00:00:00
I just want to let Freeberg know. He told me to stop taking my nicotine pouches because I had brought too much energy. Freeberg, you see what I got
00:00:06
here? Nick, blur that out. See what I got? We're not doing We're not doing promotions. We're not doing any of these promotions.
00:00:13
What you need to know is he sent me my own flavors. Jason, just so the rest of you guys know,
00:00:18
Jason's trying to get paid side hustle. I have no He's trying to turn the show into an infomercial and he's trying to
00:00:24
get paid personally. I'm selling this on eBay. If anyone wants to know about eBay site,
00:00:31
[Music] we'll let your winners ride.
00:00:36
[Music] We open source it to the fans and
00:00:42
they've just gone crazy with it.
00:00:48
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, Be Allin Podcast. And we were supposed to
00:00:53
take off this week, but no, your independent moderate moderator said no.
00:01:00
Scrati taking a week off. No weeks off. So I told my besties, "We're out
00:01:06
gallivanting. We're doing a show on Friday with or without you all. Of
00:01:12
course, David Freeberg showed up. How you doing, Davey?" I'm here.
00:01:17
You're here? I'm here. But you weren't going to come at first. You were a little frustrated that the other boys took the week off.
00:01:22
I was annoyed. We were going to record yesterday. Yes. I had gotten a docket, which we're
00:01:28
supposed to do. What are we going to talk about? I read it. I mentally prepared. I drank some coffee. I get dressed in a t-shirt and I
00:01:35
get in front of my computer. And then your co-hosts bail. And they're like, "I can't talk to your co-host,
00:01:40
too. I can't. I'm in this country. I can't. I'm on this boat." And um how many hours slash minutes of notice
00:01:47
did they give us? Oh, it was like 5 minutes before we were supposed to record. It was 90 minutes before. 90 minutes
00:01:53
before the show. That's true professionalism. But Freeberg, a consmate professional, is here. And we've got a full docket for everybody
00:01:59
also with us. My god. Gavin Baker is here. He's at the beach, I'm sure,
00:02:07
enjoying a little recreation. But you decided, hey, let me get in here, help Jay Cow. Let's lock the show down, take
00:02:15
a little time out from the beach, and do an episode of Allin. Thank you for doing that, Gavin. Always happy to help. I should say that
00:02:21
I'm working hard at the beach. I mean, it was supposed to be an easy breezy summer. We had like a busy couple
00:02:28
years, but we're post election. Everything was supposed to slow down. We get into a groove. It's never been busier, right?
00:02:35
Uh well, we're just we're in the still in the thick of public company earnings,
00:02:40
right? Which is always busy. Yeah. And of course uh for those who don't know Gavin is the managing partner
00:02:46
and CIO of a treaties. He invests in private companies, public companies or just public uh public and private public
00:02:53
and private. So that makes you a crossover fund. with us as well today,
00:02:59
my guy, fellow broadcaster Ben Shapiro, host of the Ben Shapiro
00:03:04
show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, which uh gosh, makes a mountain of
00:03:10
money, and has a new book coming out in September. Lions and Scavengers, the
00:03:15
true story of America and her critics. You gendered America, Ben, in your
00:03:20
subtitle. A bold move. What's the book about and why are you writing it? Uh so so basically the the concept of the book
00:03:26
is that we're watching civilization break down between people who want to build and people who want to tear down and and you saw that pretty clearly I
00:03:32
think in the last election cycle but you're seeing it all over the world. You know people who actually are innovators people who want to build social fabric
00:03:38
people who want to defend the civilization then people who are interested in getting rid of borders people who want to destroy businesses
00:03:44
people who are not interested in the foundations of western civilization and see them as fundamentally bad. So that it's really that contrast
00:03:50
and see I knew that you had something you wanted to say because the book business for a podcast or especially one
00:03:57
as successful as you are now you know right behind us number two in the rankings there I kid he's ahead of us
00:04:02
thing but we're manifesting we're right there right with Ben Shapiro and true crime that's your and Bill Simmons so
00:04:09
NBA true crime Ben and us but writing a book is a net loser in terms of your
00:04:16
productivity and time when compared to doing your daily show and all the other things the Daily Wire does. Yeah.
00:04:23
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it started off because I honestly things have been so pathetic lately that I became pathetic
00:04:28
and started journaling uh which is not a thing that they really should do. And as I was uh traveling around and going to
00:04:34
like Oxford University a month after October 7th and debating people who were telling me about how October 7th was
00:04:39
fine and dandy, I just was keeping almost a diary of of what that was like. And so part of the book is is that it's
00:04:46
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
00:04:51
felt like uh you know, putting it out there. It's interesting. You, if I'm reading into this correct, you probably had some
00:04:59
dismay, anxiety, whatever, hand ringing over the state of affairs, decided to use journaling just to get it out of the
00:05:07
system. Hey, no shame in the journaling game, Ben. I think it's fine. You know, better than popping some pills. But
00:05:13
it's in a trapper keeper with it's got like a little heart lock. Oh, you went with the trapper keeper. You went with my little pony trapper
00:05:18
keeper. So, just like when you were in high school. Oh, that's exactly. But yeah, you get it out of the system. I too have been journaling and
00:05:23
meditating because just making sense of the world as Gen Xers here, all of us. I think
00:05:30
you're a Gen Xer. Maybe you're a millennial. You're you're on the bubble, I think, Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just weird to see everything be
00:05:36
topsyturvy. And rounding out the fivesome here today, we got a full compliment. My guy Phil Deutsch from
00:05:44
NGP, Energy Technology Partners. This is the smartest guy I know when it
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comes to energy. He's my rabbi. When I have a question about energy, I just text him. He explains to me why I'm
00:05:57
right about solar batteries being better than clean coal. But we'll find out today. We're going to do a deep dive in
00:06:02
energy. Phil Deutsch also with a PC that Chimath would be in awe of today
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and you come from we call him deep state Deutsch because he comes from a family
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of politicians. Yeah, Phil. Government employees I think is better than politicians or public servants
00:06:21
would be more public servants 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
00:06:27
in here, Freeberg's been working really hard on the all-in summit. Everybody join us.
00:06:33
Look at this lineup that we put together. Mostly Freeberg and I. The CEO of Eli Lily, Dave Ricks, Alibaba's
00:06:40
co-founder Joe Sai also owns the Nets. My guy Dra from Uber with the $200
00:06:46
billion market cap. We got the ARM CEO Renee Circles co-founder Jeremy Alair.
00:06:51
Zipline's CEO Keller. That's a $5 billion company really doing cool stuff.
00:06:56
Toma Bravo, co-founder Orlando, Sequoas Rolof Botha, my guy, Kathy Wood, and
00:07:03
science YouTuber Cleo Abram. One of your favorites, Freeberg. You got you got a little friend in the science uh
00:07:10
broadcasting game now. And we're going to have a there's a lot of big announcements still to come. Other names, we're saving
00:07:17
other names for the days leading up. Some of them will still be secret and some will still be secret. So go to
00:07:24
allin.com/summit or allin.com/yatta yatta yada and uh yeah get your tequila
00:07:29
tequila.allin.com. All right, chat GPT5 just broke. Large language models continue to drop just
00:07:36
four weeks after Grock 4 Gavin took the crown. Uh friend of the pod Sammy the
00:07:42
Bull Alman dropped GPT5 and uh two openweight models. They're not open
00:07:47
source. We'll get Gavin's thoughts on that in a minute. It was a bit underwhelming. I'm assuming you all saw
00:07:52
it, gentlemen. And a little bit of a messy presentation for GPT5 yesterday. This wasn't like your classic Steve Jobs
00:07:59
keynote. The charts were flat and wrong. Miscalculations, typos, all kinds of stuff. Uh, but the model did top some
00:08:05
leaderboards in fairness in the chatbot arena, but many people were disappointed. Said the performance was
00:08:11
underwhelming and especially since when chat chatbt 4.0 came out and obviously 3.5. These
00:08:17
were major jumps. So, and and part of it might have been Sam not managing the hype. He tweeted, "Fellow Star Wars fan
00:08:24
Ben Shapiro will get a kick out of this." He uh tweeted the Death Star. I
00:08:30
think this is a Rogue One shot where the Death Star is coming up. And uh don't get triggered, Ben. I don't want you to
00:08:36
get into a sequels rant, but you loved Rogue One, correct, Ben? I did like Rogue One. Rogue One is good.
00:08:42
Rogue One, it's exceptional. Exceptional. Rogue One. Rogue one is like the last good Star Wars movie that's been made.
00:08:49
Okay, so let's do it. Empire Strikes Back is my number one. Then Revenge of the Cis, then Rogue One. What do you
00:08:54
got, Ben? Who's your top three? Oh, I mean I I go Empire and then New Hope as everyone should
00:08:59
and then New Hope and then probably Rogue One. Wow. Okay. I like Rogue One a lot. I think it's
00:09:05
really good. Me, too. It's a perfect film. Gavin, 100% agree with Ben, but Empire Strikes
00:09:10
Back is just so much better than all of the others. Yes. Yeah. Freick, what do you got in your ranking? I know you're going to rank. I
00:09:15
remain adamant in my point of view that the entire Star Wars franchise is built around an anti-technology,
00:09:22
anti-utopian view of the world, anti-progress, and um the Death Star is
00:09:27
the ultimate manifestation of technology. And of course, it's used for evil. That's kind of the main message of
00:09:33
the the the series. Wow. Way to bring the show down, Dave. Way to ruin all our childhoods. I did
00:09:40
like the last one. We just had a Gen X moment. He's like, "Yeah, I did like the last one though."
00:09:46
I'm terrified to ask you who you think of like The Wizard of Oz, but uh I'm going to go with the original. It was a dystopian gender
00:09:54
take on Free Will. That was the first uh Epstein Island.
00:09:59
Uh the original Jake, I remember my mom taking it to me when I was a kid. It was awesome. So, I'm going number one.
00:10:04
Number one. Okay, there you go. And so, anyway, Sam did this tweet. It kind of built a lot of expectation that this would be like
00:10:10
otherworldly. It wasn't. Anybody get a chance before we go on to the open uh models or the open weight models I
00:10:17
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 trrow of despair
00:10:24
or maybe diminishing returns in the LLM space where maybe it's feeling incremental, not
00:10:31
like groundbreaking when we release these iterations? Maybe for OpenAI,
00:10:37
but if you look at Gro 4 versus Gro 3, that was a pretty giant leap. And I
00:10:42
think what was surprising to me is this is the first time that you know OpenAI
00:10:47
has released a new model that was not decisively the best. Here's Gro 3. It
00:10:52
comes out. It's it's the purple line. This is in this is artificial analysis
00:10:57
and then you know shortly thereafter maybe 6 to 8 weeks 03 comes out and it
00:11:02
is clearly significantly better. It's that black dot and they've had that flex anytime they've been surpassed in the
00:11:09
past and you know Google and and Grock have surpassed OpenAI at times which shocked me on the next slide and I do
00:11:16
think some of the loss of talent may be beginning to weigh but um you know a big
00:11:22
problem in AI is what's called benchmark saturation which is just these models are getting so smart
00:11:28
that benchmarks that were optimized even for you know human graduate students are not sufficient to measure their
00:11:33
intelligence. So, we've developed these new benchmarks. There's humanity's last exam on the left and you can see
00:11:39
Can you explain what that is to the audience? It's got such an evocative name. What What does it mean? It is a list. I Everybody, you could
00:11:45
just Google it, but I mean the questions are ridiculously hard. They're extremely hard questions from a wide range of
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disciplines. And you can see Gro 4 when it came out and it has improved since
00:11:57
since its release roughly a month ago was at 44.4% 4% and GPT5 was at 42 and
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similarly RKGI2 which is another benchmark there's something called the jagged
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frontier in AI where things that are very easy for AIs like maybe math are
00:12:18
really hard for humans and vice versa and RKGI measures tasks that are relatively easy for humans maybe you
00:12:25
could almost think of you know there's a lot of like geometric puzzle solving but very hard for AIs and here again Gro 4
00:12:31
is, you know, significantly better than GPT5. Now, in fairness and, you know, to be balanced and accurate, it is narrowly
00:12:38
very narrowly ahead in artificial analysis on on the right,
00:12:44
but this is this is the first time they have not released a model that wasn't decisively better. And the progress for
00:12:51
Grock 4 was exceptional. Grock 5 is coming soon. you know, they have more and I I should note my firm is
00:12:58
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
00:13:05
human is to be biased. But, um, they have the largest Blackwell cluster. So, I'm I'm optimistic for Gro 5. But, you
00:13:12
know, we're we're waiting on Gemini. I would expect there to be a very, you know, an impressive new Gemini model and
00:13:18
we'll see how that lands relative to both Grock and GPT5. But I do think it's
00:13:24
significant that this is the first time that OpenAI has not been able to clearly beat a competitor on all metrics, you
00:13:31
know, a month after a new frontier model was kind of released from one of their chief rivals. Freeberg, let me ask you a question. And
00:13:38
have you have have you played with it yet, Dave? Have you gotten into Chat GP5? So, I'll get your initial thoughts,
00:13:44
if any, but I'm interested in leveling up the conversation to this concept of
00:13:52
why would they release it if they weren't a definitive winner? Because hey, Sam the Bull Alman, Sammy the Bull
00:13:58
is pretty competitive. He took he knew that this was going to be the reaction that it wasn't definitively better, but
00:14:04
yet he released it anyway, which means hey, maybe he's having a hard time making those innovations and there has
00:14:10
been the brain drain. So, sort of two-parter there and take whichever one you want first. I don't know how much this quote brain
00:14:15
drain is affecting things, but I think one of the big milestones
00:14:20
that was realized with this upgrade is it's kind of multimodal. So, if you guys
00:14:26
remember a couple weeks ago, if you're using chat GPT and you have a pro account, you have to select the model
00:14:32
using the drop down which model do you want to run? And so you know if you're doing a research task or a very simple
00:14:38
kind of search task, you would choose the right model to increase speed or increase depth. Part of the factor that
00:14:44
I think was a big upgrade with this system is that it kind of recognizes which underlying model to call and which
00:14:50
underlying path to to draw from. I actually tried by asking a very complicated research question and then I
00:14:55
asked a very simple kind of information retrieval question and the information retrieval question it very quickly pulled the answer and the deep research
00:15:02
it said it got into the thinking mode. So it it's self- selected. I think this is really important from a user
00:15:07
experience perspective for AI to work. You don't want users going in and technically choosing which model. No one
00:15:13
understands what those letters and numbers mean. You want to have a very simple, clean, basic interface where the
00:15:18
model figures out on its own which underlying set of models to pull from, which reasoning process to follow to
00:15:25
give you your answer. So I think from a product experience point of view, this was actually a pretty big upgrade for
00:15:30
chat GPT and it'll give them a real advantage as people start to access it. It's also, I think, why they're making a
00:15:35
lot of the research functions more broadly available on a limited use basis to the to the wide population so people
00:15:41
can start to see the depth of what's possible. That was kind of the key milestone for me less about the actual
00:15:46
performance of the underlying model on the benchmarks and more about this kind of big UX upgrade. Kevin, I don't know
00:15:51
if you feel similarly, but I do. Well, I mean, in all fairness to OpenAI, the the router that kind of auto
00:15:57
selects the right model was apparently broken for the first kind of 12 or 16 hours of the model's release.
00:16:02
It wasn't working. Yeah. It was not working consistently for all users.
00:16:07
Yeah. So, you know, the scores may improve, but yeah, I mean the one thing OpenAI is like they are a very good
00:16:14
product. Just really really good. And I just always go back to the statement from
00:16:19
Eric Fishria, you know, uh, who's a venture capitalist at, uh, at Benchmark,
00:16:25
brilliant man, and he just, he said, it was on X, you know, it might be that if OpenAI never releases another model,
00:16:32
they're still a really valuable company because they have so many users and they're so good at product and they do
00:16:38
have a lot of distribution. Phil Deutsch, what inning are we in here? And how much of your research and
00:16:45
do you rely on or can you rely on these language models now being in a a very
00:16:52
you know specific vertical every day studying energy etc and those opportunities has it made its way into your workflow and did you get to play
00:16:58
with chat GPT5? Yeah, I mean I think for investing we use it all the time and it really is very efficient but uh one
00:17:05
thing I'll cite is Nvidia did and Freeberg I don't know if you've played with it or not but it's uh climate in a
00:17:12
bottle sea bottle. Nvidia has done a climate model of the earth and put that out there. So I would say we're in like
00:17:19
the first half of the first inning when we start seeing uh AI really help us
00:17:24
with the thorniest problems and the trade-offs in and around energy. Uh, so I think for us very early and we're
00:17:31
using it just like any other investor would. Yeah. Ben, has it made its way into your workflow at Daily Wire? And are you
00:17:38
monitoring this as a business owner with I think you have a couple hundred employees and, you know, do you see a
00:17:44
bifurcation of the people who use the tools and who don't? Yeah, I mean I I it's definitely bleeding into workflow in terms of, you
00:17:50
know, being able to gather information obviously very quickly or even using some editing tools via via AI. We we put
00:17:56
out Jeremy's Razer commercial two months ago that was entirely AI. You know, it still had the kind of AI slop feel to it
00:18:02
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 kind of want to, you
00:18:08
know, again, I'm the dumb guy in this part of the conversation for sure in many conversations. But I just have a general question which is do you think
00:18:14
that the productivity gains are going to bleed over fast enough to justify the investment? I mean, that's like the dumb guy question, right? Yeah.
00:18:20
like like so much money is pouring into this and I'm looking at the valuation of of these companies and I'm seeing that
00:18:26
like 60 70% of all S&P 500 gains are happening in the Magnificent 7 and I'm
00:18:32
thinking to myself I mean when you look at the internet the internet was working by 99 2000 and it took until maybe 2006
00:18:37
2007 for all that productivity to really enter the marketplace. Is this stuff going to going to hit fast enough to
00:18:42
actually justify the amount of investment or you going to see a crater here? I think there's a good question for Gavin and just to sort of set it up
00:18:49
we are now seeing hundreds of billions low hundreds of billions per year being deployed and we'll see a trillion or two
00:18:55
deployed I think in the next 5 years on data centers and this and we put the TAM or I put the TAM last year for just
00:19:01
business or last week just for business at about $50 to $100 per business user a
00:19:07
billion business users in the world it's going to put you at a billion dollars in revenue which would be like a you know5
00:19:13
to10 trillion TAM just for the business side. How do you calculate it? Gavin, do you have a back of the envelope way to
00:19:20
answer this question? And if we catch up or do we even need to catch up, is there enough capital in the world that they
00:19:27
can be patient? I think estimating the TAM this early,
00:19:33
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
00:19:39
the economic return on these investments. you know most of the companies investing these big dollars into AI data centers
00:19:45
are public the report quarterly financials you can calculate some you know something called return on invested
00:19:51
capital and it's actually gone up since they started making these AI
00:19:57
investments and at first a lot of it was maybe through opex savings but that is
00:20:03
what you would expect with AI um kind of you know silicon to replace you know
00:20:08
silicon opex to replace human opex But more recently, you were starting to
00:20:13
see some really significant accelerations in revenue growth. Um, you know, Meta just reported a quarter with
00:20:19
revenue significantly ahead. And I think a lot of that was due to AI. AI making uh people spend longer and AI improving,
00:20:27
you know, the quality of their ad targeting systems such that advertisers get a better rorowaz and spend more. But
00:20:33
the economic return thus far has been here. And it is, you know, even Microsoft, I mean, for me, Copilot is
00:20:40
not the best product, but even Microsoft on their call talked, you know, they shared some pretty astonishing stats
00:20:46
about C-pilot uptake. So, I do think the economic returns are
00:20:52
here thus far and that is a good sign because, you know, this early in the internet, the economic returns weren't
00:20:58
there. And I think maybe the, you know, the the biggest difference between this and the internet is a lot of the capital
00:21:06
that went in during the internet era, which is often called the tech bubble, it was really a telecom bubble. It was deployed into something called dark
00:21:12
fiber. And that means exactly what it sounds like, fiber optics that people spent tens of billions of dollars laying
00:21:18
and then it was dark cuz it was not utilized, but there was an expectation it would be utilized. completely
00:21:24
different here with AI where one of the biggest problems with GPUs and you know
00:21:29
AI data centers is the GPUs are used so intensively that they melt. So all of the dollars that are going into the
00:21:36
ground are being used. We're not building ahead of demand. In fact, we're clearly still behind demand you know. So
00:21:44
it it can all which is really interesting observation Gavin because this idea of training a model there's no
00:21:51
analogy to that in the docom era you know it's not like you had to I don't know upload all these video files and
00:21:57
you needed all that dark fiber to do it. It's a silly analogy I know but but that also did lead to um you know the com
00:22:04
bust. Ben the other side is the energy side of this. if the I think that the energy
00:22:11
implications of AI are probably bigger than the inflation reduction act and
00:22:16
certainly will be longerlasting. And so just to kind of give you to give credit where credit's due, I think all the
00:22:23
stuff we're seeing on the small module reactors at some level owes its uh
00:22:28
renaissance to uh AI and the energy demands of AI. to focus on energies
00:22:35
we'll get to later really wouldn't exist except for the hyperscalers giving very specific concrete and immediate demands
00:22:42
for energy that have changed the energy landscape uh as they say probably bigger even than the legislation under the B
00:22:50
administration give an example of what they're asking for because you are uh
00:22:56
active and investing in these projects you know what was what's a pre what's like a large pre
00:23:03
AI boom project versus a post AI boom project in terms of scale footprint
00:23:09
investment. Well, well, a quick way to say this, and Freeberg knows this stuff as well as I do. Anthropic just released a paper this
00:23:16
month saying we want 50 gawatts of power uh for the AI uh in America and over the
00:23:24
next three years. And so that's about as much power as was added of all this
00:23:29
year. So you're talking, you know, huge amounts that in our lifetimes, you've
00:23:35
basically been able to say the electricity demand has been zero uh in the United States. Now it's 2 to 3%. And
00:23:42
a data center needs continuous power in specific locations
00:23:47
and it's relatively price insensitive. So that's what's and the hyperscalers
00:23:53
and bed, you may or may not like this, but they're they want carbon-f free power. They're willing to pay for it.
00:23:58
not because of the government, just that's what they want for their workforce. So when you say you hit the
00:24:04
market with, you know, 50 gawatt of demand, much of it clean, that changes a
00:24:09
lot, uh, in a very exciting way. And for reasons we may get into later in the pod, it's a real pleasure not to have to
00:24:16
rely on the government, be it Democrats or Republicans, as we think about those
00:24:21
things. 50 megawws, that's a small town. Gawatt gawatt g you say gig g.
00:24:28
So what is that? If 50 megawatts is that's 5% of the total US electricity production. So
00:24:33
my lord. So free I think it's about what you add a year right in in new a new capacity
00:24:39
the US. Yes. Yeah. Meanwhile China is adding one terowatt a thousand gawatts every 18 months.
00:24:47
Well okay I want to say one thing about that David. Um,
00:24:53
but where is China getting its gas and coal from?
00:24:59
That's being imported. It's imported. So, I don't I I get the stat on China
00:25:06
increasing things quickly, which I think you're right on, particularly the nuclear side, but on the gas and coal
00:25:11
side, unlike us, they are looking to others for their source of their fuel. I
00:25:19
think their biggest ad, isn't their biggest ad in hydro right now? Well, I'm talking about imports versus
00:25:25
ads, but the hydro and nukes presumably are al-Qaeda's non import dependent, but
00:25:31
the coal and that gas, it's not a great story for them on that side of it. David, by the way, just my understanding
00:25:38
was by far the biggest source of China's incremental electricity was solar.
00:25:44
like this is a verifiable stat that we should just be able to quickly verify that that Gavin I that let me just say
00:25:51
one thing you got and Freeberg's knows this you got to be a little careful when you say what where the electricity is
00:25:58
coming from and what the additions are right so the US our additions are like 80% solar to wind but the installed base
00:26:04
it's under so I think that stat you're citing is probably at best additions not
00:26:10
oh no for sure it's additions for sure it's additions But they're, you know, they're bringing
00:26:15
on a lot of power every year relative to the installed base in the United States and a lot of it is solar.
00:26:22
There is um here's an interesting chart. This is China's uh solar surge. This
00:26:27
comes from Bloomberg. China added more panels last year than any other country has in total.
00:26:34
So in other words, they added more than the US. It looks like uh US, India,
00:26:40
Japan and Germany they add it in one year and that's a 2023 number. I think 2024
00:26:46
took a massive jump. So here's the question. See D see Jay
00:26:51
Cal and and Freeberg here's the question that I would have asked Secretary Right. Do you care about that slide? Because if
00:26:58
you care about that slide then you would have done different things than the one big beautiful bill.
00:27:06
You might not care about that slide, but we're not we're certainly not attacking the problem on that slide.
00:27:12
Uh so as well as we could be, right? And they're also putting they
00:27:17
have 150 plus nuclear actors in some state of deployment. We've talked about that here countless times.
00:27:24
So, circling back to you, Ben, winning AI, do you consider that existential for
00:27:29
America as somebody who's not in the industry? When you hear this discussion that we had in in DC last week, when you
00:27:36
hear technologists like ourselves who obviously are investing in this, this is our book of business right now.
00:27:43
Do you think we are in an existential race for humanity to win the AIS race
00:27:50
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
00:27:57
race that one person wins and the other person loses. Well, as as you might imagine, I'm definitely in the existential race
00:28:02
category. I I just look at how China has has utilized Tik Tok as a as a SCOP
00:28:07
weapon in in a myriad of ways, gathering data, putting out its own propaganda at scale. And and think about how they
00:28:14
would do that with control of, you know, the tools that everybody uses in all their businesses. And that's putting aside the military connotations. I was
00:28:20
talking to my friend Mike Gallagher who was a congressman on the subcommittee on China and who's now over a palunteer
00:28:27
doing policy over there and he was pointing out correctly that you know China's capacity if they if they win the
00:28:34
IA rights militarily is going to explode and that's and that's going to mean an awful lot for things like freedom of the
00:28:40
seas. It's going to be a lot for for our allies, for America's economic dominance in the world. And and so, you know, that
00:28:46
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
00:28:53
be allowing Nvidia to ship over to China, which we're going to get to on the docket in a moment. Interestingly enough, I did you did you gentlemen see
00:28:59
the luck and coffee announcement in New York City and the socialist reaction to it by chance?
00:29:06
Nobody saw it. Okay, so people are not spending too much time on uh on the Tik Tok. Tik Tok has a bunch of like young
00:29:15
socialist New Yorkers in communist t-shirts going to Luck and Coffee and
00:29:21
talking about how Starbucks, you know, is a, you know, are capitalist and that they're glad that the Chinese
00:29:27
company Lucken, which does $2 coffees, has come to America to destroy the American company Starbucks and Duncan
00:29:37
because communists know how to do capitalism better than America.
00:29:42
Americans, that is like the central position in my hometown of New York City right now. Here's the Tik Tok. It's
00:29:49
hilarious. Watch this. Pull this up for a second, Nick. It's It's a It's a worthy diversion. This should There's
00:29:54
some red meat for you guys. Get a $2 cup of communist coffee. So, this specific coffee shop has more
00:30:02
locations in China than Starbucks does. Um, okay. I'm going to come back to make a
00:30:08
video there later. But no, this company went through a $300 million accounting scandal where they faked their profits
00:30:14
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
00:30:21
successful than Starbucks. Back in Soho. Of course, this location is right by NYU
00:30:26
campus. Should have paid your workers. All right, I think we get the idea. I I
00:30:31
have a new theory, Ben, that the Chinese cuz I do I'm with you on the existential
00:30:37
uh threat of that competitor. I have a theory. They're going to try to beat us on capitalism and then use brands like
00:30:44
we've used brands like Apple and Google to defeat us. BYD producing cars now for
00:30:52
half the price of American cars and they're shipping them on their own shipping containers. Lucking coffee infecting the US now. And I had a third
00:31:00
example. Oh, and Tik Tok the example you just gave competing with and and and using that. What do you think of my
00:31:05
theory, Ben? No, I think that that's totally right. And and the truth is that what you're talking about in China obviously isn't
00:31:11
communism. It's it's state sponsored corporatism. And so you can pour extraordinary resources into, you know,
00:31:17
one path dependent part of industry and and you could out compete in coffee if you decide to subsidize that at
00:31:23
extraordinary cost and then you can undercut the rest of the market. And this is one of the things President Trump is totally right on when when you
00:31:28
talk about the tariff wars. I've always been in favor of tariffing the living out of China. I think that's that's actually quite right. My my problem when
00:31:35
it comes to the tariffs, I know I'm jumping ahead in the in the docket here. My problem is that if if you're going to do it, what you really ought to be doing
00:31:41
is boxing in China with with free trade networks with literally everybody else and exclude China from that network. You
00:31:47
have to do all the preliminary steps before you box in China. Otherwise, China's able to sort of climb out the
00:31:53
window, which is I think what they've done on everything from Nvidia chips to Tik Tok to, you know, their actual
00:31:58
tariff rate, which I believe is now lower than the tariff rate we have against Canada. Let me bring it to you Freeberg because I think this is like a
00:32:04
super inter interesting discussion. Our bestie Bill Gurley has a position that hey everybody can win. It's not an
00:32:10
existential they win or we win. I mean obviously it's a competition but there could be many winners. What's your take on all this Dave and if any?
00:32:18
Well I'm in the place like I've said before it's kind of like who's going to win the internet if we said that back in
00:32:23
1996. Like no one quote wins the internet. It's an open standard. It's a
00:32:28
platform. It's an evolution of uh access for markets, of productivity for the
00:32:35
world. I think AI is very similar. I don't think that there's um you know
00:32:40
there's this concept that you end up in some sort of state of super intelligence that perhaps reigns supreme and creates
00:32:46
superiority, but there's many vectors of competition.
00:32:52
So within drone warfare as an example, there's going to be a massive vector of competition. It's pretty clear that
00:32:58
remote autonomous devices are going to be the kind of front lines in battles
00:33:03
going forward and China has both a manufacturing productivity materials
00:33:09
advantage over the United States on that front. So it's not about having the best model, it's about having a supply chain
00:33:15
that can support their ambitions in warfare. And similarly in economics or
00:33:22
in business there's many dimensions upon which we're going to have advantage over China and China may have advantages over
00:33:29
us that are going to be enabled accelerated magnified by by tools and AI. Actual models I think are going to
00:33:35
be this continuously kind of evolving set of systems that it's unclear where things are going to
00:33:41
head. But to to kind of bring up your point, I do think that the CCP has a
00:33:46
unique ability to throttle up and throttle down entrepreneurship to drive productivity in that nation.
00:33:53
When they throttle it up, you end up seeing massive gains in individual
00:33:58
capital accumulation, which is counter to the Communist Party's intentions. And so then they throttle it back. And as
00:34:04
you can see in this image from the Financial Times, this shows the number of companies founded in China by year.
00:34:10
It peaked in 2018, which by the way aligns pretty well with the peaking of venture capital investment in China from
00:34:17
the United States and from VCs around the world. And then it began its rapid decline because there was a set of
00:34:23
policy changes and you guys may remember Jack Ma disappeared and these other sorts of things happened around that
00:34:28
time. And so there's this challenge to the CCP that resulted in them throttling
00:34:35
back the entrepreneurship. I don't think you can have massive true natural market
00:34:40
progress without having entrepreneurship, without having a more free market. And so they are, I would
00:34:46
say, rate limited at this point by this particular chart in terms of their competitiveness. We can argue about
00:34:51
their resourcefulness and their ability to do central planning and central command of the economy, but at the end
00:34:57
of the day, much of what brought the Chinese, there was a great um podcast on this by the guys from the Brookings
00:35:02
Institute years ago, uh where they talk about what got China out of poverty um
00:35:07
you know, where their GDP per capita went from whatever it was 3,000 to 30,000 in a very short period of time.
00:35:13
And it wasn't the government central planning. It was the entrepreneurship of the peasants and their ability to kind
00:35:19
of self-organize and self-mobilize and build build business and create better productivity from the ground up. And it
00:35:26
was the individual Chinese citizens that that drove that economic boom, not central planning. Central planning had
00:35:31
some enabling factors, but that was really important. And so I do think one one of the challenges ahead is is this
00:35:36
entrepreneurship suppression that's manifest. And I'm sure you have a point on this.
00:35:41
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say Gavin, the East West Conference that our friends at KOTU do was named after like
00:35:46
this really amazing boom period we had 15 to 10 years ago before Americans were
00:35:52
not allowed to invest in China. And not only that, people had to American companies had to like basically divest.
00:35:59
They shut down in China all the education companies that were venture-backed, nationalized those. Jackmaw went for painting lessons, etc.
00:36:07
So, and he's incredible painter right now, by the way. Some of those oil prints, I think, are going to be much
00:36:12
bigger in their impact than Alibaba. But Gavin, you would I I think agree like we
00:36:18
an investment in China, we were on a really great track that got shut down. Do you think when super intelligence
00:36:24
comes that that is the race because we're looking at general intelligence, you know, a lawyer, an accountant, a
00:36:31
developer, but super intelligence, I think, is where people get to the existential piece. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they for sure believe it's
00:36:37
existential. I have it on good authority that if you work for Deep Seek, you are not allowed to be in the same room as an
00:36:43
American while you're in China and you have kind of a CCP minder um with you most of the time. And that's that's kind
00:36:51
of astonishing. Um you know, so they believe it's existential. Um the second
00:36:56
thing I would say is I do think they are making an effort to throttle it up. You know, Xi Jinping had a uh a dinner with
00:37:04
kind of, you know, 20 um entrepreneurs. I think Pony Ma from Tencent was there. You know, the Deep Seek CEO was there,
00:37:11
but they kind of gave pride of place to the people who were making physical goods plus Deep Seek and maybe
00:37:17
deemphasize some of the social networks. And the last thing I would say just a stat that just builds on what David just
00:37:22
said about, you know, how entrepreneurship amongst kind of like rural Chinese is kind of what jumpst
00:37:28
started China's economy. I think at the towards the end of the Soviet Union, they could not produce enough food using
00:37:36
kind of um socialist systems. So, they let 2% of the acreage in the Soviet
00:37:41
Union kind of like be, you know, more entrepreneurial and self-organized and
00:37:47
that 2% of the acreage produced a majority of their food. You know, it just kind of shows the superiority of
00:37:52
kind of capitalism to socialism in in a world in which there are resource
00:37:58
constraints. What's better? What's better, Phil? Capitalism and democracy, capitalism and communism. Do you know long term, I
00:38:05
think we would all agree we have the winning combination? I hope. But in the short term, this sounds like an incredible
00:38:11
advantage to put your finger on the scale and say, "Hey, BYD cars can lose money forever. We just want to
00:38:18
kill the American car industry. We want to kill the German car industry." Well, first of all, nothing can lose money forever. But but the one thing I
00:38:25
think is implicit in what Dave and Gavin said is you need rule of law. You can't
00:38:31
just have innovation. You need rule of law. And it's yet to be shown that China
00:38:38
can do that in a way that will create long-term success absent government
00:38:45
propping it up. And I'll give you an example. We've had factories in China, one making wind blades, and basically
00:38:52
every day was a renegotiation on terms, no matter what you wanted to do. And if you didn't control the chop, the the the
00:38:59
the thing that made the stamp, you didn't actually control the factory. That is not a long-term recipe for
00:39:05
success. And I think eventually, no matter how strong the centralized
00:39:10
government is, you've got to have a rule of law if you really want to see decades
00:39:15
and decades of of uh innovation. Okay, Gavin, go ahead. Just 100% agree. You need rule of law.
00:39:21
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
00:39:28
private property. But I would say going back to 2018 being like kind of glory days for China, they were working. you
00:39:35
know, the these kind of internet entrepreneurs, they did create kind of the only kind of internet companies that
00:39:41
were capable of challenging American internet companies, not just in China, but globally. And obviously, most
00:39:47
American internet companies aren't allowed to part to participate in China. But, you know, the problem was those
00:39:54
those, you know, CEOs became so powerful that they were started to feel comfortable challenging the CCP.
00:40:01
And, you know, Jack Ma made some comments in 2000. I I don't remember exactly when that were he just vaguely
00:40:07
critical and you know that was it. You know then he disappears.
00:40:12
Okay. Can we Gavin can we stop with the Hey, wait. Hold on a second. Pull up my Hold on. Pull up this picture. Gavin,
00:40:17
you keep saying he disappeared. He opted in to oil painting this beautiful painting which did here. Went at auction
00:40:24
for $5.4 million to an environmental nonprofit. I mean, he didn't just disappear for saying that the old people
00:40:31
in the I think the quote was something like, "Oh, we got to pull it up." That the government was a little old and
00:40:37
didn't get it. Ben, you've been a little quiet here, but in politics is your wheelhouse. Question for you. We've seen
00:40:42
a centralization of authority in the federal government and we're sitting here talking about, hey, central
00:40:48
government plus capitalism doesn't work as well as rule of law. Do you worry sometimes, hey, Biden wanted to use
00:40:55
executive orders to do the student loan thing and you know, Trump obviously has taken tariffs and there's a big
00:41:01
question, maybe the tariffs are, my understanding is they're supposed to reside with Congress and there's a
00:41:06
lawsuit about that. Maybe that goes back to the Congress. He has been centralizing, Biden was centralizing. Even Obama was centralizing and
00:41:12
consolidating power. Is that necessary for us to compete? because we're kind of seeing overtones o overtures like that.
00:41:20
Even at our AI summit two weeks ago, uh there was this point that you know Sax has made on this podcast and the
00:41:26
president made which is we have to have federal AI legislation. We cannot allow the state you know states to have any
00:41:33
say in AI the most important technology in the world. I'm I'm kind of torn about that. So I'm curious what you think of
00:41:38
centralization occurring here and then the bigger picture with China. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that when it comes to sort of the the bigger picture,
00:41:43
the the temptation in politics is always to look at again corporatist states which always get out of the box really
00:41:49
really quickly because they look good. It's like you mobilize an enormous number of resources on on this one
00:41:54
target. I mean what capitalism does of course it allows you to mobilize extraordinary resources across a wide range of targets. But corporatism allows
00:42:01
the government to basically put you over one target and one target alone. And if you're just looking at that target, it
00:42:06
looks great at the very beginning. And this is true for this is true for Italy when when Mussolini took over. This is true actually for Hitler's Germany at
00:42:12
the very beginning. Economically speaking when you were seeing extraordinary rates of growth corporatism starts to look really good
00:42:18
particularly in a messy democratic system like ours where where the human beings you know at the top don't have
00:42:23
full control. I think one of the things that that I think is frightening to people like me about AI is because you
00:42:29
are seeing such a consolidation of AI. Yes, extraordinary spending but that extraordinary spending is relegated to a
00:42:34
relatively small number of companies again. And not just that, you're seeing it's so much spending going to to one
00:42:40
thing. And so the race for super intelligence that you're talking about, which China clearly, Gavin is totally correct, sees as as adversarial. You
00:42:47
know, if they get there first, then corporatism wins. And so the temptation is to sort of imitate that from our
00:42:54
side. And maybe you do have to imitate that. Maybe it's more like maybe it's more like the Manhattan Project for AI
00:42:59
than it is like a market driven thing if you actually do see it as a true existential threat. and we should treat
00:43:04
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
00:43:11
to steal and copper tariffs to to everything else. And and as far as sort of the the federal AI versus state AI
00:43:17
thing, I think that that may be slightly a red herring just because what you're really talking about there is not the
00:43:22
federal government usurping state authority. What you're talking about is the federal government trying to preempt state authoritarianism. I think that
00:43:28
that's what that's 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
00:43:34
filling the field with some really bad AI legislation that essentially destroys competition among all the various
00:43:40
players. Go ahead, Phil. Yeah, get in there. I have a question as an investor, not a policy guy.
00:43:46
I don't quite get Democrat versus Republican on the topic
00:43:52
of how they give support to the private sector and what counts as picking winners and what doesn't count as
00:43:58
picking winners. When I look at this administration, the previous I'm not
00:44:03
sure I see I think they're both very activist. They both kind of seem to pick winners and losers and I I feel like
00:44:09
that distinction's kind of lost a little bit. Is that is that make any sense to you? like one had the IRA, but then the
00:44:16
other has like rare earths or this or that. Like it's very hard when they switch like that, Ben, it's really hard
00:44:22
to know where solid ground is as an investor. I mean, listen, I I totally agree with you on that and I do think that the centralization of power in the federal
00:44:28
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
00:44:36
industry. I mean, I'd prefer that that nobody was picking winners and losers, but I I think that, you know, if if you
00:44:43
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
00:44:48
know, from a political point of view, I'm going to pick the winners picked by the Trump administration. I think they're doing a better job picking the winners. But just on a principled level
00:44:55
and and a general market level, I prefer that nobody be be doing these sort of subsidies. I don't like industrial I
00:45:00
don't like centralized planning and central industrial policy this way. And so let me just I think I would I agree
00:45:06
with you almost 80% and and David this is where I think I disagree with both you a little bit.
00:45:12
The subsidies right have really helped solar, wind, EV and and other industries
00:45:19
outside of energy as well. So I think what I would love to see is rational
00:45:25
subsidies that consistently last through Republican and Democratic administrations. And we had that a
00:45:31
little bit with Bush and Clinton with some of the renewable stuff, David, like Governor Bush put in wind requirements
00:45:38
in Texas that carried through. But if we keep flipping back and forth, we inhibit
00:45:44
one of our greatest strengths, which is our technology and innovation. And Gavin Freeber wants to get in this. Go ahead.
00:45:50
Great point, Phil, by the way. Great point. Here's a counterargument I'd make. The subsidies, while they may have benefited
00:45:55
those two particular industries, created a financial disincentive for investing in nuclear. And so there's always a
00:46:03
loser. And the loser isn't always necessarily the target. The target was oil and coal or oil and gas and coal or
00:46:10
whatever it was, carbon- based energy systems. That was the target when there were subsidies for solar and wind was
00:46:16
let's accelerate these deployments and get this market to start moving. It does two things. One is it doesn't force a
00:46:23
natural market dynamic where you have to ultimately get the cost of solar or the cost of wind turbine production low
00:46:30
enough that it makes economic sense from an ROIC basis that investors would natively want to make that investment.
00:46:36
They're making the investment because the government's paying half the cost. And the second thing is it then makes nuclear non-competitive. And therefore
00:46:42
the the R&D investment dollars that were supposed to go into nuclear that would have allowed us to accelerate to Gen 4
00:46:48
systems which by the way China has now done went away. And so now we are
00:46:54
several decades behind where China is with respect to nuclear which is ultimately the most scalable energy
00:46:59
production system we have. Phil go ahead and then Phil I want to get through a couple of the charts you you took the time together to put
00:47:05
together here as we wrap energy. Before we go into energy, I do have a politics kind of question I would love to pose to
00:47:11
Ben if that's okay. Yeah, please. So, um I my my parents were visiting me
00:47:17
for the last week and um we we had a lot of lively political debates and you know
00:47:22
this trend of the imperial president in America, you know, which I think really accelerated with Biden and now is you
00:47:28
know further accelerated with Trump. I their hypothesis which I think is
00:47:33
correct but I'm curious for Benz is that is a function of the fact that Congress by and large can no longer effectively
00:47:40
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
00:47:46
their job. So for 30 or 40 years a lot of the governance was done actually by
00:47:51
the judicial branch and if we have to choose by being governed between the
00:47:57
judicial branch which is unelected and the executive branch which is at least elected and accountable I would rather
00:48:04
have an imperial president um who we can judge and vote out of office than an imperial judiciary. Just curious for
00:48:10
your thoughts Ben. Yeah I mean I obviously think that's true but I think the trend goes back you know more than a few decades. I think
00:48:15
that if you're really going to go to the deep roots of this, you have to go back to the roots of the administrative state in the early 20th century because the
00:48:21
reality is the reason you have an imperial presidency is because the federal government just does way too much. I mean, the federal government is
00:48:27
just way too big. They're way too intrusive. Uh they're they're way too powerful. And so once that becomes a a
00:48:33
giant grab bag of cash, then whoever controls the federal government wins. And now if you're a legislator and you
00:48:38
can kick all responsibility for your policym over some unelected bureaucrat in the executive branch, that's
00:48:43
precisely what you're going to do. The founders gamed for ambition checking ambition. They never really gamed for people trying to kick responsibility
00:48:50
from one branch to the other. They they they thought the other way. They thought Congress is going to defend its own prerogative against imperial overstep by
00:48:56
the presidency. And instead, thanks to the administrative state, Congress people and senators started to realize, hey, what if I just pass like this very
00:49:02
vague omnibus package and then I kick it over to a bunch of regulators and the regulators do all the work and take all the heat and I can go back to my
00:49:08
hometown and tell them how much money I brought home. Yeah, it's fascinating.
00:49:14
And when you kick it back to home, I don't know if you guys saw this uh town hall um that went explosive. There's
00:49:20
been a number of them. Ben, you must have covered it. While you're pulling it up, I I I do want to say that I do think we don't
00:49:28
want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is to say, the government and a number of government
00:49:35
employees and career civil servants are doing God's work, whether it's on safety
00:49:41
or uh defense or intelligence. And what I don't love is
00:49:49
a tone of critical criticizing lifelong government workers when none of us would
00:49:56
really do that job at the pay they're taking. And maybe I don't mean to make it, let me not say the people on this call I don't know as well, but many of
00:50:02
my friends and I I do think there needs to be a a beat for those people that are
00:50:08
doing incredible work for little or no recognition or pay and
00:50:14
they we can't pay with too broad a brush. And I I'm not blaming I'm not blaming you
00:50:19
about that. I just say we don't hear enough of that. It's all I'm not blaming the bureaucrats who are there to and are
00:50:24
given responsibilities to do a thing. I'm blaming Congress for having kicked them the authority in the first place. If you're going to place, you know,
00:50:30
blame with with somebody, you have to give it to the the branch that actually abdicated its duty and decided to construct an entirely different branch
00:50:36
and then throw off all all accountability. What's the solution there? Is it the American party doing what the Tea Party
00:50:42
did, getting, you know, or the America Party, I guess, is what Elon calls it not American. The America Party saying,
00:50:48
"Hey, you know what? Forget about the presidency. Elon did that worked pretty effectively. I think we'd all agree he
00:50:54
had a significant if not the deciding factor in getting Trump re-elected. Probably also something to do with the
00:51:01
other the Democrats ran. Putting all that aside, if an America if the America
00:51:07
party or another party were able to secure couple of Senate seats, couple of House seats, could that reverse this
00:51:14
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? I I I think that
00:51:21
actually this is not going to get solved at the federal level. I think what's actually going to happen is that the federal government is going to lock up and it's going to be essentially
00:51:27
rotating elected quasi dictators uh until until the end of time except that the American people are going to be
00:51:33
unhappy with that and you're seeing already more authority now now kind of being taken up by state actors which is
00:51:38
why you're seeing a necessity for things like federal legislation on AI to preempt the states. what what you've
00:51:44
seen over the course you saw this during the Biden administration a lot I moved from California which is obviously a very leftgoverned state to Florida which
00:51:50
is very rightgoverned state but the difference in governance are massive and you're seeing governors pick up the the
00:51:55
mantle of saying okay well the federal government is unworkable they're not doing what we want to do so we're going to do our own thing down here we're
00:52:01
going to challenge the federal government in a wide variety of ways and and I think that's actually the the proper solution that's that's actually a
00:52:07
reversion to what the founders wanted in the first place when the federal government was essentially so small that
00:52:13
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
00:52:18
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
00:52:24
legislatores, right? That that's actually an easier lift in some ways. Try try to win a governorship, try try
00:52:29
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
00:52:36
federal government as an ethos. It seems to me like nobody's happy. If you if you missed it, there was this
00:52:42
like crazy town hall. It occurred in um Nebraska
00:52:48
and everybody was upset. Freeberg, I wanted to make sure you saw this. I should have sent it to you earlier. I'm
00:52:54
not sure if we talked about in the group chat, but you had people who were at once upset
00:52:59
in Nebraska about the government spending too much, then not the Medicare
00:53:05
cuts, Medicaid cuts. People were universally on both sides absolutely
00:53:11
infuriated at the state of affairs. Nobody's happy now. Freeberg, your
00:53:17
thoughts on this sort of you kind of predicted with the socialist side, but it does feel like my prediction.
00:53:24
My my prediction will ring truer than any of us hope. Socialism will sweep over this nation. I fear and I think
00:53:31
it's a cancer and it's going to be worse than what we saw with woke stuff. It's
00:53:36
going to be just like I'm losing out on everything. I mean, people are stagnant
00:53:42
in wage growth. There is no one in the United States,
00:53:47
including wealthy people, who haven't taken significant notice of the increased cost of groceries, in the
00:53:52
increased cost of buying home goods. Jason, I'm assuming you must have noticed as well how much groceries have
00:53:57
gone up in price. Everyone's rent goes up every year. There was this Tik Tok rant that went viral this week about
00:54:02
this woman that's like, "Why does my rent go up every year? my salary doesn't go up. We're in this really difficult
00:54:08
moment because of what Ben pointed out, which is that we've basically funded the government to do everything for us. And
00:54:13
by my calculation from last year, I think nearly half of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by the
00:54:19
government at this point. And as a result, because of that and the inefficiency of government allocation of capital, everything inflates in cost.
00:54:26
And we're entering this era where some people make the joke that the train has
00:54:32
left the station. You know, it's all right. Let's finish up with these two charts here, Phil, on energy and
00:54:37
then I want to get into I just want to say one thing to David. I still think
00:54:42
when it comes to innovation, rule of law, capitalism,
00:54:48
freedom, we are the best at it. I think that still gravity. There's still gravity,
00:54:54
Phil. At the end of the day, arithmetic is arithmetic. When Jimmy Carter lost the presidency, there was 12 years of
00:55:03
Republicans and then there was Democrats. It may be that socialist I don't think socialism ever the United
00:55:09
States the way left let's say the left side of the Democratic party wins for 12 years David maybe. I don't see that but
00:55:15
if you want to see that you can but it will swing back. This country is incredibly resilient and I have complete
00:55:21
faith in that resilience. the love it optimism. Hold on. Let me just get these two charts out of the way real quick.
00:55:28
Finish up the energy charts here. Um and then we'll we'll we'll continue the discussion as we pivot over to tariffs,
00:55:33
which is obviously related to all this. All right. All right. So, Dave, David, yes. I want to go back to this because I
00:55:39
think I can't I want to I can't emphasize enough how much I love you and
00:55:44
think how smart you are. And I also think the last argument made was absolute
00:55:49
regarding the idea the idea that the subsidies that went to wind and solar were at the
00:55:55
expense of nuke is nutty. And let me give let me tell you why. The issue with
00:56:01
nukes and you say this so wonderfully on China. The issue with nukes is regulation
00:56:07
and what Ben was saying over we're stifling innovation there and we've got
00:56:13
to figure out a way and I think the secretary of energy and the president have done a great job of this to
00:56:18
rationalize the regulatory framework around nuclear power that what's bother what hurts nukes is not their cost per
00:56:26
kilowatt subsidy it's the massive amounts of bureaucracy around them so if
00:56:32
you were to give the nuclear power industry five or 10 cents a kilowatt hour. That
00:56:37
doesn't help them with their big problem. So, and wind and solar, that's what you gave them. And the sizes are
00:56:44
different as well. And one's a distributed resource and ones are centralized. So, I guess what I'd say is
00:56:50
I don't think we have to treat them the same. I'm 100% with you that we should be subsidizing nuclear power. It's
00:56:56
clean. It's base load. It's reliable. We could do small module reactors. They can be used for data centers. All of the
00:57:03
above. We don't have to pit our children against each other. And in this case, they really aren't against each other.
00:57:09
Just and the chart you're showing, explain the chart you just showed. Sorry. Why should we? And then I have a second question for you, which is why should we
00:57:17
subsidize nuclear when we have hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by
00:57:22
the most powerful mag companies in the world and sovereign wealth funds who want to invest in it? Why why do the
00:57:27
taxpayers have to pay for that? You can get to that in a second, but walk me through this global electricity generation chart you pulled up here just
00:57:33
real quick. So, so, so what this chart shows um is how quickly electricity has come on uh
00:57:41
from solar, the growth rate of solar. And so, actually, Katherine, there may be a chat GPT chart on the uptick in AI,
00:57:48
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
00:57:55
success. cost about 80 or 90% and it's beginning to grow. And I agree with
00:58:01
David, eventually you have to have storage with solar. So, you can't quite uh uh match gas to solar, but we've had
00:58:08
incredible success reducing costs of solar and wind and incredible growth.
00:58:13
And so, that's what the result of those incentives have been. It's been successful that way. So
00:58:21
now the second chart here, the OBB chart. Yeah, the OBB chart, this just goes to
00:58:27
show that when you take away incentives, you lose some generation. And so the
00:58:34
point of this chart is if we really need all we can eat on energy for artificial
00:58:39
intelligence. And if artificial intelligence the race is the you know race for national security uh and
00:58:46
dominance in the world I this is saying we're taking a step backwards on this
00:58:51
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
00:58:58
do as much energy to make us a dominant player uh in artificial intelligence as
00:59:04
well as other things your response sorry that's that's what I'd say no problem free your response
00:59:10
Yeah. So again, I I think the point I was trying to make, Phil, is by driving
00:59:15
the private market capital into solar and wind because it is now discounted.
00:59:21
So you get a high rate of return by applying your capital there. You're not likely to put that capital in the
00:59:27
development or the extension of nuclear technology. and the the lack of
00:59:33
investment in improving nuclear technology. Yes, you could argue there's regulatory burdens and so on, but it's
00:59:38
largely been inhibited because there have been these other subsidized paths to market with energy. And as a result,
00:59:44
we missed a window to catch up to Gen 4, which is just so everyone understands what that means. These are these very
00:59:50
clean, meltdown proof nuclear energy production systems that are being
00:59:56
deployed at scale in China now. And the US doesn't have any and we have no path
01:00:01
to getting these deployed. Secretary Wright's going to speak at the all-in summit. He he has said at the Department
01:00:06
of Energy that in the United States we are likely going to have a Gen 4 reactor deployed or started production in 18
01:00:13
months. But we'll see. But we are so far behind because no capital went into it.
01:00:18
And that's because the capital was redirected into these subsidized markets. And that's the disincentive that arises when the government gets
01:00:25
involved in markets. the government creates these these financial incentives that number one create bubbles in those
01:00:30
markets and number two take away the incentives for capital to flow to the best path for long-term returns which is
01:00:37
what's happened in energy in the United States. Yeah. So it in in in this small module reactor Gen 4 stuff
01:00:44
we as well others have investments there uh great company we like called X energy
01:00:49
talk about the book there Jason but I think it's fair to say that the money
01:00:55
flowed into those sectors when the hyperscalers committed to them and showed they were serious about the
01:01:01
demand side from the private sector and they have been there's been a catalyst
01:01:07
from the administration because that's had four or five executive orders trying to get rid of the bureaucracy. So I
01:01:14
guess I would say David in my experience as an investor in the space the dollars flowed when the market spoke and the
01:01:20
hyperscalers said they wanted and were behind the SMRs and second it was further uh invigorated when as Ben says
01:01:30
the government took a step back and stopped being a yoke on the industry. Neither of those have anything to do
01:01:35
with subsidies to solar and wind. Can I just say one thing about socialism because I thought it was a really important thing that David said sure
01:01:40
that it's inevitable. I would just say to me so much of it comes down to mom Donnie. Um if like I disagree with every
01:01:46
one of his policies. Well admittedly they're dumb. So they're dumb but yeah I mean they're
01:01:53
obviously stupid but if you have not watched him he is an incredibly
01:01:58
charismatic effective politician. Yes. Um, an absence, as has been every socialist
01:02:04
revolutionary leader for sure, but just I think the key question will be one, you know, unless Adams or Cuomo
01:02:11
pulls out, he's almost certainly going to win. And then if he wins, you know, does he go through with these policies
01:02:17
cuz if he goes through with them, they're going to be epic failures. We know what happens when you defund the police. You know, there is a
01:02:23
governmentrun um grocery store somewhere in Kansas and it's a disaster. So, they
01:02:28
won't work. And I think that'll be a quick that'll be like a quick end to
01:02:33
socialism. I I disagree with this. I mean, sorry, I'll finish. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Please go ahead.
01:02:39
Here's the problem. It'll take a year, two years for for those policies to actually hit and and destroy all of New
01:02:46
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
01:02:52
up. But, you know, I I but the problem is you did it. You mad men. You did it. You
01:02:58
did it. Shut up crazy bastards. You did socialism in New York City, the
01:03:03
financial capital of the world. But but the bigger problem right now, and this is why this does go to tariffs.
01:03:09
It also goes to crypto policy. It goes to the it goes to AI right now. The the
01:03:15
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
01:03:21
work. Right now, they're all willing to kind of stand back and say, "Okay, well, I trust President Trump. I trust the
01:03:26
administration. I don't want, you know, full-scale redistributionism and government control because, you know, things are kind of okay. They're kind of
01:03:32
okay. If things take a downturn, then the backlash is going to be a lot stronger than anything that that any of
01:03:38
us can say about the failures of of Zoran Mamani because what it's going to be is look, the rich got richer and we
01:03:43
got poorer and it's going to be a redux of 2002 2007208, but with a much even further to the left
01:03:50
than Obama ever was. and and and that I'm deeply afraid of because so if the market crashes, if
01:03:56
unemployment goes up, then this exacerbates and makes the point. And for a socialist, all you have to do is say,
01:04:02
"Don't you want free X, Y, and Z, whatever the popular thing is, a free phone, less rent, free buses. It's the
01:04:09
easiest pitch in the world. Cheaper food, free food. I mean, it and if you fall for it, it takes a while to
01:04:14
selfrect from socialism, too, right? This idea that we kind of immediately flip back after you see Zorn Bum fail or
01:04:20
something." I mean, San Francisco has yet to have a Republican governor. They've been trying this crap for for several decades. I'm from LA. I spent my
01:04:26
entire life in LA. The last Republican mayor of LA was Richard Rearen, right? I mean, like this like it you can always
01:04:33
blame those crazy those financers who who got rich and they all moved down to Florida to avoid our tax rates and
01:04:38
that's what's really cleaning out the base of the rest. To follow up on Ben, I'm sorry to interrupt, but like something that's
01:04:44
really important about what you just said is it's not a binary switch that gets flipped. You're socialist or you're
01:04:49
not. What happens is these policies where you have big government policies that provide greater and greater
01:04:56
economic, financial and social support to the population are slow burning
01:05:02
policies. The big policies in the federal government started 50 years ago and they've gotten bigger and bigger.
01:05:09
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,
01:05:15
let's cut the food stamp program. The solution is let's make the food stamp program bigger. When rent control didn't
01:05:21
work in San Francisco to bring housing prices down, the solution was let's get the government to start building
01:05:27
housing. The solution is never let's reduce the government's role. The solution is
01:05:33
unidirectional which is to get the government to do more to solve the failings of the policies. So whatever
01:05:40
policies he does enact if they don't work the answer and the response from that socialist type movement will be
01:05:47
let's do more let's have the government do more and then you increase the burden on the people because you end up
01:05:52
increasing taxation increasing regulatory burdens and as he said in one of his interviews ultimately you seize
01:05:58
the means of production and that's the end goal of his government it's so simple to solve this problem I hate to make it too too difficult here
01:06:04
but if we had the super funds like in Australia and people had the directional ownership ship and social security gets
01:06:11
retired for people actually having you know being in the market and we just
01:06:16
crack the regulations on housing and build much more housing. this will
01:06:21
change everything. And the the housing issue is so oppressive to this generation and the cost of their
01:06:26
education is so oppressive now. They have opted out of education. They're starting to look at and go, I'm going to UT. I'm going to be in a state where I
01:06:33
can pay, you know, 50k in total for my degree. So young people are getting smart about this, thank goodness. And
01:06:40
they're going for trade degrees where plumbers and electricians are making 150k a year. But you have to solve
01:06:46
housing. I have watched this so so acutely in my move to Austin. I suppose
01:06:52
Ben, when you moved to uh Nashville and Florida, you saw the same thing with your teams. When people don't have to
01:06:58
spend 60% of their nut on their housing, their anxiety level goes down massively.
01:07:05
And when they feel they have ownership in a home, it goes down massively. Why we cannot fix this problem or why
01:07:10
neither president just says, "I am going to make housing when I run for president." President Jason.com. I am
01:07:17
going to just make housing my thing. We're building 10 million homes and the government's going to build two new cities and we're going to make h we're
01:07:23
going to make housing affordable. Although I got to tell you, you know, one of the things I think this goes to a deeper malaise actually and this is
01:07:29
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
01:07:34
charts with regard to the the American populace is geographic mobility over
01:07:40
time, how much people move. Because what what what you actually see is that that has wildly decreased in the United
01:07:46
States. There's this impression that everybody, you know, now because you get on a plane, you can go somewhere and
01:07:51
it's you can get a a truck and all no one moves now. People basically I mean I
01:07:57
mean I think one reason is because originally people were moving from, you know, rural to to cities and now they're
01:08:03
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
01:08:08
the government is going to step in and solve your problem in New York as opposed to you having to, you know, go
01:08:14
across a mountain and live in a, you know, live in a cabin somewhere, then you tend to stay. And and you do you do
01:08:20
that enough broadly speaking on a federal level and what you end up with is people who really believe I I think
01:08:25
that the vice president has grant a lot of things, but he made a statement in his RNC address that that really kind of forcibly struck me, which he suggested
01:08:32
that the the American dream was to live and die where your grandparents lived and died. And I thought to myself, that actually is not traditionally kind of
01:08:38
the American dream. The American that's kind of a European dream actually. The traditional American dream for most
01:08:43
people was cross an ocean, go to a place you don't know. If that doesn't work, cross right, cross a mountain, build I
01:08:50
mean Dville talks about this in democracy in America that that Americans were famous for for basically building these kind of ramshackle huts trying to
01:08:56
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
01:09:02
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
01:09:09
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. I was asked a question by
01:09:15
by one of my listeners recently and they 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
01:09:22
what about me in my industry?" And I was saying, "Well, yeah, but it doesn't apply to every single industry. That's that's an aggregate statistic." And so
01:09:28
when you talk about job mobility and people being able to stick and move and change what they're doing in the
01:09:33
marketplace, if the American people don't keep up with that and if they're unwilling to move to places where the
01:09:39
real estate is cheaper, then you are going to get more expensive real estate and maybe you can build your way out of that or maybe maybe you can't. But it
01:09:46
used to be that if you if you had a problem with the housing prices in New York, you moved somewhere else. Yeah. went to San Diego or something,
01:09:52
you pioneered uh you know, a new area and uh well, I'm I'm seeing that amongst
01:09:57
a lot of young people and and they're getting the benefit. Let's talk about tariffs. And so, we'll get into the more specific
01:10:05
granular ones that we've been dealing with over the last 10 days, but just big picture here's um what's happened. It
01:10:12
seems to be the Trump administration has done what they said they were going to do and we'll talk about the
01:10:17
ramifications of this but tariff revenue was up to 30 billion in July 127 billion so far in 2025 and obviously
01:10:25
this is you know 3 months of data basically here's your chart in June the trade deficit shrank to 60 billion or so
01:10:32
and that's the lowest since June of 2023 now by doing this of course inflation
01:10:38
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
01:10:46
rates in September, October, November time period and maybe 50 bips comes off this, inflation is definitely going to
01:10:52
go up. People have more money, more investment goes around. We we'll probably see a three handle again. So, we're going to trade one for the other
01:10:58
thoughts. And then here's your poly market. We made a poly market here on the pod. And poly market is an official
01:11:04
is the official marketplace of the all-in podcast. Shout out to my guy Shane. Let's go next. How much revenue
01:11:11
will the US raise from tariffs in 2025? Here's a poly market and uh right now it's looking like the number is 200 to
01:11:19
500 billion. 86% of people are believing that will be the case. And then here's ours. I had said will tariffs generate
01:11:26
greater than 250 uh billion in 2025. We're sitting around 15%. Maybe this is
01:11:32
free money in this poly market. And that was one I created. Gentlemen, who has an
01:11:39
opinion on the tariff policy and the revenue it's bringing in? Well, it's going to be hard to get to
01:11:44
that number just because the tariffs only really kicked in middle of the year. You know, 30 billion, that's $360
01:11:51
billion annualized, right? Bang in the middle of the estimate, but you didn't have a lot for the first 6 months.
01:11:56
Yeah, maybe you hit the low end of that with 30 or 40 billion for the last 6 months, but um but we'll see. But for
01:12:04
2026, that does seem reasonable. 250. We're halfway there. We're at 125.
01:12:10
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
01:12:15
the revenue it's bringing in? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Well, I assume the president wouldn't
01:12:21
the president say he already hit it because he got 500 from the Japanese.
01:12:26
Reports have come out that that might the Japanese perceive that as a loan maybe or they're going to invest in it.
01:12:31
So maybe and and none of that has been officially papered. that was both sides
01:12:37
in the EU deal were also handshake. So let's keep that in mind. These things still have to be papered and then
01:12:43
there's this potential that tariff powers could reside in
01:12:49
the house and and Trump will not be able to do any of this and it all gets reversed in our very polarizing time.
01:12:54
So So I'm just going to speak about the part of this that I have a little bit of understanding on. Let's say you tariff
01:13:01
solar panels coming from the Chinese. Uh you could do that for a variety of
01:13:07
legitimate reasons, equalizing playing fields, etc. But you are at the end of the day increasing your energy costs.
01:13:16
So to me, what I struggle with is globalization in throughout my lifetime has been a net
01:13:23
plus to the world and the United States. We've now increasingly focused on supply
01:13:29
chain security and at the expense of globalization. I
01:13:34
don't know and I'm not smart enough to know whether that's a long-term or good term good good trend. And so that's what
01:13:42
I can't quite play out of my head. Well, no, in fairness, nobody knows. This is a complete reversal of what
01:13:48
we've done. Ben, your thoughts? Yeah, I mean I think that there's a lot of triumphalism a little bit early on
01:13:53
this policy. uh g give it 6 months and and see where we're at. I think one one of the indicators that's sort of
01:13:59
fascinating is the lack of inflation because obviously a lot of people were expecting that inflation was going to
01:14:05
pop as soon as the tariffs kind of hit and it hasn't been a lot of time. But one of the kind of problematic indicators is maybe inflation didn't pop
01:14:11
because demand dropped. And so what you're actually watching is a temporary spike in the kinds of revenue that are
01:14:16
coming in via the tariffs because it's it's almost a one-time expenditure and then the demand is going to drop. And so
01:14:23
what you will see is the the tariff revenue coming into the country go down, demand dropping, inflation coming down,
01:14:29
and that's when you will see the Federal Reserve step in and lower those interest rates in order to sort of artificially
01:14:34
juice the economy. I'm I'm I I do not I understand I I think kind of what
01:14:40
they're trying to do sort of. I mean, and I think they're trying to do multiple things at once. some in conflict with one another because you can you can champion the amount of
01:14:47
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 reshore then
01:14:53
that revenue is going to go away presumably, right? You're not going to buy be buying product from overseas. You're going to be buying product domestically and then no one is going to
01:15:00
be shipping anything here in the first place. Those two things are eventually mutually exclusive. And and then if
01:15:05
you're doing all of that while attempting to also, you know, either box in China simultaneously but kind of not
01:15:10
box in China, it seems very confounding. And the thing that that I'm getting from most of the investors that I'm talking
01:15:16
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
01:15:22
sort of stability or stasis. And so I'd like to see something something anything kind of sit for a few months so we know
01:15:27
what the hell is going on. Why is Trump so sure this is going to work then in your mind? what what what's
01:15:32
the you know most charitable interpretation of this or is this you
01:15:38
know he's living in a different paradigm one might say an older paradigm of manufacturing in the US
01:15:43
I mean when when it comes to President Trump and and the economy he he's always been more of a zero sum thinker than a
01:15:49
sort of than a sort of you know grow the pie thinker and so when he looks at tariffs he says somebody's winning somebody's losing this is why his tariff
01:15:55
rates are based on on trade deficits as opposed to actual tariff rates right he was saying we're going to do reciprocal
01:16:01
tariffs And then 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
01:16:06
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%
01:16:12
tariff and all they produce is as Orson Wells famously says in in the third man is is cuckoo clocks. Like what what
01:16:18
exactly are we doing here? It has nothing to do with I think they have some chocolate. I've never had it.
01:16:23
Swiss watches and cuckoo clocks, right? I think Swiss is made here. If you have that cocoa your watch. Yes. So Phil,
01:16:29
you're in the targets. you're the target. Yeah, exactly. But not just nailing the Swiss here, but is it but you know I I
01:16:35
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
01:16:41
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
01:16:48
going to put a bunch of money into the United States so he can get a headline and to win. But it's not a sort of
01:16:53
systems approach to the economy. It's more of kind of an ad hoc approach to winning individual battles. And I think
01:17:00
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
01:17:06
one of them I have a problem with. One of them is is ensuring low taxes, which of course I'm very much a fan of. The
01:17:11
second is deregulation. Again, big fan. And I think both of those are pushing investors to to feel some sense of
01:17:17
solidity with regard to his approach to business. And then the third is the tariff war, which I think is actually creating a pretty significant dampening
01:17:23
effect on economic growth right now. You know, we'll say things like the stock market is at record highs. I mean,
01:17:28
effectively the S&P 500 right now or the Dow well the Dow Jones Industrial Average anyway is currently riding at
01:17:34
almost precisely what it was when he took office. I mean, we're essentially flat since January. And so, one way to
01:17:40
look at that is look at all of the insanity or or or you know, heterodoxy to put it kindly that's been inflicted
01:17:45
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
01:17:52
gigantic trade war and he had deregulated and he had done differential tax? economy would be ripping even more
01:17:58
more jobs. You saw Stephen Moore do this, right? Steven Moore got up in that in that presser yesterday and he held up a chart
01:18:04
showing how President Trump's economy did in the first term versus Biden during his term and he was saying that,
01:18:10
you know, the the median wages were were exploding under you and they weren't doing anything under Biden. I mean, I
01:18:15
think there's a reason why it was not a chart for what's going on in in this term so much. He he that's the big difference between term one and term
01:18:21
two. We did lower tax and deregulation. We did not do a gigantic historic trade war. Additionally, India was hit with a
01:18:27
combined 50% tariff that's going to take effect later this month if it does. Uh,
01:18:32
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
01:18:38
one. Mine is always wait 72 hours and see if it's still something he cares about.
01:18:44
25% of that 50% tariff is for what Trump called unfair trade practices. I'm
01:18:49
trying to figure out what those unfair trade practices are. um it's not exactly specifically
01:18:55
noted. And then 25% this is super notable uh and as you know Trump Ben and
01:19:01
I both the three of us all are in sync that hey maybe Russia shouldn't invade
01:19:06
democracies and so that is a punishment for India buying Russian oil which is
01:19:12
interesting that he's now you know basically taking the Biden playbook which is hey we're going to provide arms
01:19:18
to on a loan lease they're going to have to buy them to Ukraine and we're going to start penalizing people for buying
01:19:25
buying oil from Russia. I'm curious, Phil, or Gavin, what you think of the
01:19:31
the tariffs overall. Confounding to you? You're in favor of them? You're you're
01:19:36
willing to see what happens a year from now. And what happens, Phil, if it doesn't work? What will this do to
01:19:43
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
01:19:50
printing money and we're we're getting all this incredible investment end maybe some of this money goes to pay down the
01:19:56
deficit or we're neutral which is kind of their overall plan. They think these tariffs can help us become neutral in
01:20:02
our deficit accumulation. I'm clearly not a tariff expert, but I would say he does. I think one thing about these
01:20:09
tariffs, and this goes to David's point on government and socialism. Seeing a a president take action in a
01:20:18
way that's never been done before, whether it's Doge or tariffs or
01:20:23
tweeting, I think, does even for a diehard Democrat like me, it it's
01:20:30
refreshing. And it and David, maybe it goes to show that the inevitable creep of government doesn't have to happen.
01:20:37
And so even from a Republican, I find that part refreshing. It's a refreshing thing to see. The flip side of it is he
01:20:45
does seem to sometimes it seems like there's spaghetti being thrown against the wall or positions are reversed very
01:20:51
quickly and we don't know what the long-term effects. You say Jason, of course we don't know. But there are a
01:20:57
lot of people, some of your co-hosts, who don't aren't willing to concede. We don't know. And if he's wrong and if the
01:21:05
economy is in terrible shape in the latter part of his term,
01:21:11
the whole world's going to 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
01:21:19
end. I mean, if if we have low stock market, high unemployment, high inflation,
01:21:24
then things don't look as good for JD or Mar or uh Rubio and we'll be in a
01:21:31
different world. I hope David, not in a world of socialism, but that's what's at stake here. I think Jason, if it doesn't
01:21:38
work out, then handicap it. Chances it works out, you know, chances it doesn't. Give me a
01:21:44
percentage, Phil. And then Gavin, you're giving the percentage. I mean, I guess I I'm going to say 50/50, which sounds
01:21:50
wimpy, but it's pretty damn scary that it's 50/50 on such big things. I I just don't know what the unintended
01:21:56
consequences are. I'm just not smart enough to see it. Well, Gavin, your thoughts? I mean, we are in uncharted territory. We haven't
01:22:02
had a tariff war like this in, I don't know, 50, 100 years. I When was the last one? Well, I'm sure Ben knows, but it's
01:22:10
actually a higher average tariff rate than Smooth Holly now. So, more than 100 years. Yeah. 100 years. So to say we're in uncharted
01:22:17
territory, there's nobody on the planet who was an adult when that happens. So we are literally we have nobody with
01:22:22
firsthand experience here. Gavin, chances this blows up. Chances it is brilliant.
01:22:27
Handicap on a percentage basis. You're being forced. You're going all in. You got to you got to you got to state of specific.
01:22:33
I'm not letting you off the hook. Predicting the economy is a really hard thing to do. I would just say he showed
01:22:39
his hand in April. you know he looked into the abyss and if it is clearly not
01:22:44
working he showed that he will change it and then I think he also kind of learned you
01:22:51
know just that other countries you know specifically China they do have leverage especially with these rare earths I just
01:22:56
worry that you know business capitalism economic growth it does best with stable
01:23:03
policy and I think he really enjoys headlines and you know something is
01:23:09
definitionally not a headline unless it's a change.
01:23:14
And so I I do think for this to be a success,
01:23:20
you know, his presidency to be a success at some point we do need stability.
01:23:26
And this goes to, you know, you know what Phil says goes to my point about it's better to have an imperial president than imperial judiciary. If
01:23:33
his policies work, great. They'll be continued. If they don't work, well, we
01:23:38
we'll try something else. So, what do you think? 50/50? Are you in the 50/50 camp? This is going to work, not work. Coin toss for you?
01:23:44
I think he's I am inclined to think that he is much
01:23:51
more sensitive to the market than he left. So, hold back. I mean, I don't want to
01:23:57
use I don't want to do the taco then because I think that's used to provoke him and that's not smart to do with him
01:24:03
for sure. I think just to say he is thoughtful. I'm going to say he's flexible. He's flexible. He's
01:24:09
responsible. Thank you. He's thoughtful about the market reaction. He's responsive. If it's not working,
01:24:14
he'll change. And just a question is if it's not working, does he change quickly enough?
01:24:20
Got it. So, you're speeding down this highway. Can you not go off the cliff? Is there enough room to break? Freeberg,
01:24:26
your thoughts on this? I'm going to wrap there and then we'll go on to our next topic. I'll give you a final word. I've spoken a lot on tariffs. I'm good.
01:24:32
You're good. What is your general sense of the state of it now? it feels like we're in the endgame. And then there was
01:24:39
one thing actually I'll bring up Freeberg as your reaction to. He did say when he was giving his um keynote two
01:24:46
weeks ago uh you know I don't know if you guys saw it the one where he's he thanked me. I don't know if you saw the one where he thanked me in this
01:24:52
Thank you by name. Even and even Jason Calakanis a good
01:24:58
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.
01:25:03
Can I say one last thing on tariffs? I think it's actually good as a country that we're trying them whether they work
01:25:09
or not. It will just be nice to know, you know, and it's nice. Tariffs were traditionally a Democratic
01:25:16
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,
01:25:23
you know, their Treasury Secretary who generally came from Wall Street. But, you know, they've been an animating
01:25:28
feature of political discourse for 30 or 40 years. Now, we're trying them. We're going to see if they work. We're going
01:25:34
to see if they don't work. I would say thus far probably they have been less damaging than a lot of people expected.
01:25:41
You know the the core of kind of why you don't want to do tariffs is you know that retaliation was expected. We have
01:25:47
not seen retaliation which I think in some ways you know validates some of their points of views just that we do
01:25:52
have a lot of leverage and we are using it and other countries are charging America much higher tariffs than we are
01:25:58
charging them. You know maybe that made sense 50 years ago. So maybe we're hitting reciprocity, which we could all agree on, but he's not abusing them,
01:26:05
which shows that the American consumer and the American market is worth, you
01:26:10
know, maybe getting to reciprocity. The funny thing about reciprocity, it sounds good to everyone. But the whole principle of comparative advantage is
01:26:16
maybe you don't want reciprocal tariffs. But nonetheless, we're trying them. We're going to see. The early returns
01:26:22
have been, I think, less damaging than people would have expected because maybe he backed off some of the more extreme things cuz he is flexible. So we'll see.
01:26:29
come back in a year, come back in 18 months, and one way or another, we'll have run this experiment. Freeberg, did you notice in that um
01:26:35
speech he gave, he said, I don't need to know the 180th country. Maybe we just, you know, it's it's the top companies we
01:26:42
need to worry about. I I kind of 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, the
01:26:49
country. Maybe I don't even know the name of it. Okay, so maybe we don't need to worry about the tariff. Um that to me
01:26:54
seemed like he was signaling an endgame. like maybe he's I don't know. I don't I don't want to
01:27:00
say bored, but he's, you know, he's milked this one as far he's as he needs to. What do you think? Did you notice
01:27:06
that quote he did? Like I've said in the past, he's proven, which is his game
01:27:12
theory optimal way of negotiating to be unpredictable. So, I'm not going to sit
01:27:18
here and predict. Okay. Okay. I think there's a lot of gamesmanship going on that we're not
01:27:23
privy to. And again, let's see what happens. I do I do
01:27:28
like running the experiment. I like running experiments in general. I would love to reduce taxation, direct taxation
01:27:35
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
01:27:42
a new revenue source for the federal government, it gives the federal government another crutch to keep spending up.
01:27:47
Yeah. Sovereign wealth fund. Here we come. A little slush fun there. All right, speaking of trade, Nvidia GPUs
01:27:54
are getting smuggled into China at an alarming pace. According to reports on Tuesday, the DOJ arrested two Chinese
01:28:00
nationals in California, accusing them of illegally sending tens of millions of dollars worth of GPUs to China, which
01:28:06
actually isn't that many. The press release didn't name H100's from Nvidia,
01:28:12
uh, but they mentioned they were shipping the most powerful GPU chip on the market. So, fill in the blank. The
01:28:18
two were charged with violating the Export Control Reform Act felony with a max penalty of 20 years in jail. One was
01:28:25
a legal permanent resident. The other was an illegal immigrant who overstayed their visa. Here's how the scheme
01:28:30
worked. They operated a US-based company called ALX Solutions. They would buy GPUs in the US, ship them to Singapore.
01:28:36
I think Chimath pointed this out back in the day on this podcast. Got a little push back on it in Malaysia. They were
01:28:42
shipped to Malaysia as well where they would be rerouted quite easily to China. According to the DOJ, the rerouting
01:28:48
through countries is common when smuggling chips to China. Despite sending the chips to Singapore, ALX was
01:28:54
getting paid from Hong Kong and Chinese-based companies. These guys aren't the sharpest knives in the draw.
01:29:00
Financial Times reported at least1 billion dollars worth of Nvidia chips have been smuggled into China in the pina in the past three months after
01:29:08
President Trump tightened the US export controls. FT says there is a rampant
01:29:13
black market for these GPUs in China and they go for a 50% premium. Gavin, uh,
01:29:19
you're in the chip business. Your take? So, a couple things. One, I think it's going to be hard to stop it. You know,
01:29:25
we can't keep illegal drugs out of America and we're trying really, really hard to keep them out. China is doing
01:29:30
everything they can to bring these chips in. Yeah. So, it's when something is so valuable and so important, it's hard to stop it
01:29:37
completely, but secondarily, I would just say a billion dollars worth of GPUs, um it's
01:29:43
not enough to really move the the needle. you know, even if they are blackwells, the latest and greatest, you
01:29:50
know, it's better than having none if you're China. But I mean, it's just, you know, it's not like a 10 20 billion
01:29:56
black well cluster like are being stood up all over America by hyperscalers.
01:30:02
So, I think it's going to be hard to stop. I think it's happening at a scale that is,
01:30:08
you know, it's not comparable to Colossus. Yeah, it's not comparable to Colossus. So, it's just it's not going to be
01:30:14
decisive in this, you know, AI, you know, race that certainly China
01:30:21
believes we're in. And then, you know, like I said on the last time I was on, I do think it was
01:30:27
very smart to resume, you know, the H20s and whatever they're going to call the
01:30:32
kind of despect Blackwell, letting them be sold into China. And hopefully that, you know, you the theory is if you
01:30:38
legalize drugs, it, you know, reduces, you know, the drug of exactly what we're
01:30:43
doing here. We're not sending them our best uh they're sending us, but we're not sending them the high potency stuff.
01:30:49
It's actually a hilarious analogy. It is literally like the H20 or the B50 or whatever it was called. It's like the
01:30:55
It's like legalizing marijuana. Yes. Exactly. Grand gummy. How about it?
01:31:01
Yeah. So, 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
01:31:07
dispositive. Yeah. And not not a Anybody else have thoughts on it? Seems like a minor story. All right,
01:31:13
we'll end on this. Apple has bought back, let this sink in, $700 billion
01:31:19
worth of shares over the past decade. And the most innovative product in my
01:31:24
mind that they've released in that time are AirPods. Maybe they're M4 chips.
01:31:31
this user uh on Twitter, Charlie Blo.
01:31:38
Oh, you know him. Uh he tweeted this crazy chart here. We'll pull it up. Here
01:31:44
it is. Apple buyback start. Apple shares outstanding. You get the picture.
01:31:50
They've bought back almost a trillion dollar. Let that sink in. A trillion dollars. It's at 700 billion now and
01:31:56
it's not stopping. That's larger than the market cap of all but 12 companies in the S&P 500. I famously or notably
01:32:04
said maybe 10 years ago, Apple should buy Tesla for 5075 billion back when Tesla was, you know, in kind of dire
01:32:11
straits. And that was three times more than the next closest company, Google bought back 190 billion. For that money,
01:32:19
they could have bought Disney for 150 billion, Netflix 150 billion, Tesla for 100 billion in 2020, Uber for 100
01:32:25
billion in 2021, Robin Hood for under 10 billion in 2022, and BMW, Steve Jobs's favorite uh car company for
01:32:32
70 billion in 2020 still had 120 billion left over. What would have been the better move there to do all these
01:32:38
buybacks? Gavin as a public market investor or to invest in R&D and actually release a car they had project
01:32:45
Titan. Gavin, what do you think of this Apple strategy? Well, I mean, as an investor, buybacks
01:32:52
are great, and I think there's often a false dichotomy made between buybacks
01:32:57
and R&D. I mean, Apple certainly could have afforded to do both.
01:33:04
And, you know, maybe it would have been better. You know, what was the stat? It was a trillion dollars. You know, maybe they should have bought 700 billion
01:33:10
instead of 700 billion. and it's trending towards okay so maybe they should have spent 200 billion le less and spent that on data
01:33:17
centers and been like a real competitor in AI and I just continue to be baffled
01:33:24
by Apple's you know and I think they're very comfortable being late to markets
01:33:29
you know the iPhone was not the first smartphone you know the you know the
01:33:34
iPad was not the first um you know was the first tablet yeah you know there was you know there
01:33:40
was the Palm Pilot there all those devices from kind of the, you know, the bubble. But I'm just
01:33:47
shocked at their inaction and in aptitude and AI, how bad the
01:33:52
products are from a user perspective. I mean, they're they're terrible. They're getting worse. Siri's worse.
01:33:59
Siri's worse. And it's just how is that possible? Yeah. I mean it
01:34:04
it almost um you know I guess at the limit um and you know malice is incompetence is indistinguishable from
01:34:11
malice but I mean it almost feels like they're trying to lose literally if you said here's a playbook
01:34:16
on how to lose they would have written it. Yeah. They would have thought it was a joke right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's astonishing to me their
01:34:24
lack of execution on um on this is what happens. I mean, if you put uh if you put Tim Cook in charge and
01:34:29
he's a supply chain guy, he's going to do the optimal thing for for for that.
01:34:34
Ben, your thoughts on it? Yeah, I mean, I'm with you guys. I'm waiting to see, you know, when are they going to make something cool again? I
01:34:40
mean, 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
01:34:47
they brought out anything that excites me as a consumer. Yeah. And so I'm looking at that and then the only headlines I see are Tim Cook trying to
01:34:54
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
01:35:00
guess that that's his mandate is to shore up the supply chain with the president of the United States um vis the iPhone. But yeah, if that's the best
01:35:06
you're going to do, then I don't know. Things things don't look great over there from the outside. Phil, any thoughts on Apple and their
01:35:13
ineptitude? time for Tim Cook to um start thinking about hanging it up maybe and put a a product person in charge.
01:35:21
Uh not my area, Jason. Not my I got to pass on that one. I would say I do think in fairness I it
01:35:27
would shock me if they do not have the best augmented reality glasses on the market in three or four years. It so
01:35:33
plays to their strengths and maybe they're they feel like that is what they're focused on and eventually, you
01:35:40
know, they'll cut a When was the last time you heard them bring it up though, Freed? When's the last time Apple Vision was even brought
01:35:46
up in a keynote or you saw a demo? They they seem those are VR, not not AR. Like I think
01:35:52
but their eventuality is to be AR, right? You can turn them on to see through them, I guess. But
01:35:58
yeah, I mean that and that's actually an interesting point, Gavin, is you and I are sitting here like, is it AR or VR?
01:36:04
Cuz you you know, they're just not talking about it. Where's the version two for developers? Go ahead. Rumor Rumors of Apple's demise are 30
01:36:11
years old. Okay, this is every year the same story. Lack of innovation,
01:36:17
copycatting. Where is it? The iPad came out. Somebody said that under Steve Jobs that
01:36:23
there was a lack of innovation when Steve Jobs was running the show. Even during the no jobs era when the iPad came out, I don't know if you
01:36:28
remember how controversial it was. They were making fun of Jobs. He's lost his luster. What is going on with this guy?
01:36:34
Total flop. They used to They made fun of the iPad. They called it like the Maxi Pad or something. You know, remember all that stuff? It was like
01:36:40
this thing like who the hell's going to use this thing? It's a total disaster. All of a sudden they sold 10 million units then 100 million units and
01:36:46
everyone's like holy I would not count Apple out. There's a system there that's built unlike any other in
01:36:53
corporate history. Let's see what happens. Yeah, I think that's right. They have every right and ability to win. They
01:37:00
just they need to start trying. I mean the fact that you're not even in
01:37:05
the running and they're losing talent. They're losing talent. I I tried the Apple Vision in February
01:37:11
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
01:37:16
try this thing out. It's like this is pretty cool. And then you're like, "Yeah, but I'm also wearing a medieval helmet on.
01:37:22
It's got to be and we all agree it's got to be sunglasses." I got the um I bought the Ray-B bands from Meta and I used
01:37:29
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
01:37:35
pictures of the kids and video. We took the fairies. It's a really nice ferry system in New York now that they've kind of brought back and I, you know, we took
01:37:41
the ferry around the island and did a couple things and it was just really nice to not have people, you know, pose
01:37:47
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.
01:37:54
And then if you look at something, it will tell you what it is. So, the AI plus these glasses is going to be
01:38:01
phenomenal for when you're looking at a monument and you say, "Hey, tell me about Ellis Island. Tell me about Governor's Island." and it just starts
01:38:06
reading you facts. I think it could be magical. But Jason, Jason, the one thing, one thing is like if you take uh
01:38:13
your ranch, you may have like a backup generator, solar, power wall, EV,
01:38:18
grid, everything. Eventually, someone's going to want to control all that, make it easy for you
01:38:23
to control, aggregate it. There's going to be a whole infrastructure in the US on this. And that's something you could
01:38:31
see Apple coming to. Absolutely. Apple home. Yeah. Yeah,
01:38:36
that's actually a brilliant one. I I I don't know if you saw this. You must have filled. There are smart panels, circuit breakers. Have you seen
01:38:43
these where you put it in and you take out an app and each of your breakers is in the app and you can see breaker by
01:38:49
breaker your energy consumption. You could turn them on and off. I mean, that felt to me like something that
01:38:55
should be in the Apple wheelhouse as well as Sonos, but they just don't like to buy stuff. All right. Well, one thing is there's a very g like when you take
01:39:00
the number of cars that are going to be in the country, the electric EVs, and
01:39:06
then you multiply them to you say there's going to be let's say I think the estimate is in 2030 30 million
01:39:12
electric vehicles, let's say. Yeah. And they're 80 to 200 KWH in them Friedberg. That is something like 2400
01:39:21
to 3,300 gigawatts of storage that's moving. And
01:39:28
if you add autonomy to that, that is a lot of flexible distributed power. And
01:39:35
so, um, whoever controls and thinks about that is going to make a ton of money.
01:39:40
So, you're saying you could take a fleet of a thousand cyber trucks and send them to a natural disaster, plug them in and
01:39:47
power a city or power some homes, which is how that is constructed currently. You can use your actual cyber truck to
01:39:54
feed into your home and keep it awake for a couple of hours, right? Maybe in the short term just think about the parking lot of meta like
01:40:00
you know having all those cars there what you charge discharge the control of that the management of it the operating
01:40:06
system if you will of that will be very valuable all right we're going to end on this summer reading everybody likes to
01:40:12
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
01:40:19
over the summer or a series they consumed for our dear audience Ben you
01:40:25
got a you got a show or a a book that you're that you're obsessed with. Uh we can do uh we can do a show. I I
01:40:32
I'm trying to remember a Broadway musical for Ben. I know you love your musicals. I I do. Although none of no good ones
01:40:38
have come out recently, which is unfortunate, but uh shows Have you Have you guys seen this Department Q show on
01:40:44
on Netflix? No. Not enjoying it. It's a fun one. Don't.
01:40:49
It's called Department Q. Like uh No, it's it's like a a sort of
01:40:56
detective. Yeah. Cold Cases. Exactly. And it's it's well written and it's a fun show. I'm I'm enjoying that one. I I
01:41:02
like that one. Any books, Gavin, on your shelf that you uh decided to break open at the beach while you're working or you just too
01:41:08
busy? No, I am uh enjoying I like post-apocalyptic fantasy. um
01:41:13
Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen, but a but a new a relatively new series is called Moonfall um by James Rollins
01:41:20
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 uh
01:41:27
but I've enjoyed it. You ever think about writing your own uh sci-fi fantasy? You ever dabble?
01:41:33
Idally. Um but I have yet to dabble. Freeberg, anything on your plate other
01:41:38
than running and doing these incredible all-in events? You look exhausted, my brother. And babies. You got a lot on
01:41:44
your plate. I I wonder if you had the time to read a book or watch a series. I've been reading because I never read it the Andy Wear Project Hail Mary book.
01:41:52
Yeah. It's awesome. So good. I I am um disappointed. I like Andy Weir. I interviewed Andy Weir. Yeah.
01:41:58
Yeah. Halfway through I got disappointed with one of the core assumptions. Um
01:42:03
we'll discuss another day. But uh I give you permission. Yeah. To just go with it. It's it's fake.
01:42:08
Well, I think this whole idea that this alien race all died in the spaceship from radiation sickness when they're so
01:42:14
advanced. They have spaceships, but they don't understand that there's radiation in space, but they out of the story, huh?
01:42:21
It it just blew the whole the whole story line up for me. And I'm like, what? That doesn't make like and and then it traces back to all these other
01:42:27
things that they do understand which in inherent in all of them would have been an understanding of photons and
01:42:32
electromagnetic energy. So, that that kind of blew me up a little bit, Gavin. I don't know if you agree, but I was I was happy to suspend disbelief.
01:42:40
Yeah, cuz I do like Andy Weir. Yeah, I like Andy Weir. He's a cool cat. I literally when he was doing The
01:42:46
Martian, I asked him to be on this weekend startups like years ago. And uh
01:42:51
he's like, "Yeah, if you come down to my condo in like San Die, not San Diego, in like San Jose or somewhere in the South
01:42:57
Bay." And uh literally it's got this like little modest thing. And then he's like, "I just sold it." and uh you know
01:43:04
it's going to be like a major actor is going to be in The Martian, but he was broke, but everybody in our industry was
01:43:09
talking about it. It was really really charming. And he's like, "I think I'm going to move to LA." I was like, "Oh, you totally should move to LA. You
01:43:14
they'll be buying everything you do. They love sci-fi. Your shit's brilliant." And sure enough, here we
01:43:19
are. Phil Deutsch, your thoughts. And he uh And by the way, Phil Deutsch, when I go on a plane ride with Phil, he's got
01:43:26
six newspapers with him. You got to read the paper every day. Every day. I mean, four papers. through
01:43:32
five minimum a day. He's like the Charlie Rose of the governor news consumption.
01:43:37
The governor says I'm in Turo which is the middle of nowhere and there's so few papers out here I have to get up at 5 to
01:43:44
go to the Cumberland Farms to get the FD the Journal of the Times before anyone else does. So I love reading newspapers.
01:43:50
I was a newspaper boy. Read papers. Um I uh late to but just finished the Musk
01:43:57
book which was phenomenal. I thought um the biography the one.
01:44:03
Yeah, 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
01:44:11
slog, but well worth it to sound pretentious and smart. I I watched
01:44:17
Superman, which I highly recommend Ben Shapiro's review of because he's got it
01:44:22
dead on. What did you say, Ben? Well, no. Give us a teaser. Well, people look it up later. You didn't like it. Why didn't you like
01:44:28
it? too woke or you didn't like Gaza or Ukraine kind of references I thought I didn't think any of that
01:44:34
stuff was there honestly I just thought it was super meh like it was the whole thing is just it's it's James Gun being
01:44:40
very very James Gun and as somebody who likes sort of the legend of Superman you know the the sort of grandeur of
01:44:45
Superman as part of the American iconic landscape that kind of reduction of Superman to slapstick comedy surrounded
01:44:51
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
01:44:56
into James Gunn doing Guardians of the galaxy but with iconic. It was a little derivative I will say. My kids loved it though which I was
01:45:03
happy about. Continue film. Then this is a tough one cuz it was a fun date night but F1 I thought was
01:45:10
little B+ish could have been better. And then my winners uh I thought the Penguin was
01:45:16
fantastic series and Dope series and Dope Thief is very good too.
01:45:23
I would just add second season of 1923 I think also very good. I will give you um
01:45:29
Oh, interesting. Interesting. I uh I used to be in the magazine business. I haven't subscribed to a magazine in well over a decade per you
01:45:36
know and um I just subscribed to monle.com which is a bunch of like designers
01:45:42
and they um you know it's like literally they have a print newspaper they put out once uh over the summer and then they
01:45:48
actually have a bound magazine but it's an incredible uh incredibly curated look at the world
01:45:54
of design, hotels, restaurants, art, fashion and it's kind of uncompromising.
01:46:01
and they're just like, "Hey, we just like things that are incredibly well thought out." And I have started taking some of their replica recommendations
01:46:08
and they don't miss monle.com. Um, and you guys know I love uh
01:46:13
biographies and I went biography crazy uh this summer. All About Me by Mel
01:46:18
Brooks. Amazing. And he reads it. So, a great audio book. I'm I'm almost finished with Who Knew by Barry Diller
01:46:25
who at like 24 years old. Yeah, that's great. It's incredible. Did you read it yet or?
01:46:31
Don't tell me, you know, it was a little skim. Plus, I heard him talk about it, but it's Yeah, you know him. I've met him one time.
01:46:38
His career is unlike anybody else's. At like 24 or 25, he's running Paramount Pictures and then the bench he has there
01:46:45
is like he hires Eisner Katsenberg as his assistant. It's the most amazing
01:46:50
story of young people running a muck, running these media businesses. We have to do a Barry Diller interview for
01:46:56
Allin. Um, and then, uh, that would be incredible commentary.
01:47:01
Wait, did he do Godfather 2, Jason? Wasn't he? He did Godfather 2. Yes. And he he basically took over for Bob Evans. And
01:47:07
if you ever see the documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture, or that book is in both of them are incredible.
01:47:13
Comedy Samurai by Larry Charles. I just finished a couple weeks ago. And that's the was the guy who did Barat Borat and
01:47:21
um, what was the gay character that Sasha Baron Cohen did? Ah, Bruno. Uh,
01:47:29
thank you, Bruno. And he also collaborated with Larry David. And then finally, my fourth pick for bios of the
01:47:35
summer, I regret almost everything by Keith McN, who is the restaurant
01:47:40
tour. Um, he had a stroke. He has an Instagram where he's like pretty spicy.
01:47:46
And, um, he did Baltazar, Pastis, Odon, all these incredibly iconic places that
01:47:51
in my youth I hung out in. and to hear him do it's the most self-deprecating
01:47:58
in a you know uh sort of British tradition biography ever. So I love biography so many lessons in there. If
01:48:04
you're young entrepreneur I highly recommend all those. Would love to have all those people in the pod. It's been an amazing summer episode. I really
01:48:10
appreciate y'all taking the time out of your schedule. Ben, are you going to come to All-In Summit in September?
01:48:16
You're our guest. We got to have you there. Come out. Yeah. I'd love to see if we can make it. That'd be awesome. 7 8th or 9th. Uh bring the wife. Uh I
01:48:22
don't know. I don't know how old the kids are, but we'll get you backstage. We'll give you the VIP pass, the whole treatment. Okay.
01:48:27
I don't think you want my 11 95 and 2-year-old there, but yes. No, they can't come. No, but actually, I take it back. We have a surprise for one
01:48:35
of the parties that they would love to come to, but I'm going to leave it at that because Dave hasn't given up. Dave
01:48:40
loves doing the parties and he has a blowout spectacular party that will be unrivaled. Oops. The um scholarships are
01:48:49
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
01:48:55
ticket, we let a select group of upandcomers buy a discounted ticket. So, we keep uh you know, the the vibes
01:49:01
really fresh and we like to have as many people as possible. So, go to the website and you can apply. Don't apply
01:49:07
if you can afford the ticket cuz we like to give it to people who really can't. Uh and those uh scholarships are there.
01:49:13
you'll hear in a week typically because we get so many scholarship requests. It takes us a little while to get through them. Shout out to the team Kimber and
01:49:19
John Hal and the whole team over there Nick for putting so much into the amazing amazing uh all-in summit. And um
01:49:28
yeah, thanks to my friend for sending me my new Dave is freaked out right now.
01:49:33
Nick, it's not even funny anymore. Just bleep it out. See you next time on the number one podcast in the world after Ben Shapiro.
01:49:40
Love you besties. Thanks everybody. Bye guys. We'll let your winners ride.
01:49:47
Rainman David and we open sourced it to the fans and
01:49:53
they've just gone crazy with it. Queen of
01:49:59
[Music]
01:50:04
besties are my dog taking your driveways.
01:50:12
Oh man, my habitasher will meet the ugly. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all
01:50:17
just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.
01:50:25
Your feet. We need to get merch. I'm going all in.
01:50:32
[Music] I'm going all in.
