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Unknown A
There was an opportunity to embrace founders and entrepreneurship and innovation and the Democrats chewed away capitalists, billionaires, powerful people, self made people and I think they made a critical era which is Americans. They actually love billionaires. They love successful self made people. It's the best of America. And the attacks on tech from for specific blocking and tackling things or policies, those are all valid but it was a tremendous strategic mistake to be anti innovation.
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Unknown B
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Prizepix. Run youn Game the best place to get real money action while watching your favorite sports. Download the app today and use code Twist to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. Open phone Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com twist and LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
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Unknown A
Hey everybody. Well, welcome back to this Week in Startups. I am your host Jason Calacanis with me my co host Alex Wilhelm and I am in our Nation's capital, Washington, D.C. i came out to do a party for All In. We had a nice little cocktail party, became one of the hottest tickets at the inauguration. Apparently I have been going to parties and I did a live stream for all in just before I got on here during the inauguration and now the chips are starting to fall, the pardons, I guess the executive orders will start at any minute but we're going to get started here and if you are not listening to us live, just so you know, if you're part of the Replay gang on the podcast, we do go live three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We're trying to make it nice and tight for 1pm East Coast, 12pm Texas, 10am Pacific.
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Unknown A
But sometimes we change it up and if you want to follow the docket along with us, that's this week@startups.com docket. Alex, how are you doing?
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Unknown B
I'm doing pretty well. I have been trying to keep tabs of all the political news today as it relates to our world. It has been hyper dynamic. I've never been as glued to Twitter X. It's been a while since I've been this online, I got to say, but it's been a kinetic day. Things are happening.
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Unknown A
I think this is, you know, we've been saying this when Trump's president, he says a lot of things and those things tend to make the news and we have to talk about them and unpack them. I'll give everybody a reminder. Trump says a lot of things and a lot of the things he says, he workshops, not unlike myself, like I just did. I don't want to be too critical here, but he workshops a lot of things out, out loud. And some of the things he says, maybe they're negotiating tactics so we will have to cover them. But we're always going to call balls and strikes here at this Week in Startups and on the other podcast, All In. I will continue to do that. And so we're where do we want to start today? The inauguration just occurred.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
Where do you want to start?
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Unknown B
I want to start with just taking people into some of the rooms that you've been in. And I know you can't share everything, of course, but you have had, I would say, one of the most privileged points of access and information when it comes to the new administration and the technology vibes, which I think people are curious about. So just tell us what you can about the atmosphere. And has anything surprised you thus far in terms of technology and the Trump administration 2.0 coming together?
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Unknown A
Great question. I am, I don't want to overstate it. I'm not in the administration. Obviously, you don't see me with a title. And I am not rolling with Trump or Ellen around this event. I wasn't at the inauguration itself, but I have been to the parties. And this, I would say, is almost everybody in tech's first inauguration. So that was my first observation. Gen X is taking a seat at the political table for essentially the first time in our lives. In the last election cycle or two, you had some folks, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Mark Pincus, a handful of people would get involved. Shervin famously with Obama over the last two. But it wasn't, you know, as deep as of a collaboration, let's say. And certainly tech was not involved in policy. It was not involved in the running of government. But I do think, you know, now that, you know, I'm kind of here and watching it happen.
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Unknown A
This has moved from the realm of Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and a handful of folks who were interested in politics on the margins to tech, finance, business being center stage and being in the administration. So this is the ascension of Gen X and I think, you know, maybe the passing of the torch from boomers.
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Unknown B
I think that is correct. I did see a lot of commentary of people who are watching, you know, the church service and then the inauguration and so forth about the prominent placement of leading technology CEOs. I mean, Tim Cook is there, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, you know, formerly in charge of Amazon, still owns a lot of it. And people were making comments like, hey, the technology CEOs are, you know, right there, a lot of the governors are in the overflow room, etc.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
So I'm trying to sort out what I think of that statement was because I think Trump likes to get people to come along with him and likes to show that he has done that. So I'm trying to decide if that was him offering a peace offering to people that he's clashed with before or alternatively just showing the world that he has cowed them into quiescence.
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Unknown A
Yeah, no, I think it's even a little more interesting. Trump is a master of building coalitions. The Democratic Party of late, you know, let's say post Obama, post Clinton has been a bit divisive. That would be my criticism of them and, or my observation. And again, I'm a moderate, voted Democrat two out of three times, Republican one out of three times. And I'm not really very interested in politics. If truth is told, I can't wait to get out of here. Washington D.C. is not for me the most interesting place to seco. And the Bay Area much more interesting to me intellectually in New York obviously. So what I'll say about this is there was an opportunity to embrace founders and entrepreneurship and innovation and the Democrats shooed away capitalists, billionaires, powerful people, self made people. And I think they made a critical era which is Americans and especially actually Americans maybe who are in the bottom half of society, you know, financially and you know, coming up in the world.
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Unknown A
They actually love billionaires, they love successful self made people. It's the best of America. And the attacks on tech for specific blocking and tackling things or policies, those are all valid. But it was a tremendous strategic mistake to be anti innovation, whether when the Republicans did it, I think under Bush or the Democrats under Biden. The world loves these people. They love the products and services they make. People, people love Amazon, they love two day delivery, they love Google, they like free Gmail, they are obsessed with YouTube, they love Instagram, they get joy from it, they drive Teslas, they get a kick out of watching rockets go into space. And increasingly they are on Starlink networks. When I was in Japan, I sent Elon a picture of like, I was like, dude, every lift in Japan had a Starlink at the base. And I was like, wow, why don't they have Internet at ski resorts?
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Unknown A
I was always wondering that, like, it'd be so great for sharing photos, etc. It's because it's impractical to run a gigabill up a giant mountain. You have to bury it, you know, incredibly costly. Now you can throw a $99 Starlink Mini up and everybody gets to post their pictures or check their email. One way of saying that's what we're seeing here. These people are loved and the administration saw an opportunity to embrace them and the other administration, I think, you know, and that's been a big part of the discussion. So I'd love to get into what people are talking about in private here in the halls of power, in the rooms where it happened. And the discussion has been, why do the Democrats hate us? Why are they anti tech? Why are they anti acceleration? I met the guy who does E accel, you know, that little thing people put in their bio E accel.
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Unknown A
I met that guy. Really nice kid. I think this was a, a fumble. It was a big fumble to fumble Joe Rogan, big fumble to fumble Elon. And, and you know, Sergey's here, Zuck is here. You saw, see all the people. So it is really great that we're celebrating leaders of these great companies. And I think that's the point that Trump is trying to make. And listen, he won and he won convincingly. So you, you should take notes. And you know, that's my interpretation of it.
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Unknown B
Yeah, and. Well, one and a half points.
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Unknown A
But you're allowed to disagree, of course, in American elections.
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Unknown B
I guess that counts as a, as a, as a solid victory. I, I have been thinking a lot about this and I think the way I've kind of come down on what went wrong with the Democrats is that they presumed that the profit motive was always a sufficient carrot to drive entrepreneurship and capital formation and all the things that we like under capitalism. And so what they needed to do was not touch that because it already had its built in incentive system and instead they wanted to tinker kind of technocratically around the edges with policies and so forth. And I think that you can end up in a position where anything that is more pro business than technocratic tinkering feels like you're being a Republican and then you wind up kind of backed into a corner. The nice thing is Trump did win, comma, before anyone clips that one out.
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Unknown B
And so the Democrats now have a chance to find a new path. And I bring this up because think back to when Obama won first or second time. And then what was the state of the Republican Party then? All right, fair enough.
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Unknown A
They were lost. Yeah, they were completely lost.
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Unknown B
And today, looking at the Democrats, they've appeared to have dissolved like a sugar cube in a hot cup of coffee. So they're going to have to come up with something new. The thing is, I don't think anyone liked the Biden years. Like every single center right, hard right, center left, far left, libertarian, socialist, communist. Like the whole political compass is basically thumbing their nose at Biden as he walks out. So over. Okay, that's the end of that era. To your point about generations, what's next? I will be very curious to see, Jason, how long the good vibes stay, because currently my Twitter account is just a lot of people thumbing their nose at people who lost the election. Let's see how long the ebullience last.
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
Here's the thing. It's easy to be the opposition.
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Unknown A
Everything that is terrible, especially when inflation hit 9%. And oh man, that was when we, when we. Yeah, when we do the postmortem here on what happened in the election, there's a bunch of mistakes, obviously, but if you have people going, and I call this like the sort of Big Mac effect, the McDonald's effect. Most Americans hit a McDonald's, you know, every three months or so.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
I think the number was like we talked about it last time, 50 or 100 million people have gone in the last 30 days or something crazy. And there is another statistic when we examine. Okay, no judgments. It's okay. I mean, listen, I like ice cream, you like a Big Mac or a fly fish, whatever it is, it's all good. But when you see a Big Mac literally go up 50% or 100%, when you see fries go up triple and you know, the dollar menu disappears or, you know, is greatly reduced.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
That impacts people in their brain goes, I'm doing poorly. And it doesn't matter if they got a raise.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Doesn't matter if unemployment at the all time low. It doesn't matter if they got a low mortgage and they're locked into it at 2 or 3%.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
It's just a pervasive reminder that things are expensive. I think they couldn't get over that. Additionally, the thing I was completely wrong about is I thought abortion was an absolutely paramount issue and that people would come out and they would say, you know what, Losing the right, losing personal autonomy. 80% of the country believes that a woman should have the right to choose essentially up to 12 to 16 weeks. And the majority of people, conversely, don't believe there should be abortion in the third trimester. So putting these things aside, and I don't mean to get graphic about it, but this is like a hard discussion that we never had. And exactly what Trump said on all in when I asked him about this is what transpired. 35 out of 40 states, 35 out of 50 states had abortion rights intact. So you're already at some extremely.
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Unknown A
And that's just in terms of number of states, that's not population. In terms of population, it might even be more than 70% were not impacted by that issue. Outside of, you know, disagreeing with Roe v. Wade being turned over, the intellectual exercise, there was no practical downside to them. And maybe 20% of the country had to go to another state, which is inconvenient or impossible for some, but maybe half of those people could go get it. So it was the economy, stupid. You know, it's always the economy. And people just blamed that on Joe Biden. Second to that.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
People want to feel safe and these cities are not safe. And the last cohort of people who came in, we just broke the immigration system by having too many people here. Again, 80%, 90% of Americans believe the border was a serious crisis. So you just look at the statistics. I think the Democrats did not focus on those two things. They didn't have a primary, the hot swap, all these things contributed. By the end of the day, it's about turnout. And the turnout for Trump was much greater. And I think the people who would have turned out for a Democrat were like, you know what? I'm not better off than I was four years ago, full stop.
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Unknown B
I think the abortion one's very interesting because we've seen, I think almost every single state where it's come up to vote, it's passed. We have seen some states raise the threshold to 60% to pass things. And then we've seen abortion get like 50, what was it in Florida? 56%, something like that.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Which strikes me as slightly anti Democratic. But again, we can finally stop with the rearview mirrors. We don't have to. I mean, the Biden era is done. He's out, he's on the helicopter. Goodbye, Joe.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it ended with a flurry of pardons. So I don't know what your thoughts on that were.
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Unknown B
Oh, that's very simple. Two, two full. Oh, yeah. Actually, I want to take you to a conversation from 2000, late 19, early 20. And I'm going to be a little vague here, but my father in law has worked in public health policy and is a physician, has been his whole life. When Covid was kicking off, we were sitting around my in laws living room talking about this, what's going to happen, what's this going to look like? Pre lockdowns, pre masks, pre everything. And he's like, well, let me tell you, do you know who Anthony Fauci is? I'm like, I've never heard that name in my entire life because at that point no one had. And he's like, he's the guy, he's brilliant. He's going to do a great job. And when he's worried, I'll be worried. And I just, I was like, who? The Fauci?
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Unknown B
Okay. And I just, whoop, threw it out of my head. But that's how this person was viewed internally. I think he became a political football and I think taking a public servant who did a Lot of his work under the Trump administration and preventing them from being unfairly attacked for no reason other than political grandstanding is a reasonable use of presidential pardons. The family stuff is exactly why I'm opposed to presidential pardons in general.
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Unknown A
We might need to rethink that one. Like, maybe you can't do family members or business associates. That might be a better model for this, but that would take a constitutional amendment and people generally don't like to. That's incredibly hard to do. I think on the, on the Fauci thing, the FISA lady blocking, getting information, I do think that they obstructed justice and obstructed the people from investigating it. And I think they knew it was lab made and they did a little CYA and that we funded it. So on that reason, I would have liked to see an investigation and a postmortem on this whole thing that included.
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Unknown B
That, you know, it's perfectly reasonable to investigate the government itself. But I think picking a figurehead simply to bop them around in front of Congress for no reason other than being a dick is not a good use of congressional time.
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Unknown A
What if he knew that we funded it and lied? Would you think differently?
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Unknown B
Yes, I'm. I tend to be against. I tend to be against lying, which is one of my criticisms of Trump.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing that we don't know is, with the Fauci thing is, you know, did. Did they cover this up and did they know? And I really wish we would have gone to that just objectively so we can learn from it.
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Unknown B
Well, China's not sharing, Jack, so I think the investigation of. I don't think you would get to the answer you want there, even with the investigation. I don't think that would end up with a 100%. It's X. Because I think China has restricted so much information that we wouldn't be able to. Yeah, just might.
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Unknown A
They may still investigate it even if they can't prosecute him just to get that information out there. Putting this pardons aside, we'll start to see some other activity around executive orders, and there's something to the effect. I heard 50 to 100, then I heard another source saying 100 to 200. So there's supposedly a shock and all coming. I don't know which one of these executive orders actually impact our industry all that much. January 6th, then, you know, gender issues, you know, these are, you know, don't sort of affect us, you know, here on this Week in startups. But are there Any that have come up in the news that you think are directly related to startups and tech and. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown B
So on the immigration front, I do want to say that the open question there, just before we kind of put this aside, is what happens to high skill immigration? I mean Trump has already there's been reporting of massive enforcement raids in Chicago for undocumented people. In technology, we're mostly talking about high skill. So H1BS and so forth. And there I think we're waiting to see which part of Trump's words from before are accurate. Do you want to make a final handicap on what happens there? Kind of your guess based on the.
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Unknown A
Vice basically talk to everybody about this. And I asked some people on air, we had Swalwell, Ted Cruz and Ro Khanna and I think I asked all three about this or maybe two out of the three.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
On the all in podcast you can see those interviews over there. JD Seems to be the proxy for how these things will be executed. And when he says something, it's been pre vetted. Clearly Trump and he have talked about it. So I kind of follow him as where the bombastic statement, you know, the negotiation starts and where reality is. He said on the January six folks, you know they're going to go after the people who beat up cops. So I don't think everybody's getting some blanket pardon. That's my expectation. People who beat up cops or you know, cause serious damage, they'll, they're not going to get a part in. The other people will on to the next one, which is immigration. Everybody agrees violent criminals who are on their second or third offense. Yep. It's like the most non controversial thing ever. They're going to be gone and good riddance.
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Unknown A
Get them out as quick as possible. And there has to be some process here. But if you make a mistake and the person didn't commit a violent act and you deport them, you at least have the high ground to say, well even if they didn't, if the report was wrong and we got it wrong, right, this person didn't beat up this little old lady and steal her purse. They still came into the country illegally. So you have at least that standing to say we're deporting them and they came in illegally and they can reprocess that and everybody wants the border shut. So I think that's what's going to happen. All right, everybody, every time you miss a phone call, that's a lost opportunity. And a lot of people, they love to use the phone. Potential customers don't wait. If you don't answer your phone, they're going to move on.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
And if you have an existing number with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge. It's a great product. Steve Bannon is not in the administration. Everybody I talked to off the record, from the Republican Party, from the Democratic Party and everywhere in between, they were like, steve Bannon is not part of this. What he says does not matter. What matters is what J.D. vance says. And I think J.D. vance's position is the proxy for Trump. He will deliver the news. And the news will be violent criminals shut the border down. That's going to take a year. And then they'll reassess where they're at. They're not going to spend a massive amount of money dragging out. As Ro Khanna was explaining to me, you know, somebody in his district who's got a daughter in town and who's been a dental hygienist for 20 years, they're not dragging her out of the country, you know, unless she committed a crime.
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Unknown A
So that's what I expect there. And then in terms of H1B visas, they don't have to change anything. There's a certain number of them. They'll probably just do some legislation to make some tweaks to remove abuse. And there is abuse in it. We've talked about it here tons of times. I've told stories. Yeah, yeah, there's this consensus about that. So just put a floor on the salary. If you're making under 50, 60, 70k you can't get an H1B visa, you can't get high skilled stuff. And every time you do one of these you got to pay 10% of the salary, minimum 10k into a fund to manage this process. Country could use some revenue anyway. So that's where that winds up. As best as I can see, I don't have inside information but I do have habit in the room where conversations are happening with important.
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Unknown B
So just to confirm what you're saying is they're going to have a non high school immigration for maybe a year. After that point they may do some technocratic tinkering with the H1B visa program, but it doesn't look like it's set to be greatly expanded or greatly diminished.
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Unknown A
Exactly. And once the American people, you know who put him in for a mandate to shut the border and the statistics are overwhelming. I think once he completes that task then they'll be in a position to reassess it. You know and if the American people are like, you know what unemployment, you know, because of I went up to 12%, let's say theoretically at some point during this term we want to shut the border even more. We want to have less H1BS because there's not enough jobs to go around and we're not at 4% unemployment, the lowest overall lifetime. You know, we can reassess it then because it is a dynamic situation and the same thing will happen with tariffs. These things will all be onesies, twosies. I love the idea. The next thing that was everybody was talking about and I'm personal friends with Ken Howery who's now the ambassador to Denmark.
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Unknown A
People know I'm friends with him for many decades and he's in the tech industry formerly of PayPal and Founders Fund. I didn't talk to him specifically about it other than to give him a pat on the back and say go get Greenland because I think it would be great to start having an opt in grand expansion of the United States. Puerto Rico, Greenland, whoever wants to vote 80% to join this great experiment known as the United States, I love it.
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Unknown B
Have we seen any indication that there is such a support amongst green lenders to join?
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's well above 50%. They would love to be Americans. It's only 50,000 people and Denmark I believe has Friedberg was saying on the the other pod that they have something like $150 billion in national debt. We could give them 200 billion which for the United States, chump change. They get 150. Was that broke?
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Unknown B
I thought we were broke.
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Unknown A
I mean, we're broke, but we're the greatest nation in the world with great companies and we got a great tax basis. If we look at it as a hundred year purchase, which is how I would do it, 1.5 billion, it's 2 billion a year, maybe a little interest. It's, you know, two and a half, three billion a year. We can afford it. It would literally be $10 per US citizen per year in terms of a payment. And that's a lot of real estate. It's a lot of minerals and it's a lot of shipping lanes. And if there was a conflict, God forbid, pretty strategic. So. But there could also be. The thing I heard was again, back to Trump says effervescent, bombastic, you know, big things, and then falls back a little bit. One person told me, you know, buying it is like the big deal, but having a deal to have bases there, to have the minerals or whatever.
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Unknown A
It could also be shaped as a deal. Right. And so that's a possibility as well on that front.
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Unknown B
Generally, though, I would say that I think it's best if we avoid bullying smaller nations into giving up large amounts of territory, because I have a lot of interest in the wars in Ukraine and the potential conflict in Taiwan, and I don't want to give autocrats any ammunition to say, well, you guys took Greenland, ergo Taiwan's mine.
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Unknown A
So, yeah, I mean, we're not invading people. We were basically saying 80, 90% of you want to vote for this, we'll consider it. You know, let's make a deal. We're not going to invade anywhere for this. Trump's peace, Nick, you know, he hates wars. He doesn't want to start them, he wants to end them. It's literally, if you hate Trump, the one thing you could love about him is, or true things is, you know, he can, he can have his moments and be funny. It's a great, great standup at times. And then two, he doesn't want to be in wars. So that's not going to be his approach. Even if he says something bombastic like, we're going to take it.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Well, let's talk about, you mentioned AI and jobs and so forth. So on the AI front, Trump has said he's going to repeal the Biden executive order on AI just to remind people what was in that. It was discussions about using AI, water making, watermarking technology. It urged the creation of privacy standards and encouraged government use of AI. It was a very ivy, I think, milk toast, EO as far as they go, but that's going to be out. And then the other thing that I'd say is Trump has been very critical of the Chips act, which put a lot of money into domestic chip production. He said recently that in October, he said that when he's on Rogan, you don't have to put up 10 cents. You tariff it chips so high they will come and build their chip companies for nothing. Again, Trump has said many things over the years on this issue.
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Unknown B
I'm not quite sure where it lands, but it does seem that the Biden administration approach of getting a lot of money through Congress to invest in certain technology industries is less a Trump priority, just given what he said. And that's too bad.
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Unknown A
I think there's a lot of people in the administration who believe we need to be. Based on conversations I had, we need to be resilient and independent from China. And there will be some grand deal with China is what everybody's saying. That in the works will be some big reconciliation with China over Taiwan, over chips, etc. TikTok and there'll be a bunch of back and forth and he will negotiate and bundle it and tariffs will be part of that. Chips will be part of it, Fentanyl will be part of it. They're going to just do some sort of grand deal. And it does seem like China's on their heels right now. They've got serious economic problems and if there is more recessions and they face more competition for building things with people trying to be independent of their supply chain. Yeah, they got, they got serious problems and so. And their problems greatly dwarf ours.
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Unknown B
Can I, can I pick at that for one second? So grand bargain inclusive of Taiwan, to me, because this is an issue that I care a lot about, just. Do you think that grand bargain involves us letting Taiwan get crushed?
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Unknown A
No, I think it's going to go back to the ambiguous thing we had for 20 years.
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Unknown B
One China policy.
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Unknown A
The One China policy, Yes. I think we'll just go back to ambiguity. We won't be poking the bear, they won't be invading. Just leave it alone. You know, just like I don't know if somebody wanted to get involved with our relationship with Puerto Rico or a territory that we have, which is how they perceive it. It's the territory, it's a part of it. We can just say, yeah, one China, yeah, they're all part of the same thing and we appreciate the independence of the. And the spirit of the Taiwanese people at the same time saying China is a great place and everybody get along. So it's kind of like strategic ambiguity is a really great way. What I've learned just spending time overseas a bit is sometimes it's best to just keep it super light and ambiguous and then you kick the can down the road and wait for, you know, for example, Iran to, you know, have its natural turnover in terms of demographics and leadership or contain Putin and not start a war with him.
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Unknown A
You know, like just containment ambiguity. It seems like that policy has worked well historically across Democrats and Republicans.
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Unknown B
I'll just say this, here's just supporting democracies and I like democracies over autocracy. So I'm a big fan of Taiwan and a big fan of Ukraine. And so as a, as a person, as just me, just Alex, I really hope we don't mess that up. Though I did say for AI. My takeaway after reading a lot of stuff today going back to the Microsoft and the OpenAI statements and kind of economic blueprints, is that I think we're just going to have a less regulatory minded government on AI for the next couple of years. The only thing I can see that would be less good for tech would be if any of the AI companies make Trump mad. And then, and then the pick could come out because he threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg before Mark turned around and gave him everything he wanted.
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Unknown A
So yeah, there's, you know, I think that falls into the, you know, saber rattling thing, negotiating thing and Zuckerberg's weak need, as I said previously, negotiate with.
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Unknown B
A threat of prison when you're going to be the next president. To me, that falls outside the realm of, oh shucks, yeah, that's everyone's bitching and moaning about lawfare. And then here's Trump literally saying, I don't like that CEO. I'm going to put him in jail.
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Unknown A
I think a lot of people feel that one. All right, growing your business in 2025 comes down to really one thing. How well can you hire? And we all know smart hiring starts with LinkedIn. LinkedIn gives you the strongest data and insights to find the right candidates faster. From unique skills and interests to connections you have in common, LinkedIn will help you hire with confidence. And here's why it works. There's a billion members on LinkedIn now. The March to a billion has happened. These people are across 200 plus countries and LinkedIn will connect you with the best talent, period. End of 72% of small businesses say LinkedIn helps them find the right hires. And 86% of businesses get a qualified match within just 24 hours. Here's what makes LinkedIn so unique. It connects you to over 171 million professionals who aren't actively job hunting, but they're open to new opportunities.
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Unknown A
That's kind of the magic, right? They're open to the possibility of joining your team and crushing it. This means you can reach top talent who aren't actively looking. It's a pool of candidates you simply can't find anywhere else. And we have hired so many of the most talented people I have on this week in startups, all in and at Launch, my investment firm. So knowing the right information about these candidates is going to just make you super confident. Just recently we're hiring somebody. I saw we knew somebody in common and I sent them a dm. Hey, what do you think of this person's name? And I instantly got a DM back and that was super helpful to me. So when every hire matters, LinkedIn is the hiring partner you can trust. It's how small businesses stay ahead no matter how many hats the founders are wearing.
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Unknown A
I mean, listen, we're all busy, so here's your call to action. Grow your team in 2025 smart by finding your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free. LinkedIn.com/that's LinkedIn.com twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. And I think people around Trump would rather he not do certain things. Yes, that would be way at the top of the list. And, but he, you know, he says these things and to execute on them will be difficult. We saw that in the first term when he tried to do things a little too edgy or on the margins, he got stopped. There were backstops in the system. Are they perfect? No. Yeah, you know, there's a, there's three branches of government and, you know, you could be concerned about it. But I think he wants to have a legacy. This is, I ask people, what's your perception of what he wants?
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Unknown A
And I think he wants a legacy and I think he wants JD to win and have this like sort of Reagan esque legacy. And that's going to require actually accomplishing some things. And I think he's really focused on trying to get a small subset of things done, make the country safer, cut taxes. You know, you can, you can really combat inflation by making oil cheaper. It turns out gasoline, oil is an input for almost everything in society. When you lower the price of gasoline dramatically and you burn hydrocarbons. Yeah, you pollute and could cause global warming. Seems like that science is pretty irrefutable. But you get cheaper inputs, goods and services go down. And so I think that's what we will see. We will. And he said that in his speech, Girl Baby drill. He got a bunch of applause for that. Yeah, they're going to, they're going to allow nuclear.
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Unknown A
I think they're going to fast track nuclear as well. I've been hearing that a whole bunch. Fusion, nuclear reactors, everything is going to be fast tracked. Try to make energy as low cost as possible so that your EV is cheaper to fill up, your gasoline is cheaper. And when that happens, people have more money to spend and that will ensure that, you know, JD wins in four years. And I think it really is that simple.
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Unknown B
We'll see. I'm really curious to see how much higher this number can go because if you're listening to the audio version, I'm showing A chart of U.S. fuel production of crude oil and we are at all time highs. Basically we reached a peak in early 20 and then it went back all the way up to a new high in October 24th, essentially. I wonder how much more capacity there is to drill. I was reading some commentary from Exxon about this and they said that a lot of the gains we've seen are now from aging shale fields. And so there's a question of how much domestic capacity can be turned on and if people will change their investment patterns. We'll see. I think your point about prices is really good because, and we talked about in the show before my learning about why gas prices matter to people because they're just much more economically sensitive to small price changes for mandatory goods.
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Unknown B
So, okay, data point there.
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Unknown A
We'll see if you were to take an Uber or you were to have a doordash come to your house or Amazon deliver a package. That package comes on a ship, comes on a plane, comes with the car. If that car can be operated for 10% or 20% less, that means they can raise that person's salary, lower the cost to you, and consumers have more discretionary spending. I'm sure the Democrats are looking at their focus on this and saying, well, if we're buying all this oil from overseas and shipping it here, why don't we just use our own until it's gone and then keep investing in solar? Because solar is cheaper to put in, batteries are getting cheaper. So I kind of called this a couple of years ago where I was like, technology is so deflationary and each iteration it gets cheaper. So we will be sitting here every year and solar will be cheaper, install batteries will have more capacity.
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Unknown A
Battery signs will get better, things will charge faster, they'll store more and they'll get deployed more. And that means we'll just attack it on all fronts until energy and energy costs become so de minimis. I think in the next decade or two we'll be looking at it and being like kind of the way people look at water. People don't know their water bills that, you know, if a hose runs overnight, you have a broken pipe. People are not freaking out.
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Unknown B
In other countries, your house over it.
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Unknown A
Well, yeah, you don't want to get flooded. But you know, if you left a garden hose on or you were filling the pool, like people don't lose their mind about it. In Europe, people will let their pools when it's expensive, not fill. They will not make a bunch of ice. They'll give you two ice cubes in a more. They really are thinking about water. And so, you know, I think energy goes to that same destination, makes everybody, you know, have more money. And the reverse of the McDonald's effect happens. Now they can lower prices or not raise them as fast. And you know, on the AI front, I think any regulation of AI just to put, just to wrap that one up. Yeah. Is premature. And all the regulations as they were constructed were regulatory capture. Like they were like if you have this many servers and you have to file this and when you do those, you know, Sam Altman, you know Satya Nadella, you know Microsoft, they know what they're doing.
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Unknown A
They know this is going to cause, as Bill Gurley points out, regulatory capture.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
You're gonna have to have expensive lawyers, expensive people spending all kinds of money to, you know, do reports. And we really are just in the first inning. So we gotta let these AI companies cook. And we are up against the Middle east and China in terms of innovation. We are not alone in making models. And the models in China, pretty darn impressive. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So, and I, you know, I try to not ever bring it up just because I don't want to get in your personal business. But you know, the CEO of XAI came out in favor of the California AI bill. That was pretty controversial. This, this surprised me at the time.
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Unknown A
And I don't think he has no, he has campaign.
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Unknown B
I'm curious, like, does everyone agree as much as we've been discussing them agreeing with a completely hands off approach to AI regulation.
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Unknown A
Elon got into AI and started OpenAI and funded it. He's been very public about this because he has a concern about superintelligence, you know, creating doomsday like scenarios. I think he's alone in that regard. Or it's a very small group of people who believe, you know, we're going to have a Skynet type situation in the short term. But, you know, Elon's pretty smart. He does see things before most people and he can catch a rocket with a pair of chopsticks. So, you know, is he right or not? We'll find out over time. And I think that's his concern. The way I look at it personally, and I don't know, I'm curious how you look at it, is I think China is going to figure it out and they're going to have robots in people's houses doing stuff for them. And if we don't have them, it's kind of like people at work who use AI versus people who don't.
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Unknown A
Yeah, not using AI would be like not having a computer, not having an Internet connection like that person is functionally irrelevant in the current workforce. If you didn't have Internet at your desk and a computer, if you don't know how to use AI and you're not using it, you're functionally irrelevant already. And that's a good note for anybody who's not using it all day long.
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Unknown B
I'm not concerned about AI in terms of it going rogue, as we sometimes sometimes consider. But when, when Elon was in favor of a slowdown in an advancement around the GPT three days, he sent some big letters. And when he supported the California AI bill, that did make me think, because to your point, while I disagree with Elon on a great many things, I don't think he's off base about a lot of AI stuff. And I'm curious, remember the point about Republicans and Democrats and Brandy and we talked about earlier. I think everyone who was in favor of AI safety broadly got lumped in as a Helen Toner hater, you know, and I wonder if that was a mistake. I wonder if also that was also a just a covering over of people in technology who are AI advocates, but who do think that there should be some government role in keeping things from going off the rails.
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Unknown B
I don't share that view, but I'm curious how much of people in tech that is who now don't really have a public thing to stand on, if that makes sense, Jason.
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Unknown A
I mean, at this point, China's going for it. Yeah, that's all you really need to know China's going for it. We can't slow down American companies. It would be like, this is, you know, now the race for the nuclear bomb, right? This is a Manhattan Project. We don't win. China does. Bad News. They build 10 million soldiers and, you know, a billion drones. Like, we got a serious problem. So we have no choice. For democracy to be the leader and humanity, we have to be the leader in this, in the free world.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I, I agree with that. I hope we win. We win quickly and decisively, let's say.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Somebody made an interesting comment in the live chat here. If you're listening to the pod, you can turn on, you can follow us on x or on YouTube to get the live stream, turn on notifications. He said, like, robots will kill people, but accidentally, like the Waymo crash. I think they're probably referring more towards the cruise crash, which is now out of business because of that, you know, ricochet that happened. And I think that's the right point here. When the robots meet humans and humans die. This seems crazy, but this person makes a great point. Self driving cars are probably the first interaction at scale between AI and humans and the potential loss of life. Drones will be the next one. And people having drones, God forbid, do a terrorist attack, which can't believe, has not happened yet, if I'm being honest. But, you know, drones are in the battlefield in Ukraine right now dropping grenades into foxholes.
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Unknown A
So it's only a matter of time before somebody does that tragically at a football game or something.
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Unknown B
Let's not give them ideas, Jason.
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Unknown A
I mean, here's the thing about, you know, talking about these things, you know, talking about them and raising awareness about them inspires founders to create countermeasures. And the number of companies we've had on this program or, you know, that we've seen on the investment side of our business that are doing drone deployment countermeasures is enormous. And in fact, I was talking to a technologist here who pointed to the roofs and said, see this? See that? Those are radio wave anti drone technology. So if somebody flies a drone into this perimeter by the White House in the Capitol, which, by the way, I've never been in a situation where I'm locked up so much as this. It was brutal. I had to walk like a, a mile or two to get my car. I had a driver while I was here. And it was just, I mean, first of all, problem, but I've really had to walk and walk and walk to get to it in the freezing cold.
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Unknown B
That'S what I was going to say. Don't. He's not complaining about walking a mile. He's complaining about when it's like minus 20 Celsius.
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Unknown A
It's really cold here. And, you know, this stuff is being deployed right now. We're in the thick of it and it's awesome if you're a founder. Countermeasures. The first wave of this in startups was using technology to see if somebody has, you know, a bomb on them or they're carrying a gun or to read their facial expression. And if they're on a watch list, all that stuff is deployed now. You just don't see it. When I went to the Bruce Springsteen, I took my mom to see the Bruce Springsteen on Broadway. They had a really interesting technology that was scanning everybody, looking into them and knowing if there was a gun or a bomb. And you just had to, like, slowly walk through it. It's like, this is really impressive. And I remember I wrote down the name of the company. I looked it up and it's just, you know, you can, you can move a lot of people without a metal detector and it scans for all these different things.
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Unknown A
So that's all great stuff.
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Unknown B
So let's pick a new topic. Let's talk about crypto. Trump has expressed support for bitcoin mining as a domestic industry. There is the real possibility of some sort of bitcoin reserve. So there has been, up until a couple of days ago, I would say, a general crypto wide excitement for the incoming Trump administration, especially amongst the bitcoin faithful who enjoyed a nice price pump. And then, Jason, a few things happened that I think people may have noticed, which was that Trump launched a meme coin, and then Trump launched about Melania. His spouse launched another meme coin and these. It was certainly a decision to do this. I, I don't think it's hard to guess my view of using the presidency for personal enrichment. But I'm curious, Jason, do you have a different opinion we could debate?
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Unknown A
I mean, I think you and I are some pattico on this. I think, you know, this is kind of a Goldilocks situation. Last administration, you know, too cold, this administration, too hot. I would like just. Right. Gary Gensler, you know, and Lena Khan are doing their, like, goodbye videos. I don't know if you saw those on Twitter. And, you know, they're getting, you know, proper criticism for the jobs they did. And, you know, it's all part of this anti tech, anti capitalism deceleration. You know, they would argue it's, you know, in consumers best interest. But consumers clearly want to have crypto. They, you know, businesses like to merge and provide services at cheaper value or cheaper prices, and they like that as well. They like to have their Amazon prime include Whole Foods, period, full stop. First of all, a lot of crypto people were not happy about this.
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Unknown A
They, the consensus, I think, from crypto people I know, and I'm not including David Saxon said, did not talk to him about it. So just to be super clear. But I talked to other friends in crypto and they, you can see them tweeting like, this is not good. Now, I am going to continue to take my nuanced approach, which is you must, must have an accredited investor test. Consumers want to buy meme coins. Consumers want to own bitcoin. Consumers want to gamble, they want to play poker, and maybe they want to have a little bit of cannabis on the margins. You gotta listen to the populace. And if they want to do things with personal freedom, you should create a path for them to do it. If you want to smoke cigarettes, I don't advise it. It's a terrible thing to do. But I don't want to stop you from personal freedom, because you know what?
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Unknown A
I like to smoke a cigar a couple times a year. And so I don't think you should ban it either. I believe in personal freedoms. In this case, the timing of it freaked a lot of people out because they felt that this would damage crypto. And personal enrichment is also on people's minds. Now, this occurred before Trump was technically president. And we don't know who owns it. We don't have all the details. Like, we don't know the 80%. When they do these meme coins, you. You kind of say there's beneficial buyers who are the insiders who own a certain number shows, just like a company. But, you know, I tweeted about this. There are certain rules to it. 80% are owned. If people took an accreditation test and they understood what vesting was, they understood what a float was, they understood diversification, they understood an NFT or a piece of art having no value other than what another person is willing to pay for it.
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Unknown A
I'm kind of in this libertarian thing. Educate people, let them do what they want. And I think what this signals is we're going back to those early days of crypto where you can experiment and do whatever you want. Would I have done this? Would have. I advise people to do this. Absolutely not. Yeah, this is like a really aggressive, crazy thing to do. I think other people might disagree, but Crypto people think this is crazy.
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Unknown B
So here's Crystal.
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Unknown A
People think it's crazy.
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Unknown B
We'll get to that. But just to underline what you're saying about the tokenomics, this is from the official get trumpmemes.com so there's going to be a billion total Trump tokens. 200 million are out. And the thing that people have caught on is that 80% of them are constrained or held by CIC Digital and creators. These unlock at certain times. CIC Digital is the company Trump has used to sell shoes and other things lately. So it's a Trump, as far as the market understands, it is a Trump property. Which means that the tokenomics here are essentially, I would say, very predicated towards the people in question. And we recently had Coffeezilla on the show and here is.
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Unknown A
He's going crazy. You know, I, I went to Coffeezilla first. I was like, I wonder what Coffeezilla exists me.
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Unknown B
That's exactly what I did. And here's what he has said. Update. Finally saw the tokenomics of dollar sign Trump. Eighty percent owned by one wallet. And then it's the sad skeleton face wojack who wants to cry.
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Unknown A
You know who's really happy about this? Who most happy Talk to a girl.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
If you're going to go after her, you're going to have to go after Barrett or whoever did this. Listen, if you're president, I don't know if you've seen this. People sell coins. They sell plates. In fact, somebody handed me a presidential coin. I have it here. This is some commemorative coin that was in a gift bag somebody gave me. You know, they sell these coins for 100 bucks. You see them online.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
If you put this in the framing of, you know, somebody selling these kind of coins, this is a coin. It's probably worth 100 or 500 bucks. I got it for free at a. Because I'm an influencer now, apparently, because I have podcasts. You know, these are digital versions of this and digital versions of this that are global. There's a list of other concerns you could rightfully have. Number one, a foreign adversary could start buying this as a backdoor payment to the Trump family. That is a valid concern because if you tried to buy a billion of these pretty hard, but you could buy a billion dollars in Trump coin if it's at 50 billion. So there's going to be a bunch of investigations into this. And what I fear is by kicking the hornets nest here, this is going to restart this whole adversarial thing because there are People in the Democratic Party who rightfully are on some finance committee who are going to say, hey, this is a security.
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Unknown A
And then the way this is written, they said, this is a game. Like, literally, I pulled up the terms of service in capital letters. They're like, this has no economic value. These are not shares of a company. These are trading cards. I think they even called them cards. However, you and I both know these things are trading on Coinbase is trading on Crack, and they're trading on Robinhood. So people look at these, and I would say half the people understand their meme coins and probably half of them think they're Bitcoin. Bitcoin and this are two very different things. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown B
It's funny, you bring up the securities argument about how people view meme coins, what the laws are going to be, what to do with Hayley Welch, the talk to a celebrity or the hawk to a celebrity that became the talk to a celebrity, I guess. I guess now under the Trump administration, because they're not going to go after his. SEC is not going to go after him for this. Right. So does that mean that literally anybody now can create their own token?
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Unknown A
That's exactly what it means, security.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
It means that NFTs and trading cards are legal. Gary Gensler went after these things and felt they were securities. There is an interpretation that needs to occur. It's a new product. I just said, like, look, you have these coins. They're commemorative. The Bush family, the Biden family, the Obama family. You can go to their website. You can buy all kinds of memorabilia. This is the future of memorabilia. However, it's subtly different. You have to interpret this and you have to think about a new set of rules. I would never do this. This, to me sounds really inadvisable, like super inadvisable. However, I also think it's super inadvisable to not have the ability to come up with a rule set. And I've talked about 10 different ways to do this for crypto. An accredited investor test solves the problem because then people would understand that a meme coin has no inherent value.
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Unknown A
And if you buy it, it will go to zero at some point. Yes. There is nothing guaranteed.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
And it's who is left holding the bag. That's the game you're playing. Just like poker, it's a tournament. Somebody at the end wins all the chips in the tournament and gets the prize. And some people make the final table and they make money. If you're doing this, are not buying a security, there's no underlying assets. Go buy a company with a lot of revenue.
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Unknown B
Yeah. On the.
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Unknown A
Jimmy, you're appalled by this. You're in the appalled.
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Unknown B
I am so livid. Tweaked.
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Unknown A
I can see it.
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Unknown B
I just.
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Unknown A
You can be.
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Unknown B
I mean, you have to be four more years of this rent grifter to be like, ok, I won. I won again. And what am I going to do with the little bit of goodwill that I have is I'm going to sell Trump bibles, gold shoes, and then I'm going to drop not one, but two successive shitcoins. And here's the thing.
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Unknown A
Meme coins. Meme coins. These are meme coins. They're not shitcoins now anymore. No, they the same potato, 100% right?
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Unknown B
Tomato. Tomatoes are.
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Unknown A
But it's all a distraction. It's all a distraction.
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Unknown B
Imagine if you're a crypto fan. And this is why I have this Nick Carter.
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Unknown A
Heartbreaking biology. A bunch of people, right? Oh, Nick Carter. Yeah. Nick Carter is the guy.
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Unknown B
Meme coin has caused crypto Twitter ct significant psychic damage. Never seen it this bad. I'm annoyed by this for a host of reasons. I'm very opposed to enrichment of politicians and use of office. Important four ways. But imagine if you're the crypto industry, you put your. You put your political and personal capital behind this guy and the first thing he does is turn around and make you look like a complete sucker by doing a meme coin grit.
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Unknown A
And here's another idea. Oh, people have. Here's their. The, you know, another argument that people will make. People have agency. This is America. You can go play roulette, you can go play blackjack, you can play poker, you can bet on sports now. Hey, shout out to my guys at Price pick. I love doing prize picks now. I am addicted to it. You know why? Because I love being engaged in the game. And it's like fantasy sports. It's so much fun for me to put a hundred dollars on each knicks game. There's 82 a year. I'll probably wind up doing 50 of them. You know, it's like five grand for me. That's nothing. And it makes the game literally 30% more interesting to me in a regular game. And it makes it 100% more interesting to me in a blowout because I get to follow my exact players.
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Unknown A
I'm more engaged. I like it. Sure. Other people might think it's stupid. It's okay. So communication is going to be super important. And I think hopefully this is not like blow the doors off of it. But when everybody loses their money, which half the people will, by definition, there has to be a buyer for every seller. Half the people, 2/3 of the people are going to lose money on this. Some group of people are going to make a bunch of money and people will learn these things actually have no value, which I had been saying about crypto from the beginning. Unless backed by something in the real world or an actual product or service, expect it to go to zero. That should be your default expectations. The fact that Bitcoin hasn't is just a fluke of literally hundreds of thousands of legitimate projects, like projects with multiple technical people behind them, like five have not been a total washout.
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Unknown A
Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin. Everything else is just garbage and nothing and you lose everything. If you go to this casino like going to Vegas, you will go home with a pit in your stomach having lost all your money. Don't play this game. Put your money in a 401k tax free Roth IRA 529 for your kids. Do it right. This is gambling.
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Unknown B
I just want to, I want to show people who are watching the video version of this what what the vibes are like on cryptocurrency specific forums after Trump launched his, his, his coins meme. Meme coins. Here's A headline from 7 hours ago from r cryptocurrency Melania Insider Wallet rugs 12 and a half million within 3 hours. This person pulled up a Trump chart and shows the massive drop after the Melania coin came out as forming an M for Trump and just, it just goes on and on.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I mean can you imagine being Gary Gensler?
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Unknown B
I mean you must be literally just like, I mean back to your cigar comment. I told you.
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Unknown A
This is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things. This is what happens when you don't have functional government making rules and advancing. Think about this organization needs to come up with a rule set. Please start with an accreditation test. Anybody who wants to buy this on Robinhood, which I'm an investor in, or any other platform and I still have a significant position in Robinhood. Anybody who wants to buy this on Robinhood you want to go do crypto. When you go on Robinhood to trade options, they take you through this walk where they train you. Here's what it is. Take a quiz. I think, you know, here's an explanation. They are walking you through it. You know, in crypto we don't have that. Exactly. I don't think. I don't. Somebody will correct me if I'M wrong. If somebody's doing that, you need to have like seven or eight screens that say this has no inherent value.
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Unknown A
You're buying this. It is likely to go to zero eventually. Do you understand that? Yes. What percentage of your net worth is this? If you lose it, can you afford to lose it? Just ask people these eight, nine questions before they're allowed to trade this stuff.
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Unknown B
Let's take a look at the Reddit S1, and I'm going to show people what a disclosure section looks like. When we discuss risks, this is always.
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Unknown A
Like a fun exercise because your attorneys, when you fill these out, will come up with every possible scenario. A nuclear bomb will land on the Reddit headquarters, the Internet will go down. You know, it's bonkers. You know, the CEO could be captured and put in a jail in, you know, Morocco. I mean, it's everything.
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Unknown B
So Starting on page 22 in the Reddit S1, we begin the risk factors. But the first sentence being, investing in our classic common stock involves a high degree of risk. Then they just list things that could go wrong if we fail to increase or retain our user base. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Our business depends on strong brand and reputation. Changes in search could kill us. We have a history of net losses. And it goes on and on and on and on and on a page after page after page. Now, in contrast, Jason, let's take a look at the equivalent disclosures from the Trump coin.
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Unknown A
Yes. Now there is. I pulled up the coin. There is a terms and conditions. If you click it there, there's like a capital part and it says, this agreement contains disclaimers, warranties, blah, blah, blah. You go down. The Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for an engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar sign, trump and the associated artwork and are not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity, investment contract. So they're doing their CYA here. My point is this should be front and center for any meme coin for any crypto when you go buy those shares, just like for options, because Robinhood realized people were buying options, might not have known what they were doing, or they might have thought they knew what they were doing, but maybe they didn't understand the nuance of it, so they just did a little extra care.
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Unknown B
So here's, here's where I get kind of annoyed, though.
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Unknown A
You're annoyed?
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Unknown B
I. I'm so. Dude, I can say it. I can't take. I can't take hypocrisy and I cannot Take.
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Unknown A
I'm just going to ask you, please. This is going to be four years of this. Don't get too tweaked. It's going to be every week there's going to be shit like this.
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Unknown B
Jason, Jason, you don't understand how Deep breath. I. You should have seen. Well, you did. But, like, I reached a little bit of peace. And I'll tell you why. Because I wrote this. We live in a democracy, which means that I have the absolute privilege of losing sometimes. Because if you're in a democracy, you're not going to win every election. You're such a.
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Unknown A
Great point.
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Unknown B
Your party.
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Unknown A
Beautiful.
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Unknown B
So I. My. My perspectives and views lost. Now, did I agree with everything that Biden. Sorry, Kamala. Wanted to do? Hell, no. But I lost. So here we are. We voted for this. 49.9%. Okay. Off we go. So that's. That's where I'm sitting today. I'm not. I'm not losing it, but I do think the grift drives me bonkers. But here's. Here's where I get a little mad. If the Trump memes are not actually intended to function as a investment opportunity, why did you use a mechanism that creates an investment opportunity if you wanted to do Trump memes, sell them for a dollar, subsidize them, send everyone a token, and off you go. But you know why he didn't do that, Jason? Because you can't make $10 billion doing that. And so this disclosure that we just read is horse pucky. It's literally cya. Has nothing to do with reality.
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Unknown B
It's a complete shameless grift, and I can't believe it happened.
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Unknown A
Now do Hunter Biden.
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Unknown B
He got.
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Unknown A
Let me tell you what Republicans say when I bring this kind of stuff up. Now. Do Hunter Biden.
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Unknown B
Hunter Biden is not the president.
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Unknown A
He's not the president. You know, he's kicking up to the big guy. Kick it up to the big guy.
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Unknown B
You know what? You know what? I would go. I would be in favor of much stricter rules about what politicians, families can do. I'm opposed to all trading. I think every president's assets should be put into an absolute blind. Jesse. When they start to run, people are.
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Unknown A
In favor of SEC has to do that rules. Yes.
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Unknown B
Bring it on.
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Unknown A
The SEC is doing that. And I think we talked about this on another program. It was either here or on all that. I can't remember. But this is like, really cool hack. If you get picked to serve and you have to sell and liquidate a Bunch of stuff to go serve your country. You don't get capital gains. You get like a one time amnesty for capital gains.
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Unknown B
I dig that. The only downside though is, you know someone's going to be like, got any of those jobs? I just made a bunch of money.
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Unknown A
I know a venture capitalist who had to divest everything to take a position. This is years ago.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And one of the positions they were in went like 10x while they were in office.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And they couldn't own the shares. So their net worth, let's say their net worth was 100 million or something. It would have been like 2 billion. And because they chose to serve their company country and not have those shares, they got massively. Massively.
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Unknown B
So I love a blind trust. I love having it outside of your, of your domain. I just don't think you should use higher offices of this country for personal profit.
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Unknown A
Keep your, keep your expectations low is my best advice based on history I'm going to do.
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Unknown B
I'm going to keep them exactly where, as high as I can.
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Unknown A
That's fine too. That's fine too. Just I don't want you to be triggered every Monday, Wednesday or Friday at 1pm Eastern when we get on the air because I guarantee you this is going to be twice as spicy. I'm predicting it now. I think this will be twice as spicy as the first term if the last. If Biden's term was like, you know, too milquetoast and boring and you didn't say anything and you're like, where's the president? Can we see him? It's a Weekend at Bernie's. Like, can we make a statement? Can he talk about this stuff? Mm. Like this is gonna be the opposite. Trump is going to go for it. I predict it's going to be twice as chaotic. So for all my friends who are on the left, just get in there, get that calm.com app, do your journaling, get your namaste on, a little yoga, a little hot sauna, go for a ruck.
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Unknown A
It's gonna buckle up, it's gonna be chaos.
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Unknown B
This, this is, by the way, this is the post meditation version of me. You should see me in the morning. Like, like. No, I literally meditated today.
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Unknown A
You. But you have a beautiful family.
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Unknown B
I do.
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Unknown A
You have an incredible career. You are a good person.
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Unknown B
Thank you, Jesus.
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Unknown A
This will be over literally in three years. In one day. Yeah. Three years and a wake up. Four years and just under four years.
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Unknown B
Just under four years. I knew you were trying to say four. Four years minus A day? Yeah, it's. We'll see. All right, couple more things on the EV front has promised to end what he called, quote, commerce insane electric vehicle mandate. There isn't a mandate. But the general thinking is that this is a movement against EV subsidies and also against emission standards that led automate auto companies to move towards ev.
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Unknown A
Isn't this a state issue? Like can they do that? They can get rid of the federal stuff, which I'm fine with by the way. I think the free market's got this. BYD is making stuff real cheap. Elon's making stuff real cheap. He's got the cybercap coming out. I think he said that's going to be 30k. I think EVs have won the day. They don't need subsidies anymore. And if states want to do it because of pollution, go ahead. But I'm off this whole subsidies thing. Rural broadband EVs. Let's stop with these like crazy farm subsidies. The free market has to like work some of this stuff out.
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Unknown B
Emissions credits are also at risk. And so my summary of the EV coverage was, quote, for startups, probably not a great time to start an EV company. So if that was your plan, wouldn't recommend it.
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Unknown A
Or more simply make the cars better and cheaper. Yeah, because you don't get to get whatever, a couple of grand for each car from a person making a gas car. And you know what? We have a great experiment. We have 50 states. California wants to have different emission standards than Texas. And you know what? They have more dense cities in New York and they want to have a different standard. I totally get it. I'm pro local government. I love the congestion tax in New York. I think it's great. You don't get to go anywhere you want with your 2,000 pound vehicle. It's not your God given right to go from Jersey into the city center and block everything up with your giant suv. Pay nine bucks, you pay to go over bridges. If you want to go to a national park, you got to get a pass.
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Unknown A
There's only a limited amount of capacity. There's more people who want to go certain months than others. You got to make a reservation to pay a reasonable fee. The end, we're done here.
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Unknown B
Doesn't bother me at all. I mean I pay tax for all sorts of things. I don't know why I would be allowed to use that infrastructure for free.
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Unknown A
It's just unrealistic. I mean the density of cities is crazy.
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Unknown B
It's absolutely crazy. And here's for more of that on the State by state thing. I think Trump and California did tangle in the first administration. So I'll be curious to see if there's an attempt to use top down federal rules to limit states ability to set their own rules. We'll see.
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Unknown A
Good luck with that. States have a lot of rights. You're going to have a hard time pick your battles.
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Unknown B
So M and A, we've talked about this on the show ad nauseam. I don't think we have to go over this a whole bunch more. The gist is the people that Trump has put forward into antitrust positions have not been quite as stridently pro combination as I would think. I believe some of them come from J.D. vance's orbit. And so I wonder if we're going to see definitely less scrutiny than under Lina Khan, but I don't think it's going to be quite the absolute laissez faire domain that people are hoping for expecting. I think it's going to be kind of in between. Jason?
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Unknown A
Yes. I think let's just go back to the original way the law was stated and not reinterpret it, which was what I objected to. The concept of I can uniquely me and all the world can predict future competition is a farcical, absurd, ridiculous premise. I don't care who came up with the premise, it's absurd. So let the games begin. I met somebody who's working on this at Peter Thiel's party, which I'll just mention I was at Peter Thiel's party because it was in the New York Times. And yeah, I mean I got. The paparazzi recognized me. Now the business paparazzi recognizes JC Paparazzi.
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Unknown B
That's another sentence.
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Unknown A
You know Teddy from the New York Times, he, he was there and I said hi to him. He was outside of the Free Press Uber Party X Party. He was outside of Peter Tails. He was everywhere, just taking names, taking pictures. I had a nice conversation with him. I like Teddy.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And I talked to somebody who was in the, in this group and I just gave him a hug, said let me explain to you what it means to a founder when they can sell their company instead of shutting it down. You know, it's a really important thing that we allow singles and doubles and sometimes a triple, you know, an aqua hire for 10 million, a single or double for a Hyundai. You know, a billion dollar acquisition for a company that can IPO but has great strategic assets. This is kind of like a great thing that makes our capital systems the envy of the world. When I go to the Middle east, when I go to Japan, when I go to Europe, they're studying venture capital and trying to figure out how to replicate it and that Lina Khan was trying to break it. And I think it was like a socialist approach.
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Unknown A
And I think Gary Gensler and Lina Khan did a lot of damage. I don't want to go overboard and allow. And allow, I don't know, Amazon to buy Walmart. I mean, it's pretty obvious that would not be a good idea. Dan Loeb did some tweet about, like, Lina Khan stopping a handbag company for getting bought by LVMH or somebody. And I was, I wasn't aware of it, but it's like if a handbag company wants to merge with another handbag company, when you can go on Amazon and buy a $6 knockoff, like, who cares? This is not important.
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Unknown B
Okay?
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Unknown A
That's my position. Like, just.
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Unknown B
I don't agree, disagree with most of it. I think what's more, more important is what will this be like when the rubber meets the road? So I'm looking for two things. One is a potential uptick in those small aqua hires, singles and doubles. I'm curious to see how long that will take to form and then which sectors of startups get the most offers and purchases and also for what purpose? Because we've talked a lot about aqua hires over the years. It's kind of like the ultimate, like, bunt, maybe in baseball terms, but with everyone cutting staff, I just wonder how much people are going to be willing to pay for more staff. So I'm curious to see how that plays out. And I'm also curious to see what percentage of unicorns that were 20, 21 era end up being singles and doubles when they eventually do find a home.
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Unknown A
And what happens when you try to over regulate a market, entrepreneurs get creative and your clock runs out. That's what happened to Lina Khan. People were like, we need these three or four strategic things. Let's do a synthetic acquisition. We'll leave the company there. Microsoft bought all the employees. They gave them the system. And Lina Khan is neutered. Yeah, this is what happens. You're, you're in office for a couple of years. You can't, like, take your own stamp on it and, you know, make the laws yourself unilaterally. Her idea was, for me, future competition, I think was an objectively terrible test. Look at the tactics people are doing. Bundling or price, you know, selling things under what it costs them to produce, to get rid of a competitor and then raising it. If you're hitting, you know, 70, 80, 90% market share in a market.
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Unknown A
Yeah. We should be thoughtful about you not buying the last player. You know, Uber has not bought Lyft, DoorDash has not been bought by Uber Eats and uber eats and DoorDash haven't bought, you know, a couple of the other Delivery services, Instacart, etc. That kind of makes sense to me. Right. If anybody gets to, let's say 80%, that's kind of where you get monopoly, you know, power 70, 80%. You know, let's take a look at it. But everything else, let it rip and let's get some IPOs and let's get this economy cranking again.
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Unknown B
Oh, that's a fun game to play. Actually, I have not yet come up with a number about this. How many technology IPOs of note will we see in the US this year?
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Unknown A
Twice as many as last year.
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Unknown B
Well, last year was like 2, so let's hope it's a lot more than 2x.
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Unknown A
It's going to be a lot more, I would say. Yeah. And looking at the stock market is pretty good indicator of this. Crypto has been on a tear. Why? Because they saw these meme coins come out. They see this administration making it a priority. People are placing bets. I get it. That's a good indicator when people actually put skin in the game. And that's also happening on the other side. People are putting skin in the game when it comes to stocks. They're thinking, hey, if the inputs get lower, gasoline energy being a primary one, then these companies be more efficient. They use AI and they have static team size. As we've discussed, often companies will have better earnings. So we want to beat the rest of the world. America doesn't need to rip itself apart. We need to beat the rest of the world. We need to have more jobs here.
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Unknown A
And yeah, you know, if you, if you want to make an argument about increased taxation or simplifying the tax code or creating, you know, a tax code that really benefits, you know, the bottom half of society and, you know, everybody else gets asked to do a little bit more. I'm cool with it. Yeah, cool with it. You want to make one tax, income tax and capital gains become one thing. At some point, I'd be okay with it. You know, just make it. But I just ask you, make it simple, you know, simplify it dramatically. And if we sit here and we say, you know, by 2030 we're going to have one flat tax, it's 27%. And if you make over $10 million a year. It goes up a little bit, but it's just a simple. Go to a website, put in your cap gains, you know, put in your sales of capital gains, put in your income, spit it out, pay it.
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Unknown A
Easy breezy lemon squeezy. Let's do it. That would be, would be a lot of really great, great opportunity. And the flat tax disappeared. No, I mean the fact that you have to buy complicated web software to do this is just infuriating.
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Unknown B
Oh, speaking of regulatory capture, Intuit, by the way, if you don't know, Intuit owns TurboTax, which used to take 90 of my dollars every year. So just to summarize really quickly, everybody, we've been riffing, we're having a good time, but on the on, I expect much less even potential regulation in the world of crypto, I believe Let it Rip is the perfect summation of that. We're not quite sure where we're going to end up on trade and tariffs. On the immigration front, it seems that Jason views high school immigration changes, positive or negative, could be about a year out. EVs, less government support, taxes probably coming down overall. There's been discussion of lowering the corporate tax rate though. Jason, I don't see at all how you managed to lower taxes for major income drivers while also reducing the deficit. That doesn't seem to me like the near term place.
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Unknown B
I'm not sure how it's going to play out.
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Unknown A
I asked that question. The answer was we'll have much more growth. So Republicans feel the growth will offset the tax breaks. We'll see if that happens. That's always their argument. Yeah.
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Unknown B
And then on M and A, I believe there's going to be a much less scrutiny. Not zero, but definitely if we're going starting at 100 from Linacon down to a 20 or something along those lines.
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Unknown A
I think it'll be back to the old days, which is, is this in consumers best interest and are you doing unfair business practices like bundling or price dumping, price fixing? We're going to go back to the old days. Let it rip, let it function. Let's beat the rest of the world, not beat each other up.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Okay. I love it. We'll see you all tomorrow.
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Unknown B
Bye bye, bye, everybody.