Trump assassination attempt, Secret Service failure, Inside the RNC, VC liquidity problem

26:41Exactly. Well, I'm just thinking judgment -wise, listen, I understand they're in the field. I understand they have, I understand if like they were concerned, or maybe that's one of our snipers on the roof. Like maybe there was a moment, like a 30 second moment, like I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here, but it's hard to. The secret service sniper who did an incredible job taking out the shooter in one shot, okay? He had that person lined up. So again, you know, why haven't they released the audio, there must be an audio recording of all the chatter on their earpieces, their communication.

27:12100%. That sniper must have identified, you know, Crooks as a potential target and had him lined up, which is how he's able to take him out very quickly. But what was the chain of command there in terms of him seeking authorization? Hey, who is this person? Why wasn't everything stopped while they go to figure out what this person is doing on the roof there? Okay, and then once once the shots rang out and and Trump gets shot, why did it take him so long to get him in the car to get the convoy off to a hospital? There was a long delay in terms of getting him out of there. So they clearly weren't prepared for that.

27:46The whole thing, it just, you know, reeks of incompetence. Yeah, and they don't have a great track record of being honest about what's going on. They don't, you remember, not to bring up January 6th again, but they deleted all their texts from January 6th. Like they do not, they circled the wagons. They do not want people criticizing. I doubt we're even going to get that audio. My wonder if that audio is going to come out. But they don't have the right in a democracy to basically investigate themselves and say, Oh, we're good. No, that's not how it works. The people of this country need accountability.

28:17I mean, the ones and likely future president came within millimeters, centimeters of being assassinated and this whole country could have been plunged into a whole different type of situation. We need answers to these questions. And this director Chetel is obviously in the way and putting out nonsense, putting out spin at a time we need a proper investigation. Then he's to happen immediately. Cheatle should resign. We need to have agents. Okay, secret service agents need to be offered up to testify on Capitol Hill with no fear of reprisal from the Biden administration. Okay. Including the sniper.

28:54He needs to be made available. Including the sniper. The first person that needs to speak in a congressional hearing is the sniper himself. Did you guys see there was coverage yesterday that showed there's actually two snipers? Yeah. And the current. Yeah. Yeah, well, no, sorry, there's two sets of snipers as four snipers. The one set of snipers that you see the video of where he does that, there's a free blocking their ability to see crooks. The other set of snipers are the ones that apparently took the fatal shot, and they had a line of sight, but they're not on camera. So you don't actually see what's going on with them.

29:27That's the current reporting I've seen on it. So I don't want to like jump to conclusions given that there's now I'm not seeing anything. Freeberg, there's no excuse here because let me just say, but if that's what you want, the roof and they let the president on the stage, someone asked up, that doesn't seem absolutely. Why not have a delay, like not the end of the world? If we can put that, that bird's eye view of Butler farm on the screen, I don't know, Nick, if you have that. Nick, pull it up where it shows the line of sight with the free as well. So you can see it all. Yeah, there it is. But look at a shooter's position and look at a Trump's position.

29:57Okay. And I've seen broader birds eye views of Butler farm without knowing anything about marksmanship, it's just obvious that that roof is the most, if you could set yourself up anywhere as a sniper to assassinate the president, it's the most obvious location. Furthermore, let me just say that, which Moth and I hosted that dinner for president Trump, we worked with the Secret Service advanced team, and they were excellent, they were really great. And I saw just a little bit of their process and they went through the house, they mapped out the entire house, the entire property, Then they asked, well, where is the president going to be sitting at dinner?

30:33They wanted to know who's to his right, who's to his left. They looked at the window coverage of that room and they said, okay, who's house is that, that neighbor's house? And they went to go check it out. Every single movement by the president was mapped out. Every angle on the president was basically mapped out and explored. What happened to your then? Like, that's the crazy part. It was actually amazing to watch. I thought they did a great job. It was really amazing. So this is why how could this ever have happened where the most obvious shooting angle on the president was not properly covered?

31:04It just makes no sense. You could put two blues up there. Just two beat officers on there would have solved the whole problem. If you don't have enough secret service agents, I was at a Clinton benefit one time and I got detained, the secret service, and went into secondary screening. The reason given, I had two cell phones on them. They thought it was peculiar that I had two cell phones. They kept me for 15, 20 minutes in a side room and they literally took my phone apart in front of me. Took all the batteries out, went through every bag. They frisked me. I mean, wandered me like three guys around me.

31:36They take this incredibly seriously. Yeah, normally they're very thorough and they're very serious. I mean, look, even at the dinner that we hosted, they wanted to know what kind of steak knives we were using, you know? Yeah. Like literally, they wanted to make sure that was safe. And this is why they were so interested in knowing who was to the president's right and to his left because they want to think through every possible angle of attack on the president. There was some break down here. And in this case, it's something very strange happened. And of course, as I was just sort of alluding to early, if this person looked like a SWAT member, which apparently he did, if he's, you know, rangefinder, all that stuff, I'm guessing that maybe those snipers from the Secret Service thought those were friendly, is that the only possible explanation of why they paused.

32:21Yeah, but he wasn't aware of that way. or he wasn't impersonating. I thought he had the keys, but even still, I'm personally laying there. The finalized one. He wasn't laying the key shirt. The gray fear you have as a police officer is shooting another police officer. So I think that dirty was not in uniform. From whatever number feet away, you can ask a technical question. Yeah. Are you telling me in 2024 that when you show up at an event to protect a VVVIP, like the president of the United States that SWAT and other people aren't given some kind of like little pin that has an NFC chip or something where everybody knows who everybody is so that it's very clear very quickly when somebody in a position of risk is not on the home team.

33:13They do have ways of doing that right. There is a when you're under telling me for For example, like President Trump's pin or Barack Obama's pin or Joe Biden's pin doesn't actually have something in it. I'm, I would be shocked if the answer is just a pin. Well, this is what they're, this report that they're investigating that the delay in shooting the sniper might have been that they thought it was friendly. So this theory is out there now and it's part of the investigation. It is a potential one, you know, I can tell you that that would be the nightmare scenario for the secret service is to shoot the local cop.

33:47Honestly, guys, I hate people wanting to say this, but we've just our institutions are incompetent. There's a lot of confidence. Absolutely. It's just like Afghanistan withdrawal. Remember that? No heads rolled. There's no proper investigation of why so many people died in this early in that Afghanistan withdrawal. Nobody's fired for anything anymore. It's just ridiculous. And there's no resigning, obviously. Nobody resigns. Nobody gets fired. Why would anybody? So if this was a company, this would be a failing company. Why would you not strip it down from top to bottom and rebuild it? Well exactly.

34:20And I tweeted this counterfactual, which is imagine if Elon had bought Twitter, but he wasn't allowed to fire anybody. Do you think he would have been able to restore free speech? Do you think he'd be able to restore innovation? No. If you're running an institution, you have to be able to fire people when they don't perform. But we have lost that ability of our federal government. So there's something that's very, very broken here. When people fail, they have to be held accountable or you don't get good performance. Right. When institutions fail, there needs to be a question on why are we funding those institutions?

34:53Nobody gets tired. Why would you give more money to a failing company? You would never do it. This is the comment I put in the letter that I sent to that senior Democrat back in October. I don't see any accountability with respect to the programs that you pass bills to fund. You pass bills to fund these programs. You stand up new institutions. and then there is never a retrospective post mortem or review on the performance of those institutions or the objective of those programs and yet we keep funding them and asking for more money. And eventually you end up with a decaying empire like we've seen in history, we need to have a series of actions that drive accountability in federal programs and then a review on the intention of those programs and make sure that they still hold.

35:34And then we can move forward with new programs. Sacks is really right. You cannot have the secret service investigate themselves on this one. Of course not. And they deleted all their text message and did a major cover up the last time around. So you cannot trust them to investigate themselves. No. Did you see all those senators? Jay sent them up the stairs yesterday. You see that? I did see that. It didn't say which senators it was. And if that was confirmed, it was. Or is it Blackburn? What happened? So a bunch of the senators confronted the head of the secret service, Cheetle, it's her name, right?

36:02Yeah. And they confronted her and there's a someone's video the whole thing on their iPhone Of them saying we need answers. Why do you let this happen? Here's the video Nick can show it My

36:23Gosh, yeah, that's a bad video because what it does not show is the start and the end at the start they were all standing around her, having a conversation. And then they started to press her, and she said, now's not been fined, this isn't the forum. Then she took off, they followed her, and then she went into the secret service secure room upstairs and blocked all the senators from coming into the room. Her secret service staff blocked them. So all the guards said, no, you can't come in. So they all got blocked out. So the senators were pushing her for some feedback, for conversation, for dialogue, and she wouldn't engage.

36:52Yeah. Oh my gosh. I've seen enough resign now. get out of the way so a proper investigation can be done. Total total. Okay. Let's talk about the RNC, a friend of ours, you have a talk. And the VP was selected. Yeah, you did a great job, Bestie. Thank you. What was it like to get on that stage? And I have a bunch of questions about, yeah, what was it like? It seemed like people are not sitting in chairs, right? They're just mulling about. Tell us. Give us the behind the scenes. Yeah. And what was it like getting prepped and doing all the kind of prep work? Do you have to review your speech? Like tell us all the details.

37:30Well, let's see. I mean, I started working on this about, I don't know, week before the convention. And they sent me some ideas for remarks. And then I completely rewrote it with my research assistant slash writer and then sent it to them. And there was some back and forth. But by and large, they let me do what I wanted to do. Do they give you a time? Like they're like, the one thing that was kind of set was the time. and they correlated the time with a number of words. So they said you got six minutes, which is 600 words. And so that's what we worked towards. And then the big thing I had to learn was just how to use the teleprompter.

38:06So they had these rooms set up where there were teleprompters and I could do some training on how to read a speech using a teleprompter. What is that like? Like it's like? It's just a matter of knowing where to look and trying to stay natural, but also using the prompter as a as a mnemonic device. And does the prompter stop when you stop or how does that work? There is actually somebody in the room who is physically advancing the words as you're speaking. So there's someone who's actually working the prompter and they go out. So it would be a big applause. They'll pause it for you and you don't have to try to keep up.

38:42Exactly. Exactly. So that was probably the biggest thing to learn. And then the other thing about it is that you're speaking to a huge convention hall. And so you feel like you really want to project in order to reach people. But at the same time, you're really speaking on TV. And as you guys know, you'll come across as being kind of insane if you start yelling into a TV set. So finding the right balance between speaking to people in the auditorium and speaking to people watching from home, that's kind of tricky. And I'm reasonably happy with it. And the most important thing is I got to say the substance of what I said.

39:18Not universally popular, right? I mean, you basically called for an end to the conflict in Ukraine and to stop funding Ukraine's defense against Russia. And that's not a popular opinion in the Republican Party, is that right? Well, I went further than that. I said that this was not an unprovoked war. It was a provoked war. I said the Biden administration provoked the war with talk of NATO expansion. You could disagree with that if you want. I think there's plenty of evidence for it. That's what I believe. I feel like you went out on a limb more than most other speakers who kind of had a lot of good lot of Tory comments and you know, promoted Trump.

39:52Yeah, you could have panned it. Yeah, you actually went out with a strongly held opinion that is, you know, fairly contrarian, right? Well, I think that most of the people in the Republican Party, including most people on the floor, actually agreed with me. I think it took them a second to process what I had said. And so, you know, what I saw when I was up there is I said that, you know, Biden provoked, yes, provoked the war. And I think it was such a shocking statement to a lot of people because we've heard the whole unprovoked invasion narrative so many times that there were like murmurs and then people got it and they started applauding.

40:27I never actually intended it to even be in a pause line. I just thought it was an important thing to state the truth as I see it on the record at the Republican Convention. And that line did actually get applause. Now, a bunch of Ukraine stands were predictably outraged by what I said, and they were trying to claim online that Samai had been booed or something like that. There were absolutely no booze. There were actually people applauding. And then, as I got deeper and deeper into the speech, people applauded it more and more. It was very much a speech that attacked the forever wars. It attacked the war mongers and complimented President Trump for keeping us out of wars.

41:01And complimented him for being strong, but also having the savviness and the ability to negotiate with our adversaries to keep us out of wars. And I think that's now a position that's very popular within the Republican Party, but it's process. It's evolving. This is a perfect segue because there are reports that friend of the Pog Tucker -Callsland had a big impact on talking to Trump about his selection of JD Vance and said, don't pick a knee -ocon. That'll get you assassinated. That was one report. That was advice that came before the assassination attempt. Obviously, so conspiracy theorists are kind of losing their minds over this.

41:36But let's talk about the selection of JD Vance because that is a big surprise, I think, in many quarters. Tell us about JD Vance, your friends, yeah? I mean, I'm friends with him and I very much supported his selection for VP. Why is he the best pick in your mind? Well, there's a couple of things. So JD Vance represents a couple of very interesting characteristics. on the one hand, he's from this poor region of Appalachia that really represents the forgotten man or the forgotten cities and towns in America. You could call it the Maga Heartland. And so Maga really likes him at the same time. He's worked in tech, he was a venture capitalist, he understands the future and he's popular in tech.

42:21So it's very unusual to get somebody who has Maga plus tech on their side together. So that's one almost contradiction you could say that JD represents. Here's another one. JD Vance was in high school when the Twin Towers came down and Then we invaded Iraq and he was gung ho To serve and to go exact Retribution and justice on America's enemies and he enlisted in the Marine Corps and he went off to Serve in the Iraq war Now, subsequently, he realized that we had all been lied to about the Iraq war and that it was a gigantic mistake. And moreover, the forever wars were a huge mistake. And to me, this is something that I really appreciate about him.

43:03And this is a quality that I really want at President Trump's side, which is he's an American patriot. He had the courage to serve, to go serve in America's wars, but he has the wisdom and the judgment to want to avoid those wars when we don't need to fight them. And there's way too many of like you said Jason these Neocons these warmongers in the party who've never ever acknowledged Their mistake in the Iraq war and all the forever wars and they seem on virtually a daily basis to want to plunge us into the next forever war So this is I think a quality that's a paramount importance to have in our commander in chief and in the person who would be next in line to be commander in chief so For these reasons I very much support JD All right, so let me get some feedback from the rest of the panel.

43:49I'll just give you a couple of bullet points about him for those of you who don't know JD Vance. Yeah, he worked at Peter T. All Smith for capital and Steve Pace's revolution. And so he worked for a public and a Democrat in Steve case started his own farm called Naria capital. And he went to Ohio State, graduated Yale was actually classmates with Vivek. They talked about that. He's only 39 years old. So he's half the age of Trump. As you mentioned, the combat correspondent for six months on Iraq in 2005, 39 years old, and Teal backed him with, I think, the largest Senate race donation in history, 15 million.

44:25And so this is quite a ascension, Shema from a venture capitalist to potentially vice president, and obviously potentially president, he's in the second spot. So, would you a proponent of of the JD events as well. He's superb. He's superb. The press says you are lobby trump as well. Is that true? He's superb. I cannot say enough good things about this guy. He's superb. Why is he superb? He is a, he's a bit of an enigma, I think, as Sack said, because his views are so unique. And he comes from a background that is very similar to mine. So I have tremendous loyalty for the path that he had to navigate to get out just to get out and I think that that you know I really care for people like that And then he's done really good things with the resources that he's been given and The relationships that he's built and I really respect that too.

45:29We all had Hill Billy allergy I don't know if we talked about it on this pod years ago, but you and I certainly talked about it a bunch of math And he came from nothing. Less than nothing. Less than nothing. Addicts and spend. Less than nothing. And he talks a lot in his book. I don't know if you remember this about social capital. And the fact that he didn't understand that the name was a firm of social capital. People don't know the reference that he just didn't have the social capital to even understand that a lawyer went to law school. Totally. And he is an enigma. His positions don't align with Trumps in every case.

46:04but they have quickly become aligned with Trumps. He's an incredible person. Yeah. I thought he was an incredible pick before his speech last night and he even exceeded my expectations in that speech. I just thought it was truly an incredible speech. First of all, the introduction by his wife Usha was really incredible. I thought she did a fantastic job. And then he got up there and a friend text me who's not really that into politics. He's just like, this guy seems so normal. He's happy, he's normal. he seems competent. There was one commentator, I think on one of the cable shows, who I think meant this as an insult, but actually was positive.

46:41He said that when you're at like a fast food restaurant something, I need to ask for the manager. JD advances, the person you hope is the manager. You know, he comes out, he's friendly, he's competent, he's reasonable. He knows how to get stuff done. I'm not sure if that was meant as an insult or a compliment. I see this. I can tie in this man. I think it's self. Yeah, but I think it's a compliment, right? And he's just so normal. He's gonna be very hard to demonize obviously. They're trying to do it on cable news They're trying to somehow trying to portray him as an Extreme minister or a racist even though he has a mixed race family the tent of the Republican party at this R &C sacks Is the most wide open tent I've ever seen in politics They had Amber Rose and people were criticizing Amber Rose.

47:23She was excellent. She was fantastic I thought she was excellent. She knocked the ball out of the park and she's She'll approach. Absolutely. Raid is a feminist. Beautiful. And she crushed it. I thought her speech was effective I thought it was authentic and it would describe her red -pilling basically she's sorry It described her evolution in her journey from someone who believed the media's lies about Trump thinking that he was a racist to actually meeting the man It herself realizing that the way they portrayed him was basically a slander and how she became friends with President Trump I thought was an incredibly effective speech.

47:56But look, there was very few people who didn't like it. There was this one post by Matt Walsh online and he was roundly denounced for what he said. I mean, he kind of engaged in this pearl clutching that they had allowed Ambrose to because they're about to run out. Yeah. My thought value judging and it's like who's Matt Walsh to judge? It felt like a part of the Republican Party that's on its way out. You know, this pearl clutching, social conservatism. Yeah. Any event, it was really an opportunity, I think, for people to disavow his criticism and support her. Yeah, and that was, she did my point here is what, you know, they've done a really great job of, and they did a wonderful job in his talk.

48:34I want to give him a shout out of just saying, hey, listen, everybody can be part of this party. I think there's a lot of notes that Democrats could take from what they saw at the Republican National Convention. These are people who would have been at the DNC, but, you know, one election cycle ago, but because of this purity test, you can't even win with them. Let's take the obvious. We're trending into a direction right now where based on Donald Trump's pick for the vice president and some of the other surrogates like Vivek, if Donald Trump were to win, what you're going to see is a very youthful cabinet of a lot of 30 -somethings and 40 -somethings.

49:13And I think that that's a really important thing to consider versus a bunch of 60, 70 and 80 year old career politicians. Correct. Absolutely. Youth and bigger. And again, this new direction. You know, a lot of people were commenting about JD's speech that large parts of it could have been given by Bernie Sanders or you know, it's this populous message that... Well, let me ask you that, yes, Axis. He's had a position of breaking up big tech and being pro -union. How do you reconcile all that and this new Republican Party? Yeah. I trust those two because that seems to be a big discussion. Two discussion topic.

49:51Yeah. I think that it's definitely a new emergent Republican Party where this is, I think this is Donald Trump's Republican Party. This is the Mago wing, the America first wing of the Republican Party. We're moving from a party of basically the Chamber of Commerce, you know, business roundtable, a bunch of oligarchy fat cats to being a populist party that actually represents the people. I think it's a very... I think it's a very welcome change. And the part of JD's speech that I like the best is when he described that, hey, I went off and many other people went off to fight in these forever wars, risking our lives or giving our lives.

50:32We come back to our home communities and what do we find? We find them hollowed out the jobs have all been exported the factories have shut down and instead the town has been poisoned By fentanyl that is a message that you have not heard in the Republican party except for Donald Trump and that new part of the party And I think that Donald Trump choosing JD Vance was so important to cement this new vision of the Republican party It was a legacy pick because it means that this America first magma message is going to continue into the to future many years into the future And let me just tell you guys, I listened to that speech.

51:08I harkened back to another speech at a public convention I heard 32 years ago. I'm sorry to say I'm old enough to actually remember these things. And I remember Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992. And the after Pat described the factory workers who lost their jobs, I just wanted to read you what he said. And I want you to think about what J .D. said. So what you can have said was my friends these people are our people. They don't read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke But they come from the same school yards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from they share our beliefs and Convictions our hopes and dreams.

51:44They are the conservatives of the heart They are our people and we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they're hurting They don't expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care and I think that for too long Republican leaders ignored that advice. They didn't connect with everyday Americans. They were foolishly willing to cut programs like Social Security or Medicare, saying that we had to cut the deficit while at the same time funding forever. So, totally not credible. And the party was basically led by Warmongers like Dick Cheney or Mitch McConnell or Solas Bean counters like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

52:23And I think Vance really broke with all of that. And I think he represents the future of the party. He trashed the Iraq War. He promised no more foreign interventions. He railed against policies that benefit multinational corporations, the expensive workers. And I think it's no wonder that the Neocons lobbied so hard against his selection. But I think... Freeberg? Let's get you out of that. I think those days are over and I think that just needs to say at this end with this, that I think that Donald Trump and JD Vance represent a conservatism of the heart that we haven't seen before and I think this is the future of Republican Party.

53:02Freeberg does JD Vance being selected to tip your vote towards Trump Vance to get. I think he's going to do well for Trump. I think if he, who are his other options? Nicky Alley. I mean, they were pressured for him to go after a lot of the Neocons, right? Sax and get the never -trunker contingent. Wasn't that like a lot of the pressure? Absolutely. I mean, I think there was Doug Burgham who was... That was your favorite, no fripper? Not my favorite, I met him. It seemed like a really thoughtful guy. He's done an incredible job managing the state of North Dakota, but he's got some social policy issues that I think are going to rub people the wrong way.

53:47And I think to SACS point, he's more in the camp of supporting Ukraine, which it seems like some part of the party are starting to come around and say no. So it seems like he wasn't a great fit ultimately. Yeah, by the way, I met Doug Berger from the other night. And he's a very nice man who I think can play a very nice guy who I think can play a major, major role in the party. incredible business sold it to Microsoft. Yeah, there's nobody who understands, I think, energy better and all the regulations that have gotten in the way of making America energy independent and tapping our vast energy reserves.

54:22So I found I'm very, very impressive on that. But at the end of the day, you know, it's just not the kind of pick that JD is. I remain a moderate, undecided voter. I love JD Vance. I think it's an inspired choice. I know SACS where you're voting. I'll take some guesses on a euchermoth, but freeberg, where are you standing right now? I'm very happy that RFK Jr. was not selected as the VP to be on the ticket. I think RFK would have been a challenging partner for Trump and it would have led to a lot of disagreements and I think that RFK has some policy perspectives that I don't agree with, particularly as it relates to health, energy, agriculture.

55:06And so there are some disagreements I have with respect to his view of the world. I will say JD seems like a pragmatist. He seems highly intelligent. He seems highly competent. And I know that he has not been in a governing position before. So this is really critical to note. This is a training job for him in a large way. He's been a senator and he's been an investor and he's been an individual contributor as an investor, and he's built his own firm, but it's not a scaled firm. So this is going to be a really interesting kind of process to watch unfold. But I think from a policy and a strategy perspective, he can have a really positive impact on the direction of the things that we talked about earlier, which is accountability and government programs, having a clear set of objectives, making sure that we focus on those objectives and don't spend time and resources on things that are fluff and perhaps aren't really meeting the objectives.

56:07And I think that the thing I do have concern about, I think that the nationalist agenda, the nationalism and the isolationism agenda is counter to global trade, which can be deeply inflationary. And that is one concern I do have, which is the ability for the U .S. to export and import with other trade partners around the world, I think it's critical for us to continue to grow our economy and keep inflation down. So if we take policy action that limits our ability to import because we impose tariffs on other countries, goods and services, it can be inflationary, it makes things more expensive for Americans, everyday Americans to buy.

56:48When everyday Americans go into Walmart, and they buy products, a lot of those products are shipped from China. So if there's a tariff on those products and the price of those products now goes up by 30%, 40%. That can be a real burden. That drives inflation. That's the point about the nationalism on manufacturing and inputs. So, Fibreg, you're pretty convinced at this point that the reciprocal trade agreement would cause inflation, hyperinflation. No, no. I think that the idea, the general statement, which I don't think is necessarily how this is being executed, I just want to make sure that we're all cognizant of the point, that if you introduce and if you introduce tariffs on imports, it will drive prices up.

57:29Now that may be the right thing to do from a policy perspective. As we heard from President Trump, when we interviewed him, his belief is that this is an important security state that we use it to drive reciprocity and we use it to hold China in check. And so that may be a more important strategic priority over the increase in the price of certain goods. The problem that will arise and this has happened during the last Trump administration. If China then responds with tariffs on the export of US agricultural product, so our biggest buyer of agricultural products today is China. And then China put tariffs on our export or they stopped buying from the US and they started buying from Brazil instead.

58:11The farmers are hurt. And when the farmers are hurt, the Trump administration had to spend money to support farmers, tens of billions of dollars. They subsidized it. They sub -set out, they paint farmers in a way. And so the federal government then has to step in to meet the gap that arises from what will end up becoming an escalating, tariff problem or escalating purchasing problem. So global trade allows the economy to grow, gives everyone a market, you can start to trade, but there's also these security issues. I do think it's important that we onshore a lot of manufacturing. I think it's important.

58:43But there's going to be a period of pain. There's going to be an investment needed. and it's not going to be simple and easy. And we may face quite a bit of inflation on the path to doing that. You gave us an update here at the end of the show, Freeberg Scholarships, and that would have been asking for the own summit. So this week, we are opening up scholarship applications. You can go to summit .allinpodcast .co. And we have a very, very, very limited number of scholarship tickets that we hold for the summit, like we did the last two years. The applications are open now. Now please get your application in right away because we expect it will be completely overbooked almost immediately.

59:21And some of those scholarships are going to be sponsored by Athletic Growing Company. So thank you to Athletic Growing Company for paying for a lot of our scholarship recipients to go to the All in Summit this year. Really exciting programming coming together. We have more details to share in the next couple of weeks. And we do have one more last block of GA tickets that we're going to release. get your application in on the website summit .allandpodcast .co for a G8 ticket for the last block. Thank you. All right, let's just do one quick business story here since we've spent the bulk of the episode talking about politics and current events exits, crooping back.

59:55Stakoya is doing a secondary sale of their stripe investment, one of the greatest investments of the last decade. and Google is in talks to acquire whiz and this is absolutely amazing news for the industry which has been suffering from a lack of distributions. As you can see in the chart, Jamoth, after 2021, exit values just plummeted and there are some signs of life now. Let's start with Sequoia buying back some striped shares from its own LPs. Sequoia capital has invested 517 million in Stripe. That's currently worth about 10 billion. 20X, Michael Moritz, led the seed in Sarrizae. Sequoia offered to buy back 860 million in Stripe shares from LPs and its legacy funds.

1:00:45Those are the funds between 2009 and 2012. Sequoia is using capital from their newer funds, like its Evergreen fund that was formed at 2021, the Heritage Fund, that's their wealth management team, to give the legacy fund some liquidity. It's not normal that a company stayed private this long. It is the exception to the rule, but it has happened to actually happen with over to a certain extent. So legacy fund LPs have the choice, sacks to hold, sell some or sell all of their Shripe shares. Here's the quote from the note. It's a co -op personnel and associated persons will not be offered the option to sell Shripe shares previously received as carried interest distributions from the legacy funds and they are offering 2750 a share which is pretty generous $70 billion valuation.

1:01:30As you may know, Stripe has hit as high as a hundred billion in market cap in the private markets. So this will be a from the seed which was a 20 million post, a 3500 X for those LPs and for the Series A, It is a hundred million dollar post, which is 700x for those people who don't know. I think it was Sam Altman who actually did that investment as a sequest out in the same fund that I did the Uber investment. So still the number one and two investments there. Your thoughts, Tom, on this unique opportunity and device to sell early shares from the same federal fund? I have two thoughts. The first is that it's interesting to see that they mark the valuation up to 70 billion.

1:02:20So that's a good sign for Stripe. But the second thing is I was a little kind of puzzled by this whole thing. It's a very complicated thing when you're buying old steaks into a new fund and processing funds. It's sort of like actually one of those things that are supposed to be verboten. And when you're trying to build a good fund with great governance, This is actually at the top of the list of the things that you're never supposed to do, which is to provide liquidity to a group of LPs via another fund that you control. But I think this actually shows what may be going on behind the scenes, so I don't want to be conspiratorial or anything, but it would be a great way for the GPs to get liquid, to meet their capital calls here without having to pay capital gains tax.

1:03:10and that makes a lot of sense for the GPs themselves. And so I suspect that that probably has to say that the GPs aren't gonna get to liquidate anything. So they did put that note in there. So they've anticipated that. You can provide, no, we mean, but that what that means is you can provide liquidity, you don't get to pull the money out, that's fine, but then now you can use it to fund capital calls. But I don't like it. I don't like these kinds of things where one fund is basically scratching the back of another fund. It's, it always tends to be the case that this stuff on the surface looks a little smelly, then can be a little unseemly.

1:03:46And this is why you're not supposed to do it. You're supposed to go and get some other random fund to buy these things. And I think it's generally a much cleaner thing to do. And the hygiene of it is clearly what we see sacks in that documentation, giving people choices. You can make your own choice. We're not taking care. We're not selling our shares, but we're only selling 10%. So they did go to extreme measures, I guess, to outline that. But your thoughts on this type of sale, it happens in private equity all the time. I understand, but we don't see an eventual that off. And what are your thoughts on this providing liquidity to the 14 -year -old funds?

1:04:23Well, first of all, there's a kid rock concert going on behind me how to do by self -stracting. No, no, it's been, it's going to be lit. That's all I can say. If he's introducing President Trump, it's going to be pretty baller tonight. We're taping on Thursday, obviously. The steps that will probably come out tomorrow. But in any event, with respect to this, quite a thing. Look, I think there is this overarching issue of the fact that VC funds are classically designed to be 10 -year funds. The money is called over time, usually over the first few years. It's invested. And then you don't get liquidity.

1:04:57I mean, it's not like a mutual fund where you can take your money out. You get liquidity if and when the fund gets liquidity, and these funds are meant to be long -term illiquid vehicles. So like I said, 10 years. And typically, you can get two one -year extensions to the funds. So then the question is, what do you do at year 12 if you still got positions in those funds? Well, I think a pretty good solution is, what I think Sequoia is doing here and what I've heard other people do, which is, if you have a security that's not public yet, but is semi -liquid because it's a very late -stage private company, then what you can do is spin those shares into an SPV or to some other vehicle.

1:05:35And you let new investors come in and buy those shares at some price, and then you give the option to your old investors, do you want to sell or do you want to roll into the new vehicle? So nobody is forced to give up their ownership position, but if they want to get liquidity, and there's sufficient demand on the buy side, that you can get them that liquidity, it's a really elegant solution. I can't say I know exactly all the details of what Sequoia is doing, because they've got this two -tier fund structure that makes it a little different. But I have seen in other cases people have distributed shares into an SPV and then new buyers come in, participate, and then the old investors get to decide whether they roll or sell.

1:06:16So it's a pretty good way of handling this like - And valuation just to, sorry, in clerk, for this valuation is based on the last four in 2008. So that's the one thing about Sequoia that's a little different is remember it's It's their global mega fund that's buying the shares as opposed to an SPV. Normally, what would happen in terms of figuring out the price is you'd want to use some sort of validated secondary price. But obviously, it'd be, it'd have to be a market clearing price where new money wants to come in at that price. This is a little bit different because it's their preexisting fund that's buying at that price.

1:06:52How do you sanity check the valuation? and I guess I would just want to make sure that that valuation is a secondary, yeah, it's like the secondary. That's what it's trading at in secondary markets and that's what the 49a is. So I guess that would be the hygiene there, but it's certainly unique and I guess great for those out there. That's the word for us. Well, I mean, we had a similar thing happen with Uber where they We did the secondary and they had Masio Shikan, Masio Shikan come in and do an IPO. That's entirely different. Yeah, we had a new money coming into your point. Here is the second story related to DPI and VCs getting to cash out.

1:07:36Google's in advanced stocks were our whiz for 23 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. It's an Israeli -American cybersecurity startup that was founded only in 2020. backed by Sequoia Index, Insight, Intrace and others. One of the fastest growing startups ever reaching 500 million ARR in 4 .5 years. Google would be paying 46x forward revenue. They think they'll have a billion in ARR sometime next year. And what are our thoughts on this? You saw it in this in terms of M &A. You saw it on the 13th T -Hack of snowflake. But cloud security is a really big deal. The more cloud services you have, the more difficult it is to lock these things down.

1:08:20And so whether it's Google or Amazon, they have a or is your, they each have a really big problem on their hands, which is that if all these customers are convinced to move these workloads into the cloud, but then you can't secure it and you get hacked, that ends the business. So Wiz is an incredible testament to I guess engineering prowess. I don't exactly know to be honest with you the quality of the product. Obviously, I don't interact with those kind of products every day, but the fact that they're willing to pay such a premium means a, the product is good, but more importantly, be in the absence of cloud security.

1:08:53These cloud vendors are going to be constrained in how fast they can grow. So what an incredible market, but an incredible, incredible market. Aftershave these two things have really helped the climate in the LP community. This past week, a lot of chatter about IPOs that are getting filed and that we could be ending the drought and people where we're feeling very very pessimistic about Ventura as a category and I think these two things have changed a lot of people's feelings on that so Good work there and I think it also signals maybe some regime change expectation, Saxia, Lina Khan, maybe getting booted when this regime change occurs and next year and then maybe more M &A would occur.

1:09:44What's Trump's and JD Vance's position in your mind on M &A and Lina Khan, Sax if you have to interpret it? Well, something that's very interesting is that JD Vance has been relatively positive towards Lina Khan. He's... Yeah, that's the weird one. He's one of Lina Khan's few Republican fans. And the reason for that is because Lina Khan for all of her faults, and we've described them here, has been willing to take on big tech. The fact that matter is that the top handful of tech companies, the Microsofts, the Google's Amazon, these are big tech monopolies. There's just no way around that fact.

1:10:22And they do need to be closely watched and supervised and regulated with respect to their market power. And I do think they use their market power or in inappropriate ways if we discussed on this podcast. I sometimes think that Lena Khan in her approach has been a little bit more of a cleaver when she needed to use a scalpel. I don't think that she should stop some of these what I would call R &D acquisitions from taking place where there's no accretion of market share, but rather starts being bought because they contribute a useful piece of technology. I don't think you wanna shut down that part of the market.

1:10:54Lord knows we don't have enough exits as it is like we were just talking about. So I think, you know, it would be great if we kind of massage Leonek Khan's approach a little bit But I think that it is a good thing that she's not willing to just roll over and let the big tech companies do whatever they want And I think JD Vance appreciates that about her. So look, I don't think that Leonek Khan's gonna be running that agency in a second Trump administration, but I think this is The problem with Republicans, so sex is the freedom of speech issue and Republicans being banned on the social platforms.

1:11:31Absolutely. Including it up to Trump. I mean, if that issue wasn't there, I think you'd probably see maybe a different approach, yeah? Well, I think it's a huge issue because the fact of the matter is you've got these tech monopolies who are using their monopolistic market power to put their thumb on the scale of our political discourse in favor of one side versus the other. So obviously, if you're on that side of the aisle, you're going to be up in arms about that. You're not going to be happy about that. And I do think that given their market power, they have an obligation not to distort our democracy by artificially suppressing one side of the debate.

1:12:06So I think that, yes, Republicans should be up in arms about that and they should be resisting censorship. And JD Vance specifically mentioned censorship in his speech. That seems to be his main issue. I think we'll see under Trump a lot more mid -market M &A, if I were to, you know, let's call it under $100 billion. $100 billion acquisition would be fine with me under 100. Well, I really like the part of his speech where he said that in a healthy democracy, we debate ideas. And that's good. We even have debates in the Republican Party and that's good. The last thing we want to do is censor the marketplace for ideas.

1:12:40Gosh, I mean, are we going to hear anything like that from the Democrats when they do their convention? Well, in breaking news as we wrap up this program, the hot swap summer will continue apparently Biden is predicted to resign this weekend. I'll see if it happens. Speedrun primary. No sure, Domas is predicting it happens. Mr. Canvas. No, no sure can't start the circuit. No sure, it's straight. No sure. cadets will keep his position. The hot swap is coming. Well, Jake, at this point, I think you were right about Biden stepping inside. I thought he was out of the woods. He did that press conference, that NATO press conference, where he did make that one mistake, that senior moment where he actually...

1:13:20I put his VP. Yeah. Oops. That was the kind of thing where he got his name mixed up, but otherwise he seemed to be finding his footing in terms of talking about policy. And the brush fire was sort of put out, right? But then for some unknown reason, he goes on and does that luster hold interview. I don't know why they were still letting him do interviews. He should only be reading from a teleprompter and he mixes up he forgets the name of his secretary of defense Lloyd Austin and he just refers to him as the black man The BETM as a BET interview so he did the lesser hole interview, which was not good and then he did the BET interview Which is the disaster right trim off.

1:13:58So once the money goes it's over well Yeah, and he also did a horrible one with 360 with speedy speedy Mormon and that was a train wreck there was a couple moments there that are just total gaps. I mean, they say Pelosi and Schumer told him it's over and I guess that mean, and Katzenberg, your right, Jason, when the big money is gone and they make the call, you know, yeah, it's done. It's done. And that's amazing what we've learned about the Dorm Crack Party, you know, like the coup de Grasse was basically Katzenberg going in there, saying, yeah, I can't raise any money for you. And then boom, he's out.

1:14:33I am shocked that any political party would be swayed in any way by political donations. Enjoy the, uh, enjoy the hard sea, sir. I love you guys. I got a golden dinner. Love you guys. Talk to you soon. Four, the Chairman dictator, the architect David Sack, and your self -in -the -science who ducked out a little bit early. I am the world's greatest moderate. Moderator. We'll see you next time, man. Love you, Beast. God bless. We're like your winners ride. Rainman David Sack. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with her. I'm going on a swing. What are your winners ride? Besties are gone.

1:15:20I'm going through the next. That's my dog taking it away. It's your driveway.

1:15:29We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all just like this like sexual tension But we just need to release that