Dear Carolynn

Why the US Is Selling Expensive Trips

Author: Mark Bolton. Subbing: DeepSeek. Images: CHAT GPT

Dear Carolynn… nearly 500 years ago in The Netherlands, there was an economic bull market that made people incredibly wealthy, and then not.

If you are unaware of this story, history remembers it as TulipMania.

There are understandably comparisons being made between the Dutch Tulip Manic economic boom/bust with the current economic AI boom in the US. But that comparison is a little hard to follow when they it is being described in a comparison sense. So, I decided on a simple thought experiment. Instead of comparing AI to 17th-century flowers, how about we imagine that the same events over the the past three years with AI become TulipMania instead. In other words, hallucinogenic tulips.

The OpenTulip ‘High’ Hits The Streets

It was November 2022, and a small startup called OpenTulip released a new breed of tulip to the public. It was not just a pretty flower, though. When it inhaled its own pollen, vivid and articulate hallucinations began, and those around the tulip fell in love with the pollen experience.

Within five days, one million people were hooked. Within two months, a hundred million users were staring into these flowery visions—using them to make business decisions, write school essays, plan their investments and seek medical and psychological help.

When asked a question, the flower shared with users its pollen. The tulip writes legal contracts, debugs software codes, or argues philosophy in the voice of the users great-great grandmother.

The Hidden Catch

Here is the problem that no one wanted to talk about in 2023. The tulip lies.

About 10–20% of the time, the visions it shows its users are completely fabricated. It cited court cases that never existed. It wrote code with security holes that didn’t appear until production. It gave historical facts that were pure fiction.

The tulip industry politely calls these “hallucinations.”

But the users? They began to become addicted to tripping on tulips. Some were so wasted they started building billion-dollar strategies on these trips. They were signing contracts based on legal advice from a flower.

By late 2024, no one could agree on what was real anymore. Software engineers spent half of their time debugging the hallucinated code. Lawyers spent the other half verifying if the cited cases actually exist.

Big Tech Joins The Trip

During he first half of 2023, the tech giants were terrified of being left behind.

Macrosoft wrote a $10 billion cheque to OpenTulip for exclusive rights to its pollen. They forced OpenTulip to grow all their flowers in Macrosoft’s own massive, high-tech greenhouses called ASsure Farms.

Suddenly, the entire future of corporate software hinged on who controls the most potent, convincing hallucination. The Magnificent 7 pivoted entirely to selling these floral trips to enterprises. Stock prices soared based on the promise of a future breed—”Tulip-5″—that was to be 100% hallucination-free.

The Futures Market Becomes The Street Dealers

By early 2024, no one was buying tulips for their beauty. They were buying futures contracts on a promise of a realty based tulip.

OpenTulip raised $100 billion to build super-greenhouses centres with custom VNIDIA grow-lights. Venture capitalists poured money into startups that do nothing but repackage OpenTulip’s ‘non-hallucinogenic’ pollen and sell it to local markets. Retail investors dumped their superannuation/401-KS into AI-Tulip ETFs (Exchange-Trading Fund), assuming the “Tulip-5” would become divine and psilocybin-free.

The core speculation was this—Big Horticulture had already paid for the infrastructure to grow billions of these flowers. They were banking on the fact that corporations will keep paying premium prices for the exclusive rights to the high-grade non-hallucinogen plantation when it was ready to harvest. But it was lie that would quickly come to light.

However, their lie wasn’t the big problem.

The Silent Revenge

Here is where the Dutch story takes a bit of a detour because our modern story has a twist the 17th century Dutch didn’t face.

Two years ago, China joined the tulip party.

China had learnt a lot from the Opium Wars in the 1800’s with Britain and France, which both dumped opium into China to save having to pay silver for its goods. China, for a very long time, was turned into a very large crack-house by these foreign powers, before eventually pulling itself back to a sober existence through sheer national resilience.

Move forward to mid 2024, China created its own tulip at a fraction of the cost and gave it away to the world for next to nothing.

A Chinese state-backed agricultural group called DeepBloom, released an open-source hallucinogenic tulip. It was 90% as vivid as OpenTulip’s most expensive commercial strain. It hallucinates just as often, but it’s free. Anyone could take as many flowers and bulbs as it wanted. Also, there was no need for Macrosoft’s expensive ASsure greenhouses to grow it.

DeepBloom

Unlike its USA competitors, the Chinese government openly admitted its tulips cause hallucinations. They marketed it as a creative dream tool, not as a source of absolute truth.

DeepBloom does not need to turn a quarterly profit. The Chinese government pays subsidies to build global influence. They give away the bulbs to startups in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America—and they are upfront about the side effects. ‘This will make you trip, so don’t sign a contract while tripping‘.

The Trip Comedown

Here is the existential trap. Late 2024 to early 2025, the trippers began to comedown.

OpenTulip and Macrosoft had spent $100 billion on exclusive greenhouses. They had to raise the price of their premium pollen to recoup their investment. They could no longer hide that their tulips cause hallucinations, so they set out to tell the world that their hallucination is closer to reality than anyone else’s.

But the world looked at DeepBloom’s free, open-source tulips and asked: “Why would we pay $100,000 a year for a Macrosoft trip, when this Chinese flower gives us an almost as good trip—only for free or next to nothing if buying in bulk?”

Speculation. The Future The Futures Market Cannot See Coming Because It’s Stoned off Its Tree

The speculation collapses. The “Tulip-5” futures contracts become worthless. The stock market corrects violently.

In 1637, the Dutch Tulip Mania bubble burst. Prices collapse. Everyone lost money overnight. But the Dutch still owned the tulip market. There was no rival. Eventually, the Dutch bounced back to remain the flower capital of the world.

The Cost Of The Trip

The US “SuperTulip” bubble bursts. Macrosoft writes off its $100 billion greenhouses. The S&P 500 tanks. Retirees lose their pensions. The Western World is on fire.

But here is the fatal difference. When the smoke clears, the US does not own the ‘reality’ market anymore. DeepBloom’s free or cheap tulips are already in the ground globally. They are cheaper, freely available, and the West rebuilds using DeepBloom as a tool only, to help in the rebuilding process.

But the deepest wound is psychological.

Corporate CEOs look back at the past three years and realise, “we paid billions for tulips that showed us beautiful lies, and we mistook them for truth.” 

They trusted Macrosoft and OpenTulip to sell them reality, but they were just selling premium hallucinations.

Why would the world ever trust a US tech company again? Why pay premium prices for a dream, when the Chinese competitor openly admits their product is a dream, and charges nothing for it?

The Moral of the Story

The Dutch Tulip Mania was a horror story that came about because of greed. Everyone found themselves on the same sinking boat. They had to swim to the shore and then make their way back to where they were before setting sail.

The US AI-Mania is a tragedy of trust and perception.

The speculators acted as if they were selling objective intelligence. But they were selling dud trips. The moment the world realised that the expensive US trip is no more reliable than the free Chinese trip—and that the Chinese were at least honest about it being a dream—the US lost the one thing it desperately needed to regain following February 28, 2026. That is a little thing called credibility.

When the AI bubble burst, it did not just lose money because of the crazy speculation trip. It lost its grip on what the world believed to be real. And the gardener who never pretended to sell 100% AI inherited the entire garden. Their leaders were saying all along, “patience, grasshopper.“

This ain’t LSD, it’s GPT followed by OMG!

NOTE: I received a private message from someone who asked why I am constantly negative about AI, yet use DeepSeek and CHAT GPT. My reply was simple. AI is a handy tool, but requires maintenance. Builders build houses with hammers, but they don’t move into the hammer when the house is completed. That’s a tool. And if you need a cab, you don’t get into a newspaper taxi, especially when it is near the shore.