James van Geelen on His Viral AI Doom Scenario

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

Business News, News, Investing, News Commentary, Business

4.5 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Something very unusual happened in the market in the last week of February. It sold off, in part, thanks to an article on Substack. James van Geelen is the founder of Citrini Research, which published a piece a week ago titled, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It was not written as a forecast of an imminent disaster, but rather as a scenario analysis in which AI capabilities lead to widespread white collar job losses, triggering a deep downturn, and a financial crisis. Nonetheless, the piece went extraordinary viral, gathering all kinds of responses from economists and research shops and even Citadel Securities. On this episode, we speak with James, the piece's co-author, about what Citrini Research actually is, why he wrote the piece, and why this is a scenario worth paying attention to, even if it's not the most likely outcome.

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1:43.7	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're 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.
2:17.7	Yeah, it's kind of like once you release it into the world, you don't actually have a lot
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