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You're watching TVPN. Today's Monday, February 23rd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN over Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's go. Massive sell-off in the markets thanks to friend of the show Catrini. We have someone from Catrini coming on the show in just a little bit. Lots of crazy reaction really broke through with something that you know is framed as sort of you know fanfiction, low probability. And it's it's always interesting when someone posts something and they're like, I think there's a 10% chance that this happens, so it's worth talking about. And I'm like, well, like what's the 90% scenario? No one's getting any clicks for the 90% scenario, and and it and it gets completely not that exciting.
Yeah. And throwing out something like, oh yeah, like, you know, oh 10% chance that this crazy thing happens. That doesn't... people don't react to it like it's a 10% scenario or whatever percentage you put on it. 20% chance, 30%... boom. They only take away from what you said.
Yeah. No, immediately. And it's the same thing with all of the AI lab CEOs. When pressed, they'll be like, well, I do think that there's a 10% chance that humanity dies or something like that, and the headline is 'predict humanity dies.'
Like, you only... like, as soon as you say something crazy happens, no matter how low the percentage is, like, that's what you're going to be known for forever. So be careful out there with those predictions. But...
Okay, so Sunday, yesterday...
Yeah. This was yesterday around 11.
Really took it off. Yeah.
Doing family stuff. Don't really have a bunch of time to like sit down and read something.
And the entire day I'm just seeing people quoting it being like, 'this is the best essay that I have ever read.' So many people that I think are generally pretty smart. And then by the time I actually... after the kids' bedtime last night, by the time I actually sat down and started reading it, it was... almost every paragraph I was experiencing some element of Gell-Mann's amnesia, where like you have like three sentences that are like maybe somewhat coherent and then like a statement that feels like so wrong.
Specifically, I think a lot of people obviously called out the DoorDash thing, the DoorDash comment, which there's so many businesses that you could have chosen in DoorDash's place, but it didn't matter. DoorDash is down...
The Catrini selloff is here. Catrini pop...
Despite tracking to close to a billion...
Isn't it? A billion monthly orders. Something insane.
My experience with it was you had mentioned to me that like, oh, it's the current thing, and I was pretty offline. And then by the time I actually started refreshing the timeline, I was like, 'Oh, I'm like clearly stuck on some search feature because I'm only seeing Catrini posts and like posts reacting to it and reacting to the reaction.' And it had done a full news cycle, both a backlash and then a backlash to the backlash. And Ted Chiang's getting in there fighting and people are posting rebuttals and someone posted a fully AI-generated, just like 'turn it up another notch' version, which is hilarious. Like if that wasn't extreme enough, I got something even more extreme for you. People were having a lot of fun with it. Sunday is for the posters, I guess. People are having fun. What should we read through of the actual Catrini article? Because it is sort of long and we do have someone from Catrini coming on the show. So we can maybe go through some of the reactions. I mean, the futures were red last night. The market is down broadly.
Yeah. And it's interesting, a lot of people were saying, guys, there's no way that futures are red just because of this Catrini essay that is...
Obviously science fiction.
And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually stated that...
That it's the Catrini selloff.
Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, there were also the tariff things. The tariff news was sort of digested on Friday, Saturday. So there was totally like that could be possible. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Joe Weisenthal has a post here: 'The Catrini selloff.' The quote from the terminal: 'Software payment stocks slide after Catrini post on AI risk. DoorDash and American Express led declines in software and payment stocks on Monday.' And we were debating like, you know, PayPal had gotten beat up and there was a question about like what is the strategy going forward. PayPal's always been in an interesting situation because like absolutely goated founding team, but they're all disinterested in jumping back in and turning it around.
Yeah. You have Max with Affirm...
Yeah. Who over a long enough time horizon will probably compete. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's hard because I mean even if you went back, how do you build a position? How do you get control of that company? But it does seem like there's some value there. There's some stickiness and it'll be interesting to see. Does it go private? Does the new management come in? I mean, they already have some new management. So I'm not exactly sure where it goes, but it feels like the payment rail thing will be sticky for a while. Jung Macro had a take, quote-tweeting Catrini: 'Good and interesting piece, but a necessary caveat is that it's essentially a hypothetical conditioned on severe institutional failure rather than some sort of macro inevitability. As the piece itself notes, one of its two failure modes, liquidity stress and capital impairment, includes a liquidity component that the Fed can address quickly with liquidity facilities and asset purchases, repo lines, quantitative easing, as seen in recent episodes of banking stress. Losses from impaired assets won't disappear, but can in principle be moved where the broadest shoulders are.' It's an odd situation because you're seeing all of this capital evaporate from the public tech markets, but the labs aren't public yet. So they can't fully absorb it. Like they sort of can, but it's much more opaque. And it's not like most... like the average investor can't just read this piece and be like, 'Okay, I believe it. I am worried about software stocks, so I'm going to rotate into a basket of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.' They don't have that option yet. They might by the end of the year. You can buy Nvidia, you can buy Google.
Yeah, totally. Totally. Just look at Leopold's allocations and copy trade that, I suppose.
Plenty in this hypothetical economy, much more than before. He says there will be plenty of broad shoulders. Couldn't they just tax Anthropic into paying all your pensions in this hypothetical scenario? This would be done through regulatory or fiscal mechanism. The second failure mode, an aggregate demand shortfall from massive unemployment, can be addressed through fiscal policy: transfers, wage subsidies, etc. The piece argues that this may be constrained by falling tax revenues, but in a deflationary, low-inflation environment, the Treasury can run large deficits and the Fed can buy as much of that debt as it needs to, leaving aside that we'd expect the tax structure to change. The political process is unlikely to be as meaningful a bottleneck as the piece claims, as the hypothetical fiscal hawks pointing to unsustainable deficits would not have much of a point given the economy in this hypothetical will have much higher potential output. Also, that obviously wouldn't poll well. The first-principles intuition obviously tells you something is off when we're told that people will want at least as many real things as before and the economy will have the means to produce more real things than before, but the people won't be getting the amount of real things that they want or need. This is because that typically requires major policy/institutional frictions or delay in translating capacity into purchasing power. If you suddenly have two loaves of bread in your house instead of one, and you weren't starving with one, you probably shouldn't starve when there's two. But if by some hypothetical, through the complexity of the novel two-bread-loaf production process, you suddenly get tangled and can no longer access the cupboard, then it's quite possible you will starve.' I thought that was a good take. It is interesting how this moved the markets way more than AI 2027.
Like it's sort of the same piece and it has a lot of the same sort of extrapolations based on AI progress, a lot of same...
But like AI 2027, probably like the market reaction was like 'invest more in the labs.'
At the time because it was kind of aimed for more of a West Coast audience in general. Yeah.
I just mean if you had taken AI 2027 and you had just asked like, 'I own this basket of public company stocks. What should I be doing?'
And AI 2027 is your backbone, you would probably sell a lot, like you're selling right now. Like the AI 2027, Situational Awareness PDFs, like those are the Leopold Ashenbrener philosophy that is now being reflected in the market. But, you know, he didn't go long any of these stocks anyway. Sorry, really quickly.
I wonder how much that is just because of like who is actually writing it. Like the 11 people are like, you know, very San Francisco-coded, like vaguely EA, maybe safety people, where this is like, okay, they're like a financial research firm and they're known for...
And it's written with a financial audience in mind and it speaks in that language. So it's been somewhat translated. Interesting that it took almost a year for it to be translated in this way. But then yes, it's interesting for a couple of reasons because this was not the takeaway. And I remember in the Vanity Fair piece I had some funny quote in there being like, 'the market should be moving off of what happens on the Dwarkesh podcast.' And it seems sort of silly, but I think that we're now seeing the downstream ramifications of that. So Jordi...
I did think it'd be helpful to kind of provide a summary of the essay. I think the original essay, it feels like they used quite a lot of AI to write it. I'm going to use AI to summarize it before you go. So anyway, so this scenario, you should have got to this at the beginning, but by late 2025, agentic AI tools become vastly better at coding and complex tasks. Obviously, that was... yeah, it's historical. Firms found they could use AI to replicate work normally done by humans, radically cutting labor costs. Productivity looks great on paper. GDP and productivity metrics soared because AI output counted in the official numbers, but most of that value didn't translate into real consumer spending.
So like businesses are spending money, but they're spending it on data centers. And that is not as opposed to labor, where if you give somebody money, they'll buy a house, they'll do home improvement, they'll buy cars, they'll put their kids in school...
Consumption, right? So they're calling this ghost GDP, economic output that doesn't actually circulate in the real economy. And then they identify an emerging negative feedback loop, which is companies lay off white-collar workers and reinvest savings into more AI. Displaced workers have less spending power. Consumer demand weakens, especially for discretionary goods. Companies facing weaker demand invest even more in AI to maintain margins, and this creates a negative feedback loop with no natural brake. The next step is market and credit stress. So they talk about private credit having lent to a bunch of these different SaaS companies that are now being threatened, defaults climbing as the sort of perceived recurring revenue ends up not being fully recurring.
And next, intermediation and friction collapses. There's a whole segment talking about how like a lot of value capture in the world is actually just humans like not wanting to deal with friction. It's like not switching car insurance even though you know you're paying more than you should. It's just kind of a hassle, but if you could have an AI agent go and do that, then maybe you do that more often, and that pulls out some potential earnings from the system. The other thing they talk about is like all these different tech hubs and how many prime mortgages there are that might not be so prime if there's a layoff and somebody ends up having to switch career paths or something like that. So generally talking about unemployment surging, consumer spending collapsing, severe drawdown in the stock market, and then even our sort of normal economic indicators hiding the sort of overall weakness. And anyways, takeaway: AI being great and powerful may not equal all the markets ripping, but...
Well, two different things: market ripping...
And median income, like they're three wildly different things. You can see asset prices rise massively based on future promise of GDP growth. If it's guaranteed that GDP growth is going to happen 10 years from now, the market will price that in today. And then if all of that GDP growth goes to one person, you're not going to see median incomes rise. You're not going to see like broad prosperity in America. I have more on...
that, but let me tell you about Octa. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.
So it's worth really quickly. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Worth maybe noting like the kind of companies they call out in this in the piece by name. So poor uh all these companies. Let's check in with Service Now, which is which is one of the companies that was most heavily... Yep. Down four almost 4 and a half percent today.
Uh so they talk about a bunch of the SaaS tools. They call out Monday.com, Asana, Zapier. Zapier is kind of funny because in some ways like it was just like work automation before work automation was even that cool. Like I was using uh using Zapier 10 years ago. It does feel like they're kind of in a in in a decent position given that like they're already their core business is like help people automate different workflows. Um but and then DoorDash, we already talked about that. Uh Mastercard and Visa, they talk about uh suffering uh revenue pressure um because an AI agent would just opt for stablecoins, which feels like again something that many people on the show have come on and and made the case for why agents will leverage uh stablecoins or prefer stablecoins seems uh seems like a possibility, but uh unlikely that that will just you know all payment volume will shift over there uh overnight.
Uh and then Amex uh Amex they called out specifically because of uh their consumer base being uh just generally weakened by labor displacement. Um and then a bunch of others, travel booking, insurance, real estate, tax, etc. Travel booking I thought was funny because most travel agents like don't actually take fees from the consumer. They take these from the uh from the side of the like hotel, the airline or whatever. And so the idea that uh you'll just immediately get uh like every AI agent or every individual will just immediately... uh I I didn't fully process that one. Um and anyways, back to you.
I did think that John Lober I wanted to go through his piece. Yeah. Because I thought he had one of the better rebuttals to... I thought that was good. I I think the the thing that just keeps sticking out to me is like uh and I was debating with Sager and Jetty about this as well like uh he he he was telling me like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. I was like no AI is actually doing very little for the economy right now. It's doing a lot for the markets. It's doing a lot for the future. But like in terms of the actual economic impact of AI, it's very low. And we just know that because you add up the actual AI revenues from the AI labs and you're talking about like 30 40 billion and okay maybe there's like a 5x multiple on that and so you're generating $200 billion of GDP on top of those tokens but like that's just not that much in the grand scheme of the actual America's GDP.
And so there's this disconnect between like the market which is pricing future GDP, future cash flows, future value creation, then you have what is actually driving GDP today, and then you have like the the actual workforce and what what Americans do. And so there's this there's this odd disconnect and I keep coming back to the Tyler Cowen like slow takeoff uh philosophy around like what's actually holding up the American economy. It's like healthcare jobs and there's a lot of jobs that are they feel very AI resistant. I don't know maybe something changes but like it just feels like like the like the number of people that are software developers less than 1% of America the number of people that like work at tech companies broadly is less than 10%. And so even if there's some massive like reallocation there and then you go into like even in like white collar if everything shifts like the rest of world is hit and there's just a lot of other dynamics that feel like like you can see crazy gyrations in the markets and you can see really quick reallocation of 10% of capital billions of dollars flowing around but that doesn't immediately translate to what is happening in the real economy. There's always this disconnect.
I'm laughing a little bit because we've seen so many short seller reports over the last few years where somebody accuses a company of like really really bad potentially illegal behavior and the stock will like move down like half a percent. And then somebody writes like kind of a cool piece of science fiction but like easily can poke a million holes in it and then it every you know it sends like all these mega caps down. Uh let's go through this piece from uh John.
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Uh John Lober wrote a great piece very quickly after this called Contra Catrini. He says, 'Popular markets commentator Catrini recently published a compelling and popular piece of AI doomer fiction. Admittedly, with some small probability of occurring, but I'm old enough to have seen many cycles of economic doomsaying. I want to present a critique of Catrini's work and show a much likelier, more positive view of the future. One, never underestimate institutional momentum. In 2007, people thought the US was geopolitically done under peak oil. In 2008, they thought the US dollar was just shy of collapse. In 2014, they thought AMD and Nvidia were done. Then came ChatGPT and they thought Google was done. Every time existing institutions with momentum have proven themselves far more durable than onlookers thought when worried about institutional turnover and rapid labor displacement. It's very funny that Catrini writes, "Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate where buyers had tolerated 5 to 6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer." People have been calling for the end of the real estate broker for 20 years. You don't need superintelligence for this. All you need is Zillow or Redfin or OpenDoor. That's exactly uh this example actually shows the very opposite of Catrini's point. We have the type of labor that most people consider obsolete. And yet market inertia and regulatory capture have made the real estate broker far more resilient than anyone would have bet a decade ago. My wife and I bought a house a few months back. The transaction required us to have an agent, ostensibly for the above reasons. Our buyer's agent made about 50,000 on the deal for about 10 hours of form filling and party coordination that I could have done myself. This market will eventually be efficient and price this labor fairly, but it takes a long time to get there. I know a lot about inertia and change management. I built and sold a company that focused on moving insurance brokerages from service to software. And the main thing I learned is the iron iron rule of dealing with human reality. Everything is always more complicated and takes much longer than you think it will. Even if you already know about the iron rule, that doesn't mean that a meaningful change in the world won't happen, but that the change will be more gradual, giving us the time to respond and adjust.'
Second point, software has infinite demand for labor. The software sector has been struggling in recent months as investors fear that companies like Monday, Salesforce, Asana can now be easily replicated and that the value of their back-end systems is indefensible. Catrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SaaS companies are one the products become obsolete zero margin and two the jobs themselves disappear. What everyone seems to be missing is this these products effing suck. That's his opinion. I can say this because I've actually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on these products. Sure maybe AI enables competition to replicate their products but more importantly AI enables competition to deliver better products. It's no surprise to see the stocks drop an uncompetitive sticky lock-in sector filled with another swear word incumbent becoming competitive again.
Uh and and my my own personal call out here is uh even like until we see a round of layoffs at a company that is 5,000 software engineers at once, it's hard to believe that that AI is replacing software engineers versus just making them a lot more productive. If somebody's a lot more productive, you'll pay you'll pay at least the equivalent amount to maintain them.
Uh more generally, it is uncontroversial that virtually all current software is garbage. Everything I use and pay for is littered with bugs. Some software is so broken that I can't even pay for it. I have not been able to send a wire using Citibank's online banking in 3 years.
This was my pushback against Rune. Rune was like was like, 'Oh, like Codex is so good. Like, you know, you can just vibe code everything. It's amazing.' And I was like, 'Why is the United app bad?' The United app is good. And then and then he was like, 'It actually is good.' And then I used it and it's like not that bad. But the point holds there is some bad software out there. I I will die on this hill. Um but yes, hopefully it's going to get better.
Uh anyways, there's a deep and important truth. Even if we get something like the software singularity, the level of demand for labor here is practically infinite. Famously, it is the last few percent of completion that take the most work. And by that token, virtually every software product could probably scale up its complexity and features by something like 100x before beginning to saturate demand.
Uh three, this was probably the best point uh from his response. Re-industrialization. There will be some labor displacement of course driving stands out. Many types of white collar work as Catrini suggests will undergo some generation as some jobs disappear and others change meaningfully. AI may be the straw that breaks the camel's backs for jobs like the real estate broker where the job had actually already disappeared a long time ago but the pay was still there. The saving grace here is that the US we have virtually limitless capacity and need for re-industrialization. You may have heard about bringing back manufacturing, but it's more than that. We largely no longer know how to create and don't have the facilities for making the core building blocks of modern life. Batteries, motors, small semis, the whole electric stack is something we we are almost entirely dependent on China and other countries for. Um barely make fertilizer. Once you start looking at the physical world, you see a virtually endless scope for work on job creating nation benefiting fundamental infrastructure work that is politically bipartisan. I like that.
Uh he where does he close? He says and beyond the outcome of industrial mega projects is of course that we move toward abundance. He's abundance build. America will once again be more independent and make things at large scale and low cost. Transcending material scarcity is the key in the long run. If we do lose almost all white collar jobs to AI, we have to be able to provide with a continued high quality of life. Part of this will get automatic. We get automatically just because AI taking margins to zero means that those consumer products will become equivalently cheap. Uh this is a deflationary effect. My view is that different parts of the economy will take off at varying speeds and virtually all the areas are slower than a piece like Catrini's might suggest. Um to be clear, I'm extremely bullish on AI and expect that one day my my labor too will be obsolete, but it's going to take a while to get there. And that time gives us the opportunity to make good policy. On that front, preventing a market meltdown the way Catrini imagines is actually pretty easy. And the federal government's response during COVID showed how proactive and aggressive it is willing to be. I'd expect large scale stimulus to kick in quickly once needed. It slightly irks me to say that it won't be efficient, but that's also not the point. The point is material prosperity for people in the course of their lives. Broad consumer well-being that legitimizes the state and carries forth the social contract not satisfying the accounting metrics or economic norms of the past. If we are nimble and responsive to the slow but sure technical revolution then we will be fine. It's good good response.
Uh Rise uh calls out uh out of every example they could have chosen they went with DoorDash. The barrier to entry for launching a delivery app is not and has never been software. It's distribution restaurant adoption, user adoption, and of course, driver adoption. Uh it would be really funny to be using like the vibecoded version where somebody's like, 'Yeah, I just launched a delivery app and uh your food will be here in 4 hours.'
Yeah, it it does feel like if I was Tony, I'd be I'd be flying to find Catrini having to work face to face, opening up a can of uh...
I know where you're going. Uh yeah. Uh it it it feels like Okay. So you built like like you you vibe code a profitless like open source delivery app that anyone can use and you assume that it would get adoption just because it's it it's more economically efficient like it's cheaper for all parties so they will join but DoorDash is actually like a three party transaction so you need to market to all three and it's really really hard to...
break through right now and maybe it would just go viral and everyone would get on board. It just feels tough. And then he was saying that like, well, in this future it's like all three parties are using agents that are perfectly rational and hunting around for the best opportunity, so things can shift faster. And I believe that to some extent, but it just feels like still a little bit farther away because of adoption and actual, um, like...
Yeah, DoorDash has moats. That is the big — that is the simple trick that all vibe coders hate.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's like there's a lot of capital that went into building the network and the app, but also a lot of capital that went into marketing and onboarding the pool in the marketplace, like the actual liquidity.
Yeah. The only scenarios that I can see the sort of vibe-coded delivery or sharing economy app working is at a local level, but there's already a bunch of competition there. Like I have a guy that when I want a ride to the airport, I call him, he picks me up. I don't necessarily use Uber because I like having the same...
The guy's my buddy now. I like going to the airport with him.
Yeah, I was thinking about Amazon Basics and like that hasn't destroyed every company, every brand. And why is that? Is that a good analogy that like, okay, the big AI labs will have Amazon Basics for SaaS, but people will probably still want certain brands. There will be certain people that are locked in. Okay, yes, I know the Amazon Basics paper towels are cheaper, but I just happen to like this particular brand that's a little bit more tailored for me.
But Amazon Basics was like, 'Hey, you buy paper towels from this brand normally, we're going to sell you the same product with our logo.' Effectively the same product.
And I think the AI disruption that is much more real is like you have entirely new paradigms for software, an entirely new relationship with software.
And it's not just like, oh, you know, somebody built the exact same version of Salesforce. It's like somebody built an app that automatically sets your schedule every day and you're not even thinking about like, oh, I need to be monitoring this dashboard or...
Yeah. No, I agree. I think the Amazon Basics of Salesforce probably is not that big of a business opportunity because the whole value prop is that it's lower margin, and so Amazon Basics is not driving Amazon's market cap.
Well, yeah, Amazon has solved the distribution. They're like, 'We have the customer.' But when you have a lower margin profile and you don't have the customer yet, that naturally means you can't spend as much money to acquire customers and build out sales and distribution and all that stuff. It's a very different situation. It's not like people are just going to the SaaS, you know, supermarket.
I think his pushback would be like they will effectively, because they will go to an agent that says like, 'I need to accomplish this job,' and it will say, 'Okay, well for that job I need a tool. There's a legacy SaaS provider and there's a neo-SaaS provider that's vibe-coded, and I could actually build my own version too,' and it will pick the most economically efficient across that frontier. And so that's where he's coming away with like some downward pressure, which I think is reasonable. It's just again, I just keep coming back to timelines here. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Consult. Consult builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, let's continue.
Uh, very funny post from Dime Square Holdings. You think this is crazy, but just wait until next weekend when I publish my Substack article. You should freak out and kill yourself right now.
People are really having fun with this.
Well, D is on a roll. Average 2026 AI macro research note. I am legend.
This may be the most terrifying novel you will ever read.
Isn't that just the zombie apocalypse movie? Uh, this might be the most market-moving piece ever written, says Cluso Investments. That seems accurate. I mean, there are other factors going on, but this does really feel remarkably impactful. And I don't know, maybe it's a buying opportunity, maybe it's a warning to everyone else, but it certainly broke through. I mean, these articles are really, really underrated. I've noticed like I heard about 'something big is happening' on a car podcast. I got that forwarded to me in an email. Like these pieces of like AI is a thing that you need to be paying attention to are breaking through in a way that AI 2027 did not. And like, you haven't seen Ilya on Durov's cash — like that actually, that's a joke because that did not break through, but 'something big is happening' did break through to the tune of 100 million views, which actually means like everyone read it. Beyond it, it broke containment, like it truly, truly went big. And that's certainly market-moving, and the Satrini post did too. Uh, we can go through his agent commerce thing, but it's a little wonky. Uh, let's see what Venture Anthropologist had to say. 'Satrini is completely wrong about the impact of AI on the economy, but his article does correctly show that various forms of AI doomery will become incredibly popular in 2026.' Um, yeah, people are pushing back. Um, and someone was saying that this is similar to Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. This is from Mohit. 'One of the often slept-on benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking SOSC 1114 as a freshman. Marx, writing during the Industrial Revolution, predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself. Firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal cost, and the gains get competed away. This was the collapse of profits. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises, but no one can afford to buy what's produced. The contradiction between production and realization. Satrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's no natural break. But it's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years, and it makes the same errors Marx did. Schumpeter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago: creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of. Everyone in the replies is already making this point, and I think they're right. But the sharper rebuttal is this: prices are the break Satrini says doesn't exist. Who funds $200 billion in a quarter in capex when equities are down 40%, private credit marks are in the 50s, and consumer demand has collapsed? Cost of capital rises. Incremental buildout becomes uneconomical. Capital gets destroyed and reallocated. Satrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie. The 180k PM driving Uber is textbook. But the article claims this collapses consumer demand, and that's where it breaks. The top decile drives 50-plus percent of their spending, and their wealth is in equities, not W-2 income. They're long the hyperscalers posting records in Satrini's own model. Blue-collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor, not physical. The professional middle class gets crushed, but aggregate demand doesn't. The spending class is the capital-owning class. The K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing. In the stable aggregate demand, the petty bourgeoisie finds a way to reinvent itself. I think the Satrini piece is excellent and worth reading. But history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices, deflation, more leisure, and higher quality of life. Marx's error wasn't diagnosing the disruption. It was underestimating the system's ability to adapt.' Very good. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Really going heavy on the goat emojis today. I like it.
Everyone is reading the latest Satrini piece thinking it's an institutional research piece when in fact what they are reading is a marketing piece of fiction meant to go viral. And viral it did go. Lesson there. Um, I wonder how broadly the article virality — like long form has not been going viral on X or Twitter for a decade. Like even before the link ban and stuff, like it was really, really hard for articles and links to really go big. They did go big when Twitter started because there wasn't that much content. So people would write and then they'd bring that and then they'd discuss that. Um, but I can't remember a really big debate erupting around an article. Um, maybe a little bit, but...
Steve asked, 'Does Tyler clap for each ad reader? Is that a soundbite?' It is real. He claps.
Yeah, I clap for every single one.
We'll give you a chance to do it again. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Uh, we did get some feedback that the clapping can be a little loud during the ad reads. So, you know, Tyler, constructive criticism there. Uh, anyway, should we continue with the Satrini back and forth? We do have someone coming on the...
Uh, the thing about the Satrini piece that is internally inconsistent is where does all the surplus go? Okay, we become impoverished and aggregate demand collapses. What financial asset is spared from that? A lot of people were asking that. Um, and yeah, I mean the answer is commodities. You want to be in like gold and silicon and whatever is at the bottom of the stack, and then whatever has the deepest moat, and then you want to be in the AI companies as well.
