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
And so what you never know when there's the potential for a big hiccup is how much confidence that causes people to lose and then what the spillover effects of the lack of confidence end up being.
And that's what concerns me about where we are now.
If I could really understand, so I don't think you can do this, you might be able to, but if I could go out to the 200 biggest companies in America and do a survey and understand exactly how they're using AI and exactly what they're paying for it and exactly what they see they're going to continue to be willing to pay for it, that's something I would really want to understand.
And if I could see inside of OpenAI and Anthropic and understand exactly where their revenues were coming from, if they broke out their revenues by the top 50 customers, that would be another way of being able to get at that.
And I'd like for any company with exposure to this to lay out exactly not just the debt on their balance sheet, but the off balance sheet obligation that they might have if everything goes completely haywire.
And one example of that is this data center that Meta financed off balance sheet called Hyperion.
And that debt could come back on Meta's balance sheet in a worst case scenario.
And I'd want to understand that for every company.
not just what the balance sheet makes you show, but what else is out there that is harder to see.
But all of those things are really, really difficult.
So I think they play a really good role in keeping the market honest because they're the only people who are incentivized to point out problems.
And Charlie Munger used to say, show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
And everybody is incentivized to want things to go up because that's how people make money.
And that means that the market isn't quite this intellectually honest system that we all think it is because most people who are saying things are inclined to say positive things.
So you want the person who's willing to say negative things because you want to understand that point of view.
That doesn't mean it's always right, but you want to understand what it is.
The game has changed a lot because back in the old days when I wrote for Fortune, if a short seller came to me with an idea or said, you should look into this,
Nobody knew when Fortune was being published.
There was no online publishing.
And the magazine kind of slowly dribbled out from, you know, New York City newsstands to places around the country.
Showing 101–120 of 391 · page 6 of 20
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