- Hey everyone.

From KQED in San Francisco, this is Political Breakdown.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

Today on The Breakdown, San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen is here, a city native who made his fortune in the crypto industry.

He's become an increasingly engaged and potent political force in democratic politics, funding surveillance technology in San Francisco and pouring tens of millions of dollars into candidate races and the fight against the state's proposed billionaire tax.

He's also taken on his tech peers at times and remains a staunch Democrat as much as the industry rallies around President Donald Trump.

I am thrilled to welcome him to the show.

Chris Larsen, welcome to Political Breakdown.

- It's nice to see you again.

- Good to see you too.

I have to note, we're in this moment where a lot of tech folks and billionaires are getting increasingly politically active.

You're the only one who's come on my show, so I really appreciate you being here.

Okay.

And I got to ask, is it weird being introduced as a billionaire?

- Well, yeah, because it doesn't really mean anything really.

I don't think of it that way.

I get it.

It's a representation of our income inequality, which obviously we have to solve.

And I know it's a totally negative word, so when you read it, it's - Like - I don't mean it pejoratively, but yeah, it's like, who are you?

- I totally get it.

Kind of is what it is.

- Well, I mentioned you grew up here in San Francisco.

I wonder growing up, were your parents politically engaged or active?

Was politics a thing that you ever though you'd be involved in?

- Well, my dad was like, he was a union guy and I just remember he hated Nixon so much.

When I was growing up, that's all I ever heard.

He was just so outraged.

And he used to pin things up kind of on the refrigerator door, like the bombing of Cambodia.

And as you know, I ended up marrying a Cambodian, so I was kind of always remember that.

He was just outraged by some of the behavior that you saw, but you didn't really have much time to engage in actual politics.

- Activism.

Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

So you went to SF State and you worked for a few years for Chevron, I think doing financial audits and things like that.

- Internal auditor.

Yeah, that's right.

- And then you went to business school at Stanford.

I wonder what led you then, you essentially went into the financial lending space and created some really innovative products around doing online stuff.

What led you to that?

- Well, one thing my dad always complained about as well was he was always getting ripped off by lenders for his car and the house and he always had to get home equity lines.

They didn't have a lot of money.

And yeah, he didn't really understand.

He just knew he was being ripped off.

So that stuck with me for sure.

And when the web came along, the early web was all about transparency, democratization.

Now it's a lot more complicated story as we all know.

A lot of things went right, a lot of things went really wrong.

- But that was the sort of philosophy - At the beginning.

It was a philosophy.

Yeah.

And it was kind of borrowed from the idea behind Schwab, right?

Democratizing stock trading, getting rid of the middleman who was mostly out to rip you off.

And that was kind of our sense of what brokers did.

They ripped you off and in confusion that there's profit was always something that stuck with me.

- Right.

So your initial business was sort of cutting out that middleman and then it morphed into something more related to crypto.

Explain for normal people, how did you make your fortune?

What is the business?

- Well, there was three companies, eLoan, which was, again, trying to be a Schwab of lending and show people their credit scores.

So they kind of were an equal footing with the people that were selling to them.

And then Prosper was a step further where it was sort of both sides, the lending and the investing side were coming from people.

Now that ran into all kinds of regulatory barriers at the end of the day.

But that was the idea, really true democratization on both sides of the capital markets.

And we had fun with it and then we hit the credit crisis and everything was difficult.

But we were always thinking about this idea of an online currency that wasn't tied to a government.

That just always seemed fascinating to me and to a group of folks that were kind of thinking about these things.

And then finally there was a technology breakthrough with Bitcoin that allowed that.

We though we could build a better Bitcoin that didn't use so much electricity, that's the way Bitcoin works.

And that's kind of what led us down that pathway.

But I don't see it as replacing government currencies and I never got into that extreme view.

- Like full on, yeah.

- Which a lot of tech people went way too far on this, but that it was a very useful sort of new technology that made sending payments around the world much more efficient because this is actually a real bottleneck in the way the world works, particularly with poor folks.

So there was kind of a theme that I saw with eLoan and Prosper.

But yeah, I just think it's an advancement of how our financial system works and that was a good thing.

- Well, one thing I've noticed reading up on you is that you are a huge champion of San Francisco.

Absolutely.

We first met in 2024 at the Democratic Convention.

You threw a party for the city and you did not leave when the going has gotten tough.

And we are, as I've heard you say before, a boom and bust town.

I think we have been in our entire existence.

I guess, what do you think makes San Francisco special?

What has kept you here?

- Well, it's incredibly beautiful.

My parents met here, so I just feel it.

Anything I do for the city, my parents are no longer with us, but I feel like I feel them, their presence, and that's right here in the heart.

But it's an unusual place.

There's nothing like it.

You can't replicate it.

Everybody always talks about making a Silicon Valley and it's really a Silicon City.

I mean, the heart is in San Francisco, always was.

This is where it started.

And it's because we have this just very unusual combination of things, part libertarian, part sort of far left, part hippie, part capitalist, part dream anything you want to dream and there will be people and resources to back you on it.

And there's just nothing like that.

I don't care what anybody says, you cannot replicate this place.

So we've got to nurture this beautiful thing that the world needs.

Yeah.

- So Chris, one of the places that you have put some of your money is into surveillance technology in San Francisco, things like drones, license plate readers, cameras, a new high-tech surveillance hub for the police department.

Why do you see this as important and justified?

I mean, we've sort of laid out.

I mean, you are on the left side of the political spectrum.

There's a lot of civil liberties concerns that we've heard raised about these technologies.

- Absolutely.

And they're legitimate.

And as you know, we worked on financial privacy and it was going to be a ballot initiative.

We ended up using the pressure of that ballot initiative after raising 600,000 signatures to help negotiate a really strong financial privacy law in California.

So totally get it.

It's something we have to be watching all the time.

Yet at the same time, public safety is absolutely essential for a city to work.

And the city was just being eaten alive with mostly property crimes, the smash and grab epidemic, which I know it sounds like it's not violent, whatever, although it was increasingly getting violent.

- Well, it was really, I mean, affecting the city's bottom line essentially, right?

- Absolutely.

It was just killing small businesses.

It was driving away tech companies, financial companies.

It could so easily just go to cities that were next door, which weren't having the problem because I think these criminal kind of crews were targeting us because we have a lot of wealth here.

We have a lot of tourists that come here.

And we lived kind of in ground zero for this.

Our house is right next to the Lombard Steps or Lombard Street.

So you know all these tourists, they would literally come from the airport, they'd rent a car, all their luggage is in the car, bunch of cash in their passports, and we'd see them park and they'd be hit within 30 seconds.

And it was heartbreaking because they love the city, it's beautiful, but what do they go home with?

Oh, just don't go there.

That - Memory, yeah.

- It's just out of control.

- We have seen abuses documented across the country, including here in SF, by police officers specifically.

And then there's the private sector aspect of this, right?

And I do think, I mean, I reread "1984" this year, there's a lot of distrust with our federal government, with these tech companies.

What do you see as the tipping point between safety and surveillance?

Do you think we need regulations or laws to govern how this data is used and stored?

What are you pushing for as somebody who's helping fund it?

Well, - It's a fast moving kind of balance between public safety and privacy.

Always will be.

It's a trade-off.

I guess as citizens, we have to sort of accept that there's no perfect kind of, oh, here's where we get everything we want on both sides.

And it's shifting all the time.

And I think what's going on right now obviously is with this incredible mistrust about how our government is being led and by this incredible, horrible thing going on with ICE and with this complete lack of trust, rightfully so, of the AI industry and the folks that are leading it, that that is really accelerating just a mistrust generally in technology.

It's just a reality.

It's a shame because at the same time, these tools, if they're targeted and very, very focused like they are in San Francisco, they're incredibly effective.

We basically have solved the smash and grab problem.

The crime rates of crimes down 70% and still declining.

And it's very clear that those crews have given up on San Francisco.

They said the risk return on smash and grabbing is not worth it anymore.

- Right.

But do you think we have gone as far as we need to be around privacy and protections?

- No, the ball has shifted.

And I think you are seeing Mayor Lurie gets this.

He has changed the rules on, for example, Flock cameras and obviously there's a lot of controversy there.

I've had protests in front of my house because we help fund the Real-Time Investigation Center, which uses Flock, even though the Flock funding came from the state.

Whatever.

I get it.

The right to be protesting because of what's going on kind of nationally.

And so yes, we do have to move the ball.

I've talked about this before, the drones are incredibly effective, but you have the technology, you could black out what a drone sees when it flies over your backyard, because that is private space.

If you're on the streets, that's one thing, but your backyards, your decks - You - Have an expectation of privacy.

Yeah.

- And so the technology also allows you to pretty easily black that out until there was an incident, for example.

So we do have to go further and it's definitely a moving target.

And I think this will get worse because the mistrust on AI is so great.

And obviously we have to reel that in too.

I want - To talk about that in a minute, but you've said publicly that at least one of your sons, you have teenage sons opposed this technology.

And I just wonder what conversations you've had with him or other young people, and if it's moved you or changed your mind in any way.

- Well, you have to listen to the young folks.

Like my son, he's 19.

It's their world.

I'm going to be 66 this year.

It's not my world anymore, okay?

So you do have to listen to them.

At the same time, I don't want to be too hard on him.

Has his car been broken into ever?

No.

He grew up in a time when it's pretty safe.

He lives in New York City now, which is an incredibly safe city, which by the way, uses way more surveillance technology than San Francisco.

So I have to take a little bit of a grain of salt.

It was so interesting when I was working with London Breed on this, right?

Now, London's so fascinating and she did so many great things for her city, is that she grew up in housing projects, poor.

She feared the police, but she also needed the police.

- She knew these things firsthand in a way a lot of politicians do not.

- Yes.

And a lot of people that are privileged enough not to be victims of crime don't really understand.

So we have to really consider that in this balance.

That - Balance.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about AI.

You have called for what you sort of talked about as a difficult middle path between the AI arms race and the kind of shut it down argument we've heard from some folks.

What is that path?

Because as we were just talking about, there's so much distrust and it's so wild that really just a handful of men mostly are in control of so many of the decisions around this at this moment.

- Okay.

So I did talk about the middle path, which is going to be very hard because of job loss.

We have to slow that down.

We have to work with the unions to come together.

We have to protect our kids and children.

I'm going to throw that out now though, because after what's just happened over the last couple of weeks, not just a hugging face, but everybody should go read what Bill Gates just wrote about what's going on.

It is shocking and should be just every alarm bell going off now.

This is somebody who knows this better than anybody.

He's been on the cusp of this forever.

And he is now turning into an AI safety warrior.

And God bless him for doing that.

You're - In line with that.

- He has clearly seen something that has scared the heck out of him.

Yeah.

So where I believe where we are now is shut down all the data centers until we get goddamn regulations.

This is insane what's going on.

And by the way, I think we are in the riskiest - When - You say shut down the data centers, do you mean the ability to build new models?

- Stop all new building until we get regulations.

I' sorry.

I can't say that.

Okay.

You need to get regulations.

I think this is an incredibly dangerous moment.

Yeah.

And he's clearly saying what's going to happen here.

I think the risk of an AI bioattack is extraordinarily high and that we are not doing something about that.

Do you know we have open source models that any terrorist can use right now.

If I send a payment to Iran as a financial services company, I'll go to jail for 10 years.

- Right.

- Okay?

But any terrorist organization right now has access to the most powerful intelligence.

It's not just technology, it's not software.

It's an alien intelligence that can help you design a plague that will be so horrible you don't even want to talk about it.

Everybody should read "Biological War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobson and get an idea of what that might look like.

It will make nuclear war look like a cakewalk.

- And clearly we don't have the infrastructure right now to be dealing with even what's already happened.

I was talking to our attorney general, if Hugging Face, if a person had done that, it would be a felony.

- It is absolutely a crime.

These companies are responsible.

They don't understand what's going on.

And now admitting that, it's not like we have to do subpoenas like we did with Facebook for three years before you got one year.

- We know what's happening.

- Yeah.

They're telling you what is going on, that 10% chance of we're all wiped out.

Are you kidding me?

What - Do you say?

I feel like the sort of constant rejoinder is like, well, China, right?

"Well, China's going to do it.

China, China, China."

What's your response to that?

- Ignore that stuff.

Okay.

It's not about China or the US winning.

It's about humans winning over this alien technology.

I mean, I would've called myself crazy for saying stuff like that, but I used to tell people, don't say the crazy stuff.

It's about jobs and kids.

Okay, please, that's how you're going to win the political argument.

No more.

- Right.

- It's that bad.

And they all know it.

And you see these people that are whistleblowing on their companies, right?

And they describe these companies as schizophrenic, and they are.

I mean, look, Anthropic, I think it's a voice that you need to hear when they talk about how dangerous it is, but they're talking about how dangerous it is, and then 20 minutes later releasing the most powerful model you've ever seen.

And the amount of, I mean, the speed of new models now, it's out of control.

And again, this is an incredibly dangerous moment that we're at.

So we need to demand regulation.

So if it takes shutting down the data centers, shut them down, and it probably needs lots of court cases, and we're exploring that as we speak.

This is a moment to rally.

And get offline, get out of your tweets, and go protest.

Okay?

That does work.

Shut down these, protest in front of these companies, demand change.

We need people to rally right now.

- Yeah.

Well, and there's so much anxiety on the... But on the other hand, if I turn on Fox News after the Bill Gates essay, and he came out, and they're basically framing this as like, "Oh, he's an alarmist.

He said climate change was going to kill us too."

There's this whole political narrative, and it's happening as a lot of your peers in the tech industry are cozying up to President Trump.

I wonder what that's like for you to watch as somebody who clearly has a very different sort of political alignment, but knows these guys.

I mean, is at parties with them and runs in the same circles.

- I talk to a lot of folks I've known in tech for a long time.

They admit for the open source bioterror risk, it's like, "Oh yeah.

Yeah, that's a risk.

Yeah."

And there's this weird kind of disconnect where, okay, you know that's a problem, but you're kind of telling everything's going to work out just fine.

They're treating it like it's Uber or Airbnb or crypto.

It's - Not.

Well, it reminds me of the oil companies too with climate change.

You have grandkids too.

I mean, it's worse.

It's - Way worse.

- It's the lack of foresight, I guess is what I mean.

Doesn't it matter to you what happens next as well?

- Well, the thing that's so strange about that is when you look at the MAGA movement, basically aligned with, I think, most of what an average concerned person in the left would think about.

They're worried about their kids and families being influenced by these out of control AI characters.

We obviously need... We have to do what China did there, by the way.

They don't allow that.

Right.

And they're worried about job losses.

And the job loss is just something we got to slow down, right?

Because it's true.

In 10 years, this could be the greatest development in the history of humans if we - Play our cards right.

Well, there's ways to handle that, right?

Like attrition and other things, slower sort of movements.

- Got to be working with the unions on it though.

It cannot be the unions on their own and then business on their own.

That's another food fight like the billionaire attacks.

We've got to... Look, anybody who's driving a truck who's over 50, maybe guarantee them a job for life.

Maybe 20% of the self-driving trucks have to have humans in them and kind of go like that.

- In stages.

- It's like a GI bill for AI, right?

The GI bill is people come back from war and we had to slow down the job law, too many unemployed people with the history of the depression.

Anyway.

- There's ways to tackle that stuff.

There's a ton of policy things.

Yeah.

- But the thing with the bio-weapons risk, we just have to understand how serious that is.

And that's the kind of thing with... That would be a normal world and a world that you can't recognize in a week.

Right.

We just have to get real about that.

- Let's talk about the billionaire tax.

This is something, like you said, that has really split the state.

It is not pulling particularly well.

I believe there's been around $200 million put in to fight it and to promote two competing measures.

You've put some money into it.

I want to ask, one of the big arguments I hear is a lot of this wealth is on paper and that this would be really harmful to the economy to force people to pull their equity out of companies.

I wonder though, explain this to normal people because we see a lot of these folks running around with yachts and private planes and huge houses and investing hundreds of millions of dollars in startups.

How can they come up with that money, but not money to pay a tax?

- Well, the money they're coming up with to invest in companies and spending, that's liquid money.

And our tax system that we have today, it's an income tax system.

So what works there so well is that the income tax is tied to the liquidity you're getting from whatever event you had that gave you that wealth.

So it's a no-brainer that you have the liquidity.

It's not just about wealth, it's liquidity to pay that tax.

The wealth tax that's being presented, which by the way, has been tried out by many European countries in the '90s, almost all of them got rid of it because it was so remarkable.

Although - It was at a very different level.

It's different.

Millionaires versus billionaires.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

But there's a lot of other things in this... Anyway, that are very poorly written.

But when you start talking about illiquid wealth, paper wealth, which is basically how our technology industry is loaded with... If you look at all the AI companies here in San Francisco, lots of new billionaires, most of that is on paper.

You could have an AI crash tomorrow.

Imagine in the dot com crash when stocks went, we were one of them, they were down 99% in some cases, right?

So you could have easily had a situation where a wealth tax, the tax was set pre-crash, and then you're paying it post-crash, your tax would be five times the new wealth that you had.

So that's so risky that what that will do is that's going to drive those tech startups out of California, because why would you risk that?

I can just go to Nevada.

I can go to Arizona.

Well, - Because you just said earlier, it's such a great place.

I mean, but I guess what has really struck me as I've dug through sort of competing economic papers on this and looking at it is like, okay, I get what you're saying.

And yet the way that folks in your class have structured not just their wealth but income is to avoid paying the taxes that we do assess on liquid wealth.

So there was a paper that said that Sergei Brim and Larry Page took a dollar a year salary for a few years recently.

They're not paying income tax to measure it to the wealth they're building.

Well, - That's not true.

When they're selling their stock, they're paying tax on that.

If you're in California, they're paying 13.3%.

I pay 13.3% here of what I make.

- So do you think it's a red herring?

Because a lot of people say - It's - Completely.

- Well, a lot of people say like, "Oh, you won't necessarily sell your stock.

You'll just borrow against it at a super low rate to avoid that tax."

- Okay.

So I would never do that because that's super risky.

I'm going to take out a loan and then again, tech stocks are super volatile.

We've been in a boom, could turn into a bust tomorrow.

Yeah.

But the other thing is like, fine, change the tax law so if you borrow in your stock, that's a liquid event, fine.

I'm game for that.

And I think this is the other point.

We have an income inequality problem absolutely in this country, and we don't pay enough taxes at the top.

And so we have a $2 trillion annual budget right now in a supposedly booming economy.

- Right.

- A $2 trillion is unsustainable.

Everybody knows that.

But that has to be solved at the federal level.

And how do we do that?

How about we get California to be working really well?

There's a bunch of problem solvers in there to boost Gavin's likelihood of winning and becoming a Democratic president.

We get back to Senate and the House, and then we change the filibuster and we get 13 people on the Supreme Court and we pass a new tax law that gets rid of capital gains, taxes these borrowing on stocks.

I'm all in on that, and plugs our huge budget deficit and start reining this in.

That's how you do it.

But this is a really bad sort of attempt for California.

- Yeah.

It sounds like you object to the specific policy in this more than the idea of re-sort of triggering our tax system to make it more fair.

Yes.

- This just hurts California.

And by the way, another example, Elon Musk, the first trillionaire, he's trillionaire again.

How much of this billionaire tax is he going to pay?

Zero.

Is that because he's not in California?

No, he has massive businesses in California.

So it's just so easy to... The people that run these things could live anywhere and still have all their businesses here if they chose.

They're just not paying any taxes.

- Yeah.

All right.

Let's move on.

You have become increasingly active in California legislative races.

This is an area where I'm always surprised.

I mean, there's always money and interest, but I think I'm surprised it's taken this long for folks like yourself to get involved.

Talk about how you choose where to put money when it comes to candidate campaigns.

Is there any sort of litmus test or what are you looking at in these candidates?

- We're looking for problem solvers.

So I don't even like to use the word moderate.

That just sounds like you're not doing much.

Problem solvers.

We know what our problems are in California, but Sacramento has been too dominated by the public unions and SCIU, for example.

And look, they're doing their job trying to protect - The members.

It's interesting because you talked repeatedly in this conversation about wanting to make labor part of the conversation.

So you're not like knee-jerk against unions, it sounds like.

- Well, and things like some of what's going on in California where we're just not being very efficient, we're spending too much, everything's a revenue problem.

And I'll give you an example of that.

There's $2 billion now not being utilized for food aid in California, just because we're so inefficient in how we manage it.

That's outrageous, right?

We could fix that if we had more problem solvers in the legislature.

That's what we're really trying to focus on.

So yeah, we're going to fight, I think, some of these forces.

There's nothing against what they're doing.

It's just sort of problem solvers aren't showing up.

I'd say that's generally sort of business folks.

We just don't show up in Sacramento.

We show up for one silly little thing.

We get our victory or we get defeated and then we go back.

And we need to be there all the time and backing people that are going to solve the basic problems in California.

We know what there are, housing, energy, the insurance crisis, education, the really basic.

The average legislature, you know this, but there's 80 of them roughly, the average one authors 70 bills a year.

Why?

That's crazy.

- Believe me, I know.

We're all waiting around September going, oh my gosh, how many more are left?

It's - Because of all the special interests that want this, that or the other thing, and then - They're not - But aren't you special interests - Too?

In our industry?

Yeah, of course, that's right.

Yeah.

But we're not trying to propose any sort of tech specific things or crypto... This is about the general problem solving of the six things that matter to Californians.

- Do you think then that your goal would be... And again, you may not like these terms, but I think the way the outside world looks at this is that you're supporting more moderate business-friendly candidates as opposed to more progressive labor-friendly candidates, so to speak.

Would success look like that is who the Democratic Party is in Sacramento, just more balanced?

- Yeah.

Let me... I don't agree with that characterization because we actually have a lot of support from the trades, so the trade unions and carpenters and even teachers.

So it's not so clean of us versus them.

It's just I think that there's been just too much dominance by kind of a small group of folks and they've been not focusing on the key problems we have to solve.

So it's as simple as that.

- And it's more like the state employee labor unions you're talking about.

The - Government unions have not been particularly helpful.

I think SEIU has been difficult.

But at the same time, we're working with SEIU.

We want to work with SEIU as much as we can on AI policy because we cannot solve the AI jobs issue if it's business against labor.

So sure, you're going to fight some places and we got to work together on the longer term, bigger stuff.

I always think of these fights as a sideshow to the much bigger thing, which is this AI jobs concern that we... It's going to be very difficult to get through this without things going very badly.

- Well, right.

And I think that's always the thing with Sacramento in this era.

It's a fight among friends.

It's not the kind of knockdown drag out.

- Shouldn't be afraid of fighting if we're all fighting from the heart.

And then I always say fight hard and then love your opponents when the fight is over.

That's what we should be doing.

- You put $500,000 into a supervisor's race here in San Francisco, District 10, Theo Ellington is the candidate.

That is, for national politics, like a drop in the bucket, but in a local race, a lot of money.

What prompted you to write that check?

- Well, it's a lot of money.

I get it.

And again, we have to get money out of politics.

We can do that with the new Supreme Court when we get 13 of them and get rid of Citizens United.

We do have to do that.

But this is the system we have today.

That's actually not a lot compared to, let's say, Connie Chan's race against Marjan.

It was about a $2 million race, I think it was.

I was actually surprised that so little money was going into that race.

I would have thought more would have gone into the Bayview district like it goes into other districts, and it wasn't.

- Yeah.

Well, you don't have as much wealth there, right?

So I think from within the district, there's not... - It's ignored, I think.

So I didn't like how that was being ignored as a key district.

And so that was what was behind it.

And I think he was a very reasonable sort of problem solving type of person.

And so I think that would - Be good.

Do you worry... Because I feel like if you had dropped in 100 grand here and there, there's a lot of headlines about it, right?

A lot of attention.

Do you ever think about the diminishing returns of these things or worry that the imprint of tech money or whatever will have... There'll be backlash?

- Yeah.

Politics is complicated obviously in San Francisco.

But yeah, probably would have put 100,000 in if I saw four other people putting in 100,000.

You just - Thought that was the amount that was needed.

- Kind of what I was expecting actually.

I was actually shocked that there was So little attention going to the Bayview.

- Yeah.

Well, in legislative races, your Pat Grow California is supporting a number of Democrats, including some in the Bay Area, Los Angeles.

I think you guys spent around $10 million in the primary.

One of the ones here is AD12 in Marin Sonoma.

Talk about that race.

What's your interest in this race and why spend there?

- Yeah.

So I think Eric will be a problem solver.

- It's Eric Lucan and Jackie Elward for folks who aren't paying attention.

- And I think Jackie has a reputation of just being beholden to the government unions and just sort of going along with whatever they want.

And I think that's more of the same that's gotten California to be a very difficult state to manage.

I mean, talk to Gavin Newsom about how difficult it is to deal with a legislature where you have folks like Jackie who are just taking orders from government unions, they're important, they're important workers, but we got to keep in mind there's 20 million workers, working folks in California.

They represent about a million, something like that.

So you've got to open up who you're thinking about and a problem solver for a bigger group of people.

And I think that's to the heart of races like this.

And Eric's going to be a much better representative for, I think that greater good, focusing on those handful of things that we all know are the key problems in the state.

- You said in the past you feel like a lot of folks in the tech industry in particular have sort of dropped money and then walked away.

I wonder if you see these races, 8012 and others like a barometer for where you might spend money in the future.

Are you looking at these as a test case in a way?

- Well, Grow California is now I think got a very sophisticated sort of infrastructure in place.

It's being run by Shaudi Fulp, who's just an amazing individual.

And I think has got her heart in the right place, super skilled on these very complicated kind of races and what all the issues are in mind.

And very importantly, it's not tech.

This is not about tech.

It's not about crypto.

It's not about San Francisco.

These are just bread and butter kind of issues.

And the candidates we're backing are coming from all kinds of different backgrounds, usually from the local communities have worked their way up.

- Yeah.

Candidates matter, right?

You can't just drop somebody in.

No, you - Can.

And I think this is actually what tech has made a lot of mistakes, I think.

It just thinks in this tech world and tech people, and that's wrong.

The state doesn't want that.

- How tech companies run is not how government is run, for sure.

- Yeah.

And increasingly it's in a bubble and a bubble and a bubble, - Right?

Right.

Well, you said you'd be fine losing some of these races this election, but you'd keep trying, even if it takes a couple cycles.

What does success look like for you this November?

- Well, we had really good success in June.

We were in eight races.

We won or we advanced all eight of them.

So we're hoping to have similar success here in November.

But you're exactly right.

We've got to stay at it, right?

Why are the government unions so successful?

Why is SEOU so successful?

And I mean that with respect to them, it's because they show up over and over.

It's not about how much money they spend, by the way.

- Well, no, they have people power too, right?

They have folks who can knock on doors.

They have... I mean, that is the difference often between these packs and labor spending, right?

Well, - It's because we're lazy.

When I say lazy, I think the other 20 million workers are not being represented because they don't have time.

But this is exactly right.

When you talk about food insecurity, by the way, the $2 billion is going unused, right?

We need to rally folks that are concerned about food safety.

That's two million Californians that aren't getting food aid.

Why?

Because things are inefficient and part of that's being backed.

It's complicated, but we've got to fight through that, right?

So we need those folks concerned about food insecurity to show up in Sacramento in, I don't know, green vests.

Pick a color, - Pick a color.

- Pick a color, right?

And we're not doing that.

So we got to change that.

- So before I let you go, I do want to look ahead.

Seems like you're pretty all in for our governor, Gavin Newsom, if he runs in 2028.

Yes.

- Yep.

- I wonder, like as a Californian, as a San Franciscan, you know our reputation nationally.

What do you see as Newsom's path here to convincing voters in, you know, these swing states, the Rust Belt, you know, the South, that he can represent them?

- You mean that he comes from the fourth largest economy in the world that's had the highest number of like job growth?

I mean, look at the statistics on what actually is going on here.

And by the way, so we're so messed up that this is the center of the most powerful technology ever created.

They could have gone to Miami, people, these AI folks.

- They said - They were going to.

Yeah?

Guess what?

They're not there.

They're all here, right?

Are they in Austin?

I guess some, but no, they're all here.

The amount of venture capital going into this is all here.

There's a reason for that because look, we got our problems, like a lot of those have come from the legislature.

It's made it really hard and the government unions.

But despite all of that, I mean, California's kicking ass and it's going to get so good here.

I tell you, if we play our cards right.

So I think that becomes, those, those are bragging rights.

And yeah, no, he's, he's going to do it.

He can do it.

- He can do it.

All right.

Chris Larsen, thank you so much for this great conversation.

- Great.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate - It.

That's going to be a wrap for today's political breakdown.

We are a production of KQED.

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Our video team includes Jim McKee, Derek Lartaud, Kate Lowpensky, and Vivian Morales.

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