Why a Doomsday AI Blog Wiped Out $300 Billion

Ed Elson breaks down why a new Substack post from Citrini Research sent software stocks into freefall with Josh Brown. They also discuss the rise of HALO stocks. Then, Ed is joined by Robert Armstrong to unpack warning signs in the private credit market from Blue Owl Capital. Josh Brown is the CEO at Ritholtz and host of The Compound & Friends podcast. Robert Armstrong is the US financial commentator for the Financial Times. Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Running a small business means I wear lots of hats. When I put on my hiring hat, I can count on LinkedIn Hiring Pro to make it easy. LinkedIn Hiring Pro helps manage my hiring workflow, puts my job post in front of a unique network of professionals, and matches me with the best candidates for my business. I can also share my job with my network. No other job site lets me do that. No wonder most small businesses say they'd use LinkedIn Hiring Pro again. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free on LinkedIn today at LinkedIn.com/quality.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Energía baja, falta de concentración, nebla mental? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders han sido diseñados científicamente para ayudarte a mejorar el balance de hidratación en el cuerpo. Hechos con la mezcla número uno de electrolitos, sin colores ni sabores artificiales. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Signos de dehidratación leve y moderada. Consulta a tu médico si los síntomas persisten.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  My concealer is making me look worse.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:18Speaker 05

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hi, I...

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Let's get you a basket.

• 1:29Ed Elson?

  Today's number? 13 million. That's how many views a video of RFK Junior jumping into a pool with jeans on received last week. The bizarre clip was designed to encourage Americans to, quote, "get active", but it ultimately drove viewers to get therapy instead.

• 1:52Speaker 07

  Money markets, Matt. If money is evil, then that building is hell.

• 2:01Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Profiteam Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is February 25th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices all climbed as tech rallied out of Monday's sell-off. AMD led the way, climbing 9% after Meta signed a multi-year deal to buy their chips. Meta will also have the option to take a 10% stake in the chipmaker over a period of time. Meta's stock was actually flat on the news. Meanwhile, gold declined and finally Bitcoin fell below $63,000.

• 2:37Ed Elson?

  Okay, what else is happening? A new Substack piece has sent software stocks into yet another freefall. An article entitled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis", published by Citrini Research on Sunday, outlines a nightmare scenario. And that is, what if AI leads us into a financial crisis? The premise is simple. By 2028, AI displacement has caused unemployment to hit 10%, spending plummets, the S&P slumps, and the economy becomes unrecognizable. After this piece was released, the Dow fell as much as 2% and software stocks fell 5%.

• 3:18Ed Elson?

  So here to break down this Citrini Research article and the chaos that ensued, we're speaking with Josh Brown, CEO at Ritholtz and host of the Compound and Friends podcast. Josh, good to see you. I want to get your reaction to this Citrini Research blog post. This is like the second blog that's gone mega-viral in three weeks related to AI. And now we're seeing just crazy selling in the markets. Do you agree with the market's reaction? Are you as worried as other investors seem to be?

• 3:55Josh Brown?

  Not really, but I love the, I love the piece. I think, I think it's fascinating. We have people like submitting their creative writing projects, like it's college and the market instantly like starts repricing Mastercard and Visa by 10%. I think it's fucking hilarious. I, I think it was very well-written.

• 4:18Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 4:20Josh Brown?

  And I appreciated that ability to like, try to think two years ahead and all the knock on effects. The thing is, I've seen this before. And I'm not going to finish that sentence by saying I know how it turns out. I just know it turns out differently than every single negative piling on top of each other without an offset in sight. That is very rarely how these things end up. And so I think it's important for us to think through the issues that Citrini raises. But I think it's highly unnecessary for us to all conclude, oh yeah,

• 4:59Josh Brown?

  it'll probably, it'll probably shake out just like this. Every possible terrible externality will occur all at once, and it'll be game over for the economy. Like, obviously, that's not the way these things play out.

• 5:12Ed Elson?

  Yeah, 100, I 100% agree. It was so well written. It was so interesting.

• 5:18Josh Brown?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Ed Elson?

  It carried through the whole narrative. It collected all of the details, all of the relevant details that we should be talking about. And then the part where I, it lost me was when the market decided to sell pretty much everything, or at least everything in software. Software was down 5%. You saw very big names falling. DoorDash fell as much as 6% because

• 5:41Josh Brown?

  Sure, why not?

• 5:44Ed Elson?

  This guy wrote that AI would essentially replace it. What do you make of the actual argument of the piece? Which is essentially that AI is going to be so incredible, so productive, that actually it's going to destroy our economy in all of these unexpected ways. GDP will grow, there will be a lot of output, but the economy itself will be in a state of structural crisis.

• 6:09Josh Brown?

  This could only be written by someone who employs no people and has no customers and has never really been in business before. It's a, it's a, it's like a Gen Z slash millennial think piece written by very bright people, of course.

• 6:28Josh Brown?

  Who don't understand that uh the frictions in the economy are not um just like these annoying things with a friendly fa- the relationships in the real world are not just like, oh, here's a friction, but we put a salesperson in front of it and therefore it'll persist forever. Uh huh. Um, because the thing that business owners understand is that, and I don't mean business owners, like I run a hedge fund, I sit in front of a Bloomberg all day. I mean, like, people that actually run businesses where there is like face-to-face interaction. The thing that we all implicitly know is that uh every business effectively is a solution to a problem. Yes.

• 7:12Josh Brown?

  Even like, like, even like the most abstract example, um, because the, the, the examples that are right at my fingertips, a hospital is a, a business and it's solving the problem of people being sick and wanting to get better. Okay, that's easy. What is the four seasons? It's a solution to a problem. People wanna be entertained slash they wanna travel to places, but they have the means and the standards that are high enough where a regular hotel won't do. So like, if you think of businesses as just solutions to problems, which is really all they are, then what this is, this piece is saying is that we're gonna run out of problems. Right.

• 7:52Josh Brown?

  Come on. Well, in a hundred thousand years of, of the evolution of human society, do we ever actually run out of problems to solve? So this idea that um we're in a post-labor economy and people aren't gonna have to work anymore because there's gonna be nothing for them to do, like, are we losing our collective minds? Uh huh. There will always be problems to solve and every wave of technology solves old problems, introduces new ones. And this idea that we'll be able to just turn over everything over to agents who will solve problems on our behalf, okay, I'll buy that a lot of what's gonna happen is that, great. And you think we're just gonna sit in a room quietly and read a book? Right.

• 8:34Josh Brown?

  No, we'll be out creating new problems. Think about a, think about a lawyer.

• 8:41Josh Brown?

  The fundamental constraint of a lawyer filing lawsuits is he doesn't have enough associates to do the paperwork. What if that constraint were removed and utilizing agentic AI, he could file paperwork till his heart's content? Is he filing more or less lawsuits in that scenario?

• 8:57Ed Elson?

  Right, filing more.

• 8:59Josh Brown?

  Obviously more, and more lawsuits means more people defending themselves against lawsuits. And you see how this, I didn't come up with this, I didn't come up with this concept, but it's a very important one. Someone said in 1955, the work will expand to fit the time available. Like, the more time we have, the more work we will create for ourselves.

• 9:24Ed Elson?

  Absolutely.

• 9:25Josh Brown?

  And until you process that, you're not going to understand just how misguided these types of sci-fi writings really are.

• 9:33Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it seems to also say that this idea of friction, friction that we experience in our daily lives, is going to be just totally eliminated as a concept because of AI. Maybe we'll see it less in our daily lives, maybe a little bit, but even so, I mean, the friction's still being handled by someone, it's just being handled by an AI now. So, that's still a business, that's still going to create value, that's still going to create a whole ecosystem and an economy around it.

• 10:02Josh Brown?

  And there were people who used to sit on an elevator all day, and they would wear a uniform and a special cap. It was literally only the elevator guy could wear this cap.

• 10:11Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Josh Brown?

  And he stood there and he pressed people's floors for them. He operated the elevator, or maybe this is before buttons and he used a lever. Is anyone like, what happened to all the good elevator operator jobs? There were trucks that drove around Brooklyn, they were knife sharpening trucks, they had the same bells as like an ice cream truck, and they would roll slowly through a neighborhood, and all the women would come running out of their kitchens, aprons on, with an armful of knives that needed sharpening.

• 10:41Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Josh Brown?

  And then the technology improved to the point where, hey, we don't actually need to sharpen knives, we throw them out and buy new ones.

• 10:48Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Josh Brown?

  It's like... Of course, we're gonna have disruption and entire categories of jobs being lost. The thing that people are worried about is that they all happen at once.

• 10:58Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 10:58Josh Brown?

  The more realistic scenario is that this rolls industry through industry. And as each industry sees um lots of jobs be disrupted, it creates new ones in their wake. And look, I think what most people end up realizing is that AI is a better complement to experienced workers than it is a replacement. Doesn't mean no one gets replaced. It means the people that don't get replaced utilize AI and do bigger business. And that leads to more job creation in other areas of the economy. It happens every time. It'll happen this time. It'll be uncomfortable in certain pockets. Nobody is is uh nobody's delusional about that.

• 11:42Ed Elson?

  Exactly. Um. And the timeframe, the timeframe is the question. It's like, how many jobs will be replaced, displaced within a certain timeframe? How many of them in that timeframe? That's gonna be the disruption. But the idea that this has structurally changed the entire fabric of the universe, that's where it's I start to get lost. I I do need to wrap us up here. I think a big piece of this, or at least something that is very interesting to me, is, again, the market's reaction to a blog that was posted on Substack by, as you call it, it was a think piece, by a very smart person who wrote a very, very interesting and creative article. And it inspired incredible selling pressure, incredible value destruction, which to me

• 12:26Ed Elson?

  says something about how investors are feeling right now.

• 12:30Josh Brown?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Ed Elson?

  And something that you have described. Uh, you you came up with this term HALO, which stands for Heavy Assets Low Obsolescence, which is the new type of company that that investors seem to like right now, which is companies that have nothing to do with AI. AI won't even touch it. So before we go, could you just describe this halo term that's gone gotten pretty popular? Wall Street Journal wrote an article about it. It's your term. Uh, just describe what that means and how investors feel right now.

• 12:58Josh Brown?

  So in early February, I was talking about the types of stocks that were on the fifty-two week high list. And what they all had in common was they have heavy assets on their balance sheets. And they have low obsolescence risk. And it occurred to me that this was a reversal of the entire post-financial crisis period where we fetishized um the opposite, asset-light businesses. We wanted companies with subscription revenue, ARR, um very little cost of doing business and almost no assets on their balance sheet. And now it's flipped. It's the reverse. You look at stocks like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, you cannot type "I wanna diet Coke" into a prompt

• 13:40Josh Brown?

  and uh have somebody else uh create that product. It's uh it is not disruptable. Uh natural gas, transmission lines, utilities, Caterpillar, Deere. Um mo- most stocks that are related to heavy industry, in fact, completely halo. Um and there were some really fascinating examples inside of one industry. You could say Expedia is highly uh disruptable by AI. You can plan trips, you can book flights, you can have an agent that scours these uh airline websites and find the optimal trip for you, putting Expedia out of business. But within the same sector, there's Delta. Can you prompt yourself a fucking airplane? Obviously not. So um this is a really interesting market.

• 14:25Josh Brown?

  What what this does, Ed, just to sum up, it throws out all these old paradigms that people think about in the stock market. It crushes the growth versus value thing. That's now irrelevant. It gets rid of cyclical versus defensive. That's irrelevant, too. It even um breaks the tech versus non-tech idea because certain tech stocks like Apple are extremely halo. Um you cannot get around the physical iPhone device. And ChatGPT is probably just gonna become a plugin to the iOS ecosystem. So Apple is halo um while Adobe is not. So I think that that's a really important uh prism through which to view the stock market. And I think that dynamic will remain important throughout the rest of the year.

• 15:09Ed Elson?

  Absolutely. Lots more that we could discuss. I mean, again, my takeaway, people are very confused and very anxious right now. All of the paradigms that they've been following are just being thrown out the window. And it's very confusing to see which ones actually work. It's not supposed to be easy. If it were easy, everybody could do it. Get used to it. That's exactly right. Josh Brown, thanks very much for your time. Cheers, Ed.

• 15:36Ed Elson?

  After the break, warning signs from Blue Owl. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, simply put, at edwardelsin.substack.com.

• 15:53Speaker 09

  The new LinkedIn Hiring Pro can't undo your last hire. The human postponer. They were the master of one phrase. I'll circle back on that. But three months later, you are the one doing all their work and wondering how big that circle is. But LinkedIn Hiring Pro can take the hiring load off your plate by automating the hiring busywork from the initial job post to scheduling interviews. Hire right the first time with LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Post a free job today at LinkedIn.com/quality.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.

• 17:17Speaker 10

  Hi, I, uh...

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Let's get you a basket.

• 17:27Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profty Markets. Blue Owl Capital is at the centre of a new panic over private credit. In recent weeks, investors have attempted to pull their money from the asset manager. Those requests are driven in part by concerns over the company's exposure to software borrowers. Now, following the increased demand for withdrawals, Blue Owl is shutting the gates on one of its private credit funds. Investors will no longer be able to ask to withdraw their money every quarter. Instead, the firm will sell assets and offer limited liquidity on a quarterly basis. Shares of Blue Owl plunged 10% on the news, and the sell-off rippled across other alternative asset managers as well.

• 18:09Ed Elson?

  Ares, Apollo and Blackstone fell more than 5%. So what exactly is Blue Owl and why is it preventing its investors from withdrawing cash? Here to help us answer these questions, we're speaking with Robert Armstrong, US financial commentator for the Financial Times. Rob, welcome back to Profty Markets. I want to get into Blue Owl with you. I keep on seeing this name in the news. I kind of know what they do, but not really. Can you just start off for us? What is Blue Owl? Why should we even care about them?

• 18:49Robert Armstrong?

  Blue Owl is a large, what would I call them? Fixed income investor. So they run assorted funds that manage credit investments on behalf of investors in various different ways. And they're a big player in the space. They've been around for a long time and they've made a lot of money. So they're a meaningful player, especially in private credit, which is of course kind of the asset du jour. Of the last couple of years.

• 19:25Ed Elson?

  So talk a little bit about how it is the asset du jour, because I think that's a big piece of the story here. The reason why it probably matters to people is because private credit is suddenly a big deal. And it used to not be.

• 19:37Robert Armstrong?

  It used to not be, and it's not so often that a new asset class kind of appears, right? The last, you know, private credit is now something that an institution say, you know, a respectable institution will have a private credit allocation in their portfolio. And that might not have been true three or four or five years ago. And, you know, you have to go back 30 years before that, when kind of junk bonds became of like this new asset class that people are getting into. And I think the magic of the asset class has two parts.

• 20:17Robert Armstrong?

  One is that it is reputed to have fixed income like returns, like the returns you might get from uh, high yield bonds, but with a little bump because you are lending to a special class of borrowers. The, these funds are lending to borrowers who, for one reason or another, would like to avoid public markets. Either they don't want, you know, they want a bilateral relationship with their lender or their business is such that it's hard for larger markets to understand,

• 20:59Robert Armstrong?

  or their cash flows are uneven, or for whatever reason, they don't want to be buffeted by the, the daily grind of, of the high yield bond market. So they do a bilateral deal with a lender who charges them a little bit more. So let's say you were getting eight percent on your, your high yield bond part of your portfolio and institution. Maybe the private credit guy offers you 10, let's say. I'm just kind of picking those up, but you get a little edge there. And that is called reaping an illiquidity premium.

• 21:36Robert Armstrong?

  Right? You're not in the bond market. You can trade in and out all the time. You go to private credit. In theory, you get a couple more percentage points of yield, but you're like locked into this fund for five years and everybody likes this. Extra yield. Everybody loves it.

• 21:51Ed Elson?

  So what we have here is this massively growing asset class.

• 21:57Robert Armstrong?

  Yes.

• 21:57Ed Elson?

  That is interesting to a lot of people for various reasons. One of them being they might not want to go to the public markets.

• 22:06Robert Armstrong?

  That's for the borrowers.

• 22:07Ed Elson?

  For the borrowers.

• 22:08Robert Armstrong?

  Like it because they don't want to.

• 22:10Ed Elson?

  For the borrowers, for the people who are lending the money, they're making a lot of money.

• 22:13Robert Armstrong?

  Yeah. There's another very important point, which I, I, it's going to come up in this conversation, which I, I think I should mention.

• 22:21Ed Elson?

  Please.

• 22:21Robert Armstrong?

  Which is that

• 22:24Robert Armstrong?

  the value of the funds that have these private loans in them are not marked to market every day.

• 22:31Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 22:32Robert Armstrong?

  Right? They're marked every quarter or so, or however, very infrequently. And one of the things institutional investors love about this is that just because of the way the math works, this means that the returns from private credit look uncorrelated to public markets. And without boring you with the mathematics of portfolio construction, it's better to have an uncorrelated portfolio. The returns from different things in your portfolio, moving in different directions makes the whole thing, the, the return for the level of risk superior.

• 23:12Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 23:12Robert Armstrong?

  In an uncorrelated portfolio. Now, it may not really be uncorrelated. The, the appearance of uncorrelation is created by the fact that the thing isn't marked to market every day, like your bond, your, your junk bond portfolio, your equity portfolio, or whatever else. But that's a very important feature of why people like this product so much.

• 23:32Ed Elson?

  And I think this gets to the core of why this is important and perhaps could be a real problem. And people are beginning to talk about this. And I think it all comes down to the name, which is private credit, which is you don't know what is really going on. You don't see, it's not mark to market. You don't see what's really happening. You don't see really the redemptions. You don't really see the performance of these investments. And this is now becoming a real issue, especially in the AI world, where Blue Owl has been a huge player, yeah, loaning out tons and tons of money to build all of these data centers.

• 24:17Ed Elson?

  And then we're posed with the question, it's like, well, we don't really know what all of that debt is. And the big question that investors have been worried about is how much debt is being used to build out this infrastructure. And this brings us to the, the conversation that we've, we're speaking with Josh Brown on this. There was obviously the, the Citrini blog post that went absolutely haywire this week that brings up this issue of what, what AI and private credits association with AI could do to the private credit ecosystem and how much default we might see in this ecosystem. So, I mean, a lot there.

• 25:01Robert Armstrong?

  There's a lot there.

• 25:02Ed Elson?

  If you could speak to all of it.

• 25:04Robert Armstrong?

  Let me, you've given us a lot to think about. Let me complicate it even further. The, the, the point, there is two issues there. One of them is with private credit that you need to try to keep separate. One of the issues is lack of transparency. How much do we know about the performance of the underlying loans? And how much do we know about what they are worth when they are not mark to market every day? And, you know, you might have greater or lesser transparency, depending on the product. Liquidity is a separate issue, right? But the two kind of converge, right? Because when people get nervous, rightly or wrongly.

• 25:46Robert Armstrong?

  You know, maybe this AI thing is really worth worrying about, but maybe it's not. But as long as people are nervous, then the liquidity thing becomes an issue. Right?

• 25:55Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 25:55Robert Armstrong?

  Because if, you know, a couple of people head for the exit. And the fund says, and something like this happened to one of Blue Owl's funds, and the fund has a limit on how many people can come or leave. As we said at the beginning of the discussion, these are long-term loans, bilateral agreements. You can't just liquidate when investors want to leave. So there's gates on a lot, on a lot of these private credit funds. And only so many people can leave in a given quarter or so forth. But anyway, the instant anybody gets told, actually, we're up to our limit, nobody else can leave, that is the moment where everybody wants to leave.

• 26:36Ed Elson?

  Which is exactly what has just happened this week.

• 26:39Robert Armstrong?

  Right. Yeah, exactly.

• 26:41Ed Elson?

  And it's exactly what happened to Silicon Valley Bank.

• 26:43Robert Armstrong?

  Silicon Valley Bank, but you know, it's Silicon Valley Bank, they don't have, you, you, you can take a deposit out of a bank anytime.

• 26:50Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 26:51Robert Armstrong?

  The, the point about a private credit fund is it says right on the wrapper, you're only going to have an access, access to your money back, in the case of an institution, it might be years. And you kind of know that going in, and so you have to ride it out with them. But where the story gets interesting is when you try to sell this institutional product with the kind of low liquidity that institutions are designed to handle, they have an infinite life, they have a diversified portfolio. And you say, wouldn't it be great to sell this wonderful product to retail investors? Because after all, where the real money is, is selling a product to retirees. That's the biggest pile of money there is.

• 27:34Robert Armstrong?

  And so you take this product with low liquidity and you sell it to retail investors, they actually have higher demands for liquidity. And now you're trying to kind of square the circle. You've got investors who are retail investors, not institutional investors, who want and need liquidity, and you have a product whose very identity is in not providing liquidity. And then you mix in the AI stuff you're talking about and it can be quite a combustible mixture. I know that was a lot, but I think the liquidity issue becomes live as soon as there's even questions about the credit quality issue.

• 28:13Ed Elson?

  Yes, a hundred percent. And that is what we're seeing shares of Blue Owl plunging 10% on this news. I think this is a story that many of us are not fully tackling because there are so many complicated moving parts.

• 28:30Robert Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Ed Elson?

  But it is getting to that point. It seems that we do need to be talking about Blue Owl.

• 28:36Robert Armstrong?

  Yeah, I think we do. And but and the important point I'd like to make to you and to your listeners is that you can get in trouble, a product, you know, a fund can get in trouble at times like this, even if the underlying loan quality is good. And I think there's good reason to think maybe the loans in this Blue Owl product that, you know, they were going to merge and they didn't and they've stopped redemption, so forth. Maybe the maybe the loans are fine.

• 29:07Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Robert Armstrong?

  Right. But because you are taking this product that is designed for institutional investors and selling it to retail investors and trying to give them a little bit of liquidity,

• 29:20Robert Armstrong?

  you're setting yourself up for trouble. Right? Nobody waits around to see how bad the trouble really is.

• 29:26Ed Elson?

  Exactly. I want to end here with a quote from the this guy Orlando Gimes, chief investment officer for Asset Management. He said, quote, "The red flags we are seeing in private credit today are strikingly familiar to those of 2007." This is a comparison we are seeing more and more.

• 29:45Robert Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Ed Elson?

  What do you think of this statement?

• 29:49Robert Armstrong?

  It seems pretty strong. I mean, the weird thing, you started you started us out with concerns about AI investment. And the thing about those concerns, have companies over invested? Will the loans come good? Is AI going to undermine the software businesses we know it, et cetera, et cetera? All those are concerns in kind of the medium to long term. So it's this weird situation where the companies you're dealing with or the the data centers you're financing or whatever, like they're making their monthly payments. Earnings is coming in as expected. There's just this thing on the horizon

• 30:31Robert Armstrong?

  that you know it's a thing and you're worried about it, but it's not today. It's not showing up in earnings or cash flows or interest payments today.

• 30:40Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Robert Armstrong?

  But what about tomorrow? And that makes the situation really hard to judge. In 2007, the wheels were coming off and there was no cash flow today.

• 30:50Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 30:51Robert Armstrong?

  That that problem happened very much in the present, whereas we're having anxieties about the future. And I think that's an important difference.

• 30:58Ed Elson?

  All right. Rob Armstrong, US Financial Commentator for Financial Times. Rob, we appreciate you taking us through a complicated topic, but I think it's simplified. Thanks.

• 31:07Robert Armstrong?

  Cheers.

• 31:13Ed Elson?

  All right. Before we end here, let's return to this Citrini Research blog that took the internet by storm and took the markets down with it. This is the second viral blog post in three weeks that has erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value overnight, which tells you more about how investors are feeling than about the blogs themselves, because what you have to remember here is that these blogs aren't actually telling us anything new. They are simply synthesizing existing information in a creative and interesting way. And it's the feeling they are arousing within us, not the information that is causing these massive corporations to lose as much as

• 31:57Ed Elson?

  five, six, seven percent of their value within just a few hours. So let me give you my perspective on this viral blog that sent the markets into meltdown yet again.

• 32:10Ed Elson?

  So first off, it's a really good blog. It's way better than that other blog we discussed a few weeks ago. And the reason it's so good is because it ties together all of the relevant issues that could materialize because of AI. Not just how it might disrupt software, but also how it might disrupt the job market and the consumer economy and the debt markets and the insurance industry and so on and so forth. It illustrates how AI is calling into question all of the little pieces in our system that we tend to take for granted. Another way to put it is that it describes the catastrophic risks that Aswath Damodaran

• 32:53Ed Elson?

  was warning us about in our episode on Friday. And so in that sense, it is a really good read and I encourage you to read it. But does it warrant the cataclysmic reaction that we saw from the markets? No, it doesn't. Because again, it doesn't tell us anything new. In fact, it simply describes a hypothetical situation, which sounds like an absolute because of the way it was written. And that is it's written in the past tense, as if all this stuff actually happened, which makes it feel scarier. But let's be very clear, the entire post, top to bottom, is conjecture.

• 33:36Ed Elson?

  It's informed conjecture, but it is conjecture nonetheless. In addition, it also misses several key points. For example, the premise of this blog is that all the companies that handle friction, so law firms and software companies and payments processes, they will all die a slow death because AI will eliminate the business of handling friction. Agents will be doing everything for us. Now, that might be kind of true, but if that is the case, then the friction handling business won't actually be eliminated. It will simply be transferred to a new set of players, namely the companies that own the agents.

• 34:19Ed Elson?

  And that might be a new set of companies, could be OpenAI, could be Anthropic, that would cause some disruption, or it might just be the existing set of companies. It could be big tech, in which case those companies that embrace AI are going to get very, very rich. Put another way. Yes, this technology is unique to this era, but the general rules of disruption remain the same. Just as Visa eliminated the friction of paying by check, it ultimately created a whole business around that in credit cards, which did employ people and did generate value and ultimately created an ecosystem just like any other market. This blog seems to conveniently ignore that reality.

• 35:03Ed Elson?

  It's very descriptive about the value destruction that AI could inspire, but it's almost silent on the value creation that it could also inspire. There are some more blind spots in the blog that we can maybe discuss another time, but the net, net is this. It was an excellent, creative, interesting blog that also shouldn't have erased $300 billion in value. But it did, which tells you how investors are really feeling right now. Anxious, apprehensive and very, very confused.

• 35:43Ed Elson?

  Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalan, Isabella Kinsel, Chris No Donahue and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thanks for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

• 36:12Speaker 12

  Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

• 36:19Speaker 13

  Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Sorry, I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.

• 36:40Speaker 12

  1-800-CONTACTS.

• 36:42Speaker 14

  They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

• 37:12Speaker 15

  For a limited time, you can get a Big Mac meal for just $8. That's a burger, fries, and a drink. They don't call it an extra value meal for nothing. Get a Big Mac meal only at McDonald's.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.