Team Favorite: AI-Era Internet, Spaceport Investment, Bolivia’s Investability

Summary

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Wall Street Week: AI-Era Internet, Spaceport Investment & Bolivia’s Investability

Host: David Westin (Bloomberg)
Date: August 7, 2026
Episode Theme:
This episode covers three major stories of global capitalism: the shifting role of the US dollar in light of geopolitical conflict; how artificial intelligence is reshaping the Internet’s economics (including its impact on publishers and creators); and investment opportunities and challenges in frontier markets, with a focus on spaceport development in the Dominican Republic and political reforms in Bolivia.

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1. The Future of the US Dollar Amid Geopolitical Shifts

[01:40–12:03]

Key Discussion Points

• Conflict in Iran and Dollar Decline:
  The ongoing war in Iran could accelerate the decline of the dollar’s dominance as a global reserve currency, with China working to expand its own currency’s international role, especially in commodity trade.
• Military Power and Currency Strength:
  Historical parallels (e.g., British Navy, Spanish Armada) show the interplay between military might and currency status.
• Role of Gulf States:
  The Gulf’s confidence in the dollar is rooted in historical U.S. military protection. If U.S. influence wanes, the future of oil pricing in dollars and Gulf currency pegs comes into question.
• Rise of Multipolarity:
  The global financial system is trending toward multipolarity with pressures both external (China's and Europe’s moves for currency alternatives) and internal (U.S. debts and political gridlock).
• Interest Rate Shift:
  The “safe asset” premium historically attached to U.S. long-term debt is shrinking, signaling waning global trust.

Notable Quotes

• Ken Rogoff (Harvard Professor, ex-IMF Chief Economist):
  "[The Iran conflict] is definitely going to help China accelerate getting other countries to use its currency, particularly for Chinese imports." [03:00]
  "The Gulf states are a really important anchor of the U.S. dollar … because so many are pegged to the dollar, they hold more dollars. They've been important to our business model. Not as important as China, but important." [05:39]
  "There's pressures from the outside that are very slow moving … and problems on the inside where we're the richest country ever, ever, ever. But we still have trouble paying our bills and running these crazy large debts." [07:55]
  "On short-term debt, there’s still a premium to dollars. It’s still the safest asset. Long-term debt, it’s not there anymore." [09:26]

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2. The AI-Era Internet and Death of the Click

[12:03–26:57]

Key Discussion Points

• Zero-Click Trend:
  The shift from Web search traffic sending users to publisher sites toward AI-generated answers (zero-click searches), deeply undermining ad-supported media.
• Impact on Publishers:
  Publishers, especially those dependent on Google search referrals, see dramatic traffic declines and must find new revenue streams or face extinction.
• New Business Models:
  Large media groups like People Inc. (CEO Neil Vogel) diversify revenue through brand licensing—including selling content to AI (LLMs), branded products, and social platform expansion.
• Content Licensing to AI:
  Publishers are starting to block unauthorized AI crawlers and license content for LLM training—creating an emerging “found money” revenue stream.
• Potential ‘AI Shaped Internet’:
  Concern that, eventually, AI companies will both fund and control content production, echoing platforms like TikTok but on a web-wide scale.
• Impact on Journalism and Democracy:
  The consolidation of information sources, especially the disappearance of local outlets, is seen as a threat not just to journalism but also to democracy.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Rand Fishkin (Search/SEO Analyst):
  “In 2011, Google was sending north of 70% of all searches to third-party websites...and today that number is in the mid-40s and falling. That clearly indicates this zero click trend.” [15:52]
  "This death spiral that you’re describing has been something that people have theorized over the last three or four years with no discernible solution.” [24:07]
  “It would not surprise me if OpenAI or Anthropic looked a lot like TikTok, where they have a creator fund and they pay creators a certain amount based on the amount of traffic, page views and value to the training set.” [24:41]

• Neil Vogel (CEO, People Inc.):
  “Our audience on the Internet was 75% from Google Search in 2022 … that is now 25% of our audience.” [18:28]
  "We license content to LLMs and AI engines...we partnered with Cloudflare to block every AI crawler you could possibly block. So you cannot get access to our content unless you pay us for it.” [21:42]
  “We make about 50% more content than we made when this whole process started for roughly the same cost. And humans make every single thing you read and see because we’ve been able to use AI in the background to streamline so many processes.” [25:57]

• Caitlin Petrie (Rutgers):
  “News sites...are now seeing in some cases very dramatic decreases in the traffic that they’re getting from Google.” [17:32]

• Discussion on Societal Impact:
  "Anyone who cares about the future of democracy should be thinking about this right now." [25:15]

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3. The Commercial Spaceport Boom & Geopolitical Stakes

[26:57–41:58]

Key Discussion Points

• Demand for Launch Sites:
  The explosive need to launch 100,000+ satellites by 2030 is fueling an urgent market for new spaceport infrastructure.
• Dominican Republic’s Spaceport:
  Launch On Demand’s $600 million project in Pernales, D.R., will be the first U.S.-owned commercial spaceport in Latin America, positioned for geographic efficiency and safety.
• Strategic Geography:
  Site selection relies on low population density and proximity to the equator (to maximize launch efficiency and public safety).
• Investment Appetite:
  Appetite for space investment is compared to the early days of the Internet; challenges include a lack of quality opportunities and solving regulatory bottlenecks.
• US–China Rivalry:
  China’s increasing investment in Latin American space infrastructure adds urgency for the U.S. to maintain leadership; congressional concern highlights underlying geopolitical motivations.
• Regulatory & Operational Speed:
  Launch On Demand aims to deliver faster regulatory approvals (45 days vs. 6 months), appealing to commercial operators frustrated with government backlogs.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Burton Catledge (Founder, Launch On Demand):
  “If they were to identify this region as ideal for commercial space, it would be essentially the Straits of Hormuz for space.” [31:12]
  “The space industry...was like $650 billion. It’s supposed to be over a trillion by 2030, maybe a trillion and a half.” [31:56]
  "I've heard that it's about a three-year waiting list to get a satellite on orbit...If we have to launch 100,000 satellites by 2030...that's a lot of launches." [33:13 / 33:24]

• Kerry Bingen (CSIS):
  “Over 80% of the satellites on orbit today are commercial. Commercial systems, a lot from the United States...Much of that is now fueled by private capital, not just taxpayer dollars.” [38:13]
  “China has ambitions to be the world’s space power. Their presence and their capabilities in Latin America are part of that strategy.” [38:51]

• Catledge on US Policy:
  “We want to stay in line with U.S. foreign policy...If I sort of went off the beaten path, I would essentially be cutting myself off from the largest commercial market in the world, which doesn’t make much sense.” [40:56]

• On Risk & Returns:
  “We estimate that by about the 10-year point after we hit full operations, we’ll be generating about $8 billion. And so this will be the first private revenue generating spaceport in the world.” [41:40]

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4. Bolivia’s Quest for Investment & Reform

[44:52–56:27]

Key Discussion Points

• New Government, New Vision:
  President Rodrigo Paz’s administration ends two decades of Socialist rule, promising economic reform, anti-corruption, and openness to foreign investment.
• Lithium Potential vs. Reality:
  Bolivia holds massive lithium resources but lags behind regional neighbors in revenue, due to bureaucratic, legal, and infrastructural hurdles.
• Public Unrest:
  Protests against subsidy cuts, inflation, and longstanding governmental distrust threaten Paz's reform agenda and political stability.
• Investor Caution:
  Despite attractive macro fundamentals, investors are wary due to historical volatility, weak contract enforcement, and legal uncertainty—especially regarding the need for government partnership in strategic sectors.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Rodrigo Paz (President, Bolivia):
  “Peru, Bolivia, and Chile collectively hold the largest concentration of minerals in the world…Bolivia possesses the highest concentration...yet we generate only $6 billion per year. The question is, why do we choose to be poor?” [46:22]
  “In five years from now, when we conclude our administration, Bolivia will be an advanced nation, grounded in a modernity made necessary by new institutions...a clear path towards growth within an open economy governed by clear laws.” [48:08]
  "Nos prometiero veinte anos. We were promised 20 years of the possibility of becoming a Switzerland...they have left behind a shattered economy..." [54:59]

• Hans Humes (CEO, Greylock Capital):
  “Markets generally give a pretty positive tailwind when a right-of-center government comes in...But it’s easy to choke the economy [with protests].” [50:00]
  “I think the risk reward, now it's tricky. I'm not going to put 50% of the portfolio in it, but I think it's a good risk return.” [56:02]

• Jorge Ncauste (Dentons, La Paz):
  “Foreign investors are a little weary and concerned that their rights won't be respected and they won't be able to carry out the project in the terms that they want… If the government had too much of a say and you were not in a position to make your rights upheld, then of course that gives everyone pause.” [51:35]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• US Dollar Geopolitics & Iran War: [01:40–12:03]
• AI and Internet Economics: [12:03–26:57]
  • Rand Fishkin on Zero-Click/Search Decline: [15:26–16:48]
  • Neil Vogel on Adapting as a Publisher: [18:28–23:38]
  • Long-Term Threat to Content Creation: [24:07–25:57]
• Spaceport Economics & Geopolitics: [26:57–41:58]
  • Burton Catledge on Spaceport Model: [31:38–36:54]
  • US–China Rivalry in Space: [37:06–40:24]
• Bolivia’s Investment Climate: [44:52–56:27]
  • Rodrigo Paz on Reform Vision: [48:08–49:43]
  • Investor Perspective (Hans Humes, Jorge Ncauste): [50:00–52:33]

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Episode Tone

The episode is analytical and investigative, with candid, at times urgent, commentary from experts, policymakers, and business leaders. There’s a mix of cautious optimism and warning throughout, particularly regarding the transformative risks and opportunities posed both by AI and evolving geopolitical competition.

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TL;DR

Wall Street Week explores the weakening US dollar amid Middle East conflict, how AI is revolutionizing (and threatening) the Internet’s business model for publishers, the investment boom in spaceport infrastructure (set against US–China rivalry), and Bolivia’s turbulent efforts to attract foreign capital under a new reformist government.

Transcript

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[David Westin]

This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Westin bringing you stories of capitalism coming to an Internet near you. Artificial Intelligence Will those helpful chatbots kill the search and advertising paying for all that content that you enjoy?

[Reporter David Gura]

And liftoff of Falcon 9 plus the

[David Westin]

race to make money in space. Companies are competing to launch 100,000 satellites in the next five years as China builds out its own space infrastructure in Latin America and investing in Bolivia, a new regime aims to be friendly to private enterprise. But when is the right time for investors to dip their toe in the water? But we begin with the continuing conflict in Iran. Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff chronicled the US Dollar's rise and the beginning of its decline as a global currency in his latest book, Our Dollar your Problem, it turns out that it's not just oil and aluminum at risk in the Iran war. It also may be the status of the dollar. Ken, in your book Our Dollar your Problem, you talk about the position of the US Dollar as declining gradually over time in relation to other currencies. We now have a conflict in Iran. Is that affecting that decline I don't

[Ken Rogoff]

think there's any question that it will affect the decline. It could go either way. It depends on how it comes out. If the US Comes out incredibly triumphant, there's peace in the Middle East. Everyone looks to the United States to maintain peace. That's one outcome. Another outcome where it's viewed as a strategic defeat and China gains. But, you know, it's a step, I don't think either way, it's changing a dynamic that was going to happen anyway. There are things on the outside that it influences. So it's definitely going to help China accelerate getting other countries to use its currency, particularly for Chinese imports. For example, if China buys oil or if China buys anything, it's going to help in that dimension. But it's also affecting global debt because everybody sees a lot of need for military expending. The US Is the biggest debtor in the world. We lose the most when global interest rates go up. So there are pressures from the outside, coming from. Everybody's trying to look for other options and pressures from the inside that we're, you know, running this big debt that is manageable if we wanted to, but there's not a lot of will to want to.

[David Westin]

Is the strength of a currency reflective of the strength, including military strength, of the country? In your book, you go back to the Armada actually with Queen Elizabeth the First and the Spanish, as. Is this potentially a barometer of how the world is perceiving the relative military strength? The United States?

[Ken Rogoff]

The military strength is a piece of being the dominant currency. And here, just to be clear, we're talking about the dollar's market share, which reached an incredible peak about 10 years ago. But also military strength gives you the ability to affect negotiations. They can be over very unrelated things. They can have to do with how the IMF works. They. They can have to do with how global banking regulation works. So having the military power at the end of the day says, well, you know, of course, of course it matters for a lot of things. And if you're looked at as weaker, it hurts you.

[David Westin]

And part of the protection historically going Back to like 1974, was of the Gulf states, countries like Saudi Arabia because of U.S. military protection. Now, as you say, it depends on how this all plays out. But if in fact the United States does not have a triumph of some sort over Iran, does it really undermine the confidence of the Gulf states using the US Dollar?

[Ken Rogoff]

Well, the Gulf states are a really important anchor of the US dollar. And you know, it's interesting, you pick the 1970s because it really fell in the 1970s. Europe left the dollar. That's worth remembering. And the Gulf states, when they sort of did their recycling of their petrodollars through the United States and priced oil and dol, I think it was sort of helpful. Although, nevertheless, you know, that period was down. I don't want to overstate the petrodollar. I want to be a little careful about that because oil is a very flexible price. We're all staring at Brent crude and it's still here. It goes here. It can move very fast. So it's a little bit like my paying with Visa or MasterCard. It matters a lot more whether goods, manufactured goods, are priced in dollars. But. But it's important. I mean, it fills a lot of roles. The Gulf states use dollars. Saudi is still pegged to the dollar. I don't know how long that's going to last, but they still are. And because so many of them are pegged to the dollar, rotate around the dollar, they hold more dollars. They've been very important to our business model. Not as important as China, but they've been important. And it's unclear how this is playing out. I mean, I think a lot of the Gulf states are looking at us and saying, wait, I thought you built those bases to protect us. I didn't know you built those, you know, various military complexes in our country. So we could be target practice. And are you on our side? Are you on their side? Like, what's going on? That's been a delicate dance. I don't think we know how it comes out yet. So, you know, China is kind of playing it cool. A lot of people say they may benefit, they might, but. But I just think we have to see what the end game of this is.

[David Westin]

The Chinese might benefit. Will. Will the yuan benefit? Because we see Iran saying, we'll let oil through the straight Hormuz if you, if you sell it in yuan, for example. And China certainly wants more transactions denominated.

[Ken Rogoff]

They're doing quite a bit in crypto too, also, by the way. Yeah, I mean, if they get paid in dollars, we can sanction them immediately. They're putting it hostage. Why the heck should they do that? That's certainly significant. But the big thing of the Iran war in the future of the dollar is it's raised global interest rates. They were going up and up and up. So if I look at the dynamic of how I see things unfolding, it's that there's this pressures from the outside that are very slow moving, but they're happening to have a more multipolar system. And there are problems on the inside where we're the richest country ever, ever, ever. But we still have trouble paying our bills and running these crazy large debts. There's no political consensus in either party. The Republicans don't want to tax anyone. The Democrats think 1% of people can pay, which doesn't add up. And so we are racing towards having a fiscal problem. And then central bank independence becomes a problem. Because when you have a fiscal problem, you're kind of looking for the central bank to bail you out. And if all that's happening, that's sort of what happened in the 70s. In a way it undermines the dollar.

[David Westin]

So, so what are the metrics that people should use in figuring out where we are in the relative prominence of the dollar? What do you look at? I mean, for example, were you surprised that the dollar was not more of a safe harbor when the Iran conflict broke out?

[Ken Rogoff]

So there are people in finance who are doing all these papers showing that the premium we used to extract on longer term debt is gone. So on short term debt, there's still a premium to dollars. It's still the safest asset. Long term debt, it's not there anymore. I mean, it's safer than, let's say, you know, some African or South American countries debt. But if you compare it to many European countries, Japan, it doesn't rank that way. They used to. And so there are ways in which what we're getting out of the deal is going down. Now we can crowd everything into short term borrowing. And Secretary Bessant said, I think interest rates are going to go down. I'm going to borrow more short term. Okay, but that's very risky. In fact, I think he was saying not to do that 10 years ago. And so we're losing. You see that in many measures. On the other hand, you know, these things are very slow moving. If you do foreign exchange trading is overwhelmingly goes through dollars. If you do currency of denomination of debt, it's overwhelmingly dollars. Of course, part of that's because more than 50% of the debt of the advanced countries is ours. More than that in global bonds, it might even be 60 or 70% is ours. So there's, there's a lot of liquidity in it. I still remember 20 years ago a prominent European economist getting up at a meeting and saying, today is a big day. There's more euro, euro debt than dollar debt. Which was true that day. Well, how did that work out? You know, I mean, it's, I think this is a slow moving thing. We're seeing it in the interest rate spreads, we're seeing it in reserves. So what countries are choosing to do? We're seeing it in actions that the Europeans and the Chinese are taking to develop independent systems. But this isn't something the private sector is just going to do. It's mostly the Chinese. The Europeans are leading the way. We are digging our grave, so to speak. And it's all the actions of the government. It's not something that's happening overnight.

[David Westin]

Coming up, the content business made a long and difficult transition from print to the Internet. But what happens if scrolling online is now replaced by AI? We bring you the story of another revolution in how we get our information and entertainment.

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[David Westin]

This is a story about big changes on tiny screens. Since its inception, the Internet has become where we turn for content. Content we mostly access through search and that's mostly free. But of course it's not really free. When we searched on platforms like Google, we were directed to web pages created by publishers who got paid for all those ads we spent time looking at. Now all that is changing and as AI becomes the new gateway to the web, it's transforming the economics of the Internet.

[Rand Fishkin]

We believe the high water mark for Internet traffic like that was sent out from social media and search and AI tools which are quite nascent at the time was 2022. Essentially over the last four years those numbers have been dropping.

[David Westin]

Rand Fishkin is an author and entrepreneur who specializes in online search, the main way that most of us interact with the web.

[Rand Fishkin]

I do a lot of research with clickstream data which essentially looks at devices and what they visit and and don't Visit. Whereas in 2011 Google was sending north of 70% of all searches to a third party website, right? A website not owner controlled by Google. And today that number is in the mid-40s and falling. That clearly indicates this zero click trend.

[David Westin]

Zero click. It's a term for an online search result that doesn't lead to any other web pages. That can be good news for users if their question has been answered quickly and correctly. No need to spend time scrolling through all that text and pages of ads. But if you are a publisher counting on that click to bring traffic to your website and to sell those ads, it's very bad news. Which means the creators of all that web content have to rethink the game.

[Rand Fishkin]

Long before AI Google started disintermediating content providers by answering questions. Questions right in the search results you search for the Met score, the score is right at the top and AI just enhanced their ability to do this.

[David Westin]

For an idea of just how big this change is for Google itself, here's the company's head of search talking about incorporating AI just last month.

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Now we're entering the next chapter of Google Search, where incredible AI features aren't just in search. Google Search is AI search through and through. Now this is the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago. The problem is that most people don't click on the links.

[David Westin]

Caitlin Petrie is author of all the news that's fit to click. And a professor at Rutgers who studies the way algorithms shape online media.

[Sponsor Announcer]

News sites that were counting on referrals from Google for their traffic, for their ad revenue to draw maybe subscribers who might come to the site, get interested, and then subscribe are now seeing, in some cases, very dramatic decreases in the traffic that they're getting from Google.

[David Westin]

The move from print to the Internet, many people think, actually eliminated some news sources. A lot of local newspapers, for example, were eliminated partly because of the business model challenge, the revenue challenge. Do we face a risk of that with AI, that we will eliminate even further sources?

[Sponsor Announcer]

I think we do. I think it's a major concern.

[David Westin]

It was really revealing. Perhaps nobody in the world has a better view of these changes and what they mean for online content creators than Neil Vogel.

[Neil Vogel]

What happened was our audience, right? And we reach half of America each month. Our audience on the Internet was 75% from Google Search 2022, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, but ballpark that that is now 25% of our audience.

[David Westin]

Vogel is CEO of People, Inc. The largest online and print publisher in America. It reaches 175 million people each month with dozens of publications whose names you know well.

[Neil Vogel]

Better Homes and Gardens, People, Entertainment Weekly, Travel and Leisure, Food and Wine. And we put all these brands together because we believed we understood how to run these classic heritage brands on the Internet. And we've been proven right.

[David Westin]

Although Vogel has had a front row seat to the collapse in search traffic that AI has ushered in, he also told us something surprising. His business is booming, we're very profitable,

[Neil Vogel]

and we're defying the narrative around publishing. That is publishers can't succeed in this world, and we're succeeding. We feel really good and really optimistic about the future of media back in

[David Westin]

the day, before there even was an Internet, believe it or not, there was a time if you look at a publisher, newspaper, magazine, their revenue came from two sources, subscription and advertising. What's your revenue model?

[Neil Vogel]

If you look at the Internet, that is where we thrive. That is our bread and butter. 90% of our profitability comes from our Internet and our online presence. That is very much advertising, but it's also lots of other things.

[David Westin]

Those other things include deals and branded products. But Vogel says they've also got a new revenue stream.

[Neil Vogel]

We license content to LLMs and AI engines. We sat with Sam Altman at OpenAI right before they could launch the first commercial LLM. This is the fall of 2022, and we saw this LLM and we saw what it could do. And we were like, uh, oh, like the world is going to be different from here. And there's moments in your life where you know the world's gonna be different. Like you have your first kid or the Philadelphia Eagles win the super bowl, and you know that, like, your world's gonna be different from. This was one of those moments. This was like the business version of that moment. And we took a look at this and our first reaction is, thank God we have brands. Because what we knew was this was going to be a new paradigm in media and we knew there were going to be risks and there are going to be opportunities. And we made the bet and had the thesis that says if you have these intangible assets that really, really mean something to people, you have something that is going to increase in value in an artificial era. And starting in 22 and 23, we started to build other ways to distribute our brands. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, our own emails, product license. All of these things we did. And cut to today, five years later, we've made 10 straight quarters on Wall Street. We're growing in an area where most publishers are struggling. And we did it because we have these amazing brands that can live in all these places and. And our aggregate audience size is multiples. What it was when we started here.

[David Westin]

You mentioned that you do have licensing arrangements with some of the LLMs, large language models. How does that work for you? Is it real money?

[Neil Vogel]

So it's real money. It's material for us. I think we made a decision. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong. So far, I think it's right that we wanted a seat at the table. The important thing to understand and realize is AI needs three things. It needs power, which has been a lot of talk about power. It needs a model. It's been a lot of talk about models. And it needs inputs. We are the inputs. We are the training of the models. Now we believe, and I think if you talk to any of these AI professionals believe the Internet's been crawled. All the data in the world is already in the models. So the value should accrue to those of us that are still making substantial amounts of new things that are needed for the search use case, which is a very big use case and are needed for all the corporate clients that want to use LLMs for their stuff. So it can be something simple as we have 50 new recipes with avocados in them. And avocados are important to. I can tell you every single thing. Kim Kardashian did yesterday. But these are things that are very valuable, these pieces of data. The other thing we did, which is really important here is part of having a seat at the table, is we wanted to control our own destiny. Last summer, in July, we made a decision and we partnered with a group called cloudflare to block every AI crawler you could possibly block. So you cannot get access to our content unless you pay us for it.

[David Westin]

And given your model to license the training, using your content to an LLM is basically found money, right? It's not taking away from your other business because that's based on brand.

[Neil Vogel]

I mean, so it's interesting. Is it, it's funny, we have this conversation all the time and the answer we always come back to is cash is cash. It would be amazing if we could make money the way we made money three or four years ago. It would be super fun. I'd have a lot more free time, but I don't and we have to work hard. So it is what it is.

[David Westin]

For a publisher with strong, well established brands, even the uncertain future with AI may be bright. But for smaller publishers and for the web as a whole, the outlook may not be as encouraging potentially in the longer run. What could this mean for the Internet itself? Because the Internet really has thrived on very rich production of content. If content providers don't get paid for that, sooner or later there's not going to be as much content.

[Rand Fishkin]

Yeah, this death spiral that you're describing has been something that people have theorized over the last three or four years with no discernible solution. I'm going to tell you what I think is the most likely scenario, but it's also the most tragic one, which is that in a few years, AI tools find themselves unable to get enough content to train on, whether that's video or text or audio, long form, short form, and they decide to build their own publishing department. And in years to come, a decade, two decades from now, it would not surprise me if OpenAI or Anthropic looked a lot like TikTok, where they have a creator fund and they pay creators a certain amount based on the amount of traffic, page views and value to the training set that these creators provide. And so their contract, employing these creators and we get a, we get an AI shaped Internet, right? An Internet that is built not only for, but by AI tools.

[Hans Humes]

That.

[Rand Fishkin]

That seems quite probable.

[Sponsor Announcer]

I think that that is something that if I worked at an AI company, I would really be thinking about. Because if the traffic drops so significantly that we see even more Jobs in journalism be lost, we see even more especially local outlets. But a lot of news outlets shutter themselves because they can't stay afloat. That diminishes the amount of content that these alums can train on too. Right. So this is something that I think we should all be concerned about. Not just journalists, but also those who work at AI companies. Anyone who cares about the future of democracy should be thinking about this right now.

[David Westin]

Tell me how broadly, apart from people, beyond people, how do you think generative AI is going to change the nature of the Internet, the content on the

[Neil Vogel]

Internet, so we can end up being fairly myopic around here and looking at our own use case? I am and I have to be. I'm like a crazy optimistic person and I am very optimistic about AI for us. Right. The risk for AI for us is already out. It's already killed our biggest piece of traffic from five years ago. But we've built something even better over here that we use AI to do more of, like we are today. We make about 50% more content than we made when this whole process started for roughly the same cost. And humans make every single thing you read and see because we've been able to use AI in the background to streamline so many processes. If you look at as an opportunity, it's incredible for us and we have no choice but to look at it that way. If we look at it any other way, it's too scary. And this sort of like riding a bike. Don't look down, look towards the horizon like, and you'll be fine.

[David Westin]

Since we talked with Neil Vogel, People Inc's parent company made an offer to buy the part of MGM it doesn't already own. In making the bid, Chairman Barry Diller emphasized the value of what he called real world assets that I cannot easily replicate. Pursuing a part of the media world very different from the online content brands that that Vogel continues to build up next, we've come a long way from Cape Canaveral today. There's a booming business in space launches, which means a long waiting list for satellites trying to get into orbit. And the latest opportunity may lie 1,000 miles south of Florida in the Dominican Republic.

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[David Westin]

This is a story about making money 22,000 miles up, meeting a commercial need for tens of thousands of satellites to be launched by 2030. There is a race on to get all those satellites into orbit, but also a race with China, which has already built a range of satellite ground stations in Latin America. Something that's gotten the attention of.

[Burton Catledge]

So it's about 45 minutes on a helicopter flight. It's probably about four or five hours driving.

[David Westin]

In the western part of the Dominican Republic on the border with Haiti lies Pernales, a quiet coastal province that will soon be home to the country's first spaceport and what is slated to be the first US owned commercial spaceport in Latin America.

[Burton Catledge]

If they were to identify this region as ideal for commercial space, it would be essentially the Straits of Hormuz for space.

[David Westin]

When we Talk about the Strait of Hormuz. We think of all that oil and fertilizer and aluminum trying to get through a narrow sea channel. When it comes to space, it's satellites. And the choke point isn't a sea passage, but launch pads that we simply don't have enough of. How many pads are you going to have here?

[Burton Catledge]

Four.

[David Westin]

Four pads here?

[Burton Catledge]

Yeah.

[David Westin]

Burton Catledge is a former Air Force colonel who founded aerospace company Launch on demand in 2018.

[Burton Catledge]

The amount of support that they came back with was amazing.

[David Westin]

He's now developing a $600 million commercial spaceport in this remote part of the Dominican Republic.

[Burton Catledge]

The ecosystem at Cape Canaveral more or less has grown out of ad hoc. Okay. It was not necessarily built with the idea for the commercial space industry. The entire market has changed. You know, space industry is something on the order. Last time I checked, it was like $650 billion. It's supposed to be over a trillion by 2030, maybe a trillion and a half. And some people are even saying that's pretty low.

[David Westin]

To relieve the bottleneck in launching the growing number of satellites we need, the US has to have more spaceports, creating a business opportunity for companies like Launch On Demand. Right now there are over a dozen US Spaceports across the country and just one internationally. Rocket Lab's launch site in New Zealand.

[Reporter David Gura]

I think the United States from the space economy perspective is in a position of extreme opportunity and they are in a growth phase.

[David Westin]

Ryan Bruchaart is a senior partner at McKinsey who focuses on global aerospace, defense and space companies.

[Reporter David Gura]

I think the infrastructure in the US Is becoming a bit stretched.

[Rodrigo Paz]

Right.

[Reporter David Gura]

If you look at our launch sites, we're launching, you know, every day or a couple times a day from some of these launch sites. There's a huge backlog of, you know, US Companies looking to launch things into space and to be able to accomplish their mission and get the, get the return that their investors are looking for.

[Burton Catledge]

Right now. I've heard that it's about three year waiting list to get a satellite on orbit.

[David Westin]

What accounts for that demand ramping up so dramatically? And do you expect it's going to continue to increase that much?

[Burton Catledge]

Well, in order to have global coverage of the entire Earth, you have to have a lot of satellites. Right now there's about 14,000 satellites in orbit. The FCC tracks all the number of satellites that are going to be submitted and they're looking at over 100,000 satellites by 2030. So if we got 14,000 satellites and it's 2026 already and we have to launch 100,000 satellites by 2030. That's a lot of launches that have to happen between now and then.

[David Westin]

That may explain the need for more launch sites.

[Burton Catledge]

But where the goal for a rocket is to get to space in the most efficient and effective way possible. And engineers spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to finesse what does that efficiency look like. But eventually it comes down to two things. How much fuel can I put on the rocket? How much mass can I put on top of the lift? So they're always playing with that equation. Well, the geography has an important part in here. This because in order to achieve escape velocity, a rocket has to achieve 17,500 miles per hour. And the Earth closer to the equator spins faster than it does at the poles. What that translates into is you could put more satellites up with less of smaller rockets. And so the goal of most spaceports is to try and get to the as close to the equator as possible.

[David Westin]

But why does it take me to Dominican Republic?

[Burton Catledge]

So what we ended up doing about three years ago was doing a technical feasibility study. We looked at everything we could possibly look at. But as we did our analysis, it started shifting to Parada Nalis, which has a relatively low population. And because it's on the coastline and because people don't live on water, we have almost a straight shot to orbit without hazarding the public.

[David Westin]

So if something goes wrong, it goes in the ocean.

[Burton Catledge]

That's right. So that's why a lot of our spaceports are built next to the coast, is not necessarily because of the water, it's because of the low population. It's not really about whether the rocket explodes or whether the rocket gets to orbit. It's all about public safety.

[David Westin]

Safety is no small concern in the new space race, as we saw just last month when Jeff Bezos Bezos blue origin rocket test blew up in spectacular fashion along with the expected trillion dollar IPO of Elon Musk's SpaceX. It's a reminder of just how public the failures and successes can be in this business and how big the players are.

[Burton Catledge]

The pad will be two miles to the coast.

[David Westin]

That's one reason that Burton would rather work with them than against them. You are though competitive with SpaceX, right?

[Burton Catledge]

Most of the feedback that we have gotten from all the commercial operators is they would like the ground infrastructure to be more responsive, to be more. Not like we launch on this day, we launch on readiness. And right now the infrastructure and the processes are not designed that way. So right now, statutorily, the office of commercial space has six months to review it and give you a decision. We are going to give you a license in 45 days. That's very attractive. We don't look at ourselves as competitors to the rocket customers. We look at us as enablers.

[David Westin]

What's the attraction for investors and what's been your experience so far on people stepping up?

[Burton Catledge]

There is a large appetite right now for space. This is kind of like the early, you know, early Internet age, if you will. The problem is there's not very many investment opportunities or good investment opportunities to get into space. The first phase of the spaceport is going to be about $600 million of investment. And the response that we've gotten has been really quite significant.

[David Westin]

As launch on demand prepares to break ground later this year, a larger race is already underway in Latin America. Space infrastructure has become a new front in the US China rivalry.

[Sponsor Announcer]

China is aggressively making investments in our hemisphere, particularly in Latin and South America. Also partnerships that they have made with Caribbean nations to have aerospace applications, satellite demonstrations, civilian applications, also with military application components to it.

[David Westin]

A recent report from the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party warned about China's growing space footprint in the region, including more than 10 satellite tracking stations. Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan is a member of the committee.

[Sponsor Announcer]

This is a call to double down on the way our system works. And so we don't want to be ceding ground to China. We don't want to see them continuing to eat our lunch with our neighbors, and we can win this race.

[Optum Advertiser]

I guess you could look at it as a marathon or maybe an ultra marathon, but I don't see an end here. There is not a clear finish line.

[David Westin]

Kerry Bingen is a director of CSIS's Aerospace Security Project.

[Optum Advertiser]

Well, I thought what was really interesting in the decades that we were competing against the Soviet Union, so much of what was happening in space, it was fueled by government. I think what you're seeing now, which really sets this current era apart, is so much of what's happening in space is commercial. Over 80% of the satellites on orbit today are commercial. Commercial systems, A lot from the United States, SpaceX Starlink, but many other countries are now players in space. The technology is much more distributed across the globe. Launch costs are a lot cheaper. So any country or even entity can put something in orbit. And much of that is now fueled by private capital, not just taxpayer dollars. China has ambitions to be the world's space power. Their presence and their capabilities in Latin America are part of that strategy. They want access. They want Influence. They want to be able to band together with these countries in bodies like the United nations to start shaping where the standards are.

[Burton Catledge]

We started this program well before people realized that China was, you know, very interested in taking over real estate in Latin America. As we have gotten the Trump administration and President Abendadair's administration together, they are aligned on what has been called, you know, the pivot to the Western Hemisphere. So I would call the spaceport more of an artifact of the decision to pivot to the Western Hemisphere rather than, you know, anything else. And we emphasize this is run by a US Company that is designed to be commercial, that is complementary, not competitive with the spaceports in the United States. And we work very, very hard to make sure that they understand we're a friend, not a foe. And so, so much so that when we have talked to the President Ebon there, we said we want to adopt the US Safety standards for launch and reentry. And he agreed. And so if you're a customer that launches from the United States, the standard will be the same. If you launch from the Dominican Republic, we have holes.

[Optum Advertiser]

We never thought that missiles would be launched across the Southern Hemisphere, so we did not put a lot of radars down in South America or in Africa, for example. But we're realizing we need to have coverage of everything that's happening in orbit. We're seeing China, we're seeing Russia maneuver satellites much more frequently. Are they benign or do they have a hidden weapon? We don't know, but we know that they're testing these kind of capabilities. And so you need to be able to monitor that.

[David Westin]

Are there restrictions on who can use your spaceport?

[Burton Catledge]

We want to stay in line with U.S. foreign policy. And what do I mean by that? So even though I'm a US Company operating in Dominican Republic, I need to make sure that my host country, the U.S. in this case, is aligned with what I'm doing. So if I sort of, you know, went kind of off the, off the beaten path, I would essentially be cutting myself up from the largest commercial market in the world, which doesn't make much sense.

[David Westin]

Launch on Demand's being aligned with the US Government on the geopolitics of space infrastructure in Latin America is important to Catledge. But make no mistake, at its heart, this US Spaceport company is a business one that Kallidge believes will be a good one.

[Burton Catledge]

So we estimate that by about the 10 year point after we hit full operations, we'll be generating about $8 billion. And so this will be the first private revenue generating spaceport in the world. And the reason why is because we're leveraging all the technology that's been invented. We're bringing that here.

[David Westin]

Coming up from the Dominican Republic to Bolivia for a look at another Latin American country chasing US investment with the President trying to shake things up.

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[Wasabi Advertiser]

what gets your business to market. And Wasabi is designed to give every business a shot at competition. How break free from skyrocketing storage costs and unpredictable egress fees from old and top heavy legacy providers. You know the big guys. Wasabi is the world's hottest cloud storage company and the go to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams and leagues around the world. And here's why. Innovation from Wasabi's AI enabled intelligent media storage Wasabi Air to the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cybercriminals, data deletion and ransomware. The world's top companies trust with Wasabi. Remember, Wasabi is up to 80% less than market competition and doesn't charge a cent for businesses to access their own data. Wasabi another championship story. Check them out for [e-mail] Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage Proud partner of Iheart Podcast Network.

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[David Westin]

This is a story of rebranding a country. Rodrigo Paz was elected President of Bolivia in November, marking a major shift for the country following two decades of Socialist rule. Paz has a mandate of economic reform, closer relations with the United States, and increased foreign investment. But as our colleague David Gura found out, ideas and execution are sometimes very different things.

[Reporter David Gura]

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the country's crown jewel. It's a sprawling salt flat on the Andean altiplano, so large it's visible from space.

[David Westin]

We are at 3016,50 meters above sea level, my friend.

[Ken Rogoff]

Very high, very high.

[Reporter David Gura]

Bolivia's economy benefits from the tourists who flock to the Salar from all over the world. But what the country's leadership is banking on is what's underneath this snow, like, layer of salt. So the lithium mining just down on the salt.

[David Westin]

The idea of the government was like, do some manufacturing batteries or electric cars, things like that. But, you know, it takes a long time, of course. And also we need some technology from outside.

[Reporter David Gura]

You know, we're standing on top of one of the largest lithium resources in the world. And President Rodrigo Paz says if the country can develop these reserves, it will transform Bolivia's struggling economy, improving the lives of some 12 million Bolivians.

[Rodrigo Paz]

Peru, Peru, Bolivia and Chile collectively hold the largest concentration of Mexico minerals in the world. Peru generates $50 billion annually. Chile generates $65 billion annually. Bolivia possesses the highest concentration of minerals of the three. Yet we generate only $6 billion per year. The question is, why do we choose to be poor?

[Reporter David Gura]

After he was elected last October, President Paz signaled Bolivia is open for business. But as we discovered, there is a disconnect between his rhetoric and the realities on the ground. We arrived in La Paz to sit down with the president as violent protests erupted across the country, shut down parts of the city. We got the go ahead to climb through barricades, part of a police perimeter that protected Bolivia's parliament building and presidential palace. We were told to wait in a cafe on a mostly empty plaza. And as the hours ticked by, we could hear protesters just a few blocks away throwing dynamite. Tear gas hung in the air. President Paz, we learned, was locked in tense negotiations. Just before. Before midnight, we got word from one of his advisors. The president would have to postpone our interview. One week later, we finally got our chance to talk with him. It's been a busy week.

[Rand Fishkin]

Three weeks.

[Ken Rogoff]

Three weeks.

[Reporter David Gura]

Many of these protesters are calling on you to resign, to step down. And I'm wondering if there's a point at which that will become something that you would consider

[Rodrigo Paz]

in five years from now, when we conclude our administration, Bolivia will be an advanced nation, grounded in a modernity made necessary by new institutions, A frontal assault on corruption, a controlled fiscal deficit, and a clear path towards growth within an open economy governed by clear laws. Moreover, it will be a country where racial, regional and cultural differences are not exploited to fuel political conflict, where I hope I will leave behind a government characterized by pluralistic participation.

[David Westin]

Donde espero de jar?

[Neil Vogel]

Un govier no departicipacion plural.

[Reporter David Gura]

At a precarious moment for his presidency, Rodrigo Paz has gotten public support from the Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States stands squarely in support of Bolivia's government. Trump and his team have embraced Paz's new vision for Bolivia as they've welcomed wins by other center right politicians in Latin America.

[Rodrigo Paz]

I met with President Trump. There is a relationship regarding the geopolitical and geoeconomic vision on the continental level. Bolivia's vision is very clear. Pragmatic is everything that is functional for the development of our economy, of the economy of the people. We will be seated so that we can collaborate and be part of a global vision.

[Hans Humes]

I think that investors in general should have the patience to follow the situation and see, you know, how well he pulls it off.

[Reporter David Gura]

Hans Humes has spent his career investing in frontier markets. He's the chairman and CEO of Greylock Capital.

[Hans Humes]

The markets generally give a pretty positive tailwind when a right of center government comes in. So getting the enthusiasm, putting it out there, saying we're open for investment, great. And then tapping the markets when they did, raising $1 billion. I think, you know, it's a good signal. Everybody knows the Bolivia story. It's an incredible, you know, commodity wise. It's kind of hard not to see it as a really easy place to make money. It's just the sort of the ethnic tensions there that have always existed and the fact that they have a tradition of going out in the streets. There's been a lot of turnover of governments. And as we're seeing now, it's pretty easy to sort of choke the economy.

[Reporter David Gura]

Doing business in Bolivia has not been easy. And there's been talk about harnessing its lithium for decades. Today, a lithium plant owned by the state is running at just 15% of capacity. And contracts that Chinese and Russian companies signed with Paz's predecessor haven't been ratified by Bolivia's Congress. In the near term, Bolivia wants to boost tourism as a source of revenue, but the longer term vision is to do more with its minerals.

[Rand Fishkin]

The country's never been closed for business. There's always been foreign investors coming in and there's always been the ability to do business, but there was always difficulties with the administration.

[Reporter David Gura]

Jorge Ncauste is a senior partner at the law firm Dentons, based in La Paz. And he spends a lot of his time working with foreign investors on deals involving Bolivia's natural resources.

[Rand Fishkin]

Foreign investors are a little weary and concerned that their rights won't be respected and they won't be able to carry out the project in the terms that they want. One of the main things in some strategic sectors was that you needed to be in an agreement with the government. And to the extent that you weren't able to have a security that the government was going to actually comply with their side of the agreement, that was a complicated situation. If the government had too much of a say and you were not in a position to make your rights upheld, then of course that gives everyone pause. The fact that Bolivia left the ICSIT convention and was reluctant to enter into international arbitration agreement, that gave a lot of investors pause.

[Reporter David Gura]

What needs to happen over the course of the next year? President Paz has a five year term, but for Bolivia to get on track in the way that he wants it to, what needs to happen in a year's time?

[Rand Fishkin]

They need to see results of some sort.

[Ken Rogoff]

Right?

[Rand Fishkin]

So some of those results have already been seen. Right. We need to stabilize the economy.

[Reporter David Gura]

To do that, Bolivia has turned to the International Monetary Fund. It's in negotiations for a $3 billion package that Paz says would go towards social organizations, entrepreneurship and economic development. But just six months into President Paz's term, many Bolivians seem to be running out of patience. Protests have followed his decision to cut fuel subsidies, and with inflation at 14% as recently as April, the pressure has mounted. But the calls for Paz step down go beyond economics. Some opposition groups have sought to force him from office entirely. And the blockades they've erected are now causing shortages of food, gasoline and medical supplies. Do you see any missteps? Things he could have done differently or

[Burton Catledge]

should have done differently, pulling away subsidies.

[Hans Humes]

It's a, it's the right thing to do. It's a wrong thing to do if you don't manage it well. One of the problems that you see in a lot of these countries, whether it's Ecuador, Bolivia, is, you know, you want to head off people going into the street. So maybe there you should have tried to have a bit of a negotiation on the timing of removing subsidies. Slow walking it. He probably should have recognized that stylistically he might have wanted to do a Malay, but practically speaking, he didn't have, you know, he didn't have the national support that Milei did.

[Reporter David Gura]

I imagine there are investors outside the country who are watching what's unfolding in Bolivia and wondering how much has changed, if it's still status quo, that there are protests and demonstrations and overarching uncertainty. What would you say to those investors or those prospective investors about what Bolivia is like today and how welcoming Bolivia is of outside investment?

[David Westin]

Nos prometiero veinte anos.

[Rodrigo Paz]

We were promised 20 years of the possibility of becoming a Switzerland. That was the promise made 20 years ago. Twenty years later, they have left behind a shattered economy stripped of the natural resources such as hydrocarbons that we would otherwise export. We possess abundant hydrocarbon reserves, yet they have left us without the necessary investments and without the security required to ensure that those wishing to invest in Bolivia find clear rules and laws during this transition, laws that would foster an investment safe environment in Bolivia.

[Reporter David Gura]

President Paz is pushing for changes to Bolivia's legal framework to make the country more business friendly. He's still making his pitch to the Bolivian people and also to outside investors. The country just held its first dollar denominated bond sale in almost five years. What would it take for you personally to invest in Bolivia at this point in time?

[Hans Humes]

We own some of the bonds. I mean, we're already in there. We're bond guys. Yeah, I'm not going to buy lithium mine. I have friends who might be, you know, I just wouldn't know what to do with it. But yeah, I think the risk reward, now it's tricky. I'm not going to put 50% of the portfolio in it, but I think it's a good risk return. We've had a lot of bad headlines. I'm willing to keep the focus there because the macro story is a good one.

[David Westin]

That does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week, I'm David Westin. See you next week for more stories of capitalism.

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[Ken Rogoff]

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