← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
"This Is A $10 Billion Industry Pretending To Be A Trillion Dollar One" — We Had To React
00:32:02
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- [00:02]
Drew
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. Twas a lovely suv, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. This one is crazy. So if you guys don't know Ed Zitron, he's a bear. So he is very negative on AI thinks that basically the industry is a big nothing burger that people blown it all out of proportion. This is one of the more interesting ones. We're going to go deep on this,
- [00:47]
Host
so thanks for joining us here. So you know, we don't really know at this point in time, right. What the actual financial picture of these companies look like. Well, and they wouldn't be the first with bad financial profiles to to go public.
- [01:01]
Ed Zitron
Well, they'd be the first to be this bad other than work. And even then, this is so much worse than that. OpenAI burned $20.9 billion in 2025. That's the relative financials that the FT and I reported. And the problem with these companies is their margins are getting worse and they actually their costs increase linearly with their revenues. There is no proof that they can improve their margins. No amount of specialist silicon or supposed Vera Rubens will bring these costs down.
- [01:25]
Drew
So here's the big thing that people do not understand about what's going on in AI. Now listen, the final conclusion that Ed makes, I actually disagree with. I don't think the industry is hopeless in the way that he does. I think it is the revolutionary technology. I think it is literally going to change the fabric of society. I think even if it asymptoted right now, just the things that it can do in the medical industry alone are transformative. The amount that has impacted our business is transformative. But he is absolutely right in terms of the mismatch between the revenue that's coming in and how much money these guys are losing because of the infrastructure buildout is absolutely insane. I've done deep dives on this topic. Man. If people do not wake up, they're going to get blindsided. I am nervous about owning tech. I will just tell you that right now. That's just a me thing you do you. But people are not being honest about the historical pattern that repeats. We've seen this over and over. I'll talk more about this as we go, but we've seen this pattern play out before. So he, he is getting people to look at something that is so important to look at. The mismatch between revenue and, and debt accumulation, the losses that they're taking is terrifying and people should be very worried about the rate at which their revenue is increasing.
- [02:36]
Ed Zitron
It's clear that people are wising up to the problem of generative AI, which is there's not really a business there.
- [02:42]
Host
So that was discussed yesterday on Squawk Box, the comments from Alex Karp, the Palantir CEO, making the rounds. I think we have a clip teed up. Take a listen.
- [02:54]
Drew
The general way these things were sold.
- [02:56]
Guest Analyst
Again, these people are Sam and Dario. There's nothing more fun than debating Dario in private.
- [03:03]
Drew
So I'm not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens. I'm going to get no value and
- [03:18]
Ed Zitron
they're going to get my iPad.
- [03:19]
Drew
We had talked about this previously. What Alex. Alex is banging the drum. So for people that don't know their Palantir, Palantir has created like a middle layer is maybe the right way to think about it. I believe it's called ontology. And their whole idea is, okay, wait a second, I'm. I'm a gigantic company. I've got all this proprietary data. I want to take advantage of AI, and when I put it into AI, you're talking. Your token costs are absolutely ridiculous. So I'm already getting hammered there. And so you see corporations pulling back, and on top of that, the companies have learned basically the business model of these companies that are using it. They're training on all the data that they are supplying the agent and then launching competitive companies. They did that against figma, and they're doing it now in medicine as well in medical. And so it's like Dario was screaming to basically the. The creators of AI and saying, you guys need to understand you've got a terrible reputation now with the people actually using this technology. You've got to get your shit together. And so while I think that feeds in a little bit to what Ed is saying. Dario, not Dario, excuse me, Alex from Palantir. Karp is making it clear there's a there there. But these guys have got to understand they've got to put this obfuscation layer in the middle where companies can feed their data to something that they trust isn't storing it, retaining it, going to mimic them. And then they can basically change the model to match their weights. Now They've created something proprietary. This is huge. I don't want to go on too long about this, but understand the future of AI, I guarantee you is you have to somehow, some way be able to turn that AI into something that is proprietary to you. So that gives different answers. With AI, we're really trying to mimic humans. And just like I can't put anybody random in Drew's seat, you can't put anybody random in my seat. It fundamentally changes the nature of the show that I must be the same. The second you can just swap it out because they're all the same, you lose. And so that's the point Alex is trying to make.
- [05:25]
Host
Enterprises are balking at this idea that they're going to be was not being sarcastic tokens. They're not going to be able to control the data usage and how the data is, is used and they're not able to really measure roi. What do you make of those comments?
- [05:36]
Ed Zitron
I mean, hate to agree with him, but he's right. These companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, they encourage waste. They, he actually said that these companies don't charge on outcomes, they don't charge on success because you can't with large language models. They're inherently hallucination prone as proven by OpenAI themselves. And so they encourage ways they want you to spend a lot of money and then they try and pilfer your ideas. Anthropic already tried it with Claude Design with Figma, and I believe they have a relationship with the company. And Dylan Field even said he was shocked by it. And what's crazy is as well is their copies of these companies not particularly good. They don't make great software. You'll notice that both Anthropic CEO Dariama Day and Sam Altman have both said, we can't wait to see what you build with this. Well, that's because they don't know what you can build with this. They want everyone else to do their innovation for them, spend as much as they can on tokens and then take whatever's left.
- [06:24]
Drew
In what universe would you expect the telecoms who built out the Internet to know what's going to be born of this? No, you look at the technology and it's a question of what does it allow you to do, but how that's going to play out over time. When the Internet was first born, I certainly didn't think, oh, somebody's going to come up with the iPhone and then somebody's going to come up with Uber. I never would have seen those Jumps. And then it's going to be, of course, a question of, well, in what specific way are you going to execute against that thing? And everything is going to be different and many of them will fail. And it takes, you know, one person to just hit it right in terms of what the world wants at that moment. And so the fact that Sam Altman doesn't know what you're going to do with AI, or Dario Amadei doesn't know what you're going to do with AI, obviously as, as it should be. But these guys have to start thinking about them. These guys being the AI companies have to start thinking, thinking about themselves differently. And so one is intelligence is rapidly going to become a commodity. So where am I going to get my intelligence? And so again, this goes back to Alex Carput. Such a banger thing. We talked about it when it first came out, but it was a really brilliant drum that he was beating. You must create that layer in the middle where people can make that unique to them. That's going to be the thing that makes this work. That's the thing that I think that Ed is missing is just because the fundamental business model of what AI is today isn't going to be the thing. It's not going to survive in the same way that the railroads went bankrupt, the canals went bankrupt, the Internet went bankrupt, and then it was the inheritance generation of investors actually built on top of it. It is almost certainly going to play out like that with AI, but that doesn't mean that AI isn't real.
- [07:59]
Host
Then what do you think should happen? Do you believe that these are companies that should be nationalized? As we read in the intro, there's discussions reportedly that the administration and potentially some sort of sovereign wealth fund would take a 5% stake in Open. I mean, is that a situation that you would like to see happen or do you think that's more disruptive?
- [08:17]
Ed Zitron
No, I don't think there's any need to. They talk about. I think Sam Altman said, well, we can share the benefits of. On the profits of AI. What profits? What returns? That 5% will have to get congressional approval. The sovereign wealth fund is still an idea at this point, but fundamentally, large language models are not the future. The only reason Big Tech is investing in this is that they've run out of hypergrowth ideas. They don't have an X iPhone, they don't have a new Google search. So they've put over $1 trillion with trillions more to come.
- [08:44]
Drew
So when people say that LLMs are not the future, Basically what they're putting forward is the argument that pattern recognition is not going to be the game. I don't know that that's true. And this is really going to come down to whether or not because what AI has already done. This is the part that I really want to get people on board with, whether AI will make the initial investors their money back. Probably not that that would be a historic. Okay. So when you look back, when revolutionary technologies come on board that have massive infrastructure buildouts, they almost always bankrupt the first generation of investors. And it's what's called the inheritance generation that comes along that's like, oh cool, you built out all the fiber. Oh cool, you built out the railroad network. Got it. And then they build successful businesses on the back that they don't have to deal with the debt.
- [09:29]
Ed Zitron
Right.
- [09:30]
Drew
Same thing. Us right now under all this debt weight, we've got to get out from under it somehow. You sure as hell not going to pay it back. So AI definitely faces that problem. You have a cost problem, but China's already showing us that you can drive the cost down dramatically. Even some of the companies themselves, I think Elon has talked about driving the cost down. And so you can look back at history and say when these technologies come on board, in the beginning, people don't know how to do it well. They don't know how to make it very efficient. But over time, these are the exact kind of problems that get solved. And so we can expect that on a long enough timeline, it is going to get cheaper. And so if you just sort of go, go, eh, we may lose, you know, a lot of money to people that have gone and invested in this, but the technology has been invented. You're not going to put that toothpaste back in the bottle. And even if we, even if LLMs asymptote, meaning they, they stop getting better. So if they stop getting better right now, today, the capabilities are already extraordinary and they don't seem to show any signs of stopping. I don't know about you guys, but these things keep getting better. There you're not going to see just like this only up phenomenon where without any either building things out, bigger breakthroughs in the way that they actually do the algorithms that make these things more efficient, it's not just going to go up to artificial superintelligence in the next six weeks, but in terms of the things that we use here at the company, new things keep coming online. For us, it was a big step forward. With the ability to edit blueprints, the amount of our C now in the game that's being written by AI. It's just like I keep seeing that we're using it for things now. It falls down. There's no question you hit limits and it's like, oh, it sucks once you get to this part. But I would say that makes it great. This is what I call the golden age of AI because you're still necessary. If it ends up completely erasing us as being needed, that isn't necessarily going to be fun, but that's a problem for another day.
- [11:34]
Host
All right, so you think overall is a dead end. You see no business model here. You see no utility from AI whatsoever.
- [11:42]
Ed Zitron
I see this as in the future as a boring hardware based business. The kind of the Oracle licensing hardware model. I think this is a $10 to $30 billion TAM industry pretending to be a trillion dollar one. And because everyone's propping it up because they have no hypergrowth ideas, everyone's just kind of pretending it's the kayfabe of the tech industry that really has run out of ideas.
- [12:00]
Host
Is.
- [12:00]
Drew
I think that's the, the sharpest thing that he says is that that's really going to be the question that plays out like are I really think that the people investing in this are out over their skis? In terms of you're pulling, in the case of SpaceX AI, if I remember right, you're pulling forward like 100 years. I mean it was some insane number, maybe I'm misremembering that, but it was an absolutely ridiculous number of years at their current revenue rate that they were pulling into today. I did a deep dive on this if you want to watch it. I think that one is crazy. I don't think that that's going to make people their money back in anything approaching near term and we'll see if they end up surviving all of this. This is a debt game. I think what you're unfortunately going to live through is because this is following the traditional trajectory of a revolutionary new technology with a very expensive infrastructure build out. What you're going to see is we're going to run the 2008 playbook where we try to hide all of that debt. The banks are going to diversify. The banks are going to diversify into your insurance, they're going to diversify into your index funds, they're going to diversify into your retirement program. That's going to be the way that the banks like mitigate the risk on their side. It's entirely possible that that debt gets packaged up and given a high credit rating. But it's certainly going to be, it's already being sliced up and hidden in other places in the economy. And so that's the part that worries me, is making sure that people understand what they own, because I think we're in for a rocky ride in terms of this is, this is a super known pattern that these kind of technologies go through. And so it doesn't mean that the tech doesn't end up continuing to have incredible application. But his idea of like this is going to be tied to the hardware. That is very interesting. Now I think ultimately it is, it's going to be tied to the hardware because that's how they build these gigantic brains. But I think that we've already seen the evidence from the US and especially from China that you can make these things more and more and more efficient, which drives the cost way down. So I think tokens are going to get a lot cheaper. I think the ability to store more tokens in memory at once is going to get more massive, which creates more applications. I think we're going to find that LLMs don't work for everything. But it's so remember, it's so good at coding that when they dropped Mythos, they treated it as a weapon system that couldn't be exported to our allies because it could hack basically everything. So these are things that have extraordinary capabilities and it just becomes a question of can we make them more efficient over time. And so Ed is putting his finger on something that I think is very important. Myself and countless other people have not been paying enough attention to how can this go wrong. I started to a few months ago just looking at the investing and the debt and being like, oh, there's a potential problem coming here. I think Ed is maybe a little unjustified in just how bearish he is, but he's making people face something very, very difficult.
- [14:58]
Elon
One more thing about this you said he's completely right, is that when he was talking about the total addressable market is only 10 to 30 billion at this trillion dollar thing, or I don't
- [15:05]
Drew
remember when I said that. But there's a couple of things that Ed is very right. One of them is that this is currently very much tied to hardware. He's very right that right now the rate at which they're spending money, just losing money outright versus the rate at which they're bringing in capital or revenue is, is so insane. I don't know what people are thinking. Like, listen, as a very paranoid investor who does not think he sees the future well enough to go all in on one thing. I'm Captain Diversify and I totally understand that's not how you get rich. The way that you get rich is to have a concentrated bet and it pays off. It's all true. That's also how you go broke. So we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about why you're sweating. Summer is when bad fabric becomes too hot to ignore. That tea that felt fine in April is suddenly stiff, clingy and practically suffocating you by July. Most guys just suffer through the hot months, but you don't have to. Quince fixes that. I've got their Pima cotton tees and I am very impressed. The fabric, the fit, the construction, you can feel it just by touching it. That's what happens when a brand actually cares about quality materials. Quince builds everyday essentials like soft Pima cotton tees, breathable European linen shirts and pants, and lightweight cotton sweaters at prices 50 to 80% less than comparable brands they work directly with ethical factories. Cut out the middlemen and pass the savings on straight to you. There's no markup, it's just quality. Get the basics right and everything else gets easier. Make your summer wardrobe easy. Go to quince.comimpact pod for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now. Also available in Canada. Quince is spelled Q-U I N C E.com impactpod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com impactpod I want to talk about your customers expectations and why today's episode is brought to you by Quo. Your customers do not care that it's after hours. They need an answer now and if you can't give them one, someone else will. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses. To stay reachable and look professional every day, Quo's built in AI agent handles after hours calls, answers questions and books appointments so you never miss a lead while your team is offline. All your calls, texts and voicemails live in one place so anyone on your team can see the full history and respond fast. And it integrates with the tools you already use like HubSpot, Zapier and more. So nothing is going to fall through the cracks when money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months@quo.com impact that's Q U O.com impact. Let me tell you about something that happened to me. I was traveling abroad. My phone got hacked. It was a nightmare. That was the moment I really understood exactly how exposed we all are. The hack is just the entry point. Once your data's out, it gets sold to data brokers, who then sell it again and again. You're not name your address, your phone number, your Social Security number, sitting on hundreds of sites available to anyone willing to pay for it. You can try and remove it yourself, but tracking down every site, submitting every removal request, repeating the process every few months as your data reappears is designed to be impossible. So Incogni does it for you. You authorize them. Once they track your data across hundreds of broker sites and remove it automatically. And when it reappears, because it will, they remove it again. Plus, with customer removals, you send them any link where your information shows up and their dedicated team takes it down. Go right now to incogni.comimpact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan. Try it risk free for 30 days. That's I N C O G ni.com impact and be sure to use code impact. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. I'm, like, always super paranoid. I assume there's something I'm missing. Things are not going to go the way that I think they're going to go. And so paying attention to that discrepancy between the extraordinary levels of debt that these companies are taking on, man, I don't get how people aren't like, yo, this is, like, really scary. And then another thing that he said that I think. I won't say that he's completely right. I'll say, ooh, you got my attention. I want to look more at that is, are these tech companies out of ideas? Like, where's our new iPhone? The thing that hits like the iPhone hit, right?
- [20:30]
Elon
Yeah. We're going on 20 years.
- [20:31]
Drew
Yep. So is that going to be robotics? That's like when you start getting into Elon territory. So Elon is thinking big. You can say that he's a fool, but you certainly cannot say that he doesn't have a vision for how this all ends up paying off. So he's switching over. Like, if you want to think about, okay, wait a second. These hyperscalers are out of ideas. It's like, no, they're not. We're just at a this. I'm channeling Elon here. No, they're not. We're just at a different part of that curve. And so now we're looking leveraging AI to build things like self driving cars. I have ridden in a Tesla that took me like, I don't know, five or six miles up into the Hollywood Hills without the driver ever once touching the steering wheel. I could not believe it. So I was like, whoa, this stuff is getting good. It's going to keep getting better. They just need more training data. More training data, more training data. Elon almost always misses timeline, but ends up being right in terms of what the technology can do and what he's saying about robotics, man, listen, the technology may not come as quickly as we want, but the robotics is being driven by AI. And so it's like these things. One of, I don't think, is this over? Is that the.
- [21:35]
Elon
And then we got a little bit more.
- [21:36]
Drew
Okay, so I don't remember if he talks about it here, but he has done interviews where he talks about how the guys building the big data centers, he was like, if they had ideas, they would just use the compute themselves. But they don't. They're starting to like lease it out to other people. And so the big data center that Elon built, he's like leasing that out to Anthropic. And so he's like, bro, that tells you, like, nobody needs this stuff. These guys built this all on hype. They, everybody thought this was the next big thing. Capital is always seeking a return. And now this is me. When you inflate the currency the way that you're doing it, you force VCs and stuff to go, we've got to have somewhere to put money. And so they'll. They. He doesn't say this explicitly, but he's intimating this, that the VCs will trick themselves into thinking, no, no, this is real. We just gotta like, keep putting money, keep putting money, keep putting money. And because of the abuses of government deficit spending, you are making the number go up so you look like a genius. And so it's like, oh my God, this is all like, incredible. This is gonna go up forever. Then you get someone like Ed who's like, wait, hold on. What are you actually building with this again? Like, remind me, you just built out a massive data center, Elon. You're saying you got to go to space and you got to build more, but you're leasing your unused cycles to another company. Like, why the hell would you expect me to believe that there's really a there there? Like, so I think it is very important to be able to step into Ed's shoes. And other bears and articulate why they're so nervous. And if I were going to put a really fine point on it, it's really just two beats you've got. They're leasing out their own intelligence, if you will, because they don't have anything to do with it. They're not pointing at anything.
- [23:18]
Elon
Right.
- [23:18]
Drew
Ideas. And then you've got borrow. The cost versus return is so insane. You can't do that. You can't do that. It is guaranteed to hit a wall of problematic debt before the revenue reaches something that makes it self sustaining.
- [23:34]
Ed Zitron
Quote Some of our customers.
- [23:35]
Guest Analyst
OpenAI may be highly leveraged.
- [23:38]
Drew
We may experience risks of non payment in our dealings with such parties. Are the, are we going to see this from a market standpoint first in shares of hyperscalers?
- [23:48]
Ed Zitron
I think we might. But Oracle is a particularly scary one because they are building 7.1 gigawatts of capacity just for one customer. And they even said in their annual report that the risk was they might not get paid. OpenAI only loses money and I think, I estimate it's like $75 billion of revenue annually that they will have to pay for the full Stargate data center project in annual compute revenue. OpenAI can't afford that. And if they can't, Larry Ellison can't afford to pay back those bills. And Oracle stock will be in jeopardy along with the margin loans that Mr. Ellison holds. It's genuinely dangerous and it's dangerous across the board for neo clouds, for hyperscalers, for every associated party of the.
- [24:24]
Drew
Not only, not only is it dangerous, it, it is historically to be expected that we're going to obliterate. I mean Drew, is it in the trillions, it's hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that is likely to get wiped out because they won't be able to make the payments on the debt.
- [24:43]
Elon
Is this, is this some of the reason why like X money might be a thing that Elon is taking? Like, all right, I need to kind of hedge my bet, see if I can do some type of. I'm just thinking as anybody and that's the first new idea in the X AI in the space as I was talking about.
- [24:55]
Drew
Well that's definitely not a new idea. China's been handing us our ass on that for God knows how long.
- [24:59]
Elon
I'm just saying as an AI company with all the four of them together, they're going this way. Meta is now making do it yourself video game apps to kind of come up with a new Instagram for video games. That's built with their compute. So they're trying to do these side quests. I guess I'm just saying. Is that something that they're trying to do to kind of fill the coffers a little bit to help the revenue, or is it.
- [25:20]
Drew
Yeah, everything that they do is trying to make a little bit of money. But the numbers here are staggering. These guys, the odds that they'll be able to make their money back by building a thing themselves is effectively zero. That's why I think right now the right way to think of this is I'm a hyperscaler. I build data centers and I build the intelligence itself. And then the intelligence is a commodity that we sell to other people. And the bet that we're making is that everybody is going to want that intelligence in the same way that people want electricity. So if you think of, of the, the actual eye in AI as that's what we sell. We sell intelligence and we're neutral. We're not. This is Alex Karp trying to convince people, stop. Don't be a company that actually builds the business. Create the intelligence, create an obfuscation layer so that the people can go in and make this their own thing, that their AI is unique to them. It gives outputs that nobody else can get. And you're not trying to pilfer that. You're like trying to be a highly trusted, always on provider of intelligence. And when I look out into the world, basically everything will be imbued with intelligence. There's no reason to have a dumb chair if you can have a smart chair. There's no reason to have a dumb TV if you can have a smart tv. Right. So it's just going to keep getting better and better and better in terms of integrating into your daily life. But right now there just isn't enough appetite for what I can deliver. So to me, this just feels like a timing thing. So the base assumptions that I write on the back on are you're not going to get the revenue fast enough. So the early investors are going to get destroyed by the way. That's going to be terrifying to the global economy. But I'm setting that aside for now. So that's one thing. The second assumption is that people will figure out in the same way they figured out how to integrate the Internet in ways we never would have thought of in like the late 90s. Forget it. We didn't see this coming. And we're at that stage of AI. We're in the late 90s of AI compared to where we're going to be, you know, 2007 becomes the iPhone moment. When does Uber come along? 2014, 2015, something like that. So it's like you got a lot of years of people being like, well, what about this? No, that doesn't work. What about this? Well, that doesn't work. And then slowly it's like, oh wait, it's AI plus this. Like, oh, now that my microwave has it, now I can make right. And it becomes like it needs to start permeating, it needs to get out there in order to be a thing. But one of the things that, one of the base assumptions that Ed has is that the LLM as the pro generator of the intelligence is just always going to be dumb. Now that's me putting words in his mouth, but I think that's pretty close. So he thinks that's going to tap out and if he's right and this is like as good as it's ever going to get and it's like, yeah, you get some efficiencies and. But you know, you can't just turn your whole company over to AI and walk away. I get why he would think AI is cool, but it isn't. This multi trillion dollar industry, I don't share that assumption. I think that even if you can't just keep making it smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter, that just integrating what we already have, just making what we already have more efficient and cheaper will transform things. I don't know if he's not close enough to the medical side and doesn't understand things like protein folding. Be very interested to ask him that question. Because just seeing what's happening in medicine based on some of the things that are coming out, because AI can just look at an unimaginable number of patterns. And so the fact I forget how many tens of thousands of proteins it has like folded in its mind to know this goes with this goes with this goes with this, that will play out in drugs and all kinds of things in ways that I don't think we yet fully understand. And it's already happened. That's the thing. You don't need another breakthrough.
- [29:15]
Ed Zitron
I think it could be the NEO clouds, because with this rumor of Meta selling their AI capacity, I think companies like Core, even especially Nebulous and Iran and Cipher Mining and all of them terrible as well. They are all very, they're basically outgrowths and they're subsidiaries of Nvidia. Nvidia is now, according to the information, going to be paying them to rent back their GPUs when they install them in the data center. This is the. This is something that only happens in an industry without diverse and real demand.
- [29:43]
Guest Analyst
Meta is an interesting case in this instance because they don't as yet have the third party cloud services revenue propping it up. But people point to their own top line having accelerated in the first quarter of this year from like 23% to 33% presumably because they're implementing these tools or somehow making their platform more productive along those lines. And at the same time it shows you the fallback option. We're creating all this capacity even if it's not a business model that can capacity is there. We've gotten the kind of the power and the compute in place. Maybe that helps society down the road.
- [30:19]
Ed Zitron
Well the thing is with Matter is I don't necessarily agree AI is not driving matters revenue growth. The fact that they have an effective monopoly in social media is Microsoft, Google and Matter and Amazon are all doing a funny little I don't want to call it a scam but it's a trick where because their other businesses are still growing but they never disclose their AI revenues everyone conflates that with AI driving their growth. In reality there are the businesses are growing and is losing the money across the board. You'll notice that neither Mike Soft or Amazon who both share their run rate of AI will share the actual revenues. That tells you that these companies are afraid. Public companies love good news. If they had good news, why wouldn't they share it? That's a good thing. Only got bad news here.
- [30:58]
Host
So what do you think then is the straw that ultimately breaks the camel's back? You've got trillions potentially at stake in terms of just overall capex investing through the years. I mean it seems like there is a collective desire for this to work. What ultimately provides the challenge or presents the challenge in your in your mind that that kind of reverses all.
- [31:21]
Ed Zitron
I heard a Goldman analyst say recently that the first hyperscaler to pull capex will get rewarded by the markets. I think the capex pullbacks are they're the sign. I also think any financing falling through for open air anthropic would be a sign. But I think we're going to start seeing companies kind of start falling out of favor and not being able to raise money. But the big thing is debt. When datacenter debt stops being issued that will be when it's bedtime for this industry. Because even if they think is going to win We've got 100 gigawatts or so of data center capacity allegedly under construction or in planning. That's trillions of dollars of, of money needs to come from somewhere. And we are tapping out the debt markets. We saw that with Google raising that $85 billion equity raise, I'll be very
- [32:03]
Drew
interested to see what ends up happening. Because you also have the arms race aspect of this. If Fable 5 really was as scary, because the version that ended up getting released to the public was nerfed so hard, but the version that made Anthropic go to the government and say, hey, listen, we can hack basically anything. There's all these legacy bugs that people didn't realize. We're taking advantage of them, we're shutting it down. And that made the U.S. government go, okay, whoa, we can't even let our adversaries have access to this. There's a big Hubaloo about OpenAI and Google selling technology to Chinese companies via Singapore. I think so. And the government saying technically it's legal, but they don't like it and blah, blah, blah. So they, they are treating this as a weapon system. And so I haven't heard Ed talk about that, but it's an interesting angle on all of this. Like, will the government be able to stop themselves from going, all right, we've got to keep these guys going some way or the other, because from an arms race perspective, this becomes incredibly important. All right, I don't think we need to keep going on this. We get the idea. I have a feeling that we, we are not going to see less of Ed in the future. I think we're going to see more. We are all going to have to contend with what the bear case is for this in terms of if we're going to survive AI and we're really going to get to the other side and we're going to figure out what this is going to be in our lives. We've got to have a long Runway. There's got to be time for this to play out, for innovators to try things and fail and the company just completely goes under. And then the next person comes along and tries something new. That whole process, the creative destruction of a new technology, we have to go through. And I think that the Internet is our guide. And I think that we have expected. AI came in like a storm and improved so fast. I think that people really. And we needed that next big thing from an investment perspective because again, you've got all this economic pressure due to inflation forcing people, people into the markets. They want to know where they're going to get their returns from. And so that because there weren't just an endless bevy of ideas that money was just going heavier and heavier into AI. And so now you've got yourself in a position where the debt is accumulating so fast, the revenue is coming in slow, it's systemically important to the entire economy and, and certainly to any individual investor. You've got to really pay attention. And I think where what Ed said about the debt is the real thing. And if you think about this as the market starts to pull back and says ooh, like when Deep Seek first launched I think we lost almost a trillion dollars in value in a single day. So people were like wait, I thought America was going to win the AI race. Now all of a sudden maybe it's going to be China yo invest. Investors got spooked, so what's going to be the story that spooks the market? That I don't know. But if the market starts getting spooked that's when you start seeing people say I'm not willing to pay for that debt anymore. Which then is going to force companies to pull back on the capex. Now capital expenditure for people who don't know. So it's you investing in your business, you're going to build a data center. That would be a capital expenditure. So when somebody says capex, that's what they mean. Ed is saying the first person to, to not do it because they're getting pressured or not do it because they failed to raise debt where they just go we don't need anymore, we're good, we're not going to keep expanding. That that's going to be the winner. I think they might take a bigger hit. I think people might go oh you're in trouble, you're the first one to admit problems. And they'll probably say no, no, no, this is an industry wide thing. But it becomes a question of whether investors buy it or not. And so now I think it will be difficult to be the first mover because you know, if you say eh, we're all out of ideas but we're the first ones backing out. Maybe people buy it or maybe they just go, you're the only one that's out of ideas because investors are still incentivized for this to be the next big thing to keep pouring capital in. And so this one is going to be a bumpy ride. I've been saying this now for a couple months so people need to, yeah, keep your wits about you. I'll leave you with one, one last thing and that is where is the debt hiding? Where is all of this debt? The banks are already diversifying. Is it hiding anywhere in your portfolio that you're not aware of? It's certainly worth digging in and taking a look.
- [36:30]
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