Azhar was describing AI as a huge experiment run without permission, one that pushes costs onto everyone else, like his surgeon getting 10,000-word emails from patients who ran their notes through ChatGPT. His point is that spending to defend against AI spam will show up in the statistics as growth.
They might not like it. The trouble is there appears to be some revealed preference here. And that picture is not even. So only about 2.5% of Americans pay for an AI subscription, which is, considering they've been available for three years, is a very slow, slow change. You had
this. I love, sorry, I love this stat in one of your newsletters recently that more people pay for GLP1s. A larger number of Americans paid for a GLP1 than for AI.
…about robo calls from AI agents into hotels and restaurants, or as my orthopedic surgeon was telling me, he just gets long thousand word, 10,000 word emails from patients who've clearly chat GPT'd their medical notes. This is unfortunately going to happen. And that cost has now been pushed into the system and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it. I now pay, it's not a lot. I pay about a buck a month to my phone operator to screen out spoof phone calls that are essentially robocalls. And that's what's going to happen. And we're going to call that GDP. Those additional costs.
I think one of the things that's your comment, Ezra, really reminded me of this is that we have this idea in sort of Western capitalism that it's always about efficiency. In a weird way, societies require friction. And when you take away frictions, even frictions that you didn't realize existed…
And what's going to happen is that it's going to be these two AIs bouncing things back and forth. And it's just going to be a more and more and more unpleasant economy, which is why I do think there are going to be large areas where people just say maybe not. So I want to end on this question…
Well, there are so many risks that we have talked about, and there's all the complexity and fragility in the financing. The thing that keeps this on the other side of healthy is whether real customers are spending real money and getting real results. So the thing that would make me uneasy would be…