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.

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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.

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"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: [email protected].

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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: [email protected].

Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.

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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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

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: [email protected].

Be sure to watch Bradley’s TED Talk on Mobile Voting at https://go.ted.com/bradleytusk.

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In the 1990s, we were promised that the internet was going to decentralize wealth and power. How did we end up with what feels like the exact opposite of that? Tim Wu, author of the new book, The Age of Extraction — an examination of how tech platforms extract value, shape attention, and concentrate power — joined Bradley earlier this month for a live discussion at P&T Knitwear, moderated by Nate Loewentheil, Managing Partner of Commonweal Ventures. "If you look through the history of democracy turning into dictatorship," says Wu, "a lot of it goes through the path of monopolization of key industries, the build-up of a huge amount of wealth and an anger among the people. When democracy cannot fix that or make the system seem fair, the strong man has a lot of appeal."

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].

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.

Canada can never fix the asymmetry of its relationship with the US, but as Prime Minister Mark Carney showed last week in Davos, there’s much to be gained from playing to your strengths. Bradley assesses the strange predicament of the middle power in a zero-sum world. Plus: the real reason Kristi Noem has a cabinet post, why law school applications are surging and — here’s something nice — the 12 finalists for the 2026 Gotham Book Prize.

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].

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.