This is Democracy – Episode 66: Ethics in Business and Technology

Announcer:                   This is Democracy: A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri:                   Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to discuss an issue that’s in the news quite often, but an issue for which we often aren’t given very much context or very much depth. And that’s the challenges and opportunities of pursuing ethics in the world of business and technology today. There are controversies all across our society around Facebook and other entities, but we often don’t talk about the ethical possibilities in the world of business development and technology.

Jeremi Suri:                   We have with us a true pioneer, someone who I think is doing some of the most exciting and original and impactful work in this space at the intersection between really ethics and philosophy on the one hand, and business development and technology. Brett Hurt. He’s the CEO and co-founder of data.world. Brett in creating data.world also really created a new kind of corporation. It’s a public benefit corporation, certified B corporation it’s called. And among many other things, Brett is also involved in business development, he’s involved in philanthropy. He’s the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments alongside his wife Debra. He was given in 2017, this is really cool, The Best CEO Legacy Award by the Austin Business Journal.

Jeremi Suri:                   Brett began programming at the age of seven. I don’t know what he was doing his first seven years of life before that. He’s been doing stuff on the internet since 18. He has a fantastic book available for free online called The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. Brett, thank you so much for joining us.

Brett Hurt:                    Thank you. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Jeremi Suri:                   Well, we’re delighted to have you. Before we turn to our discussion with Brett, we have our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What’s the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri:                 What are the Rules.

Jeremi Suri:                   What are the Rules. Well, what are they? Let’s hear.

Zachary Suri:                 What is this moment, staring at the TV ad, frozen on the screen, where the smithereens of a mother’s car floats in slow motion to the asphalt. The trite no texting slogans at the end, but the way her son smiles as he stares out the window just moments before. What are the rules? And my grandparents were the generation of the radio that corrupted their souls. My parents were the generation of television and cartoons that fried their brains. And we are the generation of iPhones and Mac books and gaming PCs that the FBI uses to stare at us while we sit on the toilet flipping through our texts. What is this moment, the power that I possess in my pocket that is greater than what put a man on the moon, able to stream and podcast from across the globe to get my weekly British politics fix. What are the rules?

Zachary Suri:                 And Zuckerberg is Sugar Mountain [inaudible 00:03:00] like Neil Young scene to try and bring back his lost youth. He is the geek who became the Robert Barron, the tinkerer who had to testify before Congress, the larger than life Babyface on CSPAN apologizing for everything, vowing to do better. What is this moment? The way my classmates unabashedly play pointless little games on their laptops in class. The temptation of chasing the Apple with the pixelated snake, the release of connecting like multiples of two or pulling out their phones in class just out of habit. What are the rules? And what does it say that we feel the need to put little pieces of tape over our webcams like the NSA isn’t already watching us. How teenagers know how to get VPNs that tell the interwebs they’re in Bulgaria, and how many personal Wi-Fi hotspots are on the school bus these days heading home on the highway? How many? What are the rules?

Jeremi Suri:                   Wow. That is very powerful. What is your message in your poem, Zachary?

Zachary Suri:                 Well, my poem was really about how much technology surrounds us and defines our generation and our society right now, but also, how technology has in the past defined our society and how we are redefining what technology means to our society today.

Jeremi Suri:                   And how important it is that we think through these issues, right?

Zachary Suri:                 And how the people like Zuckerberg who were the inventors, the tinkerers have now become the corporations and the established businesses.

Jeremi Suri:                   Brett, how do you approach these issues? More than anyone I think I’ve ever met, you are deep in the technology world, but you think about these issues in a metaphysical way I know. What’s your point of departure? How do you think about these things?

Brett Hurt:                    Well, it’s interesting because I have been programming since I was a kid. I grew up here in Austin, had an amazing mom who just absolutely loved me. Unfortunately, she’s passed away. She noticed I was tinkering with Pong, you asked what I was doing before I was seven, she noticed I was tinkering with Pong at age four and trying to figure out how it worked, like trying to take it apart and figure out the inner dynamics. And I don’t remember that, I remember playing Pong. When she read about the personal computer revolution coming, she bought me my first computer at age seven back in 1979 and learned how to program with me.

Brett Hurt:                    I grew up basically believing in a techno kind of utopia. That I think has mostly come to light. There’s many good things that technology has done. I’ve taken part in those, I’ve become financially successful because of those. I’m able to very proudly say that the technologies that my various companies along with great teams have developed have done good things for the world. I really believe that. Data.world is doing a great thing for the world. But now, we’re in this age where the nerds have won. I was picked on most of my childhood.

Jeremi Suri:                   Now you dominate.

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah, and it’s this weird feeling where now you realize that all those things we were doing back in the bulletin board days, like the way we were talking to each other as hackers, in shorthand, now people speak to each other like that on Twitter. And it’s kind of a weird out of body experience when you’re part of the fringe and then the fringe moves into the mainstream with all the good and bad that that means. The famous saying of when you’re on the internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog or not, nobody really knows who’s behind the computer.

Brett Hurt:                    Now there’s this great responsibility that I feel, and part of that responsibility gets manifested in going to things like Ted where it really shakes you up, where it really makes you think about the implications. Watching things like Black Mirror, showing this is what the extreme version of tech takes you into. Going to things like Dialogue, which is an off the record conference, a really amazing gathering, which gets you to really mix it up with people and talk about these issues in a very deep way where you’re very actively engaged. And realizing that even though I’m a techno utopia, and that has not changed, that I need to shake things up so that I am a good steward of technology and don’t take technology into a negative way just for profit motive.

Jeremi Suri:                   And what does it mean to be a good steward for you?

Brett Hurt:                    Humanity’s kind of messy. We’ve seen this throughout history. I’m Jewish, there’s lots of things, lots of bad things that have happened like the Holocaust. And in this country, it wasn’t that long ago that we had slavery. And so, we’re not perfect. There’s definitely been some many atrocities of the past. And now we have humanity fully unleashed online in a mostly anonymous fashion. And that is leading to some pretty challenging things, the polarization of the country, the polarization of the world, the rise of the far right movement around the world, the populous movement going on around the world, a real kind of aversion to facts. People that actually believe the earth is flat, they can find other people that believe something so crazy. That is one of the bad things that happens with the internet.

Brett Hurt:                    And I think intentionality matters a lot. So to be a good steward of technology, like a community of data.world, data.world is now the world’s largest collaborative data community.

Jeremi Suri:                   Wow, that’s amazing.

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It’s grown as fast as GitHub grew in their early years. It’s got this whole commercial side too but it’s this big public data community as well. And you can choose to emphasize a lot of things from an intentionality standpoint. I used to have an internet game back when I was here at UT, I started that when I was a freshman. By the time I was a junior, it was supposedly most popular game on the internet. It was all for free and it was based on D&D, and people would play from all over the world. It was kind of amazing, it was like an amazing experience. I didn’t have any money. They organized a conference around it and flew me out to speak at it and talk about the game.

Brett Hurt:                    We had a level of intentionality around the game where we could have just a lot of fun with it. And the people that ran quest and stuff like that, the way the game worked is that if you got to the maximum level, you could appeal to the gods to become a god yourself, to kind of basically an immortal. And then if you became an immortal, you could run quest because you had the keys kind of behind the backdoor, it’s almost like the matrix, like you are now part of controlling the matrix. And the people that we promoted to be gods we were very concerned about what is their intentionality. We didn’t want anything like sexism on it or anything like racism on it and things like that.

Jeremi Suri:                   How did you prevent that from happening?

Brett Hurt:                    Well, if you saw anything like that, you’d kick someone off pretty fast. We can do the same thing at data.world when we see anything going into a really bad place. And so, it’s this weird time in technology where there’s a lot of that stuff that’s been going on, which is not being addressed fast enough and it’s not being addressed fast enough because the profit motives are such where it’s like, well, but it’s good for advertising dollars. It’s good for usage metrics if people become very just kind of addicted to these platforms.

Brett Hurt:                    And so, I feel I’ve become a very successful technologist because of my weird skill set early on and passion early on that I can be a part of the change towards good intentionality with technology and that I have a voice for that. And so, you can choose to emphasize certain things as a CEO, as a leader of a company. One thing that you know about our company that you mentioned in the intro is that we’re a B corporation, and that means that we have a public benefit mission statement that anybody can read. We are required to report out on how we’re living that mission. Again, good intentionality. And that we’re required to report it out to shareholders but we decided instead, let’s just report out to everybody. And so everybody can tune in to it. One of the letters I just wrote recently, it was the three year anniversary of us being live, and here’s how we’re fulfilling this mission statement.

Jeremi Suri:                   You went bowling. I read about that.

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah. That’s one of the fun aspects of what happened, as a company and just celebrating amazing team.

Jeremi Suri:                   You have to celebrate.

Brett Hurt:                    Absolutely. You absolutely-

Jeremi Suri:                   How do you grade yourself, Brett? You’ve obviously put down a marker that you want people to judge you not just for your profitability but for the public benefit. That’s courageous enough. Now that you’ve done that, how do you grade yourself? What are the criteria you have for saying you’ve done enough public benefit or you’ve not done enough?

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t feel like there’s an enough. One of the things that drives me right now, there’s a question of like why should I do anything right now? Like I’ve made enough money, I didn’t need to start data.world. So why do anything? Why not just travel the world, et cetera? And I tried that for a couple of years and it felt pretty empty at this young age, where I’ve got lots of energy, I’m at the top of my game. My own daughter, it’s cool, you have your son Zachary here, my own daughter Rachel, when she was 10, kept on asking me, when am I going to start another company. And one day she looked at me and pointed her finger at me and said, “When are you going to start another company?”

Jeremi Suri:                   There we go.

Brett Hurt:                    And I thought, wow, my son Levi has not gotten to see that struggle at all. So what am I really teaching them? I needed a break. It was good to have a break, and I was more active on my break than probably many people are with full-time jobs.

Jeremi Suri:                   I’m sure you were working harder on break than most people.

Brett Hurt:                    I wasn’t. It was definitely not as hard as leading a company and starting a company. I was backing lots of startups, I still back lots of startups. I did a stint here at UT Austin as an entrepreneur residence, that was fun to help student entrepreneurs. I did a number of things, but I traveled three months out of the year and I had just mostly relaxation time. I stepped back into the arena because I’m like, I can really make a mark in a very positive way but I wanted to, I wanted to do it with even more intentionality. So I think you can evolve to become even more ethical as business leader and realize that you have a bigger megaphone than you’ve ever had before.

Jeremi Suri:                   Sure, sure, sure.

Brett Hurt:                    And that can serve as a model for people including your own children. My children are watching. The very first investors in data.world are Rachel and Levi.

Jeremi Suri:                   That’s great.

Brett Hurt:                    Those were literally the first checks in.

Jeremi Suri:                   That’s great. And they’ll hold you accountable.

Brett Hurt:                    Oh yeah. I remember Levi literally crying when Rachel was like, “You’re going to want to put money in this.” He’s like, “But I can use it for toys.” She’s like, “You’re going to really regret it if you don’t invest.” They’re very proud of how the company has grown and it’s being used in lots of universities to help teach data science and data analytics. Lots of governments, government of Mozambique just signed us on. It’s being used all over the world.

Jeremi Suri:                   Used by the Associated Press I saw.

Brett Hurt:                    It’s used by the Associated Press. That’s pretty amazing story, just a quick digression on that because I’m so proud of this. You’ve actually all experienced listening to this podcast data.world, you’ve just never heard of it maybe, maybe some of you are on the community already. But the Associated Press for issues like the opioid crisis has used data.world to deliver their datasets on that crisis, which are national datasets that are all also localized where all of their customers, people like the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post and New York Times, USA Today, can write stories based on that data, and it can go down to the local level where the Chicago Tribune can say, well, I’m going to write a story about how the opioid crisis has impacted people in Chicago in this part of Chicago as well as in these neighboring cities to Chicago as well as the whole state. As well as neighboring states as well as compared to the nation.

Brett Hurt:                    And it makes it very easy for everyone to be a data journalist without having to be a data scientist, which is very few data scientists in the US or the world. By the way, career tip, that’s one of the best things you can be right now is a data scientist. You could literally almost throw a dart and get an amazing job in that.

Brett Hurt:                    And so, that led to the team that selected data.world at the Associated Press winning something called the Chairman’s Award, which is like the Nobel Prize of news. And it’s only given out once a year, and many years, it’s not given out at all because it has to be something worthy enough. And it was given out because of how it’s changed the game in data journalism and how it’s made all these papers have this capability to write very data-driven articles where if you look at the Pulitzer Prize winning articles recently, most of them are very data rich articles. And so, that’s pretty cool, that’s a pretty neat level of intentionality that went in.

Brett Hurt:                    What do we choose to emphasize in the community of data.world? And that doesn’t mean there’s not some controversial things in there. In 2017, the most popular data set on the platform was actually the Russian propaganda leading up to the presidential election. And that got lots and lots of comments and analysis and the Washington Post, New York Times wrote articles based on that data set. Again, probably most people don’t know that that data came from data.world. There are things that are controversial too in data. What you choose to focus the community on, what you choose to emphasize. And if you’re just trying to emphasize let’s just push the button and on the most inflammatory data, the one that’s getting the most controversy, et cetera, then you’re going to define the data.world community based on outrage instead of good intentionality.

Jeremi Suri:                   You’ve made a decision that even though putting the outrageous data up might get you more clicks and might actually be more profitable, you are willing to be profitable by pursuing things that you feel are more appropriate for the interest of society.

Brett Hurt:                    It’s a community. So people will put some stuff up that they believe in, like the Russian propaganda leading up to the presidential election. When they put it up, it’s something that potentially is going to get a lot of attention. But it doesn’t mean that you need to draw a lot of additional attention to it or you need to create algorithms in the system where those always float up to the top type of thing. That’s one of the things that-

Jeremi Suri:                   That’s very different from how Facebook does things.

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah, it is. And that bothers me. I wrote a blog post on, my blog is luckyseven.io and I mirror those posts on Medium, and that’s where my book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is. So if you follow me @databrett, you’ll see the book there all for free. It’ll come out in print next year. But I always want it to be free because Seth Godin’s first book, the Bootstrapper’s Bible, which I’m a product of was free and I love that book. One of the posts I wrote recently, well not that recently, but back in April of this year was about this being Facebook’s defining year.

Jeremi Suri:                   Yes. Yes.

Brett Hurt:                    And it’s been disappointing to me because, I have a dream that, and I literally had this dream, that Facebook converted into a B corporation and decided just to like really emphasize good intentionality.

Jeremi Suri:                   Why doesn’t Zuckerberg do that? Why don’t they do that?

Brett Hurt:                    He has the power to do that?

Jeremi Suri:                   Why don’t they do, and he has enough money. Why doesn’t he follow your model?

Brett Hurt:                    I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve never talked with him about it. And someone challenged me recently to try to talk with him about it. I would like to have a conversation about it. You’re still a for profit corporation and you still can give shareholders an amazing return. Being a B corporation is no excuse not to have top tier financial performance. I think that you can solve a business to kind of have it all.

Jeremi Suri:                   He could not take certain ads-

Brett Hurt:                    I think the things that are so amazing about Facebook, I’m a proud Facebook user, okay, even though I find some problems in it. We recently had a Bazaarvoice reunion, which was my previous business, which was fantastically successful. And the Bazaarvoice reunion we organized on Facebook and over 200 people came to it and it was just immediate in-person love, laughter, tears. It was just awesome. Bazaarvoice was the number one rated company to work for in Austin when it was small, then medium, then large. And a real innovator in culture. And we’ve taken that into data.world and we just want our fourth annual best place to work award. But we organized that because of Facebook. It was easy to organize because of Facebook. How much is enough.

Brett Hurt:                    And it’s not like Facebook’s going to stop growing if they stop allowing crazy political ads and people from Russia targeting people. There are all these excuses why that would be hard, like, well, but the ads coming in, maybe the people from Russia could run them through another entity that would be a US-based entity where you wouldn’t know where the money’s flowing. I just don’t buy that. I think that you could have a certain barrier to do that validation and find out.

Brett Hurt:                    And so I think if you’re, we’re not an ad supported business, and I think if you are an ad supported business, it takes you down this slippery slope where you can start to really unravel from a business ethics standpoint. And then people have different definitions of what they consider ethical. Some people are just total nothing matters but free speech and therefore everything goes. The reality is, you can’t walk into a movie theater and yell fire. That is illegal. And you can’t be in Germany and have a big swastika on your chest. That’s also illegal.

Brett Hurt:                    So, there are certain barriers. One thing that I am very optimistic on and will always be optimistic on is that humanity always muddles its way through and there’s a lot of gray in everything. There’s not that much black and white. There are certain things like you shouldn’t cheat on your spouse or certain things that are like real bright lines or beat your children or something like that. There’s things that just anybody would look at as atrocious. But in business as well as in many decisions in life, there is a lot of gray. And people define their lines differently. I’m always grappling with that. What are my lines? But I’m very deliberate and conscious about that and I feel like a lot of people in tech are so kind of, they’re such nerds and so kind of on the borderline of Asperger and stuff like that that they don’t intentionally think about that. And that bothers me a lot.

Brett Hurt:                    I don’t know exactly how to solve that other than continue to go to the things I go to. I’m lucky that I get to go to Ted every year. I’m lucky I get to go to things like Dialogue. I’m lucky that I get to go to things like the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit. And all I can do is continue to lean in and continue to set a model in my own company for the people that work there and the partners we partner with and the customers we have and invest in startups and be a mentor to them. We’re investors in 77 startups and 21 VC funds, and I love helping them.

Brett Hurt:                    A lot of companies we’ve invested in have actually converted into B corporations, which is really cool. And they’re experiencing fantastic success. There’s no trade-off where all of a sudden they can’t raise money or anything else. They’re different. They have to explain why they’re different to investors because there is a bit of herd mentality in humanity where, oh, you’re doing something different. Okay, well we don’t know.

Brett Hurt:                    I’ve always seen differences a great advantage because I grew up so different. I grew up so strange in Texas where it’s like this kid is not playing football, this Texas thing. Is just sitting there on the computer all the time. Now this would be normal. But back then, it was very different. And I’ll tell you, these days, if you found a child who is just sitting there constantly hacking on microbiology or something and that’s all they want to do, that is going to be a very successful person. Believe in that person. Just let them do that. Don’t say like, hey, son or daughter, we need to put a lot of balance in your life, you’re just doing too much-

Jeremi Suri:                   Let them pursue their passion. [crosstalk 00:26:59]

Brett Hurt:                    You know, microbiology.

Zachary Suri:                 On the topic of young people, what do you think the effects of growing technology and growing access to technology are on young people? And in a generation that has really grown up not knowing a world without the iPhone.

Brett Hurt:                    It’s addressed in your poem a bit. I read a book a while back called Everything That’s Bad for You is Good for You and it’s by Steven Berlin Johnson. He’s kind of a great kind of tech analyzer, kind of almost like a prophet in a way in that field. I kind of buy in to what’s in that book overall. You have to remember that I am actually a test case of someone who has grown up behind a computer 40 hours a week from age seven to adulthood with very little physical social interaction, that’s where I wanted to be. And I actually found great beauty in it because you’re connecting with people on a brain to brain level with no judgment about what they look like or anything else. I like the anonymity of it.

Jeremi Suri:                   You founded a democratic space.

Brett Hurt:                    I did. Eventually, you still need to go and interact with the physical world. You have biological needs, you decide you want to have children, you decide you want to start dating. You want to get together physically with friends.

Jeremi Suri:                   You can do that online now too, right?

Brett Hurt:                    Yeah. There is this grand debate among parents of my generation now of how much screen time should a kid get. And we have no rules on screen time in our house. That’s because we have chosen to emphasize certain things with our kids that have taken. Like our son for example, Levi, he has watched every Ted Ed video that there is. And now he’s moved on to watch almost every In a Nutshell video that there is. So his level of learning is dramatically accelerated. Now he does also play games but he makes good choices there. He doesn’t play Fortnite, not because I told him not to, but because he thinks it’s too violent. He loves playing Minecraft. He plays this one game where he builds all types of virtual drones.

Brett Hurt:                    And so, when you have a child doing that, stuff that’s like really complex, problem solving type oriented things on a computer, I personally don’t think you should limit their screen time at all. If they’re just sitting there watching videos with lewd comments or they’re making fun of people in the videos or there’s anything like pornographic or something like that, yeah, I mean that’s not good. And you as a parent have responsibility there. But I think this whole argument about limiting your kids to 20 minutes or something of screen time a day is absolutely ridiculous. And if my mom had done that, I would not be where I’m at today, I would not be a successful technology entrepreneur who’s getting to do my part in shaping the world.

Brett Hurt:                    And so, I actually think we’re going to be okay. I do worry about the polarization side though a lot. I worry about the micro-bubbles of if you believe something that’s completely crazy, like, as I mentioned, I’m Jewish. If you’re a Neo-Nazi and you’re just online hanging out with other Neo-Nazis and nobody’s paying attention to that, and we’ve seen people get recruited into ISIS even here in America because they’re just hanging out on the ISIS community. Here in Texas, exactly. Then that’s a real problem and a real failure of parenting. And I think that parents just look at, well, they’re on the computer, I have no idea what they’re doing. That’s also not great. You should interact in the medium that your child’s in and kind of know what’s going on and be an active parent.

Jeremi Suri:                   What was wonderful among many things in the story you told about your mom was how your mom was curating and working with you. Your mom didn’t simply buy you a computer. She learned to program with you.

Brett Hurt:                    That was amazing.

Jeremi Suri:                   It was a social experience as well as a computer experience. It was a family experience. And it was regulated in a certain way. And that’s the topic I wanted to turn to really for our closing in a sense. It does seem to me that what you were saying is that there have to be different levels of regulation in the technology world. Many are self-regulation, you’re self-regulating the many things you could do at data.world. What role do you think exists for government, maybe even nongovernmental organizations in regulating this space?

Brett Hurt:                    It’s so tricky because I’ve lobbied with the government before. I’m a member of AIPAC. I lobby every year for APAC, which-

Jeremi Suri:                   That’s the American Israel Political Action.

Brett Hurt:                    It’s not political action, it’s policy alliance. It’s actually not a PAC.

Jeremi Suri:                   Fair enough.

Brett Hurt:                    It is a medium where you’re educating, we have a tremendous amount of turnover in Congress. Every two years over 50 congressmen or women are turning over and they come in and almost none of them have any knowledge at all of Israel. And so AIPAC educates them because if Israel didn’t have the support of America, Jews would have been wiped out in the Holocaust for one. And if it didn’t have the support of America today, then there would be some big problems.

Brett Hurt:                    One thing that that happened just a few years ago is America stepped up to support the Iron Dome in Israel, which is an anti-missile defense system and all those rockets that Hamas fires over, which is a really terrible situation, where there’s a terrorist regime that literally has stated their sole goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. That’s a big problem if you don’t have technology to counter that. It’d be like living in New York and having a neighbor, we’re separated by oceans but having a neighbor constantly shooting rockets into Manhattan or something.

Jeremi Suri:                   So it’s a great example of how there has to be a role for a government entity.

Brett Hurt:                    So in doing lobbying for tech, I’ve lobbied on many things before like educating government for example on what are the value of cookies. Cookies are a technology that’s used to remember who you are on a site. And there’s all types of things that would break on the internet if cookies went away. You would go to Amazon, it wouldn’t remember your username and password, you’d have to log in every single time. It would not be able to personalize products to you. Now you could say, well, I don’t want to be personalized to, but you’ve been personalized to your whole life. When you walk into a store physically and you’re walking around, someone can come up to you and ask you if you need help. That is a personal interaction and everything’s masked by a browser.

Brett Hurt:                    These things require a lot of education and congressmen and women have so little time to actually get educated on it that I worry that some kind of sweeping regulation on something like, I mean, let’s just say for argument’s sake, that Congress decided to set up a regulatory body that looks at everything on Facebook and determines whether or not it should post. This is an untenable situation because it would require trillions of dollars of budget just to have people look at every single thing. And then you would have a very weird state which would be a slippery slope of, well, what goes and what stays.

Brett Hurt:                    And so that’s the extreme case, right? But there’s something else. Could you say, well, we’re going to regulate on making sure that every tech company knows when an ad is being placed whether or not it’s coming from a foreign actor. I actually don’t think that would be that hard to verify. I think that there could be certain things that you have to do and fill out and procedures that would be followed where it would set a little bit of friction up in the system. Now, the free market capitalist and I’m very much a capitalist would shout way, hold on, that friction in the system is going to break the system. Now you’re going to have revenue growth slow down etc. I just don’t buy that. I don’t buy that. I actually think that the amount of ads that Russians placed, and I do think that it had an effect in the election personally, but the amount of ads that the Russians placed, it’s a drop in the bucket for Facebook.

Brett Hurt:                    The big money is coming from the brands, the Walmart’s of the world, Amazon’s advertising all the time on Facebook. It’s coming from these big brands that have big, big budgets and are making billions of dollars that are spending. It’s not coming, the big money’s not coming from, like these political ads that Jack Dorsey of Twitter said we’re not going to accept any more political ads.

Jeremi Suri:                   They’re not that large. There’s not that much money.

Brett Hurt:                    Actually it was bigger for Twitter. It was more material percent of their revenue than it is for Facebook. Facebook, it’s like a rounding error.

Jeremi Suri:                   And so, your belief, if I get this right and it’s a very sensible one, that we should have not big scale regulation, but certain targeted efforts to enforce certain moral parameters in this space.

Brett Hurt:                    I would love to see senior leaders put in place, one of the things that happened in the previous administration, and just for the political record, I’m an independent, I’ve voted for as many Republicans as I have Democrats, I did not vote for Trump, would not vote for Trump. In the Obama administration, one of the roles that they had, which was a brilliant role and I’m proud to say this gentleman serves on our advisory board at data.world is Obama appointed DJ Patel as the nation’s first chief data scientist. He’s an incredible guy. We need more people like that in government, that then have the ability to really create sound policy that kind of balances everything out without breaking the capitalist system.

Zachary Suri:                 These kinds of issues are things that young people really care about, particularly because technology is something that we interact with every day and it’s become a very large part of our lives. Not only do we see the benefits of technology, but as much as we talk about how much kids my age are addicted to their phones and things, we also see the downsides of technology and how much work there is to be done.

Jeremi Suri:                   So you think young people, young data scientists, young Brett Hurts would be motivated today to go work for a White House or a state agency that’s actually trying to help regulate data science and data in a way that would help our society. You think so?

Zachary Suri:                 Yeah.

Jeremi Suri:                   I really do.

Brett Hurt:                    I’ll tell you one thing that happened in the Obama Administration, which was super, super inspirational, is they had these kind of fellows that came in that were just incredibly digitally astute. And they came from industry. They came from like plum positions at LinkedIn-

Jeremi Suri:                   How many? A large number?

Brett Hurt:                    A large number. And it was one of the last things that Obama signed right before inauguration of Trump. It was one of the last things that he signed into permanent law, these White House fellows. And we need more of that. You need to first have inspiration at a presidential level for people to go want to work in an administration. But then you need to say, what can we do to get more brilliant people in tech to go in and actually work on things that are policies because we have to, I do think that we have to create some policies. I just think it has to be done with an incredible amount of experience. I worry with the turnover in Congress that waiting until the theoretical last minute and doing a knee jerk legislation is not the right answer. That’s not the right answer.

Jeremi Suri:                   It strikes me and this analogy is overused, but in a sense we need a new deal approach, which is not about one overarching regulation or policy, but a set of incremental pilot projects in a sense, and trying different avenues of making small nudge changes in certain areas that actually improve transparency in advertising and improve privacy.

Brett Hurt:                    Exactly, exactly. I personally, being such a Facebook lover myself as a consumer of it, I personally would absolutely love more functionality on Facebook that tells me where the article and the ad is coming from, all the way traced back. Even if it’s some shady, this came through some weird PAC I’ve never even heard of, I want to know that.

Jeremi Suri:                   Absolutely.

Brett Hurt:                    And by the way, I just refuse to think that that is that hard to do and that even if they’d say, well, wait, hold on, there’s so many PACS that could be created they’d obfuscate. Come on, I’m a data person. You could create a data table of all the PACS and all the places that they come from anytime they come around. You could also set up some procedures where people have to go through some level of hurdle of disclosure and sign something, terms of service, and even kind of swear on their identity. That kind of stuff could easily be stored in data.world. It could easily be stored in terms of accessing anytime you see that information. And that would only help the system.

Brett Hurt:                    I actually think that Facebook would do dramatically better from a revenue and profit perspective if they totally leaned in, and that was the subject of my blog post of it being a defining year, and I actually invoke my game in that and like the game that I created where it’s like, this is a game. I could focus the game on just negative aspects of things that were happening in the game.

Jeremi Suri:                   But we can make it positive instead.

Brett Hurt:                    But you can instead choose to emphasize as the administrator of the game. And Zuckerberg is the administrator of a game. And the game is that we are all connected socially now for the first time in human history through the world’s greatest digital revolution and network revolution with supercomputers in our pockets as you pointed out in your poem that have more power than sending a man to the moon.

Jeremi Suri:                   It’s amazing.

Brett Hurt:                    It’s amazing. And so we’re living in this time of incredible potential abundance. It could be the most glorious time in humanity, and it should be. And I think it will be, but it’s going to take rising up that go out there and say, we’re going to do things with better intentionality. And one thing I can tell you for a fact is the B corporation movement is very much on the rise. The conscious capitalism movement is very much on the rise.

Brett Hurt:                    You have at the beginning of this year, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the biggest financial institution in the world, biggest investor in the world, something like six trillion or something under management saying that corporations, they’re really going to care about what their intentionality is towards all stakeholders. The business round table recently comes out with the statement and a lot of people look at that and say, well, I don’t really believe it or they’re just saying that so they don’t want to be so accountable to quarterly earnings or whatnot. But they come out with this statement saying, now needs to be about all stakeholders.

Brett Hurt:                    And so, why is that happening? Why is that happening? It’s happening because consumers are caring more about that. Well, who are consumers? It’s all of us. And so, this next generation I’m very bullish on is a generation which realizes the magnitude of the world’s problems and they’re going to step up and they’re going to help us do something about it. So I’m very bullish on that and I plan to be, live as long as I can to help that generation.

Jeremi Suri:                   To lead that on. Brett, that is such a perfect way to close this episode. It articulates some of the key themes in our podcast week after week, the ways in which knowledge of history and understanding of complex issues can provide us avenues for improvement and even utopian changes in our world. Democracy is an ever evolving entity, and our democracy evolves best when smart people like you are combining that intelligence with an optimism about change. And it’s so important for us. Zachary, are you inspired? What do you think?

Zachary Suri:                 Yeah.

Jeremi Suri:                   Are we able to rewrite the rules? Your poem asked, what are the rules? Do you think we can have better rules?

Zachary Suri:                 Yeah, I think it’s something that we’re definitely going to work on in the future.

Jeremi Suri:                   Great. Well, thank you for joining us for this wonderful discussion. Brett, thank you for all of your insights and all of the work you do.

Brett Hurt:                    Thank you for having this amazing podcast and doing this with great intentionality.

Jeremi Suri:                   We’re very privileged to have the opportunity to do this and share these words with audience. Zachary, thank you for your poem.

Brett Hurt:                    That was fantastic.

Jeremi Suri:                   And thank you to all our listeners for joining us this week of This is Democracy.

Announcer:                   This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer:                   The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

Announcer:                   Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.