Meta’s Six-Gigawatt Compute Deal with AMD, Notion Launches Custom Agents, Anthropic’s Safety Tests

17:55Rocket Drew:particularly in engineering product teams or really any company someone might ask a question in slack over email wherever you're doing your work but an engineering manager a product manager lots of people have to forward it to the right slack channel listen to it follow you know 10 000 slack channels to actually understand today with custom agents your custom agent can be configured to actually listen into those slack channels understand what the question is route it to the right Slack channel, create a task, maybe reply with the relevant information, close the task when the Slack channel is closed.

18:32Kevin McLaughlin:And is this a level of integration that Notion has not had before? I mean, the idea that it can take data from Slack and then also create tasks in Slack, create some of these repeatable motions, was that possible before?

18:47Rocket Drew:So the tasks are created in Notion. Notion remains that system of record of where you're doing the enterprise work. We've always been able to search over Slack, our connected search and that Q &A functionality was one of our largest launches in 2024, 2023 that really was our entry point. What's unique about this is the idea that we're moving away from the chat, right? We're moving away from it being in a chat inside Notion, but really having it act as a coworker that can be triggered everywhere. That's where a lot of this development has been the infrastructure of plugging things together at enterprise scale, So it's governable.

19:21Rocket Drew:It has version control. It has audit logs. A lot of the work around respecting permissions, if you have multiple connections, how are all of those permissions respected? That's the enterprise work that Notion has built an expertise on over the past decade that's really made us well positioned for agentic workflow.

19:42Kevin McLaughlin:So we just had a conversation with our enterprise software reporter about the corporate data wars, and we were talking about the tolls that some of these system of record companies have said, either explicitly or in some ways implicitly, you know, the idea that, hey, you can access our data, but we're going to charge you for it. And that's sort of the way some of these enterprise software companies are going to be able to sustain their businesses. And there's a big question around what customers will want in all this because ultimately a lot of these customers do believe it's their data. But my question for you, Sarah, is in all of these integrations that you have at Notion with Slack, with all of these other programs and companies, how – I mean, has there been any challenges there with companies putting up walls at all or maybe any increasing hurdles between cooperation at all?

20:38Rocket Drew:So I think every company is figuring out their pricing model in the age of agentic work. Notion is really lucky because a lot of our core enterprise users, a majority of their work is happening inside Notion, right? And so we have that native first party advantage. and we already see that Notion is not necessarily trying to replace some of your other areas where you work, for instance, Slack. However, we are that system of record where the agents are collaborating, and that isn't something that a lot of these information stores are holding. They might be a system of record for the individuals working, but no one has really been able to launch an enterprise-scale system of record for agent collaboration.

21:25Rocket Drew:A great example is offline mode. So Notion built offline mode. We launched it this summer. And the beauty of offline mode is if two people are working on an airplane and you upload a document, you're able to actually resolve those conflicts. What do you do when two agents are trying to do parallel work? How do you resolve that conflict? How do you look and inspect who did what? And those don't have to be Notion-powered agents. If Slack created an agent, if someone's using a first-party frontier model's own agent, they all still need a place to collaborate with their enterprise work. And that's the market we're going after that doesn't really exist today.

22:02Rocket Drew:And we've seen just a hockey stick of adoption because ultimately enterprises are thirsty to launch AI products, but they aren't able to do it safely at scale. And that's a market that doesn't exist. Regardless of where your information lives, it's a system of record for where agents are collaborating. even today on Notion, about 10%. Oh, go ahead.

22:23Kevin McLaughlin:What I actually wanted to get into was the usage-based pricing that you guys are diving into here. Is this the first time that Notion has done usage-based pricing?

22:35Rocket Drew:Yeah, so only the custom agents today will have usage-based pricing. We have a seat-based model for business and enterprise plans, which will remain. But as agents do more work, the value really scales with usage, not with seats. right? And so we really want to make sure that our pricing model is correlated with the value. So we want to price on outcomes, right? And this is the first time we've been able to successfully do it. That being said, it's the new adjustment for our users. So users will have access to custom agents today, and they'll be able to see their metered usage, but we're not actually charging on that custom agent usage until May, because we're learning too with our users in the market on what amount of inspectability and control they want because we don't want, as you see over Twitter, some of these crazy examples of runaway agent usage.

23:24Kevin McLaughlin:Well, that's what I was going to ask you about is, I mean, how do you know how much the agent is going to be working in the background? You put your payment information in, and I mean, it's one thing to say, hey, I'm buying this many credits, but at the end of the day, too, if my credits are getting drained, then how do I know that there's a cap on them?

23:44Rocket Drew:So that's exactly why Notion is so well positioned, because we understand these conflicts of what an enterprise administrator wants to do versus someone, you know, on their Mac Mini, just hoping that they don't run out, that their credit card doesn't get declined. Right. And so, number one, we've been building core agent for our customers and trying to understand what that pricing implication is and how it hits our margins and revenues for years. So we kind of have an intuition on what level of inspectability, whether it be model selection, trigger rate, etc., that our users want. We have first-party empathy, right?

24:21Kevin McLaughlin:So you give them kind of like an estimate saying this is what this – so you use the data that you have on hand to give them an estimate. And then the idea here is that because you have that data, the estimate will be more accurate than maybe other companies.

24:37Rocket Drew:Right. And then we also build product around telling you like, hey, you know, you've triggered this over 500 times. Do you want to think about maybe a cheaper model? Do you want to think about changing what that trigger is? Ultimately, we're not. We're here to make sure that we're delivering value to our customers. The way usage-based pricing is set up is it's a really positive incentive. Because no matter what, we're making solid margins on our customers having value. We're not trying to make money on people paying for something that they don't use, right? And so it's a great value alignment that I think most companies are trying to figure out.

25:13Rocket Drew:And, you know, we're iterating with our customers together. That's another reason we have Tilmei is that we want to do right by our customers and make sure that they're paying for the use that they're getting and paying for outcomes. And custom agents, when they act as that second coworker, we're moving out of the chat, right? It's moving even when you're offline. Then users need to understand what value they describe to that and what they'd be willing to pay.

25:38Kevin McLaughlin:Well, Sarah, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Sarah Sachs, an AI lead at Notion here on TITV. Anthropic is focusing some of its research efforts on cybersecurity, and a new exclusive report from the information revealed 50 of the company's research projects that try to study rogue agents. I want to bring on Rocket Drew, the reporter behind that story, to help us break down his reporting. Rocket, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hi, Akash. Thanks. It's great to be here. Tell me about these 50 research projects that you found out about are happening at Anthropic.

26:14Austin Lyons:Yeah, absolutely. So Anthropic has been running a fellowship program for going on a year at this point. And through this program, they bring on younger researchers to collaborate with their more senior researchers. at the company. These researchers tend to be, say, college age or PhD students who are interested in collaborating at Anthropic. And through the program, Anthropic's mentors, their senior researchers, propose research projects that these people can work on. So they proposed 49, probably of those about only half ended up getting pursued because of the interests of the people in the particular cohort that they have running right now.

26:52Austin Lyons:But maybe the best way to give you a window into these projects is to tell you about sort of the six categories that they fall into, if that sounds good. Sort of the buckets. So the first is security, like you mentioned, ensuring that, you know, say agents that are working on the web don't get exposed to a hack or a prompt that convinces them to expose a user's personal information. A second category is AI control, which is a category of research that refers to figuring out how we can get useful work out of an AI model when we're not sure that the AI model has the same goals as us. So, for example, you might want to use a weaker but more trusted model to supervise the actions that it tries to take and flag anything that looks suspicious.

27:33Austin Lyons:There's another bucket of projects called Scalable Oversight, which is a research agenda that focuses similarly on using weaker AI models to supervise and train stronger AI models. There's a category called Model Internals, which is, in the more jargon, we would call that like mechanistic interpretability. It's a real mainstay of anthropics research. It involves understanding what's going on under the hood, like inside the models, what's responsible for the outputs that we see? Because these models are sort of a black box, is how we would talk about it. And then the last two are, one is model organisms, which is anthropics term for when we use existing models as sort of, you know, So imagine like doing a science experiment on a mouse and hoping that the results generalize to a human someday.

28:23Austin Lyons:It's when we inspect modern day models for signs of the kind of risks and scenarios that could arise in future more powerful models. So a number of anthropics projects are focused on that. And then the last category is projects that focused on understanding Chinese models, evaluating them, figuring out what their capabilities are, also improving anthropics ability to host and run those models itself. So that's a breakdown.

28:46Kevin McLaughlin:So this is kind of fascinating because this is a window into basically how Anthropic is prioritizing its research efforts specifically to do with sort of the risk and safety functions of its AI. I want to ask you about these rogue agents that you wrote about, because I think, you know, you and I have talked about OpenClaw and sort of some of the security risks that come with letting an agent loose and potentially giving an access to not just your whole computer, but, you know, your accounts too, and saying, do what you want. Your reporting was interesting because it actually seemed to suggest that Anthropic is leaning into that risk and trying to figure out how to protect against it.

29:33Kevin McLaughlin:How is it doing that?

29:34Austin Lyons:Yeah, that's exactly right. I think it's a topic that's certainly on their minds. I don't know if you saw yesterday, Summer Yu, who's a researcher at Meta, said that her OpenClaw agent went and started deleting all of her emails, even though she didn't want it to. And that was an example where the agent was clearly doing something that was not aligned with her desires, but it wasn't even hacked in that case. It was just that it wasn't following instructions properly. So there's a lot of scenarios to be worried about here. Some of them are just the agent misunderstanding what it's supposed to do and sort of making mistakes by accident.

30:04Austin Lyons:Some of them involve it following instructions, but those instructions being malicious. Someone tries to get their agent to do something it's not supposed to, say, to conduct a cyber attack. And then there's this sort of other genre that involves hacking, like someone putting prompt out on the web to try to steal your information, steal your crypto

30:23Kevin McLaughlin:wallets. So how is Anthropic protecting against that or trying to protect against it?

30:29Austin Lyons:Yeah, I think there's a range of approaches. Some of it involves studying what models are capable of right now. For example, we have a sense that Claude could be good at cyber attacks, but no one has tried that hard to get Claude to compete in cybersecurity challenges. People have tinkered with it, but it has a ways to go. So one sort of thrust of the research is just figuring out what is Claude even capable of? What are these models capable of? How dangerous could they be? And then also creating benchmarks or standardized tests to measure that in a more rigorous way so we can notice when there's an improvement in those capabilities.

31:06Austin Lyons:And then, of course, there's also interest in mitigating those risks and figuring out how we can train the models to behave better. So for example, one of the projects that anthropics researchers proposed for their fellows is when a sort of cybersecurity incident or one of these hacking incidents appears in the wild, can we take that and can we automatically reproduce it in a way that we could train Claude to not fall for the same trap again in the future? Right now, that's a pretty manual process. If one of these things gets spotted in the wild, say an agent gets hacked when it's interacting with a banking website, an anthropic employee has to sit down and recreate the banking website with the same attack and ensure that it works.

31:47Austin Lyons:And it's a little tedious. The project proposes, well, what if we could just do that automatically?

31:52Kevin McLaughlin:Now, you had a conversation with one of Anthropic's safety leaders. What were the questions that you went into that interview with and what ultimately did you learn from that conversation?

32:04Austin Lyons:Yeah, I think one question on the back of my mind is how significant is the research that these fellows are pursuing? I mean, we're talking about researchers that sometimes don't have a lot of experience. There may be only working for four to six months, Anthropic is probably picking projects for them that they can accomplish in that short of a time, maybe without a lot of access to their models or without a ton of compute. So I was wondering, you know, how significant can the research really be that's come out of the program? And I was informed that of the research that one of their key safety teams has put out over the past several months, the fellows account for more than half of that output.

32:41Austin Lyons:So I think the, I was surprised that the fellowship program, I think, is becoming a significant portion of Anthropics work and a big uplift to this kind of safety and security research that they're working on. And there have been a couple pretty high profile examples of research coming out of the program. And now that we have a sense of what the mentors are proposing for the next batch of fellows, I think we have some things to keep an eye out for.

33:05Kevin McLaughlin:Great. Well, Rocket, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Rocket True, our AI and robotics reporter here at The Information. Thanks, Akash. Government regulations have become a central challenge to many tech companies' growth playbooks around the world. A decade ago, the biggest companies involved in that conversation were startups like Uber and Airbnb. Those companies remain actively involved in that story, but the arena has now very much expanded since then to include crypto, AI, prediction markets, data centers, and more. I want to bring on one of Silicon Valley's best-known advisors on startup regulatory affairs.

33:42Kevin McLaughlin:Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. Bradley, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you here.

33:48Bradley Tusk:Hey, thanks for having me.

33:49Kevin McLaughlin:So you wrote a piece about a week ago in the New York Daily News about data centers, and your view was kind of interesting to me because, look, I think a lot of venture capitalists that we've had on the show, I mean, they're very much for building out AI and everything that it will take to build the capacity. You had a bit of a nuanced view on this. What was your message that you were trying to send?

34:15Bradley Tusk:That when we think about whether it's data centers or really tech in general, we can't just think about what's best for us. If we are developing a product that has no regulatory oversight at all, doesn't involve government or politics, sure, knock yourself out. But if you were doing anything that is regulated by government anyway, for you to not think about what are the politics of this issue? How will this impact consumers? How will it impact voters? How do I ensure that what I want will be both allowed and not banned? You have to take these things into account. And somehow when the hyperscalers decided to spend trillions of dollars building data centers, the notion that they're going to impose massively higher electricity costs on consumers who were in whatever grid they're using didn't seem to occur to them.

35:05Bradley Tusk:And I think it is incredibly naive and counterproductive when you think, oh, we're saving the world. We're developing new technology. Everyone's just going to love us. And we don't have to sort of think about the negative externalities of our work. And that's what's been the case. But at the same time, you're seeing consumers facing much higher electricity bills anywhere where there are data centers. and states proposing legislation, both blue and red states, saying we're not going to allow the permitting and zoning of new data centers if they're going to impose much higher costs on everyone else.

35:38Bradley Tusk:And so to me, if we want data centers to happen, if we want AI to happen, we have to address this issue. And that was the point of the piece.

35:46Kevin McLaughlin:So how do we address the issue then?

35:48Bradley Tusk:I think that, you know, no politician is going to sacrifice their career so that Sam Altman can become a trillionaire. Nobody cares about Sam Altman or Jensen Wong or anyone in any of these companies. They care about getting reelected. And so if your data center is going to impose meaningfully higher electricity costs on the people who actually vote in your next election, then that's not going to be allowed. And we need to come up with ideas that allow for far more efficient chips and far less energy usage and far less water usage for data centers so that they can exist and be permitted and be built everywhere that we need them, but at the same time not become this political football that everybody on both sides sort of decides to oppose simply because it's not good for them politically.

36:36Bradley Tusk:And so, look, I mean, this has been the case since I started working with Uber back in 2011, which is one of the real blind spots often that you see in Silicon Valley and you see in tech is a just ignorance of government and politics and regulation. and just like the wrong engineering can kill your company or the wrong fundraising strategy can kill your company or the wrong go-to-market strategy can kill your company. If you are a startup in a highly regulated industry and you are not prepared to be able to deal with the political issues, you know, coming at you, there's a good chance you're not going to make it.

37:11Bradley Tusk:And I think that especially in the AI sector, there has just been not really any thought put into it. You see this with data centers. You see it, for example, there are 2 ,000 states now that are poised to ban mental health chatbots, and that industry has done a pitifully poor job in explaining what they do, why it can be valuable to society, and how they can do it in a regulated way that protects kids and takes care of the underlying concerns that legislators have. But you have to think about this stuff.

37:42Kevin McLaughlin:So you are a venture capitalist, and AI is sort of this unavoidable area that you have to partake in as an investor. What are you investing in then, given that you have these views on how the data center build outs should happen?

37:56Bradley Tusk:Yeah, alternate forms of compute that are far more energy efficient and energy facilities that can provide on site power to to data centers that don't require being attached to the grid. So that could be companies that have memory cylinders that are built differently that can really increase energy efficiency. There can be different types of chips entirely that are more energy efficient. We're in one company called Biological Computing Company that uses neurons from rat brains to power AI. There are companies that do microgrid nuclear or hydrogen fuel cells or turbines that can be put on site.

38:36Bradley Tusk:So I think that there's a lot of investment opportunities specifically in reducing the energy needs of data centers for AI. And those are good opportunities to me.

38:47Kevin McLaughlin:I want to understand what you think will be the defining issues in technology heading into the midterm elections, because as you, I mean, you talked about data centers, that will be a big one. We also have prediction markets, which is sort of this other hot button issue right now. And, you know, I'm trying to think about the stances that politicians might take heading into the midterm cycle. Are those the two big issues you think of? Or what do you think really define this cycle?

39:14Bradley Tusk:Well, let me kind of redefine your question a little bit, if that's okay, which is, to me, there's one key buzzword for the midterms. And keep in mind, the midterms, when we think about it, we think about Congress, which is every member of the House and a third of the Senate. But there's also 36 governors that are for election or re-election this year, as well as, you know, most state legislatures. So it's really across the board. Affordability is the issue of 2026. We got a preview of that in New York City with Mondami realizing that and writing that issue to victory to become the next mayor of New York City.

39:47Bradley Tusk:That's what it's going to be about. So, for example, the data center issue matters because if it does increase electricity prices for your average voter, that's an affordability question. And so from a big picture standpoint, if you are a tech company that is doing something that is deemed to be increasing costs for average people, you need to be aware of it and ready to be able to defend it and think about ways that you can change and pivot to give politicians the one that they need so they don't put you out of business entirely. Or on the flip side, you very well might be a startup that can increase affordability.

40:24Bradley Tusk:And in which case you've got a real opportunity to try to say, hey, we're part of the solution here. So like, for example, I'm an investor in a company called OwnWell that helps people with property tax appeals. And we're working on legislation in a bunch of different states so that people kind of access to that system. You know, that is a political winner in the sense that while obviously local governments don't want to lose property tax revenue, people do want to spend less money on their property taxes. And in a year where affordability is the question, that's really an area for success. And so prediction markets, for example, which we work on a lot, and I think I have a lot of thoughts on that we can get into, but I don't think it's going to be an electoral issue this year in that it doesn't really impact affordability one or the other.

41:11Kevin McLaughlin:What are your thoughts on prediction markets? Because this is sort of a classic federal versus state battle. in some ways, but I know probably oversimplifying it. I don't think it is, actually. Well, unpack the nuances here. Where do you think this goes? Look, people are saying, and you've done a podcast on this, it could end up in the Supreme Court, and there will be decisions there. But, I mean, are there signals that tell us which way this is going?

41:41Bradley Tusk:Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So just to give the viewers a little bit of a level set here, There are gaming companies that are regulated by states. So that's typically the FanDuel's, the DraftKings of the world that do sports betting, and they have licenses in individual states to conduct that, and then they're subject to the regulatory and taxation system of each individual state. Then there are prediction market companies that are seen as commodities, and they're regulated by the CFTC. So that's at the federal level. So they've got a different regulatory taxation structure. So that's companies like Calci and Polymarket and others.

42:21Bradley Tusk:And states are saying, you know, that prediction markets really should be under their jurisdiction because the Supreme Court in 2000, I think it was 17, overturned a congressional law known as PASPA. And what PASPA was was a ban on states allowing sports betting. And the Supreme Court said, no, this is really a state issue and their right to decide what to do. It's not up to Congress. And that opened up the entire industry and led to sports betting all over the U.S. States are saying under the PASPR ruling, they should clearly have jurisdiction over prediction markets as well. The CFTC, the federal government is saying, no, these are commodities.

43:01Bradley Tusk:These are contracts that have been historically and traditionally regulated by the CFTC. It is our jurisdiction. So what you're seeing now is litigation between states and the federal government with different types of parties involved. And some of the rulings have been on the side of CFTC regulation. Some have been on the side of state regulation. Usually when there are divided opinions across the country, that's when the Supreme Court takes up an issue. And it'll be really interesting to see how they proceed here because on one hand, this is the court that by and large did PASPA. and as a court that is more conservative, which tends to be more favored towards states' rights.

43:41Bradley Tusk:On the other hand, there is a clear regulatory framework and system that is working at the federal level. So there really may not be any reason to change that. And so, you know, I think it's kind of one of those 50-50 things, which means that for the moment, you know, everyone is just proceeding with the status quo because none of us have the ability to know when the Supreme Court's going to take up an issue or how they're going to decide it. But I will say this. If the court rules in favor of the CFTC, which I think there's at least a 50 % chance of that, then the companies that are doing sports betting are going to become, I would argue, prediction market companies instead, because they're going to say we would far rather have one regulator and a far more preferential tax system than, you know, 42 different states or whatever it might be.

44:28Bradley Tusk:That's going to create a giant hole in revenue for state governments. they're going to have to fill that hole. And so I think that if you're looking towards the future, iGaming, which is just online casino gaming, poker, blackjack, crafts, whatever you want, I think will be the next wave. So if you're looking at who are the startups that might be able to provide interesting forms of iGaming that, you know, customers and consumers might like, that's where kind of the next opportunity might sit.

44:58Kevin McLaughlin:So there's a lot there. And, you know, I think one question that I did want to get your take here on is this is the sports betting part of these operations, right? I mean, when we think prediction markets, I mean, now we have, you could bet on anything. People could be betting on what you're going to say here on the show today. But, you know, I have always tried to sort of segment the sports betting prediction market business from the rest of it and where the popularity is and also what is actually being regulated. What you're talking about here, that's only the sports betting. side of the business, right?

45:32Bradley Tusk:Well, not necessarily. I mean, the court could say that all of this, in their view, is a form of gaming that is, you know, should be controlled by the states that within the 10th Amendment fits into state jurisdiction. Then states, you've already seen legislation in different states to ban the non-sports betting parts of prediction markets. Right now, those bills don't mean anything because they don't have jurisdiction over it anyway, but it is certainly possible that if the Supreme Court sends the entire market back to the states, that it might allow certain forms of prediction markets and not others.

46:11Bradley Tusk:But with that said, you know, I was the deputy governor of Illinois for four years and I ran the state's budget. You always need more revenue. And it seems to me that if there is a way to generate more revenue, you're probably not going to say, I don't want it. There might be very pretty specific types of contracts that they say are not allowed. But my guess is that the variety of activities offered on the sites will likely continue regardless of who regulates it.

46:39Kevin McLaughlin:So what's your view on who should regulate this? Which direction do you think? You know, I think it's working.

46:46Bradley Tusk:So I understand in the state's argument, I certainly as an investor in FanDuel, we benefited tremendously when PASPA was overturned. But at the same time, I think the CFTC is doing a good job with it. I think that there's real consumer demand for it. I think companies like CalShare are doing a really good job running their businesses. And so, you know, from my personal perspective, I am very much okay with the way it works right now. But I also think that if that is affirmed by the Supreme Court, you're going to see shifts in behavior by the companies that are currently regulated by the states.

47:23Bradley Tusk:And that will both create budget holds for the states and then opportunities for new types of gaming and new types of startups.

47:30Kevin McLaughlin:Let me just run through the gamut of hot button regulatory issues right now very quickly. So you were very involved with Uber. Now we have this autonomous vehicles shift happening. Is there any roadblock right now that you see in terms of autonomous vehicles that the regulations could pose for the growth of these companies?

47:52Bradley Tusk:Yeah. So one would be at the federal level. The federal government has done an abysmal job at regulating autonomous vehicles, meaning they've just done nothing. So in 2015, there was bipartisan legislation that passed the House Energy Subcommittee unanimously that created a regulatory framework for autonomous cars. It has never moved since. Why? Because the Teamsters are scared of autonomous trucking, even though in reality it doesn't make sense because there's a massive shortage of truckers. and you desperately need technology to fill the gaps. But nonetheless, Trump saw himself as a Teamsters guy.

48:29Bradley Tusk:So he had his DOT just hold everything. Then Biden saw himself as a Teamsters guy. So he had his DOT do it. And now we have Trump again. And so while there are regulatory frameworks for autonomous cars and trucks intrastate, we still don't have an interstate regulatory framework. So, you know, that's a problem because people need to be able to cross state lines And so that's number one. Number two would be specific to autonomous taxis, whether it's Waymo or Tesla or an Uber drawing something out or whoever else, where the politics of taxis and taxi drivers will get in the way. So, for example, here in New York City, Zoran Mondomini, who's our mayor, does not want Waymo because he sees himself as an advocate for the taxi drivers and sees that autonomous taxis will remove potential jobs for taxi drivers.

49:24Bradley Tusk:You know, he's probably not wrong about that in the big picture, but the question is how do you handle it, which is you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once there is a better way to do something that there's consumer demand for, it's going to happen. And so there's one of two approaches in the way I see it. One is Mondami can choose to ignore that and just do his best to stifle it. It will happen anyway. And then when it does, the taxi drivers will be devastated. When I ran all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the U.S., that was the approach that the taxi industry took and got their politicians to take, which was just banned over completely.

50:01Bradley Tusk:and then when we won all of those fights in every market, taxi was really devastated as a result. Or you could approach this far more intelligently and say, how do we think about the future of taxi drivers in a world of driverless taxis? And there can be things like licenses for autonomous taxis and revenue streams attached to that. And that revenue stream could pay into a fund for taxi drivers. So there are intelligent ways to do it. I hope that people like Mondami and other ultra-progressive mayors choose to engage that way. But, you know, from terms of their rhetoric and their politics and everything else, you could see them just saying, you know, technology bad, autonomous taxis bad, and just trying to stop it.

50:44Kevin McLaughlin:Right. Let me ask you one last question before you go. So when you are advising a company or when you do invest in a company and you sort of take on this role as a regulatory advisor, and we could talk for a lot longer about this, but what is the Bradley Tusk playbook? What is the strategy that you put in front of them? What does it include? What do they need to do? How do you advise startups to work around regulations? Is it lobbying? What is it?

51:12Bradley Tusk:Yeah, it's a great question. So there's really kind of a fundamental thesis that drives everything that we do here, which is we believe that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on wanting the next election and nothing else. And as a result, you have to figure out in any given situation how to show the elected officials or regulators you need that if doing what you want will further their chances of reelection or if they don't do what you want, it's going to hurt their chances of reelection. That might mean lobbying. It might mean earned media or paid media or social media.

51:52Bradley Tusk:It might mean a big grassroots campaign. It might be going negative on the person. Sometimes it might mean asking for permission. Sometimes it might mean begging for forgiveness. The context depends entirely on the company, the existing laws on the books, the jurisdiction, who you're disrupting, their relative political power, and a whole bunch of other variables. And I did write a book about it. It's called The Fixer, if anyone's interested. But it totally differs not only from industry to industry, but from startup to startup and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We could have the same portfolio company and pursue one strategy in one state and a totally different strategy in another simply because that's what you need to win there.

52:32Bradley Tusk:But fundamentally, no politician cares about you, the startup. They don't care if you become a billionaire. They don't care if you have an exit. They don't care about your KPIs. All they care about is their own political future. I don't know if you remember when Amazon wanted to put their second headquarters in New York City. I think it was back in 2019.

52:52Kevin McLaughlin:and you know hundreds of i was living in toronto toronto we were right you guys screwed it up too

52:58Bradley Tusk:with sidewall okay you guys also messed it up but but new york city messed it up because as did amazon because um you know a couple hundred cities competed for this new york kind of won a little bit out of nowhere i don't think we were really expecting to win and everybody's very excited then aoc comes out against it because her politics are she doesn't like capitalism jobs technology things like that, fine. That's who she is. So the state senator for that neighborhood in Queens, a guy named Mike Jenares, and he's just a guy. He's not good. He's not evil. He's not conservative. He's not liberal.

53:31Bradley Tusk:He just wants to stay in office. That's it. And he says to himself, oh no, now that AOC is opposing this, what happens if I continue to push it forward and make it happen? And he knew, based on historical turnout data, that turnout in his next primary and because of gerrymandering only the primaries matter probably about eight nine percent those are the most left-wing voters in the district and if someone ran against him from the left especially with aoc's backing they could use this issue to take him out and he had a choice 40 000 new jobs for new yorkers good paying jobs with benefits or one job his own and he picked himself and the problem isn't that Mike Gennaris is the exception.

54:15Bradley Tusk:The problem is that Mike Gennaris is the norm. That's what politicians do. And so unless you can show the Mike Gennaris of the world that, hey, doing what we want will not only will help you get reelected, or if you don't do what we want, it will hurt your chance to get reelected, then they don't care and they're not going to do what you want. So it's always about understanding what do they need for reelection and how does your thing get framed in a way that convinces them that helping you helps them. Great.

54:47Kevin McLaughlin:Well, Bradley, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures here on TITV. Yeah. That does it for today's show. A reminder, we are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. I want to thank you all for tuning in. We really do appreciate your viewership. Make sure you subscribe to the information on YouTube and follow us on x instagram tiktok and check us out wherever you get your podcasts i'm already excited for our next show tomorrow have a great rest of your tuesday bye-bye for now