Firewall with Bradley Tusk

The best seat on a rocket ship isn’t necessarily the driver’s, says Nihal Mehta, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture firm ENIAC. He joins Bradley to discuss how he does his job and what motivates him as an investor. “As a kid building startups, I was the CEO in the driver’s seat,” he says. “But I’m a much better supporting actor. I’m a much better plus one to my wife, and a much better plus one to all these founders. I get my happiness from seeing other people succeed in something I can be a small part of.” Plus, he talks about why management fees make investors timid, the unworkable numbers behind OpenAI, and all the friends who went MAGA. “People have values and prioritize certain values over others,” he says, “and a lot of these folks, some of them still my best friends, have prioritized wealth creation, capitalism, as their core value.”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.

To anyone thinking about jumping into what promises to be a very crowded 2028 presidential field, Bradley offers advice they probably won’t hear from their own people. It starts with taking uncomfortable risks from the outset. Be bold. Don’t count on your résumé getting you anywhere. If you’re a Republican, go ahead and poke the bear, aka Trump. “If you run a conventional campaign,” he says, “you will get a conventional outcome, which is defeat.” Plus, Bradley lays out what should happen in the wake of the Jensen Huang spy scandal (congressional hearings, a halt to chip sales to China and an investigation we can trust) and catalogs Election Day voting snafus across the country. None of it was fraud, he argues, just the ordinary dysfunction of a broken system — exactly what mobile voting would fix.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.

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.