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

24:33I'm running. I'm running. There we go. 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. They just hear rent freeze and they're like, great, I don't want to pay more rent. The city on grocery stores, 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.

25:08It never works when the government is trying to run private businesses. With that said, it's a very minor thing. 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 H-E-B 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? Sure. Do I think it would really matter? No. But ultimately, there are lots of ways to go about achieving his agenda if he's willing to be a little creative. So, for example, and I'm sure you guys notice this if you're in town and you're taking the subway, people just hop the turnstiles left and right pretty much everywhere.

25:48And because we don't do anything about it, we have no enforcement, we have no real gates or anything like that, we lose over a billion dollars a year in revenue to fare evasion. 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. So there are ways to achieve a lot of things that he wants to achieve. 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? A dogmatic mayor would say we must punish the 1 percent because that is the top priority of people on the 18th percent or the 12th percent or the 9th percent.

26:24And I don't really care what – 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. 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. 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. You might disagree with him. I didn't always agree with him. But ultimately, he acted in the best interest of the city, of the people, and I think the voters understood that.

27:02And they were willing to give him a lot of leeway as a result. 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. 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. 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. Just this divide between dogmatic versus pragmatic. I totally agree with you. I think that the campaign was dogmatic as it should be.

27:34I get the sense that he's going to be actually quite pragmatic. 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. 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. Is he not losing the base? 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 rant works.

28:07Look, 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. 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 reelected. 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, a truly great mayor, a truly great president, truly great whatever says, my goal is to create as much total good as possible.

28:42And I'm not going to worry specifically about the political implications of any one decision. 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. 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. This is both the best job in politics and a total dead-end job. It's the last job. 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?

29:16And if you do that well, your legacy will be incredible and people will love you. 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 that was very insightful and obvious. And I think the two are inextricably linked when someone just connects something that seems obvious in 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. You're absolutely right that the companies announcing 5 ,000, 10 ,000, 30 ,000 people are understandably and actually the ones who are figuring out this whole AI game.

29:58I thought that was very insightful. Anyways, very impressed with you, Bradley. When you look across the landscape, you've run campaigns, you ran a very successful campaign, you ran Bloomberg's campaign. 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? 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? If you look at modern political history, so let's just start with Reagan.

30:35The 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. 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. 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. 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.

31:16And instead of the normal DNC process or maybe a year before that, put them in real-world situations. 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. Have them go to a big mall and just see who shows up, who cares, and how it goes 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. And the more time you spend with him, the more you realize that. I think that's true for the presidency too.

31:49And so all the normal checklists that everyone looks at, do you have this union? Do you have this much money in the account? Do you have this former elected official supporting you? None of that shit really matters. 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. 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. He might pull that off. You're taking a big risk there, man. He might make$100. There's an outside shot.

32:24He comes back with a quarter of a million dollars. Maybe in that case, he's like, screw this. I'm just going to make money online. There you go. I think that's what a lot of people are saying. When you look at, when you think about the nation and income inequality and polarization and rage, are there sort of two? You've been a big advocate of voting by phone. I'll give you 60 seconds of running room for vote by phone, but then come up with another two or three ideas So on mobile voting We live in a world where in my experience every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election Handful of exceptions, but there are exceptions and because of gerrymandering the only election typically matters the primary Primary turnout is typically about 10 to 15 percent.

33:07So who are they? 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. 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, 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. I ran all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the U.S., 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.

33:51And when I realized that that was working, I created this thing called the Mobile Voting Project and we ran pilot elections in seven states where deployed military people with disabilities were able to vote on their phones, turnout went up. We then built our own secure mobile voting technology that is free, will all be posted on GitHub by November 14th. 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. To me, if you can get turnout from 8 percent to 32 percent in a primary, that's what moves everything towards the middle.

34:22That's what ends all of extremism and polarization. That's what gets us results. So that's mobile voting. The next thing to me, Scott, would be universal basic income. 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. There's just too much money and it's just a failure of sort of imagination and discipline and ability to not prevent that. 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.

35:00We should do that, but it should go beyond that. There is nothing wrong with saying that in 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 OK. And the third one is less economic, but it would be repealing Section 230. 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. 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, you know, all kinds of different things.

35:38And 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 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. 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. 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.

36:11And so they don't actually go through with it. 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. So just for the purposes of conversation, and you and I are – we're allies. And even if you're holding the gun differently than me, we're still allies. 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.

36:43and both of us. So let's talk about UBI. My problem is with the U in UBI. And that is, whenever 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. Why wouldn't we just move to what I'll call, you know, more kind of basic income through things like universal child care or free vocational programming? You absolutely could do that.

37:19And 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? Although I kind of disagree on the inflationary thing in that I actually think that, and I'm sure you guys have said this at various points, you know, when we make more money, it might get invested. It might get saved. if you're giving regular people more money, I think they're going to spend it. 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. So why not minimum wage, federally mandated minimum wage at 25 bucks a share?

37:51Yes, totally agree. Here's the distinction. So when I was deputy governor of Illinois, I ran the state's budget. 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 furtled away on nonsense. We had patronage. We had all kinds of pork projects we didn't need. So many different union contracts, so many different things that when the money goes through the government, in my experience, you lose a lot of it along the way. Whereas if there were some mechanism where a dollar of your money then went to someone who's currently making$10 an hour, they get a hundred cents on the dollar.

38:32So 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. 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 I never like to be someone who defends big tech, but if If you did just remove 230 in a blanket way, it would probably, it wouldn't kneecap these companies. It would cripple them. They would probably have to shut down posting for a while.

39:08What about the idea, and there's just some nuance here, of removing Section 230 protection for content that's algorithmically elevated? That's a good start for sure. But human beings also have incredible capacity on their own to post all kinds of terrible shit. 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. That aren't good businesses. Right. But ultimately what would happen is there'd be enough litigation around the country on various things that, you know, Facebook, whoever, failed to moderate on content and jurisprudence would emerge and it would become pretty clear.

39:48This is what violates action, you know, the new law. This is what does not. 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. And I think our addiction to internet and social media and our phones is so great that we're not going to stop using it just because people are saying kill the Jews less on TikTok or whatever. We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profgmarkets.com slash subscribe.

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42:35We're back with ProfG Markets. 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. And 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. 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 for$30 an hour.

43:10You've got people saying, let's go for UBI. You've also got a more socialist bent. Mandani would fit in that camp, which says capitalism itself doesn't work. We need a completely new system. So it seems, I believe at least, that the inequality problem is the problem. And the question is, how do you come at it? What is your angle? And based on the turnout in New York and Mandani'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.

43:56Seems scary to capitalists, but I just want to get your views on, do you think that is the future? I think everything you said is right. And if you look at Mondami supporters, at least in the primary, we don't really have the general election data yet, But they tend to not be the poorest people. They tend to be relatively young, pretty affluent people but who are not in the 1 percent 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. Look, ultimately, there are two different approaches to what you're talking about and they're not mutually exclusive.

44:34So the first is how do you substantively solve these problems? I think everything Scott outlined and Scott might disagree on some implementation stuff, but basically that kind of stuff could make a big difference. The other thing to me is really a question of cognitive dissonance. So where Mondani 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? 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 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 US.

45:14But nonetheless, capitalism has done more to lift poor people out of terrible situations than any economic or political system ever created. 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. 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.

45:52And the dopamine hit from buying something kind of wears off faster and faster each time. 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. 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. ranked 24th last year and despite being, I would argue, the most successful country in history.

46:27I was in Finland this summer and they're always number one or number two. They're number one right now, I think. And I was kind of walking around thinking people are dancing in the streets. They're so happy. They're so excited. And obviously, you know, that's not the case. 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, 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.

47:01And if you feel like, hey, these are the things in life that matter, my relationships, people who give me unconditional love and support might give that to them, things that give me a sense of meaning and purpose, whether it's your work or your hobbies, your faith or whatever it might be, those tend to be the happiest people. Pretty much all of happiness, science, behavior economics supports that conclusion. And in a lot of other countries, they're able to understand that. I think in part because they don't take capitalism quite to its final logical conclusion like we do in the U.S. So to me, Ed, you know, there's the structural stuff that kind of Scott talked about, but there's also a perception thing.

47:36I think that has to change too. 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 less intensely capitalist policies. You know, they do pay for universal childcare. There are more government-funded programs. 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? 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 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 there's there's the the implementation how does this all actually work in practice but then there's the dogmatic stuff there's the ideological side to this what direction do you think the Democratic Party is going in?

48:44Are 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? Or is this going in a negatively socialist direction that will actually be destructive? I think a lot of that is about the framing, right? 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. 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.

49:20And by the way, you know, Bernie Sanders and 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. 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. it. 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. 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.

49:52I feel like that's exactly right. So part of it is helping people understand. 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 when every week people go 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. And so part of it is the Democratic Party has to stop being so condescending, stop being so intolerant, stop being so self-righteous. And like Zoran did, let people feel heard and understood. And the second thing is, what are the policies that could help bring that about?

50:25And it's a lot of it's in the framing, right? So we take childcare, if you frame it as, you know, we're now going to socialize childcare and the government's going to be in charge of raising your children and all of 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've 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.

50:56I think it is treating people like idiots. It is condescending to people 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 don't win your next election and turn out to 10 percent, then that 10 percent 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. 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.

51:33It is not the way to win a national election. And that takes leadership. So part of it is who's that rock star? And then part of it also is who was able to go to the Democratic Party and say, listen, guys, your message might work for you for your next reelection. 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. and my hope is we'll find one here too. 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.

52:09And you get offered some advice. What would be your advice to Mamdani over 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. 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. Just do what you think is right. Make people – give them the time to explain their positions. Give the time to explain why you're doing what you're doing.

52:46And 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. 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. 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. 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.

53:17I mean keep making your short-form videos. Yes, your comms team needs to look at it. But that is in no way representative. that if 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. And yet all 8.5 million of us are impacted by the mayor every single day. And so if you want to govern for everyone to be a truly great mayor, you know, stop all the kind of narrow inputs that tend to limit politicians and just do what you think is right. 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, whose campaign would you want to work for for president in 28?

54:02To me, the only rock star is AOC, but I really don't share her kind of views. And the thing actually even more than her views is just this notion of endlessly criticizing everyone for ever deviating from her ideology or her dogmatism. To me, it's just a horrible way to live. Look, I 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. 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.

54:48But, you know, what makes sense on paper and what makes sense to voters in the booth are two different things. 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. He does not seem to be afraid of different points of view or big ideas. 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. And by the way, California would be what?

55:25Like 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 current. Is Newsom a rock star in your view? 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 his caricature? Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan. Yeah, I think he's a rock star. So just give me a quick reaction to some different candidates. Mark Cuban. On paper, I love Mark Cuban. He liked Trump as a reality star on TV. What there is there, I'm not sure. And that Luca trade still kind of kills it for me.

55:59I 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, 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. He was not stupid, despite what his critics said, and he was not uninformed. 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.

56:35But I just think what we know right now, no. Bashir? You know, I get it again. You know, he's a Democratic governor in a red state. 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, to me, there's something called a vote-getting gene, which is obviously intangible, but some people have it and most do not. 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. The Clintons. Bill Clinton has the vote-getting gene.

57:11Hillary, 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. So competent they feel boring, Senator Chris Murphy. By the way, I'm a big fan of it. Yeah, I mean, I like a lot of what Murphy's done on guns and other things like that. 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. So, you know, if Chris Murphy has that kind of intangible quality, he's got to start showing. Vice President Harris? No. I mean, I think the country had every opportunity to choose her, and they've definitively chose not to.

57:51I think what we're learning is we don't really have rock stars. But I agree, AOC is a rock star. Mamdani is a rock star. Bernie is flaming out butt rock star. Yeah, he's very old, but he certainly was. 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. Only fans. I'm telling you. First person to make 10 grand, president. There you go. All right. Only fans it is. So we're adding Waffle House, calling in the Cardinals game, going to the Mall of America, and now you're an OnlyFans account.

58:27How much money can you make? I like that. I like that. The decline of America is coming. I see it. Scott is the one that put us over the edge. He moves to England and he's like, all right, now I'm going to like the middle. You guys have the OnlyFans. Okay. I think it's been here for a while. You guys are just waking up to it. 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. Bradley is the author of The Fixer, My Adventure, 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.

59:05Previously, 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. There's a candidate. Let's find someone who brightens up a room by leaving it. Exactly. We didn't get into it, but Chuck would not endorse Zoran. And I think because effectively, if anyone needs Zoran to be a disaster, it's actually Chuck Schumer because if AOC primaries Chuck in 28 and Zoran is successful, I think Chuck's in big trouble. But if Zoran's a disaster, he's going to hang that around her neck. It's the infighting that makes me depressed.

59:39Yeah. 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. This was really fun.

59:51This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonohue and Mia Silverio. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof. G Markets from Prof. G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

1:00:25You help me in kind reunion As the world turns And the dark flies In love, love, love, love

1:00:53Thank you.