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- [00:01]
Jason Calacanis
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- [00:39]
Sponsor Announcer
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- [02:25]
Bradley Tusk
Money Market matter if money is evil,
- [02:27]
Ed Elson
then that building is hell. Welcome to Prof. G Markets. I'm Ed elson. It is May 20th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices ended the day in the red with tech stocks declining ahead of Nvidia's earnings due tonight. Brent crude climbed back above $110 per barrel with no progress on Iran. And the yield on 30 year treasuries hit its highest level since 2007. On long term energy inflation expectations, traders are increasingly anticipating a rate hike from the Federal Reserve. And on Cauchy, the odds that we will see a hike this year have climbed to 43%. Okay, what else is happening? Billionaire wealth has more than doubled since 2019, and now voters want to tax it. 2026 Billionaire Tax act is officially on the November ballot in California. It would impose a one time 5% tax on the assets of Californians worth $1 billion or more. The union backing the measure says the goal is to prevent hospital closures across California and fund state programs. But the proposed tax has drawn fierce opposition. Critics argue that wealth taxes target the people driving investment and job creation and could push them out of the state. And California is just the start. Senator Bernie Sander and Congressman Ro Khanna have introduced a federal version that would go even further with a 5% annual tax on every American billionaire. So we figured that this was a good time to have a discussion about the wealth tax with two people who have thought very hard about it. Today we are speaking with Jason Calacanis, investor and host of the all in podcast, and also Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. Jason and Bradley, thank you so much for joining me here on Prof. G Markets. Bradley, I'm going to start with you because you've just written about this. I'd like to just sort of set the stage here. We're talking about taxing billionaires not just in California, but also across the rest of the nation or at a federal level. How do we get here? And when you look at California, what are the chances that you think this will actually go through?
- [04:48]
Bradley Tusk
Yeah, I mean, there's, in my view, no question that we have an income inequality problem in the United States. The question is, how do you best go about solving it? And to me, you know, there's half a dozen ideas that are a lot better than a billionaire's tax. And I'm saying this as someone who ran the state of Illinois, I was the deputy governor, I oversaw the state's budget and operations. And so every year I had to figure out how we were going to take in money and then how we were going to distribute it. And, and I know for a fact that every time that someone like Ed Elson sent us a dollar in tax revenue, by the time that money reached the people in need, 30, 40 cents on that dollar was gone. And so sure, we could make billionaires pay more in taxes. But odds are a lot of that really is just about, you know, further full time employment for the public sector and public sector unions who are big Democratic donors. And so I do think that people who have more should have to. I don't think that this is the way to do it, but the reason we're here is there is political opportunity in exploiting the anger of people. And you see that from both sides. Trump is a master of that at the right and people like Sanders are masters on the left. And when you take people's frustrations with their lives and you stoke their anger and you promise them revenge and justice, they will vote for you. And therefore, the more they vote for you and the more they pay you attention, the more they donate money, the more you do it. And so we're in this self fulfilling cycle now where both sides are incentivized to be as demagogue as possible and ideas like billionaires, taxes or whatever else become very popular. In terms of your second question, Ed, of will this pass? I'm not sure. So the latest polling that I saw did have it about 50% support, 28% opposed, and the other 23, whatever, it was undecided. But if you look at Calcium Poly Market, it's much more like 2 to 1 against. So that kind of gives you a mixed thing. On a more basic level, on the 30 something years I've spent in politics, the way I would look at this is to say the average person, when they see the ballot question is going to say, does this affect me? No. Do I think billionaires should pay more? Yes. Do I want to see health care cut? No. And so that would argue that people will vote for it. However, there were some pretty fatal flaws, whether just out of sort of greed or stupidity by the proponents. And one of them is that it allows the California legislature to expand this to any group they want as long as it is consistent with the intents and purposes of the referendum. Which means that 1.1 billion could fall to 110 million or 11 million or 1.1 million. Once you're at 1.1 million, that's every homeowner in California, pretty much. And so the opposition will have a lot of money to spend. And I think that if they can craft the right message, they can win this thing. But I think it's probably going to be pretty close.
- [07:49]
Ed Elson
Jason, you speak with politicians, lawmakers, and you also speak with many Silicon Valley investors and Silicon Valley billionaires. Billionaires on your podcast and through your investing. What do you make of Their reactions, how are they reacting to this? And then what do you think about this California tax?
- [08:09]
Jason Calacanis
So I think first you have to understand it's not a tax in the traditional sense. This is a seizure. So they're not just saying, hey, you got to pay 5% more. If it was, I don't think they would have had any reaction to it. If they said, anybody with equities that are valued over this amount or if it was, you know, wealth over a certain amount, nobody would have complained. You might have had some hand wringing. But generally they've been boiling the frog in New York and in California, where people pay over 50%, when I lived there, I played well over 50%. I think New York's up to 54%. Bradley would know.
- [08:48]
Bradley Tusk
54.
- [08:48]
Jason Calacanis
54, yeah. So people are not complaining too much about that. If they want to opt out of it, they can. They can move to a no tax state and save 14, 15. 16%. Okay, great. This is. Tell me everything in your house, Ed. Tell me every painting, Tell me every car. Oh, you have the first model S. What's it worth? Okay, go find somebody to appraise my two, you know, classic cars. What are they worth? And then we want 5% of those. So. And then what do you have in private companies? So it's a seizure of assets. I've already paid taxes on all of my wealth, and so why am I then having to organize everything, hire auditors? It's just impossible to execute on these. In addition, the way it was written, people who have preferred shares, or what's called founder shares, like 10 to 1 super voting rights would get valued at the voting rights, not the actual asset. That's why Larry and Sergey Zuckerberg immediately left. Travis has left, David Sacks has left. The list of people leaving is huge.
- [09:58]
Ed Elson
Why?
- [09:58]
Jason Calacanis
It is incredibly disruptive to have to then go make a list of everything you own and pay 5% of it. Nobody is upset about paying more taxes. So it's the seizure part. So it's incredibly poorly constructed. The second piece is everybody knows that once you start a tax, you never take it away. It is incredibly hard to get rid of taxes. And if you smoke cigarettes or you stay at hotels, you see the taxes, they never come down. Nobody's eliminating taxes. In some Republican states, they do lower taxes when they have a windfall or they'll do like a tax moratorium for some period of time if they have a surplus. Things like universal health care, the minimum wage. There are things that we can do. But this is specifically designed as Bradley astutely pointed out, to villainize the rich, to villainize successful people. And being a modestly successful person and knowing a lot of people who are extremely successful, they're astute people. And when they hear that you want to put the eye of every socialist lunatic in New York on Ken Griffin's house, or you want to villainize Larry and Sergey, they leave. And it's partially because, well, they know it's going to get worse. They don't want to be in a state where they're not wanted. And also it's dangerous. We've now tipped over with the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson being murdered. This is basically politicians like Ro Khanna and others. Mondami in New York, Bernie, they're literally putting targets on people's back. And the target they're putting on their back is this person's successful. And you should hate them for being successful.
- [11:47]
Ed Elson
Full disclosure, we were gonna have Ro Khanna on to discuss this. Unfortunately, I think I'm gonna have to step in and play the devil's advocate here. I was hoping that Ro Khanna could do it, but I'm gonna do it for him and hopefully we'll have Rohan another time and we can discuss this. I think. One response to your points, Jason, would be that there is this question of would it be effective? The idea of can you appraise everyone's assets and do that every year and count up how much your art is worth and your cars and your private companies and would you do all of that? And does that make sense? Is it possible? There are very, very big questions there. But it does seem that in a lot of ways, it seems like the very richest, the center millionaires, the billionaires, in a way, I think a lot of people would say that that is an excuse in order to not be taxed properly. And the things that people would point to in terms of the reason that you need something like this, the reason that you would need something quite dramatic, is the fact that wealth inequality has gotten, some would say, way out of control. The top 19 households owning 2% of all the household wealth, up from 0.1% just around 20 to 30 years ago. The fact the top 1% owns more of the household wealth in America than the entire middle class, that wasn't true 30 years ago. There are things that have changed here. And it seems as though this wallet might not be the most effective or easiest way to do it. To Bradley's point, this is something. And then when we propose something, then suddenly the billionaires say, this isn't possible. This isn't fair. I don't like this. I'm out of here. Some would say maybe you just don't want to pay taxes. What would you say to that argument?
- [13:31]
Jason Calacanis
Well, I want to let Bradley get in here, but I'll answer it as quickly as I can. I don't want to monopolize the time. But what I would say is if you think there's a better way to tax, then we should do that as opposed to villainizing folks and doing something completely impractical. That's unconstitutional. I actually have some recommendations here. And as a free market capitalist myself, I've invested in 700 companies. Some of them have gotten very big and I invest in 100 new companies a year. I do this week in startups. I've done 2,500 episodes where I interview startups. I'm a fan of entrepreneurship. It is the greatest force for change in the world. There's very simple things you can do
- [14:08]
Ed Elson
before Jason, because I would like to get to solutions. I think it's important. I just want to understand where you stand on this. Do you believe that billionaires that the richest in our society, that there should be more redistribution, that there should be more taxation, that they should be paying more in taxes just generally.
- [14:29]
Jason Calacanis
So the short answer is yes. And the reason is capital gains. Has not anticipated the concept of capital gains, which we want. We want people to be investing. It wasn't really designed for people to have large amounts of wealth and to be able to set up margin loans. Anybody who's got more than 10 or 20 million dollars can just set up a low interest mortgage, a low, low interest margin loan for people who don't understand what that is. It's essentially like a credit line you might have against your home, like a home equ, except it's against your stocks and you can just draw down from it, pay it back. And if your stocks are growing more than 10% a year, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% a year and your margin loan is mine was as low as 2%, which is essentially free money. Now it's maybe more like 5% given the. But which is still kind of free money. That is an actual loophole. And people will just keep drawing down on their margin, their equities keep going up. Very simple solution to all this is to look at capital gains and income tax and find something in the middle where we move to sort of a flat tax. And then when you take out and you originate a margin loan, you could put a tax on it. So let's say you had 10 million in net worth. You had 2 million and a $2 million margin loan. Just to make this easy, you could pay the capital gains on that 2 million margin loan or pay half of them. And then if you pay the margin loan back, you would get the credit for the tax in the future. Very simple solution. And then finally, I'll just say I think we should really have a conversation about minimum wage in this country, which I, I didn't used to think, but my thinking on it's evolved. But I'll let Bradley jump in here.
- [16:02]
Ed Elson
Yeah, Bradley, so two suggestions there. It sounds like Jason's advocating for maybe equalized capital gains versus income tax, also some sort of borrowing tax. What do you make of Jason's thoughts and what do you agree with or disagree with?
- [16:15]
Bradley Tusk
Yeah, I mean, I think those are both good, good ideas. But let's take a half a step back, if that's okay, which is, yes, if you take your devil's advocate position. The question is, what are you solving for? Right. So there are two different things. One would be giving people who have less more, and the other would be promoting a concept of fairness. And I would say these two things are at the moment not linked together. So, for example, in New York City in 2012, we had 12.7% of America's millionaires. In 2022, after tax increases, a really bad way to handle Covid excoriation of people who are successful. More regulations, else that fell to 8.7%. And I'm sorry millionaires, not billionaires. The resulting differential in money for New York City's and state budget was $13 billion a year in less tax revenues. If you take Mondami and all of his ideas and all of his plans and his deficit, all of it would have been funded if we had just maintained our percentage of millionaires. And this is why jurisdictional tax increases tend to not work particularly well, because as Jason said, people can move. People have been moving already. And then if you are a poor person, right, and you need public housing, you need Medicaid, you need food stamps, you don't care about social justice, you care about the money being there in the budget to provide you with these things. So if California, which I believe it would at the law, at the conclusion of, if they do enact this tax, or New York right now has less money to be able to help the poor, then you're not solving for the problem of inequality. You might be solving to make people who are upper middle class and highly progressive feel better emotionally because they feel like now the people who did better than them are being justly punished. I don't care about their emotional state or needs. I care about helping poor people. So the two ideas Jason threw out there, I think are good ones. I'll throw some more out there. I think that universal basic income, where you give someone a dollar, is a lot more effective than a system of taxation and then appropriat. Now you need taxation and you need government for things that require collective action. A military, a hospital, building a road, things like that. But most social services, to me would be unnecessary and you could make government smaller. You could reduce that part of the tax burden and instead direct that money and more into a system of a direct wealth transfer, where if people need money for rent or food or clothes for their kids or whatever it is, they would get it. And by the way, let me give you a couple of ideas of which I'm an independent at this point. So to Jason's point, I left the democratic party about 15 years ago, so I have ideas that offend both sides. Right? So I think the universe, basic income. I think Bernie was right about Medicare for All. It is a successful government program, and there's no reason not to let more people have access to it if they want. You should still have private insurance. That's an option as well. I think we need to take things that would really make life more affordable. That includes tort reform. We have $367 billion a year spent on frivolous lawsuits. Results in all of us having higher insurance premiums. I think you need a lot more affordable housing. And as a result, that means taking a lot of the sort of, you know, sacred callous of the left.
- [19:34]
Jason Calacanis
Sound like you're running Bradley?
- [19:35]
Bradley Tusk
No, I'm not, but. But I certainly have a platform if I ever did, like endless environmental review, endless community review. Having to use unions to build everything and not.
- [19:46]
Jason Calacanis
Bradley makes a very good point, though, about people moving and geography. This is the truth. In today's era, the people who are on the top half, who are business owners and who have equ, are running away with it. The people on the bottom half of society who don't own equities are stalled because America is the greatest wealth creation machine in the world. Our equities are phenomenal. That's the win of America. So instead of talking about how do we take more money from the rich, we should be really concentrating on how do we get rid of waste, which is about 30% of all these budgets, we found out. And then number Two, how can we, we look at the systematic things that people in the lower half, non equity holders, how do we make them equity holders? That's what this Trump accounts, America USA accounts, they'll handle that. That's going to take a 20. That's a 20 year story. So we close that gap from kids up and then we have the rich. So what do you do with the people in between? I've been studying minimum wage and I travel all over the world and in New Zealand, Australia, The Nordics, it's 15 to 20 bucks in US dollars as high as 20 to 25 dollars. I think Switzerland or Norway might be the leader right now in the low 20s. In America it's still federally 7 and in different locations it's 15 to $18. Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, et cetera. We really should be looking at that because when they raise the rates in those other countries, there's a lot of hand wringing that it would have a negative impact on employment and it would have a negative impact impact on the economy and what the study showed in those markets. And they're not perfectly analogous, but they're worth studying and considering. And I'm not finalized in my thoughts on this, but it turned out there was no discernible increase in the cost of goods. It like added 50 cents to a cup of coffee or a dollar to a hamburger. In other words, it was no big deal. You got rid of tipping because people were living, had a livable wage. And then what happened for the companies? Because everybody did it in unison. They were forced to do it because of regulations. We had more customers who could afford to go to Starbucks and buy a $5 coffee or could afford to buy the next pair of Nikes. So you actually take the. If you were in the bottom half of society, if you make under $100,000 a year, you're probably saving zero. Except for mandatory savings like Social Security, you're saving zero. So you spend it all. So then you just make more consumers, which is good for the rich people and you get the virtuous cycle going. And it's really like, like if I say on all in, I'm for, you know, reassessing the minimum wage. Oh, you're libtard.
- [22:21]
Bradley Tusk
Whatever.
- [22:21]
Jason Calacanis
I'm, I'm a moderate independent. Every time I bring this up, rich people have, you know, a very dogmatic approach to this. Minimum wage has to be free market. It doesn't, it doesn't, it isn't right now. And so what would it kill society to try raising it $1 a year for five years to go from seven to $12. I can tell you none of these motherfuckers would last a week making $7 an hour or $15 an hour because they'd be taking Uber black and ordering DoorDash and spending 150 bucks, you know, for their lunch and, and to commute. So I think that's like where we need to spend our cycles.
- [22:58]
Ed Elson
Stay tuned for more of this panel right after the break. And by the way, I'm going to be going live on substack today at 1230 Eastern. So if you want to see that, head to promote profgmedia.com and subscribe to Prof. G Plus. It'll only be for ProfG plus members. I hope to see you on the stream.
- [23:23]
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- [24:07]
Bradley Tusk
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
- [24:12]
Sponsor Announcer
We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious.
- [24:14]
Jason Calacanis
Partners of all time.
- [24:15]
Bradley Tusk
New friends.
- [24:16]
Jason Calacanis
You are Gary the Snake. And your last name the snake.
- [24:21]
Ed Elson
Dream team.
- [24:22]
Jason Calacanis
Hidden new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [24:27]
Bradley Tusk
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home.
- [24:30]
Jason Calacanis
You're clearly bargain at Zootopia 2.
- [24:33]
Bradley Tusk
Now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG.
- [24:41]
Ed Elson
We're back with Prof. G Markets. Jason, your point that when you suggest raising the minimum wage and then you're immediately dubbed as a libtard gets to something important here which is that that a lot of people would say that the same thing could be said for one the wealth tax. But we could go a step further and say, you know, for example Zoran Mamdani's recent pier tax proposal.
- [25:04]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [25:04]
Ed Elson
Which you know, a lot of people have been making the point where if you raise taxes then they'll leave. And then Mamdani says well, why don't we tax people who have already left. This is their second home. They're already gone. Their tax dollars are gone. Why don't we tax this? And then again, the response is, this is a libtard. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I think on the other side, the way that people start to feel is that we're just shooting down as many ways that we can tax rich people as possible. And we're using things like this is ineffective. You're a libtard, you're a communist, you're a socialist to the point, where are we going to do anything?
- [25:42]
Bradley Tusk
Yeah. And look, but I think a lot of it, again, gets to the question of. Of are you trying to solve problems or are you just trying to score political points? So I came out in favor of the pied a terror attacks in New York and said that I wasn't going to oppose it or run any campaigns against it. But when Mondami then chose to make Ken Griffin the face of it, which was totally unnecessary because the issue's not up for debate, everyone supports it. So he didn't need to do anything. Now, Griffin, who was planning a $6 billion renovation of 350 Park Avenue, might instead do that in Florida, in Miami, which would mean 15,000 jobs that would have gone. New Yorkers going to people in Florida instead, 100%. So if you care about New Yorkers and their well being, you wouldn't take away 15,000 jobs. But the reason why Mandani did it, and I understand politically why he did it, is he ran for office promising social justice, promising to tax the rich. And that was an appealing message that helped get him elected. He thought he'd be able to bully Kathy Hochul into doing an income tax increase. He was totally wrong. Wasn't able to do anything. He got through this effectively. Pretty meager tax increase. And he had to make it feel meaningful to his base so he could get political credit for it, because otherwise it would look like he failed.
- [26:57]
Jason Calacanis
It was performative.
- [26:58]
Bradley Tusk
Well, right. And the way to do it was to make it as controversial as possible. So he deliberately picked the fight with Ken Griffin, knowing that we'd all then talk about it constantly.
- [27:06]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, what if Ken Griffin is the next person who gets shot by the next Manioni? I mean, that is like, literally what people are thinking. But I can tell you, like, everybody working in Silicon Valley, the number of people I see with security teams now, and I'm like, do you really need, like, I'll go to dinner with five people. And there's 15 security people. And I'm just like, what are we. What are you guys doing here? And they're like, oh, I just had a death threat. Oh, somebody just shot the front of my house. Somebody threw a firebomb at my house. Oh, somebody sent the dead. You know, whatever. This is, like, really happening. And the answer to your question, Ed, earlier, which is important, is if we're villainizing everybody, that's not helpful.
- [27:44]
Ed Elson
But just to interrupt Jason, because, agreed, we should not be villainizing people. We should not be posting images and videos of where Ken Griffin's house is. But we shouldn't also assume that the anger there is just because media people have decided to villainize rich people. I think we could also assume that the anger there is real.
- [28:04]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, the anger is so real because
- [28:05]
Ed Elson
of the dissatisfaction in the system and a dissatisfaction in the inequality that has gotten worse and worse.
- [28:10]
Jason Calacanis
And the brave thing for a politician to do is say, hey, I know it's frustrating that some people are making a lot of money, and we should look at the tax code and figure out ways to increase their taxes. And we think there's a big win for everybody here. If you own a pied a terre, we're going to ask you to pay 5% or 2%. Normally, you'd pay one and a half percent taxes on that place. We're going to ask you to pay 5%. Why are we going to ask you to pay 5%? Because we have a crisis in New York of it's not livable. There's not enough homes, rent is at a record high. So we think it's reasonable for you to either sell your place and let a renter live there, or put it into Airbnb or whatever you want to do, or just pay that three and a half. We're taking that three and a half, by the way, and we're assigning it to, you know, this pressing issue, which is building more affordable housing. So you can feel great about paying that extra three and a half. If Mondami presented it like I just presented it, you would win 95% of people, even the rich people, they'd be like, yeah, I'm rich. Who cares? Prof. G even said this on the pod. He's like, I got a $10 million house. If I pay an extra 100k, what do I care? It's no big deal. I have the same position. But if you villainize people, if you put a target on their backs and you make a billionaire's tax, that isn't really a tax. It's an asset seizure. That's when people go, you know what? We live in the United States of America. There are 50 options. For me, I'm going to make a list of the the best options. And I have a plane and I already have four homes, so I already summer in Aspen and I go to California for two months in the summer and I go to Hawaii. This makes no sense. I'm just going to domicile myself in Austin, which is three hours away from every other city in America. It's like being in Dubai. It's like the perfect central location to be. Spend six months here, spend the other six months wherever you feel like it. So. So that's what politicians have to realize is rich people have options.
- [30:03]
Ed Elson
Yeah. Bradley, you were going to jump in there.
- [30:06]
Bradley Tusk
Yeah. Look, ultimately, if you know how to get elected in a world of 10% primary turnout and you know who you need to appease and things, you need to say, that going up to 30, 40% is terrifying to you, even though it would actually free you from being hostage to the extremes, which most politicians would actually probably like. But nonetheless, you know, I ran legislation in five different states this year and lost in all of them because. Because fundamentally I was asking the system to choose to reform itself, and it's not going to do that. So that now puts me in the position where I've just got to try to build a big national grassroots movement, stoking the anger of people across the board and say, if you want to keep living in a world where we ignore all the solutions and just keep screaming and tweeting instead, then just keep things the way they are. But if most people by definition are moderate, it. And if people could vote on their phone, we could get turnout up to 30, 40, 50% in primaries. And then politicians, just because they want to keep their jobs, not because they become better people in any way move to the middle and start working together and compromising simply because that's what the people now voting in their primaries expect of them and want from them. And so, like, in order to sort of actually seriously debate, discuss, and implement the kinds of ideas that the three of us have been throwing around around reducing inequality, you've got to have a political system that actually is incentivized to want to have change in the first place. And you only do that through changing the composition of the electorate. And so to me, that's why something like mobile voting that we're working on, and you can go to mobilevoting.org if you want to learn more about it is so necessary because otherwise we're having these great conversations. We might as well be sitting in the ivory tower because none of it's actually going to happen.
- [31:53]
Ed Elson
No, we're going to reach millions. We're going to reach millions here. I'm just going to try to wrap this up. Ty Bow on this.
- [31:59]
Jason Calacanis
Come next time. Ro. Khanna. I like Ro, actually, but he's a politician things.
- [32:04]
Ed Elson
Right. And, you know, it is a shame and I'm sure the audience might wish that there was someone. There was someone like Roe pushing back. I hopefully I've done it a little bit more.
- [32:14]
Jason Calacanis
Or aoc.
- [32:15]
Ed Elson
AOC or aoc or ro. We would love to have you on the show to discuss this at some point. Point. But I think what we can all agree on.
- [32:21]
Jason Calacanis
I also need some stock tips.
- [32:24]
Ed Elson
Enough, enough. I think one thing we can all agree on here is that if this wealth tack does. Doesn't go through or if it. I mean, it sounds like we all agree that it's probably not going to work because it's not actually going to be effective. It's going to be cumbersome, and it probably won't even go through for a lot of reasons. But I think what we can all agree on is that if the system doesn't change itself or reorganize itself in some way, then we will continue on this path and this trajectory where Jason is going to dinner and there are five security guards behind him because his dinner buddy literally got shot at at his home the other week because there is so much anger and because of anxiety.
- [33:06]
Bradley Tusk
Well, he needs the security guards just to keep all the fans away. I mean, all the paparazzi, all the, all the fans, I don't need.
- [33:13]
Jason Calacanis
People love me. I'm funny. People love me. I'm not creating a super intelligence to take all the jobs.
- [33:21]
Ed Elson
But what we need, then we need a message, I have it, that other people that everyone can sort of get behind. And I guess the question for politicians, the question for lawmakers and anyone listening to this podcast. And let's end with your thoughts, both of you, on what that message should really look, sound and feel like.
- [33:40]
Jason Calacanis
Okay? So number one, we should get rid of waste, fraud and abuse, because that's 30% and everybody can agree on that. Number two, we should really look at the minimum wage. And I think everybody can agree that it wouldn't kill the system to just make modest increments there. Number three, I think rich people should be donating more to these America Trump accounts and should there should be greater philanthropy in America by the top half of Americans doesn't mean giving to NGOs or nonprofits, just doing interesting things with your money that help society. And then finally, for technologists, we need to change the view of AI. I don't know if you saw this week all the commencement speeches getting booed whenever anybody evoked AI. AI could be a profoundly powerful force if we can solve a small set of problems that make people who are poor or lower middle class anxious and frustrated with their lives. And I come from a lower middle class background and my parents were basically living paycheck to paycheck. And the things that are breaking people are the cost of education, the cost of health care, and the cost of homes. These are three areas that are the highest regulation in the country. And this is where the opportunity lies at. If we could have, if the government start taking out the regulations for accreditations at universities for building homes faster, like we do here in Texas and Nevada and Florida do as well, and we could spread that to the democratic cities and GEOs, and then we could look at healthcare and use the power of AI and the power of individually led healthcare where individuals are driving it. We could lower the cost of these three things so dramatically, if we unleash the same entrepreneurs who are being vilified, those same entrepreneurs could solve those three things. Why don't they, why don't they attack those three categories? I've had investments in all three of those categories. The regulation and the roadblocks the government puts on any company that wants to work in housing, education or healthcare is insane. And then venture capitalists and entrepreneurs just say, you know what? Not worth it to go after those three. And the government has a monopoly on them. We need to break that monopoly dramatically lower the cost of homes, education and healthcare. And then people would appreciate entrepreneurs because they would feel it every day, oh, my kid's getting educated. Oh, my daughter has a house near us, not two hours away or in another city. And oh, I can go get a scan or a blood test for free or close to free. And a body scan. Instead of ProNovo being $3,500, it could be $300 or $30. That's what technology could achieve. And that's where I think, you know, if I do run for office, which I've been considering, I would run on that platform. Is unlocking those three.
- [36:35]
Ed Elson
Bradley, your message, and then we'll wrap.
- [36:38]
Bradley Tusk
Yeah, probably a little simpler even, which is just there are reasonable, achievable solutions to almost every single problem we face, whether it is education or healthcare or taxes or climate or guns or immigration or anything else. But the only way we can do that, that is to take power away from the extremes who currently dictate and control the agenda and give it back to the middle. And the very people who are screaming the loudest right now are doing so because they are the ones that are at the extremes and they are the ones that are using their power to empower themselves at our expense. And so if we want our country back, if we want to solve these problems, we don't need to come up with these brilliant new ideas. They're already there. But we have to choose to finally take the power back, participate in elections, reform the system itself, and make it possible so that all of the ideas that could actually work, the ideas that Jason and you and I have sort of already explained on this podcast, can actually happen.
- [37:39]
Ed Elson
Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. And Jason Calacanis is an investor and host of the all in podcast. Jason and Bradley, thank you for joining us.
- [37:48]
Bradley Tusk
Ed, thanks for having me.
- [37:50]
Jason Calacanis
It's a pleasure.
- [37:55]
Ed Elson
Okay, that's it for today. A lot in there. We appreciate you joining us for another Profgue Markets panel. If you have a guest you think we should speak to on this topic or any other, please drop us a line in the comments or email our producer claire@marketsofgmedia.com we hope to hear from you. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alex Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen o' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Profg Markets from Profgy Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.
- [38:42]
Bradley Tusk
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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Jason Calacanis
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