AI Taxes, U.S. Cyber Force Pressure and the Rise of Agent Payments

Hey everybody, welcome to Techstrong gang. It's Friday, and yes, if you see Jeff over there, we are celebrating National Donut Day because it's a free donut if you go to various stores, and we encourage you to go. And well, it turns out that there's a lot of things in AI that want to be free, or at least that's the conversation.

We'll see where we go from here. But it's been a crazy week. I think first we had Elizabeth Warren weigh in and say we needed to tax AI, and then Bernie Sanders had his piece about let's see if we can get some sort of government ownership of AI.

And now, just to add a little to that, apparently there are reports now that the OpenAI CEO has been in contact with the government looking for, well, I don't know anything other than call it what it is. It's a bailout. But we'll see.

John, what the heck is going on? Oh my God, I wish I knew. So this is a silly mess.

That's my expert opinion on how to put this. So I guess the big picture argument in regards to Warren, and Sanders, and this congressman in Texas, is that because the public's data has trained AI systems, it's entitled to a direct share of the wealth they generate. That's the argument.

So there's this debate whether AI should be treated as a private intellectual property or shared utility to fund massive social safety nets. That's the argument, like universal healthcare and job guarantees. There is a lot of anxiety over what AI's going to do to jobs and what it might do to the economy.

So therefore, we have these proposals that have been thrown out, and I can't wait to hear what Jeff thinks about this. But I just don't think they're going to go anywhere. But I'll mention a couple of them.

There's Elizabeth Warren who wants to direct taxes on AI companies such as data centers, alongside corporate and wealth tax updates. There's a congressman who I'm not familiar with named Greg Caesar. Kaczor, I'm sorry, who's proposed taxing tokens.

And then there is Bernie Sanders, who has announced plans for legislation that would claim a 50% equity stake in leading AI firms. It's effectively a one-time tax. And then what Mike mentioned, which just happened or which just has been leaking.

I know OpenAI's Sam Altman has, in a sense, kind of broached the idea for a while. So now the Wall Street Journal's reporting that White House officials are weighing proposals for the US government to take equity stakes in major AI firms like OpenAI. So the companies would voluntarily cede shares to fund this public wealth fund that could pay dividends directly to households, American households.

So in theory, it sounds totally bizarre, but I think of all the conflicts, even if it were to happen, which it won't happen, think of the conflicts of interest with the government acting as both a shareholder and regulator of a major fast-growing industry. I mean, I just boggles the mind. I don't even know where to start on this.

Well, I can look back at all the things that I thought wouldn't happen, and sure as s**t, they did happen. So I don't know. We'll see what happens here.

But Jack Pollard, does any of this make any sense to you? No, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Let me take a step back.

It makes perfect sense that they want to do this. What they want to do makes no sense. I think it's pretty obvious that in the last year we had, in 2025, we had about five and a half, sorry, $550 billion worth of IPOs and M&A activity, and $100 billion of that was in cybersecurity alone.

If you look this year, what I think they see on the horizon right now is there are three IPOs scheduled, all AI companies, that are going to be three, $4 trillion somewhere in there, which is a huge amount of money. And I think the government is envious and wants a piece of that money, and it's a pure and naked cash grab in one form or another, no matter which way you look at it. And it's really looking at it, I think these people are saying, "I see cash out there.

" So Bernie's request was to buy, not buy, basically to by government fiat, say simply, "Hey, I'm going to take 50% of every AI company that exists," and now the government owns it. And as John pointed out, there's a huge conflict of interest, particularly when you have the government is controlling or very close to controlling interest on these companies. It also leaves them open, and I argued in my editorial, my op-ed about this, that it makes them a single target for cybersecurity attacks.

And it's very, very dangerous overall. And the concept of taxing tokens is kind of ridiculous. A, how do you count it?

Tokens are a very fungible thing, and what benefit does a company get to-- Why are we taxing tokens? It's just there's no logic there. " None of the things she wants to fund are things that exist today.

Universal healthcare, we don't have that. Unemployment for people leaving federal jobs. Well, we have unemployment funds.

She's not going to increase those. She's going to create a new fund and with a new organization, et cetera. So none of this makes sense.

It's just a cash grab. Yeah. I was going to mention one thing really quickly.

I'm sorry. You mentioned the three IPOs. So I think SpaceX is probably going to be first.

That's a big one. There's Anthropic filed to go, and I'm assuming the third one is OpenAI, perhaps. I'm not sure.

But in any event- That's the rumors, right? That's the rumor, right. So the interesting thing about SpaceX is I saw something, and again, I'll take this with a grain of salt because these numbers are just arbitrary.

They're just floating by us every day. There was an estimate thatBy 2030, its revenue would increase by a staggering amount. So there is a lot of cash.

When you mention cash grab, I think about the opportunities, and I think about the government wanting to get a piece of this, almost like a gold mine. And it's all coming fast. Jeff, we talked about this on yesterday's show, and I'm going to throw this out here again and get your opinion on it.

But yes, there is a lot of things in here that are half-baked, but somewhere in here is a kernel of maybe a thought where it says, hey, these AI companies, it appears, have almost zero hope of turning a profit, and they're going to need some sort of bailout. So why not just turn the AI infrastructure into a national utility? Then we can all go out and build applications and things that are interesting and things that add value on top of that infrastructure, because otherwise, we're just going to be all dependent upon something that is on, shall we say, extraordinarily shaky financial ground.

Mike, you're right, because every time the government decides we're going to do something and we're going to do it effectively and efficiently, they do. Never. So even though there's a lot of things being thrown at the wall, and some of it's going to stick.

I'm concerned about a couple things. First of all, for everyone that's saying, "No, no, no, this can't happen. It'll never happen.

" We have been walking towards this already. It's not quite the full nationalization of the industry, although that certainly may be at the far end of the spectrum. But when you look at the CHIPS Act and the ownership stake that we have in some chip manufacturers already, you could look at that as a foundational step towards, do we want to eventually nationalize any sort of technology or system that we believe is either going to make a whole lot of money, so we need to get our part of it, which could be solved simply with taxation if that's what you want, or because we think it could be used against us from a national security perspective.

We want to, and this has happened as well recently, executive order, we want to review everything before it becomes public. And I will offer, many people can say there's no way that's going to happen effectively either, because how do you make sure I want to make sure I know every bit of software that's ever written and I'm going to take a look at it. That can't happen.

So when you look at the whole picture, there's a lot that's going to fall off, and that's going to be good. I believe that if any government, and I'll base it in the US, we'll look at this one that says, "Well, this is great. " That's pretty ignorant.

The question is, where do we land? And I think it's going to be somewhere between a taxation economy based on revenue generated or an ownership perspective, but it's going to have to be limited to non-voting ownership, limitation to percentage of ownership, and that sort of thing, and is it considered a bailout or an investment? Jack, you going to vote for any of that?

Well, Alan asked me about this on, and once again, I wish Alan was here. We could have a great debate- Yes ... about this.

But Alan asked me about this on LinkedIn, and I said one thing we have to be careful about is the details matter here. And the existing relationships the US government has made recently with Intel, with IBM, and we talked about this a couple of programs ago, IBM and a number of quantum development companies, is it was essentially an investment of the US government. Now, the US government in the past has gladly given out grants to companies for a lot of different reasons.

I think the perspective of the current administration is if we're going to give them money, we should be able to recoup some of our investment somehow. So they took minority, very small ownership shares that are non-controlling, non-voting shares in the company, so that should the companies be successful, the US government gets paid back directly through stock investments and being able to sell stock rather than the companies paying cash back and basically getting no interest because it's a grant, not a loan. In this case, for instance, the ownership claim from Bernie Sanders was, we're going to arbitrarily just own half of these companies because we're the government.

" And there's a big difference between those two alternatives. Mm-hmm. As you can see, I have argued on behalf of the Intel investments and the quantum investments in the past, should the government do similar arrangements with the AI companies, I think that might be more palatable.

Although, I think it's very clear from the IPOs that those companies clearly do not have a problem finding and raising capital as Intel did or some of the quantum companies do. So it's a completely different situation in my perspective. So Jack, I want to offer one thing, and I'm not making a political statement, but a political observation.

It seems that a majority of the people involved in the current administration that are proposing this, not too long ago said the government should never pick winners and losers. And I agree with you, and I have an internal conflict with this because I don't think the government should. I think the argument being made in this case is in cases of national security, they are trying to control and foster what's for the benefit of the country overall, not what's for the benefit of a specific company over another specific company.

That's the argument being made, but that's going down a path that's less about this discussion. The other part of this too, and the gentleman from Texas kind of raised this. Okay, someJohn, walk me through this to make sure I understand this.

So he's saying that because the AI company stole all the content that they used to train their AI models, therefore the United States government should, and then that we the people, should get some benefit of that. Now, as victims of their theft, I'm not quite clear that what he's saying here is he's saying that somehow or other, the United States government will get ownership of these things, and they will compensate folks like us, Techstrong, for the theft, or are they just saying that, well, what's stolen is stolen, and we're just going to take ownership of that- Well, I think, yeah, I don't think we're going to ever see anything ... a small percentage of the general population.

I don't think we're going to see a penny. I think his plan is he wants to pair the tech tax revenue to AI utilization so that the revenue that they get will be funding federal employment programs, like probably some sort of project he wants to push through. So, we're out of luck.

The one thing that just-- Call me skeptical, but this whole thing with Altman open to the idea of a government investment, and you mentioned the B word earlier, bailout. He's been laying these breadcrumbs lately about how the revenue is not accelerating to their expectations at OpenAI. They're probably not going to be anywhere close to profitable for, God, in the foreseeable future, maybe even woefully short of it.

And I think he's kind of greasing the skids to have some sort of backup or some sort of government partnership to help bail him out. I keep just coming back to that thought. In their case, to me, it's always been so interesting with OpenAI.

I just don't believe that story's going to end well. If and when there's actually a bill that goes through Congress that has any of this in it, I would propose the following amendment. There should be a tax write-off for those of us who create content to train the national AI.

Because, well, we're doing all the damn work, and that's kind of the part that we're not getting compensated for. So I'm just saying, share and share alike. What do you think, Jack?

Oh, I like that one a lot. Because otherwise there's no way that money's coming back to me at all. Right?

Mm-hmm. So I like that one. But, in general, I think, John, you're right.

Altman has been laying the foundations for the government bailout for OpenAI for a very long time. We talked about this probably six months or more ago on the show. And if you look at the AI companies, Altman is the only one crying poor.

Dario Amodei- Exactly. Yeah ... Anthropic aren't, Google isn't.

Google actually just said they're going to float some options. They want to raise $80 billion on the market. They're going to have no problem raising their funds.

I think, poor management of a company is completely different than an industry that needs help because the industry and the economic situation changed or because, in Intel's case, it's the last chip fab in existence in the United States. I think those are two completely different things. So you don't think that Sam Altman is going to be the Lee Iacocca of the AI industry?

Come on. Oh, I think he wants to be the Lee Iacocca, but I think everybody in the auto industry would acknowledge that Lee Iacocca, at one point, was a brilliant automotive designer, but a really piss-poor executive of Chrysler. Right?

And it was the bailout of Chrysler that helped him. That was a different time when the failure of Chrysler and the sudden unemployment of a half a million or more people would really impact the country. What was that?

That was the '70s, right? Mm-hmm. Or, can't remember when that was, but- It was ...

it's a whole different economy now, and I don't want Intel to disappear, but even if Intel disappeared, just the volume of Intel workers getting out of a job would not have a major impact on the economy. Intel disappearing would have other issues, but just the unemployment effects is not going to have the same impact that it did back then. Yeah.

I was going to ask you, going back to social media, remember when we were the product? That whole argument about how- Yeah ... we helped make the product.

And I can't remember, was there any talk about taxation of them, of a Facebook or of a Twitter at the time? We were the product. We created it, and now we have this argument in terms of AI.

I don't know. No, because the dollar values they were talking about for those companies weren't enough to be of interest to the government, is my belief. Right?

The dollar value- I think you're right ... we're talking about now are- Yeah, the scale is much larger now ... scale is enough that it makes a difference to the federal government.

The scale back then for Twitter and Facebook just wouldn't move the needle at all. So I'm glad we went here, and thank you for two reasons. One, with social media, we were the product.

With AI, we create the product. Okay. Good distinction.

Which is why the scale changes, I think. But also, if you remember, there was one of those companies that Jack just mentioned that did not turn a profit but was turned successful, and that was Twitter. " Well, let's see how that turns out still.

" Pardon me, OpenAI. I take that back. It wasn't Anthropic.

But I'm going to buy OpenAI and make it profitable and make it successful, just like I did with Twitter. The government doesn't necessarily have to be the entity to do that. All right, folks, I'm going to have to leave this here, but I would just point out that we've got in equal measures here, a little dose of socialism, a little dose of corporate welfare.

What could possibly go wrong? It's our tax dollars at work. Stay tuned.

All right. We are going to move on to our next topic here. But apparently, politics is now also finding its way into our security strategy as a country, and the junior senator from the state of New York is proposing that we create a cyber force that's roughly equivalent to the US Space Force, and it's time to have a dedicated element or arm of the armed services apparatus that is dedicated to cybersecurity.

Now, Jack, I know you're close to this topic, but what do you think? Does this make any sense? Actually, I think it does, and I'm shocked to hear me say that.

But there is some validity here. So first off, Kirsten Gillibrand, as you said, junior senator from New York, is proposing the creation of a cyber force. And very interestingly, she actually thought about this a little bit.

There's some parallelism and symmetry here. The Space Force, which was created during Trump's first term, is under the auspices of the US Air Force. The Marines, which have a very long history, 200-plus-year history, they are under auspices of the Navy.

So she is proposing a cyber force that would be under the auspices of the Army. So you still have three divisions and essentially a junior branch of each of the three divisions of the military. I think there's a valid argument to be made that says that cyber warfare is now becoming as critical or even more critical than physical warfare and electronic warfare.

We've always had electronic warfare in the last 70, 100 years. And eavesdropping and electronic countermeasures and all sorts of stuff like that. And now the digital battlefield is going to be as or more important, and formalizing that, understanding that, and being at the forefront of that, I think is critical to the security of the United States.

So I think it's actually a good move. I hesitate to say that, of course, because anytime you create an entire new force, you're creating an entire new bureaucracy with all of the problems that government bureaucracies entail and lots of spent money and wasted money. But we've been bemoaning for a while, and Alan has been bemoaning, and rightly so, the lack of investment in CISA, and this would hopefully really raise the awareness and the importance of cybersecurity throughout the federal government.

Here's my conundrum with this thing. So I get that whatever we have for a military arm needs to report to a civilian government. That's core to our Constitution.

And yet, and we talked about this earlier this week, we are sliding into something that feels like a surveillance state, and politicians are using our security apparatus for political purposes, and that's not a good thing. So if we have this specialized cyber force, Jack, I'll throw this your way, but are there controls or something that we need to wrap around this thing to prevent it from just becoming the mechanism by which politicians are enforcing whatever flavor of the surveillance state that they want based on who their enemies are? One could make the case that's already happening.

So I'm not certain those guardrails that you want would necessarily be effective, and I'll make the same statement that many of those are already in place. If you look at what comes out under the auspices of the ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Cyber Command, which has elements within each branch of the military, to a degree, this functionality already exists. So I think it should be as simple a question of, does the distributed model that we have now make sense and work for us, or does it make sense to say let's centralize all of it?

And I think that's where the argument's going to end up. It's going to be one of those two, because it's not going away. But there's always ethical questions that come in as well.

Is it Title 18 or is it going to become a law enforcement thing, or is it simply intelligence gathering? Is it different inside CONUS versus outside? There's so many questions that still need to be answered around this.

I think the fundamental one's going to be keep it distributed, get it centralized, and what rules really apply. But I do think that there will be a definitive, here's where we're going. I don't think status quo by doing nothing is going to remain.

And Jeff, if I could just say that that essentially was the core of the argument when the Space Force was created. Because very similarly, we had elements of the Space Force distributed throughout all the three existing forces, and that was a distributed versus centralization in the field. The gist was let's centralize all of it and have a much clearer picture of command and control over the capabilities.

I would offer, though, if I can real quickly, Jack. Sure. And I don't want to make it a debate, but that didn't involve the NSA and the rest of the Office of National Intelligence.

Yes, that's correct. That's where I think the difference here is. Mm-hmm.

Sorry. Does the Space Force actually do anything? Because I know it was formed, but I haven't heard diddly about it since, other than the fact that occasionally somebody gets fired or hired.

But, and I think that's also part of my fear with this thing is it just becomes a black hole somewhere and nobody knows what the hell's going on in there. Yes. I was thinking the same thing, Mike.

Does this new branch effectively streamline digital defense, or is it just adding layers of overhead while pulling resources away from existing cyber commands within Army, Navy, Air Force? I don't know. Doesn't make sense.

And is this an all or nothing proposition? Or is it, I can have my cake and eat it too, and I can have a cyber force, but there's no reason why the United States Army intelligence services shouldn't continue to invest in cybersecurity because, well, that's part of their mission is, too. Jack, can I do that?

Well, yes, you can. And the answer to your question is yes, the Space Force does stuff. Are they terrible at PR?

Probably, yes. I think the answer is yes. The argument for centralization is really for efficiency and getting rid of duplicative efforts.

And we saw that a lot in the Space Force. We still have it today where the Army, the Air Force, and the Marines all have aircraft capabilities, but they have different mission requirements. We're getting better and better at developing aircraft that are multi-mission capable and so fulfill all the different requirements, and I think that's where the Space Force was, is everybody's duplicating efforts, let's sort of combine those efforts.

I think with cybersecurity, it is the very same thing, and we also, I think, are acknowledging now that all of our strategic adversaries invest heavily in their offensive cyber operations. The three most active cyber activities we face in the United States are sourced in Russia, China, and North Korea. And so should the US be involved in offensive cyber operations?

And if so, what capabilities should they have, and should that be capability be distributed? Or is cybersecurity something that would benefit from centralization and all the researchers and all the activities all being under one roof and being able to operate as a combined force? And Jack, what you just described, I think, is the theater should determine how we want to organize this, and we need to anticipate what that theater's going to be.

And Mike, you can have your donut and eat it, too. I have to say that, sorry. But in the same way that CENTCOM can say, "Here's what's going to happen with all of our military activities," I think we either need to find a way to ensure that cyber is handled the same way, or that there's a different central command for it.

You just heard me lean towards centralization, I believe makes sense, but only based on what your anticipated theater is going to be. And you can't predict everything, but you can anticipate what a lot of theater's going to be. All right.

Well, there seems to be some rare bipartisan consensus here, but whether that actually manifests itself in DC is a whole other issue. But I would observe two things. Jack, I think you hit it right on the head, where there is a massive amount of redundant spending across these agencies and things that we're doing.

So as a tax dollar representative, maybe there's something to be done here. But there's also the idea, too, that the bad guys are centralizing their efforts, and they're running up through the seams of our defenses because we have so many different groups doing different things, and they don't all talk to each other at the same time. So my gut tells me there's more to be gained than lost here, but I think we'll see what happens.

All right. Speaking of gains and losses, let's talk to money and AI agents because, well, there's a whole effort underway, and it spans not just companies. There's a post here about what Amazon Web Services is up to, but those various foundations are talking about this, and it all comes down to the idea here that AI agents are going to buy things and sell things.

And that's going to create this new flavor of the digital economy, and there's folks now talking about the need to give AI agents the ability to conduct transactions in micropayments. These are things that are less than a penny because we might want to charge an AI agent for, I don't know, reading a piece of content on Techstrong gang or group or wherever they happen to find it. And the same thing is now playing out across, well, if I want to access an API, maybe I should pay for that.

And it's worth a quarter of a penny, and as these AI agents do this at scale, all those little transactions add up. Jeff, what do you think? Is this where we're heading with this stuff?

I believe it is. And I think there's also a good social aspect to this that not everyone is seeing yet. Obviously, it's early days.

But micropayments, once you get outside the US, especially if, say, the continent of Africa, micropayments are nothing new. Everyone there, most people there have a phone, even if they don't have a computer or a home. They have a phone, and they do micropayment transactions because that's how the economy works.

" Now, it also opens up for fraud pretty easily. " And in that movie, Jason Bateman describes what is called a salami attack. That's not the term he uses, where you take penny out of the dish at the store.

Not anymore, of course, when penny's gone. Or you leave a penny or take a penny. And he described that's what they were doing when they were committing crimes to say every transaction, when there is a micropayment left over, didn't use that term, we just end up taking it and no one noticesI'm concerned that especially when you have AI agents driving this, that we run that risk at a much larger scale, and I'm not sure what controls exist yet.

It has to be more than a standard. It has to be a control that says, "Here's how we're managing micropayments," rather than no one noticed that they, and I'm not accusing them of doing this, let's just say an organization like OpenAI said, "I'm going to fund what I'm doing by skimming the micropayments," when all of a sudden they have a billion dollars available to them that no one missed. I don't know.

Jack, are we creating a new bank for cybercriminals? What do you think? Well, this would be round four of attempting micropayments, and the first three times failed.

So if you don't succeed, try, try and try again. And I'll go back to what I said about our first segment, and I think this is just a money grab by, in this case, AWS is the one proposing it. AWS is already charging you for the CPU time and the token time, and the ingress or egress costs of the network traffic, and now they want to provide a way to get a percentage of the cut of yet another.

If somebody pays for the transaction, we get a percentage of the cut. " And Amazon's not doing that, and I don't think I've heard from any other of these things. They're simply looking at, how do I put our fingers in the middle of the transaction and siphon off a little bit for ourselves?

And I think vendors and people are going to find alternatives that don't have that capability and don't have to pay that transaction tax and won't use that service. I don't know. Remember, AWS has a parent company called Amazon that does billions in transactions for things that cost well over a dollar, and they're just going to slide this into that whole mechanism that's- Mm ...

saying, "Yep. " And maybe, I don't know, John, I got to tell you, people are lazy, so maybe they're not going to notice. They're just going to see the check.

They're not going to notice. It's all convenience always ends up costing us money, but I'm all for that. You mentioned, Jack, this is the fourth go at it, at this.

The fact that AWS and Amazon by proxy are involved in it, just that probably gives it a better chance, a realistic chance. But one of the things that I want to ask anyone about is, in terms of the math, so what is it? 402.

Mm-hmm. Does this provide the necessary speed and low transaction fees necessary for a high volume, real-time AI workflows? Yeah.

Well, I don't know how good it is. It was created, I think Stripe and Coinbase for the drivers. Coin, that's a good sign, actually.

Right. 402 foundation, which is yet another arm of the Linux Foundation, which also has an AI foundation that is also looking at AI agents and transactions. And there's a protocol from, I think it was Google or somebody else, had built something called A2A, and there's some payment extensions to that.

Oh, yeah. And the whole thing is a bit of an acronym soup. But the basic idea here is that these micropayments are coming.

And I think it's now a question of how are we going to secure these things, and let me come back to Jeff on that. So everybody says we're going to apply these guardrails to these AI agents. And every time I turn around and I look at the guardrails and I look at the AI agents, it seems like the only ones who don't know those guardrails exist are the AI agents, which seem to be routinely ignoring all of them.

So how can we actually secure something that is by definition programmed to aggressively perform whatever task it is, regardless of what guardrails or anything else that's been put in its way? Well, theoretically, it can happen, but current state, it doesn't, and I don't think can, current state, because every single agent at some point is manifesting the biases that were inherently put into, because software at some point was written by people, and those biases then find their way through to, say, a micropayment. So whatever is going to favor something politically or an organization financially, whatever it's going to be, that's going to happen.

We have not yet come up with a way to truly have independent, objective guardrails on AI agents. " And that's why, Mike, you think that guardrails are ignored by the agents when in fact, in many cases, even if it was subconscious, the guardrails were written to favor the agent. And I'm open for debate on that.

But I think that's where we are currently. Jack, you agree? Yeah, 100%.

No arguments. But I'll go back to the Apple Store model and say that recently, I think it was one of the Spotify or one of the big music catalogs sued Apple because they claim that their 30%... finger tax was too much, and they won that lawsuit if I remember correctly.

And other people are now facing the same thing. It's like, this tax is too much for the volume of transactions we do. " Mm-hmm.

So, the question is, what are we actually charging for, and is there an alternative? Is the micro payment protocols being enabled so that me, as an AI agent developer, can charge people access? Well, I have many different ways to do that.

We have API billing and API usage and app billing and all that. There's a huge ecosystem of companies involved in all of that. So do I really need this?

And if I use this, who else's fingers are reaching in and taking a piece of my dollars? That's what I wonder. Well, let's talk about that, because that is the next logical thing.

Going back to the A block. So should the clearing house actually be the United States government, which can keep track of all these transactions in real time and collect taxes on them as they go along, AKA, the big? And this is how maybe we're going to fund some of these fabulous AI initiatives that we've been talking about where we are part owners and this, that, and the other.

I don't know, John, this looks like the mechanism by which the whole thing turns. Oh my God. I don't even want to think about the government getting involved in this.

Especially this time and the fact that these companies are... Remember the movie "The Day After," where there's a nuclear explosion in Lawrence, Kansas? Mm-hmm.

I can see that in the horizon. All these convoluted, intertwined, pie in the sky ideas to take a big part of the AI system, the AI economic engine. Right now, can these stupid, I'll use your word, Mike, can these stupid companies just make a profit?

Let alone that we're getting ahead of ourselves. It always seems like we're always getting ahead of ourselves with AI, right? This is going to happen overnight.

No, it's not. This is going to happen within a year. No.

Pump the brakes on it, and yet we just keep these money grabs, as Jack points out, these ideas, these concepts. Like on paper, they sound good, but in reality, I would say 90% of this stuff is not going to happen or it's going to be a completely different version of what we first talked about. Well, I will say one thing real quickly, and that is that profit doesn't come into a transaction tax.

Nobody cares if you make a profit or not. Yeah. It's every transaction gets taxed.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Exactly, and John, I think you just described the toxic, abusive relationship we have with AI.

We keep saying, "No, I'm going to change. No, it's going to get better. Give me another month, give me another year," and it never happens.

This is why there is so much, this is just my opinion, but there seems to be so much anxiety or fear because the AI industry sends us all these mixed messages of what's going to happen, what isn't going to happen. Oh, we're going to replace all our employees. No, we're not.

That was totally wrong. Don't believe what we told you a year ago. We're going to be doing this.

No, we're not. And the fact that the government has gotten involved to the degree it has, where these guys are palling around and then they magically all get off a plane and start making deals in other countries. I'm just saying that the messaging is so out there and so convoluted and so confusing that they just terrify the general population.

Mm-hmm. Well, also, walk, reason through what I'm just saying here, because it does get crazier, right? So what we're really saying is that the United States taxpayer is going to take a piece in these AI infrastructure companies so that we can launch these micropayments and transactions to tax the very people who are consuming these AI things, AKA, the same taxpayers that we went to for the money in the first place to fund the AI stuff.

So it's kind of a tax on a tax when you think about it. That's the favorite operating mode for the government, so ... Yeah.

A long- I think the public sees that coming too, in a sense. They're skeptical a lot, especially now, and with AI, there's so much a degree of doomsday and non-trust. There is no trust at this point.

It'll change, but for now, there's a high degree of skepticism. The back end of this is money is money, and it's all fungible. Regardless of how money is earmarked, it's still all fungible.

So if this is yet simply another source where we can double tax, what is it funding? Right. Well, I'll go another step.

I think it matters what you're using the AI for, too. I think that if somebody's doing cancer research using AI, I think that might be tax-free. I think if you're creating stupid memes for social media, I think that's a high tax because, at the end of the day, what are you contributing to society here?

So, I don't know. Are all AI transactions and content created equal, Jack, or are we going to have to come up with some sort of structured system here? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Mike.

And from as far as the government is concerned, you look like a very pretty wallet. Sorry. And if I may, Mike, don't take this personally, you're a fat wallet.

Yeah. Yes. No doubt.

As somebody who, I'm probably going to get taxed coming and going. For somebody who creates the content and consumes content, I'm probably going to pay on both ends of this flow, right? And never get a tax credit back for the content you fed into the machine to- Yeah.

And to go back to this segment, if it happens in micropayments, there's a really good chance you may not even know. Mm-hmm. That's definitely going to happen.

Right. Right. " Well, I'm going to tie on that, only because I'm not against micropayments.

I think they play a very good role. And as I said, in the country of Africa, it drives the economy for the most part. Yeah.

But I think micropayments make sense when you know what they're going to do, not when it's done on your behalf without real visibility. I'm just saying, at the end of the day, I want tax-free micropayments. I think micropayments are a great idea.

I think it's an awesome way to get compensated for things that we do. What I don't want to have happen is to be taxed on something I already paid a tax for in the first place to help create. Mm-hmm.

That's it. All right. Well, I guess I'll be filing my papers to run for president and see how far this goes, and yeah.

You got my vote, Mike. I'm launching a new independent AI party, and that's how we're going to pay for all this stuff, and that's All your content has to be human-generated, not AI-generated. Yeah, there you go.

And I can't wait for the big nomination convention, because it's going to be great. I promise. Nice.

There's going to be millions and millions of people there, I swear. Bigger than Trump, I promise you all. We are writing the pitch for a movie script.

And don't worry if they're AI-generated people, because it'll be just fine. All right. Folks, I want to thank everybody for spending their time with us this week, and today especially, I want to thank John, Jack, and Jeff for sharing their infights.

Insights, sorry. And- Infights, too ... for the rest, too.

Please stay tuned for the rest of the Techstrong TV lineup that's coming up right behind us. Have a great weekend. Hey, enjoy some great basketball and some great hockey that's going on out there.

It's an awesome sports weekend. And at least where everybody knows where I stand, go Knicks, and we'll see you guys Monday. Oh, the fact I live near San Antonio has nothing to do with it.