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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 team: Lizzie Han, Simone Kanter, Alejandro Gonzalez Vega and Tanner Palin.
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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 independent evaluators, aggressively push for robust regulation and — the big one — postpone their IPOs until the risk is under control.
That's what the framers would say if they popped out of a time machine and saw our politics today, argues John Opdycke.
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 to remind himself, no longer applied.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Bradley shares his ten rules for writing well, starting with the most important: get it down fast and spend almost all your time editing.
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 was a farce and the war against Iran is turning into a quagmire. But can Democrats seize the advantage? "When I look around and I'm like, you know, I find some of these leaders appealing rhetorically, politically," says Wallace-Wells. "But I'm like, what is the program they're proposing here? If it comes to pass that the Democrats even have a trifecta — what even would they try to do?"
What if the secret to happiness is as simple as learning to extend a little more grace? Bradley argues that every unnecessary judgment — of your own behavior, of other people's choices, of all the ways the world fails to meet your standards — creates small negative emotions that accumulate into a dark psychic cloud. Showing grace dispels that cloud. Plus, Bradley sketches out the highly unlikely but increasingly plausible sequence of events that topples the Trump administration and also explains how he fell in love with Stockholm on a recent trip abroad.
This special taping in front of a live audience on the Lower East Side, Bradley hosts his niece Ellie Gottheimer, daughter of Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and Larra Mullin, daughter of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, to discuss their new children's book Shmoo & Ozzie Go to Washington, which imparts an important message about bipartisanship and democracy — through the story of two dogs.
resh from celebrating his mother's 80th birthday in Paris, Bradley reflects on what makes the city so breathtakingly beautiful while also declaring it mightily overrated as a food city.
Before he decided to run for Congress, Micah Lasher was a proud member of the Matzoh Ballers political consultant text chain.
Why do voters keep rewarding candidates with no realistic plan for fixing anything? Bradley argues that the far left's triumph in last week's New York primaries wasn't really about Israel or AI or the 1% — it was about tapping into anxiety rather than offering workable solutions.