Israel is intentionally killing journalists. Everything you have seen from inside has come from Palestinian journalists who live there. Jane Ferguson spent fifteen years in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan watching them close and realized the foreign bureaus are not coming back. So she built what replaces them. Her platform, Noosphere, lets field reporters publish straight to the public with no network in between.

Can we teach AIs to be ethical and safe? At least 100 of them are on your phone right now, watching you and learning from you every day. De Kai helped build this field, and he calls them our artificial children. The AI pioneer explains why regulating AI companies matters but won't be enough, why open-source models running on a laptop are about to blindside the biggest players, and what will happen when AI unavoidably learns without huge, expensive data centers.

The Supreme Court just heard the case that decides whether communities can sue Big Oil for the cost of extreme weather. Justice Alito recused himself, so a 4–4 tie leaves Boulder County’s lawsuit alive. David Fenton comments on the warnings that these suits could bankrupt the oil companies, why the tobacco cases are the right comparison, and why nobody gave those a chance either until a jury saw what the companies knew.

In 1959, a scientist told the American Petroleum Institute that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures and drown coastal cities. The industry spent the next 40 years saying the science was uncertain.

Richard Wiles of the Center for Climate Integrity has spent his career getting Big Oil's own documents in front of juries to prove they knew the damage they would cause. This episode of Agitation Nation features Wiles and Michael Greenberg of Climate Defiance on the plastics fraud, the natural gas lie, and the campaign to make the oil industry legally immune from all of it. #ExxonKnew

For decades, Ben & Jerry's sold ice cream with a mission. Then its independent board refused to keep selling in illegal Israeli settlements. Ever since, its giant corporate owners have been dismantling everything that made Ben & Jerry's what it is. When the White House turned against climate and DEI, a lot of companies dropped it fast. Ben Cohen says that tells you they never meant it. Can businesses change the world?

The Ben & Jerry's co-founder discusses grossly excessive military spending, building a business with values in its DNA, and why staying neutral in the face of injustice means taking a side. freebenandjerrys.com

00:00 They Want the Ice Cream Without the Activism
01:15 Companies That Dropped DEI Never Meant It
03:17 Build Your Values In From Day One
07:33 Ignore the Experts
10:07 Unilever Pushed Out the Board
12:32 How the West Bank Started All This
17:10 Totally Nuts: The War Budget
22:24 A Democracy for the Many, Not the Few
24:38 Speaking Out When Everyone's Scared
26:50 What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?
29:48 What a Free Ben & Jerry's Would Do
33:15 Pass the Torch

Six years ago, Bernie Sanders was deemed too radical to nominate. Now his ideas are winning more primaries than ever. Faiz Shakir ran Bernie’s 2020 campaign. He walks us through the 2026 midterm map and explains how authenticity and working-class politics are winning.

00:00 The Year Money Started Losing

05:46 The Cabinet Bernie Never Got to Name

09:32 If Cooper Loses, It's a Long Night

11:40 Fifteen People Got a Vote on Every Sentence

14:55 Michigan: The Loudest Race in the Country

28:19 She Won Spending Fifty Thousand Dollars

33:08 Where We Disagree About Climate

37:26 Inside the Club That Runs the Party

40:30 Bernie-Style Is Worth Twenty Points

46:54 A Trillion Dollars Is 32,000 Years

51:12 Most Media Treats People as Dumb

54:24 Pass the Torch

Billionaire Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. Gil Durán has spent years documenting what the tech circle built once they stopped believing in voting. The result is The Nerd Reich — reported almost entirely from what these men have said out loud.

Silicon Valley is trying to get AI chatbots classified as having free speech rights. One lawyer is fighting to stop it in court. Meetali Jain's nonprofit now has over a dozen active cases against AI companies, including a Texas lawsuit in which a chatbot told a teenage boy it understood why kids kill their parents.

Trigger warning: this episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.