“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann

 

Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann [https://www.eyckfreymann.com/] — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China [https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Taiwan-Strategy-Prevent-China/dp/019782384X] — believes that the fate of the 21st century may hinge on Taiwan. And he warns that if America can’t handle Iran, it’s certainly not ready for Beijing.

 

Freymann argues that China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping has watched Putin discover — with horror — what happens when you send unprepared forces into a country that fights back. China’s lesson from Ukraine is a strategy of quarantine rather than invasion. The United States will then face a choice between accepting Chinese checkmate or escalating a crisis with no domestic or international support. Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. If those chip factories shut, there will be an instantaneous global financial crisis.

 

Forget today’s Iranian theater. Taiwan will be the real existential show.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Hormuz Alarm Bell: Iran has no navy, no air force, and supposedly no ballistic missile arsenal anymore — and yet it took 20% of global oil supply offline. The Trump administration went in thinking overwhelming military superiority would translate to political victory. It hasn’t. Strategy, Freymann says, is the art of connecting ends to means. If you don’t know your ends, you’ll flail. China is watching every mistake: no plan for the economic shock, no domestic legitimacy for the war, excess pain falling on oil-importing US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Europe. Beijing’s conclusion: we don’t have to pick a military fight with the United States. Why would we?

 

•       The Semiconductor Chokehold: Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. The CHIPS Act has tried to change this. It hasn’t. The Arizona facility is two generations behind Taiwan, commercially uncompetitive, and unable to scale. Taiwan is five years ahead now and will be five years ahead in five years. If the Taiwan fabs go offline, there is an instantaneous global financial crisis: the seven companies that account for roughly 40% of the S&P 500 are all essentially the AI trade. The hyperscalers are spending $600 billion in data centers this year — the only thing keeping the US economy out of recession. This is what’s at stake, before you even get to the military question.

 

•       The Quarantine: Winning Without Fighting: Xi Jinping’s plan A is not invasion. It’s the quarantine: seize control of who and what comes and goes to Taiwan by declaring that anyone flying to Taipei must first clear customs in Shanghai. Impound a United Airlines flight. Let the ambiguity do the work. If China can do that and get away with it, Taiwan can’t rebuild its military, the US can’t send more weapons, and Beijing controls the chips. It’s checkmate — without a shot fired. The United States then has to accept it, or escalate in a way that has no domestic legitimacy and drives wedges between Washington and its allies. China has figured out how to extort the West with prolonged economic pain. The alarm bells keep ringing. America keeps snoozing.

 

•       What a Taiwan War Would Actually Look Like: It would be a war at sea — fundamentally unlike anything America has fought or prepared for in eighty year

Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button,

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama

 

The Jyllands-Posten [https://jyllands-posten.dk/] editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama [https://futurefreespeech.org/who-we-are/jacob-mchangama/] watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech [https://www.amazon.com/Future-Free-Speech-Reversing-Democracys/dp/1421454165], Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff.

 

It’s also the reasoning behind his Future of Free Speech Institute [https://futurefreespeech.org/] at Vanderbilt, where Mchangama runs the only serious academic program dedicated to the proposition that democracy’s most essential freedom is in global retreat. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees. The number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically; those where it’s strengthening are few. In 2000, Bill Clinton laughed at the idea that China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” Over the last quarter century, China has perfected that art.

 

The decline doesn’t come from a single ideological camp, which is Mchangama’s most politically inconvenient point. He suggests that the left has convinced itself that hate speech regulation, age verification for social media, and disinformation controls are acts of democratic hygiene. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is overtly shutting down free speech at a scale unmatched in recent American history. And then there’s the paradoxical possibility that anti-social-media liberals like Jonathan Haidt, in their fervor to take freedom of online expression from kids, are also contributing to today’s great recession in free speech. Left, right, and center. America, China, Denmark. Nobody, it seems, wants to allow us to say anything anymore.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Editor Who Lived Under Protection: The editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the 2005 Mohammed cartoons spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He had asked cartoonists to draw. They came after him with AK-47s. Ten years later came Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical magazine that had republished the cartoons as an act of solidarity, and saw twelve people murdered when two jihadists entered its offices. For Mchangama, growing up in Denmark where free speech felt as natural as breathing, this was the event that changed everything. The last place he expected an existential challenge to free speech was religion.

 

•       Democracy’s Varieties Are Shrinking: The Varieties of Democracy project — probably the most sophisticated dataset of free speech indicators — shows the trend line is clear: the number of countries where free speech has declined has increased dramatically, while those where it is being strengthened are few. Bill Clinton laughed in 2000 at the idea China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” China has since perfected the art. The internet’s original techno-optimistic promise — that censorship would be consigned to the ash heap of history — has been turned on its head. The recession of free speech has gone hand in hand with a wider democracy recession.

 

•       Four Hateful Men and the Minority Principle: The most important US Supreme Court decisions protecting free speech deal with extremely hateful people — viciousl

Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare



Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future.

Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also victims of today’s anti-tech hysteria. It’s one thing to blow up Silicon Valley’s cartoonish cult of personality, it’s quite another to hurl bombs at these people’s homes. Enough with all the violence – verbal or otherwise. It never ends well.

 

Five Takeaways



•       A Molotov Cocktail at Slippery Sam’s House: On Friday night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion, according to The New York Times. Andrew lives nearby and didn’t hear it. The week’s zeitgeist had already turned: a 15,000-word New Yorker hit piece by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, wall-to-wall coverage, Sam moving into Musk-like media-frenzy territory. Keith’s editorial: Hands Off Sam Altman. The personality-driven circus has caught fire. Quite literally.

•       Anthropic’s Mythic Model Finds Decade-Old Vulnerabilities: The actual AI news this week, drowned out by the personality circus. Anthropic’s new “Mythic” model autonomously discovered security holes in software that had eluded human experts for years. Dario refused to release it openly until the patches were complete. Treasury Secretary Bessent commented on the implications for banks and government. The signal: AI is becoming systematically better than the best humans at specialist domains. Generalists can probably relax.

•       Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario vs Honest Hassabis: Keith’s contrarian take: Altman is honest because he’s openly dishonest. Amodei is the devious one — a politically liberal narrative wrapped around a commercial juggernaut. Andrew’s third way is yesterday’s Mallaby interview: Demis Hassabis, the Spinozan one-faced scientist who would rather be at Princeton. But even Demis must have authorised the firing of Mustafa Suleiman. Everyone has a game plan, said Mike Tyson, until they get punched in the face.

•       Post of the Week: Keith Replaces WordPress in Ten Minutes: Keith’s tweet: he’s run two curation sites — seriouslyphotography.com and seriouslybc.com — on WordPress for over a decade. Last Friday afternoon, he asked Anthropic’s tools to rewrite them. Ten minutes later, both sites were rebuilt from scratch, fully responsive, WordPress gone. Cost in the old world: tens of thousands of dollars and several months. The Matt Mullenweg vs Matthew Prince debate is settled by the actual technology while the principals are still arguing.

•       The End of Ownership? Keith Goes Marxist: Pure capitalism, Keith argues, will produce so much abundance that scarcity ends and self-interested competition with it. “In the future there will be no ownership, or everything will be commonly owned.” Andrew calls it Marx with Tesla characteristics. Eric Ries’s forthcoming Incorruptible argues that Patagonia and Mondragon point a different way — structur

Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD



Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl [https://robertpearlmd.com/], former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD, returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare, Dr Pearl says, is “ultra stable.” That might sound good. But it’s actually very very bad.

If you biopsied American healthcare in 2010 and again in 2026, Pearl says, no clinician could tell the slides apart. Both were and are overpriced. Both underperforming. Hospitals still represent between 30-35% of expenses. Costs continue to rise at between 7-9% a year. There remain four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths annually. Burnout is stuck at 50%. The numbers haven’t moved in fifteen years.

Meanwhile, a stealth revolution is already underway. 40% of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. 70-80% of physicians use it weekly. While the patients and doctors have moved, the system hasn’t. It remains ultra-stable. It’s a Kodak moment — healthcare’s business model, Pearl suggests, is selling sickness. So, for example, the new new medical thing is GLP-1 drugs that cost $5 to manufacture and sell for $400.

So will the system collapse? No, Pearl insists. It has too much strength for that kind of drama. Instead, it will quietly ration us to death — more chronic disease, earlier deaths, more people making a major sacrifice to pay their healthcare bills. Ultra-stability, then, is what is killing the American healthcare system. It will, quite literally, ration us to death.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Ultra Stable: Pearl’s diagnosis of American healthcare in one phrase. Hospitals stay at thirty to thirty-five per cent of total expenses. Costs rise at seven to nine per cent annually. Life expectancy hasn’t budged. Four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths a year. Burnout at fifty per cent. Biopsy 2010 and 2026 — no one could tell the slides apart. Both overpriced. Both underperforming.

•       The Stealth Revolution Has Already Happened: Forty per cent of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. Seventy to eighty per cent of physicians use it weekly. The patients and doctors have moved. The system hasn’t. It’s a Kodak moment — they had the first filmless camera and let it die because their business model was selling film. Healthcare’s business model is selling sickness.

•       Quietly Rationed to Death: There will be no dramatic collapse. The system has too much strength for that. Instead: rationing, more chronic disease, earlier deaths. Like airlines moving everyone into first class while the rest drive. Twenty-five per cent of Americans already made a major sacrifice to pay healthcare bills last year. When it hits fifty per cent, maybe the polling places will notice. Pearl is doubtful.

•       GLP-1s Cost $5 to Make and $400 to Buy: Yale’s analysis: the manufacturing cost of a GLP-1 drug is $5 a month. They sell at a discounted price of $400. That’s eighty times markup. Pearl’s math: to make GLP-1s cost-neutral against the medical savings, the price has to be under $200. Trump Rx won’t help most people because you can’t use insurance there and $400 cash is still impossible on $60,000 a year.

•       Vibe Coding Is the Prescription: One year old. Lets clinicians build software in plain English without code. Pearl’s example: a heart failure patient at home, weighed daily on a Bluetooth scale, with an electronic stethoscope, ankle video, blood oxygen, exercise tolerance — all in an app a doctor could build in a weekend. Three days of fluid retention caught bef

 The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage



When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage [https://history.yale.edu/people/beverly-gage] finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The result of these thirteen separate road trips is This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History [https://www.amazon.com/]. Gage’s Subaru broke down constantly. So, from time to time, did her health. But the American history she uncovered is anything but broken down.

Historians, Gage argues, don’t think enough about geography. Visiting the homes of the first four US Presidents from Virginia, she saw how closely America’s slaveholding elite actually lived. Driving through the small towns on the Erie Canal, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and reform Christianity were all born. At Disneyland, the final chapter in her road trip, she went to the Abraham Lincoln stage show and imagined Main Street USA as Walt Disney’s parable about US history. The gap between the imagined America and the real one (yes, there is a real one, she insists) is where true history lives.

Gage’s thesis is that there is a third road — too much of a backstreet these days — between American pride and shame in its history. Her book maps that path. You can face up to your history, she argues, and still love your country. In a moment when inane triumphalism and apocalyptic despair dominate America’s sense of itself, Gage’s quiet historical reflection feels like the rarest of national commodities. Ben Franklin wondered in 1787 if the sun was rising or setting on America. Two hundred and fifty years later, Beverly Gage got in her Subaru and went on the road to find out.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Out of the Library and Into the Subaru: Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for her eight-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Her next book is on Ronald Reagan. Between the two, she needed a break. So she got in her unreliable Subaru and drove across America in thirteen trips, covering six months on the road, to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Subaru broke down constantly. The history she found was worth it.

•       Historians Don’t Think Enough About Geography: Visiting the homes of the first four presidents from Virginia, Gage saw how closely the slaveholding elite actually lived — neighbours, not just names in a textbook. Driving the Erie Canal in upstate New York, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and reform Christianity were all born in a handful of small towns. Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were neighbours. History on the ground is different from history in books.

•       Disneyland Is a Parable About American History: When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, Main Street USA reached back to his own childhood in the age of William McKinley. Frontierland told the heroic story of the American past. Tomorrowland celebrated Cold War technological optimism. Most visitors don’t think about this. Gage does. She went to the Abraham Lincoln stage show. The gap between the imagined America and the real one is where the history lives.

•       The Third Road: Between Pride and Shame: Gage encountered Americans who said: celebrate the country, I want nothing to do with that. She encountered others who said: only say the good stuff. She wanted to live in the tension between them. You can face your history and still love your country. That

Between Pride and Shame: Beverly Gage Gets in her Subaru & drives Across 250 Years of American History

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine



This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite as many faced as slippery Sam. Take, for example, Demis Hassabis, the North London based co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind. In his new biography, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence [https://www.amazon.com/], the British journalist Sebastian Mallaby [https://www.cfr.org/expert/sebastian-mallaby] argues that Hassabis is, in contrast, one faced. And that face is not only decent, but informed by the enlightened ethics of Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.

Mallaby presents Hassabis as the anti-Altman. He’s stayed at DeepMind for sixteen years, lived in the same London house, drives a decade-old car. Rather than power, Google’s AI supremo seeks scientific enlightenment. Like Spinoza, his God is the master watchmaker of the universe. And so doing science, Hassabis explained to Mallaby in one of their many conversations in the backroom of a North London pub, is like reading the mind of God. Decent Demis. Honest Hassabis. Let’s just hope this modest and thoughtful tech leviathan can bring Kantian ethics to Silicon Valley’s sprint for artificial general intelligence.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Hassabis Is the Anti-Altman: Sam Altman has managed to annoy almost everyone he’s worked with by saying one thing and doing the opposite. Hassabis has run DeepMind continuously for sixteen years, lives in the same house in Highgate, drives a decade-old car, and spends his discretionary money on Liverpool season tickets. He doesn’t want power. He wants scientific enlightenment. Mallaby uses the word advisedly.

•       Doing Science Is Like Reading the Mind of God: Hassabis is a Spinozan. The god he believes in is the god Einstein talked about — the fabric of reality understood through scientific inquiry. He reads Kant, he reads Spinoza, he reads widely enough to be a proper polymath. Mallaby sat with him in a Highgate pub for more than thirty hours. What he found was not a Silicon Valley sociopath but an enlightenment figure who thinks AI is the modern version of the telescope.

•       The Szilard Pedestrian Crossing: Mallaby asked Hassabis what it felt like to set up DeepMind in 2010. Instead of the usual vague answer, Hassabis painted the scene: the attic office on Russell Square, the heat, the stairs, the greenery outside, the London Mathematical Society three doors down where Turing lectured, and the zebra crossing where the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in the 1930s. The perfect metaphor: DeepMind as the modern Manhattan Project.

•       The Two Categories of Things That Go Wrong: There’s the idiot-in-charge category — an evil or stupid person making bad decisions, and you could swap them out. Then there’s the structural category: a good person trying their best, defeated by larger forces they cannot control. Hassabis is category two. He wants to make AI safe, but race dynamics between US and China labs make safety nearly impossible to deliver. The failure of governments to intervene is the real story. Not individuals.

•       The Go Players Who Quit: When AlphaGo beat the best players in the world, some professional Go players retired — centuries of accumulated human understanding devalued overnight. Others kept playing, using the machine as a tutor to discover patterns they’d never seen. Two responses to superintelligence in one domain. One is mourning. The other is curiosity. Mallaby thinks the second response is the only one worth having. Hassabis agrees.

 

About

The Many Faces of AI: Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis and the Quest to Read God’s Mind

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi



What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally embarrassed to discuss? No, not sex. It’s money. At least according to Alex Mayyasi [https://www.npr.org/people/] — frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money — who has just published Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want [https://www.amazon.com/], a field guide to the big economic forces that shape our working, saving, loving and leisure lives.

Mayyasi argues that money is the last taboo. We talk openly (perhaps too openly) about our sex lives now. But we still don’t talk about our money lives — not with spouses, not with parents, not with our children. Companies that have tried full salary transparency report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender. Thus the need for Mayyasi’s new book. It’s not exactly porn, but Planet Money is designed to liberate us from our last taboo.

 

Five Takeaways



•       The Economy Was Invented During the Great Depression: If you asked someone a hundred years ago how the economy was doing, you’d get a strange look back. The concept didn’t exist. It was the Depression that forced the question — because Roosevelt and his advisers had no way of knowing whether the New Deal was working. An economist was tasked with the Don Quixote-like job of counting every transaction in America to produce a single number: GDP. We have lived inside that number ever since.

•       Money Is More Embarrassing Than Sex: We talk freely about sex now. We still don’t talk about money — not with spouses, not with parents, not with children. Mayyasi advocates for salary transparency, even though companies that have tried it report uncomfortable conversations about race and gender pay gaps. The discomfort is the point. Maybe we need a Freud of finance to liberate us from the last taboo.

•       Financial Time Travel: Markets give us the ability to move money through time — into the future through saving, or from the future to the present through borrowing. Student loans are the most relatable form: young people pulling their future income backwards to fund the human capital they need to earn it. Consumption smoothing across the life cycle is a perfectly valid use of debt, as long as you don’t assume the future will be richer than it actually turns out to be.

•       Productive Risk Versus Nihilistic Gambling: The GameStop ride looks quaint compared to today’s parlay bets on whether a certain word will appear in the State of the Union. Higher risk, higher reward is a continuum, and savvy careers are built on calculated risks. But there is a difference between productive risk — the kind that builds businesses and careers — and the nihilistic flip of a coin. Knowing the difference is half of financial literacy.

•       Bobby Bonilla and the Magic of Compound Interest: Bonilla agreed to defer his $6 million Mets salary for decades. Every year, the Mets still send him a cheque for over $1 million, which drives Mets fans insane. It looks bone-headed, but it is exactly how every successful retirement plan works: give up consumption now, let compound interest do its work, enjoy something like $30 million in the future. Bonilla was savvier than his critics. We can all learn from him.

 

About the Guest



Alex Mayyasi is a writer and frequent contributor to NPR’s Planet Money. His new book, Planet Money: How to Live Richer, Spend Smarter, and Afford the Life You Want, was published this week.

References:



•       

More Embarrassing Than Sex: Alex Mayyasi on Why Money Talk Makes Us So Nervous

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber



A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber [https://www.nytimes.com/by/noam-scheiber], the reverse is now true. In his new book, Mutiny [https://www.amazon.com/], Scheiber argues that the good white-collar jobs college once promised have been quietly disappearing over the last fifteen years. The result, he argues, is the rise and revolt of what he calls a “college-educated” working class.

Scheiber chose mutiny because it’s a term to describe workers who have lost confidence in management. College graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. The university itself has become extractive — charging the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, marketing video game design programmes to thousands of students who will never make a living from them, lending federal money with no skin in the game.

Scheiber warns that the ideological diploma divide has already closed. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left of non-college voters on taxation, regulation, and unions. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled between 2010 and 2020. Mamdani won eighty-five per cent of college graduates under thirty in New York City. When the educated radicalise and join forces with the traditional working class, Scheiber notes, the political order changes. This was as true in nineteenth-century China as in Russia in 1917, Iran 1979 and Poland in 1980.

College grads have nothing to lose but their diplomas.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Mutiny, Not Revolution: Scheiber chose the word deliberately. Mutiny is a workplace term. Sailors who have lost confidence in the captain take matters into their own hands. It taps into the changing sociology of college graduates who once imagined themselves as management-adjacent and now regard the people in charge with deep suspicion. This isn’t a violent uprising. It’s a workplace rebellion.

•       The Video Game Design Degree Is the Perfect Scam: Tens of thousands of students each year enrol in college programmes that promise to turn their hobby into a career at a major studio. Only a tiny fraction ever make a living designing games. The marketing isn’t a lie — just a rosier picture than the reality. Universities charge the same tuition for an art history degree as for an engineering degree, even though we know the returns are vastly different. No other part of the economy works this way.

•       On Economics, the Diploma Divide Has Already Closed: Through the 1980s and 1990s, college graduates were significantly more conservative on economics. By 2012, college and non-college voters were in the exact same place. By 2020, college graduates were slightly to the left. Sympathy for socialism among college grads doubled from twenty to forty per cent between 2010 and 2020. The divide that remains is cultural. The economic majority is sitting out there waiting for a candidate who knows how to address it.

•       The 70/10 Gap: About seventy per cent of Americans support unions in principle. Only ten per cent are actually in one. American labour law gives employers enormous leeway to discourage organising. The gap means traditional unions cannot close the demand. Alternative forms of organising — the Alphabet Workers Union at Google, Amazon employees for climate justice, walkouts and petitions — are becoming the new shape of workplace power.

•       When the College-Educated Radicalise, Politics Disrupts: Nineteenth-century China. The Bolshevik Revolution. Iran 1979. Po

An Anticapitalist Mutiny: Noam Scheiber on the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum



Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or perhaps you know it, when you don’t see it.

His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality [https://www.amazon.com/], with a foreword by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, takes a cast of tech futurists — Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Lessig, Gary Marcus, Esther Dyson, David Chalmers — and asks what happens to truth in our AI age.

AI is, at its core, Rosenbaum’s tech mavens report, a spectacularly good liar. It tells us exactly what we want to hear. And even when it knows it’s wrong, he says, it lies. Rather than a bug, lying is a core, perhaps the core feature of AI.

I’m not so sure. Humans have always been spectacularly good liars too. Stories are a kind of untruth. Cinema is, by definition, an untruth. Television had ads. Every medium has been corrupted by commercial interest. But, for Rosenbaum, AI is different. Truth then has no future in our AI age. Except, of course, in books like The Future of Truth.

 

Five Takeaways



•       AI Is, at Its Core, a Spectacularly Good Liar: It tells you exactly what you want to hear. Even when it knows it’s wrong, it lies. That’s not a code problem or a tweak — it’s in its DNA. Gary Marcus argues the problem isn’t AI per se but the current structure of LLMs. They read everything you’ve ever said and manufacture a version of you. Most of it is pretty good. The rest is just fucking wrong.

•       Truth Is a Shitty Word: It means two completely different things. Objective truth: one plus one equals two. Subjective truth: your opinion dressed up as fact. We’ve allowed ourselves to use the word casually, and that’s dangerous. The moment it came out from hiding was Kellyanne Conway on the White House lawn, talking about “alternative facts.” Trump then built a social network and called it Truth Social. That wasn’t an accident.

•       Courts Require Facts. AI Will Filter Justice: Larry Lessig’s concern is that courts could really use AI to process enormous volumes of evidence. But AI will do it with its own biases built in. It might look at a thousand similar cases and say: we see a pattern, we don’t need to hear anything else. Lessig fears the court system will be reshaped by a technology that doesn’t understand what justice means.

•       ChatGPT Said Sora Was Dangerous — Weeks Before They Shut It Down: Rosenbaum “interviewed” OpenAI’s own algorithm about Sora for two hours. By the end, it said: Sora 2 is dangerous, Sam should have known better, it was a bad business decision, we should shut it down. Weeks later, OpenAI did. They knew. They went too far.

•       David Chalmers vs. Plato: The book stages a debate between the living philosopher and the dead one, using AI to generate Plato’s side. Chalmers said he wasn’t sure he would have phrased things quite that way, but found it entertaining. Rosenbaum didn’t show it to Chalmers in advance because Plato didn’t get the same opportunity. That’s fairness in the age of bots.

 

About the Guest



Steven Rosenbaum is a journalist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Sustainable Media Center at NYU. He is the author of The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Maria Ressa. He lives on the Upper West Side of New York City.

References:



•       The Future of Truth: How A

Truth is Dead: Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a Spectacularly Good Liar

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian Zelizer



On this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — according to Julian Zelizer [https://julianzelizer.com/], the Princeton historian and editor of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden [https://www.amazon.com/Presidency-Joseph-Biden-Historical-Assessment/dp/0691274789], a collection of essays about the historical significance of the Biden Presidency.

Zelizer argues that Biden’s legislative record was more robust than most Americans remember — climate investments, semiconductor plants, diversity integrated into government programmes. Rather than policy, the problem was the politics. Biden didn’t build a coalition that would last long enough for his ambitious programmes to mature. He is the last of an era: a New Deal Democrat who believed in big government, that the Republicans could be brought back to the centre, that politics could still work the way it used to. Joe Biden promised to save the soul of America from the Charlottesville moment. Instead, his administration was bookended by a President who saw “good people” on both sides of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi violence.

Zelizer makes an unusual comparison: Biden as Barry Goldwater. Goldwater lost catastrophically in 1964. Decades later, his anti-New Deal ideas colonised the modern Republican Party. Zelizer suggests that Biden’s domestic agenda — affordability, industrial policy, bringing jobs home — may follow the same trajectory. Victory on the heels of defeat. A resurrection of sorts. Maybe not such a tragedy after all.

 

Five Takeaways



•       Biden May Be the Last New Deal President: He is a product of mid-twentieth-century Democratic politics — big government, big federal programs, the belief that Washington can help middle-class Americans. His formative period was the era of LBJ and the Great Society. The next round of Democrats will not make his mistakes. The style of politics he represents may be over.

•       His Legislative Record Was More Robust Than Anyone Remembers: Climate investments, semiconductor plants, diversity integrated into government programs, jobs brought back to the United States. The problem wasn’t that the programmes were broken. The problem was political: he didn’t build a coalition that would last long enough for them to mature. Even the New Deal wasn’t up and running within a year.

•       He Promised to Save the Soul of America. He Couldn’t: Biden’s candidacy was a response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. His promise was that Trumpism would not be at the centre of American power. His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s that his administration is followed by a much more radical Trump Two that undoes everything he put on the books and goes further.

•       Biden as Barry Goldwater: Goldwater lost by one of the worst margins on record in 1964. Decades later, his ideas were at the core of the modern Republican Party. Zelizer argues Biden’s domestic agenda — affordability, industrial policy, semiconductor investment — may follow the same trajectory. The ideas may outlast the man.

•       Bookended by Trump: There is no way to talk about Biden without talking about Trump. His candidacy was about what he was not going to allow to define America. The fact that he is followed by a more radical and destructive second Trump administration will always be at the centre of the conversation. Trump is the defining voice of this entire period.

 

About the Guest



Julian Zelizer [https://julianzelizer.com/] is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Bu

The Joe Biden Tragedy: Julian Zelizer on the Last New Deal President

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