I started listening to Green Lights. There's a story in it from when he was like 20. He'd gotten into the University of Texas. He was pre-law. He met some people at Texas that had convinced him that he should switch to film school. And he had immense anxiety about sharing this with his father. But he finally tells his dad. And his dad utters this very simple phrase, 'Well, don't halfass it.' And he said in that single moment he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility. Called it rocket fuel.
All right, Bill. Great to see you, man.
And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought. So, there was a very thick book with a tattered cover, and I think that is as good a lead in as anything. What are you holding?
I'm holding a book called The Last Laugh by Phil Burgerer. The reason it's tattered is I think it may be out of print. Like I bought it used, you know, because I wanted to see it and have it.
The Last Lap: The World of Standup Comics.
Why do you have this book? Are you thinking of making a career switch?
No. So, as part of researching my new book, Running Down a Dream, my cowriter and I, we spent six years just diving through stories because I had done this speech at the University of Texas and we wanted to enhance it when we went to the printed form. And one of the stories we came across was Jerry Seinfeld and his decision to pursue a career as a comedian. He was in New York. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He had an inkling that he might want to be a stand-up comic, but he didn't know what that meant. He didn't know if it was a real career. He didn't know that you could make money. And he read this book and it profiles 15 different comedians: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein. It profiled them in a way that was very disinhibiting to him. It gave him permission to go do this career that's not a typical career. When you go to college, they don't list stand-up comedian as something that you can go do.
The guidance counselors are generally putting that on the multiple choice.
Exactly. But this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that.
And we're going to come back to that. I will say that I bookmarked this for future conversations and of course we're chatting outside of these recordings but because two years ago almost exactly when we did our first episode you mentioned that you were working on a book idea based on the belief that it's easier than ever to rise up because access to mentors and information is unprecedented. So we'll come back to that of course and discuss it and the frameworks and the approaches and the stories at some length but I wanted to start with some topical subject matter. AI bubble or not? And if so, what does that mean?
Yeah. So, I think this is super interesting. My partner Peter reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlota Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in like 2002. And what Perez kind of simplifies and notices, which I just find perfect for trying to understand whether there's a bubble or not, is that every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpet baggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it. Think of the gold rush. And so people want to make it a debate. Do you believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it's a bubble, they say, 'Oh, you don't believe in AI.' Like this gotcha kind of thing. And if you study Perez, and I think this is absolutely correct. If the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble-like behavior. They come together as a pair precisely because anytime there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that or participate in it. So, you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. And so, it's odd. There's a real technology wave that's fundamentally changing the world and there's also massive speculation simultaneous. They come as a pair.
I recall not too long ago, maybe two weeks ago, saw a short interview with your friend Jeff Bezos and he distinguished between financial bubbles and industrial bubbles and cited, and I'm paraphrasing here, but 2008 as an example of a bad bubble, right? Financial bubble versus let's just say the early 2000s like 99, 98, 99, 2000 where a lot of very important technology was created that then was durable after the fact and created new generations of entrepreneurs and a lot of economic growth and he believes that AI would fall into the industrial bubble category of things but I suppose given that the dancing pair you described come together. How would you think about investing in private companies, modern venture capital at this point in time? And just I suppose as it's changed since you were most active,
A quick comment on that industrial bubble thing. One thing that is surprising to me is that even though I fundamentally believe this is an important real technology wave, the big players, even the Mag 7 have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You've read about these circular deals and whatnot.
Could you explain what you mean by that?
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of talk out there, but it all started when Microsoft invested in OpenAI. OpenAI agreed to buy services from Microsoft.
Which is called a circular deal because you're giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise.
And when Dario was on stage at Dealbook last week, he said, 'Oh, I can explain this. It's not that hard. Amazon wanted us to spend money we didn't have, so they gave us even more money.' And I'm like, well, that's precisely why this is a questionable behavior. But it's gotten bigger. Nvidia's handing out money, and then Nvidia gave CoreWeave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff's not ideal. If you were to say what's crisp, clean accounting, you wouldn't do these kind of things. And some of them say, well, it's not material. And I would say, well then why are you doing it? I've asked other people to try and understand how even big sophisticated companies might get speculative using a word from the previous discussion. And I hear things like, well, loss aversion tends to go down when you're winning. Like if you're on a hot streak in a casino, you take more risk. Things like that. But it is surprising to me when it comes to retail investors. I mean, I would be particularly concerned for them at this stage in the AI game because there is a plethora of SPV vehicles. You've heard that phrase, I'm sure. SPV. This is where someone has an in on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund if you will, special purpose vehicle.
Yeah. It's a single entity just for that to invest in X. We have an allocation of however much money and then they can allow sort of Jane Doe and John Doe potentially.
And they take a rake on it and there's people promoting SPVs in situations where they don't even actually have the underlying stock or maybe they hope to get it. It's the wild wild west and most of the people on that edge I would put in the category of interloper carpet bagger. These are people that have come to this thing and I just think you got to be quite careful. The investments that were made that have already had 100x plus returns were made a while ago, you know, before this thing started. And that's not to say there won't be an incremental AI investment that makes money. I think there will, but your odds right now of that being the case are really, really low.
Yeah, I would add to that and say, and this applies to me as much as anyone else, but your actual risk tolerance may differ, probably does differ significantly from your perceived risk tolerance if you haven't had a huge draw down, right? If you haven't actually ridden a few of those waves and see how you respond in those circumstances. And you should be, I suppose, skeptical of how you view your own intestinal fortitude with some of those things or maybe the losses you can absorb because I recall for instance I've seen this many many times but with these types of SPVs people get involved and let's just say they're not typically an angel investor. They don't have the experience of watching 60, 70, 80% of their investments go to zero or become the walking dead and they sign off on all of the not necessarily waivers but they accept, accept, accept on like the SPV terms of service which all say you could lose all of your investment, this is incredibly risky.
But then when it does go to zero, the financial and psychological impact is catastrophic.
There's a lot of people, and I think this comes from a very good place, I think they're very well-intentioned, who look at the world and say, well, first of all, rising inequality, like why can't everyone have access to the same things? And then companies are staying private longer. So they say we need to institutionalize the generic public's ability to invest in private companies. And the problem, I think there's two problems. One you just hinted at which is most private company VC backed even go to zero, like the majority, which is not something people really sense. They want the lottery ticket, they want the Uber, they want the one that goes to the moon.
But they don't understand that that comes along with it.
They don't want to buy losing lottery tickets for 12 years.
Right, exactly. And the second problem is the information transparency in the private company game is just low. And I think the institutional investors have come to understand that and kind of know what they're getting into and know how to evaluate things. But if you come at it with a public market mindset thinking, 'Oh, every set of financials I've been handed is audited and is correct,' that's just not the case. It's super loosey goosey. So, if you were, this may be a difficult question, but if you were angel investing right now, how would you be thinking about your approach?
I'll tell you a funny story. When I decided to hang up my gloves, if you will, and stop making institutional venture capital investments, I had a whole bunch of ideas about what I wanted to do next. And one of them was, oh, I'll do a bunch of angel investing. Bezos did it on the side. This would be fantastic.
He did pretty well with his angel investing.
I was explaining this to a, I won't say who it is, but a Silicon Valley CEO, very successful, and he said 'What are you going to do now?' I said I was thinking of doing angel investing. He goes, 'Why would you do that?' He said, 'I got 50 of these things. People don't return my calls. I wish I'd never done it.' So there is an unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side. And you've participated in this world before. What would I say? I think if I were doing angel investments, I'd try and find an intersection of people that are super curious and are playing with all these AI tools, but bring a perspective from a particular industry that gives them an advantage in that area where they could simultaneously be maybe the smartest user of AI in their genre, in their vertical.
So despite the, or maybe because of, because we talked about the pair, the AI bubble, you would still be looking at AI intersected opportunities if you were angel investing.
Yeah, there's a weird reality out there right now and it could end if ever a bubble is popped or whatever, but the institutional investors have zero interest in non AI deals.
Zero. It's more black and white than I could be successful in.
For people who do not know the term, define the institutional investor.
People who are paid both a salary and a piece of the return to be active investors of other people's money using other people's money. But the reason that kind of matters is if you angel fund a deal and have any hope of it raising money in the future, if it's not AI related right now,
There is no interest. I can't state clearly enough how there's zero. And I could simultaneously make fun of that reality, but I could also justify that reality, but it is the reality right now. And by the way, while I mention that, I feel obligated for your audience. Like, I don't care what field you're in, you should be playing with this stuff.
Like, it has the potential to impact your role in your career. And the best way to protect against any risk of your career being obfuscated or eliminated from AI is to be the most AI enabled version of yourself you can possibly be. How would you think about maybe you can give a hypothetical example of looking for someone who has very sophisticated domain expertise and experience who's now intersecting with AI and has a unique, because of the combination, perspective on things to invest in as an angel investor? Separate that from something that's just going to be consumed by the fundamental models and these larger companies.
From a career perspective or
From an angel investment perspective, how would you pick folks you don't think are just going to end up working on something that gets replicated in short order by the bigger companies?
The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge of whatever. I mean, you can go online and see interviews with people at Anthropic or OpenAI and what they're working on. If it's the next thing they're going to do,
I don't think you're going to be protected.
But as I think about founders and angel investors, you're talking about a pretty broad array of things at this point. As I mentioned earlier, you're not going to back the next big model company. Besides, if you were, you need a billion dollar angel investment to go make that happen. The game's changed. There's so much money involved. I think you're going to want to be off the beaten path anyway. When I think about these deeper verticals, I don't think it will make sense for OpenAI to go crush every little vertical.
And even if the model's capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer and that stuff has to be stitched together.
So I think having an understanding of a particular industry and one that's not going to be on the next thing to do list at OpenAI would probably be your best bet.
Got it. So is it fair to say if I'm understanding you correctly that effectively looking for something that would not be a high priority for one of these larger companies and also a proprietary data set of some type?
Proprietary data sets. The more kind of workflows that exist are better because you can build software around those things.
The thing that popped in my head, I'm on the board of Zillow. Zillow's been investing for the past 5 years in tools that help the realtor do their day-to-day job.
They have a tool called Showing Time that helps you book in-person tours at houses, as an example. But there's putting the mortgage together, getting the sign offs on, there's just all these tasks that have to happen that can be automated.
Tasks that can be automated that can be integrated with AI. The more of that stuff you can build into a system, the better off you're going to be protecting yourself from a model that just answers questions, right?
Which is why I brought it up.
Let's move on to big topic, big country, China. You spent 10 days there over the past summer. What was your experience? What did you see? What made an impression? What did you do?
I'd been about six times before. So, this is like my seventh trip. One thing that was different, my daughter is Asian studies major, as you were.
And she spent the summer in Hong Kong. So, we picked her up and then we toured six cities in 10 days.
And my objective with this trip, in the past trips, it was mostly just to meet with entrepreneurs and founders and mutual sharing of information, that kind of thing. This time I was more interested in just kind of being eyes wide open and learning. And so we took two of the high-speed trains, just as an experience set. I got a tour of the Xiaomi factory with their new car, the SU7, and was trying to get a feel for what's most recent there. And we went to Shenzhen, Overnight City, which has gone from less than 100,000 people in 1980 to 20 million people, just to see the scale and scope of the whole thing. There's a lot of rhetoric in the US about what is or isn't happening in China.
And I just wanted to have a better feel for it. We're making policy decisions that are going to impact the global footprint and, God forbid, end up in a World War II kind of situation. So anyway, I just wanted a better understanding. I was aided by the fact that Dan Wang shared his book Breakneck with me right before I left and I read it while I was there, which was interesting. And then it came out and of course it ended up on the bestseller list. But I think China's misperceived in a lot of ways.
What are some of those misperceptions?
The biggest one is that people who have a rudimentary understanding of what is happening there use this word communism to infer a lot of other things. And one of the things that's inferred by communism is top-down state-run system. And they think of Russia and they assume that'll always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation because they have this picture in their mind of these brick buildings with snow all around them and not much happening.
And the reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wang did a great job of explaining how the country puts out this five-year plan, but then the provinces, which are a lot bigger than a US state, but they're the equivalent, they compete with each other. And the effective mayor of the province, if he does well, has a chance to move up in the system, which is not a reality in the US system. But what that leads to is just a massive amount of competition.
What are the metrics by which they're being judged? Do you have any idea on a province level? Is it some equivalent of GDP? It's not the right term, but
I'm guessing probably like we could go talk to AI and get a better answer than I have right now, but yeah, I would think that's part of it. Prosperity, employment, those kind of things. By the way, this provincial competition has also led to overbuild of buildings. It's not always positive. Bridges that aren't used.
Ghost cities. Yes. But you end up with hyper competition. So the thing that a lot of people in Silicon Valley love about capitalism is this notion of the invisible hand and competition that leads to innovation and best practice and the winners rise up and they're better for it. That is happening there. And if you read about the solar industry or the EV industry or now the robotics industry, they have hundreds of different companies competing in these fields and it's brutal competition and as a result of that they're ending up with very innovative companies which once again I think people wouldn't prescribe to being possible in a communist world. And remarkable execution from an industrial standpoint. So the price points of the products that will be sold around the globe are well below anything that could be done in the US.
How do you go about getting a tour of Xiaomi factory? I would think that they would be very closed about that. What's in it for them? And how do you
I don't know if you saw this going around the internet yesterday, but they shipped a car to this YouTuber.
Brilliant. And he did like a 15. That's the SU7. That's the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I'd been there before. So, I met Lei Jun, who's the founder of Xiaomi, in 2005 when he was chairman of Joyo, which was an e-commerce company that Amazon bought. So, he's been around a while.
He has evolved into the best thing I could say is like he's the Steve Jobs of China right now.
Mhm. When he quit doing Joyo and he had this other company as well. He declared 10 years ago he was going to build a smartphone just out of the blue. I'm going to build a smartphone. He didn't have any smartphone experience. But Xiaomi is now the third largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe. And about four or five years ago at about the exact same time Apple hinted they were interested in building a car. He said, 'I'm going to build a car.'
Well, not only did he say, 'I'm going to build a car.' But that was a response to sanctions, right? It was an emergency. As I listened to one of, well I listened to the translation of, even though my Chinese is decent but it's not as good as it once was, his I think it was 2024
Company-wide address where he talked about the sanctions coming in saying what if we couldn't make phones, what would we do?
That talk is unbelievable and it's translated on YouTube and I would encourage people to watch from about minute 30 to about an hour, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don't know if you saw that part. I did,
But it's crazy. He says he put a note on any car in his parking lot that he had never drove and he would ask each employee to give them three positives, three negatives, and loan him the car. Said he drove 200 of his employees' cars. When you hear that kind of stuff, you're like, 'Wow, I wonder if anyone at Apple did that.' It's just such a kind of bottom up, ground truth way to start the process. But even still, even if you did that, a bunch of people could do that. How do you have the wherewithal to build a factory? He'd never built a factory before. I've been in other car factories here in the US. It was phenomenal. Anyway, back to your question. Why I could get in is I knew Lei Jun from way back.
What does the process look like? Are there a bunch of clearances and you have to get the okay from the provincial?
I don't think we went through the whole factory, but no, I mean, they're a public company. I think they're interested in
Which I think hints at why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy,
And by the way, the president of Ford went over there about 6 months before I did. Went on the same tour. So, they let him go there and he had an SU7 shipped to Michigan and he drove it for several weeks and he's talked about how incredible it is.
Well, he also, if I'm remembering correctly, has talked about EV production and battery dominance or at least component dominance from China and the sort of risks inherent in that. I don't want to bleed too far into geopolitics, but it's hard not to pull it into the conversation. So, this is a question from X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. One of many questions, but I'll ask: what are your top handful of critiques, say, of the Chinese tech ecosystem or CCP after going on a tour there? What would you say they're not doing well or things that complicate their ability to compete? The first one that's I think been well publicized is when an entrepreneur has risen to a level of success and then uses that as a platform, the government seems uninterested in that. So
Yeah. Exactly. And there's a saying that I think I heard while I was over there. Don't be the tallest tree.
Don't be the tallest tree. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. In Japan, they have a totally different system. Obviously,
The other entrepreneur outside of Lei Jun is the ByteDance CEO and ByteDance probably got the leading position for the consumer AI like OpenAI but over there right now
In addition to just incredible revenue growth. This is the company that owned TikTok and whatnot.
But they're not going public and you don't see him at all.
Mhm. Which may get to this tallest tree thing.
Yeah. I mean, celebrities also disappear over there. No doubt. Very mysteriously.
Yes. And business people.
So, yes, that does happen.
I will say and for people who are wondering, right? Because there are a lot of how should we put this? I mean, there are people who are very angry, very hawkish. Some people are very, very supportive and then their agendas or alliances get questioned. I like you am just interested in understanding what is happening to the extent that I can, right? What is the actual truth on the ground? What are the details? And frankly, I mean the innovation over there is remarkable and what they've done in terms of establishing access to rare metals and everything they need to manufacture is remarkable. You go to South America or Africa and it is Chinese everywhere on infrastructure projects. I mean they've been very, very smart about it. So, I'm deeply interested in all of it. And please hold your thought because I want to hear everything you have to say. What I would say is a piece of the three-dimensional chess that I've been impressed with is how well the Chinese government is able to, well I mean of course they're able to integrate with the private sector so that they're able to use in a sense products to widen their scope of access potentially. Like DJI for instance, great example. People have a lot of questions around these cars as spectacular as they might be. Are they an extension of surveillance? Right. These are open questions that I think are worth asking. But you were about to say something, so I'll let you hop.
No, no, no. I think let me make one point and then let's come to that. So there's two other things I wanted to mention.
Obviously infrastructure. So they are building new nuclear fission plants. So fission being old school, not new school, at 1/4 the price that we do it here in the US. So is South Korea, by the way.
Yeah. And the numbers are incredible.
But when we sit here and say, 'Oh, we want to reshore manufacturing and they can build things at 1/4 the price we can.' If you don't solve that, you're going to reshore something and we're going to not be price competitive globally.
And then because you won't import what they have and you're going to make our citizens buy this new from this new factory where we're making things way more expensive. It doesn't work. The math doesn't matter. It doesn't work. And by the way, I'm not sure it brings jobs. The Xiaomi factory was, based on some numbers I was able to acquire, a third the number of employees per car output.
And I got to believe in 10 years it'll be a sixth. And so you could calculate the total number of jobs you'd be bringing back if you brought back all this car production and it'd be hundreds of thousands. It's not millions and millions of jobs. So anyway, that infrastructure thing's for real. And I think Dan Wang does a good job of saying that America is run by lawyers.
He's the author of Breakneck.
Our country is run by lawyers and theirs is run by engineers. And so when you try and build something here, the lawyers just get in the way and try and block it, which certainly when you hear Elon talks about why the gigafactories here in Austin and not in California, it all relates to those things. So anyway, that's infrastructure. There's another thing that's I think quite interesting, which is the government may not care about whether or not their companies have really big market caps.
And when I first realized this, you saw what happened when they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack and Ant Financial. Could have been this big thing and it got haircut. And you question, well, do they care? And if you are pushing your companies to be low-cost providers, maybe that's at odds with them being hyper-profitable and really big. And then you can turn around and ask the question that hearing that caused me to ask the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the Mag 7 have $3 trillion market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of our competitive capitalistic society not being truly competitive
And even within, like there's a notion you learn about in economics classes called pure competition. And in pure competition, no one has an intellectual property advantage. Marginal profits are whittled down just to the cost of capital. The consumer benefits because there's no excessive profit capture. If we have all these companies that are able to kind of have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure?
And does the fact that they exist help America in any way? I at first, of course I'm a venture capitalist. I want to think yes, of course. But then as I think about it, I don't know that our government or our society or our people are better off because these six companies have three trillion dollar market caps.
It's not that many people. The percentage of the country that's employed by those companies is small on overall basis. And so anyway, I think they have a different perspective on whether big market caps matter. And I think that is somewhat intriguing.
What do you think about the innovation in China leading in some cases to the development of superior technology at a lower cost that is plausibly an extension of the intelligence gathering apparatus of the government? Is that a real thing?
I'm not in a good place to know.
I would have to imagine it seems like they would have to be stupid not to use that given their ability to penetrate private. Certainly well known that they do surveillance of their own people and I know that would be particularly upsetting to people like Greg Luciano that runs Fire and is very interested in free speech.
The flip side is there's very little street crime. You walk around, you don't worry about that when you're there.
Yeah, it's true also in Japan though, right?
Doesn't make it right or wrong. It's just it is what it is. And I don't know that we have this ability to kind of tell them how they have to do it. Now to the extent that the Huawei stuff where their products are being shipped out and then those are used to gather intelligence out of their country and the rest of the world, of course that's a problem.
But I think the way to deal with it, I'm not a politician, but I think the way to deal with it, I'm more of a believer of engage. Engage. Talk about what you don't like and what you do like and try and negotiate that problem away like we're trying to do with the fentanyl precursors.
Yeah. Well, way back in the day when I was an East Asian studies major, this was lifetimes ago. And keeping in mind I was at the Capital University of Business Economics in 1996. That was the bicycle era. These old photographs of Beijing with millions of bicycles with people in their long green jackets. I had one of those jackets for the winters. It gets really cold. But things have changed a lot. At the time I was looking forward and thinking I might be one of those people who could engage in Chinese. I think the way to do it is in English frankly for a whole host of reasons. But even if you speak the other language like Putin speaks English pretty well but he does all of his negotiations when he's speaking in Russian for a lot of good reasons. Same good reasons. First of all, I do get accused of being like an agent of the CCP or something even by some of the people that responded to your Twitter thing and right
I'm not. I've only visited a few times. I don't know anybody in the government. But I worry greatly that we make bad policy decisions if we misunderstand what's really going on.
Oh, I agree with that. I fully agree with that. I mean, I've thought about, I'm frankly I'm worried about it. I mean, I would take a burner phone and a burner laptop. I've thought about because I want to get a better understanding of the culture of innovation that can be fostered and exactly how things are to the extent that it would be visible to me how things are developing in China. I've thought about going there. I thought about doing the same thing in India too to go and interview like 10 of the top entrepreneurs, right? But the reason I haven't done it is that I'm just like, I don't know what radars that's going to put me on, what kind of surveillance, what kind of fill in the blank. How difficult is it going to be? Who am I going to, whose rings am I going to have to kiss? Am I overthinking it or is it still
I think you're overthinking it. I think the odds that Tim Ferriss would disappear in China is really
Oh, I'm not worried about disappearing. That would be a terrible, the upside downside on that doesn't make any sense. I'm not worried about disappearing.
There are companies that may not speak with you. Like when I was there, DeepSeek and Unry, the word was kind of out on the street that they're not meeting with Westerners.
Well, it's a, I'm sure that's true. Conversely, in the US, too, right?
Yes. Oh, yeah. And by the way, I think that reflective lens when you think about the country is helpful. Like when Alex Karp was just on stage at Dealbook last week, he was talking about surveillance and he says, 'Well, of course, our tools are used to surveil the enemy.'
Yeah. And I'm like, okay, well, my god, the Chinese are surveilling us, but obviously we're surveilling them, too. Let's be honest about these things.
Yeah. I mean, it's a lot easier for a bunch of obvious reasons. In some respects, a lot easier for them to surveil us than the other way around. I mean, partially just due to the homogeneity of the society over there, right? You can't send a bunch of blond-haired, blue eyes, black, Latino, whatever to China to end up at top universities, top companies, etc. It's just a lot harder.
By the way, to put a bow on this part, I would say there's two other things. One you hinted at. One, the supply chains are so integrated in China down to the raw material level that even if you brought a factory back here, it'd be more of an assembly shop and you'd still be sourcing from there, which isn't necessarily cost competitive. And to replicate all of it would take a very, very, very long time.
Yeah. Well, including raw materials for staple pharmaceuticals. I mean, there's a lot going on. So, what at this point, is it a day late and a dollar short for the US? I know I almost promised we weren't going to go into this, but I want to know your opinion. I'm so curious. What are the keys to the US remaining globally competitive and vibrant as an economy? You hinted to one, which is I mean, it seems kind of inevitable, nuclear power or more power. So, how do you do that?
I'm not sure how quickly you can right the ship, although it seems like a handful of people have done a pretty good job of changing the narrative. What are some of the key things in your opinion that the US needs to do?
One is make it easier to build
