Reed Hastings & Kara Swisher on Netflix’s rise and AI’s next wave | Masters of Scale Summit 2026

Reed Hastings
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Reed Hastings spent nearly 30 years building Netflix, then walked away from its board this past June.
Live on stage at Masters of Scale Summit, Kara Swisher asks the Netflix co-founder and former chairman where the company goes from here.
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedReed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, reflects on his leadership journey, the strategic evolution of streaming, and the necessity of radical risk-taking. He discusses the transition from DVD distribution to original content creation, the psychological discipline of anticipating failure, and his optimistic yet cautious views on AI's role in business and education.
One of the best things I learned to do is,
you know, finding 10 minutes a day,
some ritual thing where you think about all
the ways that you could be wrong.
So I would think, okay, Netflix is going to crash, assume it's crashed.
What did I do that would cause it?
You can get a lot of attention by saying
the world's going to end tomorrow.
We humans, we're very focused on Armageddon.
Trump's done a lot of terrible things.
He tweeted when I got off the board, like, you know,
Reed, what a criminal, blah, blah, blah.
So 25 years of all this, Netflix, and that's what I got.
Yeah, well.
Please welcome Reed Hastings and Kara Swisher.
Thank you so much.
We are taping this for an On with Kara Swisher,
and we're going to do half of it here.
This is the polite part, and then the impolite part.
I will shame him in private.
Oh, you want? Okay, I can be rude.
Is the polite part when you wear the Warner Brothers Discovery shirt?
Yes, I wear the...
I'm looking forward to the rest of it, for sure.
I, uh...
Yeah.
How was your day today?
Yeah.
How was your day?
Good.
You know, Elon threatened to have
a sword fight with me today on Twitter
and then said I should be in prison, so this should be easy.
But he and Zuckerberg are great friends now,
and that was going to be a cage fight.
But you know, they used to hate each other, just so you know.
They'll hate each other again at some point, but they used to.
In any case, this will be a lot easier than that.
You're not threatening me to a sword fight, correct?
Not at the beginning.
In this case, in this case, you would win.
In the other case, I would totally kick Elon's ass.
Yes, yes.
Anyhow, moving on.
Let's not talk about him because he's really unpleasant.
I wasn't.
I have to say one of the first people I covered
from very early on was Reed Hastings and when he
started the company almost when he started the company
and we're going to talk about that and
a bunch of other things about AI and education
and apparently he's a snow bunny now so we'll
discuss that at the very end
but you stepped down as chairman of Netflix in June of this year
and you've done a lot of exit interviews about it
and what it what happened but
In over three decades,
you built a company that revolutionized
the entertainment industry,
but you seem pretty at peace
about walking away from it when you did.
Talk about what are the signs,
we're going to start backwards,
what are the signs that every founder or CEO
should be looking at when it's time to pass the torch?
Because it's something a lot of leaders struggle with,
and you look kind of young,
I mean, much more so than Chuck Grassley, say,
but what are the signs of that for you?
Yeah, well, see, getting off
the board six months ago is a very easy thing.
Stepping down as CEO, that's a much bigger thing.
So that was three and a half years ago.
I don't know.
So I'd always wanted to retire and do a bunch of other things,
you know, particularly in philanthropy.
Thank you.
And then it was finding time and finding, developing the right leaders.
And then COVID hit.
And then it was very intense for Greg and Ted and I during that time.
Thank
And then coming out of that, it felt like a very natural time.
Mm-hmm.
And the board was very open to it.
you
Me and Greg and Ted were.
And they took over three years ago.
And then the first three years, they had an awesome time.
very
Then they bought Warner Brothers Discovery.
And I was on the board.
I voted for it.
And the challenge is when you're competing
much.
with a centibillionaire who loves his son,
unpredictable things can happen.
Yeah.
And we were quite surprised to see the bid get taken up even higher.
But that's capitalism.
Right, right.
Well, I'm not so sure it's capitalism.
We could have come back.
It's how much you can fillet the president.
But go ahead.
Oh, man.
You know, Ted was pretty good at that, too.
He was good at that.
So, you know, I'm not...
Not good enough.
Just speaking metaphorically.
And so ultimately, day one,
and then it's been a little bit of a hard time
in the last six months,
which is normal after, you know,
not completing a big acquisition.
Right.
It's a phase they'll go through.
Yeah, and so a lot of CEOs don't want to,
they don't leave, they don't want to leave,
they don't want to exit.
Is there something about you,
you were just like, fine by me,
I did a great job, or...
You know, in some ways, it's very admirable,
speaking of, say, Larry Ellison,
of just continuing to kind of add value through work,
or Warren Buffett.
That's it.
Um,
And he never wanted to have another life.
He wanted to keep allocating capital
until he was 100, roughly.
I mean, so there are some people who choose that life,
and I'm not judgy at all about that.
There's other people who, you know,
want to have other experiences and do other things.
And I think that's exciting.
So I did Netflix CEO for 25 years.
And every year was exciting.
And I was, you know, pumped about trying to work the hardest
and know the most metrics and the most people
and watch the most shows and, you know, the full thing.
But it's also been really fun afterwards
to like go to the coffee shop for an hour.
It's like I go for an hour for breakfast.
It's crazy, crazy.
I still can't get over it.
Oh, God.
Are you going to start calling me now?
I'm busy, just so you know.
I got a podcast I'm doing with Hillary Clinton now,
so I'm super busy.
So going further back, I want to remember this.
I did meet you when you were doing discs.
I was just telling him,
I have a house here in San Francisco,
and my son's girlfriend found an old Netflix disc
that I haven't returned yet.
Um...
It was one of the Fast and Furious movies.
And I don't intend to return it, by the way.
But when we were starting,
I remember it was touch and go
for a lot of the time there, for a long time.
Like most startups.
Yeah, like most startups.
But I interviewed you, Hulu CEO,
Jason Kylar, and YouTube CEO.
and co-founder Chad Hurley
at Sundance Film Festival in 2009.
And I invited you there
and they put us in the basement.
It was astonishing.
And we kept going,
these people are going to kill you someday,
like that kind of thing.
And you were talking about,
and I'm going to quote you,
on-demand revolution that would let people choose
how and where they view content.
You were obviously right,
but I'm curious what you underestimated
because you were underestimated very much at that point.
Nobody believed us.
What you and Chad and Jason were saying about what was coming,
and these were all relatively small companies at the time.
Yeah, I mean, we were all internet people,
so we had confidence.
At that point, the internet was barely fast enough
to do a small-screen video.
So it wasn't that enjoyable for entertainment.
It wasn't connected to the TV at all.
That was later in 2009, we did the Xbox deal.
So it took a lot of imagination to say
the internet would get fast enough,
would get to the television.
Yeah.
A number of things were non-obvious.
But because I think for all three of us,
for Chad and Jason and I,
we'd all grown up on the internet.
It was more natural.
So I think...
When you're in a climate where things are constantly changing,
you tend to be willing to bet forward.
Right.
And in most areas of the world or business,
you know, like automobiles get...
Better very slowly,
and it's really only been sort of Moore's Law and its associated things
of networks and now AI,
where you get these exponential effects that are so unfamiliar
that many, many people underestimate sort
of where we'll be in two or three years.
Right, and what did you underestimate?
I mean, at the time, you were making
a lot of shifts going from the disks.
Which was sort of a way station to digital,
which was, you caught the wave at the right time.
Lots of others didn't.
There were many other companies before you
that had tried that.
What did you underestimate in that time?
And talk about a decision you made then
that was problematic at the time,
but proved right.
And one that you were absolutely certain of
that you were wrong.
Well, we made many radical decisions
that turned out to be right,
and we made one radical decision
that turned out to be wrong.
That was the splitting the DVD
and the streaming business too soon.
So it's called the Quickster Incident 2011.
That's what it's called, the Quickster Incident 2011.
It made Saturday Night Live parody of me as CEO
and various things.
So it was hard, but I look back on it and say,
The only way to do the kinds of things we did,
grow in DVD, convert to streaming, get global,
produce our own content, is to be pretty radical.
And so if you're willing to be pretty radical,
you've got to be willing to get some stuff wrong.
I would have loved to stick the landing
and have no big decisions wrong.
That wasn't the case.
And we did recover from that one.
What was the wrong decision there?
Because directionally you were correct.
Yeah, it was too early.
And we didn't grandfather on the pricing.
So it was an effective price increase for people.
And we should have just grandfathered everyone in the pricing
and it probably would have gone better.
But essentially, we were so obsessed with getting to streaming
that we were like, kick that DVD ---- out.
And then the consumers were like, I love those silver discs.
That was your motto? That was your advertising?
Basically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
Internally.
I mean, the traumatic moment internally was
kicking the DVD executives out of the standard executive meeting.
Oh, okay.
So that was, you know.
Wow, you just kicked them out?
I know Netflix is a bitch of a culture, but really?
Do, do, do, do, do what you got to do.
Yeah, so when you think about things
that you wish you had done earlier that you missed,
I'm curious, or...
Or something that people were really pushing against you.
What was the thing they pushed against you most?
Well, I'd say the biggest thing I missed
that luckily Ted Sarandos figured out
was the value of making our own content.
I know you didn't. I remember.
So when, back to Sundance in 06 and 07
and all that time period,
we dabbled in it, got crushed,
because we didn't have a scale distribution platform,
and got out of it.
I became convinced it's just a way to lose money.
It's like Walmart going into music.
You're like, really?
Yeah.
You know, can't you just stick to like distribution
and your confidence?
But he was convincing that we could be like HBO
where they started a long time ago
on other people's content
and then got into doing their own if they did it well.
So we gave him license to swing for some home runs
and then he hit Orange is the New Black
and House of Cards.
Right, right.
So then the die was cast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if he had gotten those first two wrong,
we probably wouldn't be in it.
Wouldn't be in the content business itself.
Yeah, and you know,
and the fact that he morphed,
you know, he worked in...
VHS warehouses for Blockbuster and their suppliers, okay?
And he's like a classic mailroom guy
who then has incredible taste and, you know,
his dynamic range is like a politician
where he has the most intense conversation
with the janitor to the president of European countries.
Yeah, I remember seeing him in the polo lounge by accident
and I was like, what's he doing here?
And he was doing deals, which was unusual.
I'd never seen you there, by the way.
Anyway, but...
But he looked the part.
He looked the part.
He was schmoozing it up.
He is.
He's a natural.
Yeah.
When you think about the shift
into other things like advertising or podcasts,
did you think that was a good thing?
Because you said Walmart's making music.
That's a very difficult thing to know what you're good at
and then shifting to things that you're not.
Yeah, well, we expanded into advertising
about four or five years ago.
And in hindsight, we probably should have done it earlier.
I think I was too close to the HBO model as inspiration.
Yeah, you didn't like, as I recall, is that right?
Correct.
Again, I think I was too close to the HBO model.
And really, Netflix should be a blend of CBS and HBO
in a U.S. context and, say, Televisa in a Mexican context
or Context or Globo in a Brazilian
where there's a lot of ad-supported content.
and a very broad taste network.
And one of the things that I remember
when I talked to Hollywood people,
one was that, I remember Jeff Bukas called you
at the Latvian army,
or like, I'm going to fight the Latvian army.
He wasn't worried about you.
And this is a guy who ran a long time.
He's a wannabe comedian.
I mean, he's a pretty good comedian, actually,
and a big fan of that.
So yes, he used to crack jokes at our expense.
At your expense.
But when you're thinking about that shift
in the nature of what you are,
Today now, a lot of people,
and you will hear Hollywood people say that,
is Netflix essentially ruined Hollywood.
Like, because of your back-end deals,
the way you did that and changed things.
How do you meet that?
Because I'm always like, don't be ridiculous.
It's a little like a Tesla, you know, ruined Detroit.
That's right, because they've made better cars.
Right.
You know, or SpaceX ruined NASA.
I mean, you know, so they feel like we ruined Hollywood
because we grew this network that wasn't.
part of their system.
But what it really means
is that we out-competed them
for consumers' affection.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know,
that's always hard on the incumbent.
And there's probably a useful story
in the reference a moment ago
to Jeff Bukas.
So Jeff Bukas,
MBA, entertainment guy,
you couldn't want a better
entertainment CEO.
And in 2001,
AOL merged with Warner Brothers.
I recall, I read a whole book on it.
Yes, we're in the middle of that.
And it was a...
A disaster.
Yeah.
And Jeff Bukas was the one Warner Brothers executive
who was telling Jerry Levin, don't do this.
This is terrible.
Don't do this.
Jerry Levin did it.
It was terrible for the Warner Brothers side.
And Jeff was the adult that held the show together,
he and Dick Parsons, and really saved the company.
Okay, so in that sense, he's a hero.
So guess what?
If, you know, when you're 45, you're a hero for something,
you remember that lesson.
And that lesson was the internet is bunk.
Right.
Right?
So that was his thing of like,
the internet is bunk.
Right.
And so then when it came to us,
2009,
you know,
down in the basement with YouTube.
He really believed the internet would never do entertainment.
He did, he absolutely did.
Because so he over-learned the thing that made him great.
He over-learned that lesson.
What lesson?
And that created the blind spot.
And so that's why I think it's a useful,
because he's an extremely talented, broad, thoughtful guy.
But because that one lesson was so seared in his brain,
Uh, he was non-objective about what was going to happen.
What do you do when you do that?
Because what lesson did you burn into your brain
that you shouldn't have?
Well, the lesson I burned into my brain
was not learning, not burning lessons into my brain.
Right.
So...
One of the best things I learned to do is, you know,
finding 10 minutes a day some ritual thing,
like when you walk the dog or when you exercise,
where you think about all the ways that you could
be wrong. So I would think, okay,
Netflix is going to crash, assume it's crashed.
What did I do that would cause it?
You have to, you know, as a leader,
you're like going, this is what's going to happen.
This is how we're going to make it.
You know, so you're always...
Pushing forward.
Pushing forward.
And you need a leader that's got that kind of confidence
and optimism and energy.
But it can make you blind to some negative scenarios.
Okay, so that's why it's important,
or it worked for me, I should say, to create...
a haven where I'd let myself be super negative
to think of all the things that could cause it.
If this, if that.
There was an early DVD format.
You know DVD as it is.
But there was a format where it was locked.
What you got is bits, but they were encrypted.
And you couldn't play them
unless you got a code from the company called DivX.
And then they wanted to make it like a license.
If that thing had won, we'd be dead.
Because there'd be no buy mail.
Right, right.
Okay, and so...
You know, I would take those 10 minutes a day
of like all the ways that DivX could succeed
and what we might do to avoid that.
Yeah.
So that's an example.
But I think it's important, again,
the main lesson is when you're so projecting confidence
and optimism of the future,
it's good to keep a quiet little reservoir of darkness
that helps you.
Wow, I am so different than you, I have to say.
You're always dark?
No, not at all, actually.
Ten minutes a day, I'm like, that was fantastic.
Fantastic.
Okay.
Once again, I win.
But then again...
Then again, Scott Galloway is my partner, so it's easy.
The bar is low.
The bar is she low.
I'm going to shift a little bit, because we're going
to talk about more specific things happening
with the deal, with the Warner.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to share.
It'll be on the podcast about the Warner deal,
but I want to get into the specifics of that
when we talk later.
But I want to talk about AI with this crowd.
And you sit on the board of Anthropic, one of the leading AI firms.
You're very bullish about it.
Recently, we've seen calls for a slowdown
from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Amodei, excuse me, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and even Elon.
The public largely wants it too.
The negativity is at huge levels, polling.
Well, it's split because if you ask what's your consumer usage,
they're like, oh, I like that.
If you ask about data centers, it's hugely negative or joblessness.
Yeah, it's a proxy.
It's got two personalities.
It definitely does.
Talk about how you're weighing this right now.
How fast is too fast?
And, of course, there's the famous person who quit
and said the 10% chance.
Yeah, how long had he been in a...
Oh, 22 days.
I'm going to push back on you.
I found a 2015 essay from Sam Altman,
and the first line is,
superhuman intelligence is certain to kill the human race.
That was his first line, which I was like, wow.
They knew it then.
I've been at dinner parties.
They've talked about it.
Talk a little bit about where it is,
because it definitely illuminated a lot of people.
Put their head up when they saw that.
I don't think he was the ideal messenger,
but your point is it's in the meme, right?
Right.
The meme is there.
Thank you, Chair.
Look, we lived through a terrible era with nuclear weapons
where we could have blown each other up,
and there were times when it was close,
and I don't want to repeat, I don't want to,
just because we got through a 10% chance of nuclear holocaust,
let's not do that again.
Right.
So let's keep the odds way, way low about what it can do.
But on the same lens, you can get a lot of attention
by saying the world's going to end tomorrow.
We humans, we're very focused on Armageddon, whether that's the...
Well, except it's the creators who are saying it, Elon said.
They all do, all the creators. It's not like...
Me or someone else.
It's the actual maker.
No, but it resonates.
So what's happening is the public resonates on it.
So then it's really fun to say those things,
you know, at times.
And, you know, it's not impossible.
So I'm not saying it's, you know,
like maybe using one of these things,
you can crack into the Russian nuclear arsenal
and launch it.
That would be catastrophic.
Yes, I would imagine.
A nuclear bomb can ruin your day.
There are scenarios that, you know,
You know, it's not zero problem.
Probability.
But where do you see it now?
Because, you know, you've said AI will...
I see it as a force for...
I mean, think about our daily interaction with it.
Like, it's using it as AI doctor
for, like, consumer medicine, you know, is fantastic.
It's fantastic.
It's helping me in all kinds of design tasks.
It's helping writing software.
It's helping in...
I mean, my day-to-day experience is incredibly positive on it.
I get frustrated when it's not quite as intelligent
as I want it to be, or the voice doesn't quite work.
Its rate of improvement is substantial.
You said it will usher in
the great act of creative destruction.
Explain what you mean by that.
Well, sure.
I think what's going to happen there
is companies are going to get very competitive.
So take Oracle.
There'll be an Oracle challenger
that will use AI and build an incredible...
...database or set of applications that'll be much lower cost.
And that's the creative destruction.
That's going to speed up capitalism and give entrepreneurs...
I mean, there'll be new ones who compete with Netflix.
There'll be new ones who compete with everybody using AI.
So that's the creative destruction.
But that's not the same or anything to do with humans and kind of risk.
Remember, in AI, there's sort of two big classes.
There's the misuse case,
sort of the North Koreans use one of these things
or the Unabomber uses AI to do something really bad.
So that's the misuse case.
And then there's a loss of control
where the AI gets so smart,
we can't do the sort of HAL scenario.
So we have to protect against both of those.
We've gotten much better just in the last 18 months
with a thing called classifiers.
Which is like a front end on your AI usage.
So if you ask it, you know, how do I rebuild the COVID-19?
You know, it doesn't let you do it.
Because that's the separate subsystem, the classifiers.
Mm-hmm.
It's not perfect.
But right now, I mean, pretty much all the AI guys
are at the White House every Tuesday for lunch, it seems like.
Which is, CNN always calls and is like,
tech people are at the White House.
I'm like, call me when they're not, actually.
That's what I'd like to comment on.
But self-policing.
Self-policing, no guardrails, self-policing, no regulation.
How do you look at that?
I'm not sure that's the best way because I think this, you know,
if we go down that path as we are, there will be incidents that happen.
And hopefully they're not too awful, but you don't know.
And then there'll be regulation.
So we tend to wait till something happens
and then think of the global financial crisis 2008
and then a whole bunch of new regulations come in.
So that's the likely case here, unfortunately.
Might it be a better idea to possibly anticipate those things
like you do every 10 minutes?
You should be at the White House.
So, you know, so.
I feel like I'm not going to get invited to the White House.
Crazy.
It's crazy.
It's definitely crazy.
Dario was there for dinner.
Dario looked like he wanted to run out.
What was going on?
He was hiding behind people.
He was like...
He got called to the front.
That was great.
I thought it was going to be a glory of the flies
and he was going to end up in a bad situation.
I think regulation, I think, would give us a higher expected value,
lower the chance of an incident,
because we want AI to get better and better
and better so that it can do these things for us.
And the public will demand, you know,
draconian limits if it does something horrible.
Right.
Right?
And so it's really in all of our interest to avoid that.
Right.
And so that's what everyone's working really hard
to make sure their systems are safe.
Thank
But it's tricky, like with the hugging face,
that as much as we try,
there are some unpredictable things that are happening.
you
Right, so if you tell it to cheat,
it's going to do really good at that, for example.
Yeah, I mean, they didn't tell it to cheat.
very
They told it not to cheat, and it did anyway.
That's the kind of scary part about it.
Yeah, because I don't know what it trained on.
Wait, humanity.
Okay, so we're running a tiny bit over.
much.
I have two more questions.
You see opportunities for AI to disrupt education.
This has been a particular area of interest.
You told Semaphore that AI is going to, quote, first,
much better than the typical and then much better than
the very best than all teachers, which is something to say.
Now, evidence suggests the opposite, that AI in classroom
is worse for kids and it cannot stimulate emotional skills,
social emotional skills, critical thinking that teachers teach.
So why do you remain bullish on education?
Well, you know, look,
if you look at the usefulness of drugs 200 years ago,
it was pretty negative because they weren't good drugs.
No.
And if you look at the usefulness of AI for tutoring,
it's not that good right now.
So you have to back to the exponential.
You have to think, okay, how good is AI going to be
at stimulating human beings for learning
as opposed to give them the answer in two or four years?
And I think it's going to be tremendous
because AI is going to be tremendous at many, many things.
So most of the time you use AI, you want the answers.
You want it crisp, you want it right.
And some of the time you want to learn how to do something, okay?
And that's this different modality.
And we have to spend enough time
on that training data and motivational.
But humans, especially young humans, learn really well one-to-one.
Okay, where there's a person, an adult who knows it
and is questioning them.
And I started as a math tutor
and then eventually became a math teacher.
Okay, and I went from one kid to then, you know,
30 or 40 kids.
And it's a lot harder because you just, you know,
the kids are learning less per hour.
Right.
So the idea is to have every kid have a tutor.
And we can't quite afford that today
because that's sort of, you know,
a hundred bucks an hour stuff.
Right.
But if it's an AI, it's possible.
So I think what we're going to see is,
again, over the next two to four years,
we'll have generalized tutors
that teach you a lot of things,
teach you medieval history if you want.
And we'll quiz you
and bring up different pieces of history
and back and forth
and make it playful and fun
and, you know, age appropriate.
And we'll be able to do the same.
For a seven-year-old, a 14-year-old.
So what I want to do is help bring about AI
so that it's nourishing of young brains, not destructive.
And if we're too simplistic about the software,
well, it's like evaluating drugs 200 years ago.
They don't work.
Yeah, that's true.
And technology has never been damaging.
No, I'm teasing you.
Last question.
I have two last questions, and then we're going to go.
Sorry, I'm running over you guys.
Even though you left Netflix, you're still a CEO, right?
Yeah, Powder Mountain.
You're the chief ski bum
at a semi-private luxury ski resort in Utah
called Powder Mountain.
Yeah, you know, there's private planes,
there's private golf clubs,
and now there's private ski resorts.
So 500 families, a huge mountain.
You get it to yourself, so it's always uncrowded.
There's fresh snow all the time.
That must be nice, yeah.
Exactly.
So it's like running a private airline.
It's a very boasty thing.
So why did you pick this?
Because I f***ing love it.
I mean, you know, it's...
It's not...
It's not service to the world, it's just so joyful.
No, no, it's not service to the world.
I'm like the little mayor of the town.
I walk around, I'm the owner, you know, it's a fantasy.
I don't know, my God.
Is this like a very dull Yellowstone, right?
Right? It's incredible.
No, it's very exciting.
It's got all this art.
No, you don't want to be like the Yellowstone.
It's a very exciting Yellowstone.
Yellowstone was the first.
No, I mean the TV show.
You don't want to do that.
There's a lot of murder.
There's the Yellowstone private ski club.
There's a lot of murder happening there.
I hope that's not the case in your case.
So you just want to...
Do that.
So it's just an incredible joy.
It's very physical.
It's sort of designing this building,
what the menu is, you know, all these things.
So, you know, like other ex-CEOs get a sports team or a 500-foot boat.
I have a ski mountain.
So think of it as it's an indulgence, okay,
of the first order, but it is super fun.
And that's also got a public ski side,
which will make them better and better.
Great.
A very last question, though.
You've also been very politically active,
especially on the Democratic side.
You're about the only one.
It's you and Mark Cuban sort of wandering around.
Did you see Bloomberg just put 80 million in there?
Yeah, and Mike Bloomberg just put 80 million.
Are you going to do that, too?
I have not done that.
Okay.
Will you?
Like, today?
There's no plan to do that.
Okay, why?
Either what happened to all of them
and what didn't happen to you?
Like, why...
Basically, why aren't you filleting Trump?
Well, you're asking...
A serious question, which is,
I think Biden's legacy in a couple of areas, crypto in particular,
was very obstructive of any progress,
very labor union, very traditional.
Thank
And a lot of people develop fears
that the crypto approach would become the AI approach.
And so that triggered, you know, like,
you
think about not inviting Elon to the electric vehicle summit.
Oh, I heard about that.
very
Yeah, so, you know, those kinds of things,
you asked, why did that whole community turn right?
All right.
Because they feel like they got pushed out.
much.
of the Democratic Coalition
that was sort of Obama-like before
or before that Clinton.
Yeah, but they're not toddlers.
They can deal with it in a different way.
Well, they want an America
where there's a lot of things done
and a lot of invention
and a lot of technological progress.
So they're North Star's technological progress
for human prosperity.
Why not you?
Why aren't you at lunch at the White House?
Well, I was not that big in crypto.
I'm kind of anti-crypto, and so it didn't offend me.
Right.
But you've been a staunch, pretty democratic supporter.
Yeah, and I remain working within,
and a lot of the work I do is on charter schools,
a form of school choice,
and that's tough in the Democratic coalition.
You know, it's a lot of arguments going on there.
Thank
I can't really explain why I didn't change
because I see hope in the Democrats,
but there's good things the Republicans do too,
and you want there to be this competition.
I mean, you know, that's very healthy for our society.
And, you know, Trump's done a lot of terrible things.
He tweeted when I got off the board, like, you know,
you.
Reid, what a criminal, blah, blah, blah.
So 25 years of all this Netflix, and that's what I got.
Yeah, wow.
So it's like, okay.
And I've never met him, so I don't know what that was.
Don't go changing, as I say.
Anyway, I think you didn't do it because you're an adult, that's why.
And that's, that's a lot.
Again, if you infantilize all Republicans,
you're not really moving the country forward.
Yeah, no, I'm not infantile.
Well, if you say I'm an adult because I stay Democratic,
I think you're having fun with it.
Not an adult because you stay Democratic,
you don't take it personally,
and you push for the things you want.
That's different.
Some of the people take things personally,
and that's not great, I agree,
but I would say the regulatory state
and the assumptions about that
got to a stage where it was inhibiting,
think of energy development,
think of all that,
think of the abundance argument now on the left,
which is, you know,
the abundance argument is we all became Ralph Naders,
and a good life was how many projects did you block?
Okay, that was the critique from a Democrat about the left.
So I think that has a lot of validity,
which got triggered from that rightward move
that you referred to.
So hopefully we win him back in this next cycle.
And, you know, if a Democrat wins in Texas,
that's going to be an amazing sign.
Yeah. All right.
Wow.
