Trump-Xi Summit, Space Data Center Debate, Inflation Up | Diet TBPN

Summary

TBPN Diet TBPN – Trump-Xi Summit, Space Data Centers, Inflation (May 13, 2026)

Episode Overview

This episode of Diet TBPN dives into the high-stakes Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, the ongoing drama of AI export policies, the future of orbital data centers from tech giants like SpaceX and Google, and the realities of persistent inflation. The hosts mix deep tech analysis, lighthearted banter, and current events with a distinctly irreverent Silicon Valley tone. Listeners get breakdowns of global trade, corporate diplomacy, AI race politics, and emerging tech debates.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trump-Xi Beijing Summit: Business, Geopolitics, and Tech

• Who’s on the Guest List:
  Business heavyweights traveled with Trump:
  • Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Tim Cook (Apple), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), Larry Fink (BlackRock), Jane Fraser (Citi), and Dina Powell McCormick (Meta).
• Jensen Huang’s Presence:
  Questions about whether Nvidia’s CEO was always a part of the trip or a late addition; speculation partially spurred by conflicting media reports and a Trump post correcting CNBC (01:39).
• Significance for Nvidia:
  • Nvidia is closely tied to U.S.-China chip sanctions unlike Apple, whose issues with China are broader but less acute on the geopolitics of AI and chips (02:02).
  • Musk confirmed Huang, Musk, and Trump traveled together on Air Force One—"I certainly wouldn’t want to get there. I would want to arrive on the cool plane.” (03:02, Joe Wiesenthal)
• Image, Branding, and Tech Leaders' Uniforms:
  Humorous riff on Jensen’s leather jackets and tech CEO “uniforms” (e.g., Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck); personal branding and how it can backfire with viral old video clips in a meme era (05:11–06:56).
  “There’s obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform… the flip side is, if you are always dressed the same and you never switch your wardrobe, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral.” – Joe Wiesenthal (05:36)

2. What’s at Stake: Geopolitical and Economic Stakes (WSJ Recap)

• Wall Street Journal’s Board Perspective:
  • The U.S. wants "stability" but China has larger ambitions (09:14).
  • At issue: trade, technology, Iran, AI, Taiwan, rare earths, chip exports, and overall U.S.-China relations.
  • “The best outcome may be ratifying the status quo: a truce on tariffs with a promise from Beijing not to hold the world’s rare earth supply hostage again.” (10:34)
• AI and Tech Policy Gaps:
  • While major business leaders (including some with AI interest) are present, AI lab leaders (Altman, Hassabis, Amodei, etc.) are notably absent, showing a disconnect between Silicon Valley’s inner debates and geopolitical "big picture" (12:28).
  • The real AI rivalry—questions about superintelligence, US-China future in a post-AGI/ASI world—are not being addressed at this summit.

3. Meta/Manus and Taiwanese Tensions

• Why is Meta There?
  With most Meta products banned in China, the presence seems more symbolic, perhaps linked to the Manus acquisition/relocation to Singapore.
  “$2 billion is really a rounding error when you look at all these other issues.” – Joe Wiesenthal (14:20)
• China’s 'Venus Flytrap' on Taiwan:
  • Xi wants the U.S. to formally oppose Taiwanese independence.
  • Trump’s desire for “stability” may be tested if pressured on this long-standing taboo.
  • “One mistake would be not stopping in Tokyo en route as a signal of solidarity with Japan.” (15:54)
  • The US’s stance is being closely watched by regional allies.

4. Anthropic’s Mythos AI and Japan Access

• Major AI News:
  • Three large Japanese banks are granted access to Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, previously restricted mostly to US/UK institutions (17:47).
  • U.S. government is playing an active gatekeeper: “The Secretary of Treasury is personally vetting each company that gets access to the most advanced US AI model since the risks… are so high.” – Joe Wiesenthal, summarizing Chris McGuire (18:41)
• Mixed Signals on AI Export Controls:
  • While the Treasury is ultra-strict about Mythos, Jensen Huang is simultaneously on Air Force One to sell chips to China, highlighting incoherence in US AI policy.
  • The “Mythos moment” in China could be a dramatic inflection: if local AI models catch up, how will China’s government and closely held companies react compared to the U.S.? (21:12)

5. The Space Data Center Debate (Speculative Tech)

• SpaceX vs. Google:
  • News that SpaceX and Google are discussing launching data centers into orbit—a possible next big tech arms race (23:22).
  • "How are we not talking about blimp data centers yet? ... No NIMBYISM in the middle of the Pacific if there’s just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around." – Joe Wiesenthal (23:57)
• Alternative Concepts:
  • Floating ocean blimps, undersea Atlantis data centers, geothermal power, regulatory challenges—highlighting the speculative, sci-fi nature of the next wave of data center infrastructure (24:25–24:49).
  • Google’s "Project Suncatcher" aims for prototype satellites by 2027.
  • “There’s no doubt, a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way... to build data centers.” (25:54, Tyler quoting Sundar)
• IPO Rumors:
  SpaceX IPO anticipated to be the largest ever, buoyed by these sorts of futuristic initiatives.

6. Inflation Accelerates & Macro Jitters

• Latest Data:
  • US April producer prices up 6% YoY (estimate was 4.8%); consumer inflation high due to energy shocks, linked to the Strait of Hormuz closure (Diet Coke shortages are humorously cited as an example) (26:37).
  • “Surging energy prices have pushed investors’ inflation expectations to multi-year highs.” (28:00)
• Stagflation Risk:
  • The concentration of AI-led CapEx distorts GDP; real economy growth is weak while inflation is strong.
  • “The real economy is only growing at 0.1% while suffering from 2.7% inflation over the next five years. That’s a recipe for stagflation.” – Joe Wiesenthal (29:11)
• Central Banking:
  • Debate about Jerome Powell’s legacy and Kevin Warsh possibly inheriting a tough environment, especially amid war and economic uncertainty (29:26).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Tech CEO Personas and Branding

• "There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen. Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck, Palmer Luckey with the Hawaiian shirt..."
  – Joe Wiesenthal (05:36)
• "The easiest thing to do is go bald. That's what Jeff Bezos did... He looks transformed. He looks very different."
  – Joe Wiesenthal (07:03)

On US-China Tech Stakes

• "Xi Jinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing’s competition with the United States, and he is trailing, though not by much—maybe six months by most estimates."
  – From Wall Street Journal, read by Joe Wiesenthal (11:44)
• "The Secretary of Treasury is personally vetting... companies for access to the most advanced US AI model because the risks of the model being misused are so high. And yet tonight, Jensen Huang is flying... to Beijing to sell chips so China can develop its own Mythos-level model as soon as possible."
  – Chris McGuire/recap by Joe Wiesenthal (18:41)

On the Futuristic Data Center Race

• "How are we not talking about blimp data centers yet?.. No NIMBYISM in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if there’s just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around in a circle."
  – Joe Wiesenthal (23:57)

On Macro Risks and Stagflation

• "The real economy is only growing at 0.1% while suffering from 2.7% inflation over the next five years. That’s a recipe for stagflation."
  – Joe Wiesenthal (29:11)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |----------------|---------------------------------------------------| | 00:02–04:53 | Trump-Xi Summit, VIP guest list, Air Force One | | 05:11–07:32 | Tech leader uniforms, brand-building | | 09:14–12:28 | WSJ perspective, stakes of the summit | | 12:28–15:54 | AI leaders absent, Meta’s role, Taiwan tensions | | 17:47–21:12 | Anthropic's Mythos AI, US export policy | | 23:22–25:54 | SpaceX/Google space data center debate | | 26:37–29:27 | Inflation uptick, Diet Coke shortage, stagflation | | 29:26–end | Central bankers, Powell/Warsh, episode wrap |

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Summary

This Diet TBPN episode is a fast-moving but deeply insightful recap of the most pressing issues in US-China geopolitics, AI policy, the blurring lines of tech and statecraft, and the arms race for sci-fi data center infrastructure. If you want to understand how Silicon Valley views world affairs and the business stakes of the coming decade—in both earnest and tongue-in-cheek terms—this is an essential listen.

Transcript

[Joe Wiesenthal]

The big news this week, and I'm sure what everyone will be focused on is of course, on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal. That's the Trump Xi Jinping Summit that's happening in Beijing. Trump and Xi Jinping vie for wins at summit. They're duking it out. And Trump brought. They both brought a big crew with them.

[Tyler]

A team.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah. Trump brought geopolitics, a couple, couple team sport, a couple political people that we won't even care about. But the business leaders are what is particularly interesting. So we got Elon Musk from Tesla, Tim Cook from Apple, Jensen from Nvidia, Kelly Ortberg from Boeing, Little flex there because Boeing has been able to maintain the lead in manufacturing large planes for a very long time. DJI has not been able to scale up and make a 747. What's going on over there? David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Stephen Schwartzman from Blackstone, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Jane Fraser from Citi, and Dina Powell McCormack from Meta. So we should read through the stakes of the Trump Xi Jinping Summit in the Wall Street Journal from the Wall Street Journal. Before we get into that editorial board,

[Tyler]

let's get into the more important stuff, which is, do you think Jensen was always coming on the trip? Right. There's been some speculation he got on the plane in Alaska.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

Was that just the most convenient place for him to get on or was he a late addition?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I don't know. Why would he have been a late addition? I don't know. It seems.

[Tyler]

Well, because there was. There was reporting earlier this week.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

He runs the largest company in America.

[Tyler]

I know, but there have been statements made from what I saw that he wasn't going.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I don't know.

[Chris McGuire]

Yes, well, so Trump had a truth social post that said CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited. But then he corrected it. He said he didn't bite him.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Personally, I don't know. These schedules move around. It's gotta be really, really difficult if you're the leader of the biggest in the world to move things around and commit to this. I don't know.

[Tyler]

I know, but what's more important for Jensen and his objectives?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

No, of course it's critical importance, but at the same time, there might have just been other moving pieces of like, okay, when can he go? Where will he arrive from? Where will he get picked up from? I don't know. These things always, like, shift. I don't have a good thesis. I mean, other than the fact that like, that is the company that has maybe the most tension between the trade deals with China. Like Apple obviously does a ton of business in China, but has been much less of a focus in the chip sanctions. And so having Jensen there is a little bit more of a discussion point. What do you think?

[Chris McGuire]

I mean, I think on China, like the Nvidia stuff seems like pretty fine now, but. Yeah, but Metta I think has like some conflict. Right. Because I mean, Manus. Yeah, maybe it's like not that big of an acquisition on like market cap wise, but.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, yeah, blocking it. A lot of these things, you know, in the, in the context of Silicon Valley, it's like a $2 billion deal or a company that's doing 4, 40 billion in revenue. And then you get over there and the stakes are like, you know, a trillion dollar oil market or like all the rare earths in the world. And it's your geopolitical conflict, which is obviously a much bigger deal. And so there might be more reporting that comes out about Jensen's goals there, what actually happened, how he found his way onto Air Force One. But that was confirmed by Elon Musk. Right. He said that Elon Jensen and Trump were all on Air Force One together, flying over. I certainly wouldn't want to get there. I would want to arrive on the cool plane. Can we play the video? Trump arrives in Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen in tow. I guess the rest of the business leaders came separately. Their arrival with. Are those cheerleaders or something? I don't know what they seem to be waving? Oh, flags. They're waving flags. That makes sense. Well, there they go, walking down the red carpet. Air Force One is truly stately. It's so disappointing that the economics of the airline industry didn't just get bigger and bigger. And so you find yourself very rarely on 747s unless you're flying across the world, because they do have such a presence and they're spacious inside, but we have been cramped down into the 737.

[Tyler]

Are there videos of pretty much everything where they give a proper tour of Air Force One, or is it kind of locked down?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I think they've done tours. I mean, there are several Air Force ones, I believe, that are on display at presidential libraries. And so you can go and tour them. There might be one at the Smithsonian. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure you can go walk around old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the, the current spec, like, somewhat secretive. There we go. This is Very grainy footage, it looks like. Oh, maybe it's just the middle.

[Tyler]

Kind of reminds me of Dune.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Dune? My Arrakis. That's Taiwan, though. Anyway, let's go through Jensen's pack list. He was having trouble thinking of what was he going to bring. Of course, he landed on just a ton of leather jackets.

[Tyler]

The back and even the sneakers, I feel like, are pretty iconic.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah. Like the uniform is really starting to compound where it used to just be the jacket. Soon we will know the exact brand and specs of the pants as well as the shoes, and the whole Jensen uniform will be out in full force.

[Tyler]

Yeah, the clothing industry doesn't want you to know this, but wearing just. Just getting a few pieces of clothes that you like and then wearing them until they fall apart.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Incredibly underrated. Not saying that's what Jensen's doing, but it's pretty funny. I tend to wear almost the exact same thing every day. And so sometimes people on the team will come in and be like, oh, we're matching today. Like, every day you dress like this, you will match with me.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen. Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck, Palmer Luckey with the. With the Hawaiian shirt. Big news from Anduril today. New round series. Are they running out of letters? Series H. H, series H. 51. 61 billion, something like that. Fantastic progress. You adopt the uniform, you become more iconic, you become more recognizable outside of your face and that builds your personal brand, your lore, and it helps you sort of differentiate and stand out. Right. The flip side, the thing you got to watch out for is that if you are always dressed exactly the same and you never switch your wardrobe, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral. And if you're not, if you're aging gracefully, it will look like you said them just yesterday. And that can be a big problem if, say, you're an AI CEO who a decade ago is reading some sci fi and thinking like, man, there's something to this Terminator thing. And then maybe in the past decade you've done a lot of work, you've investigated the systems, you have a more informed position and opinion. Well, the old video of you still looks like you today. And so there might be something to leveling up the wardrobe and changing the wardrobe over time that actually creates more distance between. Oh, well, clearly that was.

[Tyler]

So this is an indirect way of saying you want Jensen to be in a leather sort of like, you know, sort of trench coat eventually, like flowing robes.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Well, the easiest thing to do is go bald. That's what Jeff Bezos did. He was saying some crazy stuff back when he was building Amazon in the 90s and he's changed his opinion. It will be very evident from new clips that. Oh, that's an old one because it's very iconic. His older look now, his new look, he looks transformed. He looks very different.

[Chris McGuire]

I don't think Jens has to go bald, but he can do the. The Bezos playback was just get really jacked.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Get really jacked.

[Chris McGuire]

So as he gets more jacked, you'll just see. Oh yeah. I mean, he's looking like 320 lean right there.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

There you go.

[Chris McGuire]

Like that must be pretty decent.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

320. Jensen at 320 would be electric. Well, he's.

[Tyler]

We have a video of the Air Force One Golden Palace. Okay, pull it up.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

What is the Golden Palace?

[Tyler]

That's the.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Is that what they call the interior these days?

[Tyler]

The Air Force One that was gifted by Qatar.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Okay. And that one is never going to be in use, but going to go straight to the library, I think. Is that the idea or is it going to get flown around? Well, let's. Let's watch the.

[Tyler]

Presumably it's going to be used Golden Palace.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Really particular aesthetics here. It looks like a normal 747 on the outside.

[Tyler]

Looks like a yacht.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I feel like. Isn't there a big. There's a big swing in fuel efficiency based on the color of the plane. If you paint your plane black because you think it looks cool and it will attract more heat and you will burn a lot more fuel. And so most companies go with white. Spirit Airlines went yellow. I don't know if that had anything to do with their downfall. But you would think, is there a chance. Is there some weird economic logic where if you paint it gold, the gold will reflect the sunlight and increase fuel efficiency?

[Tyler]

Unfortunately, the exterior is not.

[Chris McGuire]

Well, so you should wrap your plane in like a mirror, like.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, maybe.

[Tyler]

But.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, I don't know if that actually reflect the most. That would probably reflect the most. Right. Mirrored plane. There are some silver. There are some silver bombers and jets that are in service across the United States Air Force. I can't call upon it right now.

[Tyler]

This really is a sky yacht chess board.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

You think anybody's played chess on there?

[Chris McGuire]

4D chess?

[Tyler]

Yeah. The whole plane is actually used for 4D chess, John.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

4D chess. AI is being put to good use visualizing Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Tim Cook having a beer and I guess a cigarette as well in China somewhere. And then look who pulled up. If you scroll down, Jensen coming in from the back looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Maybe not 320 lean, but he's certainly up there. Let's go through the Wall Street Journal's report and what the editorial board had to say about the stakes of this summit, what's actually at stake. So the United States wants st but Chinese communist leader has larger ambitions, says the Wall Street Journal Journal's editorial board. President Trump visits Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday and the pre meeting US spin is a search for stability in quotes. It's a nice idea as long as Mr. Trump doesn't think personal rapport can overcome Mr. Xi Jinping's anti American purposes. Says the Wall Street Journal. The agenda ranges from trade to technology to Iran. On trade, the best outcome may be ratifying the status quo. A truce on tariffs with a promise from Beijing not to hold the world's rare earth supply hostage again. The markets, business leaders, no one wants chaos. Everyone can sort of work around a tariff plan if it's going to stay in for a long time.

[Tyler]

For Trump to be coming and being like, look guys, all I'm asking for is a little stability.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yes.

[Tyler]

I just want stability.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

I want calmness. I don't want any conflict.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yes. Didn't he famously call himself a stable genius? Stability has been part of his brand for a long time, at least the one that he projects. Mr. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, China's weak economy is an incentive for him to cooperate and he'll Hope to placate Mr. Trump with promises of buying more farm goods. We talked about this previously, more aircraft and other things. But Mr. Xi Jinping has made that promise before and US farmers have never regained their lost market share in China. Rare earths ransom offer. The rare earths ransom offer may be more US advanced chip exports to China. Xi Jinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing's competition with the United States. And he is trailing, though not by much, maybe six months by most people's estimates. The administration wants to to talk with Beijing about AI guardrails and by all means keep the phone lines open, but don't expect much from AI Arms control and the best deterrent is US dominance on models and computing power. Beijing will be happy to make pronouncements about responsible stewardship and then pursue its own interests with little regard for norms or laws. Beijing is engaging in quote, industrial scale theft of American AI models. The Trump administration warned this year. And don't forget the Justice Department's indictment this year of a technology executive and associates allegedly running a sophisticated operation to divert high end chips to China. That was super Micro. Super micro. Yeah, they were doing the heater. What was it? The hairdryer?

[Chris McGuire]

Yeah, they were putting the sticker shipping labels on there.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Fake shipping labels. Noticeably absent from this trip are the key leaders of the top AI labs. I mean, Elon Musk is there. Yes. And Jensen is there. Obviously deeply involved in AI, as are many of the other folks. Dean of Pal McCormick at Meta. But you don't have Demis from Google, you don't have Sundar from Google DeepMind, you don't have Dario from Anthropic or Sam Altman from OpenAI. And each one of those leaders has their own complicated relationships with the federal government and the Trump administration. So it's not shocking that they aren't there, but it does feel like there's a little bit of a disconnect between the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley and the conversation that's happening on the global geopolitical stage at the highest levels. And so if you were looking for answers to some of the biggest questions posed about how superintelligence will play out in the global stage, the AI 2027 scenario, the China wakes up scenario, you're going to have to keep waiting because that's not really what this it's about. Maybe a little bit of semiconductor supply chain details and export restrictions, but not answering the big questions about what a US China relationship looks like in a post AGI world, a post ASI world, a post, you know, a fast takeoff scenario.

[Tyler]

OTP says, why is Meta there at all? Good question. All Meta platform products have been banned for quite a long time. I don't think that will change. But they have this Manus thing. I think it might just be to show some friendliness, some presence there. Again, I'd be shocked if there's any time between Xi and Trump that gets dedicated to MANUS because like $2 billion is really a rounding error when you look at all of these other issues. But.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

But it is a big question for both economies. Not not only can American companies acquire Chinese companies that have relocated to Singapore and have sort of moved out. Like, how strict will China be around maintaining talent and restricting exports of whole companies and technologies there? Even like a single sentence on it from this talk will clearly resound throughout the industry. And so the Venus fly trap that Xi Jinping is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan. Xi Jinping wants veto power over arms sales from the United States to Taiwan, and he is pressing for the United States to formally oppose Taiwanese independence as opposed to the current posture of not supporting it. Xi Jinping will argue the tweak is of no great consequence to Americans and Stoke and stroke Mr. Trump's ego that he can bring peace to one more troubled region. Yet that change would disrupt decades of US Policy that, for all its delicate diplomatic wording, has held the peace. Taiwan is not the aggressor in the Taiwan Strait. Xi Jinping fiction that opposing independence would indulge Mr. Trump may not care about Taiwan's freedom or its example that a prosperous Chinese democracy is possible, but the president doesn't want a crisis on his watch, which would be an economic and geopolitical catastrophe that's 100% accurate.

[Tyler]

He would never want an economic geopolitical catastrophe on his watch.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Xi Jinping will be looking to see if Mr. Trump suggests he won't defend Taiwan in the clutch. Trump's diplomacy is above all personal, and no one can predict what he'll do in the room. Japan and others in the region are watching with anxiety, a reminder that US Support for Taipei is an interest that informs America's alliances around the world. One mistake would be not stopping in Tokyo to advance Beijing in advance of Beijing as a signal of solidarity with Japan. Trump has said he'll bring up the case of political prisoner Jimmy Lai. But Xi Jinping won't move to release the 78 year old publisher who was convicted of bogus charges in Hong Kong, unless he believes Trump's request is more than a token gesture. The US Wants China's help on Iran, and it would be an improvement if China at least stopped actively helping the enemy. Retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery suggested last week that Mr. Trump should ask Xi Jinping directly if he's helping Iran with intelligence, and the Wall Street Journal goes on to say the larger context for this summit is that the CCP continues to be the main financier and industrial base for the world's bad actors, from Russia to Iran and North Korea. The first Trump administration understood China as a strategic adversary, military, economic and ideological. The second Trump admin is searching for detent and Mr. Trump is the chief dove. This has some merit if America spends the interlude diversifying its rare earth supply chain and passing a $1.5 trillion defense budget to rearm, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

[Tyler]

Anyway, yeah, a lot of people are speculating that there's already been significant deals that have been made and that this whole thing is ceremonial because if you bring. If you make this huge trip and you bring all these leaders of industry and then you don't come away with some significant progress, it just feels like a even bigger owl.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

In somewhat related news, Anthropic has granted Mythos access to three major Japanese banks. Japan's three megabanks are set to gain access to Claude Mythos, the powerful artificial intelligence model developed by US Startup Anthropic, as soon as the end of May. The banks MUFG Bank, Sumitomo, Mitsui Banking Corp. And Mizuho bank were likely informed of the move by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen, in a meeting in Japan on Tuesday. This will mark the first time that a company from the East Asian nation has been granted access to Mythos, the AI model, which can discover and exploit software security laws far faster than earlier. Tech had been restricted to just 50 or so corporates and organizations worldwide, including U.S. firms, U.S. banks and UK government organizations. So this isn't the first international expansion since the UK did have access. But now Japan does. Japanese Prime Minister Sane Takechi had instructed cabinet members to ramp up efforts to find cybersecurity weaknesses in Japan's infrastructure and minimize risks posed by cutting edge AI models like Mythos. Access to Mythos was likely mentioned in her meeting with Besant on Tuesday. And so Chris McGuire says tonight, the Secretary of the treasury is personally vetting and approving each company that gets access to the most advanced US AI model because the risks of the model being misused to hurt US national security are so high. Also tonight, Jensen Huang is flying on Air Force One with President Trump to Beijing to sell China the AI chips it will use to develop its own Mythos level AI model as soon as possible. The administration's AI policy remains inconsistent and incoherent. It is impossible to justify these two approaches simultaneously. And yeah, I'm still sympathetic to the export control take. At the same time, I feel like there's a larger negotiation that's going on, so I can sort of see both sides. But the interesting question that I've been noodling on that I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of is, you know, Dario has said that, you know, the open source community, China is maybe six months behind Mythos, and that seems to fall in line with the progress that we're seeing from all the American labs. And so the interesting question is, what would the Mythos moment look like in China? Because in America, there was a showdown with the Department of War and Dario going back and forth and Emile Michael, and there was threat of a supply chain designation, which it doesn't feel like ever really went anywhere because the business is still cooking and it's available on all the hyperscaler clouds and the model's being granted to Japan. And so it feels like the administration has backed off of that. But it was a really tense moment and it did call into question all these debates around what rules and what authority should rest with the private sector versus the government. And America handled it in sort of a democratic way, loosely sort of evaluating the technology, having the option to sort of nationalize. And there's this bigger discussion around that. But in China, we've seen many times where tech companies have gotten really big and it feels like the, the CCP is applying pressure to the CEOs, and high flyer is the company behind. Deepseek is in a very unique position where the founder has an immense amount of control and, you know, no matter

[Tyler]

what you think of the 2 billion of his own money, any art, really low dilution round.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah. And I'm pretty sure he's a solo founder who like, owns probably like majority control, at least majority voting control, if not majority economic control. And that's wildly different than Anthropic, where Dario had like 15 co founders, tons of dilution from, from different funding rounds. And, you know, we had talked about the SPV thing yesterday. Like, there are lots of people on the cap table. Like, Anthropic is going the way of, like a typical American company where there are lots of different stakeholders. They might be a public company soon, which means the government has more oversight as the SEC controls a lot of what they will do. And so you're in this odd scenario where you, you could have a similar level of technology deployed in China from a very closely held private company that is up against a much more aggressive government. If Deep Seek is able to catch up, you know, there's some, there's some, some evidence that, like, China's on a slightly shallower growth trajectory. But still, you know, if you take Dario's claim of six months, even if you extend that to a year, like something is going to happen there where China is going to have their own Mythos moment. And what that looks like and what we learn about it, I think is going to be dramatic and interesting. And also it's just, it's just odd that, like, there's this backdrop of all this stuff that's happening in AI in America, and then there's going to be, you know, talks over like, you guys want to buy more apples? Tyler, do you have any. Any thoughts on. On this? Am I directionally correct on the timeline or, you know.

[Chris McGuire]

Yeah, I mean, it concept seems like something's going. Like there's the graph that shows that open source is increasingly getting further and further away from your models. But yeah, I don't know, it's just like, so to tell like, what's actually going on in China. Like what? Yeah, like what happens when the CCP starts to have more control over a company? Like, what does it actually look like in instantiation?

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Can they continue to be pro competition if they need to consolidate all of the Blackwells that are coming into the country into one data center that's networked together that can actually train a Mythos level model, Right? That's a big question.

[Tyler]

SpaceX, Google are in talks to launch data centers in orbit deal between the two tech titans would give a boost to SpaceX business ahead of a historic public listing. Google is in talks for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space. Launch deal would put the two companies in partnership as they gear up to compete on orbital data centers, an unproven technology that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said is the next frontier for his rocket company. Google is also in discussions about a potential deal with other rocket launch companies. They got to at least have a stalking horse.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

How are we not talking about blimp data centers yet? I know Sergey Brin has a blimp company, Bezos has a rocket launch company. So there's a very logical line from AWS to space data centers through Blue Origin. But we got to put some GPUs on the blimps. We got to start mass manufacturing the blimps. This could be the thing. I mean, there's no NIMBY ISM in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if there's just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around in a circle.

[Chris McGuire]

Well, I think if you're already in the ocean, you should go down as well, you know. Atlantis Cooling.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Chris McGuire]

I feel like none of the ocean guys that are working on ocean robotics are thinking about, like, putting ocean at the bottom of the ocean.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah. I mean, it feels easier than. Than space data center. And the space is free, the land is free. You don't run into the regulatory stuff. Energy, Little bit tricky down there.

[Chris McGuire]

Geothermal.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Geothermal, maybe. I don't know.

[Tyler]

No, there's oil and natural gas reserves on the.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Do you have to bring on the seafood Oxygen there. Because how do you burn the oil in the natural gas water? Big diving bell tube. Yeah. Scuba tanks or something.

[Tyler]

Anyway, speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX's pitch to investors ahead of its planned IPO this summer, which is anticipated to be the largest IPO of all time. Last year, Google announced its own plans to launch Prototype satellites by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It's working with another company, Planet.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

That's a cool name.

[Tyler]

To build those satellites, tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out and then start scaling from there, says Sundar. There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away we'll be viewing it as a more normal way. Way to build data centers. A little bit of an interesting timeline. There's no doubt to me, a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way a decade or so away.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

He's being a little cautious in his language in his timelines, but Google was

[Tyler]

an early investor in SpaceX, announced printing 1% of the company. Not bad. The other funny dynamic from SpaceX's deal making recently is given that the OpenAI startup fund was an early investor in, I believe, Cursor's seed round. True $8 million round OpenAI. At least the startup fund will have some meaningful exposure to SpaceX.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Yeah, SpaceX, an OpenAI backed company. That's the way people will introduce it. OpenAI backed SpaceX IPO?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I thought it was. It was quite interesting having that happen while the whole trial was going on.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Everyone owns everything. Everyone has diversified into every, every company at this point. Basically we can flip over to the other financial news that's making headlines on the COVID of the Wall street journal. Inflation accelerated 3.8% last month. Not good news. Joe Wiesenthal has a couple posts, but one is just man, and he says the headline U.S. april producer prices rose 6% year over year. The estimate was 4.8%. So obviously the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having an effect. We were talking about Diet Cokes. You would think that the caffeine doesn't come from the Middle East. The delicious caramel flavor or whatever else they put in this, it does not come from the Middle east, but aluminum. Actually there are smelters in the Middle East. Aluminum is in shorter supply because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And so Diet Coke is rapidly going out of stock. And so you need to load up if you're prepared.

[Tyler]

How many you got four or five pallets.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

I have not actually gotten any. I'm not stockpiled Diet Coke yet. But who knows, Maybe prices go up. That's what inflation represents and Wall street is getting more anxious about it. So we can read through this. Surging energy prices have pushed investors inflation expectations to multi year highs. Tuesday's hot readout on consumer prices is intensifying Wall Street's anxiety about inflation. Even before the latest release of the Consumer Price Index, inflation expectations had been climbing, a potential trouble spot in the market where stocks have largely shrugged off the US Iran conflict and the resulting energy shock. And so investors bet on inflation by buying and selling both ordinary US Treasuries and those that hedge the risk of inflation, called tips. Treasury inflation protected securities. The gaps between the yields of those two types of bonds, known as the break even rate, recently hit the highest level since October of 2022, according to federal Reserve data, suggesting that investors expect annual inflation to average around 2.7% over the next five years. Now that's not entirely doom and gloom, but the risk here is that the AI boom, the GDP numbers are sort of concentrated in AI capex and data centers. It's not evenly distributed. The real economy is only growing at 0.1% while the real economy is suffering from 2.7% inflation over the next five years. That's a recipe for stagflation. Stagnation plus inflation. A very rough thing for any economy to go through and something that the market and the economy and the politicians should be focused on in some ways.

[Tyler]

Who knows how history will view Powell but he landed the plane.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

He did.

[Tyler]

And then we get war in the Middle east and and now Kevin Warsh in some ways looks like he'll have just as tough of a job.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Potentially. Potentially. Leave us 5 stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the [e-mail] and we will see you tomorrow at 11am Pacific Sharp.

[Tyler]

We love you.

[Joe Wiesenthal]

Goodbye.

[Tyler]

Goodbye.