New SEC Chair, Bitcoin, xAI Supercomputer, UnitedHealth CEO murder, with Gavin Baker & Joe Lonsdale

Hey everybody, before we drop this week's amazing episode, just some quick information for you. Chamath and Sacks both had the week off, so we had two amazing friends of the pod on: Gavin Baker from Atreides and Joe Lonsdale from 8VC. What a treat to have them on the program. But there is some big news, huh, Freeberg?

Yeah, well, the news dropped after we recorded, so it's not going to be referenced and the show might feel a little stale. But here we go: our friend David Sacks is the White House AI and Crypto Czar of the United States of America. Congratulations to our boy, amazing, super thrilled. That is a big reason why he wasn't able to join us for the show; he was in the middle of getting this news ramped up.

Yes, it came out after we had already recorded. Yeah, take that into account as we go into the show. And according to Trump's Truth Social post, Sacks will, quote, guide policy for the administration in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. He will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisers for Science and Technology. Huh, how great is that, Freeberg?

Wow, science czar in the White House, can't wait. It's going to be fun.

Pretty awesome. I have no announcements. The rumors about me becoming press secretary are obviously premature, but if asked to serve, I will serve my country. Okay, let's get to it. Don't worry, besties, All-In isn't going anywhere. We'll be here every week for you, except maybe Thanksgiving or a holiday now and again. All right, let's start the show.

Great episode, let's go.

All right everybody, welcome to the All-In Podcast. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. How you doing, Freeberg?

I'm hanging in there. I'm waiting for the tsunami to hit. It's gonna... we're about 40 minutes away. I'm a little anxious right now.

More anxious than normal is what you're saying? Like on a scale of one to Freeberg, this is like as anxious as you get with this tsunami?

I don't know what's gonna happen. This current warning shows a 5-foot water rise, or 5-meter, I can't tell. God, I really hope we don't... this episode and there's like a total disaster.

We're not going to make light of it. We get warnings once in a while. Just to give everybody a little perspective here, I'm at David Sacks' house. I've taken over. As you can see, I got my Moncler hat on. Freeberg, I found Sacks' robe. See this here? It was Sacks' robe, but I got a red Sharpie and I just crossed it out and I put J-Cal on it. And then I went down and I was talking to Chef... Does Sacks know that you're staying at his house?

He knows I'm staying here, but does he though? He doesn't know that I found the actual...

Let your winners ride. We open-source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. With us today, Chamath couldn't make it this week and had surgery and now he looks like Gavin. And Sacks is taking a day off. He's got the day off today. I think he's just winning too much. We have two substitutes to jump in here for the team. Cackling, you can hear the cackling. Joe Lonsdale, take my Moncler hat off here.

J-Cal, I'm also winning too much, but I'm happy to be here last minute as a sub for David.

Joe Lonsdale, for people who don't know, is to the right of David Sacks. He is a venture capitalist and he started a couple of companies you might have heard of them: Palantir. What are the other greatest hits? Addepar. Addepar just crossed a trillion dollars, reported on it this month. It's a good real company too. Yeah, OpenGov sold this year. We saw a bunch of companies... Joe, you're a little bit lower profile than all these accomplishments. It's pretty incredible. Co-founded how many billion-dollar companies have you co-founded now?

I don't know, maybe six or so.

Six or so. Also with us, Gavin Baker from Atreides. He is a hedge fund manager, he does private, he does public. One of the smartest guys I know, great analyst. Welcome to the program, Gavin, friend of the pod.

Yeah, we are experiencing a huge Trump bump. The election is over, the cabinet is being assembled, and we're seeing the Department of Government Efficiency as well as maybe regulations being pulled down. And we'll get to our first topic about our new SEC chair, but just generally speaking, Gavin, as a market participant for a living, what's your take on what we've seen over the last three weeks since the election results came in?

Joe, you want to maybe give us your take? I know obviously you're very vocal, you're obviously a conservative, run a think tank, and have strong feelings on all this. But there is consensus, I think, amongst all Americans that we don't like fraud, waste, abuse, and those items. Those seem to be consensus-building. Efficiency and paying lower taxes, all of that seems like something almost all Americans, most Americans, can get behind. So I guess maybe a little bit of your take on what we've seen in the markets and the plan, and then also, are you going to be involved in this at all?

Well, listen, J-Cal, I think I do agree. I think almost all reasonable Americans can see that our growth is ridiculously constrained. And I think Jeff Bezos was saying yesterday, like, we need a growth-oriented mindset if we're going to get out of our debt problems, out of our deficit problems. So it's nice to see everyone kind of coming on the team and saying, yeah, we need to fix these things. I think what people don't understand is, like, just how broken the government bureaucracies and regulations are. Right? It's not like they're kind of sort of bad. Like, it's almost like they're companies that went bankrupt. Like, think of the worst company you know in Silicon Valley that went bankrupt like 30 years ago, and imagine if someone just, like, kept pumping money into that worst company, you know, over like 30 years to keep hiring people. So like Yahoo or AOL, like some legacy company was failing. Take the worst department there, and then like the worst department gets the most money. So it's like, it's more than anything you've seen in a long time. And I think one of the important things is America used to have these really hard tests for 100 years. You know, this in 1883, we said, you know what, we shouldn't just hire our friends. If someone's going to run something in government, let's have these tough tests, kind of like China did for thousands of years. And for a hundred years, we had really hard tests. When we went to the moon, when we fought the world wars, you know, we did the Manhattan Project, the people making those decisions and hiring people had to pass things that really only like 5-10% of people could pass who took them. And then in the late 70s, we said not only are these tests racist, so we can't test people anymore of any background, we also can't fire people anymore because we're going to give them tons of protections. So for the last 40 years, it just got dumber. And then 10 years ago, you started doing all the virtue signaling and, you know, hiring based on your identity versus based on anything else. So it's got even worse. And so now it's so broken that, yes, we're letting tens of billions of dollars on fire. And so there's really two things here. One, you got to take a chainsaw, as Elon said, you got to take a chainsaw and just, like, cut a ton of broken stuff. But then day two is you got to say, how do we make this not stupid in the future? And there's things like maybe you bring back tests, maybe you bring accountability. The thing I'm most passionate about is, you know, right now there's over a million rules at the federal level. It's stuff that everyone disagrees on. You can be the most left person trying to build, like, solar or wind or whatever, and you're like, what, I have to do what study over how many years? This makes no sense. So we got to take these regulations and not only cut them, but we got to make a data-driven system that forces regulations to defend themselves. And that way, instead of having a cancer that just grows forever out of control, you could actually have a process that naturally makes things fight for themselves. And that way, it doesn't get as dumb ever again.

I would... why not just make them automatically sunsetting after five years if they're not renewed?

Exactly, but make the process to renew them difficult and data-driven.

Exactly. So if renewing them will take so much time that it will slow it down. I wonder where we got to the place... Freeberg, I will bring you in on this since really I think it was maybe two or three years ago you started to point out exactly the death spiral we're going to get in. I want to give you your flowers here on the pod because from this pod and your obsession and your harping on and on about this national debt problem, you saw it early, you talked about it constantly, you brought a lot of consensus on board, and now we're seeing it as the issue of the transition is the debt. And we were sitting here for the past year or two saying, when are politicians going to even pay attention to this? And now they are paying attention to it. So first, here's your virtual flowers. How are you feeling about the transition to date?

Well, I mean, I think first of all, there's like three layers of the problem which I've been trying to harp on for almost four years. Number one is the inefficiency and lack of accountability, which Joe and Gavin are obviously talking about, and that leads to excessive spending, and that leads to the debt problem. And the debt problem creates this kind of arithmetic debt death spiral, which is something you don't want to find yourself in. So that's the inevitability that I've been kind of really worried about. And I think that, you know, look, the first derivative and second derivative can kind of get addressed, and then hopefully you don't get to the absolute point where you have this breaking point. I think right now everyone's banking, number one, on can we deregulate in a way that can unlock growth? And by unlocking growth, the kind of arithmetic argument is grow GDP, because you're not going to be able to shrink debt super fast. In order to grow GDP, there needs to be some unleashing happening. And so if you can get GDP to grow 4-5% and you can minimize the excess spending, meaning you can minimize the deficit, the federal deficit, and therefore minimize the increment in the debt level, the debt-to-GDP ratio becomes more manageable, because ultimately you can only tax so much of GDP. So yeah, I feel like this is important in both senses. One is just cut the inefficient, wasteful spending, get rid of the regulations, and that'll unleash the necessary growth. One of the proxies I look to, and I think that this is going to be kind of the critical motivating factor for the United States, whether it's this administration or the next or on a continuous basis, there's going to be this kind of moment where we're going to look across the water at what China has. And you can see what China's getting, what China is making, what China is doing. I've talked about this a lot as well, and I do think this is the most critical metric that no one talks about as much as I think we should, which is the increment in electricity production capacity in China compared to the United States. And so we are going from one terawatt to two terawatts, they're going from, I think, two to eight over the same time period. And they're doing so... important for the people who are listening who think you're saying... I'll let Joe answer that. Joe, go ahead, just unpack it for the audience.

I mean, I obviously understand why this is important, but I want you to... the number one thing I'd say is it's usually correlated to how well the working class is doing in your country, to per capita GDP, to cost of goods. I mean, obviously I care about it because we want to scale AI for all the things we're doing and we want to be able to do it effectively. But if you just look over time, it's really clear the relationship between how well is your average working middle-class person doing and their quality of life, their cost of life, and the cost of electricity and cost of power. And it's crazy we're not just, like, ramping up and cutting things to do this. More electricity means more automation, means more AI, means more things are being done for every person that are being done in factories or being done by machines, and that unlocks a new kind of level of living. And that's been kind of a continuous process for humans. There's this guy that writes these books that Bill Gates always talks about, Vaclav Smil. He's got all these books on the history of the relationship between energy and kind of prosperity. There's definitely correlation there and there's definitely causation there. Gavin and I... there's even like really simple ones. I don't know if you've ever seen Lee Kuan Yew from, you know, the founder of Singapore, essentially talk about just how air conditioning changed the country's fate. It raises average IQ by two or three points. It really matters. But look, at the end of the day, my key point was we have to make sure that this administration, and Joe can hear me on this and I know he believes this, but for me it has to be such a priority that we accelerate a nuclear energy rollout in the United States. Because that's what China's doing. They have dozens of Gen 4 reactors that are going to get built out, each of which has a gigawatt of production capacity. And they're doing it at a cost that we can't compete with today. But fundamentally, they can do it in the US, we can't even do it, and it goes back to regulations. The regulatory structure prohibits our ability to actually expand energy capacity or electricity production capacity, which is a critical difference. And that ultimately leads to a situation where in 10 years we're going to be looking across the water at a competitive country that has 3x, 4x the electricity production capacity of our country, and everything is cheaper, everything is faster. It gives them superiority in a lot of functions that we can't. This is a key national security thing too, because we need manufacturing here to be affordable and competitive in order for national security. You know, David, when you texted me last minute to join this, I was actually in a meeting with our friend from Founders Fund who's building nuclear fuel again for the first time in the US. That's actually gone away too, and so that needs to be approved. But you know, I know Chris Wright, he's a nominee for the new Secretary of Energy, and he's a super pro-liberty guy, but super pro-cheap energy guy, and he's pro-nuclear. So I think we have some really great people who care about this. We're going to be fighting hard for it.

What's your read on it? Yeah, what's your read on energy and the blockers?

Solar's very impressive, but in some ways to me it's a little dystopian to think about all these forests just covered with this stuff. It's rate-limiting. You have to have many, many acres rolled out. And with nuclear, you can have a building that can, you know, power the equivalent of many acres. So the answer's both. The answer is both. But it is like Elon has tweeted many times about the tiny fraction of, you know, deserted desert areas of America that need to be covered with panels, and then you put in batteries there. There's still a space-limiting... like, let's just fast-forward 100 years on planet Earth. And if you look at the past 100 years and the 100 years before that, like, energy demand, even on a per capita basis, has this nonlinear kind of scaling problem. And that means that land consumption will scale nonlinearly.

Just to wrap this up and move us on, if we can get out of our own way, get out of our own way with a bunch of midwits who have put so much regulation in place and who are working from home for four hours a week, if we can just get them out of the way, then maybe we could approve some nuclear reactors and a little more solar and battery.

Did you just call government workers midwits? Is that just the ones who are blocking?

If you're not blocking and you're working 50 hours a week, God bless. A lot of people working hard in the government. That's exactly my point. But there's some number of them who just obviously do not see the forest through the trees. By the way, on that point, J-Cal, it is interesting, Texas is the number one solar producer in the country. And it's not because everybody there is more environmentally conscious. No, we're not that liberal, Sacks. It's just it's easy to build stuff in Texas. Build solar power plants. This is, I mean, for the libs in cities who are so pro-solar and anti-natural gas or whatever, yeah, look at Texas. They're just build as much as you want. And where Joe and I live in Austin, home prices have gone down two years in a row, rent has gone down two years in a row. They are building like lunatics because you don't need to beg and bribe people to build stuff.

Joe, maybe some thoughts on what we've seen in regulation?

Austin city council is not perfect. Austin, they call it the blueberry in the tomato soup. So there may be a tiny bit of begging going on, but despite that, you're able to build there and everywhere else around. You're building like mad. So it works. There's plenty of supply. I agree.

Speaking of regulation, Gary Gensler is out, Paul Atkins is in, and Bitcoin just cracked 100K. This is all obviously related. Atkins was previously SEC commissioner under Bush 2 in the early 2000s. In the 90s, he worked for both Bush 1 and Clinton at the SEC. According to the New York Times, Atkins is admired among DC legal circles and regulators. He's pro-crypto and he's been helping draft some best practices for the crypto trading platforms. As you know, Gary Gensler's approach to crypto was, there's a rule set, follow the rule set. We're not here to change the rules, we're here to enforce them. Good luck. And in some cases, I think maybe he was right with ICOs and a bunch of scams, but he also gave good actors no path to go forward. Anybody have strong feelings on this?

I love Paul. I think he's going to... he's a fair guy. Yeah, I've met him several times at conferences and groups, and he's a really smart guy, cares about the rules, cares about helping innovators. The thing that really pissed off... you went off with Gary. I mean, I love... you've probably seen, like, I think both Coinbase with Brian and the Winklevoss twins that put something out, they won't even hire anyone who worked with Gary on any of this stuff they were doing. And the reason they're that angry at them is they were purposely not defining the rules in certain cases and then going after people after not having to, in order to kind of like play a gotcha game that was very dishonorable. And Paul sees all that, and there's no way he's going to allow that.

Gavin, any thoughts here on how this might change regulations in our business? Also the fund business. Joe is a venture capitalist, 8VC. You're in public markets and funds. I do pre-IPO. So yeah, what do you think in terms of funds and regulations there, and then crypto, and the SEC maybe becoming innovative as opposed to punitive and, you know, what's the word for, Freeberg, what's the word I'm looking for here?

Adversarial?

Well, they are a regulator, they are a regulator, but they don't also seem... they seem to have gone beyond just regulating. They seem to have been aggressively adversarial.

It was worse than that. It was like a mafia letter. It was like, if you are to support this and help with this, we are going to look into everything else you are doing, and we may then find some issues. It was like a mafia threat. We can't stop you legally, but watch out. Like, it was really sketchy. It was Sherrod Brown, who now is out of office, who led this, senator from Ohio. But it was really bad. It was really bad what they were doing. It was really bad. I found it upsetting as an American.

And you kind of hinted at this, Gavin, the fear of governments is that they will lose control of money supply and monetary policy. Maybe unpack that a bit, and then Freeberg, we'll go to you on the same sort of thread.

And Gavin, to put this in context, this was during a time period, this David Marcus Libra process, when they felt certain people in government, and I'm not saying I endorse this, but this is their position, Zuckerberg had too much power. Zuckerberg was censoring people. The right felt they were being censored. The left felt that Cambridge Analytica and people were using targeting. The first, the general vibe, and even JD Vance kind of was in on this as well, was too much power specifically at Meta, too much influence. Now they've got this many people, this penetration and the algorithm, plus we're going to give them money and they're going to have power over people's wallets. And then what does the government have? They can't censor people, they can't control the message, and they can't control the purse strings. That is the time period we're talking about here.

Yes, rule of law. Rule of law is also another reason America is a great country. Yes. Freeberg, your thoughts on David Marcus's comments and this SEC pick and just generally a more pro, less regulation kind of situation?

I think the SEC is like one of the most important agencies we have, and I think they're one of the best federal agencies. So I've worked with them and I've worked with any other agencies, and there's all these issues with the SEC, but they play a very important job. And if you've worked in foreign markets and you've dealt with foreign securities regulators, you're going to be like, thank God for the SEC, like, can't wait to go back. This whole crypto thing, there's a distinction I think between Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as speculative kind of assets, speculative trading. What do you see those differences as well? I definitely concur with Gavin. I think Bitcoin fundamentally is meant to be, supposed to be, ultimately will become a real threat to the US dollar. And it's kind of ironic that Trump had this declaration this week that he's going to put 100% tariff on all these BRICS nations that try to participate in an alternative currency to the US dollar, the greatest currency on Earth, when he literally turns around and then says we're going to support Bitcoin. It felt like the biggest irony of the week to me, because I do think Bitcoin is the big threat to the US dollar. And I do think that at some point, whether it's this administration or the next, they're going to wake up to that fact. And maybe the Bitcoin does, you know, the network state concept does emerge, and that's where we end up. But I do think we want to have and are going to have a strong federal government in the United States for quite some time that's going to play an important role in everyone's lives here. And I don't know if you can really just say let the dollar, you know, be supplanted by Bitcoin. Bitcoin seems to be more of a safe haven asset, and that seems to be the trade that it's store of value, should be kind of store of value and alternative. It's just going to take over gold.

What do you think? You think the state has reasonable concerns about crypto competing with it? And then maybe specifically when you saw Trump talking about, hey, congratulations on your Bitcoin, I did this for you on 100K, and taking credit for it at the same time, which he should take credit for it, he did that last $40,000 per coin. And then you see him talking about the BRICS, and then we have the US currency. So which is a bigger threat to American exceptionalism and supremacy on planet Earth, Bitcoin or BRICS?

So one represents a move towards liberty and one represents a move towards authoritarianism. If BRICS were to become dominant, if China and Russia were able to control global currency together and other players, that is terrible. It's bad for the US for so many reasons, bad for US consumer for so many reasons. He's right to fight it. At the same time, having, you know, to channel biology, having this like pro-liberty network state forces in that direction, like for example, I think rather than just, you know, Hong Kong and Singapore, Hong Kong's been lost, we should have like more Hong Kong and Singapore in the West to compete with the US. That'd be good for all of us who are on the pro-freedom side of the US and make the US wealthier, would show examples of new experiments that create great wealth. And then that's kind of the side of Bitcoin, is you want more experiments and competition from the liberty distributed side. You don't want competition from the authoritarian side. So to me, it was very consistent.

Well, that's a check on... it's a check on the most aggressive mistakes. First of all, if the debt doesn't get under control, if our deficit is ridiculous, Bitcoin is a wonderful check on that. You actually want healthy competition from something good because you want to check the excesses and the craziness. You want... you need someone coming from the outside to say, no, don't do that. Let's just say at some point an AOC-like person gets in charge, it could happen in the next 20 years, you need some kind of check on the dollar. And it's much better to come from the liberty side than from the other side.

That is the proper reaction. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I want to point out one thing. I was doing some research before the show and I found this SEC speech. This is really fascinating. This is from 2007 from Paul, and he was kind of giving his State of the Union here. And he's talking about doing some self-reflection, and he's talking about accreditation rules in 2007 before the great financial crisis. The concept of economic risk and return also affect a different proposal of the commission, the SEC, relating to private investment funds. Specifically, part of the commission's proposal would add an additional requirement for any natural accredited person to have at least $2.5 million in investments before he or she could invest in a private investment fund, like a hedge fund or private equity fund, other than a venture capital fund. The underlying premise for the commission's proposal is that these types of investments are too risky for individuals other than the very rich. Therefore, we would have to presume that the non-rich are either unsophisticated or lack access to sophistication, and it is simply not tolerable to have these types of people at risk of losing their money on a hedge fund. Assuming that these premises are true, however, what evidence does the commission have to support the conclusion that private investment funds are the most risky? What makes a hedge fund or a private equity fund more risky than a venture capital fund? Great question. And how does the risk profile of a pooled investment compare with the risks of investing in securities of a single issue, for which this new $2.5 million standard is... this is where it gets super interesting. Many public comment letters expressed indignation at the commission's proposal. One commentator wrote, stay out of my wallet, stop trying to protect me from myself, stop presuming to know more than I do about my own life risk tolerance and financial sophistication. The commission's proposal may very well prevent the non-rich from losing their money in private investment funds, but it also certainly will prevent the non-rich from participating in any upside profits and gains on these funds. Does this mean the rich get richer while the non-rich should be content to just hold their place on the economic ladder? This to me, when I saw this, I was like, you know what, I am feeling absolutely fantastic about Trump. If he stops these wars or stops one out of two and keeps us out of, you know, participating even though we're not on the ground with any new ones, and he removes regulations, and we have people in power who understand that moving up the socioeconomic ladder is as important as protecting the downside risk, especially when we see wealth polarization, this is a great pick. Now, the other picks, there's some wack-pack picks in there, I'll be totally honest. I don't know what the strategy is. Joe, I'll ask you that in a minute. But what do we think, Gavin, of this sort of approach here, which is really thinking thoughtfully about what is sophisticated and what are we doing here, what is the outcome we're looking for?

Yeah, Freeberg, any thoughts here? I mean, this has been my pet peeve for a long time, is letting people do what they want with their money. If you don't allow people to take risk with their money and move up from poor to middle class, from middle class to upper middle class, and maybe eventually becoming affluent... Jason, there's a lot of places people can invest their money. They can buy public stocks. There's $20 trillion of public stocks they can buy. I don't think that you're prohibiting people from transitioning their wealth, like, by not being able to buy private stocks. In fact, I think it's more likely than not that people are going to go market securities in private markets and rip poor people off even worse. And that's why there are these regulatory kind of barriers. And I don't think that it's necessarily... look, everyone says let's make it everything free and everything libertarian seems like a good idea until someone gets punched in the face, gets ripped off, someone dies from a drug, you know, that's not properly tested, and then we're all like, where were the regulators? Where were the agencies to protect the individuals? And I think that's the role that these agencies are kind of providing, and that's the reason these rules are in place. I don't think that this is like one of these things where, oh, liberty's being denied. I think it's, you know, there's a careful line to walk.

Yeah, I mean, look at FTX. I mean, FTX ripped off some very, very intelligent friends of ours. Did any diligence at FTX? Yeah. But well, which is an important part of this. But I mean, if you had a sophistication... I mean, there's such an easy solution to this. You just do a sophistication test. People take a five-hour course and they answer 50 questions. The end. Like a driver's license.

Well, I do think it is a little... that's why I talked about private equity. These are extremely sophisticated institutions who are always investing alongside their clients. And they're buying established businesses, they're putting leverage on them. But like, I think private equity is kind of a middle ground. And on a pooled basis, I think you could argue, and you know, maybe those funds would need to change their reporting and their disclosures to deal with kind of the average American, but, and by that I mean strengthen it. But I think private equity, his comments were well taken. That's what I would say.

Joe, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, I think the elephant in the room that's really funny here is that you have the people on the left saying the only people with lots of money are smart enough to be allowed to do this, which I think is just a very funny position to take. If you just, like, you have to have a few million dollars to be sophisticated enough to be allowed to do this. I like your idea, J-Cal, of a test. Like, there should be some other way of accessing this if you really want to. I agree. Listen, I don't want to live in a world where we're all constantly being spammed to the average person by, like, stupid financial stuff that's just, like, we would be scammed all the time. There probably should be some rules. Like, I agree. I'm not, like, a total libertarian on this. I think it'd be really annoying. But yeah, but just to totally block people from participating, to me, that sounds crazy. Like, I mean, a finance college professor, you know, might, unless they had another job, might not, you know, be able to do $250,000.

Let's talk about a very important public market set of transactions. Gavin, I'd like your point of view...

View on Michael Saylor's convertible note issuances being used to buy Bitcoin. To which this morning Bloomberg reported is the hottest trade in hedge funds right now. Nick, if you could pull up the article. And then, Joe, I know you've been an outspoken opinion setter on Michael Saylor's promotion of his securities actions. We'd love your point of view. Gavin, just say at some point this does get too big. For a while when it was smaller, you know, you could support the debt. Sorry, could you explain it to everyone, Kevin?

Joe, do you have a point of view? Because Joe's got a run, by the way. So Joe, you want to close this out?

Defense people down here in LA. Listen, listen, I am very bullish Bitcoin. I love the energy of our society around it. I agree with what you said, Dave, that there needs to be some barriers for the public taking crazy risks. And I think the risks around how he's accessing this is actually very unusual and does scare me a bit. And people need to do their research, so they shouldn't just like throw money without studying it. It does scare me a little bit how blindly people are throwing money at this without knowing the kind of leverage he's taking, you know.

Yeah, Joe, anything else you want to share that you're up to that you're excited about before you head out?

Well, you know, this weekend is the annual Defense Forum at the Reagan Library. We're on the board. It's the biggest defense event of the year. Everyone's coming. And I guess I'm really excited that America has like woken up. Assuming we can bring back more advanced manufacturing here, I think there's enough top companies now. With Anduril, with Saronic, we're going to be building thousands of these vessels for the Navy. With AI, with Epirus, we're like turning things off, you know, 10 miles away, whatever, fairly far away with microwave radiation. There's some really cool technology coming that actually is going to make us be able to deter our enemies. So if you ask me six, seven years ago, I was panicked we were going to like get way behind China. I'm feeling really good about it now. I think, and I think, you know, just the Pete Hegseth pick, you know, is actually someone I'm quite bullish on from everything I'm hearing. So I think things are going the right direction.

Is there a wholesale upgrade happening in defense in the United States? Are all systems and all strategies being rethought right now using technology and innovation and kind of a performance-based product mindset leading kind of a reinvention of everything? Is that what's going to happen in the next four years?

Warfare has fundamentally totally shifted. We're seeing some of this in Ukraine. There's all sorts of new ways. You want to swarm things on the land, swarm things in the water, swarm things in the air. How do they coordinate and how do they work together? How do you manufacture enough of these things? And how do you use electronic warfare and new ways to, you know, it's basically created by this. And so it's just a whole new way of doing things. And we are going that direction. Too much of the money, David, like 95% of the money is still going towards like frankly like wasteful legacy, like mostly things we don't need. But enough is shifting and there's enough good people fighting. And as long as we keep just allowing open competition to say, okay, which is better and just let the best things win, as long as we keep doing that, I think it's going the right way. I'm feeling very good about it.

Is the Chinese position shift in their technology strategy and their system strategy going to motivate a shift here, do you think?