Jensen’s Ezra Interview, EV News, Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:00)

That's right.

Jordi Hays (0:00)

Get ready.

John Coogan (0:02)

TBPN Road to Christmas continues. 92 more days. Get ready. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang went toe to toe with Ezra Klein on The New York Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

John Coogan (0:14)

That's actually a crazy environment to go in.

John Coogan (0:17)

Why?

John Coogan (0:18)

As Jensen. I just think he's brave. Ezra is a real journalist.

John Coogan (0:26)

He's brave. He engaged with a real journalist.

John Coogan (0:29)

No, it's like you have to imagine he was a bit traumatized after Dwark Hesh, who I don't think of as a journalist by any means, but he obviously has very strong beliefs.

John Coogan (0:44)

And gets to the root question for a particular audience. Now, Dwark Hesh, although he was going super hard on the open source question on selling ships to China, on sort of AI safety and rollout and like how the model, how the AI race should go.

Dwark Hesh is not the person to push Jensen on like politics specifically, right? Like that's going to happen somewhere else. But yeah, it is a hot seat. But I think he did well, two hours almost, hanging out with Ezra Klein. There's some clips and I have some reactions and it's sort of interesting to dig into the mind of Jensen because he's simultaneously the biggest force in AI, the central bank of artificial intelligence, according to The Economist. He's the backstop of all backstops. He's backstopping everything from the biggest data centers in the world, lending investment grade designation to the debt and the credit lines, to sort of acting as a soft landing for startups that get acquired at the application layer or anywhere in the stack. He's been an acquirer that's sort of underwriting. If you're a VC and you did a deal at a billion dollars.

John Coogan (1:46)

And you're kind of in trouble on it.

John Coogan (1:48)

There's a chance that you could get out because Jensen is willing to do a $10 billion, $15 billion acquisition, whereas like in the prior era, Apple had the money, wouldn't do it. Google really didn't do that many deals, that huge. Facebook would do one big one every five, 10 years, but Jensen's been quick on it. And then he's also been investing directly in basically every lab and basically every AI project. So he's been an incredibly important force. And yet he's now starting to stand alone in his sort of P-Doom equals zero take, which was very much the consensus in the technology community.

Jordi Hays (2:23)

Suck would like a word.

John Coogan (2:24)

I think, ah, true, true. Yeah. I think it still is the consensus in the business community, in the finance community. Basically, anyone at the application layer is P-Doom zero. Anyone deeper in the stack on the semiconductor side or the energy side, the buildout side, the Neo cloud side, they're all pretty much P-Doom zero. But the labs and Jensen's been playing there.

He's at that level. He's as important as a voice as Daria, Sam, Elon. And so to hear him not jump on the bandwagon when Elon, Sam and Daria all agreed on pacing the frontier, he's saying, no, we don't really need to pace the frontier. It's interesting to hear him say this. There's a couple clips. Let's play one and then I have sort of an allegory for where I think his position is, but let's play this.

Ezra Klein (3:06)

So what I've been hearing from the labs, what they've been saying publicly, is that they are facing a heart problem.

Partially an engineering problem, partially an alignment problem, partially an operational excellence problem in Dari Amadei's framing and what they are worried about, is that in competition with each other, in national competition with China, that they are being pushed to move too fast, that they all feel they're in a collective action dilemma. Now I watch you on the All In podcast stage, Donald Trump, President Trump gave you a call there. Oh, no. This is not planned, but we know who it is.

Jordi Hays (3:41)

Oh, no.

Jensen Huang (3:44)

Mr. President? Oh, yes, sir.

Ezra Klein (3:48)

And you and the president and the other members of the stage were very resistant to the idea any kind of regulation or collective action was needed.

Jordi Hays (3:59)

And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen, and that could be political people, could also be China, and we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax.

Jensen Huang (4:12)

You're right.

John Coogan (4:12)