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“The Strait of Hormuz and how shifting power dynamics are reshaping global markets and strategy.”

“Striking a China mobile deal changed Apple's trajectory in China. It unlocked the iPhone in China and turned China into a market that captured sales from the rising middle class. That's really become a bedrock of their business, but it's a precarious part of their business because of the geopolitical circumstances and the adversarial relationship today between the US and China.”

“I think we're in a bad place. I don't think we can effectively compete with China economically technologically without allies. Right, They're just too big. They're too big, they're too determined, and so we need allies, including Europe, by the way, including Southeast Asia, including the Global South.”

“After 15 years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is officially stepping down. During Cook's tenure, Apple's revenue almost quadrupled, and its market value increased by about 3.6 trillion dollars. On September 1st, Cook will be transitioning to the role of executive chairman.”

“My view for a long time has been post high school education in America mostly doesn't work. It mostly doesn't work. We can argue with me about it. That's my long hal view. I was a governor who oversaw colleges. A lot of people who start college don't finish.”

“Markets may be underestimating cascading global disruptions.”

“The Vision Pro is an engineering marvel, but it's basically a disaster as a product. No pun intended, it lacks vision. That's Tim Cook; the engineering talent in the company can build a great product, but it doesn't have an ecosystem. Companies like YouTube and Netflix had no interest in building for it. That's a failure.”

“But if you picture the same data, not from zero to a 100%, but just total amount of energy, which is what the world cares about and what the planet cares about from a carbon emission standpoint, we've never used less of anything. The shares are changing, but we're using more wood today for energy than we did in 1850. And when you take a population of billions of people and you grow that population and you grow GDP, what we have seen to date is an energy addition where clean energy and you see these headlines all the time about it's breaking every record you can imagine, which it is.”

“China’s quiet advantage is part of the shifting power dynamics we unpack.”

“But if you picture the same data, not from zero to a 100%, but just total amount of energy, which is what the world cares about and what the planet cares about from a carbon emission standpoint, we've never used less of anything. The shares are changing, but we're using more wood today for energy than we did in 1850. And when you take a population of billions of people and you grow that population and you grow GDP, what we have seen to date is an energy addition where clean energy and you see these headlines all the time about it's breaking every record you can imagine, which it is.”

“Even though we're making them in Arizona, they go back to Taiwan for packaging. Problem. You gotta get that in America. I think it's thirty percent of printed circuit boards we import from China. Almost all of the chemicals, substrates, input that go into making chips. I'm from China or Asia.”

“Apple is basically the only company that is not investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. I mean, look at Amazon, its CapEx is expected to reach $200 billion this year. For Google, it's close to that, $175 billion. Then Apple is going to spend only $14 billion. They're actually cutting their spending.”

“Cook will hand the CEO reins to John Ternus, Apple's head of hardware engineering. Ternus has spent 25 years, half his life at the company, overseeing the hardware behind every major Apple product. The transition marks the start of a new era for Apple, with plenty of unanswered questions about what comes next.”

“That doesn't work in America in a democratic society, putting tens of millions of Americans out of work precipitously will create the end of democracy will not win the AI race, And so we just got to get to work and be innovative.”

“We are a net exporter of energy. We are the largest oil producer the world has ever seen. So why the heck am I paying higher gasoline prices when all of this is happening 7,000 miles away? The reason why is oil is the most global market. So we are a huge exporter of crude oil, of gasoline, of jet fuel, mainly from the US Gulf Coast. So that tethers us to the global market in a really big way.”

“Apple is basically the only company that is not investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. I mean, look at Amazon, its CapEx is expected to reach $200 billion this year. For Google, it's close to that, $175 billion. Then Apple is going to spend only $14 billion. They're actually cutting their spending.”

“A war few expected to last this long is exposing how fragile global systems really are.”

“The Vision Pro is an engineering marvel, but it's basically a disaster as a product. No pun intended, it lacks vision. That's Tim Cook; the engineering talent in the company can build a great product, but it doesn't have an ecosystem. Companies like YouTube and Netflix had no interest in building for it. That's a failure.”

“And natural gas, we're really disconnected. I mean, the price of natural gas in Europe and Asia went to 15 or $20 per million BTU. In The US, it's below 3, and it's falling. So I was con I was interested in that because we've been reading these stories about how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington to try to encourage the Trump administration to take this military action.”

“My biggest lesson from the chips program is when you do something like that, make sure it's bipartisan. It has mostly survived. Actually, now TSMC is making leading edge chips in Arizona the same way they are in Taipei, Taiwan, and they're going to expand, and this administration is like helping, not hurting that.”

“President Biden called me Gov. He's like, Gov, why can't we make everything in America? Likes the President cannot. We don't have enough people. That's inflationary. We don't have enough. It's not a good goal. We don't have enough land, we don't have energy. We should make the most critical things and work with our allies.”

“I think you could see an explosion of new small company and I'm hearing that from a lot of people. It's much easier to start your own business because of AI tools. Yeah, so like now, lots and lots of people make the living with a restaurant or a coffee shop or whatever. I think it's possible. We see a real explosion of online like new services, new online products, because people can start a business with AI.”

“Right now in the in The Middle East, the most important piece of oil infrastructure in the world today is the East West pipeline. It's a pipeline that goes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea that bypassed the Strait Of Hormuz. Usually, that pipeline is not used. It was built for an emergency like this, and Saudi Arabia was willing to pay that premium for insurance. Energy security, it's a question of how much society is willing to pay for insurance through that kind of resilience redundancy in infrastructure.”

“This is the largest oil supply disruption the world has ever seen, somewhere on the order of 13 to 15,000,000 barrels a day of supply that otherwise would transit the Strait Of Hormuz offline. There are some measures to compensate for that, like strategic stocks, but there's no policy tool in the policy toolkit large enough to deal with a shock that large. You're talking about 10 to 15 of global energy demand, oil supply. The Arab oil embargo was 7% by comparison.”

“An oil shock is less harmful if oil is less a share of your economy. And so the most durable thing you can do for energy security is just to use less in the first place, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we often forget to pick up off the ground when it comes to energy efficiency.”

“Striking a China mobile deal changed Apple's trajectory in China. It unlocked the iPhone in China and turned China into a market that captured sales from the rising middle class. That's really become a bedrock of their business, but it's a precarious part of their business because of the geopolitical circumstances and the adversarial relationship today between the US and China.”

“I think the point we were making in the article was a shock like this, particularly in a new world of fragmentation, geopolitical conflict, the, eroding world order that Mark Carney spoke so eloquently about at this year's meeting in Davos. In a world like that, countries don't view interconnection as security. They view it as a risk, and it's gonna lead to a, an impulse in a in a lure of autarky. Let's make everything at home.”

“Natural gas, which is a huge part of what the Middle East exports in terms of energy, that is key for global power generation. It's key for air conditioning. It's also a key input for manufacturers around the world. If we're thinking about companies that build everything from chips to companies that create steel and need high heat, to companies that produce fertilizer for farming, all of that requires an immense amount of natural gas.”

“I think the point we were making in the article was a shock like this, particularly in a new world of fragmentation, geopolitical conflict, the, eroding world order that Mark Carney spoke so eloquently about at this year's meeting in Davos. In a world like that, countries don't view interconnection as security. They view it as a risk, and it's gonna lead to a, an impulse in a in a lure of autarky. Let's make everything at home.”

“There was a survey from the University of Michigan. It was the lowest ever in 74 years of the survey taking place. And so some of that might be an overreaction in vibes because the economy was pretty strong coming into this. But the direction of travel, how fast that plummeted in just one month as people were seeing those price increases in the gas station, that just goes to show that people hate this.”

“It's obviously different when you're talking about a supply chain. If China were to cut off the exports of solar panels, that would not affect the ability to turn the lights on today at all. It might affect your ability to deploy new technologies, and install new solar panels, but that's a much different, impact. We're not importing electricity from China. We're importing a manufactured product that makes electricity.”

“Most of the things you would wanna do to deal with an oil shock don't help with this oil shock. They help with the next oil shock. And when the immediate crisis fades, the political urgency to do something for the next one tends to fade as well.”

“Right now in the in The Middle East, the most important piece of oil infrastructure in the world today is the East West pipeline. It's a pipeline that goes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea that bypassed the Strait Of Hormuz. Usually, that pipeline is not used. It was built for an emergency like this, and Saudi Arabia was willing to pay that premium for insurance. Energy security, it's a question of how much society is willing to pay for insurance through that kind of resilience redundancy in infrastructure.”

“Cook will hand the CEO reins to John Ternus, Apple's head of hardware engineering. Ternus has spent 25 years, half his life at the company, overseeing the hardware behind every major Apple product. The transition marks the start of a new era for Apple, with plenty of unanswered questions about what comes next.”

“An oil shock is less harmful if oil is less a share of your economy. And so the most durable thing you can do for energy security is just to use less in the first place, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we often forget to pick up off the ground when it comes to energy efficiency.”

“This is the largest oil supply disruption the world has ever seen, somewhere on the order of 13 to 15,000,000 barrels a day of supply that otherwise would transit the Strait Of Hormuz offline. There are some measures to compensate for that, like strategic stocks, but there's no policy tool in the policy toolkit large enough to deal with a shock that large. You're talking about 10 to 15 of global energy demand, oil supply. The Arab oil embargo was 7% by comparison.”

“And natural gas, we're really disconnected. I mean, the price of natural gas in Europe and Asia went to 15 or $20 per million BTU. In The US, it's below 3, and it's falling. So I was con I was interested in that because we've been reading these stories about how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington to try to encourage the Trump administration to take this military action.”

“It's obviously different when you're talking about a supply chain. If China were to cut off the exports of solar panels, that would not affect the ability to turn the lights on today at all. It might affect your ability to deploy new technologies, and install new solar panels, but that's a much different, impact. We're not importing electricity from China. We're importing a manufactured product that makes electricity.”

“And while we can make up some of that gap, because countries and companies have stockpiles, we can sort of like massage it a little bit here and there for the moment. The longer this situation goes on, the longer the tankers can't make it out of the Strait of Hormuz, the longer that 10% will continue compounding. And the longer that the supply disruption will end up rippling through the global economy.”

“We're witnessing a temporary disruption or the end of a the U.S. unipolar era.”

“Most of the things you would wanna do to deal with an oil shock don't help with this oil shock. They help with the next oil shock. And when the immediate crisis fades, the political urgency to do something for the next one tends to fade as well.”

“The German industrial base is going to get crushed. Like this is China's play. They run the play over and over again. They subsidize, they dump cheap products into the global market. In this case Europe also Africa, distort the price and it makes it impossible to compete.”

“After 15 years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is officially stepping down. During Cook's tenure, Apple's revenue almost quadrupled, and its market value increased by about 3.6 trillion dollars. On September 1st, Cook will be transitioning to the role of executive chairman.”

“So year-over-year inflation through the CPI index, which is a broad measurement of inflation, is up 3.3% from a year ago. And the Federal Reserve uses 2% as a target for where it wants inflation to be. Even before the war with Iran started, inflation was above that target level. And what we have now is an energy shock that is sending gasoline and diesel prices on one of their steepest climbs in decades, if not ever.”