Jason Calacanis: The Silicon Valley Vibes Are Still Pro-Trump

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For the newbies, Jason is a little bit of a departure from our usual material here on the Bollower Podcast. He has a podcast for his own called the All In Podcast. And his colleagues, two of them were very active Donald Trump supporters. One of them, David Balsach, ended up going into the administration. And then another one is kind of a...it was Trump Curious. Jason was the most middle of the road of the crew. And we did our first interview, God, a couple of years ago now, before the 2024 election, and have done a check-in every, you know, 6, 9, 12 months. So, we did one of those check-ins today. We talked a bunch about the stuff that he really knows about, which is Silicon Valley and VC World, and then talked about what the vibe shift is looking like on Trump. It's not shifting as much as we would like. A little spoiler alert. So, that's what's on this podcast. We also have the Next Level podcast. So, if you're looking for just a politics fix, you can just pop on over to the Next Level feed, me, Sarah, and JVL, as we do every Tuesday. So, go give that a listen. Download it if you're not subscribed to the Next Level feed. I guess one more thing before we get to this show. Jason's a big mix fan, so we discussed the potential of a Trump curse. And he was worried about a Trump curse. It turned out that he was right. Trump showed up to the game, made a massive hassle for everybody in midtown New York, salted the vibes, fell asleep. Trump actually fell asleep for a little while. He rested his eyes, lengthy rest, about a 22-second eye rest during the third quarter, and then he left early. So, as a result, the next 13-game winning streak is over. Don't know who else to point to on that, except for Donald Trump. It would really be something if the whole series, the whole vibe of New York, the whole trajectory of society shifts, because Donald Trump decided he was a 12-year-old and wanted to do... What is J. Mark calling it? The Make-A-Wish Presidency? The Big Presidency. You guys remember the movie Big? The Big Presidency, where he gets to be a little boy that does fun stuff with all the grown-ups. So, that's what happened last night. I'm enjoying it. I've got some buddy, sore listeners, sore next-fans. I'm sorry that Trump hexed you, but hard not to enjoy it. So, anyway, stick around for me and J. Cal. It gets a little hot in the second half, so hopefully that'll give you something to get your dander up. And if not, go check us out on the next level, and we'll be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. Appreciate ya. Hello, and welcome to the Bollard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Happy to welcome back to the show a journalist and entrepreneur turned angel investor. He's the co-host of the All In podcast. He's the best of the four, not really a competitive category. He just hosted the liquidity summit, a private investor summit for LPs, fund managers, and elite entrepreneurs. That's fancy. It's Jason Calakannis. What's up, man? How you doing, brother? Big fan of the show. Nice to be here for my second appearance. After five, you get the blazer, I assume. Yeah. Isn't it third? I think it's third. I don't know. I think you should make it five. It is third. Notice your third appearance. Is it my third? Okay, sure. Well, you know, I'm a big fan. I went back and checked the archive. Your last appearance was at the six month mark of Trump's turn. And we did a little check in now, like a year and six months almost has been quite a year. So we'll do an update. We'll get to that. But first, I just for some people know, we're taping this Monday afternoon. And so this will, this is a Tuesday show. So we don't know if the next of one game three tonight. I'm surprised to see you at your home studio because I've seen you not quite court side like, you know, row two, row three semi court side. I had court side for the wrap up game in Atlanta, the massacre. Yep. And I flew there with my brother. I went to Philly with Ben Stiller, my friend, fellow name. We were court side for the Philly game. They tried to block us. I was at two of the MSG games, but like you said, third row, because even with my incredible micro celebrity, you understand micro podcast celebrity. You just did a little better than me. Your shamelessness. And you're out there on X just being like, who has court side for me? I don't have the, I don't know. Well, I mean, I pay for them to be, to be honest, but yeah, but I do use the power. I mean, if you, what's the point of having a million followers on Twitter, if you can't just use it for customer support. I agree with that. That's fair. Like if something's not right. And then Cleveland, they blocked us from getting court side. So I had third row and I went to the spurs, both games. I am going to predict tonight the Knicks are going to win. And I think they're going to demolish them by 15 points, 20 points. Why are you not going? You're scared of Donald Trump. You don't want to deal with the hassle. You're worried he's hexing your squad. There was some bad juju here with Trump going. There's some bad juju. It's bad juju. He should not have done this. You should not make the fans show up three hours early and he got rid of the watch party, which has become this huge tradition. Yeah. He's the president. He can do what he wants, but I would have preferred him to do it. I was going to come in for it, but I've decided I'll just come in for game four. Kind of a dick move. Yeah. And he's even a fan. Like do you think he can name anyone from the 1999 team? I mean, I guess you went. He used to go to games, but I don't know if he went to the games primarily because he was friends with JD or if he went because it was a celebrity thing to do. But he has not been going since. So I don't put him in the Timothy Chalamet, Spike Lee. He's not part of our group. And I put myself into that group just based on fandom, not celebrity. To be clear. Well, I, based on your strong prediction on the next, I'm going to fade you based on some of the predictions you've made that we're going to get into from the Trump. Okay, here we go. Yeah. I'm fading you. You can fade. I'm betting on the. What's your team, by the way? Were you a Pelicans fan or something? I'm Nuggets. I'm Nuggets. I'm 10 for Nuggets. Yeah. And yeah, rough playoffs for us, but I'll bet on this first tonight. Modest wager on draft Kings and we'll see the listeners will know who's right before we get to Trump. Yeah. You know, because who knows how that'll go. I want to kind of get into your main area of expertise first. We'll talk kind of what's happened in Silicon Valley world AI. I don't know if you'll take this as a compliment or an insult, but I feel like you're a fair arbiter of conventional wisdom. Unlike where the Valley investor class is on things like how things are going. Yeah. And so rather than putting on your Jason hat, I just want to start there. Like where is the Valley right now on the economy broadly and also the AI stuff in particular? Let's start with AI. AI is like every previous technology wave put together and then times 10 in terms of the impact, the opportunity and just the capabilities of what's happening. The last time I was on the show or maybe it was two times ago, we had a clip go viral where I said, listen, Amazon is going to be lights out in their factory. It's all going to be robotics and they have zoos. So they're going to be delivering packages. And the idea that a human would touch a package between like you clicking order on Amazon and it showing up your doorstep will be insane or farcical in but, you know, three, four or five years. That went crazy. Shortly after that, Andy Jassy wrote a memo saying, Hey, we're going to be going all in on AI. We're going to have a different staffing level. He laid off a bunch of people. And then the secret memo got leaked that they weren't going to hire 600,000 jobs and the PR team is like, how do we deal with the fact that we're not going to be hiring humans anymore? Maybe we should give money to toys for tots. I don't know if you saw all this. Not cars for kids, notably given some of their baggage. There could be. Yeah. And then if you watch, there was the figure robotic company also doing humanoid robots had like a telethon where they had one of their robots sort packages. And so this timeline is increasing. So it is a huge opportunity and the tokens, which equal intelligence are so compelling for people to use that people are spending too much money on them. They're like going crazy using them and you've had to reign in employees for every story you hear that this technology is going to change everything. You'll have people who don't know how to apply it. But we use two terms in the industry, AGI and then super intelligence to keep it super simple. AGI means the artificial intelligence is as smart as a smartest human being. Super intelligence means it's smarter than all collective human intelligence for all time and it will solve problems we can't even think about like we can't even conceive of. The race is really for super intelligence. AGI is like a little waypoint along the way and that waypoint prints money. It prints money. And we have this grand debate on all in all the time. We have it publicly about job displacement, job destruction, universal basic income and people in our industry have delusions of grandeur because we've done big things. Right. You do have this God complex amongst the anthropic people or you know, Sam Altman, Elon, the whole group really has done some things that have changed the world dramatically. And then some of them are drama queens. And both. And some are both. Some are both. Yeah. Some fit both. Okay. So I was listening to one of your debates maybe from two weeks ago on the show where you were more concerned about job displacement than some of your co-pamels. I was talking to a little bit of Derek Thompson last week. Smart cat. Yeah, really smart. What he was basically saying is like, I don't know. He's like, I know that's not what I'm supposed to do because I'm supposed to do an explainer podcast. And he's like, I hear compelling arguments for the fact that, you know, AI is going to, you know, actually create so many efficiencies and so many potential opportunities that they'll be at with job growth. And he's like, I see the apocalyptic version as well, you know, where there's huge displacement, obviously the displacement in certain types of industries, no matter what. But, you know, the question is how is it on balance? I find it interesting that like there was a lot of, I feel like conversation about this over the last year, there continues to be, but like feeling like it was imminent. And I don't know, I sense a little bit of a vibe shift where like maybe it's maybe this stuff isn't happening as imminent as people thought. What do you make of that? Yeah. So multiple things can be occurring like a storm, right? You can have multiple components of this weather pattern. And some people it's going to flood their neighborhood and other people it's going to the weather in San Francisco might be more like Los Angeles eventually, right? In LA might turn into a hellscape and be like far too hot. So the weather system is very complex. And so Derek's right, hard to predict. So what do we know? What are CEOs of companies and what's their behavior? It's always helpful to just look from first principles like a game on the field. You had Jack at square block just cut the team in half. Now in technology, we always bloated these companies. Why? There were two reasons. One of them strategic, one of them sinister. The strategic reason was let's hire people because we're continuing to grow for a year or two from now. If we hire ahead, then we'll be able to move faster. Okay. That's strategic. Every company's been doing it for 30 years. The sinister one is what Google did early in the days and I literally had this conversation with the principles there, Sergey and Larry many times. They would hire people based on intelligence, pedigree, Stanford, Harvard, MIT. Horde them. And they would hoard them. They would hoard talent, but it was not just so they could use it. It was so those people didn't create a competitive company to Google. Right. So it was a blocker strategy in addition to, hey, we have this natural resource. Pretty sinister. Now with AI, you can get rid of middle management. What is the job of middle management? It's to set up meetings, keep people on track, provide TPS reports, project updates, all that stuff is being done perfectly and better and more consistently by AI. The number of note takers that pop off when you start a meeting on Zoom now, like Notion has one, Zoom has one, Granola. It's like, how many versions of this meeting do we have to have records of? So that whole job slice is going to be gone. Then you take self-driving, that's going to be gone. Truck driving, that's going to be gone. Factory workers, that's going to be gone. Simple food production, making bowls, slop bowls at whatever bowl place you like to order from, that's going to be all robotic. The writing is on the wall. The Starbucks has come back. Starbucks is kind of a countervailing story to that narrative because they got rid of it. What makes us uniquely human? We might drive more human experiences. So that would be the addition. So hey, this thing is so profitable. Maybe we should add some services or add some people. There's nothing more compelling to a chief operating officer, a VP of ops than the ability to replace humans with technology. They love it. They love it. How do I know this? Because for the past 10 years, I have invested in and been pitched on companies explicitly, explicitly, Tim. Our company gives you the ability to get rid of all cashiers at your quick serve restaurant. Our technology allows you to get rid of the person making French fries at your restaurant over and over again. That's been the pitch in Silicon Valley for decades and it has increased massively. So when technology people say it's not happening or they say all jobs are going away, they're talking about two different things. One is trying to protect Donald Trump from supporting AI relentlessly and that job displacement happening, which liberals and America First people are not buying for good reason. And on the other side, it's unrealistic to think that an AI first employee can't get a job. If you're an AI first employee and you know how to deploy these tools, you will get many jobs. So long term, I think we'll be okay. Short term, you could see a lot of blue collar jobs, a lot of middle management jobs get retired and that's going to cost chaos. Okay. My last thing is the other thing that people worry about is the new jobs like new out of college. I know that you have a big internship program. I was just talking to some interns here about this question. It was funny. I saw this Bill Marcliffe. I kind of hate to hand it to Bill Marcliffe because he's had some misses lately, particularly in the war. But he had this funny bit about what's happening in colleges right now, which is that college papers have just become a circle jerk. It's like a computer circle jerk. It's a circle jerk of nonsense where the AI is writing the paper and then AI is grading the paper. So it's like two computers talking to each other. No one's actually learning anything. No one's getting real feedback. It's a very dystopian concept. He made the joke. So I asked a couple of recent college grads about it and they were like, yeah, oh yeah, that's exactly what's happening. This is why they're booing at commencement speeches when you evoke AI. This is the first generation that hacked their way through school and felt like they didn't learn anything because they were just using AI tools and they felt their teachers were using the same AI tools to teach lesson plans. And so they're like, yeah, my whole college experience was AI slop. They got a reason to boo. And if you're running a company right now, the concept of training somebody for two years to be productive or a year to be productive eventually, when you could train an AI to do that, Toby from Shopify, who's a good friend, said anytime anybody wants to do a hire and they put in a request, they have to prove that they haven't tried to do that job with AI first. Very logical approach for a company, but devastating for those first two or three rungs of the ladder. That's why this feels a lot different than, you know, minimum wage debates, which we can get into. This feels a lot different than immigration and people working illegally because elite people who racked up 150, 250K in debt now can't get the first rung of the ladder. That's going to cause a whole different level of hand-wringing here. Yeah, their parents are going to be mad. Talk about who, you know, who votes the 55-year-old parent of a 22-year-old who just spent $150,000 on college and their kid can't get a job. That is a person that fucking votes and donates and who has... Their vocal. Yeah, and who's vocal. So anyway, that'll be interesting to see all that play out. Well, I guess one more thing on this, on the politics, speaking of the vocal pushback. The other area is the data centers. Where do you fall down on this? Yeah. On the great data center debate? Just so people understand my politics, my contemporaries on the podcast like to paint me as a libtard. And it's kind of like a strawman thing. But you voted for Trump this last time. I never said who I voted for because I'm trying to remain independent. Okay. And I don't think... You strongly alluded to the fact that you were interested. You were Trump curious. So you're the live on the pod and you were Trump curious 24-4. We'll get into it. I'm a moderate. You're moderate. And have always been an independent moderate. I voted 60% Democrat and 40% Republican in my career. I just vote for the best person. If you were to tell me I could vote for... Who is the private equity Republican that everybody hated so long? Romney. Romney. I would like to vote for Romney in a heartbeat right now to have a centrist. I might even vote for Pence to have a right-wing conservative, but who's normal. I'm voting for normal. That's what I would like to have. So just so people understand my politics coming into this, I'm an independent and pick people generally that way. But your question is more... Obviously, the big tech people are... Make very passionate arguments about all these data centers are needed. They're needed to fund all that compute that you were talking about earlier. There's high demand for these tokens. They are creating jobs in the communities. Within the communities themselves, there's just been a lot of pushback about environmental concerns, displacement, electrical costs, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just wondering where you think that's headed. It's a great debate filled with a lot of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt by one side. And then it is essential for our industry to get these things up and running and to get them up quick because it turns out when you put a lot of this hardware on a problem, it can in fact solve it. So sometimes the brute force of it does work and the demand is off the charts for access to more tokens and to lower the price of tokens. As you know, everybody talks about Jevons, Paradox, which basically means if you make something cheaper, people use it more. If you want an example of that, you expand the 405 freeway by two lanes, all of a sudden traffic moves quicker for like two months and then people move a little further out and it induces more traffic. On the data center side, my politics are very much in favor of state rights and local rights. I like the fact that if people in Maine or New Hampshire have a problem with this, the folks in Pennsylvania might seize that opportunity or Texas. Texas wants every data center you can build. We have the largest install base of solar and wind outside of China. I mean, this place loves energy and they don't care where it comes from, oil, NAC gas. They're indifferent, solar. As long as it makes a buck, that's all they care about. This is union economic positive. The thing about water is a fake news story. The thing about energy and in fact, in the grid is a real story in some cases. You have to parse that. The water thing is fake because all these systems use closed loop, which basically means the water goes in a pipe and it evaporates a little bit, but it uses much less than the almonds or golf courses in the country. Yeah, the fucking almonds. The fucking almonds. Fuck almonds. It's almond milk. It's a mid nut anyway. I'll go pistachio all day. I mean, who's eating all these? It's chewing medicine. Cashews. Cashews are incredible. You put a cashew with the date, you're in good shape. But anyways, the water is a fake issue. I like the fact that people are competing for these. Let the states and the people who don't want it ban it, let the states that do want it benefit from it. That's one of the great reasons why the United States is so successful is because we have an A-B testing process. We can multivariate test something. What they're doing now is the data center folks are chasing power and they're chasing power that doesn't impact locals. If you go to the Permian Basin and you get some Nat gas there and some solar and battery, you're not harming anybody. Great. You can build it to the cows, come home and putting them in spaces. The next thing, the third one you haven't heard about but that you will is people are going to start giving free batteries and solar to people's homes. And then in the rack where the batteries are, they're going to put 10 of these NVIDIA servers. So imagine I offered you for your home, hey, would you like solar and would you like battery and would you like a free electricity bill? And you'd be like, yeah, what's the catch? And it's like the catch is we're putting a mini data center on the side of your house. It's the same size as your existing HVAC. Water cooler or whatever. Water cooler. And that's going to be a real thing. And I think that'll be the bridge between now and space. So it's kind of a non-issue. It's an interesting flag. It's a little dystopian to be continued. Estate planning, not that fun to think about and easy to put off. You have to deal with lawyers and think about what would happen in the case of the worst. But it's one of those tasks that's hard to start but gives you a peace of mind when you get it done. And our friends at Trust and Will make it easy. Trust and Will offers affordable attorney design estate plans that you can create in as little as 30 minutes. And that 30 minutes is pretty key. I'm not a paperwork man. I don't like doing paperwork. I am also a procrastinator. Not really about podcast stuff but about the rest of life stuff. I just realized as a matter of fact that it only booked me and my husband's ticket for this flight that I'm about to get on in one hour. Realize that yesterday. Did manage to squeeze my child in there. So don't do this. That's not how you should plan your estate planning. We pull up Trust and Will. They make it as easy as possible. Simple for even a guy like me. 30 minutes in and out. Check some boxes. They make it as painless as possible. Trust and Will. Affordable estate plans. Priceless peace of mind. Go to trustandwill.com slash bulwark and get 20% off. That's trustandwill.com slash bulwark to get your 20% off. Trust and will.com slash bulwark. I want to do Elon stuff for you into Trump. You're on buddy or relatively buddy just an issue of transparency. Friends for very close friends for a very long period of time. So there's been a lot of critiques here at the bulwark over the manner in which the SpaceX IPO is going to happen in part because of the fast tracking of the NASDAQ breaking the traditional rules of how a new IPO gets into the NASDAQ. Also I mean Kara your friend, Kara Swisher was on lap two couple of weeks ago. She hates me. Karen Swisher is very angry. She is so angry. But I think on this case, Wright was kind of got the valuation of the company being kind of absurd. You know, there's like really one good company, which is the satellite business. And then you have like two not that profitable companies, one of them actually a shit company kind of tied onto the satellite business. And it's sort of absurd with the valuation. It's like, what's the case for the Elon NASDAQ? The least one is never bet against Elon because he manifests things in the world. You're going to talk pretty well betting against him on the process of cutting government funding through the Doge process because he totally failed at that. And has inspired another round of it that looks like it's going to be quite successful. Well, I don't think Elon can get credit for all of government cuts everywhere. The program that he was in charge of failed. I think he did inspire it and put it in front of him. So did it work perfectly? But I think he inspired people to make it a top political issue. We're talking about this 30 years ago. So I don't, you know, And did they make any progress? I guess is the question, but now you have people taking it up, realizing it's an important issue to Americans. I can put that aside. Your question is about SpaceX. There's an incredible business in Starlink. Starlink has over 10 million people subscribing. That will wind up being the largest subscription business in the history of humanity. Probably double what you see from Netflix. Why? Because they're going to go directly to your phone eventually. If you've seen the Starlink mini, if you've seen the progress that putting it on boats, most people are putting it on their houses who can afford to as a backup to their cable modem. Like, if you're a broadcaster from home, you might have Starlink as your backup. I assume you do. I don't, but I've been considering it reluctantly. Well, think about this. For $1,000 or less, you can have a backup and you make $20, $30, $40,000 per podcast. How could you not have it as a backup? You can get this router from Unify that just automatically switches over. Putting that aside. I'm in hurricane country, so it would be wise. It would be very wise for you to get a battery pack and that. I'll send you a link to the router that does the hot swapping. Okay, thanks. Do you have a promo code at Jason? I don't for it, but I have one for Roco if you want a GLP. If I could interest you in a GLP, yes. Here's the good news. That business alone will support the valuation. The second business is- It's a part of the $2 trillion valuation. Yeah, 1.75. For sure. For sure. Yeah. It's not inconceivable. 500 million to a billion people will have one of those. In other words, there'll be one for every 10 people on the planet, Ballpark. That gets you to 700 million subscriptions. If you think that's crazy, just look at Netflix. They provide a service for Ryzen, gets past 100 million. And it's quite disruptive when it starts going to your phone. I don't know if you've ever had to use the satellite. The version that's in the iPhone and you can get text messages. Their version of that's going to be much better. Much much better. And it's going to be sold to every phone. Every phone on the planet will wind up paying a dollar a month to- Just to give a baseline. I hear you. It's starting to give a baseline on your honesty. Do you think that Tesla is appropriately valued? All of Elon's companies get valued like venture capital businesses. venture capitalists invest in like what is the next business that's going to drop five years out, six years out, seven years out. Most public companies get valued on their existing performance. How much did you sell this quarter, et cetera. So if you look at Palantir, if you look at SpaceX and you look at Tesla, yes, they're essentially valued like a VC business, which means they're fully valued and you could wait. You don't have to buy these stocks in the public market. You can short them. There are many devices for you to not participate in this. The reason why Tesla is doing particularly well and has kept its value is because of Optimus and full self-driving. Optimus will be what that company will be remembered for. Huge opportunity. So what he keeps doing is he keeps building the future and then people value it as a venture business. So you're right. As a public company, the valuation doesn't match. For venture capitalists, it does match. It matches what we do. What about the NASDAQ fast track part of this? Is this too ridiculous? And those of us who invested in the index funds feel like we're forced to support Elon's grift. We don't like that. You do not need to be an index funds. And if it is unsustainable. A lot of people are an index funds. Well, I mean, if people really do have a problem with it, you could make a synthetic index fund without them in it. And if people do feel it's that way, Vanguard will take them out. It's still unfair though. I mean, if you and I were starting a business and did an IPO, NASDAQ wouldn't change the rules for us. I'll be totally honest. I don't know exactly how it came about, but I do think it's a distinct possibility that the company will trade at 2.5 trillion and then come back down to 1.2 trillion. Many people I talked to say it's undervalued at a trillion. They say it's overvalued at 2 trillion. So we're in the general neighborhood of where this will be valued properly. If it trades at 1 trillion, it's undervalued. If it trades at 2 trillion, most sharps, people who are in this business who I talked to, you mentioned the liquidity conference, most folks believe 2 trillion would be overvalued 1.4, 1.5, like probably appropriately valued. While we're in Elon world, I want to talk about X and the kind of echo chamber that has gotten created there. We have this very prime example of it this week with the Spencer Pratt mayor race, everybody on X. And we went through a series of time where the critiques- It's crazy. They all- I said it up just because the original critique of X, I think from Elon, part of it was a free speech element that people were getting silenced. And then another part of it was that it was this liberal echo chamber. It was not really the public square. And when he took it over, a lot of people like yourself and others were arguing for it because we want a public square that is without influence. And now it feels like we've just depends on the switch the other way. And now we have a center-right echo chamber to right echo chamber depending on the topic. And I think the Spencer Pratt case is like a prime example. It's like, if you only consume that race through Twitter, you'd have thought he ran the best campaign that's ever been run in the history of politics. He ends up underperforming Trump in Los Angeles. And now everybody on there is thinking that's a conspiracy theory that he lost when he just lost. Yeah. So two separate issues. On the issue of the breakup of X where blue sky is falling, threads in the libs all went to those places. And then what remains is anonymous based, right, MAGA, America first, and then business leaders, I would say is the other piece that's still very tight over there. It's kind of a bummer. It was kind of magical to have everybody sparring in one arena as opposed to multiple arenas. I go over to blue sky and like, you know, it's kind of the opposite mirror world, right? It's two bizarro worlds. Over there, they think like Trump's about to get arrested for, you know, some grand conspiracy and he's dying and he's going to have this like heart attack any day now. Like it is very weird. And yeah, I kind of miss when everybody was on one platform, you could have a more reasonable discussion. I mean, before you page is the thumbs on the scale though. I mean, obviously, for you pages, you can just look at the data about like which account is the only person who has open source the algorithm. And so you can go load the algorithm, you can point to the GitHub where it is and you can say, please tell me how to perform better with this. I did it. My team did it. And it will explain to you exactly how to do it. So I think what it is, is when you perceive the thumb on the scale is that if you take out all the libs and Karen Swisher is not there and prof G is giving up on it and, you know, they don't want to participate, well, then what does the algorithm have left? It's only got the Spencer Pratt like, you know, they're got homeless people who were given crack and meth to sign their account. I mean, is elevated. It's based. A little bit of doubt. And like the amount of people say, whatever. Well, he was always the number one or number two user, him and Obama where the neck and neck for the number one and two. This is my one compliment of the new for you page is if you get out of politics space where I think it's pretty obvious that there's on the scale of which kind of stuff is being elevated. I'm trying to think about an example of something recently where I was I was interested in a niche topic. It was a foreign something that's happening overseas. I forget what it was. And I searched for a couple of things and I clicked on it. And the for you page all of a sudden started giving me a quite valuable step. Instantly. Yeah. It is quite good on that. It's almost too powerful. I find like, you know, you you're like, oh, I'm interested in this Jalen Brunson, you know, analysis. And I'm like, okay, guys, I do want to know outside of the Knicks what's going on in the world. I agree with that. Like I could use 15% not Knicks content or whatever. But it is pretty powerful. But you know, I wish everybody tick tock in Facebook, Instagram would release their algos as well. And eventually, and I've talked to Elon about this a bunch. But I think he's probably going to go in this direction, which is BYOA, bring your own algorithm and an algorithm store. So imagine when you loaded it, it said, hey, you're currently using the default algo. Would you like an algo that is 50% you know, the most important news in the world as determined by this intellectual AI that was written by this person, and then 50% your stuff and a slider that you can pick. Like those kind of options, I think will eventually be available on X. Americans are carrying over a trillion dollars in credit card debt at rates north of 23%. That is more than $200 billion a year in interest paid mostly by households who happen to be sitting on the largest pool of untapped home equity in US history. Think about that for a second. You own a home, you built real equity in it. 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Go to AVEN.com to discover your offer. That's AVEN.com. AVEN, stop overpaying for capital. AVEN accounts are arranged by AVEN Financial Inc. and MLS number 204-2345. AVEN accounts are issued and held by Coastal Community Bank, member FDIC, equal housing lender. AVEN cards are issued pursuant to a license from VisaUSA Inc. Terms and conditions apply subject to credit and property approval. Visit AVEN.com for more details. So, there was somebody that posted about you the other day and how you are a representative of the change in the Elon algo. And I have to admit it was pretty compelling, multiple screenshots. I want to give you a chance to weigh in. The first post was a tweet you sent, I don't know what, about six years ago. Take the R pledge, please. I know it was a funny word from our childhood, but it causes folks a lot of pain and we need to retire it. That was September 2020. I lost that argument. June 20, 2006, Jason posted the following. Stop being retarded. Start retard maxing. Being retarded means you are ruminating and overthinking. Retard maxing means you're making decisions based on your gut instinct. Stop being retarded. Start retard maxing. In six years, you went from saying, take the R pledge, don't say this to doing a post that has the word in like nine times. Do you feel like you've been manipulated by the algorithms? No. When I grew up in Brooklyn, that's all we called each other. Then for a period of time, it was like, it was hurting people's feelings. And I felt like maybe this is probably not a good idea to do this because I have a friend who's got a mentally challenged brother and I felt bad about doing it. And now I just think... I noticed you didn't call the brother the R word. No, obviously not. Now I think it's now people have put the word into the proper context that like, we're not talking about people who have Down syndrome. We're just talking about the actual inherent nature of the word. And then on top of that, there's a new trend which is retard maxing, which means just going with your instinct. And if you haven't seen the guy who does these, he sits on his back deck and smokes a cigar and just talks about using your instinct to enjoy life and not ruminate, which I kind of believe rumination is the path to unhappiness in life. Like too much rumination, not good. So I'm a big fan of the retard maxing. Well, balance and all things. I think zero rumination is maybe the path to being sociopath. Introspection, okay. Okay. Introspection, okay on the margins. But rumination is when you just take introspection to a level of like OCD is I think. But yeah, sure. I've changed my position on it three times in my life. Just culturally though, like, I don't know. I don't actually care that much about the specific of this word. I think the people should use words. Speaking of using the hard word, I think that like voting for Donald Trump to be the president of the United States because you wanted to say retarded has to be the most retarded thing that a person could possibly do. Yes. That is completely retarded. Because the president of the United States has all of these like very important goals and like whether or not you can say a word without being criticized is really not that important. I think it was more symbolism of like, of the overreach of cancel culture would be how they would say it is like word policing. And I think it's just an overall debate about the overtune window. Like, are we allowed to talk about certain topics or not? I mean, I look at the 2020 Jason and I don't know, you're showing empathy. Like other someone in your life has, I do have that feeling pain and you don't want them to feel pain. And like, don't you think that's a good instinct? Isn't it bad that now we've gone to a place where people are like, oh, it's cocked if you care about somebody else's pain. It's based to just make fun of people and be a dick as much as possible. Like that's bad. Right? Yeah. I can hold these conflicting thoughts in my mind, which is one, I'm not responsible for the overtune window opening and closing. And if people want to say that's gay to me, like that's dumb or they want to say that's retarded. That's out of my control to them. I don't know. What's in your control? What you say is in your control though. It is in my control. And I think if the public vernacular is we can separate the intent of the word retarded and say like, that means you're not thinking in a crisp way. And people say it in a jovial way. I think we can separate that from the use of it. Like, I would like to make fun of this person with Down syndrome, like and make them feel as bad as possible. Speaking of the R word, let's get to Donald Trump's management of the economy and the country. Oh, it's lately. When you're on with your six month assessment, when we're on last, what prompted our last visit just to kind of set the parameters of the conversation was there was a video that had been posted on DAX that was of your colleague on the All in Podcast, David Friedberg talking positively about the Trump administration to date and you kind of jibing him a little bit, giving him a little trouble. And then you posted the link to that video by saying, you know, we're six months and your assessment is that it's been pretty solid. He still has work to do. I want to listen to the original video just so we can have a baseline. Let's look at it. Tim's got receipts. But what better team has ever been put together? It is a cabinet of CEOs. It is a cabinet of managers and people who know how to get done. And every time I go there, I'm impressed by this cabinet. I pull my hair out when I need it. So when you went with that, you're pro-Trump. I support my president. I support the president. So you voted for him. You voted for him and you love Trump. I love what he's doing. Your colleague loves what he's doing. He's in the administration now. He's in that science group that Sax is running. I'd have got the name of the P-Cast. So Friedberg said, I love what Trump's doing. You said at the time he was pretty solid. You both agreed that the cabinet was strong. Sure. How do you feel a year later? There are a series of things that are complete, unmitigated disasters and there is consensus, I think, from all Americans when you look at his historically low popularity that none of us wanted to get into an endless war in the Middle East. That was like top of the reasons to vote for Trump. And now that has made... If you're awful. If you wanted to be too... Well, I mean... Yeah, sir. I have to say, you know, he made a pretty convincing argument because he didn't start any wars in his first term because you had people who were hawks on both sides who very much wanted to engage in maybe being a little more active in Ukraine and a lot more active in the Middle East on both sides, right? Whether it was Nikki Haley or it was Hillary Clinton, they wanted to go hardcore into Iran. So he actually made a very convincing argument. Now why did he switch his position completely? I think Marco Rubio said it the first time and the first time was the correct take. They got dragged into it by Israel because they said they're going to go anyway and he decided to do it. Huge mistake. Terrible, terrible decision. I think the ICE stuff was incomprehensibly cruel and poorly executed and you heard me give J.D. Vance when he was a candidate a hard time about that at one of our events. I said to him, hey, you can't drag 20 million hardworking Americans who just happen to not be legal yet out of this country. People are going to take their phones up and record you dragging their nanny, their handyman, this dishwasher. Americans are not going to go for that. And I was exactly right about that one. He plummeted in his approval rating because of those two things. The tariff stuff was poorly executed, but the right idea. We should rebalance trade like that. He just did it in his normal YOLO nature. So if I were to put together the biggest disasters since we've last spoken, Iran is just an unmitigated disaster and it's going to kill his presidency. I think there's consensus about that. I'm not like in politics all day long, but there is strong consensus that that was the biggest mistake he could possibly have made. He cannot get out of it reasonably. And he lost Tucker, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, everybody in his group because of it. Yeah. I mean, I guess I do wonder what... And this is something we spent a lot of time on last time is like, what I never understood about why CEOs got behind him in the first place and why smart people would get behind him is that it's just the risk. He was erratic. His whole career has been erratic. He bankrupted casinos. He bankrupted an airline. He's posting late into the night. I think what we did last time we were on is I was like, if you were doing a VC, you were doing a VC vet of a CEO, you would never invest in a company that had this person as a CEO because he's just a total erratic shit show. But it's a binary choice. And if the choice was Kamala, after what Biden did to the economy and after what Biden did to M&A, if you talk to any CEO, they need to have low taxes and high M&A and they are pragmatists. They represent their shareholders, their employees, et cetera. And they looked at the option of Kamala versus Trump. They're aware of risk analysis. I believe. Okay, but it sounds like they did it perfectly. I think people would say I was ridiculous if they came on and I was like, I don't know. Trump could get us into a nuclear war. What's the stock market? Kamala's not. And here we are. We're not on the cusp of a nuclear war, but we're on a cusp of a total unpredictable disaster that is way worse than what... Kamala would never have done anything this stupid. It would have been just status quo. Kamala started the war for sure. With Iran. You think Kamala would have gone to war with Iran. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. Why? Nikki Haley, Kamala, all of them would have known. Well, they're not the same. Kamala's a Democrat. Nikki Haley's a neocon hawk, Republican. They both are very pro. You think the Harris Walls administration was going to do a war of choice in Iran? Yeah. For sure. I mean, Joe Biden didn't go to war in Iran. Barack Obama didn't go to war in Iran. Bill Clinton didn't. Why would Kamala Harris have? I think because the timing was there and Israel was going to do it anyway, which is what they said, the reason they did it. Oh, I think if Israel was going to do it, they would have followed them. That's just my gut. And I had Kamala's foreign policy guy, Phil Gordon, on this pod. I asked him that exact thing. And they all said, I just don't know why you wouldn't take them at their word. I don't... Okay. So back to your question about CEOs though, and why would they pick this person? If their main goal was to do commerce, do they have access to this administration? Yes. Do they have lower taxes? Yes. Are there stocks at record highs? Yes. So in their minds, as hard as it is for you to believe, this has worked out perfectly on those three things. M&A is back on the menu after years. IPOs are going to be happening, lower tax, lower regulation, and the stock market's at an all-time high. And OIMN is at an all-time low for all lifetime. So they're looking at that business game on the field, and they're not thinking about ICE. They're not thinking about the conflict in Iran. Yeah, sure. Well, what about the tariffs though? And you say their taxes are down, but most of those companies, not all of them, some of them are being tariffed. In consequential. Some of them Donald Trump stole from. He stole from them. How is that more inconsequential than their personal tax rates? Well, not corporate and personal. They already are treating the tax code anyway. Capital gains, everything. And the corporate tax rate went down a couple of points. You asked me why they would make this decision. They make an economic or rational decision. I'm offering the counterpoint. This is what the Democrats need to learn for the next cycle is to embrace business leaders and to bring them into the... Okay, let me get your countertake. This is how they think, and they've won big. I understand. I understand. But this is where I think the Democrats are in a real conundrum, because I want to give you a counterfactual. Kamala Harris did win. She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies unilaterally. It doesn't go through Congress, puts a tax on them. It's not legal, but she just does it. She says, it's an emergency. I've decided I have the right to do whatever, windfall profits tax on all of these companies. I'm going to do that. And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it. Sometimes she doesn't, kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they've given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, no, actually you've got to give the money back to the companies. And she says, no, actually don't want to. I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to threaten them. And maybe I might actually take a percentage. Donald Trump just suggested, I might take a percentage of the company for the government, I think. If Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies on the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds. And it would, communism- So you're making this analogy to tariffs, obviously. This is what Trump is doing with tariffs and taking a percentage of Intel, suggesting he's going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. That's left-wing autocratic politics is what he's doing. Yeah. I can educate you as to why they don't have a problem with it and why you do. You are looking at it from a moral perspective and from a logic perspective of like, well, if you were OK with one side doing it and not OK with the other side doing it, this doesn't make intellectual sense to you. It doesn't. Totally understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense. Let me tell you on a business level what this means. The tariffs were, when they're under 15% when they actually hit, are easily absorbed in one side or the other. The folks who are selling items or the folks who are providing those, they each make a bit of a concession. And maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it's not as dramatic as the left feels it is. It was chaotic, but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact. And you find it offensive reasonably so that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line in South Park, you know, get a whole send up of it, that you have to bend the knee and make your donation. That's what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. You may think it's wrong. Business people love to have a coin-operated situation. I guess. You guess? The Democrats also, this whole Biden thing is crazy. He didn't even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised taxes. You can tell me that fine, the tariff thing is inconsequential, etc. Inconsequential, yes. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in 93. All they've gotten is cuts from Obama, from Biden. They haven't faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years more. Why are they so upset about the Biden situation? Biden didn't return their calls. So the tariff isn't a big deal, the phone call us. That's fine. Actually, it is. You're brushing that off and this is where you have a blind spot, Tim, respectfully. You have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration and then you can shape policy and you can say, Hey, here's what we're trying to accomplish. And hey, can you help us with this? And this regulation doesn't make sense. That actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if what you have to pay for, I'm not saying this is my belief. You have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side. I'm explaining it to you. They much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook's like, I got to show up for a documentary that sucks. I got to bring a gold bar. I'll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones. I got to keep the supply chain open. Yeah. But he just retired. I don't know. We'll see how that goes. If President Ossoff gets in there and he decides that he wants to. He's just that he's going to put an actual tax hike on these guys, but he's going to return their calls. We'll see what they say about that. Yeah, I don't think that they'll be that happy. I think that there's an imbalance. At Little, say yes to a summer of indulgence and pick up juicy deluxe Aberdeen Angus beef burgers and save 60p with little plus. Now only 3.99 for a pack of four. Make your summer even more delectable. Little more to value 18 plus GB only. Whilst stocks last season sees apply to little.codyk slash LPTV offering 17th of June. I want to play Howard Lutnick with your colleague. OK, that's another thing that's like you guys just keep being wrong about how good Trump is for the economy, not you personally. That's mean the people that make the case that Trump was going to be better. Well, which part of the economy is the question? Yeah, but she must interviewed for your show, Howard Lutnick. This was January of this year. I wasn't on this one. You weren't on it. You weren't. But it's interesting. It's an interesting time capsule from January this year. Let's listen. You're going to see five in the greatest economy in the world. You're going to see five. And people think you can't. You can't. Five percent GDP on a base this big is just it's. Right. We have a 30 trillion dollars. So five percent is one point five trillion in growth. And if we cut rates, you'll see six. Six and people do not would never before. Donald Trump walked into that office. They would don't think that's possible. Yeah, we wouldn't think that's possible because I was insane. We're looking at maybe two percent economic growth, GDP growth this year. They were close to those numbers, by the way. If they hadn't done the Iran war, they would have hit four percent and they would have had potentially some cuts. But if you start a war and you do a supply chain shock with energy, you essentially take the Trump 2.0 agenda and you torch it. Correct. Which is what's happened. Why haven't more people come around on that? And again, I would think that Chimath, for example, I know you don't like to speak for your country. I just in theory, if you had a VC and you brought a CEO in and they're like, hey, man, you invest in me right now, you get behind me. We're going to have six percent growth this year. And then six months later, they like stuck their dick in the fax machine and like screwed everything up. And now they're at two percent growth with maybe negative with maybe going down. Quite a visual. Yeah. You'd be like, OK, well, see, turns out we need some new leadership. I'm calling the board here. I have some concerns. Yeah. So why isn't that happening? Why aren't people like we're calling the board here? Oh, very simple. Very simple. Trump demands complete fidelity. I'm not speaking about Chimath here or anybody specific, but we all know in order to be in the Trump circle, you have to have complete utter fidelity to him. He's a genius. So it's North Korea. We're in North Korea. Basically, I think he doesn't feel like again, like a capitalist system. It doesn't feel like a capitalist system. Yeah. Well, it's I can't critique the president. Capitalist slash, you know, if you told a bunch of business leaders, this could become oligarchic. They'd like sign me up. Hell, yeah. Sounds great. Oligarchie sounds pretty great to a capitalist. This is why we're fucked for a short period of time. Can we agree for a second? That's why we're fucked. This is why we're not going to get. You said you wanted normal. I'm sure you and I would disagree on the margins and what the marginal tax rate should be for the top tax bracket or whatever. But like maybe not. Maybe we wouldn't. I don't know. But we're not going to get normal because these guys have decided that they want to they want to go on with oligarchie. They decided that it's cool for Elon to become a trillionaire. They decided that they can't abide any even tiny tax hike on capital gains, rates or corporate. So what they're going to get is pitchforks and socialism. That's what they're going to get now. I do think they're driving the socialist movement. If and I've talked very broadly about how to reverse that. I think we need to have a very open discussion about minimum wage and a fair free market version of minimum wage for a long time. But then I started studying what happened in New Zealand, Australia and Norway, Denmark. You know, these are obviously slightly different than the United States. But if we want to correct the socialist movement, which is gaining steam and someone like Bernie Sanders saying, hey, listen, they stole all the content from us and the knowledge and then we should get half the company. I mean, they did. They did. Yes. Of course. And some of it is legal. Some of it's not legal. If you buy the book, you're actually allowed to train on it according to the courts. But if you steal the book, you're not putting all that aside. It is a great sales pitch from Bernie. When I saw that, I was like, oh, man, this is going to play. This will play in 2026 and into 2028. What I think we need to do as a society is look at that K shaped recovery. And it's like, you know, one group's going down, one group's going up, invest America, the Trump accounts is a great step in the right direction. Adding a dollar to the minimum wage for each of the next seven years and getting it to $15, it might seem performative, but it would actually be performative in a good way. It would say, hey, everybody on the top is doing really well with equities. Let's get these people to move up and let's look at that. Then I think universal health care is like another easy way to kind of bridge this gap between capitalism and socialism. And we do have to have, you know, some kind of grand bargain that occurs because I do think the country is on the verge of just splitting into states that are going to be like Nevada, Texas and Florida and states that are going to be like New York and California. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. I think that and that's why I like having this discussion and I wish some of them would come on and we could talk about it. But this is what I think that the CEO class and the elite VC class and Silicon Valley needs to realize is they don't change the way they talk about the stuff and change the way that these these things are regulated that the pitchforks are coming for them hard. I mean, this is a noticeable pivot. Not really. And there's been a this pivot that continues in Trump 2.0 about like, oh, giving money away is for suckers. Like the whole like the whole Bill Gates vision with his own issues, vision of the world is like different. We want we want no regulation. We want to stop, you know, doing charity. All that stuff is happening. People are aware of this issue. You know, when Sam Waltman's house got firebombed and then shot out by two different people in a 10 day period. Trust me, that was talked about a lot by the same CEOs and elite venture capitalists you're talking about. Then there's the folks at Anthropoc who are saying like, all jobs are going to go away. We need to contain this. So the industry has done a terrible job of communicating why AI is good for society and the good that could come out of it. And we have not done productive things like, say, the giving pledge. The giving pledge, again, super performative when it came out, but saying, hey, the majority of my wealth is going to be given away upon my desk. First you say, going is good, though. It made people feel like, hey, maybe we're all in this together. And what Michael Dell did when he gave $7 billion or whatever it was, these invest America accounts, that needs to happen 10 more times. Yeah, maybe next time without getting a $9 billion deal from the Department of War two weeks later. And this is the thing, like these guys, I hear what you're saying, that they like it, they're happy with oligarchy. They're happy to deal with Trump. But like some on the left listening to this will probably be like, look, capitalism has always been fake. It's there's always been, you know, crony capitalism, like Tim, you are sold a bill of goods, maybe. But like when there's a period of time where people did the performative part of it, whether it was the giving pledge, whether it was like actually committing to a real free market where there's competition, that created an environment, you know, where the capitalist system could thrive. And they have now gone all in with somebody, no pun intended. That is an assault on it. He's like, I'm just going to do deals with rich people to find me off. And I'm telling you, the reaction to that is not going to be, hey, let's go back to more friendly relations with the corporate leaders from the Democratic class. The reaction is we're going to do the same thing. We're going to use our power to bully these guys the way he did. And you're not going to like it. That's what's going to happen. That is concerning the law fair that keeps getting escalated. What we really need to start thinking about is, you know, the Democrats winning the midterms. And I guess if they win the House, they get subpoena power back. They win the Senate, then they can do hearings and a little bit more. And stop appointments. Yeah. So some of these appointments were ludicrous, you know, Pam Bondi, Christie Neum. Pete Hagseth, no. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of these are quite embarrassing. And, you know, he's given them promotions, I guess. Can never make a mistake. He promoted them, gave them a better windows. Ambassadorship. There needs to be checks and balances. That's the other thing that's kind of broken here, both on the Republican side. And I guess they did break the Republicans brains with this slush fund for the 1.7 billion. So maybe that's a sign that the Trump era is ending and Republicans are going to take the party back. Either way, this thing's over in two years, right? So we're going to have to start thinking about a post-Trump world and hopefully having more monitors. You're skiing, buddy. Tucker might run. Yeah, I think he's probably more interested in getting ratings for the show. I think he likes doing his show. If you look at all of those performative folks, I think it's just about ratings, whether it's him or Karen Swisher or Megan Kerry. I think they just want ratings, you know. At Little, say yes to a summer of indulgence and pick up juicy deluxe Aberdeen Angus Beef Burgers and save 60p with Little Plus. Now only 3.99 for a pack of four. Make your summer even more delectable. Little more to value. 18 plus GP only while stocks last. Season C's apply to little.co.uk slash LPTV. Off rent 17th of June. I have two more things for you. I don't know how much you got. Three more things. We'll go rapid fire. Three more things. Rapid fire. Here we go. Zoran, you have to look at that. And be like, that's not as bad as you thought. Um, I mean, Zoran's been pretty good. In what way? Certainly. Well, we're six months in. You did a six month Trump assessment. I look at Zoran and I think he kept the police chief. Crime rates are down in New York. People are worried that he would go in and it would be, you know, he's good. It would be on the side of the criminals and they would like give out hugs instead of having cops in the subway and like none of that happened. He's gotten rid of some of the red tape around building. They're planning to, they're planning to build the budget. They got balance. They had to kind of deal with Hocal to deal with that. He did the, the kind of performative populist left thing going after your boy at Citadel, um, for, for having a, for having a pietitare in New York. Yeah. That was not good. That's kind of fine populism. That's fine. No, I'll tell you why. This is where you have another. They should pay more. This is another blind spot. If you don't live in New York, you have a pietitare. You should totally fine with the pietitare tax. If you want to do that, it's fine. Locally, like I said, local communities can do what local communities want to do. If they want flock, because they want to have a secure community or they don't want flocking, they want to ban it. That's like a local community's decision. Let them do it. What is, and you should be appalled by and you should speak out about is when he picks a specific person and puts a target on their back. We just talked about Sam Altman having a firebomb and they, them shooting in his house, but there's kids in the house. Then you do this to the Citadel founder. That's the kind of stuff that gets people killed. And, you know, it's not cool to do that for a politician to say, Hey, this person is the reason why the city sucks. This person owns a penthouse. You don't, that's going to get him shot because there's a lot of crazy people out there. Mondan, he should have apologized for that. He should have said, this is a great New Yorker. I think he did say he's like, we want him here or whatever. But that was completely disgraced. He had, and it's disgraced. He had, if you don't call it out, every time you sing, you'll one of these people call out violence, but I don't know, man. I think that it's okay. You don't see the problem with saying, Ken Griffin, I wouldn't have done in front of his house. I don't think I would have done in front of his house. That would have done in front of his house. You're a decent human. Yeah. And I don't think Mondami would have, you know, I think that it's fair to do some populist eat the rich stuff. I mean, people are mad for good reason. Right. Be careful. Ken Griffin can afford it. Yeah. But you don't want to. He can afford an extra tax. Yeah. So again, two different topics. Are we targeting individuals and sending crazy people to murder them? Obviously, no. That's insane. Obviously. And then that's the problem with singling anybody out. You start singling people out and you're saying, this is the reason why you're suffering. Don't be surprised when the United healthcare. That's fine. I mean, the president, you know, we could just do this. Oh, no, the president doesn't. I'm not, you will not get me here defending. No rich people get mad at him. So again, that's just what I'm like. I, the crocodile tears about Zoran going after Ken Griffin. It's tough because, you know, Donald Trump doesn't all the time and they don't do that because, oh, they're scared. You can't be mean to Trump because nobody should do it. The fake capitalism. Okay. I'm doing this, I swear not to pick on you, but because it illustrates a point, but people have been making fun of you. Someone social media, because an email you sent to Jeffrey Epstein and then the Epstein files and said, Hey, pal, hey pal, running out to a kid's birthday party will dig up their info. He was trying to connect you. And to me, I thought, I thought this was an instructive exchange because you're not involved in any of the scene stuff. All that was happening. You guys were, it was, he was a network or he was a power network or you're a power network or, but I think that one of the reveals from the Epstein files is that people in elite circles are too lax about going along with and taking favors from people to do bad things or vetting people or vetting or things. That's sort of suspect, right? You know, it's, it's one of these things where it's like, look, if I heard that one of the other parents on my kid's basketball team was a pedo, I think, you know, I'd keep my distance and have my kid keep my distance as much as possible. If I heard that, if you hear that about, what's the question? No, I'm getting to it. If you hear that about somebody that can help you get a job or can help you get access to capital, then all of a sudden it's like, well, whatever, who cares? We'll do a little deal with him. And in retrospect, like, don't you feel like that maybe the lesson from the Epstein thing is that people should use more judgment and this sort of circle. Well, I mean, in hindsight, of course here, I'll give you the, I'll give you the complete background to it. My book agent, John Brockman, ran something called edge.org. We're all scientists got together and I would go to the Ted conference. He was there. He was giving donations to everybody and I wasn't following it. I wasn't following his career or anything like that. My book agent said, you know, Epstein, and I wasn't following his case to be totally honest of that first case in Palm Beach, I guess that happened. And he said, hey, Epstein, who you've met at like Ted twice and he was going to invest in your magazine. I had one meeting with him about that back in the day. He said, um, hey, he wants to meet those guys who are on your podcast. They're doing that Bitcoin thing. And I was like, yeah, sure. And I say, hey pal to everybody. That's like a New Yorker thing. Hey pal, sure. Thanks pal. I mean, I'll say it to the valet. It's not like you can read into that anything. Of course the Epstein file people do. And, uh, he was like, would you mind introducing Epstein because he wants to invest in these founders? My business is connecting, as you said, capital to founders. I wasn't really even tracking what he was doing. And in fact, I went back and I did some research on it. The way it was framed to New Yorkers when he came back from that Palm Beach, uh, sentence he had was that he was framed. He got a massage. The girl had like a fake ID and the Palm Beach person let him work from home and he had to report to jail at night and it was just like trumped up fake charges. But like I said, I wasn't even following it. So sure you got me. No, no, this is not a got you. This is a serious question and we'll just end with us and you can give a next prediction we can end with that. But it's kind of related to the, to the retard maxing thing, which is like, I feel like that as a culture, like that, that maybe we should be valuing, particularly people at, in elite circles, like, you know, valuing judgment, valuing character, you know, and, and instead I do feel like we're creating a culture where people are like, you know, it's actually, it's actually cool to, you know, signal that you're a little bit of a dick. And if somebody that you do business with is slimy, it's like, who cares? As long as you get yours. No, I don't, that's not my belief, but maybe it's some people's belief. I walk away from many deals based on character. I just wasn't happy to following that one. Oh yeah. But you don't feel like that is, you know, something that is, um, pervasive now, particularly if you look at Elon's feed from day to day, people mock the notion that, you know, we should be, you know, caring more about character and virtue. And I don't know, does not the Epstein thing reveal that like, maybe we should all be a little more judicious about all of this rather than the opposite. I mean, trust me, I've thought about it since this happened and like, oh my God, is there anybody else in my circle who has this going on? Or like, even when I take selfies now, like, you know, you get, you get stopped now for selfies. You on your tour probably took a thousand selfies. One of them's a serial killer, Tim. Do you endorse serial killing? And so the Epstein story was a lot of people that were like going to, this isn't you, but it was a lot of people going to fancy going to these dinners. And it's like, Hey, do you want to come to this dinner? Woody Allen's going to be there and so and so is going to, and Howard Lutneck's going to be there. Do you want to come? And there's this instinct that people have, like, hell yeah, I want to go on a network and shouldn't we be trying to model an instinct that's more like, you know, maybe I should value character more. Maybe I should value virtue more. Maybe I should be doing business. I mean, I, I've always character, I've always valued these things. So you're preaching to the choir on this one. Do you think Elon has? I have walked away from many of them. Look at Elon, social media now. I don't speak for Elon. I mean, every time I'm here, you do this. Oh, what does Elon think? What does Chumot think? I don't know what these guys think. He's going to ask them. Look at his social media. Elon is like, it is a walking vice signal. He's basically, he basically makes fun of anybody that tries to, to offer that, to care about. Have him on the program and you can go through his 40, to 40 tweets a day. You don't have to come. I'm not following his 40 tweets every day. I don't know which one you're referring to. All I know is you don't think that this is a problem. And an incredible, you know, business person, but I don't have like every mistake he's made. You don't think this is a cultural problem then. In our culture, I think the, I think, you know, if we do have a cultural problem right now is that we don't have people working together collaboratively in our government anymore. And that, that needs to come back and more moderation and working together. I hope that when Trump is out of office and in this midterm, we can return some balance to the various branches of government and get out of this partisanship. That's what I hope. Yeah. Well, hi, Griffin. Nixon four or five, six? I'm really concerned about this President Trump, Juju. You know, I'm like a pretty superstitious guy when it comes to the NICs because I've suffered for since the nineties over this team. I'm a little worried about him showing up and then the chaos that's going to ensue. I don't know why he's doing this, but I still think my original prediction was Nixon six. And having been at the first two games, I'm now at Nixon five. I do think it'll be a gentleman's sweep. In San Antonio. That would be convenient for me. How do you, how do you recover if you're Wimby? I mean, that game too, that was about the worst thing I've seen since Chris Webber called the time out in college in 1993. Yeah, throws the ball and is back. But you know, the NICs built up a 12 point lead. They have an incredible young squad. Their guards have been incredible on Jel and Brunson. They're beating the hell out of them and they're letting them play. So you can't argue about calls here, but the NICs are a team of destiny. And it shows what happens when you just have a very deep team that's healthy going into the playoffs. Last couple of years, we weren't healthy. Tibs didn't develop the bench at all. And now you just look at like bridges and do's and heart and Jose, like we have this long tale of incredible players and everybody's healthy. It really is like getting to the finals and winning is about how healthy your squad is at this elite level. But yeah, Wimby is not ready for it. He will be, but he's not ready for it now. And man, the fact that Carl Anthony Towns owns him and then, you know, Mitch Robinson has been doing a tremendous job on him. I kind of feel like he's on par with Mitch and I think Kat's dominating him. So total advantage gone. The guards have been playing great. What do you think? What's your prediction? Six? I mean, the NICs have been, even when the NICs were losing in the first quarter of the game on game two, I was texting my friends and I was like, they just seem better. Like they're getting better shots. They just weren't, you know, it just took a little bit for them to get in. So it's kind of hard for me to see the NICs losing the series, but there's a part of me with my Trump derangement syndrome that does want to see four straight spurs wins. Like just to have the juju get totally stopped. Oh, so brutal. I'll carry you. And I do love Dylan Harper. I bought my daughter Dylan Harper Jersey during game one because that guy is such an all. Like it's unbelievably 20 years old. 20 years old and he's the second best player on the team. Incredible. I see. So fun to watch. So anyway, that's what we're at. I forgot. I forgot to ask you about crypto stuff. So we'll have to do it again another time. Yes. I'll come on again. That's a good time. And tell your color, you know, tell Chimoth and Freebird. You have, you keep taking it for the team. Okay. Like get out of there little cozy to you. I know, but tell them to get out of their cozy little bubble. You know, I don't buy it. Here's the thing. You, you, you'll have to understand, like I said earlier, like if you're, it's a tribal sport now, you cannot break once you join the team, whether it's Trump or the other side, if you have Trump derangement syndrome, you can't break from the team. If you have Trump dedication syndrome, you cannot break from the team. I've never joined either team. I had the opportunity to be on both teams. I politely declined. I like to be independent. You have, what do we have? Two years and seven months left to just fully come on board. The door is always open. Which, which group? Mine. Which group? There's no hope to go under the Trump dedication team. It's all going to get worse from here. So if one morning you wake up and you're like, you know what, this is this little tinkerbell inside me the whole time that knew, that wanted to be with Tim, that knew Trump was terrible, but I just, I couldn't quite get all the way there. I like Rahm Emanuel. Yeah, there you go. You like Rahm Emanuel. I've been texting with Rahm Emanuel. Have you? Like Josh Shapiro. Yeah. Well, I think that Rahm Emanuel's message would go over a lot better if it was, if it was coming out of the body of someone besides Rahm Emanuel. It was good. I don't have anything against personally, but I just, I think that the Democrats are going to be desperate for somebody outside of there. There's not been part of the kind of Clinton Biden-Harris era. I just think they're ready to, to move forward. You think they're going to just go full AOC, Mondani? I don't know. It could be AOC or it could be somebody else from the center. I just think that like it's more like they don't want the baggage. I don't think, I think Democratic voters want to move forward and wash away this 12 years, this 12 year horror show that they've gone through. And I just find it very hard to imagine that the voters are like, you know what, let's give somebody from the Clinton era a try. I think that they want a fresh start. So that's my thing. I think he's super competent. That's the thing I like about him. He's super competent. I would like to have a competent moderate on either side. All right, brother. I'll talk to you. We'll see you on board. That's Jason Calichana. So everybody else will see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. Peace. The board podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer, Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.