Rise of Blue Collar Wealth 2025: AI, Manufacturing & MAGA Trends

The big thing is MAGA is the culture now, and it will be the dominant culture, I predict, for the next 50 or 60 years. It's working class, it's straight across, it's black, it's Hispanic. Anybody who makes their way into the United States and does meaningful work can be part of the MAGA culture, where.

You tie into the US Becoming increasingly becoming the magnet for global money and talent. Especially now that we're moving manufacturing back here and we control water. We have lots and lots of natural resources. We still export huge volume.

And that's happening in all the trades. Plumbing, H Vac, you know, electricians, all the trades. If you put in the accreditation and get it, some of it's longer than others, but very quickly, you're going to be making a real large amount of money without going to university.

AI is pervasive. It's in every part of our lives. And right now, it's still invisible. It's built into your phone, it's built into your computer, it's built into energy management, our cars. But learning how to engage and interact and provide value, there's massive opportunities there.

So, Dan, this is probably my favorite time of the year because at the beginning of the year, we get together and we talk about our predictions for the next year. And what you did this year that I love is you came up with this big idea, which are the three trends moving forward, which really provides a context for how to think about the future, how to predict it for yourself and start seeing patterns. So we do have a visible tool that's available. If you're listening to this, we will narrate it. But if you're watching it, you're going to be able to see the screen. So, Dan, do you want to just dive in and talk about how you think about the future and how you think about trends?

Yeah, well, I'm. You know, one of the things I'm very interested in is seafaring stories.

Especially around the 1800s. That's the golden age of sailing ships, especially wartime sailing ships, British Navy being the greatest navy. And it was. So I'm going to make a analogy here that the news is like the winds and the waves. And when you're at sea and you have to know how to deal with the winds and waves. But what really determines if you're trying to get somewhere and you want to be successful in your journey? You have to understand the currents, for example. One of the things a lot of people don't know is that if you wanted to, for example, go to South America, from England, you would go straight down the Atlantic past Spain and Portugal, and you go to Africa, and then you'd swing, right? And that current would take you right over to Brazil, okay? And you didn't have to do a lot of work.

But to come back to England, you had to go all the way up to the Carolinas in the United States and catch another current that took you to England. So that's knowing the currents. So the winds and waves are happening all there. But what's really determining the overall system are the. Are the currents. Okay, and so what I tried to do is underneath all the news and all the predictions, what are the three trends that seem to be pushing things in a particular direction? And the predictions will either happen or not happen. And how they deal with the trends. Deal with the trends. So I've got three trends and. And the three trends I'll start off. And we have a diagram here that kind of shows the three trends are the MAGA movement and.

And so I'm going to talk about maga. The other one that I'm going to talk about is AI. And the third one I'm going to talk about is the collapse of globalization and to a large degree, what global trade has been over the last 20 or 30 years. And just as a big message, I think we're entering a period where it's the beginning of the history of the Western Hemisphere. And it's more or less the end of the history of the Eastern Hemisphere and most of human history up until very recently, two or three, maybe 500 years, almost, almost all the history of the world was the history of the Eastern Hemisphere, which includes Europe, Africa and Asia. And the Western Hemisphere is North America and South America. And my feeling is the real history of the world going forward in the 21st is really going to be what happens in the Western Hemisphere. And the United States, for the most part.

Actually spent a lot of time dealing with the Central America, South America part of the world up until the 20th century. And then they got involved in the two wars that took him to Europe and took them to Asia, and they don't want to do that anymore. And now the United States is coming back and basically looking at the hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere. So that's. Those are my three things is my three trends, three currents, if you will, are maga, the MAGA movement, AI and the end of globalization.

Okay, so let's go a little bit deeper into MAGA specifically. And I can remember right after the election happened, you said something which was suddenly everyone became A Republican.

And we saw.

And I like to always pre frame this, it doesn't matter whose side you're on. You saw a combination of things happening, which was.

Number one, a massive movement away from.

And we saw a failure in messaging. And also a lot of people got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, lying.

And also a massive pushback away from.

The current movement, all the movements. And then you also saw the dominance, the powerful dominance of podcasting. And through my lens, it was Barron Trump who gave.

The current administration, the new administration, some feedback and said, hey dad, you gotta get on podcasts like Joe Rogan, like Theo Vaughn, who a lot of people had never heard of before. Joe arguably has one of the most powerful channels that supersedes. You know, it's long form going out to an audience that historically haven't voted, which are young men. I happen to believe that was a big scale tipper and you saw a lot of participation from people didn't normally participate. But really this was about maga. And why don't you explain what you mean when you say the MAGA movement and why that's so important?

Yeah, well, I think it's not a political party as such. I think it's a cultural shift.

And the 20th century, starting in the 1890s and going right up until I would say that maybe 2016.

There'S been a political culture that I'll call progressivism. And this was.

Started in the 1890s. And it's kind of interesting. It's a. In America at that time, you had a severe upper class there. They were called the upper 10. And these are the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies. And give you an idea how rich those people were in, I think it was 1908.

John D. Rockefeller's wealth was 1 65th of the GDP of the United States. Okay. I mean, and they had no income tax at that time. Income tax came in in the following decade. So these were very powerful people. They were richer than the aristocrats in Europe and they were acting like aristocrats. And they had very much of everyone else is below us. And you can be our servants, but you can't be our friends.

And there was a middle class reaction against the overindulgence, the wealth.

The sheer not caring of this upper class of people. And the United States had them all over.

A lot of them have their names, universities are named after them anyway. And then you had a very, very poor class because the US had had such enormous immigration during the latter half of the latter half. And then you had the problem of the freed slaves, you had the problem of the defeated Indians. And so there was a severe halves and then there was this middle class and the middle class was growing and the middle class.

Felt morally superior, they felt morally superior to the upper class and they, they felt that they were intellectually and morally superior to the lower classes. So there was this class and it was a middle class society and it was very church oriented. It was a very church oriented and it was principally the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and Congregationalists. You had these religions. They were all white, everybody was white. They were largely British islands heritage. They were England, Scotland, Ireland. And they were trying to make their own way and they created this idea that the way we are going to control things politically is we're going to create vast movements, then we're going to make human beings better so that they're all members of the middle class. So we want to bring the upper class down and be middle class and we want the lower class to be better and we'll bring them into the middle class and we're going to be the class. And so the whole prohibition movement started. We can't have them drinking.

We can't have them drinking. We've got to get rid of prostitution and we've got to get rid of, you know, all sorts of bad behavior, violence. So basically violence.

Violence, prostitution and drugs, especially alcohol. And that movement really became the dominant culture starting around the 1890s and they moved forward. Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive, he was a Republican, but he was a progressive. And then Woodrow Wilson was the, you know, was the philosopher of.

Philosopher of progressivism. And his whole argument was with the US Constitution. He says we can't be governed by the US Constitution. We have to make big changes. The President is the executive of the company, the country. So we can't have the President being.

Blocked by the Constitution. So we have to have a living Constitution and we move forward. Now gradually the parties started to form or not form the two parties. So the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States are the two longest standing.

Really active parties in the world history. The Democrats started in 1828 with Andrew Jackson, he was the first Democrat. And the Republicans started in 1860 with Abraham Lincoln. And all the elections since then have been between the Democrat or the Republican. There's third parties come up, they go down and everything else. But the two dominant parties are.

So one thing that was true and when you got about 40 years into this was that all the rich people were Republicans and all the poor People and the middle class were half and half were Democrats, okay? And where that changed significantly started was with Roosevelt in the, in the 1930s, okay? And he had taken all the progressive.

Issues and now he created government departments. There's this huge growth of government departments from Washington. So Washington. And the whole point is we have to make human beings better, okay? And that means that if you aren't on our side, we're going to make you better. We're going to have to change you until we make you better. And that progressivism wasn't just the United States, it was Canada, all of Europe after the Second World War. The whole goal of government is to make you into a better human being. And so we're going to direct your behavior and we're going to direct your thinking, even the way you think we're going to direct. And, and the pushback on that started mainly in the States. It started very interesting technologically. It started with the abandonment of AM radio by the Democrats and the progressives, because FM radio came in the 1970s, in the 1960s, 1970s, and it was mostly university based. Most of the FM stations were big universities and they were big urban areas. And it was a higher class of. Higher class of discussion on the radios.

Higher class talking like NPR and NPR.

On the radio side, NPR and then.

Public television, pbs. And these were all around the universities where they more intellectually superior and morally superior people gathered. The big universities, the big cities with the big universities. And what's really interesting is that the AM radio was abandoned, pretty well abandoned. And who took it over were.

Deep American religion, Deep American religion and country and western. Country and western took it over. And that created the whole beginning of the mega culture. It really started with the, the abandonment of AM radio because AM was a powerful radio. Not only that, but FM only goes for about 50 miles. AM can go. You know, even with regulation, a good AM station on a clear night, you can get it five, 600 miles away, you know, and all these. It became very entrepreneurial and there was this culture, but it was working class. The listeners were working class. They weren't at the educated classes. So MAGA really starts about 50, 60 years ago.

And so what I'm saying is that Trump named it, okay? So Trump came it up and he's a wonderful brander and it's a great market. And because you can include anything inside that package that you want. And so what I'm saying is that that's the big thing is that I think that MAGA is the culture now. And it'll be the dominant culture, I predict for the next 50 or 60 years. It's working class, it's straight across, it's black, it's Hispanic. Anybody who makes their way into the United States and does meaningful work can be part of the MAGA culture. But very interesting that the young people who previously have been very much of the progressive movement, the progressive culture have dramatically shifted in the last 10 years and now young people, especially teenagers and 20s and 30s now. And what really got them was the gaming culture, which is the biggest participation sport on the planet. I think it's like 2.3 billion people participate at least daily in gaming and that they were, they were looked down upon by the upper classes. The progressives didn't like this gaming and, and then podcasting came in and podcasting and gaming went along with each other and then all sorts of social media productions got involved. So you had this vast communication network that was going on and, and.

Donald Trump's son was a member of all those three things and he put him onto this. I mean this was, this was a bold, out of the blue really if you think about it, in the last election was when he started appearing on the big podcast. So, so anyway, that's, that's my general thing and that's my first big trend. And the United States has investigated the rest of the world. It's traded with the rest of the world, it's tried to collaborate with the rest of the world and it generally doesn't find it an enjoyable experience. So Americans are going to come back and make America great again. That's a trend.

Okay. And when you look at, I'm going to take a big view here from the diagram because I get MAGA being an American culture and it does encapsulate a lot of things.

We're going to talk more about AI want to go into globalism and global trade continuing to fall apart, which is tied to the mega movement. I mean, if you follow your process here, clearly prioritizing our trade, getting out of bad deals, not supporting NATO and huge EU bureaucracies that are very, very top heavy structurally, they're having huge challenges. You know, you're a big follower of Peter Zion, talking about why that's going on. And then in China, the eastern countries, South Korea is having massive issues right now. Japan has been kicking the can for decades because they've, their, their debt load, their GDP to debt is so high. But.

Why don't we kind of branch out from these a little bit. And then what I'd like to do is pick AI last, because that's where I've got a bunch of predictions that I want to bounce off you.

Yeah, well, the globalism thing, again in the context of the last century, and I'm a great believer in Peter Zion's theory on this, that the. When the war ended in 1945. Okay. And I'm very interested in this because I was born in 1944. So I. I was born right at the end of the biggest, you know, the biggest conflict that had ever happened in world history. And the US could see right off the bat that Japan and Germany had been the enemies, but the next enemy was Russia. There was no clearer that Russia. And Russia, you know, was then the Soviet Union. And it was a massive land mass, but they had a massive army. They had a massive land army. Their. Their army was bigger than all the other armies put together, all the armies on the planet. And.

The Russians don't get nervous about battlefield deaths. That's. That's not. That doesn't really, you know, their sensitivities don't reach that far that we just lost 10,000 troops. And they said, well, get 10,000 more. And the US historically is not a land army. They're not a land army country. They're a maritime country because we have the greatest maritime coverage of any country on the planet. You know, Great Lakes, Atlantic Coast, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific coast. We're totally a maritime country. And at the end of the Second World War, there were two things. True, the US had half the global economy economically, and they had the. They had a navy that is greater than all the navies in the rest of the world, actually just their aircraft carrier groups, the 11 aircraft groups are greater than all the other navies in the world. So they had this thing. We've got the biggest economy by far, and we've got the great navy, okay? So what they said is, we will not go to war with the Soviet Union, okay? And what we will do is we'll bribe other people to go to war with the Soviet Union. And what we'll do is we'll say three things. One is the dollar is the currency, so everything's going to be done in dollars. Number two is we will lend massively for you to rebuild your economies, rebuild your militaries, okay? And number three is our navy will protect all the trade routes, so anything that you want to produce, you can. You can ship. And there'll be no tariffs into the American market, and you can ship them. And we'll guarantee all this. All the trade routes but we're gonna, we're gonna design your defense strategies to block the Soviet Union. That was the deal. It was only there not for economic reasons, because Americans, the American economy is Americans buying things from Americans. The entire American economy is really domestic, okay. And we have about 10, 15% of trade with other countries where it makes sense. But for the most part, the United States doesn't deal that much with the rest of the world. And once the Soviet union collapses, the 19. 1991. 1991 Christmas. Right around Christmas, 1991, Soviet Union collapses. Didn't ask anyone's permission, they just did it. And the US Started saying, oh, well, the deal we did, I don't know if we were going to do that deal. And the rest of the country said, no, no, you got to go on with the deal. And that deal was called globalization. That deal was called global trade. Yeah. I said, I don't know if we want to do this. Clinton was the first one, actually Bush senior was the first one to notice it. Then Clinton, he noticed it. And then, and then, and then Bush second noticed it, Obama noticed it, Trump talked about it. And Trump said, new deal. We're going to change everything. There's this great thing that we used to have, used to be called a tariff. And we're going to start using the tariff, we're going to try it out on China because China is really screwing us. And we don't like the Chinese and they don't like us. And why not create a tariff war? And that just changed the whole world. And then Covid came along from a virus that was.

Created and distributed in China and Covid and it just. All the trade routes and everything else, all the supply chains, and it ain't going back to where it was. It's, it's because the US just doesn't have any interest in this anymore. So that's, that's the end of globalization.

Now one of the interesting things about the US bringing its manufacturing back, by the way, it's still the second largest manufacturing country in the world. Okay. It's not as big as China, but the US is the highest manufacturing country of the world of high level goods. High level that require really extraordinary technology and everything. US is number one by far. We're the number one high level manufacturing company in the world. Low level. We're going to look for partners now. Mexico is the prime one. Mexicans are great. Colombia might be really, really good. And there's other countries in the Western hemisphere that are really, really good. But so my sense is, and this has huge impact on the educational and training system because it used to be you had to work, be swept up into this global economy.

It's the box to the left in the middle, right there. Increasingly, the university system in the U.S. will, the university system will decline as an entirely new skilled trade system creates millions. And it's going to be high level manufacturing, it's going to be technology driven trade.

Manufacturing. So the university system, which is teaching more or less a lot of theoretical stuff that doesn't really prepare you for the marketplace, is going to be more and more supplanted by community colleges, trade schools and other kinds of accreditization programs of learning a trade. One statistic that I follow, Mike, is welding. Because welding is first of all.

Right now there's about a half a million.

Too few welders in the United States right now.

Half a million? Yeah. Be 500,000 jobs there. If you're an 18 year old in Toronto or Chicago, our two main cities for strategic coach. And if you take a 10 week accreditation course that's sponsored by the welding industry and the community college, you get your accreditation at the end of 10 weeks, within one year you're making $60,000. Within five years, if you, you know, don't take drugs, don't commit a crime, don't get somebody pregnant or get pregnant yourself, you'll be making 150,000, okay. And you'll never be making less over the next 50 years than that 150,000. And that's happening in all the trades, plumbing, H vac, you know, electricians, all the trades. If you put in the accreditation and get it, some of it's longer than others, but very quickly you're going to be making a real large amount of money without going to university.

And I'm going to tie some of these things together. So I'm going to go back to the big picture view here, sort of summarizing what I've heard you talk about, which was starting with maga. And for anyone who's not familiar with how Dan does what he calls his three by three when we're doing these exercises. It began as a business exercise, but Dan has an interesting way of looking at three big ideas and then building upon three big ideas and tying these together and then three bigger ideas ideas, that's what you see in the green circles. So we started with maga, we went to globalism and you just heard about how mega and globalism tie into education.

And then we'll, we'll again spend a little time on AI Here you say it's happening very small before it goes big. Billions of individual tinkerings will prepare for big.

Then you tie together mega with AI and this whole notion of the working class.

Using and taking advantage of AI continually eliminates intellectual class employment.

And how that ultimately ties into political and economic forces, which again are going to be happening in the Western hemisphere. If I intuit what you are thinking, thinking about and talking about, there is at this moment, and most likely, and this is what all the trends are saying right now for 2025, at this moment, the majority of major investment that isn't filled with censorship is happening in the Western world and we're making massive progress. Now you hear about what China's doing with its AI because some of their new models are in fact very powerful, but they are censored, they are controlled by the government. And what the current belief is is that they are in fact red herring mechanisms for China to spy on Western society and continue to steal our ip. But between their declining birth rates, the challenges they have, their mounting debt loads, and the lack of transparency they have in, in their economy.

A lot of people are predicting a huge crash in China. Not to mention they've got lots and lots of transportation, well, movement, their dependence on outside resources is so high, and their dependence on trade. So that ultimately is where you tie into the US becoming increasingly becoming the magnet for global money and talent. Especially now that we're moving manufacturing back here and we control water, we have lots and lots of natural resources, we still export huge volume. Again, I'm just trying to paint the big picture that you see here before we really dive into AI and make that another continued conversation. But is there something I left out here that you want to provide in.

Terms of the big, say, the bottom left, the green box. Oh, yes, that increasingly the influence of the broadcast media industry will decline as podcasting and social media deliver the dominant narratives.

That's the speed of trust. Yeah, I've got a stat for you to throw out, which is a friend of mine, Roland Frazier, I know you know him too. They just finished doing a bunch of research and this is one of those things that when I heard it, I intuited it and I believe it's true, which is.

People now to make a big buying decision, consume about 7 hours, 28 minutes of content.

Which says a lot about now we're moving into the dominant trust content or long form podcasts. So if you digest two or three podcast episodes, which could be a couple hours each, the value, the trust that people have in these long form conversational.

Content versus something that is clearly manipulated, controlled, put into bite sized pieces.

Scripted. Yeah, it's like scripted. The reason, you know, I was watching Jordan Peterson on a podcast, great podcast this morning. And he's one of the great podcasters, not a. The level of Joe. Joe Rogan. And he was saying, you know, the Democrats are going crazy after the election. And they say, well, we have to have our own Joe Rogan. And they said, and Jordan Peterson, they had their own Joe Rogan. And none of them would come on his show because they were afraid they would say a word that would get them blackballed, you know, and everything he says, getting canceled. Yeah, they would get canceled if they were on the show. Psychologically and emotionally, they are incapable of doing this medium as they exist today. I mean, maybe we will have some sort of change, but I think the type of attitudes they have about language especially.

Prevents them from taking advantage of any of the new media.

So here's another really, really interesting nugget. There's a podcaster I follow, his name is Rick Beato, who deconstructs music.

Music. He's great. He's great.

Love him. I went and saw him live. I think he's one of the best examples of a great educator. You don't have to know anything about music to appreciate deconstruction. Just recently he did a little nugget that came from Theo Vaughn, who was one of the podcasts that Trump was on. Who is. I had never heard of him before until he popped up maybe a couple years ago. And I knew him as a comedian and he was on Joe Rogan a lot. So he interviewed Mr. Beast, who right now he's 20, either 26 or 27 or 28 years old. So he's 20s. He has the largest following on podcast of anyone. 300 and some million subscribers to his podcast.

But he reaches billions population of the U.S. yep.

And he touches many, many, many people. So Theo is interviewing him and he says, kind of like a purple cow, which was a reference to a Seth Godin thing. He says, oh, you just add Prince. And he said, you know, Prince. And Mr. Beast had no idea who Prince was at all.

And they went back and forth and he's like, prince. And he's like, no, never heard of him. And Theo's like, you gotta be kidding me. Now Theo's in his 30s, Mr. Beast is in his 20s. I have a 22 year old and I'm astounded by when my son gives me links to people who've got tens or even hundreds of millions of views, not necessarily followers, but we'll say tens of millions. I've never heard of them before. Same thing with musical artists. And it just goes to show that there's a time for a messenger and a message and there's also a massive recycling going on which is now my son just sends me these videos of people he likes and he follows and he trusts. I've never heard of him before and it just speaks to how cultures change and messengers change. But welcome to the world of 3 second attention spans and fewer than 20 seconds to get a prospect's attention, engage them, get to know like and trust you, you and say I want and need what you have. Let's make a deal. Introducing Digital Cafe AI. A relationship building AI that will take your hard earned leads and make them feel like you're sitting down with them for a cup of coffee. Listening to their needs and responding to them with a personalized, useful, resourceful solution. It's the perfect AI team. A digital cafe AI does hours or days of work that normally requires an expensive team of specialists in minutes. It's the fastest, easiest automated way to get attention, engagement and trust to close bigger deals faster. A digital Cafe AI is a done for you service that can be adapted to any B2B or B2C business. Money loves speed and time kills deals. So visit Digital Cafe AI to see how it will work for you.

Kids these days, they, they don't even know they've never watched broadcast television ever.

Right, I haven't, I'm in year seven. Yeah, I stopped seven years, seven years ago.

U.S. too. We, we, yeah, we, we disconnected from cable a long time ago. All of our content comes and the Internet.

Yeah, yeah.

The point being the speed of trust, collapsing time and trust and where do we get the stuff that we trust and who do we follow? And I think all this ties into that. But anyway, I, I derailed you a little bit, but.

No, no, but I think the, the big thing is that it's very clear.

And I, I, I, I, I watch YouTube a lot so you know, so I don't watch broadcast tv but I, I watch and I've been going through the aftermath of the election, of the meltdowns on the Democratic side and the best ones are where they're, it's at 7:00 on election night and they're so excited and the reports are coming in and they're reporting, you know, she's ahead here, she's ahead here. And then there's this middle section where the tide stops. You know, it's like you've been there when the tide stops. You're 100 yards from the Pacific and this weird period, it's about five minutes long when the tide stops, and then it starts going the other direction. And then you see them. And they said, I don't know if I want to be. I don't. I'm not sure I want to be among Americans who could make this decision. I. I don't know. I'm very, very worried about the future of our country and everything else. And I said, oh, oh, your problem is that the express train left the station and you missed it, you know, and it has to do with how. How things are communicated these days, you know, and, you know. Yeah, we had a client named Deborah Schatzke, long time in program, and she has a business partner who's an accountant. And she had Stella McCartney as, as. As a client. And so the. Stella had taken over a building in the meatpacking district in New York, and she had. She had had a great designer, very young designer, who, you know, did all of her work, her work office, her studios and everything on the bottom floor, and then her, you know, her. Their living quarters up above. And he had done an amazing job. So she invited the accountant and the designer over for dinner, and her father was there. And so they introduced, and the accountant and Stella went out and were fixing dinner, and the designer was there with Stella's father. And he said to him, what do you do for a living, Mr. McCartney? And he says, music. Music. He says, music? He says, yeah. Says, anything. I know. And he says, I had a couple bands. Bands, yeah. And he says, yeah, Beatles. And he says, yeah, yeah, I think Wings. No, I haven't heard Wings. Haven't heard about Wings. And they're talking along like that, you know, And.

And I said, that must have been one of the greatest evenings in Paul McCartney's life in the last 60 years that nobody knew. They didn't know who he was, you know, and it wasn't. It wasn't put on or anything. They just didn't know, you know, and what do you do with a world like that where you. You try to use historical models as part of your argument, and it doesn't go anywhere.

Yeah, it, It.

And that is coupled with this new creator economy. So the way I see that evolving in parallel is again, this. My son sent me this. This video of a young guy who's got a YouTube show. And my son really likes him and trusts him and basically this guy is completely modeled John Oliver in his style of reporting, kind of sensationalist, really specific cadence to his speech. And you know, what I wanted to say is, yeah, he just knocked off Jon Stewart and John Oliver and it's just a new messenger with the same methods. And what I hope we see as a trend with regards to this long form, these podcasts is a return to true journalism.

And valuing that. Just as my prediction over the next five or 10 years is a massive return to.

Musicians playing real instruments. The young people are going to rediscover that now that most pianos are being disposed of. But you know, we'll go through a new level of scarcity.

And the desire. I don't know if you saw that video of.

The new year at the Eiffel Tower and it was this big picture of everyone holding their phones, looking at the future through their phones, not experiencing the moment. So I really predict that there's going to be this massive pushback away from social media, specifically the sensationalist creator influencer market, and a return to good old fashioned high quality journalism.

Well, you know, well, I think social media, the phone is here to stay, you know.

But I think that more and more what you're talking about is really thoughtful presentations that relate to how people are actually experiencing their lives, you know, and everything like that. And not some top down dictate on how people should be experiencing their lives, but actually how people are experiencing it. And, and I think, you know, to go to our third arrow, the AI one on the form, this is huge. But I'm not seeing the predictions coming true that were predicted two years ago. I mean, we're just in the third, early third year of the AI breakout. And you know, I think the total investment of US corporations in this is approaching a trillion dollars. And they're not, they're not seeing any return on the dollars because I think where the implementation is happening is at your level, at my level. And we're doing it for our own purposes. And I don't see the emergence of a real breakout.

Platform. Like the personal computer was a platform. Okay. Yeah. Then the graphic user interface made the platform available to everybody, you know, and software and then all the variations that software had to be disks and finally software was just a message, you know, it was just an electronic message. I don't see the big, big company that's emerging and I don't think it's any of the big companies right now that's going to be. There might be a. But it's hard for me to understand at what level that they aggregate, where they have everybody.

Yeah, I have some opinions and some predictions and also a few things that I've noticed and again I'm paying attention to the trends so I'm aggregating lots of information. So I'll begin by saying I believe the killer app because that's really what you're describing is where's the killer app after a trillion dollars? And, and, and some of that just required infrastructure. So it's, it's the building of these large language models which there are many that's been open sourced and then you've got a massive investment in the, effectively the processing. So as of right now, Elon has, has built what is probably the largest processing system.

That exists. He bought massive volumes of Nvidia processors. But what I believe the, the killer app is that we're waiting for, they just haven't matured yet. Where you're going to see a huge breakthrough is an agent technology which are effectively instead of large language models where you're doing generative AI, you're asking it a question, you've got a chatbot, it gives you some answers and you can automate a task, but it's sort of like give it a command and it does something for you. Agents will effectively, and there are some right now that are call centers, for example, customer service, customer support. But soon you'll effectively have an agent that can replace or enhance.

An entire team. So accounting, financial management, those kinds of things where you'll see a rapid movement towards an 80:20. So this is another interesting stat I just saw, I was just looking for the citations specifically. So I'm going to tell you what it is and I've got to look at what it, what it is. But basically the belief is by the end of 2025 there will be the elimination of as many as 4 million jobs, but the creation of 7 million. Okay. And so I think what you're going to start seeing is, is stuff that is repetitive, task oriented will be agentified and that's where you're going to see huge opportunities. And there's already in this trillion dollar spend what, what a lot of corporations have been doing is instead of buying more SaaS software services, they've got tools that they're building their own in house solutions. So they're not tied to huge enterprise budget.

There's been a movement that again you're looking for the killer app. It's just there's a whole bunch of AI stuff that's replacing pre existing things and either People are going back and saying, here's what we're going to pay for your agent, for your enterprise software. We're going to pay 20% of what we're paying before. So that's sort of like a global mindset. But the big areas that we're seeing already and we'll see a lot more of, I think you'll see the emergence in 2025 is just personalized where, you know, you'll wear your wearables, you're going to get a lot of data. When you get your tests, it'll go inside this thing and you'll effectively get just in time, data. You can hack stuff like that together now. But I think you're going to see a lot of, lot of movement there. And the same in drug discovery, meaning Google and some of the other big, big players are analyzing massive, massive volumes of medical data. And we'll start being able to run tests without having to go through traditional human approvals.

And then the other areas that.

We'Re.

Going to see that in is energy usage. So just like the fuel injector reduced how much gasoline cars used and controlled emissions, what you're going to see now, and we just recently had a little gadget installed at home that monitors our water usage and it effectively measures it and helps us optimize our usage based upon daytime. And this is a California thing. But I think what you'll see are more gadgets in your home that tell you where all the leaks are so you can get by and see a 20 to 40% savings in your electricity usage. And you know, aggregated and compounded, that's going to have a huge effect. So I think the areas where AI is working behind the scenes right now, it's the same thing with supply chain where and again the unions are all against this right now, but basically are one of our worst usages of energy and huge waste is in our ports where stuff just sits for weeks. And they're purposely held back by unions, you know, so there's on a conspiratorial level. So what you're going to see is a lot of automation taking place on port level where they're just going to move stuff back and forth. And assuming.

You know, when we start seeing an increase in manufacturing in the US which again the supply chains are going to be optimized and that's, that's happened in transportation and trucking with, with automation, it's just going to be aiified again requiring probably 80% fewer people in jobs that are just plain inefficient for humans.

And the other thing, or the.

Job will be enhanced and it'll be the same person but upgraded.

That's, that's what I believe. I think, yeah.

My sense is that most of the education that people are going to be receiving is the upgrading of their usefulness in the economy.

Yes.

Yeah. And it's going to, you know, I mean, when higher education becomes a joke, you know, they've passed, they passed their expiry date. You know, they get, the universities have passed their expiry date. And I, I would say it's been at least 10 years, but it may have been about 20 years that there's no, no longer any connect between spending four years at great cost at a university where your body is just being warehoused to keep it out of the workplace. And when you get into the workplace, your education starts all over again. Okay. And I, I, I would say that the educational factor of having personal AI tutors and personal AI consultants and AI coaches and AI is going to be very, very significant. But when I say one of my quarterly books for 2025, it's not the next one, but it's the one after that. The title is will it be available on Monday?

Okay. I believe all the predictions are true. I believe all the predictions are true. I don't buy into their deadlines.

Yeah.

I don't buy.

When you're moving hundreds of millions of people, I have to tell you, you can't do it on schedule.

Yeah, I think that that is.

NASDAQ talked about something tied to that, which.

Is I know it'll be available on Monday, but how far off is the Monday that it'll be available on? Right.

Well, there's two, two threads I'll follow up on. One of them is on education. So this is.

Something that happened recently. So my son's been taking classes, film classes, for example, at Santa Monica, Online class. So that's been an ongoing change. And he had this overwhelming volume studying film noir. So he had this overwhelming volume of notes and about different movies, a whole bunch of stuff he had to study. And he came to me and said, I've got 160 pages of stuff and I can't digest all this. And I've got a report to write and a test to take. And he just couldn't, you know, he just couldn't keep all this stuff together. And I said, let me show you how to use NotebookLM, Google's tool showed him how to digest it. And I created a mini podcast for him that reported on all of his notes for him and I showed him how he could break it down into little chunks. And so what we're really talking about is how you can digest hundreds or thousands of pages of material, make sense out of it and learn at least 10 times faster.

Oh, yeah.

And digest and understand.

I'm using. Very interesting. I just created one chapter, the book.

The book that I'm doing with.

Casting, not hiring. And you've met, I think online, you've met Alex Barley, who works with us.

Alex is from the UK and he's moved back to the uk. He's still on the team, but he's working from the uk. And I said, now I'm just going to send you the text and you put it through Notebook LM and send me back the conversation because I want to hear what they're saying about what they're understanding. So that's just a minor incursion on my part into the AI world. But it got me to thinking, I want to use AI as much as possible for my role in creating. Creating the book. So, yes.

So I'll give you another anecdotal example with a coach member and then I'll give you my five big takeaways. So we started building a new brand for Charlie Epstein and it's called the Fortress. And his vision is he wants to eliminate there are 22 vet suicides that occur every day in the United States. And a big challenge in the military is their money. Okay, that's definitely one of the causes of suicide, duh. And.

He wanted to put together a program that would help prevent vet suicides and also one that would help the active military and veterans manage their money and be able to do more with it. So effectively, it's a financial model, it's a financial plan and a brand new product that's education based. And what we did is we digested huge volumes of content again, somewhere on the order of thousands of pages. And we used a variety of different models and we were able to crank out in two days a full business, all the marketing, all the content and a whole program and the scripts. And then this is really funny, but one of the people involved, his name is Court Marshall, I swear to God, Courtney Marshall, and he is a master Staff sergeant. And then Charlie's also been working with a general and a bunch of other active military and also former military, retired, to put together this program. So what we did is after a day and a half, we put together all the content, all the programming. It couldn't have been done without AI. And then spent a half a day in studio and created the entire product on camera. And so going back to education, you know, it wasn't long ago and like using a slide rule would be considered cheating. And then it was a calculator and then using a word processor. And what we found is.

Better content can be created faster by effective thinkers. Okay, now non effective thinkers. You know, I joke all the time that AI can make a really smart person 10 times more effective and more productive. It can make a stupid person a hundred times dumber. And you see that all the time when you've got young people staring at their phones instead of focusing on providing service. So I think that is the displacement and that really is, you know, if I summarize my key takeaways here, work face transformation and educational transformation is number one, which is a new mindset that if you are not AI enhanced actively using these tools, you will be left in the dust. And if I were an employer right now, I would absolutely make it mandatory. Just like I wouldn't ever hire someone who can't type or use email. I'd say if you're not actively using AI, there's not a place for you. I can't get you up to speed enough to be effective or useful. And I think that's a mindset that you're going to see. And there is no time for a four year degree for that. We need apprenticeships and mentorships. And that's part of the workforce transformation. It's a mindset. The next one is AI is pervasive. It's in every part of our lives. And right now it's still invisible. It's built into your phone, it's built into your computer, it's built into energy management, our cars. But learning how to engage and interact and provide value, there's massive opportunities there. The next one is we're going to continue to see economic shifts in this, we'll call it the Maya movement. If we're going to apply that where there's disruptions that are going to occur, whether it's supply chain, economic policies, tariffs, government imposed bs, that at the end of the day we've got to pick up the slack and it's going to be done faster with AI, something we didn't talk about. I'll leave this one for last, but personalization, we didn't even talk about this. But the notion that.

Now with AI we can create a lot better content faster. But there's also the opportunities for hyper personalization. Think about what Joel Stolte has done with his newsletter platform, but now it'll be absolutely customized based on a per person basis.

And I think we're going to just see that more and more inside media as well. I just, like anyone, I'm fearful of, you know, creating an AI version of us that's almost perfect to deliver hyper personalized content. But someone's going to be innovating, there's always room and that's super valuable. But the last one is the ethics of AI, which.

You know, if we overregulate, it's going to hurt the U.S. it's going to hurt innovation, but somehow, you know, there's the number of hacks, the number of bank hacking that's going on and fraud is incredibly high right now, and that's not going to go away.

And, you know, and one person can do an enormous amount of damage very, very quickly. That's an opportunity.

Yeah. My sense is that, you know, that.

Individuals are. People don't respond as groups, they respond as individuals. Okay. And, you know, is that somebody watching this is scared halfway through what we're talking about and doesn't want to know anything about it. The other person says, I'm going to look into that, I'm going to look into that, I'm going to look into that. And it's very unpredictable which person is which person to do this. So my sense is that generally speaking, humans won't go any faster than they want to, you know, and they'll get pressure. And it's very clear that with Trump bringing in Elon and Vivek to scrutinize all the government departments, that this is 50 years ahead of where the outgoing president was. Yes, the outgoing president. I mean.

You know.

It wasn't just that he was cognitively disabled. He was, he, he was just not living in the right century to be President of the United States. You know, and, and, and I would say that the vast majority of people in Washington are still in another century. They're, they're not in this century at all. They've been educated wrongly, they've been rewarded wrongly, they've been trained wrongly. And, you know, so, but things, I mean, the energy transition is not going to happen real fast.

Yes.

Okay. And Peter, Peter Zion has a podcast today. It's very good. It's on AI. I think he did it on the 27th of December, and he said the real problem is electricity. Yeah, we just, he said, we just don't have the power right now for all the plans. The power isn't there. I mean, if you Ran. If you had a Tesla and you drove it every day. Okay. For a whole year, everything you did. Okay, and what would it be? Average person, 30, 40,000 miles? I don't know whether it would be 30 or 40,000, maybe not 20,000. What would it be?

A Tesla? How many miles per. How many year?

Per year? How many miles would you do?

Like ours, we probably put about 12. A thousand? Yeah, 12. 12 to 30. 13. 14,000 miles.

Okay. Multiply that by three. 40,000. 40,000. And the electricity that it would take. Three tests. That's what a Nvidia chip uses in a year.

Yeah.

They just produce 5 million of them.

Yeah, yeah. I. Right before we got on, I was speaking with a guy who's involved in a couple. They're basically portable nuke projects. And.

For that exact reason, I mean, this is. If there ever was an argument for deregulating nukes, this is it. Because as Peter talks about this all the time, we can't make enough batteries or solar panels. And the economic costs and the environmental costs are so high.

Yeah, he talked about we're going to run out of power and.

Yeah, well, places in the world. Cuba has been on blackout now for almost a month.

Puerto Rico, they were two thirds down the other day. Places are running out of electricity. They just don't have electricity. I mean, it's already happening.

And do you know where there's breakthroughs taking place? And I just got this today, so Kazakhstan. There's massive investment available there and it's not a ton of regulation for some of these new technologies. That's about as smart on that topic as I am right now. It's above my pay grade, but apparently there's just massive amount of movement going in there with regards to energy production. And they plan on using it for bitcoin.

Which again, we'll see where that goes. But.

There'S certainly a lot of opportunity for how we track value and store value. But.

It'S a mental leap. At the end of the day.

Bitcoin ain't real estate.

It ain't money either. Yeah.

So.

Yeah, but you know, I mean, it's part of the, you know, it's part of. Part of the picture. I mean, digital currency is definitely part of the picture, but with government trust in government at all time low, people aren't going to give up their cash.

No. Yeah.

You know, I was just.

Coming to the end, but I've done five trips to Buenos Aires in the last year and first one was November of last year before the new president was elected. He Was elected in December. And we were just back there at the end of, end of November. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. We were there for American Thanksgiving. And what a change in the country. I'll tell you a statistic. Last year I went go to a medical clinic and MRIs are required because I have orthopedic injuries that are being worked on. And so I go for the MRI. First class facility. Great technology, great technicians. $35 US for an MRI that afternoon. Okay. Ordered it in the morning, had it in the afternoon. Okay. So the new president comes in and in one year he gets rid of 10 government departments. He fires 35,000 civil servants in a country that's got less than 50 million. It's about 40, 46, 48 million people. So the US would be, you know, think of taking 50 million and putting it into 350. So seven times that would be seven times 35,000, that would be about 250,000 federal. Ten departments, they probably easy to find. The place feels better. You walk around the streets. I could tell it was really tense and now it's feeling a lot better. But the big thing is that I went in for an MRI again and it was $280 U.S. okay, it went from 35 to 280. And that tells you the economy is.

Getting sense about it, you know, and massive amount of American dollars are pouring into Argentina. But the other thing is that the banks, the government used to have a trick that people would put their hard currency, the US dollars in the banks and the government would seize the bank account. So nobody put their US dollars and they were all in mattresses, all over the tens of thousands of mattresses filled with US dollars. And now all the money in the mattresses is coming out into the economy. He wants to dollarize the currency. He wants to, whatever, whatever the US dollar is, the peso is always the same. So, yeah, he's doing it. But you know why? The US dollar is real money.

Yeah, that's right.

US Dollars, real money.

That's right.

You know what it is here, right now in Toronto?

No, I, I, well, I just looked. Isn't it 0.7?

Well.

I look at it the other way. Yeah, yeah, it's $44. 44, yeah. So every dollar that comes back from the U.S. into our Canadian bank account is worth 44 cents more.

Yep. That is a much better way of looking at it.

You can buy a lot of growth. You can buy a lot of growth with $0.44 extra on the dollar.

You sure can. Yeah.

Anyway, well, I got a lot out of this. And so what would you say my three trends, they don't seem to conflict with anything that you're talking about?

Not at all. In fact.

When you sent it to me this morning to look at and I'll pop it back up on the screen, I had been preparing and looking through trends and again, I didn't want to get super micro. But what my takeaway is, first of.

All.

You and I have talked about mega before, but the notion of how this is going to fuel a lot more trust in innovation in the United States and abroad and also reprioritize and refocus.

I put globalism in the same space. We totally agreed upon the breakdown of and where trust is coming from, which is the old media falling apart and how what AI is going to do, I believe for innovation, efficiency, transformation.

And you tie this back to the globalism.

Just being able to do more, faster with less is what AI ultimately is all about. It's buying more time, saving more time, creating more efficiency, which always benefits an economy.

And.

Again, you definitely are operating from looking at where does the US fit inside the world and where do we as Americans fit inside the world? And also.

Taking care of getting rid of bureaucracy and this class warfare. I think this is a really, really important time to restore trust and pride and confidence. And that's what I saw here psychologically. And I just see AI as a how.

Yeah, well, I don't know if that that's blended.

Yeah. There was an interesting podcast by a young guy about.

I think it was about two years ago and is when Trump started his rallies up again about two years ago. And so he was on the left, very much on the left, very woke minded, but also kind of open minded. So he heard, he lived in Los Angeles and he heard about a MAGA rally that was going to take place in Kentucky. And so he got a, you know, he just went out and he wanted to record conversations with MEGA people. And he went out and.

Everybody treated him great. Everybody was really interested. They were really interested in his story. They were really complimentary that even though he was on the other side politically, that he was very interested in what people thought. And he spent two days there talking, you know, before the rally, they were gathering already. And then the day of the rally and then the day after, he got invitations to come home for dinner with them. He was invited to a prayer group, if they wanted to come to a prayer group. And he said, nicest bunch of people I ever know. No, but he says if I go by how my friends in Los Angeles. Describe those people. They're the devil. But he said that they're wonderful people, friendly, you know, courteous.

Everything like that. Yeah, it's a made up culture war on one side that is scared silly.

Yeah, it is. Well, I think reflecting back, you and I grew up in the Midwest. I have a lot more in common with.

With small town. Us. Small town.

Exactly. Very small town. And I just, I don't want to end on a sad note, but I just buried my mom a couple of weeks ago. So I was back home in Minnesota with, with those people. And, and look, it's like the number of people showed up, my, my old neighbors that I grew up with almost 60 years ago who, who are still alive, they still live in the same homes. I could still go down, knock on the door, open it up and just walk in, you know, so, and, and I'll reflect that back. So I've been living now in Mexico for the past almost three months. We, that's where I'm, I'm shooting this from, thanks to starlink. So this technology. But the Mexican culture is very, very much what our hometown vibe is. You know, the, the celebration, the family structure, the respect for family. And you know, it's a predominantly Catholic culture. However, we just celebrated Hanukkah up on a hill. So it was like, you know, and it's just this beautifully integrated society. But I felt warm with the possibility of restoring that feeling that I grew up with and that we grew up with. And that brings me a lot of joy, brings me a lot of courage and confidence. So again, you know, precisely what you're saying. You know, the devil stories that have been told, I think, you know, there, there was no violence in the street. We can expect a peaceful transition of power. And, and the idea of America is going to continue being. Great idea.

Yep, yep. It took a billionaire to.

Yeah, it did. It took a lot of movement there.

So he's a blue collar billionaire. Mike Crowley was lawyer in the program, strategic coach and he was a corporate real estate lawyer who by his story had 30 projects with Donald Trump over 35 years. And he said that two things. One is that he would go out to work sites and Trump would be there, blue suit, tie with a hard hat. And he would sit for hours talking to the workers. Okay. And you know, and he would talk to them. Sometimes he, he'd just have a catering truck come by and he'd buy lunch for everybody on the work site and everything else. That was one story. The other story was that behind closed doors, when Trump's having a meeting. He's very gracious and he's a great listener. He lets everybody talk. But he said he's. He's a wizard of a decision maker. He just makes decisions just like that and everything like that. And looking back, I think it's the first time since the first president that we've had an entrepreneur as president of the United States. George Washington was a land speculator. He had 56,000 acres of land that he had bought in the Ohio territory, which wasn't Ohio yet. And he had the biggest and best distillery in the thirteen colonies.

How interesting is that?

I did not know. This is the first time we've had a. Why they find it so strange. It's the first time we've had an entrepreneur as president.

It's great.

Yeah.

Well, I can't wait to see what happens next. And I'm looking forward to the cleaning to begin.

And we'll see you in a week and a half, won't we?

Yeah, you certainly will. I can't wait.

So.

Well, we can wrap up this episode and say it's been another fascinating journey. Not at all what I expected, but I always love the destination we wind up in.

If, if you come on Sunday night, we're having steak.

I'm there. I'm already. I'm already going to be there.

Down £20 in the last five months, so.

Great. So this is. This is. I'm celebrating my 10th month carnivore. I. I got off the road away in a little bit because I had a hard time finding great beef. Now I've got a. I found a rancher, but I'm down.

I'm under.

Let's see, I'm down about 23 pounds and with tons of muscle. And I feel great.

Yeah, I feel good.

Yeah, it's really effective. Effective strategy.

So.

Well, let's. Let's wrap this up. Thank you for amazing episode, Dan.

Thank you. Thank you. Mike.

Sa.