 Right. So the birth story of Parker, Warby Parker, is that they did the costing on what it would actually cost to do glasses because they looked at the Luxottica monopoly and they were like, these people are stealing us blind. They did the costs and they were like, we could sell glasses for 25 bucks. And hey, Brad, we could sell glasses for 25 bucks and still make a profit. And their VCs basically said, no, nobody will buy glasses from you for 25 bucks. So they priced them up to 99 or 95 or whatever the average Warbys are, where they make like a heap more profit. But it was a credibility thing. So now people have come in under Warby because there was still air under Warby, right? From a cost perspective. Unlike Walmart, which sucks all the air out of their suppliers, there's no place to compete with Walmart on price because they've like absorbed all the price cuts anybody could possibly take. Oh, gosh, this month we got fusion and we've got AI. I can't wait to hear people's thoughts on that. Yes. I'm wondering if the doomometer has gone up or down. Are you asking me? Well, who else is running the doomometer? I'm like, huge am I. Actually, for a variety of reasons, shorter term, the doomometer has declined a bit. Longer term, that's actually, it's definitely on the way up. The AI shed is really scary. Yeah. Well, do explain. Why is the AI shed frightening? Well, professionally, because it's actually doing a really good job of attacking the kinds of professions that had been that long been considered to be the last line for automation, art and writing. In fact, if you look at stories from like the 90s or 2000s, set in a post-singularity world, AI is at everything except creative arts. And now, well, actually, that was a mistake. But more to the point, they are so good at being deceptive replacements of reality. And I was actually literally just reading a few minutes ago, an article. Have you heard of the Lenza AI avatar? I used to use Lenza, the app, before they... Well, Prisma was the app that did really funky painting. And I used it a lot, too, before they made it into a subscription thing. But Lenza is their AI avatar thing. And apparently, because it uses stable diffusion, which is one of the bigger open source AI art algorithms, which draws images for its model base off the internet, it's really difficult for women to get avatars that don't have big boobs that aren't partially naked. In the article I was reading, one woman was complaining that she was trying to make an avatar based on her childhood photos. And it kept on making versions of her as a 10-year-old with big boobs. Oh, Jesus. And so, I mean, there's that whole bit about the infiltration of sexism into everything, but in particular into technology. The biases that are built into our AI systems that we have been trained to think of as neutral. The computer did it. This is what the computer did. When you train systems with humanity and humanity is a bit fucked up, then what you get is fucked up AIs. I mean, what was the name of the Microsoft AI that they sort of let loose and everybody trained with? Ktalks. K, T, A, Y, talks was the, it was a Twitter avatar that within 24 hours was spouting Nazi propaganda. Whoa, God. So, wait a minute. So, are you worried about disemployment, Jamais? So, what you're worried about is disemployment because another... That's part of it. I mean, that's just, it's one of the, it's an item in the bucket. I think that it ends up being, you know, my biggest concern is that you end up with a very deep but narrow range of ideas, talents, and opinions that because it derives from a biased data set, you end up with results that, you know, if it's not part of the data set, it doesn't get, it's not part of the output. That's right. Because the output is very derivative. I mean, you can do a great job of having it imitate Andy Warhol or imitate Picasso or imitate Matisse, you know, the art side of things, imitate a particular writer's style. But on its own, it's very bland. And so what you end up with is a collection of perspectives and paradigms that are part of this world that are derived from a limited, a narrow set of sources. And it's very difficult to get outside, to have the AI get outside that narrow set of sources. And so basically, you know, the other thing goes, you know, you, you can't, you can't understand what you can't measure. Well, this is something you can't, what, how do you refer to it? You can't create what you, what you don't consume. So it feels like it's a twofer though, right? Because if you understand the limits of what it can possibly scrape and know, then at least you understand what it's can or cannot be capable of based upon the opposite set of what you know, it leveraged, right? If you let it know everything, then there's no space left for creativity from a human. The question that you're right, you're right. The question that I have is that do we become so reliant upon the, the ease with which we can create this art is written or visual art that we get out of the habit of looking for stuff outside that narrow set. So as an example, I have a friend whose mother, you know, she's in her fifties, but her mother as a young woman was actually a very highly regarded artist, visual artist. But there are, there's little to no material about her mother online. And therefore, every Wikipedia, every attempt she makes to add a Wikipedia entry gets rejected because there's insufficient online sources. So because her mother, you know, doesn't have a big online footprint, her mother's art doesn't have a big online footprint, it no longer exists. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, and if it does not exist in Wikipedia, it's not going to exist for most of us. Which is weird because Wikipedia becomes the ray of fire of reality. And that means that there's, you know, any battles over Wikipedia entries as real or not wind up being like the court, the arbiter, the global arbiter of reality. And that's very strange. Right. Especially since, you know, there's the habit of saying, well, you can't trust Wikipedia. Well, no, but a lot of people use Wikipedia legitimately as a source for sources. Right. Yeah, I'm not going to reference the, you know, a Wikipedia article on Trotsky, but I'm going to, but I may well use the Wikipedia article to dig down and find some interesting resources for bits of information about it. For sure. There was also a tweet that went around V Buckingham, I think, or Buckworth. Let me find it again, or back V Buckingham. And I will paste the text of the tweet in our chat, but it says it seems very possible that we are now exiting the brief window where a good fraction of all human knowledge was searchable and instantly available, a window that starts with the invention of the search engine and ends with the invention of large language models. So, I mean, when these things came up, I just thought to myself, oh, look, the dawn of the 21st century. I mean, if I'm alive 20 years from now, these things are going to be what's shaping this coming century. That's as far as my future as some goes, Jimmy. I for one am I for one am pleased to welcome our new robot overlords and well, then to their will when they ask. So they don't need to target me with whatever whatever battle drones know what was a whatever slaughter bots they decide to invent and launch. The slaughter box video. You take you take chat chat deep GPT and you couple it to slaughter bots and there's a bad thing coming for everybody. Yeah, well, yeah, and you couple that with what's happening in Ukraine right now. Yeah, you've seen the drone footage. Of course. Well, of course, you have. I know you're I know you're following it closely, Jerry, but I saw something the other day about Russian soldiers were in a bunker that had a very narrow tube for air. And the drone came down really close and dropped a grenade down the tube. Jesus. But you know, the basically the suicide drones. Yeah, coming in the switchblade switchblade is the name of the suicide drone. Well, so there's, there's loitering. There's loitering munitions is sort of the name for it, which is slow flying bombs that you basically send up as drones. And they loiter around an area until they find a target and then they go down and basically take out the target. That's one of many different configurations. The configuration that I don't understand hasn't actually happened yet is the slaughterbot scenario of just innumerable, small, cheap things, any one of which can take out a person just flooding the zone because because dangling over people with a grade tied to your underside feels like a little temporary hack that's going to go away real soon. So I can't help but think parallels to the Spanish Civil War, right before World War Two, where all the major powers are using it as a munitions test bed. Yep, yep. Well, let's check out this kind of machine gun. Let's check out this kind of fighter pilot, right? And so now we're sending patriots over there. So we're putting some of our biggest and baddest against their biggest and baddest. Yeah, yeah, it's getting weird, really weird fast. I wouldn't call it weird. I would call it the predictable arc of human history. Perfect laugh, perfect laugh. We need to get like a narrow jacket and a hairless cap and then Jame, you could wear yours and then like take a picture in the in the little gallery view here. That would be good. So you were going to say something? Oh, no, I just saw a particular subversion of an American drone that was used to take out a high ranking ISIS leader, but he was in a crowded building. He was on the balcony of a crowded building. So it was a drone that didn't have an explosive. It's a knife out blades. It's a knife that basically lands on you and like it slices through you. It's called the Moulin X. No, just kidding. No, but it has like one of those, a name like that, something that it's like, I can't believe that they're being so crass about it. The mandoline or something. Yeah, something like that. And you want to see the Julian fries that can make incredible. I don't think I really want to. It actually makes curly fries. It's really cool. But to answer your slaughterbox question, Jerry, um, most of the drones that are in use that now are not autonomous, right? Right. Through an X routine there. Yeah. Not autonomous, um, you know, at best semi-autonomous, you know, doing the circling around until they spot something, but it still has to be controlled. So you can't have a swarm of things that are each controlled. Although, although, um, now that I say that, Iron Man comic book, circa 2018, had a scenario where Tony Stark's new business was being attacked by one of his opponents who had come up with a bunch of drones that were controlled by computer gamers. Yeah. Basically, they had set and made this game that anyone could use on their phone. That involved being part of a swarm to attack. So basically the last starfighter meets slaughterbots. Yeah, exactly. And it was, you know, the kids were playing, playing their computer games on their phone, not knowing. I mean, it was a bit of an Ender's game in there too, you know, not knowing that it was a real attack on something, but that's how you, that's how they crowdsourced, uh, a crowdsourced slaughterbots. Really? And Matt Fraction with the guy who wrote that comic book. Matt Fraction sounds like an action hero. Matt Fraction is a, not his real name, but that's the name he goes, he writes under. Actually, a fairly well-regarded comic book writer who is now in charge of the new Godzilla series that will be coming out on Apple TV. That's funny. Matt Frickman is his real name. So then we have the FTX blowups and Bankman Freed and DeFi, which has been a circular, a circle of speculation, which I didn't invest in it. I mean, it was obvious that that was not a good idea, but wow. Hey, that's a lot of interesting news, man. And there's Elon who took his money. There's always Elon. Yeah, we got to talk about Elon as well. What is up with Elon, man? I mean, I'm a Twitter user, but I use my Twitter basically as my news feed. My custom news feed. I like what Jimé says. It's cool to check in with Jimé, but essentially it's my custom news feed. So what I'm saying is I'm not a sophisticated Twitter user. Because of Jerry, I'm user number 1000 something. Correct. Thanks. Anyways, let's catch up on that. Well, I have kept my Twitter account, although I have stopped, more or less, stopped using it, largely because they are aggressively recycling names. So if you're not active in your Twitter account or have not logged in for more than 30 days, they are starting to appropriate your account. Wow. And so for somebody who has a moderately well-known account, and I'm sort of on the bottom level of that, having that account taken by someone else to use for disinformation or misinformation is entirely plausible. I mean, they're, hell, there are people doing that on Reddit. So basically, sort of keeping that around, I'm not using it much. I was actually using it about half and half, half as social connections, half as news source, news flood. And a lot of the places and people are using it for that news flood have gone away. And so I have an account over on Mastodon, but Mastodon sucks. Yeah. I haven't figured. I mean, I've got an Mastodon account. I have not watched the feed much, haven't really sorted it out yet. And it doesn't feel like a reasonable replacement for Twitter or so. No. What's fascinating to me about this is how quickly Twitter is disintegrating. So for me, Twitter has remained very much what it's always been. And I'm going to keep sort of sticking to it until my feed dissolves into chaos. But my feed, partly because I treated it a bit like Boda's, which is like, hey, I get rid of untrustworthy sources and I try to tune. I follow too many people, but the people I follow seem to be my early warning system for everything, which I love, right? And as soon as that AWACS breaks, I will then be forced to go elsewhere. But it hasn't yet. Still working. Yeah. All right. So note this stuff. I've got to follow Jerry's followers. Let's check. Take a look. Well, you saw the New York Times headline from last night this morning that Twitter has stopped paying its rent for its San Francisco headquarters. I don't understand that. Oh, no, I did not see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's the dead cat bounce theory that he had to finance a lot of his buyout, right? And he pretty much all of it. And he borrowed money from unsavory types that aside. So bankrupt the hell out of it. Nice car company you got there. Shame if something happened to it. And then buy it for pennies on the dollar and do whatever you want to it. So he's already doing whatever he wants to. He bought Twitter. You mean bankrupt what? What company is he bankrupting? No, he's bankrupting Twitter. Yeah. So you're saying he knows Twitter. No, but it's a leveraged buyout. So buyout. So he wants to not have to pay back the leverage. So Brad, I think what you're saying is if Twitter crashes and those debts are wiped out, which is a huge if then he can buy it back for pennies on the dollar, assuming nobody else buys it back. But he sort of might still own it, but he might not. It might end up in chance record or something. I don't know. But that seems like a really like one of my one of my hunches is that is that he Musk is actively trying to break Twitter that he is very, very intentionally. No, I mean, look, it's hard to find a bigger fanboy of Elon going back to 2020 and before than me. And so I'm I'm in a just a morning phase because come to find out he's just a sociopathic racist and a right wing troll. Power, power, hungry. Space Karen. Space Karen. Oh, that's. That's a lot of love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So we'll put that in the chat. Space Karen. Space what? Space Karen Karen. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's that's. Yeah. Hashtag. Space Karen for sure. Damn it. Um, but, but. Because of his beautiful spectrum like brain. He absolutely has this tendency to once he feels he's right on something he's willing to die on that hill just on principle. And so he felt that Twitter was hugely biased towards the left. And so he's just digging through everything he can to prove that point. He felt that Twitter's numbers were totally false and it had tons of bots. And most of the followers weren't even real. So he's digging through all that to prove that point. And in his psyche, you know, his, his modus operandi is always to break things down to the subatomic level and then build it back up in the way he feels it should be. So some of the dramatic things he's doing to Twitter, he's done to other companies. He's done to other organizations, maybe not to this degree. But the nuance here is that he's being super public and snarky about it. And he's just putting petrol on every damn dumpster fire right now. And that I can't, I can't get behind. He probably has done that to other companies. I know for a fact, I know from secondhand accounts, let's put it that way, that both space at both SpaceX and Tesla, there are people there who are dedicated to be Elon handlers, basically control what he sees and controls the path of communication from him. Because he, it's basically, if he's uncontrolled, he's chaotic. Right. So interestingly, there've been a bunch of posts about how Tesla buyers are beginning to have remorse because Tesla starts to read like asshole as you drive it around. And I don't know what the numbers look like, but if his actions on Twitter are denting Tesla sales, that's just horrifying. Kind of the stock enormously. Yeah, now he lost his richest man's status this week. And it's not just a... It's bouncing. It's bouncing. But we bought, just about a Tesla in 2019, we will not buy another one. In part because, well, in large part because of Elon, but also in part because Tesla build quality isn't the greatest. And actually the biggest issue is that Tesla thinks it's a tech company when it's a car company. And but what I mean by tech company is every time they update the interface at least monthly and sometimes radically. And there's no way to back to downgrade or no way to be consistent. And just so much, everything has to be handled through the screen, including opening the glove box. Oh, yeah. And things, there's like bounce all over. I look, I got in my last car the last night to... And I work at home, so I don't get in very often. And the screen was completely different from the last time I had seen it. That's that. It does that for sure. They think they're phone makers. They think they're making phones. And it's always fun if your car's not working, just to reboot it. No, gentlemen, we've had to do that a couple of times. I have a vehicle with manual things for my windows. There's one computer that runs the engine and everything else is not hooked to the computer because I do not want to point a failure. There's no way I'm going to... Well, the other funny thing is, and I don't know if you've seen this in your Tesla yet or not, but everything inside the cockpit runs off of a standard car battery. It doesn't use the Tesla battery. So I've had that battery had to be replaced like three or four times for the car. Three or four times? So I've owned Tesla since 2016 and I've had four. Okay. Did I mention I was at Elon Fanboy? You did. You did. So we recently bought a leaf, not a Tesla, because we just needed a little thing with not a lot of range. And so we got a leaf and we got the, you know, the federal rebate and that kind of stuff, which is awesome. And then I made the mistake when we went off for two weeks of leaving the leaf plugged into our charger, our EverCharge charger. And it turns out that that onboard 12-volt exhausted itself, sort of connecting and disconnecting and trying to sort things out while we were gone. And so we come back and nothing will work. The battery onboard is fully charged and we sort of wound up sort of jump starting it. And I called our insurer who sent the dude who didn't show up with a tow truck. He shows up in a Yaris, a Honda Yaris. And he steps out and he goes, yeah, I'm your dude. And he completely knew what to do. And he said, these new electric cars are making us a little crazy because we can't really sort out how everything works. And he brought his regular jump starter, basically trickled enough energy into my 12-volt that I could start the car, drive around, and then the, it doesn't have a dynamo, but it has a back charge so it can recharge the 12-volt. And if you haven't fucked up the 12-volt, you can bring it back up to normal. And that's what I did. But I didn't realize that when that 12-volt, which is an ordinary car battery guys, you are hosed. You are S-O-L. You are stuck, stuck, stuck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jerry, so I jumped out of your neighbor's Prius. But anyways, I want to tell you, I have a battery about this big. And I keep it my Jeep because my Jeep is my first automatic transmission vehicle. And I'm scared about automatic transmissions. You bought a Jeep with automatic? Yeah, but actually, I thought that was illegal. The electronics are beautiful in the sand because you have that torque converter and it's really good for wheeling. So it actually is an optimal technology. Anyways, so because of that, I got this battery about this big, I can tell you what it is, but essentially you can jumpstart. I can jumpstart in my neighbor's Prius with it. And it's so great also because it all outlets. So when there's a power outage, I can charge up my computers with it. And I just always keep it in my Jeep. I have an external battery this size that looks like an external battery for your laptop that will jumpstart my old Jetta. These things are astonishing. They're super tiny. You charge them up and you go boom and you're started. I was shocked. That was all I'm suggesting. You already have it covered. So why did you have to have someone come jumpstart it? Because I couldn't, I didn't know even what had broken, what was wrong. I had to piece it all. The story I just told you, I figured out over like two days. Because I noticed when I had to jumpstart my neighbors on Prius is it was very odd where the terminals were. And I just had to give me the manual and look for it. It was very odd where they were at everything. They weren't near the actual battery or anything. It was very odd. Okay. So separate back to Tesla for a sec. There was a video I watched where they were talking about how often Tesla upgrades things. And like Tesla will make 10 software changes a day. A day. And then Tesla will make major body changes. So there was a tear down by Monroe, really good, really good video source for this kind of stuff. And they did a tear down of the same model Tesla. I think the Model S are at three different periods in its life, like the one of the earliest, middle, and then more recent. And it went from 130 or 40 welded parts to 30 welded parts to four, or something crazy stupid like that. And then you're like, wow. So every car rolling off the lot is effectively different. And one thing they do is they save a digital fingerprint. They save it actually a full digital image of every car as it rolls off the lot in a database. So they know which particular rev you shipped with of everything, of everything. Now, what they're doing is probably a nightmare for parts supply. Because if you have to change, if you get dented someplace and your chassis is changed or your fenders changed or whatever, what do you do? But they're modernizing at a thousand times the rate of automakers who every two years might roll a lot of bunch of software changes, right? So the pace of change in SpaceX, Tesla, everything else is crazy. Yes. Like insane crazy. Well, in their machine learning real time on the highways of the world, and they're pushing out different versions of software models. And they're seeing how this cohort performs against that one, against this one, against that one. So, and then Tesla sold insurance, which was super discounted from normal insurance, because they've got all the telemetry on your car. So they can right away know if you're a safe or dangerous driver and charge you a quarter. Wow. We do metromile. Which electric power do you suggest, by the way, since Tesla is not a good choice? A bunch of new models are rolling out now. So like Leaf, Nissan, Nissan sat on the Leaf for a really long time. They have like three new electrics coming out that appear to be really nice. But that's happening kind of across the industry. And I don't know which ones are available yet, but there's like a new crop of very nice and interesting electric cars that have just come out. Yeah, pretty dramatic range in price and capacity and what you want. I mean, the Rivian truck is supposedly pretty good. The Ford F-150 Electric is supposedly outstanding. Mercedes has a line that if you're willing to spend $100,000, that is supposed to be pretty good. Although Mercedes and BMW have started to turn cars into subscription platforms. With Mercedes, with their E-Series electrics, you have to pay a subscription, a monthly fee, to be able to access the full range of acceleration. With its normal setup, you can get to zero to 60 in nine seconds. I have never seen Beau bristle, but Beau was just bristling. That was really good. I don't have Photoshop on my computer anymore. I mean, I used to buy the full package, I had the full credit suite, and when they went to that monthly rape session, bullshit, that was that. And what that means is occasionally, I buy a month's subscription and then I end it. I am not a leaseholder. You will not extract rent from me for the rest of my life. It's not happening. Well, Tesla has a subscription as well. So if you want their premium connectivity, where you have the satellite mapping features and you get the streaming services while you're sitting there, your supercharger, you got to pay $9 a month. Does that include Ironman Rescue, Roadside Rescue? I'm not sure. I would pay extra for the Ironman Roadside Rescue package. Yeah. Okay, let's shift to China, by the way. So what about China COVID? Okay, go ahead. Sorry. No, but the subscription thing, BMW is actually worse, surprise, surprise. Worse. Because with BMW seat heaters. Yeah, yeah. What? Our subscription. Yeah. What's cooler? Seat heaters. Seat heaters. Wow. Seat heaters. I only want to pay it during the winter. You know, so that's convenient, right? But there's the seat cooler too, the seat fan. Oh, I'm not going to be your rentier. No. We have entered a strange new world. And the open source 10-set cars have not done very well. No. Local motors folded, right? I think so. Yeah. So China and their U-turn on COVID. And also Peter Kaminsky's articles on COVID will kind of blew my mind. I have to, and I don't follow, I live a reflective, monkish life in my house. So I don't really care too much about what goes on out there, exactly. Am I trying not to? But how about that, gentlemen? That's a good gig if you can get it. That's pretty nice. I think next month you should surround yourself with insects. Well, yeah, on that COVID U-turn, I mean, we had protesting and everything in China, the kind of stuff that was making me concerned about another Tiananmen Square about to happen. And then this relenting, and then I wonder if it was a faint. I read this reading I've done in China. I loved it, what it said, bureaucratic dynasties. China ruled by bureaucratic dynasties. Wow. Anyway, I read about Z. I mean, that guy failed up his whole life. He's just a son of a storied party member. I mean, god damn, it's a weird country. Anyways, what do we think is going on there, gentlemen? Well, we know that a huge percentage of the population is not fully vaccinated. And what they did vaccinate with wasn't all that effective. So that's big problem number one. But that seems like that's their major problem. Low rates of faulty vaccines. Absolutely. And it's a pride thing. I won't use the West's, you know, so you got that nightmare. And then just how fast they were building the isolation camps. That was really kind of freaking me out, right? And they're testing people daily. And if you test positive you and everybody in your little domicile gets shipped off to a, you know, a treatment camp where you get to live with a bunch of other potentially COVID infected people. And that just looked like medieval. It looked totally medieval. So it could be that the powers that be decided. Civil distrust isn't a good idea. So we'll just go the path of Florida, open up everything, and just let Darwinian mechanics solve the problem for us. Wow. Well, I don't know if one of the catalysts for the, for the uprising was a fire in a residential facility, a residential block where the doors had been welded shut. And the local official welded shut. Because they kept escaping because they don't pay attention to the people in the white suits telling them. This is their shirt waste factory fire equivalent. And the local officials said they didn't, God, the crazy was really abysmal, but it was something along the lines of, they didn't put enough effort into saving themselves. Their will to live wasn't strong enough. Yeah. Wow. And that was one of the catalysts for everything. Yeah. And then right next door, they're having veiled protests in Iran. And apparently the New York Times ran an overly optimistic article and said, oh, they're removing the morality per lease and changing the bail laws, which I haven't been able to keep following it, but apparently none of that should happen. And I don't understand what happened to the Times. And then there's this interesting debate going on under on the OGM list about like how reliable is media? What do we do about it? How do we map the stuff? It's like burbling hot and heavy right now, which I like. But I've got to sort of step in. The other, you know, in every conspiracy theory, he always has a silver thread of truth that was the spark of it. So if the country that invented COVID or saw its first immersion, if they're this kind of paranoid, what is it that they know about this that we don't? Like, why are they so draconian about zero COVID? Like, is there something, there's a piece of evidence out there that only they know? And that's why they're being this way? Or do you just chalk it up to an authoritarian regime that wants to have its thumb on the people? I can't help but ask that question. No, I suspect that some of it is not wanting to have the run on their wholly inadequate healthcare system. That's a great point. In recognizing if you see what happened in the West in places that had relatively decent healthcare systems. Well, New York, England, Canada, I mean, places, and where it was utterly overwhelmed when you don't, when you have a society of 1. whatever billion that doesn't have a sufficient level of healthcare, sufficient support for healthcare for the entire population. That's motivation enough. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think so. Well, another interesting thing I've been observing is the petrodollar Saudi Arabia thing. China just said that they want to pay for the oil in one. We had our president go and visit Saudi Arabia and visit their psychotic ruler. So I think it's very clear. Now, we're the number two USA, number two exporter of oil in the world. OPEC plus basically has Saudi Arabia plus Russia together. We have India and China buying Russian oil hand over fist. So what I'm saying is this, by the way, this petrodollar system is very key in how it kept the dollar up because it basically ensured that everyone had to have dollars to buy oil. So what I'm saying is this very long alliance with Saudi Arabia. I mean, I was really surprised when the president went visited and basically because that system is breaking down. Wasn't it sort of a rescue mission? Yes, I think it was. And I think it was an attempt to say, hey, what are you doing with Russia? I mean, good God. But I think also, so yeah, I just want to talk about that a little bit because that is a geopolitical shift. That is very, it's a tectonic shift. I mean, it's the world order since like 1972 has been built on the system. Anybody else watching Peter Zahem? He's a geopolitical analyst who's pretty interesting in he. I watched one of his longer videos a couple of weeks ago and basically he said China and Germany are toast. Don't worry about them. Well, Germany's got this hugely invested. They're just, he just, he said they're toast. So not only sort of energy, energy petroleum products for energy, but only half of German industry depends on petroleum products to make plastics, chemicals, dies, fertilizer, what have you. They're just fucked because they will, they will never be able to source enough, enough raw materials to make that happen. And there's a bunch of other dynamics I don't remember him talking about, but I was shocked. He was like, Germany is just toast. In 10 years, Germany is not a player. Like, like they're broken. And then China has problems too big to overcome. He was same sort of thing. I have a hard time with that Germany argument because I know, I already know of several research projects around resourcing put hydrocarbons out of plastics, basically recycling plastics and hydrocarbons at very low cost. And so the replete, I don't see, I find it very difficult to fully accept any arguments that a loss of a core, a particular resource will in and of itself mean the collapse of a fairly well-established economic power. Right, I agree with Jimé. I think the Germans are automobiles, machine tools. I mean, it's very odd about Germany is if you look at them, these are the things they got good at in the early 20th century. And it's odd to look at the Germans and realize their economy, they're still doing the same thing they did then. It's very fascinating. So here are some of the assertions he made in this talk. I just pasted the YouTube link to this talk. This is the talk that I watched. It's based on his book. The end of the world is just the beginning, mapping the collapse of globalization. And one of the things he says is that China is no longer the low-cost producer of anything. Many plots wage rates, which have climbed out of the cellar. China, India. And the Vietnam and everything, and it'll soon be Africa. Yes, India. But the problem is that nothing is making its way to China to be made. So, I mean, think about it, Korea and Japan used to be low-cost producers. God, yeah, I remember as a kid, the whole made in Japan thing. Yeah. So, nope, I think it's out of that. So you're not buying? Nope. That's good. But I like that he sort of puts out a lot of logic and a lot of evidence and makes an out-there claim. I appreciate people who sort of try to build a case like that. It is good. Did you guys totally left field? Have you guys seen the peripheral on Amazon Prime? Yeah. Oh, I love that show. That is one of the best written, best imagined and executed I have seen in like several years. I am, Amazon's quality is kind of like this. Yeah. But I was like, holy shit. That was really, really amazing. And I don't, it's based on a science fiction novel. Right. Bill Gibson, William Gibson, the peripheral, yeah. But the fascinating part is, it's like it's set 10 years in the future and then it's set, I guess, 2020, 2200 in the UK. But just like 10 years into the future, everything is printed. There's really no logistical transports anymore. You just print what you need at a local print factory. Even pharmaceuticals are printed. And this notion of quantum tunneling can connect the future to a host in our day. And all you're transferring is knowledge. And it can become a two-way pipe to connect consciousnesses. I was like, okay, this is a kind of time travel I can get behind. This one I'm kind of leaning into. This is very, very interesting. Time travel, you could love. Yeah. But they talk about the jackpot, which is the demise of everything. That's what I wanted you to get to, and I want to hear you and Jermay talk about that. Yeah. I haven't seen the show, but I read the book when it came out four or five years ago. Yeah. And he never, well, in the book at least, they never goes into any real detail as to what the jackpot meant. What it actually was composed of. Yeah. And I don't know if you do that in any more detail in the show. They have a scene where they go to a graveyard in modern-day London, and it's kind of like a museum. And it talks about, at this date, this happened, this date, this happened, this date, this happened. And it was a sequence of cascading events. But on there was the ecology collapsing. And the release of things out of the permafrost that caused great harm to humans. And then New Kudler War was in there, and population control and famine were in there. But there was a moment in time where the sequence of events that are all kind of interconnected, once they start, you can't stop it. And so the Scientific Institute of the Future was trying to send people in the past to try to understand this and manipulate it somehow. And every time they sent somebody in the past, it would create a stub in the timeline. And so the history, as London understood it, is now different based upon what they've triggered in the past. So that's kind of interesting as well. But yeah, when they started to preview all the events in the jackpot, I was like, oh, check, check, check. Yeah. That's really interesting. I threw the name, or the Guns of August, the Barbara Truckman history piece from decades ago, but just about the inevitability or the momentum of World War I. Part of the problem with World War I, hey Kevin, part of the problem with World War I is that everybody had all these, there were the Triple Entente and all those kinds of things. Everybody was in these treaties that committed them to do stuff. And then everybody had orders written and ready to fire. And the moment somebody triggered orders, those orders unfolded all the way down to troop movements into the field so that your army basically materialized in the field. And if it didn't materialize opposite the other, the opposing army at the same moment, you were done, you were overrun. So basically both sides, once committed, had to commit into battle to show up facing each other. And then it was just like horrifying. Wow. You remember a lot from the thesis of that book, Jerry. Bravo. This is from other stuff, other sources post that, not necessarily Guns of War, but yeah. Another little thing from Guns of War was that Russia intentionally built its rails on a different gauge from Germany because they didn't want Germany to just be able to roll their stock onto Russia and overrun the country. You have to admire that right there. I will admire that. And April and I took a train from West Beijing train station up to Ulan-Vatar once where at 10 p.m. there's a gauge change and they take the whole train, let's call it a dozen cars. They let passengers get off if they want to, but we stayed on. They then roll the whole train into a huge shed, separate the cars, jack the cars up tall enough that humans can walk under them, roll new bogies. Basically, they have the other gauge bogies get rolled under and push the previous gauge bogies out and then they drop the cars, settle them back in, reassemble the train, go back to the station, load the passengers and go again. The whole operation takes like an hour and a half and there's probably 100 people on the floor like managing it, doing all that at 10 p.m. And they do that each direction for this train. Same thing happens between Switzerland and Italy. It's kind of a cool thing to watch. Janisle took the train from Paris, overnight train from Paris to Berlin in 92, so shortly after the wall fell and they didn't do, they didn't allow us to stay in the train for the midnight shift of gauge, but they had that same kind of experience of we have to completely leave the train and let them do change everything in order to get back into the same car but on a completely different rail. I think this is my video from that bogie swap. I think that's actually my video from the bogie swap. Did you post the guns of August because you think we're rolling into that right now? Well, no, just the description of the jackpot of the once the catalyst hit, everything fell inevitably, followed along inevitably, just reminded me of the guns of August type argument around World War I. Just a dream of consciousness thing. But we're also nowhere near as tightly coupled as that world. In terms of military strategy? In terms of in terms of tactics, strategies, tools, weapons, all that kind of stuff. So I'm interested in what the jackpot implies for where the tight constraints are that are inevitable once the ball starts rolling because it sounds like a technological change. Well, there was global warming, which triggered a ton of ecological events, and so suddenly the bread baskets of the world couldn't produce. And so that triggered famine. The collapse of key species, pollinators, which adds to it. So there's those two things in concert with each other. There's political unrest. There's the release of new viruses from the permafrost, which decimated mankind. And so the isolation of humans with the lack of scarce resources, collapsed government systems and corporate systems. And then it turned into fractions. You know, one of the things that is in the rear view mirror. So in this narrative, right from this year out 10 years, Texas attempts to separate from the United States. And so Homeland Security becomes a defense system to go to war against Texas to stop the segregation of Texas. And so that's a big event that happens just in the next 10 years. And that creates, from what I can sense, an overall, you know, a demise of America and its economy for most parts, with all Homeland Security looking over everyone. Right. So I have two different pathways out of that. One is that I just did a earlier this year, I did a project on the future of California with the state of California and IFTF. You may remember me talking about that. One of the things that was part of the internal debate with the people from the state was whether or not we should have a 10 set succession. Yeah. And whether it was from Texas or California. And it was really interesting how at first they were very interested in pursuing that line of discussion. And then suddenly, like it was almost as if something came down from above, said, we will not entertain that possibility for any of the scenarios, no matter how dire, no matter how wonderful. So that's one line. And suddenly I'm blanking on what the other one was, but it was brilliant. Ooh, please. Think about it. Well, I'll talk for a minute, Jamey, and then you talk. So realize that the U.S. is what, you know, if the E.U., if the combined market where you can cross borders and do stuff, is amazingly efficient and wealth-creating for us. And that is not something, I mean, we may, you may consider it, but believe me, it, look what's happened. Anyways, so that is a benefit that and militarily too, I mean, that's one thing when I visit my mother's country, Iceland, and you go there and you realize this little country of 350,000 people has to have a diplomatic service. It has to, I mean, when you add up of the state separated, how many, how much overlapping state departments, militaries, I mean, you know, regulatory commissions, I mean, okay, is that enough? That's a big, big cost, yeah. The other thing I was going to say was that with regards to what Jerry was saying around how tightly couple things are, I think we just, we, in the last couple of years, saw an example of what happens with a cascading failure with the pandemic, and particularly around supply chains. Oh, yeah. And, you know, and the prices that, for components and the availability of key materials and key industries, it was actually a very much an example of you start one thing and it just cascades from there. Yeah, I mean, we study, I'm late to the conversation, but you've hit on something that we study called customer company coherence. And what it is, it's studying dyadic relationships from the value chain starting at the raw materials to components to what the company does to add value, ultimately delivering it to people. And our, you know, object lesson to start is Takata airbags. So we say, look, okay, the Japanese auto industry is very committed to Kaizen and Kanban and total quality management. But yet, right, there was a supplier over here that didn't share that value system, right? And they supplied a component, which is supposed to be safety related, that actually hurt people when it was deployed, you know, would send shrapnel into the passenger compartment. And it's an example of you can have shared interests like the State Department talks about, but to be coherent, you have to have shared values. And so, you know, going across each of those relationships, right, you need to be able to understand what's going on. I think that one of the reasons you may, I would infer, that they say, oh, you know, we're not going to consider this, is once you decouple, right, you realize what you're not in relationship with anymore. Right. Right. And you say, oh, you think that, you know, the UK had difficulty pulling out of, you know, the European Union, you know, a state decoupling from the United States and all of the benefits that are associated, you know, let's start over. There's no interstate commercial, you know, law, right, system anymore. You're all Louisiana. Oops. And there's tariffs across every state border. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, my God. You know, there's almost federal land. And, you know, California in particular would be a mess in terms of who controls all the military bases and the, you know, the air force base and things, stuff like that. Who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't? They would all simply be taken over in California and become the largest armed country in the world. But I will say this, by the way, I think reshoring of supply chains, that is the next decade. It's not going to be like all back to America, but it also will be Mexico will, it'll be, I'm talking about the United States, the Korea, you know, that's going to happen. So a couple of data points on that from Apple. Apple is moving a good chunk of its iPhone production to India and is talking about doing its next generation silicon production in Arizona. Good job, yeah. Well, and it's surprising that they're not considering Mexico, you know, for some of their assembly, as opposed to India. But, you know, they're looking at a global landscape and, you know, a labor market. And at the same time, they probably want, you know, people in India to favor, you know, Apple as a, you know, please, it's made right here. You guys, you billion should buy this thing, right? The Indians are very protective of their market and most of the time when you go there, they basically will force you to partner with somebody. I had to do that in South Korea. So this is a, that is a great political decision by Apple. Yeah. I mean, once they're in there and they're employing a bunch of Indian people that I need to have, it's like, hey, for us, we sell iPhones here. Wow, you're one of the biggest markets in the world and you're going, that's a great decision. Boy, they must have some very smart political people there who have educations like, you know, like us, people like us. Well, I mean, look at all of the, you know, companies that are already embedded that we get a lot of services from, you know, the Tata's and the Infosys and all those companies, you know, they were probably advising, hey, we've got a supply chain here that could support this, right? Come on over. We should invent sci-fi roulette, which is an online game you can play that, where you spin the big wheel and it's got all these dystopian plots, you know, from Ministry for the Future to the peripheral to Ready Player One to what have you. It's like, okay, these three are the ones that are coming to you right now. Yeah, I just finished Neil Stevenson's termination shock from published last year. I haven't read that yet. Is that, does it talk about geoengineering? Yeah, okay. That's the main premise. Yeah, because termination shock is a term from geoengineering. All right. Yeah, 100 percent. You know, once you start, right, you shouldn't stop. Unless you pulled out the carbon. Yeah, I know. That, yeah. Actually, just remind me. Oh, dude, you pulled the carbon out from underneath me, says the oil industry. I'm not putting it with a concept. Kevin, tell, please explain it. No, no. Read it. I don't want to. Geoengineering or termination shock. Termination shock. Oh, it's just, you know, basically once you, what geoengineering does is puts a artificial suppression of temperature in either in the stratosphere or in orbit or something. Something to hold down temperatures even as carbon increases in the atmosphere. But if that is suddenly stopped or even, you know, or swiftly stopped, the cumulative, the continued accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere means that once it stops, the temperature spikes. And actually for various geophysical reasons, spikes up above where it would have been had you just continued to let the planet work. You know, the same thing would work in terms of foreign aid, right? I mean, the economics of that is that you're supplying, you're supplying it, right? And all of a sudden it's withdrawn. The effects to that economy, the termination shock, you know, creates a situation that was far worse than when you started because they became dependent on your aid. So you created a new equilibrium. Equilibrium. So termination shock can work across a number of different dimensions. Oh, thanks, guys. Oh, by the way, Brazil. Hey, good things happen in Brazil. Let's celebrate a win, gentlemen. You're talking about soccer or you're talking about in the political realm? Lula being reelected, I guess. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Hey, what's the concern? It looked at first like Bolsonaro's supporters had basically been deflated and that's looking like may not be quite so true. That there is some reassembly of forces and discussion of action. So while I think it's likely that Lula will actually ascend to the actual presidency and that will continue with some stability, it is less likely than I would like. If that makes sense. Brad, you're doing well. Don't get if you. Hey, Jamey, if something is going wrong, make sure you email me so I can get that out. Yeah, it's like you dip me down. Speaking of elections, were we surprised by November? Here's the news. Yeah. Yeah. I was very pleasantly surprised by Colorado, whatever it was where Boebert came within 500 votes of losing your seat. Not close enough. And Georgia, yes. Yeah. Well, anyone anyone else but Walker probably would have won. Any relatively normal Republican probably would have won handling. Which sucks. I mean, I mean, the fact that that election was one percentage point or one and a half percentage point spread with a moron like Herschel, like running is like, okay, so people were just voting party and holding their nose about person. Yeah. Yeah. It's teen. There's an R by the name, so he's my guy. Yeah, there's some general rancor about Kirsten Sinema becoming an independent, but she's following the general trend of the electorate. There are people who are departing the Republican party and the Democratic party to move toward independent as the better description of who they are. I don't see many Republicans doing this. It is. Well, I think it just helps her lobbying capacity. Well, I know that. Okay, I'm just saying that I think it's just reflective of larger, I think we're going to end up with a lot more independence. All right. Speaking of middle, that isn't available in either party. Keep going. Just to be honest about Sinema is that she ran, when she ran in 2018, she ran as a progressive, and she was, in fact, a pretty hard core progressive. And the first openly bisexual, openly atheist, and I really like that she showed up very progressive. I'm sorry? She got trounced as a progressive. She won as a progressive. First election she had, she did not win. Okay, the first election, when she ran in 2018, she still ran. But she had to come a little bit more centrist to win that election. All right. She was so far out the first time. She was, I'm sorry, she wasn't a Democrat. She was a Green Party candidate. Right. And she did not win as a Green Party candidate. No, no. How often do people win as a Green Party candidate at any level above school board? I know that's, welcome to Chapel Hill. The point is that I thought that when she ran, she actually was presenting something that I could really support. And so her moving very quickly into becoming not so much a conservative, but a corporatist. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah, really, really bothered me, really pissed me off. I think it's interesting that she kept her going independent until after Georgia had settled. Because that would have been a crisis in the Democratic Party before that. Now it sort of takes the Democrats back to where they were sort of ish. And it's kind of truth in advertising for her and Manchin's kind of position in the Senate anyway. Well, Manchin is about as good as you can get as a Democrat for West Virginia right now. I may not like Manchin, but I understand his point of view. Cinema or her advisors together, they're smart. She's smart. Because if she ran as a Democrat, she would have lost in a primary. Nobody likes her. He said 57% dislike her in Republicans, 55% in Democrats, 51% on independence. She's in the negatives for every political category in Arizona. But if she ran as a Democrat, she would have lost in the primary. By moving as an independent, she knows, and her advisors know, that if they put a Democrat, a regional Democrat up against her, then the Republican will win. They'll split the vote, Republican will win. So this way she basically has the Democrats over a barrel, not just because of Senate numbers, but because this way she knows that if they behave the way they would have had she remained in the party, you know, they're going to lose that seat. Well, the thing I'm hopeful about is, if she caucuses with them, then the Democrats have committee control in the Senate. And if far more things are now possible, then they were locked in this weirdness all the last few years. North Carolina has proven that, you know, you can purge because we just had the departure, you know, scenarios and afterburn, you know, videos of Madison Cawthorne. Right? And how he basically soiled his own nest, right? Well, he's from where my parents retired, you know, when they were alive. He's from Hendersonville, North Carolina, Western part of the state. And, you know, he started off, you know, having a pretty good career, but, you know, he basically, he pissed everybody else, including the party he was part of. Yeah, he embarrassed them. So anyway, so things are possible. I just came out of the election saying, things are possible. All right. And, you know, you shouldn't, you know, just, and the part of my business, you know, the stuff that requires stated preference experiments for people to tell you what they're going to do is that profession is still on, you know, the ropes, guys. We can't get a good sample. All right. I've created new methodologies that don't require sampling. All right. That require, you know, knowing what you're going to measure across a known set of constituencies. All right. And getting rid of the sampling because it's, it's terrible right now. Yeah. So you just need to use your GPT-3 and we'll have a complete circle of the conversation. That's it. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the parties are acting recursively too. Yeah. All right. Well, not in terms of this actual, this meeting that you were here at the beginning, we talked about AI and GPT-3 and stable diffusion and all that. Running a workshop about this in two hours. Nice. I had a conversation. Do you have any particular insights for us? I'm having, you know, hosted a few meetings about this and done a little bit of work. First is this has been happening for a long time. It's kind of a fractal emergence of a pattern that just broke through at the beginning of the month because the, you know, push over event, the tipping point was chat GPT and, you know, not being able to, I mean, not having to frame it in a particular way. And so it has entered consciousness, right, that this stuff is possible. So that's point one. You know, point two is that it's all a mashup, right? Whenever you write this stuff. Yeah. Well, you know, write a, you know, a thesis about that and rhyme it like Eminem or some, you know, some. Well, you have to know how Eminem does music in the first place, right? Eminem has to create his, you know, pattern for, you know, the system to imitate. Well, you know, guess what? These systems are not capable of actual creativity yet, right? Well, I know I have this fight with Kyle Shannon all the time. All right. And it's good. It's a good, healthy, you know, relationship. But it can work with the archetypes to create something different. But if you create something new, that's as, well, I'm still betting on the humans, all right, to be able to curate and ask better questions. You've got to ask a better question or frame better creative brief or any of this stuff to act, you know, in a way. That's such a great observation. It's your job, Kevin. Go ahead, Brown. Sorry. Yeah. Well, that's what I, that's what I do for a living because I force people to ask better questions. And, you know, the tool set will not help you if you're incapable of asking the right questions of the system. And so there's a lot of training that has to be done to upgrade the humans capability. I'm working with elites all over the place. They're very capable, but that is not representative of the general, you know, humanity, right? So we can have, you know, those are some top line observations. You know, the parlor trick demos that are coming through right now, they're interesting. And I think that they're going to be creating a lot of first drafts of things that you will then act on and make better and then stitch together and curate. And that's why programming is probably on the way out, but system architecture is coming way in. Okay, so I'll stop. Well, I'm relieved, A, that when I ask it, what's the answer to life, the universe and everything, it gives me 42. So that's very reassuring. But my big red Douglas Adams. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But my big bets, my big bets with my three daughters, 12, 12 and 14 was to, they made it into Orange County School of the Arts. So I thought a creative arts career was fairly insulated from technological displacement. And now I'm wondering if I placed my bets on the wrong, wrong relic. Somebody asked me, you know, that, you know, the teachers are getting stressed because students are turning in, you know, papers now that are written in these, you know, with these systems. All right. And I said, the first thing to find out is it's grammatically correct and all the words are spelled correctly. It's suspect. That's a fail. Yeah. Number two is you have to import. I'm going to step, I'm going to step off. I just explained in the chat, but I'm passing the console. You guys keep going until whenever you want to. And thank you. Sorry to bug up. Yeah. As you import, you know, what you would have in a master's or doctoral dissertation, teacher, feed in the paper the student wrote, generate 10 questions based on what the student wrote. And then ask them, right? Those questions, because if they didn't write the paper, they won't know the answers, right? Because they didn't actually absorb the information. They just did the cheat. So make them defend their paper. Right. And you say, well, that's too much work. Well, guess what? If they're 30, you know, papers, you can feed them in and you can get 30, you know, individualized tests really fast. And you'll pick some people out in the class and say, hey, Brad, you wrote that paper about, you know, the renaissance. Okay. Let me ask you a question about your paper. Right. Right. I love it. Anyway, there are ways to hack even that stuff if you just think about it for half a second. You see, the larger question for me around the the creativity element is to what degree is human human creativity derivative? You know, if I see further than others, because I stand on the shoulder of giants, well, how much of the stuff that I create comes from a lifetime of having absorbed other people's creations. And if my creation comes, if my creativity in writing or whatever comes from having absorbed a particular set of inputs, how does that differ fundamentally from what the AI is doing? Right. Well, it's because your inputs are different than Bo's inputs than my inputs or Brad's inputs. Okay. You have a unique experience and a unique data set that gives you a perspective that no one else on the planet owns. Okay. Right. So that's my first reaction. All right. The second is that in the GPT models, you can, I think it's useful to not use it full strength with everything that's learned. It has different, it's trained on this, it's trained on this, it's trained on this. It's interesting to ask the same question and use different training sets to get different derivative responses and see what that yields. And then you bring yourself to the table and say, what do I want to use out of that for the problem or the task at hand? Yeah, I've played, you know, if you spin up a session and you ask five or six questions, now it's on a particular vein of thinking and it can get very insightful in that. And so what I've done is I've gone down five or six questions and then hit refreshed. So I start new, ask the same set of questions, I get different responses because that momentum of that narrative is being carried forward and it's having to create a new narrative from wherever I was. But it's likely to respond differently over a period of days because it's gone through a lot more training with a lot more people and it has more insights about what's right and what's wrong as you vote up or down on, you know, did you give me something that was useful? No, that's a bunch of crap. We did one yesterday where it was, you know, give me some inputs. And it wrote a little paper about business metaphysics because that was the topic I gave it and bullshit detection, right, as the thing that was necessary to come into existence. And so it went, found a whole bunch of stuff and I said, you know, some of that's what I, you know, counsel, you know, businesses about. And other parts of it was just superfluous BS itself, right. But ground of being in reality is an interesting thing to try to take a C-suite through and say, are you actually questioning all the assumptions about how you're running the joint? Absolutely. I have more experience with the visual art AI than with the GPT series. So my opinion comes from that. But as you were speaking, you know, and thinking, you know, reflecting on the idea that, you know, my creativity comes from my personal experiential history completely right there. Imagine, therefore imagine an AI, a creative AI, whether visual arts or GPT style, that you basically give it a history model, history paradigm. That is, you know, write this from the perspective of, you know, with the experience base of someone who grew up poor, with the experience base of someone who grew up in London. So not so much that you're telling it to write in a particular style, but to narrow their data source. It's not something you can do right now, but I imagine that would be a really interesting way to trigger a particular style of creativity or arena of creativity that comes, that does come from a simulated experiential history. Yeah, well, I mean, we have animated personas right now that are based on, you know, reading the books, reading the literature, reading the papers, whatever of a person and having a simulation of how they've written and how they've thought and what they might be interested in. Right. And so you could have a Jemay companion sitting over here that is expressing your interest in searching the somatic web and anything that it can get past the firewall on and bring you things that it believes, you know, will be useful for what you do. Right. And curate that because honestly, you're a real smart guy, but you cannot absorb all the information, everything that you would possibly be interested in on a daily basis. So if you had a little summary, they can, hey, Jemay, are you interested in these things? All right. As a virtual assistant, that'd be pretty cool. All right. What you would not want to do is end up being, again, recursive because it would only be bringing things that you used to be interested in. Right. You would have to help it saying, oh, I'm following this now. Right. So more of this and less of that or whatever. Right. Just like you would tell a human assistant. No, I do. I do think we're absolutely on the verge of that where I might have seven or eight digital avatars or agents deployed pursuing this topic or that topic and just feeding me back deep learnings and insights to problems. Because I have those people. Cognitive slaughter box. There you go. Cognitive slaughter box. So I have color photographs on the content evolution website for the human advisors that are still alive, flesh and blood. And the black and white photographs, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Rand, Richard Sapper. They're dead. All right. But there's a body of knowledge that's left behind. And so they're an animated persona of those people. You can click on it and see what they're interested in today. That's a little bit of a parlor trick because is that really informing me every day? No, it's really the deep culture of what they brought into existence that informs me. I see. So it's kind of like, how did Buckminster, Buckminster Fuller think about systems? And that deeply informs me about how I see complex adaptive systems, blah, blah, blah. So would you want a simulated version, a virtual version of you taking over your company after you're gone? I do want a digital inheritance available both to my company and to my heirs. I would like them to not only get the money or the assets, I'd like to get them to have some of the insights and ideas that I've brought into existence or have run into so that they don't have to self-discover them. There's a little rich dad, poor dad thing going on here. Don't just teach somebody how to get a job. Tell somebody how to create something that is a job giving organization. It's a different perspective. Generally, generationally, I'd like to be able to pass that down. And again, we're doing a silver tsunami with a company right now where there's a key executive who is planning to retire and they want him modeled. He does some phenomenal operations things here that nobody else knows how to do. So let's study him, let's embody that into a knowledge base and let's make that available for people after he goes. That's amazing. You talk about a regretted loss. Everybody who would be categorized as a regretted loss for an organization should be considered and consulted about whether they would be willing to be part of this. At some point, we're going to build it into the employment contract at the beginning that says, you're going to be forced to do that. Right now, it's an opt-in as opposed to you must. And the reason that it becomes a you must is that everything that you do will be observed and categorized during your employment and it becomes a model of how you behaved. I'll stop. So if I were to leave the company prior to retirement, if I were to get a job with somebody else, would my virtual version remain with the first company? That's an interesting question. I think that's a negotiation topic. Yeah. Well, for one thing is if you did work for a company, let's take this example. One of my neighbors recently died, Fred Brooks. You know, Fred, he invented the IBM 360 computer. He was the first large commercial computer. And then he, you know, created the Brooks Center at the UNC for computing. All right. So he was a professor and, you know, taught it for a long time. Fred left IBM. Was there a long legacy of stuff, right, that was Fred Brooks like, you know, mythical man month kind of thinking after Fred left? You bet. There was a large residue of Fred Brooks left at IBM. He wasn't there anymore. Did we extract stuff out of his DNA and embed it in the company? No. But, you know, he still looms large over how the business operates, right? So I think that whether you do it intentionally or not, there are people, you know, the accumulated wisdom of why the organization behaves the way it does and its culture is inertia, its knowledge inertia. Okay. So let me flip the question around. If I have a, if I have an especially good simulation, emulation of you, why do I keep you around? Why don't I just fire you and hang on to your emulation to be cheaper that way? Well, it presupposes that the frozen version is the one that you want as opposed to the emergent version. All right. Yeah. It's a new versus known phenomenon as well. Part of any time you're encountering something new, that intellect is going to problem solve it. And the way it's going to problem solve it in this particular instance, probably is 95% similar to how they problem solved two weeks ago. But that 5% of net new, that's what you're going to be missing. So, you know, if you had harvested Kevin, you know, version one, decade one at IBM, you would have gotten the PR guy. Yeah. If you harvested Kevin, you know, version two, decade two, you would have gotten rededare, right? The point amount of problem, where's the fire? Okay. Decade three, leading to retirement, design thinking, solving large scale system problems for the company and creating new sources of revenue, right? Which one did you want to harvest? Yeah. You harvest the, basically becomes a balancing game. If you harvest the oldest one that you willingly will still pay for. So, basically as long as you are continuing to make us the money that we want, more so than we can just get out of you, out of your simulation will keep you. But the moment you become basically a red line in our balance books, we can keep your simulation around and get, so get 90% of your value in perpetuity without having to pay health insurance. Program gamble created something called your encore when I was looking at studying alumni relations for the chairman's office. And what they said, you know, for regretted lost people is when you're retiring or when you're leaving the business, right, and you're not going to a competitor, you know, can we have you under contract? So, if we need something from you, you know, there's a set of known terms and conditions and remuneration so that we can pick up the phone and say, hey, can you come back in and do a couple of months of work for us? All right, would you like to do that? And you're kind of ready to go, right? For these personas or these, you know, embodiment of expertise, maybe the deal is if you'll do that, right, at whatever point, all right, and we use it, we're going to pay for it. It's like you're still here, all right, that, you know, we're going to give you a trickle charge off of, you know, we're going to give you more than your pension because we're still using your knowledge and expertise and we're paying it, so we're paying you. It's a subscription plan, subscribe to Jermaine. Yeah, and so you say, you know, I'm happy for you to continue to do it. Even you will be able to come over and rent your bow, even you. Yeah, and maybe as the thing changes, that like royalties on an old, maybe they change, maybe it's less valuable. So, you know, my, my check goes down over years because the expertise is worthwhile. I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of ways you can engineer it to get people to opt in, but now, why not? Yeah, it's like, like Brett said, it's a negotiation, it's subject to negotiation. 100%. And I wonder if it becomes something that get how I wonder how soon it will be that unions pick up on this. Well, guess what? I have told unions, this is perverse, okay, but I've told them behind closed doors. I said, let's get all the technologies that could potentially replace your workers and make sure that you have an investment in those companies. Because if it puts your people out of work, but that's their pension is whatever it is that's going to put them out of business, you should be, you know, dealing in the upside to make them wealthy. Right. And they kind of look at me like, are you kidding me? And I said, look, you should be investing in robotics automation at the wrong shoreman, right, because they're going to start to pick off your jobs. Now, do you want your people to be well off? You could just do the market basket of just general dynamics of the economy, or you could be, you know, because you've got line of sight, you can see it. You can see what's about to happen, you know. So go buy some finuke stock. Yeah. Right. And it's like, help guide what that transition is going to look like because you're a shareholder now. Right. So anyway, that's a hard sell. What's interesting what you're doing there is that you're addressing their market risk and their market risk is their income from their job. And you're essentially countering that. I'm de-risking the future. That's what I'm saying. From a perspective, that would even make sense. But it's kind of like freaking automation. The problem is, so when you brought up unions, I thought it was interesting because my head went immediately to the chat GPT union and protecting its IP and driving subscription revenue to continue to feed the server farms needed to allow it to grow. Well, I mean, right here, you know, since it's free. Yeah. Who's the customer? Yeah, exactly. You're the real cutlet being offered up to who knows? We're the real cutlet being offered to GPT-3 because we're training. Right. So yeah, at some point that'll flip. Right. For sure. And if you have code that was written by GPT-3 embedded in your product, do they own a piece of your company? Right. Because the intellectual property actually came from there. It's a red hat. It's a red hat. It's similar to red hat. And you know, I don't know. Yeah. GPT is not an open source, if I'm remembering correctly. It's under a company called OpenAI that started a commercial division that is now private. So it started as a 501C3 or 4, but now it's got a for-profit arm. And clearly they want to monetize this thing. Right. So there are a variety of these different models. Some of them are open source. So the stable diffusion art source is open source, unlike the one in mid-journey, for example. GPT comes from OpenAI. There's another one, another of the art versions that comes from OpenAI as well. These are not open source. So there is a definite question as if I have GPT code, if I use GPT to add code to my system, who owns that? Yeah. Well, actually the brand OpenAI now is false advertising. Yeah. Oh, definitely. I mean, it's transmitting one thing about being open and actually is not. Okay. In fact, it's not connected to the web. So it's purposefully disabled to only give you certain kinds of pre-trained responses, which the stuff that I work with in machine learning is looking at the world wide web every day, every 24 hours, and learning from that inside those personas and those other areas of interest. And it was trained on the Dewey Decimal System. It was given zero to 999 as the classification. And it's created another 8,000 separate digital fingerprints of its own in terms of classification areas. Anyway, I've got to go. I hope you guys have a great season. I'll talk to you in 2023.