Higher Ground Labs' Shomik Dutta: "Nothing clarifies the mind like losing”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Shomik Dutta, founder of Higher Ground Labs, to talk about funding democracy tech (3:30), what happened after 2016 (5:30), losing the technology edge every four years (9:10), transforming the Democrats’ technology stack (11:15), creating a master voter database (15:15), Reid Hoffmann’s role (18:30), how to avoid funding the next Cambridge Analytica (22:00), making political investments that are good business (27:15), why social media is the battleground (29:45), his lack of confidence in Facebook (32:20), greasing the wheels of mail-in voting (35:50), the importance of cyber security (37:00), and the run-up to November 3 (38:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Charlotte Ivers from the Sunday Times Wine Times podcast. This week we're sponsored by
0:05.2	Celebrity Cruises. Each week, myself and Will Lyons share three wines and one dish to discover
0:10.7	the remarkable ways wines can make any meal special, from picnics to pick me ups with the cheese
0:16.0	course. So pour yourself a glass, sit back for a grape-inspired podcast full of laughter, insights and
0:22.2	interesting wine. This podcast is in association with the Sunday Times Wine Club. Listen to Wine
0:27.7	Times, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:32.4	Yo! Technology. What is it all about?
0:36.7	If you are a Republican voter and you truly believe
0:40.7	Democrats are pedophiles and satanic blood drinking worshipers what isn't justified in
0:48.2	stopping somebody like that right now?
1:02.7	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
1:11.2	So, not sure if you know this, but there is an election coming up very soon. How is it only a month away?
1:13.9	But being that that is the reality,
1:16.5	I thought it would make sense to bring on a few folks over these next few weeks
1:19.9	that really sit at the convergence of tech and politics.
1:25.7	Now, you don't need me to tell you that technology and social media in
1:29.0	particular are really at the heart of this election, last election, and it appears really kind of
1:34.7	every election going forward. But a lot has changed since 2016, which is, of course, when the
1:40.7	Democrats and Hillary Clinton were really caught flat-footed and frankly
1:44.7	outsmarted outspent online and that is before we even get to the more nefarious stuff like
1:49.8	Cambridge Analytica and the voter suppression campaigns that were carried out online and
1:54.9	and recently exposed in UK by Channel 4.
	...

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