Hello, new here, just listened to the podcast today, really enjoyed it!
Listening to this from the iheart feed, and then, uh, there’s an ad for https://public.com/podcast - methinks their programmatic adtech might be a little context-aware but sentiment-blind. but hopefully y’all get a beer or three from the CPM.
EDIT: They ran it twice, so maybe two to six beers.
Listening at work and enjoying.
This was very enjoyable! Actually was over too quickly, would have liked to hear you two talk about AI stuff more.
I expect we could rant for hours without drawing breath
Tradesmen sharing tales of the worst bathroom they’ve ever encountered (positive). A++
Also, you dont look your age
I used to be young and pretty, now I’m old and well preserved
So you talk about Depression 2, but do you have any idea of what could possibly be the spark? You compare it to Enron, but Enron got had because they got audited. The AI bubble seems unparalleled in creating fake money from nothing, is there any limit to how long they do it? Tether still exists
I haven’t listened yet. Enron quite interestingly wasn’t audited. Enron participated in the dot-com bubble; they had an energy-exchange Web app. Enron’s owners, who were members of the stock-holding public, started doing Zitron-style napkin math after Enron posted too-big-to-believe numbers, causing Enron’s stock price to start sliding down. By early 2001, a group of stockholders filed a lawsuit to investigate what happened to stock prices, prompting the SEC to open their own investigation. It turns out that Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, was complicit! The scandal annihilated them internationally.
From that perspective, the issue isn’t regulatory capture of SEC as much as a complete lack of stock-holding public who could partially own OpenAI and hold them responsible. But nVidia is publicly traded…
I’ve now listened to the section about Enron. The point about Coreweave is exactly what I’m thinking with nVidia; private equity can say yes but stocks and bonds will say no. I think that it’s worth noting that private equity is limited in scale and the biggest players, Softbank and Saudi/UAE sovereign wealth, are already fully engaged; private equity is like musical chairs and people must sit somewhere when the music stops.
wasn’t audited (…) prompting the SEC to open their own investigation.
Ye, I guess I should’ve said “investigated” there, precision is important here.
There’s not only no stock-holding public to hold them to account, even if there was and they filed a lawsuit nothing would happen. SEC doesn’t exist.
I guess this is the part I don’t understand - can’t they all just play this game of pretend forever? There has to be something that corresponds to music stopping in your musical chairs analogy, but if everyone plays along forever what happens? Is there any load bearing part of this bubble where real reality can have an impact? If the stakes of calling the bluff are a complete collapse of the stock market then why would any NVidia stockholders call the bluff ever?
I outlined it here a bit. Basically there’s a lot of Wall St fuck fuck games - AI is just one of them - that’s a tottering heap of dollar-denominated accounting entries for lies and trash. But also, the institutions have been white anted. Trump’s pick for the next Fed chair is a bitcoiner who espouses Austrian economics - that is, literally the same gold standard economics that made Great Depression 1 worse.
Fortunately, most of the rest of the world economy is heading in the opposite direction and building new free-trade zones without the US. I think the US in a few years will start to feel a lot like the UK today, with everything falling apart, everyone becoming poorer and less mobile, and anger about Hispanics instead of Poles and trans people.
