to your point,

there's nothing wrong to me.

There's nothing wrong with using low interest rate instruments to help promote business.

And there's actually really nothing wrong with vertical integration.

But if you notice what happens next, it's the second half, which is they leverage the low interest rates to borrow and basically take on free debt, to your point.

But then they've understood, and this is why I say we don't have robber barons anymore.

We have welfare barons because once they've been able to leverage those financial tools for their own success, then they go, oh, wait, Washington has this insatiable appetite for bureaucracy.

But there's a lot of regulation restricting how food is bought and sold, right?

... why it is that the youth are adopting this? Let's start there.

Well, I, I, I think that all of us, generation from generation, if you go from, like, back to the Greatest Generation, you know, we've had these three promises that have consistently been told to us, which is you graduate high school, you go to college, you get a g- degree, you save 10% of your paycheck, you put it down on, on a house as soon as you can.

Your house is your retirement.

That's just kind of the formula that has worked.

We've seen it, you know, it worked for our parents, et cetera.

And then all this other stuff started happening in the background that affected all of these markets that people don't know is happening.

A lot of vertical integration, a lot of monopolies, a lot of what I call regulatory moats happening, utilizing our thirst for bureaucracy against stuff to keep... against us to keep competitors out from coming in to lower prices.

[laughs]

You want to lay that one out for me and explain what that is? Yeah.

Yeah, so the Velvet Mafia is this kind of funny phrase about gays in the Studio 54 times in New York that ran the city.

And it's like the secret society.

And so I use that as my inspiration for the Velvet Monopoly because that's really what's happened.

We have a secret society of special interest groups that are making most of our decisions for us.

There's no super villain.

There's no evil person to hang... or put a head on a stick, which is largely why this doesn't get covered, because it doesn't fit nicely in a story box.

What do you see happening

Kind of give us the other side of why a person might resist that coming in and dominating their communities.

Well, first of all, I really sort of push back on the notion that America is anti-AI.

This whole idea that people are replacing their fight against data centers as a proxy for against the AI industry, I think is so off base.

We are in an innovative country.

I mean, Uber didn't exist 20 years ago.

We've innovated our way out of economic downturn, international downturn for the whole history of this country.

I don't think people are inherently anti-technology.

Explain there how that is affecting the prices we pay at the counter now.