David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout

David Shor (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, Odd Lots listeners, I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:20)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

Tracy, we were down at SXSW recently.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Yeah, that's right. I didn't get to have any barbecue in Austin, but we did have some really good Mexican food.

Joe Weisenthal (0:29)

We did have really good Mexican food, and we recorded a really fun episode of our podcast.

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

That's right, more importantly, we recorded a good episode.

Joe Weisenthal (0:36)

That's right. So check it out, listeners, we did a live episode of the podcast talking about sort of the prospect of mass white collar displacement due to AI, as well as the politics and how politicians should be thinking about this and how voters are thinking about this. Our guests were David Shor, founder of Blue Rose Research and Byrne Hobart, who writes the excellent Diff Newsletter and a general partner at Anomaly Fund. Take a listen. Thanks everyone for coming out on a cold Sunday morning.

Tracy Alloway (1:04)

Yeah. Hello and welcome to a live recording of the Odd Lots podcast. This is definitely going to be the most uplifting of all the conversations that have happened this weekend, right?

Joe Weisenthal (1:14)

I think so. I think it really will be.

Tracy Alloway (1:16)

Everyone here is going to leave feeling really good about the future.

Joe Weisenthal (1:21)

All right. Well, let's kick it off. So we have two great guests. We are going to be speaking with David Shor. He is the founder of Blue Rose Research, Political Consultancy, Polster, knows a lot about AI, and we have Byrne Hobart, the founder of the Diff, a great newsletter that everyone should read and a general partner at Anomaly Funds. We're going to talk about all things AI and job laws, potential and the politics of it and so forth. David and Byrne, thank you so much for joining us on stage here.

Byrne Hobart (1:50)

Great to be here.

David Shor (1:50)

Yeah, thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (1:51)

Let's just start on this question. David, you're pretty like this is happening now. The economy is going to look radically different, maybe even a year, 18 months from now, and you're trying to wake politicians up. This is happening right now, but tell us what's happening right now or what's about to happen.

David Shor (2:10)

Yeah. I'm not an AI expert and I don't want to claim I'm one, but what I'll say is that I use AI a lot. I use Cloud Code a lot. I think in December, I spent maybe like 15 percent of my pre-tax income on Cloud Code, overage fees, and I think there's a real disconnect among my friends between people who use Cloud Code and people who don't, where I could really feel the extent to which I can do so much more now versus a month ago, and a month before that, the scale at which these things are getting better and the speed at which things are getting better is really jarring. I think you might not notice that if you're just using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a little better than it was a year ago. But again, it's very hard to make predictions about the future, but I do think that if things continue to improve on this scale, then things could get really weird really quickly.

Tracy Alloway (3:05)

Byrne, one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is because you're at the intersection of technology and finance. If I look at the valuations of Big Tech at the moment and a bunch of the AI companies, they basically suggest that they're going to take over the entire economy. When you see those numbers, what do they suggest to you about the future of labor?

Byrne Hobart (3:25)

I think right now, it's definitely true that you can think of this coherent category of, this is an AI company or this was a non-AI company, but they're incorporating AI and they have these distribution advantages, so they'll probably do well at that. But I think that it's a mistake to think that this is a durable, discrete category in the same way that you could refer to a lot of companies as electricity companies. If it were 1925 and you're trying to figure out which stocks to buy, and you're just really bullish on electricity, then you would really care that RCA is exposed to electricity, and I don't know, US Steel is mostly not. But eventually, every company becomes an electricity company, just in the sense of you would run a very different business if the lights did not turn on.