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 Tusk Strategies team: Lizzie Han, Simone Kanter, Alejandro Gonzalez Vega and Tanner Palin.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 deeper problem: “We still have a system that effectively incentivizes everyone to just attack each other and have one-sided policy and ideology, because when everything is gerrymandered, only the primaries matter, and primary turnout is 10 percent. We have this tendency to think that once we’ve elected someone, now everything that they promised is going to happen. And even if they are truly well-intentioned and are willing to not put their own political and emotional needs first, it’s still unlikely they’re going to be able to accomplish what you want them to accomplish, because they’re working within a system where all of the structural incentives are aligned towards dysfunction and failure.” Plus: the logic of Haley Stevens’ crossover endorsement in Michigan, the Democrats’ self-defeating trick in Alaska, and why Netanyahu clinging to power feeds the American left’s antisemitic impulses.

“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 why Zuckerberg is now building an enterprise business too, along with why OpenAI may be the most confused of the labs. They get into how Google’s end-to-end stack of chips, cloud, models and apps gets overlooked while everyone watches the leaderboards, and how an Anthropic IPO might trigger a market correction that’s beneficial for the industry, if not for our nerves. Plus, when asked for advice on a video strategy for Firewall, Akash looks around at the studio’s bright color scheme and says, “Lean into the orangeness.”This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 stretch run of the midterms and the big blue wave he sees coming, though he doesn't expect the winning party to do much with it. "Democrats," he predicts, "will run a hell of a kabuki show for the next two years."This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

“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 that hasn’t grown in years. Any single partner can say yes to a deal, and the firm publishes its operating manual on GitHub. Though he cultivates interests outside work — “I’m a terrible chess player, but I play every day” — the job is never far from his mind: “I think of myself as having a work addiction. I think of myself as managing it reasonably well, but it is a work addiction.”This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 Holmes. Turns out she’s a pretty serious Dodger, too.

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 ultimately tried to correct itself by electing Donald Trump, who honors no rules at all. Though the societal snafu Howard identified three decades ago has only worsened with time, he keeps coming up with new ways to fight the problem, most recently a vision for government he calls the Green Light. “People say, well, have you done any good?” says Howard. “And I say, I think I have a more or less perfect record of failure. But at least I’m trying.”This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 creators feel wanted, putting AI to work inside city government, age checks for teens on e-bikes, and whether independents should get a vote in primaries their taxes pay for.This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 centers harder to build. Plus, the Times' 100 biggest questions in science is the Gray Lady at her best; the war in Iran has turned a boring industry into a juggernaut; why the oldest, tiredest brand imaginable could make for a perfect pop-up; and an impassioned endorsement of Digger, the Tom Cruise movie critics hated, because it’s actually about something important.This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 New York, dinner parties where every guest confesses a meaningful failure and why hobbies are cool. "Hobbies," says Gupta, "are how you meet your friends, your significant others. It's how you inspire your kids. It's how you show your wife or your husband that you're sexy."This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Send us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: [email protected] to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.