[JM]: Dan, how do you feel about trains?
[JM]: Are you just like a casual train rider or like they're just trains and mode of transportation?
[JM]: Or are you way on the other side of the spectrum where you just can't get enough?
[JM]: You love riding them.
[JM]: You have like model train sets snaking their way through your house.
[JM]: So where do you fall on the train aficionado spectrum?
[DJ]: Well, today I learned there was a train aficionado spectrum, but I would say I'm closer to the first side of it, which is I am an enthusiastic user of my city's light rail system, but I couldn't tell you who manufactured the trains and which one is the Mark IV and which one is the Mark V train, although I have heard that some of them are being upgraded soon, but I'm not really excited about it.
[DJ]: What about you, Justin?
[DJ]: Do you have, do you have like a secret garden with a, with a miniature remote controlled train kit, like in movies?
[JM]: No, I think I'm pretty much where you're at when it comes to trains.
[JM]: With the only other thing I would add, perhaps a little extra, is that having spent about five years in Japan, I do have a lot of affection for the Japanese rail system.
[JM]: It is so incredibly efficient, clean, organized.
[JM]: It truly is the way that public transportation should be done.
[JM]: And if you have never had an opportunity to experience that or something close to it, then I highly recommend it.
[JM]: But in the meantime, I would like to refer you to a wonderful site that I came across called yamanote.fun.
[JM]: And that is Y-A-M-A-N-O-T-E dot fun.
[JM]: Yet another fantastic use of the .fun top level domain because what this is, well, first of all, I should say Yamanote is the name of a very peculiar, at least probably for people who aren't familiar with Tokyo, train line in that it is a circle and it goes around almost endlessly the city of Tokyo.
[JM]: I don't recall how many stops there are.
[JM]: It's a decent number, but it's a great way to get around
[JM]: because it travels in this circle around the perimeter of the city.
[JM]: And it's an iconic train line in part because it is this circle and it is this very useful train that everyone who spends any time in Tokyo will probably ride.
[JM]: but also because it has a lot of very fun melodies that it plays at every stop.
[JM]: And it's not unique to the Yamanote line.
[JM]: There are plenty of other train stations in Japan and subway stations that have their own melodies, but it is definitely something that I notice more on the Yamanote line than on other lines.
[JM]: And it seems I'm not the only one because on yamanote.fun, you can virtually ride either the outer loop or the inner loop.
[JM]: which confused me at first until I realized that just meant which direction you're going in.
[JM]: Are you going clockwise or counterclockwise?
[JM]: And at each stop, you will hear the melody that plays, some ambient sounds that you might hear as the doors are open and you hear the hustle and bustle of people getting on and off and whatever else is going on in the city, and the announcement that used to be done by a live person and of course now is pre-recorded, such as saying, you're now at XYZ station, the next stop is
[JM]: whatever the next stop is, any other guidance that the announcement provides.
[JM]: And it's a little weird for me to hear this because when I listen to this, when I get to the end of the Japanese announcement, I expect that to be the end of it.
[JM]: But now it plays the English version of that same announcement, which did not exist when I lived there.
[JM]: So it's a little weird for me to hear this version of it.
[JM]: But it is cool that you can just push play essentially from any station you want and more or less experience what you would experience if you were riding the train from an audio perspective, from what you hear.
[DJ]: That does sound dot fun.
[JM]: It is indeed.
[JM]: And another site with a slightly less fun top-level domain is
[DJ]: Oh, then I'm not interested.
[DJ]: I've been spoiled by these vanity top level domains.
[DJ]: If you're not .coffee, get out.
[JM]: Totally.
[JM]: This one is at jivx.com/densha, which is J-I-V-X dot com slash D-E-N-S-H-A.
[JM]: Densha is the Japanese word for train.
[JM]: And similar to the other site, this one allows you to ride the train.
[JM]: But instead of the focus being on what you hear when you're on the train, this site's focus is more on the visual.
[JM]: And it is a voxel style depiction of,
[JM]: a train riding through a very pixelated version of Tokyo, and you can listen to a lo-fi track while the train is snaking its way through the city.
[JM]: And what also appears to be the primary purpose of the site, besides just enjoying riding this virtual train, is that you can also study Japanese while you're riding this train.
[JM]: So there is a phrase at the bottom, both a formal version and below it in the informal or more casual version.
[JM]: And you have this voice track that tells you the pronunciation of these two versions of the phrase.
[JM]: And then there's an English translation at the bottom.
[JM]: So it's a very interesting site.
[JM]: It is just one of these weird creations.
[JM]: Like someone decided I'm going to create a way for you to study basic Japanese phrases while riding a train and listening to lo-fi music in the background.
[JM]: I mean, it's just a perfect encapsulation of all of the wonderful weirdness of the internet.
[JM]: I felt it deserved a mention.
[DJ]: I don't really have plans to learn Japanese specifically, but if I did, I would much rather learn it from some weird website than, you know, some lame application or something like that that sends me notifications when I take a few days off.
[JM]: Chides you for not maintaining your streak.
[DJ]: Yeah, come on, come on.
[DJ]: I want positive reinforcement, which I define as riding a virtual train around a lo-fi version of Tokyo.
[JM]: All right, moving on to a little bit of followup.
[JM]: My friend, Jeff Triplett reached out to let us know that regarding Bartender, I mentioned in the last show that Bartender Pro was switching to a subscription model that I don't really care for.
[JM]: And I neglected to mention that if you
[JM]: are looking for a good solution to menu bar management on macOS.
[JM]: There used to be this open source tool called Ice.
[JM]: I mean, technically there still is, but Jeff pointed out that Ice is not actively maintained anymore and someone did us all a solid and
[JM]: picked up the banner and is carrying it in a fork called Thaw.
[JM]: And I had already bookmarked this particular project for later evaluation.
[JM]: And I took this opportunity to take a quick look at it.
[JM]: And I'm looking at the most recent shipped release, which is 1.2.
[JM]: And I see at the top under new features, it says icon position persistence.
[JM]: Thaw now remembers where icons belong.
[JM]: Menu bar items are automatically restored to their saved sections, visible, hidden, or always hidden.
[JM]: After app restarts or system reboots, no more manually resorting icons after logging in.
[JM]: And my first thought was, wait, it didn't already do this until this last release?
[JM]: Like, I guess, as far as I know, every single version of Bartender I've ever used, probably since Bartender 1 has done this.
[JM]: And so,
[JM]: My initial thing when I thought is like, okay, it seems like they're catching up a little bit, you know, to some of the features that perhaps more mature commercial tools have been shipping for a long time.
[JM]: And again, maybe I'm just fully misreading this or misunderstanding it, but regardless, it looks like this feature has been added.
[JM]: I think there's a 2.0 release on the horizon.
[JM]: I recall seeing some RC release candidates in the list of releases.
[JM]: So I don't think I'm going to switch to this right away, mainly from a perspective of if it's not broken, I don't really feel the need to fix it.
[JM]: The now three year old version of bartender five that I'm using still continues to work just fine.
[JM]: It's the version from right before it was acquired by whoever the new owners are.
[JM]: And I don't really have a whole lot of motivation to switch to a different tool.
[JM]: But if you don't already have something that works for you, or if you're already on OS26, or if you're planning to upgrade to it, or to OS27 when it's released later this year, presumably you're going to need some continuously updated solution.
[JM]: And I think that Thaw could be a good fit for that if you find yourself in that situation.
[JM]: So as usual, there'll be a link to the Thaw project in the show notes.
[JM]: So check it out.
[JM]: All right, moving on to another bit of follow-up.
[JM]: I wanted to revisit the topic of Squircle Jail.
[JM]: And I really just get the feeling that this topic is going to keep coming up over and over again, mainly because I just won't let it go.
[JM]: But...
[JM]: Also because thankfully I, and I should say we, because I feel like you, Dan, are also of a similar mind.
[JM]: I feel like there are other people who also won't let it go.
[JM]: And that's part of what I wanted to mention today.
[DJ]: Well, I'm not going to let it go because I love the silly word squircle.
[DJ]: And so any opportunity to say it or to provoke you into saying it, I intend to take.
[DJ]: And just the whole idea of a squircle jail really makes me want to do some sort of ongoing riff where we take the names of famous prison escape movies and put the word squircle in them somehow.
[DJ]: So I'm just going to put that idea out there and see what comes back, see what the universe brings back to us.
[JM]: Steve McQueen and the Great Squircle Jail Escape.
[DJ]: Yep.
[DJ]: Or the Squircle Shank Redemption, maybe?
[DJ]: That could be a really moving film, I think.
[DJ]: Someone's in prison and manages to get a poster of a non-squircle icon on their wall, but they're secretly digging a tunnel behind it.
[DJ]: Oops, I just gave away the plot of the Shawshank Redemption, but...
[JM]: If you haven't seen that one yet, that's on you.
[JM]: So the reason that I wanted to bring this up today is that it turns out that there is a way out of squircle jail.
[JM]: But before I dig into that, just as recap, a squircle is a round rectangle icon shape that Apple has decided is what all icons must look like.
[JM]: This started out as an iOS, iPhone, iPad only thing.
[JM]: and Apple proceeded to infect the Mac operating system with this same homogenous icon shape.
[JM]: In direct contradiction to how icons have always existed on Mac OS, including some of the best of them produced by Apple over many years.
[JM]: But as of OS 26, Apple has imposed this squircle jail where all icons are forced to live inside this squircle shape.
[JM]: If you don't make your icon conform to that shape, it will be foisted on you in this gray squircle background.
[JM]: It seemed like this was just something that we were all going to have to live with.
[JM]: At least those of us who have moved on to OS 26, I'm still on Sequoia mainly because I don't like squircles.
[JM]: Okay, fine.
[JM]: That's not the only reason, but.
[DJ]: But it is the main reason.
[JM]: It's certainly one of them.
[DJ]: Yes.
[DJ]: All other reasons pale in comparison to squircle jail.
[DJ]: You're an enemy of the carceral OS state, an opponent of it.
[DJ]: Like you're saying, no, I'm not going to accept an operating system that jails my icons.
[JM]: I am an enemy of the squircle state.
[JM]: That is correct.
[JM]: So there were several posts about this, but one that I want to highlight is by Tyler Hall called Escape from Squircle Jail.
[JM]: And he wrote, this weekend, I was wrapping up a new release of Iris and decided to have some fun after a user emailed to say, I have a rather niche feature request, but wondering if it would be possible to offer an alternative app icon with the beautiful flower freed from its squircle.
[JM]: I know that Apple has mandated the squircle from MacOS Tahoe on, but I'm still running Sequoia and I imagine other users maybe as well.
[JM]: I love the way apps like Nova and Sketch offer alternative legacy icons and it would make Iris feel even more at home in my dock.
[JM]: Tyler goes on to say,
[JM]: We all know about macOS Tahoe's terrible app icons and how third-party developers have been confined to SquircleJail.
[JM]: If you're lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of SquircleJail using NSDocTilePlugin.
[JM]: It's not strictly the intended use case of that API, and it's not allowed in the Mac App Store either, but it can solve the problem.
[JM]: So today's release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app's settings pane.
[JM]: And since they use the NS Doctile plugin API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.
[JM]: And in this post, there's an animation of a screen capture of this settings pane where you can choose between four different app icons, one of which is in a squircle.
[JM]: The other three are free of said squircle jail and
[JM]: Two out of those three are really beautiful, colorful, photorealistic, detailed icons, the kind that Apple seems to have abandoned for some time now.
[JM]: And I haven't had a chance to use Iris yet, but I fully intend to, mainly because it is on sale until July 30th.
[JM]: So if you're listening to this, you've got about two weeks to get this on sale.
[JM]: I know that I'm definitely going to be buying it.
[JM]: I haven't even told you what Iris does.
[JM]: Honestly, I almost don't care what Iris does.
[DJ]: Honestly, I don't even know what it does.
[DJ]: It could be anything, but I'm buying it on sale because I hate squircles that much.
[JM]: I know that it has to do with photo management.
[JM]: It is supposed to be an improvement over the photos app that Apple ships on Mac OS.
[JM]: That much I know, but mainly I am interested in buying it just because of how Tyler implemented this feature.
[JM]: Not only am I going to get you out of Squircle Jail, I'm going to give you four different choices of app icons, half of which are these really beautiful icons, detailed icons that are very much not in the style of these abstract shapes that barely look like the thing that they're supposed to represent.
[JM]: And Iris is not alone in shipping icons that use this particular API to get around
[JM]: the Squircle Jail.
[JM]: The user who wrote in with this request to Tyler mentions Nova and Sketch.
[JM]: I believe bbedit also uses this API to get around the Squircle Jail.
[JM]: There's a post by the developer of Cyberduck called Resist the Squircle Jail where they describe using a similar technique to be able to ship an icon not confined by the Squircle.
[JM]: So I'm gonna also put a link to this particular API.
[JM]: So if you are an application developer and you want to ship support for icons that are not homogenous and that are varied and fun and distinguishable from one another in the doc, then I highly encourage you to take a look at the documentation
[JM]: and implement that API in your application.
[JM]: And I mentioned that in part because I often will look in an application's preferences to see whether this is even an option.
[JM]: So I use the otherwise excellent Mona application for Mastodon and I love it.
[JM]: And I love that it gives you so much customizability.
[JM]: And one of those things that you can do related to customization is to choose your preferred application icon.
[JM]: But unfortunately, every single one of these 15 or so options are squircles.
[JM]: So kudos to Mona for offering the choice of custom icons.
[JM]: I love it when application developers do that.
[JM]: But if you are doing this, I highly encourage you to also offer non-squircle versions of your applications icon.
[JM]: I've seen some people implement techniques where your user selected custom icon is visible in the dock when the application is running, but when you quit it, it reverts back to the default, presumably a squircle version of the icon.
[JM]: So I would encourage you to not use that particular technique and to use something like this API that allows you to always have your preferred version of the icon in the dock, whether the application is running or not.
[JM]: I want to highlight, as Tyler mentioned, that this API is
[JM]: not available if you distribute your application in the Mac App Store, which as far as I'm concerned is one more reason to either A, not distribute your application in the Mac App Store, or at least also distribute it outside of the Mac App Store.
[JM]: I'm sure someone somewhere has compiled a list of all the things that you can do when you ship your application outside of the Mac App Store that you can't do when you ship it in the Mac App Store.
[JM]: Like for example, Mac App Store apps have to be sandboxed.
[JM]: There are certain file system limitations that you have in terms of what you can access.
[JM]: I'm sure someone has compiled a long list.
[JM]: Well, we can now add this whole question of this particular API and escaping squircle jail to that list.
[JM]: One other thing that I'll mention as I hunt for versions of icons that aren't squircles, which are getting harder and harder to find as everyone gravitates to whatever it is that Apple does, is that it's much easier if you have a non-squircled icon that doesn't have a predefined shape.
[JM]: It's much easier to take that and make it into a squircle
[JM]: than if you have a squirkeled icon and then you're trying to remove the squircle.
[JM]: So even if for some reason you decide that you don't want to do the work to add this kind of customizability to your app, at least, I don't know, on some press assets page on your website, post high quality versions of your application's icon that aren't squirkeled so that people can use that
[JM]: to override your squirkeled version in the application.
[JM]: That would be super helpful.
[JM]: And the last thing I'll say about this is I realized that squircles were something I didn't really prefer, but I didn't feel particularly strongly about them.
[JM]: But Apple's recent imposition of them on macOS
[JM]: And this insistence that squircles pervade every square inch of macOS has left me with nothing but outright revulsion and contempt for them.
[JM]: I used to be mostly indifferent, a slight preference for the non-squircle versions, but at this point I have this fiery loathing of them.
[DJ]: To end on a slightly less down note, I would just like to suggest, oh squircle, where art thou?
[JM]: That's good.
[JM]: To end on a slightly more hopeful note, I do hope that Apple abandons this policy at some point.
[DJ]: I do too.
[DJ]: It's silly.
[DJ]: Especially the jail part is really, it's not a good outcome for anybody.
[DJ]: So it takes an icon and it like squishes it down so that it'll fit inside the circle shape and then just fills in the background with gray.
[DJ]: Like it looks terrible.
[DJ]: And I guess it is a, it really is Apple being like, we're going to abuse your application until you make it do what we demand, which is gross.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: But it's not good for Apple either because most of what you run on your Mac, a lot of what you run on your Mac anyways, like third-party apps, and to the extent that they don't get on board with this, I realize most of them are, but to the extent that they don't, it just makes your Mac look worse.
[DJ]: So I don't think this serves anybody.
[DJ]: And I hope that they do just quietly because it's not like Apple would ever apologize for doing something stupid and wrong.
[DJ]: But I hope they at least quietly just go like, by the way, guys, icons can be whatever shape you want again.
[JM]: Yeah, and at a minimum, and I do mean a bare minimum, I hope that they don't somehow block this usage of the Doctile plugin API and prevent people from getting around SquirgleJail, which it sounds like they're able to do now.
[JM]: So hopefully Apple doesn't thwart people who are trying to get around it.
[JM]: Because as Tyler mentions in his post, remember when software was allowed to be whimsical?
[JM]: So let's return to more whimsy in our software.
[DJ]: Yeah, you know whose software used to be pretty whimsical, actually?
[DJ]: Apple's.
[DJ]: I do miss those days when they weren't just one more big, obnoxious tyrant of the tech world.
[DJ]: I'm not sure some people would argue that they were always kind of like that, because fair.
[DJ]: But I've seen people making all these blog posts on this topic, and some of them are going back to the classic Mac days and demonstrating how icons were used to communicate information, because that's what icons are actually for.
[DJ]: And I kind of miss it.
[DJ]: I kind of miss it in this sea of completely indistinguishable blue on white.
[DJ]: Because again, for some reason, like all icons are blue and white now and have been for years.
[DJ]: Kind of meaningless shapes.
[DJ]: Yeah, bring whimsy back to our computers.
[DJ]: That's what we want.
[JM]: All right, moving on, as we have talked about, companies are investing a gobsmacking amount of money in data centers and investment in computing infrastructure to support large language models and other generative software.
[JM]: And I'd like to talk a little bit about data center construction, its financing, and what that means for all of us.
[JM]: And to kick this off, there is a massive data center in the works called Stratos, which is backed by Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank Infamy, that has been approved by county commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, despite very strong public opposition.
[JM]: This project would span 40,000 acres across three sites.
[JM]: That is more than twice the size of Manhattan for a data center project, mind you, and would require roughly nine gigawatts of power.
[JM]: Nine gigawatts would exceed Utah's entire current electricity consumption for the state of Utah.
[JM]: People who are not, shall we say, big fans of this proposed project
[JM]: warn that this facility would increase Utah's greenhouse gas emissions by about 50%, significantly deplete water resources in a drought-stricken region, and threaten the already shrinking Great Salt Lake ecosystem.
[JM]: An analysis done by Utah State University found that the waste heat from this data center complex alone, just the waste heat, could raise local nighttime temperatures by up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit.
[JM]: Thousands of people have filed objections to this proposed project.
[JM]: People are pursuing a referendum to reverse its approval.
[JM]: And said backer O'Leary has dismissed opponents as paid out-of-state protesters, which, as you might expect, is a baseless claim with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
[JM]: It seems like the governor, Spencer Cox, is amenable to the project, saying that he will require that it not harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills, and that it will proceed in phases subject to review.
[JM]: But I don't know that opponents to this project find that particularly reassuring.
[JM]: So, this is just one project, mind you, albeit a very large project.
[JM]: But think of the hundreds and hundreds of other data center construction projects that are currently either in development, already underway, and you think about the various environmental issues that raises.
[JM]: California is looking into requiring data center construction projects to disclose how much water they're going to use.
[JM]: and potentially restricting development in overdrafted groundwater basin areas.
[JM]: And the electrical draw is really just incredible.
[JM]: Even today, before you think about the impact of all of these in-development projects, US data centers today consume about 6% of the country's electricity.
[JM]: Globally, data center power consumption is up 36% in the last two years, with the United States accounting for 43% of that total.
[JM]: And now I want to talk a little bit about how these projects are being financed.
[JM]: As companies are borrowing billions and billions of dollars to invest in generative software computing infrastructure, banks are increasingly trying to mitigate the risk of all of this lending.
[JM]: and are hunting for new ways to offload that risk associated with all of this hyper growth in infrastructure.
[JM]: So there are groups, including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and SMBC, and they're trying to find ways to distribute portions of this data center related
[JM]: deal-making to a broader range of investors.
[JM]: One banker said, the sizes we're talking about, they are out of scale to anything we've thought about ever.
[JM]: Banks very quickly start choking with the idea being that they are choking on the sheer magnitude of the debt that they're being asked to issue.
[JM]: Recently, lenders including JP Morgan have spent more than six months distributing $38 billion of construction debt tied to a single data center project leased to Oracle in Texas and Washington.
[JM]: And six months
[JM]: That is a long time to be finding buyers for this debt.
[JM]: So banks are looking into significant risk transfers to offload the risk of losses related to a loan portfolio.
[JM]: And they're looking to upload those SRTs to investors such as private credit funds and insurers in exchange for a return.
[JM]: And rather than a classic SRT that might be tied to dozens of loans, banks are exploring slicing and dicing large and concentrated data center loans to shift the riskiest portions off their books.
[JM]: Does that sound at all familiar?
[JM]: Not yet?
[JM]: Don't worry, it will.
[JM]: Banks usually have limits on how much exposure they can have to a single company across loan portfolios.
[JM]: But if you take a look at isaiprofitable.com, a wonderful site that we mentioned in a recent episode, you will see that companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are borrowing so much money to invest in generative software infrastructure that banks are starting to approach those limits on exposure to a single company.
[JM]: One way for them to get around those limits is to utilize credit default swaps, which are derivatives that enable banks to buy protection against a company defaulting on its debt, thereby reducing their exposure to any single borrower and allowing them to lend more money to that same borrower.
[JM]: Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, in a very short amount of time,
[JM]: The monthly volume of these credit default swaps are up 10 times since the beginning of 2025.
[JM]: In just 18 months, the net notional outstanding on those swaps has ballooned from two and a half billion to $13 billion.
[JM]: So slicing and dicing loans into mishmash debt salad, huge increases in credit default swap derivatives, issuance and trading volumes.
[JM]: Now, does this sound familiar?
[JM]: Anyone?
[JM]: Think it sounds a little bit like the subprime real estate fiasco of 2008?
[JM]: Just me?
[DJ]: I do seem to remember the phrase credit default swaps entering my consciousness in relation to that fiasco.
[DJ]: Although I like your use of the phrase debt salad.
[DJ]: So I think maybe CDS could be redefined from credit default swap to Caesar debt salad.
[DJ]: Can we refer to it that way now?
[DJ]: Banks are making a lot of Caesar debt salad in their debt kitchens and selling it to hungry investment firms everywhere.
[DJ]: Is that basically the idea?
[JM]: That is the basic idea, yeah.
[DJ]: Well, this sounds great for everyone, though, because then the gigantic companies get lent lots of money.
[DJ]: The banks offload the risk of that debt to other people who want a return.
[DJ]: And then those other people definitely get a return on their investment.
[DJ]: And I don't see the downside.
[DJ]: It's a win-win for everyone.
[DJ]: Disclaimer, this is not financial advice.
[JM]: It is definitely not.
[JM]: And this is just the debt.
[JM]: Let's quickly talk about cashflow.
[JM]: The cashflow situation for these companies that are making these massive investments is perhaps even more dire.
[JM]: I'm looking at a graph of the free cashflow of these companies that are spending all this money to invest in generative software infrastructure from 2012 to 2026.
[JM]: And it's graphed alongside the S&P 500.
[JM]: And these two lines more or less follow each other.
[JM]: right up until early 2025.
[JM]: And then the S&P 500 line continues.
[JM]: It's up into the right direction as it's been going for a long time.
[JM]: And the free cash flow line just goes straight off a cliff and essentially approaches zero.
[JM]: I have never seen a graph explain more clearly what's going on with this current generative software bubble and why it's completely unsustainable.
[JM]: And side note, lest you think that the data that this graph is based on comes from some chicken little the sky is falling rabble rousers, this data was calculated by Nomura Securities, an institution so famously conservative that they haven't updated their work attire policy since the 1980s.
[JM]: So when you look at the debt situation, when you look at this graph and free cash flow cratering the way it has cratered over the last year or so, I feel like we just returned to the inevitable question of not if when this all comes crashing down, but when.
[JM]: So Dan, just so I can place an appropriate bet, when will this all come crashing down?
[JM]: Please let me know.
[DJ]: Well, if I knew that, I would be making my own bets, I guess.
[DJ]: But no, I have no idea.
[DJ]: It's, I guess, not unlike living through 2008.
[DJ]: It is this very weird situation as an individual to just be like watching the global economy go insane.
[DJ]: And there's kind of nothing you can do about it, except hope that this doesn't completely obliterate your retirement savings, I guess.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: You know, it's like, oh, okay, well, I guess this is probably all going to come crashing down.
[DJ]: So enjoy.
[DJ]: And then, I don't know, five years from now, they can make a stylish movie where Margot Robbie reclines in a bathtub and explains to us what credit default swaps are again.
[JM]: Most of us will definitely have forgotten what they mean, you know, these 15 or so years later.
[DJ]: Yeah, just remember, Caesar debt salad.
[DJ]: Think about it.
[DJ]: What role do croutons play in this analogy?
[DJ]: They probably have something to do with, like, distressed debt obligations or something.
[DJ]: I don't know.
[DJ]: I get out over my skis with financial terminology really quickly, so I got to be careful.
[JM]: The croutons are the issuance fees that the hedge funds just slather on top of the salad.
[JM]: I mean, I guess you don't slather croutons, but you get- No, you sprinkle them.
[DJ]: You slather on the dressing, but then you just sprinkle some fees on top.
[JM]: I keep thinking about ways in which to place a bet on this, right?
[JM]: If, as people are saying, this is such a ticking time bomb, how do you place a bet on it?
[DJ]: Well, you have to quantify an outcome, right?
[DJ]: You can't just say the bubble bursts or it all comes crashing down because you can't measure whether those have happened or not.
[DJ]: You have to pick some number.
[DJ]: And what is it?
[DJ]: Is it the market cap?
[DJ]: Like, is it the perceived value of these so-called hyperscalers?
[DJ]: Or is it some other thing, right?
[DJ]: Because that's a bet you could place.
[DJ]: The bet you could place is that thus and such got like Oracle's stock crashes to some value by 2028.
[JM]: Yeah, the question to me isn't so much how to do it, because I can think of companies that I would short in such a scenario.
[JM]: And there are even ETFs that you can get that are essentially short positions on not just, say, the S&P 500, but there's even ETFs.
[JM]: If you can think of an ETF, it exists.
[JM]: If you're like, you know what, I want to find an ETF for people who still decades later collect Beanie Babies, like there's probably an ETF for some derivative version of Beanie Baby trading.
[JM]: I don't know.
[JM]: But there are ETFs that focus on, say, people who want to go short on AI stuff.
[JM]: It exists.
[JM]: The question isn't so much, okay, how do you do it?
[JM]: It's the timing that's hard because unlike when you go long on something, unlike when you expect something to go up, you can just buy it and you can hold it.
[JM]: That's harder to do when you're trying to bet that something's gonna go down because that usually involves an options trade and something else that's tied to time, right?
[JM]: Like you have to say, okay, I think it's gonna happen during this timeframe.
[JM]: Whereas if you think something is going to go up, but you don't know the timeframe, well, you could just buy it and just hold onto it.
[JM]: But when you want to do it in the other direction, it gets more complicated.
[JM]: So the timing becomes rather important.
[JM]: Otherwise you can place a bet.
[JM]: And if it doesn't happen in the timeframe that you expected it to, well, you lost not say 10%, 20%, even of your investment, you lose all of it.
[JM]: It all goes to zero.
[JM]: And if you remember The Big Short, which was about the subprime mortgage fiasco, the main character in this story...
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: Bob Short.
[DJ]: We all remember him.
[JM]: Michael Burry places his bet too early.
[JM]: He was convinced that this was a certainty, not a near certainty, but a certainty.
[JM]: But the problem is the timing is the hard part.
[JM]: And he placed his bet too early and almost lost it all.
[JM]: In the end, he didn't.
[JM]: And he...
[JM]: achieved huge returns on that bet.
[JM]: And he, from what I understand, has either talked about or is also doing something similar now with, of all companies, Nvidia, which to me is kind of funny.
[JM]: Of all the companies that's doing well right now, obviously it's Nvidia.
[JM]: The ones that I would think to be more at risk are Facebook, infrastructure, companies with very little track record and no other revenue diversification like CoreWeave.
[DJ]: The rationale is probably not that NVIDIA has some looming structural risk, but I wonder if it's just that one method of investing, and again, can I not say enough times that Justin and I are not financial professionals and are not giving investment advice on this show?
[DJ]: One thing you can do is look at what you'd call a company's fundamentals versus what the market values them.
[DJ]: And you might conclude that NVIDIA is so overvalued against their fundamentals that to some degree on some timeline, they have nowhere to go but down.
[JM]: And I think that is precisely the bet he's making.
[JM]: So it does make sense.
[JM]: Nvidia's market cap is now over $5 trillion.
[JM]: What?
[JM]: It is the largest company by market cap in the world.
[DJ]: But also it's like the largest company that has ever existed.
[DJ]: Like what baffles me about these numbers these days is that just a couple of years ago, we were talking about, can you believe there might be a company whose market cap is a trillion dollars soon?
[DJ]: That's insane.
[DJ]: And now that's like small potatoes.
[DJ]: Now a trillion is the next unicorn, right?
[DJ]: Used to be a billion, no.
[DJ]: Now it's like a billion dollars isn't cool.
[DJ]: A trillion dollars is cool or whatever the line from the social network was.
[JM]: Yeah, it's wild.
[JM]: And it's quite possible that Michael Burry's bet pays off.
[JM]: But like I said, the timing is the tricky part.
[JM]: But I really do think it is about the timing, right?
[JM]: It's not a question of if.
[JM]: I saw this article in The Telegraph recently, and it goes like this.
[JM]: Debt-fueled spending on AI is driving up the risk of a global financial crisis, central bankers have warned.
[JM]: The Bank for International Settlements said on Sunday that excessive spending on new AI data centers and opaque transactions risked a financial meltdown similar to the global credit crunch nearly two decades ago.
[JM]: The BIS, known as the bank for central banks, said there was growing peril in financial markets from how the complex web of financial ties between AI giants shadow banks and data center builders unraveling.
[JM]: Financial stability could be at risk in the event of an AI bust, the BIS said.
[JM]: Should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.
[JM]: The opacity of AI sector financing compounds these vulnerabilities.
[JM]: One risk is that large-scale investment in AI infrastructure becomes excessive as each firm tries to outcompete rivals and dominate market share.
[JM]: This could leave the sector more vulnerable if AI underdelivers, possibly bringing the current investment boom to an abrupt end with large macroeconomic consequences.
[DJ]: The degree of understatement in that, but just the like one possibility is that there could be too much.
[DJ]: It's like we were just talking about the amount of, what was it exactly that went up by a factor of 10 in terms of debt issuance?
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: Just this idea that, guys, it's possible that in the future we could see overly enthusiastic debt market.
[DJ]: It's like, was this published two years ago?
[DJ]: Like, that's already happening.
[DJ]: This is published two weeks ago.
[DJ]: It's like, did the Bank for International Settlements just wake up after like a really long nap?
[JM]: Like, come on.
[JM]: This could, you know, possibly result in large macroeconomic consequences.
[JM]: I mean, as you said, what ridiculous understatement.
[DJ]: There's like three outcomes if you want to really simplify it.
[DJ]: There could be no macroeconomic consequences from this AI bubble.
[DJ]: There could be large, broadly positive macroeconomic consequences.
[DJ]: And there could be large, broadly negative macroeconomic consequences.
[DJ]: But it's probably one of those three things.
[DJ]: And yeah, I don't think I would bet that there will be no macroeconomic consequences from
[DJ]: I mean, and for most of us, this is the other thing, too, is that as far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong.
[DJ]: And if I'm wrong, Justin, we really need to start getting some high value sponsors on this show.
[DJ]: I don't think most of our listeners are like institutional investors, like they don't run hedge funds for the most part.
[DJ]: So most of us ordinary people who are referred to by the financial industry as retail investors are.
[DJ]: We're mostly worried about, am I going to lose my job or am I going to lose my retirement savings?
[DJ]: One of those two things, probably.
[DJ]: If we think about these possible macroeconomic consequences, maybe this is going to make us all rich or so-called AI is going to finally obviate the need for labor entirely and we'll all be able to live in the utopian dream of having all our needs taken care of by robots.
[DJ]: I guess, or something other than those things could happen.
[DJ]: And that's mostly what we're concerned with.
[JM]: I think it's probably obvious what the view looks like from where I sit.
[JM]: And as you said, this is definitely not financial advice, but it's hard to look at the data and not see the storm clouds in the horizon, to not see what is a near certainty and just a question of when that storm is going to unload its unholy delivery upon us all.
[DJ]: Well, looking forward, but my takeaway from that, I know you don't want to say it out loud, but I'm assuming that you're massively short Nvidia.
[DJ]: So we can all just do with that assumption what we will.
[JM]: I haven't taken any short positions, but it is tempting.
[JM]: If I do it, it would be a small bet just because those kinds of trades are risky.
[JM]: It's like the equivalent of putting a few chips on a particular number on a roulette wheel.
[JM]: not something you want to do because you think it's a great investment, something you do because you enjoy the thrill of maybe it pays off, or maybe you do it as a hedge.
[JM]: Like maybe you have a whole bunch of money tied up in the stock market and you don't really relish the idea of it.
[JM]: having a huge correction and maybe you feel psychologically, it would feel a little bit better to have like a slight amount of insurance in case that happens.
[JM]: Or like, okay, well my portfolio went down by 30% more or less overnight, but at least I made a few coins on my short bet.
[DJ]: I think the phrase cold comfort applies to situations like that.
[JM]: Yeah.
[JM]: That's why I said psychologically.
[DJ]: Yep.
[DJ]: Well, that's always the hardest part of investment.
[DJ]: And that's why, again, you should take your advice from professional financial advisors and not your friendly neighborhood podcasters.
[JM]: Do not listen to what we say and then go make financial trades, please.
[DJ]: Yeah, exactly.
[DJ]: It's like you can listen to what we say.
[DJ]: Just don't act on it.
[JM]: One thing I will suggest is that you take that money that you were going to use to make some risky options trade and instead take a trip to Japan, go ride the train, enjoy the chimes and melodies as you ride around the Yamanote line.
[JM]: That is a great use of your spare cash.
[JM]: All right, everyone, that's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thanks a lot for listening.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan at danj.ca.
[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.