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America doesn’t feel tense because we disagree. It feels tense because a lot of people believe they kept their end of the bargain and the country didn’t keep its end of the deal.

We start with that sense of betrayal and follow the trail through today’s economic anxiety, collapsing trust in institutions, and a media environment that turns politics into spectacle. When every issue becomes a team sport and social media rewards humiliation over understanding, we don’t just get louder. We get lonelier, more suspicious, and easier to manipulate. And when ordinary people are squeezed while elites insist everything is “fine,” anger stops being an emotion and starts becoming an identity.

Then we break down a rare commencement speech that actually says what many young people are living: an economy that isn’t built for them, a widening 99% vs 1% gap, and disillusionment that can function like a superpower if it leads to clear-eyed action. From there, we run an “autopsy” using thinkers across the spectrum, from Noam Chomsky to Thomas Sowell to Robert Reich and more, to show how different camps spotted different parts of the same collapse. The thread tying it together is simple and heavy: this is also a spiritual and meaning crisis, because money is never just money, it’s dignity and a future you can picture.

We close with a listener question about rising geopolitical tension and explain why the next decade may bring long-term global instability as a multipolar world forms without agreed rules, plus a sharp “blast from the intellectual past” that reminds us how narratives get contested in real time. Subscribe, share this with someone you trust, and leave a review with the biggest question you’re still wrestling with.

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