Election Update, Tech’s Political Shift, and America’s Stuck GDP | This Won’t Last

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation from Turpentine's podcast, This Won't Last, featuring Keith Rabois, Kevin Ryan, Logan Bartlett, and Zach Weinberg. They cover Trump's win, why tech has seen a rightward political shift, energy independence, and more. Please enjoy.

Cool guys, how are we doing?

Great. Ready for a good 2025.

Yeah. Well, a lot has happened. We, I think we tried to schedule this around the election and then I think everyone's schedules kind of went haywire. Keith, I guess from you, you had a very public bet with Mr. Nate Silver that I guess for people that don't know, maybe give a little bit of background and then I would love to hear what your You were calling this in a meaningful way, I think, both with public pronouncements, but then also dollars. And obviously Jacob was involved in some of the stuff related to the now incoming administration. So we'd love to hear like what you saw throughout all this.

Well, I think predicting elections is not that difficult. In 2016, I predicted, the only person publicly, as far as I know, in the entire world, that Trump was going to win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote. And I missed his popular vote by 10 basis points. In 2020, I missed his popular vote by 80 basis points, which is moderately significant error. And then this year I said, you're guaranteed he wins in a landslide and he'll get between 4 and 6% more popular vote than he did last time. He got 5.9% more. So this isn't difficult compared to the other stuff we do, like putting rockets into space, landing them within centimeters of each other is actually difficult. Predicting popular votes, electoral votes is really trivial. It's just that most people in politics are last principle thinkers, not first principle thinkers. They start with inclusion and they work backwards versus actually looking at data. So specifically on the Nate Silver, which is, you know, he's a popular pundit, I guess, or whatever, allegedly statistically driven pundit. He articulated this theory that Florida was going to be close in this election or could be close. And I was like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever read. I'm more likely to play center for the New York Knicks than Florida being close. Like, literally, that was the exact tweet. Because if you spend any time, obviously Miami is my home, you spend any time in Florida, there was literally zero chance that Kamala Harris was going to come close to Donald Trump. Trump is more popular in Florida than most places, and she was more unpopular in Florida than in most places. The combination was incredibly lethal. It's like Jeff Bezos. You could ask statistically, how do you prove this? But Jeff Bezos has this adage that when anecdotes collide with the data, The anecdotes are usually right. And so if you went to a dinner party with at least 10 people in Miami, which is a very, let's say the most competitive part of Florida, there was just no possibility that she was going to come close in this election. You can work backwards from the DeSantis victory as when he ran for governor, he won by 16%. DeSantis is pretty conservative and pretty polarizing. So the idea that the 16 percentage of people that voted for him, that he was going to lose 2/3 of them. To Kamala Harris. It was like insane. And so like, you know, like it was just the easiest articulation of stupidity ever. It's about equivalent to the Iowa stuff. Like if you read polls from Iowa that said Iowa, this is going to be close, is about as stupid. But people in politics just don't really have any intellectual foundations typically. They haven't read academic research. You know, there's this French trader. So if you want to get really specific of how do you predict elections, this French trader made a lot of money publicly on Polymarket. He used a basic principle and the question he surveyed was, who do you think your neighbor's going to vote for you? And a lot of people in the media ridiculed this idea. Truth is there's academic papers from the 1980s that actually articulate that this is the best way to predict a vote. So all you have to do is read academic research from the 1980s and apply it, and you can make $50 million like he did very easily. So that's all I did is triangulate.

Why do we think that the neighbor thing works? I think it's fascinating. Why does it work intellectually?

Well, because there's a stigmatization often, especially on polarizing candidates like Trump, where there's a perception of you don't want to admit you're voting for him. But if you ask what the neighbor's going to do, you avoid the stigma. It works really well with extreme polarization. It worked really well when Black candidates were running because it would work the other way. Sometimes people wouldn't admit they were voting for a Black candidate or not voting. So it kind of eliminates some distortions due to social stigma. And certainly when you see a discrepancy, one of the easiest things is like when you ask that question, do you see a massive discrepancy versus a standard poll question? You see a massive discrepancy, there's clearly something going on, and then you need to double-click, like triple-click. If they're really harmonized and in sync, more like an establishment Republican running against an establishment Democrat, you might not see a massive discrepancy.

First of all, Florida, I completely agree. I don't know why people thought he would lose Florida. Uh, but in terms of the election, it was the closest election from a popular vote point of view in 20 years. You know, if 1 in 130 people had switched their votes, she would have won the popular vote. So it does make it hard to call. It doesn't mean that in a small sample size—

No, no, no, no, wait, this is fiction. This is— both campaigns after the election have admitted there was not a single poll on the Democratic side. Kamala Harris's team has admitted publicly they never had a poll that she was going to win. In the entire race, not a single week did they have her ahead. Same thing, Trump, not a single poll did he ever take where he was going to lose. So both campaigns had the exact same perspective. You wonder why the media can't figure that out if both campaigns, and they both admitted this publicly, so it's not a controversial statement anymore. Everybody who had any intelligence knew exactly how this election was going to land. Popular vote wasn't even relevant, by the way. I mean, yes, the popular vote is closer, but that's not how you win an election. The landslide was going to happen regardless of how much closer the popular vote got. Trump, by the way, did do better than any Republican on a popular vote basis in 20 years. Um, so Republicans have typically not done very well on a popular vote basis. Um, and I think that may be changing, actually. There may be a future where Republicans don't take the popular vote for granted anymore.

When you win by 1.5%, it's not really a landslide. I mean, Biden was a landslide winning by 7 million votes.

Well, if they were all votes, which is more debatable than it used to be. I think if you look at the evidence, I don't think Trump lost the election on Election Day unfairly, but I do think there's a lot of very suspicious votes now. If you just look at the discrepancy between Kamala's votes and Biden's votes, 5+ million votes just disappearing in an election seems somewhat inflated.

I love the idea that the Democrats figured out how to rig one election, but then they're like, nah, this time we're not going to do it.

Well, during COVID truthfully, it was much easier. During COVID they changed, they suspended all the typical rules. And so what happened is this weird confluence of events. You had new rule, newfangled rules that had never been tested in a federal election before, you know, allowing remote voting in different ways that had never, never been tested at scale before. And some of that was pulled back and culled. And then obviously the Republicans were paying more attention. They won 3 to 5 different lawsuits to require election integrity this time. And then, you know, Trump I think last time made a massive mistake when he discouraged absentee voting and he really, I mean, someone counseled him that that was a selfish point to make.

You started by saying political people are morons, which I tend to agree with you. Uh, and so the idea that they could like rig some election and then forget how to do it or all like, there's no chance. Well, I didn't say it was, I don't think the election was rigged.

I think the election was not fair. I think with censorship and the suppression of, uh, various content, which even Mark Zuckerberg admitted is true now, uh, they were pressured, not that they actually suppressed the information. The New York Post had its account— the New York Post, you know, one of the oldest, I believe it's one of the oldest 5 publications, you know, news publications in the United States, had its account disabled by Twitter in the middle of an election for publishing a true story about Hunter Biden's laptop. That's completely indefensible, like by anybody. This was a clearly manipulated election. I don't think on Election Day specifically it was rigged.

No, of course not.

Nobody should have any confidence in the 2020 results given the combination of all these factors, brand new rules, manipulated information and content, and some suspicious voting patterns. The combination— the new rule doesn't matter. I mean, you can— the reality is it doesn't matter. I mean, the reality is it doesn't matter.

Yeah.

But, but, Zach, mysteriously, everyone questions on the right that somehow Biden won, but they don't question the Republicans who won on the same ballot, but in Senate and the House, those are apparently all legitimate.

Well, I also think actually, like, Trump himself, you know, just he, you know, he's like a moving target, right? Which is Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but he's kind of moderated quite a bit since 2020. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff that he's talking about, I would argue it's way more popular than some of the crazy things he was doing back in the first administration. And so it's not surprising to me. Plus, 4 years of Biden almost dying in office doesn't help. So yeah.

Yeah, I think you're right about both. The frame against Biden obviously reminded people of A lot of people, why they voted for Trump in the first place. And I think Trump is more disciplined, more on message than ever before. And just 4 years of reflection. It's a little bit like when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, 13 years in the wilderness, he reflected on a lot of things and he came back a much better CEO in every possible way. And so I think 4 years of just thinking about what would you do differently? Why did things not work out the way you wanted to? What was successful? What wasn't? Who was successful and who wasn't has led to a better Trump. It will lead to, in my view, much better Trump administration.

Are you surprised that he's moderating? But like, I've always kind of thought of him as just like, he just repeats the last thing someone said to him, essentially. And now some of the stuff he's doing, I would argue, is like a little more consistent. I'm like cautiously optimistic in a very weird way. And it tugs at my heartstrings to even say this out loud.

And I think, I think one of the interesting things, Keith, I would love to hear, uh, I mean, we saw the tension sort of break out between the more populist side and the more, I don't know, globalist or whatever economic-centric side with the H-1B thing around Shahram being elected. And we had Laura Loomer saying some crazy stuff out there. So Keith, I'm curious, I guess that sort of segues into another topic we wanted to talk about, but the tension that exists between those 2 things around the H-1B issue specifically.

Well, I think the most important thing Trump's learned is there are ways of being successful in achieving what you want without as much collateral damage. And so when, you know, many of you may play tennis, Trump committed a lot of unforced errors. He had a lot of winning shots. He's very talented, but he had a lot of unforced errors. And I think he, with counsel of the people around him, has learned to reduce the unforced errors. And so he's going to be more successful just by hitting his winners. He's going to have some winners. It's just like he really caused a lot of unnecessary drag coefficient last administration in 2020 elections. But I think so he's still the same person, I think, and I think his views are very similar from what I can tell. He's also learned, I think, the difference between he could be as edgy with humor and not come across as mean. You could say the same thing, but when he does it with humor, it really is effective. And when he goes slightly on the other edge of critiquing somebody, someone, some policy, and it comes across as mean and alienates voters, And I think he's dialed in a little bit more the humor and wit than the meanness.

I was going to say that I think that he is better prepared, for better or worse, for this case. They move much faster on appointees. I do worry the judgment. I mean, let's not forget, he won last time and was thrown out of office by a huge margin because people didn't feel good about what they got. Appointing, to propose Matt Gaetz as attorney general is just insane on the qualifications. It's just a dumb, dumb, dumb choice. And so on the other hand, he has Scott Bessen and things that are really good choices. So it'll be hit and miss, but I'm nervous we're going to get some of the things we didn't like last time and get them this time.

It's pretty crazy. Like some of the picks, you look at them and you go, this is awesome. Like these people are highly qualified, especially on the energy side. Bessen, I agree. He's got like some really good people around him. And then he's got RFK or NH, or, you know, Gates, I guess, obviously not Gates anymore. And you're just like, what, how does the same brain make both of those choices? Like, I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense to me.

I know a person who got fired for running 2 100-person organizations is going to manage a 2 million person organization. None of us on this phone in a million years would appoint someone like that to get things done.

And then, you know, he's got some good ones in there.

Yeah, absolutely.

The biggest thing that stood out to me now that I think has changed, although maybe I was just like not paying attention, is he's really pro-growth this time around. Like, we're going to win, we're going to grow.

As a—

I felt like in 2016, his whole message was basically like, America sucks. It used to be better. I'm not sure when, but it used to be better. And he didn't really have that like growth message. It was just like everybody else sucks. And now it's turning, it's a little more positive in its nature. It's not like it used to be great and now it's terrible at it. You know, it's, It's different.

He's inheriting an incredible economy.

Well, I mean, as we've talked about previously, the only way to escape this debt is you have to grow. Like, you cannot do it with like a budget cut, this pure budget cuts. And the debt is going to be crushing. And, you know, Elon and other people are calling attention to it consistently and constantly, which is helping. But you've got to grow the American economy at 3, 4, 5% consistently without triggering inflation. And that's the fine line that the Treasury Secretary really has to drive. I think he can. I think there are ways to do it. A data point that a New Yorker, very successful New Yorker, gave me at dinner was 1950 to 2000. On average, every decade we have 3.7 years of 5% or higher growth. Since 2010, we've had exactly 2 total years and one was post-COVID. So we've had one year of positive, like serious growth in the last 25 years where we used to average almost 4 a decade. So I think we can get back to that economic policy where we have relatively attractive growth with low inflation, with the right policies, and then you can work your way out constructively of this debt problem.

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Although the, the irony is one of the worst things you can do to grow your way out of this problem is to kick 20 million consumers out of the country, which, by the way, like, I'm not defending illegal immigration by any means, but we should just talk about like the reality of it, which is you've got a bunch of people who effectively pay taxes through purchasing and spending money, but then don't get any of the benefits. They don't actually get Social Security. They don't get Medicare. And so it's actually like one of the better things you can have for the national debt. And we're about to like kick ourselves in the foot here a little bit. So there's a little bit of like, how do you believe all of these things at the same time? And I know he doesn't think it through, but it's—

I think it's very well thought through. There's a comprehensive plan. They're going to remove 2 million Americans immediately, like first year. And most of those are very bad people, as he would say, convicted criminals, et cetera, serious problems. And then we'll see what happens after that. So Control the border so new people are not entering the country illegally and remove the worst 1 to 2 million. And then I don't think that will affect the macro economy. Secondly, depending upon what state you live in, illegal immigrants are eligible for significant benefits in California.

Even at a state level, not federal.

Even in Florida, most people don't know this. Even in Florida, illegal immigrants are eligible for tuition. to state universities, which is going to get reversed. Like, I'm pretty sure it just has to change. Oh, don't get me wrong.

On a state basis, especially like as a New Yorker, it's an issue. I'm just saying from a federal debt perspective, it's not an issue. It actually helps.

It's not an issue. Although J.D. Vance did cite in the debate, and he's right, there is a Federal Reserve study that argues that housing prices have gone up specifically because of illegal immigration. You can debate it, but it's a Federal Reserve study, which is a fairly detached, you know, traditional establishment organization.

Keith, there aren't— you threw out the idea that there's somehow 2 million criminals, immigrants who are criminals. That's just not true at all.

Well, there's actually 16 million. It's illegal to come to the United States without permission. No, no, no. They're criminals by definition. So let's just start there. That's not the point you're making.

That's not the point you're making.

There's 2 million people that either were convicted of a crime, in their original country or were in a mental institution. There's 16,000 to 30,000 murderers in that group. So you can grade it all you want, but there's no way that these people that were emptied out of jails and emptied out of psychic wars in Guatemala or Honduras, all the worst people were sent to the United States intentionally. That's why the crime rate went down in all these other countries. Like you look at El Salvador, they export all the people here. Great. They have no crime there and we have it in New York.

You're mouthing talking points.

Is it just—

let me ask you a question. Is the crime rate in the United States of immigrants higher or lower than U.S. citizens? It's lower.

It doesn't matter. Their crime, their effective crime rate should be zero. No, it doesn't. They shouldn't be here. It's completely atrocious that they're here.

That's a different point. I'm just wanting the point.

One incremental crime is unacceptable. It's a little bit like the, the, the, that stupid question that moderator on NBC asked J.D.

Vance.

Well, isn't it true that there's only 2 or 3 apartment complexes invaded by like Guatemalan gangs? And he's like, do you hear yourself? The acceptable answer of gangs invading apartment complexes in the United States is zero. The acceptable number of crimes committed by illegal immigrants is zero. It doesn't matter whether it's higher or less than native Americans.

And they're better, they're safer than the U.S. citizens. We should kick out all the U.S. citizens and put them somewhere else then.

No, we should have no illegal immigrants in this United States. And every single crime is an offense to the American people.

The key with all of this, by the way, just on, on, on, you know, whether I agree or disagree on like illegal immigration specifically, I think I'm, I swing back and forth. Like I agree fundamentally a little bit of like, it is a crime to come here illegally. We should enforce the law, like broadly speaking, but at the same time, from a U.S. economic policy, We need people, right? Like our population has challenges in that we are getting older and therefore Social Security, Medicare spend is just going to go through the roof and continues to do so, not because of anything about the programs themselves, but just because of how the population ages and we don't replace because we have significantly fewer kids now. It's not as bad as like South Korea and Japan, but it's not great. And so, You can't force people to have kids. So you do need some sort of like new younger population eventually to afford these entitlement programs. And so we've got to, if we're going to kick illegal immigrants out, we need to reform the legal immigration pretty consistently. If debt is an issue that you care about, legal immigration needs to be drastically increased.

Absolutely. Yes, but there's ways to do that. You know, we've had periods in the United States where we've had substantial legal immigration and then there's periods and what's the criteria is more the debate, like from where, you know.

Well, there's criteria and volume, right? Like you think of the H-1B issue, right? Like clearly I don't think anyone would argue that people who get H-1Bs are like underqualified, right? These are highly skilled people. They're making 6 figures.

We need more of them.

We need more of them. But it's a capped program. It's a capped program, you know, and therein lies the issue.

It's a capped program and it has been abused. As you know, this whole debate that blew up in the public domain pointed out, there are a lot of abuses. I think Elon had a good compromise, which is if you raise like sort of the cost, that alone just sort of fixes some of the abuses. But there was like a, I saw like a note yesterday on X that looked authentic, which is There's like a restaurant chain that literally in each store has H-1B visa people, which is clearly not the point and the intent of the program. So you can adjust it and normalize it. And I think where Elon landed probably works fairly well for most people.

But just think of the numbers, right? There's about 85, I believe it's 85,000 H-1Bs roughly every year. And we're talking about 40 million. I mean, the number, like they're just, it's just the order of magnitude is crazy. And I worry that People don't understand how population size and population growth is by far the biggest issue when it comes to the US national debt. It's just because it's not intuitive why that's true.

The root cause where I think you get to an 80% consensus view is the root cause of it is the education system in the United States is broken. So we no longer assimilate people. So there's a massive consensus in the United States for a long time about fairly significant immigration as long as the public schools and other institutions were assimilating people into the US culture. And for a variety of reasons, that's no longer the case. So I think that causes a lot of people, like I think the Viveks of the world, et cetera, are furious because the assimilation is broken and we're still taking a lot of people. Secondly, because the education system in the United States is dysfunctional, we don't train a lot of highly educated, technically proficient people. And so the combination is lethal to the future of the United States. So you really have to fix the root cause too, which is improve education in the United States.

Kevin, as you reflect on the election itself, and obviously this is our first episode we've done since then, I'm curious what meta points you take away from it that you think are extrapolable to the next election cycle and that the Democratic Party should really internalize.

Look, people, I don't take much when elections are this close. The overall point is similar to what we saw in 1980. In 1980, every major country changed. You know, the US went from left to right, France went from right to left, UK went from left to right because there was inflation. People hate inflation and they just kicked out almost every government. Didn't matter what their position was. They just, and even though inflation was a global thing and a lot of it was caused by oil prices. Uh, so here we had a little bit of that too. Almost everyone has been kicked out, uh, that has run for office this year. And this was an example. And Trump represented change. We're going to see over time how many of our presidents can get reelected because with the difficult, you know, social media atmosphere and criticism of both people on both sides, you know, do people get reelected? And so for the last 3 times, whoever represented more change And I think we're going to see that. The truth is the economy, you know, is doing unbelievably well. It's not perfect, but it's, it's doing well. Uh, so there wasn't a compelling reason on that front to make a change, but, you know, people forgot why they kicked Trump out and they brought him back in.

I think the point of like inflation is the single most destructive force you can almost have in like any country is a really important one. It's just people, you see it, you feel it every single day when you buy things. And like, you're just, that's why you see that change. It's just like inflation bad. This government did it. I'm going to make the switch.

It's amazing. I did my honeymoon in Mozambique a year ago or whatever, and I was there and talking to the people about the local economy and all the changes they've made and like the corruption and all this stuff. And it was funny talking to some of the local people and they're like, oh yeah, it's totally corrupt. It's a disaster. Like, you know, people are stealing from us all the time, but you know, like, Our quality of life's gone up pretty significantly in the last 10 years. And so we're willing to tolerate a lot of corruption in exchange for economic growth. And it was actually fascinating when the pie is shrinking, everyone fights with one another and there's all these social issues we're dealing with. And when the pie's growing, you're like, ah yeah, but my life's better than it was.

Well, what's interesting, by the way, on inflation, which is, we shall see. I agree, that's probably the primary mandate that the switch here with Trump has. If you look at the long-term debt markets, look at the US Treasury 10-year, the market is telling you they don't believe inflation is going to be wrangled in by this administration, right? The 10-year is at what, like 5% or something, high 4s at this point. And that's, it's telling you market's usually right here. So we'll see if he can pull it off.

Well, 2 points. I think, you know, as Trump said, look, the first administration had a 1.7% inflation rate. So I, you know, he doesn't care what economists think or predict. Because he actually delivered. And I think that resonated with real voters. Like, you know, you could critique it, but the truth is we had no inflation of any note during the first Trump administration. Second though, I think the interesting thing analog to China is this trade, basically from about the 1980s, people in China basically made the trade for incremental prosperity against freedom. And the leadership of China was very conscious that at the 3.6 billion person level, if I can improve their life, there's not going to be any political turmoil. And then now what's going to be fascinating and challenging and somewhat treacherous is China's incremental prosperity is not increasing, and certainly not for the marginal 3.6x billion person. And that's going to cause more political instability because that was the explicit trade that Xi and others made in his prior, you know, the one or two premiers before him. So it's going to put a lot of stress on the Chinese system.

That's not just China, to be clear. That's like all of Europe as well. You know, Canada, although they are reforming, it seems, with this next election, but like it's just slow to negative growth, inverted populations with giant entitlements. It's pretty brutal when you get outside the United States.

Well, fortunately there's a good example. All you have to do is go to Argentina and there's a great example of what you do with hyperinflation and no growth, how you can fix it in less than 2 years.

It's a fascinating experiment, by the way. I think the Argentina experiment is amazing to watch because, A, it's not us, so it's nice to see other people run this. And if you just compare what we're going to see hopefully in the next— I agree with you, by the way, Argentina will be a success story if they Consistently follow these new, let's call it like the deregulation of Argentina. But you'll be able to compare and contrast it to the rest of South America, which is not going in that direction. Most places, maybe like El Salvador, you could argue is a different place, but it's going to be an amazing global experiment to watch. And I think it'll be hard to argue with this idea of like capitalism brings you out of poverty because we are going to watch it happen in Argentina, hopefully.

I'm curious at a micro level, we've obviously had more donations, like in the last couple weeks, people have announced for inauguration campaigns. I think Altman, Zuckerberg, Dara, and a bunch of companies as well. I'm curious, Keith or Kevin, your guys' perspective on this. Is this just the natural course of election cycles and people contribute, or is something actually changing with tech's mindset towards the new administration and being more amenable to Republican candidates?

The wind is blowing and people are following it.

I'm actually really shocked. So, you know, obviously I'm going to be spending the weekend in DC and I expected this to be just a political weekend for me and like relaxing and, you know, just meet politicians and not do much. Every single person of almost any note that I know that runs an organization of note in tech is coming to the inaugural. I'm going to be like working all weekend. Like it's like the best tech conference ever as far as I can tell. And so I am totally shocked at the sea change. I think there's some people where it's obvious, like think Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. They spent $400 million electing Biden, you know, on the bad side of censoring some information. He has a lot of amends to make, you know, to not be the enemy, you know, of the new administration. But people like Dara and Uber, it's not like, as far as I can tell, it's not like they had infuriated lots of Republicans or Trump or anything. And the fact that they're, you know, really putting their signature down in supporting, or Tim Cook, you know, who's clearly not a traditional conservative, Sam Altman, you know, same thing, not a traditional conservative, are not only giving a lot of money but actually hosting events in, you know, in honor of Trump and JD Vance. That has caught me by surprise. I did not expect this. I think now a lot of tech did steer too far left, unlike a traditional Fortune 500 company, which is very balanced typically and very careful about not stepping over the edge too much supporting a Democrat or too much supporting a Republican. Some tech companies were like 98%, you know, pro-Democrat, and they need to, you know, re-steer back to some balance. But the fact that it's this vigorous and this public, you know, he's having Bezos on stage with Mark and Elon, it really did actually catch me by surprise the last 2 weeks.

Big tech is like progressive in its social views, absolutely, and still is, and rightfully so. But I would argue, like, it's always been, it's not just big tech, it's little tech too, right? It's been pro-growth, right? Like, these are entrepreneurial people and organizations and where, I mean, I can critique Biden and the administration in lots of different ways, but the, like, anti-growth rhetoric, the kind of, like, enforcement of weird, weird competition things that aren't really, like, competitive, blocking Amazon's purchase of, like, Pumbaa, like these little, like, what are you doing? Right? Like you're harming, you know, the American economy with all these things. And I do think people are now realizing like there's an influence on the Trump organization that is viable a little bit of like a pro-growth mindset. And so I would be doing the same thing if I were them. Like it makes a ton of logical sense. I am surprised like you are as to how fast it happened.

So this is the first election I think where the top 100 CEOs, of the top 100 companies, not a single one gave money to Trump. Uh, and now everyone is, you know, just seeing the wind blow and they're sucking up to him as much as they can.

Do you think it's pure opportunism, Kevin?

Pure, pure. They'll flip the other way next time.

I think it's partially trying to rebalance. Like, obviously, if 100, you know, zero, you— that's typically not a great formulation. Secondly though, I do think, uh, Zach's right that there is some economic prosperity, tech innovation that's driving some of the agenda. For example, I had 2 very prominent Democratic donors that I know well tell me after the election when I saw them in person that reality is we're kind of happy in some ways because the next administration, if it had been a Democrat, was not going to fix immigration, was not going to end the wars, and was going to interfere in AI's success. Like those 3 things, these people are very liberal. They they're in the top 100 donors to the D Party. But they were both those on those 3 things. They were really glad, actually, that Trump won, even though they would never admit it publicly. So I think if you believe that immigration is really important in controlling the borders, whether or not you remove people, whether or not you change policies, but having some control over the borders, or you believe that the world's on fire and we should do more things to remove some of the fire. And then third, if you believe that we're in an existential race for AI with the CCP and that the government putting fetters on AI undermines our probability of success. On those 3 dimensions, I think a lot of tech people, there's some consensus around supporting Trump, but the visibility in doing it publicly is what caught me by surprise because I remember when we endorsed Trump in March of this year, we gave money to him.

We too.

Jacob did it more publicly first, actually, but Fundamentally, we donated substantially to his campaign. I believe in March of 2024, I don't think there was a single other person in tech, in large, this is not that long ago, that was explicitly publicly endorsing Trump. Now, I can't think of a single person of any prominence in tech. And that's like less than a year ago. Yeah.

Sacks probably was, right?

Sacks was not supporting Trump at that point. He was supporting DeSantis and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That was like June or July. Elon was July, July 13th. Like, I don't think there was a single person. Like, Doug came out, Doug Leone came out sometime around June, I think, May. Um, but I really can't name any person in tech. I might have missed somebody, but I don't know of anybody.

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Well, I think also a little bit of what's happened, at least on the larger side, is like, if you've had to think about building a data center in the last 6 months, which I don't know, every single company of any scale has to think about building a data center. All of a sudden, you know, a dose of reality hits you where you're like, oh, right. Like I need access to water. I need permits. I need like, you know, Cheaper energy so I can run this data center. And you start to realize how important that like energy independence piece of this really is. And the Trump administration, to their credit, is very kind of like pro what I would think of as energy abundance, which is like, do all the things, do all the, you know, they're not, they're not— ExxonMobil. Yeah, exactly.

How do you suppress inflation without raising interest rates is the cost of energy is a key ingredient on the cost of goods.

Absolutely.

I was surprised.

I think that's changing, by the way, like that is changing people's tune because you have people, you see it in Zuckerberg's interviews. You've seen it in at Microsoft, you've seen other places where they are running into problems with atoms. Like it's not just a bits problem anymore, right? These, you know, these data centers are difficult to get built and they need them. And I do think the like very anti-oil and gas, anti-building, anti, you know, nuclear energy rhetoric that the Dems unfortunately took you know, for the last like 4 or 5 years is, is biting them, especially in the tech cohort, that's for sure.

Zach, we need to point out that gas prices are very low and that immigration into the country, illegal immigration, is below the level that Trump was at, but it was much higher a year ago. And so that reality, I don't know why they waited so long to do that because it, and it helped cost them the election. Right, right now there's, there's, the numbers are great.

Depends where you are, by the way. Like, let's call it, let's leave gas prices because it's kind of like a weird Like, you know, just oil, like what I would think of as energy prices are highly variable, right? Depending on where you are in the country, right? They are like, they're not cheap in California. I'll tell you that. And they're not cheap in Hawaii. And they're like, not that cheap in New York. And, you know, you go back just because I live in New York. I don't know, it was a few years ago. We're basically banning new natural gas pipelines into the city. So what are they doing? Trucking the natural gas into the city. It's just like the dumbest things in the world because, you know, people think, But like, hey, if I stop the supply side of oil and gas, it's going to stop the demand for it. It's like, no, that's not how this— people like enjoy having electricity. And so there's a little bit of state-by-state variability. I agree, US energy independence in particular on the oil front is phenomenal, right? Like we are an exporter now and not an importer, and we should continue to do that. I think of it I think tech feels it more on like a local basis, right? It's not like, you know, you're not going to the gas station to power your data center, right? Like there's real, real challenges with this stuff and they're seeing it firsthand.

We talked about big tech and like the opportunism potentially around this weekend and the inauguration and all that. And, but what I found most interesting is I, in talking to rank and file employees, it sort of seems like There's been a material shift even within the employees at these organizations that doesn't feel opportunistic in a way that— and I don't know exactly what to attribute it to, but if it goes back to the Brian Armstrong and Toby, let's keep the politics out of the workforce or whatever, I'm feeling that more and more at an individual level within the companies that people are just over talking about all this. And they saw the balance of it flip from one way to now the other way. And now it feels like everyone doesn't necessarily want to deal with these things in a workforce. I'm curious how you guys are counseling companies going forward. Like, is it the Brian Armstrong, no politics in the workforce, that whole thing and just let it be? Or are you letting the opinions sort of fly when you're talking to companies and these issues arise? Keith, I'm curious your perspective.

I think I've always been sympathetic to Brian's perspective. I thought it was very courageous when he did it because it was against the sort of prevailing wisdom. And I'm sure he was counseled not to do it by lots of people. But I think that set the precedent, a little bit like when Elon fired 80% of Twitter. It set the precedent for a lot of CEOs rethinking growth of headcount as a vanity metric. So I think sometimes one CEO in tech can set a positive example, and then there's a, despite being contrarians, there's a herd mentality to follow. Sometimes in a non-charged environment, for example, Meta, Facebook back in the day created a growth team. Then all of a sudden everybody wants a growth team. So there's a bit of that that happens in tech, emulating a perceived leader. I think it's a natural state for tech companies. There's a variety of views that work in any company at any scale. Like, the reality is if you have a 100 or 1,000-person company, you probably have people who voted for Trump in that company, and you have people absolutely voted for Kamala. You also are going to have people who believe in H-1 visa expansion. You probably have some people who don't actually. And so anytime the company takes a political view, you're going to alienate a reasonable fraction of your employees, which to me makes no sense unless it has a business interest. Obviously crypto companies have certain interests, like they need a certain regulatory environment to thrive, so you can see why, you know, they, or Uber or DoorDash has a specific interest in drivers not being classified, you know, as W-2 workers, et cetera. But absent those exceptions, I don't understand how you can run a company and alienate somewhere between 10 to 50% of your workforce all the time.

I like, as you're, no one's ever like, hey, I really think, I really think it's important to be moderate. Like it's hard. It's not. So you like in the companies, like you, you, the loudest voices tend to be the extreme voices. And that's as a founder, I remember this at Flatiron and we were like in the thick of it. It's frustrating because you're kind of like, all right, like these 2 people are screaming, but like, do they really represent The rest of the folks, because the rest of the folks don't have a real incentive to speak up and it's hard. And I, for me, at least what I've told founders is just work is for work and just keep it like that. And, you know.

Yeah, I don't think it's a complicated issue. People need to focus on building their companies. What they do outside, whether they play tennis or vote Democrat or vote Republican, that's up to them. They should do whatever they want to do. And will they talk at the water cooler? Sure. These people talk about dating and movies and politics, but it's not a, it's not a company issue.

And I agree.

You want to, you want to stay out of it.

I don't know if that was the consensus. I would say that didn't feel like the consensus in 2020 and 2021. It felt like you had to take opinions on all of these things. And now we've shifted it in a certain way, probably back to the appropriate equilibrium of how companies should operate.

I don't feel it changing at all. No smart company should be getting involved with politics. I don't have any companies that were particularly getting involved unless, as Keith said, they had one specific issue about Medicare reimbursement or crypto, then yes, you have an interest in an issue, but not necessarily in politics.

If you go back and you look at, not to like pick the one most controversial area, but like with policing and George Floyd, I mean, there was a lot of pressure on founders of companies, at least in my orbit, to comment on the George Floyd issue. And like, you know, whether appropriate or not, there was pressure to do it. And I think some people, you know, focused on it and did, and others, you know, like Brian Armstrong and others were just like, look, work is for work. So I don't know. It's like, do you consider that political? Is that politics that they're commenting on?

I would say the same thing with Israel too. October, like the same thing. Like there was a lot of pressure of, do you stand with Israel or not? And, you know, are you going to condemn Hamas or not?

And I mean, that was another one.

That definitely we had internally that people talking about, and we had companies asking us about it and all that stuff.

Smart companies should stay out of it.

Yeah. I mean, as somebody who's very pro-Israel, I wouldn't want my companies necessarily taking a position supporting Israel. I'm as unequivocal a supporter of Israel as you'll probably find in the world, but I don't expect companies to do that. Now, if they do business in Israel or they have a team in Israel or a data center or some, whatever, Um, an R&D center, that might be different. But I don't— I wouldn't be offended at all if, you know, a company I was affiliated with— yeah, if they took a position supporting Hamas, that would be different. So that would be a disqualifying event for me. But like, I don't expect them to issue public statements.

I also felt— I mean, I remember this at Flatiron as well. And again, you know, it's a different environment today, but just like extreme pressure from the employee base You can argue right or wrong on like diversity in executive hiring and diversity in promotions. And do you look at race and gender in evaluating whether someone should be promoted? And, you know, there was, and still is, I think to this day, like there was a lot of pressure. I mean, we were getting asked, I remember like, why do you not have XYZ minority represented in your executive team? And we had a bunch of Asian Americans in our executive team. I'm like, since, are Asian Americans not considered minorities anymore? Like, when did that happen? And so you were, we were getting into some of these issues and it was very uncomfortable as a founder because I'm like, this is not what I signed up for. I signed up for merit. I signed up for like, put the best people in charge and keep the bar high and to not have to think about like, you know, country of origin into my promotion decisions. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. That was happening.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah, that was on steroids and it is shifting and shifting pretty radically. But even relatively recently, Alexander Wang at SCaLE put out this concept. I think it was over the summer, so not that long ago. And it was pretty controversial at the time he put it out. Now, if you read it today, you'd think, oh yeah, it's kind of bland, mundane. So I think even in the last 6 to 9 months—

For people that don't know, Keith, it wasn't at Merit, Equity and inclusion.

Merit, excellence, and something. I forget what the I was or whatever, but when he published it, it was successful. I think it did generally resonate well, but there's a lot of controversy around it. If he published the same thing today, I don't even think it would get any news.

That, by the way, I do think has been that shift back of like, we're just going to talk about performance at work. Is that has surprised me how fast I think people have moved back to what I argue is the middle. I don't think it's left or right. I think it's just what it should be, which is like work is for work. But I am surprised at how quickly that discourse seems to have changed and changed in places like San Francisco and New York.

All right.

Do we want to do New York crime or do we want to do California fires?

Funny enough, I'm pro both.

Uh, I'll, I'll take New York crime for a second.

Okay, let's do it.

I just want to set the stage that— 3 or 4 points. One is that we can't lose sight of the fact that, you know, the murder rate is down 85% over the last 25 years. It is a staggering success in New York. Second point is that the murder rate in New York City is 1/4 or 1/5 of Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore. It's 1/10 of St. Louis and cities like that. It is just unbelievably safe. So, uh, that's remarkable. Now, it's not as low— it's gone up a little bit in the last couple years since 2019. The, the funny thing that people forget is that it hit its low under Bill de Blasio— 270 murders, uh, which was really impressive. He got very little credit for that, but somehow they did a great job. What we are seeing in New York Is murders I like to follow because it's— the statistics are completely reliable. Other things can depend on enforcement, reporting, things like that, but they're still directionally— What we can't explain in New York is why our murder rate was down 15% last year, uh, in '24. So it's going down, but the, the, uh, crime rate outside of murders, which normally corresponds has been going up. And so it's not nearly, nearly what it was 25 years ago, but it is up. Um, there are some deceptive headlines like subway, you know, when it goes from 6 murders in a year of 6 million people, you know, every single month going on the subway to 10, the New York Post said there's a 60% increase, which is mathematically correct, but it's a pretty small sample size problem. So subways are very safe. New York is very safe. But we can't figure out why the smaller crimes, but even not smaller crimes, you know, rape and other crimes are going up. So that's one thing to watch.

I don't, I think we kind of know why, right? Like we just like put fewer criminals in jail now and we have bail reform. And so when you let repeat arrests, and I didn't understand not convicted here, which is another issue of like, why aren't we actually like enforcing the law? When you let people who are more likely to be criminals back out on the street, like they're going to do crime. And then by the way, if you don't enforce it, they're incentivized to do more crime. It's just like, to me, it just seems logical. Like that's why.

It used, used to always follow murder rates as well. So there's a mental health issue that's grown in the last 5 years, which could be contributing more to these, but I think bail reform, there's a chance it's the data is sort of complicated there, but it could be contributing to it.

There's also a power law. I mean, amplifying Zach's point, a very small number of criminals commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. So when you relax the number of people that are incarcerated, you're unlocking a disproportionate amount of crime that's going to occur. This is what we learned in the 1980s. I grew up in a commuter suburb in New Jersey of New York, and I was banned from my parents from ever taking the subway past sunset because it was actually, Kevin, Quite dangerous in New York in the 1980s, early '80s. It was actually a pretty dangerous place.

I was there.

And then it was so dangerous that people basically in an 86% Democratic registered city voted for Rudy Giuliani. And he applied some basic principles like put criminals in jail, enforce the law consistently. And all of a sudden within 4, 8 years, you saw all the trends. And then Bloomberg continued the trends, et cetera, et cetera. And then for whatever set of reasons, we've lost sight of that in New York City, and maybe murders lag. There is some potential that they lag. I agree with you historically that the correlation's pretty strong, but in any event, I think the basic principles of people who commit crimes tend to commit more than one crime. And so if you have the opportunity to arrest and prosecute them, you're saving yourself from prospective crimes if you actually follow through. And then there's the deterrent effect where people learn lessons There's a high likelihood that they're going to be prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated.

Keep in mind too, we have changed the state laws in New York to prevent— we've hindered our ability to put crazy people in mental institutions. I know I'm not supposed to say crazy people, but let's be honest, that's what they are, right? And like, whether it's a mental health disorder like schizophrenia or it's a drug problem, and I think it probably tends to be a combination of all of these things. There are legitimate crazy people running around the streets and we have hurt our ability to put them in long-term care places where they need to be. And so the other thing people forget, they're like, oh, but it's homelessness. New York has a right to shelter law. Like you can get a hotel room on New York State's dime, you know, not forever. And so like you've got this issue where we just, we've hamstrung ourselves in terms of our ability to actually go after this legally, which is crazy to me. Like the mayor, and don't get Don't get me wrong, Adams talks a lot and does very little unless he tends to say, I think the right things and then just kind of like go to Zero Bond and party on Friday night. But like there are rules that we have in place that are hurting our ability to get this done. And unfortunately in New York, that means state law. And that is a very left-leaning organization in terms of our state representatives who have to write these rules. And like, are we really going to go and like get this done?

I'm not sure. So the CEOs have been trying— of New York, uh, the partnership— have been trying to push this and trying to change it and have not succeeded yet in giving the police, with a non-police person, a mental therapist, the ability to take people off the street if they're deemed to be in danger of themselves or other people. And we've all seen people like this. And the one thing I'd qualify is, you know, that number of people is actually quite small. It's not contributing to the crime rate that much. There are only like 3,000, 4,000 people on the street. We have 100,000 in shelters. People on the streets, the perception is incredibly important. When you see one crazy person yelling out, you remember that for the rest of the day and you feel very unsafe. And so it's a no-brainer to me that that needs to be corrected. And, you know, whatever, 2,000 of those people need to be put into institutions and we need to pay for that.

And by the way, I would bet, I would bet cheaper in the long run. And you need to almost view it as an investment, right? If people feel, whether right or wrong, that New York isn't safe, they don't come.

That's the perception thing. I have had a lot of my friends, family live in the South, and the perception of, hey, can we come up to New York? Is it actually safe right now? Like there's a real material impact from people that regardless of the stats, Kevin, that you have around that, I think Zach, you hit on an interesting point with regard drugs, which is something that we, you know, we haven't totally talked about, but in the legalization path or the decriminalization path, not all drugs are created equal, right, in this. And so I think that's another factor in it. But the perception problem is a big one, and I— that's what we really— I mean, that's going to really impact, you know, tourism and a bunch of other factors, city, you know, growth.

From a big chunk is false reporting of politicians saying New York is so dangerous when their own cities are so much more dangerous, which they, they don't point out. Uh, but there is a reality that crime has gone up in the last 5 years on, on smaller. And I do think bail reform could be, it could be, uh, a contributor, but not, not all of it.

I mean, you walk to Duane Reade and the deodorant is locked. Like, I just, like, you know, to, to, to keep to your point of like anecdotes, you know, probably end up being correct. Like when deodorant is locked on Duane Reade on 7th Avenue in the middle of New York City, Like, something's wrong. Like, we shouldn't have that.

One of the things I'm optimistic about is— sorry, just one last one. He said, um, Tish has just taken over as chief of police. Not at all the normal profile you would expect, you know, but, uh, someone who's been there for 13 years, is incredibly smart, has done a great job in everything she's done before, uh, was not a beat cop. Um, and I'm hopeful, I'm very hopeful that she will add a lot to the, the police department.

Yeah, I think the drugstore and the Walgreens, CVS kind of experiment. When I have friends visit from the Bay Area or New York, Miami, there's nothing locked at any of these sort of stores in Miami. They just literally walk in the middle of tourist zone on a Friday night at 9:00 PM and they're like in shock. It's like they particularly ask staff people because Walgreens just announced they're shutting down 12 stores. You can't even run a store. At least in New York, you can kind of keep the store open. In SF, you literally can't run a store because of the crime. The SF people who visit for the first time, they feel like they went to Mars. They're like, this vibrant Walgreens, CVS grocery open at midnight where everything was unlocked and nobody commits any crimes in a fairly metropolitan, very cosmopolitan demographic mix. Miami's not in the middle of nowhere.

And so you don't have to live this way, is my Well, and so I'm curious about that, Keith, as you've studied or thought about it. The amazing thing about America is we have 50 states that run a bunch of different experiments. We have all these cities that are running a bunch of different A/B tests for it. I guess, have you gone in at a micro level and just looked at, is there something that Miami's doing that clearly is just so different than what New York or San Francisco's doing? Is it this enforcement thing?

Well, we definitely enforce the law, no doubt about it. The police are incredibly responsive. I always give this anecdote. When I first moved into Miami, the first Sunday I triggered my home alarm by accident because it was a new house and I didn't have it set on off time. Within 4 minutes that it took me to deactivate the alarm, I had 5 police cars in my driveway. If that had happened in SF, I would wait 4 hours for one police officer. And I'm dead serious, this happened. I had home intrusions and it would take 2 to 4 hours to get a police response. People know that. Criminals know that too. Secondly, if you're caught, you are definitely going to get prosecuted and you're not going to avoid incarceration for any, what we would think of as a crime. And so that does take people off the street. And we don't have these crazy bail rules where you can't take into consideration the dangerousness of somebody. That sounds insane. So we don't have any of these DAs, the Soros-elected DAs that you had across the country ruining LA, ruining Francisco. So there's a lot, a combination, and it's cultural too. Like in New York, there's no groups talking about the George Floyd and stuff harking back. In Miami, there's no groups of people that resent the police. The police are a representative institution that normal citizens of every income and every demographic believe are there to protect and serve, and the police act that way consistently.

We should acknowledge what we did wrong. Which is like, at least in my view, we put people in jail for smoking weed. And we did that for like 15 years and it was mostly minorities and that was a really fucking stupid thing to do. And like, as a result, people swung this other direction, which is like, this is insane. We have people for incredibly low-level drug offenses not getting bail in jail. Like, that was dumb.

Well, let's be careful there. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. There's an exaggeration in that. And so as someone who actually served temporarily as a prosecutor back when I was a young lawyer, most of those people, and I'd argue maybe like most meaning like 80 to 99%, are pleading to a possession charge where they were actually committing a more serious offense. And it's just easier to plead that to possession. And so you don't try to show distribution.

It's hard.

You have to take it to a jury. So a lot of those people are more guilty than the plea agreement reflects, which is perfectly fine. That's how the system works. But I think sometimes it gets analyzed as if you were just like smoking this weed for yourself and you got thrown in jail for 2 years. That's not what's happening.

Fair enough. I just think like it's so visceral and we're like, this person is in jail for smoking weed and it seems very unfair. And I think that's why we swung. I think everybody swung this crazy direction. Now I got to moderate back.

The anecdote did create a story that led to the swing, whether or not you can debate whether the anecdote was legitimate or not. You saw even Kamala got in trouble in her first campaign for doing this in California where Tulsi just shredded her on this. But I think actually it was more defensible, but I think it did lead to this trend of decarceration.

I have to look up whether that is your number of 80 to 99% of people who are convicted of weed had something else. That seems—

You know where to start because the methodology is actually interesting. Just if you know like a local prosecutor like that you trust, or like, you know, some police, like if you know the new chief of police.

Historically, it's not happening. Yeah. Historically.

Because it's not going to always show up in the charging documents. You know, like you have to look at where, but I try to triangulate with people you trust.

Yeah.

I think we swung a little bit to No one is responsible for their own actions if those actions are like low-level crimes. And the problem with that, as we've now learned yet again, is like when you don't enforce low-level crimes, people do more of them. Like it's just basic incentives. And so I'm not sure why we're surprised that this happens, but humans have very short memories and we kind of don't learn and we repeat the same mistakes and Here we are. And the good news is I agree with you about Aitish. She seems great and I'm excited for her. Be nice.

I mean, we're at an hour right now. I think the California wildfires in particular, the interesting thing, I think insurance is interesting and I think the mandate to rebuild, or like, do we incentivize rebuilding with laxer rules around all this to get it built up quicker? Or do we actually use this as an opportunity to try to reinforce the structures and the ability, you know, for all these problems not to recur to the same extent it did. That's maybe the most interesting thing. I mean, we can litigate the politics of the fire chief versus the mayor and all that stuff. I'm maybe less interested in that. I'm more interested in kind of the business implications of it. I'm curious, do you guys have any perspective on either one of those things?

If the insurance industry is telling you they can't insure your house, there's probably a reason because they make money by insuring So like, that's the problem. You know, like it's not a, it's not like a government issue.

It's like, well, should there be no, should there be an insurer of last resort at all on these properties or should it just be fair market and let it play out?

No, the insurer of last resort is you.

It's really, I mean, if you live in California, it's you.

It's not you specifically, but like, you know, that's your money.

Yeah. I don't want to subsidize, you know, Zach, building a house somewhere that is going to burn down, there's no reason why we all subsidize that. And, you know, if, if, if the insurance companies were not properly calculating the risk, the 3 of us on the phone would start an insurance company and make a ton of money. And I'm not convinced. I think there's actually a 1 in 10 chance in these areas that your house is going to burn down. And if you have a $10 million house, that means you got to charge $1.5 million a year for insurance. And no one will pay it.

It's just like, it's unfortunate, but you know, the private market is telling you that like the risk is too high and that's it. Now, you know, if you want to build a house there and you can't get insurance for it, I think that's just like, that's the choice, right? This is America. Like you can make that choice. I, you know, that is a different question than, you know, should we let people rebuild their houses with fewer rules? I mean, I think in general, like we should let people build more houses and the rules are what prevent us from doing that. So that seems like a separate issue. But the other thing that's happening too, which is really adjacent to insurance, not insurance itself, is just on the perception of price gouging in the rental market, right? Because all of a sudden, obviously you've got tens of thousands of people who need rental properties and they don't want to move out of state or to Nevada or wherever they need to go. And so you've got people charging exorbitant prices on rent, which on one hand, yes, it seems shitty to do, but the minute you start regulating this stuff, the rental supply goes away. And so now you've got like 4 properties that we can rent at really good prices for like the 4 lucky people who get it. And it's just, we've seen the same story over and over and over again when it's like price gouging is a temporary moment. And that what that high price does is it brings supply on because now a whole bunch of people who normally wouldn't rent their thing are like, hey, actually maybe I should rent this. And that brings the price down and it brings supply online. It's just like basic supply. I think we teach this shit in middle school and I don't understand why people don't get this. It's just like over and over again.

We do this experiment every day with Uber. So Uber surge pricing was controversial, you know, a decade ago or 8 years ago. And what Uber surge pricing does is when the price goes up, drivers who are sitting at home that could drive say, you know what, I'm going to get off the sofa and I know I was going to do something else tonight. But at $25 an hour, I'm not going to drive. And so suddenly all the people who need rides into any particular city get the rides. And well, housing works the same way. If you float the price up, people will build. Now there are, you don't have the instant response building, can't immediately have the market move in equilibrium. But the basic principle is the same, that pricing works really well for creating supply when you need it. And when you have more supply than you need, you can lower pricing. I do think that there's a serious question though. If the regulations can be suspended now, how valid or how useful are the regulations in the first place? At least we should ask the question of any regulation that you can suspend for the next year or 2, if you're willing to suspend it now, how important is it? This happened during COVID with healthcare, which we could talk a little bit about. In theory, you're a doctor, you can't practice across state lines. So you have to be licensed in Iowa, as a physician to treat someone in Iowa, but you can't treat them in Wisconsin, which doesn't make any sense to me. We suspended those kind of rules during COVID so that telemedicine could deal with the acute issues that people had when they weren't allowed to leave their home. But it does open the question of like, why the hell can't a doctor who's licensed in Iowa treat somebody in Minnesota?

Because the doctors don't want it.

Yeah.

Which is like, and it's another, like healthcare's own weird thing, but like it is such a fascinating issue where people are Why can't the doctors do XYZ? And it's like, well, you know why? Because the doctors want fewer doctors. And it's a little counterintuitive.

I think almost every modern country on the globe, you're able to get mostly over-the-counter contacts. And in the US, you have to revisit every year and go see an optometrist and all that stuff. And like, why is that the case? It's because the optometrists really like that and that is very good for their business.

Yeah.

They're like, huh, if there's fewer doctors, I get paid more. That seems like a good thing. You know, I'm like, oh yeah, yeah.

Local monopoly or protected, you know, in law it makes a little more sense because actually the state law does vary in Iowa versus Minnesota or New York or New Jersey. So you do have to have some local context, but I think the standard of care in Iowa should be the same as in Minnesota.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't, I don't think your differential diagnosis changes based on like The George Washington Bridge, you know, like especially at the primary care level.

Nurses have to be certified, you know, in states differently. It makes no sense at all.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, like when we see these, these like market inefficiencies and this is one of them, you know, you kind of like dig of like, why is this happening? And you realize there's a lot of just like entrenched interests of the people. You think of like auto dealerships. Same, same idea, right? Like we have state rules that prevent car manufacturers from selling direct to consumers. We like, we stop commerce. And so then you get a bunch of like, you know, multi-billionaire, like the dealership guys. And my favorite part about them, this is my favorite, because it's just like counterintuitive again, like these, they can hold these 2 thoughts in their head. They're all Republicans. And they're just like, they're like free market Republicans. Everything's great. Don't have any rules except for that one auto dealership rule that I benefit from, and it makes me like the richest person in town. So, you know, it's just, you gotta dig a little bit, you find where the entrenched interest lives. And in healthcare, a lot of it's the docs, unfortunately, you know.

Well, bridging into politics, you know, Elon had to design Tesla around those regulations and, you know, I think it succeeded, but, you know, it wasn't obvious in the beginning that Tesla was going to succeed.

Oh yeah. They were forcing him to have a dealer.

Didn't he just open, I think he opened like his own dealership on like a Native American land, right? Because it skirts the rules. Isn't that like the latest Tesla move?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There's lots of little clever ideas for people who are creative enough.

That's my next startup. We're going to start a multi-specialty hospital health system on Native American lands that treats, you know, drive over. Might actually work.

Anything else, guys? I think this was a punchy 70 minutes or whatever. I think we did a good job on all this.

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