A former paramedic just crashed the Dow 800 points with a substack post.

A former paramedic just crashed the Dow 800 points with a substack post. And it's only Monday. He called it a thought experiment. Market obviously called it sell signal. The scariest part was that nobody could really point to why he was wrong. Oh, record scratch. You're probably wondering how we got here. Some contact. James Van Gillen used to work as a paramedic in Connecticut. Also co founded one of the state's first medical marijuana dispensaries, something that a lot of investors needed after today. Now he runs Citrine Research, which is the top finance account on Substack. His portfolio is up by over 200% since 2023. He's been warning about AI's impact on white collar jobs since at least April 2025, when he told a podcast there was a sword of Damocles hanging over knowledge worker, which basically means they're screwed. This morning he published a thought experiment written from the perspective June 2028 near future. It actually read like really good SCI fi, and maybe a few years ago we would have believed that it really was, but the premise here was if AI. Succeeds too. Well, like, what if productivity explodes, margins expand, companies fire everyone, and the economy collapses? What if the most bullish scenario is actually extremely bearish because machines don't buy iPhones, and when people no longer have jobs, people no longer get paid, and then there's no consumer for the I need to actually rest on. And every single Assumption that undergirds Our modern economy is turned upside down. He calls this the result of the ghost G D P. Output that shows up on paper. So corporate profits, productivity gain that actually never circulates through real people because the people got fired. Here's where it gets specific and hits Wall Street. The report names names. Doordash, Mastercard, Visa service. Now his argument is that A I. Agents don't have a home screen. Don't feel lazy. They don't default to, oh, I always order from here agents simply checks Doordash, Uber Eats restaurants, own site and quote 20 vibe coded alternatives that exist, presumably in 2020, find the lowest fee every time and loyalty is now gone. Companies that exist business model. He calls habitual intermediations like Doordash that insert themselves between in the buyer and the seller and earn fees. Not because they provide some irreplaceable value, because customers use it out of habit, convenience, or inertia. It gets worse. A I. Agents start routing payments through stable coins on Solana and Ethereum. They're bypassing the 2 to 3% interchange fees on visa and Mastercard entirely. So in this scenario, Mastercard's 2027 earnings call reports that agent LED price optimization and pressure in discretionary category causes the stock to crater and it spreads to India. He's I T. Services sector exports $200 billion a year. The entire model was built on the premise that Indian developers cost a fraction of American one. When A I. Coding agents cost essentially nothing, then that arbitrage Just disappears in his scenario. In his scenario, T C S focus and Wipro Contract cancellations Accelerate. These are all I T. Services and consulting companies. The rupee falls 18% in four months, and by Q1 2028, the I m F. Is in preliminary discussions with you. The report is explicit this is a scenario, not a prediction. But Wall Street didn't care. Heard, here's a scenario that actually seems pretty viable. And analysts couldn't really figure out how to beat down suggestions about what could actually happen if you play the tape out just a few years. For dash dropped 7%, Mongo D B. Dropped 6%, service now and sales force dropped 4%. Visa and Mastercard fell over 4%. I V M, which wasn't even in the report, dropped 13%. This worst day since 2000. Top of that, anthropic announced the same morning that Claude can now modernize a system. That there's a 30 billion dollar annual market for it. Though. That's double whammy for IBM. Reporting one out. Michael Burry, the bear of Bears. Guy who predicted 2008. He tweeted the citrine report with and you think I'm bearish? If you have Michael Burry calling you out for being bearish, you're really setting new records. Doordash co founder Andy Fang also responded on X, said, we definitely believe agnostic commerce will be transformative to the industry. The ground is shifting underneath our feet. Which is exactly what you want to hear as an investor. But here's the real question that the report asks. The Entirety of modern economics history. The scarce input was human intelligence. Capital was abundant. Even natural resources were finite but replaceable. The only thing that couldn't be replicated at scale was just human abilities to analyse, side, create, persuade. What happens if that's no longer scarce? In this scenario, labour share of G D P. Falls from 56% to 46% in the sharpest decline in modern history. The government can no longer fund itself because it taxes human time and there's less human time to tax. And 13 trillion in consumer debt is underwritten against income. Assumptions that just stop making sense. Authors are careful. They do say we are certain some of these scenarios won't materialize, but the thing is, everyone's asking which ones don't materialize.