The Rope Line
This Week's Take on Access and Who Gets In
Take Two at the Hinckley Hilton
For more than twenty years, I’ve been attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Every year I come home and tell my husband to remind me how exhausting it is. Every year he does. Every year I go back — because it’s where I get to see my favorite journalists and communications executives in one place, and that still means something to me.
This year I skipped the dinner itself and attended the Substack First Amendment event instead. The room was full of writers and creatives collaborating in real time — until news came through about the incident at the dinner and then the event went into lockdown. We all turned to each other and our phones, waiting to hear that our colleagues were okay. So incredibly grateful that they were.
It was a reminder that we work close to power and close to risk. That hotel has its own history with both.
On The Friday Reporter
Madison Mills, Axios — Episode published April 25
Most of the AI coverage you see is written from one of two zip codes: Silicon Valley or lower Manhattan. Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but the story she keeps finding doesn’t live in either of those places.
It lives in the small-town bank making a loan to a local trucking company. In the construction firm that took on debt during the buildout boom. In the regional lender whose balance sheet looks perfectly ordinary — until you trace the chain of who borrowed from whom, and for what.
Madison came to the AI beat from the Wall Street beat, which means she knows how to follow the money, and she knows the gap between what investors say publicly and what they actually believe. We talked about what finance executives are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk — conversations she describes as “a very scary picture” — and why the risks most people are worried about may be the ones easiest to see. The hidden ones are harder to find. And they’re closer to home.
We also got into the jobs debate, entry-level hiring, and the question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable? The answer matters to a lot more people than the labs themselves.
🎤 Listen to the episode → [link]
Coming Tuesday on The Deciders
Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner — Episode drops April 29
Here’s a number worth sitting with: only a small percentage of Americans have real access to the kinds of investments where wealth is actually built. Private markets — the funds, the deals, the opportunities that generate the highest returns — have historically been reserved for people who already have money. Everyone else is on the outside of the rope line looking in.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce thinks that’s wrong. And she’s been one of the most persistent voices inside the agency for changing it.
When Brody Mullins and I sat down with Commissioner Peirce for The Deciders, the conversation kept returning to a version of the same question: who gets to participate? She’s been outspoken about the accredited investor rules that keep most Americans out of private markets, arguing that ordinary people — and she’s used the word “resentment” to describe what she hears from retail investors who can’t get in — are smart, thoughtful, and capable of making their own decisions about where to put their money.
“The expectation should be that they will bear the consequences of bad decisions that they make,” she told The Deciders. That accountability argument cuts both ways. If people are going to bear the downside, they deserve a shot at the upside too.
It’s worth listening to this conversation right after the Madison Mills episode of The Friday Reporter. Madison mapped out how ordinary Americans are already quietly exposed to the risks of the AI economy — through their banks, their employers, their communities — without having meaningfully participated in the gains. Commissioner Peirce is trying to change the architecture that creates that imbalance.
The conversation also covers her work on the SEC’s Crypto Taskforce, where digital assets represent one of the clearest opportunities to expand who gets access to what. And she tells a story about her grandfather’s deeply held opinion about watermelon that somehow became her framework for thinking about financial privacy — which turns out to be a good illustration of exactly how she approaches her work: taking something that sounds complicated and regulatory, and finding the human truth inside it.
🎤 The Deciders with Hester Peirce drops Tuesday, April 29 → Preview [link]