[00:00:00] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Welcome back to the Invested podcast. I'm thrilled to have my friend Bradley Tusk back with me on Invested for a second time. In this conversation, Bradley and I are going to explore both the threats to democracy and the intersection of technology and democracy; how public policy, regulation influences the advent of technology; and what technology can do to both help government and perhaps help center the population, and make politics far less polarized.

‍

It's a fascinating conversation that I've had with Bradley many times. And I think you'll find it super interesting. We cover a lot of ground on these topics, and these are complicated topics. So I encourage you to listen to it. 

‍

Welcome back to the Invested podcast. I have a return guest. It is my second time having my good friend Bradley Tusk on Invested.

‍

Welcome Bradley. 

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Hey Michael, thanks for having me. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

If you haven't listened to our first episode, I encourage you to go listen to it. I'm not going to let Bradley introduce himself again. I'll just tell you the following about him. The guy is the single best fixer of regulation, even has a book by that name called The Fixer. He was involved with Uber, and he understands how innovation interacts with the regulatory environment in a way that just about nobody else does.

‍

But today what we're going to get to actually has to do with a book you recently published, called “Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy.” And the way I want to frame this is, I think we all believe–this podcast is a lot about investing and values–we all believe that democracy, free speech, and the things we hold near and dear to us are critical of a functioning society, for an innovation economy. And it's Bradley's view, which I have a lot of sympathy for and we're going to explore today ,that democracy itself is currently at risk. But he has a unique insight on why it's at risk.

‍

So before we dig into the book, I'd like to kind of talk through why it is that you think, Bradley, democracy itself is at risk? 

‍

[00:02:02] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Sure. So, at least from a U.S. perspective and while I won't go through my bio, I will say I've worked in the U.S. in city government. I was Michael Bloomberg's campaign manager, I've worked in state government, I was the deputy governor of Illinois, I've worked in the federal government. I was Chuck Schumer's communications director–so I've seen this from every angle. Legislative, executive, every level. I'm a lawyer, so I get the judicial piece. And the 30-odd years now that I've been in or around politics has taught me one thing.

‍

Every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on their next election, and nothing else. And why? These are generally desperately insecure, self-loathing people that can't live without the validation of holding office. There's a hole in their psyche, and that hole is only filled by being somebody.

‍

And most of them don't have the talent to do what you've done in all these different ways, in the private sector and the nonprofit sector. You know, you have a really successful career. They can only have it by winning elections. And so in the U.S., because we have gerrymandering, which means election districts are drawn by politicians to guarantee that the winner of the general election will either be a Republican or a Democrat ,typically, the only election that really matters in the U.S. is the primary, and primary turnout tends to be usually around 10 to 15%. 

‍

So who are those voters? They are the furthest left, or they are the furthest right, or they are big special interests that know how to move money and vote in low turnout primaries, whether it's the NRA on the right or the teachers unions on the left.

‍

And so as a result, our politicians do what they say. Because yeah, in a perfect world, they'd rather kids not get shot at school; in a perfect world, they'd rather not sort of destroy our schools just for the benefit of the teachers unions. But if they have to choose between their own political survival and the wellbeing of people, they're going to pick themselves every single time.

‍

And kind of, that's what got me to the conclusion–I know we're going to talk about a lot today at mobile voting, which is–you're never going to make them better people, right? My guess is this was true of the same personality type; the Greeks had it and the Romans had it, obviously there are a lot of parallels right now in Israel to a lot of this. We see this playing out in very similar ways. And just saying, “Why can't they be different? Why can't they be better?” It is pointless. It accomplishes nothing. You've got to align the broader public's policy needs and incentives with the underlying politician's political incentives. When the two things are aligned, they will work with the other side, compromise and get things done. And when it is set up the way that we have it right now, all you get is either extreme polarization, or you just got totally one-sided government.

‍

So Washington is totally dysfunctional. If you look at the state, local level, the State of Texas is wildly far right. The city of San Francisco is wildly far left. And neither of those are good either. 

‍

[00:04:54] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So I have a friend who's an economist who likes to say that, “Tell me what the KPI is and I’ll tell you what the outcome is,” and he says that the KPI for politicians is getting reelected, and therefore, that's in fact the goal.

‍

But do you think that there are–like, there's like 465 people in the House of Representatives, there's another hundred in the Senate in the United States, and there's 120 members of Knesset here, and I don't know how many members of parliament in the UK, and Germany. None of these guys are in it for the public interest and for doing good.

‍

It's all cynical? I've got no–

‍

[00:05:26] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Maybe five percent. So like I said, I worked for Mike Bloomberg when he was the mayor of City Hall. I was campaign manager when he ran for mayor. Mike certainly was someone who did what he thought was right, and didn't worry about the consequences of doing so. But look, Mike also came into office with billions of dollars and, you know, had an advantage that other people didn't have. You're raising your fingers, I’m assuming you want to jump in. 

‍

[00:05:47] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Yeah. So that's what I want to ask, which is, is it a problem of career politicians versus people who've accomplished something in the private sector before that? Is it inevitably because of the office? Like if Mike Bloomberg lost, which eventually, I mean he didn't lose, he got you know termed out– he went back to business and it was okay, right?

‍

And my sense is like Mike Gallagher just left the house right now, and he went into private business–I don't know him, for what it's worth–and so I wonder if this is like inherent to the office, or it's just a path people take today? 

‍

[00:06:16] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

You know, because there's a lot of people like Jon Corzine who was the governor of New Jersey, US Senator, he had been the CEO of Goldman before that–he turned out to be a typical politician.

‍

Mark Warner is US Senator for Virginia, smart guy, but a politician through and through. Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, made a bunch of money in the private sector first. So no, I think Mike was just unique in that, one, he was much richer than all these guys, and two, city government is designed a little better to be able to be a little less ideological and political because the job is really operational, right?

‍

Are the lights turning from green to red? Is there clean water running through the taps? Are the sidewalks filled with trash or not? So it was set up the right way. But there are also–so I think as you know, my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, is in the House of Representatives, Josh Gottheimer, I think he's been probably the most pro-Israel member of Congress or right up there.

‍

And Josh definitely does try to do what's right. There's no question about it. But I will say, Josh is also very fortunate. He is in one of the remaining 25 swing districts left in the House. He represents a suburban New Jersey district, kind of right over the GW bridge. And as a result, he is incentivized and even rewarded by his constituents, for working with Republicans, working with everybody across the spectrum, compromising, getting things done. So Josh has been a highly effective member of Congress, but the freedom that he has to operate and to sort of work across the spectrum is what every member should have. They're never going to have that when primary turnout is 10 percent and the district is already gerrymandered–Josh is not (again, one of 25, but if primary turnout were say 30, 40, 50%, then all of a sudden things move to the middle. So do you remember when Amazon wanted to put their second headquarters in Queens?

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I do. 

‍

Bradley Tusk:

‍

So based on the polling, the city as a whole, dramatically for it. The district as a whole–so this was Long Island City, it's right across the water–dramatically for it. But the state Senator Mike Gianaris, who's neither inherently good nor evil, he's just a politician, looked at his primary and said, okay, turnouts are probably about 10%. And when AOC came out against it, he said, “Oh, no, if I support this deal, I'm going to get a left wing challenger. And the people who actually show up to vote in my primary are crazy left-wing activists who do whatever AOC says, and I'm going to lose my seat.” 

‍

And so Mike had a choice. 40,000 new jobs for New Yorkers or one job, his own, and he picked the one he picked itself. But if primary turnout in this district were typically say 30 percent instead of 10, just based on math, not by being a different person or a better person or anything else, he would have been for the deal simply because he would have lost his next primary had he opposed it, right?

‍

So, if you move things more to the middle, then all of a sudden reasonable people can get around the table and get things done. But we're in a system right now that makes it impossible 

‍

[00:09:22] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So I want to go back, because one of the things you said earlier is, in the primaries, so only the really ideological voters turn out or the special interest groups went out–either because of money or it's their people that turn up for the primaries. You mentioned the teachers union, but you know, we do see in Washington in particular, people, like, now the tech lobby is turned up, and obviously the tobacco lobby and others who, I guess, are more mainstream voters on some level or represent a larger swath of the voters than just the ideological people on the fringes–like why isn't Amazon investing in this primary, in Generis or AOC, and kind of being in there to get it don?  

‍

[00:10:06] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

So Amazon, one, dramatically misplayed. Like if you were to write a Harvard Business case study on political malpractice and negligence, Amazon and their headquarters appointing would be a perfect example of it. So one is, they just screwed up, as did Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time, as did Bill de Blasio, who was New York City mayor.

‍

But ultimately, if you are Amazon, or Meta, or Google, or Microsoft, or Apple or whatever it is, you like things the way they are. So take Section 230. So as you know, and the listeners may know, Section 230 is a provision in U.S. law that says internet service providers cannot be responsible for the content posted by their users on their platforms, right?

‍

So if I defame you on Instagram, you can sue me. The deep pockets would be Meta, and you can't touch Meta, right? That is an immunity that no one else in the media has, no one else in society has. And it has given the platforms a perverse incentive to promote the most negative content possible, because we know just from evolution, humans have a negativity bias.

‍

It's what kept us from being eaten by lions back in the day, and we are just more likely to click on negative headlines than positive headlines. If you're Facebook, if you're Meta, your earnings are based on clicks. It's based on advertising revenue, and so you want as many clicks as possible. You want the most negative content possible out there, because that generates the most clicks, and because you are legally protected from any liability no matter what happens on your platform, including mass teenage suicides, depression, child pornography. 

‍

Look, we saw Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram arrested in France last week over some of this stuff. Your only perverse incentive is to allow all that to happen simply because it makes you more money right now. Because if you're Meta, you have so many lobbyists in Washington, even though most politicians from both parties will say, “We should repeal Section 230, protect kids on the internet,” you've been able to completely prevent that from happening. So ultimately the big powers, whether it's giant tech companies, or pharma, or tobacco, or the gun lobbyists, or giant unions–and this is true across the spectrum, right, this is not left or right–they like things the way they are. 

‍

[00:12:21] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Segueing for a second. Do you worry about the approach of the UK government to arresting people for Tweeting things on Twitter? Or do you say, “No, Section 230 ought to be repealed anyway, and Twitter shouldn't have immunity for that, so we gotta do something.” 

‍

[00:12:37] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Well, interestingly, if you were to vote Section 230, and in Europe, so the EU, which the UK is no longer part of, has the Digital Markets Act, which does have a lot more regulation around this–then all of a sudden, you actually wouldn't have the need to arrest people for Tweeting.

‍

And look, if people are tweeting child pornography, that shouldn't be a thing, right. But overall, what you need to do, it's a lot like the whole point we're making about mobile voting–when the platform's economic incentives are aligned with the public good, that will result in the right policy. So if Twitter says, “Oh no, someone can now take me to court and I could be liable for multi-billion dollar judgment,” that's what will change their behavior.

‍

They will block your Tweet that they think creates a liability. And so you won't even get to the point of needing to arrest the individual, because you'll finally have true content moderation. If you think about it Michael, when you were a kid, tobacco litigation in the 1980s is one of the really big things that changed smoking in the U.S.

‍

The tobacco company started being held liable by juries for multi-billion-dollar, tens-of-billions-of- dollars-judgments, and that finally incentivized tobacco to change their advertising, change their marketing, change their retail strategy, and ultimately led to a giant decline of cigarette smoking in the U.S. So we know that that strategy can work, but we can't keep letting the companies get away with having this immunity. 

‍

[00:14:02] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

But I'm glad you said that, because that actually brings me to exactly where I wanted, which is, the question is whether that's doable in a highly polarized political landscape right now, right?

‍

Because in the highly polarized landscape right now–I'll take Elon Musk's view of it for a second, which is, Keir Starmer in the UK is a radical leftist. He's protecting Islamist immigrants and not dealing with that issue. And he's shutting the mouths of those who want to protest against it. That's probably one side of it. And I’m sure that Starmer for his point of view says, “Oh, this Musk guy is a radical free speech absolutist, and to the point you make, unless we kind of rein that in, we're not going to do it.” But who's going to make that decision if I got so to speak, that guy perceived as the left guy, the radical left guy in Starmer doing this, I'll get to a different place on what's controlled speech or, you know, what's controlled smoking in a media landscape than I would otherwise. So it's hard to implement this in a polarized landscape and technology, by the way, just to make the last point, is actually the truest expression of this.

‍

Why is it the truest expression of it? Because everybody's got a soapbox. I mean, look at me, I'm standing in front of a microphone. You're sitting in front of a microphone. I'm a nobody, you're a somebody and you know, but I got a soapbox to thousands or so people are listening to, you know, who the hell was Michael Eisenberg before that?

‍

So, you know, anybody's got the soapbox. So what are you gonna do? Let Starmer do it over here? Or if you go to whatever his name is, what's his name? Bolsonaro? Or whatever it is who do it in Brazil? Or Lula? 

‍

[00:15:33] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah Lula, they flip back and forth there. Look, there's two points here that are worth thinking about. The first is the underlying nature of regulation, right? And I think one of the big problems we have in the U.S. which is probably true all over the world, is you have people who are career bureaucrats, academics, politicians, policy makers who have never had a P&L, never created a job, never really worked in the private sector.

‍

You have career tech people who have either been founders, or VCs, or others who are very smart and have made a lot of money, but have never worked in government, never worked in politics, don't really understand how that happens, and they have these extremist views on both sides that don't make sense, right?

‍

So if you take for example The California A.I. bill that passed on Friday, this will run a couple of weeks from now, but we’re at the end of August. It puts basic safety testing and regulations around large language models. I would argue that it is a totally reasonable bill. Marc Andreessen, who has kind of become the leader of sort of the libertarian tech optimist manifesto concept, is against it, as is, by the way, OpenAI. Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, everyone else. Because they're saying “No, we can't have any regulation technology at all, because it will stifle innovation.” Um, living in a world with no rules or regulation at all–is not a feasible way to live. Human beings need a certain amount of structure. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the human species, there were homo sapiens and there were Neanderthals, right? And the Neanderthals, as I understand it, were not only bigger and stronger, they were actually smarter too. Their brains were a lot bigger, but what they couldn't do was work together. They couldn't compromise.

‍

They couldn't create any sort of society. And as a result, even though homo sapiens were less impressive on individualistic levels, on a collective level, much more impressive, and in the war between the species, we won out, and that's what developed. Marc Andreessen would not like living in a world of total chaos, right?

‍

Marc Andreessen has the billions of dollars that he has, and the security to walk around, you know, Menlo Park or San Francisco, wherever it is, generally safely, because we have a society with structure. So to say we should be absolutists and there should be no rules on speech, or no regulation on tech or anything else, that's absurd.

‍

At the same time, the FTC–so take Lina Khan, right? I would say that her view in trying to make sure that the giant tech companies don't have monopolistic power over the marketplace is very pro innovation, because it's what helps allow for early-stage competitors to emerge and challenge some of the big companies.

‍

On the flip side, Khan seems to think that all M&A activity is bad, right? And her general you know, kind of antipathy towards mergers and acquisitions has created this massive chilling effect across tech where, you know, the vast majority of tech exits are not IPOs, they're M&A deals, and companies, and I'm sure you have this conversation in board meetings, I certainly do–deals that would have been discussed and pursued a couple of years ago are now just shot down immediately right?

‍

So because, “Oh, well, the FTC will never allow that.” Even things that probably wouldn't have to go before the FTC are now not happening. What does that lead to? There's been a lot less venture investment over the last couple of years than prior, and that means less new company formation, less new company success. [00:19:00] 

‍

Less innovation. Lina Khan is a career academic. She's only ever worked in either academia or government. She has never created a single job in her life and she has no ideas. The problem is, when we have a world where everyone are sort of policy extremists, whether it's Marc Andreessen on one side, or Lina Khan on the other, and instead of looking at regulation saying, “A regulation is neither inherently good nor bad, it is as good or bad as it applies to the context of situation that we're in. That's it.” But when you don't look at it that way, you're going to get these really polarized, disparate results. And the only way to take away the power of a Lina Khan on the far left or Marc Andreessen now on the right, is to move things back to the middle. And that's where technology can be an incredible solution. 

‍

Because we live in a world right now in the U.S. where the whole system of voting is designed to keep people from voting. Right, if you're in power, you don't want more turnout, because you know how to win low turnout primaries. You're not interested in changing that. When I was in law school, I had a professor by the name of Abner Mikva.

‍

Mikva had been Clinton's White House counsel. He had been a federal appellate court judge. Incredible guy. I caught him at the very end of his career, where he would basically just tell stories. And he told this story when he started off in politics, that–this was like the 1950s,and Adlai Stevenson was running against Dwight Eisenhower for president.

‍

He was a young guy and he wanted to volunteer for Stevenson. And he walked into one of the local ward offices in Chicago and the ward boss, a guy named O'Sullivan or something like that, smoking a cigar, is saying, “What do you want?” He said, “Oh, I want to volunteer. I want to help.” And O’Sullivan says, “Who sent you?

‍

And Mikva says “Nobody!” and O’Sullivan says, “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” That’s mostly still how it is today. And so even though, yes, in theory, everyone over the age of 18 could arrange to go vote, the vast majority of us don't. But 90 percent of American adults at this point have a smartphone. By 2026, 97 percent of Gen Z will have a smartphone.

‍

And if you met them where they are and said, “Look, all you got to do now is pull up an app and vote securely in an encrypted way on your phone.” That's what gets the kind of participation and primary turnout up that cancels out the undue influence that Lina Khan has on the left and Marc Andreesen has on the right, and it moves things to the middle.

‍

[00:21:28] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So, before we dig into the exact mechanisms of mobile voting and your theory as to why this works, and I'll just state that you already said that because there’s 100 percent, almost, accessibility of mobile phones, and we send things to people's mobile phones, and therefore we can kind of push, notify them to make sure that they vote–you have two unstated assumptions in there. 

‍

One is that, so to speak, wisdom of the crowds will bring people to the center. That is an assumption. 

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

The second assumption that you make is that technology being the blank slate that it is–in this case, the mobile phone or a mobile voting app–won't be subject to the same manipulation.

‍

I'm not even talking about nefariousness at this point. I was talking about, you know, influences, et cetera, before we get to nefarious, you know, the hacking, whatever it is, influences, et cetera, that we just talked about on social media platforms like Meta and X and others occur there–and AI that occur there.

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

So you have I would call two big assumptions, elephants that we need to talk about. 

‍

[00:22:36] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Sure, let's go through that. So on the first one, I think it's a math point, which is, definitionally the view of 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent is inherently more mainstream than the view of 10 percent. 

‍

Now, we may not like the view of the 40 percent or 50 percent. I would consider myself a centrist, but I have views that are in line with the right, I have views that are aligned with the far left. Not every view that I hold is going to be advanced by mobile voting, but definitionally, if democracy is the expression of the most number of people saying, “Here's what I believe,” and you're trying to that effectuate that, higher turnout inherently represents that. 

‍

Or, let me give you a more basic example, and this is one that, you know, you were kind of watching ‘cause you were in Uber through Benchmark and I was running these campaigns. So let's just take taxis and Uber, which is, by the way, I literally came up with the whole mobile voting concept in the middle of doing this work for Uber–so normally speak, pre-Uber, pre US. you're a taxi medallion owner in Atlanta, making up any city, right? You give your local city councilman four grand every campaign cycle ,and they do what you want, because they want the four grand for the next campaign, right? All of a sudden, we just, after you, at their behest, tried to shut us down, had 5,000 of your constituents, text, Tweet, email, call, express through technology in some way, “Hey, leave this Uber thing alone. I like it.” We shifted the underlying inputs, and all of a sudden, the views of the 5000 constituents dramatically outweigh the $4,000 from the taxi, you know, taxi owner. And that's what allowed Uber to win and to be legal in every single market in the US.

‍

I think we would agree that the country is far better off for having Uber, having ridesharing, you know, better options for consumers, more jobs for drivers, less drunk driving, so many positive externalities to Uber, right? And so what that said to me is–people, if you make it easy enough for them, they will express their will, but they're only going to do it if you make it easy enough.

‍

Your average person is not missing taking their kids to school or being late for work on a random Tuesday to vote in a City Council Primary, State Senate Primary. And yet they should still have the ability to be heard. And so, yes, I am taking the basic democratic view that more people is more reflective of the mainstream.

‍

And look, more people in the U.S. at this point are independents than Republicans or Democrats. And what do independents want? They just want shit to get done, right? They kind of hate both parties. They hate both extremes. Most of these issues are transgender bathrooms or, you know, pronouns or whatever, however it is on either side, they don't want to deal with any, right?

‍

They just want well-run, safe, effective government. And if those people all of a sudden were empowered, that would become the underlying incentive for our politicians. So that's why to me, the first assumption is that it’s safe. The second one is, you know, well, what about all the misinformation that currently happens on social media and the risk of AI doing that?

‍

Sure. I don't think that mobile voting makes that risk any greater or any less. But to me, right now we have a system that is in the toilet, and doomed to stay in the toilet, because whenever you have 10 percent turnout, we know for a fact that everything is controlled by the extremes and by a handful of special interests.

‍

If all of a sudden it moves to 30, 40, 50%, inherently, that diffuses the power of those special interests, right? So fundamentally, the NRA may want to put messaging on Facebook to say, “Oh, you know, they're going to come for your guns, and they're gonna kill you all in your homes and whatever else.” When it turns out 12 percent are Republicans in the congressional primary, and half of those people are NRA members, the NRA's vote share in that election is 50%.

‍

When turnout becomes 36 percent in that same primary, the NRA vote share goes down to 16%. So the people, if anything, if we have higher turnout, the people putting out misinformation, their share of the electorate goes way down, and their ability to influence it goes down exponentially.  

‍

[00:26:58] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Let me take the other side of this argument for a second. I'm not sure what I think, but I want to take the other side of the argument. Because what we're at right now is what I would call the intersection of technology and values.

‍

That's really where we're at. So my assumption is at some point, democracy worked better than it did today, because it's a system that's lasted for a couple hundred years, feels like it's coming off the rails. 

‍

At some point it worked better. Number one in the past, you know, most of these candidates were decided in smoke filled rooms by guys chomping on cigars. 

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

There wasn't a lot of representation, including of women, in those places, and certainly not people of color in the United States or whatever it is. It was a much less diverse crowd, but democracy, at least the way we thought of it, worked better. By the way, not everyone had the right to vote at some point in time, but it worked better That's kind of, I think, one part of it that we ought to be aware of, which is, somehow we think it worked better in the past, but it didn't include what today we consider to be modern values or democratic values.

‍

So that's kind of point one I'd like for you to consider. Point two I'd like for you to consider is the following. Mobile phones, whether in people's hands, and pockets, and kind of, you know, come at you all the time–that's actually the easiest place to influence people to do really stupid stuff. To click on things–these ad networks are incredibly powerful. People were concerned about Cambridge Analytica. That was before you'd have an instant click to go vote for your candidate, which is what you're advocating right now. You know, the retweet problem, which is, I see something, I gotta retweet it right now without pausing for a second is a real problem.

‍

And so, the more instantaneous something is, the more fast paced something is, the more it's in your head, the more the ability is to kind of, at a mass scale, move people. So maybe it's plausible that we actually get more polarized societies, because of the nature of the medium, because the medium is the message, rather than the outcome that you're hoping for, which is, hey, people will be who they are, and you know, most people are more towards the center. 

‍

[00:28:52] Bradley Tusk:

‍

 Yeah. I mean, so a few things. One, you know, that's definitely a very Marshall McLuhan kind of perspective, on the medium being the message. And it's certainly been around for awhile. But first of all, I spent over 30 years now in and around politics, elections, government, all that, you know, yes there are things that will influence voters in one direction or another, but overall, they're pretty true to who they are, right?

‍

And they kind of care about their pocketbook, their safety, their kids’ schools. Like New York City where you grew up, where I live, we're going to have a mayoral election next year, and fundamentally, it's going to be based on, you know, does the incumbent Eric Adams get re-elected or not? That's going to be, do people feel safe?

‍

Do they feel like the city is clean and well run? Do they like living there? And that's fundamentally where it's going to be, you know, not sort of different TikTok videos one way or the other. So number one is– 

‍

[00:29:43] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

How do you know that? You say that with authority, but I'm not persuaded you actually know that. 

‍

[00:29:47] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Because of decades of polling, focus groups, talking to voters, running campaigns, going to campaign events–just a life's worth of experience. 

‍

[00:30:01] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I'll take the other side of it again, just because I think the conversation–so nobody ever knew that they had to do 10,000 steps a day, and get up in the middle of the night to walk up and down the staircase–until they put a Fitbit on somebody's arm.

‍

So digitally-induced behavior is like a real thing. And people do crazy stuff to you know, hit 10,000 steps a day, or wherever the case may be, because these kind of digital reminders over there, so perhaps you're incorrect. 

‍

[00:30:25] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Let’s look at where we are. Just think New York City. Stick with that, right? So we have the City Council last year, primary turnout was six point five percent. So you have the city council in New York City with six, seven, eight thousand votes. In a city of 8.5 million people in the, I would argue, best and most important city in the United States. 

‍

[00:30:42] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

That's horrific. We can agree that that's horrific. 

‍

[00:30:46] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

And so who are those people? Radical left wing. So, the City Council, after failing to defund the police, passed a bill last year that said, “Oh, every time a police officer interacts with anyone from the public in any way, even giving someone directions, they have to file a report.”

‍

What is that an attempt to do? It's a backdoor way to defund the police, by saying we're going to tie them up so much with paperwork, that they can't do their actual job of policing. The mayor vetoed the bill. His veto was overwritten. Why? Because if you are a city council member with 6. 5 percent turnout, the logical decision to make, if your only goal is reelection, is to support that bill ,because that's what that 6.5 percent wants. Right now, we have a city that feels dirty, feels dangerous. We have thousands of unlicensed weed shops. We have scaffolding everywhere. We have mentally ill, homeless people on fentanyl everywhere. We have people riding their bikes off the sidewalks, and while we have the bike lanes, all of that, because there's a true feeling of lawlessness in the city.

‍

That is the result of progressive left wing policies, driven by incredibly low turnout in the primaries. We know that what we have doesn't work. What you're saying is, well, if we try this and we're at 46.5 percent instead of 6.5%, maybe it won't be different or better. So a lifetime of experience tells me that that's wrong, that it will be better, but even if not, it can't be worse than what we have right now.

‍

And so, right now we're heading on a collision course, and you and I have discussed this before, I don't think we're even one country in 25 years if we don't make some sort of massive fundamental reform to the way that we elect people and incentivize them to work together. And so to me, we were at the point where we've got to try something inherently different.

‍

And again, also just to be clear, I'm not advocating for replacing all other forms of voting with your phone. It's just an additional option. You would still have the vote by mail. We still have voting machines. Everyone can still do it the way that they want to do it. We're just saying, here's another way.

‍

[00:32:48] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Do you think that mobile voting will discount the views of older populations at the expense of Gen Z people, maybe? 

‍

[00:32:55] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

No, I think right now the views of older populations are wildly inflated, and way too inflated, right? We frequently screw over–think about all the spending that we do, right? We just take more, and more, and more debt and say, in order to have things better today, we are going to saddle our kids and our grandkids with a debt that can never be paid and eats up the interest payments alone, more and more and more of the annual budget. 

‍

And they're going to have to make do with less healthcare, less education, less resources, smaller military, all of that, because we are unwilling to make any sacrifices today. Our government is wildly inflated towards the elderly, because they are the people that vote right now.

‍

If anything, we should be looking to decrease their influence, and look out for the views of the future. One more piece though, which is, we also need reform of social media, right? The TikTok ban in the US was outstanding, right? And that should be, I hope, upheld by the courts. We need to revoke Section 230.

‍

You've seen yourself over 800 different bills on AI in state governments last year, a quarter of them were around  things like deep fakes and misinformation and elections. And all of those need to move forward. A lot of those need to move forward. So, yes, we need to make voting vastly more accessible because we can't keep going the way we are.

‍

But, yes, we also need to radically reform the use of AI and social media to protect people. 

‍

[00:34:18] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Those are all big hauls to do at once, you know. I'm obviously a huge fan of the TikTok bill. I think it's a nefarious force of a communist government on the other side of the world trying to undermine the United States, and all free societies, by the way.

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yep. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And you see the data from NCRI, Network Contagion Research Institute. it's absolutely clear that they suppress anti-China material. It's absolutely clear that they pump up pro-Hamas material. It's absolutely clear that when you compare it to Instagram or other places, there's a lot more undermining of the United States and patriotism than any other platform. And so I'm a big fan of that ban. That having been said, I think your point of moving more voting power, so to speak, which is moving more policies to the younger population versus the older population–I can argue the opposite. 

‍

So I'll take it for a second, not because I don't think we have to invest in the future and that we have inflated spending for large parts of the population, but these are people who take responsibility and go out to vote, right? And you want a society of responsible citizens.

‍

One of the things that living in Israel has taught me is that this is a society of mostly responsible citizens. And when you have responsible citizens, you have much more civic activism, you have higher voter turnouts, it’s like 70 plus percent here. And you end up–we have our own polarization, but it's not nearly as bad as the United States right now. And so what you're doing is, I would call it a hack, which is a values judgment to move power from people who've taken responsibility to go vote, to those who can't be bothered to go vote, by making it easier for them. And so, can we agree it's a values judgment and not just…? 

‍

[00:35:54] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Sure, it's a value judgment, but at the same time, if you fundamentally believe in democracy and you believe that everyone should have the ability to vote, and you now have a medium for technology to make it dramatically easier to vote–I think about what you and I do on our day jobs at VCs. We're looking for, can we reduce friction meaningfully enough to incentivize consumer behavior or business behavior in some way to buy the product or service of the startup we invested in, right?

‍

Fundamentally, that's what our job is about. If we have a way to dramatically reduce the friction of voting, I would argue we have a moral obligation to do so, right? We should do everything we can to make voting as easy and accessible as possible. And keep in mind, forget about just regular people like you and me.

‍

Imagine if you were blind, right? One of our biggest groups of support is National Federation for the Blind. Not only do you have–it's so much harder for you as a blind person to go somewhere to have to vote. You're gonna have to rely on the person you're dealing with at the polling place to actually cast the ballot in the way that you want them to. You have no privacy.

‍

You're deployed military–you mail in your bought ballots from Kandahar, it shows up three weeks after the election. It goes in the trash. Right. You are a Native American living on a tribal land, and you have 150 mile drive to the nearest polling place–it's not going to happen. You live in Alaska, you got to get in a push plane. It's not going to happen. There are so many different college students. There's so many communities. Forget about that. We're saying, are you responsible enough or not to make the effort? There are some people for whom just the ability to make the effort isn't there in the first place.

‍

[00:37:31] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Listen, I certainly have no question about the military that they need to be able to vote, vote early and vote often as far as I'm concerned. I do think though–this is not my perspective, if I was challenging it–I would say that having responsible citizens versus all citizens is an interesting values question.

‍

And one I wouldn't take seriously, but I want to switch–

‍

[00:37:51] Bradley Tusk:

‍

If you said, if you could show that the roughly 10 percent of Americans who reliably vote in private were the responsible citizens leading to an effective, well-functioning democracy, sure. Right? But we have the opposite of that! Right? We have a totally polarized, dysfunctional, broken democracy. And so, like, the very prima facie evidence of the world that we live in, in our country–it's different than your country–that we have in our country, argues that the responsible citizen sort of thesis just doesn't work. 

‍

[00:38:26] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I want to switch gears for a half a second, because you talked a lot about reducing friction. You talk a lot about speed and accessibility, etc.

‍

One of the other hot topics that you and I have spoken about a lot, and I spent a lot of time thinking about here as well, is purchasing, right? Is how the government purchases things. 

‍

Bradley Tusk:

‍

Yeah. 

‍

[00:38:43] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

It was obviously a big problem that was well publicized in the military probably 20 years ago, the $400 hammer or whatever it was.

‍

And very clearly, as the world has sped up government purchasing, procurement has not sped up. 

‍

Bradley Tusk:

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And it's still very, very bureaucratic and in general, I've made the comment many times that civic society runs on WhatsApp and iOS, whereas the government still runs on Windows 95. If we're lucky, it might still run on the Pony Express.

‍

Bradley Tusk:

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And so I'm super interested, you know, as you think about mobile voting, which is what we call a technological advance, that, perhaps in your view, changes the nature of democracy–what would you do in procurement in particular? 

‍

[00:39:22] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah, I'm trying to put something in the chat as we speak. So I wrote a Substack, I don’t know where you post it, oh, here it is–about two weeks ago, that talked about how you could use AI to start performing government functions itself. This is a little bit of a shift in topic from mobile voting, but I believe that AI could radically improve government procure, right? So the example that I used in the Substack, but it was just an example, was the disastrous rollout of legalized cannabis in New York, right?

‍

Which says, when you come home to see family or to do business here, you have undoubtedly noticed the thousands of illegal weed shops all over the city, which has caused a massive crisis in terms of teenage addiction and lawless behavior, and everything else. The process of writing the actual regulation–so the New York State legislature wrote legislation to say, “Okay, cannabis will now be regulated.”

‍

Fine. That's a very human process, and is the result of give-and-take of different people from different parties, different parts of the state, with different perspectives. Great. That is a fundamentally human process. From there, though, you know, when they write a bill, that's just sort of the beginning. The reality is you then need to promulgate regulations for industry as to how they're going to do whatever it is.

‍

That's really where the rubber beats the road a lot more in our work. It took the people, the bureaucrats who were appointed, two and a half years to come up with the rules, and in the interim, thousands of illegal weed shops opened up. And you kind of can't blame the public for not really knowing what was legal and what wasn't legal, because they knew that the legislature had legalized cannabis, and they're supposed to know–like do you have the proper licensure or not?

‍

No, like how could a member of the public be expected to know that? That's unreasonable, right? And so the shops flourish. They're waiting forever for the regulations, including the regulations by which they need to have the power to shut down the illegal shop, and it takes two and a half years. And since the bill was passed in 2021, we're now over three years later–there are only 140 licensed dispensaries. There are, somewhere, an estimate of 5,000 illegal ones. I argue in this piece, and it's on my Substack if you want to check it out, that had we used AI, we could have A. promulgated the regulations in a fraction of the time, and B. used AI to say, okay, the legislature wants these criteria taken into effect–geography, neighborhood, background of the owner of the license applicant, preference for you know, military veterans, or women, or whatever you want it to be, right? You put the inputs into the model, you put the applications in front of it and it would say, “Here is a stack ranking of all the applications, based on the criteria set out by the rules in the New York State legislature.” And you could have done it in a fraction of the time that it happened. So I believe that effectively, a licensing determination is just a form of government procurement.

‍

It's the same thing by a slightly different name. So whether it's how the military purchases weapons, or how, you know, the transportation department purchases orange cones, or how we license, you know, nail salons or weed dispensaries or anything else–I think that you could make the process A. vastly more efficient, but B. vastly more fair and less political, right?

‍

A lot of the corruption in the system comes from the human element, right? People either literally taking bribes, or most of the time, it's more soft corruption, which is like, “Oh, this vendor took me out for my birthday, and I was getting married, and he took me to a strip club for my bachelor party,” whatever it is, and then all of a sudden you're favoring them in RFP applications.

‍

I've got an investment where we led the Series A of a company earlier this year in the education space, where we have to win all of our contracts through RFP, and we've won a bunch, but we've lost two this year that I literally can't come up with any explanation other than corruption for how we lost that. Because nothing else actually makes sense. 

‍

If we had AI making affirmations–with some level of human review or override, just like we should have, that’s the point of the California regulation we talked about earlier–I really do think that you could dramatically transform the way that procurement works.

‍

So, you know, I haven't seen any startups yet focused on building AI procurement systems for government, maybe because mst people in tech don't come out of government and think about it this way. But I do think that it could be an incredibly powerful tool, and I think existing tools could be used for that purpose, too 

‍

[00:43:52] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I'm sitting here listening to you talk about how you know, AI procurement, it would help the system make it more objective. And then you said maybe with some, you would override on it.

‍

And I began to scratch my head and go, “Oh, wait a minute. Maybe then it becomes a CYA, the AI for people to make decisions, and people are people.  

‍

[00:44:06] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Maybe…

‍

[00:44:07] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

I’m try to figure out for myself, like, where do you say, like, people are people, where do you say like, “Oh, we need technology innovation here,” you know, and I come back to mobile voting again, which is like,here we need to make it super frictionless, you know, to get in front of the people, let them vote.

‍

When it comes to AI and just automating the machine, you say, “Oh, we’ll automate it, but let the guy override it.” And I just, it isn’t clear to me where you draw the line and all these things. 

‍

[00:44:35] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

With mobile voting, we have built, ultimately, you have election officials who are human beings, who are either elected themselves or appointed by elected officials, who would have not the ability, obviously, to change your vote.

‍

But, you know, ultimately, they have the ability to audit everything and print out paper copies of the ballot, and double check–everything in our system can be admitted and hitched to the election office, printed out–so there is a paper copy of absolutely everything–and tabulate that against the digital score. and the ability–look, election officials are, for example, in the U.S. voter identification. It can be as stringent as when we did mobile voting for military; we did a facial recognition scan, and a biometric scan. And then once that determined you are clearly Michael Eisenberg, you were then cleared to vote. There are other places where it's just literally a signature. And if it's sort of, your scribble looks like vaguely like the scribble in the book, good enough, right? That's up to each individual election official. 

‍

Personally, I would love to have biometric, and we built our system to allow for biometric, because I think that would make voting more secure. Just like the way CLEAR works at the airport, I think that we could do the same thing for mobile voting. We have built the same technology for it. But there is a level of human override in the sense that I don't get to decide what identification requirements a local jurisdiction is going to use, I just have to offer them technology that purports with whatever their rules are. 

‍

But when you think about the procurement question, it's a little bit to me, like I think the American legal system is maybe not a bad model here, which is, in a civil trial, you make a decision based on a preponderance of the evidence right? In a criminal trial, it's beyond a reasonable doubt. I think it’s something, and again, this is super early and unformed, but I think something like that where you say, if beyond a reasonable doubt, the AI got it wrong, hallucinating in some way, whatever it is, that's when the human ability to interfere comes in. And that's a legal standard that will be applied.

‍

Something like that. Look, we are in, as we would all agree, the top of the first, or that's the bottom of the first, when it comes to AI, so there's a lot more that we don't know than we do know, but I think something like that would work. And again, for mobile voting, that's why A. we have a system that is end-to end verifiable, that is end-to-end encrypted, that allows for paper ballots to be printed out at the end of the process, and B, comports with the local rules, regulations of whatever jurisdiction we're working in. So, yeah, I do think we have it. 

‍

[00:47:15] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

If I was going to make the argument against mobile voting, what's the best way to make the argument?

‍

[00:47:20] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

So, if I'm a politician, and I don't want mobile voting because I know how to win my current election, and I don't want to make it easier for someone to challenge me, I would say, “Security, safety, Putin's going to hack it, nothing is unhackable, quantum computing can blow this out of the water. We can't take the risk. Democracy is too important. The integrity and security of democracy trumps everything else, even if that means much lower turnout,” right? That's what they're going to say, because you know what they can't say? “We don't want more people to vote,” right? 

‍

So like in Texas or Georgia, when they passed significant voting restrictions, they didn't say, “We don't want more black people to vote.”

‍

That's what they meant. “We don't want black people who tend to vote Democrat to turn out. So we're gonna come up with ways to try to exclude that.” They said, “Security, integrity.” So those are going to be the buzzwords that we use. And there are groups like Citizens Action and Verified Voting in the U.S., these very inside the beltway, super wonky, ivory tower organizations where everyone went to Yale and everyone, you know, has sharing at 5 PM, where they don't think that stupid people should vote and they don't want to make it easier to vote.

‍

And they will argue that we are better off in the world where only people like them, to your responsible citizen thesis, should be allowed to vote. So that's the case they're going to make. And look, the reality is two things. One, I'm not going to, so when we're done building our tech, so we've got about another eight to 12 months of work to do, I'm going to make it open source and free, which A. makes it totally honorable, right? B. means other people can improve on it, but C. makes it free, right? This is completely a philanthropic thing for me, a foundational technology, not even my foundation Michael. I’ve given it to another foundation. But we're only going to do that once we're first certified by NIST, National Institute for Standards and Technology. So until NIST says “Yes, you're good to go. We think this is secure software.” I'm not putting it out there in the marketplace. So one is, by definition, we're going to meet the same certifications that technology already has to. And number two, I'm not arguing that the 2024, 2028 presidential elections should be decided by mobile voting.

‍

Let's start off with City Council Primaries. School board elections. You know, let's start off with municipal elections, maybe just primaries, and work our way up and see what works, see what doesn't work. Vladimir Putin is not hacking, you know, the New York City Council district 12 election in the Bronx, right?

‍

[00:49:48] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

It turns out he didn't need to hack the San Francisco election for the city going downhill. He did it to himself.

‍

[00:49:53] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Right! So I’m both arguing for only using the technology that we're building once certified by outside expertise, and then two, rolling it out a very local incremental way over time. See what does and doesn't work.

‍

And by the way, if the answer is, we roll this out, and it does more harm than good in any way, then don't do it, right? But to not try it simply because either you're worried about things that I think are somewhat impossible to predict, or you ultimately are an apologist to the status quo is unreasonable.

‍

[00:50:27] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Does that make you a techno-optimist like Marc Andreessen? 

‍

[00:50:30] Bradley Tusk: In that way, yes. I mean, there are ways we talked about earlier that I really disagree with Marc, because Marc would say a true techno-optimist rejects all regulation of technology in any way, shape, or form, is a free speech absolutist. I would say “No, Marc is wrong about that.”

‍

But do I think that fundamentally–yeah, you can't have the job that you have, that I have, where we invest in early stage tech companies and not be a techno-optimist, because fundamentally, if we didn't think that A. tech ultimately always wins, and B. that tech could make people's lives better. There would be easier ways for us to make a living, right?

‍

What we do, I would argue, is pretty risky and pretty hard. And it's because we have this underlying optimist belief. 

‍

[00:51:08] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Okay, before I get into the two final questions, there's a question I have to ask you based on what you said about the biometrics, and checking people, and voter registration, etc. So I think you've been a pretty vocal supporter of Kamala Harris for president. 

‍

At least the one of the beefs on her is that many illegals that have come into the country, she wants to allow to vote. And there's certainly been some moves made in that direction. What do you think about that? 

‍

[00:51:35] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

I don't support that. But even more broadly, the United States, like most of the Western world, has a significant population, right?

‍

We are, and by the way, not just in the West, but in China too, we are a country that is getting older and older, and older people are vastly more expensive. They use Social Security, they use Medicare. We need millions, if not tens of millions, of more legal taxpayers in the U.S. filling jobs. And we have these giant holes in industries like hospitality, and nursing, and construction, and paying taxes.

‍

So, I would argue we need exponentially more legal immigration. But what I don't support is illegal immigration. I think we should have giant, you know, expansions of quotas, but at the same time much tighter border security. And when someone does come here illegally, they should be deported. They shouldn't be permitted to stay.

‍

Now, the migrants that we have, if you're not going to deport them, at least let them work. Because just supporting them with taxpayer money is crazy. That makes the least sense of anything that you could do. But ultimately, the Democrats are wrong in saying that we just have open borders and everyone could be here.

‍

And the Republicans are wrong saying, “No, we need to keep things as tight as possible.” For the good of our economy and the good of our society, especially the good of elderly people, we need a lot more legal immigration, but you can't have a country without secure borders. And we should have exponentially tighter borders.

‍

[00:52:57] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Europe had legal immigration, because of the same problem. They had a worse demographic problem than the United States did. And now I would say they are culturally challenged, to say the least. And that was with legal immigration. I think for what it's worth, the Republican platform says there should be more high-quality immigration.

‍

[00:53:12] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

We should have both. 

‍

[00:53:13] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

And less kind of, you know, call it, blue collar or whatever it is.

‍

[00:53:17] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Well, it should be this! I argue the department of labor should every year say, “These are the number of openings in the workforce where the U.S.  doesn't have the skill set among the current population to fill it and we need,” I'm making it up, “Two million more workers in these six sectors, and it could be high skill or low skill. That's what we let in.” 

‍

Right? Like it should be totally determined by the economic need of society, not ideological, not illegal. And that's what it should be. I mean, we should sort of almost take it out of the hands of politicians completely. 

‍

[00:53:50] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

As somebody who's worried about elections being tipped, do you worry that illegals will tip this election?

‍

[00:53:55] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

No. No. Because the reality is–I have worked, like I said, in politics for 30 years, and the actual examples of voter fraud compared to the concerns raised about voter fraud is like exponentially different.  

‍

[00:54:10] Michael Eisenberg:

‍

No this isn’t voter fraud. This is people that aren't citizens of the United States, and they couldn't vote, basically.

‍

[00:54:14] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

How are they going to vote? If they vote, it would be fraudulent right? 

‍

[00:54:15] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Oh, no, unless you let them, right? 

‍

[00:54:17] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

So, yeah, I mean, a few things. One is typically speaking, the places that have the biggest sort of migrant populations are New York, California, Illinois, states where the outcome is already pretty predetermined anyway. So A. in the places where the voters really are in that risk, it doesn't sound really material, but B. More in reality, voter fraud is one of the things–look, I worked in Chicago, right? I mean, that's as bad as it gets. You have lots of corruption. But the notion of like, actually people voting illegally, it's fun to put it in books, and movies, and TV shows and all that–it's like 0.000006 percent of total votes cast in American history. So I don't think it's a real problem.

‍

[00:55:02] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

All right. I want to ask two last questions. One is about AI regulations. So you were in favor of the California regulation. I want to turn the question in a slightly different way. So, we're fighting a lot of asymmetric wars in the world right now, and people are fighting by different rules, right?

‍

You know, we've got the war with Hamas, terrorists fighting by one set of rules, Israel having its hands tied by, the UN, the rule of law, et cetera. None of us want to live in a lawless society, obviously, and in the rule of law, human rights is critically important–at the end of the day, the West is currently disadvantaged in this, because we're fighting under two separate systems. It’s not just war, it's also technology and AI.

‍

This very fast emerging area of technology, particularly AI. He who has less regulation will have inevitably more innovation, more ability to train models, and more ability to build the ‘AI God’ to use a term I learned from Gavin Baker. Whereas people whose hands are shackled will really or even have to turn to the regulator, and you know how slow those processes are could be slowed down.

‍

How does the West win a war when you're playing by two separate rules, and when the guys innovating need to go talk to the regulators, whereas in China, it's like, okay, go right ahead or not? Or in Iran? 

‍

[00:56:12] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

So it's like, it's interesting. Yes and no, right? Yes–definitionally, if you were playing by a different set of rules, and I think the problem is less around, for example, Chinese innovators are less restricted, and more that Chinese companies and Chinese government are stealing through corporate espionage, US technology, right?

‍

[00:56:34] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

They're both problematic. 

‍

[00:56:35] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah. Ultimately though, the U.S. has one major competitor–Israel would fit exactly in sort of the same bucket in this case, over Europe and over China and the rest of the world, which is, we have the right mix of an economic system, a governmental system, an academic system that really breeds innovation, right?

‍

Even with all of our problems, we are still the most innovative country in the history of the world by exponential margin. And so clearly some of that does involve rules and regulations, everything else. But what we do need is, A. We don't need dumb regulation around AI. The reason why I support the California bill is, it's incredibly light touch.

‍

I say, look, we should have basic safety testing. We should have some sort of ability to have an emergency stop. So if we do create this sentient being that decides that all human beings are a threat to AI and we have to go, they have some ability to deal with it. To me, it's not like the construction of cars or planes.

‍

No one would argue that we should build cars or planes by any sort of safety standards, or testing, or regulation. None of us want to get in a car that doesn’t have that level of basic regulation. To me, around AI, it makes a lot of sense. But again, it should be basic regulation to ensure bottom line safety, not to look and dictate who wins or doesn't win the market, number one.

‍

Number two, we should be spending exponentially more on government funding for R&D, both the direct government research and investing, and the investment in academics or otherwise to really, you know, significantly increase it. Three, which we've talked about before, immigration.

‍

One of the great advantages this country has, if you’ve seen the movie Oppenheimer, half the people who worked in that bomb weren’t from this country to begin with, but we brought them in, right? Certainly with Einstein, right? And like, the most talented people from all over the world would like to be in the U.S.--bring them all in, make them American citizens. Yes, you got to worry about corporate espionage. And I'm not an expert on that. We have to deal with it, but ultimately, co-opt them. 

‍

You're a Yankees fan, right? The advantage that the Yankees have always had over my Mets, and everyone else is, they could always get the cream of the crop, right?

‍

The most talented players of baseball want to be Yankees. So Juan Soto, when he comes out for free agency this fall, my Mets will probably offer him more money than your Yankees will, simply because Steve Cohen is actually a lot richer than Steinbrenner, right? And yet, we're probably not going to get, you're probably going to resign it, even if it's for 50 million less in the scope of the total contract, because you're the Yankees, right?

‍

The U.S. is the Yankees, right? We should be just like you guys, use it to get the best free agents. We should be using it to get the best scientists, the best technologists, and everything else. So it's a combination of the right regulations–no regulation is a problem, and too much regulation is a problem. It's like, take crypto.

‍

If you had a complete absence of crypto regulation, Coinbase couldn't exist. Circle couldn't exist. Lots of companies that I'm investing in, or you might be, couldn't exist simply because then you would have a point where the amount of scams would be so overwhelming that nobody could trust the market at all, and people couldn't participate.

‍

So you want a certain amount of regulation to prevent fraudulent behavior, but not so much that you can't encourage innovation, right? So you need the right rules and regulation, combined with heavy government investment, combined with right regulation policy. 

‍

[00:59:54] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Yeah. You make it sound a little bit like it's so easy, you just got to get the right regulation. Then I come back to the example you had about the Amazon second center in Long Island City, which wasn't even about regulation. It's just about, Hey, let's create 40,000 jobs, and we still couldn't get it right. And at the beginning you thought that politicians are not getting for the greater good, the kind of KPI-motivated was to get elected, but we'll get some out of the right regulation. It feels like, you know, alchemy. 

‍

[01:00:15] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

I would say the California Bill probably is the right regulation. And I think that if you had significantly more primary turnout in my____ in Queens, you would have had those Amazon jobs here. And so that if we can bring our politics to the mainstream by increasing primary turnout with XX secure mobile voting, and if we can harness technology like AI, where we both put basic precautions in place so that there are safety testing, but at the same time, really harness their ability for things by procurement–so not just the government regulates AI, the government uses AI for its own functionality–that's how we get there.  

‍

[01:00:55] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I want to finish with one last question which is a thesis I have, but it came to my mind because of something you said earlier, that human beings index for bad news which is what causes social media to promote more divisive things, and more bad news, and stuff like that, because we ran away from the lion and we wanted to get away from the lion.

‍

And so the thesis I have goes something like this. Religion, which is generally optimistic about the future, as a general proposition or certainly Judaism and Christianity are optimistic about the future, as an antidote to Darwinism. Meaning Darwinism, so to speak, survival of the fittest means one, I need to trump you–no pun intended–I need to be more fit than you and defeat you. And number two, as a way to overcome this fear gene which is so prominent in human beings because we ran away from the lions. And religion, which I know you spend some time on trying to find an application to create virtual religion, is kind of an antidote to that.

‍

[01:01:54] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yep. 

‍

[01:01:55] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

How do you think about that, and do you think that's actually implementable online? And this is why I'm asking you the question, because I know you spent time working on trying to create online religious forums. 

‍

[01:02:03] Bradley Tusk:

‍

I did.  I failed miserably at that. But look–

‍

[01:02:06] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

It’s venture capital baby! 

‍

[01:02:07] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah, no, I get it. I've gotten over it. So, look. All evolution cares about is adaptation, right? It just cares about survival for the sake of survival without any regard to humanity, quality of life, morality, anything else, right? So while it is an undeniable fact, it clearly can't be our governing thesis philosophy.

‍

What I really love about Judaism, and I would say it's a big difference between Judaism and other religions, is because we don't believe in an afterlife, and we don't believe the great carnage that differs us from Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, right, is ultimately, all that really matters is the here and now. Your happiness in this world is dependent on what kind of person you are and what kind of life you lead.

‍

And the reward for living a good life, is living a good life, right? And, you know, I think about, you know, in a few weeks, we'll be back in shul for the high holidays. You know, what are the three, ultimately, antidotes to the book of judgment–tzedaka, teshuva, tefila, right? And if you were to sort of engage those three things, and I think finally about whether or not, you know, I am on all three fronts there you know, like prayer or something that's part of my life, charity and helping other people. I do again, because it makes me feel good about myself, right? What I have learned is, when I do things that I think are societally impactful, whether it's trying to fix democracy with mobile voting, or, you know, I carry around $10 Dunkin Donuts gift cards in my pocket and I give to homeless people, that then can't use the money to buy drugs or alcohol–

‍

Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Then they get a lot of sugar.

‍

Bradley Tusk: 

‍

Yeah, it's true. It's true. I don't tell them what to eat. They want to eat donuts, it's fine. But ultimately, it's selfish, right? It makes me feel good about myself. So that's tzedaka. And then, you know, it's true. You know, ultimately, if I want somebody, again, so that I feel better about myself, I need to make amends. That might be as simple as an apology. It might be an apology plus me internalizing why I did what I did, so I understand, because things don't just happen for no reason, how not to do it again, and what prompted my behavior, how I can adjust to going forward. And I think that, you know, if we can focus on those three things, and we could focus on being a good human being, we lead happier lives.

‍

And to me, that's the moral philosophy of Judaism, especially that I would say–and by the way, is a big distinction, and there’s obviously nothing wrong with any religion, but to me, if I were living my life in anticipation of an afterlife, I think my life here on Earth would be far less meaningful, far less purposeful, and far less rich and fulfilling. And so, that's how I fundamentally think about it, and I think religion is fundamentally often a good thing.

‍

It can be abused by all religions, including ours, right? Absolutely. And I don't, just the same way that I don't like extremism in politics, I don't like extremism in religion either, right? But I do think that the precepts of helping other people, like have you seen–I'm sure they don't run in Israel–but in the U.S. for the past couple of years, there've been these Jesus ads on TV that are really, you got to watch them, brilliant. 

‍

[01:05:24] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I wasn't targeted with them, I guess. I don't know. 

‍

[01:05:26] Bradley Tusk:

‍

They are absolutely brilliant. But the point of the ad is, Jesus's fundamental view was to help other people in need, right? That is the point of Christianity. That's great, right? I think that that is, I love seeing those ads, because that's what we should be doing, which is helping our fellow human beings.

‍

And so to me, much in the same way that I believe that I support–this would be sort of a more right wing view that I hold–government funding of religious institutions to provide social services. So for example, every Thursday, I volunteer at a physical church called St. George's on 16th street through 2nd and 3rd, at a soup kitchen that we run. It's not government funded, it’s Bradley funded, but fundamentally, like there'd be nothing wrong if we received government funding to help people, because every Thursday, when hungry people come and we feed them, that is a good thing. And if churches, and synagogues, and mosques and others can perform social services to help people, we should do that.

‍

And if we could take the views that are fundamental to all these religions that are about helping your fellow person, being a good human being, and get them out there more widely–what I was trying to do was make it possible to attend religious services online, anywhere in the world (I failed in my attempt to do so, but I still have the underlying idea has some merit to it), I think we would be a much better society in a much better place. And so, you know, I do think that theology has an important role to play in society. And I recognize that progressive Americans who are listening to this would object strenuously to it. That's okay. The only that I believe I’m responsible to are my own, my own reality. But yeah, that's how I see it. 

‍

[01:07:06] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

Thank you, Bradley. I encourage everyone, really I encourage everyone, because I think it's a provoking read, to read “Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy.” Saving democracy is something I think a lot about right now. I think our politicians have gone completely off the rails. We're dysfunctional at this point.

‍

I think Bradley's suggestion of making sure we get to more and more people as a way to kind of center us as a population is a fascinating thing. I think time will tell whether it plays out that way. Bradley's also the author of “Obvious In Hindsight” and “The Fixer.” I encourage you to read those books as well.

‍

And if you wanna follow Bradley Tusk, you can find him on X, @B-R-A-D-L-E-Y-T-U-S-K. 

‍

[01:07:46] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

So find me on LinkedIn. 

‍

[01:07:48] Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

I was just going to say, he has no followers on X. That was going to be my next comment. 

‍

[01:07:52] Bradley Tusk: 

‍

We're not on X, but find us on LinkedIn. And then if you go to bradleytusk.com, you can sign up for my Substack, for my podcast Firewall. And for those of you who are in New York City or visiting New York city and you like books, I own a bookstore on the Lower East Side called P&T Knitwear. So stop by and check us out. 

‍

[01:08:12] Michael Eisenberg: PNC Knitwear is a really cool initiative by Bradley, who himself is a fascinating person taking on many of society's challenges.

‍

So thank you, Bradley. I appreciate your being here. This was a great conversation.

‍