John Rush dives deep into the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation with guests Michael LeBlanc and Scott Garliss. The conversation explores how AI and humanoid robots are already transforming military operations, manufacturing, healthcare, and everyday life.
Rather than framing technology as a threat, the show examines how innovation historically creates new industries, new opportunities, and entirely new categories of jobs. Listeners hear discussions on Nvidia’s explosive AI growth, Tesla’s robotics potential, the future demand for energy infrastructure, and why skilled trades may remain some of the safest careers in an AI-driven economy.
John also shares advice for
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With your host, John Rush.
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Are you crazy? Am I? Or am I so sane that you just blew your mind?
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It’s Rush to Reason with your host, John Rush, presented by Cub Creek Heating and Air Conditioning.
SPEAKER 14 :
Okay, we are back. Hour number three, Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Michael LeBlanc joining us now. Michael, welcome. How are you?
SPEAKER 07 :
Hey, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER 14 :
I appreciate you joining us, former U.S. Marines major and founder of Foundation Robotics of Interest. Talk to us about how robotics and just that whole technology and where it’s going in regards to our military and I guess really just day-to-day life, where we’re headed with some of this.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I think it’s amazing to see. I’ve been back and forth from Ukraine three times this year and to really see just how prominent robots are on the battlefield. So when you go over there, it is really, it is not human beings that are on the front lines. It is drones that are all connected by cables to be able to protect against cyber warfare. It is unmanned ground vehicles. And now we have tested the first two humanoids in Ukraine and now are discussing the deployment of a thousand robots into combat. So I think things are transforming a lot faster than people may realize off the battlefield.
SPEAKER 14 :
Okay, so will this become, as we go down the road with battles in general, whether it be us against another country or country against country, and depending upon who’s supplying that particular country with some of this technology and what have you, is this going to become a battle of literally that of technology as to whoever has the best tech wins?
SPEAKER 07 :
In many cases, I think that’s going to be the case. So we’ve always seen these advancements in technology.
SPEAKER 14 :
Really quick, we’re kind of already there when it comes to some of what we’re already doing in a large extent, but this pushes it one step further.
SPEAKER 07 :
Absolutely. Well, I think a kind of key weakness of the United States is that we have such an aversion to loss of life. And our enemies know this, right? We had famously Bin Laden would talk about how he could just outweigh the Americans because as soon as we would suffer losses, we were given strategically. And I think that starting to put human-shaped robots out there, starting to put other drones out there and things, that really takes care of that critical weakness because people know that we will invade without having to worry about losing our sons and daughters.
SPEAKER 14 :
You know what? I never thought of it that way. That’s a great point that you just brought up and one that I think, by the way, very distinct difference in the thought process moving forward. And I appreciate you bringing that up. I didn’t really think that way in regards to this. It makes total sense. And you’ve got a great book coming up, by the way. in the near future what if anger is the answer we’ll talk about that here in a moment but this whole idea of using you know robotics and I noticed and I didn’t get a chance to talk about it yet but Southwest Airlines there was a company with a small robot kind of and I watched the robot kind of cool the way it moved and what it did and so on they had everything Everything approved its own ticket, the whole nine yards of FAA approved battery even. But yet once it got on board, Southwest was like, yeah, no, we’re not doing that. And they wouldn’t allow the robot on the plane once it was actually on the plane. They made them not take that flight, which I mean, for me and I’m not, you know. I’m not Southwest. I get they’re trying to be safe and make sure that everybody’s safe on the plane and so on. But if this is an FAA-approved battery, I mean, man, I would have eaten up all the press on that thing. Right now they’re getting negative press. I would have eaten up all the positive press had that been me.
SPEAKER 07 :
You know, I think it’s very funny to see this kind of thing happening, because on the one hand, people are very afraid about robots stealing jobs. On the other hand, you hear almost a DEI approach to protecting robots’ rights. Exactly. The fact is, these are going to be in people’s homes, they’re going to work alongside people, and hopefully they’re going to be fighting our wars.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, I mean, we’re headed that direction, and I think that’s one of these things I talk about AI a lot, Michael, on my program. It’s one of these things where you cannot like these things. You cannot like robots. You cannot like AI. You cannot like something, but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.
SPEAKER 07 :
Absolutely. Well, and just to give some numbers to just what’s about to go out there, you know, we’ve been around for 24 months. We founded this in May of 2024, so just two years, right? And we have over $100 million in revenue from commercial use cases, so that’s going to be working in factories, manufacturing, and we already have $67 million from the U.S. military. Right. And this is my second company doing this after the Marine Corps. But I never saw any numbers like that over the eight years that I did my last company. So it’s staggering to see just how quickly this is going to grow.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, I’m an employer. So outside of what I do here, I own some businesses and do some other things. I coach businesses as well. And And what I know is all of us in business, and this is nothing against anybody, I’m not trying to be negative here at all, Michael, but what we all struggle with as business owners is finding people to get the job done at the end of the day. I don’t know of a single company that I coach that wouldn’t do more with more people. I, myself, and my company would do more with more people. The problem is finding those people, and then once you have them, having them show up. not have illnesses and not have family problems and not have, you know, mental problems and on and on we go. I mean, there’s all these things that employees bring and it’s nothing against them. They’re humans. Humans have problems. It’s the way it is. Machines typically, you know, they run 24-7 a day. Yes.
SPEAKER 07 :
And I think this is what we really see is, you know, the ATM machine is a great example of when the ATM machine came out, people thought that it was going to put bank tellers out of business and we were going to lose all the bank teller jobs. What actually happened was ATMs made banks so accessible that we built thousands more across the U.S. That’s right. It expanded it. Which then hired tens of thousands more bank tellers. Correct. And I think that’s really what we’re going to see is these jobs – I always say robots are not stealing the humans’ jobs. Humans have been stealing robot jobs for centuries.
SPEAKER 08 :
True.
SPEAKER 07 :
And we’re taking them back, right? But when you look at what these jobs are that we do, they’re not what a human should be doing with their life. And they’re not what many of the humans want to do. The turnover is immense.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, and if you end up – even we take the home side or the business side where you can put a robot in and have it do some of the menial tasks that typically, again, I as an employer have a hard time even finding people to do some of those tasks. you know, menial tasks, whether it’s cleaning up or emptying the trash or cleaning toilets or doing this or doing that. You get a robot to come in and do some of those things. And the thing that people forget is, as you know, because you’re in this, all of those machines, you know, which is what they are, will still have to have somebody place them, maintain them, update them, clean them, lube them. I mean, on and on we go. I mean, these things won’t run forever by themselves. They’ll have to have maintenance. I’m an automotive guy. That’s my background. I mean, cars have to have maintenance or they don’t run. These will be no different, Michael.
SPEAKER 07 :
Absolutely. And, you know, the first robot that we put out, it replaced three people because it was a 24 hour shift. So it had two full time employees and an attempt to attempt went back to the temp agency. But two full time employees, we end up hiring because we’re also hiring thousands of people as data collectors, people to wear robot suits, people to label data. You know, so you see the jobs, the jobs just kind of shifting is what it does. it’s shifting and hopefully up-leveling people and giving them higher standards of living.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, look at what happened. And again, being an automotive guy, you look at Henry Ford, what he did with perfecting the assembly line. And of course, the carriage folks back in the day just thought cars were awful. And why would anybody do this? They’re stinky, they’re smelly. We’ve already had a proven source of transportation, horse and buggy. Why would anybody want to change that? And as you know, what history told us or showed us is Henry Ford took that assembly line. Other manufacturers, of course, started doing the same thing. And what happened was there was an explosion in the automotive world whereby not only was one job created, millions of jobs were created out of that.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, and that’s what I love to see. I know that a lot of people are worried about AI in music, for example, that it is taking the jobs of songwriters. I’ve been a guitar player my whole life. My three kids all play instruments. We’re a very musical family. But I look at that as really unlocking this barrier to creativity of people that didn’t have the 10,000 hours to put into the violin. A synthesizer allows them to do that much more quickly and to compose beautiful music. I think that AI is really going to be the greatest unlock of human ingenuity and creativity that we’ve ever seen in history.
SPEAKER 14 :
I can’t argue with that. I was talking to one of my clients today just about some of the apps and different things that I would like to have for my own use and perfect and have in my own life, my own business and so on. And a lot of that is starting to happen, Michael, as you know. And what it will do is it will free up time where other things can now be done or you can have more time. free if you want. I mean, you know, however you want to do it as an entrepreneur, you’ll have all sorts of ways to do that. And I’m like you, I don’t really see this as, you know, total job replacements. Yes, there will be some that lose their jobs, no doubt about it. The guy making buggy whips, yes, there didn’t need to be as many of them after the car came out as there was before. But but that guy could go work for Henry Ford very easily and probably make well, not probably at that point in time made more money working for Henry Ford.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, and that’s exactly what we’re going to see across this. You know, when you just start to picture, I remember the first time I saw a 3D printer and, you know, just watching it create, you know, a little plastic thing. You’re going to look into your backyard and you’re going to see three humanoids building a shed, right? You’re going to see them assembling kids’ toys. You’re going to see them doing these tasks that, you know, really free you up to do things more that you want to do with your time and to have more rich experiences.
SPEAKER 14 :
Absolutely. Yeah, no, again, I don’t look at this as a bad thing. I look at it as a good thing. I know the book’s not out yet, but talk about the book. We’ll get you back on as we get closer to that, but talk about that for a moment.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yeah, so this summer we’ll have What If Anger is the Answer. This has been a book that I’ve been working on for over 10 years, but it really deals with the idea that anger – has to be for something good, right? We’re given these things, you know, anger and gossip and bullying, and too often in the modern world, we want to eradicate them. But I’m really more interested in what it looks like to shape it. And the Marine Corps really did that for me. I think I was, you know, not more angry than, you know, the average 20-year-old male in the United States, but they were able to take that and turn that into leadership and grit and command. And so I try in the book, which I try to make a very quick read, about four hours it takes to read, to really talk about how the Marine Corps does that, how they can take raw anger and turn it into something that fights for good.
SPEAKER 14 :
Okay. Looking forward to that. We’ll get you back on as we get closer. Best of luck to you, by the way, in foundation robotics. And if folks want to follow you and learn more about this, how do they do that, Michael?
SPEAKER 07 :
OfficialMikeLeBlanc.com.
SPEAKER 14 :
Awesome. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. I’m excited. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. You betcha. Appreciate it very much. Great interview, by the way. Enjoy talking to him. We’ll follow up with him as his book comes out as well. Dr. Scott coming up next. And again, don’t forget, Dr. Scott’s got a great seminar coming up. It is June 4th through 6th, or sorry, June 4th, 6th through 8 p.m. at the Costner Rock Library that night. Nathan Lehman will be there speaking on all things regenerative medicine. Scott will be there as well. Call Scott today, 303-663-6990.
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SPEAKER 14 :
And we are back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Joe, what’s going on, sir?
SPEAKER 16 :
John, just an observation on disruptive technologies.
SPEAKER 14 :
Because you texted me or emailed me this. I want to make sure I’m clear. Mitch McConnell, yeah, he was not running. What I had read earlier today was the fact that a lot of the folks that he was behind lost is what I should have said. So, yeah, he was not running for re-election.
SPEAKER 16 :
No, he was right.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, thank you for that.
SPEAKER 16 :
Going back to your previous guest about disruptive technologies.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
SPEAKER 16 :
I want to give you kind of a classic case example. I come from a long line. My grandfather, my father, they all worked for Telefunken, a member of Big Bell before the breakup. When they first came out with the dialing telephone, the Communication Workers of America, the union, fought it tooth and nail, claiming that it was going to put all their switchboard operators out of work. And they were correct. It did. It absolutely did.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yep, it did.
SPEAKER 16 :
But today you have almost 10 million people in this country work in the telecommunications industry. And who makes more, a switchboard operator putting plugs into a switchboard or the guy splicing fiber optic cables?
SPEAKER 14 :
The guy splicing fiber optics.
SPEAKER 16 :
Right.
SPEAKER 14 :
And to your point, what really happened, Joe, is as technology gets better and expands, more people start utilizing said technology, i.e. the phone and the phone service. And as time went by, Joe, as you know, and anybody that knows the history and been around any length of time at all, I mean, guess world fuddy duds, we know this better than most, but As that technology continued to improve and it became more and more widespread, not that people didn’t use the phone early on, but the telecommunications thing just continued to expand and people realized that, wait a minute, we can do so much more with this than what we’re doing right now. It just blew up.
SPEAKER 16 :
Right. Think about all the jobs that wouldn’t be possible today without our modern telecommunications systems.
SPEAKER 14 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 16 :
Anything that has to do with the computer internet, John, can you imagine if you still had to dial and wait for the – remember the early days of the motor use that had the handshake in the cradle in the cradle had to wait for that way yeah and then you had to you had to hear the listen for the handshake and even after they went internal into the computer you still had to hear the handshake i mean yeah those are the good old days joe no they weren’t and you’re probably too young but i remember when i was five or six years old even after we had a dial telephone i have a memory grandfather he would want to make a long distance call and you could you can only dial local it was there was no such thing as an area code you only had the local seven numbers and if you want to call long distance like the like I was living in New Jersey, if you want to call Pennsylvania, you want to call Maryland, you still had to dial O for the operator and tell the operator, I want to be connected to this number. Yes.
SPEAKER 14 :
I vaguely remember some of that, Joe, mainly because people don’t realize this probably today, but growing up in Boulder like I did, the Denver Metro was local. You could call anywhere in the Denver Metro area, no problem. But if you called Longmont, Colorado, which, by the way, was closer than Denver, it was a long-distance call.
SPEAKER 16 :
Right, and you had to involve an operator.
SPEAKER 14 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 16 :
And that’s all gone away.
SPEAKER 14 :
And then people back in the day, Joe, as you remember, bought Watts lines and things like that, which most young people have no idea what I just said.
SPEAKER 16 :
I remember, John, because I’m not a young person. But, you know, there’s a hundred examples of that, John, where you’ve had disruptive technology has made various forms of employment obsolete. The jobs absolutely disappeared. But for every job that disappeared, you had- More filled in. A dozen, 50, 100.
SPEAKER 14 :
And really quick, Joe, and my brain’s kind of exploding with that last caller, or with our last guest, I should say. I mean, you start taking some of these medium-sized robots that could be in your home where you get them cheap enough where most people could afford one. I mean, can you imagine- the amount of support, tech and other, that will be needed if even just, you know, what is there, 200 million households in the country roughly? I’m probably off a little bit on that, but let’s just say it’s 200 million. Even, Joe, if 20 or 30 percent end up as a saturation, which I’m probably not far off of, look at how many of those will be out and how much workforce will be needed to take care of that.
SPEAKER 16 :
Oh, it’s going to be huge. And let’s go over to automotive manufacturing companies. Last time I checked, John, it could be up, but I think there was something like 750,000 robots involved in automobile manufacturing in this country.
SPEAKER 14 :
It’s huge.
SPEAKER 16 :
And each robot displaces roughly five people. However, but think about this, John. If the rest of the world was replacing five humans with one robot and U.S. automotive industry didn’t follow suit, would there be a U.S. automotive industry?
SPEAKER 14 :
No.
SPEAKER 16 :
No, you’d go out of business.
SPEAKER 14 :
No, you wouldn’t be able to do it.
SPEAKER 16 :
You couldn’t compete because the whole thing was to get – and, John, it’s been a while since I looked, but I remember the number of man hours per car has fallen dramatically.
SPEAKER 14 :
Oh, huge. And they’re better. And, by the way, here’s the other thing. And I was off on my – there’s 135 million households in America. But to your point, Joe, not only did it improve manufacturing and make the car – the process faster – The quality, you know, the paint job, for example, a robot painting versus a human painting. I mean, I go down the list of the panel fitment and so on. I watched a video the other day showing what you know, how a 1978 Cutlass was built back in the day. And oh, my word, Joe, the amount of labor that was put into building that Cutlass versus what happens today on the assembly line and the quality and the workmanship and the tolerances and so on. So much better today than they were in 1978. There’s no comparison.
SPEAKER 16 :
Better than any human could do.
SPEAKER 14 :
No comparison, Joe. Anybody that comes along, and I fight sometimes on social media about, you know, are old cars better than new cars? And the reality is you can’t take that 1978 and even compare it to even a 2008. Nonetheless, a 2028 will be coming down the pike in the near future.
SPEAKER 16 :
Yep. So, again, disruptive tech. But then you look at the steel industry and whatnot. If we were still making steel the same way they were in the early 1900s, John, you know – We’re turning out, you know, you look at man hours per ton of steel. You know, we’ve cut that down by 75%. We wouldn’t have a steel industry in this country if we hadn’t upgraded and modernized. So, yes, technology is going to make jobs obsolete, but inevitably, inevitably, the result is going to be more jobs and typically less strenuous and higher paying. By the way, every time I’ve automated a factory, We’ve typically done it to meet increased demand. So rarely, if ever, did we even cut any labor. And what was left is you had the same number of people working not as hard. All the grueling, dirty, back-breaking job was now being done by a machine. And you had the same number of people making the same money. working less strenuously than they were before.
SPEAKER 14 :
And let me remind everybody, too, especially those of you that are conservative Republican capitalists, which I and Joe both are, this country, as we go down this path, whether it be AI or the robotic end of things like our last guest was talking about, Joe, we as a country will definitely take the lead on that because we, by all means, have the means, sorry to put that in there twice, but we have the means to make that happen where a lot of other countries, Joe, don’t.
SPEAKER 16 :
Yep. And, John, I’m going to go back 25 years to my days at Carrier. Even then, one of our – and I was responsible for a – I ran Carrier’s North American service business. We had 1,100 HVAC techs in all 50 states. Well, we didn’t have a branch in Alaska, but we had 1,100 HVAC techs. And one of our stated strategic goals every year – and I used to have – I used to put – was to substitute capital for labor. What tools could we, you know, what tools and investments could we make in capital equipment that would reduce the amount of labor it took to either diagnose or repair? And when I say HVAC, I’m not talking the type of stuff that you find in your house. The equipment we service, John, these are the 500-horsepower turbine-driven machines that cool.
SPEAKER 14 :
They go chillers.
SPEAKER 16 :
They’re called water chillers.
SPEAKER 14 :
They’re 500 to…
SPEAKER 16 :
500 to 5,000 horsepower. Wow. Some of these machines, John, are 40 feet tall. Amazing. You need two step ladders to get to the top of them. Amazing. They’re turbines. They operate on incredibly high voltages.
SPEAKER 14 :
Amazing.
SPEAKER 16 :
And we were always looking for ways, what can we do in terms of equipping our guys in the field or our branch offices with high-tech machinery to diagnose faster, disassemble faster, repair faster. And we would spend tens of millions of dollars every year, John, on tools and diagnostic meters and equipment to diagnose and repair this equipment faster using less labor.
SPEAKER 14 :
So I did the math really quick, Joe. Scott Garlis will join us in a minute, and I’ll probably bring some of this up with him to get his feedback on this. But even if just 25% of U.S. households end up with some sort of a robot like we were just talking about, which, by the way, I don’t think I’m too far off. That’s probably a pretty conservative number. That’s almost 34 million, 33,750, that many robots out in the marketplace. Joe, how many people will need to be employed to make that happen?
SPEAKER 16 :
How many robots, John?
SPEAKER 14 :
If just if if 25 percent of U.S. households end up with a robot, that’s thirty three million seven hundred fifty thousand households.
SPEAKER 16 :
All right.
SPEAKER 14 :
And by the way, some of those will end up with more than one. As you know, some will end up with two or three, depending upon the size of the house and what’s going on and so on. But but my point is, what will the workforce be like to service thirty three million robots?
SPEAKER 16 :
Oh, John, even if it takes.
SPEAKER 14 :
Let’s say it’s not one to one, but it’s still going to be a big number.
SPEAKER 16 :
Well, let’s say it’s four hours every five years, John. That’s still four times 33 million divided by five. You know, you’re talking, what, 120 million? You’re talking 20 million man hours a year.
SPEAKER 14 :
You need people to do that.
SPEAKER 16 :
Yeah, to do that. And that doesn’t count the people who make them, but, yeah.
SPEAKER 14 :
Oh, yeah, I didn’t even factor in the whole manufacturing sides of things that you’ll need. Like our last caller or our last guest was saying, you know, he took people that were losing jobs out of one area and went to put them to work in his area.
SPEAKER 16 :
Yeah, and that’s been the way. And, John, if you look at the employment in the United States, it has continued to – yeah, you have these little month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter blips. But if you draw a line, John, through employment in the United States, it’s a steady upward trend. You could just look at the – I can get back to you with an exact number, but we’re employing more people today than we were two years ago. And two years ago, we were employing more people. than we were five years prior.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, I don’t look at the whole AI boom like a lot of naysayers where they just say it’s going to wipe out the workforce. Joe, I look at it completely the opposite. We’ll be doing good to have enough people to make it all happen when it’s all said and done.
SPEAKER 16 :
Right, and if you’re worried, get your job. You want to become an HVAC technician. I don’t care how good AI, John. No AI system I know is going to. It may be able to diagnose a bad compressor, but it’s not going to be able to replace a bad compressor in an HVAC system or a bad condenser fan motor. John, I don’t see an AI system taking the grill work off, undoing the leads, you know, going to the supply house, getting a new motor, installing plumbers, electricians, welders. John, I don’t see a mobile welding shop coming into your business. So, you know, learn to trade.
SPEAKER 14 :
That’s right. One last question for you because somebody texted me this and I’ve been answering this, but does Joe or John have a landline? So I answered back, I don’t have a landline, but I do have an actual VoIP phone that works with my business and so on. So I actually still have an actual phone with a cord. And somebody said, a phone with a cord? That’s crazy. Yes, I do. It is a corded phone that’s a VoIP phone. What do you have, Joe?
SPEAKER 16 :
John, I got one because they gave it to me for free when I got my Internet service, when I got my cable connection. Cable TV and internet from a local internet ISP provider, it came for free.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 16 :
And when I call into the show, rather than risk the cell phone call, which can be spotty, I’m talking to you right now on my free VPN.
SPEAKER 14 :
There you go. And to your point, for these types of uses, you can’t beat them. They still work the best.
SPEAKER 16 :
Yeah. John, I’ve tried both, and that’s why when I call into the show, I’m calling on my free landline that I didn’t order, but they just said, hey, well, here’s your number if you want to hook up a phone to it.
SPEAKER 14 :
There you go.
SPEAKER 16 :
It’s there, so what the hell, I hooked up.
SPEAKER 14 :
That’s awesome.
SPEAKER 16 :
And I’m using my landline.
SPEAKER 14 :
Good stuff, Joe. Appreciate you as always.
SPEAKER 16 :
You’re welcome.
SPEAKER 14 :
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SPEAKER 05 :
The best export we have is common sense. You’re listening to Rush to Reason.
SPEAKER 14 :
All right, we are back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. And Scott Garlish joining us now, Benton Pine Capital. Scott, how are you?
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, gentlemen. Well, how are you?
SPEAKER 14 :
I’m doing good. Always great to hear from you. And I spent really kind of the first part of the show today. I had a great interview with an individual that is a – I’ll just tell you really quick. So he is a former U.S. Marine major, and he is the founder of Foundation Robotics. And they are doing wonders. They are supplying robotics to not only the military but the civilian side as well. And we had a nice conversation about robots and AI and where things are headed. In my last caller, we talked about how – These types of things actually make the economy grow and add jobs. They don’t take away like a lot of people think. And so we can kind of start there if you want to kind of dovetail back into that because Nvidia earnings, by the way, we’ll start there. They are kind of – not kind of. They are the leader on the AI sides of things when it comes to the chips that are being built and so on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I mean, NVIDIA this evening told us a lot of what we’re hearing from other AI companies, frankly. Revenue is better than expected. Data center revenue is better than expected.
SPEAKER 14 :
Hang on, I’ve got to stop you for a moment. I thought the naysayers, oh, I don’t know, a year or eight months or so said that none of that was going to happen, that they were just going to fall flat on their face.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is correct. They all did. They said this is all hype. This is overdone. Guys are blowing money, and they’re not going to get anything out of it.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, I think they were wrong.
SPEAKER 03 :
yeah yeah i mean it’s it’s to say the least uh gross margins were good earnings and their guidance was better than what wall street’s looking for i mean it was it was really good across the board um you know and then on top of that what jensen wang then video ceo was talking about was again we’ve talked about this over the last few weeks too is the the shift toward agentic ai or ai agents in business versus just having it be situational, like, hey, I’m running a search query. AI agents are doing things. They’re constantly working 24-7. And it’s not that they’re putting people out of work, but they’re, you know, it’s the AWS, Amazon Web Services, that’s their big, the biggest part of their business. The CEO recently did an interview with the Wall Street Journal, and he was saying things we’ve talked about. He’s like, It’s not that it’s going to displace people, but it’s going to make them more productive. And what we’re going to see is it’s going to take less people to do the same amount of jobs, and that’s going to free up others to do other things for companies and basically drive companies’ business more and potentially drive their cash flow and their revenue more.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, and if you start talking about the whole robotics side, like I just was earlier with my first guest. In fact, what he was saying is, yeah, he put in some robots in a particular company. They replaced a temp and two full-time people with one robot when it was all said and done. But when it was all said and done, because he needed people, he took the two people that were going to lose their jobs from the robot, put them in his company. So they just shifted from one area to another. And that’s what you’re going to see when it’s all said and done, Scott.
SPEAKER 03 :
I mean, if we if we go back and I know we’ve talked about this before, but if we go back and look at, you know, Internet usage and if you I’m sure you remember how many people talked about the brick and mortar stores are dead. You know, so there’s going to be mass layoffs. It’s going to be like the Great Depression. We’re hearing similar stories now, but. If we go back to the end of 1990 and look at where GDP was in real terms, it was like $6 trillion. By the end of 2020, it had grown to $21.4 trillion. Now, if you looked at it on a year-over-year basis, you wouldn’t see necessarily hyper growth. But when you look at that over that 20-year span, it expanded almost fourfold. That’s amazing.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, that’s huge. That’s huge.
SPEAKER 03 :
And so it wouldn’t surprise me that when we look back at the start with AI, if we’re not going to see the same thing. And, you know, right now, what we’re just seeing, it just started a few months ago, was the shift into agentic AI or the AI agent economy. And that’s, you know, agents doing more like taking phone calls, making phone calls, whatever. You know, we’re just at the beginning of that, and that has sucked all this spare compute power and compute capacity out of the data centers, and that’s why you’re starting to see the hyperscalers like the Microsofts and the Amazons talking about demand exploding and talking about rental rates going up. Think about what’s going to happen when we move to sort of the, the word has escaped me at the moment, but sort of the physical AI is what they call it, and that’s the shift toward more robotic stuff, driverless cars, that is going to increase the demand for compute power and compute capacity, and all the infrastructure parts that go into that, it’s going to increase that demand even more.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yep. In my notes, you said yesterday Google said it’s processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month across all of its AI products. For context, that’s a huge increase from $480 trillion in 2025 and then just $9.7 trillion in 2024. That’s huge growth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I mean, think about that. When’s the last time you ever talked about something in terms of quadrillion?
SPEAKER 14 :
Oh, never. Never.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. You’re talking about hundreds of trillions, and this is per month. That’s amazing. It’s mind-boggling. And again, we’re still in the early stages. So when I’m trying to think about, gee, where are we going to be? What’s this going to look like in three to five years? I think we’re going to keep seeing growth.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, I think so, too. In fact, I think my impression, again, even I think as a host, Scott, I look at these things way different than probably even a lot of other hosts do. There’s a lot of naysayers out there when it comes to AI and robotics and so on, and I’m kind of the opposite. I look at this and say, man, A, huge opportunity. Lots of things are going to grow from this. It’s going to help us out immensely. I was talking a moment ago with our last caller that there’s 135 million households in America, and even if just 25% of those end up with some sort of a humanoid robot to help around the house cleaning, whatever, You know, that’s a huge number. It’s, you know, roughly, you know, 35 million. I have to do the math again. Sorry, 35 million. I want to say households that would end up with a robot at just a 25 percent saturation rate. Thirty three million. Sorry. So close to 34. I mean, at the end of the day, the amount of infrastructure needed to even support just a quarter of American households having a robot. And by the way, that could grow exponentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And think about the mom or dad that stays at home and maybe does or spends a bunch of the time taking care of all that stuff. Freeing up time to spend with their kids, to teach them to play a sport, to learn, to do whatever. Think about how much it might improve the family life. Oh, exactly.
SPEAKER 14 :
And then you start talking about, you know, the whole health care end of things to where there’s menial tasks that are done in a lot of health care organizations from just regular people. cleaning, you know, to emptying trash, to doing this, to doing that. And the fact that that robot’s always going to be there working, you have to worry about somebody missing a shift. And then you start talking about the actual, you know, care for certain individuals where, you know, it could just be the care for that person is helping out with dishes and laundry and food prep and so on. I mean, you start going down the line here, Scott, and the list is endless as the things that could, you know, that could be helped with it right now, in some cases, probably isn’t even getting done correctly.
SPEAKER 03 :
And profitability for companies should go up, so hopefully the companies that, you know, they’re able to pay their workers a little bit more and still take home more money and keep it in their pocket because, you know, AI robots can take care of some of these things.
SPEAKER 14 :
Right. I mean, I look at some of these facilities. I mean, after what I went through with my dad and the facilities and so on, and I’m not trying to knock. I get it. Facilities struggle like everybody else does to have people to do janitorial work and cleaning and so on. But, man, you know, the place my dad was at, which was a pretty nice place, but if it had some sort of an AI-driven robot, you know, cleaning, you know, droid, whatever you want to call it, oh, my word, the place would be immaculate, which I’ll be straight up honest, it wasn’t, meaning that it’s nothing against the folks that were there, but it needed more, and there wasn’t enough there to do that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and to your point, precision cleaning might cut down on – Infections and other things that they caught and so on.
SPEAKER 14 :
Again, you look at the – again, my mind goes 100 miles an hour because there’s so many uses for these things across the board that I think a lot of people – again, the naysayers would say, oh, no, no, that’s not – it’s like the horse and buggy guys back in the day talking about the Model T. I mean, the reality is it’s coming. How is it going to be used?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it definitely, it’s going to change things. it feels like it’s going to get used the right way. There’s always going to be somebody that’s going to be looking for something outside the lines. But that’s everything we come across. But yeah, I mean, from what I see and read, it seems like it’s going to make society more productive, more efficient. And people can frankly get more things done. Businesses can get more things done. I don’t think that’s horrible. And like I said before, if You know, you can have a robot in your house to free time up for a parent to spend more time with their children instead of, you know, being like, hey, gee, I’m really sorry. I can’t do any of these things with you because I’m tired of doing all this other stuff. I mean, there is a quality of life aspect there that I think is very beneficial emotionally and mentally for people. But I don’t think that really gets brought up in the conversation very much.
SPEAKER 14 :
I don’t either. And then, you know, we start looking at, you know, just some of the AI, you know, Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT and Gronk. I mean, I can go down the list of the ones that are out there and all of those are going to continue to grow. In fact, you’ve got in my notes here that the standalone Gemini app, that’s not even the built-in, but just a standalone app has doubled its users year over year, jumping from 400 million monthly to over 900 million last month. That’s amazing.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is, I mean, it’s almost like a seventh or an eighth of the world’s population. Wow. Wow. Yes.
SPEAKER 14 :
It’s amazing. And again, that’s just one. They’re all going to continue to grow, meaning that everything else you and I have been talking about is also going to continue to grow. And I guess, you know, lastly, I guess that’s where, you know, from the investment sides of things, as folks are looking out there, you know what to invest in, not invest in and so on. What should they be looking at to try to, you know, to try to make some money on all of this?
SPEAKER 03 :
I mean, to my way of thinking and what I see, you know, one of the things I think is really interesting is Tesla. I mean, I think Tesla’s way ahead of the game in terms of the robotic or the physical AI side of things. I don’t think there’s really anybody really close to what Tesla’s doing there right now. So if you want to invest in, look, robotic AI is a ways out there, but You want to invest now, before it’s here, not wait until it gets here. you know and then the other thing i really think of as we talk about all this is it’s still power demand right right there is you know what we’re talking about and people aren’t going to want to hear some of this but you know compute power compute capacity or data center usage they’re going to have to build more power yep um yep and there’s going to be there’s going to be more demand so you know i would look at i’m trying to think of what the It’s escaping me at the moment. There are some good power company ETFs. I think it’s NLR is the one that I’m looking it up right now. Bear with me one second. No, you’re fine. Take your time. It’s VanEck NLR ETF. They do some uranium and nuclear energy stocks. And basically, it’s a way to play energy demand. And again, I think energy demand is only going higher. And I think if you look, you have a long-term view and you’re steady eddy, you buy something like an NLR, you dividend invest, and you just ride it out.
SPEAKER 14 :
Okay, I’m writing that down. And for those of you listening, that’s a great tip. And again, Scott, I can’t disagree with you. I think everything that you and I tend to talk about, which I know we look at things a little differently. I listen to not a lot of other talk shows and such, Scott, but I follow trends and different things and comments people make and so on and so forth. I will tell you that we’re probably one of the few shows out there that are talking about all of this in a positive way. Most are talking about it negatively.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I think part of the problem, unfortunately, is sometimes these things become political footballs. Right now, you’ve got a situation where that’s happening. People are trying to get soaked up about them. You’re trying to get voters soaked up about the midterms. I just don’t. I think this is a great thing for our economy and our country, and it’s what the U.S. does well. We talked about this before. We dominate the tech industry, and we’re constantly evolving and growing it, and the U.S. economy has done very well by it. And I think we need to make sure that instead of fighting it, we need to We need to control our own destiny. I agree. We need to do great things.
SPEAKER 14 :
Well, and really quick, I talked about this with my last caller, who, by the way, actually resides in Jersey, but we were talking for a moment. And, you know, when it comes to a lot of what we’re talking about, and I get it that the AI usage is huge all over the world, but we start talking about, you know, robots in homes and so on, not just businesses, but homes. And by the way, I didn’t even factor the business into that last figure. I just talked about households themselves just doing household chores. There’s many a business that would take a humanoid and robot and put that thing to work in a heartbeat, just cleaning and doing menial tasks and so on. So at the end of the day, though, where I was going with this, Scott, is because we have the means as Americans, we will be by all means the leader in having these things, having the technology, being on the forefront. Yes, there’ll be other countries doing this, but you know as well as I, we have the capital because we’re a capitalist society to make this happen where other countries won’t.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s correct. And to shun that opportunity just for the sake of it would be foolish.
SPEAKER 14 :
Agree. Fully agree. How do folks find you, Scott? Ben Pine Capital.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, sure. Ben Pine Capital. You can follow me, C. Scott Garlis, on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Substack.
SPEAKER 14 :
Awesome. Always a joy, Scott. I appreciate it greatly. Have a great rest of your week, sir.
SPEAKER 03 :
John, thanks for your time, and to everybody out there that’s had someone that’s served or fallen in combat.
SPEAKER 14 :
Yeah, awesome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Think about you on Memorial Day weekend.
SPEAKER 14 :
Absolutely. Have a great one as well, Scott. Appreciate you greatly. Thanks for saying that. You too. Thank you. You betcha, man. Great guy, by the way. You need any help at all when it comes to your investments, give him a call on the same token. If you need any help with investments, you want to talk to somebody, one-on-one here in Colorado, that is Al Smith, Golden Eagle Financial. Talk to him today. Find him at klzradio.com.
SPEAKER 10 :
A stale retirement plan could cost you the retirement you’ve been working for. That’s why you cannot afford to miss getting a fresh perspective with Al Smith of Golden Eagle Financial. If your retirement plan isn’t producing the returns you expected, don’t ignore it. Does your current advisor make sure you’ll have the income you actually need to enjoy retirement and do the things you want to do? Or maybe your investment accounts are just sitting on autopilot with a DIY platform or service where you don’t even know what gains you could be missing. Personal financial advisor Al Smith takes the time to understand your goals and dreams for retirement. Then he builds a strategy designed to support them. He’ll help you see what your financial plan could realistically produce as retirement income. We’ll be right back.
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SPEAKER 04 :
This isn’t Rage Radio. This is Real Relatable Radio. Back to Rush to Reason.
SPEAKER 14 :
All right, just a few minutes left of this show, and we’ll get you guys out of here. And, again, the first hour replays again, of course, from 6 to 7 p.m. But back to AI. Got a couple of minutes here. And with graduation season and, you know, folks are looking to, you know, kids are going to go off to college. Some are graduating from college and are looking to start their careers and so on. And there’s going to be a lot of kids, by the way, that are just entering into high school. You know, for those of you that have kids, every year it’s a different thing. And I raised a lot of kids, so I know how this works. And I also know that kids at an early age especially may or may not know what they want to do later on in life. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Where I’m going with this is for those of you that are parents and or grandparents where you may have some influence – If I was to give advice to any young person right now that’s entering into that kind of that middle school slash high school end of things, I would be looking at what are you going to be safe with job wise, no matter what AI and the robotic end of things does. That’s what I would be looking at. In other words, what are you going to do to be able to feed yourself and your potential family once you’re done with your schooling? You know, what’s that look like and what’s that field that you want to get into whereby you know you’re fairly safe in said field? Now, is every field safe? Some are pretty safe. You look at what Joe was talking about earlier when it comes to HVAC and just some of the things that technicians have to go do, the automotive world and so on, plumbing. I mean, I can go down the list. Heavy equipment operators and so on, which some of that might actually change as robotics changes. But for right now, you need all those folks. And by the way, I don’t see that changing in the near future. You’re going to need folks to do some of that stuff. Even Joe talking about some of the people that splice cables and work for telecommunications and so on. That’s not going to change. You’re going to need some of those people. So my advice to those young people listening would be find those areas, as I’ve always said, not that you love. but that you’re good at. Because I say it all the time and I’m going to keep saying it, you can love something to death and suck at it and you’ll be poor. You can not like something a whole lot but be really good at it and make millions. That’s what you need to find. So if you’re a young person out there listening or you’ve got any influence upon a young person, and I think guidance counselors and teachers and even pastors and clergy and so on get this wrong all the time, don’t tell people to go do what they love. Go tell people to do what they’re good at. Get rid of this whole, I love this, so I’m going to be good at it. No, that’s not always the case. You may love something and suck at it. If you’re good at it, though, and you perfect that and you become the best at that, you’ll be fine. You’ll make money. You’ll feed your family and you’ll be just fine. And oh, by the way, here’s how this works. Once you’ve done that and you’ve made a really good living and you’ve put some money away and you’ve got a nice little nest egg, guess what? Now you can go do whatever you love, even if you’re not good at it. Who cares? You’ve made money. You can go do what you love, even if you’re bad at it. The problem is we reverse that. And that’s where we do too many, you know, we do so much disservice to young people, by the way, by reversing that and the harm that’s done to them. We need to stop that and quit telling people to go do what they love and tell people to go do what they’re good at. That’s it for today, guys. Have a safe night out there. This is Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560.
Republic Or Democracy? Why It Matters. And The Interview Everyone’s Arguing About.