00:33:22 · Max Read, Jasmine Sun, Erin Griffith
[00:33:22] S1: Were they saying AI or were they saying SI? [00:33:25] S2: It was actually really funny. It was it was a chat in the house workshop, but there's a split in the room, and then you could tell there's a bit of internal tension between folks from the admin and other places who were saying s I and the folks who were a little bit too staunchly, like, we're not caving to that. So it was really funny. [00:33:42] S3: I've never seen a better, like, metaphor for, like, people talking over each other and, like, not being able to communicate than, like, not even being able to agree on what we're calling this thing. [00:33:52] S2: It was kind of amazing. [00:33:54] S1: Yeah. So one of the issues on the ballot next Tuesday is this tax in California on billionaires. Erin, can you explain what the what the what the proposition is, what the measure is? And what... I mean, I think we can all guess, but why are... Why are Silicon Valley so interested in this tax on billionaires?
00:34:10 · Erin Griffith
[00:34:10] S3: Yeah. I mean, it's it's been actually pretty fascinating. Prop 40 is a proposed one time 5% billionaire tax on wealth, including unrealized gains. You know, that means, like, you know, private startup stock for billionaires in California. And as you can imagine, the billionaires are a little bit mad about it. And so what better way to fight back than to use their vast wealth? And so they've gathered... This group that we reported on, Building a Better California, has gathered $333,000,000, which is so, so, so much to fight a state proposition. Mostly from, you know, Sergey Brin, but then he brought in John Doerr and Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe. John Doerr's a very famous VC investor from Kleiner Perkins. And so... And they have been, over the last couple months, recruited this, like, kind of who's who of Silicon Valley, like, very high powered, famous VCs, founders, many of whom are not billionaires. There's some, like, mere 100 millionaires and even billionaires. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, you know, aspiring billionaires. But they are... They're they're mad about this for a number of reasons. You know, they think it's poorly written, that they don't believe that it's gonna be a one time tax. They don't like how the money's actually gonna... Like, the money's not, you know, specifically earmarked well enough to to do the things that they say they're gonna do, and they don't trust... They they basically just don't trust the politicians to to do the right thing with it. And so they're really mad about it, and they don't like the precedent in a sense because California is kind of known for, you know, as being a trendsetter. And so they're worried that it's gonna turn into this cat and mouse game where other states are gonna do it, and because a lot of them have already left the state. But they're mad about essentially the principle of They
00:35:55 · Mike Isaac, Erin Griffith, Max Read
[00:35:55] S4: believe the matter. [00:35:55] S3: Yes. Yeah. They believe that, you know, this is going to hinder aspiring billionaires, founders, builders from moving to California and wanting to, you know, get rich. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of reasons that they're fighting it, and they're all kinda like banding together and getting on these weekly calls and like talking about their strategy. And like, one of the really interesting things that we found in our reporting was like, they are aware of how it looks. They they... There was this quote in one of the documents that they're circulating to other donors that says, billionaires are seen as having a net negative impact across issues. They're not trying to be the face of this. They don't wanna be out front. They're they're not like, you know, talking publicly about this like they might if there were some other, like, you know, any issue, like including data centers. They are trying to go through other groups that they're partnering with, like Planned Parenthood is a really big one that they're working with to kind of... That's opposed to it. And so Why... [00:36:57] S1: Sorry. Why is Planned Parenthood opposed to it?
00:36:57 · Max Read, Erin Griffith, Mike Isaac
[00:36:57] S1: Sorry. Why is Planned Parenthood opposed to it? [00:36:59] S3: I mean, for some of the same reasons, it's not sustainable. This one time tax thing is, like, supposed to make up for some of the Trump administration cuts. And they don't believe that it's... You know, it's not setting them up in a position to, like, be sustainable going forward. So they just think it's poorly written. I think a lot of the people that are opposed to it are not opposed to the idea of a wealth tax, including actually some people that I spoke with for this story. They they just think this is a crappy one, and they wish that it was better... Like, that it that it was just structured better and made more sense. [00:37:32] S4: But do you feel like they're always gonna say that? I feel like it's always a, well, this bill is poorly written, and if they could only legislate it better. I just feel like I've heard that from Andreessen or whoever a million times. You know what I'm saying? [00:37:45] S3: Totally. It's... I mean, it's it's almost sort of like respectability politics where it's like, I like, I agree with your message, but I don't like how you're doing it. Yeah. [00:37:52] S1: I was interested to learn that about the... About Planned Parenthood though, because I hadn't I hadn't realized that this was more than just a a cabal of billionaires plotting
00:37:52 · Max Read, Erin Griffith, Mike Isaac
[00:37:52] S1: I was interested to learn that about the... About Planned Parenthood though, because I hadn't I hadn't realized that this was more than just a a cabal of billionaires plotting [00:37:59] S3: out your like a bunch of... I mean, my... Ever since I wrote this story, weirdly, my phone has been blowing up with, like, you know, political text messages from different groups, and there's, like, a lot of health care groups that have lined up against it. [00:38:12] S4: Mhmm. That's interesting. [00:38:14] S1: Yeah. I mean, from a Democratic point of view, this is a nonpartisan podcast, of course. From a democratic point of view, it's sort of nice to put one of these ballot measures on every year so that the billionaires all get distracted and focus on that instead of putting money around the country the way Elon Musk is. [00:38:27] S4: That's pretty good game theory. [00:38:29] S1: Yeah. There you go. Feel free to call me, you know, senate political action committees. There's one other big thing I wanna talk about today, and that is the... Is what is being called Black October, the vuln apocalypse, the PHP vulnerability discovered last week. Mike, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Can you explain... Obviously, we all know what PHP is. We know what's going on. But for this... For anybody who doesn't know this stuff, can you explain what happened last week and why it made everybody who works in information security's life hell for the... For... I mean, it continues to be hell.
00:38:29 · Max Read, Mike Isaac, Erin Griffith
[00:38:29] S1: Yeah. There you go. Feel free to call me, you know, senate political action committees. There's one other big thing I wanna talk about today, and that is the... Is what is being called Black October, the vuln apocalypse, the PHP vulnerability discovered last week. Mike, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Can you explain... Obviously, we all know what PHP is. We know what's going on. But for this... For anybody who doesn't know this stuff, can you explain what happened last week and why it made everybody who works in information security's life hell for the... For... I mean, it continues to be hell. [00:39:01] S4: Well, look. I I think the way I like to think about it is how the entire, let's say, Internet and infrastructure that computers run on to this point is pretty Byzantine and built on a lot of old code that has, let's say, a lot of holes and stuff in it. Right? And that's that's just the nature of computing. You figure out what are called vulnerabilities, and you fix them over time. You know, Microsoft has dozens of fixes to their main software a year. Now it's ranging up into the hundreds because AI is finding more of them. What happened, though, Black October is not trying to get a Furby for your shopping for your kids. That was... Mike, come on. [00:39:45] S1: Was that on the spot? You gotta do better. [00:39:46] S4: No. No. Yeah. I hope you could [00:39:48] S1: workshop that. [00:39:49] S3: We're on squish... We're on squishies now, Mike.