Henry Blodget on the Software Selloff Hysteria and the Problem for OpenAI

15:10Henry Blodget:A lot of people thought it would go bankrupt. It's just a bookstore. Barnes & Noble is going to put them out of business as soon as they have a website or Walmart or whatever. Walmart and Barnes & Noble never got anywhere near Amazon. Amazon was so far out ahead always and still almost went bankrupt, by the way. But nobody was ever close. And in this case, less than two years after the product comes out, the incumbent has caught up. To me, that's when I said like, whoa, okay, maybe this actually is going to be like the internet, which is the first five years, all of us, including me, were saying like, oh, just buy the leaders.

15:48Henry Blodget:No problem. Like they're the ones that are going to survive. You know how many survived of that first 500 companies that went public in the 1990s? One went on to actually make investors a lot of money after the crash. That was Amazon. Two others that I know of, Cisco, after 25 years, finally got back to its stock price. eBay did okay for a while and then kind of sputtered out a little bit. That's out of hundreds and hundreds of companies. So I think it's very possible that, yes, AI is huge. It's a great idea. We all want it. And somebody is going to come along soon and do to OpenAI what Google did to Yahoo, which, by the way, Yahoo was the big search engine winner.

16:35Henry Blodget:And then Google destroyed it. So I just think it's way too early to say that OpenAI is the Google.

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17:57Joe Weisenthal:You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow, here to tell you about our new on-demand news report, delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day. That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg News Now.

18:34Joe Weisenthal:And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3 ,000 journalists and analysts. We're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. We started by mentioning the OpenAI valuation, which everyone was aghast at last year. Now, maybe not so much. But even if you assume a future where OpenAI or whoever comes in and disrupts every single industry and there are thousands of employees and companies that are paying$200 a month or whatever to access the new LLM, whatever the new model is, OpenAI, at least for right now, is still losing money on every customer that's like a power user.

19:26Joe Weisenthal:So how does that actually translate into a working business model?

19:29Henry Blodget:It's a good question. I think what the bulls would say is the cost of what they do is going to plummet. And so the lines are going to cross here pretty soon. If they own the whole market, suddenly they start to become incredibly profitable. We are not there yet. And I think when we talked last time at a$300 billion valuation, which everybody was horrified by at that point. But if you looked at the projections, the projections were three years from now, they'll do$100 billion of revenue. And if you, at that point, were looking at it saying, OK, if I believe that, then it's three times revenue. The economics will probably change.

20:05Henry Blodget:It starts to look a little more reasonable. Now we're at 800 billion. So it's a much bigger multiple. And you've got to actually have a much bigger revenue stream and profits. But that's the argument. I don't see it yet. I got to say, the economics are incredibly difficult for them. They seem brutal.

20:22Tracy Alloway:And there's another element, too. So obviously, unlike during the Web 2.0 era, where there was like cheap, plentiful compute, obviously, the capital expenditure budgets of these companies are just eye-watering. They're spending like crazy. there's also this other element that i think is interesting which is at least at a few of these labs like the people who found them are true believers like they think they're like they think they're on a mission to build agi is going to change everything build god build god right build the digital god and it's like they're not going to stop at anything they're not going to be like you know what it's pretty good let's tap the brakes we're pretty happy with how this model works you know i don't or at least i don't get that impression also they've couched it as this

21:03Joe Weisenthal:existential race. There's only going to be one company that dominates in the end. So the upper limit on spending to become that company is infinity.

21:13Henry Blodget:Yes. However, there is a limit to money. And when you look at when people are raising money, you watch where they're going for it. Sure, the VCs, that's one pool of money. And then the big strategics. And then the VCs who missed the first time and are feeling so embarrassed about it, they'll pay up to get in. Then it is the international phones that are watching all this stuff. Yeah, exactly. So at some point you run out of money. And we are talking about a company that is raising hundreds of billions of dollars just to keep the engine running and just to keep pace. This is the other problem. Google, Facebook, Microsoft are generating tens of billions of dollars of free cash flow every year that they can use to buy chips.

21:55Henry Blodget:OpenAI has to raise it in the open market. So if those economics don't start to change soon, they're going to run out of money.

22:03Joe Weisenthal:Joe and I were talking about this before we came on stage, but another thing that happened recently was there was a karaoke machine-making company that announced it was now an AI company, which when I see headlines like that, remind me a lot of the crypto boom, but also remind me a lot of the dot-com boom. And we are starting to see more and more of those. Wasn't there a toilet company recently?

22:24Tracy Alloway:Yeah, but the toilet one is legit. So like apparently, no, no, for real. So it was not like, oh, we're an AI company. Apparently it's this Japanese toilet company and they have some porcelain or something like that. It's very important for semiconductors or something. So everyone's like, oh, get out of the toilet business. You have this access to this material. So that one was kind of legit. The karaoke one.

22:46Joe Weisenthal:Okay, so the toilet one, maybe. The karaoke one, when you see headlines like that, what do you think? Do you think this is a rational pivot into a booming market and everyone should be experimenting with AI at the moment? Or do you think like, no, this is getting crazy?

23:00Henry Blodget:I think we are in a euphoric bubble period where we've just discovered this amazing new thing. Nobody knows what the future is. Nobody knows what's going to work. And we are effectively creating this enormous R &D lab, which is, hey, you can do something? Here's some money. Go out and experiment. I hope you'll be one of the winners. 50 to 100 years ago, All of that stuff happened in labs like Edison's lab or Bell Labs inside these big corporations. You never saw it. Now, everything is a startup. You see it. It's happening in front of you. But there's no question that most of the companies are going to fail.

23:39Henry Blodget:Happens again and again and again. And I think what investors are saying when they see that is, OK, that is a quick flip. It's, hey, I'll get it. Other people, a lot of people love AI. They'll buy it after I do. And it'll go up. And then I'll sell it.

23:50Tracy Alloway:I want to ask you a question about capital markets and how they're different to the late 90s or the dot-com bubble. Because one really big thing that's happening these days is, yes, these companies are private, but there is a lot of stock floating around. And there are these SPVs that will buy, acquire a chunk of, say, Anthropic and sell them on a secondary market. And people are trying to get, they're much more liquid than a private company would have been in the late 90s. I get, someone messaged me, they're like, do you want to buy a little? I'm like, no, I don't do that. But they're like, would you like to buy a little bit of Anthropic at a$350 billion valuation?

24:23Tracy Alloway:But you must get a bunch of those sort of messages from people. And I'm curious about your perspective on this world. Because the other thing is like, there's no financials. You have no idea like what their P &L is for these private companies. What's your take on some of this quasi-liquid private market stock? Yeah.

24:38Henry Blodget:And let us just say that when our phones are ringing, we are right at the end.

24:43Tracy Alloway:It's the last money out there. It's like if someone is reaching out to me, there can't be that much money.

24:50Henry Blodget:Big, big warning signs going on over there. So I think one of the things that changed versus the dot-com boom in the 1990s and before that is companies used to go public very early before. And you can invest in Amazon, for example, at a$400 million valuation. Sounds like a lot. It's worth trillions of dollars now. There's been incredible appreciation. Individuals can't do that anymore. And there's good reason for it. People lost a lot of money after the dot-com crash. We didn't like that. We want to protect everybody. So now companies go public a lot later, the threat of lawsuits and all of the different regulation that you've got to do.

25:26Henry Blodget:So it's later. But the bummer about it is a lot of investors who actually do have the risk tolerance can't access them. And so, yes, you've had a new business that has been built around, OK, let's get that private stock somehow. And the problem is, again, if you choose right, great company, it works, but it's more fees packed around it. That intermediary that called you has to get paid. So that's somebody else, it's more difficult to trade. So I think it is the market trying to solve the problem that it's much harder to make money in open AI at 800 billion or Anthropic at 350 billion than it is in And then seed round when it was a few hundred million.

26:09Henry Blodget:And so you've got a lot of people clamoring to get in, but it's the same problem. You don't even, in fact, less. When companies go public, they are releasing a lot of information, whereas these guys are not.

26:37Henry Blodget:I'm Barry Ritholtz, inviting you to join me for the Masters in Business podcast. Every week, we bring you fascinating conversations with the people who shape markets, investing, and business. CEOs, fund managers, billionaires, Nobel laureates, traders, analysts, economists, everybody that affects what's going on in the market, whether you own stocks, bonds, real estate commodities, crypto, you really need to hear these conversations. Sometimes it's behaviorists like Dick Thaler or Bob Schiller. Sometimes it's fund managers like Peter Lynch, Bill Miller, Ray Dalio. Sometimes it's authors, Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, and Moneyball.

27:22Henry Blodget:Regardless of the conversation, these are the folks that move markets each week. That's the Masters in Business podcast with me, Barry Ritholtz. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

27:38Joe Weisenthal:Should we do some media stuff? Yeah, let's do some media. All right, let the media navel gazing begin. Okay, so we started out by saying that, you know, we were talking about the Citrini piece that got, it went viral, but it also got a backlash. You did your own AI newsroom experiment newsletter on Substack that also got a bit of a backlash. Were you surprised at that one?

28:01Henry Blodget:Yes, I was surprised. Basically what I did, I left business inside or I started this new thing, Regenerator, and a podcast too, trying your business. It's very difficult. How are you finding it? It's fun. It's good. This is the most important aspect of podcasting is plug the podcast. Yes, podcast called Solutions with Henry Blodgett. Check it out. Check it out. Yes, please. So I left and it was just me. So I said, okay, great. Let's see what it can do. Because if you try that as a CEO of a company, people freak out justifiably. Oh my goodness, They're going to discover something. My job's threatened.

28:30Henry Blodget:We are all worried about our jobs being threatened, including, by the way, do we need articles? Any more articles? I mean, boy, there are a lot of great articles written every day. In fact, this is the problem in media. There's way too much of it. Let's just get that out there. Anyway, so yes, I experimented with everything. And the first thing that I did was, oh, if I were actually starting a publication and hiring a team, who would I hire? Well, I'd hire five people. I have a managing editor, and I'd have a few reporters, and so forth. So I asked ChatGPT, can you help me? ChatGPT said, sure, let's make them.

29:01Henry Blodget:So in two hours, we made them. They all had different personalities. They had headshots, et cetera. I wrote this up. We had Slack going where we're all talking about stories, and it was pretty good. Not spectacular, but pretty good. And so that was cool. So I wrote about it, yes. I also made the mistake of complimenting one of the headshots and was immediately lambasted for that, which actually helped me hone my own AI morality.

29:29Joe Weisenthal:Wait, I have a question on this. If you had had a human editor for that piece, do you think you would have complimented your AI-generated managing editor on her appearance?

29:38Henry Blodget:The piece needed to be edited. This is the problem. You're out on your own. You don't have great editors protecting you anymore. You let your enthusiasm bubble over a little bit too much. You know who I have edit my stuff now sometimes if I feel like I'm maybe a little bit too enthusiastic, ChatGBT or Claude. And very good. Spots it. Anyway, yes.

29:59Tracy Alloway:Talk to us about that newsroom dynamic, particularly, you know, every editor at a newsroom, every newsroom right now is like trying to figure out something, right? And you can't like alienate the entire newsroom and say like, oh, you all have to be doing what? You all have to be vibe coders. Yeah, like that doesn't work. The newsroom obviously hates it. And I would say probably for good reason. But on the other hand, everyone has to be like figuring stuff out. What should newsroom executives, whether it's editors in chief or whatever, how should they be thinking about solving this problem?

30:31Henry Blodget:So, I mean, so going back to the other thing, the other thing that I learned from publishing that was just how much anxiety there is, especially in the younger generation about jobs that have been there for a long time that are just disappearing. And that was extremely clear to me. And I would have been even more. Yeah, I understand it. I mean, it is scary. And so what does a newsroom do? I think let's look at what's going on in media. The problem, again, is there's way too much media. There are so many amazing articles, for example, produced every day. When I opened the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, I want to read dozens of articles.

31:07Henry Blodget:I might get to one or two. And distribution has changed radically. Five years ago, Facebook, Google were driving enormous distribution to lots of different publishers. That is all now changing. We are going back to something that looks like the 1990s, where actually you have to have a direct relationship with your subscriber. The industry is under a ton of pressure, both from advertising, but also we have maximized the amount of time as humans that we can spend consuming media. This is very different from 20 years ago when we started Business Insider. You remember this. In the 1990s, media was very mature.

31:48Tracy Alloway:It was really - Don't say it's 20 years ago, by the way. That's like 30 years. I don't like to think about that. Yeah, you and me.

31:53Henry Blodget:Okay, but let's go back to the 1990s even further. Media was very mature. Magazines, totally mature, very hard to start one. You needed$50 million and you need to hire all these great people. And then maybe five years down the road, you might, if you're lucky, become profitable very hard, very hard to get into newspapers, television even worse. You're slave for a long, long time getting coffee. So very, very tough. Then desktops came along and got connected. So that was suddenly 12 hours a day that people are sitting in the office. They need to know what's going on. It's a new opportunity. Then phones came.

32:27Henry Blodget:And that's the thing that really drove Business Decider in the early years. We're standing around. We want to know what's happening. Nobody else is serving that. So big, big opportunity. But over time, all the folks in the industry caught up New York Times is terrific so is Wall Street Journal so Business Insider so is Bloomberg these companies are really really good at this now and if you just look at for example political coverage we don't need a hundred White House reporters we just don't and yet that's the thing that everybody's interested in so of course you're gonna have a reporter focus on that and yet there's just too much capacity and the other thing that happened, and I'll finish up very quickly, is the internet blew up the protective moat around all of the 1990s era media.

33:14Henry Blodget:Print and TV used to be completely separate. Now they're the same. You used to not have a television company be able to own a newspaper. Now we've done away with that. Everybody can own everything. Everybody can do everything, and it's all a click away. So it has become even more intensely competitive. And so it's never been an easy industry, but we are back to it being an incredibly intensely competitive industry. And I do think there's just in general too much of it.

33:42Joe Weisenthal:So when we think about the impact of AI on media, it feels to me like people are talking about two paths here. And one is where, you know, the big chat platforms are basically, they become the front page of the internet, right? And you type in whatever query you have today, how did the state of the union address go last night or something like that. And it spits out a bunch of information that's based on a bunch of articles that you yourself are not paying for. And then the other thing that I hear is, well, actually, in the age of internet slop, AI slop, that distribution and quality is going to become even more important.

34:17Joe Weisenthal:So people are going to want to go to the New York Times or hopefully to Bloomberg or wherever and get that take on last night's events. Where do you stand on that sort of, you know, it's a very binary outcome to me. Which way do you think we're going?

34:32Henry Blodget:I think this is great for the brands that make it. And again, nobody has a right to exist. It's going to be a fight, but for the brands that make it, it is terrific. I trust Bloomberg. I read a Bloomberg article. I know the reporter knows what they're doing and they know the subject. I know there is editing there. Occasionally there's a mistake, but it It is an honest mistake that will be fixed quickly. Compare that to what I see on social media, especially now where AI can create photos and videos and everything else. I don't know. I know the New York Times will immediately dive in if something is bubbling up, some video that's apparently scandalous that we've all got to look at.

35:14Henry Blodget:I know they'll do work on it. Maybe we'll sometime get to the point where they can be fooled. Not yet. And so I trust them. And you actually need a brand and a great organization to do that. And people say, oh, yes, but everybody out there, you know, who knows what's true and it's over. That has always been the case. At its peak in the print era, a million people read the New York Times. That's it. Everybody else heard what was said from their friends or they heard something else. They never even thought about it. And so the idea that, yeah, there's stuff out there that some people believe, there's always been stuff out there that some people believe.

35:53Henry Blodget:So I think it's great for brands, but I do think it's going to be a fight. It's never going to be an easy industry. Talk to us more about this question though of like, okay, New York Times, like anyone else,

36:03Tracy Alloway:they have to figure this out, right? They have to figure out what can they leverage it? I'm doing scare quotes because I hate that word, but that's like the word that everyone used. Can it be leveraged in some way in the context of the traditional newsroom?

36:15Henry Blodget:AI. Yeah. And so going back to your question, which I realized I didn't even get to before. So what should newsrooms be doing?

36:23Tracy Alloway:And how do they handle that? Because everyone hears, oh, you have to run your text through this chatbot or train the AI that's going to replace, or they feel very reasonable fear. How can anyone overcome that?

36:35Henry Blodget:So I think there is the opportunity for there to be a lot of productivity enhancements in what we have today. We were talking earlier, you both use chat TP for research. Me too. It's great. That is a very different, that is one use of media is me looking for information going out. It used to be that I would search for articles. Now I do it with Claude or ChatTPT. That is a smaller piece than what most media has lived on forever, which is, I don't know what I'm interested in. Whoa, that's an interesting story. And that's the serendipitous consumption of media. That's why newspaper headlines have been like this forever.

37:16Henry Blodget:It's why magazine covers matter. We don't know what we want until we see it and then we get it. And it's why in our business, there are many different talents you need to be extraordinarily talented in the business. One is sure, reporting, accuracy, expertise, so forth. You also have to know what people care about and what a good story is and why it matters. And I don't think that changes. And so where do we look around the industry? Yeah, research, drafting stories. Why not? And when people are aghast at that, let me just say back in the print era for newspapers, especially a daily newspaper, what would happen is the reporters would be out in the field.

37:57Henry Blodget:They would get information. They would call it into the rewrite desk verbally. They didn't have anything to write it with. They just say, here are the facts. The rewriters would write it. And in the last 20 years or 30 years, we who have been trained in writing and we value it and we go to Columbia Journalism School, we have conflated reporting and writing as journalism. And I do think there are opportunities now where, okay, the writing lift may be lightened by this. And I'm not saying, say, here's the article and just publish it. I'm just saying, you know what? perplexity is pretty good at writing a well-informed, well-sourced story in six seconds.

38:37Henry Blodget:And maybe that actually accelerates what you're doing. And then maybe you can add your piece to the top or what have you. So I do think there are uses for it too.

38:45Joe Weisenthal:So I actually, I agree with that argument. I think like social skills and investigative skills are going to become more important in the age of AI. However, what you always hear is, well, you're going to need, you're going to need to produce scoops, right? You're going to have to find the stuff that the models don't already know about. And that's going to be the valuable aspect of journalism. But the problem seems to be that those scoops get commodified so freaking quickly that I'm not sure that actually generates much value for the news organization.

39:14Henry Blodget:It is very hard to protect news. You can't. But the organizations that produce it all the time are going to have a huge advantage because it is going to be worth subscribing to them. And that's where the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, that's where it's coming from. And Bloomberg's an interesting one because you really serve a somewhat small but highly committed base where Bloomberg reporters are breaking stuff all the time that allow people to make or lose money. They're going to care, and they're going to have that terminal. And ChatDB is not doing that. So part of what I hear you say is, wait a minute, it has to be differentiated.

39:54Henry Blodget:Yeah, it does. Actually, there's a lot less value than there used to be in somebody said something interesting. Let's write it in an intelligent way, do a little more work and get it to somebody else. That is not as useful anymore for the reason that you described. But those companies, if they want to compete with each other, and they do, ChatGPG and Claude right now, they are going to have to pay for that information. And that's where Bloomberg is in great position. And say another thing, it's not just the big generalists. It is the niche providers who are experts like you guys and do an amazing job in a particular area that people really care about.

40:34Henry Blodget:Those are going to survive. And I'll say one more thing, which is Jeff Bezos was an investor and business side was incredibly helpful to talk to him. Very smart. I realize now he's become kind of not applauded in the journalism industry. But one of the things that he liked to say is everybody wants to know what's changing and what it means. It's actually more useful to step back and say, what is going to stay the same? What is going to stay the same in media is that we are always going to want to know what's happening and what it means, and we're always going to want to be entertained. And that's what media does.

41:11Henry Blodget:It's tough, but until actually there are no more humans, we are going to want media to deliver that.

41:18Tracy Alloway:I agree with that. You know, there's some really good stories, by the way, about the like the New York Post and Daily News, like report like the crime reporters out in the fields. And then they would call the rewrite desk and then they would like translate it into like tabloid speak. It's a that's a cool. That'd be cool.

41:32Joe Weisenthal:I remember sending notes on a Blackberry in like the early 2000s and then someone in the newsroom would translate it into readable words.

41:40Tracy Alloway:With a few minutes left, I want to talk about you mentioned Jeff Bezos. I want to talk about the business environment right now. when President Trump won, there was a lot of headlines about, you know, these CEOs, they'd be like, well, now we, free speech, and now we can speak our minds, and, you know, none of this woke stuff where we have to, like, be careful about what we speak, and, like, I get the impression that it's literally the exact opposite, and that CEOs have never been more scared, and they've never been more timid, and they, like, are obsequious to him, and they, like, do these big pilgrimages and stuff, and meanwhile, we know they hate the tariffs, we know they hate all the stuff going on, What do you make of that?

42:17Tracy Alloway:Because he's not even that popular anymore. He's actually arguably one of the least popular presidents ever. And yet I don't get the impression that there's been much of a change in the world of CEOs and rich guys and billionaires about speaking their mind. Yes.

42:32Henry Blodget:The whole free speech thing was always, I want more speech than I believe in. So I can say whatever I want. You can't say what you want. So it was kind of ludicrous. I think that in general, the big companies and CEOs, especially because President Trump won the last election, clearly, said, okay, I believe in democracy. I'm going to be pragmatic and take care of my team and my company. And also for most public company CEOs, they are easily removed. And they know that. And your job is to actually take care of your company and shareholders. It is not to be a free speech crusader and stand up for your personal thing that you believe in.

43:16Henry Blodget:And so I think there was a lot of pragmatism. I think that may start to change here. I feel like things have happened in the last few months. We may be starting to see a change, but I think it is mainly pragmatism. And you can look at that from the outside and say that's outrageous. But I think they were looking out for their companies and their teams and their shareholders.

43:35Joe Weisenthal:I want to go back to media navel-gazing because I've got more questions. And I actually hesitate to ask this one because I fear that your response is going to get back to asking Joe and I to justify our own salaries. I'm not. I'm telling you why you're not going to be replaced by Notebook LM. Okay. I'm going to ask you to justify a particular paycheck, kind of. Okay. When you sold Business Insider to Axel Springer, what year was that?

44:00Henry Blodget:2015. 2015.

44:01Joe Weisenthal:Okay. If you were selling Business Insider to Axel Springer now, how different would your pitch to them be in 2026 versus 2015?

44:12Henry Blodget:I would say that I think one of Business Insider's advantages, and Joe was a big part of this, was we were not trying to defend the old way that journalism was done in print and television. We were trying to bring rigorous journalism to a new medium where people wanted different things, where distribution was very different. So we were experimenters and innovators. And for every idea that worked, we had 25 ideas that were dumb and didn't work. I take responsibility for all of them. That was the only way to figure out what worked. And one of the things we noticed relatively early is, hey, we can figure out what people like.

44:55Henry Blodget:and we want to serve them. And we did a good job at that. And I think that was the thing that made Business Decider successful. I think now for all companies, stuffing your head in the sand and wishing AI would go away is not a great strategy. So what would be, what can we do? And again, one of the things that's changed as Google and Facebook and social have totally dried up as sources of distribution is we are back in this direct subscriber world, just like magazines and newspapers way back in the world. So that is serving your subscribers. This is what you guys do. You have this incredibly passionate audience.

45:33Henry Blodget:They know you. They want to hear from you every week. And so that's what media companies need to do. So that's what I would say is we are as focused as we have ever been on serving our readers, viewers, people who love us.

45:46Tracy Alloway:So you are now in very subscriber-oriented media. You have a newsletter. You have a podcast, et cetera. Other than realizing, like, actually, you know, editors are good and so forth, what else have you learned or what's been notable about your own personal journey into subscriber-based media? What does surprise you?

46:06Henry Blodget:Well, so I'll give you a little thing. So a lot of what I've been doing the last year or two is writing novels. This is something I wanted to do forever. It's like, okay, now's the time. And I talked to another friend of mine who used to be a screenwriter. And I confessed that to him. He's like, dude, that is crazy. Just go to Claude, tell Claude what you want. And Claude will spit out 325 pages and it'll be pretty good. And I don't, I believe it. And it'll take 20 minutes. And so I feel like the world's biggest idiot from a business perspective. On the other hand, I did want to do it. I'm glad I did it.

46:44Henry Blodget:It's been really fun. What's the story?

46:46Tracy Alloway:Tell us about it. What's coming out next?

46:47Henry Blodget:One's called The Upgrade. It's about a tech billionaire who wants to use AI to take over the world. That doesn't sound like fiction. It's nonfiction, but it'll be out. It's going to be out in beta. It's a new form of books. It's like a screen test. Yes. It's been in alpha for a while. A lot of people have read it. It's a different kind of book? No, it's a book, but there's going to be a period where I invite you to read it. Thank you. If you would, send me what you think. And then when I publish it for real, it may well have benefited from your reading anyway. So I feel like a complete idiot for doing it.

47:18Henry Blodget:But what I will say is for me as an analyst and writer and speaker, part of the joy is the process. Yeah. And I learned so much. And this is what I don't understand about how research is going to be conducted. One of the things that I'm going to do was, hey, write me a research report about X. Six minutes later, it comes back. It was better than a research report that I would have written as a young analyst when I didn't know anything. And it took six minutes. So I said, OK, I'm not going to write any research reports anymore. But when it took me a month to do that as a 25-year-old, I learned a lot through that process.

47:54Henry Blodget:And so now I don't know how you learn. How do you be reading the report? Like, I don't. That's the thing I'm really struggling with. But I will say, so for me, the process has been interesting. I hope you like the book. If you like it, maybe I'll do another one. That would be great. But what I would say is on this whole thing for what are humans going to do? You're a chess player. It has been 40 years since our phones could clobber us in chess. Chess is bigger than it has ever been in person. So my hope is we have AI research and write stuff that we don't really want to do. And we save our writing and orating and everything else for the stuff that we are really passionate about.

48:36Tracy Alloway:Henry Blodgett, thank you so much. And thanks for joining us here on Airfest. There's a lot of fun.

48:42Joe Weisenthal:Thank you so much, Henry.

48:56Joe Weisenthal:This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

49:02Tracy Alloway:And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these things 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots.

49:23Joe Weisenthal:And if you enjoy OddLots, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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