Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!

So my prediction is that this becomes more of a template for the future. It'll be less about permitting. It'll be more about creating incentives and allocating those incentives for a share of the upside. And I think that there is a really strong economic argument for America to do that.

my way to put back to Chamath on that would be, I just think it's a dangerous game for the government to start picking winners. You know, I wouldn't, for example, if it owns 50% of a TikTok, does it disadvantage a meta, as an example, right?

Of course you would have. Yeah, it's a great deal. And why not give a little upside to the taxpayers? I agree with that.

So, you know, we expect and we think just the trend generally towards nuclear energy is going to continue. It's been proven in China. It's been proven in Europe. I think it will show to be a key part of the AI kind of arms race

I will tell you that there is a lot of capital, and we mentioned this last time, a lot of intellectual capital in the United States that's eager, hungry and ready to get moving on build out. The only thing that's challenged and the only thing that's holding it back is regulatory challenges, regulatory roadblocks.

The entire country knows that we need to win the AI race. The numbers are the numbers. You put up a chart like that, Thomas, and there's only one way for us to win, and that's to build more nuclear power plants.

But the point is that this model cost millions of dollars and was able to compete with a model that took billions of dollars to train. So my takeaway from that was that these costs are falling really precipitously. So that's sort of my one observation, is spending more money doesn't necessarily get you further along if the goal is progress.

I think to me, the real question, guys, is, do we ultimately believe that you can get an ROI on that 500 billion? Because if you can, there will be people that will want to fund it, right? You can do a data center by data center, you can do it actually at the GPU level, right? So the financing is there. To me, the 500 billion doesn't scare me from an absolute number.

And I don't know how you get a return on 500 billion invested in this. That's the other thing. And I don't know if that's the real number.

I think the spending money part, to be honest, is more of a gimmick than it is a technical commitment. So I guess if they want to spend the money, go ahead. ... So I kind of thought that these things were just joint. And so my takeaway was entirely different. It was not a commentary on Mosa or Larry or Sam. I think all of those three companies are frankly very good. It was more a comment that you have to be very careful to protect the president's legacy

The obvious consequence of this data center and chip infrastructure effort, which is obviously going to happen with or without government involvement, is an increase in electricity demand.

which is energy, electricity capacity buildout in the United States because it's critical. Building AI infrastructure means that we need to build energy infrastructure.

If you think of the GPU as the atomic unit of the future, right, and the key competitive advantage and the key kind of ingredient, you can't power a GPU without a data center, and you can't use a data center without power. So I do think at the end of the day, it really comes down to the grid and it comes down to power. So I think that's kind of constraint number one.

But just today it looked like President Trump overturned it and now it's full seam ahead. If you have it permitted, then it's all about just get the power, however you need the power, which I think is the smart decision. Back to your earlier point, we are in a race here.

We saw a model that got released by the Chinese under, by the way, a totally open-source MIT license that you can run on a laptop, and it turned out to be as good as OpenAI's O1 model, so a couple of versions old.

But if China, if one day China has 10 XR power capacity, it won't even matter, right? Because they'll just have so many more, whether they're not quite the same advanced GPUs or not, they'll just have so many more of them. Their industrial AI capacity will be so much larger that even if we have the best H100s and the latest technology that Jensen and others can provide, it won't matter.

I feel like Doge and cost cutting is going to be a lot harder to realize than folks assume. Nearly everyone I met with who works in government or is entering government had this, if not disdain for Doge, a concern that it doesn't really align interests with the political objectives of politicians, that they need to get more stuff for their constituents in order to get re-elected and that they're not going to vote programs away.

what they say is that folks that actually allocate the internal spending in the United States gets a lot more scrutiny because there's all of this horse trading because they want some of this money to get allocated into their specific area. It is going to be a very complicated thing.

So the Overton window is wide open now to discuss even the budget of the VA and where is the money going to come from? So, I think we're actually going to make progress on it. This was like a sacred cow and now we're talking about it.

I think that value and money are correlated in some industries, like real estate or heavy industry, but I don't think that it's very correlated in tech.

You guys mentioned we do own some OpenAI. I am bullish on OpenAI, which I guess is now a counter against the grain kind of view. ... It really is a dominant kind of franchise, right? It is maintaining 80% plus market share.

So when I use Gemini or XAI and ChatGPT, and I use them all daily and Claude, the difference between the products right now is really narrow. ... So, anyway, I think it's still anybody's, I think it's anybody's game right now.

I went to the CDC and I said, well, show me the percentage of people, Americans taking SSRIs over that same period. For depression, anxiety, et cetera, and what you see that it's also gone up. And then the last chart, I went to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and I said, what has happened to the labor participation rate over the same period?

But if you make it abroad and bring it in here, he's going to charge money and a tariff. All of this are part and parcel of, I think, this broader economic realization.

To me, it's more a reflection of, I could overlay the stock chart of, you know, Fox and Comcast and, you know, CBS and just have all of those have imploded. I think people have been kind of substituting right away.

I mean, I talked about this at the beginning of the year as one of my predictions, but I do think that the United States stable coin rails will be hugely disruptive and value added.

I do believe the ChatGPT franchise is worth something, but I think enterprise folks, when I talk to them, want the open source product most of all.

The main thing it does is it forms an internal working group with the goal of making the US the world leader in crypto. ... And the members of this working group are going to be, there's me, there's the head of the SEC, the Secretary of the Treasury, and all the agencies and departments that have an interest in crypto.

we have new Gen 4 technologies that are meltdown proof, that have a totally different architecture where there isn't a setup, where you have runaway heat and ultimately a collapse of the reactor and a release of radioactive material, which is what happened at Chernobyl. These new systems, which we highlighted on the show a couple of months ago, like the Pebble Bed Reactor that's been in production making electricity in China, are incredible new technology architectures and they're here and they're running.

Yeah, the downside is the amount of time it takes to adequately build these things properly. The thing that China has had is, it's as Thomas' chart shows, is decades of practice in building things safely and quickly. We can build things, but we haven't had the practice to build them either safely or quickly because we haven't built any.

And what I saw was a very broad-based embrace of business people, because I think that the president understands how important it is to make sure that economically, America is just firing on all cylinders.

So the number one thing that that EO does is rescind the Biden EO, which we talked about in this podcast, I don't know how many episodes ago, but you remember it was this 100-page monstrosity of burdensome regulation.

But I think you put it all together, you know, is 100 billion a reasonable scenario? ... And then could it be a trillion dollar asset, the way Trump has mentioned? I mean, in a world where Facebook's one and a half, right? And the penetration of TikTok in the US is 50% of what Metta is. I don't think it's unrealistic.

But at the end of the day, the president was very clear that it is completely and entirely worthless without his permit, and he wants to own 50% of this asset. Now, if you're a buyer of something, you're not going to pay $100 billion if you control whether it can exist or not. You're basically going to pay today's equivalent of one franc, which would be one dollar.

I do worry a lot about the precedent being set here with respect to foreign government actions on US companies in their local countries. Imagine the CCP tells Tesla they have to sell their Chinese operations and give 50% of the Chinese operations to the Chinese government because of their concerns about security