This Doomsday Article Is Causing Investor Panic

It seems as though every day we wake up to the market going down and a new viral article that's being passed around speaking doomsday of SAS companies and the world as we know it. Now, we've seen this happen before with articles like Big things are happening, right? There's ones about big changes and disruptions in technology companies. We've also seen ones that are essentially the doom of SAS

companies. That's caused a lot of companies that we know and are invested in to go down dramatically every single day. And there's more and more of these articles again, every single day. It seems like there's just two or three more of them that are going viral around X, around social circles, around investment circles. But the one that was shared over the weekend is perhaps the final boss.

It's like a video game. You're getting to the end, You've gotten through all the smaller bosses, all the bigger challenges and hurdles along the way, and now we're facing the final boss. This is Citrone Research. Why is Citrone Research the final boss?

Well, because of out of all the hundreds and thousands of different sub stacks out there, out of all the ones that you can read, all the different financial authors giving takes and thesises, there's one that's listened to and paid attention to more than any others. That is Citrone, the top selling financial sub stack in the world. It's based on macro. It's based on large events, big takes. Investors listen to it. Hedge fund managers listen to it.

Thousands of investors subscribe to this and pay good money to hear their takes. It's so influential that their takes routinely land on Bloomberg. They land on the Wall Street Journal, And what they wrote over the weekend is no exception. It is now on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. This viral doomsday report lays bare Wall Street's deep anxiety about the AI future. Citronee Research thought experiment rattles investors already wary of tech disruptions. That's right.

No, this is not a article that's on some obscure forms on the Internet. This is mainstream. This is all over CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times. Citrone's article went hyper

viral and it caused many of the most powerful biggest companies in the world their stocks to get crushed. DoorDash is down like 7% on the day. American Express is down big 3%, plus we have Blackstone going down. We have Visa and MasterCard, two companies that you think are a little bit more resilient. Yeah, those ones went down as well. This article is impacting investors thoughts. It's impacting their decisions. Investors are human and they're

selling as a result of this. Now, I didn't think I was going to spend all of 2026 reacting to viral articles online, but here we are. This is what we're doing, and this is what I'm going to be doing in this episode. We'll be going over the thesis of Citronee, why it is so engrossing, why investors have so much anxiety about what they're talking about. We'll be reviewing their arguments, and importantly, I'll be tearing some of them apart because frankly, some of them are ridiculous.

They deserve to be torn apart. Now, it's no blame of Citronee. They say that this is all hypothetical, but I think even a hypothetical argument can have severe flaws, and I'll be going over many of them in this article. Today I'll be going through in detail some of the core thesises that are causing these stocks to sell off and addressing what I believe are some of the biggest logical leaps and mistakes in this article. This will be a fun episode.

We do have some other news we'll be touching on today. For example, Warner Brothers Discovery received a revised offer from Paramount. The higher bid, we don't know what it is, but we're now in this limbo where we're waiting for Netflix's next move. I'll be giving some thoughts on

that. We have Meta agreeing to buy $100 billion more worth of chips from AMD, and we have the fail of the week, which in this case is a DJI robot vacuum that had security so poor that this man remotely accessed thousands of them. This guy accidentally hacked like 7000 robots. We'll be going over that as

well. Now, if you're not paying attention to every detail, you're not listening to every little thing going on. You may have missed what caused this most recent panic, what caused many of the biggest companies in the world to sell off 3 to 8% in the past day, and that was this viral article. This was the cause. Many people believe that Substack and these articles can't 'cause this type of effect. They can, especially when they have the distribution of a

Citronee Research article. They are one of the biggest, if not the biggest publisher in the financial world on an independent basis. The article that they published is called The 2028, 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, A Thought Exercise in Financial History from the future. Now they preface this and they say what follows is a scenario. It's not a prediction. So they give a bit of a disclaimer and say they're just modeling out a scenario.

Now, like most disclaimers, this has been ignored because many people were fearful as a result of this. And I'll note that this scenario they're modelling out also does benefit them personally. See, Citrone is not just someone that publishes takes and thoughts on the market, but they're also investors and they are bearish on many of the companies that they're sharing these scenarios on. They have short positions on them. We are constantly sort of, you know, turning our book.

And then we certainly had shorts in some of these businesses. We generally have a set of shorts out against businesses that we think are going to be disrupted by AI. He mentions right away that we are short many of the businesses that we mention in this article. So in a way, this is an article representing their view, which there's nothing wrong with that. I have bullish takes on companies that I'm invested in

as well. The difference is I'm not able to move the market in the same way that Citrone is, so just keep that in mind as you're reading this that they are short sellers on many of these companies. We won't go over the whole thing, but I want to summarize what I believe are some of the biggest points of this article. In a couple of years we'll move past vibe coding to agentic technology, and agentic technology will cause what they they say is when friction goes to zero.

And again, this is a future hypothetical. They say by early 2027, LLM usage had become default. People are using AI agents who didn't even know what an AI agent was in the same way people who had never learned of cloud computing was using streaming services. They thought of it in the same way that you think of auto complete or spell check. Just a thing that they just did now. The next chain was already

breaking intermediation. Over the past 50 years, the US economy built a giant rent extraction layer on top of human limitations. Things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depends on those constraints persisting. It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction. So they explore the consequences of agents removing friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renew despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric that enterprise subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined. Consumer agents begin to change how nearly all consumer

transactions work. Humans don't really have the time to price match across 5 competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars, but machines do. So part of their thesis is when you're buying something online, you're just going to buy like the first thing that you see because you don't have time to go look everywhere to save a dollar. But if you can do that on an agent, if you can say, hey, I want to buy this and it can go and price match 50 different websites, you're going to let

the agent do that. The agent does have the time to make those, to make those comparisons. Travel booking platforms were an early casualty because they were the simplest. By Q 4/20/26, our agents could assemble a complete itinerary, flights, hotels, transport, loyal loyalty optimization, budget constraints, refunds faster and cheaper than any platform. Insurance renewals where the entire renewal model depended on policyholder inertia were reformed.

Agents that reshop coverage annually dismantled the 15 to 20% premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals. Financial advice, tax prep, routine legal work, any category where the service providers value proposition was ultimately quote I will navigate. Complexity that you find tedious was disrupted as agents found nothing tedious. Even places we thought insulated by the human value of

relationships proved fragile. Real Estate, where buyers had tolerated 5 to 6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agents and consumers, crumbled once the AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. So now they're saying that the real estate market is going to be disrupted because the real estates, that intermediary layer will be taken out by agents. This is all just fiction.

They're, they're making this up, they're exploring this hypothetical. So this hasn't happened. They're saying that real estate agents are, are getting disintermediated by agents and that's just all in the future. That's going to happen in the future is what they're predicting here. We had overestimated the value of, quote, human relationships. Turns out that a lot of what people call relationships was simply friction with a friendly

face. That was just the start of the disruption for the intermediation layer. Successful companies had spent billions to effectively exploit quirks of consumer behavior and human psychology that didn't matter anymore. Machines optimized for price and fit that do not care about your favorite app or your website that you've habitually been opening for the last four years nor fill the pole of a well designed checkpoint out

experience. They don't get tired or accept the easiest option by default to quote. I always just order from here that destroyed a particular kinds of motes habitual intermediation. OK, so that sets the premise of their main core thesis here. Their core thesis is that agents remove friction. They bring friction down to 0. So any type of company or product that specializes in removing friction at a price, that company will be essentially useless.

It won't need to exist anymore because agents will do that already and not charge you in the process. And this is where the thesis goes from what I think is an intriguing premise to offering some of the worst examples you could offer, logically flawed ones. For example, one of the ones that they point out that will be

displaced or disintermediated is DoorDash. And this was a stock that was hit hard yesterday. DoorDash was the poster child of a Moat being disrupted by agents and their removal of friction. Now DoorDash stock since this released is down about 6%. So let's go ahead and hear their argument of why DoorDash is going to be doomed when it comes to agents coding. Agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. So now you can, you can code a delivery app very quickly.

They say a competent developer could deploy A functional competitor in weeks and dozens did enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90 to 95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. So again, this is hypothetical. This hasn't happened. But they're saying now that vibe coding allows you to easily code things like delivery applications, which is true.

Make it easier to code things. You can basically make a competent functioning, competent competitor in weeks to DoorDash and Uber Eats. Then those competent competitors cannot have the greed that DoorDash has. Instead they can just pass the savings along to the driver. Multi app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from 20 or 30 different platforms at once, eliminating the lock in that the incumbents depended upon.

The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing. Agents accelerated both sides of the destruction. They enabled the competitors and they used them. The DoorDash Mote was literally quote you're hungry, you're lazy. This is the app on your home screen, and Agents doesn't. Agents don't have a home screen. It checks DoorDash. It checks Uber Eats, the restaurant's own website, and 20 new vibe coded alternatives so that it can pick the lowest fee

and the fastest delivery time. Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn't exist for the machine. This was oddly poetic as perhaps the only example in this entire saga of agents doing a favor for the soon to be replaced displaced white collar workers when they ended up as delivery drivers. So there's the argument with DoorDash. It's basically that DoorDash and Uber Eats contain high margins. They charge a lot when you order from them.

So an agent could come along and it can shop. It can shop across all the different food delivery networks. And since you can vibe code a new app in just a couple of weeks, there's going to be a lot of them, 20 to 30 of them since the agent, which is like a ChatGPT or Gemini since it can shop for you. Frictionless and it can go to all these different potential delivery companies or just the the website of the restaurant

itself. It can find the lowest prices, which will naturally compress the margins to zero. And that seems good. At first glance, it seems a little bit convincing until you dive in a little bit deeper and highlight some of the big problems with this type of argument. One of the problems with this thought process is if you just put yourself in the customer's position here. Let's say that you're you're using Chachi BT and you're getting hungry. So you notice that you're hungry.

In that case, you notice that you're hungry, but you don't know what you're going to eat. So you could tell Chachi BT I'm hungry and it can say, hey, you've liked these type of foods, would you like to order them again? And you go, Nah, what are some other foods out there? And then it has to assemble and create a list of foods that you can order. It has to bring in all the images and then you have to say, hey, what about you're typing this in again, You're typing all this in.

What about restaurants that are within 30 minutes? Because I want to get it fast. Then it has to revise and give you another answer. Restaurants within 30 minutes. But then you want to see the reviews of all those restaurants to know which ones are are good and which ones aren't. So you want 4 star reviews and up. So you have to type that in. Now order them by by reviews. OK, so then you're on the restaurant level.

You're looking at reviews of it. And let's say that you finally narrow down which restaurant you want to order from. OK, You say, hey, Chachi PT, I want to order from this restaurant, but I don't know exactly what they have or what the prices are. Can you tell me that?

And then it has to assemble a list of the the menu from that restaurant of all the different items, what the feature is, what the daily special is. OK, so you, you have that assembled by Chachi PT Now and again you're having Chachi PT build this menu on the fly as you continually type in. Now you're on like the 6th message now and you say, OK, I want to get a #3 I want to get that meal. But there's lots of customizations in every single meal from every single restaurant.

For example, if you order from Five Guys, do you want the small burger or the normal one? Do you want the double Patty or the one with cheese? Do you want the one with bacon? Do you want it to have Mayo, ketchup? Do you want to have onions on it? Do you want to have Pickles on it? There are hundreds of permutations and customizations within a single order. Literally hundreds of them in some cases. Chick-fil-A, just that restaurant has hundreds of different customizations on a

single order. All the all the way to what type of sauce you want to get. Are you going to prompt Chachi BT all the way through this process? By the time you're done, your fingers, your thumbs will be sore from the amount of typing you do. You'll have to gone through so many different customization layers and the idea that ChatGPT will just know. That's another thing that a lot of people argue here. They'll say, well, you've talked to ChatGPT so much, it'll know

you inside and out. It'll know you better than yourself. I was a top 1% user of ChatGPT and Gemini in 2025, top 1%. And I promise you, it has no clue what I want to eat tonight. It has no idea what what restaurant, what menu, what items, because it changes all the time. Food preferences change all the time. And even though there may be something that you order on a routine basis, maybe you get the same Starbucks drink every morning.

When it comes to food delivery, this is something that's hyper specialized. Thousands of different customizations and orders, and of course different restaurants that are open different hours. Every single time that you would have to order through an agent, you'd have to rebuild a menu prompted to death because you're doing prompt by prompt to rebuild all these things to get to the point of actually

ordering your food. Now when we're talking about friction, in this case, does the agent actually save you on friction? Compare it to just opening up the DoorDash app. The DoorDash app is already hyper specialized in food delivery. You open it up, it shows you all the restaurants that you recently ordered from, all your favorite meals from all of them, all the toggles and switches like 30 minute distances or below. You have everything perfectly tested in an AB tested user interface.

You don't have to prompt anything, but if you want to, DoorDash has an AI search engine built into it as well. So you have that option available to you if you want. But you don't have to. And in most cases, people won't because they rather just tap a couple images on the screen, hit confirm order, then endlessly prompt an agent. That's an open text interface. What you lose with agentic ordering is an interface. You lose the ability to see the food. People don't know exactly what

they want to eat. And any server will tell you that they want to see images, they want to browse. They want to see things that are brought up. When you're looking at one restaurant, maybe there's some food that's similar to an A different 1. You want to see different colors and images. That's what crates hunger. And that's when you say, oh, that looks really appetizing and agents don't solve that problem.

So inadvertently by saying the agents are going to remove friction by bypassing DoorDash and Uber Eats app, they're actually creating more friction. There's no way around it. It is more difficult to get to the point of ordering through an agent than it is to just go to the app that's already hyper specialized in the specific task. A comparison that I would make is, you know how Amazon has that

ability to order through Alexa? Like you can have the speaker there and you can say, hey, Alexa, get me some more Tide Pods. Everybody has the ability to do that. You have open-ended ordering on Alexa devices, but how much has that really taken off? Amazon doesn't really give the numbers because it's not that popular. Sure, there's cases that you can cite where people have done it and maybe it's actually growing really fast, but in the whole, it's not popular at all.

And the reason why is because people don't just want to talk to a, a bot. They don't want to talk to something. They want to visually see precisely what their order is, how much it costs. They want to see it visually in front of them. So most people, the vast majority, order through Amazon.com. They go to the website, they put in their order, they see it in the checkout, they know exactly what they're ordering and they complete the process.

They don't like ordering through a speaker, just like most people won't like ordering their food through an AI that has endless prompting, endless texting. And that's not the only problem with this one examle, which is DoorDash. There are more critical flaws with this Tye of thought rocess. One of them is the simple fact that when you're ordering food, your goal is not to get the lowest price.

Now from a tech investor perspective, from Citronee, they probably look at it as the only thing the agent really cares about is getting the lowest price. So you put your order in for a McDonald's burger and fries, and the agent goes and finds 50 different delivery platforms that can pick up from McDonald's and it selects the one that is

the lowest price. Maybe it's $0.50 lower than DoorDash. So now your order, instead of being routed to DoorDash, is now routed to some third party smaller company that's offering a cheaper take rate than DoorDash by $0.50. You save $0.50. But in the process you got your order routed to a different company, and that company doesn't have as good of logistics. It's not as saturated with drivers, so it takes longer to get your order.

Your order arrives 10 minutes later than it normally would. Your food's soggy and cold. All of a sudden you're frustrated at the agent for routing your order to some third party delivery service that doesn't have its act together. So you tell the agent please only route it to big mainstream logistics companies like DoorDash and Uber. All of a sudden the whole thesis of fractional cost going down is gone and the biggest companies continue to succeed.

The truth is, people ordering from DoorDash and Uber do not care solely about fees. If they cared only about the fees and getting the lowest price, they wouldn't be ordering food delivery. What they care about is a combination of price as well as service and quality and consistency and being able to get refunds and being taken care of if there's any issues. And an agent destroys nearly all

of that. Consider the fact that part of the reason that I can get refunds on DoorDash, part of the reason they're so eager to refund me if I ever have a problem is because DoorDash knows that I'm a a good customer. I do lots of orders with them. Most of them are good. So when something goes wrong, they can look at my history, they can say, hey, most of the orders from this guy are good. So when something goes wrong, we should give him a full refund because he's overall a good

customer. We want to keep him happy. Having a healthy order backlog is important to a customer. It allows you more leverage as a customer. If an agent routes your orders to 50 different companies, you have no outstanding order backlog and therefore makes it harder to be taken care of as a customer. Because if you only have one random order from some random place, then you're not going to be able to get a refund nearly as easily as if you have 50 orders from them.

This destroys the customer relationship with the company, their order history. You also have the problem of memberships. Both DoorDash and Uber Eats have extensive memberships. We have Dashpass and we have Uber 1:00 which gives you lots of perks. People that use a DoorDash membership are not going to want to order outside of DoorDash and it will make it cheaper after they already paid for that membership.

The same thing with Uber eats. So you have further customer lock in by these memberships which make it even more difficult to have the scenario where there are dozens of different food delivery networks. Why would anybody use multi app dashboards and different food delivery networks when they have their membership with DoorDash or their Uber one pass that makes this one uniquely cheap where they get benefits from it and rewards from ordering

routinely? The whole scenario here, this hypothetical, is that agents are making it so that there's way less friction so that they can shop around. They can lower the margins down to 0. In reality, these agents would make it substantially more friction on behalf of the user. Users want interfaces, they want routines. They want to be able to know and see what they're ordering with precision.

Ordering food is not an open-ended game where you just want to be surprised of what comes to your doorstep. So these are the type of arguments that are being given here. And again, this one isn't just some random argument. They highlight this as the poster child, the prime argument. This is the example of a company that will be disintermediated, but it's it couldn't be further from the truth.

DoorDash is perhaps one of the most insulated companies from agentic technology because of how difficult it is to replicate a menu, to replicate the hundreds of of different customizations for every single item. Food is a very visual game. People want to see things when they're ordering and it takes far more work to constantly text and prompt something to build it in the way that you want.

Then already going to a well built application, already a unified user interface, one that's familiar, one that people have used, one that's AB tested for customers inadvertently, the agent would be more friction and more situations. And there's far more issues in it than just that. So when I look at these type of arguments, they are convincing on the surface until you really start to dive in to the nuances

and that's where you get lost. That's where a lot of investors don't make it. They just sell because Citronees said that DoorDash is going to be replaced. The stock market goes down. These companies drop 6 to 7% in a single day. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of market cap was wiped out on a completely fan fiction false premise. Now the DoorDash example is bad because it undermines the case that they're making.

They're saying it's the poster child, but in reality it's very resistant. But the next example that they name is it goes from bad to comical. Now we're going from delivery food networks like Uber Eats and DoorDash to the payment networks Visa and MasterCard. They say once the agents controlled the transaction, they went looking for a bigger paper clip. There's only so much price matching and aggregation to do.

The biggest way to repeatedly save the users money, especially when the agents start transacting themselves, was to eliminate fees. In machine to machine commerce, the 2 to 3% card interchange rate became an obvious target. Agents went looking for faster and cheaper options than cards. Most settled on using stable coins via Solona or Ethereum, where settlement was near instant and the transaction cost was measured in a fraction of a penny. And then they have a hypothetical.

Again, this is a fake headline of the future. MasterCard Q 12027 Net revenues plus 6% year over year. Purchase volume growth slows to 3.4% year over year from 5.9% the prior year. Management notes that agent LED price optimization and pressure and discretionary categories. Bloomberg, April 29th, 2027. It was Mastercard's Q 12027 report that was the point of no return. Agentic commerce went from being a product story to a plumbing

story. MasterCard dropped 9% the following day, Visa 2, but paired their losses after analysts pointed out at stronger position stablecoin infrastructure. Agentic commerce routing around interchange posed a far greater risk to card focus banks and monoline issuers who collected the majority of that 2 to 3% fee and had built an entire business segment around rewards programs

funded by merchant subsidies. American Express was hit the hardest, a combination from headwinds from white collar workforce reductions gutting its customer base and agent routing around interchange gutting the revenue model. Synchrony, Capital One and Discovery fell more than 10% the following weeks as well. Their remotes were made of friction and friction was going to 0. That's the whole thesis there, right?

Friction is going to zero. And this is where Citronee, with all due respect, and I, I really like this. I think it's an interesting hypothetical so I'm not trying to bash them. With all due respect, they couldn't be more wrong here. One of their assumptions, and this is a very tech kind of nerd focused assumption, a lot of investors have this assumption too, is that all customers want is less friction. That's all customers want. And that's an assumption that's correct.

In some cases, customers don't like friction in a lot of cases. But in reality, there's some cases, some unique ones, where customers do like friction, where they love friction. They don't want friction to go to zero, and settlement is one of them. Payments is one of them. Customers love friction and payments. They absolutely adore friction and they would hate for it to go to 0. Customers reject. They continually reject propositions where friction goes

to zero and payments. Let me give you a a couple examples. The whole value of a credit card is friction. That's why high income people use credit cards. That's why people like me use a credit card is because of the additional friction. Allow me to explain. When I swipe a credit card, I don't want settlement to happen instantly. I want it to show that I paid money, but I want there to be friction in the process. I want it to be routed through my bank. I want it to be the bank's money

that paid that money, not mine. I want my money to stay put, to have a delay. I want there to be a period of review where I can look at what the bank purchased on my behalf. I can review it and make sure that it was charged correctly, that I received the product, and I don't need to dispute it. I want to be able to review all of it before I actually put my money into the process. That's friction that slows down

the process. When you're purchasing things and you're transacting, you want to slow down the process. In fact, the fact that I don't have to pay the money right away to buy something means that I can hold it in my savings account and earn 4% interest for another two weeks or another month. That gives me the time money value. So by having friction in this process, by having a slower period of me paying for something that is advantageous and consumers want to delay

payment for as long as possible. That's why you have buy now, pay later. That's why you have credit cards where you can buy something today and pay for it in a month. That is friction. Furthermore, the thought process of money immediately moving from my account to someone else's account the instant I hit the buy button is terrifying. That's the last thing that I want to do. I don't want money to immediately exit my checking account when I buy something online on some random website.

I want to be able to have time to review it and make sure I got the thing that I ordered before money moves from my account. And again, that's friction. In this specific case, I want as much friction as possible. I wish there could be more guardrails and time money value in the process. So this is a a, a premise where the entire premise of what they're building this on is wrong. The premise that customers in the financial world want 0

friction is entirely wrong. Customers don't want 0 friction in the financial world, they want as much friction as possible. And so when you build an assumption on a wrong premise, every single other assumption based on that is also wrong. Another problem with the idea that agents will just wipe away that credit card fee and save the customer money is that in the eyes of the customer, that fee isn't real. Customers aren't paying that 3%

fee. Customers get credit card rewards whenever they swipe their card. The merchants are paying that fee. The merchants have hated that fee forever. Merchants, any merchant doesn't like paying a credit card fee. They don't like it at all. They wish that they could go away. They've tried to legislate reasons for it to go away. The merchant is already on board with wanting that fee to go away. And there's already many alternatives that would make that fee go away, like a debit card.

But there's a reason that high income earners don't like using debit cards because they're instantaneous, because they are frictionless. We already have that option that brings friction to 0, which is a debit card, and customers don't like it because it has no friction.

They're hypothetical of what could destroy MasterCard already exists today, and it's not destroying MasterCard because when you study these companies, you know that the high income earners want friction upon their purchases and they want the rewards and they're fine if the merchant pays the reward. See, whenever I swipe a credit card, I get a reward of 2 to 3%.

I get that money back When I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on business expenses, on paying AWS hosting fees or what have it. I get lots of money as a result in credit card rewards paid back to me. I have no interest in using stablecoin, none at all. Why would I want to give up the 3% fee so that the merchant can

save money? That's a bad proposition for the customer, so I would never adopt A gentic technology that brings that fee to 0, making it so that I don't earn a reward that's not in my interest or any other high income earners interest at all. Any American Express user signs up for those cards specifically for the rewards so that they can get paid every single purchase. By taking the friction to 0 and wiping away that fee, you also wipe away the rewards. You can't have one without the

other. You cannot have the 2 to 3% reward without the 2 to 3% fee from the merchant. So in the process of wiping away and bringing friction to zero, you also wipe away the primary value proposition of the credit card. And that just won't happen. I don't know anybody. I don't know a single person, Not one wealthy person that wants to do transactions through stablecoin. Not a single one.

So when your entire premise is built on a false premise that customers want friction to go to 0, everything else falls apart. Customers like friction in payments. They like the time value of money. They like the security of being able to buy something now and pay for it later and dispute it in the process. They like the credit card rewards. They don't care if the merchant's paying them. They never have. So all the arguments here fall flat when faced with actual consumer behavior.

Now this doomsday article continues on, but this time it

expands its horizon. It broadens itself from individual companies like a DoorDash and American Express or MasterCard. That this time a Daisy chain of correlated bets where everything starts to unravel 1 domino at a time. And I will say this is one of the most beautifully written and architected bear cases. It's like a dream, a beautiful dream of destruction. Let's go ahead and just take a look at it. I I really do respect the riders.

This is fantastic riding. They go over how private credit had grown from under 1 trillion in 2015 to 2.5 trillion in 2026. A meaningful share of the capital had been deployed into software and technology deals. Many of them leveraged buyouts of SAS companies. So in the future SAS companies are SAS companies are so toast in this future bear case that the valuations go so low that private equities buying them up left and right using debt and buying up SAS, SAS companies

taking them private. So that's the future of SAS. It's just these companies that become worthless. They're like dying burrito chains or you know, sandwich chains, which we have a private equity coming in and buying up left and right. We have a headline here again from Moody's. This is in April of 2027.

Moody's downgrades 18 billion of PE back software debt across 14 issuers citing secular revenue headwinds from AI driven competitive disruption, the largest single sector action since energy in 2015. This is another fictional future headline that's that's Moody's now talking about the destruction of SAS companies. Secular revenue headwinds. Everyone remembers what happened after the downgrade. Industry veterans had already seen the playbook. Following the 2015 energy downgrade.

Software backed loans began defaulting in Q3 of 2027. Private equity portfolio companies and Information Services and consulting followed. Several multi billion dollar leverage buyouts of well known SAS companies entered restructuring. Zendesk was the smoking gun. Zendesk misses the covenants as AI driven customer service automation erodes annual recurring revenue. 5 billion direct lending facility marked

to $0.58. And this section continues on detailing the domino effect of when all of these SAS companies eventually go to zero. And like the rest of this, there's a number of logical problems with these assumptions. First of all, you again have Zendesk. Here is the one that they highlight. Now, when we look at Zendesk, this is also a company that's in many of the Fortune 500 companies.

This article suggests that those companies will simply just RIP out Zendesk and replace it with an agent. But how long would that actually take? Consider how deeply integrated HR software is in the processes, the embedded nature of these products. Even if agentic technology was vastly superior to Zendesk, it would take half a decade plus to get to the point of actually replacing it. And that's a big if.

But the integration cost, the cost of actually doing anything is incredibly difficult in a Fortune 500 company. In most cases, the solution has to be dramatically better to even consider it. That's switching costs, which are entirely ignored in this article.

The other thing that I I just look at when I'm reading this is that when you're reading articles like this, they almost assume that humans are inflexible, that humans don't adapt, that humans don't have a brain and can figure things out when things change, which is the complete opposite of all human history. Humans are highly flexible and adaptable. Humans take on new tasks all the time. They they adapt to situations in different disruptions all the time.

One of the big concerns here is that all these SAS companies go to zero. Well, if that's the case, if Zendesk and all these other SAS companies went to zero, that means that all the other companies paying for them. Imagine all those companies that are paying money to all these SAS companies. All those companies would have margins go up. So every company that's paying for a SAS company, let's say you're paying for Salesforce, adobezendeskmonday.com, you name it, you're paying for all these

different services. You're paying $500 a month per employee for all these different licenses and seat based services. If you could erase all of those, imagine the margins of all these companies paying for all that. Every other company that's not SAS would have dramatically

higher margins as a result. Every other company that's not SAS would have entirely bigger budgets to be able to hire more people, to be able to expand, to be able to do land grabs, to be able to create entirely new products and departments and developments, to compete in new verticals. Which whenever you do that, no matter how technologically advanced you are, it requires humans. That's the problem with this assumption overall.

It's talking about the destruction of one category, which is SAS, without mentioning that when that happens, the companies that are paying for all of that, that now have those services being automated by agents, are dramatically more profitable. Profitable companies expand. That's typically what they do all throughout human history. They expand, they grab more territory, they go into different categories and that requires more people. So this is a a very rigid look at the future.

It's completely unrealistic. It ignores human behavior. It focuses hyper focused on a few companies and then even those companies that it hyper focuses on, it gives very flawed arguments that don't really represent reality. Saying that people want 0 friction in transactions with MasterCard, saying that people want to order things through a text message. These are assumptions on their surface are just on the false premise. Yet it's enough to move the markets down dramatically.

Now I don't mind responding to these type of hypotheticals and and giving my defense of them, my rebuttal of them and explain why I think a lot of this is completely ridiculous. But I'd also ask investors, ones that are listening to this, ones that are learning, investing and trying to take themselves seriously as an investor, can we just get a grip? I mean, can we? Can we for a minute in this market just get some sense and have some stability and be level

headed? Can we go a day without the market being ripped and tugged and pulled in different directions by a hyper viral fan fiction article? This reads like fan fiction. It reads like a Marvel story. So much of it is completely flawed, so much of it is embellished. So much of it ignores important market dynamics. Now, again, no offense to the author. It's an interesting article and it's well written. But it's also completely

unrealistic. Yet it's moving the market, just like many of these ones before them. They have compelling narratives that sound good on the surface and it's causing investors to question their own reality. It poses a a future where AI is this unstoppable alien force that takes over the world that no one can do anything about,

that destroys everything. In fact, in every time period known to man, there's people talking about the end of the world, the doomsday, the doom and gloom, how nothing will be the same and the future will look like nothing you've ever seen, and how the stocks you own today are essentially worthless. This is what Peter Lynch literally talked about decades ago. OK, now we'll get to the important stuff. There's always something to worry about. This is the difference.

This is what happens in the stock market. Because, see, everybody's got the brain power to do well in the stock market. Question is whether you have the stomach for it. That's the key organ in the body. There's always something to worry about. I mean, there's always something to worry about. In the 50s, it was depression and nuclear war. The 50s was the best decade. This century. Do you remember when oil went from 4 to 40? You remember that period?

And all the countries of the world are going to go bankrupt. And then and the big banks go bankrupt and we're going to have a Great Depression and the stock market's going down and you're going to wind up selling pencils and apples, you know? Doesn't that sound familiar? You're going to end up selling pencils and apples. The whole stock market's going to go bankrupt. This is Peter Lynch saying this prediction has happened before in almost the same exact way.

The only thing that's changed is the time history repeats and we're seeing again another repetition of it. So I'm asking investors today to realize that right now you're in a time period where there's a lot of uncertainty, there's questions in the air, and nothing about that is new. Nothing's abnormal. You'll be in the same situation in five years and in 10 years. As Peter Lynch highlights, his entire investment career has been filled with uncertainties and predictions of doom and gloom.

Whether it's oil collapsing the market, whether it's nuclear warfare, the Great Depression or the recession or the the even greater depression, whatever it may be, there's always something to worry about in all times of the market. So if you're investor, get a grip, lock in. This is a time to be optimistic. Not to be greedy, not to be unprudent, but we should be optimistic about the future. Optimism is what makes money in the end.

You can look at the biggest examples and although there's investors that try to look smart by always having bearish calls and when the market will collapse and there's some of them like that, you have the Michael Buries of the world. There's always way more investors that have made way more money through optimism of having realistic positive assumptions of the future. Knowing that many of these companies are going to be highly successful, extremely

prosperous. That if money is destroyed in some companies that can't maneuver and adapt to agentic technology, many of them will. And the ones that go away will mean higher margins for the existing companies that will be able to expand and grow in the process. What we have right now is investors selling off great companies for entirely unrealistic presumptions of the future. Ones that are seeded in fear and

doubt, not realistic optimism. So that's my thoughts on this and that's how I'm responding as an investor. I'll continue to invest in the companies that I think will be incredibly profitable in the future. And I think that the disruption risk is dramatically overstated by many of these articles. And this certainly isn't going to be the last. As we see more AI technology emerge, more demos, more clawed plug insurance, we're going to

see more of this doom and gloom. But that's the latest as of now.

Now moving on, we get to some big news. Over the past seven days, Netflix gave the opportunity for Warner Brothers to go back to Paramount and say, hey, look, you have 7 days to revise your offer and give us your best and final offer. And that has happened. Warner Bros Discovery says that Paramount made a higher bid and the board will weigh the offer against the Netflix deal. Basically, what's going on here is the offer that Paramount submitted as private. So we know that they submitted

an offer. It was higher than their previous one, but the details are private. We don't know the number. Everybody's speculating of what it could be. It could be anywhere from like $31.00 with better terms to $34 on the high end. And either way, this is Paramount's last ditch attempt to steal Warner Brothers away from Netflix to say, hey, Warner Brothers, we want to go with Paramount over Netflix because their offer's so much more attractive now.

They can't necessarily do that unless Netflix looks at their offer and decides not to beat it. So Netflix can look at it and they get the first call. They can match the offer or beat it. So Netflix is going to simply look at it, look at the revised offer and see if they want to adjust theirs at all or if they need to do anything to beat that offer. And that's up to them. Netflix has all the power in the situation. I think that Netflix is going to look at it and say, you know what?

If we have to pay an additional four to six months of free cash flow to buy this service, to make it so that we own all of this for the next 20-30 years so that we can drop on this well of incredibly valuable content and distribute it through our massive distribution, that's probably worth it. Internally, Netflix knows exactly what they're willing to pay and what is overpriced. They already have that modeled out. They already have their numbers.

So they can look at this and weigh it against what is their price of what they believe this asset is worth. And as Ted Sarandos says, they are disciplined buyers. If they don't like the deal, if it's simply just too much and it makes it not worth it, they will walk away and Netflix will be able to collect over a 2 1/2 billion dollar fee. So even if they walk away, they get something out of this. But if I have to guess, and again this is hypothetical,

maybe they won't. My guess is that Paramount submits a higher offer. I think that Netflix makes theirs more attractive and locks it down and then it's done from there. But we'll have to wait and see. Now moving on, we have another bit of news here. This is a big headline. Meta and AMD agreed to AI chip deal worth more than $100 billion. These deals used to be really cool, like we'd see these and

everybody would get excited. Oh my gosh, $100 billion deal with a chip company between a big tech company. But now that they've happened so frequently, it just seems like another day, like every other day there's a deal like this. It seems like I'm getting a little bit numb to looking at these deals. The instant reaction to this deal is AMD, of course, is up big. They got a new customer, so they're up nearly 10% and Meta's up a little bit. So Meta's not even being hurt by

this. Most investors already know that Meta's they're buying big, that they're investing in CapEx. So nothing is new about that. Now, I've recently invested A substantial amount of money in Meta. I've made it my third largest position. It's about $150,000 invested in it and I love what the business is doing. They're becoming one of the few supercomputing powers. Many people are bearish on this CapEx spend. I'm not.

Long term, I realize that it will hurt the financials in the short term, it'll make it so that their accounting and the fact that they're depreciating these assets over time will hurt their earnings. But I think long term, this sets these companies up to be so uniquely strong. Meta will have one of the strongest moats in the world, both a network Moat and an infrastructure Moat. It'll be virtually indestructible.

So I view this company as incredibly Moat heavy, super wide and deep Moat with ample growth opportunity priced at a 22 Ford PE. To me, that feels like a very attractive value proposition and attractive situation to invest in. That's why I continue to feel good about this one. Finally, we move on to the fail

of the week. In this case, it's an unintentional this is an accidental hacking of about 7000 robot vacuums. We have Sammy as Dewfall. He claims that he wasn't trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world. He just wanted to remote control his brand new DJI Romo vacuum with the PS-5 game PS-5 game pad, he tells The Verge. Because it sounded fun. But when his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI servers, it wasn't just one vacuum cleaner that replied

Roughly 7000 of them. All of them around the world begin treating as Dewfall like their boss. He could remotely control them and look and listen through their live camera feeds. This means that this guy inadvertently hacked other people's robot vacuums, which have cameras on board, meaning that he hacked cameras of other people's homes. 7000 people. He would watch them map out each room of a house, generating a complete 2D floor plan.

You could use any robot's IP address to find its rough location. I found my device was just in one of the ocean of devices. So it has a map here of like a we have an area map of all the different devices that he's found and here it has like a live camera feed. Like some of these have on board cameras so they can see objects and avoid them, but it also inadvertently operates as a

camera going around your home. You could just drive around and film people at will and they don't even know they're being filmed. They might just think that their robot's acting a little funny. And this has to be one of the worst hacking or personal invasion of people's privacies possibly ever done. I mean, have we had a situation where 7000 devices that are mobile and have cameras have

been hacked in people's homes? In most cases, if you hack a camera in someone's home, at least it's just one location. These ones are literally mobile. You can drive them around. So he has a camera that he can stare in other people's homes. He says right now that DJI hasn't even fixed all the vulnerabilities that he's found. One of them is the ability to view your own DJI Romo video stream without needing its

security pin. Another one is so bad, I won't describe it until DJI has more time to fix it. So DJI has a massive critical failure and there's security here. And if you have one of these robots, especially with the camera, you might want to just put the robot away, take it off its wheels, flip it upside down, make sure it can't drive anywhere without your permission. Because as of right now, it could literally be viewed by anyone with a clod code plugin.

And until the update happens, until the company publicly acknowledges it and it fixes all these these security exploits, it might be a concern. That's going to be it for this time. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.