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.

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What is TBPN?

TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.

Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.

Speaker 1:

Massive sell off in the markets thanks to friend of the show, Sattrini. 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 this this happens, so it's worth talking about. And I'm like, what's the 90% scenario?

Speaker 1:

No one's getting any clicks for the 90% scenario. And it gets

Speaker 2:

completely It's not that exciting.

Speaker 1:

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 a 10% scenario or whatever percentage you put on it. 20% chance, 30% PDOM. Only take It's away from what you over.

Speaker 1:

Like as soon as you say something crazy happens with no matter how low the percentage is, like that's what you're going to be known for forever. So be careful out there with those predictions. But

Speaker 2:

Okay. So Sunday yesterday, doing family stuff, don't really have a bunch of time to sit down and read And the entire day, I'm just seeing people quoting it, 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 kid's bedtime last night, by the time I actually sat down and started reading it, Almost every paragraph, was experiencing some element of Gaullman's amnesia, where you have three sentences that are maybe somewhat coherent and then a statement that feels so wrong.

Speaker 1:

Sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 2:

Specifically I think a lot of people obviously called out the

Speaker 1:

The DoorDash thing.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

My experience with it was you had mentioned to me that, like, oh, it's the current thing. And I was pretty offline. And then by the time I I actually started refreshing the timeline, I was like, oh, I'm, like, clearly, like, stuck on some search feature because I'm only seeing 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 Tay Kim's getting in there fighting and people are posting rebuttals. Someone posted a fully AI generated, just like turd it up another notch version, which is hilarious.

Speaker 1:

So we can maybe go through some of the reactions. I mean, the the futures were red last night. The market is down broadly. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And it's interesting. A lot of people were saying, guys, there's no way that futures are read just because of this Citrini essay that is obviously science fiction. And then it turns out Bloomberg this morning came out and actually stated that Reported it? That it's the Saturni sell off.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of other stuff going on. The the quote from the terminal, software payment stocks slide after Sutrini post on AI risk. DoorDash and American Express led declines in software and payment stocks on Monday. And we were debating, you know, PayPal had gotten beat up and there was a question about like, what is the strategy going forward? PayPal has always been an interesting situation because like absolutely goaded founding team, but they're all disinterested in jumping back in and turning it around.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

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 condition 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 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.

Speaker 1:

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 I believe it. I am worried about software stocks, so I'm gonna rotate into a basket of Anthropic OpenAI and SpaceX. They don't have that option yet.

Speaker 1:

They wait by the end of the year.

Speaker 2:

You can buy NVIDIA. You can buy Google. Mhmm. There's plenty of ways.

Speaker 1:

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?

Speaker 1:

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, etc. The piece argues that this may be constrained by falling tax revenues, but in a deflationary low inflation environment the Treasury can run large deficits and the Fed can buy as much of that debt as it needs to, leaving aside that we'd expect the tax structure to change. The political process is unlikely to be as meaningful as a bottleneck as the peace 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 is 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.

Speaker 1:

This is because that typically requires major policyinstitutional 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 a good take. It is interesting how this moved the markets way more than AI 2027.

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 3:

But like

Speaker 2:

AI 2027, probably, like the market reaction was like invest more in the labs at the time because it was kind of aimed for more of a West Coast audience in general.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I just mean 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 Aschenbrenner philosophy that is now being reflected in the market. But you know, he didn't go long in any of these stocks anyway.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, really quickly.

Speaker 4:

I wonder how much that is just because of like who is actually writing it. The ad Totally. People are like, you know, very San Francisco coded, vaguely EA, maybe safety as people, where this is like, okay, they're like a financial

Speaker 1:

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. Jordy, what

Speaker 4:

is it?

Speaker 2:

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 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 twenty twenty five, AgenTik AI tools become vastly better at coding and complex tasks.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, that'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.

Speaker 2:

So 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.

Speaker 1:

Consumption.

Speaker 2:

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.

Speaker 2:

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 perceived recurring revenue ends up not being fully recurring. There's a whole segment talking about how a lot of value capture in the world is actually just humans not wanting to deal with frictions.

Speaker 2:

It's not switching car insurance. Even though you know you're paying more than you should, it's just kind of a hassle. But if you could have an AI agent go and do that, then maybe you do that more often. And that pulls out some potential earnings from the system. The other thing they talk about is 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.

Speaker 2:

So generally talking about unemployment surging, consumer spending collapsing, severe drawdown in the stock market, and then even our normal economic indicators hiding the overall weakness. Anyways, takeaway, AI being great and powerful may not equal all the markets ripping, but

Speaker 1:

Well, two different things. Market ripping

Speaker 2:

Individual individual companies. Individual companies.

Speaker 1:

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 ten years from now, the market will price that in today.

Speaker 1:

And then if all of that GDP growth goes to one person, not going to see median incomes rise. You're not going to see broad prosperity in America.

Speaker 2:

Worth maybe noting the kind of companies they call out in the piece by name. So all these companies let's check-in with ServiceNow, which is one of the companies that was most heavily yep, down almost 4.5% 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 it was just work automation before work automation was even that cool.

Speaker 2:

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 leverage stablecoins or prefer stablecoins. Seems like a possibility, but unlikely that that will just 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, etcetera. Travel booking I thought was funny because most travel agents like don't actually take fees from the consumer.

Speaker 2:

They take fees from the side of the like hotel, the airline, whatever.

Speaker 1:

The thing that just keeps sticking out to me is like and I was debating with Sagar and Jetty about this as well. Like 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.

Speaker 1:

But like in terms of the actual economic impact of AI, it's very low. And we just know that because you add up the actual AI revenues from the AI labs and you're talking about like 30,000,000,040 billion dollars And okay, maybe there's like a 5x multiple on that. And so you're generating $200,000,000,000 of GDP on top of those tokens. But like that's just not that much in the grand scheme of 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.

Speaker 1:

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 health care jobs. And there's a lot of jobs that are they feel very AI resistant.

Speaker 1:

I don't know, maybe something changes. But like it just feels like the number of people that are software developers less than 1% of America, the number of people that like work at tech companies broadly is less than 10%. And so even if there's some massive reallocation there and then you go into like even in white collar, if everything shifts, 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 There's the real always this disconnect.

Speaker 2:

John Lobar wrote a great piece very quickly after this. It's called Contra Citrini. 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.

Speaker 2:

I want to present a critique of Saturni'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.

Speaker 2:

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 Satrini 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 twenty years.

Speaker 2:

You don't need super intelligence for this. All you need is Zillow or Redfin or Opendoor. This example actually shows the very opposite of Satrini's point. We have the type of labor that most people consider obsolete, and yet market 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.

Speaker 2:

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 ten hours of form filling and party coordination that I could have done myself. This market will eventually be efficient and prices 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.

Speaker 2:

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 back end systems is indefensible.

Speaker 2:

Satrini and others talk of AI coding as a spell of the end of jobs at SAS companies are, one, the products become obsolete, zero margin, and two, the jobs themselves disappear. What everyone seems to be missing is this. These products, effing 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 Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

It's hard to believe that that AI is replacing software engineers versus just making them a more lot 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. Re industrialization, there will be some labor displacement, of course. Driving stands out.

Speaker 2:

Many types of white collar work, as Sattrini 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.

Speaker 2:

The whole electric stack is something we are almost entirely dependent on China and other countries for. They can

Speaker 1:

barely make fertilizer.

Speaker 2:

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 Satrini, having to work face to face, opening up a can of

Speaker 1:

I know

Speaker 4:

where you're going with it.

Speaker 1:

I 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.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 2:

Yep. And it's Effectively something the same product. Yeah. I think the AI disruption that is much more real is like you have entirely new paradigms for software

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

whatever. Yeah. No, no, no. I agree. 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.

Speaker 1:

And so Amazon Basics is not driving Amazon's market cap.

Speaker 2:

Well, 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

Speaker 1:

the It's

Speaker 2:

a very different situation. It's not like people are just going to like the SAS, 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.

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

Well, Dimes is on a roll. Average twenty twenty six AI or research. I am a legend. May be the most terrifying novel you will ever read.

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

Steve asked, does Tyler clap for each ad reader? Is that a sound bite? It is real. He claps. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

I clap for every single one.

Speaker 2:

Horrors coming out of Mexico Yeah. Yesterday. Crazy. Really sad situation. Our very own Joe Wiesenthal had been in the Puerto Vallarta area Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And just left. I think he got out of there an hour Yeah. An hour before the chaos erupted. So very grateful.

Speaker 1:

I hope everyone down there is safe.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

No way.

Speaker 2:

1,000 lifetime Marriott nights. Wait.

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

TV is on fire due to the 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're supposed to be leaving for Buqueros this afternoon, but that isn't looking very good.

Speaker 2:

Worst Bonvoy property I have ever experienced. I don't think anyone will be checking in today, so there's no reason to not at to at least not extend us.

Speaker 1:

But does back this maybe 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

Speaker 2:

just buyers

Speaker 1:

and a few cars. This is like a military operation. Correct?

Speaker 2:

My wife Yeah. Texted me yesterday afternoon while I'm on X moderating

Speaker 1:

You're monitoring the situation.

Speaker 2:

All the open source intel.

Speaker 1:

You texted me. You texted me. And I was like, oh, what's up, like,

Speaker 2:

wow. I've expected something like this

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

For a long time given the the tensions down there. And then I'm just watching this and my wife texts me, our friends wanna go to Mexico in April. Can we go? A long weekend. And I was like, are you are you are you joking?

Speaker 2:

Really, really sad situation basically, 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 ten, twenty years Mhmm. 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.

Speaker 1:

Or or the probably the Mexican military.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. No. They were but the but the US special forces have trained Woah. The Mexican military. Okay.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Mean, I'm sure I'm sure some of them are not elite. But in general, this is, a paramilitary organization. It's one of the largest private armies in the world, probably the largest private army in the world. And so El Mencho, their main guy, gets taken out.

Speaker 2:

And then they respond by starting to just blow up roads, took over an airport, I guess. They just start causing mass chaos.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Because their This leaderless

Speaker 2:

person in Puerto Vallarta, if you look at any video of Puerto Vallarta, if you just went outside yesterday and looked around, there's fires rising up everywhere. 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, 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. Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And like you're getting a shelter in place warning and you're you're mad about your Marriott Mhmm. Points. But Well

Speaker 1:

but wanna move on to some nostalgia. We are gonna 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. These were the vibes, the blockbuster. So much consumer electronics.

Speaker 1:

Like, everything had a you had a different device for everything. A Walkman, a Game Boy, an Xbox.

Speaker 4:

I had an Xbox.

Speaker 1:

You had an Xbox?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. We had mod retros right here.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 1:

So we can play this liquid metal object design. I feel like this is overdue for a comeback. Amorphic is

Speaker 3:

fluid forms.

Speaker 1:

Good music too.

Speaker 3:

Terms floating around were blobism, organic materialism, and biomorphic design.

Speaker 1:

But even just being able see it's

Speaker 3:

easy to see that industrial designers were trying to push past this

Speaker 1:

because everything was really blocky in the eighties.

Speaker 3:

Futuristic vision for things like sportswear, watches, music players

Speaker 1:

A clear clear case.

Speaker 3:

This is a prime example of when technology influences form. CAD, a modeling software, introduced what is called NURBS. NURBS, non uniform rational b splines. What this allowed is for industrial designers to create mathematically smooth curves to be calculated with precision. It enabled people to make

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

you And back then, they were rocking this kind of hardware when they were saying that all retail stores globally will be wiped out in the next five to ten years.

Speaker 1:

I mean, reflecting on the .com boom, I think, is particularly interesting right now. The takeaway from the .com boom, when most people when most people pull up the .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 .com boom to the AI boom.

Speaker 1:

People loved the .com boom. The AI boom, not so much. The tenor around the .com era. Yes, there was a lot of froth. Yes, there was Y2K.

Speaker 1:

And people were worried about that. But the stats weren't quite the same. So

Speaker 2:

Were you aware of Y2K?

Speaker 1:

Extremely aware. Extremely aware.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Like a five year old.

Speaker 1:

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, your interest calculations for your bank account freak out, you have negative money, the whole financial system collapses, anything that's planned.

Speaker 1:

Right? All of this was like the fear of what might happen. Tyler?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Right? Because Why?

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 4:

Oh for for 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.

Speaker 4:

You had to be But did no one have foresight?

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 4:

Yeah. But okay. So Gregorian calendar Yeah. Goes into place 1582. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So you have, like, April to figure this out.

Speaker 1:

So I And we did, but it cost us $100,000,000,000 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 twenty twelve apocalypse stuff. Y two k was the same thing, but it was not widespread.

Speaker 1:

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 gonna be the end or 2000 was gonna 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.

Speaker 1:

Like, the the vibes are are are rough. Like, nearly every .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 refocus the conversation on actual impact.

Speaker 2:

We need a moment of silence for international business machines.

Speaker 1:

What happened?

Speaker 2:

Falls over 10%, actually 11% now, after Anthropic announces that Claude can streamline COBOL code. Oh, no. There we go. Wild times this. I was

Speaker 1:

to say Anthropic announces they're going to launch an international business machine. We are an international business machine.

Speaker 2:

There is a game called Data Center on Steam, lets you build and manage your own data center. This is low key genius, the best way to educate people on a new trait. Hyperscalers should learn a thing or two about edutainment.

Speaker 1:

Edutainment. This is fantastic.

Speaker 2:

Tyler Somebody was saying this

Speaker 4:

It's not out yet. It's coming out March 31.

Speaker 1:

Oh, Okay.

Speaker 2:

Very

Speaker 1:

Mark your calendars.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. I'm gonna grind this.

Speaker 1:

Productivity is gonna fall.

Speaker 2:

Everybody Somebody was saying it's like a it could easily be an an ender's game scenario where it's just it's just

Speaker 1:

Those racks weren't simulated. Those were real. NVL 70 twos, ender. Yeah. I love that.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

good at insider trading, you're gonna 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. But hilarious and says a lot about the society. But I think it's I don't know.

Speaker 1:

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.

Speaker 2:

Apparently, Open Claw fueled ordering frenzy creates Apple Mac shortage. Delivery for high unified memory units now ranges from six days to six weeks. I called it

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

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.

Speaker 1:

He's having fun.

Speaker 2:

Some pizza, some Doctor Pepper, having a lot of fun, looking not his not his usual self Mhmm. 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.

Speaker 1:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

These created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16,000,000 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, Aw, did someone take your hard work and use it to train a model to mimic your expertise without compensation?

Speaker 1:

Computer. Leave us five stars.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

And sign up for the TBPN newsletter at tbpn.com. Goodbye.