Latest / Financial Survival Network / The AI Effect: How Robots are Shaping Economics, Interest Rates and Industry Evolution - Elliot Kallen #6059

Transcript

The AI Effect: How Robots are Shaping Economics, Interest Rates and Industry Evolution - Elliot Kallen #6059 · Financial Survival Network

• 0:00
  I wrote you that do not expect any interest rate decreases. Even though I
• 0:04
  thought this might be the best year of bonds at about five, now I'm
• 0:07
  thinking it's just going to be whole home. Okay. Bonds prices are not
• 0:11
  really going to come down. They'll stay pretty steady. Maybe they'll come down
• 0:13
  a little bit with some softening because are so high. But in general,
• 0:17
  I think we're at the middle of an okay time. It reminds me of
• 0:21
  a little bit bit about nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine. Is there
• 0:25
  the two thousand coming? I don't know, but we have such an AI
• 0:29
  boom right now. And I remember people yelling me in nineteen ninety nine that
• 0:34
  A, you don't understand. It's all about the new economy. The only
• 0:37
  economy is dead, and they were pretty wrong. You were listening to Carrie
• 0:40
  Let'sa's Financial Survival Network where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else
• 0:47
  to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival Network now more
• 0:53
  than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your free newsletter in
• 0:58
  gift Financial Service Bible Network now more than ever, and welcome. You are
• 1:07
  listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your most Carrie. Let's
• 1:11
  well, hey, we're still in the first week of May of this year,
• 1:15
  and next person you're about to hear from really interesting besides being a digital
• 1:23
  nomad, an author and a lot of other things, a speaker, and
• 1:30
  I don't know what else he does there, but a lot of different things.
• 1:34
  Elliott Callen, it's great to have you on the show. So life
• 1:38
  as a digital nomad, you know, that's everybody's goal now that everybody wants
• 1:45
  to just kind of travel around and do stuff and make content, write books
• 1:52
  or whatever and never have a place anymore. You're kind of head of that,
• 1:57
  Trent, aren't you. Kerry, It's great to be on your show.
• 2:00
  Thanks for having me, and you know, it's a lot of fun,
• 2:04
  and it's scary being in a world of AI and digital assets as we
• 2:08
  are today. I'm wondering if AI is going to put all of us out
• 2:12
  of business at some point on there. You know, I'm fortunate enough that
• 2:15
  you know, I like to write, so I wrote a couple of books,
• 2:20
  and then I like to do shows. So I've got a podcast with
• 2:23
  sixty five on my own podcasts that's now in the top two percent in the
• 2:25
  world. I'd love to be on shows like yours. I think you bring
• 2:30
  this incredible value to the market people that are listening to the boomers and the
• 2:35
  actors and the entrepreneurs of people that want to grab on to a good piece
• 2:39
  of information, another nugget, so to speak, in their career, at
• 2:43
  in their business life, and I like being part of that. It's enjoyable
• 2:46
  for me. If I had to give up my companies and do what I
• 2:49
  do, I'd probably do this because I like it so much. Hey,
• 2:53
  understandable, and yeah, so what is the thing you're most proud of in
• 2:59
  your life? What your life's accomplishment? Elliott, Well, I never would
• 3:02
  have thought about this in a different way, you know. But I have
• 3:07
  a charity that we started, and I know this is not a charity show,
• 3:10
  but I have a charity that I started to call a Brighter Day or
• 3:13
  at a Brighter Day dot info back in twenty sixteen, following the suicide of
• 3:17
  my youngest son at college. And so he walked in front of our truck
• 3:23
  and walked the highway, jumped in front of an ourcoming truck at the University
• 3:27
  of Montana, and we took that to heart in a suicide note to us
• 3:31
  where he just was such pain from depression that he just couldn't go on anymore.
• 3:37
  And we started a charity that creates resources for teenagers and their families on
• 3:43
  stress of depression with the goal of stopping teen suicide. We're now in all
• 3:46
  fifty states and we touch about four to eight thousand families every single month.
• 3:52
  Carry I got and so it would have been I was proud of my kids
• 3:57
  or marriage or I mean, there are a lot of things I've always been
• 3:59
  proud of, and all the things that would change if I could is that's
• 4:01
  the reality of life. But making a difference out of this tragedy is a
• 4:04
  pretty cool thing to be doing. Yeah, I'm sure it is. And
• 4:09
  I can only imagine the sorrow and pain you were feeling. So it's great
• 4:13
  that you turned it into something to help other people not to suffer a similar
• 4:19
  fate to your son. So, getting back to the world of business and
• 4:24
  finance, you've sold a couple of businesses, but you haven't given up the
• 4:30
  entrepreneurial bug yet, have you. Now this is business three four five that
• 4:34
  I've started that I'm running Now, I started an eighties following a big an
• 4:40
  accounting firm career, short, very short career, and I started doing that.
• 4:45
  I sold that in eighty seven and sold another business in ninety two.
• 4:49
  I like starting and I like building. But listen, nobody likes I can
• 4:53
  tell you there's no watch of an or that likes dealing with the day to
• 4:56
  day on employment issues and a cash flow at account rechievable problems at the bank
• 5:02
  calling up saying you're overdrafted, and how can you want to get your line
• 5:06
  of credit? And how do I borrow? These have the problems the challenges
• 5:10
  of an entrepreneur, and I love that, but nobody likes that part of
• 5:13
  it. So and I'm no different than anybody else out there. But I
• 5:15
  like starting and building, and of course I'm now beginning to enter that phase
• 5:19
  of my life that I got to think about exit strategies. I never thought.
• 5:24
  But like most business owners, you have a cycle of life and you
• 5:27
  have a cycle of your business. So yeah, everything is cycle. So
• 5:31
  I've learned that over time. So so talking about cycle economic cycles something you
• 5:41
  follow closely, right, of course, I have to, right, So
• 5:45
  where are we in the cycle now? So let me be a little bit
• 5:47
  of a contrarian for a moment if I could. I've been hearing that we
• 5:53
  were going to have a recession in the last half of last year, the
• 5:57
  last half of the year before. I'm not sure we're going to have a
• 6:00
  recession at all now coming up. And if we do, it's so mild
• 6:01
  you may breathe right through it. So let's go with a lack of recession.
• 6:05
  That if we don't have a recession, that we also don't have interest
• 6:08
  rates coming down. Right about bots six months ago, I wrote a series
• 6:12
  of articles about how interest rates. We have a newsletter that goes out to
• 6:15
  a few thousand people every month, and then it's theater that and if I
• 6:19
  wrote you that, do not expect any interest rate decreases. Even though I
• 6:25
  thought this might be the best year in bonds at about five, now I'm
• 6:27
  thinking it's just gonna be hole home. Okay, Bonds prices are not really
• 6:30
  going to come down. They'll stay pretty steady. Maybe they come down a
• 6:33
  little bit with some softening because they're so high, but in general, I
• 6:38
  think we're at the middle of an okay time. It reminds me of a
• 6:42
  little bit bit about nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, is there the
• 6:46
  two thousand coming? I don't know, but we have such an AI boom
• 6:49
  right now. And I remember people yelling at me in nineteen ninety nine that
• 6:55
  all you don't understand, it's all about the new economy. The only economy
• 6:58
  is dead, and they were pretty wrong. So, you know, it's
• 7:00
  interesting because I've looked at it from the standpoint of the dot com era,
• 7:04
  before the Internet swept the planet. You know, the American economy was on
• 7:10
  the decline. We were going to be a second rate power, and the
• 7:15
  economy was going to hell in a handbasket. And then guess what the Internet
• 7:19
  came. It led to what we still were unable to actually appreciate a massive
• 7:27
  increase in productivity at every level of business, right, and we still don't
• 7:32
  appreciate that. But just let's take the mundane task. I want to send
• 7:39
  Elliott one thousand dollars, all right. The way I used to do it
• 7:43
  was, Hey, i would take out my checkbook, I'd write a check,
• 7:48
  or if I sophisticated, i'd print the check. I would sign it.
• 7:53
  Then I'd put it in an envelope and maybe it had a window on
• 7:57
  it, and maybe it didn't and I had to write out or tight your
• 8:00
  address on it, fix a stamp, go to the mailbox, or put
• 8:05
  it in the mail stack, and it went out. Now I want to
• 8:09
  send you a thousand bucks elliot. I hop on the internet. I could
• 8:13
  send it to you by mail. I could send you a Venmo you get
• 8:16
  it instantly, or a zel or a PayPal. I don't think economists and
• 8:24
  the people that actually track this stuff ever really appreciated how the Internet boosted productivity.
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  I think we are at the same point in AI. I don't know
• 8:35
  if it's actually going to wind up eliminating jobs or not, but I think
• 8:41
  we're at the same point as we were in the early nineties, where things
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  look very uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen. It looks like
• 8:50
  a period of sustain decline. And yet this AI has come to the forefront
• 8:56
  and has the potential to change everything. Well, you're one hundred percent correct,
• 9:00
  uh, and in a good way, can change many many things.
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  In a down way, it's included in things like putting the American truck drivers
• 9:07
  out of business because people go to driver less trucks, about less serial killers,
• 9:13
  then right less serial killers. They end them the truck stop as we
• 9:18
  know it today. Yeah, but I mean it has the ability to be
• 9:22
  it is, it doesn't not the ability. It will be a huge disruptor
• 9:26
  and a disruptor in many good ways, but in the disruptor is still for
• 9:31
  the You know, they used to have this phrase that if you're neighbor gets
• 9:35
  fired from their job, gets laid off, that's the recession. But if
• 9:39
  you that's a depression. And that's kind of how it's going to be with
• 9:43
  AI, is that, you know, Just look, I have a writer
• 9:46
  on staff who writes articles for me, and I write as well. And
• 9:48
  at some point do I need them? Do I need her or do I
• 9:52
  need me? I can tell you from my own experience. The thing I
• 9:56
  used to hate to do most when I started podcasting youtubing was writing show notes.
• 10:03
  And I actually had hired somebody I was paying like twelve to fifteen hundred
• 10:07
  dollars a month. I did a lot of shows to write show notes.
• 10:11
  Then we got the AI note taker that's incorporated directly into Zoom and then chat
• 10:18
  GPT. You know, now I get those things done within five minutes after
• 10:24
  the interview has been transcribed automatically, and I have my show notes posted and
• 10:31
  then you know, shows can get posted sometimes in just hours where they used
• 10:35
  to take a day or two because I'd have a queue of them. So
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  that's just for me, and multiply that one thousandfold across the world. That's
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  relatively mundane. But yes, there are going to be job losses for sure.
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  But in all the industrial revolution and computer revolution that happened before, there
• 10:56
  was only one job category that actually was eliminated. Can't remember what it was,
• 11:03
  but it was a relatively minor job category. This time, Yeah,
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  ten million drivers. The biggest occupation in the United States is driver with over
• 11:15
  ten million people, and all different types of drivers, Uber, Limo,
• 11:20
  you know, taxi drivers, truck drivers, Van, Amazon, all that,
• 11:26
  and that's coming to an end, isn't it. It's inevitable. You
• 11:28
  know, I know you like AI and we use AI as well. Or
• 11:33
  transcribing. I think it's kind of funny that every time it sees a joke,
• 11:39
  it doesn't understand the joke. So describe it kind of like a liberal
• 11:45
  that's a different conversation there, or a gen X or gen Z or you
• 11:50
  know. I always say boomers are so old. Boomers like us are so
• 11:54
  old we've forgotten what a joke is. The Xers, I should, the
• 12:00
  Ziers and the millennials, they never knew what a joke was, and everybody
• 12:07
  else has just pissed off at everything so they don't get any of it.
• 12:09
  Right. Well, you're right about that, that's for sure. I live
• 12:13
  in California and were the land of the thin skin, so we can't tell
• 12:16
  jokes here. I'm enjoying it. Yeah, Like Jerry Seinfeld said, he's
• 12:26
  basically giving up going on the road to college is because, like I said,
• 12:31
  those people never knew what a joke was, right, and my bother
• 12:35
  so yeah, but AI has got to grow a sense of humor, if
• 12:39
  that's at all possible, right. I do think that the disruption again,
• 12:43
  and in nineteen ninety nine two thousand, there was a huge disruption, but
• 12:48
  the positive was so greater than a negative it was worth it unless you lost
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  your job in manufacturing to a robot. Things like that that you might have
• 12:56
  hated. I mean, if you remember the nit or were Orginia, which
• 13:00
  is a third of what it once was, and you got replaced by a
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  robot, you know you don't feel really good about that. But that is
• 13:07
  the reality of disruption, and we're in that again with AI. We're going
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  to be disrupted in different ways. Yep, yep, this is so true.
• 13:16
  And you see it like with that robot. I'm sure you saw the
• 13:22
  YouTube of it where the guy says to the robot, give me a I'm
• 13:26
  hungry, give me something to eat, and the robot picks up the apple
• 13:30
  and hands it to them, and then it says, put away these dishes,
• 13:33
  and it stacks up the dishes and a rack, and then he says
• 13:37
  to the guy, so, how do you think you did? And the
• 13:39
  robot says, I think I did pretty good. You said you were hungry.
• 13:43
  I found the only food that was available here and I handed it to
• 13:46
  you, and you said to put away the dishes, and I'd put away
• 13:50
  the dishes. I mean, man, hey, if I only had a
• 13:54
  spouse that cooperative, the things would be totally different in my life. Don't
• 14:01
  worry. You still have to have to find a new one if you need
• 14:03
  to. Uh huh, All right, well, I'm thank you for reinforcing
• 14:07
  my optimism on that front. So we're headed for changes, though, that
• 14:13
  much is for certain. And I feel like a lot of the political instability
• 14:18
  that we're suffering is the angst right that people feel at these changes. You
• 14:28
  know, look back like you and I grew up without the internet, right,
• 14:33
  and that we wouldn't think of We wouldn't let a day go by where
• 14:39
  we're not on the Internet. Our kids have all grown up with the Internet,
• 14:43
  are close to it. We didn't have personal computers. Look how much
• 14:48
  different our lives are today than they were just a few short years ago.
• 14:52
  You know, it's a trade off again. I think it's amazing what we're
• 14:56
  doing. On the good side, there's so much upside to that. And
• 15:00
  and when it comes to using the Internet, comes to using social media,
• 15:05
  there's a lot of downside. I don't want to send the Internet because it's
• 15:07
  amazing. Year tomorrow, your team needs to do a report about the Afghanistan
• 15:13
  in five to ten minutes, they can have that own material at their fingertips
• 15:16
  using just their cell phone. On the other side of that, the same
• 15:20
  cell phone gets some wrapped wrapped up in Instagram and and TikTok in a way
• 15:26
  that increase a highlight reel of everybody else's life. But they're own and at
• 15:30
  least to a world of sadness and depression. That's the flip side of all
• 15:33
  this ready made good stuff at your fingertips is also ready made band stuff and
• 15:41
  the manipulative manipulation of news, which TikTok now is getting quite a reputation for
• 15:46
  of manipulating the news on how they wanted to read. But there's nothing stopping
• 15:50
  it either. So you know that means that the entire generation of the TikTok
• 15:54
  generation, something you and I carry are not, are getting filtered news in
• 16:00
  a way that's very pro this and very anti that, which is not necessarily
• 16:03
  accurate for the betterment of the United States and our people. Yeah, it's
• 16:07
  so true. It's so true. So when we look back in ten years,
• 16:12
  assuming we're healthy, and maybe it'll be the robots erga basically doing all
• 16:18
  of our housework and everything else. Wouldn't be such a bad thing, would
• 16:23
  it. Where do you think we're going to be? I don't know.
• 16:26
  Do I need to watch I Robot again with Will Smith? Yeah? Yeah,
• 16:30
  Well, the dystopian future certainly is possible when you consider what's going on
• 16:37
  when tech and censorship and all that. But I'm an optimist. Basically,
• 16:42
  good for you, And I think from a you're look at how a life
• 16:45
  will get better, which again being the optimist that you are, and I
• 16:49
  think of myself. There also is you're going to have a maid service,
• 16:53
  but the maid service is going to be robotic in your house, and maybe
• 16:57
  they'll be making your bet and maybe they won't be. But we've already got
• 17:00
  the little I robot machines going around that now have the ability to understand and
• 17:04
  map out your house, so they don't, you know, suck up their
• 17:07
  cat or something like that, or knock over a plant. They're already doing
• 17:11
  that. That's just a matter of time before they get go from the small
• 17:14
  size that they are now to a higher size that they can make your bed.
• 17:18
  You may have a robot that makes your dinner, or that you order
• 17:22
  the dinner from a Fresh Choice or a Blue Apron type of thing, and
• 17:26
  it's ready to go, and the one you do is hit it on your
• 17:29
  phone to make sure does everything for you. And all you need to do
• 17:33
  is take it out of the oven and put it on a table. It's
• 17:34
  ready to go. These are good things in a wait for the personal sign
• 17:38
  of light and the fun stuff you probably won't be driving your car. That'll
• 17:44
  become considered old fashioned. Yeah, but you'll probably sit there and I'll just
• 17:48
  drive for you. But that's okay because that just means the fewer car accidents
• 17:52
  on the road, fewer car accidents are on the road means yeah, there's
• 17:59
  a straight let's top to other things like that. You know, it was
• 18:02
  a Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting and they were asking Warren Buffett about, you know,
• 18:08
  Elon Musk's contention that hey, we're going to have fifty percent less accidents
• 18:17
  on the highway once we have autonomous vehicles, and what does that mean to,
• 18:22
  you know, to Geico, which Berkshire owns one hundred percent of,
• 18:29
  And he didn't seem overly worried, said, like, everybody thinks they can
• 18:32
  get into insurance and it's easy. You just get money and then you give
• 18:37
  people a little piece of paperback and you repeat. But it's harder than that.
• 18:42
  But I think he might have his head in the clouds a little bit
• 18:48
  on this topic. I've been driving Tesla's now for three years, and a
• 18:55
  lot of them have been autonomous vehicles, like over seventy thousand autonomous view miles,
• 19:03
  a lot of autonomous miles. And I can tell you that on the
• 19:07
  highway eighty five miles an hour, it drives better than me because I generally
• 19:14
  wouldn't go that fast, but that car man, and then I'm following it
• 19:18
  up, so it's another set of eyes. If it misses something, going
• 19:22
  to correct it. Locally, it's not quite as good, but it keeps
• 19:26
  improving. And I can with the amount of improvement I've seen in three years,
• 19:32
  I can tell you that it's not that much further to go. Well,
• 19:36
  look at who's going to be the winner here. You've got people are
• 19:38
  driving your own cars or make your own meals. You and I are going
• 19:41
  to live longer. And if the average Americans living longer, now that means
• 19:47
  and we have an even body that breaks down at some point, that means
• 19:51
  people the industries that deal with longer living Americans, nursing homes and home healthcare,
• 19:56
  they're going to be booming. There's going to be a lot of hiring
• 20:00
  going on. Then there's going to be a disruption from manufacturing to that senior
• 20:04
  service side of the market. Uh. And then if you're you're on net,
• 20:08
  you've got less maintenance to the road too. So there are jobs that
• 20:11
  today they work for, you know, people that barely got through high school
• 20:15
  that worked for the county or the city on maintenance projects. They weren't designed,
• 20:21
  they weren't destined to go to college, they weren't ready to go to
• 20:23
  college at the time. Their jobs could be very easily be eliminated because we
• 20:29
  have more perfection driving. You've got robots cleaning up the garbage and stuff like
• 20:33
  that. So that's a change, and they're going to go work again and
• 20:36
  say, well, what might be a higher wage job. They're going to
• 20:38
  work at a nursing hall, which is definitely a lower wage job. Hey,
• 20:42
  you know it, start seeing it like all over I said, like
• 20:48
  two three years ago, you know, And look, I don't I don't
• 20:52
  favor EV mandates, I don't favorite EV subsidies. I think it's wrong.
• 20:56
  I think the market should be left because energy transitions that have taken place in
• 21:03
  the past, it's all been market driven. We had fire, right,
• 21:07
  we had wood, then we went to coal, then you know, we
• 21:11
  went to oil, and well first we had whale oil in the middle there
• 21:17
  we had a lot of difference, but the market dictated it and generally it
• 21:22
  worked out better, but to this government mandates. They don't know when government
• 21:26
  picks up winners and losers. But being that aside, I said, wow,
• 21:32
  the electrical utility industry is going to be major beneficiary. They're going to
• 21:37
  have to expand to some extent. But all these evs are going to be
• 21:41
  charged at home or elsewhere. And it's utility executives, you know, dream
• 21:49
  to see all the cars propelled by electricity that was before AI, and then
• 21:56
  we had bitcoin mining and all that. But the AI soaks up way more
• 22:00
  electrical consumption they am than even the evs do so, so those utilities look
• 22:07
  pretty good, don't they do. We really don't have a good energy policy
• 22:11
  in this country. You know, I am my personal feelings about energy and
• 22:17
  and but in general, we don't really have any kind of energy policy in
• 22:19
  this country. Yeah, I'll saw a couple of little tax breaks for some
• 22:23
  oil tax breaks that have been going on for a century, and then now
• 22:26
  some green energy tax breaks. We really don't have a good program. We
• 22:30
  need one. They have no policy on anything that works anymore. It seems,
• 22:33
  uh, hey, what about the concept of mail delivery? And we're
• 22:37
  gonna have to end it shortly. But you know, all of this mail
• 22:41
  delivery stuff seems to be other than packages. Seems to be kind of superfluous
• 22:48
  now, doesn't it. Well, it's funny carry everybody's been talking about the
• 22:52
  end of the US Postal Service from most of my life, and so it
• 22:56
  hasn't got it hasn't got away yet. It still does its thing. I
• 23:00
  don't know if it's gonna reinvent itself. But you know, the US Postal
• 23:03
  Service is part of the US government. It's you know, up until the
• 23:07
  twentieth century, it was the largest part of the US government until the partner
• 23:11
  governments and then social services alto goral, but it was considered the most important
• 23:15
  thing in this country was the US Mail. But the reality is that we
• 23:18
  just can't afford it. And you know, your children are going to have
• 23:22
  to figure out how to scale back the United States government. It's just too
• 23:26
  big, too compass, too extensive, uh, And they're gonna have to
• 23:29
  figure that out. So the US Mail is gonna be one of those things
• 23:32
  that probably gets cut big. All right, Hey, So Elliott, tell
• 23:34
  us where we find you on the web, how we connect with you,
• 23:37
  and all that good stuff. Great best place to find me is Prosperity Financialgroup
• 23:44
  dot com. Got Me Meet the Expert episodes, Got the book, It's
• 23:48
  all on air. My cell numbers five one O two O six eleven O
• 23:52
  three. People call me all the I'm on the West coast, so just
• 23:56
  be considered a time zones. And then uh, it's Elliott at E L
• 24:00
  l i ot at Prosperityfinancial Group dot com. All right. Linkser in the
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  show notes this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com. While you're there,
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  please sign up for our free newsletter. Elliott. Been a pleasure. We
• 24:14
  will talk to you again. Hey, you've got a question for Elliott myself?
• 24:17
  Shoot me an email kl at Carrie LUTs dot com. Elliott, thanks
• 24:22
  for stopping by. We will talk to you again real soon. Great to
• 24:23
  be here, Thanks carry, Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network,
• 24:30
  your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial
• 24:33
  Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever