WATCH POWER

“She commits this enormous self-inflicted wound by going on Fox News and announcing Jeffrey Epstein's client list is sitting on her desk ready for her review. And then the next day she joins a meeting of conservative influencers at the White House and gives them a binder labeled Epstein files that they walk out of the White House waving for the cameras.”

“She oversees a wide scale purging of Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases investigating Donald Trump when he was out of office. She's immediately making clear that there is a loyalty test for anyone who works in the sprawling Department of Justice and FBI. And that, I think, is the blueprint for which she carried out her job.”

“The US has dozens of tribally owned gas stations, by and large, exempt from paying state fuel taxes, savings they can pass on. The gas stations also provide revenue for reservations to reinvest in their communities, concentrated in Western states where the priciest gas in The US is found.”

“The United States is transitioning from being the global policeman to an offshore balancer of power.”

“The United States is transitioning from being the global policeman to an offshore balancer of power.”

“Our current institutional framework is crumbling, and this collapse is the precursor to a massive systemic change.”

“The question isn’t who has the best model, but who has the most creative financing to build out AI infrastructure and beyond.”

“I mean, let's not go too far down this rabbit hole, but there is great convenience being on a single ecosystem, great platform. It is a little bit of a, I mean, it depends, right? It depends as always, but as sort of like, we're putting a lot of digital infrastructure in the hands of one private corporation. My point is always, well, it doesn't matter who the person is, they're a person and people are flawed.”

“President Trump is threatening to blockade the Strait Of Hormuz, one of the several key sticking points in failed peace talks with Iran. Negotiations in Islamabad broke down overnight with disputes over nuclear ambitions, sanctions, and control of the critical oil route.”

“The other side of the value capture for us is going to be incorporating all this IP. Not only we have the exclusivity of the model in, Azure, but we have access to the IP. I mean, having a royalty free, let's even forgetting all the the know how and the knowledge side of it, but having royalty free access all the way till seven more years gives us a lot of flexibility business model wise. It's kinda like having a frontier model for free, in some sense. If you're an MSFT shareholder, that's kinda where you should start from is to think about it.”

“There is this person who leads our network operations. And the amount of fiber there, the AI ran, and what have you. It's just crazy. There are, I think, 400 different fiber operators we are dealing with worldwide. But the person who leads it, she basically said to me, you know what? I there's no way I'll ever get the headcount to go do all this. Not forget, even if I even approve the budget, I can't hire all these folks. So she she did the next best thing. She just built herself a whole bunch of agents to automate the DevOps pipeline of how to deal with the maintenance.”

“The question isn’t who has the best model, but who has the most creative financing to build out AI infrastructure and beyond.”

“The U.S. military is currently overextended, making it vulnerable to asymmetric threats from smaller nations.”

“My favorite line, actually, of the whole thing was he talked about the shift workers and nurses. And it's just, it just, if there's anything about the, that shows how incredibly stupidly focused group this was, it's, so shift workers, what, if you work in... someone said, I would write a thing, and someone else has gone, that's good, do that, and the other has gone, fantastic, I'll read that. It's like, what were you people smoking? Like, what were you seriously doing?”

“But in Venezuela, President Trump very explicitly said, this is about taking control of the oil. And to me, it was harkening back again to a very old frame of thinking, but it also didn't really make sense to me. In a world where the price of oil was bumping along at $65 and American producers were struggling to make ends meet with such a low oil price, to claim that we should use American military prowess to try to bring more Venezuelan oil onto the global market. I didn't see how that made sense for America commercially, except in the one narrow sense, which is not insignificant, but keeping China and Russia from really having the ability to develop Venezuela's oil.”

“Even as she is devoting so many resources to investigating Donald Trump's political opponents, it's still not enough for him. He is complaining to aides and allies that she's moving too slowly. And we even saw some of this criticism spill out into the public when Donald Trump posted on True Social a message addressed to his attorney general, basically castigating her for not getting enough results and not prosecuting individuals that he thought were guilty of crimes.”

“And the reasons for this goes back to the time that I spent in Iraq. I spent about two years in Iraq immediately after Saddam fled, and then throughout the years that followed off and on. And America's 2003 war in Iraq was about primarily weapons of mass destruction. It was not about getting control over Iraqi oil. But to this day, most Iraqis, when they try to make sense of the American intervention, they come back to oil, that it must have been about Iraqi oil. So, in a world where President Trump said over the weekend, he wishes he could just take the oil. That's what he'd like to do if the American people would allow him to. I think this is going to be rhetoric that we're going to hear throughout Iranian politics for a long time to come and not to America's benefit.”

“I don't know how we're supposed to comply with that California sorry, Colorado law. I would love them to tell us, and, you know, we'd like to be able to do it, but that's just from what I've read of that, that's like a I literally don't know what we're supposed to do. I'm very worried about a 50 state patchwork. I think it's a big mistake.”

“And then we saw the Department of Justice, under Pam Bondi's leadership, launch investigations into some of Trump's long-standing political opponents. Adam Schiff, the Senator from California, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chairman, who he wants to lower interest rates. And many of these cases and investigations have collapsed or not moved forward for various reasons, mostly because there was not enough evidence to indict or to move forward.”

“Marie Luizeta is no stranger to breaking barriers. She became the Bundesliga's first female assistant coach just over two years ago, and she was the first woman to lead a Bundesliga side from the touchline, deputizing for the then manager during a one nil win over Darmstadt.”

“Democrats in congress are gonna force votes attempting to constrain the president on this war. The constitution, of course, gives congress the power to declare war, although it hasn't worked that way in practice in quite a while. Those votes are expected to fail as have all of their past go rounds at this.”

“Well, I mean, I think the the cycles of demand and supply in this particular case, you can't really predict. The secular trend is what Sam said, which is at the end of the day because quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it's a power, and it's sort of the ability to get the bills done fast enough close to power. So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It's not a supply issue of chips. It's actually, the fact that I don't have warm shells to plug into.”

“I mean, it's sort of one of those interesting things, which is everything is a commodity. Right? Compute, storage. I remember everybody saying, wow. How can they give a margin? Except at scale, nothing is a commodity. And so, therefore, yes. So we have to have a cost structure, our supply chain efficiency, our software efficiencies, all have to kinda continue to compound in order to make sure that there's margins, but scale.”

“And that's where I thought we did the right thing to give them flexibility to go procure that from others while maintaining, again, a significant book of business from OpenAI, but more importantly, giving ourselves the flexibility with other customers, our own one p. Right? Because sometimes, you know, Sam may say, hey. Give me build me a dedicated, you know, big, you know, whatever, multi gigawatt data center in one location for training. Makes sense from an OpenAI perspective. Doesn't make sense from a long term infrastructure build out for Azure.”

“The United States is ultimately going to lose a conflict with Iran because it lacks the strategic depth required for that region.”

“We're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you wanna sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer if you don't feel I I just enough. Like, you know, people are I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. People who talk, with a lot of, like, breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever, that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we we could sell, you know, your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter, whatever, about this very quickly.”

“We call it the Iran shock and the dangerous illusion of energy autarky, which is the idea that many countries are probably feeling, wow, exposure to this global market is dangerous, and we want to pull away from this global market. Now that could manifest itself in a number of ways. If you're China, it might mean you're going to stockpile energy. We actually saw Fatih Barul, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, just in the last day or so, warring countries, none by name, but warring countries generally don't stockpile. This is going to worsen the crisis.”

“The speech was so incredibly poorly constructed. And it was hackneyed. And God love Alba, I don't know what it was about Labour leaders, Shorten, Gillard and Alba over the past, you know, I think the past three leaders... they've been obviously so drilled about, don't say this, don't say that. Alba smiled like a kind of maniac because he was told to smile, obviously. And then the address was this really wooden delivery.”

“Pam Bondi was executing on a wide-ranging agenda that the president outlined when he ran for president for a third time. He wanted to lead a retribution campaign against his political opponents, and much of that depended on having an attorney general willing to shatter decades-long norms about how a justice department operates, which traditionally is independent from the White House.”

“Well, I would say it never went away. It just kind of receded to the background. And part of it allows me to pick up where I left off with this, the 1970s and the reaction of the world to becoming more integrated, to building up the global market in a way that oil became the most easily traded commodity in the world. So this is a very flexible global market that you can buy and sell pretty much in any part of the market, and the market will help that barrel of oil find its way to the most efficient destination. So this evolved over time, and it made the prospect of using energy as a weapon less attractive because the market could defuse the shock of cutting off a single supplier.”

“When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, who knew they'd do that? Well, his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate hearing that that was exactly the assessment of the entire intelligence community. Trump said nobody expected Iran to attack the Gulf states if it were provoked. Wrong again. Multiple former policymakers have told me this is exactly what was expected in war games. Experts sometimes get it wrong. You still need them in the room.”

“So it's not like, for example, the per seat versus consumption. The reality is agents are the new seats. And so you can think of it as, the enterprise monetization is much clearer. The consumer monetization, I think, is a little more murky.”

“The downside is, of course, this is going to make many more countries and economies, at least in the medium term, susceptible to political and economic pressure from China because China is the country that has a real dominance over clean energy supply chains. So again, the energy weapon is back, but it's not just the old weapon. It's not just oil and gas. It's also weaponization of clean energy supply chains.”

“I mean, certainly Russia and the former Soviet Union, I would say, has thought about stirring up geopolitical tensions as a way of increasing the price of oil. This has been documented for people who are historians and have looked through the Politburo notes from the end of the Soviet Empire, that it was actively debated whether the Soviet Union should stir up problems in the Middle East simply to increase the price of oil. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Russia had any particular hand in instigating this phase of this conflict. But I agree with you that for the moment, Russia is really benefiting from this.”

“It's not what we thought. And as I said to somebody, it's not like when we first invested our billion dollars that, oh, this is going to be the 100 bagger that I'm gonna be talking about to VCs about, but here we are. But we are very thrilled to be, an investor and an early backer, and and it's a great and it's really a testament to what Sam and team have done, quite frankly.”

“The obvious energy shock that we compare it to are the shocks of the 1970s. 1973, the oil embargo where Arab members of OPEC declined to export their oil to the United States and other supporters of Israel in the 1973 war. But they also started to take oil off the market, the absolute amount of oil that was on the market. So, percentage wise and the physical number of barrels that were taken off the market in 1973 is considerably less than is happening today. As you and your listeners will have heard over and over again, this is the biggest supply disruption that we've ever seen.”

“I I hope for very small scientific discoveries in 2026, but if we can get those very small ones, we'll get bigger ones in future years. That's a really crazy thing to say is that, like, AI is gonna make a novel scientific discovery in 2026, even a very small one. This is, like, this is a wildly important thing to be talking about. So I'm excited for that. But, yeah, my personal bias is if we can really get AI to do science here, that is I mean, that is super intelligence in some sense.”

“What gets me is that we get, everything is dumbed down to the point where we, they only communicate to the lowest common denominator and just treats everyone like a moron. It's like, we're not that, I mean, you know, God bless us, we try as best as we can as a species, but we're not that, we're not that dumb, right? You can use more than two syllables in a word if you want, right?”

“The return of Donald Trump represents a fundamental shift in how the U.S. will interact with its global rivals.”

“There there will come a glut for sure. And whether that's, like, in two to three years or five to six, Satya and I can't tell you, but, like, it's gonna happen at some point, probably several points along the way. So, you know, if a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale and a lot of people are gonna be extremely burned with existing contracts they've signed, it if if we can continue this unbelievable reduction in cost per unit of intelligence, let's say it's been averaging, like, 40 x for a given level per year. You know, that's like a very scary exponent from an infrastructure build out standpoint.”

“Global power is managed by secret societies and structures that the average person never sees or understands.”

“Fans in LA went from ecstatic to heartbroken when they logged on to buy Olympics tickets and saw prices in the hundreds and thousands of dollars. Seats at the games start at $28, but go as high as 5,500, including a whopping 24% service fee on each ticket.”

“Clearly smoking something bad, because here's the irony of it, right? I opened the papers this morning, wall to wall panning, like no one thinks this is a good, like this was an effective speech. I would have been better if it's like, Elbow, here's a six pack of beer, drink that and then just go for it, right? Like, just no speech, unprepared, just let loose. And I guarantee you, I'm not saying it would have been a roaring success, but it would have been better than what was actually delivered.”