Government shutdown at day 20: visa delays, frozen defense R&D, and a looming military payday crisis

guest? I think we have Zack off. Zack live in the TB Ultradome while coming in while the government is turned off about Turuff. Search every bite serless vector s uh and full text search built from first principles and object storage fast 10x jeer and extremely scalable. Welcome to the show Zack. Thanks so much.

Pleasure to be here live and in person. Hello. Uh we have you here the government shutdown but you were still able to attend. Uh what yeah maybe uh like set the table for us. What does the government shutdown mean? This this feels like this happens all the time.

I remember a decade ago being in college at some pool party and someone saying, "Oh, the government's shutting down and uh and nothing happened then. Uh, is something going to happen now? Is this even a story that people care about? " Like what's going on? Nobody cares. This is the big problem. Nobody cares.

It's taking forever for them to do anything. And this is there's a couple reasons why. One, government shuts down any time they can't pass a budget. We don't pass budgets all the time. Yeah. And that's why we do a lot of those continuing resolutions. That's exactly right. We gave up on budgets.

We shifted to continuing resolutions which basically say copy paste whatever the last budget was plus minus x% on this thing plus. So you can sneak stuff into the CR. Oh, you can definitely sneak stuff in and people do that all the time. And that's why lobbyists make money and that's uh I wouldn't know.

That's why other that's why other lobbyists do bad shady things. We only do good positive things. But then also that that's why I've seen a lot of founders uh visiting DC. That's right. They because if they're going to get money for their program, they need it to be provisioned at some point.

It's going to pro be provisioned in a new budget hopefully, but if not a CR. That's right. There's basically, think about it this way. 20 years ago, Congress used to pass all of these small little bills throughout the year, 30, 50 bills throughout the year. Each one had money attached to them, right?

Say we're going to give money to this, money to that, whatever. Peace. Peace meal. Exactly. Right. And there was an overall budget that governed things. But Congress all the time would pass laws, bills, whatever. Now we pass two maybe three bills every year. These are called omnibus bills, right? CRS are one of them.

NDAA which authorizes the military is another one. The defense authorization act, right? The big problem we have right now is there is a big tension between the Democrats who do not want to pass a clean CR for a variety of reasons. It's not pjorative, by the way.

It's just descriptive and Republicans who feel it's in their political best interest to pass a clean CR today. If you're Chuck Schumer and you're sitting there, remember in March, Chuck Schumer worked with the Senate GOP to get a budget passed.

If you're Chuck and you're sitting there in March, you have a problem now with your left flank who are looking at you and saying, "Why are you giving in? Why are you rolling over for the Trump admin?

" Meanwhile, if you're in the GOP, you don't want to have a Christmas tree bill where you have this ornament attached for this amount of money and this ornament attached for that amount of money and everybody gets their favorite thing. All you want is to say, "Keep it going exactly how it is.

Let's put off any of the bigger discussions for a later time. Yeah. I feel like just as like a fan of American democracy, I like the big fan democracy. Yeah. Let's give it up for American democracy. Big up. But but I feel like I feel like I like the the the peace meal peacewise bills.

Like I like the idea of like we're going to go to the moon. Here's the moon bill. And it's like that's and we all agreed to that. We all got fired up and everyone kind of got excited and we and we voted for that and it kind of happened. Like the classic of like we want to build a bridge.

So we pass a bill to build that bridge. Like that's that's kind of what I was taught in like grade school. That's what you imagine when you go to civics class in like 8th grade. You're thinking to yourself, oh, I want Do you ever watch Schoolhouse Rock? Yes. Bill. Yeah. I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill to yourself.

How I want it to be when there when there's like a systemic failure in the financial ecosystem. I think it should be a one everybody gets a vote and you want direct democracy. Direct democracy like California. Yeah, it's working. Should we bail out the banks?

That is a weird thing because I I I feel like on on one level as a fan of American democracy, I I I do want the direct democracy. I do want the peace meal thing.

But then at the same time, I live in California and I've had the direct democracy thing and I still don't have a train that goes from LA to California and there's weird like feudal land owners now who pass down their homes in California with no property taxes.

Yeah, there's like all these odd So it feels like maybe both sides have their own warts and edges. You want like I don't know, far be it for me to say what the optimal setup is.

The reason I like the older setup is every one of those small bills gets airtime, gets debate, gets discussion, and then ultimately at some point you step back and you say, "Look, I don't want to spend," and most people don't want to spend all morning waking up thinking about politics.

I mean, your audience doesn't, right? I come on here enough as it is. They don't want to wake up and think about that a bunch. So, they elect somebody to think about it for them, but they still discuss at least what all the things are that happen.

The omnibus bills instead, they're so slammed every time, you're just jamming a hundred things through. So if you're a damn look, Schumer's stated concern is that there were a bunch of Obamacare subsidies, ACA subsidies that were built in during that were all set to expire this year.

They were meant to be temporary, but as we know, often times you pass something in government, it stays around forever and it goes on for the rest of time. Dems want to codify this in law. They want it to keep going. Republicans don't want to take up any major topic. Clean CR, nothing attached to it.

That's the crux of this. And Schumer is winning points with his left flank, right? the AOCC's of the world who's not a senator but is considered primary in Shuner. He's winning points at his left flank because he doesn't now have to give in or be perceived as giving in to a hostile admin.

And the admin thinks they're winning because they look at this and they go, great, now I'm going to riff people. I'm going to lay off. I'm going to shrink the government. All of the things I want to do already, this I mean a judge blocked it, but in theory allows me to do.

Since this is a technology and business show, what are the current what kind of groups are currently impacted?

I talked to a defense tech founder on Friday and he was saying like it's obviously massively disruptive because you're in, you know, you're trying to get contracts done and nothing can kind of happen for you basically like add 60 days almost to whatever timeline you thought.

And so that prevents new hiring because they don't have um they can't hire against specific contracts etc. Uh but what are the kind of immediate impacts that you're seeing or hearing about in the private markets? I mean the biggest thing is this.

We work with a lot of founders and I have a lot of founders who are clients who are here on O1 visas and we think the O1 visa is phenomenal. If you want to get an O1 visa today, your processing time is so much longer than it ever was before. Even though, by the way, consulars aren't shut down.

Consular offices aren't shut down because they're fee based. They have their own revenue stream. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. You pay the O1 fee for the funding. So, they don't need funding for the government. Anything that either has multi-year funding or has its own independent set of revenue is able to stay open.

It's only the things that require yearover-year funding from the government that close. And by the way, there's some nuance on that because the admin has kept stuff open. For example, normally the army doesn't get paid during government shutdown.

The admin has said, "Look, we're going to take the $6 billion left over from R&D spend in defense. " So, this is impacting the defense folks, right? Any R&D spend Oh, that would have potentially gone to That's right. It's not SBI so much, but it's more sciency, but Yeah. Exactly. R&D spending that could go to startups.

Yes. That could go to startups that do R&D stuff. And instead, we're going to use that money that was already allocated, but hasn't yet been dispersed to pay the military. So, it's a little bit of robbing Peter searching through the the couch cushions. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And the problem you run into is look, they can do that now, but eventually you run out of that money, too. And so, at some point, somebody's going to have to not get paid.

So, if you're an O1 visa holder, you in a tough spot because you now have a much longer lag time, much longer processing time to get into this country, even if you were already here and just happened to be gone and coming back for your renewal. That's tough. Yep. Yeah, that makes sense.

So, uh like how long do we expect this to last? Like where should we be uh watching for like updates? the is is everyone kind of pricing in like oh 6 weeks is standard but then the it's the question of like is it six or 12 or is it or is it really wide? Who knows?

The real honest answer is the longest partial shutdown in history was under Trump one and it was 35 days or 20 days today. Okay. So that's the like tail end risk. The problem is the difference between then and now is a couple things. One, it's not a big press issue like we talked about.

Like I can imagine I'm watching people tune out to this interview when they're hearing about the government shut down. People don't care. And by the way, both sides think they're winning. The admin says, "Look, there's great stuff happening. We have peace in the Middle East plus or minus little bit, right?

Dems are saying we had huge protests. We galvanized the base. No one's motivated to get this close. " Couple leading indicators you want to look for. One, military payday. Like I said, if that happens and they don't have another way of getting dollars attached to it, that's going to be a problem.

to majority leader John Thoon, who is the senator from North Dakota in the Senate Republican guy. All of the farm state senators are looking at the expiration of loan programs that help keep farmers solvent every year. If you're a farm state senator, this matters to you a great great deal.

So, the admin is looking today to figure out where can I get my dollars to go and continue to fund these things. But in the absence of funding this, it's really really hard for a shutdown to continue without political pressure. Third thing you want to look at, and this is the big one, is political consequences.

Because the truth is, as much as Congress today has said, "Fine, I'm happy to abdicate my role and let the White House run the shutdown response. " In theory, Congress controls the power of the purse, they are able to at any time, right? Come together and do something.

If the Dems lose the governor race in Virginia, which is disproportionately affected by the shutdown because there's so many federal employees who live in Northern Virginia, or if a year from now, which I don't expect will still be shut down, but if in some number of months you start to see negative impact in as we lead up to the midterms, senators are going to wake up and say, gosh, my political future right now is shouldn't have doesn't have to be tied to the outcome of this shutdown.

I can be an independent actor. I don't need to rely on the White House or anyone else. The Dems can say this, too. I don't need to rely on Chuck Schumer to guide where my vote goes. That's the real one where my rubber meets the road.

Is the government shutdown going to increase the risk of thieves stealing the Constitution, robbing the store? We saw that thieves secrets book robbery. You saw this story. I saw this and they like left it in the gutter. I heard. Well, they well they dropped a crown. They did get away with a lot of jewels.

Uh, and I and I hope that the folks at the Smithsonian who are protecting our moon rocks are not getting furoughed because we got to protect our crown. The worst national treasure would be, by the way, it would be. What's the current dialogue around AI regulation and policy in Washington?

And then what are you seeing across the How long does it take to go from Carpathy on Dwarash to Capitol Hill? Is it are they watching or are they are they listening to shows that are talking about that or talking the next narrative? How many links in the Wait, it's just autocomplete. Always has been.

It's there are a swath of think tanks that do a really good job of translating what happens in DC. Sorry, happens in SF. Yeah, exactly. DC computer. That's right. Everything is computer. You can build a really good think tank.

your the guest who's supposed to be on before me, Dean Ball, who's an amazing guy, was the AI adviser at OSTP at the White House Office of Science and Tech Policy. He's done a really good job being that communicator. Exactly.

And his think tank, FAI, which I'm involved with, too, does a really, really good job bridging the gap there. But, and by the way, things like the Progress Conference just happened at SF. There's a lot of things now institutionally that are built to translate this on like a relatively quick time scale.

The truth is, look, if you're watching right now and you care about AI policy, the White House has an RFI or quest for information out today where they're asking people, founders in particular, to write in and say, gosh, what are the things that are impacting what are the regulatory burdens that are impacting my ability to do AI business in America?

So, they want they want the answer, but it's hard to get ground truth because when you're in DC, it's a little bit of a bubble. You hear a little bit of an echo chamber. Sure. Sure.

Is is the is the core DC AI narrative just uh state-by-state regulation versus not or are there actually higher level discussions around okay if a trillion dollars of capex is going to happen like there might be there might need to be some fundamental changes in the way we regulate data centers power even just even even if you're just the ultimate AI bull you might need to step in and say we're going to help speed this up because at a certain point if you're building 10 nuclear reactors you just can't do that without the help of the federal government right so so part of problem is we have a federalist system and so power by necessity is distributed across state, federal, local, right?

So if you're talking about means government power, not sorry power although yeah literal power is also distributed across yeah electricity is also distributed across these. Yeah. Yeah.

As you can see with Elon he built his Colossus 2 data center right at the intersection of three different states because you need to be able to go over here for a little bit. Yeah. Part of the problem is this.

If you want to build a new reactor or you want to build an energy transmission line, you need so many different people to buy in in the last 30 years of American governance basically at every level has been built around keeping things the same status quo for people who already have done fairly well. Mhm.

The other thing I would think about, by the way, it's so funny because I don't read a lot about politics, but I have like such tangible experience in politics through trying to get things done with my HOA. That's exactly right.

It's literally like the boomers control the HOA board and I I tried to suggest changes when I bought my house and I basically got death threats. So that's that's my framework for California governance is the largest HOA in the country. Think of it that way. It is just completely biased against.

All right, here's the other problem. You have a thousand people in Congress who all have their own political aspirations. Look like a Marshall Blackburn. Marsha Blackburn wants to be governor of Tennessee. What's one of the biggest industries in Tennessee? Nashville. Nashville music, right? Yeah.

So Nashville wants the home of John Fio's. That's really swinging the That's huge. Hu Marshall Blackburn. What was the other thing we saw about uh Tennessee like something about isn't Nashville? Nashville specifically is pushing heavy on AI regulation. That's right. Exactly. Elvis. No music. Okay. All right.

You guys know the AI audio app. Okay. They hate. It's like Oh, they hate it. It's like public enemy number one. You're in Nashville, right? So, Marsha Blackburn, you got to be Isn't it an open carry out there? Do not if you're not if you're if you're a light speeded and you funded, do not go to Tennessee.

Do not walk around Tennessee. I I wouldn't personally fall aside. Marcia Blackburn wants a political future in Tennessee. She wants to get out of the Senate, which is a miserable place to be, and get into the executive chair in Tennessee. Why is it so miserable? Cuz nothing gets done. You know, the House works.

No, this is like real. I mean, look, it's frustrating if you actually are a motivated person. So, you say that the House works, but the Senate doesn't No, the opposite. The House works even less. The House worked in the last since like July 4th. I think the House has worked something like 20 days in total.

Okay, that's insane. Like, think about if you guys Did they not get the memo at the Great Lock? No, they are. They are doomed. The permanent underclass. It's terrible. It's awful. This is the problem. All right. So, Marshall Blackburn wants a political future in Tennessee.

She says, "Okay, if I pass the Elvis Act today or if I allow the Elvis Act to pass, they could have they should have called it the trough act. Don't put slop in my trough. Keeping trough. Keep organic. I want organic food for all my piggies. Make the trough great again. Organic. Only organic AI for me.

Thank you very much. Okay. So, if you want if she lets the Alax pass with no federal preeemption, she wins herself a lot of friends in Tennessee. She can be governor. Exactly. Yeah. If you want to I imagine having all the country music fans and the and big country on your side for for governorship in Tennessee.

That's got to be pretty helpful. It's financial capital and it's social capital, too. It's a big outcome. Now, think about that same dynamic writ large over and over and over. A thousand people, all of whom want their own thing. Look, the truth is at some point there will have to be a federal standard that happens.

It's going to have to happen. And some of this stuff, Ted Cruz put out a bill around AI sandboxes, which is in the um OSTP, the White House AI action plan, basically saying, "Look, we're going to set up special economic experimentation zones is one way to think about them.

" So people are tackling it from different respects, but unless you're thinking completely nationally and you want to be governor or sorry, you want to be president, if you're thinking about anything at the state level, you are right now not going to act federally when it comes to AI policy.

That's uh wait really quickly. Uh you said a thousand people. Help me break that down. It's a it's a 100 senators, 538 uh house members, but where's the other like there's a gang I mean I was being a little hyperbolic. There's a gang there's a gang there's a phrase gang of 500. Okay.

Gang of 500 refers to everyone in the House, everyone in the Senate. White House staffers, agency staffers, and then people like me, the lobbyists, the reporters, the outsiders. You add all those folks and and those people have they might be want to be the governor or something. Sure.

They might want to have an aspiration or even they want to do business with somebody, right? They have some aspiration to do whatever. There's a thousand live players. That's right. The thousand live players really 500 live players. And that's who determines quote unquote conventional wisdom in right.

So if you're, you know, Blake who you guys had on from Bumero a while ago, whatever it is, the number one thing you wanted to do to convince people that you want to have a speed, sorry, a sound law and not a speed law is convince those 500 people over and over again to shift their perspective.

Once you do that, the conventional is so difficult.

Uh, I mean I I love Blake obviously and I'm rooting for him, but uh it that seems like such a hard challenge in the face of like you can't just go and do the supersonic act of 2025 by itself and everyone's like, "Yeah, this one makes sense because you have to puzzle piece it with 25 other things on the omnibus bill.

" Well, it's like when we were all in enterprise software, it's accountbased marketing. You know what I mean? Accountbased marketing, you have one person, you have all the influencers who sit around that person and your job is to win over each influencer over and over again. It's the same thing here.

You have one person, maybe five people, right, who can actually do it. Majority leader, the president, speaker, so on and so forth. You want to flip over all the people, the think tanks, the reporters, the junior members, their delegation, all the people who have influence on them. If you do that, you win. Yep.

Uh, sorry, Jordy, I uh any Do you cover nuclear at all? You cover nuclear because every time we see these, you know, one gigawatt uh you know, all all these gigawatts data centers being announced, Yeah. It it just uh it seems like the like nuclear is just going to have to play a huge part in that.

And yet we need to relearn how to make reactors here in America. Yeah. It seems like a lot of people are underwriting like oh yeah like uh you know we're going to it's going to be a lot of money.

We'll sign we'll sign on this line and then the money will come wire the money and then yeah we'll just turn on a new reactor. Those are two very different things. So easy to do. Sorry. Yeah. One one new reactor please. Yeah. Thank you very much. Add that to the I'll take one reactor and 50 transmission lines.

Thank you very much. I'm all done. You really can like wire a hundred billion in a day, but you cannot just wire a h 100red gawatts in a day. This is part of the problem. So we do I'll full disclosure we do lobby for a nuclear energy company. It's a great company. I won't name them but a phenomenal business.

We have look if you look at the federal government by 30 if you're not heavily conflicted you're doing something wrong. No conflict no interest is the name of the case unfortunately. Um, this is the thing, all right?

If you are looking at the federal government and you're looking at this federalism system and the challenges that are inherent to it, you're thinking who's cutting across this, credit to the admin.

They are the first ones who I've heard of who at least thought about, hey, we ought to have somebody whose job it is to expedite these long-term is Michael Grimes, right? Who runs the USment accelerator, former tech banker for many, many years, Calber Bears. Yeah, there you go. Poly technical. Yeah.

Uh and anyway, he is running basically what turns out to be the federal government's investment bank. Sure. He's running that across anytime there's a system they want to accelerate in deployment of an investment that's who they can turn to. But even they're limited. That's the problem.

So nuclear is a disproportionately affected by this. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. Uh what do you have a take on uh like Sager and Jetty has been saying like oh the the technology doesn't know what's about to come the the narrative.

I mean, we see these things debunked on X and in tech in the tech part of X every day where there will be a mainstream news headline about uh you know Sora uses 25 gallons of water every time and it gets sort of debunked in some like research paper from Google, but that doesn't really make it back. No, of course not.

Uh, and so, you know, I think Sager is is is, you know, identifying a potential wave of anti- tech sentiment across both sides of the aisle. What's the mood around that generally? I mean, look, unfortunately, it's great business and great politics to be anti-tech.

That's the problem because it's a narrow community that you It's a narrow community. It's disproportionately wealthy, disproportionately influential, very easy to be a punching bag. Very sloppy. Very sloppy. you. No, it really is like very visual to just show a picture and be like, "This is bad. " Yeah.

And that's why I was I was shocked that OpenAI came out and announced that they'd be supporting erotica because that just feels like, you know, as as these debates come around with power and infrastructure.

It's very easy to be like, you said you were trying to cure cancer, give free education, but like clearly a lot of your users are using this for for adult entertainment. It it it takes you down a path that uh it just puts a target on your back. This is the big divide on the right. Right?

If you're look if you're on the right wing, there's two camps. One camp says let the slop flow free, right? Tech companies, let them do their work, whatever. It's great. Let them do it all. And says the goal is to be pro tech generally, right? One camp says we're social conservatives.

I don't want my kid getting porn from open AI. I don't want my six-year-old being exposed to this [ __ ] Pardon the language. And so they want to reel it back in. That's the big problem. Look, if you're open AI, culture is often downstream of politics. Sure, Trump won this election.

Huge wave of things that feel pro- freedom of speech, and you can quibble with the definition and the boundaries that all you like, but in theory, the messaging is around being pro- free speech.

And so, a lot of what they're doing aligns to that, but I think there's a backlash brewing and it cuts to John to your point, it cuts across left and right, right? Josh Holly and Elizabeth Warren have common cause on very few things, but one of them is tech.

I made a YouTube video about that like years ago about how it was they just came from completely different realms but they were saying the exact same thing about tech. That's right.

uh and and then that that was in the context of you know Google and monopolism and and like large corporations but uh you know it just keeps ringing true again and again and again because the truth is the neobrandians who didn't like tech who are opposed to these sort of monopolistic or their view as monopolistic practices a lot of those folks have recloed themselves and now they talk about tech's power in other ways right it's very sympathetic if you watch these videos what about Swiss watches I heard that too yeah can we do a little wrist Speed a little wrist zoom in please.

Yeah. Actually, I don't want to do that cuz you guys mo me every single time. So I'm just a glutton for punishment. Um the bigger thing is All right. So look, you get these videos on X from this group. You know this group More Perfect Union. You guys see these videos?

They're the big water sort of power pusher people, right?

They make these very slick videos basically saying, you know, if you allow a data center to open up in your neighborhood, you're going to be, you know, in a drought and your crops are going to dry up and God's going to smite you with locusts and so on and so forth. A horrible outcome. Okay.

And then you know people fighting the good fight you have like you know IFP Alex stap you guys know them I know IFP Institute for Progress exactly in progress he's been on right uh I don't know if Alex has been on but yeah all right so you have Alec or Caleb from IFP Institute for Progress who do great God's work on Twitter every time that comes out they're there posting saying it's not true and so on and so should you make a data center that runs on salt water.

Yeah, there you go. That would be really easy. That's an easy win. You can just Yeah, exactly.

It could be like sewer water in there, you know, just disgusting gross [ __ ] your slop is actually it would be such a good it would be such a good retort if somebody's like you're using all this water like yeah we use sea water yeah correct there's infinite infinite in fact we're purifying it at the same time because it's so much it wouldn't work it wouldn't work a dolphin was going to drink that fish otherwise and right off the shore there's an endangered species that that is going to go extinct because you took the water from them sea turtles going to get stuck in the Nvidia rack and be okay I I have a I have a pitch for you uh so we talk about like presidential libraries, right?

Uh could we be moving into a future where each president gets one spack during each president gets one free shot of insider trading and it's all good from there. Okay. Um no, but uh what what's going on with uh uh Obama's presidential library? No, clearly not built by humans.

obviously an energy source, but three, because of the AI narrative, this could be what sets up Michelle for her run because energy is going to be so expensive. The Obama presidential library, if that's what it is, built by aliens, power source, lowers the rate of energy for everyday Chicagoans. So true.

Huge huge that that that's a launch launch. We got to get the get the tinfoil hat for you. But um no, what uh what I just saw something in the we didn't even get to it in the show today. I just saw that that there's a Cayman Cayman Islands entity that's going to be uh Yes. participating in the spa.

What what's the do you know what the story is there? I don't have the full story.

And what do you think um in a in a what's your sort of non uh non-political view on you know uh we will undoubtedly have another Democratic uh Democrat you know president do they does this set a new norm where uh wasn't Gavin Newsome saying like oh maybe we're going to do a coin we'll do our own coin like we'll fire back with our version coin oncoin violence he's peaked way too early you don't want to be peaking this early.

You want like a delayed peak a little bit. You want to have some time. You know, you're way ahead.

I do wonder, you know, uh, people are obviously latching on to all the all the Trump projects, whether it's the coin or truth social or this new spa or a variety of projects, but I wonder if we looked at his the number of companies he builds per decade if he's actually at a low period in his career because he was originally doing like Trump Stakes, Trump University, Trump, he had a vodka, a casino, and so he he used to be in 10 different industries.

Maybe he's actually more focused than ever. That's right. If you really think about it, in some ways this is the double down lock in period for Trump for Trump as a businessman as a businessman. He's avoiding the underclass. Yes. But you know, we got to give credit to Jimmy Carter who was the most locked in president.

He had a peanut farm. He sold it. No. He put it in a blind trust. Oh, he did. You know, you looked it up. He put it Oh, wow. Okay. No longer there. Obviously, I was a Carter fan before. No longer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Put it in a blind trust cuz he didn't want people to think he's in the pocket of Little Peanut. Peanut.

Big Peanut. Mr. Peanut ruling over Jimmy C. very small farm, but he was like, I'm out of the game. I'm out of the game. I'm locking. This is my thing with the Dems, right? If you're looking at the next four years and you're thinking to yourself, okay, public opinion often theatic, it's going to swing back at some point.

That's good for praise for that. I like that. Yeah. And this is the problem, which is like, look, both parties when they're in power, they love to overreach, right?

And so if you're doing if you think to yourself, I have 4 to eight years to execute every goal I've ever had in my life before public opinion is thermostatatic again. Sure. It's no wonder there's people call it the magnification of the Dem Party, right?

You look at them and you're like, gosh, AOC, Zoron being stars in this party is so unusual relative to even where Clinton was in 2008, Hillary Clinton was 2008, let alone 2016.

Y so if you're trying to put your finger out where the wind is blowing you think to yourself if a dem benefits from massive tailwinds coming out of this admin and they elect or they nominate somebody who is a magnified version of the Dems right an AOC or a Zoronish part of the wing that makes me concerned right because then you see the pendulum swinging back and forth from extreme to extreme for the next foreseeable future and there are many many times you're saying that America could be more divided than ever yeah America more divided first I'm hearing of this more divided than ever Yeah.

And this is true historically many times. Yeah. Uh what what else are you monitoring in DC right now? What what didn't we cover? What what's kind of like uh under the radar story that maybe people aren't focusing on yet, but should be? Is there anything that's like at the bottom of your list that maybe is bubbling up?

Yeah. I mean, the big thing that I'm thinking about a lot is a lot of these questions around education. You guys, you guys see the higher ed compact that the Trump admin put out? I didn't. All right. This is a big thing.

The Trump admin's basically saying, "Look, we want a set of standards that universities will sign in order to be eligible to receive future funding. " A lot of the things when you read them, by the way, they don't sound crazy. You read them and you're like, gosh, I thought universities always operated this way.

Some of them, by the way, are impossible for universities to do. Some of them are super reasonable and there's a huge spectrum. Generally, I think a lot of people are sympathetic. I understand the sympathy for it. The fear is look, universities used to be. I'm not saying they ever were this in practice.

Obviously, they've had a political bias all their own and the academy themies had that for a long time. But as an institution, universities used to be beyond politics, right? You didn't have somebody who ran. Yeah. You got tenure and then you can say whatever you wanted politically because you were you were good.

Everybody knew there were some whack job professors, but it was like your nutty uncle. It wasn't like the threatening evil communist. Totally. Totally. It wasn't like don't platform Chsky. That's exactly. Yeah. Nobody was looking at Chsky saying this guy's a you know, deport him, send him back to Poland or whatever.

You know what I mean? He's got his theories. So here's the problem. Now you look at this compact.

You go okay maybe you say to yourself 60 70% whatever is reasonable what's going to happen the next time there's a demon office who now says great our compact for universities to get federal funding is going to say there has to be DEI or there has to be this yeah exactly that's the like the thing I'm tracking for the future is look universities are pushing back I understand why I think it's very reasonable for them to do so and I get both sides of it I see the value for the admin too I'm concerned about the precedent of it swinging back and forth over and over again yeah it's so interesting because like uh I've maybe it's just like the teal influence, but I've I've sort of like stopped paying attention to universities entirely because I I every day on this show we talk to some 16-year-old that isn't even planning to go to college and is already building a company.

And then and then when we do talk to people about the education space, it's usually because they're they're building an alternative to homeschooling or or what Joe Lamont's doing at Alpha School or Andre Carpathi is doing with Eureka.

like there's so many different initiatives that just live entirely outside of the original uh the traditional education system that um I but but it does feel like like there's still pockets of the economy that are really tied to the education. We talked about this in in like basic science research.

Yes, that's exactly and and I'm super blind to it because all of the AI research that was previously done at you know these uh these AI labs on university campuses just completely paid for by big tech. That's right. Right.

And so, so I I'm not worried like, oh, we're not going to get the next AI innovation because the because there's not enough funding or whatever. It's like, no, there's more funding than ever. These PhDs are making a hundred million dollars now. Well, my problem isn't AI, right?

AI, I'm with you on you can't apply that to everything. Correct. You look at something like, you know, ocean oceanographic research, right? And you have like one place, Woods Hole in Massachusetts, which is like the best oceanographic research institute in the country.

There is no industry that is funding hundreds of millions of dollars for oceanographic PhDs to go do weather research. Yeah, we need like seronic and Amadon and there's a few others that are like in that ocean tech space. We need them to be worth trillions. That's right.

And the NSF and basic research and universities are hugely important for that stuff. Still the thing that I get um uh concerned about is when they start to be the football moved back and forth. And frankly, if you look at look, this is a very Nixonian admin in a lot of ways.

Like if you ask young Republicans in DC, I love Nixon, so I'll just put that out there. If you ask young Republicans in DC who they look up to, they will tell you it's Nixon staffers. They'll tell you to go read the Pat Buchanan books and Pat Buchanan's got his own fair share of Mishagos.

If you read the books, which are well written, you'll see the big theme about Nixon is he apologized too much. Pat Buchanan will tell you Nixon should have brazened out Watergate. Never should have apologized. Should have stuck it out.

Should have broken the power of the Ford Foundation, the large institutional foundations. That's the Nixonian view. What's the What's the view on Kissinger then?

Uh I think these people are more domestic policy focused than than Kissinger, but they're more America first than a Kissinger in a non because that seems like very different like open up relationship with China. Let's go over there and like do deals. This is the domestic policy.

We like we like Nixon but just the just the stuff we like. Just the stuff we like. That's how people always remember everyone. Right. And the truth is people like Buchanan have become Steve Jobs was just a designer. He wasn't a ruthless manager. I've never heard that in my life. He was a passionate fan of design.

That's all he's known for. That's it. That's it. If you're like a Pap Buchanan fan, you're looking at this moment and you're saying, "Gosh, we should break the backs of foundations or institutional life, you know, higher ed, right?

" And so that's where some of the desire is coming from is this reading of history where you said, "Look, the Nixon admin didn't go far enough in defeating its enemies. " And they allowed the academy, they allowed capture by X number of people.

And that's why they're motivated now to go and try to do this even though I think it is not great for universities. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. Uh Jordy, anything else? No. Always fun. We can chat all day. I mean, if you want to keep hanging out, I can tell you about replacement AI.

They're running They're running a billboard in SF right now that says, "Our AI does your daughter's homework, reads her bedtime stories, romances her, deep fakes her, don't worry. Totally legal. Who needs parenting? " Uh, and then it and then on positive