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JB Josh Brown Josh Brown CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, the investment advisory firm he co-founded with Barry Ritholtz.

“I wouldn't say rationing token use. I would say rationalizing token use. … For this leg of the trip, we need a Mercedes-Benz, but that's only 10%. For the rest of the 90% of the trip, we'd be fine with an ox cart.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · October 2026

“I wouldn't say rationing token use. I would say rationalizing token use. … For this leg of the trip, we need a Mercedes-Benz, but that's only 10%. For the rest of the 90% of the trip, we'd be fine with an ox cart.” — Josh Brown, Prof G Markets

Context

Josh Brown's "real bear case" for frontier AI labs. He expects companies to set AI budgets by department and use harnesses that send most work to cheap open-weight models, keeping premium models for the few tasks that need them.

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Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 28:53 into the episode
Speaker 2

…But I do think that this is the crux of the matter. The Fortune 500 CEOs and CFOs two years ago said, do AI to their employees. What do you mean? I don't know. I'm on a stage every week somewhere, and everyone's talking about these amazing things that they're doing with AI. Go do some AI. Okay.

Ed Elson

Do it.

Speaker 2

…now you have two things happening at once. And this is the real bear case. Number one, there's going to be some sort of budget on AI use company-wide. And they're going to have to make decisions like, okay, this department gets X dollars in budget for AI. That department only gets Y dollars because what the hell are we doing here? We're not running experiments. We're running a business. Okay. So I wouldn't say rationing token use. I would say rationalizing token use. Okay. So that's one thing. The second thing is the free weight, the open weight models, the free models, and just this idea that there actually are no switching costs. And a Fortune 500 business with a sophisticated IT department and an army of consultants, they look at the quarterly numbers. They say, why are we, you know, seven cents per share behind expectations? Where do we trace it back to?…

Ed Elson

We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend and please follow us on YouTube or on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Scott Galloway

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Speaker 2

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Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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