This Week in Startups - Trump, Memecoins, and What to Expect from the New Administration | E2074

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Today’s show: Jason and Alex explore America's fascination with billionaires and self-made figures, touching on recent events in Washington, DC, and the tech industry's political influence. They discuss Gen X's rising political power, tech CEOs' prominence at inaugurations, and critique Democrats' tech policies. The conversation covers economic factors in elections, like inflation and abortion rights, COVID's origins, immigration policy, and foreign policy. AI regulation under Biden and Trump's economic strategies, including crypto regulations, are debated. They also discuss Trump's impact on M&A, antitrust laws, and the startup ecosystem, with insights on tech IPOs and tax policy. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show. (1:06) Diving into recent DC events and tech's political role (3:13) Gen X's rising political influence and tech CEOs' prominence at inauguration (7:00) Discussion on tech founders' importance and criticism of Democrats' tech stance (10:17) PrizePicks. TWiST listeners, download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST PrizePicks - Run your game. (11:35) Economic factors influencing elections: Inflation and abortion rights (17:15) COVID origins investigation and executive orders affecting tech (19:58) OpenPhone. TWiST listeners can get 20% off your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (21:25) Steve Bannon, JD Vance, and immigration policy discussions (23:20) US potential territory expansion and foreign policy (30:23) LinkedIn Jobs. TWiST listeners can post their first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (32:13) Trump's economic strategies, legacy, and US energy production (41:23) AI and drone technology: Regulation and countermeasures (51:05) Crypto's economic value, personal freedoms, and investment risks (1:01:27) Entrepreneur wellness, Trump's EV policies, and state vs. federal regulation (1:04:23) New admin’s influence on M&A, antitrust laws, and startup ecosystems (1:09:08) Upcoming tech IPOs, tax policy, and regulatory capture discussion * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:17) PrizePicks. TWiST listeners, download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST PrizePicks - Run your game. (19:58) OpenPhone. TWiST listeners can get 20% off your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (30:23) LinkedIn Jobs. TWiST listeners can post their first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

there was an opportunity to embrace founders and entrepreneurship and innovation. And the Democrats shoot away, capitalist, 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 for specific blocking and tackling things or policies, those are all valid. But it was a true. tremendous strategic mistake to be anti-innovation. This week in startups is brought to you by Prize Picks. Run your 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 slash twist and LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as it's people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. 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. starting to fall. The part-ins, 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 from 1 p.m. East Coast, 12 p.m. Texas, 10 a.m. Pacific, but sometimes we change it up. And if you want to follow the docket along with us, that's this week in startups.com slash docket. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. I have been trying

to keep tabs of all the political news today as 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've got to say, but it's been a kinetic day. Things are happening. 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, and I don't like myself, like I just did. I don't want to be too critical here, but he workshops a lot of things 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 where do we want to start today? The inauguration just occurred. Yes. Where do you want to start? I'll 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. 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 Elon 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 Pinkus, a handful of people would get involved. Shervin famously with Obama over the last two, but it wasn't, you know, as deepest 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, 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. 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, Adam 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, et cetera. 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 then likes to show that he has done that. So I'm trying to decide if that was him offering a piece offering to people that he's clashed with before or alternative

just showing the world that he has cowed them into quiescence. 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. I 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 cold. I can't wait to get out of here. Washington, D.C. is not for me the most interesting place. Austin, Noseco, 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 shoot 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, they actually love billionaires. They love successful, self-made people. It's, 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 may. 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 Tesla's. They get a kick out of watching rockets go into space. And increasingly, they are on startling networks. When I was in Japan, I sent you on a picture of like, I was like, dude, every lift, Japan had a Starlink at the base. And I was like, wow, why don't they have internet at ski resorts? I was always wondering that. Like, it would be so great for sharing photos, etc. It's because it's impractical to run a cable up a giant mountain. You'd have to bury it. You know, it'd be 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, 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-acceloration? I met the guy who does e-excel, you know, that little thing people put in their bio, e-slash-sacel. I met that guy. Really nice kid. I think this was a fumble. It was a big fumble to fumble Joe Rogan. Big fumble to fumble Elon. And, you know, Sergei's here.

Zuck is here. You 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 should take notes. And that's my interpretation of it. Yeah.

And well, one and a half points. But you're allowed to disagree. Of course. And American elections, I guess that counts as a solid victory. 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. 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. They were lost.

Yeah. They were completely lost. 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, libertarians, socialist, communist, communist. The whole political compass is basically thumbing their nose of Biden as he walks out. So, 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 of people who lost the election. Let's see how long the Abulions last. All right, sports fans, let's talk about prize picks. It's the best way to get real money action while watching your favorite games. It's really simple. It's a ton of fun. I love it.

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Here's the thing. It's easy to be the opposition. Everything in the other person does is terrible, blah, blah, blah. 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. Yeah. I think the number was like, when 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 exist.

It's okay. No judgments. It's okay. I mean, listen, I like ice cream. You like a big mac or fly a 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.

Yeah. That impacts people. In their brain goes, I'm doing poorly. And it doesn't matter if they got a raise. Yeah. It doesn't matter if unemployment's at all. time low. It doesn't matter if they got a low mortgage and they're locked into it at two or three percent. Yeah. It's just a pervasive reminder that things are expensive. And I think they couldn't

get over that. Additionally, the thing I was completely wrong about is I thought abortion was an absolutely paramountician 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, 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 percent 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 percent in 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, yes. 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 if you just look at the statistics, I think the Democrats did not focus on those two things. They didn't have a primary. hot swap, all these things contributed. But at 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 or like, you know what, I'm not better off than I was four years ago. Full stop. 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 50s. What was it in Florida? 56% or something like that. which strikes me as slightly anti-democratic. But again, we can finally stop with the review mirrors. We don't have to.

I mean, the Biden era is done. He's out. He's on their helicopter. Goodbye, Joe. Yeah. And it ended with a flurry of pardons. So I don't know what your thoughts on that were. Oh, that's very simple.

Two, two full. Okay, 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 as a physician has been his whole life. When COVID was kicking off, we were sitting around my in-law's 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? Okay. And I just 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 attached 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. 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 post-mortem on this whole thing that included 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. What if he knew that we funded it in line? Would you think differently? Yes. I tend to be against, I tend to be against lying, which is one of my criticisms of Trump. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing that we don't know is with the Fauci thing is,

you know, did they cover this up and did they know? And I really wish we would have gotten to that just objectively so we can learn from it. 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% its X because I think China has restricted so much information that we wouldn't be able to. Yeah, they may still investigate it, even if they can't prosecute them 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 awe coming. I don't know which one of these executive orders actually impact our industry all that much. January 6th and, you know, gender issues. You know, these don't sort of affect us, you know, here on This Weekend startups.

But are there any that have come up in the news that you think are directly related to startups and tech and policy? Yeah. So on the immigration firm, 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 skills, 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 fights? Basically, talk to everybody about this. And I asked some people on air. We had Swalwell,

Ted Cruz, and Rokana. And I think I asked all three about this, or maybe two out of the three. Yeah. On the All In Podcast, you can see those interviews over there. J.D. 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 6 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 pardoning the other people.

below. On to the next one, which is immigration. Everybody agrees violent criminals who are on their second or third offense. It's like the most non-controversial thing ever. They're going to be gone and good riddons 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, I mean, 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 illegal 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. And with open phone, you'll never miss another call or lose track of who you follow.

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Open Phone is offering 20% off your first six months when you go to openphone.com slash twist. That's O-P-E-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash twist for 20% off for six months. And if you have an existing number with another service, Open Phone will pour 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's 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 Roe Conno 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. So that's what I expect there. And then in terms of H-1B 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 the stories.

is 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 H1BVs. You can't get high-skilled stuff. And every time you do one of these, you've 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, I have been in the room where conversations are happening with important. Yeah. 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 made to some technocratic tinkery with the H1B visa program, but it doesn't look like it's set to be greatly expanded or greatly diminished. 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 AI went up to 12 percent, let's say, theoretically at some point during this term. we want to shut the border even more. We want to have less H-1Bs because there's not enough jobs to go around and we're not a 4% unemployment, the lowest of our 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 one's these Tuesdays.

I love the idea. The next thing that was everybody was talking about and I'm personal friends with Ken Howary, who's now the ambassador to Denmark. 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 patent in the back and say, go get Greenland. 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. Have we seen any indication that there is such a support amongst Greenlanders to join? Yes. Yeah, it's well above 50%. They would love to be Americans. It's only 50,000 people. And Denmark, I believe, has Freeberg were saying, on the other pod that they have something like $150 billion in national debt. We could give them

$200 billion, which for the United States is chump change. I thought we were broke. What's that? I thought we were broke. 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

U.S. 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, I forbid, pretty strategic.

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, it could also be shaped as a deal, right? And so that's a possibility as well, on that front. 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. So voluntary association. 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 in it. 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 have his moments and be funny. He's a great, great stand-up at times.

And then, too, 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. 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 watermarking technology, it urged the creation of privacy standards, and encouraged government use of AI.

It was a very 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 was like, 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.

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, 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. it. Fentanol 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, they got serious problems. And so, and their problems greatly

dwarf ours. Can I pick up that for one second? So, grand bargain inclusive of Taiwan, to me, because this is an issue that I cared a lot about. Do you think that grand bargain involves us letting Taiwan get crushed? No, I think it's going to go back to the ambiguous thing we had for 20 years. One China policy? 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, in the spirit of the Taiwanese people. Hell yeah. At the same time, saying, China's 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. You know, like just containment, ambiguity. It seems like that policy has worked well historically across Democrats and Republicans. I'll just say this. He was just supporting democracies. And I like democracies over autocracies. So I'm a big fan of Taiwan and a big fan of Ukraine. And so 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 through the Microsoft and the open AI 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 the pick could come out because he threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg before Mark turned around and gave him everything he wanted. So yeah, there's, um, you know, I think that falls into the, uh, you know,

saber rattling thing, negotiating thing. And Zuckerberg's weak need, as I said previously. Can you negotiate with a threat of prison when you're going to be the next president? To me, that falls outside the realm of, oh, shucks. Like, that's, everyone's bitching and about lawfare. And then here's Trump literally saying, oh, I don't like that. Yeah, I'm going to put him in jail. 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.

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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 can be concerned about it, but, uh, I think he wants to have a legacy. This is, I ask people, what's your perception of what he wants. 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 is the sign. 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. And he said that in his speech, Drill Baby Drill. He got a bunch of applause for that. Yeah.

They're going to allow nuclear. 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. to 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. We'll see. I'm really curious to see how much higher this number can go,

because if you're listening to audio version, I'm showing a chart of US field 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 at Ock 24. Essentially, I wonder how much more capacity there's a 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 some of 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. So, okay, data point there, 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 could raise that person's salary, lower the cost to you, uh, 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, well, why don't we just use our own until it's gone and then keep investing in solar? Because solar's 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 to install. Batteries will have more capacity. Battery science will get better. Yeah. 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 bells. You know, if a hose runs overnight, you have a broken pipe, people are not freaking out. In other countries, you don't lose your house over it. Well, yeah, you don't want to get flooded.

But, you know, if you had left the 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, you know, it's, you don't want to be flooded. expensive, not fill. They will not make a bunch of ice. They'll give you two ice cubes or 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, yeah, yeah. It's 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, Saty and Adela, you know, Microsoft, they know what they're doing. They know this is going to cause, as Bill Gurley points out, regulatory capture. Yeah. You can 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 got to 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. 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. Yeah. This surprised me at the time. And I don't think of, no, he has. 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? Elon got into AI and started open AI and funded it.

He's been very public about this because he has a concern about super intelligence, 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 sky net type situation in the short term. But, you know, that's pretty smart. He does see things before most people and he can catch a rocket with a pair of chopstick. 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's 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. 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, That's a good note for anybody who's not using it all day long. I'm not concerned about AI in terms of it going rogue, as we sometimes consider. But when Elon was in favor of a slowdown in an advancement around the GPT three days, he sent some big letter. 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, Democrats, and branding we talked about earlier? Yeah. 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 rail. I don't share that a few, 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. 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. Yeah, I agree with that. I hope we win, we win quickly and decisively, let's say. Somebody made an interesting comment in the live chat here. If you're listening to the pod,

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 accidental like the Waymo crash. I think they're probably revering 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 I 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. So it's only a matter of time before somebody does that, tragically, at a football game or something. That's not good ideas, Jason. I mean, here's a great 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-dron technology. So if somebody flies a drone into this perimeter by the White House and 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 mile or two to get my car. I had a driver while I was here and it was just, I mean, first of all a problem. but I've really had to walk and walk and walk to get to it in the freezing cold.

That's what I was going to say. Don't, Jay-Z, he's not complaining about walking a mile. He's completely walking a while when it's like negative 20 Celsius. 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 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, 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. I remember I wrote down the name of the company, I looked it up. And it's just, you know, you can move a lot of people without a metal detector and it scans for all these different things. So that's all great stuff. 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, well, Melania, his spouse, launched a. another mean, quite. 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? I mean, I think you and I is sympathetic 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 Con 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, de-acceleration. 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, hopefully. foods, period, full stop. First of all, a lot of crypto people were not happy about this. The consensus, I think, from crypto people I know, and I'm not including David Saxons, I did not talk to him about it, so just to be super clear.

But I talk to other friends in crypto, and 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've got to 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 friends. Because you know what?

I like to smoke a cigar a couple times a year. Sure. 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 you do these meme coins, you kind of say there's beneficial buyers who are the inside, who own a certain number of 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. I'm kind of in this libertarian thing. Educate people, let them do what they want. And I think what the 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 I have I advise people to do this? Absolutely not. This is like a really aggressive, crazy thing to do, I think. Other people might disagree, but crypto people think this is crazy. Crystal people think it's crazy. We'll get to that.

But just to underline what you're saying about the tokenomics, this is from the official get trump memes.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 Coffeyzilla on the show. Yeah. And here is... He's going crazy. You know, I went to Coffeyzilla first. I was like, I wonder where Coffee Silla exists. It is exactly what idea.

And here's what he has said. Update. Finally saw the tokenomics of dollar sign Trump. 80% owned by one wallet. And then it's the sad, skeleton-faced Wojack, who wants to cry? You know who's really happy about this? Who? Most happy?

Hawk to a girl. Yep. 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 a hundred bucks. You see them online. Yeah. If you put this in the framing of, you know, somebody's selling these kind of coins. Okay. 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, uh, because I podcasts.

Um, you know, these are digital versions of this. And digital versions of this that are global. Okay. There's a list of other concerns you could rightfully hack. Yeah. Number one, a foreign adversary could start buying this as a back. door payment to the Trump family. That is a valid concern because if you try 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 hornet's 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. 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. You'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. There's trading on Crack and they're trading on Robin Hood. 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. It's funny you bring up the securities argument about how people view meme coins, what the laws going to be what to do with Haley 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? That's exactly what I mean. It means that. It means that. 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 inadvizable. However, I also think it's super inadvizable 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 a problem. Because then people would understand that a meme coin has no inherent value, and if you buy it, it will go to zero at some point. Yes, there's nothing here. 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,

they're not buying a security. There's no underlying assets. Go buy a company with a lot of revenue. Yeah. On the, I mean, you're appalled by this. You're in the appalled.

I am so livid. Your tweet, I can see it. I just, it's okay. You can be. I mean, you have to be such a

formal rent grifter. To, to, to be like, okay, I won, I won again. Yes.

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 shit coins. And here's the thing. Meme coins.

Meme coins. These are meme coins. They're not shit coins now anymore. No, they're the same. Potato. You're 100% right. Tomatoe, sir. It's all a distraction. It's all a distraction.

Imagine if you're a crypto fan. And this is why I have this Nick Carter. This is a heartbreaking. Apology. A bunch of people, right? Oh, Nick Carter, yeah, Nick Carter is the guy. Trump 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 in poor ways. But imagine if you're the crypto industry. 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. 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, yes, you can go play roulette, you can go play blackjack,

you can play poker, you can go play on sports now. Hey, shout out to my guys at prize 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 $100 on each next game. There's 82 a year. I'll probably wind up to do 50 of them. You know, it's like five grand for me. That's nothing. And it makes the game. 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. 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, two thirds of the people are going to lose money on this, some group of people are going to bake a bunch of money, and people will learn these things actually have no value, which I've been saying about crypto from the beginning. And last fact by something in the real world or an actual product or service, expect it to go to zero. That should be your default expectation. 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. 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. I just want to show people who are watching the video version of this what the vibes are like on cryptocurrency specific forums after Trump launched his his his coins. Meme, meme coins. Here's a headline from seven hours ago from R slash cryptocurrency. Melania Insider wallet rugs 12 and a half million within three 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. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine being Gary Genssela? I mean, you must be literally just like, I mean, back to your cigar comment, be like, I told you. I told you. 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 Robin Hood, which I'm an investor in, or any other platform, and I still have, you know, a significant position in Robin Hood. Anybody who wants to buy this on Robin Hood, you want to go do crypto? When you go on Robin Hood to trade options, they take you through this walk flow, workflow 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.

You're buying this. It is likely to go to zero eventually. Do you understand it? 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. 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 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. know, the, the CEO could be captured and put in a jail in, you know, Morocco. I mean, it's everything. So starting on page 22 in the Reddit S1, we begin the risk factors.

But the first sentence being investing in our class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. Then they just list things that could go wrong. If we fail to increase in 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. on and on at page after page after page. Now, in contrast, Jason, let's take a look at the equivalent disclosures from the Trump coin. Yes. No, 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 and engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar signed 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 Robin Hood 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. So here's where I get kind of annoyed, though. You're annoyed. I'm so, dude, I can't say it. I can't take hypocrisy. And I cannot take. Don't get, 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. It's going to be shit like this. Jason, Jason, you don't understand how deep breaths. You should have seen, well, you did, but like, I've 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. Your views, your team, your party. Beautiful point. So I, 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 losing it, but I do think the grift drives me bonkers. But 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. It's nothing to do with reality. It's a complete, shameless grift, and I can't believe it happened to be before he got into office. Let me tell you what Republicans say when I bring this kind of stuff up. Now do Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden is not the president. He's never been the president. You know, he's kicking up to the big guy.

Kick it up to the big guy. 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 trustee when they start to run. People are in favor of way he strictor rules. Bring it on. The SEC is doing that and I think we talked about this on another program.

It was either here or an all that. I can 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. I dig that. The only downside, though, is you know something's going to be like,

got any of those jobs? I just made a bunch of money. I know a venture capitalists who had to divest everything to take a position. This is years ago. Yeah. And one of the positions they were in went like 10x while they were in office. Yeah. 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 things. I love a blind trust. I love having it outside of your domain. I just don't think you should use higher offices at this country for personal profit. Keep your expectations low is my best advice based on history. I'm going to keep them exactly as high as I can.

That's fine too. That's fine too. Just I don't want you to be triggered every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday at 1 p.m. 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 milk toast and boring and you didn't say anything and you're like, where's the president? Can we see them? It's a week at Bernie's like, can we make a statement? Can he talk about this stuff? Like, this is going to 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 dot com.com app. Do your journaling. Get your namaste on. A little yoga, a little high. Ha-a-a-sana, go for a rock.

It's going to buckle up. It's going to be chaos. This is, by the way, this is the post-meditation version of me. You should see me in the morning. Like, no, I literally meditated today. You have a beautiful family. I too. You have an incredible career.

You are a good person. Thank you, Jason. This will be over, literally, in three years and one day. Yeah, three years and awake. Four years and four years. Just under four years. I knew what you were trying to say. Four years minus a day.

Yeah. It's, we'll see. All right, couple more things. On the EV front, Trump has promised to end what he called quote, Kamala's 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 automatic auto companies to move towards EVs. Isn't there 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. BID is making stuff real cheap. Elon's making stuff real cheap. He's got the cyber cab coming on. 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. World broadband EVs. Let's stop with these farm subsidies. The free market has to work some of this stuff out. 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. Or, you said 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. 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. That's bothering 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. I mean, it's just unrealistic.

I mean, the density of cities is crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And here's for more of that. On the state-by-state thing, I think Trump in California did tangle in the first administration. So I'll be curious to see it does an attempt to use top-down federal rules to limit states' ability to set their own rules. We'll see. Good luck with that. States have a lot of rights.

You're going to have a hard time. Pick your battles. So, M&A, we've talked about this on the show ad nauseum. I don't think we have to go over this a whole bunch more. That just 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 Lena 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. 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 and recognized me now.

The business paparazzi recognize J-CAP. Business paparazzi. That's an amazing sentence. You know Teddy from the New York Times. 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 Till's. He was everywhere.

Just taking names, taking pictures. I had a nice conversation with him. I like Teddy. Yeah. And I talked to somebody who was in this group and I just gave him a hug. He 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 aquire for 10 million, a singular double for a Hyundai, you know, a billion dollar acquisition for a company that can't 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.

And that lean economy was trying to break it. And I think it was like a socialist approach. and I think Gary Gensler and Lina Kahn did a lot of damage. I don't want to go overboard 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 Lena Kahn stopping a handbag company for getting bought by LVMH or somebody. And 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 to buy a $6 knockoff, like, who cares?

This is not important. Okay. that's my position. I don't disagree with most of it. I think what's more important is what will this be like when the rubber reads 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 stuff, 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 a 2021 era end up being singles and doubles when they eventually do find a home. And what happens when you try to overregulate a market? Entrepreneurs get creative and your clock runs out.

That's what happened to LinaCon. 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 game the system and Lena Khan is neutered. This is what happens. You're in office for a couple of years.

You can't take your own stamp on it and make the laws yourself unilatery. Her idea was, for me, future competition, I think it 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, 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, et cetera. That kind of makes sense to me, right? If anybody gets to, let's say 80%, that's kind of where you get monopoly and, 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. 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 U.S. this year? Twice as many as last year. Well, last year was like two.

So let's hope it's a lot more than 2x. It's going to be a lot more, I would say. Yeah. And looking at the stock market, there's a 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 earning. 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. and yeah, you know, 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. I'm 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, 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, 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, easy, breezy, lemon squeezy, let's do it. That would be, it would be a lot of really great, great opportunity. And man, the flat tax disappeared. No, I mean, the fact that you have to buy complicated web software to do this is just infuriating. Oh, speaking of regulatory capture, into it, by the way, if you don't know,

Intuit owns TurboTax, which used to take 90 of my dollars over year. So just to summarize really quickly, everybody, we've been riffing, we're having a good time, but on AI, 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 land up on freight 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 over all.

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. I'm not sure how it's going to play out. I asked that question. The answer was will 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. And then on M&A, I believe there's going to be a much less scrutiny, not zero, but definitely if we're going to starting to 100 from Lina Khan down to a 20 or something along those lines. 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. Yeah. Okay. I love it. We'll see you all tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye, everybody.