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Today’s Animal Spirits is brought to you by Betterment Advisor Solutions and ClearBridge Investments:

International and emerging market stocks outperformed the U.S. in 2025. At ClearBridge, we believe this momentum can continue. Find out more at https://www.clearbridge.com/
On today’s show, we discuss:
- The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis
- Another Viral AI Doomer Article, The Fundamental Error, DoorDash’s AI Advanteges
- People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much.
- Sam Altman defends AI resource usage: Water concerns ‘fake,’ and ‘humans use energy too’
- What to Make of This Very Weird Market
- More People Are Pulling Cash Out of Their Homes
- Blue Owl permanently halts redemptions at private credit fund aimed at retail investors
- Private-Credit Warning Signs Flash After Blue Owl Unloads $1.4 Billion in Assets
- Blue Owl on the Ropes
- What fast food’s downturn says about the US economy
Listen here:
Charts:
Recommendations:
Tweets/Bluesky:
Loved the @Citrini7 thought piece.
However seems unlikely we will have enough compute for this scenario in 2028, or even the early 2030s. Distillation, quantization and Edge AI cannot bridge the gap.
AGI is an event horizon with a significant compute dependence.
— Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) February 23, 2026
I've followed tech for 25 years and I've never felt a larger gap between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity.
— James Wang (@draecomino) February 18, 2026
At 66.40%, the greatest number of index constituents are outperforming the S&P 500 index itself over the last 50 years. pic.twitter.com/nPpgRre5V7
— Blake Millard, CFA (@BlakeMillardCFA) February 19, 2026
Earnings-led, unlike then. pic.twitter.com/rxa10aOW6B
— Steve Donzé (@steve_donze) February 18, 2026
AI-affected industries seeing consistent job losses GS pic.twitter.com/pJqSlZUaw5
— Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 (@MikeZaccardi) February 19, 2026
this is fucking hilarious.
a $7B japanese toilet company just discovered its ceramics tool can be used to make bleeding-edge AI chips.
thats a $60 Billion market.
their stock is up 60% on the news. https://t.co/cDJMV8aASc
— Ejaaz (@cryptopunk7213) February 18, 2026
amazon's internal A.I. coding assistant decided the engineers' existing code was inadequate so the bot deleted it to start from scratch
that resulted in taking down a part of AWS for 13 hours and was not the first time it had happened
incrediblehttps://t.co/K5dW15ioVH pic.twitter.com/Z9ZIrCgdB4
— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) February 20, 2026
This just blows me away. pic.twitter.com/zhKNIblU0i
— Mike Simonsen 🐉 (@mikesimonsen) February 22, 2026
Mike, I appreciate you attempting this with a straight face, but I don’t remember the CFTC having authority over the “derivative market” of LeBron James rebounds. These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling—pure and simple. They are destroying the lives… https://t.co/Ohup2x3D8u
— Governor Cox (@GovCox) February 17, 2026
@michaelbatnick @awealthofcs Movies are getting longer @soberlook @DataIsBeautiful pic.twitter.com/HLULLe0a2e
— Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 (@MikeZaccardi) February 23, 2026
DoorDash just reported its largest jump in orders ever.
Total Orders: 903M, +32% YoY$DASH pic.twitter.com/VQ4KE87XET
— Fiscal.ai (@fiscal_ai) February 18, 2026
Is Crazy Stupid Love the best romcom cast ever?
Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Julianne Moore,
Marissa Tomei and Kevin BaconGotta be up there (it’s on Netflix)
— Ben Carlson (@awealthofcs) February 21, 2026
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