What new polling tells us about Gen Z men, their views on power, and Musk’s appeal.

10 High-Impact Strategies to Reclaim Gen Z Engagement

🔹 Civic Hackathons: Quick innovation challenges for policy solutions.
🔹 Rapid Voting Access Teams: Task forces fighting misinformation in real-time.
🔹 Community Microgrants: Fast funding for grassroots projects led by young activists.
🔹 AI Civic Engagement Tools: Real-time, personalized policy updates tailored to Gen Z interests.
🔹 Instant Volunteer Networks: App-based organizing for immediate action on urgent issues.
🔹 Pop-Up Debate Series: Interactive, issue-focused town halls designed for digital-native audiences.
🔹 Crowdsourced Policy Making: Direct input platforms that give young voters a voice in decision-making.
🔹 Digital Voter Mobilization: Gamified engagement and turnout incentives to drive participation.
🔹 Youth-Led Government Labs: Test-beds for public sector innovation, driven by young leaders.
🔹 Hyper-Local Advocacy Groups: Small, agile teams tackling city and state issues with real impact.

Hearing from federal government employees as they make sense of their future

After an extension, on Monday we again face an impossible decision: Take the so-called “buyout” now, or stay and risk being pushed out later—working in an environment of fear, uncertainty, loyalty tests and where our public mission is treated with contempt, or, at best, an afterthought.

That so many of us will choose to stay, despite everything, speaks to the power of public service.

Let’s be clear—this choice is a manufactured one, with incentives and threats intended to make us forget why and who we serve.

The most likely scenario is some form of Finlandization.

The problem is that the whole MAGA narrative about Russia’s motives is false, and was always false. Putin has always wanted to conquer all or most of Ukraine — that’s why his first attack in early 2022 was against the Ukrainian capital, and why he sent a military parade column toward Kyiv. It was never really about NATO, or about protecting Russian speakers, or any of that stuff. And as long as his army continues to advance and take more territory in Ukraine, his population is quiescent, and his military manufacturing is humming along, Putin naturally sees little reason to relent. He sees that he’s winning, and he wants to win it all.

Trump and his people are now waking up to this fact:

They’re Focusing on the Wrong Things

Great software is built from the ground up, using agile methods, by small teams who can hold all essential features in a few creative minds. This is how the Cloud Czars themselves came to be. None are much more than 50 years old. Meta is 20.

Small entrepreneurial teams, with limited resources, are where tech has always found its breakthroughs. It was when the Czars were young themselves that they developed what they needed to thrive. They’re now vulnerable to the same process.

Google is in the worst shape. AI is wearing away its dominance in search. That’s cutting its cash flow. In the past the company’s “other bets” built entrepreneurial teams that took pressure off its primary business. It’s like AT&T with Bell Labs. Bell Labs gave us transistors and dozens of other innovations, but it failed to capitalize on most of this because of the company’s focus on the network.

The financial markets are the only thing that can stop Trump’s reign of chaos.

When the New York Stock Exchange opens on Monday at 9:30 a.m. we will see just how seriously the world takes the assault Elon Musk and Donald Trump launched on the American system of government.

What follows is a guide for interpreting the drop.

First, some ground rules. The securities markets have a system of circuit breakers to halt massive declines. There are three circuit breakers that are measured by calculating a percentage decline in the S&P 500 from the close of the previous day: Level 1 (7 percent), Level 2 (13 percent), and Level 3 (20 percent). If Levels 1 or 2 are tripped before 3:25 p.m., all trading is halted for 15 minutes. If Level 3 is tripped at any point in the day, trading is halted for the remainder of the day.

Early thoughts on OpenAI Deep Research

The Knowledge Navigator was not billed as an AI. Instead it was a hardware device, resembling an iPad, except that in Apple’s vision at the time, it would lie flat on the user’s desk. Running on that hardware was a virtual assistant (a man in a bowtie—I think I will always imagine our best AIs wearing bowties because of this). The virtual assistant could place and screen video calls on the user’s behalf, synthesize large quantities of academic research and other online content, and even use that information to create new knowledge. Apple imagined that you’d communicate with this device almost entirely through voice. The Knowledge Navigator was not just a computer; it was a colleague.

The Knowledge Navigator is now here, and I am indeed using it on a future-generation Macintosh. But the Navigator itself is not made by Apple; it’s a product called Deep Research from OpenAI. Deep Research is not entirely Apple’s vision; I cannot have fluid conversations with it yet (though I can with GPT-4o using Advanced Voice Mode), for example. But for all intents and purposes, the parts of Knowledge Navigator I cared about for decades have arrived.

The future of globalization in the age of AI

Today’s AI race is not merely an ‘arms race’ nor is DeepSeek easily explained away as just a Sputnik moment.

This race is playing out against the larger backdrop of more than a decade of technology infrastructure export by the largest economies around the world. – whether it is India’s export of digital public infrastructure, cloud export by the US BigTech, or China’s Digital Silk Road working alongside its Belt and Road project.

This combination of tech infrastructure exports combined with leverage through complementary AI capabilities creates a new format of globalization – standards-based globalization – something that most people don’t yet fully understand.

What new polling tells us about Gen Z men, their views on power, and Musk’s appeal.

10 High-Impact Strategies to Reclaim Gen Z Engagement

🔹 Civic Hackathons: Quick innovation challenges for policy solutions.
🔹 Rapid Voting Access Teams: Task forces fighting misinformation in real-time.
🔹 Community Microgrants: Fast funding for grassroots projects led by young activists.
🔹 AI Civic Engagement Tools: Real-time, personalized policy updates tailored to Gen Z interests.
🔹 Instant Volunteer Networks: App-based organizing for immediate action on urgent issues.
🔹 Pop-Up Debate Series: Interactive, issue-focused town halls designed for digital-native audiences.
🔹 Crowdsourced Policy Making: Direct input platforms that give young voters a voice in decision-making.
🔹 Digital Voter Mobilization: Gamified engagement and turnout incentives to drive participation.
🔹 Youth-Led Government Labs: Test-beds for public sector innovation, driven by young leaders.
🔹 Hyper-Local Advocacy Groups: Small, agile teams tackling city and state issues with real impact.

Hearing from federal government employees as they make sense of their future

After an extension, on Monday we again face an impossible decision: Take the so-called “buyout” now, or stay and risk being pushed out later—working in an environment of fear, uncertainty, loyalty tests and where our public mission is treated with contempt, or, at best, an afterthought.

That so many of us will choose to stay, despite everything, speaks to the power of public service.

Let’s be clear—this choice is a manufactured one, with incentives and threats intended to make us forget why and who we serve.

The most likely scenario is some form of Finlandization.

The problem is that the whole MAGA narrative about Russia’s motives is false, and was always false. Putin has always wanted to conquer all or most of Ukraine — that’s why his first attack in early 2022 was against the Ukrainian capital, and why he sent a military parade column toward Kyiv. It was never really about NATO, or about protecting Russian speakers, or any of that stuff. And as long as his army continues to advance and take more territory in Ukraine, his population is quiescent, and his military manufacturing is humming along, Putin naturally sees little reason to relent. He sees that he’s winning, and he wants to win it all.

Trump and his people are now waking up to this fact:

They’re Focusing on the Wrong Things

Great software is built from the ground up, using agile methods, by small teams who can hold all essential features in a few creative minds. This is how the Cloud Czars themselves came to be. None are much more than 50 years old. Meta is 20.

Small entrepreneurial teams, with limited resources, are where tech has always found its breakthroughs. It was when the Czars were young themselves that they developed what they needed to thrive. They’re now vulnerable to the same process.

Google is in the worst shape. AI is wearing away its dominance in search. That’s cutting its cash flow. In the past the company’s “other bets” built entrepreneurial teams that took pressure off its primary business. It’s like AT&T with Bell Labs. Bell Labs gave us transistors and dozens of other innovations, but it failed to capitalize on most of this because of the company’s focus on the network.

The financial markets are the only thing that can stop Trump’s reign of chaos.

When the New York Stock Exchange opens on Monday at 9:30 a.m. we will see just how seriously the world takes the assault Elon Musk and Donald Trump launched on the American system of government.

What follows is a guide for interpreting the drop.

First, some ground rules. The securities markets have a system of circuit breakers to halt massive declines. There are three circuit breakers that are measured by calculating a percentage decline in the S&P 500 from the close of the previous day: Level 1 (7 percent), Level 2 (13 percent), and Level 3 (20 percent). If Levels 1 or 2 are tripped before 3:25 p.m., all trading is halted for 15 minutes. If Level 3 is tripped at any point in the day, trading is halted for the remainder of the day.

Early thoughts on OpenAI Deep Research

The Knowledge Navigator was not billed as an AI. Instead it was a hardware device, resembling an iPad, except that in Apple’s vision at the time, it would lie flat on the user’s desk. Running on that hardware was a virtual assistant (a man in a bowtie—I think I will always imagine our best AIs wearing bowties because of this). The virtual assistant could place and screen video calls on the user’s behalf, synthesize large quantities of academic research and other online content, and even use that information to create new knowledge. Apple imagined that you’d communicate with this device almost entirely through voice. The Knowledge Navigator was not just a computer; it was a colleague.

The Knowledge Navigator is now here, and I am indeed using it on a future-generation Macintosh. But the Navigator itself is not made by Apple; it’s a product called Deep Research from OpenAI. Deep Research is not entirely Apple’s vision; I cannot have fluid conversations with it yet (though I can with GPT-4o using Advanced Voice Mode), for example. But for all intents and purposes, the parts of Knowledge Navigator I cared about for decades have arrived.

The future of globalization in the age of AI

Today’s AI race is not merely an ‘arms race’ nor is DeepSeek easily explained away as just a Sputnik moment.

This race is playing out against the larger backdrop of more than a decade of technology infrastructure export by the largest economies around the world. – whether it is India’s export of digital public infrastructure, cloud export by the US BigTech, or China’s Digital Silk Road working alongside its Belt and Road project.

This combination of tech infrastructure exports combined with leverage through complementary AI capabilities creates a new format of globalization – standards-based globalization – something that most people don’t yet fully understand.

Elon Musk’s campaign to cut Washington’s bureaucracy is aiming at a very specific, very sensitive digital power center: the federal IT infrastructure.

Musk and his allies have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments systems, and they’ve commandeered enough control at the Office of Personnel Management to send a mass email offering federal employees early buyouts. Unnamed federal officials told The Washington Post today that they’re now concerned about DOGE access to student loan data.

The overall effect has been to turn once banal-seeming federal IT systems into an ideologically driven bulldozer for removing programs deemed — by, apparently, Musk — as either unnecessary or excessively “woke.”

If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare. And since Elon is a government contractor, he’s now in a position to make policy calls that benefit his own companies and hurt his competitors—following the Russian oligarch model.

We are in a completely lawless realm, and this is likely to continue until he is stopped. Meanwhile, government employees are being forced to choose between conforming or protecting the public. Plus, Elon is also sabotaging America’s soft power and influence in Africa while he and the other tech overlords plot how to derail Europe’s effort to regulate them.

Trump’s recent folly with cryptocurrency highlights (beyond his primary motivation of greed) the fantasyland that much of economics is based on. Indeed, it is fair to say that of all the systems created by humankind, the economic one is the one based more on human imagination than any other. The mere fact Trump was to become president led to the creation of almost $30b, pretty much out of thin air. This inherent weakness of the economic system – its vulnerability to mood and imagination -, highlights starkly that the economic system is very much a human domain, at our will, capable of creative solutions.

Trump has also revealed the true cause of inflation. It is not wage growth. It is the growth of profit and the cost of consumer products. Things are more expensive, partly because of supply issues (and now tariffs), and partly because governments the world over are failing to regulate the greed of big business. This has led some to speculate that stagnation is around the corner. This, I am led to understand, is when wages are not growing to meet the escalating cost of products.

So, the problem (beyond the greed and ecological crisis) for both everyday people and the economic markets is the lack of wage growth. Enter Universal Income!

Phone bans are going into effect across the country. Already, eight states in the U.S.—California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia—have enacted a complete ban or some form of restriction on students’ phones at school.

The Project Liberty team partnered with Human Change to create Future House—a space that convened global leaders, CEOs, technologists, academics, and changemakers to tackle the most pressing issues facing the future of technology.

One session focused on the lessons from the global movement for smartphone-free childhood. Moderated by Dr. Mitch Prinstein, Chief Psychology Officer at the American Psychological Association, the session featured Chris McKenna, Founder and CEO of Protect Young Eyes, Dr. Marco Gui, Associate Professor and co-founder of Patti Digitali, Dr. Phil McRae, a Canadian educator and scholar, and Julie Scelfo, Founder and Executive Director of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA).

Welcome to the next four years.

So far, not all of my specific predictions have been borne out — we haven’t yet seen Trump launch attacks on the court system, the electoral system, the Fed, or the U.S. Military. But it has been only two weeks since Trump’s inauguration. Give it time.

But the institutional chaos that Trump has unleashed just in his first two weeks has been considerable. For example, as I predicted in that post, there is a huge purge underway at the FBI:

The Trading Game: A Confession 

That’s finance. The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.

The Trading Game is an account of what goes on inside those banks when they are at the work of ‘finance’, meaning gambling. It is a shocking but not surprising book, because Gary Stevenson’s account is essentially identical to the one critical outsiders gave of the banking system in the wake of the global financial crisis. It is especially shocking since much of Stevenson’s story is not set during the run-up to the crash, but in the aftermath – when lessons had allegedly been learned and behaviour reformed. It is clear from his book that those of us who talked about privatised gains and socialised losses were, not to put a finer point on it, completely right.

Three steps you can take to surf the waves of the Trump flood and lead in your community

Step 1: Stop Drowning

You must commit to being informed enough to understand what is happening, but not spiral down rabbit holes on social media, Reddit, or even well-intentioned group chats. It’s far too easy to find yourself in a place where you’ve spent 45 minutes on the three-page opener to the Trade War the White House released at the end of January and think, oh, I see where this falls apart.

Step 2: Refocus on Community

Step 3: Help the Impacted

The art of the deal, with him as dealer

Together, these two techniques — big demonstrations of discretionary power to reward or punish, and wild uncertainty about when or how he’ll do so — expand Trump’s power beyond the point any president has ever pushed power.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is Trump so obsessed with enlarging his power?

Hint: It’s not about improving the well-being of average Americans and certainly not about making America great again (whatever that means).

The bigger his demonstrable power and the more unpredictably he wields it, the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both in the United States and elsewhere.

Last Thursday, not long after the success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent U.S. tech stocks into a freefall, OpenAI gathered some of Washington’s most influential AI policy thinkers and power brokers in a rented office space near Capitol Hill to sell them on the virtues of homegrown artificial intelligence.

DFD sat in the room alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Lynne Parker, a White House tech adviser, as CEO Sam Altman sought to convince his audience that OpenAI deserved Washington’s full support.

The DeepSeek news had come as a sharp rebuke to the company’s claims that it was leading the world in AI model performance, showing users that the Chinese could achieve similar results at a far lower price tag, without the need for mind-boggling computational power and cutting-edge chips.