Francis Hunt: America Is Entering a Slow Decline—And Investors Need to Adapt

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**Maggie Lake** (1:36)
You've talked about jurisdictional diversification. Why is that important? What is that? We don't hear that come up very often.

**Francis Hunt** (1:44)
You've never needed it in America. It's actually underperformed everything in America because you've grown as a overcrowded capital destination. And the more you've grown, the more success has bred further success. But that in itself is a doom loop of this is easy, and buy America is best. Unfortunately, those are paradigms that have lasted for a long time. People have ingrained them as if it's a permanent feature.
The problem is you get generational changes and you get nation-based changes, and the undermining of the dollar, you could even not have a huge crash, but because of dollar debasement, you've lost a lot of ground and your true inflation rate is stubbornly high in double digits that you'll never hear out of a government official, and you can feel that supposedly on the nominal normie level, you've done okay, but it doesn't feel quite as punchy as it used to. This is that slow creeping sensation that there isn't the same zip anymore in something. You've lived the teenager to healthy athlete era. Unfortunately, for where the debt is, you have to now view it as you're the middle-age boxer that's still got quite a bit of power in his punch, but the heart and the puffing and the cardio is going a little bit, and you need the chair to sit down.
That's the beginning of fatigue. There's younger, fitter fighters that are hungrier, harder working, very tech savvy, and will put 10,000 programmers or nuclear scientists on something where you might not have the same numbers.
And on that, by the way, it's not just spin. There's a real, I'll kill one quick bug before handing back to you, Maggie. There's this notion that it's now an existential threat that America must win AI. The fear I have is that is a positioning of too big to fail like the blanking system in 2008 and nine, and it's like, oh, China's gonna kill us if we don't do this and all of that. And the notion that the only way you win is you just throw the biggest number at it. That means success. You can throw the biggest number and still lose. It's been shown that, you know, you get quantum leaps in technology, you get better versions, better designs, and that can just floor you. And I fear America's gonna become too used to, we'll outspend you because you always could. That's not the winning strategy always. And that's what you should be focused on. And they want to make it with the citizens such that you become accepting that data centers built by Facebook is something you have to pick up the can for if you ever have a major downdraft for holding, because it's like having an army.
And I would push back against that. That's a license to bail out an insider core of statists at the expense and socialize that cost on the investors and citizenry. You shouldn't be having it. I don't think America wins the AI race just because the Chinese are exceptional at that. And I don't think money ensures anything in terms of it, in terms of efficiency. Just look at BYD on batteries and the Tesla. Tesla had a running start, had Californian subsidies, and is now being outperformed. And I think that's a microcosm for winning in that. I do fear they dominate, and that's how it might end up turning.