Why now, basically?

So I first had the idea around writing a book around 2018 when we were at the height of Russian ads, Cambridge Analytica, all that stuff.

And it was like, maybe I should write some of this stuff down.

I've been a journaler since high school and all that.

But it was like, this is the stuff books are made out of.

Right.

But then it wasn't until I left.

Because you would have been in the room with politicians who wanted to set up campaigns to influence a set of voters on a particular issue or topic.

So talk about the big questions that you wrestled with while you were at Facebook, and maybe how it eventually led to this next part of your career, um, outside of Facebook.

Yeah.

I left Facebook in March of '21, so it's been about six- five and a half, almost six years that I've been out on my own doing Anchor Change.

And, um, you know, we were grappling, I think, you know, I go through this, so I have...

My book comes out on October 6 called Disrupting Politics: Um, a Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, and it goes through a lot of this, basically from the 2000 election to the tech CEOs at the inauguration in 2025.

And in the early days, we had rose-colored glasses on.

It was like, this is great.

Mm-hmm

Am I successfully doing it?

I think I am.

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing, yeah, it's great.

We're putting it up.

And thank you.

Yeah, so I think that, and Bruce, obviously, please jump in.

But like, I think early days in the early days of social media, so we're talking about Facebook was started in 04, YouTube in 05.

What's your sense of how far the proactive steps done by the companies themselves can take us?

I was about to, I was about to topic shift slightly, but please finish.

Let me just finish and then we can totally do that.

So that is, I do get worried about that.

I get worried about this time period where we are still trying to figure all of this out.

And there's a lot of education that needs to happen.

And there's a big gap, not just between where Silicon Valley is and where DC is, but where normal people are like, I was talking to my parents, my nephews who are high school, everyone's in a little bit of a different stage of using AI and how they think about AI.

And we have to remember that because I oftentimes try to remind folks at the tech companies that we need to bring people along a lot more.

What are you seeing? How big is the megaphone of these companies in elections right now? And do you see it growing?