Paul Kudrowski

It assumes that everything I'm spending money on that's capital expenditure and AI data centers are lumped into that loosely as we're railroads as it was the dot com construction.

But they're all very different for exactly the reason you allude to, which is the lifespan of the thing you're creating is wildly different.

So when you think about comparing railroads, which let's say I built something during the railroad bubble in the 19th century, say 1855, I only got around five years later to running traffic down the line.

What were the biggest issues I potentially had?

Weeds?

I don't know.

Weeds, maybe some cows had settled in.

It's not clear to me what it was that I was, what the forces I was pushing against were.

So in all likelihood, I could, quote, light that line very, very quickly.

I could put it into use relatively easily.

Similarly, with the fiber boom back in the late 1990s, if I was putting in some gear from, you know, Sienna and JDS Uniphase and all the great names of that era and building out fiber, and it was like, wait a minute, nobody wants me to light the fiber.

Nobody wants to send data down.

Netflix isn't doing that yet.

Okay, so I wait five years and I light the fiber.

What are the things that then are pushing against me?

Nothing.

Maybe someone accidentally put a backhoe through a fiber line, but I can very quickly put that back together.

So it's not as if the fiber optic cables themselves are a depreciating asset, that they're becoming less useful over time because I didn't light it to send some streaming stuff for Netflix down it.

It has no bearing.

Now we turn to the current wave of, quote, capital expenditures, and that's why this is very different.