YouSaid · the spoken record

David Shor

lines on the record: 38
first: 2026-03-24
most recent: 2026-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can mobilize them and you can get them to, you know, if there is some very close race somewhere in the house race, for example, and one of the politicians happens to support this particular pet issue. They could be like the crypto people and just money bomb the person who happens to also support the thing that they like. So we could actually have, that's another way we could potentially see AI democratizing democracy further is that you can actually coordinate interest groups for people who are just less politics brained, but still actually care about problems that should be”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That amount on video. So that was one point. I do think that it actually just makes us a less a culture that is less likely to make up our minds on important issues by watching a grainy, shaky 12 seconds of footage of something. I think that's good. I think we should read more and watch less. But I also think that when the other piece of AI, just the targeting recommendation algorithms, there's a huge chunk of AI spending and AI's impact, that probably does mean that it's potentially more likely that someone could make a career out of something like agitating against spam tech. And we did actually see Click to Cancel is kind of moving along. There's little quality of life things. Like Click to Cancel is the kind of thing a mayor would be really proud of, but it has to be done at more of a federal level. But maybe if it's possible to actually target whatever population niche really wants to bring back pay toilets because they think that banning pay toilets creates all kinds of perverse economic outcomes, which it does, you can find those people.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opt into viewing certain kinds of media that will then shape their views to make them more correlated with that kind of media. And so what we're kind of doing is democratizing democracy. We're saying anyone can make a misleading video, like you don't have to watch 20 hours of footage of this person talking to find the one gaffe. You can just fake it. And the fake is actually, like, for the fake to be a plausible opinion-shifting fake. It has to be something fairly similar to reality. It can't just be like Donald Trump is actually an alien. It has to be something like, you know, Donald Trump took a bribe in cash from Qatari businessman or something like that. But then if you can only make fakes that are actually kind of plausible, then they just exist in this space that is not that far from reality. And similarly, the big viral videos, they are often a sample from they are a sample from reality, but they are something where you can magnify the perceived frequency of an event if there's just wall-to-wall coverage.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is ominous. I did want to return to the points that you had made on deepfakes and on how everyone in media is writing for the tiny minority of people who really care about, or everyone in political media is writing for this tiny minority that cares about politics. And one, I actually do think deepfakes are a net positive development in the specific sense that we do a whole hour on this question. I've been writing about this one for a long time. My view is that it is always possible to create manipulative cuts of some media. It's always possible to say, okay, there have been 50 videos recorded in the last day of some egregious happening. Here's the one we're choosing to make a new story. That's always been possible with sufficient resources. And now it's possible for everyone. And so to the extent that when you choose what narrative, if you're in a position to choose what narrative is promoted, I think of it as kind of the modern, it's like it is the de facto electoral college is that people”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have just here's the question and here's the polished answer someone came up with and edited, you're missing a lot of the intermediate layers. And so it's hard to train a model that can trace through that and reproduce it. Now, if you have a smart enough model, it's basically implicitly reproducing all of that reasoning on its own. But that means that it does worse when the reasoning is really, really clever and the person didn't show their work. And a lot of clever people just figure things out and then they're already bored with the problem, so they don't want to tell you how they did it and they move on to the next thing.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think AI like humans is bad at knowing why it actually did things and really, really good at explaining why whatever it did was the right thing to do. So it probably, I mean, I'm not the head of PNC, so I don't know for sure, but I would imagine it actually makes it easier to just come up with some very solid sounding rationalization for anything. They're just really good at rationalizing. So I would be less concerned with that. Like, I actually think it's nice to have more open, accessible kind of reasoning. Like you can actually read the reasoning traces. And one of the effects I think it has on finance is that people who are coming up with recommendations like make this loan don't make that loan, it will make a lot of sense to have much more detailed records of their entire thought process. So you might have them working in Databricks notebooks or something equivalent to that, specifically so you could see, okay, first they ask this question and then they went down this rabbit hole, then they decided it's irrelevant, and then they went to this question, and then they spent some time on it, et cetera, because you.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be the CPA who does taxes for does 1,000, 1040s a day, you're probably the first CPA to go to prison specifically for something that an LLM told you to do if that hasn't happened yet. But I think that that kind of model where you want a human in the loop because so many structures that we have economically and socially just assume there's a person that will probably stick around.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will continue to do so as long as they can limit supply inflows. And so, what we might end up with is a more kind of guildified economy where we have limits on who specifically, not who can do the job, but who can actually stamp it and say, I'm taking credit for this and you consume me if it goes wrong, because that's actually a really valuable thing. And it's still like, you can't really sue a data center. You can try to sue OpenAI, but they can probably afford better lawyers than you. It's probably more economically efficient to sue me for something ChatGPT told me to do that I didn't double check by asking Claude. And so it is weird to think that one of our economic purposes as, you know, living in soul human beings is to be an easy target for a lawsuit. But it is actually something economically valuable that we can do. And because we all have different risk preferences and risk tolerances for things, it actually means that we would get this sort of uneven deployment of AI where there would be people who just demonstrate that you can go way too far and that if you decide that you're”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A human in the loop. I was joking about this earlier, but it is true the person who's in an ideal position right now is someone who is in a regulated job where there is some kind of trade association that limits new entrants into that job, but there's excess demand for the services they provide, then AI can increase their output per hour. Like these people will be minting money.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm thinking less about those right now just because everyone who is in that supply chain has all their capacity booked out so far in the future. Like new supply is pretty inelastic. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see the AI companies just guaranteeing that they will take delivery on something from Siemens Energy or G in the year 2032 or whatever, just so that they break ground on new manufacturing capacity. But I kind of view that because it's such a long lag thing. It's kind of a given. I think that the actual constraints are more on the internal organization side, just do you even have an org chart if you have AI everywhere that's always routing messages to whoever needs them? Like could you just have there's one person who's the CEO and everyone else is an individual contributor and you AIFI all metal management? Probably not because the other limiting factor is just liabilities that you do.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we build a microwave that has entirely mechanical controls with no transistors inside of it? Like, why would you do that?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came a huge thing and was like the main producer of headlines for a while. And then it kind of faded. And even though the situation is still very messed up in terms of global trade, in fact, it is more messed up than it was a few weeks ago in terms of oil trade. That's right. So in that sense, trade is like the day-to-day, like, are you better off than you were a week ago question? Trade is still the most salient issue. I mean, maybe if there's a new model release, that'll change things. But for now, that's the case. So yeah, it's all pretty volatile. In terms of the technology that I think maps most closely to this, I think the transistor and integrated circuits are probably the closest mapping. One in the literal sense of they are a way to make everything in your life a little bit smarter. And it is just astonishing to think of how many little idiot savant devices we have in our homes that can do little calculations and computations and have a nice little interface and how that stuff got so cheap that it basically became free. Like it would not make sense to think about”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where now the right became the more COVID libertarian just let it rip, we're all going to be immune to this at some point faction, which was really weird to me because the right skew's older and older people were more at risk. But I guess it goes back to salience and information environment. And if you're in the cohort where you're sedentary, you're elderly, and you are sedentary because you're spending a lot of time watching TV, if what you're watching on TV is Fox, then maybe you just get a very different view of the world. So I think the coalition's probably fluctuate a lot. I don't think there's actually any, I don't think either major party is a good home for the pro-growth slash abundance faction. They can be a minority among Democrats or a minority among Republicans and will have to sell out in some ways to have any kind of influence whatsoever. So in that sense, again, pretty pessimistic. But when you were talking about the issues that changed in salience, I think in the data you've had, it was like a year ago, it was trade and everyone was obsessed with trade. And then trade became”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the COVID analogy might be revealing in another way, which is the coalition's completely shifted multiple times. It was like in January, it's only the weird online, extremely online right-wing, anonymous people, and then a handful of rationalist people who say, this is a really big deal. And it's like we need to shut down air travel from China. And for the EA types, for the rationalist types, that was more like this is a prudent response to a potential existential threat. And then I think for a lot of people on the far right, it was like, this is a way to make China look bad and also to have fewer flights to and from China. And therefore, we want to do it. And then Trump, I think, was very just tied to what the S&P was telling him about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Like you could kind of see it. I think if he'd had a live ticker telling him how the market was reacting to some of his early COVID speeches, we would have had a completely different COVID policy of the country. And then we kind of did this.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anymore just, but here's the next one, but like you can do that with an LLM. But also older demographics nominally don't like AI, but they spend a lot of time on Facebook, which means they actually do really like AI. They like AI recommendation engines. They are very tolerant of AI recommended ads. They love AI generated images and AI generated text. They feel much more comfortable on a site where an AI is actually going to tell them what the comment should say and they don't have to come up with a comment. Like people actually love AI from a consumption perspective and hate it from like the outside abstract perspective. So the thing that makes me more optimistic is just the salience of these different issues fluctuates over time. Maybe AI”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like AI, so I'm very pessimistic on the political dimension. And I think part of it is that when you ask people about AI, when you're making it salient, they have one set of views. But if you look at their behavior, they have a different set of views. And I think this is a broader point about the large-scale deployments of technologies is that they do increase measured income and wealth inequality, but they decrease consumption inequality. So things like flying on a plane is just a much more attainable, affordable thing. There were some recent stats on how DoorDash usage is heaviest among lower income people. And so you just have access to a lot of things where it used to be that either nobody had it or only very wealthy people had it. And actually, ChatGPT, it is the kind of thing where if it didn't exist, and I were much, much wealthier, I would just hire people to do that kind of thing. I would just ask them weird questions about history or just send them off on little research tasks. And I wouldn't feel at all bad if they get back to me, you know, a week later and present me with this report and I say, oh, I actually changed my mind. I don't care about that.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who don't feel miserable when they can produce more economic output but have to pay different kinds of attention or put in more effort? It is true that these things have negative side effects, but when the cost of communication goes down, the amount of coordination you can do goes way up and you can coordinate in different kinds of different ways. And I think this also illustrates that it's very hard to predict the demand for service sector work because a lot of it is so meta, like a lot of it is interacting with other parts of the service sector. So Excel is kind of the trite example, but there's also word processing where you could think, okay, word processing makes it easier for lawyers to just quickly draft contracts. And so we'll need fewer lawyers. But actually, it meant they could turn a two-page contract into a 50-page contract and then you need more lawyers to handle that.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This stuff always feels dystopian at the time. Like, if you told someone 200 years ago, hey, it's going to be completely non viable for you to inherit your father's farm and work on that farm and then give that farm to your son. And if you said, not only is that economically non-viable, but you're also not going to be so fixated on is it your son or your daughter? And also you're probably going to move to a city, you'll be surrounded by complete strangers. You'll have a job in this loud, noisy, very uncomfortable building, like messing around with whatever these physical things you're manufacturing are like a lot of people would say that's kind of nightmarish. And in fact, a lot of contemporary observers did talk about that being kind of nightmarish, but it did end up working out reasonably well over time. It was just new and weird and completely incomprehensible from the original standpoint.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might be less AI exposed that you could do, or as the models get smarter, you could just sell it, hey, I want you to invent a new job for me, like a bespoke job. I've got to try the job I was born for.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That change actually was part of, I think it was like causal in both directions with America just having a really flexible financial system. We also have a really flexible labor market relative to every other country, which means we will be patient zero for all the job law stuff. It'll hit us before it hits anyone else and it'll hit us harder than anyone else. On the other hand, one of the unique things about this particular general purpose technology rolled out is that it is happening much, much faster than before. But the thing that slightly offsets that is that the specific technology actually gives you access to information and cognition such that you can ask ChatGPT, like, here is my job, like I've been selling insurance for 20 years. How should I reskill? What should I do? And it will ask follow-up questions. It'll ask, okay, well, what do what other problems do the companies and people you work with have? Or let's break down the skills that you have, what makes you a particularly good or bad insurance person, and then what are the other jobs?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But most of it will be owned by these people. And then the business, my stock could be worth 50 times as much in a few years if things go perfectly. Like, that wouldn't make any sense to them. The idea of a stock going from par value to 50 times par value is just insane.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you have electrified factories where they can expand, they can just add another assembly line, or they can upgrade this machine to a newer machine, et cetera. They can actually expand more organically and incrementally. And so that's when you start to see dividend payout ratios come down, and that's when you start to see the growth company as a concept emerge. Like if you read investor accounts from the 1920s, and they're talking about the stock market, one of the weird things is they're very fixated on whether the stock is above or below $100 a share because that was the par value. It was just like the standard value for the stock and it was supposed to be the book value, et cetera. Then people kind of viewed equity as just the most junior claimant, like the way you'd view equity, the equity slice of a CDO or something like that. And now we view equities completely differently. And so we deploy money completely differently. It would be incomprehensible to an investor circa 1926 to say, I'm going to invest in this company that has no operations. It's just people. And I'm going to put the actual money into this business.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is true that just when you look at these measures of how broadly technology is adopted, I think the thing that's really hard to measure is at what point does it become just part of your baseline expectation and at what point are the impacts so obvious that they're unspoken? So if you look at electrification, I think anyone who talks about AI is just required to say that it took like half a century to go from the first electrified factory to most U.S. factories being electrified. And the reason for that, and there's a lot of fun economic history on this, is that you have to run your factory in a different way. You actually have to build a different kind of building. And you also have to finance it a different kind of way, or you can finance it a different kind of way. So if you have a factor that has some kind of mechanical power source, you tend to expand your business in these discrete factory-sized increments. And what that means is that your investors, you pay out most of your earnings as dividends because there's nothing to do with retained earnings. Like if you're going to grow, you want to issue a bunch of stock, you want to issue a bunch of bonds and then grow in one shot.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I use AI a lot for research. I have only in the last few months have I actually gotten ideas for things to write, specifically from ChatGPT or only in the last few months has it made some original points I would not have thought of that were just like clever insights and not just it's reciting a fact that I did not happen to know. Talk to us a little bit more. So, this question of progress, right? We all know it's getting better. That's obvious. But the more interesting question is, is it getting better at a pace faster than what people had previously anticipated? And talk to us about like, okay, where we are now with the technology and where the people that you were talking to, and maybe I'll throw this to both of you, where would they have said we would be in March 2025?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I imagine So, I use it a ton for research. And one of the specific use cases is asking it questions like, does this joke land or, hey, I'm making a statement, you know, a kind of narrow technical statement about a domain that I'm reasonably familiar with, but I'm not an expert on. You are an expert on this. Tell me what I'm getting wrong. And one of the reasons for that is just a lot of my readers are software engineers and are eager to tell you when you're wrong. Yes, extremely eager. I sort of measure people's ability as software engineers in particular based on how quickly I get an email from them that there's a typo because the really good ones, like one of the skills that they have is just looking at a lot of text and immediately seeing what's wrong. Now that skill is kind of obsolete right now. LLMs are better at it, but still the mindset of I'm going to look at this and kind of absorb something coherent and then I'm going to look for any little issue with it that's still quite valuable. In fact, since there's more code being produced than ever before by a huge margin, it's really, really valuable to be able to read it fluently and understand what it's supposed to be doing.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they good at writing Poland? Like, can AI you want to find interesting polling questions, right? Not the obvious stuff. Is AI good at finding non-obvious polling questions that are non-correlated to things so that you can actually get signal from them?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a firm and you hire people. Has the nature of your hiring changed? Are you hiring for different types of roles than you would have a few years ago or something like that given the change in technology?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the obvious stuff. And so it would be kind of weird to be like to say my job right now is to say extremely obvious things to this superhuman intelligence. I don't even know what job title historically that might correspond to, like sort of a servant for a brilliant person who's also absent-minded professor. But yeah, I think we'll have a lot more manservant for absent-minded professor in that future. Man servant for absent-minded professor. It sounds fine.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in a tough spot, but we only find that models have these really spiky abilities, like they're superhuman in some respects and in other respects. In terms of things like math ability, they're beyond the point where I could reliably distinguish between two models and say, well, this one's really good at math and this one's okay at math. But in other domains, they do just kind of fall flat because they don't have this comprehensive world model. And the reason for that is that they're trained on text and text actually skews towards areas that are uncertain and open to debate. So I use the term the maybe sphere, which is like if you imagine there's like this bedrock of facts that are so obvious that nobody ever bothers to write them down. And then there's this infinite space of questions that are so weird that it's almost certain they don't have an answer. There's like this little narrow layer like an atmosphere where it's worth asking a question and you might get an answer. So they have a really good world model for the parts of the world that were either not sure about or that we've codified in textbooks and then a really bad world model for a”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's actually like that sector probably will grow. And it's kind of glum to say, okay, some white-collar workers are going to kind of move downscale in terms of status where they will probably have jobs that sound less cool. But overall output is high enough. And if the returns on capital are high enough that people, like the economy starts shifting more incremental production into just building data centers, that does mean that if you are the complement to a data center, like you are a necessary component of this entire supply chain, your bargaining power is a lot stronger because there's just a lot more capital that you're adjacent to. If you are completely substitutable by the data centers, then...”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is actually a tough question. One of them is just temporarily, I think there are a lot of jobs that are basically either human who's required to be in the loop for regulatory reasons. Like doctors are incredibly rapid adopters of AI tools and the supply of doctors is sort of artificially constrained. And so if you decrease the percentage of their time that they spend on admin tasks and you decrease the rate of mistakes that they make, you basically get the equivalent of manufacturing more doctors. And in cases like healthcare, there is effectively unlimited demand. There's yet to be an economy where people don't spend more of their marginal dollar on health.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facts have time to tweeting all day. But, David, so okay, there's been a lot of progress. No question. There are new harnesses for AI models that increase all of our capabilities and so forth. That's different than, we all know that's true. That's different than job wipeout in a significant way. What is it about to you that you think, yes, there is progress, but progress on the scale of this is an imminent thing that we have to be talking about that could really reshape white-collar labor?”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems like a lot of people are slacking off these days. I'm like, how do you have time? I have time because I'm like a journalist and I sit, you know, I create words professionally.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably goes down where a lot of people get washed out. But this has happened before. The spreadsheet did not eliminate investment banker or accountant as a job. It actually made it a more lucrative job, but it also made it a more measurable one where you just can't slack off the way that you perhaps used to be somewhat slack off in some of the white-collar professions. It's just a lot easier, like the expectation for output is so high. I'm on Twitter all day and a lot of people are tweeting. And I'm like...”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like tractor companies or whatever, but they have that element. And so I think that's part of what you see just early in the rollout of any general purpose technology is that you have a lot of really narrow specific bets. And then over time, the impact gets so widely distributed that it's very hard to trace. And you have to kind of go back and look at the history and look at things like, okay, the rise of the car leads to the rise of the suburb, but it also leads to the rise of the grocery store because, or like the supermarket where you can have a much larger selection and that means lower labor cost per unit sold and that means lower cost overall. And that works if people are not walking to get their groceries. It doesn't work if people are walking and it's like a daily stop on the way home from work or something. So we will probably see a lot of those weird kinds of outcomes. I think if you're thinking about the risk to a given career, I think for most of the careers people worry about, the average, like the mean compensation goes up, the median compensation of people who are in that industry right now, the median compensation they get from being in that industry.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think right now it's definitely true that you can think of this coherent category of this is an AI company or this is a non, 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. And if it were 1925 and you're trying to figure out which stocks to buy and you're just really, really bullish on electricity, then you would really, 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. And so it gets subsumed by the rest of the economy. And you see that with software too, where they're just a lot more companies that have software developers and are writing software for internal use and they're not software companies per se. You know, their restaurants or”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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 like tell us what's happening right now or what's about to happen.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the future. All right, well, let's kick it off so we have two great guests. We are going to be speaking with David Shore. He is the founder of Blue Rose Research, Political Consultancy Polster, knows a lot about AI, and we have Bern Hobart, the founder of the DIF, a great newsletter that everyone should read and a general partner at Anomaly Funds. And we're going to talk about all things AI and job loss potential and the politics of it and so forth. And so David and Byrne, thank you so much for joining us on stage here. Great to be here.”
2026-03-24 · Odd Lots · David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source