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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. It's a Tuesday episode, so with us is our friend and producer, Hugo Lindgren. We are recording live from P and T Knitwear here in New York City. Hugo, how are you? I'm really good.
- [00:20]
B
Bradley, we have a lot to talk about today because you are going to
- [00:24]
A
Turkey next week, is that right? Yes.
- [00:26]
B
And we. And we're gonna try to do a.
- [00:28]
A
Abby is spending the semester in Madrid, so I'm going to visit her in Madrid for a couple of days. She's already in Madrid. She's only a sophomore. Yeah, she just. The way her schedule major worked. She's double major. Just the way it all kind of worked was that she thought this was better. And so I'm gonna go visit her for a weekend. I just don't think she wanted more than three full days of me. And then I never been to Istanbul, so I'm gonna go check it out for a couple days after that.
- [00:50]
B
That's great. My mom grew up in Istanbul. I don't know if you know that.
- [00:52]
A
I did not know. That's really interesting.
- [00:54]
B
I had no idea. There you go.
- [00:55]
A
We got a lot to cover today. So the plan is Hugo's go to call the plays, and I'm going to execute, hopefully, hopefully better than Drake May did last night.
- [01:02]
B
Oh, God, I couldn't do worse.
- [01:04]
A
Yeah. All right, let's go.
- [01:05]
B
Okay, so the first thing, Bradley, we're going to talk about an essay you wrote called the Choice, which is kind of about the explanations people make to explain why things didn't work out or why they failed at what they wanted to do. And this is kind of. I guess it was a little controversial.
- [01:19]
A
A little bit. So the context here, the way it started was. And if you listen to this podcast regularly, you'll know that when we talk about New York City, I am a very frequent critic of the political competence of the business community here. And I think it has been an incredibly lazy, lackluster effort for decades now that fully explains or at least partially explains why, you know, Zoro Mondame as mayor, and the New York City Partnership is the main business group that is supposed to be representing the interests of the business community, the centrist community in New York. But they have been an utter, absolute failure for decades. And yet somehow it managed to maintain this facade that they are somehow useful and relevant. Their longtime leader, Kathy Wild, is stepping down. She's 80 and retiring. So the New York Post tried to imply she was forced out. And I Don't think that's the case. But I've been very clear that I think her tenure has been disastrous. I think that she has accomplished nothing and at the same time managed to alienate everybody. And New York Magazine did a kind of a postmortem on her. And I gave some quotes that were extremely blunt, saying that the partnership is an absolute disaster and shouldn't exist or needs to radically change their ways, and that either they're going to start engaging in actual politics, which is the one thing that matters to elected officials and the one thing that drives public policy, or that they just should just close up shop completely. And it was a controversial quote. It got, within the world of near politics, a decent amount of attention.
- [02:52]
B
And.
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A
And I got a lot of texts from people out. Go ahead.
- [02:55]
B
No, I was just curious. I mean, were your views just, like, much different than other people thought, or
- [03:00]
A
you just said the thing that. I think I said the quiet part out loud. You know, the board of the Partnership, if you look it up and actually link specifically to the board in the substack, is, you know, Fortune 50 CEOs and Titans of finance and people you're not supposed to criticize or fuck with. And so the fact that I was so openly and blatantly critical of them, I think was what was surprising to people, not the actual sentiment itself.
- [03:26]
B
So I understand that people might be publicly critical of you because they're defending Kathy and want to.
- [03:31]
A
Yeah. Or.
- [03:32]
B
Or they might be privately supported.
- [03:34]
A
Yeah.
- [03:35]
B
But were there people who came to you privately and said, bradley, come on.
- [03:37]
A
No. So here's what's. Here's what's interesting. So no one's been publicly critical of me that now I'm not on social media, so I don't. I don't know, maybe they are. But, you know, none of these CEOs are going to attack me publicly. What they'll do is, you know, they. The next time that TUK Strategies is potentially available to help solve some political problem they have, they will not hire us because of what I said.
- [03:59]
B
You've been through that before.
- [04:00]
A
Yeah, all the time. Right. So, no, I got a decent amount of texts, but they came in two buckets. The majority were like, hey, right on. Glad you said that. Someone finally needed two. The second was people explaining to me why the partnership was so ineffective. The biggest argument I heard was, well, all these CEOs are running multinational companies. They don't really care about New York in the way that they used to or the way that the Partnership, which was founded by David Rockefeller, many, many decades ago, the way they used to back then, also heard that, well, the left today has become so intolerant and impossible that there's nothing the partnership can do. Some people just blame Daniel Cuomo, but ultimately it was either excuses as to why the partnership was a failure or words of support. Not a single person said, oh, you're actually wrong about it. They are successful. But here was the thing that struck me and then produced the substack, which is the people who made excuses. And again, they were well intentioned. They were just trying to help me understand something. I think those excuses were probably accurate insights, but they're still excuses. And the way I see it is we only get one shot at this life. Your tombstone doesn't have enough room to explain all the reasons why the person six feet below failed. So you might have all the reasons in the world for why you can't achieve something. You have people to blame. Your frustration could be very, very valid. And no one person is responsible for the entire fate of humanity. But I truly do believe that ultimately there are two types of people. Those who create excuses to readily accept failure, and those who do not. And even more important than that, I think those who do not ultimately are far better served from a life satisfaction standpoint. Right. We all talk about happiness. It's a major theme on this podcast. The tagline that you wrote for this podcast was, you know, tech politics and the pursuit of happiness. But the challenge with happiness is you want it. It's great, but it's fleeting. Right? Happiness is some external event, happens in some way, and that produces a flood of dopamine and serotonin, and you feel good. And of course we want that, but it's definitionally fleeting. Right. The term that probably makes a lot more sense is eudaimonia. Do you know that term?
- [06:26]
B
I don't. I read it in your. In your piece, but I don't know it.
- [06:28]
A
Yeah, it's, I think a Latin or Greek term I think was Aristotle, so it would be Greek term.
- [06:34]
B
I like how you threw it in there. And I'm like.
- [06:36]
A
And you know, what it means is making specific choices that lead to a sense of purpose and meaning. Again, something we talk about a lot in this podcast. They not only don't necessarily correlate directly with happiness, they often coexist with struggle and failure and frustration. Because what it is, is, are you going about your life in a way that you feel good about? Are you happy with the choices that. Are you content with the choices that you make? And the value of Eudaimonia is it allows you to live a life that ultimately you can feel happy about, or I keep using happy, probably in the wrong way, but good about on a sustained basis. And that's what produces long term contentment. And oftentimes it requires you to pursue things that are worthwhile, not only if they are difficult, but often because they are difficult. Right? So the way that we envision something almost never goes to plan. I can't imagine anyone unless it's something super simple like I'm going to go pick up a Celsius to CVS before I go to the gym. You know, anything complicated has too many variables, too many people with too many competing needs and emotions and priorities to be able to anticipate all of them and see your idea come to fruition without encountering resistance and frustration and failure and roadblocks. And obviously, right, if it were easy, it already would have been done. People have different goals, right? Not everyone wants to impact the world beyond their own day to day existence. But when I think specifically for those of us who have been drawn to government and politics, I think initially it's because we wanted to feel like our lives truly mattered in a broader way, that we were impacting the world on a macro level. But then once we're there in whatever situation, whether it's someone like me in government and politics or wherever you're in, then you face a set of choices, right? So you can choose to avoid failure by just tinkering around the edge of society. So that's what the partnership does, right? They host events, they write white papers. It's all just procedural nonsense in the avoidance of serious political engagement that could actually make a difference in representing the centrist and moderate interests of most New Yorkers. And in that approach, when you encounter hardship, you just come up with a convincing narrative as to why the failure isn't your fault and you just cling desperately to that. Right? That's what demagogues exploit and encourage constantly on both sides of the aisle. Or you can come up with a plan to achieve something, you execute it as best you can, things go wrong invariably, and when they do, you lick your wounds, you recalibrate, you try new things and you keep going. Right? And you know, look, my entire work now, and I'd say pretty much my whole career, has been filled with difficult things to try to accomplish. Like, every job I've pretty much ever taken was by definition kind of a hard job because to me that's what made it interesting. That's what Made it worth my time. And that was, you know, has pretty much throughout been the primary motivation for every thing I've taken on, whether it makes money or not. Sometimes it has made plenty of money and sometimes it was, you know, working with the parts department for 21 and a half thousand dollars a year. I've been saying 22, and my friend Rob Galligan the other day reminded me that I was overstating it. It was actually 21:5. And the single thing I think that I have worked on across the, you know, I started working. Well, I mean, I started working at probably 14 or so, but like, let's say I started working in politics when I was about 18. The single hardest thing that I've done or tried to do is mobile voting. Right? And, you know, I'm sure everyone listens to podcasts, is sick of hearing it. But just in case, for some reason this is the first time you're listening, here's the base case for it, which is politicians make every decision solely based on what will impact their next election. That's the kind of people who run for office in the first place. Gerrymandering means that only the primaries typically matter. Primary turnout is typically about 10 to 15%. Those voters are the most ideological or their different special interests. And as a result, our elected officials seeking to state office at any cost govern for the extremes at the expense of everyone else. That can only change if you radically increase turnout. And to me, the only way to accomplish that is to meet the voters where they are, which is on their phones. And this mirrors what we learned at Uber when we were able to mobilize our customers through the app to beat the taxi industry in every single market in the country. But since we founded the Mobile voting project in 2017, we have faced roadblocks at every single turn. Cybersecurity experts, CyberScript, who live in the ivory tower, will declare no form of electronic voting can ever be safe. And they ignore all of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the current forms of voting, whether, you know, in person or mail. And even worse, they just ignore the fact that our country is a dumpster fire and if we don't change it, it's just not even gonna exist in 20 years. You have these sort of self appointed good government groups like Verified Voting, whose leaders are all exceptionally wealthy, highly privileged people who work in think tanks inside the beltway. And they can't envision a world where anyone doesn't just have endless free time to go vote in person whenever they want. And so the needs of people who work hourly service jobs or people with disabilities or deployed military or people who, you know, don't live in their hometown like a lot of Gen Z and college students or what are people who are afraid to go vote because of ICE or because of voter suppression against African Americans. They just don't care about any of those people. And then, of course, ultimately, the special interests and ideological streams that have power are not interested in losing power. Right. So we face.
- [12:38]
B
You have some pretty major obstacles.
- [12:39]
A
Yeah, Right. And they're not quiet about it. Right. They attack and they complain at every single turn. And they have done so since day one. Right. They did it when we funded elections in seven different states to test the hypothesis we're deployed military and people with disabilities were able to vote on their phones. They did so after we spent five years and $10 million. And just to be clear, this is totally philanthropic. And I have. Of the roughly $25 million we've spent so far, I've put in well over 90% of that. After we built the world's easily most secure voting system, they still just attack it relentlessly. And now that we are pursuing legislation in five different states, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, Colorado, Minnesota, that would allow municipalities to offer mobile voting as one form of voting for local elections only, they're attacking again. And the upshot is I wanna give up all the time.
- [13:29]
B
That was the line that struck me.
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A
This is really hard.
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B
You don't talk about giving up very often.
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A
But I want to. And I hate asking people for money. I don't have enough money to do this the way I'd like to do it over the long haul. And yet I am a terrible philanthropic fundraiser. So that is always a challenge.
- [13:48]
B
Why are you bad?
- [13:50]
A
I think it's a combination of the same reason why I feel very comfortable attacking Fortune 50 CEOs and Cathy Wild is. Is not the personality that then lends itself well to going on bended knee and asking someone else for money. So some of it is that. Some of it is that the underlying topic is so hard.
- [14:11]
B
Right.
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A
That a lot of people are afraid of it and they see the criticism.
- [14:14]
B
It's not, it's.
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A
It's.
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B
It's. It's a complicated proposition in a good
- [14:17]
A
way, and it scares them off. So people say, well, he's made a lot of money. He and funded itself. And the fact that I've generally given away the vast majority of money that I've made overall, whether it's this or school meals or P and T or whatever else, doesn't seem to really matter to them. But at the end of the day, here's what I know. I know that gerrymandering isn't going anywhere because the Supreme Court has made that abundantly clear. I know that the underlying human nature of politicians is not going to change. They're not going to start making decisions against their political interest for the greater good. And most important, I know the path we're on. A path that is beset by polarization and extremism and constant fighting and the inability to cross partisan lines and work together to solve problems that are hard but ultimately solvable. Whether it's guns or immigration or healthcare or climate or taxes or anything else, there is broad based consensus. It just doesn't matter because that 80% who could come up with a reasonable framework don't vote in primaries. And so their voices don't really matter. And so to me, at the end of the day, what choice do I have? What choice does the mobile voting team have but to just keep taking the hits and keep trying out new ideas and building support where we can get it and moving forward, it would be easier to have my time and money back. And I could easily take all of the things, the cybersecurity ivory tower assholes or the self righteous good government groups that don't live in reality or all the special interests and just blame them and say they're just evil and terrible and we should just punish them. There's nothing I can otherwise do here. But the reason I can't do that is because it's not in my best interest selfishly to do so. Working through all that frustration, fighting through it as difficult it is, that's what produces Eudaimonia. The struggle itself ultimately increases my life satisfaction and my ability to live a life that feels meaningful. And so when you go back to the Partnership, I have a plan, and I've written about it, for how we could build an effective centrist political operation in New York City. And is my formula exactly right? Now, of course it's not right. Things are gonna go wrong. But you gotta start with something. And if you truly care about something, you have to know that failure will come again and again and again. And you have to be willing to keep trying anyway until something finally works. Why? Because that's what's ultimately best for us. That's what makes us human. That's what makes life worth living. So unfortunately, the Partnership gave up on that approach a long time ago. But it's not too late for them and it's not too Late for us.
- [17:01]
B
Let me ask you two completely disparate questions. Right?
- [17:03]
A
Yeah.
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B
So first, just on the specific subject of the partnership as a counterfactual, how do you think the last 25 years of, say, New York City would have been different if the partnership had been this sort of innovative, assertive organization?
- [17:17]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think at the very least. So, you know, this, the. The 25 year. Keep in mind your time frame is a little, I don't know, either deliberately weird or just inadvertently. Which is 25 years ago is 2001.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Which was 9 11.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Right. So you have this once in a lifetime, once in a city's lifetime event which led to Mike Bloomberg. Michael does not become mayor of New York City without 9 11. He loses about 25, 30 points. So then you have 12 years of Bloomberg, which included me changing the laws on term limits, which some people liked and a lot of people didn't, but nonetheless, you had a ultra competent mayor for 12 years, but because the business community said, oh, Bloomberg's got it, and they weren't wrong, you had a guy who certainly did not need advice about business from Cathy Wild or any of the CEOs, and also brought a lot
- [18:08]
B
of business like expertise into the administration.
- [18:09]
A
Brought administration. And also just, you know, you take our entire political team over the 12 years, whether it's Shiki or Wolfson or me or whoever, Lasher, just an incredibly competent group of people with unlimited resources. Like, we got it right. But Mike and I believe he was wrong about this and made a mistake. But Mike felt strongly that it was not his place to interfere in local politics after he left City Hall. I think he was wrong about that, but he did it for reasons he believed to be right. And I respect that at least, even though I disagree with it, but because there was no organization that was in any way competent. Bill de Blasio, who was wildly incompetent, corrupt, lazy, the worst person to become mayor, wins the next election, governs really poorly for eight years. Eric Adams comes along and, you know, the business community was okay with Eric because he is centrist. Right? He might be corrupt, he might be inept, he might be bizarre, but he is centrist. But also they were okay with him because it was the absence of other viable options. Adams is a failure, although I think some things history will judge him a little more kindly on. And then that leads to Mandani, and here we are. So you've had effectively had this been the case all along, where there were a functioning political operation for the business community. You would have trained and recruited candidates, built coalitions, built field operations, built policy operations, done polling, done grassroots, done fundraising. All of these things that would have elected people. So if you think about Tish James, who was elected to the city council on the Working Families Party line, then became the city's public advocate, then became the state attorney general, or de Blasio, also a WFP guy or Mondani, then a DSA guy because the DSA kind of emerged in that period. All of them started in lower level offices and worked their way up. And you don't have that on the other side. So I think you would have had people who were in the city council, the state assembly, the state senate, who could have effectively competed for jobs like mayor, and we wouldn't be in this mess.
- [20:22]
B
And what are the tangible differences? I mean, just, I know it's totally speculative, but do you think the subway would be better financed and running better? Would there be fewer fentanyl addicts on the street?
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A
Yeah, well, first of all, de Blasio radically increased the size of the city's workforce that any productivity gains whatsoever.
- [20:41]
B
So more efficient.
- [20:42]
A
So you would have a far more efficient, better on city number one. Number two, Bloomberg spent 12 years trying to diversify the city's economy and build an active tech sector. He did a really good job with it. But look, Mike said, by definition, one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs of all time. So of course the truth is he was far more comfortable doing that than at a political rally. Right. De Blasio somehow saw it as virtuous to be anti tech. He proudly carried a flip phone. At first, he refused to even go to the opening of the Cornell Technion campus in Roosevelt island. And as a result, culminating in.
- [21:13]
B
We still have a Ketch act deal.
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A
Yeah, kill the Amazon deal, but just we would have had a lot more good jobs and a much more diversified economy that was less susceptible to financial downturns or downturns in tourism, whatever global things that are going on. I think that we would have had far less quality of life problems, whether it was scaffolding or illegal weed shops or people riding E bikes on the sidewalks or anything else. You know, Mike's underlying philosophy was that if you gave people a clean, safe, well run city, if you gave them a really good template, because New York attracts the best and the brightest from all over the world, whether it's in the business world, the arts, nonprofits, intellectual, whatever it is, they do great things with it. And when the city's template is fundamentally worse, which it has been for the last 12 years, then you just aren't able to achieve the same things. And it's hard to know what happens when Sergey Brin and Larry Page don't enter the garage. So, yeah, I think the city would have been a lot better off. And I think the blame, at least in part, lays at the feet of Kathy Wild and the board of the New York City Partnership.
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B
One other question completely from the other side of the spectrum. Have you read about aq? You know, there's iq, EQ, and aq.
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A
No.
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B
So it's funny, this is sort of a term right up my alley. I just literally noticed it for the first time over the weekend. So IQ is obviously intelligence. EQ is emotional sort of intelligence, and AQ is agility quotient. And it's funny, I didn't read that deeply about it yet.
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A
What's the definition of it?
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B
Just kind of what you're talking. I raise it because it's sort of what your piece is kind of about. About, like, when things don't work out, how do you respond? Right. Are you able to shift? Are you able to move?
- [23:00]
A
So, like, you're resilient. Resilience, which is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention. Yeah, yeah. It was just sort of a way
- [23:05]
B
of idea, putting it as a. As a category.
- [23:09]
A
Yeah.
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B
Like intelligence, like emotional.
- [23:11]
A
Yeah. I mean, look, I remember when I was doing that. Remember that piece I wrote when I turned 50 and I spent like, it was 50 reflections. I spent like, many, many months working on that. And somewhere in there, I listed a definition for success, which actually I was teaching out at University Chicago the other day and kind of revisited it, which is, to me, at least, nonlinear. Professional success requires a combination of talent, work ethic, and risk tolerance. And fundamentally, talent, to a certain extent, you're born with. But work ethic and risk tolerance are things that you can develop. And those are, to me, manifestations of aq.
- [23:52]
B
Yep. Should we do a pivot?
- [23:56]
A
Yeah, sure. Okay.
- [23:57]
B
So you wrote a piece about, I'm
- [23:59]
A
already doing better than Drake. Maybe I would say my left shoulder hurts, too.
- [24:04]
B
Oh, poor Drake. May. It was like watching a kid get his ice cream cone.
- [24:10]
A
It's funny because I was texting with a friend who she. Not a football fan at all. She didn't know any players, but she was watching the game. She said, why does that one guy look like. Why does number 10 look like a child and the rest of them look like men? And I said, he's really, really young. It's actually incredible what he's accomplished. Well, you know, I have no. Like every American outside of New England, I have zero sympathy for the Patriots.
- [24:29]
B
Who could possibly.
- [24:30]
A
But with that said, your franchise is in a great position. You have a great quarterback, you have a great coach. You have some other really terrific players.
- [24:39]
B
I might take the under on that.
- [24:40]
A
Even those offensive linemen who were terrible in the playoffs. We'll get better. Yeah.
- [24:44]
B
I just think the coach seemed overmatched with his quarterback.
- [24:48]
A
Vrabel took a team that last year won what they had, four games, and then this year they made the super
- [24:53]
B
bowl, got to play the Dolphins twice.
- [24:55]
A
I get it. I get it. Yeah. They had a lot of luck. A lot of luck.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
I watched all the playoffs. But. But still.
- [25:01]
B
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
- [25:02]
A
Credit where it's still.
- [25:03]
B
I still would take the under. But I. But you obviously have a lot of good points. So you wrote a little thing about the perils of merging business and philanthropy, kind of on the subject of Bezos and the Washington Post, which was something everybody's talking about over the last week.
- [25:18]
A
Yeah, certainly. Especially in your world. I guess here was the thought that I, you know, rather than the sort of, you know, endless tearing of garments and gnashing of teeth about how terrible this all is, it reminded me of an experience that I had. And I just think that there's an insight, this is not the world's most profound insight, but that it's worth being mindful of. So the When I started my first company, Tough strategies, in early 2010, the first really big campaign we ran was to increase the number of charter schools allowed in New York. So New York, under Governor Pataky, authorized 200 charter schools. The state quickly met that number. And then because of the power of the teachers unions, getting back to the mobile voting stuff earlier, the charter community could not increase it and just kept losing. And that, by the way, included Bloomberg World, which was trying hard to do it and couldn't get it through either. President Obama then created a program called Race to the Top, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. And we've talked on this podcast. I've proposed Race to the Top versions for affordable housing, permitting, energy AI in the classroom, and things like that. But what it did was it gave big grants to states who adopted a friendly posture towards trying new things in education. And even though the amount that New York stood to win, $700 million, was actually very little money, I mean, the New York City schools budget every year is 40 billion. So 700 million is not even a rounding error. However, when we polled it. What we found was the notion of the state turning up its nose at $700 million when New Yorkers pay so much in taxes and feel like they get so little in return for it was wildly offensive to voters. And we ran an entire campaign around that concept. Like, we would have posters all over the city like those milk carton ads of someone missing, but instead it was giant stacks of money and saying, missing 700 million because Albany refuses to do what it needs its job. And we won and we beat the teachers union. And it was a really big win because people tried and failed before we won Race to the Top. As a result of it, we went from 200 charter schools to 460, I believe over time, that has led to 125,000 more charter school seats being created and about $2.1 billion a year in additional funding provided to charter schools, which was the real money here. And our backers were hedge fund leaders. And I will say you can debate the overall impact on society of hedge funds, but in this case, despite the bullshit attacks from the teachers unions, the hedge fund people who are supporting chartered schools are not doing it to privatize education or to profit. For personally, there's no money to be made in education compared to what these guys make running hedge funds. They did it because they saw a status quo that was wildly broken. They saw an alternative concept in charter schools that could do better success. Charter schools today has the best test scores in the state of New York and educates the same kids from poor neighborhoods and produces wildly better different results than traditional public schools that are stuck with all of the rules being dictated by the UFT and nicet. And we won. And everybody's very, very excited. And I remember saying to these guys afterwards, this is great. Good win for all of us. But the teachers unions aren't gonna go away. Which means if we want to maintain political influence in Albany, we have to build. Not unlike what I was saying before about the partnership, a sustainable political operation that day in, day out is part of the process, is lobbying, is going to little fundraisers, is doing all of the things that any political organization does. And they didn't want to do that, right? Some of them moved on to other causes. Some of them stayed and still are very supportive of charter schools, especially success, but on the operational side, not the political side. And as a result, there's never been any progress since. So that cap has not been raised since 2010. New York has been stuck at 460 for a long time despite tremendous demand for it. And it's because those guys worked hard. They put in money, they took public hits, they got attacked constantly with teachers union, they had their homes protested, all of these things, and we won.
- [29:38]
B
They were done.
- [29:39]
A
And they're like, I'm done. Yeah, with this. And I think that in some ways, that's typical of what happens when very rich people adopt causes. And the cause could be philanthropic, like charter schools, but it could also be quasi business, like your world of media. Right. So we saw Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post in 2013. We saw Marc Benioff by Time in 2018. Patrick Xuncian buying the LA Times in 2013, John Henry buying the Boston Globe in 2013. And there's more examples, too. And look, Bezos does not seem like someone who is driven by anything but self interest at all times. And so perhaps it's funny, when I showed a few people the draft of this piece, their biggest objection was that I made him seem too good and that he was solely driven by the desire for influence and status on the Washington Post and not the desire to promote journalism. But nonetheless, for well over a decade, he pretty much continued to keep a excellent newspaper afloat. Right. Individual journalists have gripes, but people who become journalists tend to have a lot of gripes to begin with. That's part of the appeal for them. So Bezos, then, in the 2024 presidential election, decides not to have the Washington Post issue an endorsement of Kamala Harris because he looks at the big picture of his blue origin needs and his Amazon needs and says, I'm not messing with Trump and taking a risk here. And it doesn't matter who the Washington Post endorses. I would think it's so silly that the one like the New York Times is only endorsing in federal races, which I thought was crazy, because, like, no one cares for the Washington Post. New York Times, like anyone who reads New York Times, Washington Post religiously is for Harris already.
- [31:19]
B
Well, it doesn't have an impact on races, I think that's for sure.
- [31:21]
A
Well, it could. No, no, I think on a local race. Oh, I see.
- [31:24]
B
Right, right.
- [31:24]
A
I think they. They got it exactly wrong. I think these newspapers took where they could have a huge impact, forfeited it, and then kept it for something. So it's not that Washington Post didn't do it. It was the fact that Bezos was saying, I am no longer interested in sacrificing for this thing.
- [31:40]
B
Right.
- [31:40]
A
And then that ultimately culminated in 30% of the Washington Post workforce being laid off last Thursday. And Look, I'm not even sure that the world is objectively worse off if these publications all cease to exist in that, that's creative destruction. And we see a lot of new forms of media happening. Podcasting, like this substance.
- [31:59]
B
No, and there's actually a bunch of companies. Media companies have risen up. Politico, Axios.
- [32:05]
A
Yeah, Short form video, long form video only news outlets. So it's not in and of itself even despite, you know, obviously there's journalists and people who work there having their lives terribly impacted. Even a terrible thing in of itself. But I think what it just means is that when a cause becomes popular among the billionaire set, whether it's charter schools or criminal justice or institutional media or anything else, you have to view it with the understanding that the lifespan of that commitment is likely very limited. You know, when something is motivated solely by goodwill. And if your only motivation is to help, after losing enough money, taking enough criticism, you know, dealing with enough problems, people get fed up. So, to the discussion we just had earlier. If it is truly your life's mission, like mobile voting is for me, would if you were Jeff Bezos, be better off fighting through it? Absolutely. By the way, that still doesn't mean that you wouldn't lay off 30% of the workforce. Businesses have to do everything they can to get revenue to exceed costs. 30% less for a newspaper that then becomes sustainable is better than 100% turning into zero two years later. So I'm not even sure. I don't really even take issue with what he did, because you could argue he's just trying to keep this thing afloat at all. But overall, you got an $84 trillion wealth transfer expected to happen over the next couple of decades, from baby boomers dying out to younger generations. You have all of these tech founders who are in their 30s and 40s and even now some in their 50s, who built these incredible companies who have not yet. Like I mentioned the Google guys before. Like, I'm not aware of them being wild, totally philanthropic, but presumably at some point they will become so. And that's great. But I think that when they adopt a cause, you have to at least be mindful of the fact that there is a decent chance that if it gets too hard for too long and it is not their life's work, and keep in mind, these are people who are very business and profit minded in the first place. That's how they made all that money. Just go in and understand that this
- [34:13]
B
may not be permanent.
- [34:15]
A
It's still good, but it may not be permanent. So you and I were texting about this over the weekend, and I just, you know, Manani has made the decision not to clear homeless encampments. And New York City this weekend was insanely cold. It was -13 with the wind chill. In fact, in my building, this is obviously a minor problem compared to people on the streets, but we didn't have any water because our pipes froze.
- [34:36]
B
Oh, really?
- [34:36]
A
Yeah.
- [34:37]
B
How long did that last?
- [34:39]
A
About 24 hours. It's back on. So it was incredibly cold. And the question has been, should you force people who are on the streets in that weather to have to go inside, even against their will? And some of them, when you read the articles, make the point pretty rationally of, hey, I've gone to the shelter and I've been stabbed or I've been robbed. I'll take my chances on the street. Now, that may not be a rational choice in -13, because dying of hypothermia and people have died. This is not a theoretical thing. It's still probably worse than losing your wallet. And I don't understand why it is progressive in general to let people sleep on the street. And I certainly don't understand why it is progressive to let people die of hypothermia knowing that that's what's going to happen to them. But I was thinking about it this way, and you and I were texting about it, which is if you or I wanted to spend all weekend walking around New York until we froze to death, no one would stop us. It would be our right to do so. And I don't think, I'm not even sure that the city could legally force us to not do it. Right. They'd have to first get us declared mentally incompetent and then committed. And by then it's too late. So it's a lot of paperwork. Right? So if. If that's the case, then I think you would argue that if the person making that choice is clearly meant, you are. You and I are not meant to mentally ill. If you were clearly mentally ill or if you were an addict and you're not of sane mind, then you could argue that you're not going to go through all that process. You will just physically force them indoors for their own good because they are not capable, given their challenges, of making a sane decision for their best. You can't administer a whole test on the street in real time to know that maybe some of the people you're doing that to are of sound mind and you're denying them their rights. But you Know, just from living here, it seems very clear that a lot of people in the streets are very much not of sane mind. You can just see that if you have a pair of eyes when you walk around, if you're not just staring at your phone the entire time. But I guess it is, you know, if you were, you know. Interestingly to me, what Mandani is doing is not only not progressive, it's libertarian. I don't think he would ever call himself a libertarian. He has people like C. Weaver who don't even believe in private ownership of private property. It's certainly in the coffee shops of Astoria and Crown Heights. Not popular to be anything other than socialist, turning towards communist. But interestingly, if Zorami truly believes that people have an inherent right to be on the street, even if it causes their death, even if they are mentally ill, even if they are addicts, and most of us would say therefore not capable of making choices of sound mind. And our mayor might be a libertarian.
- [37:34]
B
Well, look, I think the issue distills the issue that's with us all the time, which is there are people on the street clearly who are not of sound mind, who are hurting themselves, harming themselves by being on the street. They are also creating problems for other people by doing that. But fundamentally the greatest damage is usually to themselves. And we just tolerate that. For what reason? What's the.
- [37:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, the only thing that you get to. Because I was talking to. To I have a text chain with my friends, Jamie Rubin, who's been on before, and Rich Sable, I think it's been on too. And Jamie is the chair of nycha, New York City Housing.
- [38:10]
B
And what does he say? What does he say?
- [38:11]
A
So here was the question that we were discussing, which is put aside the. Everyone agreed that of course people shouldn't be allowed to sleep on the streets who are not of sane mind in this type of weather. So I didn't get anyone telling me other than that. But my question to Jamie was, could you use NYCHA to provide sustainable housing for people who are living on the streets, who are not mentally ill and not addicts, but just really struggling, just really down on their luck? Because it seems to me that if you were to take the homeless population and divide it up to people of sound mind and not of sound mind, I just don't believe that we can't find a way to help the people who are of sound mind. It might be a relatively minor percentage of the homeless population.
- [38:57]
B
Well, those people are in shelters, right?
- [38:58]
A
They're in shelters. But that we couldn't find a way to do better than the shelter system ultimately. Now, a lot of that will require major reforms to the way that we permanent build affordable housing, which the far left doesn't like. Right. We've got to get rid of most of the environmental reviews and most of the community veto provisions and the requirements to use labor and everything else to union labor to build. But it seems to me that with the right policies, you can arguably not solve, but meaningfully improve the situation for people who are just really struggling. I genuinely don't know what the solution is for people who are addicts and mentally ill. And I think the number
- [39:43]
B
of people who are right. Because one solution is arresting them. Right. And then where do they go Till
- [39:47]
A
Rikers doesn't work here. It's funny. I was in San Francisco, this was now a couple of months ago, and I was downtown and walking around, and there just weren't very, very few homeless people in a place that was the most that I'd ever seen of anywhere. And I kept asking people ranging from like, Uber drivers and bartenders to venture capitalists, like, who live there, like, where'd they all go? And everyone was kind of like, like, we don't know. We don't want to know. And Dean Lurie, who's the mayor, is. Seems excellent and is very popular. After I checked, he was at, like, a 73% approval rating. That was a few months ago. So maybe it's changed, but somebody knows. Somebody knows. I don't know what he's doing with it.
- [40:27]
B
Is that the cops going around?
- [40:29]
A
Where do you put them? I don't know. This, to me, is like, it is a public policy problem that I don't really just genuinely don't know what the answer to it is, because you can put them on a bus, but then whatever community you're sending them to just has the same problem. Right. So that's not solving anything. That's just moving it from point A to point B.
- [40:46]
B
And you would also notice them loading people onto buses. I mean, that would be a.
- [40:50]
A
A hard thing to miss. Right? Right. We saw that with the migrant crisis, obviously. And on top of that, it seems like mental illness and addiction problems are only growing in part because I would say the overwhelming pace of technological change, which you can't really stop humans from progressing and advancing, but that pace is so overwhelming to people that I think it is causing more mental sort of instability. And we have a world where you have an opioid crisis pushed by actual pharma as well as A totally failed war on drugs. And so, you know, I don't know the answer to it, but I do
- [41:30]
B
know you raise a really good question. Is like, I, I, it's, I mean, they should find out where the, where the people in San Francisco have gone.
- [41:38]
A
Right. But, but the notion that in minus 13 weather. That was with the wind chill.
- [41:42]
B
Yeah.
- [41:42]
A
That, that you let people choose, I think is actually wildly inhumane. And for a mayor who professes to care about the least fortunate among us, it seems to me that, you know, we've talked a lot on this podcast about the. The real question about his mayoralty will be will he be willing to defy his base and his ideology to do the right thing for people and for the city? And unfortunately, this was one clear example where he was not and people died.
- [42:16]
B
Let's talk about your Pete Buttigieg ad. It is your attempt to one up my ad from last week.
- [42:21]
A
Yeah.
- [42:22]
B
I think you did a pretty good job.
- [42:23]
A
I did an okay job.
- [42:24]
B
You're not that happy with it?
- [42:26]
A
No. Well, because the problem is you don't like Pete Buttigieg. I don't like Pete Buttigieg.
- [42:30]
B
That's why it's a perfect assignment for you. It really tests your skills.
- [42:33]
A
But I had a hard time. I wrote the best ad that I could, but I had a hard time because I genuinely think he's one of those people that is preparing to be president since he was 5. And I think we all instinctively hate those people. John Kerry, you mean like J.D. vance? Al Gore? Maybe. I don't know. I still struggle with the fact I don't like Vance in the slightest. I think he is the single worst option for president in 2028 of both parties.
- [42:57]
B
I'll take Stephen Miller as the worst. But he's not running.
- [43:00]
A
Well, maybe, but, like, you know, I never have.
- [43:02]
B
No, he's not running.
- [43:03]
A
But nonetheless, just the weenies are just so annoying.
- [43:08]
B
The weenies?
- [43:09]
A
Yeah. And Buttigieg strikes me as a weenie.
- [43:11]
B
Jamie Vance is a good weenie, too.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah.
- [43:13]
B
Except I still not as much a weenie.
- [43:15]
A
You don't think just because I read Hillbilly Elegy and it was so not weenie in a way that I just still in my head, have a hard time.
- [43:24]
B
Did you like Hillbill Elegy? Yes.
- [43:26]
A
Really very much. And like, I still don't. I put him in the category of people who are so desperate for power that they will literally do absolutely anything imaginable to get it, but not. I don't know. That's exactly the Same category as the I've wanted to be president since I was five. So here's the Buttigieg. Donald Trump is 81. Joe Biden was so old he couldn't even run for reelection. The average age in The House is 57. The average age in the Senate is 64. What happens when the people in charge are really old? They pass laws that benefit their generation at the expense of everyone else. Trillions in debt that has to get paid by the next generations. Running through all the money in Social Security and Medicare, socking young people with unimaginable student debt. Want a government that stops putting old people before everyone else? Then stop electing old people. Pete Buttigieg is 44, and he's already been the US Secretary of Transportation, the Mayor of South Bend, a Rhodes scholar, and a decorated veteran. He's more than qualified to be president, and yet he's also one of us. Make America younger. Support Pete Puttige for president.
- [44:37]
B
Okay, first of all, I like the marshaling of facts. I like the tone. I like the just the language. But here's my question.
- [44:43]
A
Yeah.
- [44:44]
B
Can you win election to the White House without the old vote?
- [44:47]
A
Well, two different questions. I thought what you're gonna say is, can the resume guy win? And the answer is almost always no.
- [44:53]
B
Right?
- [44:53]
A
Right.
- [44:54]
B
What if you have two resume guys running?
- [44:56]
A
Maybe we almost instinctively. Even though the resume guy or gal, because Hillary Clinton was certainly the resume gal, gal, or Harris compared to Trump. Right. Are often the more qualified. Can you win without the old vote? Yes, you can. Because in a presidential election, turnout is typically about 66%, about 2/3 in the general. And enough people turn out that you are not. It is the one antithesis to the whole argument I made earlier about mobile voting, which is in every other election, you are in a world where you are stuck to a very, very small group of voters in a primary of which old people still vote in greater proportions. One of the points of mobile voting is to take power and put it into the hands of younger people who have phones and live on their phones and could vote on their phones. But look, in this mayoral election, Andrew Cuomo was the older, much older candidate. He was over 33 years older than Mandani. His entire campaign was as if we were still in 1997, it was all TV ads on Channel 4 at 6pm it was totally predicated on just older voters, and it failed miserably. I think the difference is Mandani is genuinely exciting to younger people, and they turned out, as a result, in significant numbers. I Don't.
- [46:21]
B
So that's what you're. That's what you're aiming for?
- [46:23]
A
Yeah, I just think that. I just think being able to inspire people to vote who don't usually vote requires there being a really special something, and I don't think Buttigieg has it.
- [46:36]
B
Okay, so Buttigieg is not hiring tusk strategies for 2028.
- [46:39]
A
We don't work really for candidates one way or the other. And certainly I've been publicly critical of him multiple times, so he wouldn't.
- [46:47]
B
So do you have a recommendation?
- [46:49]
A
Yeah, I have been reading a book. I try not to recommend books unless I'm actually done reading them, but this book, I just have found it to be so exceptional that I do think it's worth recommending anyway, so. It's called the Mattering Instinct. It's by Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. And the first hundred pages or so are a little tough to get through because it's a lot of neuroscience. But ultimately what it gets to is her thesis. And others have made this case, too. Jennifer Wallace, notably among them, is that what we really want is to feel like we matter. Right? We want people to see us and hear us and take us seriously. And that actually often matters more than the underlying outcome itself. In fact, when I studied dialectical behavioral DB therapy, dbt, in many ways, that's what I took from it. Right? Which is let people feel heard and seen, and then you might give them an answer they don't want, but they are far more able to accept it anyway. And, in fact, the piece that we started this whole podcast with, I wrote it without the point around Eudaimonia, and really how, if you do struggle through hard things, it actually is better for you at the end of the day because it will make you feel more content and increase your life satisfaction. And I think it went from a substack that I thought was okay to a substack I think is actually pretty good. And I literally woke up. Did I text you at like, 3 in the morning?
- [48:24]
B
Yeah, 3:42.
- [48:25]
A
Yeah. I woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't sleep, started reading Real. I was reading about her take on Eudaimonia and then realized what was missing from that piece and went ahead and rewrote a lot of it and sent it to you. So, yeah, it's an excellent book. If somehow the end of it turns out to be bad, I'll come back and let everyone know. But if you like this kind of stuff, I'd recommend it. You just got us along through the beginning.
- [48:52]
B
Nice. So next week, just to remind you of Turkey, we're Turkey, it's gonna be a day late. It's gonna be released on Wednesday next week.
- [49:00]
A
We got of a lot of topics we didn't get to today.
- [49:02]
B
I know, but those, those we're probably going to push off for even a couple weeks because in Turkey we're going to be while you're there, we're going to be talking about I'm doing the
- [49:08]
A
whole episode in Turkish.
- [49:09]
B
Beautiful. All right, thanks, Bradley.
- [49:16]
A
Firewalls recorded at my bookstore, PNT Wear, located at 180 Orchard street on the Lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack at bradleytus substack. Com. Thanks again for listening.