NVIDIA CEO GONE! National Security Nightmare Engulfs Trump

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This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good. Find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlow. Jess, what to talk about. But before we get started. Nothing's happening at all. Nothing. Slow news day. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date and support the show. All right, let's get into it. A powerful man who is. Facing accountability. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has resigned following reports of affairs with two women, including a businesswoman US intelligence believes may have ties to Beijing and the senior NVIDIA executive, who he also appears to be having an affair with or with past tense. The board launched an investigation. Lawmakers demanded accountability and shareholders sued the company. The CFO Colette Kress will take over as interim CEO. So much to unpack here, Jess. I'll talk about the business end. But first, you talk about the political end. What do you think this means? What kind of ramifications do you think this has on the Trump administration, defense, security department? Any thoughts here about how this impacts Washington? Well, my first thought is I can't believe how quickly this all happened. I mean, usually these things are slower burns. And I think the NVIDIA executive who ended up coming forward with. The whole story and also had an affair with him knew that once she came forward with this, that it would be, you know, a matter of hours, uh, until something changed, uh, the political ramifications are massive, uh, the wall street journal and New York times, both reporting that when Jensen was on air force one to go to China in 2025 and came to the white house state dinner with she back in September, uh, Trump and his team knew about the affair with the Chinese honeypot. That is insane that they knew that someone directly tied to the Chinese communist party, uh, in their group, their tiny group that could go on air force one and be part of this delegation was being exposed in this way. Obviously there's a craven money angle to this. And the idea that our entire economy is being propped up by seven companies, which I want you to talk about more, but when you think about accountability and what investigation look like in the new term, once Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are in charge, this is one of the things that springs to mind. Like, how is it possible that the Trump administration were comfortable with this, or even if they were uncomfortable that they still made themselves or twisted themselves into a pretzel to allow something like this to happen? Um, we will, I assume, never find out exactly what it is that the spy, I believe her name was Alice, right? Uh, was relaying back to, to the Chinese government, but you have to have the expectations of that. It is absolutely everything possible. And that while he slept, she was digging through his stuff, the kinds of things that he was telling her. And they've been photographed together going back years at this point. Um, so enormous ramifications for the Trump administration right now, but also for the agenda of the Democrats, uh, as they're looking to what it looks like to actually have some power on Capitol Hill. Yeah. I, I would argue that this isn't a story about infidelity. This is quickly going to be a story about, uh, national security. And just to give people a sense for how serious this is and just the ramifications here. So just here are some of the most sensitive applications of NVIDIA compute or chips that potentially could have been compromised or close the Delta between America's leadership and technology and weapons and China's, uh, nuclear weapons. Uh, these chips simulate nuclear detonations, modeling weapons aging, validating stockpile reliability, autonomous weapons, AI driven drones, target recognition, coordinated drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, simulating aerodynamics, extreme temperatures, flight behavior, intelligence and surveillance, satellite image analysis, facial recognition, tracking individuals and military movements, cyber warfare, AI assisted vulnerability discovery, missile defense, processing radar and sensor data, biological and chemical threats, molecular modeling and protein design, military command and control, combining satellite. I mean, this is just going to get, when you think about how many people, whether it's people in universities, whether it's people, the brightest scientists in the world at Lawrence Livermore lab, whether it's our millions of service men and service women, whether it's hundreds of thousands of people working to build the best aircraft carrier in the world, trying to keep Americans safe. And to think that, okay, Jensen Huang always had these two rules for staying CEO, you know, don't get fired and don't get bored. It ends up there was a third rule and it ends up that I think this is going to be the greatest national security breach in history. And I mean, just imagine what might have happened here. So Jensen had been actively advocating for selling more chips into China. Everyone thought, okay, that's wrong, but he just wants to get the share price up. As far as we know, this played out. Jensen, my love, it's Alice. I've got such terrible news. Someone who claims to be from the CCP called me and said, they're going to unmask our affair in the most aggressive, uncomfortable, ugly way possible. But they said that maybe they won't if you continue selling chips into my company more than we need. The commerce department went down there and found unpacked boxes of GPUs, meaning they were likely going somewhere else. You could even see them buying it. I mean, I think the lawsuits here are going to be so extraordinary. What if Binance finds out that the North Korean hack of $6 billion was using AI, possibly powered by NVIDIA chips, possibly secured or given access to by China who got these chips from Megaspeed. If anyone can connect anything to AI potentially fronted by Chinese LLMs, they are going to have a hard time. We're going to have to wait and see. And to give you a sense for the market's reaction here, after I was trading yesterday, the stock was off about $400 billion. Theoretically, Ms. Wang is worth more than Oracle. What do I mean by that? The company last night and after hours lost the value of Oracle. And I think you're going to see them connect this. I think Democrats, when they get the gavel, are going to try and connect this to a total abandonment or negligence or careless disregard for our national security when one CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world is throttling back defense systems for Ukraine, potentially without the president's knowledge. The president's pointing fingers at him. He's pointing fingers at the president. And that the president knew about this and didn't stop it. So this is the biggest story. This is the biggest business story of the year. And what happened between, I think, so I said a few days ago, there's no way he gets out of this. And the board appeared to be supporting him initially. We talked about this. The board members, it's a group of fairly middling boards. They've been there on average of like 12, 15 years. One of the board members, just as an example, the CMO of NFL, hasn't worked since 2018, but since being on the board has made $80 million. And the board announced a quote-unquote independent count. And I've, first off, independent, council, independents doing a lot of work there, because typically an independent council always comes back with a recommendation based on one thing, who's paying for the independent council. And this council was going to come back saying mistakes were made, but there's nothing that gets in the way of Jensen leading this company. I would bet in the last 72 hours, some people from our security apparatus have sat these board members down and started asking them questions and outlining scenarios here that could have taken place. And then each of these board members called their own personal attorney, and the personal attorney of these board members said, unless you want to be charged with crimes or negligence against the state, you need to swiftly cauterize this. And then I think they did another meeting yesterday, and they said, okay, he's out. But this is likely, I mean, if every, and I apologize for what's out here, but if every Fortune 1000 CEO had a Wonder Woman's golden lasso around them and had to fess up to any indiscretions, romantically, a hundred to nine hundred of them would be out the next day or would have to admit to it. This is not about infidelity. This is about national security. And this is just getting started, what might've gone on here and the vulnerabilities. I think this is a very big deal. And I think it's going to have a lot of ramifications for the protocols around how these companies acquit themselves. If all of a sudden it comes out that some anthropic executives were potentially in any way having relationships with potential spies, that could, that could shelve the IPO that's supposed to happen next week. This is, the tentacles of this are going to go everywhere. Any thoughts, Jess? Yeah. I'm curious what you know about Colette Kress, who's now the interim CEO and what you think the future of NVIDIA looks like. Is this one of those companies that can survive and continue to thrive without, you know, the future of NVIDIA? Yeah, I think it's going to have a lot of ramifications for the future of NVIDIA. I think it's going to have a lot of ramifications for the future of NVIDIA. Yeah. I think it's going to have a lot of ramifications their big figurehead and the intellectual juice behind the company, or do you think they're going to struggle? So appointing the CFO is basically the board's way of saying, don't panic. A finance chief person is the person you hand the keys to when you want the car parked, not necessarily accelerating. The first thing I do on boards is I introduce myself to the CFO and say, is it okay if I call you after board meetings? And they always say yes, because the CFO is typically the source of really handy with adjectives and embellishment and can turn chicken shit into chicken salad in front of the board and say that our shitty earnings are, were actually signs of growth. You call the CFO for a source of truth. They're usually the stabilizing force. It's a really good idea. The key term around all of this is the idolatry of innovators. The fact that famous hedge fund managers and most of Silicon Valley is saying, oh, human's going to be human. Boys will be boys. We should get past this. We're going to be rich. We're going to get rich. And again, it's the idolatry of the dollar. If you create trillions of dollars in shareholder value, according to Silicon Valley executives, you are no longer subject to the law, norms of national security, fidelity around your obligation to the country. And then the flip side of that idolatry of innovators is the following. The ridiculous notion that all of AI, much less this is dependent upon one person who is clearly distracted and spending a lot of time in Southeast Asia. You cannot, greatness is in the agency of others. And five, a $5 trillion company is in the agency of a ton of incredibly competent people. There are probably a dozen outstanding potential CEOs walking the halls of NVIDIA. We always like to believe, we fall into this ridiculous notion that there are these Jesus-like figures that are singular. Oh, Steve Jobs. Apple is done when Steve Jobs is out. The creativity is gone. Oh, wait, Tim Cook has 15X'd the company. Oh, wait, Sergey Larian, Eric, the dream team. What will happen to Alphabet when they're gone? Oh, what's going to happen? It's going to quintuple its market cap. How will Microsoft ever survive without Bill Gates? Oh, it's not only survived, it's thrived. So again, ridiculous excuses that we would, or a different set of standards for someone because they've created shareholder value versus every other citizen or every other executive in history. And then this notion that there are these Jesus-like figures that are singular. So in sum, this is only going to get worse in terms of national security, but I believe NVIDIA stock will likely be up at the end of the year. Because if you look at the stock right now, it's trading at where the average S&P company trades. And even if you take out 20% of the stock that supposedly potentially shouldn't have been sold to bad actors, this company is growing much faster, is much more profitable, and has got much broader moats than, say, a Caterpillar or a Ford or a Procter & Gamble. So this is going to be a very tumultuous 30, 60 days, but absolutely the company can continue to thrive. And what's probably more important to the AI market is the panthropic IPO that's coming up, because that'll give a signal on the demand side. The panthropics IPO goes well, and these frontier LLMs continue to show that they're growing fast enough to provide them with the cheap capital to buy NVIDIA chips. That's more important than whether he was sleeping with five people. The thing that's going to be unfurled here in a very weird way, in a very ugly way, is going to be all the scenarios around what potentially the nation or Jensen's recklessness has done in terms of diminishing, eroding, and really damaging national security. This will go down, likely, as the biggest national defense compromise, breach, whatever you want to call it, in history. So you would buy the dip? Yeah, I look. To summarize? Let's get to it, Scott. I don't know if you should give out advice like that, but, like, did you buy the dip? I haven't bought NVIDIA. I typically don't trade stocks during the middle of the year, but NVIDIA right now, and I don't like to make stock recommendations, but my prediction is the stock's up by the end of the year. The stock right now has had such an overhang on it that right now, like I said, it's trading at the same multiple of some pretty boring companies, and it's an incredible company. And again, I know these guys, or I know some of them, they're just like us. They're incredibly talented people. It's such an insult to the team at NVIDIA. It's like, you could have the most amazing quarterback ever. You could have, I don't know, whoever you think it is, Steve Young, or Joe Montana, or Joe Namath, or Aaron Rod, you know, pick Tom Brady, pick the quarterback of the. If he doesn't have an amazing line and amazing receivers and a running back to take pressure off of him, he goes 0 for 18. And to believe you can build a company like this with a team like that, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't this design, supply chain, corporate development, sales, financial management. I mean, it's just ridiculous. The overhang here, the thing that could screw it up is they might be subject to just a crazy amount of lawsuits. But the company itself, without Jensen, I mean, let me put it this way. He was clearly distracted. He was clearly, you know, he was clearly, you know, the most valuable company in the world. God brought down by the, you know, kind of the, what I'll call the oldest, the oldest playbook in the world. So, yeah, I would argue that this company, again, my prediction is the stock is up from here. I don't think this has been such a cloud over the company. But again, I think the anthropic IPO is going to say more about the AI market than what happens with Jensen. Okay. I would, if this were Raging Moderates, estrogen edition, I would then say, I would like to talk about the actual affair. And now I've like dissected all these videos of Jensen and his wife, like dancing at events and how she's looking at him and he's just surveilling the room and like looking for what other eye connections he can make and like what his glow up meant to all of it. But we should move on to politics. But the affair does matter to me. And I continue to be stunned. I know I'm in the throes of like little kids and like, I love my husband and we're too tired to have affairs anyway. But this stuff, it just grosses me out so much. And that they're just doing it all the time. And with multiple people. And to these women who built these companies with them, like when you were a dork in school and they were your lab partner up until these, you know, trillion dollars worth of companies. My estrogen is mad about this development. Well, another prediction here is it just goes to what I'll call estrogen. There's a pretty decent probability that a ton of philanthropies are about to get billions of dollars, tens of billions over the next 24 months. Because this, like this has got to put a strain on their family and their marriage. And what typically happens when people get divorced is the side of the divorce that has estrogen, the female, the Melinda Gates or the Mackenzie Scott, they go about giving away tens of billions of dollars. This is a sexist statement, but there's something about the female billionaire brain that just bluntly is more philanthropic. That's not to say there aren't a lot of philanthropic male billionaires. But there's something about the female billionaire brain that just bluntly but it just seems like like standard pattern recognition, that the moment Melinda or Mackenzie get their 20, 30, 60 billion, they start giving it away. And also, look, fidelity, and then we'll get some pushback on this, fidelity is somewhat correlated to opportunity. Rock stars and athletes have a tough time remaining monogamous because men for millions of years have been sort of taught that it's your job to spread your seed to the four corners of the earth, and women are taught to use a much finer screen to pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed, resulting in evolutionary progress. It's not pretty. That doesn't mean we can't have a modern society, and people shouldn't reflect character to modulate their instincts. But where you see it really in spades in the tech community is that a lot of these CEOs didn't have a lot of game when they were young. They didn't have a chance to go to St. Bart's and party. On a boat with women and have, I mean, all of us, not all of us, most of us want a period in our life where, quite frankly, we can have some, for lack of a better term, fun. And most of these guys never scratched that itch because they were captaining the math team, they stayed home from prom, and they've been working nonstop. And Jensen met his wife in college, and I like this story, he was, you know, if you look at pictures of Jensen in college, he wasn't exactly George Clooney. And he met someone, and he said to her, I love this, he said, if you let me tutor you every Sunday, I promise you I'll get you straight A's. That's how they met. And this guy never had that chance. It doesn't excuse it. But what you find with these guys is they wake up one day, and they put on a leather jacket, and they're worth $180 billion. And all of a sudden, they're the sexiest man in the room. And they're like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And they have a chance to behave the way they wanted to behave when they were 19 or 22 and never got the chance to. But this is a story as old as time, but it's a story that plays out in high decibel volume in the valley. Because these guys never had a chance to kind of sow some oats, if you will. I mean, the dynamics here around chemistry and, you know, the male ego. But for this guy, I mean, people have been calling him a traitor. I don't think this is a question of treason. It's just a question of how could you be this fucking stupid? And that is, do you realize commerce executives were going down to Megaspeed? When he met her, Megaspeed had $3 million on his balance sheet. Now it has $2 billion. Commerce executives got suspicious and went down to the company and found unpacked boxes of GPUs, meaning they were probably just. In a way station there waiting to be shipped somewhere else. And he never thought he might be compromised. For a brief second, I thought, wait, he's not this stupid. Our security apparatus gave him a heads up and he's been feeding them the wrong information, just the way we turned spies during the Oppenheimer days and fed the Germans faulty information around how to get to, you know, splitting the atom. I thought maybe this is a giant security operation. He's been cooperating with our security apparatus. And he's been feeding them the wrong information. And he's been feeding us. I think that is giving him and the Trump administration, as we learn more about this, too much credit. But again, I don't, I think the stuff around, the stuff around infidelity and his failings is not going to be the story here. The story is going to be just how serious this breach was. And also this is, notice how Trump hasn't said a lot in the last 48 hours. No. When they say, okay, let me get this. You guys are aiding and abetting the invasion, of Europe by Putin. And now you're handing over our most sensitive information, even after you knew it, or enabling the handover, the most sensitive information or the confiscation or the theft of the most sensitive information. And you didn't intervene. So I think this, I used to think that he would resign, get out of the hearings, peace out. Now I'm thinking, oh, these hearings are coming. And they're not only going to be, they'll be about Jensen, but with a lot of other people. What they'll really be about is how this administration has shown no fidelity and no respect for the expertise, the commitment, the expense, and the sacrifice our defense department, our army, navy, air force, marines, our security apparatus have made over the last 80 years to try and make us more lethal and more safe. And to ensure that our weapon systems had an advantage over the Chinese and the CCP, they likely, I think what you're going to find is this was like maybe a decade of progress around our national security. We just gave up a decade potentially to the CCP. I think this is a, anyways, Jess, I think this is a big deal. I get that. And I agree. And I think this is another ding, by the way, on Marco Rubio looking ahead to 2028, because he was the China hawk in all of this. Um, and obviously he would have been aware of whatever the Trump administration, you know, writ large was aware of, uh, vis-a-vis the honeypot sitch. And it was already bad enough that they were, you know, defending selling these more advanced chips. Um, but I think this is a big blight on all of them, but there will be more to come. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah, this is going to be C-SPAN porn that we're going to, there's, there's going to be a lot here. So my favorite kind of porn. There you go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Right now, podcast listeners can save up to 48% off their first order at pendulumlife.com slash moderates. That's pendulumlife.com slash moderates to save up to 48% off your first order. Again, that's pendulumlife.com slash moderates and get almost half off today. Support for the show comes from Granola. You know, that sinking feeling you get when you sit down to a meeting, your team starts working their way through the agenda. And suddenly you realize that you dropped the ball and you're like, I'm going to do this again. And you're like, I'm going to do this again. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free when you head to granola.ai slash moderates. That's granola.ai slash moderates to get your time back. You can go to granola.ai slash moderates and try it on your next call. A man who isn't facing enough accountability is Secretary Hagseth. After narrowly escaping impeachment, he had another rough day in the spotlight. This time on Vets.com, he's a veteran of the Pentagon. He's a veteran of the Pentagon. away from impeachment, 11 Democrats are facing backlash for missing the vote that could have changed the outcome. But the impeachment fight is just one of several headaches for Republican leadership. Representative Thomas Massius continues procedural maneuvers to force uncomfortable votes for Republicans on issues including the Iran war and the Epstein files. I tuned in yesterday to see what you and Aaron had to say. I was shocked. I felt like everything was turning up blue. Like I just got spoiled by all the momentum we had. And I thought, okay, occasionally you have to take an L. I feel as if yesterday was the first L we took when I found out that we didn't have the votes potentially because of some people who missed the vote. But I tuned in and I thought you and Aaron had an interesting take on the mechanics of what went down or specifically what did not go down yesterday. Can you summarize for us? Yeah, I mean, I will say before I get into the minutiae of like how many votes we had and how many votes the Republicans had and how Mike Johnson would have ensured that this never went through anyway, that this is embarrassing and bad and should not have happened. And that Democratic leadership has not had a good enough answer as to how this was allowed to happen. And if they did want to say, we just want to do this in January when we control the gavels and there's no way that you would actually get this to go anywhere because majority Republican Senate and the way that Trump is being is never going to vote to convict. I think that would have been acceptable to people to say, oh, our work starts, what is it going to be like January 4th? They get, sworn in on the 3rd and then, you know, that is effectively the day one. But when you have Democratic social media accounts saying things like impeach Hegseth now and then your members or just some of them can't get back from a cocktail party, it is a bad look. Would it have changed things? No. Mike Johnson, so the Republicans were missing seven Congress people. Mike Johnson has kept a vote open over 10 hours before. They would have just waited until everybody got back and it wouldn't have gone through. And there's a very strong argument, which I would have made and I am going to make because here I am, that the eight articles of impeachment that Massey brought were far too broad and that you should be doing this piece by piece. And that's essentially what's going to happen when the Democrats come in and control the committees. You will have the pieces showing up in different committees and they'll move forward on that basis. And Massey is going to pare back the articles of impeachment Those are the quote-unquote uncomfortable votes that he's going to force Republicans to take about the war in Iran, what happened in Venezuela, also what happened in the Caribbean seas where we are just taking out fishing boats that weren't narco-terrorists, no matter how many times Secretary Hegseth tells you that that's what happened. So that's, in general, my take. And I agree with you that it doesn't feel after you have this blue tsunami and that big promises are made, made about action and also accountability, that you flub something like this. You know, Nancy Pelosi being on the West Coast, it's one thing there's a congressman, Correa, who's actually ill and couldn't make it. But I think, you know, the imagery of Pat Ryan and, you know, Pat Ryan has a very particular set of feelings about Secretary Hegseth and obviously he served our country honorably as well. But if you have him checking himself out of the hospital after back surgery to make sure he, he can get there to vote, it's not an excuse that you couldn't run fast enough or make it the mile and a half back to the house. And I think it's just an enormous unforced error and you need better answers from leadership. Not just Hakeem Jeffries, but Catherine Clark, the whip. This is your job. It's like, it's the title for you. So I think that people should, you know, spread the love in terms of who you're pissed off about, pissed off at for what happened. So he was on the greenest of the green miles and he's got like a 60-day stay of impeachment. But this is going to come back in January, don't you think? Yes, definitely. I think that it is, you know, on the list for sure. But yes, it's coming back. And in a historic breakthrough for Democrats in the South, Scott Colombe has defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith to become Mississippi's first Black U.S. Senator since Reconstruction. Colombe, a district attorney, pulled off the upset in a state Trump, carried by nearly 23 points in 2024. His victory marks the first time a Democrat has won a Senate race in Mississippi since 1982 and puts Democrats at 55 seats in the Senate. Let's watch a bit of the speech last night. All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this. I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi is the best. That Mississippi matters. For me, this journey started with a prayer, y'all. In Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history. I can't help but think about Mecca Evers on Veterans Day, a moment like this, where he served his country and came home to Mississippi when they wouldn't let him vote. But he had faith that Mississippi could make progress. He had faith that one day, everybody would have the right to vote. He had faith that a day like this was possible. Wow, right? Yeah, just, I mean, this has been going on for a few weeks now that I'm almost emotional every time I talk about now-Senator-elect Cologne, but his campaign. He is the encapsulation of what this election meant for the civil rights movement. And that's what I'm talking about. And that it has been ongoing for decades. The ad that he released walking through Medgar Evers' house, if you don't feel the gravity of the moment, looking at the bullet hole that came through the house, how there's no door on it, and listening to Scott Cologne talk about how Evers would tell his children what to do when, if they heard gunfire. Their father taught them that if they ever heard gunfire, they should crawl to the bathroom. This is what we're talking about. This is where Medgar Evers died. He fought for this country and Normandy. He came home to Mississippi and they wouldn't let him vote. So he organized, helping other people register. Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, he pulled into here with an armful of T-shirts that said, Jim Crow must go. A man hiding across the street shot him in the back. He was killed for helping Mississippians vote. On Tuesday, use your vote. And on Tuesday, honor everyone who died for that right. You know, I don't know what's broken in you if that doesn't touch your soul. There's a mother, a Mississippi mom, a white Mississippi mom, who was talking to MS Now about the impact of his election. And she said, we have great dreams for our kids. And for a lot of us, that means that your kids leave and find a better place to live than Mississippi. But that changes now. This place, this has been about hatred and animosity and lawmakers who try to convince you that if we make life better for some, we have to make it worse for others. And Scott will be the leader who changes that. He'll reverse the brain drain. And I thought that was really important because we've kind of stopped talking about that at the beginning of the Trump administration when they were going after all of the universities. It was top of mind to everyone. You know, what's going to happen when all of these incredible academics stop setting up their labs here? Right? Or we deport them back to, you know, adversarial countries. They're going back to China. They're going back to Iran, etc. So I love that she highlighted that. And she said, make this a place where mamas can be thrilled that their babies come back to. So again, estrogen addition of raging moderates. That really spoke to me. And I hadn't heard that perspective necessarily. You know, what folks who are actually raising their kids feel about the fact that they wish that their kids, you know, go off to great schools and then, and stay away from this place. And the fact that, you know, he won against Cindy Hyde-Smith, who went to a segregation academy, whose kid went to a segregation academy, who's worn Confederate gear, called it the best of Mississippi history. It speaks volumes about progress, about the civil rights movement, about the importance of investing in Black leadership, of what is possible. And he was talking about the map and that that if, if we continue to only focus on the places that we won before, maybe you got 51, 52 senators, but to ignore the South and where it is also a lot less expensive to play, because that does matter in all of this, right? How much can you carpet the airwaves? You can have incredible return on investment. And that's how you get real progress. That's how you get big bills through, where you can have, you know, veteran-proof majorities and where, honestly, you can represent, majority of Black people. I mean, Mississippi has the highest Black voting population in the country. That was part of why Chuck Schumer had always been thinking about Mississippi and made the pitch, I think, three times he met with Cologne trying to convince him to run this race. I'm overwhelmed. I think there are so many beautiful elements to this story. And I think he's going to be sensational. I think he's going to, you know, stir shit up and, you know, and bring a different way of thinking to Washington, also adding to the Millennial Caucus. I mean, we got such an upgrade in the ages and the perspectives of these senators that are coming in. I'm so excited. So, along the theme of estrogen, you know, I'm a hammer and everything I see is a nail. And I was saying, wow, young men really showed up, 38-point swing from red to blue. You want to talk about estrogen power? 20% of the Mississippi electorate, or 20% of the people who showed up, Black women. By the way, it was 10%. Black women showed up in double the proportion. Black women showed up in double the numbers to vote as Black men. And do you know what percentage of that 20% voted for Coulomb? 100. 99. I bet that in this election, if you took all of Trump's statistics, you'd be able to see that. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't staff and found out who they really voted for once they got behind a curtain, I bet it's not 99% for the Republican candidate. I mean, Black women are sending a senator from Mississippi for the first time. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen any cohort this large vote at 99%. And then they did the work also. They were the ones chasing all of the ballots, making sure, I mean, Mark Elias was down there with his legal team and a forever hat tip to him. And what an incredible elections lawyer he is to make sure that, you know, everything is counted fairly. And remember that Mississippi doesn't have a recount function. Like, they haven't done it before. There's no, you can't look it up. This is exactly how it's supposed to happen. So you really, really had to make sure that everything was being done above board. But not only did the Black women organize, turn out, show up 99%, but then they didn't stop. And they've been working around the clock to ensure that every vote is counted and that Scott Cologne will be headed to Washington. Yeah, Democrats keep saying they're trying to find where their base is. Well, it ends up their base is in churches and in poll lines at 7 a.m. I mean, this is, you just got to hope this same way that Dean of Democracy has worked for old people, that it starts working for some, I mean, quite frankly, for Black female voters. J.D. Vance is the vice president because of Peter Thiel. Senator Cologne has the term senator now because of Black women in Mississippi. Support for the show comes from Enjin. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. 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Life can be messy and complicated especially during the holidays. One thing that isn't, switching to the simplicity plan from Verizon. It's one plan, one price. Just $30 a line per month for you or the whole family. Make the simple choice this season. Switch to Verizon and shop their best holiday deals today. I think we should go on to our questions. How does that sound, Jess? Yeah, fab. Okay. So question number one, we have not seen these. How should the Dems focus on the real work ahead? Rebuilding government departments that provide oversight? What do you think the Dems need to do here, Jess? Well, I think that there are going to be a lot of folks who have been fired or have left the government that they're going to be talking to about how to rebuild here. I mean, this is one of those moments where I'm curious to see what all of the like Project 2029s look like that folks have been working on. I know there are a lot of lawyers also hard at work focused on this question of how you rebuild. But I think it's really important for people to remember that the concept of Doge is actually very popular. And Mamdani, for instance, has been doing this in New York City and saved a tremendous amount of money. So it's not just about putting everything back together the way that it was, but doing a proper Doge or a proper procedure for seeing where there is fat to cut, what is necessary, what will make us, you know, lean, mean, and effective. Yeah, look, there's, we need, and I think they're planning this, we need to essentially, even if these bills get vetoed, outline what the democratic agenda is for 28. Propose some sort of universal health care or renewing the health care subsidies. Propose $25 an hour minimum wage. Propose an ethics, new ethics guidelines around stock trading, corruption. Propose something that does something that codifies women's rights around, I mean, basically outline the agenda and let him veto everything. Let him veto an ethics bill. Let him veto a stock trading bill. Let him veto raising minimum wage to $20 or $25 an hour federally. But basically signal, this is what we're going to do. And the way I call this, the Democrats need to ensure that the ratio of ideas to indignance is hugely positive. And that is, I'm all for the late night C-SPAN porn of dragging, famous people's children in front of Congress, and, you know, accountability. Absolutely. But for every ounce of that, there needs to be a pound of how are we going to get people, help them get a mortgage, a job, and form a family. And if we go on what I'll call a nostalgia revenge tour, and that's what people think of as what we're primarily focused on, instead of health care, instead of, you know, housing, this is how we have, a red wave in two years. All right, let's move on here. Question two, Tuscan Sal asks, do the national security issues raised here open up a conversation of the federal government potentially nationalizing the most sensitive and critical parts of NVIDIA? I'll go first here, Jess. I don't think so. Generally speaking, you always want to have a bias towards the private sector running an industry. Now it goes too far. The health care industry being totally privatized, prisons being privatized has resulted in externalities where we want to become the most incarcerated nation in the world. Check that box. We want to let health care companies verticalize so they can extract more and more money from consumers such that people working in companies, those businesses are now paying $23,000 a year. We pay on average $13,000 per individual for health care versus $6,500. So there are absolutely, there needs to be government intervention in these companies, but it should be through regulation. What we need at a place like NVIDIA is defense and Department of Energy and CIA level security and protocols and screening and scrutiny and not WeWork level security. But to privatize NVIDIA and take away the profit motive and the innovation motive to a certain extent, you end up with Air France or DeLorean. It's just, no, it should be regulated. We should be more thoughtful about our defense considerations. But this is the kind of company you want to let cook. And the private sector. Your thoughts, Jess? Well, we do have a socialist-y president, so I wouldn't be surprised if he came out and said, you know, for the good of everything, they're going to take a 10% stake or something like that. And maybe that'll be like the proverbial slap on the wrist. But I'm always on high alert for this administration to be doing something mega corrupt. So if the ideas are floated of people in their orbit that they couldn't stall within the company, that would not surprise me at all. And I hope that this does put to bed the conversation over whether these companies need some degree of regulation and oversight. I think everyone who was saying absolutely not, you know, let them cook with no guardrails has big egg on their face. Question number three. Hi, Scott and Jess, big fan of the show. What do you make of J.D. Vanske's getting sidelined from foreign policy issues? Has he been sidelined, Jess? A little bit. I mean, the back and forth over is he right or wrong about his criticisms about Iran? I mean, remember, he was the point person for Iran for a long time and was the one who negotiated the world's worst MOU. So I would say, yes, he's been sidelined more and more. They also thought that he was going to be an effective campaign surrogate. But basically everything that I've seen relating to J.D. Vance to me just indicates that this is not the guy and that they know that this is not the guy who's going to be able to carry the party forward. So maybe he should just be Mr. Mom. He's got four kids now, you know, go into the sunset. There you go. And then question four, Tom the Temp says, Tom the Temp, these names are great. I wonder if Jensen will retire his leather jacket. Let me put it, something I'm fairly certain of, and here's a prediction. Hands down, the most popular Halloween costume is going to be Jensen Huang with someone who says, with a date that says spy. Or, or I, I just got to think that sales of leather jackets at Halloween stores are going to skyrocket. Yeah, the leather jackets are going to be flown at half mast. That was one of my favorite memes from this. That's, that's, that's your joke there. I mean, not mine. Yeah, it's, I don't know if they're going to retire the leather jacket. I think this is, God, I'm just, literally my mind is absolutely blown here that. I mean, just for. So many reasons what's gone on here, and I'm in the midst of trying to do the analysis around the anthropic IPO, and I've been talking to analysts, and everyone, every piece of information that comes out has just befuddled everyone. And you start thinking about all the, you know, the nuclear detonation has happened, but it's what happens over, you know, the blast radius, what happens over the next few months. I just don't even think we can begin to imagine the unintended consequences here. It's going to be just fascinating on an economic, a markets, and a political level. Anyways, let's leave it there, Jess. Thanks to everyone on Substack for tuning in. And Jess, I will see you, when are we next together? What day is it? Where am I? Monday. Oh, no, you're not on Monday. Monday, I'm on with Maggie Haberman, which will be awesome. Oh, that'll be great. Yeah, I love Maggie. I think we are reunited on Tuesday. I will miss you. Well, I appreciate that. You could say it back. That's how relationships work. No, no, no. I. I. Sorry, I will miss you. I will miss you as well. It's okay. I don't want to beg for it. It's fine. I am sending you every, I am sending you every microchip and GPU hopper I have. That's how you show affection. That's how I show it. That's my love language is semiconductors, AI driven semiconductors. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Have a great rest of the day. 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