Bethany McLean
speaker
391 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Bethany McLean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The CapEx is massive.
And I made a face when you said sustainable cash flows, because right now, even the Magnificent Seven, the hyperscalers among the Mag Seven that have been investing so heavily in CapEx, their free cash flow is turning negative.
And so they're going from these massive cash generators to these companies with negative free cash flow as they spend everything.
on the AI revolution, that's a different business model than they had in the past.
It is still in part because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't public.
It is really hard to see what the actual end user demand is for a lot of this stuff.
And that really is the key question.
what is the end user demand and what are end users willing to pay for what AI can do?
And I don't think we know the answer to that yet.
The circular financing within the AI ecosystem makes it really difficult to see because no one breaks out clearly.
Well, this percentage of my revenues came from Google who gave me this amount of cash in order to do this.
You can't see how much is coming from within the ecosystem versus how much
say, Caterpillar is paying OpenAI for access for AI tools.
And so I think there are just a lot of questions about this.
And so I am a believer in AI, but I am somewhat skeptical about its ability to generate the profits on the schedule that make all this happen without some gigantic hiccup.
And I think the complexity of the debt structures financing some of these data centers and the complexity of the circular revenue stream leaves open the possibility of a nasty surprise.
One of the really key things in the market is confidence.
Even today, nobody can actually lay out exactly why problems in subprime mortgages caused the problems that they did.
I mean, there's a theoretical big picture answer to that.
But if you try to absolutely track it down, why did this cause this, cause this, cause this, the answer that it comes back to is people lost confidence.
Showing 81–100 of 391 · page 5 of 20
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