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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're gonna find out what this sound is.
It's a really strange form of marketing to predict that if your technology is successful, if the effect of that success will be a calamity for the United States. Right after this ad.
I want to explain, Mina and Derek, how you guys know each other. Because, Derek, this is the first time that you and I are really getting to hang out together in this context. The origin of this episode is that you guys have been beefing off air. But I want to understand the backstory.
Yes, you guys are beefing. What? That's not at all accurate. We're confronting Derek. I would not characterize it as a beef. I would characterize it as a constructive... Disagreement.
Chapter 2: How do Mina and Derek know each other?
I wouldn't even go that far, personally.
Unconstructive disagreement? A deconstructive disagreement. Wow.
We used to call it seitan, fake beef. Wow. That's great. Derek and I have been friends for like 20 years. Is that too long? No, less than that. More like maybe 15. Yeah, maybe like 15 years. Because I met you like the month I moved to New York City. And I moved to New York City in 2012. So in the summer of 2012 is when we met.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI on the economy?
I think we were co-honorees at some... award thing for young journalists whose name currently escapes me. And for some reason, I recall like we were like the two most maybe like overdressed people at this particular ceremony.
And so Game Recognize Game, at that point, you were working for Fortune and doing investigative reporting and we got lunch and... We were both business journalists at the time. Yeah, we had a lot in common considering like similar jobs and kind of things like that. And Yeah, we were early 20s, though. So that was a long time. And then we stayed friends throughout the years, kept in touch.
And before I even started working in sports, I remember Derek shocked and awed me with one of his wildest takes, which was that he doesn't root for an NFL team. He would just root for a quarterback and then follow him. Peyton Manning being, which just, like, NBA happens all the time. Not a thing, really, in the NFL. Yeah. I was ahead of my time, Mina.
I was way ahead of my time in terms of following players over teams. I mean, now with fantasy, there's a lot of people who I feel like don't follow a team at all. Like they de facto root for the players in the fantasy teams because that gives them way more emotional feedback than whether or not a team wins. And as you said, in the NBA, I think following players over teams is pretty standard.
So it is or maybe was an embarrassing position in 2012. I did fall in love with Peyton Manning because he and I both shared the biological curse of high foreheads. And so... Again, that was just game-recognized game. And yeah, since Peyton has retired, I've basically been an absolute free agent.
And so, by the way, I was around in the Time Life building on a different floor at Sports Illustrated when Mina Kimes, rising star, award-winning business investigative reporter, was also this character who showed up on Bloomberg looking very goth. That's just how I'm going to imagine.
That was C-SPAN. Before I knew how to do my makeup on television, I looked like an insane person on C-SPAN. Anyways, that is our lore. That is Derek and I's lore.
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Chapter 4: Is AI a bubble or transformative technology?
So there you go.
That's right. And so when did you guys start hating each other and arguing offline?
We don't.
I will answer this question directly. It's probably not where Mina's going to go. Before we started hating each other offline about artificial intelligence, after the first or second lunch that we had, Mina sent me a photograph of young Tim Pawlenty, former rising star in the Republican Party, and said, Derek, Do you realize that you look exactly like young Tim Pawlenty?
And I think one really has to, like, remember the world of 2012 to even, like, live inside of this reference.
An amazing Paul.
It is genuinely one of the most hateful things you can possibly accuse your Democratic friend of being. It's a testament, really, to just how charming and smart Nina is that even despite this just horrendous offense, I was like, you know what? She's still pretty fun to hang out with. I guess we can still get drinks. Okay. One of my worst attributes...
and I have many, socially, is once I see a looks like, I cannot physically restrain myself from pointing it, even when you are like, it's a high wire act. Because, you know, it is a risky thing to say to someone unless it's someone really good. I've done it to Pablo, Derek, if it makes you feel better.
Instead of getting a former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, I got Andrew Lopez from The Bear, from the Forks episode, who- Just undeniably true. Yeah. accurate I met Andrew and we both ultimately had to had to agree that Mina Kimes was right which is all to say by the way also the guy in Miss Rachel there was Spider-Man meme yeah he looks like the guy in the Miss Rachel universe wait me?
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Chapter 5: How does AI affect job displacement in various industries?
Really productive Filipino guys.
Yeah, incredibly. Are they though? Are they? The amount of market cap that is hanging on those 60 Filipino guys is something truly impressive.
And that's why we're gathered here today. I do want to understand though, because Derek, the other reason I brought you on here besides your desire to argue mercilessly with Mina about AI is you do all of the reading.
That's why I consume your work in part is because I know you to synthesize lots and lots of research and text and you do a lot of reporting that helps inform what the state of the union is right now.
And so before we get to the argument specifically that you guys were having, if you were to say to a person who feels like they know what the f*** is happening with AI and gets the idea that like maybe it's God, maybe it's the devil, maybe it's... the thing inside of Geraldo Rivera's vault. Maybe it's actually all of the riches in the world. How would you characterize where we are right now?
It's March in 2026. What is the log line of what's up right now?
One line that I think is fair to say is that there's no way that artificial intelligence isn't going to be one of, if not the most important stories of the 2020s. Because either one of two things is true. Either artificial intelligence is a bubble, in which case companies are spending $700 billion per year. That's two Apollo programs per year.
The Apollo program was $300 billion spent over 10 years, inflation adjusted in the 1960s, 70s. So either it's a bubble because we're spending all of this money and the revenue is never going to catch up. And what's going to happen to AI is exactly what happened in the dot-com era, is exactly what happened in the railroad era. That takes down the stock market. It takes down the economy.
It takes down banks. It certainly, if this happens the next 18 months, transforms the 2028 election picture because any incumbent party running on an economic procession is facing an enormous risk. Or it's not a bubble.
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Chapter 6: What role does storytelling play in the perception of AI?
They're already maybe the fastest growing businesses in modern capitalism. So if that happens, if the revenue actually does keep up with the spending... I mean, for this economy to find half a trillion dollars per year in extra spending that's going to something that's competing with labor, well, that's the biggest story of the decade.
So from my standpoint, there's no off-ramp here for AI being the most important story of the decade. It's either a bubble in which case you have to pay attention or it's not a bubble in which case you have to pay attention.
I think, Derek, what I find so tricky about the bubble or not question and like the actual economic impact, which goes back as a business journalist was something I thought about a lot. I didn't work at Fortune during the dot com, but we had all of the issues from that period prominently displayed the pets dot com.
And then I did join during the financial crisis, which is a very different kind of bubble. I think what I find so tricky here is if AI and the actual impact on the technology is more akin to what they call a normal technology, right? There's the famous piece that I think it was in the Columbia Review written about AI being normal technology.
If it's neither personal computing in terms of being a transformative, completely revolutionary thing that's going to affect everything and make things better, but it's also not NFTs where it's just, you know, bullsh**t. If it's somewhere in the middle, which is kind of where I land based on my reading, but valuations right now in the markets are so out of whack.
What does that actually mean for the next 10 years, both from an economic perspective, certainly, but also an industry perspective, right? Like if this thing is actually useful and it's important and it's threatening, but it's not that, what does that mean if we've so dramatically overvalued?
Because from where I stand, I see a technology that where most of the money is just from other companies paying for it or for the services or the chips, right? I don't see an economic impact at the ground level. And I don't see humans paying for it right now.
So it's so hard for me to... Can I just put the meme, Derek, in front of you? I think it's the image someone posted of like a surge projector plugged into itself. And it's like NVIDIA. And the question that I mean is circling to some in 2008 when all of us were doing some form of print journalism. Is it now too big to fail? Is that what we've boxed ourselves into?
Well, Mina brought up a scenario that I think is really easy to describe. If AI is anything close to NFTs, and OpenAI is currently valued at $600 billion, and Anthropic is currently valued at $400 billion, it's a bubble, period. It's over. These companies are doomed if this technology is NFTs.
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Chapter 7: What are the limitations of AI in professional settings?
Look at what's happening in the software industry. The job of being a software programmer has been completely changed. Let me give you a sense. There's this company called Meter, M-E-T-E-R. that does these famous benchmark studies of AI. It does these studies that are quoted throughout Twitter, throughout the AI discourse of how powerful this technology is.
And last year, they published a study that was held up very strongly by the AI doubters because it said that if you ask the best software programmers to use artificial intelligence, they think it makes them about 15%, 20% more effective. But if you have a third party grade their work, they're actually significantly less less productive on an hour-per-hour basis.
And all these people who are doubters of artificial intelligence pointed this study and they said, look, this proves that AI is just vaporware. This year, Meter announced that AI for coders with technology like Cloud Code and Codex from OpenAI
has gotten so much better that they can no longer do this study because they can't find developers who are willing to work without AI in order to be the control group. So this is already a technology that has completely transformed at least one major industry, which is coding. But I guess what we're going to talk about a little bit more is that the underlying problem
value of this technology, the underlying skill, I think, is its facility with data. And there are so many jobs that are, whether they're in data analytics or they're in research, they're putting together PowerPoints, they're working with Excel. There are so many jobs where the moment-to-moment tasks are so easily reproducible or accelerated by the best AI tools that exist.
But I think it's far more likely than what you've seen in the last few months is going to continue, which is that anthropic and open AI have, in the last 13 months, gone from a combined ARR, a combined annualized revenue, of about $3.5 billion to a combined annualized revenue of $35 billion. It's grown by 10x. That's practically unprecedented in the history of capitalism.
And it suggests at the very least that there are ordinary people, not just 60 people in the Philippines, but millions of people in America that are choosing to pay significantly for this technology month after month. People who are paying it for it out of pocket or you mean in companies and in their jobs? Because I think that's an important distinction here.
It's a great question, and it's hard to decompose exactly how much of this spending is coming from individuals who are choosing to pay for it versus companies that are choosing to pay for it. But I would say this. There are a lot of companies, a lot of major Fortune 100 companies that prohibit their employees from using Claude or OpenAI and force them to use other models like Gemini.
And that suggests that a lot of the money that's going into anthropic and open AI are from individuals choosing to use this technology rather than from companies forcing them to use this technology. And I think it's important to say, you know, you go back to what the folks at Meter said. It's not that the folks at Meter have found that companies are forcing software programmers to use AI.
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Chapter 8: How can AI be effectively integrated into our work lives?
What they found is that the individual software programmers themselves will not enroll in this study because it requires that some of them be selected to be in a control group where they can't use this technology. And they're saying, we can't do that. I don't dispute that there's utility for software programmers.
And I think that, Pablo, my feeling about AI generally and why there's so much public backlash and it's so politically polarizing, whatever, is it strikes me as unsexy technology being marketed as sexy. Maybe sexy is the wrong word, but I see a lot of B2B use. I see a lot of data use. I see a lot of industries where it streamlines processes.
What I think where I kind of get a little bit suspicion about putting it more in the personal computing, completely transformative side is I would like to see evidence of consumer use rising to that to meet that as opposed to like people using it in their job, which I do. Like, Derek, I believe that. Like, I've heard stories about that. I know people in software who say that.
I just don't think I just want to see some evidence that people are paying for it. Normal people.
And a lot of this, for better or for worse, does happen on Twitter, on X, the everything app. It's a lot of where, frankly, the industry is like arguing amongst itself. The AI industry. Yeah, and the stories are told, right? And I think storytelling is such a huge part of this still. We just had, I'll bring in, Derek, something you're familiar with, the Citrini Research Substack.
that moved markets. And what that literally was, was a fictionalized account of what Citrini, the author of the post, who I weirdly kind of have interacted with before, and I'm like eager to actually talk to maybe on the show one day about, but it was this looking at the crystal ball of like, this is what it's going to be like.
This is my vision for how maybe AI might be revolutionary and also still horrific for the economy. And so in real terms, as the storytelling contest was being contested, you saw American Express and DoorDash and these specific companies that he cited as like those who may suffer from the agentic, the revolution in which maybe the ability to process data in this seemingly unsexy way, but with...
this frame around it that feels, if nothing else, like it is cosmically impactful. It led to these real-life monetary hits, which is kind of insane. It tested it to the fact that as much as there is this economic reality that is being debated, we're also still here for the best story someone can tell us. There are lots of persuadable voters even in the market, it seems like.
Let me give you two answers to that.
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