Anthropic Fallout, AI Sovereignty Fights and SpaceX’s Giant Surge

Hey everyone, happy Monday, and what a Monday it is here in New York City for my friends in New York, or wannabes, or New York Knick fans. 53 years in the making. Mike still got...

You haven't taken that shirt off since Saturday, Tony? Yeah, probably not. I've got a few shirts myself, and some hats, and I just ordered some of the new championship gear.

But congratulations to the New York Knicks and their championship. Thursday's the big day. There'll be a big parade in the city.

And we've been following it here on Techstrong Gang, so I had to mention that. But not everyone's a Knick fan. There's probably one or two of you out there who aren't.

But, sorry. But we're going to move on. And we'll move on from the Knicks, though, and talk about, it was an interesting week and weekend of news in the tech world.

So much going on. We're living through, really, these are historical times that I love to be able to talk about. We've got a lot to talk about with you all today, but let me introduce you to our gang who's going to talk about it.

From the West Coast, he's our man about town, John Swartz. She looks like she's up in Ottawa, it looks like from the background, Garima Bhopal. Garima, how are you?

I'm good. And making her debut here on Techstrong Gang, she hails from New Jersey. Where in Jersey?

She's in New York. And Yvette, I hope I get your last name right here. Schmitter?

That's correct. It's right. There's an actual sandwich named after me in Philadelphia called the Schmitter.

Really? Yes. I'm full of those kind of...

If you were playing- Well, we're going to have to pull all these things out of you over the course of our thing. And then, of course, joining us up in the High Castle, Mike Vizard, still wearing his Knick shirt. By the way, we should extend some congratulations to the Carolina Hurricanes, because they actually won the Stanley Cup.

I know everybody else is watching basketball, but there are a fair people watching this who are hockey fans. There are still people mad at them for leaving Hartford. But I digress.

Mike, it was a crazy week. Yeah. In both sports and tech news.

You just can't make this stuff up. But it's just fascinating to see how it all plays out. " But- Yeah ...

that's a whole other issue. But John, you were on top of this as well. Here we are on Monday, and it's been a couple of days since the initial chaos and insanity, but what's the response?

What are people talking about now? They're in disbelief, but then again, they've come to expect this because Anthropic and the US government are at war with each other. I know Dan O'Brien, I know, mentioned something to you about this, and I'll mention what he says later.

But it was crazy, right? This was Friday. It happened late Friday.

So Anthropic basically announces it's shutting off access to Mythos-5 and Fable-5 after receiving this order from the US government to block all non-US citizens, including its own employees. So in a sense, what the government did, or is trying to do, according to Anthropic, and I think a lot of us, by suspending access to Fable-5 and Mythos-5, they've effectively, I think they're treating software code as a physical weapon of mass destruction. And the backstory of this is so fascinating because Anthropic has kind of reached a crossroads.

They're going to go public very soon, and they've positioned themselves from day one as this adult in the room when it comes to AI safety. They're the responsible company. They are not as cooperative with the government as OpenAI because they don't want to compromise their principles.

But in the process, now the government, as we've come to expect, has flexed its regulatory muscle, and they're pushing Anthropic from the market over safety concerns, essentially. And as Dan O'Brien pointed out, for a company that's built a lot of momentum over the past six months, especially in enterprise, this puts them in a really, really fraught position. In a sense, it's really complicated matters for them, and it's had a ripple effect, which we will talk about in our next segment.

But opening it up to you all, this doesn't completely surprise me, but I don't know where this is going to escalate to. This is crazy. Well, let's just get down to the bare attacks on one issue here.

Alan, I'm going to kick this to you. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? For who?

For people who have software out there because they're concerned that- It's a bad thing. But it's going to wind up being a good thing. All right.

Explain. And I'm going to tell you why. I don't view this through the lens of a war between the government and Anthropic.

I view this another way. The US government wants to be able to wield AI as a strategic advantage against vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And not just nation states, but corporations and even individuals And what they did here was not just slap an export ban on it, John, so that you couldn't take it to China or Europe for that matter.

They said if you're a foreign national within the borders of the US- Mm-hmm ... you couldn't use it. And in the case of Anthropic, two of their co-founders are actually foreign nationals living in the US.

So now, what was Anthropic supposed to do, check for green cards before they let you access a model? That's ridiculous. So they had no choice but to shut down Anthos and Fable.

But what is that going to do? So first of all, it martyrs it. It makes Anthropic the martyr here.

The world loves a martyr. And if you're looking to promote your creds as being the good guys in this, Anthropic is promoting their creds as being the good-- Look what the government did to us. What's it going to do in the rest of the world?

" They're calling the shots on what AI I could use and when. And not just nation states. Imagine being a company that's using Fable for your biopharma research, your security research, your marketing plans, whatever you're using it for, and all of a sudden, you have nothing to do with cyber vulnerabilities.

All of a sudden, it was pulled out from under your rug. We're going to get to that in the B block. So what's the good news?

But here's the deal. So you're going to blame the US? No.

Are you going to blame Anthropic? No. You're going to blame the US government.

The key here then is we need sovereign AI, and the two things, sovereign AI and open source. Those are the big winners here. Well, the government said, "No soup for you," but I want to talk about Yann LeCun's quote.

He took a victory lap saying that Dario's fearmongering finally backfired. One reap what one sows. And I'm going to give him half credit for that, because what he's got wrong is he's wrong about the motive, not about the outcome.

Because what's the best ad you could ever run for a model? It's so powerful the federal government tried to ban it. So no agency on Earth can buy that endorsement.

So no, Yann, Dario didn't reap what he sow. He got handed a national security billboard with a taxpayer footing the bill. And you don't get to spend a decade of calling AI dumber than a house cat and then also be mad that it got classified as ammunition.

So to Yann, I'm going to say pick a lane. But Allen, he's teetering on the next big thing. It's about the sovereignty, and I can't wait for us to get talking about that, because there's a whole bunch of stuff that we need to cover around the sovereignty angle, and this is just one of them.

All right. Garima, let me ask you this from the perspective of the poor software developer who's looking at all this and knows that they have code out there that has all kinds of fun vulnerabilities in it, that they probably know about some and don't know about many. " So I'll tell you, I wrote an article late last year in December about AI storm and how we have to weather that storm.

It is not about this model only, and this jurisdiction only. So if we do not keep a check on AI integration and AI-infused software, in worst case, 25% or more vulnerabilities, by 2040, there will be half a million vulnerabilities will be open. So just giving you context of the problem.

So this decision, again, I have many questions on this decision because I think we have been talking about regulatory gap and the compliance issues, and you have often mentioned, Mike, that where are these discussions taking place? And the technology is moving faster than how governance and compliance can catch up. But this is a necessary evil.

And I'll tell you with this decision, what is going to happen, of course, there is a AI divide, which is seen and is happening as we speak. So that is, I think we have to be very careful on that because cyber vulnerabilities, there is good actor and a bad actor angle to every technology evolution. So it's a governance and regulatory issue, which we need to tackle in a better way.

We can't create a AI divide on these kind of models because now will it stop here? There are other models. Companies are invested into other models.

There are investors and there are creators. There is a lot of people who are non-US citizens who have contributed to these models. So banning-- I'm unable to understand this because I think if government seems to ban access for people who are not US citizens, it's just like as a US citizen, you can get access to a gun, and any other person will not.

But does it stop the crime. So I have this question at hand as well. The good actor and the bad actor is in every society.

So this is not a solution to the problem. The problem what we have is that these AI models have to be regulated. And how should that regulatory take place?

In a very democratic way, where we can create alliances, where we should think about what should happen at the chip level, what should happen at the infrastructure level, what kind of models we should create so that the governance gap which we are seeing right now, it's not like use it for all purposes. Right? Mm-hmm.

And the last aspect is that the investors will be turned off with this kind of decisions because in the longer run, I see that there is a mistrust building up. What if the other models go at the same path? One thing I was going to mention too is- Yeah ...

you know what really disturbs me, and I think it's part of what you're alluding to, Garima, is that the US government basically is saying they're signaling that national security is going to justify these aggressive real-time interventions in private tech, which blows up this whole boundary between federal regulation and private innovation. Which kind of sets this bad precedent or stark precedent for how frontier AI is going to be controlled in the US. Well, I'm going to add two things to this.

So one thing, you mentioned, Garima, about investors. Well, let's just tell you, who ratted Anthropic out? It was Amazon.

Amazon. Yep. " Right?

And Amazon is one of Anthropic's largest backers. Yes. The flywheel runs inside the group, too.

All right? So I'm going to say that. The second thing is- I'm glad you brought that up because that's right, he ratted them.

Jackie ratted him out to Sax. Right. He didn't call Anthropic.

And they're one of the biggest investors, right. So this is this whole game going on. He didn't call Dario.

He called David Sax. So that goes to tell you, right? So that's one.

Two, what America just did is that it proved that its AI has an off switch, and the rest of the world was taking notes in real time. Because within 48 hours, Carney warned that the Mythic situation is exactly what happens with over-reliance on a handful of- Carney, we're going to come to that whole issue in a minute. Everybody stop jumping the gun.

Now, the next thing, though, is so if I'm sitting here and I'm looking at all this and I'm a software developer, will I just kind of not use these things, to Garima's point, or am I going to go maybe move somewhere else to go use a model and push all my development somewhere outside the United States jurisdiction? Would I just kind of take this whole thing and say, "Let's be out of this mess"? There's an old story.

The tighter you hold things, the more it slips through your fingers like sand. Mm-hmm. Right?

" Mm-hmm. Right? And that is how this can wind up going down here, right?

That Anthropic now becomes the choice of people who don't kowtow to this administration. I do have issues, though, with what Anthropic was saying, because as I looked through their statement, I was like, "Let me get this straight. " But you also took the minute to actually include the line that says, "In the future, there probably will be jailbreaks.

" Because you've never written software. That's an acknowledgement for them- Of reality ... they've got to list their risk factors.

They've got to cover their a***s. No. But you're right.

So here's the thing. You're speaking as a cyber person, right? What they built in here was a defense in depth.

Yes, as far as they could see, there was no jailbreak, but these things happen. And if someone doesn't find the jailbreak today, they'll find something. But what they had were other defenses in depth that even if you jail broke it, it would still trigger off alarms if you were trying to do something using the Mythos security stuff.

There was a defense in depth built in that just jailbreaking it alone would not allow you to use the vulnerability finding Mythos security kind of stuff. And that's what they did, is that they built a good mousetrap around it, and that's what the point was. Amazon's jailbreak, if it in fact were, would not have been successful.

And if you're in security, you know that. Not every vulnerability is exploitable. True.

And it's the same thing here. True. But here's the thing.

But this is case in point where the auditor can't be the vendor. You know what I mean? It's just like, so we're going to trust Anthropic and say, "Oh, it's good.

" Right? And I think this is where most folks, this is where we need, and Garima was talking about, there's that independence, there's that governance that's required. And you can't grade your own homework.

You can't grade your own midterm. That's like 90% of your grade. You just can't.

And when we are saying to these large frontier models like OpenAI, Anthropic, you name it, just like, "Yeah- test yourself and you'll figure out when it's dangerous, and you'll let us know. Andy, definitely- Well, you're good. I agree with you 100%.

Who should we have tested? OpenAI? No.

The government? No, it has to be independent, and this is my opinion. When you got the same seven companies that are almost 40% of S&P who are driving the narrative of hype marketing, fear of missing out, and building the stuff that's making everyone buy it, it can't audit itself.

" Right? It has to be people who are not invested in selling products based on these frontier models, full stop. Welcome to Monday in this world.

Right? And it probably won't be KPMG either, so I'll- No ... leave that alone.

But you know what, guys? Hey, we're way over time on this one. But the next one is kind of closely related.

But Mike, let's broach the sovereign AI issue. So this sovereign AI issue, and sovereignty in general, has been percolating around for a good year and a half, two years now, and this just threw a little more gasoline on that particular fire. And we've had politicians from around the world talking about how you cannot trust the US.

We had the Prime Minister of Canada visiting the west of Ireland, where my people come from, and while he was there, the first thing on his mind is to remind everybody that you cannot trust the United States when it comes to AI and technology. Karima, you happen to live in Canada, so what's your take on how all this is going to play out, and is this going to make everybody kind of stand up and take notice, and an issue that was annoying become something that is now top of the list? Yeah, I'm a technologist, and I will do a due diligence on this from a technology perspective.

I do not understand more on the political angle, so I stay away from that. This whole issue of banning these models is basically highlighting the issue of centralized global reliance on few models, and specifically US models. Now, the warning which our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and again, it was followed by many other leaders and industry leaders as well, that what happens in this ecosystem is that, of course, there is concern, mistrust, as well as there is, as I mentioned in the first section, there is a divide happening in terms of what capabilities should belong to...

From an infrastructure and model perspective, it was tied up together from the beginning. But now we are seeing that people would take consideration into decentralizing it and trying to kind of host their models in a more appropriate localized or hyper-localized environment. It also would give rise to the standards and the regulatory fragmentation which we are seeing.

From our perspective, we are closely monitoring and watching out what the EU regulatory is being developed in terms of how they are managing their AI infrastructure and AI models. And they are more and more advocating for their own models to be in place. But I think in all this ecosystem, I find it very difficult how the services would be impacted.

If you think about the models become a licensed entity or asset for a particular jurisdiction or geographical kind of applications, then there will be a lot of implications on these services companies, these consulting companies. I think we'll have to see far-reaching implications in terms of open source, for example. The boom of this sovereign AI would also lead to geographical relocation of tech personnels, for example.

So there is a lot of consequences of these kind of decisions, and we probably will see a fragmented ecosystem for AI as we go along. And Yvette, why not just take Anthropic, throw everybody's stuff in a suitcase, move to Brussels and call it even? Well, okay.

There's a couple of things, right? So one is people are framing this because it's easy to do this, just as anti-American emotion, and it's not. It's actually jurisdictional risk, right?

And so, for example, just three weeks earlier, what was it? Oh my gosh. The Netherlands.

Okay, the Netherlands, about three weeks ago, blocked a US company from buying, it's called Sovinity, right? It's the cloud that runs its national digital ID center called DigiID or something like that, citing CLOUD Act exposure. You all need to read that because it's very, very interesting and specific, right?

Because it's the first US acquisition the Dutch screening bureau has ever blocked. Ever. Right?

So here's the thing. People frame sovereignty as this anti-American emotion, and it's not. I'm going back to it's jurisdictional risk because that CLOUD Act means US law follows US-owned infrastructure anywhere on the planet.

So sovereignty is just enterprise risk management wearing a flag. So what everyone is now trying to race to do is they're racing to build these sovereign clouds, but- Even Europe's flagship sovereign initiative had to include Google in a joint venture. So, you can't decouple everything by Tuesday.

So I'm thinking that we need to start thinking this more broadly, and that the bridge, in the meantime, needs to be jurisdiction-agnostic, independent governance. That's what I'm saying. Proving that a system is safe and- Yvette, with all due respect, if you don't think this is about anti-US, I got a bridge to sell you.

It's easy, right? Because right now, our current leadership is easy not to like, right? So how can you get that stamp- No, but that...

So an anti-US... Let me say it this way. It's not personal in this case.

In some cases it is personal. They don't like Trump. Yes.

Let's be honest. But when the US has a policy where regardless of where the data is, if you are hosting it with a US company, a la all three of the major cloud providers- Yep ... they have a right to put the kibosh on it or access anything.

Correct. And so that is anti-US, right? It is.

It may not be anti-Trump, or it may not be personal, but it's saying the US laws have made it so impossible and undigestible- Yes ... taste bad to deal with, that we don't want to deal with them. And I would tell you, I was at SUSECON, Mike was at SUSECON with me in Prague about two months ago.

Yes, there are some sovereign clouds that work with AWS and Google they're building over there. But I will tell you they're also building Europe-only clouds. And that's what they need to do.

And they're moving that way, right? Yes. Because if you think about it, right now in Europe, the UK, what do they build?

Handbags and cologne and stuff, right? And clothes. They don't build infrastructure, right?

If you want your laws and your controls in how the data for your constituents is run- Well, let's be clear, we don't build infrastructure either. Yeah, but the- Our infrastructure's built in Taiwan and China- True ... and around the world.

Very true. But which companies is running 90% of- The companies are here. Yeah.

So then who winds up being the loser here? Well, we all lose because the internet gets balkanized. Yes.

But US companies are now unable to compete on fair grounds in Canada and Europe and Asia and so forth because US government policies have hobbled them. And it's the same thing here now with AI. Forget a country, if I'm a European programmer, individual company, let alone a country, I'm saying if I have a choice between using a US-based AI or an open source one that's maybe based in Europe or somewhere else, I'm going...

It may not be as good, but at least no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I think this is like- That's the loss here. I'm going to say what I said on a previous show, the US CLOUD Act is stupid, written by people who didn't understand the economic implications, and maybe we should revisit the US CLOUD Act.

Just saying. Yeah, no. The problem is most, especially the present administration, thinks that our stuff don't stink and everybody wants it, and that people will go against their own self-interest just to get some of that US mojo.

And that's okay, maybe, if we all want to go to the trailer park on the lawn of the White House and watch a UFC fight. But it don't work when we're talking about high technology. Yeah.

I think it's also a literacy gap. I agree with you, Alan, because I'll tell you, this is not a warship, right? This technology is democratized, and in the short-term, or interim term, people will fall back to other models, even other Chinese models.

But they will try to kind of create their own models as well. I feel that, in the longer run, the supply chain interdependence, I think people will not have one spot-fail solution. They will architect many solutions and many multi-model, multi-cloud solutions.

So this is a transient problem, but I think in the longer run, and this is only me taking it from the lens of a technology perspective, that in the longer run, such kind of bans would hurt the innovation ecosystem of United States. So I would just end this little chat about one thing. The one thing that I find about this that is just a positive knee-slapper is that the United States government seems to think that there are no cyber criminals within the 50 states of the United States who might want to access this AI model.

Just saying, man, isn't it great that we live in a country where everybody does the right thing all the time? Right. Well, yeah.

It's also like this government has this decision that they have this kill switch over commercial technology. They don't trust anyone else. And if I'm a European policymaker, this is yet another wake-up call that relying on tech companies from America leaves my own industries and critical infrastructure vulnerable to any unilateral decision by Washington.

That's a scary thought. Yeah. But I think, John, one thing which we should also realize that, and recognize that, all the good innovative companies, wherever they come from, they rely a lot on US ecosystem, US funding, US investments.

So we can't take US out- Right ... at any point in time- Well, you- ... even if we wish to You know what, Garima?

There's a lesson here we should look at. China. We pulled this card with China.

We played this game with China. You could only get the H200 GPUs. You can't get the good stuff.

You can't get our better chips, our better mobile chips. You can't get our better this. You know how many H200 chips China's bought?

Zero. You know what they've done instead? They said, "That's okay.

" Mm. "It may take us two, three years to get parity, but we're off the heroin. You don't have that hanging over us anymore.

" Yeah. I mean, that's- And I'm telling you, the rest of the world's going to do that, too. And smart And then again, who loses?

Our companies lose. We lose. Yep.

This is a zero-sum game they're playing that you wind up losing. Yeah. I think everybody loses.

Right? This is go to war with a country to make a deal that we had a deal with 10 years ago. Oh my gosh.

Let's move along. Mike, what's next? We got- I just came out of the dentist.

I'm a little numb. What's next? So- You don't sound numb to me ...

if you had told me on Friday that there was two other things we would be talking about before this, I would've said, "Well, that's highly unlikely," but here we are. SpaceX went public, and stock, not surprisingly, seems to have surged a little bit, at least around the first IPO. And this, of course, is the company that exists because of US tax dollars were used to fund various projects that then became recurring sources of revenue for these guys.

And there's some talk about whether we should buy these companies in the first place as a nation, or at least own a percentage of it. But Yvette, I'm going to start with you. What's your take on what's going on here with Elon and SpaceX, and it just seems like it's a thing of its own momentum without any reason or logic.

You know what, Mike? So I'm riding Alan's wave right here, because the same week this current government proved it can switch off a private AI lab, it let one man become a trillionaire off of private space satellites and an AI he answers to no one for. So let's just talk about the numbers, right?

77 trillion valuation. It raised about $75 billion, and it made Elon the first trillionaire on paper. Right?

And I like- Mm-hmm ... to my folks out here, they all may look good on paper, but in real life it might be a little different. So anyway, so that's about a 94 times revenue, more than Meta had when it went public at 22 times its revenue.

So, what's the story here? I'm going to say this. Alan, what do you think about this?

77 trillion is the distraction, and I think this is the real story here. One private actor, one, now controls global launch, the satellite internet, and half the planet routes through a social platform and a frontier AI lab, and he took it public. So when we were talking about the government saying, "No soup for you," and we're talking about sovereignty, so this is where we got to come back to that conversation about sovereignty, right?

But from the opposite direction. We just watched the US government reach into Anthropic and kill it. So who reaches into Starlink?

No one, because he- Right ... is part of the cabal. Right.

So right, no independent audit, no kill switch. Anyone but Elon holds it, right? An evaluation that is going 75 times earning growth on pure faith.

And this is the same man who said if he can't be in control of the robots, y'all don't get robots. Right? So, think about it.

This is something that we just can't walk away from. It's a conversation that we need to all be having. So yes, folks, look up from your Instagram and making your squirrels fly planes and stuff.

This is some really important things that's going to impact every single one of us. And so think about it this way. When the critical infrastructure, this is going back to Garima's point, when critical infrastructure is privately held, unaudited, and is priced on belief it's just too big to fail, that term becomes more than that banking term that led to the 2008 crisis, right?

So everybody who sits on a board should be thinking about this. Map your dependencies on single-actor infrastructure before the market maps them for you. So the company's now worth $2 trillion in valuation.

Yeah. Right? Yeah.

So, but I think of this, this way. This debut, they're benefiting from the scarce availability of shares and brand enthusiasm than fundamentals. In a sense, it kind of reminds me of the Google IPO, where people wanted a piece of the brand.

This first big IPO. There'll be others, but only a few. People want to get a piece of the brand and drive the price of the stock in the short term, but they're not looking at the lore fundamentals.

And it took a few years before Google stock reverted to reflect the value of the company. And I think the same thing, if it happens to SpaceX, which it will. John, if Elon did as well as Google, I think he'll be pretty happy.

Yeah, he'll be happy. But I'm just saying, this is like- But that's not the case here ... first.

This ain't Google. No. This is not Google Here's my take on it, and you can never tell where Alan's going to go on these shows.

No. Right? No.

I think, watch SpaceX fall back to Earth. No pun intended. Watch SpaceX fall back to Earth, because here's what I do believe in more than the American government, and more than the EU, and everything else.

I do believe in the market recognizing what's a good investment and what's the right return on stuff. And I think SpaceX has benefited from not truly opening the kimono and seeing what he's... There's an old saying, you could stack crap so high, and what do you got at the end of the day?

A high stack of crap. And we haven't seen the whole kimono open here, and they went, NASDAQ bent over backwards and let him, they're going to index this stock before the normal rules say it should be indexed. But it's going to come where the market's going to look at that kimono and see, because what you really have with SpaceX is this.

You do have what used to be Twitter, and we all know X ain't Twitter. Right? It's a pale shadow of what Twitter was.

Then you've got Grok. If Grok was so good, he wouldn't have contracted 330,000 GPUs to Google and Anthropic that should've been using for Grok's AI. Grok is a failed AI.

You do have SpaceX, which had almost a monopoly for a while in terms of launch vehicles. But, from what I've read, that star ship program's a huge loser. It costs almost as much as the Artemis program, or more.

And it's a loser. And you've got another billionaire nipping at his heels. He had a little explosion last month, but Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is a rapid competitor.

" Every country and their mom is building their own launch capacity. Forget China or Russia for the moment. I'm talking India, I'm talking every company wants to be a satellite launcher.

So what do you have at SpaceX? You do have Starlink. And Starlink, make no mistake, Starlink is the gem of that, when you look at this from a financial point of view.

Starlink's the money maker. But I'm telling you right now, SpaceX, when you look at all the pieces, the only way that'll ever approach making sense financially to the market is if Elon can really make in-orbit data centers work, and I think that's a huge absurd kind of thing that ain't coming. You're not going to see that so quick.

Yeah, but you know, Alan, the one thing to underscore, to summarize, what I'm basically trying to say is that what drives the price of the stock for now, and maybe the foreseeable future, is not the value of the underlying- No, it's- It's just the availability of a share of stock. Yeah. It's like 3% or whatever they put up there.

But look, I think this is a $75 stock in a year. So can I ask this question? Just, and I'll throw it out to Alan, but are we in danger of too much capital being poured into a handful of companies and other companies are- Think so there, Captain Obvious?

Yeah. My name's not Alan, but I'm going to answer the question like, yes. Mike, you and I talked about this before, just think about it.

Alan, I'm going to say this. You're absolutely right. But most people, with the type of liquidity to play in this space, aren't thinking about long-term s**t.

I'm just going to say that, right? They're thinking about, "Oh my gosh, look at my portfolio. " That's being driven by the same seven companies that are almost 40% of the S&P.

He's one of them. And- No, it's not 40%, Yvette. I think it's closer to 80%- Oh, okay ...

of the growth in the S&P is those seven companies. Right. Those seven companies.

So everyone's looking at their portfolio, "Oh my gosh, I'm making all this money," right? It's the snake eating its own tail. If you think about it, these seven companies, where they do all these announcements, and moving cash here, buying and then giving and doing that- ...

within the same seven, right? Same seven, and people who have the liquidity to play the market are seeing their portfolios go like this. They're not thinking common sense.

But Alan- Right ... you and I both know, because we grew up in the city, look, we see s**t around the corner. We know that the other shoe is going to drop, and when that other shoe drops, right, you think you put the money back in these seven companies, well, the other people who put the money in those seven companies hold your mortgage, hold your 401 .

So it's not like one goes, we all go. And when you start thinking that way, you'll see the smoke in the mirror. But let me just go Frank Pentangeli from The Godfather on you here for a second.

"But you know, Tom, the little guys always lose. " The people who are foolish enough to play into this, they don't get out before the shoe drops. But the smart people who have the liquidity, they always do.

Right? For whatever reason, they always do. And that Maybe they're congressmen or other politicians who are whatever, but they always do, and that's really the issue.

Absolutely. The visa that-- I've been talking about the visa that expires today, just to let you guys know. Anyway, so I'm bringing in another topic.

Sorry, Mike. But no, just like Alan, he hit the nail on the head on that one. I think we all need to look up from our phones and watching squirrels fly planes and drive cars and yachts, and think through, follow the bouncing ball.

This is not like a Where's Waldo. It's like follow the ball. All the signs are there.

You just choose not to read them. Well, we missed those signs during the housing collapse, so we're not good at reading signs. What signs?

You know what, though? Hey, guys, we got to wrap up. But here's the deal.

The cross-cutting theme across all of this, first of all, AI itself has become much bigger than just another technology consideration or another technology conversation. It has become strategic, national-level, security-level, and I don't mean just cyber kind of business. And it's global.

The acts the US government is taking is setting up what's going to make for some interesting bedfellows in geopolitics and global corporations. It's going to be interesting. But that's why we come on the gang here to talk about this stuff.

Where else are you going to talk about it? John, I thought you were very restrained today. Oh, the thoughts are going through my head right now.

No- All right ... I'm just pacing myself. Yeah.

All right. I just want to say- Welcome to the gang- ... one thing here ...

Garima Gadd. Yeah. I just want to say this, that where is people in this equation?

I leave you with this thought because I feel that technology is made for people, to simplify our lives, to simplify how our kids would live in the future. And if we let this roll in the way we see it now, I think we have to act today. Actually, one thing I was going to say, so Yvette, a lot of things you said really resonate with me at the end, especially this day of reckoning that's coming, which I think is coming sooner than we realize.

It's like a freight train coming, but we don't see it yet. That's what I just keep reverting to, that this is not sustainable. This is insanity what's going on right now.

All right. Well, with that, I got to go to the Army Navy store and see if I can find some stuff to- Make a shelter. Yeah, yeah.

Get the bunker ready, Mike I'm going to go do a webinar. Get your bug out bag. I'm telling everybody.

And your wind-up radios. I'm telling you, yeah. The days are- Oh, jeez.

All right, guys. Hey, I hope you've enjoyed today's show. It was certainly a lively conversation.

We'll be back tomorrow with more. What else can we talk about? Just wait and see.

com. Mike, John, Garima, Yvette, welcome to the show. Thank you all for coming on.

Thank you for watching. We're out. We'll see you tomorrow.