Joe Weisenthal on Mark Carney's Davos declaration that the old world order is dead and China's export trap

technology interaction with 11 Labs. And we do have Joe Weisenthal in the reream loading room. We'll bring him into the TVP ultra. Joe, how are you doing? It has been it has been eons. It's been far too long. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for taking the time.

I missed you guys, too. And it has been far too long. It probably hasn't even been that much time, but probably like there's just been so much that's happened since the last time we connected. It feels year. It feels like years.

There it has been. So So, uh, do you have Davos FOMO right now? I I feel like it's been a good year for Davos. You're normally our foreign correspondent. You're on the ground at all these big hoytoy events. I go to you, but you're appears you're in New York. I'm in the New York studio. You know, I was in Davos in January.

Whoa. We get it, dude. We get it. We get [laughter] it. We get it. Joe, you've been to Davo.

15. They said 10 years and he wouldn't lose touch apparently. He just completely [laughter] lost touch.

No, this is a real story. This is a real story, though. I got like I got like First of all, it's like very cold there. It's not that nice. I got a flu or I got sick there. I was so miserable. Yeah. that when I got back, I told the people inside Bloomberg, I said, "Never invite me to Davos again, lest I feel tempted to say yes." Cuz I don't cuz it's like, "Oh, do you want to be part of our Davos team?" Of course.

Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe. So, I didn't even want the temptation to say yes.

I thought you were going to I thought you were going to say you got back and you immediately switched up on your day one. [laughter]

You never You never looked back.

Not where you came from. No,

no. And it's like I I I do not want the temptation to go back. But I've always been the same as everyone else. Like a Davos, boring, blah blah blah. And then finally there's a good Davos. 10 years or however many years it's been since I went. There's finally a good Davos where there's like a bunch of news and action. And I guess did I have a little FOMO? Maybe I did. I don't know. It seemed like a fun one this year.

Yeah, it's been 55 years, something like that. Uh going strong. What headlines have stuck out to you uh that have come out? We've been tracking most of the AI and tech stuff, but has anything popped up on your radar that's sort of updated you?

Did anything spike your cortisol?

With without question, the Mark Carney speech, the Canadian prime minister, it was like pretty out there in terms of like the old world is dead. There's no point in nostalgia. Everybody for themselves, sovereignty, power, politics is back. And this is like, you know, it's one of these things where like you the three of us could have had this conversation a couple years ago, but to hear it from someone like a Mark Carney who's like he's such an institutional man, right? So he used to be the head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada for the matter uh for that matter like a true internationalist Davos man. I mean I think if you thought of who is Davos man, you would think someone like Mark Carney. So to hear him basically say say like we shouldn't be that world is dead and there's no point in spending time being nostalgic for it. I would say it's sort of a it was a mark tomarket moment I would say. And so without question I think like that was from a sort of geopolitical standpoint the highlight of the whole event. The other one the other speech that I thought was really remarkable or very important was the Chinese vice premiere there talking about how China doesn't want to just be the factory to the world. also wants to buy your stuff because for all the anxiety that we have here in the US, every other country is feeling that stress as well. Their manufacturing sector is getting hollowed out by Chinese competition. So, it's clearly a source of I would say a different anxiety for China that every country around the world looks at them and thinks, wait, are you going to kill my domestic champions as well as you've done to, you know, European chemical automakers and so forth?

It's great. Great that they're saying that, but does anybody actually believe it?

I mean, ask ask like Elon, do you think do you think do do the Chinese really want to buy Teslas?

No. I mean, so I I wrote about this and my take is that like they have been saying this for years. This is not the first time. And they're like, "Oh, we're going to lift domestic consumption and that's going to create imports. Then that'll benefit the rest of the world and so forth." um they've been saying this for years and I think there is this view that's like well this is just lip service it's just they just say it every year and they then they say it again the next year I think however in their defense what I would say is the structure of the sort of domestic Chinese political economy makes it very hard and if I can just get technical for a second they have this very decentralized approach to fiscal policy which is you know all of the different provinces basically run their own economies and the provincial leader They try to achieve goals that are set by Beijing and basically this is how you get this crazy race to the bottom which is every you know every province wants to have their BYD their you know battery maker etc. And so the issue isn't so much whether Chinese leaders in Beijing are serious about wanting to like boost imports. The question is whether their system will ever allow them to get out of the sort of game theory equilibrium where all of the provincial leaders feel incentivized to just export as much as possible. And it is probably a tricky thing to turn around that political system in the same way that we have difficulties that are very difficult to turn around even if someone in Washington DC says otherwise.

What's the sweet spot for Chinese imports? because it feels like they're they are exporting a ton cars and phones and all sorts of stuff rare earth elements.

The sweet luxury goods is the one thing it's like you can't but they want to import chips but we've you know we're really putting the kibash going back and forth whatever

the companies do.

The companies do but uh you know the the China seems to want to be a buyer of semiconductors and silicon but is there a sweet spot product that you think that they'd actually be well suited to scale their imports of? I think this is the this is the real serious question. So I mean even on the chips thing they want to be an importer of chips now but they don't want to be an importer of chips in 5 years right they want to be an importer of chips only so long only for so long as it takes for them to have domestic capacity to produce the world's most advanced chips they certainly I mean they clearly do not want to like have this permanently be importing Nvidia chips or whatever they would like Huawei to uh uh supersede them but then on the other things you know the intuitive answer is like you're like going to um import luxury goods and fine wines and all that stuff. But even there like there was a great uh FT story in December talking about how China is becoming a booming producer of caviar and sparkling wine. These things that we don't associate with China at all or really nice like organic cherries and stuff like that. And so even their there's the sort of effectiveness of their domestic productivity, their ability to sort of identify a sector and get really good at producing it really fast, which you can't knock them for it. That's progress. But it does create these very intense strains. And so you ask, okay, you want to import more from the rest of the world. Well, what do you imagine that's going to be in 2035? What is the rest of the world making that you can't make domestically? You can't really knock the country for it, right? Being good at building things is awesome and everyone would like to do it, but you can't. What is that thing? And I don't think anyone really has that sweet spot answer. I think it's really

Yeah. On the luxury good side, they're so good at making stuff. They can make you a watch that looks exactly like a Rashard. Like it looks it looks like a one to one. The only difference and that that well the kind of saving grace for our RM is like

you can't just like snap your fingers and have you know that quality of the story

but like the but if you can't you definitely can't sort of establish the backstory and the brand the legend that's going to take a long time but I think like even in I bought a Chinese a very cheap Chinese watch last year but I sort of looked into the Chinese watch industry and the sort of like the watch nerds online, you know, people who talk about luxury watches on Reddit, etc. They're full of praise at the quality of the mechanical gearing or whatever

the

in a lot of the sort of so they are catching up, you know, they are catching up fast to what they can do in Switzerland and elsewhere even in that category.

Interesting.

What's going on with Japan? What's going on over there?

So, you know, we did a we actually we have a we have a great episode that came out today. So, we talked to the CEO of PIMCO which you know owns the world's largest bond fund.

That's on the OddLots podcast which is available in your podcast. Wherever you get your podcast making it handmade for over 10 years.

Over a decade.

That's right. Yeah. Handmade in New York City for over a decade.

The P tech Khalifa podcast.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Many people say that. Yeah. You I haven't said that but has a lot of history. It does.

This is what everyone always says. Oh, art. Yes, that's the PC Philippe of podcast. That's right. But um there, you know what? So, everyone's looking at these bond yields in Japan and they're surging and people are saying, you know, Japan has a lot of government debt. That's very true. And they're they're saying, is this the big one, right? Is this the moment where the bill comes due and they're going to have to print a ton of yen and the yen, you know, is worth as much as confetti or whatever? His argument is like, no, that's he just he had just gotten back from Japan. He said, no, that's not what's going on at all. What's happening is that Japanese economic growth etc has been stagnant for 30 years about and there is actually a reinvigorate um reinvigorated uh uh domestic investment and that has an inflationary impulse and that does push up rates you know just in the way that rates have come up in the US since the zer era of the 2010s and his argument which I find compelling is that

if you look at the um the nikkeay the their main stock index and you look at it in US dollar terms that is surging to new all-time highs. So, we're not seeing a collapse of the yen at all. Okay? And you would not expect, you know, if this country was like, "Oh, this is the prelude to hyperinflation." You would not expect to see such robustness in the stock market. And I find that uh I find that compelling. So, for now, I'm going to take it as a sign of a country. expand that a little bit more because uh

hyperinflation you could have asset prices going up even if even if there's not necessarily

the fundamentals changing

yes but you would not expect to see that happening in other currency terms so it's like yes if you look at the Venezuelan stock market in in the 2010s I mean you just look at a line and it looks like it's going through the moon because it ex to the moon existed and then you just like on the Bloomberg you just toggle that and now I want to look at the name stock market in US dollar terms uh not in boloulevards and then you see the stock market's basically gone to zero and so it's like a simple test

yeah like in a period of like broadscale devaluation of the currency you get the phenomena that you describe where everything goes up but when you see it going up in dollar terms there has been some dollar weakness but when you see it going up so much in terms of a foreign uh currency then it's no longer a story about debasement

what did you think about uh some of Ken Griffin's comments ments. I I thought it I I I appreciated his perspective on the AI boom and job loss specifically because this is somebody who's like been heavily focused on automating trading specifically for a very long time working with some of the best

uh what did he say now I feel bad what was the I missed

he he was just basically saying that like this sort of job loss concept is is overblown in in the short

his example he had he said it was he said it was hype

yeah he had a commodities trader come to him with a report that was AI generated and he said he was he was you know amazed with the title amazed with the intro paragraph and then as he dug in he he basically called it slop and it's a classic debate on well are we about to turn the corner and Ken Griffin's the next person to be impressed because Andre Carpathy was not impressed with the code that these models were writing a year ago now he's like I'm falling behind it's amazing and so is Ken Griffin the ne the next domino to fall or is he a canary in the coal mine for some true plateau.

It would be really interesting. I would love to if I could the dream if I I what I would really love is not to hear Ken Griffin's take on AI, but what I'd like to hear is a pod manager within Citadel because so many of those jobs of like running the pods or the um you know, I've talked to a bunch of them now and they're coding jobs. So there someone gets hired as a junior analyst within a pod, right? and they're going to study, you know, they're going to track industrial stocks or they're going to track they're going to trade chemical stocks, but those jobs are like basically coding jobs or a large part and they're they're running back tests and so forth and they're trying to see, okay, what information corresponds to useful signal, what sort of economic data and so forth. And these are all just, you know, they're computer jobs, they're engineering jobs, they're in many cases competing at some of these firms for some of the same talent as many cases as big tech. Yeah. So I agree like like you I I think it's many people would agree with Ken Griffin that you are not going to get some gem of insight about what stock to trade or anything like that or any commodity from a sort of AI generated report. I but you know like it's also we know at every every engineer every software engineer we talk to talks about how much how impressed they are right now with like Opus 4.5 and so forth and so I you know I would be curious because we've talked to we have an episode of the podcast coming out next week with the head of a major bank they are seeing you know the I'll say the tenor of the conversation has changed from last year to this year last year when you ask executives, well, what are you actually getting value out of from AI right now? They would say, well, we have tests everywhere, right? We all of we're all we're testing a bunch of stuff. We're really excited about it. Now, they come back with clear examples of this is a workflow process that was more costly or time inensive last year than it is right now.

And so, I I think from my perspective, clearly just talking to people, people are finding productivity gains that are real from it. That's so funny because yeah, I remember more of the Ken Griffin quote and one of the lines he said was that he specifically asked a bunch of business leaders to give examples of how AI is improving their business and he was taken aback by the fact that none of them were citing generative AI as the core driver.

That's interesting.

But I but I I I agree with you generally. Uh there was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal about how uh the seauite is reporting much more timesaving from AI tools than workers in the nonsweet seuite uh category. Uh and it wasn't sure what to make of that. Um whether it's just like stuff fills the gaps more, there's some sort of incentive. I don't know. I do look I I I still think by and large at this point probably it's modest what people in terms of oh this is like really moving the dial or this is a dramatic change in how productive our employees can be at any level and I'm sort of you know even in the seauite I'm like I I'd be curious to know what exactly they're doing that okay this is saving them time I mean maybe in some cases it might just be they're having an AI draft an email for them that's a lot quicker and there's probably some

yeah I when I think about the seauite job I think about a lot of deep research reports for every every business decision that they're making and they're probably they're not working less they're just saying that you know well to make this one decision I need to I needed to get a survey together of all the companies in this category that I could potentially do business with before I walk into this meeting with this one company that I might do business with and yes that would take an hour on Google and a spreadsheet to pull together deep research does it in 10 minutes in the background on your phone. And so I I feel like there there are real speed ups there and maybe workers just haven't been diffused in that way or it's less relevant in like a non-nowledge work nonexecutive functioning task. It's it's just a different diffusion level. Um anyway, I I want to talk to you about the future of the New York Times homepage because you were I love this topic. I love this topic.

Yeah. Yeah. You were blackpilling a little bit saying that it's not going to be maintained in a future where you know the news is is collected. My point was maybe uh if the cost to maintain the New York Times homepage goes down because AI tools are more available and more diffuse and cheaper that you might actually see a continuation of the greatness that is you know beautiful homepages. What do you think?

Yeah, I think that's a great take actually and I I I I guess my concern isn't like okay we're not going to have websites anymore per se. I mean we still have newspapers that seems so yeah we still have newspapers right but it's more that um you know if in a world in which

we are communicate you know I buy my auto insurance through an AI agent of some s of of some source like why did that why does that auto insurance company really need to have a web presence as we know it or why is the web presence optimized for human consumers as the sort of human consumer uh becomes less and less a factor, less and less relevant for them. So, you know, I I I wasn't even like when I wrote that like I wasn't even like dooming or blackpilling or any of that per se. And actually, you know, even going back to the New York Times example, you know, the post homepage era is actually, you know, it's been there for years, right? So, if you think if you think like the digital

digital media at the New York Times, what are they probably really excited about? Well, it's probably like getting their many of their reporters to get comfortable doing reals or going out doing TikToks where they talk about that story. So, like in a sense, the sort of post web page era has been around for a long time. But it feels like with like the sort of efficacy and the clear usefulness of agents and scraping etc. It's just not obvious why it's going to be much of a priority maybe for you know the times is a really nice homepage and so to your point it would be easy to maintain and so forth. It's probably very easy to maintain as it is or a lot certainly a lot easier than it used to be. It's not clear that this is going to be the sort of dominant way that we sort of trade digital information.

Yeah, they might they they have a big obviously games division.

We could see them we could see them continue to invest or maybe get into gaming, open a casino in Vegas.

The New York Times casino that would be a great idea. I went to Vegas hanging out by the pool at the New York Times casino. I want high stakes Wordle. [laughter] I'm putting a 100 G's down on Wordle. Let's go.

I would love People would love that. They got [laughter]

people probably would love that.

Yeah.

The thing about the New York Times is um you know other than there's a handful of others perhaps and I'd like Bloomberg is one of them. But you know it is a brand. It is a lifestyle brand right in a way that very few news outlets of any sort have ever been able to achieve. So, you know, they go into cooking and they have cooking shows. They go into uh, you know, simple games on the phone. There are not many news entities of any sort that could pull that off. And I've always been for years a sort of not literally, but a a New York Times bull because it's just been so obvious to me that there is this one news brand that is also this big lifestyle brand and their core subscribers will follow them into all of these new ventures. And it's just something you know like

I don't want to name names but like other like big publications uh similar national general news publications do not have that same cache where if they get into some totally new line of business that they'll have subscribers who will pay up all of that money. So the New York Times is sort of a sort of a special entity.

Totally. Totally. You know I completely agree. It's also interesting that the New York Times has managed this like sort of influencer transition remarkably well. When I go on YouTube, I'll see the Ezra Klein show or Ross Det or Hard Fork and and Ezra and and Ross have like their own brands, but they it's still like has the aesthetics of the New York Times and they brought that into YouTube and they do these collabs like just watching how they've actually mechanically positioned as the talent is more forward but it's still under the umbrella. very very smart

and every again every publication would love to pull that off but it's really tough because then you get this situation which the talent says like oh wait why am I still here etc. I think it actually speaks to just like how powerful that New York Times brand is. Yeah. That someone, you know, Ross Alet, Ezra, etc. No, this is a very good fit. But it's tricky. Every publication is going to try to do some version, have their own, you know, equivalent of their Substack roster, right? Or have their equivalent of that. And I think very few are really going to be able to pull it off at scale.

Are you oneshotted by vibe coding? [laughter]

Yeah. You know what? I I have like full-on AI psychosis and I'll tell you here's here's the uh here's the evidence that I realized

complete victory of attack.

Yeah. So, here's uh I I I'm going to admit this um here, but here's here was the moment that I knew I had full-on um one-shotted psychosis, which was whatever whatever term you want to use. So, I was like vibe coding. I was using cloud code and I was like very uh impressed and then I opened up a second claude code window. So, cuz I wanted to be able to work on a couple like aspects of the project in parallel. And then the second window, it made a suggestion for what I work on that was actually a very bad suggestion. It was the first had I actually said yes to the suggestion, it would have really set me back quite a bit. It was and I'm glad I paid attention, overwrote it. And my first thought in that moment was like the original window would have never made that mistake. You know, it's [laughter] like the original window, that window really got me. this window doesn't get me at all. And I was like, I'm I'm I'm sticking with the window on the right side. And in that moment when I like had that thought that, oh, this window doesn't get me the way the other window. I was like, Joe, okay, I got to step away from the computer a little bit. That is those are early signs. I think I'm like, you know, I'm very proud of myself. I think I avoid psychosis of all sorts. I've been on Twitter for 15 years and I haven't gone crazy. And so I was like, okay, I saw that in myself. I was like, step away from the computer. It's just a computer. There's no personality. There's not one screen that gets me better. But when I noticed that, I was like, okay, I am I am more at risk perhaps uh than I thought.

What have you been building?

Yeah. So, I'm very obsessed uh for years with this idea that people write and speak fundamentally differently. And when we give speeches, we use various things. We rhyme and we speak in rhythm and we use pneumonic aids and we say first and you and all these different linguistic things have just been a personal interest of mine. And I sort of think that a as uh as digital media has saturated our lives over the last 15 20 years, even our written text comes to resemble more um spoken text. And so I thought, well, it would be fun if you could like build a piece of software that actually empirically tested this question like do does a piece of writing in a newspaper today resemble more written word than say that same column or whatever 20 years ago? I'd like to be able to test this out. And there various lexical markers that uh linguists and others have used to work on these things. So I thought, okay, it would be fun to see if I could build this. And so I've actually been able to uh build it. People go check it out. Havlock.ai. And you just drop a piece of text in. And then it says, "This sentence looks literate. This sentence looks like the spoken word." And so forth. And it's almost works. Like I'm actually astonished. It's not perfect by any stretch. I still have a lot of work to do, but basically I sort of was able to vibe code this sort of machine learning model where I trained a model to to detect this is rhyme, this is not, etc. And then it breaks out every sentence and then sort of scores the whole piece and it works and I'm sort of astonished.

You're testing it on Davos.

Yeah. Like so I you know I tested on the Mark Carney speech and the Trump speech and the difference is remarkable. It's every sentence. It sort of classifies one as this resembles the spoken word, this resembles the written word. And the difference, you know, we hear this, right? You hear the two speeches, it's like, okay, they're speaking in a very different register. This feels very different. And it's cool that like I've been uh you know with two weeks of hobby coding been able to build this model and I actually I trained uh you know I'd learned how to I don't know what I learned but I was able to build this little machine learning model that identifies each sentence and categorize in one and I'm like this is crazy. it actually kind of works and I don't know anything about code and this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time and I was able to just build it and it's cool because one shoted

it's something uh it's something that like I'm I'm sure you could find a way to turn it into a business but it's actually a tool that just should exist like there were so many tools that didn't exist because there was no business justification to devote hundreds of hours

exactly that right like so this is an interesting thing but who's actually going to take the many many sort of uh hours that it would take to actually code this cuz I don't think there was like some obvious path to riches here. But it was a you know I did like an hour or two a day for a few days at 5 in the morning before my kids got up and it is a properly working piece of software that I can use. I still need to fine-tune a little a lot. There are still mistakes and so forth, but it actually works. You need to turn into like a vibe codingmindset influencer [laughter] every morning. It's like, it's 5:00 a.m. I'm tired. I'm still at my I'm up at my desk. Everyone else is sleeping. I'm

willing. It's the photo of the watch every day.

It's 2 a.m. on the West Coast. Every All my enemies are sleeping.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm going to

That's great. I just ran my most recent I just ran my most recent uh uh essay through havlock.ai. I got a 76% orality score. I write very very loosely strongly oral.

Part part of that is start the essay I I started the essay Trump Greenland Elon blah blah blah let's focus on the important thing like because I I deliberately write exactly like I talk but

so that's like and like I'm pretty happy about that. It sounds like it scored it pretty well. It also means that you are writing in a way that connects with the modern um you know the modern audience and so I think that's great and you could test that and now you can know and is this in the contemporary register and I don't know like high score low score better or worse I just think it's cool that this thing can actually sort of figure it out.

I love it. I love it. Anything else Jordy?

No super fun.

Thank you so much for taking the time for me. Always great. Can't wait to talk to you soon.

Great to hang.

Have a good one.

Talk to you. Have fun out there. Goodbye. Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes and apps fast.

That is right.

So up next we have an anonymous guest. An anonymous poster.

Healing an anonymous poster join.

An internet anthropologist.

The Tik Tok anthropologist called healing midwesterner in exile. loneliness, epidemic super spreader, and a dark statistician. I'm going to tell you about Crowd Strike before we bring him in to the from the reream waiting room. Crowd Strike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. So, without further ado,

chat is saying that Microsoft is down. Microsoft is down.

What happened?

People are not getting emails, but I thought the stock was down. Wyatt is in the chat hanging out with us because Microsoft is down. So, little silver