This Week in Startups - Ohio sues FB + Bradley Tusk “The Fixer,” Uber, startups navigating politics, mobile voting | E1327

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

First, Jason covers the Ohio Attorney General suing Meta (2:05). Then, Tusk Venture's Bradley Tusk joins to discuss the strategy he developed to help Uber overcome cities trying to ban it (17:43), what actually motivates politicians (23:02), mobile voting (31:07) the advice he would give Mark Zuckerberg (48:28) and more!

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 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 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 Byrd and help them with their regulations of having scooters on the street. 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. This week in startups is brought to you by Marketer Hire. Do you need expert marketing help fast? Hire Vetted Marketing Specialist this week from the company already used by Netflix, Allbirds, and more. Get $500 off your first hire at market or hire.com slash twist by using code twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Stripe. Join the thousands of

successful founders who choose Stripe as their payments platform. Whether you're an online or in-person retailer, software platform, marketplace, or subscription business, visit stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business today. Okay, on Monday, Ohio's attorney general 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, online poker. You could have crypto lawsuits that happened with the Attorney Generals in Florida going after specific ICOs. There are many Attorney General's 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 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 on the All-In podcast. To date, there have been 16 articles published by the Wall Street Journal in their Facebook files series. The most recent was November 9th. Series is obviously ongoing. The Facebook files, of course, included documents leaked by Francis Howgan, who testified before Congress on October 5th. She came across as very credible. They tried to discredit her since that time. You know how this

works, this playbook. We covered the hearing specifically on episode 1298. if you want to go back. 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, a 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 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 curate something, you will take some responsibility for that

content. When an editor looks at something 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 puts something up there ahead of you. And if it said, the tone of these is charged and there's a, we suspect or we indicate in the commenting on this thread, there is a cantankerous tone. It's on a scale of one to ten. 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 Unopolis 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. If you're going to be manipulating 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? 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 and it says going deeper on right wing or going deeper on Ben Shapiro, Milo Unoplas style content, showing you the opposite with Rachel Maddow and whatever, MSNBC, or showing you something more factual.

They 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. This lawsuit focuses on Facebook's failure to alert shareholders 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. 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 sharehold. 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 claim. that Facebook management misled the public about their impact on minors 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 was it inadvertently misled the public. This is, I think, implied that this would be intentional about their impact on minors. In other words, they pretended there wasn't a negative impact. And the fact that they were considered launching Instagram kids kind of shows they're doing the opposite. Not only they are misleaning the public that there's an impact on minors, 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. that represent like a 2 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 13th and October 21st. Facebook stock price declined by $54 and $8 per share over or over 14% representing a decline of more than $150 billion in Facebook's total market capitalization. Since October 21st, Facebook stock dipped down to 312 a share, but it jumped back to 343. So is this 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 headwin 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 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 on Netflix, et cetera, 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 could 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 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 defense is,

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 everything. MTV or in a magazine can cause body dysmorphia, that's nothing new. So we were continuing our research, no harm, no foul. 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, covering it up, allegedly, did they grow faster because of that? And then you withhold that, and then they could have gotten out of the stock or never bought it if you had been more honest. So I think that's where it's going to 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 ask 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. what email producers at this week and 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 startups 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, ten founders get together and help each other grow their companies. And then eventually in this Mission 3, 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 3, we're going to add investors.

So this is a very focused event. No salespeople, no vendors, no sponsorship yet. Maybe in Mission 3 or 4, 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. Buy founders for founders with some investor friends since founders need to raise money. Okay, you're going to love this Bradley Tusk interview. Stick with us.

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So that's 500 right now, marketer hire.com. M-A-R-K-E-T-E-R-H-I-R-E dot com slash T-W-I-S-T. All right, 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 now has a speciality in investing in startups that have to deal with regulators and the government for his first time.

This is his first time on the pod. So welcome to the pod, Bradley Tusk. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you and I never really met during the Uber days, but we were both involved in the company early. You got involved, I believe, when Uber was in one city, San Francisco. So Uber was in San Francisco. Travis kind of dealt with that political mess on his own. They came to New York, got a cease and assist letter.

And I got a call saying, hey, there's a guy with from Willett, which is Mike Bloomberg's financial family office. And the guy named Steve Ratner called me. He said, hey, there's a guy with a small transportation startup. He's having some regulatory problems because you do us a favor and just give us a favor and just and some advice. And I was like, sure. And talk 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. 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 U.S. to legalize ride sharing. And the thing that I think we figured

out was that we could turn our customers into political advocates and use them as a countermeasure to tax these kind of political muscle and lobbying. And this was a seminal moment, 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. When you 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 double click on in a moment. 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 the app, they said, hey, they want to put a cap on the number of Ubers in New York.

You should call up, you know, this representative. Was that the first moment that that, let's face it, confrontational tactic? We started in 2012 in D.C. actually. So we launched in D.C. 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. 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 are. 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 time we did it. So you flip the person who the taxi lobby was putting the screws to. Yeah. And if it took a take a step back here, it's actually fairly straightforward, which is this. So I spent the first 15 years in my career

directly in government and politics before getting at the time. I was my Bloomberg's campaign manager. We ran for mayor. I was the deputy governor of Illinois, Chuck Schumer's communications directors. 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 they make. So if you 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 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 members were getting from taxi. And that's why we want. So in all these cases, I've now, you know, investing in my third fund with the private 45 deals out of the venture fund so far. It's all really based on that one insight, which is you got to reshape the political inputs to make what you need in the interest of the politicians you need to do something for you. 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 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 you, that's how you should frame working with politicians as a startup founder. That's perfect. Exactly. I mean, basically, if they don't think that you could. I've never heard anybody say it so candidly. I'll go even one step further. I wrote this in my book.

99.9% of politicians are desperately insecure. self-loatting 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 to who they are. And then let's give them the reasons to do what we want based on inputs that make sense to them, not just things that we think they should be doing. Okay. So I have no choice but to double click on this second most profound, you know, insight that you have. They are insecure people who desperately crave validation.

Yep. So given that, validation comes in the forms of votes and being important and being votes, fundraising money, press coverage, polling numbers, and most importantly, just, you know, your average person thinking that there's somebody because they're in the state assembly or whatever it is. Got it. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yeah, Mike Bloomberg was an exception. 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 politics. But in fairness, they were 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. 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 greater than almost anybody else. And this manifested itself most acutely in his battle against the school unions in New York or in some?

Well, certainly won, and they, you know, but it was a lot of stuff. Like, if you think back around early, early, early in its first term, you know, we passed a bill to ban indoor smoking. And now everyone has replicated that, not only over the U.S., but all over the world. But at the time, it was incredibly controversial 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 even 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 tells a story well, which was right in the shadow of ground zero, a mosque was being built. And a lot of people felt like, how dare you build a mosque right by this site where a Muslim 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. And he just took, 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, that again, we had all the money in the world, so it's a little, it's not totally normal. But I do think that if you can govern in a way that actually delivers results for people, you can piss off various powerful political interests and still get reelected. However, you know, you have to have the brains of Mike Bloomberg has. You have the balls of my Bloomberg has. And worst thing that would happen to him is he'd just go back to being a billionaire. So, you know, he had a lot, he had a lot more risk tolerance. So 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 good or perhaps better.

Better, much, much easier for sure. Much easier. No one's like, why did you go to Bermuda this weekend? Exactly. He just doesn't really want. So he was different. I would say to some extent when I was deputy governor of Illinois, Obama was a state senator, and then I also knew when I was 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. And maybe when I said 99.9% I was being uncharitable. We can reduce to 99.2%. But it's about that. Sure. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics,

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your first purchase of a website or domain. And congrats to the team for going public back in May. What an amazing journey. Great job, Squarespace team. 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, you know, member of the squad most closely aligned with, I think, the socialist, Democratic Party.

And I was watching as a former New Yorker growing up in Brooklyn and living in Manhattan as an adult. And I watched your 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 a tax, that's a tax 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 dumb truck of $4 billion. And then you have Chuck Schumer who, 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 have this election where it seems like people are saying, you know what, a little bit too hysterical on the hysterical

left, 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? No, what do you make of politics? A little optimistic, but a few things. So the Amazon story is actually an excellent example of what we're talking about, which is there there was no question that New York City would have benefited from having Amazon's headquarters there. 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 in 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 much, but she's very smart. Turn out 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 a ginsist thing than for it. And that's why they killed it. So, you know, for as long as we have gerrymandering and as long as turnout in primary age is 10 to 15%, the ideologues or a handful of special interests will almost always call the shots. It's why I'm actually working on a project right now to my 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 on an 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 like legislative primaries, right?

They don't know whether they're city council members 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 what pain in the ass, and they won't do it. And so as blockchain technology got better and better, we started funding pilots. So we've now funded 21 elections in seven different states, we either deployed military or people with disabilities have voted in actual elections on their phone. So how does this mobile voting project work?

Is this going to be where I just take out my phone and I can vote? Ultimately, yes. There's a lot of steps between this and that. So, but we are right now building our mobile voting technology. I just announced on I'm putting $10 million of my own money into a grant program to do this. And we will make it open source to every government who wants it in the world for free. Mobilevoting.org, people can go see it. Yeah.

So what's the bridge between, you know, I take out my phone and I vote for president and where we are today? Yeah. I've got to build technology that the critics will say, yeah, this actually works. So the very might Bloomberg-esque move, I put most of the critics that I could find on the payroll and said, okay, help me build something. So now they- Who's against mobile voting and why? So a few reasons. So ultimately, if you benefit from the status quo, you don't want to see a change. So if you're a union, a trade group, you know, a political boss of some kind, you like things the way they are.

So you're not looking for change. Because you've optimized it so well? Yeah, it works for you. For sure. So like, let's say you're- What does that mean in a practical way? What have the unions figured out? Yeah.

Yeah. So you're the teachers union, right? Turn out in a typical city council primaries, nine, 10,000 votes, right? Tiny, right, 11,000 votes. 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 on the right guns. You know, there's a shooting and 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 turn out we're 50% in your primary.

Just based on math, you would vote for the assault weapon ban because you would lose your next election if you did it. So the good news is these people believe in very little. And we can, we, they're adaptable, but we've got to have the right inputs that they respond to to shape the outputs. Now, there was some app, if I remember correctly in 2020 in the Iowa caucuses that didn't work. So it wasn't mobile voting. It was reporting. And we told the DNC not to do it because we were like, we don't see how this thing's going to work.

They didn't listen. They literally hired like some political hacks to run it. They f*** it up. And it would have set us back. 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 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 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, health care, portion, whatever it is, a certain point people say, you know what, I'm going to go my own way. That's like couples get divorced. So I think the only way to save the union is to dramatically increase turnout, especially in primaries. And the only way to do that is to make it a lot easier, which means voting on your phone. And also, why is voting limited to a day in person? For sure. I don't understand this.

Every other country in the world seems to have a voting window. Yep. What would happen if we had one full week to vote in a presidential election? So some jurisdictions have been doing that and not shock. 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. I live on 19th Street. There was only one print available to me. It was somewhere down in Soho, and I'm like, it's too much of pain. They ask I'll wait till election day. But it was still one more option. But, you know, if you're a political boss,

you don't want a higher turnout. You want lower turnout. And so as a result- You want your turnout in the lower turnout. I think I understand it. 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 power. It's just a left or right issue or both of them want lower turnout and it's just virtue signaling on the market. It's the same thing on. It's the same thing on each side. 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. And the party and all of that. 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 people's phones, people would do it. I don't think it's that complicated. If Bloomberg had announced a year earlier or two years earlier for president, would he have done better or one? Not if he had run as a Democrat. No. Couldn't win as a Democrat, huh? So Mike had looked at the presidency in 2008, 2012, 2016, and then ran in 20. I was involved in all of those looks, right? So I kind of know how it went down every time. 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 and running as independent. He was afraid of being a spoiler and inadvertently electing Trump. Of course, he might have been the only thing standing in the way in retrospect. By 2020, because Republican

politics has shifted so 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. But the politics of the party had moved so far to the left that a kind of gross business centrist Democrat was just not at all kind of what the primary voters were looking for at that point. But given how horrible things have gone in the country, do you think he would have a better chance today than he did at that point? Good question. You know, Biden... It's my dream candidate, by the way. He's my dream candidate. No, I understood. I think he's done Michael turn 80 in February.

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. You know, and look, Mike, even if he were at 80 percent, is still sharper than everybody else in a hundred. Combined, yeah. But, yeah, but I don't know, because the, the channel, like, take Joe Biden, right? Joe Biden's numbers are terrible. He's at a 38% approval rating. Almost as bad as Trump. Yeah, almost as bad as Trump. And I think part of the problem is this, the system is so f***ed up and our politics are so broken and dysfunctional that people run for office and say, the reason we haven't solved is because you haven't had me yet.

I am different. 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 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, you know, 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, you know early decisions. can be the difference between success and failure. You want to make those right decisions right up front. One decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payment platform.

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at this point, present day, present moment? I mean, we know who's done the worst. Right. So best and worst. So I would put into two categories if that's okay. Okay, yeah, yeah. You can redefine the question. I will allow it. And there's big tech, right? Okay. So on big tech, there's five. Five, so it's Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and then maybe Twitter, Uber, a few others are like one level. Airbnb, right.

Airbnb, right. Of that group, Facebook has done the worst by far. Okay. And if you look at it, I would argue, they're paying a significant price for it. substantively. So Libra, which was their payment system, I believe was designed in anticipation of eventually there will be new privacy regulations in the U.S. It will limit our ability to monetize data. And therefore, we need new revenue streams. 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 everybody. Apple has payments. Google has payments. Why can't Facebook have payments? Because everybody fucking hates Facebook on the left It's really that simple. They would, 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 or they just got feedback and people were like. They couldn't achieve it.

Yeah, because everyone hates them. Look, here's the fundamental mistake I would argue Facebook has made the whole time, which is they treat people like idiots. meaning 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 and find your best friend from the eighth grade online for free, we're a business. We have to have some way to make money. So we're going to monetize your data and show you ads. Right.

If you don't want that, you could pay 20 bucks a month or whatever it is. So simple. 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. And then everybody wants that. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was such a bald faced lie that everyone knew it wasn't true. And so every group, the left, the right, the center, the media, the regulators, were all like, screw you, you're just lying to us incessantly. And they came a point where even among the people that everyone didn't like of big tech, they just became the worst. Zuckerberg is also sort of the least capable politically. So, like Tim Cook is very skilled politically, right?

He has done a great job navigating Apple. where they don't get that much regulation, they don't have that many headaches, keeps him out of the fire squad. He is like, in a way, a politician. He is incredibly savvy. He had no problem sitting to the left of Trump and visiting the White House.

And, you know, he has no problem 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. Engagement is a valid 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 malfeasance or for us to go to war because our economies are so integrated. So he is, I think, the best. Do you think he's the best at it? Is he the best at it today? Of the, you know, Bezos, Sundar, you know, That crowd, yes, I think he's the best of that group at it. And I think Mark is the worst at it. Is Mark's problem, you know, and it's, you know, I hate to bring this up, but 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 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 if the president, if the president, you know, if the president. had asked for his as well, we would have to talk about it. 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 behavior? There's two problems. 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 communicating. And in some ways, good for him that he's confronting him. But the other problem, Fortinardot, he tells 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 gifted. He is, but you know what? Like,

with massive blind spots. Right. And the world of policy, every sort of subculture is different. And like, you made the point earlier, you asked question, what are the incentives, the currency that politicians care about. We identified votes, money, press, whatever it is. Adulation. Yeah. And therefore, you're just working with a different set of metrics and tools. And I don't think he's ever understood that. And I don't really know what happened to Cheryl and that she was sort of very dynamic and popular. They should put Cheryl in charge. I mean, if she had, she understands stuff 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 executive chairman and be chief product officer or product visionary and do what Larry and Sergey did,

which was put somebody else in charge. And when they need to call the CEO, you can say, I don't work there on a day-to-day basis. I don't know. I don't have to come to Congress anymore. Yeah. Totally. Was that the most savvy move in the world by tech CEOs, founders with Sergey and- Because they Kaiser-Sozated.

They Kaiser-Sosated. And they got themselves out of, you know what 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 shit. 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. Yeah. And Mark just hasn't done that. So that's been challenged. Listen, I don't want you to give your services away for free, but we're here. We're investors. 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 nominating you right now. We're ready 25 minutes in. 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.

Well, if you're a startup, yeah. I own a consulting firm separately. I don't work there, but yeah, so that you can hire them. But yes, you need to invest. I'm assuming Facebook is not hiring you. No, no. By the way, I've said what I just said to you publicly plenty of time. So I'm sure they don't love me.

If Mark came to you, Cheryl came to them, they said, listen. We understand we f*** this up royally. We'll just do whatever you tell us. Yeah. Okay. 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 thing they have to do is they have to accept that they've fucked this up. There needs to be a genuine apology without your fingers behind your back or whatever immature thing marks got going on. Just say, look, we created this amazing technology. It has brought a lot of good to a lot of people, 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. Right.

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 refuse to sort of 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 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, you know, section 230 is of the telecommunication you said, right?

So section 230, which protects a platform like Facebook from. liability based on... Or Verizon or Squarespace or GeoCities, whatever. Whoever, whoever. It's going to change, right? And rather than fighting tooth and nail to keep it the way it is, anticipate that it's going to change and get out ahead of it. Same thing with privacy.

So 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 anything. kind of change or any kind of reform because you just have no credibility in doing that. Okay, so number one, I'm going to admit that we've fpped up. Number two, we are, we're going to open the kimono and just say, 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. Let's 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 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.

And same thing with, right, embrace a proactive agenda. And then the fourth one, which discussed before is create a pay option where you say, if you don't want your data monetized. That's so brilliant. That has been my position from the beginning. You open up Facebook tomorrow, 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. 9.95 a month, we delete all your data. You are not in the database, period. Why won't they do that? 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. So Zuckerberg's, I saw some article today where I was reading it that, oh, it would be a giveaway to the rich. It would allow the rich to be able to enjoy ad-free Facebook and everyone else.

Literally said that. Yeah, he said that. So you realize how, I kind of pause on that for a second. Yeah. 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 Open Courseware is available on YouTube.

This is 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? the United States without a phone and internet connectivity. Because I have the same issue with mobile voting, right?

90 plus percent of American adults have a smartphone. And the people who don't, it's probably by choice. But yeah, they're, you know, bloodites are really old or whatever. 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 Wi-Fi everywhere. It's such a condescending position. And like you said, he's so full of shit that people actually, he thinks he's outsmarting us when he says something stupid like that. Yeah. And he doesn't realize. Yeah. So to take it one step further, so I've been incubating a new social media platform for religion

specifically. Whoa. 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 protectants 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 there are other business models that can work here that are. that address these issues, you just have to be willing to change. I'm really interested to see what happens with Twitter Blue. Did you see the Twitter Blue announcement?

Did you pay for it? No. No, what did they say? So Twitter Blue is basically $2.99 a month. They bought a company called Scroll in New York, which I was an investor of. Tony Hell, great job. So when you click on a story, if it's part of the 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, it's a step in 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 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 he 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, giving 70% in the app stores, whatever it is, Twitter now is giving a revenue share. All these revenue sharing people, he could have built his own group of Airbnb host, Uber drivers, Uber customers, to be. part of the Facebook defense, like you said, how could he ever mobilize his people? Like the people

who use his products hate him. He could never do that playbook of the Airbnb hosts. No, no, because look, he's become a utility in the same way that nobody likes the phone company or the electricity company. Nobody who likes Facebook either. There is a political playbook like we use with Uber or I'm an investor in Fanduil. We used it with Fandul. We used it with bird where if people love your product, you can mobilize them politically and it can work. But they have to really care about the product. And if you treat them like shit in the way that Facebook does constantly, they won't do that. And so he has completely sacrificed the goodwill of the media, the regulators, the consumers,

and everyone else. How did Fandul and all of the other wagering, gambling, startups, how were they able to, in such a short period of time, let's say under a decade, turn around an entire group of constituents who were anti-wagering. The NBA comes to mind. 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. Yeah, so that's the PAPS rule is part of it. I think there's three or four different factors that kind of led to this. And I've been. in the gambling space in different ways for a long time.

Wagering, wager. You know what? Every one's called the gaming. I'm like, fuck it. It's gambling. It's gambling. Listen, I tell people startups are gambling. We're gambling.

We're betting on startups. Most fab. We're betting on founders. We're betting on founders. I love it. Gambling, wagering. Let's go. So anyway, so I think there's a few things.

So one is Fanduel and draft kings 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, pay 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 this gray area. Then the kind of the shit hits the fan. We get season to assist 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 in 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, what's called a state rep in George, I'm making this up. And we'd say, look, let's be honest. Here are the people in your, here are the number people in your district who are Fanduil and drafting 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, let alone who the members are. However, they, I, fucking, love this thing. But if you take it away from them, we are going to register them and we're going to make sure they know your name and they are going to come out to vote and they're going to take you out of office. You know, every politician base said, fine, no problem. And then, so that happened. And then after that, Supreme Court overturned the congressional ban on sports betting 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 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 for third party sources because it's less politically fraud. And so as a result, the legalization, because of Supreme Court, the desire for revenue,

you, 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 a couple of dozen states, I think we're up to 30 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, 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, in a stadium, uniforms, you're referees, a lot of stuff. though. Two dudes are playing Madden on Twitch and you want to bet at 25 cents if the next play is a

run or a pass. It's literally infinite, right? Yes. And people are playing. A million games going on. All the world. All over the world. Basically, Discord is going to become open. Discord could become Fandul. So that's the holy grail. Whether it's Discord or someone else, we've been working on an incubation in space. Yeah. But, but to, why doesn't Fandu do that? Why doesn't Fandu just make their own Twitch? Or they're just too busy printing money in their professional. I guess they're just, yeah. And we're,

I think we're just about out. There's two more. Oh, are you building a company in the space or you're backing a company? Oh, you're incubating it or it's out yet? We're incubating it. We're incubating it's in stealth. Of course, I just talked to our podcast about it out of a test venture partner.

Oh, okay. It's our first incubation. Oh, is your first? So how do I wet my beak? How do I get a little chip there? We'll talk about it offline. And then I got a following. I got a podcast.

Yeah. We'll go raise a new around soon. We'd love to have you in it. Yeah, slide me in. Slot me in. You know, I always just save a slice for JCal. Let me ask you this. You were in coin base.

Congratulations. Crypto is full of grifts. ICOs were a total scam. NFTs feel like there's money laundering, all kinds of crazy stuff going on. This thing is unregulated. You're in the regulation space. What? 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 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. We'll have our own fiat, digital fiat. Bitcoin, you're done. It's illegal. What's going to happen in America? So I think the U.S., what will happen and what should happen are two different things.

Let's do it. First of all, here's where we are on 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 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 targeting it. Right. So we want consumer protection. At the same time, to me, the China thing has an incredible opportunity for this country to say, we are going to be the global hub of crypto. Yes, it's a sovereignless 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 things 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 smart product. Have they waited too long? 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. They have Circle, which listen, it's part of your book. But I had Jeremy Aller 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 stable coin. And then you have tether on this other side, which is like, hey, we're like, got the six percent of the cash and everything else. Trust us. It's in a good place.

That's why as a circle investor, I want regulation. Right. So did they wait too long because it seems like with XRP, that was a total grift in a scam. They were selling that, you know, out of the back of the truck. Of course they did. However, nothing to our discussion earlier. Every policy output is the result of a political. Part of the problem right now is there is no crypto political.

with the city. And you got Brian Armstrong, who I respect, but saying, yeah, I'm doing my own thing completely. Kind of thumbed his nose, didn't he? Yeah, completely, which was, in a way, was sort of a cool move to do. But on the other hand, cool how? Just in the sense of like, instead of saying, I'm going to ignore politics completely, he took a position on it, which is, you know, 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 or the wrong place for you. At least respected that he had the policy to do that. He also told the SEC in that famous tweet storm, like, I don't understand what you're doing.

Like, why can't, why wouldn't you meet with us? We're the biggest. Yeah. I thought that was like actually, 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 us? Right. You can't, like, crypto lending is an obvious manifestation of cryptocurrency, and it's okay to have regulations around it, but you've got to tell people what the regulations are, and you've got to meet with the companies who are in the space, but Washington's not going to do any of that until they have to, and until the crypto community becomes politically powerful where they can be a force in primaries, in congressional races, in state senator races,

in presidential, everything else, they're not going to have the credibility they need to shape the regulations. So they need to get, 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 just haven't done it yet. So that would be. Yeah. And by the way, you can solve a lot of this with 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 can do a great job. I think it's like voter registration, mobilization, and all of that. So they have their own crypto block party. And they should just say, here's the crypto block

party and, you know, crypto and blockchain party. It's a got a good ring to it. Now, there is a movement to start allowing campaigns to take crypto in the form of donations. If that does happen, that will change the equation simply because 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. sort of a hack pinchly 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. Yes. Which is, I just have a slightly 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 with Bitcoin or whatever it is. And they don't do with it. Right.

And so they buy NFTA. So we're investors, we're going to be called Dibs, which is a fractionalized sports trading card company in the NFT space. And I had the CEO on, I was a podcast by firewall. 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 all of this money and they don't know what to do with it? Yeah. So sitting on major gains. Yeah.

And they 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 you. So that's why I think it's happening. I actually agree with you on that. And I think NFTs are a great use case. I think what's happening is if you had money you wanted to launder in the 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 pating in the tape, a bunch of transactions. And then whoever comes in last gets to carry the back. and you can basically wash money through them. That's where I think regulation has to step in. There has to be know-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. Front run it. And going up on the eighth person to own this home slash NFT, therefore I have some safety. That's the kind of stuff that makes me worry. Does it make you worried?

Yeah, a little bit. Like on one hand, I tend to have the view that it means a slightly libertarian standpoint. I generally believe that people can make up their own decision. So for example, I believe in full legalization of drugs simply because my view is if somebody wants their heroin, that's their choice. That's their right. And instead of having this massive incarceration system and violence and everything else, just let people decide.

Right. And I feel the way about gambling and abortion and same-sex marriage and all this stuff. Let them make adult decisions. And then the ramifications will help steer them. And then government regulations should try to say, okay, in cases where market forces will deceive people to a point where they can't make good decisions, we will shape and influence those. And then that's what government should be doing. Which, by the way, it's very interesting you bring 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 certainly like the plant-based medicine that people are doing, MDMA as well. All of that stuff seems to have really great outcomes in certain cases and very little downside recreationally. And then you look at the fentanyl, math, and, you know, 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 fentanyl is so cheap to produce and so efficient that you can't get real heroin. So nobody thinks about these second order of things that occur. Right. If heroin was legal or regulated. You would actually be safer. Just like, think about it. It would actually be safer because the Chinese created a super drug. Right.

That they make and bat die in touch with vats for nothing. Right. Think about it. Moonshine, you should not drink because it destroys. brain cells at a vastly bigger rate than tequila or some of their alcohol, right? Too strong. Moonshine was only really a serious thing during prohibition because there was just a black market for it, right? Yes. If you can get a nice scotch or what are the kids drinking, the Zima white claw stuff? Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Kids are going to drink the white claw. They don't want

moonshine. But if they didn't have white claw, they get the moonshine. This is going to sound crazy, but I have a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old. And I am more worried about them trying illegal drugs laced with fentanyl. Of course. Then, like, the truth, then, you know, if they got weed from a dispensary, like, you know, they're under 25. I prefer that their kind of brain chemistry not be shaped that much. It's definitely not good for kids.

But with all that said, at least I would know that the source that's coming from is safe and regulated and taxed and controlled and everything else. Whereas, you know, people are buying drugs in the street. You have no idea what you're getting. And, you know, a bad batch kills people all over those lips. 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. is elated fentanyl. You have to think holistically about these problems. And that's one, how is that one 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? Well, it's interesting. At some point, they would have said the same thing about marijuana. Right. Right. So sometimes there are movements that have to be led by the people, right? Because the politicians are never going to have the

balls to do it. But if you look at the cannabis movement, it was individuals in all these different states, slowly but surely making the case, running referendum, running legislation, and it eventually became seen as politically safe, and now most states allow it. 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?

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. Giving people free condoms, giving people free needles that are clean. If you have the problem, not an issue. And even giving them Narcanon, 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

all these amazing people, I believe somebody can fact check me, there's Tom Petty. and Prince both had fentanyl-l-laced stuff, if I'm correct. Yeah. And they were addicted to opioids or whatever. So they probably thought they were taking opioids and they were getting pressed pills or whatever. These are rich people who have access to doctors who would give them prescriptions or previously would have. Michael Jackson. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, losing Tom Petty and Prince, oh, it's just brutal. I saw Petty play, it was like one of the, just randomly one of the last shows before he OD. And it was like, it was amazing. 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 a really cool venue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty small.

And he played there and it was. I saw him with Bob Dylan. Tom, when he's a backup band for Bob Dylan at the Garden twice. Oh, wow. Yeah. 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. 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 addicts. Yeah. Who still want better products. Please give us cleaner drugs. Right. Right. So there needs to be, I do think that because there is a significant movement in this country now on criminal justice reform, both on the left and to their credit.

it on the right, that I do think that ultimately so much of the flaws in our criminal justice system are based on really unjust drug laws. That to me, that's maybe what ultimately leads to it. You think about it right now with a little, I know this is not the original topic of the podcast, but right now with the legal drugs, you have incredible violence in Latin America because of the cartels. Yes. That of 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 that and then all 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 toke of weed, you know, but not, not cocaine or heroin? Like, it's ridiculous. So it will take a while, but I do think ultimately it's authoritative.

policy and I think over a period of decades will get there. Yeah, I, 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 has been making a lot of donations and getting people to donate to MDMA, suicide, and other research. The first time I ever met Tim, he met with me to say, can you run campaigns? So you guys could do, you guys take catamane together? No, we didn't do. But we did, I might have tried it. But he, uh, but he, uh, He basically said, how do you do for psilocybin what people did for cannabis? We had an interesting conversation about 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 was part of that. But you're seeing decriminalization in places like Ann Arbor and Denver. It's starting. This is, yeah, Oakland. 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 a more comprehensive way. The thing I thought was like the Great Slam done. is you look at people suffering from PTSD, whether it was coming, you know, 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, 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 asshole to not want to see a vet or severely debilitated 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, now you've got cannabis, alcohol, taking care of. Now you've got the psychedelic category and ketamine. What's left? Okay. You've got cocaine, fentanyl, you know, and heroin. It's obiates and amphetamines, right? That's what's what's what. 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. There are 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. No, I look, my consulting firm ran Andrew Yang's campaign. Yes, I was going to ask about that. 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, I was talking to someone about this like a couple hours ago, remote work means that people can be anywhere, right? And that means that companies in big cities could hire employees from all over the world. Or if people say, hey, I really want to live in New York. work in San Francisco and Chicago, whatever it is, I can do that and work remotely from anywhere. 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 some

these places, people aren't going to do it. Just describe San Francisco. People are acting out. Well, that's why you see this outpouring of people from the Bay Area, from New York to Austin, to Miami, all of that, partly it's taxes, but partly it's also quality of life. And 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 worst deal economically and quality of life, you've basically given people a very easy out. You know, 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 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 ramp. Yeah. I mean, 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. Yes. He said, what are we delivering to the people that makes it worth their living here? Makes it worth their taxes. Yes. 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 stuff that makes cities really vibrant, but you've got to make them feel like they're safe and that it's a place that they want to be. And so that dovetails where we started our conversation in this incredible hour of Bradley Tusk, a really great guest. I think you're not short list for guests of the year. When we look at what Suarez and Austin have done, Miami and Arkansas. They actually realize this. And now you have politicians who are saying, not only do I want to stay in office, I want

to attract people from another geo to come here. I want to grow the city. They're acting like CEOs. They're acting like product managers. What is our product offering? Miami knows their product offering. They're like less taxes, safer, better lifestyle. Often less taxes, more freedom, less judgey, woke people dunking on you, less chaos, less

fentanyl, you know, let's go. Right. And I think cities that think about it from that standpoint have a significant advantage over 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. And a part of it is, I would argue there's an assumption by the left that people are suckers and you can tax them as much as you want and excorate them as much as you want. And they'll just stick around and keep taking it. And in New York City, something 30,000 percent of the, 30,000 people pay like more than half the taxes, right? And those are the most mobile people, right? So, like, you know, if you have private jets and second homes already. 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.

So all it does is save them. 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%. If all of a sudden it's dirty and dangerous and you're just being excoriated by the left, everywhere you go at the same time, you're like, and people leave. 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. Can't wait to do it. All right. And then I'm going to be in New York. Maybe we'll catch a Nick's game. Maybe you take me to some great sushi place. Let's go. And I want to know about this new company you got. We got we got to start vibing now because this is like a moment here. I think we got a bromance going. We got the shared history with Uber. It's going to be great. I'll definitely be. Producers, six months from today, I want Bradley back on the program. I'm committing right now to doing. I think there's going to be a lot for us to check back up on. Well, yeah, this stuff always evolves and changes. Look, there's all kinds of we even talk about yet.

Like, we touched on crypto. But to me, the most interesting part of the work that we do is all 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? And that's like the most fascinating stuff of all.

Yeah, we can touch on it. So part two. We could have easily that other hour. So, yeah, look forward to coming back on and thank you for having me. 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 weekend service. Bye-bye.