James van Geelen on His Viral AI Doom Scenario
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Joe, we're in the media business.
That's right. That's right.
Have you ever had an article go viral, unexpectedly viral?
Yeah, I can't I'm like trying to like remember like specifics, but yes, and it's one of those things Typically where you're like really excited, it's like oh a lot of people are you know, there's getting a lot of traction. Cool, people are talking about this. And then it goes like multiple orders of magnitude bigger and you're like, Oh, this is like super weird and No context for what this is and you like sort of want to hide in your home and like close the laptop because then you sort of like make it all go away and stuff like that. Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of like once you release it into the world, you don't actually have a lot of control over how people use it. And I think back to I wrote a piece about some investors trying to revive claims on Chinese imperial bonds, like antique Chinese imperial debt from the early nineteen hundreds. And somehow this went absolutely viral in Hong Kong at the time of the pro democracy protest. So I would walk down the street and I would see these homemade banners that people had created saying that China owes the US like twenty billion in payments on old debt. And it was started to stay
absolutely
Absolutely surreal and like completely unexpected, because you you wouldn't think that some like intricate debt story was suddenly gonna become a pro-democracy protest slogan. But the world works in mysterious ways. And speaking of the world working in mysterious ways, there is something that went viral this week. We are recording on February 27th. And if you haven't heard of this particular thing, you have probably been Living under the proverbial rock.
Right, so past Odlot's guest, James Van Galen, uh co-authored a piece on his uh substack, Citrini Research, talk about a potential AI doom scenario, which a lot of people talk about. And uh there's been a lot of talk about mass white collar displacement as a possible thing that could happen as AI gets adopted, etc. But you know, we know that the market's been very skittish about this specifically. We've been seeing this. software stock sell off all year, which we've talked about plenty on the podcast, and the some of the private insurers and all this. And something about this moment and this particular piece I think it came out on Sunday, last Sunday, landed with a sort of like unbelievable thud, and so it evidently started moving markets on Monday.
And then throughout the week, and this is the part that really flabbergassed me, was you see like all these banks and everything, economists, et cetera, like weighing in and many of the very critical and like Citadel Securities, which I didn't even know they like published stuff, because that's just a market maker. Like they put out all this stuff. So uh like responding to it or trying to take it out. It was a as a market story and a media story, a wild week.
It has become the discourse du jour. There's actually a prediction market on it, which you were telling me about a few minutes ago. Like this thing has just become much bigger than the initial Substack, which to me, again, says much more about the nervousness of the market and how little anyone actually knows about how AI is going to unfold at the moment that people are so keen to just like latch on to any scenario that comes out.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:44
2
Why did James van Geelen’s Substack piece go viral and shake the markets?
5:44–12:26
3
What is Citrini Research and how does it generate its investment theses?
12:26–25:15
4
How does the AI capability curve translate into potential white‑collar job losses?
25:15–45:04
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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