Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Kelsey Piper is an American journalist and effective altruism advocate best known for her work at Vox's Future Perfect newsletter, where she spent seven years covering AI safety, global catastrophic risks, evidence-based philanthropy, and education policy. She broke major stories including OpenAI's non-disparagement agreements and conducted the first post-collapse interview with Sam Bankman-Fried. In August 2025, she left Vox to co-found The Argument, a Substack newsletter focused on reasoned policy debate. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who pledged 30% of her lifetime income to charity, Piper brings a rare combination of technical fluency, ethical rigor, and accessibility to some of the most consequential questions of our time.