00:00You know, it's very difficult to define where we are in this process, right?
00:04Because you had several stages of market reaction.
00:07There was an interesting column up by John Authors about, you know, the beginning of the year, people are excited.
00:13Then you had the scare of Liberation Day.
00:15Then you had the taco trade theme.
00:17Where are we now in terms of the market narrative?
00:20Look, unfortunately, the markets, you know, they reset almost 24 hours.
00:24So the tendency and the flow of capital right now is moving towards headlines.
00:30And, you know, we have a president in the U.S. that makes headlines every day.
00:33And that's driving markets.
00:35And I think we're trying to find some sort of norm.
00:40And the norm is going to be geopolitical.
00:42So until we get some real cooperation between the U.S. and China, and it looks like it could be lasting and it looks like it's agreed upon,
00:50I think you're going to see a lot of ebbs and flows.
00:52But I still think that we're kind of bumping against bottoms that keep getting higher.
00:56Yeah.
00:57And the thing is, one of our guests on the show yesterday pointed out U.S. and China both have very strong points of leverage.
01:05With China, it's rare earths.
01:06They can control.
01:07They can restrict.
01:08The U.S. is market access.
01:11So how do you see it playing out between the two sides in terms of where we eventually end up?
01:17So, look, I think that there's going to be a meeting in Seoul.
01:20I think that there's a lot of things playing in the background.
01:24And unfortunately, us as viewers, we only see what happens, what's delivered in the headlines.
01:30But I think there's a lot of negotiating that's going on behind the scenes.
01:33I don't think there is any sort of the acrimony that the headlines pretend I don't think exist.
01:39I think that's staged.
01:41That's politics.
01:42We also have to remember that in this time when everything is accessible through social media, politicians are always campaigning, no matter where they are.
01:53Yeah.
01:53To think that she is not playing to his base is wrong.
01:57To think that Trump is not playing to his base.
01:59So maybe there's a reason why Friday happened ahead of what Trump delivered yesterday.
02:04So if you think about this, this is a huge—
02:07You're seeing a connection between the Friday post and Trump's visit to the Middle East region.
02:12Yeah.
02:12So I think that he—I think he set a baseline that played to his idea Friday that he's going to fight,
02:20that he's going to make sure the U.S. gets what they deserve in any sort of a trade negotiation with China,
02:25knowing that he was walking into a stage on Monday or Tuesday that completely paints him into a different light.
02:32So let's think about how you actually look at staging and how people think about what they're saying and why they're saying it.
02:41As I said, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
02:44We only see what happens when they step at the podium.
02:46But a lot of this stuff is very premeditated and thought out because there are strategies about how diplomacy works.
02:54Yeah.
02:54You know, I said in my piece to you, diplomacy is about words.
02:57Yeah.
02:58You have to choose them wisely.
02:59Yeah.
02:59Most definitely.
03:00I mean, you could argue that he didn't necessarily pick his words yesterday, but, you know, he definitely had a stage.
03:07Yeah.
03:08What do you think President Trump's visit to the region actually then means as far as those geopolitical considerations are concerned with China?
03:18Has he just sort of reasserted the U.S.'s presence in the region?
03:21What, 100 percent.
03:22But I also think that the thing that people aren't focused on is it resets the conversation between Trump and Xi.
03:30And what do I mean by that?
03:31So, yes, he has reasserted himself in the region.
03:34The region at one point was looking like it was pointing to China.
03:38And the region looked like China influence may be at the table to get a negotiation done in the war.
03:46That is, that's gone.
03:48No one has heard China's name in the past three or four days in the lead up of, you know, Trump was on saying many nations have come forward.
03:55You know, obviously four kind of led the negotiations, but there were others in the background that were critical.
04:00If you think about it, there hasn't been one mention of China.
04:04Now, what does that do to Trump's leverage?
04:06I think this puts things right back into his kind of sweet spot where he has now come to the region.
04:13He said something that people thought was impossible.
04:17He did so in a day where he went to Israel.
04:19He went to Egypt.
04:21He set the tone and everybody came and lined up behind him.
04:25Yeah.
04:25So quite literally.
04:26Yeah.
04:27Okay.
04:28So really fascinating.
04:30But let me just maybe ask quite a simplistic question, which is, isn't most of the action anyway in the U.S. around the AI theme?
04:38You know, around anything that OpenAI touches?
04:41At the top of the show, I was saying that anything NVIDIA touches, they're all buying stakes in each other and doing partnerships with each other.
04:46Look, this thing is unprecedented.
04:48We've never seen anything like this.
04:51I think that people try to draw parallels to the dot-com boom and bust.
04:55I will tell you I think it's quite different.
04:57And the reason it's different is because the companies that are making commitments to one another, and people are calling this a circular economy, you know, you often see that power strip with the cord plugged back into it.
05:08Like, it's just a big circle.
05:10This is different this time.
05:12I don't necessarily – I wouldn't advise that this is the way that the theme moves forward.
05:18However, the companies that are marrying each other have a tremendous amount of firepower.
05:24They have huge revenues.
05:25They have a lot of money behind them.
05:27This isn't paper trading like it was in the dot-com era.
05:30So I think the AI theme is not played out.
05:35You know, I think it's heavy.
05:36I think it's overwhelming.
05:37I think that we're going to see something come back from it.
05:40And I think the fringe players will get blown out of the water.
05:44And I think people are paying too high a price to be on the fringe.
05:47But I think if you're looking down the middle – and remember, the stock market has come to six or seven stocks.
05:52If you look in those names, those companies are getting more powerful.
05:57They can have some sort of slippage and still move forward.
06:02The ones on the periphery, I think it could be disastrous.
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