Is Zohran Mamdani's Plan for New York Economically Possible? — ft. Bradley Tusk

Transcript

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Speaker 2 Today's number 2 million. More than 2 million people voted in the New York City mayoral election, the most in a half a century.

Speaker 2 True story, reportedly, in every Asian household, the kids are freaking out, as now their parents are going to say, what, you're not mayor by the age of 33?

Speaker 2 Also, also add, let's be honest, this is a huge defeat for perverts all over the world, but

Speaker 2 I want the other perverts to know that we will rebuild. We will be back.

Speaker 2 Listen to me.

Speaker 1 Markets are bigger than us. What you have here is a structural change in the wealth distribution.

Speaker 12 Cash is trash.

Speaker 1 Stocks look pretty attractive. Something's going to break.
Forget about it.

Speaker 2 How are you, Ed? I'm doing very well. How are you doing, Scott? I'm less miserable than I usually am.
I'm really excited about the election results.

Speaker 2 You know, I don't, I would not have voted for this mayor. I'm not, I'm not a New York resident.
I always have to feel like I have to do a land acknowledgement to my Jewish brothers and sisters. But

Speaker 2 the other races I'm especially excited about, the governor's races, even down ballot races,

Speaker 2 probably the most important race was the referendum in California, and that passed overwhelmingly. But yeah, I'm feeling pretty good this morning.
And how about you? How are you doing?

Speaker 2 You know, I have something for you.

Speaker 13 One second.

Speaker 2 Who's under the table? Is that why you're smiling?

Speaker 2 Boss, if it has anything to do with my birthday, it was two days ago.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 13 But thank you. We got to celebrate it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, no, actually, we don't. We don't.
We do.

Speaker 13 We do. It's your birthday.
This is Scott's favorite. I mean, it was your birthday a couple of days ago.

Speaker 2 We didn't celebrate it.

Speaker 13 Your least favorite day of the year, but we have to celebrate it and acknowledge it somehow. Otherwise, what are we doing here?

Speaker 2 Okay, box checked. Let's talk about my book and my media tour.

Speaker 2 Come on. It's a good day.
It's good when you're 14, like fucking Ed Elson, when you're barreling towards death, like Scott Galloway. All I have is like shingles and crones to look forward to.

Speaker 13 I ordered these last night. Come on.
This was a lot of effort for me.

Speaker 2 You really brought it there. You must be a fantastic boyfriend.

Speaker 2 It's like when my dad came home for Christmas on the 21st, four days before Christmas, and he brought home a quiz nart from Sears for my

Speaker 2 his third wife.

Speaker 13 I could do a little more than a paper hat.

Speaker 13 Next time, next time I'll get you the second Ferrari.

Speaker 2 Talk about my book, bitch. That's my birthday present.

Speaker 13 Tell us about your book. Amazing book launch.
You're all over the place.

Speaker 13 Number one. On Amazon.

Speaker 2 I'm number one on Amazon. It's funny.

Speaker 2 I don't really buy into the modern metrics of a capitalist society. Ed.

Speaker 2 I have not refreshed my Amazon page every seven minutes, waiting it to fall to number two behind fucking let them Mel Robbins and Andrew Huberman telling me to eat drink pineapple juice and creatine the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 I think the kids, I, no joke, cried on the view, which felt very masculine in front of four women.

Speaker 13 It was nice, though. It was moving.

Speaker 2 That was a low light.

Speaker 13 So you've been on The View, you've been on Morning Joe, you were on The Today Show,

Speaker 13 you were on Cara Swish's podcast.

Speaker 13 What am I missing here?

Speaker 2 I'm not even keeping track. CBS, PBS, I'm on Tour, Times of London, and today I go on Friedzakaritz.
Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper.
Today I go on The Daily Show

Speaker 2 with Jordan Clepper. And then tonight I'm being interviewed by Ben Steller,

Speaker 2 who I'd be great friends with, but he doesn't drink. It's really getting in the way of our friendship.

Speaker 2 What's going on in your life?

Speaker 13 I'm just grinding, Scott. I'm just working on this podcast.
Yeah. But it's going, everything's going very well.
And we're going to have our, I thought we were going to have our meeting last week.

Speaker 13 We didn't have that meeting. It's happening this week and we're going to review how the business is doing.
I got to tell you, I get very excited for these meetings.

Speaker 2 That's because the business is doing well.

Speaker 13 Exactly. If we were doing badly, then I'd be, I'd be a little terrified.

Speaker 2 But it'll be good.

Speaker 2 I don't think anyone in your generation, maybe with a few of these kids who are being laid off from these information edge companies, I think the majority of people with your kind of certification and your your skills, and this worries me a little bit, your life has pretty much been, and I'll say that having, I don't know what you face personally, but professionally,

Speaker 2 I don't know if there was a malicious clown at a little birthday event.

Speaker 2 I don't know what happened.

Speaker 13 Without any real knowledge, I'm just going to go out on a whim and say, your life's been pretty good.

Speaker 2 Your life's been a fucking Easter parade.

Speaker 2 I know professionally, because your entire professional life has been with me, that your professional life has pretty much been up and to the right. Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's true.

Speaker 2 It's been a cakewalk. You know what? Just for a learning experience, I promise to fix that at some point.

Speaker 13 I can't wait. Well, should we get into our conversation here with Bradley Tusk? We're going to talk about this election, what it means for New York.
Let's do it.

Speaker 13 Here is our conversation with Bradley Tusk, veg capitalist, political strategist, and writer. Brad, thank you very much for joining us on Profit Markets.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 13 So we want to get into this election here. The reason why we wanted to speak with you, just to go over your background for our listeners here.

Speaker 13 So you ran Mike Bloomberg's mayoral campaign in 2009, which he won.

Speaker 2 You were the campaign manager.

Speaker 13 Before that, you served as deputy governor of Illinois. Before that, you were Chuck Schumer's communications director.
Before that, you actually worked for the New York City Parks Department.

Speaker 13 You're a senior advisor. So

Speaker 13 are

Speaker 13 heavily involved in New York politics, but at the same time, you're also a leader in business. You worked on Wall Street for several years.
You were an early advisor to Uber.

Speaker 13 You started your VC firm, Tusk Ventures. So you have pretty deep experience in the New York City political world and also the New York City business world.
And these are two worlds which may be...

Speaker 13 colliding after this mayoral election many believe they're about to be at odds with one another so i just want to start with the context here and then I'll throw it back to you and we'll start very broad.

Speaker 13 Zoro Mamdani is the next mayor of New York City. What does this mean for New York City?

Speaker 2 It's an open question. So I think part of the challenge over the last few months is a misunderstanding of the role of city government and of the mayor.

Speaker 2 So while I did not vote for Mandani, a lot of the sort of rendering of garments to me is overstated.

Speaker 2 Yes, he's a socialist, but at the end of the day, the mayor doesn't really control the economy directly. The mayor does not set interest rates.
The mayor does not control the supply chain.

Speaker 2 He can't even really raise taxes without Albany. And so, you know, the job of the mayor, of really any mayor, is to pick up the trash.
It's to make sure the lights turn from green to red.

Speaker 2 It's to make sure the clean water comes out of the tap. And if he governs pragmatically, then I think he might be just fine.
If he governs totally dogmatically, then I think we've got a problem.

Speaker 13 So you mentioned that he is a democratic socialist. This wouldn't have a real impact on markets, on the economy.

Speaker 2 He doesn't have that level of power.

Speaker 13 What does it mean, though, that he is a democratic socialist?

Speaker 13 Is that important to you? Does that strike you? Is that something that we should care about?

Speaker 2 Well, it's important in the sense that if you were to take the DSA, that's the Democratic Socialist of America, their platform, and if he were to truly try to apply that to the mayoralty, then I think New York City very well might be a place where a lot of people wouldn't want to live.

Speaker 2 If you truly believe that the police are evil and should be fully defunded, if you truly believe that taxes should be as high as absolutely possible, if you truly believe

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 every business and every business person sort of is inherently rapacious and greedy and needs to be punished in some way, then yeah, that is not a good look for the city that is the financial capital of the world, the media capital of the world, and a city that relies on its highest income taxpayers.

Speaker 2 About 1% of New Yorkers pay about 50% of the city's income taxes. And New York City is a value proposition.

Speaker 2 And at a certain point, if it is too expensive and too dangerous, people can and will choose to live somewhere else. And what that ultimately results in is a lot less money for poor people.

Speaker 2 It's the poorest among us who need maximum city revenue for Medicaid, for public housing, for public assistance.

Speaker 2 And if Mondani's policies do cause a flight of capital, the poor people are the ones who are going to pay the most.

Speaker 13 Do you think that that will happen? I mean, we've seen a lot of people saying leading up to the election, a lot of wealthy people saying, I'm leaving if he gets in office.

Speaker 2 You think that's going to happen? No, I don't. The odds of anyone this morning.

Speaker 2 picking up the phone, calling a real estate broker and leaving town just because Mandani won last night seem pretty low to me. It will come down to how he governs.

Speaker 2 One very encouraging sign so far is that he said that he wants to keep Jesse Tish as police commissioner. She runs the NYPD.
She seems to be extremely good at it.

Speaker 2 If she chooses to stay and he lets her do her job, that's a pretty clear sign that he understands that the role of the mayor is to give people a clean, safe, well-run city.

Speaker 2 And if he can do that, he's going to be just fine. And if he can't, there will be a flight.
There already has been.

Speaker 2 So in 2012, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, New York City had 12.7% of America's millionaires, and now it's down to to 8.7%, and that's a resulting loss of about $13 billion a year in tax revenue.

Speaker 2 And so people can move. City governments are the most vulnerable to that kind of thing.
So we'll see. I think in my conversations with him, he gets that.

Speaker 2 But, you know, the proof will be in the pudding and who he hires will tell us all.

Speaker 13 You mentioned some of those things that

Speaker 13 you're saying. If he truly believes X, Y, Z, if he truly believes that we need to defund the police.

Speaker 13 I'm trying to remember some of the examples that you gave, but

Speaker 13 generally speaking, they seem to be slight caricatures, but I'm not totally sure. And I think one question a lot of people are asking is like, what does he truly believe?

Speaker 13 We know that he tweeted in 2020, defund the police. So we know that that's where he stood on the issue.
Now he's on TV saying, that's not actually what I believe.

Speaker 13 And I think I don't have a problem with that personally, saying I actually switched my view. But I guess my question to you, having talked with him, what does he truly believe?

Speaker 13 And those concerns you raised, do you think that those are the kinds of policies that he will actually enact and try to enact as mayor?

Speaker 2 I don't think so by and large, because I think he does study history really well. And I think he is quite smart.

Speaker 2 And when you look at where other mayors have failed, it is typically because they either went way too far on some sort of ideological bent or they ignored.

Speaker 2 I mean, Eric Adams' mayoralty effectively was derailed, probably not by all the petty corruption, but simply that when it came to quality of life, he didn't do a good job.

Speaker 2 You know, there was a point where New York City had over 5,000 illegal weed shops, which means stores that were openly selling narcotics without a license to do so.

Speaker 2 And Adams just for years and years just ignored it, right? We have scaffolding everywhere.

Speaker 2 We have such a shoplifting epidemic that if you want a tube of toothpaste, you have to get someone to open up a lock case for you.

Speaker 2 We have e-bikes roaring up and down the sidewalks. And so when the city feels out of control, people blame the mayor.
I do think that Zoron gets that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we'll see how that impacts his choices as governing. I can't help but add on a lot of

Speaker 2 my Jewish friends asked me why I wasn't being more vocal against Mondami. And I'm like, he doesn't set policy on Israel.
I mean,

Speaker 2 it's just,

Speaker 2 we've got bigger battles to fight here than

Speaker 2 who's in charge of the MTA union negotiations. Anyway,

Speaker 2 talk a little bit about some of the other races. This feels, as a proud progressive, this feels like a good morning.
Typically in off-cycles, it goes against whoever the incumbent president is. So

Speaker 2 was this a surprise to the upside for Blue or just sort of an average part of the cycle?

Speaker 2 No, I think it was a surprise to the upside for Blue, in part because Democrats have been having a really rough go of it.

Speaker 2 Just quickly on your point in Israel, look, I'm a fervent Zionist, but with that said, no member of the Israeli Knesset has ever said, wait, before I cast this critical vote, let me see what the mayor of New York is.

Speaker 2 Let's see what it thinks. It does.

Speaker 2 What matters is whether and how he protects Jews in New York. I think he gets that.
As long as he does that, it's fine.

Speaker 2 Nationally, look, where you can really contrast Zoron with the other candidates who succeeded last night is whether you like Zoron or not, to his credit, he did have an affirmative agenda, right?

Speaker 2 He had a clear vision for New York City. He smiles.
He laughs. He's likable.

Speaker 2 Whereas I think the stereotype right now, and largely it's been pretty true, of the Democratic Party is just incessant whining and complaining and no real vision, just being against everything.

Speaker 2 I don't know that Mikey Sherrill or Abigail Spanberger, who respectively won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia last night, have a clear vision for their states.

Speaker 2 They have policy positions on their website, obviously, but I don't think it really mattered because voters were expressing their opinions about Trump and about the nation overall.

Speaker 2 The thing to me that was the most telling was an ABC News Washington Post poll came out yesterday morning that said 71% of Americans feel that their grocery prices have gone up.

Speaker 2 And of independence, two-thirds of them blame Trump for it directly based on tariffs and everything else.

Speaker 2 There are lots of issues that you or me or Ed or whoever might scream about on authoritarianism or rule of law or process.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure that most Americans care all that much about process, but they know what it costs to go to the grocery store.

Speaker 2 And when they start feeling like it's costing them a lot more money, they start blaming people.

Speaker 2 And so unless you think that Trump is going to totally revoke the tariffs and everything's going to change, you're in a position where this very well might be the same or even worse economic climate a year from now when the midterms hit.

Speaker 2 And you have to be encouraged, if you're a Democrat, at your chances of at least retaking the House.

Speaker 2 So now, with all of that said, Democrats retaking the House just gets us to a place where Trump can't get his agenda through Congress.

Speaker 2 But if you have a president that genuinely does not care about rule of law and just does things anyway and a Supreme Court that seems terrified of him, that may not matter.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So I want to come back to New York just for a second, because what you said about Democrats need to be more than just clutching their pearls. They need a party of ideas.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 government-sponsored food grocery stores makes absolute fucking lutely no sense to me. It's a low-margin business.
83% of bodega owners are immigrants. That's like the last business we want to be in.

Speaker 2 Someone from the DMV picking our produce is not going to make prices go down unless you subsidize those stores and ultimately. No, I love the DMV.

Speaker 2 I know, yeah, a big part of the DMV trading is picking the right off the coffee.

Speaker 2 Listen to two of you.

Speaker 2 Rent stabilization and rent freezes, as far as I can tell, economics 101, they end up having the opposite effect. They end up actually increasing rent prices.

Speaker 2 But instead of just being the, you know, the podcaster of no,

Speaker 2 what, as someone who's been a deputy mayor of Chicago, focus on affordability. What are the structural shifts America could enact, or even Congress, to make

Speaker 2 life more affordable for Americans? What are the ideas that would, in fact, bring down prices? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is

Speaker 2 wasn't paid much attention to, but there were ballot measures last night in New York City that dealt with the process for approving construction and housing, and they passed.

Speaker 2 And that's a really big deal because one of the reasons that New York City and so many cities around this country lack affordable housing is that the cost of creating new housing is is so incredibly high that it doesn't pencil out for developers.

Speaker 2 Like you just made the point on the rent-free. So about 28% of New York City apartments are rent controlled or rent stabilized.
The mayor does have the power to

Speaker 2 basically disallow any rent increases for those apartments. Like you said, that just spreads the cost out to everybody else.

Speaker 2 So if you were to meaningfully make affordable housing easier, and if you were to reduce the costs and reduce all the political burden and nonsense that typically goes on,

Speaker 2 that leads to more housing and just basic supply and demand. If there's a greater supply of housing, then prices will come down.
So that's clearly one thing that we could do.

Speaker 2 And obviously, I'm sure you've had, you know, Ezra Klan and Derek Thompson on one of your shows at some points talk about their whole abundance agenda.

Speaker 2 A lot of that

Speaker 2 would certainly make sense.

Speaker 2 The other thing, and this is much more on a national level than local, but it's an issue that you talk about a lot on your podcast, Scott, which is what's the impact of AI going to be?

Speaker 2 And to me, at least, when I look at the job numbers, I think that AI is already having an impact.

Speaker 2 The companies that are laying off the most people, which are the really big tech companies, are the earliest adopters of things like AI. Often they're the developers of it, too.

Speaker 2 And I think by 2026 and 2028, this will be a really meaningful issue to people.

Speaker 2 And how we go about regulating AI, how we go about making sure that we don't end up with 26 people who are trillionaires and 19% unemployment is going to be really important.

Speaker 2 I think Andrew Yang kind of kicked this whole conversation off 15 years ago or so with his book that proposed universal basic income. as a solution for AI layoffs.

Speaker 2 That's going to be an issue that the government has to deal with. And typically speaking, Congress has abdicated that role.

Speaker 2 If you look at kind of Internet 2.0, there's been no meaningful federal regulation of social media, and it has had an absolute disastrous impact, especially on kind of young men, Scott, as you talk about quite a bit.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah, I think those are at least two things that I would jump into, definitely on a national level and someone on a local level.

Speaker 13 We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend and please follow us if you haven't already.

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Speaker 13 We're back with Prof G Markets. Just going back to the to the rent freeze, Brad,

Speaker 13 I think Zoran is kind of a genius, as the more I've gotten to know, to learn about him and the way he handles himself in these debates, his social media strategy, his communications.

Speaker 13 I mean, he is like a superstar, like no doubt about it, generational talent.

Speaker 13 And then there are some policy proposals in here that have kind of become like the linchpins of this guy doesn't know what he's doing. Freezing the rent.
is a great example.

Speaker 13 The city-owned grocery store, another great example. And it's very easy to sort of categorically take those down through simple economics 101.

Speaker 13 You know, freeze the rent, that sort of goes against, it disincentivizes construction, it sort of goes against the abundance agenda. My question,

Speaker 13 why do you think he put those in there? I mean, I get the sense that he probably has heard why freezing the rent probably isn't a good idea.

Speaker 2 Of course, he knows he wants, because he wanted to get elected. He's still a politician at the end of the day.

Speaker 13 Okay, so

Speaker 13 it's all election. It's all for campaigning.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, people who run for office, in my experience, and I've been at this now for over 30 years, are typically desperately insecure.

Speaker 2 They typically desperately need attention and validation, and they get that by everything that comes with holding office. I'm running.
I'm running.

Speaker 2 There we go.

Speaker 2 So, look, and keep in mind, when you talk about the rent freeze, even though it's only 28% of apartments, my guess is that a lot of people who voted for him yesterday assume that it applies to them too.

Speaker 2 They just hear rent freeze and they're like, great, I don't want to pay more rent. The city-owned grocery stores,

Speaker 2 yeah, look, you know, a couple of times in my career, I've had the opportunity or responsibility of trying to oversee what really are private sector businesses for government, whether it's golf courses at the New York City Parks Department or the lottery in the state of Illinois.

Speaker 2 It never works when the government is trying to run private businesses. With that said,

Speaker 2 It's a very minor thing.

Speaker 2 And while the city opening grocery stores is not going to work, if he said, all right, I'm going to do an initiative with Whole Foods or Kroger or HEB or they're in Texas, whoever, and we're going to provide city-owned land and grants and tax credits and whatever else, could you do something?

Speaker 2 Sure. Do I think it would really matter? No.

Speaker 2 But ultimately, there are lots of ways to go about achieving his agenda if he's willing to be a little creative.

Speaker 2 So for example, and I'm sure you guys noticed this if you're in town and you're taking the subway, People just hop the turnstiles left and right, pretty much everywhere.

Speaker 2 And because we don't do anything about it, we have no enforcement, we have no real gates or anything like that, we'd lose over a billion dollars a year in revenue to fare evasion.

Speaker 2 His free bus idea, whether you like it or not, would cost around $630 million, I think. You could easily pay for it if you started enforcing the law on fare evasion.

Speaker 2 So there are ways to achieve a lot of things that he wants to achieve.

Speaker 2 It may not happen the way he wants to do it, which really just gets back to that question of are you going to govern pragmatically or dogmatically?

Speaker 2 A dogmatic mayor would say we must punish the 1% because that is the top priority of people on the 18th percent or the 12th percent or the 9th percentile. And I don't really care what, you know,

Speaker 2 this mayor would say, I don't really care what the economic impact of the city is. I want to achieve social justice for my voters.

Speaker 2 Or he could be a mayor that just said, I want to maximize tax revenue to spend on the best possible thing. Sometimes that might mean not raising taxes, actually.

Speaker 2 You know, what made my, I'm biased, but what made Mike Bloomberg in many ways a really great mayor is Mike made every decision based on what he truly believed was best for New York.

Speaker 2 You might disagree with him. I didn't always agree with him.
But ultimately,

Speaker 2 he

Speaker 2 acted in the best interest of the city, of the people. And I think the voters understood that and they were willing to give him a lot of leeway as a result.

Speaker 2 The voters don't expect to agree with you on everything, but if they know that you're looking out for them, they will generally support you.

Speaker 2 Another reason why Eric Adams was such a failure is he seemed to constantly looking out for like minor grifting opportunities and for all of his buddies to do that.

Speaker 2 And the voters had no confidence that he cared about them. So, and by the way, that might be some of what we saw last night nationally as well.

Speaker 13 Just this divide between dogmatic versus pragmatic. I totally agree with you.
I think that the campaign was dogmatic as it should be. I get the sense that he's going to be actually quite pragmatic.

Speaker 13 I think he's going to work with establishment Democrats, which is good in a lot of ways, but also maybe bad for the people who voted him in, who thought he was going to completely shake up the system.

Speaker 13 If you run on a campaign and say, I'm going to freeze your rent, which is a big thing to say, and then you don't freeze the rent, it sounds like you think he actually will not go through with that.

Speaker 13 Is he not losing the base?

Speaker 2 Well, I think he'll go through with it for that small segment. It's just not what most people, it's not how most people's rent works.

Speaker 2 Look, it's an excellent question, Ed, because if you look at Bill de Blasio, who is the mayor of New York City recently, de Blasio was very smart politically.

Speaker 2 And de Blasio understood that as long as the base, which was I think he got 282,000 votes in the primary when he won in 2013, as long as that roughly 300,000 people are happy, you're going to get re-elected.

Speaker 2 If your only goal is re-election for the sake of re-election, then you just govern for the base and you don't care about the other 96% of New York City.

Speaker 2 A truly great mayor, a truly great president, a truly great whatever, says, My goal is to create as much total good as possible, and I'm not going to worry specifically about the political implications of any one decision.

Speaker 2 If you are the mayor of New York City and you say, I just want to do the best job I possibly can, and that's what governs your choices, odds are you will be successful.

Speaker 2 And keep in mind, no New York City mayor has ever won an election after being mayor. Lots of them run for president, they run for governor, for Congress.

Speaker 2 This is both the best job in politics and a total dead end job.

Speaker 2 And the way to go about it is to say, what can I do to have the greatest impact on this city for four or eight years?

Speaker 2 And if you do that well, your legacy will be incredible and people will will love you.

Speaker 2 If all you're doing is endless political machinations and how do I kind of game this thing out and then triage that thing, you're going to fail. I just want to press pause because you said something

Speaker 2 that was very insightful and obvious. And I think the two are inextricably linked when someone disconnects something that seems obvious in the...

Speaker 2 the light of day. You said that the companies laying off the most people were the early adopters of AI.
And I hadn't even made that simple connection.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely right that the companies announcing 5,000, 10,000, 30,000 people are understandably and naturally the ones who are figuring out this whole AI game. I thought it was very insightful.

Speaker 2 Anyways, very impressed with you, brother.

Speaker 2 When you look across the landscape, you've run campaigns. You ran a very successful campaign.
You ran Bloomberg's campaign.

Speaker 2 When you look at candidates on either side of the aisle, Who do you think is most disciplined and effective and has the most resonant messaging?

Speaker 2 If you had to pick nominees from either side of the aisle, and I realize we're kind of three years out, but who do you think, regardless of your own political beliefs, who do you think is just good at this?

Speaker 2 If you look at modern political history, so let's just start with Reagan.

Speaker 2 The people who win the presidency are almost always not the best qualified people. It's people who really resonate with the voters.
It's the rock stars, Reagan, Clinton, W., Obama, Trump.

Speaker 2 None of them were the most qualified people. The two who were most qualified, George H.W.
Bush and Joe Biden, each only served one term.

Speaker 2 And so if you are either party, but especially the Democrats, stop worrying about who wins the Yale University primary or the think tank primary or whatever it is, and just figure out who's the rock star.

Speaker 2 I had this idea that I threw out there in Substack maybe a month or two ago that kind of said we should do a battle of the network stars for the presidential candidates.

Speaker 2 And instead of the normal DNC process or maybe a year before that, put them in real world situations.

Speaker 2 Put them at a waffle house at midnight and see how they do with the truckers and the cops and the college students. Have them call an inning of baseball on the radio.

Speaker 2 Have them go to a big mall and just see who shows up, who cares and how it goes.

Speaker 2 You know, to bring this full circle, one of the reasons why Zoran Mondami won, and he's the next mayor of New York City, is he is a rock star. He is incredibly good at people.

Speaker 2 And the more time you spend with him, the more you realize that. And that's true for the presidency, too.
And so all the normal checklists that everyone looks at, do you have this union?

Speaker 2 Do you have this much money in the account? You know, do you have this former elected official supporting you? None of that shit really matters.

Speaker 2 What really matters is how you resonate with the people directly. And if the Democrats want to win in 2028, that's what they have to figure out.
I like this.

Speaker 2 I think my first idea would be we charge Vance of making $10,000 in a week and only give him an OnlyFans creator account. That's my idea.

Speaker 2 He might pull that off.

Speaker 2 You're taking a big risk there, man. He might make $100.
There's an outside shot. He comes back with a quarter of a million dollars.
Maybe in that case, he's like, screw this.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to make money online. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 I think that's what a lot of people are saying.

Speaker 2 When you think about the nation and income inequality and polarization and rage, are there sort of two or

Speaker 2 you've been a big advocate of voting by phone?

Speaker 2 I'll give you 60 seconds of running room for vote by phone, but then come up with another two or three ideas.

Speaker 2 So on mobile voting, we live in a world where, in my experience, every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election. A handful of exceptions, but there are exceptions.

Speaker 2 And because of gerrymandering, the only election that typically matters is the primary. Primary turnout is typically about 10 to 15 percent.
So who are they?

Speaker 2 They're the far left or the far right or special interests. And as a result, they dictate not only who wins office, but then what happens once those people are in office.

Speaker 2 So either you get the absolute chaos and dysfunction of D.C., which is literally shut down, or you get totally one-sided governments, whether it's the city of Portland on the left or the state of Texas on the right.

Speaker 2 And none of that reflects how most Americans feel. There is consensus among most people on most issues, but their voice is not heard because they don't vote in primaries.

Speaker 2 I ran all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the U.S.

Speaker 2 And the way that we beat the taxi industry, because at the time we were a tiny tech startup and taxi was a really, really powerful industry, is that we were able to mobilize our customers directly through the app to tell their elected officials, hey, I like this Uber thing, leave it alone.

Speaker 2 And when I realized that that was working, I created this thing called the Mobile Voting Project.

Speaker 2 And we ran pilot elections in seven states where deployed military people with disabilities were able to vote on their phones. Turnout went up.

Speaker 2 We then built our own secure mobile voting technology that is free. It will all be posted on GitHub by November 14th.

Speaker 2 And now we are about to start running campaigns in states around the country to allow people to start voting on their phones, beginning with municipal elections and going from there.

Speaker 2 To me, if you can get turnout from 8% to 32% in a primary, that's what moves everything towards the middle. That's what ends all of extremism and polarization.
That's what gets us results.

Speaker 2 So that's mobile voting. The next thing to me, Scott, would be universal basic income.

Speaker 2 I really do believe that in the richest country in the history of the world, the notion that some people don't have enough food, the notion that people who are not, let's say, mentally ill or addicts are sleeping on the streets, things like that, we just don't need to live in a world like that.

Speaker 2 There's just too much money and it's just a failure of sort of imagination and discipline and ability to not prevent that.

Speaker 2 And so, for example, out of my foundation, we fund and run a lot of the campaigns around the country to do universal school meals so that every kid gets breakfast and lunch.

Speaker 2 But we should do that, but it should go beyond that.

Speaker 2 There is nothing wrong with saying that a world, especially where you might have temporarily very high unemployment because of AI job displacement, that we're going to find ways to make sure that people are okay.

Speaker 2 And the third one is less economic, but it would be repealing Section 230.

Speaker 2 So Section 230 is a provision in federal law that says that internet service providers cannot be sued for the content posted by their users. And that has led to an absolute cesspool.

Speaker 2 You guys talk about this a lot, especially in relation to young men. On the internet, it has led to epidemics of teenage suicide, self-harm,

Speaker 2 all kinds of different things.

Speaker 2 And when you have a dominant form of media that is totally unregulated, and when the, if human nature, because of our negativity bias, which we have so that we know how to like, you know, walk the other way when we see a lion or leave the room when we smell gas, is such that we're going to always click on the negative headline first.

Speaker 2 The platforms all know that. That's what they feed us.
And in order for them to make more money, we continue to sort of destroy ourselves and our society.

Speaker 2 You can fix that by changing the liability provisions. Most even politicians in Washington agree with it, but they're just terrified of meta and all of the different companies.

Speaker 2 And so they don't actually go through with it.

Speaker 2 But I think that if you could raise turnout meaningfully so that politicians are less incentivized to fight and more incentivized to work together and make sure that people have the basics and take away the toxicity of the internet, you'd have a much better world.

Speaker 2 So just for the purposes of conversation, and you and I are,

Speaker 2 we're allies. And even if you're holding the gun differently than me, we're still allies.

Speaker 2 And one of the things I don't like about the Democratic Party is we have this sort of apostate philosophy where if you don't agree with me exactly, you're my enemy.

Speaker 2 And both of us, so let's talk about UBI.

Speaker 2 My problem is with the you in UBI, and that is whenever I, I both of us are friends with Andrew Yang, I think a lot of Andrew, and I agree with the narrative that there should be a base level, but it's the universal part that I think, if you double-click on the actual economics of it, make it near impossible to implement and would just create inflationary pressure that nets out any of the UBI payments.

Speaker 2 Why wouldn't we just move to what I'll call

Speaker 2 more kind of basic income through things like universal child care or free vocational programming?

Speaker 2 You absolutely could do that. And ultimately, you know, some of what we're talking about is a means test.
And there's no reason for you or me to get $1,000 a month in the mail, right?

Speaker 2 Although, although I kind of disagree on the inflationary thing, and that I actually think that, and I'm sure you guys have said this at various points, when we make more money, it might get invested, it might get saved.

Speaker 2 If you're giving regular people more money, I think they're going to spend it.

Speaker 2 And I think that's actually going to juice the it could arguably induce inflation, but it would also juice everything else in a good way.

Speaker 2 So why not minimum wage,

Speaker 2 federally mandated minimum wage of of 25 bucks a share? Yes, totally agree. Here's the distinction.
So when I was deputy governor of Illinois, I ran the state's budget.

Speaker 2 And the distinction is if when we got a dollar from you in taxes, by the time that some of that money went to all the different programs you just outlined, half of it got furted away on nonsense.

Speaker 2 We had patronage. We had all kinds of pork projects we didn't need.

Speaker 2 So many different union contracts, so many different things that when the money goes through the government, in my my experience, you lose a lot of it along the way.

Speaker 2 Whereas if there was some mechanism where a dollar of your money then went to someone who's currently making $10 an hour, they get 100 cents on the dollar.

Speaker 2 So look, I am absolutely for a higher minimum wage. I am for childcare.
There's a lot of things that we can and should do that would make people's lives a lot easier and better.

Speaker 2 I just know from having worked so much inside of government that the mechanism is so wildly inefficient that the people that want to help get a lot less help that way. And then on Section 230, and

Speaker 2 I never like to be someone who defends big tech, but if you did just remove 230 in a blanket way, it would probably

Speaker 2 kneecap these companies. It would cripple them.
They would probably have to shut down posting for a while.

Speaker 2 What about the idea, and there's just some nuance here, of removing Section 230 protection for content that's algorithmically elevated.

Speaker 2 That's a good start for sure, but human beings also have incredible capacity on their own to post all kinds of terrible shit.

Speaker 2 I think I might disagree with you a bit on that because Section 230's elimination would mean that social media companies are subject to the same types of liability issues as mainstream media.

Speaker 2 That aren't good businesses. Right.
But ultimately, what would happen is

Speaker 2 there'd be enough litigation around the country on various things that, you know, Facebook or whoever failed to moderate on content, and jurisprudence would emerge, and it would become pretty clear this is what violates section, you know, the

Speaker 2 new law, this is what does not.

Speaker 2 And especially with the use of AI as a content moderator, the companies would be able to adapt to it pretty quickly. So, I just personally think that the risk to them is a lot less.

Speaker 2 And I think our addiction to internet and social media or phones is so great that we're not going to stop using it just because people are saying kill the Jews less on

Speaker 2 TikTok or whatever.

Speaker 13 We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profitmarkets.com slash subscribe.

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Speaker 13 We're back with Prof G Markets.

Speaker 13 Just going back to your guys' discussion of UBI and what would work and what wouldn't work, it all goes back to wealth and income inequality, which is getting worse and worse and worse and which AI is likely to make worse.

Speaker 13 And of of course, this is what Andrew Yang talked about. And it seems as though different people are coming at the inequality thing at different angles.

Speaker 13 So you've got people saying, let's raise the minimum wage, let's have universal free childcare, which, by the way, that's part of Mamdani's campaign. He wants to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour.

Speaker 13 You've got people saying, let's go for UBI. You've also got a more socialist bent.
Mamdani would fit in that camp, which says capitalism itself doesn't work. We need a completely new system.

Speaker 13 So it seems, I believe at least, that the inequality problem is the problem.

Speaker 13 And the question is, how do you come at it? What is your angle? And based on the

Speaker 13 turnout in New York and Mamdani's win and also just the energy and the heat that he's creating around the nation, it seems as though that is the angle going forward, that there is a socialist bent and that he could be the face and future of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 13 Seems scary to capitalists, but I just want to get your views on do you think that is the future?

Speaker 2 I think everything you said is right. And if you look at Mondami's supporters, at least in the primary, we don't really have the general election data yet.

Speaker 2 They tend to not be the poorest people. They tend to be relatively young, pretty affluent people, but who are not in the 1%

Speaker 2 and are angry about that for a variety of reasons and in many ways are the most ardent about things like raising taxes on the wealthy and things, defunding the police and things like that.

Speaker 2 Look, ultimately, there are two different approaches to what you're talking about, and they're not mutually exclusive. So the first is how do you substantively solve these problems?

Speaker 2 I think everything Scott outlined and Scott and I disagreed on some implementation stuff, but basically that kind of stuff could make a big difference.

Speaker 2 The other thing to me is really a question of cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 2 So where Mandani is wrong in my view about capitalism is it has far and away been the most effective force in history to help poor people, right?

Speaker 2 Since World War II, something like 3 billion people now have clean drinking water and electricity and much less infant mortality and a much higher standard of living, less, you know, people living in extreme poverty, all of these different metrics because of capitalism, because jobs started moving all over the globe, sometimes to the detriment of countries like the U.S.

Speaker 2 But nonetheless, capitalism has done more to lift poor people out of terrible situations than any economic or political system ever created.

Speaker 2 The problem with capitalism is when you take it to its final logical conclusion, which is what we do here in the U.S., which is to say the only thing that matters in life is the accumulation of status and money and prestige and Carrera marble and gold plating or whatever else, Trump effectively.

Speaker 2 And if you have a totally zero-sum approach to life, it's really almost impossible to be truly happy because you're on this hamster wheel where all you're trying to do is accumulate more and more and more and it's never enough.

Speaker 2 And the dopamine hit from buying something kind of wears off faster and faster each time.

Speaker 2 And as a result, broadly speaking, if you have a society where everyone is in that rat race and everyone just wants to be at the very, very top where they're the ones on Instagram with a private plane and a yacht and whatever else, 99 plus percent of those people aren't going to make it by basic math.

Speaker 2 And as a result, they're going to feel dissatisfied, they're going to feel discontent, and they're going to be unhappy. When you look at the World Happiness Report, so the U.S.

Speaker 2 ranked 24th last year in it, despite being, I would argue, the most successful country in history. I was in Finland this summer, and they're always number one or number two.

Speaker 2 They're number one right now, I think. And I was kind of walking around thinking people are going to be dancing in the streets.
They're so happy. They're so excited.

Speaker 2 And obviously, you know, that's not the case.

Speaker 2 And from what at least I was able to learn from reading and talking to people, is it's not that the Finnish or lots of other countries, people are inherently happier or wealthier or anything else.

Speaker 2 It's that their view of what makes them content is very different, right? And if you feel like you can only be content if you just keep accumulating and acquiring, you can't be content.

Speaker 2 And if you feel like, hey, these are the things in life that matter, my relationships, people who give me unconditional love and support and might give that to them, things that give me a sense of meaning and purpose, whether it's your work or your hobbies or your faith or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2 Those tend to be the happiest people. Pretty much all of happiness science and behavioral economics supports that conclusion.
And in a lot of other countries, they're able to understand that.

Speaker 2 I think in part because they don't take capitalism quite to its final logical conclusion like we do in the US. So to me,

Speaker 2 there's the structural stuff that kind of Scott talked about, but there's also a perception thing. I think that has to change too.

Speaker 13 I mean, when you look at those countries, I think some people make the mistake of saying those are socialist countries. They're not socialist countries, but they have

Speaker 13 less

Speaker 13 intensely capitalist policies. You know, they do pay for universal universal childcare.
There are more government-funded programs.

Speaker 13 So it's an interesting ideological debate because on the one hand, what we're describing is like, make capitalism less capitalistic or something, which when you say that, it's like, are you saying you want to be socialist?

Speaker 13 Are you saying you want to be communist? And now we have a guy who won on a platform that has the word socialist in it, which seems so important to me.

Speaker 13 Whether or not he actually believes in communism and socialism, I don't think he necessarily does. The point is, the word is there.
So that's something that we all have to grapple with. So I guess

Speaker 13 there's the implementation. How does this all actually work in practice? But then there's the dogmatic stuff.
There's the ideological side to this.

Speaker 13 What direction do you think the Democratic Party is going in?

Speaker 13 Are we in going into a direction that you think is constructive, where we're actually going to make ourselves a little more like Finland, perhaps?

Speaker 13 Or is this going in a negatively socialist direction that will actually be destructive?

Speaker 2 I think a lot of that is about the framing, right?

Speaker 2 So Trump, for example, won the presidency twice, in part because he was able to convince tens and tens of millions of people that he heard and saw their frustrations.

Speaker 2 He understood that they felt like they weren't getting a fair shake in life. And they felt like if they supported him, he would look out for them and he would get them their vengeance.

Speaker 2 And by the way, you know, Bernie Sanders and Trump Trump in 2016 effectively ran the exact same campaign. Trump just blamed it on brown people and Sanders blamed it on the 1%, but it was effective.

Speaker 2 I'm going to get you justice. Zora in many ways ran that campaign too.
And so I think the first thing is you have to understand that a lot of people are incredibly frustrated.

Speaker 2 They don't feel like they have what they need. And they do have what they need, but they feel like somehow they're getting cheated by society.

Speaker 13 Well, it's hard. It's hard to feel satisfied if you're seeing Bezos deconstruct a bridge for a yacht and you're struggling to pay for groceries.

Speaker 2 I feel like that's exactly right. So part of it is helping people understand.

Speaker 2 Like one of the things that Biden did that was such a disaster is he tried to convince everyone that inflation wasn't an actual problem.

Speaker 2 When every week people are going to the grocery store and they know it's a problem because they're spending more money. And when you treat people like that, they hate you for it.

Speaker 2 And so part of his Democratic Party has to stop being so condescending, stop being so intolerant, stop being so self-righteous. And like Zoron did, let people feel heard and understood.

Speaker 2 And the second thing is, what are the policies that could help bring that about um and it's a lot of it's in the framing right so if you take child care if you frame it as you know we're now gonna have socialized child care and the government's gonna be in charge of raising your children and all that that automatically becomes controversial if it's look everyone needs to work to make a living and people want to have kids and you got to do something with the kid all day and here's the way to best help people you know make that work for themselves in their lives i think people will be really responsive to that message and so i don't think it's a lack of policy ideas that exist that could work.

Speaker 2 I think it is treating people like idiots. It is condescending to people.

Speaker 2 And it is effectively living in this little world where, and by the way, if under the current political system, it makes sense, but if you are a Democratic legislator somewhere and all you got to do is win your next primary because gerrymandering means you're going to win your next election and turn out to 10%, then that 10% on the far left and what you read on Blue Sky and what you hear from your staffers and from the different kind of institutional players around you is what you believe and how you act.

Speaker 2 And that might be what you need to do to stay in your job as a state senator or as a member of Congress or whatever it is. It is not the way to win a national election.
And that takes leadership.

Speaker 2 So part of it is who's that rock star? And then part of it also is who is able to go to the Democratic Party and say, listen, guys, your message might work for you for your next reelection.

Speaker 2 It does not work for the party or the country as a whole. Here's where we need to go.
That leader has not emerged yet. I'm not sure who it is, but throughout time, those leaders have emerged.

Speaker 2 And my hope is we'll find one here too.

Speaker 13 You wrote an open letter to Mamdani. You have called for, you said you didn't vote for him, but you've called for the business community especially to embrace him, figure out a way to work with him.

Speaker 13 And you offered some advice.

Speaker 13 What would be your advice to Mamdani?

Speaker 2 over these over his his his term now that he is the next mayor i mean the most important thing and i saw this from my time working at city Hall for Mike Bloomberg, is what I said before, which is just run the city as this is your last ever elected position.

Speaker 2 Don't worry about 29. Don't worry about, he can't actually run for president ever because he wasn't born here, but don't worry about trying to be governor or senator one day.

Speaker 2 Just do what you think is right. Make people, you know, give them the time to explain their positions.
Give the time to explain why you're doing what you're doing.

Speaker 2 And if you do that for the right reasons consistently, the people will understand it. They will generally accept it.
They won't agree with you on everything, but they don't need to.

Speaker 2 They need to believe that you are looking out for them. And I think of all the politicians we've had in recent years in New York City, he has more ability to do that than pretty much anyone.

Speaker 2 But it does mean tuning out a lot of the noise around him. It means not letting the DSA dictate his positions.
It means not letting the unions dictate his positions.

Speaker 2 It means not reading social media all day. One of the pieces of advice I have in that letter is stop looking at social media.
I mean, keep making your short form videos.

Speaker 2 Yes, your comms team needs to look at it, but that is in no way representative.

Speaker 2 Even with the really big turnout we had yesterday of about 2 million voters, it's still only like 70, 23% of the city's population. So like 77% of New Yorkers didn't actually vote.

Speaker 2 And yet all 8.5 million of us are impacted by the mayor every single day.

Speaker 2 And so if you want to govern for everyone to be a truly great mayor, you know, stop all of the kind of narrow inputs that tend to limit politicians and just do what you think is right.

Speaker 2 Bradley, if you decided to get back in the game and you said, all right, you got to get back in the game. You're going to run someone's campaign, but you have to pick now.

Speaker 2 Whose campaign would you want to work for for president in 28? To me, the only rock star is AOC, but I really don't share her kind of views.

Speaker 2 And the thing actually, even more than her views, is just this notion of endlessly criticizing everyone forever deviating from her ideology or her dogmatism, to me, is just a horrible way to live.

Speaker 2 Look, I would would love to see someone who is maybe not a traditional candidate, someone who has built and run a really big company or a really big movement, something like that, as opposed to saying this governor or that governor.

Speaker 2 Of the people who are currently in the mix, if you're talking about just sort of who politically makes the most sense, you know, it's probably kind of a Midwestern moderate type like a Shapiro or a Whitmer.

Speaker 2 But, you know,

Speaker 2 what makes sense on paper and what makes sense sense to voters in the booth are two different things.

Speaker 2 And so I don't know the two, like Newsom, on one hand, may be the easiest to caricature and stereotype and everything else. On the other hand, he's got a lot of talent.

Speaker 2 He does not seem to be afraid of different points of view or big ideas.

Speaker 2 And so someone like him, even though I could see all the reasons on paper why he doesn't make sense, I could still see how he could sort of have it in a way that a lot of the governors who are thinking of running probably do not.

Speaker 2 And by the way, California would be what, like the fifth biggest economy in the world if it was its own country. So I don't know, I guess I'm sort of landing on Newsom of the people.

Speaker 13 Is Newsom a rock star in your view?

Speaker 2 I think he could be. You know, I think on one hand, he's really, really easy to caricature.
But you know who's also easy to character? Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think he's a rock star. So just give me a quick.
quick reaction to some different candidates. Mark Cuban.
On paper, I love Mark Cuban. He liked Trump as a reality star on TV.

Speaker 2 What there is there, I'm not sure. And that Luka trade still kind of kills it for me.

Speaker 2 I love that. What about a guy like Dwayne Johnson? You know, he is very charismatic, but I don't like, so, okay, so Ronald Reagan was an actor,

Speaker 2 but he was also the governor of California. And Reagan had very clear, strong political and ideological views, whether you agree with them or not.

Speaker 2 He was not stupid, despite what his critics said, and he was not uninformed.

Speaker 2 So, you know, with The Rock, just being able to sort of you know pop into a movie and have the box office you know receipts go up in and of itself is not necessarily a great candidate so if i knew more about what he believed in i could certainly consider it but i just think what we know right now no

Speaker 2 you know i get it again you know he's a democratic governor in a red state he's he's popular he got reelected it hasn't so far struck me that he has that sort of you know other thing you know i to me there's something called a vote-getting gene, which is obviously intangible, but some people have it and most do not.

Speaker 2 Take the Bush family. W, who was sort of the least impressive between his brother and his father and him, had it.
He became president. His brother very much did not.
His father very much did not.

Speaker 2 The Clintons. Bill Clinton has the vote-getting gene.
Hillary, for all of her competence, did not. And so I don't know if Bashir has it or not.
It doesn't feel like he necessarily does.

Speaker 2 So competent they feel boring. Senator Chris Murphy.
By the way, I'm a big fan of. I didn't make a sound.
Yeah, I mean, I like a lot of what Murphy's done on guns and other things like that.

Speaker 2 You know, lots of highly competent people with amazing resumes run for president all the time, and most of them never even make it to Iowa.

Speaker 2 So, you know, if Chris Murphy has that kind of intangible quality, he's got to start showing. Vice President Harris? No.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think the country had every opportunity to choose her, and they've definitively chose not to.

Speaker 13 I think what we're learning is we don't really have rock stars.

Speaker 2 But I agree.

Speaker 13 AOC is a rock star. Mamdani is a rock star.
Bernie is flaming out butt rock star.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's very old, but he certainly was.

Speaker 2 But I think that's the reason why, Ed, to maybe consider an alternative process of some kind, which is let's find the rock star, even if it's among the dozen or so people. OnlyFans.

Speaker 2 I'm telling you. First person to make 10 grand, president.
There you go. All right.
OnlyFans it is. So we're adding

Speaker 2 Waffle House, calling in the Cardinals game, going to the Mall of America, and now you're an OnlyFans account. How much money do you make?

Speaker 2 I like that. I like that.

Speaker 13 The decline of America is coming.

Speaker 2 I see it.

Speaker 2 This is the fun. Scott is the one that put us over the edge.
He moves to England, and then he's like, all right, now I'm more like the only family. You guys have the OnlyFans.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 2 I think it's been here for a while. You guys are just waking up to it.

Speaker 2 Bradley Tusk is the founder of the political consulting firm Tusk Strategies and the CEO and co-founder of Tusk Venture Partners, the world's first venture capital fund investing solely in highly regulated industries.

Speaker 2 Bradley is the author of The Fixer, My Adventures, Saving Startups from Death by Politics, writes a column for Fast Company and hosts a podcast called Firewall about the intersection of tech and politics.

Speaker 2 Previously, Bradley served as the deputy governor of Illinois, the campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg's 2009 mayoral race, the communications director for U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 2 There's a candidate. Let's find someone who brightens up a room by leaving it.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 We didn't get into it, but Chuck would not endorse Zoron. And I think because effectively, if anyone needs Zoron to be a disaster, it's actually Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 2 Because if AOC primaries Chuck in 28 and Zoron is successful, I think Chuck's in big trouble. But if Zoron's a disaster, he's going to hang that around her neck.

Speaker 13 And fighting that makes me depressed.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There we go.
And also, his last thing, he was Uber's first political advisor. Bradley, really appreciate your insight and your time today.
Thanks, Brad. Yeah, guys, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 This was really fun.

Speaker 13 This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dan Shallan, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio.

Speaker 13 Drew Burroughs is our technical director, and Catherine Dylan is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof Dew Markets from Prof Media.

Speaker 13 If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

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