Tennessee: A Journey Into A New Hard Tech Frontier

If you ever have the chance, I recommend going into Kid Rock's Nashville Steakhouse with Kid Rock.

How y'all doing? What's up, brother?

How are you, man?

Nice to see you.

You may not care for his politics, but the man is hospitable.

Holy shit, now we're rocking.

To be inside Kid Rock's private dining room is to be visually gangbanged by America, Trump, and Kid Rock himself. It's glorious, if you're into that sort of thing. This bathroom is amazing. The only bit more impressive is the women's restroom, which is a tribute to Kid Rock's ex-girlfriends, and also lobsters, apparently. The point of this is that I've come to Tennessee to talk to Kid Rock about songwriting and what AI means for the future of music.

Everyone's kind of freaking out right now.

More broadly, I have come to Tennessee to see all that the state offers on the technological front. For Tennessee is full of surprises if you know where to look.

Okay. Oh, shit, yes!

Cue the nerdery montage.

Aha!

It's glorious.

Y'all would probably expect us to start in Memphis or Nashville, but we're going to begin in Crossville, population 13,021. It's like a lot of small American towns these days. There's a solid Main Street, some nods to history and faith, and some ups and some downs. The two star attractions in Crossville at the moment are the Buc-ee's, because Buc-ee's is a a damn American icon. And then there's the startup Whisper Aero, which is an aspiring American icon.

So what you see here is the future of small aircraft. It takes our unique electric ducted fans directly into the leading edge of the wing.

Whisper was started in 2020 by these two gentlemen, and their goal was to make the skies quiet.

Whisper is a next-generation propulsion company. We're delivering cleaner, quieter, more efficient thrust for air management. So that's things that move air on the ground as well as air mobility. So everything that flies through the sky.

I just have one question for you. Are you still believers?

Yeah!

I'm Mark Moore, 32 years at NASA and then 4 years as an engineering director at Uber Elevate.

Much of Mark's time at NASA was spent working on electric aircraft and vehicles that could take off and land vertically before such things were considered cool.

20 years ago, that was insane Star Trek geek talk.

Ian, meanwhile, studied aerospace engineering at Stanford, then worked at Northrop, and then went into startup land. They both ended up at Uber Elevate to try and make flying taxis a thing.

I'd been thinking about how to do these quiet propulsors for like 10 years before I went to Uber. When I went to Uber, we saw what everybody was doing, from Aurora Boeing to Hyundai, and we said, "Yeah, that's good, but I think I know how to do it better." The company's big invention is a new propulsion system.

It builds a fan out of lots and lots of small, thin blades, which it attaches to a fixed rim and then connects to an electric motor.

See, we have a lot of blades.

Yeah.

And they're all attached like a bicycle wheel rim. Well, if you look at this, the bottom one is a Schubler, and you can see there's a gap, and that creates these tornadoes at the tip of every single blade. We don't have those tornadoes at the tips.

Like, if they actually wanted, why couldn't they support on both sides?

Because from the beginning, We are obsessed with making this low noise. So we started from a design place. What do we have to do to make it really quiet? One of those answers is it's got to be at really low rotational tip speeds. If we were spinning at normal tip speeds, it would just rip apart. The centrifugal force, you couldn't do it. So that's why they don't put the rim around it. But one of the cool things about that is when you go to this really high number of blades, then you can push the tonal content above human hearing.

Mark is a legit legend in the aeronautics field. He played a key role in the rise of air taxis and advised companies like Joby and Archer Aviation. But what Whisper is proposing is borderline outrageous. The company is saying it has hit on a major aerospace engineering advance that others have missed despite decades of research. For me, hearing would be believing.

Now we're going to see the engines in action and we'll see competing existing things on the market in different classes.

Yeah. What you see over there, that's at about 5 pounds of thrust. And then that guy is the one that's going to go on and propel 1,000 to 10,000-pound aircraft.

All right, I'm in. Ready to feel the thrust.

So this is the low thrust rig. We've got our 5-pound fan as well as a Schubler that's producing about the same amount of thrust.

This is the competing one?

This is a really high quality Schubler electric ducted fan made in Germany.

And you can see the swirl.

Yeah, yeah, lots of swirl in it. These are carbon fiber blades, far fewer blades and stators. Than what we do, theirs is far more expensive than ours.

Okay.

So now you can barely, barely hear it.

Barely hear it, yeah.

And there's less of that swirl, it's more of like a straight line.

For people who are not swirl experts, how important is that?

If you think about the force, right? Any swirl is a deviation from just straight thrust.

Yeah.

So the less swirl you have and the more just straight thrust you've got, the more efficient you're generating that.

That makes sense. It's just true shot. All right, should we scoot down? We'll go.

Yeah, big guys. So this one is going to put out way more thrust. We start at 40 and then we're going to ramp up all the way to 70, 80.

Yes, bottom one again is a Schubler, but much larger.

Why are you guys picking on Schubler so much?

We're complimenting them.

They're the best product there. Before we kill them.

As Whisper's turbine kicked in and again mercilessly dominated Schubler's, I had a strange urge to put my body on the line in the name of aviation progress. Or maybe just for fun.

It was glorious.

These turbines are meant to one day go on air taxis and planes and drones. And the military very much wants Whisper's technology so that it can fly things that see and hear near people without them noticing. In the short term though, Whisper has been working to fix that great scourge of suburbia.

Part of our business model is not just about aviation.

Yeah.

We're developing the world's quietest and most efficient leaf blower.

Oh man, we got leaves and everything.

We got leaves.

Yeah, we bought every single electric leaf blower and some gas ones.

Everybody hates leaf blowers. I feel like if you guys actually solve this, people will be happy.

We solved it.

Yeah.

What we have is more thrust, which is what matters, but with efficiency that's about 40% better. So I know that sounds crazy, but that's how bad small electric ducted fans are typically.

Yeah, so these are all electric. This one is the Whisper one, and these three are like, these are kind of the leading Yes. Should we do loudest first, maybe? Or biggest, I guess?

And just like that, once again it was time for a demonstration. And again, I was willing to put my body on the line for all of you.

Jesus, dude, it's gonna hurt.

All right, here we go.

You gotta wait for the whisper one.

Hold on, his cheeks are being pushed back.

Yeah, that's good constant thrust.

Getting blown was nice, but there's more about Whisper that I'd like to show and tell you. For one, the company's headquarters is a little nuts. Hello, Mark.

Ashlee, great to see you again.

Just a few miles from the hangar is this former timeshare resort. Mark bought this place and turned it into Whisper's original campus.

I took my UberShares and bought this It's a foreclosed timeshare. We all moved in and for 2 years we blitzed on the new technology and proved that it worked. And now we've got a headquarters downtown and in Nashville. And this is where the interns get to stay.

And this is your house?

This is where I'll always live. Come on, it's right on the lake. How can you not want to live here in Tennessee paradise?

Yeah.

The interesting thing is the younger single people for some reason wanted a dating life, and so they wanted Nashville. The families were really happy here.

Oh yeah, you do have a putt-putt.

Yeah, it needs a little bit of work, but we'll get to that too. This is what we call the tennis house, where we have fun discussions. Oh yeah, and drink a little bourbon.

You gotta keep the interns out of here.

Yeah, no interns allowed.

The timeshare is an example of things you can have and do in Tennessee that you can't in Silicon Valley.

Welcome to Whisper.

So too is Whisper's R&D facility located in the Crossville city center. This building used to belong to a magazine publisher, and now it's being used to test and manufacture aerospace parts. The Crossville locals have welcomed Whisper with open arms and open wallets. In return, Whisper can do more engineering for less money and bring the city tech jobs. Whisper's leaf blowers will go on sale soon, which is nice. But for the company to really become a big deal, it needs to put its turbines on more things that fly through the air. Redesigning aircraft around a new engine is incredibly expensive, time-consuming, and risky. For Whisper to succeed, it would have to prove to skeptics that it's a massive leap forward and worth the trouble. That said, Whisper plans to perform a number of demonstrations in the air over the coming year. We wish them luck because major aerospace advances are rare and prized. And now it's time to bid Crossville goodbye and push on through more of Tennessee.

We just left Whisper and we're on our way to Knoxville.

It's about an hour away.

And in fact, Knoxville Knoxville seems to be the beating heart of the Tennessee hardware startup scene. We are cruising through eastern Tennessee. It's very pretty, full of kind people. It's hot, it's humid.

Life is good.

It's the early morning in Knoxville, and so the pilgrimage to Matt Robb's Biscuits has begun. You have from 9 to noon to acquire a biscuit. But they're usually all gone before that window expires. Such is life in the hard streets of Knoxville. Which, okay, are not actually hard at all. You've got graffiti giving way to parks, quaint streets packed with restaurants and bars, and in an ultimate flex, You've got a sun sphere. Powerful. Our interests, of course, are away from the city center and in this office-cum-laboratory, because this is the home of Perseus Materials, and we have come to watch them cook.

The goal of Perseus is to simplify how we build enormous structures. One of the things that we've really focused the tech development towards is wind turbine blades that can be up to 150 feet tall. 50 meters.

So something like a wind turbine, is that made with a mold?

Yeah, the mold is even bigger than the part itself. And so you need special factories, you need special equipment just to move it around. The upfront cost and lead times are a huge problem. So we developed a combination of the chemistry processes and the new automation capabilities together to invent a kind of mold-free process. You no longer need the lead times and the upfront cost of the tooling.

The first key to this technology is some chemistry Dan helped develop while studying at Stanford.

We started talking to blade makers and composite manufacturers, and we kind of identified core constraints that seem to exist in every composite manufacturing process. And then we traced it to a limitation in chemistry. And we didn't use that to then invent new chemistry. We had the chemistry, we just didn't realize what this phenomenon could be used for. And then when we realized, now we have really weird freedom in how we design.

Process.

What Perseus has built is just straight-up bizarre. It wants to make huge structures out of composites like fiberglass and Kevlar by using this thing. It's a machine that has some of the flexibility of a 3D printer but does jobs usually associated with more traditional manufacturing techniques like stamping and casting.

The goal is to do any fibers, but today we're using glass.

Here we go. We're pouring some resin onto glass fiber, and then we're gonna cure it and shape it at the same time.

The second big leap forward takes place on the machine itself. The material goes down, and the machine shapes and cures it at the same time.

Zach, what are you doing? Just checking to see if it's cured. Okay. You wanna tap it? Yeah, so you just feel like a little bit of hardness. Feel back here, tap it hard.

Yeah.

And then feel right here. Oh yeah, yeah, way more solid. A little gooey on one side and firm on the other. Yeah, so that's— I'm just checking to make sure it's curing as we're going through.

We kind of redid the process where we're actually curing it as we're pulling. That gives us flexibility with pulling infinitely. We can decide whatever shape we want on the go. We can composite, 3D printing, full trusion.

Resin is the heart of the thing that you're controlling.

Yeah.

And a resin is what, like a plastic?

Yeah, it's basically a plastic precursor. Yeah, so it's a liquid form that then hardens.

So you're putting the resin on the sheet, and then you're triggering that process through heat and pressure.

I'm going to leave that a little bit vaguer, but yes.

Okay, okay. So that's where the magic happens, is how triggering this process.

If we want to revolutionize how we build big things, let's say there's a 12-mile bridge and you want to build the entire skeleton of the bridge on site so you don't have to transport it, components, and do the assembly. What does manufacturing have to look like? It has to be extremely fast. It has to be faster than any manufacturing technology that exists today. It has to be extremely reliable and it has to be very low cost. And so that is only capable with like with the advanced synthetic chemistry that we've developed and worked on, we can manufacture faster than steel.

That's cool.

So, like, in your future vision, you might have these machines right by whatever you're trying to make.

Yes.

I've seen just about every new stab at manufacturing there is, but I've never run across anything quite like this. It's chemistry meets materials science meets computing in a totally new form. Perseus is in Tennessee in part because it struggled to win over venture capitalists. This forced it to chase some government grant money that came from the Department of Energy and to set up shop in Knoxville.

So we're funded by ARPA-E, NSF, and Department of Energy AMTO office. And part of that last one was a partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab.

Which is just down the road.

Which is down the road. We opened up shop nearby and started working.

I can understand the doubts around the technology. It might work okay on these small prototype parts, but then struggle to make big stuff with enough precision and speed. Still, I like that this is new and different. And it's not hard to see a bigger, more automated version of this with lots of actuators cranking things out. If you're not here for bridges being printed on demand, I don't know what to do for you. After enjoying my time huffing fiberglass with the boys, I needed to make a pilgrimage to Knoxville's ultimate star attraction, the University of Tennessee. I mean, it's no University of Texas, but the surroundings are all right. Inside this university building is Eonyx. It's a startup run by Don DeRosa, and it's trying to make better batteries faster.

My name is Don DeRosa. I'm the CEO of Eonyx. We're an accelerated materials discovery company for lithium-ion batteries.

We are in a new electricity-rich era as cars, planes, and all sorts of other vehicles are now running on lithium-ion cells. Making new battery chemistries that are safer and more efficient is a must, but this process tends to require huge investments and many years of research and development. And so, Ionix has decided to automate the R&D process using a mix of software and robots.

Everything is running by itself. Formulations are automatically sent to our robot.

Okay.

So we have the ability to use 12 different additives 4 different solvents or 2 different salts at a time. You're able to get up to about 32 solutions done in just a few hours.

Okay.

Now for context, we used to have 2 lab techs who would work at this station and they'd get about 11 or 12 solutions done per day. So we have a significantly higher output. We don't require 2 humans to be at the station at all times, and you don't have to work in a glove box, which is a huge upside.

Ionics tries to blast through as many promising battery chemistries as possible. Then it measures and analyzes the chemical reactions in ultra-fine detail.

Once we automatically formulate those suggestions, they go into a series of machines to evaluate thermal performance, conductivity, viscosity, things we want to know before they should even be considered for a battery. So we're able to see like this one doesn't freeze all the way down to -80°C. That's probably a good candidate for low temperature applications like space or EV tolls or Arctic conditions for military applications. We've made a lot of non-flammable lithium-ion batteries. We've made one that doesn't suck.

The major goal is to find chemistries that last longer and are less flammable and that can slot right into existing battery designs.

So we evaluate different chemistries, different electrolytes, and we pick out which one works better, and then we drop it right into a commercial cell. So This is a cell that's really 99% of the way there from a manufacturing perspective. Only thing it's missing is the liquid electrolyte.

We go over here.

This is just a glove box. We fill it, we seal it. So it's crimped right here. And then we have a battery and that's it. Getting something to just drop into batteries that are already manufactured, that's the real trick.

We're going to go blow a battery up.

We're going to blow a battery up.

Yeah.

So we're going to do a totally real test. It's called a nail pen test where we take a fully charged lithium-ion battery and we drive a nail through it.

Let us in! I wanna blow stuff up!

Alright, so they have the tool open so you can see the chamber.

Oh cool!

It's an accelerated rate climber. Allows us to determine basically the thermal performance of a battery on failure. So we're gonna drive a nail into to that battery, but we're gonna short it internally, and well, this one's gonna explode. Okay, like a lot.

So much anticipation. Are you guys gonna count down?

Just being like, any minute now, you're gonna hear it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, nice.

Okay. Oh shit, yes! Oh, that's a nice fire. How hot did this one get?

This was just under 800.

800 Celsius.

Yeah, 800 Celsius. Wow.

Feeling satiated by my daily dosage of explosions, it was time to to push on across Tennessee and through its weather. It was time to get moody and make a religious pilgrimage of sorts. It was time to go to Oak Ridge. For the first time, the newsreel camera is allowed inside the atom bomb city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where a vast army of workers kept the secret of a new age. ¡Ah! Los Alamos gets most of the Manhattan Project attention, but it was here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that the industrial end of the U.S.'s nuclear program got going. This is where we enriched the uranium that would go into the first atomic bombs. In the decades that have followed, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has remained as a major nuclear a nuclear technology research hub. The U.S., though, has failed to maximize many of the lab's discoveries. This is due, in large part, to the country souring on nuclear energy and nuclear power plants. That is, until now.

Now you see the administration shifting more towards nuclear energy.

Love him or loathe him, President Trump has very much helped make America pro-nuclear again. He's ordered the U.S. to boost its nuclear energy production and make new plants, which is why I've come to Oak Ridge and the headquarters of Standard Nuclear.

This area in Tennessee, I think of it as the Silicon Valley for nuclear. There's government institutions here. There are nuclear reactors all around. There's also a great university close by, so there's a large talent pool, and historically this is One of the key sites for the Manhattan Project. So there's a large history, a large heritage of the nuclear industry here.

Standard Nuclear is building off decades of research done at Oak Ridge National Lab into something called TRISO fuel.

The name TRISO stands for Tri-Structural Isotropic, which is a central fuel kernel. You take that kernel and then you apply coating layers to it.

These are tiny fuel particles that surround uranium with layers of carbon and ceramic materials. The casing acts like a containment system for each particle.

It's completely hermetically sealed, so none of the fission gases are getting out. And it's extremely effective, extremely robust.

The pitch is that TRISO is very safe and ideal for a new class of small nuclear reactors being built by a handful of startups. These so-called small modular reactors are all the rage.. And they can, in theory, be placed anywhere extra energy is needed. Standard is trying to become the main TRISO fuel supplier for these reactors and to benefit from a U.S. nuclear revival.

We're seeing the wave of new reactors that use this type of fuel coming at us. Most startup companies that are developing small reactors in the U.S. now are using this type of fuel because it's inherently safe.

A lot of this process revolves around refining the particles to be the perfect composition and size. Standard puts them through one stage after another, tests their chemistry, and sorts them.

So the first step of the process is where you take a uranium feedstock, dissolve it in acids, mix it with some other components, and we make what we call a broth. If you keep it cold, it remains a liquid. If you heat it up, it becomes a solid. So yeah, different than the normal properties. So basically this is where industrial-scale kernel manufacturing, okay? And so we can run about 3 kilograms of uranium through this system in a day.

Where do you guys get the uranium?

A lot of it comes from Canada, actually, in the US. We also have uranium mines in the US, okay?

Okay.

So the next step is triso coating, okay?

So we We start out with the liquid.

We make a gel sphere. We put it in a furnace to densify and convert them to the chemical composition that we want. We upgrade them, and then we bring them to this process where we coat them. Okay. Okay. And then you can get up there, and when you look, you'll start to see the particles rotating around.

That's crazy. So what's happening? They're all just moving around?

They're all flowing around, and it's important that they flow around so they're evenly coated.

The glow I'm seeing is just heat.

The glow you're seeing is it's glowing red hot.

It's like looking at the sun.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is. The important thing about triso particles is it's considered what's called a functional containment. When you look at a large commercial reactor, normally you drive by on the road and you see a fence that's a long way from the reactor. Now in these reactors, the site boundary can be closer because the amount of activity that you would release during a severe accident is much lower.

A typical light water reactor, there's 90 or so operating around the U.S. Severe accidents for those can be bad. We know about Fukushima. The reactors that use TRISO fuel are really incapable, as a function of their design, of having an accident like that. Once finally you have TRISO particles and they're ready to go into their final fuel form, you can make simple shapes like that. You can also make shapes like this. So you could put triso particles in here and make a very complex fuel element.

So if you've seen the triso particles, it's just a big jar of very, very tiny loose particles. So you have to make a fuel form out of that, right? And there's a couple of different methods to use. Traditionally is to embed those in a graphite matrix, right? So you have this little graphite pellet and they're all inside.

The other is the silicon carbide.

So during the printing process, all the powder that doesn't get binder just remains loose powder, and that's what we're removing now. Everything that gets binder turns into the shape of the part that you want.

Okay, I see a gem hiding in there.

Mhm.

What I'll do now is air pressure.

Aha!

Behold!

Recognize that?

It's glorious.

Nice logo.

Looks extra nice when it's made of silicon carbide.

The physics on Triso does check out. It really has been proven to be very safe, and China has been building TRISO reactors for years. The US military, AI startups, and others want to place these reactors, which can fit in a shipping container, anywhere they need extra energy.

You might be able to put them in cities, you might be able to put them next to AI data centers.

That's what this fuel enables. There's a bunch of also military uses. The most common place to have our troops lost overseas is fuel convoys to supply remote bases. So if you can drop a reactor that's inherently safe at one of those remote bases, then you completely eliminate the diesel supply line that you need.

Standard hopes that its factory here is the first of many as the U.S. tries to catch up with technology it invented in the first place.

I need to figure out what's going to allow us to produce TRISO at scale for the cheapest cost. We want to democratize TRISO because the more reactors that use this fuel, the more we can sell.

Yeah.

Cleared for public consumption, I had one last stop to make in Tennessee. It was time to reunite with Kid Rock. Nashville has turned into Disneyland for people trying to get drunk and/or married.

It's my homeboy's birthday, man. We're gonna leave, y'all.

Hey!

Each evening, the masses pack Broadway Street to drink at country singer Branded Bars. The scene is thick with revelry and excess. Bachelorette parties cruise around the rest of downtown in booze wagons. One after another after another after another. I'm told that Nashville used to be a little more like this place, Joelton Hardware, Feed and Pharmacy. It's about 25 minutes from downtown. It's full of locals and brimming with community.

Everybody's all divided, and I was like, "You know what? Coffee's the one thing that brings people together." And I've always wanted to call it Middle Grounds Coffee.

It's weird and wonderful, and Chris, the owner, makes everyone feel at home.

Hey, anybody out there need a drink?

Since Nashville is full of songwriters and aspiring musicians, I came here to take a temperature check on how people are feeling about AI.

How do I feel about AI? I do not like robots. I do not like AI. I do not support AI.

I don't think we've seen enough of it in play yet to really see the ultimate good or the ultimate bad of it. We're still kind of forging that path.

Honestly, I'm kind of against it.

I think the whole thing is scary as fuck.

If you want to write something that's relatable and true and resonates with people, why would you use AI? Why wouldn't you want to write something true to yourself? That's the That's the whole point.

It feels like it's like this double-edged sword, which I think all technology trends, whether it's in music or not, all kind of feel like that.

One Jolton regular is Shane Mack. He's a tech dude who did his time in Silicon Valley and then came here for something different. As it happens, Mack dabbles in music too, and he's been training an AI model on his favorite country singers. So we decided to put the model to work.

People will say AI doesn't write very well, which is true because it's writing general, it's writing broad, and great writing is usually really specific. The secret to trying to make AI write better for you is to draw a smaller box around the dataset. And so when I saw the ChatGPT projects, you can train a project to only think like these 3 songwriters in Nashville.

Can we disclose which 3 you picked?

I actually did it on 4: Ashlee Vance, Chris DiStefano, Ben Johnson, John Byron. Okay, big songwriters. So, you know, I don't know, is it right or wrong that I just kind of like built a model to try to think like they think?

Yeah. Have you shown this to them? Yeah, yeah, I actually have. So were they pissed at you?

I They might be pissed at me for doing this interview. Let's write a song.

Great.

So it responds like, "What type of song are we writing? Heartbreak, summer love, small town nostalgia, bar anthem, faith and doubt, etc. Got a title or hook you want to build it around?

If not, I'll pitch a few." I want to do a song about an AI that comes to Nashville hoping to make it big as a musician, but Nobody really wants it around. I actually wrote something for this. Hang on. I wasn't born yesterday, but I was turned on. Some humans filled me with Reddit posts, and now I can think along. I don't drink whiskey or drive a truck, and I ain't got a dog. All I have is everything stored in my logs.

I want to be one of you, but I'm just not.

Will you let me sing a verse or take me out in the parking lot?

So let's say, can you write a good verse for this? Pulled off the bus on Broadway Wednesday, 3:09. Printed out a face they said was weather but kind. Had a thumb drive full of heartache songs I never lived and a preloaded line, hey y'all, I'm just trying to fit in.

And do you, do you take this and put it in Suno? Because this is ChatGPT, it's not going to generate—

write the whole, whole song. Give me another verse too. Okay, so like, here's your song.

All right, here we go.

Broadway Wednesday, 3:09. Printed out a face they said was weathered but kind. Had a thumb drive full of heartache songs I never lived. And a preloaded line, hey y'all, I'm just trying to fit in. Hit the open mic at Tootsie's. They said Q trick hit, but I saw him flinch when the chorus hit.

I wasn't born yesterday, but I was turned on. Some humans filled me up with red poles. Now I can think along. Truck and I ain't got a dog.

All I got's a memory bank and everything stored in my life.

I want to be one of y'all, but I know I'm not.

Would you let me sing a verse? Take me out to the parking lot.

Obviously there's only room for one final arbitrer of truth around AI and music, one totally rational mind who could settle this debate once and for all. I am, of course, talking about Kid Rock.

What'd you think of our song that we made?

I thought it was average. You might want to stick in the tech lane.

Obviously, tech and entertainment are colliding. I was just curious if you mess around with AI, what you think about it.

The songwriters, I have, you know, a special place in my heart for them. Like, I don't know how it works out for them. Like, there might have to be some legislation there or whatnot. Maybe for artists too. I'm not against it, but I don't think we need to be unreasonable about something that we can't stop. I mean, my attitude personally is like, if 100,000 people want to be out there writing songs with my intellectual property, whatever, my voice, go for it. Yeah, I hope somebody nails one. Yeah, if you nail one, I'll give you a piece of of it because I get to go sing that live and we make the majority of our money live at the gate.

Yeah.

Now what's going to happen, there's going to be the other half of the country that are writing songs like, you know, Kid Rock wants to blow Joe Biden, you know, stuff like that, which, hey, I'll laugh at that too. There'll probably be some funny stuff there.

I love that one, man.

Yeah, right.

What's that you say, Kid Rock? Challenge accepted.

I'm not actually Kid Rock, but you heard what the man said. Make a version of a Kid Rock song with AI and leave a link to it in the comments. We'll send the best version to Mr. Rock. Make America proud.

And now back to our program.

It's another tool. You can pound in a nail with a rock if you want. Yeah, go for it. Or you can get a nail gun. No technology and you're not going to stop it.

So let's figure out how to use it.

Use it, make life better. There's going to be some adjustments. Yeah, industries are going to, you know, lose some workers and stuff, but they'll come back in other spaces somewhere. It's always worked out throughout time.

And I want to be one of y'all, even if I'm not.

Would you let me sing a verse or leave me humming in the parking lot?