"Shortly after his tenth birthday," according to Maloney's biography on his own website, Brain Terminal, he "was introduced to his two main passions: politics and technology." Politics was the subject of family dinner-table discussions, and his parents were liberal, so he handed out flyers in Manhattan for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Talk radio, however, introduced him to conservative ideas, and when Maloney, as a student at JHS 167, had to give a classroom presentation on nuclear weapons, he rejected "the propaganda propagated in schools... that President Reagan was going to drive us headlong into nuclear war," knowing "viscerally that our weapons protected our country and helped keep the peace." In an interview with the New York Sun, Maloney described that incident in this way: when delivering a classroom presentation "about the danger of nuclear weapons," he "realized I didn't believe a word I was saying." In 1989 he volunteered on Rudolph Giuliani's mayoral campaign.