Hugo Scott-Gall: Today, I am thrilled to welcome James Mackintosh to the show. James is a distinguished senior markets columnist at the Wall Street Journal, where his sharp insights have garnered a loyal following.

Prior to joining the Wall Street Journal, James spent two decades at the Financial Times, covering a wide array of topics from the automotive industry to global markets. His tenure at the FT culminated in his role as the writer of the highly regarded Short View column.

James, it’s an honor to have you on the show. Thank you very much for coming on.

James Mackintosh: Thanks for having me, Hugo.

Hugo Scott-Gall: You are an observer, a student, a diarist of markets, so let’s start with, I think, a very topical question. We are doing this in January, the start of 2025. Are we, when we look at the U.S. equity market, in a bubble?

James Mackintosh: Are we in a bubble? Now, the problem with bubbles, as I’m sure you’ll know, is that you can never really know you were in a bubble until after it’s burst. So, with that taken, I would say we’ve got some clear signs of bubbly behavior around a group of stocks, basically anything AI-related. It particularly shows up with Big Tech, but this is very different from the last big bubble because everyone wants to make the comparison to the dotcoms.

But back in 2000, the clear bubble in dotcom companies that had just been set up and shot to enormous valuations, companies added dotcom to their name and suddenly doubled in price the next day, these sort of things where the bubbliness was just obvious, and lots of companies didn’t make any profit at all.

This time around, we got a whole bunch of big companies that whilst they are pouring money into AI, they can afford it. There’s no reason that Microsoft can’t spend $80 billion on data centers next year if it turns out AI was all empty talk and there’s, in fact, no gains to be had from it. Microsoft isn’t going bust as a result. It’s not Pets.com.

So, we got a different sort of a bubble, but I would say, yes, it’s very, very hard to see how these valuations can be justified by growth. It’s possible; anything is always possible, but I would say it’s hard, and the way the market has been behaving, it seems that lots of people are willing to buy into it without thinking about it.

So, all the weight is on one side, which is a bad sign. On the other hand, this is not March 2000 for AI. These things could easily become much more expensive than they are. So, if it’s a bubble, it’s a small bubble so far, but just in some very, very big names.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Well, you and I are both old enough to remember 2000 pretty well, and clearly, there are differences because: A) you talked about valuation, but B) we don’t know for sure that this investment is going to be unproductive. What I mean by that is before we start with valuation, I guess we’ve got to check the earnings pile that may well be generated by this investment. And I guess…I don’t know how confident you feel in saying this…but it’s hard to say no to artificial intelligence in terms of what it may well be able to do. Inside of that are a number of assumptions, such as you need to have some idea of compute power.

You need to have some idea of how increased compute power plus data plus problems to solve may well impact a lot of the economy rather than a small percentage of the economy. And I’m not saying that I disagree with you, nor am I saying that I do agree with you; I’m just kind of saying before we start with near-term valuation being so demanding, how sure are you when you think about this? Again, it’s a very difficult question that is sort of, as I said, an observer of markets, someone who’s been doing this a long time that we might need to be a bit more imaginative because this could be such a profound change.

James Mackintosh: Yeah, it absolutely could be. What’s not at all clear is where those earnings are going to come from. So, for some of the most expensive stocks, if you take NVIDIA, which is way out there, it’s much easier to say, “Well, look, there are the suppliers of picks and shovels to the boom.” However, it pans out for AI, there’s definitely going to be more demand for chips, and it’s not an unreasonable claim, although there is also, I would point out, lots more supply coming through of competitors with AI chips, which ought to give people pause.

But it’s the bigger question of everyone seems to be sure who the winners will be from this. And it’s not at all clear to me that that’s right. It’s not obvious that just because you have a big AI model that means you will be able to secure monopoly-like rents from that. Everything is priced for people being able to secure monopoly-like rents. But they can’t all have monopoly-like rents. So, it’s not only that there are lots of these models coming through. Also, it’s becoming increasingly clear that people are able to produce these models quite quickly now.

It’s quite easy to—copy is not the right word—but it’s quite easy to produce a new one, relatively speaking, to get up to a very similar level of capability as the current GenAI models and, indeed, Meta, of course, has this sort of semipublic methodology where it basically gives this away.

And if it turns out that these models are going to end up as almost public property, easy to access for free, where you supply your own compute power, then where is the monopoly rent? So, if this is a thing where the profit comes from supplying the compute power, well, that’s going to be a highly, highly competitive market.

And it’s not at all obvious to me that Microsoft has so much of an edge in supplying compute power that it will be the one that beats the others just because it’s big. There are obviously economizer scales and things like that, but this isn’t the same as the monopoly rents that Meta has been able to secure by having the leading social media platform, for example, or Meta and Google share the monopoly advertising platforms. This could be a very different sort of market, and it doesn’t seem to me that it’s priced for that uncertainty. It’s priced for, yes, it’s going to work, and it’s going to be huge.

But actually, there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about the profit from this, even if it works. And remember, if you use GenAI, there’s a lot of things about it that still don’t work.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Sure, sure, sure. Do you feel, though, if one was attempting to justify these valuations, that even if this is a…not an egregious misallocation of capital, but it is perhaps a misallocation of capital that doesn’t earn its cost of capital, the underlying businesses of the hyperscalers are so profitable that it’s just optionality that maybe if this doesn’t return the cost of capital, that it still generates something. They still got enough cash flow and dominance to invest in the next thing. So, perhaps it’s not so much that AI might not invert commerce work in the next five years; it’s more that these companies are still dominant, and so, therefore, they have a core option on whatever logical change there is.

James Mackintosh: Sure, I mean that’s possible, but that absolutely doesn’t justify paying 50% more valuation for them now than you did two years ago.

So, obviously, if it turned out, I don’t know, something happens tomorrow and everyone concludes that AI, actually, all this money was sunk in something that’s not going to generate any future earnings, then the share prices of all of them will fall very hard. So, I’m not suggesting they would go bust; these are not failure dotcom companies, so it’s a different sort. So, if it’s a bubble, there’s a different sort of bubble. But if it doesn’t work out, then they have lost a lot of money, which is currently the reason that they are trading on a very high premium, and they should trade at a much lower premium if that’s the case.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Sure, so, give me some data points or things that you see, patterns that would say there is some euphoria, there is some thundering herd, not quite mania, but there’s certainly a crowd like euphoric, overconfidence, whichever, whether it’s data, whether it’s observation, whether it’s just gut feel, where do you think we are on your map of history on this sort of euphoria-o-meter?

James Mackintosh: Sorry, I’m a bit out of date on this because I haven’t looked at it since before Christmas. But back before Christmas, when I did a whole place look at all the sentiment indicators before I went on holiday, the sentiment at that point was very, very high on almost everything. So, almost wherever you looked, survey data, positioning by investors, positioning by mutual funds, holdings of cash by mutual funds, which is one of the things that they can do when they’re a bit cautious and hold a bit more cash, all of these things suggested that investors were all in on the trade. Now, that’s not specifically the AI trade.

There’s a bunch of other things going on as well: the market as a whole, the Trump trades, the U.S. exceptionalism trade, so a whole bunch of things that were all going on, of which AI is just one.

But those were all well excessive, which, again, I’m not setting out here to argue there is a bubble. I’ve discussed a lot of stuff about bubble only because you raised it. I think that if there is a bubble, it’s insipient; as I said, we are not sort of full-blown March 2000, but there is quite a lot of bubble-like behavior going on.

There are a lot of crowded trades and the tendency for contrarians to be shattered down or, indeed, for the contrarians to give up; we’ve seen a few of the contrarians give up and switch to being bullish; these are all things that tend to happen as markets become excessive. And, of course, shortly after, I then wrote about why the market did fall back and has pulled back quite a bit.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah, so do you think a narrative of…because really we’re talking about the U.S. here. We’re certainly not talking about China.

James Mackintosh: No, indeed.

Hugo Scott-Gall: What comes first, the chicken or the egg? What comes first, the rise in the U.S. equity market and then the story of U.S. exceptionalism or U.S. exceptionalism drives fantastic relative earnings growth versus the rest of the world, powers an equity market higher?

James Mackintosh: Well, it’s a feedback loop. So, both of these happen at once. The fact that the U.S. economy has been so strong is not down to AI, and the fact that U.S. productivity has looked very good, again, it’s not down to AI because if it’s going to feed through, it hasn’t happened yet. These are things that contribute to the U.S. exceptionalism story as well as the U.S. market doing phenomenally well. So, the U.S. economy over the past couple of years decoupled from most of the rest of the world and, not surprisingly, so did share prices.

Hugo Scott-Gall: We talked about U.S. exceptionalism. Do you think that the underlying drivers, such as the ability to these clusters of excellence, whether it’s capital, whether it’s talent, whether that is home-borne talent or talent by immigration, the size of the domestic economy, all of those things are real, and therefore would you want to bet against?

I’m not talking about the valuation of the U.S. equity market but the relative earnings growth that we’ve seen in, say, the U.S. equity market versus Europe or even versus China, which has had really low growth and earnings per share over quite a long time. So, do you think that, never mind valuation, but the underlying, you look at the U.S. economy, how it’s evolved, and still is a sort of special source that is allowing the U.S. to generate superior earnings growth.

James Mackintosh: I mean, it’s quite clear, so I certainly wouldn’t make any comparison between China and the U.S. If there were China stocks that are a buy, it’s only because they’re even cheaper than they should be. The Chinese economy is a mess, but it’s not just earnings that have been terrible for years; it’s also productivity. The country has not done very well for the past decade or so. The U.S. story is an interesting one because everyone now talks as though it’s forever.

But again, we’re old enough to remember when Americans would turn up in Europe with their Motorola where they had to pull the aerial up on their phone.

And everyone would laugh at them as they flashed their new modern Nokia, and there was sort of general handwringing of how awful American vehicles were, how awful American technology in general was, and how the U.S. was falling so far behind. I think there’s a large element that this goes in cycles. It’s clearly true that the U.S. has a massive innovation machine in Silicon Valley and sort of associated areas. It’s done a fabulous job of bringing together capital, people, and ideas.

And I do think it does that better than anywhere else, and maybe that continues, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on that. And it certainly runs some risks…speaking of monopoly, it runs some risks that its dominant companies become so dominant that they fall behind on innovation.

That’s certainly, the history of big companies is that they don’t tend to remain innovative when they’re huge. The interesting thing about the past 10 or 15 years in the U.S. is that the big companies have managed to remain innovative even when they’re huge. Now, maybe these companies are different to all the others through history, and they all manage to stay innovative. Even though they are enormous, they won’t rest on their laurels, and they’ll keep producing new stuff, and that’ll be great for investors. But, as I said, that’s certainly not the history of the world up until about 15 years ago. So, I would tend to expect that over time, they will also flounder as they get lazy and try to extract too much profit.

But again, that could be years and years and years away. That’s not a trade that I would put on. This is just discussing U.S. exceptionalism.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Sure. So, as you were speaking, I guess I was formulating my next question, which was: A change agent is coming called President Trump.

Are we in a period of stability or a period of change, I think it’s very clear we’re in a period of change. And so, if you look at super normal profits, very high profits, are they created and caused by fantastic products that drive productivity that help the economy that help society or are they rents? Are they excessive profits that are, in a sense, undeserved? Do you think that President Trump may well be more of a friend to Main Street than Wall Street?

He may well say, particularly if there are some inflationary pressures created by policy, that could be tariffs, for example, or changing supply chains with securities as the upper-most consideration versus inflation, a way of trying to fight inflation is to reduce prices, and you can do that by attacking large profit pools that are less…call them lazy profit pools. Do you think that might be something that’s coming?

That certainly would be perhaps a reminder to equity markets that perhaps President Trump will be a more Main Street focus than Wall Street focus. Actually, he might be, perhaps at an aggregate level, not necessarily a risk to corporate profits, but certainly, in some areas, he may well be.

James Mackintosh: Honestly, I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else does either. So, in his first term, he did some of that. There were a couple of big competition inquiries that started in his first term. Biden, of course, pushed even much, much harder on competition and has had quite an aggressive approach to competition. And there have been some suggestions from some people in the Trump camp that they would–whilst, they would never say they want to continue what Biden’s done, of course–they certainly have suggested that they won’t be friends of big companies and Big Tech in particular.

On the other hand, when you look at the donations to the Trump inauguration, when you look at the sort of cozying up to Trump, the Big Techs he has all flying down to Mar-a-Lago, when you look at Elon Musk and his closeness to Trump, and the effect that’s had on Tesla share price, all of these suggest that they think they will get something out of that relationship.

Now, I honestly have no idea if they will or not, and I don’t know how to predict that; it’s just not something that’s easy to do. I wouldn’t have a problem with him continuing to push to say actually the U.S. has become less competitive than it should be, and it needs a more aggressive approach to competition. I think that would probably be a good thing for the U.S. economy in the long run, certainly for U.S. consumers. But he does seem to like successful people, and there’s no doubt that these big companies are founded by and run by very rich, highly successful people. So, it is possible that that will swing him, and certainly, they seem to think that by their behavior.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Would you agree with my assertion that this is definitely a time of change, not stability? I’m trying to think, what does that mean when you approach investing? This is something I think you’ve written about in a period of change where there are quite a few things that perhaps were fairly constant through a period of history that are now in flux. How does that inform valuations? How does that inform the attractiveness of different asset classes?

James Mackintosh: We’re early in the year, but every meeting I have had has pretty much started with fund managers, strategists, investors, and executives saying we don’t really know. We haven’t really got any idea what’s going to happen. So, yes, absolutely. At the very minimum, we are in a major period of uncertainty. People expect there to be a lot of change. They’re not quite sure what it’ll be. Of course they saw that in the first term, Trump’s first term as well, and then, a lot of the things they thought would change in the end didn’t.

So, again, I think the uncertainty is as important as the change. How do you invest under uncertainty? Well, you always invest under uncertainty. You should think about your worst-case scenarios. You should think about how confident you are and probably dial it down quite a lot. However confident you think you are, you should probably be less confident. You should, at the moment, in particular, we’re, what, 11 days away from inauguration, and a very large amount of volatility could happen in the first few days once Trump’s team takes office and starts telling us what they plan to do, what they actually plan to do now they’re in office.

So, I would probably be thinking I would be very cautious about large positions on almost anything, large bets on almost anything. There are some things out there that offer relatively cheap gains. There are some things out there that are very expensive.

But a lot of them could be quite volatile in the first few days. So, I’m afraid that the rather boring advice of diversification definitely holds. I mean, there are some other very good reasons to think the treasuries might be a reasonable place to put some money at the moment. That’s a slightly separate issue.

Hugo Scott-Gall: As a fairly long-term reader of yours, I think you have a contrarian bend to you. What are your contrarian thoughts around markets? Let’s be clear in terms of asset class, geography, or even sectors. You kind of said, I think pretty clearly, that you’re quite contrarian around Big Tech, that you would be on the other side of where the market seems to be. When you think about asset classes, when you think about geographies when you think about specific countries, and sectors, where do you come out? Because of this question last year, a great answer would have been Argentina.

It might not have been everyone’s top pick for the best-performing equity market, but it had an astonishing performance last year in local currency and in dollars. So, give me your contrarian slate.

James Mackintosh: So, the most obvious contrarian place to be at the moment is Europe. Everyone hates it. It’s fairly cheap. It’s got lots of problems, but it could all turn around. So, this is sort of, let’s say a reasonable contrarian position, not the extreme. It’s plausible that Europe could start to get its act together. It wouldn’t have to do very much to have quite an effect on the price because it’s so hated. Virtually everyone is underweight. It’s not the most extreme. Of course, if you want the extreme contrarian, you would buy China, but I am not a contrarian for the sake of it. But yeah, if you were a contrarian for the sake of it, you’d definitely be buying China.

My concern there is too much depends on whether the totally unpredictable thing of will she come out sometime in the next couple of months and do a massive stimulus package.

I’ve tended to be fairly skeptical about the potential for that to work. I think they’re in a very potentially quite long-running, multiyear, maybe decade-long process of dealing with excess that they had in the hangover from the housing bubble, and that’s going to take them a long time, which makes me not very positive about China. But yeah, I think Europe is a reasonable thing to think might turn itself around. I guess Chicago; if you wanted to be really contrarian, you’d bet on Chicago, but I’m not, again, not that contrarian.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Chicago is an underrated city. As someone who travels there frequently, I can tell you that; very good food. And I say that as someone who lived in New York, I think the food is better. This is controversial. I think it’s better in Chicago than it is in New York.

James Mackintosh: I lived in Chicago for three months last year, sorry, not last year, year before last.

Yeah, I very much enjoyed myself, but it’s definitely a city that has some serious trouble.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah, yeah. Can we talk a bit about your journalistic process and how that’s changed over time; how you get your ideas, I guess the idea of sources and people you speak to. What are the must-have skills of a journalist, and what do you think yours are? Is it pattern recognition? Is it your ability to write to a word limit on a deadline? Is it really just everything that’s in your head through a long number of years of just doing this?

James Mackintosh: So, the absolute basics. Yes, you’ve obviously got to be able to write to a word limit at the deadline. If you can’t do that, you can’t be a journalist. That’s a straightforward sort of requirement, but that doesn’t make you a journalist. I think the absolute basic core skill is being able to spot a story and being able to explain it simply and clearly. And that’s just as true if you’re covering a murder inquiry or a disaster as it is if you’re covering the markets.

I would say that’s the thing absolutely at the heart of it; can you see the thing that is news? Can you spot the thing that’s interesting?

I mean, I’m now a columnist, not a news reporter, so my job isn’t to write news, but I have to spot the thing I think is interesting and be able to say it in a way that, in the case of markets, obviously, simplifies without oversimplifying. I think that I have a harder writing task now than if I were covering a factory fire or a murder inquiry, but the basic principles of the journalism behind it are the same, plus obviously spell people’s names right.

Hugo Scott-Gall: And has the job got easier? Certainly, I don’t mean the business model, but I mean the job in terms of creating content, internet, connectivity, and availability of data. Does that make it easier to find source material to do the job, or does that actually make it harder in some ways, lower barriers to entries, more stuff is accessible?

James Mackintosh: Both. So, it makes it, of course, naturally much easier to find stuff, to find the basic things you need, and the technology goes much further. You now get the transcripts. I can analyze the transcripts of hundreds of earnings calls in seconds if I wish to, using AI, of course, if I want, and I can access every data release that one of the statistics bureaus has ever put out in seconds. So, access to information is no longer the problem it once was. So, a lot of that skill has kinda been removed, not all of it, but a lot of it. But with that has come the problem that, of course, what you might have said in the past and people would’ve found interesting, the barrier has risen a lot.

So, in the old days, most people were getting their information from the physical newspaper or from, if you were in television, from the television, and just simply passing on that information was in itself a valuable job.

But nowadays, they can get their information from any number of sources. So, passing on the information is much less valuable, and you’ve got to be able to add something to it, either dig out exclusive information that they haven’t got, or analyze it in a better way or a more interesting way, or a more accessible way, all of which are the sort of skills of a journalist and a columnist now.

Hugo Scott-Gall: I guess you don’t really have sources, but there must be people who you speak to. Are people more inclined or less inclined to speak to journalists these days, or is it for you really it’s just long-term relationships? I’m just wondering whether, as a profession, people are still willing to talk because people just do.

James Mackintosh: Yes, yeah, people just do. I mean, I have the wonderful privilege of being at the Wall Street Journal and, before that, the Financial Times, which are major, trusted institutions that people are willing to talk to in a way they may not be a New York tabloid.

But I would say, yes, people want to talk; people mostly understand that journalists are trying to do their job, trying to provide information and explain it, and of course, they want to convince you they have a view. There are lots of people who want to convince you in the particularly covering markets. There are a lot of people who want you to write about their position, so you have to be very careful. It’s important to understand the point of view of the person you’re talking to, of course, but yes, a lot of people do indeed want to talk to you.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Do you think that, obviously, there are fewer and fewer still trusted recognized platforms, and you’re on one of them, the Wall Street Journal, but I guess the sort of Substack versus platform, the individuals can find audiences quickly now, and they can charge subscriptions to just individual content on a platform like Substack.

Do you think that I don’t know, five years, 10 years, 15 years, there still will be these high-quality, trusted platforms such as, I don’t know, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the Economist? They all still exist because they’re just so good at what they do, and there’ll be nothing in the middle, and at the other end, you’ll have individual content creators on sites like Substack.

James Mackintosh: Yeah, I think the Wall Street Journal will thrive and prosper; the most trusted U.S. news source, so yes, I think there’s really no doubt about that. Substack’s business model is an interesting one because I’ve got some very good friends, and I know some very good writers who write for Substack, but even I can’t subscribe to all of them, and I can’t read all of them. I need a filtering mechanism. I need something that says: Well, here’s a great column from this person this week, but actually the one we had last week, they’re not so good this week, so we won’t bother including that.

There’s some great content over here, and we’ll put all that together. It’s kind of like what a newspaper does or a website, but it’s, I think, going to be hard to have every individual on Substack continuing to work as an individual because there are just too many, even in specialist areas. There will be some who have the brand to be able to continue that, but I can’t see how it can be satisfying both for the reader and for the writer when you can’t get a diversity of thought from it. You don’t want just the one, but subscribing to 50 is too expensive and, anyway, too much content because you don’t want 50 every day.

So, there’s a sort of fundamental design flaw that they need to overcome, and I suspect they will. There will be some sort of subscription, a slightly modified subscription model, but they haven’t got that yet.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah, I wonder how that gets resolved because I’m sure, like you, I’m a voracious reader of the very best content, but there’s a slope. So, how do you find the very best content? It’s like, would you want to listen to the world’s most interesting person for five hours?

Yeah, you would. Do you want to listen to the world’s most boring person for 10 minutes? No, you wouldn’t. So, how do you find the very best content? That is just a perennial challenge, and I’m interested in your view. I’m not convinced that AI is going to be able to do that because a lot, right now, even of what you call AI, but sort of, I guess, better than average searches, are still giving you a consensus view, or they’re giving you a view based on history.

And it’s hard to know, for example, if you haven’t told a machine that you’re a huge fan of, pick a writer, pick a type of music, pick whatever, that if you a classic taste, the machine is solving for the mean and just say: Okay, this is most what you like, and so I’ll give you more of what you mostly like. So, the tales and the things you don’t even know you’re going to like, and again, that can be any kind of content, I wonder if you thought about the inefficiency of curation and how that gets solved.

I think part of your answer was, well, look, if you’re buying the Wall Street Journal, picking up a copy of that or the Economist magazine, there is an implied trust that the quality will be of a certain, at least a minimum standard, and there is some selection in what to write about that day, and so there is trust. But I wonder, outside of a group of established trusted media, how that might get solved by technology?

James Mackintosh: I mean, you’re coming back to the question of can Generative AI do what we want? I mean, at the moment, with newspapers, you’re obviously relying on people who are fallible. The editing process is horrible with curating what’s coming; they say that’s relevant to editing. But the selection of which articles to publish, which topics to cover, that’s the editor’s job, and AI may one day be able to do that. We don’t know. At the moment, they give you slightly more than the mean.

If you use Spotify or something similar, they don’t merely give you the most popular songs; they give you the most popular songs that are, in some way, similar to and follow on from what you’ve been listening to. They will give you more of the same, and they will typically also throw in something new and a bit different to see if you might like it, and if you do, they might carry on with more of that. So, you don’t merely get sort of the mean, as it were. But, yeah, I think it’s indisputable that they’re not there yet. I mean, the mess of Apple News recently throwing itself over to an AI has not been about the editing problem, but it certainly demonstrates some of the problems that putting an AI in charge can lead to.

Hugo Scott-Gall: So, here’s a final question for you: When you were marching out of Oxford University freshly minted philosophy graduate, would you, knowing what you know now, the world as it is today, would you still want to go into journalism or would you do something else or would you do a different aspect of journalism, or would you say, “You know what? Given who I am, given what I like, given what I like doing, this has worked out pretty well for me. I’d do it all again?”

James Mackintosh: My choices when I graduated were to go into…well, I actually did a two-year postgrad, and then went on to journalism, but before that, my option to leave was to go and work on some early AI stuff, which I was very interested in at university. And I have to say I’m really glad I didn’t because I was in the early ‘90s wave of AI excitement, which did turn out to be a bubble. And I would have banged my head against a wall for 15 years or 20 years before Google came along and said actually, this is a statistical problem, not a psychological problem.

I was trying to solve language using grammar and psychology and linguistics, and Google just said: Nah, we’ll just chunk millions and millions of examples at it and let it learn for itself pretty much.

So, I’m very glad I didn’t go into AI, which, obviously, I can’t think there are many people around today who would think they’re glad they didn’t go into AI. Most people would be kicking themselves if they missed out on the opportunity to make an absolute mint, but I don’t think I would’ve done nothing. I would have wasted a lot of time banging my head on the wall and being very frustrated. So, I’m extremely glad I went into journalism. I’ve had a fabulous time.

I mean, I miss the glory days of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and even the ‘80s when journalism was, in some ways, a better place to work; let’s say, not necessarily better journalism, but a better place to be a journalist. But I had a great time. I had a fabulous variety in my life and really enjoyed it.

Hugo Scott-Gall: You are one of the lucky people that loves what they do. So, James, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you going all the way from the possibility of bubbles in AI all the way back to AI at the end.

James Mackintosh: Yeah.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Thank you, and good luck navigating 2025’s uncertainty.

James Mackintosh: Thank you very much.