In 2024, the cryptocurrency industry spent more than $130 million to influence elections nationwide. Their campaign donations and lobbying efforts turned the tables for their risky boom-and-bust business, which is now poised to overtake our entire financial system.

In Part Two of What Tech Wants, Lever Time’s investigation into why Silicon Valley is buying our democracy, producer Ariella Markowitz reveals how crypto companies aligned with President Donald Trump to advance their agenda.

To listen to Part One of our series, click here.

Click here to subscribe to Molly White’s newsletter Citation Needed.

Click here to read Jacob Silverman’s book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

Click here for a full transcript of the episode.

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In 2022, nonprofit neighborhood groups, backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, helped recall a progressive district attorney in San Francisco. What happened next would change the country. 

In Part One of What Tech Wants, Lever Time’s investigation into why Silicon Valley is buying our democracy, producer Ariella Markowitz uncovers how a local experiment unlocked a new formula for political power.

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As private investment companies encroach upon youth sports, how does that hurt the players — and their families? As Lever reporter Luke Goldstein discovered, there’s more at stake than just higher prices. 

Today on Lever Time, David Sirota tells the story of how a Lever investigation into a shocking claim prompted a national outcry, one that led to a small but mighty victory against Black Bear Sports Group, one of the youth sports kingpins calling the shots.

Read Luke Goldstein’s reporting mentioned in the episode here and here. 

Click here for a full transcript of the episode.

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This week we’re sharing a special episode from our friends at On NOTUS, which was recently featured by Semafor and POLITICO as a must-listen podcast.

Produced by the nonpartisan newsroom NOTUS and hosted by congressional journalist Reese Gorman, On NOTUS brings on lawmakers from Capitol Hill for truly candid conversations. Each week, they go past the headlines and soundbites to hear what really makes Congressional leaders tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. You’ll get an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the United States, from House Majority Whip Tom Emmer to Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and beyond.

And today, we’re sharing On NOTUS’ recent episode with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who breaks down how to get things done in the House, why he decided to run for office, and the assassination attempt that almost took his life. It’s a conversation that is well worth a listen. 

And for more interviews like this, make sure to follow On NOTUS on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell them we sent you.

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Are we wasting our talents on meaningless jobs? Should our career choices reflect our morals? Author and historian Rutger Bregman thinks so. He argues that the most talented people in America are stuck in a real-life version of the movie Office Space  — and that we should be trying to solve the world’s biggest problems instead. 

Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with Bregman to ask: When did we lose our moral ambition? Are we greedy, cynical, or are we just trying to escape an ever-increasing affordability crisis?  

Click here to learn about Bregman’s book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent And Start Making A Difference.

For a transcript of this episode, click here.

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2025 has been a tremendous year for the artificial intelligence industry. Stock prices for AI companies skyrocketed, soaring beyond expectations and propping up an otherwise stagnant U.S. economy. But everywhere, there’s talk of an AI bubble — one even bigger and more threatening than the 2008 housing bubble or the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s.

What makes this bubble so different? When is it likely to pop? And if it does, what does that mean for the rest of us? 

In this episode of Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with Ed Zitron and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, journalists covering the AI frenzy, to recap the year of the AI Bubble — and predict what will happen next.

To read Ed Zitron's blog, Where's Your Ed At, click here.

Click here to check out Sruthi Pinnamaneni's two part series on AI data centers.

Got three minutes? Please take our end-of-year survey!

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As parents, we’re told homicidal maniacs, drug peddlers, and creeps are lurking in every shadow, waiting to grab your children. But is that true? Is our obsession with keeping our kids safe doing more harm than good?

Today on Lever Time, David Sirota investigates the difference between good parenting and overparenting — and the political history behind our fear that kidnappers are roaming the streets.

Want to hear more? As an exclusive bonus to our paid subscribers, click here for David’s full conversation with Lenore Skenazy. Lenore explains how to protect kids on social media, how she developed her parenting philosophy, and so much more. Not yet a paid subscriber? Click here for a special membership offer exclusive to Lever Time listeners.

Click here for a full transcript of the episode.

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From flying to online shopping to using social media, everything seems to be getting worse. It’s all — pardon our language here — shittier.

According to today’s Lever Time guest, that’s no accident. Cory Doctorow is the author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. In this episode, Doctorow explains how enshittification works, how it’s infected our online spaces, and what we can do to stop it.

Plus, as an exclusive bonus to our paid subscribers, click here for the rest of David’s conversation with Cory Doctorow. They talk about why Americans are trapped on Facebook or Microsoft Office and how Donald Trump is using tech companies as weapons in his trade war. Doctorow also offers a few simple solutions to stop our world from going to shit.

Not yet a paid subscriber? Click here for a special membership offer exclusive to Lever Time listeners.

To leave a tip for The Lever, ⁠click here⁠. It helps us do this kind of independent journalism.

⁠Click here⁠⁠ for a transcript of this episode.

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The U.S. House just voted to force the Trump administration to release every document it has on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful associates. The move comes after Congress released 23,000 pages of Epstein emails and text messages, a data dump that references Donald Trump more than 1,500 times and has so thoroughly tarnished former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that he’s stepped back from public commitments. Now, many more revelations are likely to come.

In this special episode of Lever Time, David Sirota sits down for a live interview with two people who’ve led the long and brutal fight to expose the Epstein scandal.

First, investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, whose reporting originally broke open the Epstein scandal, joins the podcast to explore the revelations from the newly released documents. Then, David speaks with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been leading the bipartisan fight to force the government to release the Epstein files.

Click here for a transcript of this episode

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Maine overwhelmingly voted last year to end Super PACs. A federal judge blocked the ballot measure — but left a kill switch inside the ruling. Larry Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and head of the nonprofit Equal Citizens, is ready to flip that switch and take his case to the Supreme Court.

In our final episode of Lever Time’s MONEYBOMB series, David Sirota speaks with Lessig about the legal battle against Super PACs and why he believes that we can stop Citizens United without touching it.

To read more about Larry Lessig’s case against Super PACs, click here.

⁠Click here⁠ to order our new book, MASTER PLAN: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

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