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Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google’s Gemini Problem, China’s Thorium Discovery Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) The Besties intro Andrew Ross Sorkin
(2:04) Market bump: Trump rally or a Bessent put?
(18:04) Are tariffs damaging the American “brand”? Apple’s investment in India
(38:18) Balance of power politics, Ukraine/Russia ceasefire negotiation halted over Crimea
(50:00) Alphabet earnings: Massive resiliency, Google’s Gemini Problem
(1:05:40) Tesla jumps on Elon’s return, pulling back from DOGE
(1:18:35) Science Corner: China’s Thorium Breakthrough
Follow Andrew:
https://x.com/andrewrsorkin
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
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https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod
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@theallinpod
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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.google.com/finance/quote/.DJI:INDEXDJX?comparison=INDEXSP%3A.INX%2CINDEXNASDAQ%3A.IXIC&window=5D
https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1909066161464959070
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/business/china-rare-earths-us.html
https://x.com/TheTranscript_/status/1915116330534998440
https://www.ft.com/content/c2be45b8-cfad-4cbb-9a1a-bfd0626be372
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/world/europe/ukraine-cease-fire-talks.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-after-russia-annexed-crimea-locals-prefer-moscow-to-kiev
https://x.com/EconomyApp/status/1915501252420784499
https://polymarket.com/event/how-much-spending-will-elon-and-doge-cut-in-2025
https://doge.gov/savings
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3300360/chinas-thorium-survey-finds-endless-energy-source-right-under-our-feet
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/es/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/020123-china-to-maintain-renewables-growth-pace-in-2023-despite-uncertainty
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/images-show-china-building-huge-fusion-research-facility-analysts-say-2025-01-28
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Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google’s Gemini Problem, China’s Thorium Discovery Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google’s Gemini Problem, China’s Thorium Discovery Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the All In podcast, the hosts discuss a range of topics, primarily focusing on global economic dynamics, technology, and geopolitical issues. The episode features Andrew Ross Sorkin, a journalist and author, as a guest speaker. The conversation kicks off with a plug for the All In Summit, highlighting its significance in fostering important global discussions.
A major theme is the economic relationship between the U.S. and China, with discussions on trade dependencies and the strategic implications of China’s dominance in critical industries like rare earth processing. The hosts critique the lack of regulatory parity in trade negotiations and emphasize the need for the U.S. to address its trade deficit and dependency issues to maintain strategic autonomy.
The episode also delves into the tech sector, particularly focusing on companies like NVIDIA and Google. The hosts discuss NVIDIA’s revenue distribution and its implications for global markets, while also analyzing Google’s strategic positioning in the face of competition from AI-driven companies like OpenAI. They suggest that Google should leverage its existing user base by integrating AI technologies like Gemini to enhance user experience and revenue.
Actionable insights include the importance of strategic communication in trade negotiations and the need for tech companies to innovate and adapt to maintain competitive advantage. The hosts also stress the significance of addressing regulatory constraints to foster economic growth and maintain geopolitical leverage.
Overall, the episode underscores the interconnectedness of global markets and the strategic maneuvers required by nations and corporations to navigate complex economic landscapes. The recurring message is the need for proactive strategies in both economic policy and technological innovation to ensure long-term success and stability.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google’s Gemini Problem, China’s Thorium Discovery Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
Okay. Welcome back to the All In podcast. JCal is not here this week. He is off in Detroit at the Knicks game. Congrats to the Knicks. Here’s a photo of our boy JCal hanging out with who’s that? Ben Stiller?
Speaker: 1
00:16
Man, what happened to Ben Stiller?
Speaker: 2
00:17
That looks like, Chalamet right next to him.
Speaker: 3
00:20
Timothy. Chalamet.
Speaker: 2
00:21
Is that Chalamet?
Speaker: 3
00:22
At Tim’s house? Chalamet. Chalamet.
Speaker: 1
00:25
You know, Ben Stiller was once referred to as the Jewish Tom Cruise, but he he has not held up like Tom Cruise. I gotta say that.
Speaker: 2
00:34
He should’ve joined the
Speaker: 1
00:35
Tom Cruise Scientology. Keep it up. You gotta represent for us a little better.
Speaker: 0
00:46
Ai in this week is our boy, Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist, author, extraordinaire. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Speaker: 2
01:06
Long ai listener, first time caller. Thank you for having me.
Speaker: 0
01:09
Andrew, I’m gonna do just a couple of quick plugs and I’m gonna give it over to the pro to do his work, take us through the docket today. I think this is gonna be really fun. The world’s greatest moderator. The world’s greatest moderator is here today.
Speaker: 1
01:22
That’s funny. It works. Shots fired.
Speaker: 2
01:25
We’ll see. We’ll see.
Speaker: 1
01:26
Hold hold
Speaker: 2
01:26
your tongue. You can tell me when it’s over.
Speaker: 0
01:28
Before we kick it off, I just wanna give a quick plug. The All In Summit, if you haven’t seen the video, check it out on YouTube and Twitter. Going into our fourth year, the 2024 recap, we’ll kinda give you a high set of highlights from last year. It’s September in LA. Trying to have the world’s most important conversations.
Speaker: 0
01:45
Andrew, I know it probably competes with one or two of your conferences, but let me just tell you, this one’s way better. We’re gonna be blowing it out this year with partiesallin.com/summit to apply to join us at the summit this year. Awesome. Andrew, thanks for being here.
Speaker: 0
02:02
We’re excited to have you.
Speaker: 2
02:04
Okay, boys. Here we go. I’m I’m curious. Ai, I wanna get your take on all this stuff because I’m fascinated by Yeah. By what’s going on in these markets this week. Let’s start on the markets because we got a rally. The question, I think, behind the rally is is this, best input? Is this, Jay Powell’s in the job? He’s got a put on this thing.
Speaker: 2
02:21
I don’t know what you think is going on. We’re, up three to 7%, for the week. There’s been a she loves me, she loves me not situation with what Trump’s been saying about China and whether there’s a deal or not a deal. China’s saying nobody’s talking. He says everybody’s talking.
Speaker: 0
02:36
What do
Speaker: 2
02:37
you guys think is really happening? And then we gotta get into Alphabet. We got Tesla. We got a lot of earnings here that’s also moving this around.
Speaker: 3
02:42
I think that the most important piece of financial logic that we have to break is this idea that there is always a put. The put is this weird thing just for the folks that don’t understand it is that when the market goes down, somebody can bellyache and ai, and somebody in the government will say, okay.
Speaker: 3
02:58
We’ll buy your shitty securities at your bad prices. So that’s what the put is. So typically, what’s happened is you can cry to the White House and they’ll call the Federal Reserve, and they will buy it. That’s the Meh put. And in some very rare cases when things get really calamitous, like in 02/2008, treasury will set up a program and start to buy things.
Speaker: 3
03:19
That’s what was called TARP back in the GFC. So the question is, is there a put here? I mean, my honest answer is no. And the simple reason is if you look at where we are, the stock market’s back to where we were in, like, May or August of last year. And if you had said that we would have upended fifty years of economic policy and the markets would only be off 5 or 600 basis points, I would have been shocked.
Speaker: 3
03:45
So there’s no reason for a put. Maybe the more interesting question is who’s asking for the put? The ones that have suffered from the volatility. And a lot of those are the active market traders. So if you trace the feedback, who has been the most negative? Ackman’s been negative. Ken Griffin recently turned negative.
Speaker: 3
04:04
And that’s probably comes from the fact that they’re not monetizing the vol the way that they used to monetize the vol more than the market has speared down to such a degree that the world is coming to an end because it isn’t.
Speaker: 2
04:22
Okay. Zacks.
Speaker: 1
04:22
Can I build on that? So Please. There was a tweet two weeks ago when all this started by Nick Carter that I retweeted because I thought it was really interesting, which was, if you think a market sell off delegitimizes Trump’s presidency, you’re gonna give him unconditional credit when it rallies.
Speaker: 1
04:36
Right? Because those are the rules now. And that’s exactly what’s happened is that the market has rallied. Like you said, it’s up 7% this week, but the media doesn’t wanna give Trump any credit for it. So it’s kinda created this narrative of a Besson put.
Speaker: 1
04:49
In other words, Besson is entirely responsible for it. Look. Scott is a very smart man. He understands markets. He understands the bond markets, and he is a reassuring voice to those arya. And I think he’s doing a great job.
Speaker: 1
05:02
But I think part of what’s going on with this best and put narrative is that no one ever wants to give Trump or his administration as a whole credit. So what they do on any particular week is valorize a particular member of the administration shah they can then say, well, this is the person who’s really responsible for this, not Trump, because Ai don’t wanna give Trump that credit.
Speaker: 1
05:22
Next week, they’ll be tearing Scott down, and there’ll be some other member of the administration they’ll be trying to valorize to basically prevent the administration as a whole from getting credit for doing something good. Sai, again, I think Scott’s doing a great job. I think he’s doing a great job making these deals, and he’s saying a lot of correct and reassuring things to the arya.
Speaker: 1
05:40
But I think if the media is gonna tear Trump down every time the market goes down, you have to give him credit when the market goes back up. And I think there’s just a general reluctance to do that.
Speaker: 2
05:52
Where do you land, Dave?
Speaker: 0
05:53
I think that there is is he crazy enough to let it all fall apart signal that kinda got wiped out this speak. That’s really what it was. It was the fact that everyone realized that Bessette, Trump are not gonna let trade come to a standstill. They’re not gonna let the whole global economy grind to a halt, that they’re gonna have to do something.
Speaker: 0
06:17
And I think that the read is that they’re making the indications that they’re gonna get deals done, which means that their intention is to make sure that the market doesn’t tank, that the
Speaker: 1
06:28
ai more importantly, the big economy ago. Roughly three weeks ago, when we started talking about this, I think I made the point, Chamath made the point, that part of the art of the deal here, so to speak, is an opening salvo
Speaker: 3
06:41
Right.
Speaker: 1
06:41
Which is bold and some people would say maybe it’s too extreme, but it’s it’s basically an opening bid to shift the conversation completely.
Speaker: 0
06:51
Yeah. And
Speaker: 1
06:51
that that would create tremendous leverage to get deals done. And isn’t that exactly what’s happened? Isn’t that the way it’s played out?
Speaker: 0
06:58
Ai remember there was a guy from Harvard who used to teach a class in negotiation. He put out all these videos, and what he always said is, like, set your anchor point as far away as you possibly can if you wanna get maximum leverage in a negotiation. I don’t know what’s farther away than a 45% tariff.
Speaker: 0
07:13
So it’s clearly, you know, a point for, as Zach said, for negotiating to a deal that seems like one that would have been impossible or implausible if you started from a 0% tariff beginning point in negotiating. And there was some percentage of the market or some probability that people were assigning to the fact that this administration could be crazy enough to tank the global economy by leaving tariffs really high and letting this kinda run.
Speaker: 0
07:39
And I think that that’s kind of being taken out of the market. Right.
Speaker: 2
07:41
But now that it’s out of the market, that means that the leverage there’s less leverage. There’s less leverage in the conversation. And if the goal is to No.
Speaker: 3
07:50
That’s not true. That you’re saying a critical thing, and that is not true.
Speaker: 2
07:52
Well, hold on. If if if the goal is to effectively pressure China, which I think is the ultimate goal, I think as the bond market has spoken and as Trump and best the administration has said, okay. We understand where the where the floor is here, what we gotta what we gotta do.
Speaker: 2
08:12
I assume if you’re Mark Carney, if you’re the EU, name your place India, Japan. You sai, I’ll make a deal with you, but, you know, if you thought you were if you thought I was giving you the world before, no. No. No. No.
Speaker: 2
08:25
No. You need me as much as I need you, and you sat you seemingly need me even more now.
Speaker: 3
08:31
So the part where I agree with you is that last part. Like, I think too many times you look at the stock market and think that that’s reflective of what’s actually happening, And it’s not. The stock arya, I think the best way to think about it is it’s an estimation of what the future would look like at a rate of return.
Speaker: 3
08:49
You’re superimposing a view on reality. So what is actual reality right now is if The United States was running negative $2,000,000,000 a day of trade deficits, right? If our current account balance was minus 2,000,000,000 on March 31, the day before Liberation Day. The real question is what is that number mathematically after April 1? Right?
Speaker: 3
09:13
Because you’re ratcheting it up tariffs. Okay? And you’re implementing a scheme that should take that negative 2,000,000,000 that’s going out the door Yep. Out of America Shores, it would have flipped it positive. How positive?
Speaker: 3
09:25
We don’t know, but I’m sure that the government knows, and I’m sure the White House knows what that number is. That’s that’s important fact number one. And then separately, the country that matters the most on the other side of that, who was very positive. Right? Let’s say China was plus three or 4,000,000,000 a day.
Speaker: 3
09:44
Where did they go to? And I suspect that it’s probably speak even or possibly even negative. So if you think about what the new reality is today, April 25, as we tape the show, we’ve gone from minus two to maybe plus one, and China’s gone from plus 4,000,000,000 a day to maybe zero or minus one.
Speaker: 3
10:05
And I think that’s what instills the leverage that is required to get the deal done. Then then we can all debate whether the four PE of the S and P should be 16 times or 22 times. I don’t think that that matters, but the actual cash flows have materially changed.
Speaker: 2
10:22
By the way, I think long term, the Meh got leverage here. Everybody wants to invest is ultimately gonna want to invest in Meh, including China. There’s no question that we we have the advantage on a long term basis. The question is, do we have the patience?
Speaker: 3
10:37
Well, if you go from negative two to plus. Given our democracy,
Speaker: 2
10:40
given our bond market, given everything that goes on, we’re such an ADD society.
Speaker: 3
10:44
Okay. Then you’re then I but then what I would say, Andrew, I think that that’s a very good point. What I would say to that is then we need to communicate better. It needs to be a single point that’s repeated by everybody in the cabinet. And what they should probably focus on is, hey, ai, we just flipped cash flow. We went from negative cash flow to positive cash flow.
Speaker: 3
11:05
Here are the actual numbers, and don’t deviate from that because then I think Americans would say, hey. This thing is working. Let’s let it play out to your point.
Speaker: 2
11:12
Hey, Zacks. Here’s my question for you. So we hear, you know, the president say he’s talking to president Xi. We hear Scott Veston say that he’s he talks with China or that their talks are gonna begin. And then you hear China say, no. No. No. We’re not talking.
Speaker: 2
11:26
There’s no talks happening. We don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop saying these things. What are we all supposed to believe?
Speaker: 1
11:33
Well, ai, first of all, let me just say that when I’m on this show and I’m not talking about AI or crypto, I’m just a civilian. Right? So I’m not a spokesman for the administration on anything but the two issues that I work on. So I don’t wanna come across as someone who has special knowledge because I’m just I’m not part of the trade conversation. So I can’t answer your question directly.
Speaker: 1
11:52
But what I would say is that with respect to the China relationship, I think what’s happened over the past few weeks has been a very important stress test, and it’s basically flagged some serious weaknesses or dependencies that have evolved in this relationship over the past few decades.
Speaker: 1
12:07
You know, I flagged this in a a previous episode that we did with Larry Summers where I said that twenty five years ago is a huge mistake to walk China into the WTO. And I think that just to build on on that thought, one of the problems with walking them into the WTO is that they got what’s called developing nation status.
Speaker: 1
12:25
Yep. So, you know, you can either be a developing nation or a developed nation in the framework of the WTO. And maybe there was something legitimate to that in 1978, you know, when Deng Xiaoping began his reforms. The average Chinese person was making $2 a day. By the year February, it was much more questionable, and it certainly makes no sense in the year 2025. And still to this day, China gets developing nation status.
Speaker: 1
12:52
Now what is the benefit to China of that? Well, they have a whole different set of rules. They’re allowed to have tariffs. They’re allowed to subsidize their industries. They have all sorts of different timetables for doing things. They’re allowed to do things that The US simply can’t do. Now how have they leveraged that?
Speaker: 1
13:08
They have identified strategically certain industries that are chokepoints in the global supply chain, and they have taken them over. And the best example of this is rare earths. So there was some good stories in the New York Times about this over the past couple of weeks, which I think were largely accurate.
Speaker: 1
13:23
China identified this as an as a critical industry, and the rare earths, the ore itself is distributed all over the world. I mean, China has some advantages there, but they’re not huge. It’s the processing of the rare earths that’s very expensive, very complicated, and they ai to dominate that industry.
Speaker: 1
13:41
And they’re responsible today for over 90% of the processing for rare earths. And then the next step in the supply chain is that those rare earths get cast into rare earth magnets, which are a critical component in pretty much every electric motor. And so they’re a critical component of the automotive industry, but not just cars, lots of different products.
Speaker: 1
13:59
And I think China makes something like over 90% of the cast rare earth magnets. Well, by the way, this issue still has not been resolved. China has now cut off The United States. And so as part of this trade negotiation, we’re gonna have to, you know, resolve that issue. And I trust that it will be.
Speaker: 1
14:16
I mean, what you’ve heard from the president and the treasury sector over the past week is that they’re they’ve indicated a desire to engage in bilateral negotiations with China and to essentially deescalate this trade war. But I think it’s been very useful, again, as a stress test to reveal our critical dependencies on China that we’ve exposed. We never should have let this happen.
Speaker: 1
14:38
Just from a national security standpoint, we worshiped at the altar of this, like, free trade god to the point where we became dependent on China for these critical components of our supply chain. I think that was a catastrophic mistake, and I think that it’s exposed these dependencies we’ve created on a nation that is not our ally and that we can’t count on them.
Speaker: 1
15:00
It’s a country of concern. So I ultimately think that we’re sana need to learn from this experience and very rapidly make some major corrections here.
Speaker: 0
15:09
Andrew, let me just highlight what I think is one of not talked about point about the discussions that are underway. There’s a lot of conversations about tariffs and about trade deficits, but very little about regulatory parity. And I think that this is really critical for these trade negotiations to actually resolve to a positive outcome for American businesses and American enterprises because there is not parity in how American businesses can do their work overseas relative to how foreign companies can do work in The US.
Speaker: 0
15:39
So if you’re a Indian company and you wanna sell something in The US, you set up an LLC, you set up a bank account, you set up a store, you take a lease and you sell your product. There is not a lot of hoops and challenges to that business operating in The United States. I’ll tell you a story.
Speaker: 0
15:57
In, 02/2005, ‘2 thousand ‘6, Monsanto, which was a seed company that doesn’t exist anymore, launched in India cotton seed, seed for cotton farmers that basically had a trait in it that would prevent worms from eating the cotton. And so Indian farmers were paying $4.50 rupees an acre for cotton seed before. Monsanto basically put this cotton seed. The yields went through the roof.
Speaker: 0
16:21
The farmers made 5,000 rupees per acre of incremental profit, and they charged 1,500 or 1,400 rupees per acre for the seed. So it was more expensive seed, but it had a 5,000 profit improvement. And it took off, took the whole market. 90% of farmers bought the seed, not because they had to, but because it was better.
Speaker: 0
16:38
And what ended up happening was the Indian government stepped in and sai, you gotta lower prices. You gotta go back to the price of $4.50 because that’s what’s fair for farmers. And the farmers were like, we we’re doing great. We don’t need to have this kind of price control, but the government put it price control in and ultimately sued the company, went to court and stole their IP and they left the country.
Speaker: 0
16:59
And this was a company that had invested, you know, well over a billion dollars in developing and launching this product. The same is true by the way in pharmaceutical companies, in software companies, in hardware companies. If you wanna go do business in China today, you have to set up a 51% JV where some local company owns 51% of your equity and your IP.
Speaker: 0
17:17
The stories around the world, I think, start to paint the picture of why American businesses find it so hard to develop international markets and sell into those countries when in The US we make it so easy for companies based in foreign countries to come and sell in America.
Speaker: 0
17:33
And that’s a big part of where the trade imbalances arise from. It’s not just because Vietnamese people can’t afford expensive American goods. It’s because it’s so much more regulatory difficult to do work in these countries. They can come in and take your IP. And so I think that this is ai a really important part of the trade discussions and negotiations that a lot of people miss vatsal American businesses will see massive revenue growth and massive market adoption if we can get regulatory parity in some of these, key key trade deals.
Speaker: 2
18:03
Question. Ai raised, the issue of Ken Griffin who made some comments this week about the brand that is America and effectively said there was sort of a sell America situation going on. And my question about the brand that is America is whether you think after these tariff, whatever deals get done, that you can put the toothpaste back in the tube, that you can get the trust back, that there’s not gonna still be some kind of toothpaste on the rim of the tube that you that you can’t stick back.
Speaker: 2
18:31
It gets all nasty and crusty. Right? That to me is a fundamental question. I wanna read to you what Ken had to say. I think Ken was probably a bit of a reluctant, Ram for the second term, but, nonetheless, he’s been outspoken on a couple of things.
Speaker: 2
18:47
He sai, if you think of your behavior as a consumer, how many times do you buy a product with a brand on it because you trust that brand? In the financial markets, no brand compares to the brand of US treasuries, the strength of the US dollar, the strength of creditworthiness of US treasuries. No brand comes close.
Speaker: 2
19:04
We put that brand at risk. What say you?
Speaker: 1
19:08
Well, look, I I think there’s a fundamental question here about whether you think there’s a problem with the status quo or not. Ken Griffin is one of the biggest winners in our economy under the current status quo, and I don’t think he sees a big problem that needs to get fixed.
Speaker: 1
19:23
But I think, like we just talked about, I think there are some big problems. I mean, Freeberg just laid out the way in which trade with China is nonreciprocal. Like, our companies cannot participate in their markets the same way that they can participate in ours. But it’s worse than that.
Speaker: 1
19:37
Like I talked about, these WTO rules gave China the opportunity to strategically annihilate our core industries that are critical in the supply chain. And there’s one other piece of this which I think is really important, which is the race to the bottom. I mean, if you’re an American company and you are still producing in America and your competitor is able to go to China and undercut you, obviously, you have to do the same thing because, I mean, those are just the rules of the game.
Speaker: 1
20:04
And so we’ve had this race to the bottom where if you’re an American company operating under these rules, you have no choice
Speaker: 3
20:10
It’s worse.
Speaker: 1
20:10
But to export your manufacturing, your supply chains. So, you know, we’ve had these rules that, again, under the status quo, I I would say they’re not free trade. It’s unfair trade. It has all these perverse consequences. It’s bad for Middle America and this manufacturing belt of the country, and it’s created massive strategic dependencies on an American adversary.
Speaker: 3
20:31
I’ll say I’ll say three things. Let me just say three things quickly. Number one, I think Ken is massively long, Speak America. I mean, he’s built a 42,000,000,000 empire. He owns a billion dollars of American real estate. So I don’t see him investing in Ecuador anytime soon relative to the opportunity set in The United States.
Speaker: 3
20:48
And I think that’s what speaks to the second point, which is investing is always a relative exercise. On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a Brazilian multi deca billionaire, very, very, very successful guy. And we were talking about the tariffs and the investing posture. And he’s like, there’s still no other country other than America that I can really put my money to work in that makes any sense.
Speaker: 3
21:10
And I kind of pushed him. What about China? What about India? And in all of these markets, there are, as Freeberg mentioned, vagaries in Ai. There’s different problems in India. There’s different problems in these other markets. Europe is roughly uninvestable.
Speaker: 3
21:23
So the more generalized answer is on a relative basis, The United States is still the shining beacon on a hill. There is no investable alternative for scaled capital except The US. The the last thing I wanna say is just to build on what Saks sai. Andrew, the the thing that we keep forgetting is when economic leverage spills over to political leverage, what happens to The United States?
Speaker: 3
21:52
And specifically what happened this week was on the rare earth ai, not only did China constrain rare earths into the supply chain, what they then did was tell South Korea what they could do with the rare earths that they gave them. And now all of a sudden you have this geopolitical spillover where it’s not just a country constraining ai, it’s a country now dictating the political and trade practices of another country.
Speaker: 3
22:16
So let me ask you a question. How do you think America is in the best position to make its own decisions? For example, let’s say that there’s a China Taiwan situation and we need to decide one way or the other. And I’m not saying which way is right or wrong, but for the purposes of this, the thought ai is Ai and Taiwan get into some speak.
Speaker: 3
22:37
We have to take a side and China sai, we’re sana constrain all the pharmaceutical APIs into the supply chain. We’re gonna constrain all the battery cathode into the supply chain, and we’re gonna constrain all of the rare earths to anyone who doesn’t take our side. Now, how is America in a position to actually decide for ourselves what is in our best interests if that’s looming over us?
Speaker: 3
23:01
And I think that this is the big problem that this sai exposed. This rush to globalism, the race to the bottom has actually created a level of dependence that doesn’t allow you to do what’s in your best interest.
Speaker: 2
23:15
So real quick, I agree with you in so many ways. I think the question that I have is not in what the ultimate goal is. It’s how you get there. And is there a way to do this with a a velvet glove, if you will? And maybe there’s no way to do it in a in a better in a better way.
Speaker: 3
23:35
No. But what is to say this isn’t the velvet glove? This could be it’s that the stock market is down 6%. Like, it’s not down 60%.
Speaker: 1
23:42
But this this is what I think is so interesting, Andrew, is is the way that Trump has already shifted the conversation. Because the truth of the matter is that before Liberation Day on April 2, which is three weeks ago, no one was talking about the unfair trade practices. No one was talking about the dependencies on rare earths. No one was talking about the race to the bottom, and Trump has shifted the conversation.
Speaker: 2
24:01
A %.
Speaker: 1
24:02
When Jared Kushner was on the show, he talked about how the Trumpian approach is controversy elevates message. And we said at the beginning that by having this Liberation Day, by planting this flag in the ground, Trump was creating leverage to then have these negotiations, and he completely shifted the conversation.
Speaker: 1
24:21
Now where I will agree with you is that the administration has to stick the landing here. Right? Bryden, and it’s not just Bessen, also Lutnick, these are all smart, talented people. They do have to then negotiate these deals, and we have to basically stick the landing. But I think the fact that you’re saying that you don’t disagree with where Trump is trying to get to, but it’s mostly just tactical is a huge shift in the conversation.
Speaker: 2
24:45
It may it may raise the issue the way you’re describing, but at some level, it’s also undermining a semblance of trust. I just wanna relay two stories. One is, you know, I’ve been talking to a whole number of of multinational CEOs who do business in China. I’m talking about the McDonald’s of the world, the Starbucks of the world, the Nikes of the world.
Speaker: 2
25:03
And so many of them now talk about not just how consumers, aren’t going necessarily in their stores the way they used to, But really about the American dream, the American brand, and they talk about the idea that, you know, if you were a young kid and you got a job at Starbucks, you used to go home to your family in China and say and your family go, wow.
Speaker: 2
25:22
That’s amazing. They’re not doing that right now. So many of these companies are even trying to reestablish how they market and advertise their companies almost as if they’re a local business, not an American brand. And I don’t know what that ultimately means, but I also was talking to sai a Chinese CEO who made a, I thought, just a fascinating comment to me, which was, you know, we’re cool with The US being the leader.
Speaker: 2
25:47
We were always cool with that. We’re okay with that. We’re gonna love it if we’re okay with it. It gets a lot more complicated when you have to be the winner. And I think that’s an interesting sort of construct, this idea that we’re first and we’re we have to win.
Speaker: 2
26:00
And I know we’re telling it’s you know, Trump is telling, you know, citizens in The US that we’re gonna win, but he’s also telling the world back. And I think that’s a
Speaker: 3
26:08
I think that Chinese CEO should have written that memo to Xi Jinping and see if he agreed because I think he would say, no. We are the winner. Look, you gotta remember in 02/2003, ‘3 years after China was admitted to the WTO, Hu Jintao became premier. He had this incredible speak.
Speaker: 3
26:25
And in it, what he said is, there are these 10 boxes. And I’ve written inside these 10 boxes all the critical industries that in twenty five to thirty years from now will dictate supremacy in the world. We are going to create national champions, he said, in those 10 areas. And what’s interesting about Xi, despite the ideological differences to who, he followed through with it.
Speaker: 3
26:52
This is a group of people, so we can say what the CEOs are gonna say. But at the end of the day, the CEO of China Inc is one meh. And he and his c suite have been pretty resolute, which is even when he inherited a political ideology that he didn’t completely agree with, he followed through with it, which is these guys in these 10 areas now, own the critical inputs that make the world go around.
Speaker: 3
27:18
And I think it’s pretty reasonable to do a risk assessment to say, well, how do you stand up to that and actually have your own point of view if you don’t have your own method of having access to those things? I think that is the most important question. Everything else about, you know, brand and all of this other stuff, I think, comes after this question.
Speaker: 3
27:41
This is the critical question. Because if they can tell you what to think, that is not winning.
Speaker: 1
27:48
Yeah. Ai would just add to that that you hear this criticism of Trump a lot, which is that, okay, he’s right on the issue or his instincts are correct, but there should be a a nicer way of doing it. And I guess I would give that story more credence if the people making that criticism had actually been advocating for a change in the status quo prior to Trump, and they weren’t.
Speaker: 1
28:10
I mean, we had this bipartisan globalist consensus that pretty much all trade practices with China, no matter how unfair they got, was basically good for The United States, and no one was really doing anything about it until president Trump made it this issue and made the unfair trade practices conspicuous.
Speaker: 1
28:27
So if somebody else had been willing to take that on, then I maybe would give credence to this idea that there’s some non Trumpian way of doing this, but I just don’t think that’s the way our political system works. I think that the way our political system works is that you have to completely shift the conversation first to create a new consensus, and then you work out the deals.
Speaker: 1
28:47
And that process can be a little bit disruptive.
Speaker: 2
28:51
Okay. One tiny follow-up. So I don’t know if you guys saw the news this morning. A report out that Apple is gonna move its manufacturing of iPhones that are exported to The US or imported here in The US, but they’re gonna manufacture all that stuff in India, not in China anymore.
Speaker: 2
29:11
So they’re gonna move all the manufacturing to India.
Speaker: 3
29:15
What do you think? Meh you in 2035.
Speaker: 2
29:18
They say they can do it supposedly in eighteen months by the end of twenty sai. Bet. You say no way? Bet.
Speaker: 1
29:25
Well, if I think this is geopolitically smart.
Speaker: 3
29:28
Yeah. They should do it, but I’m just saying that’s a it’s very smart. It’s not gonna get done in eighteen months. I
Speaker: 1
29:36
I don’t know how long it’s gonna take, but look. I think one of the big lessons here over the past twenty five years is that you have security first. Security has to be worked out first, then you have trade. If you build your whole, supply chain and all your trading relationships with countries that are fundamentally adversarial to your interests, and we can get into that part of the The US China relationship, but I think most people would say that we’re in some version of a new cold war with with Ai.
Speaker: 1
30:03
Obviously, you’re gonna have to revise your trade relationships because, again, we can’t be dependent on an adversary for core components that then go into our military, for example. So security always has to come first, then you work out trade. And I think that India is fundamentally extremely aligned with us on security because they view their biggest potential threat and adversaries being China, and that is basically the way that The US sees the world as well.
Speaker: 1
30:32
And so I do think that The US India relationship is just very ai, and I think, therefore, the investments that get made and the trade relationships that get forged will be very stable over the next couple of decades. Whereas, know, if you make a big investment in a country that could be your adversary, you should expect that that relationship could get disrupted.
Speaker: 0
30:53
I don’t think the Apple deal is from a standstill. My understanding is Foxconn and others have been working with Apple to actually stand up manufacturing capacity in India for some time now. And I do believe that they probably have one or two model runs already active in the country. So I don’t think that this is necessarily from a standstill.
Speaker: 0
31:16
Let’s go recruit the people, figure out the processes, find the builders, stand up the facilities, that there’s probably a model system already running that’s now about replication and scale up, which is why they have confidence in the state stated goal. It’s not often that Tim Cook will stand up and say, I’m gonna do something in eighteen months and then be delayed by yours. He’s not Elon.
Speaker: 0
31:34
He’s gonna come out. He’s gonna be very clear. He’s he’s always been very clear. So and my understanding is this has been thought about for some time. Andrew, I think you’ve been to a lot of conferences where for three years now, you’ve been hearing people banging the table saying meh everything out of China as quickly as you can.
Speaker: 0
31:48
Yep. Tim Cook’s heard that message. He’s been thoughtful about it. He’s been planning for this day. I don’t think he wanted to be declarative about this until the day came. Well, the day is here.
Speaker: 2
31:57
And how do we feel that it’s gone to India? It’s not coming to America. I think we knew it wasn’t coming to America.
Speaker: 3
32:03
Well, India has one massive advantage over China, which is that it has one fifth the labor cost of China, which has one fifth the labor cost of America. So India is a natural place for a lot of this next generation labor to end up. Plus they have a very educated workforce, plus they have a young workforce.
Speaker: 3
32:21
In many ways, you could say that it’s it’s China circa 02/2003. I mean, you have to meh. Right? Like, China ram 02/2006, I think, to, like, 02/2012, their GDP grew at, like, 10% a year. I mean, can you imagine what that must have been like when a country that big is growing that fast?
Speaker: 3
32:38
So India’s gonna have that moment over the next twenty or thirty years. I I the the only reason I scoffed at what you said You’d
Speaker: 0
32:44
invest in in in India, would you?
Speaker: 3
32:46
I have a large rare earth mine in India. Yeah. It’s one of the largest supplies of rare earths outside The United States. We negotiated that deal with the PMO and they gave us a great deal to compete with the Chinese. Our specialty chemicals processing is on the ground there, and then the idea is then to import all of that specialty chemical into The United States and then do all the
Speaker: 0
33:08
I like the macro. Ai just there’s something about China where there’s a lot of accounting fraud still, and you can’t really trust a lot of the numbers. But if that all gets cleared up, the macro is alright. It’s exactly where it should be for
Speaker: 3
33:19
You mean India?
Speaker: 0
33:20
India. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker: 1
33:22
I I just think the structure the the structural realities just make it a good place to invest. I just think that India and The US are gonna be very aligned for for a long time.
Speaker: 3
33:33
Agreed.
Speaker: 1
33:34
Again, their main security threat is Ai, and our main security threat is China. And this is not gonna change for probably the entire twenty first century.
Speaker: 3
33:43
A couple weeks ago, Sachs and I sat down with the Indian ambassador and it’s very clear they’re fundamentally aligned with The United States. And I think exactly what Sachs said is true. Everybody knows who needs to cooperate in order to have a reset of global trade policy and political leverage.
Speaker: 3
34:00
So I don’t know. I’m pretty pro India. It’s a very difficult place to invest. I agree with you, Sorkin. I’ve never made money there.
Speaker: 3
34:07
I tried my hand at tech investing. Over a decade, I maybe have returned 50¢ on the dollar.
Speaker: 2
34:13
Why?
Speaker: 3
34:13
So then so then
Speaker: 0
34:14
What went wrong? Like, what’s the macro reason?
Speaker: 3
34:17
The market was far too immature. My mental model was about how American success looked ai. And when I tried to impose that on the Indian market, it all just blew up. So a lot of the Indian entrepreneurs, how they raised money was not from Indian VCs, it was from American VCs.
Speaker: 3
34:34
And you can’t tell an American VC an idea that just makes no sense to you because your frame of reference is The United States. So what turned out to work was a couple of very large bets that were copies of American businesses. So like the Indian Amazon worked, the Indian PayPal kind of worked, the Indian DoorDash kind of worked, but everything else didn’t work. So then Why?
Speaker: 0
35:01
Because is it the consumer market’s not there or the No. No. Because because arya aren’t there.
Speaker: 3
35:05
No. Because we have these mental biases that that will never allow us to believe the way that they would construct the business would work. So for example, they’re like, ai, here’s a business where we’re going to buy food from the local farmer, then we’re sana put it in a warehouse, then we’re gonna drive around on rickshaws and deliver it to people.
Speaker: 3
35:23
And you think, well, this business can never work. Well, actually that business turned out to be a ginormous success. Nobody in The United States would have ever funded that. Now what happened four years ago though was after a bunch of meetings, I pivoted to these other areas because when you talk to the Ambanis and when you talk to the Adanis, they’re like, dude, stop beating your head against this ai.
Speaker: 3
35:44
Like, build infrastructure. It just works. And, it was true. They’ve been right.
Speaker: 2
35:51
Okay. One geopolitical question. How do you feel about India buying as much oil as they do from Russia? I know we’ll get into the whole Ukraine thing later. Smart.
Speaker: 1
35:59
Smart. Look. India is a country that has two great powers in its neighborhood, China and Russia. It has a contested border with China. They’ve had border skirmishes. When you have a country that is much more powerful, that’s actually a security threat to you, you then seek good relations, even possibly an alliance with the other great power in the neighborhood.
Speaker: 1
36:22
That has been India’s philosophy. They’ve had good relations with Russia for a long time, even going back to the Cold War. That is what makes sense for their security standpoint. By the way, the exact same thing is true of The United States. We just haven’t realized the strategic reality.
Speaker: 1
36:36
China is the peer competitor. I mean, Mearsheimer made this point at our all in summit. China is the peer competitor. It’s the only country in the world that is a peer of The United States. It’s the only country that’s really capable of threatening our security.
Speaker: 1
36:52
Russia is a distant number three in terms of the great power rankings. What you wanna do, if you’re in a sort of heads up competition where there’s two superpowers, is you wanna make an alliance with that number three. And what we’ve done is we’ve pushed Russia into the arms of China. What we ought to have been doing is to reverse Kissinger.
Speaker: 1
37:12
We did this during the Cold War, by the way. We had the Soviet Union, and we had Ai, and in that case, the Soviet Union was a big threat to American security. So what did we do? We had Nixon and Kissinger go to China and make a deal with Mao. China was just as communist as the Soviet Union.
Speaker: 1
37:28
Mao had blood on his hands to a degree that is much greater than someone like Putin has, and yet we were willing to shake hands with him and make an alliance because that was realpolitik. And I think in a similar way, this is what our strategy should have been with Russia for the last two decades, and instead, we’ve been foolishly pushing them into the arms of China.
Speaker: 0
37:49
Well, Sorkin, what’s your read? I mean, what’s your opinion on the
Speaker: 2
37:52
I think India is a tough ai. India is India is a tough place to invest. Every everybody I know who’s been talking to India for the last, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty years has been talking it up as the next great utopia. And it may very well be, it probably will be. It’s just a question of when.
Speaker: 3
38:08
I think you have to and you have to be specific about the end market. You know? Like, there are people that have made a ton of money there, but it’s not the way classical western economics is played out by any means.
Speaker: 1
38:18
Andrew, what I mean, what do you think about this sort of ai I would call balance of of of powers logic one zero one?
Speaker: 2
38:24
I get I get the idea that you you go to your, you know, least, I don’t know, if they’re they’re your
Speaker: 3
38:32
your least ai. Your friend’s friend. Your friend your enemy’s enemy is your friend.
Speaker: 1
38:36
No. The enemy is your enemy is your friend or whatever it is. Yeah. No. That is what it is. The power logic.
Speaker: 2
38:41
I I get I get where you’re going with this. I just think that Russia, given all that they have done, I’m not it’s hard it’s hard to look at Russia and China and maybe Russia on the margins on a relative basis in life is better than China in certain ways, but in other ways, it’s not.
Speaker: 2
38:58
And so it’s very complicated to sort of for me to look at it and go, okay. It’s actually interesting. Who I mean, there’s a I was gonna use a reloaded word. Who’s more evil? Right? Is China more evil, or is Russia more evil?
Speaker: 0
39:13
I mean, I think it’s
Speaker: 2
39:14
very be a big debate about that in the world.
Speaker: 3
39:17
Well, I think it’s it’s unnecessarily judgmental. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
39:20
Right?
Speaker: 1
39:21
I think it’s dangerous to look at foreign policy from a position of extreme moralism because, ultimately, the purpose of our foreign policy is to ensure American security, and we can’t rectify every injustice in the world. And over the past twenty five years, we’ve become hyper interventionists, you know, in an attempt, so we’ve claimed, to do that. Right?
Speaker: 1
39:41
We keep saying that we we’ve gotten involved in all these places because we wanna promote our values and spread democracy. And ai the way, we did the opposite. I mean, you look at the forever wars in The Middle East, we had interventions and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. How did all those things work out?
Speaker: 1
39:57
They did not promote our values or spread democracy. So my point is just Sai don’t think we should look at foreign policy from a position of extreme moralism. I prefer to think of neither of those countries as quote, unquote evil, and I would refer to think of them as countries which have their own interests.
Speaker: 1
40:14
I think that with respect to China, the real issue is that it is a revisionist great power. It has made clear that it wants to basically annex Taiwan. It wants to turn the South China Sea into, effectively, a Chinese lake. It does not respect international waters. It has territorial disputes with Japan.
Speaker: 1
40:34
And if we don’t play a role in containing China, then China will revise the balance of power in East Asia in a major way. And I think that would have, I think, profound consequence for The United States.
Speaker: 2
40:47
That may be I just I just
Speaker: 1
40:48
don’t know if Chinese are gonna throw
Speaker: 2
40:49
you off a roof in one day and you won’t even know it. I mean, that’s the difference. And I don’t know if that’s a moral ai shah we’re supposed to know.
Speaker: 1
40:55
The United States is not gonna be thrown off a roof by by Russia, and that’s the level at which we should think about these things. If you look at Russia’s behavior, Russia actually is not a revisionist great power. What it wants is just security on its borders. The revisionist power actually in Europe over the past twenty five years was The United States because we pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders despite the promises that were made to Gorbachev in the nineties.
Speaker: 1
41:20
So we’re the ones who’ve revised the balance of power in a way that was profoundly threatening to the Russians, And I think it would be far better ram the American standpoint to just work out a security architecture for Europe with Russia that gives the Russians the security they crave on their western border and gives Europe the security it craves.
Speaker: 1
41:39
And I think if we had had that mentality as opposed to this highly moralistic mentality where we basically wanna spread American style democracy everywhere
Speaker: 2
41:46
You don’t think that American style democracy, though, has helped the world in some way? I’m not saying we did it right everywhere.
Speaker: 1
41:51
I I believe we’ve lost
Speaker: 2
41:53
a lot of lot of wars that we should not have attempted.
Speaker: 0
41:55
But If it could be done, you’re right. But the problem is, Andrew, the failure rate is too high. Look at what happened in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq. As we’ve gone in to make, you know, regime change, we actually put those people in a worse condition than they were before. They don’t end up with American democracy.
Speaker: 0
42:13
After a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, the Taliban is back in charge doing awful bryden things.
Speaker: 1
42:18
Right. 2,000,000,000,000. And And I would be I
Speaker: 0
42:20
would be a proponent of and this by the way, this was also part of the promise of the open Internet. And I think it from a fundamental point of view, the regulatory regime we had in The United States with the Internet was driven by this notion that the freedom of information would actually allow democratic proliferation.
Speaker: 3
42:34
You know,
Speaker: 0
42:34
we were talking about the Arab spring as you’ll, you know, recall, like ai was gonna be this big moment. But at the end of the day, it turned out that didn’t work either. That there’s something much more complex in the history of a people, in a geography, the deep ties that those people have.
Speaker: 0
42:48
But this idea that turning on a screen or showing up with a tank is gonna flip the switch to democracy turns out not to be true.
Speaker: 1
42:54
And look, just to be clear, I mean, I think my lucky stars that I’m an American and we do have the type of government we have here. And my parents immigrated to The United States in 1977 for political reasons because we have the type of government we have here. So, look, I’m a strong believer in American style democracy.
Speaker: 1
43:09
The problem is our efforts to promote it or impose that style of government through regime change operations simply has not worked. I mean, this is should be one of the big learnings of American foreign policy. I’m suggesting it’s better to
Speaker: 2
43:23
model it. Right? It’s better to model
Speaker: 1
43:24
it. Yeah. So how do you model it? I think you model it by being the shining city on the hill, by setting a good example, by focusing on our own country and making America the best it can be sai that people all over the world look to us and say, oh, we wanna do that. And I actually think that what I’m describing is Meh soft power. If you go back to the ai, we had that soft power.
Speaker: 1
43:43
I mean, the people of places like in Russia, they love buying American blue jeans and American music, and we had that soft power. We were inspiring to the world, but it all changed, Ai sai, starting in the nineties, but then really in the February. When we started going into these countries with our militaries and occupying all these countries, we soured them on America. We made them hate us.
Speaker: 1
44:06
And this is the problem with this hyperinterventionism is what we should be doing is setting an example, not trying to occupy these countries.
Speaker: 2
44:15
Let me read something to you. This is this week. This is Trump condemning the strikes going on in Kyiv. This is, I’m not happy with the Russian strikes in Kyiv. Not necessary. Very bad timing. Vladimir, stop exclamation point. Five thousand soldiers a week are dying.
Speaker: 2
44:35
Let’s get the peace deal done. How is this deal gonna get done? I should also say secretary of state Marco Rubio reportedly skipping a meeting on a ai talk on Wednesday after Ukraine refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Speaker: 1
44:50
Well, the reason why Rubio canceled that meeting is because the Americans put forward a peace proposal, and Zelensky dismissed it out of hand. Before the Russians could do anything, Zelensky dismissed it. And recognizing Russian ownership of Crimea, if you will, should be the easiest point for Zelensky to concede, and he dismissed it out of hand.
Speaker: 1
45:11
Now why do I say that? The Russians annexed Crimea in 02/2014, so this was not something that happened in 2022. It happened over ten years ago. And if you look at what the people of Crimea want, and there’s been a lot of Western polling on this. There’s been man on the street interviews by NBC.
Speaker: 1
45:28
The people of Crimea ai something like over 80% say they wanna be part of Russia. They’re ethnic Russians. And I’d say the the final point on this is that Zelensky and Ukraine tried to get Crimea back in the summer of twenty twenty three with a summer counter offensive. Remember, the whole point of that summer counter offensive was to sever the land bridge to Crimea, destroy the Kerch Bridge, isolate Crimea, and essentially lay siege to it.
Speaker: 1
45:50
This was the whole point of that, and they got nowhere with that. They didn’t even break through the first Sana Vikan line. So my point is that it’s militarily impossible to retake Crimea. The people of Crimea don’t want Ukraine to retake it. They wanna be part of Russia, and yet Zelensky cannot give this up.
Speaker: 2
46:07
Okay. So how do we get to yes? How do we get to yes? This sai supposed to be done on day one, and here we are.
Speaker: 1
46:13
The basic problem is that Zelensky doesn’t wanna make a deal. I mean, he he has rebuffed the Americans on Crimea, which should be the easiest point to give on. He’s been completely unrealistic about their prospects on the battlefield. He was insulting to the White House. When he visited the White House in his T shirt or whatever, he was dressed inappropriately and then
Speaker: 2
46:34
One of the Rorschach tests for America, I think that meeting was.
Speaker: 1
46:38
Well, I mean, he was insulting to the president and especially the vice president. He he murmured under his breath a curse word to the vice president. You remember that?
Speaker: 2
46:47
Yep.
Speaker: 1
46:47
I mean, it was really quite something. And remember, he’s biting the hand that feeds them. I mean, he has an obligation, I think, to be respectful to his patrons in a way that his patrons may not His patrons. In a way that they we may not to him. And he has demonstrated, I think, that he’s unrealistic in every possible way.
Speaker: 1
47:08
He’s unrealistic about Ukrainian prospects on the battlefield, about retaking Crimea, and about who the the hand is that feeds him. So my view on this is quite simple, which is if Zelensky won’t see reality, let him go ai new patrons. Let Starmer and Macron support him. They say they will. They say they have the ability to do this.
Speaker: 2
47:27
But they can’t, and you know, they can’t enough.
Speaker: 1
47:29
Well, they appear to do
Speaker: 2
47:30
They can’t enough. They sai they
Speaker: 1
47:31
can’t make Zelensky has made his meh. Let him sleep in it. This is my point of view on it. He refuses to listen to the Americans. He refuses to recognize that this administration even has leverage over him.
Speaker: 2
47:44
And you don’t think that ultimately if Putin takes Crimea plus plus whatever, that he’s going after Poland next? Or I mean, that’s it’s the dominant theory that becomes the complicated part.
Speaker: 1
47:57
No. I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any evidence that he wants Poland. I don’t even think he wants the part of Ukraine that is chock full of Ukrainian ultranationalists because you would have a massive insurgency there. He doesn’t want a Gaza type situation. And, by the way, just another point on Crimea, where is the insurgency?
Speaker: 1
48:13
If Crimea really wanted to go with Ukraine as opposed to Russia, why has there been no uprising there over the past ten years? So in any event, my point is there’s no evidence that that Putin wants Poland. Poland’s part of NATO. That would start World War three. I I think Putin has shown that he’s a calm, rational decision maker, and I don’t think he wants World War three.
Speaker: 1
48:35
Now, the Russians have said what their terms are. They said it last year. They sai they basically, in in this root cause speech they gave in, I think, June of last year, and and basically what it comes down to is they want Istanbul plus. There was a deal to end this war in the in the first month, the Istanbul deal, and it required Ukraine to basically sever its its security relationship with the West and to recognize that it would not become part of NATO.
Speaker: 1
49:00
And they had to give up Crimea, basically. That was the deal back then. What Russia has said is that’s still the deal plus realities on the ground. So in other words, the Russians have lost, I don’t know, hundred thousand plus hundreds of thousands of soldiers now taking this territory in the East, and obviously they’re not gonna give it up.
Speaker: 1
49:18
So Ai think that the Ukrainians could have had a better deal in the first month of the war. The Biden administration rejected that. Now there’s a different deal. It’s Istanbul plus. And I think that the American proposal is pretty close to that, so I think this administration recognizes the wisdom and just reality of that deal, but the Ukrainians aren’t.
Speaker: 1
49:37
Sai, look, my view is simple. If the Ukrainians are unwilling to take the deal that’s on the table and they wanna find new backers with the Europeans, let them. But why should we continue to support this?
Speaker: 2
49:49
Okay. Let’s pivot. Let’s talk arya, and let’s specifically talk a couple stocks because
Speaker: 1
49:53
there’s And, Andrew, do you disagree? Because I wanna hear you
Speaker: 2
49:55
disagree. No. No. I Ai I could, but we’re gonna we we I think we’re gonna run out of time.
Speaker: 1
49:59
Okay.
Speaker: 2
50:00
I wanna talk Alphabet. So everybody thought the Blue Link economy was dead. OpenAI, perplexity, all of it was, you know, gonna take the search market. They come out with earnings. Sundar, does way better than everybody expected. Revenue up $90,200,000,000 is up 12%. Net income was up, up almost 50% year over year.
Speaker: 2
50:21
You got the cloud still ripping. You got a big buyback program. He starts talking about Waymo on the call for the first time in a long time, if ever. Stock’s up about 5% on the news. What do we think?
Speaker: 3
50:34
What an incredible business. Meh gosh.
Speaker: 0
50:37
There’s there’s a lot of resiliency in Alphabet that I don’t think people have given the company credit for. First of all, I’ll just highlight with the dividends they’re paying plus the share buyback, you’re basically getting a four or 5% yield on the stock. So the dividends are like 10,000,000,000 a year and they’re announcing 70,000,000,000 back on 2,000,000,000,000 in market caps.
Speaker: 0
50:58
You’re making 4% a year just by owning the stock in the dividends and the buybacks. Then if you look at the revenue, it’s 90,000,000,000, 70 7 in services, 12 in cloud. So the 90,000,000,000, about half of it was ads on search. And a lot of people have been talking about the decline in search due to Ai. That’s the end of Alphabet. Here you can kind of see the breakdown.
Speaker: 0
51:21
What this shows is that there’s such significant growth, 9,000,000,000 in YouTube, 7 and a half billion in non Google ads, 10,000,000,000 in subscriptions with 270,000,000 subscribers across subscription businesses, 12,000,000,000 in cloud revenue, which is growing 30% year over year.
Speaker: 0
51:40
There’s a lot of resiliency even if you take out search. And so the question is what’s the ai? What’s the upside? Well, the downside is what’s the worst that could happen to search? What they lose half of the market due to, to chat GPT?
Speaker: 0
51:53
If they lost half the market to chat GPT and the rest of the business keeps growing the way it is, you get back to parody pretty quick. What’s the upside? Well, the upside is they’re able to use AI to actually reinvent search, retain the audience and create an entirely new search experience that’s chat based or has some chat integration into search.
Speaker: 0
52:13
So it seems to me trading at 18 times free cash flow, which is where this thing’s at right now, plus the 4% yield on dividends and buybacks, plus the kind of seemingly pretty significant gap between the downside and the upside here. It’s just such a powerful business. It just seems like it highlighted that this is not a business that’s in decline and is about to die as everyone’s been kind of proclaiming.
Speaker: 0
52:34
There’s enough growth engines here and there’s enough resilience, And the price is so good. I don’t I feel quite good about the price.
Speaker: 2
52:39
Sai think there’s a hundred billion dollars of hidden value called Waymo in this business.
Speaker: 0
52:43
On the Waymo. Two hundred fifty thousand rides a week now, growing like crazy. And they’re only ai four cities. It’s crazy. And I think I think the market is
Speaker: 2
52:51
giving them zero for that right now. Zero.
Speaker: 3
52:53
Zero. I think the most interesting stat that I saw
Speaker: 0
52:56
from the current SpaceX, by the way, which is crazy.
Speaker: 3
53:00
The most interesting stat in the earnings was that I think they said that they had 270,000,000 total paid subscriptions across YouTube and Google One. And my initial thought was, well, when are you just gonna stick Gemini as the most obvious interface in front of it? Like, I think that these companies now need to confront that this OpenAI behemoth is growing at a rate that was probably a hindrance before and now is a real strategic risk.
Speaker: 3
53:33
And so if you have 270,000,000 paid subs, come on, ai. Stuff Gemini right in front of these guys. That’s that’s that was my first takeaway. But it’s, again, they’re doing it from a position of strength, but they need to get going because they’re they’re probably himening and ai, and there’s probably all kinds of people, all kinds of cooks in that kitchen.
Speaker: 3
53:50
But I’ve heard a
Speaker: 0
53:51
lot of stories about this question.
Speaker: 3
53:53
Sundar, Larry, and Sergei just need to take the equity and the political capital they have as a CEO and the two largest shareholders and just stuff the decision down people’s throats. So that’s that that’s number one. The other thing that I think about actually relates to what I spoke about last week about NVIDIA.
Speaker: 3
54:11
So just to give you guys a little bit of a cleanup, you know, after we spoke about NVIDIA, the NVIDIA team reached out to me and they were like, hey, Jamaf, here’s a bunch of stuff that will help you unpack what you spoke about in a little bit more detail. So let me tell you what NVIDIA told me and then it I think it relates to GCP.
Speaker: 3
54:32
So what they told me, when you look at the SEC filings for NVIDIA and you add up all the revenue, it says that about 47% of the revenue goes to China, Singapore, Taiwan, I think it was. And what these guys educated me on is that they’ve been trying to refine how this is described, but it’s not what it seems.
Speaker: 3
54:55
Meaning, they report revenue on what’s called the billing or the invoicing address. So meaning, you are an entity, you’ll buy a huge amount of chips or compute power, and you issue the invoice out of Taiwan or Singapore or China. That’s what represents 47% of NVIDIA’s reported revenue. So it turns out that that’s actually not where the silicon gets shipped. So there’s a Singaporean office that handles the invoicing.
Speaker: 3
55:30
So then I said, well, who are these companies that are using these these places? And it turns out that it’s a bunch of major US companies, including US OEMs and clouds that use Singapore for invoicing their ai, but that the you know, what industry sources have told us is that all of these products are almost always shipped elsewhere, including US, Mexico, Taiwan, etcetera, all over the place.
Speaker: 3
55:57
So why is this interesting? There was a study by artificial analysis. Nick, I will send you the link, but basically what it showed was that the clouds were not doing any real form of KYC on who is using their stuff. So now I think we get to this next place, which is ai, I think the Google business is profoundly amazing.
Speaker: 3
56:22
I think they need to do something with the subscriptions that they have and put Gemini right in front and really do a head on attack against ChatGPT. Those are the pluses. The minuses or the risks that I think now will get uncovered is, are the clouds doing enough to make sure that China and other folks aren’t getting access to compute that they should not get access to.
Speaker: 3
56:45
And that could have an impact on some of their revenue. So that’s a GCP problem. I think it’s an Azure problem. It’s a AWS problem, and that’s gonna need to get sorted out in the next couple of quarters because if Western governments basically say to the clouds, hey, you need to KYC your customers sai that it’s not somebody distilling the best of our models into a place we don’t agree ai.
Speaker: 3
57:07
I think there could be some blowback.
Speaker: 2
57:10
All these numbers obviously backward looking. Do we think and I won’t be talking too much about tariffs, but do we think that the tariff story is gonna impact Google next quarter? Do we think it’s gonna impact Meh next quarter? And to the extent that Google is saying, look.
Speaker: 2
57:25
We’re gonna keep our big infrastructure speak $75,000,000,000, you know, full steam ahead, which is great for the ecosystem, great for NVIDIA, great for great for everybody in that world. Do we think that holds up if we think there’s a hiccup between now and whenever all this tariff stuff gets sorted if it does?
Speaker: 1
57:42
I think it’s gonna hold up. I mean, look. I just think that this investment in in CapEx and the data center build outs is so strategic right now. I mean, I think that the hyperscalers, it’s only good for their their businesses, but I think they see it as so strategic to their survival that they just have to do it no matter what.
Speaker: 1
57:58
In other words, I think they’re totally inelastic on this. But let me just go back to Google. Nick, can you throw up this chart? I mean, I think the problem that Google has with respect to ChatGPT is that Gemini ai just not getting the usage, and ChatGPT is just growing like crazy.
Speaker: 1
58:13
If you look at how these models perform according to the benchmarks, Gemini is actually really good. I mean, Gemini has made substantial progress
Speaker: 3
58:21
It’s actually
Speaker: 1
58:22
catching up to ChatGPT.
Speaker: 0
58:24
Yeah. But they
Speaker: 1
58:24
have not caught up on the usage side. Now to Jamast’s point, you could just make Gemini the default interface in Google search, but that is true innovator’s dilemma because if you do that, you could be giving up more than half the search revenue. So I do think Google is is in a really tough speak, and the longer they wait to make Gemini front and center, the worse this usage problem gets.
Speaker: 1
58:46
I mean, what’s basically happening right now is users are learning a new habit. I mean, they’re they’re learning to go to ChatGPT to get their questions answered or just their searches answered in a completely different way.
Speaker: 3
58:58
And let’s be sana, they make using Gemini impossible. And they can do it just a much better job. At a minimum, give the best leading edge Gemini model to the 270,000,000 people that are already paying you for a subscription. Just do that. Do something so that you can start to blunt the growth of of OpenAI. Otherwise, you’re gonna look back in four years and regret hemming and hawing today.
Speaker: 0
59:22
Sai, Chamath, you’re the CEO of Google. You’ve got a $200,000,000,000 run rate ad search ad business. What’s the right kind of integration of Gemini such that you don’t massively disrupt the search ad business overnight? Or do you
Speaker: 3
59:37
not care and you’re just gonna do it? I think that’s the conundrum they’re dealing with. That’s not a conundrum. If you don’t understand how to value a dollar today versus a dollar tomorrow and a discount rate to disambiguate the emotionalness of that decision, it’s not a hard decision to make.
Speaker: 3
59:52
I think the diff the the more difficult question is what is the integration look like? And if you are already paying for a YouTube subscription or a Google One subscription, what should your experience be? That’s a key question. The second question is today, they’re already inserting Gemini in all kinds of uncomfortable ways.
Speaker: 3
01:00:10
So for example, if you use Gmail or if you use Google Workspace, what happens today is all these random Gemini pop ups come up all over the place. That is an implementation that happened at way too junior a level by people that have no product taste. So if you just stop that, it’s not hard.
Speaker: 3
01:00:29
But right now you have a bunch of, you know, honestly, people that don’t have taste and are a little too junior creating a very cluttered experience. And if you use the products every day, it would be hard for you to disagree with me.
Speaker: 0
01:00:42
They have infinite capital and infinite access to talent. Capital doesn’t buy taste. Right. So what do you think is wrong?
Speaker: 1
01:00:48
I agree that the Google interface trying to incorporate Gemini into the 20 blue links or whatever is very kludgy, but I don’t know how you fix that without just getting rid of the blue links. I mean, I guess you can do a hybrid experience, but it doesn’t compare to ChatGPT, which is all in on the AI experience.
Speaker: 1
01:01:05
So I think it’s a real innovator’s dilemma for them.
Speaker: 2
01:01:07
And look, the truth is the market was killing them already because people thought that that first little AI summary thing was actually gonna kill the Blue Link economy. Right? Like, that was that was their worry. And so it’s this tear I mean, I think it it is a terrible conundrum if if if you’re Sundar.
Speaker: 2
01:01:21
How how do you how do you do how do you do both things at the same time? Jamal, I think you’re right. There’s a design way to do it, but they’re not doing it.
Speaker: 3
01:01:28
This comes down to taste. And I think you can’t have group think drive creativity and taste. You either have it or you don’t, and you need to find the one or two people, and then you need to use the strength of your leverage as a CEO and the ownership that Larry and Sergey have to impose one person’s taste on the decision.
Speaker: 1
01:01:51
Well, Jamont, let me ask you a question. When well, the Google homepage where they just have the search bar and the, you know, you can basically submit your search or I feel lucky or whatever. Would you replace that with that search bar with an AI chatbot?
Speaker: 3
01:02:05
No. Here’s what I would do. I would first go to the critical other points that are around that today do not cannibalize the blue links. So the obvious insight should be, if you look at the traffic patterns almost as a Sankey ai, right Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:02:19
We just show we just had one up.
Speaker: 3
01:02:20
Show a Sankey. Okay. There we go. Who cares about revenue? What the real thing you should be looking at here is where are the entry points into Google that then result in a clickable link? And what you would have is a very different Sankey. And what it would show you is that there are certain places that are highly de optimized today for revenue generating events.
Speaker: 3
01:02:42
They happen as a ai, but they don’t happen as the use case. So in that example, you would put Gmail as a critical place, the YouTube one, the Google one subscription, and there’s ai five or six other places. That’s where I would put Gemini as the front door and start to habituate 300 to 500,000,000 people a week in using that.
Speaker: 3
01:03:05
I think then you can figure out over time how much money you can make from all of that or how it directs derivative revenue and figure out what to do with Google.com last. But my point is the experience in Gmail should be done today. The experience in YouTube should be done today. The experience in Google One should be done today.
Speaker: 1
01:03:25
Would you okay. Nick, can you put up this here’s their homepage. Right? This is the famous shot. I just checked ai. This this hasn’t changed in twenty five years or whatever.
Speaker: 3
01:03:33
I would leave I would leave it alone because I think it’s too disruptive, and it’s it’s too politically fraught. I mean, you could do
Speaker: 1
01:03:40
some of their tests. Placed I’m feeling lucky, which is kinda antiquated now with AI. I I mean, Ai, basically.
Speaker: 3
01:03:45
I meh, you you I would need to look at the Sankey to understand how many people are actually generating monetizable events or behavior from I’m feeling lucky in 2025.
Speaker: 1
01:03:56
I’m not sure if
Speaker: 3
01:03:57
the novelty it was in, you know, 1990.
Speaker: 1
01:03:59
The novelty. I don’t I think it’s just there as ai a whimsical thing. I don’t know if it drives revenue for them or not. If it takes the user off-site, I don’t see how it drives revenue for them.
Speaker: 3
01:04:08
Here’s a I’ll tell you a great Facebook story just to explain this and why I get so animated about this. I was telling this to my eighty ninety team yesterday because we’re dealing with this one product implementation issue. And engineers always end up fighting about whether things should be opt in or opt out. Okay.
Speaker: 3
01:04:27
And it’s it’s almost like this religion where people feel like, oh, you cannot force people to do something. You you should always make things optional. And I remember at Facebook, we bought this little company for a few million dollars that made contact importers, which essentially means if you’re using any other email service to sign up for Facebook, other than like Hotmail back in the early two thousands, we could import your address book.
Speaker: 3
01:04:53
Anyways, long story short, I remember getting into a huge fight about whether that thing should be opt in or opt out. And I remember telling the guy, and I’m not gonna say who it is because you guys all know him. And I’m and I was literally like, honestly, just shut up and enjoy the success that will come from keeping this as an opt out.
Speaker: 3
01:05:09
And it just reminds me that at some point somebody needs to impose their will to make very difficult product decisions. And if you leave it to a team, you’ll end up with by the way, go to Gmail today with 95 Gemini pop ups. It’s not what will allow them to win with what they have, which is a better product, which I will agree.
Speaker: 3
01:05:31
It is a meaningfully better model on multiple dimensions than anything else.
Speaker: 2
01:05:35
Okay. I know this access to go. Before you go, David, Ai just wanna hit Tesla for half a second. Tesla’s out with earnings this week. Stock is up 8% on the back of that back of that news. 23% up in the last five days in large part because Elon basically said, I’m getting out of Doge, and I’m going back into Tesla.
Speaker: 2
01:05:53
So the question is, what can he actually do to fix Tesla at this point? What does he have to do? And is he really out of Doge?
Speaker: 1
01:06:01
No. I don’t I don’t think he’s out of Doge. He didn’t say he was out of Doge. It was just a matter of how much time he could allocate to each thing. I mean, look, I saw this before when I was part of the Twitter transition is that for the first three months or so, he was basically full time at Twitter HQ learning the business down to the database level.
Speaker: 1
01:06:19
I mean, every nook and cranny of that business, he learned about. Once he felt like he had a mental model and he had the people in place that he trusted, he could move to more of a maintenance mode. And I think that’s the only way he can manage five companies is that he has these intense bursts where he focuses on something, gets the right people and structure in place, feels like he understands it, and then he can delegate more.
Speaker: 1
01:06:41
And I think that he has reached that point with Doge, but he was also clear that he’s gonna keep doing it because if he doesn’t, there’s gonna be a huge backsliding where, you know, all the corrupt interests will basically put back all this corrupt spending. So he’s gonna stay involved, but as an SGE, he’s limited to a hundred and thirty days a year anyway.
Speaker: 1
01:06:58
And so it makes sense for him to kinda now ration his days a little more closely, but he’s got the people in place. Remember, Doge, it wasn’t just him. It was also the US Digital Service, which is basically the IT branch of the executive branch, which got put under Doge. So my sense is that Doge is gonna continue.
Speaker: 1
01:07:18
It’s just that Elon is shifting to a mode where he can manage it one day a week or two days a week as opposed to being there five days a week.
Speaker: 2
01:07:25
Steve Bannon says he wants the receipts. He says there are no receipts. We don’t have the receipts. He says we need itemized receipts to see what has actually happened. What do you think?
Speaker: 1
01:07:34
Why wouldn’t we wanna cut as much of this corruption as possible?
Speaker: 3
01:07:37
I ai,
Speaker: 2
01:07:37
I think we have to. We have to. The question is, should the public get to see exactly what’s been cut and what hasn’t?
Speaker: 1
01:07:44
Why wouldn’t they? Of course. And what we really need is for congress to now embrace all of the corruption that Elon has found ai eliminate it from the budget. Because at the end of the day, in order to capture the savings here, we do need those appropriations eliminated from the budget.
Speaker: 1
01:07:59
And my biggest concern is not something that that Doge is gonna do or not it’s not up to Doge to do that. It’s up to, frankly, these old bulls in Congress who control the appropriations process. Are they gonna basically backslide and just put the spending back in because it’s easier to just do that, to engage in this log rolling?
Speaker: 1
01:08:18
Or do we take advantage of this, I think, incredible sacrifice that Elon has made? I mean, look. This has cost him enormously. One of the reasons why Tesla is down is because you’ve had crazy leftists engaging in terrorism, firebombing Tesla dealerships. In any event, he’s made this sana enormous sacrifice in order to expose the corruption. And look at what we’ve learned.
Speaker: 1
01:08:39
We’ve basically learned that this whole NGO thing is a giant scam where, you know, the people in government give enormous amounts of money to their friends, probably with the expectation that when they leave government, they’re gonna be next in line at the trough. And I think Elon’s done an enormous service exposing this, but, you know, it’s not entirely up to him.
Speaker: 1
01:08:59
In order for us to realize the benefit, we need Congress now to act on that. So we can I’m just afraid that’s not gonna happen.
Speaker: 2
01:09:06
What kind of total number do you think we get? I always sana dollar saved is a dollar made, and we should we should say amen to that. The question is what do you think the total number’s ultimately gonna be?
Speaker: 1
01:09:13
Well, he says they’re at a hundred and 60,000,000,000 right now. I think that’s by the way, that’s an annual number as far as I understand it. So, you know, what I always hear with spending is they always multiply everything by 10 because they assume it’s gonna be ten years.
Speaker: 1
01:09:26
So if it is 160,000,000,000 a year, that would be 1,600,000,000,000.0 over ten years, probably more because the spending always grows. And look, that’s 160,000,000,000 that we weren’t planning on saving before Elon got involved in the government. So if that’s all it is, that would be great.
Speaker: 1
01:09:40
I think there could be more, And it really comes down to whether Doge continues to be supported by the political process. And, look, Elon can’t he can’t force that. Right? I mean, ultimately, it’s up to legislators to take advantage of the work that he did, and, ultimately, it’s up to the people to put pressure on those legislators to embrace what he did.
Speaker: 1
01:10:03
He’s done an enormous amount, you know, but there’s an old saying that you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. If the entrenched political interests at the end of the day arya you know, if they’re not gonna embrace the the savings that Elon has found, I I, you know, I don’t know what we can do about ai
Speaker: 0
01:10:20
mean, there’s there’s the administrative and discretionary speak, but, you know, I’ve said for a while, it’s gonna be necessary to have statutory resolve to actually fix the deficit problem in The United States, and that means getting Congress to act. And Congress has not shown a willingness to act. And every time I go to DC, I come back more disappointed.
Speaker: 0
01:10:39
I share the stories on the shah, and I talk about the fact that there are very few members of congress that are staying up and saying, at the end of the day, the first thing we need to solve is how do we reduce the deficit? Then we can address all of the policy issues that we wanna talk about. But if we don’t solve the deficit problem, there is no policy.
Speaker: 0
01:10:57
There is nothing we’re going to be able to do because the treasury rates are gonna spike. There’s gonna be no capital. There’s gonna be no funding. We’re gonna go through a debt death spiral. So at the end of the day, we really do need Congress to stand up and lead here.
Speaker: 0
01:11:11
It is not on one man’s shoulders. There’s only so much Elon can do without statutory authority from Congress. And I think that’s really important in this in this budget reconciliation process, and it’s really important for the president to also help lead Congress to where we need to go on this.
Speaker: 0
01:11:27
Members of Congress are elected because they get stuff for their constituents. The more they get, the more likely they are to get elected. And next cycle, they gotta get their constituents more stuff. So it creates an escalating spiral staircase. It’s a problem in how democracy operates.
Speaker: 1
01:11:41
It creates a tragedy of the commons. There’s a collective action problem because ai you said, each individual congressman or senator primarily wants to get stuff for their district or their state for their special interests, and there’s no one really looking out for the public interest, the overall common good.
Speaker: 1
01:12:00
And these appropriators are basically engaged in log rolling where they’re willing to give, you know, their their colleagues their pork if they get their pork, and this is why we have a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit. It’s a really hard thing to fix. I mean
Speaker: 0
01:12:14
It’s really hard. This is the problem
Speaker: 1
01:12:15
which the model ai I mean, people
Speaker: 0
01:12:17
eventually until you realize you can vote yourself all the money, and that’s what you do.
Speaker: 1
01:12:22
I Ai think, you know, this has been something that I meh, Bush forty one in his State of the Union called for a line item veto. This was, like, 30 ago, and we still need that. You know? Because I do think that if the president had more authority over this process, it’d be less of a tragedy of the commons.
Speaker: 0
01:12:40
In my naive youth, I was very against that, and I felt like it was giving too much power to the president, and I never really understood the wisdom of it until we find ourselves at the end of the cycle, which is where we are here. That’s Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:12:50
And, unfortunately, Congress will never, I think, change its ways until they’re forced to by some sort of crisis, which Freeberg, I think, is your point about eventually we’ll be in a debt ai, and then Congress will finally see the wisdom, and they’ll finally appreciate what Elon did. You know, there’s all these entrenched political interests complaining about Elon.
Speaker: 1
01:13:09
I mean, again, he undertook an enormous sacrifice to try and fix our fiscal situation, which is unsustainable before there’s a crisis. One day there’ll be a ai. Everyone will see that he’s right.
Speaker: 0
01:13:19
But to answer your question, Andrew, Nick, do you wanna pull up this poly market? So this is the poly market on how much spending will
Speaker: 1
01:13:25
Ai, unfortunately, I gotta go. Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:13:26
Yeah. We’ll see you later, Zac.
Speaker: 3
01:13:27
Bye, Zac. Zac, Zac, supoon.
Speaker: 2
01:13:28
Love you. Dave, that was great. Thank you.
Speaker: 1
01:13:30
Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker: 0
01:13:31
Polymarket’s showing an 84% chance of less than 50 billion being cut in 2025 and only ai% chance.
Speaker: 3
01:13:40
Isn’t the number on doge.gov right now, like, one sixty
Speaker: 0
01:13:43
or something? That’s what they’re saying. They’ve cut in contracts. So that means the annualized run rate of savings from cutting contracts. But what PolyMarkets showing is what’s the actual savings in 2025 from Dogecoin.
Speaker: 3
01:13:57
Oh, because these are multiyear contracts.
Speaker: 2
01:13:58
Multiyear contracts. But then there’s also reporting that, like, $92,000,000,000 of it, I think, isn’t actually itemized, so it’s hard to understand what’s actually That’s right. On the list.
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01:14:07
And they haven’t they haven’t done anything yet in defense. Right? So that’s a big honeypot, I guess, if you wanna use that word potentially.
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01:14:16
That could use this number. Do you think he’s gonna go there?
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01:14:20
Well, I mean, there are people there are people at at DOD and at HHS, but I don’t think we’ve had a readout from any of those people yet. Right?
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01:14:27
I mean,
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01:14:28
all of this other stuff that
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01:14:29
they is huge. It’s sai number if you look at their list on the go the Doge tracker on the website, HHS is the number one department of savings right now, and they’ve got the contracts. Yeah. Defense is
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01:14:38
on the Okay. Okay. So they are they are ai.
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01:14:40
Well, remember, what they’re doing is they’re just cutting wasteful contracts. So they’re cutting stupid stuff that aren’t used
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01:14:45
to it. Discretionary stuff.
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01:14:46
All the bullshit that’s not used or not needed.
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01:14:49
No. No. No. But my point is, like, all of these things are still these are not ai item appropriations. Right? Because you can’t cut those.
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01:14:56
Well, here you can see the Department of the Interior had a $3,000,000,000 contract for refugee resettlement, with a company called Family Endeavors Inc. And so they put that as the number one contract they cut on the ai, saves 2,900,000,000.0 total. Treasury, they cut a deal with a company called Centennial Technologies, which is an enterprise software company, saves 1,900,000,000.
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01:15:19
What is Centennial Technologies? My god. Ai mean,
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01:15:21
that’s the thing. Go into this stuff. You can you can disappear.
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01:15:24
In that.
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01:15:25
Wow. Yeah. These are all, like, small you can click on it. It shows you the contract. Here it is.
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01:15:29
Well, I no. I’m gonna go try to find ai Centennial Technologies. Who are these guys?
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01:15:32
You’re gonna invest?
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01:15:33
Yeah. Okay. Should we talk you wanna still talk a little Tesla, or you think we should move to the science corner?
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01:15:39
What I would say quickly on Tesla is I would encourage all of you guys to try FSD. It’s really
Speaker: 0
01:15:46
it’s a new thing you’ve discovered. This is the reason I bought my Tesla. I’ve been using it for
Speaker: 3
01:15:50
The quality the quality of FSD is just so good. Yeah. But you never turned it on. You just set it in the pre thing.
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01:15:56
No. No.
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01:15:56
I use it all the time.
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01:15:58
It is just an incredible thing. I I don’t I think, like, there was, like, a rev of it probably in, like, the last month or two that I think took it from, like, a ’98 to, like, ninety nine point five or something. It’s just, like, there’s just very few disengagements.
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01:16:15
Okay. So are you a believer that we that Tesla’s doing real robotaxis in two years?
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01:16:21
Oh, Ai yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, right now, my car is effectively a robotaxi. The part about my Tesla experience is I have to hold the freaking steering wheel and look ahead because this camera’s always looking at me. My wife, it’s so funny. She’ll come home and she’ll be ai angry because shah, like, got suspended because she was like looking away and looking on her phone and they turn it off.
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01:16:42
They punish you. Tesla punishes you. If you look away too often, they put you in like, you know, tyler out for like, I don’t know how many days or whatever. It’s that’s the worst part about the experience because it is so good. You’re just like, oh, can I just take my hands off the wheel and just do something else?
Speaker: 0
01:16:58
Well, there’s a lot of videos getting posted on Twitter of FSD being on and then the car drives into the sunlight and at a certain angle when the sun hits the cameras, the car goes into an emergency disconnect on FSD. And I’ve had that happen. So I know it’s true. I know it’s real. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:17:13
So it is a bit of a risk with the camera only mode on how Tesla operates FSD if they can actually run a full, you know, never to disengage robotaxi service like Waymo does. Are you still pushing LIDAR
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01:17:25
on them? Is that what you’re doing?
Speaker: 0
01:17:26
I don’t I that’s the that’s the word on Twitter, which is watch out because without LIDAR, you’re gonna have a lot of disengagement. Elon
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01:17:33
Elon’s never doing lidar.
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01:17:34
Never doing lidar.
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01:17:35
Here’s an interesting factoid. I’ve been working with somebody here on trying to figure out what does next generation AI data centers look ai, and do you build, like, inference pops all over the all over the country? And I talked to some folks at Waymo. I talked to Takedra.
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01:17:51
And what’s interesting is the Waymo approach is they don’t need POPs anywhere because all of the models are on board.
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01:17:59
Yeah.
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01:18:00
So these things go fully autonomous units out into the wild. They can make every decision themselves. They have the ai arya then they come back to the fleet and then they can resync the models. Whereas everything else, particularly if you have human intervention, But if you have human intervention, so all of the food delivery folks that have, like, central knocks of people that can engage and intervene, they need all these all this real time ability so that things are multi millisecond latency maximum.
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01:18:29
Awesome. Should we go should we go to the ai corner, my friend?
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01:18:33
Yeah. If you’re ready for it.
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01:18:34
I’m ready.
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01:18:35
Today’s science corner is on a discovery of a massive thorium reserve in China and a disclosed molten salt reactor in China that’s been running for some time. So at a
Speaker: 3
01:18:49
private Before you let me do the tea up for this. Freeberg, tell us about these thorium reactors. I think the the most important thing that everybody should know before I tee this up for Friedberg is that what he’s gonna talk about is a material called thorium, which doesn’t speak.
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01:19:09
It doesn’t release energy unless it absorbs a neutron, and then it transmutes to uranium two thirty three. And by this, what I mean is this is a trans that everybody should be able to get ai. Over to you.
Speaker: 0
01:19:22
Hey. He got it. He got it. Did you get it, Andrew?
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01:19:26
I got it. It’s a beautiful thing.
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01:19:28
I don’t think we brought it up in Ai Corner before, but apparently, there was a giant thorium deposit discovered in Inner Mongolia that has enough thorium to effectively power the entirety of China for sixty thousand years. It was made by the Bayan Obo ai complex. It’s a million ton reserve in Inner Mongolia.
Speaker: 0
01:19:48
And so thorium is much more abundant in the Earth’s crust than uranium, which is what we’ve historically used for fission reactors and what we use today for all of the even new generation nuclear fission reactors. And for a long time, folks have talked about building a thorium reactor. There’s a lot of challenges with building a thorium reactor. It’s a new set of of systems.
Speaker: 0
01:20:09
But if you build a molten salt thorium reactor, you can ultimately produce energy in a way that doesn’t actually have the risk of a meltdown. It can passively shut itself down. It’s not high pressure, so it can’t explode. So it’s technically a much safer, much more reliable way of producing power with a much more abundant fuel source.
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01:20:31
And people in The US have been talking about building these thorium molten salt reactors for decades. In fact, in 02/2009, the US geological survey in The United States went out and did a study to identify how much thorium existed just in the continental North American region.
Speaker: 0
01:20:47
Turns out The US has about 64,000 tons. Canada has a 72,000 tons of thorium reserves. And China just discovered a million tons in this in this one region. But the amount of thorium that we have in The United States is enough to power our country for centuries. So in China, turns out, they built a molten salt reactor. This was another secret. They’ve been operating it now for some time.
Speaker: 0
01:21:11
Last June, while the reactor was running, they replaced the fuel. So it basically showed continuous use of the reactor without needing to do a shutdown and refueling cycle. It’s a two megawatt experimental unit and they’re actually building and planning to take live a 10 megawatt unit by 02/1930. So this was all shared at a private meeting.
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01:21:33
It got out. The discovery in Inner Mongolia was also kept confidential for, I think, nearly two years. And then it got reported out. And after it got reported out, it was confirmed ultimately in a government meeting. And that that’s how we know about it now.
Speaker: 0
01:21:47
But I think this just is Another kind of critical point about this. Once China gets this two and ten megawatt system running, this allows for very small, very modular nuclear reactors using a very abundant fuel stores that can be quickly built, stood up, and safely operated in a distributed way.
Speaker: 0
01:22:04
You don’t need to have one gigawatt, which is a thousand megawatt station running centrally and then you’ve gotta have a big, you know, construction project invested in to build and operate this thing. You can have many small reactors split around neighborhoods, split around cities and so on. This is not built into China’s energy projections.
Speaker: 0
01:22:23
So they actually have an electricity forecast that over the next fifteen years gets them from three terawatts of electricity production to eight. And that’s through a combination of solar, hydroelectric and then the Meh three and Gen four traditional uranium nuclear reactors that they’re building out.
Speaker: 0
01:22:39
So if you add this in, it provides even more or perhaps lower cost or more distributed energy production capacity than is even provided in the forecasts today. Again, this is, I think, one of the base drivers that is part of the compounding effect of China’s economic advantage for this century is energy, energy production, the cost of building new energy production systems, and the cost to operate those energy production systems.
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01:23:03
Can I say something about the Hu Jintao conversation about picking national champions and getting focused? This was an area that China chose. And now, you know, The US finds itself years behind on a technology that we invented. Right? So this was research that happened at Oak Ridge National Lab. That’s right.
Speaker: 3
01:23:23
We pioneered this decades ago and then we shelved it. And then the person in China that led it gave credit to The United States and basically said, you know, Americans let the research wait for the right successor. We were that successor. That’s what he said in quotes. So, you know, here we are, we invent this cutting edge technology.
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01:23:45
It’s a huge leap in innovation, but they Then we can get ai.
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01:23:49
They put a regulatory fence around it and we blocked it from getting organized.
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01:23:52
Ai they’re like, you know what? We can we can just do this and we’ll figure this out. Yeah. It’s really it’s really unfortunate vatsal goal here.
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01:24:00
They have an infinite thorium reserve. They don’t need to refine it. One of the key advantages of thorium is you don’t need to go through a refining process. In uranium, you have a very expensive, very difficult kind of refinement process where you end ai, I think, getting less than 1% of that uranium that you pull out can actually be used as fissile.
Speaker: 0
01:24:20
And you and you have to enrich down to the uranium to find the fissile material. With thorium, 100% of it can be used as fuel. So it’s a very low cost, very easy kind of fuel source that can be very quickly kind of put into production if we actually build out the supply chain and build out the energy systems to utilize it.
Speaker: 0
01:24:39
So it’s a real kind of reinvention of a nuclear energy technology, and this will take off. I mean, once this experimental reactor
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01:24:47
is working Just to add.
Speaker: 0
01:24:48
To get the meh giant rod reactor going, boom.
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01:24:50
Imagine how much fundamental leaps in science that we have funded that are just basically gathering dust or falling through the cracks that other countries are using right now and probably a little bit snickering behind our backs about the fact that, you know, we did all of this work, and then they were able to take advantage of it.
Speaker: 0
01:25:12
Well, here, I’ll show you. Here’s another, let me put this in the group chat real quick.
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01:25:16
But how much of this stuff do we have this I mean, what what’s our ability to actually do this?
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01:25:21
We have We invented it. We invented it. Well, the big problem has been the regulatory, fencing we put around the dander. So There’s a bunch of interesting trivia. There’s forms.
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01:25:32
Yeah. There’s pronouns. There’s all kinds of stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:25:35
And just speaking to this point. So we’ve talked in the past about nuclear fusion. Sai, Andrew, this is I don’t know how familiar you are, but fusion is different than fission. Fission is where you take a heavy element ai uranium or thorium and it breaks and you release energy.
Speaker: 0
01:25:48
Fusion is where you take a light element like, you know, hydrogen, you accelerate it, you make it really dense and you jam the protons together. And when you jam those protons together, they fuse. So hydrogen turns into helium. This is what goes on in the sun and energy is released in a different form through, you know, accelerated neutrons. We capture that energy. We make electricity.
Speaker: 0
01:26:06
So fusion is this next gen technology where we could theoretically just use water from the ocean to create all the electricity we need on planet earth. 10 meter by 10 meter by 10 meter of water makes all the power the entire planet uses every year. That’s what you could ultimately do with fusion technology.
Speaker: 0
01:26:22
So it turns out this is a satellite photo that discovered a very large scale fusion research center in Mianyang, China, which we did not know about, that was just kind of stumbled upon. It turns out it’s the largest fusion reactor experimental facility in the world now, 50% larger than the national ignition facility run-in The United States.
Speaker: 0
01:26:43
Not only is China getting this new energy infrastructure built with all of the stuff that was discovered last century, but they are now getting ahead of us on the new discoveries to be made in the next gen of energy systems, which is fusion, which at some point this century will work and will end up having this ability to unlock effectively unlimited free energy.
Speaker: 0
01:27:01
And these are compounding value craters. Ai, ultimately, if they can make new energy systems cheaper than The United States, scale them faster, they will ultimately have much cheaper, much higher volumes of electricity, which gives them the advantage of manufacturing and production and transportation and everything.
Speaker: 0
01:27:18
And that’s where the economic advantage will will ultimately accrue to them. So, this is, I think, key to the strategic puzzle on what’s sana to happen in the great race with China this century is the build out of electricity and the cost of that build out. So, the regulatory constraints need to be addressed first and foremost. That’s ai my opinion, the number one mission critical strategic imperative for The United States right now. Awesome. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:27:45
Anyway, Dorium, that’s just a red flag on Ai. Science corner for the day. Thorium is real. Thorium Mandarin. So how was it, Andrew?
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01:27:54
How do you like hanging out with the best ai
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01:27:55
the best of the best
Speaker: 3
01:27:56
of the best of the year?
Speaker: 2
01:27:56
I you know, I’ve I meh I’m still getting used to it. I’m still getting used to the whole flow, trying to figure out how you guys all roll, but it’s good. It’s good. It’s a
Speaker: 3
01:28:03
lot of fun. Do the do the outro. You gotta do your out you gotta do the outro.
Speaker: 0
01:28:06
Oh, yeah.
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01:28:06
I gotta do the outro? You guys can do the outro. Come on. It’s your show.
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01:28:10
Do the outro.
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01:28:11
Come on. Come on.
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01:28:11
Come on. You. WKGB.
Speaker: 2
01:28:15
What is what
Speaker: 0
01:28:16
is the outro?
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01:28:16
I’ll do I’ll do I’ve never done an outro. I’ll be you do the outro. On behalf of our crypto czar, David Sacks, our prince of panic attacks, and sultan of science, David Freeberg, our new bestie, guestie, Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Speaker: 2
01:28:33
Thank you.
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01:28:34
I am your chairman dictator, Jamoth Palaiya. Thank you for listening to the All In podcast. We’ll see you next time.
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01:28:41
Love you.
Speaker: 3
01:28:42
Love you too.
Speaker: 2
01:28:42
Bye bye.
Speaker: 1
01:28:43
Thanks, guys. Have
Speaker: 3
01:28:51
a just gone crazy with it. Love you, sis. Queen of quinoa. Besties are called.
Speaker: 0
01:29:10
That is my dog thinking I wish
Speaker: 3
01:29:18
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension and we just need to release them out.
Speaker: 0
01:29:26
Let your feet be. Wet your feet. Wet
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01:29:29
your feet. Wet your feet.
Speaker: 0
01:29:31
Wet your feet.
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01:29:31
We need to get mercy. I’m doing all in ai.
