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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
And without further ado, our first guest of the show is in the waiting room. We have Tyler Cowen, the American economist, to talk to us about all things. How are you doing, Tyler? Good to see you again.
Speaker 2:Hello. How are you? I don't drink coffee.
Speaker 1:I I was my dad. I have to ask every guest. Are you
Speaker 3:gonna start? Are you gonna start?
Speaker 2:I've only had coffee twice in my life, both times in rural Ethiopia in a coffee ceremony. And it was amazing. But I thought this is the peak. I can't beat this.
Speaker 1:Is that because you'd become too powerful or do you see it as a Faustian bargain?
Speaker 2:I see people getting addicted to it and if they can't get their morning coffee, they have headaches.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it does supply chain.
Speaker 3:How often are you somewhere where you can't possibly get a coffee in the morning?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It can't, but you have to go out and get it or go to some effort or you're in a hotel room and you make a crummy coffee there
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And then you don't really enjoy it. It's just simpler not to have that addiction, I think.
Speaker 1:What's very interesting is that coffee, caffeine pills are incredibly economically efficient. It's like 1¢ for the equivalent of a cup of coffee if you buy them in bulk and yet absolutely zero adoption. People love a cup of coffee even if it's a couple bucks. It's like a simple pleasure. It's a joy.
Speaker 1:People just can't stop paying for them.
Speaker 3:Do you do anything in the morning? Any type of ritual that you feel like you have to do to be yourself? He's
Speaker 1:like Celsius.
Speaker 2:No. I get high from mineral water. But if I don't have it, I'm fine. I'm not craving it.
Speaker 1:I'm addicted. Okay. Okay. Well Okay. Let's talk about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the latest debate around Kimi k three open source AI? Where should we begin the discussion? And then I'm sure we can narrow down a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 2:Open source and is coming and is here whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from China. We should allow American competitors to proceed on an even footing. But basically, the attempt to outlaw it or ban it or use sanctions against it is gonna fail miserably. Like, about multinationals?
Speaker 2:What about companies whose affiliates use open source? What about all the major US companies that use open source Chinese products right now? I hope, I plead that the Trump administration gives up on this crusade. Sure. It cannot work.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I wanna push back on on it cannot be banned because I at first blush, agree with you. Like, it is software. It is something that can just be downloaded. You can download the weights and have it.
Speaker 1:Anything that that that's that's replicable infinitely, should just proliferate across the world very quickly. But the fact that you need an NVL 72, you need a whole server rack, you need equipment and infrastructure, that acts as a point of leverage. I'm not saying that we should ban it. I'm just saying if you put me in charge of banning it, I think I would have an easier time banning open source AI than banning music distribution, for example.
Speaker 2:What will you do when it's on device? How long is that from now? True. Why go down the path at all?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That yeah. That's a good point.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What what what lessons are there from the automotive industry for this moment? Just just given, you know, the the use of of tariffs and how that those have worked and haven't worked. Mhmm. And we were talking, you know, earlier about how Europe's approached the problem.
Speaker 3:You see BYDs all over Europe now. But at the same time, many of the manufacturers have been hurt most by just losing the Chinese market. Right? Or not losing it, but having declining sales there because of local alternatives.
Speaker 2:I think if Europe starts a major trade war with China, Europe will lose. This is a sad reflection on Europe, and it's a sad reflection on Europe that they can't just say, oh, we'll make fewer cars. We'll do five or six other great things that we're readily positioned to shift into. They're not really there. But simply putting up big tariffs isn't going to help them get there.
Speaker 2:It actually will postpone it. And those tariffs over time end up applying to the inputs for your other sectors, and it makes them less competitive. So Europe's really in a pickle. There's no good way out, but I don't favor the tariffs either.
Speaker 1:How do you think about, the open source models, in in terms of, like, the broader AI stack? Like are is it important that America have some position in energy, data centers, chip manufacturing, networking? There's this whole stack. And I've been surprised that we've been building as many data centers as we have in The United States, given all the pushback. That feels like something that could have gone to at least other Western nations, energy rich countries, but that's been fairly centralized.
Speaker 1:But there's there's clearly it feels like there's a potential slippery slope for, oh, well, if China's handling the open source models, then maybe they should have the data centers. Maybe they should also do the power generation over there. It's dirty. We don't like having data centers here. Put them over there.
Speaker 1:And then at some point, it feels like you could lose leverage and but I don't know how risky that actually is.
Speaker 2:I live right next to all the data centers in Northern Virginia. It's great. They pay for half of the taxes of their county. The energy, the INB, all that, I'm completely for it. The chips, Bring it on.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But at the end of the day, people are afraid that the American models can be yanked from them. Sure. That's partly our fault.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if there's open source as something in the background, people are more willing to lock into our systems to a partial extent. So the two are complements, in fact. And again, there's all these major American companies that don't typically advertise it, but they use a lot of Chinese open source right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're just gonna pull that out of their guts?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, both enterprises actually deploying these models for cost savings and also I mean, we saw with thinking machines. They they use the Chinese open source model to bootstrap a a step in the process of building their latest product. And so it's a whole supply chain.
Speaker 1:Where do you think the data center pushback comes from? If you are there and have a positive experience, it's polling very poorly. Is it all fear around job displacement? Is it anything particularly on the ground? Like, where where did this come from?
Speaker 2:I think right now, people are just negative about many, many things. They're negative about their country. They're negative about social institutions except the military. They're very low levels of trust. They were told during COVID times, during the great financial crisis, everything's okay when it was not.
Speaker 2:So you can't completely blame them. But look, as you know, this country has 50 states. And if Mark Zuckerberg needs to pick up the phone and call the governor of Louisiana Mhmm. Thank goodness that can work here. And I think we're gonna do
Speaker 1:it. What is it about this we're in this, like, counterintuitive vibe session moment. Kyler Scanlon sort of written about it, coined the phrase, this idea that when when you pull people on how are your neighbors doing economically or financially, people say, they're doing fine, but I'm doing terribly. Or The economy will grow. The job market will be stable, but people will report that consumer confidence is very low.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if you've reflected on that more generally. And then I do have a follow-up question. But is the state of the Vibe session? Is it just continual? Is it permanent?
Speaker 1:Is it getting worse?
Speaker 2:I call it negative emotional contagion. Mhmm. And you see it in many other eras of world history. Mhmm. It feeds on itself.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure we know what starts it. Maybe it is some negative events. But once it gets going, it's hard to reverse. Sometimes you need actually a war or some kind of catastrophe. I hope we do not.
Speaker 2:But if you look at wealth accumulation, the job market, stock prices, real wages, many other indices, they're doing like okay to find. They're just not doing terribly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. I completely agree. And so I had this idea.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you'll agree, but, maybe the fact that we're in this vibe session and the vibes are so bad and there's so much negative emotion around the economy that if we actually were to go through a brief recession or a market correction, we might be a more resilient country, sort of ironically, because of that because everyone would look around and be like, well, I already thought it was bad. It got a little worse, but I'm ready to reinvest. I'm maybe this is what I've been waiting for. Finally, I'm justified in thinking things are bad. And so I can get out of this and do whatever's necessary because I am I'm I'm there's no longer a cognitive dissonance between the what the market is doing and how I feel.
Speaker 2:One hopes. Yes. It could be a bullish signal. But then again, if something terrible does happen, everyone says I told you so maybe we get stuck in the mire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jordy? About a
Speaker 3:year ago, you had a blog post, if I remember correctly, one of many of course, that that was something to the effect of like AI is real and it's amazing, but the economy is still gonna just sort of generally continue growing as it's grown, maybe a little bit faster, hopefully.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Are you seeing anything that could update your worldview on that? Because so far, feel like you've been pretty vindicated.
Speaker 1:Deserve a victory lap.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm seeing a lot of confirmation. There's so many people they will say to me or say in chat groups or on Twitter, my goodness, if we had Fable five, I would have thought the world would be totally different and it's not.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:that's my view. But look, you go back to 1995 through 1998, we got half a percentage point of extra growth out of those advances. They, to me, seem less impressive than AI. So I think over time, with some slowness, we'll get that and maybe a bit more, which is great.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Have you seen The Odyssey?
Speaker 2:I have seen The Odyssey.
Speaker 1:Can you give us your review?
Speaker 2:Well, look, compared to other movies, it's fantastic and it's dreamy and it's impressive. But mostly, I was disappointed. I thought the dialogue was lame. The casting, I don't mind the cross ethnic casting at all. I just didn't think they were the right people.
Speaker 2:Matt Damon is not Odysseus. He's just not impressive enough physically. The woman who played Calypso just seemed like a suburban housewife. I love Zendaya, but she didn't have any real role. So they screwed up many things.
Speaker 2:It didn't quite cohere. I'm very glad I saw it. Everyone should see it. It's worth the three hours. But relative to expectations, I suppose a disappointment.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's do you think classicists are satisfied with it? Do you think it's good for the field?
Speaker 2:They're delighted to have any attention at all. And the different translations of the Odyssey are now on the bestseller lists. So what's their alternative? Right? They shouldn't complain too loudly.
Speaker 3:Do you think technology is making soccer worse?
Speaker 2:I don't watch soccer, but I think technology in some ways has made basketball worse. And I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of soccer, that it homogenizes things and everyone chases after the same targets, the same players. Teams have less individual style. But two soccer, I cannot speak.
Speaker 3:Fair.
Speaker 1:What about AI maniacs? Take me through what defines an AI maniac, why it's important, and I have some, some pushback and follow-up questions.
Speaker 2:I spoke to two teenagers this morning. One was 13, one is 17. Abu Dhabi, Finland, they're AI maniacs. They spend their spare time mastering AI. They know way more than their so called teachers.
Speaker 2:They're starting companies or building models. They realize this is the future. You're going to have a large number of companies with quite a very small number of employees but pretty high revenue. And I think AI maniacs will compete in medicine, law, business consulting, banking, wherever it is we let them compete. So this to me is the future.
Speaker 2:Like, if you're asking, will The UK recover? I would rephrase it. Is The UK going to encourage its AI maniacs?
Speaker 1:How can they encourage these AI maniacs? It feels like AI naturally lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship. And so, there's not much encouragement that's necessary. I mean, as long as the models are available and affordable for young people, they will do things with them.
Speaker 2:Young people should be allowed to rise to positions of authority. Respected. They shouldn't be looked down upon. They should have the chance to buy a computer, get grants. It's not automatic.
Speaker 2:So you look at The United States, we do great on all these metrics. Estonia is a country that does pretty well on these metrics. A lot of parts of the world are too small c conservative, and we'll see where different countries are gonna fall on this spectrum. But they're not all gonna do it automatically, just like not all countries have made great rock and roll. So the technology is pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Estonia is famous for major government investing in in high speed bandwidth. Is that correct? Is that the is that the rough Yes.
Speaker 1:Story of Estonia?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And but I'm interested in what that would look like for AI in America or The UK. Like, it feels like many of the models or application layer companies, they have sort of a free tier that gets someone potentially from zero to close to AI maniac and then at some point they can go and find a customer to help pay for their compute bills. But is there more the government should be doing?
Speaker 2:But as you know, with venture capital, there's a valley of death. Sure. I don't know that the government should be making grants to 16 year olds, but someone should. Yeah. I'm doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Other people should as well. So this is really the province of youth. Yeah. There's nowhere you can go to learn this stuff other than, say, some of the major AI centers and companies.
Speaker 2:So you've got to teach yourself. And is there the support in your environment for that? We will see.
Speaker 1:Give give us an update on how you're thinking about grants. Are you going younger, broader, smaller, different partners? I mean, there's been some folks who have been able to do compute grants and then they sort of cap sort of the the dollars go further because of the implicit margin.
Speaker 2:With AI maniacs, I'm going younger and weirder. And I've also noticed Europe is doing pretty well on the AI maniacs metric.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:We'll see how it develops as the costs rise.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I've been pleasantly surprised, and I'm now more optimistic about Europe than I was six months ago.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How does that like, where did that come from? That feels like a come from behind story for Europe. I feel like the for the longest time, the the brightest technologists in Europe have gone to America to start their companies. The the Collison's famous example.
Speaker 1:There's many others with the exception of like the Swedes and Spotify, I suppose. But in general, it feels like many people have come. Are they staying more frequently? Like, what's happening?
Speaker 2:Well, these kids may yet go to America. They're too young to be going now. Maybe it's that, you know, chatbots didn't interest the Europeans that much. They seem to, like, compete with culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Agents are a chance to do something. Now American kids have had opportunities to do things for a long time. Yeah. But for the European kids, this is something new. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think at the margin, you'll see more extra activity there. Yeah. And a lot of new companies from quite young people coming out of all of Europe, including Eastern Europe.
Speaker 1:Do you think young people are better at avoiding the fake work trap that happens with some AI users? You know, the person that just builds an automated workflow to, you know, check summarize every meeting, and then they never look at the notes. And it's just endless token consumption in service of, like, creating the ultimate second brain that they never actually refer to. And it's it's ultimately a lot of make work, but it feels very productive, sort of the tool shaped shaped objects formulation.
Speaker 2:I think the young people are more playful with it. They take more chances. Mhmm. In the aggregate, they might even do worse. But in terms of coming up with the new things that really matter, think they're gonna win.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What do you think about the the risk of of the one shotting from AI? People that, go so deep in it, they lose they lose their grip on reality.
Speaker 2:It happens with everything, you know. When I was a kid, people one shotted on baseball. Can you imagine that? Or like drugs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:AI is one of the better things to be one shotted from, I would say.
Speaker 1:No. I I was laughing about I know some guys who've been basically one shotted by golf. And they Yeah. And all day Can
Speaker 2:you do that?
Speaker 1:Every day. They're like reading about golf, studying golf, trying to improve their golf game and it's the same thing as AI. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What, if a billionaire came to you and said, Tyler, it seems that my type is very unpopular right now. What should we do to to try to, shift public opinion? Right now, there's a, I think, a $80,000,000 campaign being spent to, block the the the billionaire tax here in California. But it seems like there are other things more broadly that that billionaires could do to shift public perception. But what do you think?
Speaker 2:I would say don't apologize and keep on going. I hope the billionaire tax fails. It will wreck California. If it passes, it's already harmed California. Even a lot of the Democratic Party politicians don't support it.
Speaker 2:I think again, there's just this negative sentiment about many, many things, including billionaires. You might say some of them deserve it. Fine. Like with all humans. But at the end of the day, I'm reminded of the old saying from Jonathan Swift, and he said, censure is the tax a man pays to the public for the privilege of being eminent, unquote.
Speaker 2:If you succeed, people will hate you.
Speaker 3:But You saw this,
Speaker 2:you know, wasn't Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Levitt, Paul Krugman, whoever did well got hated.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's right.
Speaker 3:At the same time, would, building some massive, you know, parks and or, you know, any any type of of public work. Yes. I I Be be worthwhile.
Speaker 1:The interesting question is, is there is there some sort of, like, like, a greater leverage from having, like, the library that you walk by versus, like, 1% lower levels of malaria that's, like, this abstract thing that you don't see. Like, there's something about building, a monument as a wealthy person as opposed to having an abstract diffuse impact on humanity even if the reduction
Speaker 3:Maybe the modern version of a park is just like owning an NFL team.
Speaker 1:It doesn't really feel the same.
Speaker 2:Obama just built a monument. True. Does anyone love him for it? Now, I'm all for today's billionaires doing more to support art, music, libraries, whatever we all might come up with, but I don't think it's gonna make them loved.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not. What about religion and AI? There were Anthony Lewandowski was working on an AI religion way before it was cool.
Speaker 1:I think 2017, he was thinking about this. Where do it feels like we're maybe behind the curve on a true AI based religion. It feels like based on the capabilities of the models, you could have something happening. There's little pockets of people that are obsessed with certain models, but, I haven't seen anything formally being built out. Where do you think that goes?
Speaker 2:I think it'll be more like sects than new religions. Mhmm. So you could write your own version of Hindu sacred books or your own version of Shiite Islam with your own, you know, slate of who the true imams are or should be. Mhmm. And we're just gonna see proliferation.
Speaker 2:Like for a while in history, we had a proliferation of different versions of the LDS Church Mhmm. Different kinds of Mormons. Some are still around.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And using an agent, you'll be able to whip up your own religion, I don't know, in less than a day with rituals, sacred books, practices. Most won't catch on, but if you will, they'll have a few 100, a few thousand adherents. That may sound trivial, but if half of 1% of the population does this and some of these get some number of adherents, over time, the whole religious landscape looks quite different. I think it will be more diverse and feel weirder and be less centralized in religious authorities.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Where do you think the Amish will be in two hundred years? I saw someone try and use one of these AI models to project out project out the human population in in twenty twenty two hundred. And the prediction came back as, like, America will be 34% Amish. And I think it was just extrapolating, you know, linear trends of their birth rates versus everyone else.
Speaker 1:But it feels like the idea of the Amish lifestyle is actually becoming in vogue in almost popular culture with, don't use screens as much, try and put, limit your Instagram usage. You need to log off and touch grass. All of these memes are sort of, you know, the the potential gateway drug to, the Amish lifestyle.
Speaker 2:I visited the Amish many times. I admire what they've done, but it's possible because the surrounding society cross subsidizes them. Oh. So you can't have a third of America being Amish. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think they keep people in the fold because it is pretty small and tightly knit. And were there, say, three or 4,000,000 Amish, which we're very far from, the rate of leaving would be much higher. So I think it's bounded on the upside. But I'm glad they're there. They've done a great job.
Speaker 2:Their communities are quite interesting and pretty prosperous. Mhmm. They have a lot of kids. Good for them.
Speaker 1:Do you agree with Jeremy Gaffan that people are constantly looking for a priestly class? And in recent years, it's moved from the billionaire class to the online poster?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Maybe online posters peaked five or ten years ago, and now there's a lot more video and just the AI itself competes against the online posters. Sure. I liked his dialogue on that topic, but I don't exactly agree with what he said.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. I'm interested to know what level of entrepreneurship you think is is reachable? Can can every young person become an entrepreneur? Or are there some people who are more interested in just finding a stable job and then they need to figure out how to navigate changing jobs in the future?
Speaker 2:Most people cannot become entrepreneurs. They're not ambitious. They should not be ambitious. You could argue the numbers, but it's a small percentage, and other people want to work for them. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So people like working in large institutions. Large institutions pay better. It's lower risk. I don't think that feature of the world's going to change.
Speaker 1:So advice for someone who's in an organization, they're seeing things change because of artificial intelligence. Maybe they're not set up to be an AI maniac, go out and start a company, but should they be trying to find a role that is messier in their organization?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Follow AI. Learn how to work with the leading models. It's a big time investment because everything changes so quickly as you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you don't, you're left behind. And for all this talk of the leisure dividend from AI, right now we're still in a setting where most people have to work some amount harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That will change. But it's not about to change. Time to work. Get to work. Do you do You do.
Speaker 2:Doesn't it exhaust you how many new and different things happen in the world of AI? And you've gotta stay on top of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is a lot.
Speaker 2:AI leisure dividend? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, I don't know. Learning learning about AI, I see as different as actually learning AI. There are a lot of there are a lot of facts around the there there are there are six AI tigers in China and like, I just need to memorize what those six companies are, their histories if I wanna understand Yeah.
Speaker 3:You can follow it like a sport and not learn really anything at all about how Yeah. What the models
Speaker 1:are truly than using the models, which the models are so good. It it feels like it's it's less of a learning curve and more of just the volition to just go and do it. Because even when someone says, oh, well, I haven't tried the the latest coding models. And I'm like, oh, well, they can do a lot more. Like, at the very basic, like, if you wanted to ask ChatGPT for one image, you can now ask Codex for a 100 images, and it can just go and do it in a for loop.
Speaker 1:And it can write a little code for you and do whatever it needs to to get you your answer that's more robust and hydrated. But also, you can just ask ChatGPT, how do I do that? And it will tell you how to do it. And so the learning curve this is a Joe Weisenthal, opinion, but he he says that, like, there there is no learning curve because the AI is good at teaching you how to use it. But there is something there where you talk to people all the time.
Speaker 1:They're like, I haven't tried AI yet. I gotta check that out.
Speaker 2:It it can tell you what to do, but if you're always chasing it, waiting for it to tell you what to do, you're not on top of it. It's not really the way to excel in the area. So I think you do have to stay on top of both like the baseball team side of it and the how do you do this side of it. Again, it's hard.
Speaker 3:How big can gambling get?
Speaker 2:Oh. It's already too big. I don't know how we pull it back in. It's a problem. Now people must enjoy it, the people who don't wreck their lives with it or it wouldn't be that addictive.
Speaker 2:But it is fairly addictive for many people I
Speaker 3:don't The see that we turn the clock thing that's telling is even people that lose a lot of money gambling, I've noticed that they don't hate their bookie or the app that they use That's to lose money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They seem to have like, you know, maybe maybe it's like a toxic relationship. Right? Where where No.
Speaker 1:No. A lot of times people will hate like the player that missed the field goal. And they will be cyber bullying the particular athlete that lost them the money, and they won't be
Speaker 3:manager at DraftKings or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, isn't
Speaker 3:But how would what like, you know, if you have a big red button that the ban, you know, sports betting or or gambling, do you do you hit the button? Like what what would be your practical solution for reining it in?
Speaker 2:I wouldn't hit the button. Banning it would not rein it in. We know that already. You hope norms change. It's a bad thing to be one shotted by.
Speaker 2:That said, I'd like to see a cost benefit analysis, all the people who enjoy it, and add them up, and see how that compares to the cost. No one wants to do that for obvious reasons. Just say no.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But it's but it but but right now The
Speaker 2:Amish don't do it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Be honest. Yeah. I guess I guess I I was watching the the latest UFC event Mhmm. And almost every single ad is a gambling ad. Certainly, reining in advertising for gambling would probably
Speaker 1:We have a playbook from the tobacco.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I think it's in like You restrict
Speaker 1:can add taxes on a state and local level as well as federal taxes. And you can sort of try and internalize the negative externality.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There was that law that said you could only write off like 90% of your losses, which which for, you know, which is really bad Yeah. If you're, you know, a sports book or
Speaker 1:The problem is is that I I don't think the the impact of gambling, the negative impact has been fully quantified in sort of a sound bite yet. Like, with cigarettes, it's like cigarettes kill millions of people every year. Fifty percent of smokers who smoke a pack a day will die from cigarettes or a cigarette related illness. There isn't that for the gambling industry. It's just like a lot of people lose money, but you technically lose money when you go see the Odyssey.
Speaker 1:You just get the enjoyment of a three hour film. You lost money, and people get the entertainment of gambling. And so that like, that's the same trade. It it doesn't hit as hard as, like, you will die if you smoke cigarettes. Tyler?
Speaker 2:I think the campaign against smoking worked because people like me hated it when someone next to them would light up or on a plane or in a movie theater. If someone if my next door
Speaker 3:neighbor can't cigarettes on whatever on
Speaker 2:their phone Wait. Really? On the airplane. I don't care. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. You used to yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:On a commercial plane.
Speaker 1:Old commercial planes, they would have a cigarette, an ashtray in the armrest.
Speaker 2:I suffered under that for years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You you try to not sit next to the smoking section. Yeah. But again, if there's like a no gambling section on the airplane, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The guy next to me could be gambling on his phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You wouldn't even know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Let it be.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. That is shocking to me.
Speaker 1:I like that you just learned that. When did when did Smoking on Planes end? In eighties? I feel like it was Yeah.
Speaker 3:Before I
Speaker 1:was probably. Born. Maybe like early nineties at the very, very latest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I recall celebrating, but I don't know
Speaker 1:the Celebrating. Yeah. Anyway, what what what have you been reading into the jobs numbers that have been coming out? Like, the overall unemployment rate seems to be holding steady. It seems like it's buoyed by health care
Speaker 3:So real quick. Yes. Smoking was banned in 1988 on domestic flights lasting two hours or less. Okay.
Speaker 1:They were
Speaker 3:saying, you can go two hours without a smoke.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We know you can. And then eventually, they expanded it.
Speaker 1:They expanded it.
Speaker 3:So all domestic flights in Wow. 1990.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 1990. There you go. Jobs, data, hiring, it feels like there's sort of stagnation everywhere except health care, which is sort of the messy job thesis playing out. But what else is going on in the hiring market that you've noticed from the last couple releases?
Speaker 2:Well, the unemployment rate for eighteen to twenty four year olds, it's back to where it was before we had good large language models. So AI is not destroying that market. It seems we're not going to have a recession anytime soon. That's good news. Labor market has slowed down quite a bit, but that's to be expected.
Speaker 2:And some of the reports sound less impressive because we have fewer immigrants. But overall, I've been pretty happy the economy hasn't crashed. It's kept on going. Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That makes sense. Then what are you attributing the, like, the vibes around, like, young people entering the workforce? Everyone says it's so bad.
Speaker 1:Is that just the really cushy tech jobs are sort of a little bit belt tightening there? They're not hiring as much, and so there aren't as many of these, like, really nice laptop jobs? Or what do you think is going on there?
Speaker 2:I think there are big sectoral shifts going on and the new jobs being created, people who think of themselves as educated and high class may not want Sure. Or may not even be good at, and they complain and they're vocal and they have the ear of the media. It is a problem. I wouldn't deny that. But in the aggregate, a lot of other people are doing better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the AI maniacs are about to take a huge leap upwards.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And there'll be this massive reallocation of status. Yeah. It'll be very hard for our politics to handle that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw oh, that's interesting. Well, well. Yeah. I I saw some stats around, like, new grad computer scientists from Stanford not getting as many job placements.
Speaker 1:And Tyler on our team was saying, like, that's a skill issue. If you're if you're a Stanford graduate with a computer science degree, like, you can get a job or you can start a company. You can do something, but you might need to think a little bit differently because the track might be slightly different. But I don't know if you agree with that or not.
Speaker 2:I agree with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it also just feels like the the one of my latest, like, thesis is that a lot of these CEOs who are doing, like, AI based layoffs, the optics are just terrible. And if they actually have a good business, they should be going on the offensive. We we we love that Matthew Prince hired, I think, like a thousand interns or something like that. And it feels like young people who understand AI coming into an organization that has some sort of moat, some sort of durability, some business, like the leverage is just going up.
Speaker 1:So you should be hiring more instead of doing layoffs if you actually understand what's at stake and how big your business can be. But if you just went through a hiring glut, maybe you do need to, sort of retool.
Speaker 2:The AI companies themselves are hiring plenty as you know. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 3:Can you recall a point throughout history where the majority of people their let's say their their sense of like self worth and identity was not tied to their employment or their job. Because that's We're a big
Speaker 2:whole separate issue, But obviously, that's a major qualifier. Sure. Medieval.
Speaker 1:Medieval times? I think we lost him.
Speaker 3:His internet went back. To 1988.
Speaker 2:Growing food. Different way from how things work now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. It's always a pleasure to go all around the world
Speaker 3:It's an honor.
Speaker 1:Topics. Have a fantastic week and a fantastic summer.
Speaker 2:Catch you all next time. Let's Like I said, work harder.
Speaker 3:Yes. When you're next time you're in California
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come to see
Speaker 3:three of us. A cup of Joe. We will try to We will try to create an experience.
Speaker 1:Third cup of coffee in history. History?
Speaker 3:That would be
Speaker 1:Do a four hour show? Incredible. The Wired Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 2:Get me to do it.
Speaker 1:Let's see. We'll peer
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:don't think it'll work. Thank you so much, Tyler.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day.