Trump's Tariffs Return, Kalshi's Midterms Hub, and Elon's AI "Odyssey"
Episode
52 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Relationships, Investing, Fundraising & VC
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Tariff Economics: Trump's 50% Canadian tariffs will cost average U.S. households approximately $1,000 this year, rising to $1,200 if additional tariffs proceed. Roughly 90% of tariff costs are absorbed by U.S. consumers, not trading partners. Canada sends 80% of its exports to the U.S., making it disproportionately vulnerable to economic damage from this policy.
- ✓Prediction Markets vs. Polling: Kalshi correctly predicts Federal Reserve rate decisions with a near-perfect record and outperforms traditional polling by roughly 78% accuracy on election outcomes. The core reason: asking people where they place real money reveals genuine beliefs more reliably than surveys. Polling firms are losing business as a direct result of this accuracy gap.
- ✓AI Market Bifurcation: Chinese open-weight AI models grew from 10% of global token usage in January 2025 to 58% today. DeepSeek charges approximately one thirty-fifth the price per token compared to U.S. frontier models. Businesses with disciplined CFOs will increasingly choose Chinese models delivering 80% of frontier performance at 10% of the cost.
- ✓Social Media Age Bans: France banned social media for under-15s and phones in high schools, following Australia's ban for under-16s. Research from NYU shows that individual parental restrictions backfire — children whose parents remove phones become more isolated and depressed unless a universal collective ban applies to all peers simultaneously, making legislation the only effective mechanism.
- ✓Tesla Valuation Reality: Tesla's vehicle sales volumes rose significantly, but margin compression is accelerating as BYD offers comparable EVs at roughly half the price. Analysts outside of underwriting firms place Tesla's fair value between $30 and $60 per share versus its current trading price. The robotaxi program has only 24 vehicles operating globally, compared to Waymo's 4,000–5,000.
What It Covers
Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, recording live at CAO Summit in Los Angeles, cover Trump's returning tariffs on Canada, Kalshi's midterm prediction markets, Anthropic's $40M political spending, China's AI market dominance reaching 58% token usage, Tesla's margin compression, and France's social media ban for under-15s.
Key Questions Answered
- •Tariff Economics: Trump's 50% Canadian tariffs will cost average U.S. households approximately $1,000 this year, rising to $1,200 if additional tariffs proceed. Roughly 90% of tariff costs are absorbed by U.S. consumers, not trading partners. Canada sends 80% of its exports to the U.S., making it disproportionately vulnerable to economic damage from this policy.
- •Prediction Markets vs. Polling: Kalshi correctly predicts Federal Reserve rate decisions with a near-perfect record and outperforms traditional polling by roughly 78% accuracy on election outcomes. The core reason: asking people where they place real money reveals genuine beliefs more reliably than surveys. Polling firms are losing business as a direct result of this accuracy gap.
- •AI Market Bifurcation: Chinese open-weight AI models grew from 10% of global token usage in January 2025 to 58% today. DeepSeek charges approximately one thirty-fifth the price per token compared to U.S. frontier models. Businesses with disciplined CFOs will increasingly choose Chinese models delivering 80% of frontier performance at 10% of the cost.
- •Social Media Age Bans: France banned social media for under-15s and phones in high schools, following Australia's ban for under-16s. Research from NYU shows that individual parental restrictions backfire — children whose parents remove phones become more isolated and depressed unless a universal collective ban applies to all peers simultaneously, making legislation the only effective mechanism.
- •Tesla Valuation Reality: Tesla's vehicle sales volumes rose significantly, but margin compression is accelerating as BYD offers comparable EVs at roughly half the price. Analysts outside of underwriting firms place Tesla's fair value between $30 and $60 per share versus its current trading price. The robotaxi program has only 24 vehicles operating globally, compared to Waymo's 4,000–5,000.
Notable Moment
Galloway argued that if any trading partner deserved to impose tariffs, it would logically be Canada imposing them on the U.S. — because American exports like iPhones carry 40–60% margins trading at 30x earnings, while Canadian timber and commodities generate far lower shareholder value per dollar exported.
Episode Transcript
Support for the show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave, medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI, ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to corewave.com/ready for anything. Support for the show comes from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and the new film Disclosure Day. Watch Disclosure Day at home now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? Now the truth belongs to 7,000,000,000 people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Koepp starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required, also in theaters. With Fin, we've built a number one AI agent for customer service It solves up to 90% of queries for businesses, tops all the performance benchmarks and the g two leaderboards, and it comes with a million dollar guarantee. Check it out at fin.ai. I think my third wife is here, so my next ex wife is somewhere in this crowd. I'm not gonna say a word about that. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. Scott, we are here in California, the hellscape behind us. It's really quite It's awful here. I don't know how people survive. We try weather, the breeze, the ocean, the In N Out Burger. God. Awful. Yeah. So we're here at a conference. We're recording this live in front of a live audience at CAO Summit in Los Angeles. This is at Terraneo where, again, I used to run the, Code Conference here for many, many years and Yeah. Many memories. There there really are a lot of memories here of doing things. Yeah. This is yeah. You absolutely this is kinda where your this is where you made Mark Zuckerberg sweat. Yeah. Mhmm. This is it's spectacular now. Him sweat. He sweat because he had a panic attack. Okay. Okay? Yeah. No. I think he What's what's the real memory for me is this is actually the last, interview, that Steve Jobs ever did. He did several interviews here, but the last one before he died was here, which was really an amazing interview. It was actually just in this ballroom here. And, one of the things that I remember before that when we did Jason Jobs together is, when we had Mark here, the year he sweat, all he wanted to do he is is is an up and coming entrepreneur that Facebook wasn't very big. …
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company
“DeepSeek charges approximately one thirty-fifth the price per token compared to U.S. frontier models.”
“margin compression is accelerating as BYD offers comparable EVs at roughly half the price.”
“Anthropic's $40M political spending”
“Kalshi correctly predicts Federal Reserve rate decisions with a near-perfect record and outperforms traditional polling by roughly 78% accuracy on election outcomes.”
“The robotaxi program has only 24 vehicles operating globally, compared to Waymo's 4,000–5,000.”
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