The Man Tasked with Saving AI

AI is stealing crypto’s playbook to win in Washington, DC – and hiring the same man to do it

In November 2022, Big Crypto faceplanted in front of the world.

That was the month that Sam Bankman-Fried’s $32B exchange, FTX, went bankrupt. Evidently, running a crypto company out of a Bahamas penthouse with a polyamorous, Adderall-fueled cluster of thirtysomethings isn’t a recipe for success.

After its November 11th bankruptcy, FTX became the Lehman Brothers of the crypto world, and scrutiny of the nascent industry grew. Congressman Brad Sherman, chairman of a key investor-protection subcommittee, said it was “crucial” that Congress “develop a clear understanding” of what had gone wrong. With FTX’s implosion and the crypto community’s anti-government philosophy, crypto seemed a prime target for a slow, regulatory death.

To save itself, it needed a game plan. Enter Chris Lehane.

Lehane was no stranger to a PR crisis. He spent his 20s working in the press shop for Clinton, playing a major role in navigating the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky crises. Lehane came up with the term a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” which he claimed the Right was using to undermine the Clintons. He clearly earned his stripes in the press shop because in the 2000 election, Vice President Al Gore tapped him to be his press secretary.

After Gore lost, Lehane cashed in with consulting gigs in the private sector and earned the label “Master of the Political Dark Arts” from The New York Times. The New Yorker described some of his post-Gore exploits thus:

When trial lawyers wanted to increase the state’s caps on medical-malpractice jury awards, they brought in Lehane, who helped send voters flyers that looked like cadaver toe tags, and produced ads implying that doctors might be performing surgery while drunk. A few years later, when a prominent environmentalist hired Lehane to campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, he sent activists into press conferences carrying vials of sludge from an oil spill; the sludge was so noxious that reporters fled the room. Then he hired one of the Navy SEALs who had helped kill Osama bin Laden to talk to journalists and explain that if the pipeline were approved a terrorist attack could flood Nebraska with one of the largest oil spills in American history. Lehane explained to a reporter his theory of civil discourse: “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth. So let’s punch them in the mouth.”

But the story that explains what Lehane would do for crypto starts in a conference room in San Francisco in 2015. That fall, San Francisco was voting on Proposition F, a ballot measure to limit short-term rentals, which of course threatened Airbnb’s existence. With its passage looking likely, Airbnb’s executives called Lehane from the bullpen – literally. According to The New Yorker, he showed up minutes later in the baseball jersey and sweatpants he’d been wearing at his son’s Little League game.

Lehane decided to work Airbnb’s customer base like a get-out-the-vote operation. He hired former Obama campaign staffers to host town halls and operate phone banks to get all 130,000 people who had used Airbnb to lobby against Prop F. At one point, the company sent an email to everyone who had ever stayed in a California Airbnb, urging them to contact the state legislature.

But that wasn’t it. Airbnb sent canvassers to knock on 285,000 doors – roughly a third of the city – and put $8 million into a municipal ballot measure, about ten times what the other side spent combined. At Lehane’s urging, Airbnb also volunteered to start collecting hotel taxes and offered to share data with the city as a gesture of goodwill.

Prop F lost by twenty points, and Lehane earned his stripes in Silicon Valley.

Lehane then got involved with crypto.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading. We know this was a long one, but we hope you found it interesting. As always, send in your thoughts on today’s reporting here or leave a comment below.

Some interesting responses to yesterday’s article on the billionaires building doomsday bunkers:

Kimberly wrote:

It is a very appropriate topic for todays news. Should Elon be putting so much money in colonizing Mars? Are most of us becoming poor so a few billionaires can survive in bunkers? Are there enough resources on the planet that we can all continue to live well? Are we even living well now?

Dvdmon said:

It seems to go part and parcel with the idea about trying to live forever among the Silicon Valley elite. They are incredibly scared of dying, whether that’s from old age or an apocalypse, and will go to almost any means to avoid it. Then again, building these shelters makes them potentially even more dangerous because then it becomes an unconscious (or even conscious) excuse for them to behave in a way that is dangerous to most humans on the planet - since they have what they believe to be a way to avoid the worst consequences.

And Melissa wrote:

Quite frankly, I’m not sure I would want to survive a world-wrecking disaster. I believe in the after-life/heaven and I just don’t think this earthly life is the what we are all about! Death is not always the worst thing that could happen.

And if you’ve missed any of our latest reports, you can find them here:

• Inside Big Bunker

• The Conference that Created AI

• Fast Food Nation, 25 Years Later

• How Hollywood Is Embracing AI

• “Un-Aliving” and the Tyranny of Algospeak

See you tomorrow.
—Max and Max