Bradley Tusk, OBVIOUS IN HINDSIGHT
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[1:03]Bradley Tusk is the author of Obvious and Hindsight, a novel.
[1:07]Bradley is a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist, and writer.
[1:11]He is the CEO and co-founder of Tusk Ventures, the world's first venture capital fund
[1:16]that invests solely in early stage startups in highly regulated industries and the founder
[1:21]of political consulting firm Tusk Strategies.
[1:24]Bradley's family foundation is funding and leading the national campaign to bring mobile
[1:28]voting to all US elections.
[1:31]Past philanthropies also runs and funds anti-hungry campaigns that have led to the creation
[1:35]of anti-hungry policies and programs, including universal school breakfast programs in
[1:40]20 different states, helping to feed over 12 million people.
[1:44]Bradley is the author of the Fixer, my adventures, saving startups from death by politics
[1:48]and obvious and Hindsight.
[1:50]He hosts a podcast called Firewall about the intersection of tech and politics, and is
[1:54]the co-founder of the Gotham Book Prize.
[1:56]He recently opened a book store podcast studio event space in Cafe, called P&T Knitwear
[2:01]on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which by the way, I'm going to have my launch event
[2:05]for blank there on March 5th, I think, so come down and see me.
[2:10]He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.
[2:13]Previously, Bradley served as campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg's 2009 mayoral race as
[2:18]Deputy Governor of Illinois overseeing the state's budget operations legislation policy
[2:22]and communications as communications director for US Senator Chuck Schumer and as
[2:26]Ubers, first political advisor.
[2:29]Welcome Bradley.
[2:30]Thank you so much for coming on Monster Have Time to Read Bex to discuss your book, obvious
[2:34]and Hindsight.
[2:35]Welcome.
[2:36]Hi, thanks for having me.
[2:37]You're welcome.
[2:38]You're obviously so much more than just an author, although I think that's a pretty big
[2:42]deal.
[2:43]I'm excited to talk about your bookstore and your whole career and everything.
[2:46]But first, obvious in Hindsight, tell listeners why this book and when are we supposed
[2:52]to expect flying cars?
[2:53]I don't know.
[2:54]Yeah, so the first of all, flying cars are coming sooner and sooner than we think.
[2:58]When I started this project, it was like, what would be a fantastical thing to write
[3:02]about?
[3:03]Since then, they've made it in the same progress, so they're starting to get permits
[3:06]for testing and things like that.
[3:08]But the book is about a campaign to legalize flying cars in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin
[3:14]one side is the flying car start-up and their vicious political consultants and on the
[3:18]other side is Uber, the Audubon Society, the socialist, the transit workers, and the Russian
[3:23]MOP.
[3:24]And the point of the book is to try to show people in a hopefully very fun way.
[3:29]Here's why decisions are really made in politics.
[3:31]Here's how decisions are really made in tech.
[3:34]And if you want to be the position to understand what's going on and pretend to do something
[3:38]about it, you have to know how these people actually think, and that's what I try to
[3:42]to show in the book, based on the fact that I spent the first 20 years in my career
[3:46]in politics and now we're on a venture capital fund, so I kind of lived both of those
[3:49]worlds.
[3:50]What is surprising, what do we not know about the from the politicians and everybody?
[3:57]People have kind of a bad rap, right?
[4:00]Well, it may be deserved, actually, but I would say, I've worked in city government,
[4:06]state government, federal government, legislative branch, executive branch, and
[4:09]lawyer, like I've really seen this thing from every conceivable angle.
[4:13]And the lessons pretty simple, every policy output is the result of a political input.
[4:19]Every politician makes every decision solely based on reelection and nothing else.
[4:24]And if they think that you can either help them win their next election or if they don't
[4:27]do what you want, they potentially cost win their next election, then you go work with
[4:31]you.
[4:32]And if you can't commit some of one of those two things, you are irrelevant.
[4:35]And I wish human nature were different than that and sure there are exceptions.
[4:39]I worked for my Bloomberg for a long time, he's clearly an exception to it.
[4:42]But by and large, this is how politicians are.
[4:45]This is how politics work.
[4:47]And if we want different outputs, we gotta change the inputs.
[4:49]That's so depressing.
[4:50]Thank you.
[4:51]I like to believe it's not that, but it is, okay, all right, well, great.
[5:00]When you thought about turning this idea and the whole book is like a show, don't tell,
[5:05]right?
[5:06]It's like, how do you exhibit all of these things?
[5:08]How did you come up with this particular thing and then what was the most fun to write
[5:13]about it?
[5:14]Yeah.
[5:15]So I originally started off as a TV show.
[5:17]So I was working with Steven Soderbergh, the movie director on a totally political thing
[5:24]that he needed to get done from a regulatory standpoint for a company that he owns.
[5:28]And at the time, I had written my first book, The Fixer, which was a memoir about my time
[5:32]and tech and politics.
[5:33]And then the galley came out and I gave it to Steven and said, hey, I would just love
[5:36]your opinion.
[5:37]He said, okay, I'm flying the London tonight.
[5:39]I'll read on the plane.
[5:40]I'll let you know.
[5:41]And I wake up the next morning and he says, we got to make this a TV show, like, amazing.
[5:44]Steven Soderbergh, make a TV show with me.
[5:46]Like, that's the greatest thing ever.
[5:47]So I was thinking about, okay, what would a fictionalized version of The Fixer look
[5:51]like?
[5:52]And I knew it had to be around some kind of campaign because you can tell a really good
[5:55]story around a specific campaign and flying cars at the time was like, okay, it's, it's
[6:00]not impossible, but it's also not happening tomorrow.
[6:04]So it can be sort of a fun way to go about this and still show how politics really works,
[6:10]but in a really entertaining way.
[6:12]So I wrote the pilot with Steven, then wrote the next nine episodes and we had our big
[6:16]meeting at Apple TV to pitch them the show and have made March 10th, 2020.
[6:21]Oh no.
[6:22]Yeah, a little bit of a global pandemic in the way and show kind of went away, but I really
[6:27]love the characters and the concept.
[6:29]And so I decided to try to convert into a novel and started working on it and worked on
[6:34]it and worked on it.
[6:35]You written novels, you know how this is.
[6:37]And eventually got to a point where somebody wanted to publish it and, you know, I'm
[6:40]really excited.
[6:41]Well, I don't know why you can't just bring back the whole show.
[6:46]Is it really true?
[6:47]Well, no, no.
[6:48]We're working on it right now.
[6:49]Okay.
[6:50]Good.
[6:51]Good.
[6:52]Yeah.
[6:53]Not like you needed my encouragement for that, but I'll just throw my hat.
[6:54]But don't know.
[6:55]It's nice.
[6:56]Nice to hear it.
[6:57]Okay.
[6:58]It was written that way first.
[7:00]Interesting.
[7:01]Go back a little bit.
[7:02]How did you, when did you get into the whole political sphere?
[7:07]Did you ever want to just be the president and have you given up on that?
[7:10]Like, have you, are you associated now?
[7:12]I think I've given up on being president.
[7:15]So look, I mean, I think when I was a kid, I just had this strong view, mainly in large
[7:21]part of the guy was just sort of this misfit that didn't really fit anywhere.
[7:24]But I didn't want to live sort of an ordinary life where you have a good job and live
[7:28]on the suburbs and I have two and a half kids and retired 65 to like golf or whatever.
[7:32]And it's just didn't interest me.
[7:34]And I kind of felt like it would be more meaningful, I'm sure to me if wherever I did
[7:37]kind of had a broader impact on the world and politics was clearly the way to do that.
[7:42]And so I got to politics in a really lucky way in 1992, this was a long dating myself.
[7:48]But the democratic convention was at Madison Square Garden in New York.
[7:51]And I was 18 years old, I just finished my freshman year of college.
[7:55]And my family or immigrants, you know, we don't know anybody, my dad had a friend who
[8:01]was a lawyer for the Carpentition, you know, this guy, Brian O'Dwyer was a lovely man,
[8:05]a new I like politics.
[8:06]And he called me and said, Hey, would you like a one day pass to the convention, a
[8:10]carpenters pass?
[8:11]I said, sure.
[8:12]So if you look in the newspaper, it says convention noon to midnight, having now been
[8:18]to a few of these, it's really like eight to 10 PM, but I didn't know that, right?
[8:22]So I show up at noon at the garden and it's empty, right?
[8:24]It's like two dudes running for state rap in Montana speaking.
[8:27]And for some reason, Ed Rendell, with the time which the mayor of Philadelphia was sitting
[8:31]in the audience by himself, that's kind of pretty nervous, but I was like, you know what?
[8:36]He's a Jewish guy from New York originally.
[8:37]So am I he's the mayor of Philly.
[8:39]I just finished my freshman year of Penn.
[8:41]So I lived in Philly.
[8:42]And I said, let me just go say hi, what's the worst that could happen?
[8:45]And Rendell, of course, was probably just literally talking about to the empty chair and
[8:48]tell someone to show it up anyways, he was happy to have an audience.
[8:52]And we talked for 15 minutes or so and said, look, when you get back to school, you
[8:55]really busy.
[8:56]And I said, no, not particularly.
[8:57]So it's like the internship.
[8:58]I said, that'd be amazing.
[8:59]He said, okay, send me a note.
[9:01]We'll set it up.
[9:02]So I go home.
[9:03]I write a letter and every day I'm checking the mailbox and what I know now but didn't
[9:07]know then is that correspondence is the black hole of government.
[9:10]Everything goes in.
[9:11]Nothing comes out.
[9:13]And so I never heard back and I get back to school and this is a decade before 9-11.
[9:17]So security is not what it is today.
[9:19]And it just kind of say how naive I was.
[9:21]I just thought, all right, I'll just go see him.
[9:23]So I showed up at City Hall and started wandering around and I found like his outer office.
[9:29]And I said, it's the mayor here and they kind of looked like that's a crazy question to
[9:33]ask, right?
[9:34]Because he had to show up and ask that and the people who do or either are genuine
[9:37]and crazy or they're protesting and I wasn't protesting anything.
[9:40]And I didn't look genuinely crazy and these old ladies from South Philly and they were
[9:44]like, well, he's not here but you can leave him a note.
[9:47]So I write a note and I explain and then I'm on the subway back to the door and I'm like,
[9:51]you idiot, you can't just do that, you don't forget it crossed off the list.
[9:55]And then getting the dorm 20 minutes later the phone rings and it said, run down.
[9:58]I said, when are you coming to work?
[9:59]Let me show you.
[10:00]I'll be right there and I worked for him off to college.
[10:02]Oh my gosh.
[10:03]What a great story.
[10:04]That's amazing.
[10:05]And then why venture capital?
[10:07]So spent the first chunk of my career
[10:09]directly in politics, culminating with being
[10:12]Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager for mayor in 2009.
[10:15]We won coming off of that.
[10:17]I started a consulting firm,
[10:19]kind of traditional political consulting firm.
[10:21]So your Walmart, you're trying to upload stores
[10:23]in four major cities.
[10:24]You've got union issues, zoning issues, community issues.
[10:27]We figure all that stuff out.
[10:29]And I was sitting in a meeting in early 2011
[10:32]and a friend of mine called and said,
[10:33]hey, there's a guy with a small transportation store up.
[10:36]He's having some regulatory problems.
[10:37]Would you mind talking to him?
[10:39]I become Uber's first political advisor that day.
[10:41]I get really lucky when Travis calls me back
[10:43]and says, listen, I can't afford your fee,
[10:45]which take equity.
[10:45]I had no idea what equity meant.
[10:47]But thank God, I said, yes.
[10:49]Oh my gosh.
[10:49]After in the series A, spent the next few years
[10:51]mainly running campaigns all over the US
[10:54]to legalize Uber and ride sharing and it worked.
[10:56]We figured out that we could turn our customers
[10:58]into a kind of a political force and mobilize them
[11:00]through the app.
[11:01]Did it again for clear to get them into airports.
[11:04]And then met my partner who was a,
[11:07]he was running Blackstone's internal venture
[11:08]at the time, but you wouldn't know him
[11:10]because that was like very low level
[11:11]because the problem is like they were rounding errors
[11:13]at Blackstone's internal venture capital.
[11:16]And Jordan, you know, wanted to have his own fund.
[11:19]And we'll start talking about like,
[11:20]if you really understand regulation
[11:22]and you could do something about it,
[11:24]would that make you a better investor
[11:26]and kind of off of that thesis
[11:27]than the Uber experience and Jordan's experience
[11:29]at Blackstone, we went out and raised our first fund in 2016
[11:33]and we're now raising fund for and we invest
[11:36]in all kinds of startups and regulated industries.
[11:38]And we don't only to give them money,
[11:39]but then we run all of the political efforts for them
[11:42]whether it's really goizing fan duel
[11:44]or prescription via tax for Roman
[11:46]or getting the insurance licenses for lemonade
[11:48]or whatever it is.
[11:49]So basically I live in real life
[11:51]the story that you see in this book.
[11:53]Wow.
[11:54]So you're just like, Mr. Red tape, like you,
[11:57]if there is red tape, you know how to get myself in.
[12:00]Yeah, absolutely.
[12:02]And, you know, it's funny.
[12:04]I don't have this sort of like libertarian view
[12:07]that all regulation is inherently bad.
[12:09]I think some is good, some is bad.
[12:11]And when it's regulation aimed at the best interest
[12:14]of the consumer, that's great.
[12:16]What often happens though,
[12:17]is that whatever entrenched interest is regulated
[12:20]over time builds up so much political power
[12:23]at the regulator instead of looking out
[12:24]for the average person looks out
[12:26]for the really crappy taxi owners instead
[12:28]or the casinos instead or the hotel lobby instead
[12:32]or whatever it is.
[12:33]And then there's a big fight
[12:34]because the startup has a better way to do it.
[12:37]And they get a lot of political pressure
[12:38]from the other side and then we come in
[12:40]and hopefully solve the problem.
[12:42]Amazing.
[12:43]I know who to call next time I want to start a business
[12:46]and a regulated industry.
[12:47]Never know when that's going to happen.
[12:49]Yeah, but luckily I've learned,
[12:51]other than I think getting like our tavern license
[12:53]will be in one of the cafe,
[12:54]I have not had to do much politics at the bookstore.
[12:57]Yeah, exactly.
[12:58]Yeah, tell me, okay, when did you decide,
[13:00]did you always want a bookstore?
[13:01]I always wanted a bookstore.
[13:02]Yeah, I always wanted one and then,
[13:04]but you know, until Uber really,
[13:06]I never had any money, right?
[13:08]I didn't grew up with a lot of money,
[13:09]a working government never made a lot of money.
[13:11]And it was just sort of like, wouldn't it be cool?
[13:13]And then all of a sudden I got lucky
[13:14]and I did make a pretty good amount of money pretty quickly.
[13:17]And when COVID hit,
[13:19]I started to call the Gotham Book Prize
[13:20]with my friend Howard Wolfson.
[13:22]And we give 50 grand a year
[13:23]to the best books at New York City that year.
[13:26]And I started working with authors on the jury
[13:28]and the nominees and really enjoyed it
[13:30]and said, you know, what else can I do in this space?
[13:32]And at the same time,
[13:34]the city was getting ravaged by COVID.
[13:35]We lost 600,000 jobs.
[13:38]And I kind of realized like,
[13:39]look, if you're going to do something nice
[13:40]for New York City from a retail perspective,
[13:42]you could do it when you're tired
[13:44]or you could do it right now
[13:45]when the city really needs it.
[13:46]And as let that led to me fighting the space
[13:49]on the lower side and opening a bookstore.
[13:52]And it's got a funny name.
[13:53]And the reason why is when my family came
[13:56]to this country in the 1950s
[13:58]from the refugee camps in Germany,
[13:59]if you're an uneducated Jew
[14:01]and you didn't have, you know, any other type of job,
[14:03]you could do, you could always work on the garment business.
[14:05]And my grandfather and a guy that he knew
[14:08]and the refugee camps both came here around at the same time.
[14:11]And they opened a 300 square foot sweater store
[14:14]in Alum Street called P&T Knitwear.
[14:16]When I signed the leads for this place
[14:18]and weren't orchard between house and Stanton,
[14:19]I texted my dad and said,
[14:21]where was that original store?
[14:22]Cause I knew he was around here somewhere.
[14:23]And he told me I said, that's the next book over.
[14:26]I said, what was it called again?
[14:27]And he wrote P&T Knitwear,
[14:28]but you can't name a bookstore P&T Knitwear.
[14:30]So of course I now own a bookstore called P&T Knitwear.
[14:34]But we are also the only free podcast studio in New York
[14:36]that anyone can use.
[14:37]You just go on our website and sign up for it.
[14:39]We've got an event space, we've got a cafe
[14:41]and we're a cool indie bookstore.
[14:42]So it is a labor of love as you well know,
[14:45]but it's been fun.
[14:47]That's amazing.
[14:48]Oh, I love that so much.
[14:49]Where your grandparents in the concentration camps as well
[14:53]or they just graduated.
[14:54]So my grand father, yeah, everyone else was.
[14:58]My grandfather, she grew up in town called Ludds in Poland.
[15:02]It was super orthodox, right?
[15:04]And he was the rebel of the family.
[15:07]And his rebellion was to join the Polish army.
[15:09]He was 15, but he lied about his age.
[15:11]And when the Russians invaded Poland,
[15:14]Poland lost in like 36 hours.
[15:17]And he got captured and sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war,
[15:20]which now is like the worst possible thing
[15:21]that could happen to you except all of his like 11 brothers
[15:25]and sisters and parents ended up at Auschwitz
[15:27]and died in the camps.
[15:28]And because the Nazis never made it as far as Siberia,
[15:31]he survived.
[15:32]My grandmother was from Odessa.
[15:34]Her father was, you know,
[15:36]commissioned to the Red Army, died in the war.
[15:38]And they fled the Nazis as the Nazis
[15:39]started coming into Russia.
[15:41]Also went to Siberia.
[15:43]She stood on my grandfather there.
[15:45]The war eventually ended.
[15:46]He was freed.
[15:47]They had my father and kind of made their way
[15:49]back across Europe and then ended up in the refugee camps
[15:51]three years in Germany.
[15:53]And then finally a cousin in Brooklyn, you know,
[15:56]sponsored them for Fisa and they came here.
[15:58]Oh my gosh.
[16:00]All these stories, you know, these, it's amazing.
[16:04]How life goes one way and not the other way.
[16:06]And so I'm like so many little variables.
[16:09]Like, you know, like I've had so much luck
[16:11]and I think about that a lot where like,
[16:13]if this thing went just in one direction
[16:15]instead of the other or this call did happen
[16:17]or this person wasn't there, you know,
[16:19]who knows, but it probably wouldn't be this.
[16:22]Wow.
[16:23]When you do your podcast, what are the get,
[16:25]what are the conversations you are most excited to have?
[16:28]So the thing, my podcast is sort of it's tech politics
[16:32]and the pursuit of happiness.
[16:34]And it's really that intersection of tech regulation,
[16:38]politics, so like on a typical episode, you know,
[16:41]on the one we did on Tuesday, for example,
[16:45]we talked about, I had my chief of staff on
[16:48]who's sort of a millennial, very left wing
[16:50]about kind of why the DSA has been pro Hamas.
[16:53]Then I kind of laid out my plan
[16:54]that why New York City shut a city manager.
[16:56]Then I get laid out my pedestrian rules for the road
[17:00]of how people in New York City should not walk
[17:02]so that we can save a little bit of time.
[17:04]So none of those were actually tech oriented,
[17:06]but usually it's that plus some combination
[17:09]of some big tech thing, whether it's, you know,
[17:11]Tesla or Apple or Amazon or Uber or whatever it is.
[17:14]And then we have guests on, you know,
[17:16]typically either from politics or tech,
[17:18]who talk about, you know, the company,
[17:19]their building, the idea, their pursuing,
[17:21]the thing they're trying to change.
[17:23]And you know, they're very sort of,
[17:24]I'm not a journalist by any means,
[17:25]they're sort of very positive interviews.
[17:27]But it's called Firewall.
[17:28]We're on twice a week, about 30 minutes each episode,
[17:31]no ads, and then you can find it on any platform.
[17:34]Amazing.
[17:35]And then when do you find time to read?
[17:37]I'm assuming you do it with a bookstore.
[17:38]I read a ton.
[17:39]Yeah, in fact, I read a ton.
[17:40]And then I write, I make a list of, I assume you do this.
[17:43]Also the books that I read finished number 51 this morning
[17:47]was nine nonfiction, 42 fictions.
[17:51]I read a lot of fiction.
[17:53]The dirty secret is I read a lot on my Kindle,
[17:56]which is a bookstore owner.
[17:57]I'm really not a book designer, do that.
[18:00]For me, it is really efficient.
[18:02]No, I also just walk into the store
[18:04]and grab whatever I want, walk out of two.
[18:05]So I read one paper as well.
[18:07]But yeah, I read a lot of contemporary fiction.
[18:10]In fact, one of those 51 books was yours
[18:12]and of which I love it.
[18:13]No, thank you.
[18:14]And devoured it, by the way.
[18:16]And it's a wide variety of stuff.
[18:18]It could be sort of stuff that's considered
[18:20]to be kind of literary fiction-like, demon copperhead
[18:24]or the heaven or earth grocery store.
[18:26]Books that come out this year, they ensure you're
[18:28]selling lots of copies of.
[18:29]It could be the book that I finished this morning
[18:31]was the New John Griffin book.
[18:32]I remember loving the firm when I was really young
[18:34]and read the sequel.
[18:35]And so it's mainly fiction, it's mainly contemporary.
[18:39]Those thing I would say is, I have a very quick
[18:41]trigger finger.
[18:42]So let's say I ended up reading this year, 65 books.
[18:45]I will probably start at 130 and by page 40,
[18:49]I'm not into it, I'm out.
[18:51]My view is life is too short
[18:53]and there are too many books to make myself
[18:55]read something I don't want to read.
[18:56]I have the same philosophy.
[18:58]But if everybody loves a book and I can't figure out why,
[19:01]I read a little more.
[19:03]Yeah, and then I assume something's, well, did you read?
[19:05]You don't have the trust by her and NDS.
[19:07]I did it.
[19:07]I have to.
[19:08]I just got this book actually.
[19:10]So I, you know, I look, everyone loved it.
[19:12]It was one of the finalists for the Gotham Book Prize
[19:15]last year and I didn't dislike it.
[19:17]But I just was like, there must be something wrong with me
[19:20]because why does everyone think this book's so amazing?
[19:22]And I just didn't see it.
[19:23]But you know, it's all subjective.
[19:25]I know.
[19:25]I feel like that a lot too.
[19:27]Like, well, I passed on that book and now it's like biggest.
[19:30]So, but you know what?
[19:32]Those books I still don't want to read, you know?
[19:33]So it is what it is.
[19:36]In a weird way, not unlike venture capital, which is, you know,
[19:39]I sometimes pass on companies that go on through really successful.
[19:41]But it's got to be founders that I want to work with
[19:43]and ideas that I'm interested in.
[19:44]And if I'm not, it doesn't matter.
[19:47]So what is your next thing?
[19:49]I, your next innovation, your next project.
[19:52]Mobile voting.
[19:53]So, and I've got a book coming out on this next year
[19:57]from source books, which is a random house.
[20:00]in front of the final edits are due on Friday.
[20:03]This is the one.
[20:04]So thank you, but we're pretty close.
[20:06]And so a lot of stuff that we're talking about in this podcast,
[20:09]which is I spent all this time in politics
[20:11]and kind of learned that every policy output
[20:13]is the result of a political input.
[20:15]And then I ran this campaign for Uber
[20:17]and saw that the same people who were never voting
[20:19]in city council primary, state senate prime,
[20:22]or thinking about that,
[20:23]were willing to advocate for us
[20:25]because they could do it from their phone, right?
[20:27]And so the question was,
[20:28]what if we could vote this way,
[20:30]wouldn't that really increase turnout?
[20:31]And the problem we have right now
[20:33]is because of gerrymandering,
[20:35]the only election that ever really matters
[20:37]is the primary and primary challenge countries
[20:39]typically 10 to 15%, so who were those voters?
[20:42]And the furthest left wing,
[20:43]they're the furthest right wing,
[20:45]or they're special interest
[20:46]and kind of move money and votes
[20:47]and we'll go turn out election.
[20:49]And so the message to politicians is,
[20:51]you gotta be ultra-pure.
[20:53]That's why we see this craziness right now
[20:54]and the republicans not able to pick a speaker
[20:56]because everyone has to be so ideologically extreme
[21:00]because the few people who actually do show up to vote,
[21:02]that's what they want.
[21:04]And my view is politicians will do whatever they do
[21:06]to stay in office.
[21:07]So let's say you're a Republican congressman from Florida
[21:10]and turn out your primary is 12%
[21:12]and half of those voters are NRA members.
[21:15]You're never gonna vote for an assault weapon van
[21:16]because even though you know intellectually
[21:18]that it's crazy that someone could walk into a store
[21:20]and walk out with an AK-47,
[21:22]you also know that you would lose your seat immediately.
[21:24]If you said that you were forward,
[21:25]we should even think about it.
[21:27]And so as a result, it never happens.
[21:29]But imagine if turn out in that same primary
[21:30]where 36% instead of 12% simply
[21:33]because we made it much easier to vote,
[21:35]then just based on all the polling
[21:37]we see around assault weapons, your view would flip
[21:40]because you wanna keep your job
[21:41]and you would only keep your job.
[21:42]If you support it and assault weapons ban.
[21:44]So if we want the views of the majority
[21:46]to become our laws, to become our policies,
[21:49]if we want the two parties to actually work together
[21:50]and get things done,
[21:52]we've got to empower them to do so
[21:54]and they're only gonna do it
[21:55]if they feel safe politically.
[21:56]And they're only feel safe politically to do that
[21:58]if turn out it's exponentially higher in primaries.
[22:01]So in 2018 at Critterston called the Mobile Voting Project
[22:04]where we started funding elections in different states
[22:06]where either deployed military
[22:08]or people with disabilities,
[22:09]we're voting and grow elections on their phones.
[22:11]We ended up paying for seven states,
[22:14]21 jurisdictions to do these elections.
[22:17]They were all independently auto by the National Cyber Security
[22:19]Center and came back clean,
[22:21]turn on an ad for it's doubled.
[22:23]City of Denver did a poll.
[22:24]The people participated in 100% said they preferred it
[22:27]because of course you'd prefer something
[22:28]to your phone than have to go somewhere.
[22:30]But the Cyber Security community was sort of very worked
[22:32]out that it wasn't secure enough.
[22:34]And so in 2020, we started a tech bill
[22:36]to build our own mobile voting technology,
[22:38]funded it out of my foundation.
[22:40]And three years and $10 million later,
[22:42]we are just about done.
[22:43]We are gonna release the software next January.
[22:48]It's gonna be free and open source.
[22:49]Anybody who wants to use it can have it.
[22:51]People can build on it.
[22:52]And then I've got a book coming out about it.
[22:54]And the next step is really to be to hopefully,
[22:57]it's gonna be really hard,
[22:57]but build a movement to demand.
[23:00]Because ironically, if you want to unite the parties,
[23:02]the one thing that will bring republics Democrats together
[23:05]as well as every union and every lobbyist,
[23:06]every trade group is to change the system
[23:09]and make it more likely that they could lose power.
[23:11]And so the only way to win this thing
[23:12]is that I can get millions of people in Gen Z and Alpha
[23:15]just like we got for Uber to demand it.
[23:18]And so that's kind of the next big thing
[23:20]is rolling out the mobile voting technology
[23:22]and then hopefully building this movement
[23:24]so that we can make it happen.
[23:26]That's amazing.
[23:27]And I wonder that every time I'm there.
[23:28]Like there has to be a better way.
[23:30]Like what honors?
[23:31]There is, there is, and we have dealt it
[23:35]and we will be sharing with the world very soon.
[23:37]Amazing.
[23:38]Well, I'm just gonna follow along
[23:38]with all the things you would venture forever
[23:40]because you're sort of looking out
[23:42]for the maximum efficiency of the rest of us.
[23:45]So thank you for that.
[23:46]Yeah, it's fine luck.
[23:49]To your point about like sort of sliding doors
[23:51]and everything else.
[23:52]Like I got lucky in a lot of ways
[23:54]from being able to be born in this country
[23:57]and be free and safe to different opportunities
[24:00]that came along over time and lucky to make some money.
[24:03]And my view is I just want to do the things
[24:06]that really interest me and kind of use the resources I have
[24:09]to do things that I think are important,
[24:10]especially for things other people aren't taking on.
[24:12]And so yeah, as a result, kind of the stuff
[24:14]that I do looks pretty weird in random
[24:16]but makes sense to me and I like it.
[24:18]And, you know, if you go to brandglotest.com
[24:20]you can kind of get updates
[24:22]and all the different stuff we're doing.
[24:23]I did not say it was weird in random.
[24:25]I think it's good.
[24:26]No, I think it's good.
[24:27]Okay.
[24:28]I think both people think it is, right?
[24:29]You understand it, but you're, hold on.
[24:32]One might argue that someone who chooses to open up
[24:35]an indie bookstore and write a novel
[24:37]and to the podcast and all stuff that you do
[24:39]might also be a little weird, right?
[24:41]So you may not be the best of us.
[24:45]Fair, fair point, I'll take it.
[24:48]Bradley, thank you so much for coming on.
[24:50]Congratulations on your book.
[24:52]Thank you.
[24:54]Thanks for listening to this episode
[24:55]of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[24:57]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[25:00]at Zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:03]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[25:05]and sign up for my virtual book club
[25:07]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[25:09]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[25:12]for the Sound Editing.
[25:13]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[25:15]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[25:18]All right, thank you.