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This episode of Hsueh is brought to you by Salesforce, even when we have to be a part, Salesforce is finding new ways to bring companies and customers together. It starts with helping companies unite their teams on one customer relationship management platform so they can deliver the seamless experiences that keep customers happy with Salesforce. Customer 360. Everything from marketing to customer service can operate under one digital roof, breaking down silos and giving you a comprehensive single source of truth to learn more had to Salesforce.com 360.

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I'm Kara Swisher, and you're listening to Sway, my approach is simple to get real answers. You got to ask a lot of questions. Now I'm going to ask you something. Help us understand how you listen to this show and others by filling out a survey at NY Times Dotcom Segway survey.

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And now to the show. Silicon Valley is full of characters, but some people still manage to stand out people like Thomas Polly Hoppity Sharma is a billionaire who is well known for his bold predictions and a penchant for telling it like it is, even if a lot of people don't like it. When he first arrived in Silicon Valley in 2000, Kamath was an outsider. But he quickly rose the ranks to become the youngest vice president in AOL's history, running its instant messaging department at 27 years old just a few years later.

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He joined Facebook and became their first VP of user growth by many accounts. He's one of the reasons Facebook first reached the one billion user mark as an investor, Jamous ability to forecast success has earned him the reputation and wealth he enjoys today. His VC firm, Social Capital, was an early backer of companies like Slack and Survey Monkey. He's also made big and lucrative bets on cryptocurrency and the latest hot IPO trend. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies Prospects and much multimode also has made some calls that have been spectacularly wrong.

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The willingness of this expert poker player to push the edge of investing is a power that few others dare to try. So what does he foresee in this uncertain moment and with those giant piles of money as what's he going all in on now? Well, for starters, he's adapted to the pandemic in ways few of us have been able to. I bought a rapid testing covid machine and I have a bunch of tests, and so I've been able to see my poker friends now.

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Oh my God, we come in, we do a little what? That is the most Silicon Valley thing you've ever said. Wait, what are you going to do? Sit in my home in a dark?

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Where does one by a rapid whatever you can buy it on these medical websites.

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How much does that costs? Come on. You're the only person who tell me how much that cost.

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I think it's like five K for the test and that each test is expensive. It's like 30 to 50 bucks a test. So then you test yourself and your friends. Yeah. And then we can hang out and play poker. We did it on Saturday. And how fast is the testing. 15 minutes. Wow. That is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever heard.

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I don't know. I think it's the most lonely thing I've been so lonely about. So thank goodness you're not lonely anymore.

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All right. So just as cover was starting, you made some predictions that turned out to be true. You were talking about having to save money, that this was going to be a lot worse than you thought it was gonna last a long time. And when you made those predictions, how do you feel about them? And where do you I would like you to sort of get a sense of where you think we are in that continuum that we're talking about.

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I think we're still another year away from everything getting sorted out. Look at the Pfizer vaccine as an example. It's only 90 percent effective, which sounds like a great number, except when you think about the fact that 50 percent of people will get the vaccine, which means that you'll always still have this looming viral spread of this coronavirus, probably forever. And then you have to factor in all the mutations of all of these things for a long time. And then you have to factor in what other airborne forms of disease do we not know about that will also be novel two years from now, three years from now, four years from now.

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And I think the only way to protect the American economy and American individual freedoms will actually be to impose more invasive behaviors by the federal bureaucracy. There will be a biological Patriot Act. You will have an app on your phone that you will use to authenticate yourself as being disease free. So that's the broad population level issue. Now, here's what's interesting. Companies will start to act like many governments even more than they already have. What do you think the odds are that a big tech company, a highly profitable one, basically says the following.

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You will have to be vaccinated if you want to work at my office. And I think that's going to create an entire new sort of Pandora's box, which we haven't seen before, which is this further encroachment of these large organizations. The more profitable you are, the more powerful you are, and then the more that you become central to an individual's life and you supersede what governments do for you. Well, Americans seem to trust businesses more than their own government, should they?

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I think it's generally better. And the only reason I say that is that the United States of America, where three hundred and thirty million people each with our own views, it's ungovernable at the federal level. And just looking at how this Electoral College and this election played out just kind of confirms it. It's we have 50 completely independent ways of thinking about the problem and we have 50 different body politics now and now. What's happening is the next layer, which is all the cities are kind of having their own legislative framework on top of that.

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And then is the next iteration, which is that a company by company level. And so you're going to get this really interesting cross section of health care policy, social policy and economic policy at the federal, state, local and company level. And I think what that gives people is a matrix that allows them to make really thoughtful choices about how they want to live their lives.

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So early in the pandemic, you caused a bit of a stir when you remarked that we shouldn't be bailing out airlines and other zombie companies or companies that wouldn't be able to pay off their debts without borrowing more money. What do we do with these zombie companies?

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So two things happen. One, our physical institutions that need to still exist, but not necessarily maybe in the same size and scope, those will shrink and they will get refactored through the lens of technology and through the lens of minimal financial engineering. So give me an example. So the next modern version of a hotel company will be some form of Airbnb. Right. And what they are are completely technological on the front end. So the consumer interface is completely technological, but on the back end, there is no financial engineering to be done because their asset light, they've completely put the responsibility of the actual real estate into the hands of individuals and many, many individuals who then just do it for themselves.

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So that's one kind of business. The second model is you go out of business and you're completely replaced. A new company that does what you did in a very, very different way, so if you take a manufacturing company, let's just say that you are in the middle of America and you make widgets for cars. Ford buys you. General Motors buys your parts. Well, what will probably happen is somebody inside that company will say, you know what, there's a more efficient way to think about this business.

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They will go to a company like Desktop Metal and buy a whole suite of 3D printers, and then they will print the parts versus make the parts. They'll do it in an environmentally sustainable way and then they will sell those parts back into Ford and GM at or lower than the same price. And so then that old manufacturing business goes away. So unfortunately, we're at the beginning of a 15 to 30 year cycle. And those that can innovate through the lens of software and deemphasizing financial engineering will survive.

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And those that cannot will get rebuilt by an entirely new version of that business that uses a modern suite of technologies for everything.

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And so what's the best way then to go about stimulus? You have the government trying to figure out how to keep jobs and not send us into a depression or give it to people checks to people just sort of normal, ordinary Americans. Those would have included an enormous number of small business owners that today didn't get any PBB What would they have been able to do? They would have been able to keep their stores open. They would have been able to keep their five, 10, 15 employees hired.

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They would have been able to buy inventory. They would have been able to move if they were restaurant to curbside pickup for a while, keep a skeleton crew on staff, wait until the vaccine was available, figure out what the right ordinances on masks should have been inside the building so that you could have reopened with the right social distancing. You could have done so many more things to keep individuals in the game. And instead what we did was we went over and above more than we had to to keep crappy corporations in the game.

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And we didn't do nearly enough to keep ordinary Americans in the game. So when you think about the idea of a recovery, is it a U shaped V? Tell me your letter and I don't have a letter.

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I think that these are ways of people who are afraid of trying to find something to anchor onto. I think that you can try to forecast these things and predict these things to make yourself feel better. And all you're going to do is create a blind spot for yourself and just be disappointed. So I'd rather not be disappointed. My honest view is that it's going to take two or three years to reset and get back to where we were. And it's going to require a massive, deep politicization of things that are public health issues.

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And we need to reign in the way in which dollars at the federal level are allocated, because ultimately this is debt that you and me and every single person listening to this and all of our children inherit. And so I think we have to be a little bit more prudent, so if we're relying on these people to do the right thing, it's incredibly scary that basically everything gets politicized. Nobody has the courage to stand up for what they believe in.

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And all they're looking for is political air cover to basically tell the truth. That should be fucking scary. So how do you then get away from that? When you look at this election, the thing that shocks me and woke me up is more people voted for Donald Trump in twenty twenty than twenty sixteen. There are 70 million Americans that really believe what he was telling them. And so I think it's important to take a step back and listen to what they're saying.

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And I think what they're saying is we have lost the script and that we spend too much time fawning over sort of political and social issues that are not as important as structural health and well-being of your fellow Americans. And they will continue to vote that ticket, whatever, and however that embodies itself, they will use those people as a vessel to continue to screen this from the mountaintops until we listen. So let me put it more bluntly. It is more important to them that we fix the manufacturing crisis in America, blue collar jobs in America, the cost of education and health care, then the transgendered bathroom issue.

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And they care more about making sure that they have a path to having a reasonable quality of life, not getting addicted to opioids. Then they care about Black Lives Matter. And it's not to say, I think, that they don't care about those issues, but they're making a very strict prioritization. So then then the question is for the rest of us is our reaction. Go fuck yourself. But what is it? Well, it can't be because it's every other person.

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So anybody that says that is a fucking moron. All right. And they basically want civil unrest because that's not a path, OK. All right. Let me take the other side. That was what was told to the side that won this time. That was by five or six million more people. So how do you bridge that? Because that that's I was like, screw you on anything that's important to your dignity.

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That was the vessel. That wasn't the people that's like this. Explain the difference. Tell me that disconnect. So I think the disconnect is people think that a vote for Donald Trump is a wholesale endorsement. And there is just been an infinite amount of exit polling and polling in general that have proven that that isn't the case, that essentially what people have used him for overwhelmingly, let's say that there's 25 to 30 million people that really believe in him. OK, I think that that's roughly in the order of magnitude.

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But I think that that means that there's twenty five to thirty million people that use him as a vessel to push back against the system that is now completely tilted away from those people. Right. When you go back to Maslow's hierarchy, Kyra, it's the most simple and basic things, right? The ability to have shelter, the ability to have food, the ability to take care of oneself. And so I just think we have to remember that somewhere between one and two people feel deep economic insecurity.

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And so if our reaction to that is we don't care, then no offense, but I don't want to be a Democrat. Do you think that is the reaction?

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No, I think it's confusion. And I think that there's a small strain of the Democratic Party that is dialed up the volume and there was a head fake somewhere in the primaries. People thought that this progressive agenda was what was a winning ticket. And then they got beaten back. Warren got beaten back, Bernie Sanders got beaten back.

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And we're all talking about workers, by the way, both of those candidates.

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Well, I think what we saw was a more centrist agenda, but they're not talking about workers. Let's be honest. They're implementation of worker rights is a consolidation of federal power. That's not necessarily protecting workers. That's basically creating a ruling class of people who theoretically know better. Now, I try to be more and more humble in my old age. Here's what I'll tell you. I don't think those are the smartest people in the world to be deciding fucking anything for anybody across the political spectrum.

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Politicians are no longer thoughtful intellectual policy agents. They are people who are extremely good at being in front of cameras, at tweeting on Twitter and curating a narrative that sells. There's a huge disconnect between that and thoughtful, effective policy. So let's just think about what we're doing. We're basically picking reality stars in a popularity contest. And so I think the better thing to do is take the reality star you like, but don't give them the power to legislate.

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I mean, like, would you want Kim and Kanye telling you what your health care policy should be? You'd be an idiot no matter what side of the political spectrum you want to want that we shouldn't want that. We should probably have people you and I have never heard of who are Warnke health care types design it. The problem is those people will never be in power to do it. So I think you have to just realize that extremes in federal politics are no longer good at all extremes.

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California just effectively denied affirmative action, rent control, gig worker protections. Where is California now?

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It's lost. California is completely lost. And it's an example of of what happens when you don't have balance. Balance is good. You don't eat broccoli every day. Broccoli is healthy. But if you broccoli every day, something bad happens to you. OK, just like sugar is bad, but a little bit is good. You eat sugar every day, you're going to get fucked up. We need political balance and we need more centrism. And what you're seeing is just the stupidity of what happens when you have a tilted monoculture trying to make decisions.

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It ends up with shitty outcomes, you could say that of Texas or some other places. So any place and I think that California is an example of if you just tilt into one direction too hard, you're going to lose your way.

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So centrist centrist people do have gripes that are real, a balanced diet. I have a salad I'm going to push back on because I do think that people have had enough and I think you need to hear them.

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But I think that you can't ignore you can say centrists, but in those centrist situation, most many people do not get the same starting line.

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I think it's really I would just tell everyone who thinks that those 70 million people don't have a right or are not the same as you is you're really, really in a misguided state like we are all equal. None of us is better than the other person.

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But let me just say so do the seventy five million on the other side. I know. But what I'm saying is that I think that what I take away from those 70 million people I voted Joe Biden and I voted for just humanity. I just voted for somebody that just seems reasonable. But I voted for a centrist and I voted for somebody who I really do think will actually take care of everybody. And I think that we have to re prioritize what's important, which is that social issues will have to come second.

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Maybe hopefully it's a close second, but two economic issues. And I think that those have been unaddressed for too long.

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And how do you look at the Republicans when they get in this sort of lockstep around Trump ism? Is that just that's a monoculture? It is.

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And I think that it's really quite on the one hand, important is one word that comes to mind and on the other hand, dangerous. The important part is that he will be a vessel, he will be a king maker. And you already see it today. And sort of Ted Cruz and his rhetoric is shifting to be more Trump. He's a pale, pale, pale version. So Donald Trump is himself. One thing you can say about the man as he is himself, Ted Cruz seems to sort of be a little bit more malleable, clearly, if you look at his the first time.

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He ran for president all the way through now, just the way he ebbs and flows. It's just very unreliable. Those are the most dangerous people because they're really, truly unpredictable and just kind of chameleons. So I think it's important to fix these root causes issues. Otherwise, symptomatically, what you're going to have are more and more extreme caricature people on both the left and the right, and in that it'll be easier, fortunately for centrists to win.

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I think that the the counterintuitive thing, which most people will not believe me, is I think that we are now in an era of centrism. Donald Trump 2.0 will get a lot of votes. Bernie Sanders 2.0 will get a lot of votes. But the person that wins will be a Bill Clinton style Southern Democrat.

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You've attacked social media even though you've made your money from it. You said they need to change their business now that Biden has won. What do you think they should do now? And how do you think Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have handled the disinformation and twenty twenty election? I'm only using that Facebook because it's the biggest data. They did a very good job. I think they did a much better job than Twitter did. I think if 2016 was the election of Facebook, twenty twenty was the election of Twitter.

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And each of them basically have swapped turns now being in the eye of the hurricane. OK, tell me why.

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Because I think there's more information than ever on Facebook. And they were slower. Many people felt they were slower.

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No, I think 2016 I think people were shocked at the pervasiveness of the disinformation that was pumping through the Facebook algorithm, Facebook news feed. So I think twenty twenty for Facebook. It is what it is for Twitter. However, it was much more complicated because they started to make a much more aggressive set of decisions on Donald Trump's commentary. And I think that while Facebook may have become sort of more right, Twitter had become much more left. And so I think they reacted to the desires of a of a small minority, maybe plurality of its users who wanted censorship.

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Now, all roads lead to the same conclusion, which is nobody won. I think that Mark and Sheryl and Jack have an incredibly hard job, impossible job. And I think all roads will lead to changes in Section 230. That's the body of law that allows Facebook and Twitter to claim that they are immune from this, from legal action. Yeah, I mean, they've used it to remain immune. Unfortunately, I think Section two 30 will change probably for the worse, because I think that's something that the Democrats and the Republicans can agree on.

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And I think they both don't want what Facebook and Twitter represent, which is a disruptive force in reallocating their power. You know, Democrats probably dislike Facebook. The Republicans probably dislike Twitter. Together, they'll find a coalition and all of it will say we should be able to go on our own distribution channels the way we choose and not have the risk of censorship. All right. So you're using you're throwing on censorship.

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You know, I'm on the opposite side of you on this issue because I do think these pervasive, continual lies do have an impact on the electorate and how people feel. You think they don't know?

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I think they do. All right. I think you think they should just let it fly? No, I just think that I'm just kind of trying to have a sense of what I think will happen.

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Right. So tell me how you saw this, that eventually it will take care of itself, that we don't have to keep yelling at Facebook to fix itself? Exactly. I think that spending so much time focused on Facebook and Twitter don't really solve the problem. I do think you probably have to tweak Section two thirty and make folks understand that having an algorithm is the same as being a publisher. That is the same thing. Right. So that law should change because it's just smart in twenty twenty to realize the obvious.

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But beyond that, I would just let time do its thing. There's an entire generation of Gen Z who are growing up on Tick-Tock and it's not just, you know, funny dance videos from Charlie DeMille. Oh it is. There's news content. There's all kinds of really interesting stuff and it will inform people in a different way. And so in many ways, we're seeing a diversification of consumption, many different ways, curated, non curated, algorithmic free for all anonymous named ways of getting information.

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The thing that it does, though, is it puts the onus on you, the person. And right now I think we're only seeing a small percentage of people take advantage of it, like I take a lot of time to curate.

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So you have all these people that are getting this information almost daily in a flood zone.

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I think the next product iteration will automate that. It'll allow people to learn in a more balanced way. That'll be a feature. It won't be an accident.

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So how do you avoid the Q Anan's and the bad information?

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I don't. I actually follow five Kuhnen accounts on Twitter. Why? Because you want to see it there. I just think it's really important. For me to have a spectrum of views, I really I am a centrist. I don't really have. All right. But a spectrum is fine for someone like you. Who can who can you avails themselves to? A lot.

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I'm sorry, but I'm sorry, but it's fine for everybody. It's right. Except except that if it's not information where they're availing themselves to lots of different things. So it's OK to fall for. I have a bad information diet. You're just saying they have a bad information diet and then it has no real world.

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No, no, no. You're absolutely right. I think a bad information diet. If you eat too much sugar, you'll get diabetes, you'll lose your eyes, you'll get obese, you'll die of heart disease in the process, in this case, possibly hurt society.

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There's going to be some versions of that as well. I think that if you are completely putting yourself in any kind of bubble, you're setting yourself up for failure.

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We'll be back in a minute, if you like this interview and want to hear others hit, subscribe and you'll be able to catch up on Hsueh episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with Elon Musk and you'll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Thomas Polli Hoppity after this break. This episode of Hsueh is brought to you by sales force these days, the office isn't always in office and a work from anywhere solution is more important than ever.

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Hey everyone. It's instead Herndon political reporter for The New York Times. I think that journalism that is accurate and fair is a bedrock of democracy is how folks make informed decisions. It's how we learn things that other people, many times people in power are trying to hide. And when you are taking the idea of fairness seriously, that means that you have made clear to both sides of the aisle what you intend to report. You have made sure it's accurate and that it lives up to the standards of independence that The New York Times believes in.

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It's not just people can trust what we're saying has been vetted. It's that we have gone through that process without trying to calibrate or dilute that information to appease one side or the other. If you want to support the work that we do, you can subscribe to The New York Times and NY Times dot com subscribe.

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OK, let's move on to what you've been up to more recently, sparks that is not a pair of socks or something. First, tell me, what is a spack? Explain what Spaak stands for.

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A Spack is a special purpose acquisition company. And basically what it is, is a blank check shell, meaning it's just a business that has a leadership team led by me as a CEO. And we have a balance sheet of money in a bank account and we use it to buy another company. So essentially what it is is a public company. But what that company has is only one thing, which is cash. So essentially what you're taking public is a shell company, which has called it a couple of hundred million dollars on its balance sheet.

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So the value of the company is a couple hundred billion dollars. Very simple math. So why is that important? Well, by having a public shell company, what you do is you go through this one process yourself and you go through all the machinations that are inherent in a traditional IPO. But now you're public. What then you can do is you can find a private company to partner with and essentially merge. And by merging, what happens is that private company is getting bought essentially by this public business that I've already taken up and then that company goes public.

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So now what does that do? It synthetically recreates an IPO. Now, why would you do that? There are really three main advantages of doing it this way. The first is speed. The second is certainty. What does that mean? Well, when you do a merger, it's not different than a funding round. You have a prize money, you have a post money. It feels exactly like every other funding round they've ever done. So that certainty of price and that's very different from a traditional IPO because an IPO, you build the book and it's like a grand reveal on the last day.

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What is the price? But the problem, as you see, is like whenever you see a big pop in the stock, you lose that value. All that money is not going to the company. So there's speed. So one hundred days versus 18 months certainty, which is a price that you know about versus a price that you don't. And then the third thing which is critical is sponsorship. And what that means is who is the person that's running this back and why is that valuable?

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Because it's a merger. You have one critical feature that's different between that process and a traditional one, which is you can talk about the future. Now, for a technology company, I would say all the value is in the future. There is really not that much that defines a company based on the past.

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So if you have a sponsor, a partner that has great relationships with other buyside hedge funds and mutual funds and the two of you can construct an elegant narrative of how to describe the company over the next five to 10 years, you're empowering all these people who are going to buy your stock to understand your company better to IPO's, keep you in the dark is what you're saying is keep people in the dark about promising companies, I think.

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And for high growth businesses, traditional IPOs really handcuff your ability to talk about the future. So, for example, I can you know, what I try to tell people is, look, we're creating a platform. I'm going to do a whole alphabet of these things, maybe more. So that's twenty six companies. I've talked about the themes that I'm looking to underwrite. So in my SPAC platform, there are these 10 boxes and each box represents three to five companies that I would love to IPO over time.

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So what are those boxes? So no one is e-commerce and consumption online. Huge theme for the future. Number two is deep tech car technologies. Number three is health care IT and digital therapeutics. Number four, sustainability, climate change, decarbonisation. Number five is fintech. Number six is in machine learning. Number seven is enterprisers. Number eight is consumer network effects and subscriptions. Number nine is education and number 10 is biotech. And so what this process does is really allow those people to have much more transparency into how you think about the company and how you're going to build the business, which is just better, I think, for everybody.

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And there's a million of them. It's sort of head spinning. How many? I think Paul Ryan has a SPAC. Everyone had everyone I turn to has his back. How do you look at what's happening and is it the next bubble? Because I think it makes people worried.

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I would say that it's not dissimilar to any other part of the capital markets, meaning there are some really, really, really shitty hedge funds. There are some really incredible hedge funds. There's some really shitty venture capital funds. There's some really great venture firms. So I just think it's like anything else, when things get to scale, you have a distribution of outcomes. And so it's up to the company in the board to look at the track record of the sponsor.

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And it's also up to the investor to make a decision about how much risk they want to take. But you make twenty percent fee on this. Correct. And there's a possibility of real fraud. You're absolutely right. So then it comes down to how do you do diligence? There's two or three things that everybody should care about. And the single most important thing to ask in a back is how much of your own money are you putting in this thing?

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Because if you want to see frauds, my suspicion is when we look back or if you want to see busted outcomes, crappy companies, they will be emblematic of people who have had no skin in the game. They are an agent.

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So they find a name and they put it on top of the spec. They don't care. There's a lot of that. So I don't know whether Paul Ryan will do a good spec. But when he does, the single most important question is, Paul, how much money did you put in there? And if Paul says zippo, honestly, I would just take a wait and see approach in my deal. So far I've done three. I put four hundred and fifty three million dollars to work myself and my partners.

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And over the next 30 I'll have five or six billion dollars of my own money in these things. That's an enormous amount of my net worth. And so I am going all in in trying to find myself an advantage. I do get compensated for that. But the most important thing is to ask a simple question. How much of tumults money only should he put one hundred billion dollars into that thing when he and his partners have one hundred and sixty seven million?

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They're not stupid. They're not in the business of losing money. And so I think that those things matter. Do you think the IPO process as it is, is broken? It's not broken, but I think that there should be more options.

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How do you look at then companies like Robin Hood and others which get a lot of attention, both negative and positive from their fans? Love it. And others think it's a lot of people being led like a pied piper out to bad outcomes?

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Well, I think it depends on what we think about our role in society. Is, is it that people are allowed to make mistakes or are we going to live in a highly judgmental state where no mistakes of any kind, including financial ones? My thought is that I think none of us are infallible. And I think that having a little bit more tolerance for other people learning is better.

[00:34:21]

OK, that's fine. Except that if your business is taking advantage of people's idiocy, they see that. I think that that's that. I think that's a level of judgment that I'm not willing to take. I don't think Robin Hood is. And entrepreneur in particular.

[00:34:32]

No, I don't think all over. But some of the educational stuff is weak and they get to it later. It's a very typical Silicon Valley thing, which is we'll fix it later. Once you make a mistake, that was really OK. OK, in fairness to what you're saying, I don't think any of these folks are. Oh, it's a mistake. We'll fix it later. I think people fall into things at work and then they double down.

[00:34:52]

All I'm saying is we should just be OK with the distribution of outcomes where some folks learn some lessons because again, in order to fix it, it will have to be such a paternalistic nanny state that you're not going to be able to say 90 percent of the things that you want to say Carol.

[00:35:09]

Well, I get that, but I'm talking about basic consequences, knowing that they are impossible to define not so there's some things you could have known before.

[00:35:17]

An example, Facebook life. Come on. Oh, they rolled that thing out. Like I was like I mean, they do with they're careless people, like, yeah, sure, you could drive your car into a wall, but maybe you could learn to drive, like, you know what I mean. Or maybe you could teach the people who drive. And that's it's not easy. You either go just like you were talking about. We get reduced to things.

[00:35:36]

It's either a nanny state or, hey, do whatever you want. And there is a medium in between it that most people could agree on is not a nanny state, which is good practices. So to reinforce what you're saying, I think that the products that actually empower people do win. So, for example, I think like if you look at the last three years where Apple is really double down on privacy, have been their best three years.

[00:36:00]

And so to your point, I think markets do reward that kind of thing, which is there is a balance. There's a line we won't cross and we're going to give people real choice and understanding. And I do think those are the products that with the day, all I'm saying is I think the market is really good at finding them and rewarding them. And remember, Apple didn't win until twenty seventeen through twenty twenty. So unfortunately, these cycles just take a long time.

[00:36:27]

Fair point. All right. Talk about two or three really critical areas people should really look hard at and how and then one that they absolutely should get the heck out of.

[00:36:37]

I'm taking climate change as my number one priority. I'm spending more time there than on anything else, probably 50, 60 percent of my time. I'm learning everything possible.

[00:36:48]

And I think that the world's first trillionaire will be a climate change person, OK, in tech or something, something to do with climate change, decarbonisation, sustainability.

[00:36:59]

I think, quite honestly, it's going to be some form of carbon capture, meaning taking carbon out of the earth. So there's that that's a huge category. I think it's stating the obvious, but I think education is going to get ripped pillar to post, especially post this pandemic. Schumer has been talking about a fifty thousand dollar per person student loan amnesty. Education is just completely bankrupt and broken, and I think it's moving to a more for profit model.

[00:37:25]

So I think that that's one. I also think that there's just a lot of action, health care and therapeutics now where we're going to solve most of the common diseases. We just have so much innovation that we've made in the last few years and CRISPR and Carti and things like that. So those are just three areas that that I really love. Crypto, obviously, I care about a lot. So I'm looking out there, you know, where am I less excited?

[00:37:50]

I don't know. It's hard to say. If you named a company, I could tell you if I hated it or not. Disney Man Bestman Hollywood entertainment. Done, finished over.

[00:38:01]

Because people still are going to watch shows. I watch a lot of shows. Yeah. Just the way that it's done is just not the way that they do it, you know, with the glad handing and the relationships and quite honestly like the, the sexual perversion, like all this stuff is just so fucking antiquated and stupid retail that's mostly finished and will be, what, a bunch of last mile distribution outlets and online brands that basically sell online stuff for offline fulfillment.

[00:38:30]

All right, one more. The restaurant industry thriving because there's nothing left where you can have a community. You know, unfortunately, the byproduct of social media is we're the most separated we've ever been. And there's something really amazingly tactile and being in a social space together. And so social spaces, physical social spaces are going to see a resurgence resurgence. OK, the Biden administration, what would you advise them to do? And would you want to be involved in the Biden administration?

[00:39:04]

I think that there's a lot of really good things that he can do. I want to aspire to be a Coke brother before I aspire to be an undersecretary or state. Which which kind of Coke brother?

[00:39:15]

The one that controls all the things I think which thinks they're not very nice, though, for others. I know, but we need a nicer and nicer a darker chocolatier. Well, isn't that isn't that the George Soros. Doesn't he the the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. So you wanna be a Coke brother. Good to know. I'd rather control the resources than work in the administration of the administration. But if you had to be there, if they said you are now the head of the Department of Commerce or whatever department that.

[00:39:41]

Have impact. What would you say his first focus should be, whether the climate economy or whatever, what would be the first thing to do from an economic point of view to send out checks to everyone until this pandemic's over?

[00:39:53]

So I think the check thing is, is actually an important thing, because I think it's the only way that we can see inflation. I do think inflation is a good thing over time. But what I would do is I would introduce some mechanism to invest in refactoring a lot of the manufacturing economy and a carbon neutral way. And I think that where the government can play a huge role is to be a balance sheet. So if you are right now in Ohio working in a factory that's making parts for the auto supply chain or the aerospace supply chain, you should be able to go to the government, get a 50 million dollar loan, go to desktop metal by 40 or 50 printers.

[00:40:32]

Those things do not burn fossil fuels or coal to generate heat. They print things using electricity. And then you should sell them in with a certificate that says this is a carbon neutral part. And so if the government both empowered people to completely revitalize the supply chain for resilience and carbon neutrality. Right. So on showing things fucked China, bring these things here, be able to support a little bit more cost and inefficiency, but it's more resilient and it favors Americans.

[00:41:03]

Do it in a way that's carbon neutral and then incentivize or either punish the downstream manufacturer who chooses not to do those things and continue to optimize for ravaged roads. I think that that would be an incredibly powerful policy. No. One, and then number two is I would try to make sure that there are. Equal starting lines, nobody wants an equal finishing line, I don't think, but I think everybody wants the starting line. And the two most powerful ways is No.

[00:41:36]

One is to make sure that you completely put a dent in for profit education. You cannot allow Harvard and Stanford and Yale to do this fucking bullshit that they do because everybody else copies them. And so you have to cut the head off the Medusa to cripple them, meaning segregate the foundations and the endowments from these schools and make these schools rely and run like some other school that only has a two hundred million dollar endowment. And you'll see people focus on outcomes versus the entrenched aristocracy.

[00:42:09]

And then the second is you need to provide some structural revamp of Common Core and a focus on some STEM education at the high school and primary school level. If all the next ten presidents did were those three things, I think you'd have a renaissance in America.

[00:42:23]

Are you or do you think there's going to be a renaissance in America? Are you? I do.

[00:42:27]

I do. Because I think the money is changing hands to. The important thing is, let's be honest, the money is what drives all of this stuff. And all the 70, 80 year olds are now transitioning the money to people like me in their 40s and 50s. And I think we'll transition them to people in their 20s and 30s. And that's important because our values are different. So however, the Koch ran is not the way they run now because that money is getting distributed.

[00:42:51]

Think of all the money in the hands of amazing people like Laurene Powell Jobs or McKenzie Scott. The money is getting reallocated and with it is a worldview that I think is more balanced, more centrist as a result. All right.

[00:43:05]

What is your. My last question. What is your relationship to your money now?

[00:43:09]

It's just a tool. It's kind of like it distorts. It distracts, it frames relationships. But at its best, it's an accelerant of my worldview. But it's mostly nothing. It's cracked up to be it's mostly oppression. But I've found a way to frame my mind around it being motivational because it's like it's like playing an online video game and trying to consume all the resources.

[00:43:33]

All right. Thank you so much.

[00:43:36]

Thanks.

[00:43:47]

Hsueh is a production of New York Times opinion, it's produced by name Marasa, Hebeler, Bonnie, Matt, Quong and Vishakha Darba, edited by Paula Schoeman with Music and sound design by Isaac Jones.

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