In The Big Short, Mark Baum gets tipped off to investigate the housing market. So he does what any good skeptic does — he goes and talks to regular people.
What he finds shocks him. Strippers with five mortgages. Buyers who don't understand what they signed. Everyday people who've been handed debt they can't carry, blissfully unaware of what's coming.
He gets back on the phone and says it plainly:
The proof wasn't in the data. It was in the conversations.
I had a similar moment recently — just in reverse.
My close circle is deep in it. Founders, operators, tech people doing daily dives on AI tools, debating the end of SaaS, wondering if the knowledge economy is about to collapse, building automations, spinning up companies, Claude, OpenClaw, Gumloop, etc., etc. etc. The conversation never stops.
And then I started talking to regular people.
The cashier at Shoppers. The server at Joey's. The bartender at Banter Room. The outreach coordinator at church. Blissfully unaware. Not stressed, not building — just living, completely untouched by the thing consuming my entire social world.
That's when it hit me: I'm in a bubble.
And that realization opened two doors at once.
The first: maybe I can relax a bit? The anxiety I've been carrying — am I learning fast enough, moving fast enough, keeping up? — that's a bubble problem. I've been benchmarking myself against the most obsessed people on the planet and feeling behind. But most people haven't even heard the starting gun. Which means maybe I'm not racing against as many people as I thought. For now.
The second: there's real advantage here. AI use penetration is still very low. There is so much upside left in this thing. The people who understand what's possible right now — really understand it — are still a small, strange, lucky group. My founder friend said it to me straight in a text message: "Welcome to being red pilled. The question is what can you exploit in the short term having access and knowledge to this that others don't?"
That's a question worth sitting with. Perhaps not with anxiety. With intention.
Maybe this bubble isn't something I need to escape; but now that I’ve realized what’s going on here, it’s something to use.