Podbit · Freakonomics Radio
Canals. Railroads. Electricity. The internet. Every major technology wave generated massive capital spending that far outstripped revenues before the bust. Gensler sees no reason AI will be the exception.
The industrialization of the late 19th century produced the progressive era: antitrust laws, the Federal Reserve, women's suffrage — but also Jim Crow. Gensler predicts AI will trigger a similarly turbulent political reckoning in the 2030s and 2040s.
Clinton reveals her real-time calculation during the infamous 2016 debate moment when Trump loomed physically behind her. She decided not to confront him because she feared it would make her look rattled or unable to handle him. In retrospect, she wishes she had said 'Back off, you creep.'
Clinton finally explains the viral meme of her laughing behind Obama at the Obama Presidential Center opening. Michelle Obama mentioned Barack's Nobel Peace Prize in her speech — Clinton burst out laughing, poked Obama in the back, and whispered that Trump must be in 'the third circle of hell' watching. Obama replied: 'Yeah, I hope he is.'
When Primo Levi's train pulled into his Italian hometown after the concentration camps were liberated, the waiting crowd was so horrified by the survivors' condition that they turned away. Levi described that act of not seeing as, in many ways, more devastating than the camps themselves.
Every ~80 years, civilizations hit the same wall: debt maxes out, wealth gaps explode, internal politics fracture, and external wars follow. The last reset was 1945. Dalio says the US and UK are now deep in the decline phase, not heading toward it.
Take slavery out of the picture and there is no Civil War — end of discussion. What's harder to grasp is that most Union soldiers still fought to save the republic, not to free enslaved people, making causation and motivation two entirely different questions.
A Vermont farm boy didn't put on a uniform to free enslaved people — he did it because he believed the republic his ancestors bled for in the Revolution was too precious to surrender over a lost election. Union meant democracy itself at a moment when Europe was sliding toward oligarchy.
The Confederacy claimed to fight for states' rights yet built the most intrusive central government in American history. It passed the first national draft, a national income tax, crop seizures, and suspended habeas corpus — all before the Union did.
Lincoln had almost no formal schooling, no administrative experience, and a rural accent that Harvard men sneered at. Yet he became the most eloquent president in American history and eventually outmaneuvered every more-educated rival in his cabinet. The man is simply inexplicable.
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