For investors, as you're looking at these companies, do a little bit of research to see,

are they simply just handing out cash? Or are they actually going out and doing campaigns that

target voters to say, we think you are an Airbnb voter or we think you are an Uber voter,

and we want you on our side? If they're organizing, they're going to be even more effective.

I'm Ricky Mulvey, and that's Charles Duhigg. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and

a best-selling author of supercommunicators and The Power of Habit. He's got an article in the

New Yorker titled Silicon Valley, The New Lob new lobbying monster. My colleague Mary Long caught up

with Doohigg to talk about it. They discuss how Airbnb won an existential election, the message

that a powerful lobbying group sent to politicians about crypto, and what tech giants have kept from

their underdog days.

Charles, you wrote recently a fascinating story in The New Yorker about Silicon Valley's changing relationship with the lobbying industry and with Washington more broadly.

It was fascinating for many reasons, one of which is that reading this in 2024,

even pre-election, it was wild to think,

wait, Silicon Valley didn't always have a lobbying relationship with Washington. So maybe we start

at the beginning, like take us back to a decade plus ago. Why did Silicon Valley consider itself,

I think the word you use is detached from electoral politics? And they did hire lobbyists, right? Particularly like after Microsoft was taken to court

in the late 90s, everyone in Silicon Valley realized, oh, we got to have a couple lobbyists,

but they didn't like them, right? They would call them up and gossip with them, but they just

thought politics was stupid. They thought it was like, it was like, if you were really smart, you'd go into tech.

And if you weren't that smart, you'd go into politics and they'd give you some like senator

role or maybe a cabinet position. So there was just basically this total like dismissal of politics

until about 2010. And up until 2010, you could get away with that, right?

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