Earnest Sweat 00:03
Welcome to swimming with allocators

Alexa Binns 00:05
The VC podcast from the LP perspective,

Earnest Sweat 00:07
With your host, Alexa Binns and Earnest Sweat.

Alexa Binns 00:11
Are you ready? Let’s dive in,

Earnest Sweat 00:15
In advance to the 2024 election. We have a special guest today, Mr. Bradley tusk. You may know Bradley from Tusk Venture Partners, where they invest in early stage startups in highly regulated industries. The first 15 years of his career was spent in government and politics, including managing Bloomberg mayoral campaigns. He speaks and writes in depth about the intersection of tech and politics. He also has a family foundation which is leading a national campaign to bring mobile folding to all of us. Elections. Today, we’re going to dig into the California AI bill and its potential implications on tech and VC and the election and its impact on tech and regular regulation. So with that, thanks Bradley for joining us. Yeah,

Bradley Tusk 01:06
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Earnest Sweat 01:07
So you’ve done a lot and two pretty competitive and quirky industries to say the least.

Bradley Tusk 01:18
Quirky is a nice way of putting it. I try

Earnest Sweat 01:20
I try to use nice terminology. I’m curious, how did you get to this point of launching a VC firm in a political advisory firm?

Bradley Tusk 01:31
in 2009 I started my first company. It’s a consulting firm, and really early on in our existence, I get a call one day from a friend of mine saying, hey, there’s a guy with a small transportation startup. He’s having some regulatory problems. Would you mind talking to him? I became Uber’s first political advisor that day. I get really lucky when Travis calls me back and says, Listen, I can’t afford your fee. Would you take equity? I had no idea what equity meant, but thank God I said yes. That was back during the series A spent the better part of the next few years running camp. Campaigns all over the US to legalize Uber and ride sharing. Did it again with clear taking equity get them into airports. That worked too. And then met my partner, Jordan Knopf. Jordan, at the time, was running black’s internal venture fund. And the question we started asking each other and ourselves is, if you really understand regulatory risk and you can do something about it, would that make you a better venture investor? And on the strength of that thesis, we went out, raised our first fund in 2016 and we’re a lot like every early stage venture fund and that we’re looking at the founder, the TAM, the underlying idea. But then we asked two questions that I think are somewhat unique to us. One, is there a dating regulatory issue or opportunity that, if it were solved, could really drive growth and valuation. And two, if so, can we solve it? And when the answer is yes to both, that’s really what makes sense for us to deploy capital. So the first deal we ever did was FanDuel ran over campaigns to legalize fantasy sports betting. Second deal we ever did was lemonade and got insurance licenses in every state. Roman legalized prescription via text and so on. And we’re now investing out of our third fund and raising our fourth.

I would be curious. So many VCs run away from regulatory areas. It’s just a no go zone. What do you wish more of them knew or understood? Yeah,

Bradley Tusk 07:31
a few things, and I think to a certain extent, and we’ll get into sure the election, I find some of the back and forth among some of the VCs in the valley very silly about their sort of, you know, supporting Biden, I’m sorry, supporting Trump or Harris, simply because it just comes off to me, like none of them really understand politics. The first thing is, despite everything we just said, you do sometimes need to know what you don’t know. And oftentimes in our industry, meaning tech, there’s an assumption that because you made a billion dollars or because you went to Stanford, or because you were in Y Combinator or you raised a lot of money, whatever it is, you’re therefore genius about everything, right? And you know, the world of creating a great tech company or raising a venture capital fund and deploying it well is very different from the world of passing legislation, blocking regulations dealing with procurement, and they’re just very different currencies, right? So I find that oftentimes you’ll get a founder or VC that says, just put me in the room with the governor or whatever it is, and I’ll get the sale done. And the problem is they don’t even understand the underlying inputs. They just think that the brilliance of their argument is what matters and what matters. And say, venture is how much money you raise your Arr, you know, what kind of product market fit you have, and we have KPIs that matter, but they’re very different from KPIs in politics. Right? The KPIs in politics are polling, fundraising, media attention, you know, ability to reach the narrow group of people who will actually vote your next primary, and if you don’t speak their language, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one cares how much money you have or how much money you’ve raised or where you went to school. They just care about whether they can help me win the next election or not. And you have to understand that every decision of politics gets made solely based on whether they believe that you can either help them win their next election or by not cooperating with you, what it could cost from their next election. If they believe most things, they’ll work with you, and if they don’t, everything else is irrelevant.

Earnest Sweat 09:34
Yeah, I love the fact that I’m just like how those are actually two different languages being spoken to each other, right? Yeah, insights, you all are serving as a bridge. How I want to, I had a question about the kind of these first couple of years doing it, our first couple of funds, and, you know, making your name, and you know whether it’s transportation. Regulation, or with fan deals or and in legal betting, right? Online betting, those are traditional industries that already had a lot of regulation on them. Yep. Do you foresee more of those opportunities coming down the pike? And like if, if an investor is interested in one of those spaces, how do they even plan and think about, yeah, so, how it impacts their possible thesis?

Bradley Tusk 10:30
Yeah, if you think so, the first thing is, I would say that our work falls into one of two buckets. So the first one is what you described, which is a founder comes up with a better way to do something that already exists, right? Yeah. Travis did not invent the idea of paying someone to take you from point A to point B. He just came up with a much better way to do it, right. FanDuel did not invent gambling. They just came up with a better way to do it. So in those cases, the company comes along, they’ve got a better approach. They start taking market share away from the incumbents. The incumbents resort to politics to try to shut down the new competitor, and we have a big regulatory fight that’s really about market share, but it’s under the guise of regulation. The other bucket would be all the white spaces. So crypto, drones, AI, autonomous vehicles, whatever it is. And there’s good and bad news there. The good news is there’s not some big entrenched interests that we have to defeat that makes life easier. The bad news is there are no rules at all. And it may sound great if you’re Marc Andreessen and you believe in this tech utopia of full libertarianism. That may sound great on paper, but in reality, you can’t build multi billion dollar industries and companies without some sense of structure, without some sense of rules and regulations. Human beings need that. If you think back to the very beginning of the human species, there were the Neanderthals, who were not only bigger and stronger, they were smarter than the homo sapiens too, but what they couldn’t do was work together, and Homo sapiens, whatever deficiencies we had, were able to form structure and rules in societies. And ultimately that one out. You need that today too. And so in that world, our work is less about fighting off the trans interest, and it’s more around what should the regulatory framework be? Who should the regulator be? What should the rules be? What can we live with? What can’t we live with? What might work really well with our particular technology. And so it fits into one or the other. But I would say, especially understand your question on the first bucket, if you are an investor or a founder and you’re sort of disrupting an existing industry, what you need to understand is, who are you disrupting? How powerful are they? And can they stop you from operating right? There are times where we don’t make investments simply because while the idea might be cool and the founder might be smart, there might be some things that we like about it. We think, you know what, this is not a winnable political fight, or at least not for a seat space company that’s gonna have a couple million dollars in total to spend, let alone just spend on a political campaign. And this doesn’t really work. And then sometimes, you know, people come in and they’re all freaked out about what they think is gonna be their big political challenge. I’m like, don’t I’m like, don’t worry about it. It’s going to be fine that state, that Governor, that legislators, they don’t care about that thing at all. Right? Because even within the world of powerful special interests, it’s not universal, right? So a teacher’s union can be really powerful in one state and really weak in another. The NRA can be really powerful in one state and really weaken another. An important thing to understand is the vast majority of tech regulation happens at the state level. You know, all of us in our head when we think about government, the White House pops in or the capital pops in. And the reality is, there are some tech areas that work relevant, and we can talk about those, but the vast majority of it happens at either state houses or city halls, and that’s who you both need to focus on and what you need to understand.

Earnest Sweat 13:45
Bradley. It makes me think of one time a VC a little bit more tenured than I am, brought up just the idea of stripe and how he passed on it because he anticipated there was going to be more regulation. And then after kind of doing a post mortem, he was saying to himself, it wasn’t like headlining to fight against, against. Oh, when you think about a financial data shared so easily, you would think somebody would fight that. But it wasn’t like I was stealing this job or something like that. So even that mindset of thinking, Okay, what will actually not only be a threat to people’s constituencies, but also is palatable for somebody to actually eat and understand and build momentum on an argument? Right?

Bradley Tusk 14:35
The narrative is critical, right? I remember passing on a deal, and maybe time will prove that right. Maybe not. I’m still not sure yet, but I like the company. I kind of like the founder. I love the TAM, but I really felt like once what they were doing came to full light, and the margin they were making on the backs of the taxpayers became something that reporters and legislators knew about. Out. I didn’t see how they would then survive the political fallout from that, and so I didn’t make the investment. And that really was a narrative decision, right? It wasn’t a legal decision. It wasn’t based on the existing regulations. It wasn’t even that there was a specific entrenched interest that I was worried about fighting. It was more once all of this fully plays out the narrative here, to me, is really problematic, and therefore that makes the risk greater than

Alexa Binns 15:27
the reward. One, one of these hot examples, I think, of where people maybe are confusing state level versus federal level is in AI regulation. Would you mind breaking down for us some of your perspective on what really is now? Yeah, a few

Bradley Tusk 15:43
things. So the first thing would be, I think just because of the timing of us having this conversation, is the California bill that just passed, right? And so California passed a bill for the listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with it, that it’s the first comprehensive AI safety regulation, safety testing regulation in the country. And it’s an interesting bill, because it passed pretty overwhelmingly. I think it looked like 41 to nine in the house and 32 to one with seven abstentions in the Senate, something like that. It’s on the GABA news desk right now, and for my reading, it is really just very basic safety testing. It is not particularly onerous, it’s not particularly expensive. And yet, all of the big AI companies, most of whom claim to be in favor of regulation, vociferously oppose it, right? So open AI, anthropic, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, you know, meta. Everybody said, no, no, we can’t possibly have it. And the reason I decided to be for the bill was I looked at their arguments against and I said, these are all the same nonsense arguments that I make when I don’t have a legitimate objection to something that’s not good for me, right? So the first was like, Oh, well, it’ll just discourage innovation, right? And that’s what that’s what you say when there’s, like, nothing else there, everyone’s going to stop working on AI because now there’s, like, some minor testing. Or, oh, no, one’s going to do business in California. Oh yeah, everyone’s going to leave the most lucrative economy in the most lucrative country in the world because of some safety testing. Or, oh, they said, Oh, this is just, you know, a way to lock in the advantage. Or the big guys, you’re hurting the little guy here. That’s true. Why are the big guys against history associations against it like clearly, that’s not true. And so I think Newsom both will sign it and should sign it, and politically speaking, because we were talking about earlier, Gavin Newsom’s not thinking about this from the perspective one way of, is it better AI policy or worse? Gavin Newsom is thinking about, I. Gavin Newsom, wants to be president really, really badly. And if combo loses, which he secretly hopes she does, I can run in 28 so what will best help me or hurt me? So on one hand, he’s gonna be tempted and say, well, these are some of the biggest companies in the world. I’m gonna want their financial support, so I ought to do what they want. But here’s the problem, if he vetoes the bill, he owns every problem associated with AI. When anything goes wrong, anywhere, and someone gets hurt or something fails or collapses, or whatever it is, you would say, Oh, well, if they’d had safety testing, that wouldn’t have happened. Guess why they don’t have it. Gavin Newsom, the legislature overwhelmingly supported it, but he was in the pocket of anthropic open AI meta, whoever it was, and therefore he’s only out for the big guys, against his actual constituents and against the voters. And I just think that it would be so easy for someone like me in a campaign to just destroy him with that I imagine, again, talking about the narrative, the narrative of vetoing that bill is way too risky. But the other area that at least, and this may get too wonky, so feel free to edit this out or whatever, but what I’m really interested in is one, how the government can use AI to better perform its own duties. And then two, worker classification regulation around AI. So I’ll work backwards here. So I’m sure you guys remember all the big fights between, say, Uber and the unions, or DoorDash unions, where they would say, okay, are the drivers? Are the delivery people, employees, or are the independent contractors? Right? The sharing economy platforms all set contractors, the unions all set employees. And was simply because everyone had their own self interest. If you were the platform, your cost for law, if they were contractors, if you were the unions, you could only organize these people and get their union dues and membership if they were employees. And so you have these big fights. And ultimately, the biggest one was one called AP five, also in California, that passed and then was overturned by a citizen referendum later that year. What I’m fascinated by is what happens when we’re talking about functions where human beings are required to be licensed in some way, but it’s now AI, not a human being, right? So for example, I haven’t tried it, but I was reading an article that Equinox is rolling out these massage robots. So at least here in New York, you. Massage therapists have to be licensed, right? And, you know, either that’s because there’s some basic safety that they’re worried about, or because the existing industry wants to sort of have protectionism and stop new competition, either way, the licensing process exists. How do you license a massage robot? I don’t know. What are you looking at, the Islander line? LLM, right. Like, you know, so, like, how we’re going to issue professional licensure and determine worker classification for AI performing formerly human jobs, to me, is really fascinating. I think it will create both moats and deficits for different AI companies, depending on where you’re coming from and how you approach it. And I think it’s going to create interesting alliances, right when it was the pure the pure, you know, sharing economy stuff, it was just business first labor, kind of the very classic dichotomy. And then here you may have businesses that say we’re going to side with labor, because even if we don’t want our workers unionized, we certainly don’t want to be replaced by AI, assuming that they don’t have the tech to do that, right? And they’re going to want to block it, you’re going to see all kinds of weird bedfellows and alliances. So I think that’s really fascinating. And then the other one would be the application of AI to government processes. So Have either of you guys been in New York lately,

Earnest Sweat 21:17
like a month ago? Yeah, okay. Do

Bradley Tusk 21:18
You remember seeing illegal wheat shops on every single corner.

Earnest Sweat 21:21
I’ve heard everybody. And I was like, why are they here? And friends are like, they’re just always coming up.

Bradley Tusk 21:27
Yeah, so there’s, there’s 140 licensed dispensaries across the state of New York, and over 5000 illegal dispensaries. And the reason this happened is in 2021 the New York State Legislature passed the law legalizing recreational cannabis. Fine, pretty normal. It then took the agency two and a half years to promulgate the rules and start issuing licenses. So what happened in that void? New Yorkers knew, Okay, weeds are legal. You don’t expect them to, like, know what facility meets licensing requirements which doesn’t, and all these illegal facilities sort of, did whatever there’s a void in the market or back in the market, which is, it fills it, right? And they filled it with all these illegal dispensaries. But the problem is, they were selling wheat to anyone and everyone, right? So I have two teenage kids. I live in Manhattan, and, you know, I suspect both of them have bought wheat at illegal dispensaries, or at least, you know, the risk is there, and their friends certainly have. And we these days, I’m much older than you guys, but like, when I was a teenager, you know, it was, like, a lot of stems and oregano and, like, it wasn’t right. But like, yeah, that shit is really potent, I think there, and you could smoke a vape, or just, there’s no order at all to it, or take a gummy or whatever it is, if kids, I was talking about the principal of my kid’s school, and he’s like, kids are high all the time. And so had you instead used AI to develop the rules for who the license would be and then review the actual license applications itself, you could have resolved all that in months or even weeks, as opposed to two and a half years. And instead of having a legal marketplace sprout up, you could have had the legal license system that we were supposed to have in the first place, and you would have protected an entire generation of teenagers. So I think that you can use AI to make government work better. And in general, procurement, rather than all of the politics and corruption that tends to revolve around decision making about government contracts, you could have AI do it and sort of eliminate most of that risk.

Earnest Sweat 34:12
Do you think that you know this, this vertical gov tech will have a moment more than it ever has over these next 10 years, or

Bradley Tusk 34:22
no, not necessarily. So we have 54 investments across the three funds so far. We have two gov tech deals in that. I love both of those companies on the boards of both of those companies, but I think that they are really exceptions to the rule overall. As someone who you know, when I was deputy governor in Illinois, one of the things that I oversaw was the state budget? So kind of procurement and all that reported up to me, and it’s a horrible process, right? And to me, a business whose entire revenue stream is solely contingent on winning government RFPs is not a great business at all. I’m very happy when I portfolio companies for whom it’s a great revenue stream. We can help you figure that out. We can help you win that stuff like so we’re not opposed to it, but when it’s the entirety of your revenue stream, to me, you’re really, really handcuffing yourself in many ways. And so if anything, the time when Govtech should be appealing to investors is when the economy is bad and you say, Okay, this is, this is sort of, I think, counter cyclical. It’s just not cyclical at all, because the government always has to buy things, right, yeah, and therefore you don’t have to sort of worry about the normal down to the economy. So, but, you know, even the pandemic or whatever else, like, I don’t think we saw this giant boom with Govtech. There are specific things like, I think defense tech might be having a moment, okay, especially as they get kind of more dual usage, and so that there’s ways to sell the same type of product to make it useful for the federal government, but then also for state and local utilities or consumers, or whatever it is. So there might be some subsets within you know, we let the series they’ve come called Odyssey, which is an ed tech company that runs school choice programs for states. So this is when a state says to parents, if you don’t want to send your kid to the local public school and you want to do homeschool or parochial or private or whatever it is, we will provide you with funding to do that. Someone has to manage that whole program and run the marketplace between the parents and students and the state and educational providers. Obviously it does that. That is a significantly growing market. So that’s why we led their Series A. So there are some exceptions. Indiegov is another company that we led their Series A, and I’m on the board of where we do its constituent. It’s like a CRM for the government. So effectively, it allows the government to much better manage their interactions with constituents. Lock complaints, find problems, follow up. And ultimately, the reason why that’s really good is, if you’re a politician and the constituents think that you’re on top of things, that makes you look good, and they like to look good. So, you know, to me, that was an exception. So there are a handful. But overall, you know, are we super bullish on GOV tech now?

Earnest Sweat 36:57
Okay, the reason I asked that is that I was trying to think of why our industry has been so vocal about their allegiances in this upcoming election. And so my mind first comes to, okay, Where’s, where’s the advantage and opportunity? Why do you think about

Bradley Tusk 37:17
that? Yeah, I just don’t think it’s necessarily so there’s some. So like, an end, you know, if you’re a big investor, like anduro, for example, or they’ve got big defense contracts, or SpaceX obviously has big, you know, NASA contracts, or things like Starlink, things like that. So there are some. And there’s, like, for someone like Elon Musk, you know, look, I, I had, I’m supporting Harris. I’ve signed that PC pledge for Harris. I’ve donated six figures. I strongly think she’s the better option than Trump, but I understand why some people might think that their portfolio or their companies would be better suited in a Republican White House than in a democratic White House. So I think here are those areas. One is crypto. So Gary Gensler, who’s the head of the SEC for Biden, is the most anti crypto regulator in history. And I think what these scams are so particularly awful is it’s not just that he’s anti crypto. He won’t tell people what the rules are, right to say to them, well, like, we’ll just do what you’re going to do, and we’ll see. Maybe we’ll indict you and people we won’t, but we’re not going to give you any rules to live by. That’s not it. That’s bullshit, right? That’s not democracy, that’s not the rule of law. So look, I don’t see how

Alexa Binns 38:23
people are popping up in their illegal stores. That’s the equivalent,

Bradley Tusk 38:28
exactly, right, totally. And by the way, like we were investors in Coinbase, we’re investors in a circle. You know, if you are a legitimate player in that industry, you want some rules, right? Because you don’t want to be competing against frauds on ICOs, because it undermines consumer confidence in the whole sector. But you want to know what the rules are, right? Maybe you can lend on margin, maybe you can’t. We can have a reasonable discussion as to whether or not that’s good public policy, but you can’t just refuse to tell anybody, right? And so we know for a fact that whoever runs Trump’s SEC will probably be vastly better at crypto. And so I think that’s why you have some, especially Andreessen Horowitz, and they’ve so much exposure to that sector. The good news is, I don’t see Harris reappointing Gensler either. And so I think we’ll get a better SEC chair, no matter what the FTC would be the next one. So that’s the Federal Trade Commission. Lena Khan is the chair of the FTC, and she’s really interesting, because I would say some of her work has been very pro innovation, and some is very anti innovation. So the pro innovation, at least from my perspective, would be her efforts to break up really big tech. So as an early stage investor, I can’t invest in a company that wants to challenge Apple or Microsoft or meta or Amazon or whatever, because they’re giant monopolies with monopolistic power, and there’s no way to compete with them, and so that discourages early stage investment and innovation. So I think her efforts around that are actually laudable. However, her general view that all tech is bad and all business is bad and all m a is bad is a huge problem, because it’s had this massive chilling effect that has just led to so much. Less activity. And as you guys know, it’s awesome when a portfolio company of yours, IPOs, but that’s like 10, 15% of your portfolio, right? Of those where there are exits and the rest are M and A deals, and when M & A deals are totally shut down, because everyone is terrified that the feds will just block whatever they’re trying to do. That’s a huge chilling effect. And what does that lead to, at least to less venture investment, less new company formation, less graduation to successive rounds, less innovation, less jobs, less technology. And so the good news, again, I think, will be Lena Khan, I would imagine, won’t be there in the new administration, whether it’s Harris or Trump. But again, you could say I want someone who is totally pro M A and that’s why you might be supportive of Trump. So you know, there are some public policies where people might say that they believe that Trump will be better for them than Harris. But again, as we discussed earlier, it’s not really where most tech regulation happens in the first place. The vast majority of it is happening at the state level, local level. So who’s governor, who’s mayor, who’s the Speaker of the State Assembly, the Senate, President, that stuff matters a lot more.

Alexa Binns 41:11
I also can’t help but feel like it’s a bit naive to say I support ex candidate Trump, because Trump also believes in XYZ when we’ve seen he can flip flop on things pretty quickly. Trump

Bradley Tusk 41:25
believes in Trump, Trump and nothing else. For example, Tiktok is a good tech example, right? When Trump was president, he was absolutely right, in my view, to say that Tiktok has to divest from a sale of a US owner. But then, you know, when that law actually passed, but broad bipartisan support, by the way, both parties, he had donors who didn’t like that position, because they had a huge stake in bytedance, and all of a sudden he flipped, and now he’s against, you know, requirements. So yeah, relying on Donald Trump to be consistent on anything is a very dangerous thing. Yeah,

Alexa Binns 42:00
yeah, he’s absolutely and, and I am curious too, if you’re focused on specifically crypto, or you’re focused on, you know, is this going to be good for for my my companies exiting, are you sort of missing the forest for the trees totally that, you know, what economy, what? What is a better American economy? What? What kind of policies do we need in place for not just four years, eight years, 20 years, sure.

Bradley Tusk 42:28
Let me give you a perfect example, which would be Jerome Powell on the independence of the Fed, right? One of the one of the real benchmarks of our economy is that we have an independent federal reserve that makes decisions on interest rates that are based on their view on how to combat inflation or deal with unemployment, but not how to elect or reelect any particular politician, right? And Jerome Powell has been very, very independent, and I think most presidents that have worked with him are unhappy, right? I think Joe Biden, Donald Trump, I think a lot of them are not necessarily happy about it, but I respect that right doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every decision the Fed makes, but I respect the fact that they’re making it for the right reasons. And Trump has been very explicit that he would like to eliminate the independence of the Fed. I think the long term damage that would do to our economy is significantly greater than any upside you get your portfolio because you have a better regulator on crypto or M and A or whatever it might be,

Alexa Binns 43:19
yeah, yeah. If you’re investing in businesses that are gonna be private for the next 12 years, what is this time horizon that you’re thinking about? And

Bradley Tusk 43:29
The other thing is, look, I don’t know if this is true for you guys, but it is for me, which is, we are also, we’re venture capitalists, yes, but we’re also human beings living in the world, right? And I found it really stressful when Trump was president, just the level of chaos, the level of vitriol, the level of conflict, the level of uncertainty. Like, I didn’t like living like that, you know. And I think Joe Biden was like the best in every way, no, but he was like, at least a sort of more normal person. And I kind of appreciated that about him. And so, like, I just personally forget about my portfolio or whatever else. Like, I just don’t want to live like that,

Earnest Sweat 44:05
yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like the last season of Veep. It’s like, I don’t want that that’s funny to laugh at, but I don’t want that to be my reality,

Bradley Tusk 44:15
correct? Kenneth

Alexa Binns 44:16
can all like, likened it to like Russian roulette, where it’s like you didn’t get shot in the head last time, but you’re still playing.

Bradley Tusk 44:24
That’s a great analogy. Yeah,

Earnest Sweat 44:26
That’s amazing. When we met in person, Bradley, we spoke a little bit about this idea of mobile voting, and you actually have a book coming out with your phone, which really pushes, kind of the importance of mobile voting and how it can really influence and engage more voters, not just for presidential but all elections. Yep, can you just briefly, kind of share how you got that interest and

Bradley Tusk 44:55
talk about it? Yeah, this is my passion. So stop, stop me where I’m going on too long.

44:59
I. Okay, so

Bradley Tusk 45:00
As you guys mentioned, I spent the first 15 years of my career working directly in government and politics, and I feel like I’ve really seen it from every angle. I’ve worked in city government, state government, federal government, executive branch, legislative branch, Philly, New York, DC, Chicago, and I took one thing away from it, which is that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And are there a handful of exceptions? Sure, Mike Bloomberg was one that I happen to work for, but it’s a handful, right? And because of gerrymandering, which is the process by which legislative districts are sort of pre-drawn to determine if the seat’s going to be consistently Democrat or consistently Republican. The only election that really ever matters is the primary, and primary turnout is typically 10 to 15% so who is that? It’s the furthest left, it’s the furthest right, or it’s big special interests. And so if you are a politician and your only goal is to stay in office, not only are you chosen by the extremes, but then all of your policies and all of your decisions are dictated by these dreams. So we get one of two things, either we get the absolute chaos of Washington, DC, where it’s total dysfunction, total polarization, everybody fighting, nothing getting done, or we get totally one sided government. And whether that’s the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left, in my view, it’s both a problem right, which is, you know, we want moderation, we want compromise, we want consensus. We want the views of the mainstream to become our laws and policies. And until turnout becomes significantly higher in primaries, we’re never going to get that. So let me give you a couple examples. When Amazon wanted to put their second headquarters here in New York City and Queens, the city as a whole, very much supported it. The district as a whole, very much supported it, but AOC came out against it, and Mike ginares, who’s the State Senator for Long Island City, said, Oh no, my primary typically has around 10% turnout. Those are very left wing voters. And if I support this deal, even though most people in my district want it, those people don’t vote in my primary. AOC followers do. I’m going to lose my next primary. And so Mike had a choice of 40,000 new jobs for New Yorkers or one job of his own. I guess for 20 picks, he picked himself right? Or, you know, imagine that you are a Republican congressman from Florida and turn out your primary is 12% district is gerrymander so only the primary matters, and NRA members are half of that 12% you may know intellectually that it’s not so someone can walk into a store and walk out with an AK 47 but you also know that if you were to say that, let alone vote that way, you would be thrown out of your job In the next election. And so therefore we have school shootings, we have church shootings, we have Walmart shootings because people put their own political survival well ahead of the safety of kids or other people. We had one in Georgia just last week. And so now in a visional world where in those same primaries, turn out, instead of being 12% or 10% were 30% 36% just based on math, all of a sudden my generis would have been for the Amazon deal. The Republican Congressman would have been for some sort of sensible gun laws, not because they became better people. They’re who they are, just politicians, but because now the underlying inputs changed, and in order for them to stay in office, they need to be pro jobs, pro sensible gun laws, right? And when I ran those Uber campaigns around the country, the way that we want to beat the taxi industry is that we were able to get millions of our customers from all over the place to tell their elected officials, hey, leave this thing alone. I want it. And even though, at the time, we were a tiny, little tech startup, and taxi was a big, muscular industry. We want absolutely everywhere, because we changed the inputs, right? You’re a city councilman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the taxi guys give you a couple of grand for your election. Every couple of years you do what they want. I just had 5000 of your constituents call, email, text, tweet, tell you, Hey, I like this thing. Don’t touch it. And guess what you say? Okay, I’m not going to risk pissing off all these voters. Sorry, taxing industry. I’m going this way. And when that was happening, I started wondering, like these people who are advocating for us as much as I love them, they don’t know who their city councilman is. They don’t know who their state senator is, they’re not voting in local primaries, but maybe they would if we made it as easy as we’re making it to advocate for Uber. So that tells you the idea for mobile voting came about, and I kind of created the mobile voting project. And in 2018 we sponsored the first election in US history. The deployed military from West Virginia were able to vote in elections on their phones. Because imagine, if you know you’re a member of our military, you are literally risking your life to protect our right to vote, right posters don’t even bother to use. And then you’re in Kandahar and you’re mailing your ballot, and it shows three weeks after the election, guess where it goes into the trash? Right? And you’re totally disenfranchised. So Matt Warner, who was a very conservative Republican. But Mac had been in the military. All four of his kids were in the military, and Mac felt like it is really unfair that it would make it so hard for people who are deployed in serving our country to vote. And so he approved mobile voting, and then we ended up doing seven different states. We either deployed military or people with disabilities voted in real elections on their phones. But I got a lot of pushback from the cryptography community that the voting tech that was out there was not sufficiently secure. So I decided, You know what, I’m going to build my own mobile voting tech. So four years later, we are just about done. We’re working off of the recommendations from the future of voting report from the US wealth Foundation. The Tech we are building is end to end, encrypted, end to end, verifiable, air gapped, multi factor authentication, biometric screening, and most importantly, it’s open source, which means that anyone can see what happened and audit the code and see if anything went right or anything went wrong or anything else, and you can check the work every single time and when we are fully done, and we have submitted it to entities like NIST for their review, I’m going to make it free and open source, so any one government can use it for free. This has all been done on my foundation. I’ve spent about $20 million in my own money so far on mobile voting, and the reason that I wrote this book is the next step, which is to legalize this everywhere. Right? Because as much as politicians might be frustrated that they’re sort of held hostage by the extremes. They also know how to win in the current system, right? And if you said to them, Hey, guess what? We’re going to triple turnout, and maybe you hold your seat, maybe you won’t be like, no, no, don’t do that. And so they’re all going to ironically unite against us, Democrats, Republicans, unions, lobbyists, trade groups, and the only way we’re going to overcome all of that is to build a movement right, and we’re going to need Gen Z and Gen alpha and people in every different community, and we’ve built a coalition of civil rights leaders. In fact, I’m making available Martin Luther King, the third at the Carter presidential library in a couple of weeks on this and disability leaders and military leaders and different groups to say, No, we deserve the right to vote securely on our phones, and that’s what I’m trying to do. And you know, I wrote the book to just try to help build this movement and get people interested. And so if you like what you just heard for the last couple minutes of my rant, if you go to votewithyourphone.org you can learn more and get involved. And you know, we’d love your help.

Alexa Binns 52:18
And so cool that this passion came out of seeing what you could build inside the Uber app to motivate customers to become

Bradley Tusk 52:29
and Travis, to his credit, because he gets a lot of shit from a lot of people. If mobile voting happens, one of the people, and if it does change turnout in a way that forces everyone towards the middle and let’s just get things done. One of the people who really search credit for that is Travis Kalan,

Alexa Binns 55:25
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t feel like unless you’re paying attention, sort of politically minded person. You don’t even know when the primaries are happening,

Bradley Tusk 55:32
correct, right? But imagine now if meta and Tiktok or whatever platforms exist, and iOS and Google and Android are all just bugging you be like, Did you vote? Did you vote? Did you vote? All you gotta do is download this app and you can vote. And you’re waiting for your coffee here, where you’re sitting there in the traffic, or whatever it is, you go, boom, boom, boom. You press a few buttons, all of a sudden, now you have participated. And guess what? The elections that have the lowest turnout are the ones that impact you the most. It’s, you know, mayoral city council. So here in New York City, primary turnout last year for the council was 7.2% you could win a city council seat with 6000 votes in the city of 8.5 million people, and that results in really terrible governance, because those are just the extremes, and the city council is governing just to cater to a handful of extremes. You know, we need people to work together to get things done, and this prevents them from using the current system.

Alexa Binns 57:55
Well, you’re putting your money, you’re putting your money to go to work, you’re putting your money into the

58:00
things. Thank you.

58:02
Bradley, of course, yeah,

Earnest Sweat 58:05
yeah. Bradley, thanks for just all the insights. And I think you know, as this comes out, as people get geared up to vote their paper ballots, they’ll think, oh, we should actually just be doing this on our phone. So thanks so much, exactly.

Bradley Tusk 58:19
Well, thank you guys both for having me. This is, you know, this is how we win this fight. So I just, I’m really grateful to both of you and when you guys are back in New York, let me know we’d love to grab coffee or something.

Earnest Sweat 58:27
Absolutely take care!

Alexa Binns 58:30
See you later, allocator!

Earnest Sweat 58:33
After portfolio, tile, investing with a smile.