Start Making Sense

Firewall with Bradley Tusk · Oct 13, 2026 · 45m

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. And the country that devalued judgment ultimately tried to correct itself by electing Donald Trump, who honors no rules at all. Though the societal snafu Howard identified three decades ago has only worsened with time, he keeps coming up with…