When Politics Meets Profit (with Steve Case & Wes Moore)
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Polestar 3 is for drivers who won't settle for anything less. Book a test drive for Polestar 3 at Polestar.com. From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I'm Preet Bharara. Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with AOL founder Steve Case and Maryland Governor Wes Moore about how the government and the private sector can work together to solve some of the biggest challenges we face as a society, like strengthening our democracy.

Steve Case currently serves as chairman and CEO of the investment firm Revolution, LLC. And prior to becoming Maryland's first Black governor, Wes Moore was the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization aimed at ending poverty in New York City. Our discussion covers the ways to ensure that new technologies like AI can be both innovative and responsibly regulated, and how we can strengthen America's innovative spirit and unify our country.

Our conversation was recorded live on October 23rd at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Here is that conversation. Good afternoon. How is everyone? All right. I have my legal pad. So these guys are in some trouble. So it's great to be here and to talk about what I imagine is something that's on the minds of both of you and on the minds of a lot of Americans, and that is all the problems we have

in democracy, with poverty, with climate change, with polarization. And some people think the government should solve those problems. Some people think the government should stay out of those problems and that the private sector is the best forum and tool to deal with those problems. I think we're all of the mind that we should work together, right? So it's an oft-used phrase that's a little bit old-fashioned, this idea of private-public partnerships.

That's the reality of our world. So my first question in thinking about some of these problems, we'll get to some of the specific problems in a moment, is to make life better for people, what are the conditions that are required for the government and for business to work together? Mutual respect, I would imagine, is one. Mutual trust, people acting in good faith, the rule of law. What do you think, either one of you?

Well, so one, it's a real pleasure to be with y'all and thank y'all for this. And I think the answer to that is, the answer is yes.

Right. It requires all of it. You know, I remember when I first came and decided I was going to run for office. I'd never run for office before in my life. I was an army officer. I led soldiers in combat. I came back. I joined the world of business, both in finance, and then I ran a small business. We had a successful exit in 2017. Then I ran something called Robin Hood, which is one of the country's largest poverty-fighting organizations.

And I remember having a conversation with one of our board members on it when I told him that I was thinking about running for governor. And I told him I want to focus on issues like child poverty. I want to focus on issues like economic growth and inclusive economic growth. And he was saying, well, why would you want to leave this to go to do government to do that? And my honest answer is that because you cannot underestimate the role that government had in creating the problems in the first place.

That was an interesting reaction. No, but it's real. Note for the record. No, and let's be honest. Government can act like they're the ones who can uniquely solve the problem unless they're also willing to acknowledge that they're the ones who also have uniquely helped to create them. That...

The policies that have been in place, the rules and regulations that have been in place, the fact that government has been maybe in history are the best at picking winners and losers. Like government has had a role in doing that. Right. But just in fairness, there are people who make that point. Ronald Reagan famously made the point that some of the most frightening words in the English language are, I'm from the government, I'm here to help. Yep. So was he on track?

No, no, because also I think that it's important to recognize the role the government had in creating them. So I think it's also important to understand that the role the government has in helping to unearth them as well. That government can also not just have a side spectator role of saying, now that everything is jacked up, now everyone else come and come and fix it.

particularly when you're thinking about the budgets that we have within state government. So like, you know, perfect example. I remember when I was running, when I was running Robinhood, you know, we would say like, listen, I could make an announcement and say, we're going to put $25 million into supporting public education and people in the team would cheer. And I might even get a little write-up in the newspaper about the commitment that Robinhood has made until you realize that the budget for the, the budget for the department of education in New York city alone is 27 billion.

So to act like government does not have a role in helping to fix these challenges is also naive. So that's where I think the partnership does matter. And I think it's even the way you look at what we've done in the state of Maryland, where I understand that there are certain entities, private sector, philanthropy, et cetera, that can really serve as our leading indicators.

They're the best practice mechanisms. They're the ones who can be essentially the seed capital, oftentimes in innovations at work. What they need to then have is a partner in government who, once they understand what works, once we understand that this actually has an outside societal ROI on it, now we're then prepared to then take it public.

We're then to then say, show me what works and I will fund that. Show me what is not working and I will stop funding that. It's not more complicated. But that becomes the appropriate role that government can help to take on to help to address a lot of our societal challenges. Steve, do you have a thought? Yeah, what I add to that is I've been in the innovation economy my whole life as an entrepreneur, as an investor, as a philanthropist, as a kind of influence some policy things.

And I've seen where government can get it right and where government gets it wrong. And there's always frustration, I'm sure some of the applause in the audience reflects this about government stifling innovation, regulatory capture, locking in incumbents, a bunch of things like that. But I've also seen, including my own situation where we started America Online AOL almost 40 years ago, that company would not have started

if government hadn't taken some action, including breaking up Ma Bell to create innovation in the telecom space, Congress passing a Telecom Act that actually commercialized access to the internet when we first got started in 1985. Only 3% of people were online. They were online about one hour a week, and the reason is it's too expensive, so you had to get the cost down. And it took a few years before even the internet was available

to consumers and businesses. It was set up originally by the government, funded by DARPA as a network for a whole host of strategic reasons, and limited to educational institutions and government institutions, so consumers or business couldn't do it. Government had to fix that. And the FTC also had the mandate that phone companies had to open up their networks, open access they called it.

And so that unleashed the internet revolution that put America at front and center as the leader of that revolution. So as we think of technologies now, obviously AI being more front and center, how do we learn from some of those lessons? Make sure, for example, we do have an open access approach, an open source approach in this case to,

AI. We don't just let big tech get bigger. We make sure the playing field is level so new companies can emerge. So that's sort of where government has to strike the right balance from regulations to stop bad things from happening, which is important, while also making sure they are unleashing kind of the next innovation and America continues to lead the way. The last point I'll make is part of the reason America has led the way in so many of these new industries is

is our policies more generally around tax policy, immigration policy, innovation policy, have been better than Europe, have been better than China. And the core in this US-China battle right now is essentially a battle between a top-down approach to innovation led by the government, where they kind of make

to make the key decisions about which companies will win or lose versus the American approach, which is much more of a bottoms up pioneering innovation culture. But we need to make sure that's not just alive and well here in San Francisco, but alive and well all across the country, because that ties into some of the political divide we have now where a lot of people in a lot of parts of the country are feeling kind of left out and left behind. The one data point there that's worth noting.

When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton eight years ago, he won 30 states. If you added up all the venture capital in all 30 states, it was 15%. The 20 states she won had 85%. That's important because everybody in this audience knows venture capital generally drives the innovation of the companies that scale, create a lot of jobs, drive a lot of economic growth. So if we're only investing in entrepreneurs in a few places,

Guess what? A lot of people see the disruption that causes, don't see the offsetting benefit of new companies, new jobs being created. And that leads to a divide. And we're living it again today. You mentioned politics because we sometimes talk about these things. Smart, intelligent people who are engaging in this debate in good faith, as both of you have been. And we almost talk about it as if all reasonable people would agree. And there's not a political or ideological dimension to it.

Do we need to do something about our political rhetoric and dialogue so that we don't have undue demonizing of government and on the other side, undue demonizing of people who are successful through entrepreneurship in this country? Two points. One is...

I'm very proud of the role that our company played in getting America online, getting the world online. I'm very proud of the impact the internet's played in so many different respects in terms of creating opportunity and free exchange of ideas and so forth. One area where I'm

really quite disappointed is what's happened with social media. And we were the first companies that launched instant messaging and buddy lists and chat rooms and in some ways was the first company prior to Facebook and many others that was in that space. And I always thought, isn't this great? Because when I was growing up,

All I could see was what the three television networks were broadcasting, or three plus PBS, which was there but didn't get general ratings. All I could read is a newspaper owned by the tycoon or the legacy family in that town. Wouldn't it be great if we could level the playing field and more voices could be heard and that the internet would enable that to happen? And it did enable that to happen. Again, there's many blogs and all kinds of things that bought podcasts and so forth that like Masters of Scale that have come out of that.

But what was the unintended consequence of that, which was surprising to me and very disappointing, is instead of using that as a way to learn about other issues, connect with other people, it led to these tribal tendencies, these filter bubble tendencies where most people, including most people in this room, are following people and watching things that are consistent with their views and not taking the time

to learn the other point of view. So that's been a big disappointment. One area where I'd say it's positive is an initiative, a nonprofit initiative launched a few years ago by Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics called Unite, and they launched something called the Dignity Index, and it goes to your question. And some politicians now, including a number of senators and governors, are using that to make sure their communications are

scored in a way that it's more trying to build that common ground, trying to build that consensus, not this hot rhetoric that maybe plays well on cable television or on X, but doesn't really result in ways that people can come together. So I invite people to look at that dignity index and score some of your own communications. It's a little bit of a wake-up call, not just what they're doing, what are each of us doing to try to be part of a solution, not part of the problem.

Have there been ratings of our current presidential candidates? They have, including the debate. They did some analysis. What were the scores? The scores, they both could have done better, but I would say that you might expect that the Trump rhetoric scored as a little hotter than... Not as much dignity? What's that? Not as much dignity? Yeah, okay. But I'd say kind of along those lines of...

But I do think it's important because we do have to stop demonizing success. We have to stop demonizing those who are our society's risk takers. And I think about it where people would ask me, they're like, well, doesn't it keep you up at night how many millionaires we have or how many billionaires we have? Like, no, what keeps me up at night is how many people we have living in poverty.

Like, I think we need to start actually shifting our focus here. - But some people would say-- - And remember what is actually, like when people say that being a billionaire is a poverty, it's a policy failure. No, how many people living in poverty is a policy failure? Let's stay focused.

on the things that should actually, we should be focusing our time and our energy on. Because I do understand the idea of people talking about, well, how can you have a society where you have so much and so little? I think that's the point that some people are making. And I completely understand, and I get that point. The thing I would just say, though, is if you can create a society where we actually support the risk takers,

When you can create a society where we can actually have people, where we're increasing opportunity and liquidity to our small businesses, to our entrepreneurs. If you can have a society where, you know, again, when people are, you know, one of the things we did in our state,

one of the first bills we introduced, is actually focusing on how are we creating capital for entrepreneurs who are really at that seed level concept to give them a chance to grow and frankly grow in Maryland. And a big reason for it, I say in that stage, the first round is kind of like that friends and family round. Here's the problem, not everybody has the same friends and not everybody has the same family.

So how can you then do a better job of actually democratizing that opportunity to have economic growth be something that can be real? And so I just believe that as a society, yes, we have to stop this demonization of success. Yes, we have to, and for our elected officials, if you continue to demonize elected officials, you're going to get the elected officials that you don't want and the people actually running for these offices. And so we have to then have better ways of being able to celebrate that culture of service

but at the same time also demand more from people who are sitting in those seats to make sure that they're actually meeting the expectations that we hope for as well. So what about some of the policies that, in particular, Kamala Harris has put forward for the purpose of incentivizing and making easier the transition from a regular nine-to-five job to an entrepreneurial job or a small business? Either of you find those policies to be on the right track?

Yeah, I think they're very important. Some of the Biden-Harris policies around, what they call Build Back Better, some of the things around the Chips and Science Act, including funding tech hubs, $10 billion was authorized for that, only $500 million has been appropriated, was appropriated.

a way to try to, you know, kind of spread the capital more broadly. And it's not just this place. As Wes said, women are half the population. They get less than 10% of venture capital. By some estimations, more like 2%. Depends how you count it. Same is true with blacks, same is true with Latinos. So as you said, it does matter

your friends and family, doesn't matter who you know, doesn't matter what school you went to, and how do we create more opportunity for more people in more places so they too can live the American dream and they can help uplift their communities so they have stronger communities and we don't have so many people in so many places that do, unlike us, wake up in the morning anxious and fearful about the future. Pew did a study about 10 years ago that was like, like,

startling, that 80% of people wake up anxious and fearful about the future. 80%. So, you know, we thankfully don't have that problem, but most people in the country do. So how do we create opportunity for them? And it's not just about backing startups, not just about venture capital, obviously, but that's a piece of it because that is the kind of the seed corn that starts growing these companies, starts growing these industries, starts growing these communities. And

One of the speakers this afternoon, Dan Gilbert, we worked together on a number of things with our Rise the Rest regional entrepreneurship initiative and launched it 10 years ago in Detroit. At the time, people...

kind of were giving up on on detroit there was some some big challenges in detroit but dan made a significant investment investment about 103 buildings brought his company quicken loans downtown launched some companies that we we funded like stock actress now has 3 000 jobs in detroit worked with the mayor worked with the governor worked with foundations like kresge and others and

And now 10 years later, we're just back a couple of months ago to celebrate the progress. Detroit is on the move. There's still issues for sure, but it's on the move and it's on the rise. That's a city that was in some ways the Silicon Valley of its time 100 years ago. The most innovative city in America when the car was the technology of the day.

kind of lost its way, lost 60% of its population, went bankrupt a few months before we showed up 10 years ago, and now it's back on the move. That's because of creating that entrepreneurial culture, getting people to take the risk of starting something, getting people to back those companies. We just need to do that. Obviously, we want to continue to do that in Silicon Valley, but we also need to do that in Baltimore and Columbus and Minneapolis and Detroit and Atlanta and many other cities all around the country.

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So one of the great impasses between the government and the private sector, other than taxes and some other things, and you've mentioned this already, Steve, is regulation. And particularly when you have a new technology, forget about the old technologies for a moment, whether it's AI or crypto or quantum computing, the people who are investing in those technologies and see the promise of those technologies want everyone to just go forth and multiply and flourish and be unfettered.

Government, sometimes in a knee-jerk fashion, sometimes reasonably and in good faith, says, "Hold on. We don't know what damage this can cause. We want to regulate." And a permeating problem through all of this, and I mean this with no disrespect to our elected officials, some of them don't know anything about technology. Many of our leaders, including the next potential president, brag that they never sent an email, and yet they're going to regulate AI intelligently. Then there's a possibility

of self-regulation, and you see some of that with AI, because even the people who are the most passionate advocates and proselytizers about AI say, "Hold on a second, we should do something." What are some particular examples of ways in which we can overcome this impasse between innovation and regulation?

Well, I mean, I can tell you what we're doing. You know, I am personally very bullish on what I think is the promise of new technologies. And, you know, I think about for our state, I want Maryland to be the global leader in

in AI and quantum computing and technology and cyber. And part of it's because I know what assets my state has. So, like, for example, you know, Maryland is the home of NIST. Maryland is the home of the NSA. Maryland is the home of U.S. Cyber Command. Maryland is a new home of the FBI building.

I apologize. So stay away from Maryland. Yes. Yeah. A lot of surveillance going on. But my point is that we have all of these assets. Why would we not be the global leader? Now, being able to invest and be a global leader, I made Maryland, we have a senior advisor to AI, to the governor, one of the only states in the country that actually has that. We want to lean into this. Now, we understand that that means you have to put together the right kind of guardrails, and it also means you've got to bring the public together.

Along with you because there is a fear for a lot of people about what this means and they think about you know Will Smith movies and all that when they think about what is the future of new technologies? There is a way though that we can actually be smart about putting together the right kind of guardrails but saying that we're not gonna be afraid of

about what kind of opportunities and what kind of potential that this could hold and potentially specifically something that is going to benefit the people of our state, that we are going to invest in it, that we're going to lean in on it. We are going to say very clear that we want to be the global leader in it, but that does not mean moving blindly, but that takes actual initiative and it takes actually thoughtful leadership to be able to make that happen.

One thing I learned, it was a tough lesson because it was almost 25 years ago, we merged AOL with Time Warner, which was the largest merger in history. I stepped aside as CEO because I really thought it would be a great thing and watched more from the seat of being on the board, a dynamic develop

which I didn't fully appreciate until I was in it for a little while, which is I realized that the culture we had built, and many folks here building companies had built, the entrepreneurial culture, this innovation culture, was more about imagining things

Futures. Larger companies, Fortune 500 companies, most people who rise in leadership are more focused on managing. It's more about de-risking, keeping bad things from happening, as opposed to unleashing, enabling good things to happen. I've been able to carry some of those lessons, even though

They were tough lessons to learn into my work around policy, around innovation and things like that. I currently chair the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, worked on President Obama's Jobs and Competitiveness Council, worked on the Jobs Act, a bunch of different things. Because I realize people in government generally are adopting this

"keeping bad things from happening" kind of attitude. And generally, if you're in the, you know, call it the FDA, and there's some drug that's approved that works, nobody really focuses on it. If some drug gets approved and it doesn't work and somebody dies, there's a congressional hearing and oversight and so forth. So I understand that, you know, that dynamic. The critical thing, and generally we've done it pretty well. With the internet, we did it pretty well. Our government said, "This is interesting,

It does seem like there's some risks, but it's a little early. So let's have a late touch in terms of the regulations. And then as it develops, we can figure out what to do. With AI, it's coming along much faster. It's kind of...

amusing to me, because I've been doing this for a while, that the internet was created about 50 years ago. AI was actually created 75 years ago. The AI is older than the internet, but it really took 72 years or so of it bubbling and being used in more discreet, almost stealthy ways, lots of different companies, actually most companies. It became a consumer phenomenon, obviously, with chat GPD. That then led to this focus on

on what to do, how to strike the balance between innovation and regulation. And I applaud speed of the innovation. And I testified with the Senate bipartisan AI forum that they've been holding a number of sessions over the last year. They're just trying to learn about it. I think we will not make the mistake I believe Europe is making, which Europe often makes, of over-regulating, trying to be so careful about bad things happening, you don't allow the good things to happen.

and we need to figure out a way to strike the right balance. Some guard rail, some perspective on it that is informed by some lessons from the past, but leaning in, as the governor said, in terms of what might be possible. I should say, that's because I find it... We first met, Wes and I, 15 years ago when I was asked to chair the Rhodes Scholar Selection Committee.

you know, after picking the Rhodes Scholar. And just so to be clear, I was not a Rhodes Scholar, but they want the chair to be, everybody else in the committee is a Rhodes Scholar, they want the chair for some other reason not to be a Rhodes Scholar. So that was my role, the dumb guy who was not the Rhodes Scholar. And so we met and that, we did it over a number of years together, but one year we selected somebody by the name of Fagan Harris, who then went to Oxford, came back to Baltimore,

focused on a variety of things, Baltimore Core, others in nonprofit. Wes Moore, all along, kept an eye on him, was his mentor.

And when Wes Moore became Governor Moore, he hired Fagan as his chief of staff. So that's an example of somebody who 15 years ago saw the potential of somebody and then has followed that up, helped develop that potential, and is now benefiting from that. He says he thinks he's the best chief of staff in the country, and it's somebody because he helped develop him and stuck with him through some tough times. So thank you, Wes. Well, in fact, the exact words I said, he's the dopest chief of staff in the entire country.

And if y'all want to understand what's going on in Maryland, understand Fagan Harris. He's outstanding. Okay, you can go back to Maryland now. We only have four minutes left. I want to have you folks anticipate what the fate of some of these issues will be, depending on what happens in the election. And I started out by talking about the conditions that are necessary for there to be partnership between the public and the private. And among those things, we talked about mutual respect, rule of law,

And I'm just going to present an example of something that happened recently, and I wonder how this is going to affect things if the guy wins. There's one... So it's one thing to talk about the tectonic plates of the private sector and the public sector, both have a role. But then you have, from time to time, the specter of sitting president of the United States singling out a particular company by name.

for retaliation. So we're not talking about policy, we're not even talking about 60% tariffs on Chinese products, but you had a candidate, you can guess which one, said in the wake of John Deere suggesting they might make some of their parts of their machinery in Mexico, well, if you do that, I'm going to unilaterally slap a 200% tariff. And putting aside whether the merits of that are there or not, how does that work for the business community

having to be worried that at any moment, whether you're Meta or John Deere or NBC Universal, that the canon of the presidency can be turned upon you? So I have been for- Go Maryland. Don't move, yeah, come to Maryland.

Well, no, but I do think this is real because, you know, I will spend the next 12 days in a wake-up doing everything that I can to make sure that Kamala Harris becomes next president of the state. I just believe there's an inherent danger, not just in the policies of the guy, but in his values.

And that's more dangerous to me, frankly, than anything else, because I think for a lot of people who sit in these seats, you know, tactics can be flexible. It's values that are permanent. And if our values don't align, if who you see, if who you fight for, if at the end of the day when decisions are made, when I feel that, you know, there's this idea that, you know, you can't claim to love your country when you hate half of the people in it.

And so I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that she wins. I also know that we all collectively, that it's going to be our patriotic duty that no matter what happens come election day, that we will never give up on this country and we will never give up on the hope of this country. And that we're going to have a distinct responsibility because the truth is, no matter what happens, there's going to be an era of healing that's got to happen in this country.

And I don't think that that era of healing and that responsibility and that burden is going to be put on the shoulders of who the president-elect is or who the elected officials are.

I just think that's something collectively that we're going to have a patriotic responsibility to all play a part in. And that means being able to understand that we're going to have tough times, and this country has seen a lot of tough times before. But the people who have been the truest of patriots were the ones who understood that in the tough times, we just get tougher. And in the hard times, we just...

hunker together a little bit tighter. And I think that's gonna be a collective responsibility that this country is gonna have to take on no matter what the results on November 5th are. - Steve, last word. - I'll just be brief. First of all, it's a reminder that y'all should be nice to everybody 'cause you don't know what's gonna happen. I actually went to high school in Hawaii with Barack Obama

And JD Vance worked for me at Revolution on our Rise and Respond five, six, seven years ago. So it's a strange world out there. But I want to build on Wes's comment. Because I've been chairing, I just stepped down recently, but I was chair of the Smithsonian Institute, which has 21 museums in Washington, a bunch of digital things. And we're working on the 250th anniversary of the country, which is in two years.

the semi-sequentennial, or most of us call it the 250th. And it's a reminder that 250 years ago, America itself was a startup. It was just an idea. And a pretty fragile idea, like most startups, almost hit the wall.

But somehow we stuck with it, somehow we built this culture, somehow we built this innovative mentality, led the way in the agricultural revolution, led the way in the industrial revolution, led the way in the digital revolution. So as we take a step back, hopefully it's an opportunity

to come together as a country, to focus on what got us to now and what we need to do going forward. And hopefully that will lead to a little bit more connectivity, a little bit more, a little less of this kind of tribalism, a little bit more remembering that there is something special about America, that we need to learn from that and build on that and for God's sakes, not lose that.

So I think the spirit that Wes is talking about is critically important. I would just ask each of you, what can you do to be part of that solution? What can you do in your lives or two years from now to try to use it as a way to bring people together? Of course, you've gotten focused on your companies or whatever you're doing, but we also have to focus on our communities and focus on our country. I'm hoping that this 250th creates an event. I was at the 200th.

In 1976, when the Smithsonian opened the Air and Space Museum, I was still at the time, you know, young, a teenager, and I was mesmerized by everything that was happening. That inspired me to do some things, including what led to AOL and the Internet, where some of the things I saw in some of the exhibits there. How do we inspire the next generation of people to figure out what we need to build next, what we need to fix, but also what we can expand on to really make sure America 250 years from now is still...

the leader of the pack, and still has the most innovative entrepreneurial culture in the world. But we do it in a more inclusive way so it's not just some people in some places, mostly on the coast, but everybody everywhere that feels they actually can have a shot at the American dream. Our time is up, but you have your orders. Go forth, vote, be involved, participate. Thanks, gentlemen, for being part of this. Thank you all. Thank you.

I'd like to thank my guests, Steve Case and Governor Moore, and special thanks to Jeff Berman, Jay Punjabi, and the entire Masters of Scale team. For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com slash insider to sign up for a trial. That's cafe.com slash insider.

Or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tadishore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noah Azoulay and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez. And the Cafe team is Matthew Billy, Nat Wiener, and Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost.

I'm your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned. Robinhood is introducing forecast contracts so you can trade the presidential election. Through Robinhood, you can now trade financial derivatives contracts on who will win the U.S. presidential election, Harris or Trump, and watch as contract prices react to real-time market sentiment.

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