The Market as AI: What a Listener Question Changed About How We Think
A listener noticed something: when Wheeler and Colin talk about the market, they talk about it like it's alive. Like it knows things. Like it's learning. So this episode starts with that observation and goes somewhere genuinely surprising.
The stock market and artificial intelligence turn out to share more DNA than most people realize. Both process enormous amounts of data to generate an output. Both reflect collective intelligence at scale. Both are, in their own way, always learning. But the differences matter just as much — the market isn't trying to predict the next sentence. It's trying to maximize profit, from every direction at once, with no central brain running the show.
Wheeler and Colin work through the Ben Graham "Mr. Market" framework — the idea of the market as an irrational business partner you deal with every day — and trace how much the market has changed since Graham was writing. They unpack efficient market theory alongside Shiller's case for irrationality, and land on a framing that actually holds: the market is efficient until it's not. From there, the conversation covers what AI managing your money would actually look like, why robo-advisors have underperformed, what the SaaSpocalypse has in common with a market hallucination, and why Fastenal is still around despite Amazon.
One question threads through all of it: if the market is this kind of distributed intelligence, always absorbing new information, always compounding its own understanding — what does it mean for how you invest?
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Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/
Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell
