Silicon Valley’s Case Against The Wealth Tax

Ed Elson is joined by Jason Calacanis and Bradley Tusk to break down their perspectives on the proposed wealth tax in California. They debate the chances of it passing, whether a wealth tax would actually reduce inequality, and what other policies could more effectively redistribute wealth in America. Jason Calacanis is the Host of the All In Podcast. Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:45Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Profty 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 calcally, the odds that we will see a hike this year have climbed to 43%.

• 2:22Ed Elson?

  Okay, what else is happening? Billionaire wealth has more than doubled since 2019 and now voters want to tax it. The 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 Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna have introduced a federal version

• 3:07Ed Elson?

  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 at a federal level. How did we get here?

• 3:52Ed Elson?

  And when you look at California, what are the chances that you think this will actually go through?

• 3:58Speaker 10

  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 I know for a fact that every time that someone like And sent us a dollar in tax revenue. By the time that money reached the people in need, thirty, forty cents on that dollar was gone. Um, and so sure, we could make billionaires pay more in taxes.

• 4:44Speaker 10

  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 with big democratic donors. And so, um, I do think that people who have more should have to pay more. I don't think that this is the way to do it. Um, 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 and more they donate money, the more you do it.

• 5:28Speaker 10

  And so we're in this self fulfilling cycle now where both sides are incentivized to be as demagogic as possible. And ideas like billionaires taxes or whatever else become very popular. In terms of your second question, Ed of will this pass? Um, I'm not sure. So the latest polling that I saw did have it about fifty percent support, twenty eight percent opposed. And the other twenty three, wherever it was undecided. But if you look at calcine polling market, it's much more like two to one against. Um, so that kind of gives you a mixed thing. On a more basic level, on that thirty something years I 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, um, does this affect me?

• 6:13Speaker 10

  No, um, do I think billionaires should pay more? Yes. Do I want to see healthcare 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's consistent with the intents and purposes of the referendum, which means that one point one billion could fall to a hundred and ten million or eleven million or one point one million. Once you're at one point one million, that's every homeowner in California, pretty much. And so, uh, the opposition will have a lot of money, uh, to spend.

• 6:54Speaker 10

  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.

• 7:00Ed Elson?

  Jason, you speak with politicians, lawmakers, and you also speak with many Silicon Valley investors and Silicon Valley 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?

• 7:19Speaker 11

  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 paid well over 50%. I think New York's up to 54%, and Bradley would know.

• 7:58Ed Elson?

  Fifty-four.

• 7:59Speaker 11

  Fifty-four, 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,

• 8:40Speaker 11

  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. Why? 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.

• 9:25Speaker 11

  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

• 10:10Speaker 11

  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.

• 10:39Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 11

  This is, basically, politicians like Ro Khanna and others, Mondami in New York, Ernie, 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.

• 10:57Ed 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 Ro on 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? Does it, is it possible? There are very, very big questions. Questions there, but it does seem that in a lot of ways, it seems like the the very richest,

• 11:39Ed Elson?

  the 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 nineteen households owning two percent of all the household wealth up from point one percent, just around twenty to thirty years ago, the fact that top one percent owns more of the household wealth in America than the entire middle class. That wasn't true thirty years ago. There are things that have changed here. And it seems as though this, while

• 12:21Ed Elson?

  it 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?

• 12:41Speaker 11

  Well, I want to let Bradley get in here, but I'll answer it as quickly as I can.

• 12:44Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 11

  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 seven hundred companies. Some of them have gotten very big. And I invest in a hundred new companies a year. I do this week in startups. I've done twenty five hundred 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.

• 13:18Ed Elson?

  But before, before we, sorry, just, just, Jason, I was, 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 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?

• 13:40Speaker 11

  So the the short answer is yes.

• 13:41Ed Elson?

  Okay.

• 13:41Speaker 11

  And the 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. Essentially like a credit line you might have against your home, like a home equity line, 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, six, seven, eight, nine, 10% a year, and your margin loan is, mine was as low as 2%, which is essentially free money.

• 14:23Speaker 11

  Now it's maybe more like 5% given the, but which is still kind of free money. You know, that is a, 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, 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,

• 15:08Speaker 11

  which I didn't used to think, but my thinking on it's evolved, but I'll let Bradley jump in here.

• 15:13Ed 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?

• 15:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think those are, those are both good, good ideas, but let's take a half a step back if that's okay, which is,

• 15:32Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 15:32Speaker 10

  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, scoriation of people who are successful, more regulations, everything else, that fell to 8.7% and I'm sorry, millionaires, not billionaires.

• 16:13Speaker 10

  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.

• 16:53Speaker 10

  So if California, which I believe it would 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 appropriation.

• 17:35Speaker 10

  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 wherever 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 Bernie was right about Medicare for all. It is a successful government program and there's no reason not to let more

• 18:20Speaker 10

  people have access to it if they want. You should still have private insurance as 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. That 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 cows of the left.

• 18:44Speaker 11

  You sound like you're running Bradley.

• 18:45Speaker 10

  No, I'm not. But but I certainly have a platform if I ever did.

• 18:49Speaker 11

  Yes, you do.

• 18:50Speaker 10

  Life, endless environmental review, endless community review, having to use unions to build everything and not doing that.

• 18:57Speaker 11

  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 equities, 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 look at the systematic things that people in the lower half, non-equity holders, how do we

• 19:38Speaker 11

  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, you know, I travel all over the world and in New Zealand, Australia, the Nordics, it's 15 to 20 bucks. You know, in US dollars, as high as $20 to $25. I think Switzerland or Norway might be the leader right now in the low 20s. In America, it's still federally seven, and in different locations, it's $15 to $18. You know, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, et cetera. We really should be looking at that because when they raised the rates in those other

• 20:23Speaker 11

  countries, there was a lot of hand wringing that it would have a negative impact on employment, and it would have a negative 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.

• 21:06Speaker 11

  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, if I say on All In, I'm for, you know, reassessing the minimum wage, oh, you're a libtard, whatever. 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 $7 to $12?

• 21:50Speaker 11

  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 to commute. So I think that's like where we need to spend our cycles.

• 22:08Ed 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 12:30 Eastern, so if you want to see that, head to profgmedia.com and subscribe to Prof G Plus. It'll only be for Prof G Plus members. I hope to see you on the stream.

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• 24:06Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profty 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 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, Zohar Mhamdani's recent pied-a-terre tax proposal, which, you know, a lot of people have been making the point where if you raise taxes, then they'll leave. And then Mhamdani 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

• 24:49Ed Elson?

  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?

• 25:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, I, I, I look, but I think a lot of it again gets to the question of are you trying to solve problems? Or are you just trying to score political points? So, you know, I came out in favor of the pedeter tax 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

• 25:28Ed Elson?

  Totally agree.

• 25:28Speaker 10

  The issue's not up for debate. Like everyone supports it. So you 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 to New Yorkers going to people in Florida instead.

• 25:45Ed Elson?

  Hundred percent.

• 25:46Speaker 10

  If you care about New Yorkers and their well being, you wouldn't take away 15,000 jobs. But the reason why Mondani 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 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.

• 26:22Speaker 11

  It was performative.

• 26:23Speaker 10

  You are right. And the way to do it was to make it as controversial as possible. So he deliberately picked a fight with Ken Griffin, knowing that we'd all then talk about it constantly.

• 26:31Speaker 11

  Yeah. What if Ken Griffin is the next person to get shot by the next Mangione? 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.

• 27:09Ed Elson?

  But but just to 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.

• 27:18Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 27:18Ed Elson?

  But we shouldn't also assume that the anger there is just because media people have decided to villainize rich people.

• 27:26Speaker 11

  Sure.

• 27:26Ed Elson?

  I think we could also assume that the anger there is real.

• 27:29Speaker 11

  Oh, the anger is certainly real.

• 27:30Ed Elson?

  Because of dissatisfaction in the system and dissatisfaction in the inequality that has gotten worse and worse.

• 27:35Speaker 11

  Right, 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-à-terre, we're going to ask you to pay 5% or 2%. Normally, you pay 1.5% 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.

• 28:08Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 11

  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 3.5. We're taking that 3.5, 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 3.5. 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?

• 28:53Speaker 11

  We live in the United States of America. There are 50 options for me. I'm going to make a list of 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 gonna 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 that's what politicians have to realize, is rich people have options.

• 29:27Ed Elson?

  Yeah. Bradley, you were gonna jump in there.

• 29:30Speaker 10

  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 the 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 fundamentally, I was asking the system to choose to reform itself, and it's not gonna do that. So that now puts me in the position where I've just gotta try to build a big national grassroots movement, stoking the anger of people across the board, and say, if you wanna keep living in a world where we ignore all the solutions and just keep screaming

• 30:14Speaker 10

  and tweeting instead, then just keep things the way they are. But, you know, if most people by definition are moderate, 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 wanna 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 gotta have a political system that actually is incentivized to wanna have change

• 30:59Speaker 10

  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 moblevoting.org if you wanna learn more about it, is so necessary, because otherwise, you know, we're having these great conversations, but we might as well be sitting in the ivory tower, because none of it's actually gonna happen.

• 31:17Ed Elson?

  Now, we're going to reach millions. We're going to reach millions here. I'm just going to try to wrap this up, tie a bow on this.

• 31:23Speaker 11

  Come next time, Ro Khanna. I like Ro, actually. But he's a politician doing politician things.

• 31:28Ed Elson?

  Right. And, you know, it is a shame. I'm sure the audience might wish that there was someone, there was someone like Ro pushing back. I hopefully have done a little bit of that job.

• 31:38Speaker 11

  Or AOC. AOC or Ro.

• 31:41Ed Elson?

  Ro, we would love to have you on the show to discuss this at some point. But I think what we can all agree on.

• 31:46Speaker 11

  I also need some stock tips.

• 31:48Ed Elson?

  Enough. Enough.

• 31:53Ed Elson?

  I think one thing we can all agree on here is that if this wealth tax 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.

• 32:31Speaker 10

  Well, he needs the security guards just to keep all the fans away. I mean, all the paparazzi, all the fans.

• 32:37Speaker 11

  I don't need it. People love me. I'm funny. People love me. I'm not creating a super intelligence to take all the jobs.

• 32:45Ed Elson?

  But what we need then, we need a message.

• 32:49Speaker 11

  I have it.

• 32:49Ed Elson?

  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.

• 33:05Speaker 11

  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 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 helps 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.

• 33:50Speaker 11

  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 healthcare, 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 the government start taking out the regulations for accreditations at universities, for building homes faster

• 34:35Speaker 11

  like we do here in Texas, and Nevada, and Florida do as well, and we could spread that to the democratic cities and GOs, and then we could look at healthcare and use the power of AI and the power of, you know, 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

• 35:17Speaker 11

  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, you know, a scan or a blood test for free or close to free and a body scan instead of Prinovo 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.

• 36:00Ed Elson?

  Bradley, your message and then we'll wrap.

• 36:02Speaker 10

  Yeah, I 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 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.

• 36:46Speaker 10

  But we have to choose to finally take the power back and 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, you know, explained on this podcast can actually happen.

• 37:04Ed 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.

• 37:13Speaker 10

  Ed, thanks for having me.

• 37:14Speaker 11

  It's a pleasure.

• 37:20Ed Elson?

  Okay, that's it for today. A lot in there. We appreciate you joining us for another Prof G 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 at [email protected]. We hope to hear from you.

• 37:38Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalane, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonahue and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

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