← Lunch with Jamie
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to another lunch with Jamie. Today I'm joined by Bradley Tux. Bradley is the founder of Tusk Strategies, the Tusk Ventures, the mobile voting project, Solving Hunger, the Gotham Book Prize, and PNT Knitwear, which is a bookstore and podcast studio in New York City. This guy really is doing it all. He worked with Uber in getting Uber into circumstances cities across the country. He worked with people like Chuck Schumer, Andrew Yang, Michael Bloomberg. He was also the deputy governor of Illinois. He's the CEO of Tusk Holdings. He writes a substack. He has a podcast called Firewall. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and he's an author. Most recently written Vote with your why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy. Bradley Tusk truly is doing it all. This conversation was fascinating. I could have talked to him for hours longer. We barely scratched the surface of what I know. He would have a lot to say and think about and talk about. He's somebody's voice who I think we all need to be paying more attention to. He does a great TED Talk, which you haven't heard it. You should go and listen to that. A lot of our conversations focus on mobile voting. After you listen to Bradley, it's head. Head scratcher on why this isn't being, you know, implemented in other cities and countries. It's a little head scratcher as well that Estonia is one of the first countries to actually adopt mobile voting. He's making a dent, he's making an impact and it's starting to take shape. But we as society need to really make it a priority that we push for mobile voting in our elections. He talked about security concerns. If you're not concerned about your banking information, your health care and many other things you use your phone for, why would you be concerned about voting? There's multiple security methods that he's put in place and the technology that he's building that personally, for me, gives me no concern. We talked about how much it'll help disabled voters, military voters. I mean, there's so many benefits of how mobile voting will help to get more people to vote. And, and personally, I still believe the more people who vote, the better it is for a functioning democracy. We shifted our conversation to AI a bit. I probably could have talked to him for an hour just on AI. He's somebody who's really knowledgeable about it and one of the things that he focused on, which I think is really helpful, is ubi. And when we look at this job displacement, how are we going to be able to make up for it with so many people losing their jobs. And I think UBI is one of the things that we should be taking a serious look at now. Here's my conversation with Bradley Tusk. I'm thrilled to be joined by Bradley Tusk, who's the founder of Tusk Strategies, Tusk Ventures, mobile voting, project, Solving Hunger, the Gotham Book Prize, PNT Knitwear, which is a bookstore and podcast student in New York City that you should all check out. He's one of the driving forces in getting Uber in cities. He's worked with Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Yang. Chuck Schumer serves as the Deputy governor of Illinois. He also serves as CEO of Tusk Holdings. And if that wasn't enough, he has a substack and hosts a podcast called Firewall. He's an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and author, most recently of Vote with your. Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving democracy. Bradley, nice to meet you officially and thank you for joining us.
- [03:26]
B
Yeah, thank you for having me. And yeah, I'm thrilled that we finally got the chance to meet. Yeah.
- [03:31]
A
So I, as always, this joke's getting old. I'm gonna start you off with my toughest question of the day. This is called Lunch with Jamie. So although we're not having lunch, I learned through my research we have a similar affinity for the food in New Orleans.
- [03:48]
B
Yes, I am a big. I go down there about twice a year mainly to eat.
- [03:52]
A
Never enough time. So I won't make do. Do the impossible, which is pick your favorite place in New Orleans. But if you were curating a trip for me and you to eat in New Orleans, where are a couple of the places you would take me?
- [04:04]
B
Well, I mean, I was there over Christmas, so I could at least sort of say kind of where. Where we went then, because we always try to shake it up. So we went to. There's a place called like Moscas. Do you know it? So it's all the way out and it's like an old school kind of Cajun Italian place. And I had never been there before, so that was on my list. And. And we got to go there to Meadery. Have you been there? Yeah. That was exceptional. So we went there. We went. My. My daughter or boyfriend went to Sabah and my son and I went. The Knicks were in town, so we went to the Knicks Pelicans game instead. Oh, we went to this, a Caribbean place kind of uptown.
- [04:56]
A
Was it, was it Africa was a Dakar. The tasting menu, it wasn't Dakar.
- [05:01]
B
I've been to. I'VE been to Dakar, but this was like the number one Caribbean place in New Orleans. And it was, of course, great. I'll send it to you afterwards. But, you know. Yeah. And so I'm going for Jazz Fest if you're going to be there. And we'll do. You know, the food at Jazz Fest is actually very good, but we'll do our dinners separately.
- [05:23]
A
Bradley, we really. We really were separated at birth, and I think you're my old. My older brother bike a year because I just turned 50. I feel like you're 51. 52.
- [05:31]
B
52, yeah.
- [05:32]
A
52. Okay. So you're. You're kind of my older brother, so
- [05:36]
B
you should come to Jazz Fest.
- [05:37]
A
I. I am there almost every year. This year I have to be there the weekend before for something, so I'm not sure I'm sticking around.
- [05:44]
B
It's a good lineup if you stick around.
- [05:46]
A
So good. So good. All right. Well, as I dig deeper into what you do, what you've been doing, I keep on, as I get back and pull another layer of the onion away, I just sort of continue continually am blown away and surprised and thankful and appreciative. And we're just lucky to have someone like yourself out there. So I want to thank you.
- [06:08]
B
Well, thanks for thanking me. Not many people do. Usually I get attacked for whatever I'm doing, so. Well, I appreciate it.
- [06:14]
A
You deserve it. And, you know, you released a podcast recently and a substack which talked about the radical rest, which really shook up all of my thinking of our conversation. So I'm going to try. I want to start with mobile voting because that's obviously not to speak for you, but one of the most important things you work on every day, and, you know, it's one of those things where the naive person must sort of say, well, obviously we should move to mobile voting. Like, why wouldn't we? We do everything on our phone. Everything. At this point, we trust everything between two factor authentication and security and health and bank. Why would anybody be against mobile voting? Unless you just don't want that many people to vote? And so, you know, I know we could be here for the whole hour talking just about mobile voting, but help. Help summarize a little bit of what you've been working on. And so people who don't know know.
- [07:16]
B
So I believe that we have a government that is governing for the few at the expense of the many. And I believe that that's not because that's what the people in the government want to do, but it's the structure of our political system effectively leaves them with very little choice. So in a world of gerrymandering, the only election that really matters most of the time is the primary. So the Times did a study of the 2024 general election. What they found was only 8% of congressional races were decided by 5 points or less in the general election. Only 7% of state legislative races were decided by 5 points or Less in the general election. Which means that respectively, 92 and 93% of elections were determined in the primary. Primary turnout is really low. It's typically 10 to 15%, usually closer to 10%. So who are those voters? They're the ideological extreme. So that could be the far right or the far left. And they are very special interests that can move money and votes in low turnout primaries. And I have spent well over 30 years now working in politics. I started working for the mayor of Philadelphia when I was in College back in 1992, and have been in and around it ever since. And the thing that I've taken away from it more than anything else is that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on winning the next election and nothing else. And there are some exceptions here or there, but not many. And if their next election is being determined in the primary, and if their voters are going to be 10% total, and they're the extremes or special interests, in order to get reelected, they have to cater to those groups. But typically that means doing so at the expense of everyone else, because those are the extremes. And those groups don't want bipartisanship. They don't want compromise, they don't want consensus, they don't want trade offs. They just want what they want. And if they can't have exactly what they want, they would prefer for there to be nothing. And so that's what we get. So whether it's guns or immigration or climate or healthcare or education or taxes or 20 other issues, the reason why we either can't solve them or when we do address them, it tends to be at the extreme on either side is simply because the only people that are participating are the people at the extreme. So they call the shots. I ran all the campaigns to legalize uber about 10 to 15 years ago. And at the time we were this tiny little tech startup. Like today, Uber's a giant corporation, but back then we were an early stage tech company. And, you know, we couldn't compete with the taxi industry in terms of their lobbyists and their political contributions and all of the Normal stuff. And so in order to beat them, because they were trying to put us out of business by getting regulators to ban us, we had to figure out a different approach. And what we did was we went to our customers and said, listen, if you like Uber and you want to be able to keep using it in, you know, wherever city you're in, we need you to let your elected officials know. And we built the functionality directly into the app so that our customers could tell their council member, state senator, mayor, whoever was relevant in that situation, hey, I like this Uber thing. Please leave it alone. And millions of people did. And so finally it hits me, like, these people who are advocating for us, God bless them, but they probably don't even know the name of the city council member who represents them. They've probably never voted in a state senate primary. But when we made it really easy and we put it on their phone, their behavior changed. So I finally asked myself the question, what if they could vote this way? And that's what led to the creation of the mobile voting project and kind of walk you through what we've been up to since. But basically the idea is that if you make voting a lot easier and make it consistent with the way, like you said, that we live the rest of our lives, lives, more people will do it. And if we can get primary turnout up from, say, 10% to even 30, it doesn't need to be 80, but just even 30, you dramatically change the composition of the electorate and the people that politicians are answering to go from the extremes to the mainstream. And once you get into representing the mainstream, you can find solutions to most issues. It's not that our problems are intractable, is that they're intractable if you are assisting an ideological purity for either side. And so to me, if the country continues to be run solely by extremists from either side, and we just. The pendulum just swings back and forth. I'm not even sure we'll be one country in 20 years. Whereas if we can find a way, and I believe that we have, through mobile voting, we can get primary turnout up to, say, 30, 40%, we can start to give politicians the COVID and courage they need to work together to get things done, and that starts to solve problems, that starts to inspire a little more faith in government, and it creates a much better society. So I think we can get there, we can get into this, but we've built all of the tools to get us there. But obviously, it's a really hard fight because we are trying to change the status Quo. And the people who like things the way they are, the people who have power under the current system, are not interested in making it easier for others to gain power. And so they're doing everything they can to stop us.
- [12:38]
A
Again, thank you for doing the work on this because I think it is such a critical part of kind of moving the country forward in the right way. I am always in shock that there's so many people out there who are trying to make voting harder because I've done a handful of voting rights panels and conversations over the years and I'm always trying to find, okay, who's the sensible voice from the other side who can kind of explain to me why there's a benefit to, to making voting more difficult when time and time again it's proved there's next to no voter fraud currently.
- [13:13]
B
Totally. I was, I was teaching a class the other week in Chicago and I was talking about mobile voting and someone raised their hand and said, well, wouldn't more people voting mean that, like more dumb people vote and we get worse results? And I said, brandon Johnson is your mayor and Donald Trump is your president. How much worse could it get? Right?
- [13:34]
A
Exactly.
- [13:35]
B
You know, all we have to go from here is up. I should just make it clear to the listeners this is not a business in any way. This is a philanthropic effort. The mobile voting project is a C3 to C4. I have self funded it. I've put over $20 million of my own money into it. We have built secure mobile voting technology that I can walk you through that we have put up on GitHub and it's just now available for free to anyone who wants to use it. So it's not just that we have this idea. We have funded pilots in seven different states where actual voters were able to vote on their phones. To test the concept, we have built the. And we are now running legislation in five different states that would authorize mobile voting for starting with municipal elections. But to be clear, the opposition isn't just from the right. So Trump clearly wants to limit voting and he only wants in person voting and paper ballots, but so does the League of Women Voters. So there are groups that consider themselves liberal or progressive that are just as backwards and just as invested in reinforcing the status quo and protecting it as people on the right. You know, anyone listening to this, please don't assume that like, oh, it's just another thing of the evil Republicans or Trump, like, yes, he's bad on this, but so is the left.
- [14:51]
A
I don't want to get too much in the weeds of how it works. And you have great TED Talk and a lot of other talks about the process. But just explain quickly how secure this is.
- [15:02]
B
Yeah, sure, I'll walk you through it really fast. So you would go on the App Store, you would download the LA County Board of Elections app. They would say, is Jamie Patrickoff a registered voter in LA County? You put in the last four digits of your social and your address. Okay, we know that someone with your name is registered voter in LA county, but are you that person? So Multi factor authentication, that's like when you forget your password and they send you a code followed by biometric screenings. That's like what you do now at the airport with tsa. We've now established. Okay, you're really Jamie Petroff. Great. Ballot comes up on your screen. Ballot is meant to be as straightforward and easy as possible. Whenever you're ready to hit submit, three things happen. Your ballot's encrypted, your ballot's anonymized, and you get a tracking code. The ballot that goes back to LA county, they air gap it, which means they just remove it from the Internet. Once it's offline, they decrypt your ballot, they print out a paper copy of your ballot. That's what gets scanned and tabulated. You can see from the tracking code where your ballot stands that it was received, tabulated, printed, so on. And then the underlying code itself is publicly available. It's all up on GitHub. So anybody can audit, anybody can verify it. It's completely transparent. So that's how it works.
- [16:15]
A
And you know, to the, to the average person and who's not so tech savvy, you know, it sounds more susceptible to hacking and foreign interference will push back there for me.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah, a few things. So one is it's the only voting system in the world that is end to end, verifiable, end to end encrypted, has biometric screening, multi factor authentication, error gapping, open source code, but also, you know, you've got to compare it to how we vote today. I agree with you. I don't think there's a lot of voter fraud. In fact, I worked in Chicago politics for four years and even there I did not CEO voter fraud. But nonetheless, you know, when I vote New York City and you know, did you, did you live here before? When you were a voting age? Did you still live in New York City or had you already left?
- [17:04]
A
No, I was, I voted a few times in New York City.
- [17:06]
B
Okay, so what you remember is you just scribble your name, that's it. There's no id, there's no nothing. And my signature is literally a handful of squiggles that anybody could replicate. So is the way that we are conducting the system more secure than that? For sure. Do voting machines break? Absolutely. Do people pull a fire alarm at polling places?
- [17:28]
A
Yes.
- [17:29]
B
Does the heating break in the school and they have to close it? Yes, for mail and voting. Do ballots get lost? Do trucks get lost? The crates get lost? Absolutely. So one is in the way. We vote today is pretty good, but it also has its share of vulnerabilities like everything else. But to me, the biggest risk is the risk of maintaining the status quo. We have a country that I think most people would say feels like it's on fire, right? We have a country where the vast majority of our problems have not been solved. They only grow worse. And we don't have any confidence that we have a government capable of fixing them. And if that problem only grows worse and worse, like I said before, I think we might hit a point where we decide it doesn't even make sense to be one country eventually. And the sad thing is, if Americans were truly divided, 50, 50 on every issue, then you can make case, say, you know what? We had a good run. Now we need to sort of break it off into places where people can agree more together. Fine, but that's not the case. It's basically 10, 80, 10, and within the 80, you know, you can basically reach a consensus on how to deal with almost any single issue. It doesn't mean you're going to agree with every component of it, but you shouldn't. That's life. The product of a good negotiation is that no one is fully happy with it. So it would be such a shame to take the greatest country in the history of the world and break it up simply because we didn't solve for the one problem of finding a way to make it easier for the mainstream to vote. And now that we've actually built attack and I've paid for it out of my pocket and made it free, I just don't think there's any excuse not to try.
- [19:04]
A
It sounds so logical to me. Is there any rationale and that you can put on the other argument that you really buy that you think you could make if you had to represent the other side?
- [19:21]
B
I could look at the people who oppose us and sort of tell you where I think there's some validity, or at least I understand where they're coming from. County clerks, a lot of Them oppose us because it's more work for them, right? They feel understaffed, underfunded, and they're just like, hey, I'm already doing my best to keep my head above water. Now you're asking me to take on this entirely new system. Now, fundamentally their perspective is backwards, which is they're looking at it from what is best for the institution of county clerks, not what is best for democracy. Right. Fundamentally, they only exist to facilitate democracy. If something can make democracy healthier and stronger and better, they should be for it. And look, we should give them the funding that they need to do this. But, but keep in mind, I already built the tech and I already paid for it, right? So it's not like we're asking to do that, but that's reason that they oppose it. There are cybersecurity experts who oppose it because the question they're asking is, could anything ever go wrong? Of course something could go wrong, right? All the time for absolutely anything. And that because they live in this ivory tower of the only thing they think about is cybersecurity, comparing it to the risk of inaction, of continuing the country the way it is doesn't occur to them. It's not part of their mindset. And so as a result, you know, they say they only look at it from that narrow perspective and say, well, the best way to eliminate any risk is just to not have it at all. Not really factoring in all of the risk of just things going the way they currently are, which is unsustainable. But the reality is those are minor groups. The real opposition comes from people who just like the status quo the way it is because they have power under the current thing. And if you think about every major right in American history, it's ever been one, women's right to vote, the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act, same sex, marriage, bureaucracy, disabilities, whatever it is. The status quo didn't want to do any of those things. They were against all of them. They fought all of them. And the only reason those things happened was enough people stood up loud enough and long enough that eventually they demanded their rights for so long that the status quo finally had to give in. And that's what we're going to have to do here too. So we are building a grassroots movement that hopefully, eventually, I think, you know, there's studies that show that what's about three and a half to 5% of a population gets involved in a cause, that's usually enough to put it over the top. So that'd be about 10 to 15 million Americans. So we need to be able to mobilize about 10 to 15 million Americans to weigh in on this with their elected officials. And if we can do that over the next five to seven years, then I think we have a really good chance of succeeding. If we can't, then we probably won't.
- [22:01]
A
I love how you give that timeframe because it just, it actually feels realistic. I mean like a five to ten year timeframe. It's seems like you're going to continue to get buy in. I want everybody listening to this to go listen to your TED Talk, sign up for your substack, listen to your podcast and read the book. Because it's just something that we should all. It just should be in our conversation on a regular basis. Right. I always say to people, people get kind of overwhelmed all the time. It's like I don't know what to do. And I think just doing something about remembering the fact that moving towards mobile voting is actually something that can be done and thinking about it. So when you're talking to elected officials or people are in power, people with money, that's something that there and people themselves and they're at a protest, just thinking about it and talking about it because I think that really will make the difference. I'm going to ask you two more quick questions on this and then we'll move on.
- [22:54]
B
Great.
- [22:55]
A
Is one of the things scared by certain people that, you know, there's a certain group of people that automatically just radically is affected by this in the sense of like whether it's younger people or urban voters or one Democrats or Republican, older people like who are the. Who instantly votes more by this?
- [23:12]
B
Yeah, there's a handful of groups. So one would be deployed military. And we have a lot of support for military families because think about it, you are overseas, you are literally risking your life to protect our right to vote. And then you mail in your ballot from Kandahar or whatever, it shows up in the election office on December 3rd. 3rd and it goes in the trash. And you know, think of just how offensive that is. So military families, people with disabilities, imagine if you're blind, you know, and you've got to. Then we think voting currently is a pain in the ass. They've got to sort of go through twice as much effort to be able to vote. And then especially you have to vote in person. You have to hope that the person marks the ballot the way you ask them to. Right. For all you know, you say Trump and they mark Biden or you say Biden and they mark Trump so people with disabilities, young people, college kids who are not living where their home jurisdiction is and Gen Z in general that just kind of lives their lives on their phones. People in rural communities for whom polling places are particularly far away. So those are all I think also we have found lately we've been picking up support from Latino groups because there are people who are worried that if they go out to vote they will have to deal with ICE and they would rather just not vote which then denies them if they're an American citizen of their constitutional rights. This affects that protects against that. The other thing is we have a lot of support from the civil rights community. So Stacey Abrams Reverend Sharpton MLK III because they would argue the best anti voter suppression tool is mobile voting because when you're voting in your living room, no one knows what color your finger is and they can't try to turn you away. So those are all groups that I think specifically would benefit from this.
- [24:55]
A
That makes total sense. And then the, the last thing which I just found fascinating in they know there are a few places this is happening already, but one of those places is the country Estonia. Correct?
- [25:06]
B
Yes.
- [25:06]
A
It is not would not be number one on my democratically elected progressive voting method.
- [25:13]
B
Yeah. So it's interesting. So when they broke off from the Soviet Union, I think in 1992, the people who are running it were really smart and what they thought about was you have all these now former Soviet Republic republics. What can we do to make Estonia different? What, how can we distinguish it and make it a better place to live and be able to join the EU and everything else. And they built a digital society. So it is the most digitally advanced government and society in the world. So for example, in Estonia, for your taxes you just go on the government website, you put in your stuff, your taxes are already prepared for you and you just confirm that it's accurate because they have your W2 data. Wherever the equivalent is in Estonia, they know their tax policies and they do the math. You could get married online, you get divorced online. And mobile voting is. And they do it Internet, not phone, but they've been doing it for over 20 years now. And what's interesting is in year one it's, you know, only 1.2% of people who are, who, who could vote digitally chose to do so. But today it is the majority of how vote and especially in their local elections. Turnout was previously, you know, pretty abysmal. Now it's consistently over 50% because people just built the muscle memory of Voting. Oh, okay. It's time to vote. Super easy. I know how to do it. I'm already on my phone or computer or whatever it is. No problem. Right? Whereas in the US because it's a hassle, most people that you or I talk to who would say, oh, yeah, I'm a regular voter, they mean the presidential election, right? They don't mean state senate, they don't mean state rep, they don't mean city council, school board, things like that. But if you can do it, you know, without any inconvenience, then the odds of you participating in local elections goes way up. And Estonia has seen that.
- [27:06]
A
It's great. Well, no longer is America the place to look. The North Star is now Estonia.
- [27:11]
B
Yeah, it was. So I went there this summer, and it was so cool because Tallinn is in many ways this beautifully preserved medieval city, and yet the juxtaposition is with the most digitally connected and advanced society in the world. And so it was a really interesting place.
- [27:26]
A
That's great. Okay, we're gonna change topics to the Radical Rest, which I think is such a fascinating term. I would love you to talk a bit about it. People can read the substack and listen to last week's POD for you to really understand more. But so give me. How did you kind of get.
- [27:45]
B
Yeah, so I. I kind of. I was reading a novel called the Comorant Hunt. It's a spy novel by guy named Michael Idol. A very good novel, but it's a spy novel, right? And he just had a throwaway line from one of the characters saying, you know, the existential debate now was between people who wanted to make institutions better and the people want to replace institutions with themselves. And I thought that was smart, and it kind of stuck with me. And the with themselves part is pretty obvious, right? Trump, Putin xi, we see this all over the world. But I thought about the people make institutions better, and it felt like what he was really doing was saying, oh, if you're a MAGA person, then that's bad. And if you're not, you want make decisions better, and that's good. And that didn't sit right with me. And the reason why is, yes, you know, Trump's total decimation of the rule of law is a huge problem. But when you look at the big institutions in our society, government, media, Wall street, religion, higher ed, they are all very broken, right? And they are all in need of major reform. And the question isn't whether we just keep the status quo or, you know, elect a strong man like Trump. The Question should be, of course, we shouldn't just have, you know, one individual being using all of society to empower and enrich the themselves. But at the same time, the alternative shouldn't be just the status quo of broker institutions. The alternative should be saying, do these institutions work and if they don't work, how do we remake them? And I think oftentimes a lot of institutions across society now exist for the benefit of the institution itself and the people who run them, rather than the actual people in the world. And I think that you've got your extremes on either side who either love the status quo the way it is or want to be able to sort of gain power to enrich themselves. And that could be people on the far right or the far left. But then there's sort of everyone else who is failed by our existing system of higher education, our existing system of religion, our wealth inequality in this country, our failed governing all these different institutions where, you know, trust in them has been steadily declining since the Vietnam War. No one particularly believes in them anymore, but at the same time, we're really not asking the hard questions or acting on them to make the kind of changes to make those institutions work. So, like, for example, you know, am I in the 1%? Yes. But at the same time, I believe that a world where 1% of the country controls 31% of the wealth and the bottom 50% of the country controls just 2.5% of the wealth is not a good thing. It is not fair, it is not sustainable. I think we're just asking for the French Revolution. So the left would then say, okay, great, so the answer is raise taxes by a lot. And you've got this whole referendum in California right now that I'm sure you are familiar with, and you're, your listeners are who are in California, and they just have more government spending, more government programs, but that doesn't really work either, right? So when I was the deputy governor of Illinois, I oversaw the state budget. And what became very clear to me is that if we took in a dollar in taxes from you, by the time that that dollar reached someone in true need, a family didn't have enough money for rent or for food or for the heating pill or whatever it is, you know, at least 20 to 30 cents of that, which is gone because we spent it on program administration, salaries, benefits, pensions, IT facility, all this stuff. And if you just took that dollar and you gave it instead to the person in need, they would have the benefit of the full hundred cents on the dollar. Now that Would not be as good for the people who work in government, because you wouldn't need them. If we're sort of able to solve people. People's problems without having these giant social service programs. And a lot of those workers in government agencies and the unions represent them are big political forces for Democrats. The Democrats would not want to actually see this happen, even though it would achieve their stated goal of helping people in need. But nonetheless, you know, when we think about what functions of government are necessary, there are things that are required that require collective action. Right. Military, roads, hospitals, things like that. Okay, that should be funded by government, that should be run, you know, potentially by government. At the same time, there are a lot of things that, you know, yes, we've built programs and systems, but doesn't mean they work. In New York City, we spend upwards of $40 billion a year in our K through 12 school system, and yet four out of five of our students aren't even ready for college by the time they graduate high school. Like, imagine if you owned a factory. Out of every five products you. You made, four were defective. You would be out of business immediately. Right. And if you managed to sort of stay in business, you would say, okay, I got to remake this whole thing. It's clearly not working. Whereas in New York, all we do is say, oh, 40 billion. Not getting the job done. How about 50? How about 60? And then that takes away either money that could go into the local economy because you're taking out of people's pockets in the form of taxes, or you're taking it away from other things that are needed, whether it's sanitation or police or firefighting, whatever it might be, or religion. Right. You know, in. In the early 1970s, only 5% of Americans didn't affiliate with any sort of organized religion. Today, it's 30%. You know, in something like 1955, 75% of Catholics went to services every week. Today, it's less than half of that. Religious participation has lapsed a lot. And the reason why I would argue is, is religion exists. I think most people say to serve religion, to serve the institution, to serve the clergy, not to serve the interests of the people. I'm Jewish, you're Jewish. And I was thinking about this. So my nephew's bar mitzvah was about a year ago, and I was bored, and I started looking through the matzah, the prayer book. And what I was doing was counting what percentage of the prayers are glorification of God. And the reason I did that is Jews believe in a God that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. If a God is those things, it doesn't have an ego, and it certainly doesn't have a fragile ego. It's not Donald Trump. Right? Which means what is the point of taking half of a service and praising God when a God that we believe it doesn't need it in the first place? Right. That doesn't accomplish anything. And, you know, when I think about why I generally don't go to services on the high holidays, it's because I don't get anything out of it. Right? It's in a language I don't speak. And even if I went to reform services, it's still just sort of rote prayers that don't mean much to me. Whereas, you know, we are a people that, you know, really value education, that are a lot of people who do interesting things in all kinds of different sectors. If you said, instead, this Shabbos, we're going to spend an hour talking about how the Talmud would think about kids use of the Internet, kids use of social media when kids should get cell phones, all of those things that would be relevant and interesting to me and to a lot of people. But when all you're doing is the same stuff over and over again, no wonder the attendance is dwindling. It's not there to serve the people or higher ed. You know, we have all of these notions about what it should be, and it doesn't make any sense. Right? You know, why is it every four years? Why do we need to give teachers lifetime employment? Why do people who have academic expertise in an area then have a say in how a university spends its money or what its policies are outside of their area of expertise? Why do we educate people and then from other countries and then not let them stay and actually work in the things that benefit the U.S. economy that they learn? I mean, they're just. We just keep sort of reinforcing what a college education should be without looking at whether or not it's serving the needs of people is $1.83 trillion collectively held in student debt. And as recently as 2010, a Gallup poll showed that 75% of Americans thought that the value proposition of a college education was worthwhile. In August of 2025, that number fell to 35%. And so Americans have lost faith in the system. So Americans have lost faith in almost all of the major institutions. And yet rather than be willing to think critically about why they're failing and how do we radically restructure them, even if that means that people currently have power, will have less power, the debate is just whether to throw more money at them or less money at them. And that doesn't make any sense. And that just screws over the vast majority of people. So that's why I wrote that piece.
- [36:40]
A
I think it was great. Do you want to just go into a little bit why you came up with the sort of title Radical Rest as opposed to Radical center and.
- [36:48]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's funny, the first draft was Radical Centrism. And then, you know, I didn't quite sit right with me. It just felt like it kind of didn't mean anything. And I have a group of people that I'll send stuff to if I just want an opinion before I publish it. And a couple of the people said, yeah, that just doesn't. They didn't have good alternative. They just didn't quite think that it was a good phrase either. Radical Centrism. And then it just kind of hit me that instead that the radical rest would obviously go what would represent the mainstream most people for whom our institutions are not currently serving them. And that's the rest of us, right? The institutions might serve the people who work in them. Well, they might serve elites, you know, you. Or I might say, because we're in a position to send our kids to college without having to make them borrow money, that sure, why not? Let them spend four years taking liberal arts classes. It's, you know, good enough for them and we can afford it. Fine. But that's a very tiny subset of the American population. Right. So what about everybody else? And when I kept thinking about sort of the vast majority of people who are not served either by having a person like Trump just take institutional power for themselves and used to enrich the power of themselves or institutions that no longer really do what they're supposed to do. That's the rest of us. And so instead of the radical right or the radical left, you know, the thought that popped in my head was, well, how about the radical rest? So I don't know if it's going to catch on or not, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
- [38:19]
A
I like it. I'm going to use it. You know, you said something earlier that I talk about all the time, which is, you know, I think ultimately, if you gave the majority of Americans a kind of a questionnaire or a poll or a test, they would all, for the most part, and I think you're right, 80% of them would probably have the same answers on what they want. They want secure borders, they want healthcare for all people who are working. They want good education. They want. It's just, how do we get there? And then you have that radical extreme. So that. I like the radical rest idea. I will. I'll help you push it out there. Thank you. I feel like it might be the topic of your next book.
- [38:57]
B
Could be, if anyone wants to publish it. Yeah. Well, right now, trying to do something even. Even harder than getting someone to buy a book, which is I'm trying to write a scripted TV show or I'm writing it. The trying part there is easy. The getting it made, as you know, is basically impossible. But I'm still writing it anyway.
- [39:15]
A
Anyway, Bradley, I know you're trying to solve world hunger, you're trying to solve mobile voting. You don't need another equally as challenging topic. Bradley.
- [39:24]
B
Yeah, just a problem. But. But, you know, I had an idea that I liked and I kind of wanted to do something with it. So either way, I like writing so.
- [39:31]
A
Good. Well, that's. As long as you like writing.
- [39:33]
B
Well, I was thinking what I could do with it because, you know, this industry is. Let's assume there's no chance, because TV show. I own a podcast studio. So what if I just hired a bunch of kids from Tisch to do it as like a serial podcast and just take the eight. The eight episodes and do it that way.
- [39:46]
A
By the way, we can table this for later. But, you know, in many ways that's your best idea because, you know, have anything you can have some IP to work off of, you're going to have. Create more value than just having kind of a screenplay more times than not. So that might be my. You're not asking for advice, but I'm going to ask.
- [40:02]
B
No, I would like. I will pick your brain separately on this. Yes.
- [40:05]
A
Okay, now let's jump into a topic that's just a very small thing on the. On the table and a couple minutes to talk about, which is AI.
- [40:12]
B
AI.
- [40:12]
A
You know.
- [40:13]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [40:14]
A
That's like.
- [40:14]
B
We.
- [40:15]
A
We have like 10 minutes left. That's more than enough to cover the entire.
- [40:17]
B
Sure, easy. We'll probably have five minutes to spare.
- [40:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You wrote a daily news piece where you called AI to be beneficial for everyone. If that rings a bell or sounds correct.
- [40:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, I know the piece. Yeah. Actually, it's funny, I didn't write the headline and the editor did and it wasn't the headline I would have chosen, but. But yeah, I think it still captures the fact that we have this Incredible technology that has some incredible potential for good, but a lot of negative externalities for people too. And I think that we have to sort of really be considering both in an intelligent way.
- [40:55]
A
And I saw, I've been talking about this documentary I saw at Sundance this year that'll come out later in March about AI, which is, which is great and looks at all different aspects and all different size, has all the smartest thinkers. But I guess just talk a little bit more about that in the sense, like, where is your head at now on where AI? I mean, you see a lot of companies, you look at a lot of investments. How scared are you about what's coming? Are you cautiously optimistic? There's the doomsayers, there's a utopian side. Where do you sort of live?
- [41:27]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think to me, when we think about AI, we've got to sort of divide it up into some different categories, right. So category one would be, you know, what are the catastrophic harms that AI could cause? I am not in the camp of people that is worried about an army of robots, you know, rising up to subjugate human beings. So. But I do think that there are risks that AI poses to safety or privacy or things like that that we need, you know, a framework in place to protect us against it. But I am not wildly worried about, you know, us all dying because of AI. Then the next category would be more realistic harms caused by AI. So I think there's sort of two categories. One would be job displacement. So anytime there's, you go, a society goes through a major economic shift. The steam engine, the car, the computer, whatever, the train, whatever it might be, it always results long term. Has so far in real economic benefit and growth. It has led to all kinds of new industries that no one at the time could have thought of, but that both led to people's lives being better and easier and ultimately more jobs and more economic activity. That's probably going to be the case here too. But the challenge is, if that's in 20 years and if today lots of people are losing their jobs because they're being displaced by AI, what do you do with those people? How do you help them? One of the reasons that I'm an advocate for universal basic income is I do think that you're have more and more people in need and rather than these giant inefficient government bureaucracies and programs which just giving people money directly to help them withstand this massive transformational economic shift. But you've certainly got to think about how we're going to deal with people who were laid off. Then there's all the other negative externalities too. So that specific column was about data centers and the fact that if every planned data center came online, it would double U.S. energy consumption. And at the same time, bringing new energy supply online is really difficult because we have so many obstacles to permitting and things like that that just laws, supply and demand. If you double demand and supply stays flat, prices double. And people who live near data centers are already seeing their electricity bills go up quite a bit. 30%, 40%, 50%. That doesn't work, right? Nobody who is a regular person, the radical rest, let's call it, is like, oh, I'm happy to pay an extra $400 a year in my energy bill as long as Sam Altman achieves his goal becoming a trillionaire or Jensen Wong or whoever it is. And I don't know how the hyperscalers didn't think about this when they were planning all these data centers and the trillions of dollars of money they were borrowing to build them. But you know, specifically there needs to be regulation. And you're seeing a lot of states take the situation up right now to say data centers can be great, but you and I shouldn't have to subsidize them. They should either be able to have to use more energy efficient chips. And that might not be what Nvidia or ADM makes or intel. And if so, like, that's not my problem. Right? There are plenty of alternative chip makers and I'm investing in some of those right now that are anywhere from 100 to a thousand times more energy efficient. Which means that, you know, AI can be powered without having to impose these extra costs on everyone else. Or you could have on site power generation, micro grid, nuclear, hydrogen cell, you know, fuel turbines or cells or whatever it is that could be used. So how do you make sure that the actual operation of powering and providing AI doesn't impose huge costs on everyone else? That's the next category. The third would be where can AI have really significant societal benefit? I think there are a few areas. One would be medicine and healthcare. We're already seeing lots of advances in healthcare due to AI. And if you think about drug formation, like think about GLP1s, you know, they were invented specifically for diabetics to deal with, helping them reduce the food noise in their brain so that they wouldn't overeat and they can deal with the obesity that help contribute to diabetes. It turned out the GLP1s are kind of this miracle drug that also help with cardiovascular and neurodegenerative and cancer and metabolic and all these other things. And that was a kind of by accident, from what I can tell. So imagine now with AI, you can just pair up every conceivable combination of molecules and say, okay, if I put this one with this one and this one, like what happens? And it very well may be that we're going to discover cures to all kinds of problems simply because we haven't had the ability in the compute before to take all different pieces and put them together in different ways, or climate change. You know, I am not a big believer that things like recycling are going to solve climate. They're fine if you actually do them. Sadly, in New York, where I live, you know, we put stuff in one bin and stuff in another bin and then it all goes in the same landfill anyway. But ultimately, to me, the way that you solve climate change is decarbonization. And that's, you know, plants that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere, store it deep underground, and if there's less carbon in the atmosphere, then the temperature goes down, down, and that's the way you solve it. There's already a carbon capture industry that exists, but it's very nascent, it's very inefficient. I think that AI could figure out how to make that work. It could solve climate change education. If you think about your favorite class in college or high school, whatever it was, it might because the teacher was particularly good teacher, it might be because you enjoyed that topic. But I believe there's a really good chance that we typically like the classes where the teacher's teaching style happened to match our learning style. And it's totally random, right? You know, you got three people with equal intelligence, but one learns by seeing and one by hearing and one by reading. And I think AI could take what a teacher is doing and then translate it into the learning style that best fits each individual student and just make school better and more effective. So there's a lot of stuff where AI could do things better for society. And then the fourth bucket would be how AI could actually make institutions like government work better. So we spend like in New York City right now, we've got about a $7 billion budget deficit and. Right. You know, we've got about 30 to 40,000 employees here that perform middle management functions, procurement compliance, data management, facilities management, license permitting, stuff like that. AI can do all of that. And you could save billions and billions of dollars that could then either be used for programs like expanded child care or to reduce taxes or frontline services or whatever it is. I had hoped that's what Doge was going to be. Instead, it was a total disaster. But when I first got announced, I'm like, okay, great. Elon understands AI. Let's figure out how to bring AI into government and we could give people a much better product. So those are the ways that I think about it kind of holistically, if that makes sense.
- [48:52]
A
That's great. And, you know, I think you're going to really appreciate this documentary. It's called the AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptomist. And it's by Daniel Rohr and Charlie Tyrell. Daniel did the Navalny doc, but it really looks at, you know, the Apocalypse Eye, where society's ending in 10 years, and then the utopian side where it's going to solve climate change and every disease and world hunger and all these things. And it's really woven through a really smart way. Come out later in March.
- [49:21]
B
Okay, great.
- [49:24]
A
You know, and you know, you're talking a little more specifically about it, I think, and Sam Harris talks about this, but like, people are sort of talking around the job loss issue in the sense that we're just going to wipe out a significant number of the workforce. And people keep saying, you know, we're going to have to figure out ideas of how we're going to solve for that. But it doesn't seem to be at the forefront of most people's conversation on a daily basis. Ubi, which my friend Michael Tubbs has been a real focus on. Michael, you know, listening to you talk about, I mean, that's definitely one of the ways that make a lot of sense and it's proven through a lot of stuff, studies and actual uses of it. It's ubi, people don't waste the money. More times than not, it's very rare.
- [50:09]
B
Yeah.
- [50:10]
A
Is that your mind right now? Is that kind of the.
- [50:14]
B
The. I think so. And by the way, just give credit, words too. This is what Andrew Yang was talking about 10 years ago, 15 years, like, like his book the War on Normal People. And I'm obviously a friend of Andrews and a fan of his, but, you know, saw this coming. He would talk about automation, which is what. Is what AI has become. But. But nonetheless, I think that's right. And to put a finer point on it, about. In December, I was in a meeting with a member of Congress and about eight early stage venture capitalists, including your dad, and I asked the member of Congress, like, okay, we're going to have all this job displacement. What are we going to do? And he said, and I knew he was going to say this worker training, which is always the answer that they have, right? So then I turned to all the VCs in the room and I said, okay, guys, we are prominent New York early stage venture capitalists. Anybody should know what the industries of the future are, it's us, right? Tell me what we're training them in. Nobody had an answer, not one. And these are really accomplished, smart people. So yeah, it's a problem because you can take a long lens of history and see how it works out collectively for the benefit of society over a long period of time. But when you're caught in the middle of it, the people who are losing their jobs, they don't care that be silently net positive in 30 years. They care about putting food on their table to feed their kids. And so yeah, we're going to have to do something, something on this. And to me UBI is the most logical solution.
- [51:40]
A
Yeah, you're definitely helping me getting to that place. Okay, last sort of big topic, but we have a couple minutes left. So this will have maybe to do a part two. You know, there's, there's a lot of focus on the sort of 1%, the billionaire class and you know, and why they need to be doing more and not bending the Trump and so on and so forth. You know, and the pushback a lot of times is, you know, ultimately these CEOs of public companies, they have one person they're serving and that's the shareholder and that's the bottom line and that is the stock price. And if that's going to help their stock price, they are. And I did some research like Henry Ford was actually sued potentially at one point about like not doing something related to kind of what was best for the stock price or for the shareholder. It could be slightly off, but. But I guess the question is, when you're a thinker, you did a great job of your 50 rules for your 50th birthday, which I love, which is a great substack you did. Where do you come out on that? You know, is your job, is the job of these CEOs to do what's going to form a more perfect union, which relates to the good of the whole society, or is their job to be doing what's best for their shareholder?
- [52:56]
B
Yeah, I mean I believe that CEOs do have a legal fiduciary duty to these shareholders to maximize gain. So that is sort of the clear answer, however, it's more complicated than that. Which means on any given decision. So say you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're Meta. You know that from an evolutionary standpoint, human beings have a negativity bias, because that's how when you see a lion, you go the other way. When you smell gas, you leave the house, whatever it is. And when you and I are presented with two different types of headlines in social media, our instinct as a human is to click on the negative headline. And Meta makes their money on clicks. The more clicks, the more revenue they make. It's a direct correlation. And so if you are one of those companies, you are incentivized to show people the most toxic content possible, because that's what makes you the most money. And the way you justify it is to say, this is my obligation legally to my shareholders. And even when there's an epidemic of teenage suicide, you bullshit your way around it and rationalize and ignore it by using the fiduciary standard as, as your excuse. And then the real question becomes short term gain versus long term gain. So in the short term, Meta is clearly advantaged by having the most toxic content, regardless of the societal consequences of it. Long term, if it becomes a company that everybody despises, then is it in their interest? So, for example, Australia passed a ban on all social media for people under the age of 16 last year. Now, it's only a country of like 23 million people or something, so it's not that big a deal. But fundamentally, the reason why that bill had so much support and 88% of parents supported it is because people, no one believed that Meta was looking out for anything other than the share price and Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth. And so you can choose to ignore the societal consequences of your actions and justify them based on fiduciary duty, but you run the risk that you might create a pathway for regulation that is far more economically harmful than had you just made a more responsible choice in the first place. And so to me, it's still an economic question, but it's a question of short term versus long term. Even if you go back to the AI question, you had all of these hyperscalers announcing $500 billion spent on data centers here and a trillion here and all of these things. And they, I think it was long term, short term profiteering disguised as long term thinking. They knew that when it looks like, oh, we're thinking out ahead for our niece 20 years from now, the market rewards that. So their share Price went up, their valuations went up whenever it was, but at the same time they were really doing all of it, saddling their companies with totally unmanageable debt in order for the people who work there today to make more money and cash out and higher share prices. So, you know, I do believe that capitalism means that, you know, you have a duty to generate the best returns for your shareholders, but that doesn't mean generate the best returns today at the expense of the future. And I think that we live in a society that broadly speaking, whether it's business or government or anything else, has really moved much towards, more towards a zero sum mentality where people just look at it as it's me versus everyone else and it's everyone for themselves. And my only goal in life is to accumulate as much status as often as I can. And if I do better than someone else, that's even better. And you know, there's two problems. I'm thinking, one, it's a recipe for the destruction of any society because you know, societies only work when people work together. You know, if you go all the way back, say 60 to 100,000 years ago, the Neanderthals weren't only bigger and stronger, they were smarter. The problem was that they couldn't work together whereas the dumber, weaker Homo sapiens could. And the ability to cooperate and sacrifice some of your immediate short term need for the greater good ultimately resulted in one species winning out. There were more than one species of humans originally. Same thing is true now, where if you only engage in short term zero sum thinking, you are sort of guaranteeing signing the death warrant for society as a whole, for your country or whatever it is as a whole. But two, it's not going to make you happy. There's this massive misconception in our society that the path to happiness is as much status and as much money and as much stuff as you can get. And all the research on happiness science, behavioral economics shows that's not true. There are only two things that are proven to increase human happiness on a sustained basis. Assuming that you have a place to live and you have food and you have the very basics, and that's relationships that have unconditional love and support and things that you do that give you meaning and purpose. It could be your work, it could be your faith, it could be your hobbies, but something. And at the end of the day, if you can structure your life around trying to maximize the benefit of those two things, your chance of being happy is so much greater than you're like, oh, I've got the biggest house in S. Southampton, or I've got three Ferraris and so on. The guy only has one or whatever it is. That shit doesn't work. There's a thing called the hedonic treadmill, which is every time that you buy something, yes, you get a dopamine hit and you feel really good for a short period of time, but it passes. And then every time the next one has to be that much bigger to produce the same doping. It's like being an addict of anything and it doesn't work. So the hedonic treadmill is undefeated. And so I think in many ways the question about fiduciary duty to shareholders gets into a longer term question of what are we solving for and why. And I think that we have, unfortunately, over the past 50 or 60 years, had a society that has prized individualism to the point where, yes, there are more rights and that's a really good thing, but at the same time, people seem far less obligated and responsible for the collective good of society. And you know, when you look at the world happiness report, even though we are the richest and most abundant country in the history of the world, in the last report, the U.S. ranked 24th, and for people under the age of 30, we were 62nd. Right. So think about it. We're the best place to live. Everyone wants to be here. And yet 61 other countries, young people said they were happier than they are here. Why? Because I think our entire formula for happiness is off. And we are giving people all the wrong lessons, teaching them all of the wrong lessons, and we're dooming our kids.
- [59:39]
A
Well, Bradley, you do not have to get up every morning and do what you do. So I thank you. You laid something out there for me that I think is really important, which is this seems so simple, but this idea that, that you can do something, invest their fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. If ultimately you're just trying to create a more a wealthier society that ultimately can buy your products and use your products down in the long term, right? Like that's something that's such a simple thing and who knows if it's totally true, but if ultimately all the, if you know, Apple is ultimately doing what's best for the greater good of the society, that's ultimately uplifting them, creating more wealth for everybody, that's ultimately be more app.
- [60:22]
B
Also, if you're, if you're Tim Cook, how much money do you need right at the end of the day, like, look, maybe Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath, but assuming he's not, how could you feel good about yourself knowing what your product does to kids? Right. So Whether he has 100 billion or 200 billion or 300 billion, what's the difference? It's the same amount of money, effectively, at the end of the. You can't spend it either way. And so, you know, when you say, I don't have to do what I do, I would disagree in that I would argue that a lot of the things that I do that are considered good, whether it's voting or school meals or bookstore or whatever else, are things that selfishly maximize my happiness. And I try to make choices. And what I have found is when I use my resources and my time and my influence to further the things that I think that matter, that has the greatest ROI for me in terms of my own personal happiness. Happiness, and therefore doing good is selfish in a good way because it ultimately makes the person doing it happier than they would be otherwise.
- [61:22]
A
Yeah, I think that's. That's. That's well said. Well, keep doing what you're doing. I. I can't wait to come to your store at bookstore, PNT Netwear. If you're in New York, take advantage of it. We didn't get a chance to talk about solving hunger. Your organization, their nonprofits focus on hunger, so I will need to have you come back.
- [61:43]
B
I will gladly come back anytime.
- [61:45]
A
Thank you very much.
- [61:47]
B
Great to speak to you, Jamie. Thanks again. I appreciate it.