Azeem Azhar

speaker

7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Plain English with Derek Thompson · Everybody Thinks AI Is a Bubble. What If They’re Wrong? · 17 Oct 2025 podcast

There's a lot to do.

And I think that that has been part of the story of how rapidly technologies diffuse and deploy across economies.

And so I take a view that these systems will get better, they'll get better quicker, that we have to get prepared for them to be really good.

But reality is always more messy than the spreadsheet model.

I think it's quite different to the dot-com bubble, because while there was a lot of circular supplier sub-financing, that was provided as debt rather than equity, which has technically a different categorization, and the spending was often sham on the way back, and nobody was using those fibers.

I mean, we didn't start to use those fibers that were laid until 2012, 2013, when YouTube was really, really kicking off.

So the differences here are that this is done in equity.

A lot of these things are tranched.

That means that they're dependent on people reaching specific milestones.

And businesses across America and across the world are demanding this technology like we've never seen before.

Now,

Is it ugly?

I'm actually looking on my screen at the moment at the spider's web map that you talked about, and it's really ugly.

And you should look at that and say, this doesn't feel right.

But let me give you one other example where perhaps...

We're familiar with it, and it worked for a long time in vendor financing, which is in about 1919, General Motors set up something called GMAC, and they said dealers are finding it hard to get finance to set up dealerships, and Americans have got stable jobs but can't buy the car up front.

So what we will do is we've got the best balance sheet, we've got the most cash, and we will finance both dealers and dealers.

American homeowners.

And GMAC still exists today.

But within a decade, the loan book of GMAC was the equivalent of half a percent of US GDP.

Showing 3681–3700 of 7,268 · page 185 of 364