... sentence of your column, "Slow down should be a full stop."

stop."Yeah.

I love that you pointed to that word pacing, 'cause I think it's very interesting that he used that and slowed down, 'cause pacing is different to slow down.

Pacing doesn't mean slow.

It means kind of working with a rhythm or a strategy or a kind of plan to get to or to manage a certain path to get to a particular goal.

And I thought it was very interesting that the CFO of Anthropic posted an, um, Dario Amodei's essay on LinkedIn, and he didn't use the word slow down at all.

He just used the word pacing in his own explanation of it.

Uh, the likelihood of that happening?

Why are so many other policymakers pushing ahead with measures like this, even if the evidence we have so far isn't terribly strong about their effectiveness?

I think it's because this is what parents want, and it really shouldn't surprise...

And I think this is sort of a long time coming if, if we think back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook.

This was probably the real turning point for the general public's perception of technology companies.

And ever since then, as these companies have grown bigger and the users on their platforms have gone into the billions of people, and there's been more reporting in the press and whistleblowers showing the harmful side effects of being on social media, the toxic content, the going down rabbit holes, the misinformation and conspiracy theories and, you know, teenage girls who feel worse about themselves when they're on Instagram.

That was a very famous study that came out of Facebook's own research, and we know about that because of the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, um, who, um, released a whole trove of documents.

So all this over the last, you know, five to 10 years has been slowly building this gradual kind of understanding that actually while these platforms are fun to use, and they are addictive, and people, you know, scratch this kind of mental itch when they get to go on their Instagram or, or Snap or whatever it is, there is this toxic side effect.

So besides the age-related bans, what other methods are regulators looking at to try to reduce the harm from social media?

How important is AI going to be for the future of the world?

I think it's going to be very important, but I think it's going to be hard at first to see the impact.

And I think one way to think about it is the Internet.

When people in the 50s and 60s, 1950s and 1960s tried to imagine what the future would look like.

They imagined robot butlers and flying cars.

And of course, we don't have that.

But we have something that was just as monumental, if not more so, which was the web.

How is Europe doing? Is Europe lagging behind everything or are there some encouraging developments there?

Do you see that level of capex, as Tom talked about, continuing next year? And as we see this roll-out of AI, what are the potential bear traps there waiting down the road for the administration or the economy?

Well, I think you're absolutely right.

In a lot of ways, the AI boom has given the Trump administration a lot of cover because it's just made it look like everything is going so well.

And in aggregate, the Magnificent Seven tech stocks have seen their market valuations increase by trillions of dollars just in the last three years since ChatGBT came out.

I personally think there is going to be some kind of correction in 2026.

And for all the reasons that people are saying, which is that there is very high risk of near term monetization not happening.

In other words, there's been this huge build out of infrastructure anticipating all this demand that probably will come in eventually, but it's just not gonna come in fast enough to meet the expectations of investors.

What should we be watching on that? What are the key debates we should be looking out for next year if we're kind of concerned about the form that AI is gonna take?