Saagar Enjeti on screens, children, cannabis, and populist backlash against data centers

It's one It's 100 pm. I don't think we're going to see it today, but it's but it's fun to think about.

Well, there's more news, but our next guest, Sager and Jetty from Breaking Points, is in the re room waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV Ultra Dome. Sager, how are you doing?

Hello, gentlemen. Thank you for having me back.

We have so we have so much good news for you. But first, can we do a sound check? Can you just say platypus 25 times? I

platypus. Platypus. Platypus.

Oh, I'm retired. I'm retired. Thank you. Thank you. I I wasn't sure you were going to do that, but uh this is this is gamechanging for me and my family. So, thank you. Uh no, we will not be betting on this conversation. We will not be encouraging that, but we will be asking you about elite lawyers are seeing record hourly rates. I knew I knew you were going to love that.

You're going to love that.

Uh two some of these Oh, yes. Some of these hedge fund guys are putting up record

record numbers. Steve Cohen just pulled in 3.4 billion. That's good news.

We know you're going to be excited about that.

Yeah. I'm really I'm I'm just I'm you know, it warms my heart to see the top of American society doing so well and carrying the US economy on their back.

Yes. Yes. Yes. True. True elite elite media, not not independent anti-establishment. Right. Exactly. That that's what Breaking Point stands for, breaking the bank.

Anyway, great to have you on the show. Uh Let's start with this. Let's start with this Wall Street Journal article. So, uh, social media bans for youth are gaining momentum worldwide. I was sort of saying like I get it, but also it's a little bit of a parenting skill issue. I, you know, can make choices like how how heavy of a hand do we want on social media? Uh, how are how have you been processing social media and kids? Yeah, we were we were talking before the show about this a little bit and I was saying that like an iPad like very even even without social media really is like a drug like it probably has an immediate negative effect on the child.

But if you're on some place like an airplane where like a child could be, you know, completely freaking out and really ruining the other passenger's time.

You're sacrificing

maybe you got to sacrifice the child

uh via a little iPad time. But uh yeah, broadly I I don't necessarily disagree with that, man. Uh I think that there's a time and a place technology can be a tool and definitely even some of the people in the no tech community for children will say, "Look, if we're on an airplane, we can all make exceptions." But I do think it is important to zoom out and say organically, John, people you and I our age as we begin to bring children in the world and as we're on the backside of and really recognizing some of the dangers of technology, phone addiction and seeing the light in an a child's eyes the moment that they see a screen. My kid's only 9 months old. If this TV goes on, I mean, I'm talking about immediately going directly towards it. I have friends with smaller children, you know, like 2, three years old, and their battle there is constant. I'm not sure if you guys saw the more viral thread recently about Spotify and parents who are really freaking out because Spotify has added music videos. And it used to be that they would give their children their Spotify account. They say, "Hey, you can play whatever music they want." All of a sudden, my kids asking for Spotify all the time is watching the Moana video, which I would never let them watch on YouTube. And so, broadly, I think the entire

Dude, yeah, exactly. I mean, think about our our own experiences, right? Our parents, you know, they're like, "Yeah, mom, don't worry about it." Right? I'm I'm spending six hours doing my homework with my friends. Definitely not on AOL like shit-talking with all of my friends. Any millennial, I think, can can really understand that. But because of our relationship with technology and then seeing it at such a young age with these children, I do think that parents around the world are waking up to this. And many of the experiments that have happened about banning social media, keeping children away from phones, especially banning uh phones in school, the results have been extraordinary for the people who are doing it. I'm not sure if you saw this, there's a recent phenomenon of many parents are even turning in the schoolisssued Chromebooks or laptops and saying, "No, we're going back to paper. We want all paper exams." Especially with AI and, you know, concerns about My parents are

They saw us print out the post. They saw us print out the post. Exactly. I love the print out. You guys see you see the utility and the physicality of doing that. You know, I don't know if you guys saw this. I'll tell a personal anecdote. Uh I was talking about this with reading and one of my friends was like, "Dude, you don't even read." And and I was like, "Well, I I've I only listen exclusively to audiobooks for the last like 10 to 12 years." But I was talking with them about how children will mirror your behavior. And I was like, "Oh my god, my child will never know that I read 40 books a year because they never see me read." And so it's time to bust out these bad boys again, no headphones, you know, just sit on the couch, nothing else going on, 1990s style, and and show like this is a very important part of our life. And so the physicality and also you you'll discover that the mental exercise by doing that is fundamentally different. Andrew Huberman's actually talked a lot about this about physically reading the page and memory retention, different ways that they will activate different parts of your brain. So, it's really about trying to hang on to the physical world and the benefits that we recognize that that that has.

Yeah. I I'm so curious to know how much these companies uh the the platforms whether it's like entertainment platforms like YouTube much less of a of a social network versus the meta platforms actually actually generate from a revenue standpoint from accounts that are like targeting like you know for teenagers

like in in some ways they're not the most valuable consumers because they don't necessarily have a credit card or they can't just like be you know direct response like, you know, spending money, but at the same time, I I just going off of Miss Rachel on YouTube's like earnings. Like, clearly advertisers will put an insane amount of dollars behind these channels.

Mhm.

Yeah. Well, the thing is, dude, with that is that it's not about the children spending money. It's about how they pester the parents to buy Miss Rachel products. You know, Miss Rachel is a business. She's a billiondollar enterprise. You can go to Walmart and Target and buy stuff with her. I mean, I don't know if you guys know what Tony boxes are, but you can actually get like specific Tony's, which is it's like a child's toy that plays songs and you can put physical items on top of them. They charge $20 each. There's an entire aisle at Target. Everything is about their favorite YouTube show or like their favorite character that they'll learn about. And you know, some of them, I have had many parents tell me, you know, the introduction to my show. They're like, "Oh, my kid knows the introduction to Breaking Points cuz I watch it all the time." like they're like w you know welcome to breaking points. It's an independent show but and and I get that like you know no fault to to that person but I I am just showing you like the mimemetic quality of technology in a child's life and how that bubbles up through everything. So like Minecraft related birthdays and the way that they will socialize with Roblox, right? Like if you were to ask a friend of mine told me this, you know, their kids were introducing themselves at soccer practice and they're like, "My name is so and so and I like to I like to play Roblox." They're like, "Oh my god, me too." Right? And so like the nature say they introduce themselves in real life with their gamer

tag. Yes. Right. Well well they probably do that and I'm not sure if you know about the scandal involving Roblox too which we don't have to get into but yeah there's another problem right in terms of spending time online and that mimemetic quality. So me personally I can only speak for myself. I'm doing my best to keep my kid or and future kids away from this. But you know the one thing I always want to emphasize is that this is still an elite phenomenon. And at the individual middle class level, the vast majority of American parents are not like woke on the technology question. They may feel something, but a lot of them are still letting their children use a lot of iPad, a lot of TV time. And that's why I do think that the government here, it's it's almost unfair, right, to leave it up to an individual with vast amounts of resources and algorithms at engineers and others developing trying to uh you know, trying to optimize time on platform. You're up against a ve you're in a very asymmetric war and that's why I think it's important to try and have some regulation around this.

Mhm. Yeah. The only issue is that you ban kids accounts and then the parents just have their account and they're like here's the iPad or like here's here's I'm putting on. So again, it has to there there's maybe a solution at the at the just

age level, but but it's also

I I'll tell you this, man, and I always hear this, especially on on drugs, right? Can we all pause it? If drugs are illegal, people will always find a way. What did we learn with gambling? Friction is important. Actually, making it illegal is really good. So yes, I will grant you that even if we were to put some modest regulation, some parents would still go around it. The point is about friction and the social signal. If you can reduce in this example, it's it's zero friction, right? Because

I really disagree with that. You know, the ability to just create your own account or even the social signal to every parent in America for everyone saying, "Hey, like you're going to have to do a workaround with your parents social media account and you're going to have to give it to your kid or if we have

I was talking about the example of like your like a 5-year-old watching YouTube. It's like it's most likely the parent is. But yeah, if you if you have Yeah, you don't want your your uh you know 10-year-old using your Instagram account, right? That

it's not the same. I mean, that's not even social media

because but but I'm just saying like I think there's two problems. It's being focused on social media, but like entertain like like highly stimulating entertainment is clearly bad for kids. And this is purely purely anecdotal. I've tried we've tried like putting on like an animated show uh for 10 minutes and immediately after the kid

just is like way more sensitive like gets gets like really angry short-tempered all these things. So it's like okay let's not do that cuz clearly it has an immediate like there's like a comedown.

Um

it's bad. Well, I'll tell you guys, even I mean I hate to say it for my girl Miss Rachel, but I'm never using Miss Rachel. And I'll tell you why. Is that as a YouTuber, and you guys know this too, YouTube is about retention and time on platform. And so, even though I think she has a role, at the end of the day, there's a lot of jump cuts, smashes, constantly keeping children's attention. If you do want to play video, a lot of parents are experimenting with 1990s TV. actual VCRs and playing the pre-in retention era where you have all the engineer I mean look it's not miss Rachel's fault she knows certain types of videos are going to increase time on platform why do you think she makes so much money on for business man

exactly dude and these you know if you want two to three hours of retention in your YouTube video you got to keep your kids engaged people in the '9s they were thinking about that to a certain extent but the technology ology and the knowledge about.

And by the way, we know what you're doing with your voice right now. You're keeping us engaged. Fluctuating.

Listen, I'm part of the problem, brother. I'm part of the problem. I wouldn't even be sitting here without those algorithms. That's always something that we got to square.

Yeah. I I want to talk more about that, but I have a funny story about Miss Rachel. I went to a kid's birthday party and uh there was someone who's dressed up as Miss Rachel, like singing a song in the costume, and I was so out of the loop. I was like, "Oh, is that the Miss the real Miss Rachel?" And they're like, "No, she's a billionaire. like she's not just making random appearances. I thought I thought it was just like, "Oh yeah, you could like just throw her a couple hundred bucks."

I wonder if you do if she does have speaking fees.

She definitely has speaking fees. That's probably six figures at least.

I you know, I don't know. Miss Miss Rachel is actually a big leftist. She doesn't even believe billionaires should exist. So I I would be surprised. I would be surprised. I hear she lives very modestly actually in New York, well below her means, but I don't know a lot about her. I've listened to a few interviews. She's an interesting lady.

Yeah. What what uh what about uh like your interaction with social media, social media addiction, this type of stuff because I feel like I mean we're in a very weird position. I I like to say like I my screen time is low because I am the screen time. Like right now I'm not on my phone and I actually this actually shows up in my screen time like because I'm on the show and so like yes I'm reading posts but not on my phone. when I'm reading like the paper here physically and so uh but a lot of what I have to do for my job is actually on social media and it's been both I really enjoy it and also economically valuable like everything is squared where I feel like maybe I'm addicted to but it's kind of like addicted to your job I I don't know it's like weird for me but how have you processed it addicted to the game uh how have you processed it and like how do you think about like your own your own social media use how bad it can be for like you know people that are sharp about it

yeah story of my life for for the last 10 years. Literally wouldn't be here if I wasn't addicted to social media. And now also uh I'm like social media is bad. Uh you know I I think John we are in a perfect position right because we can always justify it. You're like babe it's for work. Don't worry about it. Yeah. It's for work. Don't worry. And you're just like sitting there scrolling about some drama intra drama which if you tried to explain to a normal person they'd be like what are you talking about? We we we explained we we we we had to explain uh

clvicular getting to a gender maxing. My wife is like what? Like it's like is your brain rotted or remember the the Gary Tan meme? They're like Gary Tan needs to save me from being and I was I made a joke about that to a friend and they're like dude what are you talking about? I was like oh my god I'm so online. Yeah. Yeah, for my own social media use, for anyone who follows me on Twitter, uh I don't tweet that much anymore. I'll do it like fits and spurts and I have a lot of rules around like family time, etc. But again, you know, would I be here if I hadn't been literally addicted to getting into Twitter?

I was saying we're going to pull up our pull up pull up the ladder behind us. The last social media guys,

here's my thing. Here's what I would recommend. If you want to do what John and Jordy and me and I do, you should probably do what we did. you will lose uh you will lose parts of your life to it. Uh I it's funny, you know, I don't know about you guys, the most fun I ever had on Twitter was like blue check with sub 5K followers cuz we're [ __ ] posting all day. Gentlemen, when you have 500,000 followers and you have like, you know, very powerful people who follow me, you're like, "Ah, dude, it's kind of controversial. I can't be making fun of it. I miss it every day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was also a different time years ago before the acquisition because like truly everyone was there and now people have fragmented to threads and blue sky and so you don't get as much like cross-pollination fighting which is like the real fun stuff. A lot of times you got to take the fight to them over on over on threads if you have an opinion about basketball. I I I have a sort of ongoing concern that the way that feeds work today are going to have some real impact on either short or long-term memory because I don't think the human brain was meant to process like hockey data center uh you know uh Donald Trump s like

AI video of cat

curling you know and so and so uh you know you're reading other forms of media even a newspaper yeah technically you could kind of like skim the headlines, whatever. Um,

but pretty quickly you go into an article and you're like,

I totally agree. You know, uh, years ago I quit. I didn't tweet for 3 months. I found myself

thinking in tweets. I would have something happen and I would frame it immediately. I'd be like, "Oh, this is ex this would be the character limit. Here's how I would do it." And I was like, "Oh my god." Like my brain is rotted, dude. I was like, "This is like five, you know, five years of reflex." And this is when I was really, you know, in the game. Uh, and I do recommend that people, you know, really check themselves. And part of the way that's part of the reason you should read a physical and a real book. This is part of the danger. I also think about chat GPT with students. I was talking to a class and I was just asking them how many of them write physical articles. It was a journalism class. Like, do they know how to write a 1,000word article without AI? None of them knew how to do it. It's painful, man. Oh, man. It's painful. But it teaches you a lot. sentence structure, how to convey yourself, and you know, news copy is fundamentally about how to grab attention, how to keep attention, convey as much information as possible, but also be able to flesh out and to tell a story. But that's the hardest part, the third one, and that's what really makes your brain work. And a lot of these students had never attempted or even really knew how to do that. I was really, it made me afraid, right? Because now everybody thinks of the news as tweets instead of learning how to write or like you know the axios like be short brevity stuff which I get is very useful. Everything has utility. It's it's for us and as consumers it's all about thinking about how to balance it and then really as parents man that is the hardest hardest question that we have to solve.

Yeah. Well let's switch gears to something that we're fortunately uh not addicted to. Cannabis. It feels like cannabis has been uh growing in a very dangerous way. Uh Andrew Huberman told us that the best thing about cannabis cannabis is that you should recommend it to your enemies and your rivals because it will help you get away uh get ahead by not using it. But uh I guess my question is like for my entire life basically I guess the last like decade people have been like oh it's going to be federally legal soon. There's going to be some bill. But it feels like nothing's really changed except for the potency, the negative impacts, the adoption rate, the commercial success, but there hasn't been really been even like a power law company that owns it all. It's all very distributed still. Like where do you actually see this going? Is is the conversation stagnant or is there something that needs to be reignited? Yeah, I would push you a little bit, John, because the most important thing that's just happened is Donald Trump reschedled marijuana, which opens the door to exactly what you're talking about. And just to explain at a banking level, schedule one down to schedule 3 means that it opens up the ability for the big weed companies to have access to the legitimate banking system, which is specifically what's kept the big weed conglomerate companies that you're worried about from happening. So, this is going to happen. And there are actually prototype companies like this that are out there with several billion dollars in market cap. The thing that we should worry about the most is potency. And I've talked about this, you know, Andrew, he's always been great on the weed question. This is fundamentally about marijuana social norms and regulatory structure. And when I talk about social norms, at the most, it's kind of like what we were just saying with phones. The signal of legalization and then the cultural uh millu around weed was that nobody ever died. It's just a plant, man. And you know what I always say to that? Hemp is or sorry uh uh what is it the po like there are poisons that are plants right hemlock is a plant that doesn't mean that it's good for you hemlock is a naturally occurring substance that doesn't mean that it's not also going to kill you the point that remains

just a rock yeah it's like yeah a rock a rock can be smashed to death so the point is is that there's this social norm where marijuana addiction is not seen as an addiction if you wake you know wake and bake that entire idea what do you call somebody who has to drink the moment that they wake up in the morning. You're an alcoholic [ __ ] loser. Sorry.

Yeah. No. Okay. Like you are an alcoholic loser. All right. Everyone in your life is going to be like, "Bro, you have a problem." Like you have a serious problem. If you wake and bake, it's all chill. Right? You know, and these these guys are like, "Oh, I smoke every single day and it's medicine." There have been multiple studies now that show that all almost all the claims around medical marijuana are complete [ __ ] They are at the very least. It's kind of like SSRI. People are like, "Well, SSRIs work for me." I'm like, "Well, in double blind studies, it actually shows that exercise is more effective and there's significant downside to SSRI. It doesn't mean it can't work. It just means that there's a lot of other stuff which is not nearly the number of negative externalities. The cultural conversation around marijuana does not factor in all of this high potency, the uh the amount of IQ being lost amongst children, can cannabis hyperis syndrome, the scromitting phenomenon, teenagers who are getting checked into the ER at a record height who are vomiting for days on end and it's in their fat cells and they're withdrawing from like this is a serious crisis. Ask any ER doctor and they'll know exactly. you uh Gab Gabe in our chat says, "If you want cannabis to be more regulated, rescheduling is the way because it enables companies to actually do uh research on it."

Oh, we know everything we need to know about weed. It makes you fat, you're a loser, it lowers your testosterone, it's bad for pregnant women, it lowers your IQ, it's makes you an addict. We don't need any more research. We have tens of billions or sorry, tens of millions of research subjects every day here in the United States. No, I I mean I've never So So I I I you know, earlier in my career, I I I was kind of uh

tried to uh tried to track some of this stuff of of I I was wondering would anyone that was a proud cannabis user, like an active user, go on to build a big company and so far uh have haven't seen it. And so I always saw it as like it's a performance decreasing drug. Correct. There's some people that are going to just say, "I'm fine. I'm fine with that." I I that they might enjoy it and it's worth the

Yeah. Like if you're like 180 IQ and you don't want to go into like math, pure math or chess compet, you can go work at a hedge fund or something,

right? Well, you know, guys, it's like gambling. And you know, that's always not everyone who gambles is an addict, but a significant portion of the people who do. And the negative externality of that is the highest suicide rate of any addiction known to mankind. So, not all marijuana users are addicts, although about 20% of them are daily users. And I would classify you as an addict if you are using it every single day specifically for like medicinal purposes, you know, fake medicinal purposes. And it's, you know, they people just do not grapple with. And by the way, this is the subject I get the most hate on. I'm talking about BLM, trans, Iran, Israel. I'm telling you, nobody has ever threatened to kill me over those. It's always weed. There's something about their attachment, their pathological attachment to this drug that people telling the truth about this substance just triggers them, you know, to the

Let's switch to something less controversial. Data centers.

Data centers.

Okay. Data centers.

Uh what what Yeah. So, so how have you been track I saw something I think it was New Jersey today had some success banning

a new data center project. Uh what what are you what are you tracking right now specifically guys? The MAGA revolt around this is incredible. So, Oklahoma just had a major town hall meeting. You can go read about the Financial Times just wrote a whole story about all of the MAGA counties and red states that are revoling against data centers. A lot of these people are actually going uh they're they're like showing up to town hall meetings. They're staying the lines are so long till 4:00 a.m. People are bringing their children with signs that say no data centers. They're like, "We don't believe your lies. Stay out of here." You know what's interesting? What I really love about the American public is they're taking this issue seriously. So, a couple of people showing up to the city council were like, "Hey, I'm reading articles about how the Chinese are able to do this without a lot with less power and resources. So, how do we know that you're even going to be sticking around here? Like, you're going to build this massive conglomerate and then there'll be a sea change in the technology and you're just going to abandon us immediately with all of your claims." Not to mention the power generation issue which is massively controversial in all of these states. So I actually think the you know the revolt that I predicted it's already happening. It's a blue state red state phenomenon. But this is hyper local. Nobody really in Washington is paying attention to this. But when you've got do you know what it takes for people ordinary citizens to show up and stay in line till 4:00 a.m. to speak against something. It does. It's not a lot of subjects you know that will inspire that level of hatred. So for all the data center builders who are out there, you got to convince us more, man, that this is actually going to do something for us because we're not buying it right now.

What do you think about the uh initiatives from many of the tech companies to offset the increase in power prices? That seems like very logical that if someone's energy bill is actually flat or falling, that takes them out of the line at 4 a.m.

Totally. I I'm I'm with you. like I do think that was a little bit reactive to the populist backlash that was coming against data centers. It remains to be seen whether something like that's actually going to happen or not and also it comes down to the regulators in the individual states. Now I would totally support that if they man they make it mandatory you have to build the amount of power if you're going to be able to do this. But you know in general guys it's not about the individual policy. It really is an overarching populist backlash against AI. And I think that's what these guys really don't uh they what they underestimate more than anything is that the public utility of this technology is just not bought by the American people on this subject and they really feel as if it's encroaching at a high level and then at a low level whenever it's your individual community.

Part part of the part of the part of the story is that the data center doesn't need to be in your backyard to get the value from AI. If you ask I every person I ask outside of tech has a

great story to tell you about AI. It could be really simple. It could be oh it helped me learn this thing. It could be I it helped me make this you know image that that I I shared a moment with my family. Like they don't you know there there's like the higher level stuff like you know if we can accelerate you know scientific research and and uh generally increase productivity across the whole economy all that stuff's great too. But uh again the uh the not getting a benefit from being in your own town is like a real thing.

Yeah. Right. No. Exactly. And and I also say Jordy that's a very white collar kind of bias whenever it comes to AI, right? So we're talking about blue collar workers who are wearing you have a blue collar yourself

brother. Uh brother I'm not claiming to be one of these people.

I'm saying you literally have I'm saying you literally do a blue collar.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair fair point. That's true. Uh, but I'm saying for a lot of these people, you know, let's say you're a Teamster, right? And you're talking about and you're reading articles about self-driving cars and the Teamsters Union is sounding the alarm about this. I mean, remember, you know, the vast what is it 60% maybe 45% of the American public has gone to college has gone to college, right? So, let's say 60% or so, let's say metriculated, have not metriculated from a 4-year college degree. That is a significant part of the US population that's going to think about the technology very differently. And then what percent of college graduates are doing work where they feel under threat let's say from AI and they're like oh my god like this job could be gone in two to three years right

I mean the current proclamation of doom is around early stage white collar work not even the blue collar thing uh what are you seeing in the economy weird job numbers

some job growth but not a lot it's all healthcare related and services like how have you been interpreting all the different girrations in the labor market.

Yeah, John, we talk about this all the time. We're like, well, the economy's growth is just AI and then the other backst step of it is just healthare workers who are like caring for boomers and that's apparently the US economy. That's the the backbone of the US economy are like senior nursing individ you know like health home healthcare aids. I'm not even joking. This is like one of the fastest growing sectors currently of the economy. There's not a lot of innovation. I mean, look, everybody's worried about tariffs. there's some of the manufacturing blowback that's currently happening. I also think you know if you look at the labor market and the housing market the softness you know in the housing market specifically that is the one the populist area I'll tell you there is no issue like again like with weed when I get the most amount of hate the most amount of love is if I'm talking about housing and the inability for people who are my age or you know in their 40s or all the way up to their 40s and really feel uncompetitive in the housing market. There's a lot of intergenerational rage, you know, about boomers. It's just a Wall Street Journal article, might even be in the paper in front of you about how boomers uh have all of the money. They had a big interactive spread in their paper today. But these things go viral in the wrong way uh for a lot of younger Americans. And so I do think

does any part of you uh believe what I think Silicon Valley believes which is that uh widespread diffusion of robotics could ultimately uh bring down housing prices. I don't know uh you know I don't know if anybody's obviously right because there's regulatory there's all these kind of like local level challenges but uh I would say that generally we at the show believe that you know 10 years from now we'll have millions and millions and millions of robots that can do functionally useful tasks like building homes and you could uh you know send an army of these robots uh and build a suburb in a in a relatively short period of time. Uh and and so I

kind of ignores the demand side issue though, you know, because right now the builders will tell you that they are fully capable of building a smaller, cheaper type of house, but that that's not where the market is in terms of the people who have money. Part of the reason that we've seen the rise of McMansions and larger houses is because that's the demand side problem where a lot of people who have more money are the people who are willing to buy these bigger, more palatial homes with lots of experiences in it. the suburb you're thinking about. My idealized, one of my favorite books is about the 1950s. There were these things called Levittowns, you know, where Mr. Levit would build a suburb and be 1500t house and, you know, it wasn't that great. A couple bedrooms, it had a car park, not a garage, but, you know, a little covered uh parking area. It was a couple 30 40 minutes from the city. But this was the dream, you know, for a lot of Americans. The so-called starter home. The starter home doesn't exist where I live here in Northern Virginia. The original starter homes from the 1970s go for $1.2 million. Okay.

With a ton of stuff.

Yeah. And they've been massively renovated with a, you know, the rain shower and all this other stuff for the people uh who can afford it. So Jordy, the thing I think that that ignores we, I'd have to look it up. What percent of housing cost is ascribed to labor? And what percent of housing scarcity is because of the labor constraint that you know or labor costs and not regulatory and existing?

Yeah. And also you're talking about you're talking about standards when we when when when people reflect on the golden sort of era of American history when every you know family could you know own their home with a single income the houses were just tiny right it was they were homes that today people

we would consider them tiny

yeah yeah know I'm saying people generally would look at them today and be like I can't raise a family in that house but there was a time that we did and

the boomers had wonderful child wonderful childhoods.

Yeah, they're fine.

And then bought the entire economy for potato.

Yeah.

Right. And then Well, yeah. Go ahead.

Yeah. I I think the biggest bull case for housing is probably more related to self-driving cars. I've saw this saw this chart that showed that uh that basically most humans have sort of a commute budget where they will are willing to spend up to 30 45 minutes a day commuting each way. And so, uh, before the horse and carriage, the cities were this big. And then the horse and carriage expanded it to how long you could take 30 minute horse ride into your job. Then when the car when the bus line came and the train and the faster car, everything got a little bit more sprawling. And if you think about, okay, well, I don't love being in the car for an hour, but if it's a self-driving car and I'm just sort of sleeping in the back, that probably extends that that commute budget a little bit. And then people just push out further into the suburbs. And we do get new suburbs, but they're just in more undeveloped areas, farther away where the land's

cheaper. The other the other connection to that I would add is Starlink. And that's one I really thought about during co is how Starlink opened up an entire part of the country where for years access to non broadband internet is a death sentence for working from home. I mean, I wouldn't even be able to do something like this. Let's say I was traveling and I was on a camping trip or whatever. Now I could stream into you. I mean, [ __ ] I think I could be on a United flight with Starlink and I could be streaming with perfect quality.

Viral there's going to be viral videos of people being like, I just got on a 6-hour flight and the person sitting next to me is doing has done three podcasts already.

Right.

It's like, please, by the way, do not do that. You are an [ __ ] Do not do that. Yeah. Do not take an interview.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat. Glad I'm glad that we could agree that that there's a a technoc capital solution for every problem in our lives.

Yes.

Yes. But perhaps maybe followed by a political solution to that techno capital.

Oh no. We'll get into that next time. Have a great rest of your day, soccer. We'll talk to you soon. Good to see you.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.co where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. And without further ado,