Columbia Energy Exchange

“What I call a g zero world... is that when The United States rejects being the, the the the guarantor of collective security for its allies, when it rejects promoting free trade, when it rejects rule of law, and no one else is prepared or capable of responding. It turns out that in that environment, the a 100 plus trillion dollar global economy is extremely vulnerable to political actors that wish to disrupt it. And that might be the single biggest implication of g zero.”

“I think one of the long term implications of the Iran war is that the GCC is increasingly not fit for purpose. I think that The Emirates and the Saudis will have a much more structural fight. The Emirates will tell you that, you know, in a time of war, this is when you really know who your friends are. Number one for them in this environment has been Israel... Saudis, that's a very different story. It's Pakistan. It's Egypt. It's Turkey. I think that becomes bigger, not smaller.”

“And it's very clear to me that Trump wants to announce a win. He's desperate to announce a win. He wants to get past this. So what does that look like? He needs an agreement on the nuclear side, which means, a the removal of the enriched uranium stockpiles, which both sides seem to be close to agreeing on, and an agreement on no enrichment for a period of time, which both sides are pretty far from as of today. There's a three page document, an MOU, if you will, that is presently being circulated.”

“It is not sovereign AI LLM models in my view. I think that one of two things will happen. Either it'll continue to be winner take most, and so a relatively small number of companies in The US and China will just continue to blaze past anyone that tries, or it's gonna become commoditized. Those models will be too expensive, but good enough will be good enough. Then you will spend a lot of money to catch up in something that becomes essentially free. If you're talking about the entire stack, that seems completely—it's a myth.”

“What they're doing is long term, no regret, no risk moves to take advantage of The United States undermining its own reliability with allies globally. China still has problems... but in terms of Xi Jinping's ability to have more influence globally and invest in the big long term technologies at scale. They don't have a problem with American based architecture. They just wanna control it. This whole responsible stakeholder stuff was, oh, they're going to align with the Americans. Turns out the Chinese see that this is perfectly good architecture as long as the Americans aren't running it.”

“Part of resilience will be more money on critical infrastructure and hardening targets that weren't thought to be as vulnerable, desalination plants. Part of it will be building infrastructure for other land based alternatives. The Chinese feel pretty good right now. They have Turkmenistan. They have power of Siberia. I mean, they're just this is a different environment to think about those investments. I do think The Gulf is gonna look also not just geopolitically, but sovereign wealth funds in The Gulf are gonna completely change what their long term priorities are.”

“One of the big problems for academe and one of the big problems for people with analytic temperaments is a lot of them have overdeveloped their baseline research and underdeveloped their management skills, their people skills, their organizational skills. And yet when you have AI that is really good at researching and analyzing, it's the other skill sets that you really need more of. For us, AI is not displacing workers. AI is allowing us to actually have more effective labor. It's allowing us to essentially hire staff that we can't afford.”