Billy Riggs (00:35)
All right, welcome back to rewiring the American edge. I'm Billy Riggs here with my cohost, Vipul Vyas And today we are kicking off 2026, not with predictions, but with signals, because if there's one thing that we've learned over the past years, it's not.

usually the way the future arrives with PowerPoint predictions and in decks, but it's usually through stress tests and through those moments where systems are forced to reveal what they're actually built to review to do. And so what does it mean when our public institutions make decisions when they're looking more like hedge funds, trades versus educational strategy?

What does it mean when education and work are not in the abstract, but when we're being prepared to function in a world filled with automation and AI in our economy, when we're still training for jobs that may not exist in the future and ignoring the ones that may be growing the fastest, maybe our green collar and our blue collar workforce.

So today we're gonna pull on a few threads and as always, we're not here to tear things down. We're here to build and to talk about how we can be proactive and to make them better, not through predictions, but through pressure because that pressure may make

a diamond eventually. And because the future doesn't arrive as a clean transition, it arises a stress test. And when a system under pressure, whether or not it's a university or market is under stress. That's when you find out really what they're actually designed to do.

So when you look at the the handful of places that we looked in 25, there's what what we saw, we saw a couple of different areas that I think we wanna focus on today. And you may have seen that we've been kind of quiet. That's because of the various things.

We've been traveling. We've been on holiday. Thank you for giving us a couple of months off. We appreciated it. So maybe we can tell you a little bit what we've been up to. But we want to talk about big time college sports and the economics behind coaching. It's not all gossip, but the window behind public institutions and the way they are governed is fascinating. We'll dig behind autonomous vehicles and blackouts because they're real.

Autonomy isn't behind perfect demos. It's about what happens when connectivity disappears. What's going on with AI and OpenAI included? What's going on with valuations for what they do and what we hope they will become? And across all of this, what are we thinking about mispriced risk? Overconfidence in systems that haven't been stress-tested and institutions...

that are still optimized for yesterday's incentives and yesterday's jobs. And at the same time, the American edge that we've been talking about has never been about hype. It's always been about adaptation. It's about aligning technology with governance and human capital faster than anybody else, faster than our competition. And our question has always been

Are we doing that with elegance and speed? So today, again, we're not tearing down these systems. We're about building and asking, what does it take to make them more and more resilient? So with that, Vipul Vyas let's start with the year itself. We spent a lot of 2025 thinking about signals.

and maybe 2026 is already signaling to you, what do you think, my friend?

Vipul Vyas (04:16)
I think there's a lot of institutional transition, which is just code for a lot of things that used to work a certain way are going to stop working a certain way and they have to work a different way if they're going to survive. Because the environment that they're operating in is changing faster than maybe they can adapt to. So we're going to, I think, deal with an extinction event.

because it's multiple meteors are hitting the earth. You know, we can jump right into name, image and likeness, which is a concept in college football, which is going to be very foreign to anyone outside the United States. I think most people who follow sports outside the US and maybe North America in general are used to, say, the promotion relegation system in

football or what we call soccer, which is you have a lot of privately held teams of different tiers that are governed in a pretty well-defined way in terms of, you know, this is a lower tier team, this is a mid-tier team, this is a premier team or, you know, the highest echelon level team, and players make a decision early in life as to

the fact that they want to pursue a certain sport and dedicate themselves to that and then move up the ranks in pursuit of that dream. And they may start very early. Like you have all the football academies in Europe that they start kids off in practically what are boarding schools at a very, very young age. And that's why some of the Spanish team, et cetera, they're...

They're so amazing and fluid, they can read each other's minds.

That's a function of just knowing people for so long. The closest thing that we have to that in the US is the baseball tiered league system, which ⁓ goes from various degrees of minor league to the big leagues or the major league otherwise, and then they've sort of introduced something similar to that in basketball in the US with the D leagues relative to the NBA. But in general,

In the US, the farm teams, or where the talent is cultivated, happens at the collegiate level, so the university level. That's where the cultivation of talent, the grooming of talent takes place. ⁓

Billy Riggs (06:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, but you know, before we

before we jump into explaining this crazy sport, American football to people, you know, I want to make that a ⁓ clean cut in terms of a segment. Maybe maybe we can just talk about like. So we spent a better part of eight months talking to people about this, this idea of a reframing of the economy with. Labor.

Resilience, talking of cities or future ready, a workforce evolution, land use, climate change, tariffs, AI policy, automation, even talking about, should we colonize Mars and designing streets differently? And then like talking about ⁓ Chinese AI and robotics in our last episode in

October. And a lot of that.

I think the top line, saw a theme in 2025 of innovation, but I think as 2025 closed and I thought more about the institutions, universities, utilities, transit agencies, local governments, even companies, I got more more afraid of the...

of how concentrated the capital was and I guess the economic divergence I started to see and I think the mismatch between the economic players. And I think I see an underlying story of fragility and instability. And so I'm wondering if there's another narrative going into 2026.

that is it more of a dangerous mismatch of risk, degrowth, and whether or not we're rewarding growth narratives where there's an under investment in the boring stuff like maintenance, governance, workforce training that shows up across all these disciplines that maybe we're diverging from.

that we need for some of this to flourish. All the innovative stuff we talked about last year.

Vipul Vyas (08:23)
⁓

I don't think that we're in any kind of degrowth period. I actually think the opposite. think that there's a level of, there's a lot of money making a lot of bets and that can lead to bubbles. That's part of the nature of things. I think that that is. ⁓

That's what I see. I don't see things pulling back. I think there's going to be more uncertainty. People are going to, based on uncertainty, make more bets. I...

don't see people pulling back.

I think there's sort so in this context, you're going to have fear and fear can make people shrivel up like a ball, like, know, cocoon, you know, and shelter, or it can make people try to hedge bets, actually become more active, proactive in an attempt to not get caught on the wrong side of things. And I actually think that's what we're going to see more of.

It's the latter versus the former. You're to see more energy versus less energy. And some of that energy is going to be Brownian motion, just people kind of doing frantic things maybe a little bit. But just for example, people are going to try to do more side hustles. People are going to try to do more upskilling. People are going to try to have more irons in the fire. So I think that is more likely than people going, you know what? I'm just going stick to my existing job and save money.

Billy Riggs (09:17)
Interesting.

Vipul Vyas (09:38)
and keep my head down. But I don't think people are going to do that because I don't know if this existing job is something to bet on. I don't think it's the safe place or the safe space, as the kids would say, that people may have thought of as an existing job representing in the past.

Billy Riggs (09:52)
Okay, so I don't know that I agree with you on this. So I'm gonna put a pin in this and I want us to come back to this because I'm convinced that there is,

concentration of capital around AI that puts strain on other parts of the economy and that there is fragility in other parts of the economic spectrum as a result of concentration in one part of the economy.

Vipul Vyas (10:21)
I don't think that's probably that controversial, but the question becomes, where do you bet? What other bets are there? If you have a dollar today, if you have an extra dollar to do something with, what are you gonna do with that dollar?

Billy Riggs (10:35)
Well, I have some ideas, you know, think, but well, no, mean, you know, assets and raw materials.

Vipul Vyas (10:39)
put them up there. Yeah. I mean you can buy Nvidia.

I'm not going to be serious

on that. like you could buy Nvidia or you could buy gold or silver. mean, both are actually not bad, right? But what they are is not traditional.

They're not, you you could bet on the S&P, right? Which is what probably some people do. But my point is that the spectrum of things that now you'd entertain, like the gold bugs, for example, were considered to be crazy people 10, 15 years ago, maybe even more recently than that. Now they're looking smart, right? So I think a lot of things are changing.

Billy Riggs (10:54)
Yeah, I mean...

Yeah,

but the people that would advise their children to become electricians or plumbers because they'll be employed in 15 years also might look foolish 10 years ago. mean, so ⁓ it is a counterintuitive time that we live in, but you

Vipul Vyas (11:27)
Yeah, that's right.

Billy Riggs (11:35)
sitting here in San Francisco Bay area as a university professor, I do know that a foreman plumber makes a good $100,000 more than a university professor. So it's a strange world we live in.

Vipul Vyas (11:52)
But I think that's my point is that the people who are, you know, white collar workers are looking and going, I have a fairly high stress job, relatively speaking. I don't get compensated that well and there's massive uncertainty around it.

I'm gonna make different decisions than the conventional wisdom had historically dictated. So the movement from white collar to blue collar as an example, the one that you're giving is motion, is not people being stagnant. It's actually a form of dynamism that we don't typically see.

Billy Riggs (12:23)
Well, there's a couple of things that have triggered me on this recently, because there are plenty of individuals in the Bay Area that have white collar blinders on in San Francisco area that that that don't understand the impacts of the AI economy on them. And I think there are plenty of people outside of

California outside of the immediate tech bubble that don't understand the benefit of the AI economy on the blue collar workforce. The fact that the value of labor in the future, traditional labor goes up.

Vipul Vyas (12:57)
Right. Right.

Billy Riggs (12:58)
And I think that's a really interesting paradigm shift that the value of labor actually goes up and the value of highly skilled labor goes up and the value of white collar labor in theory goes down.

Vipul Vyas (13:13)
You could actually argue that there's a glut of supply of the certain types of white collar labor and that we generated artificial demand by having a lot of, know, subsidization of certain, you know, types of degrees or degrees in general. And so then you have a huge college educated workforce that you have to have, you have to have something for them to do. And some of them do things, there's jobs that are probably

not as value, they don't create enough value to dictate their salary or to line up their salary.

Billy Riggs (13:48)
Well, think which is,

yeah, which is the perfect segue into higher education, which is why I wanted to have that discussion first. And it's the perfect segue into a different higher education dialogue:

the machine that has become big time college sports. But we have to talk about the biggest college sport in the room. Good old American football.

Vipul Vyas (14:12)
I mean, it's one of the sports that's pretty dominant in college.

Billy Riggs (14:17)
American football it's not a ball you play with your foot. Why do they call it a football if you don't kick it with your foot?

Vipul Vyas (14:24)
I mean, it's got an interesting history. I don't know it all in detail, but essentially the game was that we call football in general was played in the Ivy Leagues in the 1800s. It's really violent game actually. it didn't actually start out that way. No, it was a derivative actually of soccer originally. So when someone can check the, you know, I'm sure someone in the comments will check my.

Billy Riggs (14:41)
It's a derivative of rugby?

Vipul Vyas (14:49)
my history lesson here, essentially you can look at it real time. Now it looked more akin to soccer, which is why it's called football. And the Ivy leagues would play each other and they would apply the rules, house rules for who was visiting. So if Dartmouth was playing Yale or Yale was playing Harvard, you'd use the Harvard rules if Harvard was the home team and use the Yale rules if Yale was a home team. And they had slight variations among them.

Now, what I understand, and you can fact check me while we're talking, is that when Harvard played McGill in Canada, McGill University of Canada, McGill actually had completely different rules that were more akin to what we think about football today, more rugby-like. Whereas Harvard's rules and the rules traditionally seen in the Ivy Leagues up to that point were more soccer-like.

we largely adopted the McGill rule. the sport that we consider American football is actually has significant Canadian DNA, number one. Now that sport became so violent that the president of the United States at one point in time, Teddy Roosevelt intervened to say, look, this is getting out of control because people were dying on the field. It was a pretty bloody affair.

And those, that's the origin of college football. And it is very similar to rugby and some of the nomenclature and some of the mechanics of the game, but essentially just like soccer or basketball, you're trying to advance the ball to the opposing team's side of the field and their goal, or what we call an end zone. And there's all sorts of complicated ways you can score. There's ways that you can score that people don't even use anymore, such as drop kicks.

Billy Riggs (16:31)
Listen to this Vipul. You are totally correct. So this is why my friend Vipul Vyas is just an amazing historian, in addition to being one of my best friends on the planet. But on Wikipedia, when you all go and do your your historical evaluation to fact check Vipul, you will also see this interesting factoid after the

Harvard rule change, the dangerous mass formations were eliminated. One of them was called the flying wedge that they eliminated. The flying wedge had resulted in serious injuries. Listen to this description of the flying wedge. A flying wedge is a configuration created from a.

Vipul Vyas (17:00)
Yeah, people would die.

Billy Riggs (17:13)
body moving forward in a triangular formation. This V-shaped arrangement began as a successful military strategy in ancient times when military units would move forward in wedge formations to smash through enemy lines. So basically they moved it from the military to football. Insane. Okay, wow. I've learned something.

Vipul Vyas (17:34)
was a variety of plays

and things that they got rid of as a way to clean up football. And it was probably before the whole concussion protocol era, the first sort of football crisis of safety was, you know, around the turn of the last century. So the one thing I would say, and then then football was professionalized in the 30s, really the 40s and going into the 50s. At the time, heavyweight

boxing was the most popular sport in America in the first half of the latter century. And football really got preeminence going into the 60s and 70s. And slow motion. ⁓

Billy Riggs (18:10)
and remind people so

it's a, you know, oblong, weird conical ball. Yeah. Looks like a, also called a pigskin.

Vipul Vyas (18:14)
The football looks like a rugby football. It's not round. It's sort of like a little bit like a

Yeah, because that's what it traditionally had been made of, but it looks almost like a symmetrical egg except point here.

Billy Riggs (18:26)
And those of you

that know our famous holiday that we, one of the reasons we didn't post from like late October on is because we celebrated, know, most Americans basically just take off most of late November until December because we have two of these holidays, Thanksgiving. And then basically after Thanksgiving, don't expect to get through to most people because

Thanksgiving, people just watch football and then they just roll straight into the Christmas holiday season and nothing gets done from like late November until the end of December.

Vipul Vyas (19:01)
Ironically

people who work on saying see you against Christmas or football players because there's usually a live televised game then but but when it comes to like, know your earlier commentary on college football and where it is today as a sport Football American football has its roots in the college environment. That's where it started. That's

Billy Riggs (19:20)
Oh, we'll pause for a second because you

said football was professionalized, but for the audience, sure for our audience, make sure they understand. there's what happens. there, Vipul there's a professional league and there's with the universities, they have these, they have university teams, right? So Harvard University has their university team, but that's not a professional team, right? Or at least up until recently, right? That was like an amateur team, right?

Vipul Vyas (19:45)
Well,

the way that this works is that the game of college football was started by and played by the American aristocracy. It had an evolving set of rules for many decades and that got slowly solidified going into the late 1800s and early 1900s. It got solidified in a way that was especially violent, that was leading to people being killed and injured.

such that it became a national issue. And some of the problems with it were addressed, though not fully. Still a very violent game. going from the 1910s, 20s into then the 30s, 40s, and 50s, professional leagues began to, it left the college environment and became professionalized, as I was alluding to before. And so you had professional football leagues.

often associated with corporations. So companies would field football teams and slowly those corporate teams, like we have another thing where we have companies that have softball teams, which is a version of American baseball. Companies would have these football teams and you can fact check me as I go along here, Billy. And then those slowly amalgamated to create

national football league, similar to maybe what you consider like a Premier League in college, sorry, in the UK, which is recognized worldwide. So that became the National Football League or what is referred to as the NFL that most people may have heard of. And it is a collection of right around 30 plus or minus teams that represent various US cities. And so those teams went from representing companies

to representing cities where those companies had historically been. the change was, instead of being the Acme widget manufacturing companies football team, you became the Acme City, if that's the name of the city, football team. And then that's what we are rooted in today. There's some vestiges of this. think the Browns maybe, that's probably wrong, the Packers.

you know, which, you know, related to meatpacking. There's a few teams in professional football that have some vestiges or links, you know, it's kind of ancient, primordial links back to that, that transitionary era. And so you have now, there's professional league and that's where the real money is. These, these players are better, you know, just like the premier league in soccer or football. This is where the top talent goes. But because of the roots in college,

environments that American football had, it is still well established and strongly held there in terms of its role in college life. Now, as these things have developed, what's happened is that the college system, college football has become a talent development tool for the professional leagues. So instead of having a tiered league system, that's what you have now.

Billy Riggs (22:34)
Well, yeah, let's push pause.

Let's push pause there. So about two years ago, the college, the National College Athletic Association, the NCAA developed a system that allowed players to be compensated.

more or less.

eliminating amateur amateurism in college leagues. This opened up something called the transfer portal. Now what you have is almost every player on every college team making some kind of revenue for their participation in a college sport.

This includes coaching staff, but it also creates really a, I would say a...

a really kind of oddly unfair competitive playing field for smaller universities that want to compete at college athletics too, but also that want to provide good educational programs where you have small liberal arts programs that want to field athletic programs, but that have to

pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have to fund big time college athletics. So you've you now have, you know, you have these these economic engines that are college athletics programs. So you have athletic program budgets that

exceed the budgets of most academic programs.

Vipul Vyas (24:06)
One thing I think it's important to consider or remember is that, as I was alluding to before, heavyweight boxing was the big popular sport in the US before like 1950s, proceeding as was baseball. And really this comes down to entertainment, sports as entertainment. In the college setting,

When football first started out, it was like a sport for the aristocracy. It was like polo, violent version of polo.

A few people would watch it, but it wasn't, you know, a huge spectator sport. Once I think the professional and the college game became much more of an entertainment, you know, and it was a in-person attendance type of entertainment, which was, you know, pretty significant in terms of popularity. Once it moved to television, that's when you had the first big changes happening. So you had, you had successive waves of, you know, from the nineties to today.

of in American football, and conferences, are groups, collections of teams that band together for this purpose, negotiating TV rights contracts to sell their games as entertainment in a bundled form. So they will get a TV contract with the ESPN or whomever. They'll create their own channel or network, as is often the case here.

Billy Riggs (25:16)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (25:17)
And so what was happening was schools were starting to make big money off of these television contracts. And the question then became is, if the schools can monetize.

these sports, why can't the student athletes? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. And the idea there was why are schools now making potentially in some cases tens of millions of dollars on especially television contracts. And none of that money is flowing to the students who are essentially giving free labor.

They're giving away something for free. And so the rationale became is if the school gets to make money, why can't the student? And the reason that's important context is because the mechanism you described, way student athletes are now paid, the name, image, and likeness is inherently tied to those television contracts in terms of at least notionally. It's, if you're using my name, my image, my likeness.

in a video game version of the sport and I'm my, as a player I'm showing up there, then I should get compensated. I can get sponsorships, I can get other things as compensation. Now schools cannot directly pay these athletes under the current rules. It kind of doesn't matter. There's ways to work around it. Donors can come in and sponsor athletes and things of that nature. So.

This has been the corrupting force, if you want to call it that, in college athletics in the US. Primarily it's college football, then it's men's college basketball, a little bit of women's college basketball, but primarily football. And the issue that this has raised is those funds are now diverted to football. The universities may argue this is a great way to create brand awareness, but...

And some people would argue that, this money would never come into the system otherwise anyway. So that's the defense of why it works the way it does. It's fair that now the students actually get to make money off their efforts, just as the schools are. And yeah, the system now is inherently better because everyone is getting compensated for their talents.

Billy Riggs (27:18)
Yeah, but I wonder, and I agree with you about, think it's wonderful that the athletes can be renumerated for their time and their likeness and that the courts were able to recognize that through the name image likeness regulation and the fair pay to play regulation. But at the same time,

It feels to me like a governance story in terms of how it it shifts the the market in terms of and shifts the alignment of educational incentives where universities end up making decisions to. To fund things that that prioritize athletic departments and to fund

things that may not be mission aligned in terms of educational programs and mission aligned in terms of the educational mission and may more be mission aligned in terms of supporting athletic endeavors. And so, I think the question maybe comes, how do universities balance the struggle between sports,

rationally with how they govern these other things like AI automation workforce transition, because I think there's some accountability there. How do you balance both ethically?

Vipul Vyas (28:37)
I think there are two separate issues. I think there's probably a reallocation of resources that is missed.

poorly conceived, right? If the university is reallocating money there, then that's probably a breakdown in decision making. think, do personally, believe that lot of the money that's coming into the system is money that would not have gone to the academic endeavor anyway. So this is net new money. And, you know, it's coming from a lot of alumni and donors that want to use football to enhance the brand of their university.

which does enhance the brand of the university in the domestic market. So if the University of South Carolina we alluded to before is winning more games, it's getting on television more often, it becomes more visible, it might get more applicants, therefore it can be more selective and get, it can elevate the profile of its student body. I think those things are likely true. So it's a big branding exercise or brand enhancing exercise to promote these sports.

But, but I think.

Billy Riggs (29:33)
Vipul,

think it's a lot harder to sell for a five foot six professor that researches autonomous vehicles than it is for a seven foot center that can slam dunk a basketball. I have to say like some little, some person that's actually going after donors isn't gonna go

sell my research lab even though it's gonna benefit students that are gonna go get jobs and should it change the world, the donor department ain't gonna sell groundbreaking research. They're gonna sell tickets to basketball games. And that's depressing.

Vipul Vyas (30:09)
But

then, but that goes to my, the corollary to my point, which is what I was teeing up is that if all what I just said being true, if we assume that for a second, the problem inherently is three, maybe fourfold. One is these universities are, like many of the other institutions we're talking about,

thinking the world is the same as it was before. And it's not. They're having to now compete with international universities. American universities used to basically be at the pinnacle of the education system, generally speaking, even ones that may not be the Ivy Leagues, they still were marquee relative to other institutions of the world, by and large. They're now having to compete with dozens and dozens of universities around the world.

And there's now friction in the funnel in terms of foreign students coming here from a political perspective and also competitive perspective. They have other options. There are countless schools, for example, in China they could go to and study, and Australia and Canada, all over the world, right? To some degree that's been the case for a while, but those options are just expanding at an accelerating rate. And...

The flex, as the kids would say, is you're sort of, if you're focused on the sports side, you're doing a flex in a small pond versus one in a more relevant global environment. It's probably more important to tell the world how many Nobel laureates you have, or patents are being produced by the people that

are associated with the university or a lot of these other metrics, then your television contracts. If the academic mission is still the primary mission. But that process of deciding what is the reason for this institution to exist is a fundamental leadership question. And that's one that

short-term money and lots of it can make it hard to make a clear-eyed decision for the long term. So I think that's where we're at is people are still playing by the rules of yesterday when they don't realize that there's one more global competition to do what they do, better competition, and that's not going to worry about talking about

the performance of their team on the field or anything like that. And then third, the nature of what these institutions need to do in terms of their role in society, given AI, given all the other changes that taking place, is fundamentally changing.

Billy Riggs (32:29)
So if we're gonna invest in something.

Vipul Vyas (32:29)
So

that's, are the places we probably want to invest. But if you're thinking about the world in the traditional way that this just, you know, this we're just operating within the U S we're just operating, you know, with the old rules as they were. And the goal is the, you know, enhance my brand in this limited universe. Then you're going to make decisions that align with that. You're going to think that, you know, chasing the best players and the,

and the best unfil... And look, no one can blame someone for wanting that, but it's gonna warp decision-making. And it has, I think, to some extent.

Billy Riggs (33:05)
Well, I love basketball and I love football, but I also love automation and there's been a lot of news about automation. There's been a lot of news about infrastructure, but in your opinion, what specific things should the educational endeavor be focused on in terms of

future jobs to be keep pace for the 21st century, 22nd century, 23rd century, going into 2026. What direction should we be going in architecture and engineering in the sciences? What should we be thinking about? come on, take a gander.

Vipul Vyas (33:39)
I have no idea. But what I do know, no,

no, I don't. shouldn't, shouldn't in the sense that that is a dynamic question, you know, that that will evolve. Right. But you have to have the right F of X, the right objective, general objective. And that is how does the universe. Right. Yeah.

Billy Riggs (33:50)
Okay, I'm gander.

Let me, let myth busts in. Yeah. I say, I

think there's a myth. I think there's a myth that everyone needs to code. You don't think I think, because you know what? That I think that the, the, already see that, that we see no code apps. We see that, that OpenAI is already able to do a rudimentary coding for us. So the, we, we have a lot of basic understanding of no code solutions.

Vipul Vyas (34:04)
Whoa.

Billy Riggs (34:22)
So.

Vipul Vyas (34:22)
Well,

I would say that differently. And that actually supports my point is that you can't know where to, you know, from a curriculum perspective to make your bets. That should be something that's dynamic. That is something that you have to create an environment where you can really flexibly adapt to whatever is needed based on what the market pull is. But my bigger point is that universities need to think of themselves as having just like the Fed has

two missions or two goals. Universities in this country need to think of themselves as having two goals. Creating an educated workforce to enhance the competitiveness of the country and creating people with skills and capabilities that can be competitive within the country. That their institution is producing people who can be successful.

Those are their twin missions. Putting a championship team on the field is quite peripheral to those two missions. And as much as I love college sports, that's just the fact. And if they don't realize that, they're going to be out-competed by places from around the world that we have not even heard of today.

because that is those institutions' mission. And they're much more dedicated to it. And those people who are dedicated to that mission are more likely to realize the outcome of that objective.

I think that's where things are today.

Billy Riggs (35:40)
Yep. So what about specific news? So OpenAI got a huge valuation.

But if we stepped above that, I alluded earlier that in our current economy, I think there's some volatility or fragility in terms of how much capital there is chasing AI products right now.

Do you think AI companies are being priced as if they'll capture enormous value and the assumptions are valid? Is the evaluation appropriate? Is that, are there bottlenecks ahead? What are your thoughts on some of the, some of what's being discussed right now in terms of the...

kind of the magnitude of some of these companies.

Vipul Vyas (36:32)
I mean, if the question is there a bubble or not, I don't know. And if I had a strong opinion on that, I would be, you know, options, either puts or calls against companies reflecting that. I think the cycle we're going through is very similar to what we did with the internet where, there was a lot of investment, a lot of bad investment, lot of over investment. Are we doing that again? Maybe.

but it's often the case. But what you end up on the other side of that is a lot of infrastructure and capacity. Like, you know, we built out a fiber network probably bigger than it needed to be. We had more people knowing HTML than we probably needed to at the time. But what then happened was the price of all those things fell because there was excess poorly allocated capacity. And so now you can even do more of the things that you, you know, that you'd want to with that, those basic inputs.

And so AI, you know, in that case, the web became even cheaper to become a part of after the bubble burst. And I would say the same process is probably going to play out this time. So there may be a bubble, it may burst, but that will be a painful, but likely short-lived experience. mean, I think the dot com bubble lasted from like, late 2000, maybe it was 2001 to 2003, four ish.

Billy Riggs (37:29)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (37:49)
So a few years, which is not fun, but it wasn't forever. It felt like it was gonna be forever.

Billy Riggs (37:53)
That's a

good character. think what Vipul and I...

Vipul Vyas (37:58)
And from there, it's

straight up.

Billy Riggs (38:00)
That's a good character of saving. always have to, and I taught the media about this a couple of weeks ago is that, you know, Silicon Valley has always been a, a location of experimentation. It's always been a place of cycles. And it's always been a cycle where the rebound, the region always ends up with another cycle of innovation and the spawning something that comes after. so, I, I too agree that, that it.

that even if there is a bubble, the bubble will always yield some type of rebound effect. The one thing that I think is interesting, and maybe I want to ask my original question a bit differently is, Vipul is there a piece of the value chain in the AI stack that you're most interested in or a piece of the the AI value chain that you think is

is most valuable right now or that you'd be most interested in diving into or even investing in?

Vipul Vyas (39:04)
I don't know about investing in it, but would just say that I think people should concentrate on where dredgery can be removed. It's likely not going to be in the cloud.

Billy Riggs (39:11)
Drudgery, drudgery,

can you explain that?

Vipul Vyas (39:13)
just mundane tasks that are just no fun to do. know, like document creating, you know, user manuals, documenting change request, even like, you know, I'll give you an example, like police reports, like, or certain kinds of documentings, you know, certain interactions that happen. Like if AI can just capture what was said and then summarize it.

Billy Riggs (39:18)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (39:39)
you know, lot of people's life is buried in paperwork, as opposed to the actual doing of the thing that they were trained for, that they've aspired to focus on. Instead, they're having to document what they just did to mitigate legal exposure, you know, to just to dot i's and cross t's for billing purposes, for legal purposes, whatever, you know, non- it's important because you don't want to

Billy Riggs (39:52)
Yeah, it's great.

Vipul Vyas (40:03)
expose yourself to risk and you know legally or you don't want to miss out in the ability to bill something as fully as you can. And that's often why people document things. either to be able to legitimately bill something or prevent someone from accusing you of not doing what you said you were going to do or that you did. But that constitutes a huge amount of friction in labor. And so I think concentrating on those kinds of things is more valuable.

than anything super glamorous or complicated.

Billy Riggs (40:30)
And those are going to be where we see entrepreneurship in the future. that, again, this is where I've taken a lot of interviews on this as well is I don't think people understand. Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (40:37)
It's also

where companies can play because you're taking a general model that may be created by Anthropic or OpenAI and you're applying it to a very specific problem. And those larger companies probably don't have time to deal with those very specific use cases, at least for the moment. so someone has to learn about all that stuff. has to go and learn what's involved with

this type of documenting this or that and the specifics of it and all the vagaries and the workflows and someone like these bigger companies, they're just not going to bother. It's not worth their time, but it is worth the time with someone who's got more modest aspirations. Like I'd rather be a hundred million dollar company versus a hundred billion and there's fine. That's good enough.

Billy Riggs (41:18)
Yeah, exactly. it's really what excites me more about the future of LLMs and generalized models is this idea that they will support smaller entrepreneurs and smaller companies and just the job growth beyond

Open AI beyond llama, beyond Meta beyond Anthropic and just this idea of, of dividend economies beyond, these tech bros. Cause I do think that we haven't even started to understand the economic implications that, are potentially trickled down from the AI revolution. And I mean, it definitely could be world changing for small business owners.

Vipul Vyas (42:01)
Right. I agree. I think there's a lot of time, trapped time that can be freed up to do more productive things. That's the first place to start. I do have to go, but I think that's to me where I think the most immediate term opportunity, immediate term impact and utility comes from is those types of things.

Billy Riggs (42:19)
Well, think,

yeah, I think this really goes back to our conversation last year and this year in terms of reframing the workforce conversation that the future isn't white collar versus blue collar. It's hybrid in where blue collar perhaps becomes more refined, skilled, and technical white collar becomes more leverage and scarcer. And then

Green collar becomes more foundational. Maybe the important thing is that we make sure we invest in education so that we can capably credential the future.

Vipul Vyas (42:56)
Plenty more to talk about for 2026. It's going to be a pretty interesting year.

Billy Riggs (42:59)
Absolutely.

Thank you, Vip. Happy New Year, everybody. We'll be back. Let us know your thoughts. See you again on Rewiring the American Edge.