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Hello there, Happy Friday, and welcome to another episode of The Chuck Podcast.

My apologies.

The Chuck Podcast headquarters had a traveled day that they had to deal with, so that's why we are coming to you a day late.

My apologies for that but it's actually a good time to remind you that, hey, guess what.

Thanks to the holidays and various issues, including the college football playoff, my publishing schedule is going to be at tad shorter next week.

I am not going to drop a new episode on Christmas Day, which would normally be the schedule we will have.

We will have two down two downloads next week, one on Monday and one on Wednesday.

Then we'll do the super long weekend and go from there.

But you will have two new feeds for me next week, not just It's not going to just be holiday reruns or anything like that.

But yes, I am here a day late, so my apologies for that.

But again, like I said, the production headquarters of the Check podcast had to relocate in preparation for the holidays, and it involved some road tripping, and we'll just leave it at that.

I also want to promote what I have today.

My interview is with a gentleman by the name of Bradley Tusk.

He is a democratic, sort of a democratic operative of sorts.

He was a campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg's successful third term run for New York City mayor back in two thousand and nine, But he's really more in the investor space, and he's actually focused when it comes to small d democratic reforms on an effort to make mobile voting mainstream.

And in fact, the first experiment is going to take place in Anchorage, Alaska, Alaska, considering how many people live in very remote areas not the easiest to either vote by mail, vote early, and so Bradley Tusk will make the case that this is safe.

If it's safe enough for you to do transactions for the Internet, when it comes to your bank accounts, buying and selling stock and bitcoin and all that business, why shouldn't we have a mobile voting Estonia actually is the one country in the world, but it's been doing this the longest.

Let's be realistic, in thirty years this is going to be mainstream.

The question is how many generations is it going to take for us to have to die off before there is trust in this.

I think we are in this current moment very distrustful of each other, distrustful of big tech.

So it's hard to imagine mobile voting going mainstream in the next two to five years.

But considering everything you know, how about you know, when's the last time you wrote a check, a physical check these days.

Right, I'm not saying some of you don't do it.

I do it.

I at least write one check a month.

So I'm somebody who's still writing the occasional actctual paper check.

But I know I'm in the minority, and so we're going to get there.

The question is how long will adoption take anyway we go through this and some other The other interesting aspect by my conversation with Bradley Tusk is I sort of challenge him to say, you know, give advice to the Democrats.

How can they be more friendly towards business without sort of giving away the store if you will?

Right like, right now, you have a Trump Republican party that is not interested in doing any regulating with business.

Basically, you know, it's regulate, it's regulation or no regulation depending on what you want and how big of a check you write.

Very transactional.

I think it's easy to classify it as as as borderline corrupt.

Some of you may say, why did you use the why did you use borderline?

But it certainly is the process itself these days when it comes to big business and the Trumpet min isration, it's a corrupt bargain.

Uh, and it is you know, we're you know, capitalism itself needs good regulation, We need some good guard rails.

But the Democratic Party is in a real trap on this because if you if, if you're in a if you're trying to woo a constituency and the person and the entity you're running against says, hey, you know, go ahead, you know, no rules, we don't want any Yeah, no, no, you don't want ai regulation in the States, Sure we'll sign a moratorium, you know, No matter how how much that maybe individually some of these business groups may think, yeah, we there probably ought to be some structured regulation.

And you know what, what the Democrats are asking for doesn't seem to be totally unreasonable.

How do you go to your shareholders if you can get if you can actually have no guardrails on your business, or you can have minimal guardrails on your business.

And one party is saying that.

Now again, I think at some point this is going to implode on them, you know, the lack of regulation on social media.

Look what we have today, right, we destroyed the information ecosystem.

So but it's an interesting challenge they have, and it's not easy.

And obviously the party itself is not united on this either.

And I think it's fair to say that mister Tuskett, I don't think he's you know, if he if he if he qualifies as a Democrat.

He's very much in that center left portion of the Democratic Party.

And of course they're in in some ways in a huge debate with the more progressive wing of the party about the direction of when it comes to how accommodating are you to business and how and how unaccommodating should things be?

So it is uh, I do think the conversation is more than just about mobile voting.

I want to alert you to that, and I think it'll be I think it'll be a worthy conversation for those of you that are wondering where's the Democratic Party going and what can the Can there be a constructive political relationship with the business community in a way that doesn't essentially turned business away from one party?

Again, it's just not good.

It's never good if one party becomes a party of one thing.

And you know, it's like, you know, take the issue of Israel.

You know the damage that Benjamin meant now, who has done to the pro Israel movement in this country, is just incalculable.

But he made it a partisan issue.

And the minute you take an issue and turn it into a partisan issue, and you lose all your allies on one side of the aisle because you think, well, I've got more allies on this side of the aisle, so I'm going to punish that party.

But over time, not having bipartisan supporters will bite you.

And then you know what, at some point, and Israel's cause is being hurt because of what Yahu, how much he's politicized.

You know, he got involved in America's politics as leader back during the Obama era, and that really is now doing extraordinary damage to the relationship between the West in general and Israel.

So it's it's you know, that's if you're ever wondering what's that's the downside, asked, Look ask the gun rights movement.

Right when the NRA cared about being bipartisan, they had a lot more traction, if you will, then when they gave up their decision to be bipartisans.

So it is it's all about how devoted are you to your cause?

Right, if you really care about your cause, you should fear ever allowing yourself to become to become sort of to side with just one party, it'll eventually actually hurt the cause that you care about.

Israel to me is as good of example as any of the point I'm trying to make there.

But before we get to my interview with Bradley Tuske, look where I haven't talked, do you sits?

The President addressed the nation, and you know, look the way I looked at this address was through the prism.

You know, I always look at these things.

What are you trying to accomplish?

When you ask for time?

When you want to address the nation in primetime, presidents are usually doing a couple of things.

One Sometimes they're explaining a controversial decision.

I remember George W.

Bush addressing the nation on his decision about whether the government would fund stem cell research, particularly embryonic stem cell research.

Sometimes you're announcing a war, you know, whether it's Iraq.

I think some people, thanks to Tucker Carlson rumor MANGERI thought that maybe he was going to address the nation about what his plans were for Venezuela.

He did nothing about Venezuela.

In fact, I'm not saying I want a primetime address on that, but he is ever made the case for what he's doing, why he's doing it, what the point is all of You know, it has been left to the rest of us to sort of figure out what the agenda is here with Venezuela.

And sometimes you're trying to make a case for a political argument.

It's rare that the networks will give you that.

But the networks will be accommodating if you haven't abused the privilege.

And in this case, in fairness to Donald Trump, he hadn't asked for prime time from the networks.

I don't think he had asked for it yet, and if he did and was rejected, it hadn't been reported upon.

So and you know, I think that he was going to be given some leeway.

So it was clear he was trying to fix his politics a little bit, trying to address his bad poll writings, particularly on the economy and in theory.

I'm guessing the whole plan about this and Donald Trump sort of as usual.

It's weird.

He bullshits all the time, but he will tell you the truth when it comes to like optic things.

Right.

So, after the speech is over, there were people in the room that heard him.

Wow, this was a SUSI idea, you know, sort of he sort of admitted that this wasn't his idea.

Eighteen minutes is never his idea.

You know, it takes him an hour to clear his throat, right, And that's why this speech was I've seen some people describe it as taking a two hour Trump rally speech and trying to turn it into eighteen minutes.

It was that.

That's not a bad description of what it was, because in some ways it was just you know, it was just it was Trump on speed, right, and it was just rattat tat.

Nothing was unfamiliar.

If you've ever watched a Trump rally speech or any sort of lengthy period about Trump remarks, he has the crazy straw man arguments.

You know, it was the worst inflation in the history of mankind.

It was the best this, and it's the best that, and so the worst that, all of which are provably, you know, they're just it makes fact checking him, actually, I think, and possible task, because yes, he does.

You know, he doesn't usually say anything that's factually true, but he sometimes says things that are directionally accurate ish, you know, like take gas prices, Yeah they're down, They're not down.

The way he said, they were down, but they're down a little bit, okay, And certainly he was helped by the news that the inflation numbers were a little cooler than what was expected.

By the way, still over two percent, right, still above the line that the Federal Reserve says is good.

We're still sitting And by the way, you know, this was a trap that the Biden administration found themselves in.

They say, hey, inflation is lowering.

Yeah, but it's not like prices are going down.

Prices are still increasing.

They're just slowing in the rate of increase.

And that's what's happening.

Now everything keeps going up.

Okay, it's not going up at three percent, but still I'm not only going up two percent.

It's now going up closer to three than closer to two.

But at least it's under three percent.

That is certainly progressed.

It also could simply be statistical noise because we had a government shutdown, we had some month, you know, so really, let's let's let's see what the numbers are in two months.

That will tell you whether this was a blip or whether this is the beginning of a trend.

And somehow the numbers might continue to go down.

So I'm going to judge this speech through the prism of what I think what is clear that they were trying to accomplish, which was he was trying to essentially tell voters to give them more time.

Hey, things aren't you know, we know you're not happy.

But here's what I've done, and here's the progress we expect.

Now, he didn't give it to you in that way.

Right, he can't admit that things aren't working yet.

He has to say they're lying to you or things are so bad it took us forever to turn around.

And you know so, I think if the goal was to reassure the public that isn't a part of his political base that things are going to be okay, I think he did a terrible job at that.

He instead used the language of his right wing base.

Right, it is, it is.

If you're addressing the nation, you're you're you're trying to talk to voters you don't normally get to talk to.

Right, here's already talking to MAGA plenty.

And he may have some issues within his MAGA base that he's got to deal with.

There are better ways to deal with that than doing an address to the nation.

He'd be better off going on Joe Rogan, he'd be better off talking, you know, directly, you know, doing a sit down with Sean Hannity, or doing a sit down with lor Ingram, which which he's likely My guess is he probably gets one of those in at the beginning of next year in some form or another.

But if you're going to address the nation, then you actually need to speak to the voters that are that are not totally tuning you out, but they're never they're not huge fans of yours either, And that's the part where there was just simply no self awareness, and his lack of self awareness I think is sort of ultimately his achilles heel.

So he comes comes across bloviating.

He's bssing his way through crazy statistics.

He's saying things that aren't true easily prove that they aren't true.

But in some ways that's not the point.

You know, he's trying to make his weak case on the economy look better in comparison, and that's truly the problem he has.

To me, he's got two giant issues that are going to haunt Republicans in twenty twenty six.

One is healthcare, and you know, this was an opportunity to deal with it, and he didn't do a good job dealing with it.

And the second is rising electric bills that actually he made an attempt to deal with better than he did on healthcare.

So let me unpack both of those.

On healthcare, he you know, he's so fixated on it being a Barack Obama situation.

You know that this is Barack Obama's legacy, and so in his head, making that work is somehow him supporting Barack Obama.

And he doesn't want to get caught supporting Barack Obama.

You know, for a man who's assumes that everybody who doesn't like him has Trump derangement syndrome, he clearly has Obama derangement syndrome.

And he has had Obama derangement syndrome.

I can tell you the specific moment that he got it.

He got it when the Obama White House didn't return his calls on allowing him to take over the state dinner process.

This goes back to two thousand and nine.

I've discussed this those of you that are longtime listeners of mine, I've discussed this before.

It was actually in my Obama book called the Stranger where my favorite chapter is the cha do I write about sort of that that entire sort of Trump burtherism, Bin laden right, that entire White House correspondence weekend, which was the humiliation of Donald Trump by Barack Obama combined with the capture in Killo of Osama Bin laden right, It was just sort of an extraordinary personal moment in some ways political triumph for Barack Obama.

But you know, all Trump viewed it as was a personal humiliation, and so in his head, if he makes a government entity work better, but that entity was created by Barack Obama, then then he doesn't want to do it.

You know, this is to me one of the worst viruses that's running through our politics right now, but particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, which is they only want to govern for those who support them.

When you get elected President of the United States, governor of a state, a congressional representative, you've been asked to represent the entire population.

What's in the entire population's best interests you obviously, you know, the good politicians figure out what's in their constituent's best interest and what's politically helpful to them.

But he doesn't you know, this is a guy who doesn't want to make government work well for those that he thinks don't support him, so he views it this way.

They've had fifth, we're up to now sixteen years to come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

And do recall that it was the Heritage Foundation that provided the framework for the Affordable Care Act.

Yes, the same Heritage Foundation that has been turned into this empty vessel of a think tank that is just blindly supporting whatever Donald Trump asked them to support.

But there was a time that the Heritage Foundation employed public intellectuals, academics that actually did real research.

They had a conservative ideaology, but it was it was out of the Heritage Foundation who wanted to come up with an alternative to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton's plans for health care.

That essentially created the mandate.

The mandate that you know, if you were going to try to at least level out the cost of health insurance, you had to get more people in the pool, including people who are healthier.

If you're going to cover those with pre existing conditions and not gouge these people simply because of their genetics, because they were born with something you had to get and you want to and we're going to go with the insurance model, okay, And this is the issue, right, we're going if you want to get the insurance companies out of the equation, then government has to guarantee healthcare.

But I don't think the Republican Party is ready to support Medicare for all.

Ironically, I think Donald Trump would support Medicare for all.

But I don't think even this magnified version of the Republican Party is ready for Medicare for all.

But I did think they would be a little more creative in this and perhaps do medicare adopt the buy into Medicare for those fifty plus, which to me, is this simpler way to do the quote public option.

The people that are most concerned and worried about the cost of health insurance and access to health insurance are people in their middle ages who are creeping closer to retirement but are nervous, right.

They're worried about getting laid off, They're worried about, you know, losing their health insurance through that.

So having that safety net of Medicare or having that option to buy into Medicare is pretty It's one of those that it's by the way that that idea pulls super popular.

You know, could I I'd love to buy in a medica it is.

That's an eighty twenty issue when you set up the idea and it is.

You know, there are different ways that I thought Trump was going to just essentially tweak something, slap his name on it, kind of like what he's doing with the Kennedy Center right, Slap his own name on it and say, hey, look it's a brand new healthcare.

It's now Trump Care.

I think there are Democrats that would have gone along with it as long as he sort of kept the structure in place and was willing to actually improve the infrastructure of the Affordable CARECT and a couple of these ideas could be ones that would have improved it.

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But he seems to be stuck with a political grievance and his inability to get out of his own way on grievances.

Right, we saw it.

He humiliated the country with his behavior with what he said about rob Ryan or first in a tweet then doubling down on it.

Just just horrendous, disgusting, sick, you name it, all of those things, but it was really just embarrassing, right, nobody.

We wouldn't.

I don't care how pro Trump you are, you would not accept that behavior from any family member.

And I think that, And it's pretty clear there are a lot of people that noticed.

There were no there's no normal people defending this.

Okay, there is not a single normal conservative defending Donald Trump on this.

But he's so consumed, right, this is the part of the narcissism.

This is the real question.

Does he have the you know, I don't know if he ever had the temperament to be president, But now as he's gotten older with less of a filter, is this more of an acute problem?

Right, and this you ask like, how does this impact the day to day governing?

Well, he's so consumed with his hatred of Barack Obama that he doesn't want to solve the health care problem.

And he's going to punish people that likely voted for him in many places, which is the point Marjorie Taylor Green's been making.

He's going to punish some of his own voters simply because he doesn't want to look like he's helping the Affordable Care Act work better.

How screwed up is that?

Thinking?

How have we gotten so far off?

You know, we have lost the plot on what representative democracy is supposed to be.

Right, the inability to accept the premise that there are some things that have been created in government that were the idea of the other party.

I know, I'm shocked, shocked that this happens.

And the idea that you're going to punish Americans over a personal political grief, which is what he's doing with healthcare, it is, it is.

It's amazing, And you're going to hear a conversation later next week.

I just you know, with a with a Congression reporter who notes that there is you know, this virus is actually there are some Republicans just so angry about helping Barack Obama have an accomplishment that to this day they don't want to support making this system work despite what the country actually wants.

Right, is anybody here in the game of actually being representative of the constituents that sent them here?

And I think that that's so.

I don't think he solved the healthcare problem.

His ranting and raving about it didn't solve the problem, and so I think that he's only set himself up to more problems.

I think that, you know, most of January, as far as domestic conversation in Congress, is going to be consumed by this issue of skyrocketing healthcare premium.

I fully will admit I whiffed on this one.

I thought because it was Tony Fabrizio, the President's poster, who's been sounding the alarm on this healthcare problem.

I thought, for sure in House Republicans, don't you know, they're not going to go out on a limb and do this, a majority of them without backing of the president.

And he just won't do it.

Is it is setting him, you know that alone.

Forget anything else about the economy, anything else about electric bills that alone is going to cost him the House control of the House.

Why do I say that that's exactly what happened in twenty eighteen on that exact on this exact issue.

Now, let me talk about the electric bills.

I thought at least they made an attempt to say, hey, look at all the new energy, the new energy projects we have all over the country whose goal is to produce for electricity, which over time can bring down the cost of electricity.

At least they were trying to acknowledge a problem that everybody is seeing.

Right.

You know, Look, it's easy.

It's easy to sit here and and troll him on this speech and own him.

Look, it was a terrible speech.

He terrible at reading a teleprompter.

It was it was.

It was not good under any levels.

But you know, I'm trying to look at it through.

Okay, what were you trying to accomplish?

What were his aides hoping he would do?

And Lee, I see what they were trying to do on the electricity issue.

I don't think it's going to work.

And I think, in fact, it is the President getting in bed with big tech on AI is going to be an easy dot to connect to go to higher electric bills.

Hey, he's doing this therefore, and it's this is who's doing it.

It's not creating any new job in your community at all.

And what's worse is it's all it's doing is ray your electric bills.

That's going to be a pretty potent political argument, you know, it's always you know, a political argument becomes more potent when when you've got somebody to blame that more than just a partisan would agree that, yeah, they have some responsibility there, And it is easy to blame big tech for a lot of our problems.

People are already inclined to be negative on the tech world these days because of what they've done to us with social media, what they've done to our kids.

So there's there's like automatically that the tech business world is starting with a deficit, and so pointing the finger at these AI data centers is going to be it is going to be quite believable to the public.

In fact, I'll be curious that we're already seeing I see metas out there with trying to put a positive spin in Hey, data centers are going to be good for your community, Okay.

How it is.

I think it's going to be.

I think it's going to be a difficult sales pin to say the least, But I will say this, at least they had at least they tried on that front.

But look, overall, I think that speech unfortunately reinforced.

Look, if you didn't like Trump, nothing in that speech was going to make you empathetic or sympathetic.

If you love Trump, I wonder how much you like that speech.

I noticed not a lot of people, even as biggest supporters, aren't really supportive of the speech.

I think they wish he would have performed it better.

I mean, here's another exercise that you could do.

How would Jade Vance have delivered that speech?

Right?

Whatever you think of jd Vance, he's at least self aware and knows how to read a room.

And what that speech felt like was a president who doesn't realize how unpopular he is, doesn't realize how exhausted folks are with his antics, and border delusional right about his current political standing.

He doesn't fully appreciate just you know, I think he just you know, like anybody's just blaming well, you know, it's going to be the media's fault that they're not getting the word out or then it'll soon be Congressional Republican's fault for not getting the word out, or it'll soon to be some of his aids fault for not getting or what not.

But bottom line is, I think what the speech was intended to do, I think it's going to turn out to be an utter complete failure.

Now, in fairness, let's wait to see does the public feel better about about his stewardship of the economy in a week or two or are they going to feel worse right that?

I mean, he was the whole point of that was to try to fix what are just cratering numbers when it comes to his approval rating on the economy, and if I don't think he accomplished that task at all.

A few other notes before we get to my conversation with Bradley Tusk one, uh, I just too get interest just to not servation about the so called fallout from the Vanity fair piece Susie Wiles and those that participated with that sort of deep dive.

I guess I guess that what Chris Whipple had was in agreement to sort of check in, and he was good for him that he always always tape your conversations with with folks that are going to accuse you of of of something not being true.

But there were two things I took away from sort of the fallout from this fallout.

One the fact that there was a rally around Susie Wiles by sort of key people in the administration that are also considered credible with Magaworld and Megamedia, including Donald Trump Junior, Donald Trump himself.

They didn't there was they rallied around her with statements and social media support because my guess is they were petrified that Megamedia on their own would eviscerate her, would say, hey, she's you know, she's she's not a real Trumper, She's not real MAGA.

And I think that the fact that they were worried about it, and the fact that they wanted to protect her from Maga media world just eviscerating her, I think, does tell you how much credit they give to her for resuscitating him politically.

And let's remember, nobody wanted to work for Donald Trump after January six, not a single person.

Susie Wilds was the first quote unquote establishment person that was willing to do this.

Perhaps her motivation was to screw around DeSantis.

We don't know for sure, but either way, it's rare that the Trump show loyalty to somebody that needs it, and the fact that that family did is interesting and it's noteworthy.

Second observation, Susie Wiles wants Marco Rubiatovi air apparent.

I think it's it's now.

Part of it is she knows Marco Rubio.

She doesn't know Jady Vance as well.

Right, She's gotten to know JD.

Vance since the campaign.

She's known Marco Rubio because of her influence in her work inside the Florida Republican Party.

And so maybe we shouldn't be surprised, but just look at how how she talked about you know, Rubio had to get there, meaning, you know, he had to find a principled way to become part of Team Trump.

Jadie Vance is a conspiracy theorist.

It's just interesting that if you're JD.

Vance and you're already a little paranoid, right, there's always been a little bit of paranoia.

I think in that world a little bit I would be I would be worried that the president's chief of staff is looking, you know, it's going to put her finger on the scale to get Marco Rubio in a better position to be the air parent than jd Vance Now, so maybe that doesn't matter.

And who knows if this is a nomination worth having by twenty eight because who knows if Trump even wants it or anything like that.

But it's it's sort of like one of the under the undercovered pieces of fallout on this vanity fair thing.

Is Marco Rubio has got an ally in the West Wing?

Does jd Vance?

Just something?

Just something to think about, just something to ask, just something to do and just something to pon her all right, before we get to Bradley Teskut to talk about I don't even know what we're supposed to think of this the Trump narcissism, right, which is this ridiculous walk of fame that he's created and now he's got plaques of crazy truth social rants that he has said about, you know, whether it's about George W.

Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton.

I mean, his lack of inst in honest American history, in being honest about his predecessors is I know, we're not surprised that he behaves this way.

It's not shocking, but it should be.

It should bother it should bother you more than just that's annoying.

And you know, I know a lot of folks are conditioned to believe that all politicians are self absorbed.

At least I know it.

With him, you know, we can I'm going to use the words of the of the current First Lady of the United States, though I have no idea whether she really cares or wants that role, which is, let's be better.

I think she called it be best or whatever.

Why can't we be better?

Why can't we demand better?

It is it is really sort of laughable, right, He's sort of It's both ugly and sort of weirdly funny, like that he is so consumed with denigrating his predecessors that he actually created a plaque with crazy rants of how he describes Obama, how he describes Biden, how he describes Bill Clinton, about Bill Clinton's plaque is about beating Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen, Right, It's just all of it is sort of you're like, well, of course, you know there's I know there's some of you going, well, Donald Trump is who he is.

We know who he is, right in the immortal words of the late great Dennis Green, he is who I thought he was, and yet he always finds a way to be a little uglier, to be a little He just doesn't care about the country.

He doesn't care about the story of America.

And that's the part of this.

You know, I am.

I have been.

Attacked for being an institutionalist right by the by the hardcore left and the hardcore right at different times, guiltiest charged.

I you know, I am a I'm a constitutionalist.

I hold the Founding Fathers in high esteem, even as flawed as they were, because they gave us a hell of a blueprint to make a more perfect union.

And we've we That's what I hold in high esteem, our ability to evolve, the fact that we've always had these building blocks, We've had forty plus presidents who believe in the story of America.

That it is a you know, to borrow the phrase from from Martin Luther King, that they the arc of the arc of justice, bench, the arc of history, bench towards justice, and that America has sort of been on this path.

And yes, it's it's not always a straight line.

We bounce back and forth, and every once in a while we even have to take a step backwards.

But when our when when the president himself doesn't can't even you know, accept history as it is and as it was.

It's just, you know, I I know, in some ways it's like, hey, good gets better, bad gets worse.

You know, in some ways, you know, we kind of see this coming.

I think he's you know, the filter's going away.

I think that's pretty clear, you know whatever.

I'm not saying there was much of a filter there in the first term, but there was more in the first term than we're seeing now.

He is his own worst enemy, right, pick your cliche on this, but it's just, you know, the fact that he used taxpayer dollars and I'm sorry, even if he paid for the plaques, he's using people that are being paid by the taxpayers to instead of figuring out how to lower the cost of health care for you, he's more consumed with creating plaques for himself.

Because it's not like the general public is walking along the White House portico over the paved over rose garden by the way that he's turned into a patio.

Right, and then now the absurdity of the board of directors at the Kennedy Center pass a resolution to say we've renamed the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center.

It only sort of adds to the ridiculousness that is him.

Right.

There are times where I think he is the Onion presidency, because you don't know whether you're reading The Onion or you're reading the New York Times on any given day, and he does so many absurd things.

I had somebody very recently, good friend of mine, asked me, wait, did Trump really pave over the Rose Garden.

I said, yeah, he did.

He goes when did he do that?

And I said it was a few months ago they had done that, and all this stuff.

It was a reminder that I think one a lot of this stuff doesn't break through the general public right away, but it does eventually.

And I don't care where you are politically, the fact that our president consistently wants to embarrass other presidents, wants to demean dead people, wants to you know, make memorials that are about dead presidents about himself is quite something and I think it really does offend people.

And I think there's this middle of the look the end of the day, people are going to vote their own Most of these swing voters are voting what's in their own best interests, okay, And I think ultimately that's politics is ninety percent about appealing to that swing voter in their best interest rather than in your best interests.

But this stuff does matter on the margins, and I think it demoralizes supporters who have a harder and harder time defending his behavior, and it motivates those that are on the fence right like, well, I don't like the Democrats on this, this, and this, but my god, at least they don't do that.

I think it does matter, and I think it's one of those things.

It's like I've used this metaphor a lot over the years, which is it's like watching a riverbed eroad.

If you stand there, you don't see it.

You come back every six months you can really see it.

And I think this is one of those where why I'm a big fan of repeating my favorite Haley barberism, good gets better and bad gets worse.

And in this case, the president is in a bad place and it is only getting worse.

And as I look, I've been chronicling this for the last six weeks.

Right, you can go back to the sub stack where I said there's cracks in the coalition.

This is back in September October and pretty much everything that I was trying to foreshadow here you're starting to see, right, It's like crumble after crumble after crumble after crumble.

By the way, I do have a fun little dad pun for you.

You know what is the biggest cause of truth decay in the Trump White House plaque?

In this case these plaques?

Do you get it?

Do you get it?

Sorry?

I could.

I tried it out on a radio hit that I do with my friends of Boston and PR So, Marjorie, if you're listening, see I'm even ry it with my listeners.

Here, truth decay, truth decay.

Get it?

Truth decay?

And then these bronze plaque right, terrible, right, nothing nothing is you know what is bad for truth decay?

Then made up plaques?

Anyway?

Yeah, I know, grown, grown away and on that.

I'm gonna sneak in a break and when we come back.

My conversation about mobile voting?

Should we be voting on your phones?

Bradley Tusk, that's NICs.

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My guest today as someone who's been at the center of American politics business for the better part of a couple of decades, and because there's so much happening in the world of business that is intersecting with the world of politics, and Washington in some ways is becoming an epicenter of business in a derivative way, because it's frankly about a whole bunch of companies trying to figure out what it takes to keep Washington out of their business.

But that in itself is a big business.

So my guest is Bradley Tusk.

He's a political strategist turned investor.

He lives in this world in between in a political side.

He was the campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg.

And when Michael Bloomberg decided he wanted a third term, which I wonder if in hindsight he ever, I want to tell anybody who wants a third term, don't do it.

Yeah, third terms never go.

I'm trying.

I was trying to sit here and think of a good third term.

There's none, Bradley, there's none.

Ask Mario Cuomo whether he should have run for a third term.

Ask Eduobo whether he should have been thinking about a third term.

Third term.

I Tim Walls is running for a third term.

I want to say, don't do it.

There's no good.

That comes from it.

If you've if you've succeeded enough that a third term is viable, there's nowhere to go but down.

Yeah.

I saw a study once it said that after seven years, no matter who the chief executive is, people are ready to move on.

And that's like every tackleo system, whether it's a dictator or a mayor or a governor or anything else.

Right, look at our own history.

I mean, I'm a believer.

And this will get to a little bit of our conversation here a little bit, but you know, I think any Democrat that is still consumed with Trump is sort of wasting their time.

And I don't mean this.

Look Trump, there's a lot of things he's doing that that you that you may that may impact your life, and you've got to care about it.

I get it, but I don't think he's you know, we're about to have a debate about what the post Trump world's going to look like.

And I got to think people need to be focused on that because he's been in our lives for a decade.

And guess what, nobody ever lasts that long.

We're at the tail end, right, the Reagan Bush era basically ended with the nineteen ninety tax deal, right, you know, Eisenhower lasted you know, you know, his era was about a decade, Kennedy, Johnson a decade, Nixon even less than that.

I mean, you know, Obama sort of you know, it just we don't we sort of wear out.

And if you look at the modern air of our presidents going back since World War Two, there's a reason that sort of a movement sort of petered out right in that eight to ten year mark in some form or another.

We're ten years with Trump.

Yeah, yeah, man.

I think the question is to me, the things that he's doing that will go away when he goes away, and the things that he's done that will last, of which some might prove to be good, but a lot of it might prove to be pretty harmful long term.

The area And maybe this is where kind of my perspective from the business side is a little different than the typical person in the political world is I don't like all of the rule of law stuff, but I think that that ends when he ends right.

That is very much a product of him specifically, Whereas some of the steps he's taking around the economy really do worry me from a much longer perspective as an investor, because if I were China and I said I want to put in the Manchurian candidate, and I want to undermine the long term strength of the US, our economy, one of the things you would really go after.

So what are the things to me that make our economy unique.

It's free trade, its intellectual property, it's rule of law, it's independent markets, independent data.

It is getting the very best people through immigration.

So a lot of the fundamental things that make our economy truly unique.

Thing in R and D, investing in higher ed, all of that are all things that Trump, for whatever reason, has really tried to undermine.

So I worry more about the impact of just taking our strengths and undermining all of them than whateverything he has said today that on truth social that makes everyone upset.

I don't care about that stuff.

No, I mean, to me, the biggest I've always said that there's the presidency.

Actually there's three different jobs wrapped up in one.

You're being elected to lead your party.

You're being elected to command our armed forces as commander in chief, and you're being elected to be leader of the free world.

And he has chosen not to be leader of the free world.

And that is something that the public doesn't realize is a problem until it's gone.

It's a very hard in fact, when you tell people you want to be leader of the free world.

No, we don't want that.

We don't want to be the beat cop.

But as I always say, you know, I always say when people say I don't want to be the world's policeman, and I'm like, yeah, but somebody's going to be.

Would you rather be us or another country?

You may not want us to be the world's cop, but you're not gonna like it if China is right, which.

Then how do you explain the other day him sending allowing the VIDIA to sell you know, the h two hundred GPUs to China?

Right like it?

There are things that I don't get.

So for example, he says that, and look, if you were a full free trade you know, absolutist, right, But then the next day they issue an executive order saying, oh, States can't regulate AI because it's a national security issue.

It can't be an ob security issue if you just took the most valuable thing that your biggest rival would want and allow the to go to the.

Well, let's talk about This is actually at the heart of the conversation I want to have, which is, you know, the business community in general has been frustrated with the last two Democratic administrations, sure for too much regula, too much regulation, too much red tape, things like this.

And I get the appeal of, hey, isn't it great that you don't have to have an army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

You just have to go into the Oval office, write one check or rite you know, or make one board seat change whatever.

You only have to placate one individual as a hell of a lot easier than placating you know, thirty members of Congress or ten senators and all of that stuff.

So I understand the efficiency aspect of this, But are we doomed here because business is such as an easy relationship right now with Trump's version of the Republican Party, that they're now going to expect this kind of treatment from all politicians going forward, that this is something that we can't put back in the bottle.

And I, you know, I'm sorry.

I don't trust the tech industry with AI without guardrails because I saw what the tech industry did with social media, which totally destroyed our information ecosystem.

So, yeah, but this is the world you live in, Yeah, and you're navigating, so you tell me.

So I would say, for me, the efficiency argument probably doesn't work because it's too risky and too variable.

Right, you were dealing just with winning the favor of one very mercurial person and who seems to a lot of the time agree with the last person he spoke to about something, And so I don't like the notion of basing an investment strategy or regulatory strategy around that.

And to me, the right analogy is when I have a company that I'm investing in that has some sort of new disruptive technology that either where taking on an entrenched interest in there's a regulatory fight, or recruiting an entirely new type of industry.

AI crypto flying cars, whatever, and you need to build a regulatory framework.

There's often the question of do you go federal or do you go state.

We usually choose to go state by state, which is wildly inefficient.

Right, we're talking about fifty different bills or whatever it is that we rules, whatever it might be that we have to create or pass.

However, I can get outcomes.

So in twenty fifteen, the House Energy Subcommittee, on a bipartisan basis, passed unanimously legislation to begin the regulation of autonomous vehicles.

So right now, the US federal government has done nothing to figure out how to regulat or deal with self driving cars or trucks or anything else.

The bill passed the subcommittee honesty and has never moved since, nor has federal dot issued any sort of rules whatsoever as to how this should work.

This is for presidential administrations.

Correct, right, and at the same time in states now, you can like or not like any individual states rules around autonomous vehicles, but they have them right, and you can get to an outcome.

And even if you don't get the president you want in one state, you have fifty bytes at the apple.

So oftentimes we're looking at something and saying, Okay, where do we think is the right starting point to launch this thing?

Based on partly the economics, so the market, you know, and ever early starts in California, in New York and Texas, but also from a political standpoint, where can we win because you know, one of the things that when when I invest in an early stage tech startup, I genuinely believe that people are going to really like the product or the service or otherwise I'm not deploying the capital or make any investment in the first place.

And so like, for example, the very first tech company I ever did was Uber, starting in twenty eleven, and my view, which was the same as Travis's view, was people are really gonna like this, So we just need to get this thing up and running wherever we can show people how much better it is in the taxi system, and then they will fight for it, and in every market where we prove it, it gets that much easier in the next market.

And that basically it was a big fight, and it was city by city in that case, but it turned out to be right.

So I generally think the right strategy to legalize most technology actually occurs at the municipal or state level, and not in Washington.

It's always been the ke I mean, look at the recreational marijuana movement, the medical marijuana movement, same sex marriage.

Right we've in some ways to create critical mass to convince Congress that hey, you should get involved in this, you know, having it emanate.

I mean, that's the beauty of federalism, right like that, that is supposed to be the beauty of the system.

Which is why I'm glad to see there's bipartisan concern about a moratorium on state regulations with it and it it is, you know that this is I think this is where if I were, if I were in this industry, I wouldn't want this.

I mean, look at the public right now.

The public approval ratings of AI are plummeting.

Right we are, compared to the rest of the world, more dystopian about AI than most other civil societies.

I would argue that has a lot to do with how involved our polarizing president is with the industry.

I actually think if he were less involved, there'd be fewer doom and gloomers about AI.

With with two caddia, its one is I actually think the political tsunami and AI hasn't even hate.

I agree twenty eight is going to be that.

I think it's I think the fear I believe the single biggest issue in twenty eight, and we'll see it a little bit in twenty six, is going to be fear of AI displacement, well.

Displacement our jobs combined with so every data center requires so much compute and so much energy that they're expecting it to consumption to double.

We're certainly that doubling supply, which means consumers electric bills are going to skyrocket.

We already saw a little bit of this in Georgia.

Virginia, I mean Louden County.

Man, you know they were making all this money lease and land on data centers.

It is now like you know, it's a they've declared war on data centers.

I think we're going to see laws passing states this year that say that localities cannot issue permits and zoning for data centers without proof that there will not be a corresponding price increase for consumers and electric bills.

And so you're right, but we had a world where let's say that unemployment and the job numbers today, I think further to accept that they were valid.

Further, you know, support of this thesis that if job displacement keeps going up, and unemployment keeps rising and rising gets even potentially double digits, and electric prices keep going up, and because of Tariff's other consumer prices keep going up, and you know, twenty five thirty guys like Sam Altman become trillionaires, but the rest of the world's you know, that's of the country city of eighteen percent unemployment, that's the French revolution man.

And I don't think either party necessarily understands that or sees it coming.

I think one, you know, Trump, in his view is like, doesn't matter.

The only goal is to get your hands on as much as you can before you die.

So therefore this at least fits with his worldview.

Democrats, I don't think have any plan at all.

From one I can tell.

No, I don't think they do either, and I it strikes me and I'm curious.

Look, I take it you're trying to help Democrats be more pro business.

Yes, I mean in part because that's how you would describe your you know, your sort of your altruistic goals.

Here often times, and I think you know, not counting what I do out of my foundation, which is totally separate.

But yeah, and I think oftentimes I feel like and you might appreciate this more than most people.

Both sides are so dug in that they miss the underlying point.

Right.

So you have these Silicon Valley types who are now very powerful Washington A Mark Injuries or someone like that, right, and they hate regulation and their libertarians and that sort of sounds great in theory, no rules, but in reality you can't build multi multi billion dollar industries and the absence of all structure.

You need a certain amount of rules and regulation.

Crypto, right needs a certain amount of regulation to separate the coin bases of the world, the circles of the world, companies that I've invested in with total scams, right, And because there's a lot of fraud in the crypto world, and there's also a lot of genuine companies that you can decide whether or not buying crypto is a good idea.

That's up to the individual.

But crypto itself only works because there is some level of regulation that says this exchange is permissible, exchange is not right, So you need that.

But then on the other hand, democrats by sort of playing to their extremes that all capitalism and all wealth is inherently corrupt and evil in some way totally missed the point because people need to make a living, and people are aspirational and want to do well, and so just vilifying everyone doesn't work either.

And the reality is regulation is neither inherently good nor bad.

It's how it's applied.

Like, let me give you an example.

I was driving once from Santa Barbara to Ally, and I'm going down the Pacific Coast Highway and I'm appreciating how beautiful it is, because you'd have to be something really wrong with you not to do that right.

And the thing that hit me was, Okay, what I'm seeing is from my car window the ocean.

The reason why is that they are not gas stations and you know, Chipolis and whatever else blocking the view because of regulation.

So in that case, I would say a good regulation, and I didn't get to LA and I run into all of these homeless encampments.

Now again that's the product of regulation.

Bad regulation in that case, those are regulations that make constructing affordable housing way too expensive and difficult, and people don't have anywhere to live as a result.

So basically, zoning regulation on the same street right resulted in a net positive at one part of it and negative in the other.

And anyone on either side who just declares unilaterally that something is inherently good or bad just doesn't understand what they're talking.

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You know, it's funny, I keep it feels as if the Democrats are looking for the twenty first century version of Bill Clinton, who was who struck this balance right now.

He did it out of necessity.

Democrats had lost three straight presidential elections, all of them were blowouts.

It was sort of you kind of had to have a Democrat who acknowledged at that point in time.

And I have a friend of mine who we argue, is the country center right or the institution center right right?

The constitution sort of arguably gives gives the minority a bit.

You know, you could our rules give the current structure the right side of the spectrum has more advantages.

I could argue fifty years ago that same structure gave sort of the Democrats a little bit more.

But at some point that is the structure that we live under.

But Bill Clinton sort of, you know, one, hey, we should have a rules based, opportunity focused society, right like, you know, should be fair, equal access and opportunity, and I remember responsibility and opportunity, right, that balance between the two.

I guess you know, I could say Obama tried to get that messaging, and he was better about it by twenty eleven, twenty twelve, frankly out of necessity, right he was.

He had a tough reelection, and he borrowed more of the Bill Clinton language or the Teddy Roosevelt language of the Square Deal things like that.

It seems as if we just haven't found the politician to meet the moment that we're in.

I think we all know them.

We want to be both aspirational but with a I think we want a stronger safety net, and we haven't figured out how to.

Donald Trump said, hey, I can do both, but he couldn't.

Right, he doesn't really have the He doesn't really have a political party behind him that actually wants to do both.

And I think there are those in the business community that don't believe the left wants to create what you said, a society that allows for wealth.

Right, Yes, they want the strong social safety net.

So when ultimately what we really want is strong safety net and a realistic path thick and look.

It's hard to end the other the day, right, So capitalism as a system, to me, I think almost just incontrovertibly is the greatest system ever created because if you look at the last eighty years since World War Two, three billion people who were living in extreme poverty now have clean drinking water and electricity and less infant mortality and longer life expectancy, in higher literacy, you know, all the status right, So unquestioning, none of that happens without globalization and capitalism.

Capitalism on's taken into its full logical extreme, which is kind of what we tend to have here, often results in a lot of unhappiness and a lot of people who are frustrated with the system.

Because if the only ultimate goal to be successful and happy is to accumulate as much status and wealth as possible by definition, ninety nine percent of people can't be in the one percent, and those ninety nine percent are upset.

So then you look at say, okay, well does Finland or someone have it right, because it's capitalism, but with a much stronger social safety net, Like you said, so yes, people there, if you look at say the World Happiness Report, are exponentially happy because both they feel compelled to need less and they have more on the on the floor.

But when you look at the last thirty years or so and look at all of the innovation in the world that has emerged, basically none of it has come from Europe right other than Spotify, and there's not a giant tech company that's been invented.

So if you were to say, Okay, the US will be Scandinavia, as the left I think would like to see the case, yes, you will have a higher floor for people, and I believe in that.

But at the same time, there is something about our system that is incredibly unique and that encourages the kind of innovation that has lifted the billions of extremely poor people that in theory the lefts you care about the most out of poverty.

Well, I do think I'm one of those who believes it's because we're a nation and immigrants that we that if we if we have I think what you're I think we could we would already be Scandinavia if we weren't continuing to have fairly open doors, meaning if we weren't importing more people who want it, who are looking for the American dream, like in some ways third and fourth generation Americans are more satisfied than first and second generation America.

So would you say then that, let's say we have so I would argue, weh have exponentially higher legal immigration, right and a perfect world.

You know who was set that the quotas the Bureau of Labor Stistics, because they would say, okay, the construction industry has this whole hospitality this by the way.

Along with the Social Security Administration, where because we need more new workers to fund Social Security.

Correct, right, you need tens of millions potentially of people.

And that's not at all exclusive with having strong borders.

But the question is if we said we're going to keep bringing in the greatest talent from all over the world, and if we do that, we're always going to have the kind of innovation we need because those are I'm a first generation American and I know I was braised in an immigrant so I know exactly what this is like, right.

Right, It's always like you were I mean education.

First look, I grew up in Miami, an immigrant community where it was just you felt it all around everybody in that community, even frankly, even the domestic you know, even those second third generation Americans like myself.

You moved to Miami for opportunity.

Nobody was a native of there.

You were there for opportunities.

So it had an immigrant's mentality, which means they were hustlers.

Everybody hustled.

So let's say that we really increase that, which again does not in any way have to me not having.

Strong border security.

They're not mutually exclusive at all.

But let's say that we said we are going to radically increase legal immigration so that the people who are the hustlers are constantly coming in.

If you did that, could you have the kind of social safety net that Scandinavia has without deterring the innovation that America has because that combination of the new people constantly coming in takes care of that problem.

Well, it depends on when you make them eligible for the same fafty net.

Now, right, Oh, fair point, And I think you and I think this is what I'm what we're talking about here.

Some people would say is heartless.

What do you mean you wouldn't make the safety net available for the immediate first gen family at the same you know, But I think that would be a debate, and I think that's a fair political debate.

To have is when should somebody be eligible for the social safety net in the United States.

You know, you certainly need to become a citizen, right, I think that that's a fair that's a fair bar.

You have to do the work to be a citizen.

You have to probb.

Now, I'll tell you this.

I remember this great George W.

Bush quote when he used to talk about people coming over there.

He goes, anybody that's going to go over is going to fight the environmental elements to get across the Rio Grande River.

I want them in America.

Yeah, because they're going to be great workers.

Yeah, that's totally well.

Look, do you remember when Eric Adams All these migrant showed up in New York City and Eric Adams made the decision that New York City would house and feed everyone.

Even though I am wildly promegration and a first generation American, I thought that was crazy for two reasons.

One, city didn't have the money to do that.

It came to the expense of sanitation and police and schools and everything else.

But two, my family, your family.

You know, millions of families have come here, and what they're asking for is not free housing or free food.

What they're asking for is the opportunity to work and to make a living.

And I don't think you needed to provide that, because I think people would have gone to where the jobs were.

Some might be in New York City, a lot might be at me packing plants and iore or something like that.

That's fine, right, But I don't think you even necessarily need to at the beginning, because the truth is, most immigrants just want to work, and the economy has a lot of holes of jobs that are needed to be filled that most Americans don't want to do.

And so I think the problem kind of solves itself if you just let it happen.

No, I mean, it's by the way, it's been true if you fought, you know before, if you look at the immigration patterns at the border pre say twenty fifteen, okay, and we've we've had some different surges for different reasons, I would argue since then, but it usually went if we had a lot of ope.

But if our economy was humming, there were more people at the border.

If our economy wasn't humming, there were fewer people at the border.

I mean, you know, if you thought you could find work in the United states.

You came if you didn't think you could find work, you weren't going to risk your life to.

Come, right, right, Yeah, I think that that's I think that that's right, and I think I mean, it seems like it's a puzzle, right, which is, if you accept that most people want others to do well right now, some of us have easier some mentality were literally we believe that if you win, that means that I lose, and I think the President has that mentality quite frankly.

But overall, what we're really talking about is enough resources, enough of a social stify, and enough opportunity and balancing it so that it's fair so that people aren't starving, and yet we are still innovating and creating.

So let me go back to sort of the premise that I that I really want you to deal with, which is, is the business community going to see the Trump way of doing things and not want a risk of going back.

And basically, look, you brought up crypto.

Whatever you think of crypto, the industry decided, hey man, we're tired of waiting to convince the left on this.

We're just going to buy supporters, right.

You know, Look, they're not the first industry to decide to do that.

But it was kind of it's kind of gross just looking at it from my perspective.

You're like, sure, I don't.

We're not making We didn't create that Genius Act didn't pass because we thought it was a good idea.

It passed because they bought enough politicians.

I could argue, okay, and we can we can have a we can, we can.

You know, I I am pro blockchain, less convinced on the value of of of of the of the coins themselves, but I accept the pre tokenization.

I get right like I'm I find myself.

I'm in I'm in the middle on this.

I worry that it's a it's a the value scam on one hand, that get rich quick scheme part of it, versus the blockchain and and all of that, which is a different type of technology.

But but if I look at if I'm an upstart industry in any sort, and I look at what crypto pulled off, why do I want to risk a the other party coming in, who is just at the end of the day going to be more bureaucratic.

Yeah, well, but flipping around depends on the industry, right, So if you are the solar and wind energy industry, you feel exactly the opposite.

Right, You felt like under the Democrats you had the kind of regulatory structure, the kind of tax credits, the grants, everything else that you wanted and needed, and Trump came away and came in and through the big viewer.

I hear you.

But should any industry be basically at the whims of which party wins?

I mean, to a certain extent, that is the point of democracy, right, I think the bigger question really becomes who's making the decisions?

And to me, the real problem is a structure one in that if you accept that in a world of gerrymandering, only the primary matters ninety plus percent of the time, and Stat's proved that out.

And if you look at primary turnout, which is typically about ten to fifteen percent, and those voters are typically the extremes, either the far right or the far left, or different special interests that can move money and votes, whether it's fair shake doing crypto or the teachers' unions or whoever it might be.

And if you accept that politicians will always do whatever it takes to get re elected, then by definition they're governing for that ten percent on each side to the exclusion of everyone else.

And I actually think, and you know, if you sat most people down, you could get eighty percent of people to agree on a framework to solve almost every single problem we have.

But those people don't vote in primary, so they're disenfranchised.

So one thing that I've been trying to do with you know, I didn't I didn't grow up a lot of money.

I worked in government, I didn't make much money.

Then I went into tack and I did pretty well, And so I've been given it away is to try to make mobile voting happen, because to me, you're only going to get primary turnout from ten to say thirty or forty by meeting the people where they are.

Will people take off from work and line up to vote for president, Yes, But will they do that for city council, state rep, state Senate.

No, they don't.

And as a result, and that's probably even congressional primaries have a ten percent primary, you know, ten percent turnout, right, So, and yet close to one hundred percent of us have phones.

We live our lives on our phones, are banking, our healthcare, our love lives, all this other stuff.

And if we were able to allow people to vote securely on their phones.

We could get turned out from ten to say, thirty, and then all of a sudden, I'm not sure that any one industry is at much risk of the whims of a party because it's not being decided just by the extremes that either hate Crypto or hate Grant Energy or whatever it is.

Well, I just had somebody on as a guest who's been advocating getting rid of partisan primaries, and I kind of think that it's pretty clear it is.

I put it this way, I don't see how a taxpayer funded primary is constitutional.

The idea that I think it's actually a poll tax.

Right.

If I tell you the only way you could to participate in this primary is you join a private club, right, and you could participate in this taxpayer funded election.

That's that seems you know, give, where the where are my goddamn lawyers here?

Come on, I'm an independent living in New York City and my vote does not count.

Well, that's just that doesn't make It's like, what are we doing, especially when you look at this youngest generation and they're registering as independent or no party at a greater rate than either of the two major parties, So I do think this might actually fix itself, meaning a majority of people plurality would prefer a non party you know, sort of, Hey, I want to I want to decide, right, we're we're actually all libertarian, you know, the whole idea of America's libertarian.

You know, I would, I would, I would argue.

So I think we're getting there.

But on mobile voting, you know, when you look at mobile technology through the prism of our banking system, yep, it's really secure right now.

The times that it's not, Like, there's nothing I hate more than when a credit card company tells me, hey, you've got to change your number.

We're doing this for your purposes.

No, you're not.

You're doing it for your person.

Like I just hate being lied to about that.

Like it's like no, no, no, no.

And I even tell them, stop reading your script.

You're not doing it for my benefit.

You're doing it for your benefit.

But let's you know, let's figure this out.

You have a You're going to have a hard time convincing the public that because cyber criminal activity exists when it comes to scamming people out of crypto or scamming people based on you know, a text message they get and they click the wrong link, that they're going to have a hard time believing that the voting is going to be secure.

Yeah, I mean, I just think psychic the psyche.

Yeah, I mean, that's right.

The polling doesn't quite show that.

What's interesting is so before twenty twenty, we polled nationally and about seventy five percent of Republicans, Democrats, independence all said, if mobile voting is secure, of course we should have it.

Right after twenty twenty, we pulled again, stayed in the mid seventies with independents and Democrats fell to the forties with Republicans because of all the doubt cast on the twenty twenty election.

So to me, the solution to that, and this is what we're working on right now by to start running legislation in seven states.

To do this is to allow start with local elections and let cities choose to opt in to offer mobile voting as one form of voting for council, school board, may or things like that.

So Anchorage is the first city that's going to do this.

They're going to do it in their April municipal elections, and then if we pass our bills in these different states.

That would allow cities to choose to opt in if they want to, to offer it for local elections only, and then let's see how it goes.

If people use it and it works and they develop trust, we can move up the ladder to state and then maybe one day federal.

If not, then we don't.

But I think we have enough.

You can start locally enough to sort of experiment a little bit.

But you so give me some of the tech, the security things.

Is it.

Here's how it would work.

Location?

What would it be?

So you would go on the app store.

You live in Arlington.

So let's just say for purposes, you would download the Arlington Board of Elections app and the first thing would say, Okay to someone, n ain't Chuck Todd really live in Arlington?

Who's a registered voter?

Last four digits of your social your address?

Okay, now we know that there is a voter named Chuck Todd in Arlington, but are you really that person?

So first thing is multi factor authentications.

That's like when you forget your password, they send you a code, you put it in the app.

Then biometric screening so they matt scan your face match it up against your driver's license or whatever idea you have.

Now we know this is really Chuck Todd.

Ballot comes up on your screen.

Ballot is as simple and straightforward as can be.

Whenever you're done and you're ready to submit, three things happen.

Your ballots encrypted, your ballots anonymized, and you get a tracking code.

Goes back to the Board of Elections.

They air gap it, which just me They take it offline once you're is you know, on a flash drive and not connected to the internet.

Then they decrypt it.

A paper copy of your ballot gets printed out, that gets mixed in with all the other ballots.

You can see where your ballot stands because the tracking code will show you it was received, tabulated, printed, and so on.

And then the underlying code itself is open source.

So we've spent the last five years building this thing out of my foundation.

We posted it to GitHub a couple of weeks ago, so it is now public code.

Anybody can use it, anybody can download it.

I don't even known it anymore.

It's just purely in the public domain, and any government that wants to try to do it now has the ability to do so.

And I've already and I've spent twenty million dollars my own money so far, you know, working on all of this, I've already paid for it.

So I feel like given that we live in a world where polarization seems to be the contributing factor to so many of our problems, and polarization is because not that people are polarized, because the only the extremes vote in primaries, and that's where everything is decided.

If you could do something that could make it so much easier to vote, especially in primaries, and you get do you remember when Amazon wanted to put their second headquarters in Queen So part of it went to where you are, to Arlington, right, and then the other half was supposed to go to Long Island City, So hundreds of cities competed for this.

New York want a little unexpectedly, everyone's very excited the poland shows people are really into it.

Then AOC comes out against it, and look for her politics.

Fine, she's anti jobs, business, capitalism, whatever.

Fine.

So there's a guy named Mike Gennaris who is a state senator in Long Island City courts.

And Mike is just a guy.

He's not good, he's not bad, he's not Conservatives at liberal.

He is just a political hack that wants to stay in office, nothing else, and all things being equal.

Of course, it's exciting when your district is picked by Amazon to be this thing.

But now he says to himself, oh shit, if I support this, I could get a primary from the left to or not, I'll be around a eight nine percent based on the data, and the voters in that primary will be the most left wing voters of my district.

And if AOC supports the opponent, I could lose.

And he had a choice forty thousand, forty thousand new jobs for New Yorkers that are good jobs for benefits, or one job his own, and he picked himself.

And by the way, that's what politicians do.

But if he did the same analysis and turn out his primary was going to be thirty seven instead of nine, not because he cared anymore about the voters, the district, the job, whatever, Nothing only changed, just the math.

He would have done the deal simply because he would have needed to get re elected.

So but if there were non partisan primaries or open primaries, that would definitely help.

But you know, I still think if you look at places with the open primaries and I'm a big supporter of open primaries for local elections.

You still just don't get people going to submit in plays.

With mail and voting, it's a little easy, but in New York, where you have to go, people just don't show up.

But you know what, those same people all have phones.

So when they're sitting on the subway or they're waiting for their coffee or wherever else, if all they have to do is press a few buttons, then you can go from nine to thirty seven.

I don't think you can do that when people have to go show up somewhere.

Let me introduce a counterintuitive point about voting.

Yeah, and I'm not I'm saying this.

I'm not saying I agree with it.

So anybody listening that wants to try to, like, you know, aggregate me and sort of say, oh, there he goes he doesn't want.

If you choose not, you know.

It's sort of like I'm not for compulsory voting like I think you should.

I think you should feel comfortable made.

You know.

In fact, I think it's been fascinating that that voter turnout goes down, the more apathy goes up, the more content and stable our governments are right, apathy goes down a bit more unstable when our leadership is a little bit more unstable.

Maybe that's a good thing that that people pay more attention, but it is is more uninformed people voting a good thing.

You know what, if more uninformed people is more, it's still a better reflection of the mainstream and therefore democracy than fewer.

And you know, I just when I was giving a talk on mobilevoting somewhere someone said, raise their hands, said, well, under your as system, we're going to have a TikTok president.

We have a TikTok president, and in new have a TikTok mayor, mayor.

Right now, we're already living in the biggest in the biggest markets.

We're already living in that world.

So we're we're already there.

So to me, the thing that I learned I worked in city government.

I worked in you know, I was in DC, I was sure studing patients director, I was deputy governor of Illinois.

I saw it from really every angle.

And to me, the only thing you can count on is that politicians will do whatever it takes to get reelected.

And so even if it's an uninformed thirty seven percent.

A politician trying to sell for an uninformed thirty seven percent is still going to land much more in the mainstream than a politician trying to solve for nine percent.

Do you think you're gonna have an easier time selling more rural states on mobile voting than urban state.

So it's one of the reasons why Alaska's.

Are Alaska is a perfect Yeah, a perfect.

Example, if not for twenty twenty.

Yes, the challenge I have right now is that red states don't want to do anything Trump doesn't like, and he hasn't said anything about mobile voting.

But if you are a paper only in person thing, then clearly you're not gonna like mobile voting.

And so therefore in blue states you not only don't have the concern about Trump, but you actually have the incentive of sticking it to Trump.

Right, So, in theory what you said should have been the rollout plan, Trump scrambled that.

So now the rollout plan is much more partisan, which I'd say again, I'm not even an m roll party anymore, right, So it's not like i want one party as opposed to another or one type of state, but I'm going to have mobile voting.

I want ever want to have it.

I think realistically, there's a world that I live in for what I'm doing through twenty eight, and then there's a new world that starts in twenty nine.

That's interesting that you say it that way, when you say there's just a new world, that's you're just are you sort of plotting and living?

I mean I want more people to be thinking this way, which is, Look, the Trump era is over, it just hasn't ended yet.

Yeah, I mean He's gonna go away and norms will be restored.

So well, see that's the question.

That's what I'm not I'm now starting to become a skeptical So we never go backwards, Bradley.

So I've been asking people who know Dvance specifically this question, right, because let's say it's any Democrat, we're probably going back to a more normalized rule of law system, right.

So now on the Republican side, even someone like Rubio probably goes back to that.

So to me, Vance is the biggest of the major contenders, the biggest variable.

He might not want to, but remember when Jordan retired and the NBA kept turning to manufacture these errors to Jordan and it never worked, right, you had great basketball players, but until Lebron naturally came along, you just didn't have it.

Right, Vance and others will try to imitate Trump at every turn, and it's not gonna work because Trump is an end of one and for better or worse, he's just unique, right, And if you try to imitate him, that will probably look really inauthentic and actually fail.

And so Vance would be my biggest concern about continuation of the current approach to rule of law.

But I kind of think that people are going to want change, and I think that he is going to refer he has to run on continuity to Trump.

And Vance is discovering the same trap that that a being vice president for an unpopular president is, like that Kamala Harris discovered, You're never going to be judged on your own merits, right.

Right, Well, do you think he learned so?

Harris clearly regrets not distancing herself from Biden in any way.

Do you think Vance has learned from that?

And if so, when you're the city vice president and a candidate, how do you distance yourself?

You can't.

I mean the point is just because you should doesn't mean you can, right, yeah, right, you know look, Hubert Humphrey couldn't do it, and he waited too long.

Al Gore to this day did the best version of it that was possible.

Right.

He found he was trying to figure a way to show distance on the things that mattered the most, the concerns that people had, which was the kind of the personal ickiness of Clinton.

Right, and Joe Lieberman was the tonic.

And so you know what, you know, had Kamala Harris picked Elon Musks are running made I don't know, I'm like trying to think, like who could have been the.

I'm not sure anything.

I don't know if anything.

Could even al Gore couldn't outrun it.

Right, he got closer.

I will always go to my grave believing that race got competitive because he figured out a way to walk the line of being, Hey, I'm going to be the stuff you liked about Clinton, and I'm not going to allow the stuff you didn't like to happen either, right, which was but it was hard.

Yeah, I bother one of the biggest what asks because if you think about it, let's say, for a few ballots got fully punched through instead of hanging had tats or whatever.

Right, and the outcome is different.

It seems to be there's two very radically different outcomes that we said of what we had.

One is, let's just see nine to eleven still happens, because it probably would have.

Right, I've gone through this.

What if I'm curious where you're gonna go.

I have an idea where this goes.

See, you still get Afghanistan.

That doesn't change, No, But I don't.

Think you realize Rack, it's not just that Bradley.

Yeah.

If at nine to eleven happens under Al Gore, that's the ninth the year of a democratic presidency.

So while George W.

Bush was new and could claim the intelligence was new, then all of a sudden, if Gore's president, then the whole well, you knew this guy was a problem because your administration tried to kill him once and missed.

You were on top of Bin Ludden, and you still missed this.

I think the politicizing of the intelligence failure under a democratic administration, which is a continuation of eight years of a democratic administration, becomes we are far more polarized.

The world we live in today is the world that would have happened to us.

September twelfth, ninth two thousand and one, meaning I think we would have gone immediately because it would have been this was the because he would have had the same CIA chief probably maybe he had had the same Secretary State maybe, but you know what I mean.

There would have been more continuation than difference, and it wouldn't have been a new president.

It would have been right like.

So that to me is the is the dog that didn't mark right, which is, well, we were we could have nine to eleven, could have gotten politicized.

It didn't, right, and it was a unique set of circumstances for why it didn't.

But could you have gotten away with the WMD stuff?

Well, I don't think I rack ever happens, right, right, right?

I mean in that sense it doesn't happen, and we probably still do Afghanistan.

But what I'm saying is I think we have a far more politicized world because this wouldn't have been the failure of a new administration.

It would have been the failure of an administration that, in theory, had been in power for nine years.

Right.

I think that's probably right.

Can I throw one crazy idea at you, because.

Lady, that's what we do here at the Chuck podcast.

So, okay, so if you look at sort of modern political history for the president, let's just say since Reagan.

So there's been seven presidents, including Reagan's nineteen eighty five of them, I would argue, were rock stars who were definitely not the most qualified person.

Two win so Reagan, Clinton, w to some extent Obama Trump.

The two that were ultra qualified Biden and hw both only lasted one term.

Right, so I call them nineteenth century presidents.

They'd have been better in the non media era.

Right, at least for president.

Americans want rock stars.

And my argument is the DNC or the RNC are the least qualified entities to pick rock stars.

And do you remember that show?

I think you were probably around the same age.

Battle of the Network Stars is like when I was a kid, Right, So what if you did that in say in twenty twenty seven, where you said, okay, instead of a tug of war in the mud, go to the waffle house of midnight, talk to the truckers, talk to the cops, talk to the college kids, show them all of America and see who comes and what they talk to you about.

Call inning of a Cardinals game on the radio, whatever it is, and put candidates in real world situations that are not totally scripted and not totally packed with party faithful and just see how they do.

Because some will resonate, some will not.

And ultimately you got to pick the candidate that has that intangible quality.

And you're never going to get that through the debates and the normal primary systems.

You almost need an alternate method.

Well, you know, we have.

You know, it's funny, what if I told you that we had already had that system but we didn't like it, and it's called the Iowa Caucuses.

The single greatest aspect of the Iowa Caucuses is what you just described, the fact that candidates have to go into small venues.

They have to it's the only time in the presidential process where you see more personal interactions, right, And you know, I've always thought that what people don't understand that actually, the two parties that stumbled on a really smart way to do the presidential primary system.

We start in a super rural state that's very friendly, in the state of Iowa, and you're being tested, can you organize ninety nine counties like That's essentially what you're being told to do.

You've got to figure out how to organize.

You can't just win desmoins, You've actually got to show strength in ninety nine counties.

Then with the second test, we're going to send you to a state that is cranky independence and in fact they get to decide which party to vote in and they vacillate like two thousand was fantastic.

It was really a fight between McCain and Bradley to see who could convince more independence to pick the D ballot or the R ballot.

Well, McCain won that, and therefore Gore won.

Had Bradley won the debate with McCain, Bradley wins the New Hampshire primary, and then the messages said, hey, this guy is better at winning independence and it's a test of that.

Like I think the parties and we didn't fully appreciate that the system that we had stumbled into place you test or actually existed.

And what you have is you had a whole bunch of idiots at the DNC who said, well, Iowa was too white, and it is and they had it, and they applied a DEI test to the state of Iowa mistakenly realized, not realizing that by preventing their candidates from learning how to speak to rural America in a friendly state like Iowa, that they were going to fail in appealing to rural America all over the country.

So I absolutely agree with what you're saying.

And I'm like, we already had this system because it tested Barack Obama, it tested Bill Clinton, and in fact, it was in the small states and their interactions in the small states that made the country comfortable with what they what.

We weren't sure whether these were attributes that were going to work or not.

So we had the system, and we are now actually trying to throw that system away, which I sort of am frustrated them well.

Because by throwing it, throwing it away and sort of nationalizing it empowers the people inside the Beltway at the expense of everyone else.

But the problem is those people like other people who went to Yale and write in bullet points and that.

Is not a rock star, right right, But let me go back, let me throw somep at it chew, which is which is?

And I've I've been working with a company that's basically popped up, that didn't exist for a while but now exists as an entity to help corporations communicate how to deal with tricky political situations, either with their own employees or with the outside world.

And it's sort of it's a company now that it's thriving, and there's a lot of Fortune five hundred companies that want this research, this information, etc.

And what I've come to discover is that basically we're now looking for the same attributes in our CEOs as we expect in our presidents as you just defined, right, which is ultimately we're looking for the best communicator.

Right, we elect the best communicator.

We don't elect the best person.

We're electing the best communicator.

The companies with good communicators probably are doing better on Wall Street than the companies with bad communicators.

And I actually think now now we're communicating is so much more important now to success in both the business world, the political world, the entertainment world, frankly even the sports world.

That it is now a skill set that is as important as learning how to type.

It is a skill set that it's important as understanding how to write.

In fact, you need to know how to do that then you do right cursive right.

I just think it's a skill set that it's necessary now and.

All walks away in my world investing in tech startups, narrative is frequently more important than economic fundamentals, right, you know, EVE and P and L and everything else oftentimes takes a backseat to who has the narrative, the rhetoric, the sort of you know flash that really gets investors excited, and that's what drives evaluation.

Look think about AI right now.

You take two companies and you call one of them AI and one of them not.

It could be the same company.

The II one has doubled evaluation immediately, right.

I mean, I would even argue that a lot of the spending that the open aiyes and the Navidias are doing on data centers and everything else is really short term narrative and profit seeking disguise as long term planning.

So it looks like you're saying, oh, I'm thinking twenty thirty years out, and the market loves that, and they reward it with higher share prices or higher valuations if you're still a private company, and in reality, we have no idea what we're actually going to need to power AI in twenty or thirty years, because the answer might be that we don't need nearly this much compute, right, Maybe the inference model works.

I'm at a company that is literally using rat brain stem cells to try to power a compute.

Whether it works, who knows, right, But like, there's lots of different ways to go about it.

And I think that if your Jensen want you know, you say, if I announced I'm going to spend a trillion dollars on data centers, my valuation goes way up immediately.

And the truth is, by the time that the bill comes due, I'm probably long gone.

My shares became worth more and more money in the short term, and even if all that debt goes bad in people's four oh one k's get wiped out as a result, not really your problem.

So yeah, narrative, you know, for better and for worse.

You know, it has overwhelming influence over everything else.

No, and it's like, it's not just politics, it's it's it's business.

Let me get you out of here.

On this.

Is Is it better to be a public company or a private company in twenty twenty five and in twenty twenty six.

That's a great, great question.

I believe that tech startups stay private for too long.

And the reason they stay private oftentimes is a it's easier you don't have all the scrutiny of the market and analysts and investors, all of that, and b oftentimes they're really overvalued and they're afraid to go to the public markets because they're going to face a steep cut in the share price.

They might have a good IPO day, but then you look six months later and it's down seventy percent, and that's because fundamentally the company was never worth what people like me said it was in the first place.

And we tell me if this is a little too technical, but in the venture world, we have gotten into a game where the real way for people to make money is have more AUM assets under management, because you get a two percent fee.

So if you can have billions of dollars of AUM, it doesn't really matter what your investment performance is because the management fee is worth tens of millions of dollars and if you're you know, the main GP, you can pocket that.

And so as a result, if you are raising much more money than you need to get that two percent, you have to deploy it at much higher evaluations to make the math work.

And everyone's in on the joke, from of the earliest stage you know, investor to fidelity, whoever at the series A F for G and then they know that it all works for as long as they're not exposed.

And what exposes it is often the public markets.

As I think tech companies stay private for way too long as a result, and that is really harmful to the employees, to consumers, to a lot of other people.

So I think that ultimately I would really like to see the speed to market increase.

How would you incentivize that?

Because right now, I mean, I'll be honest, is as much as look, I'm an advocate of the public markets.

I think the public markets are for all the reasons you just said.

Right, It's a way to protect employee rights and all those things.

You have.

You know, it's having another set of eyes on everything.

But I think the incentive is to stay private and attentive is But if you so, how do you incentivize the public How do you incentivize driven.

By the institutional capital allocators, meaning the giant pension funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the endowments that give hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars to a private equity fund of entricapital fund, whatever it is.

Because ultimately, every year that the company stays private, the RR of the pension fund goes down.

Right, So the people who ultimately control the money are way too lax in the requirements and pression that they put on the funds that they invest in.

And so you think the people running the pension funds could put more pressure in these private companies.

And you want our if they want our crash, you need to go public.

Yeah, they said to Sequoia, if you don't get your average company from your investment to an IPO down by twenty five percent, we're not doing your next fund.

At the next board meeting, the person with Zaquoia on the board is betting in the table saying we got to get to the market faster.

So that's where the power lies in this situation, situation, And I really think that in some ways because the public pension funds especially or look when I was deputy governor of Illinois, like I saw this, we would appoint people, but there are political appointees right to the pension funds.

They weren't business people and as a result, they're often poorly run, and you know, they are more eager to be able to say I'm in Sequoia I'm an in grees and whatever it is KKR, then it is demaining that the leaders of those funds be accountable and provide really good returns.

And so you know, that's where it has to come from.

Anybody, anybody getting grabbing your attention for twenty twenty eight that you're excited about yet or.

No, because in part, if you go back to the conversation we had about twelve minutes ago, I would say that I don't know who the rock star is yet, and I know that if I just find the look, you know, like you people come through New York and they're rising money or whatever in the car.

Yeah, you meet these people, right, They're smart, anyone's for president smart, They're impressive.

They're also super narcissist.

I always pay this like you run for president, You're like, boy, you know you're you're a bit different than most of us who don't think we should be right, But you're good at this.

And so I don't trust my own reaction in those meetings.

And I've spent a lifetime around politicians because I understand what they're really good at, and that's what they're really good at, and so I don't Maybe it's you know, returns to the version of Iowa.

But I would like to see something that shows me because look, I'm a rich guy in Manhattan, right.

I am not an anyway indicative of America, right you.

I live in downtown, I went to Ivy League schools.

I'm everything that the that the right hates right many ways, and I'm not a good barometer for who's gonna win Iowa or New Hampshire.

And so for me, what I'm trying to do is know what I don't know.

And rather than saying, oh, Josh Shapiro is the guy, Yeah he might.

I don't even know Josh Pierro, but he might resonate really well with me in a one on one launch or whatever it is.

But so what right, So I would like to try to figure out a way that who is the candidate that can do what you talked about, which is they figured out how to navigate the independence in New Hampshire, they figured out how to organize ninety nine counties in Iowa, and then through that you knew this person has the intangible skill.

Well it goes back.

You know, It's funny you brought up the Battle of the Network Stars.

By the way, if you, if you ever want to entertain yourself, go look at Go go watch highlight reels of that on YouTube, because they haven't.

Okay, oh my god, it's it's fantastic.

It's unbelievable, right you just see the You're like, how much cocaine was being done behind the scenes, right, there is no doubt, like you wouldn't have it if there was it, like you know, the amount of like create seventies coke that was taking place.

But anyway, that ought to be actually a pretty good Netflix limited series, like behind the scenes and the battles of the network starts.

I'm sure it'd be, you know, just hilarious investing, and we're going to make the show.

Let's make that show.

It would be you know, tell us the real story of Farah Faucet and Lee Majors, you know, like those those sorts of things.

But there is a series of tests that we want these candidates to go through.

And while I don't think we want it to look like Survivor or a game show, in some ways I do.

I do like that there are all these weird obstacles in the primary calendar, or that there used to be.

Because while it doesn't test you on whether how you're going to handle Putin.

If you can't handle you know, the person that you got to deal with in Columbia, South Carolina that that in order to navigate you know, precinct, why well, then how the hell do we expect you to be able to handle a tough moment with Putin?

Right?

So the modern version that actually is the candidates who are truly adapt to new forms of technology, whether it was Kennedy and television or Obama and text, or Trump and Twitter or Mandani in short form video, they do really well because that becomes the way to do it.

No, it's a you're not wrong, it's like, how do we how do we how do we sort of celebrate that part of the prime because you know, there's plenty of people who will criticize our conversation.

You're trying to gamify it is sort of.

It's not gamify.

It's simply finding the person who's got the best attributes to handle how the job is done today.

Plus, a binary contest is a game by definition, right, So like we're already in that construct.

Yeah, well, mobile voting, when will we see the first votes.

April in Anchorage?

And then my hope would be a whole bunch of cities in different states.

What does success look like to you?

Turnout, like huge increases turnout.

I'm not going to get that in year one.

So Estonia is the one country in the world that has had internet voting for twenty years.

I went over there this summer to kind of meet with a lot of people and learn more about it.

So in year one it was one point three percent of voters voted online.

Today it's well, it's a significant majority, right, And they went from having higher national turnout and low local turnout to sort of normalize it across the board, whereas now even MS collections are getting fifty instead of five because people just got used to it and it just became so easy that there's no reason not to do it.

So that's what I'm going for.

Hey, in nineteen ninety five, the state of Oregon ran this interesting experiment for mail in voting.

It was the special election to replace Bob Packwood.

The entire West Coast now majority votes by mail.

Yeah, you know, and that was just thirty years ago.

So that's that's what I'm hoping to do here.

Yeah, Well, I'll be watching rather than great conversation and this was super fun and yeah, absolutely love to meet and we'll do it again.

All right, thank you.

Well, then you get your phones out or you're ready to vote on the internet mobile voting and all seriousness.

I do.

I believe this is going to happen.

The question is is it going to happen in my lifetime?

Are we so negative on the tech community that this is going to be something that we are later to adopt simply because of our distrust of both government and the tech companies these days?

I think so.

By the way, you may be wondering nothing on the Epstein file, I think this is one of those things where it's going to be I think the it's hard to speculate what revelation is necessary to change to change the conversation on this right.

Is there.

Is there a revelation that suddenly so troubles the right that they walk away from him completely.

That's an open question, right I I think, you know.

I think another fair question that I've been asking before I get a question here is I don't get his What does it?

Why is he afraid of Glene Maxwell?

What is it?

I keep asking people that know him, why is he so soft on her?

What is with this?

You know, and we'll see does she get a you know, does she get her verdict thrown out?

Does she end up you know, what does he end up doing there?

I'm surprised he hasn't gone the other way and gotten harsher on her.

What does she know?

What is he afraid of?

The only answers I get from people that know him is that it's because she's known him, She's known Milania longer than him.

Something with that relationship.

But that that origin story or whatever it is.

That that's you know, I want to I'm not going to go any farther than that on that, on that speculation front, but whatever it is, he fears her enough, or maybe it goes back to a relationship with her father, who was a famed conservative Canadian media mucule.

So it is, it is something there.

And you know, he's also just very empathetic to fellow rich people in trouble.

That's you know, just look at the people he pardons, right, So it is it is.

Unfortunately his behavior is so odd that it only inspires more speculation, and that is on him.

All right, Let's get to a few questions in here.

Ask Chuck, Hey, Chuck, thanks for the great shows and let Cheese read if you know you know.

I've dabbled in prediction markets for the first time this year and appreciate betting against other participants instead of the House.

But political BECs do make me uneasy.

Wagering on individual outcomes feels especially right for corruption, and I worry at further roads trust in our political system.

I draw a line at institutional based outcomes like FED decisions, and feel more comfortable betting on foreign elections where influence seems less direct.

How easy would it be for Stafford to know, for example, who the next FED chair will be then and then have themselves or friends or family load up on the prediction market positions.

Keep up the great work things, Nick Smith, ps bear down, all right, I see what you did there.

You know.

That's the issue I have.

I go back to the player prop market, and I appreciate the state of Virginia right.

The state of Virginia, for instance, doesn't let you bet on awards.

I can't bet on on who the NFL MVP is going to be.

You can't bet on the Heisman Trophy, you can't bet you can bet on who's going to win the national title.

You can bet on who's going to win the super Bowl, but they don't allow on the individual awards.

They don't let you bet on the Oscars in Virginia, but you can bet on the Oscars in DC.

But different, like I said, different states are regulating things a different way.

But this is something that perhaps this is where national regulation is probably going to be.

The corruptibility of the individual prop markets.

Whether it's about who's the next FED chair, who's the first cabinet secretary to be fired, who's that?

You know, there is always a window in time where somebody knows the actual answer.

You know, it's you know, we call it in the stock world insider trading.

You know, there's going to be an announcement.

If you want to know what we mean by this, go watch the movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, which was about cornering the frozen You know, they thought they had stolen the report, right, that's the plot, and they thought they had insider information, and they load up on buying un buying frozen orange juice concentrate, which I don't think you gotta you can do oranges, but I don't think you can do orange juice concentrate.

But whatever.

The point is is that the movie Trading Places actually is a pretty good job of at least explaining showing an example of how insider trading can work, how it is, it is, how manipulative to a market it could be.

And that's the point, right Like that appears needs to probably be the line, you know, and betting on American elections, it's just I just worry about, you know, my god, political coverage.

It was interesting.

I just had I appeared on newsbacks recently and the one of the hosts, Rob Finnerty, said, oh, he trusts the prediction markets more than polling, and I said, I'm sorry, I don't.

I'm not there because the prediction market, it's follow the polling that I've noticed.

Where there is polling, the prediction markets basically allow the polling to influence the market.

It's not as if the mark you know, I'm not saying that over time, if you have a lot of numbers that maybe maybe that is a way to sort of crowd source disparate information.

But I'm skeptical that it can be regulated against abuse.

That's my that's my concern on that Anyway, I appreciate the question.

Next question, Chucks, a fifty three year old Kine from Coral Gables.

It's a joy listening to you.

Well, I'm a fifty three year old Caine from Kendall.

So there you go.

We can keep up the great word.

Thank you.

I've been thinking about your interest in prediction markets like Calcia and polling market, especially as a parent.

I worry these platforms are part of a larger wagering industrial complex trying to hook young people, turning serious events and entertainment and tempting people to manipulate outcomes.

Some of the bets feel straight out of idiocracy or worse, the hung games.

Gocain's hire them Los Angeles, California.

Look, you said it very well.

Like it again.

There are I like I enjoy sports gambling.

I enjoyed gambling on team sports.

I struggle even an individual sports.

Now, bet on, I would be more comfortable knowing that everybody, you know, I don't.

I don't think there's golfers that want to throw the Masters, and I don't think they're tennis players that want to throw Wimbledon.

But table tennis, I don't know, right, you know, in some of the biggest scandals have been the sort of more arcane sports at times, and usually where you can just find one person to essentially totally look.

And I'm not saying you can't corrupt team sports.

We've had points shaving scandals and all of that, and I do think in fairness in the sports world, I think one of the reasons why we've seen a hot we've seen these scandals is because the casinos, these mobile betting companies are doing a good job identifying and finding patterns and sort of you know, it's certainly, at least in the iteration one point, oh, I've done a pretty good job at identifying that.

But everything gets more sophisticated over time, and ultimately, if something can be corrupted, it will be corrupted.

And I don't think a larger market can could correct this corruption.

All right, next question, Hey, Chuck, I haven't dug into prediction markets much, but if I did, I might place a show bet on Gavin Newsom for the Democratic nomination.

I'm uneasy about the potential for insider trading, and worse, the risk that someone might try to influence political outcomes through violence for financial gain.

With sports betting already targeting young men heavily.

I'm wary of making high stakes wagering even more mainstream hashtag Ashta five timer club Chase c from Little Rock Nice.

I think if that's the case, Kudos, congratulations, welcome to the UH.

Here's another one.

I don't think I'm not gonna have to answer.

I'm just gonna this is mostly from you guys.

Here's Eric B on this issue.

Dear Chuck, thanks for all the great content.

I especially enjoy the long form interviews and your Monday pod with Melissa.

As a financial consultant, I find prediction markets like Calshi and Pollymarket helpful for gauging consensus on elections and policy shifts.

That said, I'm concerned these platforms are increasingly gamifying investing, especially for younger users, blurring the line between gambling and financial decision making.

But she's a read from Colorado.

PS.

You share a fence with my brother in law and sister in law, so your local references always make me feel closer to my niece and nephew.

Well, no kidding, Well, nice to know, and I am one of those who thinks good fences make good neighbors.

I think all I find all of my neighbors are good, but I have a good fence because I'm the one with the dogs and I'm the one with barking dogs.

So know that hopefully your your niece and nephew aren't anti dog on that front.

Look, I what you said is important, and you know, it's interesting with the investing, right, we've seen the meme stock trend and and this is you know, as a concern with Robin hood right, the idea that that suddenly, you know, memes can take off.

But look, you have run on stocks all the time.

I hope people are smarter about investing and look at things like, hey, are you how many you know, what percentage are you trading over your over over your over your essentially over your profit?

Right?

You know, I think Google trades at eighteen times, but I think pollunteer trades it's like six hundred decks.

Well, be careful of by owning stock of anything that's six hundreds because that's overly speculative versus something that has more provable, more more provable, provable, provable uh profit and things like that.

But yeah, the gamifying as stocks we've seen, you know, imagine being on the wrong end of game.

Stop for instance, Here's another one from Michael.

I'm a younger millennial who's dabbled in betting markets but now mostly observes with concern, interesting especially around their impact on young men.

Alongside meme stocks.

They seem to turn everything into a game of instant gratification with little lasting gain.

Your Federal Reserve example is spot on.

Many now just trade events rather than invest with long term thinking.

With personal finances already shaky for my generation, I wonder if policymakers are being too libertarian and whether we're heading towards a future where safety nets are strained by decades of unchecked gambling.

Thanks Michael, you know it's interesting this issue.

You're the second person to bring up the what this impact is doing for younger men, this sort of this scenification of everything.

You know, it's sort of like how you know, how Instagram really sort of screwed up a lot of younger women and on looks and things like that, and worried about that issue that this was, that this Instagram was was causing all sorts of young women to have body shaming issue, body image issues due to body shaming and all of this stuff.

I mean, is it is interesting that we've got two fairly new technologies, and these mobile technologies, and they're really having negative impacts on young women for different reasons and on young men for different reasons.

And so it is I think you're we're hitting on something that ultimately, you know, the big pushback that is coming against big tech and against sort of all of this is going to be the argument is going to be strongest when you do it through the prism of what it is doing to young girls, young boys, young men, young women.

Finally, I'm going to do one more question.

It's not this one is not about the Calshier polymarket.

This one comes from a UNBC fan.

By the way, that UNBC Retrievers.

You might remember them.

They're famous for being the loan sixteen seat to defeat a one seat in the NCAA basketball tournament.

But Douglas writes this.

He says, Hey, Chuck, you frequently say that you trust the public, especially when it comes to holding a constitutional convention.

I am hesitant.

I first voted in the twenty oh four presidential election, where voters in eleven states enacted state constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage.

I just came out to my family in February of that year, and I felt like an outsider in both my house and my republic.

Yes, through later grassroots efforts in Supreme Court cases, I gained the right to marry ten years later in Maryland, but it is still a reminder that civil rights is always a struggle in the country.

How can we trust the public when the public isn't always protective of minorities.

You're not wrong on that, but I would argue that the Constitution that ultimately the way what it takes to get a constitutional amendment passed is not just a simple majority, and so you don't have to fear sort of mob rule, and right, that was kind of kind of mob rule, right, It was a little bit of of I don't know how else to put it.

Those those things were worded in such a way to be negative and all of that.

To get thirty eight states to sign on to something that is prejudicial, I just think is really assuming the worst about us as a as a country.

So I just think that because of what it takes to get a constitutional amendment at it, thirty eight states, you know, plus you know, super majorities when it comes to Congress, I think those are that that I I think provides the buffer right those referendum that you're referring to, know, for we're all fifty percent right.

It was all fifty percent plus one, which is why I'm always a little concerned.

You know, I have some empathy for those that want to raise the threshold on state constitutional amendments to sixty rather than fifty.

Now.

I think the motivation for it is very political and very ideological, but I think the principle of it I sort of, like I said, I'm I empathize with it.

I think that when you're trying to put something sort of in legal cement right, which is what a constitutional amendment is putting in an either state level or at a federal level, that that shouldn't be a simple majority.

So that I take your point.

It's a very fair example, but it also look at how public sentiment.

I think if public sentiment had been negative towards same sex marriage, I don't know.

If the Supreme Court does what it does right, the shift in acceptance mattered too in that, which means public opinion did end up end up in the right place.

On that.

Reminder, next week, I am going to empty the mailbag.

So if you've got questions, if you want to do races, if you want to do individual Senate House battleground stage, college football, constitutional conventions, more poly market.

I'd love if you guys get some reaction everything was one sided.

I'd love to hear from those that are pro betting markets.

Give me your best tastes.

Why you think I'm clutching my pearls too much on this one.

For those of you that think that, I would love to hear the best arguments in favor of being able to bet on who the next VET chair is and why that is a good thing, So please send me that stuff as well.

All right, well that I can't not do an update on college football.

I am going to the Texas A and M game.

I'm looking forward.

I'm going to be tailgating with my friend Chris Alissa, who is married into an Aggie family, so I will hear a lot of Gigham.

I guess what I'm really hoping for is the only thing I want to experience that's positive in college station is tailgate barbecue.

So if any of you Aggie fans out there, if you want to be generous to a Hurricane fan before the game, give me some thoughts on getting some good tailgate barbecue Texas barbecue while I'm down there.

That's what That's what my daughter and I I think we would both be interested in on that front.

So I'm looking forward to that's my first.

I will be my fourth hundred thousand plus college stadium that I've been to and experienced a game at.

So I've been to the Rose Bowl for four.

Rose Bowl Miami's only appearance in the Rose Bowl, they won a national title.

I believe that was over one hundred thousand.

I've been to a Miami Tennessee game that Miami won that was over one hundred thousand.

And I've been to a Biay Penn State game that Miami won.

So hopefully that streak will continue because we're you know as well, so hopefully that'll happen.

Look, I'm I'm very I want to be bullish about my Hurricanes, both as a fan and you know, Miami is always better in an underdog role when they're better.

I think Mario crystalbal is a better underdog than he is as a favorite in that sense.

I like our chances.

I like the fact that we're not playing a night game down there with the twelfth Man that we're playing a day game.

It's just going to be you know, I don't know how early Aggie fans are going to get up to start getting moved up for that game, but my goodness, you're gonna I think by the eleven am local kickoff it won't be as loud and crazy as it would be if it had been a seven pm local kickoff.

So I think the I think the the the programmers at ESPN that they chose not to make probably the best game of the first round of the College Football Playoff.

The fact they didn't put that sucker in primetime is or make that the Friday night game is a bit of a head scratcher.

I don't think the Alabama Oklahoma game is going to be all that interesting.

Well you know, I think it'll be an ugly, low scoring affair where for where very where Alabama is in almost the same spot Ohio State was in last year, where had Ohio State lost to Tennessee, Ryan Day would have been fired.

Instead, he beats Tennessee and wins the national title, and now he's got some job security for a few years.

I'm not saying Alabama will fight Kaylen de boor if he gets a fourth loss here, but it would be what third loss?

Three losses out of in the last five games if they end up and twice to Oklahoma team that barely registered on offense.

And I will say this, I thought, Kaylen de Bor's I'm not going I'm going to be the coach of Alabama explanation took him way too long to get to that conclusion.

During that press conference.

It was Paul Feinbaum seemed to have noted this because there was a lot of world salad when he simply could have said, no, I'm not Why would I ever leave Alabama?

This is the best job in college football.

Why was that not the easiest answer to say?

The fact that that wasn't instinctively his first answer tells me someone is not somebody's not loving having to be the heir apparent to Nick Saban, because as somebody who knows the little things about air parents or not, Let's say, you don't want to follow immediately follow a legend like Nicksaban.

You want to be the guy after the guy.

And I think my guess is that calein de Boor.

He strikes me as a guy who's all of his experiences in the Midwest or the northern tier.

Right, all of his small college experience was up there.

He's not a guy of the South, didn't have as much experience recruiting in the South and all of that.

So I I wonder if he's just culturally not been the right fit, and I would I remember being surprised that they he was certainly the hottest coach to hire, But in hindsight, you know, the smarter hire would have been a former somebody who had been on Saban's staff.

Oh, I don't know, somebody named Kurt Signetti.

Well easy to say that now.

Isn't it.

But anyway, I look, I'm weirdly bullish.

And if Miami gets through this, they would play Ohio State.

And what I love about Miami's path is it's the single hardest path to win a national title.

And and for Miami's purposes, I wouldn't want it no other way.

Right, there is a lot of question marks about the ACC, a lot of question marks about Mario Crystabal.

Well, the best way to erase those question marks beat A and M on the road, and then beat Ohio State, and then after that everything is gravy.

You know.

For me, my expectations are I'm extraordinarily disappointed if we can't win one game.

I expect to win one game.

I will be disappointed if we don't win two.

I will be happy if we can get to the Semis.

And then it's Carson Beck versus his old team in Georgia.

That would be a fun one, right, great storyline.

There's some fun storylines for Miami in various right being able to play Ohio State a nemesis.

You know, the last time Miami played for a national title, Ohio State, with the assistance of a referee, stole that national title from him.

So we got a little bit of there.

Georgia.

It's Carson Beck versus his old team.

How about a Miami Oregon matchup Mario crystal ball coaching against his old team.

So some fun, interesting storylines that could develop.

But if there is any pressure, I you know, it's interesting.

I think both Miami and A and M have unique pressure.

Right.

A and M doesn't want to have to lost like two of its last three, you know, when they could have almost lost three in a row, right, they lost to Texas, almost lost to South Carolina.

All you know, A and M has always had this, They're always really close to being a top tier college football program, but for some reason they stumble right, and this would fit a pattern for them ever since Miami's tried to come back.

Right is the U back?

Is the U back?

And it looks like we get there and then we stub our toe not beating Texas A and m Right, that would just add to the lore.

Can Mario Crystal Ball win big games?

Right?

So there's a little bit of pressure there, and plus we have the we're carrying the load for a mismanaged conference called the ACC.

So that interesting and I am curious to see does the pressure that I think both Elco and Crystal Ball have in this game?

How how conservative are they in the first half.

I expect a super low scoring first half and then we'll see the playbooks open up as the as sort of desperation kicks in in the third and fourth quarter.

But if you told me this was seven to three at halftime, ten to seven, three to three, six to three, right, these are two really good defenses, and you know defenses always travel.

Carson Beck on the road has not always been the greatest.

The last time he was in the state of Texas, he threw perhaps what would have been the single most important interception that he threw all year, the last one against SMU in overtime.

So you know, Beck has something to prove as well.

But I'm just happy Miami seems healthy and the quarterback that needs to prove something because he's got a draft coming up, So all the incentives are aligned.

We don't win, it's gonna it's gonna be painful.

I guess I could accept losing by three or less, but losing is gonna sting this one.

You know, it's really proved that Miami is back and belongs in its rightful but what I believe should be the rightful place in the top consistent, top ten program.

They gotta win one.

They gotta win one in this playoff run at a minimum, and of course my expectation at a minimum is too a few other things on the weekend, Like I said, very curious what happens how Alabama fans react if Alabama loses this game.

By the way, at the start of this season, there was some chatter that Brett Vvennables was on the hot seat at Oklahoma.

I think it's fair to say that he's bought himself another year or two.

Is this offense going to be any better though.

This offense has been a it is.

And you know, I will say this, Mattier has had more time to get healthy, and I think that's why you're seeing a lot of momentum if a lot of the experts, a lot of people feel better about Oklahoma going into this game, Materiar getting healthier, having more time off.

Alabama seems less healthy and they have this sort of this stuff hanging over their head.

In fact, I think Oklahoma has like the least amount of turnover that they have to do with.

Only Miami I think has less turnover.

They don't have coaches going to other jobs or anything like that.

Orgon's got two assistants that are beginning that will be beginning head coaching stints.

So you know that also could be a factor of the two long shot ones.

Right, we have our group of five playoff games, right, you have two lane oh miss.

I will say this, the fact that Tulane's played them once, that's got to matter for something.

And obviously you'll have a different I smell a lower scoring game in that one, particularly a lower scoring first half.

As for Oregon, that's one of those where't be surprised if James Madison JMU tries all sorts of crazy things in the first quarter.

You'll see fake punts, You'll see trick plays, fleet flickers, all of these things, and it's one of those can they get a shock early touchdown?

Right like you know I it would if you told me, wow, jmu's up ten to three.

Wow JMU lost forty one to ten, right like that, if you told me we had a sort of pattern like that, Because I do think you'll see, like the what should be fun about watching JMU is they talk about playing with house money.

They got nothing to lose.

It is not about just you know, trying to cover the spread.

I think you're going to see some innovation and at least a lot of trick plays, which could make at least fun.

I'll be I wonder if we have it as much of that with Tulane or not.

Look Tulane, they're the you know as a program, they're you know them South Florida, ut SA maybe to North Texas like they're the they're the group of five teams that in their head think that you know, if the power four expands by another four or six schools, right, or if the ACC.

You know, if the best teams from the ACC go end up in the Big ten in the SEC, then the ACC replaces those teams with North Texas, South Florida, ut SA, and Tulane.

I think they're the they're the first.

They're among the first four programs that could get the call up to the ACC.

In particular, if the ACC loses, UH loses a bunch of folks there.

So look for those of you that know me really well, know that Saturday is probably the biggest single day, UH in my personal football fandom that I've had in a long time, because my Packers have to play the Bears on Saturday night in Chicago, and it is for the division winner is likely going to win the division.

Loser is going to be stuck going on the road playing either Tampa Carolina whoever wins that South Division, or maybe having to play the Eagles, a beating up Eagles team, but either way having to start the playoff.

You if the Packers want to host a playoff game, they got to win Saturday night.

So I got my Hurricanes at lunch and my Packers for dinner.

I'm just hoping that the Aggies don't have my Hurricanes for lunch and the Bears don't have my packers for dinner.

All right, with that, there's my college football finat.

Remember fan is short for fanatic, and I fully accept that I am fanatical about my Packers and about my Hurricanes.

By the way, I'm also in my fantasy football playoffs, in case you're wondering there, I was seven and seven, I got the last spot, and I'm already in my semi finals.

That's how you do it, That's how you get lucky.

Is all honesty.

Thank you, mister Etn for getting more than one touchdown last week.

Okay, so with that, I'm gonna enjoy your weekend, enjoy college football.

If you like this podcast at all, send some good vibes down to College Station on behalf of my Mind Hurricanes, and from there I'll see I'm my mone