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Obvious in Hindsight
A tech start-up and their cutthroat consultants will stop at nothing to realize their dream of filling the skies of America’s cities with flying cars…and their opposition is equally determined to bring that dream crashing down.
Dozens of start-up tech companies are forming each week, innovating at a breakneck pace and forcing change overnight, ready or not. In the blisteringly funny Obvious in Hindsight , the new technology in question is flying cars, and they’re coming to a crowded urban area near you. But before that happens, the slick and powerful political consultants campaigning to get the new tech adopted will have to manipulate political operatives to their advantage while overcoming fierce opposition from groups hostile to the idea, from the strategically aligned taxi cab and rideshare companies to the squawking, costumed Audubon Society, the socialists, and the Russian mob.
This story takes readers on a richly imagined, page-turning journey through multiple cities populated by opposing special interest groups, hucksters, and corrupt power brokers. A riveting and ultimately insightful satire that provides an insider’s view of how capitalism, politics, and entrepreneurship intersect, Obvious in Hindsight is a timely novel destined to become one of the most entertaining cautionary tales of the millennium.
Dozens of start-up tech companies are forming each week, innovating at a breakneck pace and forcing change overnight, ready or not. In the blisteringly funny Obvious in Hindsight , the new technology in question is flying cars, and they’re coming to a crowded urban area near you. But before that happens, the slick and powerful political consultants campaigning to get the new tech adopted will have to manipulate political operatives to their advantage while overcoming fierce opposition from groups hostile to the idea, from the strategically aligned taxi cab and rideshare companies to the squawking, costumed Audubon Society, the socialists, and the Russian mob.
This story takes readers on a richly imagined, page-turning journey through multiple cities populated by opposing special interest groups, hucksters, and corrupt power brokers. A riveting and ultimately insightful satire that provides an insider’s view of how capitalism, politics, and entrepreneurship intersect, Obvious in Hindsight is a timely novel destined to become one of the most entertaining cautionary tales of the millennium.
- GenresFiction
272 pages, Hardcover
Published November 28, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 28, 2023
The premise of this novel is excellent - it's a cross between House of Cards and The Circle. A tech company is attempting to get its flying cars off the ground (both literally and metaphorically). The company's erratic CEO has brought in a political lobbying company, because it's no easy job to get permission for flying cars in the skies of a city (their initial targets are New York, Los Angeles and Austin). Meanwhile it's also no easy job to get the car to fly safely at all.
Bradley Tusk - who has been both a political operator and a venture capitalist, so has an ideal background - brings to the fore the two people at the top of the lobbyists - the ruthless Nick and his number two, Lisa (arguably the main protagonist), Susan the CEO, and her chief engineer, Yevgeny. They join a large cast of characters from FBI agents to corrupt city mayors and union bosses. Tusk also gives a very cynical (but probably accurate) picture of the totally self-serving nature of US politics.
It's a great storyline, even if it does verge more into Tom Sharpe territory later on (more on that in a moment). And I enjoyed reading it. I'd definitely give it four stars for the ideas. But it could have been better. Tusk's writing style isn't particularly engaging. We get too many characters thrown at us, without the space to develop (or even, occasionally, to keep track of who is who). And the dramatic tension isn't particularly well handled. It's not really a page turner.
In case you aren't familiar with Tom Sharpe, he was a British satirical novelist who particularly took on academia (both new universities and Cambridge), using sledgehammer-unsubtle farcical situations. What I really wanted Obvious in Hindsight to be (what is that title about?) was a sizzling political thriller, like House of Cards, with the added fun of the dodgy goings on of the tech billionaires (hence my reference to The Circle). And there are bits where this happens. But, presumably in an attempt to add humour, we also get deeply farcical elements, such as FBI agents (one of whom is obsessed with disgusting sounding eating contests) operating from a kosher Mexican Korean food truck - and then there is the public test of the flying car where the passenger is a steer (a bullock in English English) that also happens to be the mascot of a college football team. What could possibly go wrong?
It was so close to being a really good book that I genuinely do recommend giving it a go - but it should have had more of an editorial steer (not a bullock).
Bradley Tusk - who has been both a political operator and a venture capitalist, so has an ideal background - brings to the fore the two people at the top of the lobbyists - the ruthless Nick and his number two, Lisa (arguably the main protagonist), Susan the CEO, and her chief engineer, Yevgeny. They join a large cast of characters from FBI agents to corrupt city mayors and union bosses. Tusk also gives a very cynical (but probably accurate) picture of the totally self-serving nature of US politics.
It's a great storyline, even if it does verge more into Tom Sharpe territory later on (more on that in a moment). And I enjoyed reading it. I'd definitely give it four stars for the ideas. But it could have been better. Tusk's writing style isn't particularly engaging. We get too many characters thrown at us, without the space to develop (or even, occasionally, to keep track of who is who). And the dramatic tension isn't particularly well handled. It's not really a page turner.
In case you aren't familiar with Tom Sharpe, he was a British satirical novelist who particularly took on academia (both new universities and Cambridge), using sledgehammer-unsubtle farcical situations. What I really wanted Obvious in Hindsight to be (what is that title about?) was a sizzling political thriller, like House of Cards, with the added fun of the dodgy goings on of the tech billionaires (hence my reference to The Circle). And there are bits where this happens. But, presumably in an attempt to add humour, we also get deeply farcical elements, such as FBI agents (one of whom is obsessed with disgusting sounding eating contests) operating from a kosher Mexican Korean food truck - and then there is the public test of the flying car where the passenger is a steer (a bullock in English English) that also happens to be the mascot of a college football team. What could possibly go wrong?
It was so close to being a really good book that I genuinely do recommend giving it a go - but it should have had more of an editorial steer (not a bullock).
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July 29, 2023I loved the description of this novel and was really looking forward to reading it. In large it was an okay, easy read and was interesting to see the interplay between PR and politics. Some of the characters were very superficially written, literally just enough for them to serve their purpose, and even the main characters you end up knowing very little about, and caring even less. One of the main characters, who is straight laced throughout most of the book, seems to be come a bit of a lunatic at the end with no real rhyme or reason.
I read a lot of YA fiction and that comes across as more complicated than this book almost every time.
I was disappointed that the end proved to be a selling tactic to get people to look at the authors website/business interest. More like marketing material than a novel in it's own right.
I read a lot of YA fiction and that comes across as more complicated than this book almost every time.
I was disappointed that the end proved to be a selling tactic to get people to look at the authors website/business interest. More like marketing material than a novel in it's own right.
May 13, 2026
I went into this expecting a competent insider novel and ended up missing my subway stop twice. Obvious in Hindsight is funnier than it has any right to be, smarter than most of its reviewers seem to have noticed, and a much more interesting book if you read it next to The Fixer and Vote With Your Phone instead of treating it as a standalone debut. While the flying car startup is the plot, the real subject is the gap between what tech people think politics is and what it actually is, and Tusk has earned the right to write about that gap better than anyone.
The setup: FlightDeck wants to legalize flying cars in New York, LA, and Austin. The CEO Susan Howard has promised her investors a launch by the end of her first quarter, which is hilarious if you’ve ever been near a city council. She hires Firewall, run by Nick Denevito, whose CV in the early pages is the kind of joke that tells you everything: he “made esports betting legal in sixteen states. Stopped Phoenix from banning Pokémon Go. Took down the Butler’s Union. Made mini golf an Olympic sport.” That last one is dumb and perfect. The rest of the book lives at that level when it’s working.
The closest literary cousin is Christopher Buckley, especially Thank You for Smoking. Buckley writes lobbyists and spin doctors as protagonists, not villains, and refuses to moralize while he shows you how the machinery works. Tusk does the same. The difference is that Buckley imagined this world. Tusk worked the jobs. There’s also a strain of Michael Lewis here, the same gift for finding one character whose specific weirdness explains a whole system. The Jimmy Van Meter scene in LA, where he looks like “he’s carrying a stack of headshots in his briefcase, just in case he runs across a casting agent looking for someone to play a dashing lobbyist,” is the kind of detail Lewis would have spent ten pages building. Tusk does it in a sentence and moves on.
Here’s where I want to push on him, because the book is worth pushing on. Tusk’s load-bearing claim across all three books is that politicians don’t do the right thing because what they actually want is to stay in office, and the fix is to widen the electorate through mobile voting so the median voter pulls them back toward sanity. It’s a more honest diagnosis than most people in his world will make on the page, and the “10 Rules That Demystify Politics” at the end, which the book pretends are Nick’s but are obviously Tusk’s, are the most honest pages here and worth the price by themselves. But the novel is least convincing when it leans hardest on the thesis. By the time the FBI subplot resolves and the book starts gesturing at its argument, you can feel him stop joking and start arguing. The funniest pages are the ones where he just lets the characters be venal and ridiculous and trusts you to draw the lesson.
The other thing I want to say, because nobody else seems willing to: Nick’s “made esports betting legal in sixteen states” line is the most morally interesting sentence in the book and the one Tusk himself can’t quite hold the gaze on. He’s been clear in The Fixer about his work for FanDuel and DraftKings, and the customer-mobilization playbook on those fights was real political engineering and it worked. But it’s 2026 now, calls to gambling hotlines have more than doubled in states that legalized, and forty-seven percent of men under thirty now say legal sports betting is bad for society, more than double the share from three years ago. The “we just helped legalize something people were doing illegally anyway” defense doesn’t really hold up, because legalization plus push notifications plus celebrity ads created demand that wasn’t there before. The school breakfast guy and the DraftKings guy live in the same body, and the novel briefly stares at that tension and then looks away. I would have read a much longer book about that.
Four stars, and I think the people giving it three are reviewing it for the wrong things. It’s not competing with literary fiction. It’s competing with everything else written about tech and politics, and it’s near the top of that list.
The setup: FlightDeck wants to legalize flying cars in New York, LA, and Austin. The CEO Susan Howard has promised her investors a launch by the end of her first quarter, which is hilarious if you’ve ever been near a city council. She hires Firewall, run by Nick Denevito, whose CV in the early pages is the kind of joke that tells you everything: he “made esports betting legal in sixteen states. Stopped Phoenix from banning Pokémon Go. Took down the Butler’s Union. Made mini golf an Olympic sport.” That last one is dumb and perfect. The rest of the book lives at that level when it’s working.
The closest literary cousin is Christopher Buckley, especially Thank You for Smoking. Buckley writes lobbyists and spin doctors as protagonists, not villains, and refuses to moralize while he shows you how the machinery works. Tusk does the same. The difference is that Buckley imagined this world. Tusk worked the jobs. There’s also a strain of Michael Lewis here, the same gift for finding one character whose specific weirdness explains a whole system. The Jimmy Van Meter scene in LA, where he looks like “he’s carrying a stack of headshots in his briefcase, just in case he runs across a casting agent looking for someone to play a dashing lobbyist,” is the kind of detail Lewis would have spent ten pages building. Tusk does it in a sentence and moves on.
Here’s where I want to push on him, because the book is worth pushing on. Tusk’s load-bearing claim across all three books is that politicians don’t do the right thing because what they actually want is to stay in office, and the fix is to widen the electorate through mobile voting so the median voter pulls them back toward sanity. It’s a more honest diagnosis than most people in his world will make on the page, and the “10 Rules That Demystify Politics” at the end, which the book pretends are Nick’s but are obviously Tusk’s, are the most honest pages here and worth the price by themselves. But the novel is least convincing when it leans hardest on the thesis. By the time the FBI subplot resolves and the book starts gesturing at its argument, you can feel him stop joking and start arguing. The funniest pages are the ones where he just lets the characters be venal and ridiculous and trusts you to draw the lesson.
The other thing I want to say, because nobody else seems willing to: Nick’s “made esports betting legal in sixteen states” line is the most morally interesting sentence in the book and the one Tusk himself can’t quite hold the gaze on. He’s been clear in The Fixer about his work for FanDuel and DraftKings, and the customer-mobilization playbook on those fights was real political engineering and it worked. But it’s 2026 now, calls to gambling hotlines have more than doubled in states that legalized, and forty-seven percent of men under thirty now say legal sports betting is bad for society, more than double the share from three years ago. The “we just helped legalize something people were doing illegally anyway” defense doesn’t really hold up, because legalization plus push notifications plus celebrity ads created demand that wasn’t there before. The school breakfast guy and the DraftKings guy live in the same body, and the novel briefly stares at that tension and then looks away. I would have read a much longer book about that.
Four stars, and I think the people giving it three are reviewing it for the wrong things. It’s not competing with literary fiction. It’s competing with everything else written about tech and politics, and it’s near the top of that list.
January 19, 2024
Cute story line – a start-up company trying to sell and build flying cars – with various competitors, politicians, and consultants playing their own role in supporting and opposing the concept for reasons beyond whether it was a good or bad idea. Add in quirky characters and fun ideas like detectives eavesdropping from a Kosher Mexican food truck. You should get a fun and maybe funny book. But while some pages had fun ideas and even generated a couple of laughs, everyone in this book was scheming, cheating, and presenting the worse in humankind. Worse part is the last two pages, the ‘purpose’ of the book. That reminded me of the scene in Christmas Story where Ralphie discovered the answer to his decoder ring.
This book is in the House of Cards view of politics, not West Wing. He speaks about how none of the Socialists paid their taxes. The author created a mayor who put an addition on his beach house after being paid off for making a DUI disappear, something that would be impossible with today’s computerized criminal system. The author casts every politician – those on the “public dole” – as someone who is on the make, having not made any money their life. Union leaders steal from their members as if it’s cast in their union constitution, they have to be criminals.
The author was capable of more. When the book spoke about online funerals with 3D printed tombstones and automatic cancellations of the deceased’s social accounts, it had to produce a laugh from most readers. The brief story line of how people took advantage of the Disneyfication of Times Square was also funny.
The author also claims that 117 startups are currently working on flying cars, fueled by $8.4 billion in total investment from venture capitalists.
But the most irritating portion of the book is why the author wrote it – the book’s own decoder ring: saying the only way we can truly have a democracy is by allowing people to vote by their phones. He spells out this solution after declaring things like: “Expecting politicians to ‘do the right thing and defy human nature never works and that the only thing politicians “want to do is stay in office.” The author doesn’t think any politicians care about issues or truly want to change our community. It’s a sad reflection for someone who spent much of his life in elected politics or office.
This book is in the House of Cards view of politics, not West Wing. He speaks about how none of the Socialists paid their taxes. The author created a mayor who put an addition on his beach house after being paid off for making a DUI disappear, something that would be impossible with today’s computerized criminal system. The author casts every politician – those on the “public dole” – as someone who is on the make, having not made any money their life. Union leaders steal from their members as if it’s cast in their union constitution, they have to be criminals.
The author was capable of more. When the book spoke about online funerals with 3D printed tombstones and automatic cancellations of the deceased’s social accounts, it had to produce a laugh from most readers. The brief story line of how people took advantage of the Disneyfication of Times Square was also funny.
The author also claims that 117 startups are currently working on flying cars, fueled by $8.4 billion in total investment from venture capitalists.
But the most irritating portion of the book is why the author wrote it – the book’s own decoder ring: saying the only way we can truly have a democracy is by allowing people to vote by their phones. He spells out this solution after declaring things like: “Expecting politicians to ‘do the right thing and defy human nature never works and that the only thing politicians “want to do is stay in office.” The author doesn’t think any politicians care about issues or truly want to change our community. It’s a sad reflection for someone who spent much of his life in elected politics or office.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 18, 2023
This is a funny, eye-opening political satire about a campaign to legalize flying cars in major American cities. It features a flying car startup and its various opposition groups, including Uber, socialists, transit workers, and the Russian mob. The book is about a campaign to legalize flying cars in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. On one side is the flying car startup and its vicious political consultants. On the other side are Uber, the Audubon Society, the socialists, the transit workers, and the Russian mob.
It's clear from reading Obvious in Hindsight that the author has much personal experience in the world he writes about. The author provides a fascinating look into the actual workings of politics and technology, drawing from his extensive experience in both fields. While flying cars may seem futuristic, he makes the reader believe they're right around the corner, and you can envision the excitement and outrage their arrival would bring. Obvious in Hindsight is a timely novel destined to become one of the most engaging cautionary tales of the millennium.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at: https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...
It's clear from reading Obvious in Hindsight that the author has much personal experience in the world he writes about. The author provides a fascinating look into the actual workings of politics and technology, drawing from his extensive experience in both fields. While flying cars may seem futuristic, he makes the reader believe they're right around the corner, and you can envision the excitement and outrage their arrival would bring. Obvious in Hindsight is a timely novel destined to become one of the most engaging cautionary tales of the millennium.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at: https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...
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March 30, 2024
I thought it was fun how the author (not a politician!) painted all politicians as bad people (might be true), and even says they'll never "go against human nature" to do the right thing (implying human nature is to be a bad person).
I thought it was SUPER fun how the author utilized this entire book as a cover to push his own (future) voting app, which I'm sure will be for the good of the people and not just another self-serving, profit-driven data mine. He wrote a ""satire"" about the games and BTS corruption of modern-day politics, so we can definitely trust him. He's not a politician!
I thought it was SUPER fun how the author utilized this entire book as a cover to push his own (future) voting app, which I'm sure will be for the good of the people and not just another self-serving, profit-driven data mine. He wrote a ""satire"" about the games and BTS corruption of modern-day politics, so we can definitely trust him. He's not a politician!
July 21, 2024
Satire is hard to do well and unfortunately this missed the mark for me. A lot of moving parts, a lot of characters, and disappointing resolution. I have no doubt this is a fairly accurate portrait of tech start ups + policy and politics, it just didn't have high enough stakes as a story to get too invested in the characters or outcome. All of the name-dropping of current websites, app, and brands was cringey, too.
November 29, 2023
I couldn’t put this book down. It’s so non-stop funny that you don’t even realize at first how expertly it’s revealing the way the levers are pulled in the intersecting worlds of politics and tech. A fast-paced satirical thriller with a bigger mission, it shows us who we’ve become and what the future looks like. Highly recommend.
December 3, 2024
Quick, indulgent and at times funny satire that examines the political machine of tech-centric visions of the future. In a world of hyperloops, Tesla tunnels, AI and waymos, Tusk feels very at home in in his skeptical narrative of a flying car legalization effort.
February 21, 2024
Great peek behind the curtain of politics and venture capital. Easy read but kept me interested throughout.
April 13, 2024
A fun, quick read with a couple laugh-out-loud moments
June 25, 2024
SIX WORD REVIEW: Such are the politics of progress.
December 30, 2024
A new favorite of mine - Tusk does an excellent job in providing realistic motivations to believable characters in ever-crazier political and business situations.
August 27, 2023
Cool, fun, exciting fiction combining the business and political worlds. Not my usual genre but still had me hooked!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews