Firewall with Bradley Tusk

This is a rare window into cutting-edge political tactics. Chris Coffey and Matt Munsil of Tusk Strategies join Bradley to talk about the firm's high success rate in the midterms, specifically the half dozen Republican House candidates they worked against on behalf of the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, a clean-energy group. In the second half of the episode, they are joined by key members of the Tu...

Never mind all the talk about waves and tsunamis. “The number one thing that matters," says Bradley, "would be the Democrats taking one chamber of Congress, not because I love the Democrats particularly, but because I really think Trump is the worst president we’ve ever had. And not giving him the ability to push legislation through Congress is critical.” But no margin on Tuesday changes the deepe...

“Nobody knows anything,” screenwriter William Goldman famously said about Hollywood. These days, the same feels true about AI. Akash Pasricha, host of TITV , The Information’s daily tech show, switches sides of the mic for the first time to test Bradley’s ideas and arguments with the rigor of a beat reporter. They discuss Meta’s bet that free, ad-supported models can beat paid subscriptions, and w...

The quiet truth of venture capital is that it's not the optimal way for many new businesses to fund themselves. Bradley does the math on how bootstrapping can often be the wiser choice. "Venture funding is really great if you fail," he says, "because you don’t have to pay us back. But if you succeed, it’s really expensive." Plus, he previews this huge week in politics: Israel’s election, the noisy...

“Management bundles a lot of things together,” says Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta. “I only liked some of them, and I was terrible at other things.” Bahat joins Bradley to talk candidly about how he runs the in-house venture fund for Bloomberg LP, focusing on the future of work. Venture capital is a customer-service job built on lists and follow-ups, he says. He does it with a nine-person team...

Just as the Los Angeles Dodgers were undone by money hubris, argues Bradley, so too is our society. What can we do about it? He has three remedies. Plus: Though Elon Musk’s spending on the November midterms won’t stop the blue wave, it might still achieve his broader objective; and why the new documentary You Can See Everything reveals more about us than about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth...

Philip K. Howard is an agitator for common sense. He’s been at it since at least 1994, when he wrote a book about public-sector dysfunction called The Death of Common Sense . During the tumult of the 1960s, he explains to Bradley, Americans stopped trusting anyone in government to make sensible decisions and replaced judgment with thousand-page rulebooks. And the country that devalued judgment ult...

Here's a novel way to make a dent in the housing crisis. City Council member Virginia Maloney joins Firewall to make the case for her Shared City Act, which would turn half-empty office floors into legal shared housing (private rooms, common kitchens and baths), adding as many as 37,000 beds in a decade. She and Bradley also get into homeless encampments, why City Hall can't seem to make job creat...

So that likable, conscientious CEO warning that AI could kill us all — is he still going to be so likable and conscientious if his stock price falls off a cliff? Let’s take that off the table, argues Bradley: Until we know how to manage AI, Anthropic should not go public. As for Trump letting tech CEOs police themselves, well, that’s only going to further poison popular opinion and make data cente...

What would you do with a year devoted to getting good at one thing? Ravi Gupta, good friend of the pod, is back on Firewall to talk about his new book, The Invisible List , in which he argues for chasing one new passion every year, no matter how busy or stuck you feel. He and Bradley talk about tennis as a midlife balm, the surprising difficulty of making risotto, the secret greatness of Western N...

What New York really needs is a City Hall that nails the normie stuff: getting the homeless off the streets, fighting crime and fixing the budget. Plus, Bradley explains why nobody should feel compelled to abide by strict religious rules, argues that declaring martial law on Election Day would only hasten Trump's downfall, and gives a hearty plug to Ari Emanuel's memoir. This episode was taped at...

How big of a blue wave should we expect next month? Sheila Nix, CEO of Tusk Philanthropies and veteran of three presidential campaigns, tells Bradley that the House is a done deal for the Democrats, while arguing that Chuck Schumer's smartest move would be to win the majority and then walk away. Together, they dig into how voters forgive crazy but never phony, why AOC's path to the nomination is m...

Among tech titans, there is an invisible line dividing those who add something meaningful to our society and those who are merely extracting value for their own benefit. Bradley reviews the roster of Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman and more. Plus, will the e-bike tragedy in the East Village force Mayor Mamdani to do the right thing, does standing in line bring New Yorkers together, what Bill...

When Zibby Owens, author of the forthcoming Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances, and Found the Plot , was at her lowest point, she started taking baby steps toward what would turn into a bustling mini-empire, built in and around the publishing business. Bradley talks to Zibby about how it all came together. On starting from nothing: "I recorded a podcast into my phone sitting o...

Now that AI risk has jumped from theoretical to totally real and frightening, Bradley lays out a five-point plan for what OpenAI and Anthropic should do if they're serious about safety: disclose everything about how they're developing their products, draw real distinctions between what the technology can do and what people actually need, enact unilateral safety measures like kill switches and inde...

That's what the framers would say if they popped out of a time machine and saw our politics today, argues John Opdycke. From the start, they cautioned against political parties. Forty-one percent of the country now identifies as independent, yet closed primaries in states like New York lock them out of the elections that actually decide who governs. Opdycke, who runs a group called Open Primaries...

But are Americans really upset about them — or something much larger? The data-center fury, Bradley argues in today's episode and in his recent Substack , reflects humankind’s inability to cope with the ever accelerating pace of technological change. Plus, why Mayor Mamdani's penchant for taking political gambles will eventually cost him, a happy-ending story of how a lost dog brought out the best...

But a concrete economic plan for extreme job losses just might. In this repost from an episode first released in June, Daniel Schreiber, CEO of Lemonade and founder of the MOSAIC AI Policy Institute, joins Bradley to make a surprisingly hopeful case. The enormous wealth generated by AI can be captured and redistributed in a way that leaves almost everyone better off, he argues, without raising tax...

Bradley talks to Michael Idov, author of The Cormorant Hunt , about how his own life — coming to the US from Latvia at age 16, running a café on the Lower East Side into the ground, getting discovered by Nora Ephron and moving to Moscow as editor of GQ Russia — feeds his fiction, as well as the passage from his novel that turned Bradley into a superfan: "The left-right distinction, he kept having...

If you write out a list of bad things happening in the world right now, it's easy to feel the apocalypse closing in on us. To counteract that kind of negative thinking, Bradley makes a list of the most important things about the world that are improving, including breakthroughs in medicine and gene editing, falling murder and opioid death rates, record US charitable giving, clean energy advances,...

What can be done to preserve the value of learning in the age of AI? Bradley sits down with Adam Chilton, the dean of University of Chicago Law School, to discuss his vision for fortifying legal education. Chilton argues that critical thinking and judgment, the muscles built by Socratic teaching, are the skills AI can't easily replace. But at the same time, students need training in applying AI in...

Bradley returns from a week-long stay at the Hoffman Institute, an intensive personal-development program that he calls “the single most helpful experience I’ve ever had.” He explains how it reframed his understanding of childhood patterns, self-criticism, and emotional healing, including a cathartic exercise that drew out an important lesson. "We literally drew a picture of our dark side on a pos...

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig joined Bradley for a live event last month at P&T Knitwear, co-hosted by Teddy Himler of Optimist Ventures, about the two most fundamental threats to American democracy and what to do about them. Lessig, founder of EqualCitizens. US and author of numerous books on copyright, technology, and political corruption, makes a surprisingly hopeful case that Super...

Bradley shares his ten rules for writing well, starting with the most important: get it down fast and spend almost all your time editing. Plus: why the annual outrage over admissions to New York's most selective public schools keeps missing the point; how Governor Hochul's data center moratorium will play out, and what Bradley is doing on his non-vacation in the Canadian Rockies. This episode was...

Was MAGA's cultural dominance ever real, or was it always partly a joint hallucination of self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals? David Wallace-Wells , opinion columnist for the New York Times, joins Bradley to argue that the vibe shift, to the extent it ever existed, has reversed itself. Trump's approval ratings are in freefall, his celebration of the nation's 250th birthday w...