Derek Thompson

It's like you think we're reaching like the end of like an end phase of human technological development.

Like you're not interested in the question of like, oh, is CapEx slightly outpacing revenue growth?

It's like, no, like behind this curtain that is mere inches from our fingers lies a technology that will absolutely change the world.

That's the only thing that I'm focused on.

And so I do think that one of the things that maybe could get us in trouble, us as the economy in trouble, is that the folks building this technology have a faith in it that is psychologically, philosophically distinct than the people who are building it.

or laying fiber optic cable.

Even the folks who were building pets.com didn't think that they were ending human employment.

People who were building the railroads certainly thought they were doing something quite grand, but they knew exactly what they were doing.

They were taking a carriage and putting it on rail and sending it across the country.

Maybe before we go to the next gauge here, I do just want to pause

and sit in the fact that one thing that could contribute to an economic bubble is the rather unprecedented confidence of the people building this technology, that the thing that they're building exists in a kind of biblical sense as the last thing we ever have to build.

Your next and fourth gauge you title Valuation Heat.

This is basically the question, are stocks overpriced?

And my god, are stocks going absolutely bonanzas if they have anything to do with artificial intelligence?

I mean, just a few statistics.

In the last two years, roughly 60% of the S&P 500's growth has come from AI-related companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta.

And if you look at the reason for why some of these companies' valuations are soaring, it often seems very circular.

So NVIDIA, for example, will say we're investing $100 billion in OpenAI.

But in return, OpenAI agrees to buy billions of dollars from NVIDIA.

And then I think just last week, OpenAI signed a deal with NVIDIA's rival, Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of chips from them.