Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta, and we are welcoming back today, Bradley Tusk, who's a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropists, and writer.

He's the co-founder of Tusk Ventures, the world's first venture capital fund that invests solely in early-stage startups in highly regulated industries.

And he is the founder of the consulting firm Tusk Strategies. And he has

written a few books, one called The Fixer, which is absolutely incredible. And I would say underrated

about his times as a political fixer for everything from incredibly flawed politicians

to better ones like Michael Bloomberg and then some companies.

And then he has written a fictional book, which we're going to talk about today called

Obvious in hindsight, but it is based on a lot of experience in the trenches of politics.

And I would say, I haven't read a book in a long time that though fictional teaches you

as much about the world and how it actually works as this

one. So I'd say it's kind of a blend. And he has done so much. I mean, I could talk forever about

this. He hosts a podcast called Firewall, which I've been on before. And he runs a bookstore

called P&T knitwear on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a block away from where I used to live. It's a wonderful space that you should check out. He's also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. I can go on and on and on and on. But Bradley, welcome back. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Well, congratulations on the book, and we're going to get to that because I actually think there's a lot of ways we could weave in and out of your book and what's been happening in the world as you've released this book. But to start off, you've written a few things recently since you've released your book that I wanted to ask you about, the first of which is our mayor. You and I, I think, I don't even have to ask you that we may have talked about this, but I get the sense that you and I probably had a similar feeling about Adams in the sense that, like, I don't know if he was your first choice or I can't even remember if he was mine, but I was certainly excited to have somebody as mayor who wanted to do the job. That was because we did not have one before. We did not have that for eight years with the boss, yeah. And I would say I've been disappointed. And not that he doesn't want to do the job, it's that he, you know, I think some of his flaws have gotten in the way of getting anything serious done. But you wrote something today saying, like, it's not all done for Eric Adams.

So give me your sense of where you think stand right now.

So look, things are certainly bleak at the moment.

There is a serious federal corruption investigation into him.

We don't know what they have based on what we know publicly, and the main thing seems to be

that he asked the fire commissioner to

give us temporary certificate of occupancy to the Turkish embassy. That doesn't in and of itself

seem like enough to indict the sitting mayor over. But at the same time, the FBI doesn't usually

confront the sitting mayor on the streets and confiscate their phones unless they feel like they've got the goods on

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