Dan Dreyfus: America's Critical Minerals Crisis is Here

We've got Dan Dreyfus on the show. He's with Borneight Capital. We're gonna be measuring human progress by how much electricity we consume. The semiconductor industry, I view that as an industrial or infrastructure company. I mean, it's effectively a factory. We try to figure out where the world is going, and then we try to figure out what we're gonna need to get there. In the next ten minutes, I am going to try to teach you about critical minerals, commodities, our incredibly fragile infrastructure here in The US that is going to require trillions and trillions of dollars of investment if we want to achieve our technological objectives, our reshoring, re industrialization objectives, and our national security and military objectives. But first, a little bit of history. We are at a very significant inflection point right now in US economic growth and what it's going to look like. Really from the early two thousands until just a few years ago, The US went through effectively what I think was an economic miracle, where we created so much growth, so much market cap, so much value without really having to invest any capital at all. I mean, think of all the companies that were created with no capital. You had Google with the search engine. You had Meta with social media. They bought WhatsApp for $30,000,000,000 with 12 employees. You know, no capital whatsoever. You had the streaming platforms. You had the food delivery platforms. You had Apple Computer, which was capital light, created trillions of market cap. You had software as a service. Absolutely no capital required to create all that value. And at the same time, we were creating these companies. At the same time we were doing that, we were literally tearing down all of our critical infrastructure and moving it overseas to China. So we were really doubling down on that capital light mentality. But then it sort of started to come back to bite us. Right? We had COVID. We had the Russia Ukraine conflict. We had the tariffs. Now, we have the Iranian conflict. And every time we had one of these geopolitical flare ups, inflation spiked like a rocket. You need a telescope to see how high inflation went, and it never came down. And the reason for that is we let our supply chains get way too fragile and way too weak, and there's no resiliency in the supply chains. And now, we're at this inflection point where we want to reassure everything that we tore down and move to China. We want to re industrialize. We have this technological compute revolution that is infinitely more infrastructure intensive than compute was in the last generations And this is creating this really wild demand shock for infrastructural, critical minerals, commodities, at the same time where there's a supply shock because we just haven't invested in this stuff for so long. Now, there are so many capital cycles going on at the same …