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Profit, Power, and the Crisis of the Common Good (with Sen. Chris Murphy)

Why do so many Americans feel powerless, lonely, and disconnected — and what does that have to do with our economy?

Senator Chris Murphy joins Nick and Goldy to discuss his new book, Crisis of the Common Good, which makes the case that America’s political crisis is inseparable from a deeper collapse of power, connection, and shared purpose.

They dig into the “cult of profit,” Market Humanism, AI, scarcity, corruption, and the limits of an economy organized around efficiency and extraction. It’s a conversation about what happens when profit becomes the highest measure of success, and what it would mean to build an economy rooted in dignity, connection, and the common good.

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Chains of Command: How Franchising Turned Control Without Responsibility Into a Business Model (with Brian Callaci)

When you walk into a McDonald’s, it looks like one company. But legally, the person making your fries probably doesn’t work for McDonald’s at all. Brian Callaci, Chief Economist at the Open Markets Institute and author of Chains of Command, joins Nick and Goldy to explain how franchising became a blueprint for corporate control without responsibility — shifting risk, liability, and labor costs onto franchisees and workers while profits flow upward.

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The Joy of Money (with Carrie Joy Grimes)

Most personal finance advice starts with the same basic premise: you’re doing money wrong. But Carrie Joy Grimes, founder of WorkMoney and author of The Joy of Money, says that misses half the story. Yes, people need real tools to budget, save, pay down debt, and plan for the future. But no amount of discipline can fix an economy where wages are too low, costs are too high, and working people have lost power over the rules that shape their lives. This week, Nick and Goldy talk with Grimes about why money is “math and feelings,” how shame keeps people stuck, why so much financial advice is written for people who already have money, and why the best thing we can do is not teach people to be better at being poor — but build an economy where fewer people are poor in the first place.

Any society that allows itself to become radically unequal eventually collapses into an uprising or a police state—or both. Join venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why. Turns out, everything you learned about economics is wrong. And if we don’t do something about rising inequality, the pitchforks are coming.