How Substack Creators Are Covering This Strange Markets Era

We closed out our New York live show on May 28 with a panel that featured three of our favorite Substackers: James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, founder of The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. They've all been Odd Lots guests before, and we wanted to get them together to discuss how journalists and analysts are supposed to cover this incredibly strange and highly pressurized moment in markets. Not only has AI basically infected every corner of the world, the media included, but there's just so much news that it's sometimes hard to figure out what the focus should be. But James, Sam, and Jasmine have all found their own niches, and cover AI in a really unique way. This panel discussion debates how the media has covered fears over the AI bubble and the possibility of mass job loss, if people in Silicon Valley are scared about the future of society, if AI can really mimic a writer's voice and personality, and (if they can) how writers can hedge against that future. Read more: Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut Nvidia https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/amazon-is-in-talks-to-sell-nvidia-rival-chips-to-other-companies?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article AI Company Dream Triples Value to $3 Billion in Funding Round https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/ai-company-dream-triples-value-to-3-billion-in-funding-round?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 1:08Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:07Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:13Tracy Alloway?

  So, Joe, we continue to publish some of the conversations from our recent live show in New York, and I hope people didn't mind. They didn't seem to. They seemed to enjoy it. But we did do a little bit of media industry naval gazing.

• 2:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. So as we've been talking about, if you listen to past episodes from the show, you know, the theme obviously had this big, like, sort of future markets, future of trading theme. But, you know, I would say, and maybe this is like, I'm very biased here, but I would say that information dissemination and collection, and I guess you say journalism, is an important part of markets, right? How people get information.

• 2:49Tracy Alloway?

  You can't say journalism like that, huh? Journalism?

• 2:51Joe Weisenthal?

  No, but you know, like, the thing, like, in the, if you think about, like, the flora and fauna of the market ecology, then the people who, like, report the news, digest the news, explain the news, highlight what news is relevant, what is not relevant, are important actors in that system.

• 3:08Tracy Alloway?

  Absolutely.

• 3:08Joe Weisenthal?

  And in a period of so much change and uncertainty, the question of, like, A, how you decide what's important, and B, how you convey that to an audience, these are really tough questions.

• 3:18Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. So I think there's two major challenges here. One of them is what you just said, which is, like, how do you explain these huge technological shifts to people who may not, you know, they might be outside of the tech industry? How do you explain, like, an incremental improvement in a model to

• 3:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Tracy Alloway?

  the average layperson? And then, secondly, the other big challenge is the media itself is caught in the crosshairs of the debate over whether AI is gonna take all the jobs.

• 3:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. That's right. So any one of us who's in the business of trying to consume, figure out what's important and relay it, is also thinking about, will AI do a better job than we do? And precisely that, including writing newsletters and producing podcasts.

• 3:59Tracy Alloway?

  That's right. So we had a trio of perfect guests for this particular discussion. All of them have been on the show before.

• 4:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Tracy Alloway?

  We had James Van Geelen. He is, of course, the founder of Citrini Research and the author of The Viral AI Jobs Doom Scenario, as well as Jasmine Sun. She writes a Substack that's all about AI and the culture of Silicon Valley and tech, as well as Sam Rowe. He is the author of one of my favorite newsletters with the best name, The TKer. So take a listen.

• 4:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Where do you even begin?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I'll start with James because he's next to me and I just want to know what his life is like right now. Do people like recognize you on the street and scream at you about AI job losses?

• 4:41Speaker 04

  I have gotten two credible death threats, but not on the street.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Okay, I guess that's a plus.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, yeah, I mean, you know, it's better when it's not in person, right? But, uh, no, I've, uh, I luckily have been very much an internet personality and not, uh, someone that does a lot of taped interviews like this. We appreciate you making your time.

• 5:02Joe Weisenthal?

  I assume like 95% of you know, but in case a few randomly don't, I assume you do. When was that? February or something? You wrote a post about a theoretical possibility of, you know, we're all going to lose our jobs, but anyway. So I could see why people were upset about that. Jasmine, you write about AI and you sort of like try to, when I read your writing, it's like bridging a gap, right? To some extent, because there are people, most of them in San Francisco, often on a lot of drugs. Or maybe they're on a cult or something like that. And there's like, these are like the people who are like going to influence the rest of our lives. How do you think about the question of like, what is actually important to communicate to a broader public?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because I think the vast majority of AI media coming out of Silicon Valley is by AI people for other AI people. And it serves that purpose really well, right? Like you got really in-depth podcasts, you got the Dorkesh podcast, you got this like whole ecosystem of Substacks. One thing that I really noticed and that I think most people who listen to the comms coming out of the industry leaders will notice is they're saying all these crazy things without like four second thinking that like any normal person might hear them say it. And they're like, oh, man, why don't these people like AI very much? It's like, I don't know, you've been telling them you're gonna take all their jobs and kill everybody for the last several years. And like, you're on the record saying this stuff. And so I think it's really interesting where it's not like crypto where only a small fraction of sort of the broad public ever deeply engaged with it.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  AI is something that whether people want to or not is impacting their lives. It's on their social feeds, their kids are using it, it's in their workplace. And so people have all these questions about the intersection of AI and politics, AI and affordability, AI and parenting and education. And the majority of, I think, AI media historically has not really focused on that. It's been more the business and technology communities. And so I'm sort of trying to say like, okay, but what about the rest of us?

• 6:53Tracy Alloway?

  Sam, you write a newsletter and the tagline is basically, you know, stock markets usually go up over time. You've been very right for the past couple of years because they've certainly gone up. But like, are things starting to get uncomfortable for you when people are talking about AI bubbles and overvaluations?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, things are always uncomfortable for me. I think that's sort of like one of the most important things about understanding this idea of stocks usually go up is the key word there is usually, right? Like every way you cut the data historically, even good times and bad times and bull markets and bear markets, you always have like these periods of volatility where, you know, stocks do go down. Like that's the, that's the catch here with stocks usually go up is that they go down a lot often. So yeah, of course I'm nervous, especially when you, when you're at, at peaks. I mean, of course the data will also tell you that the, you know, 12 month returns after all time highs actually tend to be higher than when you're at lows. But yeah, of course I'm nervous.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  I mean, that, I think that's like very healthy for anybody in the investor class is even, no matter how optimistic you might be over the near term or long term, you have to be prepared for those big drawdowns because they do happen and they happen frequently.

• 8:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Jasmine, you know, so James wrote his piece about, you know, the potential, at least, and it wasn't a forecast, it was a prediction, but a scenario.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  We've also written other stuff.

• 8:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Right, right. But no one likes the idea of like mass job loss, but I've been reading some other stuff and there's a lot of people who don't talk about AI job loss. They talk about AI will literally kill every single person in the world.

• 8:30Tracy Alloway?

  Right.

• 8:30Joe Weisenthal?

  If the labs don't do a good job of aligning the models. How seriously do you think the public should take that specific element? That if the models are misdesigned, they will destroy humanity as we know it?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Yes or no? Contentious question. Oh, God, they call this a P doom out in San Francisco. I won't give you a probability, I suppose, but without getting to the question of like, will literally every single person die? I do think there is a very good reason to be concerned about misalignment and rogue AI. Because when you think about it, there's sometimes people say that safety and the safety of a model is maybe in tension with these goals like acceleration and is a model really useful? And I think the thing that's really interesting is in the history of AI research, it's often the people who make the biggest technical advances in these foundational models who end up the most concerned about misalignment. And that's because actually the the product functionality of the models, their utility

• 9:30Speaker 03

  is only as good as how controllable they are and how much they do what you expect. So when you say, hey, like AI agent, like, go off and like, make me a million dollars or whatever, like, whether that model goes and does so in a law-abiding and safe and nonviolent way, the safety of the model, the alignment of the model is very correlated with whether it is economically useful as well. So I think that it's important that we not hold them in total tension. And I think there are really good reasons to be concerned with whether these agents are doing the things that we expect them to do.

• 10:00Tracy Alloway?

  Just going back to AI job losses, and I guess any of you can answer this question, and please, like, feel free to chime in on every question that we ask. But, you know, you also hear a lot of the big tech CEOs talk about being genuinely concerned about the future of society once AI is developed and starts like taking people's jobs. Some people interpret that as AI CEOs basically talking their own book and being, you know, like, hyping up the capabilities of AI. And then you have some people who argue that like, maybe they're genuinely concerned, not least because they're going to get like Molotov cocktails thrown At their houses and things like that. Where do you fall in that spectrum?

• 10:43Tracy Alloway?

  Is this like a real concern when you talk to senior people in Silicon Valley?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  I do think that most of the people that I've spoken to who are worried about it are genuinely worried about it. Something that I'd add to it is pretty much unanimously throughout history. When we've had any sort of technological leap forward, it's been a positive thing. And I think that AI will mirror that. It's just the question is, we've never had a technological kind of advancement this quickly. We, you know, we go from having the industrial revolution and the mechanization of agriculture. And 95% of people used to work in agriculture and then now I think it's 5% do. And I'm very happy to work in an air conditioned office rather than in a field.

• 11:29Tracy Alloway?

  I know you do some gardening.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  A little, yeah. So maybe not, but the, the thing is that will happen, I think, believe very strongly it will happen with AI. It's just what happens in the interim? What happens if the models get so good and, and can, and people kind of adopt them with the same approach? And use them correctly over five years instead of a hundred. So I think speaking to some of the senior people, they would echo the fact that over the next 30 years, AI is going to be an immense force for good and going to make people's lives more comfortable. They're just worried about the pace of the trend.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the transition is like super important because as much as everyone likes this idea, like even on the corporate side or the shareholder side, like the promise of all this productivity that's unlocked by AI. And, you know, maybe some people are thinking quietly in terms of like, oh, this is going to replace all of our workforce. But, you know, the economy sort of stops working when no one has jobs and no one has income, right? It's like, it's great that you have this huge profit margin, but you have no revenue because everyone's unemployed and they don't have any money. And, you know, those people aren't shopping, those people aren't buying, you know, washing machines and the washing machine manufacturer kit, you know, buy, you know, metal parts and suddenly we're digging up less copper and the whole economy shrinks because no one has.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Jobs, then the whole point of this exercise becomes sort of meaningless. So which is why I think you're increasingly hearing from folks on this side, you know, talking about things like, you know, basic income and guaranteed jobs and all these things. So it's, I think that's where, um, you know, the conversation sort of goes is, all right, let's make this assumption that we have all this productivity because of job loss. Well, that doesn't work, you know, we, people need to have money to go out and spend and buy these products that are being produced efficiently.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And it's worth noting that, like, for example, like people, politicians will point to say, retraining is the default. We have never had a successful, large scale reskilling program in the history of the United States during, say, you know, the deindustrialization, you lost all these factory jobs. It wasn't that many jobs and we created way more net jobs, say in Silicon Valley, but the steelworkers did not learn to code, right? And so people are right to be concerned, both morally and about the political backlash that could occur, even with relatively small numbers of net job loss.

• 14:03Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from Past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 15:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Sam, like, I love your newsletter. I read it. I'm a paid subscriber. All that. I think I could train a model to write a newsletter that says stocks go up.

• 16:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:04Joe Weisenthal?

  I think I could, like, it wouldn't be good.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, my, uh, I'm pretty sure none of us are gonna have jobs. My sister, my sister recently got into cloud coding, and she did this project with herself and, and thought that, you know, I'd find this really interesting. And basically, she created this app that was like a Sam robot.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  That was informed by, you know, stuff that I've published and like by, by Byron and all this free stuff that's out there. And it's like, I was kind of offended, first of all. But yeah, it's a problem.

• 16:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you worry about that? Is it sole proprietor of a media company?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny. It's like, there was this time where you could go out and say, "Well, you know, um, something that you can't really replace is, you know, the individual's voice, the personality or whatever." And it's like, I, you know, I, I run some of this stuff too and run these queries and say like, well, how would Sam Row write this? And it's like, "It sounds like me." And sometimes it actually, you know, uses the language and comes up with the words faster than how I would. So it's like, you know, what I do has to be about something more than just having the samro voice. Right? Um, so to, to answer the question, like the problem and the challenge and I, you know, uh, James and Jasmine and I, we, we talked about this a little bit in the back is like, you know, where do you add that value?

• 17:20Speaker 05

  And it's like, it's, it can't be something that's like just sort of replicable or, or something that, you know, someone who might be interested in what you're reading or writing about can put into a query and get back. Like, you know, the toughest part about my job, and I think a lot of our jobs, is being able to come up with those ideas and those angles that no one's asking for.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Um, and you know, again, like I write about the stock market usually going up, which by the way, even before AI, it's kind of a ridiculous thing to be writing about because everyone who has money in their 401ks and IRAs, I've already been told this, they already know this. So it's like, why do I exist? Um, and you know, it's a relatively small market of, of people who are reading what I'm writing about. But yeah, I, I guess there's something about, and not to toot my own horn, it's, this is reader feedback that I'm getting. But I've been told that there's something about whether it's the cadence or the timing of things I do write about, or the way I frame it, that feels a little bit more human than the research or the analysis that, you know, the chief investment strategist or whatever is sending out to their financial advisor who's regurgitating it back to them.

• 18:28Tracy Alloway?

  James, one of the things you've been doing that I don't think a bot can replicate just yet is sending actual human beings or a human being to the straight of hormones. Is that like the edge in media? Is it like first person experiments and data gathering?

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you just have to look at this from, I'm pretty confident that investment research won't exist in the same way that it does now. The internet kind of made it democratized, so to speak, the distribution. It was like, only the banks had distribution. Now we have distribution and we can utilize that. But if we're just utilizing it to kind of do the same thing that the banks are doing, well, there is. Is so much investment research that these models have been trained on. And as they get better, they will pretty much be able to do the same thing. So it becomes very much about doing something different. And I think that there's like two ways you can do that. One, you can be right all the time. So hopefully, you know, fingers crossed.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I think that that one aspect is like, like when I came on, Alas was the only media that I did after that piece, which I was very happy about.

• 19:35Tracy Alloway?

  Thank you.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  I said, one of your questions, Joe, was like, why do you think this went so viral? And I think it's like, this is not like tooting my own horn. It's just sometimes you go on a hot streak. And when we started, that was very much in like a year of just like 100% correct calls. And, you know, obviously I've had a bunch of wrong ones since then, but it was like, a bunch of people were reading something and they would read it and they would say, well, if I hadn't read this piece, I wouldn't have bought Nvidia in 2023, or I wouldn't have bought Eske Hinek or something. So I generated value from it. And then if you can add into that something that the model can't do with a query, they can't be out in the real world, then it's going on in the real world. If there's, if, you know, in five years, the robots come and then the models can go out in the real world, we'll have to find something else that they can't do.

• 20:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Jasmine, how do you think about this question of like, what the human writer can still bring to the table? The one time you were on Alas before was nothing about AI. You were talking about Chinese peptides consumption.

• 20:32Tracy Alloway?

  No, but you did go to a peptide range.

• 20:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I know, this is what I'm saying. So like, that is sort of your equivalent of sending an analyst to the straight of Moomoo's.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  I mean, we were talking about this. I'm gonna be the San Francisco spy that Jamie sends out. I guess I'm, I've doxed myself already, but I can get away.

• 20:47Joe Weisenthal?

  But is that like, do you feel like that's a big, like,

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:50Joe Weisenthal?

  market, that like being in it in some way, physically in it, is that is like what you can do, at least currently, that the AI can't?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Basically, I mean, I, I'm very bullish on secrets and I'm very bullish on gossip, right? And, and, and, I mean, that's kind of what journalism is in the end. It's you have, what is not in the training data? Like data is like one of the most valuable things. It's like chips, data, algorithms, right? And the, the data is out there in the world and they've scraped the entire internet. They've torn the covers off all day. These books, they're Merck or is like paying hundreds of dollars for these experts to like feed all their knowledge into the models. But the thing is, the world's constantly changing. It's very dynamic. There are parts of the world, parties, straits that are unexplored by humans. And if you go and you are the first person to see that, or you're the first person to be there at a critical moment in time, as news is happening, as news is breaking, that kind of actual reporting is like more valuable than ever.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  One way that I think about reporting is that you have this private knowledge that's maybe known in whisper networks in the, you know, in some party scene or whatever, or you have tacit knowledge that nobody's really written down yet. And as a reporter, my job is to take the tacit or to take the private and to turn it into public knowledge. Like that particular task, I think, is extremely robust in the era of AI.

• 21:59Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, so speaking of secrets and gossip and going out into the real world, you recently came back from a trip to China.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:06Tracy Alloway?

  Where you were sort of comparing, I guess, how China is thinking and undertaking AI versus the US. What's your big takeaway?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Oh, um, yeah, I mean, China is one of those places where it's hard to get a sense of without going in person because it's so restricted what's on the public internet and we have these wild off internets. One interesting thing is the way that I think about USAI research is it sort of had three eras of American AI. You had the academic era, maybe you call the boom kicking off with ImageNet or AlphaGo. You had the commercial era, let's call it kicked off with ChatGPT. You know, the maybe geopolitical era, that's sort of Pentagon and Mythos drama. And China is weirdly still in the academic era more so. It's very collaborative, very pro open source. The labs and the researchers themselves seem unconcerned pretty much with the sort of big philosophical and geopolitical questions.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  And that's, there's sort of a division of labor where, because the party and the government is so active in shaping exactly what AI's role in society ought to be, then the companies themselves have sort of abdicated that responsibility. And they're also much more focused on collaborating because they see collaboration as the only way to sort of maybe have a chance against the US frontier.

• 23:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Just to follow up on this a little bit, because so much of the American AI conversation is suffused with both the job loss question and then the even more sinister question of like, will the models turn against us? Is that dimension there as well, that sort of the safety alignment part? Is that a big part of the Chinese AI culture?

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Not a lot. And I mean, we asked researchers at a lot of the top Chinese labs, how much they thought about safety and it was clear that it was less of a priority. One is that they're compute constrained, right? Like, so one OpenAI researcher is allocated more compute than like an entire Chinese lab oftentimes because of the chip controls. And so when you're that constrained, you're probably not going to devote as many, as much compute to safety and alignment. So that's one thing. The other thing I noticed is just that China has a little bit of this more, almost like, I call it like, it's not techno optimism, which sometimes people confuse. It's more like techno determinism or this pragmatic approach, which is that technology has always progressed. Automation, like mechanization, like the industrial revolution, like technology has always progressed. It's overall made life better. There's no way to stop it.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  There's not really a culture of protest and resistance in China because of the political environment. And so as an individual or as a company, there's no point in being like, oh, we don't want this. We're going to regulate it. We're going to refuse it. Like, it's like you adopt or else you are going to fall off. You're going to get left behind. And so every individual is much more concerned with how can I adopt like OpenClaw or whatever it is as fast as I can so that I get this job? Because if I don't do it, there's a million people behind me who are going to take it instead.

• 24:45Tracy Alloway?

  James, I know you're approaching the the US versus China AI question. I guess both from an investment perspective and also from a social economic perspective, per your doom scenario, not thesis. Doom scenario. But like, where do you stand on this particular question?

• 25:02Speaker 04

  I think that it's very important that we continue to sell chips to China. I think that that if you were to cut China completely off from chips or or crack down on some of the smuggling, it would, it's, there's like a Sun Tzu thing about you, like you build your enemy a golden bridge upon which to retreat. I think it's very similar here where we don't really want to encourage even more capacity for China to to take the reins in in AI. And if we can control certain aspects of the infrastructure stack, then then the US absolutely should. I think that the next thing that we'll see, and this is like a really, I think, kind of spicy take. If you were to look at the price action of the the memory complex.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  I think that we will see within the next like Chinese deep seek moment will not be about a model, it will be about hardware.

• 25:54Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a good take.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  So, is it? Oh, really? Oh, okay.

• 25:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's see.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  I thought, well. Joe knows about takes. Clearly, you don't own SK Hynix. But I think, you know, everyone's kind of piling into the bottleneck trade, so to speak. And I think there's kind of a new vintage of investors that are doing this bottleneck investing without the awareness that bottlenecks are made to be widened. And I think that what's going to happen if we continue to see this kind of meteoric rise in DRAM prices is that, just like every other technological bottleneck, there will be a bunch of nerds in their basement that are very, very incentivized to fix this. And there are many ways that you can do that. One is, you know, you match flash bandwidth to DRAM. It's 100 times cheaper, like it's, so.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  And I think that with China CXMT, is there like Micron, SK Hynix, you know? And with the IPO happening this year, there will be a lot of capital that will.

• 26:52Joe Weisenthal?

  I've been wondering about this because it's like, the models are so, like, why even store any photos or images or whatever in a big bank of memory data? The models could just recreate it on command. And so I've been wondering if, like, in the end, like, storage is not going to be that big of a deal because the model is just like, yeah, let's see that photo of, like, you know, me and my son's birthday. And the model will just create it. And why did I need to save it to my iPhone?

• 27:20Speaker 04

  I think that the reason why, it's interesting because if you look at, like, memory is like a key component of the GPU, right?

• 27:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  But then why didn't, you know, Nvidia was rallying for a year and a half before memory started rallying, right? So why did that happen? Well, it's because of the advent of agentic AI and having to remember.

• 27:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Sam, I have a question for you. Like, per the theme of your Substack, generally speaking, stocks go up. Is the sub-theme just ignore everyone else on this stage because you're just going to get distracted and you're going to get freaked out and whatever? And that ultimately ignore all the Odd Lots episodes, ignore all the news, ignore the doomers because in the end, the only thing that can happen if you pay into the. News is you do something stupid, then you miss the long run.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  No, no, I'm actually the complete opposite of that.

• 28:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  And, you know, like I said before, like, you know, I'm always worried.

• 28:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  And, and this is like sort of the message I try to, you know, communicate out to the world. Like, you know, I do a lot of things and communicate a lot of things that are kind of counterintuitive. Like, you know, I do check my 401k plan every single day, you know. I do, you know, instead, you know, a lot of advisors and professionals and stuff will go on TV and say, you know, forget your, you know, 401k password.

• 28:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  Or ignore politics, or ignore what's going on in Iran, you know. We have a long history of getting past all this stuff. I think that's all incredibly silly. I think you really do have to think about how bad things are at a given time. That way you sort of build up those memories when, you know, 10 years from now, when there is another war, you do remember how bad things were in the past and how, you know, markets evolved out of all that stuff. So, so, yeah, like, I think it's, you know, to ignore things makes you sort of more vulnerable to making mistakes. So it's like, yeah, be really conscious of like where there are job losses, where there will be industries that fall apart, because all the lessons you learn today from all the bad things that happen, and when you lose your job, and when your neighbors lose their job,

• 29:19Speaker 05

  and then, you know, a couple of years from now, you know, maybe the market's higher. You know, 10 years from now, it's going to happen all over again, and you're more robust when that stuff happens. So, yeah, I think it's a complete mistake to ignore terrible things going on as someone who's optimistic in the long run.

• 29:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Good take.

• 29:34Tracy Alloway?

  I have one last question for all three of you, and it ties into something that Joe and I have experienced on the podcast, which is a lot of our episodes are starting to feel very surreal. You know, we're talking about like space elevators and data centers in space and companies with like trillions of dollars of market capitalization and lines that always seem to go up seemingly forever. Everything feels very sci-fi and surreal at the moment. What's the most surreal thing or like data point that you have seen or witnessed in person in recent months?

• 30:07Speaker 05

  The first thing that comes to mind, like I said before, like prompting, I think this was actually Gemini asked us to like, you know, how would I write this?

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  And I came back and I remember thinking, gosh, not only would I have sounded like that, but it's actually using, you know, slightly, you know, words I would have run through at the source and actively chosen to fold into my writing. That was really, you know, kind of scary. It really made me think about separating out like exactly what is it that I'm offering to subscribers? So, yeah, but, but being able to sort of see increasingly see yourself in these machines that are getting better at, you know, replicating human behavior.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  I think that probably for me, there, there's like a quiet kind of robotics boom that's occurring outside of like, like people are kind of waiting until the humanoid robot comes and folds their laundry and everything, but.

• 31:02Tracy Alloway?

  That's the dream.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, for me, for sure. But the thing is like, Amazon this year will employ more, twice as many robots as they do humans. You're starting to see in a lot of the earnings reports, like from Fannick, for example, that like factory automation is really experiencing a huge inflection that's not commensurate with other segments of that are selling into factories. And I think if you just imagine like, what level is robotics going to be at when it's fully like, like automated the factory, automated the warehouses, by the time it actually comes into your home, that's kind of, that's like, that's going to make things so much more surreal.

• 31:42Tracy Alloway?

  Just to be clear, Amazon is not employing the robot.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:46Tracy Alloway?

  That would be interesting.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  You just know that like, when this happens, you will be on a podcast talking about robot rights.

• 31:51Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  I can already hear it.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's perfect that James said that because I was going to talk about my trip to the Unitree office in Hangzhou and being both face to face with the humanoids, which is an extremely surreal uncanny valley experience. They are good dancers, they are good fighters, they're incredibly mobile. The quadrupeds, they look like bug dogs. They're like climbing all over and those are actively being deployed in factories for inspection and surveillance. We saw 24/7 pharmacy that was in operation where a humanoid robot would take stuff off and drop it in a box and delivery drivers, Chinese delivery drivers were coming in and out. It was fully in operation. And so China's pushing as fast as they can on the factory automation and the physical AI stuff. And when you see it, you just look at it and you're like, that's clearly where the future is headed.

• 32:37Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, I always do the test when a new model LLM comes out, I say like, write 10 tweets in my voice. And there's still, I don't think I can do it, but there was one from Claude and it said, the 10-year yield doesn't care about your feelings and frankly, it doesn't care about mine either. And I was like, you know what? It's not really a thing I would say, but that's kind of a good tweet. Anyway, thank you all so much, James, Jasmine and Sam for coming on Odd Lots Live. That was a lot of fun.

• 33:15Tracy Alloway?

  So that was our conversation with James Van Gielan of Citrini Research, Jasmine Sun, the Substack author, and Sam Rowe, the editor of the newsletter TKer. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 33:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, James Van Gielan. He's at Citrini. Sam Rowe, at Sam Rowe. And Jasmine Sun, at Jasmine News Sun. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Arman, Dashal Bennett, at Dashbot, Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano, at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 34:01Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we occasionally indulge ourselves in talking about the media, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the Instagram. Congratulations, you've built a dashboard. But now comes the follow-up question, and the follow-up to the follow-up, and the dashboard for that. Meet Hex. Give everyone the power to ask their own questions, explore data and build with AI, all in natural language. Because every answer should spark another question, limited only by your curiosity, not your data team's bandwidth.

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