Derek Thompson

There's a way in which if you're rooting against a bubble, you could say, well, it's like building a railroad.

You can use it forever.

So the $300 billion that's being spent right now can be made useful 10 years from now, 20 years from now.

That's the railroad analogy.

On the opposite side of railroads, there's like bananas, right?

If you spend $300 billion on bananas today, your CapEx isn't worth shit in like two weeks because all the bananas are brown.

And like, I don't think GPUs are like entirely like bananas, but they're also not entirely like- They're closer to bananas than anything else.

It's worrying that they're closer to bananas than steel.

And so like, what does this tell us at a high level about the value-

of this kind of spending and the threat that these companies are just not going to be able to return capital from all this upfront investment.

And before we talk really deeply about how this could lead to a bubble or a crash, I do want to talk about how this is affecting the economy right now.

It's eating tech jobs.

There was a University of Maryland study that found that if you subtract out AI jobs from all IT jobs, basically all IT is declining when you subtract out AI.

Like tech is just in large part becoming an enormous employment bet in the future of artificial intelligence.

I'm also looking at the fact that like,

You know, construction jobs are declining.

Mining jobs are declining.

Manufacturing jobs are declining in America, despite the fact that the tariffs are nominally about reindustrialization.

It almost feels to me, Paul, like AI is like this star that is pulling in all of these resources gravitationally from throughout the economy.

In your own words, and hopefully I got you started along the right track, how do you see AI spending warping the 2025 economy?