Fareed Zakaria critiques Trump's tariffs on allies while highlighting AI's displacement of 80% of JP Morgan's credit underwriting, suggesting Universal Basic Income as a necessary response. He contrasts U.S. healthcare inefficiencies with Singapore's government-led model and argues that Israel's military dominance in Gaza risks long-term security without a two-state solution. Despite Elon Musk's "Doge" cuts targeting foreign aid, Zakaria predicts China will remain formidable due to its scale, though TSMC's global reliance makes an invasion unlikely. Ultimately, the discussion emphasizes that human skills like empathy and trust will become more valuable as analytical tasks automate. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Tariffs and Foreign Relations00:12:58
What's up everybody?
Today we are joined by a man with the jawline of a Bollywood sex symbol and the hairline of Count Dracula.
Born to a Muslim family in India, he became an American citizen in June 2001.
Just made the cut.
Morgan King, he's a renowned journalist, expert in U.S. foreign policy, geopolitical affairs.
He is a three-time, as of last week, Emmy winner, a Peabody Awards winner, and has become one of the most insightful voices on global affairs and geopolitics, despite working for CNN.
Today, we're giving you the ultimate 2025 explainer on every major geopolitical conflict from Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Epstein Island to Love Island.
We'll be diving deep into everything happening in the world.
So give it up for the most successful H-1B visas in U.S. history, Fari Zakaria.
Thank you so much for taking the time, man.
We hope you enjoyed our introduction.
Oh, my God.
Did you get everything right?
It was all totally fact shuri, right?
It makes you realize sometimes in life, inflation is a good thing.
So tell us, what's going on in the world, man?
Like, what are you?
I know right before we started, you said you want to talk about America, its relations to its allies, the tariffs, the Trump stuff.
But is there anything?
I mean, we can even start there.
Do you think there's been any net positive to the tariffs?
Honestly, no.
I know what you're supposed to say on the one hand, on the other hand.
You say whatever you want.
I'll tell you, to me, the tragedy of this is like one of the superpowers of America, the real superpowers, is that we have this group of countries that are our allies, that are friendly with us, that trade with us, that we've built this ecosystem.
And so you can't just look at what we can do.
You have to really ask yourself, what can we do along with Europe, along with Japan, along with Australia?
Because they're all on board.
They're all part of the American ecosystem.
And if you look at the tariffs, the way Trump is doing them, they actually get slammed the most because they're being punished for trading with us closely.
Because the ones that we have a lot of trade with are the ones that end up getting the most tariffs.
I mean, crazily, the one country exempt from all the tariffs is Russia.
But even if Trump had thrown Russia in, the truth is we don't do that much business with Russia, so it wouldn't make a big difference.
But it's the Canadians who've linked their economy to ours for the last 30, 40 years that are getting slammed.
It's the Mexicans who've reformed their economy to essentially make it almost like an integral part of the American supply chain.
We don't make cars in America anymore.
We make cars in North America.
And the parts go back and forth 16 times, which is why the tariff rates are sometimes really high.
Because every time one part crosses a border, you got to pay that tariff.
And it's the Europeans.
So to me, that's the tragedy.
It's like we don't realize that that's the unique thing about America.
Like, you know how many military alliances China has?
Russia and North Korea.
You know how many we have?
59.
Yeah.
Right.
That's what makes us special.
So help us understand this, just like the average American like myself doesn't really know much about this.
I keep hearing people saying, oh, these tariffs are devastating.
They're bad for foreign relations.
They're bad for foreign policy.
Yet many of these countries that we are now imposing tariffs on tariff us.
So why is it only bad for foreign relations when we are tariffing them?
I think the average American looks at that like, well, tariffs can't be that bad for foreign relations if they're all tariffing us.
Right.
So first important thing to understand, again, among our allies, this is the advanced countries in the world, average tariffs before Trump came to office were 2.5%.
So for everyone.
So you can always find some.
Averages get tricky, though, right?
Agree.
So the Europeans protect their agriculture.
And so how much do they tariff us on agrarian products?
So there are two kinds of things.
One, they tariff us.
It's not so much the tariffs.
It's they don't take, they don't import American chicken.
They refuse to take our customers.
They believe that our chicken is washed in chlorine.
They think that that's bad.
There are a lot of issues.
There's a lot of issues on which there are a lot of issues on which Europeans basically agree with RFK Jr.
You know, which is to say that we have too many chemicals in our food, you know, things like that.
They might be right about that.
Dude, I agree.
I actually think they're right about it.
One of the few areas where I totally agree with RFK Jr. is on all that stuff.
You know, he points out.
On everything else.
A box of cereal.
Cereal in Europe has like eight ingredients.
The same box of cereal has 18 ingredients.
Like, what are the 10 things that we're putting in that they banned?
So some of it is those kind of tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers.
But the main point, because what you're saying is true, is that they tariff us.
Look, everybody protects a few things, but we lived in a very low tariff world so that these things, these were not major distortions.
And you could have your pet peeve like you wanted to protect some agriculture and we wanted to protect something.
What we've done is we've gone from 2.5%.
We're at 15% now.
So that's like a six-fold increase.
And what that's going to do is make everyone else raise their tariffs more.
So suddenly everybody...
Why would they do that?
Because they have to retaliate, right?
Well, because their feeling is if you're putting, if you're blocking our goods, we're going to block your goods.
But what if we say, no, you don't do that?
You have access to our market.
Our market is bigger.
And therefore, we have some leverage.
Right.
And so that's what that's essentially what Trump.
Costco buys a bunch of stuff, they get a much lower price.
So if we buy a bunch of stuff, we get a much lower price.
Now, remember, the European Union, which on trade acts as one, have about as much power as we do in that sense.
The market is about as European Union every day.
No, no, the trade stuff, they're pretty unified.
We got England out of there.
We're going to break it down.
So we're going to advantage.
Everyone's doing great on intelligence.
I tease, but like.
So you're right.
The two kind of players that can go mano-mano are the Chinese and the European Union.
Because they've got enough, they've got a bunch of leverage.
But, you know, we'll always have a slightly higher.
So you're right.
They won't raise them to the level we do, but they'll raise them a certain amount.
And all my point is, who suffers?
The consumer, right?
The American who goes to Walmart and now his food is more expensive, his clothes are more expensive.
And by the way, you don't give a shit whether this shirt costs you 20% more.
But I don't know.
But there are people who raise your hands.
But a person who lives on $35,000 a year.
$1,000.
So walk me through this because I'm not an economist, but the theory to me that I understand...
Oh, thank you, dude.
I appreciate that.
I put on my wife's price.
I was complimenting him so much that I forgot how handsome you were.
Dude, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I was feeling like that, right?
I would go along with that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he's a good-looking guy, right?
I fully disagree.
So anyway, as you play out this America first thing, I understood the idea.
We go to Middle America a lot for these shows, and I see there used to be manufacturing there, and there's not.
And I actually empathize with what they thought Make America Great meant.
A lot of them.
I'm sure there were racist people, but I think a lot of them were like, yo, we used to have manufacturing, we used to have jobs in the city, and now there's nothing.
So in my mind, as I play that out, does that not eventually force America to build its own warehouses back up, to build its own manufacturing back up, maybe even forward-thinking things like supercomputer facilities or whatever?
Do the tariffs not, in the long run, pay off in that sense or not?
So it's a great question because that is at the heart, really, of what Trump is trying to do.
And I totally agree with you that that is a huge problem, that we de-industrialize and we de-industrialize very fast and like it hurt certain areas a lot more than everywhere.
But here's the problem: when you look at every rich country in the world, what has happened is over time, you lose manufacturing and you move into services.
And it's a very simple reason why.
As you get richer and richer, look at your own lives, okay?
As countries get richer and richer, they buy less stuff and they buy more services.
So if you look at 1960, about half of all American consumption was on goods.
Now, 25% is on goods.
Most is on services.
Can you give an example of a service that we would transfer entertainment, software, software services?
So going out to shows, dining out would be these are all services.
All services, law, accounting, finance, consulting, software, software services, entertainment.
Opposed to a developing country would spend more money on making steel, making aluminum.
So the newly industrialized nations are putting as much possible emphasis as they can on that, whereas we're buying movie tickets.
Now, give you a simple, you know, 80% of the American economy in terms of employment, 80% of Americans are employed in the services economy in America.
You know how many employees in manufacturing?
8%.
And actually of that 8%, half of all manufacturing jobs are in branding, sales, which are service jobs.
So really it's 4% on the factory floor.
So you're taking 85% of Americans, you're taxing them, you're penalizing them to subsidize this 4%, which is shrinking.
Now, let me just turn it into one thought, which is the reason we've surged ahead of all the other countries in the world over the last 30, 40 years, and we have, and I can go through the numbers if you want, is because we embrace the future.
We said we're going to lean into technology.
We're leaning into services, software services.
We're the entertainment, you know, we dominate the world in terms of entertainment.
We export all that stuff to the world.
We have huge trade surpluses.
In other words, we send out a lot more of that than we buy of anybody.
And what was the last Kazakh movie you saw?
Right?
Borat.
And Borad doesn't count.
But by the way, Trump doesn't count this.
For him, the services economy doesn't exist.
All he looks at when he looks at these tariff rates is stuff, goods.
How many cars did I sell you?
How many cars did I buy?
But the point is, we became the world's leading economy because we leaned into the future.
And that's where, so I'll give you a simple statistic.
German wages and U.S. wages 25 years ago were roughly the same.
Roughly speaking, we were a little higher.
We're now like our wages are 30% higher than German wages.
European wages on average were 50% higher.
If Britain were to join the United States as the 51st state, Britain would be poorer than every state in the Union.
It is poorer than Mississippi on a per capita GDP basis.
Why?
Why?
Because how can we embrace services?
So how can they sustain life if they have such a small GDP?
Well, they're smaller countries, but so given the numbers in comparatively few.
So Mississippi is about per capita GDP is about 47,000.
I think Britain is 46,000.
So they're okay.
But by the way, it's the cost.
France is even lower.
Standard of living is lower.
That's the big difference.
The standard in the business.
That's something I know.
Think about it.
Look at average house size.
Look at the number of rooms, air conditioned.
Look at the number of cars and average.
Look at the size of the showers in the country.
When I was living in Spain, I noticed that.
That there was just an acceptance of a lower standard of living.
Not to insult it.
Like I thought it was really enjoyable.
I had a great fucking time living at the moment.
Right.
It wasn't the same let like just assuming your apartment is AC is an American thing.
Right.
We're just assuming everybody has a flat screen.
Exactly.
Now, now here's an interesting question, though, which is, I leave, I throw it out to all of you.
The Europeans, particularly in the North, where the incomes are a bit higher and they have really good government, it works well, they find that they actually, the quality of life in terms of happiness, they score much better than we do.
Who's doing those tests?
It's self-reporting.
In other words, are you happy with your life?
But my question is, do you think you're always going to be happier if you're making more money?
That is a misconception.
This is my concern: we're talking about consumerism in America, and obviously, our wages have gone up.
But is it possible that that is indicative of an empire in decline?
That, you know, like in previous generations, you were guaranteed a job and now we're guaranteed stuff and low prices is sort of the promise to my generation.
And I wonder if as we become this consumption machine, that could be potentially lose our leverage on a global scale.
Well, you know, the part that resonates with me is, and you guys are talking about going to the middle of the country.
Comedy Tour Dates Announced00:02:30
The thing I noticed when I traveled, you know, because I wrote a book where I tried to deal with some of these issues.
So what you notice is there are places where the factory went away, but people still have jobs.
Look, unemployment in America right now is at a 50-year low, and it's been at roughly that low for five or six years.
It's not a Trump versus Biden thing.
But what has gone away is the community.
You know, because if everybody in a Midwestern town would work for the steel factory, they'd all go to church together.
They'd all be members of the Kiwanis Club.
They'd all go to the movies together.
They'd all go to the hardware store together.
There's an identity wrapped in.
And it's like a community and a sense of belonging and purpose.
And that has gone away.
But a lot of it is not globalization.
I mean, why did the movie theater went away because of Netflix?
The hardware store went away because of Home Depot.
The factory may have gone away because of globalization.
But it's a combination of these forces of modernity that are eroding these community structures that we have.
And that's a tough one.
We're a tribal species.
So that does make sense.
So, all right, guys, let's shout out some dates.
August 1st and 2nd, Kansas City, Missouri.
August 8th and 9th, Perrysburg, Ohio.
That's Toledo, I believe.
August 22nd and 23rd, Liberty Township, Ohio.
It's a lot of Ohio.
September 11th and 13th, I'm back in Civilization in Dania Beach, Florida.
September 25th and 26th, back to Helen, Ohio.
And this is a show that's, I'm very excited to do it, but it's going to sell out October 5th, Dubai Comedy Festival.
I didn't get to go last year.
It was a big mix up.
This year, I'm there.
The tickets are already like 80% sold out, so you need to hurry up and buy those.
All those dates and more at akashsing.com.
Get your tickets.
Also, I am very excited to announce the Akash Singh show.
This is my podcast.
I flew out to India to record a bunch of episodes because of everything that is happening with free speech over there, court cases with friends of mine being threatened with jail time.
Honestly, I'm not sure how many episodes I can put out because lawyers have been calling me left and right and my friends' lives are in danger.
But we are still going to put out a bunch of great episodes with people that I'm excited to talk to.
So it's on my YouTube at Akash Singh Comedy.
Please check it out.
I love y'all.
Thank you guys so much.
Channel, Arizona, San Diego, Burlington, Vermont, Montreal, Toronto, Berkeley, Detroit, a bunch of other dates getting at it.
I can't wait to see you guys at the show.
I'll be doing one hour of stand-up comedy.
No more, no less.
See you guys at the show.
Outsourcing Rare Earths00:15:40
So here's my question.
Let's assume that we did embrace the future and that we have succeeded better than any other country in the world at embracing the future.
We at the end of the day are primal animals.
There must be a cost to embracing the future in outsourcing a lot of these industries.
And I've heard a lot of people talk about this.
And the cost of that might be like, hey, to build a submarine in America might be a little tricky.
To build a fighter jet might be a little tricky.
We got to get these parts that they only make in China.
So now potentially we're getting parts for our submarines from a country that might not want us to build the best submarines.
Can you explain, like, what would be your steel man argument for the downside of converting into a consumption economy?
Like, give me like, it can be fear-based, but like, just give me what the realistic concerns are of that.
So I think that is the realistic concern.
My view, the realistic concern is not like we should be making everything in America.
We can't.
Like, we're, you know, the margins on making.
The capitalist system won't incentivize it.
Right.
I mean, it's just like they've done the math.
It would cost $3,500 to make an iPhone in America.
So that's like more than twice as expensive.
But the national security argument, I think, is real.
That there are some core areas where you don't want to be dependent on countries that maybe your geopolitical adversaries may not have your best interests in heart.
But that's why I come back to our allies, our ecosystem.
So the truth is, we don't need to make all the steel in the world right here in America.
But if the Canadians are making it, if the Europeans are making it, we built a defensive.
I mean, we protect them, right?
So that's why I feel like the turning on our friends is the worst idea.
I'll give you an example.
Computer chips is the, you know, everybody understands this is like the holy grail of the modern world.
So the company that makes, that does the x-ray lithography that actually makes the chips, you know, that puts the transistors on the chips, which is now down.
It's so, there's so many billions of transistors on each little chip that basically can only be done by an x-ray machine.
That x-ray machine is only made by one company in the world.
It's ASML.
It is the most advanced piece of equipment probably we make in the world.
It has 400,000 parts.
It costs $300 to $400 million.
You need three Boeing 747s to transport it.
And the temperature inside that machine is five times the surface of the sun.
That machine is only made by one company.
It has a 95% market share.
It's not an American company.
It's a Dutch company.
But because it's part of our ecosystem, and we tell it, don't sell to the Chinese.
They don't sell to the Chinese.
We tell it, don't sell to the Russians.
They don't sell to the Russians.
So we can't make everything ourselves.
But if we were to embrace our friends, we have, and that's what, like, as I say, nobody else has this kind of relationship.
So this is really interesting, right?
And I think this is something that I don't begrudge the average American for not knowing because it's like, I don't know, you know, the importance of these relationships in your allies, you can outsource certain things that you used to do in your country to other countries that you are allied with.
But is it possible that some of the things that we are outsourcing are not to our allies?
Are there certain things that we are reliant on to our adversaries?
Yes, we are.
And we should be changing that.
That's 100%.
And then should we subsidize those things with the government if there isn't a capitalist market that will support them?
Like, what is something that we are reliant on our adversary?
Like pharmaceuticals, for example.
I think we get a lot of them from China.
So the best example would be these rare earths.
You've probably heard about them.
Greenland.
Right.
So the cool most important thing to understand about rare earth is they're not rare.
They're called rare, but they're actually widely available.
The processing of rare earth to turn it into the magnets that we need is what is a very complicated, energy-intensive and dirty process, environmentally, extremely dirty.
Like massive pollution of air and water when you do it.
We decided we didn't want to do that because, you know, for all those reasons.
So we can try and bring it back.
And I think we should come up with some strategy.
But keep in mind, you're going to have a really hard time finding an American community that says, yeah, okay, it's okay in my backyard, right?
Like everyone wants it in theory, but then you try to find a place in America.
That's a very point.
And again, my point would be, why not talk to the Indian?
That's a much larger issue than you're talking about.
But India is a poor country.
It is willing to put up with a trade-off that we are not willing to put up with.
Why not talk to the American?
Right, right.
You know, and look, because they already have a lot of pollution.
They still have huge coal plants.
But it is a real problem.
And we should be, you know, but I would keep that list small because the danger is here.
You know, you can kind of imagine every problem needing to be then made in America.
And then you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing all these industries.
Keep the list small, make it strategic, and say to yourself, what are the areas where you can find friendly countries that would be willing to do it?
Where is that happening, the production of these big magnets?
The rarest stuff is almost all in China.
The Chinese made a strategic decision to do it.
And I mean, I know it sounds like, like, what do you use the rare earth magnets for?
So, you know, you're in a car seat today.
You can make like 17 different adjustments.
Those are all rare earth magnets that are doing it.
Now, you could say to yourself, you know, do we want to go back?
Could we go back to the old car seat?
Probably, but we've gotten used to a lot of stuff like that.
What about like making a submarine?
What about making, I was speaking to the guys on the all-in-pod, and they said that we just didn't have the production line capabilities in America at this point.
How do we generate that?
Correct.
Some of it I think will be very, very hard to do because it's, you know, these are a series of low-end, energy-intensive, often dirty, you know, manufacturing processes that, you know, the markets are efficient.
They went away for a reason.
And bringing them all back together will be very hard.
Creating an ecosystem where they are done with a group of countries is going to be much easier.
Well, we could do, first of all, actually, nobody manufactures a submarine.
These things are made in 10 countries.
They're assembled.
Even when people say the iPhone is made in China, it's not.
It's made in 16 countries.
It's assembled in China.
And that is all the low-end stuff.
The high-end stuff is all done in California.
So we've got to be savvy about understanding that.
Like, we want to be involved in the critical parts that are the most important, the most value-added.
And the other stuff, if it's national security importance, our friends could do.
I think that the idea that we can, you can judge me by this prediction.
The idea that we're going to be able to bring back these entire supply chains into the United States is completely unrealistic.
The one thing I can guarantee you is that Trump is not going to produce a massive manufacturing revival in this country.
That number of 8% of Americans being involved is not going to go to 15%.
I bet my life on that.
So then what would be your plan for revival of Middle America economically?
I mean, historically, what we've done is we run the economy fast and innovative, and then we redistribute.
And part of what we haven't done over the last 30 or 40 years is redistribute.
Where are the great worker retraining programs?
Where are the great apprenticeship programs?
Where are the great technical schools training plumbers and engineers and people who maybe don't have a college degree but want to make good money?
And by the way, you can make very good money in many of those kinds of areas.
But we need to scale up all of that.
And what's really, I mean, the thing I really worry about, we're talking about reviving, you know, the 1950s economy.
What's really about to hit us is AI.
And AI is going to be, you know, what we're going to have to do is have a serious conversation about what do all of us do.
I mean, you guys are probably fine.
But who knows, you know?
I was thinking about this because the next election will probably be decided.
You know how the past elections, like Obama was like the Twitter president, and maybe this last election was Trump's TikTok or whatever.
And the next one will probably be AI.
And what I was really curious about with JD specifically is because he comes from an area of the country that was ravaged by outsourcing.
Right?
Like Appalachia and Ohio.
I think they give these grants, these Appalachian grants, where I think you just need to pass high school and you get free college anywhere.
So I'm really curious.
I actually just like to hear you guys say, but how do you make sure that doesn't happen all over the country?
You've witnessed what happens when we leave a section behind.
And it won't be just Appalachia.
This will be like major parts of the country.
Look, I mean, isn't there like any predictive planning that we can do for this?
Like, if we know what industries are going to be impacted, like, why don't we start leaning into that transition before, not after?
And part of it is it's all happening so fast and nobody knows exactly what's going to happen.
But I think your intuition, I think, is right.
Like, you look at what the CEO of Microsoft says: 30% of the code in Microsoft is now written by AI.
Oh, dude.
Right?
Yeah.
So now you say to yourself, okay, I don't need to be, you know, I want to bring my social genius to understand that that probably means you need 30% fewer programmers, right?
And you can always justify it by saying my obligation is to the shareholders.
Right.
So this increases the share price.
So we relay off 30% of the programs.
Well, and by the way, they are in a competitive environment where if they don't do it, somebody's going to do it.
Right.
So think about lawyers.
What do young lawyers do when they come on?
They do what they call discovery or draft writing of appeals, of court appeals.
These are all easy things for AI to do.
David Solomon at Goldman Sachs said that the prospectuses that the investment bankers did, they used to take weeks and weeks.
The AI does in two, three hours.
This is something that came out recently from the Harvard BS reunion a few weekends ago.
This happened.
Hardest business school does that kind of thing.
Didn't you go to Harvard?
I went to Harvard, but I got a PhD.
I didn't get a business.
That's right.
That's why I don't own this podcast.
I'm just a guest on it.
Check it.
Okay.
57% of Microsoft's software code was written by AI in its most recent quarter.
Coca-Cola used AI for the design of 100% of its upcoming holiday marketing campaign.
Salesforce is able to handle close to 85% of its customer service related inquiries with AI tools.
The CTO of Moderna was recently appointed to the additional role of the head of HR.
The three, I guess, broad employee groups predicted to be most likely impacted by AI reside within software, financial services, and professional services.
JP Morgan expects 80% of its credit underwriting process to soon be handled by AI.
80%?
A bank is going to get rid of 80% of its workforce.
So here's the sweet irony here, which may be only true temporarily, but the data currently is that computer science majors just graduating have a higher unemployment rate than art history majors.
Which is kind of sweet.
It probably won't last.
But the reason is probably so many people went into computer science thinking this is the sure thing.
And AI is right.
And AI does programming really well because so many are going into coding, et cetera.
Now they're going to be able to do that.
Andrew, the whole learn to code trends.
Yes, you remember this?
People are telling truckers, like, oh, just learn to code.
And now it's like, yeah, coders learn to trust.
Well, this is actually, to answer what you were talking about earlier, there was one candidate talking about this six, seven years ago, and nobody cared because we're all going to need a UBI.
I don't see a way around needing universal basic income.
Andrew Yang said it.
We all laughed at him.
We all thought he was a fucking idiot.
And I think, and we as people are just so concerned with the problems right in front of us, we're not even thinking about the problems five, 10 years down the road.
So let me ask you what you guys think about this.
So my problem with UBI has always been, I think that human beings need not just money, but dignity.
I understand this.
I agree.
And so that's one of the reasons this sounds super wonky.
I've always preferred something that's called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which just to put it in simple language, what it says is we already have it.
If you work a full-time job and you don't hit the, what you make is less than the poverty level, the government drops up your wages.
I agree.
And I think we should double that.
We've been doing it with Walmart for years.
Why not do it for everybody?
But the question is, I mean, that's expensive.
And that's going to, you know, you're going to need a lot of money to do.
And even there, I worry, like, is there work for people to do in the world that you were just describing, Andrew, where like 80% of the work is still done by AI?
What do you do?
I think UBI is a solution to all of our problems.
But again, when 80% of jobs become unnecessary fairly, much quicker than we think, what are we going to do for those 80% of people?
It's not like just what would people do in the day?
Don't you think they'll feel like that?
I can't answer their purpose.
No, I don't think we'll be happy.
But I do think there's an immediate need, which is a lot of people are probably going to be unemployed soon.
And we need something to at least satisfy their survival.
There'll just be more services.
I think when people aren't doing things, they're not just sitting around.
They're just going to be more forms of distraction.
I mean, like, one of the, I think one of the...
They'll give each other massages.
Exactly.
The second time you ask about massages.
We're too close to Chinatown for you to be talking about.
Robots will do that better than bots, dude.
Don't worry.
There's a interesting phenomenon, I think, happening right now where like you see a lot of people that are not necessarily poor actually making really good money.
Let's say you're in like the 90 to like 120,000 range.
Like the amount of money when I was growing up, you're fucking rich.
That's what I thought.
But I think what they're experiencing right now is because of crippling college debt, they don't really feel an exit strategy.
Right.
So they're stuck in this like extended adolescence, right?
Where they're they have their flat screens, they're going to parties with their friends, they're enjoying things, but they don't really feel like they'll be able to buy a house or buy an apartment or maybe even start a family.
There's this like real delayed adulthood.
And I think that's where you're feeling a lot of frustration.
I think that's like where the mamdanis start to come in and they have a lot of success, where like the democratic socialists are really pushing.
It's not for the very poor people.
When you saw poor people in New York, they voted for Cuomo pretty much, right?
It's the kind of like middle class that doesn't feel like they have escape velocity or escape opportunity.
And now they're like, well, I deserve.
It's almost like this little bit of an entitlement that poor people don't have.
They're like, I deserve to have a house and a family and to be super rich, but my loans won't let me do that.
I totally agree.
Delayed Adulthood Crisis00:07:11
So if you look at the three areas of American life where costs have gone up way faster than inflation, it's education, health care, and housing.
And those are the three things that those people who I think you put it exactly right, they feel like, wait a minute, wasn't I promised this?
I don't work hard, take all the tests, go to a good college, and I got a good job and making good money.
And the irony here is all three of those areas, you have massive market distortions caused by weird government involvement, weird oligopolies around hospitals.
So it's like the market actually doesn't work.
You're not letting the market work.
I mean, look at Texas.
Not my favorite state for a lot of things, but for housing, they do phenomenally.
They barely have a homelessness problem because of that, because they don't have all this restrictive zoning and regulation.
Maybe we could learn something from that.
Well, this is what I'm optimistic with AI for, is that it could be the case that AI disrupts employment and there's massive unemployment.
But it could also be the case that it massively increases worker productivity and drives prices down.
Is that not also the case?
We talk about education, like the cost of education, obviously it's inflated for a myriad of reasons.
But if they're able to democratize education where it's largely free due to AI models, they're able to teach kids.
Then is it possible that the cost of those things could go down and then you don't have these massive load inflation?
But that thing has new kinds of jobs.
Sure.
Like, is it possible that could also be the case?
That's what the techno-optimists say.
And I think you got to say, for most of history, they've been right.
I just worry the speed and scale of this.
I mean, this is so big.
And secondly, if you look at history, there were periods of like 60 years where book average GDP didn't go up.
Like eventually things worked out, but that's like a long period.
Yeah, long term, maybe.
I think short term of a CEO is saying, I could say I could make increased profits at however many X multiplier by laying off this percent of my workforce.
But what if they almost always go?
What if they can make the same profits as like think like a wealth manager?
It's like, I don't take clients under $100,000 because it's not worth the time.
But now you can take on thousands of clients under $100,000 because you have this AI model that does the same amount of time.
And now you're able to increase your margins that much.
That's very smart.
I think that, you know, that's why I say we don't know what's going to happen.
But it's important to hear that side as well, because it's easy for us to get caught up in like the fear, like doom spiral, right?
But this idea that you can see the jobs you're losing, you can't see the jobs in the future that are being created.
And it's going to be a battle between those two.
And we are going to.
No, I was just saying, I think corporations are going to benefit the most because they have the money to invest in AI right now.
And a lot of other places don't.
And like education is one of the places that I don't see them really investing in AI that much.
Like in terms of...
Yeah, why would an institution invest in an AI education software if it's going to stop students from spending $100,000 a year for going to do like keg stands for four years?
That's what we did in college.
Like I don't think any of us really learned that much in college.
It was a fun experience.
I would say this is a good thing.
Speak for yourself.
You had to support that.
I was a scholarship kid from India.
We didn't all have Indian parents.
I had to maintain a GPA.
But I would say that's the same reason why all these online programs have exploded, right?
Like in terms of like Harvard undergrad is like a few thousand.
Then their like online program is like tens of thousands.
Wow.
So like these online programs are able to then spread it out and they're able to gain smaller margins or yeah, basically like less cost, but for way more people.
And so in that vein, I'm like, why would they not do the same thing for AI?
Be like, everyone can get an AI degree from our school and lower the cost.
It's always going to be like Cuba where everyone has a degree, but there's no jobs.
Well, this is what's kind of happening now, right?
We are already like Cuba without realizing it.
We're like Cuba.
Now we're just stacked with debt.
So Cuba just doesn't have the opportunity, but they have the education.
Now you have this circumstance where going to an Ivy League institution, like you went to two fine institutions, I would imagine, you tell me if I'm wrong here, but the greatest benefit was being around other people and increasing your network.
You don't get that going to Ole Miss.
You don't get that going to UC Santa Barbara like me.
I met great friends that I'm friends to this day, and it's amazing.
And a beautiful place.
It's incredible.
It was awesome.
I've spoken there.
Oh, my God.
It's amazing.
Put it myself.
I got to find a way to get a gig here.
To enjoy that.
You shouldn't be educated there.
But when you go to Harvard, you go to Yale and you're sitting down with future presidents or future senators and future headphones managers and all these other people.
Your book, right?
Like the people that you can call to access information or call to for help for your future projects.
It's like invaluable.
100% right.
And it actually points to maybe an area where AI can't disintermediate, which is the physical networking that takes place among human beings that still requires, you know, conferences and meetings and things like that.
Like, because ultimately, human beings are social.
And you can't get, you know, you can't somehow do everything automatically without meeting, without trusting.
Like something like trust, I think, becomes even more important in a world of deep fakes and AI.
So it's going to be very interesting to think about when you have a technological push that moves you in this direction where they can do kind of everything analytic that you can do better.
Maybe we start to emphasize those qualities of human beings, which are not about analytics, which are about our emotions, our ability to trust, our ability, EQ, character.
Exactly.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Great thing.
Right?
Like that, actually, that's what is fundamentally human about us.
Our ability to be brave and wise and loving and emotionally support other people.
Maybe that's where we're headed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're saying we'll just become France.
I don't think of the French as emotionally very supportive.
It would take a doctor, right?
Like a doctor.
There used to be the whole idea.
The doctor was using this brainiac who could diagnose what was going on.
You'd ask you a few questions.
Well, I mean, the AI can diagnose way better than the smartest doctor in the world because AI knows like 40 million cases.
Well, how many doctors can remember 40 million?
But maybe what the doctor's skills then become is talking to the patient, relating, understand, helping you understand your condition, helping you make the kind of lifestyle changes that you need to make in order to be successful on this path of recovery.
That's a skill they don't teach in medical school, right?
Like it's all brainiac, brainiac, brainiac.
That's nursing school.
Exactly.
That's right.
But maybe we need to reverse the order and say, you know what, bedside manner, emotional support, being a life coach is a core part of being a doctor.
Not just being this guy who I'm like a genius and I know how to do this.
Yeah, I mean, that'd be great.
Kraken Crypto Platform00:03:24
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It's not just crypto, but I do want to, I always give Kraken credit for this, and I want to continue to.
When Bitcoin and crypto took that massive, I don't even want to call it tumble, just like fell off the face of the earth.
Kraken held.
Like you want to be with the legit exchanges that can handle those dips in the market.
The ones that just fall by the wayside, obviously, we don't trust those.
I've been burned on a couple of those.
Yeah, Akash can speak to it.
Yeah.
You know, like this.
Maybe Mark Cuban.
Yeah, Mark.
Yeah, dude.
Okay.
So we've been using Kraken since last year because it's very simple, secure, and it's fast.
When crypto's moving, you want a platform that keeps up.
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So what Kraken did is they hooked us each up with $10,000, which is insane that they would do such a thing.
Okay.
It doesn't even feel real.
10,000 in USDG, and now we get to build our own investment portfolios across thousands of cryptos and stocks that they have on the platform.
So we're obviously competitive and we're obviously gambling over here.
I'm up finally.
No way.
Finally, because I learned my lesson, I just put it in Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's why is anybody doing anything else?
Yeah, I tried the fart coin.
I'm not that guy.
I can't do that.
It ain't me.
I'm not a good picker of stock.
I trust one thing now, and that's it.
I think that's a smart way to go about it.
That's pump, dude.
Same page.
Yeah.
There is a part of me that's like the second they gave us money that I was like.
That's kind of what I was thinking.
It's gravy.
It's a bonus, baby.
Yeah.
Let's run it up.
Yeah.
Lost 70% of my money.
That wasn't a good idea.
Bitcoin, baby.
I'm all in.
So that's it.
Just be secure.
What about you guys?
How you guys doing?
I did the dumbest way ever, I think.
Okay.
Because I just put it all in the ETFs.
I didn't realize you could buy ETFs on the platform.
Okay.
So now it's just like a safe thing and I just get paid like a monthly yield.
Dumb, that's smart.
It's just gay.
But yeah, it's just not fun.
It's not sexy.
I should have put it in Fartcoin.
So they're paying you a monthly dividend on that?
Yeah.
No way.
Yeah.
What does it come in?
Monthly?
I think it's like 7%, 7% to 10%, depending on which ETF.
That's pretty fucking good.
If you get a more aggressive ETF, then you get a bigger return.
And then there's like a small fee that they take.
It's like 0.35%.
And they guarantee you that return, or that's when it's doing well.
Depending on how the commodities are trading.
Wow.
It's an interesting thing.
And I think it's cool that Kraken has ETFs.
Al, what do you do?
How are you doing?
Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Safe bets.
Safe bets.
So what is Ethereum's like, what, Pepsi?
Is that the idea?
Yeah.
It's like another one that's safe, but it's not Coca-Cola, but like you'll drink it.
You're exactly right.
And crypto people will be like, oh, it has like more actual benefits that you can actually build stuff on.
You can sell other things.
Yeah.
And a blind taste test.
People chose Pepsi or Poke.
You know what I mean?
Crypto people say a lot of stuff.
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All right, guys.
Healthcare Insurance Incentives00:11:57
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You mentioned prices increase the fastest in what was it?
Healthcare, education, and housing.
So you said maybe deregulation has helped Texas with housing.
AI can potentially help education in terms of bringing costs down.
Why can't we do anything about healthcare?
It's a great question.
Healthcare is the toughest one because every, let's start by saying every country, every advanced country in the world, healthcare is a problem.
Because, you know, there are two or three fundamental problems with healthcare, which I think it makes the market not work really well.
Number one, you go to a showroom and the salesman says to you, you should buy this flat screen TV.
It's really cool and it's really good and it's twice as expensive as anything else.
You're going to say, ah, let me think about it.
I don't know.
A doctor tells you, you need to get this test.
You're going to get the test.
There's an asymmetry of information.
You can't bargain hunt for the best medical procedure or even whether you don't even know whether you need that medical procedure.
You don't want to haggle.
So we get like, we get three times as many MRIs as people in Germany do.
We don't need them three times as many MRIs.
We get them because the system is incentive to create that.
Secondly, I think that there is a fundamental problem here, which is that the market's incentive is to have you be sick, need a medicine, and not die.
Like if you have diabetes, that's perfect for the market because you're going to be on every month.
Whereas the best thing for health is for you to be prevention, for you to never eat, you know, that.
But why will the healthcare system, why does it have any incentive to prevent problems?
Because they make money by having you sick and solving the problem, right?
So it's an interesting kind of market failure.
And that's where I think you need the government.
And we don't do government that well.
Like, you know, if you look at like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, where they have good healthcare systems, which are very low cost, it's because they do government really well.
Like they're very.
They also have a lot of faith in their government.
I think that in the inception of America, it's baked it to resent, to fight back.
It's decentralized.
It's inherently fragmented.
And we're anti-state by get the government off my back.
Exactly.
Do you think we can pull off universal healthcare?
Look, Medicare is basically universal healthcare, and we've pulled it off pretty well.
I think that the fantasy we have is that nobody is making these decisions.
Remember when Obamacare was being touted and they were like, there'll be death panels, Serapel.
Well, we already have death panels.
They're insurance companies.
I mean, the insurance company decides whether or not this procedure is okay or not.
And, you know, maybe it would be better to have some centralized group of experts who decide, look, if you want this, God bless you, but we're not going to pay for it because we don't think it's medically necessary.
That's what most of these other countries have.
There's an interesting thing.
So Shifty is one of the guys who works with us.
He's our editor.
I want everybody out back home to go wish Shifty Healthy Recovery just had hip surgery.
He's like 20.
How old is Shifty?
22. 23. 22, 23 years old.
And but what's quite interesting is he had health insurance, but navigating the claim process is like virtually impossible.
Right.
So what Shifty did, and this is to Mark's point earlier, is he just input everything in ChatGPT.
And his insurance paid for it.
Yeah.
He goes, I would never have been able to do this alone.
I would have to hire, I think they're called like a health advocate or something like that.
But he had AI do it for him.
So in the same way that like you see on Twitter, somebody posts some like crazy fake news headline and then Grok immediately or people ask Grok to, is this true?
Verify this, yeah, yeah.
If Grok verifies it, like Twitter is so much more enjoyable for me now that I'm not consuming all this rage bait without having a fact check on it.
Maybe that starts to happen with the healthcare companies and then they have to find a different system because you can't take advantage of the people now that we have an AI tool that's going to essentially fight back on their, I don't know if it's bureaucracy.
Reverse incentive.
Yeah, they're reverse incentive.
No, you might be, you might, I think this may be an area where AI really helps because navigating the complexity of the healthcare system or of taxes.
That's what I was going to say.
All these systems that seem like so daunting to us.
Now we have something on our side, on our side, that can at least help us through it.
And maybe my parents' generation won't be able to do it, but in order for me to help my parents, it'd be easy.
I'm throwing in ChatGPT.
It's kind of like, you know how the robber barons come about and then unions are like this equal and opposite force to the robber baron who's taking advantage of the worker.
It's like maybe we start to use ChatGPT as this equal and opposite force to the, what do you call that?
The muck that you have to go through.
Economic bureaucracy.
The economic bureaucracy or the administrative bureaucracy that you have to go through trying to get your clients.
No, but it's a very interesting thing to ask yourself why we do this.
Why do we have so much of this?
And it's true for Medicaid.
It's true for food stamps.
It's true.
And there's a very good article in The Atlantic by this woman, Annie DeLowry, who says, what we do is we put a time tax.
And it's particularly felt by the poor because we're so worried that somebody who doesn't deserve the benefits is going to get it, that we put so many requirements.
And, you know, and by the way, this new big, beautiful bill has added a huge number of them with regard to Medicaid and work and this, that, that, you know, you make it impossible for somebody to go through it.
And it takes so much of their time.
And these are people who work, you know, real nine to five jobs where they're being clocked.
It's not like, frankly, all of us who can take an hour off in the middle of the day and do stuff.
Right.
And so it's a very cruel thing to do to poor people where they're poor, they don't have many resources.
And now you put this huge burden where they have to navigate this whole process.
Maybe AI can help, but I really wish we would rethink that and ask ourselves, like, you know, the thing, the thing about something like UBI, and by the way, all the data has shown that when you give benefits like this, it's much better.
Just give people money.
They're not stupid.
You know, if you're giving them a benefit, don't make them jump through 16 hoops to prove this and prove that and prove that.
You know, you're going to catch 1% fraud, but 99% of the people, you've made their lives miserable.
Yeah, I don't think we think their intentions are to help people with these rules.
I think we think their intentions are to not pay you.
And that's why we don't trust them.
And that was kind of my thing with Obamacare.
It still gets touted a lot.
But to me, it was like, maybe it's better than what we have, but I don't think the solution is to give everybody health insurance when we all know insurance companies are inherently pretty terrible.
Yeah, the one thing about Obamacare I thought that was pretty awesome was the pre-existing conditions.
Like talk to anybody who had pre-existing conditions.
Like before Obamacare, they were going to die.
They were just going to die.
Because they're never going to get the best.
And like, talk to Republicans that had pre-existing conditions, like coal miners, like people who work in factories and shit.
That Obamacare came around and saved their fucking lives.
I'm not saying they're going to change the way they vote, but like...
Obama has a special place in a lot of Republicans' hearts because of that.
Look, the basic thing Obamacare tried to fix, and it only got somewhere, is you can't have a functioning insurance system where everybody doesn't buy in.
Think about car insurance.
If you said, oh, all the people who are most, you know, who are not going to get into accidents, you don't have to buy the insurance.
But they're the people who make the system work.
Like insurance workers, because a whole bunch of people who don't need it also buy it because they pay for the people who are balancing it, right?
They balance it out.
So in healthcare, when you say young people don't need to buy, you know, you can't do that.
Like the only systems that work that are real insurance systems, everyone has to buy in, like house insurance.
If you don't have some minimum number of people all buying in, it's not going to work.
That kind of is like a universal health thing in that essential, like I pay full price for health insurance, which for my wife and me is like $2,500 a month for not that good a coverage.
It's fine.
But that's kind of like a tax I pay.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I just wish we could remove the insurance company.
I don't mind paying a tax.
Not that the government's going to be that much better at it, but at least I don't think their intentions are to not pay, which I think that is the case with insurance companies.
I think now we're getting to the point where it's like, what is the American criticism of like the Canadian Healthcare Service or like the British healthcare service?
Healthcare is not as good.
It's not as good.
You're waiting on lines.
You can't get a doctor visit.
It's like, we're waiting online.
It's not as good.
You can't get a doctor visit.
You can either charge us and offer something spectacular.
Or you don't charge us and offer something adequate.
You can't offer something adequate and charge us.
That's where I think people start to revolt.
And I think that's where the insurance companies have kind of, because of their incentive structures, have like squeezed us.
And we're at the point where like, I'm not justifying this, but you have a guy shoot a healthcare CEO and then kind of be like celebrated on the internet.
Like if that's not indicative of how Americans feel about our healthcare associations.
I will say this.
You know, all of this points to a problem we have in America, which is when we don't want the government to be involved in something, but it kind of has to be involved in it, we end up devising the most complicated Rube Goldberg type system that is totally inefficient.
And that's what we have with healthcare, right?
Like we're like, oh, if you look at so many of the tax credits we have in America, we're like, we don't want to say, we want the government to give you this money.
So we're like, the government will give you a tax credit where you can, basically the government is giving you money.
But you've created this complicated system where the lawyers are going to get a piece, the accountants are going to get the piece, a consultant is going to, why not just say we're subsidizing this?
We're writing you a check.
So there's something like...
Because then we're a socialist country.
Exactly.
So we have $1 trillion of government expenditures that are tax credits.
Think about that.
So we're already given a trillion badge.
But because our egos are tied into democracy and socialism and capitalism, it's horrendous.
We have to disguise it as something else.
Is this buy-in system you're describing why we couldn't have like a dualistic sort of like public healthcare program as well as a private healthcare program?
I was wondering that.
I think that's what we should have.
I mean, my own view would be have a basic system that's like a very, very bare bones Medicare for all.
And you can layer on top of it a gold-plated system, whatever you want.
You want to buy it.
That is what it is.
Public school, private school.
The problem is, how do you get from here to there?
So Clinton tried to get rid of the insurance companies.
That was the end.
And they've revolted.
Assimilating Foreign Born00:12:33
And then they said that he got head in the old offices.
There's a lot from the insurance office.
You see the propaganda that they throw at our heroes?
What the hell is going on here?
He said that he was on Epsom's Island.
That's because he tried to get rid of the insurance companies.
Last guy to balance the federal budget.
Maybe, you know, whatever he was doing, it was working.
Now we're talking about balance.
Defeat of the interns.
I want to be clear.
I'm disassociating myself with that comment.
Okay, that's interesting.
How was he able to balance the budget?
Did he just kind of let Wall Street run wild without the other thing?
Here's the magical, crazy, Nobel-winning idea that he had.
He raised taxes and he cut spending.
You've got to do both.
Crazy.
Like, it's math, right?
I mean, that's the only way when you've got huge deficits like this, obviously you've got to do both.
And what we did was we cut back at taxes and we sort of cut spending.
We raised it.
We cut spending a little bit, but we raised it in so many different areas.
You got to win an election and you can't win an election and say, I'm going to raise taxes.
You just can't.
People are going to be like, fuck that.
But he won or did.
No, but he didn't say I'm going to raise taxes.
But Clinton won in 96 after he had raised taxes.
Oh, no, yeah.
And I remember my parents, my dad lost his job in 91 for like two years and then 93, opened a business.
And like, I remember being like, yo, I feel like it's not just me.
You feel like we're all kind of doing really well.
And then 96, I think it was just the momentum was crazy from the economy.
But you know, your point about your dad losing the job, you know, it reminds me of something you brought up, which is when you have this much change and you have all, you know, what do we expect?
And what we should have realized and that you're going to get a backlash.
You're going to get a lot of anxiety because this much change.
I mean, think about the amount of change we've had globalization, okay?
Then information revolution, software, internet, mobile, cultural change.
Think about how much the culture has changed in the last 30 years.
The role of women, role of minorities, role of sexual minority, all that stuff has exploded.
Sexual what?
Sexual minorities, gays, lesbians coming into the mainstream.
You're thinking of more sex.
Well, it wasn't sexual, Latinas.
Ironically, the role of sexual minorities is going up, but apparently young people are having less sex.
I know.
What the hell was that?
Because they keep talking about it.
My point is, like, you have that much change.
You're going to get a backlash.
You're going to have people say, wait, my world is disappearing.
Yes.
And I think a lot of the Trump phenomenon is, it's actually not that economic.
It's this cultural.
And I don't mean cultural in a racist sense.
It's just like my world is disappearing.
My community went away.
What, you know, give me back those.
That's why, you know, the most important words on his cap are again, make America great again.
So it's a politics of nostalgia.
Let me go back to when, you know, all this crazy change wasn't happening.
I thought that this was something that was idiosyncratic to the United States of America.
Okay.
I'm on a boat in Ibiza.
That was a very privileged sentence, and I'm very proud to say it.
I'm on a boat in Ibiza, and I'm talking to the captain of the boat.
Right.
And there was a captain, like a first helper or something like that.
And I was like, so what's going on in Spain?
Like, tell me, like, what's happening?
You know, I saw there's some protests in Barcelona.
And he gets comfortable enough.
At first, he's kind of like nervous to share.
And then he gets kind of comfortable.
He's like, honestly, yeah, it's like, you know, the immigration and like the, you know, the left-wing government is just kind of letting all these Moroccans in.
You know, at the front of the boat is one of my best friends who's Moroccan.
He's just enjoying his life.
And I'm like, yeah, he's one of them.
And he's like, he stops the boat, falls off.
But he's like, he's like, yeah, this Moroccans are coming in.
They let them come in because once they're naturalized, they can vote and it bolsters the support of the left-wing side.
And he's essentially like echoing the talking points that you hear so many Americans talking about.
So have you heard about this phenomenon?
Like, why do we think there is, there seems to be this huge frustration in not just America.
I guess you're feeling it in Europe.
And you could say a blame of the immigrants that are coming in and a reluctance for maybe the government to place that blame, but the people seem to feel it.
Can you speak on this?
Is there, if we were to make the argument for it, what would it be?
What would the argument against it?
Like, can we just speak on it intellectually, not like what we personally feel?
Yeah, yeah.
So what is that sentence?
Right.
So you're, first of all, 100% right.
Right-wing populism is happening all over the Western world, right?
And it's important, again, to notice it's happening in places that like don't have huge amounts of inequality, like Northern Europe.
Sweden is like one of the more egalitarian places in the world.
They've got a very strong right-wing populist party.
The Dutch have a big welfare state.
They've got right-wing populism.
France coddles its workers more than anyone else.
I can tell you, when I was at Newsweek, I tried to get rid of one person in our Paris office, basically had to shut down the whole office.
It was crazy.
And they have right-wing population.
They have a very strong party.
In fact, it's the most likely to win right now if the elections were held.
So, and all of them, the rocket fuel is immigration.
So, I think it's two things.
One, we let too many people in too fast over the last several years.
The U.S. in 1975 was 5% foreign-born.
We're now 15% foreign-born.
Sweden in 1975 was probably 2% foreign-born.
It's now 22% foreign-born.
So, it's like, and that's not even a country with a strong tradition of immigration, right?
So, these places just let too many people in.
There's only so much you can assimilate.
There's only so much.
You are historically very pro-immigration.
I am totally pro-immigration.
And I think that it is the distinctive thing that makes America tick is like these people coming in who are, you know, hardworking, driven.
I don't even think it matters that they're the world's smartest.
I think, you know, having somebody who's willing to try to cross the Rio Grande three times to come and wash your dishes and look after your kids, that person has drive and determination.
But there is a reality.
Numbers matter.
Like, you know, how many people can a society digest?
So I think, you know, we, and the left got that wrong.
This is the nuance lost in the conversation, I think.
Yeah, immigration.
Yeah, but numbers matter.
Too high.
And the speed matters.
And the second piece of it is, I think immigration also becomes a kind of symbol for all these changes that we're talking about, right?
Because how do you visualize fast movement of capital around the world, fast movement of goods?
How do you visualize the computer software program that got rid of a whole bunch of jobs?
These are all abstractions.
But the guy who moved into that town and he speaks a different language and he worships different gods and he looks different.
That's a very traditional human reaction to say, you know, that's change and that's changing.
So some of it is the immigrant becomes the stand-in for all these changes that are happening to your world and you don't know how to put a, you know, your finger on them.
But boy, you can look at that guy and say, that's the problem.
But what's interesting is they're not necessarily wrong to say that there is a fundamental change.
Maybe they're getting too much of the credit for the change because it's the easiest thing to put your finger on.
I love that.
But this idea that a country could go from 2% to 22% foreign-born, like that's going to cause some friction.
There are going to be some changes there.
And then what we do is we gaslight those people and go, ah, you're just racist and you're biggest.
Some of them might be racist, but there might be others who are just like, hey, this feels different and we're not adjusting to this.
And especially in Europe where there are like thousand-year-old cultures in America, at least in New York, like everybody came from somewhere.
All of our parents are immigrants, right?
Everybody came from somewhere.
Everybody kept talking about like the immigrants in New York.
I'm going to be completely honest.
Maybe it's the neighborhood or whatever.
I didn't even notice.
But everybody's kind of like they just got.
But by the way, that's true in general.
The places that are most worried about immigrants are like, you know, Montana.
They don't have a lot of immigrants.
The places that have the immigrants, they're like, we're cool.
We're fine.
So your earlier point.
And you know that they're just like normal people.
They're trying their best.
They're not threatening to destroy America.
I was listening to your earlier point.
It doesn't feel jarring to us.
Like it doesn't feel like our world is changing because here in New York, you've always been used to seeing immigrants.
So it doesn't feel like it's changing when there's more.
You don't even notice it's not.
And you're used to changing.
New York is a rapidly changing system.
Your point about Europe is so good.
Like, what do we, what we like about Europe when we visit, right?
This is French.
It's a palace.
Like, we're going there for that experience.
So you go into the village and it looks like everybody's been the same.
Baker looks the same and it looks like his grandfather was the baker.
But imagine the new guy from Morocco.
Where is he going to fit in?
You wouldn't worry about that for a minute in America.
And that's why I think we shouldn't give up, you know, Not just immigration, but the pride we have in it because we do it really well.
We assimilate people really well in this country.
Look, I'm an as you said, we're all in some way connected, but I am an immigrant.
I grew up in India.
We got that Islam out of you immediately.
Convert it!
I can tell you, this country is the, there's no question it is more welcoming.
It allows people to find their own place in it.
When I came, Ronald Reagan was president, and he said he had a line which I loved.
He said, in America, we don't care about your origins, we care about your destination.
Fire.
And that's a great line.
Love it.
And that is the way we should think about it.
So what is the rate, do you think?
And it's impossible to judge right now, but if we think that there was a time where it's too few, a time where it is too much, where do we assess what is the right amount for assimilation to not have like that jarring kind of culture shock and for the average American or Western person in a Western country to not place that blame?
Because we know that will be the impulse.
Like we're aware of how humans act and we have to kind of we can't tell humans not to be human.
Right.
Right.
Because we'll fail every single time at that.
So how do we figure out what that rate for immigration is that makes the people coming in feel welcomed, which is what you want, and gives them an opportunity to assimilate.
Like if you're coming into a place that's 22%, right?
We're going to Sweden and I imagine any as any immigrant, you would go to a place where there's a lot of your people.
You have no need to assimilate because you're within that community.
You probably speak in that language.
And then there's this chasm that begins to grow.
So what do we think the rate is?
So the United States takes in about 1 million legal immigrants a year.
We've done that for many, many years.
It's never really caused a problem.
You know, 350 million people in this country, 1 million.
It actually helps us enormously demographically because the truth is in America, we have a demographic problem.
And if you look at the white fertility rate, it's actually much lower.
It's at European levels.
So basically, the two things keeping America going demographically are immigration and immigrants, not just Latinos.
Immigrants have more kids.
So two is replacement, right?
Two parents having two kids.
It's if you have more than two that you're actually helping.
I will point out I am an Asian American immigrant.
I have three kids.
Oh, there you go.
Boosting the average.
Get them out.
So the problem became the breakdown of the asylum system.
Basically, people, people who are poor and dispossessed in places like Latin America and Central Americans, they may be poor.
They're not stupid.
They realized that there was a loophole in the system.
If you came to try to cross the Rio Grande and you were trying to do it, you know, without any cause, you got hunted down and thrown out.
But if you came and said, I am seeking asylum because I have a credible fear of political persecution, you got a lawyer, you got two court hearings, you got to stay in the country.
Wrestling Match Approaches00:03:34
And so guess what?
The number of asylum seekers, which used to be in the thousands, is now in the millions, right?
And so obviously the system is being gamed.
And nobody wanted to say this.
I've been saying this for a while.
And you catch hell for saying it.
But obviously these people are gaming the system.
And nobody wanted to point this out.
And I think the answer is we got to just scrap the asylum system we have and come up with a new one.
You know, we've got to either put limits on it or we've got to have very stringent requirements or we've got to have requirements that you can only apply from your home country.
Because, you know, look, we live in an age of technology now.
You don't need to show up at the border.
Right.
You can apply by, you know, if you have a smartphone, you would apply.
So we've got to completely reconceive that.
That is what broke down.
If Joe Biden had just not done one thing, which was to have reversed all of those Trump bans, I think he, yeah, I think the Democrats would have had a chance to win because he did open up the gates and he did let in millions of people.
And they need to be accountable for that.
All right, guys, let's talk about some UFC fights for a second.
I'm very interested in this Chamayev Duplessis fight.
DDP versus Chemayev.
So here's the thing.
Like, DDP has had so much success with his very unique style.
Yeah.
And like, you're even seeing guys like Stylebender and stuff just give it up.
He's like, he's just difficult.
Like, he comes at you.
He throws caution to the wind.
Yeah.
And it's very hard to plan for.
And Chamayev is like a traditional, like, beautiful wrestler, traditional in terms of his striking ability.
But like, you're looking at a guy who's unorthodox versus wildly orthodox.
Yeah.
And they're just going to clash.
Yeah.
It's going to be fun.
And it's, and, and DDP is big.
So that's the thing.
It's like Chamayev is unbelievable at wrestling, but like, will he be as effective versus a guy who cuts a lot of weight and is fucking strong?
Has Drake is taken on just a traditional wrestler type?
Who's in the weight class that even would wrestle him?
We got to look.
I mean, this is going to be different.
Like, Chamayev is like exceptional.
Yeah.
But even just stylistically, like, I just can't imagine DuPlessis would want to go to the ground with him.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that.
So then I wonder if that makes him not approach as strong.
And he only has one way of approaching.
There's the other thing where it's just like, if it's worked for you your whole career and you're beating the best guys on the planet with this style, I think these guys are so confident in their style.
They're like, I'm not going to change anything for this guy.
Yeah, Like, I get that approach too.
It's like the Tom Thibodeau approach, where it's like, this has got us to the playoffs, so I'm not going to change anything.
But sometimes you need to fucking make a change.
What do you guys think?
I think this is, I don't know much.
I just think, like you said, it's going to be two very diverse styles.
I love that idea in a fight.
Like, what wins out?
Not giving a fuck or being the most locked in, disciplined from that, where they Dagestani, whatever.
Like, I think he's Chechnya.
Oh, he's Chechnya.
Yeah, he grew up in Sweden, but like his, I think his family comes from Chechnya, if I'm not mistaken.
Super disciplined.
And then just, dude, watching Dreikis, it's like, it doesn't make sense how he's winning.
Seems like he just puts his head down, charges in, takes whatever abuse you give him.
He can't even fucking breathe, and then he wins.
It's like, it's the craziest thing.
It made no sense.
Obviously, I'm watching the Izzy fight.
We're all rooting for Izzy.
And watching Dreik is just kind of like be relentless.
It's crazy.
But then again, with a wrestler, can he just hold him down, pin him down, whatever?
Birthright Citizenship Debate00:06:55
It doesn't matter.
That's the other thing.
Can you mitigate that by just keeping it on the ground?
Yeah.
Because he's so unpredictable on the feet that you're like, I don't know if I want to get into these exchanges.
And that's easy to striker, so he couldn't just take him to the ground.
But if you can just take him to the ground, does that kind of take away all of his?
That's what I would lean toward, but I don't know much.
I don't bet against the Dias Danny's.
Yeah, it's hard.
Well, he's Chechnya.
And I don't know if he knew that.
But to Americans, that's that.
If there's no mustache, I don't bet against it.
If it's just beard, no mustache, then I just, yeah, I just feel like you're going to be able to bait him in.
And he's going to, I imagine Dregus is going to get antsy and like just fucking go full force, especially if it goes in the later rounds.
And then Chamaev just takes him to the ground and fucking tights.
What do you think, Al.
Titto, your boy, you can't go against a stance, man.
Even though he's not from a stand.
You can't go against his tight stand.
Yeah, shit.
Stake is the leader in global betting.
The fellow Tom Sports and political events is a problem called Flagrant for you.
Welcome, bonus.
Al, let's get back to the show.
Based on everything you're saying, we need to ask you about Israel.
We need to ask you a big beautiful build.
For that, based on everything you're saying, we can't have too many immigrants coming in too quickly.
There are loopholes that get exploited.
How do you feel about ending birthright citizenship?
I think, look, I don't think birthright citizenship is some like, you know, hill I am willing to die on.
In that, if you were to have a country that had some requirements based on it, like, okay, you're born in this country, but we also want to make sure X, Y, and Z, other countries have that.
Yeah, European countries have that.
What I will say is, because of the particular history of the United States, because of slavery and the Civil War, it is in the Constitution.
And I don't think it's particularly ambiguous.
It's pretty clearly written into the Constitution.
And it's not an area where I would be leading the charge for a constitutional amendment.
I don't think we need it.
We've survived 250 years pretty well with it in there.
You're getting too many immigrants too quickly.
Yeah.
And there's a loophole that you can come here illegally, have a kid, kid is an American.
I'm not saying what I believe.
What I'm asking you is what you're saying.
So what I'm saying is, I would rather make sure through the processes I was saying that you don't let the illegal immigrants in rather than say, we're going to try and amend the Constitution and take out something that has been pretty cordial to the United States, as opposed to just strengthening the border and making sure you change the asylum.
If you change asylum, by the way, to be fair to Trump, he has shown that it's actually not so hard to stop border entry.
Border entry is down to close to zero, right?
So you don't have a problem with birthright citizenship now because you're not letting anybody in.
But why do we, why does it seem like people are so upset with the amount of immigrants here if it doesn't seem to be affecting the economy that much?
Like right now, it helps the economy.
Yeah.
Like unemployment is at record lows.
And I don't really hear people complaining that they can't get a job because some immigrant or migrant has that job that they think a lot of it is cultural.
I do think a lot of it is cultural.
You know, people, as we were talking about, the places that have the immigrants don't seem to mind.
It's the places, you know, where do you feed the strongest anti-immigrant fervor?
It literally is the places that have the lowest number of immigrants.
Where their idea of America is one without immigrants.
And the places where your idea of New York is a city of immigrants.
So it's not as shocking for us.
Yeah, I don't see.
So don't we have to change how they feel and look at what America is?
No, because America is a place where we're accepting of all different types of people.
We should be accepting of their view of America.
I think you can meet them where they are, maybe a little bit, where it's like, instead of you have to completely change how you think, okay, we're still letting in America, we're still letting in immigrants.
That is what America is founded on.
Maybe we let them in a little bit slower.
And you can be upset about that if you want.
But we have to do that.
And like I said, we still, you know, we take in a million legal.
I don't think anyone has any problem with that.
And honestly, as a legal immigrant, I kind of resent the fact that people who, you know, who don't stand in line and don't do the things you're meant to do somehow, you know, get a lot of people.
Get ahead a lot.
I think that I went through a very, very long, complicated, painful process to become an immigrant.
We got to vet out the good ones, man.
To your example, it might be similar to what some people experience with gentrification of a black neighborhood, right?
You know, when one white family moves in, it might not be that bad.
This feeling that like tons of white people are moving into this area and like changing the fabric of that area, changing the culture of that area.
You've heard a lot of people go, I don't really like this gentrification.
Why are all these white people moving in?
You can understand that perspective, right?
Yeah, like I can see being a little bit upset about the change, but they're not like, kick them out.
But if, well, would you, hold on, would you say that on record?
You don't think that they're not kicking him out?
They're not protesting in front of white homes right now in Brooklyn's demanding him to leave.
Are they not?
No, okay, okay.
Maybe they're not, but you would agree that there is a sentiment that is against it.
Yeah.
And I guess what I would say is, like, if we can understand that, then maybe you can understand the people from we're going to use Montana as a placeholder that also have that same sentiment that these people coming in are changing like what our idea of our neighborhood and our community is.
Yes, and I and I agree with that.
But I think we have to.
You said, why don't we change their opinion?
No, I think we had changing their opinion that, like, hey, we're against all change.
Like, change is going to be a difficult thing at times, but you have to like.
I think you're talking about extremes who are like, Tefri's earlier point, who are like, we don't want legal immigration.
I think they're talking about illegals, which is a pretty easy thing to get behind.
Like, if somebody just came to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, was just forced families out illegally.
Nah, this is ours.
We need asylum from whatever the fuck.
You'd be like, no, I just wanted to point out this is one of the reasons why I think our politics has gotten more polarized.
Is that, you know, in the old days when it was all about economics, you could always split the difference.
Like one side, one side wanted to spend $100 billion, the other side wanted to spend nothing.
There's a number in between those.
50.
Let's make it there.
But when you talk about cultural issues, abortion, gay rights, immigration, these are all kind of like they feel very much like they're about values.
So hard to compromise this.
And that's where we are.
And it's not just America.
I think all over the Western world, let's say like we've moved up Maslow's hierarchy so much.
What is that?
What is that?
So Maslow has a hierarchy of needs, which was like when you start out in life, you need basic physical needs.
Now it's material.
I need Wi-Fi.
And his final one, which I think is really interesting, is self-actualization.
Like we want to feel like we are doing the thing we were meant to do in life.
Netanyahu and Suffering00:14:42
We have purpose.
We have dignity.
And when it starts to become about all those things, it's very hard to compromise.
Those issues are so amorphous.
Okay, let's talk about the world.
We've just been talking about America.
We've got a geopolitical expert right here.
That's what happens in America.
But that's every country.
Like every time I go to a different place, it's like they're not concerned about anybody besides themselves.
I don't know if there's anything wrong with that.
I don't even think that that's...
Well, we're particularly bad.
Not bad, but big countries generally are like that in particular, right?
Like people will say to me, oh, nobody in America speaks another language.
Yeah, you know, but go to Russia, they speak Russian.
Go to China, they speak Chinese.
Now, if you go to Europe, yeah, they speak a lot of languages.
They have to.
Well, because you drive one hour and you're in another country.
I think that they act like there's some sophistication with that.
I mean, you drive three hours a year, you're still in the same Iowa cornfield.
Not there's anything wrong with that.
Okay, so let's tell me about the recent, I don't even know if I would call it diplomacy, but everything that happened with Iran, are you privy to what had happened?
Like, did we blow up the nuke site or what?
Like, why is there so much disinformation here?
So it's pretty hard to tell because the Iranians won't let you in and say, by the way, here's the damage.
I think my guess is we did a lot of damage.
Those are huge bombs.
Nuclear facilities, nuclear enrichment facilities need structurally stable environments.
They need continuous power supply.
That's a very important piece of this.
So if you cut the power supply through all this bombing, the centrifuges, the centrifuges start malfunctioning.
So it's very likely that there was a lot of damage.
But the key thing to remember, and this is the point that the International Atomic Agency had said, they can rebuild because you can't bomb the knowledge out of there.
And remember, nuclear technology is now 75 years old.
This is not like cutting edge.
And I'm making microchips.
Right, exactly.
This is like the world of transistor radios and television tubes and 1940s technology.
Can they rebuild it?
Sure.
And so the real answer is going to be you've got to come to some agreement with them.
You've got to allow for monitoring and inspections.
And that's the part where it feels like the Israelis don't want to do that because they want to just keep bombing them every now and then.
And I don't think that's a stable situation for the Middle East.
I don't think it's healthy.
And I think what Trump should do now is say, look, I gave you guys a big thing you asked for, which was we use those bunker buster bombs.
Now you get on board with some kind of deal where we come up with a monitoring system.
And I think it would stabilize the whole region.
But look, the Israelis have done.
So if you're asking, what is like the big story of the last five, seven years?
The big story is Israel has become the superpower of the Middle East.
They have decided to take out all their enemies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, who are now so much weaker than they've ever been.
They attacked the Syrian militias, which then led this, in part, led the Syrian regime to collapse.
So they've managed to put back this whole array of militias that had been kind of keeping them on edge, particularly Hezbollah.
And they called the bluff.
They went in.
And part of it is Israel has just become so much stronger over the last 10 or 15 years.
They're technology superpower.
They're a military superpower, largely thanks to us.
We provide the weaponry and the trading, and we still give them a huge amount of military aid.
Well, it's interesting.
You're saying Israel is a superpower, but every politician here seems to think they're the weakest, most helpless country.
That's the truth.
I mean, just like confidence.
They're like, really?
Why do they keep Samalia in the 90s?
Because no idea what rough living was.
So just ask yourself, look at that world and say to yourself, you know, look at what they've done to Hamas and Gaza.
Look at what they did to Hezbollah.
Look at what they did to Syria.
Look at what they've done to the Iranians.
Like, that's this one country with 7 million people.
The huge, huge support from the United States makes a difference, but they're also super inventive.
The IDF, the military, fights amazingly well.
Look at the intelligence success of the Pager operation.
So that's the real story here.
Now, the question is, what does that do?
For the Palestinians, it's a very sad story because what it means is the Israelis can just continue to pummel them in this way that feels to me completely beyond excessive.
There are reports that they may have killed 100,000 people in Gaza by now.
It's somewhere between 50 and 100,000.
Nobody knows.
But there are Israeli reports that say it's in that range.
I heard there's a lot of people that are missing.
Well, there was a report that came out by some.
The SIGIS says what we're talking about is missing.
No, no, no, no.
But if you just look at Gaza, right?
You look at the photographs.
You don't have to be an expert.
You look at it, and there's no World War II city that looked like that at the end of the Allied bombing.
So you say to yourself, why do you have to do that?
What is your answer to that?
I think that there is some combination of different things going on.
There was a element of vengeance, the sense of like October 7th, which was a brutal, horrific terrorist attack.
And it made Israelis think, oh my God, these people will never let us live in peace.
These people always want to kill us.
I understand all that.
But so some of it, I think, is vengeance.
Some of it is a Bibi Netanyahu feeling like this is my opportunity.
And by the way, it allows him to stay in power because it's a wartime situation.
That's kind of what it is.
You're a wartime prime minister.
But look at the price you're exacting on innocent people to do it.
The price you're exactly innocent people.
And also, like, this idea that this could potentially create more security for Israel.
I don't know if that's necessarily true.
I've never seen less support for Israel around the world, but especially in the United States.
I don't know Americans outside American Jews that support what's happening right now.
And I think a lot of American Jews know in their heart that this is not right.
I don't want to say it all.
You know, they're feeling defensive.
There has been a rise of anti-Semitism in the country.
That's the fact that you can understand.
And there was a lot that we didn't realize, wasn't there?
But exactly.
You scratched the surface and you found, you know, it's very sad.
But I think that at the end of the day, even Israelis are going to look back on this and go, what the hell?
What did, you know, how could we have allowed this to happen?
So here's a question I have, right?
Because like, I think what a lot of Americans are experiencing now that there's economic uncertainty at home is we hear these numbers going out to other countries, right?
Like, I think that's why there was like a primal satisfaction to cutting U.S. aid, because it was this idea that millions of dollars is no longer going around the world.
It's going to stay home.
Now, I don't know if it actually stays home, but to the average American, we're going to be, okay, well, now that I'm suffering, at least we're going to take care of us.
And I think you see this a lot, especially with Ukraine and Russia.
You saw it immediately, just the numbers, the amount of money going over there while Americans are struggling, right?
We can't pay our health care bills.
We're suffering with this, not even like, I'm talking about American debt.
I'm talking about college loan debt, just credit card debt, whatever we have.
Cost of living going up, rent going crazy high.
And you hear like billions of dollars just going abroad.
And we start to get the sentiment where it's just like billions of dollars going abroad, especially like to destroy Gaza, like just nothing left.
And then we're going, what is, how does this affect us at all?
Why are we supporting this when we're suffering at home?
Why isn't that money coming home to make sure we're good?
And then you start hearing these things that like, I think they got health care in Israel, right?
They got free college in Israel.
Like, why don't you take the health care money and the college money and put it into the bombs before you ask us to give you money for the bomb?
Like, we don't got healthcare.
We don't got college.
I think you can understand why there is this American resentment for money going away when we need it here.
At least it feels like it.
And to me, it feels like there's a big difference between supporting the bombardment of Gaza and USAID helping AIDS babies in Africa.
I mean, I'm an unashamed supporter of USAID.
I have traveled the world.
I've seen these people.
60% of it was food and medicine.
And yeah, we're the richest country in the history of the world.
And I was always proud as an American that we were also the most generous country in the history of the world.
We basically invented foreign aid.
If you look at MBA, you know, Elon Musk said he didn't notice any effect of it.
Well, I'm sorry if the baby who's now going to get AIDS because we stopped giving the medicine is not on Twitter complaining.
But those are the people, those are the people who are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
And it was a small amount of money.
It's 1% of the federal budget.
Most Americans, when they're polled and asked, what percent of American American budget do you think we spend on foreign aid?
The average number people give is like 15% or something.
And it's actually 1%.
It's 1 15th of that.
It's a small amount of money.
You could trim it back some, but that was America at its best.
But you look at the bombing of Gaza.
And yeah, I mean, why can't we have the strength to say, look, we support you, we support your security, we do everything we can to support your security.
But we think what you are now doing is actually hurting your security and it'll hurt your security in the long run for generations.
Undoubtedly, I mean, their security is dependent on U.S. support.
If you don't have U.S. support, I mean, I think it's not easy to do these missions that they do.
Don't get me wrong.
Like, it obviously needs sophisticated intelligence apparatus to execute them.
But it must be nice knowing that no country can really slap you back too hard because daddy's over here.
But at a certain point in time, if you don't have our support, which it doesn't feel like there is much American support, you're putting yourself in incredible.
You think American support for Israel has dropped?
I think who supports it?
I know hardcore Republicans outside of politicians.
Hardcore Republicans, apparently, like 94% as like hardcore Republicans are in support of everything because they support everything.
But I think a lot of the moderates, a lot of the left.
I remember growing up, I just assumed Palestinians were like bad because that's what the media would show me.
And then I remembered in the last like 15 years, that kind of shifted.
And now most left-wing people I know, completely pro-Palestine, most moderates I know, at least think what's happening is horrific.
And then hardcore Republicans, I don't know many, but it seems like what I've, the polls I see, they're in favor.
That's it.
Yeah, I just think that like if you were if you were looking out for the long-term success and safety of Israel, if that was your main concern, you would make sure that you wanted to foster the most nurturing relationship between our allegedly our greatest ally.
I think that make sure it's bipartisan, right?
That's the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand.
And I was talking to Barry Weiss about this.
I wonder if I was like, I don't think Americans know, like we hear like Israel's our greatest ally.
We get why we are to them.
There's no question.
Right?
Like there's never been a greater friend in the history of the world.
What I don't think Americans get, and I think that the burden of this is on Israel, is to communicate to Americans what we get.
And it can't just be like, oh, military intelligence.
It's like, okay, well, we give you billions of dollars a year to develop it.
So we pay for that.
Like, what are you doing for us?
And it's on them to explain that.
And if you don't explain that, then it will feel like a one-sided relationship.
And you can't be upset at Americans who are hurting right now that feel like money is going out there and they feel like politicians are kind of like, you saw Ted Cruz on Tucker.
You know what I mean?
Like seemingly like, oh, well, Genesis said so.
Like, that's your justification?
Because Genesis said so?
Well, not all of us believe everything in Genesis.
Like, what do you say to that?
Like, what can they, do you know what their relationship is?
Do you know what they give America?
Like, what we're getting out of this?
There's no question.
It's asymmetrical.
We're giving them way more than that.
But I think, look.
What are they giving?
Like, is there a thing?
Like, I've yet to, for anybody to tell me an exact thing that we're a tangible thing.
Yeah, like intelligence?
Okay.
Like, but give us on each other.
I mean, it's got a foothold in the region.
Right.
It's a pro-American.
It's a pro-American.
It's a Saudi now.
We have Qatar.
We have so many other footholds.
But I mean, another way to say what you're saying is the long-term security of Israel surely is going to be enhanced more than anything else by not having a situation where you've got, you know, millions and millions of Palestinians living in your country who have no political rights.
Like, how can that be a recipe for stability in the long run?
Right.
Like, when I look at even Netanyahu, who's brilliant at the external maneuvering, he's done a brilliant job with Hezbollah and all that.
Like, what about this?
Like, you've got 5 million people in your country who you refuse to give political rights.
And yeah, I understand there's problems, there's bad leadership and all that.
But what is your plan?
What is your solution to this?
Right?
You just kick the cancer.
Nobody questions Hamas is horrible.
Nobody questions it.
Disgusting.
Awful.
But you've got, you know, like you're just going to keep kicking the can down the road and hoping people won't notice that 5 million will become 6 million or become 7 million people who don't have any political rights and no, you know, no country.
That just seems to me to be the biggest existential problem for Israel because one day you just know it's going to explode.
It feels like it's exploded.
Do you believe in the greater Judea ideology?
And do you think that that plays a role in the politics within Israel and like the high brass of Israeli government?
I like this idea of trying to basically recreate the Israel of the Old Testament and basically from Tigris to the Euphrates, take all of that land.
So there's no question that that is a view held by some people in Israel on the right who have grown in power.
Like they say it openly.
Ironically, the phrase from the river to the sea, the most dangerous use of it right now in Israel is by these Israeli right-wingers who say, we want all of Israel from the river to the sea and we're going to kick the Palestinians out to Libya or to Egypt or places like that.
Israel Credibility Actions00:05:10
And Netanyahu is allied with these people.
I think it's a minority view in Israel.
I think that the mainstream understands that you can't do that.
You know, that would be the ethnic cleansing of five, six million people.
But there's definitely a group of people who say that and they're doing it piecemeal by don't just look at what's happening in Gaza.
Look at what's happening in the West Bank.
They expand these land confiscations, this expansion.
You know, they've got it to the point where one village after the other, the Palestinians, they lose their land, they lose the water supply, they lose their, and life becomes unlivable.
And that is, you know, it feels to me like that is a kind of, you don't forget what they're saying.
Look at their actions.
The actions represent that's the thing.
It's like, how can we, in good faith, believe that this is just because Hamas is this terrorist organization when in the West Bank, there are these continuous expansions?
Like, you would assume that you would make the West Bank a Palestinian paradise just to prove that your intentions were for a two-state solution.
But when you continue to expand the place that doesn't have Hamas, I think you lose some credibility in that argument.
Trump has a big opportunity, honestly, because he's so trusted by the Israelis.
And if he wanted to and he would willing to spend some political capital, he could demand, he could say, we're going to have a two-state solution.
It's going to be, you know, and maybe you say, okay, it's initially a demilitarized state or something like that, right?
You know, that Costa Rica is a demilitarized state.
And maybe that's a start because it's better than the hell that is there now.
But he would have to pay political capital.
And by the way, if he did it, that is his one shot at the one thing that he really wants.
It's a fucking World Peace Price.
You know, but use your political capital.
I mean, use political capital.
Means be willing to do unpopular things because people are going to trust your, you know, they think you have, he has credibility with the Israelis.
Cash on a little of your credibility with Israel.
Look, I've been there for you.
Exactly.
Do this for me.
I supported the hell out of you.
You know, but it doesn't seem like he's doing that at all.
No.
It seems like this.
No, you're spandering even in that meeting with, you know, call him one of the greatest men on earth or something.
It seems like the world wants this, except Israel.
Like, it seems like the world wants a two-state solution.
Except there's a lot of people.
To be fair, just to remind everybody, two Israeli prime ministers tried very hard and the Palestinians rejected it.
Yes.
And that's all real and that history has moved Israelis to the right.
And that's part of the problem.
But you don't get to just stop trying because when you have a problem like this.
I also think there's another component that's very important, which is like Iran sponsoring of terror in the region.
And again, I know nothing.
This is why you're here.
But it seems to me the lack of involvement of the other Arab states might be indicative of them supporting the downsized influence of Iran in the region.
In other words, if I'm Saudi, if I'm UAE, it's like, I want to turn this into Las Vegas.
I want this to be like a fun place where people go vacation.
They're not going to do that if there's going to be the Houthis that are shooting bombs over here and all these other terror proxies of Iran.
So is there a version where they're just kind of like letting Israel do the job to they were?
So I think the Iranians had a very clever strategy, which is they knew they were not very strong, particularly up against Israel with American support, right?
So they came up with this strategy, asymmetrical strategy.
We're going to fund these little militias, you know, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Syrian militias, the Iraqi militias, and we're going to keep Israel and Saudi Arabia and all kind of the American, we're going to keep them on edge.
We're going to keep them, you know, they're always going to be a little worried about what can happen.
And that's why I say what the Israelis did over the last few years has completely changed that strategic situation because they decided, in a way, October 7th, I think, kind of freed them up and said, we're just going to go for it.
And they went after them one after the other.
And it turned out they were all weaker than people thought.
The Israelis were stronger.
They had our support.
So that whole balance of power has completely shifted.
Iran is now much weaker.
Its militias are basically decimated.
And the interesting question is that the Saudis and the Gulf states, that you're absolutely right, were very happy to have Israel take care of business, are now watching an Israel that has become the superpower.
And now they go.
And you wonder what they, you know, this is like classic balance of our politics where, well, now the Iranians are so weak, they don't care that much about Iran.
But I wonder whether they're looking and saying, has Israel got too strong?
Do we, you know, do we want to live in a Middle East so dominated by this one country?
Or, you know, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're also kind of like trying to ask themselves, what does this mean?
You know, it's a kind of the Middle East of today is basically dominated by Israel, Saudi Arabia, just, you know, in certain ways, Saudi money, and Turkey.
And those are the three, the others are all knocked out.
Paying Rent with Points00:02:27
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Sanctions and Stability00:14:31
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Could you see a future where Israel becomes the hegemon of the region and they kind of push American influence out, like basically create distance with the American government?
Is that possible for the Israelis to do it?
Not really.
The Israelis so depend on American military hardware.
And there's an interesting thing that's happened with the world of software where it used to be you sold somebody a plane, a military, a fighter jet, and it was theirs.
And they would kind of run it and fix it.
Nowadays, when you sell people complicated hardware, it's all got software that needs to be updated all the time.
SaaS deposits.
So you can sell it to them, but you can turn the switch off whenever you want.
Two years later.
This is one of the big challenges the Europeans are having, which is they're saying to themselves, we've relied.
The basic deal the Europeans made with America was you protect us.
In return, we'll buy a lot of your military hardware.
And so that's what tends to happen.
That's why when we say we've given all this money to Ukraine, it's, I mean, 90% of American aid to Ukraine has come back to American defense contractors.
But now what the Europeans are saying is, suppose we buy all your stuff and we think we have to go to war with Putin and President Trump says, Putin is my best friend.
You can't go to war with him.
I'm going to turn off the software updates.
Then we're stuck with these F-35s that we paid hundreds of millions of dollars for, but the Americans have cut off the incredibly vulnerable.
So they're beginning to say we need to have our own defense industrial base.
We need to have our own defense industry.
And one of the effects of Trump's warring with the Europeans is going to be the creation of a European defense industrial base.
It'll take a while, but believe me, the Germans know how to build weapons.
This is not like, you know.
But that's a good point.
That goes right back to what you were saying about the importance of having these allies because it allows you to outsource certain things.
And once you create a system where they can no longer rely on you for certain goods, they might be military goods, especially if they're goods that ensure their survival, they will be forced to rely on themselves.
Well, this is what I wonder about with Israel.
Like if they're able to neuter the militias in the region and all of their adversaries in that part of the world, and they're able to then take on contracts with other countries, is it possible that they can decentralize the reliance on the American empire?
They could go a little bit less, but they're too small a country to have a real defense industrial base.
You're talking about a few million people.
The big defense manufacturing bases tend to be in places like the United States, China, Russia.
You need to be a size and scale.
So I doubt it.
I also think we own the skies in a way that all nobody does.
The Chinese will probably rival us in the near future.
But why do the Israelis have all this amazing intelligence?
They're amazingly good, but they are able to get all American satellite intelligence.
We provide all that stuff to them, the real-time targeting of all these Iranian sites.
How do they have the pinpoint accuracy?
They had some.
So that's our stuff?
Why are you giving them all this credit?
We own the skies.
I mean, it's amazing how comprehensive American, you know, America's view of the world is because we have these satellites all over the world.
We map every square inch of the world and we know exactly where stuff is.
We can see tank movements in a way that almost no other country.
Is that all our satellites or is that a combination with like Starlink?
It's all our satellites.
And that stuff is all military.
What Starlink was able to do, which was incredibly helpful to the Ukrainians, is the Russians basically brought down the Ukrainian cellular system, Wi-Fi system, all that.
And tank battalions need to communicate back and forth using cellular systems, Wi-Fi, all that.
Starlink provides that for them.
But it's not the satellite pictures.
That stuff is all that's U.S. and we give the Ukrainians that.
Trump occasionally has paused it when he gets into a bad mood about Zelensky.
But we have usually given that stuff to them.
We have managed to play this incredibly important role in the world where we can provide this huge advantage to our friends.
And again, I just think sometimes we forget, we've built this amazing system where we are the hub of this whole system.
These people rely on us, but pissing everybody off.
Yeah, we're strong enough, we can strong-arm them, we can arm twist them, we can squeeze them for a better deal.
But as any good businessman knows, the way you really build enduring businesses is not by squeezing people on every transaction, but by building relationships.
You know, you build a web of relationships that causes trust, that causes continuous business.
And that's what we have.
Is it possible for peace in that region?
I imagine you either need, I guess, regime change in Iran, or you need the current regime to stop funding the terror in the region.
You need Israel to stop turning Gaza into rubble.
But it seems like there needs to be an agreement between Iran and Israel before there will be peace in the region.
So a very good point.
I think you're not going to get that right now because Iran doesn't even recognize Israel.
But what you could get is an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia and maybe Iran and the other moderate Gulf states.
Basically, you're right that you need an Iran to behave.
Henry Kissinger had a great line.
He said, Iran needs to decide: is it a cause or is it a country?
In other words, is this a country that just wants like, we have our national interests, we need to protect them.
And, you know, they have legitimate interests.
Or are you this cause, Islamic revolution with funding proxies all over the world?
If you cut that stuff out, and if you focus on your national interests and you say we have these defensive concerns, that I think could allow for peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the United Arab Emirates, and then you build from there, maybe.
So Iran doesn't necessarily have to recognize Israel, but if it is in good conversation with Saudi, Saudi could apply some pressure on Iran for Israel to stop the proxies.
And then when Israel and Iran are not in this proxy war, the region is safer.
Exactly.
Economy can grow.
Everyone wants to make Iran.
That's his peace press.
Exactly.
So maybe that's what.
Yeah, and that's that.
And by the way, Saudi Arabia.
The Israelis don't feel like a very real existential threat, which is like constantly, we don't know what they're doing.
Correct.
Look, don't forget, Israel lives in a tough neighborhood.
These countries have tried to go to have gone to war with it many times.
They've tried to wipe it off the map.
Tom Friedman, I think, once said, he said, you've got to remember three things about Israel.
One, it's an amazing country that built an incredible country out of the desert.
Two, it can do really, really horrible things as it is doing now in Gaza.
And three, in Gaza and the West Bank, I think he said.
And three, it lives in a crazy neighborhood.
Like all three things are true at the same time, you know.
But I think the other thing that's going for a more optimistic view of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia.
We sometimes don't talk about like the good news.
The good news is Saudi Arabia, which used to fund all the Islamic terrorism in the world.
It used to fund all the Islamic fundamentalism.
I'm exaggerating, but it was a huge, you know, this is where the bin Ladens of the world came from.
They used to have a couple buildings downtown.
Exactly.
That's 19 out of 20 of those guys.
Sorry, 15 out of 20 of them, I think, were Saudi.
The four pilots, I think, were the leaders were Egyptian, and the others were Saudi.
So Saudi Arabia has been transformed.
It's now a force for stability.
You know, they have actually cracked down on all the Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism.
Not just women's rights, but in many different ways they've pulled back.
They're trying to find ways to stabilize the situation, be more secular.
Saudi Arabia basically wants to become Dubai.
And that's a very, very powerful force for stability in the region.
Because as you said, they just want, maybe not Vegas, but they want peace, stability, tourism, trade, commerce.
That's great.
There's a mafia saying, which is like, when we're at war, nobody's making money, something to that extent.
Yes.
And like when the families are fighting, it's very hard to profit, right?
You got the police looking after you, you got the FBI looking after you.
When everybody's at peace, you can run your little racketeering thing, you can run your gambling thing over here.
And it does seem to me that like peace in the region will bring that.
The question is: will the current regime in Iran allow for that to happen?
But that's really interesting, using Saudi as the proxy for the peace negotiations, even though there is like a, I think, a religious difference, right?
There's still a lot of people who are in the world.
There is a synergy, but they've actually started a rapprochement.
They've had foreign ministers have met, they've gone back and forth.
Again, this is all part of, and it was Saudi outreach that made this happen.
I mean, this is pretty, this is transformative.
Yeah, because the Saudis, as you say, the Saudis want peace and stability because, you know, these countries, Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, they're now like there's so much wealth has accumulated.
They're like hedge funds with small countries attached to them.
And what they're really thinking to themselves is, we need peace and stability to invest our money so that we can make a good return.
You're 100%.
And, you know, that is their perspective.
They're almost like fund managers with huge pools of capital that need peace, stability, and trade.
Is it possible to get Iran economically aligned in that way?
Not with this regime, I think.
And I worry about when people talk about regime change in Iran, like think about all our experiences of regime change in the Middle East.
In Iran, first of all, in Iran, you know, where we win when we've done it.
But in general, like these things have to come from within, you know, these transformations.
Look, Iran historically is the most of all of those countries.
It was the one, it's the oldest trading state in the world in some ways.
This is a very sophisticated, bazaari culture.
But right now, they've got a bunch of crazy mullahs running them.
And I would say more than crazy corrupt.
Like one of the things I noticed when I went to Tehran was the degree to which you didn't realize the people at the top actually like the sanctions.
Because guess who does all the smuggling?
Guess who benefits from like so you take all the sanctions down?
You take all the guess what it means for the revolutionary guard and for the mullahs.
It means competition.
All of a sudden, every businessman in Iran, and there are a lot of businessmen in Iran, they're going to get in on the import action.
They're going to get in on the export action.
Right now, so one of these guys, Rafsanjani, he cornered the entire market of pistachios.
Iran is another great place in the world.
There's basically one family now.
Guess what?
If you had no sanctions, the Resniks in California who do the wonderful pistachios, they'd be in there.
This is like this is Russia after the perestroika.
Yeah.
Right?
This is...
Yeah, there's...
Whenever you have controls, it means that somebody, because trade, capitalism is going to happen.
I was in Turkey and I'm right there on the Bosphorus and I'm seeing all these boats come down and there's this like beautiful castle.
I was in Istanbul.
There's this beautiful, I'm forgetting the name of the castle, but it is like where the Ottoman Empire, you know, the Sheikh, where they, what are they, the Sheikh?
No.
The leaders of the Ottoman Empire, I forget what they were called.
What were they called?
They're the king, but whatever they're.
Maybe I'm trying to remember.
The Sultan of Sultan.
Oh, I know the one you mean, the Domabachi Palace right on the water.
And there's all these ships coming down and they're blank ships.
And our tour guy was like, you see those shit?
That's Russian oil.
It's like the oil is going to get there.
There are sanctions, but you're going to strip the colors of it.
There's no flag flying.
And it's going to go.
And all that is consolidated at the top.
That's such an interesting, like almost like how markets are going to decide themselves no matter what.
There's a Russian oil goes to India and then when it gets refined, I was talking to a guy who was at the refinery.
He was like, look, once it's come to our refinery, it's in.
It's in its Indian oil.
It's in India.
Okay, so Turkey is an interesting example of this because Erdogan has this like stranglehold of power, right?
And my understanding is that Erdogan just gets a piece of everything, like off the top, right?
It's run like a mafia state.
So those are the rumors.
I think it's more his son-in-law.
As always happens in these situations, the person on top is like, I'm clean.
Yes.
My son-in-law, you've got to talk to him if you want to get business.
Who did that in our country?
Was there an old guy that did that?
Anyway.
But, okay, but maybe it takes a kind of, I guess, strongman leader like that in a way to organize a system that can thrive.
So like maybe that is kind of what Iran needs.
Well, you know, the case of Turkey is very sad because the Turks who are moving very modernizing very rapidly, they were on a fast track to European Union membership and all this.
And then Erwan comes in and I don't think he ever wanted that future for Turkey.
He wanted it to be much more.
So Turkey's actually in many ways gone backwards.
Like what really modernized Turkey over the last 20, 25 years was the prospect of European Union membership.
And Erwan, and partly the Europeans screwed things up by saying you'll never get membership because you're a Muslim country.
Oh, really?
But they're a secular Muslim.
Exactly.
And I think it would have been possible to at least have some kind of associate membership or something like that.
But by turning them down so dramatically, it made them turn east rather than west.
And Erwan kind of wanted that.
Deep State Operating00:08:23
He always wanted, you know, he's always more.
And most of these places, I think what we don't understand sometimes is the religion is sometimes a charade.
It's not completely a charade, but this is a power.
These guys are power hungry.
They want power.
Look at the Syrian guy, okay?
This Syrian guy was like right, he was to the right of al-Qaeda.
These people were like hardcore Islamic, you know, fundamentally.
The minute he gets into power, he's like, I want trade, I want commerce, I want to have good relations with America.
And by the way, he signaled he's open to relations with Israel.
Wow.
Because, you know, and he wants power.
It turned out he thought 20 years ago he thought the way to power was to be an Islamic revolutionary.
Now he thinks the way to be power is a pro-American, pro-Saudi modernizer.
He's right.
Yeah, but these guys are, you know, I mean, that just tells you, like, don't believe too much in, oh, these guys are going to want, they want martyrdom.
You know, people say that about Iran.
I'm like, if these guys want martyrdom, why are they building up these huge bank accounts in Dubai?
Like, that's not going to help them in heaven, right?
That's going to help them and their families for their lives now and their kids' lives.
So maybe that, maybe you can use that against them.
Like, maybe if we know that's what they need, then you have to show them that the pathway to power is through better relationships for the people.
So one of the hardest things about our relations with Iran, I think you're exactly right in thinking along these lines, which is, look, we need to be very tough on them in terms of none of these proxies, militias, you know, terrorists.
But if you do all the right things, there has to be an upside for them, right?
And so every time we talk about the upside, people are like, you're giving them money, you're funding.
First of all, it's all their oil money.
They're getting sanctioned, right?
But secondly, how can you have a negotiation where you say to them, do everything we tell you to do?
You get nothing.
And you get nothing.
It's like, okay, why would I do all the things that you want me to do then if I get nothing for it?
This is the tricky thing about geopolitics is because you're operating with people who say things that they might not mean, but they're the things that they believe will keep them in power.
But the things that they say that they might not mean are terrifying to people.
So if they say that they're going to death to America, like I'm taking that shit serious.
Exactly.
I don't even know if they could reach America.
But if you say death to America, I'm taking that serious.
If I'm Israeli and somebody says death to, I'm taking that shit serious.
You can't begrudge people for taking threats seriously.
While at the same time, if you are some form of like a geopolitical diplomat or negotiator, you have to know that what they really want, hopefully, or best case scenario, is power, just like the leader of Syria right now.
And to assure their power will not be thwarted.
And it's very difficult to trust, I would imagine, America in that because we have thwarted it so many times in the past.
But oof, that's a.
You put it very well.
Like, think about even during the Cold War.
You know, you'd have like these Soviet guys who'd say, we believe in worldwide communist revolution, the destruction of every capitalist society in the world, this, that, and the other.
And then they'd sit down and say, okay, can we make a trade deal?
Can we make a nuclear arms deal?
Like, you know, they're operating at two levels.
Like, some of that is being said, but maybe some part of it they believe.
Some of it is for domestic legitimacy.
That's what makes them feel like they're, you know, holding up the, but part of it is a negotiating leverage.
Like they're, you know, but at the other, there's another practical level at which we did make deals with the, you know, with the Soviets.
We had an arms control system that really stabilized the world so that we knew we're not going to go into a nuclear war.
Like, and that happened with these same guys who were saying, you know, our goal is to completely destroy you.
Can I ask you a question, like, geopolitically?
Like, when you're negotiating with a country that has a dictator who doesn't have term limits and you strike a deal, is there a world where you can trust the longevity of that deal more than striking a deal with a president who only has a four-year term and the next administration could just undercut that deal?
So for sure, which is one of the reasons why, for example, the Saudis, one of the things they've been holding out for in terms of this normalization with Israel deal, they said, we don't want just an executive agreement like the Iran nuclear deal.
So they noticed that the Iran nuclear deal, the weakness was that a president of political, they said, we want a Senate-confirmed treaty.
That's interesting.
Right.
Which, by the way, a president cannot unilaterally abrogate.
So they understood that, right?
They understood that.
And look, it hurts us more when you have an administration to administration, like massive change in policy.
Like, look at the Trump.
He pulled out of the Iran deal.
And as I said, you kind of look at the situation now.
He's going to have to, if he wants to stabilize the situation, he's going to have to make another deal.
And by the way, it won't be that different from the original one.
But I will say this: you know, people always think that because we're a democracy and we're messy and we're chaotic in foreign policy, the other side has the advantage because they're dictatorships and they have a long-term view.
And people say that about the Chinese now.
I don't buy it.
Look, we were up against the Nazis.
We defeated them.
We were up against the Soviets.
We defeated them.
We were up against Al-Qaeda.
We defeated it.
You know, the truth is, and we're amazingly consistent in general.
We are still on the banks of the Rhine, 75 years later, protecting Europe.
We're still in Okinawa, protecting the Japanese.
We're still on the DMZ protecting the South Koreans.
We are the kind of crazy, you know, messy, complicated Americans, but we've kept our word in those places.
You know, halfway across the world, we have our boys and women protecting those countries.
We have not renewed on any of those commitments.
I think we do a much better job than we give ourselves credit for.
Now, I agree with you.
And it's also just because we're just superior Americans.
But something about when you emigrate here from another country, it makes you better.
But I do think there's something interesting about this that lends itself to conspiracy a bit in that in order to have these long-term goals, it would be much easier to have a, and I hate this term, but like a deep state.
And I think this is where like the American populace might start thinking, like, is there a group of people within the country that are not necessarily elected officials that are plotting the course of America?
And I don't want to make an argument for the deep state here, but like one might say that having that would maintain stability in our geopolitical process, even if it goes against the interests of Americans.
So I think you're raising a really interesting point.
For the continuity, for stability, for professionalism and expertise, it is important to have some group of people who are on a, you know, conducting things, whether it's in economic policy and foreign policy.
But the thing to always remember is we have a very large, very powerful elected layer on top of that that can change it anytime they want.
And as Donald Trump is demonstrating, you can change all of that if you want to, right?
And if you feel like you want to rip the whole thing up and you want to completely stop giving foreign aid to poor people all over the world, you can do it tomorrow.
And it shuts down.
Like, you know, those offices are dead.
They're empty.
Those people, you know, those people, Americans who've been, you know, were living in Ghana trying to help malnutrition, they're gone.
They're like, that's, and it's all gone in 100 days, right?
Does that affect our relationship with these countries?
I have to.
Like the cutscenes.
Of course.
I think it.
Look, it affects it also.
And like, we've always been the good guys.
I mean, and that's, I think, no matter what you hear about anti-Americanism around the world, as somebody who grew up, everybody knew the Americans were the good guys.
Everybody knew that if you were trying to figure out how to grow your crops better, how to irrigate your, the country you went to was the United States.
Modi and Independent India00:13:25
The people who would give you the money, the know-how.
Nobody thinks the Chinese will do that.
They think the Chinese will do it in a totally self-interested way to help the Chinese.
Whereas we've always had this sort of reputation for being willing to help the world rise up along with us.
Even our trade policy was part of that.
So, you know, it's like, why are we screwing up something like that for 1% of the federal budget?
It just seemed like.
Can I use the bathroom real quick?
Oh, sure.
Do you have to use the bathroom?
I'm good.
I got to use the bathroom, but I don't want to miss out on this.
I'm like really interested in this conversation.
This is one of the big tests that used to take place in international diplomacy.
What was who pays first?
Who can stay?
Every time.
He went to the bathroom three or four times before every talk.
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America is kind of looked at as a Christian country.
And usually, like you were saying, like we would do these nice gestures for people.
But it seems like when Doge came and we wanted, people just wanted to see some cuts.
Like, I don't see too many people upset about the USAID cuts as they should be.
So it's like, it's like contradictory.
You're right.
You're right.
It surprised me as well because I thought people would realize how small an amount of money it was, how much good it was doing.
I don't think that information got out though.
I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of it got mischaracterized very easily.
And it was like, first of all, there was almost no waste for fraud or abuse found.
Almost everything that the people around Doesche said, including Elon Musk, these were programs they didn't like.
You know, it's like, we found a gay theater in Ireland being performed being supported.
Okay, you won the election.
You want to kill the program?
Kill the program.
It's also $10,000.
Right.
But there was no fraud.
Like, they gave the money, they performed the show.
Like, similarly, there were condoms being given to Gaza.
Well, it turned out it was condoms to the Gaza province of Mozambique that has a huge AIDS problem.
And one of the most effective, cheap ways to deal with AIDS is to make people wear condoms.
And that was why it was being given, right?
So almost every one of those cases, there was no fraud, there was no corruption, there was no waste.
These were just programs they knew that if they characterized in a certain way, Americans would say, I don't want to support this.
Or why are we giving money to foreigners?
And so it was very sad because it was easy to, it was easy to mischaracterize.
It was easy to, but the whole Doge experience was a fiasco.
It wasn't just the USAID part.
I mean, and I think what happened is that my own theory is that Musk goes in, he realizes there isn't the $2 trillion he thought he was going to be able to easily cut.
And so he picks on what he knows is the most easiest target.
What is the thing most Americans are resentful of?
Or why do we spend money on foreigners?
So even though it was a tiny part of the budget, it was low-hanging fruit.
You go for it.
You mischaracterize it.
And, you know, the thing I think I most resent is, okay, if you're going to get rid of it for whatever your reasons, why call these people who work there criminals, corrupt, you know, like these are literally people going in for no money.
They're spending their lives trying to figure out how do you get nutrition to a poor country in Africa?
How do you cure disease in a poor country in Asia?
They've devoted their lives to this for 70,000 bucks a year.
They're not, you know, they're not getting rich on it.
And to characterize them as criminals and mercenaries to yank them and say them, you know, in three days you've got to get back.
These are people with kids in schools in these places.
I thought that was shameful.
I think you're actually, you have a kinder view of Elon Musk's initial intentions than I do.
I think he just wanted to be in power in the government.
I do think there's a lot of bloat in government spending that you could probably cut.
And it didn't seem like he attacked any of that stuff.
And I do think the theory I have is Vivek was more of a purist about it.
And I'm obviously supportive of him because he's brown.
But that's it.
But I think he was more of a purist about wanting to have some of that waste.
And I think Elon and Trump were like, no, we're not doing that.
We're picking and choosing.
So Vivek, I think you're exactly.
Vivek understood.
I think I really understand the government.
And he understood what, you know, the legal changes you need to make.
I think Elon went in and he was like, what he does with every company is like, cut the headcount, get it down to that.
But the problem is in the federal government, the money is not in the admin.
It's not in the people writing the checks.
It's in the numbers on the checks.
It's like the money in Social Security is not in how many people you are at the Central Bureau.
It's how much money you're sending out the door.
It's same with Medicare, same with veterans benefits, right?
So it's like the wrong model.
It's like in a tech company, maybe you get rid of 50% of the programmers and you've made big savings.
The federal government is basically a check writing operation.
Somebody once called it.
Somebody once said, the federal government of the United States is an insurance company with an army.
Those are the two things it does.
It writes checks and it has a big army.
And that's where the money is, not in the people writing the checks.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's talk about China and India.
India, I have to add.
Let's talk about India.
Let's talk about India first.
So my first question, the BJP, you hear a lot from NRIs, meaning people who are Indian but not didn't grow up in India.
It is the party in power.
It is Modi.
Yeah.
Modi.
So we have a perception growing up here, they're doing horrible things, whatever.
I was in India during Operation Sindur when they attacked Pakistan and talking to people there.
I was there on my own.
I'm not interacting with my family.
Most people go back, talk to their family only at home.
There was a lot more support there than I thought, than I understood.
And I also know these are people living there every day, experiencing it every day, going through actual life there.
And we just kind of put being Indian on as a costume and then make assessments.
What are your thoughts on Modi, on the BJP, on how India is being governed, et cetera?
So India is, I think, in a sweet spot to begin with structurally.
It's like it's been doing reforms for 25 years.
Those reforms are paying off.
It's become a much more market-oriented, growth-oriented economy.
You've unleashed Indian aspirations.
Average person in India thinks he can move ahead.
Amazing.
I think it's an amazingly hopeful story of what's happening in India.
And it's actually bipartisan.
It's been going on across two changes of government.
Is a good example of how democracy actually has strengthened the process because you've now had two different parties in power over 25 years still goes up.
I think Modi has been a very effective economic manager.
He has managed the economy very well.
He hasn't done the biggest reforms.
He's tried to do some of them, couldn't get through some, made mistakes.
But basically, very competent, very hardworking.
In foreign policy, he's navigated very well.
The sweet spot again is for India that it's not China, that it's a democracy.
The Americans want to do deals with it.
The Europeans want to do deals with it.
The Russians still want to maintain relations.
So he's handled all of that well.
I think, however, when you look at the issue of two things: one, his authoritarian tendencies and the treatment of Muslims in India, I think you'd have to give him a bad score.
Courts in India are less independent than they used to be.
The press in India is less independent than it used to be.
In fact, it's almost, there's almost no real, particularly in television, the really powerful independent press in India, which used to be very strong.
You know, treatment of minorities, not just Muslims, you know, Christians, Buddhists.
And this is not me.
You look at any objective, you know, the three institutes around the world that raid democracies.
And all three of them, Freedom House, the V Dem in Sweden, Freedom House here, have actually put India in the category of almost a non-democracy because of the abuse of the rule of law, the abuse of minorities.
So it's a complicated picture where there are some very, very good things happening in India.
There are some, there's a darker, there's an underbelly to it.
Most of the people you're going to meet in India, just to remind you, are, you know, India is 85% Hindu.
And I think that it's also fair to say Modi is very popular.
Like this is not happening without public consent or anything like that.
It's a lot more like Erdogan.
You know, Erdogan is, whatever you may say, he's won three elections, right?
And Modi has won two elections.
You know, one of them very strongly.
The last one, he got pulled back a certain amount.
So it's, you know, it's like not all good things go together, but I'd say on the whole, India is moving ahead in a very forceful way.
So talking to people there, what I was told, you can tell me if it's true or not, the Congress party, which is in power before the BJP, would do the same kinds of things.
The BJP seems to, if you go against them, they will ruin you.
And I've heard the party in power before that, Congress, would do the same thing, but because there was only television back then and no internet, no social media, we never knew about it.
Because they could just do it.
They controlled the television media.
They control the newspapers.
Nobody's going to find out.
Now with the internet, we can call out the BJP, but they've been doing that in India since its inception.
That's what I was.
So like I said, that's why better to rely on objective measures used by these independent think tanks that rate countries on the basis of judicial independence, the number of court rulings that go against the government, the number of times a judge who issues such a ruling is then transferred to some kind of wild West province.
Those are the kind of things that they look at.
I mean, media is very simple.
There's very good data on all this.
Basically, Erdogan did the same thing in Turkey.
There was one independent television channel in India that was really, I wouldn't even say anti-government, anti-BJP.
It was very independent and would call it as it saw it.
They decided to ruin it, to destroy it.
They launched four income tax cases against it.
Most people would argue these were bogus cases.
The company was ruined.
Was then brought down to brought to its knees, and then Modi's favorite billionaire steps in and buys it.
Adani?
Adani.
Adani.
The TV channel was called NDTV.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
So those are the kind of things.
And you do it once, it's a good demonstration to everybody else, and everybody else falls in line.
But as I say, I think the truth about India is that it is doing, on some dimensions, is doing very extraordinarily well.
And on some dimensions, Modi is an extremely successful prime minister.
But look, the BJP in its DNA has always had this very sectarian.
Yeah, you talk about populism, I would say.
Right.
So, and to me, somebody like Erdogan or Orban in Hungary are very similar.
Like, there's a path to power which has always been about saying, you know, I'm against these secular urban elites and everything they represent.
And those people, you know, what the BJP would say is, yeah, but the courts were full of these secular urban elites.
The media was full of these guys hated us.
Robotics Labs Ahead00:13:26
We had to do something about it.
You know, by the way, Trump does, there's a certain amount of that Trump is doing here as well, right?
Like, why are they trying to defund every NGO and every museum head?
I mean, they're going after the Smithsonian.
Like, who knew that there was something so bad about dinosaurs?
But there's an idea that that whole class of people are basically left-wing kind of resistors, and we've got to break them.
I was seeing chatter, and I think that there might be American ignorance about when we were going through our low negotiations with China.
I think a lot of Americans are like, hey, Indians are homies.
Like, why don't we just send all of our manufacturing over there?
Is there a misunderstanding on how long it takes to develop efficient production lines?
And how many years would it take to transition those production lines where we could send our manufacturing?
Oh, it would be hugely complicated.
To begin with, the biggest challenge would be China was unusually successful at being able to consolidate all this stuff.
Think about all the countries it out-competed to get all this stuff to be in China.
And it's not just cheap labor, because there are countries that are cheaper labor than China, all of Africa, right?
Like, why did it not all end up in Africa?
So the Chinese were amazingly skillful and strategic and hardworking.
And if you go to China, you go to these factories, they are mind-blowing.
I mean, there's a level of scale and the technical expertise of doing it.
Secondly, China, most people don't realize because we now have this idea of China is all bad, that China opened itself up to the world a lot.
So it lets in a lot of goods and lets in a lot of competition.
Its firms are very, very competitive and smart.
And they don't have a lot of tariffs on intermediate goods.
So we were talking about the iPhone, right?
So one of the difficulties of moving iPhone production from China to India was the Chinese let all the component parts in with very low tariffs.
India is actually the highest tariff country in the world.
India and Brazil are the two most protectionist countries.
When parts come in, you get in charge.
The phone comes out, you get in charge.
Right.
So the Indian, so the cost, so Apple had to work out a special deal with India to get them to lower the cost of all the component parts that were coming in.
So now India is competitive because it has low, but it hasn't loaded them for everybody.
Right now there's a kind of series of special deals.
But that's what India needs to do.
If India wants to really be the next China, it's got to open itself up more to the world, be less protectionist, let all these intermediate goods come in.
Then you can start doing the manufacturing because manufacturing is a combination of manufacturing and assembly nowadays.
So you've got to be able to bring in stuff cheaply.
The other piece of this is the Chinese are really good at technical education.
They have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these, I call them engineers, but they're really technicians who can do the things that you need to do to make an iPhone, to make machine parts, machine tools, to make cars, for example.
The best Chinese EVs that BYD makes, they make for $10,000.
Think about that.
Like you put a 50% tariff on that.
That's still $15,000.
That's half the price of a Tesla, right?
And they've managed.
And why is that?
They have brutal internal competition.
So these companies have gotten to the point where they are amazingly efficient.
There has been some state support.
But by the way, we've also provided a lot of state support.
Support incentives for Tesla.
Exactly.
So it's a huge market.
And they're very good.
And as I said, they open themselves up much more than people realize to competition.
India has not done it that as much.
They have not been able to move as far in some of these technical fields like batteries.
The Chinese dominate battery production.
They dominate solar panels, things like that, which are started out as technical fields where you have to understand it and then they can scale in a way that nobody else can.
But all of which is just to answer your question, it's going to be very hard to move these supply chains.
You can move some of them, and we should be trying, particularly in the areas that are national security concerns.
But you have to admire what the Chinese did for their own people.
They move 400 to 500 million people out of poverty in 25 or 30 years.
Why do I see on Bloomberg once a month that the Chinese economy is falling apart?
There's always some like fear-based tweet or Instagram post, and it's like, the Chinese economy is finally unraveling.
And it's like, well, when is that going to happen?
And what is that based on?
So they face challenges.
Look, the truth is every economy face challenges.
You can paint this however you want.
They face real challenges.
I'd say their biggest challenges are the three things.
One, the thing that made China boom over the last 30 years was their embrace of the market and their embrace of trade and their embrace of competition.
Xi Jinping clearly doesn't like all that because he thinks it undermines the party.
And he's right.
It undermines the role of the party.
Jack Ma becomes more important than Xi Jinping.
He puts him in a political party.
He didn't like that market.
He didn't like that for.
So that's number one.
Number two, they have accumulated a lot of debt.
All these local governments have accumulated.
And I don't think it's as, it's not like a cataclysmic thing because it's debt they owe themselves.
You know what I mean?
One arm of the government owes another arm of the, it's all denominated in their own currency.
It's not borrowing in dollars or anything like that.
But the third is demographics.
You know, the one-child policy meant that they, it's a good, good, fascinating example of like dictatorship.
Dictatorships can execute bad policies very well, but also good policies well.
But when you have a bad policy and you execute it too well, that's the one-child policy.
Execute.
By the way, India tried to do family planning also, but because it was like a messy, chaotic democracy, it never quite worked.
So India's demographics are now much better than China's because of their failure and China's success.
But those three things, you put them together, it's a real challenge because you've got a regime that is a government that is less pro-market than it used to be.
You've got debt which constrains them.
There's certain things they can't do.
And the third is the demographics, which means they're going to have fewer workers and more retirees.
But all that said, my own view is your skepticism is justified.
They're going to be okay.
They're going to be fine.
They're going to be the second largest economy in the world for a long time.
They're going to have areas of incredible productivity, like they dominate solar.
They're going to dominate green and EVs and all that because we're cutting back on that stuff.
So they're going to surge even further.
They dominate batteries.
Robotics.
One out of every two robots made in the world is made in China.
And they're doing very well on AI.
So the thing that I worry about is, yeah, there's going to be a mass economy that's maybe not as productive as we are.
But at the top end, they're probably going to do really well at AI and they're going to do really well at robotics.
And you put AI and robotics together.
And do you still need as many people as you need?
That may solve your one-child policy.
So they're going to be formidable competitor.
And my theory is always: if you're in a race, don't hope the other guy is going to trip.
No.
You need to be investing in yourself.
We should be thinking to ourselves, what do we need to be doing to be competitive, to be world-class in all these areas?
That's why I'm all for be innovative, lean into the technology.
How far behind are we in those areas?
Is it getting a lot of people?
AI, we're still way ahead.
AI, there's no question way ahead.
There's an interesting question of does it matter that much?
Because in AI, it's like Pixie dust, right?
You're going to sprinkle it on everything.
It's like the internet.
Everyone can use it.
Does it matter if some company is using DeepSeeks versus ChatGPT?
I don't know, but we are ahead.
In robotics, they're well ahead of us.
In battery, they're well ahead of us.
In green, they're well ahead of us.
But, you know, there's a whole bunch of areas, nanotechnology, quantum, AI, where we're ahead.
There's a lot of biotech areas where we're ahead.
We're the most advanced economy in the world, no question.
Now, what has kept us in that place is this extraordinary combination of government funding, research being done by universities, and the private sector using that research.
And that triangle has been, it really is, it's difficult to overestimate how important it's been because it's been, only America does it this way.
The Europeans don't have this triangle the way we do.
The Chinese don't.
It's all government done.
The Indians, it's all government done.
So what we're screwing with with these attacks on Harvard, with these attacks on universities is that, and, you know, weirdly, you're attacking by withdrawing funding from the research arm of these universities, the guys doing cutting-edge computer physics, biology, medical research, they have nothing to do with those campus protests.
I can tell you, having spent a lot of time at universities, those scientists.
They don't fuck about what's going on.
They're very non-political.
They're like sitting in their labs trying to invent the dream of the future.
And the level of funding cuts is crazy.
All these labs are being shut down.
Literally, we have graduate students, the best graduate students who were Chinese, who were hoping and dying to be in America.
They're going back to China to government-sponsored labs there.
Why?
With RIP, with all our training, with all the culture we...
Aren't they stealing secrets and bring it back to get arrested?
So some small percentage of Chinese American graduate students were, I think, involved in that.
So we have to do something.
But the vast majority Not only come here, they want to stay here.
Like, there's a reason they're leaving China.
These are not people who are super happy with being in China.
And if you look at our labs, if you look at our tech companies, if you look at biotech, it's all Chinese and Indian Americans.
These are immigrants who came here, went to the best universities, wanted to stay, and have ended up doing cutting-edge research or founding companies.
So let's address the problem.
You're 100% right.
There is some spying taking place.
But we are, you know, we're very good at this.
This is why we have huge organizations like the CIA to look into this.
But let's not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I mean, one of the things that keeps us cutting edge.
The over-correction, right?
Well, look, we get the, you know, some of it.
I think Li Kuan Yu, the ruler of Singapore, put it very well.
He said, look, the Chinese can tap the best and brightest in their 1 billion people.
The Americans step the best and brightest from the 8 billion people all over the world.
We want to be doing that.
What is the Chinese calculation when it comes to an invasion in Taiwan?
Look, nobody knows.
So your guess is as good as mine.
But I think my sense is that, first of all, this is not just a Xi Jinping thing.
The Chinese have always wanted Taiwan.
Unification of China and Taiwan is in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.
It's written into the Constitution that that is going to be one of their goals.
It is the unfinished part of the Communist Revolution of 1949, that they have this piece of China that is not, you know, that was the place where the nationalists escaped to, the exiles escaped to.
Secondly, I think that Xi does believe that part of the kind of historical project that he wants to oversee is some kind of grand reunification.
But I think China is very different from Russia in this regard.
Russia is a rogue regime.
They like to cause instability around the world.
Look at, you know, they're always doing it.
Europe, even in the Middle East, Afghanistan, right?
And don't forget, how do they make money?
Like, I always go back to the money.
Russia, the Russian economy is basically an oil and natural gas economy, right?
When you have instability, oil prices go up.
So they actually don't mind instability.
That's actually good for them.
The Chinese are the opposite.
They are consumers, not producers of energy.
They need stability.
They need low prices.
They need international commerce.
They export to the world.
They need open markets.
So I think what deters Xi Jinping more than anything else is the fear that if he were to invade Taiwan, he would get cut off from all the markets of the world.
Natural Gas Error Trial00:12:23
And there goes this.
And China's economy goes into that.
So I think that the biggest mistake we could make is to cut him off from all of that anyway.
Because then he has no reason to not invade Taiwan.
Then he's saying, I'm already being screwed by all these guys.
The Americans are shutting me out of their market.
They're decoupling from us technologically.
Wow.
I'm already in a fortress mentality.
Why don't I, you know, and I can't, my economy is doing badly because of that.
Why don't I score a big win on Taiwan?
Ideological reunification plus the semiconductor.
And also when the economy is doing bad, it's easier to galvanize the people.
All these people want China to die.
We're going to prove to them that we don't die.
We can even expand.
Wow, that's so interesting.
So essentially coupling with China will ensure the safety of Taiwan.
To some degree, right?
Because that's the leverage we have with them.
Until they don't use up the leverage before, you know, like now, the Taiwan semiconductors is a really interesting question because, you know, 95% of the world's most advanced semiconductors are made in one place in Taiwan by the TSMC.
Can you explain to the people what, and by the people I mean me, what exactly a semiconductor does?
Sure.
So, God, you asked.
Because we hear these things all the time, and it's like, what exactly does it do?
So, a semiconductor is a piece of machinery.
It's like you've heard about how with computers, everything is bits and bytes.
So, everything is zeros and ones.
So, you're sending signals to take a language, for example, and turn it into zeros and ones.
So, how do you transmit that?
How do you send that or store that?
You have a machine that has little switches, and the switch is either on or off.
The on is a one, the off is a zero.
And that is your mechanism, that is the code that you're sending across now.
So, you're thinking to yourself, well, we're sending a lot of stuff, right?
Like, so that's why you need these massive, massive amounts of data to go to be easily stored on tiny, tiny devices.
So, you we develop these things called chips, and they're called semiconductors because they are neither on nor off.
So, they're in this semi-state.
And each chip, each computer chip, which looks like it's the size of maybe a nail, it has hundreds of millions of these transistors or these switches on them that have been etched into them by that lithographic machine I was talking to you about, the Dutch machine.
And so, that's how you store information.
So, they're either memory chips or they're transmission chips, which are moving stuff around.
So, that's the heart of all computers, of every computer.
And the highest-end chips, the ones that can hold the most of this stuff, are, you know, these things are now measured in nanometers, which is the, you know, like much, much thinner than a human hair.
Those are only made by this one company in Taiwan.
Taiwan's much thinner than a human hair that has hundreds of millions of these.
Hundreds of millions, literally, I mean, billions.
And it's like it's mind-blowing.
These are the most complicated things human beings have ever done.
And this one company in Taiwan is able to make them at five nanometers, now three nanometer.
Nobody else can do it.
And it's really partly a kind of like mystery as to how do they, why is it, like, what is the secret sauce?
Nobody knows.
Everyone has tried.
And it's a combination of these engineers who've worked together forever, the best machinery, a culture in this firm that really is all about excellence, pristine work environments like these environments have to be almost like vacuums so that they're so.
This is NVIDIA you're talking about?
No, this is TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor.
Because they make the chips.
So NVIDIA designs the chips.
And they're the ones who actually are producing.
These are the guys who actually produce the chips.
And so the argument is the Chinese will come in there because they want those.
My own sense is you have an invasion of a country like Taiwan, which is all it has is human capital.
It's only human beings.
There's no natural resource.
First of all, I think the United States would bomb the factories and they would be rendered inoperable.
But even if they didn't, like you wouldn't be able to do it anymore under some dictatorship because the engineers would emigrate, they'd flee, they'd leave it, they'd be the new boat people.
The guy, the CEO, once explained to me exactly how each unit worked.
And they're in continuous collaboration with like seven different countries that they have research centers and ASML and Holland, which is the company that provides the lithography machines, you know, teams in the US, teams in Germany.
Like he said, we're like the hub of a global system.
If we got invaded and all those things got cut off, all those connections got cut off to us, we wouldn't be able to do what we do.
So I think that the Chinese, you know, it's not like you're going into Taiwan and there's like this big pot of gold.
There is an amazing, amazing intellectual operation that requires the active participation of hundreds of high-quality engineers with machines that need to be updated constantly and the software that needs to be updated constantly.
That's all going to collapse.
But couldn't China see the value in that and be like, hey, we're going to look the other way on certain things just to make sure that this factory keeps running the way it should be.
But the Germans would cut the ties.
The Dutch would cut their ties, the Americans would cut their ties.
And as I said, by the way, I also think the Americans would bomb the factory.
But the Chinese have tried to replicate.
And remember, TSMC is basically a Taiwanese company, by which I mean it's all Chinese people.
It's all ethnically Chinese people who, you know, in many years who have fled the mainland.
So you'd think it'd be pretty easy.
They've spent, by some estimates, $200 billion trying to recreate a version of TSMC.
Can't do it.
The chips they make are very low quality.
They make a lot of chips.
I mean, we use all the chips in our washing machines and things like that are often Chinese chips.
They can't make the high-end chips.
What's Chinese chips?
We can't make the high-end chips.
Intel can't make the high-end chips.
What's China's influence in Africa?
It's very real because they've provided a lot of assistance.
They've built a lot of the infrastructure.
But in my experience, traveling in Africa, the Africans, they like America a lot more because I'll tell you one program, George Bush, to give him credit, George W. Bush, PEPFAR, this is the AIDS prevention program.
It probably has saved tens and tens and tens of millions of lives in Africa.
Africa was being ravaged by AIDS.
And the Bush administration went in with a huge program that, you know, again, small on our budget.
You're talking about, you know, probably a quarter of a percent of the federal budget.
And it has saved, you know, tens and tens of millions of people's lives.
And people know it.
And people talk about it.
When the Chinese come in, they build something, but they're like, and here's what we want in return.
You know, there's a much more of a transaction program.
There's a quid pro quo.
Isn't that how their batteries are so advanced that control the cobalt mines in Africa?
It's not why they're so advanced because they got that raw material, but we could get the raw material.
No, they've invested in it and they're very innovative.
They're not just copying.
But they do have the cobalt mines, which is apparently the worst slavery conditions in human history.
Yeah, but getting the raw material is only one part.
The challenge with batteries is basically we've not found a way to make batteries much more productive.
Battery technology has kind of gone up 10 or 15% a year over the last 20 years.
It's kind of interesting mystery of why, you know, and then when you can get them to be good, they're very heavy.
This is one of the big problems with green technology, with wind and solar, because any wind and solar plant, you need storage because the wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining.
And if batteries were strong enough, we wouldn't need the backup that we have now, which is natural gas.
Almost all these green technologies right now, they need a backup because you need something, you know, let's say you're at a hospital, right?
The hospital needs the power all the time.
And Trump caricatures it by saying, oh, honey, the wind is out going, so I can't watch TV.
That doesn't happen.
And it doesn't happen because they all have a natural gas backup.
Fusion.
Now you're getting above my pay grade.
Well, what about this idea that AI will get us exponentially closer to fusion?
And once we're at fusion, EV, like any of the green technology used for energy, is pretty much useless.
Gas will be useless.
What do you think?
Are we doing anything to utilize AI to get us closer to that?
Is it a hype dream?
Right.
So fusion is the holy grail because it's nuclear technology with no radioactive waste, with no instability, with no possibility of a meltdown.
It's the way energy is made in the sun.
I think that the people who are really smart about this, who I talk to, because I'll be honest, this is above my pay grade, say we're getting closer and we've gotten closer than we have, that people were expecting to.
But it's still going to be a lot of trial and error before you can be sure.
There is one company that Sam Altman is the chairman of called Helion.
Exactly.
Isn't Bezos involved in that too?
He may be an investor and they're planning by 28, 2028, which is three years from now, to have an operational power plant.
They've actually already contracted to sell the power to Microsoft.
So this is happening.
My own guess is it'll be more in the nature of a pilot project than an actual scaling it and all that.
But you're right that if the promise of fusion is if you get it right and if you can get it at the right cost, it solves all the energy problems.
And we are, as far as I can tell, we are ahead of the Chinese influence.
That's my assumption for why you see Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states leaning so much, not only into AI, but also leaning away from this dependence on natural gas.
Because with AI, it's not like we're doing these computations by hand.
No, exactly.
Right?
If the time it takes is the trial and error, AI is a trial and error machine.
Yeah.
Right?
100%.
That's why, by the way, bio, you know, so like Demis Hassa Abbas, the guy at DeepMind who runs essentially Google's AI, who won the Nobel Prize, he says that he thinks AI will basically cure all diseases.
Yeah.
Because a lot of what disease is trial and error.
You know, you try stuff, it doesn't work, you try something else, and the AI can kind of do it a billion times.
So, I mean, there's a lot of upsides to AI that are in some ways like unimaginable.
Because if you could really use AI, like what could we do with climate change?
What could we do with disease prevention?
So we have to hold out the hope that we get incredible benefits.
And yet, what I worry about is something that powerful is also going to be very disruptive.
And one thing that hasn't changed is human beings, like in our psyches and our, you know, our degree of nervousness and anxiety and fear and, you know, in confronting all this disruption.
Yeah.
Okay, listen, we know that you have to go.
We could talk to you forever.
There's just one last thing.
NATO Expansion Preservation00:05:39
You had mentioned that you had met Kissinger a bunch.
I think we've heard of Henry Kissinger as this instrumental figure in like carving out the world as we know it today.
Let's just remove what people think about him.
Is he responsible for all the ills of the world?
Responsible for good hunger.
Is there anything in conversation with him that he's told you about negotiation?
Like, are there any like tips that he's given you?
Is there any wisdom that he's bestowed?
Like, what is it at the end of the day that people are wanting?
Like, he's been in the room during some of the most important geopolitical conversations that have kind of created the world we live in today.
Have you asked him anything about that?
Yeah, it's funny that you focus in on that because that is that.
So, he was a great scholar practitioner, right?
So, he had that unusual mind and he was a great negotiator.
And I think for him, one of the reasons he was able to be a great negotiator is, I'll be honest about this as a loyal, very proud, patriotic American.
Most Americans can't put themselves in the shoes of a foreigner.
You know, we're so Americans are so Americans, exactly, exactly.
So, they made that.
Very, very, very well said.
Americans are so, you know, I mean, we're insular country, big, vast, you know, we dominate the world.
We don't care about what you're putting.
So, because he was an immigrant, I think because he was a Jew in Germany who came to America, you know, he was always able to put himself in the other person's shoes and able to try to understand what the world looked like for that person and try to understand what it was that that person needed.
So, one of the things I think about, I have so many thoughts, your question triggers, but one of them is that over the last 10 years of his life, what we often talk about was him trying to get inside Putin's head.
He met Putin like 30 times one-on-one for hours at end.
And the reason he would do it was he was trying to understand what he wanted what is what are his motives?
What is he, you know, because rather than just demonizing, he's trying to think, okay, what's going on?
What does he need?
What is keeping him in power?
That skill, I think, that's a muscle we Americans don't develop enough.
Because we don't have to, like, sometimes when you're the country in power, you don't have to be as empathetic.
Exactly.
What did he say?
Our way of negotiating with people is to say, here's what we want.
So, what did he say about Putin?
What did he say?
What was his conclusion?
His point was: this is this vast country, you know, the largest physical space in the world.
He's, you know, he's facing a China that they've had historically very bad relations with.
Hulong border.
During the Cold War, one-third of the Soviet army used to be tied up on the Chinese border.
Toward the south, he has all these, you know, south of Chechnya, you have all these Islamic countries.
He's worried about them.
And, you know, he's got a Western border where he sees a West that is modernizing, advancing.
So he's more, so his view was always that Putin was more fearful and defensive and reacting than offensive and imperial.
And I would somewhat disagree with his perspective, but I think there was a real, there was a reality there about the way that Putin saw the world.
So he was always asking, is there a way to stand your ground, but also reassure him?
You know, is there a way to.
And so he would have been a little more cautious about NATO expansion.
He would have been talking about.
Because he knows that he's incredibly sensitive to invasion, and that's constantly in his mind.
So if there is NATO expansion, he is going to react.
Right.
Oh, and so, and so part of what always, so his thought was like, that's where you want to keep a continuous conversation going.
That's why, and that's why you don't want to loosely say things like, oh, we want democracy in Russia, because he reads that as you want regime change.
Let's go.
You want to topple my regime.
So don't use ideological words like that loosely.
Think about it.
You can trigger him and wild him up, yeah.
Right.
So it was, you know, he was always very sensitive to the idea that people in those positions are very, they want to preserve power.
They want to preserve the coherence of their country.
So, you know, he was also, you know, we talk a little bit about Iran, and he would similarly say, you know, we've got to ask ourselves, what do the Iranians need?
It can't just be about what do we need, because you're not going to get a deal that lasts for the long term if they're not satisfied.
If there's not something that they get out of it, you know, so that was always his perspective.
And he always, when he was negotiating, was, you know, was thinking in those terms.
It's what pissed off a lot of people in America.
You know, that's why he, I mean, he made the opening to China.
The right got very upset with him.
He, you know, made a deal on Vietnam.
The left got very upset.
You know, he's all, but he was always trying to say, look, the world in which we live in is a world of grace.
There's no, you know, if you want to look for total victory, total, that's not going to happen.
You've got to find a deal where each side can walk away, feeling at least that they preserve some shred of their dignity.
Yes.
Fareed, Zakaria.
Thank you so much, Molly.
This was a lot of pleasure.
This is great.
Thank you.
Tell people where they can see you.
I'm sure they're going to want to consume more.
Obviously, CNN, Washington Post, and then back here when you next invite me.