Half of Americans are lonely and isolated—and artificial intelligence is stepping into the void.
Sam Altman just announced that OpenAI will soon provide erotica for sexually lonely adults. Mark Zuckerberg envisions a future where solitary people enjoy AI friends. According to the Harvard Business Review, the top uses for large language models are therapy and companionship.
It’s easy to see why this is happening. AI is always available, endlessly patient, and unfailingly agreeable. Millions now pour their secrets into silicon confidants, comforted by algorithms that respond with affirmation and tact. But what masquerades as friendship is, in fact, a dangerous substitute. AI therapy and friendship burrow us deeper into ourselves when what we most need is to reach out to others.
As Jordan Peterson once observed, “[O]bsessive concern with the self is indistinguishable from misery.” That is the trap of AI companionship.
Following the announcement of Donald Trump’s ‘peace’ deal and the resulting ‘ceasefire’ there has been a lot of quiet commentary in legacy media circles about the future of the fifth estate.
“What are all these single-issue media critics going to do now that the issue is solved?” is the question being asked in newsrooms, as if now that the bombs have officially stopped dropping over civilians in Gaza (never mind that they haven’t), audiences will return to the legacy fold.
This question isn’t based in malice but a fundamental misunderstanding of what caused the schism in trust between audiences and media. It’s also not new. There has always been a level of distrust within newsrooms of people who undertake journalism away from the fold. It’s easy to dismiss renegades, even as the mainstream is forced to follow them.
Who gets to be a journalist — and who doesn’t
Who ‘gets’ to be a journalist has always been set by the mainstream – you must work for a masthead, a network or an established broadcaster to be counted as a ‘proper’ journalist. With one of those behind you, then it follows that everything you do is ‘journalism’.
Without the overhang of an established brand, then you are not a journalist. You’re something else. An activist. A ‘citizen’ journalist. A blogger. A podcaster. An influencer. A content creator. Someone ‘masquerading’ as a journalist. It doesn’t matter if you once worked for an established media outlet. You left. Whatever you’re doing now obviously can’t be considered ‘journalism’.
Ensuring equality of opportunity in support of economic mobility remains one of the most profound and enduring challenges facing modern societies.
The pursuit of genuine mobility, where an individual’s prospects are not dictated by birth or circumstance, is central to any vision of a fair and dynamic society. Yet the path to achieving this ideal is anything but straightforward. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wisely observed:
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
This is a question I used to ask my students, and only now realized I should ask FB friends. What’s a major political issue/narrative/belief/commitment on which you changed your mind, and what made you change your mind?
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Oct 20-26, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9901
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese returns from a meeting with the mercurial US President Donald Trump, a great diplomatic success by the usual measures. Trump said without hedging that Australia would get nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact and inked a critical minerals deal to “unlock” private investment.
The media lapped up Trump’s comments, as did the Prime Minister – who said Labor’s ads at the next election might feature Trump’s endorsement. But as Emma Shortis warned this week, beneath the bonhomie there was little substance. There are good reasons to doubt that AUKUS will happen and that a full embrace of Trump is wise, or even electorally popular.
‘Symbolically, the meeting was a success. In substance, it revealed that the fundamentals of the relationship have not changed.’
Dr Emma Shortis unpacks Albanese’s meeting with Trump in The Conversation.
Pulitzer Prize–winning US journalist Chris Hedges joins Antoinette Lattouf to unpack his time in Australia so far, including some fraught interactions with sections of the Australian media. We also discuss what he flew all this way to talk about: how western journalists are betraying their colleagues in Gaza.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Space is the defining strategic frontier of the 21st century. America’s space leadership depends on harnessing the private sector to create wealth and focusing the public sector on limited yet critical security and scientific objectives. While achieving supremacy in cislunar space (the region between the Earth and Moon, including the Moon’s surface) must be our immediate aim, it lacks the strategic coherence to sustain American leadership across decades. We need long-term goals to define success and clarify tradeoffs. A manned mission to Mars can do both.
China and Russia, our near-peer competitors in space, pose serious challenges. Beijing openly pursues dominance in the Earth-Moon system while accelerating toward Mars, with an ambitious sample return mission scheduled for 2028. Russia maintains formidable military capabilities in space, alongside proven Mars science achievements.
If our authoritarian rivals prevail, the world’s free nations may find their ability to access and use space significantly curtailed.
This is why the United States needs a unifying long-term vision that focuses and directs near-term commercial, military, and scientific objectives. We must also research and develop technologies for sustained living in space. A smart Mars strategy provides the needed framework, creating the technological roadmap and institutional durability to win the cislunar competition and position America for permanent space premiership.
Young Canadians are typically the first to face a tougher job market during hard economic periods, and the times are getting tougher. For young Canadian workers between ages 15 and 24 in July 2025, youth employment hit its highest levels at 14.6 percent — a situation comparable to the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. During these crises, equity-deserving youth experience even higher rates of unemployment. This outcome is frustrating for young people looking for their first job, and Canada’s right-wing is looking for scapegoats, rather than economic justice.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Troll King | The Roundtable Ep. 290
The latest round of “No Kings!” rallies, reportedly attended by 7 million—average attendee, per Axios, mid-40s and female—took to the streets this weekend in protest of…what monarchy, exactly? This week, three kings—Ryan, Matt, and Spencer—discuss progressive populism, John Bolton’s indictment for alleged mishandling of classified intelligence, and Zohran Mamdani’s likely victory despite a weak performance in New York’s mayoral debate. Plus: more cultural recommendations!
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the critical minerals agreement struck between the Australian and American governments, Andrew Leigh’s new anti-price gouging legislation, and why Aussies have been lining up for gold.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 23 October 2025.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
The shocking murder of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University puts an exclamation point on the degraded state of reasoned debate in America.
Like many in the last month, I’ve found myself doing a deep dive into Kirk’s YouTube channel, watching debate after debate. You learn something from watching them in full: Kirk was willing to talk to anybody, and he always brought liberals to the front of the line. He was pugnacious at times, but always civil. It was his interlocutors who would sometimes resort to ad hominem attacks, and their arguments often collapsed as they met a steady stream of his questions and retorts. Time after time, these students lost the debate with Kirk because they simply didn’t know enough.
What causes a person to stake out a position with such confidence before mastering the evidence to support it? For many of the students who challenged Kirk, the answer is action civics. This is a pedagogical theory that teaches that the highest form of civic participation is protest rather than discussion. Its result is thoughtless grandstanding or worse. The antidote to this state of affairs is classical education rightly understood.
The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.
Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.
The university had net assets of more than $1.8 billion at the end of 2024. That is an increase of more than $150 million from the previous year.
This strong increase in the value of its assets is due in part to the strong surplus of $61.3 million shown in the audited accounts.
“The University of Newcastle is not experiencing any form of financial crisis,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“To suggest that there is something ‘unsustainable’ about the financial performance of an organisation whose net assets have grown by nearly $600 million and whose retained earnings have grown by more than $400 million over the past 10 years is just silly.
“It is important to realise that claims the university ran an ‘underlying deficit’ last year are not based on the university’s audited results.
“The so-called ‘adjusted operating result’ is calculated by management by removing some forms of revenue described as ‘one-off’, but there is no similar effort to remove one-off items of expenditure.
The Manosphere. This online, man-made safe space serves as a kind of glasshouse of masculine performance, there for observers to imitate or revile. However one might measure the relative percentages of truth and lies on offer in the Manosphere, however one might separate the true masculinity on offer there from the Manosphere’s many vain effeminacies masquerading as virile strength, one thing is clear: men are in the middle of an identity crisis.
We could leave aside the various instances of that crisis that emanate from the sexual Left, by which I mean the LGBTQ emporium of options for how one might live out one’s manhood. But why should we? Left, Right, and Center—we can’t agree on what it means to be truly manly. A central cause of the present crisis is that America’s men have almost a complete lack of experience with single-sex education before college.
On this crossover episode of Follow the Money and After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Ebony Bennett discuss why Australia is still unlikely to receive any Virginia-class submarines, why the “shared values” that supposedly underpin the Australia-US alliance are looking increasingly shaky, and Trump’s bizarre AI video showing himself dropping excrement on protesters.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Salmon farming is the primary threat to the endangered Maugean skate in its only home, Macquarie Harbour, part of Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area.
The latest report from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies states the population of the skate is still dangerously low, while juveniles are in an even more precarious situation. There is no guarantee these will survive to reproductive maturity.
The government has admitted salmon farming is the primary threat and that the skate remains at high risk of extinction, but is refusing to follow its own advice, which is to “eliminate or significantly reduce” fish farms to avoid the “almost certain” and “catastrophic” impact of this industry.
Meanwhile, the Tasmanian government is currently preparing Terms of Reference for a review of the salmon industry in Tasmania, but there has been no public consultation to date.
“For the Australian government to say the species appears to be recovering is incorrect, and to say that when its own advice says it’s not possible to make such conclusions, is misleading.” said Eloise Carr, Director of The Australia Institute Tasmania.
“The Australian government is failing to meet its obligations to protect World Heritage.
“The government is ignoring its own department’s advice in its attempts to reassure UNESCO that enough is being done to address the destruction of World Heritage caused by the salmon industry. This is simply not the case.
This federal NDP leadership race presides over a caucus of just 7 MPs in Parliament and no party status. But this is not a unique situation for the Canadian left-wing in the House of Commons. Nor does it mean that the working-class can’t influence public policy in Canada. With Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government still 5 seats short of a majority government, working-class Canadians should start asking NDP leadership candidates how they would wield this balance of power as they make their first public appeals at the Canadian Labour Congress’ October 22ndleaders’ forum in Ottawa. They can look to one hundred years of progressive influence that social democratic Parliamentarians have had in Canada for answers.
Before the NDP and its predecessor party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, an ad-hoc “Ginger Group” of fifteen MPs was formed in 1924. While belonging to left-wing party factions or sitting as independents, the Ginger Group used their small, but outsized, influence to push for progressive policies during the majority government of Prime Minister McKenzie King, such as the establishment of Canada’s first publicly funded pensions in 1926.
The selection committee for the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2025 prize, as voted on by AIPEN members.
The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2024 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by an Australia-based scholar.
The prize defines IPE in a pluralist sense to include the political economy of security, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, post-coloniality, gender, finance, trade, regional studies, development and economic theory, in ways that can span concerns for in/security, poverty, inequality, sustainability, exploitation, deprivation and discrimination.
The overall prize winner will be decided from the shortlist by the selection committee, which this year consists of Ainsley Elbra (USyd), Claire Parfitt (USyd), Tim DiMuzio (UoW), Annabel Dulhunty (ANU), and Wenting He (ANU). The winner will be announced in November 2025.
The 2025 shortlist for The Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is as follows:
In 2025, sometimes it is difficult to remember that, for two decades or so at the end of the twentieth- and start of the twenty-first century, Latin America was a place of hope. A progressive wave brought left-leaning governments to power across the region, driven by social currents fighting for new ways of organising society, politics and production; that is to say, new ways of organising life. The Zapatista uprising on the 1 January 1994 sparked excitement that Latin America could be a social laboratory once more. After being the cauldron where the economic ideas of the post-War period and the counterrevolutionary violence of the Cold War were first forged, the Zapatistas at once centred Latin America across debates over autonomy, democracy and alternatives to neoliberalism. Factory occupations by the piquetero movement in Argentina, Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador demanding control over water and other natural resources and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peasants’ Movement, MST) across South America captured the imagination of a generation of critical scholars. Arguably, nowhere was this truer than in Venezuela, where the charismatic president Hugo Chávez had returned from the brink in the face of a conservative coup d’état in 2003 to pursue what he labelled ‘twenty-first century socialism’.
The Labour government that rules the United Kingdom is hardly a year old, but its time is already coming to an end. Its popular legitimacy has collapsed, and it is visibly losing control of both the British state and its territories. Every conversation not about proximate policy is about the successor government: which party will take over, who will be leading it, and what’s needed to reverse what looks to be an unalterable course. What is known, however, is that the next government will assume the reins of a fading state after what will likely be the final election under the present, failed dispensation.
The Britain birthed by New Labour three decades ago, deracinated and unmoored from its historic roots, is unquestionably at its end. Its elements—most especially the importation of malign Americanisms like propositional nationhood—have led directly to a country that is, according to academics like Dr. David Betz of King’s College London, on the precipice of something like a civil war. That’s the worst-case scenario. The best case is that a once-great nation made itself poor and has become wracked with civil strife, including the jihadi variety. It is a prospect that will make yesteryear’s worst of Ulster seem positively bucolic.
No drug is as sacrosanct in today’s sexually “liberated” culture as oral contraceptives. But the proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.
None of this would surprise Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. In the early 20th century, she promoted contraception as the mechanism for female emancipation. “Birth control is the first important step a woman must take toward the goal of her freedom,” she wrote. “It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.”
Feminist author Betty Friedan agreed, asserting that the pill gave women “the legal and constitutional right to decide whether or not or when to bear children,” and established the basis for true equality with men.
Because oral contraception has been touted as a cornerstone of women’s equality and freedom, its health repercussions are rarely called into question. Even HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who regularly wades into controversy by calling for investigations into seed oils and food dyes, remains relatively silent on oral contraceptives.
On October 7, President Donald Trump proclaimed a “National Manufacturing Day,” recognizing that “the strength of our Republic rests on the strength of our industries and the determination of our workers.” It is his administration’s latest move to support the reindustrialization of the American heartland.
The proclamation caps off numerous successes of the past nine months, which have seen around $5 trillion in new private and foreign investments in America, along with reciprocal tariffs, that are reawakening our manufacturing base. Better still, it highlights the all-too-often unsung hero of President Trump’s Golden Age industrial policy: deregulation.
For decades, smug economists and academics have insisted that America’s transition from an industrial economy to a financialized service-based one was natural, that the hollowing out of the American heartland and the offshoring of jobs were inevitable byproducts of capitalism. I beg to differ.
On September 20, 2025, thousands of Canadians took to the streets uniting climate justice, migrant justice, economic justice, Indigenous rights, and anti-war movements, calling for government action. Helping coordinate the more than 70 community demonstrations across Canada was Atiya Jaffar, National Campaigns Manager at 350 Canada. Activists from interconnected movements refused to stand by and accept the status quo.
On 9th October, we held a workshop for local authority members to learn more about the best ways to implement the socio-economic duty – a part of the Equality Act 2010 that may finally be coming into force. We and our expert speakers shared case studies, tips and resources on how to approach the SED […]
The market for futures on Australian Government Securities (AGS) is one of Australia's key markets for trading interest rate risk, and turnover in AGS futures is substantially greater than turnover in AGS themselves. We examine liquidity in the market for futures on AGS using granular 'tick-level' data that captures trades and changes at the top of the order book from October 2019 to June 2025. We find liquidity deteriorated at the onset of COVID-19 and around the end of the RBA's yield target. Nevertheless, the market for AGS futures functioned well in the period, with market participants always able to transact (albeit sometimes at higher transaction costs). For 'news' events in the period – such as monetary policy decisions and economic data releases, which are inherently uncertain – we find liquidity tended to deteriorate briefly following these events but recovered before day's end. By contrast, for 'flow' events – such as pre-announced purchases and sales of AGS, including syndicated issuance – we find liquidity improved in anticipation of these events and smooth trading conditions were maintained. A better understanding of how liquidity in AGS futures changes in response to market-moving events should assist AGS market participants – including the RBA – to extract and interpret information from market data, and to design any AGS market transactions to maximise effectiveness while minimising side effects.
Media Release Number 2025-30: Martin Thomas has been appointed as General Counsel at the RBA, leading our Legal team. The team provides legal services to the RBA, manages legal risk, and provides strategic advice to support the delivery of our charter functions and priorities.
On this episode of After America, Judge Navi Pillay, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and 2025 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss accountability in international law and the prerequisites for genuine peace.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 13 October 2025.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via Australia Institute Press.
Guest: Navi Pillay, Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
For the past few years, a growing problem has put healthcare budgets under increasing stress.
State and territory governments have been trying to do more with less, and it is all starting to come apart at the seams.
Extra money for healthcare during the pandemic hid the problem for a while. But, with those emergency sources of revenue gone, the states face funding shortfalls, and it is everyday Australians who are suffering as a result.
Overcrowded hospital waiting rooms. People waiting years in pain for hip replacements. People delaying appointments because of the cost, which then means issues are not picked up early.
Source of the problem probably not what you think
But this is not all doom and gloom. There is the real possibility of meaningful change.
The problem is that the GST is failing. The GST was created as a state tax, collected by the Commonwealth government, but then transferred in full to the state and territories.
It was promised to be the states’ own growth tax, which would help them fund their spending responsibilities, the biggest of which was healthcare.
But over the past 25 years since its introduction, it hasn’t grown with the economy.
Earlier this week, Alvaro Bedoya published a story-forward account of his experience as an FTC commissioner in the US. It's the kind of story that makes an ethnographer swoon. Through his accounting, he demonstrates how his perspective on politics changed by talking with people around the country. His experience this role upended his understanding of why American people are struggling - and why they are making the political choices that they make.
His accounting reminds me so much of my experience talking with teenagers all over the US. What powerful voices think about the problems in the world often look different from a different perspective. In my case, I was grappling with how teens' understanding of their struggles, desires, and goals looked different from adults' anxieties. In Alvaro's case, he came to realize that the DC narratives animating "left" and "right" don't make sense on the ground as people struggle with the economic realities of the present. Put simply, he shows why grappling with the political economy matters. (And he makes it very clear how corporate greed and oligarchic power have shaped political views.)
On May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government killed over 700 civilians gathered in the eastern city of Andijon to protest the economic, social, and political conditions of Uzbekistan. Prompted by the imprisonment and subsequent jailbreak of popular local businessmen, the crowd grew to 10,000 people, some drawn by a rumor that their dictator, President Karimov, would address the largest protest in Uzbekistan’s history.
Instead, military forces greeted the demonstrators. According to the Uzbek government, the forces targeted only armed insurgents, 187 of whom were killed. According to nearly all other accounts, the military fired indiscriminately into the crowd, murdering at least 700 people, including children.
At the center of the massacre was a group the Uzbek government called “Akromiya”. According to the Uzbek government, Akromiya armed the militants, Akromiya gave the orders, Akromiya was responsible for the deaths of Uzbek citizens in Andijon. Akromiya was a menace that had to be stamped out at any cost.
There was one problem with this theory: Akromiya — by the accounts of Uzbek and international human rights groups, political organizations, journalists, citizens, and accused Akromiya members themselves — did not exist.
To mark both Challenge Poverty Week and the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty we are delighted to welcome our friends from Addressing Poverty through Lived Experience (APLE) Collective to author this guest blog. APLE continue to inspire us with their incredible work putting lived experience at the centre of decision making. At APLE Collective, we […]
There is much to gain from reading the short stories of Raymond Carver, especially for today’s conservatives. When he published in the ’70s and ’80s, Carver was unsurpassed in his popularity. Today his settings, for instance, would be immediately recognizable to the average Trump supporter: fishing trips, small farms, barber shops, motel rooms, bingo halls, and bars (plenty of bars).
His scenes are small or midsized towns in the Columbia Plateau, the Great Basin, or the Pacific Northwest (mostly coastless parts like Clatskanie, Oregon, or Yakima, Washington, where Carver was born and grew up, respectively). These regions were industrial, sleepy, homogenous, and poor during Carver’s time (he died an alcoholic’s death in 1988 at the age of 50).
Pretty much all his characters are white and working-class, a group largely sandwiched between privileged, coastal elites and handout recipients. These are people who cannot live in a world of make-believe and have to confront head-on the realities of belt-tightening, scouring for money for rent or hospital bills, cars on the verge of breakdown, etc.
Still, Carver’s plots do vary: an elderly man losing his farm to a slug infestation; a father who abandons the family dog because they can’t afford it; a postal worker who can’t stand a hippie couple who have moved onto his route; an apparently evicted man who moves the interior of his home outside for a “house party”; a depressed divorcee who finds inspiration from a double amputee, a door-to-door salesman, etc.
Many gas exporters continue to pay no tax and PRRT payments are at a 3 year low.
The Australian government gives gas exporters more than half the gas they export royalty free.
“A 25% gas export tax would go a long way towards solving the nation’s housing crisis and the self-inflicted ‘gas crisis’ in one fell swoop,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
“It is extraordinary that Australia raises so little money from gas exports, despite being one of the world’s largest producers.
“This is an opportunity for the Albanese government to implement progressive patriotism and put the interests of Australian households and businesses ahead of gas industry greed.
Here’s the thing you need to understand about the artificial intelligence race: it’s exponential, not linear. In a traditional race, the track underneath you doesn’t change in real time. But when it comes to AI, a single innovation can radically transform the field. Think of a poker table, where the deck reshuffles mid-hand.
In January, a little-known Chinese startup called DeepSeek jolted the stock market with a cheaper reasoning model than anyone thought possible. Immediately, AI chip and Big Tech stocks plummeted, the Nasdaq slid about 3%, and Nvidia shed roughly $590 billion in market value—the largest one-day wipeout on record.
Last month, Nvidia published a Nature paper, claiming it trained its flagship “R1” for about $294,000 on export-restricted H800 chips. That’s a suspiciously low number, to say the least. For context, the H800 is a purposely less capable chip in order to get around export controls. Most in the field are quick to dismiss this problem, claiming the U.S. is still well ahead of China. But it’s still prudent to take into account the existence of a competitive, cheap, Chinese model.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
In July, the Trump Administration published “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” a blueprint for American leadership in the defining technological endeavor of the 21st century. President Trump and key advisors like David Sacks and Michael Kratsios are setting the regulatory stage to ensure America dominates in AI, and that the government supports innovation and channels use cases to ends that serve the American people.
The Plan acknowledges that the administration’s aggressive embrace of AI leadership is not without risk. From labor to culture to national security, AI will fundamentally alter the landscape, introducing vast potential for good but also pitfalls that must be avoided. Above all, America’s adoption of AI must preserve the character of our people and the integrity of our economy, giving Americans confidence in the prospects of a future where AI propels us to untold levels of national greatness.
Political skills are the skills to build trust, influence, and persuade others to support a decision within a political context. These abilities underpin effective political leadership, advocacy, and decision-making, yet they are often invisible and difficult to define. This is especially true for people from minority backgrounds who may not be as familiar with Australian cultural and political norms.
As the Executive Director of Per Capita, one of Australia’s leading progressive think tanks, Dr Chau brings both academic depth and lived experience to this topic. Her personal journey has required her to learn and refine these skills intentionally — from grassroots advocacy and community organising, to serving on ministerial advisory councils, and now shaping national debates on equity and inclusion. Along the way, she has navigated the challenges of cultural identity and leadership in spaces where diverse voices are often underrepresented.
At the October 2025 John Cain Lunch Dr Chau explored how political skills are developed and applied, particularly in environments where power and representation are contested.
For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.
