I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me.
I know exactly how much I don't know and feel uncomfortable speculating without inserting caveats between every other word.
I wasn't expecting basically anything it was just idle chit-chat, just expect someone doing economics to have some basic idea of economy good / economy bad. Are interest rates low? Not sure if he would've known.
This guy is extremely clever and has a scholarship to die for he just isn't very curious.
This reminds me of people with a scientific background who take a very measured and cautious approach when talking about those topics ("the research suggests...", "it's likely that...", etc) which is interpreted by laymen as little more than a guess.
Contrast that to any drongo with a blog who feels fine unleashing an unfounded, agenda-driven diatribe of misinformation - but does so confidently - and you have an uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of those who don't have the foundational knowledge to understand the science themselves, or the critical thinking skills to evaluate the information and the people producing it.
I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given.
Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all.
A lot of theoretically smart aren't like people who comment on hackernews and actually have intuition (or a penchant for meaningless speculation...)