The Four Horsemen of the AI Apocalypse with Ed Zitron

**Ed Zitron** (0:00)
Like, I ran a PR firm until like last year, and I was like doing that as kind of a contract labor thing. And then I started writing this in 2020, and I just kept going and going and going and going. And then initially, I was writing about like management theory stuff, and how much I liked remote work and how evil the articles were about it. Then I wrote about crypto, and I wrote about Elon. And by the end of those two things, I was so thoroughly depressed with both. I was just like, what am I going to write about?

**Michael Batnick** (0:24)
Well, with the topics or with writing?

**Ed Zitron** (0:25)
With the topics. The topics were so depressing. Like every week following what Elon Musk does and just ugh. And then the metaverse happened. That was kind of fun to write about, but that was before that. But then OpenAI got, like, sorry, Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI. And I saw on Twitter that there were journalists who were like, oh my God, I hope they bring him back. They were like talking about him like a rock star.
It was like, oh, then everyone's, there was someone like, oh, I'm crying because how beautiful it is that everyone's showing support for Sam Altman. Josh cried.

**Josh Brown** (0:56)
Journalists.

**Ed Zitron** (0:57)
Yeah, journalists. It's f**king crazy. So I saw this and I just, I didn't even judge them for it. I was like, fine, whatever, feel. But I was like, this is weird. Why are you acting? Like I was like, what does this mean? Why are you acting this way? And so I kept looking really intently and I just immediately saw this thing where everyone was saying, AI is the biggest, most hugest, best thing ever. It's inevitable, blah, blah, blah. But I couldn't find any revenues.
Like I couldn't find, and every time I was like, okay, great. But how much does it make? And everyone was like, I couldn't possibly say. How much does Microsoft, they're spending billions of dollars on CapEx. How much does this make?
I can't tell you. No one wants to tell you. But you kept having these articles every earnings season saying, Microsoft's AI bet pays off. Google's AI bet pays off. Even though they never mention their AI revenue. And I just kind of taught myself economics from there. Like a lot of this, like everything's self-taught. Which to the chagrin of my many haters is just like stuff I learned.
But you can learn a lot by reading books and such.

**Josh Brown** (1:55)
Okay. So you, alright. So you're, I guess it's a sub stack or?

**Ed Zitron** (2:01)
Ghost.

**Josh Brown** (2:02)
Okay. So what you're doing is being read everywhere. People are sharing it. And bulls on AI are reading it. Because I think, so my view of the market is, most professional investors are intelligent enough to listen to both sides.
And they don't have to agree with everything they read in order to want to keep reading it. Right. I don't think that's the same is true for retail investors. But we're not going to concern ourselves with that. I think professionals do like to hear both sides. Especially if they have a lot of money on the line.

**Ed Zitron** (2:33)
That's actually been my experience talking to some of the banks and the institutions. Like they want to, even the ones who are very pro AI. I agree with that.

**Josh Brown** (2:39)
All right. We're the same way. So we've been doing this show.
We tape every Thursday going back to the summer of 2021 And for five years, the majority of our guests are bullish. And so far so good, for the most part. Yeah. Okay. We have had people who are bearish, but they are non-specifically bearish. So we've had people like Jeremy Grantham, who's become famous for...
He takes issue with the perma bear label, but he's almost always bearish. So we've had people like that on the show. And I always find that fascinating. But we haven't really had, specifically, an AI bear. Somebody that, like, specif... You know, most of the people that come on, portfolio managers, or they're analysts covering the space. And you know all the incentives to see the brighter side. So this will be an interesting test of all of the things that we've done on the show to hear the other side. So we're really excited about it.

**Ed Zitron** (3:35)
I'm pumped. Okay, awesome.

**Michael Batnick** (3:36)
Do balls think you're an idiot, or do they generally like what you're saying to them?

**Ed Zitron** (3:40)
So it's got to a weird point. So if we're mixing in every kind of ball here, so I imagine a lot of them are retail bags.