Bruce Mehlman on the Age of Disruption and AI Advice
Everyone I know seeks out Bruce Mehlman for counsel at the intersection of technology, policy, and politics. For years he distilled that thinking into big quarterly slide decks; now he does it every week in a Substack he calls The Age of Disruption. This conversation was about how the three chapters of his career—government, technology, and consulting—come together into a point of view that reporters, executives, and even Sunday-show hosts keep borrowing from.
Bruce is a partner at Mehlman Consulting, a bipartisan government-relations firm, and a former technology-policy official at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he and I first crossed paths two decades ago. He's a self-described nerd who loves history, politics, and policy—and who has a rare gift for making the present moment feel legible rather than terrifying. I think you're really going to like this one.
"Microsoft flagged me as a spammer"
The origin of the weekly newsletter is one of my favorite small stories. For years Bruce produced giant quarterly decks—30 or 40 slides, "sort of Mary Meeker meets Karl Rove"—that he loved making and that drew real feedback from people he respected. But his distribution method was gloriously inefficient: an enormous spreadsheet of names, sorted by company and VIP status, blasted out 40 people at a time in BCC. One day it all jammed. "Microsoft concludes that anybody who sends that many BCC identical emails out in that short a period of time is sort of definitionally a spammer," his IT team told him. That forced him onto Substack—which he likes reading and finds easy to use—with one catch: "You got to feed the beast more than once a quarter." A couple of thematic posts got that dopamine hit of shares and new subscribers, and suddenly he was a weekly writer. The trade-off is real; the free Sunday-morning post takes him "somewhere between three and eight hours," time carved out of sleep, family, and client work. But it cuts through—he watched a Sunday show pick it up—and people reference it constantly.
20th-century institutions, 21st-century problems
Ask Bruce for the day in the life and you get something much bigger: a theory of the moment. "We're living through an extraordinary time in American history," he said, "not unprecedented. We go through periods like this." His frame is a mismatch between the institutions we inherited and the problems we actually face. "In this case, 20th-century solutions to 20th-century problems"—policies and institutions built in a prior era that are no longer well-designed for the new one. He reached for history: the New Deal answers that no longer fit the "malaise, sclerotic economy" of 1970s America and set up the Reagan Revolution; the agrarian rules of the late 1800s that couldn't handle the Industrial Revolution and gave way to the Gilded Age and then the Progressive Era. "We're living through, I think, another mismatch," he said—people in the real world facing 21st-century challenges and concluding, "these guys don't get it. They're not solving my problems." The trade deals look good for people in Davos but not for me; that's why the factory moved to China. "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to vote for change." That, he argues, is what connects the macro trends to the everyday politics we all feel.
Technology's fading halo
When Bruce and I first worked together, technology had a halo. He walked me through how it slipped. Internet 1.0 was "awesome"—until the stocks blew up and everyone decided buying dog food online was stupid, "the right idea at the wrong time." But the internet and late-'90s America were seen as net-positive answers: new voices got channels, there was hope, and, as he joked about early online privacy, "nobody knew you were a dog." Two things changed. Technology became ubiquitous, defining every aspect of modern life "overwhelmingly to the better." But it moved from "less impact on our lives and a lot of promise to overwhelming impact on our lives and a mixed picture." His example was perfect: the app that lets him order the same coffee at the same red light and just show up to grab it. "The good news is, my God, that's efficient. The bad news is I used to know the baristas." Now the upsides are magnified—and so are the downsides, from disinformation to teens weighed down by FOMO.
The Vertigo Years: nothing is unprecedented
Bruce's antidote to feeling like the world is moving too fast is history—specifically Philip Blom's book The Vertigo Years, about the world just before World War I. Back then, just like now, "how we work, live, play, learn, parent, fight wars" was overwhelmingly transformed by technology. "Today we know it's the internet, it's autonomy, it's drones, it's AI. But back then it was electricity," along with new manufacturing, automobiles, airplanes, telegraphy, and telephony. People reported nervous disorders; they couldn't keep up. "It reminds me that nothing is unprecedented if you've read history," he said. And he's optimistic about where it goes. In 20 or 25 years, he expects home assistants that have become part robot and far more thoughtful—"you'll just say what you want and it'll do so many of the things"—and we won't say this sucks. "It won't have drained humanity out of being human. We'll just be spending our time doing other different cool things." I told him I say a version of that to my own kids all the time: remind yourself of the pivot points in history, and you remember we've seen change before.
What you do matters more than what you say
Because Bruce advises companies on political risk, I asked what counsel he gives now. He started with what lobbying firms do at their heart: help organizations "understand what's going on, separate headlines from reality, anticipate what's likely to happen next, and engage" the right policymakers and stakeholders. So much of it is understanding risk—war, supply chains dependent on Taiwan or mainland China, tariffs, climate, technology. And in the social-media decade, brands got dragged into contact with activists in a new way, where an online boycott could change a company's behavior "not because of a law, but because of the perceived reputational risk"—first from the left, later from the right. Businesses now face not just supply-chain and geopolitical risk but "the culture-war risk of getting dragged into one side or another of a 50-50 issue."
His answer is a piece he once wrote, "Woke Capitalism and Its Discontents," and he's careful to be balanced—"my firm is half Republican, half Democrat." Two camps are both wrong, he argues: those who think a business should never speak about anything (they miss that silence is itself a position) and those who think a company needs a "secretary of state" opining on every news event ("that's an insanely horrible policy"). His north star is simple: "What you do matters more than what you say." If your young employees care about climate, don't become their Twitter spokesperson—look at your supply chain and make it more sustainable; write the checks; expand first-generation college access. "I don't care that you have 100% approval rating from the American Conservative Union or the ACLU. You're just a bunch of hot air. I want to see what you do." He illustrated it with a story about his old law-school roommate, Andy Keys, who quietly bought Christmas trees and left them for families who needed them, never telling anyone. "That's so much more powerful than somebody trying to get credit." His advice for businesses and careers alike: "Do the right thing. Don't worry about whether it's adequately heralded." Or, as the line taped to his wall puts it, "No grind, no glory."
Counseling the next generation on AI
I told Bruce about my own 20-year-old, who came home wondering whether he should go to trade school because AI felt like a threat to future jobs. Bruce, who has three kids in their twenties and teaches as well, called AI "unbelievably scary and unbelievably empowering." He rejects the idea that blue-collar work is safe while creative work is exposed: "Blue-collar jobs aren't safe from AI"—the robots can't do the plumbing or the welding yet, "but they will." His solution isn't fear, it's fluency: "Learn more about AI, learn how to use AI." He wants people who can be the best in the office at "prompt jockeying"—knowing when to reach for Claude, when for ChatGPT, when Gemini gets the best answer. But he's disciplined about verification, especially for client work and his own writing: if he sent an LLM's wrong answer to a client, "they should fire me," because his job is to give the right answer. Used well, though, it saves him an hour of hunting for sources. His analogy is the one that should reassure my son: "The internet didn't get rid of jobs. It enhanced all of our jobs." The people who win are the ones who learn to leverage the new tools first. He even sees a future where 3D printing collapses supply chains and "Nike is just a design company now," printing shoes fit to your feet in 20 minutes.
Key Takeaways
- History says nothing today is truly unprecedented — Mehlman points to the New Deal era and the Gilded Age as past examples of institutions failing to fit new problems, just as they are now.
- His rule for corporate political risk: "what you do matters more than what you say" — action, not public statements, is what actually manages reputational exposure.
- Technology's impact has shifted from "low impact, high promise" in the early internet era to "high impact, mixed picture" today — magnifying both the upsides and downsides.
- On AI, his advice is fluency over fear: learn to use the tools, but stay disciplined about verifying anything before it goes to a client.
- No job is fully insulated from AI, in his view, including blue-collar work — but he compares it to the internet, which reshaped jobs rather than eliminating them.
Find Bruce Mehlman
Bruce Mehlman is a partner at Mehlman Consulting, a bipartisan government-relations firm in Washington, and a former technology-policy official at the U.S. Department of Commerce whose career has spanned government, Silicon Valley, and consulting. He writes the weekly Substack The Age of Disruption. The easiest way to find it, in his words: Google "Bruce Mehlman" (M-E-H-L-M-A-N) and the word Substack, and you'll land right on it. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.
The Friday Reporter is hosted by Lisa Camooso Miller. Listen wherever you get your podcasts — and subscribe so you never miss a conversation.