YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Campbell

lines on the record: 65
first: 2026-01-14
most recent: 2026-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“When you go from zero sum to negative sum, just get out of the relationship as fast as possible, you know, like just pay whatever you have to get out of the poker game because when the other, there is this classic auction from auction theory called all pay auction, which is a negative sum game where like, you know, you bid one and I bid two and now no matter what, you have to bid one. You've already paid that one. Now you're going to pay three. Now I'm going to pay four. You get these all pay options where they go for like 10 times the value of the thing itself. Maybe not 10 times, but you know, and they consume all the surplus. So that's you got to watch out for negative sum games.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know to the end of the match or whatever, and you look around there and you go, yeah, like maybe we can get Korea to build a destroyer, but like, can we get them to build 20 destroyers in a year? You know what I mean? Like, can we get them to build, like, how do we get our chips if Taiwan gets taken over? So it's that level of what if we had to 10x everything, then we would be kind of hosed. And so I think that that is really true. And you would probably have that be important because those big conflicts and these big capital runs tend to be about resource mobilization. But right now, I don't think it's, but that's why both sides are kind of teetering, right? The game is still kind of zero-sum, positive sum, still some trade. What you have to worry about, and I'll kind of close on this, is like when the games turn negative some, I got divorced once, okay? So this is from experience.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could imagine if we didn't get Chinese TVs for like a couple years, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Korea makes TVs, Japan makes TVs. We would kind of figure it out. Yes, there's some of these minerals that go into magnets or radars or night vision or all this stuff. It'd be hard to get that stuff. We'd probably be okay. It's really about the deep tail of We don't have that supply, and we need 10 times more because we're going to fight”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To some extent, we don't know, okay, where you can always get around some of these things. Like they're getting H100s. How are they getting those? It's not that hard to get some metal. They have a lot of capital flight problems. So with Leave, I mean, it would matter. I think the real way it matters is if you can somehow imagine like a world war that doesn't have nukes in it where it's not just about like facilitating the amount of stuff that we have now, but it's like I need 20, 155 millimeter shells. I need 5,000 F35s. I need 10,000 tanks. Holy moly. I've done a little bit of the back of the envelope on both the AI level and the conflict level. And the AI level is probably the peaceful version of this. And so that's why it's converging. But if you do this like, oh my God, we need a ton more stuff. That's where it becomes almost existential. It's not that that is essential for now if like.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last question here on China and how it relates to metals is obviously, yeah, Trump has had the stick of tariffs and China has had the stick of precious rare metals. How strong is that rare metals stick? I feel like that is something that I've heard a lot of different opinions on. I'm curious your thoughts.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it from that old movie, you know, it's like No, man. Like, we're actually doing pretty well, and we're not using that strength. And I think eventually I'll use that strength more.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you know, just think about for a second that there is twice, I don't know, his actual numbers right now, but two to three times more money in China than in America. Just think about that. If every bank account got zeroed out in China, could they really buy the American money twice? Could they buy all the bank accounts in America? No way. That's crazy. Okay. And yes, there are two to three times or four times more people still crazy. And yes, doesn't mean I don't want it. tower commercial building in Shanghai. Those are pretty cool. I'm not saying those aren't good assets. Okay. I'm just saying there's too much money and it's on a house of cards. And that is our strength. Our strength is that our transparency, our accountability, our markets, our regulatory environment, there's a reason why American Capital Markets are the best capital markets on earth. And it's not a coincidence that it's a liberal democracy. And so this is where I think we're almost like not, it's like we're so money we don't even.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One two trillion dollars of capital flight that they call Arizona Emissions, and now they juice their current account. They still have a huge current account surplus, but a lot of that money leaves. I think that that is the weakness, the strategic weakness that one, Westerners don't really appreciate. And two, is definitely a third rail because when I talk about it, I get a million bots and 50 cent army people like screaming at me on Twitter. So like.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we'll figure it out. And again, like because our system is not broken but kind of janky in need of reform, we tend to fix problems that are an emergency, not a chronic problem. So, oh my God, we really need this thing and we actually figure it out. We really need a COVID vaccine. We figure it out. And I think that that's what I see the administration trying to do, which is communicate that it is actually that level of seriousness. And yeah, the cat is out of the horse is out of the barn, the cat's out of the bag, the cat's out of the barn. I don't, you know, like when they can now sell to everyone but America, you have less leverage, right? So that's an argument to be even more aggressive and extreme than you would have been before because you can't contain, right? And I think they're lying about their exports, but that's a whole other story. Just go look at the balance of payments, errors and omissions for 2005, 2020. They had about one.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, when I reflect on what happened in April and those ensuing couple months, I was like, okay, well, perhaps when I see the reactions to it, it's they want to be able to isolate China. So they need to make sure everybody's on the same page and that we're trying to decouple and isolate China and get everyone in the same page so that they don't just go start rerouting to Vietnam or wherever. And I was sympathetic to that idea. But now when you look at how it's panned out, like in reality, you know, exports from China are doing great. So I'm curious, like, how do you like, how do you see this going up next? Like, is this idea of, or Besson calls a strategic decoupling? Like, do you see a runway for that happening?”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would anybody really claim that they haven't fundamentally changed the legal and the economic and the jurisprudential system in Hong Kong? Like they have broken that now, it wasn't a treaty. Oh, it was an agreement, not a treaty. That's because you got duped 40 fricking years ago into calling it not a treaty because they knew they were going to do this. And so rather than just keep taking it, he's saying, look, I'm going to have to show you guys that we're in this like, whether it's a mattresses or just a TIFF, you know, what are you going to do about it? So anyway, long answer to a very good question, but sorry.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It. And if you're a China watcher, that's a very classic behavior. People are going to call me jingoistic or whatever. It's not. It's, I think, a strategy. It's this notion of, you know, we say we're going to do something. And then we kind of defect from what I would call the coalition. And then when you claim we've defect, it's just immediate gaslighting in your face. And I learned this when they started working on the banking system because it's the same kind of modus operandi. Like Hong Kong, man. Hong Kong's still there. We're still in the 50 years.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then immediately start negotiating over it, right? So the deal is not one off, it's always evolving and always a conversation. And what you saw was that The Allies, the real allies, in my opinion, said we're willing to negotiate. What can we do? We'll be reasonable. And some of them got off with a slap on the wrist or some of them got off with a tweak and a regulation or this or that. And he goes, okay, you're 5% now. You're 10% now. And China's like, let's go to trade war immediately. Let's suit up. We're ready to go. Critical minerals, this, that, this, that. You're getting it. You're going to get it, you know, those negative energy. And it shows you what is your opponent thinking. And if you think back to phase one, 2016, 10 years ago, why is Trump picking on China? Oh my God, blah, blah, blah. And like the phase one deal wasn't even important, right? It just set a precedent that we couldn't even trust them to buy some soybeans or whatever.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of show what the other side of really believes and wants. Now, you might think that's immoral. I don't think it's necessarily immoral if you're playing a poker game like you can bluff, but if you remember back to when he did the, you know, quote unquote crazy Brings up the tariff table, and he's got some cookie formula, and he's like, they're going out for everyone. Now, first of all, imagine if he came out and said, I've done a unique study on each of these individual countries and you should be 23%, you should be 15%, you should be 40%, and everyone would just yell at all this stuff, right? So instead, they pick some kooky formula and they show the formula. It's like based on inputs and output, experts and imports.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both are right. Like, it's not enough. It's the current equilibrium will not stand, basically. And so the tariffs is a classic example of this horseshoe because it's something that came completely out of left field. Everyone's like, oh my God, everyone agrees with the neoliberal consensus in free trade. How could you possibly do this? That's so crazy. And, you know, Trump's running around and saying, wait a second, like everyone's getting rich off our market. We are the predominant, you know, center of global capital, our enemies and our rivals tap into that system just as much as other people do. We then enrich them and we don't even use it as a source of foreign policy. And so I had this little micro tweet that went microviral or whatever back in, I don't know, spring, which was like, I view Trump as playing what a game theorists would call mixed strategy equilibrium, meaning he uses chaos. He uses randomness to”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feels like a rearguard action. I'm kind of of the view. It's not my only person I've used is that we got to get saved by robots and AI. That's basically it. And we got to go as fast as possible. I'm an accelerationist when it comes to technology in that sense. I don't think that by passing more laws or yelling at more legislatures or packing or unpacking the Supreme Court, I don't really care. I would prefer to just delete everyone in government and reset the whole thing. You know, same structure, just all new people. I think that's one of my new wacky ideas, right? Where you get five years and that's it or whatever. We give everyone two more years and we reset. Barring something like that, it's got to be robots and AI. Like you're not going to fix the pothole problem and the bridge problem in this current equilibrium. You just can't. You know, if you're a Republican, you'll say, oh, it's all those crazy EPA rules. You know, if you're a Democrat, you'll say we need more unskilled labor. Maybe neither are right.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody would be surprised if we shut down, I would say. Yeah, yeah. When I put together those three big themes, it feels like I don't know if you agree with this, but it feels like one of the big Expressions of that is what we've been seeing with the tariff policy over the last year and the idea of reshoring because look our roads suck and we can't get anywhere and people are upset and we want to get jobs because there's no factory jobs anymore. Like that's one version of it. There's the use the trade policy and our tariffs as a tool to try to make sure that we win the AI race or whatever or that we just like dominate. And so there's this like us versus the east type of idea. So I don't know. It feels like it kind of sits in all of them. So I'm curious like how do you see that whole thing going on right now in contrast to these big three themes you just talked about?”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work out what to do. Shutdown is an example of that, right? If we shut down again, which I don't know if we will, but I have no information here. But like If we shut down again, it's an example, right? It's an example of kind of the system trying to find the new equilibrium.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consumption taxes as opposed to income taxes will help this inheritance taxes will help this. I'm not a big fan of just giving much money to the government, but something to kind of change that dynamic to me, it's not even a, I'm advocating it. It's more, it's inevitable. It's that you just look at what I felt as a, now I'm like an old millennial, I guess, but as a millennial, in like a little way just seems really, really strongly felt by the next generation men, women, you know, white, non-white, immigrants, non-immigrants, the current consensus cannot hold. And so I think that that's what the horseshoe is, basically. It's where do we go? And we hope that the coalition that emerges isn't some really radical group that has some crazy idea, but manages to swing everybody because of all the other things that, you know, for their good intentions, the Democrats and Republicans can't kind of.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I should be able to get whatever the hell that Chinese Shanghai train from the airport is. Great, let's do that. You know what I mean? And go from San Francisco to LA in an hour and a half or whatever. I want to go from San Francisco to New York in eight hours and stop in Chicago and Detroit and whatever. And there is so much economic capacity that you would unlock with just that one eye stupid idea, right? And then you go look at our inability to build like, you know, that classic photo of Newsom's like 20 foot length of concrete that they managed to get in like Bakersfield or whatever and they spent like 20 million dollars and go my god like high speed rail is a disaster and it's like yes high speed rail is a disaster right now because america can't build stuff that breach is so broken in in baltimore or whatever right like there's still crazy potholes outside of jfk robots will help fix this new social organizations will help fix this things like in my opinion”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be you know kind of straw man as just in terms of sarcastic dynamics of that situation, it's just too unstable. There's not enough of a tie binding them together. And so things like national service become way better ideas when you have crazy inequality. And it doesn't have to be national service to go shoot people. Maybe it's go pick up trash or plant trees or build a data center or, you know, make a train system that you can work and get to where you need to go where public transit doesn't suck. Like there's this huge potential for what do you do when the old consensus is dead. And I think that that transition will happen around some conflict because historically it tends to happen around conflict. When you look a lot of the kind of big leap forwards in America, it was like right around and after the Civil War, World War I, World War II, a little bit of Vietnam, you know, like intercontinental railroads. So I have a little joke, which is like, we need a new intercontinental railroad.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is this notion of meritocracy, which is dead, kind of, which says that if there's at least some signal to him being the richest man on earth, which there obviously is, if you believe the game is not totally hosed, then you want him to allocate capital more than average than the average person. So it's not bad for Carnegie to have a lot of money or for Gates to have a lot of money or for Zuck to have a lot of money. This is fine. Like they're going to do things with it, right? Like look at Bezos. He's also going to the stars and he's also trying to help media institutions and you might not like his politics, but he's at least trying. Okay, what I am not okay with is there being no test except for a birthright, right? Or genetics or whatever, which is not a strong enough signal to have trillionaires. That to me is where we get to civil war, honestly. And not because of anything to do with the trillionaires and not to do with anything with the, you know, the poor and huddled masses or whatever it is.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some level they're like, you know, big law banking or whatever. What do you do? What do you do with your life? Are you going to be a Twitch streamer? You know what I mean? What the hell? And so I think that What I mean by the horseshoe is real. And then I put together all these kooky policies to be like, well, wait a second, what happens when Elon Musk is worth $20 trillion? It's not that far away. It's a 20x on where he is now. He's already got him 10,000 X. I'm actually totally cool with Elon having $20 trillion. He would do all kinds of, I mean, you know, not everybody has his politics or whatever, but he'd probably do some cool stuff with it, like in terms of building things. When I am a lot cool with is his kids inheriting a trillion dollars. Just think that's stupid. I think from a capital allocation perspective.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is unsustainable. It's 100% unsustainable. And I'm not deep enough to figure out how I just kind of put the label of the horseshoe is real to say this is how political realignments happen. You know, if you're a Redalio, you start talking about civil wars and dooming on the timeline and that kind of stuff. I'm not that extreme. I think we figure it out. And if we don't, I think we end up with something better in the end. But I think it makes total sense that. If you're coming out of college and you spent two years paying Harvard or whatever, $80,000 a year to take a Zoom class, and then you work to be a lawyer, you spend another $200,000 in debt to go to whatever Yale Law School, they're probably fine. And then in five years, like 75% of those first year associate jobs are going to be gone”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Axis is actually a bad abstraction because you have multiple dimensions, right? We now know AI, we know about multiple dimensional matrices and vectors and that kind of stuff. And you go, well, just take old versus young for a second, right? Boomer versus Zoomer. And like if you're a Zoomer, forget the white Caucasian male thing. If you're a Zoomer right now and you wake up and globalism is dead and the robots are going to take your job and you're not going to get social security and you're not going to be able to buy a house and you know mortgage rates are super high and the boomers no offense boomers, I love you are clutching on to power harder than a walking cane or whatever. I mean Generation X hasn't even come into control. It's crazy. Okay. Yeah.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the short way of answering this question is why are young white men in America so conservative? There's another way of thinking about this. And I don't actually think they're that conservative. This is what the horseshoe is. The horseshoes is framework of like the old left, right.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so the last big thing you mentioned is the horseshoe being real disintegration of the neoliberal consensus playing out, compounded by intergenerational and intersex zero-sum thinking, new political realities emerging.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, in terms of my markets, I'm not the best stock timer. Okay, I'm usually try to run a little bit short against my fundamental views. There are people way better at that than I am. But yeah, I 100% agree with you that we're not as levered. The big CapEx players are not as levered. Private credit is getting involved in data center spend, but they're not, it's still, we're still 20, 30% of the way through that thing. And a lot of things haven't even started. And that's where it gets expensive. That's where you got to, you know, get the trucks and the dirt moving and the teamsters show up or whatever. That's where it gets expensive. And I don't think we're there yet at the peak.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guns to the races or whatever it's called, conclusion is that they just seem totally incapable or uninterested in doing that, just 100%. Evergrand still has not been resolved. It's like five years later, like is this thing, you know? And that's because they had this huge wall of other debt where if they take a loss on Evergrand, they have to take a loss in other stuff and the dominance start falling. And so, you know, maybe the answer is just in the end everybody prints. And again, that then leads you back into gold and silver because you go, oh my God, everybody prints and globalism's dead, so treasuries aren't as valuable as they were in 2005. So more people are going to buy gold, more people are going to buy gold. And this is the super bowl case for silver. Central banks are going to come back to silver, right? Just like they did for thousands of years. Because why? Well, the worst case scenario is you get a bunch of solar panels, man. Way better than gold, you know. So like that's when I get all excited. But that is definitely.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, and American households aren't that levered. The governments are all levered all over the place. And honestly, like when I think back on when I started this kind of wacky path of kind of being. Know a hedge fund guy who's also an AI guy. The reasoning was actually to kind of hedge themselves. It was this notion of like, I wanted to bet on AI. I left Bridgewater to kind of start an AI company more or less. I was like, the only thing that could mess this up is China blowing up. That's my crazy brain. And I still kind of think that in a way, which is like, you know, I don't think we're going to get a depression or any kind of real horrible recession in the US without China really contracting. the kind of”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're getting burned right now. But overall, we're not that levered. I don't know. I don't feel like the probability of default is that high when you look at how levered these companies are and just like the market in general.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investing evolves risk, including possible loss of principal. For more information and important disclosures, visit grayscale.com. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk, terms, and conditions apply. Do your own research. Yes, I saw there's actually, I don't know if you read it, but there's like a BIS report that came up this week looking at talking through the financing of this AI buildout, and they were looking at how, yeah, it was quite interesting. I'll send you a link. But yeah, I mean, it just seems like, yes, although we've swapped from these big megacorps, they're using all their free cash flow to fund these things. And that kind of game got tapped out over the last few months, and now we're shifting to debt issuance and whether that's public corporate bonds or in the private credit market. That's where we are now. But overall, it seems like, you know, we're not that levered, really, when you look at like there is a lot of runway. So I mean, maybe it's just all about the price that people pay for it. Like if you paid an arm and a leg for an oracle bond a couple months ago.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between these expectations, where the kind of short term, medium term investors who do not have three year or four year time horizons, who kind of have quarterly time horizons or six-month time horizons get over their skis, there's obviously some potential private credit problems just in general in the economy, and you get a little bit of an air gap there, which is a great buying opportunity personally.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“more of this is being paid out of cash flow the people doing investing are actually these mega companies these kind of oligopolies that own the future anyway um you know core weave being kind of the interesting example where it's like the debt says this thing's going bankrupt you know but like it could go either way uh and so you see people buying kind of straddles on as a result of that which i kind of think is not a bad idea um you know a little bit of equity credit are for those uh punters like me but really the leverage is what you have to watch the leverage and the cash flow and so that's why i think that i think a lot of these promises of capex aren't going to happen because they don't have the chip so they don't have this energy they don't have the permitting or the whatever um and that will help a little bit um won't help growth because you know that's going to peak the build but i think you're not going to see the revenue really until back half of 27 so i think we're in the you have the potential for an air gap”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“cycles and canals. There were boomba cycles in turnpikes, literally roads. We used to have road bubbles, okay? There was, you know, I don't know, 20 emerging market South America boom cycles or something, right? There was many oil cycles. And so we have to watch that. And I think people are smarter than they were in 2000. I think.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's two questions to kind of disambiguate. One is, is the trend real? Is this thing real? And we have confirmation that it's super real and we're actually still pretty early. Okay. So that is the thing that everybody has in their head. The second is, and I put this in the blog, but if you look at the history of panics or crises or stock market meltdowns or whatever, they are almost always a result of something that was a really good idea. You had to kind of CapEx cycle or an investment cycle where the money flowing into that good idea juices the returns for the early investors so much that it gets levered on top and people start betting more on the price appreciation than the thing itself and the pace of the price appreciation and you know that's that's what people are saying kind of about silver too they're like oh the price is you know it's too steep and and that's you know not a bad argument and so you know there were boom bust cycles in railroads there boom”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going faster than the actual compute. So I see kind of 28 29 is where I think it catches up and I see a gap in 27. Rough math. I could be wrong, but you can kind of see both things happening. And then if you're, again, if you're that seed investor in OpenAI are anthropic, who cares, man? You know what I mean? Like they're in the lead. They have the future. That 28, 29, 30 is coming. And Anthropic is worth $350. I'd probably buy it there. So, yeah.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's really, I view it as very empowering because not because all the nefarious bits, just because of the human potential of what you can do, we can actually own, control, like interact with something in that way. And so Nvida came up with a local desktop that's like 100 gigabytes. It's kind of slow. But you can kind of see it coming. You can see a world where you actually have a, you know, an agent that's pretty smart in your headphones or in your watch or in your button that doesn't look like crap or whatever, you know, and it doesn't go to the cloud. It just like is there. And that is a world where we need a lot more computers, man. And so everything about that is kind of getting priced in. There's probably a little bit of a gap where the expectations and the stories that the frontier labs have to sell to get the big enough compute to make the next model are kind of go.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants to talk to the cloud. Okay, but the tools and the AI is almost at the point where if you're a quant, definitely, if you're an analyst at some investment bank, you can probably figure it out. And that means you're going to want a model that runs on your computer. And there's this magical feeling, and I'll get off my soapbox in a minute here, but there's a magical feeling about running a local model because you do kind of own it. It's your model. You talk to it. No one's looking at what you're saying. And so, you know, when I benchmark Chinese models versus American models, open source, not open source, and I ask them about Taiwan, if you go to deep-seek or you go to Gwen and you ask you too many questions about Taiwan or Peng Shui or whatever, they're going to record your IP in some database, right? If you say what your crazy steps to chat GBT and then you go do a bunch of crazy stuff, like some lawyers are going to requisition those chat logs, like that's not the case when you're operating on a local model. And I think that that's really scary to people.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's mostly happening in coding right now because it's kind of a scoped sandbox where, like, you can't blow up stuff too much. But you start to get a sense of, you know, you feel the AGI. The robots are basically as smart as a human in these like scoped paths now and faster. And so that kind of logic is paying off. And you can extrapolate forward your demand for compute. And you're like, oh my God, we're going to need more chips or any more video cards, any more laptops. You know, I had four or five literal laptops talking to each other with agents over the break. And I feel like I need to buy more computers. You know, it's like 2002 or whatever. I need more computers. And I think that's also going to happen in a really big way in the next year or two at a local level. So we're all kind of socialized to the cloud. Oh, the cloud's amazing. Go to the cloud. The cloud's also a pain in the butt to use. You got to like sign in all these crazy systems. Like AWS is not user-friendly at all. Like no one's not a developer.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beach is AI. This is not a new story, but it's very clear there's some sort of platonic relationship between compute and intelligence and more intelligence takes more compute to train and more compute to use and compute is about chips and energy, right? And so the energy, as we talked about before, is a big ingredient. That's hence the solar and the natural gas and the nuclear. And then the chips and all the things that go into them and the ecosystem. And so I think we were talking about this a little bit before we got on air, but if you started to play. Of forward leaning products or agents or coding environments where the AI can actually take actions for you and interact with your world”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what you've seen the US and specifically do is kind of say we were pretending that we were that for 40 50 years but we're actually not and so we have to have our ambitions in line with our capabilities”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you know, kids have to play video games, and there's, you know, and we have a little bit of that, it's not 100% one versus the other. But yeah, it definitely feels like, yes, you can make more apples and I can make more bananas, but do you want to? And, you know, does it make sense? And if we end up in some sort of Kumbaya world in 100 years where there's some like kooky world government that everybody actually doesn't hate and we can mediate all these, you know, all these problems via that system, then you can imagine it being a global thing, but that probably requires a true like. Creepy global government with like space lasers and like, you know, kind of what Elazar Yukowski wants, which is if you build too many data centers, you get zapped from Sky or whatever. So we're not there yet, right?”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad. We kick you out of the club. Now, the thing I think that, and I don't want to go too into this because it gets kind of, you know, spooky scary or whatever, but I think the thing that most people don't appreciate is, you know, how much that trade and the positive some relationships on both sides, when you have a geopolitical rival, leads to an inability to deal with the problem because a lot of your elites are frankly captured and people have big positions in China. China holds big positions in them. There are supply chains that are dependent on them. Like, you know, imagine you went to Tim Cook and you said, you got to get an Apple tomorrow. You got to get Apple out of China tomorrow. He'd be like, well, I have 10 billion, 100 billion reasons to say no or whatever. And there's influence involved in that and it's hard to move. And that's something I think we're vulnerable to as a kind of Western capitalist society as opposed to China, which says, I don't want daycares anymore and there's no more day.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the logic of comparative advantage is still a law at some level, but it's a non-ideological non-geopolitical non-real abstraction. It just says human apples and I make bananas and I focus on bananas and you focus on apples and we can trade and we'll get more apples and bananas than we would if we just made both ourselves. The problem is like if my bananas turn into tightened missiles or whatever, it's like a big deal. That's the kind of lens on top, which is like you should think about free trade potentially as a club that you get access to for good behavior. And if you look at the behavior, if you look at the like sanctions behavior of the West and the US in general over the past 20 years, 40 years, that's kind of the modus operanda we kind of back into, which is you get sanctions. If you do something.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Zombie documentary of mine from like the history channel, but it's like these groups of like two to four guys and gals who go up to Alaska and they literally just like you know take rocks and like shake them and like rinse them with water and then they hope the gold particles like fall into these little mats and they take the mats out and they rinse them and that's how they get like thousands of ounces of gold or whatever but they're using incredible amounts of energy to do this driving tractors around and earth moving and ripping off you know 40 yards of topsoil and stuff so you know very interesting place for miners i'm not a mining expert but you're seeing that in the prices so that's where we are in the movie you know i think this is a 10-year trend not a two-year trend um because it takes a long time to set up these supply chains but that's kind of where we are”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can imagine that switching sides game over for OPEC, right? And not that OPEC really matters anymore because the US is a swing producer of oil, but it means that we might be very well supplied borrowing some crazy supply chaos in energy, in oil in particular. And so that's really good for miners because miners tend to consume a lot of energy, consume a lot of petroleum. If you've ever watched it like Gold Rush, it's a favorite vacation.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next door and get it. And so we're in this kind of transition period. And I think that's what you're seeing in the metals, obviously. And I think that's what you're saying in the world. Now, what's interesting is that it's not really an oil story. It's actually the opposite. It's more of a metals and minerals and stuff story because the crude market looks relatively well supplied. And now with Venezuela, that's probably going to get better. Now it could get worse for a while before it gets better. And same with Iran. But Iran and Venezuela together in their peak were like 30-40% of OPEC.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China did a very good job in securing supply chains and going basic industry up to even think of it as like first industry, second industry, third industry in their economic ports. And they kind of built this, you know, we'll take all the grimy stuff that you don't want to do and then create a supply chain to refine our earths or manufacture steel or XYZ. And now the West and America in particular can't make that stuff. And so the death of globalism is it just mean, oh, the probability of conflict is higher because even if we don't get actual shooting, it means that resource nationalism is actually a real big deal. And so you're seeing this all over the place with trade restrictions, tariffs, strategic investments, scramble for various XYZ. And the hope is that it doesn't turn into kind of imperialism of the kind that we had in the 1800s and the 1700s and all the way back to the Egyptians or whatever, where it's like, oh my God, I need my moldabenium or whatever. I got to go.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Underlying arguments and logic for mercantilism, resource nationalism, imperialism were mostly a function of a lack of faith in an ability to procure the resources you need in a peaceful way. And there's examples on both sides going back hundreds and thousands of years of people invading X because they wanted some sort of asset or land or claim or whatever. And again, when there's this hegemon who's super powerful and a rules-based order and you can just buy that stuff, you don't have to worry about it, but it becomes existential when you can't guarantee that supply, whether it's food or energy or chips or some random mineral on the table you've never heard of with like 500.”
2026-01-14 · Forward Guidance · The End of Globalism, AI Acceleration & the Political Horseshoe | Alex Campbell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT