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

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Oracle. TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ DevSquad. TWIST listeners can get 10% off at http://devsquad.com/twist Ramp. TWiST listeners, get $250 when you join Ramp today at https://www.ramp.com/twist Todays show: Jason & Alex discuss Palantir's valuation, possible opt-in empire building for the United States and the incoming presidents appointments pulling from tech and VC. (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (0:22) Approaches to population growth: immigration and opt-in empire building (1:40) Live streaming and show schedule (2:09) Introduction of Alex Wilhelm and seasonal greetings (3:41) Jason's Twitter controversy regarding Palantir (7:06) Palantir's financial analysis and market comparison (10:27) Oracle. TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ (13:41) Deeper dive into Palantir's valuation and growth (18:18) Memestock caution and market dynamics (19:03) DevSquad. TWIST listeners can get 10% off at http://devsquad.com/twist (20:21) Jeff Bezos' fake wedding and Michael Saylor's Bitcoin strategy (22:17) Cultural takes on weddings and Michael Saylor's media attention (22:55) Defense tech: Palantir and Anduril's consortium (27:18) The rise of entrepreneurs in defense technology (28:45) Ken Howery's ambassadorship and US geopolitical strategies (29:49) Ramp. TWiST listeners, get $250 when you join Ramp today at https://www.ramp.com/twist (31:13) Funding ambassadorships and their significance (34:10) "Opt-in" empire building for US growth (42:40) Government's recent strategic hires (43:45) Evaluating new government hires and their impact (50:30) AI policy advisory and Surem Krishnan's role (56:09) Investment accreditation and securities law evolution (1:02:15) Modernizing securities laws for new assets (1:03:59) Emil Michael appointed under secretary for research and engineering (1:06:45) Michael Kratzios and emerging technology assistance Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:27) Oracle**.** TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ (19:03) DevSquad. TWIST listeners can get 10% off at http://devsquad.com/twist (29:49) Ramp. ****TWiST listeners, get $250 when you join Ramp today at https://www.ramp.com/twist Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I think opt-in empire building is a great goal for our nation. I think our goal should be to get to a billion Americans and have America be the most populous and the most innovative country in the world. Now, how do you get to a billion from 350 million? You gotta triple. And there's a certain amount of, you know, population growth through babies, but let's just say people aren't making a ton of babies. So there's two ways to accomplish this. You gotta immigrate people or you gotta do a little empire building. Opt in, of course. Maybe there's countries in Europe that would want to be. Maybe Greece wants to be part of the United States. Wouldn't that be great for me if Greece was the 51st state? If they wanted to?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Why Greece?

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Because I'm Greek.

• 0:43Jason Calacanis?

  And because we created man. I mean, we created democracy. America perfected it. This would be full circle for me.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. I did not know your heritage. So I'm like struggling demographics. Famous debt load. I'm like, dude, I'm not picking Greece.

• 0:58Jason Calacanis?

  That's why I think it's an interesting concept.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at oracle.com/twist. Dev Squad. Most dev agencies only offer developers. Why? Because product management is hard. Get an entire product team for the cost of one US developer plus 10% off at devsquad.com/twist. And Ramp, the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money. Get $250 when you join Ramp today at ramp.com/twist.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. We call it Twist. You can call it Twist if you want to. We are doing the show three days a week in 2025. Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. Trying to get consistent, about 10 a.m. start Pacific. Sometimes we're a little bit late. Sometimes we get a little early and set up the show. You get to watch us live about 25% more show live on YouTube X and LinkedIn. If you sign up for those services, just search for This Week in Startups there. Search for Alex, search for myself, and you can follow us. Turn on the bell on YouTube and you'll get an alert when we start. We take questions from the audience and a couple thousand people show up live across the platforms, which makes the show a little more dynamic. We get feedback in real time. But if you're part of the podcast

• 2:21Jason Calacanis?

  gang, that's okay. You can join the Noti gang, N-O-T-I, the notification gang by going to YouTube, clicking the bell after you subscribe and putting on all notifications. You can do the same on X, X.com/TWI Startups. With me again today, the one, the only, he's cautiously optimistic, Alex Wilton.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Hey, hey, hey, Jason. Two things. One, we finally gotten snow out here. So now that I see your background, I can also just see it out my window. Fewer skiers, similar look. And I just wanted to give a holiday shout out to all of our friends out there. This is a short week for Twist. It's a short week for pretty much everybody. If you're a Christmas person, or if you are a Hanukkah person, may you please enjoy. This is a gift from a friend of mine who knows that I like Happy Meal. But I think it's a good moment to dig through the news and then we'll send everyone off for a short hibernation and then we're back on Monday.

• 3:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, back on Monday. All right. So you got us today, you get us Monday, and we're going to do the Twisty Awards again, I think, on Monday, right?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  We are going to do Twisties.

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  Great show Monday. We'll do our Twisties, the annual tradition. Before there were the Besties, I had started the Twisties. You started thinking a theme here, a lot of the all-in bits and stuff like that were built off This Week in Startups, if you're an all-in fan here, especially my Saks and BAGA fans who come here to troll me. Welcome. We love to talk a little bit of politics, but only in relation to technology here.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  We're not just going to talk about like random stuff, or Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, or whatever. Here is for, you know, overlapping tech and politics, which we're going to do today, a whole bunch. And first up, over the weekend, I got I stepped into the Palant- you know, sometimes I step in something, Alex.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:59Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if you've ever seen this on X, but sometimes I step in something.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I- I've seen it several times now.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  So I- I walked into a hornet's nest. I didn't realize Palantir-

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  -had an army of individuals who are very enthusiastic, like our friends with Bitcoin or the XRP army.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:19Jason Calacanis?

  There's- there's an enthusiastic, vivacious, effervescent group of individuals who would love the company Palantir. Now, I've known Palantir forever. Joe Lonsdale's a friend. He's been on the ship program. Uh, he's the co-founder, and I love the CEO, Alex Karp of Palantir. He's so based. But it is a somewhat expensive stock that people are really promoting. And when you see massive promotion, especially on social media like X or YouTube, it's like X and YouTube seem to be- have won the conversation in finance. That's when I get a little bit of radar going up. So I thought today we'd start with, since so many people were like dunking on me.

• 5:02Jason Calacanis?

  Um, there was an all-in clip that came out-

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:05Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, which we'll put in the show notes. I don't know if we should play it here or not, but-

• 5:09Speaker 01

  No, we don't need to go through that.

• 5:09Jason Calacanis?

  We don't need to go through that whole thing, but the clip was basically me joking about, I guess, we were talking about Cloudflare or whatever, and I just made a joke about how Palantir was deep state. Because you know, Saks loves to talk about the deep state. Palantir is as deep state as deep state gets. Saks is a shareholder. Joe Lonsdale's a co-founder, obviously a shareholder. Everybody we know is a shareholder. It's the founders who run the company. And I was just like, yeah, they're deep state too. And- but somebody tweeted as if I was saying the stock wasn't and trying to say I was making a stock call on it. I wasn't making a stock call on it. I was just joking about it being- there was no discussion about the stock price.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Well, Jason, I- I had your tweet. So Jason, here is your tweet about this. You make an argument that really speaks to my soul, because you're talking about price earnings ratios and price sales ratios or just sales multiples here.

• 5:53Jason Calacanis?

  Let's read the tweet, yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Okay. So the people listening- Jason says, "I think we were joking about them, Palantir, being part of the deep state, not stock price, but at a 400 price earnings ratio and a 65 X sales- Multiple exclamation points. Looks like a good time to take some profits on the name. In fact, and this is spicy, insiders told me they are selling into this insanity.

• 6:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know. I overheard.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  To Sax.

• 6:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Sax was like redouging the tweet.

• 6:21Jason Calacanis?

  And listen, he gets a lot of calls, right? Obviously, it wouldn't be where he is if he wasn't smart. So

• 6:26Jason Calacanis?

  a lot of people I've heard, you know, like at cocktail parties or whatever, you know, I literally heard folks saying, hey, I'm trimming at this level. I hear that. Now, I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know how much they have. I don't know if they're trimming one share or billion shares. I'm just saying, the buzz I've heard from people who maybe own shares is, hey, this is a good time to maybe uh, trim if you got in very early. You know, you could be certain if, you know, Robinhood, Uber, uh, you know, DoorDash, or other companies that I own shares in, uh, including Facebook, uh, Google, I don't know, Apple. I own a bunch of different uh, individual stocks that I've made trades on, or I own from another private companies.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  If it was trading at 65 times, Sal, uh, you could bet I would be trimming my position. Now, this is not financial advice, but I, I just wanted to ask you, since you're, you know, a deep data finance nerd, which is why we're here. Where does Palantir's multiples, and this is a great company with a great CEO and a great team, incredible growth. I know they're growing like close to 30% year over year, something in that ballpark. And, um, you know, I, I, this is just a discussion over the price because once I added Palantir, I don't own shares in it, uh, although I think I might own shares, uh, through like, you know, uh, mutual funds and stuff like that, obviously.

• 7:47Jason Calacanis?

  I was just trying to wonder how expensive this is right now.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:52Jason Calacanis?

  Cause that, when I, when I did add it to my Apple stocks, there was a lot of stories about, oh my Lord, this is an incredible run up.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yep. So one thing I think it's important to show is just how quickly the company has appreciated in value. So we're going to go ahead and pull up a chart now on the screen and this shows Palantir's price sales ratio. Now, Jason, for those who don't know, price sales in public market terms is last 12 months revenue, four quarters, divided by, sorry, it's your valuation divided by your sales, essentially. This chart goes vertical as we approach the last couple of months. And I think this type of appreciation makes people greedy and very enthusiastic. But when you see a chart like this, Jason, that goes vertical in a valuation terms, it makes you wonder what's driving such insane near-term appreciation. Yeah?

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So we would know in the case of, say, Eli Lilly, it was the, you know, Ozempics or Zepbound or whatever. We would know, because I'm assuming their chart does something similar there. Although their sales did skyrocket. So then we might see a similar chart with an Nvidia, as an example, when they moved from just doing, you know, their main category being gaming GPUs to server farms becoming the majority of their revenue. We've seen those charts before. So there can be explanations for massive acceleration. Somebody could get a huge contract, right? You could have somebody from, let's say, the CHIPS Act, you know, Intel or TSMC could get

• 9:21Jason Calacanis?

  a couple of billion dollars in loans or grants dropped on their head from the US government to build a foundry in the US. So that is not unprecedented. And I guess Palantir sells into the government. Peter Thiel's biggest bets were Facebook, JD Vance, Trump, you know, Palantir, Founders Fund itself. I mean, he's got an incredible record. And I don't know if anybody's ever had a betting record that dipped into politics like this, because now with these appointments, which we'll talk about next, it's looking like a lot of Thiel folks are in the are in the administration. Let's keep going.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  I want to, I want to stay on the price sales point because you asked about the Nvidia chart. And if we could just share the screen again, here is Nvidia's price sales ratio, Jason.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And actually, not what you and I both expected, which was a vertical ascent up into the right. It's actually been relatively static since, I don't know, it's actually where it was in mid 2022, which is shocking to me. This just goes to show that Nvidia's valuation has scaled as its revenue has also increased so quickly that it's actually kept up with the appreciation in its value.

• 10:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's talk about AI, everybody. It's everywhere. Self-driving cars, breakthrough medical research, and of course, business tools that make everybody better and faster at their jobs. If AI hasn't hit your industry yet, trust me, it is on the way and it's happening fast. But AI requires a ton of computing power. You know that, and those costs will skyrocket if you're not careful. I have seen these bills come in. It can get crazy quick. And that's why it's time for you to upgrade to the next generation of cloud. And that means Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform that covers all the bases. Infrastructure, databases, app development, and of course, all your startups' AI and machine learning needs. Now here's the kicker.

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

  OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for network compared to other cloud options. That's a lot of savings, especially when every minute counts in the cloud. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including MGM Resorts, Specialized Bikes, and Fireworks AI. So here's your call to action. Right now, if you switch to OCI, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half for new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment. But you'll need to act fast. The offer ends December 31st, 2024. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com/twist. Oracle.com/twist. What this does is that people are looking

• 11:55Jason Calacanis?

  at the valuation in relation to sales. They're very attuned to what the top line sales is, sales line, the sales line is. And then they're doing the math to say, what's the price of sales ratio here? What's reasonable, given their growth? And they were doubling revenue a year at one point, I believe.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Oh, Nvidia, more than that?

• 12:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's three-digit growth year over year is unprecedented.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  It's absolutely insane.

• 12:22Jason Calacanis?

  15% to 30% is high growth in public market companies. Nvidia grew like a startup, a Series A startup, going from three to, you know, 10 million or 10 to 30 million, which does happen. You showed the Google chart at one point last week. So this is discount. Connected from reality.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  But.

• 12:39Jason Calacanis?

  But yeah, give me, yeah, no, no, you tell me what, because if this is just, is it disconnected from reality?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  So.

• 12:47Jason Calacanis?

  I don't, I'm gonna check with you.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so I, I went through their last earnings report and I just want to point out that, as you said earlier, this is a really good company. So revenue growth last quarter, Jason, thirty percent, seven percent quarter on quarter. And I would say more importantly, inside the US, revenue growth is forty four percent.

• 13:05Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  So very impressive.

• 13:07Jason Calacanis?

  Unbelievable.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Customers count up thirty percent year over year and GAAP profitable, so their net income had a twenty percent margin in the last quarter. And they have about a billion dollars in trailing operating cash flow. So profitable, kicking off cash, growing quickly and increasingly diversified customer base.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  So where does Palantir sit? I guess, you know, putting things in context, super important. Are there other companies trading at sixty or seventy price to sales ratios right now in the market? I asked ChatGPT and Gemini. Gemini wouldn't give me finance information. Come on, Google.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Really?

• 13:42Jason Calacanis?

  I know a lot of, yeah, a lot of the Googlers are listening to the show. And I've been, because we've been given so much great praise to what they've been working on, but I couldn't get the Google finance and the Google finance teams behind. So where does Palantir sit versus other stocks when we look at a price to sales ratio?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:00Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, the, this all goes back to startups. There is a time in which your valuation can get ahead of itself. And that happens in private markets. You know, the people who are giving the investments in those cases have downside protection. They're called protective, protective provisions. So they get their money out first. So if the company does get sold, and let's say I put ten million dollars into your company at a billion dollar valuation.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 14:26Jason Calacanis?

  Um, for about one percent of it. And the company's making ten million dollars, so it's a hundred times revenue. It's a hundred times, um, you know, price to sales ratio. Well, if the company was sold for fifty million dollars or ten million dollars in a fire sale, my ten million dollars comes out first. That's what happens with private stock. That's why VC's will make, you know, crazy bets, like, or seemingly crazy bets. On a stock that's high growth and to beat another venture firm. So if you're a venture firm, Acme, and I'm venture firm Delta, and you offered $500 million valuation for that startup to put 10 million in for 2%, and then I come in and I say, I'll put 20 million in for 2%, so I'm going to pay twice the valuation. If we're both believe this is going to be a $100 billion company,

• 15:11Jason Calacanis?

  all I'm doing is losing the gain from a billion to 2 billion that you're insisting on getting, or 500 million. The difference between 500 and 1 billion, you're getting that first double. I'm saying, you know what, I'll give up that first double. I'll just play for everything after it. And that's why you see crazy valuations in private markets. In public markets, typically people like to make money, and they don't have that downside protection. So they're like, well, let's make sure we reevaluate every day the stock market is trading. What makes sense here? And this, obviously, I guess the correlation here is we are going to have a more efficient government under Trump 2.0. That's their promise to us, the American people. If we take them at their word, and I actually do at this point, we'll get into that in a minute,

• 15:55Jason Calacanis?

  that they want to lower spending, they want to lower the debt, and they want to have a more efficient government. Well, where would you go to have a more efficient military? You go to Anduril, you go to Palantir, you would go to SpaceX. These private companies have lowered the cost of getting to space or building missiles by 90%. So then, of course, you would go to them. So Palantir does have a bright future. Maybe that 30, 40% growth is going to go to 60, 70% growth. Maybe it is the next Nvidia, and that's the bet people are making.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  So Jason makes a great point about other companies that might have a similar set of accounting or perhaps a similar focus. I found a couple of names, Splunk, Tableau, and Alterix are all companies that we think of when we consider big data and perhaps visualizations of it. Sadly for us, Splunk was bought by Cisco for about $28 billion in March. Tableau got bought by Salesforce, and Alterix was taken private by Clear Lake and Insight. So where does that leave us in trying to understand where Palantir sits?

• 16:50Jason Calacanis?

  So we don't know for those three what the sales were at that time? Or we have a guess?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I don't recall the exact price sales ratio of those companies, but the point is they're off the table and they're off. Table far enough in the past that I think they wouldn't be directly comparable to Palantir today. But two companies that are Jason at least related, one is C three dot AI does AI stuff for the enterprise. Currently trading at a price sales ratio of 13, so about one fifth of what we're seeing from Palantir. And that was as low as about 10x in recent quarters. And then the other one, when we think about big data warehousing, leveraging that information. Snowflake, a very well run company. We've talked about them here on the show a lot. Well, their price sales ratio today is 16.2x when as high as 24 in the last couple of quarters, Jason.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  But I couldn't find anything at scale in these areas that had a price sales ratio, revenue multiple of anything even approaching Palantir. But people are willing to overpay for expectations. And so when you look at, you know, Trump media or, you know, whatever you call that company.

• 17:55Jason Calacanis?

  Donald Trump, yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  People will pay for it.

• 17:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, people will pay for it. Okay. Well, so a great company, probably dipping into meme status. If, when I talk about it, so many people are like, have fun staying bored. Like when you see people pumping, pumping, pumping, that's when you know that you should be more cautious. I'm not going to say that's when you know there's like funny business going around. But literally this weekend, there was a fake news story about Bezos spending 600 billion on his, or 600 million, not billion, on his wedding.

• 18:29Jason Calacanis?

  He's spending 600 billion on his wedding. Everybody who comes is a billionaire.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Right. You get a free billion dollars in your goodie bag and your Nintec.

• 18:35Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. So, no, it's, and so Bezos had to come out and say, I'm not spending 600 million on my wedding. Do you know what the first reply I saw to his tweet was?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  What was it?

• 18:46Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Saylor. So go ahead and.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Oh my God, are you serious?

• 18:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, go ahead and do a search for it. Look for Jeff Bezos and you'll find it. It is the funniest thing I've ever seen. All right. Take a second and picture the ultimate all-star team for your startup. Okay, you got that mental image, maybe the Avengers, maybe even X-Men, Wolverine, Cyclops, pick your favorite superhero team. And let's be realistic, until you've raised your Series A or your Series B, you might need some help building that dream team and finding top-tier talent, managing all the timelines you've got, and maintaining quality. It's a big lift for all founders. I mean, scouting for that elusive 10x developer, that's going to eat all your time. And that's where Dev Squad comes in. Think of them as

• 19:31Jason Calacanis?

  like Professor X, you know, they, they know where to find those exceptional mutant developers who are 10x devs. And Dev Squad offers a complete product team from Latin America. You're going to get two to six full-stack developers, a technical product manager, and specialists in case you need them, like product strategy, or UI and UX design, Dev Ops, and of course, quality assurance, all for 75% less than a US-based team, while being on your same time zone, which is really important. There's no long-term commitment, it's just seamless collaboration. So if you want a GSD, if you want to get stuff done, and you're ready to squad up, head to devsquad.com/twist for 10% off your first engagement.

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

  That's devsquad.com/twist, and transform your startup with the all-star team it deserves. The story comes out. Bizarre to even see a story like this. Press not doing themselves any favors. So the press, if you scroll up a little bit, you'll see the top. The press, you know, did the story, which you can't see here, about the 600 million. So Bezos comes out and says, furthermore, this whole thing is completely false. None of this has happened. In the old adage, don't believe everything you read, is even more true today than it ever's been. Been throwing shade at the press, I'll go over and watch the post. Now lies can get all the way around the world before the truth can get its pants on, so be careful out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Michael Saylor's reply.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  $600 million would buy a lot of Bitcoin. Here's the thing, though, Jason, that's not true. Because in Michael Saylor's estimation, anything less than $2 or $3 billion with a Bitcoin purchases is just chump change. I mean, he's out there buying real Bitcoin, not that $600 million fake crap.

• 21:09Jason Calacanis?

  That's a like an interesting segue here. I'll just give you another tweet. As of this morning, December 23rd, Merry Christmas.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 21:19Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Saylor reports Michael Schreiber just acquired 5,262 BTC for 561 million.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Dang it.

• 21:27Jason Calacanis?

  600 million. He literally bought the 600 million last week.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I have never eaten my words so quickly in my life, but I do want to make a small point there about the press comment that you made, which is we are discussing the New York Post.

• 21:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Which I believe is part of the Murdoch empire.

• 21:44Jason Calacanis?

  You know, the New York Post isn't the one who reported it. I think they were reporting that it was fake. So.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So you know how the press is somebody, if one of the outlets gets something wrong, the other press pile on about it.

• 21:59Jason Calacanis?

  But of course this led to crazy chaos online, but yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I'm trying to say what $600 million for a wedding. I mean, that was that's like buying a castle, tearing it down, rebuilding the castle, tearing it down, rebuilding it, and then inviting everyone in England. Like, I mean, that's, that's a lot of money.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is crazy. It's not true, obviously, but there was, I mean, it's not without precedent. Wasn't precedent, wasn't the, an heir to an Indian fortune? Didn't he just throw like a hundred million or $200 million wedding where he paid? You know, a bunch of major celebrities, just giant appearance fees.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  And Bonnie family.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  The kind of, I would say the robber barons of modern India, to use in a historical American analogy to a certain Gilda era. And there's been some discussions about potential fraud in certain major family run business empires in India. So just pointing that out. The thing though about Palantir, I do want to make sure we're giving the positive vibes here. And I did go through their product lineup and what they built is very impressive and they're proud of themselves for doing well. The thing that hit me was this FT story from recent, from the last couple of days in which it discusses a new conglomeration of the companies you're discussing working together. So when you talk about SpaceX and Palantir and Anduril, we think of them as as discrete

• 23:25Speaker 01

  units, but I think that they really want to operate more together. So the FT reports that Palantir and Anduril and other companies are quote, "in talks with about a dozen competitors to form a consortium that will jointly bid for US government work in an effort to disrupt the country's oligopoly of prime contractors."

• 23:42Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yes, that was exactly my first reaction. Because even if there's a lot of self dealing here amongst the TL and PayPal mafia folks, it'll still be less corrupt and better than what we currently have.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it's a free market. So you know, if you look at what's happening right now, I think there's like a duopoly basically in these contracts. You get the same two or three people each time doing cost plus bidding. What the this new group of tech, defense tech companies are doing is not cost plus. They're just saying, here's what I could sell this to you. How many do you want? And so if they offer, as we had the submarine company on, the unmanned submarine company, you'll remember, my short term memory is gone. That company was, I think, they think they said they were making them for 50 to 100K and they would normally

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  cost 500 to 750. The Titan submersible, thank you. If you were to take the Titan submersible, you know, maybe the government's like, you know what, we were going to buy a thousand of these, but since they're 90% cheaper, we'll take 2000 and we'll have a new plan. So if you were going to defend against new enemies, new possibilities, if there's a vibrant competition going on here and startups are included in it, and it's not fixed, and it's not based on like who gave the most money, or it's a new group of people who are exerting their influence through our system, which includes money. It's better for us because prices will go down and the value will go up of these products. And no competition.

• 25:15Jason Calacanis?

  If you look at the things that have gone up in cost in the United States, the top things that have gone up in cost are healthcare, education, especially higher education, healthcare education and housing. And if you look at those three, they are the most regulated and government participatory verticals that we have. And if you take some regulation out and there was like more college degrees were available from different folks, or there was a more open healthcare system, insurance system, maybe we'd see a little bit. I wonder where military is in terms of the acceleration of costs. And if we are going to lower the budget,

• 25:55Jason Calacanis?

  you could actually get more functionality and capability with startups making weapons, defense systems, et cetera, for less money. So more for less? Who is not taking more for less?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  No, it's absolutely lovely. I do think that the cost plus accounting that we've seen is essentially just a license to be incompetent to run out timelines and to take in more money. It's literally saying, please bilk us. So I'm glad that that is out of favor. I will say though, I don't want to compare Andrell and Vatten Systems and everyone else to Titan Submersible because that submersible was cheaper and failed. What I'm excited about is cheaper and better because I bet, I bet you, I bet you, Jason, I'm sure you actually agree with me here, but I bet these companies will make better products for cheaper. So it's not just more and cheaper.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, these are going to be much better, much better. Yeah, better and cheaper. And so, you know, there's a, there's a number of examples of this. If you go take an Airbnb, you might have a better experience if you like a kitchen and a backyard when you rent a house than getting a suite or three one bedrooms or three rooms.

• 27:02Jason Calacanis?

  At a typical hotel in the same city. So if that's the case, this is a similar situation where you're going to get a better product, produce differently. And I could tell you entrepreneurs are all of a sudden asking themselves, I wonder if I could do something with drones. That sounds kind of fun. That sounds kind of profitable as a business. That sounds kind of helpful to the world. So entrepreneurs are getting into defense tech. They're looking at all these areas. They're saying, how can I? And we had the founder of the self-driving company that does remote control of cars to drop off.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Your rental car.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  In Vegas, yeah.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And so, you know, that company, a great founder, it will come to me in a second, is also working in defense tech. So you can imagine, you know, if you're in the field and you want a Humvee.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, how do I get a Humvee to you? You're 100 miles away.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna say drive it, but I presume that's not the right answer.

• 27:59Jason Calacanis?

  Now you gotta put four people into a Humvee to drive it to you. And then maybe they need to have another Humvee following them to get them back.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:05Jason Calacanis?

  And then maybe you need a Apache to give them some air cover and throw up a drone. You want to send one Humvee into the field, you could send it alone.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:13Jason Calacanis?

  Just some guy with a joystick, gal with a joystick, boom, zipping it right to the frontline. So, or maybe you need to put some stuff into it. Maybe you need some more ammunition. Boom, you send a Humvee remote control. It's gonna be awesome. And so you do need to be vigilant.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:28Jason Calacanis?

  Anytime we have this kind of situation, I'm not saying like people shouldn't be vigilant and question everything, but we are entering a new era clearly. And I thought we should talk about some more of the, of my contemporaries, I'll say, people of my generation getting into politics. My friend Ken Howery, who was previously an investor, who was previously an investor at Founders Fund or co-founder, I think he's technically a co-founder, and was at PayPal. He's now going to be the ambassador to Denmark and he was previously the ambassador to Sweden. So he's back in the mix. He's a good friend of mine.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Did you see the, uh, the Trump post about this? I did. We're gonna put it on the screen right now. We're gonna pull it up. And this is all standard stuff here, but then he says, "For the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the US of A feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity." Now, we can take that off the screen, but, uh, usually ambassadorships, Jason, are, are just well-funded boondoggles. Like, uh, Calista Gingrich just got the ambassadorship to Switzerland, which I presume is gonna be her bouncing around castles, eating chocolates for a couple of years for free. Uh, I thought that they were sticking Ken in a relatively unimportant ambassadorship until I saw the Greenland thing. So are they serious about this?

• 29:49Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:35Jason Calacanis?

  because you can do things like dial up and dial down how much money can be charged to a card. Ramp software is so smart. You no longer have to do manual expense reports either, and they'll even play bad cop for your company, chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment. Ramp's so easy to use, and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes. So join Ramp right now, and they'll give you $250 right into your account. Ramp.com/twist, R-A-M-P.com/twist. It is the best way to manage expenses for your team. It's elegant, it's dead simple, and it's gonna save you money. Disclaimer: Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Members: FDIC. Terms

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Conditions apply.

• 31:16Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know that it would have to be for sale. I would like the Japan one. I know Rahm Emanuel's got it right now. But I found out, I asked, I asked, how does this all work to some friends? And basically you have to fund the ambassadorship. So people don't know this, but you as the individual who's going to be the ambassador to Sweden or France or Spain or whatever it is. You fund the operations of the embassy for those years. So it's going to cost you low millions of dollars to fund the parties, the staff and all that kind of stuff. Yes.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  That's not fun at all.

• 31:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So if you see people doing this, they have to raise money or they have to have money in order to do that. And it's a ceremonial position, uh, obviously, and you represent our country, but obviously the decisions and there can be moments, I guess, uh, where you're in the mix. But I do think it's, uh, there's a large amount of ceremony with these ambassadorships. And they're often, they seem to be a lot of fun. It seems like this is what rich people do for a four-year vacation. Uh, and to serve their country. I like it. I could see myself doing it someday.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Oh, I would love to be an ambassador. I have a number of countries I would love to spend time in, uh, while wearing a fancy hat and a sash and going to dinners and such. I don't want to pay for it though.

• 32:30Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's how it works. Well, you, you've raised money. You get some better factors. It's like having a chair at a, a school, you know, if you want to have like your own chair at Columbia or Harvard, you know, you get somebody to donate a $500,000 or a million dollars to pay for it, right? All this stuff has got some underwriting. Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know that, but the Greenland point's interesting, uh, for two reasons, uh, just to show everyone kind of where next year might be going. One, there is talk about somehow adding Greenland to the US. Again, with Trump, never sure if it's trolling, never sure if it's being serious, but Ken's caught up in that. And then, uh, also, uh, Trump wants to go and retake the Panama Canal is the latest thing that I've seen.

• 33:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, there's some talk about the Panama Canal being co-opted by the Chinese or something. That seems like a national security issue. We sold it. So I don't know if we get to get it back. I will say, I, you know, when they're talking about deporting people and the sort of xenophobic part of the dialogue, which I don't like, which I don't think is actually going to happen. I think that's the rhetoric. I, I've now become convinced. I don't have inside information, obviously. Um, but I think the rhetoric is 15 million. I think the reality, so we'll talk rhetoric and reality here. Rhetoric, 15 million people dragged out, thrown over the border, you know, chaos.

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  Reality, 50,000, 250,000 violent criminals, people who, you know, steal, jump the turnstile or light somebody on fire in a subway car. Like, that's what's gonna happen. And there'll be zero tolerance for that, zero tolerance at the border. And then they're gonna quietly, kinda grandfather this concept of 15 million people being removed, which I think is great. I think opt-in empire building is a great goal for our nation. And just hear me out here.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:12Jason Calacanis?

  I think our goal should be to get to a billion Americans and have America be the most populous and the most innovative country in the world. Now, how do you get to a billion from 350 million? You gotta triple.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Just about, yes.

• 34:26Jason Calacanis?

  So, and you got, and there's a certain amount of, you know, population growth through babies, but let's just say people aren't making a ton of babies. So, there's two ways to accomplish this. You gotta immigrate people, or you gotta do a little empire building, opt-in, of course. I think we should off, start offering countries to join the United States. There would be some decade-long period of integration, getting off of their dollar, whatever, services, voting, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Canada, I don't care who it is. I don't care if it's on the other side of the planet. I don't care if it's a Middle Eastern country, an African country. Why wouldn't we have a couple of outposts around the world? The French have some territories, you know, in the BVI, obviously the British Virgin Islands. There's a bunch of these kinda-

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And French Guiana, yeah.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  French Guiana. I like the idea of America spreading democracy and building the largest populous country and the largest economy concurrently over the 21st century. Let's try to get to a billion Americans. What do you think of my proposal?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Well, I, one, agreed. And I was just trying to find a post that I wrote in which I cheekily said, this was some months ago, that we should, one, Puerto Rico should be a state, clearly. But also, I was like, let's just take Canada, we'll take Mexico, let's just make big, big, big United States, many, many states. And I think it's a great, frankly, idea. Other nations have their own views of sovereignty and so forth, but if I'm-

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I'm saying, it's opt-in, right? It's opt-in.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Open door policy is great. I do not want us to go out there and grab other countries by the back of the neck and drag them in because that's going to lead to, I think, a lot of dissension in the ranks. But certainly. And.

• 36:04Jason Calacanis?

  What percentage of people, before you go to your end?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  Would need to vote in favor of joining America for it to seem like you had enough consensus for that, dare I say, transaction to occur?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Sixty five.

• 36:18Jason Calacanis?

  You think sixty five? Okay. I was gonna say more like seventy five. I was thinking seventy five or eighty percent.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 36:24Jason Calacanis?

  Like the overwhelming majority, a super majority. But you're you're thinking super majority too at sixty five. I was thinking, the first number that came to my head was seventy five, eighty. But it's maybe between sixty five and eighty.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  It becomes impossible at some point, right? Because if you have the bar set so high, you'll never clear it. And so to me, sixty is too low. Seventy feels impossible. That's how I got to sixty five. But sixty five, seventy percent, yeah, I'm totally here for it.

• 36:49Jason Calacanis?

  I have an idea.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:50Jason Calacanis?

  If it's, um, in order to do the process, you have to have five consecutive years of voting sixty five percent or more to join the United States, or seventy percent. So it has to, you have to vote every year for five years for this to happen and start the integration process. Then it's like, listen, the country voted not once, not twice, not three times, five times over five years to join the United States. You know, like there was a little, there was, there's plenty of time to consider it. You didn't have one chance to vote. You had five and you had to five years in a row have seventy percent or more. So you had to have real consensus and real discussions about it. Because if in year three it dips to sixty percent, now that resets the clock. Now you gotta do five years in a row.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  And we should just go out there and like, give our best offer. Maybe there's countries in Europe that would want to be, maybe Greece wants to be part of the United States. Wouldn't that be great for me if Greece was the 51st state if they wanted to?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Why Greece?

• 37:50Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I'm Greek.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 37:52Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I'm, and because we created man. I mean, we created democracy, America perfected it. This would be full circle for me.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. I did not know your heritage. So I'm like.

• 38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Golly, Gannis.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Struggling demographics.

• 38:05Jason Calacanis?

  Where have you been?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Famous debt load. I'm like, dude, I'm not picking Greece.

• 38:08Jason Calacanis?

  That's why I think it's an interesting concept with if you have a debt load, if you have challenges. And another country wants to come in and say, hey, listen, I know you're having challenges. We could help smooth those out and maybe you'd like to be part of our culture. And you know, like, do you care if you have USD as your currency or? You know, do you need to have your own currency? Do you want to be part of the EU? Or do you want to be part of the United States? Do you want to? You know, be able to come to the United States anytime, back and forth, would not worry about your visa? You know what that would do for Greece? And then if the? Taxation was similar, retirement was similar, and you just take 20 years to have those systems blend together. I mean.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Jason, can you imagine how funny it would be to explain to people who are accustomed to European style healthcare? How healthcare works in the US?

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there you have it, right? And so maybe there's things the United States could learn, like Canada. Has obviously figured some things out about healthcare. When I talk to Canadians. They complain incessantly about their healthcare. When I talk to Americans, they're like, why isn't our healthcare like Canada's? I'm moving to Canada to get their healthcare system. So they've obviously learned some things and yeah, it would be. That would be amazing for Americans if Canada was the 51st state, if they opted into it, obviously. And Americans could move there and get in Canada as a. You know, state with, you know, multiple, it would obviously be multiple states over time. They would, um, Americans who went there would get the benefits of their healthcare system and their healthcare system could be different than ours. And that would be an interesting. Ah, you know, concept.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  So maybe we need another level here because we have

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Territory.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  United States, fifty states, and then we have the federal government. But what you're describing almost sounds like underneath the federal system, different collections of states with different rules, almost like having blocks.

• 39:54Jason Calacanis?

  Territory. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be like the northeast, the southwest, you know, this would be the Canada states. So if there were, if they broke into five, six, seven states, whatever it is, it'd be the United States of Canada.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, hell, yeah, I'm, I'm a big fan. The thing I was gonna throw in there is that I don't think we have to go quite as far abroad to get more folks. I also think that we have lots of room inside the country. And anyone who's flown over the United States once has looked down and gone, wow, there's no one here. And so there's lots of room just inside of the country.

• 40:24Jason Calacanis?

  Pick a great location for energy and water and climate. Given what's happening, what is the perfect place to build a new city? And build a city intentionally for thirty million people. Now, it could start as three million, but with the intentionality of it hitting thirty million. In other words, a city of the scale of, you know, Beijing or Shanghai.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:47Jason Calacanis?

  A, a mega city, like really going for it. Where would you put the mega city? This is be like such an incredible thing for America do, to do, to say, we're gonna build a mega city. And we're going to start with this plot of American owned land. Cause our, our government owns a lot of land. And we just say, hey, this million acres, this hundred thousand acres, five hundred thousand acres is gonna be the city center. And here's how we're gonna have this Manhattan project where we ask startups and companies to pitch an architecture for the city. And then we're gonna pitch neighborhoods and you as a company. Whether it was Google or Boeing, and Google did have a city project, you remember, and they have Waymo. Google could come in, Apple could come in and say, I want to build,

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  you know, this hipster neighborhood, this will be the Brooklyn or the Venice or the Berkeley of it. I want to have that territory, I'm gonna build Apple apartments, Apple whatever. And I want to have the concession to build a building of, you know, like the.

• 41:46Jason Calacanis?

  The Apple headquarters. So Apple's headquarters could become like those rings. They could say, we want to build 10 rings around the city. And we're going to connect the 10 rings with Skyways, whatever, a Hyperloop. And people will live in a ring, work in a ring, play in a ring, live in a ring, you know? Steve Jobs considered that one of his great products, the, uh, the, the mothership.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I remember watching that thing get built. I really like this idea, but I wonder if we have to use federal land because there's a lot of folks out there who own quite a bit of.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  Government could buy from them. Yeah, government could buy from them and then you.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Sure, I guess you could do it that way. I, I love the idea and I think, I think we've seen some nations try this. If you look at Egypt's, um, capital that they're building, uh, kind of de novo. I, I just think.

• 42:29Jason Calacanis?

  Is that the UAE? UAE bought some land from them and they're going to build this new city there. And yeah, you have NEOM, which is being built by, uh, Saudis. So yeah, there is some precedence to doing something like this.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  But I love it. I love it. Okay, moving on. Uh, other recent hires by the government, um, Scott Kapoor, now a, now he's going to be the Director of Office of Personnel Management. Previously a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, employee number one, been there for about 15 years. I don't know Scott at all. Tell me about Scott.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  I, I, I haven't worked with him, but he's got a great reputation, smart. He's a team player. I don't know what this job does and what the mandate is there.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  So I went through their, uh, plans and I went through their strategic plans for the OPM from 2022 to 2026. The thing that I struggle with is that they want to make the federal government a leading employer. That is technology forward, but also a great place to work. And the struggle, Jason, is that I think a lot of the people who are glad that Scott's taking this job. Want the federal government to have far fewer people. So not exactly building out the same mission. So here we're going to have, we're going to see someone really come in orthogonal to where things have been heading. And probably be a very unpopular person internally. The question is, what are the net benefits for the nation, uh, as we go through this? But that's going to be a tough, a tough gig.

• 43:51Jason Calacanis?

  So the gig is, uh, just looking at it here, um. Human resources for federal employees, their benefits, their strategy to recruit, retain, and maintain the workforce. So basically, it's like being the chief operating officer of Human Resources Department. This sounds like really great to have somebody who's a businessperson in this. And if the goal is to shrink it and to get rid of the grift, there's a lot of people who are, let's face it, you know, in very high-paid jobs and not working. I'm sure there's tons of people who are working more than they're getting paid for. But we all know it's growing too fast. We're in debt. We're spending too much money. Get in there. If you cut too deep, you can always add people back, is the philosophy that I think we'll see. And I know it sounds cutthroat, but

• 44:36Jason Calacanis?

  that is how you save money.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Let's squeeze here one more time here.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Um, Jason, this is the federal employment, right?

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  Over what period of time?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  This is 1940 through today.

• 44:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that percentage?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 44:50Jason Calacanis?

  Or is there a reward number?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Thousands of persons. So it's, uh, the federal government is not, now this doesn't include the, I think, the military. Um, but it's not that many people.

• 45:01Jason Calacanis?

  Which, which one is that? Cause I, you know, it has grown. Um,

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Now, there's a state, it gets higher.

• 45:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, cause you have state, you have military, you, there's a bunch of different data points here that we need to look at. The federal, three million, state, 5.5, local, 14.5, according to the Daily Caller. So I'm not sure if that's correct or not, but, so anyway, we can debate how many people there should be in the government. I think maybe you and I agree there should be less.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Oh, fewer. I, I just, I just think that people think that the federal government has 45 million employees who are all sitting around playing Tetris in their flip flops. And it's, uh, it's several million people. So if we're gonna cut spend, I really do think that we're having, we're having, there's a goal and there's a method to reach that goal. And we talk about cutting spending and cutting staff as a way to get there. I just don't think that this number is gonna add up to anything approaching impacting the actual spend and debt issue.

• 45:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I got you. Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  So if we're gonna do this, we gotta cut somewhere else. And it's gonna hurt.

• 45:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's, yeah, and it's good. Well, you know, it doesn't have to hurt, because my guess is one third of the employees are aren't contributing a bunch and the top third, you know, are doing 80% of the work and then there's the middle third. So if you cut a third, I've seen this in every organization I've ever worked with, you cut the bottom 10, 20, 35%, you will see universally, the company works more efficiently. And that's just the nature of any organization, nonprofit, for profit, etc.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 46:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's how I would do it.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  What I meant was, we're gonna have to make painful cuts on spending, like entitlement programs, that sort of thing. So the staffing, we can definitely cut 30%, I'm sure. I think you and I talked about this a while back. If it's 35% or if it's 50%, you can cut whatever, but that's gonna be a very small percentage change in our overall spend.

• 46:47Jason Calacanis?

  The military is the big number. Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Interest on the debt and so forth.

• 46:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. There's a lot of places to cut, but you know, I think a lot of it is also a philosophy. And the philosophy is going to be efficiency and competition and no more cronyism and grifting. I think that's what's gonna happen is opening up, you know, that philosophy and I'm here for it. And you know, listen, if you don't believe they're gonna do it, if you believe there's crony capitalism at work, it's gonna be pretty obvious to see it. It's gonna be right there on display. So you will see it. I can tell you, based on what I know, even the most cynical Democrats, the most cynical who hate Trump are going to have to nod and say, it's my prediction. We'll be sitting here a year from now. I think they did a good job on those issues. I give it to them

• 47:33Jason Calacanis?

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

• 48:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's always been my dream is to see more people. And for me, that version of it was, I wanted Bloomberg to win. He got knocked out in the first debate. Knockout punch, brutal. It is what it is. But I want to see Jamie Dimon in there. I want to see more business people in there, less career politicians, and really make the thing more efficient. So here's what my pitch is to everybody who doesn't like Trump. You have a year of action that you'll watch. You can be as critical as you want to be, bang on every assumption, everything they're doing, and just judge them in a year. Because you know what? You have no choice but to do that. You could fight them as much as you want, you could tweet, you can scream, but they won. And they won with a bit of a mandate. And so, here we go.

• 49:01Jason Calacanis?

  Let's see, and Democrats, some Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, are on board with some of these issues. So I think when they start voting on them, there's going to be a lot of Democrats who cross the aisle and say, and there'll also be some Republicans who break rank, but they'll say, you know what? I agree, we should spend a little less here. So it's going to be entertaining. It's going to be a shade now.

• 49:20Speaker 01

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

• 50:05Speaker 01

  when the other side that I'm being forced to hold hands with, you want to turn around and slap me the first chance they get when the tables are turned. Okay, though, I was raised Christian, turn the other cheek, all right. But I gotta say, people have tried this before. We have tried Blue Room Commissions, which is what Doge is, to cut spending. We have tried things. Let's see what we get. Now, other people that are coming in, Jason, include Surem Krishnan, former GP over at Andreessen. He's going to advise on AI policy. I've met him once, but it was back when I was a mess.

• 50:36Jason Calacanis?

  He was embedded by Andreessen Horowitz at Twitter when the takeover happened. So I spent a little bit of time with him there for the first couple of weeks. He is a hardcore, great human being, really solid individual, great communicator, hard worker. He's gonna do great.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And he's gonna work with David Sacks. He's gonna be inside of the AI and crypto policy spot. And he was, if I recall, very active on the crypto side of investing for Andreessen.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  So he'll be bringing, I think, a little more crypto to David Sacks's AI?

• 51:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, his group. Yeah, I guess there's a group being formed and crypto needs to be regulated. And if we look at what happened the last four years, it was kind of, Gary Gensler gave no path. He didn't give the third path. It was either, you can't do it, or you can do it my way, or the way we've always done it.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:30Jason Calacanis?

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

• 52:16Jason Calacanis?

  you know, adjacent to crypto or in crypto. And they're like, we're gonna put this in, literally, speaking of Panama, in Panama.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:22Jason Calacanis?

  In a nonprofit. It's gonna cost a million dollars to set it up. And I'm like, What? What corporation costs a million dollars to set up? I can go on like any number of sites and register a new company for $500 or free or a thousand dollars. It makes no sense. So let's not drive it offshore. Let's regulate it. Let's tax it. And I believe we should build a Bitcoin reserve. You know how we should do it? If you want to trade in Bitcoin in the United States, there is a 1% Bitcoin tax. You want to buy it? You want to sell it? Both sides pay 1% on every transaction. You know where it goes?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Right into the Bitcoin trust.

• 52:56Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. Our government is not going to-

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That's very interesting.

• 52:59Jason Calacanis?

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

• 53:29Speaker 01

  I want to, I want to ask a question about this because I have been lightly sympathetic to the idea that crypto does not match one-to-one to existing securities law. And we might need a couple of tweaks to make it work a little bit better for crypto. It sounds though, when you say third way and, you know, a different approach, that you're anticipating something a little bit more broad, Jason. So I'd like you to be. But I'm kind of curious, like, why, why does crypto need a separate and more lenient set of rules compared to traditional securities like you and I are know and love?

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  Great question. You cannot take your Netflix shares and use them to fund a rendering

• 54:14Jason Calacanis?

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

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

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

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  or whatever terrible thing that could be done with these cryptocurrencies. That's people have reported is being, that tether is being used for, there's many reports. It is the, it is the currency of choice for, you know, the criminal underground, which by the way, hundred dollar bills were also part of that. Gold, bullion and diamonds are part of that. They just have to be tethered as a quicker way than handing somebody an ounce of gold for whatever you're trafficking. So I think those are all examples of things that, you know, the current system doesn't take into account. And, um, okay, this very simple accreditation, start with a sophistication test. I have been shouting this on every all in episode, every this week and startup episodes for, well, 14 years.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ever since I got exposed to this because I know that people want to, in my family, in my friend circles, you know, or employees of mine, want to participate in something like the syndicate.com where we share deals. 90% of the deals will probably go to zero in any of those platforms. And so I expect ours will be similar and I wrote a book about this. It's, and there's a book called the power law. People love to get educated about this stuff, but I can't offer for, I don't know, a million Americans to put in a hundred dollars each into a startup. Like, let's say Cafe X, which we did some syndicates for the top 5%, but maybe the public wants to buy shares of Uber or Robinhood when I had access to them.

• 56:58Jason Calacanis?

  And I could have said, you know what, I'm going to do something where I offer to drivers the ability for them to put in a hundred to a thousand dollars. They're not allowed to, but they know Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and Sidecar before it better than anybody because they're doing it all day long. But they're not allowed to be to participate. So just start with the accreditation laws is my message to Washington. And then let people participate in risky things as a percentage of their income or net worth. Those two things would solve the whole problem. You want to buy XRP? And you know, half the people think it's a scam. Half the people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Great. You could spend up to 10% of your net worth on any one on cryptocurrencies in this experimental category.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I find it very interesting that your example about Netflix maps so neatly to Bitcoin.

• 57:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

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

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  What if a musician, what if a musician?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:24Jason Calacanis?

  That you, what's your favorite heavy metal band?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Fit for an autopsy.

• 58:28Jason Calacanis?

  Fit for an autopsy says, we are putting out a new double record. And it's going to cost us, are they a major signed label band or are they?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  They're on Nuclear Blast Records, Jason.

• 58:39Jason Calacanis?

  So maybe they spend a quarter million dollars to make an album?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 58:44Jason Calacanis?

  I'm putting a number out there.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Somewhere between that and 500, yes.

• 58:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So let's say 500,000 is what it costs to make a really high quality record. They say, hey, you know, our label dropped us, but we're going to offer our fans $500,000. And you each get to own for, you know, every $5,000 is 1% of that record for all eternity. And you get your name on the back cover.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  They can't do that right now. They can't do that. They're not allowed to. They can do it for 5% of the country at an expensive cost. But what if you said, you know what? For me, it's about supporting the band. I want to own 20 basis points, $1,000. For me, being able to go to the, go to the concert. To get a signed album, so every $1,000 gets a signed album. Uh, so they have to sign 500 albums?

• 59:33Jason Calacanis?

  Would you spend a thousand dollars to get a signed album, go to the concert and have your name in the record label notes as one of the producers?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I would do that for, for no recognition. If, if the band was like, we're broke, send us money, I would send them money.

• 59:47Jason Calacanis?

  So, okay, they do that for their album and they get to own their masters for all time. And the community gets to own half of their masters alongside them. So half of the equity goes to them, half goes to the community. You can't do that right now. Why can't you do that? Because we have antiquated security laws that want to protect you, Alex, and the other fans from spending your money. You're not allowed to do it because in the eyes of the SEC, you're not sophisticated enough, which is another way of saying you're dumb.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Well, just as a reminder to everyone, what Jason's talking about in the accreditation test, according to SEC.gov, currently the financial criteria is net worth over a million excluding your house, or if you and your spouse make 300K or more per year in each of the last two years.

• 1:00:31Jason Calacanis?

  You're accredited probably, but anyway, putting it all aside, yes, putting it all aside, you 10 years ago weren't accredited.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Oh God, no, I was, I was entirely accredited.

• 1:00:40Jason Calacanis?

  And that's when, so back then you were writing for TechCrunch, you were brilliant. I met you in your first couple of years in the business. You were too stupid in the minds of the government, unsophisticated to do that. No, you were sophisticated enough to go take your $1,000 and play poker and lose it to your friends or give it to, you know, whoever, you go to Vegas and put it on a roulette wheel.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:01Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm saying a third way because I think there's so much innovation here that you really need to start from a blank sheet of paper and really understand, you know, is this a situation where you do need to know your customer? Or not? Right? Is this a situation where it has to be registered? If it's like NFTs, you know, and they're trading under a certain dollar amount and they're trading cards, like I don't know that you need to be so worried about KYC, etc. That's why I think you could like let people start small projects as the projects get bigger. If there's a central authority, they have to register, etc. But anyway, you're correct that a lot of what I'm saying could also be viewed as evolving the securities law.

• 1:03:00Jason Calacanis?

  And when I say a test, I mean a test similar to a driver's license, an easily accessible test. Not something you pay where you go to school for for a year or two. I'm talking about you spend six hours in a course on your own time. That's a free course online and then you take a 50 or 150 question test and you're licensed. In other words, you can't go back to the people who sold you a, you know, a JPEG and say, oh, this JPEG isn't worth the $50,000 I spent on or the 5,000 or the 500 because you took a test. That said, there's no inherent value to this because it's a piece of art and it's the only way for this to have value is for somebody else to believe it has value and there may not be a buyer for your piece of art ever again.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  Again, because you picked the wrong piece.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yes, well, that's why I buy all art on the predication of I love it. Comma, if it goes up in value, huzzah. Uh, look, uh, we have a couple more names, though. Uh, Emile Michael, former Uber executive, named under secretary for research and engineering.

• 1:03:59Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Congrats to you, Emile. Um, I don't know him at all. I know you do, and so tell me why he's the right guy.

• 1:04:06Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he was Travis's right-hand man. He will get any deal done. He is just, if you wanted to have a dealmaker by your side, uh, he'd be top three in the industry to grab. If you want an operator, you know, dealmaker, aggressive, you know, this is like, this is like getting a version of Travis on your team for the government. And so whether you like business people or not, sharp-elfed people or not, aggressive people or not, in our government, we've had the opposite. I am here to have aggressive, hardcore, driven people who want to perform at a high level in the government.

• 1:04:45Jason Calacanis?

  I predict all these nervous Nellies, all these people who are negative about this right now, you know, who are like, oh, my God, we're just, this is oligarchs. We're turning into oligarchy. Um, I think these people actually are doing it uh, uh, in a patriotic way. And I think we're going back to a founding fathers type situation where the most successful people in the private sector go do a tour of duty. Give up making money for four years, eight years, whatever it is, and then they come back into the private sector. Uh, or in some cases, they're able to do both in some of these positions, but some you can't. And we don't know in each of these positions, which ones are, you have to divest everything, you can't.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  We're gonna find out. I can't wait to read the financial disclosures. I wonder who's poorer than we think.

• 1:05:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, and then the other thing is, you know, they're going to, in some cases, have to divest. And if you're worried that people are going to be, you know, um, you know, people are going to be grifting or talking their own book or working their own book, this is something that exists already. All these generals, all these people working in defense do like whatever number of years at Raytheon, then they go work in government, they go back to Raytheon, it's a revolving door, it's well-known.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  It's a problem.

• 1:05:58Jason Calacanis?

  And it's a problem. Here you have high-profile people who've already made their money, who are playing for legacy. I would judge them based on that. And just, you'll know if there is any type of corruption or grift, it is going to come out so fast because AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and that group are so tuned in to making sure it doesn't happen. There are checks and balances in our system. That's my belief. I could be wrong. This could be one of those clips that gets played, and people go, "Look, you were wrong," but I am an optimist. I think that this is the default case. I think everybody's gonna be quite pleased with the performance of these individuals.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that brings us to one last name, just adding one more to the mix, because Jason's giving them all lots of points, so one more for the scoreboard.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Michael Kratzios, someone that actually, this is new to me, is gonna help with Sacks on Emerging Technologies. Currently an MD at Scale AI, a company that we all know, but this was one of the tech people that I didn't.

• 1:06:54Jason Calacanis?

  Don't have a, yeah, I don't have a relationship with them, can't speak to it. But again, I think what we're gonna see is a really young, high-energy, tech-first, entrepreneurship-first, less regulation, lower taxes, less spending, more efficient and competitive America. That's my guess. And I think people are going to learn to appreciate what this group can do. And back to people with Trump derangement syndrome, or who don't like Trump, or who have, you know, concerns about his leadership and his track record. In this Trump 2.0 era, my major concern was that people who I consider incompetent, racist, xenophobic,

• 1:07:35Jason Calacanis?

  deranged, dumb, the whack-pack, remember some of the whack-pack he had around him? The last time around, like really bad actors, people with nefarious intent, people who were really dark individuals, in my estimation. Now you've got people who are rabid capitalists. This is the ultimate upgrade. This is the ultimate upgrade. Steve Bannon versus Emile Michael or David Sacks, like massive upgrade. So thank your lucky stars is the way I'm looking at this. If this was Trump 1.0 and it was a bunch of Steve Bannons, then I'd be super concerned.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  This is a much better turnout. So that's another way for people who have concerns to maybe think relative to who Trump could hang out with. Maybe this is better.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  No, I definitely, I'll take someone who's run a business service, Steve Bannon, because I would take the gum stuff to the bottom of my shoe before Steve Bannon. So low bar there. But I do appreciate the optimistic take here.

• 1:08:37Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm trying to be optimistic. And you know, these in some cases are many of my close friends. So I am as biased as that comes. I am the most biased.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  I understand that. But this is one of the times in which I think bias is useful.

• 1:08:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Because you're speaking from not just people that you've met a handful of times, like a great many people that journalists meet, you know, three, four, five times total. These are people that you know very deeply. And so that gives you, I think, a better view into what they'll do when people aren't looking, which I think is basically what character is.

• 1:09:06Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Like, I can tell you, David Sacks made enough money. Elon's made enough money. Emil Michaels made enough money. I know that they don't need, they're not doing this for money. I've had conversations with many of these people about why they're doing it. I won't say which ones. They're doing it because they actually think America needs them. So whether you think that's deranged, delusional, delusions of grandeur, put it all aside. They feel called to serve. They feel called to put, you know, whatever number of years of entrepreneurship and increasing their net worth during one of the great eras in technology, the AI era, they think it's more important to save America in their minds. They literally think they're saving America. Now, people will laugh at it. People will criticize it. But I can tell you, that's truly what they think.

• 1:09:48Jason Calacanis?

  They want to, they think that national debt's an existential issue and they want to help and they want to make the government more efficient. I say, give them 12 months and write a school grade.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the only thing I'll say is, I do hope that people remember that, and I just pulled up the latest numbers, that Trump won 49.9% of the vote.

• 1:10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Now, that is 1.5% more than Kamala did. Shout out. But I'll just say.

• 1:10:13Jason Calacanis?

  3 million? What was it? 3 million Americans more?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  It's a 2 point.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  2.3 million more.

• 1:10:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  It's not, not, they won. Shout out.

• 1:10:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  But I, I do hope that there's also a recognition that not everyone has the exact same vision. And so I hope.

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Other people also have a chance to have a voice.

• 1:10:34Jason Calacanis?

  I, literally, the reason I'm saying this is because I know that there are a bunch of people who are very concerned. And I have told them, and I said it on the, an episode of All In. I think it's important for Republicans who have a very high troll level, a very high vengeance level, you know, explicitly stated, for them to say, you know what? Let's do this for all Americans. And I told them on the other side, again, Captain Nuance here, I am a moderate, just like I'm telling the people on the left, hey, give them a chance, judge them based on the results. I told them publicly on the All In Pod, on my Twitter, and I've told them privately,

• 1:11:12Jason Calacanis?

  do not troll people and make sure the benefits of Doge, make sure the benefits of efficiency are felt by the bottom half first. And my pitch to them was, all the gains that we see, if we can get, you know, back in the black as opposed to going into debt, let's say we're back in the black by whatever amount and we can reduce taxes. They should just come out and say, you know what? All tax reductions for the next four years are going to the bottom 75% of the country. The top 25% are not going to get any tax breaks. That would be the high ground.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would love to see a tax package that was actually progressive in that way. History is not kind to that kind of expectation, but there's always a new chapter to be written. So again, leaning on your optimism here, I'll take it.

• 1:12:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Because here's the thing, Jason, we're in the car, we're going over the cliff. Geronimo. So like, it isn't like we're like opting in or out here. You and I are side by side here and someone else is driving and.

• 1:12:13Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you're, my perception of you now, working with your, you know, a couple of times a week here is you're a moderate techno optimist who is liberal socially. Am I correct?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Uh, capitalism, technology and gay rights.

• 1:12:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, awesome. And so you put that package together. I think we're in a good place right now. I think they're gonna, I think you're gonna be pleased with how this goes.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, look, I love a good surprise. Um, but before we go, I have a couple of really funny comments from the audience that I do want to bring up.

• 1:12:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  So, uh, a while back, uh, Toronto filmmaker, Rvonn X said, right now, thirteen percent of Canadians are in favor of joining the US, according to a recent poll. So we have some work to do to get Canada on our side.

• 1:12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Thirteen percent.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Upside down, but I like that. And LMNOP, that's a great name.

• 1:13:01Jason Calacanis?

  LMNOP.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Says Greenland would be great for natural cooling of data centers. To which I say to you, LMNOP, yes, but, uh, have you heard about climate change? So that will have a multi-hundred-year, uh, ceiling to it.

• 1:13:15Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting you bring that comment up. There have been data centers that were put in cold locations with, um, you know, good natural, um, energy sources. And somebody told me the way they designed them is to put fans in them and to have the wind and where they place them be where cold air will blow into it. So during certain months, they actually literally can open the doors, as it is, on either side of the data center and have the freezing air blow through the H100s and cool them down.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I don't know if that's reality, but that was explained to me by a data center expert that that existed as a concept.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Did you see that Microsoft thing from like, I want to say five years ago, when they wanted to put a data center in like a shipping container underwater?

• 1:13:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  I thought that was so cool. And that was before the AI boom. So I want to know, actually, okay, here's a question. If you are building something, or to our friends in the audience, that involves, uh, really, really insane data center cooling, Alex W. or launch.co, shoot me an email. I want to talk to you because this is an issue that I, that I just love. Jason, we're, we are, we have one more show before the end of the year, and it's the twisty, so it's gonna be a little bit more retrospective.

• 1:14:21Jason Calacanis?

  Great.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  So let's just, let's, let's.

• 1:14:23Jason Calacanis?

  End here.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  End on a positive note of just saying that let's hope everything goes better than we expect and may everybody benefit, uh, to the nth degree. And may this be the new onset of an American century and may my concerns be wrong.

• 1:14:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, golden age. Let's do a golden age. Uh, keep, stay positive, folks, and cause you have no choice.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  We're in the car.

• 1:14:44Jason Calacanis?

  You're in the car with them and Louise heading towards the cliff, folks. We'll see you all in on Monday with the Twisty Awards. Sign up for the channels and my pitch to you is in 2025, I want you to start a company. Be independent, start a company, you know, like Alex did. He works here with me, but he also has cautiously optimistic.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Cautious optimism.

• 1:15:08Jason Calacanis?

  Cautious optimism. We have to put that in your lower third. Can we get lower thirds here now that we're using Restream cautious optimism? Then I won't mess it up. Crushersoptimism.substack.com I believe is the newsletter. Give them a hundred bucks. Yeah, help them out here. Let's, uh, let's build a foundation. He's been entrepreneurial. He's here half the time and he's doing his newsletter half the time. And founder.university, which I'm going to be bringing and I'll be announcing next year. Founder university is going to be coming to another region in the world.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  You teased this on the last AI with Sunny. If you want to go get a little, uh, little more, there you go. Go back in the archive.

• 1:15:44Jason Calacanis?

  Founder.university coming to another region in the new year. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.