Firewall with Bradley Tusk

Is Mayor Mamdani's first hundred days as mayor a genuine reason for celebration, or just a decent start before the hard part kicks in? Bradley gives the mayor real credit for focusing on the operational stuff that actually matters to New Yorkers, but says that if he's serious about running this city, he should start making the case for bringing the subways and buses back under city control, the way Bloomberg brought the schools back under mayoral control in 2002. And he should stop banking on squeezing more out of the small group of high earners who already pay for almost everything, because when they leave, the people who suffer most are the ones he claims to be fighting for. Plus: Bradley opens up about joining Marijuana Anonymous, how the NBA can solve its tanking problem and why he has no regards for Broadway.Firewall nominated for a Webby! Vote today and support us for best individual episode - interview or talk show -for Bradley's interview with then-candidate Zohran Mamdani in April 2025. We’re up against Oprah, so we’ll need all the votes we can get! It only takes 10 seconds - thanks in advance: https://bit.ly/firewallwebbyThis 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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Amid meme coins, scams, and scary price swings, something more consequential is quietly happening in the crypto world: stablecoins are offering a faster, cheaper way to transact — the original promise that Bitcoin made but never quite delivered on. Bradley talks to Tusk Strategies partner Eric Soufer about how the regulatory framework is being engineered to survive future administrations that might not be as friendly. Despite the banking industry's loud objections, Eric's verdict is blunt: "I don't see tons of small businesses in the Rust Belt suddenly pulling their deposits out of community banks." FIREWALL NOMINATED FOR A WEBBY! Vote today and support us for best individual episode - interview or talk show -for Bradley's interview with then-candidate Zohran Mamdani in April 2025. We’re up against Oprah, so we’ll need all the votes we can get! It only takes 10 seconds - thanks in advance: https://bit.ly/firewallwebbyThis 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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

What if we human beings are an evolutionary anomaly, a species that discovered how to destroy ourselves before we learned how not to? Bradley links that question to his thoughts on a decidedly different subject: Why everything we tell our kids about how to live is basically useless if they don't see us doing it. "Show, don't tell" is not only good advice for writing, it turns out. It works for raising kids, tooFIREWALL NOMINATED FOR A WEBBY! Vote today and support us for best individual episode - interview or talk show -for Bradley's interview with then-candidate Zohran Mamdani in April 2025. We’re up against Oprah, so we’ll need all the votes we can get! It only takes 10 seconds - thanks in advance: https://bit.ly/firewallwebbyThis 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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

[Vote for Firewall and help us win our first Webby Award! https://bit.ly/firewallwebby]Is it possible to build the most powerful technology in human history while remaining a genuinely decent person, or does that kind of greatness require a willingness to burn everything down? Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, joins Bradley to argue that Demis Hassabis may be the rarest breed: a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and world-changing CEO who cares deeply about safety. But as Mallaby and Bradley explore the coming political reckoning with AI, the big unknown is what sort of catastrophe it will take for our leaders to bring this technology under control.This episode was taped at P&T Knitwear at 180 Orchard Street — New York City’s only free podcast recording studio.Firewall nominated for a Webby Award! Vote today and support us for best individual episode - interview or talk show - for Bradley's interview with then-candidate Zohran Mamdani in April 2025. We’re up against Oprah, so we’ll need all the votes we can get! It only takes 10 seconds - thanks in advance. Vote here before April 16: https://bit.ly/firewallwebbySend us an email with your thoughts on today’s episode: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

We all need to stop worrying about who the Democrats will nominate in 2028, argues Bradley. Unless it's someone from the far Left, the main candidates are essentially interchangeable — structural conditions, not the picayune distinctions between them, will determine the outcome. Plus, Bradley and Hugo discuss what makes life worthwhile, trade basketball stories, and discuss why starting a band might be the answer to everything that ails us.Discussed on today's episode:Start a Band, Even if You’re Terrible, by Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times (03/22/26)Why Sweden punches above its weight in music, by Henrik Karlsson (03/21/23)The Web of the Game, by Roger Angell, The New Yorker (07/13/81)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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

How did the Democratic party drift so far from the real interests of the poor and working class it historically championed? Legendary journalist Joe Klein joins Firewall to argue that the rot starts with his own generation — Baby Boomers — who indoctrinated two generations of Americans in ideals that have never worked in the real world. Bradley and Joe find surprising common ground on three big fixes.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

On the eve of a college trip with his son, Bradley reflects on the murky future that kids are facing and how education will have to be massively rethought. Plus, he thoroughly debunks the concept of the all-powerful Israel lobby, chastises the Mamdani administration for policies that will adversely affect quality of life, and contemplates how to manage the level of difficult news we let into our lives.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

One big reason that the Left has grown so powerful in the city, Bradley argues, is that the Partnership for New York — the group that should have been fighting for centrist, pro-business interests — never showed any inclination to play politics. That could be changing now that Steve Fulop, former three-term mayor of Jersey City, has taken over as the Partnership's CEO Fulop joins Firewall for a spirited debate on what it will take for business to punch its weight in political matters and reinvigorate the pro-growth agenda.Discussed on today's episode:What Steve Fulop Needs to do to Make the Partnership for New York City Relevant and Effective Again by Bradley Tusk, November 5, 2025This 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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Progressives make life hard on the rest of us, Bradley argues, by claiming to champion the poorest Americans while supporting policies that reflect their own biases and selfishness. But his ultimate conclusion is that far-left behavior, for all its flaws, is fundamentally and recognizably human — driven by a mix of self-interest, genuine idealism and the universal desire to belong to something meaningful.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Even when your issue won't win votes, there are ways to make your political opponents pay. Bradley sits down with his friend and partner, Tusk Strategies CEO Chris Coffey, to break down how the firm helped a climate group go after Rep. Chip Roy in a Texas Republican primary. Running ads on Truth Social and Rumble, they attacked him for not being MAGA enough — a strategy that produced a roughly 20-point swing and forced him into a runoff without mentioning climate change once. Bradley and Chris also dig into New York City's budget crisis, the upcoming 2026 congressional primaries in New York, and what it will take for Mayor Mamdani to succeed in a job that demands pragmatism over purity.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Why do a small minority of selfish, fear-mongering people wield so much power over the rest of us? Bradley argues that most of us want essentially the same things: meaningful work, healthy families, a little fun, and some peace. The problem isn't human nature — it's broken systems that reward the loudest and most divisive voice. He also weighs in on whether Trump's instincts are well suited to the Middle East, why the AI companies fundamentally misread their political situation, and what makes Los Angeles his ideal "composite city."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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Does fixing America's $5 trillion healthcare crisis start with taking a single picture? Bradley sits down with Andrew Lacy, founder and CEO of Prenuvo, to explore how full-body MRI scans are shifting healthcare from reactive to proactive — and why that shift could be the most important change in medicine today. They discuss Lacy's 80/20 approach to personal longevity (sleep first, everything else follows), his vision of patient-driven healthcare spending and why AI promises to make world-class diagnostics accessible to everyone.Firewall listeners can go to prenuvo.com/firewall to get $300 off a scan from Prenuvo.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

But in taking a principled stand against the Pentagon and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, it will gain valuable trust with customers, argues Bradley, and that means winning the war. Plus: Jack Dorsey's 4,000-person layoff at Block is a sign of things to come as AI efficiency tools displace white-collar workers — and nobody has a real plan for what comes next; why the addiction claims being made in the lawsuit against Meta are "1,000 percent accurate" but that doesn't mean it's illegal; is Mayor Mamdani governing as a pragmatic big-city leader or showing his progressive stripes; a Chuck Klosterman theory about political movements that Bradley mostly finds fault with; and the case for cautious optimism about the Mets pitching staff.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Early childhood education has quietly become one of the most successful — and bipartisan — reform movements in the country. Elliot Regenstein, author of Readiness: Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Brighter Future, sits down with Bradley to explain how it's working. They dig into why the system is more adaptable than K-12 or higher ed, which states are leading the way, and what the Trump administration's push to dismantle the Department of Education could mean for the most vulnerable kids.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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

"We don't need purity," says Bradley. "We don't need saviors." The remaking of our institutions starts from the middle, he argues, which has a lot of untapped power against the extremes on both sides. Bradley contends that media, hollowed out by market forces, has ironically become the most adaptive of our broken institutions, while higher education has saddled a generation with $1.83 trillion in debt to prop up a system that puts the needs of administrators over students. And on religion, he sees the collapse in attendance not as a spiritual failing but as a rational response to institutions that serve the clergy over the congregation. 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: info@firewall.media.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Calling in from Istanbul, Bradley opens with impressions of a historically rich but complicated city — ancient cisterns, street cats, a shady taxi driver, and bomb-proof doors on a synagogue. Earlier, when he was in Madrid, Bradley took Abby to visit the Prado and the Thyssen, which got him thinking about the uncomfortable economics of museums: tens of billions in art, much of it in storage, underwriting tax breaks for wealthy donors while hungry people go unfed. How should we address these issues? The conversation turns to Marco Rubio's speech at the Munich Security Conference, which Bradley reads as an early audition for 2028, contrasting Rubio's smooth "I'm my own person" approach with Vance's unconvincing Trump imitation. On whether Americans are actually angry at Europe, he is skeptical — ordinary people on both sides seem to like each other fine, he says, and manufactured grievance is just what demagogues do.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: info@firewall.media.Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Why are the biggest names in venture betting big on prediction markets? Aaron Miller, principal at Will Ventures, joins Bradley to talk about the evolution of platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket into a new kind of financial exchange and societal "source of truth." They dig into the states-versus-federal regulatory battle, the surge in American gambling behavior, and then turn to the messy restructuring of college sports. Do our old ideas about it make sense anymore?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: info@firewall.media.Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

Everybody fails, doubts themselves and encounters unexpected obstacles on the path to whatever they're trying to achieve. But the choice to keep going in the face of difficulty, says Bradley, is what maximizes our own satisfaction and well being. He explains all this in the context of why the business community failed as a political force in New York City since Mayor Bloomberg left office. Plus, he talks about why the merging of philanthropy and commerce is often so fraught, questions Mayor Mamdani's decision not to force homeless people into shelter in the extreme-cold weather, and writes an ad for Pete Buttigieg that he contends is superior to Hugo's from last week.Discussed on today's episode:New York’s CEOs Are Gearing Up for a Battle With Mamdani, David Freedlander, New York Magazine (02/05/26)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: info@firewall.media.Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

What happens when an entire generation grows up with nothing but chaos, only to encounter an AI revolution that makes practically every career look iffy? Bradley talks to Rachel Janfaza, founder of The Up and Up, about why COVID didn't just disrupt Gen Z—it split them in two: the older group that remembers life before the pandemic and the younger ones who don't and who never learned how to have an unplanned conversation. She explains how Gen Z voters feel betrayed by Trump just one year into his second term, why they're demanding AI regulation, and what effect data centers, crypto and phone bans are having on their politics.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: info@firewall.media.Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.

What do you get when you ask five AI platforms to crunch some numbers and help solve an investment decision for you? A shocking array of basic errors, faulty assumptions and bizarre omissions, Bradley discovered, enough to make him seriously wonder where this revolution might be heading. Plus, he reevaluates his loathing of social media in light of Minneapolis and Greenland, debates the merits of his own particular form of networking and proposes an ad that could propel Rahm Emanuel to the top of the 2028 leaderboard.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: info@firewall.media.Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack + YouTube.