Trae (Trey) Stephens

Biggest deterrent of all.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so, yeah, I think about this all the time.

That's awesome.

Thank you so much.

I go through a lot of effort every time I travel internationally to have burner devices and things like that.

So this is something I think about a lot.

Yeah, no, that's good.

There are a lot of misconceptions.

I think they're constantly changing because obviously the administration's changed, the politically appointed officials changed, and so you get this kind of ebb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped.

If you go back to the Obama administration,

basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president.

But there was really no presence of tech people in the administration.

It was kind of, he ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that.

And so the connectivity was really, really low.

Obviously going into the first Trump administration, Peter and Palmer were the only tech billionaires that were engaged in that administration from the very beginning.

And then Biden came around and, you know, again, the whole tech community jumped out in support of him.

But there's been a bit of a shift now where people are starting to realize that all of this time and effort and money that they put into courting the Democratic establishment didn't really give them the connectivity to drive any of the change that they wanted to see.

And so I think in this administration, there's been a real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech, whether that's with AI regulation or with crypto or with defense, and trying to figure out ways to pull them into that conversation.

And so you get people like Michael Kratios, who is Peter's chief of staff, who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy.