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Back to episode — Episode 2671 CWSA 11/26/24

Context —

All right, we're going to start with some optimistic science and breakthroughs, and we'll get to some optimistic politics, and then we'll get to our optimistic holiday coming up. Everybody good? Lots of optimism. All right, starting in with a study that shows you—there's a paper written by Brandon Busch, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Florida. He found that the key driv…

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of view, you should be skeptics, right? You shouldn't assume everything I say is true. I think it is. I have no reason not to tell you the truth. But your view should be other people are always sketchy when it comes to money. Doesn't matter who it is. Just assume all other people are a little sketchy when it comes to your money.

Now I'm going to tell you what change I made, but I'm going to be really serious about this next statement: Don't think it's a good idea for you. Do you all get that? Because what I'm going to tell you was probably the worst investment idea you ever had in your life. I just sold all of my Nvidia stock. I had quite a bit. Now, I'm a recent buyer of it, so I didn't get the 10,000% gain. I got maybe a 75% gain. So 75% in less than a year, and so I sold it.

Now I owe you an explanation, but again, don't take my explanation as being credible or smart. I'm not really good at investing. I'm seriously not good at it. There are things I do that I do well, and I'm happy to tell you what they are. I love to tell you what my good things are. This isn't one of them. And what I mean by that is that there aren't really people who are smart enough to pick individual stocks. You know, if you're going to listen to me, you get an index fund.

All right, so here's my reasoning, but I'm not confident in it whatsoever. My reasoning goes like this: I believe that the market of people who can buy these expensive AI devices will soon be saturated. It's not there yet, so there's still probably plenty of room to grow. So if you held yours, I would say probably smart. But at some point I think there's going to be a competitor, and I don't know that they have the moat that I would look for in a company like this. For example, if somebody comes up with a more clever chip and it's cheaper, the entire Nvidia business model falls apart all at once, because if somebody could do the same thing and cheaper, what do they have? And it does seem to me that there should be the highest level of technical experts who would be trying to compete with Nvidia, because Nvidia became the most expensive company in the world in no time at all. So in theory, if the free market is working, then the smartest people in the world are creating whatever is the next technology that they hope will take over from Nvidia.

I also am worried that companies are going to start announcing in the next year or so that they overspent on AI. And what I mean by that is that they had high hopes for it solving all their problems, but once they got into it and they really got deep into it, all they could do is make apps that they would try to sell to other people to solve their problems, but it doesn't. So AI so far is not a technology that solves problems. It's a technology that people are producing. They're turning it into different apps and products, and they're selling it to you to solve your problem, but it's not solving any of your problems. At some point somebody's going to notice, hey, looks like we spent millions of dollars on this and everything's the same.

Now, there will be special cases where it works perfectly. There'll be special cases where an AI app will just replace some people, save some money, everybody wins, does a better job. But I think they're going to be the exceptions. I think they might be the exceptions. And I think the AI as an interface might become a commodity, and that seems to be the only thing it can do. The only thing AI does consistently is create art, which will have no value. Do you know why the art from AI will have no value? Supply and demand. You're going to have infinite art for no cost. If you already own the app, you can make infinite art. So it's great that AI makes art, but it's going to make art have no value because everybody can make infinite art. Supply and demand. It's obvious. So art will have no value, at least the art that AI can make.

The part where it's really good at talking to you and understanding what you're saying and creating good sentences, that will continue to be useful, but it's going to be a commodity. It'll just be in everything. And I can't believe that that drives Nvidia's profits where they need to be. And then there's the pattern recognition stuff, which might be great, like it can help with a program. But so far—and I don't see this changing, by the way—so far nobody except a trained programmer can use AI to make a program. Am I right? Do you think you, with no training whatsoever and had a program, could go use AI and make yourself an app and put it in the market and it's commercial and everybody buys it? I don't think so. I've never heard of it. I don't think it's happening.

So I think that a lot of the interest in Nvidia is because people are thinking in terms of AGI. But Nvidia is not in the AGI business. I don't know that they will be, because nobody knows how to make AGI. So there's no hardware you can make to make the thing that nobody knows how to make. Now, you can make little chatbot LLMs and stuff, but at the moment they don't really do much. They're just too limited.

The battle between art and science is settled. I didn't know there was a battle. There's talk that SaaS will collapse because companies can just generate it with AI. Again, Owen, that's where common sense takes you. Common sense tells you, hey, this AI stuff can replace all these obvious things that are suboptimal. Except that I don't think you can. We're not seeing it. And the fact that AI still hallucinates, and I don't think that's been solved. How are you going to replace your SaaS with something that hallucinates? Because you'll get answers, but you won't know if they're real. So between hallucinating and the fact that AI doesn't seem to remember you, and there doesn't seem to be a technology where I can have my most personal stuff I wanted to remember to be local and away from the AI company so that they can't get my good stuff—because my perfect situation is I've got an AI and it sits on top of data that only I own, and my AI only goes into it when it needs to, but otherwise it doesn't know anything. It only knows it has access to the database that's not there.

So here's a Warren Buffett reason for selling a stock: If you have a reason for buying a stock, you buy it, and if that reason doesn't change, you hold it. For me, the reason changed because I like monopolies. So Nvidia is basically a monopoly right now, but I don't see the moat. I don't see how they can stay one. So that's why I changed my investment. But remember, I'm terrible at investing. If you follow my lead, you'll probably lose money. Nvidia is already up today, so if you had followed my advice yesterday, you would already have lost money. So say that as clearly as possible.

All right. Alex Jones is saying the Sandy Hook was a Bloomberg op—not the crime itself, but rather the fact that Alex Jones was sued and basically taken down by that lawfare. And he thinks that that was all funded by Bloomberg and that he was behind the whole thing. It looked like it was organic, but it wasn't. It was just to get to Trump. So given that Alex Jones was a strong voice for Trump, it was one way that they could take him out. Now, do you think that's true? This is Alex Jones saying that. This is new information that came out. So I guess the court cases revealed who got funded for what.

Because here's what I've been wondering about Sandy Hook. I understand that the parents would be distraught because somebody in the media said something about their situation. I get that. But why does that let you sue somebody? Where'd that come from? Like, that doesn't sound organic. Take today, for example. Today I'm going to talk a little later about fentanyl and some changes. And when I talk about fentanyl, do you know that almost every time I mention it on X, somebody will come into my feed and tell me that it's my own damn fault that my stepson died from a drug overdose and that he deserved to die. It was weeding out the ones we don't need. And it goes like that.

Now, how's that make me feel? Well, I'm a little tougher than the average public figure, so I just usually block them and say people are terrible. It doesn't bother me a lot. It bothers me a little bit, but not a lot. Now, do I get to sue them? Do I get to sue the people on X who say things that I think are not true? I don't think I should. It just feels like their opinion. So to

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me it seems like Alex Jones had an opinion which he thought was true. Nobody ever—I don't think anybody ever proved that he thought he was lying. Can you correct me on that? I'll need a fact check on that. There's no evidence produced anywhere that he thought he was wrong, right? Now, I don't think he was right. I don't think there was a fake event. But there's no evidence that he thought he was w…

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