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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 and throwing out something like, oh yeah, like uh you know, oh 10% chance that this crazy thing happens. That doesn't uh that uh it people don't react to it like it's a 10% scenario or or whatever percentage you put on it. 20% chance, 30% poom. They only take away from what you said.

It's over. Yeah. No, immediately. And it's the same thing with with all of the uh 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 and that the headline is predict humanity dies.

Yeah. Like like you only like as soon as you say like something crazy happens with 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. Uh but uh okay so Sunday yesterday did this doing a lot of Okay. Yeah. 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 uh pretty smart. And then by the time I actually uh after the kids's bedtime last night, by the time I actually sat down and started reading it, it was uh every almost every paragraph I was experiencing some element of Galman'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.

Sure. Sure. Sure. Specifically, I think a lot of people obviously called out the um the Door Dash thing. the Door Dash comment, which there's so many businesses that you could have uh chosen in Door Dash's place, but it didn't matter. Door Dash is down. Yeah. 6.8% today.

The Satrini selloff is here. Satrini pop despite tracking to close to a billion, isn't it? A billion monthly orders. Something insane.

Um 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 I actually started refreshing the timeline, I was like, "Oh, I'm like clearly like stuck on some search feature because I'm only seeing Satrini 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 Tay Kim'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. Uh people were having a lot of fun with it. Uh Sunday is for the posters I guess people are having fun. Um what uh what 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. Um so so we can maybe go through some of the reactions. I mean the 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 Yeah. Obviously science fiction. Yeah. And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually uh stated that reported it that uh it's the Catrini selloff.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean there were also the tariff things that the 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. Uh Joe Weisenthal has a post here. The catrini selloff. The the quote from the terminal software payment stocks slide after catrini post on AI risk. Door Dash and American Express led declines in software and payment stocks on Monday. Um, and we were debating like um, you know, PayPal had gotten beat up and there was a question about like what is the what is the strategy going forward. PayPal's always been in an interesting situation because like absolutely goatated founding team, but they're all disinterested in jumping back in and turning it around.

Yeah. You have Max with a firm Yeah. who over a long enough time horizon will probably compete. Yeah. In every 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, uh, it does seem like there's some value there. There's some stickiness and, uh, 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, uh, I'm not exactly sure where it goes, but it feels like the the payment rail thing will be sticky for a while. Uh, Young Macro had a take uh, quote tweeting Catrini. uh 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 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.

Mhm. There's plenty of ways. Yeah, totally. Totally. Just look at uh Leopold Brothers allocations and copy trade that I suppose. Um 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 and aggregate demand shortfall for 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 as uh 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, uh that obviously wouldn't pull well. The first principle is intuition obviously tells you something is ary 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 slashinstitutional frictions or delay in translating capacity into purchasing power. If you suddenly have two loaves of bread in your house instead of one in your house, 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 you will starve. I thought that was a good take. Um, 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 the the market reaction was like invest more in the labs. Yeah. At the time because it was kind of aimed for more more of a West Coast audience in general. Yeah. Um 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 P PDFs like those are the Leopold Ashen Brener 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 uh you know, very San Francisco coded like vaguely EA maybe safest 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. Uh so it's been somewhat translated. Interesting that it took almost a year for it to be translated in this way. Uh but then yes, it it's it's interesting for a couple reasons because it didn't uh this was not the takeaway and I I remember in the Vanity Fair piece I I had some funny quote in there being like like like the market should be moving off of like what what happens on the Dark Cash podcast. Uh and it seems sort of silly, but I think that we're now like seeing the downstream, you know, ramifications of that. So Jordy, uh I did think it'd be helpful to kind of provide a summar summary of the essay. I think the original essay, it feels like they use 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 uh 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, uh 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 uh lay off white collar workers and reinvest savings into more AI. Displaced workers have less spending power. Consumer demand weakens especially for discretionary goods. Uh companies facing weaker demand uh invested even more in AI to maintain margins and this creates a negative feedback loop with no natural break. The next step is market and credit stress. So they talk about private credit having uh lent to a bunch of these different SAS companies that are now uh being threatened uh defaults uh climbing as the sort of like perceived recurring revenue ends up not being fully uh recurring and uh next uh intermediation and friction collapses. There 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, uh then then maybe you do that more often and that and that pulls out um some potential earnings from the system. Uh the other thing they talk about is like all these different tech hubs and how many like prime mortgages there are that might not be so prime if there's a layoff and somebody ends up having to uh switch you know switch career paths or something like that. So generally talking about unemployment surging, consumer spending collapsing, uh severe draw down in the stock market uh and then even our sort of normal economic indicators hiding the sort of overall weakness. Uh and anyways takeaway um AI being great and powerful may not equal all the markets ripping uh but well two different things market ripping individual individual company individual companies and median income like they're two 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 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. Um 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.5% today.

Uh so they talk about a bunch of the SAS tools. They call out Monday.com, ASA, 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 Door Dash, 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 stable coins, which feels like again something that pe many people on the show have come on and and made the case for why agents will leverage uh stable coins or prefer stable coins 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 AMX uh AMX 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 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 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 3040 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 Cowan 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 girration 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. Before we do, let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

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 doomsang. I want to present a critique of Satrini'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 Chad GBT 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 super intelligence for this. All you need is Zillow or Redf Fin or Open Door. That's exactly uh this example actually shows the very opposite of Satrini's point. We have the type of labor that most people consider obsolete. And yet market in 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. Ostens 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. Soft uh 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. Satrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SAS 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 su k 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 rep 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. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. 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 City Bank's online banking in 3 years. This was my push back against Rune. Rune was like was like, "Oh, like Codeex 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% 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 be 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 suggest will undergo some geration 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 U is in 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 are large 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 catrines 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 CO showed how proactive and aggressive it is willing to be. I'd expect largeale 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 Door Dash. 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 opensource 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 Door Dash 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 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 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 Door Dash has modes. That is the big that that is the 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 and onboarding the pool of of in the marketplace like the actual liquidity. Yeah. The only the only scenarios that I can see the the sort of like vibecoded delivery or uh 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 Yeah. The guy's my buddy now. I like I like going to the airport with him. Yeah. Right. Uh so yeah I I was thinking about Amazon basics and like that hasn't destroyed every company every brand like and why is that like will that is that a good analogy that like okay the big AI labs will have Amazon basics for SAS 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, we're you buy paper towels from this brand normally, we're going to sell you the same product with our with our logo." Yes. 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 you're not even thinking about like, oh, I need to be monitoring this dashboard or Yeah. No, no. I I I agree. I think the 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, naturally means you can't spend as much money to acquire customers and build out sales and distribution and all that stuff. It's very different situation. It's not like people are just going to like the SAS, you know, supermarket. I I think his I think his push back 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 SAS provider and there's a and there's a neo SAS provider that's vibe coded and I could actually build my own version too and it will pick the most e economically efficient across that frontier. And so that's where he's that's where he's coming away with like some downward pressure which I think is like reasonable. It's just again I just keep coming back to timelines here. Uh before we move on let me tell you about console. Consult builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, let's continue.

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.

What was this next one?

This may be the most terrifying novel you will ever read.

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 like 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 it really 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 went, it broke containment, like it truly, truly went big. And that's certainly market moving, and the Satrini post did too. We can go through his agent commerce thing, but it's a little wonky. 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 doomerism will become incredibly popular in 2026. Yeah, people are pushing back. 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: 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. 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. But I can't remember a really big debate erupting around an article. Maybe a little bit, but...

It is real. He claps.

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. We did get some feedback that the clapping can be a little loud during the ad reads. So, you know, Tyler, constructive criticism there. Anyway, should we continue with the Satrini back and forth? We do have someone coming on the...

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. 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.

Let's switch gears to something that is certainly more important than the Satrini piece. A street-legal modded garbage truck and Whitney J3 jet engine.

Let's pull this up. You don't even know anymore.

Feels like a six-foot flame at the end of your vehicle is not street legal.

Anyways, horrors coming out of Mexico. Yeah, yesterday, really sad situation. Our very own Joe Weisenthal had been in the Puerto Vallarta area and had just left. I think he got out of there an hour...

I hope everyone who's down there is safe.

Somebody said: Westin Puerto Vallarta won't honor late checkout with streets closed. I am Platinum Elite.

I thought that was a joke. I didn't realize somebody actually posted this.

Does this person just not understand the scale of what's happening? Maybe you could break it down for anyone who's living under a rock. Like, what actually happened in Mexico? Because it was not just fires and a few cars. This was like a military operation.

Because my wife...

...texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X monitoring the situation, all the open-source intel.

Like, "Wow, I've expected something like this for a long time given the tensions down there." And then I'm just watching this and my wife texts me, "Our friends want to go to Mexico in April. Can we go? On a long weekend?" And I was like, "Are you joking?"

Over the last 10, 20 years, they look like their special forces. I think the story is that many of them actually did train at some point with US special forces and then flipped.

Or probably the Mexican military.

Yeah. No, they were, but the US special forces have trained the Mexican military, and so these guys are like, they have their own version.

It's not like, oh, they just picked up something they watched like a video on YouTube.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure some of them are not elite, but in general this is like a paramilitary organization. It's like one of the largest private armies in the world. Probably the largest private army in the world. Um, and so Elena, their main guy, gets taken out and then they respond by starting to just like blow up roads. They took over an airport, I guess. Like they just start causing mass chaos. This person in Puerto Ordaz, if you look at any video of Puerto Ordaz, if you just went outside yesterday and looked around, there's like fires rising up everywhere. It literally looks like a war zone. So, for somebody to be hitting Reddit at this moment and being frustrated, it's like, 'Hey, maybe just, you know, the State Department put out like almost exactly when this person was posting a security alert saying due to ongoing security operations and road blockages and criminal activity, US citizens in the following location should shelter in place until further notice.' And like, you're getting a shelter-in-place warning and you're mad about your Marriott points. But again, hopefully things settle down.

I agree. I agree.

I want to move on to some nostalgia. We are going to get Tyler Cosgrove up to speed on what it was like to live in the 90s and the early 2000s. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than it? The AI market. Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. I grew up in an era before MongoDB. I think of my life as pre-Mongo. It's crazy. Back then, you had to store files in text files. Now, MySQL existed. But the 90s and the early 2000s were iconic. And we got to get Tyler Cosgrove up to speed on what it was like during the heyday.

These were the vibes. The Blockbuster. So much consumer electronics. Like everything had a different device for everything. A Walkman, a Game Boy, an Xbox. You can still go see a Monster Truck rally.

You had an Xbox?

Okay. Okay. So, you're maybe up to speed. Well, there's another one that talks about the liquid metal object design. And I found this reel very informative to show how technology in the digital world actually shaped the physical world. So we could play this liquid metal object design. I feel like this is overdue for a comeback.

Fluid forms, terms floating around were blobism, minimalism, and biomorphic design. It was easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past this because everything was really blocky in the 80s futuristic vision for things like sportswear, watches, music players. This is a prime example of when technology influences form. CAD, a modeling software, introduced what is called NURBS, non-uniform rational B-splines. What this allowed is for industrial designers to create mathematically smooth curves to be calculated with precision. It enabled people to make... So before, you had to just like use blocks basically, and like you'd get like a sphere and that was it. You could do like a sphere and a cube, but you couldn't really do whatever shape you wanted.

And back then they were rocking this kind of hardware when they were saying that all retail stores globally will be wiped out within the next 5 to 10 years.

Yeah. I mean, reflecting on the dot-com boom, I think is particularly interesting right now. I mean, I do like the takeaway from the dot-com boom. When most people pull up the dot-com boom, they're just like, 'Oh, it's a bubble and everything's going to zero.' And like, that's not quite the lesson because the internet was still like actually the most powerful force for economic growth and change, and it did radically change society. It just did so over two decades instead of like one year as was predicted. So there's an article in the New York Times that's sort of comparing the dot-com boom to the AI boom, and it's a piece by David Streitfeld at the New York Times. He says people loved the dot-com boom, the AI boom, not so much. And I buy that generally. Like the tenor around the dot-com era. Yes, there was a lot of froth, but in general, people were like, 'Oh, this is like sort of interesting and cool. I got to play with this like tinker.' They just missed it more as a toy than like true doom. Yes, there was Y2K, and people were worried about that, but the stats weren't quite the same. So, right now, there was just...

Were you like aware of Y2K?

How did you process it? Because my parents were trying to explain to... Yeah, like a five-year-old.

Well, you got to get out. Everything's collapsing. You know, you got to seek refuge. No, no. There was like a fear that like, okay, like something crazy might happen. But in general, my parents were like dialed in enough that they had been through the boom and bust of like that something bad will happen to actually understand that like, no, the fixes were in place. And there were a bunch of interesting fixes. So if you're not familiar with Y2K, basically the idea was computers were programmed to store dates as two-digit numbers. So you would just say it's 86, then it's 95, 96, 97, 99. What happens when you get to 2000? It just says 00. And all of a sudden, all your interest calculations for your bank account freak out. You have negative money. The whole financial system collapses. Anything that's planned, right? All of this was like the fear of what might happen.

Tyler.

Easy for you to say, Tyler. You weren't born for... Oh my gosh, the numbers are resetting all of a sudden. Like you can see it's like a calendar. You can see... You had to be there, Tyler.

Uh, nothing happened, right?

No, no, no. Yeah. People did have foresight, and so they started implementing changes, and the changes cost a ton of money. I think the total bill for Y2K systems updates, because if you had hardcoded like our dates in our systems, or we're a bank and we store dates in two digits, you got to go and change that. And that's a couple days of work writing some code. They didn't have cloud code back then. And so yes, it wound up being something like hundreds of billions of dollars were spent in the lead-up to Y2K to prevent that. Going for the Y2K payday. A lot of people made a lot of money.

But there were also a whole bunch of interesting rules. And you know, hot shot over here, I'm going to give him a pop quiz. Do you know how to calculate a... If you get this wrong, there's going to be consequences.

I told you there'd be consequences, Tyler.

That was the most Zoomer thing I've ever seen in my life. You have to ask. He just has to go. He's brain dead.

Yes. Like, when do leap years happen?

Every four years except every hundred years except every thousand years. So they toggle back and forth. And so in 1900 was not a leap year. And so if you didn't know any of the special rules, you would just be like, every four years is a leap year. It's a leap year, 2000. But if you knew the hundred-year rule, you would be like, oh, actually, it's not a leap year, so I need to hardcode the system that it's not a leap year. And you can fact check this too, because I'm not sure. I'm just riffing here. It might be wildly wrong. But the thousand count cancels out the hundred, and you wind up with just a normal year. And so if you did nothing, you win.

Yeah. But okay, so Gregorian calendar goes into place 1582. Yeah. So you have like 400 years to figure this out, right? Yes. Yes. So... and we did, but it cost us a hundred billion dollars. As is all technological change.

But Y2K was like, it was very millenarian. People were dooming about the apocalypse, but these were like fringe sort of cult types. The same thing happened with 2012. I don't know if you remember 2012 apocalypse stuff. Y2K was the same thing. But it was not widespread. AI doom is truly widespread. There's a study in YouGov, more than 30% of Americans are concerned that AI could end human life on Earth. Like that is a wildly high number compared to how many people believed 2012 was going to be the end or 2000 was going to be the end. Like I would be shocked if either of those dates were single-digit percentages. Most people were like, 'Yeah, okay.' Like I might need to like print out my bank statements. A lot of people were doing that. Like print out your bank statements before Y2K because like then you'll have a backup and you'll be able to go in and say like, 'No, I actually have $10,000 in my bank and I don't have negative nine million because it's not the year 1000 right now.' But you know, everyone got through that. The other interesting thing is that there's this disconnect between the doom AI is going to kill everyone and then what is the impact of AI. There's this new research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER. They polled a whole bunch of firms in America, a whole bunch of companies, and they said, are you getting a benefit from AI? Tyler, what percent do you think said, yeah, AI is helping out?

It's extremely low.

It's exactly 20%.

80% said that AI was having no impact on their productivity or employment.

We got to get those numbers up, folks. There are clearly good ways to use AI to benefit your company and your people. I mean, those surveys, you never know who you might be. Somebody who's just not, who's going to answer the survey quickly and they don't realize it. But I mean, just think about it. Like there are lots of companies where you have to be HIPAA compliant. Maybe they just don't have a HIPAA-compliant LLM available to them. And so they're just like, 'Yeah, I literally can't use it.' Or like, all LLMs are blocked on my local work network because the IT department's still figuring out how we roll it out. Like these things happen all over, and it affects like lots and lots of people. I mean, if you're just a cashier at Walmart, is AI helping you? Like it's just not, right?

I agree. I agree. And I mean...

Totally. Totally. And even if you zoom out to AI just being like machine learning, it's like, okay, so the Walmart person at the checkout counter is not seeing a benefit, but like Walmart definitely has a recommendation system on their website.

You believe that that's happening?

You're willing to bet at all on that? You're willing to bet at all on Walmart going through a dramatic digital transformation right now? You don't think it's slow? You don't think that they're still like, 'Let's figure this thing out?'

You think they're past the pitch phase? Maybe. Hopefully. Yeah. And we got to talk about... We should talk about Rufus. Do you guys hear about Rufus? Rufus is going crazy.

Okay. While you pull that up, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

I have some more. My takeaway was that the average American believes that they are in Terminator Judgment Day, but they still have to go to Cyberdyne Systems and do their fake email job just right up until the bombs drop. That's the general tenor around AI. Like the vibes are rough. But if we go back to the dot-com bubble and try and understand what's different, there's some interesting stuff that we can learn. So first, there was definitely a vibe around permanent high growth and a new economy. There was this, economists, analysts, executives, they were arguing that productivity would permanently accelerate and recessions would largely disappear and the business cycle would be broken by information networks that moved at the speed of light. Before the SaaS apocalypse, there was what you referred to earlier, the retail apocalypse. The most extreme formulation was total physical retail extinction. Within 10 years, so within 10 years, they predicted by 2009 there would not be a single retail store anywhere in America. This was the prediction. This was the prediction. This was the prediction.

Directionally accurate. For sure. For sure. So, shopping malls would become obsolete. All brands would be commoditized by cheap online alternatives. Some of this happened. Amazon Basics is popular. Temu flooded America. Shopping malls are struggling. But Walmart's a trillion-dollar company. Nike. Nike is worth 90 billion. And Rick Caruso has seemed, you know, to sort of figure out a way to make malls work in LA, in LA at least. There were also a ton of other crazy dot-com proclamations. Revenue doesn't matter. Only eyeballs matter. All media will permanently be free because file sharing and products like Napster simply cannot be stopped. And so every piece of media will be free forever. That obviously didn't happen. And offices will disappear entirely. Digital currencies will replace fiat money. At its core, the most extreme claim was the internet was a civilizational phase change equivalent to the printing press or electricity. And most importantly, this transformation would happen in five years, not 50 years. And so time compression was the biggest forecasting error here. Not every dot-com prediction... like nearly every dot-com prediction had some directionally correct element to it. But various brakes were applied either voluntarily or involuntarily, and things slowed down. Media companies sued file-sharing companies, for example. Financial markets pulled back. Companies adjusted their strategies and retreated to internet-proof modes. And so protests and political movements also had another role to play as a brake. There was this really interesting anti-tech protest in the late 90s, the Battle of Seattle. So, over four days, 40,000 protesters rallied against the World Trade Organization to push back against internet-driven capitalism. There were 600 protesters who were arrested at the Battle of Seattle, and they were arguing that the internet was linked to corporate consolidation, outsourcing, and labor displacement. Like all relatively true things, hard to disprove, but the timelines are what matter, of course. And so the Battle of Seattle didn't result in any specific dramatic curtailing of internet adoption, but it did raise the political salience of international trade relations and was clearly in the back of policymakers' minds when they set sector-targeted tariffs and domestic preference procurement rules over the next decade. And so I was thinking about this in the context of the New Brunswick data center protest. So the actual... this data center that got cancelled in New Jersey, by comparison to AI, like it's tiny. It's...

Yeah. It's more of like a data point than a data center.

Yeah. So it's 25,000 square feet. The current like Meta large data center campus is 500,000 square feet. So 5% of the size. And so this data center, we don't know who was actually going to buy the capacity, where it was going to go, but you can think of it much more like, you know, delivering you Netflix faster than, you know, training the next AI model. But like it worked. They got the data center cancelled. And so this is going to be like a data point in the minds of AI policymakers, decision makers, leaders for a long time. And I think that will affect things. So, you know, the internet rollout continued even during the bubble and the bubble popping and pushback and all sorts of different things. AI will continue as well. But I think it's important to refocus the conversation on actual impact. Like the 20% needs to go up, and people need to say, yes, this is helpful. And then mitigate the negative externalities before they turn into real problems for average Americans. The energy issue was foreseeable, like it was predictable, and maybe that's what we need to be forecasting. Like the next turn of AI, 2027 or AI 2028, should be like, here are all the problems that we're going to bump into along the way. Like let's go mitigate those now because all the hyperscalers could have been subsidizing electrical buildouts like years ago, for sure.

So anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

We need a moment of silence for International Business Machines.

Falls over 10%, actually 11% now after Anthropic announces that Claude can streamline Cobalt code.

Wild, wild times. The example that I was talking about earlier about Amazon's Rufus. I...

We are an international business. Mike Isaac was reporting... no, Financial Times, he was just commenting. Amazon's internal AI coding assistant decided the engineer's existing code was inadequate, so the bot deleted it to start from scratch. That resulted in taking down a part of AWS for 13 hours. And it was not the first time it happened.

Sometimes the best course of action is to delete and recreate.

Lots of people are having fun with the data center protest. I think it should be taken seriously. But apparently the New York Times ran an article in 1887 that says peasants destroy a balloon. Is this a real article? Peasants...

1887. What? What? You can actually find it on the New York Times website. October 25th, 1887.

The Russian peasantry appear to be sunk in ignorance and superstition. During the recent eclipse of the sun, three famous Russian savants descended. I'm trying to read. This is in the Times Machine. It's very, very...

Yeah. Incredibly hard to read. But the peasants did destroy the balloon.

Somebody asked, 'Would you live next to a date center?' Not a data center, but a center for dates.

Yeah, dates are good. Healthy, delicious. Anyway, ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. Let's go over to the horse section of the show. There's some big horse news going on.

In the Financial Times, a horse walks into a lab. Let's see.

Yes. But okay. So, the interesting thing about the Whimo fires was that we live in LA where the Whimo fires happened. And if you were on the internet, it looked like Los Angeles was burning to the ground. And Tyler went to the Philharmonic...

The Philharmonic, which was directly like a block away from where the main protest was, and we were like, whoa, man, like this seems pretty dangerous from what we're seeing online. And it was fine, right? You just pulled right in.

And so a lot of these protests, the scale of these protests is hard to pick up on because things can go really viral and you can have a protest that's a couple hundred people and if it's in one block and the photographer is good about lining it up and you're not seeing like a helicopter shot of like tons of people in the street, it can actually be sort of small. I remember that video of the data center protest where he runs outside and he's like, 'We did it. We did it.' Like it seems huge, but I actually think there were only like a couple hundred people there. And you compare that to the World Trade Organization Battle of Seattle, it was 40,000 people. They arrested 600 people. Like that's pretty significant. And so I guess I'm not saying like we're still early for protest, but it is important to understand like the scale of what's happening in the real world and the actual impact of that. And you know, you need to be charting this because if they're getting bigger, like they need to be addressed more. And even if they're small, like people have good points, so they should be listened to. And the solution should be brought to the populace before it gets to a vote. Like you could tell that that New Brunswick debate would go way differently if the hyperscalers were there saying like, 'Hey, good news. Like we've done so much forward thinking here that your energy prices are going to go down.' Like people would be like, 'Oh, okay, cool. And we're making it beautiful. It's going to be a data center and we're building underground. We're putting EMF grass on the roof.'

Why don't you read us this?

Yes. A horse walks into a lab. It's a December afternoon at the Campo Argentino de Polo at Palermo in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. The sun is shining in a sky of clear Argentine blue. The jacaranda trees are in bloom. This is too noisy. I'm going to put this down. The jacaranda trees are in bloom. You're sitting in the stands overlooking an immaculate green lawn six times the size of a football pitch. A military band with brass trumpets and drums, red epaulettes and shiny black jack boots, has just marched away. Argentina's president Javier Milei, famous for his mutton-chop sideburns and economic chainsaw, has taken his seat above the center line. Eight players center onto the pitch, tanned arms, taut muscles, hair curling over the collars of their polo shirts. It's the first semi-final of the Argentine Open. The most prestigious tournament in the polo world, the one the players really want to win. This year, the stakes are higher than usual. It may be the last open for Adolfo Cambiaso, the world's number one player for more than two decades and the sport's GOAT, the greatest of all time. Cambiaso has changed the way polo works, not only through his skill and tactical genius, but as a result of a bet he made nearly 20 years ago. He bought into the idea of cloning ponies a decade before his rivals. This year, many of the ponies he will ride in the open will be clones, identical twins of his favorite horses from years gone by. The players line up, four against four, the ponies waiting, ears pricked, poised for action. And the whistle blows. The game begins. The players streak up the pitch, sticks swinging, using their ponies to ride off their opponents to block them from getting to the ball. They gallop, turn, stop, turn on a sixpence, and start speeding in the opposite direction. They bounce the ball on the small head of a stick, hit backhands under the ponies' necks. If there's a break, they gallop to one end and leap onto a fresh pony before charging back into the fray. You can tell sitting high in the stands, the ponies get the game. They can anticipate what's going to happen. They're enjoying themselves. That in and of itself is remarkable. In the millennia since humans thought to tame the wild horses that roam the steppes and plains, we have bent them to our will for our species. Horses have charged into battle, dragged plows through rocky fields and carriages through the slop of medieval cities.

Humanity versus slop. Man has taught them that a hard white ball needs to get to the end of a large field and through the gap between two poles. In return, we feed them, tend to their shoes and teeth. We give them massages and march them up and down hills to make sure they are fit enough to play. We polish their coats, plait their tails, and bandage their legs. And to the best, give them a chance at life through cloning. And another, and another. But it seems that isn't enough. Now, two men, a scientist and an entrepreneur, are going beyond making copies of an original. They are engineering polo ponies to make them even faster in the hope that in a game of high stakes and slim margins it will give them the edge to win. For one pony, Polo Perza, the circle of life began on an estancia near the town of Coronel Suarez, a six-and-a-half-hour drive southwest of Buenos Aires. She was born on December 12th, 1988. A slight mare raised on a diet of weeping lovegrass, the silvery fronds that grow in the red soil of the Pampas. It was apparent from an early age that she had what it took to make a great polo pony. She played in her first open final aged only five, ridden by Pepe Heg, one of four brothers who competed at the highest level. Four brothers, all polo legends.

Polo remains a macho sport. The top players are male, though there is an open tournament for women too. The grooms who canter the spare ponies up the side of the pitch wearing the gaucho's traditional floppy beret, the boina, are typically male. The open has only ever had male umpires, but the ponies are usually female. The players favor mares, citing their intelligence and grit. Polo Perza was one of the great polo mares of her generation. She was a bright bay, the color of autumn conkers, with black legs, a white star between her eyes, and another splash of white on her nose. She played at the top level for 14 years, winning the cup for best pony at the open, among many other awards. And speaking of ponies, the purple llamas, Vanta automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. That mare was a natural polo player, one in a million, he said. The guy said in a video made to celebrate Polo Perza's induction into the Polo Pony Hall of Fame. She had an impressive heart. Also, she was a mare who never got tired. Polo Perza retired in 2004. Before she died, samples of her DNA were banked in liquid nitrogen in the laboratories of Kieran, a biotechnology company co-founded by Gabriel Vera and based in a science park in the town of Pilar, 35 miles northwest of Palermo's polo fields. With his neatly trimmed beard and white lab coat, Vera, 46, would not be mistaken for a polo player. When I first emailed him, he apologized for not responding sooner. He was competing in the World Indoor Archery Championships. Oh, made sense. His company is named after Chiron, the mythical archer. Half man, half horse. It's the morning of the open semi-final, and we're sitting around a large table in the cool of the conference room at Kieran, just a few meters away from the vats of nitrogen housing Polo Perza's remaining cells. There are photographs of horses on the wall. Each is a clone Vera was responsible for creating. Each a genetic replica of a famous polo pony. One photograph, the newest, is of five bright bay foals covered in baby fluff. Their legs still too long for their bodies. These are the gene-edited polo Perzas, he says. The ones you are going to meet. I stare at their photos. There is no clue in the faces of their unusual conception. No way to differentiate them apart from their similarities to each other and to the videos of Polo Perza that I have watched. What do you think? Would you go to a polo match if all the ponies were genetically modified and cloned, or do you want a natty league? Natty ponies only?

Yeah. I mean, why not push the sport to the limit?

Well, they should have the sort of like wild league.

Where you can just go find a wild horse, go play.

Yeah, for sure. This is kind of the...

What do they call it? The enhanced games. Yeah, this is the enhanced games for polo. For sure.

Anyway, Tyler, are you a polo accelerationist?

Sorry. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Tyler, are you a polo purist?

You're a polo accelerationist.

Pak, as they say.

Well, good news for you. There's lots of cloned ponies coming your way to a polo field near you.

What did this post say? If you run every day, you'll be ready for any situation that calls for extreme cowardice. Was this deleted?

Probably the running community.

Zach Pogba came in and said, 'You're about to be running for me.'

Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. There is a game called Data Center on Steam which lets you build and manage your own data center. This is low-key genius. The best way to educate people on a new trait. Hyperscalers should learn a thing or two about edutainment.

So, it's not out yet. It's coming out March 31st.

Mark your calendars.

Productivity is going to fall. Everyone...

Those racks weren't simulated. Those were real NVL72s. Ender. Yeah, I love that. This is all a ploy. The humanoids are already deployed. They just need you to wire everything up. This is amazing. And it feels like the game mechanics feel just from this video remarkably deep. Like you're not just walking around a data center doing cabling the entire time. You're also deciding tax treatment and what software runs and getting probably Kubernetes installed or something like that. Slurm. Very, very fun. I love these one-off games.

If you're good at insider trading, you're going to love this game. Steam has a game called Insider Trading. Get ready. It's a roguelike deck builder that lets you literally pump and then crash the market. This is going to be wildly, wildly popular. No, depends a lot on the actual mechanics of the game. But hilarious and says a lot about the society. But I think it's... I don't know. I'll give it a try. I wonder if it will have microtransactions. That's the big question. Or if it's pure for the love of the sport, love of the game. But these roguelike deck builders are fantastic. Balatro went mega viral a couple years ago. Really, really fun game. Just crazy poker basically. It's like poker rules but with a whole bunch of crazy modifications that allow you to just do insane things and sort of turns it into a completely different game.

That'd be good.

Yeah. Whoever has the highest score gets hired.

I do wonder, we've seen this... I heard the story about like everyone talks about the death of AAA games right now. Have you heard about this? So, it used to be, you know, GTA 5, Halo 3, Bioshock, like there were these big games that would sell for 50, 60 bucks. They would sell a lot of copies, but then they weren't... what do they call them? Permanent service games, online service games or something, perpetual. Like Fortnite is a game that has endless updates and monetizes forever. And same thing with Counter-Strike, League of Legends. There's a few others that have wound up generating a ton of money for these companies because once they get them up, they're like ecosystems. Roblox, great example. Versus if you're doing like Bioshock and you make a bunch of money, then you have to do Bioshock 2 if you want more money from those customers. And then you have to do Bioshock 3. And at each point, people are like, 'Well, I didn't actually finish Bioshock 1, so I'm sort of out of the market for Bioshock 2.' And your TAM just gets smaller and smaller while your development costs get higher and higher. And there's been a whole spate of AAA perpetual service... why am I blanking on the term? There's online service games where they've come out and they said like, 'Okay, we've seen what Counter-Strike has done. We've seen what League of Legends has done. We want that for our company, so let's go.' Yeah, free-to-play is the model, but there's something around the word service that's the gaming lingo. But there's been a lot of flops recently. Like a lot of companies have spent a ton of money on these online service games that they hope will become the next League of Legends or the next Counter-Strike 2, and then they just flop and they're shut down in like a couple months. And it's a huge loss. At the same time, there's been a whole bunch of developers that have gone sort of the indie route and done really, really well. Live service games. Thank you, Bobby Cosmic. They're called live service games.

And there was this interesting story of this developer that spent like three years working on this live service game and it completely flopped. And then in his free time made like this game called Peak in like three months and it went super viral and did really well. And I'm excited to see like when do we see the actual acceleration in vibe coding? Do we get more of these like meme type games that have really interesting mechanics? Does it actually free up the developers to come up with not just interesting viral hooks like Data Center Simulator is funny enough to get us to click on it, but like the mechanic actually has to be good too. And...

Yes. 10,000 will try it.

How many people actually...

Play for more than 10 minutes?

And the key to playing for more than 10 minutes is not like the graphics will be taken care of. We already have Unreal Engine. The engine will work. Like you're not going to be falling through the floor. It's not going to be buggy. But and you'll be able to generate assets and actually make the thing look like it. But if you can come up with some sort of novel reward mechanism, progression system that's interesting, that shows, okay, I'm learning and I'm having fun, I'm re-engaged, I think that will...

Dan says Peak was that developer's peak. Nominative determinism hits again. Yeah, you never want to launch a product called Peak. Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Sorry.