Walter Bloomberg at the Wheel for the Whole Stock Market

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Newcomer Podcast, or is it Dead Cat? We have Tom Doton, my old co-host is here, no longer at the Wall Street Journal, free to speak your mind again, untethered and hanging out with the Newcomer crew a little bit more. That's my comedy special. You can picture the cover of that. Probably like busted through some chains or something. Finally in the free speech zone again.

[00:00:26] You know, that's actually a dangerous thing to go with because it's a little bit close to like that FT banker who got super excited he could say the R word again. Oh my God, no. That I'm not going to say. That's what I want. We're trying to really exactly send it up. I'm not going there. You can hack my signal. Totally loose. Then we'll really keep you in your orbit. If we make you unhirable by anyone else, that serves our interests.

[00:00:50] And I'm presupposing the woke backlash. So I'm actually going to be more woke than everyone and get in front of me. If you're feeling liberated, we're definitely going to be jumping into liberation day. So hold on to your hats for that. Perfect. With that wordplay. Yes. No surprise what we're talking about this week. Tariffs. On again, off again.

[00:01:12] At the end of this episode, I'll have a conversation with Ryan Peterson that was recorded the day before and almost published moments before Trump decided on the 90 day pause, which we'll get to the whole timeline. Madeline will give us a rundown of the timeline in a second. But you'll get the best bits of my conversation with Ryan Peterson that remain relevant. And honestly, I think as we'll talk in this podcast about tariffs are still on.

[00:01:40] So for a second, it seemed like, oh, they're freezing everything. And anyway, so I think the conversation remains very relevant. Stick around for that. But was recorded on Tuesday. Hopefully you're listening now on Friday. We get it. News move fast. Ooh, a loyal supporter of the Newcomer Podcast. I think our first advertiser and Christina, the CEO, has been on the show. Anyway, without further ado, Founder, finding product market fit is probably your number one priority.

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[00:03:04] Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off at Vanta.com slash newcomer. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash newcomer for $1,000 off. Madeline, do the hard work. What happened? It's back and forth all week, sort of whipsaw of the markets and tariff announcements. Okay. It's a lot of things. It could change before this episode comes out tomorrow.

[00:03:30] So I'm going to try and give just the biggest overview rundown of the whiplash that we've been seeing for the past week. But basically this all started last Wednesday when President Donald Trump declared, you know, the Liberation Day unveiling the first set of tariffs, which is a universal 10% tariff on all imports, and then higher reciprocal tariffs to come, which then were revealed to be basically our biggest trading partners, China tariffs out of control,

[00:03:58] but then all of the places where manufacturing has shifted because companies have been trying to move away from China, they're getting tariffed even more. So like Cambodia's 49% originally, Vietnam was 46, Sri Lanka. Right. This was the whole made up calculation, potentially Chachi Bt-ified, just totally about the trade imbalance. That was last week. And then, of course, markets freaked out. It's just been nonstop, like chaos, zooming up and zooming down.

[00:04:26] I think there was like a moment early this week where, you know, the Walter Bloomberg Anon account, like had a market surge that then was corrected, which ultimately ended up being true about the 90-day pause on tariffs. So... Can we take one quick second to talk about the Walter Bloomberg Twitter account or X account? Because it's so exciting at times when the world that we all live in as business journalists and financial journalists, once we're addicted to Twitter, leaps out into the grimy sphere, the greater sphere.

[00:04:56] So the Walter Bloomberg account, which... How much do you really know about it? I mean, as someone who formerly worked at Bloomberg... Well, I worked at Bloomberg. He rips off all the best terminal headlines, basically. Some guy has a terminal, much like Business Insider, your old employer. And then they use our headlines, our being Bloomberg, and publish them before they're on the web so that, you know, Bloomberg customers still make the money because they traded on the terminal headline. But then, you know, all the people who,

[00:05:25] you know, the broke traders... Basically what this guy does, right, is he has a Bloomberg account, he has a Bloomberg terminal, and then he, as quickly as possible, publishes in all caps everything that flashes across the Bloomberg terminal. And my thoughts always with that account was, one, this has got to be a gross violation of the terms of services of Bloomberg. I'm sure they're hunting for him. Yeah. I'm surprised Michael Bloomberg has not dispatched like a militia, like a predator-style militia of people to take this guy out because huge, huge value destruction made just by tweeting out Bloomberg terminal headlines. But also,

[00:05:55] as a reporter, huge nice boost when you would see your story come out and Walter Bloomberg would tweet it out in all caps. It's so authoritative. Like, I love that it's like some random guy, but, and such a funny name, but it's like, oh, this is, you know, most of the time they're actual Bloomberg headlines, which are about as authoritative as you can get. Yeah. And so, yes, as a reporter, it was very gratifying to see Walter Bloomberg tweeting out your story, flashing the headline, you know, on his account. But it seems to be that when he had this false, you know,

[00:06:25] inaccurate headline about Trump pausing the terminals, or maybe he just had the scoop before anyone else. Maybe he's a reporter. Do we know what the deal was? Like, did he make it up to like move the markets or? It was originally quoted as sources say when he leaked the headline and it was unclear where that came from, but it appeared to have come from an interview from one of the Trump officials on CNBC, which then led to CNBC giving a denial about it. How did it be in a Bloomberg headline? I want to say everything Walter Bloomberg tweets out is the word of gospel

[00:06:54] from the Bloomberg terminal. So I think what happens, you know, on Bloomberg, the issue is like, you can send all these one line headlines, right? You're like watching TV and so you write a headline off of it. Those aren't necessarily like the end all be all, but he puts it on in a tweet and it seems like in total isolation. But as the non-journalist, non-financial Twitter addicted world began to recognize who this Walter Bloomberg guy was, I think it really confused people because people thought it was like a coincidence that his name happened to be Walter Bloomberg. They thought,

[00:07:24] they think there is a guy named Walter Bloomberg who like, is like Mike's half brother, someone who's trying to take him down. It wasn't ever clear to me, but huge market correction based entirely on a tweet that was maybe an accurate, maybe an accurate distribution of this Bloomberg headline. And it was so, it was so fun to see the rest of the world, see this guy that we've been paying. He's like up there with like zero hedge as just these financial Twitter accounts that I don't know who they are. I was going to say in our world, there's like

[00:07:53] buco capital bloke in the EACC Twitter anons that move markets. Also Autism Capital who is like a diehard Trump supporter. They are real finance now. I mean, you know, the other major Twitter market moving happening in this whole saga was obviously that Donald Trump on True Social tweeted out, it's a great time to buy stocks like 15 minutes before he announced the 90 day pause. So we had the Walter Bloomberg thing where he correctly

[00:08:23] forecasted this future 90 day pause. And then, yeah, the Trump himself giving a handout, I guess, to whoever believes his tweets. And of course, potentially giving air cover to suspicious amount of options trading around the announcement of the pause. Anyway, you can go back to the explaining of stuff, but I just very, very happy to talk about Walter Bloomberg. The main thing I would just say is like when the markets jumped Wednesday, it seemed incredibly premature

[00:08:51] because the tariffs on China were increased to 125%. So the tariffs that are like not paused are our three biggest trading partners, which then, you know, led to the further jump down today. But yeah. Friday, bad for the markets. Sunday, especially like, oh man, we're going to come into this week terribly. Like Gary Tan tweeted, like people are getting margin called and then deleted it. Like it just felt like, oh, this is bad vibes. Monday, we come in not as bad as expected. Sort of like flat, slightly down.

[00:09:22] Then Wednesday was the 90 day freeze. So that's like, oh, Tuesday, Wednesday, we start to see actual, like the markets hit and treasuries are hit, which is when it's like, oh man, people don't believe in America anymore. And today, there's a little, today being Thursday, there's a, oh wait, this freeze doesn't undo all the insanity and there's still tons of tariffs. And so actually the market isn't happy just because Trump says, oh, I'm listening to you. I mean, does that,

[00:09:52] is that, am I getting the animal spirits of the market right there? You, you hit basically every single vibe point of the market over the last week. That's our non-percentage based read of the market, the narrative of the market every given day. Yeah. Yeah, again, I get all of my market moving news from David Sachs' Twitter account. And so as far as I understand on Monday, Black Monday was canceled and then the market immediately plummeted and then he tweeted out

[00:10:22] after Trump said that they were putting a pause on all the tariffs. Well, yeah, then he goes, silent. He's like, he's not, these guys are not on Twitter when it's going bad for them. They're like nowhere to be seen. Right. No, David Sachs seems to only crop up when he has something incredibly inaccurate and non-predictive to say. And so Black Monday was canceled and the market plummeted. And then after Trump announced the pause on his tariffs, the market predictably shot up as people were making a bunch of money on artificially low stocks. And he tweets out,

[00:10:52] how do you like them apples now? Now, if I could take a second on that one. He's an official Trump administration of figured out, figured out, by the way. I know, he's in there. He's the AI czar. Yeah. Well, but that's the job of those people is to be like as combative and unpleasant on X as possible. I mean, that's the J.D. Vance purview. But how do you like them apples now? David, if you're listening, because we're fellow podcasters, the line is, how do you like them apples? And it's from Good Will Hunting.

[00:11:22] How do you like them apples now implies that there's a time in which you would have liked the apples at different amounts at different times. And it's when Matt Damon takes the phone number that he gets from Mini Driver and he puts it up on the wall on the window of the diner and he shows the rich kid and he says, how do you like them apples? But it's not how do you like them apples now, dude. So if you're going to be like, you know, jumping all over people, by the way, before the market had a bad day today. So those apples aren't that great. At least get the at least get it right.

[00:11:51] But it's so perfect about these people that even in their trolling that scene also appears in a Kevin Smith movie. They do it again, right? There's a strike back version of this. Anyway, maybe he pulled it from there. I have no faith in his ability to get anything right. Anything. It feels like he's the VC equivalent of like the Jim Cramer when you call it the opposite happens at this point. I mean, what to be said about that? Because that's actually an interesting point. I mean, David Sachs, who, you know, of all the all in bros,

[00:12:20] has taken his relationship with Trump the furthest, right? He's the one that actually got a Trump appointment. Like Chamath is basically the same guy, just with more people paying attention to his clown. Chamath is getting quote tweeted right now because he is complaining that he was a quote mega donor during the Biden administration and they weren't listening to him. And now you pay some money and Trump, those guys listen to you all the time. And it's just like this should be a campaign ad. You know,

[00:12:50] it's just like, oh, Trump really, you know, you get what you pay for. Whereas the Democrats, they're not bought out by their elites. It was the weirdest. Anyway, but yeah, Chamath is just, you know, the guy who pumped and dumped. All right. So we gave, we gave the timeline. I guess some first order takes as fun as it is to talk about all the characters points of view on what's happened here. I'm happy to go first. Do you guys have,

[00:13:19] do you guys have strong points of view on what America's tariff policy should be? Yeah, you should, you should take this one first. You can follow that sword. I just don't. I got, I got a lot of thoughts, but I need to organize them. Well, you're an interesting, you're sort of the, like, want to be a leftist business reporter. So I'm, I'm actually unbiased and I read the market as it comes. And newcomer, we're allowed to have opinions. I'm, you know, as globalists as they come, a free trader for life. I don't even

[00:13:49] want to trade war with China if we can dig out of it. I do believe in reciprocal tariffs with China. Like I've been pretty hawkish on TikTok just because how is that not a, how is that not a trade war? How is that pro free trade if you want reciprocal tariffs? The Trump reciprocal tariffs are bullshit. I mean, I don't think we should have tariffs because of that. I think if specifically with China, if China is abusing us as another global power, it's reasonable to respond. You know,

[00:14:18] it's like if they block our social media companies, we block theirs. I don't believe in the quote unquote reciprocal tariffs as Trump has articulated them, which are in no way reciprocal, not rooted in actual tariffs imposed by other countries. Gotcha. Okay. This is all just a long way to say you think TikTok should be banned. I'm trying to, I was just trying to make sense of my pro, being pro banning TikTok relative to otherwise having a very pro free trade stance.

[00:14:48] But as the free trader on this podcast, you found the last couple of days to be extremely, extremely upsetting, extremely disheartening. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. I mean, it's terrible, obviously. I feel like the classic like theoretical economist gripe is never really that compelling. It's like, oh, you know, like our, our wine, you know, our comparative advantage of the thing we're good at, you know, it's going to be ruined by having to recreate that, you know, it's not always the best story, but, you know, it's going to be

[00:15:18] terrible for the economy all over the world. And I think very little actual benefit. You're not excited about the factories where people are going to be screwing in iPhone parts. I think somebody was last, are you going to like one of these right wing accounts? It's like, are you going to work in the factory? It's like, I'm going to run the factory. Like somehow it's like there, there isn't a person like, what is the sort of like Republican, like blue blooded American here, the most coded phrase in the world who wants to like work in a factory? You know, it's just like people, I think there have

[00:15:47] been studies, you know, like at the same pay, obviously people would prefer to be in a service job. You know, it's like nobody wants a manufacturing job unless there's like a ton of money in it, which would then drive prices up. Yeah. The guys who are like, I don't want to work in the factory, but I want to own the factory are funny on a number of levels because like that is kind of the core Trump constituency, right? Like that is like the petty bourgeois type who, who just, they don't really, you know, they've got to their station because they owned a thing,

[00:16:16] whatever that thing was and like money sort of fell their way. But if you really think about it, like America kind of does own the factory, right? Like they're making the parts and America is collecting the money because there is some sort of ownership over the output of this factory. And so these guys kind of already have what they want. Like if their goal is just to have the factory that they own to be based in the U.S. versus based in China, I understand America doesn't own Foxconn, but it exists because of the consumption of American, you know, the American populace. Nobody has wanted

[00:16:46] to say it, but we've had a good thing going. Like it's not a winner in elections, unfortunately, but like we had a great economy. Trump has made it worse. Like we are on a bad path. Like we had a good thing going fundamentally. There were, you know, people we could help. We could expand the safety net. I'd be like much prefer to give everybody free health insurance than distort the economy with tariffs. But fundamentally, we had a good thing going and now we're lighting on fire for no reason. Well, it's also like

[00:17:15] the American appetite for cheap consumer goods cannot be overstated. And I just don't think that people even pitching for these manufacturing jobs are like realizing it's not going to come immediately. And now all of your immediate benefit of this trade system that you were complaining about is out the window. So I just don't see that being a winner. Well, yeah, it's like if we bring the manufacturing jobs, they are going to be jobs held by robots, basically. To that point,

[00:17:44] do you think the Silicon Valley Democrats could, you know, get back in the game and could the Democratic Party and the abundance people, could they take the mantle here? I don't have a ton of interest right now in Silicon Valley Democrats. I don't even know who they are at this point. I mean, aside from like stalwarts, like Reid Hoffman, who is like increasingly isolated socially from a lot of these people, I'm very interested in the Silicon Valley MAGA types at this moment because they clearly made a bet

[00:18:13] going into the Trump administration and in the months afterwards that they could kind of steer the ship, which is a bet that a ton of globalists and, you know, free market or just typical capitalists have made with Trump, which is like, we see him as a vessel to be able to enact our interests and the world that we foresee. And they saw with the rise of Trump and, you know, tapping into probably their instilled anger about social change and wokeness and the fact that they're largely

[00:18:43] all white men who are, you know, employing a bunch of people that don't really like them all that much, that they could kind of capitalize on that and also maybe influence policy. And I think it's really interesting in the last couple of weeks, we sort of had two major fissures with Silicon Valley MAGA heads. One is like, obviously, the trade war and like the disaster that's all been. And the other thing was Elon probably reaching the end of his, we're in the beginning of the end stages of Elon and his relationship with the Trump presidency. You're calling the Elon

[00:19:12] top of the market here, Tom? A hundred percent. I have no problem. Like, come at me, David Sachs. There's no way. After he expended quite a lot of, you know, public goodwill going to Wisconsin to, you know, campaign for their Supreme Court candidate and losing, the day after that, stories start leaking to Politico that like Elon is going to start transitioning out of the Trump White House. I know. Well, that's the most reassuring fact that we still live in a democracy that losing an election, a bunch of politicians start getting freaked out and say, oh, let's get away

[00:19:41] from us, guy who can't win elections, you know, is sort of how these things are supposed to work. Right. And then, of course, you know, a couple of days later, the Trump tariff bullshit starts to happen and Elon is out there relatively publicly fighting with like Howard Lutnick or Scott Besson. I can't remember who it was that he called it a moron. Navarro. Navarro. Yeah, he was attacking Navarro. Ackman accused Lutnick of like working his own financial dealing. But yeah, Elon was actively fighting with them. Right. So at this point,

[00:20:10] Elon is not a political asset to the Trump administration. He can't push elections very strongly and he disagrees with like a core policy when it comes to trade. So like it's I don't see any way in which it's not the beginning of the end or a fairly short road toward him being completely out. And now he once was two trillion dollars in cuts, then one trillion, I think is down to 150 billion in professed doge cuts. So he's really shrinking the aperture of what they're trying to do. And obviously,

[00:20:40] I'm sure, I mean, we don't believe in, you know, I'm skeptical of a lot of these cuts like, you know, they're cutting the IRS's ability to extract tax revenue. So I'm sure there are lots of things that when we have to recreate them and lose revenue, you know, will create costs that they're not even making in besides all this stuff. Not to mention they just completely eviscerated like American soft power resources. Right, right. And it's bad. The things that are cutting are good and the cuts are bad regardless of the cost savings. So I guess my question

[00:21:10] to any one of these tech people and you're thinking about like the David Marcus's or the Mark Pincus's or the people who very publicly declared allegiance to MAGA and to Trump, did you get what you wanted? Was it worth it? Did this actually work out in the way that you expected? And what did you think was going to happen? What did you really think was going to happen? This was the same Trump who was around in 2016 who you abhorred or you had to go out there and say, you know, this does not represent the views of America and the, you know, the policies of America and all this shit. And they decided because it was

[00:21:40] probably more politically feasible for them to do it this time around because Trump was more popular or the Democrats were even more unpopular that they could publicly declare allegiance to it. Did you get what you wanted? Did this work out for you? Like, you know, we had our quote, you know, our Parker Conrad, which is sort of like our anchor Trump response in the newsletter right after the election was my purse. This is Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling, actual tech guy, not just us reporters opining. My personal view

[00:22:09] is that a lot of smart people are being very stupid and believe that Trump is going to do their thing. Tech people think he will usher in new tech forward business friendly environment. Kooky fluoride conspiracy theorists think he's going to take care of that thing, et cetera. And they'll be disappointed when they get their get their faces ripped off. And that's exactly what happened. It's just like just right. Yeah, just totally predictable. Yeah, I was chatting mostly with Silicon Valley, like liberals this week to

[00:22:39] get the reaction from the tariffs, which was a lot of I told you sewing. So I can't back this up because it's all rumors. But a few people were telling me spoken privately with some people that are certainly very upset that had been, you know, on the Trump train back in November that are now seeing the consequences of their actions. And it seems like no one's going to come out and say that they were duped at this point. They're all like licking their wounds as their portfolios crash. But even in private, people are feeling like this is utter chaos.

[00:23:08] And it's like, you could have seen this coming. He said exactly what he was going to do. The whole thing reveals a lack of sophistication, political sophistication on the part of Silicon Valley in general. You did not need to read the news all that closely to see that Trump was exactly who he said he was going to be and that these were the policies that he was talking about as he was running for president. So why did you think it was going to be anything different other than it felt really good at the time to think you were on a winning side and feel like you made a positive bet and the fact that the anti-woke

[00:23:38] and socially conservative, whatever you want to call them, things he was talking about really appealed to you. So just go out there and say it. Don't make it out to be some economic argument, an American Valhalla. Well, there was such a denial in the election that it is a choice between two people. You know, it was like, oh, can we make it a referendum on Kamala and Biden and the age, Democrats, wokeism, without really engaging with, we're going back to Trump and a Trump who is more empowered than ever before. And the last thing

[00:24:08] I'll say about all of this is that one of the arguments or justifications I saw from the recently converted, you know, Silicon Valley, now-now MAGA right people was that they misunderstood Trump the first time around. It was the media's fault. Sam Altman was out there saying that after he did his Stargate conference, press conference, after Trump's first day in office, being like, oh, I misunderstood the guy. He's actually pretty great. I've got a lot to learn. There was a lot of wish, Cassie. I'm a little sympathetic.

[00:24:37] Right after he gets elected, it's like, fine, he's elected. It's like with a child. You're talking to them as if they're going to listen to their better angels. You're like, you're such a compassionate kid. You're not saying they are those things. You're saying, come on, let's aspire to be better. I'm a little sympathetic to the tech executives. As someone who was critical of Trump, obviously, but gave a sort of, all right, let's see tone. What are you

[00:25:07] for the best for a second? Otherwise, you're going to be the foil. Yeah. The one thing they really chose to believe about Trump, which maybe was true, was that if you appear to be an enemy of his, he will come at you directly and he will make life very difficult for you. And so they just had this very ham-fisted and obvious way of approaching it, which was to flatter him and blame the media, which sure, fine, I don't give a shit, and say that's the reason people thought he was this way. When in fact, he just is this way, and you should just have been honest about it and say, like, we want to

[00:25:36] buddy up and kowtow to a president who wants to run things as an autocrat, and we can maybe benefit the company by appealing to him. The thing that just is so ridiculous to watch throughout all of this is the people, even the MAGA people, who are trying to express their criticisms around Trump on these policies and clearly disagree with him, but have to position it in such fealty because of all these loyalty tests. It's just kind of gross. Like, Joe Lonsdale, you know, was tweeting, like, guys, there are some good arguments for

[00:26:05] some tariffs and for not being taken advantage of as we have been by many countries. President Trump is right about that. Let's not tariff any inputs we can't easily substitute. And it's like, you're clearly saying the tariffs are bad. You just have to couch it in like three lines of like, just kissing the ring. There are multiple elements to this. Like, I feel like there is this one, obviously Trump responds very aggressively to how people behave towards him. He cares about it more than their actual like principled

[00:26:35] agreement or disagreement. So it encourages this sort of dear leader behavior. So that's frustrating. But I also think there's like this element that like Silicon Valley people are so exhausted by like, I don't know, our class of people being like, oh, it's all dumb that they like bend back to understand Trump. And I mean, I love Ryan Peterson, but I did feel like, man, you are a free marketer. And like tariffs are like breaking the free market.

[00:27:05] You know, it is literally like capitalism has made America a great place and tariffs are really like an attack on capitalism and free trade. And like, you think they'd be so passionate. This should be their most passionate issue. And instead they like become like academics where it's like I've been reading everything that they like say there is just like they want to humor it so bad. And I don't like get the impulse like Tom. Yeah. What is it just

[00:27:34] getting backpacks from Trump and they know they need to stay close or like why is there such the intellectual humility with Trump when you never see it with the left? Because one, it remains a contrarian standpoint, which is very appealing. Exactly. They love it. They love it. They love it. Like the foundationally, you know, you can psychoanalyze that all you want in their unhappy childhoods, but like being contrarian is extremely appealing to these people. And then there's also this obsession from a lot of business people, but tech specifically in

[00:28:04] trying to position themselves as the intellectual side of Trump, you know, the intellectual, what's the line? I can't remember it, but you know, basically the intellectual argument in favor of Trumpism. And it is since he's been like a national political figure, a loser's bet. Every person that has wanted to be the intellectual side of Trump has lost, has ended up completely blowing up because there is no intellectual side to Trump that's justifiable. It's inherently a contradiction. And so they make all these stories when it's like some guy, like it is

[00:28:33] like this guy, Trump decided this, like, and they're just like, it's just like elaborate, you know, it's like, oh, I mean, right now what's happening is they're like, this is all about China. And like clear, I mean, at first they were like, we're going to get out of this, but we're going to say Navarro came up with this, not Trump. So we're all going to hate Navarro to give Trump the out. Then we take the out and then Besson is like, oh, this was all part of the plan. And Trump's like, oh, we saw the treasuries, like actually, you know, like they're all trying to make it seem like there's a plan. And then Trump himself is like

[00:29:03] pretty open that it's like, oh, no, I changed my mind. Like I read the room, you know, I don't. Right. The only thing dumber than trying to be the intellectual argument in favor of Trumpism is trying to be the fourth, you know, 10 dimensional chess argument in favor of his, of what his policies are, because like this motherfucker upends the chessboard every day. There is no there's no game that is going on here that you can give you can look out that many steps in advance because no part in the process of describing this guy's 10th, you know, 10 dimensional chess was it ever. And then we're going to back off

[00:29:33] without making any deals. Well, also, he he admits that that's like Trump is open about this being his procedure to like even with the 90 day pause, he said his reasoning was like looking at the bond markets and was like, oh, no, that's why we did it. And all these people were making excuses for like how genius it was. And this was this negotiation tactic. And he just comes out and says, like, basically it's because the markets freaked out. So like, what are you working with here? You can't like reason with this. I do love, by the way, just as an aside that it's like what it's like a Japanese

[00:30:03] was a hedge fund or bank that seemingly was like they had to get out of treasuries and that like, you know, Japan's treasury movements ended up saving or at least moving us away from tariffs. I think as we were saying at the top of the show, still pretty heavy tariffs. Honestly, two of the people that I'm embarrassed to admit this. Well, one, I'm not embarrassed to admit Tyler Cowen and Richard Hania. Like it is refreshing to have these like conservatives be like the Trump support is totally

[00:30:32] like, you know, they're just lying constantly and they're required to sort of contort this way and that to defend the situations. And I just don't understand why get so rich and powerful and have to have a public reputation. And so I mean, Bill Ackman, what's the point? Like why, why do it? Like, what do you need? Like, why do you want that to be your reputation? Because fundamentally they're not that powerful. And I think like that's what gets revealed in all of this is that like Trump, you can't

[00:31:01] wrangle him and also benefit yourself. So you might as well just try to attract your reputation to his star and hope that that benefits you in some way. And that's allowed people like Sean Maguire to become, you know, somewhat national figures, even though as an investor, he wasn't that significant. I don't think people thought of him as like one of the more important people at Sequoia. He's sort of in the come up, but yeah, you know. But the reason people think about him is that he is attached to Trump is that he is an Elon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Elon. Yeah. Which again, like

[00:31:31] which side are you on here, Sean? Because Elon is I know that'll be interesting. I do. I do hope there's more of a chasm there. You know, if you have to pick right, like if you really want to attach your reputation to one of these people and there's going to be like a fissure between them, like that's going to be tough, Sean. Like good luck to you because it's not benefiting you economically. It's not good for Sequoia. It's not good for your investments. So this is strictly about your reputation and trying to find relevancy. This is your wish casting. Now, the reality

[00:32:01] is we're still year one of Trump. You know, it's like four years into Trump. So I'm saying there's still going to be a lot of upside and staying team Trump. Like we want to be like, oh, he's a loser. Give up on him now. And certainly I do think like come midterms, hopefully it'll be good for Democrats. And like certainly the reckoning post Trump too is going to be insane. But, you know, they have four more years to, I don't know, make a fortune and get out of there.

[00:32:30] I don't want to go too far into the predictions market, but it seems like, I mean, Trump two versus Trump one is a very different animal. And I think a lot of the problems that Trump won was encountering was resistance from Democrats, right? A lot of it had to do with Russiagate and investigations from the House and people kind of looking for ways to impeach him. Whereas everything that's gone wrong this time has been self-inflicted wounds. It's been the unpopularity of Doge, Elon's increasing in popularity, and

[00:33:00] now the market's turmoil. And so it's hard for me to see what the upside is going to be at this point through. Like for Trump one, you could argue like, well, the Democrats, if their attempts to ostracize and impeach Trump don't really go anywhere, then he can continue to carry out his agenda. And like the general trend of America's upward economic direction is going to benefit him and people will like him. I'm just saying if you want a pardon, if you want your factory to be placed somewhere, if you want anything out of the government,

[00:33:30] if you don't want an antitrust investigation, like they're going to be in this balance where if you're just purely extractionist, you're like, oh, Trump's got a lot of room to run. I need to be close to him, but not like so close that when there's a reckoning over the fact that they're literally rounding people up and disappearing them to El Salvador without any recourse. Yeah, it's pretty dark. Well, let's just keep in mind also that there's a 90 day pause and then how does

[00:33:59] this end up being something that is what the tech people want, right? The bull case for this whole catastrophe is that the tariffs were always too high on us and we could negotiate line by line in the rapid fire negotiation and actually get everything down to zero tariffs. And that's, I think, what some of these Silicon Valley people want. That's what Ryan Peterson would want, right? Right, sure. We all want zero tariffs, but it's not clear that the Trump position is like, do they want zero tariffs or are we

[00:34:29] introducing tariffs? Well, that's what his Silicon Valley backers would want. The Trump position seems much less clear and honestly pretty still pro tariff. So he just likes tariffs. He's been talking about it for 40 years, right? You can look back. This is kind of one of his pet issues that America is getting a raw deal and we need to bully people with this. So I guess my point is that I'm skeptical of the Silicon Valley people's kind of wish-casting bull case that this will even happen.

[00:34:59] All I can really say after what's happened in the last week and a half is that America's negotiating hand to get to this place is like significantly weakened. No, we won. We won the negotiation. Like, what are you saying? There were many leaders that called. There were many leaders that called. He was on the phone all weekend, Tom. He was on the phone all weekend. You've never seen a man work so hard. I guess it's unfair for me not to say that. The president of Mexico has been very nice to Trump. He loves her. Yeah.

[00:35:28] No one plays Trump better than Scheinbaum. Really. She should teach some sort of paid Zoom course. I know. I want to move to Mexico. I love Mexico City. They're going to get money from China and the United States. It's a left-wing government. Like, man. Yeah. Wait, is she laughing? Yeah. She's a socialist, dude. Yeah. You're going to have to reckon with that yourself. Yeah. It's too left-wing. Yeah. In Mexico City, they might say that, but like most people are like working on

[00:35:58] like the black market. It is the most capitalist place in the world. I mean, they invest in public housing. She's certainly more leftist, I think, than even AMLO. But yeah, I guess we were able to get like Cambodia to bend the knee. So I don't want to like sell short the effectiveness of Trump's, you know, market chaos and terrorist policy. But I think we've created a world in which China is a very appealing option for a lot of these countries if they are able to consume at the rate that Americans are. And I don't really see the path now towards like a zero tariff or

[00:36:27] significant changes in the way that trade is done that benefits the U.S. other than maybe some on-shoring of some manufacturing. But I don't see that even happening in the next couple of years. Right. That was always the problem. Like does Trump have the Constitution? Even if you think he's right, are they really going to stick with the painful medicine long enough to get what they want? But Trump is never the painful medicine guy. I mean, that was always the problem with this argument is that like even if you were in favor of this

[00:36:56] stuff, which I think a lot of leftists really are. And you saw like the UAW president coming out in favor. Right. Not very probably not very strategically. And Whitmer made an appearance with him. Yeah, Whitmer showed up there. Yeah. Yeah. There is like a strong leftist streak inside the belief that onshore manufacturing benefits the working class. The problem is that Trump as the avatar of this is horrible. And his appeal to certainly his supporters was never this is going to be really hard. You know, and like remember you saw Democrats

[00:37:26] talking at the outset of the Ukrainian war, like we'd be willing to pay more money for gas. You know, that's the Putin tax. And Democrats like hurting themselves. They love self-flagulation. They love making their lives worse in favor of things. We've had this like Maoist Trump thing now, which is like, you know, some of the right wing influencers are like, you don't need money. Money is like made up. You can handle that. What is money but ones and zeros? Yeah. They're like the hard labor will set you free kind of posting nowadays.

[00:37:57] What is going on? They're third worldist now. It's just totally flipped. All right. Let's take our medicine. One thing. Talk about business for one second. Okay. Sectors that win. Obviously, American dynamism. I don't think we need to say that. It's like everybody's ready to buy every gun they can and ship it to Washington. That's clearly going to go strong. I think robotics is strong. I think the question I have, why is it good or not good for AI? Oh, I mean, I think anything

[00:38:27] that increases the cost. I understand they weren't directly impacted, but if we're in a place in which we are having bad trade relations with Taiwan and the ability to import GPUs, which are still at a deficit to demand, is going to be impacted at all. AI is in a really shitty space. And these are companies that have terrible margins, all the AI foundational model companies. And if you do anything to make it worse, it changes the cost structure of these things. And I don't even know with even the best of them how they're going

[00:38:56] to get to being profitable. But if the core technology behind it and the GPUs are suddenly made more expensive or the infrastructure in some way is harder to build, they're in such a shitty spot. So I don't know if AI is immediately impacted by it, but they need to fix this stuff fast because they're already operating on extremely tiny bad margins that if made worse is only going to cause more pain to the businesses and

[00:39:26] their investors. Let me just jump in and say separate from the tariffs, other Trump policies I think hurt the AI boom too, especially if there's this whole goal of construction around data centers. They're also just like culling the labor force of people that typically do these jobs with mass deportations and rounding people up. And not just to be kind of direct about it, like that's how this kind of functions. And it's like how are we going to have this amazing manufacturing boom in places where people are not trained to do this work? And a lot of our labor force that we're currently

[00:39:56] reliant on, if you wanted to ramp it up really quickly, you're actively getting rid of violently. I just don't see how this is good. I'm going to take the other side of this. I think AI is going to be in this national security. We're reshaping the tariffs from a tariff war with the world to a tariff war with China. That's clearly happening. We're going to be in this tense China fight and it's going to be like we're going to talk about the Cold War and everybody in Silicon Valley is going to be like, our go to the moon is having the best models. Deep Seek

[00:40:26] is a big threat. And so I think there's just going to be a lot of nationalism thrown behind AI. David Sachs is an AI czar. The Trump administration, J.D. Vance is big on AI deregulation. I think there's just a lot of energy from the top. The GPUs got exempted from the tariffs. And so I think it's clear that the administration is very supportive of AI. And so I think Silicon Valley and the government right now are just going to say, oh,

[00:40:56] actually, AI, at least the foundation model piece of it, is part of our Cold War. And so it's important to national security and we're going to invest a ton. Yeah, I guess I could add on to that with if they wanted to have some kind of hard reset on trade and policy after this whole disaster, they could make an argument that like, look, the way it was carried out was not effective and not strategic. But in this came up during the Biden administration, like we probably should be manufacturing

[00:41:25] chips domestically. It actually is an issue. It's a Chips Act. No one's against strategic like that. Yeah, exactly. That was the Chips Act. Exactly. Right. So they can do it. And like that maybe could be a way. I mean, I still think like the Trump bull is like impossible to wrestle and get exactly, you know, the way you want it to go. But they could probably start, like that would be a smart argument to start circulating. Rename the Chips Act to the Trump Act and get like double the money. Yeah. Because none of this stuff is a new problem.

[00:41:55] And I agree with you, Madeline. I think specialization of the workforce is a major issue with the construction of data centers. And you have people like Brad Smith and Microsoft talking about how the biggest thing we need to do in America now is train electricians to build the data centers. And that is not like an undocumented labor thing. I mean, that is, you know, the people that would be taking these jobs are very likely educated people who, you know, somewhat middle class and above, you know, upward mobility. So that's like, that's a workforce you could be focusing on. It's not the

[00:42:25] core of Trump's base. So it's hard to get like, you know, his team excited about it. But sure, that's like a reasonable approach to all of it. All right. Well, Tom, great to have you back on the show, hopefully for at least a couple more episodes. Madeline, enjoyed it. All right, stick around. In the second half of the show, I interview Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport. He is Silicon Valley's whisperer on all things logistics, whether it's a canal trapped or the president jacking up tariffs all over

[00:42:55] the world. Listen to my conversation with Ryan from earlier this week. Ryan, thanks for joining. Yeah, my pleasure. I'm like a hurricane reporter. Exactly. Whenever there's a canal jammed up or weird policies, yeah, we come to you. So do you think like the Silicon Valley set is sort of aligned with Trump? Do you think all of us are like pretty free marketer or do you think there is a subset here that agrees with the tariffs or what's your read on

[00:43:25] like the Silicon Valley like point of view on the tariffs? Folks I've talked to are big advocates of the Trumps and some of whom have gone to work for Trump are pretty upset about the tariffs themselves sort of violate some of the they were hoping for a very libertarian like let's deregulate it wasn't just about pronouns they were like can we deregulate the economy and shift towards like we're all about growth. That's my core view is that growth is the most important economic issue because

[00:43:54] so many of our other problems with 7% growth for 10 years you're twice as rich. If you could achieve that everybody was twice as rich even if it was not equally distributed if the government would have twice as much tax revenue we'd solve so many of our That's why you have one party that says we'll definitely not blow up the economy but maybe we'll slightly slow it down another says 20% we blow it up and then like a bunch of funds I don't know but yeah another thing you know

[00:44:24] I sort of try not to engage in any argument unless I think I can argue the other side's point of view better than they can and so I think there's some valid reasons certainly they're after some noble goals here is like the United States should industrialize more tariffs by the way we have a $2 trillion deficit every year that's unsustainable so like tariffs are another form of taxes maybe it's better than income tax I feel like the problem with the tariff argument is that the Trump administration is not doing a good job of successfully

[00:44:54] articulating one coherent argument like some of the arguments contradict themselves there are three or four good ones for it in a national security environment I mean you don't we gotta have some manufacturing because you're you know you're not being able to make any ships in America or any you know like anything else it's not good in a situation where there's a war so there's plenty of good arguments for it and yet it's just a very complex system that nobody understands I'm not even saying because they're dumb it's just there's no one can understand all the beauty

[00:45:25] of markets and not central planning you know it feels like the Republican communist now now all of a sudden it's like we're gonna tell you how to build your like iPhones and certainly the government sets the rules and like you know rule of law and there's lots of reasons why government wants to change course and drive things and have a national strategy and all of that but markets need a time to adapt they need to be able you know we're a bit like the analogy I've been using is we're like a 60 year old man who hasn't been to the gym in 30 years and remembers

[00:45:55] how good he was when he was 30 and he could deadlift 600 pounds and he gets a herniated disc and so we gotta like ease into we're not a 60 money lenders to all the world you know it's just like on a lot of domains we're in the best shape of the world and sure we're not ready to go work in manufacturing but anyways I'm selling my own book tariffs are bad for my business so obviously how much is Silicon Valley and like

[00:46:24] startups how much are they going to be hit by this like how much do you think they're really dependent on supply chains or it's just you know it's a software business no tariffs or how do you think about the effect for Silicon Valley chips semiconductors in general were accepted so I think that was people they dodged a bullet there that's probably the biggest deal but you know computers were not so you

[00:46:54] now have to import the chip I'm seeing a lot of conversations going between technologists who were like I can't import a graphics card would be taxed even though the graphics card by far the most expensive part of it is the GPU is duty free but the graphics card is not and you're going to pay on the full amount of the semiconductor so now maybe this is galaxy brain incentive to create graphics cards in the United States because you can import the chip duty free but now you have to assemble

[00:47:24] it in the US if we become the people that are like oh yeah in America you always have to assemble your computer at the last mile because of some weird government regulation it actually succeeded in industrializing because yeah of course you can do those kinds of rules and America has the power because we have such a big consumer market and so people will play the game and you can build a big

[00:47:54] company but to actually know you're building a good company you got to be able to export that was the rule that these Asian governments set the ones who succeeded in building up industries was where they actually exported because export is proof that you're making a competitive product a competitive company no one around the world buys your stuff then all you've is protected your market and hurt your own consumers you know to create some your wealth around inside your own country but

[00:48:24] if your policies are really working for industrialization the test is do people abroad buy your products and you can see the difference in Malaysia they tried to industrialize but nobody wanted you never heard of a Malaysian car only if you go to Malaysia you would see them they were unsuccessful in creating a competitive company that could export whereas Hyundai Japan and Korea famously and now China become really good at exporting cars so as the United States embarks on re-industrializing to the that

[00:48:53] we're capable the ultimate test is do people in other countries buy ourselves not can we just manufacture some GPUs here because the law requires it like that or rather some graphics cards assembling parts from other countries like that let's dive into the American auto industry for a second because in some ways it's like we're failing to get other you know Trump is making a big deal of Japan not buying American cars do you have a little far field but do you have a point of view on

[00:49:24] whether these countries are really Tesla is way behind their cars are so beyond in quality and build quality and features and what

[00:49:54] is it BYD everyone is so excited about them in some ways the US we're getting denied now we're the ones with the sort of second rate products yeah I'm afraid to drive on Chinese roads but riding in the back seat they're amazing and you know it doesn't take much to just get into one of the Detroit automakers and say that these products aren't as good but how did that happen how did the Chinese or the Koreans or Japanese get so good

[00:50:35] land factories they repressed labor movements they made organized labor illegal in Korea Korea mandated a six day work week these are things that help the sector go and so currency likely there's evidence for that Vietnam has been booming I think they've had 8% annual GDP growth for the last several years in a row and yet their currency has gone down in value it's kind of weird you know I mean that much

[00:51:05] the currency should appreciate but it goes down so clearly there's something going on there I'm not like a macro economist on any level but I can kind of basic logic like if you grow that much and so much manufacturing is coming more dollars are flowing in it should increase your currency so yeah there's some validity to a lot of this stuff some of the challenge becomes like well we're supposed to be like this free market country we don't want our government to be involved in these in private industry and so we don't really

[00:51:35] TSMC is a great example where the guy Morris Chang was working for Texas Instruments and spent 30 years in the US and decided he wanted to start a foundry and nobody in the US wanted to back such a capital intent to business so you sort of brought a bunch of more free market solutions up it's like the government could have its own investment bank or back some of these projects or we could have

[00:52:05] not be so friendly to some resistance to them there are things that we could do that would allow the markets to roam more free to deliver results yeah and I

[00:52:39] got tons of subsidies and the US Boeing sued at the World Trade Organization and won the suit and it's still going through endless long process I'm not like no terrorist I

[00:53:39] or the stated disease and what caused it I'm hopeful because I don't really believe that narrative I'm hopeful that yeah we might like EU and now if they would go to zero tariffs so is Vietnam Cambodia said five Israel India like a lot of these countries have said that would that be an improvement and zoom in on Europe for a second what is we've talked about Asia and Latin America what's all this meant for Europe if we're doing zero tariffs with Europe is that a better outcome

[00:54:08] than where we started I would prefer to have low tariffs I don't think that's going to be enough to satisfy the Trump administration their view is Europe has all these non in general their view is that there's all these non tariff barriers industrial policies like what I was getting at subsidized credits these in general for manufacturing organized repressing labor currency or like in Europe's case their big allegations are around non non scientific allegations of

[00:54:38] like they don't accept American GMO corn you a bit of mis mis in there with RFK and I know you could make hay all day of their

[00:55:08] inconsistencies but but that's been the longest running feud between the United States and Europe because they won't accept our farm products now how jobs and they like jobs so I get their point of view from that stance too are you bullish or

[00:55:38] bearish on the stock market or your general sense that we've taken our medicine versus there's a lot of pain to go or what's your read on I don't know man I only own one public stock it's GameStop I still have my shares from you're like that shows your sort of nihilism about the markets it's like the only the only stock I bet on is pure gambling it admits what it is I'm letting it ride no I have no idea I'm not a public market investor for

[00:56:08] probably I mean I should have some index or something but mostly I've just been work flex sport everything's tied up in flex sport I'm definitely like I don't this is really ugly they're going to have to do a lot of magic to repair things and allow not to have mass bankruptcy in really very large sectors of our economy of companies that buy international buy and sell I think there's a lot of stuff in this that's going to hurt US export obviously I'm very close to that problem because it's a lot of our own customers so

[00:56:38] we're worried about our customer base how they're going to make it through this thankfully Flexport is in a well capitalized situation so we're going to be able to ride out

[00:57:09] on doing things cross border we've made a couple of positions that have made us a big player in the domestic side so we bought convoy and shop by logistics so both of those are US domestic plays so we do about 200,000 truckloads this year domestically moving freight around the country 97% hands off the wheel automated tech only so we love that business and Shopify logistics does e-com fulfillment now that's going to be hurt by these merchants because most of the goods are made internationally

[00:57:38] they'll be hurt there but I think that business has a tailwind now because the fulfillment that was being done in Mexico and Canada is going to come back to the US so it'll be balanced by that business will be in a place but we're definitely on the international side probably lower prices etc you think you'll have revenue fall yeah we're modeling that our revenue is volume times price

[00:58:08] so both of those are likely to fall so yeah it could be financially it's going to be tough we're going to have to dig in and you know Flexport has been through some rough periods over our lifetime so we'll be fine we'll find a way to get through it all and make sure the main key is just focus on the customers and like get everybody talking to every customer you can and solve problems for them bring new customers in etc do you feel like you're spending a lot of time like in

[00:58:49] white papers and stuff from like his policy walks to try to get inside their head and understand what they're thinking so some of the interviews with Besant and Lighthizer and this guy Steven Moran who was like kind of the he was a treasury official in the first administration he's like an economist who's kind of providing some of the underlying philosophical background for it all Lutnik has done some interviews so I'm just trying to see how they think definitely spending time with that and read all the

[00:59:19] orders myself like executive orders and rules and stuff don't rely on anybody having to read it myself and understand the text of it and you think that what you're reading is going into the decision here or it's sort of a Trump affinity for tariffs and then sort of backing in an explanation you know Lighthizer was his USTR Jameson Greer worked he was the chief of staff for Bob Lighthizer in the

[00:59:48] first administration so when Lighthizer did an interview on Tucker Carlson like two weeks ago it's like an hour long and yeah I think he gives you a lot of context at least you know again to my point of don't argue with people unless you can make their argument better than Lighthizer he's a good arguer but I want to at least understand his point of view so I can be capable I mean it doesn't matter if I defeat him in battle he's got all the power I

[01:00:35] startup founder right now are there businesses you think that people could be building to take advantage of this moment or like I don't know what should Silicon Valley be building given what's happening right now I mean there's a lot of them are doing manufacturing so that seems to make a lot of sense defense stuff seems to make sense we seem to be trying to I'm sure there's some signal to take

[01:01:05] from it all I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it we're mostly trying to figure out how do we adapt flex sport we need to diversify be in more countries we should be a network that ships everywhere we shipped to and from 147 countries last year Europe is our fastest we need to shift we launched a program for I call it the

[01:01:35] Marco Polo program getting people from all over our offices our existing network we have offices in 37 cities getting people from those locations to go out to the next 10 countries that we're launching get them to we have offices a big one in Vietnam and in China today those are mostly focused on exporting goods to the United States and to Europe but like Vietnam and China are big trading partners we should get them working well to ship to

[01:02:05] and each other so we're starting to think these are long term things we needed to do anyways but we're pulling tumors forward how do accelerate that our our our roadmap in customs tech. Our team that builds technology there has been really focused on automation and lowering the cost of customs transactions. Today, that's less important than

[01:02:28] quality of data reporting. Normally, you just don't need to have like, oh, how good am I at cutting over the duty rate from today to tomorrow? These things have been more stable. Now you're like, oh, I better build much better technology for reporting, for visualizing changes over time in your duties and calculating your landed costs of the goods. We're definitely reprioritizing a lot

[01:02:52] of stuff in our tech roadmaps. My last question, is this good for robotic startups in the United States? I mean, on the one hand, it's like, okay, we're going to have to build more here. On the other hand, you were talking earlier about if the machine that makes the robots is from somewhere else, that hurts it. Yeah. Are you optimistic about robotic startups given the tariffs?

[01:03:17] I've been a robotic skeptic for a long time. I'm not saying that, not on the long run. It's just a very high bar to clear. Humans are very smart, very dexterous, and not that expensive. They're good machines. Yeah. You know, they're just not that expensive and they are pretty cool. Like you feed them well and you're nice to them. They're, you know, they're fine. So I think it's a

[01:03:43] very high bar to clear for these like humanoid robotics. I mean, you can invert. Charlie Munger always says, always invert, invert, always invert, invert the problem. So you invert this, you go, hey, if there was a robot that you didn't have to buy, you could just pay it, pay it $20 an hour. And it had the IQ of a human and you had the dexterity of a human and it could just do any, any task you acted, asked it within the warehouse. You'd be like, oh, cool. Let's like,

[01:04:09] I'll take 500 of them and I'll put them in my work. You know? And so it's kind of, it's a high bar to clear. So you were, you were not bullish about robots pre tariffs. And now it's like, uh, this isn't going to change the calculation. I think it'll happen over time. It's just a really high bar and it's difficult to make that capex. Like I think the renting model, if you're a buyer of robotic system, which we would be, we're not developing robots, but we're a potential buyer of these systems. Then I don't want like also the rapid pace of

[01:04:35] change also hurts adoption in some level. Cause I don't want to go spend $50 million on some system that three years from now, there's way better system because of how- It's like electric cars. You want to lease them because they're going to keep changing. Yeah. And so that, you know, there's a lot of flaws. I'm not, it's certainly not anti-robot by any mean. I mean, I hope all this stuff becomes, I I'm big advocate, for example, in port terminal automation and robotics and it's, you know, and so, but I don't know if this is net good

[01:05:03] or bad. I think anything that I think a recession is likely here. That's probably bad for everybody. Um, I think that because of this, like you think a self-inflicted recession is coming or I do. I mean, JP Morgan has now made that their default forecast as a result of the tariffs. And I, you know, they, they spend more time. You're very fatalist about it. I mean, you know, you know, people who are hop, skip and jumping away. Are you, uh, you know, when you're talking

[01:05:30] to them, trying to get them to put a little more heat on the administration that this is, this, I think is so central. I mean, even Elon, he's posting Milton Friedman videos about free. You're like Silicon Valley does not have sway on this. There is no amount of Baskin Peter Thiel to like scream. Pretty close to the president. We've seen that for the last six months and he couldn't, I'm, I'm definitely hopeless. And they know I'm selling my own book. I, you know, I'm bad for my business. So no one should listen to me. I'm, I'm promoting my own interests

[01:05:58] here. So, right. Well, I wrote, you know, after the election, you know, I'm certainly not pro Trump, but I was, I was like, you know, I hope tech wins, you know, I'd rather the tech influence over Trump than anything else. But I literally said, but if it has tariffs, it's going to overwhelm any pro business thing he did. I didn't even expect that he would do some of the like union stuff, trying to block like automation of, you know, of, yeah, that one really pissed me off. Yeah. Um, and the terror, you know, long list, but,

[01:06:27] um, anyway, thanks for coming on and helping us navigate it. And, uh, we'll, we'll see what happens tomorrow. The market, you know, uh, crazy one day flat the next, uh, yeah, a lot of it waiting to see what happened to my GameStop shares. I haven't checked it all right. I got 10 shirts. All right, Ryan. Thanks so much. All right. Thank you.