Robots Crash, Chips Rise | MCA6

Welcome to the Morpheus Cyber Podcast. Today, robots crash, chips rise. From SpaceX's wild $800 billion dollar payday to the Roomba Maker going bust, it's a tale of AI winners and losers. Grab your phone and vote in our live polls. AHA Slides.com-MCA6. SpaceX just became America's most valuable private company at $800 billion. That's more than Tesla, a medical bank. The company that made your floor cleaning robot is officially bankrupt while Chinese competitors sweep up market share. Microsoft is quietly dismantling its diversity programs. Turns out social justice has an expiration date in Silicon Valley. Intel CEO wants Uncle Sam to bankroll more's. Law revival because apparently chips supremacy requires taxpayer subsidies now. Vote along with us at ahaslides.com-mCA6. Let's dive in. SpaceX hits $800 billion valuation peak. OMG. And I also saw that Elon, his net worth has soared to $750 billion. Now he is three times his next billionaire person in the rankings. He's an eligible to be a guest on our podcast. Yeah, because this is the sub billionaire and he ate welcome. Yeah. We throw around these numbers, billion and trillion and just become immune to it, especially when you're talking about dollars. But I was trying to wrap my head around a little bit. I was just tinkering around. If you convert it to time, which is a little bit easier for my brain to figure out, a million seconds takes 11 and a half days. Seconds takes 31 years. Oh yeah. A trillion seconds takes 31,700 years. It's not linear. You go from a billion to a trillion nothing 800 billion like SpaceX. Billion, it's just a huge number. That's hard to wrap your head around. I don't know what they would have done with the Roman Empire and what was Caesar worth. But he's not worth anything anymore. Is he? Some day, Elon Musk either. They're talking about Starlink as being one of the key components of the because he's got, I don't know, over 5,000 satellites. Yeah, he's going to blanket the earth with satellites. The other government's going to want very much to be a part of all of that. They're going to want to be a service, him to be the service provider for the government because of just the sheer resilience of it all. Internet will be there no matter what. There's no terrestrial access to it. They're pretty secure out there in space. Somebody's going to have to send a rocket out there to not just one out. Like you said, he's got thousands of them up there. The resilience factor is great. From the security standpoint, yeah, he's going to command the infrastructure, global infrastructure that the world will depend on, especially if anything happens in natural disasters on the face of the earth to take out communications. Yeah, I've heard that his Falcon 9 jet, I think, can send up something like 60 or 70 satellites at a time. His new one can send something ridiculous like 6 or 800 at a time. Yeah, yeah, and the weight that he can take up there now is something like a 100 to 150 tons of weight that can be taken into space. That's crazy amount of weight. You can take a data center up there and drop it off and be completely isolated and secure. And in a way, he already has a data center up there because every one of those nodes can communicate between one another and, of course, up and down. It's like a mash. I don't know how it works. We should probably watch a video sometime, guys, on how Starlink works. But it is, it's pretty incredible that they can do with that. He's seeing latencies like in the 20 millisecond range. That's respectable. That's structural latency, really. That's trust. Absolutely. And there's the ability to laser links directly from space. That could even be faster. There's a lot of cool things definitely as fast, if not faster than some terrestrial links. Couple things. One of them is that I think that maybe the biggest risk that SpaceX has just based on our last couple minutes of conversation is pushback from governments as far as monopoly or privacy or whatever, but having one person controlling one company controlling all this stuff. That might be their biggest danger. Yeah, the fact that he will command much infrastructure. But he has the delivery system too to keep putting more in space. If one gets taken out, he can put a dozen back up. He owns the supply. They manufacture it themselves. He owns the transport, which is the rockets that take it to space. And then he owns the network. He owns the entire ecosystem. Who can compete? No one can compete. Everyone else has got to buy time on his spaceships. They're going to rent time on his satellites. And if they want anything manufactured, he's already poised to do that too. They call that monopoly. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So Starship can deploy, here's the statistics. Starship can deploy 400 star-link satellites per launch versus only 60 with Falcon 9. That's seven times the number. Each launch of a Starship is six or seven launches of the Falcon 9. Put that in your pipe. I personally like Elon's more power to him. I hope he succeeds. I think he's an honest guy. However, he, like you said, monopoly. When he controls it all, he could be kind of never around with it either. I'm not a government. I'm not, it's a global thing. Yeah, right. You look at how that works. You know, but I'll tell you something. If just everything we're talking about, he's gearing up for scale, obviously. And if Starlink can be adopted universally, and why wouldn't it be? It looks like it could be the future. If that's the global broadband mechanism, and if they can start having military grade communications and be important to AI, this 800 billion might be more of a ceiling rather than a more of a floor. I mean, that's as big as that number is, if they can become as important as we're speculating Sky's limit, no pun intended. Yeah. And AI demands more access to more people and responses to, that's how it learns. It wants to talk to as much and as many people and entities as it can. And with this global network that he's built, AI is, that's the natural path. It can get around the world everywhere in the world. Yeah. You know, the gloom of doom people who are worried about AI taking over. And if we have weapons in space and all those things, that's surely a possibility, but I think we're smart enough to prevent that by putting systems in place. What do you guys think of the Irobat Bank, Rupsey? I'll tell you what I think. I'm depressed because I just brought that for my wife. And as you know, and I remember choosing and I went for the market leader and spent a little extra money because it's a Christmas present. And I saw that less expensive ones out there, but beyond this subject. And I don't know if it was a little bit before Christmas, I'd swap it out. Yeah. Yeah. I went through that process of buying an inexpensive one with lots of features and non-name brand that I would have recognized normally ended up sending two of them back to Amazon. Yeah. Well, that makes me feel better then. Yeah. I ended up buying a shark. Sharky contrast. A shark's been around forever. They're really good for you. Yeah, it's a low cost alternative. Sure. Yeah. And they're really consistent. That one's been really consistent. I've been happy with mine. That's a shark. It's not an Irobat, but it's a very good robot. I don't know. Robot. That's what I do on a robot. I keep saying I want a robot. I do. This ties into our last conversation because it was a really bad day for them when that Amazon sale got blocked. Whatever there was 1.7 billion, they had it made. And the EU came in and called, well, that was for privacy issue. That was an anti-trust. Still, look at what you did to this company. Yeah, bankrupted. Yeah. Yeah. They needed the capital to move on and to expand into other products. And that's what that deal would have provided. They pretty much just killed that company. It's just a shame. And then the Chinese manufacturers, they take the technology and they industrialize the process of manufacturing. They can give it cheaper, faster, better in the sense. I don't know if that better. The fact that I had to send two of them back, and those are both Chinese. I don't necessarily think that's really true. I think the quality is still here in the United States. Of course, they're made in China. It's just they're made in fact. They're different. Probably to a different tolerance. Maybe that's generally what it is. The Americans' views require different grade of material a little bit. And some secret electronics sometimes that are shipped over and they just put it together. Yeah, but it's like I said, the shark has been good and really good cost. Well, the good news is that the technology isn't going to be dead because other people will buy the technology. Probably Amazon will go out and part it out. And anyway, what they say is consumer robot companies have 85% higher failure rate than other like B2B robotics firms. Consumer products are nowhere near what B2B products are. That's where the money is at. Yeah, that's where the quality is. Expression. Yeah. And manufacturing or other types of robotic systems, I think, and is largely robotic in a lot of its control centers. The post office has been robotic for a long time and a lot of it's different endeavors with package movement. We can credit Rumba for changing the way people think about robots. When they first came out, people go, I don't know if I want this thing going around in my house and bouncing around doing all these things, bothering the dog, all these things. No, it's become common now. A lot of people got these things and they do work. I love it. I tell my wife all the time, I said, this is your present. You're not going to have to back you anymore. She loves that thing. She says, let's run the robot because it just goes and vacuums everything up, queen, too. And it just, you know how to put those lines in the carpet when you vacuum. Oh, that does it do that. Yeah, the robot does that. Yeah. Nice and queen looking. Yeah, and it does suck it out because I watch how much of dirt that get pulls out of the carpet. And it goes and unloads it automatically by itself and then it goes out again and runs really back and unloads it if it needs to recharge itself when it needs to and finishes the process later on if it needs to recharge. You know everything, I just tell it one time, queen the house. I map it out one time. It uses LiDAR, but actually can see around, it can see little things like the foot of furniture, the legs of furniture, it'll go around them. And then it maps it permanently. You can see in the mapping program exactly what it learned with LiDAR and you say, yeah, it's pretty accurate. Is it that automatically or do you automatically know, you don't do it? The first time you run it in a new space, it maps your house. Yeah, now somebody was saying that this is a because it maps your house and that it's a privacy thing. I'm sorry. I just don't have a feeling that my house is on the national security list. Well, not even. Yeah, so there's some privacy and security people who are to the inf degree and I'm using TV sets. And TV sets can be used to a camera. There's all these things. Yeah, what are you going to do? Just get electronics out of your life. And literally there are people who are like they don't have a cell phone. They don't have a television set. There's no electronics in their home. They certainly don't have one of those Alexa, Alexa things. Yeah, she just upgraded by the way to Alexa 2.0. She's going to talk now. Oh, yeah, I don't know how to say. I shouldn't have said it, but don't call her name. Yeah, because I have one on my desk. Actually, I have an echo show. Yeah, this is indicative of success, but yet failure in that these little home robots are already getting the prices getting low that it's basically taking the first movers out. But I wonder if it doesn't point to a bigger problem because you know, the fact that I robot came out with this amazing technology. And then these Chinese companies were able to do it much cheaper, maybe not quite as good. 80% is good, perhaps, but much cheaper. Why can't we do that? And I know the answer to that really, but it's a problem. And how can we fix that? And maybe perhaps the robotics is the answer as I feel bad for all the people that are going to be unemployed, but as the robots is more environments, our robotic is billier mentioned in the different companies that we're mentioning as they get to be that way. Maybe that'll bring the cost down and we can be competitive. That'll be a create 11 level playing field because they have robotics. Yeah, the difficulty is it's the innovator. It's the first mover who spends the lion's share of the risk. And then they do all the innovations and then other people just come along and copy them. And that's the problem probably with the robot is I think said they have a thousand patents, but patents aren't meaning a great deal anymore because as soon as something gets to China, they reverse engineer and use your patents regardless as to whether they pay for them or not. But if we could level the price playing field, I robot would still be in good shape. That is true. But the innovator can still be successful. They make the name for themselves. And as long as somebody doesn't undercut them by dramatic amounts like what? Chinese versions were 60% of what they were selling that for. That's a 40% distance. Well, they're talking about essentially the that they're delivering 80% of the functionality for 20% of the money. And now that may be an exaggeration, but that's the type of thing that we're dealing with is material. And which one of us when we go out to when we go out to Amazon and we go look at for instance GoPro, you go look at a GoPro camera. I mean, those things are massively expensive, but you can get a GoPro like clone or knockoff, a lot cheaper. It just it seems to that the first mover wins the market to start with, but then they start losing it little by little until a bad situation. It is the story of business. I've been in business for 30 years and I've had to reinvent my own businesses at different times because Bill, like when we first got into the networking world, it was pretty much new. margins were really high and you were able to charge a very good price for your time and your effort. Why? Because there was a limited amount of people that could do this. That's where I robot was. They were the only guys on the market at first. They commanded a good price. They should have known just like anyone in business knows you can only command that for long. You have to innovate. You have to change. You have to morph into whatever. That's why a lot of these companies will go out and buy their smaller competitor who offers it at a lower cost or whatever and they'll have good, better best type of thing and associated with that. That they themselves maintain the volume within each one of the pricing scenarios. And what the market will bear of that goes moves to the lower end, they can expand that if it moves to the higher end because of features that people really want, then you can exploit that. But when you only have kind of one product line, I don't know what I robot has because I'm these guys that started I robot. These are MIT people. These guys are smart people. They should have been able to see maybe they weren't great business people. I don't know. But obviously you really do have to think of both sides of the story just because you have innovation doesn't mean you can live off of that. You're going to have to have some business savvy too because the world's mean to you. If you're the first guy who arrives, they're out to take you out. They're trying to take your legs out. I know what they could have done. What could they have done? It's not like they could sell it by subscription. You have to have innovation that China doesn't have. That's the thing. If they're smart enough, that robot could have done something different than what they were now just turning out by the thousands. It'll be old news. Those products from China and people won't want to buy them because they say, that's old. Nobody wants that anymore. Great. It's a lower price. But look at the new technology that I robot have. You have to continue once you innovate. You have to continue to innovate. Absolutely. You have to hold the market that way. That's the server lining of this whole story. That is what drives innovation. That brings us to a topic of Microsoft quietly backing out of the DEI. They used to have 150 people. They spent like $150 million budget on DEI. Now they've backed that down to well under 100. A lot of companies are following suit. Now what's interesting, of course, we don't have the experience of a minority on our podcast today. But if you think about it, Microsoft, since they started spending $150 million a year on DEI, they started out in 2020 with 3% of their workforce that was black. They have nothing to show for their DEI investment because still their employment of blacks is at 3%. I disagree. I think that they do have something to show. And they show exactly what they intended. When does all happen around George Floyd time? And all these companies, what were they trying to do? Were they really trying to elevate the black person or were they just trying to prove that they weren't racist and trying to prove that they were cool? And they proved that it was completely successful. And I think that's why it fell down too, is because the goal was not to elevate black people. The goal was to improve the company's image. There was no substance to it. It didn't have the right. It didn't have the guts at its its inception level to really make a difference. And it's interesting. You're saying it was all imagery enforcement as opposed to substance. Yeah. And it shows. That's why it collapsed. That's why the way it collapsed with all this secrecy stuff because really they don't want to go back on that goodwill that they think that they received. They're just changing with the times. After that Supreme Court ruling about fairness in students applications getting into college and all these things. After that kind of got blown up in the Supreme Court says, no, you cannot pick different people based upon the color of their skin. That's not going to happen. All these programs now fall under the same thing. No, you can't hire people just because they're this color of a skin. It has to be by their ability, their talent, their credibility, whatever, all the things that should be how you hire somebody. Now that they know their base. Yeah, merit based. Absence. Now they know that there's a Supreme Court ruling. They know that they're up for a bunch of liability because if they don't follow what the Supreme Court says, there's going to be lawsuits coming the other direction now saying, Hey, I was qualified and you did not hire me. Hey man, there's a lawsuit. They're just rolling with what the times are. They're making their shifting because they know they have to from a legal standpoint. It's interesting that in 2020 or 2021, they were spending 2.8 billion all these companies on DEI. Now that spending is down to 1.6 billion in 2023 and it continues to decline. There is an industry wide spending decline on DEI. Now DEI, obviously, we all believe that it should be somewhat intrinsic for fairness and merit, colorblind fairness. And we do have some issues in our society and in our world around these issues, how we deal with them is still the problem that we're grappling with because I don't think anyone wants to say, you know, these people from this area or these people with this color of skin should be suppressed. I don't think anyone wants that. And there's a first discrimination too, the Asian community in which I am half I'm half eight and I have something to say about this, is that if you're Asian, there was a definite push to say Asians are not considered to be our number one choice. We need to bring in minorities of all other cultures, not Asians because or whatever. Well, because Asians had the merit in the academia and consequently that was the problem. Just in McKinney sentence, if they're qualified, they should have been hired. I tend to defer to Martin Luther King on this one. What's his most famous line? People should be judged by the content of the character, not the color of their skin. Amen. That's it. But there are systemic issues in our society that I think we all have to acknowledge that there's cultural things that that naturally suppress people's ability to compete. I don't know what to do with that. There's an inordinate number of minorities in prison that are in poverty. But those problems aren't something that you can really take to a fast track easily. And I think we all want to solve those problems because you meet some young person with a lot of aspiration and you want them to have the same capability or the same opportunity that another person has. But intrinsically, that's just not the case in our world. You mentioned you don't know what to do about it and I'll tell you one thing that won't work. And that's the reverse just start discriminating against a different group. But I agree with you 100% that there is a problem. But I think the answer is stay the course because this gets in a heck of a lot better in a relatively short period of time a while ago. And I'm not sure if I'm repeating it correctly. But if the US Black population was a country, they'd be like the seventh richest country in the world. Really, we're all blessed to living United States. That's our privilege. Why look at the person who's slightly lower than you and focus on that? Let's help these people that are starving to death. People don't like things that are different than themselves. There is a need for some inclusion, but you can't go overboard on it. They can't be the heavily weighted criteria for creating a job classification. You cannot be, let's get 50% black new employees. It has to be, or even Asian, you can't do that either. You have to kind of realize that it has to be about fairness. You can't have enforceable quotas. The moment you do that, you've violated the Supreme Court. You have to have, you can't have an explicit classification. Oh, they must be from this cultural sect. None of that is allowed anymore. Now here you go. The companies are going, we're walking a tight road here. What do we do? We've won inclusion, but boy, the moment we set quotas, we set classification, we're going to get a lawsuit. They know they have a problem now. This is why you see Microsoft backing off quietly, none. A lot of noise just quietly moving away from it and trying to figure that out. I have a question for you guys. I don't know, but what about the other organizations? I know that Microsoft was a failure. It started at 3%, $150 million or whatever it was later. It's at 3%. What about Google and some of the other guys that are back and off of their DEI program? Do we know any metrics on their success? Was anyone not really sure? But there is, for instance, Costco has not lessened its work on DEI. They are full speed ahead and have told everyone that they're full speed ahead. Now they do walk a tightrope because there are laws of equity. There are fairness laws that they can't violate at the same time, but they have still maintained their investment in DEI. I don't know what their outcomes have been, but that's something that we can report on in the future. I think that's a good example. That would be a good thing. Yeah, especially since all three of us go there on a regular basis. Next on the agenda is Moore's laws revival over at Intel. You know, used to have a greater percentage of improvement and a lower price. And that is something that Intel has been wanting to put it back into effect. And they actually want the government to help them fund that. They can achieve that again in semiconductors. I don't know how that's going to work for them, but it is an interesting idea. We do have some Moore's law in my opinion with AI because we all use AI and it costs like $20, $30 a month. And that's a very good Moore's law is still with us in my opinion through AI. Now I think it's going to be even more when we get to quantum. And that's where we're going to see the hundreds of years of advancements in a short period of time is when we get to the quantum drug improvements, the health improvements that we're going to be able to achieve, the technical improvements we're going to be able to have. That's going to be a really nice to enjoy. This article was what Pat Gelsinger who's come back to Intel. See, I like Intel. I really am sad that Intel has fallen low. Intel was there in Folsom up in California. It was nearby where I have lived for many years. And I knew a lot of people who worked there, a lot of people got stuck. And it was a great company for a long time. And then they didn't, they ceased to be true innovators in certain areas, especially in the chip manufacturing area. And I was talking to Josh a few months ago about this because we were building the computer. And I said, which CPUs should we get? He said, definitely not in Dell. Wow. I'm kind of changed. Yeah, we did not, we went to AMD. And he said, and the problem with Intel is the chip that they built me, the wave, and I don't, I can't talk like Josh does, the way they got capacity is they stacked their chips. Instead of building them smaller and more intricate, they stacked them. They got more capacity, but it was still a slower method because now you had these links to the upper chip, to upper because they're different stacks. Now they had to have little connections going up. The back plane of some sort. Yeah. And those were all slower paths than if you could do it within the chip. And anyhow, that's the best I'm going to do. But I was sad because I've always been proud about Intel being the United States and was nearby where I lived and everything. And I always heard good things. I knew a lot of friends who worked for Intel and they were a great company, are a great company. But somewhere they lost that capability to just design, I guess. I don't know what it is, but I hope they make it. I really am rooting for these guys. Well, they're in American icon. And we all hope that they make it back. But but I'll tell you, I did a lot of work for Intel back in the day. I actually flew my airplane up to Hillsboro, Oregon, to for a couple of weeks to train a whole bunch of people on how to use the sniffer problem solving and debugging their code with packet analyzers. And I and then I was also down in Folsom. I did a lot of work there and I used to fly my airplane down there too and drop off employees. That was a lot of fun. But here's the thing I got to know some of the folks relatively well. And several of them complained that when they got to the top of the salary level, what they did, and this is just in a lot of American companies did this, they outsourced and they outsourced a lot of their work to people in India. Now you would have thought it went to Taiwan, but it went to India for a lot of their engineering or debugging and a lot of that sort of thing. I know a guy by name and he worked at the Folsom plant. He was a very good friend of mine. He said, Bill, it was humiliating when I was forced to train my Indian replacement. And it was purely economic. So in some ways, Intel deserved what it got in that it's kind of like karma. If you go and outsource your employees to Third World Nations in order to get a lower cost and then screw the American employee, obviously it's the screwing you get for the screwing you got. Consequently, Intel has made some of those moves in the past. And I think in my opinion, that is where their downfall is right there. Totally makes sense. It's not about more as long at all. It's about whether... Murphy's Law. You know, whether the United States companies know how to build things anymore. Do we know how to build at scale anymore? Instead of... We've got to be used to outsourcing it across the ocean. And can we bring it back and just learn how to do it in house again? What did we talk about last week? We were talking about the manufacturing of materials and we were the ones who actually created the process for mining lithium and processing it and preparing it and then we gave it off to China and got them to do it at a cheaper cost. And now their experts at it, we don't have that capability in the United States. We have the smart people here. We just don't have a willingness. So in a way, guys, we can say thank you to COVID for some things. When we started seeing that our drugs were manufactured in other countries and we didn't even have the ability to manufacture your standard drugs in our own country. And then they started doing prioritization and we weren't on that priority list. Their own country needed the drugs. And then the masks. Look at the debacle with the masks and how about incredible billions of dollars worth of masks. And yeah, it's pretty sad. That COVID happened to us, but we learned something from that. We learned that we need our supply chain to be intact, even in the event of something like a pandemic, which is not a war. It's not something of that nature. It is just purely, we countries need to have their own supply chain capabilities when push comes to shove for whatever reason we end up with that situation. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad to see the Trump administration. It is focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It is a priority. And we can see maybe like you just said, maybe it was just purely the impetus, was purely because of COVID. But hey, we've probably known this for a long time. And sometimes you have to hit rock bottom. It's kind of similar to the IROBA story in a way. There's a lot of parallels there. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Yeah, we got to fix some stuff. And I agree with you. I think bringing back manufacturing is key. The question is it too late. Is it too late for Intel to catch up? I wonder. And is it too late for us to catch up? Well, let's talk about some American companies that are still doing pretty well. IBM. They've gone through from hardware economy into a service economy. And IBM has managed to do pretty well. They have other AI solutions. And if you look back, IBM was trying to promulgate AI into all of our businesses today. They just didn't have Chad GBT and proof that this is the way to go about doing it. And then the distribution system, they gave that capability to companies to some degree, but they didn't give it to individuals. And as soon as these technologies are democratized and become ubiquitous within the society, that's when businesses can capitalize on it. Because now everybody wants to have AI. But 10 years ago, I remember IBM talking about AI and using it for your business, but it never caught on until the individuals creativity and the innovators were loose. Yeah, good point. To the original subject about Morris Law, Morris Law definitely does not apply in this world as is, but in a way because innovation is important with the GPUs coming in, because they're really good at doing certain things. And for the large language models, they can do thousands of things at once. And those sorts of improvements are maybe replacing just the chip being twice as many, twice as good and half the price like Morris Law said, shifted to a different sort of Morris Law. TSMC is building a plant here in the United States. Some of the chips that they manufacture over their entire one are going to be done in the United States. I think it's the H100s. Not their best GPUs, but lesser ones are going to be done here. But Intel, Intel's completely not in competition now. They've got to step up their game. They've got to, they've got to get back into being some level of competition to TSMC. We like the old Nvidia chipsets and all of this, but reality is they're offshore. They're not here. Well, I see, I see what's happening is these other companies like Nvidia just invested in Intel. And I think Nvidia is looking at building out their capacity and building out their technology with a partnership that's going to make Intel more competitive and to give Nvidia a larger US-based and fab capability for chips. We can see that the United States is looking favorable now to any company that will build in the United States. Nvidia knows that too. The writings on the wall to them. Either they invest in companies that are building in the United States and do it themselves, or they're going to be on the out eventually. Because that is the focus. We have to become secure in ourselves being able to manufacture what we need for defense, for medical fields, all of these different types of chips that are being made that we depend upon, especially being that Taiwan's in that disputed location with China. China's saying that they own that piece of land. And they, and there are a lot of people that are saying they will eventually invade Taiwan. And it's going to be a bad day. We'd better get that manufacturing back here in the United States. Yeah, look at what they did. I was in Hong Kong and I can't remember, I think, 1989. And I remember them talking about then when I was 10 years prior to the 1999 lease that the UK had on Hong Kong. And Hong Kong was a much smaller area. But look at the, it was a size of a postage stamp, but it had massive productivity because the business acumen of Great Britain and the British Empire, the workforce that was very smart and diligent, look what happened in Hong Kong. And then 10 years after I was, I left in 1999, it reverted their 99 year lease, reverted back to China. And then China started making all these assertions that no, we're going to leave the markets alone. We're going to, we're going to leave them as just like they are in order not to upset the apple cart because Hong Kong was a very productive location around the world and very connected. Well, they've pretty much proven that they managed that in my opinion poorly. They took a lot of the political people and imprisoned them. They did a lot of bad things. And they did not manage the, the bringing back of Hong Kong into China very well. However, they did maintain the business side of those things. Oh, good. Bill, yeah, that's great, great analogy there with Hong Kong since I spoke. Yeah. Now we have some things happening in our auto industry that are somewhat concerning. We did have this big push by government to pick winners and to fund electric vehicles. And obviously a lot of the US companies decided to go do that starting with general motors. And then it moved over to Ford. And just this week, it announced that it is no longer going to be making the F-150 Lightning pure EV starting this month. They're no longer going to make it. They were hoping for 150,000 units a year. And they peaked out at 11,000 units per quarter, which that was their peak. That wasn't the average. That was their peak. If you took their peak and what they were able to attain, they marketed for, they did production for, they did pricing for selling 150,000 F-150 EVs. And they were only able to achieve at top 11,000 in one quarter, which would be 44,000. It was less than one third, maybe even one fourth, what they thought the market was going to be. And of course, speaks. Well, the market does speaks. It's pretty tragic that we had this, and this was a 20 billion dollar markdown. Yeah, 20 billion dollars. Now they are going to keep some things. And what they're going to do is they're going to transition to an F-150 with a V6 engine in it that is a generator and it's gas powered. So they're going to go from having a few hundred miles of range up to 700 miles of range, but they're doing that by having a gasoline powered generator of V6 engine. And I did some looking up to find out where are they going to put this engine? Is it going to be, is it going to take up space in the, you know, in the payload area in the back or something, put a little motor back there? Because I thought about that for a Neve pickup, you could just put a generator in the back and charge yourself. Well, that's funny. It's open, that's called a front. Front. Yeah. Yeah, they could put it there. That's where they're putting it. It's going in, it's going in the front. The front trunk. I'm a F-150 guy for past 15, 20 years. I just buy F-150s. That's it. And I was going to get one of those light names myself, but just the whole idea of not being able to travel long enough distances without having to recharge. And he's what really made me not want to buy one. Just to get, here's, I was real candidate up until those point. I watched a YouTube video where a guy had bought one. And he said, we live up in the mountains, there's going to be a test guys. He said, I'm going to buy one because I like them, just like I like them. And I'm going to see if I can get by with it. He got, gave that truck up within two weeks. He had to go pick up his parent at an airport. And he could not get back from the airport without recharging. It was embarrassing. He had picked up his parents, had a stop, and they had to sit somewhere until his truck could get home. He said, I'm taking it back to the dealership. It's just not worth it. And that kind of told me that's a real world situation that I would be in myself, that I would want to drive a distance and get back home in one day without having to stop and charge. And I'm not doing that. This is good. If they're adding this on or generator, that's pretty cool. I might do it. Think about this. You see that picture behind me? That is Plaskit, California, South of Monterey, North of San Simeon, Hurst Castle. That area that you're looking at, that picture is from a family cabin. And that area has no electricity still today. There is no electricity on that whole stretch of the coast. You can't charge your EV if you take it over there. Now, you also have to drive down to either up to Lucia, which is 11 miles away, or down to Gorda, which is six miles away from where the cabin is in order to get gasoline. Now, you will pay $8 a gallon for the gasoline, but you can get it. And if your $65,000 EV is over there, and it got there, but it can't get back, what are you going to do? You're going to call AAA. And hopefully you have that RV capability where they'll tow you 100 miles. You're not going to get home unless somebody brings out a battery, a big generator to charge you alongside the road or something. There's a business plan. I'm here in California, and I had to fill up gas here. It was 398 a gallon, I think, here. And Texas where I came from was, it was, it was pretty low before I left. It was average this week. I filled up this week and last week for $2.19 a gallon. Yeah, I saw it costs going before I left. You were $2.19. That's pretty low. Yeah. Yeah, both Costco and Sam's Club was $2.18. And I belonged to both of them. So yeah, great. And almost double gas stations around are still up to $2.65 to $2.69, but you can go to Costco or Sam's Club and get it for $2.18 to $2.19 a gallon. Yeah. What do you guys think about California has that law that all new cars have to be electric vehicles by the year 2035? This has to put a big dent in that. Yeah, we're going to find people voted with their dollars. They voted with their wallets. I still wonder why a California voter who's paying $4 plus a gallon for gas does not realize where that's coming from. Right? Yeah. That it's the people that they're voting for that are doing that. And then their houses are a million dollars a piece. And yeah, and then whole cities are burning down because they don't have water. And you don't like that. They're running away. They said, I don't think that they have still built if any, a few houses out of the thousands that were taken out. And it's over two years later and they haven't built one house yet. Yeah, California's in trouble. And that's who you voted for. And it's like, why do they keep voting for the same people who did that to them? They don't believe that story. And with Chevron leaving, you know, the predictions that has, you know, that gas price. Chevron, the Philip 66. Yeah, the gas prices are predicted to be around eight to $10 a gallon very soon. And by the way, Jim, down in San Diego, I haven't seen any 398 gas. Now I get premium, but I haven't. It's about 475 in that area. Wow. Yeah, I would flip out over 398. So do you know why the gas is going up to eight or 10 gallons an hour or dollars a gallon? Well, they've had two or three refineries shut down. We're going to have to outsource our gas. It's the same story over and over again. Let me tell you another thing. There is a law on the books. It's a very powerful federal law that says that we cannot take products from, let's say Houston, a port in Houston, and come down around the horn or through the Panama Canal and bring it into California. There is a law that says you cannot, you have to have train or truck, you cannot go by ship between ports for domestic purposes in America. What does that mean? That means even if there's plenty of gas in Houston, you cannot go to Houston, fill up a tanker with and bring it over to California. It's against the law. It's a very powerful law. It's been on the books for a long time. And it's some sort of maritime law that's very powerful and very strong. You can't manufacture something in New York and then ship it by ship to another domestic port. Now I don't know where that came from exactly, but that is the truth and that is the law. So what's going to happen is California is going to have to buy its fuel from Korea and Vietnam or other locations. And it's going to have to be shipped from an international port to California. And it's going to be man, it's going to have to already be refined because they closed, they ran out the refineries out of California. Standard oil of California, which is Chevron, which was in the 1800s built, you know, the railroads, they built everything. It was all around the power of that standard oil of California, which is now Chevron. And Chevron is packing up and going home. Yep. I better sell my house quick. You're going to have to buy an EV. They're closing the glass because it's cheaper. It's more cost effective to get rid of them, than try to retrofit them according to the laws that California's created about the emissions that have to be restricted. And also the cleanup and all those things that have to go for them, it's, hey, it's a no brainer. Shut it down. No real brainer. They lose a lot of money in the short run and they don't care. Why doesn't the, why doesn't California is to say, look, we're going to help you because we need, we because we need you and we care about our citizens and we want them to have a lower cost of living. We're going to help you by taking away some of these requirements and maybe temporarily until you get it all rebuilt again. And then we'll put some different requirements back on you, but help them. But there is nothing. They just let them walk out. And they did. They did. They let them create a sovereign well fun for the state based on the help that you give. These refineries and such. Take the money that they make and put it into a sovereign well fund or a sovereign environmental fund to fund the things that they care about. But do it more slowly instead of just jacking the price up to 10 bucks a gallon on that. But yeah. Did you guys hear, did you guys hear what the CEO of Chevron had to say about Newsom? So he reached out to Governor Newsom before making the decision to pull out a California and said, Hey, would you like to talk about this? Because this is what we're going to do. And is there any conversation we should have and Newsom at Courtney to the CEO of Chevron Newsom said, No, I don't need to talk. I'm good. To your point, why doesn't this day do something? It's the leadership. Well, the other good thing about these F-150s building and the reason why the F-150 saw the handwriting on the wall is because Ram Trucks has that capability now. And what is it called an e-rev? It's a great solution. And it's basically got a gas engine that it always runs at optimal RPM for generating electricity. It's pretty powerful. And like we were talking before before the pod was on about the benefits of having one of these trucks. Your house loses power. There's some sort of a problem. Or my family who has this cabin on the coast where there's no electricity. And if they want to do renovations to the cabin or something, they have to bring a generator over and or you can just bring your F-150 over with one of these. And now it does take some discipline not to use that in the cabin area because we always use carousine lamps, maybe a candle once in a while. We'd put a long burning candle in the bathroom. Right. You don't even have a solar panel yet. No solar. No, nothing. I get it. And that's by design. If you think about it, you know, we've done that for first centuries. And since the mid 1800s our families have been there and that's how that's what we do. When we go there, we celebrate the founding and the original way that we lived. Heat with a wood stove. Use propane for your stove. We also use propane for our refrigerators. Good for you. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Hey guys, what's about time to wrap it up? Sure was fun today talking about all these wonderful topics. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Hey, what are you doing for what are you doing for Christmas? Gus? You're all kind of things sit back, watch a little football. I'm sure we have a tradition of crab legs on Christmas Eve. Really? Yeah, there's a really cool neighborhood. Actually, there's a really cool neighborhood by our house called Candy Kane Lane, where every house is decked out. The tradition is Rojanco Loan's champagne. We drive safely over to this area and you get out of the car. You walk around. It's great fun and all the people that live there have bonfires and they're driveways. And it's beautiful.