Ben Shapiro, Gavin Baker, Phil Deutch: OpenAI's GPT-5 Flop, AI's Unlimited Market, China's Big Advantage, Rise in Socialism, Housing Crisis

00:00I just wanna let Friedberg know. He told me to stop taking my nicotine patches because I had brought too much energy. Friedberg, you see what I got here? Nick, blur that out. See what I doing we're not doing promotions for this.

00:11We're not doing any of these promotions.

00:13What you need to know is he sent me my own flavors. Jason's trying to make a side hustle.

00:17Just so the rest

00:18of you

00:18guys know, Jason's trying to get paid.

00:19Not side hustle. I have no

00:21He's trying to turn the show into an infomercial, and he's trying get me personally.

00:25Sweeberg, I'm selling this on eBay. If anyone wants to hear about eBay's site, it's name, George.

00:48Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, be all in podcast. And we were supposed to take off this week, but no. Your independent moderate moderator said no. Taking a week off.

01:01No weeks off. So I told my besties, we're out gallivanting. We're doing a show on Friday with or without you all. Of course, David Freeburg showed up. How you doing, Davey?

01:16I'm here. You're here.

01:18I'm here.

01:18But you weren't gonna come at first. You were a little frustrated that the other boys took the week off the Well,

01:22was annoyed. We were gonna record yesterday. Yes. I had gotten a docket, which we're supposed to do. What are we gonna talk about?

01:30I read it. I mentally prepared. I drank some coffee. I get dressed in a T shirt, and I get in front of my computer, and then your co hosts bail. They're like,

01:39I No. Can't. Can't Do your co hosts too.

01:41I can't. I'm in this country. I can't. I'm on this boat.

01:45Many hoursminutes of notice did they give us?

01:48Oh, it was like five minutes before we were supposed to record.

01:51It was ninety minutes before. Ninety minutes before they go, that's true professionalism. But Freeburg, a consummate professional is here and we've got a full docket for everybody also with us. My God, Gavin Baker is here. He's at the beach, I'm sure, enjoying a little recreation, but you decided, hey, let me get in here, help Jay Cal, let's lock the show down, take a little time out from the beach and do an episode of All In.

02:17Thank you for doing that, Gavin.

02:19Always happy to help. I should say that I'm working hard at the beach.

02:24I mean, it was supposed to be an easy breezy summer. We had like a busy couple of years, but we're post election. Everything was supposed to slow down. We get into a groove. It's never been busier.

02:33Right?

02:35Well, we're still in the thick of public company earnings.

02:40Right.

02:40Which is always busy.

02:42Yeah, and of course, for those who don't know, Gavin is the managing partner and CIO of a treaties. He invests in private companies, public companies or just public?

02:52Public and private.

02:53Public and private, so that makes you a crossover fund. With us as well today, my guy, fellow broadcaster, Ben Shapiro, host of the Ben Shapiro show, co founder of the Daily Wire, which, gosh, makes a mountain of money and has a new book coming out in September, Lions and Scavengers, the true story of America and Our Critics. You gendered America, Ben, in your subtitle, A Bold Move. What's the book about and why are you writing it?

03:24So so basically, the the concept of the book is that we're watching civilization break down between people who wanna build and people who wanna tear down. And and you saw that pretty clearly, I think, in the last election cycle, but you're seeing it all over the world. You know, people who actually are innovators, people who wanna build social fabric, people who wanna defend the civilization, then people who are interested in getting rid of borders, people who wanna destroy businesses, people who not interested in the foundations of Western civilization and see them as fundamentally bad. So that it's really that contrast.

03:50And see, I knew that you had something you wanted to say because the book business for a podcaster, especially one as successful as you are now, right behind us, number two in the rankings there, I kid, he's ahead of us. But we're manifesting, we're right there, right with Ben Shapiro and true crime, that's your, and Bill Simmons. So NBA, true crime, Ben and us. But writing a book is a net loser in terms of your productivity and time when compared to doing your daily show and all the other things

04:21that Daily Wire does. Yeah? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it started off because I honestly, things have been so pathetic lately that I became pathetic and started journaling, which is not a thing that they really should do. And as I was traveling around and going to, like, Oxford University a month after October 7 and debating people who were telling me about how October 7 was fine and dandy, I just was keeping almost a a diary of of what that was like.

04:44And so part of the book is is that it's a much more personal book than the other stuff that I write, which honestly is not my it's usually not my bag, but I felt like, you know, putting it out there.

04:53It's interesting. You if I'm reading into this correct, you probably had some dismay, anxiety, whatever, hand wringing over the state of affairs, decided to use journaling just to get it out of the system. Hey, no shame in the journaling game, Ben. Think it's fine. You know?

05:11Better than popping some pills, but

05:13It's in a Trapper Keeper with it. It's got like a little heart lock.

05:15Oh, you went with the Trapper Keeper? Went with my little pony Trapper Keeper. Just like when you were in high school. But yeah, you get it out the system. I too have been journaling and meditating because it just making sense of the world as Gen Xers here, all of us.

05:30Yeah, I think you're a Gen X or maybe you're a millennial, you're on the bubble, I think Ben.

05:33Yeah, yeah, yeah.

05:34It's just weird to see everything be topsy-turvy and rounding out the fivesome here today. We got a full compliment. My guy, Phil Deutsch from NGP Energy Technology Partners. This is the smartest guy I know when it comes to energy. He's my rabbi.

05:53When I have a question about energy, I just text him. He explains to me why I'm right about solar batteries being better than clean coal, but we'll find out today. We're gonna do a deep dive in energy. Phil Deutch also with a protect that Chamath would be in awe of today. And, you come from, we call him deep state Deutsch because he comes from a family of politicians.

06:16Yeah? Phil?

06:18Government employees, I think, is better than politicians or public servants would be more accurate.

06:22Servants would be the way to say it. Yes. Public servants would be the way to say it. Hey. And then just to get a little plug in here, Freiburg's been working really hard on the all in summit.

06:32Everybody join us. Look at this lineup that we put together, mostly Freiberg and I. The CEO of Eli Lilly, Dave Ricks, Alibaba's cofounder, Joe Tsai, also owns the Nets. My guy, Dara, from Uber with the $200,000,000,000 cap. We got the Arm CEO, Renee.

06:50Circle's cofounder, Jeremy O'Leary. ZipLine's CEO, Keller. It's a $5,000,000,000 company, really doing cool stuff. Thoma Bravo, cofounder, Orlando. Sequoias, Roloff Botha, my guy.

07:01Kathy Wood, and science YouTuber Cleo Abram, one of your favorites, Friedberg. You got a you got a little friend in the science broadcasting game now. And We're gonna have a great

07:12We're gonna have a there's a lot of big announcements still to come. Other names that we're saving, other names for the days leading up. Some of them will still be secret.

07:21And some will still be secret. So go to allin.com/summit or allin.com/ yada yada yada. And, yeah, get your tequila tequila.allin.com. Alright. Chat GPT five just broke.

07:34Large language models continue to drop just four weeks after Grok four Gavin took the crown. Friend of the pod, Sammy the Bull Altman dropped GPT five and, two open weight models. They're not open source. We'll get Gavin's thoughts on that in a minute. It was a bit underwhelming.

07:51I'm assuming you all saw our gentleman and a little bit of a messy presentation for GPT-five yesterday. This wasn't like your classic Steve Jobs keynote. The charts were flat and wrong, miscalculations, typos, all kinds of stuff. But the model did top some leaderboards in fairness in the chatbot arena. But many people were disappointed and said the performance was underwhelming.

08:12And especially since when Chat GPT four point zero came out, and obviously 3.5, these were major jumps. So and part of it might have been Sam not managing the hype. He tweeted fellow Star Wars fan, Ben Shapiro, will get a kick out of this. He tweeted the Death Star. I think this is a Rogue One shot where the Death Star is coming up.

08:34And don't get triggered, Ben. I don't want you to get into a sequels rant, but you loved Rogue One. Correct, Ben?

08:40I did like Rogue One. Rogue One is good.

08:42Rogue One. It's exceptional.

08:45Exceptional. Rogue One.

08:46Rogue One is like the last good Star Wars movie that's been made.

08:48Okay. So let's do it. Empire Strikes Back is my number one, then Revenge of the Sith, then Rogue One. What do you got, Ben? Who's your top three?

08:55Oh, I mean, I I go Empire and then New Hope.

08:58Everyone should.

08:59And then New Hope, and then probably Rogue One.

09:02Wow. Okay.

09:04I I like Rogue One a lot. I think it's really good.

09:05Me too. It's a perfect film.

09:07Gavin? A 100% agree with Ben. But Empire Strikes Back is just so much better than all of the others. Yes.

09:13Yeah. Freiberg, what do you got in your ranking? I know you're gonna rank.

09:15I remain adamant in my point of view that the entire Star Wars franchise is built around an anti technology, anti utopian view of the world, anti progress, and the Death Star is the ultimate manifestation of technology. And, of course, it's used for evil. That's kind of the main message of the the the series.

09:35Wow. Way to bring the show down, Daniel. Way to ruin all our childhoods.

09:39I did like the last one.

09:40Says, we just had a Gen X moment. He's like

09:43Yeah. I did like the last one, though.

09:46Friedberg, I'm terrified to ask who you think of, like, the wizard of Oz, but I gonna go with the original.

09:51Dystopian gender, man. Take on free will. That

09:56was the first Epstein Island.

09:59The original J Cal, I remember my mom taking it to me when I was a kid. It was awesome. So I'm going number one, number one.

10:05Okay. There you go. And so, anyway, Sam did this tweet. It kinda built a lot of expectation that this would be, like, otherworldly. It wasn't.

10:13Anybody get a chance before we go on to the open, models or the open weight models, I should say, anybody get a chance, and Gavin, I think you're at the tip of the spear here. Any of your thoughts? Are we hitting like either the trial of despair or maybe diminishing returns in the LLM space where maybe it's feeling incremental, like groundbreaking when we release these iterations?

10:34Maybe for OpenAI. But if you look at Croc four versus Croc three, that was a pretty giant leap. Okay. And I think what was surprising to me is this is the first time that, you know, OpenAI has released a new model that was not decisively the best. Here's Grok three.

10:52It comes out. It's it's the purple line. This is in this is artificial analysis. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, maybe six to eight weeks, o three comes out and it is clearly significantly better. It's that black dot.

11:06And they've had that flex anytime they've been surpassed in the past. And, you know, Google and and Grok have surpassed OpenAI at times. Shocked me on the next slide, and I do think some of the loss of talent may be beginning to weigh, but, you know, a big problem in AI is what's called benchmark saturation, which is just these models are getting so smart that benchmarks that are optimized even for, you know, human graduate students are not sufficient to measure their intelligence. So we've developed these new benchmarks. There's humanity's last exam on the left.

11:39And you can

11:39Can you see what that is to the audience? It's got such an evocative name. What what does it mean?

11:43It is a list. I everybody, you could just Google it. But I mean, the questions are ridiculously hard. They're extremely hard questions from a wide range of disciplines. And you could see Grok four when it came out and it has improved since since its release roughly a month ago, was at 44.4% and GPT five was at 42.

12:05And similarly, RK GI two, which is another benchmark, especially called the jagged frontier in AI, where things that are very easy for AIs, like maybe math, are really hard for humans and vice versa. And RKGI measures tasks that are relatively easy for humans. Maybe you can almost think of it. You know, there's a lot of, like, geometric puzzle solving, but very hard for AIs. Here again, Grok four is, you know, significantly better than GPT five.

12:34Now, in fairness and, know, to be balanced and accurate, it is narrowly, very narrowly ahead in artificial analysis on on the right. But this is this is the first time they have not released a model that wasn't decisively better. And the progress for Grok four was exceptional. Grok five is coming soon. You know, they have more.

12:56And I I should note my firm is a shareholder of XAI. So, you know, as much as I try to be objective, I am for sure biased because I am human. And to be human is to be biased. But, they have the largest black well cluster, so I'm I'm optimistic for Grok five. But, you know, we're we're waiting on Gemini.

13:14I would expect there to be a very, you know, an an impressive new Gemini model, And we'll see how that lands relative to both Grok and GPT five. But I do think it's significant that this is the first time that OpenAI has not been able to clearly beat a competitor on all metrics, you know, a month after a new frontier model was kind of released from one of their chief rivals.

13:36Friedberg, let me ask you a question. And have you have you played with it yet, Dave? Have you gotten into chat GPT5? Yeah. So I'll I'll get your initial thoughts, if any.

13:45But I'm interested in leveling up the conversation to this concept of why would they release it if they weren't a definitive winner? Because, hey, Sam, the ball Altman, Sammy the ball is pretty competitive. He knew that this was gonna be the reaction that it wasn't definitively better, but yet he released it anyway, which means, hey, maybe he's having a hard time making those innovations and there has been the brain drain. So sort of two parter there and take whichever one you want first.

14:14I don't know how much this, quote, brain drain is affecting things. But I think one of the big milestones that was realized with this upgrade is it's kind of multimodal. So if you guys remember a couple weeks ago, if you're using ChatGPT and you have a pro account, you have to select the model using the drop down, which model do you wanna run. And so you know if you're doing a research task or a very simple kind of search task, you would choose the right model to increase speed or increase depth. Part of the factor that I think was a big upgrade with this system is that it kind of recognizes which underlying model to call and which underlying path to to draw from.

14:52I actually tried by asking a very complicated research question, and then I asked a very simple kind of information retrieval question. And the information retrieval question, it very quickly pulled the answer and the deep research, it said it got into the thinking mode. So it it self selected. I think this is really important from a user experience perspective for AI to work. You don't want users going in and technically choosing which model.

15:13No one understands what those letters and numbers mean. You wanna have a very simple, clean, basic interface where the model figures out on its own which underlying set of models to pull from, which reasoning process to follow to give you your answer. So I think from a product experience point of view, this was actually a a pretty big upgrade for ChatGPT, and it'll give them a real advantage if people start to access it. It's also, I think, why they're making a lot of the research functions more broadly available on a limited use basis to the to the wide population so people can start to see the depth of what's possible. That was kind of the key milestone for me.

15:45Less about the actual performance of the underlying model on the benchmarks and more about this kind of big UX upgrade. Gavin, I don't know if you feel similarly, but

15:52I do. I mean, in all fairness to OpenAI, the the router that kind of auto selects the right model was apparently broken for the first kind of twelve or sixteen hours of the model's release. It wasn't working. Really? Yeah.

16:03It was not working consistently for all users. Yeah. So, you know, the scores may improve. But, yeah, I mean, the one thing OpenAI is, like, they are very good product. Just really, really good.

16:18And I just always go back to the statement from Eric Fisher, who's a venture capitalist at Benchmark. Brilliant man. And he said it was on X. It might be that if OpenAI never releases another model, they're still a really valuable company because they have so many users and they're so good at product and they do have a lot of distribution.

16:40Phil Deutsch, what inning are we in here and how much of your research do you rely on or can you rely on these language models now being in a a very, you know, specific vertical every day studying energy, etcetera, and those opportunities? Has it made its way into your workflow? And did you get to play with ChatGPT five?

17:00Yeah. I mean, I think for investing, we use it all the time, and it really is very efficient. But, one thing I'll cite is that NVIDIA did. Friedberg, I don't know if you've played with it or not, but it's climate in the bottle, sea bottle. NVIDIA has done a climate model of the Earth and put that out there.

17:17So I would say we're in, like, the first half of the first inning when we start seeing, AI really help us with the thorniest problems and the trade offs in and around energy. So I think for us, very early, and we're using it just like any other investor would.

17:34Yep. Ben, has it made its way into your workflow at Daily Wire? And are you monitoring this as a business owner with, I think you have a couple 100 employees. And, you know, do you see a bifurcation of the people who use the tools and who don't?

17:47Yeah. I mean, I I it's definitely bleeding into workflow in terms of, you know, being able to gather information obviously very quickly or even using some editing tools via via AI. We we we put out Jeremy's razor commercial, two months ago that was entirely AI. You know, it still had the kind of AI slop feel to it a little bit, but it but it's it was it was doing a thing, and it was obviously a lot cheaper than having to to shoot something. But I kinda wanna you know?

18:09Again, I'm the dumb guy in this part of the conversation for sure in in many conversations, but I I just have a general question, which is, do you think that the productivity gains are gonna bleed over fast enough to justify the investment? I mean, that's, the dumb guy question. Right? Yeah. Like, they like, so much money is pouring into this.

18:22And I'm looking at the valuation of these companies, and I'm seeing that, like, 70% of all S and P 500 gains are happening in the magnificent seven. And I'm thinking to myself, I mean, when you look at the Internet, the Internet was working by '99, February, and it took until maybe 02/2006, 2007 for all that productivity to really enter the marketplace. Is this stuff gonna gonna hit fast enough to actually justify the amount of investment? Are you gonna see a crater here?

18:45Think this is a good question for Gavin and just to sort of set it up. We are now seeing hundreds of billions, low hundreds of billions per year being deployed, And we'll see a trillion or two deployed, I think in the next five years on data centers and this, and we put the TAM, or I put the TAM last year for just business or last week, just for business at about 50 to a $100 per business user, a billion business users in the world, it's going to put you at a billion dollars in revenue, which would be like a 5 to $10,000,000,000,000 TAM just for the business side. How do you calculate it Gavin? Do you have a back of the envelope way to answer this question? And if we catch up, or do we even need to catch up?

19:24Is there enough capital in the world that they can be patient?

19:28I think estimating the TAM this early, it's hard to do it with any precision. You know, I think your your methodology is as good as any, but we can measure the economic return on these investments. You know, most of the companies investing these big dollars into AI data centers are public. They report quarterly financials. You can calculate some, you know, something called return on invested capital, And it's actually gone up since they started making these AI investments.

19:58And at first, a lot of it was maybe through OpEx savings. But that is what you would expect with AI, kind of silicon to replace silicon OpEx to replace human OpEx. But more recently, you are starting to see some really significant accelerations in revenue growth. Meta just reported a quarter with revenue significantly ahead. And I think a lot of that was due to AI, AI making people spend longer and AI improving the quality of their ad targeting systems such that advertisers get a better ROAS and spend more.

20:33But the economic return thus far has been here. And it is, you know, even Microsoft I mean, me, Copilot is not the best product. But even Microsoft on their call talked know, they shared some pretty astonishing stats about Copilot uptake. So I do think the economic returns are here thus far, and that is a good sign because, you know, this early in the Internet, the economic returns weren't there. And I think maybe the, you know, the the the biggest difference between this and the Internet is a lot of the capital that went in during the Internet era, which is often called the tech bubble, was really a telecom bubble.

21:10It was deployed into something called dark fiber, and that means exactly what it sounds like. Fiber optics that people spent tens of billions of dollars laying, and then it was dark because it was not utilized. But there was an expectation it would be utilized. Completely different here with AI, where one of the biggest problems with GPUs and, you know, AI data centers is the GPUs are used so intensively that they melt. So all of the dollars that are going into the ground are being used.

21:38We're not building ahead of demand. In fact, we're clearly still behind demand,

21:43you know, so it can always Interesting observation, Gavin, because this idea of training a model, there's no analogy to that in the .com era. It's not like you had to, I don't know, upload all these video files and you needed all that dark fiber to do it. It's a silly analogy, I know, but that also did lead to, you know, the .com bust.

22:05Ben, the other side is the energy side of this. If I think that the energy implications of AI are probably bigger than the inflation reduction act and certainly will be longer lasting. And so just to kinda give you to give credit where credit's due, I think all the stuff we're seeing on the small modular reactors at some level owes its renaissance to AI and the energy demands of AI to focus on energies we'll get to later really wouldn't exist except for the hyperscalers giving very specific, concrete, and immediate demands for energy that have changed the energy landscape. As they say, probably bigger even than the legislation under the Biden administration.

22:51Well, give an example of what they're asking for because you are active in investing in these projects. What's like a large pre AI boom project versus a post AI boom project in terms of scale, footprint, investment?

23:10Well, a quick way to say this from Freeburg knows this stuff as well as I do. Anthropic just released a paper this month saying, we want 50 gigawatts of power, for the AI, in America and over the next three years. And so that's about as much power as was added of all this year. So you're talking, you know, huge amounts. In our lifetimes, you've basically been able to say the electricity demand has been zero, in The United States.

23:39Now it's two to 3%. And a data center needs continuous power in specific locations, and it's relatively price insensitive. So that's what's and the hyperscalers and, Ben, you may or may not like this, but they're they want carbon free power. They're willing to pay for it. Not because of the government, just that's what they want for their workforce.

24:02So when you say you hit the market with, you know, 50 gigawatts of demand, much of it clean, that changes a lot in a very exciting way. And for reasons we've been getting to later in the pod, it's a real pleasure not to have to rely on the government, be it democrats or republicans as we think about those things.

24:2250 megawatts, that's a small town.

24:24Gigawatts. Gigawatts.

24:26Oh, you say gigawatts.

24:27Gigawatts. Gigawatts. Wow. Gigawatts.

24:28So what is that? If 50 megawatts is That's 5%

24:31of the total US electricity production.

24:33So My lord.

24:34So And, Friedberg, I think it's about what you add a year. Right, in in new a new capacity.

24:39The US.

24:40Yes. Yeah.

24:41Meanwhile, China's adding one terawatt, a thousand gigawatts every eighteen months.

24:47Well Okay. I wanna say one thing about that, David. But where is China getting its gas and coal from? That's being imported.

25:01It's imported.

25:02So I know I I get the stat on China increasing things quickly, which I think you're right on, particularly the nuclear side. But on the gas and coal side, unlike us, they are looking to others for their source to their fuel.

25:18I think their biggest ad isn't their biggest ad in hydro right now?

25:23Well, I'm talking about imports versus ads, but the hydro and nukes presumably are I'll count as non import dependent. But the coal and nat gas, it's not a great story for them on that side of it, David.

25:36By the way, just my understanding was by far the biggest source of China's incremental electricity was solar. Like, this is a verifiable stat that we should just be able to quickly verify.

25:47But I

25:48That that, Gavin, I that let me just say one thing. You got it and and Freiburg knows this. You gotta be a little careful when you say what where the electricity coming from and what the additions are. Right? So The US, our additions are, like, 80% solar to wind, but the installed base, it's

26:05Oh, yeah.

26:05Yeah. For sure. So I think that stat you're citing is probably at best additions,

26:10not Oh,

26:10no. For sure it's additions. Yeah. For sure it's additions. But they're, you know, they're bringing out a lot of power every year relative to the installed base of The United States, and a lot of it is solar.

26:21Totally.

26:21Totally. Is, here's an interesting chart. This is China's, solar surge. This comes from Bloomberg. China added more panels last year than any other country has in total.

26:34So in other words, they added more than The US. It looks like, US, India, Japan, and Germany, they added in one year.

26:42And that's a 2,023 number. I think 2024 took a massive jump.

26:48So here's the question. See, dae see, Jay Kal and and Freiberg, here's the question that I would have asked secretary right. Do you care about that slide? Because if you care about that slide, then you would have done different things than the one big beautiful bill. And you might not care about that slide, but we're not we're certainly not attacking the problem on that slide.

27:12So

27:12As well as we could be.

27:14Right. And they're also putting they have a 150 plus nuclear reactors in some state of deployment. We've talked about that here countless times. So circling back to you, Ben, winning AI, do you consider that existential for America as somebody who's not in the industry? When you hear this discussion that we had in DC last week, when you hear technologists like ourselves, who obviously are investing in this, this is our book of business right now.

27:43Do you think we are in an existential race for humanity to win the AIRIS race with China? Or do you think that's like a construct maybe that's just everybody wins and it's it's not an existential race that one person wins and the other person loses?

28:00Well, as as you might imagine, I'm definitely in the existential race category. I I just look at how China has has utilized TikTok as a as a psyop weapon in in a myriad of ways, gathering data, putting out its own propaganda at scale, and and think about how they would do that with control of, you know, the tools that everybody uses in all of their businesses, and that's putting aside the military connotations. I was talking to my friend Mike Gallagher, who's a congressman on the subcommittee on China and who's now over at Palantir doing policy over there. And he was pointing out correctly that, you know, China's capacity, they if they win the IRAs militarily, is going to explode. And that's and that's going to mean an awful lot for things like freedom of the seas.

28:40It's gonna be a lot for for our allies, for America's economic dominance in the world. And and so, you know, that opens up a whole can of worms as, you know, as goes to the Trump administration's policies with regard to NVIDIA and what kind of chips we should be allowing NVIDIA to ship over to China.

28:55Which we're gonna get to on the docket in a moment. Interestingly enough, did you did you gentlemen see the Luckin Coffee announcement in New York City and the socialist reaction to it by chance? Nobody saw it. Okay. So people are not spending too much time on the TikTok.

29:12TikTok has a bunch of young socialist New Yorkers in communist t shirts going to Luckin Coffee and talking about how Snorbuck's are capitalist and that they're glad that the Chinese company Luckin, which does $2 coffees has come to America to destroy the American company, Starbucks and Dunkin' because communists know how to do capitalism better than Americans. That is like the central position in my hometown of New York City right now. Here's the TikTok. It's hilarious. Watch this.

29:50Pull this up for a second, Nick. It's it's a worthy diversion. This should there's some red meat for

29:55you, my friend then. $2 cup of communist coffee. So this specific coffee shop has more locations in China than Starbucks does. Okay. I'm gonna come back to make a video there later.

30:09But, no, this company went through a $300,000,000 accounting scandal where they faked their profits because capitalism sucks, and then they started paying their workers and putting the money back into the coffee and what actually matters. And now they are more successful than Starbucks back in Soho. Of course, this location is right by NYU campus. Should have paid your workers.

30:29Alright. I think we get the idea. I I have a new theory, Ben, that the Chinese because I do I'm with you on the existential, threat of that competitor. I have a theory. They're going to try to beat us on capitalism and then use brands like we've used brands like Apple and Google to defeat us.

30:48BYD producing cars now for half the price of American cars, and they're shipping them on their own shipping containers. Luckin Coffee infecting The US now. And I had a third example. Oh, and TikTok, the example you just gave competing with and and and using that. What do you think of my theory, Ben?

31:06No. I think that that's totally right. And and the truth is that what you're talking about in China obviously isn't communism. It's it's state sponsored corporatism. And so you can pour extraordinary resources into, you know, one path dependent part of industry.

31:20And and you could outcompete in coffee if you decide to subsidize that at at extraordinary cost, and then you can undercut the rest of the market. This is one of the things president Trump is totally right on. When when you talk about the tariff wars, I've always been in favor of tariffing the living shit out of China. I think that's that's actually quite right. My my problem when it comes to the tariffs, I know I'm jumping ahead in the in the docket here.

31:38My problem

31:38is that if if you're gonna do it, what you really ought to be doing is boxing in China with with free trade networks with literally everybody else and exclude China from that network. You have to do all the preliminary steps before you box in China. Otherwise, China's able to sort of climb out the window, which is I think what they've done on everything from NVIDIA chips to TikTok to, you know, their actual tariff rate, which I believe is now lower than the tariff rate we have against Canada.

32:01Let me bring it to you, Friedberg, because I think this is, a super interest interesting discussion. Our bestie Bill Gurley has a position that, hey. Everybody can win. It's not an existential they win or we win. I mean, obviously, it's a competition, but there could be many winners.

32:15What's your take on all this, Dave? And if any?

32:18Well, I'm in the place, like I've said before, it's kind of like, who's gonna win the Internet if we said that back in 1996. Like, no one, quote, wins the Internet. It's an open standard. It's a platform. It's an evolution of access for markets, of productivity for the world.

32:36I think AI is very similar. I don't think that there's, you know, there's this concept that you end up in some sort of state of superintelligence that perhaps reigns supreme and creates superiority, but there's many vectors of competition. So within drone warfare, as an example, there's gonna be a massive vector of competition. It's pretty clear that remote autonomous devices are gonna be the kind of front lines in battles going forward. And China has both manufacturing productivity materials advantage over The United States on that front.

33:11So it's not about having the best model. It's about having a supply chain that can support their ambitions in warfare. And similarly, in economics or in business, there's many dimensions upon which we're gonna have advantage over China, and China may have advantages over us that are gonna be enabled, accelerated, or magnified by by tools in AI. Actual models, I think, are gonna be this continuously kind of evolving set of systems that it's unclear where things are gonna head. But to to kinda bring up your point, I do think that the CCP has a unique ability to throttle up and throttle down entrepreneurship to drive productivity in that nation.

33:53When they throttle it up, you end up seeing massive gains in individual capital accumulation, which is counter to the communist party's intentions. And so then they throttle it back. And as you can see in this image from the financial times, this shows the number of companies founded in China by year. It peaked in 2018, which by the way, aligns pretty well with the peaking of venture capital investment in China from The United States and from VCs around the world. And then it began its rapid decline because there was a set of policy changes.

34:24And you guys may remember Jack Ma disappeared and these other sorts of things happened around that time. And so there's this challenge to the CCP that resulted in them throttling back the entrepreneurship. I don't think you can have massive true natural market progress without having entrepreneurship, without having a a more free market. And so they are, I would say, rate limited at this point by this particular chart in terms of their competitiveness. We can argue about their resourcefulness and their ability to do central planning and central command of the economy.

34:56But at the end of the day, much of what brought the Chinese there was a great podcast on this by the guys from the Brookings Institute years ago where they talk about what got China out of poverty, you know, where their GDP per capita went from whatever it was, 3,000 to 30,000 in a very short period of time. And it wasn't the government central planning. It was the entrepreneurship of the peasants and their ability to kind of self organize and self mobilize and build build business and create better productivity from the ground up. And it was the individual Chinese citizens that that drove that economic boom, not central planning. Central planning had some enabling factors, but that was really important.

35:33And so I do think one one of the challenges ahead is is this entrepreneurship suppression that's manifest. Gavin, I'm sure you have a point on this.

35:41Well, I was gonna say, Gavin, the East West Conference that our friends at Kotu do was named after like this really amazing boom period we had fifteen to ten years ago before Americans were not allowed to invest in China. Not only that, people had to, American companies had to like basically divest. They shut down in China all the education companies that were venture backed, nationalized those, Jack Ma went for painting lessons, etcetera. So he's an incredible painter right now, by the way, some of those oil prints are I think are much bigger in their impact than Alibaba. But Gavin, you would I think agree like we an investment in China, we were on a really great track that got shut down.

36:22Do you think when super intelligence comes that that is the race? Because we're looking at general intelligence, you know, a lawyer, an accountant, a developer, but super intelligence, I think is where people get to the existential piece. Yeah?

36:35Yeah. Well, they for sure believe it's existential. I have it on good authority that if you work for deep sea, you are not allowed to be in the same room as an American while you're in China, and you have kind of a CCP minder, with you most of the time. And that's that's kind of astonishing. You know, so they believe it's existential.

36:56The second thing I would say is I do think they are making an effort to throttle it up. You know, Xi Jinping had dinner with kind of, you know, 20 entrepreneurs. I think Pony Ma from Tencent was there. You know, the DeepSeek CEO was there. But they kind of gave pride of place to the people who were making physical goods plus DeepSeek and maybe deemphasize some of the social networks.

37:19And the last thing I would say, just a stat that just builds on what David just said about, you know, how entrepreneurship amongst kind of, like, rural Chinese is kind of what jump started China's economy. I think at the towards the end of the Soviet Union, they could not produce enough food using kind of, socialist systems. So they let 2% of the acreage in the Soviet Union kind of, like, be, you know, more entrepreneurial and self organized, and that 2% of the acreage produced a majority of their food. You know, just kind of shows the superiority of kind of capitalism to socialism in in a world in which there are resources

37:58better, constraints. Phil? Capitalism and democracy, capitalism and communism. Do you know, long term, think we would all agree. We have the winning combination, I hope.

38:08But in the short term, this sounds like an incredible advantage to put your finger on the scale and say, hey. BYD cars can lose money forever. We just wanna kill the American car industry. We wanna kill the German car industry.

38:21Well, first of all, nothing can lose money forever. But but the one thing I think is implicit in what Dave and Gavin said is you need rule of law. You can't just have innovation. You need rule of law. And it's yet to be shown that China can do that in a way that will create long term success absent government propping it up.

38:46And I'll give you an example. We've had factories in China, one making wind blades, and, basically, every day was renegotiation on terms no matter what you want to do. And if you didn't control the chop, the the the the thing that made the stamp, you didn't actually control the factory. That is not a long term recipe for success. And I think, eventually, no matter how strong the centralized government is, you've gotta have a rule of law if you really wanna see decades and decades of of, innovation.

39:18Okay, Gavin. Go ahead. Just real quick.

39:20A 100% agree. You need rule of law. It's essential for, you know, any system of government and but particularly for capitalism. I mean, in some ways, capitalism is the rule of law with private property. But I would say going back to 2018 being, like, kind of glory days for China, they were working.

39:35You know, the these kind of Internet entrepreneurs, they did create kind of the only kind of Internet companies that were capable of challenging American Internet companies, not just in China, but globally. And, obviously, most American Internet companies aren't allowed to to participate in China. But, you know, the problem was those those, you know, CEOs became so powerful that they were started to feel comfortable challenging the CCP. And, you know, Jack Ma made some comments in February. I don't remember exactly when that we just vaguely critical.

40:08And, you know, that was it. You know, then he disappears.

40:12Okay. Can we Gavin, can we stop with it? Hey. Wait. Hold on a second.

40:15Pull up my hold on. Pull up this picture. Gavin, you keep saying he disappeared. He opted in to oil painting. This beautiful painting that Jack Ma did here went at auction for $5,400,000 to an environmental nonprofit.

40:28I mean, didn't just disappear for saying that the old people in the government I think the quote was something like, oh, we got to pull it up. That the government was a little old and didn't get it. Ben, you've been a little quiet here, but politics is your wheelhouse. Question for you. We've seen a centralization of authority in the federal government, and we're sitting here talking about, hey, central government plus capitalism doesn't work as well as rule of law.

40:52Do you worry sometimes, hey, Biden wanted to use executive orders to do the student loan thing and Trump obviously has taken tariffs and there's a big question. Maybe the tariffs are, my understanding is they're supposed to reside with Congress and there's a lawsuit about that. Maybe that goes back to the Congress. He has been centralizing, Biden was centralizing, even Obama was centralizing and consolidating power. Is that necessary for us to compete?

41:16Because we're kind of seeing overtures like that even at our AI summit two weeks ago. There was this point that Saxe has made on this podcast and the president made, which is we have to have federal AI legislation. We cannot allow the state, states have any say in AI, the most important technology in the world. I'm kind of torn about that. So I'm curious what you think of centralization occurring here and then the bigger picture with China.

41:41Yeah. I mean, I think that when it comes to sort of the the bigger picture, the the temptation in politics is always to look at, again, corporatist states, which always get out of the box really, really quickly because look good. It's like you mobilize an enormous number of resources on on this one target. I mean, what capitalism does, of course, it allows you to mobilize extraordinary resources across a wide range of targets, but corporatism allows the government to basically put you over one target and one target alone. And if you're just looking at that target, it looks great at the very beginning.

42:08This is true for this is true for Italy when when Mussolini took over. This is true actually for Hitler's Germany at the very beginning, economically speaking, when you were seeing extraordinary rates of growth. And corporatism starts to look really good, particularly in a messy democratic system like ours where where the human beings, you know, at the top don't have full control. I think one of the things that that I think is frightening to people like me about AI is because you are seeing such a consolidation of AI. Yes.

42:31Extraordinary spending, but that extraordinary spending is relegated to a relatively small number of companies. Again, and not just that. You're seeing, it it's so much spending going to to one thing. And so the race for superintelligence that you're talking about, which China clearly, Gavin is totally correct, sees as as adversarial, you know, if they get there first, then corporatism wins. And so the temptation is to sort of imitate that from our side.

42:54And maybe you do have to imitate that. Maybe it's more like maybe it's more like Manhattan Project for AI than it is like a a market driven thing if you actually do see it as a true existential threat, and we should treat it more like a military program than like anything else. I think the temptation is to extend that across the rest of the economy to industrial policy, to stealing copper tariffs, to to everything else. And and as far as sort of the the federal AI versus state AI thing, I think that that may be slightly a red herring just because what you're really talking about there is not the federal government usurping state authority. What you're talking about is the federal government trying to preempt state authoritarianism.

43:27I think that that's what that's, I think, what David is pushing is is sort of the idea that the federal government ought to prevent the state of California from filling the field with some really bad AI legislation that essentially destroys competition That's among all the various players.

43:40Good, Phil. Yeah. Get in there.

43:42I have a question as an investor, not a policy guy. I don't quite get democrat versus republican on the topic of how they give support to the private sector and what counts as picking winners and what doesn't count as picking winners. When I look at this administration, the previous, I'm not sure I see I think they're both very activists. They both kinda seem to pick winners and losers, and I I feel like that distinction's kinda lost a little bit. Is that is that make any sense to you?

44:14Like, one had the IRA, but then the other has, like, rare earths or this or that. Like, it's very hard. When they switch like that, Ben, it's really hard to know where solid ground is as an investor.

44:24I mean, listen. I I totally agree with you on that, and I do think that the centralization of power in the federal government and the choosing of the winners and the losers over the course of the last several decades, actually, has been really denigrating for for private industry. I mean, I prefer that that nobody was picking winners and losers. But I think that, you know, if if you basically are now relegated to a choice between the winners that are picked by the Trump administration and the winners picked by the Biden administration, you know, from a political point of view, I'm I'm gonna pick the winners picked by the Trump administration. I think they're doing a better job picking the winners.

44:53But just on a principled level and and and a general market level, I prefer that nobody be be doing these sort of subsidies. I don't like industrial I don't like centralized planning and central industrial policies this way.

45:03And so let me just I think I would I agree with you almost 80%. And and, David, this is where I think I disagree with both of a little bit. The subsidies, right, have really helped solar, wind, EV, a lot and other industries outside of energy as well. So I think what I would love to see is rational subsidies that consistently last through Republican and Democratic administrations. And we had that a little bit with Bush and Clinton with some of the renewable stuff, David.

45:35Like, governor Bush put in wind requirements in Texas that carried through. But if we keep flipping back and forth, we inhibit one of our greatest strengths, which is our technology and innovation. And, Gavin, don't get

45:48Friedberg wants to get in this.

45:49Go ahead.

45:50Great point, Phil, by the way. Great point.

45:51Here's a counterargument I'd make. The subsidies, while they may have benefited those two particular industries, created a financial disincentive for investing in nuclear. And so there's always a loser, and the loser isn't always necessarily the target. The target was oil and coal or oil and gas and coal or whatever it was, carbon based energy systems. That was the target when there were subsidies for solar and wind was let's accelerate these deployments and get this market to start moving.

46:20It does two things. One is it doesn't force a natural market dynamic where you have to ultimately get the cost of solar or the cost of wind turbine production low enough that it makes economic sense from an ROIC basis that investors would natively wanna make that investment. They're making the investment because the government's paying half the cost. And the second thing is it then makes nuclear noncompetitive. And, therefore, the the r and d investment dollars that were supposed to go into nuclear that would have allowed us to accelerate to gen four systems, which, by the way, China has now done, went away.

46:53And so now we are several decades behind where China is with respect to nuclear, which is ultimately the most scalable energy production system we have.

47:01Phil, go ahead. And then, Phil, I wanna get through a couple of the charts you you took the time together to put together here as we wrap energy.

47:06Before we go into inner energy, I do have a politics kind of question I would love to pose to Ben, if that's okay.

47:12Yeah. Please.

47:13So, I my my parents were visiting me for the last week, and, we we had a lot of lively political debates. And, you know, this trend of the imperial president in America, you know, which I think really accelerated with Biden and now is, you know, further accelerating Trump. I their hypothesis, which I think is correct, but I'm curious for Ben's, is that is a function of the fact that congress, by and large, can no longer effectively legislate. Every once in a while, they'll do the IRA or the one big beautiful bill. But by and large, congress is not doing their job.

47:47So for thirty or forty years, a lot of the governance was done actually by the judicial branch. And if we have to choose by being governed between the judicial branch, which is unelected, and the executive branch, which is at least elected and accountable, I would rather have an imperial president, who we could judge and vote out of office than an imperial judiciary. Just curious for your thoughts, Ben.

48:11Yeah. I mean, I I obviously think that's true, but I think the trend goes back, you know, more than a few decades. I think that if you're really gonna go to the deep roots of this, you have to go back to the roots of the administrative state in the early twentieth century. Because the reality is the reason you have an imperial presidency is so the federal government just does way too much. I mean, the federal government is just way too big.

48:28They're way too intrusive. They're they're way too powerful. And so once that becomes a a giant grab bag of cash, whoever then controls the federal government wins. And now if you're a legislator and you can kick all responsibility for your policymaking over some unelected bureaucrat in the executive branch, that's precisely what you're gonna do. The founders game for ambition, checking ambition.

48:47They never really game for people trying to kick responsibility from one branch to the other. They they they felt the other way. They thought congress is gonna defend its own prerogative against imperial overstep by the presidency. And instead, thanks to the administrative state, congresspeople and senators started to realize, hey. What if I just pass, like, this very vague omnibus package, and then I kick it over to a bunch of regulators?

49:05And the regulators do all the work and take all the heat, and I can go back to my hometown and tell them how much money I brought home.

49:10Yep. It's fascinating 100%. Situation. And when you kick it back to home, I don't know if you guys saw this town hall, that went explosive. There's been a number of them, Ben.

49:21You must have covered it.

49:22While you're pulling it up, I I I do wanna say that I do think we don't wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is to say, the government and a number of government employees and career civil servants are doing god's work, whether it's on safety or, defense or intelligence. And what I don't love is a tone of critical criticizing lifelong government workers when none of us would really do that job at the pay they're taking. And maybe I don't mean to make it let me not say that people on this call don't know as well, but many of my friends. And I do think there needs to be a a beat for those people that are doing incredible work for a little or no recognition or pay, and they we can't pay with too broad a brush.

50:29You know, blame with somebody, you have to give it to the the branch that actually abdicated its duty and decided to construct an entirely different branch and then throw off all all accountability.

50:38What's our ambition there, Ben? Is it the American party doing what the Tea Party did getting, you know, or the America party, I guess, is what Elon calls it not American. The America party saying, hey, you know what, forget about the presidency. Elon did that work pretty effectively. Yeah.

50:53I think we'd all agree he had a significant, if not the deciding factor in getting Trump reelected, probably also something to do with the other the the democrat who the democrats ran. Putting all that aside, if an America if if the America party or another party were able to secure a couple of senate seats, couple of house seats, Could that reverse this trend where maybe the house takes back a little responsibility in your mind, Ben? Is that a is that a strategy worth pursuing for moderates?

51:21I I think that, actually, this is not gonna get solved at the federal level. I think what's actually gonna happen is that the federal government is gonna lock up, and it's gonna be essentially rotating elected quasi dictators, until until the end of time, except that the American people are gonna be unhappy with that. And you're seeing already more authority now now kind of being taken up by state actors, which is why you're seeing a necessity for things like federal legislation on AI to preempt the states. What what you've seen over the course, you saw this during the Biden administration a lot. I moved from California, which is obviously a very left governed state, to Florida, which is very right governed state.

51:51But the difference in governance are massive, and you're seeing governors pick up the the mantle of saying, okay. Well, the federal government is unworkable. They're not doing what we wanna do, so we're gonna do our own thing down here. We're gonna challenge the federal government in a wide variety of ways. And and I think that's actually the the proper solution.

52:06That's that's actually a reversion to what the founders wanted in the first place when the federal government was essentially so small that you could walk into the White House and just talk to the president, and and state governments were the ones with the vast majority of authority. So trying to solve it, what I would love to see for the America party, actually, is to instead of try to take over the federal government, try to take over some state legislatures. Right? That that's actually an easier lift in some ways. Like, try try to win a governorship.

52:29Try try to actually do some of these, you know, libertarian minded policies at the state level, which is where most of the power resides, and then bleed that up into the federal government as an ethos.

52:38It seems to me like nobody's happy. If you if you missed it, there was this, like, crazy town hall. It occurred in Nebraska, and everybody was upset. Friedberg, I wanted to make sure you saw this. I should have sent it to you earlier.

52:54I'm not sure we talked about in the group chat. But you had people who were at once upset in Nebraska about the government spending too much, then not the Medicare cuts, Medicaid cuts. People were universally on both sides absolutely infuriated at the state of affairs. Nobody's happy now. Friedberg, your thoughts on this sort of you kind of predicted with the socialist side, but it does feel like my prediction will My my

53:25prediction will ring poorer than any of us hope. Socialism will sweep over this nation, I fear, and I think it's a cancer. And it's gonna be worse than what we saw with woke stuff. It's gonna be just like, I'm losing out on everything. I mean, people are stagnant in wage growth.

53:44There is no one in The United States, including wealthy people who haven't taken significant notice of the increased cost of groceries and the increased cost of buying home goods. Jason, I'm assuming you must have noticed as well how much groceries have gone up in price. Everyone's rent goes up every year. There was this TikTok rant that went viral this week about this woman that's like, why does my rent go up every year? My salary doesn't go up.

54:06We're in this really difficult moment because of what Ben pointed out, which is that we've basically funded the government to do everything for us. And by my calculation from last year, I think nearly half of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by the government at this point. And as a result, because of that and the inefficiency of government allocation of capital, everything inflates in cost. And we're entering this era where some people make the joke that the train has left the station. You know?

54:34Alright. Let's finish up with these two charts here, Phil, on energy, and then I wanna

54:38get into that. Wanna I say one thing, David. I still think when it comes to innovation, rule of law, capitalism, freedom, we are the best at it. I think that

54:52Still gravity. There's still gravity, Phil. At the end of the day, arithmetic is arithmetic.

54:56And when Jimmy Carter lost the presidency, there was twelve years of Republicans, and then there was Democrats. It may be that socialists I don't think socialists in every United States, the way left, let's say, the left side of the Democratic party wins for twelve years, David. Maybe. I don't see that. But if you wanna see that, you can.

55:16But it will swing back. This country is incredibly resilient, and I have complete faith in that resilience.

55:22Delove it. Can I just add optimism? Hold on. Let let let me just get these two charts out of the way real quick. Finish up the energy charts here, and then we'll we'll we'll continue the discussion as we pivot over to tariffs, which is obviously related to all this.

55:34Alright. Alright. So, David? Yes. I wanna go back to this because I think I can't I wanna I can't emphasize enough how much I love you and think how smart you are.

55:46And I also think the last argument made was absolute bullshit.

55:49Regarding

55:50what? Idea the idea that the subsidies that went to the wind and solar were at the expense of nuke is nutty. And let me get let me tell you why. The issue with nukes and you say this so wonderfully on China. The issue with nukes is regulation and what Ben was saying over what we're stifling innovation there.

56:12And we've gotta figure out a way, and I think the secretary of energy, the president, have done a great job of this, to rationalize the regulatory framework around nuclear power. That what's bother what hurts nukes is not their cost per kilowatt subsidy. It's the a massive amounts of bureaucracy around them. So if you were to give the nuclear power industry 5 or 10¢ a kilowatt hour, that doesn't help them with their big problem. So and wind and solar, that's what you gave them.

56:42And the sizes are different as well. And one's a distributed resource, and one's a centralized. So I guess what I'd say is I don't think we have to treat them the same. I'm a 100% with you that we should be subsidizing nuclear power. It's clean.

56:57It's baseload. It's reliable. We could do small module reactors. They could be used for data centers. All of the above.

57:03We don't have to pit our children against each other. And in this case, they really aren't against each other.

57:09Just like chart you're showing, explain the chart you just showed. Oh, sorry. Why should we and then I have a second question for you, which is why should we subsidize nuclear when we have hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the most powerful max seven companies in the world and sovereign wealth funds who wanna invest in it. Why do why do the taxpayers have to pay for that? You can get to that in a second.

57:29But walk up me through this global electricity generation chart you pulled out here just real quick.

57:33So so what this chart shows is how quickly electricity has come on, from solar, the growth rate of solar. And so actually, Catherine, there may be a chat GPT chart on the uptick in AI, but what you see is the yellow the hyperbolic growth of solar. And so this goes to the fact of it really has been a success cost around 80 or 90%, and it's beginning to grow. And I agree with David. Eventually, you have to have storage with solar, so you can't quite match gas to solar, but we've had incredible success reducing costs of solar and wind and incredible growth.

58:13And so that's what the result of those incentives have been. It's been successful that way.

58:20So And that's why second chart here, the OBB chart.

58:24Yeah. The OBB chart, this just goes to show that when you take away incentives, you lose some generation. And so the point of this chart is if we really need all we could eat on energy for artificial intelligence, and if artificial intelligence, the race is the, you know, race for national security, and dominance of the world, I this is saying we're taking a step backwards on this supply. And, again, it's not either or, David. I would say do as much solar and wind as you can, as much SMRs as you can, do as much energy to make us a dominant player, in artificial intelligence as well as other things.

59:05Friedberg, your response.

59:07Sorry. That's that's what I said.

59:08No problem. Friedberg, your response.

59:10Yeah. So, again, I I think the point I was trying to make, Phil, is by driving the private market capital into solar and wind because it is now discounted, so you get a high rate of return by applying your capital there. You're not likely to put that capital in the development or the extension of nuclear technology. And the the lack of investment in improving nuclear technology, yes, you could argue there's regulatory burdens and so on, but it's largely been inhibited because there have been these other subsidized paths to market with energy. And as a result, we missed a window to catch up to gen four, which is just so everyone understands what that means.

59:49These are these very clean meltdown proof nuclear energy production systems that are being deployed at scale in China now, and The US doesn't have any, and we have no path to getting these deployed. Secretary Wright's gonna speak at the all in summit. He he has said the Department of Energy that in The United States, we are likely gonna have a gen four reactor deployed or started production in eighteen months, but we'll see. But we are so far behind because no capital went into it. And that's because the capital was redirected into these subsidized markets.

60:21And that's the disincentive that arises when the government gets involved in markets. The government creates these these financial incentives that, number one, create bubbles in those markets, and number two, take away the incentives for capital to flow to the best path for long term returns, which is what's happened in energy in The United States.

60:38Yeah. So in in in the small modular reactor gen four stuff, we, as well as others, have investments there. Great company we like called X Energy. Let's talk about a book there, Jason. But I think it's fair to say that the money flowed into those sectors when the hyperscalers committed to them and showed they were serious about the demand side from the private sector.

61:04And they have been there's been a catalyst for the administration because it's had four or five executive orders trying to get rid of the bureaucracy. So I guess I would say, David, in my experience as an investor in the space, the dollars flowed when the market spoke and the hyperscalers said they wanted they were behind the SMRs. And second, it was further invigorated when, as Ben says, the government took a step back and stopped being a yoke on the industry. Neither of those have anything to do with subsidies to solar and wind.

61:36Can I just say one thing about socialism? Because I thought it was a really important thing that David

61:40said. Sure.

61:41But it's inevitable. I would just say to me, so much of it comes down to Mamdani. If like, I disagree with every one of his policies.

61:49Well, admittedly, they're dumb. So

61:51They're dumb. Yeah. But yeah. They're I mean, they're obviously stupid. But if you have not watched him, he is an incredibly charismatic, effective politician.

62:00Yes. And absence That has been every socialist revolutionary leader. For sure.

62:06But just I think the key question will be one, you know, unless Adams or Cuomo pulls out, he's almost certainly gonna win. And then if he wins, does he go through with these policies? Because if he goes through with them, they're going to be epic failures. We know what happens when you defund the police. There is a government run grocery store somewhere in Kansas, and it's a disaster.

62:28So they won't work. And I think that'll be a quick that'll be like a quick end to socialism.

62:34But if you

62:35I I disagree with this. And I I mean, sorry.

62:37Let finish. No. No. No. Yeah.

62:38Yeah. Please go ahead.

62:39Here's the problem. It'll take a year or two years for for those policies to actually hit and and destroy all of New York, and it'll be like the end of of planet of the apes, and we'll all be wandering on the beach looking up at the Statue Of Liberty asking why we blew it up. But, you know, I I but the the problem is

62:55You did it. You madman. You did it. You finally did it. You crazy bastards.

63:01You did socialism in New York City, the financial capital of the world.

63:06But but the the bigger problem right now, and this is why this does go to tariffs. It also goes to crypto policy. It goes to the it goes to AI. Right now, the the kind of normie in America who who doesn't know that much about AI, doesn't understand how crypto works, doesn't understand even how financial markets work. Right now, they're all willing to kind of stand back and say, okay.

63:25Well, I'll I trust president Trump. I trust the administration. I don't want the full scale redistributionism and government control because, you know, things are kind of okay. They're kind of okay. If things take a downturn, then the backlash is gonna be a lot stronger than anything that that any of us can say about the failures of of Zohr Mamdani.

63:40Because what it's going to be is, look. The rich got richer, and we got poorer, and it's gonna be a redux of 2,002 02/2007, 02/2008, but with a much even further to the left than than Obama ever was. And and and that I'm deeply afraid of because

63:54100% of market crashes, if unemployment goes up, then this exacerbates and makes the point. And for a socialist, all you have to do is say, don't you want free X, Y, and Z? Whatever the popular thing is, free phone, less rent, free buses. The easiest pitch in the world.

64:10Yeah.

64:10Cheaper food, free food. I mean, it and if you fought

64:13for it But but self

64:15correct from socialism too. Right? Mean, like, idea that we kind of immediately flip back after you see Zornbam down and fail or something. I mean, San Francisco has yet to have a republican governor. They've been trying this crap for for several decades.

64:25I'm from LA. Spent my entire life in LA. The last Republican mayor of of LA was Richard Riordan.

64:30Right?

64:30I mean, like, this like, the the it it the you can always blame those those crazy those financier who may who got rich, and they all moved down to Florida to avoid our tax rates, and that's just really cleaning out the base of you To and look at all the rest of

64:42follow-up

64:42on Ben, I'm sorry to interrupt, but like something that's really important about what you just said is it's not a binary switch that gets flipped, you're socialist or you're not. What happens is these policies where you have big government policies that provide greater and greater economic, financial, and social support to the population are slow burning policies. The big policies in the federal government started fifty years ago, and they've gotten bigger and bigger. It's a snowball effect because when they're not working, if I'm not getting enough money in the food stamp program, for example, the solution isn't, hey. Let's cut the food stamp program.

65:16The solution is let's make the food stamp program bigger. When rent control didn't work in San Francisco to bring housing prices down, the solution was let's get the government to start building housing. The solution is never let's reduce the government's role. The solution is unidirectional, which is to get the government to do more to solve the failings of the policies. So whatever policies he does enact, if they don't work, the answer and the response from that socialist type movement will be, let's do more.

65:48Let's have the government do more. And then you increase the burden on the people because you end up increasing taxation, increasing regulatory burdens. And as he said in one of his interviews, ultimately, you seize the means of production, and that's the end goal of his government.

66:01It's so simple to solve this problem. I hate to make it too difficult here, but if we had the super funds like in Australia and people had the directional ownership and social security gets retired for people actually having, being in the market and we just crack the regulations on housing and build much more housing, this will change everything. The housing issue is so oppressive to this generation and the cost of their education is so oppressive. Now they have opted out of education. They're starting to look at and go, I'm going to UT.

66:32I'm going to be in a state where I can pay 50 ks in total for my degree. So young people are getting smart about this. Thank goodness. And they're going for trade degrees where plumbers and electricians are making $101,150 ks a year, but you have to solve housing. I have watched this so acutely in my move to Austin, I suppose Ben, when you moved to Nashville and Florida, you saw the same thing with your teams.

66:57When people don't have to spend 60% of their nut on their housing, their anxiety level goes down massively. When they feel they have ownership in a home, it goes down massively. Why we cannot fix this problem or why neither president just says, I am going to make housing when I run for president, president jason.com, I am gonna just make housing my thing. We're building 10,000,000 homes, and the government's gonna build two new cities, and we're gonna make we're gonna make housing affordable.

67:25Although, gotta tell you, you know, one of the things I think this goes to a deeper malaise, actually, and this is maybe just a human problem. You know, one of my kind of favorite charts it's it's a sad chart, but one of my favorite charts with regard to the the American populace is geographic mobility over time, how much

67:41people move.

67:42Because what what what you actually see is that that has wildly decreased in The United States. Why? There's this impression that everybody, you know, now because you get on a plane, you can go somewhere and it's you can get a a truck and all no one moves now. People Why? Basic I mean, my thing.

67:57I mean, I I think one reason is because, originally, people were moving from, you know, rural to to cities, and now they're in the cities, and so they sort of stay in the cities. But I think part of it is also, again, because of those government dependency programs. Once you feel like the government is gonna step in and solve your problem in New York as opposed to you having to, you know, go cross a mountain and live in a, you know, live in a cabin somewhere, then you tend to stay. And and you do you do that enough broadly speaking on a federal level, and what you end up with is people who really believe. And I I think that the vice president's granted a lot of things, but he made a statement in his, RNC address that that really kinda forcibly struck me, which he suggested that the the American dream was to live and die where your grandparents lived and died.

68:35And I thought to myself, that actually is not traditionally kind of the American dream. The American that's kind of a European dream, actually. The the traditional American dream for most people was cross an ocean, go to a place you don't know.

68:46Yeah. Go place. Work.

68:48Cross right. Cross a mountain. Build I mean, de Tocqueville talks about this in democracy in America that Americans were famous for for basically building these kind of ramshackle huts, trying to set up shop. And if it didn't work, they would just abandon it in the forest and then move on to the next place where they could build a ramshackle hut and and try and try it again. And so that that sort of innovation and entrepreneurship and this idea that that you have to move in order to succeed and that you might actually have to, you know, move from the city that you grew up in and go find a job somewhere in North Dakota.

69:14I was asked a question by by one of my listeners recently, and he said, well, you know, you're you're always talking about this stat that there are more open jobs than there are people applying for the open jobs. But what about me and my industry? And I was saying, well, yeah, but it doesn't apply to every single industry. That's a that's an aggregate statistic. And so when you talk about job mobility and people being able to stick and move and change what they're doing in the marketplace, Now if the American people don't keep up with that and if they're unwilling to move to places where the real estate is cheaper, then you are going to get more expensive real estate.

69:42Maybe you can build your way out of that, or maybe maybe you can't. But it used to be that if you if you had a problem with the housing prices in New York, you moved somewhere else.

69:50Yeah. You went to San Diego or something. You you pioneered, you know, a new area. And, well, I'm I'm seeing that amongst a lot of young people, and and they're getting the benefit. Let's talk about tariffs.

70:02And so we'll get into the more specific granular ones that we've been dealing with over the last ten days, but just big picture. Here's what's happened. It seems to be the Trump administration has done what they said they were going to do. And we'll talk about the ramifications of this, but tariff revenue was up to 30,000,000,000 in July, 127,000,000,000 so far in 2025. And obviously this is, you know, three months of data, basically, here's your chart.

70:28In June, the trade deficit shrank to 60,000,000,000 or so. And that's the lowest since June 2023. Now, by doing this, of course, inflation, which is a trailing indicator could pop up at any time, we've seen a small tick like 10% up in inflation. And if we cut rates in September, October, November time period, maybe 50 bps comes off this inflation is definitely going go up. People have more money, more investment goes around, we'll probably see a three handle again.

70:56So we're going to trade one for the other thoughts. And then here's your poly market. We made a poly market here on the pod and poly market is an official, is the official marketplace of the All In podcast. Shout out to my guy, Shane. Let's go next.

71:09How much revenue will The US raise from tariffs in 2025? Here's a poly market. And right now it's looking like the number is 200 to five hundred billion eighty 6% of people are believing that will be the case. And then here's ours. I had said, will tariffs generate greater than $250,000,000,000 in 2025, we're sitting around 15%.

71:31Maybe this is a free money in this poly market and that was when I created. Gentlemen, who has an opinion on the tariff policy and the revenue it's bringing in?

71:43Well, it's going to be hard to get to that number just because the tariffs only really kicked in middle of the year. You know, 30,000,000,000, that's $360,000,000,000 annualized, right, bang in the middle of the estimate. But you didn't have a lot for the first six months. Yeah. Maybe you hit the low end of that with 30 or 40,000,000,000 for the last six months, but, but we'll see.

72:04But for 02/1926, that does seem reasonable.

72:07$2.50, we're halfway there. We're at a 125, so we'll see if they can keep it up and then what the impact is. Phil, what are your thoughts on this tariff policy and the revenue it's bringing in? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

72:19I assume the president wouldn't the president say he already hit it because he got 500 from the Japanese?

72:26Reports have come out that that might the Japanese perceive that as a loan maybe, or they're going to invest in it. So maybe, and none of that has been officially papered. That was both sides in the EU deal were also handshakes. So let's keep that in mind. These things still have to be papered.

72:43And then there's this potential that tariff powers could reside in the house and and Trump will not be able to do any of this and it all gets reversed in our very polarizing time.

72:54So so I'm just gonna speak about the part of this that I have a little bit of understanding on. Let's say you tariff solar panels coming from the Chinese. You could do that for a variety of legitimate reasons, equalizing playing fields, etcetera, but you are, at the end of the day, increasing your energy costs. So to me, what I struggle with is globalization in throughout my lifetime has been a net plus to the world in The United States. We've now increasingly focused on supply chain security and at the expense of globalization.

73:34I don't know, and I'm not smart enough to know whether that's a long term or a good term good good trend. And so that's what I can't quite play out in my head. No.

73:45In fairness, nobody knows. This is a complete reversal of what we've done. Ben, your thoughts?

73:50Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a lot of triumphalism a little bit early on this policy. Yeah. Give it six months and and see where we're at. And I think one one of the indicators that's sort of fascinating is the lack of inflation because, obviously, a lot of people were expecting that inflation was gonna pop as soon as the tariffs kinda hit.

74:07And it hasn't been a lot of time, but one of the kind of problematic indicators is maybe inflation didn't pop because demand dropped. And so what you're actually watching is a temporary spike in the kinds of revenue that are coming in via the tariffs because it's it's almost a a onetime expenditure, and then the demand is gonna drop. And so what you will see is the the tariff revenue coming into the country go down, demand dropping, inflation coming down, and that's when you will see the Federal Reserve step in and lower those interest rates in order to sort of artificially juice the economy. Yeah. I'm I'm I I do not I understand, I I think, kind of what they're trying to do, sort of.

74:42I mean and I think they're trying to do multiple things at once. I'm in conflict with one another because you can you can champion the amount of revenue that we're raising off of tariffs, but you can't do that at the same time that you're championing reshoring. Because if you reshor, then that revenue is gonna go away presumably. Right? You're not gonna buy be buying product from overseas.

74:57You're gonna be buying product domestically, and then no one is gonna be shipping anything here in the first place. Those two things are eventually mutually exclusive. And and then if you're doing all of that while attempting to also, you know, either box in China simultaneously but kind of not box in China, it it seems very confounding. And the thing that that I'm getting from most of the investors that I'm talking to is just confusion at this point. It's just a feeling as though we're kind of riding in choppy waters, and there's no sort of stability or stasis.

75:23And so I'd like to see something something, anything kind of sit for a few months so we know what the hell is going

75:27is Trump so sure this is gonna work then in your mind? What what what's the, most charitable interpretation of this? Or is this, he's living in a different paradigm, one might say an older paradigm of manufacturing in The US.

75:43I mean, when it comes to president Trump and the economy, he's always been more of a zero sum thinker than a sort of than a sort of, you know, grow the pie thinker. And and so when he looks at tariffs, he says somebody's winning, somebody's losing. This is why his tariff rates are based on on trade deficits as opposed to actual tariff rates. Right? He was saying we're gonna do reciprocal tariffs.

76:01Then And we looked at that big board he was holding up, and it had literally nothing to do with the tariff rates that Vietnam had on The United States. It had to do with the trade deficit that we had with Vietnam. It's why we just hit the Swiss with a 39% tariff, and all they produce is, as Orson Welles famously says in in the third man is is cuckoo clocks. Like, what exactly are we doing here? It has nothing to do with the

76:21cocktails. Chocolate. I've never had

76:22chocolate, Swiss watches, and cuckoo clocks. Right?

76:25I think Swiss gets this made here if you have that cocoa. Your watch. Yeah. So, Phil, you're in the targets. You're the target.

76:31Yeah. Exactly. Not just in nailing the Swiss here, but is it but, you know, I I think that one one of the things that that he thinks is, okay. We're getting back what's what's fairly ours. We're we're forcing other countries, and you can see how other countries have picked up on this, which is why you're getting Japan saying, at least titularly, we're gonna put a bunch of money into The United States so he can get a headline and a win.

76:52But it's not a sort of systems approach to the economy. It's more of kind of an ad hoc approach to winning individual battles, and I think that that's maybe conducive to short term headlines. I think there are basically three systemic changes that he's making. Two of them are good, and one of them I I have a problem with. One of them is is ensuring low taxes, which, of course, I'm very much a fan of.

77:11The second is deregulation. Again, big fan. And I think both of those are pushing investors to to feel some sense of solidity with regards to his approach to business. And then the third is the tariff war, which I think is actually creating a pretty significant dampening effect on economic growth right now. And we'll say things like the stock market is at record highs.

77:28I mean, effectively, the S and P five hundred right now or the Dow well, the Dow Jones Industrial Average anyway, is currently riding at almost precisely what it was when he took office. I mean, we're essentially flat since since January. And so one way to look at that is look at all of the insanity or or or, you know, heterodoxy, to put it kindly, that's been inflicted on the economy, and we're still sort of flat. The other way to look at that is what if he hadn't done that? Where would we be if we weren't in the middle of a gigantic trade war and he had deregulated and he had done differential tax policy.

77:56Be ripping even more more jobs. I mean, he's

78:00He's also even more do this. Right? Steven Moore got up in that in that presser yesterday, and he held up a chart showing how president Trump's economy did in the first term versus Biden during his term. And he was saying that, you know, the the median wages were were exploding under you, and they weren't doing anything under Biden. I mean, I think there's a reason why it was not a chart for what's going on in in this term so much.

78:19He he that's the big difference between term one and term two. We did lower tax and deregulation. We did not do a gigantic historic trade war.

78:25Additionally, India was hit with a combined 50% tariff that's gonna take effect later this month, if it does. A lot of this is fluid. As, Ben says on his podcast a lot, Trump says a lot of things. That's kind of Ben's rule number one. Mine is always wait seventy two hours and see if it's still something he cares about.

78:4325% of that 50% tariff is for what Trump called unfair trade practices. I'm trying to figure out what those unfair trade practices are. It's not exactly specifically noted. And then 25%, this is super notable. And as you know, Trump, Ben and I, both the three of us all are in sync that hey, maybe Russia shouldn't invade democracies.

79:07So that is a punishment for India buying Russian oil, which is interesting that he's now basically taking the Biden playbook, which is, hey, we're going to provide arms on a loan lease, they're going to have to buy them to Ukraine, and we're going to start penalizing people for buying oil from Russia. I'm curious, Phil or Gavin, what you think of the tariffs overall confounding to you, you're in favor of them, you're willing to see what happens a year from now and what happens, Phil, if it doesn't work? What will this do to Trump's second term legacy if we're sitting here a year from now and it doesn't work? Or if we're sitting here conversely a year from now and hey, he's printing money and we're getting all this incredible investment and maybe some of this money goes to pay down the deficit or we're neutral, which is kind of their overall plan. They think these tariffs can help us become neutral in our deficit accumulation.

80:04I'm clearly not a tariff expert, but I would say he does I think one thing about these tariffs this goes to David's point on government and socialism. Seeing a a president take action in a way that's never been done before, whether it's Doge or tariffs or tweeting, I think does even for a diehard Democrat like me, it's refreshing, and it and, David, maybe it goes to show that the inevitable creep of government doesn't have to happen. And so even from a republican, I find that part refreshing. It's a refreshing thing to say. The flip side of it is he does seem to sometimes it seems like there's spaghetti being thrown against the wall or positions are reversed very quickly, and we don't know what the long term effects you say, Jason, of course, we don't know, but there are a lot of people, some of your cohosts, who don't aren't willing to concede.

81:02We don't know. And if he's wrong and if the economy is in terrible shape in the latter part of his term, the whole world's gonna be upside down. I mean, Gavin, I almost think of it as like, you know, an out of consensus view on where this stock could end. I mean, if if we have low stock market, high unemployment, high inflation, then things don't look as good for JD or or, Rubio, and we'll be in a different world. I hope, David, not in a world of socialism, but that's what's at stake here, I think, Jason.

81:37If if it doesn't work out, then

81:40Handicap it. Chances it works out, you know, chances it doesn't. Give me a percentage, Phil. And then Gavin, you're giving the percentages. I mean,

81:47I guess I'm gonna say fifty fifty, which sounds wimpy, but it's pretty damn scary that it's fifty fifty on such big things. I I just don't know what the unintended consequences are. I'm just not smart enough to see it.

81:59Well, Gavin, your thoughts? I mean, we are in uncharted territory. We haven't had a tariff war like this in, I don't know, fifty, a hundred years. I don't when was the last one? Well, I'm sure Ben knows, but Gavin is probably It's

82:10actually a higher average tariff rate than Smoot Hawley now. So more than a hundred years.

82:13Yeah. A hundred years. So to say we're in uncharted territory, there's nobody on the planet who was an adult when that happened. So we are literally, we have nobody with firsthand experience here. Gavin, chances this blows up, chances it is brilliant.

82:27Handicap it on a percentage basis, you're being forced.

82:30I would all in.

82:31You gotta you gotta you gotta state of specific. I'm not letting you off the hook.

82:35Predicting the economy is a really hard thing to do. I would just say he showed his hand in April. You know, he looked into the abyss. And if it is clearly not working, he showed that he will change it. And then I think he also kind of learned, you know, just that other countries, you know, specifically China, they do have leverage, especially with these rare earths.

82:56I just worry that, you know, business, capitalism, economic growth, it does best with stable policy. And I think he really enjoys headlines. And something is definitely not a headline unless it's a change. And so I do think for this to be a success, you know, his presidency to be a success, at some point, we do need stability. And this goes to, you know, you know, what Phil is saying.

83:29This goes to my point about it's better to have an imperial president than imperial judiciary. If his policies work, great. They'll be continued. If they don't work, well, we'll we'll try something else.

83:39So what do you think? Fifty fifty? Are you in the fifty fifty camp? This is gonna work, not work? Coin toss for you?

83:44I think he's I am inclined to think that he is much more sensitive to the market than he lets

83:55on. Back. I mean, I don't wanna do the taco thing because I think that's used to provoke him.

84:00For sure.

84:01And that's not smart to do with him. For sure. I think just to say he is thoughtful. I'm gonna say he's He's flexible. He's responsible.

84:09He's He's thoughtful about the market reaction.

84:12He's responsive. If it's not working, he will change. Just the question is, if it's not working, does he change quickly enough?

84:20Got it. So you're speeding down this highway. Can you not go off the cliff? Is there enough room to break? Freiburg, your thoughts on this?

84:27I'm gonna wrap there and then we'll go on to our next topic. Give I'll you a final word, Friedberg.

84:30I've spoken a lot on tariffs.

84:31I'm good. You're good? So what is your general sense of the state of it now? It feels like we're in the end game. And then there was one thing actually I'll bring up Friedberg, get your reaction to.

84:42He did say when he was giving his keynote two weeks ago, I don't if you guys saw it, the one where he thanked me. I don't know if you saw the one where he thanked me in this Eddie,

84:52thank you by name, name,

84:55Even and even Jason Kalakanis, a good guy. A good guy. Meant a lot to my my parents. So I'll give him credit there. He knows how to work the room.

85:03Can I say one last thing on tariffs? Sure. I think it's actually good as a country that we are trying them. Whether they work or not, it will just be nice to know. You know?

85:13And it's

85:13A nice experiment.

85:14Tariffs were traditionally a democratic policy position. You know? Clinton ran on them. Obama ran on them to maybe a slightly lesser degree. They're generally talked out of them by kind of, you know, their treasury secretary who generally came from Wall Street.

85:26But, you know, they've been an animating feature of political discourse for thirty or forty years. Now we're trying them. We're gonna see if they work. We're gonna see if they don't work. I would say thus far, probably they have been less damaging than a lot of people expected.

85:41You know, the the core of kind of why you don't wanna do tariffs is, you know, that retaliation was expected. We have not seen retaliation, which I think in some ways, you know, validates some of their points of views just that we do have a lot of leverage and we are using it. And other countries are charging America much higher tariffs than we're charging them. You know, maybe that made sense fifty years ago.

86:00So maybe we're hitting reciprocity, which we could all agree on, but he's not abusing them, which shows that the American consumer and the American market is worth, you know, maybe getting to reciprocity.

86:12The funny thing about reciprocity, it sounds good to everyone, but the whole principle of comparative advantage is maybe you don't want reciprocal tariffs. But nonetheless, we're trying them. We're gonna see. The early returns have been, I think, less damaging than people would have expected because maybe he backed off some of the more extreme things because he is flexible. So we'll see.

86:29Come back in a year, come back in eighteen months, and one way or another, we'll have run this experiment.

86:33Friedberg, did you notice in that speech he gave, he said, I don't need to know the hundred and eightieth country. Maybe we just you know, it's it's the top companies we need to worry about. I I kinda felt like I don't know if you caught that in his talk, Dave, where he said, I don't even know the name of the company or the country. Maybe I don't even know the name of it. Okay.

86:51So maybe we don't need to worry about the tariff. That to me seemed like he was signaling an endgame. Like maybe he's, I don't know, I don't wanna say bored, but he's, you know, he's he's milked this one as far as as he needs to. What do you think? Did you notice that quote he did?

87:08Like I've said in the past, he's proven, which is his game theory optimal way of negotiating to be unpredictable. So I'm not gonna sit here and predict.

87:19Okay.

87:20Okay. I think there's a lot of gamesmanship going on that we're not privy to. And, again, let's see what happens. I do I do like running the experiment. I like running experiments in general.

87:31I would love to reduce taxation, direct taxation on the American people, but I would also like to reduce the size of government. The thing I most worry about with respect to tariffs is if it does create a new revenue source for the federal government, it gives the federal government another crutch to keep spending up.

87:47Yeah. I'm a wealth fund. Here we come. A little slush fund there. Alright.

87:51Speaking of trade, NVIDIA GPUs are getting smuggled into China at an alarming pace according to reports. On Tuesday, the DOJ arrested two Chinese nationals in California, accusing them of illegally sending tens of millions of dollars worth of GPUs to China, which actually isn't that many. The press release didn't name an h one hundreds from Nvidia, but they mentioned they were shipping the most powerful GPU chip on the market. So fill in the blank. The two were charged with violating the Export Control Reform Act, a felony with a max penalty of twenty years in jail.

88:24One was a legal permanent resident, the other was an illegal immigrant who overstayed their visa. Here's how the scheme worked. They operated a US based company called ALX Solutions. They would buy GPUs in The US, ship them to Singapore. I think Chamath pointed this out back in the day.

88:39On this podcast, got a little pushback on it in Malaysia. They were shipped to Malaysia as well, where they would be rerouted quite easily to China according to the DOJ. The rerouting through countries is common when smuggling chips to China. Despite sending the chips to Singapore, ALX was getting paid from Hong Kong and Chinese based companies. These guys aren't the sharpest knives in the draw.

89:00Financial Times reported at least $1,000,000,000 worth of NVIDIA chips have been smuggled into China in the China in the past three months after president Trump tightened The US export controls. Feet says there is a rampant black market for these GPUs in China, and they go for a 50% premium. Gavin, you're in the chip business. Your take?

89:21So a couple of things. One, I think it's gonna be hard to stop it. You know, we can't keep illegal drugs out of America, and we're trying really, really hard to keep them out. China is doing everything they can to bring these chips in. Yeah.

89:33So it's when something is so valuable and so important, it's hard to stop it completely. But secondarily, I'd just say a billion dollars worth of GPUs. It's not enough to really move the the needle, you know, even if they are black wells, the latest and greatest. You know, it's better than having none if you're China. But, I mean, it's just you know, it's not like a $1,020,000,000,000 dollar black belt cluster like are being stood up all over America by hyperscalers.

90:02So I think it's gonna be hard to stop. I think it's happening at a scale that is

90:08It's not comparable to Colossus.

90:10Yeah. It's not comparable to Colossus. So it's just it's not gonna be decisive in this, you know, AI, you know, race that certainly China believes we are in. And then, like I said, last time I was on, I do think it was very smart to resume the H20s and whatever they're going to call the kind of despec black while letting them be sold into China. And hopefully that, you know, the theory is if you legalize drugs, it reduces, you know, the illegal drugs trade of exactly

90:43what we're doing here. We're not sending them our best. Sending them the high potency stuff.

90:49It's actually a hilarious analogy. It is literally like the H20 or the B50 or whatever it called. It's like the it's like legalized Yes, exactly. Here's funny little gram gummy. Yeah.

91:01So I just think it is what it is. I think you'll see these articles and it's going to be hard to stop, but I don't I don't think it's all that dispositive.

91:09Yeah. And not not a anybody else have thoughts on it? Seems like a minor story. Alright. We'll end on this.

91:14Apple has bought back. Let this sink in. $700,000,000,000 worth of shares over the past decade. And the most innovative product in my mind that they've released in that time are AirPods. Maybe they're M4 chips.

91:31This user on Twitter, Charlie Bill Bellello. Oh, you know him. He tweeted this crazy chart here. We'll pull it up. Here it is.

91:45Apple buybacks start, Apple shares outstanding. You get the picture. They've bought back almost a trillion dollars. Let that sink in a trillion dollars. It's at 700,000,000,000 now and it's not stopping.

91:57That's larger than the market cap of all but 12 companies in the S and P 500. I famously, or notably said maybe ten years ago, Apple should buy Tesla for $5,075,000,000,000 back when Tesla was in of dire straits and that was three times more than the next closest company Google bought back 190,000,000,000. For that money, they could have bought Disney for 150,000,000,000, Netflix 150,000,000,000, Tesla for 100,000,000,000 in 2020, Uber for 100,000,000,000 in 2021, Robin Hood for under 10,000,000,000 in 2022, and BMW. Steve Jobs' favorite car company for 70,000,000,000 in 2020, they're still at 120,000,000,000 left over. What would have been the better move there to do all these buybacks, Gavin as a public market investor or to invest in R and D and actually release a car?

92:44They had project Titan. Gavin, what do you think of this Apple strategy?

92:50Well, I mean, as an investor, buybacks are great. And I think there's often a false dichotomy made between buybacks and R and D. I mean, Apple certainly could have afforded to do both. And, you know, maybe it would have been better. You know, what was the status?

93:07A trillion dollars? You know, maybe they should have bought $700,000,000,000

93:10instead Well, with of 700,000,000,000, it's trending towards

93:12Okay. Okay. So maybe they should have spent 200,000,000,000 less and spit that out data centers and been like a real competitor in AI. And I just continue to be baffled by Apple's. And I think they're very comfortable being late to markets.

93:30The iPhone was not the first smartphone. You know? The, you know, the iPad was not the first, you know, it was the first

93:37Tablet.

93:38Yeah. It would be the You know, there the PalmPilot. There are all those devices from kind of the, you know, the bubble. But I'm just shocked at their inaction and inaptitude in AI, how bad the products are from a user perspective. I mean, they're they're terrible.

93:56They're getting worse. Siri's worse.

93:59Serious worse. And it's just How is that possible? Yeah. I mean, it almost, you know, I I guess at the limit and, you know, malice is incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. But, I mean, it almost feels like they're trying to lose.

94:15Literally, if you said here's a playbook on how to lose, they would have written it. Yeah. They would have thought it was a joke. Right? Yeah.

94:21Yeah. So it's astonishing to me their lack of execution on

94:26Well, let's see what happens. I mean, if you put if you put Tim Cook in charge and he's a supply chain guy, he's gonna do the optimal thing for for for that. Ben, your thoughts on it?

94:36Yeah. I mean, I'm with you guys. I'm I'm waiting to see when are they gonna make something cool again. I'm I'm just an ignoramus on this stuff, and it's like the last time I saw something that came out from Apple that was exciting. It's been many years since they brought out anything that excites me as a consumer.

94:50Yeah. And so I'm I'm looking at that, and then the only headlines I see are Tim Cook trying to cut a deal with the president to, again, sort of shore up his own supply chain. So if he's a supply chain guy, then I guess that that's his mandate is to shore up the supply chain with the president of The United States vis a vis the the iPhone. But, yeah, if that's the best you're gonna do, then I don't know. Things things don't look great over there from the outside.

95:10Phil, any thoughts on Apple and their ineptitude time for Tim Cook to start thinking about hanging it up maybe and put a product person in charge?

95:21Not by area, Jason. Not by area. I'm gonna pass that one.

95:24I would say I do think in fairness, I it would shock me if they do not have the best augmented reality glasses on the market in three or four years. It's so placed to their strengths. And maybe they're they feel like that is what they're focused on. And eventually, you know, they'll cut a punishment.

95:41When's last time you heard them bring it up, though, Friedberg? When's the last time Apple Vision was even brought up in a keynote or you saw a demo? They seem Those to

95:50are VR, not AR. Like I think

95:52Well, there VR never eventuality is to be AR, right? You can turn them on to see through them, I guess. But yeah, I mean, and that's actually an interesting point, Gavin, is you and I are sitting here like, is it AR or VR? Because you you know, they're just not talking about it. You're where's the version two for developers?

96:09Go ahead, Jack.

96:09Rumors of Apple's demise are thirty years old. Okay. This is every year, the same story, lack of innovation, copycatting. Where is it? The iPad came

96:20out everywhere. Somebody said that under Steve Jobs, that there was a lack of innovation when Steve Jobs was running the show?

96:25Even during the no jobs era when the iPad came out, I don't know if you remember how controversial it was. They were making fun of jobs. He's lost his luster. What is going on with this guy? Total flop.

96:35They used to they they made fun of the iPad. They called it, like, the MaxiPad or something. You know? Remember all that stuff? It was like this thing.

96:40Like, who the hell

96:41is gonna use this thing? It's a total disaster. All of a sudden, they sold 10,000,000 units, then a 100,000,000 units, and everyone's like, holy shit. Would not count Apple out. There's a system there that's built unlike any other in corporate history.

96:54Let's see what happens.

96:56Yeah. I think that's right. They have every right and ability to win. They just they need to start trying.

97:03I mean, the fact that you're not even in the running and they're losing talent. They're losing talent.

97:09I I tried the Apple Vision in February 2024, and that's literally the last time that I've tried it. Like, there was that hot moment where everybody's like, let's try this thing out. And it's like, this is pretty cool. And then you're like, yeah. But I'm also wearing a medieval helmet on my It's gotta be

97:23and we all

97:23agree it's gotta be sunglasses. I got the, I bought the Ray Bans from Meta, and I used them on my recent trip to New York and it was quite compelling to wear them and live stream or to wear them and take pictures of the kids and video, we took the ferries, it's a really nice ferry system in New York now that they've kind of brought back. And we took the ferry around the island and did a couple of things. It was just really nice to not have people pose when you're doing a video. If you have kids, I think it's the must have product because it's so elegant to just boop.

97:54And then if you look at something, it will tell you what it is. So the AI plus these glasses is gonna be phenomenal for when you're looking at a monument and you say, hey, tell me about Ellis Island. Tell me about Governors Island. It just starts reading you facts. I think it could be magical, but

98:09Jason Yeah. Jason, one thing one thing is, like, if you take your ranch, you may have, like, a backup generator, solar, Powerwall, EV Everything. Grid, everything. Eventually, someone's gonna wanna control all that, make it easy for you to control, aggregate it. There's gonna be a whole infrastructure in The US on this, and that's something you could see Apple coming to.

98:32Absolutely. Apple Home. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a brilliant one.

98:37I I I don't know if you saw this. You must have felt. There are smart panels, circuit breakers. Have you seen these? Where you put it in and you take out a nap and each of your breakers is in the app and you can see breaker by breaker, your energy consumption, you could turn them on and off.

98:52I mean, it felt to me like something that should be in the Apple wheelhouse as well as Sonos, but they just don't like to buy stuff. Right?

98:59Well, one thing is, like, you take the number of cars that are gonna be in the country, the electric EVs, and then you multiply them to say there's gonna be, let's say, I think the estimate is in twenty thirty, 30,000,000 electric vehicles, let's say. Yeah. And they're 80 to 200 kWh in them, Friedberg. That is something like 2,400 to 3,300 gigawatts of storage that's moving. And if you add autonomy to that, that is a lot of flexible distributed power.

99:35And so, whoever controls and thinks about that is gonna make a ton of money.

99:40So you're saying you could take a fleet of a thousand Cybertrucks and send them to a natural disaster, plug them in and power a city or power some homes, which is how that is constructed currently. You can use your actual cyber truck to feed into your home and keep it awake for a couple of hours.

99:57Right. Maybe in the short term, just think about the parking lot of meta. Like, you know, having all those cars there, what you charge, discharge. The control of that, the management of it, the operating system, if you will, of that will be very valuable.

100:09Alright. We're gonna end on this summer reading. Everybody likes to read a book in the summer, I'm assuming, and one of us likes to write a book this summer. Anybody got a book they read in over the summer or a series they consumed for our dear audience? Ben, you got a you got a show or a a book that you're that you're obsessed with?

100:29We can do, we can do a show. I I I'm trying to remember what's in

100:33musical for Ben. I know you love your musicals.

100:36I I do. Although none no good ones have come out recently, which is unfortunate. But, shows have you have you guys seen this department q show on, on Netflix?

100:45No. Kevin's not enjoying it.

100:48It's it's a fun one.

100:49Don't it's called department q?

100:51Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Seven? No.

100:53It's it's like a a sort of Cold detective. Yeah. Cold cases. Exactly. And it's it's well written, and it's a fun show.

101:00I'm I'm enjoying that one. Like I that one.

101:03Books, Gavin, on your shelf that you, decided to break open at the beach while you're working, or you're just too busy?

101:08No. I am, enjoying I like post apocalyptic fantasy. Okay. Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen, but a but a new a relatively new series is called Moonfall by James Rollins, and I'm enjoying it. I will just say it's a slow start like a lot of great fantasy and science fiction where you have to do a lot of world building, but I've enjoyed it.

101:28You ever think about writing your own, sci fi fantasy? You ever dabble?

101:32Idly, but I have yet to dabble.

101:36Friedberg, anything on your plate other than running Oh Hollow and doing these incredible all in events? You look exhausted, my brother, and babies. Got a lot on your plate. I I wonder if you had the time to read a book or watch a series. I've been reading

101:48because I never read it, the Andy Weir project hail Mary book. Oh, great. Yeah.

101:53It's awesome. I So good.

101:54I I am, disappointed.

101:56I like Andy Weir. Interviewed Andy Weir. Yeah.

101:58Yeah. Halfway through, I got disappointed with one of the core assumptions for we'll discuss another day. But

102:05I give you permission Yeah. To just go with it. It's it's fake.

102:08Well, I think this whole idea that this alien race all died in the spaceship from radiation sickness when they're so advanced they have spaceships, but they don't understand that there's radiation in space. But they

102:19Took it right out of the story.

102:20It it just blew the whole the whole story line up for me, and I'm like, what? That doesn't make it like and and then it traces back to all these other things that they do understand, which inherent in all of them would have been an understanding of photons and electromagnetic energy. So that that kind of blew me up a little bit. Gavin, I don't know if you agree, but

102:37I was I was happy to suspend disbelief. Yeah. Because I do like Andy Ware.

102:42Yeah. I like Andy Weir. He's a cool cat. I literally, when he was doing The Martian, I asked him to be on this weekend startups, like, years ago. And he's like, yeah.

102:51If you come down to my condo in, like, San Die not San Diego, in, like, San Jose or somewhere in the South Bay. Literally he's got this like little modest thing. And then he's like, I just sold it. And you know, it's gonna be like a major actor is gonna be in The Martian. But he was broke, but everybody in our industry was talking about it.

103:10It was really, really charming. And he's like, I I think think I'm gonna move to LA. Was like, Oh, totally should move to LA. They'll be buying everything you do. They love sci fi.

103:17Your shit's brilliant. And sure enough, here we are. Phil Deutsch, your thoughts? And by the way, Phil Deutsch, when I go on a plane ride with Phil, he's got six newspapers with him.

103:29You gotta read the paper every day. Every day. I mean, four papers.

103:32Five minimum a day. He's like the Charlie Rose of Gavinder. Could have consumption.

103:37Gavinder says, I'm in Truro, which is the middle of nowhere. And there's so few papers out here. I have to get up at five to go to the Cumberland Farms to get the FD, the Journal of the Times, before anyone else does. So I love reading newspapers. I'm a newspaper boy.

103:51Read papers. I late to, but just finished the Musk book, which was phenomenal. I thought The biography?

104:01The Ithacin one?

104:03Yeah. I know I'm late, but it was great. I'm reading a book on the making of the King James Bible, which I is a tough slog, but well worth it to sound pretentious and smart. I watched Superman, which I highly recommend Ben Shapiro's review of because he's got it dead on.

104:23What did you say, Ben? Well, no. Give us a a teaser. Well, people will look it up later. You didn't like it.

104:27Why didn't you like it? Too woke or you didn't like any Gaza or Ukraine kind of references from China?

104:33I I thought I I didn't think any of that stuff was there, honestly. I just thought it was super meh. Like, it was the whole thing is just it's it's James Gunn being very, very James Gunn. And as somebody who likes sort of the legend of Superman, you know, the the sort of grandeur of Superman as part of the American iconic landscape, that kind of reduction of Superman to slapstick comedy surrounded by a bunch of other characters who I don't care about, and then just kind of there there's a part where it just turns into James Gunn doing Guardians of the Galaxy, but with iconic characters.

105:00A little derivative, I will say. My kids loved it, though, which I was happy about. Continue film.

105:05Then this is a tough one because it was a fun date night, but f one, I thought, was a little b plus ish. Could've been better. And then my winners, I thought the penguin was fantastic.

105:17Oh. The

105:18series. And

105:19dope thief

105:19is very good too.

105:22Ah. Ah. I would just add second season of 1923, I think also very good.

105:28Will give you

105:29Oh, interesting. Interesting.

105:31I I used to be in the magazine business. I haven't subscribed to a magazine in well over a decade per you know? And I just subscribed to monocle.com, which is a bunch of, like, designers. And they you know, it's like literally they have a print newspaper they put out once over the summer and then they actually have a bound magazine, but it's an incredible, incredibly curated look at the world of design, hotels, restaurants, art, fashion, and it's kind of uncompromising. They're just like, hey, we just like things that are incredibly well thought out.

106:04And I have started taking some of the recommendations and they don't miss monocle.com. And you guys know I love biographies and I went biography crazy this summer. All About Me by Mel Brooks. Amazing. And he reads it.

106:20So a great audiobook. I'm almost finished with Who Knew by Barry Diller, who at like Yeah, 24

106:27that's great.

106:28It's incredible. Did you read it yet?

106:31I love to talk

106:31to him.

106:32You know, was a little skinned, plus I heard him talk about it.

106:34Because Oh, you've yeah. You know him. I met him one His career is unlike anybody else's. It's like twenty four or twenty five, he's running Paramount pictures. And then the bench he has there is like he hires Eisner, Katzenberg as his assistant.

106:49It's the most amazing story of young people running amok, running these media businesses. We have to do a Barry Diller interview for All In.

106:57That'd be awesome.

106:59That'd be

107:00incredible. Samurai. Did he do Godfather two, Jason?

107:03Wasn't he? He did Godfather two. Yes. And he he basically took over for Bob Evans. And if you ever see the documentary, the kid stays in the picture or that

107:10That's great.

107:11He's in both of them are incredible. Comedy Samurai by Larry Charles, I just finished a couple of weeks ago. And that's the was the guy who did Borat. And what was the gay character that Sacha Baron Cohen did? Bruno.

107:29Bruno. Bruno. And he also collaborated with Larry David. And then finally, my fourth pick for bios of the summer, I regret almost everything by Keith McNally, who is the restaurateur. He had a stroke.

107:43He has an Instagram where he's like pretty spicy and he did Balthazar, Pastis, Odeon, all these incredibly iconic places that in my youth I hung out in and to hear him do It's the most self deprecating sort of British tradition biography ever. So I love biography, so many lessons in there. If you're young entrepreneur, highly recommend all those. Would love to have all those people on the pod. It's been an amazing summer episode.

108:09I really appreciate y'all taking the time out of your schedule. Bette, are you gonna come to All In Summit in September? You're our guest. We gotta have you there. Come out.

108:18Oh, yeah. I'd love to see if we can make it. That'd be awesome.

108:19Seven, eighth, or ninth. Bring the wife. I don't know. I don't how old the kids are, but we'll get you backstage. We'll give you the VIP pass, the whole treatment.

108:27Okay?

108:27I don't think you want my 11, nine, five, and two year old there, but yes.

108:30No. They can't come. No. But actually, I take it back. We have a surprise for one of the parties that they would love to come to, but I'm gonna leave it at that because Dave hasn't given up.

108:40Dave loves doing the parties and he has a blowout spectacular party that will be unrivaled. Scholarships are open. If you're young and a fan of all in or young in your career, I should say, and you can't afford the normal ticket, we let a select group of up and comers buy a discounted ticket so we keep the vibes really fresh and we like to have as many people as possible. So go to the website and you can apply. Don't apply if you can afford the ticket because we would like to give it to people who really can't and those scholarships are there.

109:13You'll hear in a week typically because we had so many scholarship requests. It takes us a little while to get through them. Shout out to the team, Kimber and John Hale and the whole team over there, Nick, for putting so much into the amazing, amazing all in summit. And yeah, thanks to my friend for sending me my new Dave is freaked out

109:32right now.

109:33That shot, Nick. It's not even funny anymore. Just bleep it out.

109:36See you

109:36next time on the number one podcast in the world after Ben Shapiro's. Love you, besties.

109:40Thanks, everybody. Bye, guys.

109:44We'll let your winners ride.

109:47Rain man David Sack.

109:51And it said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet