TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #764: Revenge Of The Blue Collars with Peter St. Onge

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Marty sits down with economist Peter St. Onge to discuss the AI bubble's remaining runway of real earnings, the coming renaissance for blue collar workers alongside the gutting of generalist cubicle w...orkers, and why Kevin Warsh should fight inflation by unloading the Fed's balance sheet instead of hiking rates. Peter on X: https://x.com/profstonge Peter’s Substack: https://www.profstonge.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Lygos https://lygos.finance/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. X's professor is back, the econ professor, Professor Peter St. Ange. Welcome back to the show, sir. It's good to be back, Marty. It's good to have you. I mean, AI is so hot right now. I mean, you DM or you texted me this morning saying, I really want to talk about AI today. I said,
Starting point is 00:00:53 hey, I'm more than willing to talk about AI. You notice that we've been leaning into more ai content before we just hit record and i said why don't we just hit record and i'll tell you why it's because we've been using ai we've built basically a company brain and an agentic system that all of our employees can interact with that has allowed us to really expand the breadth of content that we can cover uh which has been a very cool process and uh you were also mentioning it seems like a lot of the number go up people are focused on ai right now which is true and i'm trying to bridge that gap which is like i'm still full fully dedicated to bitcoin never been more bullish despite the fact that we're back in
Starting point is 00:01:33 the 58 000 dollar range right now and that's what was it like a buck 20 a couple months ago yeah right before the war yeah yeah 58 that's insane yeah i think you're right i think that you know a lot of the number go up crowd um they you know the sort of hot money uh they're partying in AI at the moment. AI has longer legs than AMC or some of the stonks from a couple of years ago. So that'll probably hold their attention for a while here is my biggest guess. You know, I think the underlying argument for Bitcoin is unchanged. But, you know, a lot of people talk about Bitcoin like it's stable money. But then in the back of their mind, they really think it's money that's going to go up a bunch. And, you know, like, welcome to maturity, Bitcoin, you
Starting point is 00:02:26 know, and yes, there will be a huge jump, you know, if it takes market share from gold and from fiat, you know, there obviously be the massive step jump where it goes up 10x or 50x or whatever. However, you know, I think that this current sort of crab walk, I mean, that's what gold's been going through for 50 years. You know, sometimes gold will triple, sometimes it'll drop in half threefold. You know, I think it has nothing to do with the sort of fundamental thesis of Bitcoin. In fact, you know, if you just sort of step out and look at gold, like if you didn't know the history of the world, then you would look at gold and you would say, no way can gold be a currency because, look, you can't have a currency that doubles and drops in half in the course of a year.
Starting point is 00:03:10 right and you know of course the reason is because if it's not the main money then it's a much thinner market and so you know speculation and uh you know its value is going to be derived based on interest rates and this and that and it's going to be much more volatile than the main currency will be so you know what we're seeing bitcoin right now this this sort of boring crab walk that we've been in for i think over a year more or less uh i think that's that's you know probably going to continue as long as ai is sucking all the sort of hype oxygen out of the room uh but even after that you know i'm not sure that that you know we're going to see this sort of um uh having you know process where like you know you have these huge run-ups uh in prices every single
Starting point is 00:03:56 time i think those those days i think for the moment they're gone unless we get some major step up in adoption uh at which point you know of course you know if we take a big share from gold if we take a big share from fiat then you'll see another step yeah no i haven't been in this for 12 years it's it's just another bear market to me it's uh and it is each bear market is unique uh like 2015 like this is probably the worst sentiment since 2015 where it's been i've been in this for 13 years now which is hard to believe um 2015 people are gonna die yeah we haven't had a real competing investment story i think since uh bitcoin was born like the closest that you could say was maybe uh the rebound from the 2008 crisis you know march of of 2009 uh we saw you
Starting point is 00:04:52 know we had and that was fed or anyway it was just a rebound and then you had a fed induced bubble going into covid where they just dumped out all the liquidity that caused the inflation so you know you had two periods where you had like broad equity strength which you know on the margin draws out some of the demand out of bitcoin but i don't think we've really had like like a real stonk story like ai since um since dot com so like i'm not surprised at the sucking all of the number go up oxygen out of the room for the moment but yeah you know i think you're right i mean bitcoin goes through winter summer you know uh and you know the fundamentals are unaffected i don't understand the quantum but i do understand that you know there's a lot of people who are much
Starting point is 00:05:37 smarter than me who are not worried about it and so i don't think there's any legs to that i think this is simply the number go up people are currently distracted they're partying down the street well i mean you messaged me what how are you reading what's going on in ai are you bullish on it do you think there's a mania going on um a uh irrational exuberance is that what we're exhibiting what we're seeing or is this truly like a step function uh improvement on technology yeah i think it's both so i cut my investment teeth on dot com uh and i got into it because there was an interview with paul krugman where he said he said this thing's a giant bubble well Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Earlier than that, I read an article in Wired Magazine. It was an
Starting point is 00:06:25 interview with Yahoo CEO Terry Siegel, I think it was at the time. And that was 1996. And everybody said, the internet is this giant bubble. Don't invest in it because you're just going to lose your money. I bought Yahoo at 60 bucks a share. Everybody told me I was an idiot. But I'm 24. I don't have any kids. You know, I make more money than I spend. Like, what am I going to do with the money so what the hell gamble it uh and of course split adjusted you know yahoo went to like a thousand dollars i retired at 25 i went partied around the world i did you know kind of the crypto thing before it was cool um and then lost it all because it eventually collapsed um but the moral of the story is that in 1996 everybody knew that dot com was a bubble okay why because the idiots
Starting point is 00:07:14 at the wall street journal look at a stock price and if it went up a whole bunch they say it's a bubble okay they don't go any deeper than that they say what it was a dollar last year now it's five dollars it's a bubble it doesn't occur to them that okay yes it's a bubble but guess what bubbles don't pump just because you called it a bubble right bubbles can keep going uh there's a study in fact um i can't remember the guy's name there's a guy out of columbia university does some really good empirical work on stock behavior. His name will probably come to me after the interview is over. And what he found is that the main determinant of a bubble, it's not price multiples. It's not price to earnings, price to sales. It's not how much it went up.
Starting point is 00:07:56 It's none of those things. It's not magnitude. It's just time. Time passes. Eventually, the bubble goes out. There is no other determinant. So my take home on that is that if you're looking to ai okay did it go up a lot compared to two years ago yes all of it did nvidia broadcom whatever uh what's the one now marvel uh micron okay you know you keep having this rotating cast of guys who go up 10x exactly like dot com okay uh and but then you know so did it go up a lot yes it's a bubble in that sense however number one if you look at the valuations compared to dot com they are far lower. I mean, we'd have to go up probably 2 to 4x from here to even get close to .com because in .com, it was all vapor. If you look at the actual earnings, like NVIDIA is minting
Starting point is 00:08:45 profits, like profits you put in your pocket. This is not eyeballs. This is not the kind of hokey metrics that they come up with .com because nobody was turning a profit. In fact, I think internet stocks as a group did not earn a single dollar throughout the entire 1990s. They all lost money and they were all like no no we got to reinvest because we got the eyeballs are coming okay but they didn't they didn't make any money right if you look at the actual profits on these uh ai semis and really it's the semis we're talking about right it's not the actual ai models we'll talk about that separate but um they don't have any pricing power i think and their stocks are reflecting it um it's the ai semis the um picks and shovels right the equivalent of cisco during
Starting point is 00:09:27 dot com. OK, and those guys are absolutely minting money from memory. Like if you look at NVIDIA's PE right now, I don't think it's even that high. I think it's like 30 or something like it's it's not astronomically high. It's not a thousand. Right. This is not the dot com. So my takeaway on is that number one, is it a bubble? Well, yes, it went up a whole bunch. And I would not be shocked if it dropped in half at some point here. OK, so in that sense, yes, it's exhibiting bubble behavior. But in any bubble, the question is, how long will the bubble go? Are you in the first 10% of the bubble? Are you in the last 10% of the bubble? Are you somewhere in between? So if you overlay the AI semi-bubble just day for day, the reason
Starting point is 00:10:09 you're doing day for day is remember that study, right? It's just time. It's nothing else. If you lay it day for day on the dot com, you know, you got to decide when you need to start them. So call at Netscape IPO versus ChatGPT release. Okay, if you overlay those, we're probably 98, arguably early 99. I think we've got another year or a year and a half of free money. Watch it blow up tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:10:35 But anyway, I think most likely, if I had a gun to my head and I had to guess, we got another year, year and a half of free money, probably scale out gradually because otherwise you're gonna lose all the money like I did when I was young. um so scale out gradually over time but you know so to answer the question cleanly i think yes it's a bubble but it's got another year year and a half to go and what do you take of the technology
Starting point is 00:10:58 and its effects on the technology it's blown me away just absolutely um i thought dot com was once in a lifetime thing all right if you look at the world before the internet and after the internet uh i i thought we were never going to see something like that in our lifetimes and ai is 10x that it has absolutely blown me away um so the areas that i know about because you know i don't know anything about coding uh programming there's a lot of crap i don't know about i'm not qualified to comment how good it is the stuff that i know about which is economics economic history i mean you can it is like having murray rothbard in your pocket it is like having the nobel committee not not the socialist politicized one the real one it's like having them in your pocket
Starting point is 00:11:46 i am absolutely blown away by the quality um people used to ask me these these kind of science fiction questions you know like uh i don't know uh what if gdp growth went to 50 a year or you know um what if we had immortality and then people stopped dying all right so people used to ask me these sci-fi questions and i mean it's fascinating as an economy so you say well that's really interesting let me think about you know you have the human capital erosion okay now people don't ask me anymore because they go to ai and guess what i go to ai too i wouldn't ask me either all right just just go you you know it's like the old line when somebody would ask something you say just google it okay just just go ask rock sgpt ask a couple models average out the answer because
Starting point is 00:12:25 they do mix stuff up make uh make stuff up but fundamentally like a a combination of ais is it's better than you know i've asked medical questions uh my my wife has dysautonomia like with blood pressure all of our doctors were idiots they were like oh maybe just change the dose i don't really know what it is we asked the ais they were like hey look into this we went i mean just it it is literally like having the top experts on earth in your pocket on any topic right health economics everything in between i am absolutely blown away by ai and remember we're just at the chatbot stage right like when you zoom out to what the ai potential is this is like the first one percent right this is just like the joke little goofy stuff that you show off to your friends i mean
Starting point is 00:13:13 you look at the stuff down the pipe so already uh a uh ai not ai specifically but a this stupid speaking of oh the thumbs up apple used to program um intelligently the the you know uh what is it 2024 chemistry Nobel was won by a prize. You are, was won by a team using AI, right? Google's, what is it? A deep seek or something. That's the Nobel. Okay. You know, yeah. You know, people love to trash AI. They're like, ah, you know, this is goofy. What can you do? Put bikinis on, you know, rabbits. No, no, dude. I'm like already. Okay. Protein. So that was for protein folding protein folding. Again, I'm an idiot on science, but anyway, uh, is approximately how your genes translate into actually doing stuff in your body. Okay. That is one of the holy grails
Starting point is 00:14:04 in medicine. There's like a half dozen other, I mean, foundational stuff that AI is just solving trivially. So I am, you know, number one, blown away by how impressive AI is. Yes, it makes crap up. So, you know, if it's an important question, run it through two, three AIs. But what I'm really excited about is, you know, what's coming next in materials research, medical research. I think AI stands a very good chance of giving us quasi-immortality, in other words, an end to aging within 10 years. I think that we're going to see absolutely revolutionary materials that will make things possible we haven't yet imagined. Jeff Bezos, I want to say $10 billion. Anyway, he put a chunk of change into a new AI startup that's specifically doing that. So it looks like
Starting point is 00:14:51 new materials. And so you can have insulating or superconducting or all kinds of interesting things. So I am absolutely blown away by AI. I think it is 10x the impact that the internet had in terms of not just the economy, but potentially of health, of longevity, of politics. People can discover truths that used to be guarded by the gatekeepers. I think it's very exciting. It's literally for me you know having cut my teeth on the dot com i think this is much much bigger than that yeah i would agree and again it's because i've been getting c touch feel that's right anybody is naysaying ai right and i'm like have you actually used this like yeah have you used chat gpts uh about before it's like not that impressive it's like well you're not actually
Starting point is 00:15:39 using it um yeah i mean you are to an extent but there's so much more that you can do with it and then bring this back to the bubble conversation i keep grappling with this in my head i'm sure We've heard the likes of Gavin Baker from Atreides and others talk about this, but the analog to .com, many would argue, and I think myself included, that there are things that really don't comport to what was going on in the .com era, particularly the dark fiber, like the laying of the broadband. There was actually no monetizable businesses in the .com era, or very few outside of Amazon.
Starting point is 00:16:18 in google before they when they found their ad revenue model but like with to your point like nvidia micron marvel these guys are all printing printing cash making profits and then like even the frontier models i mean i saw the headline earlier today obviously anthropic's not public yet but they're they're in the process of going public and it seems like they're producing free cash flow and so that's like the question and like there's inherent utility out of the box not that there wasn't for the internet for the individual but i think particularly for businesses out of the box today i think tftc being one of those examples like we're able to use it spend money on it uh productively efficiently and profitably to to expand what we're doing and so
Starting point is 00:17:06 people talk about we're in a bubble it's like yeah we could be in parts of the market and to your point about time dilation like how like this i feel like this could go on longer than the dot com bubble like that that's what i would be interested to dive into that study and to see if there is like a set amount of time that he that the the individual wrote that basically decided like yeah bubbles typically last x amount of time or depending on that the magnitude of the bubble uh the time scale changes a bit i'm just uh length of bubbles yeah well you made a great point on the dark fiber right so the issue if you're just zeroing in on the picks and shovels right so the issue for companies like cisco lucent um you know the kind of picks and shovel the
Starting point is 00:17:52 the internet the issue there was the dark fiber that you just mentioned right which was that the internet, you know, all these people are, you know, traffic was exploding. And so they built these highways out of fiber optics. The problem is that the price of building a highway with 10,000 lanes is approximately the same as building a highway with four lanes. And so you may as well make 10,000. But of course, the issue is that it took a while for the internet to grow into those 10,000 lanes, like a further decade. All right, that is a completely different beast than we're seeing with um with ai at the moment which is that companies are like they will take all the compute they can possibly get their hands on right so um i can't remember the company they blew through
Starting point is 00:18:38 their ai budget of like 500 million dollars without noticing i guess there's rumors that it's uber or somebody like that yeah there you go i mean there is unlimited appetite because think about it right this is not a highway with 10 000 lanes okay this is uh processing and the companies are doing stuff with that processing you know so you know you take i don't know 40 bucks worth of tokens and you replace three weeks of a goldman sachs analyst times a billion people and it's not just the people you're replacing right the vast majority of the stuff you're doing was not being done before okay so now you know you can have like a like a mom and pop taco shack that can go to ai and you know they can they can analyze their um their shoppers so you know
Starting point is 00:19:24 which part of the week should I buy certain type of stuff? Can you make me a logo? Can you make me a slogan? Can you program me a website so I can take over? These are things that it's not that somebody was doing it before that was replaced, right? It's that it was so expensive that nobody did it, right? And so now because AI is, I mean, for outside of corporate applications, it's pretty much free uh for individuals and for small businesses uh you know the vast majority of the things that um that they're able to do now couldn't be done before right so you put that together with the corporates you know who are actively replacing extremely expensive uh people you put those together and there is pretty close to unlimited demand for compute they can certainly
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Starting point is 00:22:53 denationalization of certain parts of the market. What are your thoughts on this as a free market guy? Yeah, so it's tricky. OK, first, the good, which is that Biden and Kamala, it's not really them as their handlers. You know, they were very hostile to AI. They were trying to turn it into a government pet, you know, essentially the social media censorship model. But this time, you know, turning it into Big Brother. I think that was existentially dangerous because at the moment, for a lot of people, AI is truth, right? And, you know, they need to verify, they need to check with multiple AIs, of which one should always be Grok. But, you know, even that's kind of unhealthy. But if government were actively, like if you had a political commissar of the Communist Party
Starting point is 00:23:47 sitting at Anthropic, literally checking things, which is approximately how it was with social media, that was extremely dangerous, right? So I'm very pleased that Trump is so pro-AI in the abstract. You know, we were very, very lucky with .com that we had Bill Clinton. I'm not a huge fan in general, but God bless Bill Clinton because he was hands-off. He was certainly hands-off on content. And it took, W, I think, was the first one who started with, I can't remember the chain of events. Kamala, by the way, pushed on, I think it was Sosta or Sesta or something. Anyway, the internet got captured gradually, but God bless Bill Clinton. And, you know, so I was very happy when Trump won partially for that, because I think he's a lot closer to Clinton. Just promote the
Starting point is 00:24:30 tax, see where it goes, don't strangle the baby in the crib. Having said, I think that, you know, the idea of government partnering with these companies or owning shares, that puts us right back to, you know, maybe not under Trump, you know, maybe Trump has David Sachs and he's got smart people who aren't going to abuse that. But he's not going to be president forever. I mean, you know, he's he's got two years and, you know, he keeps building these structures in government as if he's going to be president forever. And all of those things are going to be delivered on a silver platter with a bow tied on them to Gavin Newsom or, you know, Zoran Mamdani or whoever the hell's next. That's what makes me nervous. So I love that Trump is so pro AI. I
Starting point is 00:25:19 don't think he personally has strong opinions about AI, but he listens to people who tell him it's cool and so good to go. But yes, I am not a huge fan of this idea of government owning things or partnering. I think there should be a separation of church and state when it comes to business in general, but certainly when it comes to technologies that can influence how voters think, right? Because if government is tied up, whether it's social media or internet censorship or AI, if government is controlling how voters think, the voters are not sovereign anymore. The government is a self-licking ice cream cone. It runs itself. That is a tyranny.
Starting point is 00:25:54 So I'm not a huge fan of that part. No, I mean, the silver platter. I mean, you mentioned Zoran Mandani, but the election, the primary elections in New York. I mean, you have I mean, he's the mayor of New York. He's an overt socialist, but it looks like the state legislator and I think the senator primary in like three three spots went to overt socialists who want to who want to seize the means of production and distribute wealth, confiscate wealth and distribute it. have some piker riding pretty high on his own supply right now and you do you do have this this growing unabashed socialist part of the democratic party really taking hold and you can imagine i mean i think one of the memes that's been growing in strength over the last six months
Starting point is 00:26:43 is as elections moving forward are going to be communism versus nationalism and the democratic party i think the the zealots who are um overtly socialist and communistic are are beginning to take it over they've got the fire i mean look look at the rest of their bench you know you got slimy newsome who's dirty nobody likes him i mean he's not popular you know you know people aren't excited to go work for him he's he's like an instrumental you know you use him i guess as a stepping stone of the Democrat Party. There's no fire in there, right? He's not even Bernie Sanders. Forget Zoran. Who else you got? Pete Buttigieg? I mean, it's a thin bench. So, you know, AOC gets floated as a president. She's, you know, again, she doesn't have a large constituency
Starting point is 00:27:33 for her ideas. No, I think Zoran or somebody like him is a future of the Democrat Party, without a doubt. On the Republican side, I think that Trump or somebody like that is the future. So, you know, the old parties that we grew up with, right, when I was a kid, the Democrat Party was working class union guys, you know, very patriotic, kind of racist, to be honest. You know, they were kind of the deplorables, as Clinton put it. OK, that was the Democrat Party. The Republican Party was a bunch of rich guys like Monty, you know, what is it, Mr. Burns out of The Simpsons. Yeah. Who just wanted lower taxes.
Starting point is 00:28:11 is none of that. You know, they, you know, didn't really have strong opinions. They were like, whatever you do, what you got to do, invade this country, you know, whatever. That was pretty much all they cared about was big business thriving, either through lower taxes or through, you know, government partnership. So that was kind of the fault lines. And, you know, Trump broke the Republican Party, I think, amazingly fast. You know, if you consider that in 2012, we have Mitt Romney, who was like 100 percent a tool of the old, you know, he had there was nothing about him that was against orthodoxy in the Monty Burns party. And then four years later, just bam, right, it completely transformed. And I think that's where we're going with the Democrat party
Starting point is 00:28:51 as well. So, you know, if I had to guess, I think there's a very good chance that their nominee for what is it, 28 could actually be Zoran. Could it be? He wasn't born in the United States. that's a very good question let me see where i was born by the way the guy from uh nyu it's nyu his name is andrew low hello and uh he's done a lot of empirical research on uh stocks um worth a read you can find all this stuff by going to chat gpt which is which is who gave me his name too all right zoron mom donnie born um all right let's see if kampala uganda the republic is saved all right but but it's going to be one of his acolytes who are born here uh i think that's a like there's there's no fire the party abandoned the blue collar union guys that's who trump picked
Starting point is 00:29:54 up right that's like his whole shtick is appealing to the old democrats uh the party then got captured or the people who who who evicted those union guys uh were basically uh faculty professor types you know so like people who use latinsk uh and but there's no fire for them there's no passion for them right like after this last election their you know post-ops were all you know we gotta learn how to talk to real people and i mean there's just like i don't think there's future with the whole professor schtick um you know but but this this new group whether it's piker mamdani i think that that's what's capturing the fire in the democrat party um and so you know as a party they could choose i think the professors aren't going anywhere so
Starting point is 00:30:41 they can either go back to the old school union guys or they can go to these uh new sort of fiery all that over-educated underemployed uh revolutionaries and you know the union guys don't really organize uh so i think most likely uh they're going to get captured by the call it the piker man danny wing yeah and oftentimes the piker man i mean they might have a short bench there too because i don't think a lot of them are native foreign um you know it's on parker i'm pretty sure he's born in turkey some some pawn some american-born pawn so freaks this was brought to you by good friends at ligos finance celsius block by ftx they took your bitcoin and gambled it away lagos can't because they never hold it non-custodial lending on
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Starting point is 00:32:13 very convenient particularly if you're traveling and you like to work out you like if the brain juices flowing they have these creatine packets as well uh they're about to launch a bunch more flavors lemon lime uh watermelon and and a few others as well um so go check it out go to drink saute d-r-i-n-k-s-o-t-e.com use the code tftc for 15 off seriously game changer in our house my wife drinks it i drink it our boys drink it stay hydrated it's a beautiful thing no it is crazy times i mean and then on top of all that uh going back to sort of overreach and maybe this is an overage man actually i think some people could view it as refreshing because you're just admitting what's been happening for for some time and the sort of nomination and um the sort of nomination
Starting point is 00:33:06 and the sort of accepting of that nomination of kevin warsh joining the fed him sort of shifting gears no longer doing forward guidance but i think more explicitly signaling that the treasury and the federal reserve are going to be acting in compatico as they they try to re-industrialize and reorient the economy and i think that's a whole other can of worms we should jump down like what are your thoughts on on kevin warsh as fed governor and and his first fomc meeting what he plans on doing yeah so he's been interesting um if you look back at his uh history you could argue that he's a hard money guy uh you know during the 2008 crisis we had from memory we had something like eight percent unemployment and uh you know the economy was
Starting point is 00:33:57 doing terrible and he was like no no we have to hike we have to hike interest rates you know which is I mean, that's based right. That's like old school. That's 1920s style. You know, when the economy is in bad shape, you know, the reason is because you had all this irrational exuberance, malinvestments in Austria and he's got to purge all the junk. And, you know, so I love him for that. It's very Volcker adjacent. However, you know, and then there was this kind of accusation that he had had a foxhole conversion because he wanted to get the job from Trump. So he flipped to easy money and starting to push for rates to come down. But he had actually been pushing that for, I think, 2014 is when he started pushing it.
Starting point is 00:34:39 And his argument was that we have new technologies coming that are going to make the economy much more productive. And so that lowers prices. And if so, then you have room to lower rates without it showing up as inflation. Now, and he reiterated that I think even before he was on Trump's radar, he was talking about A.I. specifically that that was going to be a massively deflationary i think he said something like the greatest deflationary technology of our lifetimes i mean he was out there uh so you know i think that the the the idea that he's just mouthing the words about rate cuts but he but his heart's not in it i know i think he's had an evolution uh since 2008 where um you know he's he's learned to love rate cuts. Now, his shtick immediately before he came in, he was calling it Robin Hood
Starting point is 00:35:30 policy or Robin Hood monetary policy, where the idea was that, OK, so normally the way that the Fed controls inflation is that it can, you know, raise interest rates in order to reduce inflation. Right. But there's a second way that the Fed really picked up starting the 2008 crisis, which is that the Fed just goes out and buys crap. So they go down to the basement, they type a bunch of zeros, then they say, this is money, and then they go and buy stuff. So this is called quantitative easing. And what's happened since 2008 is that the going out and buying stuff kind of took over to the point where the Fed has, I think, currently about $7 trillion of assets that are built up on a balance sheet. Now, $7 trillion, OK, the entire money supply is something
Starting point is 00:36:16 like $21 trillion or something. Anyway, it's ballpark three to four times that. So put differently, the Fed has printed approximately 25% to 30% inflation, and it's parked it like a battery on its balance sheet, meaning that any time the Fed wants, the Fed could just go and pawn all that garbage, right? It could sell off all those assets that it bought, and it bought them in financial crises or the so-called taper tantrum. Basically, whenever something goes bad,
Starting point is 00:36:48 the Fed goes out and buys crap. So it could pawn all that stuff and it could immediately lower prices by 20, 25%. And you would not hurt the economy. You would hurt Wall Street because Wall Street owns all that stuff. They own the treasury bonds, the mortgage-backed securities. They own all the crap that the Fed bought.
Starting point is 00:37:03 The point is that you can immediately lower inflation just by selling off the Fed's stash and it doesn't hurt the economy, right? Because the alternative is that you raise interest rates to fight inflation. And that strangles the economy because now, you know, loans are more expensive. You know, mom and pop factories on Wall Street can't finance their inventory. OK, so that that that costs jobs, whereas pawning the Fed's garbage doesn't cost jobs. It just causes, you know, profits on Wall Street. So that was his shtick immediately before he came on board
Starting point is 00:37:35 was that that Robin Hood. Right. So take from Wall Street, give to the people. Now, unfortunately, he's coming in after the war right so the iran war at the moment is screwing up the numbers uh you know you've got i think in the first month inflation was running at annualized 10 then it was like six percent and so on so because of the war oil prices went up now interestingly so far uh what are we four months into the war the inflation has not bled outside of energy It's only in energy. In other words, companies are not raising prices. So he could, what I hope he'll do, is simply ignore the current inflation. I hope that he'll stick with that Robin Hood thing and continue pawning off the Fed's assets, bring inflation back down using that, not using interest
Starting point is 00:38:26 rates. But the problem is that historically, the Fed tends to panic. So when inflation jumps, that gets the plebs upset. The plebs are upset. They call their congressmen and their congressmen call the Fed. And there's always the threat that the Fed could lose power based on bad headlines. So the Fed historically panics on headline inflation. I think that's been the concern at the moment. So if you if you put that together, Kevin Warsh, I think fundamentally is a hard money guy, just kind of a mini Volcker. He has gradually come over to, you know, favoring to being easy money on interest rates and then making up the difference by taking it out of Wall Street. But at the moment, I think that he's kind of trying to navigate some tricky space. You know,
Starting point is 00:39:13 he's only one vote out of, I think, 13 on the Fed board. And a lot of those guys are Biden appointees. Some of them probably just want to see Trump fail anyway, you know, to hell with the million jobs that are lost in the process. So he's only one vote of 13. And so he's kind of got to heard the cats. And I think that instinctively what he wants to do is ignore the current war driven inflation. The war is going to be over soon enough. Trump is trying everything he can to get out of it. I think he understands it was a mistake, even though he'll never say it. But anyway, one way or the other, the war is going to be over soon. The impact on oil price is going to be over. So I think that, you know, Warsh is thinking the way that I am. In other
Starting point is 00:39:53 words, just let it go and continue doing the Robin Hood thing, which is good for the economy broadly my concern is that he's going to be forced into a fed panic where they hike rates that then that hits everything right it hits uh investments it hits jobs uh it's the trump boom that uh that we've been counting on well it's already hitting housing certainly in parts of parts of the market across the country it it's hitting housing just the way it is with rates you know not that particularly high so you know if you if you hike another point or you know another half point or point from here, then yeah, it's going to be even worse. And, you know, of course, the problem in housing is that the Fed yo-yoed rates, right? So you had essentially zero
Starting point is 00:40:34 interest rates during COVID in order to finance the lockdowns, the totalitarian lockdowns that then locked all these people in their house where, you know, they can afford their current house at a 3% mortgage. They cannot afford it at a 7% mortgage because the payment more than doubles, right? And so all of these people, they don't necessarily, you know, like maybe their kids moved out. They get a six bedroom house outside of, you know, Boston. Normally they would sell that, put it back in circulation. Now a family can live in a house. They go down to Florida. Everybody's happy. But in this case, they're stuck with it because the new mortgage would be 7%. So yeah, the housing market is completely screwed up. You know, it's like a pendulum where, you
Starting point is 00:41:15 know, we smash into it. It's going to go one way to, it's going to go the other way too far over and over, which kind of captures what the Fed does anyway to pretty much every industry it touches. yeah i hope they keep them higher i hope they keep the rates higher it seems like the ai infrastructure build out for at least some of the companies the return on invested capitals making the the cost of capital maintainable and then for the housing market i mean i locked in a 675 mortgage in february and yeah my monthly payment um is not great i think we got i think we got our house like 20 under market luckily we had some uh the the previous owners wanted to give it to a young growing family and so i think they were very amenable on on price
Starting point is 00:41:58 negotiations but i think broadly speaking if you're looking at housing affordability uh i guess it's pretty clear that the the sort of sticker price of the houses are too high for for any millennial or um endeavoring gen zero to actually afford a down payment and so maybe prices coming down with mortgage rates at six seven five seven seven twenty five maybe it's not a bad thing i mean what were mortgage rates in the 80s aren't they like in the teens yeah well they were really high in the early 80s yeah that was like an overhang from the 70s um but if you look at a healthy housing market like in the 90s they were pretty much where they are now like the rates so the problem right now isn't necessarily the rates are astronomically
Starting point is 00:42:42 high the problem is that they were low for i think a two or three year period and so tons of people refinanced which they were smart to do but the end result is that now they're they're they're kind of stuck uh they have these relatively cheap houses and if they try to switch out um then they're going to lose it and you know there is some help on the way like there's regulation you could do that that could uh probably drop the price of new construction by 50 even 100 000 there's a lot of stuff you can do with you know environmental mandates and zoning and and uh rent control could help bring more supply online there's different regulatory things that you can do. The other moving lever is, of course, wages. You know, so if real wages are
Starting point is 00:43:22 growing, then maybe house prices don't come down, but wages can grow into it so that millennials can actually get into it. And that brings us to the question, you know, which is kind of the other aspect of AI, which is what's going to happen to wages and jobs. And, you know, I think one of the most fascinating things there, just kind of watching AI's impact on the economy evolve, is that the so far, and I think for the next couple of years, the main impact on AI is that it is going to reduce wages for college educated generalists, particularly young ones. In other words, people who have credentials, but no skills, those people are going to get absolutely savage, right? So somebody who graduates, like if you're graduating this year with a psychology degree or
Starting point is 00:44:09 an economics degree okay a a general degree where the purpose of the degree was basically an iq test yeah you don't actually like companies don't hire economists because they're going to take over a country right like like or companies don't like like what are you gonna do with an economist right realistically um a psychologist right the vast majority of psychologists go and work cubicle jobs at like you know aircraft parts makers i mean like what the hell is a psychology degree those people are going to get absolutely shafted like at this point the only reason to go to college is to get a concrete skill, engineering, programming, health, anything related to health. Okay. It's got to be a concrete skill. If you're not getting that, then you are paying
Starting point is 00:44:48 $150,000 for an IQ test. They're going to get hurt. The people who are going to get helped, what I think is fascinating is blue collars. So we're already seeing that now, right? We've got some of the strongest blue collar wage growth in 60 years. Pricewaterhouse estimated that 4.7 million construction jobs are coming for ai data centers all right everybody forgets right they talk about the ai data centers as if they were dropped out of like alien spaceships to come eat our jobs yeah but somebody built this and it was not hr directors with psychology degrees right uh so 4.7 of which they estimate one in five are going to be permanent because you got to maintain the crap and it's not just a data center it's the you know it's the energy and the water
Starting point is 00:45:31 and you got all this infrastructure related to it. Okay, so you've got a lot more stuff. And what I think is fun is that effectively the blue collars are taking the jobs from the white collars, right? The blue collars are getting paid more, which is fitting, right? Because for 50 years now,
Starting point is 00:45:45 the blue collars have been sold down the river. They were the main victims of China, right? So China opening to the world was, if Kevin Wurst thinks AI was the biggest deflationary technology of the century, China was number two, right? China was massively deflationary. Like when I was a kid, all this stuff, you know, you couldn't go out and buy a pool table for 70
Starting point is 00:46:05 bucks. You're on drugs, right? You can buy like a toaster for $18. That's 18, 20, $26, right? When I was a kid, like a crappy microwave oven was like 50 bucks. That was 1977. What is that? $1,000 today? China has been astounding, which is great if you're a consumer. It sucks if you're a blue collar, right? So blue collars got absolutely wiped out. Now this is like revenge. You know, It's not revenge of the nerds. It's like revenge of the roughnecks or something. It's all coming back around. You know, people worry about robots.
Starting point is 00:46:40 Like, you know, whatever you say, this is a blue collar renaissance. They say, yeah, but the robots are coming in. Okay, to put that in perspective, right? So you need one AI to serve 8 billion people, okay? You need three or maybe six robots for every McDonald's. Okay, the robots goes much, much slower than the AI. For perspective, the first factory in America that electrified. Before then, it was like steam power and coal.
Starting point is 00:47:08 So the first factory to electrify was something like 1870. It took 80 years for half of the factories to electrify. Capital goes much, much slower than you think. And the reason is that the assembly line in Guangzhou, wherever it is, maybe some other America. The assembly line is already amortized. It's already there. It's functioning. So you're going to run that thing into the ground before you go out and buy a whole bunch of robots. So I think what we're looking at is the next 10 years or so, generalist white collars are going to get gutted. The vast majority of them are, by the way, women. I think Brookings said
Starting point is 00:47:49 84% of the people who are on the front lines for AI displacement are women because women get generalized college degrees. They don't have concrete skills. They're cubicle people. Not all women. I'm married to a woman. Women are fantastic. However, cubicle people are overwhelmingly women. So people work in governments. They work in big companies. They work in administrative positions. Those are getting gutted. And what they're getting replaced by is the blue collar. So you have that pattern for call it the next 10, 20 years. And then maybe at that point, the robots start coming in. Now, when the robots start coming in, no problem. Because again, number one, there's a certain amount of human, it's infrastructure. And, you know, once you have
Starting point is 00:48:31 physical objects, you know, you've got more things to go wrong. And so you need somebody to make decisions like, should we fix this first or should we fix that first? A lot of that has to do with, you know, human interaction, valuing. The other part of it is that if you look at the history of massive technological waves, so if we imagine a future where AI and robots have taken all the jobs okay that happened and it's called the industrial revolution right so in the industrial revolution you lost something like 80 of jobs depending on how you count them 80 to 90 you lost every job except for the merchants uh doctors which were you know there were very few of them back then they generally just killed you faster okay like almost every job imaginable was wiped
Starting point is 00:49:18 out in the industrial revolution and here's what happened so the new jobs yes it redistributed okay so relatively speaking uh white collars did much better out of the industrial revolution than than blue collars did right so before the industrial revolution the uh wage of a white collar so like service employment uh i don't know tradesmen might be two or three times out of a blue collar worker when the smoke cleared you're talking more like five seven times okay so yes white collars did much better however so i was walking around new york a couple years ago there were two guys moving cinder blocks out of a truck and they're new yorkers so they're loud and one of them is telling the other guy how he went to vacation brazil soon they're thinking your job
Starting point is 00:49:59 is moving rocks all right that is that is the bottom of the barrel that's as bad as it gets that is the lowest skilled job conceivable and you're vacationing in brazil right blue collars today. So in other words, the losers of the industrial revolution, blue collars, men who work with their muscles, they are unimaginably richer than the blue collars were before the industrial revolution, right? Just to give a sense. So a house painter in America makes about nine times more than a house painter in India. Okay. If you're painting a house about $200 a day in India, it's about $11 or $20, $22, okay? And, okay, both, like, neither were automated, okay? A house painter in the U.S., for the most part, is doing it by hand. There's not much
Starting point is 00:50:49 automation. So that's a, you know, massive difference. And India is not pre-industrial. I mean, it's got electricity. You know, they have cell phones. Like, if you actually compared what a house painter makes today in terms of, like, what you can afford with it, right? You can get a Netflix subscription. You can have a cell phone. You know, house painters live fine. They have like, you know, nice pickup trucks and they live in houses just like the rest of us. They don't actually sleep on the street. You compare that to what life was like for a house painter in, you know, pre-industrial America. It's inconsistent. I mean, you're talking 50x, right? So when people get excited about the AI, the robots are going to take all the jobs.
Starting point is 00:51:25 We've seen this script before. In fact, technological automation is thousands of years old. The ancient Greeks, I think it was Socrates who worried that oxen were going to replace all the farm workers. You'd have too many men left over. And so you'd have to start wars to get rid of the men. In medieval Europe, they worried about water wheels, right? Water wheels were replacing the millers. And so again, you're going to have all these people who had nothing to do. What are you going to do with all these unemployed people? Technology, it's been around for a very long time. And guess what happens? Humans have an hierarchy of needs. And whenever you have the humans freed up uh you know people step down it's like on an escalator they step down
Starting point is 00:52:05 to the next job but the automation itself is making you richer so that escalator is going up and up when the smoke clears you look at the industrial revolution the absolute worst the people who move rocks for a living the people who were in the absolute bullseye of the industrial revolution make 50 times more than they did so you know if if the ai if the robots if they come and take all the jobs. We're talking 20, 30 years down the line. Great. Dog walking will pay a hundred bucks an hour. Why? Because the vast majority of people won't be working. If they work, it'll be like a salmon, you know, people who work on salmon boats, like they'll work for three months and they'll go party in Thailand for six months or whatever. People won't be working.
Starting point is 00:52:47 And so in order to get somebody off their butt to come and walk your dog, it'll cost you a hundred bucks. So, you know, the people who worry about it, yes, you have transition pain, right? You have these psychology majors freshly minted from Yale who can't find a job, yes, that is in the here and now. That's absolutely going to happen. You're going to have a transition period. A lot of those people are too good to work blue-collar jobs, so they're going to hold out. If you look at it today, for example, an adjunct professor in the humanities makes about $20 to $25 an hour. right that's for the phd okay a babysitter there was just a study a babysitter makes 20 25 dollars an hour many of them are 16 years old okay so yes you're gonna have a holdout like that where
Starting point is 00:53:31 the professor is like screw that i'm like i'm not i'm not working at panera man but eventually they're gonna give it up and you know i'm sure it's gonna be very traumatic for them um but yes you're gonna have you know people have difficulty adjusting but when the smoke clears on the other side, it's going to be absolutely amazing. Yeah. We're going to have to have all these cubicle white collar women who make up, go down to the dive bar, find your blue collar hubby, you know, get the fertility rate back up. That's what's happening. You know, there was a recent study that found that, you know, normally women do not marry below their education because women are hypergamous and they can't stand the idea of a man being with them as
Starting point is 00:54:13 dumb but what's happening now is that you have all these women who have you know master's degrees and they're hooking up with like electricians because the electricians are making like 150 right so you know you know they can either party with the philosophy major who's between jobs at the moment or the electrician so no it's beautiful it's uh revenge of the blue collars yeah i feel like we've been weaving in and out of uh incredibly bullish and somewhat cautious commentary here what what are what's your overall view of the economy of the state of america right now um yeah i think the economy itself um so i came into 2026 thinking that it was gonna be really strong i think the war is in the way at the moment um but you know i think the war is
Starting point is 00:55:01 gonna bounce off i think the fundamentals are really strong in the economy the fundamentals are uh taxes regulation uh those are kind of the two big moving parts where the government can have an impact anyway. And on both of those, Trump's instincts are very good. You know, Republicans in Congress haven't done as much as I hope. They haven't done as much as they promised. They never do. However, at least they're not causing new problems the way that, you know, Joe Biden might have. So, you know, we've got little bits of deregulation here and there. I think there was actually about 450 major deregulations last year, which is the best in history. That allows, you investment to come in and offer new products that's a big deal uh taxes um extending trump's
Starting point is 00:55:43 tax cuts was big he particularly had a part in there for accelerated depreciation which sounds boring but it's very important because what that means is that so like if you go out and buy a business like if you buy a laundromat or by the way if you buy a bitcoin rig you can expense the entire amount against your income so it's almost like a 401k so like literally you know you can make $200,000. You could go out and buy a bunch of Bitcoin rigs or a cafe, whatever, something that creates jobs. And you could literally pay no taxes. So that's a very, very big deal. That's rocket fuel to investment. Even the tariffs, broadly speaking, tariffs are taxes. They're not great. However, the way that Trump's been using these tariffs is to put pressure on other
Starting point is 00:56:27 countries. He's basically been saying, look, you can buy your way out of the tariffs if you invest in america so taiwan semiconductor i think put a hundred billion dollar factory in arizona a whole bunch of semiconductors uh german auto parts makers are moving to america there's all these companies that are coming in they're investing you're not seeing the jobs yet because it takes time right like the taiwan semiconductor i think it was like five years between blueprint and actually employing somebody on assembly line so these things take time you know democrats keep pounding away we're still losing manufacturing jobs now if you look at what's in the pipeline between the deregulation, the taxes, the accelerated, you know, beautiful things are
Starting point is 00:57:03 coming. So I'm very optimistic about that. The Fed is a risk. It always is. The main concern there is that it panics, hikes rates. General rule of thumb is at every point you hike rates cost about a million jobs. OK, so the Fed could absolutely strangle the economy. Hopefully it doesn't um i don't think you know wars wants to uh the other i mean those are really the only meteors on the horizon um you know in the war i mean iran's trying to get all kinds of stuff frankly the kinds of things that iran wants i don't think like for me being a mega guy i don't care like i don't care if iran controls the hormuz that's not my problem that's somebody's problem but it's not my problem um so you know i don't think the war is going to end up uh leaving any
Starting point is 00:57:49 lasting damage. So I think the rest of the world, I'm pretty optimistic, or the rest of this year, I'm pretty optimistic. If you look at inflation before the war, Truflation is a private sector alternative to the government statistics. They scrape real time. They do something like 1.4 million numbers. And they look at the real numbers. They go to Zillow and they say, OK, what are our houses actually selling for? They don't have these BLS models, BS models. And before the war, true inflation had us at about 0.7 percent annualized inflation. You can't get any lower than that. Like, literally, if you try to get lower than that, the Fed's going to come in and print
Starting point is 00:58:26 money on purpose because it's an inflation machine. Right. So that's literally as good as it gets. So, you know, between the pre-war inflation numbers, the jobs numbers, which, again, you know, we've had a lot of strength in jobs. It's muddled because we got rid of 3 million migrants who were being counted as jobs. We got rid of, what's the number, 300,000 plus federal workers. Again, those are counted by jobs, even though they're parasites.
Starting point is 00:58:51 So, you know, when you control for those things, good jobs numbers, good inflation numbers, I think very good growth numbers. So I'm actually very optimistic. And, you know, I think going back to the AI thing. So we're seeing this massive bubble in AI. Normally, in Austrian business cycle theory, you expect to see those stupid bubbles during, you know, when rates are too low. Rates are not particularly low.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Rates are probably neutral at this point. In other words, if the Fed didn't exist, interest rates would probably be roughly where they are right now. So to see a dot-com style, you know, explosion, it's not the Fed. It's not that the Fed made money too cheap. That's certainly what they did in early COVID. Right. That's why everything went up in COVID, even though half the economy was shut. But at the moment, it doesn't even look like that.
Starting point is 00:59:39 So, you know, without a doubt, there will come a day when, you know, AI stocks will drop by 30 to 50 percent. OK, the question is, you know, do they go from 200 to 1,000 back to 500? So that that's my expectation. The question is just when is that going to happen? But in terms of the broader economy, I think we're actually in a very good spot right now. well actually bringing this back to wash had a conversation about this yesterday on the show um another sort of policy position that he's put out there is that he doesn't want to do bailouts anymore like his definition of a recession is his business is failing due to their own their own volition if they get overextended on debt and they can't pay it back they deserve to fail and
Starting point is 01:00:28 to your point like do they overreact one way or the other with interest rates i'm very interested see if he holds that line as well because i think that's desperately needed is this ability to let companies fail yeah i'm cautiously optimistic about warsh um it feels like he read uh james grant's book the forgotten depression which any listeners if you haven't read that very strongly recommend uh he talks about um the last time we had a recession that the government did not try to fix uh it's an amazing read but um and you know the the punch line is uh you know let all the uh losers who created the recession get wiped out that's capitalism suck it up uh you know that's what should happen in 2008 warren buffett was ready to buy all those banks out of
Starting point is 01:01:14 bankruptcy like if city bank goes bankrupt it's not that like the whole thing vanishes like you know it's not like a nuclear weapon just explodes okay everything's still there the bank's there the employees are there the whole thing's there the deposit it just gets bought by somebody else and shareholders get wiped out so that's what should happen every time you know purge the stuff that everybody used to understand that um but anyway yeah it it feels like warsh is familiar with that history and he's familiar with the way that you actually do fix economic weakness which is government gets the hell out of the way what was that 1919 1918 uh yeah it was it was like It was right after World War I. So, you know, you had the guns going back to butter.
Starting point is 01:01:57 So there was a bunch of adjustments to that. And it's basically stretched over about a three or three, four year period, of which I think only about six to nine months were proper depression. And the government essentially just let it rip. They said, look, you know, you got to purge all this crap. Murray Rothbard is a great example or a great metaphor. He says, OK, imagine that you had an industry of locust fighters. all right see all these guys and whenever the locusts come these guys go out and fight the locusts but you only use them one out of seven years right so you know every seven years you've got this explosion in the locust industry and then you have a locust recession so what do you do right do you give them free money you know do you give them money to tide them over the six years until the locust no you let them go liquidate it you know they'll they'll sell the locust fighting
Starting point is 01:02:45 equipment at a loss but that's fine because they made profits when the sun was shining you just let it be and you know that's when you had like an actual legitimate temporary industry right on the other hand if you have pets.com and the economy implodes would you bail out pets.com no of course not right that's obvious to everybody well then why are you bailing out city bank yeah well i mean a lot of these private credit funds too private equity for sure dealing with private credit funds that you know that's why part of me is actually okay with this whole shadow banking thing because the beautiful thing about shadow banking or or even shit coins for that matter is that there's no chance they're gonna get bailed out you know when wall street makes
Starting point is 01:03:27 a mistake they uh you know they essentially they apparently get their get the right to check on your credit uh you know the rest of these guys the um you know private equity the blue owl the uh You know, Solana, when, you know, when these guys wipe out, they wipe out a loan. It's beautiful. Yeah, we need more of that. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's only a couple industries that have guaranteed bailouts. So cut those strings.
Starting point is 01:03:54 If Kevin Warsh is amenable to that, then, you know, that'd be fantastic. Now we need Congress to get on board and Trump. Unfortunately, I'm not. Trump is mixed when it comes to helping corporations, unfortunately. um but yeah i would love to uh to cut those strings yeah anything else on your mind that we didn't touch on before we wrap up here uh let's see we covered everything uh did we get um the politically incorrect what was it yeah yeah no yeah i think we we covered pretty much everything oh yeah ai boyfriends and girlfriends apparently spending on ai companions is now higher
Starting point is 01:04:32 than it is on traditional dating apps so that's what's coming the waifus are here the waifus and the husband do's yes uh that's depressing i mean that's uh i mean it was always gonna happen i mean japan japan foretold foretold that trend coming i mean japan was a leading indicator of that you know young people are such a mixed bag man like if i were like 20 right now like on the one hand you have so much opportunity on the other hand you know you have so many falling boulders it's uh it's a tricky time to be young tricky times a lot of opportunity though now gen z my view it's like half trad cast like crazy right wing and then half like uh nihilistic um streamers that are
Starting point is 01:05:24 that are just trying to party gen z okay so that's the question so gen z already looks significantly more based than millennials um you know like each generation sort of echo like you know it's like a reaction against their parents right so you know the boomers are communists gen x are based millennials are communists again so that's my question for gen z on honestly i'm kind of optimistic um you know i just saw my own kids who are uh they're they're right at the tail land of gen z they're they're 15 and 17 and you know they cut their teeth or they learned about the world when before the censorship went in right so you could say you know you could say racist shit you could say just the craziest out of control stuff that came to mind um you know on
Starting point is 01:06:14 on youtube really up until what 2016 17 that's when they grew up so they got it all and i mean they are freaking out there man they're like more extreme than i am just in terms of you know like they have no respect for you know any of like what they're told for the establishment if they hear it from an official source like their their knee-jerk reaction is bullshit and then they'll go look it up themselves so i'm i'm very optimistic um for gen z now having said you know the vast majority of them they went through the socialist school system you know that 16 years of brainwashing uh if they went on to college so i mean yeah a lot of them are we're gonna have to pull them out of the matrix one by one but broadly speaking i'm i'm
Starting point is 01:07:01 pretty and i'm much more excited about gen z than i was about millennials you love to say it i mean as a millennial and i feel like i'm an outlier in the millennial uh millennial demographic but you'd love to see gen z taking the reins and uh distrusting authority we need more of that these days we're absolutely and you know if they're like this currently when they're like still in the matrix you know like they're literally still in school right they have to you know parrot the you know bs their professors so if they're already kind of based when they're still literally mid-brainwash i mean you know i think they're gonna be nuts yeah well we'll see this is uh it's been a great catch-up yeah yeah always man it's great it's great talking to you man
Starting point is 01:07:45 it was a good uh it was a good amount of time between the last one and this one so there's a lot to catch up on the ai thing really took over over the last year and i'm i'm bullish right now it's going to be chaotic like you said there'll be a lot of change drastic change but that is life that is the arc of human history is constant change up and to the right to to put it in perspective so the average person changes jobs i want to say every three or four years they change careers about every 10 years okay so even even if the ai job losses are all career changes that's about a 10 difference okay it's not that big a deal like i so i'm 53 i've changed careers four times i mean like and each time it was kind of fun i mean for me personally it was
Starting point is 01:08:35 fun and you know i i kind of like the blue collar jobs better than the white collar jobs but anyway I mean, it's part of life. It's been happening forever. You know, people act as if, number one, cubicle jobs are, like, amazing. Everybody hates cubicle jobs. I mean, you know, have you ever seen the movie Office Space, right? He's working in cubicle jobs. It's soul-crushing.
Starting point is 01:08:57 You know, he's got to do the TPS reports. And the movie ends with him, you know, with the sun in his eyes digging a hole. Okay, that's AI. But the kicker is that digging the hole pays twice what the cubicle did. like future generations are gonna be like why did you guys why were you you know mourning the loss of cubicle jobs and now i think it's um i think it's good stuff that's that's coming down the pike i do as well i do as well well peter it's been a pleasure and uh maybe we don't wait uh like a year or however long we waited to do it catch up
Starting point is 01:09:32 catch up this fall all right all right marty you're good all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives
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