Episode
"We're Running a 20th Century Operating System on a 21st Century Economy — And It's Crashing"
- Published
- Jul 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3926
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Summary
What happens when five completely unrelated thinkers, writing across five different decades, all point to the exact same moment in history as a coming crisis point...and that moment is now? Samuel Huntington, Neil Howe, Ray Dalio, George Friedman, and Peter Turchin never collaborated. All of them landed on the 2020s. In this episode, Larry Kotlikoff sits down with Bruce Mehlman — founder of Mehlman Consulting, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy under George W. Bush, and author of the widely-read Substack Age of Disruption, for a conversation covering geopolitical aftershocks, political polarization, AI's economic risk, and whether the median American worker has gained any ground in fifty years. What You'll Learn in This Episode: [00:08:05] What the Iran conflict revealed about global supply chain fragility — and the permanent changes companies are making now [00:11:43] The "mid-2020s crisis" convergence — five major historical frameworks, developed independently, all pointing to right now [00:15:39] Why 11 of the last 13 federal elections have been "change" elections — up from just 3 of 10 in the 1960s and '70s [00:21:02] The staggering partisan perception gap — how badly Republicans and Democrats misjudge what the other side actually looks like [00:31:02] A sharp disagreement over whether AI is overhyped — Larry argues AI gets deterministic financial questions catastrophically wrong; Bruce pushes back with the early-aviation analogy [00:40:52] The "servant economy" concern — whether AI eliminates good middle-management jobs while leaving low-wage service work behind [00:48:38] A Social Security trustees report most people missed — the program is now 46% underfunded, requiring a payroll tax hike from 12.4% to 18.1…