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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chances are your favorite websites used to depend on Google for traffic and money. But that's not really working anymore. Now publishers are scrambling for new lifelines. Neil Vogel, who runs People Inc., says his company figured it out a couple years ago.
You would think, given what everyone said about us, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now. We're kind of the guys doing the best now.
I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide. You can hear my conversation with Neil Vogel now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Today's number 40. That's the percentage of Americans who didn't read a single book last year. True story, Ed. I just read a book on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Ask me anything.
Listen to me. Markets are bigger than us. What you have here is a structural change in the world distribution.
Cash is trash. Stocks look pretty attractive. Something's going to break. Forget about it.
I don't think you're a non-expert on book writing at this point. How many books have you written now?
I want to say I've written more books than I've read in the last five years. That would reveal me for the pseudo-intellectual douchebag I actually am. Supposedly, my publisher told me 1% of the popular spies, 90% of the books, which I believe.
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Chapter 2: How is the conflict with Iran affecting global oil prices?
I get the sense that the reaction from the markets to the Citrini research article, the blog post that went very viral, it just totally kneecapped the markets. I assume your view is that that was a major overreaction.
When financial markets think about what will happen in the future, in some cases, we have a very, very strong and quantified answer. For example, and I know this might sound a little peculiar, but when all the prices go up $10, we have a Fed model. We can take the Fed's model out, and the Fed model tells you what will happen to GDP, what will happen to inflation, what will happen to unemployment.
But in this instance, we now have a discussion about what will AI do to the future? And there is no Fed model. There is no model I can take out. And suddenly there is a vacuum. And with the vacuum, then suddenly, of course, things are thrown into the vacuum where people say, wow, it could be this. It could also be that. It could also be this. This is what happened, of course, with tariffs.
We had some ideas. There was a long academic literature about what's the impact of tariffs on inflation, GDP, unemployment. But that wasn't really helpful, in particular, not the way that tariffs were implemented. So the key answer to your question here, Ed, there was no framework. There is truly no framework for thinking about AI.
And that made the doors wide open for someone like that report and other reports to go out and say, oh, we think the framework should be this. Other people say, no, we think the framework should be this. I mean, the noteworthy, complete counterpoint to that report is, of course, what Jay Powell has been answering at literally every press conference for the last several meetings.
Jay Powell, when asked about, where do you see AI? His answer has been, I see everywhere AI, except in the incoming data. There is no signs of AI in the employment numbers. There is no signs of AI in the productivity statistics.
Yes, productivity went up last quarter, but that was only in manufacturing, not in services, which is really weird because it's in services and goods, the knowledge economy, that you're supposed to see the benefits from AI. So the short answer to your question is,
This is really, from a research perspective, what's so fascinating is when there is a question that is unanswered, in this case, what's the implication of AI? And everyone is trying to think about it. Anyone who comes up with something that just looks a little bit like a framework, they will immediately get a lot of attention.
And in particular, that's a very anxiety-inducing framework because this will then be, everyone will say, gee, maybe we'll all lose our jobs because of this. So that's why the answer to that point, and my view is that it made sense that the markets moved so much because people basically still don't have a framework for thinking about what AI will do.
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