Peter St. Onge: Revenge of the Blue Collars
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/peter-st-onge-blue-collar-ai-jobs
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/peter-st-onge-blue-collar-ai-jobs-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:02] Marty Bent: Ex's professor is back. The the econ professor Professor Peter Saint Ange. Welcome back to the show, sir.

[0:09] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, it's good to be back, Marty.

[0:11] Marty Bent: Good to have you. I mean, AI is so hot right now. I mean, you you DM or you texted me this morning saying I really want to talk about AI today. I said, Hey, I'm more than willing to talk about AI. You you notice that we've been leaning into more AI content before we just hit record. And I said, Why don't we just hit record and I'll tell you why? It's because we've been using AI. We've built basically a company brain and an agentic system that all of our employees can interact with that has allowed us to really expand. the breadth of content that we can cover, which has been a a very cool process.

[0:51] Peter St. Onge: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that's something that's something, what was it like buck twenty a couple months ago? Right before the war? Yeah, fifty-eight. That's insane. But yeah, I think you're right. I think that, you know, a lot of the number go up crowd. they, you know, the sort of hot money, they're partying in AI at the moment. AI has longer legs than AMC or some of the stonks from a couple years ago. So that'll probably hold their attention for a while here, is my biggest guess.

[1:08] Marty Bent: Yeah. Yeah.

[1:31] Peter St. Onge: You know, I think the underlying argument for Bitcoin is unchanged. but you know, a lot of people talk about Bitcoin like it's stable money, but then in the back of their mind, they really think it's money that's gonna go up a bunch. And, you know, like welcome to maturity in Bitcoin, you know, in it it yes, there'll be a huge jump, you know, if it takes market share from gold and from fiat, you know, there obviously be the massive step jump where it goes up 10x or 50x or whatever. however, you know, I think that this current sort of crab walk, I mean, that's what gold's been going through for 50 years.

[3:37] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I haven't been in this for twelve years. It's it's just another bear market to me. It's and it is each bear market is unique. twenty fifteen. Like this is probably the worst sentiment since twenty fifteen, where it's been I've been in this for thirteen years now, which is hard to believe. twenty fifteen. People legitimately thought Bitcoin was gonna die.

[3:44] Peter St. Onge: Yeah. Yeah. We we we haven't had Yeah, we haven't had a real competing investment story, I think, since Bitcoin was born. Like the closest that you could say was maybe the rebound from the 2008 crisis, you know, March of of 2009. we saw, you know, we had and that was Fed or anyway, it was just a rebound. and then you had a Fed-induced bubble going into COVID where they just dumped out all the liquidity that caused the inflation. So, you know, you had two periods where you had like broad equity strength, which, you know, on the margin draws out some of the demand out of Bitcoin.

[5:15] Marty Bent: Well, I mean, you messaged me. What what how are you reading what's going on in AI? Are you bullish on it? Do you think there's a mania going on? a what i irrational exuberance? Is that what we're exhibit what we're seeing? Or is this truly like a step function improvement on on technology?

[5:24] Peter St. Onge: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's both. Yeah, I think it's both. So I cut my investment teeth on dot com and I got into it because there was an interview with Paul Krugman where he said, he said, this thing's a giant bubble. Well, no, no, no, no, no. Earlier than that, I read an article in Wired magazine. It was an interview with Yahoo's CEO, Terry Siegel, I think it was at the time. And that was 1996. And everybody said the internet is this giant bubble. Don't invest in it because you're just gonna lose your money. I bought Yahoo at 60 bucks a share. Everybody told me I was an idiot.

[7:56] Peter St. Onge: Number one, if you look at the valuations compared to dot com, they are far lower. I mean, we'd have to go up probably two to four X from here to even get close to dot com, because in dot com it was all vapor. All right, if you look at the actual earnings, like NVIDIA is minting profits, like profits you put in your pocket. Okay, this is not eyeballs, this is not you y you know, the kind of hokey metrics that they come up with dot com because nobody was turning a profit. In fact, I think internet stocks as a group did not. Earn a single dollar throughout the entire 1990s, right?

[10:23] Marty Bent: And what do you take of the technology and its effects on the the economy?

[10:26] Peter St. Onge: The the the technology it's blown me away. Just absolutely. I thought dot-com was once in a lifetime thing. All right, if you look at the world before the internet and after the internet, I I thought we were never gonna see something like that in our lifetimes. And AI is 10x that it has absolutely blown me away. so the areas that I know about, right? Because you know, I don't know anything about coding. programming. There's a lot of crap I don't know about. I'm not qualified to comment how good it is. The stuff that I know about, which is economics, economic history, I it it I mean, you can, it is like having Murray Rothbard in your pocket.

[12:48] Peter St. Onge: the thumbs up. Apple used to program intelligently. The the you know what is it 2024 Chemistry Nobel was won by a prize you or was won by a team using AI, right? Google's, what is it, Deep Seek or something. That's the Nobel. Okay, you know, Yeah, you know, people love to trash AI. They're like, you know, this is goofy, what can you do? Put bikinis on, you know, rabbits. No, no, no, dude, like already, okay, protein.

[13:05] Marty Bent: Mm. Deep mind, yeah.

[13:18] Peter St. Onge: So that was for protein folding. Protein folding, again, I'm an idiot on science, but anyway, is approximately how your genes translate into actually doing stuff in your body. Okay, that is one of the holy grails in medicine. there's like a half dozen other, I mean, foundational stuff that AI is just solving trivially. So I am, you know, number one, blown away by how impressive AI is. Yes, it makes crap up. So, you know, if it's an important question, run it through two, three AIs. But what I'm really excited about is, you know, what's coming next in materials research, medical research. I think AI stands a very good chance of giving us quasi mortality, in other words, an end to aging within 10 years.

[14:51] Marty Bent: Yeah, I would agree. And again, it's because again, C touch feel. That's right. Anybody who's naysaying AI right now. I'm like, have you actually used this? Like, yeah, I've you I've used Chat GPT's bot before. It's like not that impressive. It's like, well, you're not actually using it. I mean you are to an extent, but there's so much more that you can do with it. And like bring this back to the bubble conversation. I keep grappling with this in my head, and I'm sure you've heard the likes of

[15:06] Peter St. Onge: Yeah. Yep.

[15:16] Marty Bent: Gavin Baker from a Treaties and others talk about this, but the analog to dot com. Many would argue, and I think myself included that the that there are things that really don't comport to what was going on in the dot com era, particularly like the the dark fiber, like laying of the broadband. There was there was actually no monetizable businesses in the dot com era or very few, outside of Amazon and Google before they f to

[15:46] Peter St. Onge: Well yeah.

[17:04] Peter St. Onge: I'm just length of bubbles. Yeah, well, you made a great point on the dark fiber, right? So the issue, if you're just zeroing in on the picks and shovels, right? So the issue for companies like Cisco, Lucent, you know, the kind of picks and shovel the the internet, the issue there was the dark fiber that you just mentioned, right? Which was that the internet, you know, all these people are you know, traffic was exploding, and so they built these highways out of fiber optics. The problem is that the price Of building a highway with 10,000 lanes is approximately the same as building a highway with four lanes.

[18:10] Marty Bent: It was Uber, yeah.

[18:33] Peter St. Onge: And it's not just the people you're replacing, right? The vast majority of the stuff you're doing was not being done before. Okay, so now, you know, you can have like a like a mom and pop ta taco shack that can go to AI and you know, they can they can analyze their their shoppers. So, you know, which part of the you know, week should I buy certain type of stuff? can you make me a logo? Can you make me a slogan? Can you make me, you know, can you program me a website so I can take over? Like these are things that it's not that somebody was doing it before that was replaced.

[19:41] Marty Bent: Yeah. And there's another interesting part of this AI story too, like tying it to the bubble as well. So it's pretty clear that the Trump administration has recognized and deemed this AI infrastructure build-out and I think just broad reindustrialization, even outside of AI, is in national security rests of view, the the race to AGI as existential, particularly as juxtaposed. To China and so you you're seeing like a quasi nationalization of certain parts of the market. What are your thoughts on this as a free market guy?

[20:17] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, so it's tricky. Okay. first the good, which is that Biden and Kamala, I mean it's not really them, it's their handlers. You know, they were very hostile to AI. they were trying to turn it into a government pet. you know, essentially the social media censorship model, but this time y you know, turning it into Big Brother. I think that was existentially dangerous because at the moment For a lot of people, AI is truth, right? And it you know, they need to verify, they need to check with multiple AIs, of which one should always be grok. but you know, even that's kind of unhealthy. But if government were actively, like if you had a political commissar of the Communist Party sitting at Anthropic, literally checking things, which is approximately how it was with social media, that was extremely dangerous, right?

[22:41] Peter St. Onge: but yes, I am not a huge fan of this idea of government owning things or partnering. I think there should be a separation of church and state when it comes to business in general, but certainly when it comes to technologies that can influence how voters think. Right? Because if government is tied up, whether it's social media or internet censorship or AI, okay, if government is controlling how voters think, the voters are not sovereign anymore. The government is a self-licking ice cream cone. It runs itself. That is a tyranny. So I'm not a huge fan of that part.

[23:13] Marty Bent: No, I mean the silver platter, I mean you mentioned Zovron Mamdani, but the election the primary elections in New York. I mean you have I mean he's the mayor of New York, he's an overt socialist, but looks like the state legislator and I think the senator primary, like three three spots went to overt socialist who want to who want to seize the means of production and distribute wealth and confiscate wealth and distribute it. You have Sam Piker.

[23:23] Peter St. Onge: He's Yeah.

[23:42] Marty Bent: riding pretty high on his own supply right now. And you d you do have this this growing unabashed socialist part of the Democratic Party really taking hold. And you can imagine I mean I think one of the memes that's been growing in strength over the last six months is is elections moving forward are gonna be communism versus nationalism. And the Democratic Party, I I think the the zealots who are overtly socialist and communistic are are beginning to take it over. And to your point.

[24:15] Peter St. Onge: They've got the fire. I mean, look, look at the rest of their bench. You know, you got Slimy Newsom, who's dirty. Nobody likes him. I mean, he's not popular. You know, you know, people aren't excited to go work for him. He's he's like an instrumental you know, you use him, I I guess, as a stepping stone of the Democratic Party. There's no fire in there, right? He he's not even Bernie Sanders. Forget Zoran. Who else you got? Pete Buttigieg? I mean it's a it's a thin bench. So you know, ALC gets floated as a pres she's you know, again, she doesn't have a large constituency for her ideas.

[25:24] Marty Bent: The sentence.

[25:39] Peter St. Onge: big business thriving either through lower taxes or through you know government partnership. so that was kind of the the fault lines. And you know, Trump broke the Republican Party, I think amazingly fast. You know, if you consider that in 2012 we had Mitt Romney, who was like 100% a tool of the old machine. You know, he had there was nothing about him that was against orthodoxy in the Monty Burns party. And then four years later, just bam, right? It completely transformed. And I think that's where we're going with the Democrat Party as well. So, you know, if I had to guess, I I I think there's a very good chance that their nominee for what is it, twenty-eight, could actually be Zoran.

[26:20] Marty Bent: Could it be? He wasn't born in the United States. They changed the rules.

[26:24] Peter St. Onge: Very good question. Let me see where I was born. By the way, the guy from NYU. It's NYU. His name is Andrew Lowe. L O. And he's done a lot of empirical research on stocks. worth a read. You can find all the stuff by going to Chat GPT, which is which is who gave me his name too. All right, Zoran Mom Dani Bourne. all right, let's see if. Kampala Uganda. The Republic is saved. Right, but but it's gonna be one of his acolytes who are born here. I think that's a like there's there's no fire. The party abandoned the blue-collar union guys. That's who Trump picked up, right?

[28:17] Marty Bent: Yeah, and oftentimes the Pikerman wait, mean, they they might have a short bench there too, 'cause I I don't think a lot of them are native foreign. like even Hassan Piker, I'm pretty sure he was born in Turkey.

[28:24] Peter St. Onge: They'll they'll have some Italian candidate who they insert some some pawn, some American born pawn.

[28:33] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, it is crazy times. I mean and then on top of all that, going back to sort of overreach and and maybe this isn't overreach actually I think some people could view it as refreshing 'cause you're just admitting what's been happening for for some time, but the the sort of nomination and the sort of nomination and the sort of accepting of that nomination of Kevin Warsh joining the Fed him sort of shifting gears, no longer doing forward guidance, but I think more explicitly signaling that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are g are going to be acting incompatico as they they try to reindustrialize and reorient the economy. And I I think that's a whole other can of worms we should jump down. Like what what are your thoughts on on Kevin Walsh as Fed governor and and his first F O C meeting and what he plans on doing?

[29:29] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, so he's been interesting. if you look back at his history, you could argue that he's a hard money guy. you know, during the 2008 crisis, we had from memory, we had something like eight percent unemployment and you know the economy was doing terrible. And he was like, No, no, no, we have to hike, we have to hike interest rates. I you know, which is I mean that's based, right? That's like old school, that's nineteen twenties style, you know, when the economy's in bad shape, you know, the reason is because you had all this irrational exuberance, malinvestments in Austria. and you just gotta purge all the junk.

[31:31] Peter St. Onge: is that it can, you know, raise interest rates in order to reduce inflation, right? But there's a second way that the Fed really picked up starting the 2008 crisis, which is that the the Fed just goes out and buys crap. So, you know, they go down to the basement, they type a bunch of zeros, then they say this is money, and then they go and buy stuff. So this is called quantitative easing. And what's happened since 2008 is that the going out and buying stuff kind of kind of took over. to the point where the Fed has, I think, currently about seven trillion dollars of assets that are built up on a balance sheet.

[33:51] Peter St. Onge: what are we, four months into the war? The inflation has not bled outside of energy. It's only in energy. In other words, companies are not raising prices. Right. So he could, what I hope he'll do is simply ignore the current inflation. I hope that he'll stick with that Robin Hood thing and, you know, continue pawning off the Fed's assets, bring inflation back down using that, not using interest rates. but the problem is that historically the Fed tends to panic. So You know, when when inflation jumps, that gets the plebs upset. If the plebs are upset, they call their congressmen, then their congressmen call the Fed, and there's always the threat that the Fed could lose power based on bad headlines.

[36:02] Marty Bent: It's already hitting housing in s certainly in parts of parts of the market across the country, right?

[36:09] Peter St. Onge: It it's hitting housing just the way it is, with rates, you know, not that particularly high. So, you know, if you if you hike another point or you know, another half point or point from here, then yeah, it's gonna even worse. And, you know, of course, the problem in housing is that the Fed yo-yoed rates, right? So you had essentially zero interest rates during COVID, in order to finance the lockdowns, the totalitarian lockdowns, that then lock all these people in their house where you know they can afford their current house at a three percent mortgage. They cannot afford it. A seven percent mortgage because the payment more than doubles.

[37:15] Marty Bent: Yeah, I hope they keep them higher. I hope they keep the rates higher. It seems like the AI infrastructure build out for at least some of the companies, the return on invested capital is making the the cost of capital maintainable. And then for the housing market, I mean I locked in a six seven five mortgage in February. And yeah, my monthly payment is not great. I think we got I think we got our house like twenty percent under market. Luckily we had some

[37:32] Peter St. Onge: Yeah.

[37:42] Marty Bent: The the previous owners wanted to give it to a young growing family. And so I think they were very amenable on on price negotiations. But I think broadly speaking, if you're looking at housing affordability, I guess it's pretty clear that the the the sort of sticker price of the houses are too high for for any millennial or endeavoring Gen Zier to to actually afford a down payment. And so maybe

[37:46] Peter St. Onge: That's awesome. Yeah.

[38:09] Marty Bent: Prices coming down with mortgage rates at six, seven, five, seven, seven twenty five. Maybe it's not a bad thing. I mean, what were mortgage rates in the eighties, weren't they? Like in the teens?

[38:19] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, well, they were really high in the early 80s. Yeah, that was like an overhang from the 70s. but if you look at a healthy housing market like in the 90s, they were pretty much where they are now. Like the rates, so the problem right now isn't necessarily that rates are astronomically high. The problem is that they were low for, I think, a two or three year period. And so tons of people refinanced, which they were smart to do, but the end result is that now they're they're they're kind of stuck. they have these relatively cheap houses, and if they try to switch out, then they're gonna lose it.

[40:41] Peter St. Onge: they're gonna get hurt. The people who are gonna get helped, what I think is fascinating, is blue collars. So we're already seeing that now, right? We've got some of the strongest blue-collar wage growth in 60 years. Price Waterhouse estimated that 4.7 million construction jobs are coming for AI data centers. All right. Everybody forgets, right? They talk about the AI data centers as if they were dropped out of like alien spaceships to come eat our jobs. They yeah, but somebody built this.

[41:06] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[41:09] Peter St. Onge: And it was not HR directors with psychology degrees, right? 7 of which they estimate one in five are gonna be permanent, because you gotta maintain the crap. And it's not just a data center, it's the you know, it's the energy and the water, and you got all this infrastructure related to it. Okay, so you've got a lot more stuff. And what I think is fun is that effectively the blue collars are taking the jobs from the white collars, right? The blue collars are getting paid more. Which is fitting, right? Because for 50 years now, the blue collars have been sold down the river. They were the main victims of China, right?

[43:24] Peter St. Onge: So you're gonna run that thing into the ground before you go out and buy a whole bunch of robots. So I think what we're looking at is the next 10 years or so, generalist white collars are gonna get gutted. The vast majority of them are, by the way, women. I think Brookings said 84% of the people who are on the front lines for AI displacement are women because women get generalized college degrees. They don't have concrete skills, they're just c they're they're cubicle people, not all women. I'm married to woman, women are fantastic. However, cubicle people are overwhelmingly women. So people work in governments, they work in big companies, they work in administrative positions.

[45:04] Marty Bent: Ha.

[45:19] Peter St. Onge: white collars did much better out of the Industrial Revolution than than blue collars did. Right? So before the Industrial Revolution, the wage of a white collar, so like service employment, I don't know, a tradesman, might be two or three times out of a blue-collar worker. When the smoke cleared, you're talking more like five, seven times. Okay, so yes, white collars did much better. However, so I was walking around New York a couple years ago, there were two guys moving cinder blocks out of a truck, and they're New Yorkers, so they're loud. And one of them is telling the other guy how he went to vacation in Brazil.

[47:45] Peter St. Onge: And guess what happens? Humans have an hierarchy of needs. And whenever you have the humans freed up, you know, people step down, it's like on an escalator, they step down to the next job. But the automation itself is making you richer. So that escalator is going up and up. When the smoke clears, if you look at the industrial revolution, the absolute worst, the people who move rocks for a living, the people who were in the absolute bullseye of the industrial revolution, make 50 times more than they did. So, you know, if if the AI, if the robots, if they come and take all the jobs, we're talking 20, 30 years down the line, great, dog walking will pay a hundred bucks an hour.

[49:41] Marty Bent: Yeah, we're gonna have to have these cubicle white collar women who make up go down to the dive bar, find your blue collar hubby, you know, get the fertility rate back up.

[49:49] Peter St. Onge: Yeah. That's what's happening. You know, there was a recent study that found that, you know, normally women do not marry below their education. Because women are high hyp hypergamous and they can't stand the idea of a man being with them as dumb. But what's happening now is that you have all these women who have, you know, master's degrees and they're hooking up with like electricians, because the electricians are making like 150, right? So, you know, you know, they can either party with the philosophy major who's between jobs at the moment, or the electrician. So No, it's beautiful. It's Revenge of the Blue Collars.

[50:25] Marty Bent: Yeah. So I I feel like we've been weaving in and out of incredibly bullish and somewhat cautious commentary here. What what are what's your overall view of of the economy, state of America right now?

[50:40] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, I think the economy itself, so I came into twenty twenty six thinking that it was gonna be really strong. I think the war's in the way at the moment, but you know, I think the war's gonna bounce off. I think the fundamentals are really strong in the economy. And the fundamentals are taxes, regulation. those are kind of the two big moving parts where the government can have an impact anyway. And on both of those, Trump's instincts are very good. you know, Republicans in Congress haven't done as much as I hope. They haven't done as much as they promised, they never do. However, at least they're not causing new problems the way that you know, Joe Biden might have.

[53:02] Peter St. Onge: hikes rates. General rule of thumb is that every point you hike rates costs about a million jobs. Okay, so the Fed could absolutely strangle the economy. hopefully it doesn't. I don't think you know Warsh wants to. the other I mean, those are really the only meteors on the horizon. you know, in the war, I mean Iran's trying to get all kinds of stuff. Frankly, the kinds of things that Iran wants, I don't think like for me being a mega guy. I don't care. Like, I don't care if Iran controls the Hormuz. That's not my problem. That's somebody's problem, but it's not my problem. so you know, I don't think the war is gonna end up leaving any lasting damage.

[55:23] Peter St. Onge: Right, that's why everything went up in COVID, even though half the economy was shut. but at the moment it doesn't even look like that. so yeah, you know, without a doubt, there will come a day when you know, AI stocks will drop by 30 to 50 percent. Okay, the question is, you know, do they go from 200 to a thousand back to five hundred? So that that's my expectation. The question is just when is that gonna happen? But in terms of the broader economy, I think we're a actually in a very good spot right now.

[55:54] Marty Bent: Well, actually, bringing this back to Warsh, I had a conversation about this yesterday on the show. another sort of policy position that he's put out there is that he doesn't want to do bailouts anymore. Like hi his what was his definition of a recession is his business is failing due to their own their own volition. If they get overextended on debt and they can't pay it back, they

[56:08] Peter St. Onge: Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah.

[56:18] Marty Bent: deserve to fail and to your point, like do they overreact one way or the other with interest rates? I'm very interested to see if he holds that line as well, because I I think that's desperately needed is this ability to let companies fail.

[56:31] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic about Walsh. it feels like he read James Grant's book, The Forgotten Depression, which any listeners, if you haven't read that, very strongly recommend. he talks about the last time we had a recession that the government did not try to fix. it's an amazing read. But and you know, the the the punchline is you know, let all the losers who created the recession get wiped out. That's capitalism, suck it up. you know, that's what should have happened in 2008. Warren Buffett was ready to buy all those banks out of bankruptcy. Like, if Citibank goes bankrupt, it's not that like the whole thing vanishes.

[57:35] Marty Bent: What was that nineteen nineteen? Nineteen eighteen?

[57:38] Peter St. Onge: yeah, it was it was like it it was right after World War One. so you know you had the what guns going back to butter. Okay, so there was a bunch of adjustments to that. And it's basically stretched over about a three year three, four-year period, of which I think only about six to nine months were were proper depression. And the government essentially just let it rip. They said, Look, you know, you gotta purge all this crap. W Murray Rothbard is a great example or a great metaphor. He says, Okay, imagine that you had an industry of locust. Fighters. All right. So you have all these guys, and whenever the locusts come, these guys go out and fight the locusts.

[58:56] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean a lot of these private credit funds too, private equity funds dealing with the private credit funds.

[59:01] Peter St. Onge: For sure. That you know, that's why part of me is actually okay with this whole shadow banking thing, because the beautiful thing about shadow banking or or or even shit coins for that matter is that there's no chance they're gonna get bailed out. You know? When Wall Street makes a mistake, they you know, they essentially they apparently get the r get the right to check on your credit. you know, the rest of these guys, the you know, private equity, the blue owl, the You know, Solana, when when the you know when these guys wipe out, they wipe out alone. It's beautiful.

[59:36] Marty Bent: Yeah. We need more of that. We need more.

[59:38] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's only a couple industries that have guaranteed bailouts. So cut those strings. if Kevin Warsh is amenable to that, then you know that that that'd be fantastic. Now we need Congress to get on board and Trump. Unfortunately I'm not Trump is mixed when it comes to helping corporations, unfortunately. but yeah, I would love to to cut those strings.

[1:00:02] Marty Bent: Anything else on your mind that we didn't touch on before we wrap up here?

[1:00:05] Peter St. Onge: let's see, we covered everything. did we get the politically incorrect what was it? Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, I think we we covered pretty much everything. yeah, AI boyfriends and girlfriends. Apparently spending on AI companions is now higher than it is on traditional dating apps. So that's what's coming.

[1:00:28] Marty Bent: Waifus are here.

[1:00:30] Peter St. Onge: The wifus and the husbandos, yes.

[1:00:35] Marty Bent: that's depressing. I mean that's

[1:00:37] Peter St. Onge: I mean it was always gonna happen.

[1:00:39] Marty Bent: I mean Japan Japan foretold foretold that trend coming. I mean Japan was a a leading indicator of that.

[1:00:43] Peter St. Onge: I I I d you know, young people are such a mixed bag, man. Like if I were like twenty right now, like on the one hand you have so much opportunity. On the other hand, you know, you have so many falling boulders. It's it's a tricky time to be young.

[1:01:00] Marty Bent: Tricky times and a lot of opportunity though. No, Gen Z, in my view, it's like half tradh, like crazy right wing, and then half like nihilistic streamers that are that are just trying to party.

[1:01:16] Peter St. Onge: Gen Z, okay, so that's the question. So Gen Z already looks significantly more based than millennials. you know, like each generation sort of echo, like you know, it's like a reaction against their parents, right? So, you know, the boomers are communists, Gen X are based, millennials are communists again. So that's my question for Gen Z. On honestly, I'm kind of optimistic. You know, I just saw my own kids who are they're they're right at the tail end of Gen Z. They're they're 15 and 17. And, you know, they cut their teeth or they learned about the world when before the censorship went in. Right. So you could say, you know, you could say racist shit, you could say just the craziest out of control stuff that came to mind in on on YouTube really up until what, twenty sixteen, seventeen.

[1:02:56] Marty Bent: You love to see it. I mean as a millennial and I feel like I'm an outlier in the millennial millennial demographic, but you love to see Gen Z taking the reins and distrusting authority. We need more of that these days.

[1:03:09] Peter St. Onge: We absolut and you know, if they're like this currently, when they're like still in the matrix, you know, like they're literally still in school, right? They have to, you know, parrot the you know, BS their professor set. So if they're already kind of based when they're still literally mid brainwash, I mean, you know, I think they're gonna be nuts.

[1:03:28] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well we'll see. This is this has been a great catch up. Yeah, that was

[1:03:33] Peter St. Onge: Yeah, always man. It's great it's great talking to you, man. Should do this more often.

[1:03:36] Marty Bent: It was a good it was a good amount of time between the last one and this one, so there's a lot to catch up on. The AI thing really took over over the last year and I'm I'm bullish right now. It's it's gonna be chaotic, like you said. It's gonna be a lot of change, drastic change, but that is life. That is the arc of human history, is constant change up and to the right.

[1:03:56] Peter St. Onge: To put it in perspective, so the average person changes jobs, I want to say every three or four years. They change careers about every 10 years. Okay? So even if the AI job losses are all career changes, that's about a 10% difference. Okay. It's not that big a deal. Like, I I so I'm 53, I've I've changed careers four times. I mean, like, and each time it was kind of fun. I mean, for me personally, it was fun. And you know, I I I I kind of like the blue-collar jobs better than the white-collar jobs. But anyway, I mean it's it's part of life. It's been happening forever.

[1:04:39] Marty Bent: Right. Right.

[1:04:55] Peter St. Onge: But the kicker is that digging the hole pays pays twice what the cubicle did. Like future generations are gonna be like, Why did you guys why were you, you know, mourning the loss of cubicle jobs? No, I think it's I think it's good stuff that's that's coming down the pike.

[1:05:13] Marty Bent: as well. I do as well. Well Peter, it's been a pleasure. And maybe we don't wait like a year or however long we waited to do it again. We should catch up catch up this fall.

[1:05:22] Peter St. Onge: Put it on a calendar. All right, Marty. All right, Marty. Be good.

[1:05:28] Marty Bent: Alright, peace and love freaks.