Palantir’s Valuation, VC’s Go To Washington and Much More | E2065

25:53And if we are going to lower the budget, you could actually get more functionality and capability with startups making weapons, defense systems, et cetera, for less money. So more for less. Who is not taking more for less? No, it's absolutely lovely. I do think that the cost plus accounting that we've seen is essentially just a license to be incompetent, to run out timelines and to take in more money. It's literally saying, please bilk us. So I'm glad that that is out of favor. I will say, though, I don't want to compare Andril and Vatten Systems and everyone else to Titan Submersible because that Submersible was cheaper and failed.

26:30What I'm excited about is cheaper and better because I bet you, I bet you, Jason, I'm sure you actually agree with me here, but I bet these companies will make better products for cheaper. So it's not just more and cheaper. No, no, these are going to be much better. Much better. Yeah. Better and cheaper. And so, you know, there's a number of examples of this. If you go take an Airbnb, you might have a better experience, if you like a kitchen and a backyard, when you rent a house than getting a suite or three one bedrooms or three rooms at a typical hotel in the same city. So if that's the case, this is a similar situation where you're going to get a better product, produce differently.

27:10And I can tell you entrepreneurs are all of a sudden asking themselves, I wonder if I could do something with drones. That sounds kind of fun. That sounds kind of profitable as a business. That sounds kind of helpful to the world. So entrepreneurs are getting into defense tech. They're looking at all these areas. They're saying, how can I? And we had the founder of the self-driving company that does remote control of cars to drop off. Yes. In Vegas. Yeah. Yes. And so, you know, that company, a great founder, it will come to me in a second, is also working in defense tech. So you can imagine, you know, if you're in the field and you want a Humvee.

27:51Okay, how do I get a Humvee to you? You're 100 miles away. Well, I was going to say drive it, but I presume that's not the right answer. Now you've got to put four people into a Humvee to drive it to you, and then maybe they need to have another Humvee following them to get them back. And then maybe you need a patchy to give them some air cover and throw up a drum. You want to send one Humvee into the field, you could send it alone. Just some guy with a joystick, gal with a joystick, boom. zipping it right to the front line. Or maybe you need to put some stuff into it. Maybe you need some more ammunition.

28:21Boom, you send a Humvee remote control. It's going to be awesome. And so you do need to be vigilant. Anytime we have this kind of situation, I'm not saying people shouldn't be vigilant and question everything, but we are entering a new era, clearly. And I thought we should talk about some more of my contemporaries, I'll say, people of my generation getting into politics. My friend Ken Howery, who was previously an investor, who was previously an investor at Founders Fund, or a co-founder, I think he's technically a co-founder, and was at PayPal. He's now going to be the ambassador to Denmark, and he was previously the ambassador to Sweden.

29:01So he's back in the mix. He's a good friend of mine. Did you see the Trump post about this? We're going to put it up on the screen right now. We're going to pull it up. And this is all standard stuff here. But then he says, for the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the U.S. of A. feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity. Now, we can take that off the screen. But usually ambassadorships, Jason, are just well-funded boondoggles. Like Calista Gingrich just got the ambassadorship to Switzerland, which I presume is going to be her. Pretty nice.

29:36Bouncing around castles eating chocolates for a couple of years for free. I thought that they were sticking Ken in a relatively unimportant ambassadorship until I saw the Greenland thing. So are they serious about this? Hey, everybody, I want to tell you about an awesome corporate card and spend management software that's designed to help you save money. Basically, it puts money back in your pocket. It's called Ramp, and we use it here at launch. My COO, Heidi, our chief operating officer, loves it because Ramp gives you visibility into your company's software usage. This is going to help you trim your subscription costs.

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30:44And they'll even play bad cop for your company, chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment. Ramp's so easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes. So join Ramp right now and they'll give you$250 right into your account. Ramp.com slash twist. R-A-M-P dot com slash twist. It is the best way to manage expenses for your team. It's elegant. It's dead simple. And it's going to save you money. Disclaimer. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Members FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. I don't know that it would have to be for sale. I would like the Japan one. I know Rob Emanuel's got it right now.

31:21But I found out. I asked. I asked how does this whole work to some friends. And basically you have to fund the ambassadorship. So people don't know this, but you as the individual who's going to be the ambassador to Sweden or France or Spain or whatever it is, you fund the operations of the embassy for those years. So it's going to cost you low millions of dollars to fund the parties, the staff and all that kind of stuff. Yes. That's not fun at all. Yes. So if you see people doing this, they have to raise money or they have to have money in order to do that. And it's a ceremonial position, obviously.

31:57And you represent our country. But obviously the decisions and there can be moments, I guess, where you're in the mix. But I do think there's a large amount of ceremony with these ambassadorships. In fact, they seem to be a lot of fun. It seems like this is what rich people do for a four year vacation and to serve their country. I like it. I could see myself doing it someday. Oh, I would love to be an ambassador. I have a number of countries I would love to spend time in while wearing a fancy hat and a sash and going to dinners and such. I don't want to pay for it, though. I think that's how it works.

32:31Well, you've raised money. You get some better factors. It's like having a chair at a school. You know, if you want to have like your own chair at Columbia or Harvard, you know, you get somebody to donate a five hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars to pay for it. Right. All this stuff has got some underwriting. Yeah. Well, I didn't know that. But the Greenland point is interesting for two reasons. Just to show everyone kind of where next year might be going. One, there is talk about somehow adding Greenland to the U.S. I'm in with Trump. Never sure for trolling. Never sure for being serious.

32:58But Ken's caught up in that. And then also Trump wants to go and retake the Panama Canal is the latest thing that I've seen. Well, yeah, there's some talk about the Panama Canal being co-opted by the Chinese or something. That seems like a national security issue. We sold it. So I don't know if we get to get it back. I will say I, you know, when they're talking about deporting people and the sort of xenophobic part of the dialogue, which I don't like, which I don't think is actually going to happen. I think that's the rhetoric. I've now become convinced I don't have inside information, obviously.

33:30But I think the rhetoric is 15 million. I think the reality. So we'll talk rhetoric and reality here. Rhetoric, 15 million people dragged out, thrown over the border, you know, chaos. Reality, 50 ,000, 250 ,000 violent criminals, people who, you know, steal, jump the turnstile or light somebody on fire in a subway car. Like that's what's going to happen. And there'll be zero tolerance for that, zero tolerance at the border. and then they're going to quietly kind of grandfather this concept of 15 million people being removed, which I think is great. I think opt-in empire building is a great goal for our nation.

34:10Just hear me out here. Okay. I think our goal should be to get to a billion Americans and have America be the most populous and the most innovative country in the world. Now, how do you get to a billion from 350 million? You got a triple. Just about, yes. Yeah. And there's a certain amount of population growth through babies, but let's just say people aren't making a ton of babies. So there's two ways to accomplish this. You got to immigrate people or you got to do a little empire building, opt in, of course. I think we should start offering countries to join the United States. There would be some decade long period of integration, getting off of their dollar, whatever services, voting.

34:53Cuba, Puerto Rico, Canada. I don't care who it is. I don't care if it's on the other side of the planet. I don't care if it's a Middle Eastern country, an African country. Why wouldn't we have a couple of outposts around the world? The French have some territories, you know, in the BVI, obviously the British Virgin Islands. there's a bunch of these kind of guiana and french guiana i like the idea of america spreading democracy and building the largest populist country and the largest economy concurrently over the 21st century let's try to get to a billion americans what do you think of my proposal well i one agreed and i was just trying to find a post that i wrote in which i cheekily said this was some months ago that we should one porto rico should be a state clearly But also I was like, let's just take Canada.

35:40We'll take Mexico. Let's just make big, big, big United States, many, many states. And I think it's a great, frankly, idea. Other nations have their own views of sovereignty and so forth. But I'm saying it's opt in, right? It's opt in. Exactly. Open door policy is great. I do not want us to go out there and grab other countries by the back of the neck and drag them in because that's going to lead to, I think, a lot of dissension in the ranks. But certainly. And what percentage of people, before you go to your end, would need to vote in favor of joining America for it to seem like you had enough consensus for that, dare I say, transaction to occur?

36:17Sixty five. You think sixty five? OK, I was going to say more like seventy five. I was thinking seventy five or eighty percent. Oh, like the overwhelming majority, a super majority. But you're thinking super majority, too. It's sixty five. I was thinking the first number that came to my head was seventy five, eighty. but it's maybe between 65 and 80 it becomes impossible at some point right because if you have the bar set so high you'll never clear it and so to me 60 is too low 70 feels impossible that's how i got 65 but 65 70 yeah i'm totally here for i have an idea okay if it's um in order to do the process you have to have five consecutive years of voting 65 or more to join the united States for 70%.

37:00So you have to vote every year for five years for this to happen and start the integration process. Then it's like, listen, the country voted not once, not twice, not three times, five times over five years to join the United States. There's plenty of time to consider it. You didn't have one chance to vote. You had five. And you had to five years in a row have 70 % or more. So you had to have real consensus and real discussions about it. Because if in year three, it dips to 60%, now that resets the clock. Now you got to do five years in a row. And we should just go out there and give our best offer.

37:39Maybe there's countries in Europe that would want to be, maybe Greece wants to be part of the United States. Wouldn't that be great for me if Greece was the 51st state, if they wanted to? Why Greece? Because I'm Greek. Because we created, man, I mean, we created democracy. America perfected it. This would be full circle for me. I'm so sorry. I did not know your heritage. So I'm like, golly, where have you been? Famous debt load. I'm like, dude, I'm not picking Greece. That's why I think it's an interesting concept. If you have a debt load, if you have challenges, and another country wants to come in and say, hey, listen, I know you're having challenges.

38:16We could help smooth those out. And maybe you'd like to be part of our culture. Yeah. And you know, like, do you care if you have USD? as your currency or, you know, do you need to have your own currency? Do you want to be part of the EU or do you want to be part of the United States? Do you want to, you know, be able to come to the United States anytime back and forth, would not worry about your visa? You know what that would do for Greece? And then if the taxation was similar, retirement was similar, and you just take 20 years to have those systems blend together. I mean, Jason, can you imagine how funny it would be to explain to people who are accustomed to European-style healthcare how healthcare works in the U.S.?

38:56Well, there you have it, right? And so maybe there's things the United States can learn. Like Canada has obviously figured some things out about healthcare. When I talk to Canadians, they complain incessantly about their healthcare. When I talk to Americans, they're like, why isn't our healthcare like Canada's? I'm moving to Canada to get their healthcare system. So they've obviously learned some things. And yeah, that would be amazing for Americans. If Canada was the 51st state, if they opted into it, obviously, and Americans could move there and get in Canada as a, you know, state with, you know, multiple, it would obviously be multiple states over time.

39:29They would, Americans who went there would get the benefits of their health care system and their health care system could be different than ours. And that would be an interesting, you know, concept. So maybe we need another level here because we have the United States, 50 states, and then we have the federal government. But what you're describing almost sounds like underneath the federal system, different collections of states with different rules, almost like having blocks. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be like the Northeast, the Southwest. This would be the Canada states. So if they broke into five, six, seven states, whatever it is, it'd be the United States of Canada.

40:06Well, I mean, hell yeah. I'm a big fan. The thing I was going to throw in there is that I don't think we have to go quite as far abroad to get more folks. I also think that we have lots of room inside the country. And anyone who's flown over the United States once has looked down and gone, wow, there's no one here. And so there's lots of room just inside of the country. Pick a great location for energy and water and climate, given what's happening. What is the perfect place to build a new city and build a city intentionally for 30 million people? Now, it could start as 3 million, but with the intentionality of it hitting 30 million.

40:42In other words, a city of the scale of Beijing or Shanghai, a megacity, like really going for it. Where would you put the megacity? This would be like such an incredible thing for America to do to say, we're going to build a megacity. and we're going to start with this plot of american owned land because our our government owns a lot of land and we just say hey this million acres this hundred thousand acres 500 thousand acres is going to be the city center and here's how we're going to have this manhattan project where we ask startups and companies to pitch an architecture for the city and then we're going to pitch neighborhoods and you as a company whether it was google or boeing google did have a city project, you remember, and they have Waymo.

41:27Google could come in. Apple could come in and say, I want to build this hipster neighborhood. This will be the Brooklyn or the Venice or the Berkeley of it. I want to have that territory. I'm going to build Apple apartments, Apple whatever. And I want to have the concession to build a building like the Apple headquarters. So Apple's headquarters could become like those rings. They could say, we want to build 10 rings around the city and we're going to connect the 10 rings with skyways, whatever, a hyperloop, and people will live in a ring, work in a ring, play in a ring, live in a ring. You know, Steve Jobs considered that one of his great products, the mothership.

42:07Yeah. Well, I remember watching that thing get built. I really like this idea, but I wonder if we have to use federal land because there's a lot of folks out there who own quite a bit of - Government could buy it from them. Yeah. Government could buy it from them. And then you - Sure. I guess you could do it that way. I love the idea. And I think we've seen some nations try this. If you look at Egypt's capital that they're building, kind of de novo. I just think it would be cool. Is that the UAE? UAE bought some land from them and they're going to build this new city there. And yet you have Neom, which is being built by Saudis.

42:36Yeah. So yeah, there are some precedents to doing something like this. But I love it. I love it. Okay, moving on. Other recent hires by the government. Scott Kapoor, now he's going to be the Director of Office of Personnel Management. previously a managing partner at Andreessen Horvitz, employee number one, been there for about 15 years. I don't know Scott at all. Tell me about Scott. He's smart. I haven't worked with him, but he's got a great reputation, smart. He's a team player. I don't know what this job does and what the mandate is there. So I went through their plans and I went through their strategic plans for the OPM from 2022 to 2026.

43:15The thing that I struggle with is that they want to make the federal government a leading employer that is technology forward, but also a great place to work. And the struggle, Jason, is that I think a lot of the people who are glad that Scott's taking this job want the federal government to have far fewer people. So not exactly building out the same mission. So here we're going to see someone really come in orthogonal to where things have been heading and probably be a very unpopular person internally. The question is, what are the net benefits for the nation as we go through this. But that's going to be a tough gig.

43:51So the gig is, just looking at it here, human resources for federal employees, their benefits, their strategy to recruit, retain, and maintain the workforce. So basically, it's like being the chief operating officer of human resources department. This sounds like really great to have somebody who's a business person in this. And if the goal is to shrink it And to get rid of the grift, there's a lot of people who are, let's face it, you know, in very high paid jobs and not working. I'm sure there's tons of people who are working more than they're getting paid for. But we all know it's growing too fast.

44:26We're in debt. We're spending too much money. Get in there. If you cut too deep, you can always add people back is the philosophy that I think we'll see. And I know it sounds cutthroat, but that is how you save money. Let's squeeze here one more time here. Okay. Jason, this is the federal employment, right? Over what period of time? This is 1940 through today. Is that percentage? Nope. Thousands of persons. So the federal government is not... Now, this doesn't include, I think, the military. But it's not that many people. Which one is that? Because it has grown. No, there's state. It gets higher.

45:07Yeah, because you have state. You have military. There's a bunch of different data points here that we need to look at. The federal, 3 million, state, 5.5, local, 14.5, according to the Daily Caller. So I'm not sure if that's correct or not. So anyway, we can debate how many people there should be in the government. I think maybe you and I agree there should be less? Oh, fewer. I just think that people think that the federal government has 45 million employees who are all sitting around playing Tetris in their flip-flops. And it's several million people. So if we're going to cut spend, I really do think that we're having, there's a goal and there's a method to reach that goal.

45:45And we talk about cutting spending and cutting staff as a way to get there. I just don't think that this number is going to add up to anything approaching impacting the actual spend and debt issue. Oh, I got you. Yeah. So if we're going to do this, we've got to cut somewhere else. And it's going to hurt. Yeah. And it's good. Well, you know, it doesn't have to hurt because my guess is one third of the employees aren't contributing a bunch. and the top third are doing 80 % of the work and then there's the middle third. So if you cut a third, I've seen this in every organization I've ever worked with, you cut the bottom 10, 20, 35%, you will see universally the company works more efficiently.

46:22And that's just the nature of any organization. Non-profit, for-profit, et cetera. I agree with that. That's how I would do it. What I meant was we're going to have to make painful cuts on spending, like entitlement programs, and that sort of thing. So the staffing, we can definitely cut 30%. I'm sure. I think you and I talked about this a while back. If it's 35 % or if it's 50 % that you can cut, whatever, but that's going to be a very small percentage change in our overall spend. The military is the big number. Yeah. Medicaid. Interest on the dad and so forth. Yeah. There's a lot of places to cut, but I think a lot of it is also a philosophy and the philosophy is going to be efficiency and competition and no more cronyism and grifting.

47:02I think that's what's going to happen is opening up, you know, that philosophy. And I'm here for it. And, you know, listen, if you don't believe they're going to do it, if you believe there's crony capitalism at work, it's going to be pretty obvious to see it. It's going to be right there on display. So you will see it. I can tell you, based on what I know, even the most cynical Democrats, the most cynical who hate Trump, are going to have to nod and say, it's my prediction. We'll be sitting here a year from now. I think they did a good job on those issues. I give it to them for that. Whether it's making the military more competitive, cutting spending, reducing spending.

47:39And just as a philosophy, you're starting to see, and I'll just, as we look at these appointments, what we'll do with them in a moment, here's where I've come to. People know I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, haven't been, have been super critical. All the receipts are out there. You can see me saying all the things I I believe, about his past performance. My belief is he's the president now, and I'm seeing him surround himself with, quite literally, all of my friends and colleagues. My dream has always been that the government be as efficient as Silicon Valley, as entrepreneurs, and it should be more entrepreneurial and more efficient.

48:15Guess what? I just got my dream. It's always been my dream, is to see more people. And for me, that version of it was, I wanted Bloomberg to win. He got knocked out in the first debate. Knockout punch. Brutal. It is what it is. But I want to see Jamie Dimon in there. I want to see more business people in there, less career politicians, and really make the thing more efficient. So here's what my pitch is to everybody who doesn't like Trump. You have a year of action that you'll watch. You can be as critical as you want to be, bang on every assumption, everything they're doing, and just judge them in a year.

48:51Because you know what? You have no choice but to do that. You can fight them as much as you want. You can tweet, you can scream, but they won and they won with a bit of a mandate. And so here we go. Let's see. And Democrats, some Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, are on board with some of these issues. So I think when they start voting on them, there's going to be a lot of Democrats who cross the aisle and say, and there'll also be some Republicans who break rank, but they'll say, you know what? I agree. We should spend a little less here. So it's going to be entertaining. It's going to be a shakeup.

49:20Absolutely. I'll take quite a lot of that. And I like the fact that we will be able to vet results based on the numbers. For example, we know how much money we were spending. We will know how much money that we do spend. We will see if yearly deficits decline. We will see if the federal employment numbers decline. We will be able to actually kind of go out and see what they can do. So I don't think anyone was saying that everything we were doing was going well. So here's a new way forward. Okay. What I struggle with is the demand for whenever the Republicans win, everyone goes, we all have to get together now and all have to hold hands and work together.

49:54And when the Democrats win, the Republicans go, they want to bring Satan back and beat up your children. And I struggle a little bit to be as big of a person as you're asking me to be when the other side that I'm being forced to hold hands with is going to turn around and slap me the first chance they get when the tables are turned. Okay, though. I was raised Christian. Turn the other cheek. all right but i gotta say people have tried this before we have tried blue ribbon commissions which is what doge is to cut spending we have tried things let's see what we get now other people that are coming in jason include um suram krishnan uh former gp over at andresen he's going to revise on ai policy i've met him once but it was back when i was a mess he he was embedded by andresen horowitz at twitter when the takeover happened so i spent a little bit of time with him there for the first couple of weeks.

50:43He is a hardcore, great human being, really solid individual, great communicator, hard worker. He's going to do great. And he's going to work with David Sachs. He's going to be inside of the AI and crypto policy spot. And he was, if I recall, very active on the crypto side of investing for Antresen. Yes. So he'll be bringing, I think, a little more crypto to David Sachs' AI? Yeah, his group. Yeah, I guess there's a group being formed. and crypto needs to be regulated. And if we look at what happened the last four years, it was kind of, Gary Gensler gave no path. He didn't give the third path. It was either you can't do it or you can do it my way or the way we've always done it.

51:29Exactly. Don't do it or do it the way it's always been done. There is, in fairness to everybody in crypto, they should have a rule set that has evolved And the SEC, Congress, whatever commissions they come up with, whoever winds up working on this, they need to light a fire and make us, America, the most open to cryptocurrency geography in the world. It should not be the Zerg or it should not be some communist country or North Korea or Switzerland. It should be America. This is where we have the largest number of entrepreneurs pushing them to be in Puerto Rico, offshore, hiding their money. I've told the stories before.

52:13I've been on the boards of companies that are adjacent to crypto or in crypto. And they're like, we're going to put this in literally, speaking of Panama, in Panama, in a nonprofit. It's going to cost a million dollars to set it up. And I'm like, what? What corporation cost a million dollars to set up? I can go on any number of sites and register a new company for$500 or free or$1 ,000. It makes no sense. So let's not drive it offshore. Let's regulate it. Let's tax it. And I believe we should build a Bitcoin reserve. You know how we should do it? If you want to trade in Bitcoin in the United States, there is a 1 % Bitcoin tax.

52:49You want to buy it. You want to sell it. Both sides pay 1 % on every transaction. You know where it goes? Into the government. That's it. That is very interesting. I mean, if I told you Bitcoin was totally legal, was totally sanctioned in the United States, and you could go crazy with it, have fun with it, and we came up with maybe a capital gains treatment for it that was different or unique in some way. And then we said, hey, we're going to go down and we're going to help XRP and Doge and whatever else is out there, Solana, we're going to help them have a very clear regulatory environment. But every time you trade in and out of crypto, both sides pay 1%, it goes to the government wallet.

53:28I want to ask a question about this because I have been lightly sympathetic to the idea that crypto does not match one-to-one to existing securities law. And we might need a couple of tweaks to make it work a little bit better for crypto. It sounds, though, when you say third way and, you know, a different approach, that you're anticipating something a little bit more broad, Jason. So I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I'm kind of curious, like, why does crypto need a separate and more lenient set of rules compared to traditional securities like you and I know and love? Great question. You cannot take your Netflix shares and use them to fund a rendering cluster of computers and then burn those, you know, as a utility token, etc.

54:19So those shares just exist as a piece of paper in a ledger somewhere that you own a share of a company. They don't have any utility in the real world. An NFT is a collectible. It's obviously the NFTs. People are buying them when they buy a Beeple NFT. It's a one of one. It's a piece of art. He is a known artist. That doesn't fit in there either. So and then when you have a DAO and everybody's voting on what to do with their crypto and which NFTs to buy and then what rights the NFTs have, can they come to this party or that party? That's more like a membership club, but it trades like a currency.

54:51These are called innovations. Those innovations should be allowed. But we should allow them while making sure that people don't steal the money and grift. And if it's permissionless and there's a network of computers that nobody owns, the network, but each individual's own nodes, well, then that has to be accounted for as well. Because who's responsible when somebody loses their money who's a retiree in Florida? Well, here's very simple regulation. Each of these projects has to have an overseeing committee. That overseeing committee gets paid compensation in order to make sure there's insurance for the project, that there is KYC, that people are looking to make sure it's not being used for money laundering or terrorists or human trafficking or whatever terrible thing that could be done with these cryptocurrencies.

55:37that people have reported is being, that tether is being used for. There's many reports. It is the currency of choice for the criminal underground, which by the way, $100 bills were also part of that. Gold bullion and diamonds are part of that. It just sounds to be tether as a quicker way than handing somebody an ounce of gold for whatever you're trafficking. So I think those are all examples of things that the current system doesn't take into account. and it's very simple. Accreditation. Start with a sophistication test. I have been shouting this on every All In episode, every This Week in Startup episodes for, well, 14 years, ever since I got exposed to this because I know that people want to, in my family, in my friend circles, you know, or employees of mine, want to participate in something like thesyndicate.com where we share deals.

56:3190 % of the deals will probably go to zero in any of those platforms. And so I expect ours will be similar. And I wrote a book about this. And there's a book called The Power Law. People love to get educated about this stuff, but I can't offer for, I don't know, a million Americans to put in$100 each into a startup like, let's say, CafeX, which we did some syndicates for the top 5%, but maybe the public wants to buy shares of Uber or Robinhood when I had access to them. And I could have said, you know what? I'm going to do something where I offer to drivers the ability for them to put in$100 to$1 ,000.

57:06They're not allowed to. But they know Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and Sidecar before it better than anybody because they're doing it all day long. But they're not allowed to participate. So just start with the accreditation laws is my message to Washington. And then let people participate in risky things as a percentage of their income or net worth. Those two things would solve the whole problem. You want to buy XRP? And half the people think it's a scam, half the people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Great. You can spend up to 10 % of your net worth on cryptocurrencies in this experimental category.

57:44I find it very interesting that your example about Netflix maps so neatly to Bitcoin. Yeah. Own a bit of Netflix, sits in a ledger somewhere that you own it, and you can't use it in a DAO. It's not a utility token. It's not going to get burned. That's holding ETH or holding Bitcoin, which would make them, by my logic, securities. And this is when I really begin to struggle. I do think that there's something, to your point, about how we have downloads and other things that don't quite map to securities. And if you buy a token that is designed to be a lever on a system instead of a corporation or as a group, sure.

58:19But like... What if a musician... What if a musician... Yeah. What's your favorite heavy metal band? Fit for an autopsy. Fit for an autopsy says, we are putting out a new double record. Hell yes. And it's going to cost us, are they a major signed label band or are they - They're on Nuclear Blast Records, Jason. So maybe they spend a quarter million dollars to make an album? Sure. I'm putting a number out there. Somewhere between that and 500, yes. Okay, so let's say 500 ,000 is what it costs to make a really high quality record. They say, hey, you know, our label dropped us, but we're going to offer our fans$500 ,000 and you each get to own for, you know, every$5 ,000 is 1 % of that record for all eternity.

59:05And you get your name on the back cover. Yeah, okay. They can't do that right now. They can't do that. They're not allowed to. They can do it for 5 % of the country at an expensive cost. But what if you said, you know what? For me, it's about supporting the band. I want to own 20 basis points,$1 ,000. For me, being able to go to the concert, to get a signed album, so every$1 ,000 gets a signed album so they have to sign 500 albums would you spend $1 ,000 to get a signed album go to the concert and have your name in the record label notes as one of the producers? Oh yeah, I would do that for no recognition.

59:43If the band was like we're broke, send us money, I would send them money. So okay, they do that for their album and they get to own their masters for all time and the community gets to own half of their masters alongside them. So half of the equity goes to them, half goes to the community. You can't do that right now. Why can't you do that? Because we have antiquated security laws that want to protect you, Alex, and the other fans from spending your money. You're not allowed to do it because in the eyes of the SEC, you're not sophisticated enough, which is another way of saying you're dumb. Well, just as a reminder to everyone, what Jason's talking about in the accreditation test.

1:00:22According to sec.gov, currently the financial criteria is net worth over a million, excluding your house, or if you and your spouse make 300K or more per year in each of the last two years. So you're accredited probably. But anyway, putting it all aside, yes. Putting it all aside, you 10 years ago weren't accredited. Oh God, no. I was anti-accredited. And that's when, so back then you were writing for TechCrunch. You were brilliant. I met you in your first couple of years in the business. You were too stupid in the minds of the government, unsophisticated to do that. Now, you were sophisticated enough to go take your$1 ,000 and play poker and lose it to your friends or give it to, you know, whoever.

1:00:58You go to Vegas and put it on a roulette wheel. Sure. So that's what I'm talking about. And that's the kind of stuff that you could then sell it. Let's say that album becomes one of the best-selling albums of all time. And your equity and it's worth 3X. And your kid's going to college and your$5 ,000 turned into$15 ,000 and you want it for college. You could sell it to somebody else in the Dow instantly without any going public or anything, just in a wallet. So the way I would say it is projects under$100 million in total market cap should be able to do whatever the hell they please, as long as they're registered in some way with this is the people who have started the project and we have some basic insurance that costs$1 ,000 or something.

1:01:38So I love all of that, Jason. You're speaking my language. I would love to have more ways to work with fans and other artists that I love, especially bands that are struggling in the Spotify era. but here's the thing. All we need to do that is to just update the securities laws to be a little bit less stupid. None of that requires a special set of rules for crypto that's distinct. So to me, I don't think we need a third way. I think we need a more intelligent main path. Sure. I just think that it's not a sin that many assets in the crypto world are securities. And so what we should do is we should just make the securities aperture a little bit wider, which I think is what you are.

1:02:14I think we're getting to the same place here. Yeah, I'm saying a third way, because I think there's so much innovation here that you really need to start from a blank sheet of paper and really understand, you know, is this a situation where you do need to know your customer or not? Right. Is this a situation where it has to be registered? If it's like NFTs, you know, and they're trading under a certain dollar amount and they're trading cards, like I don't know that you need to be so worried about KYC, etc. That's why I think you could like let people start small projects as the projects get bigger.

1:02:50If there's a central authority, they have to register, etc. But anyway, you're correct that a lot of what I'm saying could also be viewed as evolving the securities law. And when I say a test, I mean a test similar to a driver's license, an easily accessible test, not something you pay or you go to school for for a year or two. I'm talking about you spend six hours in a course on your own time. That's a free course online. And then you take a 50 or 150 question test and you're licensed. In other words, you can't go back to the people who sold you a JPEG and say, oh, this JPEG isn't worth the$50 ,000 I spent on it or the$5 ,000 or the$500 because you took a test.

1:03:33That said, there's no inherent value to this because it's a piece of art. And the only way for this to have value is for somebody else to believe it has value. And there may not be a buyer for your piece of art ever again because you picked the long piece. Yes. Well, that's why I buy all art on the predication of I love it. If it goes up in value, huzzah. Look, we have a couple more names, though. Emil Michael, former Uber executive, named undersecretary for research and engineering. Fantastic. Congrats to Emil. I don't know him at all. I know you do. And so tell me why he's the right guy. I mean, he was Travis's right hand man.

1:04:09He will get any deal done. He is just, if you wanted to have a dealmaker by your side, he'd be top three in the industry to grab. If you wanted an operator, dealmaker, aggressive, this is like getting a version of Travis on your team for the government. And so whether you like business people or not, sharp elbow people or not, aggressive people or not, in our government, we've had the opposite. I am here to have aggressive, hardcore, driven people who want to perform at a high level in the government. I predict all these nervous Nellies, all these people who are negative about this right now, you know, who are like, oh, my God, we're just this is oligarchs.

1:04:54We're turning into oligarchy. I think these people actually are doing it in a patriotic way. And I think we're going back to a founding father type situation where the most successful people in the private sector go do a tour of duty, give up making money for four years, eight years, whatever it is, and then they come back into the private sector. Or in some cases, they're able to do both in some of these positions, but some you can't. And we don't know in each of these positions which ones are you have to divest everything you can't. We're going to find out. I can't wait to read the financial disclosures.

1:05:26I wonder who's poorer than we think. Well, I mean, and then the other thing is, you know, they're going to, in some cases, have to divest. And if you're worried that people are going to be, you know, you know, people are going to be grifting or talking their own book or working their own book, this is something that exists already. All these generals, all these people working in defense do like whatever number of years at Raytheon, then they go work in government, they go back to Raytheon. It's a revolving door. It's well known. but it's all and it's a problem here you have high profile people who've already made their money we're playing for legacy i would judge them based on that and just you'll know if there's any type of corruption or grift it is going to come out so fast because aoc bernie sanders elizabeth warren and that group are so tuned in to making sure it doesn't happen there are checks and balances in our system that's my belief i could be wrong this could be one of those clips that gets played and people go, look, you were wrong, but I am an optimist.

1:06:28I think that this is the default case. I think everybody's going to be quite pleased with the performance of these individuals. Okay. Well, that brings us to one last name, just adding one more to the mix because Jason's giving them all lots of points. So one more for the scoreboard. Michael Kratzios, someone that actually that's, this is new to me. He's going to help with SACS on emerging technologies, currently an MD at Scale AI, a company that we all know, but this was one of the tech people that I didn't already follow. Yeah, I don't have a relationship with them. Can't speak to it. But again, I think what we're going to see is a really young, high energy, tech first, entrepreneurship first, less regulation, lower taxes, less spending, more efficient and competitive America.

1:07:10That's my guess. And I think people are going to learn to appreciate what this group can do. And back to people with Trump derangement syndrome or who don't like Trump or who have concerns about his leadership and his track record. In this Trump two-point era, my major concern was that people who I consider incompetent, racist, xenophobic, deranged, dumb, the whack pack. Remember some of the whack pack he had around him the last time around? Like really bad actors, people with nefarious intent, people who were really dark individuals. in my estimation. Now you've got people who are rabid capitalists.

1:07:55This is the ultimate upgrade. This is the ultimate upgrade. Steve Bannon versus Emile Michael or David Sachs, like massive upgrade. So thank your lucky stars is the way I'm looking at this. If this was Trump 1.0, and it was a bunch of Steve Bannons, then I'd be super concerned. This is a much better turnout. So that's another way for people who have concerns to maybe think relative to who Trump could hang out with, maybe this is better. No, I definitely, I'll take someone who's run a business over Steve Bannon because I would take the gum stuff to the bottom of my shoe before Steve Bannon. So low bar there.

1:08:34But I do appreciate the optimistic take here. I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm trying to be optimistic. And, you know, these in some cases are many of my close friends. So I am as biased as Nick Cums. I am. Oh, I understand that. But this is one of the times in which I think bias is useful. Yeah. Because you're speaking from not just people that you've met a handful of times, like a great many people that journalists meet, you know, three, four or five times total. These are people that you know very deeply. And so that gives you, I think, a better view into what they'll do when people aren't looking, which I think is basically what character is.

1:09:07You like, I can tell you, David Sacks made enough money. Yulon's made enough money. Emil Michaels made enough money. I know that they don't need, they're not doing this for money. I've had conversations with many of these people about why they're doing it. I won't say which ones. They're doing it because they actually think America needs them. So whether you think that's deranged, delusional, delusions of grandeur, put it all aside. They feel called to serve. They feel called to put whatever number of years of entrepreneurship and increasing their net worth during one of the great eras in technology, the AI era.

1:09:39They think it's more important to save America in their minds. They literally think they're saving America. Now, people will laugh at it. People will criticize it. But I tell you, that's truly what they think. They want to, they think that national debt's an existential issue and they want to help and they want to make the government more efficient. I say, give them 12 months and write a scorecard. Yeah. Well, the only thing I'll say is I do hope that people remember that, and I just pulled up the latest numbers, that Trump won 49.9 % of the vote. Yes. Now that is 1.5 % more than Kamala did. Shut up.

1:10:12But I'll just say - 3 million? What was it? 3 million americans more let's see it's uh 2.2.3 million more okay so it's not not let they won shout out yes but i i do hope that there's also a recognition that not everyone has the exact same vision and so i hope oh no other people also have a chance to have a voice i literally the reason i'm saying this is because i know that there are a bunch of people who are very concerned and i have told them And I said it on an episode of All In. I think it's important for Republicans who have a very high troll level, a very high vengeance level, you know, explicitly stated.

1:10:53For them to say, you know what, let's do this for all Americans. And I told them on the other side, again, Captain Nuance here, I am a moderate, just like I'm telling the people on the left, hey, give them a chance, judge them based on the results. I told them publicly on the All In Pod, on my Twitter, and I've told them privately, do not troll people and make sure the benefits of Doge, make sure the benefits of efficiency are felt by the bottom half first. And my pitch to them was all the gains that we see. If we can get, you know, back in the black as opposed to going into debt, let's say we're back in the black by whatever amount and we can reduce taxes.

1:11:35They should just come out and say, you know what? All tax reductions for the next four years are going to the bottom. 75 % of the country, the top 25 % are not going to get any tax breaks. That would be the high ground. And I think that's what they do. I would love to see a tax package that was actually progressive in that way. History is not kind to that kind of expectation, but there's always a new chapter to be written. So again, leaning on your optimism here, I'll take it. Because here's the thing, Jason. we're in the car. We're going over the cliff. Geronimo. So it isn't like we're opting in or out here.

1:12:10You and I are side by side here and someone else is driving. I mean, my perception of you now working with you a couple of times a week here is you're a moderate techno optimist who is liberal socially. Am I correct? Capitalism, technology and gay rights. Okay. Awesome. And so you put that package together. I think we're in a good place right now. I think you're going to be pleased with how this goes. Well, I mean, look, I love a good surprise. But before we go, I have a couple of really funny comments from the audience that I do want to bring up. So, a while back, Toronto filmmaker Yvonne X said, right now, 13 % of Canadians are in favor of joining the U.S., according to a recent poll.

1:12:51So, we have some work to do to get Canada on our side. It's currently upside down, but I like that. And LMNOP, that's a great name, says, Greenland would be great for natural cooling of data centers. To which I say to you, LMNOP, yes, but have you heard about climate change? So that will have a multi-hundred-year ceiling to it. Interesting you bring that comment up. There have been data centers that were put in cold locations with good natural energy sources. And somebody told me the way they design them is to put fans in them and to have the wind and where they place them be where cold air will blow into it.

1:13:35So during certain months, they actually literally can open the doors as it is on either side of the data center and have the freezing air blow through the H100s and cool them down. I love that. Now, I don't know if that's reality, but that was explained to me by a data center expert that that existed as a concept. Did you see that Microsoft thing from, like, I want to say five years ago when they wanted to put a data center in, like, a shipping container underwater? Yes. I thought that was so cool. And that was before the AI boom. So I want to know, actually, okay, here's a question. If you are building something, or to our friends in the audience, that involves really, really insane data center cooling, AlexW at launch.co, shoot me an email.

1:14:12I want to talk to you because this is an issue that I just love. Jason, we have one more show before the end of the year, and it's the twisty, so it's going to be a little bit more retrospective. So let's just end here. And on a positive note of just saying that let's hope everything goes better than we expect and may everybody benefit to the nth degree and may this be the new onset of an American century and may my concerns be wrong. Yeah, golden age. Let's do a golden age. Stay positive, folks, because you have no choice. We're in the car. You're in the car with them and Louise heading towards the cliff, folks.

1:14:47We'll see you all on Monday with the Twisty Awards. Sign up for the channels and my pitch to you is in 2025. I want you to start a company, be independent, start a company, you know, like Alex did. He works here with me, but he also has cautiously optimistic. Cautious optimism. Cautious optimism. We have to put that in your lower third. Can we get lower thirds here now that we're using Restream? Cautious optimism, then I won't mess it up. Cautiousoptimism.substack.com, I believe, is the newsletter. Give him the hundred bucks. Yeah, help him out here. Let's build a foundation. He's been entrepreneurial.

1:15:23He's here half the time. He's doing his newsletter half the time. and Founder.University, which I'm going to be bringing and I'll be announcing next year, that Founder.University is going to be coming to another region in the world. You teased this on the last AI with Sunny. If you want to go get a little more, there you go. Go back in the archive. Founder.University coming to another region in the new year. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.