TWiST News: Netflix Goes Live, The FCC Revamp, Free Speech, and Regulatory Shifts | E2046

Alright everybody, welcome back to this week. In startups, I'm your host, Jason Calitanis, with me, my co-host Alex Wilhelm. How are you, Alex?

Oh, I'm fantastic. We have a really diverse and interesting show today, so I've gotten to learn a lot of things. We have a really big show. First of all, Netflix's live event bet and data thereof. We're going to talk about the incoming new head of the FCC and his views on tech and a recap of his time here on twist, Jason. Much to do about censorship over in the UK, the former Uber exec that might head the Department of Transportation and also how much ground VCs need to make up in exits. Jason hacked docket.

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I think the main character this weekend was Mike Tyson and Netflix. I was on many group chats where people were sharing screenshots of the new, not the rainbow spinning wheel of death on your Mac. For those of you who've experienced that.

This was the red spinning wheel of death on Netflix. Everybody was getting error codes. The picture quality was terrible on Netflix for the Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul, Fugazi, big fight. The fight was terrible, huge disappointment. The two women who fought before Mike Tyson were incredible. Oh my God, that was one of the best fights I've ever seen in my life.

But the Mike Tyson fight was a fraud. And I guess it's good that Netflix is stress testing their system. Take us through the numbers. How many people tuned in for this fraud? Sorry. We'll get into exactly that because I want to get your thoughts on the quality of the event. But this was a huge smash hit for Netflix Jason. So according to preliminary data, they're going to tell us more in a couple of days when they adjusted to all the logs. But they think about 60 million households watched

There was a 65 million concurrent stream peak, which is totally nuts. And because you mentioned the undercard, the fight between Taylor and Serrano, that was watched by 50 million households, which Netflix was very proud to say was that they think the most streamed women's sports event in history.

That's incredible. Those two women put on a spectacular show. I'm guessing they got paid a fraction of what Tyson and Jake Paul got. My understanding is Jake Paul got $40 million for this fraud and Mike Tyson secured a $20 million bag, which I'm happy to see that Mike Tyson can pay his bills, whatever.

My Lord, it was a terrible fight, a waste of time. It was a disgrace. The Scrathead, as we would say, in Italian slang in Brooklyn. It was a complete disgrace. Why? Tell me why.

Um, it was clear that Jake Paul was not fighting. It was clear that Mike Tyson. We're like pointing punches. He was unable to fight. So they were basically just trading on Mike Tyson's reputation as being an absolute murderer and just, you know, maybe he can land one punch, but.

I mean, I think there was one jab where you saw Mike Tyson hit Jake Paul and his head tilted back a little bit, but Jake Paul said, I think the next day that he didn't want to embarrass Mike Tyson, so he didn't fight him. He didn't actually throw a bunch of punches.

You know, the whole concept of a fight is that you're supposed to leave it all out there. Like the two women, Serrano and Taylor. Was it Serrano or Taylor? I want to go see the first fight of the Serrano or Taylor because this is a second. And putting all that aside, I guess this is K-Fab is, I guess, what we would call these exhibition fights that Jake Paul does. They're just fake fights. He's a fake boxer. It's all fake, which is kind of a bummer.

because the fight before it was very real. But the good news is you didn't pay $99 for this or whatever $79, whatever pay per view is. If you had paid for that, you would really be upset, I think, but it's free and it's on Netflix. So this is great for Netflix. Netflix stress tests their system and failed. A bunch of people probably got fired, whoever their partners are on the CDN sign got fired. It's got to be really uncomfortable today, but that's part of

You know, learning is, I think, did they win an NFL contract or a sports contract? Yeah. That's part of this next deal. The future of Netflix live events, the upcoming two major events that I think we care about here are two games on Christmas. So if you want to watch Chief Steelers or Ravens Texans on September 25th, Netflix will have those. I agree very much. The stress testing ahead of those is very important because those are not fake fights. Those are very serious teams in a very serious league.

Also, and this was news to me, Jason, I didn't know that Netflix had a deal with WWE's Monday Night Raw starting in January of next year. Now, I've never been a pro wrestling fan, had friends going up there with big fans, but that's going to be a recurring event. So I do think that Netflix is really leaning into live sports broadly. Although I am just disappointed that the fight wasn't much because there was so much excitement about it. There was that big pre fight slap.

It did feel a little bit manufactured. Yeah, that's the whole concept of we're all in on it, like professional wrestling quote unquote professional, which is fine. I mean, if people want to get into the storylines and they're great athletes doing essentially ballet or coordinated.

You know, physical contact, whatever, I'm okay with it. Um, if everybody's buying info, but this was presented as a fight. So I think that it was a bit of a fraud. Uh, and that's about betting though, because people, the handle on, on this fight was enormous. So if it was a fake fight, how do you feel about sports betting on it? It seems a little. Okay. So that's also risky because if Jay.

um... who won the fight he would have actually gotten a knockout probably in the second or third round if he had gone full out because he was fighting an old man who couldn't defend himself uh... and as the commentators are saying you know his legs were very weak as any six-year-old's legs would be versus a twenty eight-year-old whatever jake ball is so i think jake ball just by physically bumping into him swinging at him whatever would have knocked him out so there was probably

gambling on a knockout. And so by Jake saying, I purposely didn't knock him out because I have respect for him. That's kind of like throwing the fight. So I do think that complicates the betting. A lot of my friends were gambling on this, putting a lot of money, like a lot of friends putting, you know, five, 10, 25 pay on this fight. And almost all of it was on Jake Paul, because they just knew like there's no way for him to lose, even if it was two to one or whatever. So I had to put up 200 to win 100, I think.

Putting all that aside.

I think that we might be on the precipice of sports events regularly be coming as large as the Super Bowl if they are free and included in bundle. So I think Disney needs to pay attention to this with Hulu. I think Netflix needs to pay attention to this because if you have a footprint like Netflix has or Disney, Disney has 150 subs and I think Netflix has 250. If I'm ballpark correct, you can check those numbers. I'm on it.

Yep. And so if you start thinking about those numbers and you start thinking of how easy it is to put an app on your phone and how global these services are, and the fact that sports are not

culturally or language don't have culture and language barrier boxing is boxing soccer is soccer football is football basketball is basketball. It's very much like nature of documentaries there are two things that work really well on a global basis in other words you don't need.

to localize them. Sports is one. And nature documentaries are the other. So Shark Week is Shark Week. And you can do any voice dubbing. So this is, I think, a really turning point moment or should be for these streamers. They should be thinking of every sports. They should be bidding on them massively. And if the NBA or NFL was available on these services,

Without payment, with advertising, I think the NFL games would double their viewership. I think the NBA games would triple or quadruple their viewership. The fact that these things have payments behind them throttles them. So in order to watch NBA games, I pay $300 a year, $250 or $300 for NBA lead pass to watch every Nick game without ads. Okay, great. I'm 5% of the audience that wants an ad-free experience with the local cameras.

But you start thinking about how many people could actually be watching these games? All of the leagues have gone for max dollars from subscriptions. This might actually be a mistake. We might have underestimated how big these audience could be on a global basis.

60 million people if there had been ads in this there were no ads right i didn't see any ads i think was ad-free i believe it was that for yet but there were tons of sponsorship so every like. Ring the ropes on the ring had logos for madam there were logos everywhere but imagine if this had been sponsored for 60 million viewers.

You know, a Tesla or Uber or Amazon. I'm trying to think of people, Disney, people who have global footprints, a Marvel film by Lord, like getting 60 million people in one night is a very hard thing to accomplish. I don't know the international members here. I suspect half the audience with US half was international. I don't know that. Do we have any conception of what the international national split was?

No, because the data we have is still preliminary. So in a couple of days, so everybody is listening. We will find that when it comes out and bring it to a Wednesday or Friday for our future live news recordings, but the data just is a little bit early. The thing that I'm a little bit concerned about because I'm also a sports fan and I watch a variety of different sports is just the fragmentation of it. Like it's cool that Netflix has some upcoming NFL games, but I hate having to think like, okay, this is Thursday night. Does Amazon have that contract right now or is it on?

And so as a viewer, it gets kind of crappy, and the NWSL, a link that I love, has had this problem all year, and I've watched a lot less. So to me, the idea of opening these up to audiences on the major streaming platforms does make a lot of sense. Like, Netflix, we all have it. It's like water at this point. You just have a sub to Netflix. So that tracks well. But like, if I want to email B on Apple TV+, sometimes I don't have that.

And that's a little disappointing that I have to have more recurring subscriptions to watch sports. I just wish that everything had to leak past model chasing like I got. If I was watching every Warriors game, I just spend the money and then watch it on my own time and not have to just federate across services.

Yeah, it's a little annoying. They're obviously maximizing profitability right now. Do you spend too much time tabbing between your team chats, documents, spreadsheets, database as well? It's time to consolidate all the knowledge that has spread out across your entire organization on one platform and that platform that we use every day here at this weekend. Startups and launch is called CODA. If you don't know about CODA, it is a new category of software.

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I think where this winds up is Amazon will be the home of the NFL. Apple will be the home of soccer. Major league soccer, you know, Netflix will be whatever, the NBA or major league baseball. They're just going to own the entire thing. And I think that would be brilliant. There was a rumor of the NBA and ESPN, I think, maybe spinning out ESPN from Disney and maybe the NBA owning it or something.

which is a little bit weird because they're supposed to be reporters reporting on the league. So that always creates a little bit of friction where if you have a big contract, you can't be critical of the NFL or there was an issue with brain injuries. And I think you couldn't talk about it.

on certain networks, they kind of banned people from talking about it, or you don't even have to ban it. I mean, everybody who's getting paid $5 million to be an announcer knows, don't bring that up. It's uncomfortable. You may not get that $5 million contract, right? It's also the uncomfortable nature. Again, not to make this political, but everything seems to be going back to it. You know, if you're Anderson Cooper or Fareed Zakaria or on CNN, and you're making 20 million a year, 10 million a year, these are big salaries.

Do you think they're going to be the ones who do the investigative report on Pfizer? No, not when Pfizer is a third or 50% of it. Those stories, you know, if something hits a certain benchmark, you have to report on it, of course they will, but they're not doing a 60 minutes and nor is 60 minutes doing some big.

Expose you can maybe frontline would do that so doesn't mean it's censorship. It's kind of like self censorship or just editorial steering. What are your thoughts on that? Oh my gosh, I mean this comes up all the time. So one of the tensions.

All right, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about myself here, but, Jason, I think you'll forget. Let's be honest with the audience here. I ran TechCrunch Plus for a while, and one of the reasons why I really believed in building a subscription pillar at TechCrunch, my historical home publication, and I love the people there, was that it would reduce our dependency on advertising incomes and also on events.

advertising incomes go up and down based on the economy. When the economy is good, ad dollars fall from the sky. When the economy is poor, they're impossible to find. And that's really hard to build a company on a boom bust income cycle. So that's the thing that subscriptions do solve. And then there's events.

TechCrunch has hosted, does host events around the nation and around the world. I've taken part in a lot of these. And we often have people come to the events that we report on to talk, to be interviewed, to sit on a panel, to judge startups, whatever it is. But there's a natural tension between reporting on people vigorously and vociferously and trying to get them to come to your event so you can sell tickets so people will come to hear it from them.

a long way of saying access journalism. And this was, if you were too critical of a subject, Steve Jobs famously, you know, Steve Jobs shows up for your event or doesn't show up for your event. That's the difference between a double ticket sales to land, you know, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs at the peak.

And there were journalists or commentators who had those relationships, who got paid seven figures. So let's anybody think that, you know, journalists or publications are not impacted by the reality. They are. And so, you know, whether it's ESPN, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, everybody gets impacted some ways by this uncomfortable relationship.

And the way that this is usually set up is that the business side and the editorial side of a media company are distinct, but I think Jason made a good point earlier about not being an idiot and destroying your own income stream. And so when I think about this, there are those tensions. It does impact everything that you see and read, but Netflix, I'll just say this, if I was the biggest online streaming company in the history of the world, I would have had my live streaming set up in better shape because it was pretty embarrassing how poorly they did and they have to do better.

They have 280 million subscribers globally. This is, I think, the largest subscription business outside of China that's ever been built. China, obviously, China and India have, you know, billion citizens. So when you start getting to those numbers, you know, who knows? I don't know the phone companies there, but they might have more than 280 million subs. But this is an amazing feat. And I think what Netflix is going to realize over time is that

pushing people towards the advertising tier. And I think Disney is realizing this is going to maximize revenue. So some number of people paying $6.95 with limited ads or ads, people paying zero with a lot of ads, insufferable ads, $6 with some ads, and then $12.15 with no ads is going to be the perfect, perfect.

Way to thread the needle if Netflix had a free tier right now that was ad based

with a lot of ads, but you didn't get the first run shows. You only got like the second run shows or it had like a limited amount of the archive, whatever. There's some way to do it. I could see them having 500, 600, 700 million subs. And I think Spotify is a good example of this because I believe Spotify has a free tier and the free tier has an enormous number of people in the advertising tier. So this is obviously the way this is going to go. If you were to look at

The NFL is an example Thursday night football Amazon Prime Sunday afternoon evening games Paramount plus and Fox Sports Sunday night football NBC Monday night football ESPN when I was a kid I remember my dad was like big on Monday night football because when Monday night football came out

it became such a phenomenon that the bars were packed and this was like the late seventies i think it came out and it was great for my dad's business because sunday people did come into the bar to watch the games and the book he was there and that's how you place your bats you know it's like. Two for one kind of situation you can place your bat have a drink and watch the three for trifecta and then all of a sudden monday night which was the deadest night of the week became such a hot night you got ten monday night football games twelve monday football games.

Was awesome for business all of a sudden Monday night became like a Friday or Saturday night. Was awesome for the economy. I think they've watered that down a bit with like Thursday night and all these Saturday games, everything else, but they're going to cut the NFL into as many little pieces as they can. In fact, the highest bidder for each one and people have made some hay in recent years about a slow decline in kind of like.

cable viewership and also NFL viewership. And the best example of this that I've had explained to me was the NFL is the most popular thing on paid television. And so if it declines, TV declines and vice versa. So they're very, very tied at the hip still. But I will say Netflix getting into live events, full stop, I think is brilliant, because what they haven't had since

Stranger Things, Wednesday, or one of those occasional hit shows that really just takes over the zeitgeist is a way to get everyone there at the same time. To drive that intense hive of conversation and communication. And so, yes, it is bad they had streaming issues, but it's also very good that so many people show up that they had. And they also still are with dropping the entire series at once. When they do a Stranger Things or something, they drop all nine episodes, 10 episodes, so you can watch it. It's not like HBO.

With house of the dragon where they do every week. It's not like those that kind of a vibe, right?

Well, that's how they just disrupted the industry was just by saying, eff it. Here you go. Here's the whole thing. Everyone loved it. But I hear more commentary still on social about the shows that are released incrementally. And I can see this in my spouse who loves to watch the show, ghosts. And every time it comes out, she's ready to go right there. And so they get her more often more frequently over a longer period of time. We're all sorting out Jason bundling and unbundling again here in the world of media. And this is the latest iteration of it. One last note.

I'm less receptive to ads than you are. And I just want to say that, well, I pay for prime. I pay for prime for.

I don't recall what I didn't pay for Prime. I'm very annoyed that they just decided Alex, you've been a dedicated lifelong subscriber and now we're going to make your service worse. That's still really great. You say Amazon Prime, you have no choice but to watch it on some shows. You can pay more if you don't want ads, but they've debased the service that I've had for a long time. I can take the Amazon shopping experience going to hell. I can take the UI being chaotic. I can take half of it being ads for locals, Chinese drop shipping sites, fine, fine, fine, fine.

But now when I watch my shows, they're like, and we just wanted more of your money, Alex. So screw you. And I'm like, come on, guys. Come on.

Uh, I'm just happy that there isn't an ad free tier available. Spotify is such a huge business, 343 million ad supported monthly active users, 61 million, uh, they have 220 million paid globally, 61 million. So you put those two numbers together. I mean, talking about close to 600 million people are using Spotify between the paid subs and the ad supported ones.

There's going to be a number of these businesses that hit a billion and that's going to be unbelievable.

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Let's relate this to the current AI boom, Jason, because, you know, we're still figuring out how AI is going to monetize. You and I both pay for chat security subscriptions at the corporate level and the personal level. I think that's worked out pretty well. I'm always surprised at how, how well AI consumer services have monetized on the subscription basis without having to revert to ads because I don't, for me thus far, AI has been an ad for experience. And I wonder how long we can keep it so pure and lovely.

I mean, social networks were ad-free at the beginning. And so was Google search. Yeah, fair enough. So almost always when these services come out, you have enough venture capital to back you. If you're growing, I would say low single digits a week or low double digits a month, month over month.

Then you have earned the right to not monetize and just burn money. So if you can grow your service one to five percent week over week 10, 20, 30 percent month over month, but just let's say 10 percent month over month. There are VCs who have seen this movie before YouTube Spotify, Google search, Facebook, Instagram.

And I was like, you know what, don't bother advertising. Keep growing because the longer you wait, the more pent up demand you get. And when you do turn on ads, you're going to be hitting 10 million, 50 million, 100 million users and you really can get big ads. So it's very hard to to achieve product market fit. So what you want to do as an investor is give the team the ability to just do that one thing well in a consumer based service. And I think, um,

A lot of folks want to not have to earn money and just build their startup. You earn that right by having industry-leading growth. So this idea that you can have a no-growth startup and not charge, no one-oh. But if you have really good growth, they will suspend disbelief. But anyway, this is definitely the trend to watch. And I do think advertisers are going to swarm these things.

when they start hitting Super Bowl like numbers. And this was a, I guess like a half a Super Bowl, right? Super Bowl brings in over a hundred million people to watch something live. I don't know that Jake Paul would have drawn this. This had to do with Mike Tyson, but there are other people who could draw this. I think there's other celebrity boxing matches that could do this. And I feel that around. I wonder how many people would show up to watch

And I say this respect to his fighting career, elderly Mike Tyson versus somebody. I wonder if this is really just the ability of Jake Paul to attract such outside's attention to his antics over the years that he's the real draw. I bet you if it was Mike Justin versus Randall fighter, it would have been 10% as big.

And that speaks to, by the way, the power of online culture. Well, I mean, I think you do get the Gen Xers and boomers who got to witness Mike Tyson coming into this combined with the millennials who know this. So maybe it's like a little bit of both.

But I think Mike Tyson versus Holyfield or anybody doing like one of those kind of exhibitions would have drawn similar, but I could be wrong. Okay. Last thing, does Netflix ever go pay per few? I'm curious because if there are guys spending all this money on these events, does it just fit into their not for monetization strategy? I'm torn on that. I mean, they have so many paid subs that why even bother, you know, like they have so many billions in revenue that even this thing, if it costs them a hundred million to do this. Yeah.

Who cares do it quarterly for four hundred million a year do something something ten Paul like this if you reduce a million let's see if the average person spends twelve dollars on Netflix a month.

Or let's say 10 bucks, 10 bucks, which you have the introduction of the pay tiers, whatever. I'm just gonna say eight bucks. Eight bucks a month is a hundred bucks a year. A hundred bucks a year is a million subs. Four times a year would be four million subs, four hundred million. Four million, if four million, less people churn because you do a tent pole like this.

which is but one and a half percent of their user base, paid user base. If you reduce churn because you do something crazy like this and it keeps you from pausing your account or cutting your account.

probably worth it. So when you start thinking about it that way, they have so, they have an ability to outspend everyone else based on a legit business. Now, if Apple chooses to lose money or Amazon chooses to lose money on these things because they can, okay, that's different, but it actually turns out they could actually economically make this pencil out, which is nuts.

Well, it's awesome. Although I'm just going to say the argument is that adding friction to an existing paid consumer subscription is often the wrong choice. Take the ads out of my prime Amazon. Listen to Jason. Why not? Well, I mean, if you, I don't know what Netflix's revenue is right now across those 280 million subs.

Because I do know that there are very low fees in India, and Asia, and other regions, and the West is much more expensive. But if you start thinking about how much revenue they have,

It's about 10 billion a quarter, by the way. So 40 billion a year. I mean, that's a lot of money to be able to spend. And I wonder what the total revenue for the NBA is, like what they get from all the games combined.

I wonder what their license, because you know, the NBA, a lot of the folks have their own cable networks, like the NYX have MSG network, and they make money off of MSG one, MSG two, you can people subscribe to those through cable systems, all over the world, you can subscribe direct.

There's going to be an argument at some point for someone like Netflix or YouTube to just jump the fence and just go to one of these, you know, one of these leagues and just be like, we'll take it all. We'll just take the whole goddamn thing. Here's 10 billion a year. We'll take the whole bank. And can you imagine the number of people if one service had the NFL?

It would be bonkers and everybody's got a smart TV that was the other limitation of this was getting the show. 10 years ago the idea of doing this kind of stuff was really hard. Because not everybody has smart TV. I just bought a new LG TV here at the ranch and. It came with everything and I'm like oh I gotta go take out the apple TV and I haven't gone to it because.

Apple TV is in storage somewhere, I'm trying to find it, but it's got everything in the menu. The whole thing is just sitting there, and I don't need to, because it's on the remote control Netflix. Then there's Roku. You could put a Roku on your TV for nothing, and it's built into many TVs. The idea that you can't find it, or your dad can't find it, or grandpa can't find it, that's over, too.

It's a brave new world. My Lord, it's going to be awesome for, I think this could be awesome.

for producing shows that just wouldn't normally be economically possible or spreading these leagues. If you're running the NBA, if you own those teams, you got to be thinking at some point, what would it be like if we gave up all the paid subs and had a global footprint? And it was just a, an NBA lead pass was a free product with an ad supported tiering. Everybody could watch every game and you lost my 250. I think you'd make it back and advertising globally.

Well, the question then becomes, how many more Geico ads can I possibly survive before I die?

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Meaning you can avoid waiting around while someone else enters your data into a computer by hand. One slow keystroke at a time. It's like that scene from the movie with the sloth at the DMV. Anyway, Kite doesn't do extra fees. It operates in large cities around the United States, and I've used it in both LA and San Francisco and love it. Here's your call to action. Download the Kite app or book online at kyte.com. That's kyte.com. Go ahead and download the app now so you have it ready to go. Use the code Jason. I check out. You get 10% off your first round, which could be significant.

Don't forget to use the code, Jason, download the app, kyte.com right now. One of the biggest stories out in the last very recent time period is that Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner, is going to be the next chairman of the FCC. And just so everyone knows, we had Brendan on twist episode 1870. If you want to go back and watch the interview, lots about Starlink, lots about TikTok, Jason.

But I have gone through his positions, I have notes on them, but I just want you to tell me why on Twitter you were so ebullient about Brendan getting the nod. You said, boom, I believe. Yeah, I mean, for me, this is great because two of my pet peeves here, government waste, right? And TikTok, I think he were very aligned on.

In terms of government waste, this rural broadband thing has made me lose my mind.

The idea that we are going to spend $10, $20, $30,000 to put people on broadband in five or 10 years and they've installed none of them, they canceled the Starlink contract because it wasn't fast enough. Now I got Starlink at my house as a backup. It's plenty fast. Over 100 megabits down, 10 megabits up. I could be doing the show from it. I have done the show from it when I lost my spectrum line and I flip over to Starlink. That's how I use it currently.

all of these people who are in rural areas are already using Starlink. And before that, they used data-packed, high-Earth satellites. So the idea that our government would do something like rural broadband.

and then waste our money, our taxpayer money, to bring a cable modem to somebody's ranch. I live on a ranch. I would be like infuriated if the government spent $20,000, $10,000 to bring people their lines when there is a viable option. Now, the problem with our government is they set these things in motion and then the free market solves the problem.

and we don't reverse the span. I don't think Starlink should get the contract. I don't think the fiber companies or the cable monitors, you know, I think she get the contract? Nobody.

If the problem's been solved, there's also three or four competitors to Starlink that are all in the process of building their constellations. Why on earth will we do this? And if we did want to, because of the digital divide, if I don't know, the 70, 80, 90 bucks a month for a satellite connection was too much, okay, give them a voucher for $40 a month for it and call it a day.

and do it for five years and then we're done. It's ridiculous, ridiculous. And this is, I think, why?

Although I've had my problems with Trump and his personality and January 6th and any number of things, I do think the one thing that could be absolutely fantastic and I am rooting for him and Vivek and Elon and Trump and everybody involved is to lower the footprint and the size of government and government waste. And I think this might be one of the great examples of it.

The idea of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money on broadband when the problem's been solved, it's the same thing with the superchargers. Why on earth are we doing superchargers or just like EV chargers when the free market, I see so many startups, Alex, that are putting these things in, you don't need the government to subsidize it. Maybe 15 years ago, that would have been a brilliant idea. In 2024, 2025, you don't need the government to subsidize any of this. There's plenty of free market.

capital available, sovereign wealth funds, venture capital funds, and consumers paying for it. We've already passed the Rubicon here. There's plenty of EVs, there's plenty of people with credit cards who will pay for an EV charging station. Hotels will pay for EV charging stations to get customers. If you put an EV charging station in your hotel and this started maybe 10 years ago,

You put in Tesla chargers, you put in regular charge point chargers, the J2s, you get more customers. The hotels are willing to pay for it. There's a lot of hotels already out there. You don't need to pay for it.

No, all that tracks with me. I did dig deep into the Starlink contract fiasco. And honestly, if you want to read up on that, we'll throw in the show notes in just a long history of the FCC. But very much agreed on less government waste. But what I'm surprised by is how strident Brendan Carr is on certain technology issues that I did not expect him to be. By the way, I don't know all his positions. The TikTok position I do now, we'll get to that, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah. No, tiktok. No problem. They're totally great. But so here's an excerpt from Carr and he wrote the FCC chapter in the Project 25 Manifesto, which I've read through today. So if you want to read this, it's all in there. It's his notes. But Carr Heritage Foundation wrote something called Project 2025. Project 2025 is something that Trump disavowed because it's a bit radical.

We had the Heritage Foundation on to talk about their election stuff that was great with Hans. Um, so it's, it is obviously a concern, the most concern. I think think tank and one of the best funded, but obviously some aspects of project 2025 are on the menu. Yeah. I mean, for example, car wrote the SCC chapter for that. And now he's going to be SCC commissioner. No one's surprised by the way that Brendan Carr got the tap here. This was kind of expected, but here's what he said. And tell me, Jason, if this doesn't sound a little bit like a Democrat,

After Google manipulates search results, a small business can see its web traffic drop precipitously overnight for no apparent reason. On Facebook, social media posts are left up or taken down, accounts are suspended or permanently banned without any apparent consistency. Out of the blue, YouTube can demonetize individuals who have risked their capital and invested their labor to build online businesses.

Those are all criticisms of individual choices that businesses have made that they think are in their own best interests. And here's Carr saying that they are acting in a manner that is in Congress with his politics. And so to me, this smells like government involvement in technology in a way that if it came from a democratic administration would be relatively controversial. So I'm just surprised that a guy who would write that as his view and put it in print is such a supposed ally of the tech industry. I feel like I'm missing something here.

I can tell you what it is. When Trump got banned from all platforms, this was a controversial maneuver. If I take you back in time, some people have memory hold it, which means they don't like to think about it. But people were very scared when January 6 happened that there could be a civil war.

You have all those people breaking up the capital. Mob behavior is such that you could have more mobs break out. By the way, we saw that with BLM. You'd have a riot in one city and then you have a riot in another city. Remember that whole time period where every weekend there were different protests and then some percentage of the protests?

resulted in bad actors. I don't know all the actors, but I think Antifa was one of the ones that was particularly violent. I don't know if that's an actual organization or a loose affiliation of philosophies. Antifa is a loose affiliation. It's not a core entity. People claiming to be Antifa just started lighting stuff on fire. Great. We all agreed. None of that should happen.

people thought, hey, Trump's going to tell the next group of people to go to the next city to do a protest. And yeah, maybe the Capitol or the city hall in New York City will burn down or get broken and people get shot. So they banned him on all platforms for two years. And then they undid those bands over time because they were nervous that he might

uh, you know, prompt people to do that inside as a word inside people to do more damage. The Republicans have never gotten over this. They believe this was like the ultimate form of censorship. So they add one point and you're, you're absolutely correct in pointing out the hypocrisy in this.

At one point, they're like, hey, total free speech. At another point, they might be like, hey, in free speech includes, to your point, private companies being able to do what they want with their services. So this bakery will not make a gay wedding cake, but Facebook can't not have whatever people on its system.

So there is an inconsistency here. The way it's been explained to me, I'm not saying I agree with it, is those platforms have such reach.

that they now need to have some process by which they've vanquished people. So if Alex Jones is vanquished, seems like a reasonable thing to do, if you were running a private business, if you're having a dinner party or you might not want him there, you might not want him on your platform, pretending that parents

whose kids have been murdered were actors, crisis actors, like this is dark stuff. So that's the reason they want to hold YouTube, Facebook, specifically those two platforms accountable for when they ban what they believe conservative views from the platform.

That's, that's what that's all about. And that's why, and that's always been like an issue for them since Trump got banned across it. I do think it would be better hygiene for these platforms. I don't know the government has to be involved if they just said, if there was a process by which they adjudicated these cases.

That would probably be good. But honestly, if YouTube suddenly banned my account, I guess I could sue them, but it's a private business and that's not going to work. So yeah, I kind of believe in the free market. And if people don't like how Facebook runs it, they could be on Twitter and X. And Twitter and X are the and Reddit are allowed pseudonyms. LinkedIn doesn't, Facebook doesn't, Instagram does. Like you could have all different options out there for people, but this is like a pet peeve.

of the republicans in the conservatives and I understand why they have that position. Here's how I feel like slightly like I'm walking into upside downville because people are like, oh my god, I'm so glad that RFK is going to lead HHS because he's going to get the chemicals out of our foods. I'm like, bro, when I was growing up, that was the crunchiest liberal position. That was the Tiva wearing patruli oil,

You know, and I'm like, what's going on? Like, yeah, my mom would not buy red dye yellow, red and yellow dye number five. My mom would not allow us to have eat any of that. And now that's a Republican position. And Republicans are certainly the union and the working man and Hispanic immigrants. Like that's their audience. So congrats.

way to have the biggest open tent. And now we're seeing on the Democratic side, they're like, you know what, we need to open this tent up. AOC is taking a pronouns out and saying like, maybe we should be more reasonable. So the funny thing is, when we talk about the EU, and we talk about the EU on this show on a regular basis, and just you have said, you know, more regulatory focus, less free market, but they have a thing called the very large online platforms threshold, which brings on another set of regulation that impacts those platforms. This is a bugaboo.

of American technology. But here we have the guy who's going to run the FCC, seemingly endorsing per your view, a relatively similar setup. And I'm just kind of like, what? It's intellectually inconsistent, and you're right to point it out. And it's an important discussion because this is a nuanced discussion. If a bakery doesn't want to make a cake for a gay couple,

Yeah, that's abhorrent, and I'm not for it, but I understand if they were like devout Christians or Catholics, this might be against their religious beliefs. Okay, we give a pretty wide berth for people to have those beliefs, even if you don't like them. And you can go to the bakery next door.

There is no when you talk when if you get banned from Facebook, the app store, YouTube, and previously Twitter, you're basically gone. You are out of all. I mean, you could pop up a website, which Alex Jones did.

But I don't know if you remember, for like two or three years, and I know that some people on the left love this. Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, they were just kind of out of the zeitgeist. That noise, those individuals were not part of the public square. Now, is that fair or not? I don't mind racist lunatic.

uh, offensive people being on my social network, cause I can block them or ignore them, where I can, and I don't mind them being on my radio either cause I can change the dial. I'm, I'm pretty hardcore for the free speech here, but, um, I am too, which is why I'm, I'm just, again, like other things cars talking about include like letting people, um, um, um, um, and power consumers to choose their own content filters. Like,

I'm kind of in favor of that. But again, absolutely. That's been my position from the beginning, which is let people pick their algorithm. If you use an algorithm, I believe that's an editorial decision. And I think if you use an algo, that should break your 230 protection unless

unless your algorithm is transparent, and when you load TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, it says, we are going to give you this. You can choose between these three algorithms, educational enriching, most popular.

or let it work. Or none. And I just want my reverse chronological feed. I'll build my own feed. That should be how this works, I believe, if you want to keep Section 230. But that's not the pro, the pro business viewpoint is that companies should be allowed to set this up as they think is the most profit seeking.

And we're talking here about really telling companies how to run their business. And it's wrapped in this idea of, oh, no, conservative speech is being censored. But to me, it's just the same substance with a different sauce. And so like, this is why I know I want to make this very clear. Free speech is a nonpartisan issue because both of the American political parties love to beat the jump about free speech. And then when it's inconvenient, pretend that their inconsistencies don't exist. So don't trust anybody on free speech, except for yourself.

Because this stuff does me literally bonkers because I'm much like one of our biggest intellectual agreements is free speech. And no one in the American spectrum is good here. And it's frustrating to me. Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that X is a great platform for free speech. My experience has been degraded.

Because of it because people feel very free to say really gnarly stuff in my replies and i have to do a lot more scrubbing and blocking and i don't enjoy my experience on x as much.

on a day to day basis as somebody with a big following because it's just a little bit gnarly. If you look at my replies, people are pretty brutal. It's like psychologically, I'm a pretty resilient, happy guy. But looking at 50 comments every time you tweet something that are like, you're an idiot with TDS, it's just like, well, I used to enjoy the conversation here.

And I used to have like a thoughtful conversation and now it's just, and it's the same with threads. I go over to threads. I say something and I get every liberal friend of mine who's like, why are you here? I'm like sorry. I didn't mean to realize the exclusive dinner party or what? Um, let's touch on TikTok really quickly. Cause I want to get to the censorship thing and stick on that theme from the UK perspective, but Jason Brendan Carr, uh, I would say on the, on the far extremes of anti TikTok agitation.

Personally, I agree with him. I think his comments on the show about how they've repeatedly not shown their trustworthy data make a lot of sense. And I'm in favor of divestment or banning TikTok.

So here's my question that I have for the world, not for you, but just for everybody. Trump is going back on his TikTok stance and has very publicly. And here we have Brendan Carr, who is on the other side. So I'm going to be curious to see how that tension is resolved. I was watching that one. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one to watch because Jeff Yoss.

reportedly made a big donation to a super pack. He's a big shareholder, a private equity guy in TikTok. Trump was obviously had the position to ban it, divest it, whatever. Then he flipped, hey, TikTok's very popular. It's a great service. All of those things can be true at the same time. I kind of have the insights getting on this, I think. I think I have enough information to know what's going on here.

All the shareholders want to maximize their profit like any shareholder does in TikTok course. They secretly want it divested. They don't have the leverage to force China to do that.

So what would be the logical thing? It would be for there to be this tension, to get the company public, to allow them to sell their shares and to not have it be banned, to satisfy, you know, not having an adversary have something as powerful as TikTok under their control to be abused at the same time being able to sell your shares. That's kind of what they're vying for, I think. And so it looks weird to us.

Okay. And this is like 4D chess. But wouldn't you, it would be kind of like, you have to sell all your shares right now at the peak. It's like, oh, oh, no. Oh, this is brutal. Right. Okay. Fine. I'll divest. You know, it's like pretty great to divest and get your cash out of this thing. That's, that's the key thing. Because if you have shares in bite dance, as Jeff, yes, Jeff, yes, yes, yes. Anyways, that's why. Yeah.

Yeah, I probably asked you right. Anyways, he's got bite dance shit. And you know what's really hard to do in China, Jason, is get your money out. So if there's a forced divestment, you get a chunk of the equity suddenly it's liquid. That makes more sense to me than arguing the bite dance side of things here. Also, we'll have to see a conflict between Trump's general China hawkishness hawkishness and the TikTok issue. So quite a lot to say there won't be watching that space. Now, UK censorship, you asked me a question. Jason said,

out. Have people been arrested for social media posts in the UK? And the answer is yes. And I have, I have the examples here. If you want me to run through what happened in what? Please, because this is something that I keep seeing on Twitter, people discussing these knocks at your door in the UK. You said something on Twitter that was spicy or Facebook or wherever. And the police show up to talk to you about it.

Now, we're not talking about a threat, like a bomb threat. We all know that that's, you know, in the United States or UK, no bueno, you're going to, you're going to rightfully knock on your door and get arrested for putting in a bomb threat. We're talking about somebody saying, I don't like X type of people or X people should get out of my country.

That is hate speech or it's offensive speech and you and I would never say it, but you know, it is free speech and it's a different level of speech in the UK. So I've been hearing over and over again from people from the UK was on this trigonometry podcast and they were telling me it was true. And I was like, can I get some examples of this? Cause I see people saying it, but I haven't seen the example. So I'm very happy that you did the work for us.

Okay, so the first person, according to the UK police, the first conviction for posting online in relation to the public disorder was Jordan Parler, age 28, jailed for 20 months after pleading this to the Guardian summary, after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred with Facebook posts in which he advocated an attack on a hotel in Leeds as part of the violent public disorder that swept England at the time.

So the other guy that was brought to the police in the same time period was Tyler K 26. And he called for mass deportation and for people to be set fire in the hotels that they were housing asylum seekers. And here is one of the tweets, set fire to all the hotels full of the rolling care. If that makes me racist, so be it. So in both cases here, it was not just saying, I don't like

Italian people, make an example, it was much more an incitement to violence. Now, there are a handful of other examples, but all of this boils down to, critically, the Public Order Act of 1986 over in the UK. Okay. Two key sections, section 19, section 21,

both of which say that a person is guilty if they intend to stir up racial hatred in their either distributed written material or recorded content. So quite literally in the UK, since 1986, you could get in trouble for inciting racial hatred. But as we said, this is the first time a digital example that has been brought to Cape Bear, and it was, I think, much more about an assignment to violence.

versus hatred. And that's the distinction and why I'm not freaking out about this, because I think my free speech absolutum ends when someone says we should burn their hotel down. Okay. Yeah. We all everybody. I think a hundred percent of people are going to say threatening to burn a hotel down with or without like the actual intent to do it is problematic to say the least because if you say that and a mentally ill person says,

Oh, yeah, I agree. And then they go do it. You, in fact, incited it. Now you could say the person is mentally ill, but you do have to be thoughtful about these things. And you know what? This could happen here in the United States, where if you make a threat against the president and threat and harm violence, the Secret Service does visit you.

And they did visit who was the comedian who had like a Trump, the headed Trump head and she held it up. Remember that? Yes. But they also went to M&M's house. He actually wrapped about this. And then he had to say, no, I was talking about Trump using words, not actions. I'm butchering the lyrics quote there, but this does. So we have an equivalent here. If you threaten violence against the president,

you or and I wonder if that goes to other elected officials. I think it does. If you threaten violence against an individual, you can get a knock on your door. So this example, I think we would agree, probably should get a knock on your door, probably should have it taken down. I don't know in this country, if you would actually go to jail for that.

or not. So the critical difference between the UK and the US is that hate speech in the US is protected. Hate speech, as we noted in the UK law, is not. But where the two legal codes, and Jason, I'm not a lawyer, I did my best research here. So if we get the strong, please let us know.

But the difference here is that the similarities that there's a concept of true threats in the US. So when your speech becomes a true threat, then you lose, according to the Supreme Court, your first amendment protections. And that's why in the case that we described of people saying, let's burn down that hotel. To me, that does constitute a true threat. And I think this is one of those examples when it's very easy to say, oh, someone did a bad tweet in the UK. It's censorship.

But a lot of the rules that have been put into place in the last couple of years in the UK to crack down on protesting and so forth have come under the conservative party. So keep in mind, this is also not entirely a partisan issue. But I think the US is a better system. I think you should be allowed to say whatever you want. I also think people should be allowed to respond and not invite you to their party if they so desire.

It would be interesting to see if a comedian like Dave Chappelle, etc., who frequently goes into comedy that might include ethnicities or gender or sexuality, sexual preference, etc., all these identifiable groups. I wonder if they would be arrested for doing that kind of comedy in a comedy club in the UK?

I really doubt it because I watch a lot of UK comedy and it's pretty rival at times. Interesting. Like if you watch question time or quite interesting or whatever, there's a lot of stuff out there that's relatively, I mean, I would say that they're much more okay with making like gay related jokes, like not homophobic jokes, but jokes that might be considered to be on the margins in the US seem to be more tolerated.

But there's a joke about Muslims or Islamic immigration, maybe not as much. So I wonder if that is the case there. Anyway, we are neophytes in this. We've started researching it. Please let us know if there's other tweets and examples, because we have but one tweet that we've now shown.

If this is actually a very persistent thing, I would like to see the 10 tweets and talk about each one of them and how the law works there. But there's one more example. I'll just throw it in because I was thinking of completing this. So there was a 25-year-old man, Nathan Thompson, from a place called New Castle Upon Time, which is the best name for a town I've ever heard in my life before. Well, New Castle, yeah, very famous here.

Well, but upon time, like it's like boring time. Why are you doing it like that? He got 16 months, I think, suspended sentence for a series of offensive tweets. He quote, according to a local news report, celebrated Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany white supremacist mass murders and promoted extremist right-wing material. He's not going to prison, but he did get in trouble.

And I think under the UK's law, as we have read it here on the show, that would be illegal. But again, a 1986 law, this is not something that was passed in the last 20 minutes to make conservatives feel bad.

Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting situation. I don't have enough information on it. It's great that we're getting educated on it. And by the way, like in Germany and France, I've talked about this before, there are specific laws just about Nazi memorabilia and, you know, Hitler and all this kind of stuff because, hey,

They've got a lot of trauma and a lot of history there, and they've written specific laws on selling of Nazi propaganda. Remember the Yahoo auction site got in trouble for having people sell Nazi memorabilia, which in the United States would be totally fine. And so there's a big question about that kind of stuff. And even buying a Leenie Riefenstahl film when I was getting into my film hour and I was thinking I was going to be a director

I had read a biography of her, the wonderful, horrible life of Lini Riefenstahl, and I was fascinated like she was this incredible director who I was kind of going down the rabbit hole of Kurosawa and his influence on George Lucas. And then I found out that Lini Riefenstahl had had an influence on George Lucas as well.

And if you look at all the stormtroopers and all those scenes, they're actually scenes from a film Triumph of the Will, which I think I either bought or I rented on Netflix when it was like a mail in service and I watch. And I was like, watching, I said, wow, this is fascinating. It is just like Star Wars where

the way they line up the platoons of stormtroopers is literally in stormtroopers, obviously relating to Nazi stuff. So it was very interesting. These laws and we'll keep monitoring them. If you have any information on it, you know, he's Alex on Twitter and I'm at Jason. So just mention us, the other examples, because I think one of the things that's weird here is a lot of times when these things happen, they don't share the tweets for some reason.

I don't understand that, but I think that's a big part of this is understanding what the posts were. Yeah, versus talking about what they said, what did they say? Yeah, I would like to see the actual tweet in question here. When you showed the one burn down the building, he's like, I don't care if the building burns down, putting it in a hypothetical. I get the sense that that guy knew he was doing something spicy and tried to put a disclaimer on it.

Yeah. Well, yes, right? Because in the language there, he did say, I don't care if the building burned down or something. If I remember correctly, what you just showed, he didn't say, I'd like to go burn the building down or he should go build the burning down. He kind of put it in a hypothetical kind of situation. I think in the UK, they give you a little bit less of a, yes, you can claim you didn't know what you were doing defense defense. And I think that's just a choice that they made, but

Let's move on to another very important story, Jason. Someone that I think you probably know could be heading for status in the next administration as Secretary of Transportation leading the DOT. This is, of course, Emile Michael, a former Uber executive.

Not someone that I know personally, but just context for everybody was a long time exec over at Uber during the hypergrowth years was often called Travis Kalinik's right-hand man, critically also previously considered for the role of Secretary of Transportation under the previous Trump admin, lost then to Elaine Chao. But now is I think the top of the list, Jason, to take on that role. And quite a lot of folks in technology are very excited about this, including Elon Musk, Derek Oshoshahi, Sarah Goa, we have some tweets, but

I take it. You know this guy. Yeah, I know him really well. He is an aggressive deal maker of deal makers, brought Uber to the Middle East and did a lot of the great deals with Travis's right hand man for a while. And he would be extraordinary to have like a business executive.

in that position, as opposed to just, you know, some wonk, you know, politician, because I think he'd actually get stuff done. He would look at something like high speed rail or self driving or v-tolls, you know, and obviously, like the DOT doesn't do everything and a lot of things are local versus, you know, like California's got their own rules about self driving or whatever.

But just to have somebody and they obviously maintain their own disastrous high speed, well, the boondoggle. But it would be great to have more people who could aggressively come in there. And I think Brendan Carr falls into this, although I don't know what Brendan did before he was in there.

But I just think it's, you know, for all the drama around these Trump appointments, there are some that are bizarre, whack-pack, bizarre selections, legion of doom, whatever, in people's mind, rightfully wrongfully, whatever. But I do see like little bits of hope of efficient people. And again, I said it at the top of the show, you don't have to like Trump to like the idea of less government and less spending and getting the budget under control.

That's my number one issue. So I got to be intellectually consistent. I think something like a meal going in, breading going in, the vape, you on, you know, those kind of folks are going to come in and cut things the size of things and make it more efficient. So yeah, hopefully, and it has to be done thoughtfully. You can't come in there. It's not a private company. It's not like you long going into Twitter. You can't just go in and just nuke stuff, right? There's going to be a process here and the machine's going to fight it. You know, you go in and you say,

Uh, I want you to give back this thing that's in the chips act. Right. And I think we talked about this last week. I think you pointed it out like, okay, I fought for that. I got a bunch of jobs for my constituents and now I'm giving it back. Like you might have Republicans were like, yeah, I'm not doing it. I had a very small majority in the house. They did a lot of votes then. It's only a couple of senators. So if you lose even a handful of folks, because the year things going to impact their district or their state, it gets tough pretty quickly.

Jason, just to make everyone sure everyone's aware of this, the DOT is the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Federal Highway Administration, the pipeline and hazardous materials, safety, it's a lot of stuff. This is an agency with 55,000 people. So a good interesting test will be to the efficiency and waste point, how many people are still at the DOT and how much does this budget change from 88 billion in 2021

Why the end of the Trump administration? And I'm curious to see how much waste there is inside of a more targeted agency. Pick any agency. What do you think the waste is? If you had to pick a percentage number, we'll give you guys an average. No, give me your average. What do you think the average cuts that could be made on a percentage basis?

and have zero impact on the services they provide and, in fact, make them more efficient because you'll be cutting what X percent of people who were just not super dynamic and qualified to be clear. You're talking about the administrative costs, not the disbursements of Social Security checks, like the actual dollar amounts that go to Medicaid recipients and so forth.

Um, I guess there's two questions there. So let's go with the institutions, how much waste is there in terms of their operations and then, you know, like welfare checks going out. We know there's some amount of fraud or waste there, but let's put that aside. Yeah. Okay. So on the personnel side, I bet.

if we could with a perfect laser point scalpel, probably size 35% of people without any dramatic loss. But I literally said one third in my mind. So we're exactly in sync. One third could be cut and it would be just as good.

It would have no impact. So if you can find the right people, though, and I'm worried that what we're going to do is we're going to use more of a meat cleaver. Yeah, then a salad fork to make a culinary based analogy. But you know, here's what happens. I watched Elon do this up close and personal. Okay. I was there for the first 30 days of the, you know, Twitter takeover.

My involvement has been way, way overestimated by everybody. They don't only talk about it because people then think I'm trading on Elon's fame or his name or whatever. I was asked to help out. I helped out on the margins. One of the things I noticed when Elon did this was he was incredibly thoughtful of that while cutting it to save the company because the company was hemorrhaging cash and they were planning on their own riff.

One of the, you know, before he bought it, they were going to cut a very significant amount of people. Like we saw Google and Microsoft and everybody else do shortly thereafter. He emailed everybody and said, Hey, we've made these cuts. If we made a mistake and you should be here and your job is critical and you think we made a mistake, we're going to make mistakes. So simply email me. This is my email.

and the remaining team and explain to us why you should be back in the office this week, you know, and we made a mistake and we will give you your job back. You know, we said that to them. And you know what happened? Some people did. They said, hey, I do this mission critical thing. I think, you know, community notes is really important. And I think community notes was one of them where there were some cuts in community notes.

And you know what? You see Elon talking about community notes all the time? He was like, oh, OK, and remember the community notes team coming in and explaining to him why this was essential. And Elon immediately was like, this is essential.

carry on, right? This should not be cut. And you see community notes as super vibrant and you want to talk about it all the time. And it actually kind of works. I, I've been community noted a lot of time and I, and I'm part of the community notes thing or I get asked to vote on it. Do you get asked to vote on it as well? I don't. And I'm, I pay, I pay. I think you have to go in there, by the way, and opt into being aspirated. So go into the next time you see a, next time you see a community note, click on it and apply to be in it.

Because I think they want you to apply. They don't want those randos going in there. But it's really simple approach applies to a thousand people. Okay. So you. So just to, again, I'm not not trying to be a pastor, but just trying to understand. Yeah. So let's say, uh, what was the number? Elon cut 80% of Twitter stuff. Yeah. So here 20.

out of the d o t okay if you got 20 out of the d o t and then you said to them hey we have to do a reduction in force we have to stop spending this much money. We've asked the managers we looked at you know who's actually showing up for work we're doing return to office if you don't want to return to the office you can opt out and you kind of gave people like hey.

Um, to the managers, I need you to cut. You have, you know, if you have a hundred people in your department, you need to get to 80. Please give us your submission. And then they let those people go and they said to the 80 remaining. Hey, with these, they email those, try to, hey, listen, you've been like, oh, but if you think you shouldn't have been like, oh, let us know why. Yeah. Write us a letter and three more, three of them did it and they came back.

Great. So now you're at 83 and you saved the American tax payers 17% of the budget. Great. Missy 70% of the personnel budget. And that's the thing that I think that people are overestimating is how much money be spent on salaries versus programs. And I, you know, I mean, Jason, if we ran that playbook exactly across the federal government and we got rid of 17%. So 83 stayed and 17 left across every department.

I don't think you would add up to a material sum against our outlays and the start. I mean, I think you have to ask yourself, if every administration adds eight, nine trillion more dollars in debt, if this one went sideways and added nothing, that would be a huge win.

Let alone if we could cut 5%, 10% a year. If we cut 5% a year, you know, somehow we could magically do that. I mean, that would be a miracle. If we started paying down our debt. Oh, my God. What an amazing place. This is the place where I resemble a goddamn Reagan clone. This is my thing that I'm terrified about. But I just think that we're talking about smaller potatoes and extending tax cuts.

when there is a multi trillion dollar lever in not extending the tax cut and jobs act. And to me, it's a little bit wild that we're focusing on haircuts versus decapitations. My guess is

You might not believe this, but Trump at times can be hyperbolic. Yeah. Just buckle up for a second. Sometimes they'll say things that are way hyperbolic and he'll say he wants to deport 15 million people and then he'll deport 150,000 felons, criminals, or in jail. We've never had their citizenship to begin with.

So I have a feeling it's like kind of one of these things, hey, we're going to make these massive cuts. If they just froze spending, and then made 5% cuts every year for four years, that would compound to like a pretty significant turnaround since Clinton balanced the budget and had a surplus. So anyway, I'm rooting for all of them. Emil Michaels. Yeah. And Emil Michaels, awesome. And you cannot like Trump.

and like some of the appointments. And I was about to argue. So one of the news stories that just came out to Bloomberg piece came out yesterday that quote Trump team is seeking to ease us rules for self-driving cars. And if you were going to pick somebody to take point on that, I think Emil Michael will be a pretty sure fit given that his time in Uber is self-driving cars and so forth. And so here's the place. I'll do it. If the Trump administration makes it easier to have

steering wheel and pedal-free self-driving cars, I will give them five points. Awesome. Great. So I mean, this is, and also I...

a message to my liberal friends who are freaking out about all this. He won. He has a mandate. He won by three million votes. He won all three branches. They get to give it a shot. So support them and hold them accountable. You can do both those things. Support them and hold them accountable. The end. We always have to do this when the Republican wins, when when a Democrat wins.

Mitch McConnell doesn't let outgoing, you know, Republican president nominates Supreme Court justices. So I'll take that if you can get your friends to agree to it too. In the meantime, I would like them to do that. Yeah. Well, I can unilaterally disarm myself, I guess, but I in a perfect world. Yeah. Hell yeah, I agree with that because it would be lovely if we could all succeed together. When's the last time the Democrats had all three branches?

I guess. Yeah, I don't remember. There was an interesting question that came out, by the way, and an episode of this question here. Hunter Freeman says, ByteDance valuation still rising with Lumen US restrictions. Why is this happening? What do you think, Alex?

Why would this valuation go up? I think the business is good. And I think that there's also a slight replacement in excitement for technology products in China. I think the government there realizes that they crack down way too hard on tech post Jack Ma making the most anodyne common critical of regulation of all time.

And I think they're trying to re-inflate the animal spirits and just, I'm not quite sure that's going to be possible. And here's a chart showing changes to Biden's support over time. As you can see, went up, went back down, is coming back up again. But I think it's a solid business. And I think even a divestment of TikTok, they retain some equity ownership. So I can perceive it all going well for them. And frankly, China will always be a place where investors are willing to place bets even with the issues, just because, as Jason noted earlier in the show, the market's so big.

Yeah. And what I would say here is the market is also pricing in a resolution. Yeah. So too big to ban would be, yeah, too big to ban. Yeah. Yeah. It's too big to fail version, but it's the social media equivalent of it. You know, you know, Jason, I got to say, I think this show today was reasonably upbeat. Look at us. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, listen, again, for people who are freaked out

Not saying you don't have a reason to be freaked out, but let's be supportive of the things we agree with. And you should be vigilant about things you disagree with. I think somebody should create a website of all of the things Trump promised. This would be a really interesting thing to do with politicians. And I haven't seen this done by an independent person, but this would be like a startup idea I would actually back.

If somebody just put quotes of everything, a politician promise, and then track them over time. So Kamala, if she had one, promised that $25,000 down payment, right? And she promised some startup funding for African American men. Okay, great. Put those things down. Let's track them over time. The same thing for Trump. If Trump said he's going to deport $15 million, the largest deportation ever, put that down.

And then if JD said hey, we're gonna do it one bite at a time like a sandwich and we're gonna take the felons that okay put that down as well Put the quote to when they said it put the date put how many days it's been automatically and then track their progress and then you could actually give I don't scorecard but at least you could track these in a reasonable way and I don't know why that doesn't exist like

So, PolitiFact, I just found this. I'll throw it up on the screen. Who is PolitiFact? They get a lot of PolitiFact. Is that a private organization? Is it from a university? I don't know who runs PolitiFact. So, here is the Biden promise tracker. Now, I don't know if they're going to do this anything for Trump, but it does keep tabs on what they've done. And Jason, you're making a good point. How partisan are they? How not partisan are they?

how good of a judge they do on actually vetting these things. But you can definitely see that. Oh, here it is. It's run by the Pointer Institute of St. Petersburg, Florida. So that would be left leaning, I guess. PolitiFact is an American nonprofit project, operated by Pointer Institute. They are like the

Uh, yeah, there are issues. But what I do like here is the, uh, they really break down sources, ownership, how they approach things. Like I don't mind if someone is left or right leaning. If they tell me how they approach data and making decisions, cause then I can, I'm an adult. I can bet from there. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Uh,

All right. What an episode. We got a big, lots of stuff on the docket for the rest of the week. He's Alex. I'm Jason. Send us your ideas for news stories. And if you know who the main character is at the moment. Oh, do we have Nvidia earnings this week? I believe Nvidia earnings this week. I'm behind on my economic calendar work because I had to spit up a baby last night, but we will have all earnings coverage that's critical on the show. We're going to do just the companies that have the most importance that are moving the markets.

Great. Awesome. So let's put that in the doc. And then I know there's a lot of IPL action going on. So let's go through that. And we'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Bye everybody.