Podcasts about FDI

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!Note: We didn't directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus' and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.Full Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals* 33:23 Industries and Datasets* 35:22 Building the Agent Team* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode* 55:38 Token FOMO Culture* 56:31 Production Function Secrets* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and EngineeringTranscriptAdapting Work for AgentsAaron Levie: Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work.We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you'll see compounding returns. But that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.Aaron Levie: It's a pleasure. Wow. How'd you get upgraded to, uh, to that?swyx: Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.We really do.swyx: Uh, and we're here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.swyx: Uh, yeah. So we've all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it's always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You're, you're super excited about agents.I loveAaron Levie: agents.swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executiveswyx: hire.Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,swyx: hey, that's my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.Why Every Agent Needs a BoxAaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've, we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time.And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that's gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we've been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we're only working on the new active stuff.All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it's gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it's gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're gonna need access to that data as well.And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's gonna be agents that are just.Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you're gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.It's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.We think it's gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody's just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.And it's nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that's theswyx: tagline. Every agentAaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I'm fine with this. And that's the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,swyx: okay, let's do it. Yeah.Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.swyx: Yeah.Agent Governance and IdentityAaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we're gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.That's inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that's needed to make all those agents effective in the enterprise? Make sure that they are well governed. Make sure they're only doing [00:05:00] safe things on your information. Make sure that they're not getting exposed. The data that they shouldn't have access to.There's gonna be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt, inject an agent and sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to. Oh, weJeff Huber: have God,Aaron Levie: right? I mean, that's just gonna happen all over the place, right?So, so then the thing is, is how do you make sure you have the right security, the permissions, the access controls, the data governance. Um, we actually don't yet exactly know in many cases how we're gonna regulate some of these agents, right? If you think about an agent in financial services, does it have the exact same financial sort of, uh, requirements that a human did?Or is it, is the risk fully on the human that was interacting or created the agent? All open questions, but no matter what, there's gonna need to be a layer that manages the, the data they have access to, the workflows that they're involved in, pulling up data from multiple systems. This is the new infrastructure opportunity in the era of agents.swyx: You have a piece on agent identities, [00:06:00] which I think was today, um, which I think a lot of breaking news, the security, security people are talking about, right? Like you basically, I, I always think of this as like, well you need the human you and then there you need the agent. YouAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: And uh, well, I don't know if it's that simple, but is box going to have an opinion on that or you're just gonna be like, well we're just the sort of the, the source layer.Yeah. Let's Okta of zero handle that.Aaron Levie: I think we're gonna have an opinion and we will work with generally wherever the contours of the market end up. Um, and the reason that we're gonna have an opinion more than other topics probably is because one of the biggest use cases for why your agent might need it, an identity is for file system access.So thus we have to kind of think about this pretty deeply. And I think, uh, unless you're like in our world thinking about this particular problem all day long, it might be, you know, like, why is this such a big deal? And the reason why it's a really big deal is because sometimes sort of say, well just give the agent an, an account on the system and it just treats, treat it like every other type of user on the system.The [00:07:00] problem is, is that I as Aaron don't really have any responsibility over anybody else's box account in our organization. I can't see the box account of any other employee that I work with. I am not liable for anything that they do. And they have, I have, I have, you know, strict privacy requirements on everything that they're able to, you know, that, that, that they work on.Agents don't have that, you know, don't have those properties. The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because, because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have any legal, you know, kind of, you know, responsibility.So thus you can't just be like, oh, well I'll just create a bunch of accounts and then I'll, I'll kind of work with that agent and I'll talk to it occasionally. Like you need oversight of that. And so then the question is, how do you have a world where the agent, sometimes you have oversight of, but what if that agent goes and works with other people?That person over there is collaborating with the agent on something you shouldn't have [00:08:00] access to what they're doing. So we have all of these new boundaries that we're gonna have to figure out of, of, you know, it's really, really easy. So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with ai, which is the agent just is you.And when you're in quad code and you're in cursor, and you're in Codex, you're just, the agent is you. You're offing into your services. It can do everything you can do. That's the easy mode. The hard mode is agents are kind of running on their own. People check in with them occasionally, they're doing things autonomously.How do you give them access to resources in the enterprise and not dramatically increased the security risk and the risk that you might expose the wrong thing to somebody. These are all the new problems that we have to get solved. I like the identity layer and, and identity vendors as being a solution to that, but we'll, we'll need some opinions as well because so many of the use cases are these collaborative file system use cases, which is how do I give it an agent, a subset of my data?Give it its own workspace as well. ‘cause it's gonna need to store off its own information that would be relevant for it. And how do I have the right oversight into that? [00:09:00]Jeff Huber: One thing, which, um, I think is kind interesting, think about is that you know, how humans work, right? Like I may not also just like give you access to the whole file.I might like sit next to you and like scroll to this like one part of the file and just show you that like one part and like, you know,swyx: partial file access.Jeff Huber: I'm just saying I think like our, like RA does seem to be dead, right? Like you wanna say something is dead uhhuh probably RA is dead. And uh, like the auth story to me seems like incredibly unsolved and unaddressed by like the existing state of like AI vendors.ButAaron Levie: yeah, I think, um, we're, I mean you're taking obviously really to level limit that we probably need to solve for. Yeah. And we built an access control system that was, was kind of like, you know, its own little world for, for a long time. And um, and the idea was this, it's a many to many collaboration system where I can give you any part of the file system.And it's a waterfall model. So if I give you higher up in the, in the, in the system, you get everything below. And that, that kind of created immense flexibility because I can kind of point you to any layer in the, in the tree, but then you're gonna get access to everything kind of below it. And that [00:10:00] mostly is, is working in this, in this world.But you do have to manage this issue, which is how do I create an agent that has access to some of my stuff and somebody else's stuff as well. Mm-hmm. And which parts do I get to look at as the creator of the agent? And, and these are just brand new problems? Yeah. Crazy. And humans, when there was a human there that was really easy to do.Like, like if the three of us were all sharing, there'd be a Venn diagram where we'd have an overlapping set of things we've shared, but then we'd have our own ways that we shared with each other. In an agent world, somebody needs to take responsibility for what that agent has access to and what they're working on.These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise contextswyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: That are not leaking your data constantly.swyx: No. Like, I mean, you know, I run a very, very small company for my conference and like we already have data sensitivity issues.Yes. And some of my team members cannot see Yes. Uh, the others and like, I can't imagine what it's like to run a Fortune 500 and like, you have to [00:11:00] worry about this. I'm just kinda curious, like you, you talked to a lot like, like 70, 80% of your cus uh, of the Fortune 500, your customers.Aaron Levie: Yep. 67%. Just so we're being verySEswyx: precise.So Yeah. I'm notAaron Levie: Okay. Okay.swyx: Something I'm rounding up. Yes. Round up. I'm projecting to, forAaron Levie: the government.swyx: I'm projecting to the end of the year.Aaron Levie: Okay.swyx: There you go.Aaron Levie: You do make it sound like, like we, we, well we've gotta be on this. Like we're, we're taking way too long to get to 80%. Well,swyx: no, I mean, so like. How are they approaching it?Right? Because you're, you don't have a, you don't have a final answer yet.Why Coding Agents Took Off FirstAaron Levie: Well, okay, so, so this is actually, this is the stark reality that like, unfortunately is the kinda like pouring the water on the party a little bit.swyx: Yes.Aaron Levie: We all in Silicon Valley are like, have the absolute best conditions possible for AI ever.And I think we all saw the dke, you know, kind of Dario podcast and this idea of AI coding. Why is that taken off? And, and we're not yet fully seeing it everywhere else. Well, look, if you just like enumerated the list of properties that AI coding has and then compared it to other [00:12:00] knowledge work, let's just, let's just go through a few of them.Generally speaking, you bring on a new engineer, they have access to a large swath of the code base. Like, there's like very, like you, just, like new engineer comes on, they can just go and find the, the, the stuff that they, they need to work with. It's a fully text in text out. Medium. It's only, it's just gonna be text at the end of the day.So it's like really great from a, from just a, uh, you know, kinda what the agent can work with. Obviously the models are super trained on that dataset. The labs themselves have a really strong, kind of self-reinforcing positive flywheel of why they need to do, you know, agent coding deeply. So then you get just better tooling, better services.The actual developers of the AI are daily users of the, of the thing that they're we're working on versus like the, you know, probably there's only like seven Claude Cowork legal plugin users at Anthropic any given day, but there's like a couple thousand Claude code and you know, users every single day.So just like, think about which one are they getting more feedback on. All day long. So you just go through this list. You have a, you know, everybody who's a [00:13:00] developer by definition is technical so they can go install the latest thing. We're all generally online, or at least, you know, kinda the weird ones are, and we're all talking to each other, sharing best practices, like that's like already eight differences.Versus the rest of the economy. Every other part of the economy has like, like six to seven headwinds relative to that list. You go into a company, you're a banker in financial services, you have access to like a, a tiny little subset of the total data that's gonna be relevant to do your job. And you're have to start to go and talk to a bunch of people to get the right data to do your job because Sally didn't add you to that deal room, you know, folder.And that that, you know, the information is actually in a completely different organization that you now have to go in and, and sort of run into. And it's like you have this endless list of access controls and security. As, as you talked about, you have a medium, which is not, it's not just text, right? You have, you have a zoom call that, that you're getting all of the requirements from the customer.You have a lot of in-person conversations and you're doing in-person sales and like how do you ever [00:14:00] digitize all of that information? Um, you know, I think a lot of people got upset with this idea that the code base has all the context, um, that I don't know if you follow, you know, did you follow some of that conversation that that went viral?Is like, you know, it's not that simple that, that the code base doesn't have all the knowledge, but like it's a lot, you're a lot better off than you are with other areas of knowledge work. Like you, we like, we like have documentation practices, you write specifications. Those things don't exist for like 80% of work that happens in the enterprise.That's the divide that we have, which is, which is AI coding has, has just fully, you know, where we've reached escape velocity of how powerful this stuff is, and then we're gonna have to find a way to bring that same energy and momentum, but to all these other areas of knowledge work. Where the tools aren't there, the data's not set up to be there.The access controls don't make it that easy. The context engineering is an incredibly hard problem because again, you have access control challenges, you have different data formats. You have end users that are gonna need to kind of be kind of trained through this as opposed to their adopting [00:15:00] these tools in their free time.That's where the Fortune 500 is. And so we, I think, you know, have to be prepared as an industry where we are gonna be on a multi-year march to, to be able to bring agents to the enterprise for these workflows. And I think probably the, the thing that we've learned most in coding that, that the rest of the world is not yet, I think ready for, I mean, we're, they'll, they'll have to be ready for it because it's just gonna inevitably happen is I think in coding.What, what's interesting is if you think about the practice of coding today versus two years ago. It's probably the most changed workflow in maybe the history of time from the amount of time it's changed, right? Yeah. Like, like has any, has any workflow in the entire economy changed that quickly in terms of the amount of change?I just, you know, at least in any knowledge worker workflow, there's like very rarely been an event where one piece of technology and work practice has so fundamentally, you know, changed, changed what you do. Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and [00:16:00] does it for you, and you may be at best review it.And even that's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. Mm-hmm. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution.The rest of the economy is gonna have to update its workflows to make agents effective. And to give agents the context that they need and to actually figure out what kind of prompting works and to figure out how do you ensure that the agent has the right access to information to be able to execute on its work.I, you know, this is not the panacea that people were hoping for, of the agent drops in, just automates your life. Like you have to basically re-engineer your workflow to get the most out of agents and, uh, and that, that's just gonna take, you know, multiple years across the economy. Right now it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this.‘cause [00:17:00] you'll see compounding returns, but that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: I love, I love pushing back. I think that. That is what a lot of technology consultants love to hear this sort of thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First to, to embrace the ai. Yes. To get to the promised land, you must pay me so much money to a hundred percent to adopt the prescribed way of, uh, conforming to the agents.Yes. And I worry that you will be eclipsed by someone else who says, no, come as you are.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And we'll meet you where you are.Aaron Levie: And, and, and and what was the thing that went viral a week ago? OpenAI probably, uh, is hiring F Dees. Yeah. Uh, to go into the enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And then philanthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.Yeah. So if the labs are having to do this, if, if the labs have decided that they need to hire FDE and professional services, then I think that's a pretty clear indication that this, there's no easy mode of workflow transformation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to your point, I think actually this is a market opportunity for, you know, new professional services and consulting [00:18:00] firms that are like Agent Build and they, and they kind of, you know, go into organizations and they figure out how to re-engineer your workflows to make them more agent ready and get your data into the right format and, you know, reconstruct your business process.So you're, you're not doing most of the work. You're telling agents how to do the work and then you're reviewing it. But I haven't seen the thing that can just drop in and, and kinda let you not go through those changes.swyx: I don't know how that kind of sales pitch goes over. Yeah. You know, you're, you're saying things like, well, in my sort of nice beautiful walled garden, here's, there's, uh, because here's this, here's this beautiful box account that has everything.Yes. And I'm like, well, most, most real life is extremely messy. Sure. And like, poorly named and there duplicate this outdated s**tAaron Levie: a hundred percent. And so No, no, a hundred percent. And so this is actually No. So, so this is, I mean, we agree that, that getting to the beautiful garden is gonna be tough.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: There's also the other end of the spectrum where I, I just like, it's a technical impossibility to solve. The agent is, is truly cannot get enough context to make the right decision in, in the, in the incredibly messy land. Like there's [00:19:00] no a GI that will solve that. So, so we're gonna have to kind of land in somewhere in between, which is like we all collectively get better at.Documentation practices and, and having authoritative relatively up-to-date information and putting it in the right place like agents will, will certainly cause us to be much better organized around how we work with our information, simply because the severity of the agent pulling the wrong data will be too high and the productivity gain of that you'll miss out on by not doing this will be too high as well, that you, that your competition will just do it and they'll just have higher velocity.So, uh, and, and we, we see this a lot firsthand. So we, we build a series of agents internally that they can kind of have access to your full box account and go off and you give it a task and it can go find whatever information you're looking for and work with. And, you know, thank God for the model progress, but like, if, if you gave that task to an agent.Nine months ago, you're just gonna get lots of bogus answers because it's gonna, it's gonna say, Hey, here's, here are fi [00:20:00] five, you know, documents that all kind of smell like the right thing. And I'm gonna, but I, but you're, you're putting me on the clock. ‘cause my assistant prompt says like, you know, be pretty smart, but also try and respond to the user and it's gonna respond.And it's like, ah, it got the wrong document. And then you do that once or twice as a knowledge worker and you're just neverswyx: again,Aaron Levie: never again. You're just like done with the system.swyx: Yeah. It doesn't work.Aaron Levie: It doesn't work. And so, you know, Opus four six and Gemini three one Pro and you know, whatever the latest five 3G BT will be, like, those things are getting better and better and it's using better judgment.And this sort of like the, all of these updates to the agentic tool and search systems are, are, we're seeing, we're seeing very real progress where the agent. Kind of can, can almost smell some things a little bit fishy when it's getting, you know, we, we have this process where we, we have it go fan out, do a bunch of searches, pull up a bunch of data, and then it has to sort of do its own ranking of, you know, what are the right documents that, that it should be working with.And again, like, you know, the intelligence level of a model six months ago, [00:21:00] it'd be just throwing a dart at like, I'm just, I'm gonna grab these seven files and I, I pray, I hope that that's the right answer. And something like an opus first four five, and now four six is like, oh, it's like, no, that one doesn't seem right relative to this question because I'm seeing some signal that is making that, you know, that's contradicting the document where it would normally be in the tree and who should have access.Like it's doing all of that kind of work for you. But like, it still doesn't work if you just have a total wasteland of data. Like, it's just not, it's just not possible. Partly ‘cause a human wouldn't even be able to do it. So basically if a, if a really, really smart human. Could not do that task in five or 10 minutes for a search retrieval type task.Look, you know, your agent's not gonna be able to do it any better. You see this all day long. SoContext Engineering and Search Limitsswyx: this touches on a thing that just passionate about it was just context engineering. I, I'm just gonna let you ramble or riff on, on context engineering. If, if, if there's anything like he, he did really good work on context fraud, which has really taken over as like the term that people use and the referenceAaron Levie: a hundred percent.We, we all we think about is, is the context rob problem. [00:22:00]Jeff Huber: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like ranking considerations. Gentech surgery think is incredibly promising. Um, yeah, I was trying to generate a question though. I think I have a question right now. Swyx.Aaron Levie: Yeah, no, but like, like I think there was this moment, um, you know, like, I don't know, two years ago before, before we knew like where the, the gotchas were gonna be in ai and I think someone was like, was like, well, infinite context windows will just solve all of these problems and ‘cause you'll just, you'll just give the context window like all the data and.It's just like, okay, I mean, maybe in 2035, like this is a viable solution. First of all, it, it would just, it would just simply cost too much. Like we just can't give the model like the 5,000 documents that might be relevant and it's gonna read them all. And I've seen enough to, to start believing in crazy stuff.So like, I'm willing to just say, sure. Like in, in 10 years from now,swyx: never say, never, never.Aaron Levie: In, in 10 years from now, we'll have infinite context windows at, at a thousandth of the price of today. Like, let's just like believe that that's possible, but Right. We're in reality today. So today we have a context engineering [00:23:00] problem, which is, I got, I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or prob, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like massive degradation.16. Okay. I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with where I'm gonna get accurate information. That's not a lot of tokens for a corpus of 10 million documents that a knowledge worker might have across all of the teams and all the projects and all the people they work with. I have, I have 10 million documents.Which, you know, maybe is times five pages per document or something like that. I'm at 50 million pages of information and I have 60,000 tokens. Like, holy s**t. Yeah. This is like, how do I bridge the 50 million pages of information with, you know, the couple hundred that I get to work with in that, in that token window.Yeah. This is like, this is like such an interesting problem and that's why actually so much work is actually like, just like search systems and the databases and that layer has to just get so locked in, but models getting better and importantly [00:24:00] knowing when they've done a search, they found the wrong thing, they go back, they check their work, they, they find a way to balance sort of appeasing the user versus double checking.We have this one, we have this one test case where we ask the agent to go find. 10 pieces of information.swyx: Is this the complex work eval?Aaron Levie: Uh, this is actually not in the eval. This is, this is sort of just like we have a bunch of different, we have a bunch of internal benchmark kind of scenarios. Every time we, we update our agent, we have one, which is, I ask it to find all of our office addresses, and I give it the list of 10 offices that we have.And there's not one document that has this, maybe there should be, that would be a great example of the kind of thing that like maybe over time companies start to, you know, have these sort of like, what are the canonical, you know, kind of key areas of knowledge that we need to have. We don't seem to have this one document that says, here are all of our offices.We have a bunch of documents that have like, here's the New York office and whatever. So you task this agent and you, you get, you say, I need the addresses for these 10 offices. Okay. And by the way, if you do this on any, you know, [00:25:00] public chat model, the same outcome is gonna happen. But for a different kind of query, you give it, you say, I need these 10 addresses.How many times should the agent go and do its search before it decides whether or not, there's just no answer to this question. Often, and especially the, the, let's say lower tier models, it'll come back and it'll give you six of the 10 addresses. And it'll, and I'll just say I couldn't find the otherswyx: four.It, it doesn't know what It doesn't know. ItAaron Levie: doesn't know what It doesn't know. Yeah. So the model is just like, like when should it stop? When should it stop doing? Like should it, should it do that task for literally an hour and just keep cranking through? Maybe I actually made up an office location and it doesn't know that I made it up and I didn't even know that I made it up.Like, should it just keep, re should it read every single file in your entire box account until it, until it should exhaust every single piece of information.swyx: Expensive.Aaron Levie: These are the new problems that we have. So, you know, something like, let's say a new opus model is sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try these types of queries.I didn't get exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, at [00:26:00] some point I'm gonna stop searching. ‘cause I've determined that that no amount of searching is gonna solve this problem. I'm just not able to do it. And that judgment is like a really new thing that the model needs to be able to have.It's like, when should it give up on a task? ‘cause, ‘cause you just don't, it's a can't find the thing. That's the real world of knowledge, work problems. And this is the stuff that the coding agents don't have to deal with. Because they, it just doesn't like, like you're not usually asking it about, you're, you're always creating net new information coming right outta the model for the most part.Obviously it has to know about your code base and your specs and your documentation, but, but when you deploy an agent on all of your data that now you have all of these new problems that you're dealing withJeff Huber: our, uh, follow follow-up research to context ride is actually on a genetic search. Ah. Um, and we've like right, sort of stress tested like frontier models and their ability to search.Um, and they're not actually that good at searching. Right. Uh, so you're sort of highlighting this like explore, exploit.swyx: You're just say, Debbie, Donna say everything doesn't work. Like,Aaron Levie: well,Jeff Huber: somebody has to be,Aaron Levie: um, can I just throw out one more thing? Yeah. That is different from coding and, and the rest [00:27:00] of the knowledge work that I, I failed to mention.So one other kind of key point is, is that, you know, at the end of the day. Whether you believe we're in a slop apocalypse or, or whatever. At the end of the day, if you, if you build a working product at the end of, if you, if you've built a working solution that is ultimately what the customer is paying for, like whether I have a lot of slop, a little slop or whatever, I'm sure there's lots of code bases we could go into in enterprise software companies where it's like just crazy slop that humans did over a 20 year period, but the end customer just gets this little interface.They can, they can type into it, it does its thing. Knowledge work, uh, doesn't have that property. If I have an AI model, go generate a contract and I generate a contract 20 times and, you know, all 20 times it's just 3% different and like that I, that, that kind of lop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code version of that LOP didn't, didn't introduce.These are, and so like, so how do you constrain these models to just the part that you want [00:28:00] them to work on and just do the thing that you want them to do? And, and, you know, in engineering, we don't, you can't be disbarred as an engineer, but you could be disbarred as a lawyer. Like you can do the wrong medical thing In healthcare, you, there's no, there's no equivalent to that of engineering.Like, doswyx: you want there to be, because I've considered softwareJeff Huber: engineer. What's that? Civil engineering there is, right? NotAaron Levie: software civil engineer. Sure. Oh yeah, for sure. But like in any of our companies, you like, you know, you'll be forgiven if you took down the site and, and we, we will do a rollback and you'll, you'll be in a meeting, but you have not been disbarred as an engineer.We don't, we don't change your, you know, your computer science, uh, blameJeff Huber: degree, this postmortem.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so, uh, now maybe we collectively as an industry need to figure out like, what are you liable for? Not legally, but like in a, in a management sense, uh, of these agents. All sorts of interesting problems that, that, that, uh, that have to come out.But in knowledge work, that's the real hostile environments that we're operating in. Hmm.swyx: I do think like, uh, a lot of the last year's, 2025 story was the rise of coding agents and I think [00:29:00] 2026 story is definitely knowledge work agents. Yes. A hundredAaron Levie: percent.swyx: Right. Like that would, and I think open claw core work are just the beginning.Yes. Like it's, the next one's gonna just gonna be absolute craziness.Aaron Levie: It it is. And, and, uh, and it's gonna be, I mean, again, like this is gonna be this, this wave where we, we are gonna try and bring as many of the practices from coding because that, that will clearly be the forefront, which is tell an agent to go do something and has an access to a set of resources.You need to be responsible for reviewing it at the end of the process. That to me is the, is the kind of template that I just think goes across knowledge, work and odd. Cowork is a great example. Open Closet's a great example. You can kind of, sort of see what Codex could become over time. These are some, some really interesting kind of platforms that are emerging.swyx: Okay. Um, I wanted to, we touched on evals a little bit. You had, you had the report that you're gonna go bring up and then I was gonna go into like, uh, boxes, evals, but uh, go ahead. Talk about your genetic search thing.Jeff Huber: Yeah. Mostly I think kinda a few of the insights. It's like number one frontier model is not good at search.Humans have this [00:30:00] natural explore, exploit trade off where we kinda understand like when to stop doing something. Also, humans are pretty good at like forgetting actually, and like pruning their own context, whereas agents are not, and actually an agent in their kind of context history, if they knew something was bad and they even, you could see in the trace the reason you trace, Hey, that probably wasn't a good idea.If it's still in the trace, still in the context, they'll still do it again. Uhhuh. Uh, and so like, I think pruning is also gonna be like, really, it's already becoming a thing, right? But like, letting self prune the con windowsswyx: be a big deal. Yeah. So, so don't leave the mistake. Don't leave the mistake in there.Cut out the mistake but tell it that you made a mistake in the past and so it doesn't repeat it.Jeff Huber: Yeah. But like cut it out so it doesn't get like distracted by it again. ‘cause really, you know, what is so, so it will repeat its mistake just because it's been, it's inswyx: theJeff Huber: context. It'sAaron Levie: in the context so much.That's a few shot example. Even if it, yeah.Jeff Huber: It's like oh thisAaron Levie: is a great thing to go try even ifJeff Huber: it didn't work.Aaron Levie: Yeah,Jeff Huber: exactly.Aaron Levie: SoJeff Huber: there's like a bunch of stuff there. JustAaron Levie: Groundhogs Day inside these models. Yeah. I'm gonna go keep doing the same wrongJeff Huber: thing. Covering sense. I feel like, you know, some creator analogy you're trying like fit a manifold in latent space, which kind is doing break program synthesis, which is kinda one we think about we're doing right.Like, you know, certain [00:31:00] facts might be like sort of overly pitting it. There are certain, you know, sec sectors of latent space and so like plug clean space. Yeah. And, uh, andswyx: so we have a bell, our editor as a bell every time you say that. SoJeff Huber: you have, you have to like remove those, likeswyx: you shoulda a gong like TPN or something.IfJeff Huber: we gong, you either remove those links to like kinda give it the freedom, kind of do what you need to do. So, but yeah. We'll, we'll release more soon. That'sAaron Levie: awesome.Jeff Huber: That'll, that'll be cool.swyx: We're a cerebral podcast that people listen to us and, and sort of think really deep. So yeah, we try to keep it subtle.Okay. We try to keep it.Aaron Levie: Okay, fine.Inside Agent Evalsswyx: Um, you, you guys do, you guys do have EVs, you talked about your, your office thing, but, uh, you've been also promoting APEX agents and complex work. Uh, yeah, whatever you, wherever you wanna take this just Yeah. How youAaron Levie: Apex is, is obviously me, core's, uh, uh, kind of, um, agent eval.We, we supported that by sort of. Opening up some data for them around how we kind of see these, um, data workspaces in, in the, you know, kind of regular economy. So how do lawyers have a workspace? How do investment bankers have a workspace? What kind of data goes into those? And so we, [00:32:00] we partner with them on their, their apex eval.Our own, um, eval is, it's actually relatively straightforward. We have a, a set of, of documents in a, in a range of industries. We give the agent previously did this as a one shot test of just purely the model. And then we just realized we, we need to, based on where everything's going, it's just gotta be more agentic.So now it's a bit more of a test of both our harness and the model. And we have a rubric of a set of things that has to get right and we score it. Um, and you're just seeing, you know, these incredible jumps in almost every single model in its own family of, you know, opus four, um, you know, sonnet four six versus sonnet four five.swyx: Yeah. We have this up on screen.Aaron Levie: Okay, cool. So some, you're seeing it somewhere like. I, I forget the to, it was like 15 point jump, I think on the main, on the overall,swyx: yes.Aaron Levie: And it's just like, you know, these incredible leaps that, that are starting to happen. Um,swyx: and OP doesn't know any, like any, it's completely held out from op.Aaron Levie: This is not in any, there's no public data which has, you know, Ben benefits and this is just a private eval that we [00:33:00] do, and then we just happen to show it to, to the world. Hmm. So you can't, you can't train against it. And I think it's just as representative of. It's obviously reasoning capabilities, what it's doing at, at, you know, kind of test time, compute capabilities, thinking levels, all like the context rot issues.So many interesting, you know, kind of, uh, uh, capabilities that are, that are now improvingswyx: one sector that you have. That's interesting.Industries and Datasetsswyx: Uh, people are roughly familiar with healthcare and legal, but you have public sector in there.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Uh, what's that? Like, what, what, what is that?Aaron Levie: Yeah, and, and we actually test against, I dunno, maybe 10 industries.We, we end up usually just cutting a few that we think have interesting gains. All extras, won a lot of like government type documents. Um,swyx: what is that? What is it? Government type documents?Aaron Levie: Government filings. Like a taxswyx: return, likeAaron Levie: a probably not tax returns. It would be more of what would go the government be using, uh, as data.So, okay. Um, so think about research that, that type of, of, of data sets. And then we have financial services for things like data rooms and what would be in an investment prospectus. Uhhuh,swyx: that one you can dog food.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. [00:34:00] So, uh, so we, we run the models, um, in now, you know, more of an agent mode, but, but still with, with kinda limited capacity and just try and see like on a, like, for like basis, what are the improvements?And, and again, we just continue to be blown away by. How, how good these models are getting.swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think every serious AI company needs something like that where like, well, this is the work we do. Here's our company eval. Yeah. And if you don't have it, well, you're not a serious AI company.Aaron Levie: There's two dimensions, right?So there's, there's like, how are the models improving? And so which models should you either recommend a customer use, which one should you adopt? But then every single day, we're making changes to our agents. And you need to knowswyx: if you regressed,Aaron Levie: if you know. Yeah. You know, I've been fully convinced that the whole agent observability and eval space is gonna be a massive space.Um, super excited for what Braintrust is doing, excited for, you know, Lang Smith, all the things. And I think what you're going to, I mean, this is like every enter like literally every enterprise right now. It's like the AI companies are the customers of these tools. Every enterprise will have this. Yeah, you'll just [00:35:00] have to have an eval.Of all of your work and like, we'll, you'll have an eval of your RFP generation, you'll have an eval of your sales material creation. You'll have an eval of your, uh, invoice processing. And, and as you, you know, buy or use new agentic systems, you are gonna need to know like, what's the quality of your, of your pipeline.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: Um, so huge, huge market with agent evals.swyx: Yeah.Building the Agent Teamswyx: And, and you know, I'm gonna shout out your, your team a bit, uh, your CTO, Ben, uh, did a great talk with us last year. Awesome. And he's gonna come back again. Oh, cool. For World's Fair.Aaron Levie: Yep.swyx: Just talk about your team, like brag a little bit. I think I, I think people take these eval numbers in pretty charts for granted, but No, there, I mean, there's, there's lots of really smart people at work during all this.Aaron Levie: Biggest shout out, uh, is we have a, we have a couple folks at Dya, uh, Sidarth, uh, that, that kind of run this. They're like a, you know, kind of tag tag team duo on our evals, Ben, our CTO, heavily involved Yasha, head of ai, uh, you know, a bunch of folks. And, um, evals is one part of the story. And then just like the full, you know, kind of AI.An agent team [00:36:00] is, uh, is a, is a pretty, you know, is core to this whole effort. So there's probably, I don't know, like maybe a few dozen people that are like the epicenter. And then you just have like layers and layers of, of kind of concentric circles of okay, then there's a search team that supports them and an infrastructure team that supports them.And it's starting to ripple through the entire company. But there's that kind of core agent team, um, that's a pretty, pretty close, uh, close knit group.swyx: The search team is separate from the infra team.Aaron Levie: I mean, we have like every, every layer of the stack we have to kind of do, except for just pure public cloud.Um, but um, you know, we, we store, I don't even know what our public numbers are in, you know, but like, you can just think about it as like a lot of data is, is stored in box. And so we have, and you have every layer of the, of the stack of, you know, how do you manage the data, the file system, the metadata system, the search system, just all of those components.And then they all are having to understand that now you've got this new customer. Which is the agent, and they've been building for two types of customers in the past. They've been building for users and they've been building for like applications. [00:37:00] And now you've got this new agent user, and it comes in with a difference of it, of property sometimes, like, hey, maybe sometimes we should do embeddings, an embedding based, you know, kind of search versus, you know, your, your typical semantic search.Like, it's just like you have to build the, the capabilities to support all of this. And we're testing stuff, throwing things away, something doesn't work and, and not relevant. It's like just, you know, total chaos. But all of those teams are supporting the agent team that is kind of coming up with its requirements of what, what do we need?swyx: Yeah. No, uh, we just came from, uh, fireside chat where you did, and you, you talked about how you're doing this. It's, it's kind of like an internal startup. Yeah. Within the broader company. The broader company's like 3000 people. Yeah. But you know, there's, there's a, this is a core team of like, well, here's the innovation center.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And like that every company kind of is run this way.Aaron Levie: Yeah. I wanna be sensitive. I don't call it the innovation center. Yeah. Only because I think everybody has to do innovation. Um, there, there's a part of the, the, the company that is, is sort of do or die for the agent wave.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And it only happens to be more of my focus simply because it's existential that [00:38:00] we get it right.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: All of the supporting systems are necessary. All of the surrounding adjacent capabilities are necessary. Like the only reason we get to be a platform where you'd run an agent is because we have a security feature or a compliance feature, or a governance feature that, that some team is working on.But that's not gonna be the make or break of, of whether we get agents right. Like that already exists and we need to keep innovating there. I don't know what the right, exact precise number is, but it's not a thousand people and it's not 10 people. There's a number of people that are like the, the kind of like, you know, startup within the company that are the make or break on everything related to AI agents, you know, leveraging our platform and letting you work with your data.And that's where I spend a lot of my time, and Ben and Yosh and Diego and Teri, you know, these are just, you know, people that, that, you know, kind of across the team. Are working.swyx: Yeah. Amazing.Read Write Agent WorkflowsJeff Huber: How do you, how do you think about, I mean, you talked a lot about like kinda read workflows over your box data. Yep.Right. You know, gen search questions, queries, et cetera. But like, what about like, write or like authoring workflows?Aaron Levie: Yes. I've [00:39:00] already probably revealed too much actually now that I think about it. So, um, I've talked about whatever,Jeff Huber: whatever you can.Aaron Levie: Okay. It's just us. It's just us. Yeah. Okay. Of course, of course.So I, I guess I would just, uh, I'll make it a little bit conceptual, uh, because again, I've already, I've already said things that are not even ga but, but we've, we've kinda like danced around it publicly, so I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Just like, hopefully nobody watches this, um, episode. No.swyx: It's tidbits for the Heidi engaged to go figure out like what exactly, um, you know, is, is your sort of line of thinking.Sure. They can connect the dots.Aaron Levie: Yeah. So, so I would say that, that, uh, we, you know, as a, as a place where you have your enterprise content, there's a use case where I want to, you know, have an agent read that data and answer questions for me. And then there's a use case where I want the agent to create something.And use the file system to create something or store off data that it's working on, or be able to have, you know, various files that it's writing to about the work it's doing. So we do see it as a total read write. The harder problem has so far been the read only because, because again, you have that kind of like 10 [00:40:00] million to one ratio problem, whereas rights are a lot of, that's just gonna come from the model and, and we just like, we'll just put it in the file system and kinda use it.So it's a little bit of a technically easier problem, but the only part that's like, not necessarily technically hard, it is just like it's not yet perfected in the state of the ecosystem is, you know, building a beautiful PowerPoint presentation. It's still a hard problem for these models. Like, like we still, you know, like, like these formats are just, we're not built for.They'reswyx: working on it.Aaron Levie: They're, they're working on it. Everybody's working on it.swyx: Every launch is like, well, we do PowerPoint now.Aaron Levie: We're getting, yeah, getting a lot, getting a lot of better each time. But then you'll do this thing where you'll ask the update one slide and all of a sudden, like the fonts will be just like a little bit different, you know, on two of the slides, or it moved, you know, some shape over to the left a little bit.And again, these are the kind of things that, like in code, obviously you could really care about if you really care about, you know, how beautiful is the code, but at the end, user doesn't notice all those problems and file creation, the end user instantly sees it. You're [00:41:00] like, ah, like paragraph three, like, you literally just changed the font on me.Like it's a totally different font and like midway through the document. Mm-hmm. Those are the kind of things that you run into a lot of in the, in the content creation side. So, mm-hmm. We are gonna have native agents. That do all of those things, they'll be powered by the leading kind of models and labs.But the thing that I think is, is probably gonna be a much bigger idea over time is any agent on any system, again, using Box as a file system for its work, and in that kind of scenario, we don't necessarily care what it's putting in the file system. It could put its memory files, it could put its, you know, specification, you know, documents.It could put, you know, whatever its markdown files are, or it could, you know, generate PDFs. It's just like, it's a workspace that is, is sort of sandboxed off for its work. People can collaborate into it, it can share with other people. And, and so we, we were thinking a lot about what's the right, you know, kind of way to, to deliver that at scale.Docs Graphs and Founder Modeswyx: I wanted to come into sort of the sort of AI transformation or AI sort of, uh, operations things. [00:42:00] Um, one of the tweets that you, that you wanted to talk about, this is just me going through your tweets, by the way. Oh, okay. I mean, like, this is, you readAaron Levie: one by one,swyx: you're the, you're the easiest guest to prep for because you, you already have like, this is the, this is what I'm interested in.I'm like, okay, well, areAaron Levie: we gonna get to like, like February, January or something? Where are we in the, in the timelines? How far back are we going?swyx: Can you, can you describe boxes? A set of skills? Right? Like that, that's like, that's like one of the extremes of like, well if you, you just turn everything into a markdown file.Yeah. Then your agent can run your company. Uh, like you just have to write, find the right sequence of words toAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: To do it.Aaron Levie: Sorry, isthatswyx: the question? So I think the question is like, what if we documented everything? Yes. The way that you exactly said like,Aaron Levie: yes.swyx: Um, let's get all the Fortune five hundreds, uh, prepared for agents.Yes. And like, you know, everything's in golden and, and nicely filed away and everything. Yes. What's missing? Like, what's left, right? LikeAaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: You've, you've run your company for a decade. LikeAaron Levie: Yeah. I think the challenge is that, that that information changes a week later. And because something happened in the market for that [00:43:00] customer, or us as a company that now has to go get updated, and so these systems are living and breathing and they have to experience reality and updates to reality, which right now is probably gonna be humans, you know, kinda giving those, giving them the updates.And, you know, there is this piece about context graphs as as, uh, that kinda went very viral. Yeah. And I, I, I was like a, i, I, I thought it was super provocative. I agreed with many parts of it. I disagree with a few parts around. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as as just if we just had the agent traces, then we can finally do that work because there's just like, there's so much more other stuff that that's happening that, that we haven't been able to capture and digitize.And I think they actually represented that in the piece to be clear. But like there's just a lot of work, you know, that that has to, you just can't have only skills files, you know, for your company because it's just gonna be like, there's gonna be a lot of other stuff that happens. Yeah. Change over time.Yeah. Most companies are practically apprenticeships.swyx: Most companies are practically apprenticeships. LikeJeff Huber: every new employee who joins the team, [00:44:00] like you span one to three months. Like ramping them up.Aaron Levie: Yes. AllJeff Huber: that tat knowledgeAaron Levie: isJeff Huber: not written down.Aaron Levie: Yes.Jeff Huber: But like, it would have to be if you wanted to like give it to an Asian.Right. And so like that seems to me like to beAaron Levie: one is I think you're gonna see again a premium on companies that can document this. Mm-hmm. Much. There'll be a huge premium on that because, because you know, can you shorten that three month ramp cycle to a two week ramp cycle? That's an instant productivity gain.Can you re dramatically reduce rework in the organization because you've documented where all the stuff is and where the answers are. Can you make your average employee as good as your 90th percentile employee because you've captured the knowledge that's sort of in the heads of, of those top employees and make that available.So like you can see some very clear productivity benefits. Mm-hmm. If you had a company culture of making sure you know your information was captured, digitized, put in a format that was agent ready and then made available to agents to work with, and then you just, again, have this reality of like add a 10,000 person [00:45:00] company.Mapping that to the, you know, access structure of the company is just a hard problem. Is like, is like, yeah, well, you just, not every piece of information that's digitized can be shared to everybody. And so now you have to organize that in a way that actually works. There was a pretty good piece, um, this, this, uh, this piece called your company as a file is a file system.I, did you see that one?swyx: Nope.Aaron Levie: Uh, yes. You saw it. Yeah. And, and, uh, I actually be curious your thoughts on it. Um, like, like an interesting kind of like, we, we agree with it because, because that's how we see the world and, uh,swyx: okay. We, we have it up on screen. Oh,Aaron Levie: okay. Yeah. But, but it's all about basically like, you know, we've already, we, we, we already organized in this kind of like, you know, permission structure way.Uh, and, and these are the kind of, you know, natural ways that, that agents can now work with data. So it's kind of like this, this, you know, kind of interesting metaphor, but I do think companies will have to start to think about how they start to digitize more, more of that data. What was your take?Jeff Huber: Yeah, I mean, like the company's probably like an acid compliant file system.Aaron Levie: Uh,Jeff Huber: yeah. Which I'm guessing boxes, right? So, yeah. Yes.swyx: Yeah. [00:46:00]Jeff Huber: Which you have a great piece on, but,swyx: uh, yeah. Well, uh, I, I, my, my, my direction is a little bit like, I wanna rewind a little bit to the graph word you said that there, that's a magic trigger word for us. I always ask what's your take on knowledge graphs?Yeah. Uh, ‘cause every, especially at every data database person, I just wanna see what they think. There's been knowledge graphs, hype cycles, and you've seen it all. So.Aaron Levie: Hmm. I actually am not the expert in knowledge graphs, so, so that you might need toswyx: research, you don't need to be an expert. Yeah. I think it's just like, well, how, how seriously do people take it?Yeah. Like, is is, is there a lot of potential in the, in the HOVI?Aaron Levie: Uh, well, can I, can I, uh, understand first if it's, um, is this a loaded question in the sense of are you super pro, super con, super anti medium? Iswyx: see pro, I see pros and cons. Okay. Uh, but I, I think your opinion should be independent of mine.Aaron Levie: Yeah. No, no, totally. Yeah. I just want to see what I'm stepping into.swyx: No, I know. It's a, and it's a huge trigger word for a lot of people out Yeah. In our audience. And they're, they're trying to figure out why is that? Because whyAaron Levie: is this such aswyx: hot item for them? Because a lot of people get graph religion.And they're like, everything's a graph. Of course you have to represent it as a graph. Well, [00:47:00] how do you solve your knowledge? Um, changing over time? Well, it's a graph.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And, and I think there, there's that line of work and then there's, there's a lot of people who are like, well, you don't need it. And both are right.Aaron Levie: Yeah. And what do the people who say you don't need it, what are theyswyx: arguing for Mark down files. Oh, sure, sure. Simplicity.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Versus it's, it's structure versus less structure. Right. That's, that's all what it is. I do.Aaron Levie: I think the tricky thing is, um, is, is again, when this gets met with real humans, they're just going to their computer.They're just working with some people on Slack or teams. They're just sharing some data through a collaborative file system and Google Docs or Box or whatever. I certainly like the vision of most, most knowledge graph, you know, kind of futuristic kind of ways of thinking about it. Uh, it's just like, you know, it's 2026.We haven't seen it yet. Kind of play out as as, I mean, I remember. Do you remember the, um, in like, actually I don't, I don't even know how old you guys are, but I'll for, for to show my age. I remember 17 years ago, everybody thought enterprises would just run on [00:48:00] Wikis. Yeah. And, uh, confluence and, and not even, I mean, confluence actually took off for engineering for sure.Like unquestionably. But like, this was like everything would be in the w. And I think based on our, uh, our, uh, general style of, of, of what we were building, like we were just like, I don't know, people just like wanna workspace. They're gonna collaborate with other people.swyx: Exactly. Yeah. So you were, you were anti-knowledge graph.Aaron Levie: Not anti, not anti. Soswyx: not nonAaron Levie: I'm not, I'm not anti. ‘cause I think, I think your search system, I just think these are two systems that probably, but like, I'm, I'm not in any religious war. I don't want to be in anybody's YouTube comments on this. There's not a fight for me.swyx: We, we love YouTube comments. We're, we're, we're get into comments.Aaron Levie: Okay. Uh, but like, but I, I, it's mostly just a virtue of what we built. Yeah. And we just continued down that path. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And, um, and that, that was what we pursued. But I'm not, this is not a, you know, kind of, this is not a, uh, it'sswyx: not existential for you. Great.Aaron Levie: We're happy to plug into somebody else's graph.We're happy to feed data into it. We're happy for [00:49:00] agents to, to talk to multiple systems. Not, not our fight.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: But I need your answer. Yeah. Graphs or nerd Snipes is very effective nerd.swyx: See this is, this is one, one opinion and then I've,Jeff Huber: and I think that the actual graph structure is emergent in the mind of the agent.Ah, in the same way it is in the mind of the human. And that's a more powerful graph ‘cause it actually involved over time.swyx: So don't tell me how to graph. I'll, I'll figure it out myself. Exactly. Okay. All right. AndJeff Huber: what's yours?swyx: I like the, the Wiki approach. Uh, my, I'm actually

Kia ora. Welcome to Tuesday's Economy Watch where we follow the economic events and trends that affect Aotearoa/New Zealand. I'm David Chaston and this is the international edition from Interest.co.nz. Today we lead with news the world has suddenly gotten far more dangerous after the US/Israeli strike on Iran. Shipping costs especially are in a dramatic rise on necessary re-routing. The cost of war will hit inflation soon and that is a looming problem for central bank policymakers. And investors are demanding higher yields from not only corporate paper, but benchmark government bonds as well. But first in the US, the February PMI from the widely-watched ISM survey dipped very slightly from January, but held up better than analysts were expecting. It is only the third time in 40 months that this metric shows an expansion. It was driven by prices and imports, both of which are rising faster. New order flows rose at a slower pace. This metric is basically the same as the parallel S&P Global factory PMI for February, which noted faltering exports. This contrasts with the latest EU PMI which reports its strongest rise in new factory orders since April 2022 taking their factory PMI to a 44-month high. But coming with it are building inflationary pressures. Driving this result is a notable uptick in Germany which is now back in expansion. The rise and rise of Japanese manufacturing is now getting real momentum. Their February factory PMI burst out of its trend (confirming the January rise), to now be at almost a four year high. This is on the back of output, new orders and employment that all expanded at their fastest rates since January 2022. Not to be outdone, Taiwan's factory PMI rose sharply too in February, although this also came with higher inflationary pressure than for Japan. Firms there are struggling to meet demand. In some other selected Asian nations, their factory PMI's were mostly positive. This is true for Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, although the same survey in Malaysia isn't quite so positive. Indian industrial production rose 4.8% in January from a year ago, and while most countries would love that, it represents a sharp slowing from December's +8.0% and is way below the +6.5% expected. The December rate was unusual however, and the January expansion mirrors what we saw for most of 2025. China announced late yesterday that they attracted ¥92 bln (US$12.6 bln) in foreign direct investment in January 2026. This was -5.7% less than in January 2025. But we probably should also note that the December FDI was quite good, standing out from the long run of negative flows. (The December inflow was +US$20.6 bln.) In Australia, the Melbourne Institute monthly inflation gauge recorded an easing in monthly inflation in February, dipping -0.2% from January. The main influence were lower fuel prices. In annual terms, however, headline inflation remains elevated above the RBA's 2–3% target band and has exceeded the top-end of the band for the past six months. Changes in the monthly cost of living were mixed, with employee households experiencing the largest monthly increase. And staying in Australia, the Cotality Home Value Index rose +0.7% in February, easing slightly from a +0.8% gain in January. Price growth remained strong in Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, but values were flat in Melbourne and Sydney. Year on year, national home values rose +9.6%, moderating from +10.2% rise in January on this basis. Globally, we should probably note that the aluminium price is up during this turmoil, now at a four-year high. And tin has taken off, now at a record high. Copper is near a record high too, but it isn't changed during this crisis; its been at the current level all year. Also globally, we should note that air cargo demand rose +5.6% in January from a year ago with international airfreight up +7.2%, driven by the +9.4% rise in the Asia/Pacific region, and restrained by the +1.4% riser in North America. Meanwhile passenger air travel rose +3.8% with international travel up +5.9%. It is notable that domestic air travel fell in the US on a year-on-year basis. But it also did in Australia as well. And ocean freight costs have surged in the past day, shocking many as ships need to be re-routed away from the Middle East. The UST 10yr yield is now just on 4.06%, up +10 bps from this time yesterday.  The price of gold will start today up +US$18 from yesterday at US$5296/oz. Overnight it got up to a new record high of US$5415 but it has retraced since then. Silver is down a sharp -US$6 at US$87/oz today also after an interim burst higher. American oil prices are up +US$3.50 at just on US$70.50/bbl, while the international Brent price is up +US$4 to be now just over US$77/bbl. These at +6% rises. Given the intensified Middle East tensions, this seems pretty restrained. But European natural gas prices have leapt overnight. The Kiwi dollar is -70 bps lower against the USD from yesterday, now just on 59.3 USc. Against the Aussie we are down -40 bps at 83.9 AUc. We are down -20 bps against the yen. Against the euro we are unchanged at 50.7 euro cents. That all means our TWI-5 starts today down -50 bps, now just on 62.9 and a one month low. The bitcoin price starts today at US$69,835 and up +5.5% from this time yesterday. Volatility over the past 24 hours has been high at just under +/- 3.4%. You can get more news affecting the economy in New Zealand from interest.co.nz. Kia ora. I'm David Chaston and we'll do this again tomorrow.

Ukraine will emerge from this war with enormous debt. The conventional wisdom treats that as an obstacle: investors weigh it before committing capital, and the burden slows the recovery before it starts. Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld of UC Berkeley argue the opposite. A thorough restructuring of Ukraine's war debts – including, for sufficiently large obligations, outright forgiveness – is not just politically defensible but economically essential for attracting private investment. The bill for rebuilding and growing Ukraine, Gorodnichenko estimates, is $40 billion a year: $20 billion to replace destroyed capital, $10 billion to stop Ukraine falling behind its Eastern European peers, and $10 billion to start closing the gap. Put that figure next to what Poland absorbed in FDI during its post-communist transition, or the €200 billion of Russian state assets currently immobilised in Euroclear, or the budgetary support Ukraine has been receiving since 2022 – and it looks achievable. The harder challenge, they argue, is not raising $40 billion. It is directing it: towards investment rather than consumption. Ukraine didn't grow in the post-Soviet era at the rate that its neighbours achieved. EU accession momentum and secure borders can be a signal to investors that this time the trajectory will be different.The research behind this episode:Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, and Maurice Obstfeld. 2026. "You Only Live Twice: Financial Inflows and Growth in a Westward-Facing Ukraine." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues, special issue: "What's Next for Ukraine?"To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2025. "You Only Live Twice: Financial Inflows and Growth in a Westward-Facing Ukraine." Economic Policy: Papers on European and Global Issues (podcast).Assign this as extra listening — the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsYuriy Gorodnichenko is a CEPR Research Fellow and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads CEPR's Ukraine Initiative. His research spans monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the macroeconomics of growth and business cycles.Maurice Obstfeld is a CEPR Distinguished Fellow and Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2015 to 2018, and as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama from 2014 to 2015. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Research cited in this episodeThe discussion of debt overhang draws on a body of work from the 1980s developing-country debt crises, notably the insight that for sufficiently indebted countries, debt reduction can increase the expected value of what creditors recover. Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld apply this framework directly to Ukraine's war debts, arguing that deep restructuring – supported by bilateral official creditors, many of whom are European – is a prerequisite for private investment to follow.The €200 billion figure for immobilised Russian central bank assets held at Euroclear is the basis for Obstfeld's proposal of a reparations loan that would give Ukraine immediate access to large-scale resources, with repayment contingent on Russian reparations. This is discussed in more detail in the related reading below.More in the "What's Next for Ukraine?" seriesThis episode is the first in a three-part series based on papers presented at the inaugural Economic Policy winter conference, Paris, December 2025. Episodes 2 and 3, on rebuilding and the labour market, are forthcoming.Related reading on VoxEUYou only live twice: A growth strategy for Ukraine — Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld's own VoxEU column summarising the key arguments in this paper: why $40 billion a year is achievable, what the policy levers are, and why the window matters.Euroclear and the geopolitics of immobilised Russian assets — The legal and financial context behind the €200 billion of Russian central bank assets frozen at Euroclear, and what it would take to use them for a reparations loan to Ukraine.Using the returns of frozen Russian assets to finance the victory of Ukraine — A VoxEU proposal for channelling the interest income generated by frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine's needs, without requiring the more politically contested step of confiscating the assets themselves.Ukraine's recovery challenge — An earlier VoxEU overview of the reconstruction task: the scale of damage, the role of EU accession, and the two-phase approach to restoring growth.

Dopo quattro anni dall'inizio del conflitto tra Russia e Ucraina, appare ancora lontana una tregua. Facciamo il punto insieme ad Ettore Sequi, già segretario generale della Farnesina e ambasciatore.A seguire, ci concentriamo su una novità che riguarda il codice della strada: l'introduzione dell'alcolock. Cos'è, chi dovrà installarlo e quanto costa? Proviamo a dare una risposta con Giordano Biserni, presidente Associazione Amici della Polizia Stradale.Infine, torniamo su uno dei casi più controversi della cronaca italiana: la morte di David Rossi, il capo comunicazione di Mps, deceduto il 6 marzo 2013, dopo esser precipitato dalla finestra del suo ufficio. Le nuove perizie volute dalla commissione d'inchiesta hanno rivelato che le lesioni al volto di Rossi non sarebbero riconducibili alla caduta, ma sarebbero compatibili con un' aggressione. Uno scenario che smentirebbe le sentenze che avevano chiuso il caso bollandolo come un suicidio. Ne parliamo con Gianluca Vinci, deputato di FdI e presidente della commissione parlamentare d'inchiesta sulla vicenda.

Today's episode is the third in a series of three that examine the potential consequences for China if a military operation against Taiwan were to fail. In each of these episodes, we're speaking with authors of a recently published German Marshall Fund study of the possible costs that China would incur across four different, but interrelated areas: the Chinese economy, the military, Chinese social stability, and international costs. The report is titled, “If China Attacks Taiwan” and it is posted on GMFUS.org.  Our podcast today focuses on the potential costs for the Chinese economy.To recap, the study considered two scenarios that could take place in the next five years. In the first scenario, a minor skirmish escalates into a multi-week maritime blockade of Taiwan by China. Although several dozen members of the Chinese and Taiwanese military are killed, U.S. intervention eventually forces China to de-escalate.  In the second scenario, a conflict escalates into a full-fledged invasion, with Chinese strikes on not only Taiwan but also U.S. forces in Japan and Guam. After several months of heavy fighting, Chinese forces are degraded and eventually withdraw after suffering many tens of thousands of casualties.Our guests today are Charlie Vest and Logan Wright, who co-authored the chapter on the implications for the Chinese economy of a failed operation against Taiwan. Logan is a partner at Rhodium Group and leads the firm's work on China's economy and its global impact. Charlie is an associate director at Rhodium Group, where he manages corporate research and advisory work on China.Timestamps:[00:00] Introduction[02:34] Key Takeaways: China's Ambitions vs. Economic Realities [05:41] The Escalation Dilemma in China's Decisionmaking[09:56] Immediate Disruptions to Trade and FDI[13:52] Gray-Zone Military Engagement and Political Pressures[16:48] Could Beijing Underestimate the Costs of US Intervention? [24:12] Policy Tools and Limitations for Economic Stabilization and Recovery[27:19] Long-Term Economic Effects[29:24] Impact of Social Instability

VOV1 - Trong bối cảnh thị trường chứng khoán nước ta được Tổ chức tín nhiệm quốc tế nâng hạng từ cận biên lên mới nổi thứ cấp, thì việc tăng hấp dẫn của thị trường từ cổ phiếu doanh nghiệp FDI là một giải pháp quan trọng.Bà Vũ Thị Chân Phương, Chủ tịch Ủy ban chứng khoán Nhà nước khẳng định, doanh nghiệp FDI khi đáp ứng đầy đủ điều kiện theo Luật Chứng khoán Việt Nam, thì hoàn toàn có thể tham gia thị trường chứng khoán Việt Nam như doanh nghiệp trong nước, mà không có bất kỳ rào cản hoặc sự phân biệt nào.Chúng tôi đánh giá trong bối cảnh hiện nay, sự tham gia của doanh nghiệp FDI chất lượng góp phần quan trọng làm phong phú thêm hàng hóa trên thị trường chứng khoán, tăng sức hấp dẫn đối với nhà đầu tư quốc tế và thể hiện quyết tâm hội nhập của Việt Nam. Tôi hy vọng sớm đón nhận thêm nhiều doanh nghiệp FDI quy mô lớn, hoạt động có hiệu quả, góp phần nâng cao chất lượng hàng hóa và thúc đẩy sự bền vững của thị trường chứng khoán.Ảnh binh họa

Is there more than hot air behind the CBAM regulations now in full effect in the EU? How should the North American fastener industry view these new mandates? Braving conditions created by inevitable climate change, the gas loving Charlie Kerr of Kerr Lakeside offers his views from the ski slopes of Lake Tahoe (1:42:54). Würth Industry USA compliance officer Danielle Riggs provides more sober commentary from the conventional setting of her office (14:52). On the Fastener News Report, Brighton Best International president Jun Xu joins senior news editor Mike McNulty with strong FDI numbers, and plenty of reaction from the market (44:40). Thread guru Carmen Vertullo presents options for meeting non-conformance situations on the Fastener Training Minute (1:32:28). BONUS: Where is the sweet spot in new warehouse space? (38:07) Brian and Eric look ahead to significant warming as they consider who vandalized the Sphynx. Run time: 02:43:50

L'importanza della formazione in ambito Stem è motivo di grande dibattito nel mondo accademico. Molto meno sensibilizzata invece è l'opinione pubblica, perché? Maria Latella ne parla con Francesca Ferlaino (nella foto a sx), fisica quantistica italiana e l'on. Marta Schifone (nella foto a dx), capogruppo in Commissione Lavoro alla Camera per FDI.

"Finita l'ideologia della globalizzazione, siamo nel caos. Tolta la lingua unica, dobbiamo trovare un linguaggio comune. Ci stiamo provando: l'Europa certamente ha un futuro". Così Giulio Tremonti, presidente di Aspen Institute Italia e della Commissione Affari Esteri e Comunitari della Camera dei Deputati, a margine dell'Aspenia Talk che si è tenuto a Milano lo scorso 2 febbraio. "Non è solo l'America, non è solo la Cina, ma anche l'Europa. Basta che l'Europa faccia l'Europa, ovvero che sia seria, che non si occupi, come fanno a Bruxelles, dei tricicli piuttosto che dei giocattoli, che si occupi del nostro futuro", ha concluso. Approfondiamo questa posizione di Giulio Tremonti, deputato (FDI) e presidente della commissione Affari esteri ed europei della Camera, ex ministro dell'Economia governi Berlusconi, Aspen Institute Italia.

Liên Hiệp Châu Âu hiện là thị trường xuất khẩu lớn thứ ba và là thị trường nhập khẩu lớn thứ năm của Việt Nam. Năm 2026 được coi là “thời điểm vàng” để doanh nghiệp Việt Nam khai thác tối đa lợi thế từ Hiệp định Thương mại Tự do (EVFTA) với Liên Âu vì lộ trình cắt giảm thuế quan giữa hai bên đã tiến gần đến 100%. EU cũng không ngừng hỗ trợ Việt Nam trong chuyển đổi xanh để đáp ứng tiêu chí sản phẩm của khối 27 nước. Kể từ khi Hiệp định EVFTA có hiệu lực ngày 01/08/2020, giao thương giữa Việt Nam và Liên Hiệp Châu Âu không ngừng gia tăng. Năm 2025, tổng kim ngạch thương mại song phương đạt 73,8 tỷ đô la, trong đó Việt Nam xuất siêu khoảng 30 tỷ đô la. Theo báo Đầu tư ngày 07/01, Việt Nam là đối tác thương mại lớn nhất của Liên Âu trong khối ASEAN, đứng trong top 10 nhà cung ứng hàng hóa cho thị trường EU (Eurostat 2024). Doanh nghiệp châu Âu tin vào Việt Nam Liên Âu hiện là nhà đầu tư lớn thứ 6 của Việt Nam. Việt Nam trở thành điểm hấp dẫn trong mắt các nhà đầu tư Liên Âu. Trả lời RFI Tiếng Việt ngày 20/01/2026, đại sứ Liên Hiệp Châu Âu tại Việt Nam Julien Guerrier nhận định : “Tôi thậm chí có thể nói rằng trong một hoặc hai năm gần đây, chúng ta đã thấy sự gia tăng đáng kể về niềm tin của các nhà đầu tư châu Âu vào Việt Nam. Điều này được Phòng Thương mại Châu Âu - EuroCham tại Việt Nam đo lường hàng tháng. Mức độ tin tưởng vào đất nước gia tăng nhanh chóng. Năm 2025, tăng trưởng của Việt Nam đạt 8% và Việt Nam đặt mục tiêu tăng trưởng hai chữ số trong những năm tới. Vì vậy, đây là một quốc gia có nhiều cơ hội kinh tế, nơi có một mong muốn thực sự, một tầm nhìn để hiện đại hóa nền kinh tế Việt Nam, và là nơi đang thu hút ngày càng nhiều công ty châu Âu. Hiện tại có 1.500 công ty thành viên của EuroCham đang đầu tư mạnh vào Việt Nam. Đọc thêmHiệp định Tự do Thương mại EU-Việt Nam : Pháp-Việt được lợi gì? Cụ thể, theo Chỉ số Niềm tin Kinh doanh (BCI) quý IV năm 2025 được EuroCham thực hiện, niềm tin đã tăng 13,5 điểm so với quý trước và lên đến 80 điểm - mức cao nhất trong 7 năm gần đây. Chủ tịch EuroCham Bruno Jaspaert đánh giá trong bài nhận định đăng trên The Investor ngày 19/01 : “Đây không chỉ là một con số ấn tượng, nó còn báo hiệu một sự chuyển biến rõ ràng trong tâm lý kinh doanh châu Âu, từ sự phục hồi thận trọng sang niềm tin chiến lược… Từ 2021 đến 2025, các nhà đầu tư châu Âu đã rót hơn 28 tỷ đô la vào Việt Nam. Điều này cho thấy niềm tin dài hạn của họ và tiềm năng của đất nước”. Trước đó, tại Diễn đàn Hợp tác Kinh tế Thương mại Việt Nam - EU 2025, diễn ra ngày 17/10/2025, phó chủ tịch EuroCham Jean-Jacques Bouflet nhận định : 76% lãnh đạo doanh nghiệp châu Âu hiện nay nhìn nhận Việt Nam là điểm đến đầu tư hấp dẫn, và 80% dự báo điều kiện sẽ còn thuận lợi hơn trong 5 năm tới. Khả năng phục hồi và tư duy cải cách : Hai yếu tố củng cố niềm tin Niềm tin này được căn cứ vào hai yếu tố chủ đạo : Khả năng phục hồi đáng kể ; tư duy cải cách mạnh mẽ. Khả năng phục hồi Về yếu tố thứ nhất, Việt Nam được giới chuyên gia đánh giá là đã thể hiện được sự linh hoạt, khéo léo hóa giải các biện pháp thuế đối ứng (ban đầu lên đến 46%) của tổng thống Mỹ Donald Trump. Giám đốc nghiên cứu Benoît de Tréglodé, nhận định với RFI Tiếng Việt : “Vấn đề thuế quan (với Mỹ) đã được Việt Nam đàm phán khá khéo léo, và cuối cùng họ không bị thiệt hại quá nhiều. Còn về quan hệ song phương với Trung Quốc, quan hệ đối tác kinh tế và thương mại đã cởi mở hơn và nhiều hơn. Nhìn từ góc độ này, bối cảnh rất đặc biệt cho Việt Nam, nhưng “ngoại giao cây tre” đã chứng tỏ hiệu quả đáng kể, bởi vì Việt Nam đã phần nào vượt qua các cuộc xung đột đánh dấu năm 2025 mà không bị thiệt hại đáng kể”. Năm 2025, Việt Nam gia nhập nhóm 25 nền kinh tế có trị giá xuất nhập khẩu lớn nhất thế giới, với tổng trị giá xuất nhập khẩu đạt 920 tỷ đô la. Theo Cục Hải quan, Mỹ tiếp tục là thị trường xuất khẩu lớn nhất (152 tỷ đô la) của Việt Nam và Trung Quốc tiếp tục là thị trường cung cấp hàng hóa lớn nhất (183 tỷ đô la) cho Việt Nam. Tư duy cải cách Tư duy cải cách mạnh mẽ là yếu tố thứ hai tác động đến niềm tin của doanh nghiệp châu Âu vào Việt Nam. Ngày 16/01, hãng tin Pháp AFP nhận định “từ khi lên nắm giữ vị trí cao nhất cách đây chỉ 17 tháng, ông Tô Lâm đã tiến hành chiến dịch chống tham nhũng quyết liệt, giảm bớt thủ tục hành chính và thúc đẩy đầu tư vào các công trình cơ sở hạ tầng” : từ 30 bộ và cơ quan chính phủ giảm xuống còn 22, giảm gần 150.000 công chức, khởi động nhiều dự án đầy tham vọng về đường sắt và năng lượng. Đối với nhiều nhà ngoại giao và nhà phân tích, được AFP trích dẫn ngày 16/01, “chính trị gia 68 tuổi là một chiến lược gia khôn khéo, có khả năng chấp nhận rủi ro, và những canh bạc táo bạo nhất của ông đã mang lại thành công”. Giáo sư danh dự Carl Thayer, Đại học New South Wales (Úc), “không gọi ông Tô Lâm là Trump của Việt Nam, nhưng đó là một nhà lãnh đạo tìm cách củng cố quyền lực để đưa ra những quyết định nhanh chóng và dứt khoát”. Đọc thêmEuroCham : Tinh giản hành chính nhưng cần nhanh, hiệu quả để Việt Nam tăng hấp lực Tân tổng bí thư “Tô Lâm sẽ vạch ra hướng đi cho các cải cách đã ấp ủ trong năm qua”, theo nhận định với AP của Nguyễn Khắc Giang, nghiên cứu viên thỉnh giảng tại Chương trình Nghiên cứu Việt Nam, Viện ISEAS-Yusof Ishak (Singapore) : “Tôi cho rằng các cải cách sẽ tiếp tục được đẩy nhanh sau Đại hội Đảng. Nhưng rõ ràng, sẽ có rất nhiều rào cản đối với các cải cách của ông ấy, đặc biệt là nếu nhìn vào cách thức mà các phe phái bảo thủ, nhất là quân đội, sẽ đặt ra nhất nhiều hạn chế, vì lo ngại rằng các cải cách sẽ đi quá xa, khiến Việt Nam có thể đi chệch khỏi con đường xã hội chủ nghĩa mà Đảng muốn đề ra cho đất nước”. EU sẵn sàng đồng hành trong quá trình chuyển đổi Vậy mô hình tăng trưởng mới gồm những điểm gì ? Đó là tái cấu trúc nền kinh tế, đặt mục tiêu tăng trưởng ít nhất là 10% hàng năm cho đến 2030, đưa thu nhập bình quân đầu người lên khoảng 8.500 USD vào năm 2030 ; tỷ trọng công nghiệp chế biến, chế tạo đạt khoảng 28% GDP; tỷ trọng kinh tế số đạt khoảng 30% GDP. Để thực hiện chiến lược này, chính phủ coi trọng ba nhóm giải pháp chính : Hoàn thiện thể chế để phát triển, xóa bỏ những điểm nghẽn, rào cản, giải phóng mọi nguồn lực (…) ; Phát triển nguồn nhân lực chất lượng cao, trình độ cao, trọng dụng nhân tài (…) ; Phát triển xây dựng kết cấu hạ tầng kinh tế - xã hội; nhất là hạ tầng giao thông chiến lược (đường sắt, cảng biển), hạ tầng công nghệ, hạ tầng năng lượng. Những hạ tầng này hết sức quan trọng để bảo đảm tăng trưởng 2 con số trở lên trong thời gian tới và mục tiêu đến năm 2045 trở thành một nước phát triển, có thu nhập cao. Đây cũng là ba trụ cột cốt lõi được chủ tịch EuroCham Bruno Jaspaert nhấn mạnh khi nói về chiến lược phát triển của Việt Nam để đạt được tham vọng này. Cụ thể, Liên Hiệp Châu Âu, cũng như các nhà đầu tư châu Âu, trông đợi gì từ Đại hội Đảng XIV ? Đại sứ EU Julien Guerrier nhận định với RFI Tiếng Việt : “Đại hội cần hướng tới việc xác định và phê duyệt các chính sách đã được hoạch định cho 5 năm tới. Việt Nam đang thực hiện quá trình đơn giản hóa hành chính ở quy mô lớn, bao gồm việc sáp nhập các tỉnh, bộ và đơn giản hóa các thủ tục, tất cả nhằm mục đích hiện đại hóa đất nước và thu hút đầu tư. Tôi nghĩ rằng điều mà chúng tôi kỳ vọng, đó là sự thành công của tất cả các cải cách này, để môi trường kinh doanh trở nên hấp dẫn hơn đối với các doanh nghiệp châu Âu tại Việt Nam và tạo điều kiện thuận lợi cho đầu tư vào các lĩnh vực như năng lượng tái tạo, công nghiệp xanh và chuyển đổi số. Đây là những ngành công nghiệp của tương lai và cũng là những lĩnh vực mà Liên Hiệp Châu Âu có lợi thế cạnh tranh và có thể cung cấp cho Việt Nam những giải pháp công nghệ cao, an toàn, bảo đảm tính tự chủ chiến lược và độc lập kinh tế của Việt Nam đối với việc phát triển trong tương lai về những lĩnh vực trọng điểm này”. Đọc thêmEU-Việt Nam vượt bão thuế quan Mỹ qua Hiệp định Thương mại Tự do EVFTA ? Một khung pháp lý minh bạch, ổn định và nhất quán chính là nền tảng để xây dựng một nền kinh tế có thể tiến xa và tăng trưởng bền vững, để thuyết phục được các nhà đầu tư tự tin đặt những “viên gạch” dài hạn. Điểm này đã trở thành điều kiện tiên quyết trong bối cảnh cạnh tranh ngày càng gay gắt để thu hút đầu tư trực tiếp nước ngoài (FDI) chất lượng cao. Chủ tịch EuroCham cho rằng “nếu làm tốt, Việt Nam hoàn toàn có thể thu hút thêm nhiều dòng vốn châu Âu vào các lĩnh vực giá trị gia tăng cao như công nghệ, năng lượng tái tạo, sản xuất xanh và dịch vụ hiện đại”. Để hỗ trợ chuyển đối số, chuyển đổi xanh được chính phủ Việt Nam khẳng định “là hai yếu tố căn bản cấu thành một xu thế tất yếu, không thể đảo ngược”, Liên Hiệp Châu Âu và chính phủ Việt Nam đã ký Hiệp định tài trợ cho Chương trình Giáo dục nghề nghiệp Việt Nam (VETVET) với hơn 50 triệu euro. Được ký ngày 31/12/2025 - ngay trước khi khai mạc Đại hội Đảng XIV, Hiệp định có hiệu lực đến năm 2030, trùng với kế hoạch 5 năm 2026-2030. Đại sứ Julien Guerrier đánh giá Chương trình VETVET cũng sẽ giúp Việt Nam tăng sức hấp dẫn cũng như đáp ứng nhu cầu nhân lực của các nhà đầu tư, đặc biệt là các nhà đầu tư châu Âu, vào Việt Nam.

Liên Hiệp Châu Âu hiện là thị trường xuất khẩu lớn thứ ba và là thị trường nhập khẩu lớn thứ năm của Việt Nam. Năm 2026 được coi là “thời điểm vàng” để doanh nghiệp Việt Nam khai thác tối đa lợi thế từ Hiệp định Thương mại Tự do (EVFTA) với Liên Âu vì lộ trình cắt giảm thuế quan giữa hai bên đã tiến gần đến 100%. EU cũng không ngừng hỗ trợ Việt Nam trong chuyển đổi xanh để đáp ứng tiêu chí sản phẩm của khối 27 nước. Kể từ khi Hiệp định EVFTA có hiệu lực ngày 01/08/2020, giao thương giữa Việt Nam và Liên Hiệp Châu Âu không ngừng gia tăng. Năm 2025, tổng kim ngạch thương mại song phương đạt 73,8 tỷ đô la, trong đó Việt Nam xuất siêu khoảng 30 tỷ đô la. Theo báo Đầu tư ngày 07/01, Việt Nam là đối tác thương mại lớn nhất của Liên Âu trong khối ASEAN, đứng trong top 10 nhà cung ứng hàng hóa cho thị trường EU (Eurostat 2024). Doanh nghiệp châu Âu tin vào Việt Nam Liên Âu hiện là nhà đầu tư lớn thứ 6 của Việt Nam. Việt Nam trở thành điểm hấp dẫn trong mắt các nhà đầu tư Liên Âu. Trả lời RFI Tiếng Việt ngày 20/01/2026, đại sứ Liên Hiệp Châu Âu tại Việt Nam Julien Guerrier nhận định : “Tôi thậm chí có thể nói rằng trong một hoặc hai năm gần đây, chúng ta đã thấy sự gia tăng đáng kể về niềm tin của các nhà đầu tư châu Âu vào Việt Nam. Điều này được Phòng Thương mại Châu Âu - EuroCham tại Việt Nam đo lường hàng tháng. Mức độ tin tưởng vào đất nước gia tăng nhanh chóng. Năm 2025, tăng trưởng của Việt Nam đạt 8% và Việt Nam đặt mục tiêu tăng trưởng hai chữ số trong những năm tới. Vì vậy, đây là một quốc gia có nhiều cơ hội kinh tế, nơi có một mong muốn thực sự, một tầm nhìn để hiện đại hóa nền kinh tế Việt Nam, và là nơi đang thu hút ngày càng nhiều công ty châu Âu. Hiện tại có 1.500 công ty thành viên của EuroCham đang đầu tư mạnh vào Việt Nam. Đọc thêmHiệp định Tự do Thương mại EU-Việt Nam : Pháp-Việt được lợi gì? Cụ thể, theo Chỉ số Niềm tin Kinh doanh (BCI) quý IV năm 2025 được EuroCham thực hiện, niềm tin đã tăng 13,5 điểm so với quý trước và lên đến 80 điểm - mức cao nhất trong 7 năm gần đây. Chủ tịch EuroCham Bruno Jaspaert đánh giá trong bài nhận định đăng trên The Investor ngày 19/01 : “Đây không chỉ là một con số ấn tượng, nó còn báo hiệu một sự chuyển biến rõ ràng trong tâm lý kinh doanh châu Âu, từ sự phục hồi thận trọng sang niềm tin chiến lược… Từ 2021 đến 2025, các nhà đầu tư châu Âu đã rót hơn 28 tỷ đô la vào Việt Nam. Điều này cho thấy niềm tin dài hạn của họ và tiềm năng của đất nước”. Trước đó, tại Diễn đàn Hợp tác Kinh tế Thương mại Việt Nam - EU 2025, diễn ra ngày 17/10/2025, phó chủ tịch EuroCham Jean-Jacques Bouflet nhận định : 76% lãnh đạo doanh nghiệp châu Âu hiện nay nhìn nhận Việt Nam là điểm đến đầu tư hấp dẫn, và 80% dự báo điều kiện sẽ còn thuận lợi hơn trong 5 năm tới. Khả năng phục hồi và tư duy cải cách : Hai yếu tố củng cố niềm tin Niềm tin này được căn cứ vào hai yếu tố chủ đạo : Khả năng phục hồi đáng kể ; tư duy cải cách mạnh mẽ. Khả năng phục hồi Về yếu tố thứ nhất, Việt Nam được giới chuyên gia đánh giá là đã thể hiện được sự linh hoạt, khéo léo hóa giải các biện pháp thuế đối ứng (ban đầu lên đến 46%) của tổng thống Mỹ Donald Trump. Giám đốc nghiên cứu Benoît de Tréglodé, nhận định với RFI Tiếng Việt : “Vấn đề thuế quan (với Mỹ) đã được Việt Nam đàm phán khá khéo léo, và cuối cùng họ không bị thiệt hại quá nhiều. Còn về quan hệ song phương với Trung Quốc, quan hệ đối tác kinh tế và thương mại đã cởi mở hơn và nhiều hơn. Nhìn từ góc độ này, bối cảnh rất đặc biệt cho Việt Nam, nhưng “ngoại giao cây tre” đã chứng tỏ hiệu quả đáng kể, bởi vì Việt Nam đã phần nào vượt qua các cuộc xung đột đánh dấu năm 2025 mà không bị thiệt hại đáng kể”. Năm 2025, Việt Nam gia nhập nhóm 25 nền kinh tế có trị giá xuất nhập khẩu lớn nhất thế giới, với tổng trị giá xuất nhập khẩu đạt 920 tỷ đô la. Theo Cục Hải quan, Mỹ tiếp tục là thị trường xuất khẩu lớn nhất (152 tỷ đô la) của Việt Nam và Trung Quốc tiếp tục là thị trường cung cấp hàng hóa lớn nhất (183 tỷ đô la) cho Việt Nam. Tư duy cải cách Tư duy cải cách mạnh mẽ là yếu tố thứ hai tác động đến niềm tin của doanh nghiệp châu Âu vào Việt Nam. Ngày 16/01, hãng tin Pháp AFP nhận định “từ khi lên nắm giữ vị trí cao nhất cách đây chỉ 17 tháng, ông Tô Lâm đã tiến hành chiến dịch chống tham nhũng quyết liệt, giảm bớt thủ tục hành chính và thúc đẩy đầu tư vào các công trình cơ sở hạ tầng” : từ 30 bộ và cơ quan chính phủ giảm xuống còn 22, giảm gần 150.000 công chức, khởi động nhiều dự án đầy tham vọng về đường sắt và năng lượng. Đối với nhiều nhà ngoại giao và nhà phân tích, được AFP trích dẫn ngày 16/01, “chính trị gia 68 tuổi là một chiến lược gia khôn khéo, có khả năng chấp nhận rủi ro, và những canh bạc táo bạo nhất của ông đã mang lại thành công”. Giáo sư danh dự Carl Thayer, Đại học New South Wales (Úc), “không gọi ông Tô Lâm là Trump của Việt Nam, nhưng đó là một nhà lãnh đạo tìm cách củng cố quyền lực để đưa ra những quyết định nhanh chóng và dứt khoát”. Đọc thêmEuroCham : Tinh giản hành chính nhưng cần nhanh, hiệu quả để Việt Nam tăng hấp lực Tân tổng bí thư “Tô Lâm sẽ vạch ra hướng đi cho các cải cách đã ấp ủ trong năm qua”, theo nhận định với AP của Nguyễn Khắc Giang, nghiên cứu viên thỉnh giảng tại Chương trình Nghiên cứu Việt Nam, Viện ISEAS-Yusof Ishak (Singapore) : “Tôi cho rằng các cải cách sẽ tiếp tục được đẩy nhanh sau Đại hội Đảng. Nhưng rõ ràng, sẽ có rất nhiều rào cản đối với các cải cách của ông ấy, đặc biệt là nếu nhìn vào cách thức mà các phe phái bảo thủ, nhất là quân đội, sẽ đặt ra nhất nhiều hạn chế, vì lo ngại rằng các cải cách sẽ đi quá xa, khiến Việt Nam có thể đi chệch khỏi con đường xã hội chủ nghĩa mà Đảng muốn đề ra cho đất nước”. EU sẵn sàng đồng hành trong quá trình chuyển đổi Vậy mô hình tăng trưởng mới gồm những điểm gì ? Đó là tái cấu trúc nền kinh tế, đặt mục tiêu tăng trưởng ít nhất là 10% hàng năm cho đến 2030, đưa thu nhập bình quân đầu người lên khoảng 8.500 USD vào năm 2030 ; tỷ trọng công nghiệp chế biến, chế tạo đạt khoảng 28% GDP; tỷ trọng kinh tế số đạt khoảng 30% GDP. Để thực hiện chiến lược này, chính phủ coi trọng ba nhóm giải pháp chính : Hoàn thiện thể chế để phát triển, xóa bỏ những điểm nghẽn, rào cản, giải phóng mọi nguồn lực (…) ; Phát triển nguồn nhân lực chất lượng cao, trình độ cao, trọng dụng nhân tài (…) ; Phát triển xây dựng kết cấu hạ tầng kinh tế - xã hội; nhất là hạ tầng giao thông chiến lược (đường sắt, cảng biển), hạ tầng công nghệ, hạ tầng năng lượng. Những hạ tầng này hết sức quan trọng để bảo đảm tăng trưởng 2 con số trở lên trong thời gian tới và mục tiêu đến năm 2045 trở thành một nước phát triển, có thu nhập cao. Đây cũng là ba trụ cột cốt lõi được chủ tịch EuroCham Bruno Jaspaert nhấn mạnh khi nói về chiến lược phát triển của Việt Nam để đạt được tham vọng này. Cụ thể, Liên Hiệp Châu Âu, cũng như các nhà đầu tư châu Âu, trông đợi gì từ Đại hội Đảng XIV ? Đại sứ EU Julien Guerrier nhận định với RFI Tiếng Việt : “Đại hội cần hướng tới việc xác định và phê duyệt các chính sách đã được hoạch định cho 5 năm tới. Việt Nam đang thực hiện quá trình đơn giản hóa hành chính ở quy mô lớn, bao gồm việc sáp nhập các tỉnh, bộ và đơn giản hóa các thủ tục, tất cả nhằm mục đích hiện đại hóa đất nước và thu hút đầu tư. Tôi nghĩ rằng điều mà chúng tôi kỳ vọng, đó là sự thành công của tất cả các cải cách này, để môi trường kinh doanh trở nên hấp dẫn hơn đối với các doanh nghiệp châu Âu tại Việt Nam và tạo điều kiện thuận lợi cho đầu tư vào các lĩnh vực như năng lượng tái tạo, công nghiệp xanh và chuyển đổi số. Đây là những ngành công nghiệp của tương lai và cũng là những lĩnh vực mà Liên Hiệp Châu Âu có lợi thế cạnh tranh và có thể cung cấp cho Việt Nam những giải pháp công nghệ cao, an toàn, bảo đảm tính tự chủ chiến lược và độc lập kinh tế của Việt Nam đối với việc phát triển trong tương lai về những lĩnh vực trọng điểm này”. Đọc thêmEU-Việt Nam vượt bão thuế quan Mỹ qua Hiệp định Thương mại Tự do EVFTA ? Một khung pháp lý minh bạch, ổn định và nhất quán chính là nền tảng để xây dựng một nền kinh tế có thể tiến xa và tăng trưởng bền vững, để thuyết phục được các nhà đầu tư tự tin đặt những “viên gạch” dài hạn. Điểm này đã trở thành điều kiện tiên quyết trong bối cảnh cạnh tranh ngày càng gay gắt để thu hút đầu tư trực tiếp nước ngoài (FDI) chất lượng cao. Chủ tịch EuroCham cho rằng “nếu làm tốt, Việt Nam hoàn toàn có thể thu hút thêm nhiều dòng vốn châu Âu vào các lĩnh vực giá trị gia tăng cao như công nghệ, năng lượng tái tạo, sản xuất xanh và dịch vụ hiện đại”. Để hỗ trợ chuyển đối số, chuyển đổi xanh được chính phủ Việt Nam khẳng định “là hai yếu tố căn bản cấu thành một xu thế tất yếu, không thể đảo ngược”, Liên Hiệp Châu Âu và chính phủ Việt Nam đã ký Hiệp định tài trợ cho Chương trình Giáo dục nghề nghiệp Việt Nam (VETVET) với hơn 50 triệu euro. Được ký ngày 31/12/2025 - ngay trước khi khai mạc Đại hội Đảng XIV, Hiệp định có hiệu lực đến năm 2030, trùng với kế hoạch 5 năm 2026-2030. Đại sứ Julien Guerrier đánh giá Chương trình VETVET cũng sẽ giúp Việt Nam tăng sức hấp dẫn cũng như đáp ứng nhu cầu nhân lực của các nhà đầu tư, đặc biệt là các nhà đầu tư châu Âu, vào Việt Nam.

If you work across time zones, borders, and cultures, this is the show for you. This is your host Leonardo, welcome to The International Business Podcast. AI can now summarise almost anything in seconds. That's powerful, but it makes it easy to stay at the surface. We get headlines, bullet points, "3 key takeaways", and move on. What's lost is context, nuance, and understanding that changes how professionals think and decide in international business. With this new format, host Leonardo Marra pushes in the opposite direction. Instead of a quick AI overview, he built a long‑form deep dive into Japan after 1945: from World War II defeat to economic miracle, bubble, stagnation, and today's super‑aging, innovation‑driven society.Part 1 traces Japan's path from post‑war devastation through U.S. occupation, state‑guided capitalism, keiretsu networks, export‑led growth, oil shocks, the 1980s bubble, and the "lost decades." It links policy, institutions, and social change to Japan's rise and current challenges.Part 2 shifts to practical insights. Guests who live and work in and around Japan share how firms make decisions, how kaizen and relationships function, how demographics reshape strategy, and what foreign executives consistently misunderstand about the Japanese market.--------⁠Join Leonardo on Patreon for Podcast Archive and Bonus episodes (100+ episodes). ⁠--------With guests:Massimiliano Colonna – Director of Communications, Brookings Institution Governance Studies. MPhil in Modern Japanese Studies from Oxford's Nissan Institute, where he researched the internet's role in Japan's political debate.Waka Someno – CEO of YOUNEEDS Co., Ltd. and SOMENO-YA (Tokyo/Osaka). Provides sales, marketing, and legal support for international companies entering Japan. Over 15 years in B2B sales, DX solutions, and market-entry advisory.Jason Durkee – President, Idea Development (Tokyo); co-founder, Practical Training Transfer. 25+ years helping businesspeople innovate, communicate across cultures, and transfer learning to results. CPTD, ATD Japan director, serves 130+ clients annually across Asia.Neal Jansen – Director, Asia Office, Arkansas Economic Development Commission. CEcD with 20+ years in FDI, trade, and workforce development. Fluent in Japanese, builds long-term partnerships between Arkansas and Asian companies.Brett Jason Lee – Learning and performance professional specializing in Asia Pacific; ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC). Designs learning solutions focused on behavior change, capability building, and cultural context for Japan and the region.Shaun Rein – Founder & Managing Director, China Market Research Group (Shanghai). Author of five bestselling books on China's economy. Works with Fortune 500s, PE firms, and heads of state. Regular contributor to WSJ, FT, NYT, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg. Harvard MA.Tom Roberts – Founder, Cranberry Leadership International. "The Expat Whisperer." Former Head of Japan - Neurology at UCB (200 people, ~$1B P&L) and MD/President UCB Korea. Forbes Coaches Council member, helps C-Suite leaders navigate cross-border challenges.Jeff O'Dea – Communication Specialist, Inspiringbiz (Tokyo). Since 2010, helps Japanese professionals communicate effectively in English for global meetings. Clients include BMS, Novartis, MSD, Chugai, Merck, UCB, Softbank.Kelvin Ro – Founder, Kagi Career LLC (Tokyo, 15+ years). Coaches non-Japanese professionals on landing jobs in Japan. Author of Three Ways to Land Your First Job in Japan; ranked #2 non-Japanese LinkedIn creator in Japan (Dec 2024).-----If you work across time zones, borders, and cultures, come on the show to share your story. ⁠Connect with the host Leonardo Marra.

VOV1 - Nhờ có môi trường đầu tư tốt, năm 2025 nhiều tập đoàn FDI lớn đã chọn Đồng Nai làm điểm đến đầu tư lâu dài và liên tục tăng vốn để mở rộng sản xuất kinh doanh.

VOV1 - Bất động sản khu công nghiệp tại Việt Nam đang ở thời kỳ đỉnh cao khi làn sóng FDI, hạ tầng bứt tốc và thay đổi chuỗi cung ứng toàn cầu mở ra cơ hội tăng trưởng.

Ireland has spent the last two decades riding a unique position: European by treaty, American by economics, a “bridgehead” for US multinationals into the EU, and a country whose prosperity has quietly depended on America's outsized pull on global capital. But if the US and Europe drift into a real rupture, Ireland becomes the uncomfortable jockey straddling two horses heading in opposite directions. In this episode, we map the cold numbers behind Ireland's exposure, exports, FDI, and the corporate tax windfall, and then pivot to a genuinely optimistic idea: using the last of the US windfall not just to cushion the future, but to build it. Think infrastructure now, and a Schumpeter-style startup fund that turns the country into an innovation machine before the sugar daddy's money slows down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VOV1 - Thống kê sơ bộ của các tỉnh thành đã công bố mức chung thưởng Tết cho thấy, mức bình quân thưởng năm nay tăng 6.8% so với mức thưởng năm ngoái.Cụ thể, Tết Ất Tỵ thưởng Tết bình quân đạt 7 triệu 720 nghìn đồng còn mức thưởng năm nay là hơn 12 triệu đồng. Mức cao nhất thưởng Tết Nguyên đán năm nay tính đến thời điểm này là hơn 1,8 tỷ đồng của một doanh nghiệp FDI tại TP.HCM. Dự báo, mức thưởng Tết 2026 có thể tăng nhẹ so với 2025, do kinh tế dần ổn định lại sau khó khăn.“Thưởng Tết 2026 để công nhân vui xuân đón Tết trọn vẹn” là nội dung Dòng chảy sự kiện hôm nay với sự tham gia của bà Trần Thị Thanh Hà, Phó Trưởng ban phụ trách Ban Quan hệ lao động, Tổng Liên đoàn Lao động Việt Nam. Bà Trần Thị Thanh Hà, Phó Trưởng ban phụ trách Ban Quan hệ lao động, Tổng Liên đoàn Lao động Việt Nam.

- Cần sớm hoàn thiện hồ sơ thành lập sàn vàng quốc gia- Niềm tin nhà đầu tư củng cố triển vọng FDI năm 2026- Bất động sản: Sôi động trong thận trọng, đáp ứng nhu cầu thực

China saw strong growth in new foreign-invested firms in 2025, with over 70,000 established—up 19 percent—while FDI stayed above $100 billion, led by gains in e-commerce, medical devices, and aerospace.

China is optimizing the framework for helping companies go abroad, shifting toward a more sophisticated, service-oriented support system aimed at facilitating their high-quality overseas expansion and enhancing global supply chain stability, officials said.中国正在优化企业走出去的扶持框架，转向更精细化、服务化的支持体系，旨在促进企业高质量海外拓展，增强全球供应链稳定性。The updated framework was outlined by the Investment Promotion Agency of the Ministry of Commerce on Monday, as the agency moves to professionalize the support mechanisms for enterprises going global, placing greater emphasis on resilience, compliance, and industrial integration rather than simple scale expansion.商务部投资促进局周一公布了更新后的框架，旨在推动企业走出去支持机制的专业化建设，更注重韧性、合规和产业融合，而非单纯追求规模扩张。The shift comes as China's outbound direct investment has seen a steady rise. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, China's total outbound direct investment increased 6.9 percent year-on-year to $158.21 billion in the first 11 months of 2025, cementing its position as the world's leading source of outbound investment.此项调整正值中国对外直接投资持续攀升之际。据商务部数据显示，2025年前11个月中国对外直接投资总额达1582.1亿美元，同比增长6.9%，巩固了其作为全球最大对外投资来源国的地位。During the same period, Chinese companies made nonfinancial direct investments in 10,165 overseas businesses in 153 countries and regions, with total investment reaching $132.09 billion, up 2.7 percent year-on-year, the data showed.同期，中国企业对153个国家和地区的10,165家境外企业实施了非金融类直接投资，投资总额达1,320.9亿美元，同比增长2.7%。Yu Zirong, deputy director of the Investment Promotion Agency, said that amid new global developments, the agency will strengthen cross-border investment service platforms to provide end-to-end, targeted and efficient support for companies going global.商务部投资促进事务局副局长俞子荣表示，在全球新形势下，该局将强化跨境投资服务平台，为企业走出去提供全流程、精准高效的支持。By innovating and improving full-chain services for outbound investment, Yu said, the agency aims to encourage upstream and downstream firms to expand overseas together, supporting the orderly cross-border deployment of industrial and supply chains.俞子荣指出，通过创新完善对外投资全链条服务，旨在鼓励上下游企业共同拓展海外市场，支持产业和供应链有序跨境布局。As part of this effort, the agency has introduced a "five-sphere" service matrix, designed to act as a comprehensive navigator for outbound businesses. The framework covers brand cultivation to enhance corporate identity, platform support to aggregate resources, and project-level services that provide lifecycle assistance.作为该计划的重要组成部分，商务部投资促进事务局推出了“五维”服务矩阵，旨在为对外经营企业提供全方位导航服务。该框架涵盖品牌培育以强化企业形象、平台支持以整合资源，以及提供全周期服务的项目级支持。Additionally, the strategy prioritizes "park empowerment" to upgrade overseas industrial cooperation zones and the establishment of long-term mechanisms to ensure sustainable dialogue and support.此外，该战略优先推进“园区赋能”，升级海外产业合作园区，并建立长期机制以确保可持续的对话与支持。The ultimate goal for 2026, the agency said, is to assist "chain-master" enterprises—leading firms that anchor supply chains—in coordinating efficiently with upstream and downstream partners, fostering self-sustaining industrial ecosystems abroad.商务部投资促进事务局表示，2026年的终极目标是协助“链主企业”——即锚定供应链的龙头企业——高效协调上下游合作伙伴，在海外培育自我维持的产业生态系统。The emphasis on higher-quality outbound direct investment reflects China's long-term trajectory. According to the 2024 statistical bulletin of outward foreign direct investment, China has ranked among the world's top three sources of ODI for 13 consecutive years, underscoring its position as a major global investor.中国对外直接投资质量提升的趋势，彰显着其长远发展轨迹。根据《2024年对外直接投资统计公报》，中国已连续13年位居全球三大对外直接投资来源国之列，彰显其作为全球重要投资者的地位。By the end of 2024, Chinese investors had established around 52,000 overseas enterprises across 190 countries and regions, with 70 percent of them reporting profits or break-even performance.截至2024年底，中国投资者已在190个国家和地区设立约5.2万家境外企业，其中70%实现盈利或持平。In 2024, China's outward FDI spanned 18 industry sectors, with investments in five sectors, namely wholesale and retail, leasing and business services, manufacturing, finance, and mining; each exceeded $10 billion and collectively accounted for over 80 percent of the total. Investment in the construction sector and the information transmission/software and IT services sector recorded substantial growth, rising 80.5 percent and 205.5 percent year-on-year, respectively.2024年中国对外投资覆盖18个行业领域，其中批发零售、租赁和商业服务、制造业、金融业、采矿业五大行业投资额均突破100亿美元，合计占比超八成。其中，建筑业和信息传输、计算机及互联网服务业投资增幅显著，同比分别增长80.5%和205.5%。A significant evolution in the 2026 strategy is the expanded role of professional services as "soft infrastructure" for outbound firms. The reliance on capital alone is being replaced by a holistic support network comprising legal, financial, and digital services, reflecting China's ongoing reforms to improve the public service system for companies "going global" and to strengthen support for high-quality international cooperation.2026战略的一项重大演进，是专业服务作为对外企业“软基础设施”作用的扩展。单纯依赖资本的模式正被法律、金融和数字服务构成的整体支持网络所取代，这反映了中国持续推进改革，旨在完善企业“走出去”的公共服务体系，并加强高质量国际合作的支持力度。The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is also strengthening its role as a "super-connector". Wang Qing from Invest Hong Kong revealed that the city's 2025 policy address announced the establishment of a specialized outbound team to help Chinese mainland firms navigate complex legal and financial landscapes.香港特别行政区正强化其“超级枢纽”功能。香港投资推广署王青透露，香港2025年施政报告宣布成立专业对外团队，协助内地企业应对复杂的法律金融环境。On the mainland, technology and finance are being further integrated into the outbound support system. The Shanghai CIPA Overseas Service Platform has introduced "AURA", an AI-driven agent designed to digitize global resource matching, helping reduce information asymmetry that often plagues manufacturing firms.在内地，科技与金融正进一步融入对外支持体系。上海CIPA海外服务平台推出人工智能驱动的智能助手“AURA”，旨在实现全球资源匹配的数字化，帮助制造企业减少信息不对称问题。Financial institutions are also stepping up support. Banks like China Merchants Bank are rolling out cross-border financial systems capable of handling complex financing in 140 currencies, addressing the liquidity and financing challenges commonly faced by overseas subsidiaries, particularly in emerging markets.金融机构也在加大力度提供支持。招商银行等银行正推出跨境金融系统，能够处理140种货币的复杂融资业务，解决海外子公司（尤其在新兴市场）普遍面临的流动性与融资难题。

VOV1 - Nhân dịp Đại hội đại biểu toàn quốc lần thứ XIV của Đảng, phóng viên Đài Tiếng nói Việt Nam phỏng vấn Bộ trưởng Bộ Tài chính Nguyễn Văn Thắng về các nhiệm vụ trọng tâm của ngành Tài chính trong thời gian tới.            Các kết quả tích cực của ngành Tài chính trong các lĩnh vực, như đảm bảo thu – chi, cân đối ngân sách, tài khóa hỗ trợ doanh nghiệp phục hồi sản xuất sau dịch bệnh, cải thiện môi trường kinh doanh, thu hút đầu tư nước ngoài FDI, phát triển thị trường vốn Việt Nam, đã góp phần quan trọng vào tăng trưởng kinh tế - GDP giai đoạn 2021-2025, đặc biệt là mức tăng trưởng cao hơn 8% của năm 2025. Trên nền tảng này, Bộ Tài chính sẽ tiếp tục phát huy vai trò bệ đỡ và động lực tăng trưởng của nền kinh tế trong năm 2026 và giai đoạn tiếp theo.

WIFI Woman of the Year and world traveler Darlene Collis of LSG talks shop and shows why she is the Fastener Ninja (1:05:51). On the Fastener News Report, Birmingham Fastener VP Anthony Crawl joins thread newsman Mike McNulty to marvel at the latest FDI numbers (19:18). Volt Industrial Plastics maven Heidi Volltrauer announces a voyage of her own (10:05). Carmen Vertullo presents his takeaways from the recent bolted joint symposium on the Fastener Training Minute (56:38). PLUS: Is the party really over for industrial property landlords? Brian hangs out with Horus and Eric bids farewell to an icon. Run time: 01:58:55

VOV1 - Thủ tướng nhấn mạnh yêu cầu, tập trung hình thành lực lượng doanh nghiệp bán dẫn đủ mạnh, tạo nền tảng hoàn thiện chuỗi giá trị bán dẫn trong nước và kết nối hiệu quả với khu vực FDI, chuỗi cung ứng toàn cầu.

Nella puntata del 13 gennaio di Nessuno escluso abbiamo parlato di: 00:00 della politica estera americana e cinese con Greta Cristini, analista geopolitica, e Simone Pieranni, giornalista di Chora Media; 30:00 insicurezza, voto fuorisede e politiche urgenti per le nuove generazioni con Fabio Roscani, deputato FDI, e Rachele Scarpa, deputata PD. Nessuno escluso è il talk sull'attualità di Will Media e Chiara Piotto, con la partecipazione di Pietro Forti. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all love winners. We love hearing about the big wins and the perfect track records. It feels good. It feels safe. It instills us with a sense of trust. But I've been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are long-term winners have had profound moments of failure from which they learned invaluable lessons. Those are the people I really want to hear from. They have the kind of knowledge we all need as we navigate through life. It's called wisdom. Surgeons have a saying: “If you've never had a complication, you haven't done enough surgery.” In my surgeon days, I had a handful of complications. Let me tell you—they are no fun. You stay up at night replaying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently—how you could have had a better outcome. Even when unavoidable, those complications teach you something you'll never get from textbooks. It's been no different for me when it comes to business and investing. But I take comfort in knowing that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and rose from the ashes stronger and wiser. Warren Buffett. Ray Dalio. Every big winner has a story of failure. And while it may be cliché to say that we learn best from mistakes, I truly believe it. The good news is that those mistakes don't have to be our own. Learning from other people's mistakes can be just as effective. This week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is with Russell Gray—a guy many of you already know from his podcasting and radio career. Russ lived through 2008 up close. He took a beating, and he talks openly about what went wrong. But that period also changed the way he sees the world—in a good way. It changed how he thinks about risk, leverage, and what actually matters when things stop going up. That mindset is a big reason he's been successful since then. It's a conversation worth your time. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  If you let the debt run, at some point you fall into a debt trap where the interest on the outstanding debt consumes all of the available discretionary income, and then you’re borrowing just to service the debt. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast coming to you from Montecito, California. Before we begin today, I wanna remind you there’s website associated with this. Podcast called wealthformula.com. It’s where you will go if you would like to, uh, become more, uh, ingrained with the community, including getting on some of our lists such as the Accredit Investor Club. Of course, it is a new year and there are new deal flows coming through. Lots of opportunities that you won’t see anywhere else if you are a, an accredit investor, which means you. Make at least $200,000 per year for the last couple years with a reasonable expectation of doing so in the future. That’s 300,000 if you’re filing jointly or you have a million dollars of net worth outside of your personal residence. If you, uh, meet those criteria, you are an accredited investor. Congratulations. You don’t have to apply for anything, whatever, but you do need to go to wealthformula.com. Sign up for the Accredited Investor Club, get onboarded. And all you do at that point is look at deal flow, and if nothing else, you’ll learn something. So check it out. And who doesn’t want to be part of a club? Now let’s talk, uh, a little bit about today’s show. You know, um, we all love winners, right? We love hearing about big wins, the perfect track record. It feels good. It feels safe, gives us a sense of trust. But the thing is, I’ve been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are, what you would call long-term winners, have had profound moments of failure from which they learned, um, invaluable lessons. So those are the people that I really like to hear from. You know, they have the kind of knowledge we all need that as we navigate through all of life, and it’s called wisdom. Um, surgeons, as you know, I’m an ex surgeon. Have a saying, if you’ve never had a complication, you haven’t done enough surgery. Uh, in my surgery days, I certainly, you know, had a handful of complications just like anyone else who did a lot of surgery. And, and lemme tell you, there, there are no fun, right? So you stay up at night replying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently, how you could have had a better outcome. And sometimes you realize that those mistakes were unavoidable, but. You still learn something from them. And in these cases, you always learn something that you’re not gonna get from the textbooks, just from reading something. And you know what, it’s been no different for me when it comes to business and, and investing, but I, I take comfort in the fact, uh, that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and arose from the ashes stronger and wiser. All you have to do is look up stories of Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio. And Ray Dalio basically lost everything at one point, uh, because he, you know, he had a macro prediction that went completely south. But listen, uh, the, the point I’m trying to make here is that every big winner, every big winner I know of as a story of failure. And while it may be cliche to say, you know what we learned best from our mistakes, I, I truly believe that. But the good news is that those mistakes don’t have to be our own, right? So you can learn from other people’s mistakes as well, and that can be just as effective. Uh, so this week’s episode of Well, formula Podcast is featuring a guy that you may know. His name is Russell Gray. Russ, uh, has been around a long time, uh, in the podcasting world. And radio. You know, he talks a lot. He’s talked many times to me at least about living through 2008. And you know what that was like, the beating he took and, you know, what went wrong? Uh, you know, it’s, it’s something that he talks about because, you know, he’s a successful guy and that period in time changed. You know, the way he sees the world, the way in which he behaves in that world. How he thinks about things like risk and leverage and you know, what actually matters when things stop going up. Uh, it’s a mindset thing and it’s important. Um, and we also obviously talk about other things as well, such as, uh, Russ’s current take on the economy. Uh, so anyway, it’s a, a good conversation and it’s one that you’re gonna wanna listen to, and we’ll have that for you right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying. You compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it at result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique, it’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its back. Turbo charge your investments. Visit www.wealthformulabanking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to Show Everyone. Today my guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Russell Gray. He’s a second generation financial strategist and, uh, you may know him from being a, the former co-host of the Real Estate Guy Radio Show, which is one of the longest running, uh, uh, radio shows of its time, uh, in the United States. He’s, he’s a founder of. Raising Capitalist project, which is an initiative focused on helping aspiring investors and entrepreneurs how to better understand how wealth is actually created and how uh, economic systems really work. Uh, he’s best known for his emphasis on real assets, cash flow, economic cycles, and preserving wealth and what he views as an increasingly fragile financial system. Welcome, Ross. How are you? Good buck, happy to be here. And, uh, proud of your success on your show. I remember way back at the beginning you were like, Hey, I wanna start a podcast. Yeah. Yep. You’ve done a great job. Yeah, it was an idea. I was like, here’s the idea. Start a podcast, build a community, all that kind of stuff. But it’s interesting. Uh, well, and let’s talk about what’s going on now. You’ve spent decades teaching people about, you know, real assets and cash flow. But lately your writings feel more focused on systems and and macro forces. So what’s changed? Has something finally become too big to ignore? Well, I think there’s two things you know personally, uh, most people who have heard of me or followed me know that 2008 wasn’t kind to me. I was in the mortgage business. I was very leveraged into real estate all over the place. Had my businesses for cash flow, had the real estate for equity growth. Believed that real estate was hyper resilient and gonna be the beneficiary of inflation. Didn’t understand the dependency on credit markets in both my business and my portfolio. And so that was a big mess, not doing, uh, a real SWOT analysis and understanding. And the third part of that, that was tough, is that I operated the business primarily on credit lines as well. So I had virtually no cash. And so when the credit markets seized up. Canceled my income, it canceled my credit lines and it evaporated my equity. And now all I had was negative cash flow on debt, on real estate. I couldn’t control. And so I looked at that and I said to myself, you know, I’m a pretty smart guy. I. Pride myself on paying attention. So obviously I’m not paying attention to the right thing. So I became obsessed with the macro, uh, picture and, and the financial system, which, you know, to me it’s, it’s the macro economy is what’s going on with, uh. Geopolitics and the energy and, you know, even policy, uh, that affects, uh, how well money can flow through the system. Both monetary policy from the Federal Reserve and fiscal policy from the government now today in the Trump administration trade policy. And so I began to pay attention to all those things, but from the standpoint of not how it was gonna affect the stock market, but how it was gonna affect the bond market and interest rates and the availability of credit, and how it was gonna affect Main Street. Directly and specifically now in terms of jobs and job creation are real wages. And so when I started really looking at all that, um, I, I, I realized that there were some things happening that were gonna be really good, and there were also some things that we needed to pay attention to. And these things move very slowly. So in 2010. I saw that coming outta the financial crisis, the Chinese were very upset with the United States about how much the Fed Balance sheet was expanding, and they were concerned about their very large investment in US dollar denominated. Bonds, and so they began creating bilateral trade agreements with Russia and many other countries to where they could begin this large process of de Dollarizing. Well, that was the first time I’d seen that movie, because it was the same thing that the Europeans did after they saw the Nixon default. Right? They began working on the Euro, which took ’em from 71, 72 when they started, maybe 74 when they started, but it took ’em till 99 to get it done. But you know, once they got it in place, over time, the Euro, the Euro has taken over 20% of global trade. You know, that’s market share from the US dollar. And so I saw this BrickX thing beginning to form. Uh, and then I saw the other thing on the macro that I thought was gonna be really good was in the jobs act, something you’ve benefited from as a syndicator, we. I wrote that report, new law breaks Wall Street Monopoly. And so, uh, even though I, I can’t tell you I was a big fan of Barack Obama, but he signed that legislation that happened on his watch. And I think it was fantastic because now it allowed Main Street syndicators, main Street Capital raisers to advertise for accredited investors and began to really, uh, level that playing field and open up Main Street, uh, to invest directly in Main Street. And so I met you in the syndication program that we put together with the real estate guys to coach real estate investors on how to become capital raisers to, to capitalize on that trend. So that’s, you know, kind of how I kind of became doing what I’m doing. And then when I decided, uh, just about 20 months ago to depart the real estate guys, I wanted to take some of the things that I originally set out to do when I first met Robert Helms way back in the day. And, you know, as relationships go, you know, he has his interest in the things that he wants to do, and I had my interest in things I came to do. And for a long time we were aligned well enough to continue to work together. But it got to a point where, for me, I, I wanted to go off in a different direction, and part of that was driven. By the, the death of my late wife. Uh, you had me on the show right after that happened to me, and I was going through this like, who am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do next? What do I really want to get done before I die? And so all of those things kind of informed my personal decisions to, to make a switch. And then of course, what’s going on in the macro. Um, what I saw with Trump 1.0, what I saw in the Biden administration and those policies, and then what I thought would happen in Trump 2.0. And I did a presentation on this at the best ever conference in March of 2025, right after he’d been inaugurated. And, and so, uh, that, that’s kind of has me where I feel like there’s some real opportunity coming. Uh, there’s also some things we need to be aware of on Main Street. Yeah. So you’re bullish on Main Street in general, but you’ve been pretty cautious about the broader financial system. So, uh, what are the things that you’re worried about? Well, I, I think if you understand the way the financial system works, uh, it has a shelf life and that. It’s because it’s, it’s a system that is, depends upon ever increasing debt. Um, people say, I wanna pay the debt off, but if they, if they really understood the system, at least the way I think I understand it, uh, and I’m not alone in this, so it’s not something I just figured out on my own. But, um, you know. I, I don’t want to sit here and pretend like I’m the world’s foremost expert, but the way I understand the way the system works is that it, it requires ever increasing debt, and if we were to pay the debt off, it would collapse the system. So I think you waste a lot of time and energy and from a policy perspective, trying to argue about doing that. And I think that’s why it’s never, ever, no matter what administration, what politician, what mix of congress, what. Pressure there is everywhere globally. The system, the central banking system, the way it works globally, is designed to create ever increasing debt. So the, the flip side of that then is to let the debt run. And if you let the debt run, at some point you fall into a debt trap where the interest on the outstanding debt consumes all of the available discretionary income. And then you’re borrowing just to service the debt. Yeah, that’s about $1 trillion right now, by the way. Which is. Which is, uh, about the, the, the defense, uh, budget. Well, and I think that the bigger thing is when you look at, at the interest on the debt and mandatory spending, there’s virtually no room left after that. So if you’ve got, you’ve got the mandatory spending and you’ve got, um, debt service, you, you have very little room. So it’s not. Feasible either for two reasons. One is there’s just not enough discretionary room to be able to cut expenses enough to, to ever manage the debt. Number two, as I previously mentioned, if we were ever to effectively try to pay down the debt in any appreciable way, it would crash the the system. So the, the way I look at it is it’s, it’s, it’s got to be replaced. There’s going to be a great reset. I think the World Economic Forum was trying to set that up for the world, and they had an agenda. I’m, I’m not particularly fond of. Um, there’s been talk about creating a central bank digital currency, which I think is what, you know, the Federal Reserve and the, what I all call the wizards, uh, or the powers of B would prefer. Uh, but I think if you care about privacy and, and, you know, individual sovereignty, uh, and, and just personal freedom, um, I have a lot of concerns about a central bank digital currency. Um, I think the popularity of Bitcoin, uh, if it was, you know, and who knows what the. True origins were, but let’s just take it at face value. I think a lot of the people, at least that were the early adopters before it had the big price run up, was just a way to escape, uh, the system before it failed. And so you’ve got that. And then you’ve got, again, as I mentioned, the bricks and this global effort to de dollarize, which was I think really kicked off. After the great financial crisis and the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. And then I think picked up a little steam when we froze Russian assets and people began to see that the US might use the dollar and the dollar system, uh, for political instead of being neutral. And I think that picked up some steam. And, and so there’s, there’s both a geopolitical drive to. Uh, come up with a new system. There is, I think we’re at the end of a shelf life that some type of a new system is gonna have to be, uh, created. Uh, and, and then you look at what Donald Trump is doing and what he’s espousing. You know, let’s get rid of income taxes. Let’s get back to pulling in, uh, revenue from tariffs the way the country was originally founded. Uh, he’s talked about eliminating the IRS and going with an ERS, an external revenue service. There’s people that think that he might beat. Wanting to try to get back on some form of sound money, you know, coming out of, Hey, let’s audit the Fed, let’s audit the gold. I mean, let’s audit the gold. And, um, so, you know, we, you, you never know what what’s really gonna happen, but, but I think what we have to pay attention to are the signs that the system is beginning to break down. And one of those signs that I pay a lot of attention to is monetary, metals, gold and silver. I make a distinction between precious metals, which would also include platinum and palladium, and of course they’re strategic metals, but I just focus on monetary metals, which would be gold and silver, and gold and silver. We’re telling you that people would prefer to be the, the, the safe ha haven asset is no longer us treasuries, but, um, but, but gold and central banks have been driving a lot of it. This isn’t the retail market driving it yet. It, it’s really central banks have been accumulating. And so those are the ultimate insiders when it comes to currency. And if the insiders in the currency markets are repositioning into gold, uh, I’d, I’d call that a clue. Yeah, absolutely. Um. Yeah. You recently commented on the public criticism, president Donald Trump made toward, uh, uh, Peter Schiff. What stood out to you about that exchange? Maybe give us some background people. Not everybody knows who Peter is and, and, uh. And all that. So, yeah. Well, I mean, as you know, I’ve known Peter for 12 or 13 years and, uh, I had read his father’s work way back in the day. He is a very famous in the tax protestor world as somebody who just believed that income taxes were unconstitutional. And he resisted that and ended up going to jail for, died in jail as a matter of fact. And so that was, uh, I think sad. Um. But, but to me it felt like a little bit of being a political prisoner, but be that as it may, that’s how I got to know Peter. And so Peter is a guy that comes from the Austrian School of Economics and he believes in sound money. He believes in gold. He does not like Bitcoin. I’ve sat on panels the last two years with Peter, uh, in between him and Larry Lepard. And you know, Larry is a, a former gold guy. He’s still not opposed to gold, but he’s a hardcore sound money guy. But he likes Bitcoin. Peter hates Bitcoin and they get into it, and I usually sit in between ’em and try to keep things calm. Well, you know, so Peter ended up going on Fox and Friends, uh, I think on whatever it was, Friday the eighth I think it was, or whatever, whatever day that was. And he, he criticized Donald Trump’s spending. And, um, budget deficits and said that it would lead to inflation, and that’s a hot button for Trump. And so Trump, yeah. Uh, responded to him, uh, I think like four 30 in the morning on Saturday morning and called Peter, uh, a. Jerk and a total loser. Well, actually I saw it before Peter did, and so I took a screenshot and I texted it to him. I said, Hey, have you seen this? You know, maybe I’ll press is good press. And I think to a degree, maybe it has been me from, I understand Peter ended up on Tucker Carlson’s show as a result of that. So, but I made a video right after that because I, you know, there was a time when. I’m friends with Peter Schiff and I’m friends with Robert Kiyosaki. As you know, I, we introduced you to both those guys and, and at one point they didn’t like each other very much. They got into it ’cause, you know, and, and so we introduced ’em to each other and found that they had more in common than they, they didn’t. And I, I think that that would be true. Not that I’m in a position to introduce Peter to, to Donald Trump, but I think the way Peter is looking at it is true. Um, but there’s context and I think the context is super important. Now I’ve been studying Donald Trump as a businessman way before he was a presidential candidate or a politician, you know, before he was a polarizing guy, a pariah for some people. He, he was just this real estate guy. He’s good at marketing, he’s a real estate guy, and as you know. We got to know his longtime attorney, George Ross. And so I’ve had a chance to have conversations about what it was like working with Donald Trump, the real estate guy, and when he became a politician, I asked George, is he a crazy man? Does he shoot from the hip? And you know, I got a lot of reassurances that he is a sober sound. Methodical, self-disciplined guy and, and I think he uses the eroticism to keep people off balance as a negotiating tactic. And he writes about that in the art of the deal. So the context that I think that people need to have, and I’m not here to defend Donald Trump, the man. I’m not here to defend Donald Trump, the politician, but I look at the policies and what I think he’s up to in the context of realizing that we have a system that is fundamentally flawed and has to be remodeled. So to use a real estate, uh, metaphor, it would be like we have a hotel building that is very tired. It’s at the end of its life, it’s got to be remodeled, and so you can’t. Completely shut it down because it’s an operating business, so it’s gotta operate during the remodel. And so you begin to, um, reposition things and. You, you, you’re not gonna run optimally, so you’re gonna run some deficits while you’re doing the remodel. You’re gonna go into debt because you got a lot of CapEx to do, and during that period of time, your debt and deficits are gonna be a problem. But real estate guys look at debt and deficits not as a permanent condition. I think Peter is saying, Hey, you’re just running up debt and deficits. Well, in the short term he is. Honestly, I don’t think Trump is concerned about that. I think he’s focused on getting this remodel done, and part of that remodel was showed up in the last jobs report, right? We lost jobs to a degree, but they were government jobs, and what we got was a lot of gains in private sector jobs. Scott descent, his treasury secretary, has come out and overtly said, we are an administration for Main Street, not for Wall Street. So if you’re going to de financialize this economy and turn it back into a productive economy. You’re going to have to have policies that are gonna stimulate Main Street, and that’s, that’s the, the, the new units that you’ve rehabbed in your hotel that you wanna move people into. At the same time, you gotta move them outta the old units, which is people making money, trading claims on wealth instead of producing real goods and services, which is the financial ice economy. So it’s not about banking, it’s not about stocks, it’s not about Wall Street. You know, you need the stock market to stay up. But really what you need to do is you need to create production. And, and, and I think that’s fundamental. I think he understands we’re never gonna pay the debt off by cutting. We’ve got to keep the system running until we can get to some form of sound money. We’re actually paying the debt off as realistic, and then we have to earn so much money that the debt relative to our earnings shrinks. So it’s not paying down the debt, it’s paying down the percentage of GDP by growing GDP. And the presentation I did at best ever in March of 2025 was me explaining why I thought. His policies, were going to allow him to increase velocity and increase wages by cutting taxes, interest regulation, transportation costs, and, and again, that was six weeks into administration. That was theory. I’m gonna do a follow up in March of this year to say, okay, looking back when I gave the speech a year ago, what’s transpired, but I can already tell you a lot of the stuff that I thought he would do. He’s done. And I think that’s muting some of the inflation that his spending and deficits to Peter’s point are causing. And that’s why when this last CPI report came out, it wasn’t as ugly as everybody thought it would be. And, and this is when you don’t look at, when you look at it in the mono, you just look at one thing and Peter’s very fixated on this quantity of money theory. Then the expectation is that you print a bunch of money, you run a bunch of deficits, you’re gonna get inflation. And it’s just a. Equals B or A leads to B. But there are other nuances and I think Trump is looking at more like a real estate developer, which makes sense. ’cause that’s his background. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s, I mean, and then the other just point to, to make there is that there is probably, um, now inflation’s a tricky thing, right? Like on the one hand you don’t want this riding up, but on the other hand, it actually helps with that debt. You’re, you’re basically eroding the debt by letting inflation ride a little bit higher at the same time. And I think the Trump administration knows that it’s a tricky thing to balance, but the goal is to, you know, get GDP pumping at, you know, four or 5%, but it’s gotta be real production buck. And that’s the difference, right? The old way of dealing with the debt was inflation. And, and I think people think that he’s using the old formula, but I don’t think he is. Well, I think it’s, I think, I think it’s definitely geared towards increasing real GDP, but I think in the process there’s probably, they probably care less a little bit. Of inflation riding up a little bit in the meantime. ’cause you’re still gonna have, I think he thinks he can mute it. I think he can mute it with lower taxes, lower interest expense, lower energy costs. And the energy is the economy. And from day one, that was the first policy. He’s, he’s aggressively gone after lowering energy costs because that has a, a, a ripple through, it just affects every area of the economy. And then the regulations in, in the last cabinet meeting. It was reported, the way I understood it, that for every regulation his administration passes, they’ve eliminated 48. So it’s actually, he’s removing the friction. And I think the bigger thing is, and I, and I was on a panel at Limitless, uh, this last summer, and TaRL, Yarborough was moderating the panel, asked the panelists what we were looking at that maybe other people weren’t looking at that. Um. You know, is, is a signal about maybe the direction it was. We, I, I can’t remember. This was a prediction panel and what I said was trade policy because everybody in finance spends all their time looking at the flow of money and trying to get in front of the flow of money. And we’re so used to the money coming from the Fed or coming from the treasury. So they’re gonna come from monetary policy or fiscal policy. And that’s what Peter’s doing. He’s looking at the Fed and he is looking at the treasury. And so what I’m looking at is not just the tariff income, which is relatively minor, but I’m looking at the trade deals, and those are published at the White House and there’s a couple trillion dollars of money that’s FDI, foreign Direct Investments coming right into Main Street. And it’s gonna build infrastructure. It’s gonna build factories. It’s good. And they tell you where it’s gonna be because they, they came back with the opportunity zones, which I thought they would do. Makes sense. It’s the way he thinks. And then taking those opportunity zones, the governors can say where in their state they want that money to go. Well, people on Wall Street don’t think geography ’cause they operate in a commodity world that trades on global exchanges. But real estate people. Geography matters a lot. So if I’m a Main Street person, I live on Main Street and I’m looking for Main Street opportunities, I wanna look where that money is going to be flowing in geographically. And then there may be opportunities in real estate or small businesses in those economies, and you can see it coming, but nobody talks about it. So I created Main Street Capitalist as a show to begin to talk about it. I still do the investor mentoring club, which is, you know. A premium thing where we get together every month and we talk about these things. And the point is, is that if you understand, I think what he’s doing, then you can, you can begin to paddle into position. And I think, again, I am really bullish if he loses inflation. If he loses to inflation, he’s cooked. He knows it. I think that that even the suggestion that Peter made that he was losing to inflation is what flared him up. And so I wasn’t trying to necessarily defend. Peter and I wasn’t trying to defend Trump, I was just trying to reconcile that it is possible that both guys could be right at the same time from their perspective. And so I, you know, I, I had one guy take exception because he felt like I was defending Trump, but for the most part, I got positive feedback on the video. I, I, I, you saw it. So you tell me. Did it make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So when you look at today’s environment, everything going on, where do you think investors are most vulnerable? Um, I, I think that if you are very dependent upon, um, healthy credit markets, we could have a disruption. And that’s what happened to me. If Trump loses the inflation battle even for a little while, little be reflected in interest rates. And the challenge is right now that he is asked the Fed to quote unquote lower rates, but the Fed actually doesn’t like. Set rates, what they do is they set a target and then they manipulate markets to achieve those rates. And if, if people believe the fed, there’s a little bit of front running. So what’ll happen is the Fed will come out and go, oh, we’re gonna lower rates, which means bond prices are gonna go up. So they’re like, that’s great, let’s go buy a bunch of bonds, which drives rates down. So the Fed just by talking. Begins to move the market and then they hope that later on the Fed will buy those bonds from them at a profit to push rates down. Does that make sense? So, so when the last two times the Fed has raised rates in their target, the 10 year has responded in the opposite direction. Which means that the market is like not buying in, and the Fed is gonna have to step in. And when the Fed steps in, they do it by printing money out out of thin air. Now, the concern about that is that when they print the money out of thin air. If they’re replacing bonds on their own balance sheet, that’s kind of a circle and it doesn’t leak out into the economy. If they’re buying new issuance from the the treasury, then that money is gonna work its way through the government to to to main street. Now, the Trump administration can prevent some of that by keeping the money in the Treasury, for example, uh, Trump 1.0 left. The Biden administration with, I think over a trillion dollars in, in the treasury checking account, and Janet Yellen put that into the economy right away during the lockdowns, which immediately created extreme inflation because you muted production at the same time you goose. Uh. Purchasing power, you know? So anybody with like three ounces of economic understanding could have told you that that inflation was gonna come, it was gonna come hard, it was gonna come fast, and it was gonna be stickier than than you thought. ’cause once you let that money out in the economy, it’s out. It’s out and the only way to mute it is either to suck it back, which is very, very difficult, or to outproduce it, and it’s very hard to produce anything when everything’s in lockdown. So I think that, you know, those days are behind us. I think the policies that we’re embracing now are more. Pro productivity. And I think that even if the Fed does have to step in, as long as that money doesn’t leak out into the economy, and part of it is the treasury being able to throttle some of that, and the money that does go into the economy doesn’t go into stimulus, but goes into CapEx and infrastructure, that’ll actually, uh, create. Production. Then I think that, you know, this, this game plan that I think they’re trying to execute has a chance. And so I, I’m, I’m watching for it. And of course, to answer your question, what do we have to worry about that it doesn’t work? Right? If it doesn’t work, then inflation will show up. Interest rates will rise, credit markets will crash, it will take real estate values with it. And the hedge is really gonna be, what I’ve always talked about is gold. I started talking back in 2018 when we were the zero bound with interest rates. Hey, there’s only one way interest rates can go and that’s up. And if they go up fast, then that’s gonna crash bonds. So it would be smart, and that’s gonna take real estate equity with it. So it’d be smart when you have real estate equity and low rates to pull some of that equity out and move it into gold. And I called that my precious equity strategy. If I have a video I did at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in January of 2022, explaining that when you could still really execute on that, and I’m not saying that you couldn’t do it today, but it’s harder, but the people who did it back then, I mean, you know, they’ve, they’ve seen their gold almost triple. And at the same time, they were able to lock in interest rates that are, you know, a half what they are today. So when you see those mega trends and you can begin, and that’s the stuff I didn’t know how to do in 2006, 2007. I didn’t understand any of this stuff. The, the, you know, losing everything in 2008 forced me to become a hardcore student and then try to apply that to Main Street strategy. And so I think gold and real estate and debt, they all work really well together depending on where you are in the cycle. Do you think that Main Street investors may actually have some advantages in periods like this? Yes, a ton because I think what’s gonna happen is if we have a, um, a, a, a restructure of the financial system into something more responsible, which I think is either gonna be forced upon us or it’s gonna be done by design, and I hope we do it by design. But when that happens, then the days of just buying low and selling high and riding the inflation wave that goes away. And so now it’s gonna be very, very important to understand how to invest for. Productivity. So I call it, you know, buy low sell high trading as an acronym, B-L-S-H-T you. You can sound it out for yourself phonetically. And then the other one is poo, which is productivity of others. And I think that if people focus on investing in the productivity of others, which is what Main street investors, especially real estate investors, focus on, I think cash flow, real profits on small businesses, not speculating on. Uh, exit price or a company that’s gonna take a company public, everybody trying to tap into this giant flood of money that gets pre created from thin air in the banking system and in Wall Street. If, if, if people on Main Street will just start investing. Kind of what Kenny McElroy was doing going through 2008, just focusing on sound assets and good markets with good fundamentals. That cash flow and, and are run by good managers, whether it’s a business, an apartment building, a mobile home park, a self storage, residential assisted living doesn’t really matter. Invest in real businesses that produce real profits where you’re not overpaying for that production of income and especially where there’s some upside. Not to flipping out of the stock, but to actually growing the market share and growing the income. That’s what investing really should be. Wall Street has perverted it into just placing bets and riding a wave and trying to figure out where the money is gonna flow from the Treasury or for from Fed stimulus. And I think Main Street is gonna pick up on the new game sooner. And the good news is if you get good at playing that game, even if the system stays the same, you’re probably gonna do better off anyway. When you talk about buying, buying or investing into productive businesses, I mean, what, what’s the difference in your mind between investing in a private business versus investing in a, you know, a publicly traded business that’s run off, you know, dividends? Yeah, so I, I, I think that it could be okay if the dividend yield makes sense, but anytime you have a publicly traded security, it’s a highly liquid market, which means it’s gonna be volatile and the stocks become chips in the casinos where professional traders are just gambling all day long. And some of that gambling can create an impact on the stock, and it doesn’t matter to you if you’ve only bought it for production of income. Um. And so, uh, you know, I, I don’t think it’s bad. I’ve, you know, Peter’s always been an advocate of, uh, dividend paying stocks, and I think if you’re gonna be in the stock market, that’s what you want to do. I think the opportunity in a private placement in a small business is the opportunity not to have to pay the high multiples because it’s not a perfect market. It’s, it’s the same reason there’s so much more opportunity in real estate. If real estate could trade on an electronic exchange where. You know, millions of buyers could find it, and you could have perfect price discovery. It’s very difficult to find a deal, right? It’s very difficult. But we, if you buy a private business, you know there’s gonna be considerations. You, you deal with a, a owner. Who cares about his customers, who cares about his team, maybe would be willing to carry back the way you would if you were buying a, a, a piece of property from somebody that cares about their neighbors or whatever. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot more humanity in it. There’s a lot more room for negotiation in it. And a lot of times there’s a lot more room to have control. So, you know, one of the adages with real estate that real estate investors like is, I’m gonna buy an asset, one that I understand, two that I can control. And so when you buy a stock, like a dividend paying stock, you, you might understand the business, you may not understand completely the. Uh, market dynamics that drive the stock price. But as long as the dividends are there, that can be okay, but you don’t have any control. When you actually go buy a small business, you have a, a degree of control. Now, if you’re a passive investor buying into a syndication, then you still have a little bit more, um. Relationship, you have a little bit more insight. You maybe have a voice. You may know the people that are making the decision and running the company personally. So it’s the same thing. You know, you Buck is a syndicator. When you go do a deal, your investors know you. They have a personal relationship with you. Go buy stuff in the stock market and mutual fund managers and investor. You don’t have a relationship with that fund manager and I think that’s worth something if you have a voice right. So we’ve, we’re talking a little bit about credit markets, um, volatility, you know, interest rates. Are they gonna go down like, you know, Donald Trump would like to see, and you know, we’ve got a new fed share coming, all that kind of thing. How should investors be thinking about leverage and risk right now? I, I think the adage with real estate, uh, I mean, sorry, with leverage is always the same, is, um, you know, manage cash flow. I, if, if you use leverage to speculate, that could be a real problem. And whether you did it. Do it for real estate like I did by having very thin or negative cash flow and making that up someplace else and believing that somehow, you know, rents or appreciation are gonna do it. Or buying a non-income producing asset with borrowed funds hoping it’s gonna go higher. I think that would be dangerous, but I think if you fundamentally use debt as a tool. Based on cash flows and you use conservative cash flows, you know, so the debt service coverage ratio, you know, if you have $10,000 a month going out in debt service, make sure you have at least, you know, $12,000 a month coming in on income or above. Then that’s how you begin to build resiliency into your portfolio. And the other thing is don’t borrow long to invest short, right? So your duration matters a lot. We were talking about this before we hit the record button, and I think what happens is people. Uh, make a mistake when they try to operate like a bank. ’cause banks lend short and invest long. And the only reason they get away with it is because they have the Federal Reserve Bank system backstopping them. But you don’t have that as an individual, so you better to do the opposite. Um, if you can match the durations, that’s perfect, right? ’cause then you know what your interest expense is for the, for the duration of the investment. And once you lock in the spread, then you just have the counterparty risk of the, whoever is responsible for creating that income stream that’s gonna service the debt you use to control the asset. And then it just comes down to underwriting and then recourse. And if you feel comfortable with the underwriting and you feel comfortable with the recourse, and you’ve got spread and you’ve locked in a, a duration. Um, that, that is compatible, then that can be a, a, a fairly safe way to use debt. And if interest rates work against you, then you’re okay. And if interest rates work for you, you might be able to refinance your debt and actually increase your spread, but you don’t need it to happen to be successful. Let’s talk a little bit more about what you’re doing right now. So in the past year, you’ve launched, um, several new initiatives. You had masterminds via platforms. Tell us a little bit about this and, and a little bit more what, what you’re trying to accomplish. Well, you know, after losing my wife, um, you, you go through this. Period of time of like figuring out, okay, life is short. What do I want to get done before I left die myself. And so, um, after thinking about that, I went back to really what I came to do when I first met Robert Helms and got involved in the real estate guys. And so I just kinda went back to home base and. Then the other thing is now I’ve got 17 grandchildren, and so I’m thinking a lot less like a father, more like a, a grandfather, a founding father. And, um, and so I’m thinking about what the world is gonna be like in 40, 50, 60 years, and what can I do to plant a seed that will make that world better for my grandchildren? And so I, I did a couple things. One is, um, after I left the real estate guys, we were going through a merger with Ken McElroy, George Gammon and Jason Hartman to create, um, a mastermind group, which we did. And I, I was CEO of that for the. The year during the merger. And that took up some time. And the second thing I decided to do, uh, ironically, it was after a conversation I had with Charlie Kirk. I had a conversation with Charlie Kirk. I said, Hey, I’ve got this idea to help, uh, K through 12 get involved in, in capitalism by starting businesses or working with businesses. Their parents start, and I explained to him the model. He goes, I love it. I want to help you. And so that encouraged me. And then I had a follow up meeting in January of 20. 24 with Mark Victor Hansen, and he really encouraged me. And so with the strength of those two endorsements, I go, you know, I’m gonna do this. And so, uh, I left the real estate guys in, um. March, late March of 2024, and in the summer of 2024, I, I launched the Raising Capitalists Foundation, and people can learn more about that by going to raising capitalists plural.org. And I, I literally launched it at Freedom Fest on July 13th, 2024 and five minutes before I took the stage, Donald Trump got shot. Always remember where I was and how distracting it was, but I did record that presentation and it’s on the website, and so it explains the model. But in, in short, it’s pairing, um, or it’s, it’s putting parents who are in what Kiyosaki, uh, rich Dad would call the E-Class employees. And, uh. Put them under a mentorship program with experienced entrepreneurs and investors to help them start a business, a side hustle. They need the money and they need a mentor. And so then they, um, it can create a situation where their children can come to work for them in the business. And today, information Society, you know, there’s a lot of things kids can do where they learn real life skills, um, working with their parents. So that’s what the Raising Capitalist Foundation is all about. Then I launched two shows. Uh, in 2025, uh, one is I literally just launched like a week ago, and that’s. That Donald Trump video was really the first one that I put out, the Donald Trump versus Peter Schiff video on YouTube. I haven’t even started the podcast side of it. Um, and in on September 27th, uh, on pray.com, I started, uh, another show that, that one’s called the Main Street Capitalist. So if you go to YouTube and look at the Main Street capitalist, you’ll, you can find me there. And then the other one I created was the Christian capitalist. And I kind of went back to, you know, my, my core roots of realizing when I started looking at. Where the country was at, John Adams said that, um. Our Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people and is really wholly inadequate for any other, and so I thought, you know what? I’m I, I’m going to do that because my experience as a, as a Christian businessman is that I find that sometimes the stuff I get in church is more consumer oriented, and it doesn’t, it’s more employee oriented. I, I don’t. And, and then the other part of that is I created a, a ministry called Fellowship, a Christian capitalist, which is really about helping people put purpose into their business and then, you know, express their faith. Love your neighbor. Through their business. And so I’ve got all these different initiatives going and then I created the Main Street Media Network because I wanting to reach youth. I hired a YouTube coach and I said, look, I want to create content to encourage youth. He goes, that’s great. You can’t do it. You’re too old, he said, so what you need to do is find young people you can mentor and teach them the things that you’ve learned and let them teach it in their own words and they’ll reach their generation better than you. So with Main Street Media Network, I’m I, I’ve got. Two guys that I’m apprenticing right now, but I’m gonna be adding a lot more. Um, one, one young man is 20 years old, the other one is 26 years old. And, uh, I just came back from the Turning Point USA event where we had a broadcast booth and they were conducting interviews and I did the New Orleans Investment Conference. And so these guys are sitting down with Peter Schiff, Robert Kiyosaki, Mike Maloney, Ken McElroy, you know, you, you know what that did for you, buck with your show. You know, you, you met all these people through us and then you. We’re able to build upon that and create a very credible show. So I’m doing that for these guys that are in their twenties with the idea that they will be able to reach a generation of people. Uh, I call it putting Boomer Wisdom in Gen Z mounts. I mean, they get to process it and it gets to be their own. And I’m helping them build financial podcasts that actually make the money and is the foundation of, in this case, they’re both capital raisers of their capital raising business. I got all these different things going, but I’m doing it through leaders, so I’m not trying to do all things myself. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I’m building out an ecosystem to accomplish all these goals and so far so good. It’s a lot. Sounds working like a young man, man, man. I’ll tell you that. I know, I know. Wow. I I thought you were gonna slow down after you. No, I’ve actually, I put my, I put, I put my foot on the gas. I, I’ve probably never worked, uh, harder. Um, but I, I think I’m working smart, you know, so I’m hiring coaches and I’m bringing in, um, leaders and going through all that EOS and organizing to scale stuff. Sounds good. Well, always a pleasure, Russ. Um, make sure not to be a stranger to have you on again, um, you know, in a few months and figure out where you’re going with all this stuff. All the new things that you’ve accomplished, but it’s, uh, it’s great to see you. Well, happy to be here, proud of you. Uh, keep up the good work and keep educating people. Thank you. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens to you. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealthformulabanking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. As always, Russ, uh, is, uh, you know, he’s, he’s got a lot of wisdom. He is the guy you really wanna listen to. And I would encourage you to follow his work anyway. Uh, just pivoting back, you know, to where this economy is and all that. I think for me personally, it’s about allocating capital in a market that is a, uh, is certainly losing value in its dollars. And, um, and I think that we’re gonna continue to see that. Speaking of that, make sure if you haven’t, as I mentioned before, sign up for the Accredited Investor Club. Go to wealthformula.com, go to investor club, as we have plenty of those types of things that are hedging against inflation, um, saving taxes in terms of tax mitigation strategies, that kind of thing. Check it out. That’s it for me This week on Well Formula Podcast. This is Buck Joffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealthformularoadmap.com.

Ideas in Development is VoxDev's new second podcast! You can listen to Ideas in Development wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe, so you won't miss an episode.Today we're bringing you one of the episodes from our new series. Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran ask how Costa Rica, a small country of approximately 5 million people, became an attractive hub that now hosts operations for more than 1,000 multinationals. To take us through this period of economic change, we were joined by Andres Valenciano Yamuni, who played his own role in Costa Rica's FDI journey during his time as Minister of Foreign Trade.

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- Năm 2026, Việt Nam phấn đấu đưa xếp hạng Chính phủ điện tử/Chính phủ số và Chỉ số Dịch vụ công trực tuyến của Việt Nam nằm trong Top 65 thế giới.- Giai đoạn 2021- 2025, khu vực đầu tư trực tiếp nước ngoài (FDI) đạt hơn 158 tỷ USD, vượt mục tiêu đề ra  cho thấy sức hấp dẫn của môi trường đầu tư Việt Nam trong bối cảnh kinh tế thế giới nhiều biến động.- Hôm nay, dự báo lưu lượng phương tiện tăng cao trong ngày cuối cùng trong kỳ nghỉ lễ Tết dương lịch 2026- Trong chương trình Đài TNVN có bình luận nhan đề “Asean 2026: Tạo ra những cơ hội từ thách thức” trước bối cảnh môi trường chiến lược khu vực và quốc tế nhiều biến động sâu sắc.

Năm 2025 khép lại với hội nghị của Ban Chấp hành Trung ương khóa XIII ngày 22-23/12 và khả năng ông Tô Lâm tiếp tục làm tổng bí thư, theo nguồn tin của Reuters. Năm 2025 cũng đánh dấu nhiều kỷ lục về kim ngạch thương mại, số lượt du khách nước ngoài đến Việt Nam ; tăng trưởng “sáng nhất trong khu vực” Đông Nam Á, tinh gọn bộ máy hành chính. Bên cạnh đó là những thiệt hại khủng khiếp do thiên tai, ô nhiễm môi trường. RFI Tiếng Việt điểm lại một số sự kiện quan trọng tại Việt Nam năm 2025. Tổng bí thư tập trung quyền lực trong nước Tại hội nghị của Ban Chấp hành Trung ương khóa XIII, các đại biểu nhất trí ủng hộ những chính sách được tổng bí thư Tô Lâm thúc đẩy. Ông Tô Lâm trở thành người thi hành được nhanh chóng “cuộc cách mạng chống quan liêu” được ấp ủ từ lâu. Thành công này cũng cho thấy quyền lực cá nhân của ông Tô Lâm và những chiến lược tập trung quyền lực đằng sau, theo nhận định của giám đốc nghiên cứu Benoît de Tréglodé, Viện Nghiên cứu Chiến lược (IRSEM), Trường Quân sự Pháp, khi trả lời RFI Tiếng Việt ngày 04/07/2025 : “(…) Nếu một cuộc cải cách đầy tham vọng như vậy được thực hiện bởi một người duy nhất thì đó là do ông ấy không cảm thấy bị bất kỳ ai đe dọa và điều này nằm trong quyền lực to lớn của ông trong bộ máy chính trị Việt Nam. Vào đúng năm trước Đại hội Đảng, với cuộc tinh giản bộ máy hành chính ở cấp địa phương, nhưng cũng có thể nói là ở cấp trung ương, ở cấp bộ, không ai chắc chắn là giữ được vị trí của mình, kể cả trong Ban Chấp hành Trung ương. Số người may mắn được chọn sẽ ít hơn vào năm 2026. Có thể nói chiến dịch kiểm soát khổng lồ này thậm chí còn hiệu quả hơn các chiến dịch chống tham nhũng thông thường. Bởi vì chúng khiến mọi người run sợ, ai cũng muốn giữ lấy chỗ và có thể theo đuổi sự nghiệp trong một bộ máy hành chính bị thu hẹp lại”. Đọc thêmSáp nhập tỉnh, thành 2025 : Chiến lược tập quyền và thành công cá nhân của TBT Tô Lâm Mở rộng vai trò của tổng bí thư trên trường quốc tế Trong hơn một năm giữ chức tổng bí thư, ông Tô Lâm có lẽ là lãnh đạo đảng công du nước ngoài nhiều nhất, thăm hơn 20 nước, ký nhiều thỏa thuận nâng cấp quan hệ đối tác. Tổng bí thư không chỉ còn muốn đứng đầu đảng, giữ vai trò về tư tưởng, mà là một nhà lãnh đạo cao nhất. Và ông Tô Lâm đang làm cho các đối tác phương Tây quen dần với hình ảnh này, theo nhận định của tiến sĩ Vũ Khang, Đại học Boston, Mỹ : “Việt Nam đã đặt các đối tác phương Tây vào vị trí phải công nhận tính chính danh và sự ngang hàng của vị trí tổng bí thư với các vị trí nguyên thủ quốc gia qua các cuộc gặp cấp cao. Đây cũng là một di sản của cố tổng bí thư Nguyễn Phú Trọng khi ông đã thành công bắt Mỹ phải công nhận tổng bí thư là ngang hàng với chức tổng thống Mỹ. Điều này chứng tỏ đây là một chính sách đường dài chứ không phải ngắn hạn cho kỳ Đại hội Đảng sắp tới, và dù ai ở vị trí tổng bí thư đi chăng nữa thì cũng sẽ được kế thừa di sản này”. Đọc thêmNâng cấp đối tác chiến lược toàn diện với Pháp, chủ tịch Tô Lâm muốn thể hiện năng lực ngoại giao, ổn định chính trị Việt Nam Mối quan hệ đặc biệt với Pháp được thể hiện qua chuyến công du Hà Nội của tổng thống Emmanuel Macron. Với 14 thỏa thuận trị giá 9 tỷ euro, Pháp muốn hiện diện mạnh mẽ tại Việt Nam, kể cả trong lĩnh vực quốc phòng. Giáo sư Pierre Journoud, Đại học Paul Valery - Montpellier 3, đánh giá : “Có thể nói ngắn gọn rằng bối cảnh hiện nay thuận lợi cho việc Việt Nam và Pháp xích lại gần hơn trong lĩnh vực quốc phòng. Pháp là nước xuất khẩu vũ khí lớn thứ hai thế giới vào năm 2024, cho nên có một số tham vọng chính đáng ở khu vực Đông Nam Á. Còn Việt Nam đã tổ chức triển lãm quốc phòng quốc tế lần thứ hai tại Hà Nội vào tháng 12/2024. Việt Nam bắt đầu đa dạng hóa việc mua vũ khí và trang thiết bị quân sự để bù đắp cho những thiếu hụt thực sự, hoặc được cho là như vậy, của nhà cung cấp Nga, vốn chiếm ưu thế ở Việt Nam”. Kim ngạch thương mại lập kỷ lục, bất chấp thuế đối ứng của Mỹ Năm 2025, tổng kim ngạch thương mại của Việt Nam lập kỷ lục, đạt 920 tỷ đô la, tăng 16,9% so với năm 2024, theo Tổng Cục Hải quan. Trung Quốc tiếp tục là thị trường cung cấp hàng hóa lớn nhất cho Việt Nam, đạt kim ngạch 183 tỷ đô la. Mỹ tiếp tục là thị trường xuất khẩu lớn nhất của Việt Nam, đạt mốc kỷ lục gần 152 tỷ đô la, bất chấp các biện pháp thuế đối ứng (20%) của tổng thống Donald Trump. Tuy vậy, trả lời RFI Tiếng Việt, chuyên gia kinh tế Lê Đăng Doanh cho rằng mức thuế 20% vẫn bất lợi cho các doanh nghiệp Việt Nam, so với một số nước khác được mức thuế 19% hoặc 15% : “Theo tôi, những mặt hàng bị tác động bao gồm may mặc, da giày, kể cả một số mặt hàng đồ gỗ. Nếu như tình hình tiếp tục như thế này, các nhà xuất khẩu Việt Nam sẽ phải tìm cách đa dạng hóa các thị trường và tìm các biện pháp để có thể tiếp tục duy trì sản xuất và xuất khẩu và tìm cách né tránh thuế 20% này. Hiện nay Việt Nam đang cố gắng tìm cách mở rộng thị trường ở Trung Đông và tìm kiếm những thị trường ở châu Phi, đồng thời muốn phát triển những thị trường khác tuy nhỏ nhưng hy vọng là sẽ vẫn có thể đón nhận được hàng hóa của Việt Nam một cách thuận lợi”.  Đọc thêmViệt Nam: Thuế "trung chuyển" của Mỹ gây khó khăn cho doanh nghiệp đầu tư nước ngoài Thặng dự thương mại (đạt 21,2 tỷ đô la) chủ yếu đến từ khối đầu tư trực tiếp nước ngoài (FDI) với 48,2 tỷ đô la bởi vì các doanh nghiệp trong nước thâm hụt thương mại hơn 27 tỷ đô la. Mức thuế 20% có thể khả thi cho hoạt động xuất khẩu của các nhà đầu tư nước ngoài. Tuy nhiên, thuế “trung chuyển” (transshipment) lên tới 40% mới là vấn đề khó khăn. Ông Jean-Jacques Bouflet, phó chủ tịch Phòng Thương mại châu Âu tại Việt Nam - EuroCham, giải thích với RFI Tiếng Việt ngày 08/08 : “Theo thuật ngữ hải quan Hoa Kỳ, “trung chuyển” không chỉ đơn giản là dỡ hàng từ một phương tiện vận chuyển hay từ một hình thức vận chuyển này sang một phương tiện hoặc hình thức vận chuyển khác, mà chủ yếu là sự thay đổi nguồn gốc ở nước cuối cùng. Nói cách khác, nếu quyết định đánh thuế hàng “trung chuyển” được sử dụng để áp đặt một hàm lượng nội địa tối thiểu đáng kể, thì có nghĩa là để ngăn chặn nhập khẩu nguyên liệu từ các nước thứ ba, ý tôi muốn nói ở đây là Trung Quốc chẳng hạn. Đây có lẽ sẽ là một vấn đề lớn đối với phần lớn lĩnh vực sản xuất của Việt Nam (…) bởi vì hiện tại, Việt Nam không thể bảo đảm sản xuất được 100% hoặc 80% sản lượng nội địa, có thể là trừ sản xuất nông nghiệp”. Mục tiêu tăng trưởng 10% năm 2026 khó đạt được vì khó khăn toàn cầu Với tổng kim ngạch thương mại năm 2025 đạt 920 tỷ đô la, Việt Nam gia nhập nhóm 25 nền kinh tế thương mại lớn nhất thế giới. Sau mức tăng tổng sản phẩm quốc nội (GDP) khoảng 8%, chính phủ đề ra mục tiêu tăng trưởng 10% cho năm 2026. Ông Hubert Testard, chuyên gia về châu Á, tổng biên tập báo mạng Asialyst, cho rằng “mục tiêu này lại quá lạc quan, rất tham vọng” : “Trước tiên là mức thuế quan trung bình 20% của Mỹ mà ai cũng biết, nhưng cũng phải kể đến nhiều mức thuế đặc biệt khác đối với ô tô, thép, nhôm. Gần đây, còn có một vấn đề khác đối với các nhà xuất khẩu thủy sản Việt Nam, với thông báo ngừng xuất khẩu một số mặt hàng vào năm 2026. Ngoài ra, bối cảnh chung ở một số nước khác cũng không đặc biệt hơn. Nghĩa là nhu cầu của Trung Quốc không mạnh lắm, châu Âu thì đang cố gắng hạn chế dòng hàng nhập khẩu từ châu Á, đặc biệt là từ Trung Quốc. Vì vậy, bối cảnh quốc tế sẽ kém thuận lợi hơn. Tất cả các tổ chức quốc tế đều dự đoán năm 2026 sẽ có mức tăng trưởng kém hơn một chút so với năm 2025”. Đọc thêm2026 : Bối cảnh quốc tế không thuận lợi cho mục tiêu tăng trưởng 10% của Việt Nam Mục tiêu tăng trưởng cũng có thể bị tác động vì thiệt hại do thiên tai, ô nhiễm môi trường. Theo Cục Quản lý đê điều và Phòng, chống thiên tai, năm 2025 đã đi vào lịch sử thiên tai Việt Nam với những kỷ lục chưa từng có ; thiệt hại kinh tế lên tới hơn 100.000 tỷ đồng (gần 4 tỷ đô la) - lớn nhất từ trước tới nay. Theo Kế hoạch Ứng phó thiên tai chung năm 2025, được Liên Hiệp Quốc xây dựng trên cơ sở hợp tác giữa chính phủ Việt Nam và các đối tác trong nước, quốc tế, khoảng 96,2 triệu đô la được huy động để đáp ứng nhu cầu nhân đạo, hỗ trợ cho người dân bị ảnh hưởng, đồng thời xây dựng lộ trình hướng tới khả năng phục hồi và thích ứng với  biến đổi khí hậu trong dài hạn. Giải quyết ô nhiễm môi trường : Vấn đề cấp bách Một vấn đề khác là tình trạng ô nhiễm không khí ở Việt Nam, khiến khoảng 70.000 người chết. Để giảm bớt “thành tích” nhiều lần đứng đầu danh sách “đô thị ô nhiễm nhất thế giới”, thành phố Hà Nội triển khai lộ trình cấm xe chạy xăng dầu, bắt đầu trong vành đai 1 (trung tâm) Hà Nội, kể từ ngày 01/07/2026. Song song với biện pháp triệt để này, nhà quy hoạch đô thị Basile Hassan, trưởng dự án Moov'Hanoi, Cơ quan hỗ trợ Hợp tác quốc tế Vùng Paris tại Việt Nam - PRX-Vietnam, cho rằng cần phát triển, nâng cấp hệ thống giao thông công cộng để người dân có nhiều lựa chọn : “Mạng lưới giao thông công cộng hiện tại không đáp ứng được nhu cầu của người dân. Hà Nội có tàu điện nhưng lại không đủ, thậm chí còn không đi đến trung tâm thành phố. Trong bối cảnh người dân chủ yếu sử dụng xe máy, rất cạnh tranh về mặt thời gian, đi từ điểm A đến điểm B mà không phải thay đổi phương tiện, cho nên giao thông công cộng có vẻ kém cạnh tranh hơn vì mất thời gian hơn so với xe máy, phải nối chuyến, phải đi đến các bến. Vì vậy về mặt thời gian và hiệu quả, phương tiện công cộng kém hấp dẫn hơn xe máy, được ưa chuộng ở Hà Nội”. Đọc thêm“Xanh hóa” giao thông Hà Nội: Cần bỏ ôtô cá nhân thể hiện “thành đạt” và kết nối hệ thống công cộng Việt Nam đón gần 22 triệu lượt du khách nước ngoài Cho dù trải qua một năm thiên tai, nhiều di tích, công trình bị ngập trong mưa lũ, Việt Nam ghi nhận số lượng du khách nước ngoài kỷ lục, gần 22 triệu lượt. Mục tiêu đặt ra cho năm 2026 là thu hút 25 triệu du khách quốc tế. Ngoài việc chú trọng vào dịch vụ chăm sóc khách hàng, chi phí không quá đắt, thì kéo dài thời gian miễn thị thực đối với nhiều nước được cho là một yếu tố quan trọng, theo giải thích với RFI Tiếng Việt của ông Nguyễn Xuân Hải, giám đốc của La Palanche Voyages : “Bây giờ khi được 45 ngày, có thể người ta đến Việt Nam chỉ 15 ngày thôi, nhưng người ta có thể tiến, lùi ngày để có được vé máy bay tốt hơn, phù hợp với khả năng chi trả của người ta hơn. Miễn visa 45 ngày là cả một bước đột phá lớn (...) Nay có đến 45 ngày miễn visa, giống như là chúng ta đang “thừa giấy vẽ voi”. Chúng tôi sẽ có thể vẽ ra những con voi rất sinh động, đưa được khách đến những vùng xa hơn, sâu hơn, đến những nơi mà theo chúng tôi còn nguyên bản hơn”. Đọc thêmDu lịch Việt Nam: Đà phục hồi bị ảnh hưởng bởi yếu tố kinh tế, địa chính trị

- Dòng vốn FDI chất lượng cao tăng mạnh – điểm sáng của kinh tế Việt Nam trong năm 2025.- Huy động và sử dụng hiệu quả nguồn lực tài chính quốc gia cho tăng trưởng 2 con số.

- “Bùng nổ” FDI vào Vùng kinh tế trọng điểm phía Nam-  Đà tăng tiếp diễn, chỉ số VN-Index đóng cửa ở mức cao kỷ lục phiên chiều qua.

In this video, I interview Dr. Igal German & Rev. Ken Overby about the errors of Replacement Theology. Ken serves as the Executive Director of Jewish Awareness Ministries.You can Learn more about Ken's ministry here:JAM YouTube Channel:  @JewishAwareness44  JAM Website: JewishAwareness.orgJAM Replacement Theology Conference: jewishawareness.org/refuting-replacement-theology-conference/Free Digital Magazine about Replacement Theology: https://mcusercontent.com/d114e810637e141a168db68f2/files/3d284c7f-3482-d8d8-165f-50cab5c64b69/IM_Fall_2025_I.pdfDr. Igal German is the founding Director of Faith Defenders InternationalLearn more about Igal's ministry here: FDI YouTube Channel:  @bibleapologist_fdi  FDI website: https://www.bibleapologist.org/

Today's show reviews the performance of the US economy the past year. Topics covered include actual inflation, jobs and likely GDP numbers. Special focus on Trump's 2 main economic initiatives: the $5 trillion tax cut package and Trump tariffs offensive. What have been the actual impact of both thus far? Likely impact in 2026 and beyond? Trump monetary policy browbeating the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Why neither corporate cost reduction via tax cuts and interest rate cuts will have much effect on the real economy. Contradictions in 21st century US capitalism that negate stimulative effects of fiscal and monetary policies. Trump record on war spending and social program spending. US Deficits, National Debt, and interest payments 2025. State of AI investing and financial bubbles (tech stocks, gold-silver, cryptos). What's the Trump record on the trade deficit, FDI financial flows, and US dollar.

The year concludes with mixed news from across the fastener industry, as veteran sales rep Rick Rudolph shares his recipe for seasonal cheer (1:40:39). Eurolink president, Craig Penland is bullish on the future, but keeps watch on European CBAM and other environmental regulations that complicate running a fastener business (23:25). On the Fastener News Report, Martin Inc. EVP Scott McDaniel joins news editor Mike McNulty to unpack the surprising shift of the FDI (57:53). Thread guru Carmen Vertullo explains B7 threaded rod markings on the Fastener Training Minute (1:30:26). PLUS: Zech Williams of Würth Industry explains the YFP approach to professional development (47:48) and Marco Rodriguez of Cresa drops more commercial real estate wisdom (42:49). Brian and Eric think deeply about the coming year as they take stock in the present moment. Run time: 02:25:39

How does China's economic model work? Political economist Ben Norton explains the ideas behind Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, discussing China's socialist market economy, historical development, reform process, poverty reduction, industrial policy, and more. VIDEO with charts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E89qUXTX-k Topics 0:00 Introduction 1:07 China has world's largest economy 3:01 China's economic development 3:54 Poverty reduction 6:56 Rising incomes 7:42 Life expectancy 8:57 Mortality rates 9:34 Reform and Opening Up 10:16 To get rich is glorious? 11:35 Deng Xiaoping's ideology 13:54 Primary stage of socialism 14:28 Chinese capitalists 15:54 Industrialization & urbanization 16:55 Birdcage economy (Chen Yun) 18:17 State ownership 19:40 State-owned enterprises (SOEs) 20:49 Grasp the large, let go of the small 22:22 Public property 23:16 SOE assets 24:14 Provincial & local governments 25:51 Golden shares in tech companies 26:54 Huawei, biggest worker-owned company 27:17 Rural cooperatives 29:09 Democracy in China? 31:40 Foreign investment in China 33:49 Global value chain 34:34 Foreign direct investment (FDI) 35:48 Industrial policy evolution 38:22 New quality productive forces 39:23 China's green energy revolution 40:24 World's manufacturing superpower 41:04 US deindustrialization & financialization 43:22 US bubble economy 44:37 China popped real estate bubble 46:50 Inequality & uneven development 48:31 Eras of the PRC 49:01 Common prosperity in New Era 49:34 Gini coefficient 50:26 Labor income vs capital income 51:48 Poverty alleviation 52:17 Wages of Chinese workers 52:44 Labor unions in China 55:19 USA funds anti-China labor groups 57:02 Marco Rubio takes over NED 57:32 Delivery workers 58:30 996 system is banned 59:23 Working hours in China 1:00:25 Imperialism & division of labor 1:03:51 AI & new cold war 1:04:45 Silicon Valley model: monopoly 1:05:43 Market competition in China 1:07:44 China opposes private monopolies 1:08:10 State planning 1:09:05 Cold War Two

Fratelli d'Italia non arretra sull'emendamento che riguarda le riserve auree detenute dalla Banca d'Italia: vuole chiarire che quell'oro è degli italiani. Cerchiamo di capire meglio insieme a Carlo Marroni, giornalista de Il Sole 24 Ore. E mentre FdI si occupa di questo tema, in Forza Italia è Piersilvio Berlusconi a prendere la scena sostenendo che siano necessarie "facce nuove e idee nuove". Un messaggio per il Vicepremier Antonio Tajani? Lo chiediamo a Emilia Patta, commentatrice politica de Il Sole 24 Ore. Proseguono nel frattempo le discussioni diplomatiche attorno a una possibile pace in Ucraina. A che punto siamo? Ne discutiamo con Claudio Bertolotti, Direttore di Start Insight.Infine, tutti gli aggiornamenti sulle partite di Conference e Europa League dal nostro Giovanni Capuano.

Farmers are having a tough time of it. Tariffs are driving up costs, and trade wars are driving down crop prices. North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring talked about those things on this episode of Plain Talk, but he also pointed out another problem. Labor shortages, which not only leave positions unfilled, but also drive up wages for those who are available for hire. "You can't get anybody to come out and want to work on a farm," he said. Contributing to the labor shortage is problems with the H2A visa program for temporary agriculture workers. "H2A is specific to skilled labor that we can bring into the country to help us do the work, because you can't find anybody anymore to do it," Goehring said. "And sometimes when you talk about that, people are like, 'Yeah, you're just trying to get free cheap labor.' No. On the contrary, in fact, if you bring in an H2A worker from South Africa or from South America or Central America, you're required to have housing for them. You're required to pay for their transportation. You're required to pay them, no matter what, when they're here," he continued. Asked if the Trump administration's hostility to immigrants was contributing to labor shortages, Goehring admitted it's having an impact "to some degree," but also pointed to complexities in the visa program, as well as the oil industry's competition for workers. Goehring also discussed the Industrial Commission's $400 million in loan programs to help farmers grappling with tough times. "We're lucky, you know, North Dakota has the only state-owned, sovereign bank in the entire country," he said. "We aren't FDI insured. We're insured by and the backing of the state of North Dakota. So, with that being said, it gives us the ability to develop some programs and be the banker's bank, help them manage and mitigate risk better for our multiple industries out there. This just happens to be agriculture right now because there's been several several areas that have been hard hit in our economy." Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I discuss the national fight over immigration, the challenges of selling and buying locally-produced foods, and the case for harm reduction programs like needle and pipe exchanges in our communities. If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts | Episode Archive

Farmers are having a tough time of it. Tariffs are driving up costs, and trade wars are driving down crop prices. North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring talked about those things on this episode of Plain Talk, but he also pointed out another problem. Labor shortages, which not only leave positions unfilled, but also drive up wages for those who are available for hire. "You can't get anybody to come out and want to work on a farm," he said. Contributing to the labor shortage is problems with the H2A visa program for temporary agriculture workers. "H2A is specific to skilled labor that we can bring into the country to help us do the work, because you can't find anybody anymore to do it," Goehring said. "And sometimes when you talk about that, people are like, 'Yeah, you're just trying to get free cheap labor.' No. On the contrary, in fact, if you bring in an H2A worker from South Africa or from South America or Central America, you're required to have housing for them. You're required to pay for their transportation. You're required to pay them, no matter what, when they're here," he continued. Asked if the Trump administration's hostility to immigrants was contributing to labor shortages, Goehring admitted it's having an impact "to some degree," but also pointed to complexities in the visa program, as well as the oil industry's competition for workers. Goehring also discussed the Industrial Commission's $400 million in loan programs to help farmers grappling with tough times. "We're lucky, you know, North Dakota has the only state-owned, sovereign bank in the entire country," he said. "We aren't FDI insured. We're insured by and the backing of the state of North Dakota. So, with that being said, it gives us the ability to develop some programs and be the banker's bank, help them manage and mitigate risk better for our multiple industries out there. This just happens to be agriculture right now because there's been several several areas that have been hard hit in our economy." Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I discuss the national fight over immigration, the challenges of selling and buying locally-produced foods, and the case for harm reduction programs like needle and pipe exchanges in our communities. If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts | Episode Archive

What is helpful and what is hurtful in attracting new FDI to the US? Listen for more on Two Minutes in Trade. 

Ukraine's antitrust/competition law regime remains in place despite Russia's invasion. How are the rules enforced and what changes can we expect? Timur Bondaryev, a leading Ukrainian lawyer, joins Matthew Hall and Anora Wang to discuss merger control and antitrust/competition law enforcement and practice in Ukraine as well as the proposed introduction of foreign direct investment (FDI) control. Listen to this episode to learn more about the past, present and future of the rules in this important jurisdiction. With special guest: Timur Bondaryev, Senior Partner, Arzinger Related Links: Ukraine: Antitrust Enforcement in Challenging Times, Concurrences (November 2023) Merger control in Ukraine: positive developments for global deals despite wartime challenges, Competition Law International (June 2025) Hosted by: Matthew Hall, McGuireWoods and Anora Wang, Arnold & Porter

In this episode, Uzair talks to Anna Twum about Pakistan's export potential, how import tariffs hurt the export economy, and the ways in which Pakistan's $60bn export potential can be met. Anna Twum is an economist at the World Bank and recently helped write the Pakistan Economic Update published by the World Bank. You can read the full report here: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/972c49ee47cc09d4face97b09ea64362-0310012025/original/Pakistan-Development-Update-Staying-the-Course-for-Growth-and-Jobs-October-2025.pdf Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 2:15 Why are exports low? 17:30 Import taxes and exports 33:20 Energy reforms 41:30 FDI for exports

La trimestrale di Nvidia, pubblicata ieri sera, mostra ricavi record oltre 57 miliardi di dollari e una previsione di 65 miliardi per il trimestre successivo, sopra le attese degli analisti; anche l'utile netto, quasi 32 miliardi, supera le stime. Per il mercato globale questi numeri sono determinanti, perché Nvidia vale più degli interi listini di molte capitali europee ed è considerata un indicatore macro oltre che un titolo tecnologico. I conti arrivano dopo settimane di tensione legate ai timori di una bolla sull'IA: l'immediato +5% nell'after market indica sollievo, ma resta il tema degli enormi investimenti richiesti dalla rivoluzione dell'intelligenza artificiale. Le big tech prevedono centinaia di miliardi di spesa nei prossimi anni e stanno aumentando l'indebitamento: una corsa che alimenta dubbi sulla possibilità di ritorni certi e sull'eventuale rischio di sovra-investimenti. Secondo Goldman Sachs, i benefici economici dell'IA potrebbero però arrivare a migliaia di miliardi, potenzialmente sufficienti a giustificare gli investimenti in corso. Interviene Morya Longo, Il Sole 24 Ore.Manovra alle battute finali. Intanto continua a preoccupare la crescitaIl percorso approvativo della manovra entra nella fase decisiva, con 414 emendamenti segnalati come prioritari, di cui 238 dalla maggioranza. Il vertice tra le forze di governo è il primo banco di confronto su temi dove esistono punti d'incontro ma anche nodi ancora irrisolti. Le modifiche in arrivo, però, non cambieranno l'impostazione complessiva della manovra, che non riesce a incidere sulla crescita: per i prossimi anni l'Italia rimane ancorata a livelli vicini allo zero, nonostante l'intervento del Pnrr. L'Italia registra una delle crescite più basse dell'area euro - quest'anno quarta dal fondo, l'anno prossimo seconda, nel 2027 ultima - e la fine del Piano nel 2026 impone un primo bilancio del suo impatto. I dati disponibili confermano che, pur senza generare una crescita robusta, il Pnrr ha evitato stagnazione e recessione, grazie agli effetti espansivi degli investimenti pubblici richiamati dagli studi della Banca d'Italia. Inoltre, poiché gli investimenti di qualità finanziati in deficit riducono il rapporto debito/Pil attraverso una maggiore crescita, si può dire che il Pnrr ha contenuto l'aumento del debito atteso tra il 2024 e il 2026. Ne parliamo con Gaetano Scognamiglio, Presidente Promo Pa Fondazione e Co-fondatore dell'Osservatorio Recovery Plan (OREP). Manovra, Fdi propone di trasferire allo Stato l'oro di BankitaliaFratelli d'Italia ha presentato un emendamento - firmato da Lucio Malan - che afferma che le riserve auree detenute da Bankitalia appartengono allo Stato. Si tratta di un tema che ricorre ciclicamente da almeno vent'anni, spesso legato all'idea di una possibile vendita dell'oro per alleggerire i conti pubblici: un patrimonio stimato in circa 275 miliardi di euro, quasi un decimo del debito nazionale. Tuttavia la competenza su queste riserve non è nazionale: secondo il Trattato dell'Unione europea e le prerogative della Bce, il governo non può disporre autonomamente dell'oro che rientra nel sistema delle banche centrali dell'Eurosistema. È per questo che anche i tentativi precedenti di trasferire la proprietà allo Stato si sono sempre arenati. Il commento è di Franco Bruni, presidente dell'Ispi e professore emerito del dipartimento di Economia dell'Università Bocconi.

Monica Guerzoni parla delle diverse interpretazioni date dal Quirinale e da Palazzo Chigi del faccia a faccia tra il capo dello Stato e la premier all'indomani dello scontro tra il Colle e FdI su un presunto complotto anti-governo. Lorenzo Cremonesi spiega come Usa e Russia sono arrivati a definire un'ipotesi di pace molto penalizzante per Kiev (che non è stata consultata). Francesco Strippoli presenta le Regionali del 23 e 24 novembre.I link di corriere.it:Mattarella e i 20 minuti al Quirinale con Meloni, l'incontro non chiude il caso: toni diversi tra il colloquio e la nota di ChigiIl piano segreto di Usa e Russia: «Colloqui in corso su 28 punti per far finire la guerra in Ucraina»Elezioni regionali in Puglia, Vendola ha un malore e va in ospedale. Lo staff: «Sta bene». Poi l'abbraccio con Decaro in teatro: «Tra noi nessuna guerra»

In this episode of Develop This!, host Dennis Fraise sits down with Bruce Takefman, Founder and CEO of Research FDI, to explore how technology, AI, and global trends are reshaping the future of investment attraction. Bruce shares his personal journey and lessons learned from years of helping communities and economic development organizations (EDOs) compete in a rapidly evolving global marketplace. From AI-powered tools like FDI 365 to training programs that strengthen EDO outreach, Bruce highlights the strategies that separate high-performing organizations from the rest. Listeners will gain insights into: Why a clear investment attraction plan is essential for success How smaller communities can leverage their unique assets The growing role of AI and data analytics in investment outreach How to measure success beyond leads—through site visits and job creation The importance of diversity, inclusion, and global perspective in building competitive teams Whether you're leading a regional partnership or managing a local EDO, this conversation delivers actionable takeaways to elevate your investment attraction efforts and prepare for what's next.

Fastener sales continue to race along, as Star Stainless president Tim Roberto Jr. and news editor Mike McNulty explain as they present the latest high octane FDI results on the Fastener News Report (44:34). Meanwhile, industry journeyman and BBQ connoisseur Tony Martinez of Buckeye Fasteners describes a great place for a pit stop (33:15). Back behind the wheel in the fastener industry, newly appointed All-State Fastener CEO Dan Hill shares his view of the road ahead (15:56). Feature: Dan Walker and Preston Boyd of the Industrial Fasteners Institute describe an exciting new apprenticeship program designed for domestic fastener manufacturing (1:31:55). On the Fastener Training Minute, industry expert Carmen Vertullo looks at hydrogen embrittlement testing (1:20:03). Brian and Eric suspect Sam Altman has a secret fastener fetish. Run time: 02:16:45

Monica Guerzoni parla dello «stupore» espresso dalla presidenza della Repubblica per le parole del capogruppo di FdI, che aveva chiesto al Colle di smentire di far parte di un complotto anti-Meloni, come scritto da «La Verità». Marta Serafini commenta il via libera delle Nazioni Unite al piano di pace di Donald Trump. Marco Bonet presenta il voto del 23 e 24 ottobre, che chiude i 15 anni da presidente di Luca Zaia (ma lui non sparirà).I link di corriere.it:Bignami: «Piano del Quirinale contro Meloni?». La nota del Colle: «Stupore, sconfina nel ridicolo». E Fazzolari: «FdI e Chigi leali»Il via libera dell'Onu alla risoluzione su GazaElezioni regionali in Veneto, primi scontri in tv tra Stefani e Manildo: botta e risposta su Europa e legittima difesa

Fiorenza Sarzanini parla delle polemiche politiche sull'Autorità per la Privacy nate dalle inchieste della trasmissione «Report» di Sigfrido Ranucci. Lorenzo Cremonesi spiega che cosa cambia nella guerra con l'ingresso nella cittadina del Donbass di 300 militari di Mosca che hanno sfruttato la nebbia. Marta Serafini racconta il primo sì della Knesset al disegno di legge voluto dal ministro Ben Gvir contro i responsabili di attacchi terroristici.I link di corriere.it:Report, FdI attacca: «È contro il governo, ora mozione a tutela del buon giornalismo». Scontro tra Meloni e Schlein sul Garante per la PrivacyPokrovsk, «300 militari russi entrati in città, coperti dalla nebbia»: così il meteo ha «accecato» i droni ucrainiPerché i Baklava di Ben Gvir e la pena di morte per i terroristi possono diventare un problema per Netanyahu