From 2013-2023, more than 700 American colleges closed, and another 442 are now at serious risk.

Nich gets into the various reasons why in the video, what it means for society, and what we need to change to fix the system:

But one aspect we ended up cutting from the episode is what happens to students and alumni when these schools close.

Imagine you’re enrolled at a college and it closes. Or you attended a school that shut, and later need to prove to an employer that you do, in fact, have formal training.

A commenter on the video shared that she graduated in 2015 and her university closed in 2023:

“As a nurse the closure of my university has caused me so many problems career wise. I know I am not the only one. The way these universities close can be a nightmare, leaving current and former students with complex mazes to navigate just to get their paperwork.”

For alumni of closed colleges, their degree is still valid, but it becomes harder to obtain records, and the process can vary by school. Only about half of US states have a record retention requirement. The federal government could offer a solution here, and step in to standardize the process. No one’s quantified how many alumni have been affected by university closures, but it’s safe to assume it’s more than a million people.

For the approximately 500,000 students who were enrolled at campuses that closed, that rupture made their education far more precarious. A 2022 study that followed 143,000 students from shuttered institutions found that 53% didn’t re-enroll anywhere, and only about 17% ended up earning their credential.

About half of US states require closing schools to create “teach-out” plans where students can transfer to another college to complete their degree, but the options aren’t always the best. (This is another area where the federal government could provide a solution.) PBS reported that the schools in these plans are often “sketchy” for-profit schools. One student told Inside Higher Ed that she transferred schools after her first college closed, and then the second one closed, too.

And if students decide to go to a school that’s not part of the formal teach-out plan, their credits often don’t transfer. Other times, like a recurring nightmare come to life, students actually have to take courses they’ve already completed all over again. And many students just run out of money before completing their degrees.

The intricacies of what happens to student loans when a college closes depend on whether the student re-enrolls at another school, and where they choose to go.

The American higher education system has created countless discoveries, companies, and societal changes. But it’s also overcomplicated, flawed, and in need of fixing. Perhaps this sweep of college closures will finally force the system to correct itself.

As Nich concludes in the episode:

“For decades, colleges rarely had to answer the questions that every business that’s ever going to be successful has to ask itself. Who are we actually for? Why should someone choose us instead of the school down the road? How do we actually make people understand the price that we charge?

Now they have to answer those questions. They have to become more honest with students and families and themselves. And the lesson here is simple. Markets and the incentives they create exist whether we acknowledge them or not. Higher education in America has to understand the market it’s operating in and adapt.”

As Nicholas Carlson and I sat in Dynamo’s new studio listening to John Doyle explain all the ways that mobile networks can be compromised, we grew more and more surprised and disturbed.

“I didn’t know this was happening,” Nich said, staring at his iPhone on the table in front of them with newfound distress.

Doyle is the CEO and founder of Cape, a mobile network built from the ground up focusing on privacy. Before Cape, he spent about a decade at Palantir, where he ran the national security business.

Before that, he was a Green Beret in the US Army, where he carried a 160-pound rucksack full of radios to keep his unit connected to command. Doyle told us that no matter where he went, including Iraq in 2007, he carried a cell phone in his cargo pocket. Because if everything else failed, he could still make a call using cellular networks. In the Ukraine war, Russia didn’t bomb cell towers because they also needed them to stay connected.

We all rely on our phones to do basically everything. And while we may use encrypted messaging, VPNs, or other security measures, Doyle explained how those don’t protect us from security breaches at the network layer. That’s what he’s building Cape to solve.

Doyle is the paramount example of the type of guest we’re hoping to have on our new show, Founders Explain The World. He has deep expertise in a topic worth explaining, and he’s founded a company that’s out in the market testing his theory.

Paid Substack subscribers can watch our full hour-long interview with Doyle, where he goes into more detail about all the ways your phone can be tricked, what they’re building at Cape, and America’s answer to Huawei:

Thank you for watching and reading! Let us know what you think of the new show in the comments.

Hey, Dynamos!

We have a special issue of the newsletter today to announce our new show: Founders Explain The World.

At Dynamo, we want to uncover how the world actually works. In this new interview series, our founder Nicholas Carlson sits down with a different founder each episode to explain the world together.

Founders develop unique theories about how the world works, then bet everything to prove them right. That’s what makes them among the world’s best expert witnesses.

On our first episode, we explore how trading cards and collectibles grew into a $12 billion industry. Our guest is Michael Katz, the CEO and founder of Trove, a gamified commerce app focused on cards and collectibles. Before Trove, Katz sold his previous two companies, Interclick and mParticle, for a combined $570 million.

Katz explains the hidden systems that propelled the trading card industry to where it is today, and what it can teach us about markets in general:

Paid subscribers also get to watch the entire hour-long conversation with Katz, where he and Nich talk about being founders, his previous two companies, and his advice for other entrepreneurs.

We’ll publish the second episode later this week. Stay tuned!

Chinese electric cars are suddenly everywhere. Except America.

China became the world’s largest exporter of EVs almost overnight. Influencers, car aficionados, and millions of drivers outside the US are going gaga over BYD, Zeekr, and other Chinese cars. They look great, and they have features Tesla owners (including Nich) wish they…

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Tucked outside Los Angeles and San Diego, the Salton Sea used to be a vacation paradise for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

But then the lake shrunk, and the concentration of salts, chemicals, and fertilizers turned it toxic.

One of those salts is lithium, which powers phones, electric vehicles, and anything with a battery.

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America’s population growth went from exponential to resilient to shrinking in just a few decades. And while most countries are dealing with just one of these causes, the US is dealing with three, all at the same time.

Immigration used to make up for America’s shrinking birth rate. But now fewer people are coming to the US at the sam…

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Business Explains The World turned one year old a month ago, and we’re still celebrating!

We want to thank you for watching, reading, and sharing our stories with your friends, families, and colleagues. We are SO grateful for your interest and feedback.

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We’re about to need a lot more energy. Data centers, electric cars, factories to make the chips powering all these new technologies — they all require way more power than we’re generating today.

Our existing systems cost too much. Residential energy prices already rose 7% across the US in 2025, and that’s just the start. Nuclear coul…

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When Dynamo CEO Nicholas Carlson went to the Gulf of Mexico for the abandoned oil rigs episode, he saw these oil flares that were just burning in the marshes of Louisiana.

Nine months later, we published an episode investigating those flames. The story that Nich found down in Texas’ Permian Basin revealed surprising truths about Amer…

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The dust. The hazy sunsets. The sheer crush of people.

Seeing India as an American is all-consuming.

We know it has the largest population of any nation on Earth, but it’s hard to fathom nearly 1.5 billion people. That’s 18% of the world’s population. Delhi alone has a population similar to the entire state of California.

When I visite…

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Hello, Dynamos!

This week, we published an episode from our own backyard explaining why New York City’s skyline looks the way it does.

I’m talking, of course, about air rights1, the neat zoning law trick where landmark buildings can make millions selling the empty space above them.

This practice also explains how supertall buildings2 have recently proliferated, reshaping the skyline, and sometimes blocking beloved landmarks.

We hope you enjoy:

We also wanted to share some fun facts we learned from shorts we published in April…

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Hello, Dynamos!

We’re quickly approaching 1 year since Business Explains The World started publishing on YouTube, and in that time we realized something.

Essentially, every form of transportation for moving goods should be bigger.

And the US is falling behind in this regard. We do have the longest freight trains in the world, but when it comes to shipping and trucking, Asia and Europe are kicking our butts.

So for this special episode of Business Explains The World, Economist Chris Clarke brought together the reporting he’s done on trucks, ships, and trains, and offered expert commentary on why the US needs these economies of scale to compete in today’s interconnected world.

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The look is somehow both dull and aspirational, and it’s everywhere. Since the mid-2010s, this aesthetic has become an algorithmically reinforced norm from Louisville to Lisbon.

But I remember when coffee shops embraced eclecticism and outright tackiness. Back in the 2000s, the color schemes were assertive, the seating was plush and plentiful. Coffee shops were downright cozy.

So what changed? How did we end up with barren walls and metal stools wherever cortados are served? And, more importantly, why?

Though it’s tempting to blame social media (or millennials’ questionable tastes), the answer is actually rooted in business. And it begins with the burgeoning global trade of the 1990s…

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I talked to a shopkeeper who told me that most of what he sells comes from China. The products look Mexican. The supply chain is not.

That conversation stuck with me, because it’s the same thing happening on the other side of the border — just at a much bigger scale.

In our latest episode of Business Explains the World, we tell the story of a Hisense TV with a “Made in Mexico” sticker. It’s a TV you can buy at Walmart, Best Buy, pretty much anywhere. And technically, the label is accurate — the TV was assembled in Mexico, at a factory in Monterrey.

But the components, the technology, and the company behind it are Chinese. The TV crosses the US-Mexico border duty-free under a trade agreement called the USMCA.

And that’s exactly what the rules were designed to prevent.

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But when Professor Chris Clarke visited an airplane boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico, he found them stripping a relatively new plane for parts.

That plane was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner that was 17 years old, but it only flew 13 hours. So the barely used parts on it could sell for a premium.

COVID, Boeing woes, and tight safety regulations have stretched airplane supply chains to a breaking point. Airlines can’t get new planes fast enough to keep up with demand, so they rely on a robust aftermarket for used airplane parts.

We discovered this isn’t actually a bad thing!

We have a bunch of behind-the-scenes bonus clips to share from this episode. It’s not every day you get to crush a plane!

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Every self-respecting history dad1 knows the story:

The Empire State Building was built in a year, ya know. Its steel beams came out of the mill in Pittsburgh and 24 hours later they were being hoisted into place 1,000 feet above Manhattan.

They were still warm to the touch!

In reality, it took 13 months (15 if you count the excavation). And beams arrived within ~80 hours.

But still, it’s an astonishing feat that puts modern construction timelines to shame (the skyscraper that’s about to become the world’s tallest building has been under construction for 13 years).

So what was their secret?

We’re doing a series of videos about DYNAMOS… IN… HISTORY2. These are people from the past who deserve to be reassessed and given their flowers, so to speak, decades after changing the world.

Our latest video focuses on the geniuses who built the Empire State Building so fast (more below):

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What’s underneath that white, synthetic mass? Rows and rows of vegetables. So many that the greenhouses of Almería grow about half of Europe’s veggies.

On this episode of Business Explains The World, producer Karin Shedd is back! She traveled to Spain to discover why they grow vegetables like this, why the United States doesn’t, and what all of that means for our collective food future:

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The trendy Miami neighborhood I used to live in suffered from a weird problem. Brickell is one of the most popular areas for recent transplants and young professionals, filled with high rises and “clubstaurants”, but my gym options fell into two extremes: an Equinox for $300 a month, or an LA Fitness for $50.

The Equinox was spacious, pristine, and modern. It had social hangout areas, luxurious locker rooms, and a spa with massage therapists. But since I was unwilling to spend more than my monthly car payment on a gym, I went with LA Fitness.

To put it kindly, I found the place unpleasant and rundown — from the mildew smell and frequently out-of-order machines to the 2007-era wall decor and uniquely brazen clientele that seemed straight out of a reality television show.

After a few months of grimacing through workouts, I avoided going altogether. I couldn’t believe that in one of the most densely populated parts of Miami — a city known for its obsession with appearance and fitness — there was no option between the opulent Equinox and this dingy LA Fitness. (Neither Equinox nor LA Fitness responded to multiple requests for comment.)

Sure, there were class-based studios everywhere, but a clean, fully functional, moderately priced gym for average people was nowhere to be found.

It made me wonder: Do “normal” gyms even exist anymore?

As it turns out, not really. And the reason extends beyond just the fitness world.

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So how did we get to the point where, in the middle of a major snowstorm, I can buy two quarts of fresh blueberries — on sale?

I looked into it, and the numbers shocked me. The US went from importing 44 million pounds of blueberries in 2000 to 450 million pounds in 2020. Americans now eat 10 times more blueberries a year (two and a half pounds per person) than we did 26 years ago. Between 2007 and 2023, blueberry imports from Mexico alone grew by over 60,000%.

So what happened?

While we like to think that we are making our own choices when we pick food to eat, there are actually thousands of hidden business decisions and economic realities that shape what lands in the grocery store and on our plates. As Miranda Priestly tells Andrea Sachs in my favorite scene from “The Devil Wears Prada”:

“It’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”

I wanted to know what forces were driving the blueberry boom. Is there a Miranda Priestly of blueberries?

As I found out, there is — but it’s not just one person.

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I’ve spent years digging into the American healthcare system. I wanted to understand why hospitals keep shutting down even as healthcare spending keeps rising.

Hundreds of US hospitals have closed in the last 20 years, leaving communities without accessible healthcare. Meanwhile, healthcare executives have reaped huge returns. What is behind it all? We answer that question on the latest episode of Business Explains the World.

For Substack, I wanted to dive deeper into something we didn’t talk much about in the video: the ER.

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the latest season of the HBO series “The Pitt,” which depicts a 12-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room in real time.

It’s fitting that the famous quote, “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” — often misattributed to either Albert Camus or Pablo Picasso — is itself a fiction. There is no record that anyone ever said it, and yet it rings true. “The Pitt,” is entirely fictional, but it reveals something about the dark underbelly of America’s healthcare system.

In the show, overworked doctors and nurses scramble to save people’s lives while dealing with staff shortages and underfunding. Crises pile up, and bad incentives proliferate. Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch fights to keep his own humanity amid the chaos.

The creators of the show wrote it to be as authentic as possible — real doctors were involved with the script and consulted on the medical scenes. But there’s a key piece of the story of our struggling healthcare system that has been left out: the devastating influence of private equity.

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