How Substack Creators Are Covering This Strange Markets Era

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:22)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:24)
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.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:36)
Totally, so as we've been talking about, if you listen to past episodes from the show, the theme obviously had this big future of markets, future of trading theme. But 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.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:00)
You can't say journalism like that, huh? Journalism.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:02)
No, but you know, like the thing, like if you think about the floor and the 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. 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.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:29)
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, they might be outside of the tech industry. How do you explain like an incremental improvement in the model to the average lay person? And then secondly, the other big challenge is the media itself is caught in the crosshairs of the debate over whether AI is going to take all the jobs.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:55)
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.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:10)
That's right. So we had a trio of perfect guests for this particular discussion. All of them have been on the show before. 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 sub stack that's all about AI and the culture of Silicon Valley and tech, as well as Sam Ro. He is the author of one of my favorite newsletters with the best name, The TKer. So take a listen.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:42)
Where do you even begin?

**Tracy Alloway** (2:43)
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?

**James van Geelen** (2:52)
I've gotten two credible death threats, but not on the street.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:56)
OK, I guess that's a plus.

**James van Geelen** (2:58)
Yeah, no, yeah, I mean, you know, better when it's non-person, right? But no, I luckily have been very much an Internet personality and not someone that does a lot of taped interviews like this.
Thanks for inviting me, by the way.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:13)
I assume like 95% of you know, but in case if you 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 then 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?

**Jasmine Sun** (3:56)
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 DoorCash podcast, you got this whole ecosystem of sub-stacks. One thing that I really noticed and 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 going to 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 engage with it. 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?