Derek Thompson

my sense is a lot of them are willing to say, this action is crazy, that action is crazy.

But fundamentally, these are people who got into business to do business.

And they ended up lining behind Trump, not only because they were ideologically aligned with him and against some kind of like, you know, wokery that was incipient in Silicon Valley around the country, but also fundamentally because they were like, Donald Trump is a counterparty that we can do business with and that we can get rich with.

And we're concerned that the Biden folks are going to stand in our way in various ways, whether it's crypto regulation or something in artificial intelligence.

I want to be clear, like, there's some questions that you ask me where I'm like, I feel very confident about this because I've done the work.

I have not done the work understanding exactly what these guys want.

Maybe you think you're drawing a distinction and maybe you are drawing a distinction.

I don't see much daylight between our answers.

I think fundamentally these are venture capitalists with limited partners who want to return their limited partners as much money as possible and think that the Biden administration's rules and personnel were likely to get in the way

of that end and saw in the Trump administration a group of people that were very interested in making deals with more conservative VC capitalists and essentially doing whatever they want.

And to a certain extent, you have to admit that a part of that bet has definitely paid off when it comes to, say, crypto regulation.

The Biden administration was absolutely regulating crypto.

You said the regulations were minor.

I think folks in crypto would say the regulations were significant.

It doesn't matter.

The point is, it is an objective fact that crypto has been significantly deregulated.

See, regulation has also come under- Unregulated, I would say.

Yeah, unregulated.

I mean, you look at the Trump deal with Binance alone.

I mean, it's just absolutely pure- You cannot do crypto crime now.