Zibby interviews venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist, and founder of the Mobile Voting Project, Bradley Tusk, about his deeply informative and timely analysis of the American voting system, VOTE WITH YOUR PHONE. Bradley shares his passion for improving democracy and making voting more accessible through mobile voting, revealing he has invested $20 million to create secure voting technology. He also discusses his advocacy for other issues, from regulating social media to fighting food insecurity. Finally, he talks about his contribution to Zibby’s latest anthology, ON BEING JEWISH NOW, and the importance of being openly and proudly Jewish.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back to the podcast, Bradley.

It's so nice to have you here. Congratulations on yet another book. 

Bradley: Thank you. Thank you. I feel like, well, it's sort of like double, right? Because we've got this book coming out September 17th, and then I was lucky to be part of your, you know, Being Jewish Now book, which is October 1st. So I feel like it's like a double header.

Zibby: Yes, you are launching that book as well as, uh, you know, one of the.. 

Bradley: Me and 80 other people, yeah. 

Zibby: Yeah, exactly. No, holding up the tenfolds. It's so important. Your essay is so good, and I definitely want to talk about that as well. Tell everybody, your book that's coming out first, before that 

Bradley: Yes. 

Zibby: Mobile voting.

This is something that you have written about, something you've invested in, something you're very passionate about. 

Bradley: Yes. 

Zibby: Describe the genesis. Obviously, voting is completely flawed, but why did you pick this as a cause to really.. 

Bradley: Yeah, yeah, I picked it and it's, it's really in a weird way almost become kind of my, my life's work.

So my career started off in government politics. So in, I've worked in city government. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager. I went on for mayor of New York. I worked for him at City Hall. I worked in state government. I was the deputy governor of Illinois. I've worked in Washington. I was Chuck Schumer's communications director.

So I've seen this from every angle, right? Legislative, executive branch, city, state, federal, campaigns, all that stuff. And I took one thing out of all of it, which is every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else.

And yeah, there's a handful of examples, but the fact that you or the listeners are thinking of two or three right now kind of proves the point. 

Zibby: But doesn't that mean that, like, our whole system is completely broken and we should all just sort of throw our hands up? 

Bradley: Well, yeah, but, so I think I have a solution, right?

So what we try to do is say, Hey, You know, there was a school shooting in Georgia yesterday, and we keep saying, well, shouldn't they be better people? Yeah. You know, in this case, Republicans, sure, you might lose your seat if you support an assault weapon ban, but you should do it anyway, because you don't, you want to save kids, but that's just not how these people are.

Right. There's a hole in their psyche, and it can only be filled by the affirmation of validation that comes with holding office. And we know that they are never, ever going to put anything ahead of that, right? So rather than trying to make them better people, which is never going to happen, we've got to align what we need to happen from a policy standpoint with what they need to happen politically because of gerrymandering, which is the process by which pretty much every general election is predetermined by the way the district is drawn.

The only election that really ever matters in the U. S. Are the primaries and primary turnout is typically about 10 to 15%. And who are they? They're the furthest, right? They're the furthest left or their big special interest that can move money and votes and low turnout primaries. And it gets you one of two things.

Either the utter dysfunction of Washington, no good or totally one side of government. And whether that's the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left. Also, No good, right? Um, the only good news is the politicians will just do whatever they need to do to get reelected. So you're a Republican congressman from Florida.

Turn out in your primary is 12 percent NRA members are half that 12%. You know that while it's crazy that someone can walk into a store and walk out with an AK 47, you also know that if you were to ever say that publicly, you're out in the next election and you're never going to take that risk. Or I don't know if you remember back in 2019 in New York, Amazon wanted to put their second headquarters in Queens.

Zibby: Yes, I remember. 

Bradley: And one state senator, again, Mike Gianaris, who's not evil or dumb, he's just a politician, and when AOC came out against it, given that primary turnout for him was around 10%, and those voters are so radically left wing, he knew that if he supported the deal, he would probably lose his next primary and had to pick between 40, 000 new jobs for New Yorkers or one his own.

And he picked his own. But in each case, let's say turnout was 36 percent in that Republican House primary and 36 percent in that Democratic State Senate primary, just based on math, not based on them being better people or changing their views. The Republican would have to be for some sort of gun laws and generics would have had to have been for Amazon simply because that's what the most of his voters would have wanted.

So I really learned this when I ran all the campaigns to legalize Uber and ride sharing around the U. S. and the way that we won, because at the time we were a tiny little tech startup and taxi was a big, powerful industry, but we were able to mobilize millions of our customers through our app to tell their elected officials, Hey, leave this thing alone.

So all of a sudden, you know, you're a city council member, state senator, mayor, whoever it is, and thousands of people have got more telling you don't mess with this. We changed the inputs. And as a result, they said, Okay, I'm gonna leave it alone. And we want in every single jurisdiction. So the question I started to ask myself was, would these people vote if we made it this easy, right?

Because the same people that were helping us, they didn't know who their city councilman is. They don't know who their state rep is, right? They're not vote. They're not like not taking their kids to school on a Tuesday morning so they could vote in a local primary, but maybe they would if they could vote on their phone.

So I started the mobile voting project. The first thing that we did was we found out of my foundation elections in seven different States were either deployed military or people with disabilities. We're able to vote in real elections on their phones. Those all went really smoothly. I got a lot of pushback from the cyber security community saying, well, it's too risky, could be hacked.

And so I said, you know what? I don't want that. So let's build tech that is secure. So over the last four years, we've been building tech that we think will be done sometime in 25. That is it. End to end encrypted, end to end verifiable, multi factor authentication, biometric screening like clear at the airports, open source, air gapped, literally the most secure voting technology ever built, and I have funded this entire thing myself, so I've put in about 20 million of my own money in total so far into doing this, and the reason I wrote this book is even once we build the tech and it becomes free and available for any government to use, then the really hard work begins. And that's legalized in this, in every single city, in every single state and in Washington, because if you are a politician that knows how to win in the current system and environment. You're not going to want to take the risk of opening it up and potentially losing. And so we've got to build a movement, right?

And we need Gen Z. And we need civil rights leaders and disability leaders and military leaders and all kinds of other people to come together and demand that this thing happens. So the book is hopefully the beginning of the movement, and in many ways the book is an open letter to Gen Z. In fact, David Hogue from the, the Parkland tragedy will kind of emerge as, as the spokesman for that wrote.

The forward to the book is saying, listen, yes, the future looks really bleak, but it doesn't have to be that way, and here's the one way we can fix it. 

Zibby: Wow. So essentially you're taking a risk of $20 million to create something that maybe won't ever be able to be put into use. 

Bradley: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. It's a big risk.

I get that. But look, I have made the broader determination not in some way similar to the choice that you made and I made and sort of opening a bookstore that can't possibly ever make any money, which is I'm going to do the things that are meaningful to me. And yes, like, take the bookstore, right? I once did the math and said, so I don't fly private.

I fly commercial. And I did the math and said, if I flew private last year instead of commercial, what would it have cost me? And it was almost exactly the same amount of money I lost running the bookstore. And so, okay, which is better, right? Now, yeah. You know, are the airports of pain in the ass? Yeah, absolutely.

But I don't find that the TSA pre check thing all that difficult to deal with. And on the flip side, I get having this place in Lower East Side that people really enjoy where we have authors. We've had you there, you know, doing great events and a podcast studio is free for anyone to use and a cool indie bookstore.

And quite frankly, Yeah, absolutely. I personally get more out of that from a purely selfish standpoint. My personal ROI is higher from that than skipping the TSA line. So yes, on mobile voting, that risk is magnified by 20 fold. But to me, this is the only scalable solution to democracy. And because I've had this very weird career.

Where I had all this different experience in politics and then all this different experience in tech and because I didn't plan to make a lot of money, I just got really lucky like I'm a first generation American. I didn't grow up with any money. I worked in politics. I didn't make any money. And then when I worked for Uber, they couldn't afford my fee.

And so I took it in equity. I don't even know what equity meant when I said yes, but I just said yes. And then Uber became Uber and it became worth a lot of money. And then all of a sudden I had a lot of money. So to me, it's all kind of house money anyway. Okay. So like I'm going to use it to do the things that to me feel worthwhile.

And if I take risks that fail, so be it. 

Zibby: Wow. I love that attitude. And I think putting your money where your mouth is, is so important, right? There's, it's one thing to say, I wish this were different, but it's quite another to say, okay, here's my time. Here's my investment. And I will do anything to improve something that will not just benefit.

I'm still grappling with accepting the fact that politicians will not vote for the greater good. Like, do we have to accept that? 

Bradley: So I, so I, yeah. Well, two things. So one, literally, I almost worry now that you were like eavesdropping on my therapy session yesterday because this is what we talked about. So the first would be, from a personal level.

How do I feel good about making the effort knowing that the failure is a pretty decent chance, right? And how do I say, okay, all I can do is everything that I'm sacrificing to do this. And that has to be enough from a psychological fulfillment standpoint. And that's hard, right? Because this is super uphill.

And, you know, every time I try to raise money from other people, I get rejected continually because they're afraid of being criticized or the risk or whatever else. Uh, and there are lots of people who don't like mobile voting and they attack me publicly. And so, like, I take a lot of shit and I have to be willing to both take all of that and still find a way to feel good despite all the failure and rejection.

So that's number one. Number two would be, you know, isn't it depressing the fact that politicians are the way they are? So I accept them for who they are. In fact, my guess is that politicians in the Greek Senate and the Roman Senate and every democracy throughout history have effectively been the same way.

But the good news about them believing in nothing and being so desperately sort of attached to their own ambition and just in service of that at all costs is you can shift them, right? So when If you go back to the tax example, when we weren't mobilizing people and the taxi medallion owners would give a local city councilman a couple of grand every campaign cycle, you do what they want.

When I get 5, 000 people from your district to call and text and tweet and email saying, hey, leave this thing alone. You do what they want. And so to me, you know, if we can change the underlying inputs, it will shift the outputs, not because they'll become better people, but simply because if we take advantage of that same selfishness that drives all of their decisions, we can harness it to our benefit and we can get things done.

Like I think about, for example, I don't know if you've ever met him, but my brother in law happens to be in Congress and he is from Northern New Jersey. And Josh. Is one of the remaining 25 members of the house that's still on a swing district, and his job is exponentially more pleasant and better than everyone else is there because He is rewarded by his constituents for working with every right, so he will do bills with the Republicans.

He created this thing called the Problem Solvers Caucus. He can work with the far left. He can work with the far right. The far left tends to hate him because he's very, very pro Israel. But overall, you know, Josh has this freedom to work with everyone because, you know, he's one of the few people whose election is actively determined in the general election and not in the primary.

I think that ultimately, if you gave politicians the freedom to try to get more done, they'd feel better about themselves, and they'd feel better about their work, and they would like it, but what you have to do is get them over the hump of worrying that, oh, well, it might be a better system, but it might not be better for, you know, Me, right?

And that's gonna take this movement, right? But if you think about, for example, like same sex marriage, you know, that went pretty quickly in, like, less than a 20 year period from something where Democratic politicians like the Clintons were against it to it becoming the law of the land and just sort of widely accepted throughout the country.

And so really effective movements can change policy can change minds can't change laws. What's ironic about our movement is usually those movements are sort of at the radical fringes trying to get people to accept something that is usually, you know, considered out there. I'm trying to move everything to the middle.

Right. So it's a little ironic that, you know, my goal is just to be more centrist and more normal and more peaceful. But, you know, that's what I'm trying to do. 

Zibby: How does it go at Thanksgiving when you, when you talk about your views of politicians in general and you have a politician in the family? 

Bradley: So, you know, it's funny, it was really difficult for a while and there was definitely tension.

And I think in Josh's case specifically, He has proven to me, in part because of the luxury that he has as a, you know, true swing district member, but also in part just because of his own personality, he has proven to be an exception. Um, the other main thing I do out of my foundation are school meals, so we fund and run campaigns all over the country to mandate programs like that.

And Josh has been a tremendous partner on that both nationally and in New Jersey. And so he has kind of won my, my respect and heart. And for those of you who are in New Jersey, his name is Josh Gottheimer. He's running to be your governor next year. Um, so if you are going to vote in a democratic primary, I hope you'll give him a look.

Zibby: So hunger, mobile voting, do you have other things that are simmering that you haven't taken on in a big way, but you're like, Ooh, if I only had the time, I would really try this. 

Bradley: What are the other areas that, that gets to the more specifics of New York city. You know, I was born here, you know, I raised my kids here.

I have my businesses here, everything else. And on a sort of hoc basis, I jump into different issues, depending on sort of, so for example, three that I've been working on, one is. Illegal weed shops for the time that you, when you're in New York, I'm sure you notice that on every single corner there's an illegal weed shop and I think that has created a massive addiction among teenagers I've got two teenagers that you know live here.

I think they're okay but I know that they can buy weed effectively anywhere they want 24 7. And, you know, it's not like the weed when we were kids, like this is really potent, strong, scary stuff. And if you smoke it too much, it's mentally debilitating. And the mayor and the governor have effectively let these shops just sort of flourish and go unabated.

And I kind of went on a campaign publicly. I write a column for the daily news and I just beat the living crap out of the mayor so much until he finally said, okay, let's work together to solve it. Someone who worked for me is now at city hall. Running this effort. We've closed about 1100 legal weed shops so far, and I'm trying to keep pushing them as hard as I can.

Another one are our broker's fees. I don't know if you did you ever like rent an apartment in Manhattan when you were like in your 20s? You had to pay this like outrageous fee for someone who did absolutely nothing, right? They literally opened the door. I remember when I was like in my early 20s, you know, personally, this is bad. Bullshit. Like, why is this happening? And New York is the only city in the country that has this system, and I always thought, I wish someone would do something about it. And then about a year ago, a city councilman named Chi Oay introduced a bill that would ban brokers fees for rental apartments. And I have partnered with Chi and spent a bunch of money to move this bill forward and been a big public advocate for it, and lobby a lot of members and become sort of the, you know, when the real estate community says, oh, the business community's against it.

I'm like, no. You're against it because it's not good for you. I can speak for the business community as well because I'm part of it. And I can tell you that, you know, all it will do is let younger, talented people afford to live in New York. And that will make all of the rest of our businesses a lot better.

So that's one third of social media regulation. So I partnered with a state Senator, Andrew Bernardis last year on legislation that passed and has been enacted in New York. That bans algorithmic feeds from being sent to minors unless the parents opt into them. So the idea is to protect kids from just being bombarded with negative imagery, toxic stuff.

You know, I had a daughter who really went through a real self harm period by things that she learned on Instagram. She's okay now, but it was a scary situation. And unfortunately, that's very common. And so social media regulation. But what I would love to do, if I have a little more money that comes my way, Is have sort of a ongoing New York operation where every year I've kind of a pool of a couple million dollars that I can say, let's pull this.

Let's run ads on that. Let's lobby this and whatever just sort of feels important to me. I can work on. And then the fourth, obviously, like you said, it is books, both the bookstore and then also, as you know, book. We created and won the Gotham Book Prize, where we give away 50, 000 each year to the best book that came out that year set in New York City, maybe one day you'll write a I remember when I started reading Blank, I was really hoping there'd be a lot more of New York in it, so I'm like, that would be awesome if I could give Zibby the award, or at least nominate her for it, but, uh, hopefully the next book.

Zibby: Oh, my next book is also set in LA, but maybe now with the promise of this, you know, things struggle. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. 

Bradley: I'm super intrigued by LA, so I was there in August. And my youngest is going into 10th grade. And my plan is once he goes to college to do a version of what you've done, which is I'm going to live in LA from like January through April, because I want to be in a big city.

I don't want to be like the typical old Jew moving to Boca Raton, but I don't need once. I don't have two kids living here that are my responsibility. Like I don't need to be here. So my girlfriend Laurel and I actually were looking at. Um, neighborhoods. When we were there, we're like renting a place for a few weeks over Christmas and kind of getting a feel for LA to figure out where we might want to be.

So maybe there'll be an LA book prize at some point too. 

Zibby: Amazing. And if you want to talk LA neighborhoods at some point, I am not there as much as I would like to be. I'm still, my kids are still in school here in New York, but I do try to get out as much as I can and summers and all that. But yeah.

Anyway, happy to share any intel on that as well. In terms of your essay, you wrote an essay called Why Being Jewish Matters for On Being Jewish Now, which, as you mentioned, comes out October 1st in e book and audio book and in trade paperback on November 1st. Why did you say yes to this book and what did you get out of writing for it?

Bradley: Yeah, so one, you ask. You know, you and I as a listener, we do a lot together. We have a lot in common interests. And we help each other if we can, but, but more important, even if it wasn't you, I would have said yes, because, you know, I, I think it is more important than ever to be very clear and affirmative about being proud to be Jewish.

So, for example, you know, I'm wearing, it's under my shirt right now. But a star of David and actually usually when I'm wearing a t shirt, I deliberately now wear it over my shirt because my view is like, screw you. Like, I'm not going to be told that I can't be outwardly Jewish and I'm proud to be Jewish.

And, you know, the essay was about effectively the feeling of identification that has gotten stronger in many ways because of October 7th. And I tell the story of Laurel and I were in Montreal for a weekend and our flight home was canceled because of rain. And we thought, Hey, maybe, you know, it's like a seven hour drive.

Like, why don't we just rent a car and suck it up? And that way we don't have to do this all over again. Tomorrow we get down to the car rental place and everybody had had the same idea, right? So it's a mad house. There's no cars available. And it turns out actually taking the car out of a country is a much bigger process than we had understood anyway.

And we overhear these people say to someone else. Hey, are you going to New York? I'm thinking of renting a van. I need people to split the driving and the cost and like the entire single lesson of childhood more than anything else is don't get in a van with strangers. Right? I taught my kids that. You teach your kids that.

And Laurel and I immediately raise our hand and say, we'll go. And then for a second, I'm like, what am I doing? And I noticed that the driver had a star of David tattoo on his leg. And that kind of gave me a little bit of comfort to just go up and talk to him. And then they noticed my star of David and we started talking and, you know, ended up with them and 10 other strangers in a, in a seven hour van ride from Montreal to Manhattan, where we got into two 30 in the morning.

And it was actually kind of a fun experience. And so that kind of leads into the broader point about. You know, being openly Jewish, but also our responsibility as Jews to show the world who we are, right? You know, we're 0.02 percent of the global population, and yet our contributions to every field, from the sciences and math, to humanities, to business, to art, to everything, has been exproportionally, exponentially disproportionate to any other culture.

And we need to keep doing that and we need to keep helping people. And yes, we have to support, you know, Jewish causes, but the truth is we just have to keep doing good things overall because we have to show the world that all of these stereotypes about us, and these are terrorists have been perpetuated now for 5, 700 years are not true and we're not going to accept them.

And so that's why I was actually really grateful to have the chance to write for the book and having read, you know, a lot of the other essays in it. You know, I, I can tell the listeners that it is really a wonderful book. I'm proud to have been part of it. And I really hope people check it out. 

Zibby: And what does being Jewish mean to you now?

Bradley: I think in many ways, it's a few things. So one is I'm more proud of it than ever because you have to confront it more. You take it for granted. It's just like something that who you are. Right. And then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, this is very much an identity that very few other people collectively share.

And I have to be very mindful of that. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I spend a lot of time, I think, like, like, like a lot of other Jews now reading about Israel, thinking about Israel, talking to people about Israel and trying to figure out sort of how I feel about all of it. And it really becoming part of, you know, like every morning I pray.

And one of the things that I. Pray for sort of a few different things each day for the world. And since October 7th, you know, every single day, you know, Israel has been in that prayer and it wasn't necessarily before it, it might have been, if something came up, but now it has just become, you know, basically praying that, that Harris beats Trump, I'm praying for Israel and then I'll pick one or two other things, but, you know, so really it has just become much more.

On my mind, I feel like I'm much more engaged in Israeli politics and policy issues. And by the way, I don't think there are easy answers, right? So like, I am on a daily text thread with four other kind of political operative consultant types who are all Jewish and all very stereotypically New York Jews.

And literally right before I signed on to this, you know, I was saying on one hand and stop me if this is getting too political for this podcast, I really do believe that Netanyahu wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice the life of an Arab or a Jew if it kept him in power for one more day. On the other hand, I think of the first Iraq war and Bush pulling out too early and everything that that then led to and thinking maybe there's a real lesson from there, which is like, no, you're not going to eradicate Hamas completely.

And yes, we are engendering an entire new generation of People in Gaza and in the Arab world who will hate Israel, of course, but at the same time, if we, the more that we can decimate Hamas's infrastructure and their leadership, the harder it's going to be for them to rebuild. I think the real success that we saw when the U.S. was in Afghanistan and went after Al Qaeda was that we were able to really take apart their operation, and that has resulted in not having a serious deal. domestic, you know, terrorism incident on U.S. Soil. If you don't count things like school shootings for the last 20 years or so since 9/11. So maybe the answer is you stay and finish the job and maybe the Philadelphia corridor is more important than you think.

And then you heard like a lot say that it's not so I don't know. And I try to know what I don't know. But I don't remember another time in my life where I've been this absorbed and engaged in what's happening over there. 

Zibby: Well, well, Bradley, you are not only brilliant, but you are a mensch at the same time.

So there is, there is that. So thank you. for, thank you for all that you do and for so many people and people who will never know that it was you who helped them or you that made their lives better or helped their children and can never say thank you. So on behalf of all of them, thank you. 

Bradley: I appreciate that.

Thank you. 

Zibby: Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you. 

Bradley: All right, dude. Thanks, Zibby. I'll talk to you later. 

Zibby: Bye. 

Bradley: Bye. That was awesome.