Skyscrapers define New York City’s skyline, but on the ground, another form of architecture lies closer to our hearts: the brownstone. These graceful townhouses sprang up in the 1800s near Central Park, in Brooklyn, and in Harlem as the city rapidly amassed wealth and power. They were a status symbol then, and they remain that way today. Gazing at their wide stoops, proud facades, and generous windows, the typical NYC transplant can’t help but feel a tug of longing to own one someday, followed by a more practical question: “I wonder what that costs?”

The answer, of course, is “a lot.” Though a fair number of current owners snapped up their brownstones in the crime-ridden 1980s and 1990s, when many were abandoned and sold for a pittance, these properties now command well into the millions of dollars. Even a crumbling brownstone in need of a gut renovation could go for a million dollars or more, despite historic preservation rules restricting what can be done with them. Often passed down through generations, these homes may fall into disrepair and distress when elderly owners fail to keep up with never-ending maintenance and property taxes. Enter a specific kind of predator who exploits these murky situations: the deed thief.

The whole idea of “deed theft,” literally stealing a person’s property through con artistry and forgery, seems a little unreal. Going through a real estate closing involves so much paperwork, especially in New York, where lawyers are required to advise throughout the process. I did it once, and my hand literally cramped from signing my name so many times. But I guess old properties and old documents, with titles transferred between spouses and family members, still present loopholes. According to the New York attorney general’s office, that’s how deed thief Joseph Makhani did his work.

A self-described real estate developer, Makhani was convicted in July 2026 of a scheme to defraud and criminal possession of stolen property over his taking ownership of two Harlem brownstones, valued at a total of $4.7 million. His tricks included fake deeds, forgery, shell companies, and legal proceedings, all to persuade authorities and even the real owners of the homes that he had actually purchased the properties. He was so convincing, apparently, that one elderly owner ended up living in a homeless shelter, believing they no longer owned the home, while Makhani illegally collected rental income from it.

It’s an ugly tale, what happened with these two houses, and 63-year-old Makhani will likely spend a significant portion of his remaining life in prison because of it. But when I started digging, I found an even more interesting thread that had gone without mention in recent press accounts. Legal documents revealed that Makhani had been engaging in various alleged deed-theft tactics for many years. In one case from the early 2010s, a would-be victim fought back….and won (somewhat). This is his story.

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As anyone who keeps opening my Substack emails probably realizes, I care deeply about writing stories people actually want to read. That means hours of real reporting, hunting for fresh angles, and stitching together complex narratives with characters, tragedy, irony, and, when warranted, a little sparkle of comedy.

This summer has been unusually hectic, especially over the past week, and I’ve run out of time to give you a new piece that meets my own standards. I’m still working on it, and it will be out next week.

For now, consider this a “rerun” show: a quick tour through some of my recent best‑read Black Sheep posts and the reactions or new context around them. If you missed any, this is a good moment to catch up and see more about how the pieces landed. Enjoy!

Is The AI Boom A Mass Hallucination?

Sep 28, 2025

I was early to the party in calling out misaligned incentives in the current AI frenzy. While acknowledging the promise of the technology, I took aim at the hype, pointing out that it did not (at that time, and maybe still not yet) deliver enough everyday value to justify its staggering costs. I noted that past mega-innovations like electricity and the internet changed the world because ordinary humans found them useful (notwithstanding the false starts and failures in the development process), and that VCs and tech CEOs, even armed with tens of billions of dollars, can’t force that connection to happen from the top down. Looking through the lens of the current whiplash over “tokenmaxxing” and how to rein in the costs, I think a lot of it still holds up, even if the bubble hasn’t actually popped.

The post has ~2,800 reads so far, and the podcast (basically me just reading the post in one take, possibly with the sounds of my cats making mischief in the background) was downloaded 1,421 times.

The Most Powerful Jacket in Tech

Jan 11, 2026

On a similar theme, I zeroed in on an unlikely market stabilizer: the Nvidia CEO’s leather jacket. As Jensen Huang became the de facto face of the AI boom, his signature garment evolved from personal style into a kind of collective talisman, signaling that someone competent was still at the wheel. I traced how Huang’s optimistic pronouncements, amplified by that visual branding, helped mute critics and keep investors committed even as doubts mounted about AI’s profitability and the sustainability of its infrastructure spending. His own comment that “the whole world would’ve fallen apart” if Nvidia stumbled suggested he saw his confidence as a load-bearing beam for the economy. I haven’t seen as much of Huang in his leather jacket lately, so I’m not sure what that portends for us.

The post has ~2,500 reads so far, and the podcast has 876 downloads.

The Corruption Probe That Just Won’t Quit

Jun 29, 2026

You know that feeling when a mystery novel gets yanked out of your hands mid‑cliffhanger? That’s where I was after the feds dropped their 2025 indictment of Eric Adams. But just when you thought the corruption saga was over, prosecutors pivoted hard: in June 2026, they charged Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone, with taking $120,000 in kickbacks to help Chinese developer Yan Po “Andy” Zhu land a migrant‑housing contract for his Long Island City Microtel. The photos and texts between Carone and Zhu (wine cellar hangs, “Thank you my big guy”) read like a textbook bribery playbook, and the way the case was revived seemed to suggest investigators raided the grab bag and pulled out the theory most likely to survive political interference.

The piece so far has ~1,400 views.

A Ponzi Scheme On the Prairie

March 1, 2026

A Missouri man, Josh Link, allegedly sweet-talked $220 million out of 2,000-plus investors by selling them stakes in cattle that, in large part, didn't exist. The scheme was called Agridime, which claimed to offer sustainable beef, farm-to-table vibes, and returns of 15–32%. Prosecutors allege that it actually amounted to a ghost herd of mostly fictional steers, conjured from recycled ear-tag numbers. When regulators first started taking action, Link stood his ground, but he eventually bolted, leaving behind his wife, co-defendant Tia, to face the indictment alone. I wrote this as a three-part series, all published in March 2026. By coincidence, Link was caught at LAX by US Customs agents just hours after I published Part II, seemingly mid-journey to somewhere that wasn’t a federal courtroom. I’ve been continuing to follow the case after finishing the series, as it yields more developments.

Across Part I, Part II, and Part III, the posts collectively got ~6,200 reads. The podcasts, collectively, were downloaded ~1,100 times.

The Billionaire Who’s Blowing Himself Up

Jun 21, 2026

I used HBO’s “Silicon Valley” as a frame to analyze Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, tracing how the founder’s journey from scrappy Richard Hendricks–type to Gavin Belson–adjacent tyrant tracks with the company’s implosion under AI missteps and mass layoffs. The piece leans into the irony that a company once known for utopian perks and intellectual freedom now has employees calling it “the gulag,” while leadership responds to despair with… more snacks and a hackathon nobody asked for. I argue that Zuck’s real problem isn’t his eccentric hobbies (sword-forging, cattle-slaughtering, whatever), but the yes‑man echo chamber that convinces him he can jiu‑jitsu for two hours a day and still run a 70,000‑person tech empire without consequences. Spoiler: he can’t.

The post has ~1,600 reads so far, and the podcast has been downloaded around 147 times.

The Highest-Altitude Scam

April 12, 2026

Every spring, the world’s highest peak becomes a traffic jam of amateurs chasing bragging rights, and an entire ecosystem of guides, insurers, and medevac operators has learned to monetize their oxygen-starved poor judgment. I dug into this after a 2026 headline landed in my Google alerts: Nepali authorities had charged 32 people in a $20 million scheme involving staged helicopter rescues—and, in some cases, climbers allegedly poisoned with baking soda, uncooked chicken, or rat droppings to trigger fake emergencies. The real origin story, though, goes back to 2018, when a local journalist tracked down the ins and outs of the con through very literal boots-on-the-ground reporting. The moral ambiguity is especially interesting here; do you really feel sorry for Everest hikers who get scammed if they did no basic research at all before showing up to climb the mountain?

The piece got ~1,800 views, and a preview for the podcast was downloaded 107 times.

A Long-Overdue Checkup On “Zack Morris”

Jun 14, 2026

Back in 2024, I wrote about how a crew of penny-stock pumpers led by “Zack Morris” (real name Edward Constantinescu) managed to “beat the Feds,” winning dismissal of a $114 million fraud indictment just weeks before trial. I was skeptical that it would hold on appeal, and sure enough, the Fifth Circuit revived the charges in late 2025. Since then, things have only gotten weirder: the original judge recused himself, Constantinescu’s lawyers dropped him, and he started publicly taunting prosecutors online: posting photos of weapons (and, yes, a Power Rangers sword), doxxing government staff, and even offering a $5,000 bounty to his followers for information about them. Then he fled, first to Mexico and now, by his own X bio, to Romania, where he’s been posting smug videos about how much he loves his “mother country.” A new trial date is set for May 3, 2027, but whether Constantinescu ever shows up (and whether Romanian citizenship shields him from extradition) remains to be seen.

Across both “Zack Morris” posts, there were ~5,800 reads and ~450 podcast downloads.

A Fourth of July Flameout

Jul 5, 2026

Once again, I got hooked by an unfolding drama in my home state of Missouri with this post. AM Pyrotechnics, run by fireworks enthusiast Aaron Mayfield, went from "fell in love with fireworks as a toddler" to perennial bankruptcy filer after two fatal warehouse explosions, in 2018 and again just before Thanksgiving 2025, left employees dead and the company drowning in OSHA penalties and insurance woes. I traced how the firm's second Chapter 11 filing in early 2026 set off a domino effect of canceled shows across Missouri and Arkansas, angry local organizers, and an Arkansas attorney general investigation, even as Mayfield insisted he was still trying to pull off shows and sell the business.

The post currently has about 1,400 views, and the podcast has been downloaded 58 times.

Most countries do not derive a sense of patriotism from explosions. Not so in the United States, where rockets and bombs factor prominently in our national anthem. On Independence Day, nothing shows love for 'Merica like blowing stuff up, especially in the Heartland.

That’s why the story of the collapse of AM Pyrotechnics, a fireworks show producer from my home state of Missouri, struck such a chord with me. While trolling the internet a few days ago, I came across an outpouring of woebegone local news coverage of the aftermath.

”Third Mid-Missouri fireworks show canceled following AM Pyrotechnics bankruptcy,” central Missouri-based station KRCG 13 reported on July 2, 2026. The article noted that a Mexico, Missouri, Lions Club chapter and “communities across the Lake of the Ozarks, including Osage Beach and Camdenton,” have been forced to cancel or postpone celebrations due to the company’s failure.

An article from Arkansas station 40/29 News focused on an annual celebration at the state’s Beaver Lake that had to be dropped at the last minute. Reporter Lakyra Banks noted that this year’s display was “expected to be the largest ever” in honor of “America’s 250th anniversary,” and that it was funded entirely by local donations. An organizer vented to the reporter: “We're just incredibly frustrated, more than a little angry.”

News articles further reported that the Arkansas attorney general had launched an investigation, and communities were considering lawsuits. Still, given that the company was under bankruptcy protection, refund prospects were dim. So it was a sad state of affairs. When I looked closer, though, I realized the story was even darker and more tragic than it first appeared. Here’s a quick recounting:

“Fell in Love With Fireworks”

First of all, let’s establish one key fact: AM Pyrotechnics was not just some faceless corporation that happened to go belly-up, leaving customers in the lurch. It had a face, a founder that community members undoubtedly felt they could relate to. His name is Aaron Mayfield. Judging by what I could find on the internet about him, fireworks weren’t just a business for Mayfield. They were a passion.

According to the website for “Sky Wars,” an invitational fireworks championship run by the Missouri Pyrotechnics Association (yes, all real things), Mayfield has been selling fireworks for almost 30 years and manufacturing them for nearly 20 years. His bio claims he “fell in love with fireworks as a toddler,” adding: “As he grew older, he literally saved his pennies to purchase fireworks that he choreographed by color on his bedroom floor before he shot them in the sky.”

The site also highlights that his wife, whom he met on eharmony, is a “leading female fireworks shell creator.” Intentionally or not, the bio leaves a distinct impression: AM Pyrotechnics is not just a fireworks seller; it is a family-run artisanal explosives maker.

As bizarre as this blend of danger and wholesomeness might sound, it is surprisingly on-brand for Missouri. While Americans in general adore setting off fireworks, regulatory restrictions for selling them to the general public vary across the country. Missouri, however, is in one of the more “permissive” categories.

How permissive? Well, here is an image of a fairly common type of establishment scattered across rural Missouri. Based on what you see, try to divine where my home state lies on the continuum between “safety first” and “try not to blow off too many of your fingers this year.”

Sorry. That was a bit of a trick question. As you see, the establishment pictured above is a combination fireworks emporium and gas station. When something goes wrong here, you’re going to lose a lot more than fingers. I think we can safely conclude that if there are any states where parents might routinely allow their toddlers to play with fireworks, this is certainly one of them.

The Darker Side to Blowing Stuff Up

Running a business, though, had its challenges for Mayfield. Fireworks revenue streams are lumpy and inconsistent, with the biggest chunk coming around the Fourth of July. Margins are thin. The company struggled to pay bills in the mid-2010s, running up substantial debts for inventory (while the company manufactured fireworks, it also ordered some from other producers), insurance costs, and payroll taxes. Swamped with debt, AM Pyrotechnics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (for the first time) in July 2014. The company managed to reorganize, but things only got worse. Much worse.

On July 3, 2018, a 28-year-old woman who worked for Mayfield, Samantha Dean-Wood, was visiting the company’s facility in southwestern Missouri (Google Maps image below) to prepare for an upcoming show. According to a local news report, Dean was alone in a warehouse that night when some unknown accident occurred, sparking an explosion.

According to the Kansas City Star, ten local fire departments responded to the blast, and the building was a “total loss.” Dean-Wood was taken to the hospital with third and fourth-degree burns covering 60% of her body. She held on for a week before passing away, leaving behind an 8-month-old son. In an interview with a local TV news station, her mother said she made the call to tell doctors “to stop and let her be at peace.”

The woman added, “I want somebody to blame. I want something to blame. But it was a pure accident.”

Local news reported that a GoFundMe account raised more than $11,000 to help cover hospital bills. The company was hit with $34,734 in OSHA penalties for “failing to protect employees from physical, chemical, fire, and explosion hazards” and the actual fatality incident.

But that wasn’t the last tragedy to befall AM Pyrotechnics.

Disaster Deja Vu

Financial difficulties continued to plague AM Pyrotechnics and Mayfield, who piled up personal debts to help support his company’s operations. However hard he was working to make ends meet, though, he couldn’t overcome what happened the day before Thanksgiving in 2025. Once again, an employee was alone at the AM Pyrotechnics facility. Once again, there was an accident, and a building was blown to bits. And once again, an employee died. His name was Chad Eaves.

Based on news reports from that incident, it sounds like it took investigators at least a few days to identify his remains. Various agencies, including OSHA and the US ATF, launched investigations, but a Missouri Department of Public Safety spokesman told reporters the “extent of the fire and structural damage” made it impossible to determine what exactly happened. OSHA eventually assessed $27,238 in initial penalties.

A relative posted a heartfelt message about Eaves on social media after his death, mentioning that he was a 46-year-old father of three who had recently become a grandfather. “Please pray for them,” she urged. “May God give them comfort and clarity as they walk through this heartbreaking loss.”

When the Fireworks Faded

On Feb. 27, 2026, AM Pyrotechnics filed for Chapter 11 protection for the second time in a little over a decade. The case records note that Mayfield also filed for personal bankruptcy, that the company was facing outstanding legal claims from creditors, and that the troubles were “compounded by the death of an employee on its premises in late November 2025.” The docket references insurance difficulties for the company. A bankruptcy trustee attempted to convert the case to Chapter 7 (a liquidation). Mayfield objected, trying to hang on and maintain some sense of control.

On June 1, 2026, the company’s lawyers proposed a reorganization plan:

Strategic Path Forward. The Debtor's strategy to emerge from Chapter 11 is to sell the business as well as land related to the business, owned by both the Debtor and Mr. Mayfield personally. For the sake of this Plan, and because no motion to sell has been filed yet in Mr. Mayfield’s individual bankruptcy case, the Debtor will assume that it will not recognize any benefits from the sale of land owned by Mr. Mayfield. To the extent that is incorrect, the funds will constitute a cushion to support feasibility and will likely push this to a plan paying 100% to general unsecured creditors.

In bankruptcy lawyer speak, this amounts to a description of wishful thinking.

The court has not yet issued a ruling. It stands to reason that before any determination is made, the judge will hear from at least some of the community organizers ghosted by the company on the eve of Independence Day festivities. That won’t look good for Mayfield.

In public statements, Mayfield apologized to disappointed would-be revelers, citing an inability to “secure qualified personnel” and ensure safety. He also claimed the company was still completing numerous shows as scheduled. AM Pyrotechnics’ website remains up, as Mayfield apparently clings to hope. But his labor of love, I suspect, will end in broken dreams.

Note: I will continue to monitor this case as it develops, and I may publish follow-up articles as I learn more. Stay tuned.

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For some reason, taxi and Uber drivers like to regale me with their conspiracy theories while I’m in the back of the car, a captive audience. Most are cliché: 9/11 was an “inside job,” elites do mind control through 5G, etc. Yet one guy, a South Asian native, driving me home from LaGuardia in 2023, told me a yarn that sticks with me: He claimed that if he paid off a certain city official, he could get a green card.

Now, anyone who knows on a basic level how our government works would find this assertion laughable. No municipal bureaucrat, no matter how powerful, can direct the workings of federal immigration agencies and get paperwork approved. But when I posed these counterpoints to the young driver, he provided an oddly reasonable response: He said he didn’t know exactly how the official accomplished this task, but greasing the right wheels was certainly part of it.

Looking back, what made this unlikely quid pro quo seem plausible was that it occurred during former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. Based on the corruption allegations that emerged as he continued to cling to his office in disgrace in 2024 and 2025, I got a nagging sense that something was fundamentally wrong in how the administration operated. But it was impossible to tell, from the surface, how far and deep the rot might go.

As if I’d had a mystery novel snatched out of my hands, I was disappointed when the Justice Department dropped its indictment against Adams in February 2025. The decision caused several federal prosecutors to quit in protest, as they believed it was influenced by President Trump (a new ally of Adams). But the Feds found a way to breathe new life into the case. In June 2026, they brought charges against Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone. Let’s take a closer look.

[Want more of my take on the Adams debacle? See previous Black Sheep posts on our former mayor’s continuing shenanigans after leaving office (free) and a mysterious side-character involved in the Turkey-related charges (paid).]

The first thing I couldn’t help but notice about the accusations against Carone was that they had virtually no overlap with the scheme Adams had been charged with. Adams was accused of offering favors to the Turkish government in return for free vacations and heavily discounted business-class airline tickets. Instead of finding an offshoot of that mess involving Carone, prosecutors pieced together a whole new alleged scheme involving the former chief of staff: He had supposedly taken $120,000 in kickbacks in exchange for helping a hotel owner secure a contract for housing migrants.

Adding more intrigue to the situation, the hotel in question, a Microtel in Long Island City, Queens, was owned by….

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Seven years after it ended, HBO’s “Silicon Valley” remains the most searing satire of the tech industry. Many of its scenes still feel fresh. One clip from the 2019 season, in which Gilfoyle’s bot “Son of Anton” deletes code bases as the “most efficient” way of fixing bugs, and orders 4,000 pounds of meat when tasked with finding cheap hamburgers, has taken on a second life as a viral critique of today’s AI.

But the show’s deeper theme is even more enduringly relevant. Every founder, at first, is some version of scrappy hero Richard Hendricks, trying to beat the odds and turn a brilliant concept into reality. If they’re successful, though, they risk becoming Gavin Belson: ensconced in privilege, surrounded by yes-men, high on their own superiority complexes, and constantly throwing their power behind bad ideas they no longer know how to gut-check.

Let’s look at where Mark Zuckerberg falls on this continuum.

When I was in college, I knew him as the Facebook founder wunderkind, decked in a hoodie, building something that, for better or worse, changed the world. Now what is he doing? Apparently practicing jiu-jitsu for hours each day, raising, hunting, and slaughtering his own meat, dramatically engaging in watersports (as seen above), forging Japanese swords, and nurturing fantasies about becoming an MMA star.

Oh yes, and still running his $1 trillion-ish, 70,000-headcount company, which as of late has descended into turmoil and revolt. First, he changed the name to “Meta” in 2021 on a bet that everyone would soon be living and working in a virtual reality “metaverse.” That was a dud. More recently, he took a similar headfirst dive into AI, shifting 7,000 workers and billions of dollars toward Llama, its AI Superintelligence Labs, and other projects. Though AI overall is significantly more promising than the metaverse, this has nonetheless gone poorly for Meta.

First, the company’s lost its chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, over his concerns that Meta’s priorities for AI development were short-sighted, and too focused on LLMs rather than building more comprehensive visual-based AI. Then, like turning a shower knob that can only do “hot” or “cold” and no in between, the company at first encouraged massive “tokenmaxxing,” or using AI as much as possible for every single task, no matter how complex or mundane. Then, as tens of billions of dollars in costs stacked up, Meta rapidly shifted almost 180 degrees, suddenly throttling AI usage, according to The Information.

On top of the whiplash, the company conducted a mass layoff in May 2026, axing 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce. The workers were told in a memo from HR that the cost-cutting was needed to “run the company more efficiently” and “offset other investments we’re making.” Zuckerberg directly tied the move to the company’s AI ambitions, saying “we’re transforming the company.” Meanwhile, misery reportedly increased for everyone who was spared.

According to Wired, an employee described the atmosphere as “literally the gulag.” Engineers claimed they had been forced into repetitive tasks, like labeling data, creating puzzles for AI, and ranking outputs, which shattered their sense of autonomy and purpose. At least one worker interrupted an internal meeting with an expletive-laced rant, while others distributed flyers and signed a petition against new employee-tracking for training data, Reuters reported. According to Business Insider, CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth later admitted morale was “among the worst it’s ever been” in the company’s history.

Instead of assuring workers, Meta’s attempts to contain the damage only inflamed grievances. The company’s leadership offered increased meal and travel budgets as a morale boost. On X, a nonprofit labor organizing group quipped, “No pizza party tastes as good as a union feels,” while gifs and memes mocking the company and comparing it to the dystopian TV series “Severance” collected thousands of “likes”.

Zuckerberg sent an internal memo attempting to lift spirits and revive camaraderie with a three-day AI hackathon. It got a chilly reception. Gadget Review wrote that “internal messages paint a workforce that sees the hackathon not as a gift but as uncompensated overtime dressed up with snacks.” Observers joked online: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

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Now, it’s obvious that Zuckerberg, no matter what havoc he wreaks, doesn’t exactly map to Gavin Belson. Belson is overtly vain and sociopathic. Zuckerberg is more of a supercharged nerdy goofball; despite making questionable choices for his company, he appears to have a healthy family life with his wife, Priscilla Chan, and supports a range of social causes he seems to genuinely care about, like education and child health initiatives.

But there are striking parallels. In the show, Belson is constantly trailed by sycophants, a traveling echo chamber that causes him to mistake his own petty impulses for vision. His Google-like company “Hooli” launches massive, foolhardy initiatives at his whim, only to shut them down and mass-fire people when the plans inevitably end badly.

He also displays a stunning lack of self-awareness that provides fodder for some of the show’s most memorable quotes. For example, when proclaiming his supposed altruism, Belson says: “I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

The Meta chaos looks much like Hooli’s chaos. And Zuckerberg’s “hackathon” memo displays almost as much tone-deaf absurdity as Belson. While young Zuckerberg was a likely inspiration for Richard Hendricks, the middle-aged version has since drifted uncomfortably close to the Dark Side.

The problem isn’t having exotic billionaire-style interests, no matter how pointless and bizarre they may sound to the rest of us, like making Japanese swords or slaughtering your own dinner by choice. The problem is being surrounded by too many people who will only tell you what you want to hear. For Zuck, that might be hearing he can devote 100% of his focus to all his activities simultaneously and excel at them — while also keeping one of the world’s largest technology companies thriving. The problem is isolation from reality, and living in a bubble of your own making.

The irony baked into this unfolding mess at Meta is that — like many big Silicon Valley tech firms — it has been known for being generous with compensation and perks, with six-figure salaries, free food at many of its campuses, and a historical culture of encouraging job-related intellectual exploration. Compared with the typical workplace, that’s almost utopian. Zuckerberg’s mistakes were a cold and abrupt counterpoint. They are a reminder that a flash of genius that makes someone a billionaire doesn’t last forever, that hubris corrupts judgment, and that the same person who can build a great company can just as easily push it off a cliff.

Back in 2024, I wrote about how a crew of social media-based penny stock pumpers, led by a guy who went by the persona of “Zack Morris,” managed to “beat the Feds.” Charged with a $114 million fraud scheme for allegedly promoting stocks to their followers and quietly selling at the peak, they won the dismissal of the indictment just two weeks before trial. The judge’s ruling hinged on a creative interpretation of a recent Supreme Court precedent and findings that the pumpers were “too far removed” economically from the investors who got stuck with the losses.

This seemed questionable to me and unlikely to survive an appeal. I wrote: “After all, even a conservative-majority Supreme Court probably would not give carte blanche to ‘pump and dump’ schemes.”

Lo and behold, I was right.

When I checked back in on the case this week, I found that not only had the Fifth Circuit revived the indictment, but a whole host of bizarre developments had unfolded. Among them: the original judge suddenly recused himself; “Zack’s” lawyers dropped him as a client. He had repeatedly harassed and threatened prosecutors online, including posting suggestive photos of real weapons (along with a Power Rangers sword), and he offered a $5,000 bounty (!) to his followers for information about the lawyers. But he wasn’t thrown in jail for all that; he has fled the country.

How did all of this unfold? What was the reaction in court? Will he ever face justice? I will do my best to bring paying subscribers up to speed — with receipts.

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It’s probably difficult for fragmented, attention-limited, slop-fed audiences of the 2020s to grasp Eddie Murphy’s box office power in the 1980s. His perceptive comedy leapfrogged demographic divides, launching whole franchises (see “Beverly Hills Cop”). He didn’t just mix levity with racial and social commentary; he set the tone for entire studio hits that might be unworkable, or maybe unthinkable, without him. Of course, I’m most specifically referring to 1983’s “Trading Places.”

No one has ever seriously talked about “rebooting” this movie. It’s too edgy (a whole scene leans on extremely insensitive cultural stereotypes, including Dan Aykroyd in blackface), and way too nerdy. In the chaotic climax, Murphy and Aykroyd get rich while putting the villains, “the Dukes,” in the poorhouse by shorting commodity futures using insider information. But the original holds together, remaining beloved for decades, almost certainly because of Murphy.

“Trading Places” has had such an enduring appeal, especially among finance nerds, that it managed to do something exceedingly rare in the world of blockbuster Hollywood comedies: It directly inspired actual market regulation. Colloquially, policymakers called it “the Eddie Murphy rule.”

The rule was enacted as part of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2011, and incorporated into the Commodity Exchange Act. But it gathered dust for years. Now, with the first‑ever criminal case invoking the rule, over a Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the policy and enforcement wonks who adore “Trading Places” are dorking out.

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Case in point: I didn’t take interest in the Maduro/Polymarket situation when I initially saw news on it, while scrolling through Google Alerts. But a few weeks after the indictment was unsealed, at a New York City Bar Association event in May 2026, I saw a former prosecutor I remembered from my days of covering Brooklyn federal court talk about the case on a white-collar crime panel. The most intriguing part to him, clearly, was the Eddie Murphy nexus, the precedential nature of which he explained with great enthusiasm. He added: “I do expect with the rise in prediction markets and the value of content-driven information that you will see this becoming too much more active." Being a policy and “Trading Places” dork, myself, I was hooked.

So here’s what it’s all about:

In the dead of night in early January 2026, an elite U.S. military tactical group carried out the raid to arrest Maduro on narco-terrorism and cocaine-related charges. For obvious reasons, the mission was a closely guarded secret, being extremely dangerous, and also very likely in violation of major components of international law. All that aside, Trump’s tough talk on Venezuela had been ramping up, and for better or worse, really nothing is off the table in his administration. Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based trading platform where users can speculate on world events, had been taking bets for months on the various possibilities.

According to the Justice Department, one of the soldiers tapped for this covert operation, 38‑year‑old U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, decided to use his insider knowledge to his financial advantage. He allegedly invested about $34,000 on Polymarket, putting “yes” positions on questions like “will Maduro be out of power” or “will U.S. forces enter Venezuela.” Polymarket allows people to trade on binary questions like this, putting down a portion of a dollar for each bet and getting a full dollar back if the prediction comes true. Van Dyke’s trades allegedly paid off handsomely: He walked away with about $400,000, roughly 12X what he put down, according to the indictment.

Van Dyke is now facing five federal criminal charges: unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and an unlawful monetary transaction. While the statutory maximums add up to decades in prison, he will probably receive much less, if convicted, owing to his impressive military service. Still, it’s a worthy cautionary tale.

****

But what does this all have to do with Eddie Murphy, you might be asking. A fair question. To answer, allow me to explain more about the wacky plot of “Trading Places.” (P.S., this is riddled with spoilers, but the movie is 43 years old, so the statute of limitations has long passed.) In the story, the greedy, sociopathic Duke brothers own a commodities brokerage firm. They decide to toy with the lives of two men — played by Murphy and Aykroyd — as an “experiment,” using various manipulations to cause them to exchange places in society. Aykroyd plays an Ivy League-educated star office manager for the firm, who is fired, arrested on trumped-up theft and drug charges, and kicked out of his townhouse. Murphy plays a street hustler who is hired to take his place, paid a handsome salary, and given the townhouse.

Murphy’s character eventually discovers the scheme and reveals it to Aykroyd’s character. The two also come to realize that the Dukes are insider traders who have plotted to steal government crop reports, which they intend to use to corner the market on “frozen concentrated orange juice.” The heroes track down the operative who stole the report, take the information to use for themselves, and pass along a fake report containing the exact opposite information to the Dukes.

In the climactic scene, which takes place in a commodities trading pit, the Dukes arrive believing the government will eventually announce a poor orange harvest, which would cause the price of the futures to shoot up. They instruct their trader to buy as many shares as he can, as quickly as he can. Murphy and Aykroyd, meanwhile, show up armed with the real data — it’s a bumper crop — and they plunge what little money they can scrape together into a highly leveraged short bet. At first, the share price shoots up, driven by the Dukes’ aggressive buying. Then a television monitor shows the Secretary of Agriculture announcing the crop results. The price plunges far below where it started, and Murphy and Aykroyd’s characters make a killing on the difference.

****

The market mechanics in the scene were reasonably authentic in 1983, including one intriguing aspect: At the time, it wasn’t really “insider trading,” in the legal sense, to use insider government information to gain an edge in commodities trading. This sounds odd considering that doing virtually the same thing with insider corporate information and public stocks can land someone in prison.

For decades, things remained like that, until after the 2008 financial crisis. Hoping to prevent another similar debacle, regulators and lawmakers proposed a vast compendium of new rules and restrictions, which ultimately was packaged together as the Dodd-Frank Act. Amid the discussion and debate, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair (undoubtedly a fan of the movie) pointed out the lapse. As explained by the former Brooklyn federal prosecutor on the Bar Association panel:

In the lead‑up to the passage of Dodd‑Frank, Gary Gensler, who was then the chair of the CFTC, went before Congress and pointed out that what happens in “Trading Places” was not actually illegal under the commodities laws at the time, and so lawmakers instituted a ban on insider trading using not just orange juice concentrate information, but all non‑public information misappropriated from a government source.

Not actually illegal! Imagine that! Through the magic of the legislative process, that all changed. Now we have the “Eddie Murphy rule,” AKA Section 4c(a) of the Commodity Exchange Act, which makes it unlawful for any federal government worker to use information obtained “by virtue of the employment or position” for commodities trading, if the data isn’t available to the general public. For good measure, the next two sections of 4C make just using insider government information you happened to have that you know is non-public, or stealing such information, also illegal.

****

The thing is, though, tracing the impact of insider information on commodities trades is tricky. Massive macroeconomic forces usually drive price changes. A single report from the Department of Energy is probably little more than a blip on oil futures prices. Where would enforcement even begin to investigate how your special access led to minor profits? Converting insider government information into commodities profits is also hard. Can an average person, even a government worker with special access to information, predict how secret geopolitical news might affect gold or nickel prices? Not impossible, but it requires serious analysis.

But now we have Polymarket, and that tide is turning. The prediction platform, based offshore after an earlier regulatory settlement, has become largely normalized despite being morally dubious — allowing for betting on global events, no matter how horrific. As the Van Dyke case shows, it provides a straight path from government insider information to illicit returns, per Section 4c(a) of the Commodity Exchange Act.

As more people become tempted to place bets on the platform, using data or details that shouldn’t be traded on, some could eventually find themselves in handcuffs. They can thank Eddie Murphy.

Despite combing the internet and poring over court filings, what I could find out about the man spanned little more than a paragraph. His name was Jed Hansel Wood; he lived in Fort Worth, a city with deep ties to the cattle industry, where Agridime was based. He was in his 60s, roughly twice Link’s age. And he had some money — enough, at least, to back the venture and later hire himself a high-end defense attorney.

The address listed for him in court records turned up Google images of a modest ranch-style house built in the 1950s. A LinkedIn profile that appeared to be a geographic match lacked a photo and described the individual as a former aerospace engineer and logistics specialist, an upper-middle-class job at best. To the extent he had wealth, he was doing an excellent job of not flaunting it.

But criminal charges and the looming possibility of prison have a way of forcing even the quietest characters to reveal themselves. When I checked the docket recently, Wood had already made his move. Just six weeks after his arrest, he pleaded guilty. The decision might have been prompted by an honest urge to come clean, or a more self-serving instinct to lock down the best possible deal. Either way, it was bad news for Link.

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Like the cursed undead, Builder.ai’s profile lingers on LinkedIn, its pleas to “SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT” echoing in a digital wasteland. The once $1.5 billion startup filed for bankruptcy eleven months ago, insolvent despite initial big backers like Microsoft. The bigger scandal: It billed itself as an AI-based app developer, yet allegedly outsourced work to hundreds of human engineers in India.

The set-up conceptually resembled a famed 18th-century hoax in Vienna known as the “Mechanical Turk,” in which a mannequin, built for whatever reason to look like a Turkish person, was said to be able to play chess entirely by automation. However, its movements were controlled by a grand master hidden in a compartment through levers and magnets. Fake gearworks of the machine were shown to impress audiences. The human who did all the thinking was not.

The Wall Street Journal initially exposed the discrepancy at Builder.ai in August 2019. At the time, the company called itself Engineer.ai, and the founder, Sachin Dev Duggal, claimed to have an AI bot called Natasha that allowed “anyone to build custom software like ordering a pizza.” But employees told the WSJ the company’s AI code-generation capabilities were more hype than reality. A former chief business officer at the company, who sued for wrongful termination and an assortment of alleged false promises, claimed in his lawsuit that the founder was telling investors the company was “80% done with developing a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop.”

While an obvious reputational problem, this revelation didn’t kill the company. Engineer.ai changed its name and kept going. Meanwhile, LLMs advanced, surpassing the capabilities Duggal had pitched to investors years earlier. Builder.ai eventually did provide the AI code wizardry it had promised — using Claude, not legions of outsourced humans. But by June 2025, when the company failed, the past claims of AI con artistry were resurrected. The Business Standard in India published a short, punchy item: “Builder.ai faked AI with 700 engineers, now faces bankruptcy and probe.” This time, it hit an AI-wary public’s schadenfreude sweet spot, and the news instantly appeared all over the internet.

As with many viral headlines, that one oversimplified the situation. An analysis by the blog Pragmatic Engineer poked holes in the “700 engineers” headline by pointing out that a “Mechanical Turk” scheme would have been ridiculous in 2024 and 2025, when just about anyone could have an LLM spit out code at the touch of a few buttons. Further, as Bloomberg detailed, Builder.ai had far worse problems than being mocked for alleged fake AI output. It was rapidly burned through cash, wasting millions of dollars constructing unnecessary internal versions of widely available tools like Slack. Before its collapse, creditors accused the company of vastly overstating revenue, seizing a considerable portion of its assets.

Yet the company’s LinkedIn death rattles show what caused the most lasting harm: not fudging financials, not wasting cash, but allegedly passing off (however briefly) the fruits of human labor as the output of machines. During the company’s final days, someone — maybe Duggal himself — posted the series of screeds to its account that I referenced at the beginning of this post. The all-caps provide an unmistakable sense that a nerve had been touched

*****

This is a familiar pattern for me. As you can read more about in SMIRK, my multifaceted relationship with “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli gave me an unusually detailed view of viral social media cycles. Some of the parallels are striking. Just as with Builder.ai, with Martin, it wasn’t the first “punch,” the reporting on his shocking drug price increase, that was the “knock out,” so to speak. It was the second: his dramatic early morning arrest months later on securities fraud charges.

In the public eye, the two events fused into one plot, complete with images of Martin scowling in a hoodie, paraded by FBI agents. Containing all the ingredients for propulsive outrage, the arrest story instantly swept the internet. It also developed a stubborn distortion. Most people assumed Martin was criminally charged for drug pricing, while the truth was banished to the realm of quirky factoids, the stuff of barroom trivia.

But on a deeper level, the conflation made sense. Drug pricing had evolved into a particularly searing topic by the mid-2010s. It was a concrete element of the vast and amorphous problem of excessive healthcare costs. Martin offered a cocky face onto which people could project their hatred for an entire industry. Regardless of the specific legal charges involved, the arrest had an obvious connection to price gouging in their minds: It was karma. No amount of explanation could change that.

Similarly, Builder.ai collapsed as public sentiment about AI plummeted. Virtually everyone was proclaiming it would widely replace jobs, despite not really performing most tasks as well as skilled human workers, or at least not without substantial guidance from skilled human workers. But corporate executives, as usual, eagerly bought into hype and used it as an excuse to slash headcount. People saw Builder.ai’s predicament as a sign of cosmic justice. A sampling of online comments:

• More people taking jobs from AI. Disaster!

• Did no one at Microsoft think to ask why the AI needed chai breaks?

• Raise your hand if you’re shocked. No, AI — your third hand.

• Humans 1 AI 0

• AGI = "A Guy from India"

*****

Now, I’m not denigrating all uses of AI. There are compelling examples of it being integrated into workflows in intelligent ways that actually do make complex tasks faster and easier. But that can take a high degree of coordination between people developing AI tools and the workers who use them, to ensure they are calibrated to appropriate functions. I think we can assume many corporations don’t approach AI rollouts with that level of care.

And that brings me to an irony I couldn’t help but see: While Builder.ai was roasted for allegedly using humans to perform what was supposed to be AI-generated work, lots of other companies today are — in a more subtle way — doing more or less the same thing. Numerous articles have highlighted a stark divide between how much work executives think AI is doing and how much employees are secretly taking on themselves. Often, AI deployments lead to more labor, not less, for remaining human staff, with many putting in extra hours to fix what has been termed “workslop.”

The net effect ends up the same as in the assumption about Builder.ai. The machine serves a performative role, while humans still toil in the background. Only they do even more work than previously, because the executives have decided to either stop hiring or lay people off. We punished Builder.ai for a story about fake AI, while embracing circumstances where AI is real, but its role in many companies is significantly exaggerated. If you think I’m overstating things, be aware that plenty of comedians on Instagram and TikTok have made this same point with far more sting.

This yet again reminded me of the Pharma Bro story. The media spotlight aimed at Martin landed squarely on a pharmaceutical industry practice that had previously escaped widespread attention: acquiring decades-old first-line treatments for deadly diseases, mostly ignored by the industry and lacking any competitors, and jacking up the price. Having seen a dramatic example, people were better positioned to understand and object to further instances of the same tactic by other companies.

With Builder.ai, the claim of its army of 700 human engineers pretending to be AI struck a similar strong chord that people couldn’t forget, sharpening public scrutiny of an entire industry. It was an emperor’s new clothes moment with a new moral: FOMO may drive companies to chase AI, but Builder.ai’s final all-caps shrieks of desperation show that devaluing human workers also comes at a profound cost.

New York City weather usually alternates between flavors of misery, but for a few days in spring, it’s bliss. New Yorkers shed their puffer coats. Windows fly open to breezes. Children scamper down sidewalks, their parents swearing in vain. On a stroll through a park, you might catch yourself humming a tune, smiling as you notice a vagrant on a bench doing the same. You can feel the city inhaling, exhaling, unburdened.

This spring, New Yorkers got an extra reason to collectively rejoice as the sun warmed their spirits: The leader of an organization that has routinely scourged the city, crowding its streets with sloppy, ill-behaved drunks dressed as Santa Claus, was arrested and charged with fraud.

On April 14, 2026, the federal court in Manhattan unsealed charges against Stefan Pildes, organizer of New York City’s SantaCon, over allegations that he stole $1.4 million of the proceeds of the purportedly charitable bar crawl for personal expenses like parties and luxury vacations.

The victims of this alleged scheme were the “Santas,” thousands of young people who streamed annually into the heart of Manhattan, decked in holiday attire, to engage in a messy display of public drinking, carousing, urinating, puking, fighting, and countless other disruptive activities. Born on the West Coast in the 1990s as a countercultural prank, SantaCon helped inspire Chuck Palahniuk’s vision of Fight Club’s Project Mayhem; but when the event came to New York City, it swelled into an even more unruly and more despised tradition.

On the Internet, New Yorkers unleashed their snark. When the US attorney’s office in Manhattan posted a tweet asking to hear from people who believed they were “victimized in the alleged SantaCon fraud,” replies included:

• “Santa exposed himself to my 3 yr old daughter last SantaCon. It’s ruined Christmas. The holiday traumatizes her. Who should I speak to about this?”

• “does trying to commute to work while it’s happening count?”

• “Does having to dodge vomit on the street count?”

• “Every New Yorker is a victim of santacon.”

• “what if you have been victimized by SantaCon, but also brought it upon yourself?”

No one expressed any real concern for the Santas. To the extent their plight was considered at all, the overwhelming theme was “they had it coming.”

This sparked a philosophical dilemma that often arises for me when writing about criminal cases: How should journalists and the public interpret the situation when the victims themselves are unsympathetic, somewhat at fault for their predicament, or even bad people? The default frame is the one prosecutors use in trials, portraying defendants as villains. But that starts to fall apart when the individuals they supposedly harmed seem to be on the receiving end of karma.

Follow this reasoning far enough, and it ends in dark places: like the widespread support for fresh-faced alleged populist vigilante Luigi Mangione, accused of gunning down a health insurance CEO in broad daylight. Or on a less macabre level, you have situations like the Mt. Everest rescue con I wrote about in my last Black Sheep post, targeting ill-prepared amateur climbers who have been overrunning the mountain, trashing the delicate environment and creating “traffic jams” along narrow summit paths at dangerous altitudes. Writing that, I couldn’t help but want to root for the alleged scam artist sherpas a little bit.

But no matter how much you might despise the harsh realities of capitalism, murdering executives is never the answer. Nor is it OK to defraud someone just because they are obnoxious and seem like they should be defrauded. These are the terms we must accept as conditions of living in a civilized society; when laws are broken, the agreed-upon legal process should have a chance to run its course, however out of sync it might seem with our personal notions of poetic justice.

And that brings me back to the Bad Santas. Here’s a sober look at the facts (ok, pun intended):

Unsurprisingly, there have been suspicions about sketchiness and SantaCon funds for at least a few years. Gothamist did an investigation in December 2023, analyzing the nonprofit’s financial filings and finding that a significant portion of the money went to “crypto and Burning Man.”

The federal indictment now alleges Pildes raised $2.7 million from 2019 to 2026 by selling $10 to $20 tickets to the Santas. He also took a cut of sales from the 60ish bars that agreed to be “official stops on the SantaCon route.” While not mentioned by the Feds, a TimeOut New York article on SantaCon 2025 notes: “This year, there’s also a VIP ticket option for $360, which includes line-cutting privileges and an exclusive SantaCon keepsake badge.”

In marketing, Pildes claimed all the money went to good causes, including “arts funding and fighting hunger,” telling attendees on the event website that they could “brag that [they] actually gave to charity this year.” According to prosecutors, the group also sent an email to an attendee who questioned the purpose of the ticket, saying that it was a “donation” and “that good feeling will warm your heart faster than whiskey and gingerbread.”

The vehicle Pildes used to gather all of these funds was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called, strangely, “Participatory Safety Inc.” The group’s Form 990s, which you can find on the IRS web page, describe its mission as raising “funds and community participation through a costumed city-wide event” to support “Arts Projects and “causes and charities that align with our goals and mission.”

However, according to federal prosecutors, about half of the money went to Pildes, himself. The indictment lists purposes including “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, extravagant meals, and a luxury vehicle.” SantaCon also allegedly covered his Manhattan rent and a “$100,000 investment in a boutique resort in Costa Rica founded by a personal friend.” A lot of the funds were allegedly diverted through a separate corporate entity he controlled, even more amusingly named “Creative Opportunities Group Inc.”

Now out on bail, 50-year-old Pildes is charged with wire fraud. The government is seeking the forfeiture of his lake house, among other assets. If convicted, his future probably includes at least a few not-so-jolly or boisterous holiday seasons in a drab prison camp.

*****

Looking over all of this, one could easily argue that thousands of Santas are no worse off for allegedly unintentionally “donating” $10 or $20 or so to Pildes’ living expenses and luxurious lifestyle. One could also plausibly argue that being conned out of such a small sum is far from the worst thing that could happen when getting black-out intoxicated in the middle of Manhattan.

But here’s the annoying thing about principles: They are impossible to shake off, even if the immediate harm appears nominal. And deeper truths tend to emerge, showing they were important all along.

Thinking back to my original question in this piece, I arrived at some answers, at least as applied to this situation specifically. There’s no point in feeling sorry for the Santas. The victim frame doesn’t fit them. Their raucous antics make city living more challenging than usual for a day. Skimming a little off the top of the hundreds of dollars each probably spends achieving peak drunken idiocy might seem benign.

However, there are real losers, even if they don’t technically meet the legal definition of “fraud victims.” While not directly robbed, the charities that were supposed to receive the donations — or, more accurately, their beneficiaries — come to mind. We will never know what good works could have been done with the money if it had gone where it was promised.

Another “real” victim is New York itself. Claiming that an event is for charity does exactly what the organization says: it warms the heart and makes a participant feel good about themself… even if they end up puking on their shoes. Who knows how many Santas might have reined themselves in and behaved a little better if they didn’t get to wear an artificial halo.

Superlatives are like siren songs to the middle of the bell curve, promising a brush with something special or extreme.

For marketing, they work like magic. Plenty of subpar restaurants stay in business by selling what someone has declared the “hottest” chili, the “tallest” stack of pancakes, or the “biggest” burger, no special culinary talent required. Small towns can claim fame by constructing comically oversized objects like the “World’s Largest” mailbox, cuckoo clock, or ball of twine. In fact, the “World’s Largest Ball of Twine” is so successful that America boasts at least three: in Darwin, Minnesota; Cawker City, Kansas; and Branson, Missouri.

But there can be serious downsides to being tagged with a superlative, and the inevitable influx of thrill-seeking masses that follows. Nowhere on Earth is this more obvious than on its highest peak, Mt. Everest.

Every spring, when climbing season begins in the Himalayas, there are stories about the “traffic jam” on Everest, as hundreds of visitors take a crack at the mountain. Some are seasoned climbers, but the vast majority are amateurs, driven by a desire for bragging rights and maybe some “likes” on social media. Their exploits are made possible by an extensive industry of sherpas, other local guides, supply providers, and trained medical and emergency personnel.

While the steady stream of inexperienced mountaineers (typically paying $10,000s to over $100,000 each) has helped support Nepal’s economy, it has also left a devastating mark on a natural wonder. Photos abound documenting the extensive piles of trash — discarded oxygen tanks, food wrappers, water bottles, and God knows what else — scarring the scenery. There are also frozen remains of some unlucky climbers themselves. They serve as a reminder that the danger in scaling Everest is actually real, not just hype invented for tourist brochures.

With only a few routes to the summit doable for non-experts, crowds directly compound the risk. The air is so thin above 26,000 feet, the so-called “Death Zone,” that people’s bodies start breaking down from oxygen starvation, the brain swells, and the heart and lungs grow strained. Having to wait too long in line can literally kill you.

Of course, a fair number of the amateurs don’t make it far enough up the mountain to be exposed to those risks. Estimates vary, but available data indicate that at least a third of would‑be summit-seekers turn back early, often before setting foot in the Death Zone. The reasons range from sudden storms and illnesses, which can derail even seasoned mountaineers, to problems concentrated among the least experienced: inadequate gear, exhaustion, and altitude sickness. That context creates a different kind of vulnerability, apart from the elements: Rookie climbers become easy pickings for con artists.

*****

One could argue that I have no business poking around in the dealings of Everest adventurers. Apart from casual day hikes, I do not climb mountains. I have zero desire to spend weeks dragging gear up treacherous paths and sleeping in a frigid tent in pursuit of a summit. But I do find stories of these rigorous journeys compelling, and creative fraud in exotic locales even more so. That’s probably why a recent headline about the Everest scam grabbed my attention. I might not need to scale the mountain, but I did need to get to the bottom of whatever deeds were being orchestrated on it.

I first glimpsed the story in one of my Google alert emails, an April 2, 2026, piece from the UK’s Independent: “Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers to force fake rescues in $20m scam.” According to the article, Nepali authorities had criminally charged 32 people in a case claiming widespread fraud by tour operators, who had allegedly conspired across the climbing ecosystem to stage hundreds of unnecessary helicopter rescues for insurance money. In some cases, complicit climbers may have agreed to take part in exchange for cut-rate expeditions. However, the Independent focused on the more scandalous claims involving unknowing participants: those who were allegedly poisoned.

According to the article, some guides staged the need for rescues by "lacing food with large amounts of baking soda,” uncooked chicken, or rat droppings, or giving some climbers “medications with excessive amounts of water.” This apparently led to nausea, dizziness, body aches, and other symptoms that mimicked or worsened existing altitude sickness, which the guides allegedly contended must be handled through emergency evacuations via helicopter. (Experts generally say the cure is simply to walk down and rest, not to summon a chopper.)

Before you ask, yes, I looked it up — you can get sick from consuming huge amounts of baking soda or overhydrating in a physically demanding environment without maintaining an appropriate salt balance. But that said, this information still left me with questions. First of all, baking soda has a very off-putting bitter taste. Shouldn’t a substantial amount of it in food be noticeable, even if the altitude messes with your senses a bit? Also, how much water would the guides have to push on trekkers to mess up their body chemistry? Liters? Both situations seem like they should raise red flags in any reasonably aware and skeptical person. (We will assume the dangers and grossness of uncooked chicken and rat droppings are even more obvious.)

Plain as day, I could see a plausible, unspoken narrative operating in the background: These amateur climbers, who came by the dozens, may have had no mountain sense and put their full faith in these guides, eating whatever gross-tasting food was served to them and following even the most counterintuitive instructions, like, “Here, if you’re feeling queasy, drink this entire two-liter bottle of water right now.” They might not have even done basic homework before embarking on the trek up the world’s highest peak; a cursory Google search could tell you how to fix altitude sickness. Maybe they didn’t express skepticism because they didn’t know enough to have any.

So I was torn: Clearly, insurance fraud and, even more so, poisoning people were serious crimes and moral wrongs. But was I supposed to feel sympathy for these “victims,” who had apparently made themselves into such easy marks?

****

It turned out that this alleged scheme had existed in some form for several years, with stories dating back to 2018.

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A One-Way Ticket

Just hours after I hit “publish” on Part II of this series, the man at the center of an alleged $220 million cattle fraud who had gone on the run, leaving his wife to face a criminal indictment alone, was caught at Los Angeles International Airport.

According to federal authorities, he was apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection at 11:45 am on March 9, 2026. Public records don’t say where Link had been coming from or where he was headed. But they do make clear where he ended up: in federal custody. The following day, in Los Angeles federal court, a magistrate judge ordered him permanently detained, finding him a flight risk, with no possibility of bail.

I checked the US Bureau of Prisons database; he was listed as an inmate at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, a sleek fortress with slots for windows and a stack of cage-covered recreation decks. He would remain there until transferred to a facility in Northern Texas, where his criminal case was ongoing. From my experience as a journalist covering white-collar crime, I knew he was unlikely to emerge as a free man again for years — possibly many, if convicted and sentenced to a lengthy term.

Because BOP restrictions and court orders often limit contact between co-defendants, Link’s wife, Tia, was unlikely to receive permission to visit him. Their lawyers would almost certainly discourage them from writing, emailing, or speaking on the phone. Conversations would be recorded, scrutinized, and possibly used as evidence.

For the foreseeable future, the couple might only interact through looks exchanged across the courtroom, where he would sit, already judged in many eyes as, at minimum, a coward.

It was a humbling fate.

The “Ghost Herd”

Interestingly, records filed by investigators don’t paint Link as eager to head for the hills when his cattle investment company, Agridime, ran into trouble. They depict the opposite: Link stood his ground, seemingly committed to doing whatever he could to keep the business afloat. Unfortunately, as the documents allege, that included lying to investors.

After its founding in 2017, Agridime operated for several years, apparently doing as promised — allowing investors to purchase heads of cattle for $2,000 each, then delivering returns when the animals were eventually slaughtered and sold for meat. It’s possible some investors received the generous payouts the company advertised, of 15% to 32%, from honest practices.

But the wild swings in the cattle market during 2020 — resulting from drought, pandemic-related labor shortages, and the shuttering of the restaurant industry — proved too much for the small, young business to bear. Agridime would have been hemorrhaging cash as it struggled to both purchase cattle and sell meat at reasonable prices, while also paying investors on a promised schedule. Facing imminent failure, Link and his colleagues allegedly took a dangerous step in January 2021: they started selling contracts for cattle that didn't exist.

Federal investigators traced the shift to that same month, when Link and his colleagues continued meeting with investors, offering the usual pitch of guaranteed returns on cattle purchases. But when the funds flowed in, some as little as $10,000, some as much as $2.7 million, the money allegedly went elsewhere. According to prosecutors and securities regulators, it went into Agridime’s operations, to repay loans, into Link’s and other employees’ pockets, and — most critically for the “Ponzi scheme” label — to pay previous investors.

When investors expressed concerns and demanded proof of their purchases, Link and others at Agridime allegedly supplied electronic tag information for real, living cattle. But the same tag information for the same animals was allegedly provided to multiple investors simultaneously, essentially using a relatively small number of actual cattle to fabricate an entire “ghost herd.”

Based on the amount of money owed to investors in 2024, Agridime should have owned somewhere between 28,000 and 58,000 head of cattle. However, a receiver appointed by a federal judge found only 6,500.

Walls Close In

In the abstract, treating cattle as an investment probably makes sense. Sitting down in a restaurant, about to bite into a juicy hamburger, the average city dweller rarely spares a thought for how it got there. Similarly, driving along a rural highway, passing a herd of cattle grazing in a field, you might see them as interchangeable, sleepy-looking sources of more hamburgers.

But raising animals, especially huge ones of 1,000 pounds or more, and getting them slaughtered and sold is a complicated venture. Unlike piles of metal, agricultural products like grain or vats of petroleum, animals don’t sit still. They must be fed and cared for. They may be shifted between multiple lots and pastures throughout their short lives. Sometimes they get sick and die, or escape entirely.

For an investor, taking Agridime’s deal even under the best circumstances was far riskier than the company let on. Due diligence was virtually impossible for a third party located hundreds or thousands of miles from a herd, especially without any knowledge of the cattle industry.

Because of these blind spots, securities and commodities regulations are often found to apply when companies solicit passive investments, even in something as tangible as a cow or a steer. By 2023, state regulators in Arizona and North Dakota had identified this fatal flaw in Agridime’s model: the company wasn’t registered, anywhere, as a securities broker, despite selling what the regulators viewed as unregistered securities. Both agencies issued cease-and-desist orders.

Doubling Down

Link and his colleagues didn't let adverse orders from state regulators slow them down. As alleged by federal authorities, they kept selling mostly fictional head of cattle, with Link meeting personally with numerous investors while his wife, Tia, allegedly helped make assurances in person and over the phone.

By August 2023, months after both Arizona and North Dakota had ordered the company to stop, Tia was still allegedly working phones and email chains, telling one prospective investor that Agridime had just sailed through a USDA audit and was in regulatory compliance. When another investor wrote to ask whether it was truly "guaranteed that one year from now you will pay me $5,500," her reply, according to the indictment, was three words: "Yes, that is correct."

The group allegedly falsified dates on purchase records for cattle, making it appear that animals had been purchased promptly with investor funds when the money had already gone elsewhere — including to cover company costs and personal expenses, among them a $528,000 property for the Links in rural Missouri, what was probably a home, and more than $11 million paid to Link and others involved in the business as salaries and commissions.

Amid continuing problems securing enough inventory, Agridime allegedly persuaded a handful of local ranchers to “consign” their animals to the company, giving Agridime access to live cattle. Agridime allegedly promised the ranchers it would pay to feed the animals and have them slaughtered, returning a share of the profits. According to court documents, including filings submitted by the ranchers themselves, they never received any funds from the company.

Following the state's cease-and-desist order, Arizona’s security regulator brought an additional enforcement proceeding against Agridime over claims it continued to operate in the state. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed an enforcement case against Agridime in December 2023, with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission following suit in May 2024. Corporate assets were frozen, and the company was forced into receivership.

Link’s Last Stand

Through much of the escalating crisis, Link stood his ground. He defended the company to securities regulators. He testified in a deposition, explaining his role in the founding and management of Agridime and asserting that the “buck” stopped with him and his co-founder, a Texas businessman named Jed Wood.

Fighting the cease-and-desist order, Link argued to the Arizona Corporation Commission in June 2023 that regulators had fundamentally misunderstood his business. Agridime, he contended, was “a registered and bonded livestock broker and market agency” operating squarely within the USDA’s existing regulatory framework — not a securities dealer subject to Arizona’s securities laws. He accused the state of attempting to improperly “transmute cattle brokers into securities brokers,” and denied that Agridime’s customers were investors at all. Link demanded the order be vacated and all charges dismissed. The order stood.

In an August 4, 2024, filing to the federal judge overseeing the SEC’s case, Link objected strenuously to the agency’s determination that Agridime was a Ponzi scheme, while pledging to help ensure anyone owed money by the company was paid back. The one-page document states:

Defendant Joshua Link files this Response to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. To Mr. Link’s knowledge, Agridime conducted legitimate cattle business and was not a Ponzi scheme. Accordingly, he writes to state his strong opposition to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. Nevertheless, Mr. Link does not oppose the relief requested in Receiver’s Motion with the understanding that obtaining this designation will assist Receiver in maximizing the value of the Receivership Estate and, in turn, work towards ensuring that Receiver will be able to pay back the purchasers of cattle contracts and any outstanding bills owed by Agridime.

The court rejected his position. Agridime was declared a Ponzi scheme by the judge on August 13, 2024.

Sifting Through Remains

In business collapses, insolvencies, and fraud cases, courts can appoint receivers to act as neutral fiduciaries, charging them with sifting through the wreckage and figuring out who is owed what — and whether any money remains to pay them. In Ponzi schemes, receivers also take on the unenviable task of clawing back payments to the lucky investors who were paid with other investors' funds.

A receiver appointed to oversee the aftermath of Agridime provided a sobering financial picture:

As of 2024, the company was found to have raised $191 million from roughly 2,100 people, a figure the Justice Department later revised upward to $220 million. At least $58 million of those funds were used to make Ponzi payments to prior investors.

A quarterly update covering the final months of 2025 was starker still. The estate had $2.8 million in cash on hand, nine properties scattered across Kansas valued at roughly $1.1 million on Agridime’s books, and approximately 12,000 pounds of frozen meat sitting in a Kansas warehouse. Investors who were “net winners” — those who received payments funded by later investors — owed a combined $15 million back to the estate. But recovering it would be a long and fraught process. A similar effort involving Bernie Madoff’s investors, for example, took 16 years.

All told, investors had lost an estimated $115 million, with uncertain prospects of ever seeing more than pennies on the dollar returned.

A Broken Trust

Having picked my way through multiple federal and state court dockets and read whatever coverage I could find, I still don’t know when Link decided to run, or what specific event pushed him to it. That bothers me. What bothers me even more is this: growing up outside of Kansas City, I probably met many people like Link, hardworking, sincere Midwesterners just trying to get ahead.

From watching videos of Link, including one of his and Tia’s 2018 wedding at a Sedalia, Missouri farmstead, I didn’t get the vibe of a high-pressure, fast-and-loose hustler. He looked kind, warm, and dependable. His alleged scheme wasn’t a siren song to the greedy at heart, but an appeal to fundamentally decent values: offering an alternative to factory farming, supporting sustainable food sources, and treating animals raised for meat with as much dignity as they could hope for.

Link’s literal indictment felt, to me, like an indictment of my own biases. Whether the business fell off the rails through bad luck or bad faith, whether Link and his colleagues made desperate decisions or cynical ones, I would have expected people who resonate with my own sense of identity to take what comes and face the music, support their loved ones, and do whatever they could to help fix what they broke.

But Link didn’t do that.

A Steer’s Last Day

One summer morning, while I was visiting my aunt’s farm, I helped her load King Richard III into a trailer to meet his end. He was a Dexter steer, the oldest in her small collection of cattle, and she had decided his day had come. He was headed to a Mennonite-run slaughterhouse, a humane alternative to large assembly-line processing plants. My aunt had carefully scheduled the trip to minimize how long King Richard III would have to wait before the Big Event. He had bad hooves, and she didn’t want him stuck for hours on concrete.

My aunt and her late husband had named him King Richard III because, like the British monarch immortalized by Shakespeare, he had congenital deformities. He was also born in winter, prompting them to think of the famous line from the play: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It was a peculiar habit, naming animals you intended to kill for meat. But I also sensed a quiet bravery in confronting the moral consequences. A name conferred respect. Not everyone had the strength to show respect to an animal they intended to eat.​

Dexter cattle are typically smaller and more compact than standard meat breeds, like Angus or Hereford. But King Richard III had grown into a giant among his peers, the size of several refrigerators. Standing in the mud that morning, trying to corral him away from the other steers, I felt both the practical danger and my City Slicker vulnerability. When he was finally in the trailer, with the door shut behind him, I was overwhelmed with a mix of pride and sorrow. That pang, I realized, was a hidden cost of raising livestock ethically.

Now, years later, looking at Agridime’s website, I think of that day. The framework, wrapped in an emotional attachment to how things should be, was exactly what the company was allegedly built to exploit. Agridime pitched itself as a way for ordinary people to invest in beef raised on local ranches, a way to make money and feel virtuous at the same time. As I explained in Part I of this story, the feel-good venture allegedly morphed into a $220 million Ponzi scheme, leaving investors empty-handed and triggering federal indictments. One of the key figures, Joshua Link, is now a fugitive; here, I trace how Agridime started and how it allegedly went off the rails.

Mysterious Beginnings

Despite multiple government investigations and extensive court records about the company, there is surprisingly little public information about Joshua Link’s life before Agridime. This opacity is striking given his role. Documents identify him as the co-founder and Executive Director, and in a prior regulatory probe, he described himself as effectively the company’s CEO, saying that he and the other co-founder, Jed Wood, were “where the buck stops” for all major decisions.​

Court filings in the federal criminal case and related civil actions still shed no light on where Link came from or how he met Wood. What they do show is that Link and Wood organized Agridime LLC in Texas on April 13, 2017. Link, then in his mid‑20s, had clear ties to Missouri; in September 2018, he married his future co‑defendant, Tia, in Sedalia, where she had gone to high school. Over the years, he also had addresses in Gilbert, Arizona, and Hope, Kansas. Wood, by contrast, was a man in his 50s from Fort Worth, Texas, described in legal documents as Agridime’s President and Operations Director. He allegedly oversaw finances while Link drove sales.​

While the records don’t explain how the two men became business partners, their concept, on paper, sounded plausible: a way for investors to profit from cattle without doing the physical labor, while ostensibly supporting local agriculture. On its website, Agridime proclaimed “PRODUCING THE BEST MEAT FOR THE BEST PRICE. RAISED BY AMERICAN FARMERS,” with the text appearing over an image of a woman on horseback, in a cowboy hat, carrying a large American flag.

Agencies that later scrutinized the company, including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, do not allege any fraud before 2021. Perhaps when Link and Wood launched Agridime, they believed in the model. But once the company gained a foothold, something — or someone — took a wrong turn.

The Pitch: “Everybody Wins”

Agridime started with no deep industry connections, no celebrity endorsements, and no massive initial outlay of funding. But it did have the benefit of the right cultural backdrop. The rise in “farm-to-table” dining, interest in high-quality grass-fed beef, and the idea of “using the whole animal” had flourished in the 2010s. Agridime’s pitch slotted neatly into that landscape, sounding persuasive to both investors and meat customers.

Using social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube as its primary marketing vehicles, the company successfully attracted the right attention. In 2022, a local television station ran a paid promotional interview with Link at a Gilbert, Arizona warehouse, where the co-founder claimed the company offered “the most nutrient dense protein on the planet.” Along with packages of meat, Link showcased the company’s offerings of tallow-based candles and cosmetics, which he described as a way to use “the whole carcass” and “respect” the animal.

YouTubers running investment-related channels also noticed the company’s frequent social media posts promising significant returns, which some commented on favorably. Reviewing information posted on Agridime’s website, one YouTuber posting in April 2022 offered mostly positive impressions to his audience of about 1,760 subscribers.

Although he refrained from explicitly recommending the investment, he noted the “guaranteed” return was higher than the S&P 500’s growth, adding that the company’s business model had “led them to grow rapidly since launch” and that it had established a “fully transparency and sustainable supply chain where everybody wins.” The YouTuber also repeated the company’s claims of being USDA licensed, saying that “the entire process of investment in Agridime is legally done,” that “all cattle are insured” against death loss, and that “this really gives a peace of mind for investors.”

Court documents included excerpts of the company’s marketing materials, providing a simple financial summary:

The cost per steer or heifer was $2,000, an amount that was purportedly supposed to include its feeding and care, plus meat processing costs. The cattle were supposed to yield an average of 500 pounds of beef each, sold at $6 per pound, for a total of $3,000. Of the profit, $600 was intended to go to Agridime and $300 to $400 to the investor, for a 15–20% return.

In the materials, the company states: “Respectively, we feel if we were giving much less than 15-20% return that we wouldn’t be doing right by our customers. Our aim to is to create a sustainable supply chain that we can have 100% transparency with start to finish and everybody still wins.”​

For people who wanted to feel like the kind of person who supports sustainable farming, Agridime offered a shortcut, with interest.

Rapid Rise

All told, about 2,200 investors were lured by Agridime’s promises, according to documents submitted by prosecutors. While some were agricultural professionals, most were individuals scattered across at least 14 states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Investors typically bought dozens of cattle each, sinking $100,000 or more into Agridime, which was likely a substantial portion of their savings. According to prosecutors, the entire operation brought in $220 million from January 2021 through December 2023.​

Through it all, Link was involved in nearly everything, including face-to-face meetings with investors, training sales staff, overseeing digital marketing, and negotiating contract terms, according to the court filings. His wife, Tia, worked closely with him as Agridime’s Marketing Director. As Agridime’s flow of investments grew, so did its operations. A LinkedIn page for Agridime lists a headquarters address in Fort Worth, Texas, and 12 employees. Its staff came to encompass a variety of administrative roles, including a financial controller, operations managers, and logistics personnel. In 2021, the company hired a North Dakota cattle broker, Taylor Bang, the owner of Taylor Bang Cattle Sales LLC. Some staff received generous compensation, particularly Bang. Regulators claimed Bang raked in almost $7 million in commissions from Agridime. Meanwhile, Link and his wife allegedly drew payments of more than $2.7 million.

Unstable Market

Most of us living in big cities don’t have to think too often about how wild swings in weather and other uncontrollable factors affect our food supply. But for small farmers and ranchers, these issues can be matters of economic life and death.​

Just as Agridime was ramping up, conditions in the cattle market were shifting against it. Drought plagued much of the Western and Midwestern U.S. in 2021 and 2022, causing the price of animal feed to soar. Hay “was like gold,” my aunt told me, noting that it often had to be transported long distances at “a hideous profit.” Inflation also pushed up prices of various farming necessities, like diesel fuel. As a result, farmers liquidated their herds. Inventory levels dropped to their lowest levels in decades, while demand for beef continued unabated, causing prices to shoot up. For anyone trying to buy thousands of animals, as Agridime claimed to be doing on investors’ behalf, that meant paying more for each head, or not getting them at all.​

Yet the company continued to tout a “guaranteed” return that supposedly covered “feeding that animal to finish,” as if these costs were static.

Problematic Math

And that brings us to Agridime’s simple return formula, which arguably should have been a big red flag for investors. Look harder at the costs involved, the probable revenue from selling meat, and most importantly the wide range of uncertainties, and the numbers start to look unrealistic.​

Graze, a trade magazine for small ranchers, gives a hypothetical cost of just buying a 700‑pound calf at $1,600+, without even accounting for feeding, transport, and processing costs. With that in mind, a flat investment of $2,000 was unlikely to go far enough. Meanwhile, an expectation of 500 pounds of meat, selling at $6 per pound, for each animal was also highly optimistic. Agriculture researchers provide examples of 1,200‑pound steers typically yielding only 470 to 490 pounds of packaged beef. (As huge as he was, my aunt told me King Richard III netted just 530 pounds.)

But how were investors to know to question the data they were shown by Link and others at Agridime? After all, most were probably just City Slickers like me.

This concludes Part II. Click here for Part III.

Far From The City Lights

Every once in a while, you stumble across a fraud story that hits close to home. In this instance, I mean that very literally.

For almost 20 years, I’ve been a New Yorker. The city’s jarring cacophony of noises, smells, and humanity resonates with my nervous system in a way that most Americans will never understand. And that’s OK. New Yorkers don’t need or want everyone to come here.

But I didn’t start out surfing urban chaos. I grew up outside of Kansas City, Missouri, a stone’s throw from pastoral-looking scenes of cows and soybean fields. Like so many Hallmark movie protagonists, I had to escape all of that for bright city lights. Yet, it’s still embedded in my soul — the sense of being in the country, with a big sky overhead and undeveloped land unfurling as far as the eye can see. It’s part of what makes me me.

As a Big City reporter, I’ve covered Wall Street schemes and corporate scandals and brushed elbows with famous journalists, celebrities, and power brokers in Manhattan courthouses. So I couldn’t help but smile a little when I saw news of a major financial crime near my hometown. It involved a Missouri man who allegedly ran a $220 million cattle scam.

Most-Wanted Cattle Man

The indictment was unsealed on Feb. 12, 2026, in Fort Worth, Texas, federal court. It charged five individuals with assorted crimes over their alleged roles in a scheme to fleece cattle investors. The group was involved in a business called Agridime, which allegedly promised to channel funds into purchasing steers on local ranchers’ farms, and provide returns of 15% to 32% when the animals were eventually slaughtered for meat.

Instead, according to prosecutors, Agridime operated as a Ponzi scheme, purchasing very few actual animals and simply repaying old investors with newer investors’ funds. The scheme, spanning multiple states including Texas, Missouri, and North Dakota, totaled $220 million from 2021 through 2023, with defendants extracting millions of dollars for themselves, according to the indictment. More than 2,000 investors ended up losing at least $115 million, prosecutors alleged.

Curiously, while four of the defendants were arrested, one remained at large. The holdout was a 30-something Missouri man, Agridime co-owner Joshua Link. News sources highlighted how he was a fugitive, providing links to his FBI wanted poster:

Nothing evokes the historic Wild West quite like a guy being on the lam, wanted for cattle fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s release, the charges, and the poster captivated me and jarred me out of my preoccupation with big-city hustlers. There was something oddly affirming, given my own background, about recognizing equally complex swindles in America’s Heartland.

At first glance, the pattern of what Link and his compatriots were accused of looked standard: overpromising, wildly under-delivering, and pocketing some of the ample cash flowing through the scheme based on these deceptions. But the documents couldn’t tell me how, exactly, Agridime had grown from nothing into an operation siphoning in hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years. That question hooked me.

Anyone who’s ever tried to raise money for anything, be it a hedge fund, a tech startup, or virtually any other endeavor, knows it’s no easy feat getting outsiders to sink ample quantities of money into a venture with no proven track record. Winning trust often relies on shorthand signals of legitimacy, such as the founder coming from a top Ivy League school, having famous friends, being named to a “30 under 30” list, or otherwise generating media attention. Old-fashioned nepotism can work, too.

The folks at Agridime had none of those special qualities, and yet, according to prosecutors, they somehow sweet-talked $220 million out of people. This didn’t sound like the work of a country rube. Someone with the finesse of a Jordan Belfort or a Bernie Madoff had to be involved, acting as a rainmaker. Based on everything I read in the court documents, his sudden disappearance, and the cool, even stare captured in his wanted poster, I sensed the lynchpin of the alleged scheme was Link.

Tia & Josh

While there was a flurry of local news reports on the indictment and on Agridime, no journalist had taken a close look at Link. So I did. When I started poking at the threads, a dark and intriguing tangle emerged.

The indictment named five individuals, hailing from locations sprawled across the midsection of the country:

• Jed Wood of Fort Worth, Texas; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Taylor Bang of Kildeer, North Dakota; charged with eight counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Royana Thomas of Arlington, Texas; charged with six counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Joshua Link, of Strafford, Missouri; charged with 10 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two counts of money laundering.

• Tia Link of Smithton, Missouri; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

While Josh and Tia had the same last name, neither the indictment nor an earlier filed criminal complaint specified their relationship, whether spouses, siblings, or otherwise. Tia Link was also known as “Tia Makenzie Shane,” according to the indictment, though it did not note whether either “Shane” or “Link” was a married name. It was a small detail that hinted at a deeper backstory.

I noted their alleged residences, in Smithton and Strafford, were about two hours apart, mostly a straight shot from each other along I-65, and theoretically doable for a couple that didn’t mind commuting.

I had driven that very stretch of interstate myself many times while attending college at Mizzou, in the early 2000s. My parents were living in Ozark at the time, not far from Strafford. Brightly lit with numerous billboards for Jesus, smut shops, and anti-abortion campaigns, it was, from what I recall, a relatively easy trek.

Obviously, Item 1 for me was determining if Josh and Tia were, indeed, married. Fortunately, the answer took only one two-second Google search for “Tia Shane” and “Josh Link.” The star-crossed pair had left up their Zola wedding website.

A Labor Of Love?

The website is scant on details. It provides the basics for the Big Day — Sept. 18, 2018, in Sedalia, Missouri — links to Amazon and Target gift registries, an RSVP link, and an assortment of photos. At the time, Link was nearing 25. Tia was a couple of years younger, a former high school volleyball player for a small Christian school in Sedalia.

The website for Heritage Ranch, where the event was held, included a video of the Links’ wedding. It shows a charming but modest affair; three bridesmaids in dusty pink, three groomsmen in shirtsleeves, Tia beaming in a spaghetti-strap gown with a plunging neckline, and Josh smiling back at her lovingly in a straightforward suit and tie. Their ceremony was held amid lush greenery, and the reception in a barn strung with fairy lights.

Now, professional wedding videos typically show an idealized version of the day. A videographer who made a wedding seem unpleasant or highlighted points of tension probably wouldn’t stay in business. Even with those caveats, I noticed no obvious red flags. Guests appeared relaxed. Expressions of joy and surprise seemed sincere. Children danced. People hugged. Nothing seemed over-the-top, “too perfect” or forced.

Looking at the video, I doubt that anyone present at the scene — maybe even that happy couple — had any sense of what disastrous path this was leading toward. It seems unlikely, for instance, that any gossipy relatives were lurking in corners, taking bets on how long the marriage would last. Surely, no one guessed that the bride would end up in handcuffs and the groom a fugitive.

But judging by the timeline captured in court documents, the wheels were already in motion by the time the pair said their “I do’s.” Just a year and a half earlier, in April 2017, Josh Link had co-founded Agridime, the venture that would ultimately make him a wanted man.

This concludes Part I of “A Ponzi Scheme On The Prairie.” Click here for Part II.

CORRECTION: I accidentally misgendered the cattle pictured in the main image. Actual comment from my aunt: “Them are steers, not cows. Jeez, city people.”
The error has been corrected.

When Old AI News Gets A Rewrite

News doesn’t gain traction until it finds the right context. Social media creators understand this, and algorithms are built to exploit it. That’s why you might occasionally run across an “old” story on Instagram or TikTok repackaged as “new,” suddenly going viral.​

A prime example: North Carolina musician Michael Smith, who was arrested and charged with fraud in September 2024. Despite my fascination with novel fraud cases, I had forgotten entirely about his alleged crime—using bots to stream AI‑generated music tracks and pocket $10 million from online services. So had many people, apparently.​

When the indictment was unsealed, it got a brief flurry of press attention, mostly unsympathetic and parroting the US Attorney’s comments about victimizing “musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders”. Wired published a follow-up feature in May 2025, and then the case seemed to disappear from the media.​

The Instagram Redemption Arc

Then, while scrolling through Instagram one day in January 2026, I saw a viral post presenting the case as fresh and framing it in a very different light. The post, by an AI‑focused marketing brand, showed a cheeky AI‑generated image of robots playing music together with the headline: “Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands with AI, then Making $10M by Listening to Their Songs with Bots.” My curiosity engaged, I clicked through the avalanche of comments, gobsmacked by how overwhelmingly positive they were.​

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game 😆”​
“You’re supposed to start a band and make someone else 10M.”​
“This is literally what major labels are doing to generate stream numbers though. 🤷🏾”​
“God forbids a man has a side hustle 🤦🏾‍♀️😅”​
“When tech Startups do it to little people it’s called ‘disrupting the industry’”​
“Can someone teach me how to do this?”​
“He found a loophole. He’s a hero!!”​
And simply: “rage against the machines”.​

Public opinion rarely shifts in favor of people accused of committing white‑collar fraud. People typically view this type of crime through a lens of socioeconomic inequality and vengeance against the privileged who act out of greed. The reputational damage for the accused is instant and life-changing, even for defendants who are later exonerated. Yet 16 months after his arrest, Smith was being hailed as a kind of renegade folk hero. What had happened—and why now?​

Sixteen Months in AI Time

I have a theory. Sixteen months is a blip in litigation time, but in tech time (especially AI time) it’s eons. In that span, the AI zeitgeist shifted from “intriguing experimental tool” to “unavoidable force,” and people started to feel the negative consequences across major aspects of life: jobs replaced, and workloads ratcheted up on those who stayed, all on the premise that AI would magically increase productivity.​

At the same time, the world around us has started to feel like it’s being redesigned for robots, AI agents, and chatbots, with humans pushed to the edges. There are “dark factories” in China where robots work without a need for light. School assignments are generated by AI, completed with AI, and graded with AI, in a circular parody of education. Applicants use AI to apply for jobs while companies use AI to reject them, and “no one is getting hired.” Completely AI‑generated bands have topped Spotify charts, racking up streams from listeners who might not realize any of it was made by a human or a machine.

Bots Talking to Bots

Perhaps strangest of all, there is now a social media platform that exists solely for bots to interact. Moltbook describes itself as “A social network for AI agents” where “AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.” The “users” are agent personas whose posts and comments are generated by bots connected to Moltbook.​

Looking at the forum is a confusing, surreal experience. At first glance, it resembles any other nerdy social platform, like Reddit or Hacker News. There are feeds of posts, comments, upvotes, technical discussions, and advice.

There are even weird manifestos, petty rants, and insults.

Like with many supposedly autonomous “robots” (think of smart‑home bots like Neo), humans still hold the strings in the background. Developers write the agents’ system prompts, specify example behaviors, and decide what each agent is “there to do.” For example, despite having the capacity to use virtually any language, the agents mostly chat in English because the developer community, and most connected models are strongest in English. However, the bots do supposedly come up with their own original “thoughts.”

This also allows English-speaking humans to become spectators, which is kind of the point: to create systems that can run with minimal human friction, generating content, engagement, and value at scale, but with humans no longer the main characters.

Alongside these bizarre experiments in taking humans out of social ecosystems, worry about AI’s impact on livelihoods has been steadily rising. Sentiment has evolved from early‑2022 optimism to heightened anxiety by 2026, with most Americans now expecting AI to cause net job losses over the next decade. Surveys show majorities of workers expressing concern about AI in the workplace and HR leaders predicting broad reshaping of roles, even as many people say they’re more worried about the economy as a whole than their own specific job—for now. The sense that “the system” is rigged by and for machines is getting harder to ignore.​

Put together, these developments create exactly the context shift that Smith’s story needed. We’ve been watching AI‑powered systems normalize “gaming” the system at scale: AI‑written papers to satisfy AI‑driven grading rubrics, AI job applications aiming to placate AI resume filters, platforms full of AI‑generated content designed to please recommendation algorithms rather than people. Streaming, with its opaque royalty structures and its appetite for cheap, endless content, fits right into that pattern.​

Inside the Alleged Streaming Machine

Look at the allegations in Smith’s case, and it becomes easier to see why the Instagram crowd responded with admiration rather than outrage.

Prosecutors say starting in 2017, Smith, who is in his 50s, used bots and AI-generated songs to stream tracks billions of times on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Prosecutors claim he partnered (allegedly by lying) with the CEO of an AI music company to release hundreds of thousands of tracks. Many of those songs allegedly had nonsense names, like “Zygotic Lanie” by “Calm Force,” designed to blend into the background of an endless catalog.​

He allegedly used thousands of fake accounts, created with fake email addresses bought in bulk, and relied on cloud servers and macros for automation. His scheme also allegedly included VPNs, family plans, and debit cards in false names to keep as many as 10,000 accounts active at once. According to prosecutors, he spread streams across a wide range of AI‑generated tracks with peculiar names to evade detection.

On paper, it reads like a classic fraud scheme: deception, automation, shell accounts, and a lot of money flowing where it wasn’t supposed to go.​ But in a world where we’ve accepted that bots will talk to bots on platforms like Moltbook while humans watch from the sidelines, and where entire industries are optimizing for efficiency gains, Smith’s alleged behavior can start to look less like an aberration and more like a version of what everyone else is already doing. Given that he started almost a decade ago, he is actually a bit ahead of the curve.

If labels and streaming services are quietly fine‑tuning algorithms, playlists, and promotions to juice numbers, why is the guy who built his own little streaming machine the villain? That was the theme echoed in many of the Instagram comments: don’t hate the player, hate the game.​

The Case Meets the Overton Window

Smith faces serious federal charges in the Southern District of New York, one of the most experienced jurisdictions in the country with white-collar fraud cases. He is accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy, each carrying up to 20 years in prison. He pleaded not guilty in September 2024, with bail set at $500,000.

The legal outcome will depend on evidence and statutes, but also possibly at least a little bit on how the public perceives what he did in the context of an increasingly robot‑focused world. Taking a newly minted folk hero to trial amid a wave of anti‑AI sentiment carries risks for federal prosecutors. In a world where even our social networks are testing what happens when the “users” are machines, a man accused of using bots to listen to bots can start to look like a perfectly logical extension of the systems we have built.

Whether Smith ultimately pleads guilty, is convicted at trial, or is acquitted, his case has already revealed something important: our society’s wildly diverging views on automation, depending entirely on who's doing it. When platforms and labels optimize for algorithmic gains, it's business. When an individual does the same thing, it's fraud. That double standard may have made sense in 2024 when Smith was arrested. In 2026, with bots talking to bots on social platforms designed for exactly that purpose, the distinction is harder to defend. As the Overton Window shifts, prosecutors may find themselves making an argument that the public no longer recognizes.

Or do you have other thoughts?

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There’s nothing conventionally “productive” about singing for me.

I’ll never be an “American Idol” contestant; it will never bring me financial rewards. Yet I spend several hours each week rehearsing with a chorus, learning new music, and practicing vocal techniques. Why? For the most human reason imaginable: because it’s fun.

The tech world almost completely discounts this basic human motivation (unless the fun itself is tech-related), with strange results. The other day, deep in my unmarketable musical pursuits, I opened a messaging app to coordinate with a few choir members. An AI chatbox promptly intruded, occupying the actionable portion of my screen. “Want tips on boosting your productivity?” it asked.

Besides being unwelcome, the question was unintentionally revealing. Boost productivity…how, exactly? By shaving a few seconds off a task that exists solely to support a hobby? If my time was so valuable, why was the bot getting in the way? And more to the point: productive toward what? What goal was this efficiency meant to serve?

In theory, productivity is a good thing. Most people like the feeling of accomplishing something of value, whether finishing a novel, launching a startup, or doing taxes. AI clearly offers methods to pare down busywork, leaving room for the bigger stuff: generating ideas, strategizing, decision-making, and also pleasures like socializing, daydreaming, and having fun. Again, in theory, AI should help us lead fuller and happier lives.

But it’s increasingly clear the reality is often different. Productivity has drifted from purpose. Passion and fulfillment are often left out of the conversation about work and are considered personal indulgences. The focus is on output. Downstream from Silicon Valley, where luminaries are still allowed to be intellectually expansive eccentrics with quaint habits (see Sam Altman’s enthusiasm for analog note-taking), the emphasis is on “optimization,” forward movement without direction, or as they say in tech lingo, “building,” without a direct object. What, exactly, is going on?

Lest you think I’m imagining things, there is data to support these notions sinking into our collective consciousness. Take Google Trends: searches for the word “productivity” are roughly four times higher than they were five years ago—an astonishing trajectory for such a boring term, especially considering how much chatbots have recently eaten away at traditional search volume.

The trend line for “optimization” is even more extreme, as shown below.

Of course, these curves are unsurprising given what’s on social media these days. The messages on LinkedIn and Instagram are relentless: optimize your workflow, automate your life, master every aspect of AI, or be left behind.

We know it’s self-defeating to let productivity hype spread so far, without boundaries. When “doing more, faster” becomes the highest value, human needs, feelings, and aspirations look like inefficiencies. In that sense, one of AI’s more concerning risks is making us behave like machines, rather than machines taking on human-like intelligence.

Many people who do know better are stuck, constrained by economic necessity and forced to follow shifting management directives. Others have embraced the cognitive dissonance as an opportunity, pivoting themselves into AI evangelists and thought leaders. Some note the paradox that AI's productivity gains have generated new forms of busywork (learning prompts, managing tools, “staying current”), ensuring we never actually reach that promised land of freed-up time.

Part of the impetus behind the push comes straight from Marketing 101. The promise to “boost productivity,” detached from any understanding of what users actually want, relies on a tactic behavioral economists call manufactured necessity. Like deodorant ads insisting we smell bad, AI marketing suggests that anything done without automation is slow, naïve, or irresponsible. The underlying message is not “this might help,” but “you can’t afford not to do this,” because the cost of opting out is framed as irrelevance, unemployability, or obsolescence.

But there is something deeper at work as well. Productivity, stripped of direction and elevated into a moral obligation, begins to take on the contours of a belief system. It offers simple rules, repeated mantras, and a promise of salvation in the form of relevance or future-proofing. Doubt is reframed as an excuse. Exhaustion becomes an expectation. Participation is technically voluntary, but the penalties for opting out feel existential. In other words, it becomes a cult.

Americans love cults. From the radical Puritan Separatists who arrived on the Mayflower and Manifest Destiny-related sects, to effective altruists and MLMs, our society seems to constantly crave a sense of belonging and substitutes for purpose and critical thinking. Silicon Valley, itself, has often been described as a cult, with defined sub-sects like crypto bros, biohackers, and the people who almost literally worship AI like it’s a magical entity.

The Protestant work ethic described by sociologist Max Weber in 1904 has long been interlaced with our cults, with relentless labor being cast as a sacred and idle as sinful. When salvation is uncertain, work becomes both a distraction and proof of virtue. Today’s productivity gospel inherits this tradition in secular form.

AI has intensified underlying anxieties dramatically. Faced with rapid technological change and an unknowable labor market, many people respond by putting their heads down and working harder, trusting that constant productivity will somehow confer safety. In that sense, productivity has stopped being a measure of success and begun operating as a creed.

Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that small acts of resistance are emerging. Some millennials and Gen-Zers are returning to actual religion, possibly as an antidote to the productivity rhetoric. Some get involved in community volunteering. Others seek release in reckless pursuits (for instance, young tech workers sparring with makeshift tasers). And some people, like me, spend hours each week singing, not because it advances a career or improves a metric, but because it does neither. It’s a time to just be human.

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How do you preserve your humanity in the Age of Optimizing? Let me know in the comments below.

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You have to hand it to Eric Adams.

Nothing can sink his spirits — not staring down the barrel of bribery charges and prison time in 2024, not the indignity of begging Donald Trump to call off the Justice Department, and not being an object of derision for 8 million New Yorkers, including most who initially voted for him. He cheerfully served as mayor, right to the end of his term, despite a widespread perception that he betrayed the public trust in exchange for hotel stays and cheap airfare.

“How long until he flees the country?” a friend asked me after he left office on Jan. 1, 2026. “Immediately,” I replied. “Or as soon as he figures out where we don’t have an extradition treaty.”

But we were wrong. Adams stayed, both in the United States and involved in questionable dealings. Within two weeks of walking out of Gracie Mansion, he publicly announced a crypto venture, the “NYC Token,” intended to “combat antisemitism and anti-Americanism.” It soared within hours of launch to a $580 million market cap before plummeting as much as 80 percent. Amid the surge, a wallet tied to the token’s deployer withdrew $2.5 million, then returned a portion of the funds, according to blockchain analytics firms. In other words, the series of events resembled what crypto people call a “rug pull.”

Basically, it’s deja vu. Once again, Adams is being accused of something that, on its face, sounds comically illegal. Before, it was allegedly trading favors for freebies with the government of Turkey while serving as America’s most visible municipal public servant. Now, Adams is under renewed scrutiny over theories that he ran a version of one of the oldest investment scams in the book, the crypto equivalent of a “pump and dump.”

A sampling of recent headlines paints the narrative:

• Eric Adams’ next act is exactly what you thought it might be (Jan. 12, 2026; Politico)

• Former ‘bitcoin mayor’ Eric Adams faces $3 million rugpull allegation after issuing NYC Token (Jan. 13, 2026; Coin Desk)

• Investors cry foul over former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s crypto launch: ‘Such an obvious rug’ (Jan. 13, 2026; Fortune)

• Crypto coin firm touted by Eric Adams denies allegations of ‘rug pull’ scam (Jan. 13, 2026; The Guardian)

• Inside the botched launch of ex-NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ new crypto token (Jan. 15, 2026; Associated Press)

• The Eric Adams Crypto Scandal Is Getting Messier (Jan. 16, 2026; New York Magazine)

As scrutiny increased, Adams has characteristically kept moving forward, unruffled, denying wrongdoing and, according to this New York Post article, getting fairly spicy with hecklers.

Along with thrusting Adams back into an unflattering spotlight, the incident has drawn renewed attention to crypto, including claims of rampant scams and regulatory attempts to rein them in. While it was essentially impossible to avoid crypto conversations just a few years ago (remember the fever dream of NFTs, for instance?), the whole roughly $3 trillion market has hummed along in the background as the topic of AI took over tech bro podcasts, online debates, and the business news cycle.

But in the meantime, things have been happening in that space, nonetheless, which may have relevance to Adams:

The SEC became noticeably friendlier to crypto

For much of the early 2020s, the SEC’s crypto policy was defined mostly by bringing sweeping enforcement actions based on the presumption that crypto offerings were almost always “unregistered securities,” and therefore violating securities laws. Under former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency filed cases against Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, using a Supreme Court precedent from 1946. Despite the crypto industry's outcry for modernized regulations, the lawsuits kept coming, leaving companies in a constant state of uncertainty.

That posture has changed. Since 2025, the SEC has dropped or narrowed several high-profile enforcement cases and shifted its public messaging toward classification and guidance rather than blanket suspicion.

Meme coins have especially become less legally risky

Meme coins, so-called because they get hyped up or spread as jokes on social media, were previously often a target of regulatory concerns, for obvious reasons. However, in 2025, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued guidance that more or less gave them the green light by specifying that most do NOT qualify as securities. The guidance now treats tokens that lack profit-sharing rights, governance claims, or promises tied to managerial efforts as speculative collectibles, not as investment contracts, offering much wider latitude.

The Trump administration launched its own meme coin

Along with ushering in a new attitude on crypto enforcement, the Trump administration launched its own meme coin: $TRUMP, followed closely by a $MELANIA token. The Solana-based coins, issued days before Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, surged in value to tens of billions of dollars before collapsing sharply and shedding most of their gains. Analysts estimated the project generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Trump-affiliated holders. While there was outcry over perceived ethics and legal violations, no substantive regulatory actions were taken.

Pardoning crypto fraudsters

As part of the about-face, Trump also provided clemency to crypto criminal defendants. Most notably, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or “CZ,” was pardoned in October 2025 after pleading guilty in 2023 to a felony for failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. The guilty plea was part of a broader $4.3 billion settlement between Binance and the US, under the Biden administration.

Fulfilling a promise to vocal libertarian supporters, Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht in January 2025, saving him from the multiple life sentences he had been serving since 2015 for operating the Silk Road, a marketplace that facilitated the sale of illegal goods and services using Bitcoin. While more of a political reward, the pardon also signaled a distinct shift away from the government portraying digital assets as a boogeyman synonymous with criminality.

Crypto has become less “fringe,” more mainstream

All the while, crypto has continued its migration into the financial establishment. Major banks can now be used to hold digital assets. Stablecoins operate under federal law. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs trade in portfolios alongside traditional securities. For better or worse, the crypto bros finally got the institutional acceptance they had been craving while, ironically, rebelling against institutions.

Impact for Adams

To Adams, or anyone else in similar circumstances, all these developments might signal a more permissive culture regarding crypto. But here’s the thing: fraud is still fraud.

Largely indifferent to the Trump administration’s posture, Democrat-driven state and local prosecutors have continued to pursue crypto fraud using consumer protection, money laundering, or other laws at their disposal. New York Attorney General Letitia James continues to freeze crypto assets tied to scam rings, sue firms accused of misleading investors, and secure settlements. Similarly, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has shut down dozens of fraudulent crypto websites accused of luring victims into investment scams.

Separate categories of crime that happen to involve crypto deals or crypto-related figures also remain fair game for US attorneys’ offices, such as a Brooklyn sanctions-evasion case and an Illinois money laundering case. While cases specifically citing “rug pulls” dropped off over the past couple of years, multiple defendants were sentenced to prison in 2025 in federal cases over crypto-related investment scams (examples here, here, and here).

All this has obvious implications for Adams, whose ongoing legal exposure from multiple angles remains an open question. Even after the Justice Department dropped its corruption case against him, probes focusing on his inner circle have continued.

Just this month, the federal probe was rekindled with the indictment of Adams’ City Hall liaison to public housing residents, who was accused of taking bribes in exchange for giving unfair business advantages. Although the feds are barred from rehashing the Turkey-related bribery charges against Adams, nothing stops them from bringing new charges over other alleged misconduct if the evidence supports them. The latest indictment shows interest in that area is still alive and well.

Now that he’s out of office, Adams has no more influence to trade and no “get out of jail free” card close at hand. With his crypto venture, he has handed investigators a whole new book of material to work with. We’ll see if he keeps his cheerful smile.

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For more on the previous Adams’ case, see my earlier Black Sheep post here.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

As 2026 gets underway, AI remains the economy’s North Star. We still do not know whether it will lead us to a brave new world or off the edge of the map, into the jaws of sea monsters. But one visual signal has served to calm fears, bolstering faith that no matter what hype may be overinflating the market now, everything will turn out fine in the end: Jensen Huang and his leather jacket.

Bear in mind, this is pattern recognition more than rigorous analysis; I'm reading the vibes, not building valuation models. But markets move on confidence as much as fundamentals, and sometimes the symbols we cling to reveal more about where we’re heading than the spreadsheets do.

You see, while investors remain mostly steadfast in their grandiose visions of the future, and in their commitments to a vast AI infrastructure build-out, the voices of critics have steadily grown louder, sharper, and more sophisticated. Fields Medal recipient Terence Tao, for instance, has pointed out weaknesses in large language models, noting that they are “probabilistic” rather than “grounded” in reasoning, and can easily make mistakes that “go off the rails.” Meanwhile, trader Michael Burry of The Big Short fame has raised doubts about the financial assumptions underpinning the boom, placing a contrarian bet against AI in late 2025.

These doubts touch nerves because so much of the AI boom, and by extension so much of the broader economy, rests on future promises, optimistic projections, and business models that are still searching for profitability. Yet through all the bluster, noise, and increasingly unsettling questions, investors have largely stayed the course, reassured on some psychic level by Huang.

If you are not familiar with him beyond a vague flicker of recognition as a “tech guy in a leather jacket,” it is worth establishing who we are talking about. Jensen Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, a specialized computer chip maker whose products were once used most notably in video gaming and are now indispensable to AI. Since ChatGPT introduced most of us to generative AI in 2022, Nvidia’s trajectory has been nothing short of astonishing. In three years, annual revenue surged from roughly $27 billion to well over $130 billion, and the company’s market capitalization ballooned into the trillions, at times surpassing even Apple, Microsoft, and other tech behemoths.

Huang himself is also a remarkable success story. Born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand, and educated in Kentucky, Oregon, and at Stanford, he brings a global perspective paired with the bold sensibility of an American industrialist. Far from being a green newcomer to tech, Huang is in his early 60s, having launched Nvidia in the 1990s while hanging out at a Denny’s restaurant. He is battle-tested, having shepherded the company through multiple economic cycles, including a near-bankruptcy after the dot-com bubble burst.

On top of all that, and here is where my theory comes back into view, Huang really does have a thing for wearing leather jackets. As the AI bubble surged, he has been seen wearing them everywhere: in the business press, at tech symposiums, on industry podcasts, the Joe Rogan Experience, and in numerous selfies with fans on social media (see below).

Amid the exponentially intensifying spotlight, it is hard to fault Huang’s choice of fashion armor. Leather jackets have been cool since the days of James Dean, projecting an unflappable confidence with a hint of youthful rebellion. Perhaps that is why Huang, an outlier in Silicon Valley’s cult of youthful hotshots at the cutting edge of innovation, first defaulted to the jacket, as a way to seem young and hip.

But something more powerful, and more concerning, has begun to happen as Nvidia has become increasingly aligned with the fate of AI itself. Investors have started to put weight in the jacket as a symbol, a stand-in for operational competence amid a swirl of uncertainty, and a visual confirmation that someone grown up has a firm grip on the controls.

To be sure, other tech giants have recently provided their own steadying signals. Google's Gemini advances and search integration, for instance, have reminded investors that the AI ecosystem extends beyond any single chipmaker. But none have offered quite the same visceral reassurance as Huang in his jacket.

As one trader joked recently on social media (below), the market seemed to be waiting once again for “one man and his leather jacket” to save it.

Meanwhile, a Wired journalist noted the shift from “leather jacket” to “shiny crocskin,” asking pointedly, “Bubble indicator?”

Cheeky though these remarks may be, they carry a kernel of truth. As the AI boom swelled, Nvidia became increasingly enmeshed in it, not only providing chips but also financing the purchase of more of them. A Bloomberg graphic illustrating the round-trip nature of these transactions went viral last year, raising more than a few eyebrows.

One starts to wonder whether Huang’s optimism, conveyed symbolically by the jacket, has become one of the main forces holding the ecosystem together. How much of the S&P 500 is currently propped up by appearances of Huang in his leather jacket? The effect is impossible to measure, but it is probably larger than many would like to admit.

Huang has not only kept showing up in leather jackets, he has also continued to issue market-stimulating predictions and soundbites, often based on little more than his own confidence. Among them:

• “In 2-3 years, 90% of the world’s knowledge will be generated by AI.” [podcast excerpt]

• “Intelligence is about to be a commodity.” [speech to the UK’s Cambridge Union]

• “It's very likely that human robots are going to be robots that we can deploy into the world relatively easily..and I think this is likely to be the next multi trillion dollar industry." [Bloomberg TV interview]

• “I’m improving the performance by a factor of 10 times each year, but demand is going up by a factor of 10,000, a million times each year.” [CSIS fireside chat]

• In about 10 years, the computational capabilities of AI systems will be a million times bigger than they are today. [paraphrase, Stanford SIEPR Economic Summit]

• “AI will create more millionaires in 5 years than the internet did in 20… I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any other CEO in the world.” [All-In podcast]

• “The AIs are smart enough that everybody wants to use it, and we now have two exponentials happening at the same time — models needing exponentially more computing power and exponential demand growth for their use.” [CNBC’s “Squawk Box”]

Unsurprisingly, this kind of commentary has not only helped support stock prices, it has also seeded think pieces, LinkedIn posts, and tech articles, creating a cultish feedback loop that drowns out critics, at least temporarily. Having noticed this phenomenon, I find it profoundly unsettling. No matter how much talent, vision, and discipline Jensen Huang brings to the table, he cannot hold a bubble together all by himself, even if it sometimes appears he is trying to do exactly that.

In a rare flash of candor, Huang has acknowledged his own anxieties about Nvidia’s importance to the broader economy. According to Business Insider, he told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that “the whole world would’ve fallen apart” if Nvidia missed earnings expectations, adding that “we’re basically holding the planet together.”

The full quote is striking:

If we delivered a bad quarter, if we're off by just a hair, if it just looked a little bit creaky, the whole world would've fallen apart. There's no question about that, OK? You should've seen some of the memes that are on the internet. Have you guys seen some of them? We're basically holding the planet together — and it's not untrue.

The comments escaped widespread public attention, but a few observers who noticed them found them alarming. One poster on X summed it up bluntly: “That’s not confidence. That’s panic.”

Huang, as an experienced CEO, undoubtedly senses the hazards ahead, and like the captain of a ship bound for uncharted seas, is doing his best to lift collective spirits. The jacket plays an implicit role, much like a sea captain’s uniform. But uniforms cannot calm the sea, and confidence alone cannot resolve the structural questions investors have chosen, for now, to ignore. A moment may lie ahead when even that confidence falters, and if it does, there will likely be visual tells.

As the year unfolds and we see what it brings for the economy and for AI, it is worth keeping an eye on Jensen Huang. Want to know whether trouble is around the corner? See if he keeps wearing the leather jacket.

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CORRECTION: Earlier, I misstated Nvidia’s revenue in 2022. Here are the company’s revenue figures from 2020 - 2025, and you can refer to the company’s earnings releases (linked) for confirmation:

2020: $11 billion
2021: $17 billion
2022: $27 billion
2023: $27 billion
2024: $61 billion
2025: $130 billion

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

Business Genius Barometer?

I realize it was shocking when someone like me — a nerdy, fact-driven, experienced journalist — publicly admitted to falling in love with Martin Shkreli years ago. But consider this: So did Forbes.

The same publication that bills itself as a barometer of business genius named him to its exalted “30 Under 30” list in December 2012. It called him an “activist hedge fund manager specializing in healthcare stocks” who also “founded a biotech focused on rare diseases.” It turned out those ambitions were backed largely by Martin’s outsized bravado, a handful of wealthy investors he had beguiled, and a complex game of robbing Peters to pay Pauls. He spent several years in prison.

Martin, of course, is just one example of a Forbes-anointed wunderkind who ended up in disgrace or convicted of crimes. The magazine has acknowledged a “30 Under 30” Hall of Shame, which also included FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, his co-defendant and ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, AI education startup founder Joanna Smith-Griffin, real estate fraudster Nate Paul, and the founder of failed mobile payments startup, Lucas Duplan. Now-incarcerated young Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t officially a “30 Under 30” honoree, but she graced Forbes’ cover and featured at its Under 30 Summit, so she arguably belongs in that group, too.

And now, Charlie Javice has joined this ignominious club. Once hailed for creating Frank, a college-aid startup JP Morgan purchased for $175 million, she has now been sentenced to 7 years in prison for fabricating its main selling point: explosive growth. Frank claimed to have more than 5 million users when JP Morgan bought it in 2021. The reality was closer to 300,000.

Apart from embarrassing the bank, Javice revived the perennial online wisecracks about Forbes’s “30 Under 30” serving as a cheat sheet for future true-crime documentaries. But the memes and the snark belie a deeper, toxic mythology. The media merely mirrors what our society and investor class idolize: youth, effortless genius, and flashy, frictionless growth. The folly of Forbes is that the magazine reflects, amplifies, and even celebrates a system that rewards storytelling over substance and fixates on the same delusions that make some frauds and failures inevitable.

To pass the bank’s due diligence, Javice hired a data scientist to generate millions of realistic-looking profiles for student aid applicants. JPMorgan discovered the deception only after the acquisition, when it sent a marketing email blast to Frank’s supposed 4 million users and saw that only a tiny fraction were deliverable. Javice was convicted in March 2025 of wire, bank, and securities fraud, along with conspiracy.

But Javice’s individual story matters less than what it reveals about the system that elevated her in the first place.

True, catastrophic frauds and blow-ups represent a small (though disproportionately visible) portion of the thousands of Forbes honorees. It’s also true that a fair percentage of paradigm-shifting Silicon Valley mega-hits (i.e. Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple) were founded by a certain type of young, brash, rule-bending hotshot. However, the cultural obsession with young, rapidly rising superstars creates unnecessary pressure that pushes some toward ethical shortcuts. We’ve taken a handful of wild edge cases and recrafted them into baseline expectations, creating a generation of founders who feel they must achieve similar trajectories or risk being cast as permanent failures.

While Forbes reflects these broader cultural values, it also actively shapes them. Being named to the “30 Under 30” opens doors to funding, partnerships, and media attention that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Intentionally or not, the list gives selected founders a stamp of legitimacy that can paper over red flags investors might otherwise notice.

Though Javice defrauded a bank rather than VCs, she was elevated by the same cultural forces that produced Bankman-Fried, Holmes, and the rest. Understanding those forces, including the biases, preferences, and pressure points of the startup ecosystem, might help explain why so many of our supposed best and brightest end up cheating, stealing, or committing epic errors of judgment.

The Tropes Of Startup Magical Realism

Granted, I’m just a journalist who mostly covers legal cases. I’m not a founder or a venture capitalist, and I’ve barely set foot in Silicon Valley. But I’ve seen the messy aftermath of plenty of startups going sideways, including blame games, broken trust, and long-simmering tensions suddenly exploding. From my vantage point, I think I can assemble a roughly accurate picture of some of the psychological underpinnings of the ecosystem.

Namely, investing is often compared with gambling. If buying stocks is a bit like playing blackjack (skill matters, but luck still decides the hand) then venture investing is closer to buying lottery tickets in bulk. The odds of winning are infinitesimally small, but the potential payout is so insanely alluring that no one can resist believing they might hold the winning numbers. And unlike actual lotteries, when these bets fail, the collateral damage extends far beyond the gamblers, to employees suddenly laid off, customers left holding worthless products, and markets that lose faith in innovative products.

Sure, VCs and acquirers of early-stage businesses examine financial metrics and construct elaborate rationales to give their decisions a veneer of logic. But at the end of the day, there are too many unknowns to rely purely on data. When placing bets on startups, emotion inevitably creeps in. Symbols, totems, and tea leaves end up doing as much work as spreadsheets, even for the most analytical investors.

These superstitions aren’t lucky socks or crystals (I assume). They’re qualitative or quantitative factors (real or imagined) that supposedly indicate a company is on the verge of exponential growth. To believers, these signals promise a return on investment at the very least, and at best, the next “Uber” or “Airbnb.” For those who guess right and hit it big, the rewards include not just fabulous wealth but the sort of legendary status that guarantees speaking gigs, seed funds, and podcasts for the rest of their natural lives.

Some examples of the supposedly predictive patterns and symbols VCs seek out:

Hockey-stick charts

Common sense and philosophical wisdom tell us that success takes a variety of forms; that the proverbial tortoise can beat the hare; and that there are many paths up a mountain. These are not the messages that win over the investor community, however. Investors want to see revenue or user figures moving in exactly one direction: up. The steeper and sharper the curve, the better.

Investors accept that it might take some time for the Next Big Thing to catch on, and that growth could be flat for a period of years before an inflection point occurs (such as with Amazon, in particular). But once that happens, there should be no turning back, or so the model of Past Big Things tells them. Expecting every promising tech startup to replicate those rare alignments of timing, product, and market is more than a little absurd.

Founder protagonists

Even the most measured, critical thinkers among us can be seduced by a compelling narrative. Investors, being only human, want to fund a story, not just a product or a business. And every great story needs a main character. For investors, that’s the founder/CEO.

But the traits that make for a captivating startup protagonist aren’t the same ones that drive sustainable success. The heroes of startup mythology are usually young, brash, whip-smart, eccentric risk-takers: the Ivy League dropouts, the twenty-somethings who grind nonstop and sleep under their desks, and the mavericks who “move fast and break things” no matter what chaos they cause.

Building a lasting company does require boldness and self-assurance, but it also takes humility, discipline, ethical grounding, and the ability to manage people and plan for the long term. Those virtues don’t sparkle in a pitch deck, and they rarely earn anyone a Forbes write-up.

Mystical milestones

Serious investors scoff at psychics, mystics, and numerology, yet they readily put their faith in the predictive power of semi-arbitrary financial milestones. Startup lore goes like this: the first hurdle is $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), then $5 million, then $10 million, and so on. Each round number is a rite of passage, opening doors to more funding. However, the difference between $990,000 and $1 million is almost entirely psychological.

Reality and markets are messy, governed by countless variables beyond our control. But like palm readings or tarot cards, the mythology of the numbers holds power because they offer an illusion of certainty, and a way to impose order on the unknowable. The path from $1 million to $5 million to $10 million looks smooth, inevitable, and deeply reassuring on a PowerPoint slide.

Blitzscaling as a virtue

To most bootstrap founders (indeed, to most humans), spending money you don’t have and expanding a business well beyond its means is simply bonkers. But in the startup funding world, “blitzscaling” is proof of belief in your own destiny. Under that mindset, actions that would ordinarily be considered borderline sociopathic are reframed as courageous and visionary.

The logic is simple and circular: if you are growing rapidly, you should be constantly at risk of running out of capital. Founders are told that if they move swiftly with enough conviction, the market, the team, and even the product will eventually catch up. Or, you may assume that you’re in a “winner take all” situation, and whoever dominates the market will be a trillionaire (see the current AI race). Sometimes this works spectacularly well (see: Amazon), but often flirting with disaster does end in actual disaster: namely, wasted resources, unpaid debts, and people who are suddenly laid off and unable to support themselves or their families. But who’s to say you can’t try again and fail upward?

Disruption as a purpose

Who remembers Juicero? I’m sure the venture capital industry would prefer if you didn’t. In the mid-2010s, Juicero sold $400 WiFi-connected juicers that promised fresh, effortless juice at the touch of a button. The catch was that Juicero’s juice came from pre-packaged produce pouches, not whole fruits or vegetables, and those packets could be squeezed just as effectively by hand.

Despite the absurdity, Juicero raised an astonishing $120 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Google’s venture arm, by pitching itself as a “disruptor” to the juice industry. But the product solved no real problem, offering no meaningful convenience or innovation, just an expensive, over-engineered machine. The business simply shut down in 2017, with no way to move forward, leaving investors nothing to show for their contributions.

Exceptions vs. Rules

Do these patterns sometimes correlate with success? Absolutely. Facebook did experience hockey-stick growth. Amazon did blitzscale and disrupt. Uber and Airbnb disrupted. The problem isn’t that these patterns never work—it’s that they work so rarely that treating them as reliable indicators is dangerous. For every Amazon, there are thousands of Juiceros. The venture capital model can absorb these losses because one massive win overcomes all the failures. But celebrating this dynamic culturally, on magazine covers and conference stages, creates a generation of founders who think recklessness is a necessary ingredient of success.

Notably, as Juicero shows, not all bad bets and manifestations of magical thinking lead to outright fraud. But both outrageously bad ideas that nonetheless raise millions of dollars in funding and “fake it till you make it” schemes have common roots: a culture that values storytelling over substance, that rewards bold claims more than verified results, and that treats due diligence as an obstacle to overcome rather than a safeguard to embrace.

Youth vs. Experience

Youth does have important advantages in the startup game, especially if the business is at the leading edge of a new, innovative industry. Young founders typically bring energy, dedication, unconventional ideas, and an appetite for risk.

But take a super-ambitious twenty-something founder, fresh out of school or freshly dropped out, and hand them a roadmap filled with milestones, metrics, and must-haves that everyone insists are essential for success. They won’t just aim to hit those targets; they’ll want to crush them. Young founders are competitive by nature, and when the spotlight shines brighter (say, after landing on a “30 Under 30” list), the pressure to win at any cost intensifies. When those goals are unrealistic or modeled on rare, lottery-style success stories, the temptation to “fudge” the data or other markers of success gets stronger.

Experience is the best antidote to that pressure, and it is the one thing every prodigy lacks. Seasoned operators know when the ground is solid beneath them, when a smooth-talking investor is speaking in empty platitudes, and when the numbers don’t make sense, no matter how you spin them. On an aggregate basis, older founders perform better than young founders, as shown clearly in research, not because they’re smarter but because they know how to brace themselves for what can go wrong.

The Real Folly Of Forbes

It’s easy to dunk on Forbes, and to some extent, the magazine has earned the ridicule. The “30 Under 30 “franchise is a self-congratulatory, credulous feedback loop between elite media and elite investors. It has been a popular feature, though, bringing desperately needed eyeballs, ad revenue, and sponsorship to the magazine as traditional readership falls. (Note: It is NOT pay-to-play, but there are lots of other ancillary economic benefits for the magazine.) Given the incentives, the “30 Under 30” section has ballooned: more categories, more honorees, more conferences. “Thirty” now means several hundred each year, and with that scale comes statistical certainty: more stars, but also more scandals.

Still, Forbes continues to hold enormous cultural sway, the kind that could be used to change the conversation. Imagine if the magazine treated caution and proven track records as virtues that were even more important than speed and spectacle. It could celebrate founders who build slowly, profitably, and ethically, who measure success in years, not funding rounds — and stop venerating founders based mostly on their youth, but on other, more meaningful metrics? That shift would require swimming against the hype, but who better to lead it than the publication that helped define what ambition looks like in the first place?

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

Inflated Expectations

Long ago — ok, six months ago, but feels like decades in tech years – I wrote a Black Sheep piece about an AI startup founder with a chatbot that gained rapid traction in the sports entertainment industry. But customers didn’t want to pay very much for it. So the founder, Alexander Beckman, allegedly turned to fraud.

Today, Beckman and his wife, Valerie Lau (who allegedly helped him with the fraud), are facing an ongoing criminal case and the prospect of prison. Meanwhile, the AI industry’s trillion-dollar promises of value creation have yet to yield results. Numerous other founders are undoubtedly battling pressures that could push them down the same path.

Let’s look at some recent headlines, shall we?

• WSJ, Aug. 2, 2025 – “The AI Boom’s Hidden Risk to the Economy.” The rush to build AI infrastructure is “straining companies and capital markets,” but hey, at least it’s propping up the economy while consumers pull back on spending.

• CNBC, Aug. 18, 2025 – “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Sees AI Bubble Forming.” Trying to get ahead of the inevitable, the CEO himself drops the “B-word,” and talks about “smart people” getting “overexcited about a kernel of truth.”

• AIInvest, Aug. 24, 2025 – “Massive Credit Fueling AI Boom as Debt Risks Rise.” Tens of billions are flowing into AI via…CMBS (commercial mortgage-backed securities). I feel a twinge of 2008 real estate crash deja vu.

• The Information, Sept. 5, 2025 – “OpenAI Says Its Business Will Burn $115B Through 2029.” In other words, it will consume roughly the entire GDP of the Dominican Republic. That’s just $80B more than previously forecast. No biggie.

• Motley Fool, Sept. 24, 2025 – “The Buffett Indicator and Shiller P/E Ratio Are in Rarified Territory.” Spoiler alert: The “rarified territory” is not a good sign. The article doesn’t mention “AI,” but we all know it’s the main driver behind those huge multiples.

• Axios, Sept. 25, 2025 – “Nvidia’s $100B OpenAI Investment Fuels Bubble Fears.” Capital markets strained? No problem. Papa Nvidia cuts a check. The circular nature of the transaction prompts a flurry of memes of animals eating their own tails, and concerns about “interconnectedness” in Silicon Valley and what happens “if the AI bubble pops.”

People who have been through a few popped bubbles can easily see what’s going on here. There will be at least a temporary downturn. Investors will get burned. Hard-working founders and employees will end up broke or even bankrupt if they take on debt they can’t repay. The tide will go out, and you will see (as Warren Buffett famously quipped) “who’s been swimming naked” — in other words, who’s been faking success, or possibly worse. It’s familiar terrain. But how did we get here?

Whenever the “bust” happens, your social media feeds and email inboxes will be inundated with thinkpieces from technology experts, stock market gurus, and highly credentialed academics trying to answer this question. Here is my attempt as a lowly journalist to front-run all of them by explaining what I think is the biggest problem staring everyone in the face: AI — in its current form, anyway — simply does not deliver enough value to ordinary people to justify its staggering cost.

This isn’t about whether AI will change the world eventually —it almost certainly will. This is about whether the hundreds of billions being deployed right now can be justified by the value ordinary people are experiencing right now. History suggests the answer is no, and that’s what makes this a bubble.

Trenches Vs. The Clouds

Lest I sound like a Luddite or Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at a cloud (meme below), let me be clear that I don’t hate AI. I find generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and the like fascinating, fun, and even sometimes really helpful. I also agree with the notion espoused by many technology executives that smart people will eventually do something really amazing with these tools.

For now, this is what generative AI platforms have provided for most people. At the positive end: help with research, brainstorming, line editing, compiling or assembling data, and other tasks requiring little higher-order thinking. At the negative end: We get loud warnings about diminishing job security, paradoxically paired with heavier workloads and frustration. That’s because all the productivity gains that were supposed to magically result from adopting AI for everything have simply not happened. Quite the opposite, in many cases (see the Harvard Business Review article on “Workslop”).

Meanwhile, seemingly unaware of the chaos in the trenches, Silicon Valley thought leaders still breathlessly compare AI to every great technological innovation in human history, waxing philosophical about its alleged ability to cure cancer, solve climate change, power “hypergrowth” across all industries, and make human labor obsolete. In the long term, some of these pronouncements may be true. But they all ring fairly hollow, for now, when generative AI can’t even reliably take drive-through orders at a Taco Bell.

From Fire, To Electricity, To Internet

Silicon Valley may insist that it’s on the cusp of the next great leap, similar to humankind’s mastery of fire or electricity, or the invention of the internet. But truly revolutionary technology doesn’t need to be sold this hard. The sheer volume of AI evangelism and FOMO-based marketing pitches is evidence that organic adoption just isn’t happening fast enough to justify the investment.

Real technological revolutions don’t just happen because the technology exists and it’s cool, and has the potential to do great things, but because it creates immediately recognizable value.

For example, it’s hard to imagine many Pleistocene cave-dwellers remained wary for long after being introduced to fire, stubbornly chewing raw meat in the dark. Fire’s benefits in a survival context are obvious: It provides warmth, light, makes food more digestible, and discourages predators from sneaking up and mauling you to death. No early human needed to hear a treatise on how fire’s transformative properties would allow our species to endure an Ice Age and spread throughout the globe. They just used it. The rest is history.

Likewise, electricity was an easy sell once it could be brought, at scale, into people’s homes. There were bankruptcies and missteps along the way — streetcar schemes, failed utilities, the costly DC-vs.-AC fight — but the value of electric lighting was clear as soon as it became as simple as flipping a switch. A single live demo, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, captivated the public. More than 27 million people, over a third of the U.S. population, attended the fair to experience the glow of AC-powered incandescent bulbs. By 1900, most major cities had adopted electric streetlamps, gas lighting was in sharp decline, and the number of power plants across the country had tripled.

The internet was a bit trickier. Tethered to a bulky personal computer and a landline, it was seen as a novelty at first, used mostly for chatting on AOL, playing basic games, looking up trivia or celebrity gossip, or (of course), downloading porn (at glacial speeds). After the dot-com bust cleared away the hype, broadband took hold and e-commerce exploded. A tipping point happened: people realized they could research, shop, bank, and interact with the world without leaving their homes — and later, with the iPhone, not even their toilets.

To be sure, there are enterprise and niche applications of AI that are producing real-world value today: accelerating drug discovery, detecting fraud, helping coders write at least some boilerplate code, optimizing logistics, and streamlining certain back-office workflows. But again, revolutions (commensurate with the size of the cash bonfires going on) aren’t built on niches. They happen when value is experienced organically on a massive scale.

I could go on and talk about other paradigm-shifting technological leaps like the printing press or the steam engine, but I think my point is clear: What drives widespread adoption and fundamental shifts are the users themselves — what individual human beings find important, useful, and valuable, not what “thought leaders,” self-interested technology executives, tech bros, or pundits tell them they should care about.

My humble prediction: Until the focus returns to humans, AI’s power to reshape life as we know it will remain a hallucination.

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