You've heard the line about "waste, fraud, and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid. But what does that actually look like? Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz has created Chapter, a company that helps new American seniors navigate the convoluted morass that America's health care programs have become. Cobi is also a veteran of Palantir, so he talks to Charlie about the disastrous inefficiency of government contractors, what our AI laws should be, and far more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
Ask chapter.com, a conversation with Kobe Blumenfeld Gantz all about Medicare.
I learned a lot about Medicare, the issues, the problems, enrollment, and more.
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Okay, everybody, welcome to this amazing conversation we have with you all about ask chapter dot com dot Did I get that right, Kobe?
Great.
And we are joining us now as Kobe Blumenfeld Gantz.
Did I say that correctly?
Yes.
Okay, welcome to the program.
is.
I hear such amazing things about you from Vivek and other people, and so glad you're here.
Introduce yourself to our audience.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I started Chapter a few years ago.
Before that, I had worked in software, working with the government, and have spent a lot of time looking at how large data sets can be used to help people, how the government can be more efficient, and there's a lot to explore there, in using information and providing better services to people, how we can create systems that help people with much better incentives to create better services for Americans.
So you decided to start ask chapter dot com, first tell everybody what it is and then the why.
So, or you could, whichever way you want to do it.
Yeah.
Tell us, tell the story, because it's about, it's a personal experience that drove you to this.
Yeah.
So, I was very fortunate to grow up with my grandfather living with my parents and me when I was in high school.
He was very healthy, mentally sharp and with it, but just as a function of his generation, he didn't really have access to the technology of the day and didn't really know how to interact with others in a meaningful way.
And it wasn't because he was a Luddite.
In fact, it was the opposite.
He would take radios apart.
He was very, very technical for technology of his day.
And he was fairly isolated in our home.
And I always thought that was just kind of crazy, that we didn't have a good way to engage our elders and our seniors in productive life after this thing we call retirement.
Of course, I didn't do anything with that at the time.
I went to college, I went to grad school, worked in software for a long time.
And then as my parents were getting older and going through a similar process, I observed them navigating Medicare and retirement at large and just saw how the system is really rigged against our elders when they're dealing with Medicare.
and it was just such a challenging experience for them.
They were working with a local Medicare advisor who was maybe well-intentioned but didn't have the data or the tools to be effective.
And they frankly got screwed.
They were far overpaying for a plan that they didn't need.
And I just looked at the industry and thought it was kind of crazy.
So excuse my ignorance.
So there's Medicare advisors.
So is it like open enrollment?
I mean, I've never dealt with Medicare.
How does this process work and who set it up?
Yeah, so the history of Medicare is pretty interesting.
Goes back to LBJ with Social Security Act and Medicare.
And we largely have a system that's been Frankenstein together over the past many, many decades.
And there are many types of Medicare.
It's not just this one, it's not one Medicare plan.
Part A, B, C, D, all these letters, alphabet soup of Medicare.
And most people assume that it's just automatic, that you turn 65 or you retire and you get Medicare.
And that's fortunate or unfortunately, just not how it works.
And so there's a whole industry of people out there who are there to support seniors in navigating this process.
But as we're seeing with some of the DOJ investigations now into a lot of the Pretty much every American who's working with a Medicare advisor today is not getting the best guidance for their needs.
That's 70 million people.
But who are these Medicare advisors?
Are they private actors?
Okay, so they're companies.
Yeah, think of it as like a real estate agent.
So you have that.
That's a good comparison.
Okay.
It's a real estate agent analog, many of whom are kind of doing this as a side hustle.
And so, you know, not all are malicious at all, but most to all don't have the data or the really expertise to be effective.
So, let's say a couple, what age, are you eligible, MagnaRC 65?
65.
Okay, so they both turn 65, they call a Medicare advisor, there's all these hotlines, right?
Yeah.
That they advertise on TV.
I just kind of, I drone out when they do that, right?
But they say, okay, call your Medicare Advisor hotline, whatever.
You call it, you're like enlisting a real estate agent.
What is the conventional or the most common experience that anyone has?
So the way it works is most Medicare advisors are paid a lot more in terms of commission for one type of plan, it's called the Medicare Advantage plan.
That's one of the two types of Medicare plans you can go down.
And because they're paid more by these Medicare Advantage plans, they're going to push a subset of Medicare plans on the user.
In the same way you might have an insurance agent push plans of any type, whether it's auto insurance, life insurance, whatever it is.
But when you're dealing with someone's health and something that's so foundational, and also let's remember, it's not a welfare program.
Medicare is a program that we've all been paying into.
We pay into as part of Medicare payroll tax our entire lives.
and so it's something people have paid into and deserve and have really earned through their whole careers.
They're being, It's not what's better for the customer.
And really, who is the customer here?
So then, so do people have to co-pay on Medicare then?
I mean, who's paying for Medicare Advantage versus a lower plan?
The senior themselves?
I thought Medicare is largely covered by the government taxpayer.
Yeah, we it's the short version is there are a lot of costs to the consumer on Medicare without going into too too nitty gritty detail.
But the the majority of Americans do sign up for some kind of supplemental coverage, which they do have to pay something for.
Sometimes that's in the form of premium, sometimes that's in the form of co-pay, sometimes it's in the form of paying for prescriptions, whatever it is.
And so there are a lot of costs sometimes hidden in the system that can be really hard for people to navigate.
So then where do you guys come in and you help with the three key Medicare decisions?
When to enroll, how to get the most value from Medicare, and then also how to keep Medicare working for you.
So you're a disruptor.
That's like the favorite word, like, ooh, you're a disruptor.
How are you disrupting it?
And how have you been received by the conventional Medicare lobby?
Yeah.
So I am not liked by the Medicare industry.
And that's why you're doing great work.
I appreciate that.
The Medicare cartel is doing a lot of...
It's wild.
It's wild.
I'm talking about Medicare itself, the cartel surrounding it.
Yeah.
So Medicare as a program is actually beloved.
Most people who are on Medicare have a.
really good health insurance coverage.
It's all the things around it.
It's really the on-ramp, the accessibility to Medicare that are so challenging and are rife with misincentives.
So things that we do to help, first and foremost, you know, it's probably not a surprise to say that health insurance companies are not the most technologically savvy or technologically forward organizations.
And so what we do is build a lot of really good technology and improve the data quality.
So as an example, if you want to know what your prescriptions are going to cost on a Medicare plan, you know, it's a reasonable thing to ask.
There is not a single organization or company in the country other than Chapter for better or for worse, that can tell you that with precision.
And the reason is because we have to integrate tens of billions of records of prescription data to know that answer.
It's actually a very hard technical problem.
So one is we do a lot of technology to in the background so that the senior doesn't have to do all that research.
Two is we align incentives.
And this is one of, if not the most important.
As I was saying, most Medicare brokers just push plans that pay them the most.
In fact, the DOJ just unveiled this huge investigation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So is that illegal to do?
We're about to find out based on how the DOJ investigation I mean, there's no question that it's unethical.
Whether it's illegal is a question, and that's what they're litigating now.
But at a high level, you have a few big Medicare insurance brokerages who are being paid basically volume-based performance programs saying, hey, if you sell...
So does everyone use a Medicare advisor or it's just most people?
I mean, it's like closing out a house.
You don't need a real estate agent.
Would you say 60%, 70%?
Roughly half to 60% of people use some kind of Medicare advisor.
And the reason is you can't get a different price going direct.
So it's actually, there's no incentive not to use a Medicare advisor.
And it is very..
complicated but the advisor makes the money from the government then the advisor makes the money from the insurance carrier so the flow of funds is the government pays a health insurance company united at night anthem whatever got it i see they pay you know they are the ones who are paying the medicare broker got it We're honored to be partnering with the Allen Jackson Ministries, and today I want to point you to their podcast.
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And so then you guys come in and you are trying to revolutionize the entire broker relationship where then people would then use you as a replacement for Medicare advisory.
Is that correct?
Yeah, so at our core, we are a Medicare advisory and a retirement advisory, which we can talk about in a few minutes.
But we look at every single Medicare option.
We take in the needs of each person.
and we educate them on what their needs and concerns are and then we figure out what's right for them if there's a medicare plan that suits their needs even if it's one that we don't earn any money on we will still enroll someone in that medicare plan and because it's the right thing to do, we think it creates a long-term relationship with the customer.
And it actually makes the end user the customer.
A really simple way to think about in any market, where are the incentives, is who is the customer?
If we were to go back to employer health insurance, the reason that it's tied to your employer is really a product of World War two.
The government was trying to stem inflation and so froze wages.
And the only way for employers to compete was to provide other benefits like health insurance, tax-free health insurance.
And so we're still eating the cost of that decision half a century later, almost a century later at this point.
But the employer in that case is the customer, right?
The health insurance company sells to the employer, not to the employee, not to all of us as consumers of the health insurance.
It's similar in Medicare.
The Medicare broker thinks of the health insurance company as the customer, not the end user.
I think that's a fundamental challenge with the industry and one of the things we've really flipped on its head.
And so the.
To kind of complete the whole point then, how big are you guys?
How many employees?
And you have success stories that are flowing?
We've been really fortunate.
We are helping hundreds of thousands of Americans navigate Medicare.
At this point, we've been around for a few years and growing.
We're definitely the fastest growing Medicare organization in the country, one of the fastest growing companies in the country of any archetype.
And so, yeah, we're helping a lot of people and our goal is to help every American.
Yeah.
And so the, you are an entrepreneur and you started this.
Where did you work previously?
I worked at a company called Palantir.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
The New York Times says they're wanting to spy on everybody.
That is what the New York Times says.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, I loved it.
There was a Wall Street Journal article about some of the work we did just a couple of days ago.
And I'm a huge fan of the work we did.
I'm very proud of what we did.
I was fortunate to be able to support the Marines in the Middle East and support a large number of areas of the government.
Yeah, it's when the New York Times attacks you, then there's probably another, there's something of the opposite of the truth there, and so there's been some great people that have come out of that.
So let's now talk a little more broadly about government waste.
What is your philosophy on the inefficiencies of government and how we can try to modernize it?
It's a really tough problem.
I spent almost a decade working with the government while at Palantir and now at Chapter.
in different ways.
I think one of the least sexy but most fundamental improvements that the government needs to make and they're trying to make now is around, this is going to sound so silly, but HR policies.
How do you hire the best people, incentivize the best people?
Because what are organizations?
They're groups of people trying to make good decisions.
And you need to have a way for people to, for the government to hire the best people, to retain the best people, and to let go of people who aren't an appropriate fit.
And I think that's one of the hardest things for the government to do, not only because it's the government, but it's, and it's not unique to the government.
Any large organization has this challenge.
Any, and you know, these are.
hundreds of thousands of people in these government agencies.
It's a lot of people to manage.
It's hard.
Yeah.
And so the more on the HR, he who controls the HR will control the personnel and with personnel is policy.
Where did we go wrong as a country just more broadly at the collapse of robust HR?
How did we run human resources hiring, onboarding 40 years, 50 years ago, not just technologically, That's just been a general trend across pretty much every administration.
And that often includes bringing on more people.
And then there are a lot of rules.
There are a lot of different interest groups who promote different areas of investment for different groups of people.
And that creates sort of different little fiefdoms in the government and in different agencies.
And because the sort of political class, the political appointees change roughly every four years or every eight years with the administration change, but you have the civil servant class which doesn't change it creates this really interesting and often challenged relationship between people who are there for a very long time and people who are not and it's really hard i don't have a i don't have an easy solution for it yeah and so what what are some of the other massive inefficiencies you think in the government that technology
absolutely um i think we the way that our government procures technology um is really stuck in the stone age and i'll give a couple of examples um so one is sort of a defense example and one is a medicare example um in the defense world um you have these cost plus contracts and so for people who aren''t familiar, cost plus is basically a way of contracting where a private company will say, hey, it's going to cost me a dollar to produce this widget.
I'm going to charge the government three times my cost in this case.
So I'm going to charge the government three dollars.
It's going to cost me a dollar.
I'm going to make two dollars a profit.
And that's going to be a consistent way of doing it.
The problem with that is it disincentivizes innovation.
It disincentivizes investment into new ways of doing things because the company is always going to make the same profit margin.
right and the government has there are a lot of rules and a lot of executive orders that have come out particularly in this current administration to move away from that model, but the civil servant class is still stuck there.
And we're seeing that in Medicare as well.
At HHS, there are a whole host of technology challenges and procurement challenges, some of which aren't that hard to solve that they're most technical problem, but they're very hard to solve because you have these people with different incentives and different sort of fiefdoms, as I was saying.
Yeah, and there's just recalcitrants.
to any sort of technological innovation or adaptation.
And I guess that's part of why you started your business.
And it just goes to show that the private sector is doing everything the government once wished it could do from SpaceX to, you know, Palantir you mentioned, right?
Both SpaceX and Palantir had to sue the government to get this.
So Let's talk about that.
So Palantir sued the US Army and won for the same Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act called FASA Statute, where basically the government was not allowing Palantir to compete on a very large defense contract because the government wanted to build it themselves.
And so what do they do?
Also expand it because people attack Palantir all the time.
Okay, I don't work at Palantir.
I'm not a school person for country.
No, no, I know, but I just, I care about truth.
I don't like laws.
Sure, sure.
I'm just sharing that so that they don't get mad at me.
Palantir is very good at building software that allows people to analyze data.
It integrates data and it analyzes data.
It's very simple.
So it's, you know, if you're upset with Palantir, I think you also have to be upset with Microsoft for Microsoft Office, I think you also have to be upset with Amazon for AWS products, I think you have to be upset with pretty much any company that builds data analysis products, which is hard to be upset with because they actually do provide a lot of value to the world.
Yes, so they sued.
I interrupted you.
No, yeah, so Palantir sued the army for not allowing Palantir to compete on a particular government contract that Palantir thought it was best suited for.
And the government's claim was that it should be built by the government.
And this is, I think, a much broader issue, which again we're seeing in pretty much every federal agency where the government is still trying to build software themselves, which doesn't make sense.
I mean, the government can barely deliver the mail, no offense to them.
I mean, 100%.
So wait, so you're trying to say the government is building software.
I mean, how does that even?
It's like an incomprehensible concept.
There's two sides of it.
One is the government employs a small number of actual engineers, very small.
We're talking about like a handful of people at each agency who try to build.
But the much more pernicious and much wider version of this is you have the government consultants and contractors.
These are, you know, the Booz-Allens, the Accentures.
And they're literally like attaches of all of them.
Exactly.
They have government IDs.
They're viewed almost internally at times as government employees.
And they are the ones.
They're STs sometimes, yeah.
Exactly.
They're the ones sucking the money out of the system.
And I think if you want to go after anyone, you go after the big consultants.
Well, and that's, yeah, let's zero in on that.
That never gets talked about, right?
So we're always like, okay, the Department of Labor has, you know, I don't know, 60,000 people.
I don't know if that's that much.
Whatever, Department of Education.
But there's sometimes double or triple that of government contractors.
That's where we should start the cutting.
Absolutely.
I mean, I don't want to get too political, but why have Republicans refused to start that?
A lot of them finance their campaigns too, right?
Like you have these major law firms like McKinsey, where they're consulting, and they just get checks every month from the government.
And they have badges.
They have like literal, it's not visitor badges.
They're able to badge in and badge out.
Yeah.
And it's not just a special government employee.
They have like a permanent government.
They have desks of people that are just for contractors in the government.
Yeah.
Has this made us more efficient?
No.
It's made us dramatically less efficient.
That's the argument.
They're like, well, we need these McKinsey types because otherwise the government would be super inefficient.
look to the free market and the government should say, hey, is there a better product that exists?
Let's buy it and integrate it.
rather than and that can take a month rather than let's give, you know, Accenture or Booz Allen or someone five years to build a worse version of.
How many contractors are there in the federal government?
We don't even know.
I don't know the number, but it's got to be over a million.
I would be surprised if it weren't.
Yeah.
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It gets you have this permanent civil service bureaucracy.
You have this permanent government contractor class and a DOD and CIA and the Pentagon, there's a ton of contractors that, especially in the Intel world, like, remarkable.
And so then the civil service, we kind of know they're just slow and bureaucratic, but the contractors, that's a whole lot.
They should be held to an even higher standard.
And are they?
No, absolutely.
In fact, they're held to a lower standard.
They mess up and they almost fail upward.
You have these contracts that go so far over budget and take so much longer to build than they're supposed to.
And then the government just says, oh, well, you know, we're already pot committed.
We've already spent five years building this thing.
Let's just spend another two and let's just give them more money.
And this is a product in many ways of that cost plus contract instead of an outcomes-based contracting.
And we're seeing that at the health and human services today as well.
It's not unique to DOD or to Intel.
It's really across every part of the government.
And I think the number one place that Americans actually see the government more than any other place is with their Medicare.
You have seventy million Americans dealing with Medicare every single year.
Seventy million.
How often do they shift from plan to plan?
People it really depends on the details, but most people are eligible to make a plan switch roughly once a year, some people more than that.
But it depends on the persons.
Yeah, and so, and the CMS, which is run by Dr. Oz, that's a beast.
Medicaid.
And what would other ways with your company or outside, how else do we save money with Medicare?
Where are some of the other wastes in this behemoth?
I think there's a few areas.
One is it's just a massively inefficient system today.
If you think about inefficiency creating waste, you have people who are signing up for the wrong Medicare plan and different studies show different things, but roughly 70 to 90 percent of Americans are on the wrong Medicare plan for their needs.
So if you think about the entire system, you have this massive inefficiency of what plans people are on, how they utilize those plans, and how the plans serve those end users.
So that's one big area.
The second big area is utilization.
Like you have these Medicare plans that have all these benefits.
but they're all locked in in the plans and they make them so hard to use and so seniors are offered these great hearing dental vision over-the-counter benefits but they can't actually use them so one thing we've done at chapter is we've built a free app that allows people to look up their Medicare plan, look up their over-the-counter benefits and just redeem them with a click of a button.
And then magically a few days later, their free benefits show up at their door instead of having to spend weeks calling different carriers, calling different middleware providers to understand what's going on.
And this is just one very small example, of course, of the inefficiency and the waste.
But you magnify that across everything.
And there's just no price transparency across the entire system.
No price transparency.
No, if you go into a doctor's office and ask how much is this procedure going to cost, they don't even know.
They don't even know exactly.
It's not like they're holding it.
They're just, I don't know.
Yeah, no.
It's all the third party paying is like the downfall of American healthcare.
It's one of the two.
I think that's one.
I think the second biggest issue in healthcare is there's no longitudinal incentive for insurance carriers to provide good health.
So what does that mean?
Every year, your employer can switch your healthcare or your Medicare plan can change.
And so if you're a health insurance company and you want to create long term, you know, good preventative healthcare, you don't know that you're going to have that customer in 10 or 20 or 30 years, not to be charitable to the health insurance companies, but where's the incentive for them to make me healthier today rather than in 50 years?
The longitudinal incentive just isn't there.
And so the, it just, well, here's a, here's a provocative question for you.
Why has no one done what you're doing yet?
When I started the company, pretty much everyone in the industry I agree.
I agree.
Pretty much everyone in the industry told me I was crazy, that what I wanted to do was illegal, and that I would fail within the first three months.
And so I think some of it is path dependence.
I think a lot of people who operate in the health insurance space and the Medicare space just frankly don't think about things in a new way that often.
And part of it is technical.
It's a very hard data and technology problem that we've had to solve.
And I brought some of the best engineers I've worked with at Palantir and at other places to build for this.
And the best technology individuals, the best companies don't really build for seniors.
They build for problems they see.
That's a good point.
How do I get Chinese food to my dorm?
To my apartment quicker.
And I think it goes to this systematic issue that we have actually in our society that we don't have the right engagement, the intergenerational engagement.
engagement with our I agree with our seniors.
No, and it's just like I mean, I know we have a ton seniors that are watching this program and they're getting hosted by this stuff.
So you guys are using artificial intelligence, is that right?
We are.
Talk a little bit about that, then I want to have more macro conversation on AI.
We use a lot of applied AI.
We don't build foundational models ourselves, nor should we.
But AI is really, really great at automating repetitive tasks in a high quality way.
So what a lot of our competitors That's a good way of putting it.
What a lot of our competitors do is they'll hire teams of thirty or forty or fifty people to listen to samples of phone calls, because we do a lot on the phone.
And they'll listen to samples of phone calls and say, hey, is this Medicare advisor giving a good experience or a bad experience?
But they're listening to one or two percent of calls.
What we do is we have an AI listen to 100% of calls, flag issues, and much faster, much more real time and much lower cost.
Which company is able to build that kind of model for you?
We're always testing the latest model.
So we use So is that a large language model?
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's a large language model.
So we use all the big guys you'd expect.
And they'll be able to do a boutique thing for Is that how it works?
You would go to a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Grock and you say, hey, I'm a corporate actor.
And they build is that how?
I'm always interested how the backdoor corporate stuff works with these.
So I know front facing AI just the way it works is we go to their APIs.
So we go to Gemini An, Anthropic, OpenAIs, APIs.
Perplexity.
Perplex, yep, whatever.
What do you mean by API?
So it's an app, basically a backend program that allows us to programmatically communicate with that service.
So instead of me logging into a web user interface, a chatbot, it says, hey, tell me about X. I can connect our two databases, for example.
And that costs more money, obviously.
It costs more money, usually, because an enterprise is using it.
And then on top of that, we are the ones building or working with other companies that build more products around it.
So if we wanted to build a scorecard for our Medicare advisors.
Sure.
We're the ones building that or working with other parties building it.
The OpenAIs of the world, the Anthropics of the world are not building it.
I just think that's important because people only think of Jack GPT as what they see front-facing, but back-facing, they could be scanning phone calls to make sure seniors save money.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so that's exactly what third parties like us do.
So let's talk more broadly about AI.
I mean, you're in the tech space.
You come from that whole world.
Are you an accelerationist?
Do you have a little bit of skepticism?
Do you think we should have more government control?
What is your philosophy when it comes to artificial intelligence?
I think of AI in the same way I think about kind of any technology revolution, which I think makes me both an accelerationist and a skeptic at the same time, which is that I think it's a much bigger change, but in the same way that technology accelerates, it's not qualitatively different than the internet or than a cloud-hosted database.
It is something that will make us much more efficient, much better, and allow us to do many more things than we used to be able to do.
to your point on ordering chinese food I was never able to just click a button 30 years ago to get Chinese food to my door.
Today I can.
It's magic.
And so AI looks like magic today and it will continue.
to make it more interesting.
More efficient.
What are your biggest concerns with artificial intelligence.
I think people will rely on it far too much without human oversight or human intervention.
And maybe in some contexts that's okay, but broadly I don't think that's okay.
I think from a more metaphysical perspective almost or a religious perspective, I think it's very hard to have a thing that humans have built as compared to an omniscient being.
And I think that's very dangerous.
What do you mean by that?
There are groups of people who think about AI as omniscient.
It has all the information, it has all the data.
It's not...
It doesn't have a soul.
It doesn't have a good...
Exactly.
It doesn't have a good way to personify this information, but it does have a lot of raw input.
And so people think, oh, I can just rely on this supercomputer to make my decisions.
And I think a society that just relies entirely, it's almost like a society that just relies 100% on technocrats is probably not going to.
I'm hesitant to say the government should have some dictate that implicates how we..
how we use AI.
I think that's very hard for the government to do as we just said.
The government's not always the best with technology.
I think a lot of it has to be free market and there do there do need to be some controls for what disclaimers do we allow, how do we source the data that goes into AI and how is it checked.
I think I think knowing whether the information that we're looking at is whether it's correct or incorrect.
And by what standard and by what standard exactly.
That's the key.
Yeah.
Because AI starts determining the standard.
Exactly.
It's hard.
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I don't.
It's not something I think about at all.
No, that's okay, but why?
Because I view AI as, I don't want to say just another technology innovation, but just another technology innovation.
I don't view it as something that will take over the world in sort of a doomsday.
Sure.
So, I mean, trust me, I'm not making any proclamations here, but a big argument sometimes on the right is, you know, it's Cyberdyne systems, Terminator 2, it's going to take over our grid.
In some of the large language models, Gemini, there's some evidence to show prior that it has contempt for humanity.
Is there any truth to that?
I'm not the one building the model, but the way I read it.
I know, but as a technology.
Yeah, the way I interpret it is the models are trying to give us what we want to hear often, and they're trying to figure out what we're trying to use it for.
There are plenty of people who are prompting and asking questions of these models who may have contempt for humanity or who may ask questions that indicate contempt for humanity.
So that's where I think it's lear very easy to imitate or to ape these conversations.
It's very hard to truly have an AI that makes these decisions.
At what moment do we know if it's reached singularity?
Will we ever know?
That's a great question.
I think we would probably know.
How?
I think we, well, there's, has the AI reached singularity?
And there's, have we relied upon the AI in a singularity?
Well, then there's the third question, how do we know if it has?
Right.
So I don't think we would know unless we are relying on it is where I was getting it.
Okay, so build that out.
So let's say an AI has secretly exists today that already knows everything and is smarter than all of humanity.
And knows itself.
And knows itself.
Which is the key, right?
And can build more of itself, right?
Yeah, and it looks outside of itself and can really look at, as humans do, introspectively.
Absolutely.
Let's say that exists.
Like, why would it stay hidden today?
Probably because it's trying to amass some kind of power.
That's sort of what, at least what we would think is a rational reason.
And we're not reliant, or at least that we know of, on an AI as a singularity.
But I kind of think of it similar to, like, are we living in assimilation?
Like, how would we know?
Yeah, we wouldn't.
But I don't think we are.
So you're a religious Jew is that correct?
Yes.
You eat kosh fruit.
I'm Shobra Shabbas from a Christian perspective.
I have a belief that the entire spread of the simulation argument in Silicon Valley is there.
It's the politically correct way to say you're a theist because it's a lot of technologists that actually want to say they believe in God and the way they do it is like we live in a simulation.
If you think about it, if you say we live in a simulation, it's a cutesy way of saying that this is designed and there's intentionality behind it.
I like that.
I think it's sad, but I like it.
No, but it's a counterfeitit replacement for a monotheistic creation.
I'll take people that want simulation more so than the people that say there's no, this is all randomness, just a bunch of cells.
Yeah.
Because simulation posits a designer.
Look, for me, the reason I grew up a conservative Jew.
I have kept kosher my whole life.
different points in my life I've observed Shabbat.
And to me, it's as much about the discipline and the forced introspection and the forced alertness of what's going on in my surroundings and sort of the approach And there's just a lot of value to humanity and to society to have those things, whether you believe in this entity or not, I almost think is not the only question.
There's also just what's the value of it, and there's tremendous value to it.
Yes.
So the, just to close the thread on artificial intelligence, you're kind of a maximalist with some skepticism.
You say that you think it's like every other technological revolution.
Do you think there's anything that makes this a different category?
So there's two schools of thought, right?
Hey, don't be a Luddite.
to term you used earlier it's fine we're going to go from horse buggies to you know cars is there something different about this though that makes it seem less technological and is to your words more of a metaphysical or theological debate the reason i i think it is less qualitatively different is because people were saying the same thing about the internet.
People were saying the same thing about prior technologies.
So I do think that AI is and has proven to get much better, much faster than prior technologies.
And I think the next thing after AI will also get better faster than AI did if there is a next thing if we're not you know hitting the singularity quantum computing yeah quantum computing which is very exciting exactly and and AI I think will help the insolvable illness yeah I think will actually help with quantum computing those together yeah could be very powerful absolutely in closing here ask chapter.com when did you start the company in 2020 And you guys have how many employees do you have now?
We've about 200 employees.
Wow.
And how many, tell me about some of the success stories that you could share, some of the anecdotes.
Yeah, I mean, without sharing specific names.
Yeah, but we help people, we help a lot of people.
every day.
I get texts and emails pretty much every day from our members thanking me and our team for support.
One example is last week a woman emailed in saying that we saved her $31,000 on her prescriptions because she was on a plan that didn't have any of her prescription coverage.
Yesterday a friend texted me that she was visiting her parents for the weekend and her dad was just raving about chapter because he had spoken with one of our advisors and he had so much peace of mind.
And so there's both the dollars and on average we save people $1,000 to $2,000 a year, but there's also just the peace of mind and the security that comes because it is Medicare is not just it's not just healthcare it's not just financial it's really the on-ramp to retirement and people need this security yes and that's amazing and you guys could grow limitlessly at this point is that right i mean millions and millions and millions of people could potentially use it last question why do you think conservatives lose on
healthcare i i know you're non-partisan but just if you were to give an independent analysis why is it that conservatives lose so terribly on this topic do they i don't i don't know if anyone wins on healthcare i guess the democrats kind of do by you know by saying free healthcare free stuff.
Let me ask it in a different way.
Do you think that, what is your take on the push towards Medicare for all, single payer, this whole make the whole medical system like the VA?
I think it's not going to happen.
There's no political will for it.
But in general, I also don't think it's the best idea.
It's hard enough to manage a massive program of Medicare.
Medicare for all would basically be Medicare Advantage for all, and Medicare Advantage has a lot of issues.
But to your point earlier, I think the to your question, I think it really comes down to just Republicans or Conservatives are often seen as more focused on cost cutting and Democrats are often seen as more focused on providing more services.
And this isn't a normative statement, it's just what they are.
And I think that's that's largely why.
But no one's really created a shared vision for what the future of healthcare should be, for what the future health system should be.
I don't think either party has done a particularly good job at it.
Ask chapter dot com, Kobe, anything else you want to mention about this that we didn't get a chance to cover?
This has been wonderful.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Ask chapter dot com, if you guys are watching out there and you are on the verge of having to enroll.
So if someone's currently enrolled, they can re-analyze, is that right?
Yes, it's totally free.
So we encourage anyone to give us a call if they have any questions or they just want to know if they're already on the right coverage.
So everyone can kind of get a little pulse check and that's totally free.
Totally free.
at ask chapter dot com.
Yes.
Kobe, thanks so much.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk dot com.
