Aaron Levie

And the tools at his disposal and Doge's disposal is sort of, you know, completely unprecedented in terms of the ability to put anybody in Congress on notice if you know, if basically they are promoting things that are not making the country better. So the thing that we saw this week was actually that playing out.

Everybody's been wondering, well, what are the actual, you know, what are the formal mechanisms Doge has to accomplish and enact change? And it's like, you just saw it. Like they can just create enough visibility and spotlight on the problem that it causes a level of discomfort in supporting moving forward with whatever that thing is. And so I think it's interesting.

No opinion on the actual elements of the bill other than from a process standpoint and a new kind of case study of how this is going to play out is I think we're seeing some early indication of what Doge will be able to do.

I mean, so to give some credit, you know, you have Ro Khanna supporting it. You have Fetterman supporting it. Bernie Sanders, you know, everybody. Yeah, Bernie Sanders had a good call out for Elon. You have everybody has their thing in the government budget that they don't like. So assuming that they see that as something Doge can contribute to, you could probably get actually broad support.

You know, there's a classic, you know, sort of reflex within within probably Democrat Party on at this point, just because of Elon's support of Trump. That if something is an Elon project, they're going to instantly respond no matter what the thing is as a negative without kind of actually saying, does this actually support actually something I do agree with?

That's going to be true of both sides. Michelle Obama was like, let's get kids healthy. And all of a sudden, now it's in vogue to do that. So I think we're just in an environment where anything will become partisan.

What's interesting is that because of the, you know, some of the cross-party elements of Trump and now his cabinet is it might pull in more of the Democrat Party than would usually happen. And I think because of Elon and the people that are surrounding Trump, you probably have a bit more air cover for the Rokanas of the world to also step up.

Because if it was like Steve Bannon and Trump doing Doge, it would be like, okay, maybe this is not the thing to lend credibility to for pure political reasons. If you have some of the best entrepreneurs that are out there actually literally in the cabinet driving this, at some point, it is an IQ test if you're on board or not.

This is this is sort of not not the part of politics I think about as much. So I'll leave that up to you as the other left leaning moderate.

No, I mean, I can't add that much more to this. I think there's probably a little bit of a disconnect at times from the, let's say, the voting public and broad constituents from then those that have sort of seen this in real life being inside of a company having to do a startup and scaling up and just the perverse incentives to build bigger teams, spend more.

Your project then is more important the more dollars it gets. We have all of these systems in place, which is the stuff that gets attention are the things that you spent more on.

So you have all these weird incentives to actually have your thing literally cost more, to have more overhead because you've brought in more contractors into the project that then you're going to get some kind of future benefit from in some way.

So you have a lot that is sort of fully broken in this and there's no – it's hard to imagine any other way to veer off from that path other than something that does shake things up as much as Doge is doing.

I'll just throw out one more thing on this because I think the branding of Doge is often the efficiency side, which people always go to the spend side. But the corollary to that is the regulations that obviously are expensive to maintain. And that's what creates layers and layers of overhead on reviewing everything that's coming in then to the government.

And, you know, unfortunately, we have great examples in California where literally we spend more to do less. And it's because we've ratcheted up these layers and layers of regulation. And I have friends literally doing climate tech.

In climate tech, you couldn't imagine something more probably left-leaning Democrat that they can't actually get things done in California, the state that you would imagine to be the most kind of climate-first friendly state because of the amount of regulation that prevents them from getting things done.

So, you know, there's actually this like, you know, total combination of actually fewer regulations. You'll spend less money in government. You'll actually grow the economy faster, which will create more jobs. Like all of the things get solved, the more efficient you get, you know, kind of writ large on all of the topics.

Can I just get one more random example? Feel free to edit it out. Chamath, you'll like this because it came out of Meta. Have you followed the Z standard compression library from Meta? No. So this open source library, kind of a next gen compression on data. And we finally, it took us probably too long, but the team worked insanely hard, implemented this compression algorithm.

We literally, our uploads and downloads got faster. we spend less money on networking and compute. And it took some re-engineering of the system. But that's just not a concept that people go into problem solving with, which is like, what if the thing actually was cheaper to run and it was better?

And so think about all the systems of government that could just be upgraded and then you would spend less money actually maintaining them. I mean, we spend... you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, way too much on legacy infrastructure, technology. We could automate more. You could spend way less money and then get better outcomes. So this is just happening everywhere.