Tales of Abundance
Tales of Abundance artwork

All episodes

Digital Serfdom: Why You Don't Own Your Business Online

Episode 94 · 7 October 2026 · 58 min

Open on Spotify

Show notes

Digital Serfdom: Why You Don't Own Your Business Online

Digital serfdom is Chris Pearson's name for building a business on land you rent: social platforms and centralized services you don't control. Chris created the Thesis WordPress theme, DIYthemes and PageMotor. He joins Randy Lorensen and Dr. John Oberg to talk about who really owns your data, what digital sovereignty looks like, and why he thinks AI hands that power back to individuals.

Most entrepreneurs are building their empires on rented land — and they don't even know it.

Chris Pearson, creator of the first $1M WordPress theme, calls it "Digital Serfdom." In this episode, we explore why centralization is quietly killing the open web, who actually owns your data, and how AI is finally giving individuals the power to take it back.

Who Owns Your Data, and How to Own Your Website Again

What you'll discover:

  • The 1926 WIBO radio story that predicted modern digital ownership — "The license does not give you any right beyond its term"
  • Why 85%+ of the internet has been swallowed by social media centralization
  • PageMotor: all-in-one website + AI knowledge base ($49/mo — interview an AI, get a website, done)
  • The constraints thesis: why tight constraints create democratization (and why AI is the first constraint in 20 years)
  • Microtransactions + AI: the two-way data economy coming in the next decade
  • Abundance Briefing: 5 XPRIZE competitions awarded, and AI costs dropping 47% per quarter

Timestamps

  • [00:00] The WIBO Radio Story: Building on a frequency you don't own
  • [01:59] Welcome Chris Pearson: The WordPress era and the first $1M theme
  • [04:13] Digital Serfdom: Social media swallowed the internet
  • [06:38] Subscription fatigue: From 4-6 bills in 1970 to 15-25 today
  • [09:16] PageMotor: Conceptual disambiguation and all-in-one website hosting
  • [13:23] AI knowledge bases: where do your brains live?
  • [14:56] Randy: managing hundreds of AI agents across platforms
  • [18:03] When 1,000 people think like you: the clone effect
  • [22:10] Who owns your data? The honest answer
  • [24:47] Zero P-doom: The mobile mechanic + Tesla repair anecdotes
  • [31:02] Data security, cold storage, and John McAfee
  • [35:00] 2-year, 3-5 year, and 10-year AI outlook
  • [37:54] Microtransactions and the true cost of everything (including golf)
  • [46:20] Abundance Briefing: AI self-regulation White House pledge
  • [51:37] AI costs dropping 47% per quarter
  • [52:26] 5 XPRIZE Competitions awarded

🌿 SPONSORED BY AG1 (Athletic Greens)

Fuel your health and performance from the inside out.

Try AG1: https://shop.drinkag1.com/tales

About Chris Pearson

Chris Pearson created the Thesis WordPress theme, DIYthemes and PageMotor.

Find Chris:

Find us online:

Hit Subscribe so you never miss an episode of Tales of Abundance. 🔔

Related episodes

Meet the hosts: Randy Lorensen · Dr. John Oberg · Anthony Marino

Transcript

A full transcript is below. It comes from the episode recording and has speaker labels. It hasn't been proofread yet, and the time markers follow the raw recording, so they can run a minute or two off the published audio. The Abundance Briefing at the end comes from YouTube's automatic captions.

Randy Lorensen [00:00]: It's 1926. America is falling in love with radio. Entrepreneurs are pouring money in. They're building studios, hiring talent. Hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners. A Chicago station called WIBO has been on the air for years. They have a real audience, a real community, a real business. Then Congress passed a law. A commission was created, and they sent a letter to 164 stations. Prove you're in the public interest, or you're off the air. WIBO made their case. Didn't matter. Why? A station in Indiana needed their frequency. Indiana was under quota. Chicago wasn't. The commission reassigned the signal. WIBO seized broadcasting, not because their audience left, not because they did anything wrong, but because they had built everything on a channel they never owned. The law was written this way. The license does not give you any right to operate beyond its term. You could build a million listeners. The frequency was never yours. John, we talked about before this started, today's world, public interest, public utilities, et cetera. you wanna you wanna fill people in kind of what we were discussing there before we get to our our guest,

Dr. John Oberg [01:12]: I there's

Randy Lorensen [01:13]: Chris?

Dr. John Oberg [01:14]: Yeah, I there's laws that that there are certain private companies that are so important to the public interest that they have a different set of rules that they follow. And as a result they have a different set of liabilities. You know, the social media would be the one that's kind of probably most in the news today where social media doesn't have liability for some of the things on their platform, but they have to follow a different set of rules than other companies do in in terms of what they're expected to provide for people. And so I think this is true for social media. It's true for utilities like electricity and you know tel telophony. And I think it's also true for you know, big platform services like social media. And I don't know that if everyone knows that you know that they play by a different set of rules, both for the benefit of and perhaps to the detriment of society.

Randy Lorensen [02:03]: So how does Chris play into this? Welcome, Chris.

Dr. John Oberg [02:06]: Well, I mean Chris, you play in a world that's yeah, welcome welcome to the show. Chris Chris, you you were a part of the the earlier side of the internet boom when people needed some type of kind of consistent way of building websites early on. You wanna tell us about how you got involved in the WordPress ecosystem and some of your claims to fame? You've got a couple of big ones.

Chris Pearson [02:25]: Sure, sure. So I f fell in love with what to me like kind of the second wave of internet, which was blogging. Like you could have previous like big corporate sites, it was, you know, the big dot com stuff. That never seemed to like trickle down to the everyman. But blog seemed like something that was attainable for everybody. And in particular, like I graduated from college at a time where that was really ascendant. And so like every ever all my peers were kind of doing this. Everywhere I looked, it's like people wanting to have their own little little piece of real estate on the internet. That was a really cool time. And it was a time for builders where people were sort of intrepid. They were addressing a lot of these technical challenges and kind of laying down their their stake on a little piece of internet real estate. And so I became a builder during that era. I started I made WordPress themes so people could have designs, easy, you know, easy to run, nice looking designs on their websites. and there was a whole lot of demand for that back then. And I had the first million dollar WordPress theme, the first premium theme that people actually paid for. It was like a free economy before that. so I built that, built a pretty big business pretty rapidly. this was 2008 when I launched. the business was very big, 2009, 2010, 2011. And lived through that that first wave of you know, public land grab, I guess you might say. And it's been fascinating to watch it change, but that radio story, very interesting because that parallels so many things that we've kind of seen play out over and over again in the digital space. And here we are again confronting another period where it's like deep centralization, you don't own anything, you're like a digital serf. That term comes up every decade or so. we're always like confronting this new era of digital serfdom, and then you have this reactionary element of people that want to. have something that's uniquely theirs, something they can control, something where, you know,

Dr. John Oberg [04:24]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [04:25]: there's some posterity to it, I guess, where they can have it and have it later as well.

Dr. John Oberg [04:31]: And so tell us more about the concerns of being a digital surf and then tell us about you know, how that plays out into your decision to launch something called PageMotor.

Chris Pearson [04:41]: Well, I mean, social media really got like took this ascendant arc in about 2014. It was blogs. I just described that before. Like 2005-2014 was the era of blogging. And then when social media took off in 2014, we had a contraction of the internet. Fewer sites were being built, people were coalescing on these centralized social media platforms, blogs were no longer necessary because you were really You know, you're you're posting your existence sort of transitioned from blogs to social media. people stopped using search as much. Search stopped being a primary like lead generation tool like it had been in the previous decade. and so that that movement has really only solidified since 2014. Like more people moving onto these, you know, into these social media echo chambers, fewer people having their own real estate. But I still I started building PageMotor sort of as a bit of a response to this, only because businesses were kind of losing touch with like having this their base online. People were running social media campaigns across various, you know, like TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn. You know, their footprint kind of became this vague thing. You're like, the business is this, and it's this collection of digital presences, but no one unified presence. There's not one place where things are being run from. And increasingly it was hard to run a digital business. Like it wasn't too bad in 2012, 2013. You'd have a couple pieces you'd cobble together. But in the time since, like one example is like SMTP being offloaded to the user, you have to do you have to have a sub separate subscription and a digital hookup to even run email off your server to say, like, hey, you just changed your password, or something like this. Stuff got harder. All that stuff used to just be baked into the cake. And so many things like that got harder over the

Dr. John Oberg [06:39]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [06:41]: last decade, and businesses as a result were establishing less of a presence online. So I wanted to fight back against that. I felt like there was a big opportunity to kind of wrap all these things up in a single package and deliver that to businesses and to end users if they wanted to do that. But really just sort of a reaction to 20 years of contraction and decreased efficiency that I had witnessed on the internet.

Dr. John Oberg [07:06]: Yeah, and that and that's been a that's a trend, right? Like like you know, if I look at the number of bills that a household paid in like the nineteen seventies versus today, I'll pull this number up in a minute. But it like it used to be a few and now it's a lot. And and that's true for businesses, particularly in marketing, right? And you think about like, you know, if I placed ads in a number of places before, like pre-internet, I might have placed ads in twenty-five or thirty places, but now I have to monitor I mean untold number of places through all the different, you know, technological channels that I have to monitor. And it creates several full time jobs in size companies that aren't necessarily huge.

Chris Pearson [07:43]: Right, right. That's something I didn't really have a a grasp of until recently. Like I guess I was naive about this. I thought, you know, technological improvements should result in less nonsense for people to deal with, but that's not really the direction the internet has taken at all. So Page Motor is is quite literally my attempt to sort of you know, it really started because of subscription fatigue. I've got subscription fatigue. I have subscriptions to a billion different services. just to run my site is like six active subscriptions. I have logins in all these different places, gotta go to these services. Like it's terrible. so that was kind of my yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [08:19]: Well j t that point nineteen seventy Chris, four to six core bills paid by a family. And today it's fifteen to twenty five regularly paid monthly bills, so six X the number. And my guess is that that research I just pulled up is probably old because I think there are people that might have ten or twelve or fifteen AI bills just from the different subscriptions they're paying right now.

Chris Pearson [08:39]: Yes. yeah, that's yep. Yep. Something new to try. I tell you what, so this is funny, this is a little aside. I've been watching a little bit of football this year and can never find where the games are. Like it used to it's like ESPN or ABC or something, like, okay, you can find the game. Now I'm like it's like ESPN sixteen or some like, you know, ACC network speed two, something ridiculous. Like I can never find it. And you know, finally this week I just snapped. I'm like, you what? I th I think cable was actually better. I'm a big anti-cable TV guy, but now I've reached the other end of the equation. I'm like, you what? I think it was actually better. I think it was easier. I think it worked better. You know, like I I wanted

Randy Lorensen [09:17]: Think you're right.

Dr. John Oberg [09:17]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [09:18]: a million subscriptions. I got it. I don't like what I got. I want to send it back.

Dr. John Oberg [09:25]: I think people are trying to do that right now too. They're trying to reaggregate that through one particular piece of glass. And that's the it's tough. And so so I mean, it's funny because that that's all the content that we're receiving right at home. And what what you're doing is you're trying to change the way that content management works on the business side of things, right? Like that's the whole thing. So so what is what's the thesis for page motor? If you're if you if you like me have subscription fatigue, how are you solving that?

Chris Pearson [09:52]: So the most typical solution for a website, like if you get a website, you actually have a domain, you have web hosting, you have software that runs on the web hosting, and then to actually have a business, you have some other software that works with that software, such as like e-commerce, email campaign stuff can be ad tracking stuff, all kinds of stuff like this that businesses need to operate online. Those are all separate subscriptions in the current paradigm or in the one we've been working through. Those are all, they all happen in separate places. You've got to go set up accounts, you've got to integrate everything. All these are huge technical pain in the butt. Like the expense bar just to get in is like minimum 25,000 plus the relationship, which carries a cost, like finding who who should I work with, should I do this? Is this gonna work? There's risk and cost associated with that. That bar keeps going up. And so my thesis was that I could build page motor, we could set up a hosting environment and run all of that stuff. And do something that I call conceptual disambiguation. I don't want people who want a website to confront all these different technologies and all these things they would otherwise have to deal with. They don't need to know what this is. They don't need to know what SMTP is. It's absurd. They don't need to know who the providers are in the space. They don't need to set up the accounts. Like it's ridiculous what we are putting people through or have been putting people through to set up websites. You want so it's it's like it's like a paradigm that comes up over and over again. I want to build a website. I had to learn about hosting, software, FTP, all this other nonsense, but all I did was want a website. Like, why can't I just get the thing that I want? And so PageMotor enables us to deliver all of that stuff in one box. And the customer never has to see any of that. They just, they literally log in, take an interview with a w an AI, and get a website and can log into the website. They never had to install anything, they never had to look at a database, they don't even know what that is. It doesn't matter. they're

Dr. John Oberg [11:49]: Okay.

Chris Pearson [11:49]: certainly not setting up F you know, S S T P, none of that stuff.

Dr. John Oberg [11:54]: But isn't it I can't I just use AI to do that? That's I mean everyone's just got that idea, like, I can just use AI to build a website today, right?

Chris Pearson [12:00]: Well, you could, but AI would tell you to go to these places and set up these accounts so it could perform the connections. So it at the very least, you'd be saving on that. But the AI angle is a whole nother layer that kind of got added on once I was already on this journey. it was sort of a a happy coincidence that AI really took off at the time where PageMotor was just mature enough to really start accommodating it, bolting it on, so to speak. And that has supercharged the entire initiative because As you mentioned, people have multiple AI subscriptions, AI stuff happening all over the place. PageMotor is very unique in that it is a thing you connect your AI to PageMotor, and then you can run lots of stuff through it. You say I want to publish something, it'll do that. You say I want to create like a knowledge base to use for my company or for this other initiative. I'm gonna write a book, whatever. It you can use page motor, your AI will use page motor as a knowledge base to store those materials. You can access them remotely, you can access them from this computer, that computer. You know, working off a local environment, no restrictions at all. if you set up a business, so it's real interesting, we have business where n equals one, where you're one operator and you only need one environment and you don't really care. But as soon as n equals two or more, you have to have and especially if it's remote, like the other person is somewhere else, then you need to have a stable operating base where everybody connects to the same thing. That's actually kind of a tricky problem to solve, especially if you've only

Dr. John Oberg [13:27]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [13:27]: been operating locally. And PageMotor offers a solution to that as well, because these knowledge bases that it stores can now be accessed from anywhere in the world by anyone. You can delegate access. You can say, well, this person, you know, this is a contractor, they're only going to get access to this. So you can hook everybody up to your AI brains and sort of delegate in this new way, which is super fascinating. This is kind of unfolding before us right now. It's the it's the evolution of the agentic topic. So we want things to work agentically. But we now we actually want to run and delegate our businesses with AI. How do we do that? So page motor is sort of emerging as an answer for that, which I honestly think is more compelling than the website angle at this point.

Dr. John Oberg [14:09]: What's funny, I'm watching people build, you know, things with AI and they have skills and I'm asking, like, well what do you do if you want your team to use the skills? Like I just send them the file. It's like, nineteen nineties called and they want their file management system back, please. Like it's we're we're

Chris Pearson [14:23]: That's that's right. Yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [14:24]: it it's it's like what's what's new is old and what's old is new and it's we're kinda going all the way back around to that and it's you know, I think there's people that are innovative who are willing to kind of go through that pain of developing. but you know as a guy with a background in technology diffusion academically what I can see happening is the innovators are like, it's so easy. And the early adopters will follow those innovators like they have for, you know, hundreds or thousands of years. But the early majority is not going to take that jump. We we've known that, you know, for hundreds of years of academic research. And so We're we're gonna bump into this problem where we have to solve the problems that we've already solved once, we're gonna to solve them again, like as we diffuse the technology. And so Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Pearson [15:02]: Yes. Well, it's super annoying. It's the cloud computing problem all over. Like local file storage is is fragile. It it breaks down under very clear circumstances, especially business cases. So we need cloud. Well, now the AI, we're just ask answering asking and answering that same question over again. It's silly. And there's actually downstream questions

Dr. John Oberg [15:20]: Yeah. It's interesting.

Chris Pearson [15:22]: that we've also answered that are that are gonna they're next in line. We're gonna hit those again as well.

Dr. John Oberg [15:27]: I mean, Randy, you're you're a pretty interesting innovator in this space where you've gone in and you you're a super user for a non-technical person. Like I don't know many non-technical people that are as far ahead as you are in AI. You know, what's been your experience with how you're managing content across multiple domains and and how are you managing some of those frustrations?

Randy Lorensen [15:49]: Mean, we just you and I talked about this with a group the other day. I I have so many different things going. Like, you know, I'm I'm not only in I don't know how many different AIs with paid subscriptions and I'm coding over here and then I have a whole set of agents that are on my Hermes bot. There's there's literally hundreds of agents running there, and then I have a Grok bot running things. And sometimes I don't even remember where I set something up, right? Like there was some skill I was trying to do and I was talking to my Hermes agent, Odin. And it was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I was and I went over to Grok and I was like, Grok, is this you? And it's like, yeah, we have that skill. Right? Like it's I I and I so now I've decided I need an agent to talk to all the other agents and keep it straight. I mean, it's just there's a lot happening and it's happening

Chris Pearson [16:34]: That's the way.

Randy Lorensen [16:35]: so fast. It's hard for my monkey brain to keep up with it.

Dr. John Oberg [16:42]: And and Chris, what do you see in you've got an entire form of kind of advanced users right now that are talking about what the future of this type of work looks like. What are some of the things that were obvious to you and what have surprised you?

Chris Pearson [16:57]: that's tough. I mean, I think what's surprised me is that people have been open to using a sophisticated environment like Claude Code, who I probably would not have pegged as being even open to that. And once they get a little bit of momentum, they're completely hooked. And like the their whole personality is has like changed to me. As far as being an effective user, providing really detailed effective feedback, They there's like an intrepid sense about these people where they kind of like want to take on new problems because they they they realize they have you know now have a super ability and they kind of want to test the boundaries with that a little bit. And so that's almost been one of the best gifts of this process so far has been to watch people level up to and then to like you know kind of bathe in that confidence a little bit and want to do more with it. I think that's tremendous. Another outcome that I mentioned on our show, I have a show with my wife every week, That really caught me off guard was that I within PageMotor, I have tons of documentation that I update all the time. One big part of this is called conventions. This is like how we work, what we're looking for, how we do it, you know, kind of kind of the thinking that goes into it. Every page motor instance has this, and everyone who runs an AI against it is bumping up into this reasoning. They're hitting it all the time, that their bots are are running this. And what I noticed from doing this for about two, two and a half months. Is the responses I was getting from these these my power users in the forums who are using Claude Code and the like, they're sort of behaving like me out in the wild. Like they're giving me reasoning that I would provide that was absent before. Like I've done this for 20 years and I wasn't getting a lot of responses that were like directly in line with my thinking before. Now I'm getting all these responses that are super aligned, and it's it's made me stop and think. Like, I have clones out there now. Like right now I have like 10 of these power users. What happens when it's a hundred? What happens when it's a thousand? And I I don't think that that I I so like we talk about training AIs. This is like an angle in that that I had not anticipated, but I think is very, very powerful.

Dr. John Oberg [19:09]: And so what happens when he does come become a hundred or a thousand? Like what what starts to change? Like what are we gonna see? You know, be I I think and let me just say where my pre question's coming from. I remember like the first time we started using email in a business that wasn't using email before and we had like these e machines that were like these word processors doing email. It was crazy what they you know, and and then I got a laptop and we started using laptops and then there was websites that came out. It was just it all seemed so futuristic, but it's moving so much faster now, right?

Chris Pearson [19:38]: For sure.

Dr. John Oberg [19:38]: And so what happens when there's a thousand people that are thinking the way you're thinking, like what's gonna change in the way that we do business and the way we use computers?

Chris Pearson [19:44]: I just think a lot of I think it it's hard to imagine what it looks like when we don't have the breaking effect that tech technology has provided. Like a lot of initiatives died on the vine because the tech specs were too heavy. Actually pulling these things off was too difficult, too expensive, whatever. And when those barriers drop to zero basically overnight, it's like the the flood waters come rushing through. You don't know how much damage that's gonna deal, but it's gonna be it's gonna be tremendous. It's gonna clear out wide swaths. Of territory that were were covered by forest before. So like who knows? you know, when you can do anything, really when you can do anything, when it's not just like a happy cliche, well, that changes. Then then the calculus is should we do something? Or what's the most valuable thing to do? I don't think we have a good handle on that right now. I don't. I'm kind of keeping my eyes open, but I can't say, you I'm not like a nostodomas here, like, this is definitely where it's going. I don't know.

Randy Lorensen [20:40]: So I I think I speak for a lot of us in that it's frankly overwhelming. Like I I'm really excited to be living through this time we're living through. Like things are changing and I I see all this abundance, but it is. It's scary. Like how it I am, I feel like on the cutting edge of this stuff and I still it's like drinking out of a fire hose, right? I I can't keep

Chris Pearson [21:01]: yeah.

Randy Lorensen [21:01]: up. How do you how do you do that? How do you try to stay current?

Chris Pearson [21:07]: I'm I'm just looking at like what are the most powerful use cases? What are the fundamental questions that we're going to be asking? like such as like this. Wh where is my data? Who owns my data? Who manages my data? I think I think of it like a garden. Who's tending my garden? You know, can I just go out and go out into my garden? can I move my garden? You know, it's it's it's here now. Can I move it to to Brooklyn, New York tomorrow? you know, the if it's on a centralized thing, the answer's often no. The answer's often, well, that comes with a caveat. so so like the fundamental question that I'm phrasing now is where do my brains live? Where's my you know my AI knowledge base? Where does that sit? how how do I operate with that? what does my business environment look like? So it's now like what's the flow chart? The flow chart is you have your AI, this is your central connection point, this is the point through which everything else passes. And you've got connections. Your business has, you know, maybe 20 relevant API connections. That enable you to do everything that you do. And so it's you talking to the AI, the AI going out and fetching everything you need. And like, what's the so that's the very basic flow chart. And then you get into the details, like what's the best way to arrange this thing? Like, how how do we do this for maximum power, maximum effect? I think it's gonna take two forms. I think we're gonna have a an AI workforce, which is like your operators, to run businesses, so small businesses. That were had a breaking effect in the past of not being able to hire a good operator. You know, you got the risk, you got the the chance of flight. This person comes in, establishes some stuff, leaves, you're left holding the bag. You can now have a world-class operations team for like 50 grand or less, you know, for for small businesses or whatever. So these these businesses stuck in the hundred 150 to 500K annual range now have like a crazy amount of flexibility they never had before. So, so but but this AI workforce applies to everyone. I'm just Kind of explaining how it takes some of the breaks off of the economy. And then the other thing is AI personal assistance, which is going to be even bigger. We're going to have everybody setting up this basic environment of here's my life, here's all the API connections relevant to my life, here's my AI that I talk to. I'd like to be able to talk to it from anywhere, my phone, an app, my telegram, whatever it is. And you know, that's how we're all gonna be running everything. The AI's it's everyone's gonna have an incredibly smart executive assistant who can connect to anything.

Randy Lorensen [23:31]: back to the data, you said the first thing you answered with was who owns your data? And I don't think most people have really thought about that. Who does own most people's data?

Chris Pearson [23:42]: Who does? Well, not themselves. We've we've offloaded to centralized. It's reflexive at this point how much we offload our data to centralized servers, resources, platforms, because of the social media contraction. I mean, they swallowed the internet. I don't think

Dr. John Oberg [23:57]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [23:57]: it's well understood how much of the internet they swallowed. It's like 85 plus percent probably. It's bad.

Dr. John Oberg [24:03]: So so tell me more about that. Like like when you say I don't own my data, like inside my company I own my data, even if it's like inside of Teams or Google Workspace or wherever it like I still own that data. You're talking about people's individual personal data on social media, is that what you're talking about?

Chris Pearson [24:19]: I think a lot of corporate data is not really owned in the sense that it like do you know where it is? Can you move it? Do you have like, you know, are you the final say in where that data is? I think a lot of that data's already been used to to, you know, feed these AIs. I think it's naive to suggest otherwise. and I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Like if I could choose, I'd probably choose to have my data seeding the AIs, most of it. But I still would like to kind of know. but I also think data is very fragmented. Companies really have, there's not like a single database for a company where just everything lives. I think we may actually work towards something like that in the next like five years. what is the best data design for a company? And how can we have services that specialize in dealing with certain types of data coming into our data warehouses and and doing stuff with it? That could be a big shift we see in the future as you know the calls for privacy and and data sovereignty heat up. If that happens, I don't know that there's much desire for that at large. I think people really just want their stuff to run. They kinda don't care how it works. But to your point, I don't think I don't think people have a good sense of where their data is or how in how many places it it exists for like for businesses, for example.

Randy Lorensen [25:35]: You were talking about all the different uses for AI. And I think there's a lot of people we did a whole episode last week on Doomerism versus Boomerism. You know, I think John and I are firmly in the camp of there's yes, it's gonna be destructive. I think you used the, you know, like clearing out the forest analogy earlier, but there's gonna be all this opportunity. And I think the most common question I'm getting from people now, I s I swear at least once a week somebody asks me, What do I tell my kids? What advice would you give kids? I mean you're you're in the middle of this. What how would you answer that? And it might be different if they're five versus twenty, but what would you tell this these generations that are coming up in this?

Chris Pearson [26:17]: my my P doom is zero. My P doom is zero. I'm 100%

Randy Lorensen [26:19]: Yeah. Tell me more.

Chris Pearson [26:21]: optimistic about this. I'm gonna give a couple anecdotes. But first of all, I tell my kids you the landscape before you is incredible. You have no excuse to do anything but other than what you absolutely care about. Like you should be so invested in everything you do, there's zero excuse to do anything you you don't want to do that's like s sapping your energy. So, first of all, definite, definitely seek alignment in those terms. Couple anecdotes that I love. We had a guy on our show last week. He does mobile diesel repair, but he's really just Legion. So it's mobile diesel repair. He's got a Phoenix market, and I think he's opening a Chicago market soon. So what he does is he there's, you know, all these semi-trucks will break down on the highway, and they're immediately certain, you know, these guys travel all over. So it's not like they got a network of repair guys all over the country. They need help where they break down. And so they'll be in Phoenix, broken down on the side of I-10, and he's calling out. And he's just trying to get bids or whatever. And so this guy's set up an AI business to respond quickly and to match up these breakdowns with independent mechanics. What is fascinating about his story is these mechanics were previously working at companies dealing with the corporate constraints and the corporate pricing constraints and timing and all that crap that they don't care about because these guys are like, you know, journeyman tool guys. And they're they're making like you know 35 to 65 an hour at the company, but under this paradigm with this guy's new business, they're making 125 plus an hour calling their shots, like this is how much I work for, and it all works out because they they need the repairs, they're not paying the corporate overhead, whatever. They go out, do jobs on site, finish up, they don't do any billing, they don't do any follow-up, they don't do anything. They just go out and do the job that they want to do, and it all works because the the AI company handles the rest. What I love about that is that I met these guys. I used to work with them in a factory in Tennessee. I know how they operate. They don't want to deal with any nonsense. They like doing their mechanic job. They have a lot of pride in that. They're good. And this paradigm enables them to only focus on what matters to them, not to deal with any of the corporate largesse, any other nonsense that took away. That's not what they want to do. And so I think that refining effect there of like, Getting people down to the essence of the roles that they actually want is incredibly positive. I don't I don't see how you could see that as anything but a positive. Another one today, rear taillight is out on our Tesla. We called a basic repair shop. The one, a bunch of them, the one that got back with us was like $1,100 for this freaking taillight repair. The rest of them didn't even get back to us. Tesla got back to us and says, Well, it'll be 500 bucks and we'll come out on site and do the job. The guy comes out in a model watch. He knocks on my door, says, just want to let you I'm here. I don't need anything from you. I'll lock the car when I'm done. He leaves. He's off property, job complete in under 10 minutes. He didn't, all he did was he did, you know, did the job, got back in his model Y, punched in some stuff saying that the job was complete and detailing like the part he used or whatever. And then the invoice automatically goes through, we get charged, the whole process is done. All he has to do is drive a model Y. Do the repair job that he probably likes to do. Cause again, it's like the mechanic scout style kind of thing. And it all works. And it was like magic. Like, I certainly want to do that.

Dr. John Oberg [29:46]: Well to be and to be fair, he didn't he didn't actually drive the model y, the model y drove him, just to be clear.

Chris Pearson [29:50]: Yeah, and the model I probably drove in. That's exactly right. I mean, I'm sorry, I d there's just not a negative here. I saved time. I didn't have to go to a place, to a shop, and sit there and wait, eat up my day. Like increasingly, these are things I have no capacity to do. I have no tolerance for I'm not gonna go to a tire shop and sit there for half the day. It's not happening. So my P doom is zero. I'm a big alignment guy anyway though. Like I I live that way. I realize that's kind of a a high bar for everybody else, but AI's pushing us that direction fast.

Dr. John Oberg [30:27]: Yeah, it's gonna change things, just like the internet did. You know, I think you know, I I was joking with my kids about the yellow pages and they didn't get it. They're like, Yell w y what? Yellow pages? It's like nothing. It was a book I

Chris Pearson [30:35]: Yeah, what is that? I don't think my kids know about a phone book. I don't think they know.

Dr. John Oberg [30:39]: it was like yeah, it was a book that I sat on to lift myself up when I was a kid to get higher at the table so I could actually reach the table. They're like, I don't get it, Dad. It's like forget it. Like it was just just forget it.

Chris Pearson [30:46]: Yeah. Forget it.

Randy Lorensen [30:48]: I I was I was gonna say it was what I used to put in the cabinet above the refrigerator that I couldn't reach, that I would put stuff in there and then I realized at one point I had ten years worth of of phone books up there. Yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [31:00]: Randy, do you want do you want to tell everyone what a phone book is real quick since a lot of our listeners won't even know what we're talking about?

Randy Lorensen [31:06]: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, it's amazing. It's a book that used to go out and in whatever city you lived in, it had everybody's name, phone number, and address printed on paper, believe it or not. They actually, you know, these things were hundreds of pages long if you lived in a in a big city and there was different ones for residential and different ones for businesses. Now you Google it. Back then you

Dr. John Oberg [31:28]: It it Yeah.

Randy Lorensen [31:29]: looked it up in the phone book, yes.

Dr. John Oberg [31:31]: And the white pages were for residential and the yellow pages were for businesses and businesses had they were all just a a series of s lines and then you could advertise and have advertise and people used to name their companies based on where they would show up in those advertising books. So like the reason you have like triple A Ardvark was because AAA came before three A's, came before two A's, and so Everybody wanted to like I remember having a conversation with a guy naming his company back in the eighties and we named it with, you know, two A names so that he got in the front of the listings of the yellow pages.

Chris Pearson [32:05]: Yep.

Randy Lorensen [32:06]: Is that la is that is that like Aeron? Okay.

Dr. John Oberg [32:09]: Yeah. Keenan

Chris Pearson [32:10]: Yep. Yep. My grandmother

Dr. John Oberg [32:12]: Peel. What a great toss out.

Chris Pearson [32:12]: renamed her pediatric practice to ABC Pediatrics back in like the eighties for that exact reason. Phone book placement.

Dr. John Oberg [32:19]: Yeah. Not to be outdone by triple triple A pediatrics, right? Like, you know.

Chris Pearson [32:22]: I know, yep. Where's the fourth side? I think the eight triple A Rdvark is amazing. That's five A's in a row. I don't know how you're gonna beat that.

Dr. John Oberg [32:28]: Yeah. Yeah. So that's I think that's that's the whole deal. Yeah.

Randy Lorensen [32:30]: Triple A hardware. I never heard that one. It did yeah, but it went from there to figuring out how to hack Google and how to hack, you know, their SEO and their search algorithms to the next one and the next one and the the eternal race.

Dr. John Oberg [32:42]: Well and that's the question that's the thing, like if if we're gonna be building all these local environments for ourselves, these individual things, like what chance do we as individuals, Chris, have at like some type of attack from a state actor who wants to get our banking information? Like, if I'm if I'm an individual who just wants to do this for my personal executive assistant or whatever, like, how do I even have a chance of protecting my b banking information?

Chris Pearson [33:07]: I think that's troublesome. I think we're gonna deal with some type of it's not quite cold storage. We could see stuff like that from these you know, the the security guys always have their say. There'll be some segment of the market that goes towards like extreme extreme protections. So you'll have a a

Dr. John Oberg [33:23]: Can you talk about talk about that? What's cold storage?

Chris Pearson [33:28]: All right, so so cold storage in this case would be like historically referring to crypto keys, you keep your crypto keys on a device that's never connected to the internet. Cold storage equals never connected to the internet. what I'm describing is like semi-cold where it'd only be connected. you would have to like initiate access. The A your AI would initiate access and it would say, Okay, granted, I'm only granting it to this, you know, this particular connection with this signature. And that's the only way certain information would ever able to be able to be accessed. presumably that's sort of gonna emerge as the private solution for these people who are you know concerned about such things. But you know, I I don't know. I think that's I think that's down the line. But it's sure, you know, we we've seen this before, and that's kind of the theme of the show here. I think we're gonna see all these things again, just sort of in a new way. But, you know, I think these, you know, we're we're always asking and answering the same questions, you know. Can we keep our stuff safe? Is there any privacy? You know, I I think to an extent I'm I'm sort of cynical about this. I think there really is no privacy. I think overly being overly concerned about that kind of stuff is crazy. Like i i if the government wants you or something, you're gonna lose.

Dr. John Oberg [34:35]: So should I should I be w so w I mean should I be thinking about having an air gapped computer and how would that even work and what is an air gapped computer and what are people even talking about?

Chris Pearson [34:44]: I would suggest that if you needed that, you would know. Like John McAfee knew what he needed.

Dr. John Oberg [34:49]: W what is w okay, what is that? Who's John McAfee? Like, give us the whole 'cause there's some listeners won't even know what we're talking about.

Chris Pearson [34:55]: All right, so so John McAfee is McAfee Virus Scan, if you remember the old Microsoft Windows days. And but he f was a bit of a rascal. All right. And so he got a contract with the government in the 90s and seeded it with McAfee Virus Scan. He got this contract, but he set up the whole computers for them. I guess somehow he got the deal where he got to not only put the virus scan software on the computers, but actually provide the hardware. And he loaded up the hardware with a little back door that enabled him to sort of spy on the government. And he learned a lot about what the government seeks on in terms of information. And he became very public about this after his guess after getting out of McAfee virus scan and very so being became very public and very kind of like he was like doing these exposes all the time, talking about like these egregious offenses governments will do j in the name of obtaining information. And this guy was on the run, not hard to see why, through Latin America, famously for many years. the story is the CIA tried to assassinate him many times, and one of the prostitutes they used to try and entrap him, one of the honeypots, fell in love with him and married him. And he remained in exile on the high

Dr. John Oberg [36:12]: I gotta read about this guy.

Chris Pearson [36:14]: seas. I mean, this sounds like a stupid pirate story, but it's all true.

Randy Lorensen [36:17]: Yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [36:17]: It sounds like a movie.

Chris Pearson [36:19]: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know where that movie is. That'd be a fascinating movie. I would certainly go watch. Anyway, this guy remained in exile on the high seas until he was allegedly assassinated in Spain just a few years back. So who knows what the real truth is there, but I don't even remember how

Dr. John Oberg [36:36]: We'll find out.

Chris Pearson [36:36]: we got on the John McAfee tangent.

Randy Lorensen [36:38]: guess I'm guessing the movie is in the same stage as the CIA assassinated whoever whoever wants to make it.

Chris Pearson [36:45]: Yeah, yeah, that movie's not coming out, I think. At

Randy Lorensen [36:47]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [36:48]: least not for a while. We need that like twenty year

Dr. John Oberg [36:48]: my gosh. Yeah.

Chris Pearson [36:50]: buffer of safety before we can do that.

Dr. John Oberg [36:53]: That's amazing. Well, i i you know, so w so where is it gonna go from here, Chris? So give us give us your outlook and it we know that you're, you know, obviously thinking it's gonna be a great boon for everybody and we're real excited about that. Give give us the outlook kind of short term, midterm, near term for you as we wrap things up today.

Chris Pearson [37:10]: So short term, short term, we'll say next two years. Next two years, we're gonna see a massive transformation. So I think about it in things like practical things that every human's gonna touch. One's gonna be like phone trees. We're used to calling businesses and getting the recorded message. You sit through the whole thing and do that. That's all gonna be answered by AI very soon. It's gonna be a huge relief because you're not gonna sit through any nonsense. You're not gonna sit through the same repeated messages. You're going to be able to have interactions tailored to you immediately. That's a game changer for me right there. Sell me that.

Randy Lorensen [37:42]: Hello. Hallelujah.

Chris Pearson [37:44]: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that that's like short-term impacts right there. The next phase is going to be like, I say that's like in the next three to five years, we're gonna see businesses being run by AI teams, achieving levels of efficiency and immediate response for customers. That again, it's it's sort of plays on the AI answering the phone, immediate responses, things tailored for you, much better experiences, much quicker experiences, experiences. Devoid of red tape and nonsense. think about like going to the DMV. It's nothing but red tape and nonsense. Anything like that is an anything like that in life, government or otherwise, is an immediate candidate for these AI takeovers. Like, you know, if you're even remotely connected to anything, you you go, you sense this when you're in these situations like this stinks. Like something about this is not right. AI is gonna be doing a total makeover on those things. I also think in that same three to five year timeline. We're going to have people running their entire existence from an AI connection through their phones. Just everything. So, like I give I gave this example a year ago on my show. I said, You're going to travel to New York City, you're going to tell your AI you'd like to go to MoMA. You want to go check out this other thing on the other part of town. you maybe want to go to the zoo, Central Park, you'd like to go to a nice restaurant. What's the best time to do all that? It's going to figure out your itinerary, it's going to book all your tickets. And it's gonna tell you where to go to show up and you're just gonna go follow the itinerary without having to plan

Dr. John Oberg [39:17]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [39:18]: nothing, just spontaneous action, you know, kind of like just like you would punch a navigation on your car, except it'll be navigating your entire day and your experience, and you just show up. And that's I mean that that right there totally changes the way you do everything. Cause like, you if if you're gonna take a big trip, we've all done the thing where you like go two weeks overseas or something, and the amount of planning is enormous. It almost you know, negates the the desire to go. Like, it's gonna lead a lot of work if I'm gonna do this. I don't know if I wanna do that. That's out the window. My kids will never

Dr. John Oberg [39:49]: Amazing.

Randy Lorensen [39:50]: What a what about

Chris Pearson [39:51]: think about that. They'll be like, everything's so easy.

Randy Lorensen [39:54]: Chris, what about your thoughts on microtransactions?

Chris Pearson [39:58]: I'm big on that, and I'm surprised we haven't seen that. So a year ago, when I first really started to understand how AI was probably going to unfold, I said one of the biggest effects it would have is clarifying microtransactions, but costs, clarifying costs both upstream and downstream. So a year ago, Cloudflare famously started this access protection where you could declare that your site was off limits to bots. And the larger initiative was that they didn't want the models kind of cannibalizing all the information on the internet. So they wanted to give the publishers some means of pushback to say, hey, well, you can't look at my data. And eventually, I think this is still gonna metastasize to the point where the models are gonna say, okay, we really want that data, we're gonna pay for it. And so they're gonna pay to access your data in one direction, and then you will pay to access data in the other direction. So it's a right now, it's all it's only been one directional. The the way everything has worked. And it's still one directional. We pay them. But they will be paying to access data and information. And so that will set up a two-way street that does not currently exist. When that happens, you can figure out the price of everything. This is not well understood, but it's absolutely the truth. If you know upstream and downstream price pricing, you can figure out the cost of everything. I can know the marginal cost of me going getting in my car and going to get a cup of coffee. You know, it's not the six dollars and thirty-one cents for the cappuccino, it's The the road, the tire wear, everything else that went into that, my time, I mean all of it gets baked into the pricing. so AI will clarify that and s with it, maybe that's the larger picture, John, for 10-year horizon. We will know the cost of everything, and that's gonna change everything. Because everything will be a microtransaction basis at that point. And you know, there's some fear I have about like the sense of nickel and diming when everything is is priced. But here's what I actually think will happen that I think is super fascinating. So Let's talk about golfers. Golfers go pay to play golf. you know, that there's the like the the meme that the wife hates it because the husband's going off and screwing off all day, not creating any value, just just cannibalizing value.

Dr. John Oberg [42:06]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [42:09]: When you have a pricing upstream and downstream situation, any data that gets created has value. If you go play a round of golf, you're generating a bunch of data. That data has value to golf apps, to The USGA handicap system. I mean, that data has a lot of value that people don't currently understand because we don't price it that way. So going and playing around a golf, something that would have been seen as leisure before, actually is creating value. So there is some amount of microtransaction you would be getting paid, probably not recouping the cost of greens fees, but that's not the point right now. But you would be getting paid a little bit to generate this data. So previous activities that were viewed as pure leisure are net now carry a value generating component. And again, that changes the calcul when you put it everywhere, that changes the calculus of everything. So very fascinating how job, what

Dr. John Oberg [43:01]: Yeah, that

Chris Pearson [43:02]: is a job now?

Dr. John Oberg [43:03]: it's gonna have so much to do with what that does to the transactional versus relational aspects of society and how we handle consumption, tax and so many more policy questions that'll roll out of that. It's very interesting. Well Chris, I gotta tell you, I'm I'm really excited about the future and this great equalizer that the internet a lot of the promises of the internet are now coming to fruition with some of these new developments. And I think we're gonna start to see and make new promises about the future too, which is great. So Randy, any parting shots?

Randy Lorensen [43:37]: No, I just love the optimism, the enthusiasm, the zero percent P doom. I'm I'm on board, so love it.

Dr. John Oberg [43:45]: Chris, thanks for coming in. Well I think we're gonna bring you back in a year or so. We're gonna see how some of these things have played out. We're gonna wanna hear all about the success of PageMotor. If people wanna find you, how do they get involved with your community?

Chris Pearson [43:56]: right now you can go to page motor.com or you can just email me directly with questions. I'm happy to take those as well. CP at page motor.com. we the page motor.com website is three months old from last update. We'll be updating that again this week because we have a new product offering coming out where you can just buy a website, kind of the way I described earlier in the show. It'll be 49 bucks a month for the initial people. We'll probably raise the cost later, but the first hundred or so, whatever. we're gonna do 49 bucks a month, but you get everything. All your subscriptions, all the stuff you would have previously paid for, hosting, email service, e-commerce plugins, things like that that would otherwise carry a separate cost, all baked into the cake. You do nothing, you just show up, you connect your AI, you win. Super easy. so page motor.com for that. I do want to make one more point though, about you said

Dr. John Oberg [44:43]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [44:45]: you just made it. It was about it was about how you the internet

Dr. John Oberg [44:48]: Transactional versus relational or the consumer?

Chris Pearson [44:52]: being the equalizer. So the internet was, I think, the equalizer in the early 2000s. There was a big equalizing effect, a flattening effect from we'll say 2003 to 2010. that's I cut my teeth during that era. I was very, you know, my optimism again was high. And then I watched that sort of unravel with social media. We've actually seen this before, and history is repeating itself, aga of course. And it's interesting. I think the issue that when the internet is democratizing. Or when technology is democratizing is when there's a lot of constraints. When there's no constraints, there's consolidation and centralization, the little guys lose. When there are constraints, the little guys win. It's very fascinating, but I think there's a compelling case to be made. This happened with like the early game consoles, like Nintendo. There was tons of hardware constraints. And so you had to have massive innovation to try and squeeze the most out of that. So you have like the best minds working overtime to create magic, and everybody wins. But when you don't have constraints, people don't have to work as hard. You don't have to do magical things with what you have. You can have slop. And slop, you know, it's in sloth and laziness, that kind of feeds downstream. That's kind of how the consumers behave as well. But when you have magic, the consumers kind of seek magic. It's very interesting how that works downstream. AI is the first.

Dr. John Oberg [46:20]: Yeah.

Chris Pearson [46:20]: Force that we've had for constraints in 20 years. Hardware has gone out of control and allowed all this largesse to be created. AI says, wait a minute, if I'm gonna work the best, I need very specific data, very specific format, very tight organization to do the best job possible. To do a repetitive job that's reliable, it has to be like this. That is a deep technological constraint that affects everything. And I think, like I said, my hypothesis is that when we have constraints. We have democratization and we're in an era of super tight constraints where everything has to be rewritten. So that's my that's the root of my P optimism. that right there.

Dr. John Oberg [47:03]: Man, we get I think that was the guess we should have started and come back for another episode just on that. That's great stuff.

Chris Pearson [47:10]: All right. Well there it is.

Randy Lorensen [47:10]: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. It's greatly appreciated. Very much enjoyed this. Yeah.

Chris Pearson [47:13]: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun. I love doing shows. Love talking about AI. This is the best time. The best time.

Randy Lorensen [47:20]: All right, listeners,

Dr. John Oberg [47:21]: I work.

Randy Lorensen [47:22]: while while you're listening to Anthony talk about AG one during the break, download, subscribe, tell your friends all the good stuff. You know what to do. You're still here. You like us, love us, help help help the algorithm.

Abundance Briefing (YouTube auto-captions, unedited; times match the published video)

[46:25] AI doom versus boomerism and is it going to kill us all? Well, a couple days after we recorded that episode, all the big tech companies along with China and everybody else, they met at the White House and it was the leaders of Open AI and Claude and Google and Facebook um Nvidia and uh SpaceX etc. and they all got together to talk about how to monitor AI and what was happening. There's been a lot of talk about having government regulation and I think UI and Anthony all thought that was a terrible idea. Well, they have found that they're going to self-monitor instead of being a government uh they're creating it's voluntary. There's going to be internal controls um independent external auditor to verify uh internal overnight over oversight teams a board level committee. on the other hand, no enforcement mechanism, no penalties, no deadlines, and companies choose their own auditors. So, it's kind of an open door. Uh what are your thoughts on this? Is this the right approach, the wrong approach?

[47:34] — My guess is that for some people, this sounds really scary to not have that type of governmental regulation. And this has been the way that technologies have been regulated for centuries. Like when I was doing my masters in technology diffusion, we tal in in my I had a a not only a tech diffusion uh underpinning but also policy and planning. On the policy and planning side, we learned that it was very normal for industries to try to regulate themselves first and that government came along later to do it. So government regulating after the industry has tried to regulate itself, some cases successfully, some cases less successfully, has been the way of things for at least hundreds of years and maybe longer. And so I guess for me I'm glad to see that they're taking some of those steps. My hope is that that uh that enforcement is, you know, enforced by the peers more and more and more and then when the government does get involved, it gets involved in a way that's helpful as it is in many places. Um I I'm not as concerned about it as I was two weeks ago. — Yeah, I think the fact that they're talking about it is a good first step and the fact that they seem very aware.

[48:42] Uh, you know, I'm suspicious of Daario at anthropic and trying to get government capture and other stuff, but I also think he actually has his heart in the right place in a lot of ways and that he really is trying he he's trying to win this race and not have it kill everybody. And I think Elon Musk is definitely on that. I I I think all these people. Um I would say the part that I read about I was very impressed with Nvidia and my god two weeks in a row I'm going to give Mark Zuckerberg his flowers. I'm not a fan but maybe I'm becoming one. I think Zuckerberg and Jensen at Nvidia were really the guys leading the way in a lot of ways. And I think I I think it's a really good first step. And I will say that it's really important that we don't have government slowing this down. This is a really big fight. I heard somebody give the analogy the other day that slowing down AI, data centers, energy would be the same thing if we weren't if we stopped building tanks in the middle of World War II and has the same impact on our our national security, maybe a greater one. And I thought that was a a pretty smart and wise statement. So, uh I think it's a good first step.

[49:53] — It's reasonable to think that China has the most to gain by slowing us down on the geopolitical side. And I'm not a gosh I know very little about kind of you know uh all the geopolitics and that's not my area at all but it just seems like that they'd be the biggest winners in in that type of slowdown. So yeah I'm glad that we're doing it. I I want to keep watching and I think that the discussions need to progress as quickly as AI is progressing. And interesting along these notes though that there was a I can't remember it was a CFO or a sea level executive of big companies. One of the things that's going to mitigate some of this uh speed at AI is the speed with which the commercial markets can adopt all the technology and a lot of people feel like they have what they need for now and they can't keep up with the frontier models and I think again that's also traditionally the way the technology develops. So I'm I'm I'm interested to keep watching. I'm still I'm still pretty bullish on the whole thing. — Yeah. I mean, we this could be a whole topic onto its own, but I don't think they honestly can regulate it because the truth is if they really do start cracking down, it's like you said, it's going to get developed in China or someplace else, but there's other countries where they will welcome these people with open arms. And also, it's much harder to human. you can just go to a human's house with a gun and throw them in a cage, but it's pretty hard to do with an AI that's in cyerspace and can be duplicated and put all over. So, I do think it's going to be a little bit harder. But, uh, our next topic along this just real quick, I know we this is we you expect technology it gets better and cheaper over time. Well, that's happening with AI at unbelievable rate.

[51:31] AI costs are dropping 47% a quarter. 13 times cheaper per year, way way faster than Moore's law or even what's happening with solar. Um to give you one benchmark, the same benchmark in December of 24, so less than 2 years ago, what would have cost $4,560 to run on a model could be run in August for 30,200 times cheaper in under two years. So, uh, just I don't know that we need to dig into this one, but it's getting better, smarter, faster. Anything you want to add to that one? — I I thought our AI pulled out an interesting stat. That's like a $50,000 car 18 months ago now costing $69 today just from like a how that works. And so, I think it's cool. It's cool to watch things getting better. And we still have to make it useful, but it's cool that things are happening better, cheaper, faster. So, — I just I just want that to happen with a car. Heck, I would I'd be happy if that happened with a ribeye. So, there we go. All right. Uh, we've talked about the X-P prize before, something Peter Diamandis started and they give I mean the the concept is they give away these awards for people solving humanity's biggest problems. So, there have been five of them that recently were in the news. First one, John, is for wildfires after all the they they started this actually before the wildfires in California, but they awarded here just last week $11 million. Um it went to a Anderl Palmer Lucky and it was for detection and suppression of wildfires.

[53:07] Uh now the grand prize of 3.5 million went unclaimed. And was the winner. They got 2.2 million. But the basic challenge was that in 10 minutes you could find a a wildfire and put it out and I forget what the acreage is but over a large area. The second one was a future vision XP prize 3.5 million that they also awarded last week and the challenge was to create a 3minute optimistic sci-fi trailer. They got over 2500 entries worldwide. Um, and The Gifted is an is a movie that was three minutes entirely made by a AI. They get 2.5 million to produce a full feature length. I watched the three-minute one. It's very good. Um, quickly the build with Gemini X-P prize. They got 26,000 people entered across five countries. And the challenge was to build a real revenue generating AI business in 90 days from scratch. Um, the winner is 500K for an AI native 3D asset anyone can resize, recolor may not important, but the fact that they got 2500 or 26,000 people, sorry, to build is cool. We've talked about before the carbon removal X-P prize, $100 million was awarded recently and is still going though. and the X-P prize for health span. And the challenge of that one was to restore muscle, cognition, immune function by 10 to 20 years in adults that are 50 to 80 years old. And they need to achieve those results in a year or less. There's 10 teams now at critical trials for a grand prize of 81 million that'll be awarded in 2030. So John, which of those is there one of those that you're like, "Wow, that's cool." Or that excites you the most? I mean, so clearly the the Healthspan one is the place where I spend most of my time in healthcare. So that's the obvious answer for me. The thing I'm really excited about was this Gemini one because it was really breaking down barriers for small business people. And my hope is that puts kind of more people across the world on on a kind of even playing field eating footing. So I would say if I had to choose two, those two, if I had to choose one, you know, the healthcare ones I'm paying the most close attention to. But I really love the idea of the democratization of business opportunity.

[55:25] — Yeah, I do too. I think that's amazing and what it opens up people with a smartphone. Somebody in a third world country with a smartphone all of a sudden has access to things for again we last topic we're getting to cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time uh access. So that's pretty cool. What I haven't seen yet which I think do you remember those those whole drives where they would take used glasses and they'd repurpose those glasses off into places that were underprivileged and in poverty sometimes overseas. And so I think about all of the recycling of smartphones and chips and the things we can do uh when when someone turns in their phone like and with with the less and less technology utilized to process information that democratization I think is really really cool. Yeah, we're opening up entrepreneurship around the world and there's lots of people and the fact is somebody that's in the middle of a third world country, they have problems that entrepreneurs in America don't think about and there's opportunities all around them, probably more than we have there and it makes it more accessible and solving those problems. So, I I was undecided between that one and the one I was actually leaning toward I think more is the future vision one. And the reason I think this one's so important is when you talk about all of this technology, whether it's AI or robotics and all the self-driving cars, we're not scared, but most people around us are scared. And I think one of the biggest reasons for that is Hollywood.

[56:53] And I think that it's really limiting people and scaring them. And they've been watching whether it's Terminator or just pick the sci-fi movie. Almost none of them have an optimistic vision of the future. They're almost all dystopian. And I don't know that we can track how much impact that has on our psyche and our view of it, but I think it's significant. I think it's very significant the way that burrows into people's belief systems and what they think about this. So creating positive stories about it is really battling that and I think is a really it wouldn't have been my first choice out of instinct, but when I really think about the one that has the impact, maybe that one has the greatest impact of all long term. It's reverse propaganda or propaganda for what we believe. So maybe we don't we don't want to call it propaganda, but that's [laughter] what it is. — Yeah, that's great. I love it. — All right. Any LA any parting words, other thoughts? — I think if you're not following the X-P prize, go follow the X-P prize and see if there's ways you can get involved with the X-P prize. It's uh some pretty cool stuff.

[58:00] — Yeah, I love it. And they're constantly doing new things. Uh hey listeners, thank you for spending time with us again this week. Uh by the way, our audience is growing. Uh if Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they're all really doing great. So thank you so much. That's for for your guys' efforts and telling people about it. So please continue to do so. And until next week, go out and spread a little abundance in the world. And — and Manny, one more thing. Let's just ask people like if you want if you want to hear about a topic, let us know. If you think there's a guest who should have the show, let us know. Like get engaged. We want to hear from you. — Love it. Love it. And and they can do that. You can follow us. Search for tales of abundance on on pretty much any social media. Uh or you can email us at Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Randy. All right.