Podcasts about East India Company

The Boston Tea Party is the most misunderstood event in American history. Every schoolchild learns it was an antitax protest, proof that Americans have always hated paying taxes. But the Tea Act of 1773 was actually a tax cut. Parliament lowered the duties on tea to bail out the East India Company, a corporation deemed too big to fail, and the Sons of Liberty destroyed ninety thousand pounds of tea not because taxes were too high but because a distant government was using fiscal policy to serve corporate interests without the colonists' consent. The colonists of Massachusetts kept collecting taxes locally even as they defied the British, simply redirecting the money to a patriot treasurer. They didn't want freedom from taxation. They wanted the power to tax themselves. That distinction, argues Vanessa Williamson, is the key to understanding everything that has happened in American politics since. Today's guest is Vanessa Williamson, author of The Price of Democracy. We discuss how the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest against a corporate tax cut for the East India Company, not against taxation, why Shays's Rebellion terrified the founders into writing a Constitution deliberately designed to keep ordinary citizens away from the public purse, and how the Whiskey Rebellion revealed the pattern that would repeat across American history: when poorer people demand fairer taxation, elites respond with force or legal constraints or both. We look at how the Gilded Age Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional, why it took a twenty-year populist campaign and a constitutional amendment to bring it back, and how Rockefeller's lawyers warned that a graduated income tax "realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy." Williamson argues that free countries are high-tax countries, that authoritarian governments are bad at collecting revenue, and that the antitax movement in America has always been an antidemocratic movement, using supermajority requirements, property tax caps, and fiscal limitations to ensure that even when the people vote for a functioning government, the rules written by a previous generation's oligarchs prevent them from getting one.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603–1689. Stability was sought through the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. While some reforms remained, the new regime took grotesque revenge on the regicides, even digging up and hanging Cromwell's corpse. Charles II's reign was characterized by a vibrant court culture, the expansion of trade via the East India Company, and the growth of the British Empire. The segment also highlights the polymath Margaret Cavendish, who wrote the pioneering science-fiction work The Blazing World, reflecting the era's fascination with science and power. Despite the "jollity," the Anglican Church forcefully suppressed religious dissenters like the Quakers. (7)1650

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul's conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul's own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar's own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul's critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society. Read the transcript here Guest Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. References B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957. B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918. B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956. B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916. Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar's Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025. Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024. Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018. Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical. Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala. Bhakt: devotee Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu. Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation. Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society. Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas. Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50. Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925. Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades. BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026. Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community. Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956. PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas. Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India. EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions. Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality. Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world's largest slums. Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul's conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul's own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar's own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul's critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society. Read the transcript here Guest Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. References B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957. B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918. B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956. B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916. Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar's Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025. Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024. Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018. Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical. Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala. Bhakt: devotee Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu. Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation. Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society. Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas. Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50. Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925. Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades. BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026. Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community. Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956. PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas. Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India. EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions. Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality. Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world's largest slums. Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul's conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul's own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar's own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul's critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society. Read the transcript here Guest Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. References B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957. B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918. B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956. B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916. Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar's Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025. Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024. Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018. Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical. Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala. Bhakt: devotee Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu. Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation. Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society. Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas. Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50. Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925. Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades. BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026. Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community. Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956. PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas. Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India. EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions. Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality. Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world's largest slums. Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul's conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul's own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar's own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul's critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society. Read the transcript here Guest Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. References B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957. B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918. B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956. B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916. Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar's Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025. Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024. Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018. Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical. Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala. Bhakt: devotee Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu. Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation. Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society. Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas. Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50. Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925. Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades. BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026. Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community. Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956. PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas. Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India. EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions. Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality. Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world's largest slums. Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul's conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul's own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar's own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul's critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society. Read the transcript here Guest Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. References B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957. B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918. B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956. B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916. Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar's Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026. Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025. Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024. Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018. Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical. Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala. Bhakt: devotee Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu. Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation. Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society. Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas. Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50. Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925. Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades. BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026. Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community. Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956. PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas. Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India. EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions. Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality. Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world's largest slums. Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president could still fire commissioners, as the Court now permits, but if those firings broke quorum, the agency would be unable to proceed until replacements were confirmed. The guardrail would

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.There was an issue with this only going to paid subscribers, so sending it again. Apologies to those who get it twice. I appreciate being paid so feel free to upgrade if you enjoy TWTW.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president

Episode 4180 │ July 12, 2026 You know it's a calling when the math doesn't math but the Kingdom math is always positive — and you can't imagine doing anything else. WHAT THIS EPISODE COVERS  Scott Kesterson and Don Cox — founder of Bald Guy Brew in Boone, North Carolina, missionary, hand-roaster, and one of the most honest small business voices in the BardsFM orbit — sit down for the first time in weeks and find the same thread running through everything: the supply chain squeeze hitting specialty coffee from Ethiopia to Charleston to the Appalachian mountains is not random, the Freedom Gas stations in New Jersey are not generosity, and the corporate rot that produces someone buying moldy warehouse coffee and selling it as a finished product is the same moral collapse that turned the 250th anniversary into an ego showcase instead of a covenant renewal. The conversation moves from the Boston Tea Party as a $1.8 million act of ideological defiance against the East India Company's monopoly, to British FIFA travelers falling in love with southern small towns and reminding Americans what they are walking past every day, to the customer review Don read aloud — your employees look people in the eye and hold real conversations, something most people their age can't do, and you do it because you serve a King. The episode closes on the same John 6 thread running through the week's Vincit episodes — the boy's lunch, Andrew's math, Jesus's math, and what it means to give what you have to the One whose math runs differently than ours. KEY QUESTIONS ADDRESSED  What does the global supply chain doing to specialty coffee — Ethiopian beans stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, freight costs doubling, mold being sold as a finished product — reveal about the coordinated squeeze on small independent businesses that Don Cox says is unlike anything he has seen in 21 years? Why does Scott argue that the 250th anniversary was intentionally fragmented — and what does the Declaration of Independence's explicit language granting Americans not just the right but the duty to throw off any government that violates God-given rights have to do with why its full celebration was replaced with MMA fights and presidential speeches? What is the difference between a passion and a calling — and why does Don Cox say the litmus test is simple: can you imagine yourself not doing it, even when you hit the wall, because if you cannot, that is the thing God put you here to do? ABOUT BARDSFM BardsFM is a daily independent podcast covering faith, liberty, history, and information warfare. Hosted by Scott Kesterson — combat veteran, documentary filmmaker, and rancher. Over 4,100 episodes and 50 million lifetime downloads. New episodes every weekday. bards.fm This episode was researched and produced under the Spatial Terra Intelligence Methodology (STIM v5) — the analytical framework built by Scott Kesterson — with AI-assisted research synthesis at a 70/30 human/AI authorship ratio, fully disclosed. All analysis, conclusions, and editorial judgments are those of Scott Kesterson. BardsFM's archive includes hundreds of episodes on prayer, scripture, and walking the Way of Christ — available free in the full episode catalog. AFFILIATE LINKS Bards Nation Health Store: www.bardsnationhealth.com MYPillow promo code: BARDS >> Go to https://www.mypillow.com/bards and use the promo code BARDS or... Call 1-800-975-2939.  EMPShield protect your vehicles and home. Promo code BARDS: Click here Treadlite Broadforks...best garden tool EVER. Promo code BARDS26: TreadliteBroadforks.com EnviroKlenz Air Purification, promo code BARDS to save 10%: www.enviroklenz.com Morning Intro Music Provided by Brian Kahanek: www.briankahanek.com Founders Bible 20% discount code: BARDS >>> TheFoundersBible.com Windblown Media 20% Discount with promo code BARDS: windblownmedia.com White Oak Pastures Grassfed Meats, Get $20 off any order $150 or more. Promo Code BARDS: www.whiteoakpastures.com/BARDS Mission Darkness Faraday Bags and RF Shielding. Promo code BARDS: Click here DONATIONS: If you wish to support this podcast directly you can donate here... DONATE: Click here MAILING ADDRESS: Xpedition Cafe, LLC Attn. Scott Kesterson 591 E Central Ave, #740 Sutherlin, OR  97479

Humans have collected data for thousands of years—but now we're doing it on a whole new level.This week, Ellen and Alona and joined by Roopika Risam, professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, whose new book Data Empire explores the ancient roots of data-gathering and the rise of the “data state”.Drawing on examples from the East India Company to Palantir, she explains why advances in technology—and our means to collect, sort and deploy data—have almost always been captured by colonial powers or companies for profit, rather than for public good.She reveals how data is used to monitor and control, and how AI is rapidly accelerating the capacity of states and private companies to surveil populations, including against the Uyghur people of Xinjiang. Roopika also explains the disturbing reason she had to rewrite one section of the book three timesHas the “Data Empire” effectively moved beyond the reach of the democratic social contract? And will the future be dystopian—or is there another way?Roopika Risam's book “Data Empire: How information shaped human history” is published by Torva. To read to more on this topic, click here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Check out BeerBiceps SkillHouse Courses Here - https://linktr.ee/bbskillhouseFor all BeerBiceps vlog content Watch Life Of BeerBiceps - https://www.youtube.com/@LifeOfBeerBicepsDownload my meditation and wellness app, Swa:aha.https://app.level.game/?c=zSbmYnShare your guest suggestions hereMail - connect@beerbiceps.comLink - https://forms.gle/aoMHY9EE3Cg3Tqdx9Follow BeerBiceps SkillHouse's Social Media Handles:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeerBicepsSkillHouseInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/beerbiceps_skillhouseWebsite : https://beerbicepsskillhouse.inFor any other queries EMAIL: support@beerbicepsskillhouse.comIn case of any payment-related issues, kindly write to support@tagmango.comFollow Maj Gen Rajiv Narayanan's Social Media Handles:-X: https://x.com/KlRajivLinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/maj-gen-rajiv-narayanan-avsm-vsm-v-a08781117In this 519th episode of The Ranveer Show Hindi, we are joined by Major General Rajiv Narayanan, an Indian Army veteran and China expert who has spent over 25 years researching Chinese history, society, geopolitics, and military strategy.In this conversation with Major General Rajiv Narayanan, we explore the fascinating history of China, from ancient dynasties and Confucianism to the rise of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan, and the evolution of modern China. We discuss the historical relationship between India and China, the origins of the Silk Route, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and the cultural foundations that continue to shape Chinese civilization today.This episode also covers the Opium Wars, the Century of Humiliation, British imperialism, the rise of Japan, the Chinese Communist Party, Hong Kong, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Chinese philosophy, Buddhism's journey from India to China, world history, geopolitics, and the strategic ambitions that influence China's global outlook today.This podcast is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Chinese History, Indian History, World History, Geopolitics, Military Strategy, International Relations, Buddhism, Ancient Civilizations, Asian Politics, and Global Affairs.00:00 – China Exposed03:18 – India & China's Ancient Connection05:32 – Confucius, Taoism & Sun Tzu Explained08:04 – How Modern China Was Built10:17 – Genghis Khan & the Mongol Empire13:50 – How Central Asia Shaped Turkey16:20 – Tibet, Xinjiang & China's Expansion19:15 – The Untold History of Tibet21:00 – Beijing, Shanghai & Ancient China29:15 – Why Japan & Korea Stayed Independent33:50 – Resistance in Tibet & Xinjiang40:05 – The East India Company & China's Fall46:50 – The Opium Wars Explained53:15 – Why Hong Kong & Macau Matter55:15 – Japan's Rise to Power01:00:10 – Fall of Imperial China01:04:10 – Mao, The Long March & the PLA01:06:45 – The Nanjing Massacre01:10:55 – Taiwan & the 'Five Fingers' Strategy01:18:10 – The Pacific Power Game01:21:05 – China's Resource Crisis01:24:20 – The Great Leap Forward Disaster01:25:50 – The 1962 India-China War01:28:40 – China's Cultural Revolution01:42:00 – The One-Child Policy Crisis01:49:50 – India vs. China: Who Wins?01:56:05 – Xi Jinping's New China01:59:50 – Final Lessons from China's History

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 1, 2026 is: nabob • NAY-bahb • noun A nabob is a very rich or important person. // The upscale hotel downtown is a popular meeting spot for the city's corporate nabobs. See the entry > Examples: “NBA nabobs were dismayed by the player empowerment era, where players dictated trades or abandoned teams via free agency.” — Christopher L. Gasper, The Boston Globe, 26 Jan. 2025 Did you know? In India's Mogul Empire, founded in the 16th century, provincial governors carried the Urdu title of nawāb. In 1612, Captain Robert Coverte published a report of his “discovery” of “the Great Mogoll, a prince not till now knowne to our English nation.” The Captain informed the English-speaking world that “An earle is called a Nawbob,” thereby introducing the English version of the word. Nabob, as it later came to be spelled, gained its extended sense of “a prominent person” in the 18th century, when it was applied sarcastically to British officials of the East India Company returning home after amassing great wealth in Asia. But the word was most famously used by Vice President Spiro Agnew, in a 1970 speech written by William Safire, when he referred to critical members of the news media as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Three more forgotten campaigns… The strange, sprawling, global war fought by British soldiers, sailors, marines and East India Company troops in places most people never associate with the redcoat at all. Today we are heading first to the River Plate, where Britain tries to break into Spanish South America through Montevideo and Buenos Aires with some courage, some skill, and quite a lot of  misplaced optimism Then we go to Mauritius, or Isle de France, a French base in the Indian Ocean where Napoleon's ships were making life deeply unpleasant for British trade. And finally, we end up in Java, where a British expeditionary force lands in the East Indies to take on a Dutch colony that had effectively become part of Napoleon's empire. Three campaigns. Three continents. Three very different stories. Support the channel and join my Patreon here - https://www.patreon.com/RedcoatHistory  Buy Steve's books here - https://www.helion.co.uk/people/steve-brown.php 

Historian Sarah Pearsall joins co-hosts Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Whitney Terrell to discuss her new book, Freedom Round the Globe: a World History of the American Revolution. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Pearsall talks about how she chose to write about the global context of the American Revolution. She explains how the hanging of an indigenous woman in Detroit, ordered by British colonizers of the area, led to protests that prefigured the American Revolution. She outlines how tax protests in St. Kitts and the East India Company's actions in South Asia influenced the thinking of revolutionary leaders in the thirteen colonies. She also discusses the role that war crimes played in the public relations battle of the war and reads a passage from Freedom Round the Globe.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Whitney Terrell.Sarah PearsallFreedom Round the Globe: a World History of the American RevolutionOthersThe Declaration of Independence“What we know about the UFC fight at the White House”|CNN, June 1, 2026“These 6 Acts Dropped Out of the Freedom 250 Concert. Here's Why”|People, June 3, 2026See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all historians of the American revolution would agree. Take, for example, Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe, who turns 1776 inside out to present the American rebellion as a kind of world revolution. 1776 as 1917. American patriotism as an explosion of borderless humanity. Pearsall argues that 1776 was as globally significant in its revolutionary promise as 1789, 1848 or 1917. She reminds us that there were at least 26, possibly as many as 32 British colonies in existence in 1775 — in the Caribbean, in Canada, in East and West Florida. And the radical ideas that drove the Declaration of Independence — security, happiness, respect — were being asserted simultaneously all over the world. So in Edinburgh debating clubs, Caribbean sugar plantations and West African castles, the American revolution was welcomed as a global revolution. Universal rather than exceptional. The Tea Party as the Storming of the Winter Palace. Five Takeaways •       32 British Colonies, Not 13: The Forgotten Empire: People talk about the thirteen colonies as if they were all the British colonies in North America. They weren't. There were at least 26, possibly as many as 32, depending on how you count groups of islands. British colonies in the Caribbean. In Canada. In East and West Florida. Each had its own relationship to the British Empire, its own internal tensions, its own calculations about the costs and benefits of rebellion. The question Pearsall asks — why did some rebel and others not? — is the question that opens up the global story. •       The Caribbean Undermines the Slavery Thesis: There is a popular argument that the American Revolution was primarily fought to preserve slavery — that the colonists feared British abolition and revolted to protect the institution. Pearsall's counter: if this were the main driver, the Caribbean colonies would have been the first to join. They were far more dependent on slavery than the mainland colonies. They did not join. The relationship between slavery and the revolution is genuinely complicated — not simple in either direction. The Caribbean story is the evidence that demands a more nuanced account. •       From St Kitts to Kolkata: The Declaration's Global Keywords: Pearsall's organising device: she takes thirteen key words from the Declaration of Independence and finds the spark of each in a far-flung location. Security in the Six Nations cornfields of upstate New York, where it meant something very different to the Haudenosaunee than to the Philadelphia delegates. Happiness in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding it alongside men for the first time. Respect in the streets of Kolkata. This device lets her write about the globe without losing the Declaration as her anchor. •       Americans Were Already Thinking Globally in 1776: One of Pearsall's more surprising findings: Americans in 1776 were far more aware of global events than we tend to assume. They were reading about events in India. The Boston Tea Party is unintelligible without knowing that tea was an Asian commodity and that the East India Company was simultaneously extracting profit from Asia and from the American colonies. Colonists compared themselves explicitly to Indians under the Company's thumb. They saw the connections. The isolation of American history as a subject of study is a modern academic choice, not an eighteenth-century reality. •       Read the Declaration, Not the Constitution: Pearsall's July 4 Prescription: Andrew asks Pearsall what she'll be doing on July 4 and suggests people should read the Constitution. Pearsall gently corrects him: the Declaration of Independence. Two very different documents from very different moments. The Declaration, published on July 4, 1776, is short, bold, and reaches toward universal ideals. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, is a compromise document about how to govern. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Pearsall's prescription: read the Declaration. The IndyCar races and the UFC match at the White House can wait. About the Guest Sarah Pearsall is a prize-winning historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). She previously taught at the University of Cambridge, where she was a colleague of Christopher Clark. She grew up in the United States and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. References: •       Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). •       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the conversation; Pearsall's former Cambridge colleague and friend. •       Episode 2924: Dominic Erdozain on To Love a Country — the morning's companion episode, directly referenced. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the week's America 250 series. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Erdozain this morning, Pearsall this afternoon (01:57) - A meta vantage point: turning the revolution inside out

The five-year peace between Mysore and the East India Company was never a truce; it was simply a race to rearm. Ramjee Chandran breaks down the high-stakes geopolitical chess match that shattered the Treaty of Mangalore. Enter Lord Charles Cornwallis, a general eager to erase the shame of his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown. When the small state of Travancore strategically provokes Tipu Sultan by purchasing two Dutch forts, the "Tiger of Mysore" is forced to defend his vital lifeline to the sea. Discover how a dispute over a thorn-filled ditch and a frantic farcical hiding game by the Raja of Cochin unleashed the formidable Triple Alliance—setting the stage for the Third Anglo-Mysore War and the eventual landlocking of Tipu's empire. Key Details from the Script: The Looming Shadow of Bangalore: During the five years of uneasy peace following 1784, Tipu heavily fortified Bangalore—transforming it into an essential garrison town, arsenal, and the ultimate strategic hinge between the Carnatic plains and the Mysorean interior. Cornwallis's Mandate: Arriving in 1786, Lord Cornwallis found a disorganized Madras Presidency. Haunted by his defeat in the American War of Independence, he was impatient to neutralize Tipu but required a legitimate casus belli (justification for war) to void the existing treaty. The Provocation: In 1789, the British-aligned Kingdom of Travancore purchased two Dutch forts (Cranganore and Ayacottah) that sat in territory subordinate to Mysore. This commercial deal effectively placed a British-protected enclave right on Tipu's western flank, threatening his only access to global maritime trade and French assistance. The Anxious Farce: Sensing the impending storm, the Raja of Cochin (a Mysore vassal) tried to avoid choosing sides. When Tipu summoned him, the Raja feigned illness and locked himself in a room to escape Tipu's visiting minister. The Invasion: On December 29, 1789, diplomatic patience expired. Tipu breached the defensive lines of Travancore. By April 1790, he launched a full-scale invasion, dismantling their fortifications and sending 200 captured cannons back to Bangalore. The Triple Alliance: Cornwallis seized his trigger. Through the relentless backroom diplomacy of British Resident Charles Warre Malet in Pune, the British successfully bought, flattered, and maneuvered the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad into a massive, multi-front coalition against a structurally isolated Mysore. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Prestige Group, that makes this podcast possible. Follow The History Of Bangalore on social, here: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historyofbangalore/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfBangalore Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoryOfBLR YouTube: https://youtube.com/@HistoryOfBangalore?si=mnH3BsYfI4BUU234 iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-the-history-of-bangalore-163453722/ Follow Ramjee Chandran on Instagram and Twitter: @ramjeechandran The theme music for the show was composed by German-Indian Koln based percussionist, Ramesh Shotham. Ramjee Chandran's photos by Asha Thadani. RESEARCH AND SOURCES: All our episodes are based on published research and archive records. To request information about our sources, write to hob@explocity.com. Let us know if you are a researcher (either institutional or independent) and also provide some information about why you need this information. Researchers will get priority. We only have time to engage serious, academic queries so please understand if we do not respond to casual requests.

rWotD Episode 3286: Sunda Strait campaign of January 1794 Welcome to random Wiki of the Day, your journey through Wikipedia's vast and varied content, one random article at a time.The random article for Sunday, 3 May 2026, is Sunda Strait campaign of January 1794.The Sunda Strait campaign of January 1794 was a series of manoeuvres and naval actions fought between warships and privateers of the French Republic and a squadron of vessels sent by the British East India Company to protect trade in the region, later augmented by Dutch warships. The campaign developed as French forces based on Isle de France reacted more quickly than the British forces in the Indian Ocean to the expansion of the French Revolutionary Wars on 1 February 1793. French privateers rapidly spread along the British trade routes in the Far East, becoming concentrated around the narrow Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. These ships were soon joined by French Navy frigates and began to inflict losses on shipping in the region. The Royal Navy forces in the Indian Ocean were deployed elsewhere and so the East India Company, the private enterprise that ruled much of British India in the 1790s and maintained their own fleet and navy, raised a squadron of armed merchant ships to patrol the Strait and drive off the raiders.The arrival of this British force on 2 January 1794 was initially a success, the squadron over-running and capturing two large and well-armed privateers on 22 January, not long after the French vessels had been beaten off during an attack on the British trading post at Bencoolen. On 24 January an action against a larger French squadron was fought in the Strait itself, but ended inconclusively and the squadrons divided, the British receiving the Dutch frigate Amazone as reinforcement. The French subsequently turned southwards out of the Strait and attacked Bencoolen again on 9 February, capturing an East Indiaman in the harbour before returning to Isle de France with their prize.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:08 UTC on Sunday, 3 May 2026.For the full current version of the article, see Sunda Strait campaign of January 1794 on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Bluesky at @wikioftheday.com.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Kimberly.

In this special presentation for Just World Educational's Iran Crisis series, Helena Cobban, the president of Just World Ed, delivered a pre-recorded talk for the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center conference in Orinda, California, on April 25th. Unable to attend in person and having to record her remarks more than 24 hours before they would be delivered, she chose to take a long historical view of the crisis by tracing the Strait of Hormuz across 5,000 years of human history. She traced Hormuz's  origins as a key node connecting the formative ancient civilizations in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamian, and as a central artery in the vast Indian Ocean trading zone that once stretched from East Africa to China. She described that pre-European world as a thriving, self-governed commercial network with its own norms and technologies, drawing on the work of historian Janet Abu-Lughod. She then walked through the entry of five European imperial powers into that world: Portugal, Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France. She described what she called the "White Supremacist International," a succession of empire-building ventures driven by profit, looting, and the rise of finance capitalism. She traced Portugal's violent seizure of Hormuz in 1507 under Afonso de Albuquerque, followed by the London-based East India Company's takeover of the port in 1622, and drew direct parallels between those colonial methods and what Israel is doing in Palestine and Lebanon today. Cobban closed by urging viewers to work toward curbing Western military power and ending the war.Support the show

In this episode, the host Catherine Lam sits down with Stephanie Forbes, founder and CEO of The Forbes Group. Stephanie is an internationally recognized expert in supply chain strategy and operational resilience. To explore her groundbreaking new book, Global Wealth, Local Impact. From the gladiators of the Roman Coliseum to the East India Company, from the Silk Road to the Strait of Hormuz, Stephanie reveals how the invisible machinery of global trade has always shaped local lives, and why understanding that history is the ultimate playbook for navigating today's volatile world economy. This episode is part history, part world affairs, part leadership guide. It will change how you see every product and every business decision. Key Insights You'll Learn ·         Supply Chains Are as Old as Civilization: From Caesar's gladiator games to the Silk Road to the East India Company, the mechanics of global trade, logistics corridors, currency exchange, quality control, insurance, letters of credit, have been evolving and compounding for over two thousand years. ·         The East India Company Changed Everything: At its peak, it controlled two-thirds of world trade. It created the modern company, shared ownership, and insurance. It also shows what happens when one company controls too much. ·         The Silk Road Was the World's First Trust Economy: It ran for over 1,300 years. Merchants used early credit systems and reputation to do business. Think of it as the first five-star review system. ·         Trust and Reputation Are Still the Foundation of Commerce: From Silk Road merchants to Facebook Marketplace sellers, the rules haven't changed. People do business with those they trust. Stephanie's book dedicates an entire chapter to this truth — and why trust remains the single most important asset in any business relationship. ·         The Strait of Hormuz Is a Global Pressure Point Right Now: About 20% of the world's energy passes through it. Any disruption hits fuel, shipping, food, and whole economies. Geopolitics and supply chains are connected. ·         Disruption Is the New Normal — Build for Resilience: Big unexpected events happen more often now. Leaders need backup plans. They need multiple suppliers. The question isn't whether something goes wrong, it's how fast you can adapt. ·         Critical Minerals Are the New Geopolitical Battleground: Lithium, cobalt, potash, and other critical minerals are redefining global power dynamics. Who controls these resources controls leverage over the infrastructure of the modern economy, from electric vehicles to defense systems. ·         History's Lessons Are the Best Strategic Playbook: Every challenge facing supply chain leaders today, monopoly risk, geopolitical disruption, infrastructure bottlenecks, trust breakdowns, has a historical precedent. Stephanie's book connects the dots between ancient trade systems and modern business strategy in a way that is both illuminating and immediately actionable.   Global Wealth, Local Impact is a rare book that makes the complex feel personal and the historical feel urgent. Whether you're a supply chain professional, a business leader, or simply someone trying to make sense of why the world feels increasingly unstable, this book will give you the context, the language, and the framework to lead with confidence.  

Bahadur Shah Zafar was a nominal king living off the pension provided by the East India Company. Instead of leading the freedom struggle, he actually betrayed it along with his wife, Zeenat Mahal. Yet, for the longest time, our history books and popular discourse have celebrated him as a great warrior of Indian independence. Tune into the full podcast to understand the real truth behind such important episodes of Indian history.Support Our PodcastsIf you enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Dharma Dispatch podcast so we can offer more such interesting, informative and educational content related to Indian History, Sanatana Dharma, Hindu Culture and current affairs. It takes us months of rigorous research, writing and editing and significant costs to offer this labour of love.Ways you can Support The Dharma Podcast:* UPI: ddispatch@axl* Wallets, Netbanking, etc.* Click the button below to take a paid subscription. Get full access to The Dharma Dispatch Digest at thedharmadispatch.substack.com/subscribe

On December 31st, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a charter. What she created wasn't a trading company. It was the world's first corporate empire — and everything that followed was a hostile takeover disguised as commerce.This is the history of the East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) — two corporations that rewrote the history of India, the British Empire, and modern finance in a single century. This isn't the version they taught you in school. This is how it actually worked.This is Episode 1 of Corporate Empires — the investigative documentary series that tracks how corporations became more powerful than the nations that chartered them.What You'll Discover:➤ The Charter That Transferred Sovereign Power — How a single royal document gave private merchants the right to wage war, sign treaties, and govern millions➤ The VOC's Hidden Weapon — The Dutch East India Company invented the permanent share and created the Amsterdam Stock Exchange — the template for all modern corporate finance➤ The Army Behind the Balance Sheet — How the British East India Company maintained 150,000 soldiers — more than the British Army itself — as an enforcement mechanism for profit➤ The Bengal Playbook — How Robert Clive didn't win the Battle of Plassey through superior force. He bought it. Bribed Mir Jafar. And turned a battle into a corporate acquisition of 40 million people➤ State-Backed Narco Trafficking — How Britain's addiction to Chinese tea created a silver crisis — and how the East India Company solved it by flooding China with Bengali opium, triggering the First Opium War➤ The Corruption Engine — Why corruption wasn't a flaw in the British Empire's corporate system. It was the system. Underpaid employees, private trade, and rotten boroughs in Parliament were features, not bugs➤ The Enduring Playbook — From United Fruit to IMF structural adjustment programs, the East India Company's methods didn't die in 1874. They evolved.The East India Company didn't colonize India. That word is too small. They executed the world's first hostile corporate takeover of a sovereign nation — and they wrote the playbook that corporations still use today.The history of the British Empire is inseparable from the history of corporate greed at a civilizational scale. This is that story.Same forces. Different century.

Continuing our epic series of first-time Remnant guests, Jonah Goldberg sits down with the political economists Samuel Gregg to discuss Adam Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment, the social question, shiny shoe buckles, the East India Company, mercantilism, liberalism's origins, Burke, and the new-right's rejection of free markets. Show Notes:—Samuel Gregg's Law and Liberty article on Adam Smith—Jonah's book: Suicide of the West—Jamelle Bouie's attack on Suicide of the West—Jonah's response to Jamelle Bouie—Daniel B. Klein - “‘Liberal' as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769–1824”—Quentin Skinner - Liberty before Liberalism—Gregg's NR article on Smith and Burke—Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue—“Why I am Not a Conservative” by F. A. Hayek The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including access to all of Jonah's G-File newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you'd like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with William Federer about the miracle stories of America's founding, the East India Company, the Boston Tea Party, George Washington, days of prayer and fasting, and the moments in the Revolution that seemed to turn on providence. From Brooklyn fog to Dorchester Heights, this is a powerful look at why America's birth still matters. Subscribe for clips from The Eric Metaxas Show to hear politics and culture from a Christian perspective.

Het is een smalle zeestraat met allerlei eilanden en riffen. Een kapitein moet heel precies navigeren om heelhuids door die nauwe vaargeulen te komen. Politiek is dit een treffende metafoor. De Straat van Hormuz is een geopolitiek en economisch flashpoint van de buitencategorie. Donald Trump ervaart nu wat voorgangers als Jimmy Carter, George Bush senior en Bill Clinton meemaakten. Met deze zee-engte valt niet te spotten. En dat is al tientallen eeuwen zo. Jaap Jansen en PG Kroeger begeven zich in die smalle wateren tussen Iran en Arabië en in machtsverhoudingen aldaar sinds de oudheid die ons nu verbluffen door hun actuele betekenis. Alleroudste beschrijving van Hormuz treffen we in een reisgids voor zeevarenden uit Egypte rond het jaar 60 na Christus. Die Griekse atlas, 'Periplous', beschreef en detail waar een kapitein of een handelaar op moest letten onderweg en hoe de Straat van Hormuz geografisch in elkaar zat. Je kon er in lezen dat de eilanden in die zeestraat vol zaten met parelduikers. Er viel dus een makkelijk te vervoeren luxeproduct te verhandelen. *** Betrouwbare Bronnen is mede mogelijk gemaakt met donaties van luisteraars die we hiervoor hartelijk danken. Word ook vriend van de show! Deze aflevering bevat advertenties van Powerpeers en van Podimo Heb je belangstelling om in onze podcast te adverteren of ons te sponsoren? Zend ons een mailtje en wij zoeken contact. *** Eeuwen later werd Hormuz bestuurd door een lokale dynastie van sheikhs, die zich verbond met de heersers van imperia die de mercantiele en strategische waarde van deze zeestraat prima snapten. Meest opmerkelijk was de alliantie met de Mongoolse kleinzoon van Dzjengis Khan die erfgenaam werd van het West-Aziatische deel van diens enorme imperium. Van Afghanistan tot en met Anatolië strekte zijn bewind zich uit en de handelswegen tussen China, India en de Middellandse Zee hadden dan ook zijn bijzondere interesse. De Straat van Hormuz was de speldenknop in de zeewegen die hij moest beheersen en de lokale vorsten werden zijn beschermelingen en tribuut betalende vazallen. Dit rijk van de Ilkhaniden werd van grote betekenis voor de geopolitiek, tot de dag van vandaag. De Mongolen organiseerden de natie, staat en beschaving van een land dat zij als eerste Iranzamin - het land van Iran - noemden. Essentiële aspecten als de dominante rol van de shia islam, de bestuurstaal Perzisch, de nationale eenheidsmythe van Iran en de geopolitieke alliantie tegen het soennisme van de Arabieren zijn in deze periode doorgevoerd. De Mongolen sloten ook een alliantie tegen de Arabieren met de ‘Ferengi' - de Franken! - en moedigden hen aan het Heilig Land en Jeruzalem te veroveren. De vazallen van de Mongolen in Hormuz bloeiden onder hun bewind, de handel werd bijna mondiaal door de steppevolkeren en hun cavalerie beschermd, zowel de Zijderoute als de maritieme handelsstromen naar Venetië, Genua, India en China en met hun rijkdom konden de sheikhs van Hormuz buren als Bahrein onderwerpen. In de vroege 15e eeuw was de keizer van China zo geïnteresseerd in de strategische en mercantiele betekenis van Hormuz, dat hij er een serie zee-expedities van zijn reusachtige vloot heen stuurde. Zo weten wij uit de rapportages van zijn ambtenaren van alles over de luxe en welvaart van zelfs de lagere klassen in de havensteden van Hormuz. Xi Jinpings Belt and Road-strategie is dus eigenlijk al eeuwenoud. Niet lang daarna - in 1507 - kwamen de Europese klanten van die havens zelf aankloppen. De Portugezen voeren vanuit Zuid-India langs met hun superieure maritieme technologie. Ze werden snel intiem; de beste bondgenoten die Hormuz leerde kennen. Ze bouwden er forten op de eilanden in de nauwe zeestraat en hun paters mochten zelfs missie komen bedrijven, tot vreugde van de Paus. Bezoekers uit onze streken beschreven de ongekende luxe en de 'seks, drugs and rock ‘n roll' van het luie leventje in Hormuz. "Het is als Babylon - door de vele talen die daar klinken en door de abominabele zedeloosheid, ook van de paters daar!" Jaloers sloegen de Britten en de VOC de handen ineen en probeerden de Portugezen te verdrijven. Zij richtten zich op een verdienmodel dat uitging van het monopolie van de zijdehandel dankzij sjah Abbas I van Iran. Uiteraard was de VOC mercantiel nog doortrapter dan de East India Company. Al in de 17e eeuw leerde Hormuz de Hollanders goed kennen. Na Napoleon was de British Navy oppermachtig. De emiraten van de Golf sloten verdragen met hen, zodat de Britten de beschermheren van de zeestraat werden. Na 'Versailles' werd Irak ook nog hun kolonie en ontwikkelden zij in de Golf de olliewinning. De Straat van Hormuz werd voor weer een nieuwe eeuw, met nieuwe heersers, het brandpunt van commercie en geopolitiek. In 1945 nam president Franklin Delano Roosevelt die rol van de Britten over door een verbond te sluiten met prins Ibn Saoed uit Mekka. Amerika zou de Golf en Straat van Hormuz beschermen tegen Stalin in Iran, uiteraard in ruil voor olieconcessies. FDR voerde een strategie als de Mongolen en het British Empire in hun gloriejaren. Toen ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini de macht greep in 1979 was het president Carter die zijn Carter-doctrine afkondigde: Amerika garandeerde de vrijheid en veiligheid van de handelsroutes door de Straat van Hormuz en de oliewinning door de emiraten daar. Donald Trump beseft wellicht niet dat zijn oorlog de bloeddorstige variant is van de politiek van een door hem verfoeide Democraat. *** Verder lezen Jack Watling - Iran’s Hormuz blockade is its most powerful card against Trump and Israel. It won’t back down easily *** Verder luisteren 515 – De heftige strijd tussen Israël en Iran 315 - Vrouw, leven, vrijheid: oorzaken en achtergronden van het straatprotest in Iran. En: de rijke Perzische cultuur 76 - Rudi Vranckx: Het Midden-Oosten is het Vietnam van onze tijd 377 - Golda Meïr, Israël, triomf en tragiek 510 - Brezjnev, Poetin en hun rampzalige oorlog. Lessen voor nu uit 1980 528 - ‘Europa, ontwaak!’ Manfred Weber en de eenzaamheid van Europa 484 - Hoe Trump chaos veroorzaakt en de Europeanen in elkaars armen drijft *** Tijdlijn 00:00:00 – Deel 1 00:33:28 – Deel 2 00:54:33 – Deel 3 01:36:25 – EindeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ever since Leo Strauss published his magnum opus Natural Right and History, which ends by heavily implying Edmund Burke opened the door for the evils of historicism in the modern world, a great fissure in conservative nerddom erupted between those who align with either titan. Were Strauss' criticism of Burke warranted? Did Burke disavow natural rights and pave the way for the evils of authoritarianism, fascism, Marxism, and progressivism to come? Does a careful, esoteric reading of Natural Right and History reveal the Strauss secret family chili recipe? Saving Elephants has assembled an all-star panel to answer these questions and more.   Representing Edmund Burke: Dr. Gregory Collins is one of the most celebrated Burke scholars of the rising generation. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. He recently received the Buckley Institute's 2024 Lux and Veritas Faculty Prize. His first book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke's Political Economy, examined Edmund Burke's understanding of the connection between markets and morals. Greg has also published articles on Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, Frederick Douglass, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Britain's East India Company. His additional writings and book reviews can be found in Modern Age, Law & Liberty, National Affairs, National Review, and University Bookman.  You can follow Greg on Twitter @GregCollins111   Lauren Hall is an author and professor helping people combat overwhelm in an age of extremes. Her writing rejects binary and black-and-white thinking to help people lead more balanced lives, build stronger relationships, and restore individual and civic well-being. Hall is a 2024 Pluralism Fellow with the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Prohuman Foundation. Her Substack and speaking spread the message of radical moderation to new audiences via public writing, speaking, and podcast interviews. Hall has presented her work on radical moderation at conferences including the Heterodox Academy Conference, the State Policy Network Conference, the Mercatus Center's Pluralism Summit, and various political science and related conferences and has a range of talks and podcast interviews available on radical moderation and other topics. In her "real" job, she is a Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and author of the books Family and the Politics of Moderation (Baylor U. Press, 2014) and The Medicalization of Birth and Death (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2019). Hall has a PhD in Political Science from Northern Illinois University (2007) and a BA in Philosophy from Binghamton University (2002).   Representing Strauss: Steven F. Hayward is a fellow of the Public Law and Policy Program at Berkeley Law and visiting professor in School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Steven frequently writes on a wide range of current topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy for publications including National Review, Reason, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The Public Interest, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Policy Review at the Hoover Institution.  His newspaper articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other daily newspapers. He is the author of a two-volume narrative history of Ronald Reagan and his effect on American political life, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989.  His other books include Index of Leading Environmental Indicators; The Almanac of Environmental Trends; Mere Environmentalism: A Biblical Perspective on Humans and the Natural World, Churchill on Leadership; Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders; Patriotism Is Not Enough; and M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom. Steven has also served as visiting fellow professor, scholar, or lecturer at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), Ashland University, Mont Pelerin Society, Pacific Research Institute, The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Georgetown University, The Fund for American Studies, and University of Colorado Boulder. His blog, powerlineblog.com, is one of the nation's most-read political websites.   The international woman of mystery, Lucretia, teaches at the University of Arizona.  Steve and Lucretia—along with John Yoo—host the 3 Whiskey Happy Hour podcast.  

Episode 196East India was about controlThree possible AnswersThe long list of ridiculousYet another branch of pagan religion for AmericaWhat are people reaching for?  The 4th answerWhat happened 10,000 years ago?A caveman and a village idiotNon Importation Was/Is AppropriateMission Impossible____________________Support the show

The latest episode of Tin Foil Hat features Susan Bradford, who argues that a centuries-old crime syndicate operating from the City of London controls global finance, intelligence networks, and governments. She traces its origins to the Dutch East India Company and its merger of influence with the East India Company, describing a corporate-government model that expanded through wars like the Napoleonic Wars and revolutions worldwide. Citing figures such as Jeffrey Epstein, she claims modern institutions—including Bank for International Settlements and BlackRock—are vehicles for this agenda, and contends that recognizing what she sees as its illegitimacy is key to reclaiming public power. Please check out Susan Bradford's book: BlackRock Bamboozle- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G2L1217N Please subscribe to the new Tin Foil Hat youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@TinFoilHatYoutube Grab your copy of the 2nd issue of the Chaos Twins now and join the Army Of Chaos: https://bit.ly/415fDfY Check out Sam "DoomScrollin with Sam Tripoli and Midnight Mike" Every Tuesday At 4pm pst on Youtube, X Twitter, Rumble and Rokfin! Join the WolfPack at Wise Wolf Gold and Silver and start hedging your financial position by investing in precious metals now! Go to https://www.samtripoli.gold/ and use the promo code "TinFoil" and we thank Tony for supporting our show. CopyMyCrypto.com: The 'Copy my Crypto' membership site shows you the coins that the youtuber 'James McMahon' personally holds - and allows you to copy him. So if you'd like to join the 1300 members who copy James, then stop what you're doing and head over to: https://copymycrypto.com/tinfoilhat/ You'll not only find proof of everything I've said - but my listeners get full access for just $1 LiveLongerFormula.com: Check out https://www.livelongerformula.com/sam — Christian is a longevity author and functional health expert who helps you fix your gut, detox, boost testosterone, and sleep better so you can thrive, not just survive. Watch his free masterclass on the 7 Deadly Health Fads, and if it clicks, book a free Metabolic Function Assessment to get to the root of your health issues. Grab Tickets To Sam Tripoli's Live Shows At SamTripoli.com: Hollywood, CA: 2/10 Perryville, MD: 2/20 Pottstown, PA: 2/21 Las Vegas, NV: 2/28 Bakersfield, CA: 3/6 Yuma, AZ: 3/7 Hollywood, CA: 3/10 Batavia, IL: 3/26-3/28 Toronto, CA: 4/17-18 Dallas, TX: 4/24 Fort Worth, TX: 4/25 Albuquerque, NM: 6/12-6/13 Austin, TX: The 100th Episode Of Tin Foil Hat 6/18 Lawerence, KS: 9/17-9/19 Tulsa, OK: 10/9-10/10 Austin, TX: 12/11-12/13   Please check out Susan Bradford's internet:  Website: https://www.susanbradfordbooks.com/ BlackRock Bamboozle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G2L1217N Royal Blood Lies: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Z3QPN6C Substack: https://sbradford.substack.com/ Buy Me a Coffee:https://buymeacoffee.com/susanbradford   Please check out Sam Tripoli's internet: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/samtripoli Sam Tripoli's Stand Up Youtube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@SamTripoliComedy  Sam Tripoli's Comedy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samtripolicomedy/%20P Sam Tripoli's Podcast Clip Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samtripolispodcastclips/   Please support our sponsors: BetterWild: an ancestral blend of wolf probiotics designed to restore your dog's gut to the healthy digestion that its wolf ancestors had called Ancestral Advantage. Betterwild is committed to helping your dogs with science-backed, veterinarian approved solutions that you can feel great about. Right now, Betterwild is offering our listeners up to 40% off your order at betterwild.com slash tinfoil  

How did Lucknow become the final battleground of the 1857 Uprising? Who was Begum Hazrat Mahal, and how did she hold together a rebellion against overwhelming odds? How did the 1857 Uprising lead to the fall of the East India Company, and the rise of the harsher British Raj? In the final episode of the series, Anita and William explain how northern India's organised rebellion came to an end, ushering in a new era of British rule in India.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editors: Bruno Di Castri and Lorcan Moullier Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Captain Kidd has captivated imaginations for over 300 years and inspired many stories about pirates, but was he really a criminal? Just how many ships did he plunder, how many men did he force to walk the plank, and how many throats did he slit? Or is the truth more inconvenient, that he was a buccaneer's worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians? In “Captain Kidd: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal” (2025) bestselling author Samuel Marquis delves into the legendary life of his own ninth-great-grandfather, Captain William Kidd (1654–1701), casting new light on one of history's most infamous figures.In this engaging conversation, David Bryan speaks with  Samuel Marquis, a hydrogeologist and author, about his latest book on Captain William Kidd, a notorious figure often mischaracterized as a pirate. Marquis discusses his journey in writing the biography, the complexities of Kidd's life as a privateer, and the blurred lines between piracy and privateering during the 17th century. The conversation delves into Kidd's expeditions, the role of the East India Company, and the mutiny that transformed him into a wanted man, as well as  the life and legacy of Captain Kidd, exploring his relationships, particularly with his wife Sarah Kidd, the myths surrounding buried treasure, and the complexities of his character as a pirate.samuelmarquisbooks.com. Facebook: @samuelmarquisbooks  Twitter (X): @Sammarquisbooks Instagram: @sammarquisbooks

Send us a textLubaaba Al‑Azami discusses her book, Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World For a complete episode transcript, http://www.womenandshakespeare.comLubaaba's Book: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/lubaaba-al-azami/travellers-in-the-golden-realm/9781529371321/Interviewer: Varsha PanjwaniGuest: Lubaaba Al‑AzamiProducer: Yu-Kuan Miao Transcript: Benjamin PooreArtwork: Wenqi WanSuggested Citation:  Al‑Azami, Lubaaba in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2026). Lubaaba Al‑Azami on Travel and Exchanges between India and England. Women & Shakespeare [podcast], Series 6, Ep.3. http://womenandshakespeare.com/Insta: earlymoderndocEmail: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

The warrior queen who fought the British on the battlefield, Rani of Jhansi –or Rani Lakshmibai– is still a hero in India, with comic books and Bollywood movies about her. But what's the true history behind her legend? How did she become a fierce leader of resistance who led her men to fight fearlessly against the East India Company? In Episode 5 of the series, William and Anita are joined by Ira Mukhoty, author of Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth & History, to discuss the life of one of the leaders of the Indian Rebellion, Rani of Jhansi. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Charlie Rodwell Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An entire city turns on the British and revolts in unison. 3000 East India Company soldiers and civilians in Lucknow are under siege in one compound, hiding in tunnels and surrounded by snipers. But who will break first the besieger the besieged?  In Episode 4 of the series, William and Anita discuss how Lucknow became one of the centres of resistance standing up to East India Company power. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In one of the darkest chapters of the 1857 uprising, brutal massacres are met with revenge brutal massacres as the rebellion reaches the East India Company garrison town of Kanpur or “Cawnpore”. Who was General Wheeler and why was the entrenchment he built so fragile? How were the atrocities at Kanpur used to justify gruesome violence against Indians?  In Episode 3 of the series, Anita and William discuss the gruesome history of the Kanpur massacre which lived on in Victorian memory for the decades that followed. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Secret messages are being passed from city to city inside chapattis, rebellion is in the air. When Indian soldiers in the East India Company army hear that bullet cartridges are greased with pig and cow fat, they take a stand against their British generals. A mutiny begins that will soon explode into an all-out revolution… This is the Indian Uprising of 1857. How did India's Greatest Rebellion begin? Why did the dynamic between British and Indian soldiers start to change in the 1850s? How did the British react when the mutiny broke out? William Dalrymple and Anita Anand launch a brand new series on the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It's an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry's book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

När det brittiska imperiet var som störst år 1920 sträckte det sig över alla världens kontinenter och omfattade nästan en fjärdedel av jordens yta. Det var ett system av kolonier, protektorat och territorier som i storlek bara har överträffats av Mongolväldet.Storbritanniens koloniala historia startade på 1500-talet, nådde zenit i början av 1900-talet och består idag av en handfull territorier runt om i världen där invånarna valt att fortsätta vara brittiska undersåtar.I reprisen av avsnitt 66 av podden Historia Nu samtalar programledare Urban Lindstedt med Dick Harrison, professor i historia vid Lunds universitet, som har skrivit ett femtiotal böcker, både fack- och skönlitteratur. Han är aktuell med ljudboken Brittiska Imperiet – Uppgång och fall på Historiska Media. Han har också skrivit Englands historia i två volymer.Irländarna var de första att drabbas av britternas hårdhänta kolonialism där dagens konflikt på Nordirland är en direkt följd av tidigare generationers missgrepp. I slutet på 1600-talet hade engelsmännen upprättat kolonier i Nordamerika och på öar i Karibiska havet samt etablerat handelsutposter i Asien och Afrika.Den tidiga koloniseringen av Indien skedde via handelsbolag. I brittiska Indien övertog staten kontrollen 1858, efter att East India Company hade misslyckats med att slå ned sepoyupproret.Under Berlinkonferensen 1884–85 delades Afrika upp mellan Europas stormakter. Britterna strävade efter ett sammanhängande kolonialrike ”från Kap till Kairo”, för att binda samman Kapkolonin i söder geografiskt med Egypten.De nordamerikanska kolonialisterna förklarades sig fria från moderlandet redan år 1776. Den för imperiets viktigaste kolonin Indien år 1947, medan de afrikanska kolonierna främst frigjorde sig under 1960-talet. För Hong Kong dröjde det ända till år 1997.Det viktigaste arvet är engelska språkets utbredning och ohotade position som världens främsta lingua franca. De negativa konsekvenserna av den hårdhänta brittiska kolonialismen lever vi fortfarande med i form av instabila länder i Mellersta Östern, etniska konflikter i Afrika och utbredd underutveckling. Det brittiska imperiet institutionaliserade rasism och drog sig inte för att stötta opiumsmugglare i Kina eller uppfinna koncentrationsläger i södra Afrika för att försvara sina anspråk på världen.Grunden för imperiet var britternas överhöghet på haven och deras industriella styrka. Britternas kraftmätning med Nazityskland under andra världskrigets tömde Storbritanniens krafter och blev början på slutet för imperiet.Bildtext: Robert Clive möter Mir Jafar efter slaget vid Plassey 1757, i en målning av Francis Hayman från cirka 1760. Denna seger markerade början på Ostindiska kompaniets dominans i Indien, både militärt och kommersiellt.Källa: Francis Hayman – Lord Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey (1760), Sterling Times, National Portrait Gallery. Public domain, fri från kända upphovsrättsliga begränsningar enligt Wikimedia Foundation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is capitalism a force of nature, or a human-made order that we have the power to shape? In this episode, Luigi and Bethany sit down with Sven Beckert, a Harvard historian and author of the new book A Global History of Capitalism, to tackle a question that seems basic but remains surprisingly difficult to answer: what exactly is capitalism?Beckert argues that capitalism is not defined simply by the existence of markets—which are found in all human societies—but rather by a specific economic logic of privately owned capital productively invested to produce more capital. He challenges the popular narrative that capitalism and the state are antithetical, suggesting instead that the state has been constitutive of capitalism throughout its history, from the colonization of the Americas to the industrial expansion of the 19th century.Beckert also argues that capitalism is fundamentally "undogmatic", pointing out that it has thrived under radically different political systems from the British Empire and the slave plantations of the Caribbean to modern liberal democracies and authoritarian city-states. Rather than existing in opposition to the state, does capitalism actually rely on state power to construct markets and enforce the expansion of its logic?  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Episode: 3344 That Rare Find, Rachel Ruysch.  Today, we talk diversity in art and nature.

Clare is walking in the Cotswolds with author Corinne Fowler and historian Raj Pal, whose family has roots in both Britain and India.Corinne is leading the way, recreating and extending the “Indian Walk in the Cotswolds” walk she originally took with Raj for a chapter in her book Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire. As they ramble, they reflect on how the British countryside is deeply connected to colonial history.Beginning on the Heart of England Way at Bourton on the Hill, they pass Sezincote House, a Neo-Mughal estate built in 1805 by a former East India Company officer, take in the Church of St James in Longborough, before circling back to the Horse and Groom pub in Bourton.Map: OS Explorer OL45 The Cotswolds - Burford, Chipping Camden, Cirencester, Stow on the Wold Grid Ref: SP 173 325 Near the Horse & Groom pub, Bourton on the HillPresenter: Clare Balding Producer for BBC Studios: Karen Gregor

God, Glory and Gold. Age of Discovery made, in a way, world a bigger place. What is the legacy of it? Is the new Age of Discovery happening in digital world? Is OpenAI new East India Company? Enjoy!

When Trump announced that the American government would be taking an equity stake in Intel, Mussolini likely turned over in his grave. The blending of Big Business with Government was not invented by Trump or Mussolini, but really is best exemplified by the British East India Company. The most powerful company in the history of Western civilization was the East India Company, which later merged with the British government. They cornered the market on textiles for over a century, while simultaneously running the global opium industry and slave trade. Its creation and use of private mercenary armies allowed it to control India long before the British government did, while the East India Company's leased troops massively outnumbered the Indian military for centuries. The Octopus of Global Control Audiobook: https://amzn.to/3xu0rMm Hypocrazy Audiobook: https://amzn.to/4aogwms Website: www.Macroaggressions.io Activist Post: www.activistpost.com Sponsors: Chemical Free Body: https://www.chemicalfreebody.com Promo Code: MACRO C60 Purple Power: https://c60purplepower.com/ Promo Code: MACRO Wise Wolf Gold & Silver: www.Macroaggressions.gold LegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.com EMP Shield: www.EMPShield.com Promo Code: MACRO Christian Yordanov's Health Program: www.livelongerformula.com/macro Above Phone: abovephone.com/macro Promo Code: MACRO Van Man: https://vanman.shop/?ref=MACRO Promo Code: MACRO The Dollar Vigilante: dollarvigilante.spiffy.co/a/O3wCWenlXN/4471 Nesa's Hemp: www.NesasHemp.com Promo Code: MACRO Augason Farms: https://augasonfarms.com/MACRO Activist Post: www.ActivistPost.com Natural Blaze: www.NaturalBlaze.com Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/macroaggressionspodcast

Over 400 years ago, a bold commercial venture was established to allow an ambitious group of English merchants to send ships halfway around the world in search of spices, skills, and profit. It was known as The East India Company. Over the next 250 years, the Company grew into one of the most powerful and controversial enterprises in history. At its height, it had the powers of a sovereign state - fighting wars, extracting wealth, and changing the fate of nations.  But how could a private company be allowed to wield so much control? What are the consequences when capital rules without conscience? And what does its rise and fall reveal about the economic and political empires that shape our world today? This is a Short History Of The East India Company. A Noiser Production, written by Sean Coleman. With thanks to Dr Mark Williams, a Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University, who has published widely on the English East India Company.  Get every episode of Short History Of... a week early with Noiser+. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zheng Yi Sao was a pirate leader so formidable that she made Blackbeard and Captain Morgan look like amateurs. From humble beginnings as a sex worker in Canton, she rose to command a vast pirate fleet that wrought havoc in the South China Sea. She took on the Qing Dynasty, the Portuguese and the East India Company and still managed to walk away free.In the second episode of our 'Pirates' mini-series, Dan is joined by Andrew Choong, Curator of Historic Photographs & Ship Plans at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, to uncover the story of one of history's most successful buccaneers.You can discover more about the exhibition and book tickets here.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at ds.hh@historyhit.com.

In Episode #894, Richard Grove joins to unravel the long-running conspiracy to undermine critical thinking, hijack American education, and steer society toward technocracy and surveillance. From the East India Company's role in subverting the American republic to the Rothschild-backed colonization of Palestine, this episode traces the hidden threads of empire, AI control, and globalist agendas. Richard reflects on his time with the legendary John Taylor Gatto, exposing how compulsory schooling became a tool for obedience, not empowerment. History, geopolitics, and the future of freedom—all decoded in one explosive conversation. Check out Richard Grove's special gift for Swarm: https://bit.ly/Richard-Grove-TFH-Gifts Please subscribe to the new Tin Foil Hat youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@TinFoilHatYoutube Check out Sam Tripoli new crowd work special "Black Crack Robots" now for free. https://youtu.be/_FKugOeYaLc Check out Sam Tripoli's 2nd New Crowd Work Special “Potty Mouth” on YouTube for free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22j3Ds5ArjM Grab your copy of the 2nd issue of the Chaos Twins now and join the Army Of Chaos: https://bit.ly/415fDfY Check out Sam "DoomScrollin with Sam Tripoli and Midnight Mike" Every Tuesday At 4pm pst on Youtube, X Twitter, Rumble and Rokfin! Join the WolfPack at Wise Wolf Gold and Silver and start hedging your financial position by investing in precious metals now!  Go to samtripoli.gold and use the promo code "TinFoil" and we thank Tony for supporting our show. CopyMyCrypto.com: The ‘Copy my Crypto' membership site shows you the coins that the youtuber ‘James McMahon' personally holds - and allows you to copy him. So if you'd like to join the 1300 members who copy James, then stop what you're doing and head over to: CopyMyCrypto.com/TFH You'll not only find proof of everything I've said - but my listeners get full access for just $1 LiveLongerFormula.com: Check out LiveLongerFormula.com/sam — Christian is a longevity author and functional health expert who helps you fix your gut, detox, boost testosterone, and sleep better so you can thrive, not just survive. Watch his free masterclass on the 7 Deadly Health Fads, and if it clicks, book a free Metabolic Function Assessment to get to the root of your health issues.  Want to see Sam Tripoli live?  Get tickets at SamTripoli.com: Cleveland, OH:  Tin Foil Hat Comedy Live At Hilarities on June 13th https://hilarities.com/shows/310175   Pittsburgh, PA:  Tin Foil Hat Comedy Live At West View Fire Hall At 7pm on June 14th https://bit.ly/3GmbxaS   Pittsburgh, PA:  Swarm Tank Live At West View Fire Hall At 9pm on June 14th https://bit.ly/4jQWi8l   Boston, MA:  Tin Foil Hat Comedy Night Headlines Nick's Comedy Stop  August 1st https://www.nickscomedystop.com/event-details/special-event-tin-foil-hat-comedy-with-sam-tripoli-and-eddie-bravo-live   Broadbrook Ct: Tin Foil Hat Comedy and Swarm Tank at 8pm on August 2nd https://broadbrookoperahouse.thundertix.com/events/246069   Please check out Richard Grove's internet: Website: https://grandtheftworld.com Linktree: https://linktr.ee/richardgrove   Please check out Sam Tripoli's internet: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/samtripoli Please Follow Sam Tripoli's Stand Up Youtube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@SamTripoliComedy Please Follow Sam Tripoli's Comedy Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/samtripolicomedy/ Please Follow Sam Tripoli's Podcast Clip Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samtripolispodcastclips/   Thank you to our sponsors:  Cornbread Hemp: If you're looking for a healthier way to enjoy a carefree moment, you have to give Cornbread Hemp a try! They've created the first-ever USDA Organic THC gummy that's 100% legal. As a special offer for Tin Foil Hat listeners, you can get 30% off your first order! Just visit cornbreadhemp.com/TinFoil and use promo code TinFoil at checkout. Again that's cornbreadhemp.com/TinFoil and use code TinFoil for 30% off your first order. Cheers to a healthier happy hour HIMS: No man wants to lose his hair, but for men, it's actually very common. And now with Hims, the solution is simple. Try Hims' hair loss solutions and you'll be joining hundreds of thousands of subscribers who got their flow back.  Start your free online visit today at Hims dot com slash TINFOILHAT.  That's hims.com/TINFOILHAT for your personalized hair loss treatment options.