Noah Smith
Economics Writer & Publisher, Noahpinion. On 3 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorjournalistacademic@Noahpinion ↗noahpinion.blog ↗
Noah Smith is an economics writer and publisher of the Substack newsletter Noahpinion. He previously served as an opinion columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and as an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University.
3shows
5appearances
64statements
24resolved
17supported
1contradicted
71%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Noah Smith said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Smith: US factory construction boomed under Biden after decades of stagnation
“But when you look at factory construction, real, real factory construction, you saw this enormous, you saw it basically flat at a flat level for decades and decades at a fairly low level. Then you saw this enormous boom during the Biden years and all the facto…”
Smith: Elon Musk is the only entrepreneur to scale US manufacturing
“Who's the only entrepreneur who's been able to successfully scale manufacturing in America, you know, even in the face of international competition, and it's been pretty credible because his supply chains are far more domestically sourced than most manufacture…”
Noah Smith: Smartphone technology is driving global fertility far below replacement
“Phones have destroyed the human race. Like, the fertility crash that's happening all around the world. Nobody has replacement level fertility. Fertility is going far below replacement everywhere because of technology.”
Noah Smith: AI companionship will cause human population to continually dwindle
“The human race does not have a desire, a collective desire to perpetuate itself. We can, you know, yes, we're going to get lonely, but we'll have company through AI and through the internet. Social media, you know, until there's just a few of us and we dwindle…”
Noah Smith: Most of Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI predictions have been proven wrong
“I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant in the last year and a half, like, and especially in terms, like all the comp stuff about competition with China you know, like it turns out filtration was able t…”
Smith: Predictions that AI will replace 40-60% of jobs are 'hooey'
“This is complete hooey, and they all come up with really huge percentage, like, 40%, 60% of your jobs are gonna be replaced by AI, so, you know, every, there's a million groups doing this, and they'll come up with different things, and it's hooey for a number …”
Smith: Government-run grocery stores will drain public funds and crush bodegas
“So if you make government run grocery stores, it'll do two things. Number one It will outcompete all the little indie grocery stores and bodegas, thus like a meager source of capital and wealth accumulation for like poor people in poor neighborhoods... And the…”
Smith: Tariff threats against Japan and Europe ultimately help China win
“Hurting Japan and Europe more than we hurt ourselves, but hurting both of us actually just lets China win. So it doesn't seem like a credible threat to me.”
Smith: AI outperforms human doctors on many medical diagnoses
“AI is, is better for diagnosis on a lot of things than humans, right?”
Smith: Radiologist wages and employment rose after Hinton's automation prediction
“You also got Jeffrey Hinton's prediction that radiologists would be unemployed within a certain time frame, and by that time, radiologist wages were higher than ever, and employment was higher than ever.”
Noah Smith: AI Economy Will Fundamentally Redefine GDP Beyond Human Labor
“We're envisioning a radical shift of what GDP means to a sort of Internal pricing that a few overlords set for the things that their AI agents want to do, and that's incredibly different than what we'call GDP in the past.”
Smith: Chinese subsidies force BYD to rely on supplier loans
“We're seeing BYD having to take loans from its suppliers just to stay financially afloat, even though it's the best car company in the world because the Chinese government has paid A million other car companies to compete with BYD.”
Smith: AI productivity boom requires reorganizing production processes, not replacing workers
“Eventually we may like people will come along and say, you know what?
I could just organize my company entirely different to take more advantage of AI.
And I don't just have to replace my humans with AI.
I just have the humans do different things and the AI do…”
Smith: AI-vulnerable occupations continue rising as share of US jobs
“Returning to a measure reintroduced in two, 20, 23, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out workers that are believed to be vulnerable to AI. These are white collar employees, including people in back office support, financial operat…”
Smith: IBM fired workers for AI automation and had to rehire
“So we saw this thing where IBM fired all these people because it thought they could replace their jobs with AI and then had to hire them all back, had to hire like a ton of people back. Maybe not the exact same people, not doing the exact same things, but for,…”
Smith: Automating human tasks does not imply mass labor displacement
“Conceptually the idea of like, well, we made this thing to do all these tasks that humans do is not a, is not by itself a reason to think human labor is going to be masterplaced.”
Noah Smith: US Wage Inequality Has Decreased for Over Ten Years
“Right around the time that this thesis started becoming very well accepted and popular, wage inequality started to go down and wages started rising more at the bottom of the distribution than at the middle or top. And so we've seen that for now over 10 years. …”
Noah Smith: Mass deportations will not significantly raise native workers' wages
“The reason why a flood of immigration does not really actually reduce wages is that immigrants are also buying things and the demand from buying things creates labor demand for native born people. And so, so immigrants really don't do much to wages. And what t…”
Noah Smith: High-skilled immigration has strongly positive economic impact, unlike low-skilled
“When you look at the economic impact of low skilled immigration, it's not a lot. Either way. But when you look at the economic impact of high skilled immigration, it's strongly positive. So we're really playing with fire if we start kicking out the smart peopl…”
Smith: China is manufacturing 100 nuclear weapons per year
“China's building a hundred nuclear weapons a year.”
Smith: China is conducting the largest military buildup in world history
“And in absolute terms, the most impressive military buildup the world has ever seen ever is happening in China right now.”
Smith: Consumer Gains From Foreign Trade And Automation Are Functionally Identical
“In fact, in economic models, the gains from trade will look just like productivity. And there's a complete equivalence between those and a lot of models. So basically, if you have a robot to do something cheaply, you know, from the consumer's perspective, that…”
Smith: China Shock Displaced US Manufacturing Workers Into Low-Wage Service Jobs
“What Otter, Dorn, and Hansen found is that the adjustment of the average worker in competition with Chinese workers was much, much slower and worse, and they found that, you know, the average displaced manufacturing worker in the eighties and nineties who was …”
Smith: US Manufacturing Jobs Plunged After China Entered WTO In 2000
“Total manufacturing employment has shrunk since 2000 dramatically. So at the exact same time trying to enter the WTO, total manufacturing employment in the United States, which had been at a stable level for decades and decades, starts to plunge.”
The other half of the tape: Noah Smith's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Erik Torenberg 2Dylan Patel 2Alex Kantrowitz 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 4
Big Technology 2
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government vs. China
- Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
- Erotic ChatGPT, Zuck’s Apple Assault, AI’s Sameness Problem
- The Web’s ‘Existential’ AI Threat, OpenAI’s Microsoft Office Competitor, Tesla Robotaxi Launch
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Noah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Economics Writer & Publisher, Noahpinion | 3 | 42 | 63% 10/16 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Economics Writer & Publisher, Noahpinion | 1 | 21 | 86% 6/7 | full record on Big Technology → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Economics Writer & Publisher, Noahpinion | 1 | 1 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Latent Space → |