July 23 2025
- Sacks victory lap
- Jacob Helberg joins the show
- The Hill & Valley Forum collaboration
- Focus on winning the AI race
- Can’t afford to lose the race - its existential
- Michael Kratsios joins the show
- Director of OSTP
- Regulation
- Infrastructure
- Significant shortage of needs on the ground - electricians, HVAC technicians, etc
- Its not just about having the best AI engineers
- Chris Power, Hadrian
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Need to use AI to power factories to not lose the war
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China’s lead is immense
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Hadrian fills this gap with AI powered factories
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More efficient, more utilization
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Hoping to roll out more factories
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Cost of energy and cost of raw materials are a huge problem
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- Jake Loosararian, Gecko Robotics
- Helps save lives by sending robots to do hard dangerous data gathering
- Shyam Sankar, Palantir
- Medical use case * 2
- Nuclear submarine parts manufacturer use case
- Battery/maintenance manufacturing use case
- AI is not replacing humans but 50x-ing humans
- It is helping lever up human taste
- There WILL be special models in addition to the general models too
- AI can help eliminate dwell time in manufacturing and supply chain
- American Tech Fellows program - kinda like an elite trade school - upskilling all kinds of folks without the background
- Paul Buchheit
- Built Gmail
- Coined “Do no evil/Don’t be evil”
- Went to YC
- Now starting Standard Capital
- Paul Graham started YC with the insight that it was easier/cheaper to start a startup (20 years ago)
- Now AI is making that even easier
- We can 10x global wealth
- Even healthcare will be transformed - imagine the AI models being more predictive than clinical trials
- Keith Rabois and Kelly Loeffler
- AI is crucial for small businesses
- ~50% of workers work for or own small businesses
- Needed for reshoring, onshoring
- SBIC money is needed for small businesses (TSLA got some of that)
- 60% of SBA loans have gone to companies with 1-5 employees
- Could have a barbell outcome (small companies and super large at either end)
- She’s the only CFA to ever serve in Congress
- Can’t play favorites - can not advantage certain industries vs others - small businesses are also tax payers so they should not be financing others - so have to be sensitive to needs for taxpayers
- Taxpayers have all of the downside and none of the upside - need to investigate this again
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- JD Vance
- Illegal immigration
- If you are obsessed with the problems with AI - you will not make progress and get the worst of the problems without the innovation - made this focus in France for AI summit
- American tech stack vs other tech stack for the world
- Big tech layoffs vs applying for more visas - dichotomy
- Too much ideological conformity in American colleges/universities - needs to be fixed to serve industry and employment better
- James Litinsky, Founder and CEO of MP Materials
- 100% of american industry in rare earth mining and magnets
- Some big deals recently
- Apple, DoD, GM, etc
- They are well positioned to counter Chinese mercantilism potentially hurting their margins
- DoD deal has ownership, upside participation, etc
- Mutually assured economic destruction play with China
- Needed some guarantees about customer in the face of Chinese subsidies undercutting their profits
- Median wage $100K/year
- Need more electricians, maintenance workers, etc
- Lisa Su, AMD CEO
- AI 55 3nm and 6nm chip
- Manufacturing and TSMC alternatives
- High demand from OpenAI, xAI, nations, etc
- There will be diversity of chips because there are so many use cases
- DataCenter chips, Physical AI, AI at the edge, etc
- STEM background will be huge for the next generation workforce - the sooner we can start the kids on that the better
- AI will transform everything - manufacturing, medicine, science - everything
- Chase Lochmiller, Co-Founder and CEO of Crusoe
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Never bet against America - Warren Buffett
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Insane AI investment
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Why? First time ever in history we are able to manufacture intelligence - till now the scarcest economic resource
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$20T+ by 2030
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American energy consumption has flat lined lately
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DataCenters will be 2.5% of US power consumption to 10% by 2030
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Crusoe building AI factories (new site in Abilene Texas)
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- Jensen Huang, NVIDIA
- AI is a great equalizer
- Hopper performance improved by 4x in the time they shipped it (helped by CUDA improvements by Nvidia and community open source)
- America’s unique advantage that another country can’t possibly have is President Trump
- You can’t reshore without energy
- The future of industry is 2 factories - the robots/cars and the AIs for the robots/cars
- Every industrial company will be an AI company
- Chinese AI models are the best open models in the world (Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi)
- 150 people can create like an OpenAI (Deepseek did it)
- Fan of the Pod
Scott Bessent - Treasury Secretary- 3-3-3 plan
- June 2025 was first +ve for treasury since June 2015 (had surplus)
- 1880s, 1890s railroads in US had incredible impact on US - great increase in GDP and deflationary
- Expects to lock in US dollar as reserve currency (US backed stable coins)
- Regular breakfasts with Jerome Powell
- TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome → Tariff Derangement Syndrome)
- Tariff is not a consumption tax - and a 1 time price increase isn’t a persistent inflationary problem
- Fed is turning into UBI for PhD economists
- Our environmental regulations have led to our de-industrialization - need to make it easier to build things again
- Not over-regulate
- Doug Burgum- Secretary of the Interior, Chris Wright - Energy Secretary
- National Energy Dominance council
- China is adding a US (in energy) every 18 months
- Coal has 2/3rd of their electrical power
- US gets 75% of electricity from Natural Gas (big lead), then Nuclear, then Coal
- Have made it hard to build something, so easy to stop something
- Natural Gas is fastest growing energy source - clean, longer lasting machinery, abundant throughout US and globe - will power AI by far
- Gen 4 reactors starting in Idaho next year
- Need de-regulation - I say pipeline, you say protest
- Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary
- Japan deal
- $550B commitment
- Back projects they want (nuclear power, etc) - 90% profit to US, 10% to Japan
- Open their markets to US products
- Korea is very competitive with Japan
- Donald Trump
- Japan trade deal
- Philippines deal, Indonesia deal
- China deal WIP
- Shoutouts to Besties and parts of his cabinet
- AI
- Copyright
- Regulation
- White House AI action plan
- Investment incentives in factories and equipment
- Auto manufacturing
- Energy dominance
- Nuclear
- Aiming to match China’s energy additions
- $17T investment into US
- New Executive Order for US AI exports
- Targeting woke and DEI initiatives
- EO signing(s)
- Federal permitting for data center infrastructure
- Promote export abroad of US AI models to ensure American dominance in AI
- Federal government AI model procurement ensures the models are not ideologically compromised
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