WEBVTT

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Ours is the age of sharing, gigging
and Ubering just about everything.

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Let me give you a couple of examples.

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When you leave here tonight,

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maybe you will get on your Uber app

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and you will get someone
to take you home in their personal car.

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Let us imagine that you decide
to go on a vacation,

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maybe you'll go on to Airbnb
and stay with someone

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in their own home while they're there.

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These are the things we didn't do
that long ago, but it goes further.

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Let's say you go to IKEA,
and you buy your child some furniture,

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and you're facing putting together a crib?

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You don't have to learn how to use
that Allen wrench anymore,

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you can go onto TaskRabbit
and get somebody else to do it for you.

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Le's say you're tired of cooking.

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You can go onto Blue Plate,

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and you can get someone
to use a shared kitchen,

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and they will deliver
that fresh meal to your door

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for your family to eat,
and you don't have to cook anymore.

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Now, the interesting thing
about all these uses,

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and a lot of the other uses
of the sharing economy,

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is that they profoundly change

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the way that we think about
the way our economy works

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and the way we've done business.

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The other interesting thing
is that a lot of them are also illegal.

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Now, I wrote an article

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called "First Principles
for Regulating the Sharing Economy"

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that was recently published
in the Harvard Journal on Legislation,

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and in that, I deal with a lot of
the technical issues of this illegality.

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But I want to focus here today
on four principles

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for why you should embrace
the sharing economy

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and ways that it can affect your life.

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I'm going to call these
the core principles:

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Community, Ownership,
Reputation, and Equity.

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So let's start with community.

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When we think about community,

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we often think about family,
close friends.

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But in the '70s, a sociologist
named Mark Granovetter

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started thinking about
other types of community.

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And what he was looking at in particular
were what he came to call "weak ties."

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These were the people
that you barely know.

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Jane Jacobs, the urbanist,
might have called these, in her lingo,

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"hop skip" people, the kind of people
that help to bridge boundaries between us.

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And what he found in his research,
and subsequent sociologists have found,

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is that it's along these weak ties

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that a lot of information
in communities flows,

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and the kind of the political cohesiveness
of our society tends to rest.

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Well, that's all big thoughts
and everything,

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but I'm going to argue
that the sharing economy can be valuable

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because it provides us these opportunities
to make weak ties in communities.

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Let me give you an example.

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My family, we rented an Airbnb

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in a single-family residential
neighborhood in Bend, Oregon.

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And we go there, and we're at the park
with my two-year-old daughter at the time,

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and we start talking
to another guy who's there,

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who lives there and has a two-year-old.

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And we start talking about how hard it is
to find a place to go with kids,

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a place go out to eat.

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He tells us about this pop-up beer garden
that has come up across town,

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where there's food trucks,

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he says, "It's a great place to go,
you should go there."

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We go, we have a great time,
it was perfect.

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That's the kind of information
that wasn't in the tourist books,

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that we wouldn't have found ourselves.

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But it was that weak tie

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that provided us the information
to have a little bit of a better time.

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That's the kind of community building
the sharing economy can really facilitate.

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But there's another issue of community
that we really need to think about.

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Let's say that instead of just us
being there at the playground,

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there were 15 people that were vacationing
in that residential neighborhood.

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And we were all there
with our two-year-old daughters,

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and he comes with his
two-year-old daughter.

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Well now, suddenly, it's not
the same type of experience

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that he was expecting
when he went to the playground, right?

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So one of the issues
as we think about these types of uses

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that allow us to engage
in the communities that we visit

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is that we have to think about the effects
on the communities that we are visiting.

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So while the sharing economy
can provide us great new opportunities

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through things like weak ties,
to find new ways into the community,

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we also need to think about
the types of effects that we have

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on established communities, and make sure
that we're protecting them as well.

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Okay, so that's community.

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Now, let's talk about ownership.

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Americans, we love to own things, right?

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Let me give you a couple of examples

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about how the sharing economy
can change our emphasis on ownership

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to an emphasis on access
to owning collective goods.

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Okay.

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Let's say you're working in your wood shop
trying to make a piece of furniture,

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and you find out that halfway through
you need some sort of specialty sander.

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Well, one thing you could do
is you can go down to Home Depot

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and buy that thing that costs
$100 or $200, right?

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And you're going to use it,
then it's going to sit there for a year

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or maybe two years, or maybe you'll use it
five times in the entire time you own it.

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Then you'll sell it for $5,
20 years from now.

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The alternative would be,
what's happening now,

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is that a lot of places
have lending tool libraries.

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You go, you need that specialty sander,
you use it for the weekend you need it,

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and then you take it back,
then someone else gets to use it as well.

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Let me give you another example
of a sort of science fiction future.

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Autonomous vehicles.

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When we think about autonomous vehicles,

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which are probably going to be here
sooner than we imagine,

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in another decade or two, right?

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These are vehicles
that will drive themselves.

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Now some people will buy these, right?

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These are the people
that buy Teslas or something, right?

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But a lot of us are not going to buy
an autonomous vehicle.

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Instead what we're going to do
is we're going to access it

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through a shared autonomous vehicle, okay?

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And so what we want to do
is think about creating an access point

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to collective ownership
of that autonomous vehicle.

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This is precisely what General Motors
and Lyft are teaming up to do right now.

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You may have heard about this,

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but GM just purchased a $500 million stake
in the ride-sharing app Lyft.

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And what they are trying to do
is precisely this:

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create an access point
for you and for all of us

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to these new autonomous vehicles.

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Alright.

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So what we've seen here with ownership
is that the collective access -

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if we focus on access
to collectively owned goods,

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we can do two things.

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First, we can better utilize
underutilized goods,

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that's the sander that sits on the shelf,

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instead of sitting on the shelf,
a bunch of people get to use it.

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And the other thing is we can plan
for infrastructure better.

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We can better use
our infrastructure dollars.

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So if we collectively own that car
and it comes only when we need it,

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maybe we don't need a five-lane highway,
maybe we only need a three-lane highway.

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And maybe we don't all need
driveways anyway, right?

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The car will just pull up right in front
of our house when we need it.

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Now, that may all sound like
science fiction future,

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but it will be here before we know it.

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And if we focus on this type of thing,

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we can substantially increase the way
we plan for infrastructure in the future.

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Alright, reputation.

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When we think about reputation,

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we know that it's an important
part of business, right?

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But the reputation
in the sharing economy is all;

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it is everything.

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For both the workers and the consumers,

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it's important that we as individuals
be able to own our reputations,

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and moreover, that we can take it with us.

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So, what does that mean?

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If you decide to use the sharing economy,
like say you decide to hire a driver

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to take you from
point A to point B on Uber.

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You're going to rate that person;
you're going to give them five stars.

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Great job, they got me there on time.

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And they are maybe going to rate you,
maybe give you four stars,

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because you weren't such
a great conversationalist or something.

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Well, maybe in that one rating,
there's some variation.

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But if that driver takes
100 different rides,

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or 1,000 rides over the course of a year,
they start to earn a reputation.

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If they're a great driver, five stars,

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you're going to want to take
that ride with that person.

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Same with you as a passenger, right?

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Reputation matters.

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But here's the interesting thing.

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If that Uber driver decides
that they want to go some startup,

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can they take their reputation with them?

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Let's say it's a company
that does the exact same thing,

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some other startup, a Boise Uber
equivalent; they want to go local, right?

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Well, they can't take
that reputation with them.

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They can't take those
1,000 five-star ratings.

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I think that's a problem;

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I think that you should
be able to own your reputation.

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Moreover, let's talk about
across platforms.

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You want to hire that person to come
and assemble your baby's crib.

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Well, maybe you also want to know
about their ratings as a driver on Uber,

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or hosting people on Airbnb.

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It may not be definitive
with how they are with an Allen wrench,

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and you may decide to hire
that person anyway,

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but wouldn't you want to know
if they had bad ratings

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or people thought they had
bad driving skills or something?

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These are the kinds of things
that we would want to know,

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and that reputation should be portable,

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and somebody should be able
to own it individually.

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Alright.

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Finally, equity.

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One of the most important things
that we've done over the last 50 years

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is to ensure equitable accommodation
in things like hotels and taxis.

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People that are disabled,
minorities in our population,

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have historically struggled

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with these types of public accommodations
and public utilities.

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African Americans
having trouble finding taxis,

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people with disabilities
not being able to access buildings.

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We've done a lot over the last 50 years
with the Americans with Disabilities Act

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and specifically
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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They've done a lot to assure
that the disabled and minorities

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in our society have access
to these public accommodations.

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But there is a lawsuit
in California right now

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where a number of blind individuals
have alleged they've had a hard time

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getting rides with ride sharing
companies like Uber and Lyft,

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because drivers do not want
to have their dogs

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in the cars with them.

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At the same time, a recent study
out of Harvard University

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has found that those
with African-American names on Airbnb

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have had a much harder time
securing a place to stay through the site

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than those with non-African-American
sounding names.

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These point to problems
with the sharing economy

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that we need to address.

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I would argue that while the nature
of the regulations to ensure equity

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may be difficult for us to think through,

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they're important to ensure
that equity remains viable

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in this new economy that we're creating.

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So these are the core principles.

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These are the core principles,
and If we follow through with these,

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and we make the core principles

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part of the way that we think
through the sharing economy,

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we can make sure that we have not only
new opportunities for the sharing economy,

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a new way of doing business,

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but one that is equitable
and can actually revolutionize our lives.

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Thank you.

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(Applause) (Cheers)