Rob Armstrong

But all the kind of normal stuff the big companies do –

Google sells ads, Microsoft sells software, et cetera, on down the line.

Meta runs ads against social media sites.

All that part of the economy is doing well.

So while they're spending all this money on AI data centers, the big companies are earning loads of money just doing the thing big tech companies do.

So that's probably the strongest growth story

is the technology growth story.

There are exceptions here.

There's all these worries about certain software companies will get murdered by AI and et cetera, et cetera.

But the basic background in demand for digital services is very strong.

They are in the fun sponge business and have always been.

It's true.

And so the issue you just raised is the issue of sustainability.

You know, there is a case to be made that this is a bit of a sugar rush, that all this stuff can't go on forever.

You know, the oil companies are an example of this, right?

Not so much in the first quarter, but in terms of what they're talking about, how it's going now in the second quarter, there's a shortage of the stuff that they make.

They're going to print it, right?

But one day, as the guy in Apocalypse Now says, this war is going to end, at which point oil prices are going to go down, right?

So that's a temporary phenomenon.

And I guess if you wanted to be a Debbie Downer about the United States in particular, you might say...