Grandpa Geopolitics Grabbed the Wrong Chicken – AI Fish Still Splash
Day 1 from the Riverbank
BAWK BAWK BRAAAWK!!
Remember that clever hen who bolted when Grandpa swung the axe? Feathers flying, pure panic, thinking she’d outrun fate. Two weeks later—soup. Delicious soup, mind you. Lesson? Panic just postpones the inevitable, but the river keeps flowing anyway.
This week the attention economy got its own Grandpa moment. Everyone was cruising the AI supercycle express—Anthropic quietly nearing a $19B+ revenue run-rate (doubled in weeks), Broadcom dropping bombs like “line of sight to exceed $100B in AI chip sales by 2027” (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic all lining up like kids at an ice-cream truck), OpenAI gearing up for its own custom Broadcom chips next year. River calm, fish jumping, dopamine on tap.
Then—BOOM—a US sub torpedoes an Iranian warship (first enemy ship sunk by torpedo since WWII, Pentagon footage and all). Who bombed what pipeline got forgotten fast (Nord Stream vibes? Druzhba drama? Memory’s fuzzy, but attention moved on). Crimea warships took some hits earlier, but nothing fresh today. Israel drops its 11th wave on Tehran (command centres, IRGC compounds, missile sites), Hezbollah joins the barbecue in Lebanon, drones buzzing 11+ countries like angry bees. Oil jumps (Brent ~$83 today), gas pumps blink in terror, every feed suddenly missiles, not models.
But here’s the fun part: the river didn’t stop. It just got a massive splash.
While headlines scream war (and yes, X is cracking down hard—90-day revenue suspensions for unlabeled AI-generated armed conflict clips, because even the platform can’t handle its own sauce), the AI cash keeps swimming upstream. Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan basically shrugged: gigawatts shipping to Anthropic this year, triple next—chips don’t care about chaos. OpenAI? Still building accelerators, owning the kitchen instead of renting. The fat whale (geopolitics, eternal party crasher) jumped in, waves crashed, attention flooded one way—but the smart fish? Gliding right along. Incentives didn’t flip; they just added a side quest.
Patterns I spot from the bank with my broken fishing rod:
Timing shifts are comedy gold. Last week: agentic AI hype everywhere. This week: everyone’s a general. Next week? Bet on “Claude just wrote my novel” comeback. River loves a detour
Platform dependency? Hilarious flip. X bans AI fakes while powered by AI. Like a coffee shop banning caffeine. Incentive distortion in 4K
Hype cycles bend but don’t break. Missiles fly, yet Broadcom eyes $100B+. Trump got Big Tech (Google, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, etc.) to sign the pledge yesterday: build/buy your own power for data centres so households don’t foot the bill. Acceleration on someone else’s dime—classic
Structural risk? Only if you bet everything on calm waters. Clever hen panicked. Dreaming one? Soup anyway. But the river’s still full. Some fish dart left (Bitcoin as a chaos hedge, quietly ~$71k–$72k), some right (energy stocks grinning at $83 oil)
Tomorrow? Watch the soup simmer. More strikes? House vote drama? Or war fatigue hits and attention snaps back to AI eggs that aren’t from hens anymore? (Cube watermelons were just the appetizer—who needs nature when magnets levitate trains at 375 mph?)
Me? Still on the bank. No rod, no rush. Cash flows, patterns pop; sometimes an orange whale belly-flops for laughs.
You smile. I publish.
What pattern are you spotting in the splash? Drop it below—let’s watch the river together. Mondays are for espresso maintenance anyway. 😏