Which one was he again? Was he the Michael Scott or the Patrick Bateman??

Mr. Money Mustache's latest post is about this and I hope is right. Basically he thinks it will not destroy retirement, viewing market panic as a recurring historical pattern driven by fear rather than fundamental economic ruin. Instead of reacting to macroeconomic anxiety, he emphasizes that true wealth stems from human productivity and resilience, suggesting individuals ignore the news cycle and focus on personal financial habits. Also recaps the basics so a great reatd. We can do it one step at a time to increase freedom!

Big short investor who has been wrong about every prediction.

I had a boomer normie ask me how to use AI to develop his new "business" website telling me that he didn't want to hire a developer if the developer would just use AI anyway.

This guy doesn't know what a router is, and was asking me for help trying to understand what the AI was telling him, and it was the most basic shit.

When the normies are trying to invest in AI, they're the last to invest and know to throw money at it. That was a big signal to me that the bubble is about to pop. Money is running out and the boomers are trying to get in on it.

AI is obviously a bubble.

That said, Burry has also predicted 6 of the last 2 crashes.

I own a beer bar, and we work with some friends who have a catering business that does pop ups on our patio. They've been using AI to generate flyers and then tag us to have us share them to our larger audience. I stopped doing it because they look like trash, get low engagement, and are off brand for our art-inspired space. They got upset with me that we weren't helping promote, and I explained my position on their AI flyers, and they sent a very lengthy email back about how AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that we're still scratching the surface to understand its value. I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol. Now I have more work on my hands to design their flyers for them, but it's worth it.

I'd probably have better luck shorting stocks if I could trigger a (rightful) panic like this guy can.

The AI bubble will "burst" as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.

The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it's not doing that fast enough and it's beginning to look like it never will. We've been hearing that the AI bubble will "burst any day now" for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can't be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we'll see that suddenly the "invisible hand of the free market" will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that's why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.

So I saw a few relevant newspieces:

~ Companies are now ceasing their mandate to workers to use AI to do things that used to be done without AI. They're now saying don't use AI just to use AI. They're trying to reduce their token purchases.

~ The estimation now for AI use cases is to reconsider if tokens cost ten times their current price. If the use case is still worth it, then that use case will likely survive the bubble. If it's not worth it, it's time to hire back employees.

~ The hyperscale AI industry will have to make $6 trillion annually to break even. Amazon makes $2 trillion by selling people material stuff. Walmart is similar. There may not be a market for $6 trillion in tokens every year, even from government projects. Also, it's a bad sign if government projects are propping up the whole stock market.

~ China is mostly turning to a software AI model which does home and small business AI tasks fairly well without buying compute from a hyperscaler. You get a gaming machine, get open source AI software and a dozen terabytes of training data, and you should be able to create slop, vibe code or fix the grammar and style of your report. Also, hyperscale models are opinionated and don't like certain topics. Home-grown AI doesn't have those objections.

OpenAI had their little failure of a presentation recently, and they're introducing a "fast response" tier for 6x the current subscription cost. This is their attempt to get people used to higher pricing. They are bleeding money, and they will need to raise prices sooner than later to start attempting to make it back.

Once they do, a good chunk of their customers will simply stop paying, forcing the AI companies to further raise prices, causing more customers to leave, etc.

AI companies are trying (and failing) to be indispensable, and they need that to have any hope of survival. It's only a matter of time before they collapse, and only then might we see what's actually beneficial about machine learning.

It's a safe bet.

The bubble will burst, that's our boom-bust cycle. I think we're at the point where it is always a few bad decisions away.

I'm actually impressed that it's still going

Coincidentally, The FED was made to stop boom-bust cycles before WWI. It's never, ever worked, and it will never start working.

He’s been saying this for 4 years

God I hope so.

The thing is the collapse is like a random chance every week/day. At some point some human being will decide fuckem im not working all weekend to bail them out again and that's when the crash will happen. That's literally what happened in 2008, bear sterns and Lehman brothers for decades just rolled over their debt until one day the banks were just like yeah nah we had enough go ask the govt for help and that was the crash. It easily could have happened months earlier or months later, some bank execs were just in a room and finally decided they wanted to get off the ride one and that was the day it crashed. Just human emotion at that point if it would have happened the prior month or following month instead.

He's predicted around sixteen market crashes so far by my count. The dude got lucky once and has been riding the fame ever since. I'm not necessarily disagreeing that this whole thing will crash, but timing is the important part and he keeps missing it. I'll not be making any financial decisions on his recommended timeline anytime soon. He may as well be Dave Ramsay imo.