SPEAKER_00: Okay, on today's program, Bradley Tusk, he is a political advisor turned startup investor. He was able to get stock in Uber at one of the earliest rounds as an advisor to Travis and the

SPEAKER_01: team over there on how to deal with the taxis, commissions, and politicians who were in the pockets of those taxi commissions to get Uber to spread across the world. Now, he made so much

SPEAKER_00: money from that prescient move to take Uber shares as opposed to cash for his services that he built that into his new model for his venture firm where he invests in companies like Coinbase and Circle, and then helps them with things like crypto regulation. I think he's also an investor in Bird and helped them with their regulations of having scooters on the street.

SPEAKER_01: He's worked on sports betting, and we talk about Facebook, and all the different regulations and the issues going on what actually motivates politicians. It was a really, really candid discussion and how mobile voting could save our democracy. It's an amazing, I think top 10 top five episode of 2021. You're going to want to watch this one twice. But first, we're going to talk about Facebook getting sued by the Ohio AG. Big story.

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SPEAKER_01: revealed they filed a lawsuit against Facebook stemming from the Wall Street Journal's Facebook files, and it alleges that management misled the public to try and boost their stock price. Okay, we knew this was coming. Whenever you withhold information, that's material as a public company, you can get yourself into big trouble. And attorney generals are, you know, spread out across the country. And all you need is but one to decide that they would like to engage your company to have it become national news. We've seen this many times Southern District of New York famously going after poker, poker, online poker, you could have crypto lawsuits that happened with the attorney generals in Florida going after specific ICOs. There are many attorney generals out there, ready to take on causes. And it's one of the great parts of our system in America is that, you know, you as a corporation, or an individual, need to really be at your highest level of ethics, morality and legality. Or you might get caught up by some attorney general who would like a pelt for their wall, or who feels that their constituents have been done an injustice. And some people might think that this can be abused, obviously, it could be. But let's unpack this case, because we knew this was coming. Anytime you have, you know, these kind of leaks, the civil or criminal private, you know, lawsuits can happen, or, you know, these

SPEAKER_00: ones by attorney generals, I'm no expert on the law. But let's just talk about the broad strokes here. Obviously, I talked about the the Wall Street Journal articles on Episode 1289 and 1296. And as well, a bit

SPEAKER_01: on the all in podcast. To date, there have been 16 articles published by the Wall Street Journal in their Facebook file series, the most recent was November 9. Series is obviously ongoing. The

SPEAKER_00: Facebook files, of course, included documents leaked by Frances Haugen, who testified before Congress on October 5. She came across as very credible, they tried to discredit her since that time, you know how

SPEAKER_08: this works, this playbook. We covered the hearing specifically on Episode 1298, if you want to go back

SPEAKER_01: really at the heart of this, I think is teen girls being negatively impacted by the platform. And those were in internal documents between 2018 and 2020. Also, the big question about the algorithm, is it designed to make people more engaged by sharing more toxic and anger inciting content, spreading religious hatred in India, and Facebook's weak response to human trafficking, these were all things that came out. Now, anytime you have a billion people on a platform, you're going to get the entire scope of humanity. So in Facebook's defense, it is impossible to play police billions of people using a platform. So I don't think that they're responsible for a billion people's behavior on their platform, I believe, you know, that there is a common carrier type situation here, I think how we should judge these Facebook and social media platforms is how they respond to things. And then I think the algorithm is a unique, specific aspect to this where editorial curation is occurring. So when you editorially

SPEAKER_00: curate something, you will take some responsibility for that content, when an editor looks at something

SPEAKER_01: and says this should be on the homepage of the New York Times or CNN, they now have inherited some amount of responsibility for that content, whether it's slanderous, untrue, copyrighted, whatever it is, that's kind of how the law works. So is an algorithm an editor? I think what we're starting to realize is it's somewhere between something that's odd, it is automated, but it is making editorial decisions, it's just having the computer doing it. So if you look at your feed, and it was just reverse chronological order, I think you should have your protections under the law as a common carrier. The second you start saying, show this first, show that first, without it being very simple and clear, like, show the most commented, show the most voted up, I would say that those are community driven inputs. But once you start looking at the algorithm and say to the algorithm, what's going to keep people on the site longer, that's an editorial decision like YouTube's. And so I think that those need to be either you inherit some responsibility for those, or you disclose how those work explicitly, like you literally show the code of the algorithm, I think that's what we'll wind up is the algorithm having to explain why it put something up there ahead of you. And if it said, the tone of these is charged, and there's, we suspect or we indicate in the commenting on this thread, there is a cantankerous tone, it's on a scale of one to 10. This is the, you know, a nine in terms of how heated it is. If they had to say something like that, then the person can say, show me less heated conversations, right? So if you did those kind of tools, and you explain what the algorithm doing, that'd be kind of interesting if it said, Hey, I'm showing you Ben Shapiro, because you clicked on Milo Yiannopoulos. And now I'm showing you Cernovich. And now I'm showing you whatever's to the right of that, because we think the stuff to the right is more charged. If they had to explain the algorithm, you'd be basically educating the public on why they're seeing that and then giving them the ability to turn it off. That is where I think this will wind up. That is my own suggestion. I came up with that from first principles, like, if you're going to be manipulating

SPEAKER_00: people, why don't you unmanipulate them by just explaining? What do you think? Is that a good idea? Do you think they should explain why the algorithm is picking this maybe explain the tone of the content, maybe explain what it's considering showing you next? How interesting would that be?

SPEAKER_01: If it had the YouTube video, it said, to go deeper, we're going to show you this to go and show you the opposite, we could show you this and it did like choose your own adventure. So you're watching a video, it says, going deeper on right wing, we're going deeper on Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos style content, showing you the opposite with Rachel Maddow and whatever MSNBC, or showing you something more

SPEAKER_00: factual. And it said, here's your three choices. How interesting would that be? Well, they don't do that. Because what they found is if they don't tell you and they just hit you with stuff, you're going to stay longer. If you have to make those decisions, maybe you'll say hey, this isn't good for me, don't show me that anymore. And then you'll get off the platform. That's their big fear.

SPEAKER_01: This lawsuit focuses on Facebook's failure to alert shareholders of the to these specific issues. In other words, there was a cover up, and there was a whistleblower, right? So the Ohio public employees retirement system is a Facebook shareholder. So now they have a different style of claim. They're not like victims who are kids or religious group or somebody subject to hate speech or a user who felt manipulated, and got, you know, an eating disorder. This isn't on behalf of a customer. This is on behalf of a

SPEAKER_00: shareholder, different type of responsibility. So here's the breakdown of the lawsuit. Ohio AG Dave Yost filed the lawsuit on behalf of Ohio's public retirement system and all other investors, we should invite Dave on the podcast, please. The lawsuit claims that Facebook management misled the public about their impact on miners and the effectiveness of the platform in order to boost the stock price. Okay, let's pause on that claim for a second. Facebook management intentionally misled the public. When you say misled the public, there was an intention to do that. This wasn't inadvertently misled the public. This is I think

SPEAKER_01: implied that this would be intentional about their impact on miners. In other words, they pretended there

SPEAKER_00: wasn't a negative impact. And the fact that they were considering launching Instagram kids, kind of shows they're doing the opposite. Not only they are misleading the public that there's an impact on miners, they're kind of going deeper on it, that would show like, recklessness to me. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know how you'd frame a reckless concept here. But if you knew that speeding was dangerous, and you knew speeding in this specific area was specifically dangerous, i.e. the kids like this portion of the highway, there were a lot of accidents and the road wasn't even and had, you know, more accidents than other places. And you knew all that and then decided to go another 20 miles over the speed limit, that would be reckless indifference, I guess I don't know the legal concept. But it seems reckless. So they quantify these damages by looking at the stock price movement around the release dates of the Facebook files. Very interesting. So now they've pinned it to an event. Ohio's retirement fund bought 47.6 million of Facebook shares in early July at $352 a share. According to the lawsuit, today's stock price is $343 a share, every set represent like a two or 3% loss here 1.4 million on the 47.6 million. Here's a quote from the lawsuit about Facebook stock declined between September

SPEAKER_25: 13 and October 21. Facebook stock price declined by $54.08 per share over, or over 14% representing a decline of more than 150 billion in Facebook's total market capitalization. Since October 21,

SPEAKER_01: Facebook stock dipped down to 312 a share, but it jumped back to 343. So is this core like correlated? Is it caused it was obviously in some way played into this the public sentiment around these Facebook papers obviously would lead some people not to buy the shares or possibly some people to sell the shares. But do keep in mind at the same time, they were having this crazy app tracking transparency challenge that they had from Apple, Apple not allowing them to target their users. And then you can add to that as well that they're spending all this money on meta and renaming the company and all those rumors were starting to swirl. So maybe people, you know, those things also played a role. Maybe this is a headwind against Zuckerberg. But my gut tells me that they're such a juggernaut that the stock price is going to not only recover, I think the Ohio's retirees are going to be in the black again. So then what happens with this lawsuit? That's the danger, I guess, of these lawsuits is how do you prove harm if the thing's going up? I think the next way to prove harm would be to say, hey, is there been a revenue decline or did revenue growth slow or did user growth slow? So you could double click on this, forget about the stock price, because maybe the entire market's going up. So here's some tips for Attorney General Dave Yost, how much did Facebook grow in comparison to their contemporary Google, Apple and Amazon during this period? So if we see Apple, Google, and Amazon are and Netflix, etc, are growing faster than Facebook, you could argue that the delta between those two numbers is because of this. So even if you're made money, you maybe didn't make as much money as you should, then you can look at their revenue growth, okay, revenue growth, quarter over quarter since this time year over year compared to before they had these problems, that would be kind of interesting. So in other words, if during the cover up period, the alleged cover up period, did they because it also is like, are they

SPEAKER_00: actually required to release this information? I don't know if they're required to release this information. You know, if they're doing studies internally, and they're debatable, are you required to release them? I don't know that you're required to release them. The fact that you're even doing the studies, this would be Facebook's defenses, hey, we care about this stuff, we did studies, and we required further information. I mean, we all know that using the internet and depression and social media and looking at images, whether it's on TV, or MTV, or in a magazine can cause body dysmorphia, that's nothing new. So we were continuing our research, no harm, no foul. And that's going to be their defense, I think is like, hey, look, we're doing more research than anybody, we spent this much money on research, how dare you say that we don't care. That's obviously incorrect. So if they were, in fact,

SPEAKER_01: covering it up, allegedly, did they grow faster because of that, and then you withheld that, and then they could have gotten out of stock or never bought it, if you had been more honest. So I think that's where it's gonna sort of all wrap up. Just as a quick segue. As I mentioned during the intro to today's show, Bradley Tusk is on the program. And I asked him what he would specifically do if he was advising Mark Zuckerberg. And he had some amazing answers. Tell me if you think she should be a top five episode of 2021. We're going to do our twisties at the end of the year, or into the new year of the best moments on the show. So tell us what your best moments were email producers at this week in startups.com. Tell us who your favorite guest was. Tell us who your favorite returning guest was. Tell us your favorite question that I asked favorite news story favorite Jason rant, come up with whatever category you want. You make up the categories funniest moment stupidest moment, you know, whatever you WTF moment. Jason funny response moment, come up with whatever moment you want for the twisties and we will do them in their year end episode email producers at this week in startups.com. If you want to come to one of our meetups this week in startups.com slash meetups or meetup, either of those should work. And we have now meeting number three is going to be happening, I think for London, New York and Los Angeles. In mission number three, they're going to actually do content and they're going to have five startups pitch. And I'm going to come on the zoom, and I'll judge the stars or who knows, maybe I'll show up in person. So the meetups are cooking with oil, there's 10 cities underway. And we're adding two cities a month, three cities a month. So maybe your city could have just five, 10 founders get together and help each other grow their companies. And then eventually, in this mission three, we're going to bring some of our investor friends to each city. So it's going to be founders for founders, missions one and two in the meetups. And then mission three, we're going to add investors. So it's a very focused event, no salespeople,

SPEAKER_00: no vendors, no sponsorship yet, maybe in mission three or four, I'll let somebody host these and buy the drinks and pizza or whatever. But I'm trying to keep it non commercial for now and just make it founder by founders for founders with some investor friends since founders need to raise

SPEAKER_35: money. Okay, you're gonna love this Bradley Tusk interview. Stick with us. Are you falling behind

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SPEAKER_40: next up on the program is a political consultant turned venture capitalist and investor. His name is Bradley Tusk. And he was offered to be a consultant to a little taxi company that I was involved in called Uber. The founder Travis said, Hey, we don't have a lot of money, but we could give you some shares. Bradley made the right move and took the shares over cash and, uh, now has a speciality in investing in startups that have to deal with regulators and the government for his first

SPEAKER_41: time. Uh, this is his first time on the pod. So welcome to the pod, Bradley Tusk. Yeah. Thanks for

SPEAKER_44: having me. So you and I never really met during the Uber days, but we were both involved in the company early. Um, you got involved, I believe when Uber was in one city, San Francisco. So Uber was in

SPEAKER_47: San Francisco, Travis kind of dealt with that political mess on his own. They came to New York,

SPEAKER_49: got a season's assist letter. And I got a call saying, Hey, there's a guy with, from, um, from Will it, which is my Bloomberg's, uh, financial family office. And Steve Ratner called me and said, Hey, there's a guy with a small transportation startup. He's having some regulatory problems. Could you do us a favor and just give him some advice? And I was like, sure. And talked to Travis. And then as you said, he called back and said, listen, I can't afford your fee, which take equity. I didn't know what equity meant. Um, but I said, yes, that's what's back during the series a and then spent the better part of the next few years running campaigns all over the us, um, to legalize ride sharing. And the thing that I think we figured out, uh, was that we could turn our customers into political advocates and use them as a countermeasure

SPEAKER_53: to tax these kinds of political muscle and lobbying. And this was a seminal moment,

SPEAKER_40: I think in the history of tech startups, because previously making software, you know, it wasn't like you were running into the government or the real world all that often.

SPEAKER_55: Uh, when you, uh, decide you're going to do an Airbnb or make self-driving cars or provide an alternative to taxi services, which have a unique protectionist racket around them, which we'll, we'll double click on in a moment. Uh, yeah, you're going to face regulators and you're going to need to take a different approach. And I remember, I think it was New York where at some point I remember talking to Travis and the story broke on social media that when you opened

SPEAKER_44: the app, they said, Hey, they want to put a cap on the number of Ubers in New York. Yep. Yep. You should call up, uh, you know, this representative. Was that the first moment that,

SPEAKER_58: that let's face it confrontational tactic came up? No, we started in 2012 in DC actually. So,

SPEAKER_49: um, we launched in DC was going well. And then, you know, taxi did taxi's typical thing. They got a member of the city council to put in a bill, basically that would outlaw Uber. Um, and at the time, you know, we didn't know if this would work or not, but we sent an email from Travis to all of our customers saying, look, if you like this thing, you want to keep using it. We need your help. And the course of a week, 50,000 people organically, you know, reached out to the city council and said, I want this thing. And not only did we kill the bad bill, we passed our bill unanimously, including voted for it by the sponsor of the bad bill who then voted for us. So that was the first

SPEAKER_16: time we did. So you flipped the person who the taxi lobby was putting the screws to.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah. And if, if it took, I take a step back here, it's actually fairly straightforward, which is this.

SPEAKER_65: Uh, so I spent the first 15 years of my career directly in government politics before getting into tech. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager. We ran for mayor. I was the deputy governor of

SPEAKER_66: Illinois, Chuck Schumer's communications director. So I've seen politics from lots of different angles. And there's one truth to it in my mind, which is every policy output is shaped by a political input and that's it. You have to assume that every decision made by every politician is solely based on reelection and nothing else. And if you understand that you could then impact the decisions

SPEAKER_49: they make. So we think about it. If you're a politician, all things being equal, you raise money from taxi, you do what they want, right? Because that's, that's how you kind of raise money. Then all of a sudden we're able to start sending thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of individual constituents to a city council member, a state senator, mayor, whoever it is saying, no, I want this thing. And then those political inputs outweigh the money that, that, that members were getting from taxi. And that's why we want. So in all these cases, I've now, you know, investigating my third fund with the private 45 deals, uh, out of the venture fund so far, it's all really based on that one insight, which is you gotta reshape the political inputs

SPEAKER_66: to make what you need in the interest of the politicians. You need to do something for you.

SPEAKER_69: So let me pause on that for a second, because I think this is something that's profoundly important. The nature of a politician, according to Bradley Tusk is,

SPEAKER_40: they care about staying in office. And if they can stay in office, if they have a higher chance of staying in office by supporting you, or they have a greater chance of leaving office by not supporting

SPEAKER_55: you, that's how you should frame working with politicians as a startup founder.

SPEAKER_74: Oh, that's perfect. Exactly. I mean, look at basically, if they don't think-

SPEAKER_76: I've never heard anybody say it so candidly.

SPEAKER_77: Yeah. I'll go even one step further. I wrote this in my book. 99.9% of politicians are desperately

SPEAKER_49: insecure, self-loathing people that can't live without the validation of holding office. And they will never ever choose kind of what's right ahead of what's politically expedient. And by the way, I bet that back in the Greek Senate and the Roman Senate and wherever else, same thing. This is human nature. These are the people who run for office. Let's accept that's who they are. And then let's

SPEAKER_79: give them the reasons to do what we want based on inputs that make sense to them, not just things

SPEAKER_40: that we think they should be doing. Okay. So I have no choice but to double click on this second most

Chamath Palihapitiya: profound insight that you have. They are insecure people who desperately crave validation.

SPEAKER_82: Yep. So given that, validation comes in the forms of votes and being important and being-

SPEAKER_47: Yeah. Votes, fundraising money, press coverage, polling numbers, and most importantly,

SPEAKER_66: just your average person thinking that there's somebody because they're in the state assembly or

SPEAKER_49: whatever it is. Got it. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yeah. Mike Bloomberg was an exception.

SPEAKER_77: You know, but you know, with Mike, yes, he was absolutely an exception. He's the only person I ever saw govern that only looked at kind of what he thought was the right public policy and not the

SPEAKER_79: politics. But in fairness to the politicians, Mike had billions of dollars. He had a stable of people like me who could kind of handle the politics and deal with it. Resources.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. So even though he absolutely, on a consistent basis, truly did the right thing, whether or not it was helpful to him politically, his ability to sort of survive that was significantly

SPEAKER_92: greater than almost anybody else's. And this manifested itself most acutely in his battle against the school unions in New York or- That was certainly one and they, you know,

SPEAKER_77: but it was a lot of stuff. Like if you think back around early, early, early, early in his first term,

SPEAKER_49: you know, we passed a bill to ban indoor smoking. And now, everyone has replicated that, not only over the US, but all over the world. But at the time, it was incredibly controversial

SPEAKER_77: and unpopular and people hated us for it. How could you take the city that never sleeps and take away this activity that so many people like to do and force them outside and the cold and all this stuff. But to his great credit, he said, this will save a lot of lives. He didn't

SPEAKER_49: really realize because I think he was just thinking about it from a New York perspective, it ended up kind of being emulated all over the world. And so it saved tens of millions of lives, maybe more. And so he did the right thing. Or I'll give you a smaller example, but I think it tells the story well, which was right in the shadow of ground zero, a mosque was being built.

SPEAKER_77: And a lot of people felt like, how dare you build a mosque right by this site where- I remember it well, yeah. And Mike, to his great credit, and Mike is certainly not Muslim, he's Jewish, just said they have a first amendment right to be there. And while, and I will protect that right.

SPEAKER_49: And he did and just took all of the hits and all of the blows. And look, you know what, we got reelected twice. So I will say, now I know that, again, we had all the money in the world,

SPEAKER_77: so it's not totally normal. But I do think that if you can govern in a way that actually delivers

SPEAKER_49: results for people, you can piss off various powerful political interests and still get reelected. However, you have to have the brains that Mike Bloomberg has, you have to have the balls that Mike Bloomberg has. And worst thing that would happen to him is he'd just go back to

SPEAKER_103: being a billionaire. So, you know, he had a lot, he had a lot more risk tolerance.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So you, yeah, you take out that, oh my God, you're not going to be reelected. That creates a certain fearlessness in the candidate because his life not being the mayor was equally

David Friedberg: good or perhaps better.

SPEAKER_108: Better, much, much easier for sure. Much easier. No one's like, why did you go to Bermuda this weekend? You know? Exactly.

SPEAKER_100: He just does what the he wants. So he was different. Now, I would say to some extent,

SPEAKER_95: when I was deputy governor of Illinois, Obama was a state senator, and then I also knew him when I was

SPEAKER_77: in law school, he was a professor. And he had some of that too, more of a traditional politician, but some of the same kind of instincts that Mike had. And so occasionally you see it,

SPEAKER_66: and maybe when I said 99.9%, I was being uncharitable, so we can reduce to 99.2%, but it's about that. Sure.

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SPEAKER_55: I think directionally correct. And when you look at New York politics specifically, there's some weird stuff going on. You have AOC on one hand, who is a member of the squad, most closely aligned with, I think the socialist democratic party. And I was watching as a former you know, New Yorker growing up in Brooklyn and living in Manhattan as an adult. And I watched her chase Amazon out and kind of like gleefully say like, well, we could put that $4 billion towards something else. And then people were like, you realize that was against it's attack. That's a tax

SPEAKER_44: refund against tax that will never be paid paid. So therefore you don't, it's not like you have the $4 billion and we just handed them a dump truck of $4 billion. And then you have Chuck Schumer who,

SPEAKER_40: you know, I guess you worked with. So maybe you can tell me what's going on there in New York with regard to this movement, because we just had this election where it seems like people are saying, you know what? A little bit too hysterical on the hysterical left. Yeah. A little bit too crazy on the Trump crazy right, alt-right, whatever we call that now. It seems like there's a move to the middle or is that something that's always been there?

SPEAKER_66: No. What do you make of politics?

SPEAKER_125: A little optimistic,

SPEAKER_66: but a few things. So the Amazon story is actually an excellent example of what we're talking about,

SPEAKER_77: which is there was no question that New York City would have benefited from having Amazon's headquarters there. Of course. And if you look at the $4 billion in sort of, you know, giveaways they would have gotten, any company creating the jobs they were creating and the ways they were creating them would have been eligible for $3.5 billion of that, right? So it was really $500 million, not $4 billion. But what AOC knew, and she's really smart, right? I don't agree with her that much, but she's very smart. Turnout in her primary is 10%, 12%, something like that. Because of gerrymandering, the only election that matters for her is the primary. That 10 to 12%, which is roughly 20 to 30,000 people, they are as far left as you get, and they genuinely hate Amazon. And she understood that, and the state senator understood that, and the state rep understood that, and the city councilman. So they said, look, for my own benefit, my next election will be easier to be against this thing than for it. And that's why they killed it. So, you know, for as long as we have gerrymandering,

SPEAKER_49: and as long as turnout in primaries is 10% to 15%, the ideologues or a handful of special interests will almost always call the shots. That's why I'm actually working on a project right now to my

SPEAKER_77: foundation to make it possible to vote in elections over your phone on the blockchain. Because in the same way that we were able to mobilize ultimately millions of people to weigh in on Uber's behalf over a period of a couple of years, and that's how we won, I remember thinking when this was happening, if people could vote this way, the people who were emailing and texting and tweeting and helping us, they never vote in legislative primaries, right? They don't know who their city council member is or any of that stuff. But it's not that they're so apathetic they won't do anything. It's that the way that we require people to vote is too much of a pain in the ass, and they won't do it. And so as blockchain technology got better and better, we started

SPEAKER_133: funding pilots. So we've now funded 21 elections in seven different states where they're deployed,

SPEAKER_134: military or people with disabilities have voted in actual elections on their phone.

SPEAKER_55: So how does this mobile voting project work? Is this going to be where I just take out my phone

SPEAKER_133: and I can vote? Ultimately, yes. There's a lot of steps between this and that. But we are right now building our mobile voting technology. I just announced that I'm putting 10 million dollars of my own money into a grant program to do this. And we will make it open source to every government

SPEAKER_117: who wants it in the world for free. Mobilevoting.org. People can go see it.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah. So what's the bridge between, you know, I take out my phone and I vote for president and

SPEAKER_133: where we are today? Yeah. I've got to build technology that the critics will say, yeah, this actually works. So the very Mike Bloomberg-esque move, I put most of the critics that I could find

SPEAKER_85: on the payroll and said, okay, help me build something. So now- Who's against mobile voting and why?

SPEAKER_77: So a few reasons. Ultimately, if you benefit from the status quo, you don't want to see a change.

SPEAKER_142: So if you're a union, a trade group, you know, a political boss of some kind, you like things

SPEAKER_79: the way they are. So you're not looking for change. Because you've optimized it so well? Yeah. Over the decades? It works for you. For sure. So like, let's say you were-

SPEAKER_146: What does that mean in a practical way? What have the unions figured out? Yeah. Yeah. So you're the teachers union, right?

SPEAKER_65: Turn out in a typical city council primaries, nine, 10,000 votes, right? Tiny, right? 11,000 votes.

SPEAKER_77: You have the ability in that tiny electorate to move enough votes and money that council members are terrified of you. As a result, you say to them, block charter schools, block education reform, block all of these different things that would give kids a better education. And they listen because they're afraid of losing their next primary or flip it around the right, guns. You know, there's a shooting in a church or a school or whatever it is. It's thoughts and prayers and vigils. And everyone says, we've got to ban assault weapons. And then it never happens. The reason why it never happened is imagine you're a Republican congressman from Florida and your district is gerrymandered. So the primary is the only election that matters. And turn on your primary is 12%. When NRA members are half that 12%, you're never going to vote for an assault weapons ban because you'd be sacrificing your seat in the next election. But imagine,

SPEAKER_79: turn out we're 50% in your primary. Just based on math, you would vote for the assault weapon ban

SPEAKER_77: because you would lose your next election if you did it. So the good news is, these people believe in very little, and they're adaptable, but we've got to have the right inputs that they respond to

Chamath Palihapitiya: to shape the outputs. Now, there was some app, if I remember correctly, in 2020 in the Iowa caucuses

SPEAKER_154: that didn't work. So it wasn't mobile voting. It was reporting. And we told the DNC not to do it

SPEAKER_133: because we were like, we don't see how this thing's going to work. They didn't listen. They literally hired some political hacks to run it. They it up. And it would have set us back a tremendous amount. I think because of COVID, no one really remembers it. And so it wasn't as catastrophic for us as it could have been. But yeah, I mean, look, on one hand, there's, there's lots of excuses to sort of

SPEAKER_77: not introduce new technology into voting from concerns about hacking to concerns about functionality or whatever else. At the same time, we have a democracy that's completely dysfunctional and broken in every single way. And eventually you hit a point where, and this sounds a little pessimistic and crazy, but 30 years from now, I'm not sure we're still one country, right? If we can't resolve any issue, guns, climate, immigration, healthcare, abortion, whatever it is, at a certain point, people say, you know what, I'm going to go my own way. It's like couples get divorced. So I think the only way to save the union is to dramatically increase turnout, especially

SPEAKER_157: in primaries. And the only way to do that is to make it a lot easier, which means voting on your

SPEAKER_40: phone. And also, why is voting limited to a day in person? For sure. For sure. I don't understand this. There's every other country in the world seems to have a voting window.

SPEAKER_55: Yep. What would happen if we had one full week to vote in a presidential election?

SPEAKER_164: That goes up. So some jurisdictions have been doing that.

SPEAKER_133: Have they really?

SPEAKER_47: Yeah. Not shockingly, they have early voting periods. It goes better, right? So now they still limit it to say, like, I remember we had the election in New York last week, and I looked at, oh, maybe I'll vote early. And I live on 19th Street. There was only one prince available to me.

SPEAKER_90: It was somewhere down in Soho. And I'm like, that's too much of a pain in the ass. I'll wait

SPEAKER_133: till election day. But it was still one more option. But if you're a political boss, you don't want higher turnout. You want lower turnout. And so as a result-

SPEAKER_104: You want your turnout in the lower turnout. Correct. I think I understand it.

SPEAKER_90: And so you're blocking anything that could cut against that in any way, because you don't care about democracy. You don't care about reform. You don't even care about substantive policy. You just care about political policy.

SPEAKER_40: It's just a left or right issue, or both of them want lower turnout, and it's just

SPEAKER_98: virtue signaling on the market. It's the same thing on each side.

SPEAKER_55: So the left actually wants less voting turnout because they have locked it up so well with their union side, and the right has locked it up so well with old people and whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_175: And the Tea Party and all of that. Got it.

SPEAKER_77: So yeah. So look, so ultimately, I just don't see a solution to the situation we're in absent radically increased participation. And I think that if we made it safe and available

SPEAKER_176: on people's phones, people would do it. I don't think it's that complicated.

SPEAKER_178: If Bloomberg had announced a year earlier or two years earlier for president, would he have

SPEAKER_133: done better or run? No. Not if he had run as a Democrat, no. So yeah. Couldn't win as a Democrat, huh?

SPEAKER_79: So Mike had looked at the presidency in 2008, 2012, 2016, and then ran in 20.

SPEAKER_133: I was involved in all of those looks, right? So I kind of know how it went down every time.

SPEAKER_77: And in each case, Mike ultimately didn't run until 20 because he felt like either he couldn't win, or in 2016, where he was looking at running as an independent, he was afraid of being a spoiler and inadvertently electing Trump. Of course, he might've been the only thing standing in the way in retrospect. By 2020, because Republican politics has shifted so

SPEAKER_133: far to the right and because Trump was the incumbent, the only play was to run as a Democrat. And while Mike wanted to do it, I think it literally just came down to, he just said to himself, I don't want to sit in my deathbed one day and regret not trying. So I'll try.

SPEAKER_66: But the politics of the party had moved so far to the left that a kind of pro-business, centrist Democrat, which is not at all kind of what the primary voters were looking for at that

SPEAKER_40: point. But given how horrible things have gone in the country, do you think he would have a better

SPEAKER_184: chance today than he did at that point? Good question. It's my dream candidate,

SPEAKER_133: by the way. He's my dream candidate. No, understood. I think he's done, Michael turned 80 in February, so I think he's done running for office. But he's a sharp 80. I mean... He is. He is. I still talk to him. He's super smart. And look, Mike, even if he were at 80%, he's still sharper than everybody else at 100.

SPEAKER_95: Combined, yeah. Yeah. But I don't know because take Joe Biden, right? Joe Biden's numbers are

SPEAKER_90: terrible. He's at a 38% approval rating. Almost as bad as Trump. Yeah, almost as bad as Trump.

SPEAKER_77: And I think part of the problem is this. The system is so up and our politics are so broken and dysfunctional that people run for office and say, the reason we haven't solved it is because you

SPEAKER_66: haven't had me yet. I am different. So you're Barack Obama. I'm post-political. You're Donald Trump. I'm anti-establishment. You're Joe Biden. I'm a return to normalcy. And they promise that

SPEAKER_77: they're going to fix everything, and they can't because the system makes that absolutely impossible. So the voters say, you lie to us, and they swing back the other way. So we just have these wild swings from cycle to cycle because everyone feels like they've been lied to. Everyone's unhappy with the performance of their government. And so I think even when you get some stuff done, and they did pass the infrastructure bill last week, it's kind of too little too late or whatever the right cliche would be, and the voters are still unhappy. Fascinating. If you're a startup founder,

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Chamath Palihapitiya: world in tech of navigating the political landscape at this point, present day, present moment? I mean,

SPEAKER_204: we know who's done the worst. Right. So best and worst. So I would put it into two categories if

SPEAKER_206: that's okay. Okay. Yeah. You can redefine the question. I will allow it. And there's big techs, right? Okay. So on big tech, there's- Let's go big tech first. Yeah.

SPEAKER_47: Five. So it's Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and then maybe kind of Twitter, Uber,

SPEAKER_129: a few others are like one level, right? Yeah, sure. Airbnb, yeah. Airbnb, right. Of that group, Facebook has done the worst by far. Okay. And if you look at it,

SPEAKER_77: I would argue they're paying a significant price for it substantively. So Libra, which was their

SPEAKER_49: payment system, I believe was designed in anticipation of eventually there will be new privacy regulations in the US. It will limit our ability to monetize data. And therefore, we need new revenue streams.

SPEAKER_77: Payments is a good way to do that, but they need federal approval to do that. It has never happened. And by the way, there's no reason they shouldn't have approval to do it other than-

SPEAKER_210: Yeah. I mean, Apple has payments. Yeah. Google has payments. Why can't Facebook have payments? Because everybody hates Facebook on the left and the right. It's really that simple. They would,

SPEAKER_40: they basically block themselves because of their bad behavior, inability to communicate, you'll tell me what it is. They couldn't participate in a new category because they just assumed they would be blocked and they didn't even try,

SPEAKER_212: or they just got feedback and people were like- No, they tried. They just couldn't,

SPEAKER_61: they couldn't achieve it. Yeah. Cause everyone hates them. Look, here's the fundamental mistake I would argue that Facebook has made the whole time, which is they treat people like idiots. Meaning

SPEAKER_77: I believe that the consumer's capable of understanding, you said to them, look, if you want to be able to like share photos of your cat, find your best friend from the eighth grade online for free. We have, we're a business. We have to have some way to make money. So we're going to monetize your data and show you, show you ads. Right. If you don't want that, you could pay 20 bucks a month or whatever it is. So you don't have to have that. Right. And then people could understand that. Instead, what Facebook constantly said was, no, no, no, everything's free and everyone's protected.

SPEAKER_49: And then everybody wants that. Yeah. Yeah. And it was such a bald face lie

SPEAKER_77: that everyone knew it wasn't true. And so every group, the left, the right, the center, the media, the regulators are all like, screw you. You just lying to us incessantly.

SPEAKER_49: And they came to a point where even among the people that everyone didn't like of big tech,

SPEAKER_47: they just became the worst. Zuckerberg is also sort of the least capable politically. So Tim Cook is very skilled politically, right? He has done a great job navigating, uh, Apple, uh, where they don't

SPEAKER_98: get that much regulation. They don't have that many headaches. It keeps them out of the, out of

SPEAKER_40: the firing squad. He is like, in a way, a politician. He is incredibly savvy. He had no problem sitting to, uh, to the left of Trump and visiting the white house. And you know, he has no problem, uh, defending his position of being in China. He just said like, we need to operate in every country. We have a moral imperative to do that. And I, who I'm hawkish on China was like, I understand your point. Yeah. The engagement is a valid, uh, actual position to take with regard to despots and communists. If we engage them and we're intertwined with them, it's harder for them to be involved in

SPEAKER_55: malfeasance or for us to go to war because our economies are so integrated. So he is, Right. I think the, the best, Yeah, I think that's right. Do you think he's the best at it? Is he the best at it today?

SPEAKER_230: Of, of the, you know, Bezos, Sundar, you know, uh, that crowd. Yes. I think he's the best of,

SPEAKER_232: of that group at it. And I think Mark is, is the worst at it.

SPEAKER_55: Is it Mark's problem, you know, and it's, you know, I hate to bring this up, but the, the cat's out of the bag at this point with SNL basically making fun of him for having like Asperger's or some inability to communicate. And I, I do think that's a little bit cruel, but in a way you have no choice, but to address it because it's so obvious, right? And he's got such a powerful position. So, you know, if the, if the president had Asperger's as well, we would have to talk about it. Right. I don't know if he has it or not, but it certainly feels like it. His inability to communicate on a personal basis, how much of that is what's happening here? Or is it just his

SPEAKER_77: behavior? There's two problems. So, so one would be, it is harder for him because again, I don't know what he has or doesn't have either, but it seems like he has some challenges, right? When it comes to, to communicating and in some ways good for him that he's, you know, confronting

SPEAKER_49: him. But the other problem for I could tell us, he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Right. So he just decided like, I'm brilliant. I'm the smartest guy. Therefore I understand government, policy, regulation, media, everything better than everyone else. Right. Because he is smart and

SPEAKER_236: gifted. He is, but you know what? Like with massive blind spots. Right. And the world of

SPEAKER_77: policy, every sort of subculture is different. And like you made the point earlier, you asked the

SPEAKER_49: question, you know, what are the incentives, the currency that politicians care about? We identify votes, money, press, whatever it is. Adulation. Yeah. And therefore you're just working with a

SPEAKER_77: different set of metrics and tools. And I don't think he's ever understood that. And I don't really

SPEAKER_242: know what happened to Cheryl and that she was sort of very dynamic and popular. They should have put

SPEAKER_69: Cheryl in charge. I mean, if she had, she understands staff power, she is the opposite of him. Yeah. I thought when they did this meta announcement, the power move would be for him to move up to

SPEAKER_40: executive chairman and be chief product officer. Yeah. Or product visionary and do what Larry and Sergey did, which was put somebody else in charge. Yeah. And when they need to call the CEO, you could say, I don't work there on a day-to-day basis. I don't know. Right. I don't have to come to Congress anymore. Yeah. Totally. Was that the most savvy move in the world by tech CEO's founders with Sergey and... Well, that was... Because they Kaiser Sozated. They Kaiser Sozated.

SPEAKER_77: And they got themselves out of, you know, they also just basically said, pretty, this incredible thing. I'm worth tens of billions of dollars. I don't want to deal with this . You go deal with it. And they got themselves out of the firing line. Right. And they still have the power they want. They still have the money they want. They have voting control.

SPEAKER_255: Yeah. And Mark just hasn't done that. So that's been challenging. What would you... Listen,

SPEAKER_55: I don't want you to give your services away for free, but we're here. We're investors. Yeah. We've got to do some deals together. You're a great guest already. It's going to be a five-star show. I'm putting... I'm nominating you right now. We're ready 25 minutes in. I appreciate that. For a top episode of the year. Cool. If they... And I don't think you're selling services anymore, right? You can't buy your political services. You can only take an investment.

SPEAKER_260: Yeah. Well, if you're a startup. Yeah. I own a consulting firm separately. I don't work there,

SPEAKER_137: but yeah. So that you can hire them. But yes, you need me to invest.

SPEAKER_11: I'm assuming Facebook is not hiring you. No, no. By the way, I've said what I just said to you

SPEAKER_137: publicly plenty of time. Got it. So I'm sure they don't love me. If Mark came to you,

SPEAKER_118: Cheryl came to you and said, listen, we understand we this up royally. We'll just do whatever you tell us.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah. Okay. Tell us. So I read a column for Fast Company, some other publications, actually wrote my most recent column about this specifically. What should they do? So the first

SPEAKER_77: thing they have to do is they have to accept that they have this up. There needs to be a genuine

SPEAKER_49: apology without your fingers behind your back or whatever immature thing Mark's got going on. Just say, look, we created this amazing technology. It has brought a lot of good to a lot of people,

SPEAKER_77: but it is brand new. And in any white space, there's a lot of unknowns. And where we screwed up was in thinking that we could handle all the content on the platform ourselves. And the reality is we can't, and no one can. And if I were them from day one, I would have been like, hey, government, academics, everyone else, you want to help be involved in content moderation? Great. Go have it. Because guess what? When shit goes wrong every day, which it will, now I can blame you, right? As opposed to sort of, but Facebook kind of just refused to sort of

SPEAKER_79: spread out the blame and responsibility. And as a result, they set themselves up to fail. They couldn't, you can't solve the content moderation problem, but at the same time, they owned all of

SPEAKER_49: it, right? So one is you got to broaden that out. Two is, I think that you have to figure out a way to understand that things like, do you know, section 230 is of the telecommunication? Of course. Right. So section 230, which, which protects a platform like Facebook from

David Friedberg: liability or Verizon or Squarespace or GeoCities, whatever, whoever, right, whoever.

SPEAKER_98: It's going to change, right? And rather than fighting tooth and nail to keep it the way it is,

SPEAKER_49: anticipate that it's going to change and get out ahead of it. Same thing with privacy. So we've got, we've got GDPR in Europe, it's a regulatory privacy framework. At some point, we're going to have that in the U S figure out what you want it to be and be a good actor and be proactive and go make it happen rather than just tooth and nail trying to stop any kind of change or any kind of reform,

SPEAKER_269: because you just have no credibility, uh, in doing that. Okay. So number one,

SPEAKER_40: I'm going to admit that we up. Number two, uh, we are, we're going to open the kimono and just say,

SPEAKER_55: listen, this is a big problem. We're not going to be the ones to solve it. Our society has to solve it. We're going to give you all the data. We got all the academics. Let's build a big circle here.

SPEAKER_40: Let's build, build a big tent to figure out what we as a society want content moderation to be. We understand hate speech. We understand threats, but for stuff on the margin, we need to have a bigger discussion. Number three, Hey, section 230 was great. It helped build an industry, but we should have an open discourse about when we are liable. And if we allow, you know, the Russians to buy ads

SPEAKER_55: with rubles that should be on us, or maybe we get, you know, one or two strikes for this, but, you know, there needs to be some way for section 230 to evolve. We agree with that. Perfect.

SPEAKER_272: Same thing with, right. Embrace a proactive agenda. And then the fourth one we discussed before is

SPEAKER_77: create a pay option where you say, if you don't want your data monetized.

SPEAKER_275: So brilliant. That has been my position from the beginning. You open up Facebook tomorrow,

SPEAKER_151: Instagram, it says, would you like us, would you like the service to be free in exchange for advertising or two, we now have Facebook pro just like Netflix. You can take the ads out on Hulu. You can buy ad free, or you can watch ads. Netflix, Disney have no ads. You pay for them.

SPEAKER_212: 995 a month. We delete all your data. You are not in the database period. Why won't they do that?

SPEAKER_268: That would be the ultimate, ultimate, it's not even a concession. It would be the ultimate checkmate. It flips the whole thing on its head. Yeah. It's a checkmate.

SPEAKER_260: So Zuckerberg says, I saw some article today where I was reading it that, oh, it would be a giveaway

SPEAKER_152: to the rich. It would allow the rich to be able to enjoy ad free Facebook and everyone else.

SPEAKER_277: He literally said that? Oh. Yeah, he said that.

SPEAKER_278: So you realize how, I got to pause on that for a second. Yeah.

SPEAKER_212: That is so condescending towards poor people. That is like these woke idiots in my Twitter stream, you know who you are. When I say, oh, wow, MIT OpenCourseWare is available on YouTube. This is

SPEAKER_44: amazing. You can get an MIT education for free. And they're like, if you have a phone and access, and it's like, are you saying, it's like poor people don't have access to the internet. I'm like, really? When is the last time you saw a person in the United States without a phone and

SPEAKER_260: internet connectivity? 90, because I have the same issue with mobile voting, right? 90 plus percent of American adults have a smartphone. It's, and the people who don't, it's probably by

SPEAKER_74: choice. But yeah, they're, you know, bloodites are really old or whatever. Phones are free.

SPEAKER_197: Like literally anybody can buy an Android phone on the internet right now on eBay. Use one for 25 or 50 bucks and have access. You may not be able to play the latest game, but for 25 or 50 bucks, you can buy a phone and you could use it for free at any Starbucks, which is everywhere. There's free

SPEAKER_275: wifi everywhere. It's such a condescending position. And like you said, he's so full of that people actually, he, he doesn't, he thinks he's outsmarting us when he says something stupid

SPEAKER_286: like that. Yeah. And he doesn't realize. It's to your point.

SPEAKER_95: Yeah. And so to take it one step further. So I've been incubating a new social media platform for

SPEAKER_77: religion specifically. And, and I've been building it kind of with the advice I just gave in mind and saying, okay, I'm going to assume that section 230 protections will be different. I'm going to assume that there will be a privacy framework and we are building in a way that's completely decentralized. So a religious leader creates a community, they control it. They decide who's on there. They do content moderation and they decide if their community sees ads or not. And if they decide that they will see them, we share the revenue. And so you can, there are other business models that can work here that address these issues. You just have to be willing to change.

SPEAKER_178: I'm really interested to see what happens with Twitter blue. Did you see the Twitter blue

SPEAKER_290: announcement? Did you pay for it? No, no. What'd they say?

SPEAKER_40: So Twitter blue is basically 2 99 a month. Um, you, they bought a company called scroll in New York,

SPEAKER_55: which I was an investor of Tony how great job. So when you click on a story, if it's part of the

SPEAKER_40: Twitter blue network, they don't have ads in it. You can read a story. And I think they're sharing revenue with those publications. Eventually they'll share paywall stuff too. Yeah. And you get to put a timer when you tweet and a couple of other features like that, but basically that's the right step in

SPEAKER_55: the right direction. 36 bucks a year. You're going to have an ad free Twitter like experience with great content provided. I'll tell you the other thing that really, um, is one of Zuckerberg's blind spots is he never shared revenue and he always screwed every partner he ever had from, you know, Eduardo and every partner he had that he, or a company he acquired every employee had. There's just like this long list of people who he screwed. Yep. And that accrued to him over time, all this bitterness. And, you know, now you look at somebody like YouTube giving 55% of their revenue to creators or other platforms, you know,

SPEAKER_40: giving 70% in the app stores, whatever it is, Twitter now is giving a revenue share. All of these revenue sharing people, he could have built his own group of Airbnb hosts, Uber drivers, Uber customers to be part of the Facebook defense. Like you said, how could he ever mobilize his people?

SPEAKER_197: Like the people who use his products hate him. Yeah. He could never do that playbook of the Airbnb hosts.

SPEAKER_297: No, no. Cause look, he's become a utility in the same way that nobody likes the phone company

SPEAKER_77: or the electricity company. Nobody really likes Facebook either. Uh, there is a political playbook like we use with Uber or I'm an investor in FanDuel. We used it with FanDuel. We used it with Bird,

SPEAKER_49: where if people love your product, you can mobilize them politically and it can work,

SPEAKER_77: but they have to really care about the product. And if you treat them like in the way that Facebook does constantly, uh, they, they won't do that. And so he has completely sacrificed the goodwill

SPEAKER_269: of the media, the regulators, the consumers and everyone else.

SPEAKER_40: How did FanDuel and all of the other wagering gambling, um, startups,

SPEAKER_212: how were they able to, in such a short period of time, let's say under a decade, turn around, uh, an entire group of constituents who were anti-wagering the NBA comes to mind. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_151: Certain states come to mind. How did that all get turned around? Is there some inside baseball we're not aware of? I mean, I know about the Supreme court ruling.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. So that's the past rule is part of it. I think there's three or four different factors that, that kind of led to this. And, and I've, I've been in the gambling space in different ways for a long time. Wagering, wagering, wagering, wagering.

SPEAKER_304: You know what? Everyone's called the gaming. I'm like, it's gambling, let's call it.

SPEAKER_151: It's gambling. Listen, I tell people, startups are gambling. We're gambling. We're betting on startups. Most fans, we're betting on founders.

SPEAKER_74: We're betting on founders. I love it. Gambling, wagering, let's go. So, so anyway,

SPEAKER_77: so I think there's a few things. So one is FanDuel and DraftKings were operating for a couple of years in kind of a regulatory gray space as most new startups do, because by definition, if the law can anticipate new technology and account for it, and the people who make those laws would be entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats, right? So almost always new technology is not going to be completely covered by the existing regulations because it's a new thing. So they're operating in this gray area. Then the kind of hits the fan, we get cease and desist orders from like 40 plus states in like a two day span. And we had to go out and run campaigns in a couple of dozen

SPEAKER_49: states to re-legalize daily fantasy sports. But the thing that we had were our customers, right? They were really passionate. I remember like I would talk to, or my team would talk to, let's call it a state rep in Georgia, I'm making this up. And we'd say, look, let's be honest.

SPEAKER_66: Here are the people in your district who are FanDuel and DraftKings customers. Let's be honest. They don't know who you are. They probably don't even know that the state senate exists as an entity,

SPEAKER_308: let alone who the members are. However, they love this thing. And if you take it away from them,

SPEAKER_309: we are going to register them and we're going to make sure they know your name and they're going to come out to vote and they're going to take you out of office. You know what every politician may

SPEAKER_77: say? Fine. No problem. And then, so that happened. And then after that, the Supreme Court overturned the congressional ban on sports betting. It was a long case that kind of wound its way through the judicial system. And that then freed up all 50 states to come up with their own individual regulatory frameworks for sports betting. So there are still states that don't have it. A state like

SPEAKER_49: a Utah probably never will, right? There are states that either have kind of a religious bent to them or whatever it is, but governments need revenue and they always want more and more revenue. And if your choice is to get it from traditional taxes or you can get it from kind of third party sources, you'd rather get it from third party sources because it's less politically fraud. And so as a result, the legalization because of the Supreme Court, the desire for revenue, and I think the understanding that people who do play these things are really passionate about it, all combined led to this paradigm shift where now you're seeing, you know, a couple of dozen states, I think about 32 or something like that, have legalized sports betting. And then by the way, the real frontier is still coming, which is e-sports betting, right? Sports betting is,

SPEAKER_79: think about this. If you want to put a bet on a football game, a lot of things have to happen logistically. You need teams, you need stadium, you need uniforms, you need referees, a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_77: So, two dudes are playing Madden on Twitch and you want to bet 25 cents if the next play is a run or a pass. It's literally infinite, right? Yes. And people are playing-

SPEAKER_311: There could be a million games going on- All over the world. All over the world. All over the world.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Basically, Discord is going to become open. Discord could become FanDuel.

SPEAKER_47: So that's the holy grail, ultimately. Wow. And whether it's Discord or someone else, we've been working on an incubation- Twitch. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: I mean, why doesn't FanDuel do that? Why doesn't FanDuel just make their own Twitch? Or they're just too busy printing money in their professional sports?

SPEAKER_137: I guess they're just, yeah. I think we're just about out. There's two more- Oh, you're building a company in the space or you're backing a company? We're building a company.

SPEAKER_314: You're incubating it or it's out yet?

SPEAKER_137: We're incubating it in stealth. Of course, I just talked to you on a podcast about it, out of Tuss Venture Partner.

SPEAKER_55: Oh, okay. It's our first incubation. How do I wet my beak? How do I get a little chip there? We'll talk about it offline. I mean, I got a following. I got a podcast.

SPEAKER_175: We'll go raise a new round soon. We'd love to have you in it.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. Slap me in. Slap me in. You know, I always just save a slice for JCal. Let me ask you this. You were in Coinbase. Congratulations. Yep. Crypto is full of griffs. ICOs were a total scam.

SPEAKER_151: NFTs feel like there's money laundering, all kinds of crazy stuff going on. This thing is unregulated. You're in the regulation space. Yep. And knowing what we know about what you said about politicians, where are we at in America with this being regulated? Because this has another twist to it. Unlike, we talked about power and how

SPEAKER_44: politicians want to keep power. A big part of our government's power comes from the fact that they control money and fiat. And these things are a direct threat to a major portion of the power of governments, which is why China said enough. We're going to come up with our own currency.

SPEAKER_40: We'll have our own fiat, digital fiat. Bitcoin, you're done. It's illegal. What's going to happen

SPEAKER_47: in America? So I think the US, what will happen and what should happen are two different things.

SPEAKER_77: Let's do it. First of all, here's where we are in crypto regulation today, which is it's incredibly fragmented and scattered. And there has been some attempts by the SEC and other federal agencies to crack down and fraudulent ICOs. That's a good thing, right? Because for me, as an investor in Circle or Coinbase or these different exchanges, I need the wheat separated from the chaff because if there's nothing to distinguish the good actors and the bad actors, we're all targeted, right? So we want consumer protection. At the same time, to me, the China thing is an incredible opportunity for this country to say, we are going to be the global hub of crypto. Yes, it's a sovereign list currency by definition. But if you think about crypto, at least to me, it embodies a lot of kind of American spirit and innovation and risk taking. And there's going to be ultimately millions of jobs associated with the industry one way or another. Let's have them all be here, right? Those are good jobs. So I would love to see, and I've written about this also in my column, I'd love to see the SEC or Treasury or someone say, okay, we're in a couple of a thoughtful regulatory framework for crypto. Here's who's going to regulate it. Here's how we're going to do it from a taxation standpoint. Here's how we're going to define these, either securities or currencies or everything else. But most importantly, we have two goals. One, protect consumers as they should, and two, grow this industry in the United States and take advantage of the opportunity we have. That would be, you know, smart- Have they waited too long?

SPEAKER_55: Because this has gotten out of control. There are people, there's obviously money laundering going on. The ICOs were a total grift. And then you have things like Tether, which have you know, people are watching this Tether thing occur. And it's like a slow, it looks like a slow motion made off to me with all these fines happening. Yeah. Then you have Circle, which listen, it's part of your book, but I had Jeremy Allaire on the pod. Tether people refuse to come on the pod. That tells you enough right there. He's doing everything by the books. He's trying to go over the top and be super regulated with his

SPEAKER_151: stable coin. And then you have Tether on this other side, which is like, hey, we're like, got 6% of the cash and everything else. Trust us. It's in a good place.

SPEAKER_331: That's why as a Circle investor, I want regulation.

SPEAKER_151: Right. So did they wait too long? Because it seems like with XRP, that was a total grift and a scam. They were selling that out of the back of the truck.

SPEAKER_332: Of course they did. However, nothing to our discussion earlier. Every policy output is the

SPEAKER_261: result of a political. Okay.

SPEAKER_49: Part of the problem right now is there is no crypto political decision. And you have Brian Armstrong, who I respect, but saying, yeah, I'm doing my own thing completely and- Kind of thumbed his nose, didn't he? Yeah, completely, which in a way was sort of a cool move to do. But on the other hand- Cool how?

SPEAKER_77: Just in the sense of like, instead of saying, I'm going to ignore politics completely, he took a position on it, which is, we're not political. This is not an activist workplace. This is a business. And if you want to do your politics in the place of work, we're the wrong place for you. I at least respected that he had the balls to do that.

SPEAKER_06: Right, but he also told the SEC in that famous tweet store, I'm like, I don't understand what you're

SPEAKER_21: doing. Why wouldn't you meet with us? We're the biggest. I thought that was like, actually,

SPEAKER_44: I don't want to say gangster. I thought it was, to your point about Zuckerberg, not being genuine, not being a human. I thought that was like a very human moment. He's like, I tried to meet with you. You're sending me data requests. You're telling me to not do this loan product. Why won't you talk to

SPEAKER_79: us? Right. Crypto lending is an obvious manifestation of cryptocurrency, and it's okay to have regulations around it, but you got to tell people what the regulations are, and you got to meet with the companies who are in the space, but Washington's not going to do any of that until they

SPEAKER_77: have to, and until the crypto community becomes politically powerful, where they can be a force

SPEAKER_339: in primaries, in congressional races, in state senate races, in presidential, everything else, they're not going to have the credibility they need to shape the regulations.

SPEAKER_69: So they need to get certain, you know, Jeremy Allaire and Brian Armstrong and five other folks need to get together and create their own block where they talk to folks, they educate folks, and they

SPEAKER_237: just haven't done it yet. So that would be. Yeah. And by the way, you can solve a lot of this with

SPEAKER_77: money, right? If you can move enough money, you can start to gain influence. So it's not like, and also the vast majority of their customers are probably not regular voters. They do a great job on

SPEAKER_61: things like voter registration and mobilization and all of that. So they have their own crypto block

SPEAKER_69: party and they should just say, here's the crypto block party and, you know, crypto and blockchain

SPEAKER_345: party. It's got a good ring to it. Now, there is a movement to start allowing campaigns to take

SPEAKER_95: crypto in the form of donations. If that does happen, that will change the equation simply because

SPEAKER_49: then politicians will say, oh, I can wet my beak. 14% of my contributions are coming from this thing. I need to continue, right? And then there's like, okay, how do I do this the right way? So there is

SPEAKER_77: sort of a hack pinch to get there, but ultimately, you know, we're at this precipice of this amazing moment of opportunity and the government's blowing it and the sector's kind of not totally stepping up either. Let me take issue with one point you made around NFTs, which is, I just have a slightly

SPEAKER_61: different thesis, which is because crypto is a security dressed up as a currency in this country. You have people who have incredible paper gains on Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever it is and they know what to do with it, right? And so they buy NFT. So we're investors and we call it Dibs, which is a fractionalized sports trading card company, the NFT space. And I had the CEO on, I was podcast about firewall and I had to see my podcast a week or two ago. I said to him, don't you think one of the reasons that the prices are so high is because people have

SPEAKER_351: all of this money and they don't know what to do with it. And so sitting on major gains and they

SPEAKER_77: don't want to be in fiat. Correct. So I think a lot of the NFT is a reflection of crypto being called a currency, pretty like a security. People don't know what to

SPEAKER_49: do. So that's why I think it's happening. I actually agree with you on that. And I think

SPEAKER_55: NFTs are a great use case. I think what's happening is if you had money you wanted to launder in the

SPEAKER_151: worst, most nefarious case, or if you, let's say, wanted to make a whole bunch of money, you release some NFT collection, you create a bunch of bogus accounts on a global basis, you start trading all these NFTs, you create a bunch of painting the tape, a bunch of transactions, and then whoever comes in last gets to carry the bag. And you can basically wash money, you know, through them. That's where I think regulation has to step in. There has to be know

SPEAKER_40: your buyer and some tracking of this because you could create because it's so fluid because it's such a great technology. There's nothing to stop you and I from creating 10,000 accounts on a global basis with a bunch of servers and then trade a bunch of these NFTs, make it look like there's a history of the transaction, some providence, and it's been going up and I'm the eighth person to own this home slash NFT. Therefore, I have some safety. That's the kind of stuff that makes me

SPEAKER_95: worry. Does it make you worried? Yeah, a little bit. But on one hand, I tend to have the view that,

SPEAKER_61: it means it looks like a libertarian standpoint, but I generally believe that people can make up their own

SPEAKER_242: decisions. So for example, I believe in full legalization of drugs simply because my view is if somebody wants to take heroin, that's their choice. That's their right. And instead of having

SPEAKER_49: this massive incarceration system and violence and everything else, just let people decide.

SPEAKER_361: Right? And I feel the way about gambling and abortion and same-sex marriage. Treat people like adults, let them make adult decisions, and then the ramifications will

SPEAKER_237: help steer them. You deal with it. Yeah. And then government regulations should try to say, okay, in cases where market forces will deceive

SPEAKER_98: people to a point where they can't make good decisions, we will shape and influence those. And then that's what governments should be doing. Which by the way, it's very interesting you bring

SPEAKER_69: up the drug thing. Clearly, we need to reclassify drugs and there's a whole group of drugs that do not, as we've seen with cannabis and- Psilocybin.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Certainly like the plant-based medicine that people are doing, MDMA as well. All of that stuff seems to

SPEAKER_55: have really great outcomes in certain cases and very little downside recreationally. And then you look at the fentanyl, meth and heroin, obviously these are much more deadly, should be classified differently. And then we can have a reasonable debate about those. When you look at those, it turns out

SPEAKER_40: fentanyl is so cheap to produce and so efficient that you can't get real heroin. So nobody thinks

SPEAKER_34: about these second order of things that occur. If heroin was legal or regulated-

SPEAKER_368: You would actually, it would be safer. Just like-

SPEAKER_74: It would actually be safer because the Chinese created a super drug- Right. That they make a bat, industrial vats for nothing.

SPEAKER_77: Right. Think about it. Moonshine, you should not drink because it destroys your brain cells at a vastly bigger rate than tequila or some other alcohol. Way too strong.

SPEAKER_242: Moonshine was only really a serious thing during prohibition because there was just a black market for it.

SPEAKER_48: Right. Yes. If you can get a nice scotch or what are the kids drinking? The Zima White Claw stuff? Yeah, whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_275: Yeah. Kids are going to drink the White Claw. They don't want Moonshine. But if they didn't

SPEAKER_157: have White Claw, they get the Moonshine. This is going to sound crazy, but I have a 15-year-old and

SPEAKER_77: a 12-year-old. Okay. And I am more worried about them trying illegal drugs laced with fentanyl- Of course. Than like the truth. Then, you know, if they got weed from a dispensary, like, you know, they're under 25.

SPEAKER_208: But with all that said, at least I would know that the source it's coming from is safe and regulated

SPEAKER_79: and taxed and controlled and everything else. Whereas, you know, people are buying drugs in the

SPEAKER_176: street. You have no idea what you're getting. And, you know, Bad Batch kills people all over the place.

SPEAKER_40: And it seems like they're sprinkling this on everything. I don't know if you saw in Los Angeles, a bunch of comedians were doing cocaine, which basically is what comedians do. It's like, kind of in their wheelhouse and it was laced with fentanyl. It's like, you can't get comedians are dying of fentanyl overdoses thinking they're doing cocaine. It's like, what has happened in the country? If these, when you look at the legalization of cannabis, if kids have access on the margins to cannabis they get from an older person, like you're saying, they know that isn't

SPEAKER_44: laced with fentanyl. You have to think holistically about these problems. And that's one, how's that one

SPEAKER_275: going to get solved with politicians? Because what politician is going to come out and say, I'm for heroin? Like that's kind of untenable, right?

SPEAKER_77: Well, it's interesting. At some point they would have said the same thing about marijuana.

SPEAKER_49: Right. Right. So sometimes there are movements that have to be led by the people, right? Because the

SPEAKER_77: politicians are never going to have the balls to do it. But if you look at the cannabis movement, it was individuals in all of these different states slowly, but surely making the case, running

SPEAKER_49: referendum, running legislation, and it eventually became seen as politically safe. And now most states allow it, right? And I think with psilocybin, it's going to be the same thing. And look, you're right. There are drugs like meth and fentanyl that probably never should be legal. And look, maybe, and this is a controversial thing to say, but maybe you do make heroin legal in a specifically produced way, sold at dispensaries. You say, okay, if you're going to do it, at least let's do it in a way that's safe. Just like right now, cities distribute needles, right?

SPEAKER_61: Because their view is it's happening anyway. We at least like to stop the spread of AIDS and other diseases. So let's try to do this smart.

SPEAKER_40: Giving people free condoms, giving people free needles that are clean, if you have the problem, not an issue. And even giving them Narconon, not an issue, but you do have to address this core issue. And I actually, at this point, watching what's happening in San Francisco and then watching

SPEAKER_55: all these amazing people, I believe somebody can fact check me this, Tom Petty and Prince both had fentanyl-laced stuff, if I'm correct. And they were addicted to opioids or whatever. So they probably thought they were taking opioids and they were getting pressed pills or whatever. And these are

SPEAKER_250: rich people who have access to doctors who would give them prescriptions or previously would have.

SPEAKER_390: Michael Jackson. Yeah, exactly. I mean, losing Tom Petty and Prince, just brutal.

SPEAKER_392: I saw Petty play, it was like one of the, just randomly one of the last shows before he

SPEAKER_133: OD'd and it was like, it was an amazing show. It was so fun. He played out, I don't know if you've ever been to it, but in Forest Hills and Queens, there's like a really cool venue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty small. And he played there and it was f***ing.

SPEAKER_69: I saw him with Bob Dylan, Tom, when he's a backup band for Bob Dylan at the garden twice. Oh wow. Amazing.

SPEAKER_396: Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: But if you think about it, if you did the cannabis route and you said, listen, you could work with a doctor to get a prescription for heroin. You come in, you can take the heroin at this clean location and we're going to have a discussion with you about if you want to get clean or not, but we're going to give you an amount of it. Then they would look at like going on the street and getting fentanyl or going and getting the really good heroin. People are actually lamenting that they can't get heroin and they don't want fentanyl. So you literally have people who are

SPEAKER_287: addicts asking, please give us cleaner drugs. Right, right. So there needs to be, I do think that because there is a significant movement in

SPEAKER_402: this country now on criminal justice reform, both on the left and to their credit on the right,

SPEAKER_366: that I do think that ultimately so much of the flaws in our criminal justice system are based on

SPEAKER_77: really unjust drug laws that to me, that's maybe what ultimately leads to it. If you think about

SPEAKER_66: it right now, with the letter, this is not the original topic of the podcast, right now with illegal drugs, you have incredible violence in Latin America because of the cartels. You've got

SPEAKER_77: an incredible violence in American cities and now in rural areas too, because of the illegal drug trade. You have hundreds of billions of dollars spent on police, jails, courts, all these things. Overdoses, ambulances. Yeah. And then all of those people, when they go to jail, their life is over, right? They're not coming out in a way that sort of makes them productive member of society. And so you're sacrificing all of these people, all in the name of what? Deciding that it's okay for people to have a drink or have a toque of weed, but not cocaine or heroin? It's ridiculous. So it will take a while,

SPEAKER_47: but I do think ultimately it's both the right policy and I think over a period of decades we'll get there.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. It feels like what's happening, and I don't know if you could speak to this in terms of incrementalism, but watching what happened with cannabis then, my friend Tim Ferriss

SPEAKER_55: has been making a lot of donations and getting people to donate to MDMA, psilocybin, and other

SPEAKER_413: research. The first time I ever met Tim, he met with me to say, can you run campaigns?

SPEAKER_415: So you guys did catamines together? No.

SPEAKER_77: We didn't do it together, but we did, I might've tried it, but he basically said, how do you do for psilocybin what people did for cannabis? We had an interesting conversation about

SPEAKER_49: it. Yeah. And what was your answer? I mean, the answer is you have to build a movement, right? And you're seeing it slowly happening. Tim is part of that, but you're seeing decriminalization in places like Ann Arbor, in Denver. It's starting. This is how this stuff starts and it will spread. So I do think that we will get there, but ultimately I'd rather get there faster and in a more comprehensive way.

SPEAKER_69: The thing I thought was like the great slam dunk is you look at people suffering from PTSD,

SPEAKER_55: whether it was vets coming back or whatever, and then you look at severe depression, which everybody has somebody in their life who's suffered from severe depression and they know how debilitating that can be and how hard that can be on a family. And you just look at what psilocybin and MDMA have done for PTSD. And then you look at what ketamine is showing to do for depression. And these are given in a clinical laboratory. So if they're given in a clinical laboratory and people are taking MDMA and psilocybin and doing some sort of guided journey with a doctor, with a counselor, or they're going in for a ketamine, synthetic ketamine, IV drip with a doctor, with a psychiatrist, you know, and they're having profound results. Who doesn't want to see less suffering in those categories? Like you would have to be a complete to not want to see a vet or severely debilitated

SPEAKER_40: person with manic depressive suicidal tendencies, not suffer less. The removing of suffering in those categories is so profound that we can't ignore it anymore. And I think if we get those,

SPEAKER_55: now you've got cannabis, alcohol taken care of, now you've got the psychedelic category and ketamine, what's left? Okay. Then you've got cocaine, fentanyl, you know, and heroin.

SPEAKER_422: It's obi, it's an amphetamines, right? That's what's left.

SPEAKER_55: So then you just got to have a reasonable discussion about that, which is kind of hard to have, except actually in San Francisco, because we seem to have conflated homelessness with addiction and, you know, and also criminal justice reform, criminal justice reform. That seems to be another hot topic that's massively plagued with, you know, people wanting to be safe, which New York City seems to have voted to be a safe place with your new mayor. Yeah. I'm not sure how you feel about that. I know you-

SPEAKER_47: No, look, my consulting firm ran Andrew Yang's campaign, so I picked a different horse, but I do think that of the choices we could have had, Adams is a pretty good outcome. And if quality of, since I was talking to someone about this like a couple hours ago,

SPEAKER_79: remote work means that people can be anywhere, right? And that means that companies in big cities

SPEAKER_77: could hire employees from all over the world. Or if people say, hey, I really want to live in New York or San Francisco and Chicago, whatever it is, I can do that work remotely from anywhere.

SPEAKER_49: But the reason that people either choose to do that or not is based on the quality of life in these cities. And when it feels too dirty and too dangerous, and just too disgusting to live in

SPEAKER_98: some of these places, people aren't going to do it.

SPEAKER_431: Just describe San Francisco. People are opting out.

SPEAKER_61: Well, that's why you see this outpouring of people from the Bay Area, from New York,

SPEAKER_222: to Austin, to Miami, all of that, partly it's taxes, but partly it's also quality of life.

SPEAKER_40: And those two things are part of a, I think, contract with the city. You're making a decision. I'm paying this extra, whatever it is, 12, 13, 14, 15%, and I'm getting something. If you feel like you're getting a worse deal economically and quality of life, you've basically given people a very easy out. Austin is a more delightful place with less homelessness, with less crime. Miami, same thing. I'm just going to vote with my, I'm basically getting two wins. And I see this

SPEAKER_55: happening with couples all the time. One person wants it to be safer. Another person wants to pay less taxes. Maybe they have some overlap on those issues, but it just basically gives them the exit

SPEAKER_95: ramp. Yeah. I mean, cities, again, one of the things that to me made Mike Bloomberg such a great mayor was he looked at New York City in terms of its value proposition.

SPEAKER_77: Yes. He said, what are we delivering to the people that makes it worth their living here,

SPEAKER_79: makes it worth their taxes? Yes. And, and if you look at it that way and you can deliver a good product, then the private sector can do its thing. Then creative, smart, talented people show up and they create businesses and they do arts and they create culture and restaurants and all kinds of

SPEAKER_351: stuff that makes cities really vibrant, but you've got to make them feel like they're safe and that

SPEAKER_69: it's a place that they want to be. And so that dovetails where we started our conversation.

SPEAKER_55: In this incredible hour, Bradley Tusk, a really great guest. I think you're not short list for guest of the year. When we look at what Suarez and Austin have done, Miami and Austin have done, they actually realized this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: And now you have politicians who are saying, not only do I want to stay in office, I want to attract

SPEAKER_44: people from another geo to come here. I want to grow the city. They're acting like CEOs. Yeah. They're acting like product managers. What is our product offering? Miami knows their product offering. They're like less taxes, safer, better lifestyle. Austin, less taxes, more freedom,

SPEAKER_55: less judgy, woke people dunking on you, less chaos, less fentanyl, let's go.

SPEAKER_438: Right. And I think cities that think about it from that standpoint have a significant advantage over

SPEAKER_61: those that, you know, look right now, and you were talking a little earlier about kind of the lessons from the elections last week and kind of how the left took a little bit of a drubbing.

SPEAKER_133: Now, part of it is, I would argue there's an assumption by the left that people are suckers

SPEAKER_49: and you can tax them as much as you want and excoriate them as much as you want and they'll just stick around and keep taking it. And like in New York City, it's up to like 30,000% of the, 30,000 people pay like more than half the taxes, right? Right. And those are the most mobile people, right? Right.

SPEAKER_445: So like, you know, if you- They have private jets and second homes already.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. They already have the second home. Correct. There is no, for the person who's the hedge fund person in New York or Connecticut or New Jersey, and we saw it in all those places. For them to go to Miami, they're not buying a new home. They already got a place down there. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't cost them any.

SPEAKER_77: So all it does is save them money. Now look, New York City is such a great place that if the city is clean and safe and well run, people say, you know what? I love being here and I will pay that extra 10 to 15%. Right. If all of a sudden it's dirty and dangerous and you're just being excoriated by the left

SPEAKER_269: everywhere you go at the same time, you're like this and people leave.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah. All right. Listen, an hour with Bradley Tusk. You and I are going to become fast friends. I'm booking you for six months from now to come back on the program.

SPEAKER_453: Can't wait to do it.

SPEAKER_55: All right. And then I'm going to be in New York. Maybe we'll catch a Knicks game. Maybe you take me to some great sushi place. Let's go. And I want to know about this new company you got. Yeah. We got, we got to start vibing now because this is like a moment here. We got to, I think we got a bromance going. We got the shared history with Uber. Yeah. This is going to be great. I'll definitely, producers, six months from today,

SPEAKER_40: I want Bradley back on the program. I'm committing right now to do it.

SPEAKER_454: Okay. So you got it.

SPEAKER_231: Well, look at how, I think there's going to be a lot for us to check back up on.

SPEAKER_392: Well, yeah. There's stuff that always evolves and changes. There's all kinds of stuff we

SPEAKER_77: haven't talked about yet. Like we touched on crypto, but to me, the most interesting part of the work that we do is all of these white spaces, drones, AI, machine learning, autonomous cars, autonomous trucks, flying cars, all this stuff. What should the regulatory framework be? How do you create this thing? Right? Like, and that's like the most fascinating stuff of all. And yeah, we can touch

SPEAKER_407: on it. So we could have easily got another hour. So yeah, look forward to coming back on and thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_231: Well, I mean, I think the self-driving thing is a great discussion. We'll definitely have that one on the top of the docket for next time. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.