If you read any of WIRED’s recent AI edition, you know that lots of people are spending lots of time talking about how the technology is revolutionizing pretty much everything—from coding to writing to accounting. You’ve also probably heard by now, from us or somebody else, that we might very well be in an economic bubble of AI origin, one wherein the billions and billions of dollars being funneled into the industry is creating an untenable economic scenario that could turn catastrophic.
Of course, you may also have read that I’m really sick of being asked about AI. I’m still not sick, though, of asking other people about it—especially when they’re much smarter about this stuff than I am. Enter Joe Weisenthal, the cohost of Bloomberg’s fantastic Odd Lots podcast, and a former coworker of mine. Trust me: As someone who spent a year listening to Joe lose his mind in the office—loudly!—anytime the economy hiccuped, few people think more about our country’s, and our planet’s, financial circumstances than Joe does. And right now, Joe’s concerns aren’t strictly about what happens if or when that AI bubble bursts. His worries are more focused on what’s going right and wrong with the US economy writ large.
For this week’s episode of The Big Interview, Joe and I talked about weird market indicators, US competition with China, and whether or not we should all prepare for an AI economic apocalypse.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Joe Weisenthal, welcome to The Big Interview.
JOE WEISENTHAL: Thrilled to be here. Nice to see you again.
It’s been too long. We were just talking about how [you] and I worked together—what was that, like nine years ago?
I think you were there 2014, 2015, so maybe 10 years ago or something?
Yeah, I worked at Bloomberg. I lasted about a year.
Not bad.
Not bad. In my mid-twenties, maybe not the most conducive environment to my professional success. Let’s just say that. But Joe, you were there, you were loud, you were proud, you were always very excited about the economy.
I love talking about the economy.
You would just scream and shout and hoot and holler, and I was like, who is this guy sitting across from me? And why is he so loud? But I really appreciated your enthusiasm.
Thank you.
So we always start these conversations with some very fast questions. Are you ready?
Yes.
OK. So, you wake up extremely early. What is the latest you’ve slept in this year?
This year, on a weekday, probably no later than seven, but that’s because of kids. You know, I’m getting a little bit soft in my old age. If I didn’t have anything, I could sleep until eight or nine. I’ve really changed.
Wow.
There used to be times when I was waking up at 4:00 am every single day.
And you were tweeting.
I still get up early a lot, but I let myself slide a little bit now.
What’s the weirdest market indicator you actually take seriously?
We did a really good episode of our podcast about a month or two ago about cardboard boxes, which are very important. I don’t know how weird they are. I guess it’s kind of intuitive because of ecommerce, but you can really dive deeply into cardboard box volume sales, the types of cardboard boxes that are hot right now. Like are they ones that go for individual packages? Are they more of the larger grocery-oriented ones?
Cardboard boxes are top of my mind these days. I used to pay a lot of attention to Macao gambling receipts, when that was more of a measure of Chinese capital market outflows. But I think they’ve clamped down on that and it’s not as useful as an indicator these days.
If you could ban one financial cliche from headlines forever, what would it be?
Oh, there’s so many. It’s hard to choose. “The stock market is not the economy.” People love saying it; it’s not true.
The stock market is a very important part of the economy. “Investors hate uncertainty.” Things are always uncertain. That’s never been a thing. I could go on and on, but I would say “the stock market is not the economy” is one that I’ve hated for a long time, and I would say a very timely one.
What is a chart you would get tattooed?
I really like the chart of public sector employment over the last hundred years. You know why it’s a fun chart?
I’m imagining the tattoo.
I don’t think I would actually get it tattooed. It’s just one of my favorite charts, because it’s one of the—if you see this chart and you never knew what it was, you could probably figure out what it was because there is a little spike every 10 years, and that’s additional hiring for the census collection.
So I’ve always just enjoyed this chart because if you really think about “OK, what is this indicator that always spikes right at the turn of every decade?” There’s one thing that happens in the economy every 10 years—1990, 2000, 2010—and that’s the census. You might be able to figure it out. It’s fun trivia.
If the economy were a movie, what’s the title?
I don’t know. Mind Breaker. Something like that.
I do think the story of the last several years is: How many people’s brains have been broken because things that are perceived to make sense or relationships that they had assumed to be stable, et cetera, have not held? You just see people—there are other factors, but people who are in this space, going crazier and crazier year after year because they have such a difficult time reconciling what they see on their screen.
You are seeing these people go crazy?
I think so, yeah. I don’t know if it’s outward signs of, you know, literal insanity, but I think in markets you see this sort of intense frustration.
For almost my entire career—at least the last 10 years—people have said, “Oh, tech stocks can’t go any higher.” Or, “When are we gonna rotate out of tech stocks?” Everyone is all-in on this already, and yet these trends just persist month after month. Most people pride themselves in some way on not being part of the herd. Or taking some sort of contrarian viewpoint, or finding something that everyone else doesn’t know about.
Everyone at this point has heard of Nvidia, everyone in the world. You could have made a lot of money over the last couple years just buying Nvidia. I think this phenomenon really breaks a lot of people’s brains because the industry, to some extent, is supposed to encourage people to seek out information that others don’t have. I don’t think that’s been a particularly fruitful pursuit for a while now. And I think it’s so mind-breaking.
Alright, last question. You get to have dinner with one economist living or dead, who is it?
I’d love to talk to John Maynard Keynes. He was a very interesting character. Very interesting character, hung out with all sorts of artists and dancers and I love his writing.
Dinner, maybe one day. Well, he’s dead.
Maybe one day the AI-generated, reanimated corpse of John Maynard Keynes. Don’t put it past them.
Let’s talk about the big picture for a second. You work at Bloomberg. I know firsthand that you really care about this stuff. But you’ve said the thing that really interests you is quote, “figuring out what’s actually happening underneath the headlines.” What’s going on underneath the headlines right now?
Look, the headlines are all about the AI build-out and how the AI build-out is represented in the market. I think probably what’s less discussed is maybe some of the crowding out effects of this.
We had this guy on our podcast who is a real estate developer for drive-through coffee shops. So like, Starbucks, when they want a new drive-through location. In recent years, really basic electrical equipment that would be required to build a new facility has been in short supply because there’s all this physical capital that’s been going into data centers.
We all know about that, right? You hear about that all the time. But just think about that: Where were these things going to go instead? Cooling gear or heating gear or water filtration or doors or gas turbines or electrical equipment that allows any facility to hook into the power grid—all of this is in incredibly short supply right now.
So the ISM manufacturing report, that’s a monthly economic indicator. One of the things that they always ask their survey respondents is: What is in short supply right now? With the exception of maybe two months, electrical equipment has been in short supply for five straight years.
I’m not trying to dismiss it as being wasteful or anything per se. I have no opinion on that. But I do think that it’s interesting to think of some of these second-order effects of who is not able to get natural gas turbine equipment, who is not able to get electrical gear equipment because some big data center operator is just willing to pay top dollar for it in order to get these things online.
Right.
I think that’s one of the most interesting stories right now. In a market economy, the way allocation of capital goods works, of course, is price signals. And the builder of the data center is gonna pay more for that same piece of gear than someone who is building a drive-through coffee shop.
If you’re thinking about how it would be done in China, they would just say, “OK, look, right now we are prioritizing data centers for drive-through coffee shops. That is where we want to direct our resources.” We do it through the price system, which works well, but if some of these investments don’t pan out, it’s interesting to think what type of economic activity was constrained because it didn’t have access to capital goods during this incredible boom.
Other types of goods relevant to these build-outs are also in short supply. Why has supply not increased to meet the obvious increase in demand that exists?
It’s a really good question. I think there’s a couple of things. I think at the margins there has been more supply. But in times of uncertainty, building a big factory or building a new facility is very risky, right? You don’t really know how long any boom is going to last. So if there are, say, three companies that are the makers of some widget that’s very crucial in the economy and it’s costly, why not keep supply where it is and just raise your …
… jack your prices up. Right.
Then you have an order book that’s consistent out to the year 2030, in some cases at top dollar. It’s very difficult to get out of that equilibrium because that’s very nice if you’re one of the sellers in this environment.
The alternative is to build another factory, make a big bet on upfront capital outlays. So that’s money going out the door, and that’s uncertain, and you’re expanding supply so the price is going to be softer than it otherwise would’ve been.
I think one of the themes across the economy for a long time is paying the price for persistent underinvestment. I think another good example of that is housing. So housing activity was pretty soft in the years after the great financial crisis. All these home builders went out of business because housing prices collapsed and so forth.
Right.
So there was just not that much new housing activity. When you look at the surge in home prices now, especially post-pandemic, part of what we’re experiencing now is the price that we paid for under-investment in the 2010s.
I think you can really go across a range of industries and find this phenomenon that when the economy lies fallow and the economy is soft, investment goes down. Then when you get this boom, either across the economy like we got in 2021 or 2022, or in specific sectors like we’ve seen in 2024 and 2025 with data centers, you run into a supply crunch pretty quickly.
That brings me to tariffs, which have been, I think for me and probably for many people, one of the most insane, confusing, befuddling phenomena of this year, of the Trump administration.
Definitely.
Can you explain to us what is going on with the global supply chain with regards to tariffs right now?
The tariffs are not high enough to induce a massive amount of domestic investment in some area. The tariffs aren’t high enough that it makes a lot of sense to build big furniture factories in the United States, but the tariffs may be high enough that someone who had been importing them from China or Vietnam, maybe they’re looking for a supplier in India. That’s definitely happening. So the furniture still arrives.
Yes.
By and large, there aren’t massive shortages of things in the US economy right now the way people might have thought there would have been in early April. Part of it is that those early tariff levels, they all came [down]. Maybe we would’ve had more persistent actual shortages had those initial tariff rates stayed in place, but they didn’t. I think the administration saw they were unsustainable.
So then there’s this switching where, OK, we’re gonna maybe switch some vendor sources. We’re gonna move to a lower-cost country. So anyone who’s in the business of importing, maybe they can keep prices roughly stable. But there is this costly process of: OK, now we have to spend money finding a new supplier, building a new relationship with them, changing our trade routes, figuring out all these things, figuring out how they operate. But then this new supplier, they don’t know the customer as well. They may be reluctant to make long-term commitments with the customer because they don’t know what the tariff rate is gonna be.
Right.
This is a worry for suppliers, that they’re gonna make this furniture, these gardening goods, these holiday goods, and then the tariff rate is gonna go up and then the customer walks away from them. So the way I think about tariffs overall, outside of some niche areas, is not that they’ve raised the cost of specific goods dramatically, though in some cases they definitely have, it’s more that they’ve really raised the cost of doing business in the United States.
If I wanna understand what is going on with the economy right now, I’d say there’s basically two things: There’s this slice of the economy that’s doing phenomenally well, which is anything to do with big tech and AI; then there’s this economy that’s sort of creaking and, I don’t know, like the rest of the economy, is it in recession? It’s fairly stagflationary. I would say that hiring is certainly pretty mediocre right now. We’re recording this on a day that we would’ve gotten a jobs report had the government been open. But we’re pretty sure that hiring is certainly not booming.
The cost of living is very high, so it’s still a lot of price pain. I think the broad swath of the economy outside of AI is kind of creaking and tariffs are probably part of the story. I wouldn’t say they’re the entire story, but they’ve raised the cost of doing business for the entire economy, even if not directly in goods, just in the effort that companies have to do to reorient their supply chains.
I have a lot of questions for you about AI, especially in terms of the chatter about a bubble. We’re in an AI bubble. It will burst at some point. There are varying degrees of hysteria around this notion. How is artificial intelligence affecting the global economy right now? Are there some examples that you can give to bring this down to earth a little bit?
I would start by saying I’m very skeptical that AI as a tool is having a significant impact on the global economy, including hiring. Now, I will caveat that a little bit. I do think it’s possible that, across a range of organizations right now, there is a lot of pressure on managers to show that they’re using AI, whatever that means, that they’re implementing, that they’re finding ways to capture value from AI in their workflows.
Everyone’s doing experiments, everyone’s spending money, everyone’s trying to figure something out. One way that you could sort of demonstrate that you’re using AI and getting value is to just cut head count. Right? And then you go back and say, “Oh, because we adopted some AI workflow, we were able to reduce hiring by 10 percent.” That doesn’t mean that the AI tool actually allowed you to do the same amount of work with only 90 percent.
I mean, when I see those announcements my immediate assumption is: Air cover. You did layoffs and you used AI as air cover to explain why you’re eliminating 10,000 positions. I just don’t see the technology being equipped to eliminate 10,000 white collar jobs right now.
So anytime I ask about actual implementation I say, “Don’t give me the stuff about how your coders are using it, because I know that’s well-established.” The other connection is, OK, there is this mandate or there’s this impulse to spend more on AI. So you’re thinking about your budgetary allocations for the year 2026. We did an episode today and our guest was talking about this, that perhaps it’s a matter of, OK, we know we’re gonna spend more on AI tools and services in 2026, so that means we’re gonna allocate less to hiring in 2026.
I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for it. Like I said in the beginning, I think the stock market really is an important part of the economy. It’s not just a scoreboard, it’s an engine. It is a driver. People found companies in order to sell them to public companies or to sell into the IPO market. When stocks are up, that means IPOs are gonna be more valued. That means seed rounds will be more valued. That means more people are gonna move into this space, and that’s fine.
You know, Keynes talked about that, speaking of my ideal dinner guest. So this has been understood for a very long time, that financial markets have this accelerant, that they’re a force of production, so to speak, within the economy in a very real way.
I do think that the big rise that we’ve seen in asset prices, in stocks in particular, it’s been related to technology and AI is a big part of the economic story.
When you look at Nvidia stock, for example, which is just through the roof, when you look at how AI is a significant factor in the stock market right now, and then combine that with the fact that you are having a hard time finding tangible examples of corporate productivity being enhanced by this technology, what does that mean? What happens when those things are both happening simultaneously?
Intuitively, it’s really hard to imagine that these big AI companies, whether we’re talking about Nvidia or Google, that the AI premium that they’re receiving, the AI activity that they’re receiving, can persist forever if there aren’t more clear-cut examples of companies saying, “This is a valuable thing that I want to keep paying more and more for.” One possibility is that the productivity-enhancing use cases will be found, which is certainly possible.
Well, Joe, do you use AI to enhance your productivity?
It’s a good question. I certainly use it for interview prep.
Sure. Research, yeah.
But I put out the same number of podcasts as I did before. And they’re probably about as good as they were before. I don’t know, it’s a really good question. I think many people would say that they actually use ChatGPT, or [an AI tool] almost every day for something. I’m in that camp. But whether I can actually point to something and say “now I’m more productive” is really tough.
Like, “this is my killer use case,” you know what I mean?
But you know what’s weird? I’ve been thinking about this question, which is that the internet has obviously changed our lives. We didn’t have some mega productivity boom in the ‘90s. Productivity was a bit higher in the 90s than it was previously as the internet was rolling out, but it was not insanely different.
Same with mobile phones. Intuitively, the world changed because we all have an iPhone, but has there been some measurable productivity boom that we can find in the aggregate in economic statistics associated with the iPhone? Not really.
Part of the puzzle of figuring out where the productivity measures are going to show up with AI may mean we just put aside the AI conversation for a while and go back to the 20 years of technological gains, which have completely changed society.
But then the other possibility, of course, is that companies pull back and they don’t spend as much and then you get a stock market crash.
Well, that sounds fun. I’m curious about the psychology of all of this. I’ve been wondering in the last few months as we’ve seen more discussion around this idea of an AI bubble: How does that affect psychology? Is there a potential for a spiral from that? People start reading about this, it becomes part of the narrative, and then you do see a crash, right? That’s maybe less related to a lack of efficiency gains and more related to people flipping out a little bit.
It could be. I think there’s a famous George Soros quote, which is something like when he sees a bubble, he runs towards it. He doesn’t run away. Some people, they see a bubble and they wanna step away. Some people it’s like, No, I wanna ride this bubble and I wanna make a lot of money. They have some confidence that they’ll be able to get out when the time comes.
Oh, that sounds so stressful.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that bubbles, when I read about historical ones, are stressful because if you’re not in it, you’re jealous that your neighbor or your friend is making a ton of money. If you are in it, you’re probably kicking yourself for not having invested more in it, right? Then if you actually have a decent allocation such that the increase in the monetary value has changed your life, then you’re really stressed out about timing the sale correctly. So bubbles are very stressful.
But the one thing I’ll say is I do wonder if the mass retail or the mass investing world has sort of internalized the Soros idea that bubbles are exciting. Bubbles are something that you run toward. Retail investors who bought the dip; this was the story of the 2010s, which is that every time there was a hiccup in the market, the right move was to buy more. In March 2020, when the stock market plunged due to Covid, it worked out really well. In April 2025, when the markets plunged after the “Liberation Day” tariffs—every time we’ve seen some sort of hiccup in the market for 15 years the right thing has been to buy the dip.
So it’s possible that the psychology of anytime there’s red on the screen, it’s a good time to buy could last a lot longer than people think.
Well, I’ve missed every dip opportunity. I have bought zero dips. I’m a very anxious person.
I don’t think we as journalists have the best mentality for the market.
I don’t touch a market. I’m scared of the markets. I just cover them in an adjacent way. But I would like to live in a country that is in a financially healthy place. So the AI bubble, let’s say it bursts. I know that you are a very good journalist and very smart about this stuff. You’re not a tarot card reader, but what does that potentially look like for the United States?
I think the scary thing for the United States is like, what else is working right now? Right?
What else is … well, the other part is creaking.
Well, the other parts are creaking and the industrial areas of the economy are getting clobbered because of competition with Chinese industrial might. So we know that the auto sector, which probably hasn’t really been a particular load-bearing sector for the overall US economy for a while, is obviously having a very difficult time with global competition to say the least.
The pharmaceutical industry for the United States—here’s another area where internationally, again, particularly in China, there is much more competition than there has been in the past. So I think the scary thing is for the United States is it doesn’t feel like our growth drivers are particularly diversified right now.
Right.
There is one sector that’s doing phenomenally well, and look, it’s not even just AI. I mean big tech companies. They’ve just been huge money makers. They’re huge money makers globally, and so we’re getting a lot of money from around the world, from the existence of the Metas of the world and the Alphabets of the world and so forth.
It’s not just AI, but it does not feel like we’re particularly well-diversified. And then I think, you know, there are serious structural issues facing the economy. It’s an aging population. There’s a lot of pressure that emerges on the labor force because of the requirement to care for the elderly and to care for the infirm, which is growing every month.
We didn’t get a jobs report today, but one thing that we’ve seen is that almost every month for years and years now, the number of people who work in healthcare goes up. So there’s this very intense strain that’s being placed on the labor force overall simply because of shifting demographics.
Obviously as a society it’s important that the elderly are cared for and so forth, but these are low productivity areas, they’re low productivity jobs. When we think about real wealth as an economy, placing that greater strain on younger workers who theoretically could be used in some more productive areas, there’s some deep, deep stresses being placed on the US economy.
There are also a lot of things that are just costlier. Food has gotten a lot costlier. So you look at an economy that’s under a lot of strain, but there isn’t a lot of slack. If there’s just this one thing that’s doing well that goes away. When you look at it that way, there’s not a lot to be particularly excited about.
Well, that was actually my next question: What should I, or a WIRED reader, look to for optimism, economic optimism, in this moment?
What I think is really striking, and a reason to be optimistic, is that it’s easy to say, yes, Silicon Valley is doing great and New York is doing pretty good, the financial industry is doing well, and everyone else is doing terribly. I don’t really think that’s true, and I think one of the things that I’ve been struck by is just—and maybe this sounds a little bit corny—but America is just such an insanely wealthy country. I mean, the sheer material wealth of this country is …
It absolutely is.
It’s absolutely jaw dropping. Also the natural resources that we’re endowed with. These great lands of ours are really extraordinary. I don’t think it would be great for the economy if we completely cut off trading with the rest of the world.
But I also think if there’s one country in the world that probably could completely be self-dependent in some respects, it would be the United States. We have all the energy that we need, in theory. We have incredible technology and incredible education.
So we could go full isolationist. You’re not recommending it, but …
I do think we would be poorer for it, but I think if there’s one country in the world that could probably live off of everything that’s within its borders, it’s probably the United States.
Let me try to bring together the supply chain and tariff conversation with the AI one. How are global supply chains changing with the use of AI? Where do those two things come together?
I think that where they really come together is in a lot of the energy demand. We did an episode recently with the famed energy historian and economist, Daniel Yergin. He wrote this book, The Prize, about the history of oil, and he was talking about if you go to any maker of natural gas turbines right now, they’re sold out for years and years. I think this affects everyone outside of AI all around the world.
In 2022, natural gas prices spiked. Part of it was the war in Ukraine. Obviously, the US became this huge exporter of liquid natural gas, but there were these huge auctions that were going on among all the world’s countries to get their hands on any gas.
So when you think about where AI really intersects with international trade, it’s the energy dimension that immediately comes to mind, because the needs are so intense because everyone wants it.
Part of the thing with AI, obviously, is it’s wrapped up in this national competition. There’s this feeling that every country in the world needs their own, if not their own model, per se, at least their own data centers and so forth.
Right.
So there’s this very intense idea that national sovereignty could be on the line for some countries if they’re not somewhere playing in the AI space. Therefore, they have to be playing in the energy space, and therefore they have to take their energy needs really seriously.
And that brings me to asking you about China. China is the big boogeyman in a lot of conversations, but with AI in particular there’s talk about this arms race around AI. There’s debate about export controls on chips.
Yep.
There’s this talk of AI brain drain here in the US because of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration and visas. Everyone is keeping a very close eye on China and what they’re doing in the AI space. Do you see that conversation, the arms race that’s often discussed, as hysteria? Is that marketing? Or is there more there? How are you thinking about that?
I think there are some pretty real reasons for US companies to be concerned about international competition. I guess there is an element of hysteria. But also, when you think about the basics of, again, sovereignty and national defense and so forth, it’s hard to imagine a country truly being sovereign without manufacturing capacity. Even if you don’t have manufacturing capacity for everyday industrial goods or consumer goods, there is a good chance that eventually you lose the manufacturing capacity for weapons and arms because historically these things have been integrated, and being able to build anything means you’re able to build more things, if that makes sense.
One of the things that worries me a lot is: Why have we gotten worse at building airplanes in this country? When you think about the struggles that Boeing has had, in particular, there is emerging competition. So China has a civil aviation jet maker called Comac. That’s not the reason that Boeing is struggling. The reason that Boeing is struggling is because somehow over 20 years they got worse at building planes. That really worries me, and that’s really important for all kinds of things.
Broadly, we’re losing the muscle to build things in this country. Therefore, that eventually creeps up the chain to a company like Boeing, which has all kinds of niche specialty suppliers in all kinds of areas.
If you don’t have that whole ecosystem surrounding it, then eventually Boeing itself becomes worse at doing its job. Now, I don’t know specifically what the Boeing story is, and other people will say something different. Other people will say, oh, it’s about, you know, they brought in the bean counters who just care about Wall Street …
Right. Corporate incompetence.
I want that story to be true because it’s so satisfying. Right? If the story of Boeing struggles is that they just started caring too much about Wall Street, that’s a very delicious story, right?
Not that we as a country are losing muscle.
Then we can blame finance for it. We can blame investors and so forth. I’m just not entirely convinced that that story is true. I think maybe there’s something deeper going on about the ability of an advanced manufacturer in the US to thrive.
It’s the same really with Intel, and we know the massive struggles that they have had. They seem to have hit the end of their line in their ability to construct factories, or fabs, for the most advanced semiconductors. They design semiconductors and they manufacture them, as opposed to, say, Nvidia, which uses TSMC to manufacture their chips and so forth.
I think that’s where the deeper China conversation comes in, which is, OK, did the hollowing out of these lower value areas eventually creep up and affect the higher areas? And can the US be a secure, sovereign nation without advanced manufacturing in things like airplanes and whatever else? I guess on that level, I don’t think it’s hysteria. I think it’s something that people need to take seriously, the fact that industrial competition has created vulnerabilities for the US.
That’s a much more thoughtful and informed answer than, “Well, if they get super intelligent AI first we’re all dead.” It’s like, what are you talking about?
Well, it’s always so funny because there are so many flavors of the AI apocalypse conversation that you can have. There are obviously some people, and I’m sure you’ve talked to them and WIRED has covered them a lot, who think the moment there is some sort of super intelligence, we’re all dead.
I mean, I’ve talked to academics and they have been in tears talking to me about this.
And I get that to some extent, but it’s also very funny. It’s like, Oh, and we’re worried that China is gonna get there first? Here’s this machine that’s gonna kill us all and we have to build it first …
Yeah. I mean, if anyone is gonna kill everyone, let it be the United States.
Yeah, that’s right.
American exceptionalism, right up until the end. Well Joe, let me ask you one more question. Looking forward, what story or company or market should everyone start paying more attention to? We pay a lot of attention to what’s happening in the United States. Maybe we’re looking abroad a little bit. What are people missing? What’s really interesting?
I think one thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention is the future of Europe. Or I would say two things, maybe the future of Europe and which path is Europe going to go down? Because it’s pressured in multiple directions. It’s very literally in between the US and China, but also figuratively, because Europe has its own share of industrial powerhouses that have struggled with intense competition from Chinese competitors, most notably Germany.
Intuitively, Europe should be in part of a larger trading bloc with the United States. But of course there’s the tariffs and there’s been a division that’s opened up. Then the other option is Europe needs to integrate more deeply within itself, right? In order to achieve scale in production, it needs to go further on the project of deepening integration between all the European countries. The problem is, I don’t really know if there’s politics for that, because we live in this very nationalistic time and we see nationalist politicians rising pretty much everywhere where there’s elections, right? Even probably in places where there aren’t elections, there’s been more of a nationalist tilt.
Then, related to that, what are these other emerging markets? Which path are they going to go down? Think of Indonesia or Vietnam or Brazil, and they’ve seen their trade with China boom, but they also have concerns about national sovereignty and they also have domestic champions and their domestic steel companies, or their domestic nickel companies or so forth that are doing really well.
The question is, are they gonna be undercut? And what do they want their relationship with China or the US to be? So some pretty big open questions right now on how they’re going to orient their economies with the rest of the world.
I feel much smarter than I did 45 minutes ago. Before we end, I wanna get a little bit dumber for a minute. We’re gonna play a very quick game.
Oh yeah. I was supposed to prepare for this …
It’s too late now. It’s called Control, Alt, Delete. So the question is, what piece of tech would you control? What piece would you alt, or alter? And what piece would you delete?
OK. I would probably delete sports gambling and sports gambling apps.
Do you have a problem with sports gambling?
I don’t, but I really worry about it and don’t want it in my face all the time. It doesn’t seem particularly healthy.
No, but it’s not a problem for you. I’m glad.
Thank you. But would I say “yes”? I would prefer there be less, that there was less betting on everything. So I deleted sports gambling.
Control and alter?
I would probably alter social media in some respects. I’m a dad and I do think, I don’t know, I would probably like an hour a day.
For all of us.
I think that would be plenty.
A national limit.
I can’t say I want to delete social media because I made my entire career on social media. I love Twitter, but maybe like an hour a day for everyone I think that would be good.
I like that.
We haven’t talked about crypto at all in this podcast. I think that probably there is going to be a lot of real economic use, activity running through stable coins and perhaps tokenization of equity and so forth. I think that’s pretty real and legit. Most of it, I do still think, is just basically garbage. But I’m not as cynical as I used to be, and so I think there’s some exciting things happening there. Maybe I would control it. I would guide it in some positive direction.
So you would like to control the cryptocurrency industry?
Yes. I would control that. No big deal.
No, I like that. Very specific, focused. You know, I ask this question of some people and they’re like, “I would control the weather.” I’m like, “Well, you’re much more ambitious than I am.”
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