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“How Rheinmetall surpassed Volkswagen in market cap and what it signals about Europe's industrial reorientation.”

“Germany for quite a while enjoyed the so-called peace dividend, keeping defense spending at around 1% of our GDP.”

“I think people are sick of these gotcha interviews. I just I watched one the other day. It was Lewis Goodall doing an interview with Darren Jones, Keir Starmer's chief secretary. It was unwatchable after a few minutes. It's this whole gotcha thing. You're a bad person. I'm a good person. I'm speaking on behalf of the public. It actually is populist. It's playing into the idea as opposed to with Vucic, you're an interesting person. You're a very complicated person, and we're gonna try and find out a little bit more about who you are.”

“One of the leaders, it's claimed by somebody who knows a lot, gave $20,000,000 to somebody who'd been part of Trump's first administration, believing the guy would get him into the Trump second administration, and feels cheated and ripped off because the individual got a job in a different part of the Trump administration, didn't help him. Another one of the leaders has apparently handed over all the mines in the territory that he controls and in return gets to swagger around in Mar A Lago.”

“Potentially, the whole world is locked in a kind of abusive marriage where, essentially, the Trump administration is saying to everybody else, you can't afford to leave me. You know? Yeah. Okay. You might complain, and I might humiliate you and beat you up, but the fact is you'd never be able to make it on your own.”

“Trump's vanity and narcissism is such that he doesn't really see Kierstheimer as his opposite number because he sees himself as the king. He wants to be an emperor. He wants to be a unelected monarch. He behaves like one. He surrounds himself by sycophants in the way that A medieval monarch would.”

“So when I the teams that I worked for and now I'm starting to date myself with, like because it's been fourteen years. Like, we didn't do as much of our own internal mock drafts as much as it was, you know, okay. Let's just kinda if we're picking 22, let's make sure we're honed in on who our top 22 players are. And then this is our, you know, this is the the group of we think our pick's gonna come down to one of these seven, eight guys, so then making sure everybody in the room has watched those seven or eight guys because some might have not done them, so that we can really hone in and discuss those guys. And then they would have, like, the the leadership group would get together and have more of a strategy session of, like, okay. These teams are on these positions based off of what we know from talking to people, based off of their their top 30 visits, based off the pro days that they attended with their decision makers. So, like, an example in this draft would be, okay. You're picking in the twenties and you wanna tackle, and you're going, okay. Well, we're looking at some of these tackle teams.”

“Yeah. I mean, it it's not nothing. I know the teams they're I've talked to teams that aren't concerned about it, and I've talked to teams that are extremely concerned about it, that think it's, like, a major, major problem. And the the reasoning was interesting because, it was, like, his ability they think when he gets in the NFL, the guys are worried about it. Or, like, okay. You know, he's all power, power, power. But then once you're stuck like, there's a lot of there's a lot of wins that come in the pass game and the run game with your second move. In other words, I hit you with my first move. It stopped. How do I how would I pivot off of that and then either escape in the run game or get, you know, get navigate around you to get to the quarterback? And they're like, I don't think this guy and once the once the power is stopped because of his length, he's not gonna be able to escape against bigger, you know, the better tackles, the bigger, stronger, better tackles in this league.”

“The main story that seems to have appeared in surf media was when he said to me, some of us are principals, Alastair, which was seen as a sort of direct hit. We had an interesting series of meetings with bits of staff, and they were very much insisting that he doesn't control the media. My goodness, the coverage demonstrates just how much influence he has over certain really key bits of media. One of them actually said, you know, Belgrade welcomes the return of the NATO bomber, right, which I thought was a bit off.”

“First and foremost, tanking. You know, this has completely gotten away from the league this year. I mean, it's interesting because the lottery has changed, I think, essentially five times now. So arguably, there's less incentive under the current formation, you know, and odds of the lottery. There should have been less incentive than any time in our prior history to tank. But yet because of modern analytics, whether you know, interestingly enough, I always have to remind people. I mean, unfortunately, tanking is a strategy not to lose, but to win. It's just to win over a longer period of time, obviously. But I think where we ended up this year where, you know, make up make the numb you know, eight teams, nine teams, 10 teams, whatever, which was essentially racing to the bottom. You know? Again, in a desire to win, not to lose was not acceptable. And, you know, what exactly we could have done about it in hindsight, you know, we're about to make significant changes. And we have a already scheduled board meeting of our owners for late May.”

“So what we're looking into is, a separate league in Europe. I mean, basketball is the number two sport in Europe after soccer. Enormous interest. There are a lot of different pro leagues country by country, and then there's something called the Europe the the the they have a broader European league that that sort of covers top clubs, you know, from from around Europe. It's what they call the Euroleague. So what we're looking to do is see if there's an opportunity to create a new a new league, maybe comprised of some of those existing clubs and some new clubs. It would be separate from the NBA. I will just say over time, you know, could some of those teams potentially compete, like, in a cup tournament that we have? You know, maybe years and years from now, you could imagine when, you know, supersonic jets come back, you could see some of those teams maybe competing in our playoffs or, you know, matchups between top US, you know, US teams and European teams or or US and Canada.”

“We need to understand that the world has changed and the 2% NATO goal is now a floor, not a ceiling.”

“Germany's total stock market cap is less than a single US company like Nvidia.”

“So why does Donald Trump constantly say constantly say that he's cut drug prices by variously 300%, 400%, 500%, and 1200%. And why is that not covered anywhere in the world's media? Kennedy didn't answer the question, but he said he said this, president Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There are two ways of calculating percentages. He then says, if you have a $600 drug and it goes to $10, that's a 600% reduction. So why have we got somebody so stupid as president, and why do we treat them as normal?”

“To defend the league for a second on the 65 games. It wasn't quite arbitrary. I mean, so that's 80% of games in the season, and that was collectively bargained with the Players Association. Again, it's it's zero sum. There's gonna be same number of players who are all NBA. There's gonna be a defensive player of the year MVP, etcetera. And the feeling was, as we sat down with the players, that we needed our stars to be on the floor and that that was a you know, based on average number of games missed historically for injuries or whatever else, that that was a fair benchmark. And, you know, with this exceptional language and so we made two exceptions this year of guys who, you know, two guys who missed it by a game.”

“It's that we don't really know how to think about having a nuclear deterrent which isn't basically being covered by the Americans. We don't really remotely know how we could build up our own large language model like a ChatGBT or Claude. We've no idea, really, what we would do without American cloud computing or the dollar or five eyes. In other words, we've spent eight years becoming completely dependent.”

“I worry, as you know, as you call him my friend Emmanuel Macron, but I do worry that he doesn't necessarily share this vision. I worry that actually Macron is the one who is most reluctant on enlargement. France is now the only independent nuclear deterrent in Europe, that gives them an extra strength. I think he sees that as a strength that should be exploited. But I think this is about politics. I think they're genuinely worried about their politics and the impact of enlargement.”

“The nuclear exit decision was driven by a single state election and backfired spectacularly on our energy security.”