Meditirium yoga jogging, not exciting.
Really? I'm really excited about my story.
Steuja, how do you feel about the story? Yeah, I've been watching over 1000 euros.
βDo you have connections or do you have access to the aircraft?β
No, just like the story. Wow, and that's easy. Yeah, the macht fast, all is automatic. I feel so. In Spand, hold your Geld zurΓΌck.
Upgabber frist 130, say you lie. What? Do you have a Spand with like so? Oh, here.
Welcome to Silicantiousness.
The DSR network podcast focusing on the artificial intelligence revolution, politics and policy. Hello, and welcome to Silicantiousness. I am David Rothko, find your host. And this week is every week. We're going to talk about AI related technologies, what it needs, where we're going.
And I'm very pleased that this week we have with us as our guest Dean Baker who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1989, where he remains a distinguished fellow. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, social security, Medicare, and European labor markets, which hopefully will find time to talk with him on
a different podcast. The DSR is a blog, Beat the Press, which provides commentary on economic reporting, but we're not going to talk about that right now. He has been since the beginning of June publishing something called the AI Bubble Monitor,
βwhich you can find at CEPR.net, and I think it's just great.β
It's fascinating, and it speaks to the concerns I have about that potentially AI bubble, but it does so in this very grounded way where you use things like arithmetic. And I find that very, very helpful. Welcome, Dean. Thank you for joining us.
David, thanks a lot for having me on. So, you started this bubble monitor June 6th, I think, I think you've done six of them before. So the question of my mind is, why is that, what would you just getting anxiety here? Well, it was getting anxiety, give some background back in the 90s, I was, you know, I was in Congress, I'm getting old.
So I was looking at the internet bubble and seeing it grow in '97, '98, '99, got, this looks like a bubble, and looks like it'll be bad news, and, you know, of course, the bubble did burst, and there's a conventional view, which I'll just say, I think it's very badly wrong, the conventional view is, oh, the bubble burst, and it was no big deal.
βWell, two things there, I mean, the market really did plunge, so if you had all yourβ
money in the stock market, I don't mean just an internet company, I mean, the stock market, the S&P 500 cell 50% from peak to trough, and that was companies like General Motors and McDonald's, that wasn't just the tech companies, the NASDAQ, where most tech companies were, was down 80% peak to trough, so you really did get nailed there even more.
So you lost your money there, and, you know, if you could leave it in, did come back up, no doubt about that, but if you were had to retire, whatever, need to mind, you got it very hard. But for the economy as a whole, if you look at the GDP numbers, they look fine. I mean, minor recession.
We didn't create any jobs from March of 2000, the dating of the beginning of the recession. Till January of 2005, that was the longest period without job growth, we saw since the great depression. We had a longer period in the great recession a few years later, but at that time, that was a long period without job growth, and we'd been seeing good wage growth in the late
90s for the first time since the early 70s, so that was a great thing. But that stopped almost immediately. So that, to my mind, was a really big deal. So, as I said, the conventional view crash, not a big deal, no, it actually was a very, very big deal.
The second crash, the housing bubble, that was a really big deal, and I don't have to argue that one. I mean, the unemployment rate got almost 10%, somewhere I should know the number, millions
I'd forget, well, there was highest 10 million people, there was a huge number of people
lost their homes through four closures, millions. And, you know, this was really, really horrible story, you know, for a large number of people, and again, the markets there were get very hard, but the big thing was, of course, the housing market. In both cases, I thought these were easily seeable.
I mean, I wasn't, I don't have a crystal ball, but in the 90s, I was looking at price earnings ratios, and again, not just the tech companies, because it was most extreme there, but throughout the market, these were, they didn't make sense.
I mean, if you just looked at profit growth, not my projections, projections ...
Congressional Budget Office, they didn't make sense.
So unless you thought people were holding stock, not expecting any return, you'd have price earnings ratios rising to 60, 70, 80 to one, and no one to say that, but that was the arithmetic. And in the housing bubble, similar story that you had people that were buying homes. And this, again, it wasn't secret, people talked about, like, who knew, well, they were
advertising. People were buying homes, zero money down, in some cases, they were actually borrowing more in the value of their home. And prices just kept going up. And the big tell there was there was a huge divergent between house prices and rents.
βSo if you want to tell a story that was being driven by the fundamentals of the market,β
let's say, okay, housing shortage, why aren't rents rising? And, you know, no one, at least I didn't come across anyone who had an answer to that. So, you know, it was pretty clear to me that there was a bubble. And again, in both cases, the signs were all over the place. And the longer it went on, the more harm there was going to be.
So we get to the AI bubble. And obviously, the launch going on in the economy, the COVID pandemic, it's not that far in the back. You know, so I was focused on that, the recovery from that. And then I started, of course, to pay more attention to AI, you know, both is, you know,
what's it going to do? You know, it's productivity impacts is going to lay off a lot of workers, but looking at the prices of, you know, the AI companies in the video and the companies that are tech companies that are heavily involved in AI, like Google and meta and the others. And again, this doesn't look to me like it makes sense.
And I am very worried that we will see a crash. I mean, I think there will be a crash. And the longer this goes on, the worse the downturn will be. So it was kind of like, this was in the background and watching other things. And then I'm going to wait, this is really bad.
And I really feel a responsibility have to try and say, you know, I could be wrong. I might be wrong. I'm just going to facts on the table, you know, and as I did with the housing bubble, as I did with the tech bubble, if you got another argument, I'm happy to hear it. You know, and I, you know, someone wants to send me why this all makes sense.
I'll write about it on the AI monitor. I'm happy to, I want the argument, you know, so I feel a responsibility here.
βYeah, you know, as I listened to you talk about it, I think it's just off the point of AI broadly.β
But think of your 50 year old American.
And, you know, you became, you know, you came of age just as the first of these bubbles
started to hit. You've had the shit kicked out of your whole fucking love literally every single one of the, because you don't mention COVID as a, as a disaster, but of course, COVID was also an economic disaster. And, you know, I think it's, I think it's created a whole class of people, particularly
in the United States, who are battered and where, and who feel the systems not working for them. And that's a subject for one of our other podcasts. I'm sure on the AI, and I'd love to have you come back and talk about it. But on the AI one, you know, one of the things that you do is you go and you break it down
βin each one of your weekly installments, and you start with PE ratios, and I think ifβ
I haven't write that the PE ratio during the dot com boom was something like 43. Whereas, you know, historically, if you've been in markets, you know, you're sort of raised to think, well, 12 makes sense, right? So, you have 40 or 15 or something, but 43 is where it is. It was, and it looks like right now we're getting pretty close to that.
So, as you have your red flashing lights going off, that's one of them. But, you know, I would point out to people, and you can comment on all of this, that, you know, you know, when you look at the big tech companies, that's where you are. But, Tesla, the PE ratio is 370 AMD, the PE ratio is 185, and there are other companies that aren't on your list like Palantir that are also in the crazy stratosphere.
Yeah, and it's one of these things, when you have a relatively new company that just starting out, you don't expect to make a lot of profits, it's totally understandable that it could have a PE ratio of, you know, 500 to one, it's understandable, I mean, obviously
a lot of those companies will never make profits to justify it, and they'll go under,
you know, the stock price will fall, but at least it's a plausible story. But when you have a really big company and Tesla's probably the best example here, it's
Not a new company.
I mean, it was a form 2003 or something, so we're not talking about a startup.
βIt's a big company, it's been there a long time, and you just go, "How is it profits?β
Are it profits ever plausibly going to rise enough to make sense of that share price?" Particularly since it's actually getting its share of the EV market is falling rapidly. I mean, it's being blown out of the water, certainly by the Chinese EVs, but even in the US market, it's facing increasing competition. So how on earth is it, you know, can it, can it possibly justify that, and again, just by
another comparison, it has, I haven't checked the latest, so maybe this has changed in the last time, a month or something, but its market camp was more than the big three together, plus Toyota, plus Honda, I mean, it's just, you know, these are big successful companies that
do make a profit, so it's, it's just, how does this make sense?
So again, it's one of these things I go, you got a story, tell it to me, you know, what's Tesla's market going to look like in five years that will justify the current stock price. And again, people expect the stock price to go even higher, so I usually factor in that, you know, no one's holding Tesla because they expect five years from hell to have the exact same stock price, you'd be nuts.
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Well, you know, you talk about, and again, one of the reasons I like this is your methodical you break it down, the numbers are right there and you say, well, what would have to happen for this to actually make sense, right? And one of the things you talk about is what we'd have to have huge productivity increases, and another thing you talk about is you would have to have sort of no new competition
that changes the pricing of the marketplace in a dramatic way, and it doesn't look like either those things are on the horizon, but again, why don't you explain your thinking about it? Yeah, so the AI story and people often understand an economist, I'm used to talking about productivity, but just a backup step, productivity is the rate of growth of output per worker hour,
I should say. So we're adding up everything in the economy, all the goods we produce, all the services, healthcare education. These are imperfectly measured, so someone wants to yell at me, "Well, it's really hard." That's right, it's perfectly measured, but in any case, we get our GDP number every quarter,
βand that's what we're working from, and we're saying, how does that change per hour of work?β
And that's the productivity measure that we look at, and the AI story of how it pays off is we get a massive increase in productivity growth, so productivity until recently had been growing a little less than 2%, I mean, we don't have to split hairs here, a little less than 2%, which is okay, I mean, that's fine, we've had more rapid growth during the peak of the tech bloom in the 90s, it was near 3%, the long productivity bloom falling world
were two, people well forget that, most people weren't alive then, but 47 to 73, productivity growth average to 2.5% a year, so we've seen periods of relatively rapid productivity growth. We aren't seeing that now, and for the moment, at least no one's projecting that, and
the last three quarters, and I'm the first to say, productivity's erratic, you can't make
too much of three quarters, but the last three quarters productivity growth is actually slow, it's like under one and a half percent. So, again, I'm not going to make a big point of it slowing, but it's not soaring, so for the AI bubble to make sense, you'd have to have productivity growth around 4%, 5%, not just for one year, but for a decade maybe longer, and we aren't seeing that, and I will
point out, I've not done this, but there are economists, a number of very seriously economists, so it's not someone off the back of an envelope, they've tried to look carefully industry
βby industry, what sort of rates of productivity growth can we expect from AI?β
No one has any numbers like that, I'm cribbing off a very good economist, Thorsten Slack, who collected to get seven sets of projections from again, well-established economists, the highest was a half percentage point, so it increased productivity growth by half percentage point
A year, which is good, I mean, you know, tell me here, that's not the AI, tha...
explain AI, that can't explain AI prices, and the lowest was seven hundreds of one percent,
βand that was by Darren Assam, who could be wrong, I'll just point out, he's a Nobel Prizeβ
winning economist, so again, I mean, Nobel Prize winning economist, I'm off and wrong, so I'm not gonna say, oh, he said that, I've just pointed out he's a serious guy, he does serious analysis, and he found really immutable impact, so again, you know, you tell me increased productivity growth by 700, someone percent a year after a decade, it's seven tenths, that's good, you know, but that's not game changing, that's not, there's no
way in earth that would justify the AI bubble, but it gets even worse, because as you point out, it assumes conditions of competition don't change, and this is a really, really big deal, you know, if we were having this argument a quarter century ago about the internet and we're saying, oh, it's the internet can be a big deal, well, it wasn't a big deal, it is a big deal, but the beginner net providers, you know, you look at
Verizon, you look at Comcast, they're big profitable companies, but they aren't the biggest in the world, they don't have crazy high profits, and what's happened is we all have internet, we all have broadband, they make money on it, but there's competition, so, you know, maybe there should be more competition, we get argue that one, but the point is they can't get crazy high profits, because even though it's this great development,
great technology, huge impact, they don't make incredible profits from that, so that's
the assumption that people think that, you know, the video and these other companies, they'll just be a incredible profits for them, that competition isn't going to be there to drive down the price, and the last point I've made on this is that, guess what, we have Chinese AI, and Chinese AI looks like it's out-competing RAI, they actually open router provides weekly measures on this, and again, I've seen people contest it, but I think
it's at least ballpark, and they're getting a growing share, and in fact, in the most recent data, they outpace RAI, they outsell RAI by about 50%, so it doesn't look like we're going to have this story where RAI companies are just going to totally dominate the market and be able to charge real high prices, because, again, even if they are able to gain back market share at the expense of the Chinese companies, it'll be by undercutting
them in price, which means, again, their profits are going to be much, much less, so it seems to me, like, every part of that story doesn't work for the AI, the AI enthusiast.
βWell, and I think one of the important points to make here is you can be an AI enthusiastβ
and still be worried about an AI public, because just as happened with the internet, the internet was transformative, and a lot of these companies are still around as you point out, but what happened was that the market overballyed a lot of things, and there was a massive correction, and that had a massive impact on ordinary people, and, you know, you can be seeing AI growth and productivity growth and everything, and, but the question
is, are the stars aligning in such a way that you shouldn't worry that, you know, these the factors suggest that a bubble makes us, and as you said, a PE ratio is a warning sign.
When you have companies based on productivity estimates that have never actually occurred
in history, and are not supported by any of the estimates of virtually any economists, then you've got to worry, and then a lot of the assumptions are based on the continued leadership of the companies that are there, but one of the things that we've seen in the past couple
βof years is the rise, as you say, of Chinese companies, and I believe in one of yourβ
more recent reports, you've been talk about how demand recently has kind of flattened out for the U.S. companies and going up a little bit for the Chinese companies. And again, we're not saying AI is not going to be a big thing. AI will be a big thing. The question is whether there are signs in the marketplace now that are alarming. Do you think that is that a fair characterization of your view? Absolutely. And again, the story of the AI
enthusiasts, the people say, "Oh, open AI and anthropic and SpaceX," which is actually, it's important to realize SpaceX is actually largely an AI company. I mean, that's their assessment, not mind. They're registration statement and it says they 90% of their expected markets in AI, so that's their assessment. So the enthusiasts of these companies are betting that you're going to see very rapid growth in AI usage, and again, most of
it will go to them. And in the last, you know, last month, I was pointing out that and again, it's a radic. It actually fell slightly. And again, I'm not going to make a big point of falling slightly, but it's not growing rapidly. And that's the story they have to tell. And again, that can turn around, maybe it'll be different when we look at
The second half of this year.
So what we really would expect, and they did have young fairness, they had very rapid growth
last year. So if we look at 225, there was very rapid growth. So if that continued and
βmaybe sped up, then they'd have at least a better story. I think still very far from whenβ
that would justify their stock price is at least of being more in the ballpark. But when you have a flattening of growth, you know, let's say grows 3, 4, 5, 6%, for 226. That's not what they're talking about. They're talking about growing 25, 30, 40%, and then 227 and 228, and it keeps doing that. So we haven't seen anything that would remotely
justify, you know, the sort of growthx profit expectations that at least implicitly they
have what they're stock price. So let me talk about a dimension of this that's crossed by mind that you haven't addressed yet in your AI bubble monitor, but maybe you can in a future system. And that is extraneous factors, okay? And let me sort of get to it by circle.
βA couple days ago, the IMF came out with a projection for the rest of the air and adjustment.β
It talked about global economic disruption and noted that it was primarily linked to instability in the Persian Gulf, price of energy and so on and so forth. And it had a mitigating factor that said things, you know, the one one thing that is keeping things from getting much worse is AI activity. And this is centered on investment in the magnificent 7, these big AI companies. And you know, I looked at that and I went, whoa, you know, that this is, I'm
supposed to feel better about this bad assessment because of this factor, which may not actually continue to grow. And if I take my logic a step further and I look at President Trump and he wants to escalate in the Gulf and now he says he's going to control the straight or more moves and he's going to add a 20% fee on top of things, which of course is not going to happen, but he's talking about it. And you could sort of imagine that we
will have instability in the Gulf because there's nothing like a ceasefire agreement
that they're never was. That, you know, this could go on for several months and that could
keep energy prices high and that can lead to food issues and that can lead to problems in the global economy. And that could affect how people start looking at everything else, including the magnificent 7. So I'm just, I mean, maybe think, crazy. But talk to me a little bit about this vicious circle that potentially lies within these projections. Hey, it's David and I hate to interrupt the podcast, but I want to tell you some exciting news. We are now on Substack.
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which gives you a lot of written content as well as some exclusive video content, will receive one year membership to the other for freight. In other words, they cost the same. So you will essentially get two for one. That's one year of DSR, or need to know absolutely freight, just to take advantage of this deal. And support us, which we appreciate, go to DSR network.substack.com, or David Rothkuff, that's me.substack.com, and sign on for membership. And you'll get two for one. Anyway,
thank you for your support. We are 100% sure you're going to think this is terrific development,
βand that's why we're going to get as many people as possible to subscribe to it, and while you'reβ
at it, go subscribe to us on YouTube. So you get great videos on YouTube. The more subscribers we've got, the more support we've got, the more good independent journalism we can do. So we rely on you. We are grateful. Join us on Substack. Thanks. Yeah, well, AI, you know, your own addition to, you know, saying the anticipation of very rapid growth, it's also implicitly in an environment to robust ability and robust ability. And we aren't seeing that today, and how long does this
Persist, how bad does it get?
So I can't tell you know, what happens in our war, you know, there. But it's clearly bad. I mean,
obviously, it's bad for the people who are most directly affected, but it's also bad for, it's really bad for the economy, bad for things like interest rates. So this is a growing part of the AI story. I mean, this is in the housing bubble interest rates are really central, because you had very low interest rates for a long period of time. So that facilitated, you know,
βthe expansion of the bubble. That's going to be more important in now with AI, because even theβ
Magnificent 7, even, you know, accompanying like Google, that's tremendously profitable, company like Madda again, tremendously profitable. They have to borrow, you know, because they're undertaking so much investment. So this directly could feed back the instability raises interest rates. I haven't, can tell you today's tenure rate, I can tell you it's considerably higher than it was before the war. And that will get passed on. And that makes it that much harder for the AI
companies to meet their debt burden. But the other part of the story, you know, that you're getting to, that the AI companies are supporting the economy. And that's, that, that against speaks to the problem I see with the bubble, that if you go back to the prior two bubbles, the economy was being driven in the 90s by the stock bubbles, certainly by the end of it. And in the 0s, as we had 2, 2004, 5, 6, 7, it was very much being driven by the housing bubble. And we have a
βproblem, I mean, probably any country has a problem, you can't easily shift around your economy.β
So if it's being driven by AI and suddenly, you know, the tech boom collapses. And the really is driving the economy. It's a very large, you know, it's the IMF's point. Other people made that point. So you said to show, it's a very large share of growth. Again, we could try and parse that to say is a half of GDP growth. It's, you know, two thirds, again, we could try and parse that. It's clearly a very large share. If that goes away, you know, the bubble burst, suddenly
the major support for our economy is going. So that's to my mind almost certainly a recession. And again, how bad a recession depends how bad the bubble burst, how low prices go. But it's almost certainly a recession. And that's very much what I worry about. And again, the war and the goal, the uncertainty, the results from that clearly is not helpful. Well, you've got a little discosition in the middle of this thing. And I'm going to paraphrase because you put it more
respectable language. But essentially, it was said, you know, our, are the money guys dopes. You know, are the, are the, are the big money guys, you know, crazy, wrong about better all of this kind of thing. And of course, you explained it pretty well. But, you know, my, I've had a lot of experience with this stuff that's have you. And, and I realized that the money guys and people need to realize the money guys are not in this in the way of a fundamental investor,
might have been in it 30 years ago or in Buffett might have been in it when it was a young guy. These guys are in and based on the fact that they believe the factors will drive up prices for a while. And that they believe that when those factors cease to exist, they'll be able to get
out first. And therefore, they'll be able to get out, you know, their money out. And so, you know,
it's the old thing of what we've gone from investor driven markets to trade or driven markets. And, and this is, this is part of the problem. And so a lot of this has to do with confidence. You know, a lot of this has to do with, well, we think things are okay and we still see the factors, but but something and this is what happens when markets crash. Something happens in people though, oh, that's the, that's the sign I'm heading for the exit. And I think that's another thing
people need to keep in mind here. It's not, you know, even as good as all the economic analysis underpinning your assessments are, the irrational factor, not only shouldn't be just cat, it's a big deal. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you mentioned Warren Buffett. He's a good example
βhere, because he is a long-term investor. That's, you know, he's open about that. That's what he does.β
I mean, it's, it doesn't keep a secret, you know, he gets out there. I guess he's not doing any more. He's
what 95, whatever. But, you know, for years, he'd get out there. Here's what I see. And here's the
companies I'd like. And I remember back in the 90s, he had a huge portion of their assets, both, um, uh, Berkshire Hathwell's assets in cash. And he said, I don't understand the internet economy. And the joke after the crash was, I guess he did, you know, that, you know, he, and again, his, uh, he, Berkshire Hathwell is a very large share of their assets in cash, because again, he's apparently very worried about the market. So, that's, that's his assessment. He's one
person. He could well be wrong, which has been wrong more than once in his life. But he's got pretty good track record. But anyhow, he, he's, he's, he's worried about it. But the point you're
Making and it's very fundamental in the language obvious, if, if you're, if y...
I could make money now. I don't care, anthropic, uh, open AI, SpaceX. I don't care if those companies
make sense. Their stock price is going to go up. And I'm going to get out before collapses. And someone, uh, there was an article written, it was probably 30 years ago, it kind of gave a good analogy that explained the logic. Imagine we're in a room where there's $100 bills falling from the ceiling. And we can grab as much as we want. But at one point, the music's going to stop, and if we're in the room, we lose everything we have. So go, how much time do you want to spend
in the room? Well, it won't be zero. I mean, you know, you know, you'll grab a lot of $100 bills. And what you could actually do is you could take a pile of $100 bills, walk out with them,
βthen come back and collect more. You know, and I think that's probably what we have a lot ofβ
people doing that they're going, okay, you know, uh, open AI and, you know, the others. I'm,
you know, getting a pile of money and, uh, I'll cash some of that out, put into treasury bonds, or whatever, and then look to get more. And, you know, if you do that, you can make a lot of money. And, you know, certainly with these companies going public, that's an effect with what they're doing. So, you know, when Elon Musk sells off, I forget it was at 8% of SpaceX. He got a huge amount of money in his pocket. You know, I, who knows what Elon Musk actually thinks, and maybe it doesn't
really matter. But, you know, he got a huge amount of money in his pocket by selling off a chunk of SpaceX. If the rest of it goes to zero, it's not his problem. And, you know, one of the points I made in one of the bubble monitors, and this is, I thought was very interesting. If you look at
SpaceX bonds, they're selling at a heavy discount. So, you have, you know, they're not totally
distinct groups of investors. But, in the one hand, the, the bet that a bond investor is making, is that the company isn't going to go bankrupt, because I have a thousand dollar bond. I get paid as long as the company's not bankrupt. Well, the people investing in bonds are actually think, not necessarily able to bankrupt, but there's a reasonable probability of go bankrupt. Something
βconsiderably less than zero, whereas the investors in its stock, SpaceX stock, I think,β
price profits are going to go through the roof. Be crazy, high. So, it's kind of interesting that you have two distinct groups of investors who have radically different views of SpaceX. Well, yeah, although I'm about slightly more cynical, and you may be more cynical and not just saying it here, but I don't think investors think it's going to go through the roof. I think the big money investors think that Musk is pretty good at promoting this stuff,
and that he will push the price up and they'll get out of the room before the magic moment hits, because when you look at SpaceX and what it's supposed to do, you know, a huge portion of its profitability depends on things that are absolutely unpredictable. One is that the United States government is going to continue to deal with him, as it has in the past, despite his recent experiences with the US government, too, a lot of their hype recently has been around space-based AI data centers,
which is not actually a thing yet, and we don't know how that's going to work, and we don't know, there's some very complicated technical problems about heating and cooling and other things we've talked about here on the show, and so that's another problem, and then some of it's based on, you know, we're all going to Mars, which, you know, great, I hope we all got a Mars, but, but, you know, the idea that people are investing in a company, because it's going to take us to Mars,
it's cool cool for cocoa puffs. So what they're doing is they're investing in this bullshit artist, bad business record, good bullshit record, and they think, oh, I can make money off of Elon's back. Again, am I being too cynical? I don't think you're at all being too cynical, because I mean, again, imagine, let's take Tesla, because it's a company that's actually been there for a while, suppose we just looked at the fundamentals, let's pull Elon Musk out of it, we looked at
the fundamentals, how many cars is it selling, you know, what are its prospects for increasing its market, what are its profit for increasing its profit margins, its stock price wouldn't be a 10th, maybe 9th and 20th of what it is today, but then you throw Elon Musk in, and okay, there it is, you know, it's got a PE, I think it's over 300 to 1, and what what accounts for that? Well, it's Musk is, whatever you want to say is a great promoter, I mean, there's no doubt about that,
you know, so that, so if I'm going to make the bet, do I think that Tesla is going to be hugely profitable? I sure don't, and I suspect most, you know, most of the big money people don't,
βbut do I think Elon Musk is a great promoter? Yeah, you know, so can you get some money that way?β
Wow, people did. Yeah, but he's a lot closer to PT Barnum than he is to Henry Ford,
Probably closer to Ponzi or madeoff than he is to PT Barnum, we'll see, right...
Look, I would love to talk to you about this a greater likelihood, but you know, we're, we're,
βwe live it at time here, so I want to urge everybody to go and, you know, it's easy to find it at,β
at CEPR.net, the AI bubble monitor, I've been looking for something like this for a while,
it's extremely well done, Dean is extremely well respected, and it's just where it's
βhabit in your back pocket, you know, it's worth considering these things, whether you have a longβ
tremendous in AI, whether you have a broader interest in the macro economics of this,
or whether you have an interest in the market side of it. Whatever the case,
βI want to thank you, Dean, for joining us, and maybe coach you to come back to talk aboutβ
some other economic issues that are, that are broader, I'm one of our other podcasts, but for now, so grateful you could take the time on a nice summer day to join us and talk about this. Thanks, David, I really enjoyed it, look forward to being on another times. Great, that would, that would be terrific. Everybody else follow everything else that we're doing here at the DSR network, whether it's on YouTube or whether it's on sub-stack or whether it's where you get your podcast
or Instagram or TikTok or wherever, and we'll see you again, Rowson, until then, bye-bye. This was Siliconjustness, a production of the DSR network.


