Popping the AI Bubble

Mookie Spitz takes aim at the contradiction at the heart of the world’s biggest story from this afternoon: Nvidia, now the largest company on Earth, just delivered fiscal Q2 2025 numbers that would make any other CEO weep with joy—revenue up 56% year-over-year to $46.7 billion, net income soaring 59% to $26.4 billion. And yet? The stock slid 4%. The problem isn’t Nvidia’s performance—it’s the whisper that keeps getting louder: are we living through an AI boom, or blowing up the next great bubble?

Mookie doesn't think so, and instead shares the warning signs, the hype cycles, and the stubborn facts that don’t fit the “bubble ready to burst” narrative. He compares this moment to the dot-com crash: hundreds of billions sunk into startups that vanished overnight, and miles of undersea cables lying dormant for years. Yet, eventually, those same cables became the arteries of the modern internet. His claim: today’s billions poured into GPUs, data centers, and training pipelines won’t be wasted—they’re the infrastructure of the next 30 years.

This rant digs in and shows how AI remains a mess, but in ways that suggest transformative times ahead: 

• Market mania and FOMO: why venture capital is showering hundreds of millions on flimsy “AI-for-everything” startups, from tweaked chatbots to pump and dump schemes
• Scarcity of talent: the new rockstars of tech—23-year-old AI engineers—commanding massive signing bonuses, traded like NBA draft picks between rival companies, adding costs
• Sam Altman’s wink and warning: how OpenAI’s CEO admitted, even over dinner with reporters, that hype is running ahead of revenue and most players will lose their shirts with a few big winners
• The adoption lag: how the “AI everywhere” is sluggishly behind user behaviors—pilots failing, ubiquitous negative ROI, and LLMs accounting for only 3–4% of searches compared to Google’s dominance.
• The future of the web itself: a provocative vision where websites vanish, bots become the storefront, and advertising evolves into a battle for which bot pushes which product.

Mookie doesn’t stop at the finance page. He drags in history, philosophy, and pop culture to frame the frenzy: Nvidia’s chips as the new fiber-optic cables, “AI mattresses” as the pets.com of our era, and reinforcement-trained robots as the inevitable bridge between predictive text models and machines that act in the real world. He argues that AI’s trajectory mirrors every great digital revolution: messy, overhyped, scam-filled, but ultimately unstoppable.

At its core, this episode asks: is the AI surge just froth, or the plumbing of the future? Will we look back at this as a bubble that bankrupted fools, or the dawn of an age when AI became as invisible and indispensable as running water?

Brash, analytical, and tart as ever, Mookie Spitz delivers a podcast that’s part market commentary, part philosophy lecture, and part rant against the absurdities of the present. Mookie is raw, skeptical, and unafraid to say the quiet part loud.