Dave Troy Presents

Even if we could build a conscious machine, should we? Neuroscientist Anil Seth says no - and he doubts we can. This fall, the question of whether AI might be conscious left the philosophy seminar and landed on the business pages. Anthropic has written that possibility into the "constitution" it uses to train Claude, all on the eve of what could be the largest stock offering in history. Days before we spoke, Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi argued in Nature that today's AI is not conscious, and perhaps never will be. We talk about why a chatbot fools us when a protein-folding model never would; why time, and the stuff we're made of, may matter more than any algorithm; why "Would you like me to do this next?" is the new infinite scroll; and how the idea of a mind in the machine helps keep the AI bubble inflated. Guest: Anil Seth - Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Website: https://www.anilseth.com/ Being You: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566315/being-you-by-anil-seth/ TED2026, "Why AI isn't going to become conscious": https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_ai_isn_t_going_to_become_conscious Nature, "Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be": https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03313-7 Noema, "The Mythology of Conscious AI": https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/ X: https://x.com/anilkseth Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/anilseth.bsky.social Chapters: 00:00 Cold open & intro 01:54 Meet Anil Seth 02:45 The Nature comment and the Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper 04:31 Why talking machines fool us 08:19 The protein-folding test 12:21 Time vs. sequence: why a brain can't be paused 14:27 How did we get to be conscious? Animals, evolution and human exceptionalism 18:05 Beyond the brain: nerves, bodies and gut feelings 19:31 Intelligence isn't consciousness, and Descartes' long shadow 22:46 Useful models vs. the real brain 25:16 Scaling, energy and data efficiency 28:23 Learning from bats 29:18 Looking back in 10 years: deep mirrors 32:00 Demoting our own humanity 35:48 Lessons from the PC hype, and the erosion of science 38:39 "Would you like me to do this?" The new infinite scroll 40:19 Power users, Claude Code and neurosymbolic AI 43:30 How would we know if AI were conscious? 46:41 "Functional pain vectors" 49:25 Substrate, analog computing and computational functionalism 54:02 The rabbi's question: should we build conscious machines? 57:00 The costs of false caution: AI rights and parasocial risk 59:43 The Anthropic IPO and the AI bubble 01:01:38 Claude's constitution and the myth of agency 01:04:00 Local models, open weights and interesting times 01:05:43 Outro & links Follow the Anthropic IPO, the 2026 midterms and more on the America 2.0 Live Trackers: https://trackers.america2.news/ Hear them daily on the America 2.0 Tracker Briefing: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id6825877339 Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news

Trying to explain American politics without the radicalized billionaires behind it is like trying to explain 9/11 without mentioning Al-Qaeda. Gil Duran first joined us in March 2025, while he was still writing "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." The book debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list in August and is still there. Along the way he was permanently banned from X for two words - "TLDR: fascism" - and reviewed by a fellow of the very think tank his book investigates. We talk about what fascism means in 2026, and why the tech version promises not a return to a mythical past but an acceleration into a mythical future: Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures, the "thermodynamic God," and the clash between tech religion and evangelical Christianity. We follow the money from crypto - "a weapon of mass corruption" - to the Trump family and back into Silicon Valley, and from Praxis and the network state to Kazakhstan and California Forever. And with the midterms a month away, Gil, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, explains why tech money is buying both parties. Guest: Gil Duran - independent San Francisco journalist and author of "The Nerd Reich" (Avid Reader Press, 2026); former communications strategist for Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. https://www.thenerdreich.com https://www.youtube.com/@TheNerdReichNews https://bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com The America 2.0 Reading List: https://america2.news/the-america-2-0-reading-list/ Chapters: 0:00 Cold open: explaining 9/11 without Al-Qaeda 0:13 Intro 1:47 Welcome back, Gil 2:23 Number three on the Times list 5:13 The 40,000 words that got cut 7:15 A book in conversation: Applebaum, Michel, Silverman 9:07 Adventure capitalism and the long history of exit 10:33 Banned from X for "TLDR: fascism" 12:40 Fresh Air, and the outlets that won't touch it 14:31 The Bulwark review and the undisclosed tie 16:12 What is tech fascism? 20:38 Apocalypse on both sides 21:41 Thiel's Antichrist 23:12 It's a regime: crypto as a weapon of mass corruption 26:12 Buying the media, and Newsom's Silicon Valley Democrats 29:49 Praxis, Prospera and the network state abroad 33:03 Freedom cities, and a crypto city in Kazakhstan 35:13 California Forever and the miracle in Solano 38:12 Tennessee: Highland Rim and New Earth 40:42 From Solano to the data center fights 42:33 Will the AI money hold? S-1s and stranded assets 44:25 The doom machine markets itself 46:05 Why China has no AI apocalypse 49:29 If Charles Manson were a billionaire 51:46 Rival cults: evangelicals vs. the thermodynamic God 55:22 Yarvin's cathedral and the seizure of institutions 59:19 The midterms 1:02:09 Crypto money on both sides 1:04:11 What if the winners aren't seated? 1:06:23 Thiel in Nashville, and what's next 1:08:25 What you can do: ask your candidates 1:08:59 Outro and links Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news

What if elections, which are a cornerstone of democracy, don't produce the outcomes that we desire? Terry Bouricius spent twenty years as an elected lawmaker in Vermont - city council, then the statehouse - followed by a decade at FairVote trying to fix elections with better elections. Then he quit. Since 2005 he has been the leading American theorist of sortition: choosing the people who govern by lottery, the way we choose juries — a practice rooted in Athenian democracy. This is a conversation about an idea most Americans have never encountered, and about why it keeps working wherever it is tried. Ireland used randomly selected conventions to settle same-sex marriage and abortion. Melbourne handed a stuck capital budget to 43 taxpayers chosen by lot. Connecticut is running the first statewide citizens' assembly in the United States right now. And the argument underneath it all is disarmingly simple: you can't lobby a jury. No donors, no primary, no next race, no way to know six months out whose ear to buy. Recorded before the 2026 midterms. We close on elections themselves - and Bouricius, an election-reform veteran who says the machinery is sound, names the thing that actually frightens him. Guest: Terry Bouricius - former Vermont legislator, ten years at FairVote, originator of the multi-body sortition model, co-founder of Democracy R&D. His book "Democracy Without Politicians: Government By the People" (Routledge, 2026) is open access - the full text is free. https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org https://terrybouricius.com https://democracycreative.substack.com https://sortitionusa.org https://democracyrd.org Chapters: 0:00 Cold open: what if jurors were elected? 0:46 Intro 2:23 Twenty years in office, and why he left 5:40 What sortition actually is 5:53 Athens: a democracy because of the lottery, not the assembly 7:59 British Columbia, 2004: "This is what democracy looks like" 11:10 The 200-year project and the peeling strategy 14:19 Why left and right both nod along 15:43 You can't lobby a jury 17:25 More likely to die in office than lose an election 17:37 Plato's ship vs. the wisdom of crowds 18:21 A thousand assemblies, and Macron's climate convention 19:57 Connecticut: the first statewide assembly in the US 20:43 Aristotle: the lot is democratic, election is oligarchic 22:10 What Madison and the founders actually feared 26:09 "How many of us are renters?" 28:35 Cognitive diversity: why the room beats the experts 33:27 Designing against bribery and capture 35:09 Binding or advisory? Melbourne's budget 37:58 Ireland: marriage and abortion, decided by lot 40:00 The abuse survivor and the gay juror 44:47 Tribal loyalty: Obamacare, tariffs, switching sides 50:22 Groupthink, facilitators, and multi-body sortition 52:35 Agenda-setting: the wall, the bridges, the climate 55:33 AI: the bubble, and who gets to decide 58:29 Could AI agents replace a citizens' assembly? 62:09 What to do Monday: Sortition USA 63:10 The book is free 67:02 Are the midterms secure? 67:54 The refusal to seat: "a real possibility within two months" 69:59 Outro and links Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news

Half a percent doesn't sound like much. In a close midterm, it is everything. Dr. Jen Golbeck has spent two decades as a computer scientist studying what the internet can figure out about you without being told — and she now spends her nights as a working journalist inside the most extreme corners of American politics. Both halves of that job point at the same machine: an economy built on collecting everything about everyone, and online communities that offer people the one thing they most want, which is belonging. Dave and Jen talk about how far surveillance has actually gone, why she thinks the AI bubble is at its top edge, what a decade inside far-right forums has taught her about how ordinary people radicalize, what she saw on the street in Minneapolis during the ICE protests, and what is genuinely worth doing between now and November. Guest Dr. Jen Golbeck — Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information and director of the Social Intelligence Lab. She writes the daily MAGAReport newsletter and reports for HuffPost and Esquire. MAGAReport | UMD faculty page | HuffPost | Esquire: a weekend with the Proud Boys | TED: Is AI progress stuck? Also mentioned: the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legislation tracker. Chapters 00:00 - Cold open and intro 01:28 - Meet Dr. Jen Golbeck 03:52 - Surveillance, extremism, and the American ideal 06:07 - How bad has surveillance actually gotten 07:49 - The phone-number trick and the data-broker machine 10:01 - The TEDx talk that made the tech bros angry 13:46 - A 24-hour amnesty: 40 percent of the class confesses 17:05 - Data centers, bad neighbors, and democratic control 19:18 - The dot-com parallel: is this a bubble? 20:26 - Open source, local models, and the business-model problem 24:52 - Typing pools and the job-apocalypse story 27:37 - The antisocial internet: from privacy to radicalization 29:19 - A weekend with the Proud Boys in North Carolina 32:43 - The symbolic show of strength 36:56 - What cults know about belonging 38:58 - Minneapolis, ICE, and the feel of a civil war 44:26 - What the Charlie Kirk killing revealed 47:13 - Civil war, or Costco? 49:31 - The Facebook experiment: half a percent 52:09 - Citizens United, money, and media consolidation 56:07 - Into the midterms: troops, fraud claims, and lawsuits 58:59 - Why the election infrastructure should hold 1:02:00 - Flock cameras and warrantless tracking 1:03:24 - EFF's tracker: pick one thing and be annoying 1:08:33 - Outro and links Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. america2.news

Scott Reich recently took the TED Democracy stage in Philadelphia to argue that a renewed ethos of service could help repair our fractured country. He joins Dave Troy for a conversation that runs from ancient Athens to a modern "GI Bill for civic service," by way of Robert Putnam, the 1917 baseball All-Star Game, and the simple, radical idea that citizens owe something to one another. Reich and Troy arrived at similar conclusions by different paths: that social mixing across background, region, and class — not screens and headlines — is how a democracy rebuilds trust. Together they make a hopeful (and stubbornly non-partisan) case for citizenship as a practice, not merely a slogan. (Production note: a couple of brief internet dropouts affected Scott's audio; we've worked around them.) Guest: Scott Reich - presidential historian and attorney; author of "The Power of Citizenship: Why JFK Matters to a New Generation" and the forthcoming "One Day in September: Baseball, Brotherhood, and the Birth of the All-Star Game"; board member of the JFK Library Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.scott-reich.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Cold open: why national service 01:18 Meet Scott Reich and the TED Democracy talk 04:34 Citizenship: rights, but also obligations 05:43 From "impossible" to practical: connection and service 07:45 The baseball "farm system": start with the young 10:18 What we stopped teaching: civics and Western civ 12:30 The proposal: a modern GI Bill for civic service 14:03 Ancient Greece and the making of a citizen 15:29 Mandatory or voluntary? Incentives over mandates 18:01 Reviving civic life: Peace Corps, clubs, and lost associations 19:55 The commoditization of youth sports 22:53 We've always argued: Adams, Jefferson, and healthy disagreement 24:49 "One Day in September": how Americans used to gather 29:02 Putnam, disinformation, and the loneliness crisis 30:29 Social mixing as national security 32:54 Cohorts across difference: rural Iowa to the Bronx 37:42 Service, not servitude: beyond the military 43:59 Overestimating the other side 46:05 Leaders as vehicles: JFK and the power of citizenship 50:22 What tragedy teaches: our capacity to unite 54:29 What can one person do? Small acts of citizenship 1:01:13 Outro and links Host Dave Troy writes at https://america2.news and https://washingtonspectator.org Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news