Bring him in. Bring him in. Bring in Joe Weisenthal. I don't want to wait anymore. Oh, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really good. I'm thrilled to be back here.
How are you holding on? What are you doing?
Holding on with the market. The market was flat on Monday and we didn't know what to do. Normally, we're either depressed and praying for something to change, or celebrating a big update. We've seen these like 5% swings and it's just been boring. It's so painful. I thought like, you know, the market stopped moving and I was like, the technology brothers will never have me back. They'll never have a reason to call me again. I had one month of relevancy. People were listening to my podcast because the lines were moving up and down and then they stopped and I'm like, 'Okay, well, I enjoyed it while it lasted.' Back to obscurity.
So, yeah, we're having you on to... We want to have you back on the show. We're having you on to move the market.
Yeah. Yeah. This will drive the market. We'll see. We want to create some volatility just off of some zeros.
Well, I mean, so with the trade war... Yeah. I kind of had this somewhat controversial take that the trade war was not like COVID or the interest rate crash because the person who caused it could immediately undo it and Trump could roll it back, which he did.
And I was talking to Jordan Schneider at China Talk about this, like he was saying, like, no, this time is different. It's not going to be like the trade war from Trump 1. We're going to look back on this as like the beginning of the end. It's terrible. He was very doomilled. But it feels like now if we flash forward four years we could be looking back on this and being like that was a crazy month but it wasn't that big of a deal in like the world historical context. What's your read on it now?
It's a really tough call because I was very sympathetic to that and then as soon as he walks it back, like of course he was going to walk it back for everything that was different. All that being said, we have a laugh track now.
I love that. It's so professional.
All that being said, a 10% baseline tariff on the rest of the world is not nothing. We are now a high tariff country.
There is this pause, but a 50% tariff or whatever it's going to be is not nothing. These are not complete nothings. And I do believe that they will change the economy in some ways that they anticipate. Look, when he unveiled that chart on April 2nd, I thought it's like, well, he's basically unplugging the economy. We can't function with these levels. And he sort of realized that, too. He said the bond market got yipped. He went back and then he probably heard stories about potential empty shelves of places like Walmart and Home Depot and stuff. And then he dialed it back further. We're still in a new era though of trade. It might be more like Brexit where it's like, yeah, if you go to... I was in London a few weeks ago, it's still the same old UK. It's still a pretty like rich country. It's doing well, but they haven't grown that much. It hasn't been particularly good. So, it might be the kind of thing where we don't notice it dramatically except maybe we don't grow as much as we could. Who knows, though? Can you... I don't know if it's the weather, but when I'm in the UK, it's something about the slow growth of the economy that's just... you can smell it. You can smell it.
Well, hopefully it doesn't cover America. Can you tie this to the credit downgrade? How serious is that? Should we care about what Moody's thinks about?
I don't care about credit ratings. I mean, I'm sort of a strict view that we borrow in currency. We borrow in dollars and print dollars, so we'll never default. But there is a... you know, I would say there's two things, which is one that, you know, it looks like we're going to get some sort of inflationary mix potentially between tariffs and tax cuts. So that tends to not be very good for treasuries. And to the extent, you know, that like policy changes in the US are now everyone understands that they can be unilaterally changed on a whim, probably not great all things being considered for the perceived institutional stability. So that's probably also not great at the margin for the international proclivity to invest in the United States. You know, the one thing that's really notable is that a lot of markets clearly have rebounded to an extraordinary degree, most notably the stock market.
The dollar is still very big. Bitcoin high. Bitcoin all-time high. Amazing. The dollar is still...
Well, can I by the way... Oh, Pomp was on earlier. Can I just say a surprise guest? That's...
Can I just say, the first time I was on this show, one of the questions the two of you asked me was, 'Will SPACs ever come back?' And I said, 'Well, in my lifetime, they will definitely come back.' Pomp has a new SPAC. When I said that SPACs would come back, I was thinking like 5, 10, 15, 20 years. I did not think that we would be getting... They said Pomp doesn't have the balls to launch a SPAC in the year 2025. And he proved him wrong. He proved him wrong. I've never had a prediction come true that fast as that one. So, I appreciate Pomp vindicating my last appearance on TBPN.
Yeah, it's great. Vindicated. I want to talk about like the Middle East deals. What was your read on all of that? It didn't seem like it was super market moving per se, but it was very big in tech and it seems like there's this new era of cooperation there. It seemed like amid all the turmoil of the tariffs, there was like this bright spot of like some really strong new alliances. Obviously, there's some controversy there, but what was your read on the Middle East news?
You know, I've been posting about this a lot. You know, since I hit my mid-40s, I've been reading a lot about the Cold War and mid-20th century history because that's what you do at my age and so forth. But one of the things that I've been reading about lately is that one of the... you know, every time the US and the Soviet Union appear to have some period of détente, so to speak, one of the entities or one of the forces that pushed the countries apart were the sort of like the human rights groups, etc., that really didn't like, you know, various activities going on in the Soviet Union and that often made it difficult to have peace. It's an interesting thing to think about. Well, what if foreign policy just became a little bit more transactional? We sort of accept that like there's like a very different system in this country than, you know, this other country. But you know what, maybe we can have stable relations if we agree to sell them cutting-edge GPUs to set up an AI. It's an interesting thought and I don't have like extreme or strong views on foreign policy. It's not my wheelhouse. But it's an interesting thing to think about. You know, for so long there was this view that, you know, like an important aspect of stable relations was some sort of common ground in governance and values and so forth. And maybe we are entering this era where stable relations are who we agree to sell chips to. On the other side, it's an interesting thing to think about.
Jensen, another hundred billion for Jensen.
Yeah, he's been on a tear.
Have you been tracking how many conferences he's been going to? He's... it feels like he's at a different conference every single day. And yet, normally that would be very, very distracting for a CEO, but every time he goes to a conference, he leaves with a hundred billion dollar deal. So, it seems like it's working.
It's really remarkable. And you know, again, I don't know how much... like I've been trying to think about this, like because the way people are talking about AGI, and you guys have probably a lot of guests who know way more, and being out there is like, you know, the race to achieve AGI is something akin to like which country will develop the nuclear bomb first? We must get there. I don't know. It feels a little sci-fi to me. I don't know how much to take that seriously. Other people are better equipped to talk about that. But there is this sort of like simple business story. And so to the extent, like just from a business standpoint, Jensen going around the world making all these sales, potentially boxing out Huawei from the Middle East, just from a business standpoint seems to be doing very well.
Yeah, we were just talking to Scott Wu from Cognition. They have an AI coding agent. And this idea that we have AGI, but it's just 15-minute AGI. Like you can get an agent to go and do 15 minutes worth of research for you and compile a little dossier for you in deep research. You don't have AGI to the extent that you can just say go create economic value for the rest of your life like you can with a human and the economic incentives just lead to a person finding their way in the economy and finding a job and buying things and consuming things.
I still haven't had like a great experience yet with any of the agent tools. I was... someone asked me, they're like, do you have a list of all of the Twitter handles of guests that have appeared on Odd Lots? And I was like, no, but let's see if I could do that. So, I went to Manus, the Chinese Manus.im, and I said, 'Can you put this together?' Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know. And then it's pronounced Manus, too, by the way. Manus. And then it worked for like... it was like 30 minutes later. I went back and checked and it said, 'Oh, you're out of credits.' So I never even got to see if it worked yet. So, I don't know. I have yet to experience...
Well, the question for me is, how long do you think it would take, you know, like an intern to do that job?
Well, it would take a really long time, but like I don't even... like but you know, like my experience, I think we may have talked about this last time, like my experience, like I'm still not totally convinced that they're like reliable yet. I don't know.
I think you make a good point. It's just that when I think of 15-minute AGI, I think that what's a 15-minute job? It's look at the most recent Odd Lot show notes and find me the one Twitter handle for the guest. Yeah. And now if you want to do that 200 times, that's not 15-minute AGI. That's one week AGI. And you need to spawn all these different processes and orchestrate them and fact-check them and build that up. And so yes, man should be able to do that, but it's not... I think it's just wildly unreliable right now. And so sometimes you get an output that is 10 times faster and better than your best employee. And then sometimes it just completely fails. And we're not really equipped to like process, okay, is the agent good? Okay, well sometimes the agent is incredible and then other times it's like yesterday I wanted it to count a bunch of boxes and it like worked on it for 14 minutes and failed.
I completely agree. Like I'm every day still... And by the way, the music app. I'm a songwriter.
That actually, of all the AI tools that I've played with, that might actually be the one that's most incredible. I've been doing this thing where I just sing a song into my phone and then I say, now produce this to sound like an 80s country song, and it actually works. So that like some of these things just like absolutely blow me away.
I have a thesis for that because with music there's no right answer. Like there's no... oh, you got one character wrong in the Twitter handle and it's not going to resolve right. But if you get one note slightly wrong but it still sounds like music, you can kind of chalk that up to the vibe or slight differences. And so I feel like that's why the image generation, it's less like binary, or you have code where it compiles and it can work against itself and check, okay, does the code work or not, try again, try again, try again. And so you either need to be... when you're in the messy middle of like human management, decision-making, analysis, that's where AI is really struggling right now. So just going back to the question of like, can AI compile all of the Twitter handles from every guest? I'm guessing the answer is yes. On the other hand, if that's what AGI is, I'm not really sure it's existential whether like totally China, the Chinese model is better than OpenAI.
AGI is when you can ask ChatGPT to bring down the long end of the yield curve because it's really getting up there. And right now, if I could just go into ChatGPT and say, 'Hey, let's do something. Help us out here. Let's do something that we need to develop right away.'
