TED Intersections: How will new tech shape your life? A roboticist and a political strategist answer | Bradley Tusk and Ali Kashani

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

TED Talks Daily: TED Intersections

Episode: How will new tech shape your life? A roboticist and a political strategist answer
Guests: Bradley Tusk (Venture Capitalist & Political Strategist), Ali Kashani (Roboticist & AI Specialist)
Date: September 13, 2025

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Main Theme Overview

This episode explores the intersection of technological innovation and policy—how advances such as AI, robotics, and mobile voting are poised to profoundly shape our lives. Bradley Tusk brings a political strategy perspective, focusing on regulation, power, and civic engagement, while Ali Kashani, a leader in robotics, discusses the social and practical impact of autonomous delivery robots, AI breakthroughs, and future cities. Their unscripted conversation centers on:

• The relationship between tech innovation and regulation
• The public’s adaptation to new technologies
• The potential for technology to empower the majority and fix political misalignments
• The societal optimism and challenges that come as a result

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Public Adaptation and Perception of Robots (03:00–05:17)

• Public’s Reaction: Robots, especially autonomous delivery ones, are quickly accepted by most people after initial curiosity. Kids especially are delighted, and negative reactions occur more online than in-person.

  • Ali Kashani: “We’ve designed them to be friendly and fun... the most surprising is people just get used to them so fast... that actually surprised me the most.” (03:42)
  • Bradley Tusk: Shares anecdote about thanking autonomous cars, demonstrating how quickly politeness and familiarity set in with new tech. (04:09)

• Concerns About Displacement: There is ongoing concern (primarily voiced online) about robots replacing human jobs, but in physical communities, reactions are overwhelmingly positive.

  • Ali Kashani: “Good news is that in person, when you see the robot, 99.9% of the time, the reaction is really, really positive.” (05:03)

2. Regulation vs. Innovation: The Political Challenge (05:17–09:56)

• Regulatory Lag: Regulation trails innovation, as lawmakers can’t anticipate new technologies until they appear; “regulatory capture” then arises when incumbents use regulation to block newcomers.
  • Bradley Tusk: “Regulation, by definition, is always going to lag innovation... innovators have a hard time understanding regulators, and vice versa.” (06:45)
• Real-World Case Studies:
  • Uber: Taxi industry tried to use regulations to block ride-hailing.
  • Electric scooters: Reasonable questions were raised due to lack of precedents (e.g., where can they operate?)
• Path Forward: Bridging gaps through dialogue, helping both sides realize their goals are often aligned.

3. Power, Democracy, and Mobile Voting (09:56–13:36)

• Power Dynamics: Those currently in power are incentivized to keep participation low; innovation often faces institutional pushback.

  • Bradley Tusk: “People in power don’t like making it easier for others to gain power.” (03:00, 11:25)

• Mobile Voting Initiative:

  • Tusk describes his philanthropic initiative to build an open-source, secure mobile voting platform, aiming to boost turnout and break polarization.
  • Open source is critical for transparency and public trust.
    • Bradley Tusk: “It has to be auditable, it has to be verifiable, which means it has to be open source.” (13:36)

• Broader Alignment: Higher turnout creates more alignment between public will, politician incentives, and innovator solutions.

4. Vision: How Tech Could Radically Improve Daily Life (14:33–19:53)

• Optimism for the Future:

  • AI and robotics will create massive, positive transformations in education, medicine, and urban design.
    • Ali Kashani: “We've turned silicon into intelligence, which means everything around us is going to have that intelligence.” (15:10)
    • Bradley Tusk: “If you could use AI to teach things to everyone's individualized learning style, the efficacy of education would be exponentially greater.” (16:03)

• City Design and Mobility:

  • Expect major changes as “the car is unbundled”—a mix of autonomous delivery robots, drones, and smarter micro-mobility could reshape urban space, traffic, and daily logistics.
    • Ali Kashani: “I have this thesis, that we are about to unbundle the car.” (17:09)

• Robots & Drones Working Together:

  • Delivery robots and drones are often complementary: robots do short distances, drones handle long distances (often in a seamless handoff).
    • Ali Kashani: “The only thing cooler than robots is robots and drones.” (19:53)

5. Social Trust, Vandalism, and Media Negativity (20:38–25:29)

• Human Behavior Toward Tech: Fears about vandalism are common, but incidents are rare. There is a mismatch between fears and reality, possibly fueled by negative narratives in media and pop culture.

  • Ali Kashani: “I've always noticed we have such a low opinion of ourselves for some reason... maybe it's Hollywood.” (21:03)

• Social Media’s Influence:

  • Social media amplifies negativity, incentivized by business models that profit from outrage.
    • Bradley Tusk: “Social media is almost the unhappiness machine... your life seems inadequate and the world seems terrible.” (23:34)

• Section 230 and Political Inertia:

  • U.S. internet law shields platforms, letting them avoid liability for toxic or false content. Despite broad agreement on its problems, lobbying and low voter turnout stifle meaningful change.

6. Reasons for Optimism & Closing Reflections (25:42–27:28)

• System of Experimentation: Despite challenges, the speakers find hope in both people and the capacity of technology to keep improving lives.
  • Ali Kashani: “We have an incredible system of experimentation in place for those people that are trying absolutely everything under the sun to find all these interesting ways.” (26:53)
  • Bradley Tusk: “I do believe in the underlying nature of people. Two, I believe in the underlying nature of technology to make people's lives better.” (25:44)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Human Adaptation to Robots
  • Ali Kashani: “People just get used to them so fast... to me is a really good sign.” (03:54)
• On Mobile Voting & Power
  • Bradley Tusk: “People in power don’t like making it easier for others to gain power.” (11:25)
• On the Need for Open Source in Public Tech
  • Bradley Tusk: “It has to be auditable, it has to be verifiable, which means it has to be open source.” (13:36)
• On AI as a Discovery
  • Ali Kashani: “It's not an invention, it is a discovery... we've turned silicon into intelligence.” (15:10)
• On Social Media
  • Bradley Tusk: “Social media is almost the unhappiness machine… your life seems inadequate and the world seems terrible.” (23:34)
• On Tech’s Potential for Good
  • Bradley Tusk: “Technology can make our lives better… I think those people ultimately win.” (25:44)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:00–05:17 – Public reactions to robots; adaptation and social impact
• 05:17–09:56 – Regulation, political barriers, and innovation; Uber & scooter examples
• 09:56–13:36 – Mobile voting, democracy, and the importance of open source
• 14:33–19:53 – The future: AI in education, medicine, city design; robots+ drones
• 20:38–25:29 – Myths about vandalism, social trust vs. media representation, the role of Section 230
• 25:42–27:28 – Optimism, innovation culture, and final thoughts

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Conclusion

Bradley Tusk and Ali Kashani deliver an insightful, hopeful, and candid discussion exploring how technology—when developed in dialogue with policymakers and earnestly shaped for public good—has the potential to solve entrenched problems in politics and society. Through real-world anecdotes, systemic analysis, and imagined futures, they challenge listeners to see regulation and innovation as necessary partners, to trust in society's ability to adapt, and to energize optimism grounded in collective experimentation.

For those who haven't listened:
This conversation will leave you both more informed about the real frictions (and friendships) between tech and politics, and more hopeful about the untapped potential of fresh ideas—whether rolling down your street or in the palm of your hand.

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Transcript

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[TED Talks Daily Host (Elise Hu)]

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[Bradley Tusk]

People in power don't like making it easier for others to gain power. And by definition, if we're going to triple or quadruple the size of the electorate, people who know how to win in this current environment are not going to like that. And what's the reaction? Like, I've seen your robots and I always think they're kind of cute. Right? Like, is that the normal reaction or are there people who are abusive to them? Like, what's. Obviously it creates an impression on human beings.

[Ali Kashani]

You know, we've designed them to be. To be friendly and fun. Because for every customer we serve, there's 100 bystanders that have to see the robot first as it's getting.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right.

[Ali Kashani]

The most surprising is people just get used to them so fast that that actually surprised me the most. When I go down to Los Angeles, for example, every now and then and see this magical box moving around and people are just on their phones and just in different. Which to me is a really good sign. It just says how quickly we can.

[Bradley Tusk]

Get used to it. Yeah, you adapt. I remember. So I was in LA over Christmas and I love the Waymos. Cause I live in New York and we don't have them. And. And the first half a dozen times I got out, I thanked the Waymo. And then I'm like, wait, I'm just saying thank you to myself. And by like the seventh time, I just got out of the car. Yeah, right. So you definitely do adapt.

[Ali Kashani]

I think it's nice to be polite to robots.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah. I wonder. Well, you can tell me if they appreciate it or not.

[Ali Kashani]

I think so. I think so. I like to think that. Yeah.

[Bradley Tusk]

And what about the flip side of it? So do you have people saying, hey, human beings need jobs and you're putting them out of work?

[Ali Kashani]

I think that's like human nature.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah.

[Ali Kashani]

Funny enough, most negative reactions I see are online, not in person. People who have seen the robots actually feel fairly positively about them. Kids love robots. It's really fun to see their interactions. They sometimes get their parents to pull over and they go, wanna see the robot and play with it, get in its way. But there are always going to be, I think this kind of initial fear and concerns, and some of them are absolutely valid, by the way. I don't question it. But good news is that in person, when you see the robot, 99.9% of the time, the reaction is really, really positive.

[Bradley Tusk]

And what do you need to get a city to Let you do this? Is it legal until they tell you to stop? Or do you proactively need to create a regulation or a law?

[Ali Kashani]

Yeah, actually, I think this is an area. Maybe the work you do can help us. But by default, in the US the robots are allowed to operate in cities unless they have food, any restrictions, which is actually quite rare. We found a lot of positive momentum with them too, because again, whether you care about sustainability or your local businesses or safety, this really checks a lot of those boxes. But unfortunately, every now and then, there is someone, some politician somewhere who wants to rally around an idea, and they have done this. Which kind of brings me to the question I asked for you. One of the biggest challenges that I found in our work is actually the political system.

[Bradley Tusk]

Sure.

[Ali Kashani]

Whether it's maybe incompetence or instability or corruption and cronism, or for all these reasons, we find ourselves challenged in ways that we shouldn't probably be. Like, this shouldn't be the job of the innovators to be fighting these systems. And I'm kind of wondering. I would love to actually first hear your version of your story. I listened to your talk. It's fantastic. I love what you're working on. I grew up in Iran, so I've seen the other side of broken democracy. So the work you do, how important it is, and how do you think it can actually help with situations like this where misalignment exists?

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah. So I'm gonna work backwards. So in terms of the specific what you're talking about, regulation, by definition, is always gonna lag innovation, because until you, the innovator, think of the idea and then build it and go through all the pain of doing that, they don't know that it exists or what issues need to be regulated around it. So to a certain extent, it's kind of the natural order of things. But then you get into a problem of regulatory capture, where the same people who are supposed to be industries regulated by government end up using government to stop innovation and stop new entrants into the marketplace. And who that really hurts are consumers. Right. And so ultimately, it really comes down to a question of one, what are the reasonable regulations? So, for example, when I ran the campaigns to legalize Uber, it was all regulatory capture in the sense that the rules governing how a hired car worked, they already existed. We didn't need different rules. Right. What the taxi industry tried to do is say, well, if you're using an iPhone to calculate distance, or if you're being called summoned for a ride this way, that's not okay, but those were all just attempts to use regulation to drive us out of the market. Once we overcame that, the actual regulatory structure was pretty simple. Fast forward probably eight years later to Bird and to scooters, another sort of very local transportation mobility issue. But there wasn't a clear set of rules of what you would do with electric scooters. Should they be on the street, on the sidewalk, in bike lanes? Where can they be docked? What should charging be like? Should you need a helmet? Should there be insurance? And those, to a certain extent, in my view, were reasonable questions. So I think part of it is there's always a disconnect, to be honest, between the innovator who's saying, I'm doing something really important and great for society, get out of my way, and the regulator who's saying, well, it's my job to look after the public good and the safety and everything else. And most of the time, no one's actually corrupt. Sometimes they are, but most of the time it's that everyone has their perspective. And like everything in life, they have a hard time understanding the other's perspective. And so there's this cognitive dissonance between the two. A lot of my job is really to try to like, basically help them understand. Like, look, guys, you don't really disagree on that much, so let's agree on what we can. Maybe we'll have to fight a little bit of this out, and that's how it works. And so there are definitely solutions to most of it. But the first question you really asked is kind of basically, why am I here at ted? And it's. I was lucky to be able to give a talk today on mobile voting. And so we have been building our own mobile voting technology over the last four years that we're doing, just about done with. By the time this airs, we probably will have already finished it and made it public. And it's gonna be free and open source to anyone who wants to use it. And my hope is that we can then legalize it and everyone watching this can vote in elections on their phones if we can get turnout up. And that combats all the polarization of the system and moves things to the middle.

[Ali Kashani]

So I guess this is where the two concepts kind of connect, which is if you can empower that 80% rather than the 10% super polarized, either they're ideologues or the most angry, that actually is going to create more alignment between politicians who obviously care about the voter, whoever votes, and innovators who are trying to create Value. But a lot of times are battling well, ironically.

[Bradley Tusk]

So innovators have to find product market fit. So as a venture capitalist, that's really a big part of what I'm looking for, which is, okay, one, do I think this is a good idea? Two, do I think Ali or whoever the founder is is capable of executing? And then three, is the public gonna want it? Right. And if those three things are true, the company usually succeeds. Right. Ironically, founders have to find much broader product market fit than politicians because only 10% of us vote in primaries, but 100% of us buy stuff. Right. And so as a result, if voting turnout went up, almost by definition, it would start to align towards the market. And then once those two things are aligned, it's a lot easier to get to rational choices around how to regulate it.

[Ali Kashani]

Yeah, that really excites me. It's very cool. I have an interesting question for you, Please. When you started, what did you think were the challenges? And then what did they actually turn out to be?

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah, that's a great question. So when I started, the biggest challenge then is still what it is today, which is people in power don't like making it easier for others to gain power. And by definition, if we're going to triple or quadruple the size of the electorate, people who know how to win in this current environment are not going to like that. And the only way we're going to overcome that is with a giant grassroots movement where hopefully millions of people will tell their city council members and their elected officials, I want this thing, and we're able to push it through anyway. So that's the one that I think kind of remains a challenge. But ultimately, this is really a behavioral economics experiment in many ways. Right. There's sort of two things I'm betting on. One, if you put things on people's phones, they're gonna do it. I think everything you and I have learned in our career says the answer to that is yes. The second, if you change the inputs, if you change the political incentives, you will change the policy outputs, because politicians just want to get reelected and will behave rationally in order to do so. Everything that I've done in my career has also told me yes. And so we're really seeing if those two things are the case. I will say building the technology was really hard and really expensive. I've spent about $20 million of my own money on this so far. It's totally philanthropic and, you know, but for us, the view was it's gotta be right. And even if that Means it costs me more money, even if that means it takes longer. Cause I thought we'd be done with this a couple of years ago, to be honest. But it's gotta be perfect. Because everyone who doesn't want it, they can't say publicly that they don't want more people to vote. They know that they have to come up with another excuse, right? So the excuse gonna be, it's not safe, it can't work. Technically impossible. And if I gave them a product that it didn't work, I'd be dead in the water. And so we have just been working, just iterating forever and testing and everything else to get to a point where we've built a system that we think is incredibly secure and incredibly easy to use. And we'll stand up to the critics, and we'll have our share of critics for sure.

[Ali Kashani]

And you mentioned open source. I'm assuming that's a really important part of it.

[Bradley Tusk]

It is. And one of the reasons that I felt that this needed to be done philanthropically is in order for I think the public to have confidence in the validity of an election done on your phone. And to be clear, it's just meant to be one additional way to vote. It's not replacing voting by mail or person or anything else. But it has to be auditable, it has to be verifiable, which means it has to be open source. And my fear was an election company, and they do exist, isn't gonna invest eight figures of their own money and then just give away the IP to everybody else. And I understand that. I'm in business too, I get that. But as from a philanthropic standpoint, I was lucky enough that I could afford to do that. And I think the fact that it's open source does generate. I may even see in this conference where you have just lots of technically sophisticated people. And the reaction to what I'm doing because it's open source is so much friendlier than I think if it had been just like another guy with another product that he's trying to sell.

[Ali Kashani]

Excellent.

[Bradley Tusk]

So paint me a vision of the future. Think ahead, assume the regulatory stuff is whatever you want it to be, just for sake of this argument. And if everything goes perfectly, what do our lives look like and in what ways are they better?

[Ali Kashani]

I am so incredibly optimistic and excited.

[Bradley Tusk]

Good.

[Ali Kashani]

For a number of reasons. Actually, I'll start with one. Just being at a place like this, talking to folks like yourself. You explained why this project is open source, which may not have been possible through a normal for Profit, effort. But people like yourself exist. And in fact, most CEOs that I know are really thoughtful stewards in this moment. So that's one thing that makes me excited, of course. The other one is the technology itself. And what I like to say is this AI, this large language model, it's not a discovery, it's not an invention, it is a discovery. We figured out how to put data together in a way that suddenly this magic happens and it's doing things we didn't even expect. And if you think about it, discoveries always have much bigger impacts beyond what we even thought initially. So we've turned silicon into intelligence, which means everything around us is going to have that intelligence. So starting with one of actually my favorite TED talks of all time was Salman Khan talking about tutors in every kid's pockets. The Twitter that the richest person cannot buy is now almost free. That any child anywhere in the world can actually teach.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right. And I don't know if you teach, but I do. And my students are smart. It's Columbia Business School. And yet despite that, everyone has a different learning style. Right. And someone learns from reading and someone learns from writing and someone from listening and someone from doing. And as a teacher, even with really bright kids, you still kind of have to teach to the lowest common denominator. Right. And if you could instead use AI to sort of teach things to everyone's individualized learning style, I just think the efficacy of education would be exponentially greater.

[Ali Kashani]

Yeah. So that's, that's education.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah.

[Ali Kashani]

In medicine. We listened to a talk today about these rare diseases and existing medication that can actually cure them.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yep.

[Ali Kashani]

But there's like millions of combinations. How are you going to check every single one of them? But guess what? AI is going to make that so much easier. Again, they're scaling intelligence and you can cure, I think they said 1 out of 10 of us, our children are gonna experience one of these rare diseases for which there is no medication. And the process of coming up with one would be so expensive. So again, don't get solved.

[Bradley Tusk]

So, education, healthcare, what else?

[Ali Kashani]

And I guess coming into the physical world, I have this thesis that we are about to unbundle the car. Okay, so take it apart into. We basically made this monster of a machine that's by the way, getting bigger and more dangerous. Unfortunately, we've started reversing the trend around safety. And if you could have again, a shopping cart sized robot, do the last mile deliveries have a drone? That does. The longer distance deliveries have autonomous vehicles for the appropriate applications for them. Even scooters. One of the challenges with scooters has been you have to bring them to people at the right time. If you do, there would be more adoption, but the scooters can't move by themselves right now. What if they could by making them autonomous? So I think removing those cars off the road is one of the biggest, most interesting things, because our city is gonna change. Imagine how our cities changed when cars were first introduced.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right.

[Ali Kashani]

Like, that's the kind of scale of change that I expect to see in cities. Again, for the better, by the way.

[Bradley Tusk]

I'll even just say, as someone who lives in Manhattan in the congestion pricing zone since January 2, whenever it kicked in. There's a difference. Right. And that's a relatively minor change. Right. That's just a minor tax policy designed to disincentivize certain amounts of consumer driver behavior at certain times. Right. Like, that's pretty low level. And yet I experience it and I benefit from it and I see it. So now, one thing I've always wondered about is how you kind of the declination between drones and robots when it comes to delivery. Right. And the way I think about it in my head, but I don't know if this is right at all. Would be suburban and rural areas. Drones make a lot of sense. High density urban areas, drones would be really hard. And that's where robots come in. Is that a fair way to think about it?

[Ali Kashani]

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, they may even work together.

[Bradley Tusk]

Okay.

[Ali Kashani]

So we're doing this program Pilots, actually, with Wing, which is the subsidiary of Alphabet. And the idea is drones work great when they're going longer distances into less populated areas. But a lot of goods originate in highly populated areas like restaurants. But drones need some real estate to get to the restaurant.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yes.

[Ali Kashani]

How do you solve that? How does the drone actually get the food when most restaurants don't have the real state? Also, drone can't have noise. There are other challenges. Well, we actually have our robots pick up the food and hand it over just like a couple of blocks away, maybe in an empty parking lot, to the drone, automatically to the drone. And the drone would actually go completely. These are all very complimentary. Yeah, it's very cool. The only thing cooler than robots is robots and drones.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right. Together. Yeah.

[Ali Kashani]

And I'm actually curious, what do you think your system would have? What kind of impact in other countries? We've talked about the U.S. yeah.

[Bradley Tusk]

So good news is we want this. Is anyone's welcome to use this? I'm actually in Estonia and England next month about it. I'm in Israel the following month about it. So I would be thrilled to see any country adopt this. Overall, unless there's compulsory voting like Australia, voter turnout is never as good as it should be. So always, if you take our underlying agreement that more turnout leads to more democracy, better outcomes, more alignment with the market and everything else, you would see that everywhere, you know that.

[Ali Kashani]

What's really interesting is the most common question I get about robots is about vandalism to the point that I get the question more and then it happens.

[Bradley Tusk]

I could see that. And so what's the real answer?

[Ali Kashani]

The real answer is it doesn't happen as often as people ask me the question, like, robots can complete deliveries at a better reliability rate than actually human career is right now. And that like a small percentage of failure includes vandalism and everything else that could go wrong.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right.

[Ali Kashani]

So I've always had noticed this phenomenon that we have such a low opinion of ourselves for some reason, and I don't know where that comes from. Maybe it's Hollywood. Every apocalyptic movie, you know, people are behaving the worst possible way. I remember when I first moved to Canada and there was some issue with the water, so everybody had to go get water from the store rather than like from the pipes. And people were so kind. But when you see that in the movie.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right, they're all killing each other.

[Ali Kashani]

Exactly. I'm like, I don't know where this gap comes from, but we definitely have a lower opinion of ourselves.

[Bradley Tusk]

I would argue social media is the culprit of a lot of this. Right. Because we have this mechanism that seems to bring out the absolute worst in people. And then the regulations are. This is a case where there's not nearly, in my view, enough regulation around innovation. Because as I understand it, human beings have an inherent negativity bias because it's literally what makes us leave the house when we smell gas. It's what went back in the old days. If we saw a lion, you walked in the other direction. Right. Like, you have to have it to survive. But then it manifests itself in lots of different ways. And one of the ways it manifests itself is if you have two headlines to click on and there's endless AB testing showing this, you're going to most likely click on the negative headline. And you know who knows that? Mark Zuckerberg. You know who knows that? Elon Musk. You know who knows that? Bytedance. So all of the people that are on these platforms, if all of the money they make is basically just based on clicks which is 99% of their business models, then they are perversely incentivized to push the most toxic content towards people. And so we are seeing the worst stuff. And so if you think about it many ways, social media is almost the unhappiness machine because it does two things. One, it shows you how your real life is inadequate compared to everyone else's fake life, so you feel bad about yourself. Two, everything bad happening everywhere in the world is thrown at you at once, so your life seems inadequate and the world seems terrible. And so of course you develop these sort of negative sentiments and views about humanity and everything else. And so I would argue this is a case where you could have regulation. This may be getting too granular, but do you know what section 230 is?

[Ali Kashani]

Yes.

[Bradley Tusk]

Right. So for the viewers and listeners, in 1996, Congress passed a law called the Communications Decency act and they had a provision in there called section230 that said that Internet platforms are not liable for the content posted by its users. And in 1996 that made a lot of sense, right, because the Internet was just barely happening and it needed to get off the ground. But what they couldn't have envisioned back then was social media and all these other things and they never updated the law. And as a result, the same responsibilities that a normal media company has to meet, where if they were to defame you in some way, you could sue them. Right? Or even among individuals, we have legal obligations, they don't have any at all. So you're saying to these companies, you can make as much more money by showing people toxic stuff and they can't sue you, you can't get in trouble for it. What do you expect them to do, right? And by the way, to just bring this back to mobile voting right now. It's not that politicians don't understand that they need to repeal Section 230. In fact, in the 2020 election, ironically, Trump and Biden both had it in their platforms. The problem is, in a world of 10% turnout in congressional races, the meta lobbyists walk around the halls of the Capitol and say, hey, you know, section 230, I heard you might be for repealing it. Be real ashamed if someone ran against you next time and had a $5 million check from us. And everyone's like, well, I don't want to lose my election, so I won't do it. And as a result it prevents change. And that is not just sort of this negative sentiment, but we see a massive rise in self harm, massive rise in cyberbullying massive rise in teenage suicide. Like, all these really terrible outcomes. And so it all gets back to, like, we need a government that is working in the interests of people. And what people want is to be heard. What people want is to be able to get things done and find reasonable compromises. And they want to be able to take advantage of technologies and ideas that will make their lives easier and better and more fun. And fundamentally, that's what we should be.

[Ali Kashani]

Working towards, in my view, empowering the 80%. Like, we keep coming back to that. Yes, like getting them to actually be the reason why politicians do things, not the extreme ends. So I guess what makes you optimistic? We've talked about a lot of problems.

[Bradley Tusk]

Yeah.

[Ali Kashani]

Like, what are you looking for?

[Bradley Tusk]

Well, I think a few things. I think, one is I do believe in the underlying nature of people. Two, I believe in the underlying nature of technology to make people's lives better. And so while I do believe, for example, that we do need regulation to deal with certain negative manifestations of AI surveillance, for example, the drug development, one thing we didn't talk about yet would be energy. The way to me that you solve the climate crisis is AI figuring out carbon capture education. So there are so many ways that technology can make our lives better. I think the inherent nature of people. And then I go to a conference like ted, and it's hard not to be inspired by it because all of the speakers, and by the way, not just the speakers, just anyone, even randomly, I've sat down next to someone and we've struck up a conversation. You have all these really smart people. And I think the same thing applies for people watching this and who are just engaged in the TED content, who want to make the world better, are working on specific tangible ideas to make the world better, dedicating their money, their lives, their resources, their reputations to making it better. And I think those people ultimately win.

[Ali Kashani]

Agreed. We have an incredible system of experimentation in place for those people that are trying absolutely everything under the sun to find all these interesting ways. Like, our idea of robots was not very popular when we first started, but now we're getting to see the results and it's getting more popular. I'm sure you probably felt that way at the beginning of, oh, voting on your phone, and then everybody's complaining about these voting machines and like, you know, but the fact that all these people are out there trying different things and, you know, eventually some of these ideas actually work and have such material impact.

[Bradley Tusk]

All right, Ali, thank you.

[Ali Kashani]

Thank you so much.

[TED Talks Daily Host (Elise Hu)]

That was a conversation between Bradley Tusk and Ali Kashani for our original series ted intersections. Visit Ted.com to watch this conversation and others from the series. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarni Vong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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[Ali Kashani]

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[Bradley Tusk]

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