Tales of Abundance

“Mortgage” Means Death Pledge?! Hidden History of Everyday Words – Ep 97

Episode 97 · October 28, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

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The Hidden History of Everyday Words & Idioms: From “Steal My Thunder” to Why “Inflation” Was Redefined

Where do everyday phrases and idioms actually come from? In Episode 97 of Tales of Abundance, Randy Lorensen and Anthony Marino uncover the hilarious, bizarre, and quietly revealing origins inside the words we speak ten times a day without having a “clue” (which literally meant a ball of yarn used to escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth).

In 1709, London playwright John Dennis invented a wooden trough filled with cannonballs to create realistic stage thunder at the Drury Lane Theatre. His play flopped in days — and a week later, sitting in the audience for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he heard his own cannonball thunder roaring from the rafters and screamed: “They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”

Walking through the Four Fs — Finance, Fitness & Health, Faith/Family/Leadership, and Fun History — Randy and Anthony trace how “inflation” meant expanding the money and credit supply for thousands of years before mid-20th-century economics redefined it as rising consumer prices; how “dollar” came from a 1519 privately minted Bohemian silver coin (Joachimsthaler); why “bankrupt” means a smashed Italian money-changer’s bench (banca rotta) and “mortgage” is literally a 14th-century French “death pledge” (mort gage); and what Viking King Harald Bluetooth, Texas rancher Samuel Maverick’s unbranded cattle, 1700s Thames tobacco resuscitation kits (“blowing smoke”), Monty Python’s 1970 Viking sketch (“spam”), and 27-foot WWII .50-caliber ammunition belts (“the whole nine yards”) left inside modern English.

Then, in the Abundance Briefing, Randy and Anthony break down seven major stories shaping technology, energy, and biotech right now: the New York Times investigation comparing the AI data-center private-credit boom to 2008 alongside SpaceX’s $40B GPU financing and Elon Musk’s warning that 200+ “neoclouds” face a debt wipeout; Chinese scientists doubling sweet potato yields (+109.5%) using solar-activated mineral water; the first in-vivo CRISPR prime editing therapy rewriting DNA directly inside a living human liver; SpaceX swinging from a $1.1B loss to a $4.4B Q3 profit on the path to the first $100 trillion company; blind patients recovering partial vision with an algae protein and custom light-pulse goggles; Tesla starting production-line Optimus robots in Fremont; and Peter Diamandis’s bet on the age of programmable biology.

Origins of Common Sayings, Money History & the Abundance Briefing

What you’ll discover:

  • How money words reveal monetary history: Why “inflation” originally meant inflating the money supply, “fee” and “capital” counted wealth by heads of cattle, a “talent” weighed 60–75 pounds of pure silver or gold, and “pay through the nose” began as a brutal 9th-century Viking poll tax in Ireland
  • Medical & leadership idioms with wild backstories: Battlefield lead musket balls (“bite the bullet”), 1700s London river-rescue bellows (“blowing smoke”), Pliny the Elder’s 1st-century rabies cure (“hair of the dog”), Latin passio (“passion” as what you are willing to suffer for), and Julius Caesar’s 49 BC point of no return (“crossing the Rubicon”)
  • Everyday phrases & misquoted proverbs debunked: How “bully” flipped from “sweetheart” to villain, how Monty Python turned canned spiced ham into internet “spam,” why 1 Timothy 6:10 actually says “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,” and why Jonestown used grape Flavor Aid rather than Kool-Aid
  • Why AI is inevitable — even if 200+ “neoclouds” get wiped out: Off-balance-sheet GPU debt, Jevons paradox, grid power bottlenecks, and why AI looks more like the 1999 dot-com buildout than a passing fad
  • Breakthroughs in food, gene editing, space & robotics: +109.5% sweet potato crop yields from sunlight and mineral water, Prime Medicine’s in-vivo CRISPR liver trial for Wilson’s disease, SpaceX’s $4.4B quarterly profit, optogenetic vision restoration, and Tesla’s Fremont Optimus production line

Timestamps

  • [00:00] Cold Open — "Steal My Thunder" (1709), Bluetooth, Freelance, Muscle, Human Computers & Clue
  • [01:51] Finance & Money: Why "Inflation" Originally Meant Inflating the Money Supply (Not Rising Prices)
  • [02:43] Where "Dollar" Came From: The 1519 Bohemian Silver Joachimsthaler
  • [03:22] "Bankrupt" (Banca Rotta — Broken Bench) & [03:47] "Mortgage" (Mort Gage — Death Pledge)
  • [04:39] "Fee," "Capital" (Heads of Cattle) & [05:10] "Talent" (60–75 Pounds of Pure Silver or Gold)
  • [06:02] "Pay Through the Nose": 9th-Century Viking Poll Tax in Ireland & Tax Incentives
  • [07:49] "Pin Money" (1540s Luxury Dress Pins) & [09:11] "Blue Chip" ($25 Saloon Poker Chips)
  • [09:57] "Maverick": Texas Rancher Samuel Maverick & His Unbranded Cattle
  • [10:55] Health & Medicine: "Bite the Bullet" in Battlefield Surgery Before Anesthesia
  • [12:23] "Blowing Smoke" (1700s Thames Resuscitation Kits) & Why Medical Orthodoxy Keeps Evolving
  • [14:38] "Hair of the Dog": Pliny the Elder's 1st-Century Rabies Prescription
  • [15:42] Faith, Family & Leadership: "Passion" (Latin Passio — What You Are Willing to Suffer For)
  • [18:38] "Honeymoon" (30 Days of Honey Wine) & [19:26] "Crossing the Rubicon" (Julius Caesar, 49 BC)
  • [21:18] Everyday Idioms: How "Bully" Went From "Sweetheart" to Villain ("Bully for You")
  • [22:29] How a 1970 Monty Python Viking Sketch Gave Us the Word "Spam"
  • [24:05] "Butter Someone Up": Throwing Balls of Clarified Butter at Ancient Temple Statues
  • [25:56] "I Could Care Less" & Why Words and Translation Matter in Business (Anthony's Toyota Story)
  • [28:22] "Cat Got Your Tongue?", [28:57] "Let the Cat Out of the Bag" & [29:35] "Dead Ringer" (Horse-Racing Fraud)
  • [31:00] "Deadline" (1864 Andersonville Prison Rail) & [31:41] "Turn a Blind Eye" (Admiral Horatio Nelson)
  • [32:23] Misquoted Proverbs: "The Love of Money Is the Root of All Evil" & [33:33] "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
  • [34:45] "Break a Leg" (Theater Side Curtains) & [35:30] "Drink the Kool-Aid" (Jonestown's Flavor Aid, 1978)
  • [36:44] "Close, But No Cigar" (Carnival Games) & [37:22] "The Whole Nine Yards" (WWII 27-Foot Ammo Belts)
  • [39:47] Break — Sponsor: micro1 (talesofabundance.com/micro1)
  • [41:41] / [41:42] Abundance Briefing: Is the AI Boom Like 2008? Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, SpaceX's $40B GPU Deal & Musk's 200+ "Neocloud" Warning
  • [45:36] Why AI Isn't Going Away: Jevons Paradox, Power Shortages, Dot-Com Lessons & Who Holds the Bag
  • [50:56] Chinese Scientists Double Sweet Potato Yields (+109.5%) With Sunlight and Mineral Water
  • [53:19] CRISPR Breakthrough: In-Vivo Prime Editing Rewrites DNA Directly Inside a Living Human Liver
  • [54:42] SpaceX Turns a $1.1B Loss Into a $4.4B Q3 Profit — and the Path to a $100 Trillion Company
  • [57:11] Blind Patients Recover Partial Vision With an Algae Protein and Light-Pulse Goggles
  • [58:17] Tesla Starts Production-Line Optimus Robots in Fremont — Industrial Rescue vs. $200/Mo Home Bots
  • [1:02:28] The Age of Programmable Biology: Colossal Biosciences, Peter Diamandis & DNA as Software
  • [1:03:26] Wrap-Up & [1:03:42] Outro & AG1
  • [1:03:52] Sponsor: AG1 (shop.drinkag1.com/tales — through 1:04:48)

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About the hosts

This is a hosts-only episode with no guest. Randy Lorensen is an entrepreneur whose work runs from direct sales to bringing AI into traditional industries, including Premium Cabinets. Anthony Marino spent 30+ years as a C-suite operations executive and grew a Pella distributorship from under $1M to $30M in sales. Dr. John Oberg, a healthcare entrepreneur behind ventures such as Sedera and Precina Health, co-hosts the show and sits this one out.

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

Disclaimer: This episode is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or medical advice. Discussions of inflation, monetary history, private credit, AI infrastructure debt, SpaceX, Tesla, clinical trials, CRISPR gene editing, optogenetics, and biotechnology reflect the hosts’ personal opinions and publicly reported research. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial or healthcare professional before making financial or medical decisions.

Transcript

A full transcript is below. It comes from the final edited episode recording (runtime 1:04:48) and includes speaker labels and verified timestamps.

Randy Lorensen (00:00) Drury Lane Theatre, London, England, 1709. A playwright named John Dennis invents a brand new contraption. A giant wooden trough filled with cannonballs. When you tip it backstage, the whole theater shakes with realistic thunder. His play flops anyway and closes in days. A week later, he sits in the audience for Shakespeare's Macbeth. Suddenly the sky darkens on stage, and he hears his cannonball thunder roaring from the rafters.

Randy Lorensen (00:29) Dennis leaps out of his seat and screams at the stage. They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder. Fast forward to the words in your pocket right now. Your phone connects with Bluetooth, named after a 10th-century Viking king with a dead Bluetooth. Your freelance designer is named after a medieval mercenary knight with a literal steel lance for hire. And every time you flex a muscle,

Randy Lorensen (00:55) You are speaking the Roman word for a little mouse running under your skin. Now look at the two words we talk about all the time on this show.

Randy Lorensen (01:06) For hundreds of years, a computer wasn't a machine, it was a human job title. And for generations, inflation didn't mean rising prices, it meant inflating the money supply. Even Curiosity Killed the Cat was originally care killed the cat, meaning worry, not curiosity, is what kills you. We use these words ten times a day without having a clue, which literally meant a ball of yarn to escape the Minotaur's maze. So here's the question, Anthony.

Randy Lorensen (01:36) When when you uncover the funny, bizarre and hidden stories inside the words we speak every day, which ones are pure fun? Which ones have been doing some thinking for us quietly? And which ones are just interesting? So, you know, it mentioned inflation, that's a big one for me. You know, the government recreated this in the mid-20th century with Keynesian economics, but for all of human history, thousands of years, it literally meant.

Randy Lorensen (02:04) expanding the money and the credit, right? and they didn't blame grocery stores and wages. let's stay we're in money finance one the first of the Fs, right? you wanna tell people where the dollar came from?

Anthony (02:16) it's interesting. the English language is much more difficult today than it probably was a hundred and fifty years ago because we've bastardized so many of our phrases and things have a have an evolution. every word and every phrase started out once and then somehow the community

Anthony (02:39) embraces it, uses it, and then it morphs into whatever it morphs into. you bring up the dollar. It came from a Dutch some I can't even pronounce his name, Jochen Meister, a Dutch guy. It's a silver coin minted in 1519 in the Saint Joachim Valley of Bohemia. It was meant as privately mined, high pure silver coin, trusted across Europe.

Anthony (03:05) for a verifiable weight rather than a government decree. So we think of the dollar as a piece of paper today was actually a specific weight of silver.

Randy Lorensen (03:15) Yeah, back when our first one, inflation, meant inflating the money supply, right? So, yeah. Well, sticky

Anthony (03:19) Exactly. Before they could do that. Yeah.

Randy Lorensen (03:22) sticking with the finance bankrupt. I thought this one was interesting. It came in the 16th cent century, the Renaissance in Italy, where money changers worked at wooden benches in the public square, and magistrates would come and smash the bench of any banker who ran out of funds. So it literally meant a broken bench.

Randy Lorensen (03:43) Visual proof to the whole square that the banker was insulvent.

Anthony (03:47) Well my favorite on this list is mortgage. everyone's talking about they can't get a mortgage now. Well, maybe if you read this, you'd probably decide that's probably a good idea because what it originally meant came in the 14th century from old French legal contracts combining mort, M-O-R-T, which means death, engage, which meant pledge. So you were literally getting a mortgage.

Anthony (04:13) for a death pledge. And I guess some of us would think that because many of us are gonna die before we pay off our mortgage, so in in some sense it really hasn't changed. just thought that was really interesting.

Randy Lorensen (04:24) Yeah, that that is interesting, right? and these days people get a 30 year mortgage, most places in the world don't have 30 year mortgages. And then people refinance, they get 10 years in and they need some money and they refinance. so yeah, very interesting. the next two go together, fee and capital. you know, fee came from an old English word and it literally meant livestock or cattle.

Randy Lorensen (04:48) So again, real things, right? Not a piece of paper. We talked about gold, silver, but it was talking about cattle. Well, capital, same thing. It's a Latin word. And it meant counting a family's wealth literally by heads of cattle and you know, long before we had paper or stock certificates. So fee and capital both talking about livestock.

Anthony (05:10) the one of the ones on the list is talent, which originally was a metric of how much money you possessed, basically how much wealth you had. And we've morphed it into can you shoot a jump shot? Can you throw a football down the field? Can you dance and so forth? So somehow over the hundreds of years, from ancient Greece to now, it's gone from sixty to seventy-five pounds of pure silver or gold to

Anthony (05:40) hitting the guy over the middle on a crossing pattern. It's just I I don't know what the two things have to do with each other, but that's that's where we've come. So it it makes me laugh when we think about it.

Randy Lorensen (05:51) Well, if you had if you had that much silver and you can hit some guy on a crossing pattern, you get a lot of silver, you that's worth a lot of silver, Anthony. All

Anthony (05:57) Y I I guess it is. That's for sure.

Randy Lorensen (06:02) right. My my Viking heritage, I had to include this one, pay through the nose, came from the ninth century Danish Viking conquest of Ireland, where Viking rulers collected a punitive poll tax counted by census takers by the nose.

Randy Lorensen (06:16) meant a literal punishment if the household failed to pay the Viking tax collector, they slit the debtor's nose from tip to eyebrow. So that's kinda makes yeah, I don't wanna pay through the nose.

Anthony (06:30) Yeah, and I it's I metaphorically I think on April fifteenth every year we all feel the same way, right? That the government is really making us pay through the nose and we stop and it's great to pay taxes because you made some money, but on the other hand, the feeling I think most of us have is that we're paying taxes and we're really not getting our our money's worth. And so it's a it's a pretty painful process.

Randy Lorensen (06:54) Yeah. that remind back

Randy Lorensen (06:56) early, young when my business days, I had this accountant. His name was Terry and he was fantastic. And he two years in a row I hadn't had any taxes or I had almost nothing. I was self employed. And the next year I got a pretty decent tax bill. And I was complaining to him when he sent it to me. And he goes, Listen, he goes, You don't understand this is a good thing. If you don't have to pay a lot in taxes, you didn't make enough money.

Randy Lorensen (07:24) Now, I'm not so thrilled with how they spend the taxes. I would rather not they go around the world bombing people and killing people and letting politicians steal it and everything else. But i that always stuck with me, if you don't have to pay a lot in taxes, you didn't make enough money.

Anthony (07:39) It doesn't mean you shouldn't do things to legal things to minimize your tax bill, but nonetheless, it's something something you should be doing. a funny one in it just brought back memories of my childhood, something called pin money, which came in the 1540s in England when handmade brass dress pins were a scarce luxury item.

Anthony (08:03) And a 14th century law only let pinmakers sell them in open shops on January 1st and 2nd. It was meant as an annual New Year's cash allowance. A husband can give his wife specifically to buy dress pins for the year. The reason this brings back memories is not because we had dress pins, but my father used to use the term when we would do some odd jobs around the house.

Anthony (08:33) Or he was being derisive about how some how much money someone was making. He said, that's just pin money. It it doesn't it doesn't add up to a lot. It's just pin money. And I don't know how he got to that, but it reminds me of, when we'd cut the lawn or we'd paint the fence, you know, he'd pay us an allowance and he'd call, here's some pin money for you. So wasn't very much

Randy Lorensen (08:56) Huh. I I've never

Randy Lorensen (08:57) heard that term, pin money. So it's interesting you I I was like, I wondered why you like that one. I was like, but I I've never heard that. Well, well, as so often life does.

Anthony (09:05) It brings back good and bad memories. So

Randy Lorensen (09:11) blue chip. This one goes back to my gambling background. it was coined at the Dow Jones in 1923 by repr by a reporter, Oliver Gingold, after watching high stakes.

Randy Lorensen (09:23) saloon poker tables where white chips were a dollar, red chips were five, and dark blue chips were twenty-five dollars. So it meant the highest denomination poker chip that they played with long before it meant a premier reliable stock. So the fact that I don't know, you gotta think they're calling it poker chips and gambling is probably more close to home than than people want to admit is is my takeaway from that one.

Anthony (09:50) One one more in finance before we jump to the next category. I didn't at first it didn't strike me as anything interesting. I read a little more into it and the term maverick, we think of a maverick today as someone who, you know, kind of is out on their own and does their things their own way or the very in a very, very different way that doesn't fit the norm.

Anthony (10:10) And in fact, it does come from Samuel Maverick, who lived 1803 to 1870. He's a Texas lawyer and rancher who at one time received 400 cattle to settle the debt, but he refused to brand his calves with a hot iron. So it was meant that any unbranded free roaming calf on the Texas range before it came to mean an independent thinker who refuses to allow the herd.

Anthony (10:40) Follow the herd, excuse me. Just thought that was interesting, that it actually came from a guy who operated differently and now it's it's there's a direct link back to the origin of it. One of the few words

Randy Lorensen (10:52) Interesting.

Anthony (10:53) that we'll be talking about.

Randy Lorensen (10:55) So this next one we are moving into health and wellness. I don't know how how much this is in health and wellness here, but the bite the bullet. And this is actually one of the few on here that I would have known, but it came from the eighteenth and nineteenth century battlefield surgery before anesthesia, when field surgeons handed wounded soldiers a soft lead musket ball during amputations.

Randy Lorensen (11:23) Meant literally biting down on soft lead so the soldier wouldn't bite through his tongue or shatter his teeth during surgery. my God. I am so glad we live in twenty twenty six in this world of abundance where A, I don't have to really probably worry about getting shot in the leg with a musket ball and having them cut off my leg and being a peg leg for the rest of my leg. Can you imagine just somebody sawing off your l like, how much better is life now? That you don't A don't have to worry about this, and then B, their solution is they give you a musket ball to bite down on.

Randy Lorensen (11:51) So you don't break your teeth. Which seems like exactly what would cause you to break your teeth, but nonetheless.

Anthony (11:58) Well, we all bite the bullet and in everyday life, lots of words we don't use when we're feeling it. And so biting the bullet, I've clenched my teeth many, many time in conversation with people.

Anthony (12:12) At other times I wish I had bitten the bullet and not said some of the things that I've said. That's probably happened more than biting the bullet. So this one hits home. Then the next one, blowing smoke. This is a little a little rowdy in that this came in the late 1700s in London where the human Royal Humane Society

Anthony (12:35) actually hung wooden rectal bellows kits along the river Thames so rescuers could blow tobacco smoke into drowning victims. Now I'm not exactly sure how so many people ended up in the Thames drowning, or who thought that the literal medical recitation procedure based on the 18th century belief that warm nicotine vapors

Anthony (13:04) would restart a stopped heart. So so to your point, we've come a long way with the medical profession. I just I'm trying to

Randy Lorensen (13:13) Yeah.

Anthony (13:13) picture this this thing. A, how'd they get in the teams to drown? B, who conjured this up that let's blow smoke to keep them alive. And today what we call you know blowing smoke is more

Anthony (13:28) You're you're bullshitting me. Don't blow smoke up in my you you know what. And it's just a it's just a strange evolution from where it started.

Randy Lorensen (13:38) Well, these are, this is my argument all the time. Everybody acts like science has been solved and we know everything, right? if you go back here to the seventeen hundreds, scientists, doctors literally thought that blowing smoke into a drowning person's lungs was a way to save them. And, you know, well long after that we were bloodletting and all of these things, almost everything in science has been proven wrong. And I just always think about, boy, what do we just assume is right today?

Randy Lorensen (14:07) That in five years, ten years, we're just gonna know we're gonna look back and go, that was batshit crazy, right? And we can't believe you did that. And I, I the one I always lean on is cancer. I think putting poison in somebody's body to kill the cancer, literally poisoning them. I know it's what we know how to do now and it's working and we're getting better and better at it, but I just think in at some point we're gonna find better ways and we're gonna go, God, that was so barbaric, right? So

Randy Lorensen (14:35) Whether it's blowing smoke in their lungs or cutting off their leg or whatever. But all right, hair of the dog. So, Anthony, you've had a hangover too. Probably heard the hair of a dog. And that's what it became in 1546, is when that that became popular. But it was originally recorded by Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. And it meant a literal rabies treatment. If a rabbit dog if a rabbit dog bit you, doctors instructed you.

Randy Lorensen (15:03) To pluck actual hair from the same dog and pack it in the wound. Like cures like. Again, we've come a long way medically.

Anthony (15:14) Yeah, I have had a a hangover or two and have you employed the technique of imbibing on the a similar beverage the next day. I can't say that it works. So

Randy Lorensen (15:27) Yeah.

Anthony (15:28) all you young ones out there, the way to approach a hangover is to not get one in the first place. That would be my advice and counsel to anybody.

Anthony (15:36) But that's probably not gonna be well received or followed, so that's the way it goes.

Randy Lorensen (15:42) All right, let's move to faith, family, and leadership. Moving on from fitness.

Randy Lorensen (15:48) Third F.

Anthony (15:50) Yeah, passion is one of the words that jumped out at me. It actually came from the 12th century Christian Latin Pasillo from Patty, to suffer or endure the same route as a hospital patient. For 500 years, it actually meant physical suffering and what you were willing to endure for originally Christ's suffering on the cross, not a fun hobby. And it's become

Anthony (16:19) I guess it's adjacent when you think about it. when you someone has passion for something, they are willing to endure pain. they're willing to be in it for the long haul and and keep at it. And frankly, in some cases, be derided for it. You know, if you have a passion for a particular

Anthony (16:40) sport or a particular business interest. Many times, A in in sports of course, your your the other fandom is gonna be aggressive against you, but also in in business, you know, seeing somebody have have intense passion for a business that you that that you think

Anthony (16:59) Isn't gonna work out. And there are so many examples of this. And you go back to Edwin Land, who invented the instant camera. People thought he was, you know, completely off his rocker. and he invented the Polaroid camera and Jobs, the way Jobs had such passion for design and simplicity. you know, he was fired from a job. Job was fired from a job at Apple.

Anthony (17:24) because he had so much passion for what he was after that the board at the time didn't believe it. so this this one struck me as as interesting and and again, like I say, it's it's adjacent to its original meaning.

Randy Lorensen (17:40) Yeah, I love the passion thing. And I think it's something we don't in society, American society in particular or Western, we don't talk enough about that, there's just so much value in people following their passion and they're willing to work harder and they're just it it it lights them up, it energizes them, it fulfills them. And I think this is a bigger conversation we should be having with kids, especially in twenty twenty six, the things you can do,

Randy Lorensen (18:06) I told you I created a business last night almost by accident, just playing with Grokbot, right? I was just screwing around and I told Grokbot, look, build this business, it's yours, you run it. And I built it and launched it. And it's going and it's doing basically all the work. And it like you can just do so much now. So there's there's just a lot of the restraints that used to be there, I think, are being lifted and it's becoming easier. And I think I think we're doing kids in

Randy Lorensen (18:34) Humans in particular into service, not getting them to follow that passion. But all right, I'll get off that soapbox. Let's move on to the honeymoon. Recorded in 1546 from a northern European wedding custom of giving newlyweds a 30-day supply, one lunar moon, of mead. Okay. So basically we got people drunk for a month, is what a honeymoon was. it meant both a month of drinking honeywine and the blunt 16th century joke.

Randy Lorensen (19:02) That the full moon, married sweetness peaks on day one and it immediately starts w waning.

Anthony (19:11) I am gonna defer to you on this because anything I say will be it is recorded history and I'm still married after almost fifty years. So I don't believe that the married sweetness peaks after day one. so

Randy Lorensen (19:25) Well why d why don't we move

Randy Lorensen (19:26) right on to crossing the Rubicon then, Anthony? Why don't you tell us about that one?

Anthony (19:31) You know, I've used this term a lot and apparently this is another one that's being used in a way today that is adjacent to it to its original intent. It really came from 49 BC when Julius Caesar marched his 13th Legion across the Rubicon River on Italy's northern border.

Anthony (19:52) Where Roman law forbade generals from bringing troops. So he, you're not supposed to bring troops across the Rubicon, but he did anyway. So it was meant as a high act of treason. And from there was a legal return, the die is cast, making civil war irreversible. So there are a lot of Rubicons in my life in in terms of decisions that I that I made

Anthony (20:19) whether it was changing a job or taking on a project and something no one else did. our the most recent Rubicon of significance was during COVID when all my competition cut back on their marketing spend and we doubled ours at the same time. the first few weeks were very trying when it looked like we were throwing money down the drain, but

Anthony (20:44) It eventually put us in a position where, our market share exploded. So it's it's something and I don't know what happened to Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon. I guess we should have looked that up. But you know, he he created a terrific society at one point. so I assume things went well. Interesting.

Randy Lorensen (21:06) Well, I'm assuming

Randy Lorensen (21:07) it went well because we know how he died.

Anthony (21:09) Yep.

Randy Lorensen (21:09) he died politicians stabbing him in the back. So crossing the Rubicon seems safer than than politics, as would be my takeaway. All right, let's let's move on to the to the next F fun. So these are just fun, wild history. a bully. This is wow, this one surprised me a lot.

Randy Lorensen (21:27) A bully once meant sweetheart or darling. Then it went to fine fellow before turning into a word for someone who picks on others. that's a long fall from grace. I would not have guessed that bully started out as sweethearted.

Anthony (21:42) you know we're old movie buffs here in the merino household, my wife in particular, you know, 40s and 50s, and you hear the term bully for you, which meant in the movies, good job, you know, it was a compliment.

Anthony (22:01) somehow it it evolved to what it what we look at today as someone bullying somebody. I'm not sure how these these things happen, but I guess as we said earlier, you know, the the words start out as something and then they they just end up in another place. But I've heard not recently, but I've heard people say bully for you at times in my career. So it's it's not completely dead.

Anthony (22:29) The funniest one I think we've got on the on the docket is spam. And I actually remember this. the name for junk messages is actually linked to a Monty Python sketch where the Vikings chant spam over and over until they drown out the conversation, much like an inbox full of junk mail. Now

Anthony (22:54) Some of our listeners may or may not know Monty Python, but they were an English version of the Uprigens Brigade or a

Anthony (23:10) what's the word I'm looking for? a comedy troupe?

Randy Lorensen (23:11) comedy troop,

Anthony (23:12) Yeah, comedy troupe. And they were the most sarcastic bunch of comedians you could ever ever find yourself around. And

Anthony (23:23) the the subtlety of what they wrote and the way they operated was just was just hilarious. So yeah, I do remember this where the the Vikings were just yelling spam, spam spam, and and wouldn't let anybody speak. And it makes a lot of sense today that it's become what's in our junk bill because like most most people getting email, more than 50% of what I what I receive every day

Anthony (23:51) which is a couple of hundred emails is is junk that has now shown up in my mailbox because I clicked on a link or somehow someone sold my email address and what have you. So

Randy Lorensen (24:05) Alright, I'm gonna pick butter someone up. This came from an ancient Indian and Tibetan devotional custom practiced during temple festivals. And Anthony, it literally meant throwing balls of clarified butter, ghee, at bronze and stone statues of the gods to seek their favor and blessing.

Anthony (24:32) You've gotta you've gotta step back from this a little bit and realize how valuable that product was to that society and what it takes to make clarified butter in a you know h hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I mean, the the processes to make butter and ghee today are you know

Anthony (24:57) assembly line manufactured and so forth. There was a lot of churning, if you will. And once the butter was made, you had to get rid of the solids to create the ghee, which is extremely pure and extremely valuable. And to think that they were taking it and throwing it at statues meant that they really believed that doing this was something that

Anthony (25:21) was gonna bring them some spiritual honor or, you know, some reward from the heavens and so forth. again, it's adjacent to what you do today, right? You want to butter somebody up. Randy, you look great today. Your shirt is love your shirt. man, you're so smart. You really are I can't I can't believe you you started a business yesterday. That's that's just fantastic.

Anthony (25:45) Buttering you up because I want f I want you to teach me how you did it so that I can launch one on my own. So yeah, it serves the same purpose today as it did then.

Randy Lorensen (25:54) Alright, what's your next one you like?

Anthony (25:56) Well, one of the this may lead to a story, but you know, I could care less is a phrase that people use and it's just grammatically wrong. You know, could care less, okay? So you what you're actually trying to say is I don't care at all. the reason this may lead to a story is when I work for Toyota,

Anthony (26:20) we would either go to Japan or the Japanese executives would come to America by way of Las Vegas and then they'd come to visit us in Southern California. And they didn't speak English very well. So in all of our meetings that we had with them, there were always interpreters. Sometimes there were we'd be in a meeting and people would have headphones on.

Anthony (26:40) And things would be translated right away. Other times they would you'd be part of a meeting and there'd be an interpreter in the room, you'd say something and they'd interpret for the Japanese executive and vice versa. Well, the English language and the Japanese language are very, very different. So we took classes on words to avoid or phrases to avoid so as not to create

Anthony (27:08) a problem in the translation. the word aggressive, if I were to say something like, we're gonna be aggressive this quarter in, let giving credit to people that want to buy Toyotas, in Japanese, that means we are we want to start a war. You know, we want to have a battle. So with things like that.

Anthony (27:30) So, we're talking about the English language, but I just wanted to point out that the language itself, you've got to be careful what you're saying. You know, we had an episode last week on two words, when to say yes and when to say no. Those words are very powerful in the sense of what they lead to next. So I know I couldn't I could care less, doesn't really mean a lot, you know, it's kind of a harmless thing.

Anthony (27:56) But in the wrong context, a phrase or a statement can set a session, a meeting, a relationship down a wrong, a wrong path. And I just want to take the time to point that out because I think it's important that people be thoughtful with what they're saying and how they're saying it, the tone of what they're saying. makes a lot of sense in terms of what where that relationship or where that business meeting is gonna go.

Randy Lorensen (28:21) Alright, Anthony. Clearly the cat does not have your tongue, but you've all we've all heard the phrase, cat got your tongue, right? And this can be traced back to 18th and 19th century origins, the Royal Navy's nine-knotted whip, the Cat O'Nails tales, they called it, and medieval punishments for liars and blasphemers. So it meant either a whipped sailor left in such agony he couldn't speak, or having a liar's tongue cut out and fed to the palace cats.

Randy Lorensen (28:52) So let's let's hope the cat does not have your tongue, literally.

Anthony (28:57) Well, the right above it we have, let the cat out of the bag. It came from medieval country markets where suckling pigs were sold inside a burlap sack, a pokey, and Conado secretly swapped the stray cat into the sack. Meant to meant a skeptical buyer untying the rope before paying, letting a little cat jump out of the sack and exposing the merchant's scam.

Anthony (29:22) So hiding that basically saying hiding something from somebody. again, a term, a phrase that's, you know, as alive today as as it ever was. So I thought that was those two things are very interesting.

Randy Lorensen (29:35) Well that kind goes with our next one, Dead Ringer. and that one came from 19th century American horse racing fraud, where con men secretly swapped a fast thoroughbred, a ringer, into a slow ra a slow race disguised with hair dye to look identical to the slow horse. So they literally disguised a horse that was fast to look like a slow horse, and they did this.

Randy Lorensen (30:01) To have a look alike horse that would win the race and clean out the bookies.

Anthony (30:05) I never knew this. This one this is great. a dead ringer. I don't know w why they call it dead. I get the ringer part, but the dead the the dead part escapes me. But it sounds like something someone would do. I I grew up near a racetrack in Massachusetts and there were a lot of shenanigans at that racetrack, you know.

Anthony (30:28) I wasn't on the inside of that in terms of knowing what what was gonna happen, but I did know some and I didn't do a lot of gambling it back in the day, but I did know guys that

Anthony (30:40) had some inside information, if you will, a tip. We'll call it a tip. and we're able to to cash in. I know

Randy Lorensen (30:48) I I know a guy, one of those.

Anthony (30:50) a guy. Well, you have to know a guy. Everybody knows a guy. So

Randy Lorensen (30:53) Yeah. All right,

Randy Lorensen (30:57) what's the next on your list?

Anthony (30:59) I don't know. The deadline comes to mind, it came from Civil War prison camps, most notoriously Andersonville, Georgia, in 1864, over 50 years before newspapers adopted it as a press cutoff. The deadline was a literal wooden rail 19 feet inside a stockade wall, where if any prisoners stepped stepped or reached across it, were shot dead on sight by tower guards. Now

Anthony (31:28) Why someone grabbed that that l that term and and turned it into a newspaper terminology, I don't know. But that's kinda kind of a sad origin, if you will, so to say the least.

Randy Lorensen (31:41) All right, well, turn a blind eye. We can go back to eighteen one in the naval battle of Copenhagen, when British Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had lost he'd lost sight in his right eye years earlier, he was signaled a flag to retreat. Well Nelson deliberately held his brass telescopes telescope up to his blind right eye, announced, I really do not see the signal, kept attacking and won the battle.

Randy Lorensen (32:11) Good insubordinate. I didn't know the British could be so insubordinate, so there we go.

Anthony (32:15) Yeah, I always thought they followed o fall at orders, but I guess not.

Randy Lorensen (32:20) What do you got next?

Anthony (32:23) What about money is the root of all evil?

Randy Lorensen (32:26) Yeah.

Anthony (32:26) it came from a common misquoting of Apostle Paul's warning in Timothy six dot ten. The original verse actually said, For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, meaning loving the money was the problem, warning against greed and obsession, not money or wealth itself.

Anthony (32:48) So I just thought that was a clarification and much of the interpretation, if you will, of the Bible, misread and used for you know, individual purposes, if you will, you know, bastardizing the words of the the gospel. So

Randy Lorensen (33:06) Yeah,

Randy Lorensen (33:06) that's one of you hear. People people weaponize that one a lot, right? how how many times have you heard that in your life?

Anthony (33:12) Yeah.

Randy Lorensen (33:13) Yeah. And and that's not you know, I always wonder like the Bible was written and then it was translated and translated to the next language and the next language. And you know, it makes me you know, makes me wonder how much of those sayings we just we don't have the accurate translation. Another another thing to have Christian back on sometime soon.

Anthony (33:33) Yeah, he he'll probably clean it up. Another one that I that brings me back to my youth or my youth as you're supposed to say is blood is thicker than water. First recorded in an 1180 German epic and later in a Scottish clan law, while modern writers cite a covenant version, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Anthony (33:58) In the 12th century, it meant family-kin blood is not washed away by baptismal water. The covenant version flipped it to mean brotherhood forged by shedding blood together, and a battle is stronger than birth. I gotta tell you, we I live this. The blood is thicker than water. This is the way I was raised. This is how I was taught.

Anthony (34:20) that you know what's in the family stays in the family. If this family member was in trouble, you'd reach out to help them. You you never derided a family member. It was clan like, dot K-L-A-N, but C-L-A-N, clan-like growing up. So this this really struck home with me when I saw it.

Randy Lorensen (34:41) All right. One of them I found interesting, because I've always wondered where this came from. I always thought it was stupid, is break a leg, right? In the theater, they don't say good luck, they say break a leg. And it came in the early 1900s, theater superstition. and anyway, there was staging where the side curtains framing the stage, they were called legs. So actors believed wishing good luck aloud tempted evil spirits to ruin the show, so they wished the opposite.

Randy Lorensen (35:08) Or wished you had so many curtain call bows that you step past the stage legs and break the legs that basically so i it's interesting, I always just thought literally break a leg, but it's really just that they have such a great show that they bow and bow and bow from all the curtain calls.

Anthony (35:30) not everything that we've been talking about is old. You know, there's a there's a new phrase, relatively new phrase that really came from November of 1978. sadly, that Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, where occult leader Jim Jones forced 909 followers to drink cyanide lace punch.

Anthony (35:55) Kool-Aid took the blame in the idiom, but film footage in crates at Jonestown proved the poison was overwhelming, overwhelmingly mixed with cheaper knockoff brand called Flavorade. But again, this is a a newer phrase where people are drinking the Kool-Aid, and it's relevant today as we head to some elections in the not too distant future where people seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid of one side or the other.

Anthony (36:23) And willing to go down with the with the cult, if you will, with the respective cults, w whichever side that you're on, which is where we seem to be today. So this one jumped on at me for sure.

Randy Lorensen (36:37) Yeah, I've I've used I've used that one a lot. So all right, we got we got time for two more. I'll pick one, then you pick one. So my last one is

Anthony (36:43) Good.

Randy Lorensen (36:44) going to be Close But No Cigar. And this came from the late 1800s, American carnival and fairground games of skill. like in particular the one where you take the mallet and you hit down and it the ring you know and the ring toss, but the the the I don't know what do you call it, where the mallet hits and you you try and get the big d ring the bell at the top.

Randy Lorensen (37:06) And then the ring toss.

Anthony (37:07) Mm-hmm.

Randy Lorensen (37:07) But anyway, those two pri games in particular, the literal prize that they handed out for winning was a cigar. So almost ringing the bell or almost winning the ring toss, they said close, but no cigar. So what's your last one, Anthony?

Anthony (37:22) Well, I'm I have so much respect for the people who fought in World War Two that I'm gonna go with the whole nine yards, which was traced to the World War Two Allied fighter planes and bombers whose fifty caliber machine gun ammunition belts measured twenty seven feet, nine yards, long on the wing. the belt was nine yards long.

Anthony (37:46) When the pilot expended his entire twenty-seven foot ammo belt on a single target, crew chief said he gave them the whole nine yards. And man, this this is a term that's really lived on in so many ways. this is this defines effort, this defines giving it your all. This goes back to link to passion that we talked about a little earlier. I just think this is it's a tribute to people that did what they did.

Anthony (38:14) back in the 40s, but it it's something that, you gotta try to live every day. give it your all. Don't give up. You said it earlier about you know, doing things you can do today, whether you're young, old, in between. so really struck home with me.

Randy Lorensen (38:31) Yeah, I I actually knew that one because I've used this saying a lot and I forget if it was Julie or one of the kids one day I said it, they're like, What does that even mean? And I realized I didn't have any idea what it meant and I l I put it in Google or AI or something and it came up. So that's one of the other ones that I actually knew where it came from. And by the way, for whatever it's worth, I was guessing what you were gonna pick from from the one 'cause we have lots of things listeners left on the list. I thought for sure you're gonna find

Randy Lorensen (39:00) Or pick pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I just thought that would fit you. But we'll make people go Google that one or put it in put it in AI to ask ask what that one means on their own.

Anthony (39:13) Yeah, pull ya pull myself up by the bootstraps would have been my second choice, but for today we'll just go with the whole nine yards. Well, I hope you enjoyed this segment. we tried to make it a little looser this week, a little lighter. things, every everything is a little tense right now across our universes. And we just, wanted to take a step back and do a little history lesson, a little discussion about some words, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Anthony (39:41) Talk to you in a few minutes after the briefing.

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Randy Lorensen (41:40) or click the micro one link in the description.

Randy Lorensen (41:42) Listeners, welcome back. Anthony Abundance briefing. The first topic you put in here I think is super interesting. and it's just that the AI boom looks like the two thousand eight housing bubble, and Musk warns two hundred plus neo clouds face a debt wipeout. I don't even know what a neo cloud is, so why why'd you add this one, Anthony?

Anthony (42:02) Well, the reason I added it, it it all happened today. The a writer with the New York Times had an article about it, and then someone who couldn't be further to the other side of the spectrum, no pun intended, was Elon Musk, talking about what is frighteningly a lot like the two thousand eight housing bubble where

Anthony (42:29) There was a lot of incestuous relationships between banks, mortgage companies.

Anthony (42:41) hedge funds in terms of debt financing, refinancing, selling, and so forth. You know, back in 2008, there were a number of transactions that that occurred where people were buying up less than high quality mortgages, repackaging them, selling them to somebody else who

Anthony (43:04) Then securitize them some other way and eventually we know what happened. Lehman Brothers, a hundred and thirty-eight-year-old company, crashed and burned and led to the great financial crisis of 08 and 09. Well, today we've got a similar situation where 20% of the debt that the Magnificent Seven and others have put on their balance sheet.

Anthony (43:33) it are is not on their balance sheet. So the debt is being held by private equity, private capital. They're not really counting it as debt. We have companies like NVIDIA and others doing cross deals where one commits to buying chips while the other commits to providing compute. You know, you've got all kinds of incestuous relationships and the belief is

Anthony (44:03) That it's going to create a very high cost of money. And if if if there's going to be a high cost of money, there needs to be a high return, a higher return on investment. And both Elon and the article written in the New York Times today, while not definitive that it's going to happen, is just pointing out the significant risk of it. And anytime there's a boom,

Anthony (44:31) someone busts. Doesn't mean the whole industry bust, but everyone rushing into it doesn't win. There has to be a yin to the yang. So, you there's a lot going on here and and just you being forewarned is forearmed. there's a there's a government, federal government initiative

Anthony (44:54) to make private capital private credit and private capital available to

Anthony (45:03) normal everyday investors, not qualified investors. I that to me, and I said this months ago, to me that just sounds like they're looking to get bailed out by attracting capital from unsophisticated investors to bail themselves out. So I'm a little worried about it. I'm not an expert in this. This is a a feeling that I have and

Anthony (45:30) Smarter people than me are sounding the same alarm. No, so we'll see what happens.

Randy Lorensen (45:36) Well, I think this is I think this is incredibly complex. There are so many forces and some of them countering each other. And when people say AI is a bubble, I don't think it's a bubble. I think it's inevitable. I think it's coming. I think AI is here. The horse is not going back in the barn. And we are gonna keep growing and growing and growing. But

Randy Lorensen (46:00) we've got Jevon's paradox that we talked about before. As AI gets cheaper and better and easier, it's going to grow. On the other hand, we do have power shortages like crazy. We are way, way, way undercapitalized on power, which could be a choke point. And what does that do, right? I mean, that that you should drive prices down by making it more available.

Randy Lorensen (46:26) And even things like chips that are customized and more chips and all of that stuff, better versions, versions that run on less compute, all of that helps pr push prices down. But the lack of power, the lack of chips, all the different things going on, you know, hear more and more talk about people not using Chat GPT and Claude because they want things on open source or they want cheaper.

Randy Lorensen (46:54) there if you can use a version that does just as good on a task for one one hundredth the cost, or I've got certain tasks that run on an open source machine where I don't pay anything, right? I'm just running it on my machine, a little bit of electricity, I guess, on my end, but you know, fractions of a penny. There's there's just a lot of countering forces here. So I don't think AI is going away. I think it's here, I think it's gonna grow. It's just gonna be really interesting what route it takes and

Randy Lorensen (47:24) Is there too much investment in certain areas, not enough investment in others? you know, the free market is gonna it's gonna take a minute to figure out where that money should go and in what order to be maximized.

Anthony (47:36) Well,

Anthony (47:36) and and that's the point. where the the the money flow right now is in investments, right? Some percent of our GDP is a significant percent of our GDP is in the AI infrastructure that's being built. But where is the return on investment gonna come from? And as you said, there are there are newer solutions that run locally, that run less expensively. So if if

Anthony (48:05) just pick a company, Anthropic invest, I think it's five hundred billion dollars in infrastructure. They've got to return that five hundred billion plus in revenue to cover their their the investment. And there's a real fear that, you know, it's gonna be a race to the bottom in terms of pricing for tokens and

Anthony (48:28) how people use it and in enterprises building their own server rooms and so on and so forth to to save save money and will the revenue flow back to those companies and you know someone my my point is this someone is going to be left holding the bag

Anthony (48:47) So the the last the last one in or the first one in or the middle one in that spent too much, went too fast, doesn't have the demand for their product, whether the product's a data center, a chip, a memory chip, an electrical grid, copper wiring, I don't know what it what it could be. But not everyone's gonna win here. So, and there could be some very, very big losers. And I just hope it's not

Anthony (49:10) the individual investor who buys ten shares of Apple you know that gets sucked into this private credit thing which I just think is again it's just to me it's just it's just a trap and I and I would stay away from it.

Randy Lorensen (49:27) It's if everybody bets all their chips on one company, there's a good chance they're gonna get shellacked, right? That's probably not gonna work. If you bet on AI in general, I think you win. Now, is it gonna be there there's a four-way race right now for the frontier. Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini. I think, I everybody wants to discount them, but they have Google money. I'm not gonna discount them. And SpaceX seems to be catching up pretty fast.

Randy Lorensen (49:55) or grok but maybe it's instinct or muse that win they're betting on the assistant maybe apple comes up with something maybe it's the open source we don't know we don't know what this is gonna look like in 20 years. I worked for internet companies during the dot-com boom and bust and everybody that we thought was gonna win back then didn't win. Yahoo is still around eBay's still around like they were the big players. Nobody we didn't know who Google was.

Randy Lorensen (50:23) Never heard of the word go I don't Google hadn't been invented yet when those battles were being f played out, right? Facebook wasn't around. Amazon was they were just selling books out of a garage. So we didn't there were big, big winners in the internet, and there'll be big, big winners here. I just think it's way too early to know who that's gonna be and what that's gonna look like.

Anthony (50:45) Yeah, we'll end this segment on an on a Warren Buffett quote. When the when the tide goes out, you'll see who's swimming naked.

Randy Lorensen (50:54) I would say that's accurate. All right. Let's let's move on to the Chinese scientists. Talk about let's tell people about sweet potatoes here, doubling the yielding thing.

Anthony (51:03) Well, I read a little bit about this. the Peking I think it's the Peking Institute, they experimented with using solar power to

Anthony (51:18) improve the water's mineral content and the result of it was significant increases in crop yield without using any additional fertilizer any additional pesticides and so forth and i we had a segment on on improving yields not long ago and this has a lot of a lot of hope no exactly

Anthony (51:46) How they did it and at what scale can it be done remains to be seen. But I think this is really, this is at to me, food production in an environment that is healthy is as important as what we just got finished talking about with AI and technology. You know, our, especially in the United States.

Anthony (52:13) We grow our food using a lot of pesticides and we've been doing it for a long time. And the FDA is telling us don't worry, it's you know bel the chemicals are below a toxic level, they don't cause cancer. I have trouble with that because they also told me that the food pyramid that they developed in nineteen sixty nine was really good for us. So and with all the lobbying that's going on and the amount of money that's at stake with

Anthony (52:42) big ag, I get a little bit concerned. So I love what the China the these folks in China have come up with. I hope it's scalable. I hope it's something that we can we can employ here. I just think it's good news.

Randy Lorensen (52:59) Yeah, I see I can get on board with this. I love the fact no new chemicals. Sunlight, mineral lot water. That makes sense to me. The mineral water, they're doing it because it somehow makes it absorb the sunlight more, but plants need sun. It's photosynthesis, right? You're giving them energy. So I think this one's fantastic. all right, next topic. A first for CRISPR, power powerful prime editing alters DNA directly in the human body.

Randy Lorensen (53:26) I think this is pretty cool. we're not gonna get real deep on this. I wish we had Dr. John here for this, but I think it's really cool that they can go in and, really what it did, it rewrote DNA inside the living human without touching a single cell outside the body. I don't know. I don't think we understand this well enough, but the fact that it's coming, I think is pretty cool. You got any comments on this one?

Anthony (53:50) Well, again, we're we're working on the right things. the now the I'm sure this technology, if it if it can be scaled and if it can really, you know, save a liver or a kidney, will there'll be lots of money to be made for somebody who can figure this out and and using a bit from our last segment. Bully for them.

Anthony (54:14) to to pull this off. I love I love the fact that people are working on the right thing. they're not working on I I know people are, but this is not a discussion about, drone technology to improve our ability to to fight a war. I love the fact that resources are being put here. It just it's it's uplifting. this is truly creating abundance.

Randy Lorensen (54:38) All right. I want to talk about abundance. So SpaceX is heading toward the f being the first hundred trillion dollar company. Now that's what Elon's saying, but think about this. Last year they lost $1.1 billion, which by the way is not much compared to what the AI labs are losing, but they still lost over a billion dollars. That's an insane amount of money. Last quarter, they made 4.4 billion.

Randy Lorensen (55:05) So they have definitely turned it around, they're profitable and Rockets are now their smallest business. So I just think, we a trillion dollar company is cool, but you know, get into a hundred trillion. I mean, we're we're just talking massive scale and abundance and all the things that brings us.

Anthony (55:22) To be clear, I'm an Elon Musk fanboy. Okay. He his companies have diversified. Starlink is on fire in terms of its growth trajectory. he's got the rockets to put the satellites into space for himself. Tesla's not doing terrible. So when they combine those two companies together, which is inevitable, it's gonna make another behemoth.

Anthony (55:51) So I don't I don't understand the the angst people have with SpaceX and Elon Musk. I mean he essentially saved NASA. You know, he took all the risk away from NASA and put it on his company and is allowing NASA to share in the technology these that he's developing. I really just don't understand it. But this this is an example where

Anthony (56:18) if you diversify and you and you get into adjacent businesses where your your talent, those engineers that are building rockets, are building the technology inside of Starlink. When they'll build technology inside of Tesla and automated driving and so on and so forth, you can really leverage your intellect inside of a business. So great work here.

Randy Lorensen (56:42) It

Randy Lorensen (56:42) just comes down to how divided the world is over politics, right? And that's just people, it's the nuance of I like this person. it doesn't matter if you like 10% or 90% of what they do or nine, you know, whatever. Like, can't we just appreciate what we like about them and not, you know, we we've talked about this a lot, but I I just think that it's that division that hopefully we're moving the other way now. So all right, let's go to the next one.

Randy Lorensen (57:08) I think this is a real quick one again, but it's very cool. Blind patients recover partial vision in gene therapy. And they're using an algae protein and a pair of custom goggles to help blind people see again. what I man, this may not affect you or I, but if we're blind, this would be a really big, this be a big thing.

Anthony (57:29) Yeah, I've always I don't know about you, but when I when I see someone who's blind, working their way through, you know, getting from point A to point B, my heart just sinks. It just it just it really does. I mean, d I don't know well I know why. It's just a it's one of the toughest things to to deal with.

Anthony (57:49) so again, here we are working on the right thing. And how they figured out to take an algae protein and pair it with a custom goggles to make it happen. I don't know how the hell they do it. Good for them though. again, uplifting, working on the right thing. I love to I love seeing this type of thing.

Randy Lorensen (58:07) All right. The next one, this this one I like. You don't care because you don't like what want robots, but I want a robot cleaning my house and mowing my lawn and everything else and they're coming. And Tesla's building Optimuses now. you know, they took their Fremont, California, they're not building the X or the S anymore models and they're building robots. By the end of next year, they want to be kicking out twenty thousand units a week and with you know way more capacity from there. So

Randy Lorensen (58:35) I know you poo poo this one, but I don't know that we have to talk a lot about but the robots are coming, the robots are coming. So

Anthony (58:41) I I don't poo poo it in the sense of but I don't know where these ro what these robots are gonna do. Until until I see a a documentary on, you know, we've got 10,000 robots doing, you know, plowing the fields and harvesting crops and creating abundance. I don't know what they're gonna do. I again, he's I'm not gonna I'm not gonna pull the rug out from under Elon Musk. If he's doing this, you know, I'm heavily invested in him.

Anthony (59:09) my money is where my where my mouth should be, I guess. but i the fact of the matter is I'm heavily invested in him being successful. So I'm rooting for him. I just don't understand it. You know. And that's part

Randy Lorensen (59:21) I think

Anthony (59:22) of the problem we have is when someone doesn't understand something, they tend to dismiss it. And I don't and I don't want I don't want to be that guy.

Randy Lorensen (59:29) Is

Randy Lorensen (59:29) the is it wrong to say, Anthony, you don't understand the need? you just don't have a desire to have a robot cleaning your house.

Anthony (59:37) Right, but having robots do tasks that are you know that are difficult, dangerous, that create efficiencies for companies, I'm all I'm all for that. Again, you're right. I don't see a robot folding my laundry or cutting my grass.

Randy Lorensen (59:54) we we

Randy Lorensen (59:56) we've had stories recently, and I can't remember what we've talked about here and elsewhere, but I know we had one here where the life preservers on the ocean for lifeguards, instead of a lifeguard having to swim out there, the the drone goes, drops a life preserver, brings the person. I know there's a technology now where there's a drone on the battlefields in Ukraine that comes down almost like a coffin where it's dangerous to send a human but a soldier stranded.

Randy Lorensen (01:00:23) It comes down, picks the person up and flies them away like a sci-fi movie, right? you know, I brought up a couple of weeks ago we were talking about money that, you know, the bottom of the ocean is full of gold and all kinds of other minerals and things we would love to use, but we it's too expensive to go mine down there and we don't have the technology. Well, having a robot to do that, or if there's a gas leak instead of sending a human in, or imagine when Chernobyl blew, if there were robots you could have sent in there and they didn't get

Randy Lorensen (01:00:51) radiation poisoning the engineers that went to go stop that gas leak. I think there's a lot of things like that. But the real use is gonna be day to day life for me. How many people can't afford a maid, but they can afford a robot that's gonna be they're talking about leasing these things for a couple hundred bucks a month. And you could have it take care of your house and

Anthony (01:01:09) Well we'll see if that comes the

Anthony (01:01:12) Again, I'm not poo-pooing it. I'm just saying I'll be a follower on that, but everything you said previously, that's where I think the excitement for robotics is. And I think there is there are things that we haven't we, meaning me and you, haven't even thought about uses for it. So all of those things you said, agreed. I think they're we should be working on those things.

Anthony (01:01:34) Mundane tasks, I'm not sure if I had an the next dollar I had to invest, I'd invest in the things you talked about versus, you know, a consumer facing robot. I just don't see the

Randy Lorensen (01:01:46) It it'll be interesting. I've I'm

Randy Lorensen (01:01:48) these things that are easy. I look at something like Muse on the AI end and I'm like, I can do so much more with Grokbot or whatever. But the fact is that thing's growing like crazy. Instinct is growing like crazy because they're so simple for people to use. And just the standard we start out using AI to try and do all these complex things and build

Randy Lorensen (01:02:11) things we couldn't build before, but a lot of people are doing are using it just to make their restaurant reservations or, manage their schedule or whatever else. A lot of the mundane things ends up being what is mass adopted. So all right, our last one really quickly. we talked about this last week. This is kind of a follow-up, but the age of programmable biology where DNA becomes software, and we talked about the Colossus thing, but

Randy Lorensen (01:02:37) We're programming biology the long story short here, which again is maybe scary, maybe amazing, depends on how it's deployed, but I tend to lean toward amazing and the things that we can do. If we can bring a dire wolf back, what diseases can we solve and make go away, et cetera?

Anthony (01:02:56) Yeah, it seems like this company is shifting from, saving endangered species or extinct species, bringing them back, to what can they do, what can this technology do to help humans? Which i you know, if Peter Diamondis, who we all have a lot of respect for, is focused on it.

Anthony (01:03:14) then it's likely to happen. glad to see the continuation of their success and have them, you know, use it to make life better for humans.

Randy Lorensen (01:03:25) All right, let's wrap it there. Listeners, you know what to do. Download, subscribe, tell your friends, go follow us on Facebook, Twitter, X, whatever the heck we call it these days, Instagram, wherever you want. All those things help us. but mostly just spread the word. tell people it's out there, and until next week, go out and spread a little abundance.