The Biggest AI Money Grab In Recent History | Retrospect Ep.243

In this week’s episode we discussed how four leading AI companies are seeking to raise more capital than the entire U.S. IPO market generated over the past five years combined. We break down what's driving this unprecedented investment boom, who the major players are, and what it means for startups, investors, and the future of artificial intelligence.

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Transcript

Jason  0:01  
Artificial intelligence has spent the last few years living in the clouds, private labs, private money, private valuations, private promises, but now AI wants to walk through the front door of Wall Street. Open AI has confidentially filed for a US IPO. Anthropic has done the same. Core Weave already tested the waters, raising 1.5 billion and jumping above its IPO price within days. And overseas, China's Z AI is chasing public market money to fund its race toward artificial general intelligence. So, the question is, no longer is AI coming, it's already here, and also, Who gets to own it? Because once these companies go public, artificial intelligence stops being just a technology story, it becomes a retirement account story, a pension fund story, a national security story, a job market story, and maybe, if we're honest, a bubble story. The public is not exactly throwing a parade. Pew found only 17% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on the country over the next 20 years, compared with 56% of AI experts. Gallup found only 31% of Americans trust businesses to use AI responsibly, while 70-3% believe AI will reduce the total number of US jobs over the next decade. That is the tension investors see gold, workers see disruption, executives see scale, regulators see smoke coming from the engine room, and Wall Street sees the oldest trick in the book: turn the future into a ticker symbol, and let everybody buy a piece before anybody fully understands the risk. So today we ask, are these AI IPOs the birth of the next great American industry, or are we watching Silicon Valley package uncertainty, slap a trillion dollar valuation on it, and sell it back to the public? Because when the future becomes a publicly traded asset, we're all investors, whether we bought the stock or not. Ian,

Ian  2:34  
welcome to the Retrospect Podcast, a show where people come together from different walks of life and discuss a topic from their generation's perspective. My name is Ian, as always, I'm joined by Stoney

Stoney   2:41  
hello

Ian  2:42  
 and Jason.

Jason  2:42  
Hello, everyone. 

Stoney   2:44  
One more pre-show for the books that we didn't record. That's okay.

Ian  2:48  
We got some good. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. We've had some scheduling conflicts and some in weather and all kinds of stuff that has has made a little bit difficult for us to do our regular routine, and so it's nice to get, get back, and of course, as per usual, you know, we sit around this table, we start talking, and that's just how it ends up happening. Just takes out, yeah, but speaking up, before we get into this topic, though, I want to share with you one thing that happened over the course of, like, the past week that was very crazy, that I think you would be interested to hear about. We had during that crazy rainstorm that we were talking about, that we had, like, postponed in one of the shows for. I have a pretty big tree out in my backyard, and during the rainstorm, my roommate and I were hanging around the house, and you know, just he was in the kitchen making some food, I was, I was in, you know, in the back of the house, or whatever, and I mean, out, it was like thundering and lightning, you know, it was a, it was a crazy rainstorm pouring down, and out of nowhere, I mean, the brightest flash of light lights up the whole house, wham buddy got struck by light, well, and so something got struck by lightning, and instead the tree, it was that big tree,

Jason  4:01  
trees dead now.

Ian  4:02  
Oh, well, I was gonna say, I think it was already kind of diet, or it's dead now. Yeah,

Jason  4:08  
and so 50,000 bowls, whatever light the inside, so

Ian  4:15  
and so it, when it did that, it was certain lights flickered in the house a little bit, and the in our, my computer screen had had shut off for a second, and I was like, oh my goodness, and I was like, at first I was like, I thought it also struck the house, so I was like, oh man, please don't tell me the house just got struck by lightning, so like, we're of course, obviously, my roommate and I, I like walk into the kitchen, he's like, bruh, you're not gonna believe this again. It wasn't on fire, but there was like, he's like, I saw embers falling down from the tree outside, which is like bark, like you know, burnt bark and stuff.

Stoney   4:52  
Yep, which means it was on fire. Yeah, so it

Jason  4:55  
may still actually be on fire on the inside. Okay.

Ian  4:58  
Well, I mean, if. It has been, it's been over a week now, and I haven't

Jason  5:02  
been surprised how much that stuff can, can just kind of fester. Okay, oh yeah, it could.

Ian  5:07  
Well, it continued to rain for the rest of that night, and and then come that next morning it was sunshine, and we're looking at, you know, this is where it's going to get a little graphic, but we look, we're looking at all this bark that was kind of like strewn about the tree, we're seeing these like burn marks and scorches around the tree, and all that stuff, and I look down at what I, what I think to be, I think to be bark, and I see two little bird legs sticking up, and there's a, there's a whole bird, I mean, upside down, yeah, like, like, absolutely cooked, and I was like,

Stoney   5:43  
"Well, barbecue been fine.

Ian  5:45  
No, at that point, I think the bugs had got to it, so.. but I was like, I looked at it, I was like, "Poor guy, extra. I was like, "Rest in peace. I don't know what

Jason  5:52  
hit it exactly. Happens so

Ian  5:54  
fast, and I was like, "You're gonna

Stoney   5:55  
go, that's the best way. Don't know what I'm gonna

Jason  5:58  
tell you, what I've known, I believe. believe, I think I knew a guy that got struck by lightning, really time, and that's a, that's not a

Ian  6:09  
no,

Jason  6:09  
it's not what you want to have happen to you, because sometimes it doesn't result in death, right? Sometimes it just impairs you, yeah, sometimes it just just kills, sometimes it just

Stoney   6:20  
goes through, yeah, you never know. I knew somebody who's playing golf,

Jason  6:25  
that's scary.

Stoney   6:26  
 It knocked him out. Yeah, yeah,

Jason  6:27  
it a jack here, Jackie, big

Stoney   6:33  
white streak in his hair. After that,

Ian  6:35  
really, wow,

Jason  6:36  
yeah.

Ian  6:37  
Well, and then, of course, funny enough, the what happened immediately afterwards is the internet in the house went down, and the house is a little bit old, so like there's like coax cables that are going, you know, kind of on the outside, and like you know, lead from the from the road into the house, and I wouldn't be surprised if voltage went into the modem and overloaded it, because, like, the router was fine, everything on the modem was fine, but I think some of the jacks were messed up. So, after doing some testing that night, my roommate and

Jason  7:09  
I, I've got, he got,

Ian  7:09  
so we ended up going to buy a new, new modem box. I got

Jason  7:12  
a system with my utility company put on my, my meter to protect me from nice from electrical strikes like that.

Ian  7:20  
Everything else has been fine so far. It was a crazy circumstance, and I was like, "Man, I again, the rain was, you know, it was nothing, nothing we haven't been able to handle around here before. But I scared the piss out of me in Louisiana, they got 31

Stoney   7:34  
inches of rain, that's crazy. That

Jason  7:36  
was a record,

Stoney   7:37  
yeah,

Jason  7:37  
for 112 hour period.

Ian  7:40  
Interesting.

Jason  7:41  
Yeah, I believe that was in the Marksville, Cottonport, Mansura. Yeah, that area of Louisiana, somewhat kind of in the central part of the state, maybe a little closer to the to the Louisiana-Mississippi line. Yeah, yeah, that it just was the way the bait those bands set up with Arthur, yeah, just dumped all that rain on them, and it's like it could happen, yeah, I mean that can happen into any time, yes, get a stubborn system that just keeps training, yeah, well, I think

Ian  8:17  
that the funny thing too is around the local area I'm in, they, they recently have been like putting in culverts and, like, you know, clearing up some of the drainage, and I think some of it didn't do such a good job during this recent rainstorm, so I think they, they've, they dug it back up, doing more, which you can exactly, so, but anyways, I just thought it was interesting story, because that was something that happened that I was not prepared for, and also, obviously, I was not financially prepared for either, because I was like, man, I don't want to have to spend a couple 100 bucks on a new modem, but I was like, that's gotta, yeah, you gotta do, gotta do what you gotta do, yeah, so, but anyway, so I thought was fun, but

Jason  8:53  
we got here,

Ian  8:54  
I've stumbled across this like a video talking about the kind of topic we're talking about today, about how there's like these major AI companies that are going public, and how let me see what I have right here. It was, it said the companies are planning to raise more capital than the entire US IPO market did in over the past five years.

Jason  9:17  
Yeah,

Ian  9:17  
which is like the amount of money that takes, and again, the fact that it's all potentially happening at once, like the risk that, that you know, comes into play is like, if if investors see the value in it and try and put the money towards that, like, are they going to take the money out of somewhere else to, like, put that money into AI, and, or the worst part is like, if, if that, if asking price for it, if they don't see the value in it, and they don't invest in it, then, like, what does that mean for the AI bubble to not be able to, it's like, anyway, it's just an interesting story that, like,

Stoney   9:54  
well, it also came about because of Bernie Sanders trying to pass a law saying that the mayor. Could needs to own 50% of this.

Jason  10:02  
Right,

Stoney   10:03  
think about this, though. Here's, here's my thought process on this. Can the US government own something? Yes, it can. Constitutionally, it can. Harry S. Truman had some problems in World War Two when he tried to gain control of the steel factories in America, and the Supreme Court said no.

Ian  10:24  
Yeah,

Stoney   10:25  
national security is not a reason, right, for you to be able to take something over. When has it happened? And it worked. The auto industry,

Ian  10:36  
okay, the

Stoney   10:37  
banking industry, the housing industry, the government now owns part of this, because they bailed them out,

Jason  10:45  
correct?

Stoney   10:45  
And in bailing them out, we get part ownership.

Jason  10:49  
Yeah, so

Stoney   10:50  
to me this is what's happening. This is a pre-bailout situation.

Ian  10:56  
Okay,

Stoney   10:56  
how about we go ahead and just bail you out now, and we get at least an equal voting share, or is it a non-voting share that America will be buying, and we need to find that out, because that's very important, because who controls what?

Jason  11:17  
Well, I think kind of the way I look at just kind of following some of these stories, and I might also listen to some podcasts on this topic, and it appears the thinking by these AI companies is they want to, for lack of a better term, offshore the risk,

Ian  11:42  
yeah,

Jason  11:42  
on to the public. So, in essence, the public would always have a stake in the game. So,

Stoney   11:48  
my pre buyout, yeah. Now, let's just go ahead and buy you out now for when it happens. So, they,

Jason  11:54  
the natural process of development of this technology is going to carry, they would carry any sort of risk with investors, because the technology that will not work, it will pan out. I mean, there's already people that are, that are, you know, they're that AI is, I don't think is promising what it was built to be, and at least not yet, I mean, I think basically you've got things that can maybe run some, some simple, you know, simple machines like, you know, drive-through type technology, I think it can definitely do that, but I think the promise is it can basically take over a lot of what white-collar jobs do, accounting, you know, financial investing, those kind of things.

Ian  12:49  
Yeah,

Jason  12:50  
but

Ian  12:52  
that's crazy. I wonder, what, like, what is this? I don't know. I wonder what this is going to mean for, like, the future, not only of, like, all the different companies and AI in general, but like, what, what does it mean in the big picture of, I don't know, like the financial world altogether, because again, it reminds me, we talked, I think we kind of mentioned briefly, like, about the stuff with the.com boom, and or the housing crisis, like there's these big moments where like the stock market doesn't really crash, but like it, you know, has these major dips in it. I wonder, like, what I wonder if that could potentially be.

Jason  13:27  
Well, I mean, I saw an article here, they said Open AI was valued at roughly 300 billion in 2025 right? Anthropics valuation went up nearly 965 billion after his latest first round of funding, placing him on those valuable private companies in history. Also, Anthropic

Stoney   13:52  
is the company who they, in a matter of hours, defeated the NSAs.

Jason  14:01  
Correct, that was me, those,

Stoney   14:02  
yeah, yeah, that's part of the saying,

Jason  14:06  
yeah, matter of fact, Trump, I believe President Trump told them that you need to pull that thing down because it breached, it breached them in a couple hours, get

Ian  14:15  
out, yeah, okay,

Jason  14:17  
that's their latest, yeah, their latest platform model

Stoney   14:20  
or version, yeah,

Jason  14:21  
which I think everybody knew that if you turn these AI systems, and as they get more, you know, more sophisticated, more polished, that you're going to have to now on the back end beef up the security of what, and it's going to be this constant thing. It's yeah,

Ian  14:44  
back and forth.

Jason  14:45  
It kind of reminds me of the radar versus the radar detector, yeah. You know, and so this is constant fight back and forth with this stuff, and I mean, to me, I think that show. You where this stuff is at right now, if it's breaching, suppose NSA, which would probably have the strongest security,

Ian  15:10  
hopefully apparatus

Jason  15:12  
behind it, protecting it. If it's breaching that in a couple hours, well, then okay, where we're at here. And what was

Stoney   15:21  
funny was this was a test.

Jason  15:23  
Yeah,

Ian  15:23  
yeah. Okay, this was a test.

Stoney   15:26  
And so what did we do? We just let China and Russia know that there's a vulnerability,

Ian  15:33  
right?

Jason  15:34  
Well, I think they, they probably already know it. Oh, I'm sure

Stoney   15:39  
they already do, but they're thinking a week's or a month vulnerability. This was like a couple of hours vulnerability, and when I keep saying that China and Russia want to take out our infrastructure and our energy grids and things like that, how quickly can they do it now?

Jason  15:58  
Yeah, I mean this is a, I mean, there's just a lot here that's, I think, and I knew this was going to kind of happen. Yeah, you know, I kind of brought this topic up, not specifically this, but the idea of these, you know, the AI companies now, or what oil was back at the turn of the century with the beginning of the industrial revolution, revolution in the discovery of oil, and how that drove us industry.

Ian  16:34  
Yeah,

Jason  16:34  
and I do believe, and I've talked about the threat of the US dollar being tied to the petrol dollar, and countries are trying to get around that. If that happens, and other countries start trading commodities outside of the dollar, I mean that's going to seriously impact our ability to basically print money.

Ian  16:58  
Yeah,

Jason  16:59  
and I don't even want to think about what's going to happen to people's investments, pension systems, retirements, and stuff like that. They're all tied to this, this. Who are the who are the companies that can, in essence, hold us debt?

Ian  17:16  
Yeah,

Jason  17:17  
would be these companies now. Yeah, I mean, it just, it just, that's the reality, because it's global,

Ian  17:22  
right?

Jason  17:24  
It's in essence, information now has become right, right,

Ian  17:27  
right,

Jason  17:28  
has become the has become the

Ian  17:33  
currency, the currency now, and

Jason  17:35  
I don't, I don't, I don't know what the fix is on this, I really don't, I think this is, you know, I'd say it, but I mean, I think we're on a fast train that we can't get off of right now. There's no pulling back. There's a ton of money being dumped into this stuff right now, because everybody knows it's probably going to be bad, but no one wants to be caught flat foot and wants to be China's run into this, Russia is running at this, we're running, it's whoever can win this race is in essence going to be able to control the globe.

Ian  18:10  
Yeah,

Jason  18:11  
because the minute you lose that, say, I mean, the United States loses that to China, then China is now in charge.

Ian  18:17  
Yeah,

Jason  18:17  
just they will be, and I don't think anybody really wants that, but I mean, as I'm saying, it's once you uncork, you know, the bottle and the genie's out now. I don't.. there's no putting the genie back in. Well,

Stoney   18:34  
but there's a couple of issues that may seem smaller that aren't. If the government now owns this, we remember what happened back in COVID. The government called the CIA front, Facebook, and said, 'You need to control this speech. They, they, what was it, Twitter? You need to stop these people from speaking. They actually had to make phone calls and have meetings and bribe people to actually control speech. Well, now if they own 50 or 51% of the companies that are doing this, all they got to do is type it in, so they'll now control speech, and they will control reality because they will now control what you hear and what you see on the internet, in life, on the news, everything right, and they're they're wrapping it up, Sanders is wrapping it up in this little bowl that, well, we all need to, we'll all win, because you'll get a stipend. I'll get a stipend. Everybody will get a stipend, because we'll all own

Jason  19:46  
it, because they're looking for some sort of cash fund to fund more government service. It's also that,

Stoney   19:52  
but think what it does for the surveillance expansion, right? Because AI now I. Operates the Taco Bell drive-through

Jason  20:02  
right.

Stoney   20:03  
Well, now that AI has to be connected to the data center. Now you're going to connect all the traffic, because now traffic is going to be controlled by AI,

Jason  20:14  
right?

Stoney   20:15  
Instead of just having a computer program with sensors going, "Ooh, there's a car here, there's not a car here, let's turn it will be will be controlled by AI now, so now AI will control everything.

Jason  20:29  
Yeah, well, I think it's pretty much already is right now. I mean, I just.. I don't see much pulling back. I think it's, it's not where I think people speculated it would be, but I think that it still helps.

Ian  20:52  
Yeah,

Jason  20:52  
you know, you don't see companies just pulling out their AI. I mean, they're just, they're not doing that. I mean, but I mean,

Stoney   20:58  
think about where you talked about the money earlier. I'm looking at this in kind of a broad picture. How much money is being spent by the lobbyists right now? For think about this, for the US government, a senator to consider spending trillions of dollars, because that's ultimately what it's going to be to actually buy into this.

Jason  21:23  
Yeah,

Stoney   21:23  
how much money you think Bernie Sanders is getting through the lobbyists to even consider this?

Jason  21:28  
Yeah, these.. I don't trust any of them. They are all making money. I

Ian  21:32  
think the thing that, that is the thing that's interesting about this is that I'm reading here, and it says SpaceX will kick off its IPO shortly. Alphabet, which is Google, will fire file paperwork for a secondary stock sale that will raise 10s of billions of dollars, and Anthropic and Open AI have also filed for IPOs. If all are successful, they could raise more money. This is the whole the thing I brought about at the beginning of the show was more money than US IPOs like collectively raised over the past five years, so it's like in a very short order we could have these like very all the big AI companies are going to put their are going to put their initial investment stock out there, and the fact that it's all of them at once is like the thing that kind of is concerning for me, at least. Where it's like, like you're saying before, with like, I don't know, how there's a lot of money out there, there's a lot of money out there to be, to be spent on stuff, I know that, but my thing is like, if if the people aren't there with the money, and they, and they don't want to spend it on open or on on AI companies, especially not this much of it, because there's so much of it, like, what does that mean, if like their initial, their initial public offering, which is IPO, doesn't come through, doesn't actually go through, like, does that mean that, like, for me it would now, I could be wrong, if, if all of a sudden they all of the stocks are bought up and like people are investing in it like crazy, then AI is still going, but the thing that that worries me now is like these are some really big numbers that are being thrown out there from all the big AI companies, and if those aren't met, then, like, what does that mean for AI? Like, you know, does that mean it's going to start to, does, does that signal the downturn of, like, you know, AI maybe, maybe at its, at its peak right now, maybe curving down. I just don't know what it all means. I'm not a, I'm not an investment guy, or whatever, I don't know all the ins and outs of how that works, but it's just, it's interesting, and it's scary, because also, too, like, I like, what, who, if, if people do see the value in it, and they want to purchase it, where, like, if I have so much money invested in all these things, but I want to put all my money here, what's that money going to get taken out of? Like, you know what I mean, like, I don't know if that's how that works, either, but anyways, so well,

Stoney   24:02  
one of the things that concerned me was, if you look in social media and social media news, etc. etc. that supposedly Donald Trump declared data centers military installations,

Ian  24:19  
really.

Stoney   24:20  
Okay, okay, so that is not verified, and it's very misleading.

Ian  24:24  
Okay,

Stoney   24:25  
there are some things that did happen.

Ian  24:27  
Okay,

Stoney   24:28  
okay, this administration has treated AI data centers as national security infrastructure.

Ian  24:37  
I see,

Stoney   24:38  
okay, because a lot of the military stuff and a lot of government stuff's going to go through that,

Ian  24:42  
right?

Stoney   24:43  
He accelerated the government accelerated federal permitting for AI data centers. That's been verified. Federal land may be used for data centers. Key point: federal land. And that's been verified. Military bases may now host private and commercial AI data centers. That's been verified.

Ian  25:11  
Okay,

Stoney   25:13  
all private data centers are now military installations. That's false, based on the evidence that we have today, and data centers are military adjacent assets.

Ian  25:28  
Okay,

Stoney   25:29  
strongly supported and verified.

Ian  25:31  
Okay,

Stoney   25:32  
so what is this telling anybody? I call it Skynet. I will never use the word AI again. From now on I'm just gonna say Skynet, and I want everybody to understand when Stoney says Skynet, I mean AI, because it's coming and it ain't that far away.

Jason  25:52  
No, but it's as the models get more and more sophisticated, I mean as they become more and more integrated into the, it's kind of reminds me of, of the movie iRobot.

Ian  26:05  
Yeah,

Jason  26:06  
I mean, if you remember at the time when the big computer, whatever it was, I don't remember, it basically, I mean,

Ian  26:15  
it was AI, the

Jason  26:16  
whole company, the whole country had given over its defense, everything to this computer, and it was able to basically just take every take over, and it's just a mistake in doing that, but Matrix

Stoney   26:28  
Terminator, you know, War Games, one of the greatest movies ever, but then I still say to this day, Demolition Man was one of the best predictors of the future of this world of 15 minute cities AI, as you're walking down the street, and say, 'Damn it, thank one credit is removed from your blah blah blah for using offensive language. That's where we're going,

Jason  26:56  
right?

Stoney   26:56  
If you look at the China social score system, if you jaywalk, they automatically take it out of your account, and then they post your picture across town, saying, 'Look at this bad person, they're jaywalking, they aren't trying to be a good member of society because they're jaywalking. What do you think all these data centers, the information they're going to collect is far.

Ian  27:22  
Yeah,

Stoney   27:23  
that's what this is for.

Ian  27:25  
I found some of the numbers that I was talking about.

Stoney   27:28  
It

Ian  27:29  
says over the past five years, United States initial, the IPO have raised a total of 267 billion. So, in 2021 it was 155 22 was 823, was 2224 was 33 billion, and then of course 25 was 47 billion, and then this year with all these AI companies going all at once with the amount that they're asking for is 370 billion, so it's like, so in one year it's like it's just gonna flood the market with potential AI shares to be purchased up, and that's what I'm saying, that's what I, that's the point that I think I was trying to get to, you know, not not articulate myself very well, is like if the value is there and investors see the value where maybe they have extra money to throw around, but if not, where are they going to take that money from to put it into what they think is valuable, so like, where are we going to start seeing the downcline of, like, the decline of other things, you know, whatever, like, you know, investments being taken with everything, you're right, but I'm just saying, even more so now than ever before, where it's like if people are just going to start scraping money out of all the all their pennies out of everything to put it all into AI, if they see the value in it, like what does that mean for not only for what you're talking about, data centers, obviously it's going to get an influx of money their way, which I guess is what they want, but where are we going to potentially suffer? Because there's not going to be any fun, we got to suffer twice, because we have to pay for

Stoney   29:04  
it, and then we have to pay the utility bill far, exactly, you know, but all data centers can realistically be, you know, strategic assets, if you think about it, yeah, because what's going to happen with that, you know, that's not a conspiracy theory, that's just, you know, that's national security, you know, military logistics. How do you think things are going to get moved? AI, cyber defense. We already talked about that one with the NSA getting breached. Intelligence analysis, all satellite imagery, drone coordination. Because think about this, now that we have all of this AI, why do we need pilots now? You know what's been the restrictive use of all vehicles,

Ian  29:48  
right? The

Stoney   29:48  
human body. Okay, you can't go more than how many G's with a human body, but how many more G's can you go? How faster can you go when you don't have to do that for the human body? You know, battlefield decisions, autonomous systems, classified cloud workloads, defense contractor AI, code analysis, biosecurity monitoring. Think about that. If you put your thumb on something, or you use a retina for your, that's all going to be in the data centers. That's how they're going to control it, you know, weapon simulation. And then think about this: is the big one for me. What are we gearing toward? In January, Tesla is going to be 100% autonomous, right, for the driving. What about your supply chain monitoring? All of our trucks, you know, we're getting away from using illegal aliens to drive our supply chain around now, so now what we're going to do is we're just going to let AI do it,

Ian  30:46  
right?

Stoney   30:47  
Somebody hacks into that now. What do you

Ian  30:50  
do? Oh, well, there's a big company called Waymo that's like a big, like, taxi service, is it all AI? Oh, it's all it's right around the corner. Yeah, what's in it's in a, it's in major cities right now, like it's in big areas. I think I went to, I think it was Houston, about sometime last year, and I saw them around. They were all over the place, no driver at all. Just, you just ran out and see that. Yeah, yeah. So, it's.. I

Stoney   31:16  
can see it happening.

Ian  31:18  
Yeah.

Jason  31:18  
Well, I'm gonna tell you, there's still. I mean, as much as you know, this is kind of moving forward. There are a lot of, a lot of people that are kind of sounding the alarm on, you know, these, maybe they're overvaluing this stuff. I mean, it's.. I see here, I'm reading an article off of Business Insider. They said researcher and independent journalist Ed Zitron went viral this month for a post on Open AI's finances showing massive spending and steep losses at the AI giant. The Chat GPT maker is preparing for an IPO, and investors are eager for a peek at the financials of ahead of what's expected to be historic, offering a report based on audited financial information viewed by Zitron, published on june 15, showed that losses surged from 5 billion in 2024 to almost 39 billion in 2025 as the company went on a spending spree to pull ahead in the I race the financial condition of Open AI is deeply concerning. Zitron wrote 38.5 3 billion in losses are astronomical and far higher than most believe it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year over year and doesn't see a an end in sight right now, so this is what I'm talking about when I talk about these companies. You really don't know how this tech is really going to play out in the future, because I think we hit a - I think in essence you hit a wall,

Ian  32:54  
yeah,

Jason  32:54  
with this stuff. I think our material scientists, because the idea would be able to transition this kind of thinking into, into robots that could actually perform tasks and stuff like that, similar would human beings can.. that's

Stoney   33:09  
the next step. We've had the show on quantum,

Ian  33:13  
quantum computing,

Stoney   33:13  
quantum computing. What happens when you get there?

Jason  33:17  
Well, I've always said, holy, as soon as you think, even I think even President Trump mentioned about the ability of owning a quantum computer. I've always said that if as soon as they perfect quantum computing and you pair that with that's what's going to take AI to the next level. Well,

Stoney   33:40  
think about this for the computing that we have today. It took a matter of hours for the computing systems that we have today with AI to defeat the national, the NSA security systems. When you go to quantum computing, that's going to be a matter of seconds, right? You won't be able to be fast enough.

Jason  34:02  
Oh no, to

Stoney   34:03  
protect yourself from that. I remember back in the early days of hacking, when you could actually sit at your computer and do battle with another hacker. Now it's not like that anymore, but now when you get to quantum computing, you're talking second milliseconds of these things happening, and that comes back up to all of what we've been talking about,

Ian  34:28  
right.

Stoney   34:29  
Skynet,

Ian  34:30  
yep.

Jason  34:31  
Well, I mean, I think it's as the technology moves forward, I think it's it's only inevitable that if I can, you know, export this, this, this stuff into defense systems. I can make missiles, you know, target faster, better, if I can do things better, more efficiently. Of course, you're going to take advantage of those things in every country, you. Is going to do the same thing, so well, think

Stoney   35:02  
about this. If we have a jet that can do Mach 12 with a G force of whatever, because we don't have a pilot in it,

Ian  35:09  
yeah,

Stoney   35:10  
and there's no reaction time to it, versus somebody who's still limited by G, you know, force whatever. I mean, wow, yeah, that's crazy.

Jason  35:22  
They say analysts estimate that hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, are expected to spend more than 725 billion annually on AI infrastructure and data centers, underscoring the capital intensity drive and AI valuation, so they're slowing. That's what I'm

Ian  35:43  
saying, is like right now they're there. There still seems to be value in it, and I think that's the thing that I don't know. I just hope that this doesn't like cause some sort of crazy economical collapse because of, like,

Jason  35:57  
well, that's what I'm saying. A lot, a lot of people, I mean, is this what WorldCom was, and Enron, and remember when all that was came out, and it was the.com bust, and all that, but even with that, would it happen? It moved the technology forward. Yeah, that's how this stuff works. It would not surprise me if there's a correction,

Ian  36:21  
oh yeah, I'm not.. I don't think that it's gonna.. that at any point it's not gonna push us forward. Still, I'm just saying, like, what? How are we gonna suffer in the process of that? Like, where's it gonna affect us, you know, or whatever. Yeah. Just for

Stoney   36:34  
the record, I looked it up. The G force a jet can pull is capped around 9g with a human pilot,

Ian  36:42  
okay,

Stoney   36:42  
and that's probably somebody really well trained, 20 plus cheese from a non-manned,

Ian  36:50  
oh yeah,

Stoney   36:50  
aircraft, of

Ian  36:51  
course, do all kinds of, yeah,

Stoney   36:56  
and that's just with the mechanical engineering that we have today,

Ian  37:01  
right? The

Stoney   37:02  
plane could sustain that, her jet could sustain that. What happens, you know, in the future when AI starts developing new things? Yeah, but

Jason  37:10  
I know Sam Altman, right now, he is definitely, he is wanting a $1 trillion valuation on Open AI, and, matter of fact, they, he's talking about postponing his IPO until 2027 rather than accept a lower valuation.

Ian  37:25  
Really, yeah,

Jason  37:26  
executive reportedly remain focused on achieving a 1 trillion valuation, despite market uncertainty. That's a Reuters article. So, yeah,

Ian  37:37  
so okay, so I guess there is value there that I'm obviously, you know me well. I'm sure there were.. I'm sure

Jason  37:43  
there were, like, you know, the.. you know, Elon Musk made.. Elon Musk made news with the first trillionaire course, but then I saw that it.. it automatically dropped back down to, you know, what was it, seven $800 billion like, whatever. Yeah,

Ian  38:00  
yeah, he took to talk about that

Jason  38:01  
kind of money, but yeah, he, for a brief time, he was the first trillionaire. He was not the

Stoney   38:07  
first trillionaire. If you look back in the monies of earlier days, there's been a couple others that have reached that. He's just a modern day trillionaire.

Jason  38:16  
Well, whatever that dollar is, but yeah, I mean, as far as that's still a feat, I can't even imagine a trillion. Yeah, it's not cash

Stoney   38:27  
that they have, no,

Ian  38:28  
no,

Stoney   38:29  
it's all the companies, it's options and

Jason  38:31  
stocks and stuff, and you know what you think a stock is worth, and stuff like that. But the question is, I mean, I would ask, if it does, when it does go public, would you buy stock?

Ian  38:45  
I don't know. In it,

Jason  38:46  
would you invest? The

Ian  38:47  
big thing is that I feel like if something like Alphabet, like Google, and all that stuff, I could potentially see myself trying to put some money into that, or something along those lines, because yes, there's all these other big AI companies that I do think are going to stick around for a long time, but I feel like a safer option would be something like Alphabet, because of like the longstanding history they already have, and it's also diversified into so many different things. This is obviously not financial advice by anybody. I don't, yeah, we're not financial advisors, please don't take this as advice at all, but I feel like if, again, if for instance, if you were to invest like $1,000 in, you know, Alphabet, Google, you know, back 20 years ago, you'd be sitting on a very helpful, but they do the same thing they do, they've

Stoney   39:36  
been doing

Ian  39:36  
AI work for many, many years,

Jason  39:38  
I mean, and so think of those early investors when Exxon was so, oh yeah, you know, yep, you would have bought me what that would be worth.

Stoney   39:48  
I looked at this a little bit further, and it said certain unmanned missiles and drones can even pull over 30 G's

Ian  39:59  
crazy.

Stoney   40:00  
During interception maneuvers, just,

Ian  40:02  
yeah,

Stoney   40:03  
because of some of the, you know, things fly by wire and not hydraulics and things like that. Things are changing already in the direction to go past 30 gs,

Ian  40:14  
right?

Jason  40:14  
Yep, I mean,

Stoney   40:17  
you know, the g is, you know, we are under 1g right now. Yeah, it's the force of the earth's gravity on you, the multiplication of that 30 times the earth's gravity.

Ian  40:30  
Right? I mean,

Stoney   40:31  
think about that. You're squashing meat at that point, you know.

Jason  40:34  
And I'm gonna tell you, this is also driving the chip market,

Ian  40:37  
of course. I

Jason  40:38  
mean, you've all talked about with Nvidia, so anybody that that's into gaming right now, what all this is driving right now, the GPU market, and everything else that's tied to all that. They said right now, industry, and I'll say now the biggest bottleneck isn't software, it's obtaining enough advanced AI chips. Yes, because now it can be putting chips in everything. Think about that, everything you touch, yeah, it's probably gonna have a gonna have a chip in it.

Stoney   41:08  
Already does, you might all end up in chips in our electric razor has a chip in it.

Ian  41:15  
Yeah,

Stoney   41:16  
everything has some form of a chip in it.

Ian  41:19  
Yeah,

Stoney   41:21  
you know, it's crazy.

Ian  41:22  
If you would have, speaking of Nvidia, I just was looking up this because I was trying to find out information about Google and how much you would have invested at a certain point, but I couldn't quite find it, but it did say for Nvidia, if you made, if you would have invested $1,000 in april 15 of 2005 by today that would be $1,000,230 $1,230,000

Jason  41:54  
That's right, yeah. Did today's like, right? I've always liked Nvidia. It's like Nvidia to like Intel,

Ian  41:59  
yeah.

Jason  42:00  
You know, Intel was like hot, man. They were,

Stoney   42:03  
yeah, but Intel's going up and down a couple of times. Nvidia is just on this huge.. I'm waiting for that bubble to burst, because,

Jason  42:12  
yeah, but now

Ian  42:14  
with AI stuff, I don't.. I mean, I don't know, maybe I don't.. I think, because I think it's higher now than it ever has before, for that very reason, because that's what I'm saying. They're on it. No, yeah, you're right. You're right. A

Jason  42:23  
side story to this whole deal is now, you know, of course, we talked about the, the, the data centers, is what powers these data centers. That's another thing that's affecting community, cools

Stoney   42:33  
them,

Jason  42:34  
right? But they're saying all the fresh water that they're going to be using. We did an

Stoney   42:38  
episode on that, right? That said,

Jason  42:39  
well, it revived nuclear, the nuclear industry, and start. I know I read an article here in Louisiana. I think they were going to fast track a nuclear plant for the

Stoney   42:51  
data center,

Jason  42:52  
northern part of the state.

Ian  42:54  
Really, yeah.

Jason  42:54  
So, I mean, it's.. I've always said, I've always said that, you know, nuclear was the way to go. Yeah, just

Ian  43:04  
unfortunate it has taken AI to get us there

Jason  43:07  
now. I mean, people go back and forth with nuclear, good, bad. I mean, what do you do with these spent rods and all with the

Stoney   43:16  
amount of spent rods that they've had is nothing, yeah,

Ian  43:21  
but even still we have good ways to effectively dispose. I'm a firm believer to me,

Jason  43:28  
nuclear is should be data,

Stoney   43:30  
absolutely,

Jason  43:31  
yeah. Because, unfortunately, if you don't build the power infrastructure, these data centers are already going to stress a lot of these aging plants that you know United States hasn't been really on the ball with really kind of building its national infrastructure, because it keeps giving its money away to all these foreign countries, but yeah, they're gonna have to start doing that, because other than that, you gotta, you're gonna see your utility bills go up,

Ian  43:56  
yeah, oh yeah,

Jason  43:57  
that's happening,

Ian  43:58  
yep, and a lot of people are pretty upset. It's also interesting, too. Like, I wonder what.. like, I gosh, I.. it's so unfortunate that I wonder, like, if we would get any benefits from the nuclear power, or is it all just going to go straight to the data center? Like, I hope that it's not what would be the case.. like, I hope there would be some sort of net benefit for all of us collectively, but I somehow I doubt it, which is unfortunate. But because I would like to, you know, I don't know, it's interesting,

Jason  44:34  
I think, but I mean, look, I mean, look at all the jobs, look at all the industries that could,

Ian  44:40  
yeah,

Jason  44:41  
could be that could benefit from this sort of thing. I mean, you're looking at power infrastructure, you're looking at cooling systems, people sell these parts, fiber networks, semiconductor manufacturing equipments, all all this. I mean, you know, it may be a downside on one thing, but it'd be a. Be a benefit somewhere else, so I mean, I don't know, I'm, but it

Ian  45:05  
also just kind of makes me nervous, I do feel like we are creating our downfall, you know what I mean, like I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about like, you know, the the Skynet, you know that, that too, potentially, but I'm just talking about the fact of like we're we're flushing out all these systems, we're flushing, we got these data centers, we got all this power infrastructure, and like it's all gonna potentially make some of that obsolete. I feel like

Jason  45:31  
what bothers me probably more than anything with this, and this scares me, because as somebody that that has a pension,

Ian  45:41  
yes,

Jason  45:42  
has money in retirement accounts.

Ian  45:45  
Yeah,

Jason  45:46  
the minute something goes public that really kind of forces that energy that industry to expand and grow, because the expectation is for it to grow.

Ian  46:00  
Yeah,

Jason  46:00  
whereas where it sits right now, it's kind of still in a I'm gonna take a chance and put some money up and see what happens. If it fails, then it's the only people that are affected, the people, the people who put the money on. Yes, the minute you get all these other people into this, now it's going to be your, your, in essence, you're, you're, you're putting even a bigger ball behind it,

Ian  46:27  
yeah,

Jason  46:28  
rolling downhill, because now the expectation is it can't fail,

Ian  46:32  
yeah, yeah, you have investors, you have shareholders, you have to make sure they're

Jason  46:35  
well, you

Stoney   46:39  
have everybody, you got the government going to buy 50% then you're going to have BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard buying another 20 to 30% just for them. Now, what do you do now? Who's in control? Who's in control?

Ian  46:53  
That's what I'm saying. It's like, at that point, they still, they, to get circle back around, they still want it to succeed, though. So, like, at that point, once it goes public and all those people have hands in it, they're not going to ever want it to lose money, they're going to only want it, they want that money to, they want that number to keep going up. Well, of course, and at that point, it's like that's, but it's already the high, that's what I'm saying, is like, it's already the highest it's ever been, like, like, between the, I mean, cumulative between all of them, I know it's not individually like that, but it's still crazy to finish the

Stoney   47:21  
highest that it is today that it's ever been, right, and the government always waits until it crashes before it gets involved, and now our socialist representatives want us to go ahead and buy into it at the highest it's ever been, right, and not wait until we can get a bargain basement deal, especially

Ian  47:40  
because, like, you have people like the, the what was, who's the owner of Open AI? He's, he's, he's waiting until 2027 to to make it go public. So I apparently that he thinks that the value is going to hold, which, if that's well, he thinks

Stoney   47:55  
the value is going to hold and increase. Yeah, yeah,

Ian  47:59  
and that's what I'm saying. He's

Stoney   48:00  
betting that's

Jason  48:02  
just think of this, guys. When a single engineer can move a trillion dollar valuation, we are definitely witnessing the birth of something new. Oh,

Ian  48:13  
yeah,

Jason  48:14  
think about that.

Ian  48:15  
Yeah, one person,

Jason  48:17  
yep, a trillion dollars,

Ian  48:20  
or a handful of people being able to make big, big decisions like that.

Jason  48:23  
I just,

Ian  48:25  
right,

Stoney   48:25  
well, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have $72 trillion worth of investments.

Jason  48:32  
Well, it's like, you know, so

Stoney   48:33  
that's three people in all their cronies.

Jason  48:35  
And then, how this affects kind of geopolitics, because you know, some researchers have been discussing sovereign compute, where nations seek domestic control over critical AI infrastructure rather than relying on for operating. I can see that happening. Okay, okay,

Ian  48:50  
yeah. So you're saying, I mean,

Jason  48:52  
I don't want to be dependent on some other country, in essence, for my, my security.

Ian  48:57  
Yeah,

Jason  48:58  
because that's what's going to happen. If I was in another country, I wouldn't want another country. Well, think about it like this.

Stoney   49:03  
Okay, we're going to invest billions and trillions of dollars into this AI system, and China has not attacked Taiwan yet. Taiwan is building 95% of all the conductors, processors, and everything else that we need. Okay, so now have you spent all of this money? Then they go in and they take Taiwan.

Jason  49:27  
Well, now

Stoney   49:28  
what do we do? We are not going to give you any more of the parts you need for your systems, of

Ian  49:35  
course not. Or if they, you want to see

Stoney   49:37  
something tank fast, or it's

Ian  49:38  
going to be at an extra, I mean, an exorbitantly high amount of money.

Stoney   49:42  
Oh, the best thing to do would just not give you any of the parts for anything, and just let your whole system crash.

Jason  49:48  
I'm reading an article here. Uh, Coalition for a Prosperous America says America's AI boom has a trade policy blind spot, say US imports of data. Does center equipment reach 653 billion in 2025 That's what

Stoney   50:04  
I just said.

Jason  50:05  
Yeah, more than double the 2020 level.

Stoney   50:08  
That's all the parts they're bringing in here, and all of a sudden somebody else is going to be in control of it after we done spent all the money.

Jason  50:16  
Yeah, that total breaks into two distinct supply chains, nearly 580 billion in computing hardware, that's server chips, network more than 70 billion in power infrastructure, which is transformers, switch gear, lithium ion batteries, and and that stuff. So it's a shortages of transformers, switch gear, and batteries are already threatening to delay the build out lead times for large power transformers have stretched to as long as five years, and roughly 40% of planned US data center capacity faces delays tied to equipment and power availability. The equipment the United States cannot manufacture fast enough is the same equipment it increasingly sources from

Stoney   51:07  
China.

Ian  51:09  
I just, I wonder, listen, I'm saying either they either they outright say you're not going to have none of it or they just put a very large price tag on it for us. I wonder what that means, like, for the future of AI in general, like, if you can't have the infrastructure for it, like, is that also going to be a crash? I just.. I wonder, there's so many different areas of this where I feel like, if something falls through, like, what is going to cause it to.. what's what's going to be the downfall of it? If there is going to be one, if it's not,

Jason  51:38  
I don't think it'll ever fail. I think. I think this is a runaway train. It may change, but the way I've always looked at these things, I expect it to hit a wall. Yes, I expect things to kind of correct itself. Yes, but the technology keeps it's like, yeah, we may take three steps forward, we get, make knock back a step, but we've, we've already hit the

Stoney   52:06  
wall. You just said it, we're on a five year wait, right, for some of this. So we're hitting the wall now. I

Ian  52:12  
think two, and now I don't know if this is the majority of people or if this is kind of split. I feel like there's also a lot of people who are speaking out more against AI, because it's like it's becoming so universal, and I wonder if that's a thing too, of like there are some systems where AI is going to be forced into it, and there is going to probably be still money in it, but like I think the thing that I'm also not considering is like for some of these systems, like Chat GPT, for instance, like what if a large potential of people stop paying for subscriptions or stop using it all together, like that's the stuff, is to what I'm thinking about, is like, you're right, it's a runaway trade, I think there are some things are going to happen,

Jason  52:56  
right, something truly big would have to occur where people would kind of reject technology. I don't. There's never been

Stoney   53:09  
one point in history that human beings have ever rejected technology. Nothing has ever been rejected.

Jason  53:18  
You just keep.. well, I take that back too. I take that

Stoney   53:21  
back. There was one. What was he had VHS beta? Yeah, beta was rejected. I'm so sorry. Even though it was a superior product, it didn't catch on.

Jason  53:34  
They said the scale of this import dependent reflects the capital intensity of the build out itself, McKinsey estimates global spending on data center construction will reach 7 trillion through 2030 The World Trade Organization reported in late 2025 that imports account for 70 to 90% of the value of USAID investment a I mean, a level of import intensity which few parallels in modern American industrial history. FDI intelligence data published by the Financial Times show that 320 billion in data center projects were announced globally during 2025 with the US capturing the largest share, so that's what I'm saying. We are, we are definitely.. this is kind of goes back to what I talked about with America. We are jeopardizing our own national security by having to rely on hostile countries that wish us harm and actively are trying to undermine our country, because we all know now where some of this money has been funneling in from these people that are causing all this mischief in this country, where that money it. Coming from China.

Ian  55:01  
Yeah, I just said that a minute ago. Yeah,

Stoney   55:04  
that's exactly what I said. And they're gonna wait till we spend all the money and then drop the hammer on us. They're gonna make their money and then they're gonna drop the hammer on

Jason  55:15  
us. Yeah, they said Ray said China was by far the largest 41% of imports by value by 2025 that share had fallen to 11% Taiwan, 159 billion, Mexico, 140 2 billion billion, and Vietnam, 86 billion have emerged as a dominant suppliers, which I understand, probably because we are trying to shift,

Ian  55:41  
yes,

Jason  55:41  
to other suppliers in case away

Stoney   55:44  
from China. Yeah,

Jason  55:45  
so, yeah, yeah,

Stoney   55:50  
it's interesting stuff, but I just.. it worries me, because all I see is Skynet,

Ian  55:56  
right?

Stoney   55:57  
And it just. it's common, right? May not be necessarily in my lifetime, because I'm already

Ian  56:04  
old, but be surprised, but it's going to come a long way in just five years.

Jason  56:09  
It's rapidly, I mean, just the time I went from basically no phones to,

Ian  56:18  
yeah, where we are now

Jason  56:20  
to where we are now. I mean, I remember just having a regular house phone and rotary dialed, and now I mean, now you people have been able to talk through their glasses and stuff. I mean, it's just.. it's crazy how fast, and it's just getting smaller and smaller and smaller with the tech. I mean, I do follow that some of this new tech that's coming out, just with phones, yeah, watches, and everything else. I mean, it's, it's, it's quite, it's quite breathtaking. It

Ian  56:51  
reminds me sometimes of like my grandmother, who was born in, who has since passed, but was born in the, it was either like late 20s or early 30s, I think, of the 1900s and so, and again, the amount of technology, I think she passed away, it was like around when I was in like high school, I believe, so probably in the, in the 2000 teens, and it was, it's just think about that, to the fact that you know, over her 80 something years of life. How, how much technology she saw, the, you know, the introduction of the motor vehicle, and flying, yeah, and flying, and telephone, a couple of wars, and yeah, cell phones and internet. It was just, it was crazy to think about that. By the time that I was, you know, like I said, in high school, and had my own, my first little

Stoney   57:48  
man on my, my first,

Ian  57:49  
yeah, you're right, my first iPhone, or whatever, that I had, and was like the fact that looking back at all the stuff that she had witnessed, I'm like, man, that's crazy to think about, potentially, how much I'm gonna see in my lifetime, God willing, you know, so that's it's crazy how I think, and especially with AI, we've talked about on this show before. There was a couple times where we were talking about AI, and it was like this cute little thing that was like Chat GPT 2.0 3.0 was, you know, the newest thing, and now we're four or five years removed from that, and it's just this monster now. So, anyways, it's impressive.

Jason  58:31  
Great topic, guys.

Stoney   58:33  
This is fun.

Ian  58:34  
Well, for anybody who wants to share your opinions or suggestions or your thoughts on this matter, we have comment sections on Spotify, on YouTube, and if you listen to us on those platforms or any other platforms like that, we really appreciate it. It does mean a lot, and it helps us out. Yes, smash that button, give us a like,

Stoney   58:52  
give us five stars, correct?

Ian  58:53  
Let it again, or share it with someone that you think would be interested in this, and

Stoney   58:56  
if you agree with me on the Skynet thing, let me know. Yes, I don't want to feel by myself on this exactly.

Ian  59:03  
And until next week, thank you so much for listening. Bye, bye, goodbye everyone, and God bless.

Stoney   59:08  
This week I had a lunch with somebody, and they asked me a simple question. They asked me what I admire the most in a person, and I thought about it for a few minutes, and I said to me the ability to leave people better than you found them, to have conversations that heal instead of hurt, to make people feel safe instead of judged, and to be the reason someone walks away smiling instead of questioning their worth. I think that's a rare kind of beauty and kindness that we need more of in this world. Thanks for hanging out with us today. You're the best. Peace.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai