Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande legendary Steelers running back and fullback Rocky Bleier, as Dynastic goes deeper into the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty. From winning a national championship at University of Notre Dame… to being drafted into both the NFL and the Vietnam War… to fighting his way back from devastating injuries to become a 4-time Super Bowl champion, Rocky’s story is one of the most unbelievable journeys in football history. There are also some incredible behind-the-scenes stories involv...
May 20, 2026•1 hr 18 min
Chuck Todd opens with a wave of primary night results that all point the same direction: Thomas Massie has lost his reelection bid, Trump's grip on the GOP base is as strong as ever, and the president just endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas — a move that's great for Trump personally and disastrous for the Republican Party, which will now have to pour enormous money into a Senate seat that was supposed to be safe. Democrats outvoted Republicans in Georgia, with African-American turnout spiking in the a...
May 20, 2026•1 hr 36 min
Chuck Todd opens with a wave of primary night results that all point the same direction: Thomas Massie has lost his reelection bid, Trump's grip on the GOP base is as strong as ever, and the president just endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas — a move that's great for Trump personally and disastrous for the Republican Party, which will now have to pour enormous money into a Senate seat that was supposed to be safe. Democrats outvoted Republicans in Georgia, with African-American turnout spiking in the a...
May 20, 2026•2 hr 44 min
Dartmouth political scientist Sean Westwood — director of the Polarization Lab and one of the leading researchers studying why American politics has become so toxic — joins the Chuck Toddcast with a counterintuitive opening argument: America has actually been more polarized in the past than it is now, and polarization itself is a normal feature of democracy. What changed is that the Cold War spent four decades artificially suppressing American polarization by giving the country a unifying extern...
May 20, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Chuck Todd opens with the political obituary of Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator whose primary defeat is the latest and clearest evidence that there is simply no room left in the Republican Party for anyone who ever had qualms about Donald Trump. He argues Cassidy's downfall was as much self-inflicted as Trump-driven: he had the spine to vote to convict in the second impeachment trial but never the spine to actually defend the vote, owning it while constantly running from it on the trail. Cas...
May 18, 2026•2 hr
Chuck Todd opens by previewing Mark Zandi's sobering economic forecast from this episode and arrives at a simple, devastating conclusion: every single policy decision Trump has made has made the economy worse, tax refunds have already been gobbled up by inflation, and the math guarantees voters will feel even worse by the midterms — meaning Republicans on the ballot should be furious with the president, and those in swing districts have no choice but to start distancing themselves from his polic...
May 14, 2026•1 hr 43 min
Mark Zandi — chief economist at Moody's Analytics and one of the most quoted forecasters in America — joins the Chuck Toddcast to deliver a remarkably sobering verdict on where the economy actually stands: without the $700 billion currently being poured into AI investment, the United States would already be in or close to recession. The latest CPI and PPI reports came back ugly and uglier, oil shocks from the Iran war will keep prices elevated through 2027 even if the war ended tomorrow (Zandi s...
May 14, 2026•58 min
Chuck Todd opens with Trump getting visibly defensive with reporters over a brutal new inflation report — and argues the bad economy is in worse shape directly because of Trump's policies, with the president himself having zero answers for the data. He notes that AI investment is essentially the only thing propping up the economy, and that we are at least weeks away from the end of the Iran war. He warns we're only at the beginning of the inflation problem and that Democrats can simply point to ...
May 13, 2026•1 hr 17 min
Chuck Todd opens with Trump getting visibly defensive with reporters over a brutal new inflation report — and argues the bad economy is in worse shape directly because of Trump's policies, with the president himself having zero answers for the data. He notes that AI investment is essentially the only thing propping up the economy, and that we are at least weeks away from the end of the Iran war. He warns we're only at the beginning of the inflation problem and that Democrats can simply point to ...
May 13, 2026•2 hr 27 min
This episode of the Chuck Toddcast features a deep dive into the AI governance crisis with two of the leading experts in the field. First, Miriam Vogel — president and CEO of EqualAI — joins the show to explain her organization's mission of establishing meaningful AI guardrails at a moment when American consumers are deeply skeptical of big tech and less than 1% of companies have anything resembling strong AI governance policies. Vogel argues that good governance means corporate leadership must ...
May 13, 2026•1 hr 9 min
Chuck Todd delivers an analysis of the Virginia Supreme Court's decision tossing out the Democratic redistricting map — arguing Democrats pissed away enormous political capital for absolutely nothing and that the reaction on the left has been wildly out of proportion, treating the ruling like an election loss when it was actually a predictable consequence of trying to fight fire with fire. He notes that Democrats passed the Virginia map without ever bothering to figure out how the courts would r...
May 11, 2026•2 hr 31 min
Chuck Todd delivers an analysis of the Virginia Supreme Court's decision tossing out the Democratic redistricting map — arguing Democrats pissed away enormous political capital for absolutely nothing and that the reaction on the left has been wildly out of proportion, treating the ruling like an election loss when it was actually a predictable consequence of trying to fight fire with fire. He notes that Democrats passed the Virginia map without ever bothering to figure out how the courts would r...
May 11, 2026•1 hr 35 min
Acclaimed music biographer Bob Spitz — author of definitive biographies of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and now The Rolling Stones: The Biography , his five-year deep dive into the world's greatest rock and roll band — joins the Chuck Toddcast for a deeply enjoyable conversation about why the Stones have endured for over six decades and what their longevity says about the state of music itself. Spitz argues that the Stones gave us the foundation of the rock and roll sound and that, in many ways,...
May 11, 2026•57 min
Chuck Todd opens with the latest from the Iran war: the Saudis have now denied the U.S. military access to strikes from their bases and airspace, the U.S. cannot claim any net positive from this conflict, and Trump's best realistic outcome is some version of the Obama nuclear deal 2.0. He notes that both sides are being squeezed — Iran can't keep this going forever either — but warns that beyond the immediate political damage to Trump, the war has handed China tremendous long-term leverage, AI s...
May 07, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Chuck Todd opens with the latest from the Iran war: the Saudis have now denied the U.S. military access to strikes from their bases and airspace, the U.S. cannot claim any net positive from this conflict, and Trump's best realistic outcome is some version of the Obama nuclear deal 2.0. He notes that both sides are being squeezed — Iran can't keep this going forever either — but warns that beyond the immediate political damage to Trump, the war has handed China tremendous long-term leverage, AI s...
May 07, 2026•2 hr 12 min
Conservative writer Kevin Williamson — National Correspondent for The Dispatch and one of the sharpest voices on the right — joins the Chuck Toddcast for a wide-ranging and characteristically blunt conversation about Trump's Iran disaster, the collapse of the political parties, and what kind of country America is becoming. Williamson argues Trump made a colossal mistake getting into the Iran war and there's now no way out without national humiliation: the goals of the conflict have constantly be...
May 07, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Chuck Todd opens with the morning-after analysis of Indiana's primary results, which he says show Trump still has plenty of juice with his own party — roughly $13 million was spent to influence about 100,000 voters, and the results have created new urgency for Republican-led states across the South to redistrict before the midterms. He notes that being on the wrong side of Trump remains a career-ending move in the GOP, that Thomas Massie's upcoming primary will be a critical test of Trump's intr...
May 06, 2026•1 hr 29 min
Chuck Todd opens with the morning-after analysis of Indiana's primary results, which he says show Trump still has plenty of juice with his own party — roughly $13 million was spent to influence about 100,000 voters, and the results have created new urgency for Republican-led states across the South to redistrict before the midterms. He notes that being on the wrong side of Trump remains a career-ending move in the GOP, that Thomas Massie's upcoming primary will be a critical test of Trump's intr...
May 06, 2026•2 hr 14 min
Ashley Trice and Rob Holbert — co-publishers of Lagniappe, the alt-weekly turned investigative newspaper covering Mobile and Alabama's Gulf Coast — join the Chuck Toddcast to share the origin story of how their independent publication has grown into the region's premier investigative voice. They explain how Lagniappe started as a free paper and has now transitioned to a subscription model behind a paywall, why most newspapers won't even print these days unless they're certain it won't cost them ...
May 06, 2026•48 min
Chuck Todd unpacks a wave of devastating new polling that shows Americans have lost confidence in Trump across nearly every metric, with his approval cratering among independents and only his hardcore base still standing by him. He notes Trump is underwater on virtually every issue except taxes, immigration, and the border — that his trustworthiness is lower than any past president, that even 22% of his own 2024 voters don't believe he's kept his promises, and that his approval has collapsed wit...
May 04, 2026•2 hr 36 min
Chuck Todd unpacks a wave of devastating new polling that shows Americans have lost confidence in Trump across nearly every metric, with his approval cratering among independents and only his hardcore base still standing by him. He notes Trump is underwater on virtually every issue except taxes, immigration, and the border — that his trustworthiness is lower than any past president, that even 22% of his own 2024 voters don't believe he's kept his promises, and that his approval has collapsed wit...
May 04, 2026•1 hr 36 min
Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro — author of the new book After the Fall — joins the Chuck Toddcast for a wide-ranging conversation about the missed opportunities of the post-Cold War era and what it would take to actually fix what's broken in the global political economy. Shapiro argues America fundamentally squandered its chance to integrate Russia into the West after the Soviet collapse — there should have been a Marshall Plan for Russia along the lines of what was done for Germany and Ja...
May 04, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Chuck Todd dives into the Supreme Court's latest ruling further hollowing out the Voting Rights Act and walks through what it actually means in practice — including the very real possibility that several Southern states will now try to redistrict, creating a messy political landscape that won't necessarily benefit Republicans in the way they hope. He traces the history back to the 1990s Georgia reapportionment that led to major GOP pickups by packing Black Democratic voters into fewer districts,...
Apr 30, 2026•2 hr 25 min
Adam Green — co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — joins the Chuck Toddcast to make the case that pragmatic economic populism is the Democratic Party's path back to a durable majority, and to push back hard on the conventional wisdom that "moderate" means "centrist." Green argues the public has lost faith in both political and economic systems and is hungry for candidates who tell a clear story about power — pointing to Maine's Graham Platner, Texas's James Talarico, and New ...
Apr 30, 2026•1 hr 14 min
Chuck Todd dives into the Supreme Court's latest ruling further hollowing out the Voting Rights Act and walks through what it actually means in practice — including the very real possibility that several Southern states will now try to redistrict, creating a messy political landscape that won't necessarily benefit Republicans in the way they hope. He traces the history back to the 1990s Georgia reapportionment that led to major GOP pickups by packing Black Democratic voters into fewer districts,...
Apr 30, 2026•1 hr 15 min
The Pittsburgh Steelers became one of the most successful and enduring franchises in sports history. But their dynasty wasn’t built the way most people think. Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande tell the Steelers history like it has never been told. It starts with a moment everyone knows—the Immaculate Reception—but the real story begins long before that. For decades, the Steelers were one of the worst-run teams in football. They ignored the draft, missed on generational talent, and lacked any clear iden...
Apr 29, 2026•3 hr 7 min
Chuck Todd opens with a sobering analysis of the post-Correspondents' Dinner shooting political climate, arguing that both sides are now busy blaming each other for violent rhetoric while past presidents from both parties always understood their job was to lower the temperature, not raise it. He argues that while Democratic rhetoric has gotten harsher in recent years, Trump is the one who fundamentally changed what was acceptable to say out loud — his January 6th pardons effectively created a pe...
Apr 29, 2026•1 hr 22 min
Atima Omara — Democratic political strategist, longtime activist, and author of the new book The Instigators — joins the Chuck Toddcast for a wide-ranging conversation about who actually decides American elections, why Democrats keep losing despite favorable demographics, and what a winning coalition looks like in 2028. Omara opens by dismantling the conventional wisdom that white moderate swing voters are the deciding force in elections, arguing that the 2024 contest was lost on mobilization ra...
Apr 29, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Chuck Todd opens with a sobering analysis of the post-Correspondents' Dinner shooting political climate, arguing that both sides are now busy blaming each other for violent rhetoric while past presidents from both parties always understood their job was to lower the temperature, not raise it. He argues that while Democratic rhetoric has gotten harsher in recent years, Trump is the one who fundamentally changed what was acceptable to say out loud — his January 6th pardons effectively created a pe...
Apr 29, 2026•2 hr 27 min
Pete Curran — meteorologist for Watch Duty, the nonprofit fire alert app that became indispensable for Californians during the devastating LA fires earlier this year — joins the Chuck Toddcast to discuss why fire season in the West is now effectively a 12-month phenomenon and what every American needs to know to prepare. Curran explains that Watch Duty has revolutionized real-time fire information by providing constant updates, replacing a system where the public previously got just twice-daily ...
Apr 27, 2026•52 min
