, hey, this business is not as good as we thought it was. Look at these numbers, like the margins on the, whatever. And then I started to do the actual math myself. And I was like, wait a minute.

No, our margins are great. But the, you know, it's the report. that was wrong. So I think that AI is not all that it's cracked up to be in many cases, but what I do see is that it made a lot of our employees much more productive. Well, if I have people who are now more productive, I want as many of them as I can get because I'm actually getting more units of productivity per unit of labor. It's like sticking steroids into a great athlete or something like that. That's how you're looking at it. If you have, let's say basketball team, 12 people, you have two on steroids and they're your most productive players. First of all,

you're like, let's go give everyone's steroids. Right. Right. Yeah, very smart. But on top of that, you're like, by the way, could we play with six people on the court instead of five? Yes. Right? Like, obviously that would be great. To bring all the rules. Yeah. So I think that's what companies are going through is they're realizing, hey, for the right people who know how to use these tools, are becoming more productive. And so you're seeing this hiring happen. Now, the other piece of this story, I think, especially for young people, is young people's brains are not in cement. Right. How many young people are sitting in, sitting around and they're like, oh, there's some new technology. I don't know how to do anything at my job.

Let me use this thing. And they start to adopt it. So the number one thing you can do to insulate yourself job-wise, in my opinion, if you become the AI guy or girl, no one's firing you. If you were going to forge a 500 company and you know how to use AI, go find your boomer boss and be like, I'm the guy. I understand how to use AI. You might get a promotion because they're going to be like, oh, we need AI. I saw the headline. It's supposed to make us more productive. You know AI? You could spell AI? Oh, okay. Why should you come over here and do that? Alan I remember Alan Iverson very well. Yeah, do that, do this like AI magic or something. It make me look good, right? type stuff. So I think that, again, there's this bifurcation to it. Now, the thing that's- Bifurcation. The thing that scares the hell out of me is getting that report with the math wrong, right? Or I have some folks who work at some of our companies who will send me an email or some sort of report on something. And I will literally respond to them and say, did you think before you sent this?

Because I started reading. I'm like, the whole thing is AI. And you might as well have just like thrown chalk in the air and hope that it landed and, you know, the right thing on the board, right? Because there's no thought. There was no critique. There was no kind of like human analysis over top of the AI information. When my dad got into his 50s, he really hit a brick wall.

He had the same workouts, same diet, felt like he was moving through the mud. Nobody tells you about this stuff either. One day you're crushing it, the next day you're wondering why everything feels twice as hard. Because here's the thing, most men start losing testosterone around age 30, and the average is they lose 1% per year after that. Luckily, my dad was able to start taking Mars Men. Your body makes testosterone, but a lot of it gets locked up and can't be used. There's this protein called SHBG that basically handcuffs your testosterone.

So even if your body is making it, SHBG locks it up so you can't access it. Mars Men is designed to help free locked up testosterone. So your body can use it. It's got no synthetics, no needles, just real ingredients that help optimize energy, focus, and strength. When my dad started using it, he noticed stronger workouts in the gym and way better recovery the next day. It also gave a more consistent natural energy throughout the day. It wasn't like a cup of coffee where there was a crash later.

Mars Men is made in the USA and third party tested. And there's a 90 day money back guarantee for you so there's no risk. Worst case is you don't absolutely love it and you get your money back. But the good news is over 91% of users report higher. energy levels. Thousands of guys are feeling incredible results. Just check out their reviews on their website and see for yourself. For a limited time only, our listeners are going to get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com. Link in my description below. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase,

they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. Staples preferred business membership built for busy business owners because you've got bigger things to think about. With Staples Preferred, get free delivery. No minimums. Staples Preferred unlocks up to 3% back. Plus 10% savings on print and exclusive wireless offers.

One less thing on your plate. Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca slash preferred. That was easy. And so I've thought, I have not done this, but I've thought about banning inside of our companies, anyone sending me an AI. report. You can use AI to get smarter, have it do some of the work, whatever. But if you send me something that a human did not put the final stamp on, I'm going to freak out. Right. Because it isn't

a magic bullet for everything. It is a tool. And so you started off this conversation with it can do things that humans can't do. We forget Excel replaced entire departments inside of companies. Of course it did. Yes. There used to be people, right? If you go watch like a movie from a 1910s, Yes. They used to have entire rooms full of people sitting there with ledgers, and they were writing down all this stuff. Excel got rid of all those people. Now, companies are bigger than ever. They're worth more money than ever.

People make more money than ever, right? All these things happened. And so what really ends up happening is we're going to take people who AI is replacing some of their jobs because that's happening to a degree. And they now simply are going to shift to other places in the economy. But I don't think we can bet the economy on that. What we actually need is we need the companies who are adopting AI to say, hey, hey, this is making my employees more productive, which it looks like it is,

I'm going to hire more people. And when that happens, then I think that people start to change their mind as I did and say, you know what this AI thing? Let's get this in every single company in America because that means actually we're going to have more jobs, not less jobs.

All right, before I go into that with you, can you go back to the literal point you were making that I got you off where you were talking about how they had been raising wages by 9% and then suddenly they're like, I need to cut people. Oh, nobody was raising wages by 9%.

But they felt like, they would need to so they're like, fuck that, meaning I'm just going to integrate AI and then we started to get into it. But like, it led to rising costs of AI itself. And they're like, wait a minute. There's two different areas. So again, I look at a lot of things that people knew before 2020 are not relevant anymore. We can get into what some of those are. But yeah, I think that I think that business, job market, economy, inflation, all this stuff. You have to look at pre-2020, post-2020. The post-2020 economy was inflation's out of control. I have to either raise the wages of my employees to such a level that it is growing faster than inflation or they're falling behind. So what do companies start doing? They're like, well, I can't raise every single person's wage at my company 10% or more. So they start

to lay off people. So in 2022, you saw asset prices came down, interest rates went up and there's a lot of layoffs. And so coming out of 2022, you're starting at a lower baseline. Right. And so that's where it happens to coincide with the rise of AI. ChatGPT comes out, all this stuff. And so now you get this massive productivity gain. But again, you were coming off of some of these companies had laid off people, had become a little bit leaner. Now, one of the things I find most interesting is that there's a ton of companies right

now that are laying people off and they're blaming AI. It's not because of AI. Why is it? Because they didn't do the layoffs in 2022 and 2023 when they should have. So they've just been bloated organizations. Like, take, for example, block. Oh, so they're, wait, so you're saying they're like going. his shareholders like yeah we delay people off

because of AI but it's really because they fucked up let's talk about blocking Twitter okay Elon must buy his Twitter he goes in I think they slash something like they had 6,000 employees whatever number was down to like 2000 yeah they fired a lot I mean they just they just fired tons of people and everyone was freaking out

products probably better than ever usage is at all time highs all these things happen right so that objectively in hindsight was a bloated organization the same person who's running that company now is running block. They just did a massive layoff. I think it laid off like 2,000 people and they blamed AI. But they had like doubled or tripled the number of users post the pandemic during that time period. And so I don't think it has anything to do with AI. I think AI is a scapegoat for them to do the thing that they should have done, which is you have to right size your organization

because you got too many people, right? You overhired and you mismanaged this thing. Right. Obstics. By the way, if I was the CEO of one of these companies, would I have the intestinal fortitude and the personal integrity to just tell people, I screwed up, I hired too many people, we got to right size this, whatever, without hitting the easy button of blame AI? Right, because they'll say you first if you do that. Again, right? So again, people are operating from the perspective of what is rational from their views. Yes.

Right. So if you look at the job market, what we now have is we have tons of open roles. We have roles that we previously thought we're going to get smashed, accelerating again. We have the unemployment rate between 20 and 24-year-olds coming down substantially. Yeah, you said it went from 9 to 5.5. Yes. Now, is that? 20 to 24-year-olds.

Are you talking about the unemployment rate of people seeking employment or just overall from the population? I don't know what it's clarified as. It's probably people seeking. It's probably people seeking employment because if they're not seeking employment, they're usually taking out of the unemployment and like the labor market. But if you're 20-24 years old, pretty much everyone's seeking employment, right? There's not many 20, 24-year-olds who just say, hey, you know what, I'm just going to kick back and not a, not get a job. Well, here's another question because I haven't looked at this data closely at all.

So it'd be good to actually, like, learn about this some more so we can actually put hard numbers with it. But, like, I'm also thinking about that from the perspective of this is now the wave of young generation that came out of like they were in early high school and stuff when COVID hit and things like that. And the world change. And so there's also a change in how many people are opting to go to college versus going to more like, trade type of jobs, which are certainly in demand right now and everything as far as I've been able to see. Is that also possibly a part of the higher employment number, meaning like there are jobs that there are employment opportunities that young people are looking for now that they weren't even considering five years ago? There's a lot of stuff happening in the job market.

Some of it is AI-related, some of it's not. So for example, how many people, you know, the famous stat of like kids want to be YouTubers, not astronauts or whatever, right? Okay, fine. But how many people make a living in creative fields that there was a democratization to this. Sure. Podcasts, YouTube, music, all this kind of stuff, right? So that's like one whole piece. But inside of a company, it goes back to there was not anything to do with social media 15 years ago.

Right. Now there's those roles. But guess what else? I have people who work at some of our companies. They are young people who I explicitly seek out their opinion on things because they are across the political spectrum they're younger and guess what they do

I can pop hiring liberals I tell people all the time if you're 22 to maybe 28 or so you're willing to do something that I'm not willing to do anymore go out I want you out in the streets

on the weekends at night etc and I want you meeting people because guess what? That's what I was doing when I was that age I was going to the networking events or going out with other people I thought, you know, were successful, smart, et cetera. And I was able to meet all these incredible people who now have become very successful. I'm married.

I got family now. I'm in my late 30s. I'm not going to the club on Friday night. You're not? But unfortunately not. But if I have people who work with me who are going and doing that stuff, that's a huge part of an advantage that we can gain because we're still meeting them, those people as an organization. And so I'll go to young people all the time and say,

who are the five smartest people you know that you're your age? I'd never heard of the people that they say. So it's not like, oh, there's the founder of this company, blah, blah, whatever. It's some random person. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like this person who they don't run a company, they don't do it, whatever. And they're like, no, no, no, no. They're good at ABCD, whatever.

And I'll meet them. And I'll be like, you know what? That person is really smart. They're 24 years old. You know, let's keep an eye on what that person wants to do in the future. And so, again, it goes back to when you're in your 20s, You don't want to try to have the same advantages that the 45-year-old has because they probably got more resources, more experience, better network, et cetera.

You want to find the thing that you're really good at doing. And I think that there's a lot of folks who they're looking at AI as the boogeyman. But actually, if you're a young person in particular, you should be the earliest adopters of this stuff because it's going to make you, you know, the Teflon dawn of your organization because you got the skill set and experience and knowledge that, frankly, the boomers, they're not going to go do it. They don't have it. I also think that's why, like, if I had to boil it down to one thing, because I've known you a long time.

And I met you when you were already successful, but like you've definitely really leveled up since then as well. But I think the thing that's made you most successful in business, if there was one thing to boil it down to, is you ask a lot of questions. And you ask the questions sometimes that, you know, in the old Carl Sagan saying of like kids get laughed at sometime after kindergarten. And by the time they're in 12th grade, they don't ask these questions anymore. I feel like you actually ask those things. Of course. And that is, there's something that I learned from that. And I think everyone out there could definitely learn from, not just for business, by the way, just like in life to like figure some shit out.

But you're laying it out because you go to a 23 year old who has a totally different life experience than you. And you're like, well, you're going to do some things that I don't want to do anymore. And so who are these people? What do you think? What is it? And even if it's something that sounds virtually retarded to you, you're like, maybe it's not let's let's empower i'll take it a step further there's a lot of people inside of many organizations what they they never want to talk about politics or local policy all this type of

stuff i said every single person that i work with is i want people who have a diversity of thought that work in our organizations i want some people who they love trump i want some people who lean right lean left or centrist independent everything right just on the just political lens there are times where I know what, let's say somebody on the right things, and I have no clue what the other side would look at this. And so I will go to the person or organization and I will say, this topic, what are your friends saying? And I always ask, what are your friends saying?

Because now they don't feel like they're the one who has to counteract whatever somebody else is saying, but they will be very transparent. So Mom Doni is a great example. When the rise of Mom Dani was happening, every rich person I knew in New York City was saying exactly what you think they were saying. This guy's dangerous. This is crazy.

This is blah, blah, blah, whatever. And some people were telling you to run, right? That's not a denial. Yeah, there was a lot of people who asked me a lot of stuff. I was paying attention to this whole thing because one of the things that I thought was fascinating is that very early on,

I was like Trump and Mom Donny are the same person. They understand the pulse of the people. They understand how to use social media to communicate. they somehow have used what is a fairly elitist position to convince the popular kind of constituency that they are like them.

I always say Trump's a genius because he convinced people he's got a gold toilet but he's like a farmer in Iowa. Like how does that happen, right? Mom Dani, same thing. Mom Dani comes from a very successful family but he is walking on the streets and he's like hey, let's go take it to the man.

And so again, they have different policies. They disagree. But it's actually why they like each is because I think they realize they are like a mirror image. AOC, I think, is pretty similar as well. She understands how to use social media. She understands, like, populist viewpoint. And she's able to communicate on social media in a way that really rallies folks up. Now, compare that to maybe other politicians on the right or left who don't know how to do that stuff.

Yeah, I think Mom Donnie is like the next evolution of like an AOC. I'm talking just strictly like political style because he is so. with how he says things. He's not radical. Yeah, you can totally disagree with his policies and call the policies radical. Like, I don't think socialists should be, you know, that's the type of people we should be electing. But like, for example, some of those campaign videos that were long form videos as well where he goes to the districts within New York City that turned to Trump in the previous election. And instead of being like, how could you ever vote for the orange man or something like that, He's like, hey, I noticed, you know, your district flip like 40 points for Donald Trump.

So did you vote for Trump? Yes, I voted for Trump. Okay. I have some political differences with him. But I'm just curious what made you do that? And he listened to these people. And these people gave them great answers. They're like, well, I was doing okay financially.

And then Biden came in and I wasn't. So I voted for the other one. And you, he actually makes sense, by the way. Made a ton of sense. And so, again, like disagree with his policies if you want to. but you have to respect how he did it. Even how, Dee, if we were just looking at it, how he addressed like the Israel thing during the campaign,

but the other day he was being hounded on it like, you must be anti-Semitic because you don't support like Israel or whatever. And he goes, I actually did. How do you say, Deep? Yeah, but he's like, I differentiate whether or not I have to cast allegiance to a government that I believe commits genocide and ethnic cleansing versus a very separate group of people who happen to. to be a race that shares a race with that government who have nothing to do with that who I'm

proud to call my constituents in New York. I was like, bro. Well, here, the reason why I say, the radical communication is I think that, um, the outcome that an AOC wanted is like people with pitchforks in the street, you know, freaking out. I think that the message that frankly, Trump and Mom Donnie both delivered to a certain subset of the population is optimism. And I think, and I think that Trump went to do that. a bunch of people and was like, inflation's too high. These people are killing you. Government overreach.

You know, they're starting wars all over the place. And his message was like, I'm going to give you hope that a certain version of America is what is going to return. Make America great again. Literally this is a slogan. Mom, Donny did the same thing for a different constituency, but he basically presented a message of optimism to them. Now, these two groups don't agree on almost anything.

Right. But. Well, I agree on one thing. But yeah. But that is ultimately the battle, I think. And so if you go back to AI, now what we have is we got people who aren't in either one of those camps who control technology and we're going to find out what exactly they want to do with this technology. Now, what I will say, maybe one last thing I'll say about the positives of AI, which I think is very important. Let's use education, health care, and finance as the three examples.

If I said to you, there is a eight-year-old child, we want them. to be as smart as possible. What can we do from an education perspective that is going to give them the best shot of being intelligent in learning? At eight years old? Any age. The number one thing that we have learned

throughout history, across studies, across just human experience, is you give people a one-on-one private education experience. One-on-one tutoring works to get people smarter. So what happens if you're in school and you're behind?

They give you a tutor. What happens if you are excelling? They give you a tutor. What are rich people really care about? What is the ratio of students, teachers inside the classroom? They then even will go as far as to do one-on-one tutoring outside of school, et cetera. So one-on-one tutoring or one-on-one kind of insights works for education. In health care, what is the thing that every single rich person wants? One-on-one health care.

That's right. They want a private doctor who is focused on them. They want as much information as possible, but the private one-on-one health care experience, everyone believes is going to lead to better health outcomes. If we could give every person in America a doctor and it was their only patient, you think they'd probably be better? Of course. So it works education, works in healthcare.

What about in finance? Same exact thing. If you had one-on-one personalized insights, that would happen. What AI is doing is it is now allowing companies to take that one-on-one experience and provide it at scale. So I cannot speak to education or health care. can give you a couple of companies I've seen. I'm an investor in a company that does it in education space called synthesis.

Basically, they've created games that are AI-driven, and students play them, but it's being customized with AI to their personal, where are they from a learning perspective, how do they learn, all this kind of stuff. There's another school, which I have no affiliation with called Alpha School. Similar thing. Two hours a day, they use these products to learn. And then the rest of the day, they go and they do friendly, cool stuff, right? They work on learning business or they go play sports or do whatever.

Is there a human touch that's lost with that though? Yes and no, right? On one hand, is there a human touch in a classroom with 32 students and the teacher is trying to... Very fair argument. You know, they just can't provide one-on-one experience. So, like, there's always trade-offs in these things where I actually think what we want is we want both. We want one-on-one tutoring, essentially, in education for students for a period of time of the day. And then we want them playing with other kids or interacting with the kids.

with adults or whatever. So it doesn't need to be either or we wanted to be both, right? Healthcare. There's a lot of companies now that are showing up with things like, you know, the Dexas scans and all that stuff, but also ChatGBTGBT, BT launched Chat. And so you can go in and you can upload all of your health data, which again, some people like to do, some people don't. Sam Altman will review it all.

And it will then start to help guide you. Now, I'll give you a personal story about the power of AI in healthcare. The power of AI. my wife and I well she got pregnant contrary to a popular belief I can't get pregnant well what do you say

it's a person who can birth or something like that now listen there's a lot of different terms flying around if people want to attack me me believing that women get pregnant is I won't attack you at all I love that

yeah where I come from that's common sense right right so she goes for a scan and we are having twins and in this scan I was there. You went to zone coverage right from like two on one. Hold on. You're going to love this.

I am there for this scan. And while we are in the room, the doctor is doing the wand over her stomach. And all of a sudden, you can just kind of tell when somebody starts like not just being chill. And so she starts like scanning a little bit faster, a little bit more aggressive, whatever. And starts like looking around the room, all the stuff. She puts the machine down. She turns on the lights, and she says, we need to have a serious conversation. You don't want to hear.

We need to have a serious conversation when your pregnant wife is at the doctor, and the doctor just did a scan. That's not the way to open that combo, doc. We sit down. And the doctor says to us, you have twins, which we already know. But these twins do not have a membrane wall in between the two twins. So the twins are actually in the same, like, membrane area. And so they're sharing a placenta and they're sharing the membrane sac. Very, very high risk. To the point where the doctor says to us, at this point, most people in

your position will terminate the pregnancy. If you've ever been around anyone who has been pregnant, that is like the most devastating conversation you could have with a doctor. We leave. My wife is incredibly upset. I'm like, what just happened? Right. All this stuff. To my my wife's credit, she goes home and she takes the scan. And she's looking at it with her human eyes and saying, there's like this line in between the, like, what is that? So she uploads it to one of the AI systems. And she asks, what do you see here? And the AI system says, we see two twins in two membrane sacks sharing one placenta. And my wife's like, can you explicitly point to where, you know what, like, ask like multiple things questions in this.

Long story short is the AI identifies that there's two separate membranes. Does share a placenta those two separate membranes. That takes the risk from like the most risky to there's some risk, but like there's plenty of people who go through this. Not a problem. You know, you'll be fine. So my wife then takes the scan and she circles what the AI told her, draws the biggest arrow I've ever seen and uploads it into the doctor's system and says, just that

curiosity can you tell me what this is just out of curiosity is a hard line right there the doctor calls her and literally says some version of i am so sorry i don't know what i was looking at before that is correct that is the membrane oh my god i hope you fired that doctor you know i apologize but whatever again we've heard story after story of AI being yeah that's useful i analyzing you know x-rays or doing all the stuff whatever my personal experience going through that was without AI, I doubt my wife and I would have terminated the pregnancy, but how many parents would have? Would we have gone through that entire pregnancy thinking that there was this huge risk or whatever? Right? And so you look at that, you say, well, one area where I am 100%

positive AI is going to be better than humans is doing something as simple as analyzing x-rays, scans, et cetera, in healthcare. Oh, I agree with that. Right. So guess what, though? I don't want an AI doctor managing my wife's pregnancy or me going through a surgery or anything. I want a human augmented by the AI. I want both, right? I want like double coverage on this thing. Yes. So in my head, I know that education works.

I know health care works. So I started paying attention to a lot of finance. And I started asking myself, how can I use these tools to, again, I want human augmented by the AI. And so I started using chat, GBT, I started using Claude, et cetera. And what I started with was I used to take screenshots of all my accounts. and upload them, and then I would ask questions. How to get my tax rate down?

You know, what's the concentration levels or correlations in my portfolio? All these, like, regular questions. Long story short, we eventually got to the point where it was so frustrating to constantly be uploading screenshots that we built a product to go do this. So then I went from, I am somebody who is a user of this stuff

and somebody who is watching other people use this stuff, to now I have to think through the design of these systems. I have to think through how they work. So the way that the product works today is called CFO Sylvia. and you come in and you attach all your accounts. So AI is not valuable unless you give it the context. So you give it read access to your bank account, your brokerage, your crypto account,

your credit cards. You upload all the private stuff, private investments, cars, collectibles, et cetera. And you start talking to it. But guess what I've experienced? It has found things that my accountant, financial advisor, CFO, et cetera, did not find. All right. Hold on a minute, though. Go ahead.

What about the slippery slope of this? You know, we're living in the future, some guy, you know, he's in a, he's in a little. marriage he's not that happy about he wants to say i'd help him with his finances and everything and then the a i finds an actually madison account and says i'm going to tell your wife about this unless you do x y and z like you see how something like that could be sensitized to turn against you 100% right my response to stuff like that is twofold one with a lot of these systems they're everyone is so worried about that that actually you end up having so many controls that people are actually advocating for the opposite they're like hey can you take the governor off can you you know you know

So a good example, CFO Sylvia does not touch your money. So we can't move money. We can't execute a trade. We can't do any of that stuff? One of the number one feature requests is, can it touch my money? Can it move my stuff? Right? We don't want to do that today because there's a lot of risks associated with that.

And we like being the insights layer, not the actual one moving the money at the moment. But people are actually asking us for the opposite, not, hey, can you make this less risky? They wanted to be more risky. So that's first. The second thing is ultimately the AI is only doing. the things that you either give it access to or it is telling, I'll put in air quotes, truth if it's accurate, right? So at the end of the day, if you upload a bunch of accounts and you're on whatever, Ashley Madison or going to, you know, porn sites or going to the strip

club or whatever, I don't think a lot of people are like, oh, if you deliver me the insight that, you know, I'm spending too much at the strip club, there's kind of two responses. It's like, on one hand, like, are you spending too much money at the strip club? Like, somebody should tell you because you're not telling your financial advisor, your wife doesn't know, all this stuff. Like you as an individual actually probably want to know that information, which you don't want to tell your wife. And so I think that's where you get into this weird world of, well,

the same thing could happen with the financial advisor. The financial advisor has got your credit card statements and the financial advisor comes to you and says, hey, by the way, I see you've been going to the strip club. I'm going to go and tell your wife. Yeah, but I can beat the shit out of him. You can't beat the shit out of an AI.

You know what I mean? That's true. Now here's the number one thing that we see. So I talked about education where people get the one-on-one education, they learn faster. Healthcare, better outcome. we actually now have the data that the people who regularly use Sylvia, whether you use Sylvia or use some other AI system, whatever,

they grow their net worth faster than the people who don't use this stuff. And some of it is because if you're paying attention or using a product, you're probably leaning into it more, right? You're saying, hey, I care about my finances, I'm checking my net worth, I'm actively managing this. But the other side is that you have superhuman intelligence. And so think about our whole conversation as far, whether we're talking about a company, an individual in the job market,

education, health care, finance, whatever, we now have superhuman intelligence. And so that intelligence is incredibly valuable. That's why these companies are becoming so valuable. They're growing so quickly. Is everyone has scoured the world for centuries trying to find the smartest people to help them. I want the smartest doctor. I want the smartest teacher. I want the smartest financial expert.

I want the person who can help my company grow the fastest. I want the best engineer, whatever. If that is now in software, are their downsides? 100%. Tradeoffs, 100%. but there is going to be insatiable demand to get access to superhuman intelligence to then go and apply it to whatever the thing is you care about. This is a little bit of a tangential question here, but I'm just, it's like it's in the back of my head. Listen, you talk about all this stuff at scale and all that because like you're really, really pure business guy.

But as someone who objectively, like if you wanted to retire tomorrow, you are good. You've earned a lot for yourself, had a lot of success. you got the great wife, the great family, like that's clearly your priority, which is an awesome thing and all that. Like outside of like, hey, I just want to set a great example for my kids or something like that, what drives you to constantly be on the cutting edge of wherever things are going? Like, do you want to be Jeff Bezos or do you just get off on the action of it? Like, what is it? I think that most people who, are good at business,

they have one defining feature that I find across all industries is they fundamentally believe they're helping their customer. So if you think of Bezos, right, I'm sure he's done stuff I don't even know he's done, right? That we're all like, hey, I don't like that

or I'm worried about this, whatever. Send him dick picks to people, you know, like there's, you know, that type of stuff all the way to the technology, whatever. By the way, if you had a conversation, they're probably not proud of some of stuff they've done themselves, right? So, okay, put that.

but that guy in particular created the ability for me to press a button on my phone and something shows up the next day. It's amazing. It's like a modern miracle, right? So you go through all these companies and you say like ultimately

they are net positives. Doesn't come without trailers but they're net positives. What drove them? Almost every single one of them. I mean, Bezos constantly talked about every single public interview, every single writing, et cetera,

was we are obsessed with the customer. If you go and you look at somebody like an Elon Musk, like this guy's a maniac. He's nuts, yeah. He literally is tying his pay to getting a million people on Mars. He's already rich. He ain't going to, he's not going to be upset.

Yeah, he's not going to be upset if he doesn't need this. But if you think about this, right, is self-driving cars. Something like a neural link is literally helping disabled people. You've got the boring company with traffic. Like all these things are very much in service. And so one of the things I've learned in my career, which I think is for people who do not spend time with these types of folks or do not spend time inside of a business, I don't know very. many people who have built successful large businesses who did not make other people's life better. Like the service of improving somebody else's life is really what creates the value.

There's a difference. And I can't know without knowing some of the guys, others I can observe. And I kind of know the answer. But the difference is the people who actually lead with that as the goal versus that is just a consequence of the things they do along the way. Oh yeah, by the way, we help people. But in reality, they're like, yeah, fuck those people. Like that's Peter Thiel. But here's the thing, right? And we talk about Peter. A whole first name basis. I would say that even if somebody is like screw these people, they still have to help somebody in order to make the business successful. So if you go to whatever, take the company that you hate the most, right, or you think

it's the most egregious about this, I probably could still point to whose lives are they improving because ultimately that's what elicits the economic value being transferred. The only way that you pay someone for something is either they make your life better or you're fearful of something. It's the only two ways that money really transacts in an economy. Yeah, but I think that that's a really slippery slope when you're trying to find that with any company, though, because like Amazon aside, I can point to a lot of things that are amazing there, right? So I'm not going to pick on that right now. It's things that aren't, but like what was created is objectively amazing. But then you look at a company like Palantir is being subsidized by the Bureau fucking Deep State.

to basically surveil people and, you know, kill kids all over the world when they fucking feel like it. I don't think that that you can say, well, but, you know, we have some data on some terrorists. So there's a good thing. The tradeoff is like the scales are like this. Well, so let's take Palantires as you know. I'm not an investor. I know people who used to work that are a lot of people who still work there now, but I know some of the people who were involved early on, et cetera. And I would also as a contextual point, I was in the military.

I've seen some of the other technologies, et cetera, right? I don't think I ever, when I was in the military, explicitly was like, this piece of information is coming from Palantir, but I'm sure, just given that they were kind of in their heyday, right? I'm sure at some point I interact with the data. If you go and you look at a company like that, my guess is that they are responsible for 10, 20, 100x more of saving lives than actually hurting people. Now, the one thing that, again, there's always these tradeoffs is, well,

What about what is necessary in order to save lives? So go to the extreme of China. You can't go anywhere without walking down the street. And there's cameras everywhere. And there's this whole surveillance state, whatever, right? Now, Brett Baer, the Fox guy, I saw a clip online. He was in China to, I think, interview somebody or whatever. And while they're doing the live feed, he goes, yeah.

And we just got a ticket because we double parked for two minutes. And there was a camera, saw them double parked. and it sent a ticket to their phone. Right? Like, you've seen the guys in New York City walk down and they're like giving the parking ticket. Somebody runs out and says, hey. Hoboken. Hoboken, right, wherever, right?

In China, they just do it by camera and just comes to your phone. They don't even need a person to go do it. Right? So, like, the surveillance is incredible there compared to the U.S. Now, you know what's fascinating? I don't know if you've seen this. Who is the guy, Adam, like, jumper or something? The, he interviews.

No jumper? Yeah, this guy. He interviews a lot of, like, athletes and porn stars, all that stuff, whatever. I saw a clip. He somehow got a group of, the way that the clips insinuated, criminals in San Francisco came on a podcast. And they were saying that they can no longer steal cars because of the flock security system. So flock is a company that's got these like- Yeah, these private cameras.

they have drones, they have all the stuff. What these kids were saying is like, yeah, we can't steal cars anymore because the second we steal the car, the cameras got us, they got a drone overhead. Like, we're overmatched by technology. But here's the thing, Pump. That's how they creaked the door open to this stuff. They say, look at, and I'll go way more extreme than stealing cars. They say, look, we solved 100,000 homicides over the last two years.

That's 100,000 people that would be dead. And objectively, that's great. But if the cost of that is to enslave 8 billion people to, 10 years from now, that's not. So here goes back to, right? The first thing I always remind people is, and it's hard because whenever you see news, you're always like, oh my God, you know, this is my reaction. We probably don't hear about many of good and bad things that occur.

Exactly. I agree. So we're operating already kind of in the dark of a lot of the really, really sensitive stuff. Now, we do hear sometimes the recent plot for UFC 250. There was these five guys who supposedly were going to go. and fly, you know, drones with explosives, and they were got sniper positions, all this stuff and everything.

They were coordinating on, I think first I message, then signal and stuff. How they get caught? One of their moms turned them in. Mm-hmm. You can have all technology in the world. Your mom finds out. Sometimes you still need the human element, right?

So we have intelligence agencies and police and undercover agents and, you know, trying to recruit spies. And like, like, there's still this whole apparatus that is not tech that is needed to enforce rules, protect people, et cetera. But if you go back to, for example, just use flock in San Francisco.

I don't live in San Francisco. I go to San Francisco sometimes. I don't like the idea of cameras being everywhere. Right? I like my privacy. I like the idea of people not stealing cars, though. Yes, I like that too.

And so there's this balance. Now, bring it closer to home in New York City. New York City maybe is the most surveilled American city. It is. Right? I believe that's statistically true. Like, probably, right?

I mean, you walk, there's these crazy cameras, all the stuff, right? I choose to live there. Right? I could not live there. And does that make it right or good or not? Well, like, I don't want, like, a terrorist attack. I don't want, you know, tons of crime.

If there's, like, a shooting, like, let's catch them. At the same time, like, do I love the idea of, like, walking down the street and probably having a picture of my face taken every five seconds? How about when you go to the airport now? Diff and I just got back from Italy, you know, you don't have to show your passport anymore. They just scan your face. And there's some fucking company behind that doing that.

They know everything about me. Yeah. But here's the thing. Go back to remember the United Healthcare. Shooter? Yeah. Dude, he got to another state before he was caught. And there was a couple of videos.

Like there was a video of the shooting itself. I think there was a video of him like entering Central Park or coming out of Central Park or something on the bike. But it's not like, hey, you know, we got the facial recognition stuff. Now, whatever. Now, I don't know this to be true. But do you think that they caught him because of the McDonald's facial recognition? Have you explored this?

I haven't explored that, but that's not what I would have guessed. So maybe I I but one theory one theory that again I don't know it would not surprise me though is he went to McDonald's he ordered the story is that the woman at the cash register thought he looked like the potential shooter and called it in right if I told you that he went and he ordered at the digital kiosk which has a camera in it and somehow they were able to using facial recognition software realized that he was at that place and called. local policing get there, would surprise you? Wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me, no. Right? So again, it goes back to the first time I walked into a McDonald's, I saw the digital kiosk.

I was, I ain't playing with this nonsense, right? And I went to the human. Now when I go to McDonald's, I go to the digital kiosk. And I've learned what I want to order where it is. I'm, you know, fairly able to navigate it. And then I see this camera pointed at me. And every time I said to myself, where's that going? Right.

Why they need a camera? I love technology. I think it's amazing. It's got us to this point in the world. Like they'd never invented the wheel. Imagine where we are, right? Like if that didn't end up happening. But you still have to, like, I know you've read all these books too where art kind of mimics life, but you read the 1984s. You read the brave new worlds. And you look at the patterns that form and it's like, yes, we could see a lot of scenarios, even if it's something as simple as a digital kiosk with a camera at McDonald's, which I haven't been in McDonald's in fucking 20 years. But either way, like a lot of people go there and stuff.

It's like, you know, that little things like that, little death by a thousand cuts, if you will, can lead to statistics looking good on certain things that everyone could agree on in the short term that fucking kills everyone in the long term. And like, it'll get to a point where people could look at, maybe a time like the Western Frontier post Civil War which was if you ever seen even the show 1883 brutal right motherfuckers would go take a piss and get bit by a rattlesnake and they're dead right

like I wouldn't want to go back to that but you will people could live in a time where they go I would much rather you know I guess taking a piss is a bad example but I'd much rather like die standing up in a way well and have freedom then live in a feeling of like I'm being watched all the time and I can't do anything. I'm at home and, you know, I'm just jerking off the past the time. I grew up in North Carolina. I was in the military. Right. So you're a fake New York fan. Hold on a second. Okay. So there's also a bunch of people I know who cops, firemen, you know,

they work inside of a jail, et cetera. There are some portion, I don't know what the exact numbers, but some portion of my friends or people that I've met throughout my life who, what you just described, this like surveillance state, all this stuff scares the hell out of them. Guess what they do? They opt out. They go and they live on a farm somewhere and they're just like, leave me alone. I want to go do my thing, whatever, right? That is an option for some portion of people. Now it goes back to the economic conversation, how many people can afford to do that? Can they find it? How do they work if that's what they're doing? You know, all this kind of stuff, right? So that's one component. The other side is there's some people who I think are on the extreme of, I don't give a shit of what you're doing. I want to live in some place, New York City, San Francisco, wherever. And they don't even think about it. They don't even realize there's cameras, you know, on the street corner, whatever. It's the people in the middle. that I think I actually spend the most time thinking about this stuff because either because they haven't or don't want to opt out, but they realize the tradeoff is I want to live in XYZ city, but I know that I'm giving up some degree of this. And so it comes back to what is the counter argument, right? Like what is the thing that we wish would happen? And I think that's what society's

really struggling with right now, right? Is do we want to live in a New York City where there's no cameras in today's day and age? Probably not. Probably not, but who's got the controls and where can it go? So take it a step further. One of the things that they have done in New York City for some cameras, not all cameras, but some cameras, is that you can go on a public website and you can actually see that camera.

Now, on one hand, that's great because you can see what's going on. Also, the New York Knicks parade is going on and people love looking at how many people are out there, all those kind of stuff. Useful to have cameras for that, for sure. other side of that is do you want anyone in the world be able to tap into a random camera and see you on that camera as you're walking down the street what are they doing with that information all right that's right so you get into this weird like what is public transparency versus how could it be used and sometimes it's not just even the fact that the camera is there it's then where is it going

how can people use that what are the rules how long is it stored for you know there's a lot of things in this we haven't even talked yet about when it's used incorrectly so how many people are sitting inside of a prison somewhere, didn't do something. And some piece of technology was weaponized against them. And then they get freed later. And it's, you know, I don't know, the cop misused the DNA kit or something, right? You know, whatever the thing is. So I generally look at this as technology is a net positive for society, even something where maybe I have become much more stringent in my thoughts about social media and how it is really negatively impacting a large portion of the population, I still think it's a net positive.

It allows you- Can you explain that whole thing? There are two addictions in this country that I think are going to become massive scandals among the people. One is social media. If I look at your phone or my phone, how many hours a day do you sit in front of a screen? Mine, I looked recently, over 11 and a half hours. Now, that includes my phone, my computer, my iPad, everything, right? But that means that for, I don't know, two-thirds of the time I'm awake, I'm in front of a screen.

Yeah. On one hand, it affords me the ability to make a living for me and my family. It allows me to meet all kinds of people, learn, do all this stuff, right? So think of books as maybe an example. I love reading physical books. And I go back and forth. Sometimes I'll go through these huge spurts and only read physical books. But then I'm like, well, you know what?

watching these YouTube videos actually really valuable. I'm learning a lot from it. Or watching, you know, a podcast or listening to an audio book or whatever. And so, like, the technology is actually accelerating the learning. Sure. So I want to use this stuff. Yes. I also doomscroll on whatever app all the time, like an idiot and like a monkey, right?

And, you know, waste a bunch of time and get probably brain rot. So there's this, like, balance of even just the screen. The other one, and I know you talked to Louis Regerio, sports gambling, right? But again, it goes back. to the same exact thing that gives you access to information about a thing you care about sports, you're getting fed an ad in front of your face

that's like, hey, give me your money and bet on balls or strikes at the baseball game. Yeah. So you look at this stuff and you say, there's always two sides to the technology. If we go back to, let's just talk about artificial intelligence from a software perspective, I think that the positive effects

drastically outweigh the negative effects, maybe because it's so early that we have not yet seen all of the negative effects, Okay. But I also, people may be surprised, I'm very skeptical of the people who control a lot of this technology. Yeah.

Because I think that we do not yet fully understand how much like finger on the scale is going on the back end. That's right. I think we will learn over time. But to me, that is, if you said to me, what are the things that I wish I knew?

Well, like, when somebody asks certain questions, what happens? Let's use the Iran school where a bunch of children were killed. was AI used to fire the missile? We still don't know that for sure, right? Based on everything we've been told, both from the government and from the AI companies,

AI, it was not an autonomous system, right? The AI did not, like, press the final button to fire the missile. What we have not been told, did AI identify the target? Yeah. That specific building, did AI identify that area? Did AI identify that region? Did AI inform the person who pressed the button?

Who's AI? I mean, there's a lot of things. of questions there, right? Now, I do think a lot of people say to themselves, well, if a human press the button, that final, like, approval of the human pressing the fire missile button, okay, that would be a very, that's a very different situation than an autonomous system doing it. But like, dude, humanoid robots are going to have guns on the battlefield. Yeah. We have drones right now with explosives that are flying around in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Right? I had two of those guys in here talking about that. So you look at this stuff and you say, I don't know, you've probably seen the videos of the drone tracking the soldier who's like running around the tank, right? And it's like, yeah. And it's like, look, that video is really a timeless lesson

throughout history. Everyone tries to get a technology advantage over their opponent. Yeah. But what happens if that drone sees a farmer walking through the field, it's actually no different than the soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan who sees somebody we're going through a field you know what I mean but I think people have a very different reaction when it's a machine versus human yeah now there's also though because we're going to really

talk about it a little bit like some of the people who have their quote unquote fingers on the trigger these days with this but the conversation on this was certain people changed a lot over the years like I remember I was reading everything I could get my hands on in 2018 and 2019 on AI and listening to everything I could get my hands on. I remember like the first maybe it was like the first hundred episodes like Lex Friedman did. A lot of it was talking to some of the smartest people in the world about AI and it was very, very interesting stuff. Came out of the academic world. Absolutely. And you had guys like Elon Musk and he was not the only one, you know, publicly and then through written word and books and stuff like that when he was asked for

comment on things, absolutely sounding the alarm on where this can go and everything. And it's not to say like he completely has come off that at this point. But then, you know, at some point it just turns into, well, he's a part of the war now too. He's making GROC. He's doing XAI. He's integrating that with SpaceX to try to do interplanetary, you know, whatever. And it's like, well, what changed? Because you were the same guy who was going speechless years ago on different stages.

I think he even talked about it with Joe Rogan, like back in 2018, where he was like, yeah, it's a huge problem. I tried to tell Obama about it. He kind of got it, you know? Like, why is that conversation changed? So let's use Elon as an example. This is my external view as to his evolution. He realizes AI is going to be powerful yet dangerous. He realizes that most of the companies that are building it were like deep mine, Google, then bought deep mine, et cetera. He's friends with Sergei in particular, but I think Sergey and Larry from Google. from Google. He goes to them. It's like, this is really crazy. You know, you should be careful, but whatever. Didn't he have a falling out with them over that? I believe so. Yeah. That is ultimately the start of open AI. Yeah. The reason why open AI got started, at least my

understanding of it is it was supposed to be open source artificial intelligence. It was supposed to come at it from a like ethical, safe, you know, approach. And the reason why they made it a nonprofit and open source was there should be no economic, you know, gain associated with it. And it should be transparently kind of auditable by other people. So open AI, he's very, good at naming things, right? But Open AI gets started. At some point, as human nature takes over, some of the people involved seem to say, hey, we can make a lot of money here. And so Open AI becomes kind of like closed AI and for-profit AI. And so now they're going through this transition. What did he do with that company again, by the way? Like he divested for, I forget what it was.

He was involved. If I remember correctly, I think he put like $100 million for some big number. very involved and then he wasn't and he was like the chairman he was recruiting some of the early people like it was basically his non-profit and he had these people helping him build it and they were really doing the day to day and he was kind of like the the benefactor and then it became sams and then i think that what happened um there's a couple of details that have come out in part of the lawsuit stuff it seems like all of a sudden he was like hey these people are really smart i have Tesla Tesla needs help with AI and so one of the things Elon has done is like he just tries to attract the smart people at any of his companies and he'll take like the Tesla

you know, guy who's good at manufacturing and bring him to SpaceX for a day and say, hey, you know, fix the manufacturing problem and you're an expert, whatever. So Open AI, I think with Tesla, there was like some back and forth. At some point, there's some falling out. And that's really the fracturing of Open AI into Sam Altman and some of these guys. Got it. Now, XAI gets started. You have Anthropic.

those guys worked at Open AI spun out, right? And they're going to do the safe AI company, whatever. So if you look at this, actually you now have a bunch of competition because one, they all believe the prize is so big but two is they all disagree on how to go and do it. What is the price?

I mean, you tell me how much money can you make if you control intelligence. Control and God, that's getting dangerous when you say it like that. Now, it's no different than if you're the person who controls, you know, five million employees. And if you point all of their intelligence and, you know, sweat equity towards something, you can achieve a lot. Look at how bad it got, though, when it got to the race of who can control the internet. We almost had the whole world censored away.

The sitting president was fucking taken off the internet at one point, whether you agree with his policies or not. So now we're talking about that on an exponential scale because it's talking about intelligence, something that can think essentially perhaps for itself. when it gets that point. Well, there's definitely like recursive learning at this point. There's a lot of crazy stuff, right? Now, one of the things that I will call out is there has been a magnifying glass

put on this stuff in the last five years, three years, whatever it's been. Some of the best companies I invested in back in 2016 or so, they now are AI companies. But at the time, I went back, I looked at the pitch decks, they were talking about big data

and machine learning. So there's some fluidity, between things that have been around for a really long time and now the like AI label. Great. It's like the gender fluidity of AI. Listen, if, they don't identify.

There's one company, I'll say this because they're killing it. So I think that they'll get a good laugh at it. There's a company called Placer. Placer. Placer. P-L-A-C-E-R. And I went back,

I looked at the original information. It was all about big data, machine learning and all this stuff. It's now placer. And they're killing it, right? Right. Like, put down AI simpler. Well, here's the best part.

I think the founder's a genius. Because he understood, hey, there's a ton of attention, capital, et cetera, going here. My customers are more likely to want to work with an AI company versus one that's not, but whatever. So like entrepreneurs also are adapting to the environment as much as entrepreneurs are dictating the environment, right? Now, if you go and you look at one of the biggest pieces to this, I think that we need as much competition as possible. I think that we need 20 more companies trying to go build this.

The anti-Peter Thiel idea. Well, again, it goes, what are you optimizing for? As an investor, I want no competition. Right, the like, you want to invest in the monopoly. Of course, that's how you generate the most returns. But from a societal standpoint, we want a hundred companies all competing because they all serve as checks and balances against each other.

Interesting. It drives the cost down. It drives the experience. But competition leads to innovation. So who are you? Because that's a good question. Because you just point the two scenarios. You're both.

both, right? You don't identify. You're fluid. Well, it depends on what I'm optimizing for, right? Is if you think about as an investor, I'm constantly looking for scarcity. Right? To me, my entire investing strategy is find scarcity. I actually think that that is what Peter looks for too, right? Is he's looking for a monopoly. I don't like this first name basis. Yeah. Well, he, he, I know that you may not like him, but. I used to years ago I liked him before I knew about him. He's probably the single most intelligent person I've ever had a conversation with. Oh, he's a genius. There's no doubt about that.

The second thing is in a very similar way to I would like to get all these different perspectives, et cetera, he is probably the one person I have seen that will seek out all across, you know, people he thinks he disagrees with, the people he agrees with whatever. And he loves the debate. He literally comes from the debate world, et cetera. He likes chess, all these kind of things. And so he likes to kind of the band.

back and forth. Now, I also think that there's a lot of the, like, myth of Peter Thiel-Nour, the mystery of him. He's not helping his case. Hold on. And sometimes I see stories that people are saying things. And then I will either through friends or people associated, whatever, know a little bit more and be like, I can see how that story gets written, but, like, that's probably not the thing. I think when you hesitate to be able to answer the question, like, do you think the human race should survive? I think when you're running a company that you name after what the bad guy in the Lord of the Rings used to watch everyone, the company is fucking funded by the deep state, I think when you're moving to Argentina to get off the X after you just funded the vice president

and personally put him in the role right there. And I mean, I'm going to keep going on here. And, you know, basically funded an entire campaign to get the guy in there and then watched it all fall like a sack of bricks because of the war and Epstein and all that. I think when you are not just on emails for Jeffrey Epstein, but coordinating with him, talking with him, going back and forth, clearly meeting with him, setting things up with him long after he was convicted of all these horrible things. And when you have all the resources as a guy like that to be able to know who you're dealing with and who that person deals with and everything. And, you know, I think when you're someone who talks about the population of the world as X's and O's and basically like

zeros and ones. Yeah, I don't think these are net positives on the world. And now you saw like, you talk about these different perspectives he brings in. I'll send this over. So this thing leaked where he calls in all these different people from around the world where, you know, they're meeting about the future of sex, how to build a cult, like all these different things. Some things that make a good headline that are probably taken out of context. But then they like leak the actual, you know, I guess like the, what's it called? The like schedule of all of it. And you're looking at it and you're like, okay, he's not inviting like Billy from the block to get perspective. So when you say he's courting all different perspectives, you're right. He invited people like Jonathan Greenblatt who has political differences with him. He invited people, you know, he's on the Bilderberg group. They have people from the left and the right across there. He invites all these people around the world. But what they do have in common, is that they're all a part of elite sectors. These are not your average everyday person.

Forget average everyday American. I'm talking average everyday global citizen. And he puts together groups like this. And it's just like, my brother in Christ, if you are trying to get people to trust you, keep doing this because it's going to actually have the complete opposite effect. So take all of that. And we can go through some of the things that I think the media is wrong on.

He is probably the first person that we know of that went to a major technology or corporation and said, you do not understand the plate of the average person. You do not understand why socialism is rising, and it is imperative that you spend time focused on trying to learn this. I think he did. I can't remember exactly,

but I think it was something like 2020. It was 20, no, it was earlier than that. Even earlier, right? It was like 2016, I think. So if you almost think about it from the perspective of somebody who's hanging out with the elites, you know, successful people, whatever, but has the ability

not only to have that thought but to formulate it, articulate it, and then think it's big enough and important enough to then go send to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, et cetera. I think that's part of why a lot of the folks who know him or people like him

or like, dude, this guy is rare. Do you think he's saying that? Because by the way, his analysis, I know the email you're talking about? It's a private email too, right? He probably was like, you know, whatever. His analysis was borderline perfect. Like kind of crazy, right?

Yeah. Do you think it's because he cares about the people under the thumb of that or he is talking to the every elites that are with him knowing that if something like that happened, they're fucked. I think that there is less black and white than people realize because I think that when you look at it from the perspective of use socialism maybe as an example. Socialism sounds awesome, right? Like everything's going to be free. You know, like all like, like there's a reason why it's a timeless idea for people to adopt until they realize it doesn't work.

Right. If socialism becomes the dominant political view, it doesn't matter if you're elite or not. Everyone gets hurt. Yes. Now, he's fucked if that happened. Now, the people with the most resources get hurt more than the average person, but everyone gets hurt, right? That's right.

So again, it goes back to like, I know some people, who I will not name, who I genuinely think are like bad people, who like will, like, will, given a dollar on, on the table, will do very immoral, unethical, et cetera things. I also think that there's a lot of folks who, because their name drives media traffic, there's all these little data points that get taken and this whole public image gets construed. And all of a sudden people are like this horrible person. Now use, for example, Donald Trump. I have no knowledge that you or I don't have.

There are a lot of people in this country who think that he and, some small group of people were sexually assaulting five-year-olds, nine-year-olds, whatever, right? The people who were going to do the UFC 250 event, they were actually, I think in some of the messages said that there was a group of people who were eating infants. Who is this? The people who just got arrested that were going to do the 250. Oh, the guys who were doing 250 attack.

And part of the reason, part of their logic behind why they were going to attack this group of people was, oh, there's this like secret cabal of people who eat infants, whatever. So again, eating infants, like legitimate pedophilia, underage girls up to just like, you're just a scumbag dude, whatever, right? That's like a pretty wide spectrum of, I think on the like ethical range. But then there's a bunch of people who are like,

dude, I don't care like all, I don't like any of it. Right. I just don't like, I don't care where you're on the spectrum. Like the whole spectrum, I'm just throwing out. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, are we ever going to know the actual truth? probably not. The full truth will never know

about all this stuff, right? And so I go back to, okay, if we are trying to evaluate this stuff, you pretty much cannot get to the answer of like, what is this person's intentions? Because you're never going to have all the details, you're never going to have all the facts. You can be suspect for sure.

I think that I'm suspect of people in the AI world. I'm suspect to people in other industries. I'm definitely suspect to people in government, all this kind of stuff, right? Right. But I don't think that we're ever going to be like, you know what? I know the plan.

Like the master plan, I figured it out. Here's the thing. I'm not saying we will either. We may have an idea of the direction of that. That's a really good idea. Like, that's what I'm saying, Pomp. If it were one or two things with Peter Thiel, I could be like, I could straw men and be like, all right. You know, maybe we're just whatever.

And he's socially awkward. It's not one or two things. It's a million things. Let's go through a couple of things that you said, right? And I always tell people, everyone has flaws. You have flaws. I have flaws. I have flaws.

Anybody. But right, yeah, a lot of flaws. Take the like a moving thing. I know of maybe five different stories in the last decade. He's moving somewhere. And then he ends up back in L.A. or Miami. I'm looking at a guy that moved somewhere and went back. I went to Miami.

I came back to New York, right? But remember, I think there was, New Zealand was one. Yeah, he was a bunker there. Then he was, well, the story is, I think he got citizenship. in New Zealand. We can check that. I think you're right. Right.

Argentina, all this stuff, right? So like, I always just say like, maybe, or maybe somebody's going on a summer vacation, right? And again, it sounds crazy to be like, oh, I'm buying a place, but whatever, but like, it doesn't sound so crazy if, you know, you're super wealthy and like, whatever. So it goes back to just like, we don't know all the details. My guess is that he does have citizenship. Citizenship in New Zealand, right?

All this stuff, right? And I think, I can't remember all the details. But I think there was something like there was a venture fund. He's gonna make investment. You got the citizenship. Yeah, so I did it. Whatever. He also wanted to see the set of lore of the rings.

He likes that. But again, it was like, I remember there was a whole slew of stories of like, he's moving because that's the place that like if a bomb goes off or something, like that's the place that's not going to get effect. Of what can reach where things can reach? Hold on. I'm not crazy, right? Have you seen this map? But isn't that what like the original like New Zealand thing was like during the pandemic,

all these guys were like, I'm gonna move to New Zealand. Yeah, there's another country halfway around the world. that looks pretty good too. It's called Argentina. It's just so perfect. So look at the, look at that. Move right out of the zone. But here's a great example.

So let's use this. And this is again maybe my way to explain how I think about the world. When I see this map right here, I'm like, oh my God, Argentina, I freak out, right? And then I say to myself, well, what's more likely that somebody is trying to move outside the impact zone? I don't know what the red thing here is,

but like the impact zone. Okay, of what? Everyone's dead. Oh, okay. All right. Jesus. Talk about just, I'll just open all the can of worms.

Oh, that delivery was amazing. All right. So outside of the impact zone, right? Or is it more likely that Peter Thiel, Stanley Druck and Miller, all these guys are obsessed with and like the policies of Javier Malay down in Argentina? And they believe that his, you know, chainsaw in the middle of the street, all this stuff. Because here's the other side of that, right? Stanley Drucker Miller has this famous.

a story where he heard a speech of Malay. And he went on his computer. He did no research other than he asked AI, what are the five most liquid funds that have exposure to Argentina, these ADRs. And it gave them back an answer and he bought all five of them.

Have you seen the inflation in Argentina since you came in though? Hasn't it dropped substantially? There's things that he said. There's things that he said that's like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Like the guy, the guy's an incredible, political, skillful guy.

But like it hasn't, I don't think it's like World War 5 or anything, but it's not like, it's as far as I know like their economy is not this unbelievable bastion. Oh, no. I think that he, I think that the inflation rate has fallen off a clip. Argentina's inflation has plummeted from a peak of over 211 at the end of 2023 to left roughly 33% by mid 2026. Monthly consumer price increases had slowed to roughly 2.1. however this rapid stabilization achieved through severe austerity and deregulation as resulted in suppress real wages and a drop in manufacturing output. I think the number that I looked at was the real wages thing.

So that's my mistake. I'm pretty sure that's what I was looking at. But just unpack this one paragraph real quick, right? There's good and bad in here. Inflation went from over 200% down to 30%. By the way, 30% inflation is still horrible. If we had 30% inflation in America. No, of course.

It's better than where they were. But if we had 30% inflation in America, you, me and everybody else would be in the streets. And, you know, we march into Washington, D.C., right? So 30% is not, like, something to go and celebrate unless you had 200% before. So that's first. The second thing is real wages coming down and dropping manufacturing output, right? Those aren't necessarily good things.

But having the severe austerity and the deregulation probably are actually leading to economic growth. So we go back to, and this is always the hard part of these conversations, is like, there's no, like, easy button, press this one thing and everything is amazing. There's tradeoffs. And so if you look at the plight of the people, which is now this, like, huge. you know, kind of like over generalization, because there's all kinds of different people in Argentina. Some are benefiting from the inflation. High inflation usually means the stock market does really well.

So I bet you if you looked, Argentina, just never looked it up. I bet you Argentina is one of the best performing stock markets in the last five years. Yeah, let's look that up. Right? Because if inflation's at 200 percent, that means asset prices are going up. No, I can't speak to Argentina and who's participating in their markets. I don't know the first thing about it. But like in America.

I don't want to be the Argentine defender. Like, it's good to look at it to see, like, if it's doing better. But in America, Dief and I were just talking about this on a weekend episode. And by the way, it says over the last, Dief just got this. Over the last five years, Argentina's primary stock index, the S&P Morval experienced unprecedented nominal growth, shattering all-time highs to surpass three... 3.3 million index points. However, in U.S. D-D-adjusted terms, the market's performance is much more grounded, reflecting hyperinflationary pressures in the sweeping... So it's up, like, for sure.

But here's the thing, in their currency. In their currency. But if you look at U.S. dollar terms, it's not because all of a sudden it's growing a lot. But that helps their people because it's in their currency. If you're an investor, but what percentage of Argentinian people are investors? That's what I want to ask you about. Because, again, I don't know anything about Argentina. But here in America.

These are problems across every country. Across every country. In America, Dief and I were just talking about this on one of the weekend episodes. But like prior to the 08 crisis, it's not like Billy and Bob on Main Street. the majority of the stock market. Not at all. But they did own, what was it? Five percent of the Argentinian people participate in the stock market.

Yeah, see, all right, that's... So 95% of people are getting hurt, 5% of people are benefited. So that's actually very similar, because before 08, it was somewhere, it was like maybe 17%, something like that. Dief was owned by Main Street investors, the other 83 owned by ultra wealthy and, you know, that kind of thing. It's now somewhere between 7 and 11% with the emphasis on 7. And point being in the U.S.?

In the U.S. No, no, no, no. Retail ownership of the stock market is like 25%. Let's look it up again. We had seven to 11%. Yeah, say like what percentage of U.S. stock market is is owned by retail investors. On the episode. That was the episode two weeks ago. It was like an hour.

Now, one of the questions, how do they define retail investor? Like if retail investors are defined as like people who have $100 million, but they're just like a dude on the internet? We were talking about, I think we asked it like Main Street and investors. What do we got, thief? See, like 58% of you. So this is something that I'll, I'll dangerously say, I've got a little bit of what I want, Pomp is not what percentage of households own any stock. I want to know what percentage of the market they hold. Because you understand, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about who owns stock and who doesn't. Because the reality is, the more money you have in something, the more control you have. That's why

Bill Ackman can go corporate rate a company versus like, you know, me. I wouldn't even take my full. This is part of the problem is the numbers are pretty wide, like 10 to 40 percent. I don't know what that means. Yeah, I want to get that. But they account, but here's one interesting thing, 20 to 40 percent of daily trading volume, that number has been drastically increasing, which may actually not be a good thing. Well, there's rules, but if everyone is just doing like zero day option trading and

they're basically just gambling and handing the money over to. you know, somebody else, then like, actually, we don't want them doing it. My point I'm getting at is like I'll show you this, the clip earlier of like us actually pulling it because we had a perfect. Retail investors hold equity assets equal to 10% of U.S. market capital. Okay, that's in the range of what we were at. So what my point is, when we see something like the Iran War happen and gas prices become astronomical, everything goes crazy and all that.

And yet the stock market goes up, you know you have a stock market divorce from reality. Does that last forever? it absolutely does not. There's always a crash that'll come at some point. You and I, it's our best guess when it happens. We don't know. But I believe that for so long, especially in the COVID era, especially in that era, the stock market has become more and more divorced from the average person because the separation between the highest 0.01% class and everyone else has increased so much that people like Elon Musk are literally trillionaires now and control so much of the marketplace just by default that like yeah these are the people that pay for fucking you know the gas on their private jet

with just income they aren't off some stupid fucking bond every day so it doesn't affect them like it affects me going to the gas station there's two aspects is the first is i think people would be surprised at how much it's a lack of education that they're on the losing side of that trade here's a good example bill acman today you can be partners with bill actman you can go on the stock market, his company's publicly traded. All of those returns, all of the fees, everything goes into his company. Now, does he own a lot of the company? 100%.

Right. But you can literally own the same thing that he owns in his company. You know, Persian Square, yeah. Right. Now, if you take your $10,000, Bill Ackman's not going to call you, be like, what do we do? You know, we make this decision, right? But at least economically, right, you can take your money.

You can do that. You also, in his case, can invest in some of his funds directly as well. So you can own the management company. You can own it. Blackstone, publicly traded. Goldman Sachs, publicly traded, et cetera. Now, that's one piece of it. It helps, and the reason why all investors

who run these companies, they also get paid a salary. So they're not just getting compensated off of what is the stock price doing. They're also getting the cash salary. And some of these, every year, the sort of thing that comes out of how much did people make. I think Chris Hone was the winner last year,

like $2 billion or some crazy number. Now he generated a lot of money. And the thing that I always go back to, and this is something that, again, 10 years ago I didn't quite understand, now I understand much better. who are the LPs in these funds? They're usually public pension funds

and hospitals, endowments, foundations, that type of stuff. Where is why they're saying 58% of American households have equity exposure. It's usually through their 401K or whatever. Well, guess what? The return that is driven, there's fees that are paid. So it's the management fee,

there's the carried interest, all this kind of stuff. And so actually, the point that I would attack is, well, who's managing the money of people's 401K with the lowest fees or is actually doing more for them than the people who have high fees, et cetera, right? But I think that this whole idea of like going after some of the asset managers,

do they get paid outsized? 100%. They're doing the work, fine, whatever. You can argue whether they're paid too much or not. But usually the really big ones you can buy into the company and also the LPs that are providing the money or coming from 401K's hospitals, et cetera.

So it's this weird world of like, we actually want them to make as much money as possible in their funds if they're doing it for, you know, Children's Hospital, 401K, all this kind of stuff, what we don't like and people I think get mad about is, oh, but they took home some huge percentage of the profits.

People can debate that, whatever the rule ends up being, some of it's tax-related, like the carried interest has different tax treatment than, you know, other things, whatever. The other aspect of this, though, is when you go and you look at

a lot of, I think, the trading volume, a lot of these individuals, et cetera, people get very hung up. on, I can't get ahead. But when you go and you look at what people are doing, 50% of Americans don't have any investments. So if you go and you look at the 58% here at saying of American households who have exposures, not even they're investing. It's through the 401ks. They're benefiting from all this stuff. It's actually the group that does not invest. Now, why do they not invest? Are they though? What do you mean? Are they benefiting? Because,

again, I'll use the 08 crisis as an example. The people that one, one, out of that are the people who had a lot of money to work with. I used to like give this speech with clients like when I when I worked on Wall Street. It's like it takes money to make money. So if I was not even like an ultra elite person, but someone who's very wealthy, let's say I own a business, whatever it is and I'm worth $12 million and I'm 50 years old when 08 hits my portfolio takes a tank. It goes down to fucking $6 million. I'm shit in a brick. It sucks. But like I have a nut to work with on the way back up. Whereas if I'm 50, years old and I've been saving into my 401k at the time for 35 years and I have, you know,

780 grand in there and I'm 7,8 years away from retiring and getting to whatever my numerical goal is to be able to live off the income for the rest of my life. Well, my portfolio went down to fucking, you know, 275, 300 and I sold everything because I literally almost was losing all of it. And now I didn't get to participate on the way up and the wealth gap scale went like that. So like with just by saying someone's participating, I've never bought that logic because there is so much more for people who just have average income to lose in those scenarios. And they're also by default usually just like they don't pay attention to stock market as much. They don't have the luxury to be able to do that. Whereas someone who maybe has a lot of money and a lot of resources and people they can hire to help them and understand things along the way, like they can actually get helped on the other side.

you want to know a crazy stat along these two sides of the same coin if we look at the poverty rate in america since the 1990s it has quote-a-quote crashed it used to be whatever was to say 13 14 percent and now it's down to 11 yeah right okay you want to know the craziest part of it how many people go to the other one how many people were in poverty in there to go to the other uh um uh image in 2006 there was roughly 36 million americans who lived um under the poverty line. In 2024 to 2026, there's 35.9 million. The number hasn't really changed.

So the American population has been growing, but there's still 35 million Americans. What is the poverty line, though? How much has that moved correctly? Oh, with inflation. That's number one, number two. How much more of society is addicted to drugs? Of course.

How much more is society? What do our suicide stats look like? The American poverty line? How much happier are, people, what is this, since 2006? Oh, no, I'm saying this is a bad thing. I'm not saying, I'm saying that most people will point to the poverty rate and they'll say, oh, it's coming down. That's good. I'm saying, but there's still 36 million Americans in 2026 and in 2026. 20 years later, we have the same number of people in poverty. It's just that the baseline grew because there's more

Americans, but the same 36 million people are under the party. I would love to know how what, so. 15,960 is the poverty line. 33,000 for a family. Yeah, that can basically buy you enough a can to jerk off into. Like, you know, what, that's the minimum annual income. But, all right, so here's another, I don't know if they even have a stat for this, unfortunately, but it'd be great to look at the next layer that's a way bigger layer, which is the layer of how many people exist in, I'm just going to make it really broad right now, people, I don't want to think of numbers because I'll be way off.

But like, how many people exist and what would be termed the middle class? and like firmly in the middle class, not teetering the line between middle and lower class 20 years ago versus today. And what kind of economic power on a percentage basis of GDP did the middle class have 20 years ago versus what they have today?

I know those numbers. Look at it. This chart, I think, is actually why this is such a controversial debate is because both sides are right. Both sides are right. In 1971. adults in U.S. middle class has decreased considerably since 1971 when Nixon took us off the gold standard.

60% of people were considered middle class. Right. 14% were upper middle or upper income and 25%. Today the middle class has shrunk. That's 2021 too. I'll bet it's way worse. It's way well, the trend just continued, right? The middle class is even smaller. But some of those people move to the upper income and some of those people move to the lower income. And so the middle class is disappearing. that's where you're getting that K-shaped economy is it's getting actually worse for some people and it's getting way better for some people. Now, if you look here,

actually the shift on a net basis has been upper income. But again, it goes back to it doesn't matter what the data says. What this shows is that more people move to the upper income than that move to the lower income as the shrink. Do you think the people in lower income give a shit?

Right. Right. 30% of people are deemed lower income in 2021. It's probably worse today. Right? maybe it's 32, 33, whatever the number is. And they don't care what your data says. All they're saying is, I don't have enough money

to buy groceries or afford gas or whatever. That's right. And so again, if you bring this kind of full circle here, what we ultimately have to decide is, is artificial intelligence going to be a benefit or a net negative to those people? My guess is that it is actually going to be a benefit. It will not come without tradeoffs,

but it will lead to a more positive impact on these people than it will lead to the negative tradeoffs. Just in the interest of not making this too cluttered, I don't want to get in the weeds with every single thing with AI in the sense that like you and I could sit here and have a fucking four hour conversation that Dief would get very animated in as well about like where AI is used in art incorrectly and stuff like that and what the future of that is. That's a separate kind of thing. I'm just looking at coming for the podcast. It's coming for that, but I worry about it with like that and famous last words. Actual real art with stuff like that. But like, you know,

I'm looking at it from like the utility standpoint today and the use case standpoint of humans and correctly so you keep using this word tradeoff but a part of that the calculation of that word is who is controlling the tradeoff on the other side we keep talking about it today but like you know it to be fair it has always been statistically as far as I know it's been explained by people smarter than me it's always been statistically accurate that you're more likely to have say a psychopathic type personality, be a CEO of a major company. That's not a new trend. But we now have very clear psychopaths who run companies like this, like a Sam Altman, you know, who are in control of these technologies and in his case who joke openly on camera, you know, about the fact that, you know,

this is probably going to end humanity with things like that while they're building bunkers and trying to figure out how to get the fuck off the planet and are worth billions of dollars. And so when I'm thinking about those tradeoffs, what I can't have is the tsunami of the tradeoff from the other side of like the bad shit way outweighing the good shit because of the people whose hand is on the button. How much do you worry about that? Whenever I hear conspiracy theories about the government, nine out of ten of them, I say you're giving them way too much credit. They're not that smart, right? Like you think that they really, they got 400 people together and they had some big, you know,

conspiracy theory and no one said anything, right? Or you think they're smart enough to pull that up. Now, one out of ten, I'm like, oh, hell yeah.

Like, definitely there's some sort of conspiring that's going on, whatever, right? So I'm not in either camp 100%, but generally I think we assign way too much intelligence, et cetera, to the government and their ability to conspire

against the people in a way that, especially with the internet, we're not going to find out. So I always look at it as, if there's a conspiracy theory, last five, six years. That was just being early. That was being right to a lot of things.

things, right? So we now know it's not a conspiracy theory. It was the truth. Right. That's very different than things that are still out there that were like, oh, this is a conspiracy theory, but we don't have any facts yet that it's true. Maybe we will at some point, but usually I think we give the government way too much credit. I think the same thing is happening here. So let me give you a couple of examples. I think that there are a lot of people who enjoy the fact that people are debating, are they a good person or not? Or do they have good intentions or not? Or are they as powerful as they think they are?

Right. Is it almost like plays into, I am important. I am successful. I am rich. I am, you know, the person you need to bring on to, you know, your interview, whatever. Take clawed as an example. The U.S. government and anthropic, I don't think that they're friends. No.

Right? Especially this administration and anthropic. They've been going on each other. the U.S. government still uses Claude. Claude and the Anthropic team probably doing stuff that they didn't think they were going to be doing. So there's some, like, gray area in the middle there. Now, could there be a situation

where Claude did something that all of a sudden everyone would freak out and be like, okay, enough is enough? Well, if you go and you look at what recently happened, we kind of had a dry run of this situation. So for those that don't know, Anthropic came out with a new model. That new model they were testing internally.

So that's the thing, they see it before anybody else does. It was called Methos. And they realized that this thing was so powerful that if you pointed it at a website, a software system, et cetera, it was able to detect cybersecurity kind of issues that humans may have missed and it was able to exploit those issues

to gain control, access, et cetera. That would be bad. So if all of a sudden they gave you, me, and 8 billion other people access to a thing that could crack into systems, that's not good. What they did they alerted the U.S. government. They then alerted a bunch of cybersecurity companies.

There was a joint decision, my understanding, that they gave access to this tool to the cybersecurity companies, and they said, hey, this thing is coming. Use this to figure out how to upgrade all your systems, blah, blah, whatever, so that you can go prevent these issues from happening. At some point, there was a second decision that was made

where mythos never got released. Instead, they created something called Fable. And Fable was like a watered-down version that had some governors around what could be used. So you still had a lot of the power, but it was like, hey, there's some things

we definitely don't want to put in the hands of people. Right. They release it. I don't know. It was out for maybe a week. Somebody at Amazon, allegedly,

cracked the governor on it. And so they had the full power of this thing. And they were like, hey, national, you know, security issue, U.S. government,

pay attention. We cracked this. We open sorcery, kind of like a jail broke phone. Yeah, like a zero-day kind of Yeah, like a jail broke phone, right? They jail broke this system. My understanding and reading some of the public story about this is then there was a

disagreement with the U.S. government as to, is this a big deal or is it not? The U.S. government is freaking out. They're telling them to retract it, take back the model, don't give it to people and stuff. Sounds like Antarctic maybe didn't think it was as big of an issue. So there's some disagreement there. The U.S. government then came over the top and labeled them with essentially a national security label that said anyone who uses this thing that is not a U.S. citizen, you're going to be responsible.

There's going to be, you know, kind of repercussions, et cetera. That call, and that was even if they are an anthropic employee and they're not a U.S. citizen, if they're using this thing that's going to be in trouble. Anthropic pulled it back. Now, I look at that situation and I say, okay, there's kind of a cat and mouse game going on here where you have one side, they create a piece of technology, everybody's trying to catch up to how to protect themselves, then who gets it, who doesn't get it, you know, all this stuff.

that is unfortunately how every technology has been adopted over time. The regulators, the rule makers, et cetera, are trying to figure out it live. Yeah. What happens? That's right. Happening cryptos, happening in AI. It's happening in energy. It's happening all these different things.

I don't know if there's anyone in the world who can point to like what is the right solution. So then it begs the question, who do we trust? In my default position, I don't trust any of them. I don't trust the government to come up with the rules. I don't trust the technologist to promise to do the right thing. I don't trust the person who's got access to the technology to not do certain things. You get in this very weird world. And so if you can't trust that anyone knows what they're doing,

going to do the right thing all the time, et cetera, you then have to ask yourselves, what risk am I willing to take? So from that perspective, I would not give, there's a famous example of, I forget, maybe it was I'llia. So somebody gave access to the model to their home security system, their home cameras, et cetera. And part of the story was the camera realized that because they had access, I think, to like their biometric stuff, they were probably a little dehydrated.

And it could see on the camera that they hadn't gotten up and gotten a drink of water. And so it sent a message, get up and get water. And the guy got up and got water and sat back down. I was like, good job. Like, I'm not doing that, right? Like I'm not giving it access to cameras inside my home, not do it. You know, all of stuff. Now, there are some people like him.

He was looking at it more from like, how far can you take the technology, whatever. Again, that scares the hell out of me. But there's people who are like, dude, I have a problem. I never drink enough water. I would love for some system to tell me, you know, whatever. Listen, there's good use cases if they have the governors and if the governors are actually able to be built. You don't get reassurance, though, when we've all heard the famous.

a story i've talked about on the podcast a bunch before like facebook was building an i probably back when you were there and you weren't in that department but like in 2015 2016 or whatever and within 24 hours the two a is they built invented a language that only they can understand and they quietly looked at each other like the people and they just fucking pulled the plug because they could pull the plug that time what about when you can't pull the plug in the future again like it's not to be like fear with technology we know how that goes throughout history we just just do have to consider that we're building something for the technology for the first time that may be able to think for itself.

That's never been done before. So it's not to say, well, this time's the time where we need to say no technology and shut it down. It's not to say that's the answer. But like, you know, I'm all for the innovation if like maybe everyone could in a group think scenario somehow break every psychological standard of human history and say, hey, let's all just agree to look at this a little bit slower than we had. as much as I want to see that, though, realistically, as I said, that goes completely against human nature and that's probably not going to happen. That's why I worry. So from my perspective, again,

go back to I have direct experience building around these systems now. Our decision not to have the AI be able to move your assets with CFO Sylvia is explicitly going after this. What are the odds that it's going to make the wrong transactions, send the money to the wrong person, buy the wrong thing, sell the wrong thing, do it at the wrong time? when you didn't want it to do whatever. It's probably actually pretty low. These systems are generally pretty good. They've listened to the governors, all this stuff.

If there's a 1% chance, though, for us today, with a new product that is built on delivering personalized insights to people on their finances, it's not worth the 1% risk. So what do you do? You only give read access. And if we were to ever then say, hey, we're adding the functionality where now it can move assets for you, whatever, every single person would have to re-opt in and say, okay, I want this functionality.

With a fucking 40-page terms of service that you don't read and hit. So again, this goes back to, you know, one of the things my friend Mark Yusko one time told me this. And I think directionally it is correct. The numbers probably changed. He's the hedge fund guy, right?

For every engineer that we graduate in the United States, it's something like 40 engineers in Korea. Right? For every one lawyer that they create, we create like 14 here or something. So like, just like we're a very litigious society, right?

There's always constantly somebody running around trying to shirt you whatever. So like that has led to this like crazy thing. Now one side is, hey, get your stuff together and make sure that you clearly tell people, whatever.

I don't read terms of service. I'm sure you don't either for 99% of the products. I don't, right? And then you go and you read some of this stuff and you're like, this sounds horrible. Right.

Agree. You start using the product, right? Like they could do all kinds of crazy stuff with... You think you have to buy into convenience that everyone else in your society does. I've never read the terms of service of like a social media platform. I bet you if you go and read that, you'd be like, this sounds kind of nasty. I'm not giving them that or this or that. And then you're like, you know what? Like, I like pictures. Let me disagree on Instagram. So you kind of come back to it. Now, one other aspect of AI that we haven't talked about is the data centers. Yeah. And I know that they're

controversial. Can we put a pin real fast? And I'll take a piss and then we'll get deep into this. And I want to come back to the Peter Thiel thing as well. All right. All right. We're back. What, so how many, have you just had like one conversation with Peter Thiel before? Do you actually like know him a little bit? Um, I've had maybe four or five different ones. What are, what's the context? Like, are you meeting with him in person? You talk with him to them on the text. Like, no, no, no, just in person. And, uh, the first time I ever met him, he wanted to, uh, debate Bitcoin. Um, okay. He, uh, very intelligent. He's got some of the more interesting theories to think about, you know, who created it or how did it, uh, who did it, uh, Who does he think created it?

He doesn't happen to a specific person. But I think he's publicly talked about the fact there was a cybersecurity and money conference, I think, in Antigua in like 1999. And because he was building PayPal, fraud, digital currency, all that stuff was very, you know, much topic that they would discuss. And so he was at this conference. And I think he said there's like 200 people there. And so his thought is whoever created Bitcoin was at that conference. He doesn't know who it would be.

but he's like, if you were interested in digital currencies, you know, money movement, cybersecurity, all that kind of stuff, that was like the who's who of the time. And so his thought as someone that was there is probably it. So it's a little anticlimatic because, you know, he's like, I think I know who it is, but not an actual person. But the context of your conversations has largely, because you've been a long time, like Bitcoin guy and expert on that legitimately in the field. The context of your conversations has usually been a premise of some sort of discussing

that topic or other things. We can talk about everything. I think somebody else, a friend of mine used to work for him. And when he was there, he invested in one of our companies. And so Peter wasn't involved at all in doing that. A lot of the founders fund guys I know really well. And I think very highly of them. Obviously, he's involved there. But my conversations have always been more, I would consider like highbrow. Maybe it's more about like technology trends or, you know, maybe here's a good example of a type of conversation that a guy like that would have, which is. I think is illuminating. I remember asking him going into the, I guess it was 2024 election, who he thought potentially had a shot. And I was throwing out certain names of candidates that would, at the time, were rumored to be running against Biden. And I asked him about Ron DeSantis. And one of the things he said is he goes, Ron DeSantis has to figure out home prices in Florida or that's going to be like his Achilles heel. I remember being like, that's like a weird, but very kind of like what you would expect somebody who I can think of like five Achilles

feet hills ahead of that but that's interesting but his point was again going back to socialism affordability home prices like that whole thing if you can't solve it in your own state then how are you going to convince the national population that you can solve it across the country right so like that was like a general type of thing where and I enjoy talking with him in the sense of it's very intellectually combative but in like a respectful way And it causes you to think more deeply because when you hear something like home prices in Florida are going to affect the candidate's potential thing. And he explains it. Like, actually, that makes a lot of sense.

And so I think that's why you see a lot of folks who, frankly, there's probably a lot of people who don't even agree with them, but enjoy talking to somebody like that because there's this like intellectual debate back and forth. You're talking to an intelligent person, right? With AI, like if you're talking to an intelligent model, you know, there's a lot of people who just like to sit there and just talk to the model because it's got these thoughts. Did you talk with them at all about the future humanity or like where this shit's going? No. You weren't tempted to do that? No, because again, it goes back to like in most of my conversations, whether it's with him or anybody who I think people would put as like a super successful investor, you know, executive, whatever.

I think that is probably overblown how much people think about that stuff or talk about that. Like it's a very... He seems to talk about it a lot. I don't think that's overblown. I think that people ask somebody like him. those types of questions because they know it's very provocative and they know that he's going to answer it. And he's not going to just be like, I don't want to talk about that. But look at the, look at the things in places he goes and what they have on literally the topics that he is curating and putting together.

He talks about this stuff a lot. The future 100%, right? And I do think that also there's an element of, again, not just him. I think a lot of these folks, part of your job as an investor or as an executive is trying to understand. where is the world going? Because as the world evolves, there are ramifications politically, socially, technology,

you know, all of this stuff. And so take Mark Zuckerberg, maybe as an example. Peter was or still is on the board of Facebook. Zuck has had to navigate a lot of things. What's happening with just pure technology, right? He really is one of the companies that went through the shift of like, you had to have a server,

like a physical piece of hardware in the closet to run. to run the company to now it's all in the cloud. Like that alone is like we kind of forget, you know, 20, 25 years ago, right? Then you have, okay, all this competition of all these social networks, all this kind of stuff. People forget also that when they went public,

just from a pure business standpoint, everyone was wondering, could they make the transition to mobile phones? Mm-hmm. Right? So like 2004, I think it was when Facebook started, 2007, the iPhone comes out. So now all of a sudden everyone's scrolling in these feeds

and that's on a phone instead of on the computer, the size is smaller will people pay for the like we don't even think about that anymore crazy right but like that was a whole debate then you get the whole VR stuff metaverse they changed the name to meta like all this kind of stuff I you know yeah they kind of put that to the way side well fascinating question would be like if he could go back would he change the name back right right I don't know but like there's stuff like that then you start looking at all the say I stuff and so there's um I heard a fascinating conversation with the CFO of Pallant or of Anthropic. And what he was talking about is basically if you allocate too much money to this,

you go bankrupt. If you allocate too little to it, then you're behind on the technology and you go bankrupt. So like in order to build out all of the data centers, the hardware, train the models, do all this stuff. You're shooting at like a moving target and you're trying to forecast demand for your product. And Dario has come out and said that they ran scenarios, I think it was like two years ago or maybe last year. And they said, okay, we have a scenario where we like double demand.

And then like, let's do a crazy scenario. We 10x demand. In that time period, demand 80xed. He was like, he was like off the chart. We didn't even consider that as a like a realm of insane possibility. He's like, and we're trying to operate in this thing. So we had to raise more money. We were going faster.

But, blah, whatever. Zucks had to navigate all that kind of stuff. And so why does Mark Zuckerberg spending time trying to figure out, you know, where the world is going or, you know, jihitsu or whatever. Well, it's all holistic, right? I think that we all forget, like, these people are human. And so, you know, what do people talk about on Twitter? Allegedly.

Well, people are talking about, you know, they're like, you know, wake up at 4 o'clock. I, like, do my cold bath. I, you know, eat this food. Whatever that's, like crazy shit people talk about, right? It's everything thief does every day. Well, like, the funniest thing is, like, the world's richest man don't do any of that shit.

Like, he's sleeping on the factory floor, right? Warren Buffett, by the way, he ain't doing any of that stuff either, right? Dr. Dr. Diet Coke. But when you look at these folks, I think one of the aspects that I always try to remind myself is like they are trying to, much like everybody else, understand where the world's going, understand what the technology trends are, be the best version of themselves,

whatever that means, right? And are there people who like take advantage or try to hurt people? 100%. But I don't think that most folks who end up being super successful are able to do that. And maybe the best, maybe example here closer to home is. Takes me like James, James Dolan, hated. Hated. I mean, New York fans and fans around the world

were like, he's the worst sports fan in history. Like, literally there's been headlines, right? All this kind of stuff. The finals come here. They were giving away tickets to all these underprivileged kids. They were selling off courtside tickets to raise money for their foundation, do all stuff. And so you look at them like, is he making the call on that stuff?

I have no clue, right? Or do something good, yeah. But there's some positive. Yeah, they won a title too. Then you hear the speech that he gave to the team. Yeah. Right? And he's talking about,

I need this for 10 weeks, blah, blah, whatever. And all of that, I'm like, okay, that's like interesting, whatever. Yeah. But the one that hit home, and I actually tweeted, I said, thank you, Jim, James Dillon. Was he stood on the stage

and when they were presenting the trophy, he said something to the effect of, you know, New York, I got it done. I know it took longer. Yeah, I know it took longer than we all won it, but I got it done. Yeah. You see at Rockefeller

where everyone was watching the party at Radio City Music Hall where they were booing him and then they said that and they went, yeah! But like that to me

was such like a human moment where you're like you're the owner of a team you know that people hate you. You're famous for the facial recognition software and MSG. Like all this stuff, right? Howard Lutnik Courtside too, not great.

Right? But like then you look at this and you say to yourself, okay, the odds that that person is a bad person probably pretty low. Right? In terms of,

is James Dolan waking up every day? like I'm going to enrich myself at the expense of other people. Probably not. Now, did he make decisions that maybe people don't agree with? Did he even make decisions that maybe he regrets? I have no clue. I don't know all the details of that. But it's like even somebody who is like, quote, quote,

hated in the sports world is probably still a pretty good dude. Maybe. That might be a little recency bias. He also brought in Leon Rose, who was the best for my money for a while, the best agent in the NBA who built amazing relationships with so many players and understood. the complexities of like socially integrating a team as well, to say nothing of the skills and the skill sets put together and put together like an amazing team that plays the game the right way.

And Dolan deserves credit for bringing a guy like that. And yeah, I saw a speech from January where he's like talking to the team like, yeah, I think they can win a title this year and all that. And like, yeah, those are good things, I guess like in the finals. But like there's also been like 30 years of very bad press with a lot of things too. And it doesn't mean like he's going to die an old man. maybe he's a bad man maybe he's ebenezer scrooge and he wakes up one day and like this is the day he woke up and i'm hopeful that's like what it is for him as a person but like i think we do this thing where we focus too much on recency bias in society and then also if you take it another

level and this is something you and i can relate to each other on across different people you know when you sit down with people you're more likely to like them you know you sit down for hours with Peter Thiel and you're like, come on, this guy, he can't be building bunkers and plotting, you know, the future of the end of the world. Like, I know what that is. And I've been guilty of it probably myself sometimes too, but you have to like look at, you have to do your best. And I don't, I fail at it sometimes to zoom out to 30,000 feet and say, okay, what is this person really advocating for? What are the actions that I can see? There's a lot of unknowns, but what are the things I can see? And overall, when I add those all together, what does that more look like?

positive or negative, not even like, you know, death or life, just positive or negative. And like, that's kind of what you got to do with people. I think that we put not enough on recency bias. Not enough. Think about yourself 10 years ago. Are you the same person? Absolutely not. No. Most people aren't, right? So actually, in my mind, we should put more weight on what did somebody say recently, what are they doing recently, et cetera. I'll give you maybe a finance example. There's a guy, Kevin Warsh became the Fed chairman recently. And when he got announced, everyone was freaking out because he historically wanted to not have low interest rates and do all the things that the central bank has done.

Oh, he has ties to the Epstein class as well. Well, hold on. That seems to be a... So when he did all that, all of a sudden, what happens is you say, wait a second, he is not going to lower interest rates. That would be bad for assets and everyone freaks out. And the market literally sold off when he got announced. But then you go and you listen to what he had been saying over the last year.

and he was basically saying the exact opposite of what he had previously thought 15 years before. Now, was he doing that to get the position and he really still believes something else? We don't know. But all you can go off is like, what has he been saying recently? He's been saying he's going to get interest rates down,

whatever. So like that's a, that was like a 180. That's like saying like, you know, the sky's blue, now it's green, you know, type situation. So I think that. Now, if you go and you look, take Epstein. Have I told you that I was in the Epstein files? You got mentioned in there.

Actually, I think I knew that. Yes. I'm pretty sure I typed in your name. I saw that. Can we pull up that email? You weren't talking with them. No, not at all. It was, so Saturday, when they dropped the, when they dropped the DOJ file, whatever the tranche was, my phone blows.

And I get online and all of some people are like, dude, you're in the Epstein files. Kurt Metzger was in there too. I said, what? I said, what? I said, I never met this guy. I don't know. Whatever, right? I didn't even know that he was like a person, you know, in the world until maybe three or four years, five years before.

Whenever he's like started being in the press. That's when I first heard of who Jeffrey Epstein was. And so all of a sudden I look at the email. And the email is somebody who is using my name, but not my email, somebody else, you know, some fake email. Oh, I saw. Yeah. And is emailing.

Somebody is using my name. Yeah. With a fake email email emailing Jeffrey Epstein's brother saying that they, that I am an IRGC informant. And you have to and you have to pay money or I'm going to tell everyone. You used to have, I remember seeing this now. Look how crazy this is. There's been so much in there, but this was so funny because you of all people had the most bot accounts online per follower of anyone I've ever seen in my life.

So for context for people, this is like crypto is going crazy 2020, 2020, 2021. Every single friend I have has gotten phishing emails, extortion attempts, you know, Instagram bots, all this kind of stuff. So like for me when I saw what the date was, I was like, oh, this was like the heyday of all this. So here's what it says, Mark, I have no, allegedly from you, but it's not. Mark, I have no doubt that you are a partner in your brother's case and you should go to prison. You know you cannot escape from me. You know that I can determine your crime. I do not want to bother you.

FM looking for my money. Give me $10,000 so I cannot text you again. Mark, I am an IRGC informant. I told you before I got my master's degree from a military university affiliated with the IRGC. Suffice it to say that you know Trump had sex with a girl under the age of 18 on your brother's island. Trump has assassinated an IRGC commander. They hate Trump. If I tell them they can expose Trump through you, then it's not just a matter of hacking information.

Even your life will be in danger. I can send you the membership card in the IRC and the secret telegram chat to see. You know what's funny? I almost tweeted about this because I was going to be people were actually running with this. And the tweet said, I remember this now. The tweet said, no, no, no, guys, POMP's email is and I was going to put your real email. And I'm like, oh, wait. No, don't do that.

That's a very, very bad idea. But the best part is that Epstein's brother just forwards it to the FBI. So I think there's a second one as well. I think there's two emails from a, no, no, no, like a separate one. This is right after he died, too. They got right on it. It's like a day after he died. This is, this was crazy.

If he died. And so from my standpoint, you know, you can imagine all of a sudden you're like, wait a bit, that's not me. So I get online, there's people who, they know that it's not. me because of the email. I had one friend who said, oh, you're only asking for $10,000. I knew that wasn't you.

Right? They were like, but I was on the phone with one of our communications people and they're like, we have to issue a statement. You know, and while we're on the phone,

I see somebody and they're like going viral saying this and I just responded like, you're an idiot. And the communication, I guess that's going to be our messaging. Yeah, there you go. I said, look, if you believe that's me, you're an idiot.

That's funny as hell though. So I bring that up because, one, my guess is that there's bunch of people who were in here who it is really their names, their emails. Like it's really them. And they had no clue about anything. They just, you know, they were on an email. They got introduced, whatever. There's actually a person I know who, uh, introduced one person to him. And they had been originally introduced as he's a potential investor. And they had talked to him once or twice. It seems like on an email. And then they like later on met a founder. Wait, which guy

do you know, the guy who did the introducing? The introducing. Correct. So we knew him pretty well. I don't know because here's the thing is I should ask them but and that's why I don't want to say who it is in terms of what the relationship there is but I think about myself and I'm like you know how many times I've like met somebody one time and then I meet someone and I'm like oh you know you should talk to this person because they do something that could help you and I make the intro now I'm like way more careful I'm like right am I making an introduction that maybe you know later comes out in some files or something so that's one the second thing people that lied about it so that's what that's the tell for me.

So here's the second piece of it is I also think that there are a lot of folks who drastically underestimate the like gravity or momentum of what some of these people do. So like when you go and you look and I'd have to think through like what a good example would be, but there are people who have done things in their past, gotten in trouble, right? Not like this. This case in particular is different. But they somehow like rehab their image. They become, you know, valuable.

They're an investor. whatever the thing is. Not everybody. There's, I forget the one CEO who refused to meet with Epstein. There was one CEO. Oh,

the Hermes guy. Some guy, like an awesome, bro. He said, and then Epstein sent him money for his foundation, he sent it back. Something like that, right?

Like, there was somebody who like obviously knew all the details, like had a very good moral compass and was like able to refuse all of this. From that, you're like, okay,

but how many of the people who are communicating with this person knew some of this information? Maybe I'll give you another personal example of, again, as I have progressed in my career, I start to realize there's certain things you have to change in your career. I once was taken to dinner by an investment banker with somebody who was involved in another company and they were looking to do a deal. This investment banking firm, I trust. I've done deals with them before, right?

They're good guys. And at the dinner, this guy was, you know, kind of a, uh, uh, uh, a very, you know, good at marketing, but still, like, seemed like a good dude, to your point, talking to him in anything. And I have learned that if I'm going to potentially do a business deal with anyone, I just ask them a question, I'm going to find out what the worst thing you've ever done is

because now we have people who will go and they'll, you know, Google or do security screens or whatever. Just tell me now. So just tell me, what's the worst I'm going to find? And this guy looks at me dead square in the face and he says, oh, I'm banned from operating a public company for 10 years. I said for what? He says, oh, I got caught up in this thing.

And it turns out it was like some sort of like pump and dump newsletter thing, you know, whatever, right? So I'm like, well, one, looking at the bankers like, did you guys just bring me to, you know, dinner with a criminal? That's a great question. But two, I can't blame anybody else. I didn't Google him. I didn't, you know, just I go home. I Google it, right? And like, you know, he took a little bit of like intelligent Googling.

But like, it's there. It's public information. Yeah. but I went to dinner with somebody without. And so, like, again, what is the expectation in society of, like, one random interaction with somebody? Like, maybe we should all have AI prompts of, like, every person we interact with, like, send me the dossier of every bad thing that's associated with them or something.

I'm going to give you an example of someone I believe. That's a good one here, Brian Johnson. Now, Brian Johnson. The don't die guy? Yes. So he was on one email with Jeffrey Epstein, ended up meeting with him on Zoom. And then nothing happened investment-wise. This is 2017.

long after he was convicted and all that. Brian Johnson probably should have come out and said some a couple years ago. Like, hey, I remember I connected with this guy once. It was weird. There's people who have done that and then they didn't have a problem. That said, he also kind of over-apologized when this came out. And he's like, I had no idea. And I thought he was the worst person ever within five minutes.

And I'm like, all right, you probably didn't quite think that. But it's fine. I got it. Like, I believe that he just didn't do a background check on him and didn't know. I hope I'm right about that. But there are examples of that throughout. Where there are not examples of that are, oh, I don't know, the fucking 15 people from across elite society who went to his welcome home party from prison. Oh, I don't know the people who are on 11,000 emails with them, including a guy who was on 7,500 emails who sat in that seat three years ago.

Like, I'm sorry. You know. You know what's up. You know what it is. And there's no, you cannot defend that at any point. And then, for me, the ultimate strike is when you lie about it. And Pomp, we are living through a time now where we've talked about it today, where the middle class is going like this. And unfortunately, it was a guy who knew Epstein who pointed out this chart beautifully back in 2018, Stephen Pinker.

But like, it is literally a V like this. And so you talk about-case-shaped economy. Yes, people getting in the streets. Like, that's the kind of thing that leads to fall of Rome and fucking class warfare and all those things that I don't want to see happen. But, you know, that's where it goes. and when you see people caught up in this who provably lie and then don't even do the effort of laughing in your face about it they just continue to operate as if nothing happened and you know the example that always comes to mind as a guy i will be forever tied to through public you know

just ripping him to shreds and i'm happy to be that guy is howard letnik because he got caught lying it's fucking six ways to sunday and that fucking jerk off, stands up on stage next to the president and doesn't even have the decency to resign. And the fact that Trump hasn't fired him is an embarrassment. But like when you see this, it is the ultimate, fuck you. Who are you? You mean nothing to me. You know, yeah, I will go court side to the next game. People like that don't ever do anything like they want you to do, which is get physical with them. Do not do that. But everyone should practice their First Amendment right, that every time that motherfucker walks out on a public street, their life is hell.

Verbly. You know, and when I see things like this and I see the fact that none of these people are being prosecuted, no questions are being asked. They fucking created a war just to divert from this thing. Yeah, you can't not get mad at that. Does that mean every single person in there is guilty? Objectively, no. But when I see volume of things, it's like there's no way a guy like Peter Thiel did not

know he was dealing with it. So let me unpack some of this. And the hard part about a lot of these conversations and trying to figure out what's true, what's not true, right, is, again, it goes back to what we said earlier. Like, we don't have all the information. We're never going to have all the information. I know Howard Lutney's kids, I think, very highly of his kids

and have always had great experience with them. I would consider them no different than you, me, or anybody else, right? They're born into families. They're trying to figure out their weight. I know nothing about the kids. I got nothing against them. So that's first of all. I've met Howard Ludnick.

I did an interview with him, right? He is very intelligent. He's a fantastic storyteller. He has a very emotional story, I think tied to 9-11, which a lot of people didn't really understand the full extent of it. He came on the podcast. He explained it, et cetera. I've always known that story for the record.

Yeah. My interaction with him was in the podcast. I walked away from that conversation and was like, wow, this guy was very impressive, right? Episode did very well. I think a lot of people who heard him talk explain. know, his views on the economy, 9-11, all this kind of stuff. And this is prior, to be clear,

this was all prior to the files coming out. This is like October of 24, I guess, right? 24. Yeah, October, 2014. And so you probably have way more understanding of all the details of whatever, right? But I think that the thing I go back to is, in a lot of cases, the cover-up is worse than the crime.

Yes. Right? and we could go through history of like how many people, I mean, even, I think like Martha Stewart, didn't she get in trouble not for the actual thing, but for like lying about or something? Yes. Right. So like there's times where like people didn't even do anything wrong. They just get scared and they lie or something. Would you agree this is clearly not one of those times though?

Well, so I don't know all the details. But here's the one thing. The one thing that I have heard people talk about publicly is the fact that he went to the island, right? Which I think is like the big thing that everyone is one of the things. Okay. So from that, the other fact that I think I've heard is that, and I think I see in a picture, is he brought his family with him. So I look at that and I say, of course, the second that the island is brought up, everyone gets all, you know, they freak out. I don't think. Why do you go, anyone is. Hold on.

Why do you go on to, this is something only associate that does. Why do you go on to the New York Post podcast and concoct the whole dramatic story about the last time you were ever with Jeffrey Epstein because you're just the dude who can pick up. on it right away and it was in 2005 and even though he was your neighbor for the next 14 years minus two years where he was in prison you never interacted with the guy at all and you say i never want to be around him for business personal or philanthropy when we have emails proving that in all the years after that forget just the island he was around him for literally business literally philanthropy and literally personally like there's emails of him getting drinks there's emails of him getting donations from geoffrey apstein and inviting him to gala's emails of him trying to do business with geoffrey

upstine to say nothing of the fact that he got his fucking place for what was it one dollar or whatever, 11, the house he has next to Jeffrey Epstein and all that. It's like, yes, the cover up is horrific in the sense that he's just a complete serial liar, which then, by the way, and the reason part of it's personal with him is I worked on Wall Street. He was kind of viewed as like a legend. And I remember some people casting questions about him to me. And Danny Jones is one guy who I would talk with a lot about this a few years ago. And I would like kind of defend him. And so then to see like what he is, which is like you are this prolific of a liar that I can't believe anything else you've ever done or said to say nothing of the fact there are a lot of people of Cantor Fitzgerald to talk about the money that he took away from them after 9-11, by the way. Hold on a second.

But go back for a second. So I guess it comes back to it again, there's like if somebody lies. So take away from him for seconds. I think that there's a bunch of like emotions that people have about Epstein and all stuff, right? But just like if someone lies, that's bad. I don't think anyone's like, oh, lying is good, right? I generally think actually there's some people who think lying is the worst thing you could do on top of just doing the thing, but lying is bad. Right.

I think one of the aspects we have to ask ourselves is for all of these people, did they lie about their affiliation, their engagement, their communications, whatever? But they actually didn't do anything wrong. And so if we could run the opposite experiment, if they had just come out and been like, yeah, that was my friend. I never did anything. if I could go back, I wouldn't be his friend. Would we care? Or is it actually that they did something horrific? You know, all these allegations of underage girls

and all this kind of stuff, right? I don't even need to know that he did those things. And that's not even something that I could say like he did, to be clear. But he clearly knew what that guy was about, what he was doing, and at least some of the people he was working for. And he knew the truth. about his interactions with him and decided to lie about it, I have to assume there is something darker there because then he's also one of the most powerful people in the world standing

right next to the president, even in places where the commerce secretary, it's like, is that the guy you should be standing next? I feel like that's where the secretary of state should be instead. Like he seems to be everywhere and like it just, there is something so insidious. But go back for a second, right? So, and this just may be a different way that we kind of, approach these things. I mean, I'm the president in the Howard Lutnikate Klee club, to be clear. All right.

If we're being there. You should invite him. I don't know if he would come, but you should invite him to see if he would come. No, he wouldn't. All right. I've always come to these situations and I say,

I don't think I'm willing to him or anybody, take the leap from, I have to assume. Like once the assumption starts, I usually take the approach of, okay, what is fact? He said one thing, something else. I think he apologized.

Not that that absolves him, but I think he came out. He has not apologized. And so from that standpoint, he said nothing untoward happened on the island if you want to call that an apology after he got caught lying. Yeah. So I always go to this idea of I can't take it to the full extent of I know someone did something unless we actually know that fact. And so I think again going back to if you just extrapolate out to our whole conversation, right, what are certain technologists, expectations or, you know, their thing that's motivating them or the thing they're trying to accomplish, I don't know. Now, a lot of people aren't satisfied with I don't know, right, because

they want the certainty of good person, bad person. It's a very black or white type thing. In my experience, people are very complicated, right? People are complicated. And you take a person and it could be the person who actually, for you, saved your life. And then you find out that they have this other side of them that are this horrible person, but whatever. Yeah, but I think I think we're making leaps when it comes to this kind of case pump. I mean, if you, I would really encourage you to go through, especially the second tranche that was dropped on Friday. Is that the one I'm in? But yes, actually.

Okay. But like the actual serious stuff in there, like, I've had to go to people who previously I was like, oh shit, man, they're crazy and apologize and be like, hey, even if you didn't actually have evidence when you were saying some of these things to me, I don't even care. I have to apologize and be like, I can't rule that out any of you. more. They talk in code about this. But what you're what you're talking about, I think, is being highly skeptical and not giving people the benefit of the doubt because of the details of it. Yeah, they knew. Like, like, why is Tom Barrow, why is it like a requirement of this administration that you knew and ran with Jeffrey Epstein, especially after his conviction? Like, why, why is that literally like a job requirement in here? Like Tom Barak, who got caught, like, I don't know if you want to

call it Freudian slipping, we played it. Or, or. a previous episode, but talking about like, yeah, you know, I, I just, I knew he worked with Israel and whatever, so it was fine. That's why I was talking with them in 2016. Congratulations, Tom. Now you're the ambassador to Turkey. And by the way, we're going to make you like this new role for Syria and Iraq while we're trying to rebuild those two. And he's on an email with Jeffrey Epstein in 2016 where Jeffrey Epstein says, take a picture of you and the child, make me smile. I'm sorry. When you see this much, even just circumstantial evidence, and there's other things that are not, they're beyond circumstantial. You have to look at this and say, why is this a giant,

really sick club that, you know, we're not allowed to know what they do when these are the same people who in some cases are, you know, at least as the front running the world. My understanding of this specific situation is he was interacting with people left, right, independent, red, blue, green. It was more about power, wealth, etc. than it was about. very much like Peter Thiel. Politics, all this kind of stuff, right? The second thing is if we bring it all the way back to kind of where we started, we said ourselves, what is the world we want to see?

And so I probably spend less of my time focused on, here's all the bad things and, like, let's yell and scream about it, because I used to do that a lot, right? Frank, I used to be up and on, you could tell me something, and I was ready to take it to the mat and do all that. Do you think you can do that about a giant international? sex trafficking operation that also implicates my own government, the United States and some of the most powerful people running the world. Do you think you can really be like, yeah, that was really bad, but let's just move forward. Well, here's the question is what is the desire outcome as of today? The desired outcome is that for the people, right? Is that those people are flushed out of power.

I don't even, by the way, I'll stop before like prosecutions and shit like that, though. I do want to see that as well. Just get them the fuck out of power. Never let them be around to show their face. They don't hold their hands on any levers or whatever. And we rebuild somewhat the right way. So let's take that as everyone comes together and says that's the right agreement. That is not a winning message in America. How's that not a winning message? Because we already talked about Donald Trump and Mom Donnie, they have messages of optimism. So if you want to affect the change that you're talking about, you don't think it's optimistic to say let's get demons out of our government and have it be run by normal people that might actually represent your interests in the future. I think that's kind of optimistic. I think that if you go and you surveyed people on the street, my guess is that 99.9% of people would say that Epstein stuff is bad and they couldn't tell you a single detail about it. 99.9.9, I think that's overestimating. But your point, you're not.

points well taken in that do I think 80% of people could tell you a lot of details about it? No, I do not. Yeah, whatever they know, right? Just like most people, they've heard something about it. They think that it is a negative association. They don't like, obviously, you tell many of the high level details, but they probably couldn't really tell you that much about who is involved, what are the allegations, all this kind of stuff. And so again, it comes back to being right or affecting change. And I don't disagree that it's why can't i have both why can't why can't i push both yeah that's just not how the world works right because i think i want the world to work that way though so maybe i could affect the change but but look at it this way if mom donnie had spent his time attacking trump

i don't think he wins i agree right that's two different things here no no this is what i'm trying to explain is like we so if i go out hold on pomp if i go out and i say they've legislated way the middle class in this country they've cheated you out of it i want to regardless of what the politics are don't care what they are just pretend it's just a general message i want to put more money in your pocket and i want to make sure people that were involved with raping kids can no longer steal money from you and played at their satanic parties i mean i think that would resonate as a message i think that's pretty fucking optimistic too yeah it's pointing out one dark thing one extremely dark thing but it but i think that holds in that message as well but wasn't the

other side already saying that going into 2024? What do you mean? That we might not have had all the details, but like, wasn't all of the rumors about Trump's involvement, all these people's involvement? With Epstein? No, it was the one thing they didn't talk about because they were so exposed with like Clinton and all that if you're talking about the Democrats in their strategy. It was the one thing they would never attack Trump on because also you have to look at it

as two stories with Trump as well. Oh, yeah. I'm the guy like on this. You're the expert. I'm literally the guy on the internet. Shut up that. I don't know how we're having a conversation. Somebody knows more about it than me.

Donald Trump, yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Some of the people you sit down with, you should know, like, the involvement. Like Donald Trump did. He was one of the earliest people to come out and help people that were trying to prosecute this case. You know, Brad Edwards has been on record. The lead defense attorney for the victims back in the original case has been on record with that for years. He had a falling out with Jeffrey Epstein. That's on record.

It's disputed what it. Trump had a fallout. Yes. It's disputed what it's over. I lean towards, I think, Brad Edwards. words that said there was a real estate deal. They both wanted a property in West Palm. Trump got it. They'd a falling out because they're both egomaniacs, whatever. Or it's that Jeffrey Epstein came on to a 15-year-old towel hand at, you know, a girl at Mar-a-Lago and Trump kicked him out. Either one, whatever,

they'd a falling out. But there was a lot of time before that. And there are victims who talk about Donald Trump was in Jeffrey Epstein's office in Upper Manhattan, you know, fucking three times a week. Maria Farmer said that before she worked the front desk there. So there's a lot going on. there with him, but they never attacked him on it because the whole structure was exposed. It wasn't left or right. Like this is the most bipartisan story of my lifetime. So if you look at then what is the solution? What is the thing? You need a candidate who can tell a story to the entire country that they have some better plan. And I think that this ultimately comes back to why did Mom Donnie win in New York? Because he was able to convince a portion of the population. He had a better

better plan than the other candidates. Yes. And some of it was that it was a new plan. Yes. Now, as we know, it's really an old plan. Right. It doesn't work. But it was a new fresh plan.

It was put in this great rapper. It was a story of optimism. We're gonna go change all this stuff, whatever. If you extrapolate all the way to where we are now, he's getting credit for the Knicks winning the NBA championship, right? Like the vibes in the city are amazing. It must be, you know, whatever. So like, politicians always do this stuff, right?

Where they kind of ride the waves. But I do think, and, And this is, again, something I've changed my mind on, is to affect change, you can't simply call out what is wrong. I agree. You have to show people. Here's the better path, right? But you don't just have to do that. When it's something, listen, someone cheats on their taxes or something like that or whatever.

And people want to make it into this whole thing. I may say, that's just not. That's what's the Chamoth line? That's below my line. Right. But like, yeah, raping kids around the world and shit and doing it on behalf of banking families that actually put the people that we think in charge or actually in charge who are also there raping the kids

or protecting the people who do. Yeah, that's kind of a big deal to me. That's a really big deal to me. Now, let's go and take this outside of the United States. I have not read the report, but there is the report that just came out from Rupert Lowe in the UK. Have you seen this yet?

There is a report. I think it is called the Gang Rape Report. And it is basically about illegal immigrants in the UK, is my understanding. and a pretty large number, I think, I don't quote me this, I think the number is like 250,000 girls got raped. And it seems like this was, you know, kind of debated and now there's this report, whether the report's true or not. I don't know. My question, which we won't get the answer to for another couple years, is how many people in that country, if that stuff turns out to be true, are going to go and vote differently because of it?

I don't know, right? And I think they should. Now, we could sit here and say, what should the American people do? And I bet you we'd be 100% in line. Like, hey, you should vote for somebody who's going to make it actually more affordable, right? You should vote for somebody who's going to,

you know, put criminals in jail, whatever. All this thing. Groups are irrational. Yeah. Groups are irrational. But also I think that something that I have seen firsthand is people vote on one of two things. Either what is good for them or how,

it makes them feel. All right. Let me do this because I should have done this earlier then. Divorce just a Tuesday in November and who people are going to vote for. Yeah. Pretend that's not a thing. When you have something so sick and twisted in a powerful part of society, these are the people that are paying the people that get elected in many cases, including the people that get elected. You have a rot that if you do not get your foot on that and change that in this technological world we've been talking about all day that rot will increase and it will fester and it will get worse and i know you study history like crazy i study history like crazy too and there are patterns that exist with falls of empires over and over and over again and one of

them that exists throughout time is when the elites get so far away from the common folk in every way from operating under a different set of laws to having an inordinate amount of wealth that gets worse and worse away from the people below them to treating the other people as not even people third class citizens these are all patterns i'm seeing right here and there is no story in my lifetime that is more emblematic of that than the geoffrey upstein case and so no is it like the thing that does that mean that like I think every debate on some fucking election for whatever it is should be like so what's your take on absolutely no I'm a realist I understand that I agree with you on that but to then say well because this isn't going to be involved with elections let's just

not worry about it and move forward fuck that I don't I I'm not interested in moving forward on that I I'm interested in moving forward with with seeing people remove from power why Why are these people getting closed-door hearings that aren't recorded in D.C.? Why? You and me would never get that, POM. Yeah. I mean, look, we don't know the answer. I don't have the answer, right?

But I also... I could think of some. Howard Lutnik paid $5 million to the GOP fucking Super PAC for Congress right before he had to go and admit that he lied in front of Congress and everything. First time he ever did that while he was in office for a year and a half. I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Like, these people do these things because they can. They don't even give the effort of saying, fuck you.

They just do it. And then they laugh. Look, there's no doubt that if you look at, again, forget this situation for a second. If you go and you look at other types of cases that certain people are treated a certain way, others are not, right? There's famous studies around race, around income levels. you know, one of the things I always point out to people is to get, not bail, but to get parole, you know, the worst time to go in front of the parole hearing, it's right before lunch. Yeah.

Yeah. Crazy, right? And like, it was only found because they did a bunch of, you know, this kind of log-in-a-toodle study or whatever. Wasn't that Malcolm Gladwell? I don't know. I might be mis-fielmer. But like, just like that data point alone, right? You're like, dude, you're telling me the odds of you getting parole or not are based on what time

a day you go in front of the thing. And guess what? there's probably some attorney who knows that and there's one attorney that doesn't. And the one who doesn't is just like, yeah, I'll take whatever time. Great. We're so glad to have a hearing. And another attorney realizes, hey, if I go at a lot of time right now, we're not going to, our odds are lower.

So you know what? We're actually going to kick it back two weeks. We're going to leave you in jail for two weeks. So we get a better time slot, the parole hearing, right? So like this stuff always, I think happens. I feel unprepared in some of the details of some of this in terms of knowing what happened, what didn't happen, what are some of the sequences, et cetera. But I go back to what I do know is technology and finance.

And when I go and I look at those people, what I have over and over and over again found is that multiple things are true. These people are very smart, obviously. They are very ambitious, obviously. They tend to be much more concerned with winning than people probably realize. So whether that is I wanna be better

than the person next to me, I want respect from people, I want to have the self-respective, I succeeded. There's something that drives them to have the ambition, all this kind of stuff. And then the other aspect is I think that people, as they become more successful, resign themselves to the fact, they will not be able to control the public message. Now, there are some people who are still psychopathic about, I can control this, I can do, you know, all this stuff. But for the most part, most of the successful people I know, they're like, what am I going to do?

People are going to say what they're going to say about it. The only thing I can control is what I can control, and I'm going to go focus on that. So when you look at that, you then start to say yourself, okay, the positive and negative narratives about people or exactly that, their narratives. So there are probably people who we think are incredible. Go back 15 years ago, 20 years ago, Bill Gates,

his reputation and the public coverage of him was very different than it is today. Very curated. Right? And so I think there's a lot of people who are, And like forget like all the Epstein stuff. Just like in general, I think that there was a shift from positive to negative, right? The people who made the system that was enclosed around them to make sure they stayed in their ivory tower suddenly created something with that they couldn't control.

And the narratives that they had created around themselves fell with it. And when those narratives fell, we realized that there were a lot of narratives we never even thought of or never even occurred to think of below them that was that case. Does that mean it was like that for all of them? Absolutely not. But there are some that it's like, hmm. Now flip this. Okay. Take a Jeff Bezos.

I think that he probably had a really good reputation. I think there was a period of time where it fell, right? There was the divorce. There was all this stuff. There's the hacking. All this kind of stuff. Buying the Washington Post, things like that. But at least from my vantage point, like, he's kind of back to where he was.

People think that he's very smart. They think that he's very successful. He has done some things in the last couple years that I'm like, not the most evil thing I've ever seen. Right? So like there's also this like ebb and flow of it's very hard to evaluate the world in a static manner. Yeah. And say this person is, you know, bad all the time.

This person is good all time. Remember James Dolan 10 weeks ago, you know, people may have a different perspective they have today. So it comes back to where do I spend my personal time? I actually try not to spend that much time on individual people. I try to spend my time more on trends and on. What is that world going to look like? Now, I may not take it to the extent of like, you know, what is the future of humanity or, you know, whatever that some of that stuff is. You're not building a bunker somewhere?

No. Okay. But now here's maybe one way to look at it is I'm probably not doing it because in my apparatus of things that I would spend money on, that doesn't qualify. But if I had $20 billion and he told me the bunker was a million bucks, it's kind of like insurance. Like, why not? Right? Like, by the way, I have no different information than you have, right?

But more than a million bucks, but okay. Yeah, whatever. With 20 billion, everything's like a million bucks, right? You know, it's just like, okay, what, like, what is the downside? And I think that that's another aspect of this is it's almost incomprehensible for us to think about certain things that people do because you're like, why would you ever spend all whatever? And then you realize, well, like, there's probably things you would do for, that cost $20.

To them, it's the same. Yeah. But like you 10 years ago, you'd be like, I'd never spend money on that. Like, because I don't have enough money, right? Like, whatever. So there is this other aspect to it. And again, that doesn't absolve people of doing bad things. It doesn't whatever.

But it's just like it's very hard to think how somebody thinks. And again, my personal experience, there are things that I'll spend money on now that save me time that literally a decade ago, you would catch me dead before I would do that. Right. And so why? Well, like, I've made a little bit more money. But more importantly is I've learned that what can I do with that time back? Right.

Now, I've become smarter about that. Now, building a bunker doesn't save you time, right? But I think that that's the other aspect of this is just like there's a lot of these different components. And one of my favorite questions to ask people when I meet them, especially very successful people, is what did you do to ensure that your kids were not screwed up? That's a great question. Right? these are hyper successful people you know worth billions of dollars hundred millions of whatever every once in a while somebody will answer oh no I screwed it up my kids are

fucked like they're just like you know I'm not fool of myself I'm they straight shooter like my kid screwed up one guy one time told me his kids were uh call it like um 10 to 18 years old you know kind of age range my kids have never seen the inside of a commercial plane So again, like, that's somebody who's actually pretty self-aware, obviously knew they were making a trade-off decision of they didn't want to fly commercially or flying private. Okay. How many people do you see on the internet talking about like if the parents and the kids go on a flight, the parents try to go in first class and they'll send the kids to economy? Like completely different. You know, thinking every time somebody tweets that like everyone freaks out, whatever, right?

Build a character. Whatever nonsense they want to spin, right? So it's like those are like two ends of the same thing of like parents thinking about this stuff. Now, the good answers are usually some form of I made sure that my kid struggled. I made sure my kid had hardship. I made sure my kid had to figure things out themselves on some topic. Their kids aren't in the street starving. They're not, you know, going to let their kids get hurt.

They're not, you know, going to expose their kids to some negative, you know, super bad situation. but they at least understand that maybe there's a little bit of struggle that can be good for you. Oh, yeah. And I think about this often. It's always weird because there's real people. One of my favorite quotes comes from 50 cent. He was given an interview and they asked him, was he ever depressed? And he says something to the effect of, nah, because where I come from, ain't nobody got time to be depressed.

Right? And you're like, dude, he's not thinking about like, how do I have my kid experience hardship? right he's just like not dude we live in hardship right when he was growing up like he's i don't need to pretend i don't need to like have somebody you know manipulate the situation and so again it goes back to talk about the NBA finals recently is there any superstar NBA player who is the son of an NBA superstar uh in the NBA ever in history I believe the answer is zero in the NBA maybe I'm blanking right now. But you know what there are?

There are superstar players who were the son of journeymen or bench players, Kobe, Jalen Brunson, right? You can go through all these things. And so the reason why that becomes really interesting is maybe part of it

isn't Jalen Bronson, maybe is the most recent example. The father understood everything about the NBA. He understood what it took training-wise, what the right things were, all this kind of stuff. But it seems like maybe he was a better coach than he was doing it himself.

And he was able to teach his son, you know, play left-handed, do these drills. He's got a superstar son who's playing NBA finals. And so you look at that and you say, okay, well, that's physical sport. It's very easy to tell, you know, what did the parent do? There are some examples of people who are very successful that their kids end up being very successful in business. Usually it happens one of two ways. Either they inherit or take over the business. So think of like the Murdox, you know, with Fox and News Corp, think of a variety of other types of businesses.

But also there's money. So maybe the most largest example recently has been Larry Ellison and his son now going and buying these assets. The son is really running everything, but the money's coming from the family, et cetera, right? We celebrate in society Rick and Jalen Brunson because there's not really money. right it's more like sweat it's you either can make the shot or you can't there's a video like i actually don't think people would look at jalen and rick brunson the same way if there wasn't a video of him on the playground you know basketball court going up the hill backwards like all that kind of stuff on the other hand there is this like lineage of you know passing down assets money companies

etc and i think part of it is every person who sees the jaylin brunson video is like that could be me my kid. Yeah. Like there's a basketball court down the down the street. Yes. Could we go out there? Could I like force of will my kid into be an NBA superstar? Mm. Jalen's not that tall, right? You know, like, you know, it's not like he's got, you know, some rip six pack, whatever, like that could be my kid. That could be me. And then you look at that across sports, right? And people say whether it's soccer, baseball, basketball, football, whatever. Keep going. You're cooking. Yeah. But in business, we don't think that way. That's right. Right. No one's like, oh, that guy who gave those assets to his kid and his kid is now successful, a lot of people are like, that could be me. Now, some of that, I think, leads into,

that's why people get mad. The nepotism, the wealth generation, the hoarding of assets, the K-shaped, all this stuff is like tied together. But again, it goes back to if we could tell an optimistic story and tell people, hey, you know what? You don't have to go create Amazon, go, I don't know, create a laundromat down the street. But if you can build this and then you can hand it to your kid, you could have your own mini version of that. Maybe. Yeah. Right. Now all of a sudden, you start to think very, very long term. And I think that that is probably the single thing I see in society in general that is missing

is that people lose hope. They lose hope, right? And they now start to think, like, my kid is going to have a worse life than me. I don't like that. Right? And the second people start to think that way, they get the idea, burn it all down.

Just burn it all down. And that's the thing, though, Pomp, when you look at it statistically, right? We live in the best time in human history, statistically, by every metric. But when you look at opportunity and economics, generationally speaking, we have seen, at least for the first time as far as I know in the history of America. Maybe there was one other time I'm forgetting in the 19th century.

But we are seeing for the first time where the older generation that's retiring, the boomer generation has enjoyed the American dream to an extent that the generation coming into the workforce, the Gen Z generation cannot even comprehend. across the average. Doesn't mean that at the top there can't be bigger prizes than there were for boomers. That's true with the internet economy. But when you look at the average, the ability to buy a house, the ability to come out of college, not with fucking debt chained around your neck, the ability to have children without it being a financial decision, the lack of inflation that's occurred, the fact that boomers bought up all the houses for fucking $10 in 1971 and never sold it. Now they're

worth millions of dollars and no one can get it. Like these things are real. And so it's not to be a downer, but you have to look at the perspective of like, all right, what opportunities are we giving the younger generations that, you know, paling comparison to the opportunities we gave to previous generations before them? I'm not saying the boomers plan that out. They didn't. That's not fair to say. No, but incentives take over. But incentives take over. And so we're living through a time where, again, it's not like the boomers think this at all. So I would never accuse people of doing that, but it's the first time where passively you have a generation. that actually didn't care as much about the next generation's having a better world than they did.

You really ready to get? Yeah. Nice and fun. Go there. Look at this chart. Older Americans support raising taxes on younger workers to maintain current social security benefits. I don't think I could have meme that any better. 89% of people over the age of 65 think we should raise taxes on younger people so they can keep getting their social security check. That's insane. By the way, I'm shocked. is not 99%. That's insane. Right? Just think about how crazy this number is.

Young people think that they should cut the benefits to benefit the young people. 53% of young people think that we should cut Social Security benefits so that it benefits young people and they're not paying into the system. Like this chart to me may be one of the most important charts to understand the American society, politics, economy, etc. So is this why we have to build data centers because that'll pay for it? Well, we can talk about the data center stuff. But here's what ends up being crazy is you have

89% of people over the age of 65 who are like, take from them to give to me. Yeah, I went to college for $10. I bought a house for 20. They went to college to get a gender studies degree for 150 grand indebt at fucking 7%. And they're not going to buy a house for their entire life. They're going to own nothing to be happy, but tax them more.

That's nuts. that's actually like that wow now data centers data centers one of the best data points do you have like in your piece in is kevin o'leary talking no no make sure you hit them with this part about china no um louding county in virginia has the most density of data centers in the country is my understanding loudon county also has one of the lowest personal property tax rates in the country okay So there's a relationship between either the people who live there pay the taxes or corporations pay the taxes. Remember we talked about road paved to hell with good intentions?

Listen, that is all of the world. Everyone's got good intentions and what is the outcome? Now, in Loudoun County, they have one of the lowest tax rates on property because the corporations are paying. Now, they have high density. That sounds good. That sounds like everyone should want a data center to come to their local area. That means they're going to pay lower tax rates, right? plays into, hey, I want to pay lower taxes, that'd be great.

So, yeah, sure, put it down the street. Doesn't sound good if it's going to be in your backyard and there's a humming sound all day. Or if you're using all the water. So now we don't have that. The water, there's basically, in my opinion, there's four things that people get upset about the data centers. The first thing is that, oh, you're lying to me. You make it sound so good. And so it's not really going to create all the jobs.

It's really not going to get jobs. One second. That's the one thing that people say. The second thing that I think people say is the energy. You're pulling from the grid. You're doing all the stuff. The third thing I think is water. And the fourth is sound. Right. So really it is it doesn't create as many jobs as you say it's going to be. Also the tenants. The tenants. The people who will be in there. You're talking about Open AI, Microsoft. Yeah, but do people do people care whether they're going to the data. I care. I care if those companies get an oligopoly on AI and the surveillance state. I absolutely care about that. Okay. But Palantir is like becoming a tenant for some data center over in fucking Montclair.

if they go to build one there or wherever the fuck yeah i don't like that well are you down for the data center if it is uh sesame street why would they have a day why would they be in the day i i just mean like do people care about the day the in my opinion right based on the conversations i've had with people it's more of i don't want the data center or i want the data center less about i'll take the data center as long as a good company that i like going in there versus i don't want the data center not because of the data center because of the company well there's the environmental issue and the same people selling us this or the people who sold us the climate crisis and eat through plastics or also to save the fucking those people were stupid right but it's the same people who are

selling that to get in here now and talking about this those are the companies that had people that were donating to all the campaigns that fucking sold that for years you also do have the energy the the energy issue with the grid we've already seen there's 49 000 people who are going to be out 75% of their power and have to pay way more out in nevada for some new fucking you know data center that's coming in because that company basically is sucking all that up. And you do have the problem with them not creating jobs as well. There are a bunch of computers running on chips that are and it's making noise and it ruins the it ruins the ambiance of the whole community as well. Like what I really don't appreciate is when Kevin O'Leary tries to come out and say, yeah,

it's George Soros sending all these people out here to, no, dude, people don't fuck with this. You have to, you have to meet them halfway. All right. So back up. Let's say that there's five things. Amiance, I think is a good fifth thing that people don't like. We can, agree right out of the gate, they should make them look nice. If you're going to put them anywhere near people, make them look nice. If I knock down a bunch of trees and wildlife in Utah that looks beautiful, I could build the greatest building of all time. I could build like a prime fucking 1931 style beautiful Empire State building looking fucking data center. It's going to be worse. Well, but what I'm just saying is if people from an ambiance standpoint, and I think

the data center companies are starting to do as I've seen some of the designs that people have been floating around and stuff. They're trying to make them look nicer. Okay. So we agree on that point. I think that they're going to hear they're going to do that. On water, almost every single data center that's now being contemplated, designed, et cetera, they have closed-loop systems, which means that they're not going to use any water outside.

My guess, I don't know this for sure. What does that mean? A closed-loop system basically means that water is put in, almost think of it like a cooler, maybe is a good way. Once you put the ice in, everything stays in there, right? And so you ever seen like the plunge, like the cold plunges? Some of them, like the more, the nicer ones, you put water in, and then it basically circulates in that system, but you're not bringing new water into the system.

So a closed loop system basically means whatever water you put into it, it just stays in there and they're constantly cleaning it. So the same water keeps being cleaned and being cooled so they can do the cooling effect on the computers. Correct, but they're not pulling new ones. So right now, there's basically two different types of systems in the data centers. One pulls tons of water. One is a closed.

My guess is that because of a lot of the pushback, 100% of data centers that get built going forward, whenever they strike the period, are going to be closed looped. So I put that in the category of good critique, going to get solved by these companies because they realize if they don't solve the problem, they ain't get in the data center.

So I think most people who are complaining about the water would be happy if we move to a closed loop system as the default because then it solves the problem. If that is what you say it is, and I'm not smart enough to be able to be informed to be able to say that in theory sounds like that is okay. So I don't actually know if it's more expensive or less expensive to the closed loop system. What I do know is that their hand is being forced because people are complaining.

So to your point earlier about the complaints are leading to change, I think that that's what I've seen so far. Yeah, they should pay for that themselves. That should be if Kevin O'Leary is so worried about his life legacy being fighting China with this, then he shouldn't be concerned about how big his profit margin is on this. So he said, I believe a direct quote he gave Tucker I saw in the clip was money doesn't matter to me at all. I've made enough of it. I want my legacy to be that we're fighting China.

Okay. I accept your terms. Now don't be trying to look to cut every fucking corner to make the most money as possible. Otherwise, you are just giving me false words to try to sell me something to get me to shut the fuck up. So I just looked up now. This is a grok I'm using. Kevin O'Leers proposed data center project is designed with a closed loop water cooling system. Okay.

So it doesn't mean that we got to like it, but he gets a checkmark on that, I think, for most people of, hey, you're not going to pull it. Now, on the energy grid pull, there's two components to this that I think are important. The first is there are certain places in America. Data Center goes in. One of the problems is that the energy grid is so bad and so old, they actually can't pull enough energy. Like the actual pipes don't have enough energy come through. In those cases, what we've seen is data centers show up and they say, you know what? we're going to make so much money on this data center.

We'll just upgrade your entire grid. So the data center pays for the energy grid upgrade, which means anyone on that grid benefits because the data center is paying for it. Now, you can imagine the utility companies love this because they're like, hey, we get upgraded infrastructure, and these morons are going to go and they're going to pay for it. It's not going to come off our balance sheet.

Okay, great. Not every time. So in the cases where people are pulling from the grid and they're persistently pulling, what ends up happening is electricity prices. can go up. Right. Now, if I remember correctly, my understanding is that in places where data centers have gone in, the price of electricity actually on a national average goes down. Part of that is the upgrades, right? So if you imagine trying to do computations on an old computer versus a new one,

it should be cheaper to use the new computer because it's faster, better, better memory, better chips, all this stuff. Now, another thing. thing is that a lot of these grids are moving to something called like a power balancing or dynamic kind of power. What that means is you're pulling. So like I know a lot of us comes to Bitcoin miners. They became famous for this. Bitcoin miners pull all this energy and they're using it to mine Bitcoin.

But then the grid sometimes would come to them and say, hey, we need that power. We know that you are supposed to have it, but there's a blackout or there's some, you know, a lot of air conditioning or something, right? We'll pay you extra money to give it back to us. And so what they do is they essentially, in the Bitcoin world, they shut off their machines. When they shut off the machines, that power is now available,

and the company goes and does it. Now, why do they shut it off? Economics. I was pulling that power, and I was mining and I was making a dollar per minute or whatever. But you're telling me if I shut off my machines, you'll give me $2 a minute. Well, I'll just shut off the machines.

I'm going to make more money. Right. Now that power gets reality. That word incentive. Yeah, yeah. And so there's, some of that that really started in Texas, something called Urquot, which is basically like the electrical grid, and they had less regulations, a separate type of system than many people

have around the country. And so, again, if the data centers start coming to say, hey, look, we're going to use whatever power we need, but when you need it, we'll give it back to you. Great. Now, the difference is with Bitcoin mining, you can shut the machine off, turn it back on. If you're Facebook, you can't shut off Facebook and turn it back on. Right. So that is a whole part of this of the type of tenant becomes really important because some are going to be able to do this and some are not going to be able to do it.

I also think that just if they really believe in it and they really need it, and I'm going past Kevin O'Leary at this point. I'm talking to the people that are going to get the downstream costs as tenants and stuff that are the fucking masters of the universe that are fucking countries as businesses. Like then you shouldn't you should have the decency to not ask for tax breaks and everything. Like if you're going to go do this to people and put in, I think they've had to shrink the one that Kevin's doing now because of the backlash. But like it was going to be 62 square mile data centers in the middle of these people's communities where they've lived for generations and stuff. You know what I mean? And that's that's that's my biggest gripe with Kevin. He seems to have no ability to read the room with this.

And he speaks about it very matter of factly and almost like cold businessman style. And you have to understand that like even if in his head, let's say he really believed. he's doing the right thing. And let's say that I had a crystal ball on 10 years from now, we're going to say, wow, you know, he was right about this. You have to be able to empathize with people who are not, who don't have access to all the information you do and also have reasonable complaints, including the companies that will be going in there. We've just lived through the COVID time where these companies did not exactly have a very good record on things. And so it's perfectly understandable that something that's not bringing in jobs and all these

other problems even some of them as you say are solvable you know that people are going to be like fuck this so don't don't try to sell it another way and also like china doesn't have nearly as many of these things as we do and even if you want to argue that they're going to be building them it's like do you want to be if you're trying to beat china do you want to risk fucking becoming them just to win you know and by becoming them i mean it's like you have giant monopolistic oligopolistic type companies that basically take control and get to have the fingers on the scale of the future of the average person because they get the power and continued scales of economy with something like this to be able to pop up all over the country out of nowhere. It's like these are genuine

moral questions to be asking. And I don't say that at all as an expert on data centers to be very clear. But like I think I have a good reason to have a lot of hesitancy with how this is being rammed down people's throws. So there's a couple of things that. that there's no perfect one thing to look at. But if we look at US versus China, there's this chart that has electricity generation that we're going to pull up here. And what it shows is that the United States

had this massive lead. But we basically didn't make that much investment. We haven't really moved off the baseline. China, on the other hand, has gone like all in. That's right. And has done this. Now this is for grids you're talking about here? This is electricity generation in general.

So we can look at exactly what their definition of that is, but just like, think of it as electrical grid output. Right. Is continuing to skyrocket in China. Yes. Now, some of that is if you start in the Stone Ages, right, and there's no connected water, sewer, electricity, phone, you know, all this kind of stuff.

But to your point, they still passed us tremendously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 2010, they passed us, right? And they've been kicking our butt, you know, since then. Now, the U.S., you can see a slight little uptick there at the very end of the U.S. line, right? So I think that there's a lot of people who point to this and say from a national security standpoint, like, hey, if they have more power generation, that's not good, right? The reason they say that is there's this famous chart that shows there's basically no

prosperous, low energy consumption country in the world. So prosperity is tied to consuming energy, right? You're consuming a lot, and that means you can then transform that into different industries, products, all this kind of stuff. And so when you look at that, you need to have the end. The reason why that looks interesting is now this is the United States average retail price of electricity on a month-over-month basis or per month going all the way back to, I think, 2000. It's pretty much been going up in every single region. Call it on the average doubled.

Correct. Now you can see towards 20-23-ish or so. In some places, there's been a uptick. And I think that's part of what people are saying, like, hey, what is driving this, right? And is it data centers? Is it something else? Now, unfortunately, it's hard to unpack because. Because that's also when inflation exploded.

Right? And so again, I'm not here to say that, oh, data centers don't make electricity prices go up by any means. What I do think, though, is it's really hard to point at one single corporate. I think electricity prices are too high. I think that there are probably private market solutions from a technology standpoint that can get electricity down. That was the promise of solar and some of the stuff, right?

But also, it's a confluence of factors. That's right. It's high inflation. It's data centers. It's the fact that now we all, right, are all sitting at home. I mean, one of the things that people don't really talk about, I remember when families would leave their home,

everyone would leave. You go to school, people go to work, whatever, and you would, like, shut off the AC. Right. Yeah, it sounds wild now. Well, with remote work, no one leaves. Right. So you're generating all this stuff, right?

Which, again, everyone collectively is doing this more. I also think that in a weird way, the rise of Instagram, people, I don't know is for sure. My guess is people do more laundry. I don't think laundry is some huge component of electricity consumption, right? I definitely do. I don't think it's Instagram, but I definitely do.

But like how you look is leading to, you know, there's all this like looks maxing and peptides and, you know, all that kind of like crazy rise. But like, same thing with clothes. And so you look at this stuff and you start to realize like, okay, there's a lot of factors here. Data centers are part of this for sure,

but not all of it. And so I look at it and I say, okay, let's go study the places where it's actually coming down. And usually what it is is that the data centers are making the investment to upgrade the grids.

And so, again, I go back to it's not black or white. It's data centers can be an enormous tool for a community. If it gets your property taxes down, if it lowers your electricity bill, not raises your electricity bill,

like all these components. What ends up happening in those data center, people just dig their heels in and the people who don't like the data center start screaming at them and we get the super electric videos. You got to talk about the tenants,

though. That's a big part of it. That's a big part of it. Like what, let me ask you this. What has meta? What has Palantir? What has Open AI done over the last five years that says, yeah, I should trust these guys. Yeah, yeah.

You know what? Yeah. I'm cool with my backyard being a part of their grand plans. That's a reasonable question to ask from the average American. Is it not? If you think of the premise of Facebook, right? which, I don't know, some large percentage of people, they only interact with Facebook for one of two reasons.

Communicate with friends and family. Or somehow discover, communicate, et cetera, with businesses. Okay. Yeah. Both of those are super net positive. Yeah. Right? Are there negative things that happen?

Of course. I would argue that there's probably negative side effects from a mental standpoint of people just being on Facebook and scrolling in the feed. Yes. Right? Absolutely. Proven. Yeah.

But. the fact that you can communicate with people that you might not otherwise connect with, stay up to date with, you know, all this stuff, huge net positive. So I look at it as I say Facebook's been a net positive on the world, it's informed people,

it's helped educate people, it's helped them stay connected, meet people, do all this kind of stuff, right? Should we address the negative subjects? Of course. Right. But I think my default position is

the company is a net positive for the world, not a net negative. And rather than, go at it from a it's negative we got to try to find positive i go at it and i say this thing needs to exist in the world because it's been a huge benefit to billions of people with those five things that are negative let's go try to solve them okay again back to some of the people running these places let's say i buy that argument for facebook over which by the way i'll give a shout

out to facebook well meta as a company over the last couple years for something that i'm monitoring they've been far better with free speech over the last couple years we'll see how long that last, but objectively I'll say that. But then you look at a place like OpenAI run by Sam Altman, who's crazy. And you look at a place like Palantir, which I've already beat the drum on that six fucking times today. Like, again, these are companies that are going in these places. And it's like, I don't like that. I'm not, I go build on your own and don't do it in my backyard. That's my attitude with it. So people may not like this, this logic. But let's just look at, um, active monthly users of Open AI.

Deep just looks over. So the active monthly users of Open AI is reported to be approximately 1 billion people globally in May or June of 2026. So let's just use that as a nice round number. A billion people are using the product. If they go build a data center in five different places, it's their data center, which they usually aren't doing. They usually go into somebody else.

But let's say they go and they build it. And they do it in a place the size of Manhattan, which means that in that general five boroughs, about nine million people. So every data center they build, and let's say it's negative, impact. Nine million people are negatively affected by that data center. But they build five of them.

I don't like to do public math. I think that's 45. 45 million people. But a billion people benefit from the product. Again, If I'm one of the 45 people... Did the billion people benefit or did they all become surveillance slaves? If I'm one of the 45 million people, I might be going to the meeting.

I might be saying, I don't want this here, right? But if I'm one of the billion people, I'm oblivious. Let me just ask my questions and give me the answers, help me make more money, do all these positives, whatever. I use that as like an absurd, you know, kind of exaggeration of the problem because it's the most density in America. Right? And every single person hates it versus a billion people being used. Right. Now, boil that down to some local town, Montclair or wherever.

It's not 9 million people. Maybe it's only a couple hundred thousand people. But it doesn't matter if it's 9 million or 200,000. If I'm one of the 200,000, I'm at the meeting yelling and screaming and saying, I think this is bad. And so what I see is, well, how many of their complaints are real? The one to me that I think people don't put enough effort on that, actually is something that I don't see a solution for is the sound. Now, it doesn't affect people that are like, you know, a mile away or whatever.

But it sucks if you're right there. If you're right there, would you want to have a data center in your backyard that's humming? Of course not, right? So the reason why I say that is you have to try to figure out what are the things that are solvable and what are not. I think that this is a great way to put it, like in the sense that where we are, an argument on this and on other things. It's like, you are a business guy and a numbers guy. World needs a lot of those. I am a purely creative guy and let's say like a human empathy kind of guy.

I don't think I'm right and I don't think you're right. I think the answer has to bridge the gap between those two. 100%. And I think that's why conversations like this are important. You know, it's like I feel a certain type of way about it. But like I could, I'll change my opinion on evidence. That's one thing I do, I don't, I really pride myself on being able to do that over time. And I think I've done that with a lot of things. So like, I'm willing to do that here. But I think some of the questions of like, you know, like the tradeoff there, it's, I don't think it's as simple as 45 million people versus a billion people get all benefit. What is the things that the billion people get for benefit versus what they're actually giving up and doing it?

And then you're still leaving 45 million people behind. More extreme example, admittedly right here. So it is not quite a parallel. But they used to be like this logic at the height of the coal war in the State Department and in the Pentagon where there were literally people who thought in terms of math with nukes. So they'd be like, well, if the Soviets hit us, we'd lose 65. But then we'd hit them back and they'd lose 240 and we'd win by 175. And it's like you're talking about millions of people. 65 means 65 million people.

They looked at that as a mathematical win and not just a total loss for humanity, which it would have been. And I don't want to fall down that trap with like, you know, the future of what people's rights are and their ability to have freedom and pursue the American dream and also find freedom in places around the world, not just here. I want to see that as well. And it's like that's where my concern is. And, you know, it's like I would talk with Kevin O'Leary. We were actually emailing with his people before this whole thing came up. I don't know if we want to come on now. But like it doesn't mean he's like a bad guy. I just want to understand if like he can at least empathize where people are coming from. And I haven't. seen that yet. My understanding on his in particular, isn't his like in the middle of the desert? No. Like away from everybody? No, it's not in the middle of the desert. Oh, I thought his was like way out in the middle of nowhere. No, it's still going to be like 40 square miles

or something. I saw, I did see one video which cracked me up, which was I think that it is, if it's not a desert, it's like in a valley type scenario. And there was a study done that the data center could raise the temperature of the valley, like 2% to like 29% temperature-wide.

Like something that was like almost is like not even valuable because the, you know, it's like, hey, I could be smart or dumb, right? You know, somewhere in between. And somebody made a video and was like, Kevin O'Leary's data center is going to increase the temperature of the state of Utah by 29%.

You can't do that. You can't run with it. And it was like, listen, by the way, there may be legitimate critiques, which are not doing yourself any favors by saying to the average temperature of the entire state's gonna go to 20%. You gotta fight.

You got it. If you're going to have these arguments, you have to try. That's why like when I say I'm short-sighted on something, I'll tell you that. Because it's like I don't have all the information on X, Y, or Z. I bring it up because I do think that there are people who blindly go into these pros and cons. Yes. And they just, they torture data. They do whatever they can to go viral online. That's right. And my best piece of advice for folks, and I've tried really hard to get better at this over last, you know, five, six years. If you have a question, go to the internet. If you want to understand something, go to the internet. Go to people. Yeah, yeah. Well, just like get on the internet and you have AI tools. You have Google. You have podcast, YouTube, all this stuff. Just type in whatever the thing is that you heard and double check. By the way, I don't know, 70% 80% of the stuff I hear is actually exactly what it seems to be. And I just am confirming it.

Maybe I learned a little bit extra or something and it's fun. But like 20% of the stuff I hear, I'm like, oh, that person is an idiot completely wrong. Right. But I went and I did it. Now, it's hard to do that because we're so used to just like whatever you hear, you take as fact. You go with, yeah. Right? I'd be careful with that.

And so I think that it's just like you now have the tools to inform yourself. Like you have the agency from an information standpoint. Just do that as a starting point. And you will get a way clearer picture about it's usually not black and white. It's usually gray. Yeah. Are you invested in any of these things? In the data centers?

Not directly like in any of the data centers. I'm trying to think of any businesses. I was helping one of the. guys, Hut 8 for a little bit. I'm not officially evolved anymore or anything like that, but I think that they've done a pretty good job. What kind of companies that? They had Bitcoin mining and then they spun out all the Bitcoin mining and the Bitcoin and now they just do AI data centers. But they go and they do like really large scale net new thing, you know, Texas, Louisiana, stuff like that. So I'm not involved there anymore, but I think those guys are pretty smart

and on top of it. But I don't think that there's anything else that I'm going to be. I'm like directly involved with, that is data center related. My general theory in terms of like investing in the world right now, on the software side, you have two different approaches. There is general purpose models, open AI, clawed, you know, kind of do a bunch of different things. And then there are specialized workflows. I think that there will be a couple of winners in generalized models. I think that you'll get open AI, anthropic. I think that maybe like a XAI or somebody will kind of catch up with a grok. That's pretty much it. On the specialized workflows, I think that we are drastically underestimating how many people are going to win here. So CFO Sylvia and finance,

you know, go through education, healthcare, kind of all these different things. Harvey is a legal thing, you know, whatever. So they're going to come up with all of these verticalized approaches in software. The area that maybe I think is most interesting that is not yet talked about, so all that I think is interesting, but a lot of people are talking about it. But the area I think is most interesting is physical AI and robotics. And the reason why I think that's interesting is because you're taking the power of the AI and the models and all the software and stuff, but now you're actually affecting physical things to happen in the real world. Right.

So humanoid robots is probably the one that everyone like visually understands the most. Amazon today, the latest numbers I saw, 1.5 million human employees, 750,000 robots. That number's going to flip. Doesn't mean that they're going to have less people. I actually think Amazon will have more people in the future than they have today. Then how does that flip? Because the robot adoption is accelerating so fast. Because one of the things is that we have a shortage of number of people.

Oh, meaning it would be like maybe I'm just drawing out numbers, three million people, but 10 million robots. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So like the number of people continues, but the robots are at a faster pace. I got it. Right. And we've seen that already.

Like the number of Amazon workers has been increasing, but they went from zero to 750,000 robots in a short period of time. And so if you look at humanoid. robots, it's very easy for people to see and not be as worried about it going into like corporate environments or warehouses or whatever. It's just very obvious. We don't have enough people. Part of that, I believe, is why Biden opened the border and was like, we just need more bodies in here. Now, obviously wasn't, you know, didn't take into account all the negative side effects of this.

It caused a rise of, you know, affordability. It obviously all the criminal activity, all kinds of stuff, right? But one thing is he got a lot more people into the workforce. Well, let's get out. out of the corporate environment or the warehouse. What happens when now they're cleaning? Well, we have cleaning robots, right? We have these things that go on the ground, whatever.

They don't look like humanoids, but they clean. Okay, a lot of people buy those, they put them there, whatever. Would you put a robot in your house? A humanoid robot walking around and doing stuff. Okay. But people put the cleaning robots. They put the Alexa. They put this stuff.

I'm not saying that there's no downsides to it. I don't. I'm not saying you're not going to do it, right? But like, okay, we're one step closer there. To get another step. What would have to be true for people to let the robot babysit their kids? So I have kids. Guess what?

Almost every single mother, I don't know how big your mom audiences, but every single mother, we have a very big female audience. All right. So they will all resonate with this. which is, you know what's really popular among moms, regardless of kids up to maybe like age 7, 8, 9 years old? They all put cameras in their kids' rooms now. Yeah.

So when they're babies or even when they're, you know, toddlers, et cetera, is they put these cameras in there. Right. You know one of the things that they can do on the cameras? So they can press a button on their cell phone. They could talk through it. Yeah, my buddy, Chaz and his wife was doing that. Yeah.

And the kids know where the camera is. And they, like, will point to it. and be like, you know, mom's talking to me. It's like an intercom camera, you know, type, you know, evolution's getting weird, bro. 20 years ago, like the parent had to get up and go walk in there, right? Well, guess what the moms do?

When a babysitter comes over, they may go to dinner and they just pull out their fun every once or a while and they look at the thing. So, like, rather than text the babysitter, they just look at this, right? Okay. At some point, somebody is going to be like, the technology is good enough.

I've got the camera. All just let the robot like, you know, while the kids sleep and stay at home. Oh, yeah. So again, I'm not saying I would do that. I'm not advocating for that. But like, you start to push the extreme. Yeah, brave new world.

Now, let's go back to your conversation about some of the people we've been talking about. As people, myself, for them, try to understand this, that could be twisted as like, Anthony Papiano is advocating for robots to be taking care of children and, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever, right?

Or it can be like, no, I actually think that that is just the trajectory that we're on. What are the ramifications? Like what happens if the babysitter market gets blown up? Where do young people go to make money when they're in high school? Is there some new job create? Whatever, right? So you start to think about the humanoids in your home.

I use that as the most sensitive thing. It's the most sensitive area for you to be. It's the most sensitive thing with your kids. It's the most sensitive in terms of your personal possessions, et cetera. within, I don't know, 10 years, I think that they're going to be at least definitely wealthy people, maybe even others, depending on the price point. It's going to be pervasive. Maybe. It's getting interesting. And there will be things adopted that today seem crazy that later will be like, all right, this isn't so bad. And maybe some things that get adopted that seem crazy that later were like, yes, that was actually even crazier. And we thought. So we'll have to say. Do you go in a self-driving car? I've never been in a self-driving car. I mean, Tesla's can self-drive,

but I've never been in a car while Tesla's actually self-driving. Would you get in a, like a Waymo or something that doesn't have the human driver? I have plenty of friends who have done it. I haven't thought about whether I would do it or not. I probably would. Yeah.

So, like, I take you as somebody who's fairly skeptical about a lot of things, right? Depends on what it is. Yeah, all right. Technology in the big company, but, like, you would try. your life to Larry and Sergey and Google to drive you around. Automobile crashes.

But you know, well, automobile crashes are, you know, one of the biggest ways people die. What's interesting is that actually all the data shows that the machines are better at driving than the humans. It's safer to be in such a car.

The data shows out. So now what we're starting to see, which is very interesting, I think it's Lemonade is the insurance company, came out and said, if you're driving in a Tesla, you're on the Tesla, and you own it, and self-driving is engaged, your insurance rate will be 50% lower.

Well, now there's an economic incentive for people to get in the self-driving car. Now, they're doing it from an underwriting perspective because they're saying, well, it's less likely there's going to be a car accident, you know, whatever, right? If you're a parent, what's one of the number one things that you don't want to put your kid in an Uber for?

Who's the driver? Right. Right? Yeah, it takes away that. My, you know, if I have a third thing, 13-year-old daughter. Yeah, you don't want that. Some random dudes not picking her up and taking her an Uber.

100%. But a self-driving car that maybe even I have a camera feed into so I can see what's going on. Maybe. Yeah. If it's safer, so nobody's going to kidnap. Like, you get in this weird world of the thing that you think you would never do, actually there's the argument that like, that's the thing you should do. Right.

Put your kid in a car with no driver sounds insane until the data shows that it's safer. Right. And so the question that boils down to, is it actually safer? and the people who control this technology, what are they trying to do? Those are the questions we are going to answer. Dude, we've been talking for three and a half hours. It's been a blast. You're a good sport about everything, too.

I appreciate it. Yeah, you come and you're attacking a bunch of my friends and everything. Yeah, be careful with that friend's term. Yeah. It depends on different people. Yeah, I'm going to start vetting some friends for you. But everyone will put all your links down below and make sure I got everything in there. You're a great follow on X and then also on Instagram as well.

You're posting there a lot as well. And then let's stick your website in there. people could see all the projects you're working on. CFOosylvia.com. CFOsylvia.com. Let's get it, Thief. Pomp, thanks, brother. Of course.

Thank you for having me. Everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button

and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you.