The Pomp Podcast - #1277 Bradley Tusk on Insane Story Of How Startups Beat Politicians

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, writer, and owner of P&T Knitwear bookstore. In this conversation, we talk about his brand new book, called “Obvious in Hindsight.” It is all about a fictional story of innovative technology, flying cars, and what they have to go through with politicians, mafia members, etc. This is a great conversation about how technology meets politics, and the reality on the ground.  ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, writer, and owner of P&T Knitwear Bookstore. Now, Bradley has a brand new book. It's a novel called Obvious in Hindsight,

and it's all about a fictional story of an innovative technology, flying cars, entering into various cities across the country, and what they have to go through in terms of fighting off politicians, mafia members, and many others. Bradley and I have done multiple podcast episodes together. And each time I learned something all about how technology meets politics and the reality on the ground. He is one of the most sought after political consultants in the world. And he's continued to help companies from Uber to bird to lemonade and many, many more figure out how to navigate the regulatory environment. Here is my conversation with Bradley Tusk. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests

on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by BASE. BASE is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is BASE? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds,

BASE is shaping the future of the on-chain world. BASE is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. BASE is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform

where the future of on-chain is being built daily, BASE is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at BASE.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase. Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will.

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Go check them out today at trustandwill.com slash Pomp. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Bradley here. Bradley, you've got a brand new book, Obvious in Hindsight. It is a fictional novel, but I think it is really tied into your work with Uber as Uber and others have gone into these cities.

And there's kind of this, I don't know, competition maybe this abrasiveness between the old world and how things have been going and then these new world tech companies uh talk just a little bit it's like why did you want to write a novel most people don't think expected you to do that i know um so when i was in college i was actually in the creative writing program and i really loved to write and i knew i was like good enough that i could have made a living doing it right i would have written like sitcoms and been fine but i knew i wasn't good enough to win a national book award or write a number one best seller or anything like that and at the same time i was also working in politics all throughout

college and felt like sort of the upside there was higher so i pursued that instead um i wrote and you know because you had me on when i wrote this i wrote a book called the fixer a couple of years ago that was a memoir about all of the stuff that i've done in tech and politics so legalizing uber and lemonade and bird and fanduel and all these different startups and um do you know Steven Soderbergh is he's like a movie producer director he made like Aaron Brockovich Ocean's Eleven Traffic bunch of stuff like that anyway you know how celebrities like to buy liquor companies yes so he bought a Bolivian brandy company and from a regulatory standpoint he had a couple of challenges the first is that it's importation the second is it's alcohol which is highly regulated

and the third is Bolivia is a communist country that we don't really have any diplomatic ties with, right? And he needed a federal rule change at the Department of Treasury in order to do the business the way he wanted to do it. So we got introduced through a mutual friend. And he read the fixer. And he sent me a note and said, hey, let's turn this into a scripted TV series. Awesome. So I started thinking about what would be a fun way to do this. And it clearly should be based on a campaign to legalize something, because that's what I do. And the reason I picked flying cards was it seemed pretty fantastical and out there in the future I mean eVTOL has made so much progress from when I started this to now that actually it's much more present day and

wrote the pilot with Steven wrote nine more episodes and our big pitch meeting with Apple TV was set for March 10th 2020 as you can imagine that didn't happen and show went away but I kind of liked what I had the characters I created the plot line all that so let me see if I can turn to listen to a novel it was really hard to do um in large part because it's just i had no idea how to structure a novel and that just took forever to get it right um but eventually we did got it published and the fun thing is steven and i are now back on the tv show again i love it um i want to kind of pull out some of the lessons from it i know again i know it's fiction but but you are probably the world very barely fiction yeah yeah you're the world expert you have done this over

and over and over again. And one of my big takeaways from the book was, okay, so I'm a founder. I have some brand new shiny technology or company. I'm going to go into one of these jurisdictions. And most people think I got to fight the regulators, right? And fight I'll use is just like, they don't want me to be successful. I want to be successful. There's some sort of abrasiveness there. That seems like only the start of the problem. You have other competition, you have the mafia, you have all sorts of lobbying groups. Like just talk about maybe the apparatus that these founders are up against when they go into a city. So I'll give you the scenario in the book and then how it works in reality.

So in the book, the book's about a campaign to legalize flying cars in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. And on one side of the campaign is Flight Deck, which is the flying car startup. And then there are vicious political consultants, namely us. And then the other side is Uber, the Audubon Society, the Socialists, the Transy Unions, and the Russian mob. And it's satire and it's ridiculous. But like you said, it's not really ridiculous, right? Because the underlying motivations of why the founders in the book, the VCs in the book, the politicians in the book, the political lobbyists in the book, whoever it is, why they make the decisions they make, those are all based in reality, right? And so when you think about this as the construct, whether you're Uber or Bird or Roman or FanDuel or Lemonade or all the stuff that we've invested in and helped legalize, there's really two buckets of work.

And tell me if this gets a little too complicated. But the first is sort of the Uber situation, which is Travis did not invent the idea of paying someone to take you from point A to point B. Travis came up with a dramatically better way to do it, but he was competing with an entrenched interest in the taxi industry. And while we had these mega regulatory fights, what it really was was us fighting with taxi through the guise of regulation. It was really a fight for market share, but couched as legislation to either legalize us or ban us or whatever it was. So that's about half the stuff I would say that we work on, invest in. And then the other half, which is a lot of stuff that you focus on, are sort of the white spaces where no one's ever done it before. So that can be crypto, that could be AI, that could be flying cars, that could be drones, whatever it is.

So there's good and bad news, right? Good news is you don't have to take out some entrenched interest. Bad news is there is no regulatory framework, right? So you got to make it up. And so in a certain way, if you take the example of autonomous vehicles versus flying cars, or eVTOL is in real life kind of what they call it, so you would think that autonomous cars – if I asked you or myself when we started writing this book, like, okay, in five years, what will be further along, autonomous vehicles or flying cars? I think 100 to nothing, we all would have said autonomous vehicles, right? You know, but, you know, who's standing in the way of regulating autonomous vehicles, especially trucks, the Teamsters and Donald Trump saw himself as a Teamsters guy. And Joe Biden sees himself as a Teamsters guy. And as a result, nothing has moved in like the last seven, eight years.

So it's stuck, whereas an eVTOL, which is regulated by the same agency. So the FAA is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. It's all the same regulator. they've made a lot of progress simply because there's no one standing in the way right now they've had to come up with like okay what does the flying car look like what are the safety requirements how do we certify it and there's still a whole world of hurt coming that the flying car companies aren't even aware of yet in terms of well and that's what that's what the novel is about local zoning and permitting building these vertiports you know where do you take off where do you land you know there's gonna be a million fights around that but typically speaking

a startup falls into one of those two categories and depending on which category it's in we figure out how to proceed politically from there now when we look at something like um uh the flying cars actually let's talk about the autonomous driving um on that front we now have insurance companies coming out so these are people who are betting money in the market to be accurate in their underwriting they are saying i think the latest report is that a self-driving car is four times safer than a human driver. So whether it is two times, four times, 10 times, they are saying it's safer. They're betting money. We have no reason not to believe them. How is it possible that their regulators can then sit there and say, hey, we can't let you do this, blah, blah, blah,

whatever. It almost feels like it's data and safety versus something else. Is that how you see it? Yeah, it's data and safety versus politics, right? So you've got two things. I mean, you're absolutely right if we there's i think something like 26 000 traffic fatalities in the u.s every single year if we had full-on level five everyone's car was was autonomous it would be zero or close to that right uh maybe something weird would happen but but basically zero um the reason why we're not at that is for two reasons one is you have some entrenched interest whether it's Sometimes the original car manufacturers are called the OEMs, the original equipment manufacturers, or the big trucking unions, or anyone whose business model would be disrupted by this. And they haven't innovated, and so they can't compete.

So the only way they can stay in business is to use political contributions and lobbying and all kinds of forms of soft corruption to stop innovation. The other problem is regulators are appointed by politicians, and politicians, and just for context for the audience, So I spent the first 15 years of my career before I got into tech working in government. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager, ran for mayor of New York. I worked for him at City Hall. I was the deputy governor of Illinois for four years, ran the state's budget, operations, legislation, policy, communications. I was Chuck Schumer's communications director in the U.S. Senate for two years.

So I've seen this from every angle, state, federal, local, legislative branch, executive branch, drunk campaigns, all of that. And the sad thing is what I learned is 99% of politicians are desperately self-loathing, insecure people that can't without the validation of holding office. It fills a hole in their psyche that nothing else can fill. And so they will never do two things. They will never take any risk that could cause them to lose their next election. I mean, think about it. I don't even know your view on guns, right?

But, like, clearly the fact that we have school shootings and Walmart shootings and church shootings, like, it's hard to argue that we shouldn't try to do something about this. And the reason that we don't is because if you are—and keep in mind, I'm an independent at this point, and I hate both parties, but I'll pick on the Republicans in this example. You're a Republican congressman from Florida. Turnout in your primary is 12%. Half that 12% are NRA members. If you were to say we ought to consider some sort of assault weapon regulation, you'd lose your election immediately. Right. So they're never, ever going to risk that to do what's right. And the other thing is they're there for the attention. They're there for the validation. And so you don't get good press by saying, here's the data and here's the stats. And yeah, there's going to be some bumps in the road. but over time we have to allow this to play out so that we have autonomous vehicles that make

everyone a lot safer. It's, you get attention by haranguing against the evils of tech and against capitalism, especially if you're on the far left. And, you know, the press, because they're so focused on every AV, you know, a hundred people can die literally in the course of a couple of hours in car accidents. No one pays attention at all. A couple of AVs bump into each other across the yellow line or whatever it is, or even what happened in San Francisco where they dragged a pedestrian and that was legitimately bad. And it's international nudes. And so the politician, it's like a moth to a flame, right? They're always going to take whatever position is politically safe and gets them attention. And so ultimately, that's what the regulators

are constricted by and dealing with. And so your real question at the end of the day, is if common sense dictates that we'd be much safer and regulators are supposed to make us safer, why wouldn't they do this? And it's because safety is not their underlying goal. Their underlying goal, especially from the politicians, is political preservation and validation and attention. Now, I'm going to go from one side that has a monopoly on violence and rules, being the politicians and government, to especially taxi industry, construction, things like that there is a whole nother group most people will i think um naively just say the mafia but it really is a whole bunch of different groups of people who kind of have

their hands in they have a financial incentive to see things stay the way that they stay uh how do you see that playing out both in you know a city like new york city but also just in any city across america let me just give you two new york city examples because i'm sitting here right right now and then we can but these apply everywhere um so the illegal wheat shops right So New York State has legalized recreational cannabis, great. We have 27 licensed dispensaries and as many as 5,000 unlicensed dispensaries, which is fucking crazy, right? That you have stores openly selling drugs to children.

I got a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old. I live in Manhattan, and I know that either of them, anytime they want, could walk into a store and buy weed, and we do nothing about it. Why? Because, like you said, I don't whoever owns those illegal weed shops, they've got some juice somehow. It seems to me that likely it's not 5000 separate small business owners. It's probably a handful of guys, which is called organized crime. And whether they've got protection in the police department or city hall or something else, they're getting away with this thing, which is fucking crazy. Because if New York City, for anyone who listens to this, feels kind of out of control and unsafe, when you literally allow drugs that are unlicensed, and by the way, therefore, uninspected, right?

So whether it's fentanyl could be laced with or just lead or anything else, really unhealthy. When you just turn a blind eye to that completely, then, you know, you're not going to, you're sending a message to everyone like, go for it. Now we have an epidemic in shoplifting, in fentanyl poisoning, you know, all homelessness, everything else. And the city feels like a mess. Another one scaffolding. So we have a law in New York City called Local Law 11 and requires that every couple of years, maybe every seven years, a building over four or five stories has to undergo an inspection of the facade, which kind of makes sense. It happened because sometime in the 60s or 70s, a brick killed somebody. fine we get it however um there's a few problems problem one is as anyone who is spending time

manhattan knows the scaffolding is everywhere right it goes up and there's no enforcement of any kind and it never comes down in fact often by the time they finish it's time to do it again so don't even bother taking it down so the entire city feels covered in scaffolding and i've talked to the da's of both brooklyn manhattan about this and they would both tell you it increases crime Right. When you have these dark spaces, it leads to more assault, more rape. It gives junkies places to shoot up. It makes the city less safe. And the crazy thing about this is, one, there's a technological solution that would require virtually no scaffolding called drones. Right. You don't need guys on these like, you know, platforms that kind of with ropes and pulleys to look at it.

You could have a drone just fly through the building pretty quickly, by the way. find out exactly what's wrong with far more accuracy than a human being is going to and then you go fix that one thing right um so you have a technology solution and what's even crazier is there's not even like a strong union or particularly politically powerful interest behind local law 11 it's just kind of always been this way and no one's ever done anything about it um and so you have the combination of corruption like you said you have incentives for politicians that are not aligned with the incentives for the actual public and then you have bureaucracy and an action and indifference and you put all that together and unless you have a great mayor in a

city so look when mike bloomberg was mayor of new york a lot of this shit didn't happen because mike was really on top of it right and if mike were mayor right now there wouldn't be legal weed shops because he would have had the NYPD padlock every single one of them and say anyone who's caught in any of these facilities is going to Rikers. Now, is it possible that he'd get sued or people would protest about it or whatever else? Sure. And you know what he would say? Go fuck yourself. And that's the kind of leadership that you need. We don't have that with Eric Adams. And most cities around the country don't have strong leadership. And as a result, they feel out of control. Now, when we look at either the weed shops or the scaffolding,

Are they like paying, I don't know, business taxes or like is the city somehow generating revenue or something? So definitely the weed shops aren't paying any taxes, right? So, I mean, the crime is the people who actually have the licenses to sell cannabis went through a whole licensing process, background checks. They hired lawyers, they hired accountants, and they were supposed to be people who were the victims of overly harsh cannabis laws in the first place. So people got to jail for a long time for a cannabis related crime or veterans, whatever it is. they're totally screwed over because the illegal wheat shop pays no taxes, no licensing fees, doesn't have any lawyers, doesn't have any accountants, doesn't have to pay to have regulated or inspected products. So they can sell at a much cheaper discount than the regulated

shops can. And so the regulated shops can't stay in business. And so, no, it is actually not only not contributing, it's sucking away the tax revenue that we should have, right? If you hit the scaffolding, I assume the scaffolding companies pay their taxes, but I don't really no and it wouldn't shock me if the answer is no but here's what's happening is you have this feeling of lawlessness in new york city and we have a shoplifting epidemic i think something like 95 of stores have said that they've been shoplifted from if you want to buy like a tube of toothpaste at cbs in new york it's cbs new york city you got to go press a button wait for someone to come over unlock a plastic case and hand you your like crest or colgate or whatever

it is so guess what you do instead you order on amazon right because you don't have 10 minutes to sit there and wait. And then what happens? The stores close, people lose their jobs, more empty storefronts, more vacancies, more crime. And so, yeah, this is all a reoccurring cycle. And technology often can be the solution to a lot of these problems. But I think what oftentimes founders don't realize, and I see this all the time in my own funds, is they're good at thinking about the engineering problem at hand. They're sort of good at thinking about the marketing challenge at hand. But because they've been so removed from politics and government and regulation, the way things really work doesn't even occur to them. And how much they're going

to have to deal with that oftentimes is a total surprise. And so, look, it's great for me because I have the one fund that then solves the problem. So like gives us a ton of deal flow and we don't lose many deals. But overall, it'd be a lot better society if we had regulators and politicians that actually acted in the best interest of the people instead of themselves. So what's interesting to me is I'm fascinated by the drain on city finances where something like the congestion tax in New York City all of a sudden is going to generate billions of dollars of revenue, and it looks like they're going to have to come up with many, many more creative ways to tax or kind of drive revenue. And so whenever I see something like that, it would suggest that these cities, when a technology company is coming into them, now all of a sudden you're not just dealing with somebody who is looking at it from a regulation standpoint. They also may be looking at it from a, hey, how could we tax these people? How could we generate revenue from these people in order to solve some other problem that has nothing to do with the technology or the problem they're trying to solve?

Totally. And they're thinking way too small, right? So take San Francisco. It has become like a dumpster fire, right? I think pretty much everybody would agree with that, including most people in San Francisco. It is a kind of one industry town, which is tech, but a lot of tech has fled to Miami and Texas and other places with lower taxes and less regulation and better weather and everything else. And it seemed to me that the one hope for revival that San Francisco had was AI. And when they legalize self-driving taxis, like, oh, that's really smart.

They recognize that if they can give regulatory advantages to AI companies in different forms, which could be generative or AV or whatever it is, they can keep those businesses in San Francisco. And if the AI industry grows up in San Francisco, that can produce a huge economic recovery, right? And then they went ahead after one problem and banned the cruise and the autonomous taxis. So, you know, they're only thinking about it from the perspective of solving today's political problem, and they would gladly sort of overtax someone right now and destroy the long-term value of that industry if it meant that they don't have to deliver a spending cut to some politically powerful constituency who support they rely on in the next election. yeah it um it really is i i think uh a founder is so under uh prepared to go into these environments how do you identify what success looks like right in the book obviously with the flying cars and stuff like it's very clear kind of what you're optimizing towards but you've done everything from lemonade to uber and everything in between how do you start to try to understand

like okay what exactly is success and like are we willing to actually compromise from we get all of everything we want like how does that work yeah so so ultimately as we look at investments in my fun touch venture partners invest in seed and series a companies and we're a lot like every early stage investor we're looking at the tam and the founder and the underlying concept but we ask two questions that i think are unique to us first is is there a gating regulatory issue or opportunity that if it were solved can really drive growth and valuation and if so can we solve it so like you said we invest in fan duel and the campaign's legalized fantasy sports betting invested in row legalized prescription via tax. Lemonade got their insurance licenses and so on. So part of it

is the analysis on the front end where we have to believe not only is there potentially a regulatory issue or opportunity here, but can we then convert it, right? Because sometimes the answer is like, yeah, this company would be highly regulated. And if it could be legalized, it could be a great business. And our opinion is it can't be, right? Like the political forces that they're up against are too powerful for a seed or series A company on their own to be, right? Which is partly why uber is such a remarkable story because who would have thought that a seed and series a company could have taken on the entire taxi industry and taken it down um and that's why travis doesn't get nearly the amount of recognition in my view that he deserves um because he accomplished

something truly remarkable um and people don't really seem to to get that um but most of the time you know you have to say is there either other people with aligned political interests that we can team up with to help us win this fight or other people were taking on paper tigers right so one thing about taxi what it turned out was they were they had tons of lobbyists they gave out tons of campaign contributions but they had a product that everybody hated right everyone had shitty experiences in taxis all the time and as soon as they saw a much better you know more option in uber they were willing to fight for that right and rallying our customers is how we won in every single jurisdiction for Uber.

So it's really figuring out the relative political strengths and weaknesses of what we could muster on our side versus what the entrenched districts on the other side are going to have. And sometimes the analysis would be like, in one state, you're like, you know, I can't win this fight because this union

in this state is super connected to the governor. And if they tell the governor to kill the bill, he's going to kill the bill. And then the same union, but in another state, The leader there is weak or endorsed the wrong person in the last campaign. And it's not going to be a problem, right? So we have to do this multi-jurisdictional analysis of all 50 states or 100 cities or whatever it is.

And then based on all that data, Jordan, my partner, and I just have to sort of make a judgment call of like, OK, on the totality of all of this, we believe we can solve the regulatory problem. And it is worth us risking a couple of million dollars of our LP's capital to try to do so. On Amazon, I always like to look at the description of the book because it tells a lot about kind of how both the author, the publisher, et cetera, all is trying to position the book. And there was a phrase that caught my eye. This is a cautionary tale. Who is the cautionary tale for?

Is it for the governments? Is it for the tech entrepreneurs? Is it for somebody else? It's great. Probably for everybody, but really for the tech entrepreneurs, right? Because people in politics understand how it works, right? Like when I wrote The Fixer, I had two groups of readers. I had people in tech.

I had people in politics. No one in politics called me up afterwards and said, I was so surprised, right? They might say, I enjoyed the book. You got it right. But no one was surprised. People in tech were like, holy shit. That's what you have to do to legalize a product? And so, yeah, ultimately, I think founders and VCs need to understand that the regular

story stuff can be just as fatal as hiring the wrong engineers or not raising enough money or having the wrong you know marketing plan for customers or anything else and you've got to be able to both anticipate that on the front end and navigate it and devote sufficient resources to it right so you know there are times where you get to a point where you need a million dollars to pass your bill and it's a tough call right because if you're a series eight company million dollars is a big chunk of your funding but at the same time if you literally can't exist without this bill then what's the difference right it's a binary choice and so yeah i mean i think really the you know a lot of what i do whether it's uh the books i've written or the podcast that i host or the

teaching that i do or speaking or whatever else is really designed to try to help people in tech understand here's how and why politicians make decisions because if you understand what's motivating them then you could at least figure out a strategy to do something about it when we see uh maybe the lessons from uber lessons from lemonade etc do the governments change their tactics if they realize that something worked from the private market like in terms of you know uh uber one of the stories i always remember is like basically one day you guys wiped the app and was like this is what it would be like if this legislation passes or you know whatever the story was but like do politicians like oh cool like we saw that one time the next company that

walks through the door and tries that now we've got this new tactic that's going to be able to mitigate that strategy yeah sometimes so i think uber and bird are actually a really good set of comparison here right so when when we did uber you know this we started these campaigns back in in 2011 and the the bad news was no one took us seriously but the good news is no one saw us coming right like people just laughed at us and no one really paid attention to us and then all of a sudden we were mobilizing tens of thousands of customers and more important voters in those districts to say no leave this thing alone i want it and that changed the underlying politics and we won so we took them by surprise a little bit which was great so when bird came along five

six years later and we were launching bird in cities all over the country and this is true for lime and the other scooters too um it was both better and worse right it was better because we were at the table right they understood what would happen and you know it's easy for me to basically say to a transportation commissioner you saw what i did to the last commissioner and their boss politically you want me to do that to your boss and then you lose your job or do you want to have a meeting and figure this thing out the people took the meeting right at the same time we lost the element of surprise and entrenched interest and we were lucky in the case that there's no like big scooters we didn't have to sort of take anybody out in this case but you

10 years ago, big insurance, hotel, casino, whatever it is, they were really slow to recognize the threat, and that gave us room to run and time to mobilize. And now that they've seen over and over again how startups can kick their ass politically, they have become a lot more aware, which actually makes the fight harder. Yeah, it's interesting that like you would think the politicians in the government are so powerful, but actually the nimbleness, the creativity, the tech solutions of the tech startup could could give an advantage. And then in some weird way, the CEO of the company is still going to be here five years from now. The politician is not necessarily guaranteed that. And so they've really got to make sure that they get reelected. Yeah. So if you think about it, and actually at the end of the novel, if you saw it, there's a list of the 10 rules of demystified politics. And I wrote these a couple of years ago, and I just

use them all the time. And the first rule is every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on re-election and nothing else. Other exceptions, sure. Mike Bloomberg was certainly an exception. And there's dozens of them. But overall the exceptions of anything kind of prove the rule and so let's just use uber again as an example it's an easy one you're a city council member in tulsa and you can work for any city you want and the taxi guys give you three grand per campaign cycle and contributions all things being well you want the three grand for your next campaign so you do what they want now i just mobilize 4 000 people from your district to email tweet text call and say leave this thing alone i

don't want to lose it. Now, my 4,000 people may not necessarily be regular voters, but you don't want to wake these people up and piss them off, right? And so the input changed. So the input went from, I'll take the three grand and do what taxi wants to, I'm not going to piss off these 4,000 people. I'll do what Uber wants, right? And it's all about changing those underlying inputs. So I think for any startup, when you're thinking about this, especially if you're trying to displace and entrench the interest and you're disrupting something, you've got to figure out, can I change the inputs? And look, there are other startups that I've worked with that are great companies, but the customers just aren't passionate about the product in the way that they

were for Uber or FanDuel or Ease or Bird, where we were able to mobilize lots and lots of people and be successful. Sometimes it's like a platform or a company that's a really good company. It's a really good service, but no one cares quite enough to take time out of their day to do anything about it even through the app and in which case you know that strategy doesn't work so you've kind of got to think about like do i have the kind of product that people will get passionate about um and and fight for and if you don't and you're disrupting someone in a trench in an entrenched interest and they're very politically powerful you're gonna have a problem what is your single biggest lesson over the process of doing this for so many years that

when you went to write the book you were like i cannot put this in the book um that's a great question so so there's a subplot in the book or a kind of central plot actually about um and a corruption and political corruption investigation into the mayor of new york city a guy named joe navarro um and and there are fbi agents for characters in the book and so i do you remember got in rod blagojevich no so he was the governor of illinois yes yeah he went to got a 14-year jail since he had the poofy hair and he tried to sell obama's senate seat after obama became president so i was his deputy governor right so i spent four years running the state of illinois for this lunatic and um when he got arrested you know i had the fbi show up at my doorstep and say we need to

talk to you and i ended up having and they charged him with um do you know who rom and ari emmanuel are yes okay so rom at the time was the mayor of chicago ari was and still is the ceo or chairman of endeavor which is the biggest kind of talent agency in hollywood and rod had apparently promised rom two million bucks for athletic facility in rom's district um and then it didn't happen and then one day i get a call from rom and by the way if you remember the character ari from entourage yes he's based on ari and rom in real life and a call with rom in real life was like what the script would be an entourage you know just get hung up on three times you're told go fuck yourself six times whatever it is but eventually you kind of get the gist of what he needs and then i'm on

the phone with rod that night and i say hey rod rom called me and he's really upset about this thing i don't really know what it is but you know i can just make sure the the money gets released He said, no, no, no. And I said, why not? He said, Ari owes me a fundraiser. I said, what do you mean? He said, Ari's supposed to have a fundraiser for me for my next campaign. I'm not giving Rahm the money until I get what I want from Ari. And I said, Rod, we got a problem here because one's political, one's governmental. You can choose or choose not to support this discretionary grant, but your basis for the decision can't be on whether or not they give you money, right? That's corruption. um so he said to me you tell rom that no no grant till the fundraiser luckily i was smart enough to instead call our general counsel and say hey uh rob is doing this it's highly illegal put a stop to it um and luckily the grant was given the fundraiser never happened but i had to testify to that in a grand jury in a trial and then they had a fucking hung jury and then another trial so three different times i had to go back to chicago um with tons of media around and everything else

and so a lot of what's in the book is shaped by these crazy experiences that i've had um in real life and look maybe i've had a higher share of crazier experiences than most people in politics but i think that generally speaking the stuff that you see in this book is reflective of real life a lot more than you want to think and just again and we're talking about new york city guess who's guess which mayor of new york city is under federal investigation right now our current one eric adams so literally the same week that the book came out the fbi met adams on the street seized his phones uh and launched a major criminal investigation into him so life and art kind of imitate each other quite a bit there is a politician who i don't want to say their name

but one of the staffers told me uh every single day at like two or three o'clock there's a press conference and i was like like it's scheduled weeks in advance and they were like yeah and i was like well what do you talk about they're like we'll find something right like basically like we're gonna have a press conference every day and like we'll figure out something to talk about totally so when i work for chuck schumer so chuck is the senate majority leader so he's the most powerful person in the u.s senate one of the three most powerful people in the u.s government chuck is the most aggressive kind of media conscious member of congress that i've ever met and every single sunday we would have a press conference and the reason we had it on sunday

is there's very little competition because most people are with their families are watching football going to church or whatever it is um happens to be really highly rated local newscast that night because people are kind of at home and they're already doing a sunday night until every sunday we had a press conference and my job was to make up something that would get attention every single sunday with absolutely no relevance at all to real life right all that mattered and one of the things that we would do if we'd have anything better is we would write a letter to some company or somebody protesting like writing a letter to Kellogg protesting the high price of breakfast cereal right and because the internet was around then but it was it was nascent so

things weren't moving the same speed the company people weren't working on Sunday and you know kind of we had a one-sided story right because it was hard for them to respond but I started noticing that when there were responses a lot of the responses were we never got senator schumer's letter and what i realized was it was so besides the point that after the cameras left it didn't even occur to me to actually send out the letter to the company that we were publicly attacking and i had to put a post-it note on my computer screen that said remember to send the letter so yes that's the way your friend described it is exactly right when i see things like um who is it uh elizabeth warren recently went after a big sandwich i don't know if you saw

this no uh yeah she uh somebody is trying to buy subway i think it is and they also own like a deli and another i don't know jimmy johns or something and she's like you know we can't let the monopolies get like the sandwiches right i almost look at it i'm like is this tweet being written specifically to elicit trolls and to go viral and to like create even more news yeah well it's funny i was thinking that you could do a great piece of performance art of running someone for office who is just sort of your run-of-the-mill crazy left winger or right winger depending on wherever you are and they start off it's just sort of the usual nut and then they keep slowly getting crazier and crazier so like for example i saw an article the other day that there was a

strike by the teachers union in portland oregon right so you can only imagine how fucking left wing that all is right um and i was like imagine if like this politician or this candidate you know was on there the picket line marching with the teachers and then kept slowly advancing it to the point where by the end they're arguing it is unreasonable to ask teachers to come to work at all or to teach at all we should just be paying them for nothing um and my view is a they could keep getting attention and they'd keep getting supporters because people will go along with it right and sort of the performance art would be kind of how long can you keep the joke going for before someone finally figures out like oh this is a parody it's not real and the game

would be can you make it to election day without anybody noticing you think it could happen yes i think it definitely could happen i think you need to do it for sort of a lower level office but maybe not i mean think about george santos right this guy is a member of the united states congress he lied about every single thing his sexuality his religion his ethnicity where he went to school where he worked nobody found out he got elected i mean in new york by the way so the new york Times never bothered to check, you know, Post Daily News, Democratic candidate didn't check his primary opponents, nobody. And so, you know, the whole premise I just laid out is based on cluelessness. And I was thinking, well, it's going to be some small town somewhere that just

fucking happened, you know, here in Long Island and Queens. So, yeah, maybe you could do it anywhere. It blows my mind, you know, how kind of crazy the politics stuff is. Obvious in insight, a novel or i'm sorry obvious in hindsight uh a novel by bradley tusk um what's kind of like the one sentence pitch for people why they should go read something uh that is one fiction which a lot of people i think kind of uh shy away from at times uh but two still has a very serious um i think kind of lessons for business people yeah it is a fun funny easy way to understand how and why politicians think and make the decisions they make so that if you are a founder a startup a vc whatever it is as much as you hate it you need to know it um and this is gonna be the most fun

way you can learn it that uh that makes sense to me bradley thank you so much for uh for doing this uh the book is available amazon everywhere else that uh the books are sold so uh hopefully people go and they grab it and we'll do this again in the future thanks bob