00:20:55 · Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
But even so, you have a president right now who clearly would like to move policy in a specific direction, has been very vocal about that. And I think that's what, there's more sand in the gears here. There's more More of a challenge, actually, to influence that. [00:21:25] S0: Just real quickly, like on the cure macro. So like, I feel like if we were having a conversation about the state of the economy, wow, Tesla shares declined 10%. SpaceX shares fall another 7%, 7.5%. And they got hammered yesterday pretty hard. So these are like, man. [00:21:41] S1: Yeah. [00:21:42] S2: I mean, you have the unwind. [00:21:43] S0: Elon Cosmos. [00:21:45] S2: Yeah. It's funny where you have like this unwinding of the effects from the 2024 election response where you had a lot of. Stocks that really ripped after Trump won. Clearly put a lot of money behind Trump's election. [00:21:58] S1: He could have just paid taxes. [00:22:00] S0: He could have just paid taxes. Or just build cars and spaceships. It's really incredible how in addition to being a great car industrialist and a great spaceship industrialist, he really decided to get into politics. And he really may have just... for nothing at the end like when we really look at like yeah maybe 2028 and like what if he got anything out of like if he had just avoided the germ of like caring about politics like i just doesn't seem like it's not. [00:22:32] S1: Even that it doesn't seem like it's the male urge to tweet yeah that's all it is. [00:22:37] S0: It really feels like it male.
00:22:37 · Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, Skanda Amarnath
[00:22:37] S0: It really feels like it male. [00:22:39] S1: Politics is useful to like have something to talk about on twitter. [00:22:42] S0: Yeah i mean there's it just seems like when you add when we tell you it up in the end the cost of like The cost of caring about posting, the cost of caring about what people are talking about on X, the cost of wanting to then influence the world through X just seems like may end up being one of the most colossal wastes of money we ever imagined, right? I mean, what has he got? Has he gotten one thing from caring about politics and caring about posting at all in his life? [00:23:10] S2: So I guess it'll be to be determined about what he was able to get out of the experience of Doge in terms of his knowledge of government. But I think it's a, but there's a John Arnold tweet I think is quite apt here. It's like what, political giving is the original wealth tax. [00:23:29] S0: So there's- This is another conversation and like, they really seem to be bad at it. And especially like tech money. Like just no intuitions and neither at any point, either what the important races are or the things or like how to do it effectively. It just seems like zero intuition. These are people who love talking about their... I'm updating my epistemic priors. [00:23:54] S2: Those people love... These are people who.
00:23:54 · Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
[00:23:54] S2: Those people love... These are people who. [00:23:57] S0: Love updating priors. They're like, oh, let me improve my epistemics here. Update my priors. And then they just get hit with the biggest blind spot. And it just seems like it happens over and over again with these guys. It's like, first, I'm going to update some priors and then just completely step on a rate. [00:24:14] S2: Yeah, there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger to this stuff, right? Where it's just like you think you know a lot and you actually... You're really at the beginning of the learning curve. [00:24:21] S0: And we all have to be humble, right? We're all Dunning-Kruger all the time. Yeah, we are. These are people who pride themselves on the fact that they don't have this thing because... They're so rigorous and there's our first principles thinking and systems thinking and all the, like, this is, we are all done in Kruger. [00:24:35] S1: Yeah. [00:24:35] S0: Like that's a given. What I'm, what remarks, what's remarkable about me is like, there's a whole group of people pride themselves on their rational, like I look at the data, all this stuff and they seem to be, get it the worst. Yeah.
00:24:35 · Joe Weisenthal, Skanda Amarnath
[00:24:35] S0: Like that's a given. What I'm, what remarks, what's remarkable about me is like, there's a whole group of people pride themselves on their rational, like I look at the data, all this stuff and they seem to be, get it the worst. Yeah. [00:24:49] S2: I think it's also funny because I spent 2024, if you were sort of in tech and you were like, we're leaning or you had just decided I'm going to go to the right year. And so you throw a lot of money at it and. success so that's like clearly the success is because i also contributed i did the smart thing it's like well you did the same thing again and didn't quite work i feel like cause and effect are different from each other in some ways and so you might get sort of these like you know elon was he the cause of why trump won i don't think he was but there were a lot of a lot of democrats and liberals who i know were like oh he's the key factor behind this and it's like okay elon's still giving a lot of money but it didn't quite work out the same way this time so i though who actually has.
00:24:49 · Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal
[00:24:49] S2: I think it's also funny because I spent 2024, if you were sort of in tech and you were like, we're leaning or you had just decided I'm going to go to the right year. And so you throw a lot of money at it and. success so that's like clearly the success is because i also contributed i did the smart thing it's like well you did the same thing again and didn't quite work i feel like cause and effect are different from each other in some ways and so you might get sort of these like you know elon was he the cause of why trump won i don't think he was but there were a lot of a lot of democrats and liberals who i know were like oh he's the key factor behind this and it's like okay elon's still giving a lot of money but it didn't quite work out the same way this time so i though who actually has. [00:25:26] S0: Just on the macro stuff, a couple of months ago, we might have, if we were just catching up with you talking about the macro, we might have said, well, the non-AI economy is soft. Maybe it's like getting stressed by higher rates. The AI economy is still absolutely booming. On net, we have a lot of inflationary pressure, et cetera. Where's your read on right now, the sort of the core impulses and, you know, do we have a path not like, especially maybe if some of this AI spending cools off or like how much work does the Fed have to do to get back to 2% inflation or whatever? What are the trends there?
00:25:26 · Joe Weisenthal, Skanda Amarnath, Tracy Alloway
[00:25:26] S0: Just on the macro stuff, a couple of months ago, we might have, if we were just catching up with you talking about the macro, we might have said, well, the non-AI economy is soft. Maybe it's like getting stressed by higher rates. The AI economy is still absolutely booming. On net, we have a lot of inflationary pressure, et cetera. Where's your read on right now, the sort of the core impulses and, you know, do we have a path not like, especially maybe if some of this AI spending cools off or like how much work does the Fed have to do to get back to 2% inflation or whatever? What are the trends there? [00:26:06] S2: Yeah. So I think even by the sort of call it early part of this year, we had already seen sort of a basing of that, that dynamic where it was, Oh, the non AI economy soft and like we're headed. The Fed was, flagging rate cuts as late as, what, the May meeting? And that was just too late relative to where the economy was. The economy was solidifying after the government shutdown had ended. And so the risks were already tilted in the direction of, hey, the economy is like, it's not, I wouldn't say the non-AI economy is gangbusters, but it's fine. [00:26:37] S0: Like, it's fine. [00:26:38] S2: It's been fine. [00:26:39] S0: It's nothing. [00:26:39] S2: I would say is amazing, but all booms tend to be imbalanced. [00:26:42] S0: Housing is terrible still, right? [00:26:44] S2: Housing is soggy and soggy. [00:26:45] S1: Home builders started going up yesterday by quite a bit.