Dave Troy Presents

Dave Troy is a technologist, historian, and researcher who has studied disinformation and extremism online since the earliest days of the internet.

Dave Troy Presents is a news podcast hosted by David Troy, with 56 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

David Troy hosts Dave Troy Presents, a news show with 56 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #4

  Midterms, AI, and MAGA with Dr. Jen Golbeck

  Aug 8, 20261h 11mS4

  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

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  Episode #3

  The Case for National Service with Scott Reich

  Jul 2, 20261h 3mS4

  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

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  Episode #2

  The Power of Predictions with Carissa Véliz

  Jun 12, 202655 minS4

  Most of the predictions you encounter every day are closer to the realm of power than the realm of knowledge — and once you see that, you can't unsee it. Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz joins Dave to talk about her new book Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI . From the Oracle of Delphi (less a holy shrine than a thriving business) to court astrologers, credit scores, and large language models, Véliz argues that predictions are speech acts — veiled commands that bend reality toward themselves. Whoever owns the prediction machines is making a bid to own the future. Dave and Carissa dig into the rise of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi — anonymous wallets funded hours before an attack on Iran, journalists bullied over bets, newsrooms reporting odds as news — plus AI's "monoculture of sameness," why existential-risk panic distracts from AI-enabled authoritarianism, and why refusing to obey in advance starts with refusing the self-fulfilling prophecy. The conversation ends where it must: democracy is never won, only fought for and built every single day. Carissa Véiz — Associate Professor at Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy and Institute for Ethics in AI; author of Privacy Is Power and Prophecy . Get the book - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/239151058-prophecy TED 2026 talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4wHmKtH-Q X - @CarissaVeliz Chapters 00:00 - Cold open & intro 01:30 - Meet Carissa Véliz & the origins of Prophecy 04:37 - Ancient oracles: prediction has always been a business 07:10 - Dread, marketing & why predictions are never facts 09:51 - What makes an honest forecast? Weather vs. people 12:31 - Prediction markets: from PredictIt to Polymarket 15:27 - Insider wallets & the bet on the Iran attack 17:39 - Betting markets meet super PAC politics 20:10 - When newsrooms report bets as news 21:35 - AI as prediction machine: the monoculture of sameness 26:00 - How a digital ethicist actually uses AI 30:50 - Breaking out: serendipity, reading, defying the curve 33:47 - Philosophy as the antidote to prophecy 36:19 - Bayesian priors, agency & refusing to obey in advance 40:44 - Democracy, community & the inconvenient good life 45:17 - From Privacy Is Power to Prophecy 47:49 - Past the event horizon? Against defeatism 51:06 - Reading as an act of defiance 52:33 - Outro & links Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0 .

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  Episode #1

  Crypto Is Interested in You with Molly White and Tonantzin Carmona

  May 21, 20261h 11mS4

  <p><b>You may not be interested in crypto, but crypto is interested in you.</b></p> <p>Cryptocurrency has stopped being a finance story. In 2026 it's a political-money machine - woven into our elections, our regulators, the President's family balance sheet, and the everyday plumbing of how Americans get paid, borrow, and save. You can decide never to buy a single token and still be exposed to the fallout.</p> <p>To open Season 4, Dave Troy talks with two of the sharpest people on this beat: independent researcher<b> Molly White</b>, who tracks the industry transaction by transaction, a...

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  Episode #9

  Ghost Nation: Taiwan's Struggle for Survival with Chris Horton

  Jul 29, 20251h 35mS3

  <p>If you've been following world events, you know that Taiwan's future has become a major question, and a fulcrum for the future of democracy. Chris Horton is the author of "Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival," a new book that offers a unique view into Taiwan's complex history, its precarious present, and its potential futures. "Ghost Nation" is a must read for those interested in the future of democracy, not just in Asia but around the world, and Dave's conversation with Chris is a great introduction to this complex set of topics.</p> <p>...

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