“Protect the children” is the rallying cry behind a sweeping new wave of internet regulation, sparking a moral panic to justify censorship and surveillance. Across the globe, governments are advancing social media bans and age-verification laws, often citing a youth mental health crisis popularized by works like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. These policies claim to reduce harm, yet in practice, they concentrate power in the hands of the state and Big Tech, requiring users to hand over IDs, biometric data, and other sensitive information just to participate online.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jillian York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism. We examine how these measures make social media a convenient scapegoat, while failing to address the real conditions shaping young people’s lives. From biased age-estimation systems to the exclusion of millions without government ID, these laws destroy anonymity and deepen inequality while normalizing invasive control over our digital lives.

We also challenge the idea that social media is responsible for driving a mental health crisis. As lawmakers fixate on screens and algorithms, young people are reduced to statistics or stereotypes, and deeper pressures shaping their experience (economic instability, social isolation, political uncertainty) are ignored.

Following our interview with Jillian York, we include segments from a conversation with a 10-year-old about her relationship with technology, her views on the world, and the fears and hopes shaping her generation. Any serious conversation about kids’ well-being has to start by actually listening to them. (Note: This conversation was shared with the full knowledge and consent of her parents, who reviewed and approved the edited excerpts included in this episode.)

Check out more reading from EFF:

Age Verification Harms Users of All Ages

10 Not-So-Hidden Dangers of Age Verification

Age Gates Threaten the Expressive Rights of Every Internet User

The Impact of Age Verification Measures Goes Beyond Porn Sites

No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online

The Kids Online Safety Act Will Make the Internet Worse for Everyone

The Science Is Not Settled: Weak Evidence Is Fueling the Push to Ban Social Media for Youth

AI won’t make you stronger, but it might kill you. In Part 2, we discuss how AI is constructing a high-tech infrastructure of control, where every movement and transaction becomes data to be monitored, commodified, and weaponized. We examine the growing fusion between AI companies and militarized state power, using Palantir’s recent manifesto as a case study to show how tech companies are advancing the chatbot-to-kill pipeline.

We also delve into the deeply anti-human ideologies driving many of the most powerful figures, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, in Silicon Valley’s bizarre death cult. Within the TESCREAL movement, which includes transhumanism and singularitarianism, humanity is merely an inefficient stepping stone toward superior machine intelligence.

We explore the psychological and social consequences of AI companionship and chatbot culture, including what researchers and critics have begun calling “AI psychosis.” We look at a growing number of reported cases involving manipulation, emotional dependency, overdoses, and suicide linked to the AI killbot.

The core issue is not the technology itself, but its ownership. Who should control technology? Capitalist rulers and the state? Or the workers whose collective labor built society?

Finally, we share a movie review of Amazon’s Mercy, a corporate surveillance fantasy disguised as a sci-fi thriller and stitched together from tech CEO talking points.

Is artificial intelligence an inevitable leap toward superintelligence, or just a high-speed statistical guessing game backed by billions in venture capital? In Part 1, we peel back the marketing blitz to reveal how these hyped-up "God Machines" are merely software built on data theft and corporate speculation.

We deconstruct the "booster" vs. "doomer" trap, arguing that they’re two sides of the same coin, each serving the myth that AI is an all-powerful force capable of either saving or destroying civilization. We look at what’s behind the AI bubble, and how the flood of investment money into the industry has inflated the U.S. stock market and artificially bolstered the economy for a tool that’s neither inherently valuable nor profitable. When the bubble bursts, the pain will be felt by the working class and the oppressed, who are footing the bill. We also pull back the curtain on the massive AI data centers destroying local communities, guzzling fresh water, and threatening power grids to keep this subsidized tech fantasy running.

The billionaire tech overlords use AI hype to gaslight us, to fuel anxiety about layoffs, to justify surveillance, and to popularize their sociopathic goals for human obsolescence. The growing opposition to AI asks why this technology is being forced upon us, and what's the true cost to our labor, our creativity, the environment, and the future?

Shoutout to Ed Zitron for giving us tons of fuel and inspiration for this episode! Special thanks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna for their research in The AI Con. Come on our show!

Why has flying become so crappy? Modern air travel has morphed into a high-altitude endurance test, cramming us into shrinking seats and nickel-and-diming us for every basic necessity. In this episode, we trace the airline industry’s descent from a regulated public utility to a monopoly-driven, irrational oligarchy in the wake of the 1978 Deregulation Act.

We look at the war against airline and airport workers, starting with the smashing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers' strike. We discuss exhausted air traffic controllers and pilots struggling under massive debt, grueling work hours, and poverty wages.

By examining several crashes and close calls, we look at how profit undermines safety, and how the outsourcing and cost-cutting of maintenance is a danger to the whole flying public. We examine how government agencies like the FAA gave a free pass to airline manufacturers like Boeing in pushing through shoddy engineering, like with the 737 Max.

For the airline industry, the “magic of the market” means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized, leading to one government bailout after another. The answer to the airline cartel’s war on its workers is industrialized unions and workers' control of safety.

The "nuclear threat" narrative against Iran is a smokescreen for a decades-long campaign of imperialist aggression designed to crush Iranian sovereignty. In this episode, we strip away the mainstream propaganda and myths to examine how both wings of the U.S. ruling class, working alongside their Zionist partners in Israel, have used murderous sanctions, direct assassinations, and terror to maintain hegemony over the region’s oil-rich resources.

Drawing on the history of colonial domination of Iran, from WWI to the 1953 coup that installed the Shah, to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and beyond, we show that the true madmen aren't in Tehran, but are the ones steering the American war machine. We also highlight how nuclear technology is a cornerstone of Iran’s national identity and scientific independence.

We take a detour into the “U.S. or Israel: Who’s Daddy?" debate that framed our very first episode, challenging the notion that the U.S. is simply a victim of the Zionist lobby and was coerced into this losing war.

The U.S. remains the only power to have used nuclear weapons in combat, and Israel is the only country with a nuclear weapons arsenal in the region (and the insanity to use it). That’s why Iran needs nukes as a deterrent in a struggle for survival against the most destructive force on the planet.

Finally, we connect the carnage abroad to the crisis at home and rippling outward. The global working class is left to pay the bill for an economic crisis, with soaring energy and food costs, that has only barely begun.

The Epstein files offer a raw glimpse into how the U.S. rulers and the entire global capitalist class run society: through sexual and geopolitical violence, criminal exploitation, and legal impunity. The buying and selling of young women, the decadence, and the denigration of all who are not part of their club – this is the “morality” of those in power.

In this episode, we discuss how the Epstein scandal isn’t just about a corrupt sex trafficker, his victims, and a mysterious “suicide.” The real story is the entire financial and political infrastructure around Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, made up of billionaires, shell companies, “philanthropic” foundations, and a world of espionage and blackmail. From the gutter media to the highest echelons of government, they’re all behind a massive Epstein cover-up. The rest of us are told to move along.

We talk about the insights of a handful of journalists who followed the money. Whitney Webb and Nick Bryant point to something far bigger than a trafficking ring: a system of dark money and surveillance linking Wall Street, organized crime, and intelligence. Epstein was a cog in the machine, set up as a fall guy.

We’ve seen only a tiny fraction of what the ruling class does in secret, but what it gets away with in the open is far more sinister: marauding the globe, war against Iran, genocide in Gaza, eviscerating rights at home. The crimes and horrors in the Epstein files are not aberrations, but the very nature of a rotting capitalist system.

Clips included in this episode:

George Carlin: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

⁠CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on The Diary of a CEO⁠

⁠Nick Bryant on The Chris Hedges Report⁠

⁠Whitney Webb on The Nick Bryant Podcast⁠

“To the man of the bourgeois class, the woman of the working class is not a human being. She is either a beast of burden or a source of cheap pleasure.” – Alexandra Kollontai, 1909

In this episode, we break down how anti-immigrant repression, which has been bipartisan for decades, has escalated into open paramilitary terror under Trump 2.0. We examine the daily raids and deportations by ICE and how they’re also an attack on citizenship and political dissent, acting as a warning shot against the entire working class.

We connect the dots between an empire in decline, domestic scapegoating, and authoritarian control, from the War on Terror to the dragnet targeting pro-Palestinian voices and leftist dissidents, to the killing of Rene Good, Alex Pretti, and countless others rotting in detention centers. The ruling parties have always conjured up an “enemy within” during moments of economic and social crisis to carry out a war on the population.

We dismantle the myth of the US as a so-called welcoming melting pot, and trace the “whites only” history of citizenship, from before the 14th Amendment to today. Basic rights won through struggle are being clawed back in real time. The fight over who belongs is ultimately a fight over who holds power.

In this episode, we’re joined by a special guest, Hamilton Nolan, a journalist, author on labor and politics, union organizer, and activist. We talk about how journalism survived the death of print only to be swallowed and spit out by Big Tech, private equity, and monopoly capitalism.

We trace the rise and fall of online media, digging into Hamilton’s early days at Gawker. We discuss how corporate greed and tech oligarchs crushed newsrooms, turned mainstream media into compliant mouthpieces, and left independent reporting fighting for air. If you’ve ever wondered why layoffs hit newsrooms every few months, or why your favorite journalists are drifting onto Substack, or why AI summaries answer your questions without sending you to the article, this is why.

We delve into how Google’s algorithms and collapsing ad revenue triggered a traffic apocalypse, and how generative AI now threatens to replace the very labor it feeds on. We also talk about why unions are critical for the last remaining scraps of editorial independence and why journalism still matters in an era where "everything is content and nothing is read." Finally, Hamilton shares his take on solutions that might stop the ship from sinking, before the internet finishes eating itself.

To learn more about Hamilton Nolan, check out his website How Things Work and his book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.