6/25/26: Trump Holds Housing Bill Hostage, Trump Freaks Over War Powers, NSPM-7 Crackdown, AI Hype Debate

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for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. So Trump had a bit of a meltdown yesterday on true social and announced that he is going to refuse to sign some legislation that passed in bipartisan manner that is meant to promote housing affordability, so to bring down housing costs, unless and until they pass his Save America Act, which is about sort of like vote rigging in Republicans favor. We can get into more of the details in that in just a moment. He was asked by the press, why would you do this? Why would

you hold housing affordability hostage in favor of this, we'll charitably call it, voter reform legislation that they're putting. Let's take a listen to his response. Biden home is on table for so many Americans. Is this election legislation more important to you that we're all saying to housing? Every election is important. We're doing very well. They want a lot of communists to come in.

I'm saying it a little bit differently, but the people that they're pushing are communists. So he just starts talking about communist winning. and taking over, et cetera. I guess that's his rationale for why this legislation is so important to him. Let's put C2 up on the screen. This is one of the true socials he put out

announcing this decision. Today's Housing News Conference and signing is hereby canceled until such times as we passed the desperately needed Save America Act, which I consider to be a national emergency. He put out another one.

Let's put this up on the screen. But Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren-centric housing bill, which is of minor importance compared to lower interest rates and even FISA. pales in comparison to passing the Save America Act. That is what Americans, both Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else care about.

Not sure the polling reflects that one. Get the bad Republicans to approve it or better yet, terminate the filibuster and approve it, and everything else Republicans have dreamed of. The Democrats would do it in one hour, 100%. Republicans will feel very stupid if they don't do it. First, I'll be watching, he says Ryan, with tears in my eyes. What are we supposed to do with this guy? So, yes, Elizabeth Warren is involved in the negotiations around this housing bill, but it is a widely bipartisan thing.

With provisions like keep it pushed in an executive order. That's the way this happened. He was like, oh, I want to do this thing of blocking permanent capital from buying houses. Elizabeth Warren said, okay, bet, let's do it. We'll make it into legislation. Everybody signs on. It gets passed. And I was like, the Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas bill is not important, Save America Act, whatever.

I mean, it's just insane. And to be like, the public is really clamoring for my voter ID bill. And not housing affordability is like, what planet are you literally on? He tried this with Ken, Ken Paxton, right? You know, he said, I will, you know, Ken Paxton kind of use it against him. say if you pass the Save America Act, then I will drop out and endorse John Cornyn. They don't have the votes to pass this thing

without getting rid of the filibuster. They don't have the votes to get rid of the filibuster. They just don't. And like the idea that the Senate Republicans would cave on that, they want the filibuster. There's a reason they're not getting rid of the filibuster. They like it in place.

The idea that they're going to get rid of it just to get him to sign that his own housing bill is just completely crazy. It's not going to happen. So now he's going to have to, I guess he has until Taco Tuesday, right? There's another one coming so he can schedule the signing on Tuesday. Or he can go ahead and veto a housing affordability bill. When it is housing unaffordability that is creating this communist takeover that he's

complaining about. I mean, it's not a communist takeover, but like the thing, the thing that is driving people in the direction that he doesn't like could be addressed, not completely, but in significant part by this bill. And then he says, oh, well, it's better to get interest rates down. It's like, buddy, you got your guy onto the Federal Reserve. He is a complete and total Trump flunky, but you have so badly mismanaged the economy through your tariffs and your war that even your guy is saying, yeah, I can't really cut rates at this point because Trump has so butchered the economy that we're getting significant inflation that I have to deal with. Meanwhile, he came in and said, we're no longer doing guidance about what we're going to do in the

future. And so Wall Street responded to that by saying, well, okay, that means there's more risk. We don't know what's going to happen. There's more uncertainty. Uncertainty is priced in as a risk premium, which increases interest rate. interest rates. So he's his own guy with his new policy that he put into place of the Fed is driving up interest rates. So Trump is just doing everything wrong at every turn. It's absolutely remarkable. Yeah. And just so people know, you know, the Save America Act, we have covered it here before.

But the TLDR is it's going to make it harder for people to vote. And it requires states to send in their voter rolls. You know, a bunch of states, Georgia has been sort of ground zero for this. They will automatically kick a bunch of people off the rolls and force you to prove that you are still a voter that you're still at this address to get yourself re-added. First, you have to know that you were kicked off to begin with. And they do all sorts of things like, you know, if it's a duplicate name, or if it's a name of someone who is undocumented, who is not a citizen, but this person just happens to have the same name and is a citizen, they'll just auto-delete all those people off the rolls because they assume those are more likely to be Democratic voters. This is sort of like a nationwide effort to do that. But, you know, the other thing that is, and let's put C-5 up on the screen because this is part and parcel of his attempt to tilt the midterm playing field strongly in the Republican direction. Most obvious effort in that has been the whole redistricting push, which thanks to terrible court decisions has really skewed in favor of Republicans.

Now we have the Postmaster General saying that the U.S. Postal Service is not going to deliver mail ballots if states don't give them. the Trump regime access to their voter rolls. Okay. And many states right now are in litigation with the Trump administration right now pushing back on this executive order demand that they hand over their voter rolls. So they're trying to now weaponize the postal services. Oh, well, we're not going to deliver your ballots at all if you don't do what we want you to do. And so, Ryan, there's been this question of whether Trump even cares about the midterms because his political, I guess, actions, instincts have been so bad and so insane. You're like, I guess he just doesn't care about politics at all anymore.

He's in his lame duck period already. He's just going to do whatever he feels like doing and doesn't really give a shit if Republicans lose the House and the Senate. These actions would tell a very different story that he still is very interested in what can I do to make sure that even if there is a public that is dramatically opposed to what my administration does, that we're still able to keep our grip on power here. Yes. And some of the kind of resistance Democrats' most hysterical claims about Trump during his first term have really been borne out over time. So I think we have to really start,

you know, we have to take all of those claims very seriously. And the idea that he wants to kind of break the link between, you know, popularity, favor, ratings, the Democratic will, and what he can do in office seems to be a rather credible one here. So I think your point is right. It's not necessarily that he doesn't care about the results of the elections. It's more like he wants to kind of enact that Stalin line, where Joseph Stalin famously said it doesn't matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes. In this case, it would matter who delivers the ballots to the voters and who has possession of the voter rolls. So, you know, I think Democrats are probably going to have to take on a variety of his slogan back in 2024.

They're going to have to win too big to rig. Yeah. That's going to have to be too overwhelming. And perhaps he will lose so much political capital that even the Postmaster General is like, you know what, actually I'm not going to kind of try to break American democracy just to save this president who's at 28% at this point. But then again, like, I think we have to take everything seriously. No doubt about it.

No doubt about it. So there's been another whole crazy situation unfolding with regard to Trump and the Republicans, actually, with regards to this Iran war powers resolution that actually passed the House, past the Senate. There were two Republicans, Mitch McConnell and McCormick, who were both absent for it. McCormick was actually traveling with Trump at the time. so it was unavailable to go to the vote. And then Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy voted in favor of the War Powers Resolution for the first time this thing passed. Trump was very, very, very, very unhappy about this. Reportedly, you can put D1 up on the screen.

He and Bill Cassidy apparently had an all-out shouting match. The way CBS News describes it is a sit-down, no-you-sit-down, shouting spat during the closed-door meeting with the Senate Republicans. Trump was absolutely furious, you know, lighting into Bill Cassidy and Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski as well for their votes on this resolution. And, you know, at this point, you've got, Ryan, the Iran war is kind of on hold here as we do these negotiations. So classic Congress move here to actually pass the resolution once the war may be settled and over.

But it's also very comforting to me that Trump was so angry. angry about this going through. It's not a great sign of confidence that he feels he's done with war, I guess, at this point. Yeah, and I don't have an explanation for why it is, but I mentioned this a bunch before, Trump has always really cared about these war powers resolution votes. Like he credits them with real power, even like during Trump won, when there would be war powers pushes in the House or Senate, particularly at the time, on. the Yemen war and the U.S. support for the Saudi-led Yemen war, like he would fight hard against

them and he would change what he was doing. Like after one of them passed, he stopped kind of refueling Saudi fighter jets, which brought to a significant end of Saudi Arabia's ability to carry out that war and helped kind of end Saudi Arabia's involvement in it. So even though he has no respect for Congress, no respect for anything other than kind of his day-to-day whims, for some reason he does respect war powers votes. And so to, to, and so that I think explains why he had this kind of blow-up shouting match. You know, somebody like Bill Cassidy, who Trump threw out of office, doesn't have a whole lot of

motivation to give him what he want. But it's interesting that after getting a briefing, I guess, you know, they was able to, they're able to kind of move, move him on this. He was one of the ones that flipped, right? Yeah, so just an update to my previous comments. There was four Republicans that voted against it. Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, then Mitch McConnell, and Dave McCormick that missed the vote that it passes by 50 to 48 John Fetterman voted with Republicans because of course

he did. It doesn't even say which Democrat, was the one Democrat, but I'm just going to assume it was John Fetterman because he's been voting against all of these things. And it is significant because, so, you know, so people know how this works, it doesn't require presidential signature once it passes the House and it passes the Senate. it, then that's it. You, you know, you are supposed to not go to war. You're supposed to stop the war. And so it gives you some power to go to the courts then. If Trump was to restart hostilities, direct hostilities with Iran and say he can't do this, right? It gives them some legal power.

Now, we know that Trump has blown through previous legal limits. I have no doubt they would come up with some theory of the case why it doesn't count and we can do whatever we want. The new war. Yeah. And so, Ryan, I kind of, you know, I don't know that he's that concerned about the legal implications here. I think it's more of an ego thing that you had this many Republicans vote against him, which is why. So he freaks out, yells at everybody who voted the wrong way. Bill Cassidy, one of the things that he had apparently said is you haven't even briefed us on this war

and you expect us to go along with it. So some of the members of the Trump administration then later in the day reached out to Bill Cassidy. So all right, well, fine, come in for a briefing. Brought him into the situation room, gave him a whole briefing. He tweets on, oh, thank you for the briefing. and then he changes his vote. And they do the same war powers resolution vote again. And this time, he and Rand Paul flipped their votes.

And the two that weren't there are there. And so it's then able to pass. Now, it's kind of meaningless because you already have the one that, you know, you already have the one that passed. Yeah, sorry, failed. You already have the one that passed. So the fact that it failed this time doesn't like supersede that or override it. It's just purely an ego play.

for Trump to come in and be like, no, I'm going to bend you to my will. I'm going to force you to see the world the way that I see the world. And you are going to publicly demonstrate your fealty to me and the fact that I was right and you were wrong on this vote. Yeah, it's, it's yes. And I think you're right that like if he relaunched the war, he would say, well, it's a new war. And Higgs has even hinted at that. Like, okay, we're only allowed to do 60 days of war.

war, will we stopped? And so now we're doing new one, but just materially, he doesn't have the capacity to do that, it seems like. Yeah. Last thing on this, Ryan, I'm curious for your view and what your reporting suggests. So Bill Cassidy lost this primary, so he's a lame dog, so he has no reason to, like, continue to be slavishly pro-Trump. Sort of embarrassing to me that he went and did this briefing and flipped his vote. Like, how weak are you? I mean, and just to pause on him for a second. This guy, I think, I think his sense. was he voted in favor of the like January 6th impeachment. Since then, he's done everything they've wanted him to do.

He is a doctor, and so he did not really want to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. to be the head of HHS, but he did it. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., oh, I'm totally pro-vaccine and don't worry about it, sir, and they had these private meetings. There was all sorts of Susan Collins-esque angst about how concerned he is. But the end of the day, he voted for him. He voted for all the Trump picks. He's done everything Trump wanted to do.

but it didn't matter. Trump came after him in his primary and he gets, you know, kicked down of office. And so then for him to just still be bending the knee whenever he's asked to is frankly humiliating. But you have others as well who have lost their seats, John Cornyn is now, actually he tweeted out a Wall Street Journal article. I don't know if you saw this. That was like the top goal scorer for the men's soccer team is a citizen by birthright citizenship. Yeah. And so he tweeted out in a Wall Street Journal article that was like, this is what makes our soccer team in America great. He's been giving some interviews that are more critical. You've got a few of these, and Thomas Massie, obviously, in the house. So you do have a few more of these characters

who don't necessarily have to go along to get along the way that they used to. And you have Trump, obviously, with an absolutely dismal approval rating and his political popularity falling. So I don't know, it could make the next few months slightly more interesting, with slightly more dissent than we've seen in the past. Yeah, and Trump still controls donor networks. He controls the IRS. He controls the Justice Department. Like, he's the most corrupt president we've ever had

and is willing to kind of weaponize the institutional power that he has in the government. So, you know, if you're Bill Cassidy, you're like, okay, yeah, I lost my race and I'm leaving office. Guy still runs the DOJ. Guy still runs the IRS. Yeah. So maybe, you know, if it's going to,

pass anyway or it's going to fail anyway this next time around. And he doesn't care that much. And you know what? I'm just going to go along and get along, actually. Who knows what they said in this situation room. True. And the consequences of crossing Trump and the grave consequences that can result from dissenting with this administration are a good segue actually to our next block. So some extremely lengthy sentences were handed down in a court in text. for some anti-ice protesters. Let's put the New York Times article up on the screen that breaks down some of the details here.

Protesters accused of Antifa ties sentenced to up to 100 years in ICE attack. The subhead says the penalties issued an attack where a police officer was shot, dwarfed those given to January 6 rioters, appeared to signal at least some courts will deal aggressively with ICE protesters. Let me just read a little bit here

so you can get the details. The leader of a group of protesters accused of being members of Antifa was sentenced on Tuesday to a hundred years in prison after a jury found him and seven other demonstrators guilty of supporting terrorism while taking part in an armed assault last summer against an immigration facility in Alvarado, Texas. The extraordinary sentence against the protester Benjamin Netanyahu Song was only one of the harsh penalties meted out in the case during separate hearings in federal district court in Fort Worth by two judges who castigated the defendants for using violence and attacking the democratic process

during the protest. Nine young demonstrators, including Mr. Song, were found guilty in March of an array of charges stemming from the attack on the ICE facility. Six of the defendants

were convicted of terrorism charges along with Mr. Song, sentenced to between 50 and 70 years, another was found guilty of lesser crimes, was not even present at the protest and was given a term of 30 years in prison.

A final defendant is scheduled to be sentenced next month. Joining us now to break down this case, and in particular, these incredibly lengthy sentences, how the federal government made these charges stick and what they argued in order to secure these 30, 50, and 100 year sentences is Pisco. He is both

YouTuber at the channel Pisco Liddy and also a lawyer. So great to see you, Pisco. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So start with what was this protest? It seems like the government argued that they all conspired as part of an Antifa cell to go and try to murder a law enforcement officer. Is that, in fact, what happened here based on the evidence? Well, there's a lot of disputes factually about sort of their participation in Antifa. There's disputes even among the government's own witnesses about whether they, in fact, were members of Antifa, but certainly a lot of sort of left-wing sympathies. And we're talking about the affiliations of the group.

But in some in substance, they're accused of on July 4th at around 10 o'clock at night, going to the Praerland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, to just. shoot off fireworks, and that's where the kind of divergence occurs on the facts. According to the protesters, that was all that they were there to do was to shoot off fireworks and to have like a noise demonstration to inspire the members of the, you know, who are being incarcerated there in the detention center. But the government alleges that it was a lot more of like a corrupt motive and a motive to, in fact, like inside a riot and potentially even to ambush members of law enforcement,

but we can get into the weeds. Well, yeah, let's get it. Let's get into the weeds. Like, what evidence do they have? I mean, they wind up getting convictions here. What evidence do they have that they were trying to organize some sort of like ambush or riot? Like having covered a lot of left-wing groups and protests in the past, the idea that they would show up and set off some fireworks. And that would be the goal of the protest sounds.

entirely plausible and accurate. Like that is what groups and activists like this do. Like it would not be at all strange. Like, let's do some fireworks, bring some attention here. It's July 4th. This is America. Civil disobedience. It's a fine.

But the idea that they're going to set up an ambush and start killing people, like what in the weeds, like what evidence do they have? Or did they present that there was some, other, you know, murderous motive here. Yeah, so first is the fact that some of them brought guns to the actual side of the protests. And there was in Texas, the ringleader. Yeah, in Texas, right. And you get into a lot of these conversations, too, about Alex Prattie and whether or not it's,

you know, de facto unreasonable or de facto criminal intent to show up to a protest, you know, with guns and so open the carrying or doing anything like that. So the evidence that the government relied on is, number one, that what they're wearing, right? They make a lot of the fact that they're in black block, that the fact that they all have code names, that they turned off their cell phones in advance of what was happening here, that they brought guns in the first place,

that they had, like, medical kits there, presumably to treat any injuries that could occur. So on the one hand, you have, like, well, why are you bringing guns here? One of them actually did fire towards an officer, and he was the one who was convicted with attempted murder. But on the other hand, you have no sort of messages from these various signal groups that seem to indicate at least explicit,

that their intent was to ambush members of ICE or of the police department who later on came. So there's a, what the defense might point to is like a lack of corroborating evidence of explicitly violent motive within the messages that occurred. There's, what one attorney also points to is the fact that there's not even like messages about going and vandalizing property, which they also did. And so you want to look at the absence there. But then also the fact that they, you know, if their goal was to ambush, why weren't they more well-armed? Why wasn't this better coordinated? And there start to be a little bit of a repeat of some

of the arguments levied regarding January 6 about whether or not it's plausible that their intent here was to get them to come out just to kill them. If that were the case, then, you know, why wasn't it, quote-unquote, more successful? One, okay, so you've got in one category, you have the protester who did fire weapon at an officer. The officer is hit. That's the one that's getting 100 years. At the other end of the spectrum, and what I think will lead any reasonable person to look at this and go, this is insane. You have someone convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison here who was not even at the protest. Let's put this Guardian article up on the screen. So they say the ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved left-wing Z.

and other materials at the request of his wife after she was arrested. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. So it says the charge doesn't require prosecutors to prove a connection to any kind of terrorist ideology, only that a defendant provided support for one of a list of several crimes. The Justice Department spun the convictions as proof that Antifa was a terrorist organization. So I want to repeat for everyone because I read this like 10 times to really process it and be like, it can't be the case, that he was convicted. and sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving some leftist literature, but that is literally

the case here. His wife was at the protest. She gets arrested. She calls her husband. He moves whatever this literature is, which, by the way, they offered in evidence, you know, some of these things. And it's, you know, kind of what you would expect. There were things about immigrants' rights and how to stand up to ICE and these sorts of things. In any case, you're allowed to, you know, read whatever you want in this country. That's supposed to be the idea. And yet for this action, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. There were a number of the protesters who had already, when the security guards showed up and said, you guys got to go, left before the weapon was ever even discharged.

There was the one protester who fired the weapon. There were some who participated in acts of vandalism. There were the fireworks. No one injured, just fireworks that were set off. And now you have these sentences of 30, 50, and 100 years, Pisco. Yeah, no. So, I mean, these are great points that you're right. raising. It would be one thing if, okay, a person is separate and apart from the protest

activities or let's say the planned ambush or whatever and they're like integral and planning the violent events. And you can think about some of the conditions or sorry, seditious conspiracy charges that were levied at, for example, Enrico Tarrio and other members there where they're integral in some of the planning that's going on and where there's evidence of, you know, that they're involved in the designs of the group there on January 6th. But here, this is defendant Sanchez, I believe, but he wasn't even charged with providing material support to terrorists. He wasn't charged with attempted murder. He wasn't charged with setting off explosives. And so as to him, a 30-year prison sentence for what amounts to obstruction of justice-related offenses.

For me, it kind of is just totally disproportionate to what he's alleged to be participating in. And it speaks to a broader deficiency, I think, in the narrative that the government is trying to push here. there were attempts to get other members of this group, this alleged Antifa cell, hit with the attempted murder charges because of something called Pinkerton liability. And this essentially says that if there is a conspiracy and other members of the conspiracy are doing substantive crimes that further the conspiracy and they're like reasonably foreseeable in light of the conspiracy, you can hit them not just with a conspiracy, but with like the substantive crimes that the other members of the conspiracy did.

It's called Pinkerton liability. And here, multiple members of this, quote, alleged Antifa cell were charged with attempted murder, but the jury actually acquitted. They acquitted everybody except for defendant's song on attempted murder and only as to one person. And so that means that the jury likely did not find it compelling that there was an attempt here from the broader conspiracy to actually hurt or kill members of law enforcement. Because, of course, if they did, why wouldn't that be reasonably foreseeable? for purposes of Pinkerton liability.

And so all of that, and again, the charges of this man, defendant Sanchez, who wasn't there and wasn't involved in any planning, I think speaks to the lack of plausibility and some of the more nefarious strains that are being alleged by the Department of Justice. And so what's next here for these defendants? Like, are there constitutional arguments

that can be made on appeal? Are they going to be made? Are they free on bond now? Are they currently locked? up, like, what's the status? Yeah, so there are a ton of legal issues that were presented and rejected by the trial judge. I'll let you know that the trial judge was a George Bush appointee, and I believe the sentencing either was helped with a Trump appointee. So they're Republican judges sort of in charge of, Republican appointed judges in charge of some of the proceedings here.

But these issues sort of range from issues regarding search and seizure that might have been, might be sort of tossed up for appeal. issues related to the sufficiency of the evidence for some of these charges. I mean, there are deep factual disputes about whether or not you can charge any of these defendants, for example, with rioting using the federal statute there because there doesn't appear to be any use of the federal instrumentality of interstate commerce or any sort of crossing of state lines that would invoke the federal statute, since all that was sort of planned about or talked through these channels was not like riotous activity. So that's sort of going to be up for appeal. the sufficiency of the evidence regarding the material support. So there's a lot of, you know, questions that are left for appeal and immediate issues that the courts of appeals are going to have

to deal with. The thing is, though, they're in the Fifth Circuit, which is, you know, traditionally very conservative, very, you know, Republican-leaning. And additionally, the trial judges are given a lot of deference on, like, evidentiary issues, and they're given a lot of difference also on some of these rulings. And so plenty of issues to work with. And of course, these are federal convictions. And so presumably if the next president thought that these were two harsh sentences, I mean, there is recent precedent for pardons and commutations of people involved with conspiracies to overturn an election in the case of January 6th. So those are kind of issues that are still available in remedies available to the defendants.

And Pisco, finally, how does NSPM 7 play into this? And what are the broader implications here in terms of trying to, you know, scare other activists and protesters out of you know, out of participating in any sort of dissent against this government. Yeah, politically, I think the administration considers a huge win. Because as you know, that memorandum that you just referenced, one of its goals is to try to like broaden the scope of terrorism and to basically go after things that maybe traditionally Americans wouldn't consider terrorism and to sort of increase the amount of surveillance over these kinds of groups,

especially in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk. And so it's relevant because these, I believe, are the first. convictions of terrorism-related charges for anyone involved with Antifa. And so the administration is bandying around as a win, especially with the super harsh sentences. And so I think this will encourage the administration to try these different theories. One of the big complaints of the defendants in these cases is that they relied a lot on this kind of like innuendo and the association, and they shouldn't have brought up the fact that they were related to Antifa or that they lingered too long on it.

And so the fear, perhaps, from people who are against the administration is that this would encourage them to continue down this road of the memorandum and identify, you know, members who are allegedly part of these left-wing groups and to ascribe to them criminal culpability using doctrines like Pinkerton liability or some of these also like conspiracy against rights cases that have been sort of levied by the administration. But it is a big sort of win in a series of political or allegedly political prosecutions where sometimes they've had some failures recently. Wow. Unbelievable. Piscoe, thank you so much for your analysis. I really appreciate it. Everybody go subscribe to Pisco at Pisco Liddy on YouTube.

His channel is fantastic. He does a great job breaking down all sorts of things, legal cases, but other things besides. Great to see you, Pisco. Thanks a lot.

So we are very fortunate this morning to be joined by Corey Doctor-O. You guys might be really familiar with his work in Shittification, which I confess I haven't read but really should, but still seems to encapsulate a lot of my experience of life, just the word alone. And he's out with a new book called The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. that gives his view of AI development, what's real, what's false, is it a hype machine, is it a bubble, how should you approach it? And there's a warning here to avoid being what he describes as a reverse centaur,

which is some industry lingo. Corey, welcome, great to have you. Hey, it's great to be on. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. So I guess let's start there. What is a reverse centaur for people who are not in the know? Well, you know, this isn't the first time automation

and labor have come into conflict. And so there's a pretty rich literature about how automation diffuses through workforces. And one of the things that we know is that when labor is in charge of how they use automation, broadly they tend to use it to increase the quality of what they produce, whereas when capital is in charge, they broadly use it to increase the throughput, because if you acquire an asset and it's depreciating off your books, you want to use it as much

as possible. So this is where we get centaurs and reverse centaurs. And automation theory, a centaur is someone who is directing a machine, you know, like a human head on a machine body. So, you know, if you're riding a bicycle, you even look like a centaur, but maybe you're using a spell checker or some other tool that is allowing you to do your work better. A reverse center is the reverse, right? It's where you aren't directing the way that a machine works. It's where a machine is directing how you work.

It's where you are the human body that is supporting the machine brain. And, you know, we can think of things like Amazon warehouse workers. Those are the most automated warehouses in America. they also have three times the injury rate of other warehouses in America. And that's because when you buy a seven-figure asset in the form of warehouse automation, you want to maximize the value of it. And so you work it at the limit of the speed of the system. And the bottleneck of the speed of the system is the person.

And a person who works as fast and as long as they can will eventually make a mistake, which in a warehouse sometimes means you get impaled on a forklet. So correct me if I'm wrong. the book kind of either grew out of a lecture that you gave back in 2025 or you were already working in the book and gave the lecture. And that lecture, I remember, went viral at the time. A lot of people were reading it. Can you just like lay out for people like what the thesis is of that lecture and what the broader point you're trying to make in the book here?

Yeah, the story's even a little, a little weirder than it coming out of a lecture. the lecture and the story and the book both came out of the fact that I was sick of people demanding that I talk to them about AI. And I thought, like, if I just compile all my thoughts in one place, I can be done, not having realized that this would mean I would then have to go and talk about AI. So the book is really an inquiry into the sources of the bubble, right? Obviously, there's some there there with the technology. You know, speaking as a pretend computer scientist with an honorary degree in CS, I have to say, like, as a software matter, this is pretty cool stuff. But we spent $1.4 trillion on this technology so far as a species, $700 billion of it in the last year. So all time spending before that $700 billion, another $700 billion last year.

Sam Altman says it's going to be $2 trillion more next year. Why are we spending this much money? It's not because it's making us money. This is the money-losing-est thing the human race has ever done. The gross revenues for the whole industry worldwide are $50 billion, which sounds like a lot until you think about how much $1.4 trillion is. and you realize that they're depreciating these assets on a five-year schedule, but actually replacing them every two to three years, which means that they have three years of revenue of $50 billion a year

before they have to buy another $700 billion worth of stuff. And that just doesn't pencil out. And the unit economics are getting worse, not better. Every generation of this technology loses more money. So where's it coming from? And the thesis is, well, on the one hand, you have a lot of tech bubbles. This isn't the first one. And the tech bubbles of this century have been driven,

by the narrative need of companies that have saturated their markets to convince Wall Street that they can keep growing. You know, when Google attains a 90% search market share, that sounds very good until you realize that this means that Google is going to stop being a growth stock and start being a mature stock because you can't grow from a 90% search market share. And a growth stock is worth a fraction of what a mature stock is. And growth stock can be used to grow, right? You can buy other companies with your highly liquid growth stock.

You can hire key personnel. And that's great because it's much easier to get more of your own stock than it is to get money. You make more stock by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. You only get money from like a creditor or a customer or an investor. The problem is that when you stop growing, then you get a massive haircut from the market. The net worth of everyone who has been paid in stock plummets. The company can't pull itself out of the death spiral by buying more companies with stock. And so it's really bad. And so companies have been telling us stories about how they're going to grow into imaginary markets for a couple of decades now, Metaverse and cryptocurrency, NFTs and Dow's, Web 3 and so on. And now we get AI. And so that's the material foundation of it. I also, and maybe we can talk about this next, explore the ideological basis. Why are we spending $1.4 trillion on this, which is so much more than we spent on NFTs and cryptocurrencies.

and Web 3 in the Metaverse. Let's pause on the bubble question because there's two potential – well, I'm sure there's many potential types of bubbles, but for our purposes, there's two potential types. There's the NFT metaverse type, which is all hype and literally nothing there, right? I agree with you that crypto is the same. I'm sure there are those that would disagree, but, you know, all the blockchain technology, whatever. No, it's a speculative asset bubble, et cetera.

So there's that type. And then there's also the dot-com bubble, which was a bubble, which did pop. there was a massive crash, huge implications, tons of companies go under. But I think any reasonable person would say the internet itself was genuinely transformative. So which category do you put the AI bubble in? So I think that that's the wrong categorical cleavage. I think that there's a slightly different categorical cleavage, which is bubbles that leave something useful behind and bubbles that don't. So some bubbles, all the companies fail and there's nothing good left behind from it in terms of a business. There is no stock you could have bought beforehand that would have been a good buy.

But then there's a lot of stuff left behind that we used to start something else. So, you know, Enron left nothing behind. It was just accounting fraud. Worldcom was accounting fraud, but the convincer was they put thousands of miles of fiber in the ground. That's still there. So, you know, my house in Burbank, I've got two gigabit symmetrical fiber on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought for pennies and lit up. Right.

And I think that the dot-com bubble was one of those. You had data centers. You had servers. You had a trained workforce. All these humanities undergraduates who were like convinced to drop out of university and learn like Python and Pearl and HTML who went on to build Web 2 with all those cheap servers that were now available for pennies on the dollar. You had all the literacy in terms of how to use the web that came out of spending all that

money to promote it. And AI definitely is that kind of bubble. It has a lot of productive residue. There's going to be data centers. There's going to be GPUs at 10 cents on the dollar. There's going to be skilled workers. There's going to be open source models we can rehabilitate. But I don't know if there's an Amazon there, right?

Because the other difference here is that the web had good unit economics. New web users made the web more profitable. New web uses made the web more profitable. Subsequent generations of the web were more profitable than the previous ones. The opposite is true of AI, right? Every new customer loses money for the company. The customers that use it the most cost them the most money. And every generation is more money losing than the previous one.

And unlike, say, 1999 or 2000, when you had Harvard Business Review and NBER publishing these papers going like, are CEOs ready for workers who demand the web? Now we have articles in those same outlets saying, how can CEOs force their workers to use AI? So I think that's a very different kind of character to the bubble, although on this material level of like, will there be something left over? I think the answer is yes. It is like the dot-com bubble in that. Don't the Chinese models have better per unit cost?

Yes, but they're doing something different. So with the Chinese models that you host yourself, right, that are open source that you host yourself and that aren't trying to do this frontier compute where you're basically selling $100 bills for a dollar apiece, have better unit economics. We have such opacity in how these AI companies work here, the ones that do the so-called frontier models that it's really hard to know exactly what's going on. Ed Zittron published some leaked financials from OpenAI recently that makes it pretty clear that like their claims that they can do what's called inference. So the inference part is like you type a question into chat, GBT, and it answers it. And obviously that's like the operating expense. The training is the capital expense. But the operating expense, they say, oh, it's really low.

But it looks like what they're doing is they're hiding a lot of their inference and their marketing budget. So what they're saying is like some of those $100 bills we're giving away for a dollar are not inference, even though that's what we're spending $99 for the dollar in revenue. That's actually a marketing expense. We're succoring in new customers by selling them $900 bills for a buck. So we don't count that as an inference expenditure. We count that as a marketing expenditure. And so you see these marketing budgets that, you know, as Zitron says,

would make them like significantly larger than, say, Coca-Cola as a marketing venture. And we just don't see the ad agencies with the personnel that would absorb that marketing capital. So it really looks like there's a shell game there. Okay. Interesting. on the technological front. So the theory, both from people inside of these companies and also some of the alarms that are being sounded, both from executives who have left these companies,

but also from researchers, from professors, from experts in the field, some of the godfathers of AI. There's a variety of the warnings. But let's take the most material one first, that it's going to significantly displace some portion of the workforce. Now, you will get some people within the industry that say the entire, the goal is to replace all of human labor. Okay, that is the goal that they

state. But you also have people who are not interested in, you know, overhyping the technology, who are genuinely trying to sound the alarm. And when I look at things like the fact that, you know, you mentioned you have a computer science background for people who don't know, you're also a sci-fi writer, so you think about these, you know, these sorts of potential scenarios, the fact that it has already developed to the point where most coders are not actually coding anymore. They're overseeing these machines that are doing the coding. They're doing sort of the creative process. They're checking on the other end and making sure that all works properly.

And that the market for students coming out of college to be coders has sort of fallen off a cliff. You know, it used to five seconds ago. The whole mantra was, you need to learn to code. And then you've got your golden ticket into a high paying career. That is just completely gone at this point. So doesn't that indicate that some of the labor disruption promise has already come to fruition? And there's no reason to expect that the technology won't continue to advance. and displace more and more people in more industries.

So I think now you're getting to some of the ideological questions about why we would spend $1.4 trillion. Like, why would capital allocators be willing to spend so much money on this? And I think that you don't have to believe that this can do people's jobs in order to invest in it. You have to believe that salespeople can convince employers that it can do people's jobs. I think there you're pushing on an open door.

There is, again, a long history of employers being extremely, interested in replacing mouthy workers who tell them that their ideas are dumb and who do things that they don't know how to do with software that just does whatever it's told. I think if you're a boss, there's a certain haunting knowledge that although you fancy that you're in the driver's seat, you know that if you don't show up for work, nothing happens. Whereas if the workers don't show up for work, the whole shop grinds to a halt. And so you wonder if maybe you're in the backseat with a Fisher Price steering wheel. And that AI sales call is a promise to wire the steering wheel into the car's drive train. So you have an amazing idea. You tell the chatbot to make it.

And the chat bot does not tell you it's illegal. It doesn't tell you you're going to hurt a lot of people. It doesn't tell you that algae blossom in a pool that you painted dark blue. It doesn't tell you that it won't scale. It doesn't tell you that you're going to get hacked. It just does it. And then, you know, if you fired nine-tenths of your workers, the ones who used to tell you off that way and be so demoralizing to you, those guys are so scared of losing their jobs. that you can get them to fix the commas and polish it up and keep it running and go and skim the pawn scum out of the pool every day. And so I think that that's the sales pitch. When you described how coders use it, there was a little bit of conflation there that I think is characteristic of the industry.

So you said, well, there are some workers who say that they use AI. They do the creative part and then some of the utility functions are done by the AI. And there are other workers who mark the AI's homework. Yes. And so what you're saying is you have some centaurs and some reverse. Absolutely, yes. And where workers are in charge of their working conditions, which is the thing that tech bosses don't like about their tech workers. Now, tech workers are historically, they've been in short supply. They're very productive and valuable. When Silicon Valley firms hired an extra

engineer, they anticipated like an extra million dollars on their bottom line. And so that's why, you know, Silicon Valley engineers got like free kombucha and massages and, you know, someone who'd freeze their eggs for them so they could work through their fertile years. It wasn't because like as a class, Silicon bosses like treating workers well, otherwise Amazon warehouse workers wouldn't be peeing in bottles. It's because there are 10 bosses at the factory Bill Gates who wanted to give them a job. And AI doesn't need to do the programmer's job. It just needs to allow them to discipline the labor force so that you don't get Google walkouts saying we're not going to make tech for drones so that you don't get mouthy workers who demand higher wages, who hop from employer to employer.

You remember that the Silicon Valley firms about 10 years ago were settled a big criminal case where they had gotten together and done a no poaching agreement saying they wouldn't give raises to each other's talent to bring them over because their wages were very high and they had a lot of worker power. And so, you know, an AI that is controlled by a skilled worker doesn't solve that problem for bosses. And the AI that is being used in ways that are really impressive for software development, that AI is the AI that doesn't fulfill that goal. The AI that poops out code faster than any human being could possibly review it, that is then, you know, has its homework marked by coders who are terrified they're going to lose their job and are working, as Sergey Brin says, a 60-hour week, which he says is the target that everyone working with an AI should be shooting for.

those workers do fulfill the destiny, but those are the workers saying, you know, I'm a software developer in aerospace, we're using AI to write code, never get on an airplane again because we're producing the most ghastly tech debt at scale. So, you know, until you can like cleave apart these subtle issues, you can't know where AI is affecting the labor market, how it's affecting the labor market, and how that relates to the investor story. Well, on the question of hype, And correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to view this, you know, what's coming from the AI companies and the CEOs, you know, as at least primarily hype that it would be the popping of the bubble will leave behind something, but it's mostly hype. And then if you have a salesman who can go to a company and say, hey, this will allow you to replace your mouthy workers that's pushing on an open door. but that isn't of course a long-term business plan like that it has to actually has to actually work like

and so at some point if if it's not you're going to start to see some dialing back which you're starting to see a little bit of that from companies now which are finding that actually you know they're not able to completely replace people at this point so much of this though seems to be organized around kind of people's thoughts and motivations and ideas rather than what's actually happening. We put up F8. This is kind of a counter argument being made by one of the AI folks. I think this is an open AI person. I can't remember it.

He says so many intelligent people still cling to the idea that everything the AI labs do is downstream of IPO hope or whatever. Some kinds of intelligentsia are uniquely unsuited for the moment because their lens is, quote, strategic skepticism, where normal people can employ magical thinking. And the latter part of that, what he means by the magical thinking is, like, is observing the AI mechanistically and saying, we have some ideas about how this is working and why it's working,

but we don't actually completely understand it. And there is something going on here that is currently beyond our understanding of it. yet it is doing a lot of these very interesting things. It's solving math problems that humanity has not been able to solve, which puts it beyond just kind of a guessing game robot. Like a very significant thing. So while we're in the realm of just ideas and motivations and everything, what do you think of this challenge to kind of people like yourself,

people like me in some respects that we are uniquely unsuited for this moment because our constitutions are constantly skeptical, but at some point you're going to run up against something that is real. And how are we going to tell the difference if we're constantly looking for the fakeness behind the frauds that run these companies? What if actually underneath it, there are these computer scientists who actually have developed something?

Well, I think it's a very weird argument that being discerning makes it hard. for you to find the truth. You know, approaching things and saying, well, that's an extraordinary claim. I don't need any extraordinary evidence because the claim itself is so interesting, I think is a very weird way to do truth-seeking. And I think if you want to talk about magical thinking, the idea that shoveling words into the word-guessing program makes it wake up and turn into

God is extremely magical thinking. I always say it's like believing that if you keep breeding horses to run faster, eventually one of them gives birth to a locomotive, right? The thing that we don't know what consciousness is, we have people who make AI who say things like, this is 51% of the weight of consciousness. And when you challenge them and you say you don't know what consciousness is, they say, well, how do you know this isn't consciousness if you don't know what consciousness is?

Which is, again, a very strange little rhetorical slight. You know, the last time someone said that to me, I said, I don't know what the weather in Paris is and I don't know what the weather in Lisbon is. That doesn't mean they have the same weather. The fact that two things that we don't understand exist doesn't mean that they're the same thing. And while we don't know exactly how AI works and while AI does exceed many of the technical guesses that we've made about how making small changes and the techniques that we apply to machine learning would produce outputs that would be commensurately small. And in fact, instead they're larger, which is always exciting. You know, the formal term for that is a breakthrough.

Breakthroughs are cool and interesting. that even though that's true, the world is full of systems we don't fully understand and whose inputs and outputs we don't control precisely that are instead in a kind of brittle equilibrium that makes all kinds of sways and changes all the time, including just firms and even small, relatively well-understood markets do things that are chaotic and hard to anticipate. So I think saying, oh, well, you know, you're uniquely unsuited because you've never dealt with a thing we don't fully understand means that you failed to grasp how many things we don't fully understand, which is most of them. So go ahead, Ryan.

The one, I get two counterarguments that you hear from defenders of the virtues of the, or the power of the technology are that calling it, calling it like a word guessing game is, you know, minimizes it to a degree that just, misunderstands what's going on here. And one, and the two examples they often give are, you know, a couple that has been together for decades that is able to complete each other's sentences. It's not just a kind of random mathematical guessing game that they're doing. It's like they actually deeply understand each other.

And it's not, they're not just predicting from the past. There's something, there's reasoning and understanding behind that. And then the other example they give is, let's say you've read a mystery novel or sci-fi novel. But let's say it's a mystery novel. And in the last page, they say, and the detective says, I understand, I figured out who the killer is and the killer is, and then it stops.

And then the reader, if you ask the reader, what's the word that's going to come after this? The reader who can accurately guess the next word can do so because of reasoning and understanding. Like they understood the book. They understood the story. And so it's not just mathematics. medical computations and guessing.

And so that's true when people, I'm sorry, go ahead. I cut you one. No, so they'll say, so there is some level of reasoning and understanding going on here that we don't quite understand ourselves yet how it mechanistically comes together, but there's something there. So it is true that when people do it, it's because we're doing a thing called understanding and reasoning, which we only have a cursory understanding. of what's going on both mechanically within the brain and then, you know,

sort of chemically and so on cognitively what's going on is not perfectly understood. But we actually have a much better idea of what the computer is doing. And if we're discovering something about what computers are doing, it's that we are discovering that word guessing is actually very, very powerful, which does not make it reasoning. So it turns out that there are like linguistic correlates latent in the structure of a mystery novel that make it possible to if you count all the words, which is like, so the idea that counting words and then guessing based on the count is not what they're doing is just technically wrong. That is in fact

what they're doing. That's what model training is, right? You're measuring the frequency distribution of words and their relationship to other words and phrases. That's what it is. Now, saying that's all it is doesn't mean that it's trivial. It means that there's a lot of stuff that you can figure out by making those kinds of guesses, but those guesses are not the same as comprehension, which is where we get this funny term that we use when we describe the defects in AI products, which is hallucination. It's not a hallucination. It's just a limit to statistical guessing. Now, one of the things that AI did for us, this current generation of AI, is it showed us that statistical guessing is more powerful than we thought it would be when you scale it up. Yeah. The returns to scale from adding

more training data and measuring more and more subtle relationships are larger than we thought they'd be, that is a legitimately really interesting thing to discover about computer science and about, frankly, the nature of reality. And it's not the same thing as reasoning. Otherwise, these models wouldn't make the characteristic errors that you get when you're not reasoning, but just guessing, guessing words. Right. So I guess some of what I would say to that is, is there any limits?

though, to that power of scale because there have been a lot of predictions of, oh, they're going to hit a wall, they're not going to get better, they're not going to improve much from here. And that hasn't been the case. They've continued to improve, you know, an open AI model solved this 80-year-old mathematics problem that humans had been stumped on. There was a situation that unfolded. You could put F7 up on the screen. I'm sure you probably followed this. There's a whole controversy over whether a chat bot wrote this prize-winning story. for this famous Commonwealth short story prize. There were a lot of people who looked at this and, oh, this is AI writing. They dispute that it was, you know, it seems like the analysis at this point is that it wasn't actually AI writing, but I think it indicates how advanced the AI even in creative endeavors that require, you know, the sorts of things that you would want to imagine humans were sort of uniquely good at that AI has gotten to that place where it's indistinguishable. I've seen other analyses where experts are judging short stories and they're rating the, you know,

AI stories just as highly or if not higher than some of the human creative product. So, you know, if these laws of scale that just adding more and more and more genuinely do produce these sorts of profound improvements, what is ultimately the limit to that? So the scale is breaking in the sense that it is, it used to be that linear inputs to scale produce linear outputs to scale or even better than linear. So you spend an extra dollar, you got an extra units worth of goodness out the other side, whatever you're using to benchmark that. That number is going down, the amount that you get out, which means that we're having to put much more. And that's why each model, you know,

each new foundation model is less profitable than the previous ones, is that they are hitting limits to scale. You know, they, I have heard people say that they have seen AI art that they can't distinguish from human art of quality. And I read that short story and it was ghastly. I mean, it's a bad short story. I think that one of the, you know, and it's not the, first time that there's been a literary prize awarded to a piece of fiction that I looked at and was like, this is unreadable, terrible stuff. And maybe that's my bias because I'm a science fiction writer. We write pulp literature. And within the science fiction field, which is one of the last fields that actually pays for short fiction, science fiction editors are being drowned in AI

stories. And they don't have any trouble discerning them because they are each of them less publishable than the last. They are dreadful, dreadful work. You know, I'm not a mathematician. I'm the son of a mathematician. I don't know enough about math to assess the problems that have been solved. It seems really impressive. And, you know, the fact that mathematicians have figured out how to use computers to solve problems that they couldn't solve before is both wonderful and normal. Mathematicians have solved new problems using computers for a really long time. And, you know, a mathematician in my acquaintance was talking about iterating through several different ways of approaching a proof, which would be labor-intensive to do personally in which you can automate through a computer. That's great.

You know, look, there's a lot of things that this software does that I think in the absence of a bubble, we would just call a plugin. And there have been some really important plug-ins for the tools I use over my life. Word processors have really made some leaps and bounds. My first word processor was a program printed in a magazine, I bought it a newsstand and typed into an Apple 2-plus. And in the years since, war processors have gotten all kinds of features, some of which are very valuable to me, some of which I think are very frivolous, some of which I think when other people use them, it makes their work worse. I've never been in a circumstance where I said, well, this plugin is so interesting. Let's bet the economy on it. And also, it's probably time to feed

the writers into a wood chip. Yeah. Corey, my last question for you is, do you worry at all that if you're wrong, that if the technology is maybe not as, you know, we're going to replace all human beings, but if it is significantly, you know, more power of when continues to improve, and there are some large chunk of the labor force that is displaced, do you worry that if you're wrong and downplaying its capabilities now, that you'll suck some of the energy out of the, the capability of people to organize in ways that are needed to deal with that, you know, very scary potential future? I actually think that organizing about AI is a useful endeavor and that we should be organizing about it.

I think the local movements that are talking about data center justice, you know, no city council ever said, oh, we approved this planning permission and exercised eminent domain on your farm without talking to you about it because we knew that you'd be really pleasantly surprised and we didn't want to wreck it. And so the fact that we're getting these local movements that are building up this capacity to demand equitable treatment and to demand, co-determination with technology, I think is great. I mean, if it were the case that tomorrow AI could do a lot of human jobs that currently are being done by humans, a functional economy would find work for those people because we have full employment for the next 300 years. We're going to have to move like coastal cities 10 kilometers inland.

We're going to have to deal with hundreds of millions of climate refugees. We're going to have more zoonotic plagues as we get more habitat loss. Like you, me and everyone we know and everyone who will live for the next three centuries is going to have their hands full. Like we don't have a technological unemployment problem on our hands. If we have an unemployment problem, it's because we have a social and economic problem that is exacerbating our environmental problem. Well, that sounds like a grim future, just not one where the central problem is unemployment. Corey, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time this morning.

And I think your ideas are really fascinating. I appreciate you spending the time to engage with us on them. book is the reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and I recommend everybody pick it up. And if you want to get involved on these issues, visit EFF.org. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing this work for 35 years, and I've been doing it with them for 25 years. Amazing. Thank you for that plug. That was an interesting conversation, Ryan. I like that one. Yeah, I think your question is an important one. What if he's wrong? And to me, there's sort of a Pascal's wager element to it. Maybe it's all hype. If it is,

then it's another bubble that comes and goes. Yeah. But if it's not, you've got to be planning for it now. Yeah. We have to be thinking and organizing about what the world looks like in the event that it's not hype. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's hype. So I'm in the minority.

And you and I think we're both in the minority on this on the left. But it's something that, you know, we're going to hopefully live long enough to find out. Yeah. Well, the other thing is, let's say it is hype. The very fact that you have all of these oligarchs who are like, we need to change the social contract. That also seems like an opening because I would like to change the social. I don't like the social contract that we have now.

It leaves many millions of people needlessly emiserated. So if they're giving us that opening, even if it is to hype their shitty products, which I agree with you. I don't think that that is, I do think that there's a lot of there there for the technology. I do think it's going to be genuinely transformational. I also think it's a bubble. I think it's both of those things. But in any case, if they're giving us the opening to restart negotiations over the social contract, I think we should take them up on that. Yes, indeed.

All right, guys, that doesn't for us. We got a great Friday show planned for you tomorrow. I think Ro Khanna is joining to talk about his fight with Elon Musk and reflect on the week's activities with regard to the DSA wins. He endorsed, I think, Claire and Brad Lander, but not Dari Eliza, which I'm also interested to ask him about his endorsement process. So it should be a good one. Ryan, thank you. Great to have you. Great to see you. Good to see you too. Yep. Safe travels. And I will see you guys tomorrow.

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