BG2 Thanksgiving Roundtable: DOGE, EV Tax Credit, Tariffs, Conspiracy Theories, Invest America

I would much rather see us use a gas tax than an EV credit. An EV credit costs the government money. You just spoke about us not having a balanced budget. An increased gas tax would actually bring in income.

Bill, don't suggest that to Governor Newsom. We already have the highest gas tax in the country. Hey, Bill. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. So as you know, we were going to do a pod with Satya this week, but we wanted to make sure that we got a full 90 minutes with him. So we bumped it back to December 10th. And so I thought we'd kick in and do something a little bit different here today. It's a holiday week. We got Thanksgiving on Thursday. So you came up with this idea, which I love. We're going to ping-pong back and forth a few issues that are top of mind for us, things we're thinking about as we head into Thanksgiving. It's less of a deep dive, I suppose, and more just our initial thoughts or additional thoughts about several ideas that you and I have discussed.

Which also reminded me, Bill, you know, we're almost to the end of our first year doing this together. I love it. You're always coming up with ideas. We want to keep BG2 fresh as we head into 2025. And so we're going to experiment with a few different modes. And I would welcome everybody's idea. Kick us your ideas, DM us, put them on YouTube, and we'll try to integrate them into the show in 2025. So Bill, why don't you kick us off with your first shot on goal? What's on your mind?

I've been thinking a lot about China, and we've talked about it some on the podcast. There is a lot of articles out today about a big Huawei event. There's an FT one that we'll put in the notes, but there are others you could just search and see. And Huawei has released a phone they call the Mate 70. And it's bigger and faster than everyone thought it would be. It doesn't use Android. So it's their first non-Android mobile OS. And the part that everyone's really freaking out about and trying to understand is what chip technology is underneath it. The rumors in the articles suggest that they have accomplished fairly high-end semiconductor manufacturing at SMIC in China. So this chip was not built at TSMC.

And they had this huge event in the stadium. And I would encourage people, we'll post some Twitter feeds about this where you can see some of the photos. But the thing that's just so striking to me is just how, you know, magnificently innovative they are in China. And I continue to read what I would call rhetoric from people on both sides of the aisle in America, and even some people in our own industry who suggest that we can, you know, cut China off from technology, block them, that we're somehow ahead. I think American exceptionalism has gotten into our head. And my biggest fear is that pretending this isn't true isn't helpful to our own competitiveness. And there's a great quote. Steve Hsu pulled up a Lex interview with Elon from about a year ago.

And he says, look, the United States has been the most powerful economic engine in the world longer than anyone's been alive. And the foundation of war is economics. So we have a situation in the case of China, where their economy is likely to be two, perhaps three times larger than that of the US. So you imagine you've been the biggest kid on the block for as long as anyone can remember, and suddenly a kid comes along who's twice your size. And I just feel this so much. And Elon goes on to talk about the work ethic of the people, the investment in STEM. While we are removing advanced STEM courses in California, the number of graduates in China's university system that are STEM is 35%. And that number is below 10 in the US.

And so a combination of work ethic and technical skills, I personally think they have all the pieces they need to run as fast as they possibly can. And I don't think blocking ASML or blocking AI technology or blocking anything is working. It's just not working. And I think it would do everyone in the U.S. a whole bunch of good to stand up. There's videos all over YouTube. We'll put up some of these links and just pay attention to what's going on. We're falling behind. And tariffs and protectionism will only protect American industry for a very short window. It's actually going to deny them the competition they need to get their shit together.

My one thought about that is we got to focus on our own race. We got to make ourselves as great as we can possibly be and run as fast as we possibly can. And while I don't think we ought to be naive as to the intentions of China, at the same time, I think an idea that we can totally decouple from the second largest economy in the world is one that's probably not wise. And I totally agree with you that we don't want to do anything that causes us to believe that we don't have to have our economic and innovative engine moving at the fastest rate possible. So that's a good one. All right, what's your first one? So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, Bill, I came up with five things that I'm thankful for.

Number one, I'm thankful for DOGE and the once-in-a-generation opportunity to balance the budget. We've talked about this in our friend group for a long time, but a $38 trillion debt and a $2 trillion deficit, frankly, is just unconscionable as a burden to pass on to our kids. You know, the spirit of the 250-year history of America is really about making sacrifices today in order to create a better tomorrow for future generations. But today, we're doing the exact opposite. We're levering up the Fed balance sheet. We're borrowing on the credit card today and sticking future generations with the burden of repayment. It's profligate, and frankly, it's unethical. But some people argue that it just can't be done, that Washington is this Leviathan that can't be slayed, that we simply have to cut too much, that we can't possibly balance the budget by 2029.

So I did a little analysis with our team and asked, what would it take? What would it take for us to balance the budget by 2029? So this first chart we're going to put up, if you look at it, it simply shows the COVID bump in spending from $5 trillion to $7 trillion. Now, if you reduced spending for the next four years, Bill, at 3%, It simply gets us back to $6 trillion, which is exactly the trend line that government spending would be on if it grew at the 15-year rate pre-COVID. So not draconian at all. If you look at chart two, it shows a base case for balancing the budget at $6 trillion in 2029. Now, you get there by simply reducing the size of government by about 3% a year for the next four years.

Again, just still going from $5 trillion in 2019 to $6 trillion in 2029. So you're still growing at that 3% rate. But you have to reduce the size from the $7 trillion that we are today. And it assumes that revenues grow at 3.5%. And if we do that, then we balance the budget in 2029. And so that sounds good, but some people say, oh, that's impossible. Revenues can't possibly grow at 3.5% because Trump is proposing tax cuts. And we all know that tax cuts will make revenue go down, correct? No, incorrect. If you look at the chart three that we're showing up, Bill, we looked at three different growth scenarios. If we grew revenues at the same rate that we have for the last 20 years, starting next year, which is 4.9% per year, Kager, for 20 years, we would end up with a $450 billion surplus in 2029.

Now, if you grew at the rate since the Trump tax cuts in 2017, which is faster than the 20-year rate. So since the tax cuts in 2017, we've grown our federal revenues at 5.8%. If you do that and simply reduce the size of government back to trendline, you end up with a $700 billion surplus. And the third scenario, take a conservative case. Let's say that for some reason, we're going to grow a lot slower than we have since the Trump tax cuts, or even slower than we have over the last 20 years. And we assumed a 3.5% growth in federal revenues. Even at 3.5% growth for the next four years, you balance the budget in 2029 by simply reducing the size of government 3% a year back to trendline. I think DOGE is even more ambitious, but it goes to prove that we can do this and we owe it to our kids.

So I'm thankful that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to balance the budget and deliver the future our kids deserve.

One encouraging data point would just be the Argentina situation. So everybody's raving about the Lex podcast with Milei, which I once again thought was amazing. But if you look at the Argentinian ETF, ARGT, it's up 60% year-to-date, 65, which suggests the optimism around Argentina's economy has reversed from where it was. And I, you know, that's fantastic. And I think it speaks to the doability of DOGE.

Yep. So, okay. Give me your topic two, Bill.

I was intrigued by an article that I saw on X that was about the ServiceTitan IPO. And I think it came from Meritech Capital. I'll put the link in. But we haven't had a lot of IPOs. And so sometimes VCs will take an S-1 and break it down. And that's what Meritech did here. And they focused on one aspect of the ServiceTitan capitalization chart, which is the last round or two that went into the company, which I think was either F or H or G, you get up in the higher letter counts, had what they said is a compounding IPO ratchet. Now, years ago, I wrote a blog post called "On the Road to Recap," which went into detail about why I don't like these things. But in essence, it allows a company to pretend that the cover price on a term sheet is whatever they want it to be.

But the returns to the investor that write these things, and I love to refer to them as dirty term sheets, are embedded in the IPO clause and not in the price clause. And in this particular case, what it says is that the investor is guaranteed a certain return into the IPO, which means their share count will be adjusted on the IPO and the trigger and the calculator for how many shares they get is the IPO price itself. Now, the reason I hate these things is they create misalignment. So you have a bunch of investors on a cap chart, and now they have differing incentives. The later-stage investors that wrote this compounding ratchet term actually want the IPO to be as low as possible because they'll get more shares.

And those shares will come out of the employees and the founders and the earlier investors that didn't participate in that particular round. I have spoken out over and over again about IPO underpricing. This one, you know, there already are massive incentives for IPO underpricing. In this case, I suspect these late-stage investors are going to be tugging on the ear of the bankers, rooting for an even lower price, which once again will come out of the hide of the employees and management. So there's no one to blame here because obviously the company approved, you know, this round. And I think the thing that causes people to approve these type rounds is this pretending, you know, that the valuation—they don't want a down round.

So they do these to avoid it. But it comes home to roost and you concentrate risk. And when you concentrate risk, you can have some really, you know, negative outcomes. So there's plenty of blame to go around. I personally hate doing business with people that write these kind of terms. And I would encourage investors and founders to stay away from any investor that would write a term like this. But once again, the founders and management likely took this round somewhat knowingly in an effort to not do a down round, and now they're going to pay for it.

Well, you know, we're not investors in Klarna, Bill. And, you know, I know from my team that the company is doing great. So I'm not exactly sure where it's going to price relative to those ratchets. But I would say this, you and I have been consistent advocates for 24 years, 25 years now, that companies should just go public. And there is nothing wrong with a down round IPO. It's simply a price at a moment in time. And if the market in '20 and '21 was overheated and prices were really high in the private markets, that's just a fact of life. That's a fact of ZIRP. That's a fact of 0% interest rates. And so I think from my perspective, I agree with you. These situations, which are not, I don't think, inherently bad, but they can lead to this misalignment, particularly around the time of going public.

And I would just encourage entrepreneurs out there, founders out there, simply take the bid on offer. Take your company public when it's time to take your company public. And don't worry about the opening bid because you're building a company for a generation.

There is one irony, which is the presence of this dirty term may actually be what's creating the incentive to go public because it has an annual crank on it. And so the only way to make it go away is to actually jump through the hoop. And there was a similar situation at Square way back when. All right, let's move to your number two.

Topic two, another reason I'm thankful. It might not be apparent with the topic headline, but, you know, Governor Newsom is rebooting his attack on Elon Musk and capitalism. But I'm thankful for the fact that our great congressman from California, Democrat Ro Khanna, has said enough of the stupidity. So what's the background here? Well, Newsom has proposed an EV tax credit revival if Trump cuts the federal EV tax credit, which many, many observers say we should cut at this point in time. It's no longer needed. But the governor, in all of his wisdom, said he's going to revive the EV tax credit in a way that excludes Tesla, despite the fact that Tesla is a huge manufacturer in the state of California.

So Tesla, of course, produces cars over in Fremont, just across the bay from here, employs 20,000 people, produced over 550,000 Teslas in the Fremont factory. You know, this is about as stupid, Bill, as Biden excluding Elon from the White House EV summit simply because he wanted to curry favor with the unions. But the reason I'm hopeful and the reason I'm thankful is that, you know, Ro Khanna says enough is enough. He said, this is my district. Tesla makes 550,000 cars there. Let's not play politics with keeping manufacturing in California. It would be foolish to exclude Tesla. Have we learned anything or nothing from snubbing Elon at the Biden EV summit? Right. I'm thankful that we're turning against this stupidity and politics as usual.

Calling out your own party when they're wrong is a sign that we're healing. So way to go, Ro. And Happy Thanksgiving.

I agree with everything you said. I would add one thing just for the record. I would much rather see us use a gas tax than an EV credit. An EV credit costs the government money. You just spoke about us not having a balanced budget. An increased gas tax would actually bring in income.

Bill, don't suggest that to Governor Newsom.

We already have the highest gas tax in the country. Well, look, when gas prices spiked in 2009, big SUV sales went in the tank. And there's a reason there's little bitty cars all over Europe. And so if you want to incentivize moving to electric and getting rid of the big gas guzzlers, tax what's negative rather than... trying to pay people for what you think they want. It just creates more perverse behavior. Anyway, enough of my rant.

Ro Khanna and that type of behavior that is bipartisan, that is looking out for free enterprise and capitalism, that's the road to the White House. The stuff that Newsom's doing is just the same stuff that shrunk the party and cost Democrats future elections. Okay, Bill, topic number three, what do you have for us?

So I saw a post online that really caught my eye about something called Pix, P-I-X, and I'll put the chart up right now. So Pix is a government-run payment system in Brazil. Now, I don't think anyone would argue that Brazil is one of the top five functioning economies in the world. And I don't think anyone would say that they're more savvy or technically innovative than America. But this payment system, which is digital and immediate, and which mirrors what has happened in the UK, India, China, Australia, all these other countries have done this, is already up to, I think, 43% of all payments in Brazil from mid-2020. Wow. And they started this thing. It became a concept in Brazil after we started talking about an equivalent thing in the US called FedNow.

Now, for anyone who doesn't know, I'm sure everyone's aware that the digital transfer system in the US is pathetic. This thing called ACH takes three days to settle. It's not immediate. It's reversible. It makes no sense whatsoever in 2024. And there's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and Mastercard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total, like they're over 60%. And something's not right. And all these other countries have figured out, you know, the government is somewhat, we are somewhat dependent on the government for payment. If they don't stand behind payment, you don't have anything. And all these other governments have realized that oligopolies like Visa and Mastercard aren't working in their best interest.

And they've all built these systems. The one that's super easy to read about is the one in the UK. It's called Faster Payments. I'll put the Wikipedia link up. But now there's Pix in Brazil. There's UPI in India. And we haven't done it in the US. I think it's because of regulatory capture. The banks don't want it. Visa and Mastercard don't want it. But guess what? FedNow is underway. It's in process. It's been executing. It's mostly been doing B2B payments. They haven't switched over to consumer, but it's coming. And I couldn't be a bigger proponent. The market's had forever to try and solve this problem, and they don't. We have a broken payment system in the U.S. It's clear in these other countries that letting the government do this one part and getting it right leads to all kinds of fintech innovation because you can transfer money quickly.

Now, here's my concern, which is I've learned something over the past, I'd say, six weeks, which is innovators hate innovation. I learned it in the cleantech space when you and I went and studied nuclear. No one hates nuclear more than the person that's got the big wind investment or the person that's really all in on solar. And they should just all hate oil. They should root for each other, but they don't. And with the administration change, I've just kind of got my eyes open. I hope... FedNow gets to continue on its pace and we'll continue to chase and then hopefully succeed just like Pix and UPI and Faster Payments UK. But I do worry. I think the crypto people will say, oh, we can do it in crypto and you don't need the government to do it.

And Visa and Mastercard and the banks will lean on every one of their representatives in Washington and fight it all the way. But, but I'm hopeful that it'll work. And I feel super strongly that the innovation that will be possible for crypto, for all the fintech startups, it'll be better if we can move money fast.

No doubt about it. The penetration of these nationally supervised kind of identity and payment systems in India and Brazil is extraordinary. FedNow has been pathetic for one of the greatest innovative economies on the planet. It would be great to see this administration really catch up with the rest of the world around that.

And by the way, I'm a capitalist and people jump down my throat when I promote FedNow. But look, it's just not working. Like Visa and Mastercard's operating margins are proof that it's just not working.

Is that the result of some regulatory capture, Bill?

I suspect so. And just an oligopoly. I mean, there are certain things that kind of work better with a single player, right? We all want to connect and move money fast, right? It works better if it's a single provider, which, you know, and if you let a company do it, they create excessive operating margins, which is what these two have done. And, but the number one thing is every other country did it and it's working fabulously and no one died. We should just do it. Hear, hear.

So I'm going to jump to number three for me. The third reason that I'm thankful is what I believe to be our strategy around tariffs. So again, this is contrary to what I think the consensus view is. So of course, Trump has announced that one of his first acts will be to initiate a 25% tariff on products coming from Canada and Mexico, unless they get serious about stopping illegal immigrants and drugs from crossing the border. He said in his release about this, "We hereby demand that they use their powers to stop this trafficking or it's time for them to pay a big price." His nominee to be Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has said, quote, "the tariff gun will be loaded but rarely discharged," end quote.

But I saw a lot of debate on X about this, Bill. In fact, our good buddy JCal said, "Don't take Trump seriously. These are just literary flourishes." And I responded that I disagree, and I think you should treat them as effective negotiating tactics, not as literary flourishes. What I mean by that, you know, I jumped online here and I asked our good friend at ChatGPT, you know, the art of negotiation, particularly when it comes to anchoring. So anchoring is this behavioral thing when you set the terms of the negotiation. So it describes it in three ways. Number one, the psychological influence. The initial offer acts as a mental anchor, even if the other party tries to adjust away from it. Number two, defining the range.

It sets the boundaries of the negotiation, making subsequent offers seem more or less reasonable in comparison. So then I asked ChatGPT in The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump, you know, did he explicitly refer to anchoring, right? Or did he advise anchoring in a negotiation? And it says, while he didn't technically use the term anchoring, the principles align with Trump's negotiating style that he advocates for in the book. Trump frequently emphasized, number one, starting big. He advocates aiming high in negotiations, a form of anchoring that sets ambitious targets. Confidence and boldness. He stresses the importance of framing negotiations to one's own advantage, etc. And so I think the right way to look at this tariffs debate is that, you know, it is a starting point.

He's going to raise these tariffs in order to achieve national objectives, and then he's going to be willing to negotiate away from them, but only if he achieves the national objectives. I'm not a big fan of tariffs from an economic perspective, but I think as a negotiating tactic, it could make a lot of sense. So I'm grateful for a fully capable president and team that understand how to negotiate to achieve these objectives. I'm equally hopeful that we use the same type of negotiating tactics, frankly, to end some of this global conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East.

It's not clear to me that having a constant conversation about the negotiating tactics is helpful. But here's the thing, Bill.

Observer effect issue. As you and I know around the poker table, you can talk about it. But the question is, are they willing to call this bluff? The thing about Trump is I don't think it's a bluff.

Right. Right. I mean, the one that I read about today, look, fentanyl precursors have definitely been going from China to Mexico and then across our border. So they should be able to stop those from leaving their shipyards. And that's a reasonable ask from the United States.

So, Bill, walk us into number four. What do you got for number four?

So I saw something this week that made me happy, which is Anthropic released a new data connection tool. We'll put a link in here so everybody can see it. You've probably already heard about it, called the MCP, and it is going to make their models better and easier to integrate with different data sources. They released several integrations already in the initial pack with GitHub and Slack and a few others so that you can start having your agents interact with these things. But my favorite part of it all was they decided to open-source it. Now, I would love maybe one day for us to just do a whole episode on open source because I'm such a huge fan and I see it being used in so many different ways, but it has definitely become a strategic tool for everyone out there.

Meta's gotten really good at it. They have this project called the Open Compute Project that basically open-sourced their entire data center design. And so no one has IP control over them. And then obviously we know about what they've done with their LLM model. Based on what I've heard and seen and read and listened to on podcasts, Anthropic and their investors like Eric Schmidt have been some of the people that have been encouraging more and more AI oversight and AI regulation and trying to make it such that open-source AI would not be legal. And I think them doing this is going to create a bit of confusion amongst the people they're calling on in Washington because they're going to say, 'Oh, you don't need open source.'

And then they're going to say, 'But you just released something in open source.' And I think everything gets kind of muddy and nuanced. And maybe they've reached a new place where they're going to stop fighting that. And I hope so. But I'm thrilled that they did it. I'm thrilled that they're using that type of technique. I think it is one of the most savvy competitive tools, weapons you can bring to the field. I'm sure they were worried that OpenAI would create proprietary data connectors and they want everyone to use this one, very similar to what Google did with Kubernetes. And so anyway, I think it's super interesting and I hope it just means more and more innovation and competition in the AI market.

Bill, this just made me think about, I was watching CNBC this week, and I hear David Faber say, you know, they have a chart of NVIDIA up. NVIDIA is going down on this particular day. And he said, 'I was listening to, you know, Bill Gurley on my favorite new pod, BG2Pod. And Bill is talking a lot about the deceleration in the rate of pre-training scaling.' So shout-out to you for helping to put us on the radar screen of Faber. So number four, here's my number four reason for giving thanks. And it's for Warren Buffett's letter updating his giving plans. So this week, he wrote a letter to kind of update in a very open and transparent way his plans on giving away the rest of his wealth. He has over $100 billion, despite giving a lot of his wealth already away through the Gates Foundation.

I think he's six or seven still on the Forbes list. And so a couple blurbs from the letter that really struck me. The first, he said, 'I have never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any scheme that extended beyond the children.' He then went on to say—Bill, 'I'm grateful for this country. Things didn't look good when I arrived in 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. But the real action from compounding takes place in the final 20 years of a lifetime.' He talks about his family. He said this, which really hit me. He said, 'Instead, we share this view that equal opportunity should begin at birth and extreme look-at-me styles of living should be legal but not admirable. As a family, we have had everything we needed or simply liked, but have not sought enjoyment from the fact that others craved what we had.'

And it just got me thinking about this whole country, people I've talked to, many friends of ours who've ended up with wealth that, frankly, compared to the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, would dwarf them by comparison. But almost everybody I know intends to give away the vast majority of their wealth while they're alive. I don't have the hard information to prove this, but we may be the first nation in history where the majority of the wealth of those in, let's call it, the top 1% or 2% will be given away versus preserved for building dynasties, right? I mean, it was Europe that invented the generation-skipping trust, this whole idea of working around the system in order to preserve dynastic wealth.

And what I love about this fact in the United States is that people are doing it through their own free will. This is not being coerced by the government. This is not, 'We're gonna take everything away.' It's allowing people to innovate, allowing people to build the country, but also trusting that part of this national experiment is time and time again, those people take that and pour it back into consumer surplus. Thank you to Warren Buffett on this Thanksgiving for once again showing us the way that this freedom, the freedom to choose to give away your money, you know, is the right way. And I think—I certainly know that my family, but lots of others will work hard to emulate that.

One thing that spurs in my brain that maybe could be something we do at some episode in the future is just it'd be great to create—you know how DOGE wants to create a list of ineffective government spending? It'd be great to have a list of effective donations. Where can wealth be donated that has the biggest impact? Because it's hard. That's very hard to do. It's very hard to give it away in a way that's effective.

No doubt about it. And many of these people who've created this wealth, they're entrepreneurs. You know, I remember having this conversation with Michael Dell—you work really hard, you get lucky, you end up with, you know, in this situation, and they care just as deeply about seeing that effectiveness in giving, right? In terms of, you know, working hard to make sure that it has the impact that they desire. And I agree with you, particularly doing that at scale, very difficult to do. So, Bill, talk to us about your last and final, your fifth big topic.

I wish mine were as altruistic as yours, but c'est la vie. I wanted to just speak out, and this one will be super short, on the word conspiracy theory. Because I think it's really been weaponized. And as we maybe move in a new direction, I would just encourage everyone to stop using this phrase. The situation that really got me a couple of years ago, actually, maybe three or four years ago, I started going, going really deep on the origin of COVID. And I still believe that we have to figure this out. If we want to stop a pandemic from happening again, you have to do root cause analysis. If you're going to do root cause analysis, you've got to know what happened. Or you have to treat, since we seem to think they're one of two possibilities, you've got to treat them both as if they did happen.

Because this was the worst catastrophic event since World War II. Now, it turns out that both Francis Collins and Dr. Fauci, Collins in two different emails and Fauci in his book, called the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory. They have both been pulled in front of Congress and now suggest that it's not a conspiracy theory. But they said that back then. And I remember at the time when I would find something or read something and I'd mention to somebody and they'd go, 'Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist.' And I was like, 'What? No, I'm just reading and trying to understand what's happening.' And the word really got weaponized. It's interesting. The people that say they're worried about misinformation are the ones that are quick to use this word.

And I think Fauci and Collins and everyone that said that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory were actually, you know, wading around in misinformation themselves. That's what they were doing and trying to prevent us from getting to the real answer. So if you disagree with something someone says, say what you believe and the contrary opinion. But labeling something a conspiracy theory, I think we really need to get away from that. I think it is peddling in misinformation.

I think it's really well said. Plain English is important. And we've just lived through, I think, a devastating period of time where not only words were weaponized, Bill, but they were used to ostracize. They were used to shut down the conversation. You know, shout-out to our friend Joe Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, and others. The 60 Minutes piece on the University of Austin in Texas, UATX, this week was fantastic. I'm lucky to have been an advisor on that, you know, since the beginning. And it was really exciting. I'm watching the piece. I realized one of the students they're featuring is a great family friend of ours. Had no idea that he'd went—even went to school there. And so I texted his dad.

I said, 'What's the experience been like?' He said, 'Fabulous.' Creating venues and opportunity on X and other places where we don't savage each other for openness, but we really encourage the debate, the dialogue. And I think you pointed this out. The fact of the matter is we had people in positions of high authority that simply shut down the debate and conversation early on in a way that we now know had devastating consequences by labeling people and ideas as a conspiracy. It was shameful, and I think you're right for calling it out.

And by the way, a few pods back, I mentioned this great interview between Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Rick Rubin. And his name is now being floated as a potential head of the NIH. And I can't think of a better candidate. And I'm so hopeful that he ends up in that role.

Hear, hear. So maybe I'm going to wrap it. Topic number five. Take us home. The fifth thing that I'm thankful for heading into Thanksgiving is Invest America. Bill, you know, Invest America is a project that I've been—and now a piece of legislation—that I've been working on for three years. And it's truly gaining a ton of traction.

Bill, restate what it is because not everyone may know.

So the idea is that the federal government would cause to be created 3.7 million investment accounts a year for every child that's born in America. They would seed it with a very small amount of money that would be a rounding error to the federal government, but really be a 401(k) from birth, where companies have already raised their hands from Uber to Dell, Oracle to Nvidia, and said they would contribute to the accounts of the kids of their employees. Parents could add money to this account. It really is, you know, that 401(k) from birth. But here's the thing, Bill. This is the perfect complement to DOGE. You know, think about what we're attacking with DOGE. We're attacking, we're cutting wasteful and ineffective government programs that don't even help the people they're intended to help, right?

So instead of doing that, we ought to set up this investment account for each of these children and let the power of private markets work their magic, right? We've done the research now, in partnership with the Milken Institute, led by Kevin Hassett and Rob Shapiro. We know if we give these kids these accounts, they're more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to buy a home, more likely to start a business. They have vastly higher levels of financial literacy. They're more likely to become a taxpayer, and they're less likely to end up in jail. It has a massive ROI, and we can achieve it while having less government, not more government. In fact, I look at this as a structural rebalancing from the state to the individual.

Title rests with the family and the individuals and the kids who will be able to open up on their phone, see that they too own a little bit of Berkshire Hathaway, of Apple, of, of UnitedHealthcare, and can ask the questions about compounding. What does it mean to be an owner? They feel like they're in the game. We're going to unlock massive amounts of human potential by doing this. And it's not from ineffective handouts from the state. This is about turning these kids into capitalists from day one. And I couldn't be more thrilled to see the momentum that it's gained. Another incredible thing about this bill, if we set up this infrastructure on a national basis—I've heard, you know, we were just talking about the challenge of giving away large sums of money.

I've heard from several of these folks who have upwards of $100 billion that they could take $10 billion, put it in a drawdown trust in their state, for example, invest in the S&P 500, and match for all the kids of the families who earn, let's call it, under $150,000. So think of those kickers going in there. Now they have trouble moving that money effectively. That's a lot of gross tonnage to give away philanthropically.

Kind of a private-public partnership.

Exactly. And beyond that, I've heard there are states like the state of Maine, the state of Texas and Florida, and other places that already have some local programs like this, some state programs. But instead of everybody recreating the wheel—we just create a national infrastructure so that now those states can compete and add in a way that makes the most sense to them. So I think this is a way to unlock incredible resources in a very efficient way that, again, is compounding in the private markets in a way that is great for our economy, drives the future long-term growth of the economy, and gets government out of the equation. So couldn't be more happy about that.

What can people do if they want to get behind this movement, Brad? How can they help?

Thanks for asking. Number one thing I would say to do is follow it and support it. We have the resources that we need, and we're building a big bipartisan tent. So let your voice be heard, but we're moving. And with any luck, we can have this put into the reconciliation process in the spring and achieve something that I think would be profoundly important and worthy of a big presidential legacy, particularly as we approach next year, in 2026, the 250th anniversary of America. So, Bill, I think this was a really fun way to do it on this Thanksgiving week. Good suggestion. Let's wrap it there.

All right, man. Have a great holiday, and we'll see you on the other side. Sounds great.

As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.