Trump, Memecoins, and What to Expect from the New Administration | E2074

32:26We saw that in the first term when he tried to do things a little too edgy or on the margins, he got stopped. There were backstops in the system. Are they perfect? No. Yeah. You know, there's three branches of government and, you know, you can be concerned about it, but I think he wants to have a legacy. This is, I ask people, what's your perception of what he wants? And I think he wants a legacy. And I think he wants JD to win and have this like sort of reagan-esque legacy and that's going to require actually accomplishing some things and i think he's really focused on just trying to get a small subset of things done make the country safer cut taxes you know you can you can really combat inflation by making oil cheaper it turns out gasoline oil is um an input for almost everything it's designed when you lower the price of gasoline dramatically and you burn hydrocarbons um yeah you pollute and uh could cause global warming Seems like that science is pretty irrefutable, but you get cheaper inputs, goods and services go down.

33:27And so I think that's what we will see. We will, and he said that in his speech, drill, baby drill. He got a bunch of applause for that. They're going to, they're going to allow nuclear. I think they're going to fast track nuclear as well. I've been hearing that a whole bunch, fusion, nuclear reactors, everything is going to be fast tracked. Try to make energy as low cost as possible so that your EV is cheaper to fill up. Your gasoline is cheaper. And when that happens, people have more money to spend and that will ensure that, you know, JD wins in four years. And I think it really is that simple.

33:59We'll see. I'm really curious to see how much higher this number can go. Because if you're listening to the audio version, I'm showing a chart of US field production of crude oil. And we are at all time highs. Basically, we reached a peak in early 20 and then it went back all the way up to a new high at 24. Essentially, I wonder how much more capacity there is to drill. I was reading some commentary from Exxon about this. Yeah. And they said that, you know, a lot of the gains we've seen are now from aging shale fields. And so there's a question of how much domestic capacity can be turned on and if people will change their investment patterns.

34:32We'll see. I think your point about prices is really good because, and we talked about this on the show before, my learning about why gas prices matter to people because they're just much more economically sensitive to small price changes for mandatory goods. So, okay, data point there. We'll see. If you were to take an Uber or you were to have a DoorDash come to your house or Amazon deliver a package, that package comes on a ship, comes on a plane, comes with a car. If that car can be operated for 10 % or 20 % less, that means they can raise that person's salary, lower the cost to you, and consumers have more discretionary spending.

35:08I'm sure the Democrats are looking at their focus on this and saying, well, if we're buying all this oil from overseas and shipping it here, why don't we just use our own until it's gone and then keep investing in solar? Because solar is cheaper to put in. Batteries are getting cheaper. So I kind of called this a couple of years ago where I was like, technology is so deflationary and each iteration, it gets cheaper. So we will be sitting here every year and solar will be cheaper to install. Batteries will have more capacity. Battery science will get better. things will charge faster they'll store more and they'll get deployed more and that means we'll just attack it on all fronts until energy and energy costs become so de minimis i think in the next decade or two we'll be looking at it and being like kind of the way people look at water people don't know their water bells that you know if a hose runs overnight you have a broken pipe people are not freaking out in other countries your house over it well yeah you don't want to get flooded but you know if you had left the garden hose on or you were filling the pool like people don't lose their mind about it in europe people will let their pools when it's expensive not fill they will not make a bunch of ice they'll give you two ice cubes anymore they really are thinking about water and so you know i think energy goes to that same destination makes everybody you know have more money and the reverse of the mcdonald's effect happens now they can lower prices or not raise them as fast and you know on the ai front i think any regulation of ai just to put just to wrap that one up yeah it's premature and all the regulations as they were constructed were regulatory capture like they were like if you have this many servers and you have to file this and when you do those you know sam altman you know satya nadella you know microsoft they know what they're doing they know this is going to cause as bill gurley points out regulatory capture yeah you're gonna have to have expensive lawyers expensive people spending all kinds of money to you know do reports and we really are just in the first So we got to let these AI companies cook and we are up against the Middle East and China in terms of innovation.

37:07We are not alone in making models and the models in China, pretty darn impressive. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I, you know, I try to not ever bring it up just because I don't want to get in your personal business, but you know, the CEO of XAI came out in favor of the California AI bill. That was pretty controversial. This, this surprised me at the time. And I don't think he has no pain. pain i i'm curious like does everyone agree as much as we've been discussing them agreeing with a completely hands-off approach to ai regulation elon got into ai and started open ai and funded it he's been very public about this because he has a concern about super intelligence you know creating doomsday like scenarios i think he's alone in that regard or it's a very small group of people who believe you know we're going to have a skynet type situation in the short term uh but you know that's pretty smart he does see things before most people and he can catch a rocket with a pair of chopsticks so you know is he right or not we'll find out over time and i think that's his concern the the way i look at it personally and i don't know i'm curious how you look at it is i think china is going to figure it out and they're going to have robots in people's houses doing stuff for them and if we don't have them it's kind of like people at work who use ai versus people who don't yeah not using ai would be like not having a computer uh not having an internet connection like that person is functionally irrelevant in the current workforce if you didn't have internet at your desk and a computer if you don't know how to use ai and you're not using it you're functionally irrelevant already and that's a good um note for anybody who's not using it all day long i'm not concerned about ai in terms of it going rogue as we sometimes sometimes consider but when when elon was in favor of a slowdown in an advancement around the gpt three days he signed some big letter and when he supported the california um ai bill i that did make me think because to your point while i disagree with elon on a great many things i i don't think he's off base about a lot of ai stuff and i'm curious remember the point about republicans democrats and branding we talked about earlier yeah i think everyone who was in favor of ai safety broadly got lumped in as a helen toner hater you know and i i wonder if that was a mistake I wonder if also that was also a just a covering over of people in technology who are AI advocates, but who do think that there should be some government role in keeping things from going off the rails.

39:38I don't share that view, but I'm curious how much of people in tech that is who now don't really have a public thing to stand on. If that makes sense, Jason. I mean, at this point, China's going for it. Yeah. That's all you really need to know. China's going for it. We can't slow down American companies who would be like, this is either now the race for the nuclear bomb, right? This is a Manhattan project. We don't win. China does. Bad news. They build 10 million soldiers and, you know, a billion drones. Like we got a serious problem. So we have no choice for democracy to be the leader and humanity.

40:14We have to be the leader in this, in the free world. Yeah, I agree with that. I hope we win. We win quickly and decisively. let's say somebody made an interesting comment in the live chat here if you're listening to the pod you can turn on uh you can follow us on x or on um youtube to get the live stream turn on notifications he said like robots will kill people but accidentally like what the waymo crash um i think they're probably revering more towards the um cruise crash which is now out of business because of that you know ricochet that happened and i think that's the right point here when When the robots meet humans and humans die, this seems crazy, but this person makes a great point.

40:56Self-driving cars are probably the first interaction at scale between AI and humans and the potential loss of life. Drones will be the next one. And people having drones, God forbid, do a terrorist attack, which I can't believe has not happened yet, if I'm being honest. But, you know, drones are in the battlefield in Ukraine right now, dropping grenades into foxholes. so it's only a matter of time before somebody does that tragically at a football game or something let's not give them ideas jason i mean here's the great thing about um you know talking about these things you know talking about them and raising awareness about them inspires founders to create countermeasures and the number of companies we've had on this program or you know that we've seen on the investment side of our business that are doing drone deployment countermeasures is enormous and in fact i was talking to a technologist here who pointed to the roofs and said, see this, see that?

41:46Those are radio wave anti-drone technology. So if somebody flies a drone into this perimeter by the White House in the Capitol, which by the way, I've never been in a situation where I'm locked up so much as this, it was brutal. I had to walk like a mile or two to get my car. I had a driver while I was here and it was just, I mean, first of all problem, but I've really had to walk and walk and walk to get to it in the freezing cold. That's what I was going to say. Don't, JC, he's not complaining about walking a mile. He's like negative 20 celtures it's really cold here yeah and um you know there this stuff is being deployed right now we're in the thick of it and it's awesome if you're a founder countermeasures the first wave of this in startups was using technology to see if somebody has you know a bomb on them or they're carrying a gun or to read their facial expression and if they're on a watch list all that stuff is deployed now you just don't see it when i went to the uh bruce springsteen i I took my mom to see the Bruce Springsteen on Broadway.

42:41They had a really interesting technology that was scanning everybody, looking into them and knowing if there was a gun or a bomb. And you just had to like slowly walk through it. It's like, this is really impressive. I remember I wrote down the name of the company. I looked it up and it's just, you know, you can move a lot of people without a metal detector and it scans for all these different things. So that's all great stuff. So let's pick a new topic. Let's talk about crypto. Trump has expressed support for Bitcoin mining as a domestic industry. there is the real possibility of some sort of Bitcoin reserve.

43:11So there has been, up until a couple of days ago, I would say a general crypto-wide excitement for the incoming Trump administration, especially amongst the Bitcoin faithful who enjoyed a nice price pump. And then, Jason, a few things happened that I think people may have noticed, which was that Trump launched a meme coin and then Trump launched, well, Melania, his spouse, launched another meme coin. And it was certainly a decision to do this. i i don't think it's hard to guess my view of using the presidency for personal enrichment but i'm curious jason uh do you have a different opinion we could debate i mean i think you and i are simpatico on this i think you know this is um kind of a goldilocks situation last administration you know too cold this administration too hot i would like just right gary gensler you know and lena connor doing their like goodbye videos i don't know if you saw those on twitter and um You know, they're getting, you know, proper criticism for the jobs they did.

44:09And, you know, it's all part of this anti-tech, anti-capitalism, de-acceleration. You know, they would argue it's, you know, in consumers' best interest. But consumers clearly want to have crypto. They, you know, businesses like to merge and provide services at cheaper value or cheaper prices. And they like that as well. They like to have their Amazon Prime include Whole Foods. Period. Full stop. First of all, a lot of crypto people were not happy about this. The consensus, I think, from crypto people I know, and I'm not including David Saxon, because I did not talk to him about it, so just to be super clear.

44:44But I talked to other friends in crypto, and you can see them tweeting, like, this is not good. Now, I am going to continue to take my nuanced approach, which is, you must, must have an accredited investor test. consumers want to buy meme coins consumers want to own bitcoin consumers want to gamble they want to play poker and maybe they want to have a little bit of cannabis on the margins you got to listen to the populace and if they want to do things with personal freedom you should create a path for them to do it if you want to smoke cigarettes i don't advise it it's a terrible thing to do but i don't want to stop you from personal freedom because you know what i like to smoke a cigar a times a year uh and so i don't think you should ban it either i believe in personal freedoms in this case the timing of it freaked a lot of people out because they felt that this would damage crypto uh and personal enrichment is also on people's minds now this occurred before trump was technically president and we don't know who owns it we don't have all the details um like we We don't know the 80%.

45:51When they do these meme coins, you kind of say there's beneficial buyers who are the insiders who own a certain number of shows, just like a company. But, you know, I tweeted about this. There are certain rules to it. 80 % are owned. If people took an accreditation test and they understood what vesting was, they understood what a float was, they understood diversification, they understood an NFT or a piece of art having no value other than what another person is willing to pay for it. I'm kind of in this libertarian thing. Educate people, let them do what they want. And I think what this signals is we're going back to those early days of crypto where you can experiment and do whatever you want.

46:30Would I have done this? Would I advise people to do this? Absolutely not. This is like a really aggressive, crazy thing to do, I think. Other people might disagree, but crypto people think this is crazy. Crypto people think it's crazy. We'll get to that. But just to underline what you're saying about the tokenomics, this is from the official gettrumpmemes.com. So there's going to be a billion total Trump tokens, 200 million are out. And the thing that people have caught on is that 80 % of them are constrained or held by CIC Digital and creators. These unlock at certain times. CIC Digital is the company Trump has used to sell shoes and other things lately.

47:07So it's a Trump, as far as the market understands, it is a Trump property, which means that The tokenomics here are essentially, I would say, very predicated towards the people in question. And we recently had CoffeeZilla on the show. Yeah. And here is - He's going crazy. You know, I went to CoffeeZilla first. I was like, I wonder what CoffeeZilla thinks is. That's exactly what I did. And here's what he has said. Update. Finally saw the tokenomics of dollar sign Trump. 80 % owned by one wallet. And then it's the sad skeleton face Wojak who wants to cry. You know who's really happy about this? Who?

47:39Most happy? Haktua girl. Yep. If you're going to go after her, you're going to have to go after Barrett or whoever did this. Listen, if you're president, I don't know if you've seen this. People sell coins. They sell plates. In fact, somebody handed me a presidential coin. I have it here. This is some commemorative coin that was in a gift bag. Somebody gave me, you know, they sell these coins for a hundred bucks. You see them online. Yeah. If you put this in the framing of, you know, somebody selling these kind of coins. Okay. This is a coin. It's probably worth a hundred or 500 bucks. I got it for free because I'm an influencer now, apparently, because I have podcasts.

48:16These are digital versions of this. And digital versions of this that are global, there's a list of other concerns you could rightfully hack. Number one, a foreign adversary could start buying this as a backdoor payment to the Trump family. That is a valid concern because if you tried to buy a billion of these, pretty hard, but you could buy a billion dollars in Trump coin if it's at 50 billion. So there's going to be a bunch of investigations into this. And what I fear is by kicking the hornet's nest here, this is going to restart this whole adversarial thing because there are people in the Democratic Party who rightfully are on some finance committee who are going to say, hey, this is a security.

48:50And then the way this is written, they said this is a game. Literally, I pulled up the terms of service in capital letters. They're like, this has no economic value. These are not shares of a company. These are trading cards. I think they even called them cards. However, you and I both know these things are trading on Coinbase. They're trading on crack and they're trading on Robinhood. So people look at these and I would say half the people understand their meme coins and probably half of them think they're Bitcoin. Bitcoin and this are two very different things. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you bring up the securities argument about how people view meme coins, what the laws are going to be, what to do with Haley Welch, the talk to a celebrity or the hawk to a celebrity that became the talk to a celebrity.

49:31I guess now, under the Trump administration, because they're not going to go after, his SEC is not going to go after him for this, right? So, does that mean that literally anybody now can create their own token? Yes, that's exactly what it means. I think it's a security. Okay. It means that NFTs and trading cards are legal. Gary Gensler went after these things and felt they were securities. There is an interpretation that needs to occur. It's a new product. I just said, look, you have these coins. They're commemorative. The Bush family, the Biden family, the Obama family, you can go to their website.

50:07You can buy all kinds of memorabilia. This is the future of memorabilia. However, it's subtly different. You have to interpret this and you have to think about a new set of rules. I would never do this. This to me sounds really inadvisable, like super inadvisable. However, I also think it's super inadvisable to not have the ability to come up with a rule set and i've talked about 10 different ways to do this for crypto an accredited investor test solves the problem because then people would understand that a meme coin has no inherent value and if you buy it it will go to zero at some point yes that is the guarantee yes and it's who is left holding the bag that's the game you're playing just like poker it's a tournament somebody at the end wins all the chips in the tournament and gets the prize and some people make the final table and they make money if you're doing this you're not buying a security there's no underlying assets go buy a company with a lot of revenue yeah on the i mean you're appalled by this you're in the appalled i am so livid i can see it i just it's okay you can be i mean you have to be such a low rent grifter to to to be like okay i won i won again yes and what am i gonna do with a little bit of goodwill that i have is i'm gonna sell trump bibles gold shoes and then i'm gonna drop not one but two successive shit coins and here's the thing meme coins meme coins these are meme coins they're not shit coins now anymore no they the same potato tomato tomato sir um but it's all a distraction it's all a distraction but imagine if you're a crypto fan and this is why i have this nick carter this is a heartbreaking apology um a bunch of people right i haven't oh nick carter yeah nick carter is the guy um yeah meme coin has caused crypto twitter ct significant psychic damage never seen it this bad i'm annoyed by this for a host of reasons i'm very opposed to enrichment of politicians and use of office in poor ways but imagine if you're the crypto industry you put your you put your political and personal capital behind this guy and the first thing he does is turn around and make you look like a complete sucker by doing a meme coin grit and here's another idea oh people have here here's their the you know another argument that people will make people have agency this is america you You can go play roulette.

52:33You can go play blackjack. You can play poker. You can bet on sports now. Hey, shout out to my guys at Price Pick. I love doing Price Picks. Now I am addicted to it. You know why? Because I love being engaged in the game and it's like fantasy sports. It's so much fun for me to put$100 on each next game. There's 82 a year. I'll probably wind up doing 50 of them. You know, it's like five grand for me. That's nothing. And it makes the game literally 30 % more interesting to me in a regular game. and it makes it 100 % more interesting to me in a blowout because I get to follow my exact players. I'm more engaged.

53:03I like it. Sure. Other people might think it's stupid. It's okay. So communication is going to be super important. And I think hopefully this is not like blow the doors off of it. But when everybody loses their money, which half the people will by definition, there has to be a buyer for every seller. Half the people, two thirds of the people are going to lose money on this. Some group of people are going to make a bunch of money and people will learn these things actually have no value, which I've been saying about crypto from the beginning. Unless backed by something in the real world or an actual product or service, expect it to go to zero.

53:37That should be your default expectation. The fact that Bitcoin hasn't is just a fluke of literally hundreds of thousands of legitimate projects, like projects with multiple technical people behind them. Like five have not been a total washout. Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. Everything else is just garbage and nothing and you lose everything. If you go to this casino, like going to Vegas, you will go home with a pit in your stomach having lost all your money. Don't play this game. Put your money in a 401k, tax-free, Roth IRA, 529 for your kids. Do it right. This is gambling. I just want to show people who are watching the video version of this what the vibes are like on cryptocurrency specific forums after Trump launched his coins.

54:25Meme coins. Here's a headline from seven hours ago from r slash cryptocurrency. Melania Insider Wallet rugs 12.5 million within three hours. This person pulled up a Trump chart and shows the massive drop after the Melania coin came out as forming an M for Trump. And it just goes on and on. yeah i mean can you imagine being gary gensler i mean you must be literally just like i mean back to your cigar call that work i i told you you know like this is what happens this is why we can't have nice things this is what happens when you don't have functional government making rules and advancing think about this organization needs to come up with a rule set please start with an accreditation test anybody who wants to buy this on robin hood which i'm an investor in or any other platform and i still have you know a significant position in robinhood anybody who wants to buy this on robinhood you want to go do crypto when you go on robinhood to trade options they take you through this walk yes workflow where they train you here's what it is take a quiz i think you know here's an explanation they are walking you through it you know in crypto we don't have that exactly i don't think i don't somebody will correct me if i'm wrong if somebody's doing that you need to have like seven or eight screens that say this has no inherent value you.

55:42You're buying this. It is likely to go to zero eventually. Do you understand it? Yes. What percentage of your net worth is this? If you lose it, can you afford to lose it? Just ask people these eight, nine questions before they're allowed to trade this stuff. Let's take a look at the Reddit S1. And I'm going to show people what a disclosure section looks like when we discuss risks. This is always like a fun exercise because your attorneys, when you fill these out, will come up with every possible scenario a nuclear bomb will land on the reddit headquarters the internet will go down you know it's bonkers you know the the the ceo could be captured and put in a jail in you know morocco i mean it's everything so starting on page 22 in the reddit s1 we begin the risk factors but the first sentence being investing in our class a common stock involves a high degree of risk then they just list things that could go wrong if we fail to increase or We're seeing our user base.

56:39Scroll, scroll, scroll. Our business depends on strong brand and reputation. Changes in search kill us. We have a history of net losses. And it goes on and on and on and on and on, page after page after page. Now, in contrast, Jason, let's take a look at the equivalent disclosures from the Trump coin. Yes. Now, there is. I pulled up the coin. There is a terms and conditions. If you click it there, there's like a capital part. And it says, this agreement contains disclaimers, warranties, blah, blah, blah. You go down. The Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for and engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar sign Trump and the associated artwork and are not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity investment contract.

57:20So they're doing their CYA here. my point is this should be front and center for any meme coin for any crypto when you go buy those shares just like for options because robin had realized people were buying options might not have known what they were doing or they might have thought they knew what they were doing but maybe they didn't understand the nuance of it so they just did a little extra care so here's here's where i get kind of annoyed though you're annoyed i i'm so dude i i can't take hypocrisy and i cannot I'm just going to ask you, please. This is going to be four years of this. Don't get too tweaked.

57:55It's going to be every week. It's going to be shit like this. Jason, you don't understand how deep breaths. You should have seen. Well, you did, but I reached a little bit of peace. And I'll tell you why. Because I wrote this. We live in a democracy, which means that I have the absolute privilege of losing sometimes. Because if you're in a democracy, you're not going to win every election. Absolutely not. That's a great point. your party beautiful so i my my perspectives and views lost now did i agree with everything that biden sorry kamala wanted to do hell no but i lost so here we are we voted for this 49.9 okay off we go uh so that's that's where i'm sitting today i'm not i'm not losing it but i do think the grift drives me bonkers um but here's here's where i get a little mad if the trump memes are not actually intended to function as a investment opportunity.

58:47Why did you use a mechanism that creates an investment opportunity? If you wanted to do Trump memes, sell them for a dollar, subsidize them, send everyone a token and off you go. But you know why he didn't do that, Jason? Because you can't make$10 billion doing that. And so this disclosure that we just read is horse pucky. It's literally CYA. It's nothing to do with reality. It's a complete shameless grift. And I can't believe believe it happened to be before he got let me tell you what republicans say when i bring this kind of stuff up now do hunter biden hunter biden is not the president he's never been the president you know he's kicking up to the big guy and kick it up to the big guy you know what you know what i would it go i would be in favor of much stricter rules about what politicians families can do i'm opposed to all trading i think every president's assets should be put into an absolute blind just be when they start to run people are in favor of sec has to do that rules yes bring it on the sec is doing that and i think we talked about this on another program um it was either here or all that i can't remember but this is like really cool hack if you get picked to serve and you have to sell and liquidate a bunch of stuff to go serve your country you don't get capital gains you get like a one-time amnesty for capital gains i dig that the only downside though is you know something's gonna be like got me to those jobs i just made a bunch of money i know a venture capitalists who had to divest everything to take a position uh this is years ago yeah and uh one of the positions they were in went like 10x while they were in office yeah and they couldn't own the shares so their net worth let's say their net worth was 100 million or something it would have been like 2 billion and because they chose to serve their company country and not have those shares they got massively massively pink so i i love a blind trust i love having it outside of your domain.

1:00:36I just don't think you should use higher offices in this country for personal profit. Keep your expectations low is my best advice based on history. I'm going to keep them exactly as high as I can. That's fine too. I don't want you to be triggered every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern when we get on the air because I guarantee you this is going to be twice as spicy. I'm predicting it now. I think this will be twice as spicy as the first term. If the last if biden's term was like you know too milquetoast and boring and you didn't say anything and you're like where's the president can we see him it's a weekend at bernie's like can we make a statement can he talk about this stuff like this is going to be the opposite trump is going to go for it i predict it's going to be twice as chaotic so for all my friends who are on the left just get in there get that com.com app do your journaling get your namaste on a little yoga a little hot sauna to go for a rock.

1:01:36It's going to buckle up. It's going to be chaos. This is, by the way, this is the post-meditation version of me. You should see me in the morning. No, I literally meditated today. You have a beautiful family. I too. You have an incredible career. You are a good person. Thank you, Jason. This will be over literally in three years in one day. Yeah, three years and awakened. Four years and awakened. Just under four years. I knew what you were trying to say. four four years minus a day yeah it's we'll see all right couple more things uh on the ev front um has um promised to end what he called quote uh kamala's insane electric vehicle mandate there isn't a mandate but the general thinking is that this is um a a movement against ev subsidies and also against emission standards that led automate auto companies to move towards evs isn't there's a state issue like can can they do that they can get rid of the federal stuff which i'm fine with by the way i think the free market's got this byd is making stuff real cheap uh elon's making stuff real cheap he's got the cyber cap coming out i think he said that's gonna be 30k i think evs have won the day they don't need subsidies anymore um and if states want to do it because of pollution go ahead but i i'm i'm off this whole subsidies thing rural broadband evs let's stop with these like create farm subsidies the free market has to like work some of this stuff out emissions credits are also at risk and so uh my summary of the ev coverage was quote for startups, probably not a great time to start an EV company.

1:03:05So if that was your plan, wouldn't recommend it. Or more simply, make the cars better and cheaper because you don't get to get whatever a couple of grand for each car from a person making a gas car. And you know what? We have a great experiment. We have 50 states. California wants to have different emission standards than Texas. And you know what? They have more dense cities in New York and they want to have a different standard i totally get it i'm i'm pro local government i love the congestion tax in new york i think it's great you don't get to go anywhere you want with your 2 000 pound vehicle it's not your god-given right to go from jersey into the city center and block everything up with your giant suv pay nine bucks you pay to go over bridges if you want to go to a national park you got to get a pass there's only a limited amount of capacity there's more people who want to go certain months than others you got to make a reservation to pay a reasonable fee the end we're done here.

1:03:56Doesn't bother me at all. I mean, I pay tax for all sorts of things. I don't know why I would be allowed to use that infrastructure for free. I mean, it's just unrealistic. I mean, the density of cities is crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And here's for more of that. On the state-by-state thing, I think Trump in California did tangle in the first administration, so I'll be curious to see if there's an attempt to use top-down federal rules to limit states' ability to set their own rules. We'll see. Good luck with that. States have a lot of rights. You're going to have a hard time. Pick your battles.

1:04:23So, M &A we've talked about this on the show I don't think we have to go over this a whole bunch more that just is the people that Trump has put forward into antitrust positions have not been quite as stridently pro combination as I would think I believe some of them come from JD Vance's orbit and so I wonder if we're going to see definitely less scrutiny than under Lena Khan but I don't think it's going to be quite the absolute laissez faire domain that people are hoping for expecting i think it's going to be kind of in between jason yes i think let's just go back to the original way the law was stated and not reinterpret it which was what i objected to the concept of i can uniquely me and all the world can predict future competition is a farcical absurd ridiculous premise um i don't care who came up with the premise it's absurd so let the games begin um i met somebody who's working on this uh at peter thiel's party um which i'll just mention And I was at Peter Thiel's party because it was in the New York Times.

1:05:23And yeah, I mean, I got the paparazzi and recognize me now. The business paparazzi recognize J-Cast. Business paparazzi. That's an amazing sentence. You know, Teddy from the New York Times. He was there and I said hi to him. He was outside of the Free Press Uber party, X party. He was outside of Peter Thiel's. He was everywhere. Just taking names, taking pictures. I had a nice conversation with him. I like Teddy. Yeah. And I talked to somebody who was in this group. Um, and I just gave him a hug. He said, let me explain to you what it means to a founder when they can sell their company instead of shutting it down.

1:05:58You know, it's a really important thing that we allow singles and doubles and sometimes a triple, you know, an acquirer for 10 million, a single or double for a Hyundai, you know, a billion dollar acquisition for a company that can't IPO, but has great strategic assets. This is kind of like a great thing that makes our capital systems the envy of the world. when i go to the middle east when i go to japan when i go to europe they're studying venture capital and trying to figure out how to replicate and that lena khan was trying to break and i think it was like a socialist approach and i think gary gensler and lena khan did a lot of damage i don't want to go overboard um and allow and allow i don't know amazon to buy walmart i mean it's pretty obvious that would not be a good idea dan loeb did some tweet about like lena khan stopping a handbag company for getting bought by LVMH or somebody.

1:06:49And I wasn't aware of it, but it's like, if a handbag company wants to merge with another handbag company, when you can go on Amazon and buy a$6 knockoff, like who cares? This is not important. Okay. That's my position. I don't disagree with most of it. I think what's more important is what will this be like when the rubber meets the road? So I'm looking for two things. One is a potential uptick in those small aqua hires, singles and doubles. I'm curious to see how long that will take to form and then which sectors of startups get the most offers and purchases. And also for what purpose? Because we've talked a lot about aqua hires over the years.

1:07:25It's kind of like the ultimate like bunt maybe in baseball terms. But with everyone cutting staff, I just wonder how much people are going to be willing to pay for more staff. So I'm curious to see how that plays out. And I'm also curious to see what percentage of unicorns that were 2021 era end up being singles and doubles when they eventually do find a home. And what happens when you try to over-regulate a market? Entrepreneurs get creative and your clock runs out. That's what happened to Lena Kahn. People were like, we need these three or four strategic things. Let's do a synthetic acquisition.

1:07:54We'll leave the company there. Microsoft bought all the employees. They game the system and Lena Kahn is neutered. Yeah. This is what happens. You're in office for a couple of years. You can't take your own stamp on it and make the laws yourself unilaterally. lottery. Her idea was, for me, future competition, I think it was an objectively terrible test. Look at the tactics. People are doing bundling or selling things under what it costs them to produce to get rid of a competitor and then raising it. If you're hitting 70, 80, 90 % market share in a market, yeah, we should be thoughtful about you not buying the last player.

1:08:32Uber has not bought Lyft. DoorDash has not been bought by Uber Eats. And Uber Eats and DoorDash haven't bought a couple of the other delivery services, Instacart, etc. That kind of makes sense to me, right? If anybody gets to, let's say, 80%, that's kind of where you get monopoly and, you know, power, 70-80%. You know, let's take a look at it. But everything else, let it rip. And let's get some IPOs, and let's get this economy cranking again. Oh, that's a fun game to play, actually. I have not yet come up with a number about this. How many technology IPOs of note will we see in the US this year?

1:09:04Twice as many as last year. well last year was like two so let's hope it's a lot more than 2x it's going to be a lot more i would say yeah and uh looking at the stock market there's a pretty good indicator uh of this crypto has been on a tear why because they saw these meme coins come out they see this administration making it a priority people are placing bets i get it um that's a good indicator when people actually put skin in the game and that's also happening on the other side people are putting skin in the game when it comes to stocks they're thinking hey if the inputs get lower gasoline energy being a primary one um then um these companies be more efficient they use ai and they have static team size as we've discussed often companies will have better earnings so we want to beat the rest of the world america doesn't need to rip itself apart we need to beat the rest of the world we need to have more jobs here and yeah you know if you if you want to make an argument about increased taxation or simplifying the tax code or creating you know a tax code that really benefits you know the bottom half of society and you know everybody else gets asked to do a little bit more i'm cool with it yeah i'm cool with it you want to make one tax income tax and capital gains become one thing at some point i'd be okay with it you know just make it i just ask you make it simple you know simplify it dramatically and if we sit here and we say you know by 2030 we're going to have one flat tax it's 27 and if you make over 10 million dollars a year it goes up a little bit but it's just a simple go to a website put in your cap gains you know put in your sales of capital gains put in your income spit it out pay it easy breezy lemon squeezy let's do it that would be would be a lot of really great great opportunity and the flat tax disappeared no i mean the fact that you have to buy complicated web software to do this is just infuriating oh speaking of regulatory capture into it by the way if you don't know into it owns turbo tax which used to take 90 of my dollars every year so just to summarize really quickly everybody we've been riffing we're having a good time but on the on ai expect much less even potential regulation in the world of crypto i believe let it rip is the perfect summation of that we're not quite sure where we're going to end up on frayed and tariffs on the immigration front.

1:11:21It seems that Jason views high school immigration changes, positive or negative, could be about a year out. EVs, less government support, taxes probably coming down overall. There's been discussion of lowering the corporate tax rate, though. Jason, I don't see at all how you managed to lower taxes for major income drivers while also reducing the deficit. That doesn't seem to me like the near term place. I'm not sure how it's going to play out. I asked that question. The answer was we'll have much more growth. So Republicans feel the growth will offset the tax breaks. We'll see if that happens.

1:11:50That's always their argument. Yeah. And then on M &A, I believe there's going to be much less scrutiny, not zero, but definitely if we're going, starting at a hundred from Lena Khan down to a 20 or something along those lines. I think it'll be back to the old days, which is, is this in consumer's best interest? And are you doing unfair business practices like bundling or price dumping, price fixing? We're going to go back to the old days, let it rip, let it function, Uh, let's beat the rest of the world, not beat each other up. Yeah. Okay. I love it. Uh, we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye everybody.