Dave Troy Presents

Half a percent doesn't sound like much. In a close midterm, it is everything.

Dr. Jen Golbeck has spent two decades as a computer scientist studying what the internet can figure out about you without being told — and she now spends her nights as a working journalist inside the most extreme corners of American politics. Both halves of that job point at the same machine: an economy built on collecting everything about everyone, and online communities that offer people the one thing they most want, which is belonging.

Dave and Jen talk about how far surveillance has actually gone, why she thinks the AI bubble is at its top edge, what a decade inside far-right forums has taught her about how ordinary people radicalize, what she saw on the street in Minneapolis during the ICE protests, and what is genuinely worth doing between now and November.

Guest

Dr. Jen Golbeck — Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information and director of the Social Intelligence Lab. She writes the daily MAGAReport newsletter and reports for HuffPost and Esquire.

MAGAReport | UMD faculty page | HuffPost | Esquire: a weekend with the Proud Boys | TED: Is AI progress stuck?

Also mentioned: the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legislation tracker.

Chapters

00:00 - Cold open and intro

01:28 - Meet Dr. Jen Golbeck

03:52 - Surveillance, extremism, and the American ideal

06:07 - How bad has surveillance actually gotten

07:49 - The phone-number trick and the data-broker machine

10:01 - The TEDx talk that made the tech bros angry

13:46 - A 24-hour amnesty: 40 percent of the class confesses

17:05 - Data centers, bad neighbors, and democratic control

19:18 - The dot-com parallel: is this a bubble?

20:26 - Open source, local models, and the business-model problem

24:52 - Typing pools and the job-apocalypse story

27:37 - The antisocial internet: from privacy to radicalization

29:19 - A weekend with the Proud Boys in North Carolina

32:43 - The symbolic show of strength

36:56 - What cults know about belonging

38:58 - Minneapolis, ICE, and the feel of a civil war

44:26 - What the Charlie Kirk killing revealed

47:13 - Civil war, or Costco?

49:31 - The Facebook experiment: half a percent

52:09 - Citizens United, money, and media consolidation

56:07 - Into the midterms: troops, fraud claims, and lawsuits

58:59 - Why the election infrastructure should hold

1:02:00 - Flock cameras and warrantless tracking

1:03:24 - EFF's tracker: pick one thing and be annoying

1:08:33 - Outro and links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. america2.news

Scott Reich recently took the TED Democracy stage in Philadelphia to argue that a renewed ethos of service could help repair our fractured country. He joins Dave Troy for a conversation that runs from ancient Athens to a modern "GI Bill for civic service," by way of Robert Putnam, the 1917 baseball All-Star Game, and the simple, radical idea that citizens owe something to one another.

Reich and Troy arrived at similar conclusions by different paths: that social mixing across background, region, and class — not screens and headlines — is how a democracy rebuilds trust. Together they make a hopeful (and stubbornly non-partisan) case for citizenship as a practice, not merely a slogan.

(Production note: a couple of brief internet dropouts affected Scott's audio; we've worked around them.)

Guest:

Scott Reich - presidential historian and attorney; author of "The Power of Citizenship: Why JFK Matters to a New Generation" and the forthcoming "One Day in September: Baseball, Brotherhood, and the Birth of the All-Star Game"; board member of the JFK Library Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

https://www.scott-reich.com/

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open: why national service

01:18 Meet Scott Reich and the TED Democracy talk

04:34 Citizenship: rights, but also obligations

05:43 From "impossible" to practical: connection and service

07:45 The baseball "farm system": start with the young

10:18 What we stopped teaching: civics and Western civ

12:30 The proposal: a modern GI Bill for civic service

14:03 Ancient Greece and the making of a citizen

15:29 Mandatory or voluntary? Incentives over mandates

18:01 Reviving civic life: Peace Corps, clubs, and lost associations

19:55 The commoditization of youth sports

22:53 We've always argued: Adams, Jefferson, and healthy disagreement

24:49 "One Day in September": how Americans used to gather

29:02 Putnam, disinformation, and the loneliness crisis

30:29 Social mixing as national security

32:54 Cohorts across difference: rural Iowa to the Bronx

37:42 Service, not servitude: beyond the military

43:59 Overestimating the other side

46:05 Leaders as vehicles: JFK and the power of citizenship

50:22 What tragedy teaches: our capacity to unite

54:29 What can one person do? Small acts of citizenship

1:01:13 Outro and links

Host Dave Troy writes at https://america2.news and https://washingtonspectator.org

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news

Most of the predictions you encounter every day are closer to the realm of power than the realm of knowledge — and once you see that, you can't unsee it.

Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz joins Dave to talk about her new book Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI. From the Oracle of Delphi (less a holy shrine than a thriving business) to court astrologers, credit scores, and large language models, Véliz argues that predictions are speech acts — veiled commands that bend reality toward themselves. Whoever owns the prediction machines is making a bid to own the future.

Dave and Carissa dig into the rise of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi — anonymous wallets funded hours before an attack on Iran, journalists bullied over bets, newsrooms reporting odds as news — plus AI's "monoculture of sameness," why existential-risk panic distracts from AI-enabled authoritarianism, and why refusing to obey in advance starts with refusing the self-fulfilling prophecy. The conversation ends where it must: democracy is never won, only fought for and built every single day.

Carissa Véiz — Associate Professor at Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy and Institute for Ethics in AI; author of Privacy Is Power and Prophecy.

Get the book - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/239151058-prophecy

TED 2026 talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4wHmKtH-Q

X - @CarissaVeliz

Chapters

00:00 - Cold open & intro

01:30 - Meet Carissa Véliz & the origins of Prophecy

04:37 - Ancient oracles: prediction has always been a business

07:10 - Dread, marketing & why predictions are never facts

09:51 - What makes an honest forecast? Weather vs. people

12:31 - Prediction markets: from PredictIt to Polymarket

15:27 - Insider wallets & the bet on the Iran attack

17:39 - Betting markets meet super PAC politics

20:10 - When newsrooms report bets as news

21:35 - AI as prediction machine: the monoculture of sameness

26:00 - How a digital ethicist actually uses AI

30:50 - Breaking out: serendipity, reading, defying the curve

33:47 - Philosophy as the antidote to prophecy

36:19 - Bayesian priors, agency & refusing to obey in advance

40:44 - Democracy, community & the inconvenient good life

45:17 - From Privacy Is Power to Prophecy

47:49 - Past the event horizon? Against defeatism

51:06 - Reading as an act of defiance

52:33 - Outro & links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0.

You may not be interested in crypto, but crypto is interested in you.

Cryptocurrency has stopped being a finance story. In 2026 it's a political-money machine - woven into our elections, our regulators, the President's family balance sheet, and the everyday plumbing of how Americans get paid, borrow, and save. You can decide never to buy a single token and still be exposed to the fallout.

To open Season 4, Dave Troy talks with two of the sharpest people on this beat: independent researcher Molly White, who tracks the industry transaction by transaction, and Brookings fellow Tonantzin Carmona, who maps the structural harm - who gets targeted, who gets hurt, and how policy makes it possible.

A plain-English tour of where crypto stands heading into the 2026 and 2028 elections: the collapse of regulatory enforcement; the Trump family's crypto web (World Liberty Financial, the USD1 stablecoin, memecoins, Trump Media); the GENIUS Act that passed and the CLARITY Act the industry wants next; the super PACs that spent $130M in 2024; and the quiet creep of crypto into mortgages, 401(k)s, and checkout pages. Plus wildcat banking, predatory inclusion, the death of Web3, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the Celsius collapse, and the case for treating our financial system as a choice, not an inevitability.

Guests

Molly White - writer and researcher; Citation Needed, Web3 Is Going Just Great, and the election-money tracker Follow the Crypto.

mollywhite.net | followthecrypto.org | web3isgoinggreat.com | citationneeded.news | Bluesky @molly.wiki | X @molly0xff

Tonantzin Carmona - fellow at the Brookings Institution; writes on wealth, inequality, and how crypto is marketed to and harms minority communities ("predatory inclusion"). TEDxMidAtlantic talk forthcoming.

Tonantzin Carmona at Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/people/tonantzin-carmona/

Chapters

00:00 - Cold open & intro

01:44 - Meet Molly White & Tonantzin Carmona

06:42 - Regulatory capture: the SEC's 180

09:09 - The $130M lobby; the GENIUS & CLARITY Acts

11:26 - Money out of politics: the Illinois primary

14:29 - The Trump crypto web - and buying influence

19:48 - Stablecoins explained; dollar dominance

24:08 - Tether, audits, "Amazon bucks" & deposit flight

28:04 - Wildcat banking: financial history in reverse

29:03 - Young men, speculation & predatory inclusion

33:19 - Whatever happened to Web3?

37:52 - The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve & "End the Fed"

48:38 - Crypto creeps in: mortgages, 401(k)s, mines

50:50 - The crypto playbook becomes the AI playbook

53:17 - Payments rails: Stripe, Block, "boiling the frog"

56:29 - When it looks like a bank but isn't: Celsius

59:24 - A public alternative: FedNow & Brazil's PIX

01:01:09 - The CBDC question

01:04:27 - What you can actually do

01:08:38 - Outro & links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. More at america2.news.

If you've been following world events, you know that Taiwan's future has become a major question, and a fulcrum for the future of democracy. Chris Horton is the author of "Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival," a new book that offers a unique view into Taiwan's complex history, its precarious present, and its potential futures. "Ghost Nation" is a must read for those interested in the future of democracy, not just in Asia but around the world, and Dave's conversation with Chris is a great introduction to this complex set of topics.

More info: https://chrishortonwriter.com

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Nation-Taiwan-Struggle-Survival/dp/1035034026

00:00 Introduction to Taiwan's Complex History

00:52 Meet Chris Horton: Author of Ghost Nation

03:15 The Dutch and Spanish Colonization

07:27 The Ming and Qing Dynasties

17:53 Japanese Rule and Modernization

23:48 The ROC and the 2-28 Incident

48:18 Martial Law in Taiwan: A Dark History

50:00 Democratization and Political Shifts

51:39 Taiwan's Identity and International Relations

01:00:56 Taiwan's Economic Transformation

01:04:10 TSMC: Taiwan's Semiconductor Giant

01:08:37 China's Military Threat and Taiwan's Defense

01:23:34 US-Taiwan Relations and Strategic Ambiguity

01:33:07 Conclusion and Final Thoughts