11/12/26: JD Vance Despised As MAGA Shatters, Jensen Huang Resigns As Nvidia Crashes, Schumer Compromised By Big Tech

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Don't have time to listen to the show? Catch up on breaking points with our free daily newsletter. You'll get our breakdown of every daily story. And lots of links in your inbox every day. So, head over to breakingpoints.com. You can sign up for the newsletter at the top for free today. Well, yesterday it was made official. Democrats have their 55th senator in Scott Colom, who won Mississippi. As of yesterday, the race was called by CNN. So, 55. Democrats' margins obviously way higher than most people, other than Ryan Grimm, I guess, were predicting as of last week. Yeah. They now have flipped a seat in Mississippi that barely anybody was paying attention to with a candidate like Scott Colom, who, Crystal, the more people are looking back on Scott Colom's campaign, the ads that are coming out, the clips of him standing in line at Trump rallies and meeting as many people as he could and having normal human face-to-face conversations with them. What a talented politician, truly. Well, and it's an incredible story because Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked him famously from getting a federal judgeship, even though he had support from the other Republican senator. And so he was like, OK, all right, let's see how this works out for you. And came back, entered the Senate race. He took it extremely, he always believed that he could win and conducted his campaign as if it was going to happen. And the math in Mississippi, I mean, it seems preposterous that Mississippi has a Democratic senator now, but the math is not insane to imagine that you could recreate because it has, there's a large Black population. They vote overwhelmingly for Democrats and he had, you know, preposterous margins with Black voters in the state. It's like 40% of the state that is Black. And then if you can just win like 25% of white voters in the state, then you win. And that's exactly what he did. So I think he won about 30% or 33% of white voters in the state. Young white voters in Mississippi voted overwhelmingly for him. So as you have a generational shift to there as well, you could see how Mississippi becomes increasingly in play. This is something Democrats have had their eye on a little bit for a while, not quite as much as Texas, but a little bit for a while. And so he was able to be the first one to really put that math together and make it a reality. So really, congratulations to him. You know, the ad campaign, the way he conducted him, obviously extraordinary, extraordinary campaign. Embarrassing for Cindy Hyde-Smith, who, you know, was as bad a candidate as he was a good candidate. It's going to be very interesting to see how he governs because he used a lot of populist rhetoric, talked about how he's not an AIPAC candidate, never will be. And so I think he might have, you know, pretty heterodox views on a lot of different things. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing more from him on that because in some ways he's a sort of genuine moderate, the type of Democrat you would expect to be elected from Mississippi. Oh, Second Amendment and that sort of thing. Yes, but also an economic populist, which is a type that we have seen in the last week find a lot of success. Yes. So who could have ever imagined? Well, the White House, predictably, is freaking out. We did get an answer yesterday to how the White House is, how their strategy is kind of congealing as they expect all of these investigations to pop up in the new year. And in the new Congress, so White House counsel, Will Scharf, we can put the next element up on the screen, sent a three-page letter to Robert Garcia. So he's obviously incoming chairman of House Oversight and actually threatened the Oversight chairman with saying that they might investigate the investigators. So that's the incoming plan from Will Scharf and House Republicans. So he said in that letter, Democrats had, quote, evinced a clear intent to transgress, unquote, constitutional limits on congressional investigations, according to the New York Times. He predicted that their inquiries would be used to harass and aggrandize rather than to advance any legitimate legislative end. And, you know, that's actually interesting because even the word predict is interesting. Before the election, Crystal, Kamala Harris. Yeah. It's interesting. But Kamala Harris came out and said, maybe the first thing we do shouldn't be impeaching the president. And Democrats are, like, if Scharf is predicting in a letter that is sort of threatening to say you are going to transgress your constitutional limits, he actually doesn't know what they're going to do. So some of them may be giving the impression that they're just going to shoot from the hip and say, like, we're impeaching you over this Ukraine phone call like we did in Trump 1 and all of that sort of thing. I don't know that that's going to be the case. I'm not convinced that it will. Yeah, no, I don't think it will be. There's a reluctance among a lot of Democrats and I think across a lot of different ideological lines to not do that. Not just go straight to an impeachment, but to do a lot of accountability and investigation, whether that's the president's family members, whether it's corporate CEOs, whether it's Jensen Huang, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of questions about what is going on there. They have a long list of people that they want to talk to and they want to investigate. And so, look, this is clearly an intimidation tactic. I think it signals very much that the approach the Trump administration is going to take is going to be similar to the approach they took in the first term where they really stonewalled any sort of subpoenas, any sort of accountability. It does not seem like that mood that Trump was evincing right after the lawsuit. Oh, maybe I'll work with the Democrats. I think that as soon as we heard Stephen Miller was the chief of staff, that was pretty much out the window. In any case, incoming House Oversight Chair Garcia, who's the one who tweeted out that statement, lawyer up, responded to this tactic from the White House. Let's listen. Look, I just want to first just obviously address the letter that the president and the White House counsel sent this morning. I want to just start by saying that Donald Trump is clearly hiding something. We are not going to be threatened or intimidated because we are demanding accountability and oversight. The truth is, is that he needs to understand that Congress is a co-equal branch of government. And this idea that President Trump or the White House counsel wants to send threatening letters to myself, in which he, of course, also threatens other members of Congress broadly, is not, not only not constitutional, but it's not going to stop our important work. We need to understand at this moment that what happened on the election, the American public were very clear. They want us to focus on affordability and they want us to focus on accountability. And corruption is directly tied back to why people's gas and groceries are so expensive. And at this moment, Donald Trump does not want to take responsibility for the corruption that is happening, all across the government. There are serious allegations about what's happening with the president's family, what's happened at DHS and ICE and the abuses of kidnapping people off the street, the corruption that's happening in boardrooms across this country. And so it is our job in the Oversight Committee, in the Judiciary Committee, and in other places to investigate. That is our constitutional duty. And we're going to intend to be doing that on the first day of the Congress, as we've been doing even in the minority. Interesting stuff there from him. I mean, it is funny. Obviously, for Republicans to get precious about investigations now. And no one would understand more than Republicans how politically powerful this stuff can be. I mean, going back to the Bill Clinton stuff, the Hillary Clinton-Benghazi hearings, like this has been a tried and true political tactic for them, which I think is why Trump is kind of freaking out right now, trying to exert control. He is trying to reclaim his status here in this town, especially on the Republican side, and make sure that they do not begin to stray. And I think he had a major win with keeping everybody together on this Hegseth impeachment vote. Well, yeah, I agree with that. But it's now become a normal thing because we don't do bipartisan legislation for the most part anymore. We barely do legislation for the most part anymore. So when your party is out of power in the White House, it's just the normal thing to focus on investigations now because we don't do any damn legislation. Like, that is out the window. Congress has basically abrogated. We had Thomas Massey on earlier, so now I'm just like channeling Massey and feel like he's abrogated his Article I powers. But actually, it's true and everyone knows it. And so focusing on investigations is like the outlet for the party that doesn't have the White House. And I mean, saying, lawyer up to the administration that has all of these nakedly openly corrupt crony capitalist priorities that they have in some ways bragged about Venezuela being a really good example that's right it is crazy to get precious about that yeah and I think Republicans genuinely need to be smart about how they approach these things just from a political standpoint to oppose every single one of these investigations as lawfare or overreach is just not going to fly for them and I think Garcia is right and the Democrats are right and I'm right that the pretty usual part of the mandate from voters yes affordability yes getting out of the Iran war absolutely but elite accountability is part of it because the yes it's a populist moment the disgust at the corruption was a massive part I mean that was the number one issue that people cited when they went to the polls about why they were voting the way that they were voting so the Democrats would be remiss if they did not investigate and try to hold to account as best they could the people that were involved in that and continue to be involved in that mass corruption at the same time you know 2028 is already all the jockeying and positioning already began long ago by J.D. Vance clearly the the front runner to be the standard bearer for the Republican Party going forward but this is pretty interesting reporting from Mark Halperin who tends to be very well sourced and has his finger on the pulse in both parties but I would say in particular in the Republican Party called the election he yes that's correct he spoke with dozens of Republicans and he spoke with dozens of Republicans who wanted to tell him all about how much they hate J.D. Vance let's take a listen and I've been struck by the negativity about J.D. Vance uh uh you know I've I've I've talked now to 70 uh 68 68 waiting to hear back from a few more 68 people mostly Republican strategists operatives etc and the negativity about the vice president is quite something someone who I thought up two weeks ago was the obvious front runner how serious is it how serious a problem for him if you were his top political aid with this current conventional wisdom which is undeniable that it's the current conventional wisdom how dangerous is it for him how much of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy zero no effect 10 this is eliminating him what number would you give it I think it's probably a six or seven right now I think it's serious I think it's very serious yeah Kevin I I'm with Larry and I I'll only say you know I spent a lot of time with Alex's family they're diehard Republicans MAGA supporters of the president and they've all really fallen out of favor with J.D. Vance so running as vice president is really hard we don't have a very big sample space but the last two incumbent vice presidents who ran neither with the support of their president by the way in the nominating process they both became the nominees of their party so I think people are way overreacting to this and Emily I'm very curious for your take on this because I do think doing this show and the audience we have and how much just upset in general there is over the Iran war over the relationship with Israel it's easy to project that's where the Republican party is and that's not where the Republican party is you know when there was polling for example of Tucker Carlson and how popular he was he's not popular in the Republican party Trump still rules yeah now that that has that dominance has ebbed a bit Massey was saying oh now he's 75 percent favorable with Republican base instead of 95 percent favorable but he's still 75 percent favorable he's still clearly by this exit vote he still has a lot of control and people are still really afraid of him so the fact J.D. Vance is trying to get a little bit of a pushback on him as well as Weasley like let me leave the Wall Street Journal let me put out my statement saying oh actually the Iran war is to blame all of these things are not actually endearing him to the base and are clearly causing problems for him with the like Republican operative class here too well yeah and I think that's what's really important is Mark is sourcing this specifically to Republican operatives and Republican operatives tend to be people who are in the Beltway echo chamber who are very opposed to populism and they see J.D. Vance as a way of saying he's the president of the United States and they see J.D. Vance as an evil populist and always have and have always seen him really as the primary mascot of creeping populism that Trump opened up the door to but they were able to kind of put Susie Wiles in Trump's orbit not that he didn't have a say in that of course he did but they felt like it was kind of under control and if it was President J.D. Vance they're much more likely to say that he's the president of the United States they're much less confident that they would have control because Vance built his career criticizing basically the Republican operative class and so it's I think of course this makes sense that they are very negative about J.D. Vance he polls pretty well with Republicans still maybe that'll change soon because the Trump spell I think seems to be wearing off at least some not entirely but at least some maybe the polling will change on that but no this is absolutely true like Washington D.C. is deeply skeptical of J.D. Vance and most of it comes down to the fact that he's a Republican and he's the president of the United States so I don't think there's a lot of doubt that he's a Republican so I don't think there's a lot of doubt that he's a Republican so I don't think there's a lot of doubt that he's a Republican so I don't think there's a lot of doubt that he's a Republican I mean the AI oligarchs this is their guy like they could they would be happy as claims if he was in there but the you know the neocon wing is more skeptical even though you know again like reportedly he was an adversary of the Iran war inside the administration but he's you know gone out like a good soldier and made the case for it all of those things it just illustrates the bind that he's in of his own making that he's damned if he sticks with Trump and is the loyal soldier because for a general election public he's going to be the one who's going to be the one who's going to that is I think going to be complete and total poison and he's damned if he tries to break with him because the Republican base still likes Trump and maybe that's going to change but that would be very quick turnaround it took it took eight years post George W. Bush before the Republican Party was ready to hear from Donald Trump a critique of that era of the Republican Party now I do think things move a little more quickly these days but I don't know that it moves that quick especially when Trump is still in the White House and clearly has such a hold on the Republican Party and I do just want to emphasize like you know what we were just saying you and I would have plenty of criticisms yeah you just aired some of them about J.D. Vance in this era but J.D. Vance that doesn't render J.D. Vance's enemies moral good faith actors and not that we were saying it would but like just to be clear like a lot of the Republican operatives who are against J.D. Vance are against him because they're deeply suspicious that he is anti-Semitic and that he is anti-Israel like they genuinely believe that in their hearts and they air it in other ways by saying oh well we think maybe he's not a talented politician or oh we think he's just totally isolationist which he obviously is not he's been supportive of the Venezuela raid he's supportive of Midnight Hammer so even if he's not been supportive of this most recent war effort at least that's been reported that he wasn't privately but he has been publicly either way it's just there was a huge chorus last week that he was being disloyal to the president for quoting the president in his post that said we lost because of the Iran war. He quoted the president the night before Don Jr. came out and promoted the J.D. Vance post and said exactly what J.D. Vance posted but all of these Republican operatives and pundits were piling on J.D. Vance as disloyal they are organizing against him in group chats they have talking points and so a lot of that is this. Clearly though Trump was not too happy about that post. I don't know I genuinely don't know. He clearly was not happy yeah because he came out and he said like well the thing he should have said is that he you know we should have we would do it again. And that we have no regrets about it like I had no other choice. So I don't think Don Jr. would have reposted it if the president was pissed about it. Here's the other thing with J.D. Vance like beyond his like whatever his ideological leanings are the guy is just a shapeshifter like people do not trust him because he was a never Trump guy. Trump was America's Hitler. He literally changed his name. He marries an Indian woman has a biracial family and then he's out doing like the white nationalist flirtation on the campaign trail trial because he thinks that's what will appeal to the MAGA chuds. Then he's Trump's by then he sucks up to Trump to get a Senate seat and you know is Trump's vice president. Then he's trying to be like too cute by half putting out this statement. Oh well is the Iran war this a problem but I still support Trump etc. It's just leaking to the press. Even his statement about you guys covered his statement about the Hegseth impeachment where he's trying to redirect the energy to like oh it's because Hegseth did the right thing on Ukraine that you guys are mad. No that is not why Thomas Massey is mad at him okay. He's just he thinks he's so clever. He thinks he's so smart. He's trying to put his face out there. He's trying to put his finger in the wind play all the different angles and it just reads as gross. It just reads as gross. He also is the guy that went out after Vivek did that disgusting despicable ad. Yeah. With Amy Acton's mom. Yeah. And was the first one to come out and be like no he absolutely was telling it like it is. I stand by Vivek. I stand by this ad etc. So you know even getting away from whatever happens in the Republican primary where Trump is likely to exert a lot of influence and may back J.D. He may get the nomination. I just think politically. It's it's very bad for him. It just comes off as people look at all of this whole totality of the situation say I don't trust that guy. I don't trust him. I think that is absolutely accurate and I think they're probably overly aware and sensitive about that which is why you see this attempted like cleverness and strategy of like how to manage it with the tweets and that type of thing and it's almost impossible to imagine how that works politically in your future because you carry the baggage of MAGA. He was on the CBS town hall with Tony DeCouple asked point blank about corruption in the Trump administration. Instead I haven't seen any of that from the president. That's a great point too. But he's a populist right and we're in a populist moment. And so how do you have populism with the baggage of endemic corruption like he is in an almost impossible place. I totally agree with that. Indeed. All right. Let's go and get to Garrison Lovely who's standing by to talk about the biggest earth shattering news of the day. Jensen Wong out at NVIDIA. Progressives accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident because the only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So get peace. of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's accident response. Here's a hint. Do it with Lenox. This year, Lenox will make the holidays something truly special. How exciting it is every year to unbox all of our favorite decor and smile at the memories. The Lenox Spice Village is the perfect holiday gift for someone you love, including yourself. Calling back to the originals from 1989, now you can share the memories and the flavors of the season. 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With global scale, enterprise performance, and predictable pricing, Wasabi helps organizations focus on innovation instead of cloud bills. Companies that are paying more in fees than in actual storage costs can fall behind. Don't let it happen. When your AI needs your data and you have a budget to meet, get Wasabi. Jensen Huang out at NVIDIA. He resigned before he was fired, being replaced by the CFO of that company, Colette Kress. Interesting, they went with a woman, actually. And I think she's seen as like an interim chief, not a permanent replacement. In any case, joining us now to break down what all of this means is Garrison Lovely. He is the author of Obsolete, the AI industry's trillion-dollar radio show. He's also the author of Obsolete, the AI industry's trillion-dollar to replace us and how to stop it. Great to see you, Garrison. Welcome. Always great to see you. Yeah. So your reaction to this news, I was just looking, it looks like NVIDIA's stock has dropped another 10%. Markets overall not doing great, but not like a total catastrophe. It's mostly been primarily focused on NVIDIA here. What the hell happened and what is it going to mean? Truly one of the wildest stories of all time. So what we have here is that Jensen Huang has been selling over $7 billion of AI chips to a network of fraudulent smuggling companies that were tied to a suspected Chinese spy while successfully lobbying the US government and Trump to make it easier to sell chips to Chinese companies. And Trump learned about all of this and then let Jensen come with him to China and just continued letting this other company buy all these chips. And it's just hard to overstate how significant this is. It's the scandal of the century. And can you tell us a little bit about how important Jensen Huang is to the AI industry, not just as a business leader, as a thinker, as somebody who pushed the acceleration button on this successfully, of course, with the Trump administration, which has had a great relationship with him as much of this has accelerated, but he has really baked fundamentally into the cake, first of all, of the stock market right now, of the American economy and the entire AI industry, because the chips are so essential to progress for American AI companies. Tell us a little bit about how inextricably intertwined, at least until now, he was with the entire AI economy. Yeah. Until this happened, Jensen Huang was the most powerful man in AI because he built NVIDIA. He is synonymous with the company. And NVIDIA's chips from the very beginning of the deep learning revolution back in 2012 were the best way to train and run these large language models. And deep learning models in general. And there's way more demand for these chips than there's supply. So Jensen was personally deciding who got which chips when, which could determine whether your company lived or died. And so this has massive implications for the entire industry. NVIDIA still has a ton of, I mean, all the same researchers and engineers besides Jensen, and will still be formidable in developing the most advanced chips in the world. But the way Jensen just decided this stuff and the way he was able to push the administration to loosen these restrictions on chip sales was unique to him. And now everything touching him and everything close to him has been discredited, including these arguments around, we need to sell more chips to China to beat China. And also beating China is really important to us. And it's like, is it? You know, it just calls into question everything that's being pushed by the accelerationist deregulatory right. Let me go ahead and play for you just to understand what you're saying. I think it's really important. I think it's really important to underscore how close this relationship with Jensen and Trump was, is, et cetera. I mean, Trump was defending him right up to the last moment. What took him out, I mentioned this before, but just to reiterate for people, is another affair was revealed. This one doesn't appear to have been with a spy, but was with another NVIDIA executive, which poses its own problems. And I think there was a sense of, OK, well, if there's, you know, the famous tweet, if there's two ants in the kitchen that you see, you don't have a two ant problem. So I think there was a sense of where is the bottom going to be on this? And especially more details as more details came out about how likely it was they knew about this smuggling operation, whether the woman involved was really a Chinese spy or not. In any case, let's play C6 here, guys. This was Trump calling Jensen while he's on stage at the all in summit in the wake of the hugging face incident when there was a massively heightened concern about the continued rollout and training and development of AI models. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. You're now talking to the planet. The great thing about life is that Jensen can develop the most complex computer ship in the world that nobody can copy for 10 years, but he can't figure out how to book me on speaker. And I'm telling you, it's all a hoax. The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy. And it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It's bigger than the Internet and AI, you know, much more so. And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen. That could be political people. It could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax. You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir. So this was a very close relationship between Jensen and Trump. He was between him and David Sachs, probably the two most influential. Policy advisors with regard to AI vis-a-vis the president. What do we know, Garrison, specifically about when Trump knew about both the alleged Chinese spy aspect, the fact that the alleged Chinese spy is running this apparent smuggling operation? How do all of those pieces fit together? Because to me, that's one of the wildest parts of the story. Yeah. So Trump was first briefed in October 2025 that Alice Wong and Jensen Huang had a relationship and was presumed to be a spy. And when Trump was going to take Jensen with him to China, I think in October, Marco Rubio reminded him of this fact. They decided not to take Jensen, changed his mind, and then picked Jensen up in Alaska, brought him with him to China. And with respect to the smuggling, the New York Times reported this months ago as a possibility. And Megaspeed, the main company Alice Wong was associated with, like, didn't have a real headquarters. You know, the address was like not, it went to some place that was clearly a front. And it was buying $4.5 billion of NVIDIA chips and was the top customer in all of Southeast Asia. And Southeast Asia is one of the biggest regions in the world for AI computing power because so many companies in China have headquarters in Singapore or are doing remote compute from Southeast Asian countries. Like, these are not super wealthy countries. They can't afford billions and billions of dollars of these chips. And it's just pretty obvious from looking into this at all, and like short sellers even noticed this months ago as well, that these are not legit companies. And the fact that they got all of these chips seems entirely a result of Jensen's relationship with this woman. And she herself was touting it in her communications. She was posting WeChat photos of them together publicly. This is why, you know, short sellers were able to figure out what was going on well before, you know, it was reported in the news. And it just really was not, it was kind of an open secret. And these rumors were going around for ever and jensen has consistently said there's no smuggling there's no evidence of chip diversions and that's clearly bullshit now right and it was bullshit at the time to anybody who knew anything about this and i think that is like the piece that could be easily missed is that you know this was an effectively criminal operation that was being covered up by nvidia and nvidia was also underreporting the number of chips sold to these companies to the u.s government so misrepresenting material information to the u.s government and the fact that trump is just fine with all this is i mean even for him it's it's pretty amazing well now they've elevated the cfo i mean if they're cooking the books in terms of what they're reporting that person seems like they would be potentially implicated here too garrison it's it's totally possible i mean the general counsel tim teeter is the person who i've seen invoked in uh other situations yeah just say um and there's been reporting where he squashed a commerce department uh investigation into mega speed yes well so yeah the the fact that the sales actually went through was the one thing that gives me pause and the kind of obvious explanation that this was controlled espionage counter espionage that the government confronted jensen wong said listen you're in a relationship with a chinese spy because why wouldn't they if they knew and then uh we're sort of managing the relationship and using it to glean uh any information that they could and he seemed a fairly obvious explanation but the sales went through so that's kind of an interesting part of all of this garrison we don't talk enough about the possibility that these massively powerful ai companies are swamped with espionage we talked about it a little bit with open ai recently can you just speak to you know from studying these companies how vulnerable they are how prolific espionage might be what do you know about all this yeah i mean the context here is that this is the first incredibly consequential general purpose technology with national security implications being developed in the private sector and so the manhattan project was you know secret and they were all in the desert together that was still infiltrated by the soviets and stalin knew more about the bomb than harry truman these companies are headquartered in san francisco they have terrible information security practices and cyber security practices and the idea that you know they are able to keep any of these important secrets from you know china or other state actors is laughable and everyone in the industry kind of understands this and apparently like i've heard from people that you know ceos also understand this and dario amadei has said publicly you know if china wanted to get our model weights that they could do that and so it really makes all of this look so ridiculous it's like they're racing as fast as possible to develop the most capable models and to learn the secrets of how to build them but they have no way of keeping their secret secret and then nvidia has been pushing to allow try to access to more chips which chips are the only thing that you can really control uh you know the information about how to train these models is just so easy to leak people can learn it and just go to work at another company but the chips are you know the thing that really can determine who has the best models and you know my position is that we should not be racing to build these labor replacing machines because it's undemocratic and dangerous but if your position is that the united states needs to stay ahead of china then letting them have access to these ships while also letting these companies run such a loose ship is just a completely incoherent mess and now we're seeing its downstream of uh corruption and a chinese spy uh affair and just like kind of puts the lie to the whole thing yeah i mean one of the takes that i've seen that i think is probably right is that there's a reason why this information is being really pushed forward now right after the election too trump takes this big drubbing he's seen as a little weaker democrats are coming into power marco rubio or whoever you know takes this to the press and they're able to to push out this story that this woman is an alleged chinese spy i've seen some pushback on the idea that she is a spy to me that part is not the most important question although i will say she's back in beijing now which to me sort of lends credence to the spy idea but i don't really know um to me the bigger piece there is the smuggling operation the fact that this was clearly happening the white house knew about it nvidia knew about it jensen knew about it and no one did anything about it however you feel about the underlying issue that is a criminal act um and i agree with you garrison i'm not a china hawk by any mean i that means i think we should be you know collaborating with china i think we should do it be doing a trade war with china however i am against the further development of these models period so whether it's the american companies or the chinese companies so that's why i think a restriction on these um these chips and control over them is important but what do you make of that piece of this is sort of like a deep state plot against jensen and that's why we should go out and defend him so jensen david sacks howard glutnick those three men have been pushing the administration to loosen these chip restrictions and almost everyone else in the administration from reporting we've seen have been in favor of tightening the restrictions and so there's a lot of people who wanted to jensen and trump and also have bones to pick with glutnick and nvidia the way they've been lobbying in dc is incredibly aggressive just like unheard of levels of intimidation trying to get think tank researchers fired for criticizing nvidia or for promoting export controls and when i've been doing reporting and talking to people who work on these uh chip restrictions they don't want to say anything on the record about nvidia but the moment we go off the record or on background it's the first thing they want to talk about and so now that nvidia is in this weakened position now that jensen is out and presumably people who are close to him will also go down for this there's the floodgates are starting to open and people want to tell these stories and you know in my book i argue for a bilateral deal with the u.s and china to stop building these ai models that are designed to replace us and i was uncertain about how to feel about the export controls overall because they do increase the kind of race uh tensions and the aggressive you know posture between the countries but if you think about what a deal banning development of the most capable models will look like it's going to involve restrictions on computing power and like export controls plus plus plus and so if you can't even get export controls that most people in dc think are good because nvidia is fighting them so hard then you're not going to be able to get to a much much harder end game and so i see this as a really positive development for people who want an end to this race that's interesting we have to ask you about the howard lutnik of it all axios had a report yesterday we can toss up on the screen this is c5 saying that treasury secretary scott besink confronted commerce secretary howard lutnik over a failure to place nvidia customer mega speed on a list of companies that pose national security concerns sources familiar told axios they further reported that a situation meeting on thursday after the midterm elections besant pressed lutnik on why mega speed had not been added to the commerce department's entity list to which lutnik responded he would quote look into it commerce undersecretary jeff kessler was also repeatedly also was repeatedly warned about mega speed in deputy meetings kessler deferred to lutnik saying that's a decision for the secretary throwing the secretary under the bus sources told axios that lutnik has spent the last year quote-unquote undoing efforts by other administration officials to hold mega speed over a company accused as we were talking about of illegally diverting u.s trips to china accountable because of concerns it would escalate the trade war with china now garrison interestingly uh howard lutnik's former company is does a decent bit of business in terms of data centers real estate uh and data centers so i have no idea if that had anything to do with his his family have massive investment in nvidia oh that company does yeah it's controlled by his son and lutnik doesn't you own any of it anymore but has hundreds of millions of dollars in nvidia positions as of a few months ago isn't that interesting yeah tell us what you're reading into this and if it suggests that uh right now there's going to be a kind of i don't know the dynamics of the trump administration are kind of weirdly split on this because you have some absolute accelerationists like jensen in trump's ear and then you have china hawks like betson in trump's ear so what are you reading into the dynamics garrison i mean the first thing is they have still not put mega speed on the blacklist this is a company tied to this suspected spy that is clearly just smuggling these ships and that's just mind-boggling like truly like before it's public it's like maybe there's some case for keeping under wraps but we've also just learned today that singapore held alice wong the suspected spy earlier this year for i think months and the u.s did not speak with her apparently and just seemed not interested in this so it's it's really really wild um and that that axios report you know the the level of detail in there is really impressive reporting and kind of speaks to the frustration and anger towards letnick from other members of the administration to be giving like every detail of all of this and yeah it seems to be letnick versus all the other cabinet secretaries standing alone with david sacks who's not in the admin anymore but was very influential and still is very influential with trump as the former ai's are and jensen those three people were pushing loosening these restrictions and the commerce responsible for enforcing them. And so you can have a rule, but if the people who are supposed to be enforcing it just aren't, then it doesn't really matter very much. And this is a problem for Congress going forward because they can legislate new restrictions. And there's a bunch that are going into this must-pass defense authorization bill. And they're likely to succeed much more so now that Jensen has been disgraced in this way. Well, and Elizabeth Warren is going to be like a dog with a bone with the incoming likely chair of the Senate Banking Committee. She is already saying, we are going to investigate what the hell is going on here. Right, right. But yeah, if the department and the agency responsible for enforcement just isn't doing it, and the president is shielding the secretary, then it's like you're kind of in this standoff. And Lutnick and Trump have known each other for 30 plus years. And Lutnick and Epstein were very close. As well. And there's just a lot more going on here than we know about. And I think the scandal is going to keep growing and growing. He denies that, Garrison. Lutnick says that the moment that he met Epstein, he told his wife, this is a disgusting man. I want nothing to do with him, even before they went to the island or whatever thing he did with them afterwards. No, no, he went to the island. Yeah, with his daughters, I believe, if memory serves. Yes, that's right. Yeah, okay. It's a family thing. Yeah, who doesn't? Family friendly. It's like sandals. Take their teenage daughters to Epstein Island. Or beaches. There were a bunch of other teenage girls. Oh, that makes it fine. Garrison, last piece on this, and I want to talk to you some about the leadership fights that are relevant to AI, deeply relevant to AI and what happens next. What is this going to mean for the global economy? I mean, NVIDIA is like the single point of failure. And Jensen Huang was specifically within NVIDIA this single point of failure. Right now, NVIDIA is selling off, but most of the market is more or less static. However, there's a lot of concern. There's a lot of concerns about, hey, is this a bubble? When is the bubble going to pop? Will Jensen Huang's dick pop the AI bubble? What is your opinion on any of these sorts of things? An amazing visual. I apologize on behalf of Crystal and Garrison. Yeah, I mean, it's like NVIDIA is still going to make a ton of money and have incredible profit margins. And they still have the best ships and the best engineers and researchers working and designing these ships. So I think they're still in a good position, but Jensen is synonymous with the company. He's the public face. He built it. And there's no succession plan. So NVIDIA will be hurt by this for sure. And then the policy changes will hurt NVIDIA as well and restrict their ability to sell to the second biggest market for their chips and potentially other markets that are effectively just serving the Chinese market as well. And so not good for NVIDIA. It could end up being good for American AI companies because they want access to those ships. Like I said, there's more demand than there is supply. And so one of the export control pieces of legislation would just allow American companies to get first dips on all the chips. And since there's more demand, this would effectively cut out the Chinese companies. And if you take an America first approach, that seems to make a lot of sense. The NVIDIA policy was to effectively not just allow China, but to effectively cut out the to buy these chips, but to do so at the expense of American companies getting them. And after the midterms, we saw that the market was maybe favorable on the companies doing the AI build out, getting restricted on that. And so they might be thinking like, this has been going a little too fast. And this could be ultimately a better thing for stability. It's hard to say. And I thought Jensen was going to be pushed out. And so I got out of my index funds earlier this week. And I think, yeah, I, I, you know, it's again, but I could be wrong. It's hard to, you know, make money off this stuff. And I try not to, but you know, I just thought most people, he would be, he would be gone. Yeah. Garrison, thank you. Yeah. Lovely. Great. Thanks for having me. Progressive's accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident, because the only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. Here's a hint. Do it with Lenox. Forever. Discover the full collection at Lenox.com. No data, no AI. When your data moves freely, innovation moves faster, giving you the freedom to build, train, and grow. And do more with your data. Don't let it happen. All right, sticking with us for another important conversation, both about AI in the midterms, in politics going forward, and specifically how it matters in this leadership fight that's going on with the Democrats in the House and the Senate, is Garrison Lovely. Let's go and put his op-ed up on the screen here, where he talked about how anti-AI populism is the future of American politics. And you make the argument, I mean, there was a factor here, for sure, in these elections, but that impact is only going to grow moving forward. Just lay out your case, because it's one I certainly agree with. Yeah, I mean, people have been calling this midterm the first AI election. And I think that's true, but it's, you know, this was an election about corruption, about the war, about affordability and prices, more than it was about AI. And my argument is basically, AI is going to keep getting crazier. It's going to keep impacting people. In ways that they notice and feel. And this will happen through labor displacement. We're seeing this with young people, just the reports from young people struggling to get jobs and just talking about how doomy they feel about the future and how they feel the future has been robbed from them. I just, like, it's heartbreaking to read these things. And we're also going to see more cyber events, like people are going to get hacked a lot more. We're going to see more critical infrastructure get hacked and go down as a result of the AI industry. And we're going to see investigations and more, we're all going to get a better understanding of what these companies are actually trying to do. And my position is like, if you could pull forward the future and show people what the industry is trying to do and what it might look like if they succeed, I think they would reject it very, very wholeheartedly. And politicians who want to be leading that future, which was the name of the AI industry super PAC, that totally failed this midterm. But I digress. Run by a former Chuck Schumer aide, by the way, table that. That's right. That's right. But politicians who want to be ahead of this, you know, they're not going to be able to run against Trump in 2028, but they can run against Sam Altman, Daria Amadei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. And we know those people, unless they get taken down by scandal before then, are going to be even more central figures and people that are subject of more derision. I want to ask you about this Politico report on Hakeem Jeffries. So the headline is, Hakeem Jeffries met President Trump. Privately with Silicon Valley donors in bid to mend fences. This is D4 for the control room. So the report is that he quietly met with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors last week in California, right after the midterms, wasting no time. Politico describes this as an early step. This was actually, this is a throwback. This was right after Trump was elected. Oh, this is the first? This is like February 25. So Garrison, is he going to do this again? That's a good question. I mean, so one thing I noticed from that story was he was light on the details. AI policy and crypto policy. And there was some grumbling from some of the attendees about that. that. And he was just talking about how bad Trump is, how they're going to win in the midterms, which they did. And so I think Jeffries on AI is a bit hard to read how he'll act. I was looking at the donors to his campaigns and his packs and didn't see much from the AI industry itself. There's some companies I don't like, like Palantir, Anduril, etc. But Open AI Anthropic, I did not see on that list. And he has been signaling a stronger position and saying a lot of the right things on taking AI very seriously. He even described the hugging face hack in some detail and was basically correct. Some things he got wrong, but it's pretty complicated. And so rhetorically, he's striking a pretty strong tone here. And I think that my concerns with him as leader mostly don't come from his position on AI, but more just the AI. I mean, one of the reasons, Garrison, that I was concerned about Jeffries, I mean, generally, he's sort of like a pro-corporate guy overall, tends to be his orientation. In fact, he runs to Silicon Valley right after Trump's elected to say, hey, we're still your friends. Let's still be good. But he also put together this like AI commission that included a lot of very corporate friendly and specifically industry friendly faces, people like Josh Gottheimer, friend of the show, that people will, you know, will know and recognize. So what do you make of some of the actual moves that he's made on the issue? Yeah, I think that committee was not encouraging for people who want aggressive regulation and investigation into these companies. Zoe Lofgren, for instance, was one of the chief opponents of the first major state level AI safety bill, SB 1047 in California. She led a letter opposing the bill. And then Nancy Pelosi jumped on that letter, like citing it in her opposition to the bill, which I think played a big role in Gavin. I think that the AI committee, yeah, not looking great. One thing about Jeffries over Pelosi is that he runs a much looser ship. And so the committee chairs get a lot more leeway. And, you know, their judiciary is going to be chaired by Jamie Raskin. And Raskin has signaled he's going to be taking AI very seriously. And so I think we could see a lot of investigation and oversight coming from that committee. Now, on the tech side, what are you sensing in their willingness? Obviously, 2024, the vibe shift, you had the all-in guys literally going all in on MAGA for the most part. And you have lots of Mark Zuckerberg, other tech leaders, Andreessen Horowitz lining up behind MAGA and doing so in some obsequious, very obsequious ways. But, you know, are they trying to walk any of that back? Do you sense that they're trying to warm over? Like, what is their posture? Democrats are one thing, but is Silicon Valley really interested in continuing to kind of grease the skids with Democrats back in power on Capitol Hill? I mean, on election night, we had Sam Altman tweeting something like, we obviously always want humans to be in control of AI and choosing their destiny. It's obvious. And then Alex Karp at Palantir gave an interview to somebody and said, Politico. Progressive, like 12 times or something. Put E1 up on the screen, guys, if we've got it. Yeah, incredible stuff. Palantir's progressive. He's always been a Democrat. Garrison, I don't know if you knew this. He loves, he's primarily committed to economic justice. Yeah, the Trump immigration, it went too far. So, yeah, that's where he is today. And just to be clear, he said he supported the president a lot about a year ago. He gave a million dollars in 2024 to MAGA Inc. after Trump won December 2024. He gave a million dollars to the inauguration fund. Garrison, you know all of this, but as a refresher, if people forgot exactly how Karp was one of those people. That was literally and figuratively lining up behind MAGA with the hopes that it would be fairly friendly to the tech industry and got a lot out of that bargain. Totally. I mean, Palantir is one of the companies that's done the best under the second Trump administration, getting these massive government contracts to build out immigration technology for ICE, which really is dual use as a general surveillance technology. And just some of the scariest stuff that we've seen from this event. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. I think it's going to be very interesting if we get a 2028 then president who runs on abolishing ICE, which I think is a reasonable expectation and the right position. And Palantir is going to be one of the, I think, big targets of a lot of changes to procurement policy and to just the general attitude towards that company. And Karp is trying to get ahead of it, hiring a bunch of, you know, former Democrats. Or people from Democratic offices and campaigns. And I think we're in a different era where that's just not going to work as much anymore. And, you know, these leadership fights, it remains to be seen how those shake out. But Schumer looks a lot rockier. And, you know, leading the future, the OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, SuperPAC hired the Schumer aide, you mentioned Crystal. Former press secretary. Right. That's not going to do much good if the new leader is Van Hollen or somebody else who just doesn't owe anything to those people. Yeah. And what else would you say about Schumer and his relationship to the industry and what he said about AI? Yeah. I mean, so Schumer did these AI forums a few years ago where he brought in a bunch of experts. These were very industry heavy. They talked a lot and then produced no legislation. So not a great start there. Schumer's daughter was hired in September to be a lobbyist for OpenAI. And that was after being a lobbyist for Amazon. And I'm curious about like what she's been up to there. She's been up to a lot of work. You know, she started recently, but that was like a good pick by OpenAI's Chris Lehane, who is also a Democrat and fundraised for John Ossoff. So yeah, I think Schumer, his relationship with the industry is even closer, you know, given that his family works there. And that is concerning. And then, you know, but he is looking a lot more vulnerable given the number of no confidence or no support statements from senators. Yeah. Well, and especially with there being, I mean, Chris Van Hollen hasn't officially said that he's in, but it certainly seems like he is the alternative there. So I don't know. I guess that OpenAI investment in Schumer's daughter is a good one until Chris Van Hollen actually gets elected as a majority leader. And then what have I got this lady here for? I'm sure she's there on her merits alone, however, Garrison. Thank you so much for your insights on all of these issues. We always appreciate it, guys. The book is called OpenAI. And I'll see you next time. Bye. There you go. Yeah. Sell your NVIDIA and also get out of your index. I mean, so much of the stock market really depends on NVIDIA. So this is not investment advice. Do whatever you're going to do. But anyway, Garrison, thank you. Thank you so much. Great to see you both. All right, guys. Well, we talked to Garrison a little bit about the Alex Karp thing. So we do have some all-in clips that we'll probably play for you guys on Friday, which are just good fun. Yeah. Good fun. We have a lot of thoughts on the invert of the vibe shift, the inverse. What do we call it? Reverse vibe shift? I think that the de-chuttification of America, that's what I like to call it personally. But you learned all about that at the re-education camp. Yeah. But I can't talk about it. I send an NDA. And that's all I can say, Crystal. Yes, indeed. So anyway, we've got some good stuff for you guys tomorrow, Friday show. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you soon. Bye-bye. 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