AI Hype vs. Real Estate Reality: Here’s The Catch

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] With how high the stock market is and all of the money coming from AI, there was this report that just came out that said $300,000,000,000 is gonna go back into the economy. And the reason that made me even more of a bear is I realized they nominated someone, but he still has to, like, go through Senate approval and everything else.

Dylan Koch: [0:17] Yes. But there's never been a time where they said no. So

Mike DeHaan: [0:21] Except for right now. We'll see.

Dan Austin: [0:23] Maybe.

Mike DeHaan: [0:24] What's going on, guys? Welcome to Collecting Keys. I'm Mike DeHaan here with my cohost, Dan Austin and Dylan Cook. Rounding out January today, recording this on the thirtieth. So, hopefully, you guys had a good first start to the year. And I'm sure that, like, statistically, at least 70% of you have given up on your New Year's resolutions. So sorry. Sucks to suck, I guess.

Dan Austin: [0:47] I'm in that statistic.

Mike DeHaan: [0:48] It's probably more than 70, honestly, if you look at it.

Dylan Koch: [0:50] I would say the gym has gotten less crowded. Oh, of course.

Dan Austin: [0:54] Yeah. No. Don't be hating on those people. They're trying. They're just, it's addiction. It's like they're addicted. They're just in their early stages of it. They're trying to overcome something, but they can't. So maybe next year will be the year that they finally break through and get healthy.

Mike DeHaan: [1:06] Fifteenth try. You know, fifteenth time's the charm. They've been trying to get back in shape since they are 25. They said they turned 40, and now it's a bro.

Dan Austin: [1:13] It's a disease, man. It's a disease.

Mike DeHaan: [1:14] It's a disease. Hey. I will never ever hate on somebody that's, like, at the gym actually putting in effort. I will only put, like, hate on the person who talks about all the effort they're putting in that you know they're not actually putting in. Yes. Which is a lot of people. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [1:29] So They're literally there for like ten minutes to take their Instagram posts and then head out.

Mike DeHaan: [1:33] Yeah. Or they're like they talk about they're dieting, but then you like, know, see them ordering a cheeseburger at lunch. Like fucking come on, dude.

Dan Austin: [1:39] You know what though? I don't care if it's a fat dude doing that, honestly, because it's like, you know what? You're living that life. It's the skinny 23 year old that's talking about how hard they're working. I'm like, no. You're not working hard. You're skinny and you're 23.

Mike DeHaan: [1:49] Yeah. Well, I don't care if they do that in general as long as they don't pretend like they're not and then complain about it. Know? Like, people are free to do whatever they want. You know? I really don't care. You know? And the it's funny. I was, we'll start with this. I I just spent the past week at a at a Go Bonnet event in Breckenridge, Colorado. And it's always really interesting when you're in this dynamic. So if you're familiar with GoBundance, it's like a men's group that has entrepreneurs, real estate people we talk about here a lot. Go look it up. It's just a fake stupid made up word. Just abundance with a g o in the front. And removing

Dan Austin: [2:19] the a.

Mike DeHaan: [2:19] Yeah. I'm removing the a. But when you go to stuff like that, there's always such a wide range of personalities that are there. People that are very sort of like type a, people that are very type b, people that are very religious, people that are not, people that are very successful and like have kind of made it. People are trying to figure it out. And they're, along the health spectrum or something else too. It's always so interesting to watch the social pressures unfold with people around, like, the meal sessions that they do. You're, like, watching people at, like, what they get on their plate. Do they grab dessert? All these sort of things. And how, like, kind of conscientious everyone else is of what the other people are doing. And it's a it's a really interesting just, like, social observation because some people really care, like, a lot. You know, and they'll have to like make comments about like why they're not getting dessert or like why they got more vegetables or different things when really nobody gives a shit. Yeah. Right? But there's like such this weird like shame thing when you're in that group of people that like Well,

Dan Austin: [3:19] it's because they're all just like a day before made there.

Dylan Koch: [3:21] Well, it's because if you're in GoBundance, you just have the identity of health being a pillar.

Dan Austin: [3:25] Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [3:25] Yeah. So when you're there surrounded by the same people, you can't just be like, I'm getting the worst food that could have possibly imagined. Like, this doesn't feel genuine.

Mike DeHaan: [3:33] Yeah. And I went there and I ate dessert all three days and it was delicious.

Dan Austin: [3:37] Yeah. I always eat those little hotel desserts. They're great. You get, like, three different kinds. It's, like, my style, like, little tapas. You know what I

Mike DeHaan: [3:42] mean? Oh, yeah, dude.

Dylan Koch: [3:43] Alcohol is another big thing there. People will be like, I have been sober for fifteen years. And I'm like, bro, saw you, like, throw back three tequilas, like, whatever last night.

Mike DeHaan: [3:51] I know. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [3:52] That's bad.

Mike DeHaan: [3:52] The thing is too, depending on who you're with, sometimes the best socializing happens is at the bar. Like, you get into the most, like, in-depth conversations with people. You know, it's a social lubricant. So people get a little

Dan Austin: [4:04] bit more

Mike DeHaan: [4:04] open with stuff. 100%.

Dan Austin: [4:05] That's why I never do the events. They're like, are you gonna do breath work at 5AM? I'm like, no. I'm gonna be like trying to sleep this off.

Dylan Koch: [4:12] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [4:12] But I don't One day I went to lunch, and we went to this really awesome place, and they had this really awesome cocktail menu. And I'll be honest, I succumbed to the social pressure, I did not order a delicious Bloody Mary that the lady across the board for me had.

Dan Austin: [4:23] Why? Because nobody else was doing it?

Mike DeHaan: [4:25] Because I was the only one. Everyone was like, water. Don't drink. I'm like, oh, fuck. I guess I'll have

Dylan Koch: [4:29] See what's funny? If they would have started with you to order and you ordered Bloody Mary, I bet other people around the table would have gotten a Bloody Mary's.

Dan Austin: [4:35] Guarantee it. They were waiting.

Dylan Koch: [4:36] But because whoever went first got the water

Mike DeHaan: [4:38] I know.

Dylan Koch: [4:39] Yeah. That's how it works.

Mike DeHaan: [4:40] You're not wrong, dude.

Dan Austin: [4:41] I live my life by, you know what? I don't care what other people are doing. I'm just going to go all in. If I'm a person like, I don't drink alcohol a lot or in excess, but I'm also the person that will drink it when it's the most inopportune time. And I'm like, I'm feeling like having a cocktail. It's not the right time to do it, but I'm going to do it. Because I want one.

Mike DeHaan: [4:57] I will say for me as intrinsically an introverted person, if I do have to be socialized for the extension like, an extended period for the day, it does make it more enjoyable and easier. And I find that I do have better conversations because I'm just a little bit more loosened up. Yeah. Like, when we were at the private lending conference in, Las Vegas, we went out with those bankers and we both got drinks at lunch. That was, like, the best day. That was, like, the main networking day.

Dan Austin: [5:21] Yeah. That was a good day.

Mike DeHaan: [5:22] It was a strong drink. I was, like, a little bit just, like, you know, lubed up for the rest of

Dan Austin: [5:26] the And these bankers were all wired tight, not in their suits and stuff, you know? Like, come on guys.

Dylan Koch: [5:31] Especially the bankers, man. You gotta get the bankers the drinks. Like, let me buy you a drink, bro.

Mike DeHaan: [5:35] Well, they will later in the day sometimes, but

Dan Austin: [5:38] Yeah. The bankers are are stuffy, but the other private lending folks aren't.

Mike DeHaan: [5:42] Yeah. The other private loan folks are definitely not, dude. They were like, we went to that one in Newport. BHTs are getting freaking wasted.

Dan Austin: [5:47] That was, like, awesome. We're like, this is our crowd.

Mike DeHaan: [5:52] This is why we're meant to be financed, not real estate guys.

Dan Austin: [5:54] Nobody there is worried about what they're drinking or eating.

Mike DeHaan: [5:57] No. At all. But outside of that, though, it was a solid conference. It was really interesting to see. So in GoBundance, you have to have a I think it's $2,000,000 net worth to join now. And a lot of people have businesses. And so they're all generally higher, higher income, higher net worth people. It was really interesting to hear the variation on, like, market sentiment and then also to just, like, general situation that's happened over the last twelve to fifteen months there twelve to twelve to eighteen months rather. Because when I joined in 2021, everyone was kind of on, like, the same track of where you were kinda, like, invincible, Mark, we're ball sort of stuff. And in the last year, stuff has really separated. And so many people are, like, super bullish. So many people are super bearish on, like, the market. There's not really a lot of people that are, like, in the middle. People tend to be very extreme one way or the other. And then same with their businesses. A lot of people either crushed it last year or a ton of people did really, really bad. You know? And not even like, oh, you know, it's kind of whatever. Like, they, like, lost their asses. And the difference in those people, I would say, typically, are around how they have built their business.

Mike DeHaan: [7:07] If it's dependent on the broader market, they tended to fail if it was focused on, like, creating value or, like, actually having something to offer versus just, like, accumulating assets or doing different things, they tend to do a lot better. And something else that I think is pretty interesting is over the last number of years, residential real estate has kind of been shit on by the big like multifamily, the commercial industrial kind of folks because it's you even Brandon Turner is very famous for this. Like, I wish I'd gone bigger sooner.

Dan Austin: [7:36] Mhmm.

Mike DeHaan: [7:37] All the bigger, sooner guys that started in, like, '21, '22 are completely cooked. Yeah. All the residential guys are doing just fine. Yep. And it was it was kinda interesting to see that. And then I'm generally a bear on the market right now. So you guys have listened to the show at all, you would know that. Even more so after going to this event exclusively because the only thing that all, like, the bullish people on the market would say is with how high the stock market is and all of the money coming from AI, there was this report that just came out that said $300,000,000,000 is gonna go back into the economy. Right? And they kept saying this shit over and over. And the reason that made me even more of a bear is I realized how they just don't understand that that's not gonna go to the buying population of your houses. That's not gonna

Dylan Koch: [8:18] go to

Mike DeHaan: [8:18] the general population. That's gonna go to the shareholders and the CEOs and everything else. I'm like, don't know what you're talking about, man. But they latched onto that.

Dylan Koch: [8:26] The build out is for, like, industrial commercial properties, not residential. And I know. Not to get a tangent away from you, but all the AI build out, it's usually bad for the residential neighborhood, at least now, because it increases the electric prices of all the surrounding neighborhoods because of the data

Dan Austin: [8:41] That's a big problem.

Dylan Koch: [8:42] The power that it needs. So Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

Mike DeHaan: [8:45] Go on. There's lot of changes that's happened because of that too. I was actually just talking to my father-in-law, and he was saying that in Montana where he lives, it's a really big problem because out there, there's a ton of land and there's relatively cheap power. So they've been building a lot of these data centers out there for AI and it's actually putting They don't got that much power there though unless they go coal, baby. Exactly. And that's the problem.

Dan Austin: [9:07] Get rid of all those Democrats. We can have some real power around here. Solar power is trash, dude.

Mike DeHaan: [9:11] Wait. Why do you think all the the AI people are on, you know, Trump's side right now? They recognize that.

Dan Austin: [9:16] Exactly. They realize they're like, oh, shit. This ain't gonna work.

Mike DeHaan: [9:19] They're like, actually, I don't give a fuck about the Penguins.

Dan Austin: [9:21] They're like, actually, I like money more than you,

Mike DeHaan: [9:23] the environment.

Dylan Koch: [9:23] Well, that that was event just happened, World Economic Forum. And, like, last year, the past couple of years, it was all about climate change. There wasn't a fucking peep of that No. This year because they're like, the agenda changed.

Dan Austin: [9:33] Greta wasn't even invited, I bet. Yeah. Not at all. It's because that's honestly, I feel like climate change is a privilege. To be able to worry about something like that.

Mike DeHaan: [9:45] To care about it? Yeah.

Dan Austin: [9:47] And I don't think anybody has the privilege right now. We've got so many crazy world politics going on.

Dylan Koch: [9:52] Everyone's like, stop letting cows fart or whatever for, like, all this, like, c o two emission. But then if you ever look at the energy output between every developed world in China, China's literally, like, 20 x.

Dan Austin: [10:03] Oh, yeah.

Dylan Koch: [10:04] Like, anybody else. So, like, just the Pareto's principle of 8020, like, you're not gonna make any effect unless China decreases their output, and that's not gonna happen.

Mike DeHaan: [10:12] I would say it's a privilege to care about that on a personal level. Right? Because you don't don't have to worry about anything else in, like, the hierarchy of needs. Right?

Dan Austin: [10:19] No. It's a privilege level because how many people in Africa care about it that are in third world countries? They don't give a shit.

Mike DeHaan: [10:24] They don't. That's what I'm saying.

Dan Austin: [10:26] Wealthy governments tend to do that or or I shouldn't say wealthy governments. Governments without too much to worry about really start caring about it.

Mike DeHaan: [10:34] Well, I like, see, this is where our our political spectrums change because I I think that as a wealthy government, you have a global responsibility to worry about climate change.

Dan Austin: [10:45] A responsibility? But that's a responsibility comes with privilege. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [10:49] Responsibility comes with choice. Like the US government could choose to care more about it. They just do not because they care more about the finance and the bottom line.

Dan Austin: [10:56] I don't think that's completely true. I just think that there's right now is not the time to be worried about that. Like there's so many other things that are number one. That's why Davos is like, all these world leaders are actually, we should probably be worried about people bombing our countries and the crazy economy going on.

Dylan Koch: [11:11] Yeah. From the broader scheme, what are the most immediate concerns is is one point.

Dan Austin: [11:17] But That's yeah.

Dylan Koch: [11:18] There's don't I want get you off track, because I know Mike had another point to this. But I follow this guy pretty closely. His name's Luke Roman. And he had his report last Friday that was really good. But it basically is just like, if all this AI CapEx spending is true, and like it goes on this trend, United States does have near the infrastructure that it requires from a from a grid standpoint.

Dan Austin: [11:39] Not even

Dylan Koch: [11:40] close. Electricity standpoint, nat gas,

Dan Austin: [11:43] like The regulations are too hard to get to it in any reasonable amount of time.

Dylan Koch: [11:47] The regulations, but also just like rare earths, like all this stuff that the materials that you need are produced by somebody else.

Dan Austin: [11:55] Yeah. China has like whatever amount of the known reserves, a high high percentage.

Dylan Koch: [12:00] But and then the other point to this though is like, okay. Let's say we identified the problem. We don't have the skilled labor that we we used to have and the timeline to do all this build out, like when they did the original infrastructure, takes decades. Mhmm. Mhmm. So, like, you can't say you can fix this problem in one to two years. You just can't.

Mike DeHaan: [12:17] Well, this is the challenge I think with modern society is regardless of where you are in the totem pole, whether you're a homeless person or you're the president of The United States or a world leader, our brains have all been rewired with how fast the current information feedback loop is. Right? And the problem is is not only is it very, very quick, but it's now so spread out. And so like that person that's at the bottom of the totem pole is so far away from the president. And, like, even though it technically should be closer because stuff goes so fast, but there's so many ways for things to get skewed along the way. And so it makes it so that people, like, they always expect things to be able to happen faster or be more immediate or, like, affect less people or go exactly their way or their views are more universally shared than they actually are because that's kinda what the Internet has done. Michael Durant was one of the keynote speakers at this event. And if you guys don't know who he is, he was the one of the helicopter pilots that was shot down in Somalia during Black Hawk Down. And so if you guys have seen the movie, he's actually the guy He's also captured. He's the guy that gets kidnapped and captured.

Mike DeHaan: [13:27] It's kind of like the basis for that whole thing. Right? So he's like a, you know, US hero, like very, very well spoken person, and he had a very fascinating talk. But the whole premise of his talk, how it relates to business, is he talked about the basically, the feedback loop and why Somalia happened was such a disaster was because you had the people that were on the ground, the tip of the spear that were relaying information. And by the time it got passed from person to person to person to the top of the pyramid, right, it was good news. And so the whole point of the talk when it relates to business is the person who's at the top should be talking down to the tip of the spear on a regular basis to get the actual news of what's going on. Because as an organization gets larger, everyone wants to be doing good at their job. And the best way to be good at your job is to tell the next person up that things are going well. And so the game of telephone basically just gets, like, overly optimistic.

Dan Austin: [14:23] Especially when there's a of bureaucracy, like, in the government.

Mike DeHaan: [14:25] Especially when there's lot of bureaucracy. And the problem is now that's happened even more significantly because of the rate that things go through, and there's less time for real information to get passed. Right? And so, you know, I don't know what, like, the like, so when it goes when it goes to, like, the climate change or different things, you're right. As they've had to pass all these things as if it's something that's gonna happen in, like, the next year, like, the changes they're gonna try to make when, realistically, it's gonna take ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years to do a lot of the shit they're trying to do.

Dan Austin: [14:53] Right. Well, the argument with that is is like, should we care about that or should we care about today? Right? Is is the AI frontier more important today than the environment in fifty years? Maybe. I don't know.

Dylan Koch: [15:05] The flip side of that is we should have been worrying about this raw material, raw earth stuff, this infrastructure thing decades ago. Like, we haven't actually meet meaningfully built out any infrastructure in decades.

Dan Austin: [15:16] It's because we operate on a four year schedule. Right?

Dylan Koch: [15:18] So this is a Republican and Democratic problem that no one has had the foresight to make this a priority in decades.

Mike DeHaan: [15:26] Yeah. Well, and this is why China, even though we won't admit it yet, is now the world's number one superpower, right, is because they did do that. And so they got into Africa. They got into the Middle East. They got into South America, and they started doing these things to control the rare minerals.

Dan Austin: [15:40] You know they don't have yet though is oil. Like, US, we're capitalizing that market still.

Dylan Koch: [15:44] Yeah, we have oil, but we don't have like one belt, one road for China. Like to Mike's point, like we actually rely on China for a lot of the stuff to even build out an oil infrastructure. So it's it's kind of a catch 22.

Mike DeHaan: [15:54] Yeah. I mean, they have a foothold in a lot of that because they started doing that a long time ago. So when I went to Southern Africa in 2022, we went to Namibia, which was a country that became independent in the nineties. Right? So, like, super recent, and they had nothing. That was, like, a generally a very modern country by all intents and purposes, especially for Africa. And one of the reasons that happened is when they broke off from South Africa, China came and said, hey. We will give you a modern infrastructure. Like, in the next couple of years, we'll build you roads. We'll build you sewer systems. We'll do actually, we'll do everything. All you have to do is just give us all of your rare minerals forever. And Namibia, who at that point was a bunch of people, like, living in huts, was like Yep. Done. Let's do it. Right? Sounds good. And so, you know, they, like, they they basically just handed all that over. And so now it has, like, the super awesome thing. And the funny thing with China, because they're bastards, the way that they solve the nest another problem for them is they're like, yeah. We'll give you all this work, all these workers to do all this stuff. But how we're gonna do is we're gonna take all of our prisoners that we don't want, and we're gonna just gonna ship them to live there now. Nice. So they got rid of all their undesirable individuals and sent them to Africa.

Dan Austin: [17:00] Can't blame them.

Mike DeHaan: [17:01] You know? But they did that all over the all over the world. And so then now they have the advantage there.

Dan Austin: [17:05] Yeah. The US has been doing that too. We just build military bases. Yeah. We're we're more on the defense, I guess.

Mike DeHaan: [17:10] Well, totally. Well, military bases and but that that gives, a a defense strategy. Right? It's not like the more, like, bigger picture economic strategy.

Dan Austin: [17:20] Yeah. We're we're the police force and the defenders of the free world kind of concept is what it's been for decades, and now you gotta see what what makes sense going forward.

Mike DeHaan: [17:29] Yeah. Well, I know you won't relate to this comment, Dan. Dylan, have you ever played you a gamer at all? Did play Civilization?

Dylan Koch: [17:34] Not Civilization, but I played a lot of PlayStation stuff when I was young.

Mike DeHaan: [17:37] Yeah. So so Civilization, basically, it's like a it's like a world leader game. And you can have like an economic victory, a military victory, a diplomatic victory. You can win the space race, whatever. And basically, The US is always focused on more the military victory where you have, like, the strongest army of the highest potential to basically strike or wreak havoc or whatever. Or you get people that are in debt with you because they rely on your defense. China is definitely much pushed more towards that economic victory because of how they focus on production, right, and being able to make everyone rely on them because of the economic output that they have.

Dylan Koch: [18:08] Which is so different because like the early gilded age of America, the industrial revolution is we were the net producers.

Dan Austin: [18:14] Mhmm.

Dylan Koch: [18:14] And we've slowly become a more financialized economy.

Dan Austin: [18:17] We're a net consumer 100%. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [18:19] Yeah. The net international investment position is literally negative 30% on net from other countries.

Dan Austin: [18:25] So part of that reminds me of the production. Is it it could be that that could change potentially with robotics and AI coming out and like whoever wins that kind of race, I guess, is what they're calling it, but like whoever gets there.

Mike DeHaan: [18:39] This is such a great transition. I'm sure you guys saw this yesterday about Tesla shutting down their car production to build robots.

Dan Austin: [18:47] Yeah. They're they're not producing their premium, like, for the s and the x, which are, their premium lines. They're stopping that. Well, that, I don't think anybody's dropping a 100 something grand on a battery card anymore. They will drop whatever it is for the Model three, which is like the cheaper version.

Mike DeHaan: [19:02] Yeah. But the fact that they're moving entirely towards building robots is crazy. Something that hasn't even been adopted by society. Like what are these robots even gonna do? What do you

Dan Austin: [19:11] think, dude? I guarantee they're gonna do some badass shit.

Mike DeHaan: [19:14] A fucking iRobot. They're gonna be out there cracking skulls in Minneapolis, dude. They're have an

Dan Austin: [19:19] army, dude.

Dylan Koch: [19:20] That's why when I talk to ChatGPT, I say thank you.

Mike DeHaan: [19:22] Yeah. Exactly. That's right. I think

Dan Austin: [19:24] with anything Elon says, he's always kind of pushing it. It's like, it's not going to come true when he says it is. He's like, next end of twenty twenty seven, there'll be full production. Everybody will be able to buy one. Probably not likely.

Dylan Koch: [19:36] Yeah. Mean, said full anonymous driving by 2020.

Mike DeHaan: [19:39] Right.

Dylan Koch: [19:39] Back when but his timeline's usually short, but he's usually right.

Dan Austin: [19:43] Yeah. It's usually short, but you know, whatever he's pushing the boundaries on that stuff, but like ramping down the car production. And so they're all there. They're going to use that, those assembly lines for these robots and they're already using them in their plants. So then they'll be able to use, you know, produce more robots. My guess is it's the first wave is like industrial, which to your point, Dylan, to oppose your point is, is like, there's no way for us to build this stuff out. Well, what if you have robots and AI doing things and building that skill set as opposed to training human beings? That could be like the next race is you got to get there so that you can build that stuff out.

Dylan Koch: [20:16] I think it's a step up, Dan. But I guess my counter argument would be like, don't even have the materials to make the robots, not at scale.

Dan Austin: [20:21] Right. Yeah. Not that you don't have the materials, you just have to go somewhere else to buy them. Right.

Dylan Koch: [20:27] Yeah. But I mean, we even with our military weapons, we rely on China for a lot of that stuff. Like

Dan Austin: [20:31] You could just take Greenland over.

Dylan Koch: [20:33] There's only so much take for tat you could do when you rely on someone else for so much.

Dan Austin: [20:36] Yeah. Right.

Mike DeHaan: [20:37] So they use those robots in their factories right now?

Dan Austin: [20:40] I mean, they're not like it's not like their full production line, but that's their that's where they're using them. Their test their use case and testing them.

Dylan Koch: [20:45] Amazon just laid off like 30,000 workers in a lot of its warehouse jobs.

Dan Austin: [20:49] Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [20:49] Because they have those like little robots. They're like little mini pallet jacks.

Dan Austin: [20:54] Yeah. Yeah. And they move around the

Dylan Koch: [20:55] Like you can go do all the storage around. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [20:58] Yeah. They've had those for a long time. So when I worked at Boeing, that's how a lot of parts were transported around is they had these little droids that would either it was small parts even entire wings. They would autonomously move from station to station. And then, basically, what they would do is they would become, like, the work platform that the work was done on, which was actually pretty cool. But the I mean, like, when it comes to, like, these robots, these are, like, humanoid robots. Like, are they, like, like, walking around, like, screwing in shit? Like, I I don't know. Like, I haven't seen this.

Dan Austin: [21:28] I don't know what they're actually doing, but they can. I've seen the videos of them.

Dylan Koch: [21:32] Yeah. They're what's Boston Labs or something like that? Like, they're the ones that have, like Boston Dynamics. Yeah. Boston Dynamics. They're the ones that has, like, the premier one.

Mike DeHaan: [21:39] Yeah. They that's like that's like old. They've had like that weird dog that like kick over and it's like a deer slipping on ice. Nothing's ever come of it.

Dan Austin: [21:45] Yeah. Nothing's ever come of it. Right? Yeah. I think the one thing that I remember from Elon saying about the the approach he's taking or that Tesla's taking with the robots is that they are building it not to do superhuman things, but to do human things so it can fit in and use the same tooling that humans are using. The robotics that have been in factories before have been tooled and built around that robot. Right? So everything has to get built around this special robot arm that moves. Approach has been build this robot that fits into the existing environment and works with existing tools and existing factories. So then, of course, with AI, they can now program that thing to probably, I'm guessing, learn at high rate, the high pace. You don't have to manually program it. It can teach itself.

Dylan Koch: [22:29] Well, whole point, I think, is just like with the early Tesla cars is the more that we put out, the more data that we'll get back, the quicker it'll teach So the first ones, yeah, they'll probably suck, but they'll get they get exponentially better just from being out and learning from its own mistakes.

Dan Austin: [22:46] And one thing that I like about learning curve that I think, and I don't know how it happens, but I think that the energy requirement to power what they're saying is required, it's too steep. It's not possible. What China's doing, which is bringing on all these coal plants and gas fire plants and doing all that stuff. I don't think that's a good strategy for them either. I think what's going to happen is capitalism and people are going to be forced to figure out how to reduce the energy draw.

Dylan Koch: [23:14] Energy draw or energy breakthrough, like something like the fusion technology.

Dan Austin: [23:18] I don't even think that's, that's not even like, I mean, or physics. Right? And I think that money is, is more powerful than physics in the, in the sense of like what will drive the innovation. Physics won't necessarily have to do it. Think with a lot of things, we think, oh, this is how it has to be because this is all we see. We see these big power intensive chips and farms and plants. Well, what if you just needed less of those or the software required? The software is so much more efficient that it didn't rely on the edges of the physics, right? So it pulled back the requirement of the physical world.

Dylan Koch: [23:48] So two things. I think you should look up modular nuclear reactors because I think those will be a big thing in the future. They're pretty green and they have pretty much infinite energy. This is more regulation problem.

Mike DeHaan: [23:58] But it has nuclear in it, so people won't ever like it. It has

Dylan Koch: [24:01] a bad stigma. I think we'll get away from that. But a second thing, not to go off topic, but Bitcoin mining is actually a good solving for a lot of these energy grid problems.

Dan Austin: [24:10] It's all about Bitcoin, Bill.

Mike DeHaan: [24:11] How is it a solution?

Dan Austin: [24:13] Are you saying that because those

Dylan Koch: [24:14] are those are energy intensive, the mining operations. So when you Bitcoin usually uses the least, like, stranded energy a lot. Think of like solar or wind or hydraulic or like dams or whatever. It can go out in the middle of nowhere and use energy that normally wouldn't have been used for anything. And the more that you can set these up all over the all over the nation, there it's a load response. So right now, there's a lot of Bitcoin mining in Texas. Yep. And they use a lot of that. But a lot of the times when we just had this cold that came in, they actually shut down the Bitcoin mining, can give that energy back to the ERCOT or the grid at a cheaper price than it normally would have been.

Dan Austin: [24:52] You wanna know a big reason why that is is because Texas is unregulated. Sure. So Texas was one of the few states that's unregulated. They allow for it. That's innovation, Allowing for people to do that. Where other states are so highly regulated, it's hard to they're trying to do that stuff but it's hard to get through the regulators who don't really know shit.

Dylan Koch: [25:09] Right, so think if you're, let's say you're planning a town, I'll try to be short of this, but in thirty years from now, you're going to want a big hospital that's going to come in, right? Well, you have to build the infrastructure for the electric and the gas and the plumbing, all of that pretty much today, even though you you don't know what the next twenty to thirty years look like. So if you can build around already developed cities with Bitcoin mining and increase your energy load just from having those there. They don't even have to do the mining, they just can act as an extra power source for the grid at that point in time. So it's more of a stabilization effect.

Dan Austin: [25:41] You're saying because the Bitcoin mining operation is bringing its own generation with it? Yes. Oh, okay. Yeah. So the tough thing about anything with like, you're talking like microgrids and stuff is you still have to have grid connectivity for the resiliency, just the way it works.

Dylan Koch: [25:56] All of that has to have a build out, but I guess there are, I guess, probable solutions to this.

Dan Austin: [26:02] Thinking of it as a battery. Right? That's what you're think of it as.

Mike DeHaan: [26:05] I think the challenge is, like you said, it's supposed to have build out, but we currently have a generations coming in with no skills, no blue collar, anything. We're getting rid of all the immigrants, and we just got a bunch of TikTokers that are like

Dylan Koch: [26:17] that's been fucking jam, dude. Yeah. That is a problem. I just had like a 20 year old come in to the office much I'm in the new office today, first podcast from the new office. Oh, nice. And he was promising on Messenger because he was looking for a job. I don't say he was dumb. Like, I don't have to say it.

Mike DeHaan: [26:32] Yeah. I mean, dude, I get it, man. We we've had, like, a lot of interviewees that are young people or even, like, employees, and you're saying, I just don't understand, like, what your situation is.

Dan Austin: [26:43] Yeah. Here's what I don't get. I have college students as tenants in some of my houses. Right? And they go to a private school. So the threshold to get in or the portal to get in, you got to have, you know, not just money, but you got to be somewhat smart. Right? You got to like

Mike DeHaan: [26:58] You got to have a daddy that gets you in there.

Dan Austin: [27:00] It's not the community college. I'll just say that much at least. It's not just going to college. They are not smart and their communication like, or lack thereof. They all, every time I go to text them, they all have like silence notifications on them. Like, what are you doing? How are you communicating with your friends?

Dylan Koch: [27:17] You gotta Snapchat them. I think that's the cool way to do it now.

Dan Austin: [27:20] It's like three days later, they'll text back. I'm like, what have you been doing? Yeah. Like, you text me first.

Dylan Koch: [27:26] I mean, obviously our sample size is really low, but I've not been impressed by a younger person in a long time.

Mike DeHaan: [27:33] Our individual sample sizes are really low. The general sentiment though is very much the same across a wide sample size of people that I've talked to, heard from everything else.

Dan Austin: [27:43] I mean, I do remember going coming into the workforce after leaving the military and hearing kind of the older folks talk about millennials and they're like, you know, they talk a lot of shit about millennials. They did.

Mike DeHaan: [27:52] The thing they did. Yeah. Totally. And that's when I saw on Reddit today. It was

Dan Austin: [27:55] like Are we those people now, though?

Mike DeHaan: [27:57] This Times article came out thirteen years ago, and it was talking about, like, the fluffy millennials. Mhmm. But the difference is, okay, is that millennials, what they didn't like about the workplace, they wanted they're very sensitive. Right? So they wanted, like, people to be nice. They wanted, like, things ordered a certain way. Right? They didn't like the fact that, like, the hierarchy of things didn't always make fundamental sense because you'd have somebody that didn't fucking do shit that for some reason was your boss. And you're like, what is this? But millennials in general were still very productive. Right? Now we don't even necessarily see that because the current group of people coming in has been so they've had so much brain rot for such a long time from, like, a very young age that they never even kinda, like, develop, like, a work ethic. Right? Yeah. They don't actually, like, have a desire to collaborate and, like, do things. Whereas, like, at least when we were growing up, you know, you still had to, like you learned how to work with different people. You had to do group projects. We all had to go sit in the library and fucking write out our, you know, bibliography on shit.

Dylan Koch: [28:56] We didn't have chat GBT.

Dan Austin: [28:57] We didn't have nothing like that. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [28:59] Answers to get stuff automatically without having to think about it.

Mike DeHaan: [29:02] And in high school, I remember having papers. We weren't allowed to use the Internet. Like, all of our sources had to be from books. Yeah. Totally.

Dan Austin: [29:10] 100%.

Mike DeHaan: [29:11] So I'd be like in the library looking at books that was written in 1979 that for some reason was a more valid source than Wikipedia.

Dylan Koch: [29:18] Yeah. Wikipedia was big name. I know. That was Yeah.

Dan Austin: [29:20] Oh, yeah. It was like, yeah. You can't use Wikipedia. Don't quote that as a source. Just learning how to quote using like the eight what is it like the APA and all the bullshit, like like the citation stuff. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [29:30] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I forget what the the format was. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [29:33] But even, like, going through that, it gives you this ability to learn how to, like, produce something. And now that's that's very much lost unless you're one of those kids that actively sought that out. Right? Because unless you were like a hobbyist producers, like a young kid, like you were into crafts or like you fucking built shit or you did whatever with your parents or whatever, they don't aren't forced to do any of those things anymore. Yeah.

Dan Austin: [29:55] Yeah. I'm very conscious with my kids. If I'm gonna go do something, I try to, like, come with me and watch me do this, even though they maybe don't want to, but I'm like, hey, I'm going to change the tire on my truck. You're going to come watch me.

Mike DeHaan: [30:05] But you know what? Like you say, even if they don't want to, especially your son's with his age, I bet he's always down to do whatever right now.

Dan Austin: [30:12] Yeah. Cole's down to do whatever. I'm like, hey. You wanna go for a ride? He's like, yeah. Do

Mike DeHaan: [30:14] that's the default state of young people. And the problem is is when they get pushed into kinda like that brain rot sort of culture that goes away.

Dan Austin: [30:22] Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [30:23] Yeah. And it's not always like that. So at at the GoBundance event, one of the speakers was a daughter of a member. She's 20. And she did a keynote talk on this company that she's built. It's called Thrivable.

Dan Austin: [30:35] Oh, yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [30:36] And it is like a basically like a GoBundance for kids. Right? It's like $2,000 a year. She's up to like 60 members. She's like traveling. She's doing all this stuff. She's killing it. Dude, I'm not even kidding. It was probably the best talk of the entire event. Like, the subject matter was, you know, on her stuff, which was fine. But the actual presentation was awesome. The way that she spoke, like how it was presented, how she built the store, all sort of things. And she's 20 years old. And I was like, this gives me a lot of hope that the young people aren't all lost because she's like a rock star. But she was also such a rare case, it seems like, you know, and she's from a family that is high income, high net worth. And so she's had an extremely unfair advantage over the average person to get into that position. And I think that that's probably the biggest risk that we have right now is basically productivity has become or like the ability to be productive has become like a privilege. Right? Because it requires a family and parents that's able to sort of put you in that situation to not just put you through whatever public school. And that's where we're gonna have a really problem.

Mike DeHaan: [31:43] We're talk really big problem. We're talking about building out AI infrastructure and all sort of shit is I just don't know how we catch up with that.

Dylan Koch: [31:49] Mike, you wanna go a fun stat, and then we'll go move on to talking shit about

Dan Austin: [31:53] The

Dylan Koch: [31:54] number one indicator of a kid's future earnings is what ZIP code they're born in.

Mike DeHaan: [31:59] Oh, I've heard that before. Yeah. Yeah. Or their future success. I mean, it makes sense.

Dylan Koch: [32:04] Yep. And most of them are, I think five of the eight are within a 50 mile radius of Washington DC.

Mike DeHaan: [32:10] That's crazy. I'm not surprised with that at all. Very that's like that much one of the highest income parts of the country. Yeah.

Dylan Koch: [32:16] Yeah. It's a per capita. I think Dan over there, like, thinking. It's like a per capita thing. But

Dan Austin: [32:19] No. Was just saying you're saying the five zip codes?

Dylan Koch: [32:21] Yeah. So the the most per capita United States, five of them are within Washington DC. You think it'd be like LA County or not. It's not. It's outside of Washington DC.

Dan Austin: [32:30] Just how you define success, Dylan.

Mike DeHaan: [32:32] I know. Totally. Which is also valid. And and if you ask Gen Z's how they define success is making $560,000 a year. That was that's what that stat said when they said, like, what did they deem it'd be a good salary? And while also which to be fair, a lot of them probably have, like, friends

Dan Austin: [32:47] Honestly, you need more than that.

Mike DeHaan: [32:48] That, like, that figured out how to, like, make money on TikTok, right, and do that. And the problem is that they don't understand what that fully entails either. You know?

Dylan Koch: [32:56] The number well, actually, a good indicator of the, you know, the good times, the 2020, 2021 thing is I'm pretty sure when I joined GoBundance, the member was, like, 200, maybe 300. I think it's like like it got up to, a thousand during those years because of all of the built in equity that people got from that stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [33:14] Yeah. Now it's down to 700. Well, in

Dan Austin: [33:16] that peak or two, from a GoBundance standpoint, Brandon Turner's peak time too. And so he was a big advocate for GoBundance and that was very specific to real estate guys, which happened to also be syndicators. They're all just trying to syndicate from each other.

Mike DeHaan: [33:29] Yeah, dude. He had to start getting those referral commissions to pay for all of his deals that were collapsing.

Dylan Koch: [33:34] There's no way that he paid a go Goldman's membership after his first year.

Mike DeHaan: [33:38] God oh, god. No.

Dan Austin: [33:39] No. God. No.

Mike DeHaan: [33:40] Dude, his stuff I sat next to somebody that's very much inside that whole group. I'm not gonna say his name because you guys would definitely know who he is. But he's, you know, he was like he's been on the show. He's, like, very much involved in that whole thing. And I was like, so what's, like, the real deal with Brandon stuff? And he was telling me kind of, like, how completely screwed all these deals are. He's had to sell off all his assets, all these kind of things to try and bail himself out. And now he is 100% just like obsessed with his better life thing. And I guess a big part of that is because someone

Dan Austin: [34:14] That still exists.

Mike DeHaan: [34:15] It still exists. And I guess someone has, like, convinced him that if he builds it to a certain level, he'll be able to sell it for, like, a $100,000,000 or something. Oh, boy. And so he's, like, just fixated with this. But I guess it's gotten so out of hand that you know how, like, for, like, a while, there was kinda, like, his posse, like, just, like, random people. Like, that like, that tatty investor girl and, like, some of these random people that were, like, always for some reason, like, doing shit together. All those people have, like, left his circle because of how kind of, like, toxic it was getting around trying to grow it. He was trying to, like, leverage all these other people's communities to just bring people into his better life thing. Because he is I don't think he's a bad person. But I think that what has happened is he has really paid a price for his first mover advantage with real estate and podcasts with bigger pockets, where it's given him kind of like false confidence on the ability to produce. Right? And he has an audience. There's no doubt about it. I do think he's a smart dude. But I think that like all of the setbacks he's had over the past couple of years have created this sense of or I guess this lack of belief again, where he feels like he needs to have a moonshot now to catch up.

Dan Austin: [35:22] Yeah. Like he felt like what do you think? It was like he felt like he was up here. Now he's down here. Now he needs to

Mike DeHaan: [35:26] Now he's like, I need to get back to the big money again. Because I remember him being on Ryan Pineda's podcast a couple years ago, and he told Ryan Pineda he spends, like, $80,000 a month.

Dan Austin: [35:35] That's wild.

Mike DeHaan: [35:36] Right? And then Ryan's like, bro, that's fucking a lot. And then Brandon's like, well, you know, if I need to make some money, he's like, I can make a million dollars in a weekend if I, like, launch a new product.

Dan Austin: [35:44] Which back then he could.

Mike DeHaan: [35:45] Back then he could. Now he can't do that anymore. And I guarantee you that his overhead hasn't shrunk that much. Yeah. But that that whole thing, man, I don't know. He was the guy I was I was eating with was sharing some of these details on just, like, some of the stuff that's gone down and sort of, like, the general attitude and things that exist. And I'm like, I feel like the entire BiggerPockets crowd is kinda just like the, I don't know, the the worst of the worst kind of people that are battling for relevance.

Dan Austin: [36:09] Yeah. Well, I think too, like the I think there's the actual true institution of bigger pockets, which are like the the hierarchy of that and all the people that they brought in since like Brandon and Josh and now, you know, David Green, all those guys have left. I think that's a rotten itself. And then you have all the people that are like the pseudo bigger pockets folks that were maybe are being around like Brandon and some other people. And they're just all about Instagram photos of what they're doing. And I don't know that any of them have any business businesses that they're promoting or doing anything. It's just about being part of that, that group. And then it's that,

Dylan Koch: [36:44] Their highlight is their Instagram rail of sharing a podcast with them.

Mike DeHaan: [36:48] Right. And that

Dan Austin: [36:48] conference that once you're on that conference circle is like, Hey, you come to this conference. I'll give you a piece of The more people, you know, good looking people, famous people, you get them on there. They don't actually have any other producing, but they're going to a conference to talk about it. And then they're going to get a piece of that pie. Like, it's like a weird circle.

Mike DeHaan: [37:03] And not only that, but like a lot of them need that to work because of all this shit that they're in from the other stuff they've done that gone sideways. So we have a scale member, Alex, we had we had on the show not like, I don't know, a couple months ago. He said that he was going through his preforeclosure list in the Bay Area. Guess who had multiple properties that were on there.

Dylan Koch: [37:22] Yeah. David Green.

Mike DeHaan: [37:23] David Green. Mister David Green. Yeah. Losing He's a mess, dude. He's a fucking mess. Like

Dan Austin: [37:28] I gotta bounce boys, but keep talking about this one because, yeah, he's he's

Mike DeHaan: [37:32] a nice guy. No worries. Well, we'll wrap it up here. Dan's gotta go and something that is kids school. So have fun.

Dan Austin: [37:38] Don't say hello. Alright. See you, boys.

Mike DeHaan: [37:40] Alright. Cool. Right on, everybody. Well, thanks for listening. You guys have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you guys next time. See you. This episode is sponsored by Sir Lenzelot LLC, also known as SLA Capital, which if you didn't know, is Dan and I's private lending company. So, yes, we are sponsoring our own show, but what you're gonna do about it? It is our private lending company that offers hard money and DSCR loans to real estate investors of all types. So you can be a new investor, an experienced investor. You can be buying flips. You can be buying rentals, whatever. We can do everything. And not only that, but the rates that we offer are just as competitive, if not cheaper than pretty much every other company out there. So whatever big company you've been working with, bring us their term sheets, and I guarantee that we can probably beat it. We have the same connections they do. We just don't have all the overhead and middlemen. So if you wanna come and check us out, go to slacapital.com/keys, and I will know that you came from the show. And by seeing that you came from here, when you get the closing, you will save $500 on your first loan with us. So slacapital.com/keys, we would love to fund your next deal. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you want more from us, you can shoot us a follow on Instagram. I am at Mike underscore Invest. Dan is at investor man.

Mike DeHaan: [38:49] Dan and Dylan is at Dylan underscore does underscore deals. Choose to follow and send us a DM to let us know what you think of the show.