Things Robert Says on Podcasts

The answer to both of your questions is yes. So starting with your last question, is there fundamental, something fundamental pre-existing? Yes. Risk appetite in markets has gone down. You can see that in, as we may have discussed before, you can see that in investors moving back to the safety of treasury somewhat over the last month, since about the beginning of October. So in the background running, we have a change in risk appetite. That's point number one. Point number two, I think you're quite right about those local results. You know, it was at 40, there were 47 local ballot initiatives about data centers. The data centers lost 46 of them. People do not feel good about this technology. Rightly or wrongly, or in between, the people have spoken, right? Right now, we're frightened about this technology. We don't want it in our neighborhood. That is an issue. But this is one of the interesting things about markets in general, Ed, is that we are taught back in finance school that markets instantly assimilate all the available information into a set of prices that…

You know, so who could survive? Like, maybe Mark Zuckerberg could survive something like this. Maybe Saul Maltman, maybe Dario Amadei, maybe Jensen Huang? could survive something like this. But like, other than maybe less than five or six guys in the world, you're fired already, right? Okay. And that's precisely the problem. The question I'm asking myself is: because he knows he's one of those guys, is he more likely to make this astonishingly stupid mistake? Like, does being an, you know, I'm saying this in slightly humorous ways, but this is a serious question. Like, the culture of the imperial CEO, might it make that CEO less trustworthy?

We are still laboring under, all of us, the single great uncertainty, which is what is the return on investment on these immense investments being made in AI. This involves the most important companies in the market. Nobody really knows the answer. And anybody who does tell you they know the answer is trying to sell you something. So as we've said, I think we've talked about together before. If the revenue and profit eventually appears, all the stuff we're worrying about now and the circular financing and the anxiety and the valuations and, you know, Jensen Huang? love affairs and everything else will slip into memory and we will be okay. If, on the other hand, the money doesn't realize, nothing will save us, right? But we don't have the information and it is very normal for a market operating under a very large uncertainty like that to vacillate like the one we are living in right now. That's point number one. Point number two, as I've said a tiresomely infinite number of times on your show, the longer-term trend on the market is sideways. We're stalled since May. Right. And so again, About like you'd expect. We don't know what's going on. We're kind of frozen in place, dear in the headlights. There has been some moves in the market towards diversification. That's a good sign. Some sectors have moved up that are far from AI. People are hedging…