Firewall with Bradley Tusk

But a concrete economic plan for extreme job losses just might. In this repost from an episode first released in June, Daniel Schreiber, CEO of Lemonade and founder of the MOSAIC AI Policy Institute, joins Bradley to make a surprisingly hopeful case. The enormous wealth generated by AI can be captured and redistributed in a way that leaves almost everyone better off, he argues, without raising taxes, punishing innovation, or trusting politicians with a slush fund. "Poverty should end in the era of abundance," says Schreiber. "It should simply end."

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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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. The only existential standoff now was between the people who wanted to replace institutions with better institutions and the people who wanted to replace institutions with themselves."

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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. To counteract that kind of negative thinking, Bradley makes a list of the most important things about the world that are improving, including breakthroughs in medicine and gene editing, falling murder and opioid death rates, record US charitable giving, clean energy advances, and steep declines in global extreme poverty and child mortality. All in all, Bradley believes, there is more than enough encouraging news to keep hope alive.

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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. Chilton argues that critical thinking and judgment, the muscles built by Socratic teaching, are the skills AI can't easily replace. But at the same time, students need training in applying AI in the workplace. "We cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube," says Chilton, "nor can you prohibit your students from having access to them."

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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.” He explains how it reframed his understanding of childhood patterns, self-criticism, and emotional healing, including a cathartic exercise that drew out an important lesson. "We literally drew a picture of our dark side on a poster board," he says, "and then took a shoe and beat the sh-t out of the poster for 45 minutes. Destroying the drawing illustrates that our dark side is a creation of our own minds and patterns, which means we can change them."

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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. Lessig, founder of EqualCitizens.US and author of numerous books on copyright, technology, and political corruption, makes a surprisingly hopeful case that Super PACs can and will be ended without overturning Citizens United. Bradley makes his argument for mobile voting as the only scalable fix for low-turnout primaries that boost extremists in both parties. The two agree on a particular culprit — an engagement-based media economy that profits from turning Americans into "ignorant people who hate each other." Lessig offers the Titanic as a useful metaphor: If there's "a gash in the hull," don't waste your time clearing ice off the deck. This is a full-blown emergency and we need lifeboats.

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

Bradley shares his ten rules for writing well, starting with the most important: get it down fast and spend almost all your time editing. Plus: why the annual outrage over admissions to New York's most selective public schools keeps missing the point; how Governor Hochul's data center moratorium will play out, and what Bradley is doing on his non-vacation in the Canadian Rockies.

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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?"

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

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 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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.

In 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.

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].

Subscribe to Bradley's weekly newsletter and follow Bradley on Linkedin + Substack.