#1816 IP'd to Death: How Intellectual Property Law Went from a Protection to a Weapon
Air Date: 8-19-2026
Today we trace the corporate capture of ideas themselves. What began as a brief legal incentive granting fourteen years of exclusive rights to a creation has become a system that kept a pandemic vaccine from reaching poorer countries and where entertainment conglomerates and technology giants fence off and sell our own culture back to us.
Read more#1808 Billionaires vs. Democracy: They're Not Coming For Your Job, They're Coming For Your Government (And The Entire Economy)
Air Date: 7-10-2026
Today we look at what it means to live in an economy that has quietly split in two with a soaring stock market driven by AI on one side, a collapsing job market on the other, and the subtle shift in the right to own things, from your music and movies to your car's software, which all underlie the slide toward technofeudalism.
Read more#1800 How Capitalism Created Loneliness and How To Joyfully Organize Our Way to Community
Air Date: 6–12-2026
Today we examine how America caused a loneliness epidemic by tearing down the places where people used to find each other, how big tech is offering AI as a lackluster substitute for connection, and how people are building the opposite of loneliness with block parties, labor unions, and community gardens.
Read more#1799 The US and China Are Fighting Over Taiwan, Semiconductors, and Africa's Minerals
Air Date: 6–10-2026
Today we explore how Taiwan's own people are stuck between the US and China. Fewer and fewer of them want to rejoin China but their faith in America is sinking just as fast as Trump treats them as a bargaining chip. Their own leaders are split on how to respond. And the place that makes most of the world's advanced chips has almost no seat at the table where its future is being decided.
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#1797 AI Spent $540 Billion to Make You Lonelier: Betting Against Jobs, Art, and Community
Air Date: 6–3-2026
Today we examine the AI industry's economic house of cards, the ideology Silicon Valley uses to sell a broken product, and the very real human costs being paid by workers, the lonely, and communities bulldozed for data centers nobody asked for.
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#1792 Capitalist Class Warfare: AI, Billionaire Capture, and the How to Fight Back
Air Date: 5–15-2026
Today we examine what it would actually take to claw back democracy from billionaire capture — and why some people think it's more possible than it looks. We'll hear about California's proposed billionaire wealth tax, AOC's vision for change that doesn't depend on positional power, and why Peter Thiel's new "AI Tribunal of Truth" may have accidentally revealed exactly what the ruling class fears most.
Read more#1788 Monthly-ish Mix: The America That Almost Was—Empire Abroad, Control at Home, and the Long Arc of Resistance
Air Date: 05-01-2026
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we open with Jesse Jackson's death as a reckoning with the multiracial coalition America chose not to build, trace the American playbook from the 1953 Iran coup to Cuba to the current war on Iran, examine how the same logic of control operates at home through AI monopolies, sports money, and captured courts, and close with the religious and labor traditions that have always driven change — plus Orbán's defeat in Hungary as proof that authoritarian projects don't last forever.
Read more#1783 The Ideology of a Cancer Cell: AI, Surveillance, and Silicon Valley's Psychopath Problem
Air Date: 4–10-2026
Today we examine the ideology quietly driving Silicon Valley — a worldview that treats growth, extraction, and the erasure of human messiness as virtues. We'll hear how tech leaders from Sam Altman to Larry Ellison embody a kind of corporate psychopathy, why Zuckerberg never understood what Facebook actually is, and how the cult of "go for its own sake" may be the most dangerous religion of our time.
Read more#1778 AI, the Pentagon, Labor and Capitalism: The Fight Over Who Controls the Future
Air Date: 3–19-2026
Today we explore the long history of technological disruption — from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of software engineering — and ask whether AI is genuinely different this time, all while autonomous weapons dissolve accountability for the militaries using them and capitalism prevents AI companies from maintaining their ethical aspirations.
Read more#1774 Monthly-ish Mix: Who's in Charge?—The Scramble for Control of Nations, Bodies, and Minds
Air Date: 3-3-26
The Monthly-ish Mix™ is here to get you caught up on recent news without being overwhelming! This month we examine the multi-front struggle for control: military force and economic coercion seizing resources abroad, institutions weaponized to constrain bodies at home, platforms and propaganda capturing minds, and the democratic resistance proving that organized people can still win.
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