Artificial Intelligence's Effect on Investing, the Economy and the Stock Market | Panel

I'm interested. First of all, by a show of hands, let's see first, who's excited about AI? Pretty good hands. Who's scared to death by AI? Alright, just about everybody on both. You know, I sit there and watch some of these presentations and I have to admit I get nervous when I see how easy it is to fake something, somebody's content to fake videos. But you know, this has been true of all leaps in technology. You have great benefits and great dangers with it. And just like Brad, you said, you know, the genie's out of the bottle. We're going to have this so we need to learn how to adapt to it. So I'm going to start here and we'll go across the panel here. So we'll start with Alex. What do you see as the best and worst implications of the rapid growth of AI that lies ahead for us?

Well, I want to first of all thank Sean and Brad for giving us a great overview. I loved Sean's big picture overview of what AI is and where it's going. What I love Brad, I want to thank you for making concrete what I've been trying to explain in my writings for months about how AI is going to transform business. It is going to increase productivity, is going to cut costs, it's going to create new product, it's going to eliminate some jobs like the Internet. You know, the middleman got wiped out. Some people are going to lose their jobs over AI. But you can see from the examples he gave the incredible creativity and productivity and cost cutting potential of AI. And so I am hyper excited about how AI is going to impact business. And one of the conclusions you can't help but draw is when he shows you how inexpensive these tools are. Okay, well that's good for Microsoft and IBM, but how about the little guy who doesn't have access to all the capital and all the resources and technology those companies stand to gain hugely. I think it's going to mean that perhaps you're going to see Microcap and Small Cap stocks doing really well because they can adapt these tools and go forward. So that's what I see as the positive side, the negative side. They also covered there's problems with deep fakes, there's a problem with job loss, there's a problem. We don't really know where AI will be in five years and certainly not in 50 years. But, but the risk is if we, we, we try to rein it in now, I mean I can tell you our enemies, Russia, China, Iran. Do you think they're going to Put any limits on their AI. We're already using, I don't know if you saw this in news. The US military is already using AI to target the people they hit back against in the Middle East. The Iranian, Iranian proxies. They're saying now that the Ukrainians have knocked down five major Russian jets in the last week using AI targeting. So, so you really can have your enemies get ahead of you on this technology. I think it's one of the reasons why even though there are some real negative implications, you know, if China is using their advanced AI against us, if we don't stay ahead of them there, it could be really, really negative. So. So anyway, I see more good than bad. You can't foresee all the good and you can't foresee all the bad. But I do think that we're in the early, that we're in the top of the first inning of AI. Just like 25 years ago, people couldn't have imagined how the Internet will change things. People can't imagine now how AI will change things. And I think that by the end of this decade there's going to be two kinds of companies, companies that are fully utilizing all the capabilities of AI and companies that don't exist anymore.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Sean, you mentioned riding in a self driving car in Arizona. Do you see AI finally making self driving cars a possibility, A real technology that we use every day? And how do you see that changing the world?

Yeah, so the answer is yes. I mean we definitely see self driving technologies getting better. We haven't mastered, fully mastered all environments. And that's why you see them in places like Arizona, because it's a pretty stable weather environment that they're able to operate in. And so those technologies will continue to get better over time. What's really interesting I think is the changing business models, how the business models shift. So BMW has some new technology that they're working on where they're doing remote valet. So rather than, and they're using the technology that's already built in the vehicle so you can just get out of the car and the remote valet will park it for you. It's like kind of this in between, step between fully autonomous doing the parking for you and you doing the parking. And so they're starting to think about what are the business models that we could do out of this? What are the business models we could do? One idea is that when you rent a car, rather than having to drop it off and pick it up in the same place, you just Leave it. You just put the keys in and you walk away. You send a text, I'm done with the car. And then the remote valet will drive it back to wherever it needs to be delivered. So there are these little efficiency gains that happen in something like that, a little bit of time savings. And so you start to multiply that across every organization, all aspects of our life and you start to really create things at the same time. You've created all of these new business models out of it. And I think that's what we haven't seen yet. You've seen existing companies take advantage of the technology, but we haven't yet really seen companies born out of the technology. And that's what's coming next.

It's interesting when you talk about self driving cars, I think about, and you mentioned valet and how the car will pick you up. There are many people who are right now employed in those positions. Or you look at trucking, if self driving cars were to come in, what would happen to all the truckers? So Brad, for you, you mentioned all kinds of ways people are making jobs much shorter. A week long task becomes 10 minutes. McKinsey did a study that showed that about 12 million workers may need to change jobs by 2030. How do you see this playing out? Do you see a big disruption where we have to go to universal basic income? What do you see as the threats and the advantages there?

Yes, probably. I think it's a really interesting question. Right. So we obviously don't know, but the trend, one of the things that the trends do tell us is that yes, new technologies create new use cases that we never would have imagined before new industries show up, et cetera. And I believe that one of the things that it's going to do is it's going to widen, it's going to widen the gap, especially in the beginning between the haves and the have nots, the skills. There's going to be people who are utilizing AI as a co pilot to create really disruptive businesses and wealth, et cetera. Like one person, billion dollar company, I don't have a lot of mouths to feed, etc. And everybody else who's decided to ignore it maybe on ubiquitous, right? At the same time, one of the potential equalizing factors is the fact that, and I think you were just mentioning this, it's this democratization of the most powerful technology there is. And it enables people at low levels to become creators of value that they've never been able to do before. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who recently saw, I think it was Tyler Perry or somebody. It was in the news. This actor and director, I think it's Tyler Perry, was about to spend millions of dollars on new sounds, like nine new sound stages in Georgia. And he saw what like Sora could do and he's like, whoa, hold the horses. I'm not invested in this. This thing is so disruptive. And my friend was saying, yes, see this is one of the problems. All these people are going to be out of work. It's like, yes, but the technology is going to enable so many more people who never had the ability to create feature length movies on their computers. They've already done this with an iPhone. You need to have like these former huge cameras in production things. They filmed movies on iPhones. And now with artificial intelligence you can see that people can say wait, like a kid can go and make a feature length movie. He can script it with chatgpt if he wants. He can maybe film it with Sora and Hey Jen and deepfakes and all of this other stuff. And as long as he's pretty good at telling a story. Now it's this democratization of opportunities. In that case, I think that it may be like a rubber band though, right? Like we widen the gap but then it may snap back to where the bigs don't have all the fat stack and the cards anymore. They don't have all the advantages. Now we all have advantages. That's what I'm hoping for. But it is going to dramatically disrupt some things, I think faster. I think it's going to really hurt in the medium term, short to immediate term and a lot of adjustments. I mean I'm equally as scared about this because I'm able to obsolete myself in other roles as a marketing and growth strategist, I'm able to do what in 10 minutes for almost free, what I used to take me a month and I would charge like 20 to $50,000 for. And I was like, whoa, I gotta pivot, I gotta figure this AI stuff out and put it to work. Because the obsoletion risk is real.

It blows me away. Actually when we started using AI at the Oxford Club, we used it for all kinds of things, but just basic things like copy editing is something that it can do very quickly. But as we started using it, I couldn't believe how cheap it was. You know, you talk about $20 a month to use this world class technology that's doing something no human being has ever been able to access before. And it's so cheap. It kind of blows my mind. Do you think that the prices will come up at some point, or you think it'll go down?

No, I think so. Technology is a deflationary force, right? And it is. It's only counterbalanced by the Federal Reserve cartel, who's printing money like, you know, Duncan Saylor and. But if that wasn't happening, everything would be erased to the bottom. Information is now a commodity, like information even before it was. Information wants to be free. But wisdom is expensive. Well, right now, wisdom is getting commoditized as well, because it's being trained on all the people's wisdom. I built a Brian Tracy bot. His decades and decades of wisdom is now encapsulated in my phone. He doesn't have to get out of bed for this. So I think the prices of technology are going down, down, down. And I don't want to hog this as a soapbox, but one thing that I realized back in about a year ago when I saw how easy it is to start to create programs, I think a lot of the big, like a lot of software companies are in big danger because for the longest time they had the monopoly on pay me $20 or $100 a month and we'll create your CRM or your whatever software. We're very close to being at the point where you go to a computer and say, I need a CRM software that does this, this, and this. I want it to have the same interface as this, and I want it to do these things that doesn't exist before it creates the program, it installs it on your local machine, and it doesn't cost you a penny. So I think a lot of software companies are going to have to pivot because it's going to. It's almost like 3D printing software applications. And if everybody has the tools to do that right now, the code is getting better. It's existential question marks. I'll leave it with. I don't think that any business that's not in manual labor can feasibly plan anything realistic for more than two years, like what their business model is going to look like. I think the disruptions are happening so quickly, good and bad.

It's certainly disrupting our business. Shaw, I'll turn to you. You talk about how this could hurt some software companies. And we talked in Sean and your talk about Garry Kasparov getting defeated by Deep Blue and what a transformational moment that was. Shaw, do you see AI coming in and being able to pick stocks in a more effective way than a human being can. Do you think that will change our entire industry or do you see AI impacting our industry in a different way?

I think the potential for anybody here, let alone Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Bridgewater, to be able to use AI to beat the markets is possible right now. And I'm sure we know that there are companies like Renaissance Technologies that have been doing it for a very long time. And I think the power that we all have now, as Brad said, we have all the tools that are out there. Any one of us can do it. And I think there's going to be a period of time where we're going to have outperformance. People are going to be able to outperform the benchmarks, and it's going to get to a point like, like everything else in the markets, where people will start to understand what works and more people understand what works. And as everyone starts to understand what works and talks about it, then the efficiency will evaporate and we won't be useful anymore. So we're going to get to a point where, no, it's not going to be. It's not going to help. It'll help for a while and that's the end of it. Certainly I've looked at it because that's our business and it's not possible. And even as AI gets better, markets are inefficient. That's how we price things and that's why prices move. Well, if everything was efficient because of AI, there would be. The markets would be 100% efficient. Everything would be priced appropriately for its value or whatever it's worth. But that's probably. We were a long way off from that. So there's plenty of opportunity in the market.

So just to dovetail on that, because I've thought about that, I thought that we might actually get the efficient market hypothesis to work out in the short period of time. Like, okay, AI has all the information and AI is doing all the trading at high frequency anyway. So now it's just computers trading with computers on the exact same information. But then once that levels out, all it takes is somebody in genius to come in and find a way to almost break the system in a way. Once you get the edge, then, and it's back to the people, then the.

Other folks will figure out that edge. And then we go back to the neutral zone.

Exactly.

I mean, remember, AI is very good at pattern recognition, but as soon as the pattern breaks, it's not great. It's good at predicting the next step in a well defined Pattern. But if the market always behaved in a well defined pattern, then we would all figure out how to crack that code.

Right?

We'd all follow the pattern. But that's the value of ultimately making an informed decision and making a bet is you see a deviation in the pattern, you think something's mispriced, you think something's overpriced.

Patterns.

In my experience using this because I use it pretty regularly, it's all about two things. It's about the data that you put in that you give it to work with and then it's about the prompts that you write, the specific prompts, the way you adjust them makes all the difference in what you get out. So I foresee it being a combination of an expert at using it and the technology. That person is going to be a very sought after worker in this new economy.

That Gary Kasparov quote you put at the end of yours was like spot on. It's like the right machine, the right expert. I think it was, was, and then.

The right process, I think it's not about finding the right answer though. Like if you look at ChatGPT and other generative AI models, you don't do well. If you say, give me the answer, give me the best, it does better if you ask it things like give me examples of good applications of this. But if you say, give me the single best, it doesn't do well on that. So while there's a lot of focus and I know Brad hit on prompt engineering, to me the flip side is what matters, like there's been so much focus on writing the perfect prompt. I think AI is prompting us. So it, you feed it data and it gives it back information and then the real human job is to decipher that information. Do I agree with that? Is there something new that I learned there? Did it surface something I hadn't considered considered that changes my opinion so that, you know, I do agree with Brad that it is your intern, right? It is your help mate, it is your co worker. And just like an intern, all of us who've had interns, like sometimes they're quick and not very good, right? They're quick to give you an answer. They might be really confident. I mean, it feels a lot like the interns. I know, right? They'll give you a confident answer and it's totally.

You don't just let the intern run the business.

No, you don't let the intern run the business. But on occasion an intern surfaces an idea that you didn't think of, it surfaces Something that you didn't consider. So that's how I think about it, especially when it comes to investments. Can I feed it information about a company and can it decipher something that maybe I hadn't fully considered? And does that then change my opinion? I think we're really in risk if we just turn over everything to the system. But we should be using it to inform our own opinion about where we see things going.

Right. I should also point out that while there have been a lot of great performing AI related stocks, we have some funds that are AI driven and they have not beaten the S&P 500. And I think Sean put his finger on it, he wears chess. There are very strict rules to the game. You can't break the rules. The world is much more complicated. The game of chess, everything that happens in the world, everything in the world of politics and economics and business developments and scientific innovation and commodity fluctuations and currency exchange rates and interest rates, I mean, it's all like the ultimate Rubik's Cube. And there is no well defined pattern to tell you that.

Aha.

That means The S&P 500 is going here. It doesn't exist yet. And so I may lose my job to AI eventually. I don't think it's going to get there immediately. And it's important to know that the world is a big, messy, complicated place and AI is not going to. Is not this hyper Einstein that can just tell you the answer to whatever you ask it. We're not there yet. It is getting smarter, it is learning. But the world is much more complicated than the game of chess.

One of the things that, you know, I was about to disagree with Shah when he started his answer and then I started to agree with him, is there's an emotional quotient that's missing from AI. So the stock market works for a large part on technicals, on fundamentals, but also on emotions. And if you don't know the psychology of the market, you know, AI, when the market was crashing in 2008, it would have said sell and it would have been the right time to buy. At the same time, because we've been looking at the numbers, we've been looking at volume, we'd look at sentiment indicators, indicators, things like that. So when I saw a slide that says, you know, I saw this on 10k or 6k, what's the best way to invest? And one of the things that caught my eye was it said a cash secured put. Well, cash secured put is probably the worst way to invest in the world. You never do that because you're not using margin. And your return would be the lowest compared to using a non secured put. So those, you know, it's like we have writers and give them assignments and the riders write the assignments, assignments. And I look at them and I'm like, no, it's obvious this wasn't generated by you. It was generated by a computer. Because everything in here is nothing that I would do and we need to change that. But I just want to step back a bit and thank you for putting me on this panel. When I saw it, I was like, oh, good, Todd, you put us on a panel with artificial intelligence experts. That's great. We're going to add a lot to this. But let me just tell you, my first exposure to AI was in 1982. Okay. I took a course called Econometrics and I got a D in it. And so my dad pulled me aside because he was paying for it. He goes, you know what? You don't have any real intelligence. You've got artificial intelligence. Okay? So that was the first exposure. I just wanted to share that because I figured you want me up here for comedic value.

Said that an amateur with this technology is actually the best.

Karun's a perfect example.

While I have you, I wanted to ask. We have you on this panel because of your immense market knowledge and expertise. And you know, Nvidia has been a hot company that we've talked about a lot at this, so I'm going to bring it up again. Very well. But Nvidia has about 12 billion profit, which is a huge amount of growth for them. But their market cap is now $2 trillion, which means that it would take them at the current rate 166 years to produce the amount of profit that would be equal to their market cap. Are we in an AI bubble or is there further to run in this?

I really thought you would ask a better question, but this one's a real simple, real simple answer. I wouldn't touch Nvidia with a 10 foot pole. And I wouldn't touch pretty much any AI company right now with a 10 foot pole. And the reason is again, going back to the emotions, think about the EVs. Everybody wanted to be in every EV stock. And since that point in time, EV stocks have gone up, down, up, down, up, down. So yes, I would buy Nvidia, but not now. I would wait for everybody to say, okay, I don't like AI anymore and I can expand further on that into what investments I have in AI. When you come to it, but I don't know if you want those now.

Sure.

I think we should go through and let's talk about best AI companies or companies to avoid.

All right, so I don't have any AI companies, but what I did about two years ago was I bought a bunch of domains with AI in it and I've priced them ever since then. So today Apple announced that they're going into AI. Guess who owns the Apple AI domain.

Karim Rahm Tula.

There you go. Okay, but the symbol Apple AI, not Apple, because that was already taken.

So the.

The domain name that's actually the most valuable that I've got. The biggest offer for so far is lovemyai.com. okay. The second one is I hate chatgpt.com so it tells you that there's, you know, so I've got about 12 of these that cover just about everything in the CHAT GPT. I love Chat GPT. Chatgpt sucks. I hate Chat GPT. All those I bought about two years or. Well, the chatgpt ones I bought more recently.

That reminds me of what Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, did back when he, you know, the big Elvis craze was he printed out I hate Elvis buttons because he goes, people hate them. I'm going to make money off them, too.

So my favorite ones is say no to AI, which I'm keeping for a while. But I just think that, you know, that's where people are going to go at some point. They're going to rebel against AI, just like they rebel against everything at some point. And then it comes down to a point where it's much more valuable. Nice, Brian. Okay.

Not exactly actionable investment advice there.

Why not? All you've got to do is plug it into your ChatGPT paid one, say, create a domain name. It's going to be worth money. Right?

There you go.

I love it.

Not going to happen.

Well, it's. Do you agree with Karim? Is AI dangerously overvalued right now?

I agree with the first thing Karim said, which is that Nvidia is a great company, but it's a really expensive stock. And so if you, if you want to own it and roll with it, hey, go ahead and do it. I just don't think that you can.

Make a valuation.

Argument in favor of Nvidia. But I do think that there is really, really isn't the AI bubble that we saw 25 years ago, but we definitely have the dot com bubble. And I shouted from the rooftops about it because there are a lot of AI related companies that have gone public say two or three years ago that are selling way below their IPO prices and they're closer than ever to breakthrough. Those of you who are long term readers know that I've recommended a couple of companies that are speeding up drop drug discovery by using AI. One of them is ABSCI. ABSI is the symbol. Another is Exscientia exai and ordinarily it's taken 10 years and 1 1/2 billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. And to the extent that these companies can speed up drug discovery, they can save these biotech companies billions of dollars. One of my friends, Dr. John Reed, who's the head of drug discovery for Johnson and Johnson was telling me that it often takes years just to find a molecule that will attach to the target. Like if you're trying to treat cancer, just to find something that will attach to the right cell, the cancer cells takes years and billions of dollars. To the extent that AI can close that gap, I think you have opportunities. And ABSCAI and Exientia are both trading at probably less than a quarter of their initial public offering price. So it would be hard for me to say those stocks are bubbles. They're still speculative stocks because they haven't turned the corner on profitability yet. But the potential there is quite large.

I've been blown away just I agree with both of you that Nvidia feels very expensive to me right now. But I've been blown away that the expectations for Nvidia keep ratcheting up every earnings and they keep blasting past them.

But just remember the chip business which is what is driving them and the scarcity of their chips, it ultimately becomes a commodity business. So intel is getting involved in it. They're building these huge foundries and stuff and at some point someone's going to catch up or supply will catch up with demand and you'll see those prices.

As Sam Altman just recently, Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI just came out with the most insane leads sounding but you know, he wants to raise $7 trillion to bring AI manufacturing in a large way to the US. If you look at this, I'm not making it 7 trillion up. He wants to raise $7 trillion because he sees the future of the chip need so unbelievably large. And will he be able to do that? I don't know. But the ambition of shows you where the, the powers that be are going with this.

I want to address Nvidia. Yeah, it looks crazy and it is crazy, but it actually makes sense, not just from a valuation point, which I could make an argument there. The narrative and people trade and invest on narratives. There is no stronger, more powerful narrative now than the AI narrative. And the AI narrative is predicated on one thing, chips. So Nvidia may look overbought, it may look ridiculously high. I think it's got a lot higher to go. I think all the chip makers are in the game. Yes, there will be. Micron will catch up to. A lot of them will catch up to probably sooner than we think. But I think they've got. Just like Tesla had that first mover advantage, Nvidia has that because of the GPUs. That first move. Probably keep that for at least a few years.

I've got a question for, for Sean and for Brad here. I know you guys are AI experts and not investment analysts, but I'm just curious whether either one of you has seen opportunities with publicly traded companies that you think will really benefit from what's happening in AI. And I'm not just talking about companies that build the chips, I'm talking about companies that will benefit from AI. Do you also, off the top of your head, do you have something we might look into more closely that you.

I'll start. I do have an investment background, although it's been a few minutes since I worked in IT professionally. But I still invest a lot, study a lot. I do worry about a lot of the software companies that feel like, oh, this software company is going to come out and do this, because I think the democratization of the technology will make a million software companies competing with it. So I tend to stay away from that. The companies I think you mentioned, the health space and the pharmaceutical space, I do think that there's a big opportunity there because you don't have to be an AI company to use AI, leverage it in order to have tremendous results. So I would tend to. I've been trying to look at who stands to have the biggest product like quantum leaps in productivity. I do think the healthcare space is really big. I think that I'm trying to think what else.

When you say the healthcare space, you're talking about biotech companies in particular.

Biotech specifically. I mean, and when you add on things like CRISPR technology with AI and you now, I mean, you've got rocket fuel waiting to happen, good and bad, right? We have a lot of explosions. But I'm looking for the companies that can leverage AI for quantum leaps in cost savings, but then cutting edge innovation. And I haven't identified a Lot them outside of that. It's just, it's happening so quickly that it's, I actually, I love this space and I absolutely hate it. It has reinvigorated my, you know, love of business and all this other stuff. But you put your head down and work on something for a week, you look up and everything's changed. There's a new, like, slow down, I can't keep up. And I'm, I'm getting paid to stay up on this and I can't stay up on it.

Yeah, it's true. I think that there are, you know, none of this happens in a bubble. Like the technology doesn't just happen over here and then everything comes out of that. But technology shifts collide with cultural shifts, societal changes, other dynamics. And that to me is what's playing out in places like healthcare and why healthcare is interesting for AI because we're now, frankly, we've solved a lot of and learned treatments for a lot of the low hanging diseases. And so the diseases that we are trying to cure now are much more complex. Alzheimer's disease that is incredibly expensive, incredibly difficult. And we haven't had much success there. And if you look at the big drug manufacturers, many of them have walked away from their Alzheimer's treatment treatments because they haven't been successful. And so could AI help there? Right? Help where there's already a problem. That to me is what's really interesting about this technology is that it can help accelerate areas where we're now hitting walls of cost and walls of complexity that we're not able to overcome. And then I think the other thing is just how again how the business models are changing as a result of this. So let me give you one example. John Deere makes tractors, a name we all, we all know and love. And they've invested heavily in AI. In fact, a couple years ago they had a slogan, E I E I A I O or something like that. Play on A I A I O. And so they have introduced, they bought a bunch of tech companies, they have a Silicon Valley presence. They introduced a sprayer for the fields called See and Spray. So on the 100 foot plus boom, they have 32 cameras that go along the boom. They can monitor over 2,000 square feet of space in real time. And so as these sprayers drive down the field, they're not just spraying can chemicals across the whole field, which is the way we used to do it, but they're able to identify with the cameras at speed individual weeds. And they can spray just the individual weeds. Last Year they ran these tractors, these see and sprayers, over a million acres saved 8 million gallons of chemicals as a result of that. And so they're lowering the cost for farmers. So you know, the byproduct of that from an investment standpoint is okay, if I'm a chemical maker, does that mean chemicals are more efficient? So demand for chemicals is going to be less. But also look at how John Deere is now pricing that type of technology. In the past manufacturers priced their goods at cost plus margin. I'm going to sell it for how much it cost me to build, plus a little extra, plus whatever profit margin I want. John Deere now prices their see and spray on a per acre basis. It's $4 right now in pilots, $4 an AC. So you want to run it over 100 acre farm, you want to run it over 100,000 acre farm, we're going to charge you $4 an acre. And so they've changed the way that they price the services and the products that they deliver to market. And companies that can be successful there, that can move away from a cost plus margin environment, I think are the ones who are really going to take advantage of the AI wave because, because they're going to be able to restructure markets and move away from single digit, low double digit margin environments and potentially capture a much bigger piece of that sector that they serve. That's what I'm seeing happen in every sector. So I think there will be winners of AI in every sector. It's happening in mobility, it's happening in agriculture, it's happening in and medical. Everyone is looking at how do I restructure this. And it comes down to you need data to help fuel this. So they are all out to find data. And that's I think what you also see in the medical space. So I'd be looking at medical companies that are sitting on a lot of data or that are trying to solve problems that other people aren't able to solve. That's where this technology will become very impactful.

Well, to me that story with John Deere is a great reason to be optimistic about the future of America, the future of the stock market. When you have companies across the board getting access to a cheap technology that rapidly improves their productivity, cuts their costs, cuts their need for input materials, all of that, it makes me very bullish for the future.

I like Brad Phase, the democratization of opportunity. That's a beautiful way to put it.

Thanks. And back at you. One of the things unrelated but you made me think about this because you were talking about some of the dystopian aspects of, you know, the bad actors using AI, and they will. We have not yet seen a massive AI disruption. We 100% will. But what do they say about the only good way to. The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And I think the same thing is going to apply to AI. I think that the bad actors with AI are going to have to go up against good actors with AI, and there could be better threat detection. Like, cybersecurity is one of the single biggest. Okay. So I happen to be friends with the former head of Homeland security, Kirsten Nielsen, and we were out at dinner the other night. Name drop. And. But I was asking her, when you were in there, like, what were the biggest things you guys were scared of? Cybersecurity, like, 100%. Like, power grid going down. Nah, cybersecurity, it's big, it's ugly, it's common. And I was asking her about, yeah, she goes, yeah, there's massive uses of AI for cybersecurity protection because there's massive uses of AI for threats. But it actually shows you that, yeah, the good guys with the AI, if they're using it wisely, and I think that's our responsibility as humans. AI is our child.

Right.

We have given birth to it, we have to raise it, we have to nurture it with thought and care, and it's going to be an ugly world out there. So we have to prepare it to deal with that, to kind of humanize this element. But I think that AI is going to allow humans to be more human and do the human things, to connect, to empathize, to care, to create, to think of things that AI might never do because it doesn't know the patterns. And, I mean, it's a tsunami coming in.

You can get.

You can stand there and watch it, or you can grab a surfboard and learn to balance.

Alex, one of your big mega trends that you're suggesting people get into is cybersecurity. I think that combination of AI and cyber security is a really good opportunity going forward.

Right. And he mentioned CRISPR, which is in our 10 Baggers of Tomorrow portfolio. So, yeah, I mean, I. I realize there's a downside to AI, but the dystopian voices always get the most publicity because that grabs eyeballs, web hits, shares, and there's a lot of good things happening. But people don't want to read that compared to. It's going to destroy the world. Narrative. So you've got to balance your sources of information.

Let me give one example to that. Technology is iterative and innovation is iterative. And it could creates these byproducts, sometimes what an economist would call negative externalities. But then we also figure out how to innovate away from those negative externalities. So email is a great example. Email early on democratized communication. It made it easy and inexpensive to email. As a result, we saw an explosion of email and that drove spam, right? Spam was this huge negative externality that nobody saw when, when they decided to create computer communication. And then over time, we learned how to innovate away from it. And so we created spam filters. All of us can remember having to check our spam filter early on, right? You checked it because it was horrible. Some spam got through. Sometimes good emails landed in your spam folder, and early on it didn't work. But as you saw spam start to change the spelling, that that was them trying to work around the AI because machine learning is what we use for spam filters. Now it's gotten so good, none of us check our spam folders anymore. My presumption is if you emailed me and it ended up in my spam folder, you did something wrong, you have done something wrong, and I don't need that email. So for the most part now, the technology has improved to a point where we're not bothered by this network negative externality to the extent that we were and all of us can remember what those early days were like, the same is going to play out with lots of other technologies. There will be some negative externalities. We'll figure out how to iterate around that until we end up in a state that is generally good. And that will be constant innovation. But for sure, we are just in the very, very early innings. So as much as we can debate about bubbly conditions in the marketplace right now, we talk about the dot com era, as, you know, 2000, 2001, right? But we saw the Internet in the early 90s, like that was the time. So if you think about that same time horizon, it feels to me much more like we're in the early 90s than in the early aughts.

Just a piggyback on that. So I work with business businesses of all shapes and sizes on this stuff. And it feels like back in the 90s when, you know, it was the, you know, browsers, the world Wide Web was coming out. People like, what's a wet? Businesses like, what's a website? Why do I need one.

No.

Well, you need one because it's. What am I going to do with it? What's the, what's this website thing? And so back then, and I wasn't doing this business back then, but I had friends who work, they're like, listen, you need to have a website. It'll be really good. I'll set it up for you. This is how I feel in getting businesses to embrace an onboard AI. They're like, what do we do with it? Well, we're going to figure it out. And it's very infancy stages and as they start to figure it out, it starts to click and they start to innovate. And what I hope it is going to displace a lot of people, a lot of jobs will be lost. But I also hope that what happens is that it's not that they say, oh, we can do this without so many people. I'm hoping that they go, well, we can do so much more with the people we've got. So we don't have to necessarily. The smart companies aren't going to let their people go. They're going to retrain them and make them super human resources to use that line again, keep them employed and just do a lot better. I think the ones that are going to lose are the ones that are going to look for just how much money can we save as opposed to how much impact can we make?

Right. Well, I think we're just about out of time here. I really want to thank all of you gentlemen for joining us and going through this. You know, we're wrapping up the conference here. I want to thank a few people. I've got Julia over here. I want to thank Julia for.