AI Bull Case = Financial Crisis?

**Dave** (0:00)
There's a post making its way across X right now. It's written as a future history set in June of 2028 And in this version of the future, AI has exceeded all expectations. Companies have replaced their once high paid workers with AI agents. Their margins have expanded, the stock market has surged like never before. But the people losing those 180K jobs are the ones that once drove consumer spending. They're now gig workers, they're driving Uber, and they're not spending like they used to, which creates this negative loop, forcing companies to automate with AI even more. Basically, productivity soared on paper, while wages collapsed and created what this Centrini essay is calling Ghost GDP. So what happens to the economy if AI takes over too fast? Today on Dumb Money, our thoughts and how we're prepared, if the best case scenario for AI ends up causing a financial crisis.
This is Dumb Money Live.
Hey there, Dave here along with Chris and Jordan. We are Dumb Money. Welcome to Dumb Money Live. Quick reminder, have your agentic AI always set to smash the like button. You can grant it full access to the almighty algorithm. Chris, Jordan, good morning. This Centrini Global Intelligence Crisis Report has everyone talking. It's gone so viral that every other post on my feed is basically an opinion piece or a rebuttal to this like past tense, post-human friction world that is science fiction and causing the real market to react, which I don't know if you saw this chart, but these are the stocks that were individually mentioned in the Centrini report, which is crazy. It's science fiction that became market reality. So, so much to talk about here.

**Chris** (1:53)
Let's start by who the hell is this guy?

**Dave** (1:57)
Nobody's heard of Centrini research prior to last Friday, and now it is the only thing people are talking about on X.

**Jordan** (2:03)
I've been following Centrini for years.

**Chris** (2:05)
Okay, but again, listen, I am not ripping on him at all. I'm just saying he's an XEMT and former healthcare entrepreneur with a substack. Okay, cool. That's totally fine. I would love to know anytime I see these guys with a substack, that's totally cool. I love retail investors sharing their opinions, their insights. I feel that more times than not, a random retail investor is likely to have just as good or better insight than a professional as long as they've done the work, because some of these guys will do so much work and so much research that I want to read this stuff, but I wish I could have insight into their return history. I want to know what their track record looks like. I want to understand how much weight I should even put into wanting to read this guy's substack over this guy's substack. I've been saying this for 20 years, that's just annoying. It's about who writes the best, and who has great views on the problem.

**Dave** (3:11)
At some point, Robinhood has actually announced that they are going to have their own little social network that lets you see real trades and real returns from the people who contribute content there. But that's completely separate than what we're talking about with substack and people publishing content, some of this stuff. I personally think that this was well-written. A lot of it seemed to be like AI filling in the storytelling style. But it did kind of get me thinking, though. Like, if AI were to completely go down the path that we expect it to, what does it do if it goes faster than humans can react to restructure the economy?

**Chris** (3:56)
So we basically went from scaling in AI is completely dead, everything is going to be in the app layer, that's where all the value is, to then, oh, you know, DeepSeq is going to blow up the entire sector, now Compute is completely meaningless, Compute doesn't matter anymore, to then we jump to, well, there's a massive bubble with the hyperscalers, they're spending way too much money, they're spending money on something that generates essentially no returns, and it's going to screw their cash flow, so we're going to sell them off, to now all software jobs are basically gone. Like, every single week, it's a new doomsday scenario, and it's really pissing me off.

**Dave** (4:41)
Well, technically, nobody knows what is going to happen, and so everybody is on edge, everybody's nervous. We know that this is going to be the biggest change we've ever seen in our lifetimes, perhaps a completely new industrial revolution. Where do you want to sit your position, your portfolio during this transition?
And if you're a kid going off to college, what do you do? Do you even go to college at this point? There's so many questions and no answers. And that's why the stock market just doesn't know how to react. And so when someone puts out a piece like this that is written in past tense and feels like it has more validity because it's written in past tense as if it had already happened, I just don't even know where to go with it. But there's so much of it though that I think could happen. Some of the examples, I don't think are too realistic, but the reality is we don't know. And who knows? If you and your closet could figure out how to turn on ClawedBot to actually do something, you might be one of those thousand door dash competitors that started up overnight.