National Guard in SF? US vs China on Rare Earths, Trump-Xi Meeting, Price Floors, AI’s PR Crisis

(0:00) Bestie intros! Dreamforce and another interesting conference take the Bay Area (3:35) State of crime in SF, do they need the National Guard? (20:48) US to impose price floors after China puts export controls on rare earths, can America on-shore a full-stack rare earth industry? (36:15) State of US-China ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting, how we got here, China's elite mercantilism and strong economic history (52:59) AI PR crisis: Recent datacenters get denied Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/marc-benioff-san-francisco-guard.html https://www.wsj.com/opinion/san-francisco-cleans-up-for-xi-why-not-for-thee-242c67e3 https://x.com/the_jefferymead/status/1978130345200427334 https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/nualabishari/article/san-francisco-harm-reduction-managed-alcohol-19489131.php https://www.kqed.org/news/11985941/sf-program-isnt-just-free-beer-for-unhoused-its-backed-up-by-research https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/jb-pritzker-won-14-million-vegas-playing-blackjack-rcna237961 https://www.ft.com/content/ca3b3254-e161-41d1-b459-bc3c83004e4e https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth-export-controls.html https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115351840469973590 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115350455734003647 https://mpmaterials.com/mountain-pass https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-track-meet-xi-south-korea-bessent-says-2025-10-13/ https://chinapower.csis.org/tracker/china-gdp https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-communist-party-holds-plenum-its-next-five-year-plan-what-does-it-mean-2025-10-15 https://www.economist.com/china/2025/10/09/xi-jinping-is-personally-involved-in-chinas-new-five-year-plan https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Kuan-Yew-Insights-international/dp/0262019124 https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/The-Australian-November-18-2005.pdf https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-china-rise-peacefully-10204 https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/china-imposes-extraterritorial-jurisdiction-and-50-rule-export-controls-rare-earth https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/commerce-department-issues-affiliates-5215830/ https://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550 https://www.amazon.com/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/dp/1451628978 https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884 https://x.com/balajis/status/1937517664907460980 https://x.com/chamath/status/1978584886329082098 https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report https://x.com/chamath/status/1977794775148601541
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National Guard in SF? US vs China on Rare Earths, Trump-Xi Meeting, Price Floors, AI’s PR Crisis Podcast Episode Description

(0:00) Bestie intros! Dreamforce and another interesting conference take the Bay Area

(3:35) State of crime in SF, do they need the National Guard?

(20:48) US to impose price floors after China puts export controls on rare earths, can America on-shore a full-stack rare earth industry?

(36:15) State of US-China ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting, how we got here, China’s elite mercantilism and strong economic history

(52:59) AI PR crisis: Recent datacenters get denied

Follow the besties:

https://x.com/chamath

https://x.com/Jason

https://x.com/DavidSacks

https://x.com/friedberg

Follow on X:

https://x.com/theallinpod

Follow on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod

Follow on TikTok:

@theallinpod

Follow on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod

Intro Music Credit:

https://rb.gy/tppkzl

https://x.com/yung_spielburg

Intro Video Credit:

https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Referenced in the show:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/marc-benioff-san-francisco-guard.html

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/san-francisco-cleans-up-for-xi-why-not-for-thee-242c67e3

https://x.com/the_jefferymead/status/1978130345200427334

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/nualabishari/article/san-francisco-harm-reduction-managed-alcohol-19489131.php

https://www.kqed.org/news/11985941/sf-program-isnt-just-free-beer-for-unhoused-its-backed-up-by-research

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/jb-pritzker-won-14-million-vegas-playing-blackjack-rcna237961

https://www.ft.com/content/ca3b3254-e161-41d1-b459-bc3c83004e4e

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth-export-controls.html

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115351840469973590

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115350455734003647

https://mpmaterials.com/mountain-pass

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-track-meet-xi-south-korea-bessent-says-2025-10-13/

Unpacking China’s GDP

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-communist-party-holds-plenum-its-next-five-year-plan-what-does-it-mean-2025-10-15

https://www.economist.com/china/2025/10/09/xi-jinping-is-personally-involved-in-chinas-new-five-year-plan

https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/The-Australian-November-18-2005.pdf

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-china-rise-peacefully-10204

https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/china-imposes-extraterritorial-jurisdiction-and-50-rule-export-controls-rare-earth

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/commerce-department-issues-affiliates-5215830/

https://x.com/balajis/status/1937517664907460980

https://x.com/chamath/status/1978584886329082098

https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report

https://x.com/chamath/status/1977794775148601541
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National Guard in SF? US vs China on Rare Earths, Trump-Xi Meeting, Price Floors, AI’s PR Crisis Podcast Episode Top Keywords

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National Guard in SF? US vs China on Rare Earths, Trump-Xi Meeting, Price Floors, AI’s PR Crisis Podcast Episode Summary

Based on the provided context, the phrase “has joined the group” refers to someone becoming a member of a group, band, club, or team. Throughout the conversation, there are multiple references to joining various groups, inviting members, and welcoming new people. Specific examples include:

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These statements all indicate the act of someone joining or being added to a group or collective. However, the context does not specify exactly who “has joined the group” in a particular instance. The general meaning is clear: it signifies the addition of a new member to a group. If you are looking for a specific individual who joined a specific group, that information is not explicitly provided in the context.

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National Guard in SF? US vs China on Rare Earths, Trump-Xi Meeting, Price Floors, AI’s PR Crisis Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)

Speaker: 0
00:00

Alright. You guys were, talking about the fun shenanigans you were having in San Francisco and at Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce.

Speaker: 1
00:09

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Did you see Brian Johnson? Was it Benioff’s CEO dinner?

Speaker: 2
00:13

Oh, I didn’t see him.

Speaker: 3
00:14

Yeah. Matthew McConaughey was at our table at dinner.

Speaker: 0
00:16

Alright. Alright. Alright.

Speaker: 3
00:18

Alright. David Sacks. Alright.

Speaker: 1
00:19

McConaughey’s fabulous. He is funny.

Speaker: 3
00:22

Did you see where I was sitting at that dinner?

Speaker: 1
00:25

Yeah. Yeah. Table one.

Speaker: 3
00:26

Right next to the king himself.

Speaker: 2
00:28

The king himself. Exactly. The king who? The king and I?

Speaker: 0
00:31

Benioff is a king?

Speaker: 3
00:32

Well, he’s the king of San Francisco.

Speaker: 2
00:34

At his party.

Speaker: 0
00:35

Yeah. He’s the king of San Francisco. Yeah.

Speaker: 3
00:37

I mean, obviously, he has to bend the knee to the king of kings, which is Ram, but I was sitting next to Benioff there.

Speaker: 0
00:45

It got weird. It got

Speaker: 3
00:46

a little weird. No. Well, what happened was did you see that SF standards? Yeah. I don’t even know how they can write a headline like this. So

Speaker: 0
00:54

Well, it’s a San Francisco Standard.

Speaker: 3
00:55

Yeah. So Benioff interviewed me at Dreamforce, and somehow this was, like, headline worthy for SF Standard. And they said that Marc Benioff dodged his political questions then fawns over David Saloni Dreamforce sai one. That was just referring to the interview we did. So we trolled them by taking that photo.

Speaker: 0
01:14

That’s, yeah, it’s a little weird.

Speaker: 1
01:17

I thought the fireside chat you guys did was great.

Speaker: 3
01:19

It was great. Yeah. It’s just an interview.

Speaker: 1
01:21

It was really good, actually. He’s a very good interviewer.

Speaker: 0
01:24

Mhmm.

Speaker: 3
01:24

Yeah. Totally. But, apparently, to SF standard, it’s ai some sort of transgression that I was even interviewed.

Speaker: 2
01:31

They didn’t get the memo that vatsal culture is over.

Speaker: 3
01:34

Yeah. They can’t I know. That’s what it feels like. Right? Or they’re, like, trying to they’re trying to gin up some sort of brouhaha over the fact that I was speaking.

Speaker: 2
01:42

Yeah. Oh, you can’t talk to David Sacks. He’s in the Trump administration. Not allowed to talk to him.

Speaker: 0
01:46

He’s talking about a 100 people a week who sai that.

Speaker: 2
01:49

Literally, the AI guy and the AI CEO shouldn’t talk to him. It’s like you know, like, what the? Yeah. I’m an AI company. I should not talk to the government’s AI person. Right.

Speaker: 3
01:58

By the way, did you see that there was one other, very important conference in town at the same time as Dreamforce?

Speaker: 0
02:05

Okay.

Speaker: 3
02:05

I discovered this on my x feed.

Speaker: 0
02:07

Feel like sai cold open about time. What? The Young Socialists or was it The Republicans?

Speaker: 3
02:11

It was called Slutcon.

Speaker: 0
02:12

Oh, Slutcon? Yeah. Really?

Speaker: 2
02:15

Slutcon, my lord. Look at this website.

Speaker: 0
02:18

Oh, this is the agenda. How to be good at with Aaliyah. Let’s see.

Speaker: 2
02:23

I cannot do this. Cut this out. It’s too rough. Women inventing.

Speaker: 0
02:26

Oh, Sai. That one’s for you.

Speaker: 2
02:27

I would’ve planned an order.

Speaker: 1
02:29

Oh, it is.

Speaker: 0
02:30

Oh, Freeberg. Here. Freeberg’s giving a talk. A fluffer’s guide to jobs by David Freeberg. Is that a panel or is it a ai, Freeberg? Which way?

Speaker: 2
02:39

Reinforcement learning, hoe feedback. Small groups.

Speaker: 0
02:44

Oh, you could re underwrite your positions. I see that. Re underwriting your sexual

Speaker: 2
02:48

positions by Ai Jamoff. Jamoff’s the the last one, the VIP room.

Speaker: 0
02:52

Oh, VIP room. Yeah. That’s Jamoff. That’s pretty short, Jamoff.

Speaker: 2
02:55

Sachs, how did you hear about this? Don’t tell us that you ran out of that townhouse. Went over to the East Bay.

Speaker: 0
03:00

Sachs, were you are you on the mailing list?

Speaker: 3
03:02

No. My ex Did

Speaker: 0
03:02

they invite you to speak?

Speaker: 3
03:03

Ai ex sheet just you know, it’s the new AI algorithm. It’s just trying to find things you might be interested in. And,

Speaker: 0
03:09

Saks also keynoting this.

Speaker: 3
03:11

My ex sheet showed me Select Con. So I clicked on it, and now it’s been nothing but Select Con for a

Speaker: 0
03:16

couple of days. We’ll let

Speaker: 3
03:18

your winners ride. Rain man David Cyrus. And it

Speaker: 4
03:21

said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone racing with it.

Speaker: 5
03:25

Love you, West. Ice cream. Oh,

Speaker: 2
03:35

Chamath, what did you think about walking around San Francisco? So we went on a walk around downtown San Francisco.

Speaker: 0
03:40

We were trying to talk?

Speaker: 3
03:41

Well, we

Speaker: 2
03:41

were trying to find a place to get a drink in between the Benioff dinner and Saks’ talk. We ended up at the w hotel, but, I was worried for Chamath because it was his first time on the streets of San Francisco walking around with his own two legs. How was it Chamath?

Speaker: 3
03:56

Did you throw off those shoes? The the lower piano shoes?

Speaker: 1
04:00

I burned them.

Speaker: 3
04:00

The soles, I’m sure, were solid beyond repair.

Speaker: 0
04:03

Those are one use for Chamath. Those are single use lower piano shoes. Supposed to be.

Speaker: 1
04:07

Ai I got in the car, I I gave Eugene my ai, and I said, earn these. Eugene, I never wanna see these ever again. They’ve touched the pavement of San Francisco. And all I said was, meh.

Speaker: 0
04:16

Why don’t you just have your domestic staff carry you on their shoulders? I don’t understand. Why don’t you just bring your feet to the crowd? It makes

Speaker: 2
04:24

So Benioff pulls off this awesome convention, this conference, and then Trump does this press conference yesterday saying he’s gonna send troops into San Francisco. Do you guys see this?

Speaker: 3
04:34

Yeah. Well, yeah. But no. But the Benioff thing happened first. Right? So Benioff made news because he said send in the National Guard to clean up San Francisco. But I actually I talked to him about it and got a little bit of context, which, of course,

Speaker: 0
04:46

was that quoted or No.

Speaker: 3
04:47

He wasn’t misquoted, but it happened in a more innocuous way. He wasn’t trying to weigh in on a political issue. Basically, what happened is I think he was describing the security at Dreamforce and how they bring in a couple of 100 extra off duty cops to provide security. So then the reporter tried to stir the pot by saying, well, would you bring in the National Guard? And Benioff sai, sure. If they can be cops.

Speaker: 3
05:07

And that was ai the end of it. And then and then it turns into this massive story that Benioff is supporting the National Guard coming to San Francisco, which I think he should support it, but

Speaker: 0
05:17

It’s not exactly what he said. He was saying for Dreamforce, he would hire them.

Speaker: 2
05:20

Yeah.

Speaker: 3
05:20

I mean, who knows exactly what he was trying to sai, but the point is that He

Speaker: 0
05:24

could’ve just been talking. Yeah.

Speaker: 3
05:25

He wasn’t seeking to make the news that ultimately he made. But it’s not a bad idea. You can’t a good idea.

Speaker: 2
05:32

Do you think Trump teed off on that press cycle when when he was doing that press conference and it was kind of off the cuff sacks when he said, oh, they should send the National Guard into San Francisco next?

Speaker: 3
05:43

Well, I don’t know. Yeah. I wasn’t there for that. But San Francisco is a pretty obvious city to send in the National Guard because we have this downtown area where, you know, it’s like that zombie city arya, the walking dead part on on Ai Street. And everybody understands that it’s because they won’t stop the drug dealing.

Speaker: 3
06:03

So you’ve got open air drug markets there on the main business thoroughfare of town which is Market Street and by the way, let me just back up and say that we have the best mayor we’ve had in decades now.

Speaker: 0
06:14

Dan Lohrey.

Speaker: 3
06:14

Dan Lohrey’s great and I think Brooke Jenkins was the DA that we’d supported to replace Jason Bryden after we were called him so I think she’s good too, but they’re still working within the confines of a legal system here which is very left wing. You’ve got all these leftist judges and I think they’re somewhat constrained or hamstrung in terms of what they can do.

Speaker: 3
06:36

Again, the evidence of that is that you’ve got hundreds of these drug dealers who are just operating with impunity in downtown, and you’ve got this sort of zombie city of people who are so sick with drug addiction that they’re pretty much living on the street. So I think it would be a relatively easy thing to clean up if

Speaker: 0
06:54

Full sex.

Speaker: 3
06:55

If they send them the National Guard.

Speaker: 2
06:56

I would argue that they’re like, because I’ve been working in San Francisco, and I think it’s gotten a lot better this year. Mhmm. So I looked up after all this Benioff brouhaha and the National Guard thing that Trump said yesterday. And so the city’s publication shows crime down 30% ai and down 40% downtown. Homicides on a seventy year low this year.

Speaker: 2
07:22

There are record lows of the number of tents left on the street. They’ve cleaned up all the tents. And I’ve seen this because I drive to my place in the city, and they’re all gone. And for the first time in seven years, they’ve actually got a net gain in total police officers on the force.

Speaker: 2
07:36

And now they’ve got convention bookings up 50% with hotel bookings up 60% because of it. And so here’s what d a Jenkins put out. She said saloni convictions in cases this year, narcotics, eighty eight percent of cases have resulted in convictions. Robbery, eighty five percent have resulted in convictions.

Speaker: 2
07:53

Burglary, seventy two percent in convictions. And gun possession, seventy percent of cases result. And all the car break ins are down to a twenty five year low. And so I’ve noticed it acutely in my experience in the city. So it felt a little shocking to be like, oh, we need the national guard.

Speaker: 2
08:08

This is like a city on the upswing in my opinion. And I think things are getting much better anecdotally, and the statistics represent it too. So, you know, it just well, actually, it feels It feels like there’s a little bit of a runaway narrative with San Francisco relative to what I think we those of us who are in the city are experiencing.

Speaker: 0
08:23

Let me thread these two stories together and hand it to you, Sai. So the the interesting thing, when when Sax and I were, ousting Chesa Boudin, one of the things we learned was Chesa Boudin had this famous quote where we’re saying, oh, well, we can’t get rid of the fentanyl dealers.

Speaker: 0
08:39

Ai for drug regulation, but not for fentanyl because it’s a super drug that kills people very quickly. And it turned out, he sai, all these Honduran nationals were victims. Yeah. Which Ai guess, theoretically, could be true, but it’s kinda ai in that, what do they call it, suicidal empathy category?

Speaker: 0
08:55

But it turns out this is something where ICE and the DEA have done some work. They actually started deporting these people last year because the people in San Francisco pre ram, Laurie, refused to do it. So the the the federal government actually has been taking action Yeah. On this specific issue, and we’ve also been taking out the boats bringing the drugs here.

Speaker: 1
09:17

It’s pretty

Speaker: 2
09:18

controversial. You’re not seeing a city government try to block federal action either, which is different than what you see in other cities. By the way, this is a good forewarning of what Mamdani’s New York is gonna look like. When Mamdani’s New York kind of, you know, takes off, imagine what’s gonna come into the city because there’s now gonna be permissive culture and, you know, kind of permissive society to do this sort of stuff.

Speaker: 0
09:39

Yeah. Ai, I mean, this is this is where we’ll get strong alignment and agreement, like deporting Honduran fentanyl dealers. Like, what’s taking so long?

Speaker: 2
09:47

I would ask the administration to take a beat on the San Francisco thing because this city is, like, making major improvements, and I feel very good about the direction. It’s not like other cities that are on the downswing. And also, I think AI companies are setting up in San Francisco.

Speaker: 0
10:01

Yeah.

Speaker: 2
10:02

Ai. Coming back. Yeah. Housing prices

Speaker: 0
10:04

are going the power move by Dan Lohrey would be to say to the Trump administration, hey. Can we get, I don’t know, three months of National Guard just to be in every BART station and then on these four corners in the Tenderloin just as a deterrent? You know what people would do? That would be cool.

Speaker: 2
10:19

That? People would protest and riot because they’re like, we don’t want federal policing of our city. Like, it’s gonna be covered.

Speaker: 0
10:25

Sai think you would get, like, 20% even in San Francisco rioting. I think the rest of the people would be like, okay. It’s a short duration. It’s on these corners for this purpose. Okay. Bring it. That’s why I think the

Speaker: 2
10:36

the Democrats are making shah a stupid decision. But if the city’s doing their job and the city’s improving, why do you need that? It’s getting better. You know? Like, this is not

Speaker: 0
10:44

the time. Yeah.

Speaker: 2
10:44

That’s If things are worse and you’re in a spiral

Speaker: 0
10:47

If it is a backstop Sure. Yeah. I meh, that maybe the reason it’s getting better is because that backstop is there.

Speaker: 2
10:54

What? The National Guard backstop? They’re they’re hiring more police. They haven’t done that in seven years in San Francisco. They’re finally adding to the big force.

Speaker: 0
11:00

Top under

Speaker: 2
11:01

And they’re enforcing and they’re getting convictions. It’s kind of working.

Speaker: 3
11:05

Well, I’ll partially agree with both of you. So I agree with Freeburg that we have the best mayor we’ve had in decades with Daniel Lohrey, and I think he is making progress, and the city is bouncing back. I think we probably had the lowest low during COVID and so a lot of that is just the finally the bounce back and then we got the AI boom which is creating a lot of wealth and it’s bringing a lot of people back to the city and it’s starting to absorb all the vacancy we have.

Speaker: 3
11:30

So in any event all those are good things. Nonetheless, we still have this problem of this blighted area of Main Street where of all people Gavin Newsom proved that we could clean it up. Remember when President Xi came to town from China for that summit?

Speaker: 2
11:46

And all

Speaker: 3
11:46

of a sudden magically that whole area was cleaned up in forty eight hours and you know all the drug addicts and all the drug dealers basically disappeared, I don’t know where they sent them to. So it shows that there is a way to clean this up virtually overnight and I think that somehow the mayor and the DA are constrained in what they can do sai you could have a targeted operation here by the federal authorities to go in and clean that up and I I think that’d be a good thing.

Speaker: 0
12:15

What do you think would happen in

Speaker: 2
12:15

the city if they did that with respect to the population? Are they gonna welcome or not welcome federal policing of their streets?

Speaker: 3
12:23

Well, again, I don’t think we should be held hostage by lawbreakers who basically threaten violent protests and chaos in response to law enforcement authorities doing their job. I don’t think we should be blackmailed by that or threatened by that or held hostage by that.

Speaker: 2
12:39

But they’re getting convictions. They’re making arrests. Right.

Speaker: 3
12:42

I think that’s awesome. I’m applauding their efforts and I’m not criticizing them. What I’m saying is we still have this intractable problem of this area of downtown where, like Jhcal said, there’s a network of drug dealers. Just to build on your point, Jhcal, about the Hondurans, there’s actually an article in the Serrinscope Chronicle talking about this where the majority of the drug trade in San Francisco comes from a single town in South Meh.

Speaker: 0
13:05

Yeah.

Speaker: 3
13:05

And sai, yeah, it’s ai, why couldn’t you just round up this whole network in a very targeted operation and deport them, and that would clean up a huge part of San Francisco. I think there’s an opportunity here. If you look at the cities where it’s been very successful, so Muriel Bowser, who’s the mayor of DC, obviously, she wasn’t thrilled about the president sending in the National Guard, and she said so publicly.

Speaker: 3
13:27

That being said, she also cooperated with it, and it redounded to the benefit of all the citizens of Washington, DC. So I think there’s an opportunity here for the mayor to cooperate with the Trump administration and do a targeted exercise and clean up the streets of San Francisco.

Speaker: 3
13:41

I think

Speaker: 0
13:42

Or he can do it himself.

Speaker: 5
13:43

They could do it very quickly.

Speaker: 0
13:43

Himself for his Ai.

Speaker: 1
13:45

Did you guys see this interview with this woman in DC who was describing what it’s been like in DC over the last forty years and see the changes?

Speaker: 0
13:52

Yeah. She feels safe.

Speaker: 1
13:54

Elon retweeted it. Nick, I sent you the link on signal. Just listen listen to what she says. It’s really to your point, Sai, it’s ai, it’s just such a no brainer thing to do. The question now is, I think, is a political calculation, who wants to take credit for it? Because everybody should be doing this.

Speaker: 3
14:09

Oh, yes. Listen to this.

Speaker: 6
14:10

I’m always gonna be the person to say it, and I don’t wanna be the person to say it. But Donald Trump has been president for nine months. Nine months. And I’m seeing videos from Chicago, DC where people ai, yo, I feel safe. My kids feel safe. This is the best thing he ever did for us.

Speaker: 6
14:30

So what was happening all these years at this? Like, literally, I’ve Ai known DC and Virginia to have this type of going my whole ai, and I’m I’m in my forties. Okay? Almost touching it. So what was really truly going on if a mother became president nine months ago and cleared that out with just

Speaker: 0
14:53

a flick of the pin?

Speaker: 6
14:54

I’m just thinking like, did y’all really ever care?

Speaker: 3
14:57

Exactly. So I think that the point she’s making there is we don’t have to live this way. This is a choice. Okay?

Speaker: 2
15:04

Meh.

Speaker: 3
15:04

And we don’t have to live in San Francisco with our main drag, our main street, Arya Street, basically being an open air drug market where you’ve got hundreds of people who are addicted doing drugs in the street, you know, doing other things in the street. And, again, Gavin Newsom proved that it could all be cleaned up very, very quickly.

Speaker: 3
15:22

So look, I think it’s great that Daniel Lurry and Brook Jenkins and the new administration are doing a better job, but they’re still constrained and hamstrung by their own Well, look, ai that’s that’s that’s that’s city’s hold on. By the city’s liberal ai, extreme liberal mindset towards what’s possible.

Speaker: 3
15:39

And I think, like that person just said in the video, Trump just did it with a stroke of a pen. This is a choice. We don’t have to live this way.

Speaker: 0
15:46

It’s the biggest unforced era since opening the Southern border. These are just the two stupidest decisions the Democrats ever made, and obviously the easiest thing to do to split the the two approaches here at Friedberg is Yeah. To have Dan Lohrey say, thank you for offering Trump.

Speaker: 1
16:04

We would like

Speaker: 0
16:05

to have it for this period of time in this location. Then you could communicate to the people of San Francisco. It’s just a test. It’s just on these straight streets. When it comes top down and you don’t have a choice and JB Pritzker does what he did, which is I’m gonna ban you from coming in and reducing crime.

Speaker: 0
16:18

Like, do you hear yourself, Pritzker? Like, I wanna stop you from lowering crime.

Speaker: 3
16:22

There’s something else we gotta do as well, which is we gotta stop funding the drug addiction because the city provides something like $2,000,000,000 a year to these NGOs who are supposedly there to quote take care of this homeless shah addicted population and they manage them like their flock because for every addicted person they add to the flock they get paid more money and so obviously this is why we have this problem here, and in fact, the homeless we have in San Francisco are not predominantly from San Francisco, they’re from all over the country, all over the surrounding area.

Speaker: 2
16:53

Yeah.

Speaker: 3
16:54

They come here for the benefits, so we create the magnet for all these people. So part of it’s law enforcement, then also part of it is just cut off the flow of money that’s funding their drug addictions.

Speaker: 2
17:04

You arya a 100% correct on that. I completely agree with you on that point, and I think that forced treatment center transitions ram needed, obviously. You know, we have a ram. I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but for those who haven’t heard about it to hear about the absurdity of these programs in San Francisco, there’s a program called the managed alcohol program.

Speaker: 2
17:25

$5,000,000 per year out of the San Francisco city budget is spent on this program where, you can walk into a hotel. They have free beer. You ask for a beer, they give you a beer. What? You drink the beer, you go out, you party, you come back, you get another beer.

Speaker: 2
17:43

So they have all these studies that rationalize this program, which is, oh, this is a way to help alcoholics recover from alcoholism when they’re homeless and they need this treatment. But, here, you can see this is from last year. Beer? Yeah. So the treatment is beer.

Speaker: 0
17:59

And it’s for alcoholism. I’ve heard.

Speaker: 2
18:01

But it’s one of these absurd things where now it’s kind of a joke because there’s also this close part of downtown where, you know, it’s a little bit of a kind of do what you want where they kinda keep folks. It’s like, hey, you can use your needles here. Then folks will get a drink. They’ll play music. They’ll go after the thing.

Speaker: 2
18:17

It’s really sad how these programs, obviously, well intentioned initially, become of the most absurd.

Speaker: 0
18:23

If you want to work. Something, keep spending money on it. In fact, there is a program for people who are addicted to gambling, and they they give Chamath free flags and cranberries at the win to help him with his craftsmanship. That will land.

Speaker: 3
18:38

Yeah. It’s amazing if you,

Speaker: 0
18:40

if I can Chamath. Keep going. What’s it gonna land?

Speaker: 3
18:41

You send a private jet and extend a massive credit line. It’s amazing. How many gambling addicts are is it all attracted to your casino?

Speaker: 1
18:48

By the way, did you guys see that JB Pritzker disclosed his income from 2024?

Speaker: 0
18:54

And Let’s guess. Over under. Give us an over under.

Speaker: 1
18:56

Out of the 10,300,000.0, 1,400,000.0 of it was gambling winnings from Vegas.

Speaker: 0
19:02

What? Yum. Yum. Okay. All new respect.

Speaker: 1
19:06

1,400,000.0 playing blackjack.

Speaker: 0
19:08

So he’s counting cards. Yeah. Definitely Wow. Definitely count cards with sacks. Yeah.

Speaker: 1
19:14

Well, no. I I’ll just tell you, like, look, to win $1,400,000 in Ai, you basically you basically need to be betting a 100 k a hand.

Speaker: 3
19:22

Even I don’t do that.

Speaker: 1
19:23

That’s the only way you can win that much, which is a lot of money per hand. Not judging. I’m just saying. Sex?

Speaker: 0
19:29

Serving. Sex. I mean, that’s Dana White level. He’s Dana White level hit that.

Speaker: 2
19:34

I’m not at that level.

Speaker: 3
19:36

I mean No. No. I’m not at that level.

Speaker: 2
19:38

Come on. David plays at

Speaker: 0
19:39

the $100 hand table. He’s got great. By the way, just to put some numbers behind us all Speaking

Speaker: 2
19:44

of Vegas, aren’t we going next next month?

Speaker: 0
19:46

Yes. Yes. Yum yum. Yum yum. Just to put some numbers on it, homeless budget, San Francisco unbelievably. High estimate, like, 800,000,000. Lower estimate, 700,000,000. And, low estimate for homeless people is, like, 8,000. High estimates, like, 20 if we cut in between these two. They’re spending $52,000 a year per homeless person.

Speaker: 0
20:06

$52,000 a year.

Speaker: 2
20:10

It is a complete utter grift.

Speaker: 0
20:10

To not solve the problem.

Speaker: 3
20:12

Well, they don’t have an incentive to solve the problem because, again, a lot of this is gonna be USDA NGOs, and they get paid for every addict they can add to their flock. Thomas Sowell had a great line about this. He said that you get as much homelessness as you’re willing to pay for.

Speaker: 0
20:25

Well, on your point before is other places don’t give the services, sai, therefore, the homeless, slash junkies converse about this and then they pick the right distinction.

Speaker: 3
20:36

Have to live this way. I appreciate the mayor. I appreciate the DA, but we don’t have to live this way. There’s more that can be done.

Speaker: 1
20:41

That is exactly it. You do not have to live this way.

Speaker: 0
20:45

Yes. Do not stand for it, folks. Okay. Here we go. Lots of topics. The US China trade battle is continuing, and this time we have a new wrinkle. Trump and Xi are set to meet in South Korea. Later this month, they’re gonna work out a grand trade deal. And this would be their first in person meeting since 2019, six years ago.

Speaker: 0
21:06

But last Thursday, China announced new export controls on 12 of 17 critical rare earth minerals effective December 1. Obviously, we need these for EVs, batteries, your AirPods, everything. And on Friday, Trump threatened a 100% tariff on all Chinese imports on top of the existing tariffs as of November 1 and accused the CCP of trying to, quote, hold the world captive.

Speaker: 0
21:32

Stock market tanked, recovered on Monday when Trump told everybody, don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be all good. So far this week, things have mostly deescalated. Friend of the pod, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said the Trump Xi meeting is still on track and, quote, we have substantially deescalated.

Speaker: 0
21:51

Also, he said the 100% tariff does not have to happen. However, on Wednesday, Bessent called the export controls unacceptable and that it’s China versus the free world. Let’s take a pause here. Freeberg, thoughts on price controls generally? And if you sana to expand into the overall relationship with China as it relates to rare earth metals, Go for it.

Speaker: 2
22:16

Besson’s comments on the price controls speak to what he calls a non market economy. Meaning that the Chinese government is intervening and creating artificial surplus in the market, which drives prices down and effectively eliminates competition. And so the Chinese push in the nineties supported by the CCP ultimately eradicated competition and made it non competitive for US companies.

Speaker: 2
22:42

So they exited the market and now The United States finds itself completely dependent on Chinese suppliers. Particularly as it relates to rare earths, there was this company called Mollycorp that ended up going out of business. The asset, the Mountain Pass mine that Mollycorp operated became MP Materials, which Chamath knows well and did this big deal recently with the US government as they’ve tried to revitalize production at this mine and increase output.

Speaker: 0
23:10

Friberg, can you explain price floors for people just in case?

Speaker: 2
23:13

So price floors are that the government is gonna mandate that things have to cost at least x. So they increase the price of inputs and basically make it more difficult for China to undercut pricing, which increases the rationale for capital to invest in starting competitors because now they can have a guarantee of revenue or a guarantee of price.

Speaker: 2
23:36

But the problem is that Ai would argue the government’s role maybe shouldn’t be in setting price floors because that creates, you know, a a very bad effect long term on the market. The government should deregulate and create a more free market in The US. A large reason why mining and processing of the ores moved offshore was because of the regulatory environment in The United States, which made it difficult to compete with China.

Speaker: 2
24:00

We could argue about the environmental laws and how extensive and how relevant they may be today relative to the nineties. But this created a real challenge for companies to compete because it was so much more expensive to operate in The US. So I would argue we should be focusing not so much on setting price floors to create an incentive for folks in The US to get involved in the industry, but rather to deregulate and to provide perhaps tax incentives and other economic incentives.

Speaker: 2
24:25

So you don’t inflate the cost of things, but you create a much more kind of liquid market and drive much more volume and interest in in building, on this side.

Speaker: 0
24:34

Alright. Price floors. When we were talking about Kamala Harris running for president, she was asking for price flaws and price fixing and making sure the government got involved in this. How is this different, Sachs?

Speaker: 3
24:48

Well, look. As a general matter, I agree that the federal government shouldn’t be setting the prices of goods, and it shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the economy. But I think this is a different situation because over the past thirty years, we haven’t really had a free market in rare earths.

Speaker: 3
25:03

What’s basically happened, like Freeberg was saying, China has been allowed to dominate this industry and specifically what they did is starting thirty years ago, they identified rare earths and rare earth magnets, the rare earth processing, as a very strategic element in the supply chain and they set out to dominate it and they did that by massively subsidizing their businesses and driving all of The US competitors and the global competitors out of business and they were partially allowed to do that by stupid WTO rules that allowed developing nations to subsidize their own industries even though China is not developing I mean their economy is comparable to ours and yet these WTO rules allowed them to effectively cheat by subsidizing their industries at the expense of our industries.

Speaker: 3
25:51

And the result of this is that they do now have course of leverage over the supply ai. And over the last few weeks, they just used that imposing this vast new export control regime on rare earths, and their idea is to tighten the screws when they feel like it and to use rare earths as a form of leverage in their relationship with The United States.

Speaker: 3
26:10

So we’re well past economics here and we’re into international relations, we’re into the balance of power, we’re international security, and I don’t think that the price floors here are designed to make the government the mediator of what prices should be in the free arya. They’re designed to create enough certainty for US investors that they can reinvest in rare earths and reshore the processing and the casting of rare earth magnets and I just don’t see another way to be able to create the incentives for investors because they know that if they invest a lot of money in rare earth processing, that all China has to do is slash the prices and drive them out of business.

Speaker: 3
26:52

And China continually uses that tactic. So I think you have to address that if you want to alleviate the American dependency on this critical resource, which China currently has control over.

Speaker: 1
27:04

This started in 02/2008 with Hu Jintao, and what he basically said is we’re gonna create six or seven national champions, and he wanted to create them in the critical areas that they needed to dominate over the next twenty years. And one of those was rare earths, another one was batteries and EVs, and yet another one was around the active principle ingredients or APIs that are the core inputs for pharmaceuticals.

Speaker: 1
27:32

So what do they do? And when Xi came into power, Xi Jinping continued that huge vatsal strategy. What did they do? It’s exactly what Saks said, which is they have this very aggressive form of mercantilism. How do they affect that?

Speaker: 1
27:46

They are willing through provincial balance sheets, through federal balance sheets, through loan guarantees, through organizations that are quasi public private partnerships, they step into markets and they can effectively change the spot price on demand. Now ai is that problematic? In America, I’ll tell you the example of one of our businesses. You do these deals that are called take or pay agreements.

Speaker: 1
28:12

So MP has a deal with General Motors, one of my businesses that makes LFP cathode, same deal with GM. You do what’s called the take or pay, which means that General Motors steps up and says, great. I will buy x amount of volume from you at y price. And so you go and you take that deal to Wall Street and you say, I need financing to build a factory or a capability.

Speaker: 1
28:36

Contrast that to the Chinese company who just goes to the government and the government says, here’s a bunch of incentives and money and price breaks, just go build it. So already, we’re a little bit ai. But it’s much more free arya, and it’s more transparent. So you take a deal, you go to Wall Street, they give you money, you start building it, you start to produce it, and then you expect General Motors or Ford or Tesla to start buying this stuff.

Speaker: 1
29:03

But as Saks said, if all of a sudden China sees it, what they do is they enter the market and they will dump an enormous volume of that product into the spot market. What happens? The price craters. Now all of these end buyers are in a really tough position because their competitors can buy at a much bigger discount than they can.

Speaker: 1
29:23

They have to flow that price through their products. Their prices are more expensive. They have less demand, and that’s the huge negative cycle that China has complete control of. So why is the federal government stepping in to create what is essentially a last resort buyer of record?

Speaker: 1
29:41

It is so critical in these markets because The US balance sheet is the only one that can create a strategic reserve around these inputs. Not dissimilar to how we do with petroleum, we can nominate now things that are critical, disposing, hopper, NDPR, all of these things that can now absorb the price shocks that China may otherwise be able to affect.

Speaker: 1
30:07

So I think this structure where we now have these public private partnerships frankly is the only practical antidote to dealing with this issue. Otherwise, we’re always going to be prone to this very clever and accurate and smart mercantilism from the Chinese. So I’m I’m a big fan of this general market structure.

Speaker: 1
30:28

It’s the only way that you cannot be theoretical and actually respond to the conditions on the ground.

Speaker: 0
30:33

Yeah. We’ve been doing a little research on this and here is neodymium. This is one

Speaker: 1
30:38

of the one of the two inputs for

Speaker: 0
30:40

for magnets, for permanent magnets. Yeah. And, you can see here $50,000 for a tonne. Back in 2020 during COVID, it spiked almost up to a quarter million dollars and then it came back down.

Speaker: 1
30:52

So look, you can you can imagine, like, it’s incredibly difficult when there’s that much volatility to try to buy CapEx, to try to plant Speak, to try to extract from the ground, go through all of the regulatory rigmarole that Western countries have to go through, and then all of a sudden have a sale price that you can’t control.

Speaker: 0
31:11

And if you look at the cost, we were just doing some research on it. You know, if you get your AirPods, it’s one or 2% of the cost of that. Medical devices, it’s a lot more, but even in a Tesla model y, it’s it’s less it’s 10 VIMs.

Speaker: 1
31:22

It’s less the I think this is an inaccurate way of looking at it. You have to look at the actual mass. And so the real problem is in in cars, in engines, you’re talking about tens of kilos ultimately, and that’s where the real costs build up. And then separately, the permanent magnets that go into cars, you can work your way around.

Speaker: 1
31:43

The real in future markets that really matter is in robotics because these permanent magnets are the key input to the actuation mechanism of the actuation mechanism of the robots. Meaning how do the robots move? How do the joints move? Through actuation, that happens because of rare earths and permanent magnets.

Speaker: 0
31:59

And as Elon said at the summit, he’s building all those himself. Right now, only 7% of the known deposits of it have been found. There’s plenty of it out there. But to your point, I came to the same conclusion as you, Chamath, which is we should be building a strategic reserve of these.

Speaker: 0
32:16

And if you look, we could be, you know, buying them when these things are down and deploying them when

Speaker: 1
32:22

we need to do something different. I think instead of trying to, like, time the market, I think what The United States can be much better at is having a broad forecast of demand, knowing how many million tons of this stuff we will need, and just thoughtfully and methodically being a purchaser of record to create these strategic reserves.

Speaker: 1
32:40

And then the worst case that can happen is you can do a swap with these customers. So Tesla, all of a bryden, can’t go into the spot market. They should be able to come to the strategic reserve and be able to buy lithium. You know, General Motors need something, whomever. Right? Figure robots need something.

Speaker: 1
32:58

I think that mechanism is the only way we can compete effectively on a day to day basis with the Chinese.

Speaker: 2
33:03

I mean, I would argue, I think we actually if we let the market work and we create the necessary kind of structure to allow the market to operate, meaning the regulatory barriers are diminished to develop mines and to conduct the processing of the ore. So there’s two sides of the equation when it comes to this kind of industry of rare earths. The one is mining the ore.

Speaker: 2
33:26

You know, this mountain pass site, which is kind of on the border of California and Nevada, which is now MP Materials, they’ve got this rare earth ore called bastnasite. That’s the ore that you get out of the ground, and then you have to process that ore to get the elements out of the ore that you wanna use in manufacturing.

Speaker: 2
33:44

The processing steps, I kind of went a little bit deep on this over the last week because I got really interested in why we don’t do this anymore in The United States. And there is so much nasty output from this process. You’re using very strong acids to do leaching. You do processing. You do extraction, refinement.

Speaker: 2
34:05

All of the material kinda gets separated out from the rock, and it’s dirty. And as a result, there’s byproducts and waste and environmental exposure, but also human personnel exposure. But the technology hasn’t been deeply developed in forty years. It’s still ai of forty year old chemical engineering technology.

Speaker: 2
34:27

And we stopped developing it about forty years ago in The United States.

Speaker: 1
34:31

It’s not even technology. It’s known.

Speaker: 2
34:32

Yeah. It’s not. It’s just it’s just metallurgy and chemistry.

Speaker: 1
34:35

It’s not.

Speaker: 2
34:35

But the but there are techniques now that can be applied that can do this in a kind of scalable, safer way without any of the environmental hazards. But this is largely why this shifted over to Ai, is they didn’t have the sort of regulatory, burdens that we have in The United States, which made it much cheaper and the labor cost is much lower.

Speaker: 2
34:53

But with automation and certain systems, we can actually process this ore. It’s not super complicated. It’s a series of well understood steps of chemistry and mechanical separation. So we could process ores. The other kind of important point is there could be well over a thousand times the proven reserves of rare earths in the existing proven reserve catalog using new discovery techniques.

Speaker: 2
35:20

So USGS, the geological survey in The United States has this kind of Earth MRI system where they’re trying to do new mapping. But there’s also several private companies that can use radar and microwave imaging. And then you can use the system of interferometry where you actually put multiple beams down underground.

Speaker: 2
35:36

And you can get a better read or a better understanding of where these ores might lie. And there are unproven reserves in Texas, in Wyoming, in Colorado, in Missouri, all over the Continental United States. So if we did decide, hey, this is strategic to us. I do think one of the important points is that we can unlock both new kind of discoveries and new refinement systems in The United States and actually be truly competitive with China if we put the will behind it.

Speaker: 2
36:04

So I think, like, this is a good moment for The United States to observe what’s going on and not just kind of be, you know, focused on China’s production. I think we could outpace them and and, and accelerate through this if we chose to. So,

Speaker: 1
36:16

Sachs, where does all of this fit in to the broader agreement? And do you think that they’re gonna go to South Korea and come out with a deal? And do do you have a sense of, like, what the contours have to be to make this a success?

Speaker: 3
36:28

Well, the treasury secretary Scott Bessen, who we know, just said that the Trump Xi meeting is still on track, and he also said that we have substantially deescalated and that the 100% tariff does not need to happen. So he says it’s still on track. By the way, I think he’s doing a phenomenal job here.

Speaker: 3
36:43

He really understands the intricacies of this trade relationship, and I think he’s capable of both applying pressure but then also finesse. So I think he’s doing a great job on this. But in any event, I think the reason why you want to have the leaders meh, president Trump and president Xi, is that I think that this relationship, this bilateral relationship between The US and China, will work best when there’s an agreement at the top.

Speaker: 3
37:08

And what I mean by that is that when you just let the various bureaucracies deal with each other, you’re more likely to have misunderstandings or or food fights. So let me give you an example. Over the past few weeks, obviously, you’ve had this Chinese Ministry of Commerce pass these export controls on the rare earths, which created the possibility of greatly limiting the access of not just American companies, but companies all over the world to Chinese rare earths.

Speaker: 3
37:35

They sort of backed away from that. Separately in The US, you had movements by our government to greatly expand the export control list. And, basically, there was a interim final rule that was issued by the Commerce Department on September 29 that said that if a Chinese company is on the export control list, that restriction should also apply to any of its affiliates or subsidiaries that are more than 50% owned by that company, which is kinda obvious.

Speaker: 3
37:59

Right? You don’t want a Chinese company like Huawei to circumvent the entity list by simply setting up a shell organization. So I think there’s a perfectly reasonable rule to issue, but then China reacted to that very strongly. And so there’s just such a high chance of the two sides miscommunicating with each other and over escalating when you just allow the bureaucracies to talk to each other.

Speaker: 3
38:20

And I think what’s most needed right now is to have a grand bargain between president Trump and president Xi and that will then calm down the relationship. And obviously, this is sana be a very competitive relationship for as far as the eye can see because there’s both security and economic competition going on, but I do think that when you have an understanding at the top, it creates conditions for more stability.

Speaker: 0
38:44

Alright. Traders on PolyMarket think or no, depending on the situation, that we are gonna see cooler heads prevail. 15% chance of the 100% tariff on China going into effect by November 1. In other words, 85% chance it’s not gonna happen. 73% chance of US China trade agreement by November 10.

Speaker: 2
39:04

Who do you think has the greatest incentive to decouple? The US or China?

Speaker: 3
39:10

I think both sides understand that they can no longer be dependent on the other for things that they consider to be critical. So, I mean, The US has realized, wait a saloni. We can’t allow China to have a monopoly on rare earths. And ai the way, it’s not just the the rare earths, the processing, it’s also the casting of the rare earths into magnets.

Speaker: 3
39:29

So there’s this long tail of, I don’t know, 20,000 different kinds of magnets that are made from rare earths that are used in the industrial supply chain, and if China were to cut those off then it would greatly impede manufacturing of pretty much every different kind of electric motors from cars to other goods.

Speaker: 3
39:49

Sai, in any event, my point is just The US clearly cannot be dependent. I’m sure that China is reaching a similar conclusion. That doesn’t mean that trade can’t happen between the two countries. I’m sure it will continue but I don’t think either side wants to be in a position where the other side can use its leverage beyond just economic terms into geopolitics.

Speaker: 2
40:11

But with respect to the Belt and Road’s initiative, like, don’t you think China has been planning for the decoupling in kind of a very long viewed way relative to The United States, and they’re more, I would say, prepared and active to execute the decoupling, whereas The US still is waking up to the fact that there are certain kind of critical supply chain dependencies that we have with Ai, and maybe we shouldn’t be decoupling as quickly as we stated our intention to? Like, it feels like they’re in a pretty advantaged position, Sachs, in both the buy side and the sell side.

Speaker: 1
40:43

They have 20% youth unemployment. They have a demographic time bomb that’s gone off. They have a pretty moribund real estate market. They have very little to none foreign direct investment. So I don’t agree with you.

Speaker: 0
40:56

Okay.

Speaker: 3
40:56

Well, I I would just say that I I think what China has been doing

Speaker: 1
40:59

Meaning, they’re they’re just as challenged as we are. They have different challenges. Yeah.

Speaker: 2
41:02

No. It’s good. It’s a good point. Yeah.

Speaker: 3
41:03

I would just say that I think that China is a rising great power. I think that over the last decade, their economy grew to the point where it’s roughly the size of The US’s economy. Certainly on a on a PPP basis, it might even be bigger.

Speaker: 0
41:18

Right.

Speaker: 3
41:18

But on an international currency basis, it’s still smaller. But anyway, the point being that as China has risen as a great power, it sought to create its own international institutions. And so if you think about, you know, what The US has, The US has NATO obviously and the g seven and the World Bank and the IMF and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker: 3
41:37

And what China sought to do is create you know, they created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is a security focused organization. I wouldn’t call it quite the equivalent to NATO, but it’s trending in that direction. They’ve been probably the main sponsor behind BRICS and Belt and Road Ai think is part of that. They’re creating their own network of relationships.

Speaker: 3
41:54

They’re creating their own international order and it is a challenge to The US order. I mean during the unipolar moment from sai 1991 to, I don’t know, 2017, The US was the only great power in the system and we basically defined all the key international institutions and China as it’s risen has done what all great powers seek to do which is to create their own order and so yeah Ai think they do want to be somewhat independent of The US, they don’t want to be dependent on us, and I think we’re realizing that we have to act the same way.

Speaker: 3
42:28

And the shame of it is that when we were running all the key institutions during the unipolar moment, like the WTO, we engaged in so many foolish policies that allow China to dominate rare earths. I mean, we should never have let that happen.

Speaker: 1
42:41

Can I clarify one thing, which is Ai think that a lot of people don’t know this historical artifact, which I think is so fascinating, which is Ai don’t think China is a rising power? I think China is a reascending power. And the reason I say that is if you go back to 1500 to now, over all of those years, China had the world’s largest GDP 70% of those years.

Speaker: 2
43:06

Yep.

Speaker: 1
43:06

70%. So if you think about it in that context, especially as a Confucian society, I think the Chinese think about this as, hold on, this is reasserting the dominance that we’ve always had. And I think if you start to look at it through that lens, that’s why they view the blending of public private partnerships, the organizations that go and help backstop private companies in China.

Speaker: 1
43:31

The other interesting thing, which I learned studying China, is how they allocate capital. The capital allocation system is both rigid, but it’s incredibly flexible. What do I mean? The way that China allocates money is the following. You have Xi Jinping and his close circle of people. They dictate the priorities. Right?

Speaker: 1
43:50

I would think there was an arya, Nick, you can find it. But Xi is personally ai now helping to draft the five year business plan of China. But what happens is is it goes from that central group of ai seven, eight, nine people to the Politburo. And when it gets approved by the Politburo, it gets sent to all the provinces and then it gets sent to the prefectures.

Speaker: 1
44:09

So an example was in 02/1967 when they decided to prioritize Ai. What you effectively have is a cascading set of venture capitalists who are operating against a national ai, and then they are rewarded for it. And so you essentially have 300 VCs running around, organizing human capital in all of these different provinces against all of these different priorities.

Speaker: 1
44:33

And at the end of that, you get a BYD or you get a Xiaomi or you get these great companies. And I think that that is what’s so daunting if you think about it. So that’s another thing that we have to factor as well. They have And

Speaker: 2
44:46

and they have they have one of those plans, Jamat, for every industry. It’s not just so they have, like, an agriculture five year plan. They have an energy five year plan. And in each one, it details out their forecast of not just, like, how to catch up, but what’s possible.

Speaker: 2
44:59

And that’s why they’re charting new new avenues of innovation in nuclear power. Yeah.

Speaker: 1
45:05

It’s about them, I think, getting back to where they have been as opposed to them realizing that they could potentially be the world’s largest economy. It’s more of them saying we were the largest for so long. We took our eye off the ball, and now we need to get refocused.

Speaker: 2
45:22

I think that’s more of a national pride kind of motivation here, but it’s obviously different people, different country, different governing structure, etcetera.

Speaker: 1
45:31

Isn’t that incredible, though? 70% of the years since 1500, they have the largest GDP in the world.

Speaker: 2
45:35

It is incredible.

Speaker: 1
45:36

It’s stunning. Yeah.

Speaker: 2
45:36

I mean, there were these innovations that drove some of these ships. The technology of ships and fleets of ships drove the Dutch ai to its prowess and then the British empire to its prowess. And there were these moments of technological innovation, but you’re right. Always on the heels was China, and this may be China’s moment of resurgence across the board.

Speaker: 3
45:55

The person who really saw that this ahead of the curve was Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore based in the founder of Singapore. And Graham Allison wrote a book about Lee Kuan Yew where he talks about his ai. There’s a couple of quotes here that I think are are really good on this.

Speaker: 3
46:09

What Lee Kuan Yew said is that it’s not possible to pretend that this, China, is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world, and he also said that the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new saloni.

Speaker: 3
46:25

So, Chamath, like you’re saying, China was the biggest power in the world for hundreds of years and then it was kind of overtaken by the Western powers and now it’s kind of reasserting vatsal, but in any event, this is why I think that during the unipolar moment The US should have been a lot more careful about facilitating China’s rise.

Speaker: 1
46:43

100%.

Speaker: 3
46:44

Because it created a monster and this is the point that Professor Mearsheimer has made many times and he wrote about this going back to 2002 saying in his article about whether China could rise peacefully and he said the answer is no because if we facilitate the ai, we will create a geopolitical competitor and we’ll go from being a unipolar world order to a multipolar world order and that’s basically what’s happened.

Speaker: 2
47:05

But at the time, just remember, like, when when they were admitted to the WTO and the motivation was really about lowering the cost of goods and services for the American consumer, which was, like, an intrinsically reasonable motivation. It wasn’t like there was some nefarious intention at the time, but it was short sai and that it didn’t do the calculus fast forward twenty, thirty, forty years to determine, well, if we then kneecap our ability to actually produce anything, where are we gonna be if they do start to decouple?

Speaker: 2
47:35

And that’s sai question of hubris.

Speaker: 3
47:36

Though. It was hubris because we thought that there was only one great power in the system and that’s the way it would always be. We thought great power politics was off the table, and we thought that we were at the end of history.

Speaker: 0
47:47

It wasn’t hubris. It was greed. The the CEOs at the time and the people who were influential in making donations to politicians wanted to make more money. That’s why they did it. They didn’t do it with anything other than a profit motivation, which is greed.

Speaker: 2
48:02

Part of American, like, mindset at the time was that we had a monopoly on knowledge work. Right? And this was, I think, very key. This this speaks to the hubris of the decision making was that this knowledge work is where you create a separation of labor from intellect. And that there was this idea that America would move into a services economy fully and not have to be in a labor economy, and the labor economy could be outsourced.

Speaker: 2
48:24

Ultimately, that didn’t yield true. The the Internet kind of created a rival to knowledge work or a diffusion of knowledge and diffusion of knowledge capacity to societies around the world, which really did create a different structure than we anticipated at the time.

Speaker: 0
48:39

I think that’s looking in the rearview mirror, Friedberg. I think the the CEOs at that time were like, how do we increase the profit margin on an iPhone, on a a PC, on any product being created? And the way to do that is find the lowest

Speaker: 1
48:50

I agree. It’s a

Speaker: 0
48:51

labor source possible, and that was China. They just did it out of just pure capitalism.

Speaker: 3
48:55

That was part of it. But there is another factor here as well, which I I do think the ideology was really powerful. And meh, in the nineteen nineties, the leading philosopher or international relations theorist, the most celebrated book was The End of History by Francis Fukuyama.

Speaker: 3
49:09

And what he basically said is that we’re at the end of history because liberal democracy has won, and it’s only a matter of time before the whole world becomes liberal democracies.

Speaker: 0
49:18

You’re right.

Speaker: 3
49:18

And the theory about China was that if they got rich, they’d become more like us, That people would rise up and demand a liberal democratic government as they became rich. And so we then ai, and there probably was an element agreed to this as well, we then justified helping China rise on the grounds that somehow this wealth would turn them into a democracy and, in fact, all that it did was make them richer and more powerful.

Speaker: 3
49:45

It didn’t change their government, it just turned them into a huge geopolitical competitor to The US. The author who actually predicted this in well, there’s Mearsheimer who predicted in the early two thousands. Also, Samuel Huntington wrote a book called The Clash of Civilizations in the mid ai that was sort of the opposite of you know, End of History was celebrated.

Speaker: 3
50:05

Clash of Civilizations was sort of reviled, but what Huntington said is that what these other civilizations want around the world is not westernization. They want modernization. And as they modernize and become richer, they’re not gonna basically westernize. They’re gonna become competitors to the western order, and that’s basically what happened.

Speaker: 0
50:26

I thought for sure you would sai, Friedman’s, the world is flat, which was, I think, air cover for all this because you would get the speak dividend if everybody had McDonald’s and everybody was watching the same movies. Go ahead, Shima, do you have some thoughts?

Speaker: 1
50:38

That Huntington book is actually exceptional. The thing with Francis Fukuyama is he he writes in this beautiful way, but he literally vatsal zero. It’s ai, you could basically read a Francis Fukuyama book and understand that whatever the opposite of what he wrote is likely gonna happen.

Speaker: 1
50:53

That anyway, that’s neither here nor there. But I just wanted to pick on what Jason said because I agree with him. The thing is you had a lot of this geopolitical tension, Sachs, which I think you articulated well, like the elites were coming together, like we’re gonna convert China, we’re gonna do all of this stuff.

Speaker: 1
51:09

And I think that was a trend, but then what hyper accelerated it, in my opinion, was something that was very tactical, which Jay Cal mentioned, which is the compensation plans of most of the executives and CEOs of these public corporations started to get very tuned to gameable metrics like EPS in and around that same time.

Speaker: 1
51:29

And so Jason’s right. The direct financial incentives to basically think about this as a monocultural global world where you can just export things to every nook and cranny of the world to optimize for the flow of profits back to you, trap them in any country you want because it doesn’t ultimately matter to your compensation.

Speaker: 1
51:46

That perversion also happened at the same time, which I think accelerated what otherwise would have given us maybe another decade or two to realize that we weren’t in complete control of our destiny.

Speaker: 0
51:58

So It gets, you you could see it also in Taiwan with, like, how in the world did ninety percent of the chips come out of one tiny island? It’s just capitalism. Like, it’s the best place to do it at the cheapest ai, the most efficiently, and then you have now this dependency on Taiwan because we didn’t think about redundancy and supply chain.

Speaker: 0
52:17

Freeberg, in related international news, Trump is put up or the Trump administration has put up about $40,000,000,000 to help out Argentina. Can you explain what’s going on there?

Speaker: 2
52:29

They’re trying to bolster the credit rating of Argentina with the currency swap. That’s related to the financial condition the pro Malay proponents would argue he inherited. The, opponents would say, you know, he’s making things worse. The US is stepping in to support his free market kind of principles that are ultimately gonna drive cross border cooperation.

Speaker: 2
52:49

So I think that the swap agreement puts in place a bolstering of support.

Speaker: 0
52:54

I thought this was related directly to the to rare earths. To rare earths?

Speaker: 2
52:57

I I’m not sure about rare earths.

Speaker: 0
52:59

Ai, Shamath. I saw you retweeting some of this, and there’s been a little bit of a back channel in the last forty eight hours, kind of breaking news here. Data centers are spiking the cost of energy, or people are perceiving it to be doing sai, in different geographies here in The United States.

Speaker: 0
53:17

And, I guess, not wanting to be hated or get into wars with consumers, some big tech companies are standing down plans. Explain what’s going on here, Chamath, and if this is a trend yet.

Speaker: 1
53:30

I put this out there when I wrote that because I I do think that this is the beginning of a trend. Just to be very specific, Google was planning a $1,000,000,000 spend on a data center in Indianapolis County or Indianapolis. And essentially what happened was there was enough pushback that it looked like if it went to vote in the city council, they would have voted against the approval of the data center, against the the necessary zoning and other regulatory approvals.

Speaker: 1
54:04

And so I think to avoid what would have been an awkward press cycle, Google just pulled it and said, don’t worry. We’re not gonna do this here. And so that in and of itself, I think is an isolated incident, except that in this same week, it happened two other times. In Wisconsin, there was a proposal very similar to Google’s, but this time from Microsoft, where, again, those local residents got pretty upset.

Speaker: 1
54:32

And in the eleventh hour, Microsoft pulled it. And then in the third example, there was an attempt by an Amazon data center to get built near Tucson that I think also was mothballed. So why is this happening? When I tweeted this out or when I posted it rather, the comments were pretty instructive.

Speaker: 1
54:55

I think that there are three things that I took away from it. Thing number one is that people are seeing their prices of electricity go up in the local areas where the data centers are being built. The second is that people are worried about the water consumption of these data centers and the cost of water and the access to clean water and that the plans to be net neutral on water consumption may or may not be real.

Speaker: 1
55:26

So there’s a concern there. And then the third that many of the people commented was about the actual noise pollution that it was creating. But I I took a step back from this and my thought is very simple, which is it actually speaks to one of three very important inflection points that we’re dealing with on the AI side.

Speaker: 1
55:46

Right? So one of them we talked about last week, which is you can’t have 50 state laws. Right? It needs to come from the federal government so that there’s one set of regulation and that there’s clarity. So effectively what Sachs has been able to execute on the crypto side, I think his intention is to try to do this on the AI sai.

Speaker: 1
56:04

And I think the federal government needs to be given a chance to do that. Otherwise, locally, in The United States, the only winners are gonna be lawyers. And then we’re gonna create an own goal and China’s gonna win. Okay. Second, we just talked about it, is the government needs to be the economic backstop to The US supply chain that powers Ai, right?

Speaker: 1
56:26

And we talked about all these things, the metals, the minerals, the rare earths, so that the tax that companies can extract are mostly market driven and not exploitative and doesn’t create air pockets in the funding cycle. Okay. So we talked about that. But here’s the thing that nobody talks about.

Speaker: 1
56:42

When you look at these data centers, I think what it’s saying bottoms up is that these hyperscalers need to get these communities on their side. I think that there is no understanding of what a token is. What is a token? I don’t think if you ask the average person on the street, they know what it is. What they know is that tokens are not jobs.

Speaker: 1
57:01

And if AI is going to be embraced by the public, I think what we need to do a better job of is to show the tangible economic benefits, especially in places like Wisconsin and Indiana that may feel like they’re missing out. So we can’t have this narrative that AI may take your job away while it’s also doubling your electricity price because they’re not feeling and seeing the abundance that we think that it can offer.

Speaker: 0
57:30

This is exactly right, Shama. If you think about the average American citizen, you know, they have somebody in their family who drives for Uber or DoorDash. They have truck drivers. They have Amazon factory workers, and all those jobs are going away. It’s just a matter of when.

Speaker: 0
57:43

And some people believe we can handle the displacement, others don’t. I had Freeburg.

Speaker: 1
57:48

Jay Cal, my idea just sorry. My idea meh idea is you have to use the balance sheet of these big companies, use that free cash flow, and it can act as a cushion for a lot of what needs to happen. So Yes. They can pay higher tariffs for electricity. They can also just frankly go and pay for some amount of the electricity bill of these local folks.

Speaker: 1
58:08

They could pay for solar and storage if they wanted to. There’s a plethora of ideas here where they probably are going to need to step into market to get folks on their ai. And I think they have to do it.

Speaker: 0
58:21

It’s interesting you mentioned that because I just had Zack Dell from Base Power on This Week in Startups last speak. And what they do is they put batteries on the side of your house. Outside, they’re square ones, so they’re not as schwelt as an

Speaker: 1
58:33

industrial. Industrial.

Speaker: 0
58:33

Yeah. Industrial ones. Industrial ones. And then they will fill those batteries when the, electricity is cheap. They’ll deploy it. When it’s expensive, they get the arbitrage. And I said to them meh the show, like, it’s only they only charge consumers, like, 500 or a thousand dollars to install it just so they have some skin in the game.

Speaker: 0
58:50

You don’t have to rip your roof apart and put solar on. It’s just batteries. And Ai said, well, why don’t you do that and, like, do an entire neighborhood? Like, when they build these 3,000 home infill neighborhoods, why don’t you put them on every single one and then create a network for data centers?

Speaker: 0
59:06

And he said, stand by. That’s what exactly what we’re working on. So it kinda combines your idea. Sacks, you’re the czar. What are your thoughts on what Chamath points out is, which is the average working American and their perception of Ai.

Speaker: 0
59:24

You have job loss, you have electric bills going up, and then you have, hey, fake news, the reality, is this real or not? These sort of slop videos I’m seeing. It feels like there’s a little bit of a trend towards, a negative framing of the AI innovation, and maybe it’s not gonna help the bottom half of society.

Speaker: 0
59:43

Are you seeing that? Do you believe it? And do you have plans to counter it?

Speaker: 3
59:47

Well, what I see is that we just came off a quarter of 3.8% economic growth, of which 40% was attributable to AI. So in other words, if we didn’t have this AI boom going on, by my math, our GDP growth rate in Q2 would have been 2.3% instead of 3.8%. So AI is the difference between having great GDP growth, say around 4% and modest GDP growth around 2%.

Speaker: 3
01:00:14

So it seems to me that everyone who wants to have a great economy should be supportive of this AI boom that’s happening. The job loss narrative is just that it’s just a narrative it’s a story the media loves to tell it it’s mostly theoretical it’s mostly anecdotal you can point to a few jobs here and there but there’s no evidence of widespread job loss This is just something that people are prognosticating about the future and in every previous technological revolution that we’ve had, yes, the jobs have shifted, but they’ve shifted from more rote jobs to more sophisticated jobs that create a higher standard of living for everybody.

Speaker: 3
01:00:52

The best example being that in the year 1900, 50% of The US economy was involved in agriculture. In other words, one out of every two people were farmers. By the year 2000 that number dropped to 2%. The difference, the 48% did not become unemployed. They went off and did other things.

Speaker: 3
01:01:11

They worked in factories, for example, and they went into the services part of the economy. So I think what’s going to happen here is that AI is going to enable people to shift their work to more gratifying and less rote parts of the economy that will increase productivity and standards of living for everybody.

Speaker: 3
01:01:29

Balaji has a really good way of explaining this and I think this goes to the heart of why the job loss narrative is fallacy is because humans are end to end. What makes them really good and irreplaceable is that they can do an entire job end to end and they can pivot their objective and figure out what their objectives should be.

Speaker: 3
01:01:46

AI is not like that. It has to be told what to do. It has to be prompted. And then when it gives you a result, that result has to be validated to make sure it’s not hallucinating. And then frequently you don’t really get the result you’re looking for.

Speaker: 3
01:01:57

So you have to iterate and you have to reprompt and you go through this loop where you do it over and over again until you get something that’s valuable. So in other words, humans do the things at the end. They do the prompting and validation. AI does the stuff in the middle.

Speaker: 3
01:02:11

So as biology says, humans are end to end. AI is middle to middle. This is why meh, I think that AI and humans will be very synergistic. AI will not be a replacement for humans. They’re gonna do the stuff in the middle that humans don’t like to do, and it’s gonna allow humans to be much more productive.

Speaker: 3
01:02:26

So ai now, I’m very optimistic about this boom, and I do think that people who are criticizing it should really think about whether they want The US to have 2% growth rates or 4% growth rates because that’s what we’re really talking about here.

Speaker: 0
01:02:41

Freeberg, CEO of Uber and Tesla, believe the opposite. They think these driver jobs are gone pretty quickly. The data’s showing there’s a bit of a serious problem right now with young people getting jobs specifically because of Ai. And, obviously, GDP is not wages. The people we’re talking about who are affected by these job losses don’t own equities. The top 55% of the country own equities.

Speaker: 0
01:03:06

So what do you think about this narrative? Do you think it’s a false narrative, a true narrative, somewhere in between?

Speaker: 2
01:03:11

Okay. Here here’s how I would think about what may happen. Rather than think about someone, quote, losing their job, which, you know, is a term you keep using and others keep using and Ai,

Speaker: 0
01:03:24

I think would be yeah. I I don’t know what

Speaker: 2
01:03:25

whatever it is. It you’re you’re acting like they’re passively in in a victim state. We have the lowest unemployment in history, and there’s an extraordinary demand for new capacity of work by humans to do stuff in The United States right now because of the extraordinary manufacturing build out that is underway, driven largely by AI and soon to be robotics and several other industries.

Speaker: 2
01:03:48

We just talked about rare earths, mining and processing. There are many industries that are taking off in this country that have not existed. And there is a demand for labor. And when there’s a demand for labor and there’s a shortage of people to do the work, the employer typically says, let’s go recruit. Let’s go spend. Let’s go train.

Speaker: 2
01:04:04

And when you have an innovation cycle like is underway right now, the hiring for the new jobs happens before the loss of the old jobs happens. So you have to have someone that builds all the model t’s before people stop becoming horse buggy drivers. So who’s gonna do all the model t building?

Speaker: 2
01:04:22

They’re gonna get paid. They’re gonna get offered money to go do those jobs. So what typically happens in these cycles is that there’s a recruitment exercise, a recruiting cycle that happens upfront. And so rather than say all these drivers are going to lose their jobs, another way to frame it is that all of these drivers are gonna be offered new ai paying jobs before there’s lower demand for driving.

Speaker: 2
01:04:46

And they’re gonna say, I can go make twice as much money per hour by going over to take this new job. And then they’re gonna say, I’d rather do that than drive. I’m getting paid twice as much and I get to work on more interesting stuff. I like that. That’s how this is likely gonna go.

Speaker: 2
01:05:01

That is the more positive view on how what you’re calling job displacement actually plays out in The US economy in the decade ahead. A recruiting cycle precedes the elimination of old jobs that aren’t needed anymore. That recruiting cycle is a net positive for people. They say, wow.

Speaker: 2
01:05:17

That is an amazing improvement in my income and improvement in my lifestyle. I get to work on more interesting things. My life is better because of it. And then years later, the demand for those old jobs starts to die down. But at that point, everyone’s been recruited away anyway.

Speaker: 2
01:05:31

Sai,

Speaker: 3
01:05:31

Friburg, you mentioned the the model t putting all the horse and buggies out of business. And if we had today’s media environment around back in the days of Henry Ford, that’s exactly what they would have been bemoaning is that all the horse and buggy guys are gonna be put out of business and part of the reason why that would have been a very bad take is because it’s easy to see the people who are being displaced in the short term ai maybe the Uber drivers or something like that but it’s hard to see all the new industries and all the new businesses and all the new jobs that don’t even exist yet that are going to be created.

Speaker: 3
01:06:04

So for example, what were the downstream effects of the Model T? Well first of all, it created this new kind of industrial assembly line which applied not just to cars but to all sorts of goods. I mean, Henry Ford pioneered that and that had huge ramifications for The US becoming the industrial power that it ultimately became which led it to winning World War Two.

Speaker: 3
01:06:23

Then, just in terms of the car, you had things like the build out of the interstate highway system.

Speaker: 2
01:06:28

The tire industry.

Speaker: 3
01:06:30

Yeah. But just thinking about the highways that led to to Holiday Inn and the hotels and motels and ai through windows and McDonald’s and car culture

Speaker: 2
01:06:41

and And the taxicab industry itself emerged.

Speaker: 3
01:06:44

George Lucas got his start as a director by making the film American Graffiti which is all about car culture in the nineteen fifties sai that led to Star Wars. I mean, there’s all these butterfly effects of the model t being invented which are absolutely massive and it would have been impossible to foresee all that stuff a hundred years ago.

Speaker: 3
01:07:03

When you have these new industrial revolutions or these new technological revolutions, it’s gonna increase the capacity of humans to design all sorts of new products, create all sorts of new businesses, and what we’ve seen is that this lump of labor fallacy that you have all these humans that we don’t know what to do with sai you have to just keep them busy has always proven to be a fallacy throughout human history.

Speaker: 2
01:07:23

And by the way, those buggy drivers did not did not lose their jobs. They chose to go into one of these new industries where they were offered more money.

Speaker: 4
01:07:31

I don’t think this is

Speaker: 1
01:07:31

the issue at all. I would say that when you look at Arizona, Indiana, and Wisconsin, what you are looking at are people whose jobs are not at risk today, tomorrow, or the next day because of AI.

Speaker: 4
01:07:45

I don’t think that’s what

Speaker: 1
01:07:45

it is. And I think that they probably on the margins benefit. The question is more, how are they getting information and how are they processing their point of view so that they show up to these local municipality meetings and essentially cancel progress? That is a very important thing to diagnose because it is not isolated.

Speaker: 1
01:08:04

So I’m trying to ask the question, which I think is a more practical and important one, is what do we do to make sure that the narrative and the facts are clear? Because right now you’re seeing very different and diverse pockets of people in largely purple and then some red states voting against the exact things we need to bring this abundance forward.

Speaker: 1
01:08:28

And I think we need to figure out why and how that’s happening and have a version that counteracts that. Otherwise, this will become more slowed. It will not go faster.

Speaker: 3
01:08:41

Well, you bring up a good point. There there are I’d say there’s legitimate and illegitimate reasons to be skeptical of Ai. So the one that you bring up, Thomas, that I think is very legitimate is that we are gonna have to stand up a lot more electricity power generation. Otherwise, it could drive residential rates up and that will create a backlash to AI and the build out of data centers and we don’t want shah.

Speaker: 3
01:09:01

So that’s a legitimate issue that has to be solved. However, there are what I would call illegitimate reasons to fear AI and that’s got everything to do with the media environment and their spreading of all these unproven narratives in many cases based on contrived studies where they’re saying that, you know, there’s sana be 50% job loss in the next few years or you have all the Terminator type scenarios where AI is sana grow beyond our control.

Speaker: 3
01:09:27

All of these doomer narratives that are being created that are scaring people and creating a knee jerk reaction at the state level, which we talked about last week where there’s now a thousand bills going through state legislatures mostly because the legislators feel a need to, quote, unquote, do something, not because they know what they wanna do.

Speaker: 3
01:09:43

So there’s a lot of unnecessary fear out there that’s being created by the media and then by organizations and companies who have a regulatory capture agenda around this.

Speaker: 1
01:09:53

I hear you. What what I’m saying is we need to figure out how to fix this because you can’t have Google, Microsoft, and Amazon cancel essential projects that advance this entire sector and economy forward. We’re not talking about some random fly by night business here. We’re talking about three of the five pinnacle horsemen of the AI race that we are fielding on the field.

Speaker: 0
01:10:15

What what you were looking for suggestions. Do you have any off the top of your head? Do you think it’s in education? Do you think it’s in explaining the value of AI and how those people in those states would benefit from ram? Or do you think it’s just simple economics lower their electricity bill?

Speaker: 1
01:10:30

I think there are two things. The people in Indiana and Wisconsin said again, electricity prices, water, and noise. I think that we can fix those problems. And I think we, we meaning our industry and specifically the hyperscalers need to start using these gobs of free cash that today public markets don’t value anyways.

Speaker: 1
01:10:50

It’s not like Google, Amazon, Facebook gets credit for their cash. In fact, Facebook speak price went up when they basically burned through all their cash. You wanna see them invest. And so if you really wanna take the CapEx around AI and make it a true super cycle, there’s another avenue of where capital can be deployed.

Speaker: 1
01:11:09

I would encourage the CEOs of these companies to wake up and get their act together and do it. That’s number one. And then the second thing is Ai think that we need to have better spokesman for our industry. So meaning, every time you see somebody talking about all these navel gazing technologies and then can’t translate it into simple English into product value.

Speaker: 1
01:11:30

For example, this week, on the one ai, we have anthropic AI doomerism that Sai had to confront. But then on the other side, there were all of these people that got freaked out because OpenAI wants to push towards erotica. And all they could think of was the impact to their children.

Speaker: 1
01:11:46

Again, this is not necessarily true or not true, but the point is we need to have better, more eloquent, reasonable speak who can articulate a vision that everybody can buy into. And I said this on x. What is Arabella and Soros gonna get behind now to find a boogeyman? You don’t have Israel.

Speaker: 1
01:12:06

You’re not gonna have, you know, Ukraine soon. So what are you gonna find as a boogeyman? And it’s it’s unfortunately sitting right in our backyard.

Speaker: 0
01:12:14

Yeah. I’m I’m not sure Altman is the greatest spokesperson for the industry. Just to to clean up a little bit here, Freeburg, my position isn’t doomerism. I just think displacement’s gonna be more significant than we think, and the evidence I have of that is just watching what’s happening with young people applying for jobs and the increase in unemployment there, and then looking at the people who deploy AI at the highest velocity, which are obviously tech companies.

Speaker: 0
01:12:40

And if you look at Alphabet, you know, they had speak Googlers in 2022, a 190,000, and they’ve had massive earnings and profits increase and have a 187,000 people now. In other words, less. And then you do the same for Meta, Uber, and Amazon. You know, Meta peaked at 86,000 employees, now at 75.

Speaker: 0
01:13:02

Uber at 33, now at 31. And Amazon, where you would think you’d have a lot of growth here, they’re at they peaked at 1.6, and now they’re down at 1.55. So these companies are not hiring. The gains they’re talking about publicly in the deployment of AI are significant, and they all have aggressive plans to use automation, specifically in robots and self driving and obviously knowledge work to reduce headcount, increase profits.

Speaker: 0
01:13:34

And I think that’s gonna become the narrative that’s gonna be very challenging for our industry because if you look at our own companies, they’re saying, wait a saloni. Your companies aren’t growing, and ai kid got a computer science degree. If you look at the unemployment level of people graduating with computer science degrees who are developers, it’s increasing. Unemployment amongst developers is increasing, and that’s just really notable.

Speaker: 0
01:13:56

So I wouldn’t say I’m a doomerist, but I am concerned that the new jobs might not show up as quickly as the old jobs or the static team size, trend continues because we’ve had static team sizes for years now. Okay. This has been another amazing episode of the number one podcast in the world, the All In podcast.

Speaker: 0
01:14:15

Tell your friends, write a review about how much you love the All In podcast. We’ll see you this is episode two forty seven. Thank you to our sultan of science. We missed you last week. To our czar, have a great time this weekend at SlutCon. Be safe at SlutCon.

Speaker: 3
01:14:37

SlutCon’s already happened, to be clear. I’m not going.

Speaker: 0
01:14:39

Where’s the after party? There’s gotta be a post play party, this weekend. Who knows? There’s gotta be an after party. And, of course, puts the dick in dictator, your chairman.

Speaker: 3
01:14:52

He puts the dick in dictator. You put the slut in SlutCon.

Speaker: 0
01:14:56

Ai. Sure. Sure. You put this bizarre and bizarre, and he puts, what? The anus in your anus.

Speaker: 3
01:15:04

And calcareous? And he puts the anus in calcareous. Sana use that word. I don’t think that’s one you wanna use.

Speaker: 0
01:15:09

Anus. Alright. And Moose is doing great. Thanks. I love

Speaker: 1
01:15:12

all of you.

Speaker: 4
01:15:13

I love all

Speaker: 3
01:15:13

of you guys. We’ll let your winners ride.

Speaker: 4
01:15:18

Rain man David Sacks.

Speaker: 5
01:15:23

And it said we open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Speaker: 4
01:15:27

Love you, West. Queen of quinoa.

Speaker: 3
01:15:30

We’ll

Speaker: 4
01:15:35

Besties are called. That

Speaker: 5
01:15:38

is finding a dog to get a noise in your driveway. Oh,

Speaker: 4
01:15:44

man. Ai should all just get a room and just have one big, huge door key because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release them out.

Speaker: 2
01:15:54

Let your feet be. Let your

Speaker: 3
01:15:56

feet be. Where are your

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