The Real Eisman Playbook: The Big Short Partners Reunite: Rates, AI, Gold and Two Stock Picks | The Real Eisman Playbook Ep 75

Steve Eisman reunites with former Big Short partners Vincent Daniel and Porter Collins, who now run a long/short book anchored in gold. The conversation covers the fiscal bind facing the Treasury — deficits near 6–7% of GDP, interest plus entitlements around a tenth of tax receipts — and why the partners hold their highest-conviction precious-metals position in years. On AI, they walk through OpenAI’s deteriorating economics versus Anthropic, hyperscaler revenue concentration, enterprise cost deflation, and why forced lab IPOs could flood equity supply. The back half explains why shorting is structurally harder now, then works through two live shorts and two idiosyncratic longs. [partial: YouTube auto-captions; ASR artifacts possible]

• ~10% of tax receipts — interest expense plus entitlements Porter Collins
• ~$40T debt × prevailing rate “is a big number” and rising Vincent Daniel
• 6–7% of GDP / ~$2T budget deficits — “the root cause of all of this” Vincent Daniel
• Nvidia revenue up over 100%, but 70% of accounts receivable with top five direct customers (10-Q Note 7) Steve Eisman
• ~70% of hyperscaler AI revenue from Anthropic + OpenAI, per Wall Street reports Porter Collins
• ~25–35% of total cloud revenue — the Anthropic/OpenAI share Porter Collins
• $11.5B — Anthropic June-quarter revenue, up over 100% in three months; costs undisclosed Steve Eisman
• $6.5B — OpenAI revenue, up only 18% in three months; costs $12B Steve Eisman
• OpenAI: revenue +$1B vs costs +$3B over three months Steve Eisman
• GDP to grow 2%, at least half of it AI capex (Torsten Sløk) Steve Eisman
• ~30–40% rise in AI queries/tokens, ~60% fall in AI costs — one CIO routing off-frontier queries to open-weight models guest
• $85B equity issuance by Google Porter Collins
• $25B capital levered 5:1 → $125B positions; annualized vol target 6–9%; longs/shorts dollar-matched Porter Collins
• Pod shorts target 3–5% spreads vs the partners’ ~150% target Porter Collins
• FICO shorted at ~$2,500 after Pulte comments; prices raised 1,600% over five years; mortgage pulls 3–5x card/auto pricing guest
• 109–110 — Carvana’s average gain on sale over two years; Ally pays 102–104; mystery buyer north of 110; 75–100% of pre-tax income from gain on sale; stock ~30–40x earnings guest
• ~3% → 30–40% — Delaware Life related-party transactions, per court filings guest
• 4 FLNG boats on ~20-year toll contracts; capex $2.5–3.5B vs YPF’s $30–50B onshore build Porter Collins
• Argentina rates down from 100%+ to ~30% Porter Collins
• $90–100/lb production cost; $200/lb in California vs $600–700/lb in Germany; 50–65% EBITDA margins if export allowed; ~$500M–$1B market cap; federal rescheduling (Schedule 1 → 3) finalized last December — Glass House Vincent Daniel

Priced in: Fiscal unease, gold’s long run, AI-capex concentration worries, and the difficulty of shorting crowded names are all consensus-adjacent; the episode confirms more than it discovers. Eisman himself pushes back on imminent fiscal doom, and Collins concedes the Carvana–Delaware Life link has been known to shorts for eight years.

What’s new: The concentration math is the variant datapoint — Nvidia’s 10-Q Note 7 puts 70% of accounts receivable with five direct customers; ~70% of hyperscaler AI revenue comes from Anthropic plus OpenAI, or 25–35% of total cloud revenue; and the quarterly split (Anthropic $11.5B, up 100%+; OpenAI $6.5B, up 18%, costs up $3B against revenue up $1B). The pod-leverage mechanics (5:1, 3–5% spread thresholds, weeks-long holding) quantify why squeezes keep happening. Carvana’s gain-on-sale arithmetic (109–110 average vs 102–104 from Ally) and the Delaware Life related-party jump (3% to 30–40%) are genuinely new to most readers, as is the Mr. X cost-deflation anecdote.

The bear case: OpenAI’s narrative could re-accelerate with a product or funding event, making the “in trouble” call look premature; gold is a crowded consensus long after a strong run; the Delaware Life/Carvana connection has been litigated for years without a payoff; FICO’s pricing may invite nothing more than noise; and Bessent’s twist program could pin long yields longer than skeptics expect.

Discount: The speakers are talking their book — long gold and idiosyncratic small caps, short FICO and Carvana (where they admit being squeezed). The Nvidia Note 7 point arrives via Ed Zitron (“Ed Zitron” in captions), an avowed AI bear, though Eisman says he verified it. The Mr. X anecdote is single-source, unaudited, and not for attribution. Auto-caption artifacts (names, percentages) mean any single figure should be checked against the primary source before use.

This is three professional short-sellers arguing that the two risks Graham tracks — fiscal sustainability and the AI buildout’s funding — are converging: a Treasury reduced to signaling games on rates, and an AI economy whose revenue is concentrated in two cash-burning labs while enterprises quietly deflate the unit economics. The episode’s value is in the specifics — the Note 7 concentration, the lab quarterly splits, the gain-on-sale arithmetic — and in the rare mechanics lesson on why fundamental shorts keep failing against levered pod capital. It is a positioning read, not a call: bearish on the fiscal path and on OpenAI’s funding, bullish on gold, idiosyncratic elsewhere.