Citrini Research’s viral piece, AI and the economy, 90s Nostalgia | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Massive sell off in the markets, thanks to friend of the show, Citrini. Lots of crazy reaction, really broke through with something that, you know, is framed as sort of, you know, fan fiction, low probability. It's always interesting when someone posts something and they're like, I think there's a 10% chance that this happens, so it's worth talking about. And I'm like, what's the 90% scenario? No one's getting any clicks for the 90% scenario? And it gets completely ripped out.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  It's not that exciting.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and throwing out something like, oh yeah, like 10% chance that this crazy thing happens. People don't react to it, like it's 10% scenario. Or whatever percentage you put on it, 20% chance, 30% P doom. They only take away from what you said.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Like, as soon as you say 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...

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Sunday, yesterday, 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, almost every paragraph, I was experiencing some element of Gellman'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.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, I think a lot of people obviously called out the...

• 1:27John Coogan?

  The DoorDash thing.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  The DoorDash comment, which, there's so many businesses that you could have chosen in DoorDash's place, but it didn't matter.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  My experience with it was, you had mentioned to me that like, oh, it's the current thing, and I was pretty offline. And then, by the time I actually started refreshing the timeline, I was like, oh, I'm like, clearly like, stuck on some search feature. Because I'm only seeing Citrini posts and like posts reacting to it and reacting to the reaction and it had done a full news cycle, both a backlash and then a backlash to the backlash and Takehims 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. So we can maybe go through some of the reactions. I mean, the futures were red last night, the market is down broadly.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  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

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  obviously science fiction.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually stated that

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Reported it.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  that it's the Citrini sell-off.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  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. 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. It does seem like there's some value there. There's some stickiness and it'll be interesting to see,

• 3:18John Coogan?

  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 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 a liquidity component that the Fed can address quickly with liquidity facilities and asset purchases, repo lines, quantitative easing.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  As seen in recent episodes of Banking Stress, losses from impaired assets won't disappear, but can in principle be moved where the broadest shoulders are. It's an odd situation because you're seeing all of this capital evaporate from the public tech markets, but the labs aren't public yet, so they can't fully absorb it. Like, they sort of can, but it's much more opaque. And it's not like most, like, the average investor can't just read this piece and be like, okay, I, I believe it. I am worried about software stocks, so I'm going to rotate into a basket of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. They don't have that option yet. They might by the end of the year.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  You can buy Nvidia, you can buy Google. There's plenty of ways.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. 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 a 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

• 5:22John Coogan?

  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. 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 slash 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

• 6:05John Coogan?

  by some hypothetical, through the complexity of the novel two-bread loaf production process, you suddenly get tangled and can no longer access the cupboard, then it's quite possible you will, you will starve. I thought that was a good take. It is interesting how this moved the markets way more than AI 2027?

• 6:25John Coogan?

  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.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  But like AI twenty twenty seven, probably like the the the market reaction was like, invest more in the labs at the time because it was kind of aimed for more more of a west coast audience in general.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just mean like if you had taken AI twenty twenty seven and you had just asked like, I own this basket of public company stocks, what should I be doing? And AI twenty twenty seven is your backbone, you would probably sell a lot like you're selling right now, like the AI twenty twenty seven situational awareness PDFs, like those are the Leopold Ashenbrenner philosophy that is now being reflected in the market. But you know, he didn't go long any of these stocks anyway. Oh, sorry, really quickly.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I wonder how much that is just because of like who is actually writing it like the people are like, you know, very San Francisco coded like vaguely EA maybe same people where this is like, okay, they're like a financial research firm.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  And and 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.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  Jordy. I did think it'd be helpful to kind of provide a summary summary of the essay. I think the original essay, it feels like they use quite a lot of AI to write it. I'm going to use AI to summarize it for you.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, so this scenario, you should have got to this at the beginning, but by late twenty twenty five, 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. Mm-hmm.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  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. Default climbing as the sort of like perceived recurring revenue ends up not being fully recurring. There's a whole segment talking about how like a lot of value capture in the world is

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  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 then maybe you do that more often and that that pulls out some potential earnings from the system. The other thing they talk about is like all these different tech hubs and how many like prime mortgages there are that might not be so prime if there's a layoff and somebody ends up having to switch, you know, switch career paths or something like that. So generally talking about unemployment surging, consumer spending collapsing, severe draw down in the stock market.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  And then even our sort of normal economic indicators hiding this sort of overall weakness. Anyways, takeaway.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  AI being great and powerful may not equal all the markets ripping, but.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Well, two different things. Market ripping.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Individual, individual company, individual companies.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  And median incomes.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Like there are two, there are 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.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Worth maybe noting like the kind of companies they call out in this, 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. Mastercard and Visa, they talk about suffering revenue pressure because an AI agent would just opt for stable coins, which feels like again, something that many people on the show have come on and made the case for why agents will

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  leverage stable coins or prefer stable coins. Seems like a possibility, but unlikely that that will just, you know, all payment volume will shift over there overnight. 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 like don't actually take fees from the consumer. They take fees from the, from the side of the like hotel, the airline, whatever.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  The thing that just keeps sticking out to me is like, and I was debating with Sagar and Jedy about this as well. Like, he, he was telling me like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, no, AI is actually doing very little for the economy right now. It's doing a lot for the markets. It's doing a lot for the future, but like in terms of the actual economic impact of AI, it's very low. And we just know that because you add up. The actual AI revenues from the AI labs and you're talking about like thirty, forty billion dollars and okay, maybe there's like a five X multiple on that. And so you're generating two hundred billion dollars of GDP on top of those tokens, but like that's just not

• 12:44John Coogan?

  that much in the grand scheme of the actual America's GDP. And so there's this disconnect between like the market, which is pricing future GDP, future cash flows, future value creation. Then you have what is actually driving GDP today? And then you have like the the actual workforce and what what Americans do. There's this odd disconnect and I keep coming back to the Tyler Cowen like slow takeoff philosophy. 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 the number of people that are software developers, less than one percent of America, the number of people that like work at tech companies broadly is less than

• 13:27John Coogan?

  10%. And so even if there's some massive like reallocation there, and then you go into like even in like white collar, if everything shifts, like the rest of world is hit. And there's just a lot of other dynamics that feel like 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.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  John Lober 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 doomsaying. 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

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  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 Open Door. 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.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  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

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  backend systems is indefensible. Citrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SaaS companies. Are one, the products become obsolete, zero margin, and two, the jobs themselves disappear. What everyone seems to be missing is this: these products effing S U C K. That's his opinion. My own personal call out here is like until we see a round of layoffs at a company that is 5,000 software engineers at once. It's hard to believe that that AI is replacing software engineers versus just making them a lot more productive. If somebody's a lot more productive, you'll pay at least the equivalent amount to maintain them. This was probably the best point from his response.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Reindustrialization, there will be some labor displacement, of course, driving stands out. Many types of white collar work, as Satriani 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 reindustrialization. You may have heard about bringing back manufacturing, but it's more than that. We are large, we largely no longer know how to create and don't have the facilities for making the core building blocks of modern life, batteries, motors, small semis, the whole electric stack is something we we are almost entirely dependent on China and other countries for.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  We barely make fertilizer.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Out of every example they could have chosen, they went with DoorDash. The barrier to entry for launching a delivery app is not and has never been software. It's distribution, restaurant adoption, user adoption, and of course, driver adoption. 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. If I was Tony, I'd be I'd be flying to find Satriani at work face to face, opening up a can of.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  I know where you're going with that. I was thinking about Amazon Basics. That hasn't destroyed every company, every brand, like, and why is that? Is that a good analogy that like, okay, the big AI labs will have. Amazon Basics for SaaS, but people will probably still want certain brands. There will be certain people that are locked in. Okay, yes, I know the Amazon Basics paper towels are cheaper, but I just happen to like this particular brand that's a little bit more tailored for me.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  But Amazon Basics was like, hey, we're you buy paper towels from this brand normally. We're going to sell you the same product with our logo.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  Effectively the same product.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  And I think the AI disruption that is much more real is like you have entirely new paradigms for software, an entirely new relationship with software.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  And it's not just like, oh, you know, somebody built the exact same version of Salesforce. It's like somebody built an app that automatically sets your schedule every day and you're not even, you're not even thinking about like, oh, I need to be monitoring this dashboard or.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I agree. I think the.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  I think the Amazon Basics of Salesforce, it probably is not that big of a business opportunity because the whole value proposition that it's lower margin. And so Amazon Basics is not driving Amazon's market cap.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  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 the stuff.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  That seems correct.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  It's not like people are just going to like the SaaS, you know, supermarket. Very funny post from Dime to Square Holdings. You, 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.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  People are really having fun with this. What was this next one?

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, Dimes is on a roll. Average 2026 AI macro research.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  I am legend.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

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

• 20:07John Coogan?

  That might be the most market moving piece ever written, says Clouseau Investments. That seems accurate and I don't know, maybe it's a buying opportunity. Maybe it's, maybe it's a warning to everyone else, but it certainly broke through.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Steve asked, does Tyler clap for each ad reader? Is that a soundbite? It is real. He clapped.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I clap for every single one.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Horrors coming out of Mexico.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yesterday.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Really sad situation. Our very own Joe Weisenthal had been in the Puerto Vallarta area.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Had just left. I think he got out of there an hour.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, an hour before the chaos erupted. So very grateful.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  I hope everyone who's down there is safe.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, somebody said Weston Puerto Vallarta won't honor late checkout with streets closed. I am platinum elite.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Over 1,000 lifetime Marriott nights.

• 20:54John Coogan?

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

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Peavy is on fire due to the cartel 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 suite. We are supposed to be leaving for Buceros this afternoon, but that isn't looking very good. Worst convoy property I have ever experienced. I don't think anyone will be checking in today. So there's no reason to not, to at least not extend us.

• 21:29John Coogan?

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

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  My wife.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X monitoring.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  You're monitoring the situation.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  All the open source intel.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  You texted me, you texted me and I was like, oh, what's up, Joe?

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, wow, I've expected something like this.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  For a long time, given the tensions down there. And then I'm just watching this. My wife texts me, our friends want to go to Mexico in April. Can we go? And a long weekend. And I was like, are you, are you, are you joking? A really, really sad situation, basically. Leader of the cartel CJNG, which is like effectively is paramilitary group. Uh, 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.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  I think the story is that many of them actually did train at some point with US special forces and then flipped.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Or, or the. Probably the Mexican military.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, they were, but the, but the US special forces have trained.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Mexican military.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  And so these guys are like, like they have their own version.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, it's not a LARP, like, oh, they just like picked up something, they watch like a video on YouTube.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure some of them are not elite, but in general, this is like a, 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 Almedjo, their main guy gets taken out and then they respond by starting to just like blow up like roads, took over an airport, I guess, like they just start causing mass chaos.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, because their leaderless.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  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, 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, 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.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  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 nineties and the early two thousands. The nineties and the early two thousands were iconic and we gotta get Tyler Cosgrove up to speed on what it was like.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  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.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I had an Xbox.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  You had an Xbox?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have mod retros right here.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So you're maybe up to speed. Well, there's another one that, that talks about the liquid metal object design. And I found this 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. It's pretty close.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Fluid forms.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Good music too.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Terms floating around for blobism.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Blobism.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Minimalism and biomorphic design.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Biomorphic design.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Cause everything was really blocky in the eighties.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  For things like sportswear, watches, music players.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  A clear, clear case.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  This is a prime example of when technology influences form. CAD, the modeling software, introduced what is called.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Nerves.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Non-uniform rational beast blinds. What this allowed is for industrial designers to create mathematically smooth curves to be calculated with precision. It enabled people to make.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  So before you had to just like use blocks basically and like you'd get like a sphere and that was it. And you could do like a sphere and a cube, but you couldn't really do whatever shape.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  And back then, they were rocking this kind of hardware.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  When they were saying that all retail stores.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Globally will be wiped out.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Five to 10 years.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  I mean, we're reflecting on the dot com boom and I think is particularly interesting right now. The takeaway from the dot com boom, when most people, when most people pull up the dot com boom, they're, 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. So there's an article in the New York Times that's sort of comparing the dot com boom to the AI boom. People loved the dot com boom, the AI, the AI boom, not so much. The tenor around the dot com era, yes, there was a lot of froth. Yes, there was Y2K and people were worried about that, but the stats weren't quite the same. So.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Were you like aware of Y2K?

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Extremely aware, extremely aware.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  How, how did you process it? Because my parents were trying to explain to.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Like a five year old.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. 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 zero, zero. 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?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right?

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Why?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, like...

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Easy for you to say, Tyler. You weren't born for...

• 27:20Speaker 02

  It's not like, oh my gosh, the numbers are resetting all of a sudden. Like, you can see, it's like a calendar.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  You had to be there, Tyler.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  You had to be there.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Didn't no one have foresight?

• 27:28John Coogan?

  It wound up being something like hundreds of billions of dollars were spent in the lead up to Y2K.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, okay, so Gregorian calendar

• 27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  goes into place 1582.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  So you have like 400 years to figure this out, so I...

• 27:41John Coogan?

  And we did, but it cost us $100 billion. 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. Uh, Y2K was the same thing, but it was not widespread. AI doom is, is truly widespread. More than 30% of Americans are concerned that AI could end human life on Earth. Like, that is a wildly high number compared to how many people believed 2012 was going to be the end or 2000 was going to be the end. 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, that's the general tenor around AI. Like, the vibes are, are, are rough.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Like, nearly every dot com prediction had some directionally correct element to it. 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.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  We need a moment of silence for international business machines.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Oh, no. There we go.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Wild, wild times this...

• 29:00John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say Anthropic announces they're, they're going to launch an international business machine.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  We are an international business.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Edutainment, this is fantastic.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was saying this-

• 29:25Speaker 02

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

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  But very excited.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Mark your calendars.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna grind this.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Productivity is gonna fall.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was saying it's like, it could easily be an Ender's Game scenario where it's just, it's just-

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Those racks weren't simulated, those were real, NVL 72s, Ender. Yeah, I love that.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Apparently there's another game called, just called Insider Trading, coming to Steam.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  If you're good at insider trading, you're gonna love this game. Steam has a game called Insider Trade and get ready. It's a rogue-like deck builder that lets you literally pump and then crash the market. But hilarious and says a lot about the society. But I think it's, I don't know, I'll, I'll, I'll give it a try. I wonder if it will have microtransactions, that's the big question. Or if it's pure for the love of the sport, love of the game.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, open claw fueled ordering frenzy creates Apple Mac shortage.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Hmm, it's really happening.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  Delivery for high unified memory units now ranges from six days to six weeks. I called it.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Demand for AI is continuing unabated, like, people are using this stuff.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  My culture is not your costume, Brian Johnson. Because Brian said he decided to live life on Friday. He was spotted, just playing some video games, having some Taco Bell.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  He's having fun.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Some pizza, some Dr. Pepper, having a lot of fun, looking, not his, not his usual self, but locked in on, on the big game or something like that. Anthropic posted earlier, "We've identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Minimax."

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  "These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges, with Claude extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models." People were having a lot of fun with this, they said, "No crying in the copyright casino," in all caps. Luke brought up a vintage growing Daniel post. "Oh, did someone take your hard work and use it to train a model to mimic your expertise without compensation?" Computer.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Make sure everyone in the audience has the best evening of their life.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  And sign up for the TVPN newsletter at tvpn.com. Goodbye.