Jason Palmer for President

Jason Palmer for President

Presidential candidate Jason Palmer America’s Economic Future Hinges on Tax-Incentivized Conscious Capitalism. An entrepreneur, impact investor and philanthropist.

Bert Martinez: First of all, I think it’s awesome that you’re taking on probably the world’s biggest challenge, and that is running for president of the United States. It is such a thankless job. And, you know, I always tell people this is one of those jobs where there is no training. It’s not like you get elected and they’re gonna say, okay. We’re gonna give you 6 months to get ready for a year to get ready. You’re gonna go to a special school. No. This is like, you won. Here’s the transition period, and then boom. You’re right in it.

Jason Palmer: Boom. Millions of employees, all kinds of things going on at the same time. Yes.

Bert Martinez: You’re immediately loved and hated by millions of people. 

Jason Palmer:  That already happens just when you’re running for office, let alone actually get there. Right?

Bert Martinez: Alright. Well, alright. So I I did a little research, and I I, let’s see. Let me let me get let me get to my notes real quick. One of the things I found out, and I thought this was kind of interesting, I wanted to I wanted to get your your background on this. And, Paul, the blank’s book, broken, you attribute to inspiring you to run for president. Talk about this.

Jason Palmer: Yeah. Absolutely. So I read the book in the summer of last year. And do you? I don’t know how much you or your listeners know about Paul LeBlanc, but I’ll kinda go into it a little bit. He’s the president of Southern New Hampshire University, which used to be a little tiny university, in Manchester, New Hampshire with 2,500 students about 20 years ago. And over the last 20 years, he’s grown it to now be 225,000 students as the largest university in America. Many people still haven’t even heard of it even though it’s 3 or 4 times larger than Ohio State University or University of Texas at Austin. And, he wrote a book called Broken, which was about applying the lessons learned from running Southern New Hampshire University over the last 2 decades to big social problems, like our health care challenges, our prison problems, homelessness, climate change, you name it.

And, it’s almost like a window on the universe opened up, and I realized, wait a minute. I see how we can make the world better and equitable for everyone. It’s it’s you know? And I read it twice. Once fast and then once slower taking notes. And then when I was campaigning in New Hampshire, he was generous enough to do a town hall with me, and we talked about it. And I still think he is somewhat in disbelief that he’s a big part of why I decided to run for president.

Bert Martinez: it shows you that books, authors, messages, ideas make a difference.

Jason Palmer: Totally. I’m all about ideas that make a difference. In fact, I kind of am almost a collector of ideas. I have more than 1,000 ideas in a folder on my desktop. Some of them are billion ideas that I think could be made into companies. Others are world changing ideas. If I could go into this for a second, I was at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a number of years, and we were working on improving postsecondary education, helping more low income and minority students get into college and graduate from college. And that was the main focus of my work there, innovation to help improve college outcomes.

But the Gates Foundation kinda taught me that everything that you’re trying to change in the world can be measured. Like, they actually have a giant scorecard for all 27 of their strategies from malaria to improving higher education to financial what was that one called? It’s like, basically, like, financial simplicity so that there could be financial systems in various parts of the globe like microfinance.

And they were able to compare, like, which ones were actually better ROI for improving people’s lives. Anyway, at the end of all this, I realized the number one, idea at the Gates Foundation that’s probably gonna change the world the most are these 3 people working in kind of a back office. They don’t even get, like, nice offices. They’re kind of in a corner, and they’re at the giving pledge, which I’m sure you probably heard of. It’s like Warren Buffett has now given 99% of his wealth.

And so all these other people, and they’re up to, like, 500 or 600 multiple billionaires who have agreed to donate so much of their wealth to charitable causes.

And it’s 3 people. Three people have, you know, not done it all on their own. Obviously, all these wealthy people have to choose to give back at the end of their life or whatever stage of life they’re at. But just imagine, those 3 people have probably persuaded half a trillion, maybe a trillion in capital to go towards improving the world. And that’s pretty incredible if you think it’s just 3 people. We are 50 people in our group trying to improve college outcomes, and it improved from, like, 55% graduation rate to 62%. That’s something. Sure. But those 3 people moved half a trillion or a trillion of capital.

Bert Martinez: Yeah. It’s incredible. First of all, the idea of the giving pledge is a big idea. It’s a huge idea. And, of course, it got a lot of spotlight. First, you know, Bill Gates announced it. And then second, I think Warren Buffett embraced it wholeheartedly.

Jason Palmer: They did, like, a 3 person thing on Charlie Rose or one of those other shows. And, you know, and it’s interesting because the Giving Pledge, people just think it’s 3 words, but it really is like an idea that once you get that idea in your head and then you could execute on that idea. And it’s amazing what it can accomplish.

Bert Martinez: Absolutely. What’s the old saying that a few dedicated people can change the world? And typically, that’s what it is. I mean, America. 

Jason Palmer: Kind of what the phrase is. Like, it’s the only thing that’s ever changed the world.

Bert Martinez: Thank you. It’s the only thing and you can if you look at our history, it was a few founding fathers who said: We gotta do this differently. 

It was, you know, it wasn’t  a thousand people or even a hundred people. It was just whatever. It was a few people, and then that idea grew to maybe 20 or 30 and then whatever, and then you had a whole revolutionary war behind it. So it’s next just a few people, few dedicated people will change the world over and over and over again.

Jason Palmer: Totally. Totally. And I actually respect what they were able to accomplish in a way even more because they didn’t have emails and, you know, phone calls. And, like, I would see that guy Thomas or that guy John, like, once every 2 years, and we really bonded. And then we came up with this document, and, you know, Benjamin was there too.

Bert Martinez: Absolutely. Eva you know, again, they had access to mail, but mail back then would still take you several weeks, a month, a year. I mean, because if you were sending something overseas, you know, it’s gonna get on a ship and assuming the ship makes it through. You may get that letter and then, of course, correspond.

Jason Palmer: Then this I mean, I know we’re kind of off topic in a way, but this really came up during the pandemic when, you know, you were probably on Twitter too as I was. And I was like, wait a minute. They’re sequencing this virus in real time, and there are all these different, like, variations, and they’re all contributing to a database from all over the globe. I mean right. It’s an incredible amount of knowledge sharing. Like, that’s so far away from putting a piece of mail on a ship and having a 90% chance it gets there in 3 months. You know?

Bert Martinez: Right. It’s incredible. Alright. So I gotta ask you. I think a lot of people were shocked when the Gates just decided to divorce. Did that also take you by surprise?

Jason Palmer: It did take me by surprise. I worked with them for 3 years, and we probably saw, or were in the same meeting once every 2 months or something like that. And to all visible intents and purposes, they were very close. They loved each other. And, clearly, this was not something that was, like, brewing for multiple years. It kinda came to a head in a very short amount of time, and then they got to Boris, and we were all very sad, including all of my colleagues that I’ve talked to who were surprised by it. But, amazingly, they still continue to run the foundation. You know, I know a lot of married couples, including my parents, who, you know, are not even able to really be in the same room.

So the idea that they’re able to still co run, you know, a 50 billion foundation is quite extraordinary, actually. And I always thought they were both extraordinary people and even more so now.

Bert Martinez: Well and what’s interesting, I did a little bit of research on Melinda, and she is a pretty smart person. I think she is easily his equal, maybe his superior in a lot of ways, and I think he realized that. I think that’s why they connected on this logic level as well as this emotional level. So it’s good. It’s good that they’re able to work things out. And really, I think that, it’s a good example because not just because you’re divorced doesn’t mean you have to hate each other.

They’re I. I think that, you know, depending on what happened, theoretically, you should be able to work together and talk and co-parent. You know, my parents got divorced and They are like, 10, 12 years later, they got remarried.

Jason Palmer: I’ve heard of that story before. It does happen. 

Bert Martinez: It does happen. And so, yeah. I think the comedian Sinbad did the same thing. He got divorced. I think it’s 5 years later, they got remarried, and he said, you know, nobody else could tolerate our weirdness. So, you know, you gotta find somebody who’s willing to put up with your level of crazy. 

Alright. Let’s get back to it. Again, it’s extraordinary that this book set you on fire, And I wanna talk about this because one of the things that, you’re one of your points is that you think you have the ability to bridge these political divides, promote national unity, which we are sorely missing.

 And talk about this. Why do you think you have a sliver of a chance to lead the country and bring us back together?

Jason Palmer: Well, there’s probably 2 big reasons. So one is because I am kind of purple in and of myself. And in fact, I wear a purple tie when I go on TV, and, you know, it’s all over my website that I’m kind of a purple candidate. I’m running in the democratic primary, but I think great ideas can come from corners of the political spectrum. And some people have said, you’re a libertarian. And, you know, it’s actually true. I get Cato Institute documents sent to my house from time to time, but people have said you’re a progressive. And you know what? I agree with Bernie Sanders on Gaza.

Like, there you can agree with different sides on different issues and I really do, even people that I completely disagree with, I really respect and wanna understand where they’re coming from, and it helps me become smarter. It helps me understand the different kinds of quadrants. So that’s part of it. And then the second thing is that I, over the last few years, have run about 50 Jeffersonian dinners where I have gotten together people from different sides of an issue to talk about and try to solve complex, thorny problems.

This actually started when I was at the Gates Foundation where I would do these dinners. When you go into the University of Virginia like I did, you go to Jeffersonian dinners almost as a rite of passage. And over time, if you really like them, you learn to perform them and do them. And they have a whole artistry and specialness about them where 15 people are at a table, and it’s a table conversation.

And it’s got to the point now where I can actually host these dinners and have hosted 1 to try to diffuse a lawsuit between a foundation and one of its grantees, to try to bridge the divide between politicians on different sides of an issue. And I imagine if I get to the White House, I would actually host a dinner in the White House with 14 people or 15 people from both sides of the political spectrum. We would talk about it so this immigration bill, there are problems with it.

We can’t seem to get over the finish line, and we’re gonna broadcast it to the whole country. And everybody’s gonna hear your positions, and you better be on your best behavior and show what it’s like to actually disagree in a civil manner and so we could figure out what are the compromised positions. And I’ve gotten to the point now where I can kind of call a vote in the middle of these, and my goal is usually to get it to be a unanimous vote. But in these, you know, politician ones, you can never get unanimous votes.

But I do think that skill would be interesting and could make for great reality TV as well as we try to conquer these thorny issues that are dividing our country.

Bert Martinez: Man, that would be extraordinary. Not only would it make great entertainment, but also just a valuable lesson that adults can come together, disagree, but be agreeable about disagreeing. They don’t have to become jerks or violent or you know, we’re seeing so much craziness where if a Republican especially now, if a Republican aligns himself with a Democrat or one of their ideas, they’re gonna get lambasted. They’re going to suffer. And it’s not so much the other way. If a Democrat aligns themselves with the Republican, yeah, that’s a little bit of pushback, but not as much compared to the Republicans who have become very combative on everything.

Jason Palmer: I do agree with that. That probably means that we’re both democrats. Like, I’m smart enough to kinda recognize my own biases Right. But there are 32 congressmen and women who are part of the problem solvers caucus, 16 Republicans and 16 Democrats. And that’s how Joe Biden was able to get through some pretty big legislation, the Chips Act, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which really was mostly a climate change act, inflation reduction act, which really was mostly a climate change act. And it’s because there was a little tiny bit of bipartisanship. And, you know, right now, Washington is kind of sinking into the abyss as we talk. There’s probably gonna be another government shutdown.

Who knows if there will be aid for Ukraine or Israel? And wouldn’t it be great if there could be a televised dinner where we all get in the room, and guess what? The American people are gonna see how you behave in this room. 

Bert Martinez: And at the end of the dinner, there’s a fun food fight just to get it all out.

Jason Palmer: The sad part is I know that the way American society has gone, someone will storm out of the room, there will be some type of made for TV moment. But I do think the American people deserve to see who storms out of the room and who sticks through the hard conversation to the end.

Bert Martinez: Well, and you make a valid point. Look. The easiest thing to do is for you or I to storm out of the room.

I don’t. I don’t have an idea. I’m gonna call you a name, and I’m gonna leave in a huff. Right. Well, you know, that’s why divorce rates are high. That’s why, you know, people feel betrayed because they can’t express themselves. They can’t figure out how to have this tough conversation. Yeah. So instead of saying, hey, Jason or Bert, I don’t agree with you.

Maybe I don’t have any ideas, but this doesn’t feel right to me or whatever. Right. They shut down and they do something crazy. And, you know, I think of, oh, the actor Charlie Sheen when he had his meltdown.

Apparently, he is him and his in management, the producers weren’t getting along. And I don’t know exactly the details, but he chose a very public, very, I don’t know, funny way of dealing with it. And, yes, drugs might have played a part there, but the drugs just really allowed him to behave in the way he wanted to behave. I don’t think they were the cause. More, more of anything, they were. 

Jason Palmer: I don’t know, or was a symptom of the stress he was under dealing, you know, with that conflict that wasn’t being resolved. I don’t know. I do remember that incident. Yeah. I definitely remember that.

Bert Martinez: So one of the things that I agree with, one of the points that you brought up is that the president can create jobs. And I think this is ultimately one of the pillars or one of the objectives of any good government is to be innovative and create more jobs, whether it’s on a federal level or on a local level. I think, you know, this is paramount to a presidency. Give me your thoughts on this.

Jason Palmer: Thank you so much for asking this question because it allows me to really go deep on something that I hint at on the website, but we haven’t had time to turn it into something written yet. So we care about creating these jobs, these middle class jobs and better than middle class jobs for Americans, but we’re not measuring it in as detailed a format as we should be. So as a very simple example, you know, the jobs report comes out every month and with 272,000 more net jobs, which, by the way, the net jobs thing kinda disguises the fact that it’s, like, 4  million jobs gone and 4.2 million jobs created.

There’s a huge turnover in the job market every year. But what would happen if we actually upgraded the collection of that data to distinguish between kinda crummy jobs that pay, let’s say, $10 an hour or less or good jobs that have benefits that are kind of in the middle, like 15 to $25 an hour to what we call quality jobs, which are salary jobs that pay 50 thousand dollar a year or more. And then even there could be professional jobs, etcetera. We should have that thing documented and tracked to extremely granular detail. There is a database maintained by the labor department that updates every 2 years with these codes for what the titles of the jobs are.

And if we were really studying it at the atomic level, then we would know exactly how many ultrasound technicians there are, how many data analysts, how many data scientists. And if you knew that information and you had researchers tapping into it on a very regular basis, you could say, like, these are the jobs that are really growing. These are the courses and certificates and credentials you should earn to get those jobs. And I can see enough in this very fuzzy data to see that credentials are growing really fast.

These 6 to 12 month training programs where you get a certificate or a credential at the end. Think like Google Analytics Certification Or Microsoft SQL Server Certification. Like, some are in tech, but they’re not all tech. Some are in health care, project management, and manufacturing. Advanced manufacturing is growing a lot right now. And once you know that data, then you can actually implement policies to drive more jobs in those categories. And right now, it’s almost like we’re flying blind. We don’t know where the jobs are coming from. We don’t know what’s creating them.

We do know that small businesses create 67% of jobs. But if you double click on that, not any small business, actually, new businesses created in the last 10 or 15 years are really the job creators. And you know this because, you know, you’ve been deep in this for a while, but, we don’t even keep track of that. Like, is this a new business? Is this an old business? That’s kind of at the legacy part where it’s, you know, for example, oil and gas are kind of at the you could say they’re at the end of their life, but the end of their life could be 50 years of continuing to drill from the ground and create cash flow.

Whereas these new businesses as they crop up, like OpenAI, just created 5 or 6 years ago, it’s growing like a rocket. Its valuation is already 80 billion dollars You know? And how many employees are they gonna hire and how big are they gonna get? We don’t even track companies the way we should, and we’re overly focused on the big old school companies and not focused enough on the fast growing, job creating start up companies. At least, in the media, there’s a lot of hype around start up companies, but we don’t track it at the government data level.

And that’s why we can’t actually implement the best policy. Sorry if I went a little bit off there, but that’s there’s a huge potential, and this is my area. And I would love to have the smartest minds in the country working for me in the department of talent is what I would call it. 

I’d merge the education department and the labor department, and we’d be focused on helping make schools more connected to the labor force and helping us all be a lot smarter about how the labor force is evolving so we can actually implement policies that drive more of these quality jobs. That, you know, we should even be studying how happy people are at their jobs. 80% of people are very unhappy at their jobs.

What can we do to create more jobs that create happiness and fulfillment and purpose? We’re so far away from that right now, but I see that as like a second term of my presidency once we figure out how to get more people to the middle class and more people to the American dream with quality jobs in the first part of my administration.

Bert Martinez: You know, first of all, I love that. I would love to see that kind of report. What’s growing? What’s really not growing? What, you know, what kind of jobs are being created? Because you’re right. Again, it’s what I call marketing. Hey. We created, like you said, 4.2 million jobs. Oh, by the way, we’re not gonna talk about the 4 million jobs that evaporated.

Jason Palmer: Right. You know? It’s not even in the report. Like, it’s a lot of times, it’s not even there that it’s 239,000 net jobs. It’s not even the total number of jobs. I I the last I saw, it’s something like 40% of the workforce. Now this might be slightly off, plus or minus 5%. 40% of the workforce changes jobs every year. Wow. There’s a lot of jobs being created and destroyed every year.

Bert Martinez:  Okay. So here’s one of my pet peeves. I’ve had this issue. There’s been what I call this, this propaganda, this programming that, you know, you’re supposed to go from a high school to college and you get those big degrees so you can get those big jobs and you can get the big house and the big car and live this big life. But yet the reality is most people aren’t gonna do that. And second of all, we have trades, blue collar workers that are being, I don’t wanna say maligned, but these jobs are important.

Jason Palmer: They are being maligned. You can say that word. We need to trade and need to be made hot again. Yes. They actually are hot. You could make 75,000 to $200,000 a year, as a plumber, working with, you know, construction, manufacturing. These jobs are all over the place, actually, and you can learn the skills when you’re in high school. You don’t have to wait until you’re in college.

Like, a lot of these programs are available in high schools now around the country. You know, I spent some time with the Pipe Fitters Union out in Colorado just 2 weeks ago, last week. It’s all starting to blur. It was very recently. And, you know, they’re so I, you know, somewhat ignorantly thought pipe fitters are mostly about plumbing, because that’s where I see them is when they come to fix the plumbing in my house. And they gave me a huge education about, oh, no. There’s all the city water that’s running underneath all of the streets all over the place. You know, we go and fix the Hoover Dam.

We’re involved with, you know, all this the the, I would say, water treatment facilities. I mean, it’s like it get it was bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and, those jobs pay very well.

Bert Martinez: They do. Yeah. They do. You know, the other thing that I’ve always found interesting about every industry that I’ve ever had the opportunity to consult with is just like the example you gave. We have the surface understanding of what pipe fitters are, and then you get this education and you go from, yes, this month, all of a sudden you realize it’s like this huge thing. 

All the levels deep they go, and then you find out that there’s 1 or 2 different associations and there’s a magazine or maybe several mag it just goes on.

Alright. I wanna go back to the job thing because I think, again, this is gonna be the number one issue as we move forward, not only in this election, but the next probably future elections forever. We have, I think, and you kind of alluded to it. We have some companies that are paying $10 an hour. I don’t know. You know, if you’re a teenager and you’re living at home, $10 an hour is phenomenal. But if you’re an adult, that’s ludicrous. 

That’s almost illegal, in my opinion it’s like, you know, there’s such a huge disparity between a livable wage, which and and I don’t even like that term because a livable wage is like, hey, you’re breaking even. You’re living barely. And then so they’re you know, so you kind of alluded to this. You know, there’s a quality job and there’s a sub quality job or subpar and sub. What is a quality job versus a non quality job?

Jason Palmer: So I actually have a whole white paper we’re trying to get cleaned up so we could publish on this, but I’ll give you the gist of it.

A quality job is a salaried job that includes benefits and vacations. And this is one of my favorite things to ask at those Jeffersonian dinners is what was your first quality job where you got paid a salary? And, you know, there’s always interesting stories behind, oh, I how did you get that job, and how did it change your life? So that’s basically it. It’s about $50,000 a year or more, although some economists think it should vary based on where you live. Like, it might be 40,000 in a rural area and 70,000 in New York City, but you can basically think of it as $50,000 a year salaried with benefits. Yeah. And it defines that you’ve entered the middle class when you get to that job. You are now, you know, potentially living the American dream. You can actually get a home mortgage because you now have a salary.

You might not be able to get as big a home as you want, but you could actually get the mortgage because you’re gonna get this consistent stream of payments. The banks assume, even though the average person only keeps their job for 2.7 years or something like that, you know, they assume you’re gonna keep the job in perpetuity.

The banks kinda still run on that principle, or they’ll get some other job that pays the same amount or more. And at this point, we don’t even know how many quality jobs there are in America. Like, we have to guesstimate at that. And there’s a group called Jobs for the Future that is gonna attempt to help generate 75,000,000 more quality jobs over the next 10 years. They were one of my grantees at the Gates Foundation. They’re a phenomenal organization.

Maria Flynn is their leader. And, that’s the mission that I’m on, if I get elected president, when I get elected president, is to actually put the full force of the federal government behind the vision that Maria and her team put out there.

Bert Martinez: Yeah. Alright. So here’s a little bit. I’m gonna put you on the spot with this one because this is what they call it? Political dynamite? The 3rd rail. Because one of the problems I see, and this is on both sides. Okay? And I kinda consider myself more of I used to be a hardcore republican until they got in bed with insurance companies and should wear. . .

Jason Palmer: a purple tie too. It really feels like I can’t have those purple ties. Although ties are going out of style, so maybe I need to wear a purple headband. I don’t know.

Bert Martinez: Purple shirt. I have literally a closet full of purple shirts. So it’s actually one of my favorite colors. So it’s mine too. Okay.

But I have a huge problem with the government subsidies that we give some of the wealthiest industries in America. Beef industry, sugar industry, dairy industry, corn industry. It’s literally trillions. It’s definitely billions of dollars. You know? And it’s like, wait a minute. Why aren’t we pouring that money into small businesses or start ups or I don’t know. Let’s use that money and pay down the debt.

Let’s do something better with that money. What’s your take on this? Am I wrong?

Jason Palmer: That is not a third rail for me at all. Okay. This is one of those areas where I’m lockstep with the Cato Institute in that we do not need to be having corporate welfare for America’s largest companies. If you are getting subsidies to mine minerals from the ground or plant more corn than you need, these subsidies will be going away in the Palmer administration. They are billion. They’re not quite a trillion  but there’s quite a few of them. And, some of these laws haven’t been updated. The mining law dates back to 1872. 

So some of them haven’t been updated in forever. And, you know, that’s another thing that my administration will do that I haven’t had time to put on the website yet is every 10 years. Do we need to actually review how this law has done compared to its original objectives? Has it met its impact objectives? Is it working? And if not, we should ask congress, this law needs to be amended or this law needs to be set aside because it’s not achieving its objectives.

Unfortunately, we don’t run things with this measurement mentality in mind in Washington. So some laws like the 1872 mining law, they just kinda continue on forevermore unless some academic or person in a think tank says, hey. Does this thing actually work? And then they look at it, you know, 27 years later. But, you know, we should be getting regular reports when these things come up for I think of it as a 10 year renewal cycle on laws.

Bert Martinez: I think that’s a brilliant idea because we do have some really old laws on the books that, you know, like the mining law you bring up and some of these other laws that don’t make sense. We still have sodomy laws in some states, and it’s just like Yeah. You know, this is ridiculous. Let’s move on. And and and now we’re kind of gone back in time with Roe versus Wade and a bunch of men. I really do have a problem. Men telling women about their reproductive health.

 I have a problem with that. And, look, I’ve said this before. I don’t think there’s a woman who’s ever had an abortion, and there may be a few who did it, you know, just flippantly. Oh, you know what? I’m pregnant. I don’t give a crap. I’ll just have an abortion. I wanna continue partying. I would suspect that most women take that seriously, and, you know, it is a terrible decision to make.

It’s just a terrible decision to make, and it’s between them and their religious beliefs. That’s kind of leaving it at that. I would prefer that that child be given up to adoption, but our adoption laws are just archaic. I mean, for you and I to adopt a child here in America is so difficult.

That’s why people leave America and they go adopt in China and Europe and, you know, all these other places because you can just go there and fill out the paperwork and, you know, they’ll do some research in less than, I think, 6 months, you can adopt a baby. Here in America, that child could be living in your home as a foster parent, and it may take you 3 to 5 years. To adopt that child. And it’s a maybe. It’s not even a guarantee. It’s a maybe.

Jason Palmer: Yeah. These bureaucracies need to be reformed, and that’s a big part of what I wanna do with my administration. And part of why I’m running is we can’t just hire them, it can’t just be the same old civil servants that have always been there. Now some of them are doing a very good job, but we need to infuse the public service with more people who come from business and industry, who are very talented in technology and processes and systems, and figure out how to make it so it takes only a year to adopt a child.

That shouldn’t be so difficult. Or to take a more, you know, pressing example right this very second, so you could process asylum claims within 30 to 90 days instead of 2 to 3 years. You know, we need a thousand more judges at the border, asylum judges, and then we could actually process people as they’re coming in. And only about 10% of people coming across the border are valid asylum claims.

The other 90% wanna come here for work. We should have a guest worker program for them if there’s an employer that wants to pick them up and have them work for a summer in the fields or for a year doing some type of work, let’s make that program exist. But let’s not just keep having this giant problem at the border or this lack of adoption going on. Let’s actually solve these things one at a time with smart people and good processes.

Bert Martinez: Absolutely. I’m an immigrant. I was born in Cuba, and I’m grateful for the poll for the politics that were happening in the 1960’s because, otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. So I’m grateful. We do need to protect our borders. It’s crazy not to think that we don’t need to protect our borders. 60 minutes. I had an episode.

I think it’s just 2 weeks ago where they were saying a large percentage, and I forgot what the percentage is.

VIDEO: The number of migrants arriving at the southern border is unprecedented. Last year, US Customs and Border Protection recorded two and half million instances of detaining or turning away people attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. So what’s the fastest growing group among them? Chinese migrants. Yes. You heard that right, Chinese. We saw large groups, including many from the middle class, come through a 4 foot gap at the end of a border fence 60 miles east of San Diego. The illegal entryway is a new route for those hoping to live in America.

I don’t trust Chinese nationals very much. We have a history of Chinese nationals who’ve come here. They get an education. They go work for a company, and they’ve been caught doing espionage over and over again. We have this terrible relationship with China. When I think of doing trade with China, what I think of is toxic toothpaste, toxic toys, toxic lumber, toxic sheetrock. I mean, they just want to destroy America. They are not looking to be our friend.

They’re looking to compete with us and take us down. And so, where at least the Latinos that are coming over, and again, yes, there’s always gonna be bad apples, people who do drugs and and do terrible crimes, but that’s a small percentage. We don’t have a history of the Mexican nationals or the Latino nationals trying to take down a building or corrupt our inner infrastructure or anything like that. Take that in consideration when we’re trying to decide, okay, who we’re gonna let in and who we’re not. But I think our immigration policy is, again, archaic.

Jason Palmer: And it’s super archaic. So I believe we should move to a talent based immigration system that would be in the department of talent, by the way. Rounded out. And you would get points based on having particular skills that we need in our economy, whether you’re going to be a taxpayer and you’re already qualified for those quality jobs. Do you speak English? That would give you additional points too. Do you have family members here? Do you have a job lined up? And, this is similar to the systems that exist in Canada and Australia.

They’ve both seen a huge influx in what I’ll call talented, the world’s best and brightest, who have expanded their economies and helped them grow faster, and that means they have enough money for their Social Security and Medicare. You know? Meanwhile, we’re laboring under a 40 year old immigration system to that whole point. It hasn’t been upgraded in so long. And, you know, so we’ve got all kinds of people coming across the border, like you were just talking about, who then, we don’t have the ability to process them. So they just kind of, you know, blend into the society. And then we got all these people earning PhDs in our labs, and they can’t get a green card after they graduate, so they get sent home. And, you know, they’re just not willing to live here as an illegal or as an undocumented immigrant. And, it’s a shame.

We need to completely fix this system and be focused on attracting and keeping the world’s best and brightest.

Bert Martinez: Right. Look. During the Trump administration, he was pretty harsh on immigration, and I think that was okay. You know, did he maybe go over the line a couple times. Over many lines.

But here’s one of the lessons that I learned from it. We had these California farmers who had tons of crops that went unpicked. They couldn’t find people. And even though they were offering I think at one point, they were offering $25 an hour, Americans weren’t gonna pick that prop. Not even that $25 an hour.

And it’s just it’s just bad for you.

Jason Palmer: Have you ever gone apple picking or corn detasseling? These are hard jobs.

Bert Martinez: They’re hard jobs. I do not find those, what do you call it, to be, what do you call it, something that interests me at all. I mean, you know, it’s like they can, like, go to the apple archer and pick apples. No. No. I’m not gonna work for free and then pay them for the apples that I just picked. No. No. But, again, tons of food went bad because there was nobody there to pick them. And I love your idea of having a 1000 or 2000 or 3000 more judges To help get through this process.

Jason Palmer: It’s crazy that nobody talks about this. Everybody is almost like they’re on autopilot. We need more border control agents. We need more border control agents. We probably do still need a little bit more border control agents, but, really, we need many, many, many more judges. To actually process things.

Bert Martinez: And here’s kind of my idea. I’m gonna throw it in your idea bank. Maybe you’ll use it, maybe you won’t, but I think that if somebody wants to come over here and work, let’s let them, especially if they’re gonna help our farmers, let’s let them come over.

And we charge them a small fee to come over because it costs us money to process them. Maybe we charge them $1,000, which they can pay over time. Well, we could take that $1,000 to pay for the agents, to pay for the wall, to pay for the judges, to to pay you know, I mean, when we have literally millions of people coming over and we charge a nominal amount, not only are are they here, they get a permit, they they, you know and and I think that it will help offset the cost. And I think I’m thinking maybe both parties could get on board. Hey. The Republicans, hey. This is gonna offset the cost, and we can use the money for these other resources. The Democrats, because they wanna let everybody in or whatever. So I think that, that’s kind of my thought.

Jason Palmer: If we’re not of that on an even grander scale. There there’s lots of things that the government does. Now it’s you know, I’m a business person, so I think this way. There are lots of things that the government does where it’s not charging a user fee. Yeah. And here, you should have to pay for the cost of coming in here to be a guest worker or to become a citizen. Doesn’t need to be that much, but it at least needs to cover the cost so that it’s kind of a revenue neutral thing. And if you start thinking about it, then, well, well, what about all those toll roads that we have out there? Like, that should be paying for repairing the toll roads.

There’s no reason why Amtrak shouldn’t be breaking even. In fact, every other h three has actually privatized their railroad. We should privatize our post office and our railroad too. There are some things that the government does better, like a military, where we’re not gonna privatize our military, but there are many things that we should be privatizing or charging user fees, and that would allow us to reduce income taxes and actually get the budget into balance. And, it’s amazing that this hasn’t been done. The biggest one, by the way, is that the federal government owns so much land. All these. military bases that are finished where we could be selling off the land, they’re in every city, basically, And a lot of times, in very prime locations in cities as well where you could clean up a waterfront, put in new hotels.

We should be leasing or selling that land. The federal government has not had a balance sheet since 2013, which is completely crazy since you’re a business person, and I am too. And I talked to Steve Ratner at an Aspen Institute thing because he participated in one of the commissions. And I said, you know, why didn’t it get adopted? He said, we did all this work together on it for a year. We came up with the balance sheet, and nobody really wanted to do anything with it. They don’t even use GAAP accounting. So that’s even crazier.

So, you know, when we’re increasing the payments that go to people for, kind of transfer payments, that’s totally different than when we’re investing in making a bridge or building a new building. But we treat it all the same in the federal budget right now. We don’t actually have depreciation the same way. We’re not using GAAP. And, there’s a better way to run this railroad.

Bert Martinez: Absolutely. I, I will say I don’t like the term cost neutral or breaking even because that’s so very difficult to actually do. I’ve never seen it in business. It’s like you know? But I’m okay. I’m okay if the post office makes a profit. 

Back to stupid laws. We have a law book. We have a book. I’m sorry. We have a law on the books that does not allow the post office to make a profit.

And it’s ridiculous. Look. I hear people complain that they’re paying whatever 40, 50¢ for a stamp. Are you kidding? Where else can you move some? Look? Let’s just make it a dollar and leave it there for a couple of years because how else can you get an envelope with whatever it is, 8 or 10 pages from any state to any other state for 50¢? That’s a smoking deal.

Jason Palmer: It is still a smoking deal, like, because you would have to pay $9.95 for the lowest option at UPS or FedEx, probably the lowest option is $19 or $29. So Right.

Bert Martinez: It’s a smoking deal. And I think that, back to your thing about measuring, you know, we’ve all experienced going to a government office, and I wanna say 80%. And it seems like to me, 80% of the people there are dead. They have terrible attitudes. At the very best, they have a neutral attitude, like, they’re indifferent. We don’t care whether you stay, pray, or lay. Just I don’t care. I’m just clocking time.

Then you have that 20% that have a great attitude. They stand out. They actually listen to you and then they wanna help you. I just think that’s incredible. But if we were measuring some of these talents, some of these people, some of these metrics, maybe they could be rewarded. And I know the government isn’t set up for that, but maybe it could be. 

Jason Palmer: It definitely can be. This is another thing we haven’t changed in 50 plus years is the government service schedule. Sector, but they’re huge they still have pensions, which is not available in the private sector. And they have great health benefits too. We need to make it so you can make more money and you could be GS 16, 17, 18. It shouldn’t just be on seniority. It should be based on merit and talent.

And that can be changed too. Like, that’s a non sexy thing, but it could be really, really impactful, if you could actually bring better people into the government and promote those 20% who are the really positive solutions oriented ones.

But You have to kind of imagine that the government can become like Google or the government can become like pick your most innovative company, but it can be. There’s no reason why the government has to be this sluggish, hasn’t been updated in forever. That’s why I always say we need to upgrade our democracy.

Bert Martinez: And there’s nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, you know, it’s just one of those things that won’t be easy. It’s gonna be, you know, I remember years ago when the secretary of the veterans administration, Robert McDonald. 

He came in, and I and first of all, I think the only people that should be involved in anything with the Veterans Administration, they must have served on some level. We have these lawmakers that oversee the VA, but they’ve never served. And I and they don’t understand. And I work with VA, VA organizations, and they don’t understand what our troops are going through. They could give a crap list. They make these promises, and then they pull the rug or they break them. Anyway, so Robert McDonald 

Jason Palmer: That’s true. We don’t do the right thing by our veterans at all. That’s part of my policies to improve that.

Bert Martinez: And, yeah, and and I think that if we’re going to send people to war, the least we could do is take care of them when they come back. But, anyway, so McDonald comes in, and, I think he fired, like, a 1000 people because they were doing really crappy jobs. And, of course, you know, these are government employees and somebody filed a lawsuit and those 1,000 people got their jobs back because the judge says, hey. I’m sorry. You didn’t, you didn’t follow the process. These might be the worst people and, yes, they probably deserve to get fired, but you have to write them up. You gotta go through this process. Again, the system has to be updated.

A lot of our government agencies, including the FAA, are working on these horrible computers. It’s just like they’re Oh my god.

Jason Palmer: So much so much has not been upgraded. That’s why I have a whole pillar of my campaign about modernizing the government, upgrading the technology, upgrading the human resources, everything you’re talking about. It is not sexy, which is why I made it my 3rd pillar, to be honest, but it actually might be the most important.

Bert Martinez: You know, sometimes the least sexiest things are the most important. Look, discipline, not sexy. You know, accountability, not sexy. But discipline and accountability is what’s gonna make you the most successful. 

Jason Palmer: That’s the same area that has government accounting reform and a balanced budget. Like, these are all things we know we should be doing, but we’re not focusing on them enough. And they’re core to if we wanna put our country back on track. You gotta get these things done. They’re the basic blocking and tackling. 

Bert Martinez: Alright. I wanna talk about this. We got these 2 old folks running. Biden is 80 or 81 Trump is 77  You know, once in my opinion, Biden is too old, and Trump is too, I don’t know, crooked, too off centered, too erratic, too unstable, whatever. You know, he is not a good leader. to serve.

You know, by any measurement. If you go down the list, what makes a good leader, you will see that Trump meets none of these. Don’t take responsibility. Speaking of accountability or responsibility.

Jason Palmer: Does he tell the truth? Does he have to take? No. No. No. No. They’re all emphatic noes.

Bert Martinez: Right. It’s like, I wonder if his name is actually Donald J. Trump at this point because he lies so much about everything. You know, before I got to know him as a president, you know, I was, I admired him because he doesn’t drink. He says he doesn’t drink and doesn’t take drugs, and I admire his level of energy. And let me tell you, now that I’ve gotten to know him as president, and he does lie so much, I’m thinking he must take something. There’s no way that somebody so obese could have so much energy because he runs circles around any of his opponents.

He does have this miraculous energy. It’s gotta come from somewhere. I don’t know if he’s just mainstreaming caffeine. He’s, you know, supposedly drinks coffee. 

He doesn’t drink coffee, but I think he does drink Coke, so maybe he’s mainstreaming that. But I don’t know. I just find that amazing, but, so, I will give him points for his energy. 

But let’s go back to the age thing. I think it’s time for Biden. And Biden did say he would run again if Trump wasn’t running, but I think Biden needs to move over and give somebody younger with a little bit more zest, a little bit more energy like yourself or somebody else. And I think he has gotten too old. And I have a problem. Look. Orrin Hatch is somebody that I liked. He should have retired. What is this lady who died ? Feinstein. Come on. You should have retired. Pelosi, you need to just stay retired. Just go find something else to do. You can influence policy in a different way.

Jason Palmer: I will stick up for Nancy Pelosi that she did eventually step back and now Hakeem Jeffries is in charge. Like that that’s what Joe Biden should do at this point. He should be like George Washington and say I was gonna be a transitional figure. I’ve done my work. I passed these 3 major pieces of legislation. Now I’m riding off in the sunset to my Mount Vernon in Delaware and, you know, and have at it because there are a lot of great people. I mean, I was kidding a little bit before. I would love to be president.

I think I would be a great president, but there are many great people in the Democratic party. You got Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. You’ve got Gavin Newsom in California, Jared Polis in Colorado. Some people like Ro Khanna. He’s a congressman in California from Silicon Valley. You could even say, like, Mark Cuban would be somebody who I would say, you know, he’s a billionaire. He’s done more with business than I’ve done. You know, that type of person is who we need to rerunning the country. Some people had mentioned JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon as a possibility. You know, he’s also kind of a purple candidate, like myself. Not even sure if he’s a democrat or republican, but there are a lot of great people who could be leading the country, who are in their fifties or their forties, or even sixties would be considered young these days. Let’s let’s let the new crop of leaders pass the torch to them.

Bert Martinez: Well, I, I think you’re right. In fact, I’m going to text Mark right now and brought it up. Hey, Mark. Would you consider running for president? And, let’s see if he responds during the show here.

Jason Palmer: If he responds no, say, you’ve got a presidential candidate here who would love to talk to you about bringing the country together because Mark is on my list of people that I do wanna meet. One of the things I’ll go ahead and announce on your show is that I’m in the process of creating a super pack. The super pack is gonna be called Together, and it’s gonna be focused on trying to bring the country together by trying to get 20 young people elected to congress this fall, and it’s gonna be both democrats and republicans.

We want people who agree to be part of the problem solvers caucus to grow that group from 32 to 52, hopefully. And I did something similar back in 2018 when I announced publicly on Facebook that I wanted to help get 20 women elected to congress, and I put the whole list up. And then Bloomberg found out about the list, and they blew it up even bigger, and they put a lot more money in than I did. And 16 of the 20 women end up getting elected to congress. And I want this fall the big story is to be all these young people who got elected to congress on a platform of solutions, on moving the country to conscious capitalism, kind of a purple approach. And, I would love Mark Cuban to be one of the people that I work with on that. 

Bert Martinez: Anyway, Conscious capitalism, what the heck is that? What do you mean by that?

Jason Palmer: So conscious capital but I didn’t invent it. Conscious capitalism is a movement of people who are focused on the idea that businesses can be for good. This shouldn’t be such a controversial idea. And in fact, there’s four principles of it: that you have conscious leadership, that you put your people first, that you’re trying to do more than just make profit. You exist for a double bottom line or a triple bottom line. All the companies that I invest in would qualify as conscious capitalism in some way. And it’s a very it’s a somewhat amorphous term, capitalism in some way. And it’s a very it’s a somewhat amorphous term, but some states have started to codify it now.

In fact, up to 40 states now have laws for what are called B Corporations. And most people don’t know it, but the vast majority of companies are C Corporations or LLCs. And the law says that your primary purpose in fact, your only purpose is to make profit for your shareholders if you’re a c corporation. And I went to Harvard Business School. I love capitalism. I think that it’s great to make as much money as you want. C corporations should exist. But some people have decided usually later in life or if you have kind of more of a social mission orientation that you might wanna start a b corporation where you wanna be about profit, but you have other objectives.

Like, you wanna make sure you’re developing your people. You wanna serve your customers first. I just heard that Ralph Nader came out with a book, very recently about 12 CEOs who got it right. And I looked at the CEOs that were in there, and it’s conscious capitalist companies, like the CEO of Patagonia, Herb Kelleher from Southwest. Like, these are, you know, famous CEOs who made the company more holistic. It wasn’t just about profit. Now it could be maniacally focused on metrics. I’m maniacally focused on metrics.

But it’s not just the metrics of profit. It’s like long term. Are we developing our people? Are we serving our customers more than just one transaction at a time over the lifetime of that customer relationship? And my grand theory of the case here is that if b corporations get taxed at 15% corporate tax rate and c corporations get taxed at 25% corporate tax rate. More and more big companies are gonna say, how do I change myself into a b corporation so I get the lower tax rate? Well, you put your people first. You focus on the environment, the community, all these other things, and we will have a much better, more equitable society if that comes to pass.

Bert Martinez: You know, I think that’s great. I think that I could see a lot of C corps saying, yeah. Let’s just transition to B corp, and we’ll fake it because, you know, it’s easy to fake. It’s just like, what do you call it? A lot of these airlines, you can, I guess, donate money to them to offset emissions, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t wanna spend $72 for offsetting admissions. What are they gonna do? They’re gonna go buy emission credits from somebody else. It’s the most ridiculous thing. And so this is something that I I do have a problem with. I I I would love to protect our environment. I spent an enormous amount of time in Hawaii. I spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico now. And Hawaii specifically, you know, these people are, you know, living below the poverty line.

 I think there was a report that said to live in Hawaii, you need a minimum of $110,000, which very, very few people make $110,000 on the islands.

Environmental things to our detriment. You know, it started with the turtle with the straw on the nose, which I think was faked. At first, I thought I reacted like everybody else. Oh my gosh. This is terrible. I scuba dive, and I’ve been around these turtles a lot. I’m going, you know what? Chances of a turtle getting that up its nose first of all, the straw is gonna be floating on the surface. Anyway, it’s just like winning the lottery.

And for the turtle to leave it there and the photographer take a picture of it, another lottery. But anyway, like, you know, again, back to emissions, we have electric vehicles. I don’t know if you’ve seen this video, on c span where the guy and it’s not a hostile video. It’s not like they’re being rude. It’s actually a very educational video where the congressman is saying, hey. If we were if all the cars were electric tomorrow, how much impact would that have on our, you know, green or whatever the yeah. Yeah. And he said, like, 2%.

It’s this tiny percentage. And and then he goes on, well, you know, does it take more materials to make the EV cars? Yes. Because the batteries are, you know, the batteries are very involved. And so we’re not really helping the environment. It sounds like we are when you think about the electric vehicles, and if and if you don’t have to leave your immediate circle. And, you know, one of the other problems with electric vehicles is that they run out of batteries. So if you and I had to evacuate Los Angeles and we’re driving an e v, we’re gonna get stranded most likely on the freeway. There’s just no way you’re getting out of California quickly if it has to be evacuated, at least not out of Los Angeles or San Diego or, you know, Sacramento, you’re gonna be stranded on the freeway.

You know? So I think that we’re making too big of a deal with the environment. Do we have to protect it? Yes. Do we have to be responsible? Yes. But I think the pendulum swung too far. Your thoughts?

Jason Palmer: It’s a matter of degrees. I definitely agree. Like, one stat that you will probably appreciate is that our carbon emissions have gone down by 20%, the whole United States of America over the last 20 years. But no one will ever say that. But I think we should take a little bit of credit for that because that means we actually have done some good things. We’ve gotten better gas mileage. We have some people driving electric cars. I still think it’s less than 5%.

I have a Tesla. I love my Tesla. I do recommend everybody go get an electric car. They’re great. But I don’t think we should be mandating that people buy electric cars. We should provide incentives so that they buy electric cars. We should encourage it. We should move towards that direction for the sake of the environment.

But if we really wanna solve if climate change is your big issue, and it is a big issue for a lot of Democrats, then that’s a really complicated problem to solve because the US is doing okay. If we’ve reduced emissions by 20%, the real problem is over in India and China, their emissions have gone through the roof. And so that’s a really complicated problem to solve. How do you get Indians and Chinese citizens to be buying electric cars or to stop using coal plants? Like, the whole thing where Biden was saying, like, you know, I I I don’t want any more oil being drilled in the US, or I don’t want any more coal fired plants. It’s not the problem of coal plants in the US. That’s way down. That’s almost at the bottom at this point.

There are very few coal plants left. They’re all in China. They’re all in India. That’s really where we need to address this if we’re gonna solve climate change. And that’s a wicked hard problem, quite honestly, but nobody really talks about it that way.

The cars are the cars are part of the solution, but a bigger part is we gotta upgrade our transmission lines. Right now, we still have, like, if you just look at power lines that we have, these power lines, 30, 40 years old, haven’t been upgraded. We have much better ways to upgrade transmission lines now so that we lose less, through heat, and we lose less through just the bad conduction in the materials. There’s construction. Concrete is a huge contributor. Like, 8 to 10% of our carbon emissions comes through the processes we use to make concrete right now, but it would double the cost to use the new types of concrete. We could be putting windows in everybody’s house that, like, automatically when the sun goes through, you could actually get energy from the window

This is already. And is already in a number of, like, top end lead, buildings. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t buy windows. But it’s gonna be a million little innovations that’s gonna eventually get us there, not a million regulations.

They’re so lame. Put a whole roof on your house. I think Elon Musk even has one of those coming out soon.

Bert Martinez: I think so too. I and I, you know, but you’re mentioning India, and I think one of the reasons their emissions have gone up is, first of all, they’re going through the industrial process. Number 2, they’re receiving a lot of our trash. I mean, there there is tons of of documentation that, you know, the US and Europe sends India and some of these other third world countries a lot of the trash, and you see these people that are picking through the parts to get the little bit of gold and whatever that they you know, it’s reusable. 

Jason Palmer: It’s not even gold. It’s just copper, but it’s still valuable.

Bert Martinez: Whatever it is, the different components that they’re able to get whatever material. But, yeah, it is, again, back to your example with the job report. It’s misleading, you know, because you’re okay. You said that, hey. We’ve lowered our emissions by 20%, and that means what to us in the US? Does it mean you know, I mean, we’re still having air quality issues. We’re still having, what do you call it? To your point, we’re having all these regulations. Newsom wants to outlaw gasoline cars by some ridiculous date, And it’s like he doesn’t even have the energy now to turn to keep the lights on, and he wants to in fact, when they were having problems last summer, he asked, hey, Stop charging your cars.

Jason Palmer:  The whole thing, I would flip that whole thing around. We can actually have a pro innovation, green energy agenda that’s about, you know, electrifying our transmission network, upgrading our power plants. We should be introducing nuclear power plants again. The technology has gotten much better. Solar, we can do much more with solar. One of the most impressive things I saw was a map of, like, how many solar panels would need to be deployed across the entire state of Arizona in order to power all of the US. And you think, like, oh, it would have to be, like, the whole state.

But, no, it’s like this little tiny corner up in the corner of Arizona. If we had enough solar panels to fill one small corner of Arizona, we would actually generate enough electricity. So I think solar is gonna be the biggest out performer over the next 10 years. But we need to encourage more jobs, green energy jobs. There’s 25,000,000 of them to be had. And this isn’t about regulating old industries to death. It’s about supporting new industries and new jobs.

Bert Martinez:  And I agree with you. Look. Solar technology has improved tremendously. I think, you know, years ago, governor Schwarzenegger, came out with an initiative. He wanted to, I think he called it the million dollar, 1 million solar roofs or something like that. And, I think that should be mandated by the government in the sense of not old buildings, but any kind of new development, new office buildings, new homes, having 20%, what do you call it, solar panels and some kind of incentive rebate tax, you know, tax.

Jason Palmer: I would definitely do it by incentives, not mandate.

Bert Martinez: Yeah. I like that. Let’s do it the Jason Palmer way. Let’s do it by incentive because incentives are always better. But I think that places like Phoenix, like Las Vegas, let’s see or I should say Arizona and and then New Mexico. New Mexico, Nevada. 

Solar would do really well. Then we have certain areas where solar would do so much better than anything else. And so I think that could be incentivized very well. I think that,

Jason Palmer: It’s kind of already happening. So my sister just got solar put on her house in Nebraska. So, like, all the way to Nebraska, you can now get the panels installed, and you get paid back over 15 years. But there are some small but important law changes that need to happen. Like, the most important one is that the power company needs to be willing to buy back the energy that you create.

Now part of the reason why it gets stalled, as a business person, you’ll appreciate this, is that some states have tried to say, well, you pay, you know, $15 per kilowatt hour. You should be able to sell it back for 15. Well, it’s not exactly how it works. Usually, when you’re selling something back, maybe you might get, you know, 50% the price of what you would pay if you bought it fresh from the manufacturer. And we probably should just find that balance, whatever it is, 50%, 70%, something like that, so that all the states have this in law.

And that’s one of the types of things I would try to do if I were president, like, let’s not force the power companies to accept a 100% on the dollar for everything. There’s no incentive. Call back.

Bert Martinez: Again, back to incentive. There’s no incentive. I’m a business person. Why am I gonna buy something for the same price I’m gonna sell it for? I mean,

Jason Palmer: If they could buy it back for half price. Now all of a sudden, you’re the cheapest producer in their network. They would buy that all day long.

Bert Martinez: All day long. And so it’s amazing because, you know, when Enron and companies like Enron, when they sell energy, they’re not making a 50% markup Or a 100% markup. Right? They’re slivers. 10, 15% is considered big. 

Jason Palmer: That’s why when I hear that they’re opposed to it, I’m like, well, what are you trying to price at? Oh, I see. So you’re charging them more than they would get from their gas fired plant, and I know why they’re unhappy about that.

Bert Martinez: Alright. You know, something that we should have probably started at the beginning and that is give us a quick rundown. What is your background? You know, you’ve done business. I know you’ve been involved in a company.

Jason Palmer: So I started 3 companies right out of college, which we could go into, and sold to and failed spectacularly with the 3rd, which is actually sometimes the most fun to talk about because I learned the most lessons. And I went and worked at Microsoft for 3 years on a learning management system of the future. You could think of sort of like elearning 20 years before its time. Bill Gates came up with a great idea. We’re gonna make all these tablet PCs, and we wanna have an interactive learning system. And I worked on that back in 2002.

So very, very long ago before its time. And then I ended up having a series of jobs partly because I chose this as a 25 year mission that I would work at the intersection of education, technology, and entrepreneurship for 25 years. And my goal was to help lift a billion people out of poverty by working at that intersection. And that led me to a series of executive roles at Schoolnet, the Gates Foundation, new markets, the funds I’ve been running, and Kaplan, where I was a turnaround CEO in the middle as well.

And over that time, I do think the companies I work with, the colleges I work with, we tallied up. We’ve helped about 100,000,000 people improve their lives, either get credentials or get degrees or diplomas. So not quite pulling people out of poverty like my original mission, but I’ve ended up focused much more on the US than globally, which is when I first invented the mission, I thought it would be more of a global type mission. So I’ve been a turnaround CEO and entrepreneur, and most recently have invested in about 35 education and workforce technology companies.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of any, but I’ll tell you about a couple of them. So Credly is one of the most successful. They actually provide the credential infrastructure for Google Analytics certificates and Microsoft’s 6 of the top 10 tech company certificates. They also work with a 1000 colleges and universities to do digital certificates and digital degrees. They were recently acquired by Pearson for $200,000,000, and that was, you know, publicly available because Pearson is a publicly traded company. Another one I’ve worked with is a company that does education with people in prisons and jails. They’re in 13 states and 81 prisons and jails. It’s called Origin.

I’m very proud of that company. It’s growing really, really fast. It still only has, like, 1% of the prison and jail market. It’s really helping people reduce recidivism, helping them get credentials while they’re in prison or jail. And another company would be a company called Mursion, which does virtual reality training Mhmm. To improve people’s social emotional skills. It really originally started out as an in-class thing that some colleagues at the Gates Foundation funded where teachers would get a simulator, basically, to pretend, like, teach a simulated class, and then those teachers did better when they went to the real class. And a little company was created to do this.

There’s patents on the technology. And then they got McKinsey to sign up and do leadership training using the same software. And then Best Western wanted to train their hotel desk clerks. And then Starbucks wanted to train their store managers. And before you knew it, you know, 300 Fortune 1,000 companies of customers, and they were named, by Fast Company, one of the most innovative companies a couple years ago. You know, and there’s 35 companies like that that we’ve invested in across 5 funds over the last 20 years.

Bert Martinez: Wonderful. I love that. Yeah. That’s great. Lots of good experiences. Jason, with your technology background, and I know that, there is some information out there about you doing something with AI. Talk about this.

Jason Palmer: Sure. So you must have, like, really good ears or something. Because earlier today, we announced, and launched the first presidential AI that has ever been launched by a campaign. If you go to my website at palmerforpresident.us and you click on the little link that says palmer.ai, you can ask my digital avatar any question that you want about my campaign, my policy positions, even hypothetical situations, and I will say back to you exactly what my policy is and explain to you why. And I, you know, have to admit, my team and I, we looked at the alpha product the last couple days. We’re like, Jason, this AI is better than you on a few things. Like, it is me. These are my policies.

I do think every campaign will have one of these next time around. I mean, it’s partly because you need to know, like, when I send out text messages as part of our marketing campaign, a lot of people will write back, like, what’s your position on veterans? What’s your position on Gaza? What’s your position on abortion? There are certain key issues. And you can ask if you can ask me the 3 questions you really care about, be like, oh, I met that guy. I I know what he believes in.

Bert Martinez: That’s extraordinary. I think that I’m gonna go check it out. That I think is a phenomenal marketing tool. It’s it’s interactive video. So what better way to get to know the candidate than to be able to AI or ask questions through their AI avatar?

Jason Palmer: We’re multimedia here. I mean, I’m a startup technology guy. So we also have emails going out that are go you know, not just the standard marketing emails. It actually says it’s from Palmer AI. And it says, like, you can reply to this marketing email, and we will reply. And we’re already getting emails back. Back and forth. And then after, like, 2 or 3 back and forth emails, we’re gonna say, we don’t wanna do email anymore.

Click this button and talk to me directly, and it’ll lead people right to the AI that’s on the website.

Well, actually, we have a we we are kinda batting around. Should we sell people, like, their own version of their own AI if they wanna put it up on their website like this? Because it could be just you. It could actually do the whole podcast. You don’t even have to be here. You could just, like, feed it the 12 questions and let the AI do the rest.

Bert Martinez: You know, one of the things that Joe Biden had is that he’s been in politics forever. That’s both good and bad.

50 years of public service. You know, he’s been involved in different caucuses and commissions and, you know, obviously, he was a VP and now he’s president. So he knows the system well, but it is, I think, time for him to say, you know, so long. Let me give somebody else a try. One of the things I wanted to ask is if I think and I could be wrong with these numbers. I think that he, the media, was talking that he was able to raise, like, 80 million dollars  in a couple of weeks or maybe it was 40 million. It was a huge amount of money.

And they were comparing the, you know, the during the same time Trump was, like, a 10th or or a 20th of that. 

My question to you is, obviously, when you’re running for presidency, the presidency, it’s a huge amount of money. And It is. Do you see yourself raising that kind of money to stay in? Because one of the things that are against outsiders like yourself is the funding, and you need it. So how do you overcome that?

Jason Palmer: Totally. I I have definitely discovered that there is a democratic funder network that exists, and it is 95% behind Joe Biden. And I did know that coming in. Like, I’m not, Michael Bloomberg. I’m not a billionaire. I actually am someone who has done okay for myself, but this is you know, fundraising is a key part of my strategy here. And we have gotten a number of donations at this point. But to be honest with you, this is probably 90% self funded at this time, and I know why other candidates are dropping out.

Marianne Williamson dropped out of the Democratic primary. Dean Phillips did very well in New Hampshire, but, you know, he was just on Twitter today saying he thinks he’s gonna get less than 10% in Michigan, and I know he laid off a lot of his staff last week. It’s hard. It’s hard. Some people, I think, hire 2 big staff. We have a very small tight team of 6 or 7 of us right now depending on how you count. One person who’s part time. And, you know, it’s it’s, you know, it’s a difficult thing.

So I’m going out half of my week this week is gonna be fundraising, getting more people to decide whether to re up in the campaign. And, you know, this super Tuesday is gonna be a very important day. We have 2 places that we want to actually get a big enough percent that we earn delegates for the convention.

And possibly, in our dream scenario, we might actually win one of those places, and that’ll help put us on the map more. But we’ve done better and better in each state that we performed in so far. We feel like we’re the slow but steady that as others kind of fall away and run out of money, I’m I’m stewarding the money much more carefully, running this capital efficiently, like a startup. And I know my team always says to me, Jason, this isn’t a startup. This is a campaign.

But it really is quite similar to a startup. It really, really is. And, you know, knock on wood, my plan is to be the last one standing when Joe only has one more competitor to knock out and get the nomination.

Bert Martinez: That’s good. That’s a good plan. And, you know, to your point, in my opinion, I think you’re doing better than Bloomberg. Here’s Bloomberg. Not only is he a billionaire, but he owns a media outlet. Right. Nobody even knew he was running. I mean, it was just ridiculous. There were 2 billionaires that ran.

But so it goes to show you that it’s not just money. You need to have a message. You need to be able to resonate and connect with the audience because Bloomberg had tons of money, and he spent, like, they said, you know, close to a billion. It’s like 6 to 700 million. 

Jason Palmer: There’s a guy that was running in the Republican race. Ryan Brinkley just dropped out after raising and spending 80 million dollars. I will tell you, not confidentially because I’m sharing with everybody who watches your podcast, that I spent less than 1 one hundredth of that amount of money, and I think we’re having a much bigger impact on the discussion, the debate.

You know? When I was campaigning up in Nevada, like, Joe Biden actually came to Nevada in the final 2 days of that campaign, and I know because his schedules were published that he wasn’t planning to come to Nevada before. Now I don’t know that I got such a big percentage, but there were a few articles or a few TV commercials. Like, we were actually trying to put on a real campaign so that the goal is to get Joe Biden out of his shell and campaigning. We need to win over young voters. to win over independents.

And we need to create enough energy because otherwise, Trump has a lot of energy behind him. And there’s no way that someone who’s kind of staying put in the White House could possibly beat the Trump juggernaut. You’ve got to run a full fledged campaign. And that’s why people like Ezra Klein just came out a week ago saying, like, what can we do? How can we solve this? Because Joe might have been a great president with all these laws that he passed, but he’s not a great campaigner, and he’s not even campaigning for the most part. To give up the Super Bowl interview, that’s completely insane. That’s probably worth 20 million dollars in free advertising.

Bert Martinez: Absolutely. And I think, in my opinion, him not campaigning is either arrogance or ignorance because to your point, Trump can do no wrong. He’s got this Jager knot. He may not win the presidency, but he’s gonna give you a big run for the money.

Jason Palmer: I think he’s on path to win the presidency unless we have a change of energy. Now not gonna say it has to be a change of candidate. We need a change of energy. Yes. If all of a sudden Joe was spending as much time on campaigning as he is on foreign affairs, this would be a totally different thing. But he really is kinda sucked into a quagmire of foreign affairs right now, And that and that’s also an area where the United States people don’t really support, more engagement in international affairs. They want to focus on investing in our people here at home. And so the more they hear about Ukraine or the more they hear about Gaza, the more they just think he’s not caring about me. He’s caring about something else.

Bert Martinez: Well, and I think, again, people need to go and look at history. If people will look at the way we got involved in World War 2, everybody says now, hindsight being 2020, we should have gotten involved sooner. We didn’t get involved, you know, that if we would have gotten involved sooner, we would have avoided this and avoided that. And I think that, you know, I I think that, these wars that are going on, we have to either support it or not support it. 

Jason Palmer: We can’t be half pregnant with this thing. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I, and then there was that Republican debate where everybody was saying, like, I don’t think we should be involved with it, blah blah blah. I immediately went out on LinkedIn, which is not even really a place where you’re supposed to post on politics, and, you know, reminded people of how Hitler had taken over Czechoslovakia and Poland because he was trying to reunite all the German speaking peoples. And this is literally exactly the same thing that Putin was saying about Ukraine not being a real country.

There are all these Russian speaking people here, and I wanna recreate greater Russia. And he basically explained the same thing on the Tucker Carlson interview the other day when he went on for 30 minutes about the history of Russia and that Russia should include these territories. And, if we hadn’t intervened well, I should say, like, it was the most successful post I’ve ever done on LinkedIn even though it was all about history and politics and that history was repeating itself here, and we have to support the Ukrainians. But now we’re also to a point where it’s been kind of a stalemate.

There was a picture in The New York Times, a graphic of where the battle line has been, and it’s been almost exactly the same place for the last 2 years. There really is a stalemate. It’s like the end of World War 1 where they were at the Maginot Line, and everybody was kinda shooting each other, and there was no progress. And I do think at this point, we need to pass the aid to support the Ukrainians, and then we need to immediately get into peace talks to try to finish this thing out. And maybe Russia gets to keep Crimea or maybe Russia gets to keep a little corner of Ukraine. Everybody will be very up in arms. I don’t think you’ll hear any other presidential candidate explain this. But if we don’t, this war is gonna go on for 5 more years, and Putin is gonna win because he’s gonna wait us out.

He has longer staying power than we do, so we have to understand our own people are already losing interest. Like, you can see it going down, and so we have to work with the Ukrainians to figure out a way to finish this war in the next year after we give them the funding.

Bert Martinez: Yes. It is time to piss or get off the pot. I just looked at my phone and, no, I have not heard back from Mark, but, let’s see what we can do there to connect you guys. It has been, it’s been a blast having you on the show. I was certainly Yeah.

Jason Palmer: We went totally past the 60 minute limit, but I’ve been having fun. I hope you’ve been having fun too.

Bert Martinez: I have too. I think it’s been a lot of fun, and I’m always big. I believe that if you and I are having fun, the audience will have fun. So hopefully, that’ll be true. But, yeah, it’s been great, and I certainly appreciate you stopping by. And, man, I hope that worst case scenario, you wake Biden up. Like you said, maybe we don’t need to change candidates, but we do desperately need to change energy. He’s almost invisible. And when he does speak, it’s not it’s not with a high amount of energy, which goes to the whole age thing.

And, you know, when you listen to Trump speak, it might be completely 100% inaccurate, completely false, but he has energy. He has this incredible amount of self belief. It may be a lie, but he believes it.

Jason Palmer: Unfortunately, it’s not just him. His people believe it too. And when you come with that much energy and you get the crowd riled up, like, that’s how you win elections. Yes. And, and, you know, Joe Biden has been a great public servant for 50 years, but he’s never been known for energizing crowds. Right. Now he’s not even seeking out crowds. So this is a big problem.

And, you know, I really hope there’s only a few people that could actually convince him to do the George Washington thing, and I think that Jill Biden could talk to him. Right. I think if Barack Obama spoke with him, that’s another possibility. So Barack or Jill, if you’re out there, Joe has done a wonderful job as a great public servant, but we really need to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans. And I’m putting myself out there in hopes that Joe notices me and in hopes that he opens up the playing field. I would love nothing more than to see other great candidates get into the race and try to win the nomination.

Bert Martinez: Yes. I agree with you. Come on, Jill. Come on, Barak. Let’s do it for the party. Jason, thank you so much for stopping by.

Jason Palmer: Bert, this was wonderful. Thanks so much for having me.