Tom Gardner

It was reckless.

And the businesses had no opportunity off Broadway to practice that show and make it great.

Everything was just going center stage Broadway right away and it wasn't looking very good.

That's not happening now.

We don't have a lot of companies rushing to the public markets today.

But what we do have is a rising enthusiasm for an acronym like AI.ai.com.

We're going to see more and more of that.

I think the bubble is fully formed for AI in the private markets.

And what ends up happening downstream of that is that those companies need to go public because the only way that venture capitalists and private equity firms are going to get their money out is by forcing this stuff into the public market.

So we need to be very careful.

We need to be discerning, have a filter that's going to protect us against 80 to 90% of the stuff that comes out that's going to end up falling apart before our eyes.

For example, in Hidden Gems of the Motley Fool, we're not that excited about the Figma IPO.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the Figma IPO, but

these companies are going to be an unbelievable competitive cycle right now.

So I just think we need to sit with all the new companies coming public and recognize that many of them don't deserve a very, very high valuation.

And we need to work with great investor teams, hopefully like the ones that you're working with at The Motley Fool to distinguish between the contenders and the pretenders.

I would say to somebody that believes that artificial intelligence is presenting something new that we've never seen before, that they're not entirely wrong by saying that.

So the first thing is we go through cycles and patterns and we can look back in history and see innovative breakthroughs that changed everything.

You know, if you were hand weaving at a certain point, right, and new technologies came along, as happened to Andrew Carnegie's father, he essentially

I ended his life in disrepair financially because he didn't make the transition to the new technology.