Before, during, and after breakfast

AI Skeptic: This Business Makes No Sense

Ed Elson is joined by Ed Zitron to discuss the state of the AI industry (read: bubble). Zitron argues that every AI startup is unprofitable at its core. Then James Kynge breaks down what to expect from President Trump’s visit to China. Finally, Ed digs into data from the producer price index and what it could signal for inflation and the broader economy.

Ed Zitron is the author of the Where’s Your Ed At Newsletter, and the Better Offline Podcast. James Kynge is the host of the Prof G Media’s China Decode podcast and Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House.

Timestamps
00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Today's Number
00:47 - Market Vitals
01:30 - AI with Ed Zitron [interesting!–BB]
26:35 - Ad Break
29:00 - Trump Visits China (ft. James Kynge)
38:38 - Ad Break
40:08 - PPI
43:04 - Credits

America and China have different attitudes about and approaches to AI and work

Ross Douthat, Why China Isn’t Worried A.I. Will Replace Its Workers, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.

I presented the conversation to Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive) and asked it for a summary. 

 * * * * *

I have uploaded conversation to the project area, filename “China AI workers.”

It is between Ross Douthat, who writes for The New York Times, and Kyle Chan, who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. I would like you to summarize the conversation for me. I’m particularly interested in the Chinese attitude toward AI in general and the (proper) relationship between AI and humans.

This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation. Here's a summary, with particular attention to the themes you flagged.

Overall frame

Douthat's central premise is that the U.S. and China are in an AI "arms race," but Chan's main contribution is to complicate and largely deflate that framing. China, he argues, is running a different kind of race, not the same race at a slower pace.

The Chinese approach to AI: practical, not transcendent

The sharpest contrast Chan draws is between the American fixation on AGI — the idea of a "machine god" that surpasses all human capability — and the Chinese orientation toward diffusion and application. China wants AI in food delivery, ride-hailing, health care, government services, and factory floors. They want smaller, cheaper, more deployable models, not necessarily the most powerful frontier model. Chan puts it directly: Beijing is not "AGI-pilled."

He sees this as continuous with how China approached the internet era: not as a transformative metaphysical event, but as infrastructure to be integrated into daily life and governance. The Chinese state is also notably more willing to use open-source models, giving away AI capabilities to gain adoption at scale — both domestically and in the Global South — which is a strategy the commercially driven American labs largely ignore.

The proper relationship between AI and humans: tool, not god

This is where the conversation is most relevant to your homo ludens framework. Chan describes Beijing's view of AI as essentially instrumental — AI serves human economic and social purposes. The Chinese government is actively hostile to AI use that it considers "nonproductive": AI companions, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, even excessive gaming. The fear is that young Chinese will waste time on AI-mediated entertainment and social substitution when they should be building the economy.

There's a revealing parallel Chan draws: the same regulatory instinct that cracked down on video games and private tutoring platforms is now being pointed at AI companionship apps. The state's implicit position is that AI must serve the collective project — not become a substitute for human connection, productivity, or reproduction. This is a deeply anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of the technology.

So the Chinese "proper relationship" between AI and humans is essentially: AI augments human labor, fills demographic gaps (falling birthrate, shrinking workforce), and extends state capacity. It does not replace human flourishing or social life; it should not become an end in itself.

The demographic driver

Chan adds an important materialist dimension: China's embrace of robotics and AI is partly driven by sheer demographic necessity. Their labor force peaked over a decade ago, youth unemployment is near 17%, and the birthrate is roughly two-thirds the U.S. rate. This produces a different calculus than in America — the question isn't whether a robot waiter displaces a human worker, but whether you have a waiter at all. AI and robotics fill a structural labor hole, which makes China more tolerant of automation than Western economies that still have more human workers to protect.

The public mood: anxiety about falling behind, not about being displaced

Where American anxiety about AI tends toward fears of job loss, surveillance, or existential catastrophe, Chan describes Chinese popular anxiety as nearly the inverse: fear of not using AI enough, of being left behind in a hyper-competitive labor market. Individual workers, companies, and policymakers all share this orientation. Chan calls this a "mirroring" — the individual's fear of losing competitive edge mirrors China's national fear of falling behind the U.S. technologically.

On AGI and existential risk: skeptical distance

Chan thinks it's telling that when Trump relaxed chip export controls, Chinese AI companies wanted the chips but Beijing declined — preferring to build domestic semiconductor capacity rather than become dependent on American supply chains. This, he argues, is not the behavior of a country sprinting toward superintelligence. A true AGI race would involve gobbling up every available chip. China is playing a longer, more measured game.

He also pushes back gently on the "race" metaphor itself: the intermediate risks (cyberwarfare, biosecurity) are, in his view, underrated and real; the AGI-superintelligence scenario is overblown. He ends by urging dialogue between the U.S. and China on shared risks from rogue actors and open-source proliferation, while acknowledging the deep mutual distrust that makes formal arms-control agreements essentially impossible at this stage.

A thought for your book

Chan's portrait of Beijing's AI worldview sits almost perfectly at the opposite pole from Silicon Valley's quasi-religious eschatology — no Omega Point, no machine god, no homo deus. What you might find generative: the Chinese model is also, in its own way, a version of homo economicus applied to AI — purely instrumental, collectively economistic, hostile to play and to what the government calls "wasted time." It's not an alternative to the Silicon Valley eschatology so much as its mirror image — the same foreclosure of genuine play, just in a different ideological register.

Magenta, green, white

Claude has been fine-turned to talk down to many (foreign) users

Imagine you live in a small village.

English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle.

Claude answers like this.

"My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the… pic.twitter.com/7XN0nq4GYd

— Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) May 13, 2026

The tweet concludes:

The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer. 

 If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself. 

It was never broken. It was aimed. 

 

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam, Mark Graham, and Maty Bohacek, The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.

Abstract: The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments (sometimes subsumed under the “Dead Internet Theory”). What has hindered answering these questions is that it has not been understood just how much of the internet is actually AI-generated or AI-edited. To this end, we construct a representative sample of websites published on the internet between 2022 and 2025 using the Internet Archive, and apply a state-of-the-art AI text detector on them. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find statistically significant evidence for some of the identified hypotheses; for example, that increases in AI-generated text on the internet correlate negatively with semantic diversity and positively with the prevalence of positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, this diverges from public perception, which we measure in a user study, where the majority of US adults turned out to believe in all four of the above-mentioned hypotheses. Individuals who do not use AI or use it infrequently tend to believe in these negative impacts more than those who use it frequently; similarly, individuals who hold negative views of AI tend to believe in these hypotheses more than those with favorable views of the technology.

From the introduction:

Ever since ChatGPT first made large language models (LLMs) available to the wider public in 2022, which was followed by mass adoption, there have been concerns about the impact of AI-generated text (as well as AI-generated content in other modalities) on the internet and online discourse (Ferrara, 2026; Muzumdar et al., 2025). Specifically, many known limitations and failure modes of LLMs, including factual hallucinations (Huang et al., 2025), sycophancy (Malmqvist, 2025), verbosity (Saito et al., 2023), and more, have raised concerns that unchecked proliferation of such content could reduce the overall quality of internet content (Shumailov et al., 2024; Xing et al., 2025). These hypotheses are sometimes subsumed under the “Dead Internet Theory,” which they loosely expand, but which, on its own, predates the widespread use of LLMs (Muzumdar et al., 2025). These hypotheses have been difficult to verify, primarily because there is limited understand- ing of how much internet content is actually AI-generated (Santy et al., 2025; Spennemann, 2025). In this paper, we attempt to address these questions. We concern ourselves only with LLM- generated text,leaving other modalities for future work, and use LLM-generated and AI-generated interchangeably.

The authors have produced a less technical version of their research online HERE, where they have a shorter abstract of their findings:

The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI's impact on the internet.

Here's a statement of their methodology:

Answering this question is harder than it might seem. Constructing a statistically representative sample of the internet is difficult, as there is no central index, popular domains are vastly over-represented in most crawls, and archival coverage has shifted considerably over time. To work around this, we draw on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and apply a multi-dimensional stratified sampling approach, approximating a uniform random draw from publicly accessible web pages published between 2022 and 2025 (see Section 3.1 in our paper).

On top of this sample, we need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text. AI-generated text detection is itself an open problem, so rather than committing to a single detector, we experiment with four prominent methods selected based on their performance on the RAID benchmark: Binoculars, Desklib, DivEye, and Pangram v3. We then run our own robustness checks across text length, HTML versus plain text, model family, model version, and language, and choose the detector that comes out the strongest overall — Pangram v3 (see Appendix A in our paper).

AI-Generated Text on the Internet from Mid-2022 to Mid-2025. The proportion of websites classified as fully AI-generated (red) and AI-generated or AI-assisted (purple) based on Pangram v3 detection applied to representative samples obtained from the Internet Archive. The dashed line marks ChatGPT's public launch in November 2022.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Mary Magdelene: ChatGPT offers some revisionist depictions

Here's how the Wikipedia entry for Mary Magdelene opens:

Mary Magdalene (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, travelled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. In the heavily disputed Gnostic writings, Mary Magdalene is depicted as Jesus’s closest disciple who uniquely understood his teachings, causing tension with Peter, and is honoured as the “apostle to the apostles”.

Mary Magdalene is regarded by believers as a historical figure, possibly from Magdala. She is seen as a prominent follower of Jesus who was believed to have been healed by him, supported his ministry financially, and was present at his crucifixion and burial. She played a key role among his female disciples. Overall, there is limited information about her life.

The entry continues:

Apocryphal early Christian writings often portray Mary Magdalene as a prominent, spiritually insightful figure favoured by Jesus, challenging traditional patriarchal norms. These texts have inspired modern reinterpretations of her role. During the Patristic era, Mary Magdalene was mentioned only briefly by early Church Fathers, with her image evolving from a minor gospel figure to being conflated with other women in the Bible. Eventually she became viewed in Western Christianity, largely due to Pope Gregory I's influential 591 sermon, as a repentant prostitute, despite there being no biblical basis for this portrayal.

Somewhat later:

According to the Gospel of Luke,[19] Jesus exorcised "seven demons" from Mary Magdalene. That seven demons had possessed Mary is repeated in Mark 16:9, part of the "longer ending" of that gospel – this is not found in the earliest manuscripts and is possibly a second-century addition to the original text, possibly based on the Gospel of Luke. In the first century, demons were believed widely to cause physical and psychological illness. Bruce Chilton, a scholar of early Christianity, states that the reference to the number of demons being "seven" may mean that Mary had to undergo seven exorcisms, probably over a long period of time, due to the first six being partially or wholly unsuccessful. [...]

Because Mary is listed as one of the women who supported Jesus' ministry financially, she must have been relatively wealthy. The places where she and the other women are mentioned throughout the gospels indicate strongly that they were vital to Jesus' ministry and that Mary Magdalene always appears first, whenever she is listed in the Synoptic Gospels as a member of a group of women, indicates that she was seen as the most important out of all of them.[...] That women played such an active and important role in Jesus' ministry was not entirely radical or even unique;[32][34] inscriptions from a synagogue in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor from around the same time period reveal that many of the major donors to the synagogue were women.

As witnesses:

All four canonical gospels agree that several women watched Jesus's crucifixion from a distance, with three explicitly naming Mary Magdalene as present. Mark 15:40 lists the names of these women as Mary Magdalene; Mary, mother of James; and Salome.[40] Matthew 27:55–56 lists Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James and Joseph, and the unnamed mother of the sons of Zebedee (who may be the same person Mark calls Salome). Luke 23:49 mentioned a group of women watching the crucifixion, but did not give any of their names. John 19:25 lists Mary, mother of Jesus, her sister, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene as witnesses to the crucifixion.

The Gospels make no mention of her skill at riding a motorcycle. 

A note about the images. All of them are by ChatGPT. In the first one ChatGPT uses its default photorealistic style. I asked for a Jack Kirby style image for the second. The third is a generic graffiti style, though if you look closely you'll see Ben-Day dot patterns in the skin tones that were probably inherited from Roy Lichtenstein version that I haven't uploaded (boring). The fourth one is in the style of Salvador Dali while the last is Picasso, where I specifically mentioned Guernica. 

Notice that in the Picasso version the woman is straddling the bike while she's standing next to it in the other versions. Also, she looks more directly at Christ than she does in the others and her jacket is unzipped. I didn't ask for those changes.

Cat and bird

by Enoki Toshiyuki pic.twitter.com/a3TJ9rj8Bq

— Ramin Nasibov (@RaminNasibov) May 13, 2026

Art Deco on rails

Art Deco on rails ❤️

Duchess of Hamilton, the crimson queen of the Coronation Class.

1930s British brilliance. pic.twitter.com/wsClotAkDW

— Muse (@xmuse_) May 12, 2026

These people are crazy! Give me some sanity, some peace, give me some irises.

China and America as mimetic rivals in A.I.

Yi-Ling Liu, The U.S. and China Are Hurtling Toward a Shared A.I. Future, NYTimes, May 12, 2026.

This is a long article. Are are some highly selected excerpts.

The rivalry:

The growth of artificial intelligence has been presented as a rivalry between two fundamentally different systems. America commands capital and chips while China marshals engineering talent and manufacturing prowess. America holds an edge in building software — enterprise tools and cloud platforms. China leads in hardware — humanoids and autonomous vehicles. America pushes ahead with frontier models, with its artificial intelligence labs making moonshot bets to build a superintelligence. China focuses on scale and diffusion, with its tech firms embedding A.I. as quickly as possible in every sector of society.

We’ve been told that the ultimate prize in A.I. is the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. The country that figures this out, the theory holds, will establish world dominance through turbocharged economic and military power.

Internal division in both countries:

But looking past the headlines and the highlight reels, you can see the sharp divide in both countries brought on by A.I. Those who build and bankroll the technology speak of the future as a promise to be profited from, an opportunity to be exploited. In Silicon Valley, college dropouts talk of A.I. tackling climate change and curing disease. Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to “Supercharge your A.I.” and “Stop Hiring Humans.” [...]

China’s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing’s Zhongguancun, known as China’s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another’s star engineers while freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. [...]

Miming memes:

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as “high agency,” while the rest of us are “bots” condemned to the “permanent underclass.” In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (“corporate cattle”) and jiabangou (“overtime dogs.”) These same workers have long used the viral term “involution” to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the “NPC” or “non-player character.” They feel like the background role in someone else’s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.

Frictionless companionship:

Outside the office, both Chinese and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale. Over 70 percent of American teenagers report using chatbots as companions, nearly one in eight for mental health support.

Similarly, in China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. In a country where living alone is quickly becoming the norm — with single-person households expected to possibly reach 200 million by 2030 — A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic.

Religion and spirituality:

The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. The 20-somethings of America check astrology apps like Co-Star, part of a $3 billion dollar industry. Some in Gen Z are rediscovering Christianity, and religious conservatism has re-entered public life. In China, fortunetelling bars have popped up in cities, astrology apps like Cece are going viral and young people are consulting DeepSeek to predict their futures.

Nostalgia and authoratarianism:

When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable. Many Chinese idolize rural vloggers such as the celebrity YouTuber Li Ziqi, who rose to viral fame during the pandemic by sharing videos of her self-sufficient, pastoral life in the Sichuan countryside. You can see the same dynamics in the popularity of the tradwife Instagrammer known as Ballerina Farm, who documents her Utah homestead, milking cows and making doughnuts from scratch for her eight children. Both of those women live off the grid and embody an imagined idyll where chatbots and corporations do not exist.

Nostalgia also has a dark side, encouraging the rise of once fringe, illiberal ideas into the mainstream. This has been underway in China for years, with its influencers and ideologues rejecting liberal ideas and drifting toward a conservative centralized authority. In the United States, we see the growing influence of pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who argues that liberal democracy should be dismantled in favor of a C.E.O.-led monarchy and whose ideas have found an audience among both America’s tech and political elite, from Peter Thiel to JD Vance.

Final paragraph:

Once you step back, it’s easy to see the warping effect of the U.S. vs. China race. It’s a story used to justify sprinting ahead without guardrails in the name of beating the other. By focusing on our rivalry, we have become blind to our vulnerability. Instead of fixating on who crosses the finish line first, we must work together to lift up the people that both countries have left behind.

There's more at the link.

Here come the sun

Trump is hell-bent on nuking America back to the Stone Age

OK, OK, I get it. That statement is exaggerated and misleading. The Stone Age is too far back, 1960 will do. He’s not using nukes, he’s using oil and coal. And he’s doing considerable damage in the process.

Thomas Edsall has a long article on the subject – all his articles are long – in today’s New York Times, “Trump Is Fighting the World’s Stupidest Culture War,” May 12, 2026. His opening salvo: “On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.”

Edsall goes on:

That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.

As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.

Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.

That’s Edsall’s introduction. The rest of his article adds detail upon disgusting detail.

What’s it all about? According to one expert, Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’s all about the Benjamins:

The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.

I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.

That’s how it is with Agent 47, who has inverted John F. Kennedy’s exhortation from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Agent 47’s revision: “Ask not what you can do for your country – grasp greedily for all your country provide for you.”

Well into the article, Edsall reports:

...not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:

The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.

Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.

As the old saying goes, with friends like this, who needs enemies. To quote that great philosopher, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Edsall’s list of depredations and stupidities goes on and on. Here’s another:

A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.

In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.

Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”

Edsall’s conclusion:

Where does all this leave the country?

Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.

The power of the Presidency has allowed Trump to become a prisoner of his appetites and grievances.

AI’s New Trillion Dollar Mission (is BS)

YouTube:

This week on Prof G Markets, Scott Galloway and Ed Elson discuss the growing belief in Silicon Valley that AI won’t just replace workers, but managers too. Then, they break down the proposed pied-à-terre tax in NYC and why they believe taxing luxury second homes makes sense. Finally, they unpack why alcohol stocks are struggling while GLP-1 drugs are booming, and what that says about the future of American consumer behavior. [...]

Timestamps:
00:00 Preview
00:26 Today's number
01:04 Today's episode
05:23 AI's new mission
24:35 Ad break
26:55 The wealth tax debate is heating up
46:10 Ad break
48:41 The death of the night out
01:08:56 Week ahead
01:11:11 Scott's prediction
01:12:51 Ed's prediction
01:14:05 Credits

Starting at about 20:08, Scott Galloway:

And that is there is something to be said of and there's a balance here. I've in my companies, I'm doing some virtue signing right now. I've always said there should be two or three people and I've always had small companies, right? They they start at zero. Once we have a someone in HR or CFO, I either step step down from the CEO role or become the chairman because I I don't have those skills to scale a company and I don't want to deal with that stuff.

But until then, I've always said we should have two or three people that are one or two bad decisions away from living in their car. They're not, you know, they're they have bad judgment. They're they do stupid shit all the time. They're not what I'd call there's no way they're leaving us for Google. Let me put it that way. A little bit down on their luck maybe. And guess what? The business can be a great means of a little bit of social good.

And also the notion this is basically the notion that part of an organization if you think of stakeholders and I didn't get this. So, I always thought my goal was to pay people less than market and figure out other tricks of the trade to get them to stay and retain them. And then what you realize as you get older is that what is more rewarding is to build a profitable company and slightly overpay people. And if there's some fat in the organization and if there's a few people who quite frankly are, you know, not going to get a job anywhere else but work, you know, work hard or good people and maybe they're not, you know, amazing. Okay, that's okay too. And in some countries, the objective of a lot of the owners is to increase employment. Now, you have to balance that with making sure the organization can survive and has profitability.

But this is again this singular messiah complex that is nothing. There's only one stakeholder and it's shareholders. and I can figure out technology to replace people and we can all work singularly and then eventually the AI will take out those singular teams and replace them and then there will just be one. It'll be Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk who each own 49% of the world and do a lot of ketamine and if they're good enough they will provide UBI for all of us such that we don't uh rise up and kill them.

I I I'm not a fan, Ed. I'm not a fan of this whole line of thinking. I think it's [ __ ] and I think it's unhealthy and I think it's nihilistic.

The icon, the omelette, and some grass