We Are Better Off Today Than We Were Four Years Ago with Ron Insana 50:18

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Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, it's March. What? It is March. I need you to tell your friends. I need you to tell your family. I need you to tell everybody you know who cares about American democracy and politics. Follow the Lincoln Project. Go to lincolnproject.us. Sign up. Join today. Share everything you can, everybody. This is going to take every last one of us

You are the beating heart of American democracy. We cannot do it without you. We won't do it without you. Go to LincolnProject.us. Go to JoinTheUnion.us. Sign up. Get involved. And we will win this in November, gang. And now, on with the show. Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by Ron Insana, senior analyst and commentator at CNBC.

Ron has been a highly respected business journalist and money manager for over three decades, has written four books on Wall Street, and is a sought after lecturer on domestic and global economics, financial markets and economic policy issues. Today, he's coming to us from Inglewood, New Jersey. Ron, welcome back. It's great to be back, Reid. Okay, I have a philosophical question to start with. What does a society do when it has achieved

not for everyone but for most of its citizens and or residents something akin to solving material necessity providing a job providing admittedly uneven public education but education and like what's next humanity hasn't seen America 2024 before

So is this sort of national ennui just like part of, OK, what do we do now? Like what's happening? It's interesting. And I think there's a multi-part answer. And I'll actually go back to 1999 because we asked the same question at the end of the Clinton years where we thought we had achieved permanent peace and prosperity. The Berlin Wall had fallen.

inflation was wildly under control. We go through a technological revolution. The unemployment rate was below 4% as it is today. And in fact, my first interview with President Clinton in 1999 was when he was going on his anti-poverty swing through Appalachia and places like Clarksdale, Mississippi. And we were asking that same question, like, what do we do now? How do we solve poverty as the last item on the economic agenda? And we're kind of there again, except for the fact that

In this post-pandemic world, we have elevated prices, which are causing that ennui you're talking about. Everything else is fine, but the aggregate price level or the cost of things overall is about 19% higher than it was before the pandemic. And so this anxiety that you see among consumers is not reflected in the fact that inflation is coming down to what the Fed perceives to be an acceptable rate of 2%, but that the overall price level

is higher. Houses are less affordable. Groceries are still less affordable than they were. Gasoline prices are fine. And so I think part of that

rest of nature of the American consumer that we're seeing is almost entirely due to that fact. But yeah, we have solved a lot of other problems. I mean, and we're dealing adequately with several of them. We're bringing home manufacturing jobs. We're increasing the capacity to make high technology goods. Everybody who wants a job has a job. The unemployment rate has been below 4% for over two years, which is the first time that's happened since the 1960s. So it's a tough question and we should be swinging towards getting kids out of poverty as the

abandoned child tax credit had done. But I also think there has to be more work on getting prices back down without creating recession. And then you'd have an entirely different attitude among consumers and voters over the course of the next many months. Let me ask a cynical question on the price, the rising prices vis-a-vis inflation. At what point does a producer

raise prices to account for inflation versus a producer raising prices because they can.

Like, where's the delta there? Yeah, I think we're in the second part of that, which is they're raising prices because they can. And consumers, by and large, have adequate savings or wages have gone up enough faster than inflation of late to make those purchases. And so we see this, that a good portion of the more recent, not increase in inflation because it is slowing, but the recent stickiness of prices may well be that corporations are holding on to their expanded margins.

Their input costs, if you will, have come down and they're holding the line on prices and fattening those margins, as you suggest. And yeah, it is a little cynical. We see it, you know, at the grocery store. When the president talks about shrinkflation, he's not entirely wrong. We've all felt it. You know, like the candy bar has gotten a little bit smaller. The cereal box is a little less full, you know, and there's a little less detergent, you know, in the box as well. And so I do think that while the president can only job on that, he can't mandate anything and there's really nothing

governments can do about this. I think many corporations have purposefully fattened their margins and maintained them, and that supported their stock prices, kept their shareholders happy, consumers not so much.

Do you think there's any return from the primacy of shareholder value? Do you think there's any return to like, I know I sound like a sparkling idealist here, and I'm sure other people would use other words and other names for it. Socialist, yeah. Yeah, socialist. Like, no, like not socialism dictates some sort of government control. I'm talking about like CEOs going, maybe we shouldn't be assholes today.

Well, Ed, look, I don't want to paint them with a broad brush in that regard. I would argue that I have been a fan since the 1990s of the notion of stakeholder capitalism.

that corporations, unlike what Vivek Ramaswamy has been suggesting and others, where companies only exist to produce profits that are returned to shareholders, that companies take into account not just their shareholders, their employees, certainly their customers and their communities. And this was something that got wildly popular at the end of the 90s and went away almost as quickly as it was talked about. But you can say what you want about Henry Ford and his views and his kind of anti-Semitic

stances that he took or you could focus more on somebody like Milton Hershey. These were two individuals who knew that if you paid your employees enough, that they can buy the products that you are producing. If you're in good standing in your community and did things to improve the lot of the people around you, not only would you have more customer and brand loyalty, but you would also create an environment that enriches everybody simultaneously and not at the

expense of another. And so, yeah, look, I wish that corporate CEOs would embrace that notion, again, of stakeholder capitalism as opposed to just shareholder capitalism, because I think

At the end of the day, it could ultimately be a bit of a self-defeating process because people do get extremely angry when they're left out of the conversation or don't have a voice, whether it's employees, customers of the communities that support these companies. You start to see reactions that are certainly not favorable to the future of a company. You and I have talked previously, both on the air and off air, about sort of the modern employee to this point.

And, you know, there was this thing, was it last year sometime, Ron, or maybe the year before this whole, you know, idea of quiet quitting, right? People do sort of half-ass. Yeah, I don't think it ever really happened, but okay. Well, and I don't think, even if it did, I don't think it was a sort of new thing, right? Like people have done half-assed work at jobs they don't like forever, right? That's not a new thing. But I wonder too, if, you know, there's all sorts of these videos you'll see on Instagram or TikTok or whatever of like employees saying,

Making fun of the fact they're on nine Zoom calls a day, they're terrible micromanaging boss. There was one video I saw where it was two guys talking about the fact that one of their employees said, okay, this call starts at eight.

And I need you on at eight. And the employee is like, well, my working hours don't start till nine. And the two guys are like, what the hell? And then the other two people who were sort of watching this said, well, I mean, their job is dictated that it is working hours start at nine, working hours end at five. And sort of just like in that Apple TV show, right? Like if it doesn't take place within that eight hour frame, it doesn't exist. Maybe.

Maybe that's always been the case, but it just seems interesting to me that people are like, look, I'm going to do the job you pay me for. I'm going to do a good job that you pay me for. But like, just be understood, like, understand you see me as a cog in the machine. I understand my place in it. Don't expect me to be like the happiest cog or the cog that works extra hard just because you think I should. I think this has probably been a phenomenon that's been around for as long as work has been around. It maybe gets more play because social media can, in fact,

illustrations of this, but you can go back and watch Bugs Bunny cartoons that riff the workplace or any other number of cartoons that date all the way back to the 30s and 40s and television shows that had characters who were slightly less than enamored with their jobs. Quite frankly, I think productivity has actually gone up. And so as much as people may be portrayed as checked out before nine and checked out after five, what we found in this new hybrid work environment that we have, the

given that commute times have either been eliminated a couple of days a week, or they've certainly been shortened because of this hybrid work environment that we have. I think workers are actually doing better. Now, it's hard when you survey people to actually find workers who will say they are overjoyed with their jobs or they, you know,

They've chased their passion. They've succeeded at the one thing they wanted to do. And so I think some of these arguments get a little distorted and that they're not much different. I mean, just go back and watch The Honeymooners. I mean, it was one really long season on TV way back when, but neither Ralph Cramden...

nor Norton were all that terribly jazzed to be driving a bus or working in the sewer. And so I think some of it's overstated. And I think that unease or unhappiness has always been there. But I also think that there are a lot of people doing very, very productive things in this economy. And there's some really exciting things

ahead. The question I think becomes inclusivity. And I would argue a lot of times, most of this discontent actually stems from managers really not listening to their employees and what they need to be as productive as they can be on the work front and also affording them the opportunity to have the type of balance I think that most employees are looking for today.

And one that, again, maybe our respective lines of work, Ron, just that was never in the cards, right? That just wasn't part of- Nine to five. I don't remember the last time I did nine to five. When I was working full-time at either Financial News Network or CNBC, you worked for as long as it took to cover the news. And in the old days when I first started in financial news, the market was only open from 10 to four.

So it was as close to a civil service job as you can get. There was no pre-market, there was no aftermarket, and you'd literally go home when it was done and there was nothing else to do. Now it's a 24-7 gig. And so tonight, in fact, as we're speaking, I got a call just a little while ago from Stephanie Ruhle and, can you come on at 11 o'clock tonight and talk about what's going on? Like, yeah, okay, I'll go on. But I'm getting picked up at 9.45.

I'll get home at 1230 in the morning and you do whatever it is somebody asks you to do. And I think there are plenty of people willing to do that. And there are also plenty of people.

willing to complain about it as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, if you have the ability to breathe, you have the ability to complain and maybe the right to. OK, so let's talk about this. I mean, you know, let's talk about the American economy more broadly. So I was with a friend the other day who works in the sort of financial services sector, too. And I was asking him because I'm not quite John McCain level, don't understand economics, but I'm relatively close enough. And he made this joke. He said, you know, economists

have called the six of the last three recessions.

And I know that's probably an old joke for you. Why is it? I mean, I guess maybe there's a reason. It's 11 of the last five, and it's attributed to Paul Samuelson talking about the stock market's predictive capability. Right. And I guess there's a reason why they call economics the dismal science. Yes. But why is it that even now, after the American economy has shown not only a resounding rebound, I guess, but also incredible growth, also as compared to the rest of the world, why is it

Are we just programmed to wait for the other shoe to drop? Is that what we're programmed for? Yeah, I think so. And in this environment too, where you have many, many people talking down the economy, including one individual who happens to be running for president right now, who openly wished for both a recession and a stock market crash, that doesn't help. And we've also seen that polls...

show, depending on which party you belong to, you have a particular view of the economy. If you're a Democrat, you think it's better. And if you're a Republican at the moment, or at least a follower of President Trump, you think it's worse. The reality is the US is in really good shape. Yes, we are pre-programmed to wait for that inevitable recession or that stock market decline or crash or something, the wheels to come off the wagon. And right now,

You've had a policy mix that's been extraordinarily favorable to growth. Even as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, you had...

People who own their homes with really low mortgages, so they weren't necessarily forced to refinance at higher rates. So the household balance sheet of America looks pretty good. Corporations borrowed long-term at very low interest rates. They were not that dramatically affected by the rise in interest rates. And then along with that, the programs that were passed post-pandemic, first, obviously, the stimulus that came both from President Trump and then from President Biden. But add to that the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

And you've had billions and billions of dollars poured into the economy, even as interest rates went up, to build out manufacturing facilities, to engage in energy transition projects.

And to do the types of things that have been ignored for the last many years, if not decades, and that's created a spark in the economy and helped to fund things like the development of artificial intelligence as well, which we can talk about separately. But you've got a booming economy in the United States where, again, as I said, the unemployment rate under 4% for more than two years hasn't happened since the 1960s.

And you've got, again, anyone who wants a job effectively employed in one. This is a good economy. We're growing at about, this year, I would imagine, 2%, which is pretty good this late in the cycle. The unemployment rate's still low. Inflation's coming down. And again, as you suggested, when compared to the rest of the world, this includes China as well, which just put out a BS figure yesterday about its expected growth this year of 5%. That ain't going to happen. We are growing faster with less inflation than every other major country in the world.

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I want to talk AI for a second, but I want to talk China first. I think we talked a little bit about China the last time you were on, but give us a sense of where we are now. I've heard that they are spending something like 7% of GDP on the military. They aren't even reporting youth unemployment rates anymore. Obviously, you've had this ever grand real estate collapse. So

Tell us, you know, is the world still in the market for cheap goods from China? Is the middle class of China collapsing? Like what's going on? In my view, I'll say that this is probably not entirely a unique point of view or idiosyncratic. China is screwed. They have some really serious problems facing them.

As you mentioned, the property sector, which is not just Evergrande, but the property sector in China accounts for 30% of GDP and it's imploding. They still have 50 ghost cities that are uninhabited. They have not yet effectively dealt with that problem, which if it occurred here would be like 2008, right? But they're pretending it's not happening. They're not stimulating the economy, which is still more abundant post their COVID lockdown.

Youth unemployment rate is still at records. They've just begun reporting those numbers again. And young people are not that interested in getting jobs in China. Overlay that with the fact that China's population, and there are new numbers on this now, currently at 1.4 billion people, some months ago was expected that their population would decline to 800 million people by 2100. They've now downgraded that assessment to 535 million people by 2100.

They're just a ticking demographic time bomb. And President Xi is doing nothing to really focus on stimulus to grow the economy more quickly. It's party over prosperity. It's personal power over prosperity. And the only thing that makes me worry about China is that when you get into a situation like that, we've certainly seen this with Russia.

countries like that become much more restive militarily. Right. The belligerent. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what I worry about. But I think as an economy, if they're going to do anything, they're going to export deflation, which is going to push down our inflation rate because yeah, they'll probably sell cheaper goods. They'll be dumping electric cars and

solar panels and other things. Now, the Biden administration is taking steps to keep that from happening. But China is so weak that the price of oil, for instance, it's been almost impossible for it to break $80 on the upside because China is so slow, it's not importing nearly as much in the way of commodities as it used to. Well, which I assume also means they're buying less

illegal Russian oil too, right? Yeah. They're buying what they need, right? But they're getting it from Russia and so is India for that matter and a handful of other countries, but they're not going to grow 5%. In fact, probably half that. And that's not what we're accustomed to with respect to China, which used to have double digit growth. You look at their stock market, right? In 2007, the Shanghai composite was near 6,000. Today it's at 3,000. It's

It's down 50%. People keep talking about China as if it's a great investment. If it's so great, we wouldn't see Chinese nationals moving $50 billion a month out of the country any way they can. And they also wouldn't be coming through the Mexican border. Weren't they ordered to stop doing that? Yeah, they're doing it anyway. They're sneaking it out and gold ingots and whatever else they can move. They're buying properties in Japan. They're buying properties wherever they can move money out of the country. And so, yeah, there are capital controls there for sure. But people always find a way.

Rick, not for China, but Russia. Rick told me that in Miami, they call those empty condos Russian safety deposit boxes. Absolutely. That was true in Manhattan for a while, too, in the buildings of certain individuals we know. Right. Right. Exactly. And so how does that affect the American economy? How does it affect individual Americans?

Because, you know, we've been told that, you know, China's on the rise. But again, how does a country, again, that's, you know, lying about everything. And again, this is what I mean, they're not just authoritarian, they're totalitarian. So how does this affect the United States? And how does it affect the world? Do you think? Well, I mean, they're not an engine for growth, clearly, globally, those days appear to be over. And my guess, in a weird sense, I know you can't really say this.

And mean it. But I think they're done. As an economic superpower or one that's going to quickly surpass the United States, I think those forecasts have been ripped away. That the launch of the Asian century led by China, that's just not happening anymore.

Do they sell goods at below market rates around the world and try to maintain their economy in that regard? That's possible. Do we really disentangle with China and decouple in a way that's meaningful? Possible. And then we're seeing that in the onshoring of manufacturing capacity or reshoring where we're getting friendlier again with Mexico from a manufacturing perspective, although some Chinese goods are being transhipped through Mexico to avoid tariffs. This has happened in the past. We're getting tighter with Japan, Australia,

South Korea and other countries. So I think we're hedging reasonably well if we can get India on our side in that regard too. And any problems coming from China from an economic perspective would be lessened because we have that market in India of more than 1.4 billion people that someday might be exploited the way in which China was. And so where companies are getting hit, like we saw, for instance, Apple-

get hammered yesterday in the stock market because their cell phone sales in China were down 24% in the first several weeks for several months of the year. So companies that are trying to do business there are going to be affected. I don't think the average American is going to notice all that much. I mean, if you're going to a Walmart or you're going to a Costco, you're still going to find consumer goods that are less expensive and it may not just be a China phenomenon anymore.

Can I go back to my original question based on what you said about the iPhone? And I think about this in the context of like cars too, right? You know, every new iPhone is...

marginally better than the last one. I'm sure it has better security. I'm sure it has a faster processor, maybe a better screen. It's less breakable, all the other stuff. But at some point, you know, look, I mean, the back of my iPhone is cracked into a gajillion little pieces and it's only held together with this thing. Yeah, I know. I already busted my screen cover. Right. And so how does that affect, you know, the Apples of the world or the Toyotas of the world or the Fords of the world? We're like,

I drive a 2015 Lexus, Ron, like it's got one hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. I'm going to drive it till the wheels come off. Yeah. Right. Most people don't do that. But if you have cars now that use less gas and are more reliable or electric altogether, if you have an iPhone that works fine, it doesn't you know, maybe it's not the newest thing. So people go, oh, you got the new iPhone.

How does that happen? And again, that goes back to my sort of, you know, the beginning of this sort of material largesse of the U.S., which is like most of the stuff people want, they got and they don't need a new one necessarily.

Yeah, they don't, but you know, we're addicts, right? In the US, I mean, 70% of GDP is still personal consumption, right? We were somewhat unique in that regard that the bulk of our economic growth comes from consumption. And it's quite the opposite in a lot of other countries where in China it was output and here it's consumption. And unless you have a material event or a big recession or a huge drawdown in savings, and look, there's six

trillion in money market mutual funds. There's a couple trillion dollars more in CDs, $8 trillion sitting in cash right now for American consumers. If we can afford it, we buy it. That's typically the way we behave. Yeah, we don't all behave like you. Not everybody will drive that 2015 car forever. And look, I think it's a laudable way to go about it, maximizing the use of a consumer good that you have that ultimately...

decreases in value like an automobile. But look, we still are, I think, to a certain extent, intrigued by shiny new objects. And so when they're there, we go out and buy them. The best word in marketing is still new, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But it's interesting...

the last time I took my car in for service, the service guy's like, you interested in a new car? No, no, no, no. And I said, do most, I mean, Lexuses have a pretty good reputation for running forever, so long as you take care of them. And he said, you know, most people are coming to buy new cars, Ron. They're not looking to get the new car because their old car doesn't work. They want the stuff in it. They want the new whiz bang. They want the screen, whatever the case, the new electronics. Like, I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. But to your point, yes, I guess.

I am still vestigially analog in many ways. Yeah, look, I mean, I don't know if you've seen the screen sizes in some of these cars, whether it's a Tesla or a Mercedes or even an American built car. Now these, you know, these almost dashboard size screens that give you, you know, 360 views of the environment that, you know, are wildly interactive. It is pretty amazing that, you know, these tools are available to us and cars like iPhones are becoming ecosystems unto themselves.

All right, so let's go from my analog state now, Ron, to artificial intelligence. So just as a story, the other day I had a physical and I was at the doctor and he had his phone. He said, I've got this AI thing on my phone that will record our conversation and then upload it directly, blah, blah, blah, blah. I go, well, that's called transcription. That's not new. He goes, no, no, no, this is AI.

Like, is everything AI? Because if everything's AI, nothing's AI. Correct. Look, I mean, yes, that's transcription. Yes, he could have done that with a tape recorder, but that tape recorder then would have had to have been transcribed by an individual. So now you're getting these data dumps that automatically go into a system and are collated with everything else that goes in. And look, that's probably not the most important AI thing.

piece that's going to go into medicine. I was talking to somebody who works at a pharmaceutical company and the ability of artificial intelligence to look for project mutations from a virus to help with drug development, to improve surgical outcomes and other patient outcomes. That's where the real important things will happen. You're going to see that over time. And it's not just Teladoc and things like that, but the actual research that gets done that's enhanced by AI and

and the ability of this ultra-powerful computing capabilities that exist now is going to have a material impact on everything from drug development to identifying diseases earlier and so on and so forth. And so I think that in that regard, that's the important part. What you're talking about, though, also is interesting because

As the mundane tasks get eliminated through artificial intelligence and things, all the back office work that used to be done by individuals, once that gets automated, that leaves a doctor, a financial professional, or anyone else who's a client-facing individual time to spend with their customer, patient, client, and spend more quality time with them. And I think that's going to be another feature of AI that will become important. We still have to work through

some of these other issues, the hallucinations, the worry about cybersecurity, the worry about it becoming Skynet and killing us all. Terminator reference. I appreciate that, Ron. Yeah, absolutely. But I think the question is, thinking back, asking you to put your historian hat on, do you think that this is as disruptive as, say, the Industrial Revolution was? Do you think this is as disruptive as when we used to just call it the internet was?

The information age, yeah. Yeah, the information age where, you know, are millions of workers going to be displaced? You know, what are we going to do with if you're an older worker? What are we going to do with them? Is that the next cycle of this? It seems to be. And I think there are a lot of folks talking about it. I mean, I think estimates that I've seen is that some 300 million workers globally will be displaced by artificial intelligence over time. You know, it's interesting. And, you know, I

It may be hard to compare to the Industrial Revolution in the sense that we were an agrarian nation until about 1900 and change, the very early 1900s. The bulk of our GDP really came from agriculture and the types of pastoral activities that took place in the United States. After the Industrial Revolution, we've gone from that component, the agricultural component of our economy, to being as big as it was then.

to being less than 3% of GDP today, and yet our output is exponentially higher than it was 125 years ago or 124 years ago. So that was enormous, right? And people whose skills didn't translate from the farm to the factory were really left behind. And we still see, to a small extent, even today, some vestigial elements of that. I think...

I think it could be equally disruptive. But again, if folks who might be displaced by this are capable of upskilling so that they can either take a technology or technology adjacent job, it might not be as devastating. Look, if you're a lot older, and look, I'll be 63 at the end of the month, and I'm actually getting involved with an AI fintech company. It has not been announced officially yet. So I'll put that caveat around it. And it's fascinating.

Some of the things that can be done are really, truly quite interesting. And as long as you're a lifelong learner and as long as you commit to and are willing to go with the changes that are put in front of you, I think you could adapt, survive, and thrive. If you are unwilling...

to go with the changes. And we saw that in the agricultural community. We saw that during the advent of the information age, and we'll see it again now as AI comes in. Yeah, it's going to be problematic where it's really going to be problematic. I think you'll see this in some really tactile businesses like, let's say, quick service restaurants.

They're getting to the point where you might not need any people in a fast food place, right? You'll have a robot making the food. You have touchscreen or voice activated ordering systems. You have conveyor belts that deliver your stuff. That's already being experimented with, by the way, in a wide variety of institutions. You're going to see a lot of that. And it is going to economically disenfranchise, particularly young people who are trying to get that first job. Well, and so let me ask you that. So, I mean, there are some jobs that people still need to do theoretically, right?

And so I want to talk about both ends of this sort of demographic spectrum. Let me start with the younger cohort. Let me move to the older, which is so what does a kid do? It's not necessarily at a fast food restaurant. Maybe it's at a mom and pop burger joint. Like one of my first jobs was, you know, being a busboy at a burger joint. Right. Which is everything you would imagine it was when I was 16. Right. Oh, yeah. But also, what does that mean for kids?

education, primary education, secondary education. You know, it wasn't that long ago, Ron, when I, I mean, it's hard to believe it's as long as it has been when, you know, in my classrooms, we were still lined up in rows like they had been, you know, for factories. Now kids are more at tables. It's a little bit looser. The Harkness method, as it's called. Okay. I had no idea. There we go. The Harkness method. How does everything else sort of

respond to this? Because I saw it was that the guy who's the CEO of NVIDIA said, I don't need more coders. The stuff I want to create makes coders unnecessary. Yeah, he's right. So like, what are our kids going to do? What do we need them to do?

As you say, look, there's still always going to be some customer or client facing jobs, right? That are of a great degree of importance, whether that's medicine, whether it's law, whether it's finance, whether it's retail. And believe it or not, some of the e-commerce companies are looking at bricks and mortar stores as a new area to exploit, if you will. So you kind of do need people in those environments. They're not all great high paying jobs. And certainly at the low end of the spectrum, I mean, you still need people maintaining lawns,

fixing roads, putting in pipes, doing all those types of things, building houses. We're there are 435,000 construction jobs open in the United States. We're still short 100,000 truckers in the United States. And that job pays, it's a tough job, but it pays $120,000 a year. So there's going to always be a mix. I think the question with respect to young people and their education, I still think

that being a well-rounded, educated individual who understands the concept of lifelong learning, those people will do very well because they'll be adaptable. Their technology skills

aren't going to be the same necessarily. When you had a kid coming out of college now, he says, well, I code in Python. And as Jensen Wong, who you refer to as the CEO of NVIDIA, says, I don't need anybody to code, that's becoming increasingly true. But that doesn't mean there aren't huge cybersecurity jobs that pay extremely well that are going to be required or other jobs that are either in technology or technology adjacent that help companies

to update their systems or become more efficient, become more productive, those jobs are still going to be there. It's not all going to be done by AI. We're not just going to wake up one morning and there'll be no need for anybody. That's that kind of really, as you said, from dismal science, Malthusian view of the economy that somehow we're going to run out of steam. Or in the case of Malthus, he said we were going to run out of food because there was too many people in England. There were too many people in England and he forgot about technology.

Or in the case of China, I was just doing some math. We're talking like the loss of population of like 10 million people a year for the next, like maybe more than that for the next 75 years, right? Like that is pretty extreme. Yeah, absolutely. And so look, they'll have their own set of problems. I think, you know, one of the things about these revolutions, right? It's often been said there are as many or more jobs created as are destroyed. Right.

I think we'll go with that assumption for now because you will still need people to do jobs. If that's not the case, then you'll hear a very loud argument about universal basic income. I was going to ask about that. Yeah. That was literally next on my list. Yeah. That is the next step that if you have people with just leisure time and no work, they're going to need some income. And that

will lead some people to believe that that may be in our future. I don't know that we'll get there. It would be a radical reordering of society. You'd be getting rid of all other entitlement programs and just handing people a check every week so that they can survive. I don't know how realistic that assumption is at the moment. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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So let's talk about the other end, which is the older worker who has been in IT information services, whatever the case might be. You know, everybody's living longer, Ron. And based on I was having a kind of I might have been with Rick. I think we were together last week in California. And he said something like.

When it comes to like human longevity, right? He's sort of like, I feel like, you know, if you could survive the next 10 years, you might survive the next 20 after that. He's not wrong. Right. So David Sinclair wrote a book about longevity. He is a longevity scientist at Harvard who drinks his own Kool-Aid. And I mean this in a literal sense. He has an elixir, if you will, that is supposed to, if not slow, altogether stop the aging process at the cellular level. This is called epigenetic rejuvenation.

re-engineering. And this is something that's being explored by David Sinclair, a gentleman by the name of Juan Carlos Belmonte at the Salk Institute, Aubrey de Grey in Europe. They're trying to slow the aging process, if not stop it altogether. So when healthy cells replicate, they replicate imperfectly versus cancer cells, which replicate perfectly, which is why that tumor at Johns Hopkins continues to live outside of the woman who had it and died many, many years ago, the Hewlett tumor. So they're trying to figure out

how you get healthy cells to stop effectively killing themselves over the time. And I don't know if you've seen this guy who's been written up in the New York Post, who's got the body of a 42-year-old and he's semi-translucent, if you will. He's getting infusions of his son's, younger son's blood and all this kind of stuff. There are a lot of people that are playing around with this longevity thing. What we think, right, from that perspective is it's been said that the person, the first person to live to 150 has been born among the millennials.

And it's not just this stuff, but it's also the 3D printing of human organs from stem cells that if you have a kidney problem, you'll get it replaced. It'd be like a car going into the shop and they'll put you up on blocks. And if you do get a stem cell kidney replacement, you don't need medicines that- Right, anti-rejection. Yeah, anti-rejection medications. So yeah, it's possible if we clear the next 20 years, 10 years, you get an extra 20 out of it.

And then we got to figure out what to do because then all of a sudden, Social Security and Medicare become an entirely different proposition.

The question I have, Ron, is let me take it out of the individual human experience and into the collective human experience and the idea of the eras in which we live or have lived. So I remember, gosh, it must have been 2018, I think. And I was at a meeting back in D.C. and it was a political reform group. And everybody's very smart, much smarter than I am. And somebody talks about something, something, something in the postwar era. And I stopped and I said, may I interrupt? Like the war ended a long time.

time ago like 70 years ago now 80 years ago like have we reached the end of the post-war era because it sort of stretched through the cold war and my grandparents are gone right and so like the you know the greatest generation if there's any of them left they're very very old and so like what is the next epic for us look i what worries me more than anything else and so i'm about to lose

my uncle's wife, my aunt, in the next couple of weeks, I believe, who would be the last member of the greatest generation in my family. And it's shocking to me that they're all gone. And the through line to us started with the Depression, went through World War II, the Cold War, and our parents transmitted a lot of information, our relatives did, about that period. And yeah, we're very far removed from it. What worries me more about the next generation

epic, if you will, is that it might be the last one, is that when you get far enough away from a carried memory, you repeat the mistakes of the past. And this is what worries me with what's going on between Russia and Ukraine, what's going on between Israel and Hamas, what may go on between China and Taiwan, is that an entire cohort of younger people

don't have any connection to that historical experience or that institutional memory. So I worry that what we experienced, you and I, as either a late stage baby boomer or a member of Gen X, we didn't have anything to tell our kids, right? We didn't serve anywhere. We didn't go anywhere. I mean, we didn't have those experiences. And so my concern is that we go back to what has been considered historically normal and have some unfortunate global event. If that doesn't happen,

You have all the ingredients for a much better world being put in place right now, some of which we already talked about with AI and longevity science and things like that. You can...

If we avoid some sort of global altercation, you know, you can have an environment that is actually highly productive, highly satisfying. You know, it's in a weird way, it's almost a trade-off between Brave New World and 1984, right? You're not sure if you don't want to go one way. You don't love Brave New World. They did solve a lot of problems, but you're locked into a position that's determined by, you know, how much alcohol they put into your blood surrogate when you were an embryo. That's a flight of fancy that probably not everybody recognizes.

I don't really know what's next. Again, my bigger concern is that we're going to make a mistake that was made in the past and not so much that we have enough enlightened leaders, even those with plenty of experience, who will help us avoid it. I mean, is it Santayana? Is that who said, you know, we're doomed to repeat it? I agree with you 100%. I'm concerned about the future, but I'm concerned about the future because none of us or not nearly enough of us understand our own past. Yeah.

A hundred percent. And it's, you know, I have three Gen Z kids, right? They don't have that connection as much as they, like my parents, whom they only knew one of and only for a brief period of time, you know, never heard those stories, right? And so they heard some of my father-in-law's stories about Korea, things like that. But there's no real feel for a world in which

there is a great deal of not just discontent, but risk, right? I mean, we had this conversation during the pandemic with my kids because they were, a couple were in high school, one was in college. And so they came home.

And I said, listen, I said, I know this is unpleasant and inconvenient being locked down in our house. I said, but the generations before you were asked to leave their homes, go somewhere and possibly die. You're being asked to stay home and live. So let's try to put that in a perspective. It resonated to an extent.

But not fully. Well, because I once made a joke that I don't think my kids have much of a connection to reality. And which, you know, again, I think a lot of modern parents probably feel that way, especially Gen Xers who were like, you know, latchkey kids and everything else. And someone said, no, it's their reality. Right. And you can try and explain your story to them as much as you can. But it's always going to be a story you told them. It's going to be a story. It's never going to be their reality.

But, you know, the long tradition, the human, the age of humanity's long tradition of passing down stories through generations matters. Yeah, 100%. You know, it's Anne Applebaum said in her book, Twilight of Democracy, right, Ron? Like, we don't have a shared...

sense of anything at the moment. That doesn't mean we won't forever, but we don't at the moment. And this will be on full display between now and November, right? Is that absolute absence of a shared experience, a national dialogue. I mean, even when I was a kid, you know, when there are three, I would not argue for three channels, given that I've made my life, you know, my life's work in cable television for the most part. And so that explosion of networks was helpful to me personally. But when you had three television networks, you watched

Then I use this term advisedly, a homogenized view of the news, no matter which network you watched, right? The water cooler conversation, again, a rather anachronistic phrase, revolved around the handful of television shows or shared experiences that we had. Now, it's an entirely a la carte menu, and that comes to facts as well.

You can, you know, you could choose from column A or column B when it comes to your fact set. And that's going to be supported by some echo chamber that you've attached yourself to. And that's really problematic. And I think that's what's going to, you know, I think that is everything that will matter going into November. You have, I would imagine, roughly the same number of people on both sides, right?

But you have two distinctly different narratives about the state of the union, which we'll hear more about, no doubt, from President Biden. Many of us feel it's perfectly fine relative to history, relative to the rest of the world. Others feel it's wildly out of control. And you can't marry those two points of view, no matter how hard you try, no matter how fact-based you are. I've sat lunch on behalf of somebody else who was trying to get some business out of a guy, a billionaire, who asked me three questions. Number one, did we really land on the moon?

Number two, was 9-11 an inside job? Number three, did pharmaceutical companies create COVID so they could sell the vaccine? Guy's a billionaire. This is his reality. And as much as I couldn't really respond because I was trying to help this other guy get him as a client, I'm thinking, and I don't swear publicly, but I was thinking this guy's an effing whack job, right? He's got a billion dollars and he's out of his mind and we can't communicate.

But also just a good reminder, too, that you can be a billionaire and a moron. Yes, absolutely. You only have to be good at one thing. Right. Exactly. You don't have to be good at everything. And most of the time. And this is, you know, one of the trappings of extreme wealth, I guess, although maybe not even anymore, is that because you are that wealthy, very few people are willing to tell you that you're wrong.

either. Right. Like, Oh no, no, Mr. Smith. I think the moon landing was silly too. I think they did it on a soundstage in LA. Yeah. I mean, I was with OJ Simpson starring in the feature film. Um,

I was pleasant, but I certainly think we landed on the moon. Because I almost got killed on 9-11, that is a foundational question for me that if I thought our government intentionally, and although I was there in a weird way by accident, but it tried to intentionally kill its own citizens to forward a particular agenda, that's a really foundational question. You'd have to leave the country if you believe that. Right. So I didn't even know what to say to the guy, you know?

All right. Well, you have given me too much time as it is. What, if anything, of our broad conversation, which you always have and I very much enjoy, what else, what's one more thing that you think our listeners should be taking a look at?

Facts, really. This is fundamental, I think, to what's going on this year in particular. There are some facts that are simply not in dispute. It's the notion of a vibe session or because you happen to feel bad about who's in power. And we've seen some polls that reflect this, that if you're affiliated with one party, you think the economy sucks. And if you're affiliated with the other party, you think it's fine.

24 months of unemployment under 4%, Hispanic and Black unemployment near record lows, women in the workforce near record highs, inflation back under control, understood grocery prices and a handful of other prices are not where people would like them to be.

This is one of the best economies we've seen since the 1990s, except for that one singular factor. And it's not just in absolute terms, but in relative terms, the US is in remarkably better shape than the rest of the world. And so I think that if anyone would hew to the facts, they would have a uniform view of what's happening in the US right now.

economically in particular. I don't want to get outside my area of expertise. People can feel the way they're going to feel about Israel and Hamas or Russia and Ukraine, and that becomes a matter of debate. But the economy is really numbers at the end of the day. We're doing fine. It's a hard sell in some cases, but I really think at the end of the day right now, you cannot say that you were better off. And I'm not trying to make a political statement here, but you cannot say economically you were better off four years ago than you were today.

It's just factually untrue. Right. And we're coming up on just about a week away as we record this, Ron, from what was, I think, I recall it was March 13th or 14th when we went into lockdown, right? Yeah. And I think we're all, for those of us that survived, we're all better off than we were four years ago. Well, I mean, 1.2 million people died. It was a profound event. And I think people's

Not to belabor the point, I think people don't really understand or appreciate the magnitude of that crisis and how much change it brought. And they continue to look for someone to blame for what in this environment one would assume is a much better outcome than we certainly envisioned four years ago next week.

Right. Oh, no, listen, I mean, we could do a whole show on that. We'll do a four. Where were you four years ago? All right, Ron, before I let you go, where can our listeners find you online and where can they find your work? Still on X, formerly known as Twitter, right for CNBC dot com.

I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook, and I will be on CNBC, I believe, Friday at 2 Eastern time. I'll be with Stephanie Ruhl on occasion, popping up on MSNBC. So I'm in all those spots and not yet coming to a theater near you, but I hope one of these days that's going to be a feature of my life as well. Awesome. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen, on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP, and...

over on Substack at the home front. Ron and Sana, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Reid. Pleasure. Everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening. Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review.

To connect with us, follow us on Twitter at Project Lincoln. And for more information on our movement, to join our mailing list, subscribe to our newsletter, or make a contribution to our efforts, visit LincolnProject.us. If you want to message the podcast directly, please send an email to podcast at LincolnProject.us. And if you want to personally join the fight to save our nation's democracy, visit JoinTheUnion.us.

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