Jensen Huang Admits to Affair With Alleged Chinese Spy | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Insane weekend, timeline in turmoil. Jensen Wong, CEO of Nvidia, took the top spot on the naughty list.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Over the weekend.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Pull it up, just so we have it.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Right here.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Bloomberg reported this. It's also in the Wall Street Journal.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  The list is looking sparse right now.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Wait, I thought there were short sellers on the naughty list. Oh, we took them off?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  They got dropped.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  I think we gotta flush this out, but we're not.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  You almost put the short sellers on the nice list.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Just based off their timing.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Well, they've done very well.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Because the AI trade was over.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  They were sort of right for the wrong reason.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've done very well. Well, fortunately, we have, you know, a small, a smidgen of time before Christmas. We're minutes away, but let's actually count it down, let everyone know exactly how far away we are. There are 45 days till Christmas. Now, it's not a joke. We are actually in the endgame. We're very, very close.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Tanner says.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Forty-five days away.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Jensen is gonna be setting up some coal-powered data centers.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Oh, I'll be he's gonna get coal from the naughty list. That makes sense.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that works.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Anyways, what happened?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  So Bloomberg reported that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Wong admitted that he had an affair with a woman identified in a series of reports as a suspected Chinese spy plunging the chip colossus into a crisis like none before in its three decades history. Truly, like.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  This is one of the.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  The most flawless business execution, right? In three decades, there hasn't, there's never been an Nvidia crisis at all. It's been like, there's been like.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  There's been demand crises.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, small business things.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Things that are, things that are cyclical.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  But there's never been like, oh, he put his foot in his mouth, and there's drama, or like, something weird's happening. Like, it's all been very clean.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, super clean. Yeah, so basically, I'm standing, I'm standing in my kitchen.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yesterday, and normally, when, when I get push notifications from, like, legacy media, it's horrific crisis overseas.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Something political or something.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  You know, like, like a train accident.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Hmm, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  But this one stopped me in my tracks, and I screenshot immediately, and I sent to you, and, and I was.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  That he admitted it?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Because that was the.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  I was.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Because it was alleged earlier, but it was like, who knows? It could be some complicated.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was going off of all the pictures that they had together. It looked really, really bad.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It looked like they had a special relationship.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  That's all I would say, right?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, but at the same time, if you were doing a spying operation, you, like, part of the spying operation could be, hey, just go get pictures where you're close with him, and you pat him on the back, we'll take a picture, make it look like you're having an affair, even if he's not, right? But of course, the push notification revealed everything.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, so we, I believe it was October 10th of last year, we talked about, we talked about Alice.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, Alice Wong.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  We discussed Alex Wong.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  I wouldn't.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  We discussed her access to Jensen. We highlighted her state media background. We questioned Megaspeed's activities. We didn't explicitly say that she was a spy, but it fit the sort of exact.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Like archetype of what, you know, this, this woman who was a reporter, suddenly she's running a multi-billion dollar, you know, Malaysian hyperscaler.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You know, impressive run.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  If it was real, but there was kind of cash appearing out of nowhere from shell corporations, and given that we have a similar background in media, we were just sort of joking, we were just joking, like, you know, very, like, you know, we didn't necessarily feel qualified to set up a hyperscaler, so.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  On, on one hand, it was, it was very impressive, but on the other hand, there was just like, it was just extremely suspicious, the entire thing, and there was reporting.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  In the New York, like, a bunch of reporting about Megaspeed.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  We talked to a lot of NeoCloud founders, and it's like, oh, they've been working in real estate for a long time, they've been working in, in crypto mining for a long time, they've been building things for a decade, and now they're having the AI moment? It's very rare that you talk to someone who's like, oh, yeah, like, I, I've actually never seen a data center in person, but I set one up, and I'm doing great. It's a little, it's a little stretch. The Wall Street Journal's done some investigation into Alice Wong's, like, you know, background, but it's still a complete mess. I, I'm not at the bottom of it at all. I can read a little bit of a summary here. So, she began her career as a state media journalist before moving into finance, including positions at major Chinese financial firms and HSBC. In early 2023, she took control of Megaspeed.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  And it's like, how? Like, I would love to take control of a big company. That would be amazing. Anybody have a company that they want me to take control of?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  She was handed the keys.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Normally, when someone takes control, I mean, either they have a ton of capital, and it's very clear how they got the capital, like, they inherited it, or they made it investing or something, or they raised it from outside partners, and now they own the company. Very odd that they just take control, very unclear how that happened. It was a Singaporean company spun out of a Chinese gaming business called Seven Road, and she became its managing director, but was introducing herself as the CEO, and maybe still introduces herself as the CEO. And then, the basic pitch for Megaspeed was it was an Nvidia reseller, Nvidia AI compute provider, and it's served customers, including Alibaba. Although she formally relinquished ownership and resigned as director in November of 2023, when a Singaporean

• 5:32Speaker 00

  businessman, James Tan, took over, she apparently continued exercising significant operational leadership, representing Megaspeed at Nvidia's California conference in early 2024, meeting Jensen at Computex in June of 2024 as well, and publicly interacting with him again in Taiwan in May of 2025. A business partner told the Wall Street Journal that she was still introducing herself as Megaspeed's CEO in August of last year. So, she's out, she controls the company, then she sells, maybe sells the company, it's very unclear. Meanwhile, Megaspeed was acquiring GPUs from Nvidia, prompting a US Commerce Department investigation, beginning in late 2024, into whether restricted chips were being diverted

• 6:14Speaker 00

  to China. Again, I don't even know if you need to divert them, if you can just set up a data center in Singapore or Malaysia, and then just do the training or inference over the wire. But nevertheless, the US Commerce Department started the investigation. US officials also suspected Alice of passing information to Chinese intelligence, and Nvidia is investigating whether Jensen was targeted through their personal relationship. The key unresolved question is whether the November 2023 sale represented a genuine transfer of control, or primarily a change in legal ownership while Alice continued running the business. It is a bizarre structure.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Definitely like, the most sus company in the world.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was saying, like, if you went to Silicon Valley.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  At least it's, at least it's tech.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  If you went to Silicon Valley, and you were, so this, this is the actual structure. Seven Road International is a Singaporean subsidiary of a Chinese-owned company that owns Wong Lei Limited, which is Alice Wang's ownership vehicle that's registered in the British Virgin Islands.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Wait, she doesn't own her ownership vehicle?

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And that owned Swift Data PTE Limited in Singapore, which is now owned by James Tan from November 23 onward, and that owns Megaspeed International. I'm just trying to parcel all this out. There's a lot more investigative journalism that needs to happen to actually really piece this together. This is like.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and credit to.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  My take, but.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Credit to the New York Times and other publications.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Clocking this over a year ago.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I was saying, like, you couldn't raise a seed round with this structure. You're like, oh, yeah, we're Chinese-Singaporean, and we're owned by the British Virgin Islands, but then it goes back to Singapore, back to China. It's like the most circular structure.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, this was a, this was a black swan for me.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  It was.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Because, look, it's been very obvious forever that Jensen has not wanted to lose the Chinese market.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  He has constantly advocated for.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Selling chips to China, clearly wants to do it. I don't think it's for malicious reasons. I think he sees that China is the second biggest computing market. He wants to be there. I think he knows that China is going to remove their dependency on US chips ASAP, one way or another, and so he's looking at it as, I just wanna make as much money. It's sort of like a loyalty to the dollar. I think he wants to, like, make as much money as he can.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  In the Chinese market, while he can, and understand that, that it will be lost either way over time.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I don't think he, and, and another way to read that is that he doesn't believe in sort of ASI, he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't believe in X risk, he doesn't, he's not worried about cybersecurity.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  He just doesn't, he, he's like, I make computers, I sell them, I wanna sell as many as possible.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  And for like 25 years, it was just like.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of ways you can criticize that. There's a lot of ways you can criticize that. Dwar Kesh is looking, you know, the, the interview where he's pushing him on, like, why are you selling nukes to China? Jensen says, that's ridiculous, like, you know, this isn't.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Stochastic there, it's basically.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the, the analogy doesn't make any sense, blah, blah, blah, but you can read, you can read into that as like, this guy does not believe in sort of any, any, anything like ASI-related. He's like, I make computers, I wanna sell computers.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  So, all that being said, this was like, just so, so incredibly sloppy and unnecessary. And like, you should have had a million people around you that would step in and say, like, you know, this looks really bad.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Just, why are you doing this?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  You run the largest, or one of the largest companies in the world, you're under incredible scrutiny, you have to be in DC constantly.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  And there's, there's plenty of demand in America. This was another thing. It was like, you don't even need to sell the GPUs to China, because there's so many Americans that wanna buy them.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  So it was like basically like greed greed and lust got him into this situation.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And I was still, I don't know, I still going into yesterday, I wanted to believe that Alice was trying and and they were in the same places at times. But you know, he was just like, I'm all business. I'll sell you some some chips. And so

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Seeing him admit this was was super disappointing and I feel horrible for, you know, his family and and really everyone involved. It's like, if you had told me this two years ago, I would have said like, haha, like, that's a funny like AI 2027 scenario, like the, you know.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it was a meme. Like last year, it got to be such a meme of like, the CCP GF. Oh, if you're doing anything in AI, like China's gonna send a honeypot for you. And a lot of people were saying like, okay, look, that's over the top and potentially offensive. And also, dude, no one's sending a honeypot after your like rapper. Like, you're not like actually that important. But a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, like, like, China would love to get what I'm building, you know, and it was kind of like this ridiculous thing. But the fact that it was like a public meme that had been like beaten to death on the timeline that people, it wasn't even funny anymore. And then it still happens is crazy. It's really, really crazy.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  No, a mistake of historical significance.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, no, totally.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Like, how do you, how do you let, how do you let this, how do you let, I mean, it's just like incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly careless.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. There is an interesting debate from, I saw Joe Weisenthal tweeting a little bit about it. I saw Ben Thompson writing a little bit about it, which is basically, if you play back the the old Nvidia story, a lot of it is aligned with globalism, global capitalism that was encouraged. Like, we, it's very easy to look around at the last few years and say, oh, well, like, of course, competition with China is really serious. Of course, AI is really, really important technology. But if you go back 10 years, it's like, oh, no, China's in the World Trade Organization. Like, of course, we should sell our, we should try and sell as many of our products over there as possible. People were complaining about Facebook not being able to sell their products over there, about

• 12:37Speaker 00

  a lot of American companies not being able to enter the Chinese market effectively. And so for a long time, the the mandate and like, the cultural goal of America was, yes, export everything that we have that is good. Make all the money you can. This is the, this is the social contract around our business community. And only recently has it become very obvious, correct, but also consensus that, okay, maybe we need to be careful about how we do business with our geopolitical rivals. Maybe they are trying to overtake us. Maybe they're trying to copy stuff and not let us bring things in and then flood the international markets with their competitors, right? And so maybe you don't want to bring your best technology over there because they'll disassemble it, copy it. There's a whole bunch of other discussions

• 13:21Speaker 00

  and dynamics that are now in vogue that weren't 20 years ago, 10 years ago. And so if you're, if you're building your business for decades, under that regime of like, you know, the government is basically incentivizing you. Hey, they're saying, hey, we will help you export your goods. Like, we want the GDP to grow. We want you to be big. And you and you grow up in that, then it's not, it's not like this crazy, like, oh, America has always been against selling to China, and he's like bucking the trend. It's like, no, he's just of the old guard.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Well, and Nvidia, Nvidia has a massive R and D center in Shanghai.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  That they've had, that I'm sure they've been.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  And this was like 90s.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Two things.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  2000s peak was like, oh, you're big enough to to expand to China. You've made it. You're an American hero. Like, you're bringing our stuff over there. Bill Clinton said, the internet will democratize China. Because trying to shut down the internet is like nailing jello to a wall.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  If Alice Huang never existed, never interacted with Jensen, I think he would have been doing all the exact same thing.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And that being said, the fact that she does exist, they had a relationship that he admits to.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  He's cheating on his, you know, his, his wife.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And then he's been doing all this other stuff. It's like, it could not look worse.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  It calls.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Could not look worse. Completely destroys all his credibility in Washington.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I don't think he can, at this point, he can't advocate one way or another without looking bad.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Because if he advocates for, you know, the status quo.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Which is like, you know, supporting, you know, broadly, you know, supporting chip sales, advanced chip sales, all these things. He looks bad because it's like, wait, you've been having an affair with the.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Are you just doing that because?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And if if he now starts advocating the other way, it looks like he was compromised the whole time.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  That's true. Wow, yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  He's in such a bad spot. And this is somebody who, he is on the road more than any other CEO on earth. He's constantly, like, the whole Nvidia game has been, Jensen's game has been, show up once or twice a day, three times a day.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Every conference, every news report, constant.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, constantly be be spreading the gospel. I don't know that he can do that anymore. I mean, it's like, it's hard to stand up in front of, in front of the same crowds and say the the same things.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  And

• 15:38Speaker 00

  It's a pick up.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just unbelievable.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Like.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, and then also, I mean, we're still in the alleged spying camp, I think, with the.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Not really. Not really.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  They're still probing. They, they don't have like a, this is what information was transferred. This is what was stolen. This was what the spying entailed.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  And there's a big question there because like, is it espionage, sabotage? Is the idea getting to Jensen's phone, screen recorded?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  This is, this seems like, this seems like not something, this seems like really bad for for China's interests if they want chips. Because you had the top guy.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, the one guy you shouldn't.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  The guy who's financing everyone.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Who already is aligned to your interests.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Seemed like it.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Seems to be that way.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  And, and is a god among gods, right? Like, when he is in a room full of all the top people, he is the one that's going around, you know, like, like, he.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Laying down the law. Everyone has to, everyone, everyone is trying to get a computer.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it seems bad. And to me, the disappointing thing is like, he was, he was one of the few people that was just sort of removed from all of the the pettiness and the infighting, right? He was like, you guys might be fighting, but I'll give you compute. I'll give you compute. I'll give you compute. And let's all be, you know, like, he was one of the few people that was able to be, you know, basically like, as long as you're buying Nvidia GPUs, you're my friend.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  We can all coexist. I'm going to support this, that.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, truly a, can I?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Historical, historical proportions. And like, it's just a very, it's a very sad day for the American technology sector. And like, yeah, I mean, I'm surprised the the stock is not selling off more.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Nvidia is getting hammered. It's down something 5%, especially relative to the NASDAQ, which is up 2.5%. So there's actually been a broader rally in the market off of Thursday, Friday's turmoil, right?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  It's probably wrote people to some degree rotating out of.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Nvidia? I don't know.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  AMD is up almost 13% today.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Wow. That's, that's wild. Yeah. Like, they were getting some claps for Nvidia.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's just like, you didn't, it's not like you needed the most elite security team to tell you that this was a bad idea. It's not like you needed to run, it's not like you needed to run a background check and be like, hey, should I be hanging out all the time with somebody that

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  may or may not control the most suspect

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  company in technology.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Even, even if, even if you, even if you want to do business broadly, it's like, send a 65 year old sales rep who's like, some just like, complete suit who's like, I got the spreadsheet out. If you'd like to buy, let's follow the letter of the law. And here's, here's how much you can buy. Having the CEO go over there and and drink wine and take pictures is rough. It's a, it's a tumultuous outcome. Well, ridiculous day. Anthropic, you saw this? Anthropic just dropped Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  This is.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Jensen's like, drop a new model.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  It, it, it's crazy. I mean, I imagine that this is just like, they have their plan in the lead up to the IPO. But like, I have a feeling that it's going to be hard to get this to break through today, given.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I think it'll be like, the, the AI is a relentless technology.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And the people involved are relentless. And it doesn't care about the midterms. It doesn't care that, you know, the, the, the, the sort of face of AI globally is having an affair with an alleged spy. It just doesn't care that the progress is gonna, is gonna continue.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  You don't think the pre-training team at Anthropic was distracted over the weekend? I gotta, I gotta keep reading these Bloomberg articles.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  A lot of the imagery that's been coming out just feels like, I just assumed it was AI because it looked so incriminating by itself that like, there's no way.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think these were maybe pulled from some sort of like Snapchat story or Instagram story or WhatsApp story or something. But she had posted a number of photos. And yeah, they look, it's like, really so many, so many photos. Jensen's memo went out to the whole team. We read a little bit of it. There's a very, there's a very funny screenshot, which I have no idea if it's true, but it looks like two people gave it the.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  The crazy thing is, like, if you play back the last couple of years, and you imagine there's a world where Nvidia is run by like a manager style CEO who's not a founder, who's just like, we're gonna do, we're gonna invest in continued R and D.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  How would that be different?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And buybacks. Like, I don't think, I don't think you run around giving, sprinkling billions of dollars all over the industry backing any team that that appears to be viable at all, giving them.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Central Bank of AI.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you don't, I, I just think, if it's not your company and you don't, like,

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Like Jensen is incredible in so many ways. And I don't think that this story needs to like, take away from that. Somebody can be like, very bad on some dimensions, right? Like, he's bad on not having affairs with alleged spies. And he's very good at, you know, being the face of, of compute, right? He's very good at, at, at, at, at playing that game.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And I think the, the sort of scary scenario, at least if you're a venture capitalist, is like, well, what happens, you know, I, as of right now, unless the story gets like way, way, way worse, which it seems like it's possible.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I see. Jensen staying in this role.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  But I think a lot of people are thinking like, what happens if you don't have this sort of like founder-led company that's willing to throw $10 billion here, $20 billion here.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  And do creative deals.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Or do creative deals by companies that that aren't really working. It's felt for it's felt for the last year that if you were an AI company, Jensen was like past the point of, let's say, like north of a billion dollars, you're like too big to fail in sort of like Jensen's worldview. It seemed like he wouldn't.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  It seemed like he wasn't going to let a company that had any relevancy fail. And I think that without him in that seat, like, I think that changes, like.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, he kind of loses some of the soft power, which he was.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Totally. And now and now it's like he can he can go and do what he's always done very well. But it's like he's gonna it's like he's giving a talk with like an insane black eye. And it's just like this gonna be this like elephant, constant like elephant in the room. And again, I'm still I'm still shocked that we're even having this conversation.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Uh, what did Dylan Patel have to say over at Semi Analysis? He says, nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. Is there a prediction market for CEO?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so right now, um, the chance that he leaves before July of next year is 31%.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  That's pretty high.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, he has a like a I I saw some reporting about the board structure. Seems like it's a lot of allies. He's the founder.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  No, it's a weird it's a weird situation where it's like him being chief executive post having an affair seems like bad for Nvidia, but also like the alternative is worse.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know who would replace him. He's kind of a singular figure. Like, who's the who's number two at Nvidia? You don't really have a clear.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  His son-in-law? I think it's I think he's a son-in-law right now. But Dylan Patel says, nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. This story will largely die down in media slash finance, but Democrats will call him into Congress. They will investigate the GPU sales to Chinese companies and hammer him with questions. That's when the shoe could drop. So oddly, it seems like the AI safety folks, geopolitically minded folks are maybe breathing a sigh of relief because this will ultimately probably result in on net less smuggling of chips to China.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I think you I think you default. They sort of the the your default assumption is that they get what they've been asking for.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Who's that?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  The hawkish crowd.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  The China Hawks.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  The China Hawks get what they want. Because like, how how can you have your strongest soldier?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  On the opposing side.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Can't really.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  No longer has credibility on the top. Is what I'm saying.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  It's like the China Hawk side has, look, China really wants these GPUs. They sent a spy for America's top guy.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  So if he continues to advocate with what he's been advocating for, it increases the likelihood that he goes like.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Like in front of Congress.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that that seems like happening for sure. If he switches up now, now that he's admitted and he's and he's under investigation, and it looks even worse. So a question I have is, um, uh, Ross Douthat on on. 60 Minutes was asked was was talking with Trump.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And he talked about like a head of a major AI company who he called and said, kiss your wife and kids. And do you like the color orange?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Kids?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  And so I think you can the the sort of one, and this apparently happened like a year ago.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And so I think it would be safe to assume that that was Jensen at that at, you know. And again, it calls into question like so much that's happened over the last year.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Right?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, it's weird because when you when you hear about Trump being aggressive towards an AI founder or AI leader, you think you think Daria, obviously, because there was the whole Darfur Harbin War battle. But it seems like with what we know now, it's actually much more jostling with Nvidia.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  On the global stage.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  At least I had the question why Jensen was so outwardly like the biggest fan of of Trump and was constantly in in taking any all over the last year, taking any opportunity to, you know, praise and and all these things. And like, he's smart enough to know that the pen the political pendulum is going to swing back and forth and that going and being the loudest, most outspoken supporter.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  It seemed like kind of a short term.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Kind of like a short term arbitrage that maybe wouldn't be worth the trade.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Didn't Apple just play the Trump two era perfectly? Tim Cook, they know he's on the way out, so they send him to the Melania screening. And then immediately you get Turnus in there, clean slate, never never overstep, never overplayed the hand. Either way, did what they had to do, you know?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  But yeah, uh, even even I feel like.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  But yeah, now now it's like the.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Quote about like it being like badass that Trump got shot or something. But other than that, it wasn't so over the top like Jensen was definitely leading in charge.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  But when you look at the the pressure that the admin is going to be under come January.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Combining that with now optically, Jensen will probably be thrown in with a lot of those kind of in just general skepticism and investigations where it's like, hey, isn't your buddy Jensen is also under investigation for, you know, blah, blah, blah.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think everybody needs to be on alert for for spies at this point. Tyler, where were you this weekend?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I was at Michigan, University of Michigan.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  And are you are you loyal to TBN or are you loyal to fraternity culture? Can you say that beer pong isn't fun?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Can you say that with a straight face or?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  I don't want to comment on this.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting, interesting. I think he might be deployed by the fraternity industrial complex to keep keep tabs on some unks. What about what about Jackson over there? You were you were you lived in Texas before you came here, right? And were you were you deployed to keep keep an eye on us Californians out here? Are you working for the Texans? I want my steak. Okay, interesting.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Here's to God and football. In 10 years from now, Street.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  Good friends live in large in Texas. Texas forever, Street.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Texas forever. Can you say the the F-150 is is not a great vehicle?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  I've only driven an F-350.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Fantastic. I I think we're I think we're safe here, but everyone needs to be on alert. And it will be, I I really do hope that the investigation unearths like, okay, like, was there spyware as a piece of this like was this?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. That's a that's the thing. Bill Bill Bishop is. Bill Bishop has had, uh, some some great commentary on this. One of the things that he brought up was like if if Jensen and Alice were ever alone and Jensen had any of his devices, it's just like now you can't you can't guarantee that that somehow or another, the Chinese state apparatus doesn't have more access to what Nvidia is doing.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there still is the question of like, if you get access to even the CEO of a major American semiconductor's phone or or computer, like, is that enough to actually speed up semiconductor production in your country? Like, because you might have like a bunch of sales reports, maybe you have access to some schematics and some some PDFs and design files, but is that enough to speed up? Or do you need machinery that you don't necessarily have access to and you need to get the physical hardware? But I I think as much optimism there as there is around this leading to increased chip controls on China from the China Hawk crowd, uh, there's probably a lot of pessimism around, okay, well,

• 29:48Speaker 00

  we have to assume that China has way more information about our semiconductor supply chain in America.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other thing that's rough is like Jensen had given a quote over the last couple of weeks saying to, uh, I think it was Bloomberg that literally saying like, our my relationship with Alice Wong was nothing out of out of the ordinary. It was a normal some I'm paraphrasing, but some of the effect of it was a normal business relationship. So then it was like, okay, you were just like lying publicly, public, you know, lying to the media, you know, within within, uh, recent history.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Uh, I do wonder what's going to happen with Fable 5.2, Mythos 5.2. Everyone's kind of expecting like a 5.5 jump. And and then also Fable's been like expensive, so it wasn't ramping as fast as Opus 5.5. So is the i i is this like, uh, is the is the goal of this model to get more adoption and and actual revenue out of it or merely use it for the for the knock on effects that you get from having a great model? But I'm sure we'll see more reactions, discuss it tomorrow. Gavin Baker weighing in, Nvidia's board stated today that it found no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Okay, that's what that was my big question. As a result of Jensen's actions, they are initiating independent investigation overseen

• 31:04Speaker 00

  by a committee of independent directors assisted by outside independent counsel that will examine all available information. This will be an unbiased, exhaustive and thorough investigation, given the fiduciary responsibilities of these independent directors. Jensen said that, uh, I support the investigation, will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I'm committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America's national security. I'm proud to and grateful to be an American. Gavin says, I've known Jensen for almost 30 years. I simply do not believe he would ever knowingly do anything to disadvantage either America or Nvidia. The only thing he has ever said to me about China is the absolute importance of keeping the American hardware ecosystem led by Nvidia ahead of China. That's it. Nvidia doesn't have a contract with TSMC.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  I don't know how real this is, but Prakash Ada Pi says Nvidia does not have a contract with TSMC. That's really all you need to know. People say it's just like a handshake.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the implication there is like he couldn't possibly be removed from.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Yep, he's got the relationship.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Because that that would. But but but at the same time, it's not exactly like if TSMC was like, oh, one of our largest customers and Nvidia has a new CEO, we don't want to give them.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Call them and see how much he wants to buy. That's going to be day one.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that was from the Dorkesh interview where he said Nvidia and TSMC don't have a legal contract. They just have this mutual trust.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Oh, weird. That's very, very interesting. I wonder what the advantages of that are.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Anyway, anything else on the on the spy?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Lulu is highlighting, uh, so Shaquille said, note that Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo has put out multiple statements in recent weeks that we now know are false, unclear, of course, if he believed them to be true at the time. John said Jensen's interactions with Ms. Wong are not unusual or unexpected. And Lulu says, no serious comms person would ever lie like this. Rule number one is never lie to the press, never lie to anyone. I assumed he believed this to be true. If so, he was deceived by his leadership and made to be a useful idiot and should resign on principle. Palmer says, there is another possibility, Lulu, one that dominates my group group chats. Jensen is sleeping with all his customers.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And so when they say his interactions were not unusual or expected, they mean he is on a rampage, seducing thousands of AI hardware execs with a glance.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Uh, it's a timeline and turmoil day for sure, for sure.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And without further ado.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Goodbye.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Love you.