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- [00:01]
IBM Representative
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- [00:29]
Chase/Advertising Voice
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- [01:15]
Wise Advertising Voice
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- [01:46]
Chase/Advertising Voice
Bloomberg audio studios podcasts radio news.
- [02:02]
Tracy Alloway
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
- [02:06]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
- [02:08]
Tracy Alloway
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 seem to enjoy it. But. But we did do a little bit of media industry naval gazing.
- [02:20]
Joe Weisenthal
Totally. So as we've been talking about, if you listen to past episodes from the show, you know, the theme obviously had this big like sort of future of markets, future of trading theme. But you know, I would say, and maybe this is like, I'm very biased here, but I would say that information dissemination collection and I guess you say journalism is an important part of markets, right?
- [02:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
How people get information say journalism like that.
- [02:45]
Tracy Alloway
Huh? Journalism.
- [02:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
No, but you know, like the thing like in the. If you think about, like, the.
- [02:49]
Joe Weisenthal
The flora 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.
- [03:13]
Tracy Alloway
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 huge technological shifts to people who may not, you know, they might be outside of the tech industry? How do you explain, like, an incremental improvement in a model to the average layperson? 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.
- [03:39]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Right?
- [03:40]
Joe Weisenthal
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, is also thinking about, will AI do a better job than we do at precisely that, including writing newsletters or producing podcasts.
- [03:54]
Tracy Alloway
That's right. So we had a trio of perfect guests for this particular discussion. All of them have been on the show before.
- [04:01]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [04:01]
Tracy Alloway
We had James Van Gielen. 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 substack that's all about AI and the culture of Silicon Valley and tech, as well as Sam Rowe. He is the author of one of my favorite newsletters with the best name, the tker. So take a listen.
- [04:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Where to even begin?
- [04:27]
Tracy Alloway
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?
- [04:36]
James Van Gielen
I have gotten two credible death threats, but not on the street.
- [04:40]
Tracy Alloway
Okay. I guess that's a.
- [04:41]
James Van Gielen
That's why I'm very. Yeah, no, yeah. I mean, you know, it's better when it's not in person. Right, right. But no, luckily I've been very much an Internet personality and not someone that does a lot of taped interviews like this.
- [04:55]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We appreciate you making.
- [04:56]
Boost Mobile Advertising Voice
Sure.
- [04:56]
James Van Gielen
Thanks for inviting me, by the way.
- [04:57]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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.
- [05:04]
Sam Rowe
February.
- [05:05]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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 it'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?
- [05:40]
Jasmine Sun
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 Door Cash podcast. You got this, like, whole ecosystem of substacks. One thing that I really noticed and that 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, for a second thinking that, like, any normal person might hear them say it. 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 fees, 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?
- [06:48]
Tracy Alloway
Sam, you write a newsletter, and the tagline is basically, you know, stock markets usually go up over time. You've been very right for the past couple of years because they've certainly gone up. But, like, are things starting to get uncomfortable for you when people are talking about AI bubbles and overvaluations?
- [07:05]
Sam Rowe
Oh, yeah, things are always uncomfortable for me. I think that's sort of like one of the most important things about understanding this idea that stocks usually Go up is the key word. There is usually every way you cut the data. Historically, in good times and bad times and bull markets and bear markets, you always have these periods of volatility where stocks do go down. That's the catch here with stocks usually go up, is that they go down a lot often. So yeah, of course I'm nervous. Especially when you're at peaks. I mean, of course the data will also tell you that the 12 month returns, after all time highs actually tend to be higher than when you're at Lowe's. But yeah, of course I'm nervous. I mean, I think that's like very healthy for anybody in the investor class is even no matter how optimistic you might be over the near term or long term, you have to be prepared for those big drawdowns because they do happen and they happen frequently.
- [08:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Jasmine. So James wrote his piece about, you know, the potential at least, and it wasn't a forecast, it was a prediction, but a scenario.
- [08:08]
James Van Gielen
We've also written other stuff too.
- [08:10]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Right, Right. But no one likes the idea of like mass job loss. But I've been reading some other stuff and there's a lot of people who don't talk about AI job laws. They talk about AI will literally kill every single person in the world.
- [08:24]
Jasmine Sun
Right.
- [08:25]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
If the labs don't do a good job of aligning the models. How seriously do you think the public should take that specific element that if the models are misdesigned, they will destroy humanity as we know it?
- [08:41]
Jasmine Sun
Oh man.
- [08:43]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yes or no?
- [08:44]
Jasmine Sun
Contentious question. Oh God. They call this a P doom out in San Francisco. I won't give you a probability, I suppose. But without getting to the question of like, will literally every single person die? I do think there is a very good reason to be concerned about misalignment and rogue AI. Because when you think about it, sometimes people say that safety and the safety of a model is maybe in tension with these goals like acceleration and is the model really useful. And I think the thing that's really interesting is in the history of AI research, it's often the people who make the biggest technical advances in these foundational models who end up the most concerned about misalignment. And that's because actually the product functionality of the models, their utility is only as good as how controllable they are and how much they do what you expect. So when you say, hey, AI, go off and make me a million dollars or whatever, whether that model goes and does so in a law abiding and safe and nonviolent way, the Safety of the model. The alignment of the model is very correlated with whether it is economically useful as well. So I think that it's important that we not hold them in total tension. And I think there are really good reasons to be concerned with whether these agents are doing the things that we expect them to do.
- [09:55]
Tracy Alloway
Just going back to AI job losses. And I guess any of you can answer this question and please feel free to chime in on every question that ask. But you know, you also hear a lot of the big tech CEOs talk about being genuinely concerned about the future of society once AI is developed and starts like taking people's jobs. Some people interpret that as AI CEOs basically talking their own book and being, you know, like hyping up the capabilities of AI. And then you have some people who argue that like maybe they're genuinely concerned, not least because they're going to get like Molotov cocktails thrown at their houses and things like that. Where do you fall in that spectrum? Is this like a real concern when you talk to senior people in Silicon Valley?
- [10:41]
James Van Gielen
I do think that most of the people that I've spoken to who are worried about it are genuinely worried about it. Something that I'd add to it is pretty much unanimously throughout history when we've had any sort of technological leap forward, it's been a positive thing. And I think that AI will mirror that. It's just the question is we've never had a technological kind of advancement this quickly. We go from having the industrial revolution and the mechanization of agriculture and 95% of people used to work in agriculture and then now I think it's 5% do. And I'm very happy to work in an air conditioned office rather than in a field.
- [11:24]
Tracy Alloway
I know you do some gardening though.
- [11:25]
Sam Rowe
A little bit.
- [11:25]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
Yeah.
- [11:26]
James Van Gielen
So maybe not. But the thing is that will happen. I think believe very strongly it will happen with AI. It's just what happens in the interim. What happens if the models get so good and people kind of adopt them with the same approach and use them correctly over five years instead of 100. So I think speaking to some of the senior people, they would echo the fact that over the next 30 years, AI is going to be an immense force for good and going to make people's lives more comfortable. They're just worried about the pace of the trend.
- [12:01]
Sam Rowe
Yeah, I think the transition is like super important because as much as everyone likes this idea, like even on the corporate side or the shareholder side, like the promise of all this productivity, that's unlocked by AI. And maybe some people are thinking quietly in terms of like, oh, this is going to replace all of our workforce. But the economy sort of stops working when no one has jobs and no one has income. Right? It's great that you have this huge profit margin, but you have no revenue because everyone's unemployed and they don't have any money. And those people aren't shopping, those people aren't buying washing machines and the washing machine manufacturer can't buy metal parts. And suddenly we're digging up less copper and the whole economy shrinks because no one has jobs. Then the whole point of this exercise becomes sort of meaningless, which is why I think you're increasingly hearing from folks on this side talking about things like basic income and guaranteed jobs and all these things. So I think that's where the conversation sort of goes, is, all right, let's make this assumption that we have all this productivity because of job loss. Well, that doesn't work. People need to have money to go out and spend and buy these products that are being produced so efficiently.
- [13:14]
Jasmine Sun
And I mean, it's worth noting that like, for example, like people politicians will point to say retraining is the default. We have never had a successful large scale reskilling program in the history of the United States. During, say, you know, the deindustrialization, you lost all these factory jobs. It wasn't that many jobs. And we created way more net jobs, say in Silicon Valley. But the steelworkers did not learn to code right. And so people are right to be concerned both morally and about the political backlash that could occur even with relatively small, small numbers of net job loss.
- [13:58]
IBM Representative
So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises, so let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a Global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions. Resolving 94% of common questions. Not noise proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business.
- [14:27]
Public.com Advertising Voice
IBM Support for the show comes from public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called generated assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific, like biotech companies with high R and D Spend small cap stocks with improving operating margins or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on Public you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks, go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market ad paid for by Public Holdings Brokerage Services by Public Investing member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors SEC Registered Advisor crypto services by ZeroHash sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com disclosures Ryan Reynolds here
- [15:41]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
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- [15:58]
Chase/Advertising Voice
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee full terms@mint mobile.com Sam like
- [16:12]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I love your newsletter. I read it, I'm a paid subscriber, all that. I think I could train a model to write a newsletter that say stocks go up. Yeah, I think I could like you
- [16:24]
Sam Rowe
know, believe it or not. My I'm pretty sure none of us are going to have My sister My sister recently got into cloud coding and she did this project with herself and and thought that I'd find this really interesting. And basically she created this app that was like a SAM robot that was informed by stuff that I've published and by all this free stuff that's out there. And it's like I was kind of offended first of all. But yeah, it's a problem.
- [16:51]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Do you worry about it as a sole proprietor of a media company?
- [16:56]
Sam Rowe
It's funny. It's like there was this time where you could go out and say, well, something that you can't really replace is the individual's voice, the personality or whatever. And it's like I run some of this stuff too and run these queries and say, well, how would Sam Rowe write this? And it's like it sounds like Me. And sometimes it actually uses the language and comes up with the words faster than how I would. So it's like what I do has to be about something more than just having the Samral voice. Right. So to answer the question, like, the problem and the challenge, and James and Yasmin and I, we talked about this a little bit. In the back is like, where do you add that value? And it's like, it can't be something that's like just sort of replicable or something that someone who might be interested in what you're reading or writing about can put into a query and get back. Like, the toughest part about my job, and I think a lot of our jobs, is being able to come up with those ideas and those angles that no one's asking for. And again, I write about the stock market usually going up, which, by the way, even before AI, is kind of a ridiculous thing to be writing about, because everyone who has money in their 401s and IRAs, I've already been told this. They already know this. So it's like, why do I exist? And it's a relatively small market of people who are reading what I'm writing about. But, yeah, I guess there's something about. And not to toot my own horn, this is reader feedback that I'm getting. But I've been told that there's something about, whether it's the cadence or the timing of things I do write about or the way I frame it, that feels a little bit more human than the research or the analysis that the chief investment strategist or whatever is sending out to their financial advisor who's regurgitating it back to them.
- [18:46]
Tracy Alloway
James, one of the things you've been doing that I don't think a bot can replicate just yet is sending actual human beings or a human being to the strait of hormones. Is that like the edge in media? Is it like first person experiments and data gathering?
- [19:03]
James Van Gielen
Yeah, I mean, you just have to look at this from. I'm pretty confident that investment research won't exist in the same way that it does now. The Internet kind of made it democratized, so to speak, the distribution. It was like only the banks had distribution. Now we have distribution and we can utilize that. But if we're just utilizing it to kind of do the same thing that the banks are doing, well, there is so much investment research that these models have been trained on, and as they get better, they will pretty much be able to do the same thing. So it becomes very much about doing something different. And I think that there's like two ways you can do that. One, you can be right all the time. So hopefully that seems hard. Fingers crossed. Well, you know, I think that one aspect is like. Like when I came on Odd lots was the only media that I did after that piece, which I was very happy, thank you. I said one of your questions, Joe, was like, why do you think this went so viral? And I think it's like this is not like tooting my own horn. It's just sometimes you go on a hot streak. And when we started, that was very much in like a year of just like 100% correct calls. And you know, obviously I've had a bunch of wrong ones since then, but it was like a bunch of people were reading something and they would read it and they were would say, well, if I hadn't read this piece, I wouldn't have bought Nvidia in 2023 or I wouldn't have bought Sky Hynix or something. So I generated value from it. And then if you can add into that something that the model can't do with a query, they can't be out in the real world, then it's going out in the real world. If in five years the robots come and then the models can go out in the real world, we'll have to find something else that they can't do.
- [20:37]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Jasmine, how do you think about this question of what the human writer can still bring to the table? The one time you were on Odd Lots before was nothing about AI. You were talking about Chinese peptides consumption.
- [20:49]
Tracy Alloway
But you did go to a peptide race.
- [20:51]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
No, I know this is what I'm saying. So like that is sort of your equivalent of sending an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz.
- [20:57]
Jasmine Sun
We were talking about this. I'm going to be the San Francisco spy that James sends out. I guess I've doxed myself already, but I can get away.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
But is that like, do you feel like that's a big yes. That like being in it in some way physically in it is that is like what you can do, at least currently, that the AI can basically.
- [21:16]
Jasmine Sun
I mean, I'm very bullish on secrets and I'm very bullish on gossip.
- [21:20]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Right.
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Jasmine Sun
And I mean that's kind of what journalism is in the end, it's. You have what is not in the training data. Like data is like one of the most valuable things. It's like chips, data, algorithms. Right. And the data is out there in the world and they've scraped the entire Internet, they've torn the covers off all these books. Mercur is like paying hundreds of dollars for these experts to like feed all their knowledge into the models. But the thing is, the world's constantly changing. It's very dynamic. There are parts of the world, parties, straits that are unexplored by humans. And if you go and you are the first person to see that, or you're the first person to be there at a critical moment in time, as news is happening, as news is breaking, that kind of actual reporting is like more valuable than ever. One way that I think about reporting is that you have this private knowledge that's maybe known in whisper networks, in the, you know, in some party scene or whatever, or you have tacit knowledge that nobody's really written down yet. And as a reporter, my job is to take the tacit or to take the private and to turn it into public knowledge. Like that particular task I think is extremely robust in the era of AI.
- [22:17]
Tracy Alloway
Okay, so speaking of secrets and gossip and going out into the real world, you recently came back from a trip to China where you were sort of comparing, I guess, how China is thinking and undertaking AI versus the us. What's your big takeaway?
- [22:31]
Jasmine Sun
Yeah, I mean, China is one of those places where it's hard to get a sense of without going in person because it's so restricted what's on the public Internet and we have these walled off Internets. One interesting thing is the way that I think about USAI research is it sort of had three eras of American AI. You had the academic era, maybe you call the boom, kicking off with Imagenet or AlphaGo. You had the commercial era, let's call it kicked off with ChatGPT. And you had the maybe geopolitical era. That's sort of Pentagon and Mythos drama. And China is weirdly still in the academic era more so it's very collaborative, very pro open source. The labs and the researchers themselves seem unconcerned pretty much with the sort of big philosophical and geopolitical questions. And that's there's sort of a division of labor where because the party and the government is so active in shaping exactly what AIs role in society ought to be, then the companies themselves have sort of abdicated that responsibility. And they're also much more focused on collaborating because they'd see collaboration as the only way to sort of maybe have a chance against the US frontier.
- [23:31]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Just to follow up on this a little bit, because so much of the American AI conversation is suffused with both the job loss question and then the even more sinister question of like, will
- [23:43]
Joe Weisenthal
the models turn against us?
- [23:45]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Is that dimension there as well? That sort of the safety alignment part, Is that a big part of the Chinese AI culture?
- [23:52]
Jasmine Sun
Not a lot. And I mean, we asked researchers at a lot of the top Chinese labs how much they thought about safety and it was clear that it was less of a priority. One is that they're compute constrained, right? Like, so one OpenAI researcher is allocated more compute than like an entire Chinese lab, oftentimes because of the chip controls. And so when you're that constrained, you're probably not going to devote as many as much compute to safety and alignment. So that's one thing. The other thing I noticed is just that China has a little bit of this more almost like I call it, like, it's not techno optimism, which sometimes people confuse. It's more like techno determinism or this pragmatic approach, which is that technology has always progressed. Automation, like mechanization, like the industrial revolution, like technology has always progressed. It's overall made life better. There's no way to stop it. There's not really a culture of protest and resistance in China because of the political environment. And so as an individual or as a company, there's no point in being like, oh, we don't want this, we're going to regulate it, we're going to refuse it. Like, it's like you adopt or else you are going to fall off, you're going to get left behind. And so every individual is much more concerned with how can I adopt, like open claw or whatever it is as fast as I can so that I get this job. Because if I don't do it, there's a million people behind me who are going to take it instead.
- [25:02]
Tracy Alloway
James, I know you're approaching the US versus China AI question, I guess both from an investment perspective and also from a social economic perspective. Per your doom scenario, not thesis doom scenario. But where do you stand on this particular question?
- [25:20]
James Van Gielen
I think that it's very important that we continue to sell chips to China. I think that if you were to cut China completely off from chips or crack down on some of the smuggling. There's like a Sun Tzu thing about you build your enemy a golden bridge upon which to retreat. I think it's very similar here where we don't really want to encourage even more capacity for China to take the reins in AI and if we can control certain aspects of the infrastructure stack than the US Absolutely should. I think that the next thing that we'll see, and this is Like a really, I think, kind of spicy take. If you were to look at the price action of the memory complex, I think that we will see within the next, like, Chinese deep seek moment will not be about a model, it will be about hardware.
- [26:12]
Joe Weisenthal
That's a good take.
- [26:13]
James Van Gielen
So. Oh, is it?
- [26:14]
Sam Rowe
Oh, really?
- [26:15]
Tracy Alloway
I thought that. Well, Joe knows about.
- [26:16]
James Van Gielen
Clearly you don't own SK Hynix. I think everyone's kind of piling into the bottleneck trade, so to speak. And I think there's kind of a new vintage of investors that are doing this bottleneck investing without the awareness that bottlenecks are made to be widened. And I think that what's going to happen if we continue to see this kind of meteoric rise in DRAM prices is that just like every other technological bottleneck, there will be a bunch of nerds in their basement that are very, very incentivized to fix this. And there are many ways that you can do that. One is you match flash bandwidth to DRAM. It's 100 times cheaper. And I think that with China, CXMT is there Micron, SK Hyena. And with the IPO happening this year, there will be a lot of capital that will.
- [27:10]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I've been wondering about this because it's like the models are. So why even store any photos or images or whatever in a big bank of memory data? The models could just recreate it on command. And so I've been wondering if in the end storage is not going to be that big of a deal because the model is like, yeah, let's see that photo of me at my son's birthday. And the model will just create it and why did I need to save it to my iPhone?
- [27:39]
James Van Gielen
I think that the reason why it's interesting because if you look at like memory is like a key component of the gpu, right? But then why didn't you know Nvidia was rallying for a year and a half before memory started rallying? Right. So why did that happen? Well, it's because of the advent of agentic AI and having to remember.
- [27:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Sam, I have a question for you. Like, per the theme of your substack, generally speaking, stocks go up is the sub theme. Just ignore everyone else on the stage because you're just going to get distracted and you're going to get freaked out and whatever. And then ultimately ignore all the odd lots episodes, ignore all the news, ignore the doomers. Because in the end, the only thing that can happen if you pay into the news is you do something stupid, then you miss the Long run.
- [28:25]
Sam Rowe
No, no, I'm actually the complete opposite of that. And like I said before, I'm always worried. And this is sort of the message I try to communicate out to the world. Like, you know, I do a lot of things and communicate a lot of things that are kind of counterintuitive. Like, you know, I do check my 401k plan every single day. You know, I do, you know, you know, a lot of advisors and professionals and stuff will go on TV and say, you know, forget your, you know, 401k password or ignore politics or ignore what's going on in Iran. You know, we have a long history of getting past all this stuff. I think that's all incredible, silly. I think you really do have to think about how bad things are at a given time. That way you sort of build up those memories when 10 years from now, when there is another war, you do remember how bad things were in the past and how markets evolved out of all that stuff. So, yeah, I think it's. To ignore things makes you sort of more vulnerable to making mistakes. So it's like, yeah, be really conscious of where there are job losses, where there will be industries that fall apart. Because all the lessons you learn today from all the bad things that happen and when you lose your job and when your neighbors lose their job and then a couple of years from now, maybe the market's higher. Ten years from now, it's going to happen all over again and you're more robust when that stuff happens. So, yeah, I think it's a complete mistake to ignore terrible things going on. As someone who's optimistic in the long run.
- [29:51]
Joe Weisenthal
Good take.
- [29:52]
Tracy Alloway
I have one last question for all three of you and it ties into something that Joe and I have experienced on the podcast, which is a lot of our episodes are starting to feel very surreal. You know, we're talking about like space elevators and data centers in space and companies with like trillions of dollars of market capitalization and lines that always seem to go up seemingly forever. Everything feels very sci fi and surreal at the moment. What's the most surreal thing or data point that you have seen or witnessed in person in recent months?
- [30:25]
Sam Rowe
The first thing that comes to mind, like I said before prompting, I think this is actually Gemini asked us to how would I write this? And came back and I remember thinking, gosh, not only would I have sounded like that, but it's actually using slightly words I would have run through at thesaurus and actively chosen to fold into my writing. That was really kind of scary and it really made me think about separating out exactly what is it that I'm offering to subscribers. So, yeah, but being able to sort of increasingly see yourself in these machines that are getting better at replicating human behavior.
- [31:05]
James Van Gielen
I think that probably for me, there's a quiet kind of robotics boom that's occurring outside of people are kind of waiting until the humanoid robot comes and folds their laundry and everything. But that's the dream. Yeah, for me, for sure. But the thing is, Amazon this year will employ twice as many robots as they do humans. You're starting to see in a lot of the earnings reports from Fanuc, for example, that factory automation is really experiencing a huge inflection that's not commensurate with other segments that are selling into factories. And I think if you just imagine like, what level is robotics going to be at when it's fully like automated the factory, automated the warehouses, by the time it actually comes into your home, that's kind of, that's going to make things so much more surreal.
- [32:00]
Tracy Alloway
Just to be clear, Amazon is not employing the robots, right? That would be interesting.
- [32:05]
James Van Gielen
You just know that, like, when this happens, you will be on a podcast talking about robot rights. Yeah, I can already hear it.
- [32:11]
Jasmine Sun
I mean, it's perfect that James said that, because I was going to talk about my trip to the unitary office in Hangzhou and being both face to face with the humanoids, which is an extremely surreal, Uncanny Valley experience. They are good dancers, they are good fighters, they're incredibly mobile. The quadrupeds are. They look like bug dogs. They're like climbing all over. And those are actively being deployed in factories for inspection and surveillance. We saw a 24,7 pharmacy that was in operation where a humanoid robot would take stuff off and drop it in a box. And delivery drivers, Chinese delivery drivers, were coming in and out. It was fully in operation. And so China's pushing as fast as they can on the factory automation and the physical AI stuff. And when you see it, you just look at it and you're like, that's clearly where the future is headed.
- [32:55]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
By the way, I always do the test when a new model LLM comes out.
- [32:59]
Joe Weisenthal
I say, like, write 10 tweets in my voice.
- [33:01]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
There's still. I. I don't think I do, but there was one from Claude and It's said the 10 year yield doesn't care about your feelings and frankly, it doesn't care about mine either. And I was like, you know what, it's not really a thing I would say, but that's kind of a good tweet. Anyway, thank you all so much, James, Jasmine and Sam for coming on Hot Lots Live. That was a lot of fun.
- [33:33]
Tracy Alloway
So that was our conversation with James Van Gielen of Citrini Research, Jasmine's son, the Substack author, and Sam Rowe, the editor of the newsletter tker. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway
- [33:46]
Joe Weisenthal
and I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest James Van Gielen, he's Trini, Sam Rowe at Samrowe and Jasmine Sunew Sun. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez, Armenarmon Dashiell Bennett at dashbot, Kalebrook at Kel Brooks and Kevin Lozano, Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content go to bloomberg.com oddlots we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24. 7 in our Discord, Discord, GG Oddlauts
- [34:18]
Tracy Alloway
and if you enjoy odd lots, if you like it when we occasionally indulge ourselves in talking about the media, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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