Make Me Smart February 22, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you everyone for joining us on this Thursday, February 22.

Kai Ryssdal 

The audio show is what we do today. Listen back to some of the big stories of the week. Juan Carlos, here we go. Let’s hit the first one.

Jensen Huang

“Like AC power generation plants of the last industrial revolution, Nvidia AI supercomputers are essentially AI generation factories of this industrial revolution. Every company in every industry is fundamentally built on their proprietary business intelligence, and in the future, their proprietary generative AI.”

Kai Ryssdal 

That was a guy by the name of Jensen Huang. He is the CEO of Nvidia, which in case somehow you haven’t heard, is the new, new thing in technology. It designs chips that go into the computer processors that fire a whole lot of the generative AI large language models, and thus, that company is making money hand over fist. Their reported earnings yesterday, Wednesday after the bell. Here’s the great part about the earnings announcement. They had $22 billion in revenue in 90 days, right? In three months. That blew past expectations, which had been four $20 billion worth of revenue. But the market and after hours trading yesterday was disappointed because they didn’t blow past earnings revenue enough. A mere $2 billion in earnings revenue, beating expectations. Nvidia is going great guns they’re up. Sorry, just checking near 15% today as we speak. I looked earlier, they’re up something like 180% in five years. I mean, don’t buy at the top, but holy cow artificial intelligence and all the companies related to it are the hot new thing.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. Can you imagine if you bought that stock like two years ago?

Kai Ryssdal

Totally. Totally. Totally.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. Oh, boy. Well, AI kind of relates to our next clip, which is from an interview I did with Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs. Not Washington, DC, the state of Washington. I was at this election summit at the University of Maryland a couple of weeks ago with all these state and local election officials from all over the country plus folks from federal agencies. So, Washington Secretary of State oversees his state’s elections, and I asked him along with a bunch of other people, what scares him headed into this year’s election the most. And here’s what he said,

Steve Hobbs

“There’s misinformation attacks that keeps me up at night. You know, the robocall in New Hampshire was definitely a wakeup call to people. I mean, that could happen in our state. There could be a AI generated video from social media that maybe it gets taken down after a day or two, but does enough damage where people have doubts about our elections.”

Kimberly Adams 

Hobbs told me the wildest story, you know, that didn’t make it into the final version of the story that I did for your show. But he was telling me that there’s this one county in the state of Washington, where the county election officials who are Republican got an email from someone saying that this system they use, that is like a system that’s used across all election systems federally, in order to get certain federal funds, you have to use the system that basically protects you from malware attacks and from outside hacking into your election systems. Someone sent the county election officials an email saying that it was like a George Soros funded SIOP thing, and that they shouldn’t use it because it was going to undermine their elections. So, this county decided not to use the system that literally is designed to protect their system from attacks. And so, he was in the middle of negotiating with them, trying to say, “Well, you’re not going to get this $80,000 grant to improve your systems unless your systems include this thing.” And they are, like adamantly refusing. And he said, you know, it’s not just the misinformation on social media. Somebody sent an email to people, and it came from like someone else they trusted, who had seen something on the internet, and that, you know, sort of snowballed into this thing that could literally put this entire county’s election system at risk. Wild.

Kai Ryssdal 

Completely wild. Just don’t be gullible people.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I mean it’s not just gullible. These things are very convincing. I mean, and you know, Hobbs there referenced this AI generated robocall that used President Biden’s voice to discourage voters in New Hampshire during the primary last month. And this could happen anywhere. And Hobbes said that states are investing a lot of money in making their elections more secure, building public comment, and he individually has asked his state legislature for more than a million dollars for this campaign that would run ads, not just on where to vote, and you know, what the voting, you know, when you’re going to when you can vote and when you can register, but also things like, “Hey, your voting machines are not connected to the internet, or here are the systems we have in place to make sure that this process is secure,” just to help people build up confidence and that the process actually works.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. All right. Next one, here we go.

Neel Kashkari

“I do the grocery shopping for my family. I started doing that when the pandemic hit, and I still have sticker shock. My brain has not reset to the higher prices that I see. And in some cases, the smaller packages that I see every Saturday when I go to the grocery store.”

Kai Ryssdal 

So that was Neel Kashkari. He’s the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. We had him on Marketplace yesterday. And I asked him the obligatory, you know, what more data do you want to see? Are you surprised that the economy is still as robust as it is? Blah, blah, blah. And then I said, look, do you get why people are frustrated with the high price levels? And you know, what is going on in this economy? Big picture. And he said, as you heard, yeah, totally, totally get it. He also just for those of you who are more fed watching inclined than perhaps others. He also said he’s mostly in favor of just holding rates where they are for the time being, he’s not thinking about a cut anytime soon. So, who knows?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. I love that interview. It was interesting, because at the I guess it was towards the end, where he was saying something that could have indicated a potential rate hike, and you were like, wait a minute, wait a minute. What are you really saying? And he was like, no, no, I’m just talking about holding rates steady or a cut, not raising rates. Just one. Fun stuff. All right, last one for today. Let’s hear it.

Gary Pilnik

“The cereal category has always been quite affordable. And it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure, so some of the things that we’re doing is first messaging. We got to reach the consumer where they are. So, we’re advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do. That’s going to be much more affordable.

Kai Ryssdal

Wow,

Kimberly Adams 

Wow. I can’t believe they’re leaning into that, but that was Gary Pilnik who’s the CEO of the food company WK Kellogg on CNBC, talking about how the cereal brand is marketing towards consumers who are still feeling the pinch of high food prices, often for the string inflation, which we’re definitely seeing in the cereal aisle with less content in those boxes even if the boxes stay the same size. And anyway, USDA data shows that Americans spent like a little upwards of 11% of their disposable income on food in 2022. And it hasn’t been that high since 1991. And I think, it’s really fascinating to me that they’re using this idea of eating cereal for dinner as a positive thing because cereal is often not the most nutritionally balanced meal, and it’s a very like college students saying. I’m really surprised that they’re leaning into it, but I mean, I guess if it sells they must have tested that with some kind of focus group. Okay.

Kai Ryssdal 

I guess, and also that they’re calling it a destination. Cereal is the destination, really? I’m going to pass on that one. Thank you, Mr. Pilnik.

Kimberly Adams 

Same, same. Well anyway, that’s it for today. Join us tomorrow for Economics on Tap. We’ll have the YouTube livestream starting at 3:30 Pacific, 6:30 Eastern.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Juan Carlos Torrado is on the other side of the glass from me today. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.