LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland

So the individual homeowner is not going to be in a position to rebuild. I think that the liabilities of the insurance claims are going to be so massive that the state is going to look to the federal government to build them out.

But to the question of who is responsible, it is economically going to make no sense to rebuild unless you can get that insurance. It is a coveted place to live. But because of the construction costs have gone absolutely parabolic in California, because of regulations, you're talking about $14 million in income to build a $7 million house.

And so the free market solution is the only solution. If you look at I have an investment in a company called Kin Insurance, and they specialize in direct to consumer insurance for areas that are plagued with natural disasters... So you're not allowed to use a weather model to price in, you know, your decision making for insurance in this state. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

They're driving real estate value up because they're not allowing the cost of insurance of that real estate to naturally float. And so by driving real estate values up, the economy looks good, they make property taxes, income comes in, but at the end of the day, the bill is going to come due. And in the case of Florida and in the case of California, either the state government or the federal government is going to step in and pay the difference.

Because of climate change and other things, the Arctic ice shelf is melting. And the more and more it melts, it opens up a shipping lane in the northern passage for a lot of critical goods. And so if you had some sort of strategic agreement with Canada and Greenland, you effectively have this monopoly control over something that could become as important as the Panama Canal. And so I think if you look across the world, the control of maritime shipping lanes becomes this really critical strategic military and economic asset.

It's very strategic. If you look at the Panama Canal, I believe either end is operated and controlled by China. We are at war with China, whether we like to admit it or not, in my opinion. This is very strategic.

It's not the literal statement that matters as much as kind of the vector and the magnitude of the vector. He's clearly trying to begin negotiating for some change. I don't know what the ultimate kind of strategic endpoint is meant to be here, but clearly there's something I think Chamath might have a good read on this and seems to make a lot of sense.

But again, the lens that I would put on this is now the winds are blowing in a different direction. And I do think it's the value maximizing function... But I do think it's the smart value maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders.

I think he's going to have to deal with advertisers next, though. I mean, that's one thing that X doesn't have to deal with as much, and that's going to be the second problem he's going to have is not just the government, but do advertisers want to be next to some of the content that's about to appear.

And when he loses tens of billions of dollars in personal net worth, will he make the same decisions? We'll see. But I can tell you, if Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position. I think he is terrified of Trump and having his company broken up, and he's doing this strictly to appease Trump, which I think putting Dana White on the board is another signal.

So in this world of AI that we know it today, there's training and there's inference. And right now we think that there's training that's at a limit. And so now the market shifts to inference... But it's not clear to me why that's a better solution than all of the AI accelerators plus tensors that are now just prolifically being exposed to the market, whether it's Amazon exposing what they've done, whether it's Google exposing what they've done, a whole litany of startups exposing what they've done.

But it is true, this is going to be the largest breakout in robotics we've ever seen, if Waymo is any indicator.

I think the interesting thing is that, they really doubled down and created a pretty decent test bench for robotics. I thought that was pretty interesting, so I think that reinforces what a lot of smart people including, you know, what Friedberg and Gavin also spoke about, just in terms of the long-term future for robots.

But the bet he's making is that the models are good enough and now the chips are good enough that they can actually realize real-time responses using machine vision, using real-time input, and then respond quickly with a local model running, whatever that model is, to drive some output in the industrial setting. And that there'll be a lot of these sorts of applications, whether that's making predictions for biotech research, or whether that's for running robots in warehouses, or building new research models, or maybe you could strap this PC on the back of something like a car, a tractor, a lawnmower, a humanoid robot, or any other set of applications.

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about it because I think I've been trying to figure out how they justify their valuation over the long run. And I'm not a public market person, but I am fascinated with Nvidia. And their Cloud GPU business is definitely a majority of the revenue. So I think a lot of what we're seeing is them trying to grow into that and trying to expand in case the music stopped. Now, I don't actually think the music is going to stop.

Yeah, I guess the point is, a toy to do what? Because if you're trying to do inference, like everything is telling us that we are reaching the limits of training.

We haven't even barely touched what AI is going to do and change and all of the various things that are going to come from it. And the early adopters cannot use Cloud without getting shut down because of scaling issues. And I don't think those are artificially created based on the type of investing I'm doing. And so I'm very bullish on Nvidia.

I think that sort of along the lines of what I said on the prediction show, I think that Waymo and Tesla are going to run away with this market, and I think it's going to force a bunch of consolidation in the traditional auto OEMs.