Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of wall and broad streets in New York City, you're inside the Ice House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatched plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here right now at the NYSC and at ISIS 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now, here's your host, Josh King, Head of Communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We've talked about this a few times before and the Ice House that magical platform connecting buyers and sellers, cutting out intermediaries, increasing efficiency and saving costs. It's really the origin story of Intercontinental Exchange making the energy market transparent so that a screen could let traders see all of the bids and offers and in an instant discover price. I had a similar experience last night, it's one many of us have. John F. Kennedy Airport, a long flight from London, I just want to get home. There's that taxi line over there. I know what that experience will be like, hot, no air conditioning, have to stay focused on giving the driver directions to the West Village.
Josh King:
The alternative my finger, the app Uber, it knows my address and I know the driver, his car, license plate number and his rating and air conditioning. If I want to luxury car that's at my finger as well. The car shows up in a matter of minutes, I shut the door the driver knows where he's going and I put on my noise canceling headphones to keep plowing through early seasons of the Americans unfettered as the car moves through Queens. There's a level of rebellion in that efficient decision. I'm no longer beholden to the rate setting decisions of government to the condition of the cars. I'm participating in a sort of political statement for all of the influence of taxi medallion owners and their sway over city government. I'm endorsing Travis's Law, a reference to Ubers founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, who declared that Uber is better off entering the market with or without permission, demonstrating the product to the public and building a customer base.
Josh King:
Tech startups by their nature are disruptors and innovation doesn't ask permission. This dynamic has put companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb FanDuel plus 1000s of entrepreneurs trying to turn their idea into the next Tech unicorn directly in the crosshairs of government regulation and the established traditional companies operating in that space, the elegant platform connecting buyers and sellers. Our guest today, Bradley Tusk, recognize there was a gap in the market to help these tech upstarts apply their own form of Travis's Law and has brought to bear his unique skill set honed from a career in politics. He's the founder of Tusk Holdings and the author of the newly released book, The fixer, my adventures and saving startups from death by politics. My conversation with Bradley Tusk right after this.
Speaker 2:
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Josh King:
Our guest today Bradley Tusk has lived the political journey going back to 1992, a chance meeting at a place we both were the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. From there I headed out on a bus tour with Governor Bill Clinton. Bradley met an even more important mentor Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell will track his political journey and then focus on his work with tech startups at Tusk strategies, which he started in 2011. Growing it to one of the leading strategy firms today, which includes Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies, which itself is focused on what may be the holy grail of curing America of its own political ills. Easy mobile voting, electing a mayor Senator president for the same ease as I hailed a car from Uber last night. A fantasy based on our entrenched political system or maybe just 10 to 20 years out, as President Trump would say we'll see what happens. Bradley's got the money and he's got the time. Welcome to the Ice House, sir.
Bradley Tusk:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Josh King:
So let's start with your bona fides. Because The Fixer, your new book, it's an amazing story. Your dad came to the US straight from the refugee camps after World War Two, as Schmatta salesman.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, my grandparents and my father lived in the refugee camps after World War Two, I think wanted to go to either Israel or the US. Finally had a cousin on my grandmother's side who, in Brooklyn, who was able to sponsor them. They come over my grandfather right away goes into the Schmatta business, that's okay with it. And then I grew up in that very traditional first generation American, you have to accomplish everything thing, which was good on one hand and stressful on the other, and still is.
Josh King:
I mean, Bradley, it's the early 90s and you paint a picture of being like the Matt Dillon character and Flamingo kid, his name is Jeffrey Willis, fetching the drinks for patrons at the Flamingo club. You're out on Long Island.
Bradley Tusk:
With the Sands Beach Club. It's effectively the same thing. I think I say in the book, except without the Milson the high stakes games, but otherwise, it's the same same thing. You're just hustling constantly to get people to give you bigger tips for getting them coffee and refilling their kids pools with water and stuff like that.
Josh King:
So what drew you into the city in '92? This guy with the Irish name Brandon O'Dwyer?
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, I got really lucky. So I had always loved politics. But one downside of being the first generation Americans, we didn't know anybody. But my dad had one friend named Brian O'Dwyer, who was a lawyer for the Corporate Union. And Brian knew I like politics and called me one day and said, "Hey, I can get you a one day carpenters pass to the convention, do you want to go?" I said, "Yeah, sure. That'd be great." So I did what seemed logical at the time, which I looked at the newspaper and said, "What was the convention?" And says noon to midnight. Now you know because you've been to a whole bunch of these things. You're on 8:00 pm is when things get going and maybe little after that.
Bradley Tusk:
I didn't know that. So I showed up at the garden at noon and I'm walking around and there's nobody there. And there's two guys running for state rep in Montana speaking and kind of joke's on me. But I look up in the audience and Ed Randell at the time was the mayor of Philadelphia, which was sitting there by himself. And I had just finished my freshman year at Penn. So I kind of had some sense of who he was. I said, "Maybe I can say hi to him. We'll see what happens." And I was a little nervous. But if anyone knows Rendell and you probably do, he was probably just talking to the empty chair.
Josh King:
He wanted company.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, I'm more than happy to have someone come over. So I go over there, we have a nice conversation or about 10, 15 minutes and I felt like, okay, I have a lot of used my a lot of time here. Thank him. He said, "Do you want an internship when you get back?" And I said, "Yeah, it'd be great." So he said, "Send me a letter, we'll set it up." I go home, I write a letter and what I didn't know then, but I know now is that correspondence is just the black hole of government. Everything goes in, nothing comes out. So every day I'm going home open in the mailbox, there's no letter from Rendell.
Bradley Tusk:
So I get back to school and for some reason, it just gets in my head and I go, "I'll go see him." So I go to City Hall, this is a decade before 911, so security is not anywhere near what it is today. And I get to not his specific assistant, but the outer office. And I said, "Is the mayor here?" And in retrospect, it's a totally crazy question to ask. And the people who do ask that question are either one of two things, either they are crazy, or they're protesting something.
Bradley Tusk:
And I was wasn't crazy, I had so many petitions. I was just gobo nice kid who was so clueless, didn't realize you couldn't see the mayor. And these nice old lady from South Philly or manning the desk and they said, "He's not here, you can leave him a note." Okay, so I write a note, I get back on the staff then go back to the dorms at Penn and like, "You idiot, you can't just go like this is over. There's no way they're going to want you after this." And I rotor off my head, get back into the dorm, phone rings, please hold for the mayor. He said, "When are you coming to work?" And I said, "I'll be right there." And worked for him all through college.
Josh King:
And there's a track, call it the next 15 or 20 years of your life, you are working for a gallery of politicians who sometimes had fame and sometimes had infamy and sometimes a mix of the two. And if you look in retrospect of the world that you travel in now, advising the hottest tech startups in the world, these were guys who were incredibly charismatic, but also craving attention. Henry Stern at the parks department, Chuck Schumer just elected to the Senate, doing what I've learned from my friends like Jeff Berman, the Sunday News Conference, advocating for something like a panel to study tooth decay. Bring me briefly through those early moments with Stern through Schumer and then out to Chicago and back.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so my first job in New York politics was at the New York parks department. And I got really lucky that this summer of, I guess, going into my senior year of college, I was in a program called The Government Scholar. So the city had a program where they would bring in people from different schools and introduce them to how city government works and pay you to work there for eight weeks, whatever it was. And I had actually created a program like that for Rendell and for Philadelphia, so I knew about it, I applied, they took me. And because I knew city government a little better than the other kids in the program, the idea they all wanted to go solve homelessness and they were very noble about it. And I just knew it's really just the agency that will give you real work to do.
Bradley Tusk:
And Henry Stern is fading from Lauren Abbott, which is a New York political legend, brilliant guy, somewhere in that straddling, that line between genius and crazy, but usually in a good way. And he actually came to the meeting when I went there. And he said, "If you come here, I'll give you real work to do." Because it was free for the agencies. And so I said, "Okay, that's what I need to hear." So I worked for him that summer, they went back after college, where I spent about two years as his press secretary, did every crazy stunt you could possibly imagine from walking him wearing a toga and walking across sheet metal with a flock of sheep, to burying him in casino Park and putting him in a groundhog suit
Josh King:
He'd do anything you told him to do?
Bradley Tusk:
Anything. If we thought we'll get press, he would do it. On one hand, it's because like every politician, he really, really wanted attention. But he also understood that for the park system to get the resources it needed, he had to take advantage of his wackiness and get attention for it, because it doesn't get the kind of funny that the police department gets or the schools get, nor should it, but he was still trying to get as much as he possibly could. And he understood that by getting attention, he could really help the agency and he was just a genius at that. And so worked for him for a couple years, went to law school like every good Jewish boy does and then did what every Jewish... Every good Jewish was not supposed to do and said, "No, I'm not going to go work at a law firm."
Bradley Tusk:
I Pissed off my parents, I went back to the parks department instead, ran a chunk of the agency for Henry. And then Chuck Schumer was looking for communications director and I didn't want to work in Washington, I don't want to work in the legislature and I didn't want to do PR so of course, I ended up in the job, because I didn't want it. It's been a couple years working for Chuck. There's that joke, obviously, that the most dangerous place in Washington having Chuck Schumer on TV camera. It's true. He's definitely the most media hungry and savvy politician in America now, I guess, other than Trump.
Josh King:
You tell this amazing story of trying to smooth over the effort by the New York Times Magazine to profile the relationship between Senator Schumer, the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton and the scene in which the obligatory photographer is assigned by the times just to take a nice portrait of Schumer. The guy wears this reading glasses at the tip of his nose, he's not a photographer but he's telling the photographer how to do his job.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, I mean and that was Chuck. Now one hand, yeah, right and thank God that photographer was nice enough to still make Chuck look good in the picture because he probably could have chose to have done otherwise. Hillary of course being a lot more sophisticated, knew just let the photographer do his job and they deal with her on the back end. Look that made working for truck both great and maddening. Maddening because he would just call you all day, every day with the slightest thought and drive micromanage you and drive you absolutely crazy. I remember once, this was like right before I think I even had cell phone, I would go to the gym at five in the morning to try to escape him. And then one time, like over the gym he says the last figure "Is there a Bradley Tusk here." And "Yeah." they said, "Senator Schumer is on the phone." I'm like, how did he find out what gym?
Josh King:
Doesn't sound happy.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, I think we were not on, didn't make the daily news on top 10 first pages or whatever it was he wanted for that day. But I learned a ton because we're all the same frustrations of having everything dictated to me by Chuck day in day out. He's a really brilliant guy. He works incredibly hard. He's very savvy. He's very experienced. And so in those two years, I probably learned more about how to deal with the media than you could have learned in 10 years at a PR firm or something like that. And so-
Josh King:
And then you got this call from John Weimer.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so the in between is I go... Mike becomes mayor.
Josh King:
That's Michael Bloomberg.
Bradley Tusk:
Yep. Sorry, Michael Bloomberg. I go to City Hall, I start working for Mike and I'm very happy doing it because he's great to work for.
Josh King:
Totally different from Schumer. I mean, a person who just has enough money to not care what the press thinks too much. And he's not great in camera, but he's also running city hall like he ran in Bloomberg LP, right out in the bullpen like we are.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah. I sat in the bullpen with him. So I'm sitting in the bullpen one day, early 2003 and my phone rang, this guy named John Weimer, who had been Chuck's chief of staff when I was there. And John said, "Do you want to be Deputy Governor of Illinois?" And I said, "What's a deputy governor? And why are you calling me?"
Josh King:
Where's Illinois for kid from Long Island.
Bradley Tusk:
I had gone to law school, Chicago, so I at least knew that part. But he said the guy that runs the state and that turned out to be true. So there's both a benign reason and a less benign reason for why I got hired. So the governor obviously was Rod Blagojevich. The benign reason was, Rod was crazy. So put aside any the illegal stuff, if he had just pled insanity to his trial, they would have to have given it to him. So dealing with him on a day to day basis was unbelievably hard, regardless of anything else, just because you're dealing with this lunatic all day, every day. So they needed someone who a... I was 29. And so basically it was career making job and I was going to put up with a lot more shit than most people would, say I was part of it. Part of it was Rod turns out... Saw his job is solely running for office. He was-
Josh King:
He didn't want to work very hard, did he?
Bradley Tusk:
He really would say, "I did my job and I'll do it again in four years." He would not go we got three months at a clip without him even showing up at the office. So I knew a little bit about a lot of things, I knew about policy press politics, I was a lawyer. And so I could kind of manage everything in a way. So that was that the benign. The less benign, of course, is I was younger, I was naive. And the only things I didn't oversee in the state were contracts, grants and patronage. Of course, if you want to rob the place fine, those would be the places you would do it. But I was young and naive enough to not really... Until he asked me to extort Rahm Emanuel, I actually didn't see anything illegal,
Josh King:
You could have avoided that whole FBI conversation as your kid was being born.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah. So there's story here. So and but by the way, please, whoever listens, please consider buying the book, even though I'm telling you the stories today anyway. So Rahm was a congressman at the time from Chicago and Rod had promised two million bucks for an athletic facility around the district, pretty standard fare and actually didn't deal with grants, as we just discussed. So I wasn't aware of it. And then one day, Rahm calls me and typical Ron, "Fuck you this, fuck you that." Threatening all that, all the Rahm stuff. I said, "Okay, let me look into it." That night I'm on the phone with Rod and I say, "Hey, by the way, Rahm called me, he's upset, wants his money."
Bradley Tusk:
And I figured Rod was having nothing about it. Yeah, just make it happen. Instead, he said, "Not tell me about the fundraiser." I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Harry Emanuel who's Rahm's brother and he's a Hollywood mogul had promised a fundraiser for me. And if I give him a grant before the fundraiser, the fundraiser will never happen. So tell me that you're the fundraiser first." And I said, "You can't really-"
Josh King:
You can't keep that leverage on a man.
Bradley Tusk:
Exactly. But you can't... It's not exactly legal or closure to say, "I'm not going to give you public money for school until you have a private fundraiser for me." And so luckily, I was able to say no to it, report to a few different people, put a stop to it. Grant was given, fundraiser never happened. But because I still had that conversation with him when Rod was arrested, one of the 24 accounts he was charged with was attempted extortion of Congressman Emanuel and I had to testify both corruption trials about what happened. And for the first... Before the first trial, the FBI wants to talk to me. My wife at the time was like 38 weeks pregnant and I was running the Bloomberg campaign. I was like, "Look, I just kick it to Chicago for a little while." And they said, "We'll come to you." Okay. So it's a Saturday and they bring out 25 people, FBI agents, US attorneys, all these different people. And as I'm getting dressed, to go to the meeting, my wife water breaks.
Bradley Tusk:
So God, so we called the doctor and I didn't explain what was going on with the FBI, we just said like, "Hey, you should we go to the hospital right now." And it was our second kid. We knew a little more about this, but and then she said, "No, no, it's too early. Don't worry about it, do what you got to do." So I go to this meeting and about an hour and a half and my wife calls me and says, "We got to go to the hospital." And she said, "I got to go." What do you mean? We just brought in all these people talk to you. I said, "It's my kid being born. What do you want me to do?" And so I left and we sent them photos that night so that they knew it was real. I went back to Chicago about a month later and met with him.
Josh King:
And eventually you get back to New York a little diversion at Lehman Brothers and inopportune time, but almost back to the safety and security of Bloomberg City Hall. But trying to do something that's never been done before or not in a long time, which is win a third term as mayor and you got this pesky guy as an opponent, Anthony Weiner?
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, it's funny. In a weird way, I'm going to take credit for us kind of saving New York from debacle inadvertently. So I really was worried that Anthony would have beaten us. And here's the reason why, New York City is a democratic town through and through. The reason we had a string of Republican mayor's was crime was so bad in the early 90s that Rudy had an opening. And just barely beat Dickens in 93 despite Dickens having a horrific first term. And then 911 propelled Mike to City Hall. After those two things, neither of them are even close to winning. So it's always Democrats. So that if any of you or either the Democratic nominee for mayor, we'd walk in with 45% of the vote, absolutely anybody would.
Bradley Tusk:
So remember as you've got to win 50.1% of the remaining 55, which is like 90% of the remaining vote and my concern was that we'd never get the same Democratic votes that everyone would get, but he's a really smart guy. He's really aggressive and he would cut into our base, which were basically Jews and white ethnic Catholics and people like that. So I didn't want him to run. Obviously, I had no idea about all the stuff he ended up getting trouble for, but put together a really aggressive campaign to knock him out of the race. And I think the final straw was probably the hockey game, where Anthony played hockey every Tuesday night at Chelsea Piers and was very proud of himself because he felt it was a tough guy playing hockey. But a lot of people in our campaign like Howard Wilson and me had worked in Congress. So we understood how that the vote schedule worked and it's unpredictable. So we kind of knew like-
Josh King:
But if you get rink time at Chelsea Piers, you got to make it work
Bradley Tusk:
So that we understood that was his mentality, but we also knew eventually, there'd be some vote. He was a minor procedural thing. At some point, a vote would be called on the House floor and he'd be playing hockey. So every Tuesday night we stuck photographer into Chelsea Piers and you're waiting for that to happen. And then one night finally it's exactly what happens, they call a vote, our guy gets a great shot. He literally has weaned on the back of his jersey. So it's not even like... It couldn't have been worse for him. And the front page of the post next day is Puck Off you know the picture of him and goal. And that was pretty much the final straw. So we torture him as much as we could, I had people door knocking his parents, I mean, everything you can imagine.
Bradley Tusk:
And it's funny, I was a little bit the bad guy at the time because like, You're being too rough on this guy, this isn't now in retrospect." I think if we didn't do that he would have run, if he had run he might have won. And all those crazy Twitter scandals that were fun to read in the tablet but inreality, he was a backbencher in Congress, it didn't really matter what happened at city hall where it would have mattered a lot. So thank God we did, even though we weren't doing for that reason.
Josh King:
So Mike Bloomberg is a businessman, you're running his third campaign. He's spending what it takes with people like Doug Schoen and Bill Knapp and Howard Wolfson and fielding a team of all stars to make sure that he's going to win. And I am aware of this and you write about it, honestly, in the book that you guys each got a bonus for the victory. And you talk about after taxes, $234,000 leftover, that's what you got to yourself, Bradley. And you decide, after all these years working for politicians, learning a lot, but also having a lot of scar tissue from it, you're going to go out on your own.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so originally has to do with some mutual friends of ours. So Howard Wilson and Garrett Ginsburg. Howard instead went on to be a Deputy Mayor for Mike, Garrett got this incredible job at Time Warner and couldn't really turn it down. But Mike gave me a $400,000 bonus, it was 234 after taxes. It was the most money I've ever had in my life by like tenfold. I decided, you know what, I want to try to be an entrepreneur. So I started a company. But what I knew was just being another little consultant and of itself wouldn't really be that successful. And I figured, okay there's two things that I'm sort of good at I might have, it's a little unique. I like really running campaigns, not just doing the lobbying, or the PR or the polls, but really the strategy and then all the nuts and bolts in execution.
Bradley Tusk:
And simply because I've had this weird itinerant career, I've done politics in Illinois and in Washington and New York. And when I was at Lehman, I spent two years from around the country to state capitals every day. So I know the country. And instead of just doing this in one place, I can do it everywhere. So I started a campaign management business. And it was doing pretty well. We had good clients like Walmart and Expedia and Talman. But then I think where we're leading to is how this pivot and attack. And in 2011, I'm sitting in a Walmart meeting and friend of mine called Kevin Shick, he was on the Bloomberg, guy called me and said, "Hey, there's this guy with a small transportation startup. He's having some regulatory problems, would you mind talking to him?" Later that day, I become Ubers first advisor and then I get really lucky because Travis calls you back and says, "Hey, listen, I can afford your fee which take equity."
Bradley Tusk:
And thank God I said, "Yes." So that was during the series A, earned it, spent the better part of the next five years is beating the living shit out of the taxi industry all over the US to make ride sharing a possibility. You mentioned Travis' Law in the introduction. It's kind of what Travis and I came up with, which is, taxi has a lot of money to give campaign donations, a lot of money to hire lobbyists. Were at the time, this very small startup, how do we fight back? Use the people. So once we got into a market, get into the market without permission, hold off the regulator for as long as we can, build up market share as quickly as we can, not so much to just be able to then topple over the incumbent, but to be able to turn those people into our political advocates.
Bradley Tusk:
And then when the regulator's came to shut us down, we could turn it on and say to our customers, "If you like this thing called Uber, we need your help, because we're not going to survive otherwise, please tweet here, email here." And it worked, I mean, millions and millions of people who probably never vote in elections, politically over the years have advocated for Uber, simply because they wanted the right to be able to have ride sharing.
Josh King:
I want to get into Uber in much more detail in a second. But I want to start a little bit on your journey through tough strategies with something you did that was very much in the public interest, but backed by billionaires that are no stranger to the New York Stock Exchange. People like Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Druckenmiller, Ken Langone, they came to you Bradley with a problem or an opportunity, as you sought the idea that charter schools had not made much inroads in Albany in the state of New York.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah. So all three of those guys are really wonderful backers of education reform and charter schools and have really put their money where their mouth is over the years and built a bunch of schools. But the challenge is there was a cap on the number of charter schools because the teachers unions have so much power in Albany, they're very threatened by charter schools, because teachers aren't unionized. And they typically outperform regular schools where the teachers are unionized. So we were up against the cap. And as a result, the sector couldn't grow. And you're all these kids all over the city whose parents wanted to send them to charters because there's a better alternative.
Bradley Tusk:
And they couldn't simply because the law in Albany didn't allow for it. So Mike made an effort change the law and it just went really badly. Teachers Union just stepped all over it. And then all of a sudden, I sit down with these three guys and Joel Klein and Kevin Shick and they say, "Hey, can you try to figure out how to overturn a cap?" And at first I didn't think was necessarily possible to beat the teachers union at Albany. But we got really lucky. At the time, I don't know if you remember this thing called Race to the Top, which was an Obama program. Basically using federal money to incentivize states to do education reform by making it a competition.
Bradley Tusk:
And you can take the same program, we turn to a competition, all of a sudden, people want to do things they would otherwise never do. And New York was eligible to win $700 million. And we did the polling. I just asked this question like, how would you feel if New York turned his nose up at $700 million? Just kind of a throwaway question. And it was like, 92% were really upset about it. It's like, "Oh my God, this is an opening here." So the whole campaign wasn't about the merits of charter schools, the whole campaign was about-
Josh King:
Don't let Albany blow $700 million of your money.
Bradley Tusk:
We can't win the money without increasing the charter school cap. And Albany is corrupt and Albany keep raising your taxes. And you can't let them do this. And I worked, we won, we beat the teachers union. And ultimately landed 125,000 more charter school seats and $2 billion a year more in funding for charter school.
Josh King:
And it seems like you really learned some important lessons about, with this, your nascent little company, the billionaires coming with a problem, they're funding you adequately to use the weapons and tools that you've learned how to deploy in previous campaigns. And you're knowing how to hit entrenched interests where it hurts most. So in the intro, we referenced this complex relationship between Uber in New York City. I want to listen to a Wall Street Journal video that was published in July 2015.
Speaker 3:
Uber to De Blasio, take a hike. In an effort to lobby against a Bill De Blasio administration proposal to cap the number of Uber cars on the road in New York City for one year, Uber has added a new feature to its app. It's called De Blasio. And when selected, the normally bustling map of Ubers driving around the city goes blank. And users are encouraged to sign a petition against the proposed cap.
Josh King:
Pretty smart.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so first of all, it was warning Caitlin Dukoch who worked in the Uber office, she was pretty Junior, but man, what a great idea. And it really encapsulated all these things that we were doing, which was with the whole campaign that we ran, keep in mind, there's a saying you can't fight city hall. That exists for a reason. In the New York City Council, a close vote is 49 to two. If you somehow got five no votes, you have like a romance or revolution. And the De Blasio proposes this cap at Ubers growth. I'm sitting in Dallas Fort Worth airport that you have the book opens. And Travis says, "You got to beat this thing." And I'm thinking like, this is not feasible at all. And I just said, "Aright, well, two questions. How much money can I spend eternity I can't do."
Bradley Tusk:
And Travis being Travis said, "Do whatever you need to do." And I'm sitting on the flight home and it kind of hits me all of a sudden, everything De Blasio does is constructed as De Blasio champion of inequality champion of the poor, champion, the left against big, bad evil corporation. That's how every narrative is for every fight he has. And my question to myself was, what if he came out in from the left and you are the liberal on the campaign and you're accusing him of being racist and accusing him of being anti immigrant and all that? And try to flip the narrative. And it worked. And it worked really, for two reasons. One, I think we ran a good campaign, but to more importantly, the facts were on our side.
Bradley Tusk:
The taxi industry has incredibly horrible legacy and reputation for racism, where taxi drivers and if you ask any African American or Latino person in New York about it has happen to them, they raise their hand to get a taxi and taxi just... Taxis free, the lights on but they go right by them. And they want to pick them up because of the color of their skin. And so it had been happening for decades. And it was so institutionalized, that there was so much anger. So for the same reason that I think we were able to build up a pretty diverse customer base in the first place for Uber for ride sharing.
Bradley Tusk:
We were able to harness all that anger and unleash it. And De Blasio had no idea what hit him. Obviously, these council members who... They win their council primaries with like 9000 votes to 12,000 votes, are getting 26,000 emails for people who didn't even know they existed, but who live in their districts before that. And we overwhelmed them. And then in the span of a month, we picked up enough council members that finally they just dropped the bill entirely and then we won.
Josh King:
And the book ends on that or the book includes all those victorious moments. Last month, though, the city council cap the number of Uber and Lyft drivers allowed in the road, has De Blasio won the war or just as this most recent battle.
Bradley Tusk:
No, maybe. So I stopped working with Uber when Travis stopped being CEO and Dar came in and I will say because I hold a decent amount of equity in Uber, he's done a lot of really good things. He settled away my lawsuit which was great. He settled to speak with the City of London. He did a deal with Crabs. He did a bunch of things that I think were probably necessary for the company. But the main that he came in under and his personality is make everyone love you, don't fight with anyone, don't argue with anyone. Don't be Travis. Now, Uber never would've gotten off the ground if not for Travis's personality because we were literally breaking a cartel in taxi. And that doesn't happen by making a room of you but eight years and $76 billion, whatever it was an evaluation later, you're the board wanting something different.
Bradley Tusk:
The problem with all that is, you can do that, everyone can love you and you can settle a bunch of long festering problems that probably gets us to the right path on our IPO. And all of a sudden, a lot of people just podcast will be focused on in the next 12 months or so. But you can't do that and simultaneously be good at winning a bare knuckle political fight. And taxi in De Blasio saw that they realize that Ubers nature had changed because Dara was just a very different kind of CEO than Travis. And they pounced and Uber did not have the wherewithal to fight back appropriately this time and they lost. The biggest concern for me is not just that caps in New York ultimately will lead to longer wait times and higher prices and everything else.
Bradley Tusk:
But there's no reason this won't happen all over the world. I mean, taxi is effectively the same kind of industry in every single city across the world. And then when they saw that it failed in New York in 2015 people left us alone everywhere because they saw how badly it humiliated De Blasio. Now they started to see it when I fear that Uber is going to face the same fights everywhere and won't be able to fight them.
Josh King:
This tension between preserving your brand or getting in the gutter and having a bare-knuckle fight is another conversation you had with Elon Musk.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah
Josh King:
In the state of Connecticut and other states where they wanted to get around the challenge of selling directly to consumers rather than working through a network of dealers which is basically the same as the taxi Commission's around the world. These local interests, the type of people who are filmed gazillion series like Friday Night Lights when the owner of the buddy who owns the car dealership is the greatest philanthropist in town, you told Elon that you need to fight this. But at the time he was saying no the brand's more important.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah I mean, it was interesting because Elon substance on this issue is 1,000%, right, which is there was a time in society when having a car dealer made sense, because the cars had to go from the factory to a dealer to the consumer. Today, we have this little thing called the internet, which really makes the car dealership unnecessary. So all it does is impose significantly higher costs on everyone else. So you are wanting to sell directly to consumer and he was on the merits completely, right? But car dealers are really popular. They're really entrenched in the community, they sponsor the literally team on the Fourth of July parade and all that stuff.
Bradley Tusk:
And for us to win, we couldn't just say, "Oh, this is better for consumers," we have to say, "This owner of this key idea or dealership gave a check to this politician for this much money on this date and in return got him to bottle up this bill." You know, hard stuff is not unusual in politics. But we would have gone really hard on pay to play and corruption and employ a lot of tactics that were reporters will criticize because they're seen as sort of either dirty politics or just rough politics. Just like we're not getting out of the mayor's race, I was criticized for using rough politics, and Elon's team and Elon, I guess just felt like the rest of the reputation was greater than the benefit of be able to sell directly to consumers. And so they chose not to do that stuff and didn't pass the bills they needed to in Texas and Connecticut and Michigan and Indiana and a few other states.
Bradley Tusk:
And it hurt their business model to a certain extent. But the point I made in the book now has almost been a little bit obviated, but what's happened since the book published, which the point of the book was to say, "You can win a lot of tough political fights, but they come with consequences. They have financial costs, they've reputational costs, and you just have to weigh the cost and decide, is this worth it to me or not?" Elon made the decision in his case, in that I was involved in that it wasn't worth it to him. He has since caused so much reputational damage to himself anyway, that whatever would have come out of our thing would have been like a fly's back, so it wouldn't have mattered. But I thought he made the wrong decision. But he kind of thought about it in the right way,
Josh King:
On a totally different level for people like both Travis and Elon, and comparing it to the intransigence of Chuck Schumer not wanting to take good advice from a person who can sort of see things from a disconnected level from the politician or the leader. And even people like Mike Bloomberg we're very set in their ways. The journeys that both Travis and Elon, have had outside of the operational aspect of managing their business or fighting the local fights that they had. It's also a tragic story in some ways.
Bradley Tusk:
Yes, I mean, in a weird way, this conversation I've certainly had with Travis a lot in the last year or so. Which is, it takes a very certain kind of person to take this sort of outlandish idea, turn it into a business and beaten entrenched interest in industry and really have it succeed. There are very few people who can do that they're really unique. The challenge is not by definition, everyone's good at certain things and not as good at others. And both of those guys are probably a little less well equipped to run high functioning bureaucracies and they were to take this radical idea and push it all the way through.
Bradley Tusk:
So launching electric cars sending rockets to Mars, that kind of Elon does make total sense. The day to day operations of production of the model three. There are probably better people than him to do that. Travis in some ways, same thing really amazing come up with this idea and making it happen when they became a $70 billion company. It became a giant bureaucracy and he's a really smart guy. But that definitely took advantage of his trades a lot less.
Josh King:
So the lessons that you've learned along the way, forming task strategies, your success with Uber to create a replicable model that you summarized nicely with so many of these infographics that are throughout the fixer. I want to go through some of the successes and hear what the problem was and how your solution work. Let's go back a few years, every sports fan in America was being bombarded with commercials from FanDuel and DraftKings. And then this happened.
Speaker 4:
This morning in the multi billion dollar unregulated world of fantasy sports were hearing about allegations of insider trading, suggesting employees were placing bets using information not available to the public. The New York Times reports that an employee at DraftKings last week, admitted to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of the NFL games. And the worker won $350,000 at a rival site FanDuel. That same week and a state-
Josh King:
So regulators began to come down on the companies and you saw this as an opportunity to pick up the phone last year, Daily Fantasy attracted 3.2 billion in entrance fees. How did you do it?
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so I had been introduced to FanDuel. Just coincidentally, about a month earlier. KKR is one of Vangelis biggest investors. Jen Haley who runs comms at Tusk ventures had run comms kick hair before that. And so they said to her, "Why don't you guys talk to these guys, because at some point, they may need to know you," and I had a nice conversation with them. I happen to have a lot of experience in kind of the politics of gaming, so I knew a little more than they expected. But that was it. And then all of a sudden, the time story hits Ethan Haskell is accused of insider trading. Turns out by the way, he didn't actually do it. But no one ever remembers that part of it.
Bradley Tusk:
And I'm Christian Janeski, who was fan Dawson, still as general counsel, and really smart guy. I sent him an email, I said, "Look, if I were you, I'm sure you're doing these things, I would do these five things." I listed out just quickly, kind of the overall strategy for how I would go about it. And hit the reply was, "When can you start?", and we started that night, and have been working with FanDuel and investing in FanDuel ever since. And the big opportunity now is sports betting licenses are now going to be available in lots of different states. The US Supreme Court created a ruling last May, the overturn was called PASPA, which was a federal prohibition on it.
Bradley Tusk:
So it's going to be a crazy battle royale and every single state for who gets those licenses, which for me, like there's nothing more fun than that. So yeah, and then within that, what's interesting is there's there's the rise of eSports, which I think will then piggyback on the rise of sports betting and we're incubating a really great company called Game profit. That's a gaming platform for eSports. So yeah, it's a really fun industry. So I'm glad I sent that email,
Josh King:
And not really fun industry as property and casualty insurance?
Bradley Tusk:
Better than you think
Josh King:
I know. I was in it. I was at the Hartford and Willis for many years and the only people who advertised more that season than FanDuel and DraftKings are GEICO and State Farm and Allstate.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh King:
And here comes into the fray Lemonade. Tell me about Lemonade.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so Lemonade is a really great company. Still, I think one of the best companies in our portfolio, we want to keep saying that it's, there's two parts of our business as a part where we work with startups, usually in return for equity, solving the political problems we're discussing. And then we also raise the fund, we have investment rights, and each company we work with, and we deploy capital on the ones that we really like and then Lemonade is certainly one of those. Imagine if you could sell insurance, but you didn't need brokers, agents, offices, Super Bowl ads, and you had good technologists, you could build a much better product and offer a lot less expensively and that's exactly what lemonade does they're a Tel Aviv based company, getting Dale tribers, the CEO brilliant guy, and came up with a model and said, "We're gonna sell people basic renter's insurance for significantly less money than they're paying right now they can do the whole thing online it'll take less than five minutes, we use social behavioral sciences site to take us customers. So therefore, we don't have to ever investigate fraud on the backend." So if you have a claim, they just pay it right.
Bradley Tusk:
There's no whole process they put you through. And it's a fun, pleasant experience. So of course the regulator's didn't want it to happen, right? So you need to be licensed in each state individually to sell insurance. But in New York was sort of the Holy Grail. And the State Department of Financial Services, was really just slow walking in the whole thing. Maybe in part because they thought it wouldn't be good for the incumbent insurers. But I think also in part just because there are bureaucrats who just feel like the world should move at their pace when they say so. And that was the case here, and would have continued to be the case until Lemonade brought us in. And we changed the conversation by saying to Governor Cuomo, "This is going to be a good story for you or a bad story for you, but it's not going to be no story.
Bradley Tusk:
You can't just let some bureaucrat just screw out Lemonade forever." So as we're negotiating five car lobbyists one night I say "Listen, you tell Cuomo this front page of tomorrow's journals either new startup flees New York for London because of Cuomo's corruption and incompetence or new startup launches low cost insurance and creates jobs in New York." You decide which one I'm cool either way, just let me know. We got our license next day and then went around the country and subsequent got it and California, Texas, Florida and so on.
Josh King:
We talked to the very beginning about this model of the platform connecting buyers and sellers and how it relates to our parent company Intercontinental Exchange. A similar model in a very different space is Handy. We spend a lot of time asking friends, "Do you have a carpenter? Do you have an interior designer? Do you have people who can get things done for me and here's what I'll pay." But it's so analog it's so word of mouth, it is not at all disrupted. Handy had that option and made it all the way into into the tax bill in 2017. But then found its way out.
Bradley Tusk:
Yes. So Handy basically just said, "It's always hard to find a housekeeper and you just have to rely on someone randomly saying my person is okay."
Josh King:
Handy, the platform?
Bradley Tusk:
If you want to clean you say so on the platform, you want them to clean for you, you say so on the platform, you hire them, and they work. Oisin Hanrahan, who's the CEO and founder of Handy had this brilliant and sort of obvious, and yet now seems really counterintuitive idea, which was, even though they're independent contractors, let's give them benefits. Because housekeepers have been kind of working in the Gray economy since literally the beginning of time, we could actually allow them to still be independent contractors and have flexibility, but still get health care, pension or wherever else. And we want them to be able to provide benefits to our workers.
Bradley Tusk:
And we couldn't you know why? Because the unions didn't want us to, even though you would think if you're a union, the thing you would want more than anything else is for a poor housekeeper making, 15 bucks an hour to get some health care get some disability coverage. They didn't, because their fear was, if someone had all the flexibility of being an independent contractor, and could still get benefits, why would they bother join the union? Why would they pay union dues? What would happen to the union's salaries. So as a result, they blocked us in a bunch of states. So we decided, "Okay, let's take this federally, and try to change the US tax code to make it clear to anyone in the sharing economy, the independent contractor." Which would then give us the flexibility to go ahead and do this.
Bradley Tusk:
We are really foreign to the Bill Johnson was our champion, and he was great about it. There's something called the Byrd rule, which turns out it's about provisions being remained the other provisions in budget bills, and basically the Senate parliamentarian was still Harry Reid's person, even though McConnell had taken over. I basically said, "Okay, let me take 10 amendments, I know Democrats hate, and I'll claim they violate the Byrd rule and knock them out, and ours ended up being one of them". So instead, we went out with pass bills in six states last year, or about to get two more done in the next couple of weeks, but not nearly as efficient as if we'd built to Washington.
Josh King:
Well, Bradley Tusk has left the employment of politicians he remains active in politics and the technology behind the future of advanced citizenship. After the break, we hear about his plan to make voting as easy as ordering an Uber. That's right after this.[music]
Bradley Tusk:
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Josh King:
Welcome back to the Ice House. Our guest today is Bradley Tusk founder and CEO of Tusk holdings. And we've been talking about some of the stories and lessons from his new book, The Fixer, My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics. In the book Bradley, you mentioned that shortly after starting Tusk strategies, you decided that your time working on political campaigns had run its course what was the tipping point?
Bradley Tusk:
I think that I realized that other than my Bloomberg here 99.9% of politicians that I worked with, even the good honor smart ones just couldn't live without the validation holding office, it is literally their oxygen, so to ask them to not have the title and the honorifics and the attention that comes with being a city council member or somebody matter member, a US senator or whatever it is, it's like asking you or me to like literally just stop breathing. They can't do it. And so as a result, all the decisions they make are completely correlated to how do I keep this job. And we live in a world where every district is gerrymandered so that basically the primary effectively is the general election. And turnout in primaries are incredibly low.
Bradley Tusk:
So as a result, whether it's on the Republican side, we're on guns or on the Democratic side and teachers unions, when you have turnout of say 10 to 15% in the primary. A very very small minority of people who are the most ideological and the most polarizing tend to control the agenda. So like, let's say that you're a Republican congressman from Florida, you probably know that assault weapon ban is not a bad idea. You probably want people voting on an AK 47 around your district. But turnout new primaries 12%. Half of that 12% are NRA members. You're not gonna do anything to piss off 50% of the voters in your electorate. Now imagine everyone could vote in their phones Turn out your primary is 60% Instead of half percent, the NRA share goes from being half the electorate to about a 10th of the electorate, the politics flipped completely.
Bradley Tusk:
And because all you care about is keeping your job, you'll adapt to whatever, right? So if the mainstream view and that Alexios now, we want to start wiping man, you'll be for it. If the view of people actually vote in your primaries, we don't want one, you'll be against it. So most politicians, I learned are just totally adaptable.
Bradley Tusk:
Totally, they do to stay in the job. And on one hand, that's a horrible trait that really screws up our democracy. On the other hand, it kind of makes it easy to figure out right, which is, if we change the inputs, we'll change the outputs. And so the combination of that, and then all the work that we did, and we talked about here for Uber and FanDuel, and bird now, where we mobilize our customers, taught me that people will advocate politically, if you make it convenient enough, even if I'll never go vote in a system that was designed 250 years ago and an agrarian society.
Bradley Tusk:
And adding that last piece in the blockchain means that we can vote on our phones more securely than we vote in elections today. And we can do it globally, which can really increase participation. So my foundation toss Montgomery philanthropies which thanks to that decision, take equity nuber allowed me to have a family foundation, one of the two issues we work on is mobile voting. And we're running a program nationally to try to create this in elections. So the state of West Virginia was the first day to do it. He did it for deployed military because their argument is the people who are literally putting their lives on the line to protect our right to vote, their votes never count, right?
Bradley Tusk:
They had mailed in a month after from Kandahar or whatever, and like just got thrown in the garbage. So Mac Warner was Secretary of State of West Virginia really wanted to try to bring a better way of voting to deployed military and was willing to give this a try, I funded the state's cost to administer the election. And in the primary, it was available for deployed military from two counties in West Virginia, we announced last week, it will now be available to members from 24 different counties. We're negotiating with other states right now, and hopefully, we'll have a couple of jurisdictions for next year. And so we're proving the technology can work, we're proving that people will take advantage of it, it's going to take a while because you want to see bipartisanship, try to change the system and tell all the people who want to power this way, say we're gonna make it easier for someone to come in and take you out.
Bradley Tusk:
They're not going to like that no union is going to like that. No hardcore trade group is going to like it lobbies aren't going to like it. It's not good for anyone that currently has power. But eventually, it'll happen. Because I have a 12 year old and a nine year old, and they can't conceive of a world where you couldn't do something that fundamental on your phone. And so I think in the time between now and their voting age, I've got to create a situation where it's clearly seen as effective and safe. And therefore there's no reason not to do it. So we are running all over the country trying to make this thing happen. I'm spending a bunch of money and so far, so good.
Josh King:
If Mike Bloomberg wanted to become president in 2008, or 2012, or 2016, though he doesn't have the app-
Bradley Tusk:
No.
Josh King:
... and he's gonna have to do it the hard way and he passed on '08 and '12. He was still Mayor so that he could still run the most important city in the world and have his perch and but the actuarial clock is catching up with him, he's getting up in years. 2016 is his year, if he's going to do it. I'd known some of the story from Howard, I'd known about pre picking the cabinet and making some announcements. I didn't know about how Travis came into the story and how technology came into the story. You had a prime to go and you pull back at the last minute.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, I mean, so Mike had asked me to run the campaign if he did run for president. And so I decided I would do two things. One is I would take away from my company and do that if he did choose to run. But even in the three or four months leading up to his decision, I put together sort of the makings of the campaign, because the challenge run is independent is there's no infrastructure for you to have a ballot in all 50 states. Now money can solve that problem. But it still takes money plus organization. And working backwards on the calendar, I said to Mike, that was like March 3, or whatever was that year, "You have to decide by that day, because any day after that, I can't guarantee that I'll be able to pull off getting on the ballot in all 50 states."
Bradley Tusk:
So that was our deadline. But what I kind of realized was, if we ran a conventional campaign, we would have had a conventional outcome, which was defeat right now independence ever won the presidency before. And the only way to do it was to try to do things really, really differently. And there were two big ideas that I was excited about. one you mentioned was pre announcing the cabinet. So my thought was Mike's greatest skill, which was true when he was mayor also is really picking talent and empowering them to do a good job and just getting the best people possible. And I thought, "What if he spent most of the campaign just running around the country getting America's best and brightest on board to be part of his cabinet?" So Bill Gates, the Secretary of State or Oprah Winfrey, Secretary of Commerce or whatever it is. And every week, you make another announcement, roll someone out, and you get a lot of excitement around that. But the press plays a guessing game.
Bradley Tusk:
Some of those people actually better retail campaigners than than our guy was. So we take advantage of all of that we don't need their money. And you can make the argument to the voters and say, "Listen, this is America's best and brightest. If you want them to come in for four years and four years only try to fix our problems vote for them. If you like the way things are, vote for the normal guys." I felt like that would have been really effective argument. The other big thing was, if you're a Republican from a Get Out the Vote standpoint, you have churches and evangelicals and that whole world and if you're a Democrat, you have labor unions as independent. You don't have either one.
Josh King:
How do you put together a field staff?
Bradley Tusk:
Right? So that was a problem that was really vexing me. And then it kind of hit me that what I had been spending all of my time doing up until that moment with exactly the answer. So San Francisco went over to protect our Travis and I said, I want to pay to send every American to the polls on election day, if you put a Bloomberg button on the app." and he's-
Josh King:
80 million rides?
Bradley Tusk:
I was just buttering. I figured we'd spend at least $400 million on it. And it's fine. Mike's worth $52 billion. So there was no real amount of money I could have spent that would have been material to him. And Travis, of course, being a tech loved Mike, because Mike is godfather of tech, Bloomberg LP, the tech company. And so once we kind of confirmed that there was no legal reason you couldn't do it. He was in. And then I started seeing other people in the Valley who had control over home sharing, or delivery, or all these different things where we could utilize the sharing economy, to become our field campaign, the Komagata Vote campaign,
Josh King:
You know how to put up a house sign you're on handy. There you go. Or you have your Airbnb host.
Bradley Tusk:
We send you a sign, right? You're a DoorDash delivery person, you can have a campaign lit while you're handing out the smoothies. So that was the idea of how do we call out the sharing economy to becoming our field operation. And people were willing to do it because they were really excited by the idea of my Bloomberg being president, obviously, my chose not to run, and therefore we couldn't do either of those things. But I still think they're both really good ideas.
Josh King:
His math was that if he ran, the odds of Trump winning went up.
Bradley Tusk:
So you know Mike's a math genius. So it's far better for me to dispute them on that. But we knew we couldn't win 270 Electoral College versus independent, there was no shot of that. So what we thought we could do was win four or five states pick up somewhere between 75 and 100 Electoral College votes, which would ensure that no one got to 270. Then as people who have watched house of cards or Veep no goes to the house, and you have to win 26 out of 50 states and each state as a delegation gets one vote. And at the time, it was 33, Republicans 17 Democrats. So my thought was Hillary would be dead in the water, because none of the Republicans would consider voting for her so we would pick up all 17 democratic states because she had to support us effectively, which meant we needed nine out of the remaining 33 Republican states to get 26.
Bradley Tusk:
And there were not going to name them, there were prominent House Republicans calling us and saying, "I think you can pull this off, I'll whip this for you." And we could have run campaigns targeted every single member. And we always had a lot of money to use to try to influence things to pick up those nine states. And the whole decision were that around was, is that a feasible strategy? And Mike said, the day before he announced he wasn't running, "What if we only get eight states?" And I said, "Well, then then Trump wins." And he said, "What if what if we don't run it all? On pillory lens, right?" Mike wasn't like the most rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, but like a lot of people, he could live with it, and really didn't want to see Trump elected. And so he said," I can't run if more likely I'm going to Elect Trump than not." And so I think for the right reason he didn't run. But in retrospect, he might have been the only thing standing in the way.
Josh King:
So those of us who are keeping track, there was this article that was weird, where it came from Bradley, "The Times of London, Bloomberg looking at a 2020 campaign." This has been picked up everywhere. It hasn't been strongly batted down by the Bloomberg camp at all. And the thrust of the story is running as a Democrat to the rudiments of the campaign hold to what you were thinking in 2016. Is this a real story?
Bradley Tusk:
No it's a Democrat. So interestingly, my luck would be this, this story pops. And my book comes out a few days later. And so I'm all over the media is promoting my book, and every single host says, "So is Bloomberg running or not?" And I'm sitting there trying to deal with the question. So here's where I think we are. What Mike said, and Mike's not always the most calculated public speaker was, if I were to run it be the Democrat because in this climate, people are so polarized, and they're so partisan, look, this, if Cavanaugh does get confirmed, I think it's only going to be that much more so. And I guess we'll find out in a couple of days, that it just the path that we exist in 2016 for independent just probably isn't there in 2020.
Bradley Tusk:
So if you were to run, you'd run as a Democrat. Now, whether Mike would want or as a Democrat could win? I don't know, I firmly believe he'd be the best person to be president. But the job of winning office, the job holding office, sometimes two different jobs. So we'll have to see. I mean, certainly no one thought that the Trump was no one in 16. So all the pundits would tell you they know what's going to happen, or basically lying, I could paint a scenario where Mike gets to the primary wins. And I could paint a scenario where it doesn't catch on at all. And so he just grabbed the side eventually, do I want to be president badly enough that I will run with long highs and by the way, every single candidate has long bonds, right? And the ones who don't like Hillary Clinton who lost and if you want it badly enough, you have to be willing to do that. And so Mike will have to make that decision in the next sort of 12 months or so. And if he does, then we'll go do it.
Josh King:
I said in my book, as Secretary Clinton was on her book tour, after her time as Secretary of State that she earned so much credibility in her time in public office, her popularity coming out of the State Department was very high. You could at her age, you could be a kingmaker or a queen maker up in Chappaqua. You can continue to have a great life making your speaking fees being a grandmother, who needs the bother. And if you're Mike Bloomberg, it's 74-75. Who needs to bother? Can he instead get his emotion and money and passion behind someone of a different generation and put the whole Bloomberg all star team towards someone who thinks and acts in a Bloomberg like way and not be the person who's lighting rush?
Bradley Tusk:
He could, right? And look he actually-
Josh King:
He spent a huge amount of money on this cycle.
Bradley Tusk:
And $100 million for the midterms. And but even more so than that, just to reinforce your point. Mike pays for staff and Mayor's office is not just around the US, but all over the world to take the idea that he's interested in like innovation and try to move them forward. So the idea of him kind of having protegees and grooming people to think like he thinks and govern like he governs is very real, because it's already happening. And this is someone who between us work on climate change, education, reform, guns, immigration, public health has huge influence over our policy, not just in the US, but all over the globe. And so there's a lot of ways that he can impact society, whether or not he's president.
Bradley Tusk:
I still do believe that you're saying, Who's the single most capable person to sit in that chair in the Oval Office. It's Mike Bloomberg, I work from the city hall, I work from his campaign manager, I know the man really well. And it's just he's the most impressive person I've ever worked with. But I think he can have a huge impact on the election. One way or another.
Josh King:
Big character in your book, as we wrap up is the current mayor, Bill De Blasio. He's on his second term as mayor of New York. I don't know if he'll run for a third term, but he certainly wants to maybe take on the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, perhaps a national bid. And yet, here's the city that you and I are sitting in, we're sitting in the library of the New York Stock Exchange a 225 year old institution, the love and care and passion for the city that over three terms Mike Bloomberg had seems to be devoid in the current administration. Does someone like Bradley Tusk say, let me use the tools that we've figured out? I'll run I'll take over the city or how can we get this city back? The type of leadership that it had under three terms under Bloomberg.
Bradley Tusk:
Yeah, so I'm not a politician. So I'm definitely not the solution here. But I think there's there's a few answers. One is I think the stuff we're doing mobile voting is really important. I'm still a little bit of math for you. We have 8.6 million residents in the city. De Blasio won the 2000 mayoral primary, 2013 mayoral primary with 282,000 votes, so about 4% of the population, he then won the 2017 primary with 320,000 votes. So basically 95% of the city didn't participate in this election one way or another. And applause he's not stupid he got from for that four or 5%, the exclusion of everybody else. So the first thing is, you just got to have a lot more turnout, ideally, through your phone through mobile voting. But even if there's more people going to the polling place, in order to get a better mayor, one of the reasons that Mike won it because people were so scared after 911 that they did turn out. And without that increased turnout, we wouldn't have won we would have lost by a lot. So that's number one.
Bradley Tusk:
Number two, one of the benefits of Mike and I'll give Rudy some credit also for before that is they put a lot of good systems and processes and people in place for governance, and not just sort of the big stuff at City Hall but all the Department of Buildings and sanitation department, Parks Department, just good people all throughout who are talented and political, and they're able to institutionalize it in a way that made it more functional and effective. So at least for the first term of De Blasio, after Mike, that hangover still was there where the city could still run pretty well. I'm admittedly biased. I don't like De Blasio.
Bradley Tusk:
But it does feel to me at the seams are coming off a little bit. Right. The city feels dirtier, the homeless population is a lot worse. Crime stats are going up. The MTA is a disaster. NYCHA is a disaster. And so the other thing is, if the city gets bad enough, people start to open their eyes. And notice when they think everything's fine, they don't show up at all. And if De Blasio wins, whatever. But when they realize that New York City is not inherently safe. Nursing is not inherently well run, it is safe and well run as the people who are actually in charge. Right. We've had good mayors that have run the city really well. We've had bad mayors that run the city really poorly. And so eventually if we don't get someone in City Hall, who's a lot more competent, a lot more honest, a lot harder working. We're going to fall part of the city.
Josh King:
Bradley Tusk, CEO of Tusk strategies, a huge resume and journey in politics now helping technology companies. His new book is, "The Fixer, My Adventures Saving Startups from Death" by Politics. Bradley, thanks for joining us.
Bradley Tusk:
Hey, thanks having for me. I know it's really fun.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was speaker Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk holdings, an author of "The Fixer, My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics." If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet us @NYC. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolf with production assistance from Ken Abel and Stephen Porter. I'm Josh King signing off in the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 5:
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