Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, what do you think the rich people are doing these days? You know, Like, I know, there's a lot of like big business people lining up or who have lined up behind the Trump administration. But they have to be kind of anxious, right because things like mass tariffs and so forth, talk about reducing the role of the dollar and global tra it has got to make them kind of anxious.
I actually know the answer to this.
Oh yeah, as a person, no.
Because the New York Fed publishes a survey of consumer sentiment where you can break it out by pay bracket, and so the high pay bracket, it's probably not the super super rich, but it is pretty rich. And yeah, they're getting worried for all the reasons you just laid out.
But I do think if you exist in a pay bracket that already sort of.
Suggests that you're not that right, not the real You're not the real. You know, you're getting a pair what high standards you have to But anyway, I think these are really interesting times.
Needless to say, for the globe, for people who have money, for people who have feet around the world where they want to bet. You know, one of the things I wrote about it last week were recording this March twenty fifth. You know, one of the big trades that really had been characterized the last fifteen years is like bet on the US, literally against everything right by the S and P five just you know, you get no payment for
global diversification. You didn't make any money in China, you lost money, you didn't get any pay for em you didn't really get anything in Europe at least for a couple of weeks. So far this year, that's reversed pretty sharply, and so one question is like, if you want glory, should you look outside the US borders?
Right diversification finally potentially paying off, although again it's only been like three weeks, but we have seen a lot of people, in fact, we've recorded episodes about this talking about how this is a huge sea change in global politics, potentially in global markets as well. This big moment, similar to the fall of the Soviet Union, something that could forever alter Europe's economic and political and security paths. So we'll see.
Big things are happening in Germany is like, we're gonna spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense. They've really never done that. It's a change. So anyway, I'm really excited about our guest, someone I've known and talked to numerous times over the years, but we've never had on the podcast, luminary in the Worlds of journalism, previously a
financial journalist, an interesting guy who suddenly popped up. He started posting again recently, and so that'll I was like, oh, maybe here's in New York City these days, we're going to be speaking with Nick Denton. He used to work at the Ft, used to work and he wrote a book and many most people would probably know him as the founder of the Gawker family of websites. He currently is a new thing called a Futua Kiato. He's gonna be some sort of journalism trading kind of hybrid. Maybe
we'll find out what that is. Nick, Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
It's gonna be fun.
I have a question. I've known you for a long time, but I've never asked you this. I actually don't know the answer to this. Well, how would you describe your political ideology. The reason I ask is that, you know.
Like, starting with an easy.
I'm just gonna like say, like the most awkward intro to a guest ever. Your former company, Gawker was put into bankruptcy in large part due to Peter Thiel. But then I've talked to us, like I kind of think he has like some like teallite sympathies at times, which is a weird thing to say, but i'd like, Oh, I'm sort of picking up on some of that. But I don't know if I'm wrong. Are you like quietly based how would.
You I remember a conversation with you actually on Twitter, I mean a DM conversation and maybe twenty six twenty seventeen, at the end of which you said, oh, maybe preference falsification is happening on a very very wide scale. So I think you may have been surprised back then at the time. I would call myself a libertarian back in Gorka days, but I don't think that's really accurate, okay, because I.
Think, what do you know, just a liberal?
No, I'm probably an authoritarian, growth oriented follower of leak one you and to a lesser extent, But thanks you oping benevolent authoritarianism.
Okay, full contact alright, Tracy.
So Joe mentioned that you are a long time journalist, a veteran journalist, and I think you started your career in nineteen eighty nine covering the fall of the Soviet Union, And as I mentioned in the intro, a lot of people are kind of reaching for that analogy in describing this moment in Europe. Do you think that holds is? Are we seeing a shift on that kind of scale?
Well, I guess Nia Ferguson's piece we are all Soviets Now was the one that got people thinking in these terms. And then you know, yes, I was in Eastern Europe in eighty nine and that was a very classic empire, Soviet Empire, and a very classic uprising against it, demonstrations, unions, protests.
And eventually a complete collapse of legitimacy.
This American empire is definitely more subtle and been around twice as long, a say, more subtle, more subtle, Yeah, keep going hidden empire.
In fact, I think there's a book with that.
Name eighty years rather than forty. You know, it's been a lot longer. It didn't end immediately with the fall of the arm Curtain, and I think it's been in all our heads as Europeans for a long time. You know, I come from My father was an Atlanticist. I was an Atlanticist. I saw the United States as being an extension of Europe, a place where Europe had gone to seek new adventures and new continents and new industries. And that dream is utterly gone.
Because you still, you know, you have the World Economic Forums of the world. Does anyone believe it anymore?
I mean, I guess the polls.
The Poles still seem to believe it for well, the polls, and you know, in some English. But I think for me the two key incidents not the abuse of Zelensky in the Oval office, but the abuse of Denmark, a loyal, small but loyal American ally.
The country that actually is arguably very much in alignment on immigration policies.
Well, if you're going to talk about civilizational suicide, I don't exactly know how you fit Denmark into that. Where the social Democrats have actually stolen the entire agenda of the of the right wing in Denmark, and as a result there is really not much of a right wing resurgence anymore or in Denmark, so Denmark totally chose the way for a lot of social democratic parties in Europe.
So there was that, and then there was the abuse of Radics Sakowski, you know, one of the prime atlantisists in Poland calling it, you know, Elon Musk, you know, with an assist from Marco Rubio telling him to be quiet, little man. Now that might just seem petty on my behalf to focus on that, but you're talking about, you know, somebody who was absolutely in the American camp. And so if they're abusing somebody like Radis Sikorski, they clearly don't care at all about the Western Alliance.
And you're actually leaving the US now, right, Why have you been here?
Yeah, to some extend, I've been gone since the end of twenty sixteen. We came back for family reasons, and now we're going for good selling the apartment.
How come?
I mean I was one hundred percent in US assets pretty much in January, both in terms of stocks, real estate and everything, and now it's pretty much for stocks are one hundred percent China and Southeast Asia well, and the real estates. We just got a nice, loved little house in the Buddha Hills.
So you're you're diversifying in your portfolio, and in real life, I.
Guess the diversified portfolio would be something like US fifteen, China fifty, rest of the world thirty five percent, something like that. So I'm obviously not not doing that because I think the adjustment is going to be an opportunity for people to make money. So I guess it's going to end up more or less where electricity production divides up in the world. You know, I come from an emerging markets reporting background too, where you couldn't really believe any of the statistics.
You couldn't believe the GDP numbers.
The only numbers you couldlready believe maybe output and tradable sectors, electricity output, that kind of thing. And so that's that tends to be how I've looked at the markets now.
So you're going to be living full time. The Buddha Hill looks very very nice part of Budapest. Who should I believe about Orbon Should I believe Tucker that he's a great defender of civilization or should I believe the liberals that he's completely corrupted, not a friend at all?
I mean something in between a new orban, a bit early on back in eighty nine when I was with the FT for whatever four years in Budapest, and he was always the most talented of his generation as a politician. Clearly knew how to play the game, and clearly knows how to play the game now, having channels open to China, Russia and the United States and playing a small country's hand really rather well. There's a giant BYD factory in Hungary,
there's a giant Coatl factory in Hungary. If it actually comes down to it, I think most of Hunger's economic interests are actually China aligned, So I think that's where they'll end up forced. But there's no harm in maintaining channels.
With the other powers.
Just going back back to the intro, we were talking about whether or not let's call them the global elite, are feeling anxious at the moment. I think it's fair to say you probably move in some of those circles ultra wealthy. What are people saying right now, Like, what's the mood music that you're hearing?
Well, we're going to.
Talk about antisemitism or not definitely, Okay, it's free, free space. So when globalists get the blame for what was actually at that time. I think only a five percent or seven percent correction. When Trump blame globalists, I think it's a foretaste of what will happen if there is a significant repricing of assets in America the globalists quote unquote globalists or is is it like four brackets?
I forget what the code is.
Yeah, there the three parentheses.
So the Cosmopolitans, the internationals to quote unquote European Wall Street Journal, like any anything that seems internettional. Anybody who's ever been to Davos or maybe just the Swiss Alps full stop is going to come under suspicion and they are going to be their life is going to be uncomfortable. In the States, I think it's going to be uncomfortable. They're going to be attacked from the left for being capitalist, and they'll be attacked from the right for being unpatriotic.
And I think people are going to find, as they did during the kind of the looting phase of the twenty twenty protests, that there is no real sympathy for the Soho Loft Duweller in an environment like this when people are actually asking, so where did all the money go?
Where did all the money of the last twenty five years, you know, during the during this period of American and exceptionalism, when America was really the only place to put your money if you wanted to invest your time or your money in the future.
So where did it all go? What was left at the end of it?
What's the high speed rail network?
You know?
Where are the new companies? And I think those questions are going to be very hard for people to answer.
These are the thoughts that I have, like late at night, crawling up my phone, and then I wake up and I'm like, oh, like make my kids breakfast, and I go to the work and it's fine and it's fun. I love coming in here. And then like ten o'clock at night, that's is like my mind. Oh too, So like I was hoping, you know, want.
Have you spent Have you spent much time just playing around with Ai?
Yeah?
He spends so much time playing around with AI, so much office time.
What were you going to say, Well, un enormous circumstances, I'd said, like, this transition would take a good long time. You know, historically it takes decades, not years. But since January twentieth, and I don't mean the Trumpe inauguration, and I don't mean the Roman.
Salute by l or must but I mean the deep seat drop.
Since January twentieth, I think it's actually clear that AI is universal. It's going to be everywhere in every country, on every chip. And one of the first things that people are going to do with it is they're going to ask how to make money, and then they ask more sophisticated questions and have more sophisticated methods of working out how to make money.
So you're doing something with this right, Like you have a new venture where you're using AI to trade or to research for trade.
Yeah, I just started.
I started actually doing a simple analysis of the electric car market, projecting forward byd in Tesla sales to twenty thirty, just to see.
Where it would end up.
And you know, to look at the you know who is in the lead at every single level of the value chain. And then you know, when you've got an army of researchers that you're back and call, and you know how to manage them well enough, you can get.
Pretty robust answers pretty quickly.
You know, our answers that then lead to you to make trades that maybe you wouldn't have had the confidence to make otherwise. And I think I'm not the only one. So I think it's recursive that we all know that we're all working more and more like this, and as we recognize this in other people, so the feedback loops accelerate, and so system changes that might have taken decades get compressed into months or years.
That's my theory.
I'm actually not still totally convinced, you know, Like I've I use AI tract kidding, I mean I do, and I've used like deep research and many of them. I still think it's just a tremendous amount of garbage. And I don't say this, but I also want to. It's funny when you are answer when you're talking about AI.
I could only imagine if chatipt you'd come out like twenty thirteen, what you would have devised to torment Gawker writers, something about making them compete with AI and very you know, because all media organs have this like anxiety about well, this is actually pretty good at writing, except and then the journalists like you would have loved. You would have loved torturing your writers in some way by making.
Them Competit prefers the torture the ais to compete with each other.
But you would have you would have gotten a kick out of it, I feel like, and they would have really hated you for it.
Okay. I think that some kinds of journalists.
I wouldn't say you're abso the run of the mill journalists, but some kinds of journalists are extremely well equipped. I don't think they recognize the talents they have, and that are ability to ask good questions or to play games with somebody else who actually has information. But you want to get out of them that their skill and playing that game is actually is very is very powerful right now, that they could be traders if they wanted to be, especially.
You, No, especially about me. I don't have to go.
What's been your best trade so far this year?
Yeah, good question, let's trader.
I guess by d and Zaomi and that was based on your AI research.
Yeah, I'd look.
I've been into electric cars for a while. I'm a gadget head. I look at things from a consumer standpoint, not a producer standpoint. That's always what we sought to do with Gizmoto and Kataku and Jelopnik and the other consumer technology properties that we had.
And you look at.
These cars site by side, especially when you're talking about the SU seven, when you're not a BYD car and a Zomi car.
BYD is a battery factory, battery.
Company and Zamia phone company, and they both come into the car sector. Zomi's very first car out of the gate is really quite exceptional, with a very nice design, totally automated or as automated manufacturing process as you're likely to get, and anybody who's had their hands on it, including the CEO of Ford, does not want to let it go. It is clearly either half the price for the same quality or twice the quality for the same price.
But we're not talking about twenty percent Japanese advantages as they had in the eighties, but we're talking about fifty to one hundred percent advantages in many areas. And the lead of the Chinese manufacturers is extending.
So that seems pretty obvious to me.
Why do you think now one of the interesting things, like I had to pulled up a chart of shell me and BYD is a listener. I wrote about it for a long time. For like the last ten years, Chinese stocks have kind of been dead bunny. So even though like the rise of Chinese manufacturing dominance has been a story that's existed for several years. I wrote about it this week in the newsletter two, it has not
redounded to the benefit of Chinese shareholders. This is a phenomenon, and there's actually been this incredible amount of you know, they talk about like overcapacity, and I don't really like that term, but you know, the things that have not benefited shareholders. Do you think something's changing on that front such that the lead that these companies have now developed will be monetized in a real way.
There are signs that China is opening up it's capital markets, small signs to begin with, but you know, they've got mainland funds investing in Hong Kong stocks. You've got the anointing of various Chinese companies by Xijiping at the meeting that they had whenever it was.
Three weeks ago, four weeks ago.
You have the I think recognition on social media that you have the strongest pr The China has area of nighttime videos of cyberpunk cities which cannot be argued with. And you know YouTubers going for a ride in the s U seven and being blown away by the acceleration.
And I actually don't think it's a total accident.
There's black YouTubers who seem to find it easiest to embrace the quality of Chinese products. But I think you're going to have you're going to have two different debates. You're going to have invested Tesla narrative, which seems to be almost exclusively political at this At this point, there's very little product content in the pitch at all. In fact, the only photographs you see of Tesla products usually involve them being on flame in flames, and I'm talking about
Elon Must's own account. And meanwhile, the Sea of Jami is, you know, is posting up product porn.
All around the clock.
And just in terms of a product battle, in terms of features and in terms of marketing and in terms of price point, the Chinese have won.
It's as simple as that.
And if you don't recognize that, well, you're just not paying attention.
How do you actually go about valuing political risk or trading on political risk? Because when I think about journalists potentially trading the competitive advantage isn't really number crunching, right, it's kind of looking into the company and feeling the vibe and figuring stuff out that no one else has seen yet.
It's a multi dimensional approach. So I mean, I assume that the earnings forecasts are priced into the stock array, so there's no point reanalyzing that. You might as well just you might as well just take that as a given. The question is what do you see that other people do not? And you know, journalists tend to have an idea of the momentum.
Of a story.
So for instance, right now, I just I would say, speaking as a journalist and editor, that the fall of Elon Musk is the greatest business story of my entire life, absolutely worth getting out of retirement for, because here you have somebody who was real life iire man, you know, absolutely genuinely has three well beating major achievements under his belt. I don't care whether other people helped him do it, but he made it happen more than anybody else in the Western world.
But the problem is there's.
Only one of him, and he's up against a lot of Chinese competitors in cause, in robotics, in batteries, in mobile phones, in a whole bunch of different fields.
And I think he's gonna lose.
We should sit on this for a second, or we should stay with us for a second, because I think there are a lot of people kind of like the people who have called for let's see Trump wriggle out of this one again, Like who've convinced themselves that actually, this could never happen, that Trump will always wriggle out, that Elon Musk will always riggle out, that he's always able at the last second to find something because of his cult to personality or genuine managerial skills for the
genuine managerial skills of the people right below his level. You say, the story now is that the biggest this is the fall.
I mean, I think this is the fall. I think he may have a couple more tricks up his sleeve.
But you know, if you think about, you know, the gap between the Tesla fundamental value now as an electric car company that is ex growth, Like just think about that, yeah, Like, think how much their valuation depended on extrapolations of growth and the interruption of that growth. What that means to any net present value calculation. The it's national market so plainly being torched byl Mask himself. You know, with all of the pr and propaganda that he puts out that
might shore up the Magabase. But every single thing that he does, every single pitch on the wild on the you know, in front of the White House, is turning off both natural Tesla buyers and the big blue cities everyone, everybody except for the Magabase, you know, so you're going to probably.
Don't buy that many evs anyway, Well.
Apparently they are buying some, so it's not entirely it's not entirely a fiction, but every single one that they buy further cements this image as the magamobile and kills the international story and international story which is in any case in trouble. And because Tesla, you know, in China doesn't have very exciting cars compared with the ones that is that its competitors come out with, so I don't think the international market is going to work, which means
that it's pretty much all down to robots. And he's pretty much put all his chips on the Optimus, which seems incredibly dangerous to me, and the mark of somebody who's who's really desperate, and you know, putting it all behind a very very risky race in which he is starting from behind. How did you.
Get so into cars out of curiosity?
How do I get into cars? Isn't it just just isn't that just something.
That just is you were born with an interest.
Like a cyber truck.
I mean, I was very disappointed when I saw the metal panel. I thought somehow, I guess I didn't research enough.
I thought it looked like it had been forged somehow, a single and then to see so I think the most damaging thing for Tesla, the most damaging video for Tesla, apart from the I Love Speed video, but the most damaging video for Tesla is actually seeing the metal panels come off because the glue isn't they use the right glue, And that just sort of kills the mystique of something that was sort of pitched as a Mars rover that you can so I think the you know, the Optimus
hasn't been seen since there was a video they put out in December of it rather gingerly working its way down a slope, a little bit better than Joe Biden, but not that much.
And meanwhile, if you follow it.
The pace of videos released onto social media by Unitary and other Chinese makers.
It's got another conversation about I know they're beating us anywhere. No, No, keep going. I know it's a big deal.
I mean, you can't spin that one. It can't be spun.
Like a demo is a demo, and they're doing demos, and those demo they're kicking ass, they're doing side flips.
You know that there's a.
Race in Beijing next month, like a humanoid robot race. If Musk was really feeling it, he'd have an entry. There's no way that Ultimus is going to go up against you. However, many hundred robot competitors there are in China that are going to show up to that the race is lost already.
It is crazy though, even with all the social media evidence and demonstrations of what the cars can actually do, you still have people who are kind of conspiratorial about the social media videos. So I remember one came out two or three weeks ago. It was Tesla versus I think it was buyd You.
There was a Tesla Jaumisu seven race.
Maybe well this one it was a YouTuber who was driving a Tesla into a fake wall to test the self driving technology, and the car just went right through it in a very dramatic fashion, and you had all these people, I assume Tesla fanboys and Musk fanboys saying that the video had been faked and that no one should believe it, and that Tesla's technology is great.
It's very right.
I mean, it's very hard to kind of to tell truth from fabrication these days. Some of the Chinese videos, but one of them had to be repeated in front of a mirror just to kind of prove that it was real. But I don't think anyone's really questioned that. You know, there's one where there's like a slightly smaller humanoid robot that was actually dancing and sync with a couple of human dancers. Oh yeah, I saw which, and that one looked completely impossible to It was from two
different camera angles. That was impossible to fake. So it's going to be hard for anybody really to compete with that.
That's my view.
And if that's the whole of your story after the collapse of the international car market, then what remains beyond that in terms of the Tesla story, apart from maybe military contracts, so you start to get a little bit more science fiction, Like if you're looking for exit.
Ramps, what do you think about the dominance of US internet companies, because that was actually maybe even more than Tesla, Right, like the story of the twenty tens, you know Facebook that uh And when you get out of the United States, did they still have a sort of lock or still like deep competitive moats the way they were perceived to have in the twenty tens.
That's great, a great question.
T talk exists, So that's a problem for them. But it's improvable that a non US company can have a gigantic social media But what do you think this is where the money is?
Well, I think the type platforms are extraordinarily vulnerable and the vulnerable for the same reason Tesla is vulnerable. Tesla's biggest factory is in Shanghai. Tesla could be you know, it could be kind of crippled with a signature on a piece of paper.
Does US text your is never like to their benefit. They never had a Chinese business. They don't have, you know, like they never made Facebook's never made money in China.
Apple makes all.
Of its phones in China and has and has had almost no success in diversifying its supply chain into India or Vietnam. And I mean, look don't take my word for the people I pay attention to it the right wing. It's Palmer Lucky's recent interview, but he has a long five minute spiel all about Apple and how easy it would be for the Chinese government just to you know, basically seize the factories and become the dominant supplier of
smartphones to the world. That you know, the most valuable company in the existence of the United States could go up like that with a couple of degrees.
And I don't think that.
Kind of risk is actually priced into the market. So I have a short on Apple as well as Tesla, and so I think that, you know, there are some companies that are less vulnerable than that. But you know, even the companies that have no industrial dependence on China, you know, a company like you know, Facebook or X. Would it not be reasonable for Europe to say tomorrow that X should be X in Europe should be divested
as TikTok was that. You know that Europe is tired of you know, American politicians interfering in its internal affairs, and the full spectrum of free European speech should be absolutely given a platform. But there's no reason why outsiders non Europeans should either participate or should actually have our ownership have control in such companies. It would be a
very reasonable, consistent thing to do. And what about Facebook, Like, there isn't a huge amount of European antagonism towards Facebook right now, because Facebook really does comply with local regulations. But all of these companies are very much dependent on goodwill and on the Western Alliance continuing to exist in some form.
So speaking of Europe, I mean there is a sense that Europe is way way behind when it comes to technology, certainly versus a place like China. Do you have faith that that's going to reverse or is it the case that, like maybe they get good at something else, something non tech like what is driving some of the optimism here.
I'm not actually invested in any European stocks right now.
I do think that Europe is sort.
Of a side story here, but the ratios all off, you know, I do not believe that magically in two thousand and eight the United States economy started to perform
brilliantly and Europe just slipped into stagnation. I think it's actually much more likely that, you know, Europe went through austerity and has been pretty much going through austerity ever since in some shape or form until the recent decision by the German government to finance rearmament, and the United States has basically avoided austerity at every possible juncture that you know, two thousand and eight, rather than being a purge of Wall Street in the way that the dot
com crash was a purge of Silicon Valley, instead of that being a purge of War Street, the economy was immediately reinflated, and it's been reinflated after every single minor correction ever since, and so we've basically got twenty five years of bubble.
Could you see a world you know, you mentioned that in the end it might just make more sense for Hungary to just throw in its lot with China. That's where the future is industrially, that's where that's his biggest trading partner. Could you see I mean, like that be you know, twenty years from now Germany making the same calculation like core Europe.
I mean, I don't think it's gonna be twenty.
Years, Okay, so sooner, but you know, it's it's actually madic if Europe is being bullied by Russia and the United States.
Sometimes in concert. They want different things.
You both have territorial demands, and the United States is also trying in a rather belligerent fashion to renegotiate, to negotiate a debt restructuring.
It's a strange kind.
Of negotiation, which involves insulting all the people that hold your treasuries. But it is a kind of negotiation.
But in some way it ends up ward. China is a friend.
I think, you know, this has kind of lost Germany already. I don't know whether, even if the tune change, whether the German Atlanticists would revive. I think a kind of trust has been broken, and a face of America has been revealed.
It will be hard for people to forget. And there's also been a you know, there's been a.
Nationalist resurgence in Canada, in Mexico, in China and in Europe. You know, the people the Chinese, don't you know the Chinese joke that you know, Trump is the great nation builder, you know, the great nation builder of other nations. And when Donald Tusk says reminds people that Europe is five hundred million people who don't need to be begging three hundred million American for help dealing with one hundred million
Russians who can't even handle forty million Ukrainians. When you start to look at it a little bit differently, I think some of that European graven this fools away.
So you mentioned the post two thousand and eight reaction in the market, and I do think there is a tendency on the part of policymakers to reinflate as quickly as possible. And we've seen this over and over twenty and eight, twenty twenty. They moved very very quickly to get the market back up. And it does seem like a very idiosyncratic characteristic of the US's political economy is the importance of stocks and asset prices and this idea.
It really feels like everything kind of rests on your portfolio of financial assets, so your retirement, your education, probably, the things you buy, housing, basically everything. Are we just doomed to be kind of forever tangled up with the stock market or is there a realistic path for the US to kind of move away from that, to disentang itself from financialization.
I mean, you're totally hooked. Hm, You're totally hooked.
It's just it's been twenty it's been at least twenty five years, be longer.
You know, you look at General.
Electric, you have the idea of shareholder value, which seems so modern.
You know, I got a new fridge this week. This is GE. I was like, I didn't even know G. You'm still made fridge. It's a G.
Keep going, it's a badge or it's an I.
Looked at it. I got a new frigerator. You look at it and I was like, oh, it's a G. You logo on. I wonder who makes it? Anyway?
Keep I mean G. Jackson jack Wells' G is the warning.
Yeah, it's the warning of a company whose earnings were massage carefully up so that it actually acted like.
A pension phone rather than a company.
And you know, people warned about the growing importance of G finance and the financialization of America's prime manufacturing company, and the whole conglomerate was left as kind of a husk at the end of the process.
So that is the warning.
I I don't see how America kicks the habit.
You know, China had a policy of.
Hiding its light after cl being arguably right and through right through up until twenty ten or so. You know, arguably it's companies have hidden their light subsequently too. You know, you look at their market values, you look at their trajectories,
it's nothing that impressive. But now we've got a moment when you've got America pumped up through marketing and financialization, and you've got China that has quietly built and produced, and they are now being compared directly with one another in b Yey versus Tesla, in Zami versus Apple, and the comparison is pretty devastating.
Are your children learning Mandarin?
No?
I'm serious, like, because I some people are doing that now. Yet I just have one last question. You know, I joked that if AI had been around, I think you would have found a way to torment the Garka writers. You did do that because it wasn't Ai, but you had this belief that, like, oh, the commenters, that's where the real action is, and you're gonna make the writers compete with the commenters, and if the commenters are creating better content, then hey, so be it that they're better.
Than the writers.
And I feel like for several years since then, you've always sort of clung to this belief that that's where like the real action is in various ways. It's like, yeah, like the people tell us a little bit about what you're building now, and does it tap into that spirit?
And I guess I'm taking two lessons from the Gorka experience and just the experience of seeing watching flame Wars on the internet, since god knows when. Echo chambers are very, very dangerous, and arguably the Gorka writers were in an echo chamber from maybe twenty eleven through to twenty fifteen
when it well blew up. And when I see Elon Musk on Twitter, you know, or Joe Rogan in the podcast world, it all looks extremely familiar that, you know, here you have somebody who's basically hanging a little bit too much attention to the to the most engaged members of the audience.
Audience capture is real. It's real.
And that's actually why I don't think that Musk is capable of getting out of this vortex that he's trapped in, because he's playing to that gallery, playing to the gallery of I see extreme right wingers, and they are going to lead him and each other off the edge of the cliff.
Nick, thank you so much for coming on odd List. That was one of the gloomiest episodes. I really think so, I really think so. But I really appreciate you coming on. It was fantastic and I'm glad we made it happen while you still have the Well that was grim.
It was a fun conversation, fun, but the subject matter was grim. You know what I realized as we were sort of reminiscing about Cocker. I totally forgot I wrote like a freelance piece or just a contribution to do you remember Ion nine?
Yeah?
Yeah, and so I wrote this article about like some Russian billionaire that is trying to like reach eternal life through robotics or something. Obviously you wrote.
That for Ion nine. Yeah, I didn't know you wrote an Ion nine piece.
Well, I'd totally forgotten. Yeah, but obviously you know, like more than ten years later, we're still waiting for immortality, so tech can only go so far.
I think we're gonna be waiting a lot longer than ten years. I mean, I think there were two two three things that I found bracing. One is the industrial divide is massive and growing right between the US and China. That seems real. That's really worrisome to me. The description of the ways in which the current administration has like insulted even like stalwart allies, Why mock Denmark and so forth?
That seems like a really big deal. And then obviously you know the impulse to you know, you get a little bit of a wobble in the sell off and you blamed and I'm doing the prints the globalists. That is disturbing.
Well, the other thing I was thinking about was, you know, Nick mentioned China's starting to open up its capital accounts, and it's kind of interesting, slash ironic that is happening at the same time that the US seems to be you know, they haven't done it yet, but there does seem to be like this isolationist will when it comes to capital markets, like maybe they don't want as much foreign capital coming into the country, Like you get that sense, right,
And so they're the US and China kind of moving in opposite directions. And then also like doing some of the same stuff. It's interesting, like building out manufacturing.
Right. You know what I like about Nick that he's a journalist who can act just like talk stocks. How many journalists No, seriously, because there are journalists who are in their specialty could say things, but how many of them could just like bs with you a while about like stocks. Nick can actually do that. It's actually really impressive.
I think you need to be careful about saying that in an office full of at least like a few dozen journalists who can on No.
Right, I feel like you're right. It's more than like say like, eh, I'm short that or I'm long that, and they'll like actually have a confident trading position. No. Look, a lot of people can tell you a lot about stocks, whether they're like I mean, I well, we can't. We can't short stocks obviously at Bloomberg. But like most journalists I've ever talked to generally don't have like yeah, I'm short Apple and Tesla, I'm long Boidea to show me like,
you know, it just sort of by the index. Anyway, I really enjoyed talking to Nick.
It was fun to reminisce and also think about the very grim future.
Shall we leave it there, Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the All Blots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.
I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow Nick Detton. He's at Nick not Ned and check out his new endeavor, Fututa Kiado. It's at Fututa Kiyado. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol
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