Texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X monitoring. You're monitoring the situation, all the open source intel. You texted me. You texted me and I was like, oh, what's up? 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 a long weekend? And I was like, are you, are you, are you joking? Anyways, the really, really sad situation. Basically the leader of the cartel cjng, which is like effectively his paramilitary group. Any. Like, if you looked at any photo or video of them over the last 10, 20 years, they look like they're 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 the. Probably the Mexican military. Yeah, no, they were the. But the US Special Forces have trained the Mexican military. Okay, okay. And so these guys are like. Like, they have their own version. Yeah, it's not a larp. Like, oh, they just like picked up something. They watch like a video on YouTube. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, 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, like private armies in the world. Probably the largest private army in the world. And so el mention their main guy gets taken out and then they respond by starting to just like blow up, like roads. They took over an airport. I guess they just start causing mass chaos because their leader is this person in Puerto Vallarta. If you look at any video of Puerto Vallarta, if you just went outside yesterday and looked around, there's like fires rising up everywhere. It looks like. 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. You're mad about your Marriott points. But again, hopefully, hopefully things settle down. I agree. I agree. South. Well, 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 mongodb. It's crazy. Back then you had to store files and text files. Now MySQL existed, but the 90s and the early 2000s were iconic. And we gotta 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. You had a different device for everything. A Walkman, a Game Boy, an Xbox. You can still go see a monster truck rally. I had an Xbox. You had an Xbox? Yeah, we have mod retros right here. 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 can play this liquid metal object design. I feel like this is overdue for a comeback. Amor fluid forms. Good music too. Terms floating around were blobism, blob minimalism and biomorphic design. Biomorphic design. Easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past because everything was really blocky in the 80s. Futuristic vision for things like sportswear, watches, music play. Clear, clear case. This is a prime example of when technology influences form. CAD A modeling software introduced what is called nerves. 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. And back then they were rocking this kind of hardware. Yeah. When they were saying that all retail stores. Yes, globally, will be wiped out within the next five to 10 years. Yeah. You had to be there. 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 gotta 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? Extremely aware. Extremely. Well, how did you process it? Because my parents were trying to explain to. Yeah, like a five year old. Yeah, yeah. No, I was. I was like. I could, I could generally. Yeah, yeah. I remember the turn of the millennium. I was overseas on a vacation and there was a little fear. Yeah, well, you got to get out, Everything's collapsing. 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 dialed in enough that they had been through the boom and bust of something bad will happen to actually understand that. 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 0, 0. And all of a sudden all your interest calculations, 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. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Right? Because why? Well, like, 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. Yes. You had to be there. Did no one have foresight? Nothing happened, right? 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 hard coded, like our dates and our systems are. 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 up to y2k to prevent the gong for the y2k paydays. A lot of people made a lot of money. But there were. But there were also a whole bunch of interesting rules. And you know, hotshot over here, I'm going to give him a pop quiz. Do you know how to calculate a leap year? If you get. If you get this wrong, there's going to be consequences. Okay, okay. No, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Do you know how to. Consequences? Oh, no, no. I told you there'd be consequences. Tyler. All right. Okay. That was the most Zoomer thing I've ever seen in my life. He just has to go. He's brain dead. Wait, how to calculate leap year? Yes. Like, when do leap years happen? I don't know. Like the actual calculation. Isn't it every four years? Every four years. Except every hundred years. Except every thousand years. So they toggle back and forth. And so 1900 was not a leap year. And so if you didn't know any of the rules, you would just think, oh, 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 hard code the system. That is 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 cancels out the 100, 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. Yes, yes, and we did. But it cost us $100 billion. 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 gonna be the end or 2000 was gonna 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 are 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. I don't have negative 9 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? Oh, it's probably pretty low. It's extremely low. 20%. It's exactly 20%. Nailed it. 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, it could also be surveys. You never know who, you never know might be somebody who's just not who's going to answer the survey quickly. And they don't realize. But I mean, just think about it like, 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, 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? Yeah, but I'm sure there's still like they use services that under, you know, like behind a bunch of layers, there actually is AI going on. Right? I agree, I agree. And I mean, so like, maybe they're not interfacing with LMS directly, but at some level, like there are LMS running. Totally, totally. And even, 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. Yeah. Or like the Walmart software is being updated faster than it usually would be. Isn't that. That's AI. You believe that that's happening? It could be. You're willing to bet it all on that? You're willing to bet it all on Walmart going through a dramatic digital transformation right now? You don't think it's slow? You don't think they're still like, let's figure this thing out? I think they're probably faster than they used to be. You think they're past the paycheck phase? Maybe. Hopefully. Yeah. And we got to talk about. We should. We should talk about Rufus. Do you guys hear about Rufus? No. What happened? 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'm trying to pull up the. 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 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. 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's worth 90 billion. And Rick Caruso has seemed, you know, to sort of figure out a way to make malls work. In Atlanta, in LA, at least. There were also a ton of other crazy.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 breaks 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 moats. And so protests and political movements also had another role to play. As a break, 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 put 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 sectors 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, this data center that got canceled in New Jersey, by comparison to AI, it's tiny, generous to call it a data center. Yeah, it's more of like a data point than a data center. Edge computing. Yeah. So it's 25,000 square feet. The current 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 is actually going to buy the capacity, where it was going to go. But you can think of it much more like delivering you Netflix faster than training the next AI model. But it worked. They got the data center canceled. And so this is going to be a data point in the minds of AI policymakers, decision makers, leaders for a long time. And I think that that will, 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, like, refocus the conversation on actual impact. Like the 20% needs to go up and people need to say, yes, this is helpful. And then. And then mitigate the negative externalities before they turn into problems, like 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 gonna bump into along the way. Like, let's go mitigate those now. Because all the hyperscalers could have been subsidizing electrical build outs, like, years ago for sure. So, anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a full. With a more capable baseline. It's 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. What happened? Falls over 10%. Actually 11% now, after anthropic announces that Claude can streamline COBOL code. Oh, no, there we go. Wild, wild times. The example that I was talking about earlier about Amazon's Rufus, I was going to say Anthropic announces they're going to launch an international business machine. We are an international business machine. 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. I love it. Sometimes the best course of action is to delete and recreate. Delete everything. Sometimes that's what you gotta do. 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. Is this a real article? Peasants. 1887. 1887. You can actually find it on the New York Times website. October 25, 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. Oh, it's actually like. It's a scan. Right. It's not text. Yeah. Incredibly hard to read. But the peasants did destroy the balloon. They destroyed it. They got it. Somebody asked, would you Live next to a data center. Not a data center, but a center for dates. Dates are underrated. Yeah, dates are good. Healthy, delicious. Anyway, 11 labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Let's go over to the horse section of the show. There's some big horse news going on. The moment you've been waiting for. The Financial Times. A horse walks into a lab. Let's see. Peasants destroying a balloon in 1887 is setting a waymo on fire in 2025. Yes, but. Okay, so the interesting thing about the Waymo fires was that we, we live in LA where the Waymo 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. Yeah, I saw someone holding a flag. Yeah. And that was it. I didn't see. I didn't even see the fires at all. And so a lot of these. 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. That's a couple hundred people. And if it's in one block and the photographer's 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 comp that to the World Trade Center 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 protests, but it is important to understand the scale of what's happening in the real world and the actual impact of that. And you need to be charting this because if they're getting bigger, they need to be addressed more. And even if they're small, 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, if that. 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 building apart and we're building a park grass on the roof. Exactly. Yeah. There's like five easy tricks to get, you know, data centers approved all over the country, but everyone's been putting them on the low priority pile. But they're certainly going to be more important over the next couple years. Why don't you read us? Yes. A horse walks into a lab. It's a December afternoon at the Campo Argento de Polo at Palermo in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. The sun is shining in a sky of clear Argentine blue. The jacarandas. This is too noisy. I'm gonna 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 blackjack boots has just marched away. Argentina's president, Javier Milei, famous for his Elvis sideburns and economic chainsaw, has taken his seat above the center line. Eight players center on to the pitch, tanned arms, taut muscles, hair curling over the collars of their polo shirts. It's the first semifinal 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 Cambasio, the world's number one player for more than two decades, and the sports goat, the greatest of all time. Cambasio 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 prick, poised for action. The whistle blows, the game begins. The players streak up the pitch, stick swinging, using their ponies to ride off their opponents, to block them from getting to the ball. They gallop, turn, stop, turn on a six pence and start speeding in the opposite direction. They bounce on the ball of a small head of the stick. They bounce the ball on the small head of a stick, hit backhands under the pony's 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 steeps 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. The real slop problem in medieval cities, humanity versus slop. Now, 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, plate 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 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 Pireza the circle of life began on an estancia. Estancia near the town of Coronel Suarez, a six and a half hour drive southwest of Buenos Aires. She was born on December 12, 1988, a slight mare raised on a diet of weeping love grass, 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 Higai, one of four brothers who competed at the highest level. Four brothers, all polo legend. That's elite. 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 gauchos traditional floppy beret. The bonia are typically male. The Open has only had multiple. Has only ever had male umpires. But the ponies are usually female. The players favor mares, citing their intelligence and grit. Polo Puerza 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 mayor was a natural polo player. One in a million, he said. Guy said in a video made to celebrate Polo Puerza's induction into the Polo Pony hall of Fame. She had an impressive heart. Also, she was a mayor who never got tired. Polo Puerza retired in 2004. Before she died, samples of her DNA were banked in liquid nitrogen in the laboratories of Kyrion, a biotechnology company co founded by Gabriel Vichera and based in a science park in the town of Pilar, 35 miles north of Palermo's polo fields. With his neatly trimmed beard and white lab coat, Vachera, 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. Made sense. His company is named after Chiron, the mythical archer. Half man, half horse. It's the morning of the open semifinal and we're sitting around a large table in the cool of the conference room at Kiran, just a few meters away from the vats of nitrogen housing Polo Puerza's remaining cells. There are photographs of horses on the wall. Each clone. Each is a clone Vachera 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 Puerzas, 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 Puerza 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. I'm in favor. You're in favor of cloning? Yeah. I mean why not push the sport to the limit? I feel like it's kind of like not in the spirit of just like a couple guys getting on horses that they just like found. Round them up, you know, it's. Well, they should have the sort of like Wild league. Yeah. Where you can just go find a wild horse, go play. This definitely creates an opportunity for the Wild League. Yeah, sure. This is kind of the free range league. What do they call it? The. The Enhanced games. Yeah, this is the Enhanced Games for polo for sure. Anyway, Tyler Are you a Polo accelerationalist? Sorry? Your business is. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Tyler, are you a Polo purist? I think I'm in favor of the cloning. You're a Polo accelerationist? Yeah. P ack, as they say. Yeah. 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? I think so. I think it's deleted. Probably the running community. Zach, Pog Rob came in and said you're about to be running for me. Yeah. Let me tell you about app love and 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 lean. Should learn a thing or two about edutainment. Edutainment. This is fantastic. Tyler. Somebody was saying it's not out yet. It's coming out March 31st. Oh, okay. Mark your calendars. Yeah, I'm going to grind this. Productivity is going to fall. Somebody was saying it's like it could easily be an Ender's game scenario where it's just. It's just those racks weren't simulated. Those were real NVL 72s. 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. 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. Apparently there's another game just called Insider Trading coming to Steam. 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 here 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, like, insane things and sort of turns it into a completely different game. Ryan says someone make a TVPN intern simulator. That'd be good. I'm still waiting for you to actually now that Tyler's, like, promoted and just a real deal employee, which happened after, like, two weeks last year. But that kind of would be kind of fun for all of us to kind of, like, relive the days of internal intern summer. Yeah. Whoever has the highest score gets hired. Yeah, I do. I do wonder. We've seen this. I heard this 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 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 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. Free to play. 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 Two. 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. Nailed it. And there was this interesting story. This developer that spent like three years working on this live service game and it like completely flopped and then like in his free time made like this game called Peak in three months and it went super viral and did really well. And I'm excited to see. When do we see the actual acceleration in vibe coding? Do we get more of these 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 like click on it, but like the mechanic actually has to be good too. And a million people will think it's funny. Yes. 10,000 will try it. Yes. 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 and I'm reengaged. I think that will. Dan says Peak was that developer's peak. Nominal 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 super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Signal says serious question. How do you make someone with absolutely zero gaming experience CEO of a very prominent and important gaming platform. Asha was announced as the new EVP and CEO of Microsoft Gaming after a multi year run over on the enterprise AI side of the business. A lot of people had had opinions on this. Well, I have an opinion signals question is how do you make someone with absolutely zero gaming experience CEO of a very prominent and important gaming platform? You make them lock in and spend three months gaming. And so that should Be the first task. It should say, okay, you have no meetings. Microsoft Teams is shut down for you. Clippy's got it. Yeah, we're handling everything. Your job is to speed run every major Xbox game. Fable, all the Call of Duty series. You're going to play all the Halo games. You're going to get good, you're going to rank and you're going to learn to speed run and you're going to really, really lock in and establish true credibility that can't be faked. And then we will announce you. That's the hack. People are pouring, pouring one out for Phil Spencer who was at Microsoft for 38 years and his profile picture is just the Xbox X because he's a legend. And Palmer Luckey quoted it and put an F in the chat because the world you grow up in no longer exists, apparently. What else is going on here? Okay, so someone asked Asha, what's your favorite game? And Smash, JT says, okay, I'll play your game, you rogue. Chrono Trigger forever goaded. Final Fantasy VII GoldenEye 007 Chrono Trigger will forever be number one. I never played Chrono Trigger. I did play Final Fantasy 7 and Goldeneye and Asha said, Great list. I did my top three in another reply. Halo Valheim, which I believe is newer and has had much less sticking power in 007. It's been a long time since I played Chrono Trigger. Have you done every ending? Thanks for all the detail. I appreciate it a ton. And is is the question that Chrono Trigger doesn't have multiple endings? I actually don't know. Okay, so I don't know what's going on here, but Xbox CEO accused of using AI for replies saying she played Chrono Trigger in her reply to Smash. She would have been six years old. You could play it later, which would be very young age to play it, but maybe she loves JRP cheese and picked it up later. It is a curious thought. She must be a huge gamer. Or this is AI. This doesn't read like AI. I don't know. What does Palmer Lucky say? He says Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time and I was only three when it came out. True. Yeah, good point. Also, I don't know Chrono Trigger like I played Final Fantasy 7. I don't actually. I think there are multiple endings. Like I would not remember. I don't know. Anyway, what else is in the timeline? We should tell everyone about the linear lineup for today because we have four guests joining us. We Have Ala from Citrini. We have Will Brown from Prime Intellect. Then Michelle's coming. And Alap is not at Citrini. He just co authored the piece. He co authored the piece and he also wrote a part one that's a very good read that was released before the mega viral essay. And then Mike's coming on from also capital at 150. So linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents and you should be too. So, Yeah, Nick says hot take doesn't matter if CEO is gamer. Strauss Zelnick has said it's perfectly. A CEO's job is to attract, retain and motivate the best talent in the business and then get out of their way. New Xbox CEO Asha doesn't need to be a gamer to run a company. She simply needs to do what the CEO's job of running a gaming company is supposed to do, which is to hire talent and allow game studios to make their creative vision come to reality. The thing I think they maybe could have done better with the announcement is talk about what the rest of the management team looks like. Because if you position Asha as this elite operator who's going to like, really, like, there's a way, like if she's like managing a team of people that are gamers and love gaming and she's like working with them to figure out how to make the platforms better and better, that's more compelling than, you know, bringing somebody in that. Yeah. I'm trying to think of other industries where the CEO doesn't use the product. Part of this is like. Industries where the CEO doesn't use a product. I mean, think about almost every category of enterprise software. I think they all dog food the product, but not on a personal level. Like their teams might. Yeah, I guess that's right. I was trying to think of, like, are there. I mean, it's like Rick Rubin doesn't know how to play instruments, but he does listen to the music. And I feel like most of the big, like Hollywood agents or power players, like, maybe they didn't know how to use a film camera, but they watched movies, I believe. I don't know if there's someone out there who's just like, yeah, I've never seen Saving Private Ryan, but it made me a lot of money because I greenlit it because, like, I knew it was. Yeah. One thing's for sure. Xbox is not in founder mode. Yep. And will never be. But who did be? I don't know. Well, how do you. The. The guy. The guy who started Xbox. What is the guy? That's. It's. Seamus Blackley is like credited with. Yeah. Creating and designing the original Xbox. I think he's now in the. In the chocolate business. Yeah. I mean I definitely think the CEO of a video game company can just provide a fantastic environment for creative individuals. And also, I mean Xbox is a hardware company. It's also a live streaming company. It's also a studio that. Just. Where you just have studio heads that go in green light projects. It's not all directly related. Handel says Larry Ellison using Oracle on a nice Sunday morning. Let's go. Good job. That's correct. I don't know. He probably does store a lot of data in Oracle. Who knows. Yeah. Aaron says the CEO necessarily is not in the product daily. Who knows? We'll wait to see. It already happened. Yeah. I mean we'll see. Yeah. We're working on. We got in touch with her on Friday to find a time for her to jump on the show. Yeah. PS6 might be delayed because of the memory stuff. There's also. I don't know. Yeah. They should just delay the next Xbox and let. Let Asha just game for three months like you said. Six months. Yeah. The real, the really interesting thing on the hardware side is a lot of people were freaking out over the weekend playing with ChatGimmy AI from Talas. We had the founder on the show. He has baked llama 38B onto silicon and so it runs at 16,000 tokens per second. So you ask it your typical LLM query and it just boom, loads the page. It's all done. There's no token streaming in. You're just at the bottom of the page. It's actually sort of jarring because then you have to scroll back up. But it's clearly like incredible. And this is coming and we've experienced it with Codex 5.3 Cerebras or Spark. Is that what they call it? And there's a few others and so. And it doesn't have web search. Yeah. Yeah. So if you ask it what is tvpn? It says Quinn Butcher's Pizza Network. It gave you a different answer this time. Wow. It's really hallucinating anyway that I think that the system on a chip Cerebras, the. The wafer scale super fast inference is going to be very amazing for. Yeah, it really is just a. Is a next token predictor. It says TVPN could also stand for the Black Pine Network. This is not a well known term or organization but it could be a fictional or made up name. It's having fun. It's having fun. But I think that there's a very interesting play where the gaming systems basically bake a style transfer diffusion module onto silicon and put it on the chip. This is what Nvidia did with dlss. Dynamic something super sourcing, super sampling, deep learning, super sampling DLSS. So if you have a Nvidia, what is it? GTA GeForce? Like 4090-3090. There's a section of the chip that's trained to take a 1080p video game and up res it in real time to 4K. And so you can run, if your hardware can only run the game at 720p60 frames a second, it will up res all of those frames. It's not perfect but it gives you a sharper image. It's basically just AI sharpening that's happening. You could imagine a model that is trained to turn the images that are generated from a video game from Unreal Engine into something that's actually photoreal. Like make it like a movie that prompt that we've seen happen and you're like wow, that actually looks like a movie. You could run that in real time at 60 frames a second and be playing a video game that looks truly photoreal because the actual game engine graphics have totally plateaued and there doesn't really feel like they're just going to jump to cinema quality anytime soon. But if you use AI to do the last step, I feel like that could be really good. What do you think Tyler? Yeah, you could also do like a Genie 3 type model baked down. Right? So like interactive video. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like, it's really slow and limited right now. But if you bake that down you could play that. Yeah. I still think there's a lot of work to be done on Genie 3. Yeah, maybe it's like one or two more models. Yeah, like clearly that those are like llama 2 level right now. But yes, yes, yes, I completely agree. Anyway, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to Restream. Dan's Gaming says my theory is that Phil and Sarah did not want to shove AI into everything at Xbox. They were forced to retire and resign. Microsoft is replacing them with someone with a strong background in AI and no experience in gaming. This is just getting insane. I don't know. I have a very, I'm completely white pilled on AI in gaming. As I just said. Like, I think AI in gaming can be really, really great. I mean there's a ton of games where the developer would love to have NPC dialogue that they don't have to sit there and write, okay, this townsperson's gonna offer you five coins for your sword. It's like, no, just like be an NPC be, you know, you have coins, act agentically and then you go up and you're exchanging with the townsperson, your sword for your coins or whatever and you have like a much more natural interaction. That feels really great. I don't know. There's a million bull cases for AI in gaming. In my opinion. It seems like the hardest. It seems like one of the easiest things to sort of justify we have Mr. Shah. So let's tell you about Figma Ship the best version, not the first one with figma, including introducing Claude code to figma, explore more options and push ideas further. And without further ado, we'll bring in our first guest of the show, Ayla. How are you doing? What's going on? Doing great. How are you guys? Doing great. Is this your first time triggering a global sell off? The first time so far. But I'm just the messenger. Just the way I look at it, we've got a lot of opportunities and a lot of scary things coming down the pipe. Okay, so yeah, take us through the thought process, like how long had this been simmering? What was the actual process of putting together this report? And then what do you want people to take away from it? And then maybe we can go into some of the reactions and your reactions to those reactions. Absolutely. The process ultimately is that I've been building in AI for 15 years and I've been an investor for 20. And so especially the last six months as I've just been using agentic coding myself and my teams have adopted it. It's just been a step change function in how much we can get done and just thinking through, hey, how is this going to be.

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Lots of crazy reaction. Really broke through with something that, you know, is framed as sort of, you know, fan fiction, low probability. And it's always interesting when someone posts something like, I think there's a 10% chance that this happens. So it's worth talking about. And I'm like, like, what's the 90% scenario? No one's getting any clicks for the 90% scenario. And it gets completely. It's not that exciting. Yeah. And throwing out something like, oh yeah, like, you know, 10% chance that this crazy thing happens that doesn't. That people don't react to it. Like it's a 10% scenario or, or whatever percentage you put on a 20% chance, 30% p. Doom. 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, all of the AI lab CEOs when press, they'll be like, well, I do think that there's a 10% chance that humanity dies or something like that. And, and that only the headline is predicts humanity dies. Yeah, 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 gonna be known for forever. So be careful out there with those predictions. But. Okay, so Sunday, yesterday, doing a lot of. Okay. Yeah, yeah, this was yesterday, around 11. Really took it off 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 every, almost every paragraph I was experiencing some element of gel man'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. 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 6.8% today. The Citrini sell off is here. Citrini poppy. Despite tracking to close to a billion. Isn't it a billion monthly orders. Yes. Something insane. My experience with it was you had mentioned to me that, 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 clearly stuck on some search feature because I'm only seeing Citrini posts and 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 Tae 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. 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 Citrini article? Because it is sort of long and we do have someone from Citrini 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, down broad. Yeah. And it's interesting, a lot of people were saying, guys, there's no way that futures are red just because of this Citrini essay. That is obviously science fiction. Yeah. And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually stated that reported it, that it's the Citrini sell off. 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 is the post here. The Citrini sell off. The quote from the terminal software payment. Stocks slide after citrini 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 an interesting situation because like absolutely goaded founding team, but they're all disinterested in jumping back in and turning it around. Yeah, you have max with a firm who over a long enough time horizon will probably compete in every yeah, and it's hard because 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. Young Macro had a take quote tweeting Citrini 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 the 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 the average investor can't just read this piece and be like, okay, I believe it. I am worried about software stock, so I'm going to rotate into a basket of anthropic OpenAI and Space X. They don't have that option yet. They by the end of the year, you can buy Nvidia, you can buy Google. There's plenty of ways. Yeah, totally, totally. Just look at Leopold Aschenbrenner'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 for massive unemployment can be addressed through fiscal policy transfers, wage subsidies, et cetera. 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 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 principle's intuition obviously tells you something is awry 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 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 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. 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. I just mean, let me, let me. 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 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 Aschenbrenner 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 total people are like, you know, very San Francisco coded like vaguely ea maybe Safetiest people where this is like, okay, they're like a financial research firm 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. It's interesting for a couple reasons, because it didn't. 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 Door Cash podcast. And it seems sort of silly, but I think that we are now seeing the downstream ramifications of that. So, Jordy, 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. There we 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, 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 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 lent to a bunch of these different SaaS. Companies that are now being threatened. Defaults climbing as this sort of like 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 frictions. It's like not switching Car insurance. Because 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 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. 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, take away AI being great and powerful may not equal all the markets ripping, but. Well, two different things. Market ripping, individual companies and median income. Yes. 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 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. Yeah, I have more on that. But let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every 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, worth maybe noting like the kind of companies they call out in the piece by name. So poor, all these companies. Let's check in with ServiceNow, which is, which is one of the companies that was most heavily. Yep. Down for almost four and a half percent today. 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. Yeah, I was using, using Zapier 10 years ago. It does feel like they're kind of in a, in a decent position given that like they're already their core businesses, like help people automate different workflows. But. And then DoorDash, we already talked about that. MasterCard and Visa, they talk about suffering revenue pressure because an AI agent would just opt for stablecoins which feels like again, something that many people on the show have come on and made the case for. Why agents will leverage stablecoins or prefer stablecoins seems, seems like a possibility, but unlikely that that will just, you know, all payment volume will shift over there overnight. And then Amex, Amex, they called out specifically because of their consumer base being just generally weakened by labor displacement. And then a bunch of others. Travel booking, insurance, real estate tax, et cetera. Travel booking I thought was funny because most travel agents don't actually take fees from the consumer. They take fees from the side of the hotel, the airline or whatever. And so the idea that you'll just immediately get like every AI agent or every individual will just immediately. I didn't fully process that one. And anyways, back to you. I did think that Jon Lober, I wanted to go through his piece because I thought he had one of the better rebuttals to the piece of art. Yeah, I thought that was good. I think the thing that just keeps sticking out to me is like. And I was debating with Sagar and Jetty about this as well. 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 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 30, 40 billion dollars. 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 that's just not that much in the grand scheme of the actual America's gdp. And so there's this disconnect between 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 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 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 number of people that are software developers less than 1% of America. The number of people that work at tech companies broadly is less than 10%. And so even if there's some massive reallocation there and then you go into, even in white collar, if everything shifts, the rest of world is hit. And there's just a lot of other dynamics that Feel like you can see crazy gyration 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 every, you know, it sends like all these mega caps really funny down. Let's go through this piece from 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. John Loeb wrote a great piece very quickly after this called Contra Citrini and he says popular markets commentator Citrini 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 doom saying I want to present a critique of Citrini'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 Citrini 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. This example actually shows the very opposite of Citrini'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 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 backend systems is indefensible. Citrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SaaS. Companies are 1, the products become obsolete, 0 margin, and 2 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 direct 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 and becoming competitive again. And my own personal call out here is even like, until we see a round of layoffs at a company that is 5000 software engineers at once, it's hard to believe 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, interesting. 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 three years. This was my pushback against Rune. Rune was like, was like, oh like Codex is so good. You could just vibe code everything. It's amazing. And I was like, why is the United app bad? The United app is good. 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 will die on this hill. But yes, hopefully it's going to get better 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. 3 this was probably the best point from his response re industrialization. There will be some labor displacement. Of course. Driving stands out. Many types of white collar work, as Citrini suggests, will undergo some gyration 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 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 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. We 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. Where does he close? He says and beyond. The outcome of industrial mega projects is of course that we move toward abundance. These abundance build. America will once again be more independent and make things at large scale and low cost, transcending material scarcity. Diversity 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. 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 Citrini's might suggest. To be clear, I'm extremely bullish on AI and expect that one day 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 Citrini 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 largest 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 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. That's a good response. Rise calls out. 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, adop, user adoption, and of course driver adoption. It would be really funny to be using like the Vibe coded version where somebody's like, yeah, I just launched a delivery app and your food will be here in four hours. Yeah, it does feel like if I was Tony, I'd be flying to find Citrini, having to work face to face opening up a can of. I know where you're going with it. Yeah, it feels like, okay, so you built like 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 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 went on. 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. Yeah, DoorDash has modes. 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, the only scenarios that I can see the sort of like 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 guy's my buddy now. I like, I like going to the airport with him. Yeah, right. So, yeah, I was thinking about Amazon Basics and 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. 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. 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 and entirely new relationships 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, not even thinking about like, oh, I need to be monitoring dashboard or. Yeah, no, no, I agree. I think the. But I think the Amazon Basics of Salesforce, it 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. That's a very different situation. It's not like people are just going to like the SaaS supermarket. I think his pushback would be like, they will effectively because they will go to an agent that says, 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, 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. Before we move on, let me tell you about consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's continue. Very funny post from Dime2Square 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. What Was this next one? Dimes is on a roll average 2026 AI macro research now I am Legend this may be the most terrifying novel you will ever read. Isn't that just the zombie apocalypse movie? That might be the most market moving piece ever written, says Clouseau 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 is really, really underrated. I noticed like I heard about Something Big is happening on a car podcast. I got that forwarded to me in an email like 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 the you haven't seen Ilya on Dorkash like that. Actually that's a joke because really, 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 went, it went, it broke containers. Like it truly, truly went big. And that's certainly market moving. And the Citrini post did too. We can go through his agentic commerce thing, but it's a little wonky. Let's see what venture anthropologist had to say. Citrini 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 2020 26. Yeah, people are pushing back and someone was saying that this is similar to Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. One of the 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 Sosc114 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 for the whole system depends on production rises, but no one can afford to buy what's produced. The contradiction between production and realization. Citrini's piece describes this again exact dynamic, then declares there's no natural break, but it's the most Marxist. It's the most marxist piece of financial analysis written in years and it makes the same errors Marx did. Shumpter 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 Hayeks Prices are the break Citrini says doesn't exist. WHO funds $200 billion 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 build out becomes uneconomical, capital gets destroyed and reallocated. Citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petit bourgeoisie. The 180kpm driving Uber is textbook but 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 W2 income. There long the hyperscalers posting records in Citrini'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 Citrini 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 air 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. It's Monday. Everyone is reading the latest Citrini 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, lesson there. I wonder how broadly the. The article. The article virality like longform 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 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. 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 Citrini back and forth? We do have someone from Citrini coming on the. Yeah, we can, we can keep going. The thing about the Citrini piece is that 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 are asking that. And yeah, I mean, the answer is, is commodity commodities. You want to be in like, like gold and, and silicon and whatever is at the bottom of the stack and then whatever has the deepest moat. And then you want to be at the, in the AI companies as well. Sean says he collapses as well. Thank you, Sean. Thank you. Let's switch gears to something that is certainly more important than the Citrini piece. A street legal modded garbage truck. What? Pratt and Whitney J3 jet engine. Okay, let's see it. Is this real? Let's pull this up. You don't even know anymore. Wait, I've seen this Pratt and Whitney before. Hermeus, I think bought one. I have no idea if that's real, but that's remarkable if true. Yeah, no, you can. Those are expensive. But I do think that they will sell those to you. Feels like a six foot flame at the end of your vehicle is not street legal. I would agree. I would agree. Anyways, horrors coming out of Mexico. Yeah. Yesterday, really sad situation. Our very own Joe Wiesenthal had been in the Puerto Vallarta area and had just left. I think he got out of there an hour, an hour before the Chaos erupted. So very grateful. I hope everyone who's down there is safe. R Marriott on Reddit. Somebody said Weston Puerto Vallarta won't honor late checkout with streets closed. I am platinum elite. 1000 lifetime Marriott nights. Wait, I thought that was a joke. I didn't realize somebody actually posted this. Kiwi is on fire due to the cartels setting fires and buses. Cars and buses on fire all over the city. The airport is closed and Ubers and taxis are not running. I asked for a 4pm checkout, which I'm entitled to based on availability. They won't extend past 2pm and said we would have to use the hospitality screen. Sweet. We are supposed to be leaving for Bucheiros this afternoon, but that isn't looking very good. Worst bonvoy property I have ever experienced. I don't think anyone will be checking in today, so there's no reason to at least not extend us to 4pm this is so fascinating. 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 data center. Like what actually happened in Mexico, because it was not just buyers and a few cars. This was like a military operation. Correct. Because my wife texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X monitoring. You're monitoring the situation. All the open source intel. You texted me. You texted me and I was like, oh, what's up, Joe? 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? A long weekend. And I was like, are you. Are you. Are you joking? Anyways, the really, really sad situation. Basically the leader of the cartel cjng, which is like effectively his paramilitary group. Any. Like, if you looked at any photo or video of them over the last 10, 20 years, they look like they're special forces. Yeah. I think the story is that many of them actually did train at some point with US Special Forces and then flipped. Or. Or the. Probably the Mexican military. Yeah, no, they were. But the. But the US Special Forces have trained the Mexican military. Okay. And so these guys are like. Like they have their own version. Yeah, it's not a larp. Like, oh, they just like picked up something they watch like a video on YouTube. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure. 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, like, private Armies in the world. Probably the largest private army in the world. And so el mention their main guy gets taken out and then they respond by starting to just like blow up, like roads. They. They took over an airport, I guess. Like they just start causing mass chaos. Yeah. Because their leader person in Puerto Vallarta. If you look at any video of Puerto Vallarta, if you just went outside yesterday and looked around, there's like fires rising up everywhere. It looks like. 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. Down south. Well, 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 mongodb. It's crazy. Back then you had to store files and text files. Now MySQL existed. But the 90s and early 2000s were iconic. And we got a 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. You had a different device for everything. A Walkman, a Game Boy, an Xbox. You can still. You can still go see a monster truck rally. I had an Xbox. You had an Xbox? Yeah. We have mod retros right here. 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 can play this liquid metal object design. I feel like this is overdue for a comeback. Pretty close. Fluid forms. Good music too. Blobism. Blobism. And biomorphic design. Biomorphic design. Easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past because everything was really blocky in the 80s. Futuristic vision for things like sportswear, watches, music, play. Clear, clear case. This is a prime example of when technology influences form. Cad, a modeling software introduced what is called nerves. Nerves, 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. And back then they were rocking this kind of hardware when they were saying that all retail stores. Yes, globally, will be wiped out within the next five years of 10 years. Yeah, you had to be there. 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, 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 that's not quite the lesson because the Internet was still actually the most powerful force for economic growth and change. And it did radically change society. It just did so over two decades. 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.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 gotta 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? Extremely aware, extremely aware. How did you process it? Because my parents were trying to explain to like a five year old. Yeah, yeah. No, I was like, I could generally. Yeah, yeah. I remember the turn of the millennium. I was overseas on a vacation and there was a lot of fear. Yeah, well, you got to get out, everything's collapsing. You got to seek refuge. No, no, there was like a fear that like, okay, something crazy might happen. But in general, my parents were dialed in enough that they had been through the boom and bust of something bad will happen to actually understand that. 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 0, 0. 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. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right? Why? Well, like, 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. Yes. You had to be there. Did no one have foresight? No. Nothing happened, right? 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 hard coded, like our dates in our systems are, 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 war. 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 the gong for the Y2K paydays. A lot of people made a lot of money. But there were also a whole bunch of interesting rules. And you know, hotshot over here, I'm going to give him a pop quiz. Do you know how to calculate a leap year? If you get. If you get this wrong, there's going to be consequences. Okay, okay. No, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Do you know how to. Consequences. Oh, no, no. I told you there'd be consequences, Tyler. All right. Okay. That was the most Zoomer thing I've ever seen in my life. He just has to go. He's. He's brain dead. Wait, how to calculate leap year? Yes. When do leap years happen? I don't know. Like the actual calculation. Isn't it every four years? Every four years. Except every hundred years. Except every thousand years. So they toggle back and forth. And so at 1900 was not a leap year. And so if you didn't know any of the rules, you would just think, oh, every four. 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 hard code the system. There'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 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. Yes, yes, and we did. But it cost us $100 billion, 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 gonna be the end or 2000 was gonna 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 are 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. I don't have negative 9 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? Oh, it's probably pretty low. It's extremely low. 20%. It's exactly 20%. Nailed it. 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 for, to benefit your company and your people. I mean, it could Also be those surveys, you never know who. You never know 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, like, there are lots of companies where you have to be HIPAA compliant. Maybe they just don't have a HIPAA compliant LLM available. And so they're just like, yeah, I literally can't use it. Or like, 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? Yeah, but I'm sure there's still like, they use services that under, you know, like behind a bunch of layers, there actually is AI going on. Right. I agree. I agree. So, like, maybe they're not interfacing with LMS directly, but at some level, like, there are LLMs running totally total. 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 Walmart definitely has a recommendation system on their website. Yeah. Or like the Walmart software is being updated faster than it usually would be. Isn't that. That's AI, Right? You believe that that's happening? It could be. You're willing to bet it all on that? You're willing to bet it all on Walmart going through a dramatic digital transformation right now? You don't think it's slow? You don't think they're still like, let's figure this thing out. I think they're probably writing stuff faster than they used to be. You think they're past the pitch deck phase? Maybe. Hopefully. Yeah. We got to talk about. We should talk about Rufus. Do you guys hear about Rufus? No. What happened with 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'm trying to pull up the. I have some more. My, 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 and just right up until the bombs drop. That. 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. 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 is the prediction Directionally. 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's worth 90 billion. And Rick Caruso has seemed, you know, to sort of figure out a way to make malls work in LA at least. There were also a ton of other crazy.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 just 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 purchase prediction, like nearly every dot com prediction, had some directionally correct element to it. But various breaks 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 another role to play. As a break, 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 put 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 sectors targeted tariffs and domestic preference procurement rules over the next decade. And so I was thinking about this in the context of, of the New Brunswick Data center protest. So the actual, this data center that got canceled in New Jersey by comparison to AI like it's tiny, generous to call it a data center. Yeah, it's more of like a data point. Edge computing. 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 is actually going to buy the capacity, where it was going to go. But you can think of it much more like delivering you Netflix faster than training the next AI model. But it worked. They got the data center canceled. 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 that will, 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 like 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 problem like real problems for average Americans. The energy issue was foreseeable, it was predictable and maybe that's what we need to be forecasting. 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. Let's go mitigate those those now. Because all the hyperscalers could have been subsidizing electrical build outs like years ago for sure. So anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a full, 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. What happened? Falls over 10%. Actually 11%. Now after anthropic announces that Claude can streamline COBOL code. Oh no, there we go. Wild, wild times. The example that I was talking about earlier about Amazon's Rufus, I was going to say Anthropic announces they're going to launch an international business Machine, we are an international. 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. I love it. Sometimes the best course of action is to delete and recreate. Delete everything. Sometimes that's what you gotta do. 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. This is a real article. Peasants, 1887. 1887. You can actually find it on the New York Times website. October 25, 18, 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. Oh, it's actually like. It's a scan. Right. It's not text. Yeah. Incredibly hard to read. But the peasants did destroy the balloon. They destroyed it. They got it. Somebody asked, would you live next to a date center? Not a data center, but a center for dates. Dates are underrated. Yeah, dates are good. Healthy, delicious. Anyway, 11 labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Let's go over to the horse section of the show. There's some big horse news going on. The moment you've been waiting for in the Financial Times. A horse walks into a lab says peasants destroying a balloon in 1887 is setting a waymo on fire in 2025. Yes, but. Okay, so the interesting thing about the Waymo fires was that we live in LA where the Waymo 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. Yeah, I saw someone holding a flag. Yeah. And that was it. I didn't see. I didn't even see the fires at all. And so a lot of these. 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. 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 comp that to the World Trade Center 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 protests, but it is important to understand the scale of what's happening in the real world and the actual impact of that. And you need to be charting this because if they're getting bigger, they need to be addressed more. And even if they're small, people have good points. So they should be listened to and, and the solution should be brought to the populace before it gets to a vote. You could tell that that New Brunswick debate would go way differently if the hyperscalers were there saying like, hey, good news, 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 building a park. And we're building a park underground. We're putting grass on the roof. Exactly. Yeah. There's like five easy tricks to like, get, you know, data centers approved all over the country, but everyone's been putting them in the. On the low priority pile. But they're certainly going to be more important over the next couple years. Yeah, why don't you read us? Yes. A horse walks into a lab. It's a December afternoon at the Campo Argento Dec Polo at Palermo in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. The sun is shining in a sky of clear Argentine blue. The jacarandas. This is too noisy. I'm gonna 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 Elvis sideburns and economic chainsaw, has taken his seat above the center line. Eight players center on to the pitch. Tanned arms, taut muscles, hair curling over the collars of their polo shirts. It's the first semifinal 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 Cambasio, the world's number one player for more than two decades, and the sports goat, the greatest of all time. Cambasio 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. The whistle blows. The game begins. The players streak up the pitch, stick swinging, using their ponies to ride off their opponents, to block them from getting to the ball. They gallop, turn, stop, turn on a six pence and start speeding in the opposite direction. They bounce on the ball of a small head of the stick. They bounce the ball on the small head of a stick, hit backhands under the pony's necks. If there's a break, they gallop.

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