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00:00I sometimes joke that Nvidia is more important than the Fed, but maybe it's not a joke when you think about all of the CapEx, all of the money being spent on AI percolating in the economy. Put that into context how important that is at this juncture. It's immensely important. You know, you've had some economists say, versions of like we're in an AI ex recession and what they mean by that, I think it's kind of a misnomer in some sense, because it's not really the case that we would know how capital was being used if it wasn't being deployed in this way for these massive power centers, in this massive changing force in our economy. But the reality is there's a lot going in here, and it's going to fundamentally transform the way that the economy functions. And it already is. And it's kind of too early to tell where we are in this process. But what we do know is this is kind of transformational change. And there's a lot of money being put into efforts to try and understand how the technology can be best used and deployed. And I think it's going to be a hugely important trend to follow. Something I wonder about, though, is that when it comes to these big tech companies, these A.I. companies, it feels like they spend money in a circle. Ramin mentioned at the top of the show that 50% of NVIDIA sales come from just five companies. So, I mean, how how widespread is the theoretical benefit coming from this spend? You know, if you spend time around many of the people who are at the frontiers of artificial intelligence, what they'll tell you is that in some sense we're at the beginnings of the computer revolution or the industrial revolution, even with the ways in which this type of technology is going to be used so broadly across every sector. And so transformation with respect to how the labor market functions. Right now, we're kind of in the early innings with respect to understanding the extent to which all of this money is actually chasing exactly that type of transformation or the extent to which maybe there is some frothiness in this market and it's kind of the same companies and the same resources being deployed in a particular way, and they're going to be some winners and they're going to be some losers of that. It's just in some sense is an economist. As we're watching all of these trends, it feels a little bit early to try to make any sort of predictions about what I'm likely to expect and anticipate. And as a professor who's trying to teach students about what they should be doing, the labor market going forward, it's kind of a challenging moment. And it's challenging, too, because, I mean, when you try to find parallels with sort of past big sort of technological improvements, whether it's dotcom boom and iPhone or even going back to the computer age in the fifties and sixties, there was a lot of job creation, but there was also a lot of job loss. It's more about what the balance is, and I know you can't really predict that, but do you see evidence at least now that this could be a net beneficiary for the labor market and for the economy? And that's a tricky question remain. It's kind of at the foundation of the questions that we're all asking ourselves, like are we talking about compliments or are we talking about substitutes? Are we talking about changing the way that first year associates or lawyers? Or are we talking about fewer first year associates working in legal markets? And right now, I think there's a really interesting fundamental data question that my colleagues and I at Budget Lab are really interested in, which is we have some great data from companies like Anthropic and Open Air with respect to how exposed certain occupations are to artificial intelligence. But we don't even really have the capacity right now to map that exposure onto actual employment records to see is there a displacement that's happening in the labor market as it stands. And so actually, it's a question we're really interested in being able to answer. But the second piece of it is that I think that fundamentally in a lot of these occupations where we're talking about the knowledge economy and there's a ton of exposure, you have to wonder, isn't there space to do more types of work? Aren't there certain types of legal services or certain sectors that are underserved presently where the presence of AI and its ability to sort of allow us to do even more work is actually going to mean more access and more services for those who need it? Well, that's what I'm curious to do. You how close do you pay attention to productivity? I feel like that was a hot thing, I don't know, 30 years ago. And then everyone just stopped caring, I guess, because it was maybe they felt that the data really wasn't reflective of what was going on. Does that change with the I do. We need to start paying more attention to that. Well, we economist pay a fair bit of attention to productivity in something that's pretty important for us all to understand is that a bunch of what the Congressional Budget Office thinks with respect to broad economic growth, so GDP growth over the course of the next decade is coming on the heels of expectations about labor force growth that comes from immigration. And we're now watching over the course of the first few months of this administration, a lot of those tailwinds with immigration kind of slowing down. And so those productivity levers are also slowing down in the economy. So the question I guess is like, is AI in some sense going to be a supplement that's going to allow for that type of productivity growth? The way in the late nineties we saw a boom from computerization that can counteract some of those trends in immigration and also the broad aging of the economy. And it's how So We don't have a lot of time left, but I do want to talk about the labor market and labor market data collection outside of just say, I. I mean, taking politics out of the equation, we know that there's been a lot of focus on the bills. There's been a lot of focus on the very big revisions that we've been getting to the monthly jobs figures. And one of the points that keeps coming up is that it's just harder to get people to respond to the surveys. And I would love to hear your perspective on whether that's just inevitable. So I think it's not. But one thing I want to do for your viewers is to try to put some of those provisions into context. The idea is that we send out these surveys in relatively short order and we ask people to report about employment trends and even a really massive sounding downward revision, 248,000 jobs adjusted downward over the course of a few month period. In context of actual payrolls, something like 0.15% of overall employment. So it's pretty small, actually, even a big revision. And it's what you would expect because as more data comes in, we have a more accurate reflection in real time of what the economic picture actually looks like. And so I think there's a ton of scope for us to spend energy thinking about how to up survey responses, how to use artificial intelligence in new ways to improve data collection. But something we should like deeply appreciate is the US is the sort of gold standard with respect to government data. It's really important we don't break that. And a lot of what you're seeing with respect to the politicization of the agency and frankly, de-funding the BLS budget is down 20% and it's lost a ton of its headcount. It's actually going in the wrong direction, not the right one.

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