publican party on lightly regulated fast expansion of AI. First of all, do you buy that summary? Do you think that the Trump presidency will depend on how well he regulates AI?

Now, regulating it well might mean not regulating it much and getting the states out of the way and giving the feds primacy over the regulation and then getting out of the way. So I kind of agree that that's true, but I do wonder if the public will see it that way. You know, people like us that the fact that you're even watching me on this podcast probably means you're in the top at least 5% of people paying attention to the news. Wouldn't you say? If you're watching this right now, you're probably in the top 5% of just people who care about keeping up with things.

So I don't know if the general public will even notice if Trump did a good job or a bad job on AI. And wouldn't we just argue about whether he did a good job or a bad job? And it wouldn't be so much something you could just measure. How in the world are you going to measure how well we do on AI? Like what happens if Estonia comes up with the best AI because they just have some genius who was working on it. Does that mean we did a bad job or does it just mean that Estonia had a genius?

So I don't know how you'd know if he did a good job or a bad job unless it was just screamingly obvious and I don't think it will be. I do think that Trump's doing pretty much everything right, which I attribute to the fact that he's got Sachs and a bunch of smart people advising him. I don't think you'll get too far away from something that Elon Musk would say makes sense and is sensible for the country. So Trump does have just the best advisers for AI. Just the best.

Will that be enough? Well, I don't think that Trump is going to overrule the smartest people in the world in a domain that they know a lot about and he doesn't. I think that only the Trump haters think you would do that. Anybody who's actually been paying attention knows that he loves advice from the smartest people.

All right, whoever is just yelling at me in all caps, maybe that person can disappear, if you know what I mean.

All right, so yeah, is he betting his presidency on the future of AI? Sort of. But I do think that the Trump administration has an advantage over other countries because with AI, we're not just competing companies against companies that we're also doing that. But we're competing countries against countries.

And let me ask you this. So we've watched Europe is just falling apart under its own bureaucracy. China is somewhat difficult for us to understand from the outside, but it doesn't look like they're super flexible about everything. Sometimes they can be super fast, you know, if the government says go do this, it'll happen pretty fast. But is that the same as being super flexible? Because the United States is more likely to allow certain freedoms, you know, certain freedom of speech. The US is more likely to allow AI to train on more sources, whereas China might say, "Oh, you can't look at that." So your AI cannot train on as many things because we want to control it.

So I'm feeling that there's something about the United States and maybe this is just me being biased. I don't know. So you tell me. Am I being biased? I think there's something about our DNA as a country that gives us a huge AI advantage. I mean, just the fact that there could be a Trump who I think is very flexible business-wise. I think Trump is the smartest president we've had business-wise. He's here at a time when having the smartest president business-wise is super important. You know, Bill Clinton was pretty smart, too. Got us through the dot-com era. But yeah, I do suspect that the US is going to have a DNA advantage. We're just more flexible and more willing to take more chances. I think that's exactly where we need to be to win. So that's my optimism on AI.

All right, let's talk about—we're all following the story, maybe you're not, of California trying to rebuild after the Palisades fire, Pacific Palisades fire. And I think that here's the good news. According to the Wall Street Journal, there is a house that's been built. Yay, a house. So we're coming up on a year and one house has been built, but you can't live in it. So one house has been built, but you can't buy it and you can't live in it. It's a developer model.

And if you were to go inside the developer model and walk up to the second floor and look out the window, would you see the paradise that used to be Pacific Palisades? Or would you see a bunch of burned down wasteland as far as you could see? It would be the second one. So not only can you not buy it, not only is there only one, but if you stood in the second floor, you wouldn't even want to live there. You'd be like, why would I want to be in this town?

However, it's not nothing. So it's not nothing. So there's a little bit of motion in the right direction. I don't know how long this is going to take, but you know, I'm comparing the Pacific Palisades to China's big projects. Doesn't it seem to you like China is building things that are as big as entire states and they can just pound it out? It's like, all right, we got a year. Let's build something that's as big as the entire island of Manhattan. And then you check back in a year and they're done.

Now, we can't build a house. We can't get a house built because, oh, there's bureaucracy. We need approvals. You know what's wrong with this story is that whenever I hear that there's a long delay, the person I always want to know